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Is your Website Fresh?

If you are in business, then you know that your website ranking can be directly translated into gained or lost income. In the age of consumer control and unlimited choice, website visibility is of major importance.

Of course if you have a terrible website design, your site is hard to navigate or looks amateurish, then you will lose the battle right there. However the most modern, accessible and attractive website design in the world will not compensate for bad search engine optimization resulting in your site being hard to find or effectively invisible. Due to this, there is an entire profession that has developed concerned with nothing but best practices for search optimization and making websites rank well in google searches.

Fortunately SEO professionals are helped by Google which gives frequent and detailed updates as to where they are going with their search strategy and what kinds of sites they are giving high marks to. Which brings us to this post, and the latest notification from Google. Those of you familiar with Cook Profitability Services website design and search engine optimization will know that we strongly favor websites with on-site blogging capability. This allows the website end-user to actively blog and keep his or her website “fresh” with regularly updated content. Well this function just took a huge step into the limelight with a new announcement from the Google development team that they are placing more emphasis on the “fresh factor”. So look lively people, you need to get onto your blog and start writing and posting.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, this blogging function is one that is best done by the actually business owner or employee. The reason for this is that hiring some guy from India to write articles about your medical or dental practice will get you content for your website but will never get you any kind of following. It’s like being willing to buy a ticket in the lottery, but only buying tickets for lotteries that have already closed. Yes, you are buying tickets, but you cannot win no matter how many times you buy and no matter how much positive thinking you do.

The internet is in the end, just a machine. Where it becomes a phenomena, it is a people phenomena, which means it is an interest phenomena. In other words where the internet seems to “give” huge fame and success to a cat playing piano, it is actually serving solely as a channel for human interest. When you are designing a website and doing search engine optimization you must ask yourself this question; “What am I placing at the end of my rainbow?”. If there is no pot of gold, you can be assured that there will never be a gold rush. It is common practice in cheap, low end SEO to load up a website with huge amounts of low quality, uninteresting, bumpf, that no person in their right mind would ever read.

Yes, it has the keywords and yes, it may even push the website up. But if you are going to take the time to create content, why not create great content that is interesting and truly unique to you and your enterprise? For sure there is no guarantee that suddenly millions of people will come rushing to your website to watch you ramble about some arcane detail of your profession – but they might. Certainly dull, repetitive garbage is a sure solid guarantee that you will never get any rush of interest.

Work with your website designer. Make sure you have a way to quickly and easily get new content up on your site. And then do it and do it steady and regular. If you make it unique and interesting, who knows, maybe one day with world will want to know exactly how you learned to trim toenails on a pet bobcat, and watch the video!

A five-step strategy to avoid being ambushed by Internet customer reviews

Pro-Active Public Relations

Fierce competition among internet consumer review sites this summer underlines the growing importance of online customer reviews to consumer researching products and services. Small businesses can avoid being ambushed by reputation-damaging posts by adopting a five-step strategy, according to Cook Profitability Services’ social media consultant. More on Public Relations Strategy.

Increasingly, consumers head to search engines and review sites before deciding on purchasing products and services. Customer reviews often provide the first – and potentially strongest – impression of a business and product reviews and ratings provide the first impression for potential customers. The growth of Google Places and its reviews, and the growing complaints of rival review sites that the search giant was stealing review content to boost Places, recently led to Google’s decision to eliminate outside reviews from its own listings.

Unfortunately, many business owners have not done the same research as consumers, and are shocked to discover what people are writing about them.

Public Relations Expert Wayne Baumgarten

“Many of our clients are stunned the first time they Google their practice,” said Baumgarten. “What they often find is a series of customer reviews stretching back months or years. And the bulk of reviews are often bad – even vicious.”

Consumers’ power tools

Today’s consumers have powerful tools, to have their say and even strike back by posting reviews and ratings on Google, City Search, Yahoo Local, Yelp and hundreds of smaller or local directory sites, bulletin boards and online forums. And the ability to read and post reviews on the fly is enhanced on rapidly spreading mobile devices, with some apps and sites even encouraging interactions while at the business. A customer upset about a long wait may well spend the time complaining about it online while sitting in your waiting room.

Public Relations and Social Media

“This is social media too,” Baumgarten said. “It’s powerful, with real-world consequences, and it may not be warm and fuzzy.”

“Social media strategy isn’t just about having a Facebook page or Twitter account,” he continued. “Social media is the whole range of tools that help people share ideas, information and common interests online. Some things you can control, some you can’t. A company may not need a Facebook page – although I strongly advise it – but it can’t opt out of social media. A business almost certainly already has a listing on a review site, whether they asked for it or not.”

