Tropical Blogging

Do Ugly Sites Perform Better?

Sonja — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:03:09 +0000

In my opinion, ugly sites can perform very well, and there are a number of factors that can contribute to that: First, ugly sites are often sites that were originally built back in the 1990s by some business owner who had no web design sense or technical knowledge but wanted to promote his business online. It was much more difficult back then to actually sell online (not many shopping cart scripts existed, and ones that did exist were very expensive). So the business owner didn’t just install a cart and sit back and wait for orders to roll in. Rather, he put valuable and unique content on his site. Over the years, he added and added and added more and more content, and garnered lots of link love, and now his site is very well aged and very well linked. The MacGregor Sailboat site is a good example of this. It was built by Roger MacGregor himself, who designed the MacGregor sailboat and who owns MacGregor Yachts. It’s a horrible horrible site from the perspective of design, usability and navigation. It does all of that completely wrong. But it’s packed chockful of everything you ever wanted to know about the MacGregor, and MacGregor owners love that site. Second, ugly sites are often sites that were built by hobbyists — people who are simply passionate about a topic, and started their site without any intention of making money from it. Before eBay, before CJ, before AdSense, these hobbyists were out there creating volumes of good content about their topic of interest. They, like the business owner above, garnered lots of link love, and today have well-aged and well-linked sites. Perhaps they’ve added AdSense or affiliate links on their site, and now they realize some hefty income from their hobby site. It’s icing on the cake for them; they didn’t start the site to make money, and if the money dried up they would continue to maintain the site. They didn’t know or care about design, and they still don’t. But they offer some of the best resources for information about their hobby. Non-profit organizations often fall into this category too. A Page About Freemasonry is a good example of this type of site. It was created by a guy who is a Mason and who loves Masonry, and wanted to share information about it. The site is nothing special, design-wise, but it contains scads of good info about Masonry. Third, ugly sites that are ecommerce sites are often built by small business owners who can’t or won’t pay a professional to build their site. They use whatever free software they can get their hands on, and they do it themselves. They care deeply about their business, but they have no clue about web site development. These sites can do well because the owner’s personality and passion very often shine through loud and clear. People get a sense for how much the owner cares about his product and business, and so they trust the site enough to buy from it despite its lack of professionalism and design aesthetic. These sites are often created by business owners who are very active within the community of people who use their products — so they’re known within the industry, and people feel comfortable buying from them. AmmoMan is a good example of this type of site. My word! I would never deliberately design an ecommerce site to look like that! But lots of people who shoot know AmmoMan is a good place to buy ammunition, and lots of shooters have met the owner at various shoots and gun shows over the years. So…. yes, ugly sites can do very well. But in my experience, whenever I’ve taken on a client with an ugly site and redesigned it, it did better than before. My redesign will typically also improve search engine crawlability, usability, navigation, etc., so it’s not an apples/apples comparison. But it provides evidence that ugliness, by itself, is neither required nor sufficient for a well-performing site. When ugly sites perform well, it’s typically not because of their ugliness but in spite of it. People are very forgiving of ugliness when the site gives them the information they couldn’t find anywhere else, or sells them the product they need at a better price than they can get anywhere else.

Client Shoots Self in Foot

Sonja — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:51:01 +0000

So I have — er, had — this client. Let’s call him Mr. X. I didn’t design his website originally; I inherited him from a colleague who had designed it and was hosting it, and who wanted to get out of the business altogether. The colleague had Mr. X’s domain registered in his own account, and he transferred the domain to me. So I was hosting Mr. X’s site (at a very reasonable cost), and a couple of times Mr. X contacted me to make minor updates to his site, which I did. Other than billing him quarterly for his hosting and annually for his domain renewal, and those couple of minor updates, I didn’t have any other contact with Mr. X. Next thing I know, Mr. X calls me to tell me that he’s hired someone else to develop a new site for him, and he’ll have new hosting as well. Okay. It would have been nice if he had at least asked me for a quote, but that’s fine — he has every right to go with someone else. I sent him the ftp login info so that he can give it to his new webmaster to grab the files from the existing site, in case those are needed. I also suggested that he open an account with GoDaddy so that we can transfer his domain to his own account, since I have no desire to continue to renew Mr. X’s domain every year and bill him for it. If he’s not hosting with me, and not paying me anything to do updates or other maintenance to his site, handling his domain renewal is just not worth my time. So I walked his secretary through opening a GoDaddy account, and I transferred the domain to him. Mr. X’s hosting was paid up through the end of the quarter, so I told him that I would keep his hosting active through July 31, but his new webmaster needed to either have his new site up and running on the new host by then, or move the existing site to the new host, in order to avoid any downtime for his site. The last week of July arrived. Before I shut off his hosting, I decided to see if he’s got the site hosted somewhere else yet. Nope. It’s still pointing to my server. I email Mr. X. I get a reply back from his secretary, who said that he’s out of town and she doesn’t know anything about a new webmaster. She was under the impression that the domain transfer was all that was needed. (Even though I made it very clear in my earlier emails that the domain registration was completely separate from the hosting.) I explained that she really needed to get Mr. X to get his new webmaster to get either his existing site or his new site up and running on their new host (whoever that might be), and to change their nameservers to point to the new host. I explained that if I just shut off his hosting their site would disappear from the web altogether. I also noted that they could renew their hosting with me so as not to have any downtime if there were any problems with the new webmaster or the new host. She said she would talk to Mr. X about it. Aug. 1 arrived. I checked, and sure enough, the site was still live on my server. I emailed Mr. X and told him that he either needed to get his site running on his new host immediately or renew his hosting with me, because as soon as I shut off his hosting on my server, his site would disappear. I received a reply email that said, simply, “This has been taken care of.” When I checked again, the domain nameservers were pointing to GoDaddy’s nameservers. So I shut off the hosting on my server. Now his site consists of a GoDaddy parking page. I suspect that Mr. X never did hire another webmaster. I have the feeling that he was expecting his secretary to build him a new site, and that she knows virtually nothing about it. I don’t know why he told me that he had hired someone else, nor do I know why he was so determined to move his hosting somewhere else. He had never complained to me about any problems with either the site or its hosting, and he certainly wasn’t overpaying for the hosting. I believe he may have thought he could save some money, somehow, although the small amount he was paying me for the hosting meant that at most he could only save a little tiny bit on his hosting by going with a cheaper host. I tell myself that you can’t save people from their own mistakes, and that his site is now his problem, and his problem alone. Nevertheless, I hate to see a site disappear from the web, and kill its standing in the search engines, due to the owner’s stubbornness, lack of knowledge, and unwillingness to listen.

