August 29, 2007 7:03 am : Comments 001
What Makes the Tail Grow?
There was an interesting story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday about the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. The article used simple language to give concise, straightforward pointers without going overboard with the technical details. Overall, a recommended read for anyone who regularly creates content for the web.
There was one pretty major point that didn’t really get covered though: How do you choose the right terms to get the right traffic. While it is all well and good to go by their easy-to-follow steps for optimizing your content, you won’t get very far if you haven’t made the right choices with respect to your search terms. In fact, you might have a hard time seeing the results at all.
When counseling our clients, the one concept I emphasize more than any other is the idea of the “Long Tail“. The term Long Tail was coined (or perhaps capitalized and made popular) in a Wired magazine article in 2004 by Chris Anderson. In search engine optimization, it refers to the notion that, while a lot of people may start off searching for one common term, they keep refocusing their term to be more specific until they find the results they desire. If you can optimize for these less-obvious terms, the amount of searchers lessens exponentially but the actual traffic you get goes up (and most likely the traffic will be a higher quality with more turnover).
For example, optimizing your site for “Public Relations” may sound like a good idea at first if you want to be sure people looking to work at or hire a public relations firm in the city can find you. Chances are you will change your mind when you Google that term for yourself and see the ocean of results amongst which you will be swimming.
Given the imprecision of the “Public Relations” search term, it is going to be rather hard to get your site to rank well – and if you don’t rank well for that term, you won’t get any traffic at all from your effort. On top of that, even if you do rank well and get a lot of traffic, most of that traffic won’t be particularly useful to you anyway because the searcher stumbled onto your site by searching too broadly and most probably isn’t really looking for what you have to offer. That’s not to suggest that you shouldn’t bother optimizing for the broad “Public Relations” term. After all, it could still bring in some useful traffic. Just don’t waste too much time on it.
For example, consider how you will narrow down search results if you optimize for “New York Public Relations Firm“. Now that you have honed in tighter, a much higher percentage of searchers coming to your site will be the right ones, people actually looking for your services. This idea could be carried further with terms like “New York Public Relations Firm Website Design” or “New York Public Relations Firm Blogging” as examples. And with less competition for the term, you have a better chance of obtaining a high search rank.
The goal is to try to find the right combination of select terms that the people you target would likely search under, but that not every site out there would already be optimized for.
Tools
There are a ton of tools out there for the purposes of search engine optimization and a lot that can help you decide on quality terms, but I am only going to mention a few basic ones.
The omnipotent Google has a great free Keyword Tool to help determine good terms built into their adwords program. It allows you to see how many searches are done for a term in a month and how many people are buying ads for that term, so you can weigh the two together and ideally find good terms where the ratio is in favor of the number of searches. This is not the end-all determinate by any means, but a good first step. Google also has their Google Trends site that shows you search trends for terms over a period of time which can be very educational in this process as well.
The Overture (now “a Yahoo! company”) Keyword Selector Tool is a simple, classic, and easy-to-use tool for gauging the popularity of a term. Once you determine popular terms, you can then search for them to get a sense of the competition, how other sites are optimizing for your choice terms, and then determine whether you have a shot at a strong ranking if you use that term yourself.
Both of these tools are a great start. An added feature – which admittedly can be overwhelming at first – is that they both suggest other related terms to the one you are using. A third all-in-one tool that is not free is Wordtracker. I have mixed feelings about this site. It does help you quickly come up with information from one source; however, the interface is boggey and not very friendly and they use unintuitive terminology which can be extremely confusing. They also like to split up terms based on capitalization, which I find complicates things even more.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and your website won’t end up on the front page of Google tomorrow either. An important first step to creating the traffic you’re looking for is to put some thought into the menu of terms that will bring people to your site. Spending the time to do your homework at the beginning to figure out these terms can pay out huge in the long run. Good luck!
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August 22, 2007 7:36 am : Comments 000
Wordpress and Me
A long, long time ago, on an internet far, far away called “2005″, I began developing with Wordpress. I had started messing around a year earlier with Greymatter, which had been originally developed by Noah Grey and was a pretty slick piece of software if you didn’t want to use a database. I had limited experience with databases at-the-time and ended up feeling a strong need to avoid them. I was also avoiding Movable Type, because of its free license limitations; I wasn’t about to make any investments until I had tinkered with enough of them to insightfully size up their plusses and minuses.
Soon enough, two things became overwhelmingly apparent:
- Greymatter was done. Noah had pretty much abandoned it and the community had taken over, but there was not a lot of action going on. Also, as I got further along, having to rebuild every single file on the site got fairly tiresome fairly quickly.
- Wordpress was an emerging standard for blogging software. It turned out I wasn’t the only one less than impressed by Movable Type. Plenty of prominent web developers and bloggers began migrating to Wordpress.
And so I installed Wordpress 1.5 on my server and plunged into the world of databases…
My first attempt at a client blog came after pushing and pulling themes and generally learning as I went along. In hindsight, I was lucky to start off with 1.5, as the then-newly developed theme system was unbelievably easy to use. It has only gotten better in the 2.x iterations… well, for the most part.
