I recently subscribed to a satellite tv package when I upgraded my DSL account — and I instantly got hooked on that adorable Animal Planet show “Meerkat Manor.” Just in time for the season ending. 🙁 Then I started watching Orangutan Island, and while watching the 2nd episode I idly checked the whois for orangutanisland.com. That domain was taken, but orangutanisland.org was available, and I thought to myself, I wonder if I should register that and set up a forum for people to talk about these cute critters? So I did. I used the free phpBB forum software for the forum, and also created a small collection of static informational pages so that the site would have some content to rank for.
Archives for 2007
Bad Hosting Costs $$ and Wastes Time
Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money.
I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started.
First, I logged into the client’s hosting control panel and looked for the “MySQL” or “Database” option. No problem, that was easy enough to find. There was a link to “Activate MySQL” for the account. I thought that a little odd — most of the time, hosting accounts that have MySQL available simply have it available, no “activation” required. But okay…. I clicked the “Activate MySQL” link, then received a message that MySQL wasn’t available and the account would have to be upgraded to a package that included MySQL. I e-mail my client, explain the situation, and tell them they need to upgrade their hosting account. When the client calls the hosting company to upgrade, it turns out that this host’s current packages all include MySQL, but older legacy accounts never had MySQL added to the available options.
Some days later, the client has upgraded their account to one of the newer hosting packages, which does include MySQL. I log back in to the control panel, activate MySQL, make note of the host, username, and password to use for database connections, then look for a link to phpMyAdmin to access the database. No phpMyAdmin anywhere, but the knowledgebase included instructions for downloading and installing phpMyAdmin. Wow, even the low-end $4/month hosting accounts at GoDaddy include phpMyAdmin already installed and ready to use.
I wouldn’t have to waste time installing phpMyAdmin if I could access the MySQL server through a secure shell, so I checked the account’s features for connecting via telnet or ssh. I didn’t find any information on that, so I tried a few random-but-likely ssh connections, but no go. Apparently the account has no telnet or ssh ability. So off I go to download phpMyAdmin.
I downloaded phpMyAdmin, uploaded it to the server, configured the connection settings, and tried to load up phpMyAdmin. I got a variety of “access denied” messages, all pretty worthless.
I’ve only installed phpMyAdmin myself a couple of times, and I wasn’t positive I had it configured correctly, so I decided to just use the connection string and try a database connection in a test page on the client’s site. I still got “access denied” errors, but this time the error message was more useful: The hostname for the database in the error messages was not the hostname specified in my db connection string. I double-checked and triple-checked the hostname specified in the hosting control panel and made sure I had it correct in the connection string, but I kept getting this same error. So I finally decided I needed to contact the host for technical support.
I hate calling tech support on the phone, because it invariably involves being put on hold for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, so I looked for a tech support contact form or e-mail link. No e-mail link, but I did find a form. Unfortunately, the form required that I enter the last 4 digits of the credit card number associated with the account. This is a client’s account, not my own, and I don’t happen to have the client’s credit card number, so I couldn’t use the form — even though I’m logged into the account’s control panel using the username and password associated with the account.
Looks like I have to resort to the telephone after all. I dial the tech support number and I get put on hold for about 45 minutes. I put my phone on speaker and tried to get some other work done while waiting, but every couple of minutes a robotic voice would issue from the speaker telling me how important my call was — repeatedly interrupting my concentration and making it virtually impossible to get any work done while waiting on hold. This is exactly why I hate calling tech support.
Finally, after 45 minutes of this, I get a live person who takes down the necessary information, puts me on hold while he checks into the situation, and then tells me that the database was activated on the wrong server and he would fix that but it would take 6 hours for the correction to “take.” I don’t get this at all — if he fixed it, why is there a six-hour delay? Nevermind, I was glad that the problem was identified, so I thanked him and hung up.
By now it’s well past my normal working hours, and the database is supposed to take 6 hours to be fixed, so I closed up shop for the day. The next morning, my connection script is working, and phpMyAdmin is working, and I’m finally able to start work on the client’s database.
Fortunately for me, I charge this client on an hourly basis, and you better believe they were billed for every minute I spent attempting to get their database set up and working, including the 45 minutes I spent on hold listening to that irritating robotic voice telling me how important my call was. If they had been with a better hosting company, they would have saved about 4 billable hours on their last invoice.