Your Domain is a Valuable Business Asset — Treat It Like One

Sonja — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:25:07 +0000

Once again, I’m trying to help a client track down and gain control of their domain. A couple of years ago, they hired someone to develop their web site for them. He registered their domain in his name, and he apparently renewed it a year ago. But now he’s disappeared and they can’t locate him. None of their contact info for him reaches him. Their domain is on the verge of expiring, but they can’t find the previous developer to get him to renew it, nor can they renew it themselves. I suspect what’s going to happen is this: The domain will expire in a few days. It will go into the registrar’s redemption period, so that no one else can register it, and only the former web developer would be able to renew it. Even if they can reach him at that point, they probably won’t want to pay the redemption fee. So they’ll end up registering a new domain. I can build them a nice new site. But they’ll lose the two years’ worth of “aging” of the existing site on the current domain. They’ll essentially be starting over from scratch. This could have been avoided by the client simply registering the domain in their own name in the first place. I frequently end up registering clients’ domains for them, because they don’t know how and they don’t want to learn how, and they consider “all that technical web stuff” to be beyond anything they can or want to manage themselves. Fortunately for my clients, I don’t plan on disappearing, and I would never ever hold a domain for hostage the way some web developers do. So I consider that my clients’ domain are safe with me. But nevertheless, I always recommend that a domain should be registered in the business owner’s own account in their own name. They wouldn’t allow any other important business asset to be owned or controlled by some third party, and they should apply the same standard to their domain.

Links, Google and Advertising

Sonja — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:00:46 +0000

One of my clients (who has a very successful and busy site) recently asked me about selling text links on his site. He had been approached by someone (apparently a link broker) who was wanting to place a collection of links in the footer, sitewide. My client was asking me about format and location, but I didn’t even address those questions. I told him that before he decided to proceed down that path, he needed to know about Google’s stance on paid links and the nofollow tag. I gave him some basic background information on the whole paid links/nofollow debacle. I explained to him that while we don’t know for sure if Google penalizes sites that sell links, they might, and even if they don’t they might start to in the future. His site performs extremely well in all the major search engines, including Google, and I suggested that he wants to be very very careful to avoid doing something that could harm his site’s performance in Google. I recommended that he tell the link broker that he would be happy to sell the links but that they would be nofollowed — predicting, also, that the link broker would decline such links. He did, and they did. It still irks me that after introducing the nofollow tag under the guise of reducing blog link spam, Google then expanded its recommended usage and then further expanded that to become essentially a “requirement” that paid links be nofollowed. With Google’s focus on inbound links for ranking pages, Google almost singlehandedly created the voluminous quantities of link spam that infests the web. Now they require that webmasters and website owners help them clean up the mess. My client is smart and savvy, and has spent years building a very high-quality site that has garnered thousands of links from major universities, public school systems, Discovery, PBS, the History Channel, Fox, and many many other large, authoritative sources. But he doesn’t live, eat and breathe SEO, and he didn’t know about paid links or the nofollow tag. He was interested in the offer he received because his AdSense income has dropped this year, and he’s looking for other sources of revenue. I’m not typically the type to cry “It’s not fair,” because I know that life is simply not fair — but in this case I’ll make an exception. It’s not fair for Google to threaten dire consequences to his site simply because he didn’t know that an offer he received would violate Google’s policy on paid links. This man focuses on building a quality site; he doesn’t spend his time practicing black-hat SEO or poring over Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Copyright and Copywrong

Sonja — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:38:52 +0000

Copyright law seems to be poorly misunderstood by a great many people. I’m not an attorney, and I’m particularly not a copyright or intellectual property attorney, but I believe I have an informed layman’s understanding of copyright matters. Knowing the basics of copyright law and the legal issues surrounding the use of copyrighted material can help one stay out of trouble. I’ve had two recent copyright issues that might be helpful to discuss.

Copyright Incident #1

Not long ago, I made a copyright mistake during the course of a project for a client whose site had previously been created by another website designer. The site’s content was decent, but it badly needed a new design and underlying code structure to make it user-friendly and search-engine-friendly, along with the addition of some new features. So I used the existing content and placed it into the new design. Two of the pages in the previous site contained articles that carried copyright notices. My mistake was in assuming that those two articles were used with permission — that either the client or the previous designer had contacted the copyright owner and obtained permission to use those two articles. I didn’t verify that assumption with my client; I simply used the articles on the new site. It turned out that permission had not been obtained, and before long my client received a cease-and-desist letter from the copyright owner. Ironically, the old site was so search-engine-hostile that the articles could probably have been used forever on the previous version of the site, and the owner would never have discovered their use, because they never would have been found in any search engine. However, I made the client’s site crawlable by search engines, which made it easy for the copyright owner to track down the unauthorized use of the articles. Take-Home Lesson: Never assume anything about copyrighted material. I don’t consider it my responsibility as a website developer to police the content my clients provide me. I occasionally use stock photos on client sites where I purchase the license myself, but otherwise content is the client’s responsibility. However, while it may not be my legal responsibility, it certainly represents good practice to help my clients (and, incidentally, myself) to stay out of trouble.