“Even big companies have been blind-sided by social media, and most now have some type of social media strategy and dedicated people to monitor, respond and use social media in their customer relations,” Baumgarten said. “The big hurdle for our small-business clientele is to convince them that they involved, whether they know it or not. And if they don’t participate, angry customers may be in charge.”

Five-point public relations strategy to control internet reviews:

While they may not have the budgets to hire social media/reputation management experts, Baumgarten says, small business can work on their own reputation with a five-point strategy: acceptance, awareness, analysis, approachability and avoiding shortcuts:

1) ACCEPTANCE – Accepting the reality that your company is on the social media radar, willing or not, is the starting point in addressing online reputation problems. Denial and failure to act is devastating. On the other hand, it doesn’t have to mean surrender – for those that engage, there are positive aspects. Many companies – even those initially smeared online – have learned to turn social media into an important company resource that has dramatically improved their customer relations. A dedication to being transparent online can build your reputation for paying attention to customer concerns. And unhappy customers may be more inclined to talk things out.

2) AWARENESS – An essential first step is an immediate inventory of major review sites to find out what people have already said about you. Then you must develop a plan for monitoring of your listings regularly. It’s important to know about any new bad reviews immediately; the more quickly you can take action, the better. At some sites, you have the option of subscribing to any new comments on a listing.

3) ANALYSIS – It’s natural to get angry or panic when someone blasts your company in an online review. But it’s important to be dispassionate and to do “triage.” Your only options for action on a particular review are 1) let it slide, 2) post a response, or 3) appeal to the review site or take legal action in extreme cases. (This is a long shot; review sites generally don’t have the inclination, resources or legal liability to verify or review customer opinions.) Questions you should be asking include:

Is the criticism valid? Many have discovered real problems in their office by reading bad reviews. If the complaint is valid, set things right.
Is the criticism bogus? Do you recognize the complainer, and feel the review is just out of spite? You may need to set the record straight, in a professional manner.
Is the reviewer blasting your business on one site, or across multiple sites? Are you the victim of an organized campaign
Is the review visible? If it’s extremely old, or is buried, it may not be worth effort.

4) APPROACHABILITY – Often people turn to an online review site because felt they couldn’t speak out at the business, because they were intimidated, embarrassed or were dismissed. “Rude staff” is a very common complaint online. The best place to deal with customer dissatisfaction is at the office, where the customer should be encouraged to share their feelings and handle disputes on the spot. Customers should also be invited to share feedback on the business website.

On review sites it’s critical that businesses respond publicly to as many reviews as possible, good or bad, valid or not. Many review sites allow businesses to “claim” their listings, and then reply to reviews as the owner. Or at the least, the business can create a consumer account clearly labeled and transparent, and use it to participate on the forum. The message to people reading reviews is that your business is transparent, welcomes feedback, and pays attention to what consumers are saying, even if they don’t always agree. Even on a site with multiple complaints and low rankings, this gives your business credibility. While peer reviews are a powerful influence, most people understand that every business has a certain percentage of dissatisfied customers. A business can deliver an overall impression of credibility and care for customers on social media sites, even if it doesn’t please everyone

5) AVOID SHORTCUTS – The real solution to online reputation management is a long-term commitment to customer service, and a willingness to create a social media presence that puts individual complaints into perspective. For those unable to devote the time, a social media strategist can analyze the current situation, set up monitoring, and even handle ongoing customer interaction.

But businesses should use caution in hiring reputation management consultants promising quick and easy fixes. While many use legitimate strategies, others use questionable methods, misleading sales tactics, and even actions that may backfire on the business. Companies promising to remove bad posts or post large numbers of good reviews to drown out bad reviews through special relationships with review sites often are misrepresenting what they can do. And both review sites and the growing number of verified and trusted regular reviewers are quick to identify and take actions against businesses faking accounts or reviews.

SEO for Non-Geeks: In the beginning was the Info Superhighway

Editor’s note: This is the first of a multipart series on SEO, designed to educate small businesses and organizations insight into the important, but often-deceptive, world of SEO consulting. The series is meant to give website owners enough insight to carry on a well-informed conversation with a consultant, as well as tips on steps they can take themselves to improve their sites.

Part 1 of a Series About SEO

In the beginning, we called it the Information Superhighway, a cliché that now seems quaint. But to follow that analogy, the web was a highway with few exits, no billboards and no maps.

The newly public World Wide Web was fresh from the incubator of universities and think tanks, which shared favorite links to help spread the word about new and interesting sites. Those were the days when a link might be an IP address, rather than a domain name, and DotNet had much more credibility than DotCom in a tech world that debated the idea of even having a commercial world.

