Word! SEO gets people to your site. Usability keeps people on your site. @brianksullivan #dfwwp #uxblog

— Rani Monson (@RaniMonson) March 23, 2013

To translate, SEO is “search engine optimization,” the often-huckersterish art of tricking Google to display your website higher than your competitors in search results. “Usability” is the catch-all term for making your website easy to navigate and inviting to visitors. Companies with deep pockets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solution to ranking high with search engines is to provide visitors with good reasons to visit your site. What if we applied these principles to our churches and meetinghouses and swapped the terms?

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse /
Hospitality keeps people returning.

A lot of Quaker meetinghouses have pretty good “natural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the middle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few historical markers of notable Quakers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meetings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is covered. Although we do get the occasional “aren’t you all Amish?” comments, we have a much wider reputation that our numbers would necessarily warrant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hospitality we could work on? Do we provide places where spiritual seekers can both grow personally and engage in the important questions of the faith in the modern world? Are we invitational, bringing people into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my freelance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of statistical reports and redesigned some underperforming pages, but then turned my attention to the client’s content. It was in this realm that my greatest quantifiable successes occurred. At the heart of the content work was asking how could the site could more fully engage with first-time visitors. The “usability considerations” on the Wikipedia page on usability could be easily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ general background? What is the users’ context for working? What must be left to the machine? Can users easily accomplish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much training do users need? What documentation or other supporting materials are available to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends consider this more. FGC’s “New Meetings Toolbox” has a section on welcoming newcomers. But I’d love to hear more stories about how we’re working on the “usability” of our spiritual communities.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site
they’ll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting
together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write.

I’m looking to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many
of the same results–blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug–your
company’s life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer
service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching
an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and
searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get
answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the volume coming from these
obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could
have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper
that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates
gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour
trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area–to find my
workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We’re always blogging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it verbally around the water cooler with
three other people. Learn to type it in and you’ve got yourself a
high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways
to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was
tagifying my personal blog over at “QuakerRanter.org.” Every time I
post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the
article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk
about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we
automate them). We don’t necessarily know the categories that our
potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites
increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages according to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of
this extra volume. This doesn’t increase traffic by that nearly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag
indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

I’m not going to focus on any of the underhanded tricks to fool search engines into listing an inappropriate page. Google hates this kind of tactic and so do I. You get visits for having good content. Good search rankings are based on good content and the best way to boost your content is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the content they want. Part one is on website analysis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your website is easy to navigate. One of the neatest things about the web is that we have instant feedback on use. With just a little tracking we can see what pages people are looking at, how they’re finding our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are currently using four different tracking methods. Most utilize javascript “bugs,” tiny snippets of code that send individual results to an advanced software tracking system. I put the code inside a Moveable Type “Modules Template” which is automatically imported to all pages. Installing a new system is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Template and rebuilding the site.

• AXS Visitors Tracking System
  This software installs on your server but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the easiest installations I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can narrow it specific pages on your site, or even particular search engines or search phrases.
  There’s also a option to view the lastest traffic by visitor. I love watching this! You can see how individuals are using the site and where they’re navigating. I’ve been able to identify different types of visitors this way and understand the complexity of the audience.
  It doesn’t seem like AXS is not being developed anymore. The latest stable version came out over two years go, which is a shame.

• HitTail
  This service watches search-engine links and makes recommendations for new keywords. I wrote about this service yesterday in Blogging for the Long Tail.

• Reeferss.com
  This is a simple simple bit of software. Like every other tracking system it keeps track of referrers: search engines and websites that bring traffic to your site. But unlike the others that’s all it does. Why care then? It provides a real-time RSS feed of these visitors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a customized start page, see below) and scan the results multiple times a day.

• Google Analytics
  The internet’s gatekeeper bought the Urchin analytics company in April 2005 and relaunched the product as Google Analytics shortly thereafter. This is becoming an essential tracker. It’s free and it’s powerful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as others have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what people are saying about you online.

• Technorati
  This service tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Technorati will tell you where blogs are linking. Give it your URLs (or those of your competitors!) and you’ll know whenever a blogger puts in a link to you. You can also give it keywords and find out when a blog uses them.

• Google Blog Search
  Google can also let you follow blog references or keyword mentions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s linking to your site (or to the competition). There are lots of other services that track blogs and mentions–Sphere, Bloglines, etc. They all have different strengths so try them and see what you think.

• Feedburner
  The best RSS massager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recently introduced page tracking software too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feedburner’s other offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of this information. Most of the tracking services provide RSS feeds (See The Wonders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a customized start page, to pull these all together into a single page that I can scan every morning. Here’s a screenshot of part of my Netvibes tracking page–the full page currently shows fourteen tracking feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With tracking you find out what people are looking for on the internet. This helps you create pages and services that people will want to find. You might be surprised to see what they’re already finding on your site. Some examples:

• Analyzing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bringing in high Google traffic. I looked at these pages again and realized they did a good job of describing the company’s mission. I consequently redesigned the site homepage to feature them and I made sure that those pages contained direct links to its most important services.

• When I started work for another client I looked at their site and suspected that they’re most important articles were not being seen–visitors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of tracking confirmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to convince the executive director that we made some small modifications to the design. Having this strong content linked right off the homepage helped bring in Google traffic.