Copyright Incident #2

Not long after the cease-and-desist incident, a different client sent me a collection of photos to be used on his site that I was developing. The images were all embedded in a Word document, and I used a program called FileJuicer to extract the images. FileJuicer’s a great little program; it works on Word files, PDFs, and many other file formats, and extracts into separate files all the images and other embedded elements from the file. When using FileJuicer, I usually don’t pay attention to any files except the images that FileJuicer extracts — but in one of those weird coincidences, I happened to open the URLS.html file that FileJuicer created. This file was a clickable list of links where all these photos came from. It turned out the photos were lifted from a variety of websites, and I was pretty sure my client had not obtained permission for their use, particularly since one of the sources was a competitor of my client. I contacted my client and let him know, as diplomatically as I could, that he was not legally permitted to use those photos on his site unless he had permission. I offered suggestions for alternative approaches, including contacting the copyright owners for permission to use the images, taking his own photographs, and paying for a license for photos from one or more of the royalty-free stock photo sources. Fortunately, my client saw the wisdom of this, and agreed to use photos from other sources. Take-Home Lesson: Clients will generally be reasonable about this kind of thing, when you’re trying to keep them out of trouble. If I had ignored what I discovered from the URLS.html file that FileJuicer created, my client would probably have been hit with a number of cease-and-desist notices from a variety of different entities. He may even had received one of the dreaded Getty Images demand notices. Getty Images has been in the habit for some years now of sending threatening and intimidating settlement demand letters to people who are allegedly using a Getty Images image without a proper license. Getty often demands exorbitant sums — they often demand in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000 for a photo that can be licensed for $40 or $50. There’s no telling how many people roll over and pay these exorbitant and ridiculous sums in the face of the threatening letter from Getty, reasoning that an individual or small business owner is better off paying whatever Getty asks, if it will make Getty go away, thus avoiding the hassle and expense of a lawsuit. It’s entirely possible that the photos my client sent me originated from Getty. The sites he got the photos from may have paid Getty for a license, or may have lifted the photos from somewhere else that had paid the Getty license fee. Either way, my client could well have received one of those hostile Getty demand letters if I had proceeded to post the photos he sent me. Here are a few guidelines on copyright and using material that you didn’t create yourself:

Copyright Guidelines

Copyright Fact #1: Virtually anything you might find on the Internet is copyrighted. If it’s legally capable of being copyrighted, it’s copyrighted, unless the author or creator has explicitly placed it in the public domain. (And note that “it’s on the Internet” does not mean it’s in the public domain. It’s still copyrighted.) In the United States, anything created in the past 75 years is subject to copyright, and everything created since 1989 is automatically copyrighted at the moment of creation — no need for a copyright notice, and no need to register the work with the U.S. copyright office. Simply by virtue of creating it, the creator owns the copyright. (There are exceptions that hinge on “works made for hire,” under which a work created by an employee in the course of his employment is owned by his employer. I won’t address “work for hire” just now, except to note that it exists.) Generally, you must assume that if a work exists, it is copyrighted. Copyright Fact #2: You may not use copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright holder. There are exceptions here, too, such as fair use for commentary or criticism, but in general, one must assume that one cannot copy and use material owned by others without their permission. Copyright Fact #3: Even if you’re not making money from the copyrighted material, or if you’re not using it for commercial purposes, you will still be committing copyright infringement if you use it without permission. There are lots and lots of nuances, considerations, exceptions, and ramifications when using copyrighted material. Bear in mind, IANAL — I Am Not A Lawyer. Anyone wishing to use any copyrighted material in a way that they think is permissible under copyright law should consult a competent IP attorney for appropriate legal advice. My bottom line message is: Never use material that you did not either create yourself or obtain permission from the copyright owner to use. That approach will keep you out of trouble.

Brad Templeton’s “10 Big Myths about copyright explained” is a nice summary of some common copyright myths.
If you like to get it “straight from the horse’s mouth,” the U.S. Copyright Office has very comprehensive information on copyright law, along with an online form for registering your copyrighted works.

Watch Out for Domain Registrar Phishing Attacks

Sonja — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:32:47 +0000

Official-looking e-mails appear to be from prominent registrars — they’re really attempts to steal your domains Both eNom and Network Solutions, two very large registrars that handle millions of domain registrations, are the target of a major phishing attack. It is believed that the perpetrators’ purpose is to acquire the login details for victims’ domain registrar accounts and thereby steal or otherwise compromise their domain registrations.

Phishing warning posted on Network Solutions home page

Phishing warning on eNom

These e-mails make a dire warning about “innaccurate whois information” or some other problem with your domain, and warn you that you must take immediate action to avoid having your domain registration canceled.

