But this blog is just my life spun out. I don’t aim for keywords and I don’t want to dominate a thought-sphere. If I see a movie and jot down some impressions that attract a small audience, then my blog post is a success. A dozen or so random people a month Google in to spend a couple of minutes reading my thoughts on a fifty-year-old movie. That’s cool. That’s enough. In all the talk of targeting and SEO we sometimes forget that it’s an honor to simply be read.

The other night stayed up late to cuddled with my wife and watch good-natured but flawed Rom-Com. I read some reviews on IMDB and pondered the cliches in the shower the next morning. Boiling these impressions down into 500 words on a train commute would be easy enough. I should do it more.

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.

Visit: Kindley Law in South Bend Indiana

Client Testimonial:

“Martin provided great value in designing a website for my law
practice. He was accessible and facilitated the process, despite our
geographical distance, through email and telephone consultations. He
was flexible in working with me to achieve what I was looking for
within my budget.” May 1, 2009

John Kindley, Lawyer.
Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2008
Top qualities: Personable, Good Value, High Integrity

The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they’ve just rewritten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives recommendations about what to look out for. It starts with their definition

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.

The blog asks “how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO?” I’ve been doing a lot more optimization for clients lately. What’s particularly fun is running across the work of the SEO scam artists their competition have brought in. I’ve seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair practice and been penalized by Google.

Google’s job and our job

I’ve always taken the approach that it’s Google’s job to give people
the most useful and relevant return for their search and our job to
make sure we have useful and relevant material and arrange it in such a
way that Google can access it.

SEO is important but only in the
context of smart web design and a coherent and well thought out
internet marketing strategy. Firms that claim to do SEO
without checking the analytics data and consulting with the client
about their business strategy will not help the site in the long run.

What your SEO expert should be doing

I would agree with most of Google’s recommendations of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:

• A SEO consultant that looks at analytics data before making any changes. If the client doesn’t already have Google Analytics running on the site I install it and wait a month before doing anything. I do that because you want:
• Quantifiable results. You should be able to see shifting use patterns if the optimization is working. The internet gives us precise figures and it’s often very easy to demonstrate the value of the work you’ve done. Clients should have full access to the analytics and be trained enough to be able to independently verify the results.
• A consultant that frequently answers questions with “Hmmm…, I don’t know.” No one knows what Google is doing. You try something, then you try something else. Anyone who claims to know everything is scamming you.
• Someone who looks at your entire business model and asks hard questions about your internet strategy. What do you hope to accomplish with your site. Are there specific goals that we can measure?
• Think about your Inbound and Outbound strategies. Google will send people your way if you have useful material so think about what compelling content you can offer the universe. And once people come to the site you have to make it compelling for them to stay a while, subscribe, etc.
• The SEO consultant should make you sweat: anyone who says they can significantly boost your site without you having to lift a finger is fooling you. You will almost always have to add compelling content and it will take you committing staff time to the project (a good development team will look for ways to make this fit into your existing staff routines so that it’s as painless as possible!).

Any others suggestions for what to look for in potential SEO consultants?

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.