So today is a special day. My father celebrates his 70th birthday — aside from my outing his birthday and age (fortunately he probably won't see this), today will be just another day for him. Needless to say, he's not one for celebration. In fact, I think he sees most days as just another day, but in a good way. Let me explain.
My father comes from a time long before the web and computers. He didn't go to college, and fortunately grew up in a day when you could do a lot more with your life without a college degree behind your name — though I think he'd manage just as well even today. As a young kid in the 70's, I remember hanging out at his gas station, and then I spent a fair amount of the rest of my childhood, on through high school, growing up around a Chevrolet dealership as he worked his way up from mechanic to Service Manager, which he fulfilled for longer than I can recall. And not just any Service Manager — he was one of the top 65 Service Managers for GM most of that time as well. I'm sure he considered those to be "just another day" kind of days as well. As you can imagine, I got a huge dose of customer service throughout my life.
My father is true old-school, coming from a time when you did whatever you needed to to take care of the customer. And it shows. The dealership he was at continued to provide customers with loaner cars when their car was being serviced for an extended period of time, they had customers that would come in from all over to buy or get their vehicles serviced, and my father would go out of his way to help a customer with whatever they needed. To this day, I struggle to remember a time when I went anywhere with him and someone didn't come up to him to say hi or thank you for something he did. While he's left the dealership and now semi-retired, he continues to work, and more importantly, continues to practice these old-school ways.
So what does any of this have to do with the web? In this modern technology world with websites, e-commerce and search engines delivering all the information we seek, there are still some important elements of the pre-web era that we need to carry-over. I have no doubt that much of my father's success in life has been his "do what it takes" attitude, especially when it comes to taking care of customers and dealing with people. The web often removes some of that personal connection of a brick-and-mortar world, but that's no reason not to do everything you can to take care of your site's visitors.
SEO has become about so much more than just content optimization, choosing the right keywords and search engine spiders. SEO is really just one aspect of search marketing, and marketing in general, and successful SEO practitioners realize this. It's important to make sure that a website focuses on the needs of the audience. Is the site laid out in a way that meets the needs of the visitors? Is the site focused on selling products or services, or is it focused on helping the visitors solve their problems? Is the site nothing more than an electronic brochure or shopping cart, or does it provide visitors with useful information to help and educate them?
Set out to "do what it takes" to satisfy and help your visitors. Give them a great, user-friendly experience and give them the information they need to solve their problems. As the web continues to evolve and mature, the most successful sites will stand as a resource, providing information to help site visitors. Sure, low or at least competitive pricing may be important, as will a user-friendly return procedure, but gaining their trust up-front will come from helping them out with nothing expected in return.
Oh yeah, and this useful information, this resource you put together to help your site visitors and customers, could serve as a tremendous lead generator and traffic pull. What happens when you put together the definitive source of information on a particular problem or need? If it is done well, then you have probably created great linkbait that will naturally encourage people to link to that information.
Hopefully you'll also make sure that the information is easily accessible to search engine spiders, and with a little keyword research before developing this content, you'll also have great insight into the optimal terms and keyword phrases to title and pepper this content with. And don't forget that this keyword research may also point you toward the content, the problems and issues, people are looking for.
What's old is new. Whizz-bang on the web may be entertaining, but at the end of the day, people are looking for substance. They are looking for information. And for those who are willing to do what it takes, many of these people will be more than happy to tell everyone they know in person, but also to blog about it, to link to it from their MySpace or Facebook page, to write reviews, or whatever else. It's great knowing that some things do stand the test of time. Deliver a great experience, and you'll be rewarded many times over.
Thank you, dad, for teaching me the importance of delivering on your word, for doing whatever it takes to not only satisfy but to exceed expectations, and for always finding joy in whatever I do. Happy birthday dad.
No, I'm not talking about running laps or playing dodgeball...although a dodgeball challenge of white-hat vs. black-hat SEOers is certainly something to get the adrenaline pumping. The PE here is progressive enhancement, the better looking sibling of graceful degradation.
Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are common topics in design and accessibility circles, but these are just as important to SEO as well. These techniques are often used along with advanced technologies like JavaScript, Ajax and Flash, but are even applicable to basics like application of CSS.
Let's start with some basics...using neither of these means that visitors or search engines may come to your Web site and see "garbage" or blank pages--not a good presentation and akin to slamming the door in someone's face.
Graceful degradation was a step to overcome this, where sites were designed for the latest browsers and technology, but were also made to degrade gracefully, hopefully delivering most of the content to the visitor, or at least informing the visitor that he or she may not be "getting" everything. This was meant to make for a nicer, friendlier Web experience. An overly simple example is the use of noscript tags for JavaScript functions to at least inform the visitor that JavaScript was necessary, rather than leaving the person clicking on something with no result, or whatever effect that apparently wasn't working.