The fake eNom e-mail
(click image for full-size view)

The above image contains the actual text in one of these e-mails that I received. Since I have my e-mail program set to display the actual URLs of links, you can see that the link to “verify your contact information” is set so that it would appear to be a link to enom.com but in fact is a link to enom.com.ssl45.mobi. If you receive any e-mail about your domain registration (or any other online account you may have) you should never click any link in the e-mail. If you want to verify things for yourself, go directly to the website where you have your account by entering the address in the address bar of your browser. And it never hurts to drop into your domain registrar account to double-check that your contact information (particularly your e-mail address) is current, and to lock your domain, if your registrar offers such an option. Security experts recommend that you change your password regularly, and that you do not use free web-based e-mail accounts (such as GMail) for any sensitive accounts.

Maximize Your Return in Your Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising

Sonja — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:07:43 +0000

A good many of my clients are Realtors, and a good many Realtors throw away money on ineffective pay-per-click advertising because they haven’t taken the time to educate themselves on the tremendous opportunity afforded by this type of advertising. Pay-per-click advertising (a la Google AdWords) offers a type of advertising that has never before been available in the history of the world: Individualized mass-market advertising. A Realtor may be an expert at marketing and selling real estate — but that Realtor may not be an expert at writing AdWords advertising copy or managing an online pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your web site without waiting for the long-term results of organic search engine optimization. It’s also an easy way to throw away lots of money without seeing any return. We’ve put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising to help you get the most bang for your buck. This article focuses primarily on real estate PPC advertising, but the concepts are applicable to most any type of service or product. First, the basics:

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising, is an online advertising model that allows you, the advertiser, to run ads on the Web — and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your web site. This is called a click-through (or click-thru). The ratio of ad views to click-throughs is called the click-through rate, or CTR. Google and Yahoo are the two biggest and best-known PPC networks; there are others, but they don’t have nearly the reach of these two — and Google is by far the biggest. We’ll focus here on Google’s AdWords program, but all the major PPC advertising networks operate using similar concepts. One major benefit of PPC advertising, of course, is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Imagine being able to put an ad in your local newspaper that only costs you money when it causes someone to call you! But another major benefit of PPC advertising, which is sometimes overlooked, is that it allows you target your advertising precisely in a way that no other advertising medium can match. Think laser targeting: You make a keyword list, precisely targeted to your professional services. Those keywords will trigger your ad, which is precisely written to capitalize on the keywords that triggered it. And the ad itself sends users to a page on your site that is precisely written to give the user exactly what he is looking for.This is not your father’s advertising — This is Scud-style laser-guided-missile targeting! Imagine being able to run commercials on television that would only get shown to viewers who had just been searching for exactly your services! And only having to pay if that viewer actually responds to your ad! Then imagine being able to custom-tailor that viewer’s experience when he does respond — controlling exactly the message he gets, which may be different from the message some other viewer gets who responds to different ad you’re running.

How Does PPC Advertising Work?

You, the advertiser, bid on keywords related to your business. You bid the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay per click, and your bids go into a pool of bids. If your bid is high enough (compared to the other bids in the pool), your ads gets shown when someone searches Google using the keywords you bid on. The keywords you bid on trigger your ad to show on Google’s search results pages when a user searches for those keywords, or triggers your ad to appear on web sites that carry AdWords ads, when that site’s on-page content contains those keywords. It gets more complicated that that — you can use different types of keyword matching to define how broadly or narrowly you want Google to match your keywords. When your ad is shown and a user clicks your ad, they get taken to the landing page on your web site that you specify, and now it’s the job of your web site to induce that user to call you or submit your contact form, or do whatever is it you want that user to do once they arrive at your site.

Setting up a PPC Campaign

In your PPC account, you start by setting up a “Campaign,” which consists of an ad and the associated keywords that you want to have trigger that ad. (You can create multiple versions of the ad within the campaign; we’ll address that a little further down. But it helps to think of a campaign as “one ad and its associated keywords.”) You should set up multiple campaigns, with each campaign being tightly focused on one particular theme or topic. A real estate agent might create separate campaigns for “homes for sale,” “condos for sale,” and “land for sale,” for example, and depending on your marketing approach, you might want to have even more campaigns. You might also want to create one or more campaigns aimed people wanting to sell real estate, who are looking for a real estate agent to represent them in their sale. Within each campaign, you create an ad and a list of keywords that will trigger your ad. A “keyword” can be — and usually is — a phrase : one or more words together. A Realtor, for example, might bid on terms such as “Punta Gorda homes for sale” or “waterfront condos,” while a carpet store might bid on “carpets,” “floor coverings,” and “rugs.” You want to create a specific and unique list of keywords targeted precisely at the topic of the campaign. For your “Homes for sale” campaign, for example, your keyword list might include “homes for sale,” “houses for sale,” “waterfront houses for sale,” “affordable homes for sale,” and so forth. Now, wait just a goldarned minute! Shouldn’t the “waterfront houses for sale” be in a separate campaign aimed at waterfront houses? Yes indeed. And shouldn’t “affordable homes for sale” be in a separate campaign aimed at affordable homes? Yep. Exactly so. Look very critically at your keyword list, both while you’re developing it and after you think you’re done, and see if there are keywords that should be separated out into a campaign of their own. After all, we’re working on a laser-targeted approach here.

