Write for your customers

A few months back we were consulting with a small business owner on getting his blog up and running and the topic of who to blog for came up. Normally we give our standard recommendation to blog to his perfect customer and after one or two follow ups we move on. This client had more questions than normal and had some good reasons for writing to his peers as well.

I won’t break down the conversation for you but I will lay out the five main reasons why you should be writing for your customers on your small business blog.  While every business is different, I would wager that these 5 reasons will be true for 99% of the small businesses out there.

5 Reasons to Write for Your Customers

1. Your Peers Will Never Buy From You
   No matter how well you are viewed in your industry your customers are still the ones that pay your bills.  When they come to your website it’s for one of two reasons; to make a purchase or to answer a question they have.  If you write for your peers you’re cutting out that second reason and all the sales that it would lead to.
2. Your customers are searching for answers
   When working out an SEO strategy one of the important metrics we track is search volume.  This is an estimation of how many people are using search and from an SEO perspective you have a great many more customers searching than peers.  This means more easy organic traffic to your site, plus each of these visitors is a potential paying customer.
3. It’s not about you, it’s about them
   In blogging and social media it’s important to remember that your content isn’t really for you, it’s for them.  Focus on providing value to your customers by answering their needs and being a friendly and helpful resource. This kind of relationship pays off huge in the long term as they keep coming back and refer their friends to you.
4. Your customers don’t know who the industry leaders are
   Let’s face it, your customers have no idea who is who in your industry and they don’t care. Customers are more interested in relationship and perceived value than industry status.
5. There are better places to promote yourself as an expert
   Nearly every industry has “official” blogs, news sites, forums, and even printed magazines where you can show off your experience and get noticed.  Look into guest blogging, getting involved in the forums, starting a personal blog, and submitting articles as a way to get noticed.  Not only will you get more exposure this way but there is more prestige writing for a well known site than your own blog.  As a bonus, you get to focus your site on your customers which will make them happier too.

A lot of SEO companies will stress paid search engine placement for your keywords, while we don’t discount that as a part of some SEO campaigns it won’t mean a lot if all of the traffic driven to your site doesn’t find the content they were looking for. That’s where knowing how to develop and implement your content comes in.

Of course, content strategies will vary based on the kind of site that you have. One thing that all content strategies should contain; however, is in -depth search engine optimization research. Every piece of content on your site should be crafted with your key words, competition, and potential customers in mind. While it takes a lot of work up front, it pays off with big SEO returns after launch.

A big no-no is simply regurgitating what you have found elsewhere. Not only do search engines frown upon this, but if your “borrowing” isn’t done following copyright laws with proper citation, you may find yourself in legal trouble. Keep in mind that if you create content (whether it’s blog posts, articles, sales text, or even just meta tag descriptions) that is unique to your site, uses your identified keywords (in moderation) and is relevant to your site and your customer’s needs, you will reap great SEO rewards.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag. Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive. No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag. If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”
What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it? The easy answer is to forget all about it. In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage. So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag. Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor. Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally. Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them. Thats what I do.

Best practice is to take those old URL’s, and all their traffic and inbound links, and redirect them to a new working URL. This results in a win/win for your users and your search engine rankings.

That is where the 301 server redirection comes in. Without getting technical a 301 redirect is a HTTP response from the server that means that the page has permanently moved to a new URL. Setting up 301 redirection is pretty straight forward and easy to manage.

301 Redirects and SEO

The permenant redirection indicated by a 301 error is honored by search engines. What this means is that when a search engine encounters a 301 redirect while crawling the web they will delist the old broken URL and update all the incomming links to the new URL.

Here is a short video by Mike Cutts from Google explaining how Google treats 301 redirects and anchor text.

301 Redirects Best Practices

Currently what we suggest to all our clients is that any page that gets search engine traffic or that has a significant number of inbound links get a 301 redirect to a working page with similar or the same content. This provides the best experience for surfers and maximizes the SEO value of their existing inbound links.

Any old pages that don’t get traffic or that have little to no inbound links should then be sent to a well designed and helpful 404 error page. Since there is little value in these pages to be lost the purpose of this method is to maximize the user experience for those who stumble upon one of these pages.

Another popular alternative is to redirect these lesser used pages to the home page. Doing this allows you to direct the inbound links and search engine rankings to a valuable page on the website.

The downside of this method is that potential customers may follow a link expecting to find something and instead find themselves on your home page. This isn’t the best user experience and may result in a lost customer.

Redirects on Apache Servers

The simplist and most common ways to set up 301 redirects is through the .htaccess file in the home directory of your web server. Unlike javascript redirects .htaccess redirects are invisible to the surfer because they are executed by the server when the page is delivered.

.htaccess Single Page Redirects

Single page redirects are best used when the content on the old page is still available at a new location. This way not only do you maintain all the inbound links and pagerank but visitors who arrive through external links find the information they were expecting.

When writing the redirect rule for a single page redirect you leave off the http://www and instead just include the path that would appear afterwords. For exampe to redirect from the old page of http://www.site.com/old/page.html to http://www.site.com/new/page.html you would use …

Redirect 301 old/page.html http://www.site.com/new/page.html

Other 301 Redirects

There are many other ways to set up 301 redirects besides using an .htaccess file. Steven Hargrove has a great resource that covers all of them here. If possible I highly recommend using .htaccess though because of how easy it is to set up and maintain.