We navigated the web by looking at lists of links on well-known sites, where we learned about other cool and useful sites. Almost immediately, web sites emerged that collected and shared links, organized by category.

The colossus of this era was the original Yahoo, with thousands of wannabe’s and “cool site of the day” listings trailing in its wake.

But this type of site required human editors to collect and post links, a job that quickly became unthinkable as the web mushroomed. It also led to one of the first ethical controversies of the web: link-buying.

When the bills came due, the big operations needed cash, and they began selling directory placements – and they didn’t label them as paid ads. The constant surge of new sites found they had little way to break into the directory listings. So directories began to lose credibility; people could no longer trust that the sites displayed prominently in the directories had really been chosen and endorsed by an unbiased web editor.

Grey Hats take the stage

The directory system also spawned the first schemes to game the web link business. Most directories included a way for a website owner to submit their site for inclusion – or at least consideration – on the list. The schemers developed and sold standalone software – or in some cases, services – that allowed you to enter your web address, and then automatically submitted your URL to hundreds or thousands of web directories.

(This is still a popular “grey hat” scheme today, updated a bit for the search-engine algorithm world.)

Building better ways to catalog and map the web became one of the top priorities for entrepreneurs, and they began to focus on search technology. Searching a database is a fairly old technology. Every database has search functionality, from blunt-instrument to extremely sophisticated. A database that’s not searchable in a useful way is, well, useless. And the web, to stretch a definition, is a database – an aggregation of billions of bits of information residing on websites linked directly or indirectly.

The early search sites developed programmed “bots” that moved from link to link within and outside a website, and from site to site – like a spider moving across a web – and sending information on sites and link text back to the search site. Visitors could then search the collected information on the search site in various ways.

And in come the Black Hats

Unfortunately this information covered only a portion of the web, and was poorly organized. And a new wave of black hats learned they could capture the top pages of search results by “stuffing” their sites with hundreds of hot links that didn’t necessarily match the site content. Search results became increasingly useless.

Popular early search engines such as Excite, Webcrawler and Alta Vista were a step up from web directories, because they showed you everything they turned up, instead of cherry-picking and showcasing paying customers. But seeing everything isn’t necessarily useful. The static drowns out the ability to pick out the object of the search.

Using even a top-rated search engine of the day often meant having to flip by the first several pages of results, which generally were occupied by various spam sites – very often porn sites using respectable key words to lure visitors. You had to go much deeper into the search results to find what you were looking for.

Google changed all that in the late 1990s launching with a system called “PageRank,” the foundation of an incredibly complex algorithm that seeks to do one thing: clear away the black-hat and low-value links and deliver high-value relevant content, based on the search words. This algorithm is updated continually to tweak performance and dodge attempts to game the system.

Gaming the system today

And there are more gamers than ever. An entire industry has grown up around the idea of taking actions on and off sites to push a client further up the search results page. Some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work is transparent and open, some involves “trade secrets” that are of value only if held close to the chest, and others that are move into black-hat territory. And of course, there are a significant number of flim-flam “consultants” who promise things they can’t deliver, or use sleight-of-hand to inflate success rates.

In its legitimate form, SEO experts work with a web site’s underlying coding, proper page and content structures and other strategies. Google itself encourages this type of SEO. The search company even offers tools that analyze sites for their transparency to the indexing search bots, as well as tips for legitimate ways to improve the way you present your site to Google.

But the darker side of the industry works continually to find new loopholes and ways around Google’s “anti-gaming” safeguards, while Google works continually to close loopholes and shut down the latest schemes. SEO work in this area is brinkmanship; at best, it’s a continuing effort to keep a step ahead; as soon as the crowd learns the loophole, Google will certainly move in. At worst, a misstep can result in a client’s site facing Google’s “death penalty” – being zapped from search results.

The SEO for Non-Geeks series focuses on Google, as its algorithm delivers most search results in much of the world, and a site that is properly optimized for Google is also generally good for other search engines.

In the following parts of this continuing series, we’ll cover several major topics, including:

SEO starts with the right platform
Content is still king
Things you do that hurt your SEO
Your site updates
Warning flags: Scams, cheats & black hats

Our SEO Services

Cook Profitability Services offers complete SEO services, from site setup on search-engine friendly web platforms, to tweaking content and processes for a client’s top search terms, to ongoing maintenance and training. While we do have our own proprietary systems, our methods are strictly “white hat” and above board. Our SEO clients have seen their critical search rankings reach near or at the top of Google search engine results pages. For a free evaluation of your web development, SEO, internet marketing or public relations needs, call us at 210-601-1050 or submit a contact form.