Keyword Matching Options

You’ll want to read the support documentation in your PPC network for the keyword matching options. In Google, keywords can use broad matching, phrase matching, or exact matching. What are these options, and how do they work? Until you gain experience in your PPC campaign, phrase matching is probably your best bet to use, but here’s a quick rundown:

Broad Matching: In Google’s AdWords program, this can be a good way to throw away money. The “broad matching” option in AdWords automatically includes Google’s “expanded keyword matching technology,” which tries to use computer “intelligence” to match your keywords with other, related, words, such as synonyms and related phrases, that in all likelihood will include terms that you do not want. Your carefully crafted “Gulf-front home” ad may be shown to people looking for a lake-front mountain cottage. Your target audience will not be well-targeted, and the click-throughs that you get are less likely to be interested in your services. As you gain experience in PPC advertising, you might want to include some broad matching, but if you do, you definitely want to use an extensive negative-match keyword list.
Phrase Matching: Phrase matching will trigger your ad for any search query that includes the keywords in the order you specified, even if the search included additional words not part of your keyword. For example, a phrase-match keyword “waterfront homes” will match searches for “waterfront homes with a pool” and “Florida waterfront homes” — the search will always have your keyword phrase in it.
Exact Matching: Exact matching only triggers your ad for searches that exactly match your keyword. Using the example above, if you put “waterfront homes” in your keyword list as an exact-match keyword, a search for “florida waterfront homes” will not trigger your ad.

Negative Keywords

The ability to list negative keywords for each campaign is one of your most powerful — and one of the most often overlooked — tools in your PPC toolkit. You should include negative match keywords in every campaign you create. Negative-match keywords ensure that your ad is not shown for searches that include the negative keywords you specify. For example, in your “homes for sale” campaign, you might want to list “nursing” and “retirement” and “Masonic” and “children’s” as negative-match keywords — because you don’t want to show your ad to people looking for a nursing home or retirement home or Masonic home or children’s home. If you set up a campaign for “luxury homes,” you’ll probably want to list “mobile” and “manufactured” as negative keywords, so that you don’t show your ad to people looking for mobile homes. You might also include “affordable,” “tear-down,” and “handyman special” in your negative keyword list for your “luxury homes” campaign. You should spend at least as much time developing your negative-keyword list as you do developing your regular keyword list. If you are a Realtor who sells real estate in Florida, you should include every U.S. state other than Florida in your negative keyword list. You don’t want to show your ad to people looking for “homes in Montana” or “condos in California.” You can still display your ad to people in those states — someone in Maine who is searching for “waterfront homes in Florida” is probably a good target for your waterfront homes campaign. But someone (whether in Florida, Maine or California) searching for waterfront homes in Oregon isn’t your target market. Don’t show your ad to those folks.

Keyword Bidding

You have to specify the amount(s) you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad. If you bid too low, your ad won’t be shown. If you bid high, Google’s AdWords program automatically adjusts your cost-per-click (CPC) to one penny over the next-highest competitor. If you bid $4/click, and the next-highest bidder is bidding $0.50/click, you’ll pay $0.51 per click. But be careful: You could cause a bidding war that ends up costing everybody more money. You’ll have to experiment to find the bid price that works best for you. Use Google’s keyword tool to see what the average CPC is estimated to be for your selected keywords, and bid somewhere in that neighborhood to start. You’ll have to experiment to find the bidding level that works best for you, and you’ll probably need to adjust your bids up or down as your market changes. A few real estate agents over-bidding in your market could cause your minimum CPC to increase significantly — and likewise, a few real estate agents who blew through their advertising budget with nothing to show for it could decrease your CPC when they drop their PPC advertising.

Writing Your Ad

Laser targeting is the key. Did we mention laser targeting? Don’t forget: You’re creating a laser-targeted advertising campaign here. Write your ad headline and copy so that it is laser-targeted to the keyword list you created. Are you bidding on the keyphrase “luxury waterfront homes”? Your ad headline should read “Luxury Waterfront Homes.” Your ad copy should expand on that theme. A campaign for “waterfront condos”? Your ad headline should read “Waterfront Condos.” Give that searcher exactly what he’s looking for. This is why you should create multiple campaigns, each with its own specific keyword list. Don’t try to use the same ad to reach people looking for luxury homes and waterfront condos and commercial real estate. Create separate campaigns, separate keyword lists, and custom-written ads to laser target your ads precisely at the laser-targeted keywords.

Your Landing Page

AdWords, and the other PPC networks, allow you to specify a particular landing page on your web site for each ad. Do not send simply people to your web site’s home page. Here again, laser target your landing page so that it exactly reflects your ad and your keyword list. Your “luxury waterfront homes” campaign should send people to a page on your web site that promotes and offers luxury waterfront homes. Your “commercial real estate” campaign should send people to the most appropriate page on your site for people interested in commercial real estate It’s a good idea to consider developing specific landing pages for specific campaigns. If you don’t already have a page on your site that’s exactly perfect for a given ad campaign, you should create one. It doesn’t need to be part of your site’s main navigation, and you don’t care about optimizing it for organic search rankings. You want your landing page to reflect exactly what your visitor was looking for, and exactly what he expected to find when he clicked on your ad.

The Laser-Targeted Campaign

If you have followed the steps above, you have created multiple ad campaigns, each with a carefully developed keyword list, and a carefully written ad, and a carefully created landing page, such that for every campaign, you are targeting a very precise type of search, showing an ad that exactly matches that search, and sending the user to a landing page that exactly matches that search. You’re creating an information scent that the user can follow. You’re taking that user by the hand and leading him down the path to exactly what he’s looking for. Congratulations! Now…..

Read, Read, and Read Some more

There is much, much more. You should spend some time reading everything you can get your hands on about PPC campaigns, and you should spend some time exploring the account management interface in your PPC account. Study up on geotargeting. Learn how to run your campaign only at specific times. Read about the differences between the search network and the content network. Set your monthly maximum budget. Explore different keyword matching options, and try out variations on your ads. Read up on Google’s “Quality Score” to find out how that affects your cost-per-click. Through research and experimentation, you’ll figure out what works best for you to maximize the return on your PPC dollars.

Didjoo Vote?

