What Your Webmaster Won't Tell You

By Carl Weiss

If you have a website, then you know your webmaster has the power of life or death over it.  You probably also know that he or she speaks in tongues, where terms like “Link Equity,” “SERPS,” and “Meta Tags,” have a meaning all their own.  In today’s blog, I will part the curtain and allow you to take a look at what the wizard of the web knows that you don’t.  I will also endeavor to show you what you need to know if you want your web presence to be more than a billboard in the desert. 

Who’s On First?

The term “Webmaster” is somewhat nebulous, since the creation, optimization and control of your website can actually take anywhere from 1 to 3 individuals. 

Image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

1.      Web Designer – There are two flavors of web designer.  The first and best is an online marketer who understands that the look of your website needs to take a backseat to the functionality of your website.  A marketing-centric web designer starts by determining what it is you wish your site to accomplish (generate leads, generate calls, or sell directly from the site).  Then he or she will build the vehicle that is designed to generate the desired result. 

The second type of designer is more or less a glorified graphic artist who is mostly interested in the look of the site.  This type of designer will show you graphically intense designs that are beautiful, that most often don’t generate results.  (If you see a lot of rotating images and morphing graphics, this indicates the use of either Java (which the search engines hate) or Flash (which the search engines hate even more than Java).

2.      Search Engine Optimizer – It helps if your web designer understands the ins and outs of SEO.  If not, then you will be forced to hire an optimizer to help you sell your site to the search engines.  This will entail having a conversation with a person that will spout all kinds of arcane jargon in order to describe what it is they need to do to make your website search engine friendly.  (This is another reason to hire a designer that is ready, willing and able to take care of this during the design phase.)

Courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

Unless you want to bring your techno babble/English dictionary with you when you meet with your SEO pro, I suggest you find a firm that can explain in plain English what it is they are going to do for you and how often they intend on doing it.  For the most part you should only need to optimize your on-page assets once.  Anyone who tries to sell your ongoing SEO services other than link building is wasting your money.

3.      Website Hosting and Updating – There are a number of “Webmasters” that only provide hosting and updating of your website.  If this is the case you need to be cognizant of the fact that should you need to make a change to your website, you will first need to go through your web designer who will then need to motivate your webmaster to grant him or her access to make the desired change.  You may also be required to pay both of these individuals to make said change.  Obviously the best solution is to hire an individual or firm who can do all this at once instead of by committee.

Webmasters are a throwback to a time when it required a skilled IT professional to manage the server that contained your website.  This is no longer the case since nearly all servers are now cloud based.  This makes it doubly galling when you submit a change order to a webmaster and he or she sits on a job for days that literally takes a couple of minutes to accomplish. 

What’s on Second?

Once your website is up and running, you next need to register it with search engines and directories. 

image courtesy of flickr.com

You can either do this manually or you can hire a firm to do this for you.  Again, there are professionals who will offer to perform this time consuming service.  The devil, however, is in the details.  That the task needs to be accomplished is obvious.  If you don’t register with search engines and directories your website will never get found.  The trick is to 
get your site or sites registered with as many search engines and directories as possible without breaking the bank.  (Working the Web to Win offers a search engine push package that will register a site on 100 directories for $300.)

Once your site(s) registered on scads of search engines and directories the traffic will start rolling in, right?  WRONG. Even a perfectly optimized site registered on 100 high quality search engines and directories will not prove sufficient to generate significant traffic all by itself.  Why?  That’s because the game of generating search engine position has gotten a lot more complicated in the past few years.

Image courtesy of pixabay.com

Prior to 2005, all you needed to do to generate high ranking on the search engines was create an optimized website and register your site with the search engines.  The search engines would then send their spiders to analyze your site and determine its rank. That’s literally all there was to it.  Today on-page SEO only accounts for 25% of ranking criteria, the other 75% is comprised of off-site assets, such as blogs, social networks, videos, images and podcasts.  More crucially, not only do you need to create, publish and distribute this online content, you have to do so consistently.  Simply having a Facebook or Twitter feed on your site isn’t enough.  You also need to grow and engage your following.  The same is true of your blogs, videos and podcasts. 

