Daniel Coburn

I have worked in several different development environments in my time working on and off line.  A consistent problem with any software is the developers inability to determine exactly what a customer is going to experience.  Why? Because even if a developer creating a windows application tests it on Vista and XP, the customer might have a newer service pack, or some sort of add-on that might conflict, or a person is running bootcamp on a mac.  While this can also be true in web development it works several different ways, both good and bad.

1. There are so many different browsers you can regression test only so far before you have to say, “We no longer Support IE 4″
2. With the addition of plugin’s to firefox you have no clue what the total environment will be, and there is a slight chance of a user having something “odd” going on.

But where you can control items is in your QA process: Development = QA = Staging = Production.

When I worked at Northrup and developed testing software for the ICBM program we knew that ever aspect of our environments were identical and we never had hiccups (ok once we did, but that was a low level windows configuration).  But for all of our testing I knew that the data in test was only 1 week old compared to production, all the images in staging matched all 3 other environments etc.

If I logged into QA a week before a deploy I knew the page would look exactly how it would show up in production.

Why am I bringing this up? Very simply, it’s hard to test a product when you don’t know if it will match production.  A particular issue I’m referring too is a server configuration that is really out of the hands of development, and really cause a huge SEO headache over the weekend.  What was it? Imagine this you have several top level domains like www.danielcoburn.com and www.bethegamer.com, but for your testing and staging you consolidate onto one domain like: test-daniel.danielcoburn.com and test-gamer.danielcoburn.com.  While you can maintain the data and images like I mentioned you lose one function that you would never look for except for today.

The development crew created a great single sign on for all of our systems, and they would share a cookie with the primary domain, in test no problem, they actually all exist on the same domain, but in production they are now separate cookies that could cause other problems.  And we found one this weekend. After several back and forths with development we figured out the issue and why we were watching pages fall off of Google daily.  The damage was however done, and we are now working to recover.  But at the end of the day the lesson here is to try to get your environments 100% in sync if you can.  If you cannot, be vigilant in your monitoring of your site, you never know when one will bite you, or you might “save the world”

In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot of talking at the office about SEO lately, and how important it is to the organization as a whole.  I hear many people talk about what I like to call SEO 303, which is “advanced” methods that involve link building, external content, on site content and keyword density.  It’s all good, but as I’ve mentioned before you have to build the foundation of your site, in order to support SEO strategies.

In my previous post, I spoke about sitemaps, and those are imperative for you website, if you page isn’t index, it will never be found.  But also if your page isn’t found, what does the search engines see?

Another foundation is to solidify your page not found (404) page and use it for good vs. evil.  Evil is when you simply put a basic screen that says simply ‘page not found’, even worse is to forward it to our homepage.  Where I am currently at we do both! If you type in site.com/blah you go to the homepage, but if you add an extension (site.com/blah.as) you got to a basic page not found error.  These are is bad for a couple of reasons:

1. If a link into your site is mistyped a person can have a bad experience
2. If you have bad links internally you give the wrong information.

So what should a 404 contain?

1. An apology
2. Something that lets the customer know they are on the right page.
3. A search box
4. A link to a sitemap, to help customers and bots find their way.
5. The proper 404 header
6. A link to your homepage

An Apology – I someone got to a 404 page it’s your fault, either you changed a page, typed a link wrong, or have something pointing to your site that is incorrect.  It’s important to let the visitor know it was a mistake and you are sorry for the inconvenience.

Something letting them know they are in the right place – A person that gets a 404 needs to know they are in the right place, either a logo, sites name, or whatever, simple is good, or simply make a 404 page out of your site skin for continuity.

A Search Box – The customer is obviously lost, either by their own fault, your fault, or a third party link fault, but regardless of blame they are their to find somethings, so give them the opportunity to search and get more detailed information on things on your site.  This could be an ideal way to save a sale and get a person back into the funnel.

Link to a sitemap – Giving customers the ability to browse your site vs. search can also work to your advantage, not everyone wants to search, they might just want to browse.  Never a bad idea to give someone a second option on how to find what they want.