Sonja — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:40:30 +0000

I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice. Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign. Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it. The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

NetBiz sez: “Get onto the first page of Google….”

Sonja — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:04:28 +0000

Just in the past few days I’ve responded to several e-mails from clients asking my advice regarding e-mails that they’ve received from NetBiz. Here’s my take on NetBiz: I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves. What they’re doing is pay-per-click, plain and simple — where you run ads on Google, which appear in the “Sponsored Links” section, and you pay a set amount “per click” whenever someone clicks on your ad. There’s nothing wrong with pay-per-click; it can be a powerful tool to get targeted traffic to your site. And there’s nothing wrong with paying a PPC expert to manage your PPC campaigns for you. But I’m skeptical about anyone who offers a PPC campaign on a fixed budget, while attempting to conceal exactly what they’re doing. Despite their claims about being “featured on that first page 100% of the time,” they *have* to be setting a maximum per-month budget, which would be below what they charge you — otherwise, where would their profit come from? If and when you get enough clicks that the monthly maximum is reached, your ad would not show again until the following month. Period. There’s no other way they could make these offers and stay in business. Yet they don’t seem to want to tell you outright that your ad is running on a pay-per-click basis. I haven’t had the pleasure of receiving any calls from NetBiz myself, so I can’t speak to the truthfulness of their sales pitch. But other people who have spoken with NetBiz reps report their experiences:

An Austin, Texas, Realtor wrote a blog post nominating NetBiz as 2007′s Most Misleading Telemarketing Call.
A Realtor in Hawaii reports on his blog that a NetBiz telemarketer claimed to be calling “on behalf of Google.”
The Website Publisher blog also reports phone-spam from NetBiz and deceptive claims that they’re calling “on behalf of Google”

Furthermore, if you’re going to spend money on pay-per-click advertising, I’d recommend that you either hire someone who knows what they’re doing, or learn a little bit about it yourself and manage your own campaigns. For PPC advertising to be effective, you need to focus on carefully written, tightly focused ads, with very carefully selected keywords lists to trigger the ads, and with tightly focused landing pages on your site developed specifically as landing pages for your ads. This slap-dash kind of offer from NetBiz, with no discussion of the value of the keywords, or any focus on writing the ad itself, and no mention of targeted landing pages — I just don’t think it’s a good way to spend your advertising money. NetBiz seems more focused on getting your money than on running advertising that will work for you. PPC advertising isn’t rocket science, but getting a decent return on your advertising dollars requires more thought than NetBiz seems to put into their offers. As always, do your research, gather the facts, and make up your own mind. But I recommend avoiding the NetBiz approach. Read more about AdWords advertising:

The Web: The Rules Are Different Here

Sonja — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:54:33 +0000

Tonight we’re enjoying our first fire of the season in our fireplace. It’s quite a cheery little blaze. The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire. Years ago, there was a tourism campaign — I think it was sponsored by the Florida Tourism Bureau or some-such quasi-governmental agency. The tagline was “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.” That campaign was pretty lame, and it was widely ridiculed and lampooned. But the message about different rulescould be applied to website development. “The Web: The Rules Are Different Here.” I frequently see sites — and am sometimes asked by new clients for re-designs of sites — that were obviously designed/developed/coded by someone with a background in print design who hasn’t yet learned that the rules are different here. They use huge graphics that take forever to load. They use rigid, inflexible designs that fall apart when you resize the text in your browser, or when you have a browser window that’s larger or smaller than the window the designer tested in when developing the site. They use drag-and-drop WYSINWYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get) software programs that write code that’s invalid, that displays improperly in some browsers, and that often makes use of javascript or Flash buttons for links — making those all-important links invisible to the search engines. They don’t understand that the web is not a fixed canvas, like paper. They don’t understand that some of the most important types of visitors are search engines, which are essentially deaf and blind users with browsers that have neither Flash nor Javascript. Many — probably most — print designers are perfectly capable of learning the “rules of the web” and how it’s different from print work. But all too many of them don’t.

Search vs. Direct Navigation

Sonja — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:35:02 +0000

So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL. I checked the DNS settings on the server. I did traceroutes from my computer. I went to websites in other parts of the country and did traceroutes. I pinged. I double-checked and triple-checked the nameservers. Everything was exactly right, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why the client couldn’t reach his own site. Finally, it struck me: The client was searching for the site, using the search box on Yahoo and Comcast. Once I told him that his site not indexed yet (because it’s brand new), and that he needed to enter the URL directly into the browser’s address bar — voila! Problem solved. This is one to file away to deal with future “can’t reach my site” issues. Note to website designers and developers: If you ever have clients who can’t reach their site, check to see if they’re searching for it.

A Face Lift in Cape Coral?

Sonja — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:32:17 +0000

I received a well-written, but completely absurd, spam e-mail yesterday. It started out by saying:

“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google. I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”

My site, tropicalwebworks.com, promotes my website development firm, and it’s located in Punta Gorda. I have nothing to do with face lifts. I don’t have a single client who wants to rank for face lifts. And I don’t particularly target Cape Coral. Furthermore, there is only one result (count ‘em, one) in google for the search allintitle:face lift cape coral. That means that the competition for that term is virtually zero, and I could easily rank for face lift cape coral if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I really don’t understand the point of sending spam offering to help people rank for search terms that they have no interest in. And of course, the main take-home point is that reputable search engine optimization firms don’t send you e-mails out of the blue offering to help you rank for worthless keyphrases. If you receive such an e-mail (or phone call), that’s a sign that you should run away. (Update: Within a couple of hours of posting this entry on my blog, my site was ranking #1 for face lift cape coral in Google! Take that, you spammers!)

WordPress Upgrade

Sonja — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:53:37 +0000

WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog (Fix My Knee, a chronicle of my many knee surgeries). The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface. I decided I should upgrade Tropical Blogging to the new version. Of course, I made sure I had backups of all the files, and a backup of the MySQL database, before doing anything. I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, de-activated all my plugins per the instructions, followed the instructions to upload the files, and then followed the instructions to update the database. (Which basically consisted of clicking an “Update” button.) All my posts were still there. But all the categories were missing! No, actually, they weren’t missing — they had numbers but no category names, and none of the posts were assigned to any categories. I found a couple of posts on the WordPress support forum about this, but they weren’t any real help. The database structure had changed — there was no longer a “categories” table in the database. There’s a “category-to-tag” converter and a “tag-to-category” converter in the admin area, and I tried both, but neither one did anything. I ended up manually re-creating each category, then manually assigning each post to appropriate categories. I almost just went back to my old WordPress installation, but I have this weird obsessions where once I start down a road I really hate to give up and go back. I also discovered that my theme doesn’t work with this new version. It appears to work, initially — the home page of the blog loads just fine. But clicking any of the posts to “read more” results in an error. So I have to use a different theme, or get into troubleshooting that theme. Bah! I’d like to update my clients’ WordPress-based blogs, but I sure don’t have time to muck around doing crap like that. For now I’ll take a pass. I hope WordPress addresses this issue, or those blogs will just forever have to be stuck on whatever version they’re currently runninng.

Ebay and Linkbaiting

Sonja — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:59:22 +0000

This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house. I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.” What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay. Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name. Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info. I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account. I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.

You can get the script here: TWW’s eBay Report Tracker

Check out a screenshot: (click to enlarge)

Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site

Sonja — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:56:09 +0000

It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch. But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines. I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement. I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO. Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold. This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.

Ethics and Web Design – The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer

Sonja — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:15:19 +0000

Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same. I’m currently participating in a discussion on the SitePoint forums in which the topic of discussion is a web site developer who offers “SEO friendly CMS” (content management system) — but this developer builds his clients’ sites in frames. Not only does he use frames, but the framed content is actually hosted on his domain, not his clients. There are many, many reasons this is a terrible idea. I won’t go into those here. What I want to talk about is the statement by one forum member who wrote, “When the pages are indexed, yes they’ll show his domain but unless the client has specifically asked for that not to happen it’s not unethical.” That’s completely wrongheaded thinking, in my opinion. Clients should not have to know enough about the website building process, the architecture of html pages and framesets, and the inner workings of search engines to request that the developer avoid certain practices that would be bad for the client’s site. The client hires the web developer because the web developer allegedly has expertise in this area. Any monkey can peck at keys on a keyboard; it’s not the web developer’s time-on-keyboard the client is in need of. It’s the web developer’s expertise. When I hire professionals or specialists to perform a service for me, I rely on their expertise. I don’t think I should have to study up so that I can tell my mechanic how much torque to use when tightening the tires on my car, or tell my plumber what not to do in order to avoid damaging my plumbing system, or tell my doctor which medicines are contraindicated, or provide my lawyer with the exact wording necessary for a business contract. I hire those people because they supposedly know what they’re doing. They’re supposed to know how to do the things they’re hired to do, and they’re supposed to know what techniques and processes to avoid due to potential damage. In a similar vein, I believe that anyone who holds him or herself out as a professional website developer — and particularly one who claims “SEO friendly” anything — has a responsibility to perform the promised service using industry-accepted “best practices” without regard to whether the client has sufficient knowledge to request those best practices specifically. I believe, in fact, that it is unethical for a website developer to engage in the types of practices discussed in the SitePoint forum thread, and in many other practices as well. But unfortunately, from the client’s point of view, I don’t have a solution to offer. The client, who is usually not an expert in these things, doesn’t even know the right questions to ask, much less have any way of evaluating the answers. It’s all too easy for the unethical developers to give impressive-sounding, baffle-’em-with-bullshit, high-falutin’ answers. It’s easy to talk the talk; but how does the client assess whether the developer walks the walk? A lot of the things the client should be assessing aren’t obvious from looking at the developer’s portfolio, unless the client himself becomes an expert on web technology. It’s not rocket science, but in my experience, most clients just don’t have the time or the inclination to do that. They’re too busy running their businesses.

The News Online: Usability is Lacking

Sonja — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:24:38 +0000

Daily newspapers have been fighting decreasing readership and falling subscriptions for at least a couple of decades now. More and more, newspapers are putting their content online. For that I salute them. But the web is now about 15 years old, and I wonder why so many newspapers still don’t manage to get some of the basic things right. When? This morning I was reading an article about a replica of the Nina coming to town. The Nina is coming to town on Monday. The article is listed in this morning’s edition (Wednesday, March 12) but under the headline there’s a line that says “Last updated March 11.” This suggests the article was first written and published sometime prior to March 11. So when the article says the Nina is coming to town Monday, does it mean Monday two days ago, or Monday of next week, or some other Monday? If I go down to Fisherman’s Village today, will the Nina be there or not? Perhaps “on Monday” was a sufficient identifier when newspapers were printed and distributed once a day. But “on Monday” is completely insufficient when articles live forever on the Internet, and when articles might be updated after their original publication date. Please, sir, may I have a link? Then I read another online newspaper. I found a link to the reader comments on the “most commented story.” The comments were interesting, but I really would have liked to read the actual story. Unfortunately, there was no link to the original story. Not even a publication date or a headline, which would at least have allowed me to search the archive to find the story. Really, how hard is it to link to the original story from the comments? I learned how to do that back in 1996, within days of writing my first HTML tag. Next up: Location, Location, Location Then I was looking for some information on a certain event, and I found a newspaper’s web site which contained a story on the topic I was looking for. What I really needed to know was where this event was taking place. The newspaper article helpfully told me it was in the Marshall Civic Center, but there was no clue, anywhere on the page, as to what state the newspaper is in. Heck, I’m not even positive it’s in the U.S. I know the newspaper is the Marshall News Messenger. I can guess that the city is Marshall. The Marshall News Messenger tells me that Marshall had two fatal wrecks, and that Marshall is planning its inaugural “Third Saturday” event. But where is Marshall? Michigan? California? Florida? Maine? I have to go digging through the site to find out. It’s common sense, not rocket science The way some newspapers handle their online content, they might just as well make a giant pdf of each issue and upload that. What they do is no more usable than a giant pdf would be. Web site usability is a growing and important topic of discussion among web developers. Usability can involve some finely nuanced tweaks, and also some very advanced technical things, and I can forgive any web site that doesn’t get some of the more advanced stuff right. But come on! Clearly identifying dates, and linking from article comments to the original article, are neither technically advanced nor finely nuanced. A reasonably intelligent sixth-grader should be able to figure out to do things like that.

My New SEO Principle

Sonja — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:28:22 +0000

A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything. Read my explanation here.

WordPress vs. Blogger

Sonja — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:36:29 +0000

Sometimes, one of my clients wants or needs a blog. And the question always arises, should they use one of the free hosted blogging platforms, such as Typepad or Blogger or a hosted blog at WordPress.com, or should they download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and host it on their own site? I generally recommend that they use WordPress and host it on their own site — usually in a subdirectory on their site’s domain, e.g., example.com/blog, or perhaps on a subdomain, e.g., blog.example.com. There are several reasons I lean toward hosting your own blog on your own site:

Reliability and Safety: I dislike, in general, the idea of having your material dependent on a third-party service where the security and reliability of your blog is at the mercy of that third party. A few years ago one of the major hosted blogging services closed up shop — unexpectedly and unnanounced — and stole away in the night. All of the bloggers who had been using that service found their blogs gone with no backups available and no way to re-create their work elsewhere. With your own copy of WordPress running on your own site, your blog is totally portable — you can host it anywhere you wish, and you can easily set it up elsewhere if your hosting disapppear That’s provided you have a backup, of course — when my clients host with me, there’s always a backup available, because I run a cron job that backs up all the databases nightly, and my hosting provider runs daily backups, as well. So none of my clients will ever find their site, or their blog, gone with no backup. All of the remotely hosted blogging platforms have a terms of service (TOS) that disclaims any responsibility for your material.
Link Juice: Assuming you do a good job writing your blog, and it attracts inbound links from other sites or blogs, links to your blog at example.com/blog are likely to help the site as whole rank well in the search engines, whereas a link to yourblog.blogspot.com isn’t going to have the same effect.
Branding: When your blog is hosted on your own domain, people who visit and read your blog can’t help but be aware of the rest of your site. But when your blog is at yourblog.blogspot.com, visitors might have no idea that you even have a site of your own, even if you add links to your site in the blog sidebar.
Flexibility: WordPress has a lot of functionality “out of the box,” and much more available through a variety of free plug-ins. With the remotely hosted services, you can only do what they allow.

With that said, I’ve recently been exploring Blogger, the blogging platform now owned by Google, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. There’s more flexibility and functionality available than I was aware of, and the set-up is even faster and easier than WordPress, which is famous for its 5-minute installation. The WYSIWYG editor in Blogger for writing posts seems to be a little easier to use than WordPress’s. And Google loves it own blog service — A blog that I set up there had its first post found and crawled by GoogleBot the very same day I posted it. Nevertheless, I shall continue recommending to clients that they host their own blog on their site. I think the advantages of self-hosting far outweigh the advantages of hosting on Blogger or any other blogging service.

Network Solutions Caught Front Running

Sonja — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:56:27 +0000

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it, sir!” That was basically the response of Network Solutions when it was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, registering domains for themselves that people had looked up in their whois registry. NetSol basically defended their contemptible practice by saying, “In order to prevent domain registration abuse, we’re committing domain registration abuse.”WARNING: If you do a WhoIs search on a .com or .net domain at the Network Solutions website, NetSol will immediately register that domain. They will then kindly allow you to register it at NetSol — but they’ll also allow anyone else to register it, too. Their claim that they’re “protecting” the domain “on your behalf” just doesn’t hold up. What they’re doing is ensuring that you cannot register the domain at some other registrar, such as GoDaddy, NameCheap, DotRegistrar, or any other registrar that actually charges a reasonable fee for domain registration. The only place you can register the domain is with Network Solutions, at their highly inflated registration fee of $35 (compare that to GoDaddy’s fee of about $10). This practice costs Network Solutions nothing — by dropping the domain within the 5-day grace period, they don’t even have to pay the registration fee. Yet — yet — when they drop it, that domain goes on a list of dropped domains, and the domain tasters will snap it up. So, if you simply decide to wait it out until NetSol drops it, then register it at the registrar of your choice, you’ll likely miss out. ICANN should stop with its hands-off posture toward registrars abusing their position of trust, and take action to prevent this sort of thing. NetSol should start behaving ethically, and should start charging fair prices for domain registration. Everyone should avoid ever using Network Solutions, for anything, ever again. What’s next, Network Solutions? “We had to destroy the internet in order to save it, sir”?