Add to this the fact that the search engine spiders can not only read, but understand your website, blogs and social posts and you can see why generating ranking today is a huge undertaking.  I refer to the Internet as the elephant in the room.  Everybody knows it’s there, but nobody is prepared to talk about it.  As search engine spiders continue to evolve, you need to understand that your success online comes down to a popularity contest.  The spiders award their favors to websites that create and engage the biggest audience.  Therefore, you need to either assign the task of feeding the elephant to several staffers, or you need to outsource the task to a company that will put a team at your disposal to get the task done.  (No single human being is capable of handling all these tasks.  It takes a team.)

I Don’t Know Who’s on Third

The other three factors you need to take into consideration if you hope to prevail are geotargeting, mobile marketing and reputation management.

The Internet is no longer a World Wide Wad.  It is now not only possible, but desirable to geotarget your online assets to attract the best audience.  This is done embedding geographic information in all your online assets.  Before you go about creating or retooling a website, you first need to define who and where your best customers are located.  There is a big difference between creating a website for say a chiropractor that will have a reach of 10 miles from his or her location, to a company that needs to market to a regional or national scope.  Today geotargeting can be employed to narrow your scope to as little as an individual neighborhood.

The first thing you should do is register your business with Google Local and create a Google Map.  Since Google controls more than two thirds of all traffic in this country, the more Google friendly you become, the better your chances of success.  Even better is the fact that once created, you can embed your Google map right on your homepage.  This is another important thing to do if you hope to convert traffic into customers.  Nobody wants to search your site to find out where you are located.  Since people spend less than 2 minutes on your website, it is vital you give them everything they need to make a buying decision as quickly as possible.  Gone are the days when a web surfer would click around your site to check you out.  Today the next click you hear will be them going back to where they found you to check out somebody else.

This is also why it is vital you put your best foot forward in a hurry.  This requires video.  If your current website is composed of a bunch of stock images, what does this tell prospects about your company?  Nothing.  If you want to entice prospects to take the next step they need to know what you are all about.  Since you only have 2 minutes or less to accomplish this task, an intro video that shows who you are, what makes you special and why a prospect should take the next step is vital to your success.  It is also vital that the video be located prominently on your homepage, not buried below the fold.

Even better is a second video that shows satisfied customers extolling your virtues.  Like it or not, the biggest obstacle to converting clicks into cash is credibility.  Video testimonials are the ultimate credibility builder.  That and lots of reviews on Google will not only help you seal the deal, but it is a great way to create Google Juice.  When we shoot video testimonials for us or our clients, we routinely take the person being interviewed over to Google Maps to post a review as soon as the video is complete.  Once you get 10 reviews four red stars will also appear next to your listing which helps you separate yourself from the herd once you make it to page 1 on Google.

Getting Mobilized

Image courtesy of linkedin.com

This brings us to the last and currently most important requirement for generating traction with Google: Mobile.  Several months back, Google made it a requirement for websites to be “mobile-friendly.”  This means that if your website is not designed to reconfigure itself to tablets and smartphones, your chances of getting on page 1 are nil.  To see if your site makes the grade, simply do a search for it on any smartphone.  If the page doesn’t change shape to accommodate the platform it is definitely time you did a site makeover.  Make sure your web designer is using a dynamic language such as HTML 5.  If not, you will need to redo the redo.

What’s It All About?

Unless you have to means to hire an in-house online marketing team that has what it takes to create and distribute content to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube on a continual basis, you need to find a firm you can trust to outsource your online destiny if you hope to make your web presence work for you.  If not, you will find yourself at more and more of a disadvantage as your competitors reap the rewards online and eat up more market share.  Because the biggest thing you need to understand online is this, “If you are not coming up on page 1 of the search engines and your competition is, does that help or hurt your business?”

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida.  You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio   

Can Dirty Tricks Deep Six Your Business?