Proper 404 header – This is not that important for humans, but it is very important to search engines and analytics software.  Your server needs to send the complete 404 error header when it is delivered to a user.  If it is not configured correctly, it will send a status of 200 which tells the browser and search engine that everything is OK.

Put a link to your homepage -The homepage is one of the most visited pages on your site, and there is a good chance that a customer is looking for that page.  If you have your logo on the page make sure you make it clickable to your homepage, and also give them a link that states something along the lines of “Visit our Homepage”…

Today I read an article about how sitemap.xml files are not as useful as some people say they are in the world of SEO.  The argument was just because you have a page in the Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. index doesn’t get it ranked.  And I completely agree with them that just because it’s there doesn’t give it rank.  So the question needs to be why use a sitemap.xml file, and once you have them what do you do? Also what about a human consumable sitemap? What’s it’s function and why should you have one that is bot friendly?

First lets tackle the sitemap.xml.  These things are must haves, for a few of reasons.  They help you get your full site indexed, they help you get new pages into the indexes fast, they allow navigation of pages that might be isolated because of no-follow strategies,  and they let you set information about each page, such as how often it’s modified and it’s page priority.

A sitemap.xml is only going to get your pages into the search engine, it will be up to the public (and to some level you) to “vote” on how important those pages are to the world. 

What are the first steps to creating a sitemap.xml file? There are several ways to create a file, the simplest is to find an application that will spider your site and create an xml file for you… easy enough, but what happens if you have massive amounts of pages? Firstly you cannot exceed 50k links per file or 10 mb max, so if you do have more you will have to split your map up into multiple pieces.  The syntax for the “root” is pretty simple

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_01.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
 <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_02.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

This will allow a company to get million’s of pages indexed into search engines, vs. thousands.  Once you get the pages in the index, now the magic begins.  Let us jump to user consumable sitemaps and their SEO benefit or purpose.

A user consumable sitemap is one that a person could go to and click around to view pages, ALL pages on your website.  One of the major sin’s I’ve seen is the development of really cool looking sitemaps, that are dhtml/javascript heavy and use those technologies to render elements on clicks, or throw AJAX content into a div for user consumption.  The biggest problem here is that search engines cannot read any of it.  The pages need to be bot friend and user consumable.  This means, no more than 100 links per page and keyword rich links. 

“Daniel WHAT? ONLY 100 LINKS!” — yes 100 links otherwise you get link spammy and that’s not very good, it makes the spiders think you are a link farm.  So there’s this really cool thing called Pagination! And yes those links need to be bot friendly too so they can find the next page.

What this will do is help start creating an internal linking that will allow spiders to find your pages, and start building internal link juice.  This will begin to start allowing them to be one of the more popular kids on the block.  Now all you have to do is start working on external content…. but that’s down the road a bit.

In today’s topsy turvy world we see many people trying to figure out the “magic sauce” for making a long term profitable website. I have been reading some really good article around the web about how a disproportionate amount of money is being spend on SEM (PPC and other SEM tech) compared to SEO.  Some of the numbers are mind boggling to me and I’m really confused at why something that gets 75% of the clicks to generate traffic only gets 15% of the Online Budget and something the generates < 25% of the traffic gets over 80% of the budget.

Here’s a Google heatmap that shows what people are actually looking at:

Google Visual Heat Map

You will notice that a vast majority of the customers are on the left side of the screen, and the ppc ads on the right are only showing green/blue vs. red and orange.

I couple of months ago at my office I began looking at our SEO and created a presentation for my manager to describe what I thought we needed to do in order to become more solid in SEO.  I was happy to hear that about two months later the same issue was being brought up from our SVP.  The information from the deck was given some Bling by my manager, and presented up the chain.  I’m very fortunate that not only is my manager a good guy, but he also knows SEO well, and he’s been able to champion it and answer the questions as they were fired at him.  This is great because SEO is a fundamental change in how most organizations in product development operate.