Descriptions should be targeted at the surfer to entice them to your listing because most search engines give low ( if any ) weight to the description tag for ranking purposes. The primary value of the description tag is that it allows you to partially control how your listings display in results. If you provide compelling, unique, and accurate descriptions you will attract more search visitors.

An optimized description meta tag should follow these simple guideleines.

1. Unique description tag for every page
2. Use your primary keyword phrase once in the description
3. Accurately describe the page to reduce bounce rate

Unlike in the title tag there really are no “advanced SEO” tips for the meta description. Search engines, with the exception of Yahoo, place low to no ranking value on the description meta tag. Instead spend a few minutes creating a unique description that will appeal to searchers and then move on to something that will provide greater SEO returns.

The only time I would suggest revisiting the description tag is if you’re receiving significantly lower search engine traffic than your search position should be providing. In that case, some optimization of the description may result in a higher click through rate.

Again, I wouldn’t consider this unless I was in a top 5 position. Before that any time spent optimizing the description could be better spent building links or developing content to increase your rankings.

Those four links would normally be …

http://www.sample.com

http://sample.com

http://www.sample.com/index.php (or whatever)

http://sample.com/index.php

So what we have are in essence four different web pages, each gathering their own backlinks, but each one most likely having the exact same content. As a website owner or SEO this is obviuosly not something you want. The search engines also don’t want 4 versions of every single page cluttering up their databases.

This is where canonicalization comes in. Canonicalization gives you the power to choose which version you want to have the search engines use. It’s important that you make this choice for the search engines though because if you don’t, they will. While Google and other search engines are pretty good about deciding which version is best, its still better for us to retain as much control as possible.

To do this we will be using the canonical tag.

This tag is used inside of the tags and will indicate to search engines which of the versions you want them to link to. You are then free to begin building links to your preferred version without worrying that some site somewhere will add links to the wrong one that you won’t get credit for.

I know there are probibly a few more questions but instead of repeating information Google has provided here are the links.

Matt Cutts on “SEO advice: url canonicalization”
Google Webmaster Central Blog on “Specify Your Canonical“

Normally, whether or not you have a sitemap, a search engine discovers the contents of your website by following links. Those links can be on outside websites, or they can be on your own website. As long as there are links pointed to a page and your website has good content odds are very good that a search engine will quickly discover the page all on their own.

This brings up the question of whether or not a sitemap is necessary. If a search engine will find everything without one why bother. My personal opinion is that if a sitemap can be created automatically, like through a plugin or module, then go for it. However if you have to create one manually I have a hard time justifying that much work for something of negligable use.

The reason I belive that is because if your site is structured in a way that a sitemap is necessary for search engines to find their way around you have already failed. One of the core foundations of a solid SEO strategy is to have an easy to navigate website. Since search engines navigate the same way as surfers if a search engine can’t find it, neither can your customers.

Adding a sitemap to a good website will likely produce no results at all. Adding a sitemap to a poor website may alert search engines to content they couldn’t find before. However that page is highly unlikely to ever show up in search results because it would lack incomming links. I have yet to see a study that showed that the presence of a sitemap resulted in any SEO advantages that wouldn’t be better fixed in other ways.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag.  Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive.  No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag.  If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”

What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it?  The easy answer is to forget all about it.  In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage.  So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag.  Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor.  Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally.  Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them.  Thats what I do.

An optimized title tag will follow these three simple guidelines …

1. Title tag should be unique, readable to humans, and accurately describe the page’s content.
2. Title tag should include your primary keyword phrase that the page is being optimized for
3. Title tag should be 64 characters or less to work best in all search engines.

A lot has been written about the optimal way to do titles in order to squeeze the most SEO juice out of them. Personally I feel that if you just follow those three simple guidelines you will be getting 99% out of the tag. If you want to go out and try and get that last 1% here are a few more suggestions that may help.

1. Place your keyword phrase as early in the title as possible
2. Place your site/company name at the end since you already rank well for that (hopefully)
3. Experiment with special characters in the title. It won’t help SEO but may make your site more noticeable in search results.

That’s pretty much it for the title tag. Despite its importance it is a very simple tag to get right. Just remember the 3 simple guidelines and keep the title readable for your users.

The robots meta tag is very powerful in that it can be used to prevent a page from being indexed in search engines. According to Google “When we see a noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it”.

Normally when used the robots meta tag will look like:

If you want to prevent a page from being included in the search engines use

Additional Robots Tags

There are a couple of other operators that can be used with the robots meta tag if desired. If you choose to use one or more of these they are each used separately in their own tag.

No ODP Data

Occasionally search engines will display information from the Open Directory Project in search results instead of using the meta tags on the page. Many webmasters, us included, prefer to prevent this to retain more control over our listings. To do that use the following robots meta tag.

No Yahoo Directory

This is essentially the same as the NOODP robot tag, except aimed at the Yahoo directory. Our clients usually don’t have as many problems with the Yahoo directory but if you would like to be safe the meta tag is