A few days ago a Friend forwarded a email from a Quaker discussion list from someone who had typed “plain dress Quaker” into Google. This searcher reported to the list that there was nothing good in the results and wondered aloud whether he should contact the authors of the listings to tell them the truth that plain dress still exists. Of course my pages are at the top of that search and clearly reflect the opinion that plain dress exists and is relevant to our age. Most of the top-ten Google results point to more-or-less “Conservative” Quakers, all of whom are sympathetic to plain dress. Google’s results were actually quite good.
A few months ago I attended a “listening session” on a controversial modern Quaker ritual and heard an advocate for the practice make an argument based on the positive Google search results for the term (“I looked up ‘xyz’ on Google and found…”) Here too my site tops the results but I’m not sympathetic and neither are most of the dozen people who comment on the post. Like the plain dress curmudgeon, their description of the results bore little resemblance to what I found on Google.
h3. Has Google become our new proof text?
Looking up your pet project or cause is a variation on “vanity googling,” in which you look up yourself. But the interesting thing is that these “cause googlers” don’t actually seem curious about the results. The fellow who searched for “plain dress Quaker” came to my site, according to the tracking logs, but he looked at one page and left. He didn’t follow any links and he has yet to do anything more than complain to a sympathetic list. This kind of “proof text” searcher isn’t looking to learn anything or find anything transformative; instead they just want to confirm their cause exists in the world. They (mis)use the results to confirm their worldview: whether they think of themselves as the last holdout of a dying tradition or the vanguard of some brave new synthesis, they’ll find something in the Google results to back them up.
Sincere searchers who come wanting to learn something about the issues I write about will come in via search engine and start maniacally clicking on links, looking through dozens of pages. Many of them follow this reading by sending me an excited email, leaving a comment, and/or signing up on our related discussion list. Using Google to tally our place in the world can be fun, but it’s only a parlour game and debate tactic.
h3. Tweaking the Results
As I was writing this post I got a Google-referred visit from someone searching for the “best spiritual websites.” Well if Google is the all-knowing authority, you’ve found the sixth best spiritual website on the whole entire world wide web right here (who wouldda thought?) But wait: ask Google for the “best Quaker websites” and you’ll find me listed for the top four results.
There’s such awe-worship for search engines these days that we could make up claims for ourselves, post the claims on a blog and then advertise our invented claims. For example,
“Google has declared Martin Kelley as the spiritual heir to George Fox.”
Just by writing that phrase here, we should be able to hit the search engine in a week’s time for “spiritual heir to George Fox”:google and get this page, hence making the claim legit. With Google as judge, the possibilities are endless!
h3. See also:
* “How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000333.php
* “It’s light that makes me uncomfortable” and other Googlisms
* At least one theologian has argued that Google results for “god” constitutes “proof of His existence”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6144581/site/newsweek/ (found on “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_000940.php)
* In “Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000457.php I reproduce my websites report for my employer, Friends General Conference. I talk a lot in there about how Google is used.

This contrasts very sharply with the bulk of traffic to my site. Dozens of people a day come in off a Google search. Unless it’s a bad match, these seekers spend time on the site, clicking all around, following links to other sites, coming back, reading some more. Not everyone comes in via search engines: some follow links from elsewhere while others read the RSS Feed or just come in ever few days to see what’s new.

Part of the difference between “institutional” and “seeking” users is in their use of search engines. Many establishment Quakers don’t know how to use them or don’t think to use them. A website marketing proposal of mine was almost nixed recently when a committee member learned that search engines bypass a site’s homepage to return results from inside pages. I just assumed that everyone knew by now how a search engine works. I use Google dozens of times a day; it’s hard for me to imagine anyone navigating the net without it. It must almost be like they’re using a separate medium. Both of us are using the internet as transmission conduit, but that’s like saying both a newspaper and a personal letter use paper and ink for transition: while this is indisputably true, it doesn’t begin to speak to the different use and the depth of audience.

I wonder if the internet divide represents an even more significant divide between institutional insiders and the rest of us. The insiders might be staff, committee clerks or just very involved Friends but they share a certain way of understanding their world. First off, they have their ideas all figured out already. There’s a lack of curiosity here. They aren’t searching for new writers or new ideas. They will only consider something after some other Quaker institution has recognized it, a Catch-22 situation that the military refers to as “incestuous amplification.”

Any project outside of the established recognition zone is invisible. Even ones that have become dominant in their field are acknowledged only begrudgingly. In the last ten years, Quaker.org has done more for outreach than just about any institutionally-sponsored program or committee. Yet I know of establishment Quakers who still think of it as an upstart, and truly believe their puttering about is more important, simply because their organization has been around longer. In truth, many Quaker websites get so little traffic as to be next to non-existent.

The insider’s primary point of reference is institutions. Power comes from knowing how ideas, proposals and decisions flow through these organizations. A good idea is only good if it’s made by the right person and vetted by the right small group first. Sometimes I’ll hear of the gossip of some group scheming within some Quaker institution and I always have to laugh: like, WHO CARES? It’s a small bunch of people scrambling over crumbs while the world ignores them. There’s a whole other world of Friends and seekers out there building their own culture and connections, or trying to.

This Quaker Ranter site is primarily for those still curious, for those still interesting in building something real, for those wanting engaging conversation and stories. I actually prefer it to be a little bit “underground,” unknown or forgotten by institutionalists, for I think there’s discussions we need to have and the open internet is a good place for that.

More

I’ll be editing and adding to this post over time as I see more patterns of site use. I’m curious if others have seen surprising patterns of internet use. Oh, and by the way I should cop to being a Quaker insider myself, though I always try to keep the big picture (i.e., God and the Spirit’s commands) foremost.