While I helped turn around and develop SEO Strategy for another $1billion retailer, I believe the opportunites I’ll have here will be far greater since the potential increase from fixing the basics is in the $10′s mm.  Some times a company can feel like a big ship and it takes a lot to steer the titanic out of the way of an iceberg, but fortunately there are no icebergs, only great opportunity to improve things.  I’ll be posting some more about basic things we’ll be working on, and what type of results we see.  Also I do believe that PPC and SEO are both required for success, but SEO can bring a lot more bang for your buck in the long term, not just the short.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

I have been pretty lucky to work on several projects and my new job.  Many are exciting as they are breaking new grounds in defining relevance on the website, others are great because they are stretching beyond what is currently being done on the sites ad helping mold the future.

For me relevance on a website is pretty simple: Display something meaningful to the website visitor.  Now the method of doing this can vary.  If you are coming to a site via organic search, I would expect the page you land on should be relevant to the term you searched.  Also if you are searching for an item and you get a paid search, I would expect that the person that created the ad will land  you to a page that is meaningful to the search.

But what if you are already on the site? You are browsing products, articles, images or users?  What then? How do I make a page relevant when you are defining the path you are taking and not me?

First the amount of data that can be collected is astronomical.  Every click, every entry, every closure needs to be captured and processed.  There are several companies that specialize in relevance and that is all they do.  The one reason to work with third parties is simple.  They focus on relevance, where an internal IT group tends to focus on something immediately then move along.  Relevance engines need to constantly be tweak, otherwise you’d see very poor recommendations on sites like amazon.  I really love the idea of showing products that a customer might be interested in, and that might be because they are looking at a product another customer looked at in their shopping experience, and they bought something down the path.  So why not use this information to help jump the customer to the end of their search vs. the beginning?  What if 9 out of 10 people that viewed product A ended up buying product B?  Why not get product B in front of everybody buying A.

That is just an example of relevance, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

Imagine breaking out of product recommendations and moving into article recommendations, people recommendations, but basing all of them on the simple rules of monitoring shoppers.  It can be done and should be.

More later

But Daniel, what does measure twice cut once have to do with any SEO, SEM etc?

Well a rule of thumb, if you cannot measure it don’t do it!  Simple as that.  If you have online ads, and offline ads, have different ways to measure it.  Of course you cannot control all offline, but you can control a vast majority of online.  If a person clicks on something you know what they clicked on, how many pages they viewed, and if you are advanced enough you can tell what phone number they called and all sales associated with them.

Don’t think that an online marketer isn’t aware of this, make sure you are smart about your money spend and understand that every lead going to your website should be counted as revenue from an online lead so you can analyze your ROI and make educated decisions on what really works and what doesn’t.

As always more later.

So there’s this method called “Bum Marketing” and basically it’s a method to drive people to your site through writing articles and posting them about the web.  Now I’ve done a bit of this, but the level of success if far from “stellar”.  The basic process is discover your niche, find good keywords, write an article that contains them, and then put a link to your site in your resrouce box.

The idea is solid and overtime will pay off, but if you want to see $ now, you really need to figure our a better traffic driver like adwords.  Don’t get me wrong, it does work, you just need to give it time, and sometimes that’s the hardest part.

Probably the biggest deposit of article is at ezinearticles.com. I really don’t like the layout of the site, but there’s no denying it’s power and affectiveness.  Give it a whirl, write about something you love, then see if you can make money at it

For search engine marketer’s it’s important to understand what other people do not know.  A perfect example.  I was at my in-laws for a super bowl party and my mother in-law said she went to my blog and didn’t understand a thing I was talking about.  That made me realize that just like with most  people with special skills, SEM and SEO  is no different.  People don’t want to think magazine ads, tv ads etc.  They also do not think that online marketing influences them either.

But it is important to constantly improve your skills.  I like to search and read blogs all of the time by my counter parts.  Many write lengthy disortations about things, while I have chosen to write smaller snippets.  As time goes on I’ll probably become passionate about a topic and write about it a length.  I might even help some folks understand how certain methods can get them banned from search engines, or put them into the realm of “Grey Hat”.  I’ve intentionally gotten a domain banned from Google just for the heck of it.

If anyone has any questions they can always feel free to write or comment on the blog and I’ll do my best to answer them.  But don’t be spammy, I make sure none of that stuff shows up