Graceful degradation might be seen as being focused more on the developer than the end user. Progressive enhancement though is the opposite, developing for the lowest-common-denominator, and then progressively building on top of that. PE has delivery of content at the forefront, with presentation and the bells and whistles as added enhancements.
So why is PE so good for SEO? Well, simply put, search engines are rather limited in their abilities. Sure, they may have patents to their names, highly complex algorithms directing them, supported by multimillion-dollar data centers and the most advanced computing technology, all backed by Ph.D.s in various flavors and more engineers than us average folk could ever imagine, but their spiders are pretty much limited to following simple HTML links from page to page.
Without progressive enhancement, many sites add lots of great interactive functionality at the expense of cutting search engines off from the rich content on the pages. Maybe the best way to really understand this is through a live example.
REI progressive enhancement.
(Credit: REI)
REI tabbed content sections.
(Credit: REI)REI, one of Netconcepts clients, is probably familiar to most readers. With stores all across the country and an extensive Web presence, most of us can't help but think of REI whenever we are in need of new outdoor gear or clothing. Online retailers face some of the most challenging SEO issues. Major e-commerce sites often contain hundreds of thousands of product pages below layer upon layer of category pages. Unfortunately, more times than not, these product pages, the ideal pages for serving up highly targeted, keyword-rich content to search engines, are content lean, with little more than a few product bullet points.
Adding to the challenge, thanks to all the focus on adding rich user interfaces using JavaScript, Ajax or Flash, many e-commerce sites have hidden away what little bit of content they had on their product pages.
REI just launched a new design of their product pages. Along with adding even more content to better serve their visitors, they added a tabbed interface to keep the pages cleaner looking and limit the amount of scrolling that users will have to do. Best of all though, they did this through progressive enhancement so that users with older browsers or who for whatever reason may have turned off JavaScript, can still access nearly all of this great content. (The reviews are currently delivered through JavaScript.) And yes, search engine spiders are still able to access this content as well.
The image to the right shows how the page would appear with JavaScript off and the tabbed content revealed and nearly all of it accessible to search engine spiders. You can take a look at the product page for the Hobitat tent and see how much content is on the page in the tabs.
It's that time of year again when the kids head back to school and the air begins to hint at the coming of fall. I'm sure the first few days of school are spent doing a little refresh to get all the kids back up to speed after the summer months.
Of course SEOs don't get summer breaks and the learning doesn't ever really stop or even slow down. But that doesn't mean that a little SEO refresher every now and again isn't useful or is any less valuable.
Here are 10 important elements that should always remain top-of-mind with every SEO.
Unique titles: The page title is one of the most important aspects of your site for both search engines and users. Every page should have its own, unique title that encapsulates what that page is about in a succinct, keyword rich manner.
Crawler friendly: Many sites get off on the wrong foot to begin with, or fall astray along the way. All the keyword research and optimization in the world will be of little use if the site can't be crawled because of poor architecture or all your links require JavaScript. Likewise, Flash and Ajax are highly enticing tools (think: "eye candy"), but less than optimal implementation can stop search engines at your front door or leave them looking at what appears to them as empty pages.
Research & test: SEO is a constantly moving target. Web sites come and go, search phrases rise and fall in popularity, sites gain and lose inbound links, and search engine algos continue to change and adapt. Keyword research, site metrics and analytics should be viewed as ongoing tasks.
Keywords: Keywords are the foundation of any SEO program. With these in hand, you can begin to incorporate them into your page titles, headings and body text, as well as incorporating the most evergreen keywords into your file naming.
Compelling meta descriptions: Compelling keyword rich meta descriptions provide an opportunity to communicate with searchers, giving them a reason to click through to your site.
Don't compete: Each page of your site should have its own topical focus. Don't let your pages compete against one another, either because of duplicate content or trying to rank for the same keywords.
Build strong internal links: A lot of attention gets paid to link building, yet many sites fail closest to home with links within the site. Be sure that your internal links are optimal...no 404 errors from broken links, use good keyword rich anchor text instead of meaningless "click here" and "next" kind of links. Take this one step further and look where it makes sense to incorporate internal cross-linking to your own content.
Don't lose what you've built: A lot of energy goes into optimizing a site, improving search rankings, and building links. All of that effort can be wiped away in no time if you change filenames, move pages or even move everything to a new site or change your CMS without properly implementing 301 permanent redirects.
Participate: Today, succeeding online is about more than just keywords, search engines and rankings. You must think outside the site and participate in the greater community. On-site blogging, participating in other blogs and social media sites are all activities that serve to round out any SEO program.
Create great content: It should go without saying, but all your SEO efforts won't make a difference if you don't have great content on your site. Great content is what keeps visitors coming back to your site and encourages others to link to your site. Write content for your site users and the search engines will follow.
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