Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

One of my personal heroes, Lawrence Lessig, recently posted an outline of both candidates technology policies. The summary: McCain’s are outdated, lack vision, and only serve special interests. After reading it over a few times, I’d have to agree. See for yourself below.

My mom sent me another article today about the Detroit auto industry and yet another round of layoffs which continue to decimate the Michigan economy. On a side note, if you didn’t know, Michigan has one of our hardest hit economies right now as a result of the entire state leaning on one industry for over a century, but that’s for another time.

The article got me thinking though about risk. Risk is inherent in any online campaign - be it SEO, SEM, a website launch, an ad campaign, anything. Here’s some questions you should ask yourself before, during, and after any SEO campaign.

What happens if you’re successful?

• Does your client have enough inventory to support a surge in website traffic?
• Can they handle a large volume of sales leads?
• Are their pages optimized for conversions?
• Can you report the metrics they want for success?
• Is there website setup to handle large volumes of traffic?
• If it crashes, do they have a contingency plan?
• What’s your next move if you’re a marketing/search agency and you get to be #1 in Google?
• Is there information on the website you don’t want to get out?
• Any case study or success stories you can harness to use for future sales opportunities?

What happens if you’re not successful?

• Have you defined success? Perhaps #1 in Google was too high to shoot for. See what the sites ahead of you have going for them and set client expectations accordingly.
• Can you at least demonstrate the efforts you made or results you were able to secure?
• Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve you can try?
• Was it your fault? Did the client hamstring you into solutions you knew would never work in the first place? Did you voice your opinions?
• Any learnings that can come out of this?

Is there anyway you can mitigate against those risks? Not everything is within your control, especially when working with third parties, but always good to hedge your bets if you can. Just food for thought.

I’ve had numerous people ask me what occurs when a user from another country goes to Google.com, or if a user from the US goes to say, Google.de. Although still difficult to understand at first pass, it’s a great tutorial for how to treat international content, how to target international content appropriately, and how users view Google properties, inside and outside the US:

Just wanted to share a few interesting links from the SEO blogosphere:

• Exploring backlinks - some great backlink tools to check out how people are linking to your site
• Google Webmaster Robots.txt Syntax - in all it’s syntaxy glory
• A great example of how to present SEO results to clients in case study form
• Link building techniques from SMX Advanced

I’ve been working with a few clients lately who were asking me:

“We can’t find anywhere to post links to our site that will be relevant. We’ve tried numerous blogs, we’ve tried social network spaces, and we’ve tried message boards, but they aren’t exactly what we are looking for and we don’t feel like the links are 100% relevant.”

So what was my suggestion to get out of this SEO funk? Create your own content network of course. I mean, it’s so easy these days with Wordpress, Pligg, Plone, Movable Type, phpBB, Joomla, or Drupal and these are just the open source options. There are content management platforms for Coldfusion and .Net as well to satisfy all your technology platform desires. Granted, it will take some time for your content to be indexed and to rank well, but if you have the time and the resources, it could definitely be worth it. Eventually you can turn your own content network into an ad network using Google Adsense, Adbrite, or by selling the ad/link space yourself, which could pay back any up front initial investment.

So instead of setting up a new MySpace profile or putting your links into Yahoo Answers, why not just create your own content network to link from?

So what makes for good SEO you ask, well a lot of things. Here is a quick list for anyone starting out in SEO or just interested in learning what the heck it takes to at least get your pages ranked somewhere in Google:

1. Submit them.
   Seems pretty obvious, but a lot of people don’t bother submitting their pages and just assume that Google will somehow magically find their pages. Just do a quick Google search for “submit pages to Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.” and you’ll find the links you need.
2. Have a reliable web host.
   One measure that Google uses to ensure that you are a legitimate site and not just moving content all over the web is the amount of uptime your site has.
3. Have a memorable or obvious domain name.
   Some people try to get too clever with their domain name. The most obvious will is the best one. There is a great SNL skit that reminds me of this point. If you are a “chicago web developer“, check to see if “ChicagoWebDeveloper.com” is available. It’s not, but just an example.

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Recently, I have been doing a lot of web projects for different clients and due to the demographics of the users of those websites, I have been caving in to 1024 x 768 design. I have read recently on a number of blogs and forums that people are pushing the 1024 design scape as the new thing. Even W3Cschools says so:

Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that Internet Explorer 6 is the most common browser, XP is the most dominating operating system, and most users are using a display with 1024×768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.

However, I always take a “most users” with a grain of salt, because really it comes down to who the audience is. For the projects I am working on, our profiles tell us that the users are mostly business oriented working on PC’s with resolution at or above 1024 x 768. So that design makes sense. However, I am still of the mindset that the lowest common denominator is always the best in terms of design mechanics.

If I am designing a website to be used by the general public, should I go 1024 or 800 wide? Again, let’s go back to the users on the site. Is this a health related website where people may be older or have a low resolution to get larger typefaces, then you should use 800 x 600. If this is a website for teenagers who want to see high resolution videos and lots of content on a single screen, I think 1024 x 768 is valid.

However, shouldn’t we consider, at least for US websites, that a baby boomer generation is going to be increasingly internet savvy and going to be conducting more and more business from home and work online, thereby necessitating a 800 x 600 resolution? On the contrary, should we also assume that displays are going to be getting cheaper and larger and as a result resolutions may continue to increase?

I’d love to hear some designers input on how they go about choosing 1024 x 768 over 800 x 600 in these various situations.

Logo copyright of World Wide Web Consortium

Having worked on many website design projects, I often tell my clients to first define who the users of their website are, which should be obvious for any project, and then secondarily, write the content in a manner that answers your users questions. As more people become familiar with search engines, they often pare their search phrases down to “local Chicago stores” or “sustainable chicago” and cut out the key terms they actually want “Where can I find local Chicago stores?” or “How can I live more sustainably in Chicago?”. As more natural language processing is incorporated into search technology, this will be less of a problem as search engines are able to “guess” what people are looking for. In the meantime, content providers should try and word their content in a manner that answers exactly the questions their users will ask so there is no need for technology to catch up.

Take Yahoo Answers for example, this site is an SEO’s and an information seekers dream as most posts are from consumers looking for answers to their questions. It’s not written with business logic or marketing intentions behind them. There’s no “Contact Us” or “About Us” or “Services Strategies”, it’s people asking questions and getting answers. “Detroit or Chicago? Pros & Cons, please give me the good and the bad of Detroit & Chitown?” and “Is being a vegetarian healthy?“. This is exactly what the web was created for. It’s topical and relevant and what the user is looking for. I agree that Yahoo Answers is also the lazy person’s search engine, but many of the questions and answers that are on Yahoo Answers represent intangible events and experiences not easily found on the web. For example, where is the best place to get an oil change near Halsted and Diversey in Chicago? I can always google “Chicago Oil Changes” and get a big list of places. Then I can look at a map and see which places are closest to that. Then I can look at reviews of those places, if any exist. However, if I am a smart content writer, I figure out what terms, questions, and answers my users are looking for and write content to exactly match that.

So where can I find a usability professional in Chicago?

And where can I find a person to help me with my website?

Thoughts?

I’ve posted a note on Craigslist (see here) announcing that I would like to do a free website for a small business or mom and pop shop looking for a website. I want to keep my design and coding skills as fresh as possible and I like to help people out when I can.

If you know of someone who could benefit from my services, please do not hesitate to let them know. Thanks.

A few years ago when I began doing search marketing, I thought you could create a website with a well thought out architecture and then just link between any pages in any method at all. However, in search marketing, the links are much more important than you think, so they should not be chosen arbitrarily at all.

Example Scenario:
I create a website with products all over it, let’s use kids toys for example. You have rocking horses, toy trains and model cars. If I create a link on a page for “Rocking Horse” which links to the rocking horse product page, this will tell search engines to pull up the product page when a user searches specifically for “Rocking Horse”, which is the product name. This will increase sales for this product, which will make my suppliers happy, which will make my investors happy, and so on and so forth. However, if I put the full product name “Johnny Appleseed Rocking Horse” instead of just the basic product name, I am also going to pull in people who are looking for a generic rocking horse as well as that specific brand.

So Jeff, where’s the problem? The problem arises with the company who hired you to do search marketing for them, e.g. whatever company that makes “Johnny Appleseed Rocking Horse”. If they specifically hired you to market to customers looking for the generic “rocking horse” and not off of their own brand name, it becomes a problem for you and as a result this new website could turn into a competitor to your existing client. So before you run out and develop a website for lead generation, make sure you create a list of keywords and terms to use when building your site and not just randomly picking link names or descriptions.

I have also included a few links for more information about the power of text links or to continue the debate over whether content is king or not.

What have I missed, let me know in the comments.