It didn’t take long to realize just how powerful Wordpress is for a developer. Despite being a relative newcomer to databases, I quickly went from integrating Wordpress-driven blogs into html sites to converting html sites over to be completely driven by Wordpress. Using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) was making my whole process better and eventually faster.
Before Wordpress, I had been using Macromedia Contribute (Now Adobe of course) to work with clients on updating content. It was easy enough to use and seemed sufficient, but it always felt to me like a bit of a hack. It had a tendency to rely on some ugly code and, without a lot of extra work, tended to be very limiting to a site’s design. Web Standards was all the talk at the time and I had been trying to keep within that mindset because it didn’t take long to see how much better a site was to build and manage with Web Standards applied.
Still Swearing By Wordpress
Two years later, Wordpress and I are like this (see picture).
One of the most important reasons I stuck by it is that I know it. I know it really well. At this point, I have a lot of custom functions and plugins that I have developed for Wordpress that give me a lot of extra functionality, decrease my development time, and generally make my life easier (I am working on getting some of these ready for release in the next couple weeks).
Also, the Wordpress community is a thriving and creative one. Developers are constantly coming up with new plugins and scripts to be used with Wordpress and the forums are enormously handy. The documentation is generally excellent as well, although the deeper you get, the more shadowed things can become.
And Wordpress is fast. I worked with Drupal for a little while, because I kept hearing that it was the only way to properly manage content online. However, I found out the hard way that Drupal has horrible documentation and the community isn’t always as helpful as you might like. More than a few times I would see a Drupal developer respond with something like, “I don’t understand why you are having trouble… Drupal is so easy to use.” Umm, no, actually it isn’t. Of course, the vast majority of the people saying this weren’t exactly developing sites that couldn’t be managed with a simpler interface. My feeling was that there weren’t a lot of people in the community that could truly use Drupal to its fullest potential, and a lot of those who could were busy or offered expensive seminars. Drupal is best described as a content management creation tool, which is to say that it is more about creating a CMS from scratch than it is about being a CMS. In comparison, Wordpress allows users to go from designed to developed to live in a pretty short period of time, which is a rather significant advantage.
Oh yes – and Wordpress is free. At that price, how can you say no? Truth be told, there is quite a lot out there now in the way of respectable, free content management systems and blogging software (Drupal included). The appreciatory donation to help fund your favorite ones aside, there’s really no practical reason to have to pay for any of it.
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August 20, 2007 3:17 pm : Comments 000
Welcome to the latest iteration of StarkmanAssociates.com. The redesign has been in the cards for a while, but as most people in the business of creating websites for others have probably already experienced, finding the time to manage your own website can be pretty rough. Your own communication needs often get back-burnered by those of clients – and rightfully so. After months of development behind the scenes, we are finally up-and-running with our new layout and new built-in functionality.
We received a lot of great feedback on our earlier version (thanks to the S&A creative team led at the time by Dao Tran, who is now admirably serving with the Peace Corps in Macedonia). So why go through a complete overhaul?
As the new creative director at S&A, you could partially blame me. I came in last year with thoughts on a redesign and update from square-one. It was a classic case of wanting to make a mark and change things right away. Fortunately, I sat back and reconsidered my pace after examining the feedback we were getting. After all, “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” right? So I put ego aside and tabled the site redesign until making changes made strategic sense for S&A rather than just its Creative Director.
So I focused on the clients and their needs. We had been working for some time with clients to develop and manage their online presence from several angles, including those specific to Blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As we have told client after client, when done correctly, blogs can be of considerable value to an organization looking to create a more personal dialogue with targeted audiences. Blogs can drive website traffic, boost search engine rankings, and grant customers, clients, employees and other key groups enhanced access to you in a way that is more familiar, less mediated, and more timely than other forms of corporate communications. While a traditional website typically tells people what you and your company do, a blog can show them how and what you think, especially when used to demonstrate expertise on a subject or present a point of view on an issue that is important to your constituents.
It eventually became clear that S&A needed to “walk the talk” and create a site for ourselves that incorporated the functionality we had long been advocating for clients. We needed a site with the advanced features we were already building for clients, such as a content management system (CMS) that would allow us to easily update a blog. We also wanted to be sure the site was primed for heavier search engine optimization to facilitate the blog’s readiness for all the attention we wanted it to receive.
So we scrapped everything and decided to start from scratch, keeping some key issues in mind. While we wanted the flashy new content management system and a blog, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose focus on the experience of our visitors. The compliments we received time and time again about the previous version of the site were that the content was cleanly written and the navigations were straight-forward and easy-to-use. We wanted to preserve that focus on usability.
What we set out to build in the end was a site that:
- Maintains a high on-screen readability
- Has a straight forward flow that keeps a user from feeling lost
- Is better equipped to manage our content and search engine friendly
- All with a massive amount more functionality than the old site
We are pretty excited about the results and are looking forward to where this new site will take us.
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