By Carl Weiss

There was a time not long ago when the search engines began cracking down on what were termed Black Hat SEO Techniques.  Tactics such as keyword stuffing, serial websites, and link farms, just to name a few, were deemed verboten by every search engine on the planet.  The reasons why were obvious: If you could cheat them to beat them, there was no way that search engine operators could guarantee the validity of their searches.  Back in the early days of the Internet, there was little that the search engines could do to curb this trend since their spiders were not savvy enough to understand what it is they were reading.  However, this is no longer the case.  What this means is if you either knowingly or unknowingly hire a practitioner of black hat SEO, you could find your site sandboxed or even de-listed.  As a result, you need to take care when entrusting your online business assets to a third party.

The good news is that Black Hat SEO firms are a dying breed.  The bad news is that a number of former black hatters have retooled their heinous skills in order to turn a profit.  What I am referring to is the growing danger of online dirty tricks, where an unscrupulous business owner willingly pays to have a competitor’s reputation besmirched or even to cause overt damage to their web presence in such a way that it becomes difficult or even impossible to do business on or offline.

Here’s how it works:

1.      What’s In a Name? – Everyone knows how online reputation sites have changed the way in which we do business. Whereas in years past a shoddy business could operate with impunity, today the first place that a disgruntled customer will go are to sites like Google Local, Yelp, Angie’s List, Ripoff Report or other reputation sites to lodge a complaint.  While a boon to consumers, many of these sites allow people to post complaints anonymously.  This opens up the doors for underhanded competitors to post fabricated complaints against a competing business in order to damage the competition.  Worse still: a number of these complaint mills offer no way for a business to address or reverse a complaint. This means that once posted, it’s is nearly impossible to seek redress.

2.      Yellow Press Express – Another way to damage a company’s reputation is by publishing inflammatory blogs, newsfeeds and press releases about a competitor.  Sound far-fetched?  Back in May of 2011, ABC News reported that Facebook admitted hiring a major public relations firm to pitch anti-Google stories to news outlets across the U.S.  The blog went onto elaborate the fact that a cottage industry of sorts has sprung up where writers are paid to write comments on review sites that either boost a given business or criticize it. http://abcnewsradioonline.com/business-news/nasty-competition-fuels-dirty-business-tricks.html

3.      The Hack Attack is Back – Hackers can also be employed by a competitor to do everything from launch Denial of Service attacks on your website, to attempting overt industrial espionage.  Several businesses were even damaged by hackers when they subverted ownership of a company’s social sites or even closed or deleted a company’s social site or blog.  Wresting control of another person’s online asset is surprisingly simple.  Even if that fails, it is child’s play to create a social site or website that spoofs a competitor’s, thereby giving the hacker carte blanche to post all sorts of slanderous material.  Just like identity theft, if this should happen to your business, it could take months sort out the mess this creates. Since these tricksters can be located anywhere in the world, trying to seek redress for any damage done can prove to be all but impossible. (See our previous blog, “The Hack Attack is Back.”)

4.      Fraud Free For All – Another way that competitors can strike is by making fraudulent purchases.  In a recent CNN Wire report, Uber, a San Francisco ride-sharing service was accused by competitor, Lyft, of having its employees order and cancel some 5,000 rides since last October.  The article goes onto say: “Lyft claims 177 Uber employees around the country have booked and canceled rides in that time frame. Bogus requests decrease Lyft drivers’ availability, which could send users to Uber instead. But it’s not just the company that suffers. Canceled rides jeopardize income that Lyft drivers depend on — plus they spend time and gas money en route to passengers who have no intention of taking a ride. And even when Uber employees don’t cancel, Lyft drivers complain to headquarters that they take short, low-profit rides largely devoted to luring them to work for Uber.  Lyft claims to have cross-referenced the phone numbers associated with known Uber recruiters with those attached to accounts that have canceled rides. They found, all told, 5,560 phantom requests since October 3, 2013.” While the article goes onto state that there was nothing to suggest that Uber’s corporate office commissioned or sanctioned the canceled rides, it states there is the potential for a competitor to create havoc in a company by the use of such a tactics.  http://kdvr.com/2014/08/11/uber-accused-of-dirty-tricks-to-damage-competitors-business/