Correcting Bad Information
The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.
“Crawlability,” Web Design, and SEO
So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge. 😉
Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site.
The discussion at High Rankings opened with the story of a businessman who hired someone to design a web site for his business. The site was built in Flash, and, as might be expected, the businessman’s web site didn’t do so very well in the search engines. When he sought professional SEO help, he was flabbergasted to learn that an all-Flash site is likely to rank poorly, if at all, in the search engines.
He asked the SEO pro, “Why did the designer use Flash when he knew I wanted search engine visibility?”
A better question would be, why do designers design “search-engine hostile” web sites when they know clients want search engine visibility?
As things stand in the world of web design, anyone with some elementary graphic design skills can get themselves a copy of Dreamweaver or FrontPage and hang out their “Web Designer” shingle, offering their services for a fee to all comers.
Some of these designers do indeed have a lot of artistic talent with respect to creating pretty, aesthetically pleasing, visually attractive web sites.
What these designers lack is a fundamental understanding of the underlying code and structure of web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how search engines crawl and index web pages, and a fundamental understanding of how a web site needs to be structured in order to have a chance of getting search engine traffic.
So these web designers make a “pretty design” in Photoshop or Fireworks or Flash, and use the built-in export features from those programs to auto-generate the code or the Flash file. The client ends up with a very pretty site that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of doing well in organic searches.
The web is still relatively new as a commercial medium, and there is still some level of technical knowledge required in order to build a crawlable web site. Daily we see self-labeled “professional” web designers creating all-Flash sites, or using fancy javascript-based rollover images for global navigation, or relying on other artsy-fartsy features that doom a site to search engine purgatory — a site that is uncrawlable by search engine spiders, and generally invisible in the search engines.
The client doesn’t understand why his beautiful site gets little or no search engine traffic. The client eventually discovers, if he’s lucky or persistent, that he now has to pay for his site all over again, this time to have someone else tear apart his beautiful artsy-fartsy site and re-build it using underlying code and techniques that the search engines can crawl.
Does it have to be this way?
Should it be this way?
I say no, it shouldn’t. Some people might argue that a web designer’s responsibility is to design pretty stuff, not to perform search engine optimization. That’s true up to a point — I wouldn’t posit that it’s the web designer’s responsibility to do link building or write linkbait articles or do keyword research, unless those activities are explicitly included in the agreement.
But I do argue that anyone who holds himself out as a “professional web designer” should have a broad and fundamental understanding of the technology of the medium and the factors that are required for success in that medium. I do argue that the “professional web designer” is holding himself out as an expert, and the client is relying on the expert’s knowledge and experience.
The client shouldn’t have to have a specialist’s knowledge of the medium — that’s why the client hires a professional. When I hire a contractor to build a house, I shouldn’t have to become an expert on building houses, and I shouldn’t have to give the contractor explicit detailed instructions about how to run the wiring so it doesn’t burn the house down. I expect the contractor — ”the professional” — to have the knowledge and expertise to do that himself, even if the contract doesn’t explicitly state that the contractor will run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down.
In an ideal world, building contractors would always run the wiring so that it doesn’t burn the house down, and in that same ideal world, web designers would always build crawlable web sites.
The only exception I would make to this general rule is when a client specifically requests features that will cause crawlability problems, and, after being educated by the web designer about the consequences of his request, the client insists that his aesthetic vision is more important than search engine visibility. The client is paying for the site, after all. But even then there are usually steps the web designer can take to mitigate and overcome the problems — including text links in the footer to complement the pretty Flash buttons at the top of the page, for example.
Meanwhile, we live in an imperfect “buyer beware” world where the web designers who understand the medium are competing against the web designers who don’t. Clients have to educate themselves sufficiently, and ask lots of questions of potential designers, in order to be sure they end up with a crawlable web site.
No NoFollow, NoSnitching
The infamous Google spam czar Matt Cutts has fired another round at honest webmasters just trying to go about their daily work. In a recent blog post, He invited readers to report web sites buying or selling links that are not using the ridiculous nofollow tag on those links. Read: Google wants us to snitch on our colleagues. Turn them in. Rat them out. Become WWW stool pigeons for Google.
There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.