5.      The Ultimate Inside Job – If you have ever wandered inside a casino then you know that they are awash with security cameras that record everything from the players and dealers on the gaming floor to game supervisors and security guards that handle either chips or cash.  Unfortunately, most small businesses do not have access to this kind of technology.  As a result, this leaves the doors open for a competitor to have one of his or her minions infiltrate your business.  As the old saying goes, “It’s hard to find good help.” However, for underhanded competitors it’s oh-so-easy to find bad help by hiring a saboteur that is paid to join your ranks.  Once inside a company, the damage that can be done by an interloper is incalculable.  Everything from client lists, to suppliers, and even in some cases social security numbers can be purloined by a wily competitor.  Armed with the keys to the vault as it were, this kind of access can not only harm a company’s bottom line, it can destroy in from within.  Also, if a hacker wants to gain access to a server, there is no easier way than being able to plug an external thumb drive into a system.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Amazon even carries a book in its listings entitled, “How to Steal Your Boss’s Job.”  Talk about an inside job!

When it comes to doing business, competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It’s been known to spur innovation and force an industry to tighten its belt, which in many cases improves prices for consumers. (Remember when laptops used to retail for $2,500?)  However, if a competitor decides to go to the dark side and employ dirty tricks, the only numbers you’re likely to see could be the Deep Six.

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida.  You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio

Lost in Cyberspace

By Carl Weiss

In the recently released motion picture Gravity, astronaut Sandra Bullock becomes detached from the Space Shuttle after a debris storm causes her and fellow astronaut played by George Clooney to wind up adrift in the vastness of outer space.  Tumbling all alone in the dark void with a limited supply of oxygen and little hope of being rescued, Sandra copes as best she can with the terror of being lost in space.  While few of us will ever come to know this kind of visceral fear, many website owners have experienced a similar sense of despair and helplessness when their site went from page one to the vastness of cyberspace after an algorithm reset by a major search engine.

The fact of the matter is that search engine operators do not want anyone save for a select few to understand how their algorithms work.  They are also known to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery from time to time.  Sometimes they do this to shake out the legions of businesses that make money by gaming the system.  Sometimes they do it just because they can.  Either way, while an update by Google may come with a cute and fuzzy moniker such as Panda or Penguin, once published it can leave website owners feeling more like they have been attacked by a Bengal Tiger or Great White Shark. 

Guilt by Association

While there are more than one hundred items that Google uses to rank pages, one of the easiest ways to run afoul of the 800 lb gorilla in the room is to game the system, or hire someone who does so on your behalf.  For more than a decade it was possible to aggregate rank by using underhanded tactics such as keyword stuffing, link farms and invisible text in order to create the appearance of viability.  Of course this was back in the days before the search engine spiders had the ability to analyze what they saw as they leapt from website to website.  Today the googlebots and other search engine spiders can not only understand what they read, but they have been programmed to detect cheaters and respond accordingly.  If your site is determined to be employing any of the Black Hat techniques that are frowned upon, not only will you be relegated to the backwaters of cyberspace, but it could be years before you will ever see the light of day. This last fact is regardless of whether you were the one who added the offending code, or whether it was added by someone in your employ. 

More importantly, when it comes to search engine success, you don’t need to cheat them to beat them.  While gaming the system may generate position in the short run, it almost always fails over the long haul. Plus there is a high probability that when the next algorithm change is published, you may fall into a black hole from which you may never be able to climb out.  Some website owners are literally forced to commission an entirely new website in order to get back into the game, losing both time and money in the process.