Eight Tips Every AdWords Advertiser Should Know
1. Multiple Campaigns
First thing: You want to create multiple campaigns, with each campaign focused around a particular product, category or topic. For example, you could create Campaign A for Product A, Campaign B for Product B, and so forth. But you might also benefit by creating a campaign about Hot New Feature in Product A, in which you would target your keywords, ad text, and landing page to that particular feature, and another campaign about Great User Benefit in Product B, in which you would target that user benefit of product B.
Each campaign should be tightly focused on a single theme. Make up your keyword list for each campaign to reflect the theme of that particular campaign. Write the ad(s) for each campaign to reflect the theme of the campaign, using the keywords from the campaign. For example, if Product A’s hot new feature is something that will save users money, you might run ads with headlines like “Save Money With Hot New Feature,” “Hot New Feature Saves Money,” and so on, and the text of the ad should focus on that theme: “Product A Increases Your Bottom Line By Saving You Money”. (Please note: The sample ad text and headlines I’m using here are quick, off-the-top-of-my-head examples, not well-thought-out ways to promote Hot New Feature of Product A.)
When you’re ready to focus on your Product B Great User Benefit campaign, you’d write your ads with ad headlines and text that use those keywords: “Great User Benefit in Product B” for the headline, and ad text that refers to or describes the user benefit.
What you want is for people who search for, say, “Hot New Feature,” to get your “Hot New Feature” campaign, with an ad headline that reads “Hot New Feature” and ad text that focuses on that feature. Someone else who searches for “Great User Benefit” would get your ad headlined “Great User Benefit” and ad text that promotes the user benefit of your product. Don’t make the mistake of lumping all your keywords and ads together under one campaign — think in terms of “laser targeting” your ads to the search words that people are using.
2. Opt Out of the Content Network (At Least Initially)
Second, after you create a campaign, be sure to go into “Edit Campaign Settings” and either opt OUT of the “content network” altogether, or else check the box “Content bids” to set separate prices for content clicks. This allows you to specify much-reduced bid amounts for your ads to appear on the content network. The “content network” is when ads appear not on Google’s search results page, but on regular websites that carry Google ads. A lot of these websites are junk, and they will NOT bring you good targeted leads. You’re opted in to the content network by default, which I think is pretty scummy of Google. I recommend that you opt out initially, and after you’ve spent some time learning your way around the system, only then experiment with opting in to the content network. There are a lot of good sites in the content network that you’ll probably want your ad to appear on, so you probably should opt in at some point, in a small way, with a much-reduced bid for content network ads — but not right away. First learn how to manage campaigns and write targeted ads and set up keywords lists, and only then should you venture into the content network.
3. Exclude myspace.com
If/when you do opt in to the content network, go into the “Tools” section, the Site Exclusion link, and opt OUT of myspace.com. When myspace.com started carrying Google ads, thousands of advertisers were suddenly hit with huge advertising bills because of all the kids on myspace who click-click-click willy-nilly on everything they see, with no intention of buying anything. And even after excluding myspace, keep an eye on the sources of clicks to see if your ads are getting clicks from any other sites sending you large amounts of worthless traffic. It’s one thing to pay for good traffic; it’s something else altogether to pay large amounts of money for huge amounts of worthless traffic.
4. No Search Network
While you’re in there editing the campaign settings, I also recommend unchecking the box to opt OUT of the “Search network.” There’s good stuff that you’ll be missing — AOL’s search, for example — but Google’s so-called “search network” is mostly garbage spam sites that will not bring you good traffic. I think until Google cleans up its “search network” everyone should opt out of the search network.
5. Keep Tabs On Your Campaigns
The first few days (even the first few weeks) that you’re running PPC ads, you should spend some time every day checking on the clicks you’re getting, and the ads and keywords you’re getting them from, and conversion rates. Don’t just set up some campaigns and then ignore them — go into your account EVERY DAY and see what’s going on. Dump the ads that aren’t performing, or edit the headlines and/or text. Very minor tweaks in the wording can make a huge difference. If you have ads that are performing well, create some additional ads very similar to those, but with minor changes, and see if they perform even better. If you have ads with good click-through rates, you ultimately end up paying less per click on those ads, even while the ads themselves get shown higher up in the block of paid ads. Ads with poor click-through rates will get shown lower down, and cost you more per click. So it’s well worth spending some time to experiment and find the ads that work best.
6. Learn How Keyword Matching Options Work
When setting up your keyword list, pay particular attention to the keyword matching options — broad matching, phrase matching, and exact matching. You should probably start with phrase matching. Broad matching can result in this scenario:
I have a client who runs humpback whale watching tours on the Silver Bank in the Dominican Republic. There are sperm banks that (I’m guessing) bid on the phrase sperm bank, using broad matching. Google’s world-famous algorithm says to itself “sperm bank …. sperm whales …. humpback whales … Silver Bank ….. Humpback whales must be related to sperm banks. I know! I’ll show sperm bank ads to people searching for humpback whales on the Silver Bank!” (I think the sperm banks may have wised up after a few clicks on those ads — I’m not seeing those so much anymore.) It’s a clever algorithm, but it’s not very smart. This is what happens when you let Google’s algorithm run wild with broad matching. Stick to phrase matching and/or exact matching. You might end up with your ad appearing for searches on bull sperm if you use broad matching. If/when you decide to experiment with broad matching, keep a *real* close eye on what’s happening with your ads. You might not like the results.
7. Setting Your Daily Budget
In your campaign settings, set your daily budget fairly high initially (although not so high that you’ll go broke from paying your AdWords bill, of course). If you set it too low, your ads hardly ever get shown. Be prepared to throw some money away those first few days with a high daily budget — higher than you really want to spend on an ongoing basis — so that you get enough data to get a feel for which ads are working and which aren’t. Then after a few days lower your daily budget to a more reasonable level. I recommend lowering it in fairly small increments, so that you can see what daily budget results in how many clicks results in how many sales. Tweak as needed until you reach a level you’re comfortable with.
You set the “cost per click” that you’re willing to pay for each click separately from the daily budget, and you can edit the cost-per-click separately not only for individual campaigns, but for individual keywords within each campaign. You might find, for example, that the keyword nutritious dog food converts better than the keyword healthy dog food, so you might be willing to pay more per click for that keyword.
8. Target Your Landing Pages
And last — at least, last for today’s entry: For the most part you don’t want to send people to the home page of your site. For your Hot New Feature in Product A ads, send them to a page about the hot new feature in product A. For the Great User Benefit in Product B ads, send them to a page about the great user benefit in product B. Create some additional pages on your site to serve as landing pages for your ads, if necessary.
Remember the “laser targeting” I mentioned above? Target with your landing page, too. Lead the user down the path that he’s already looking for: Targeted keywords that trigger targeted ads that lead to targeted landing pages. Every step of the way, the user is following a path that takes him to exactly what he’s looking for. And be sure to include a clear (and targeted) call-to-action on the landing page: “Buy Product A Now” or “Start Enjoying Great User Benefit in Product B Today.”
- After you’ve explored the Google AdWords interface and set up a couple of campaigns, come back and read this again. It will all make much more sense then.
- Read more about pay-per-click advertising for real estate agents.
Pre-Launch Steps for Your Site
Does your host or website developer do these things?
Developing a new web site — or re-developing an old one, for that matter — typically involves consulting with the client to determine the site’s target audience and primary objective, creating an attractive and functional design, turning the design into properly coded, valid html, building out the pages of content, and writing the server-side programming to perform whatever dynamic features are needed. But there are several steps that are frequently overlooked before a site “goes live.”
A Search Engine Experiment
I noticed that my web site development site got a visit by someone who found it in a search for “hank hill quotations.” I haven’t put any effort at all into optimizing the site for that search term, so naturally I got curious and had to check it out. It turns out my site is #66 in Google and #32 in Yahoo for that search.
Don’t judge a book by its pretty face
I’ve never liked to use the term “web site designer” in reference to what I do. Yes, I “design” web sites, but the word design seems to suggest, to many people, strictly “visual design.” I tend to prefer developer, because effective web site development must encompass much more than merely designing a “pretty” or “good looking” site.
Do you own the #1 SERP for your domain name?
Many, many computer users use “search” exclusively as their primary means of navigation. What I mean by this is that a user, let’s call her Pam, wants to go to a particular web site that she knows of and is familiar with. Pamela knows the domain of the site. But instead of typing, say, example.com into the address bar of her browser, or even better, bookmarking the site so that she can go to it with a single click, Pamela types the domain into the search field of her Google toolbar, or into the search field of her Yahoo home page.
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