                                         

While it is impossible to completely understand every warp and weave of Google’s algorithm, just as you don’t have to understand how to build a chicken to make an omelet, you can get the gorilla to like you by feeding him what he likes to eat.  The Google gorilla is a picky eater who first and foremost likes his own brand.  This translates into creating lots of content on all the properties that Google owns.  So if you blog, you need to become familiar with Blogger, which is owned by Google.  If you produce videos, then you need to create a channel on YouTube.  And even though you may be addicted to Facebook, if you want to make the gorilla smile on your online marketing efforts, you had better start feeding Google+ as well.

What do Webmasters Want?

Now you will notice that so far I have failed to even mention on-page optimization (aka SEO).  That’s due to the fact that while important, it now only contributes to 25% of your overall score.  The other 75% is gleaned from legitimate backlinks, along with blogs, social media and videos.  Not that on-site optimization is unimportant.  It has simply changed over the course of the past few years.  Where such things as Meta Tags and keyword richness were all the rage four or five years ago, Google claims that they no longer rely on Meta Tags at all for ranking.  Today Google places more emphasis on SEO-friendly urls and titles, along with backlinks and mixed media.  Don’t confuse having links to social sites and blogs with feeding them.  Unless you are adding at least a blog a week and feeding your social nets on a daily basis, the googlebots will know and act accordingly.

In fact, as I pointed out in a previous blog entitled, “Is SEO Still Relevant?” the term Search Engine Optimization really needs to be altered to Search Engine Marketing, since optimizing the website is only a small part of the process to achieving page one results today.  As a result the task has become infinitely more complicated.  No longer can you create a perfectly optimized website every two to three years, spin it off into cyberspace and expect it to climb the ranks to wind up on page one.  Now you also need to commit time and/or money to feed the system on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in order to get into the game.  While many people see this as a way of tipping the playing field in favor of larger firms that can afford to hire a team of bloggers, social posters and videographers to do their bidding, nobody ever said the game was fair.

All's Fair in Love and SEM 

Face it, Google and all the other search engines don’t make one slim dime from organic search.  They make their money from pay-per-click campaigns and banner ads, most of which comes from major corporations.  Besides, when you own 82% of search as Google currently does, fairness doesn’t even come into consideration.  As the saying goes, “What do you feed an 800 lb gorilla?  Anything it wants.”

For many small businesses, this isn’t the best policy, it’s the only policy.  Giving the gorilla what he wants gives you a chance to take advantage of the system just as your bigger brethren do.  In fact, we have worked with small businesses who not only competed successfully with Fortune 500 contenders, but who eventually bested them.  Another advantage of being smaller is that you can react faster.  You can analyze the competition and target their weaknesses.  If a larger competitor has the advantage in social media but is weak in blogging, bulk up your blog.  If they don’t understand the advantages of video, go after them on YouTube.  The beauty of the web is that the emperor wears no clothes.  You can see what everybody else is doing and react accordingly.

This brings up the second speed bump that stops many small businesses in their tracks: Making the time to

feed the beast.  Most business owners have enough on their plate day in and day out in simply running their businesses.  This leaves precious little time to write and post to blogs and social sites, let alone shoot and edit video.  However, the answer to this dilemma is but one point and click away.  It’s called outsourcing.  For less than most businesses spend on a display ad in the yellow pages, you can hire out some or all of the tasks mentioned above.  There are legions of bloggers, social posters and videographers out there that are ready, willing and able to come into the fray.  If you find that you don’t have the budget to outsource the entire project, determine which part of the equation you can do in-house and then outsource the rest. 

The only other solution is to ignore the Internet, as all too many small business owners are wont to do.  To this I pose the following question, “If you aren’t found on page one of Google, but your competitors are, is this good or bad for your business?”  (Danger, Will Robinson!)  While it may take a little time and money to get off the bench and into the game, even if it took several months to wind up on page one, this is still better than being lost in cyberspace. 

Carl Weiss is president of W Squared Media Group, a digital marketing agency that offers guaranteed organic placement on a number of major search engines.  He also owns Jacksonville Video Production and co-hosts the weekly online radio show Working the Web to Win every Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern.