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I often say “You’re either doing the right thing, or your not.” As a progressive and agnostic, I’ve often been accused of being an ethical relativist. Well, I’m not. I think torture is always wrong, that’s why I advocate the investigation of Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned it.
As people who are very active in the world of food, specifically organic gardening and grass-fed beef, we’re always doing our best to buy and promote food that is sustainable and healthy. This ethic, which is certainly absolute, is born from our environmentalism, which guides our choices regarding our behavior toward the planet. We can’t afford to be 100% sustainable yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand we should be.
So when, recently, my innkeeper friend Cherie wanted to do a web site to encourage people to volunteer while on vacation in Hawaii, I jumped at the chance. It didn’t pay much, but I spent a lot of time on it because I knew it could be successful and make a difference.
I just didn’t realize how right I was!
This site went public around the fourth of July this year. That’s, what? Five months. In five months, the Hawaii volunteer site has earned a Google PageRank of 4. My main site, Supak.com, which has existed since 1996 and has many more backlinks, is a 4. Such is the power of link bait. And why are volunteer opportunities for vacationers in Hawaii such powerful link bait? Because it is an example of people doing the right thing. People (well, most of them) like to do the right thing, and when they see it being done, they will link to it, or bookmark it, or Digg it, or share it on Facebook (note the sharing stick at the bottom of this post).
In this case, they’re doing the right thing in Hawaii, and they’re earning a discount on their stay at Cherie’s historic upcountry Maui bed and and breakfast. Plus, they’re earning a donation (taken from the price of their stay) to the organization for which they volunteer. Win-win-win.
A close look at the analytics and the webmaster tools shows me exactly what’s going on here. The linking that’s going on is not as extensive as I’d like (that I see in webmaster tools), but the links we have gotten are good ones. Most of them are the usual links I provide to my clients, from my usual set of web properties that are capable of passing some decent link juice. So, I’d expect a PR3 out of it. But a 4?
Looking through the traffic from referrals in the analytics, I’m seeing a decent amount of traffic coming from links that don’t show up in the webmaster tools links (interesting, that). There’s a link from the front page of a German travel forum site that’s a PR 4. There’s a good link from Women’s Entertainment Television, on a blog page with a PR4.
And that link, it turns out, is from a highly ranked blogger. I go on and on about how important blogs are, and here’s a case where some decent links, as I’ve described above, work to give a page a PR4 in less than six months. Have Fun • Do Good is “A blog for people who want to make the world a better place AND have fun!” Apparently, there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing and read that blog for inspiration. More importantly for our purposes, there are a ton of people who link to that blog, because it’s a PR6. Even though the post with the link to our volunteer site has fallen off the front page, and it just links to the WETV post (same blogger) the link juice from those archives is still enough to put us over the top into PR4 territory. Who knows who found us through that post, has linked to us, and will be sending us juice next…
So, for doing good, we’ve been rewarded by those who do good. And we’re just getting started. Many of the organizations to whom we linked will be linking back (lesson: be generous with your links), and we’ll be adding more on a regular basis. And, since it’s such a cool idea for doing good (and there’s financial incentive involved), I figure there will be many more people like Britt Bravo of Have Fun Do Good who will be linking to us as well.
Unless you have a giant web site with tons of content that would take even a steroid enhanced Google bot weeks to index, you don’t have enough content. And even then, if it’s just content that sits there, you shouldn’t be content with it. My research, and I’ll admit that I don’t do enough testing, has led me to believe that unless you’re adding water to the river of content out there, you’re just not going to get the same attention from the bots.
Hell, it’s hard enough to get clients to give me new things to say. Most of them run very small businesses, which means they run them, usually dealing with every little detail. It’s time consuming and exhausting, and the last thing they want to hear is me whining about how they haven’t posted lately, or given me something to post. Whether they’re running a gourmet restaurant near Cooperstown NY, or a historic bed and breakfast on Maui, it’s just never enough for me. And those are two of my better clients who post pretty regularly to their blogs (Cooperstown Restaurant and Hawaii B&B). Point is, in today’s social media, blog-driven, twitter obsessed world, you need to keep a constant stream of your own, pouring into the giant internet river of Web 2.0 that just keeps flowing. Don’t be content with your content.
One client who always understood this is Emma Tate, owner/operator of Culinary Delight Catering in Los Angeles. She’s always coming up with ideas for promotions, additions to the site, new menus, special discounts, and the like. She sends a constant stream of testimonials from clients who love her food and catering services. I’ve been her internet marketer for a couple of years now, and her site is getting her more business than ever, although in these hard times her ideas like discount wedding catering in Los Angeles have a lot to do with it.
Of course, the fact that she’s a great caterer (voted top five in MyFox LA’s hotlist the last two years–vote again this year) has a lot to do with it too.
Lately, she’s been giving me so much to post that I get overwhelmed! Where to put it on the site, how to work it in to the existing navigation structure, how not overload the readers… All serious time consuming efforts for someone who, like everyone else these days, wants to keep costs down.
So, I built her an LA Catering Blog. I know, sometimes it seems like I think blogs are the answer to everything. Well, from my perspective they are. When I meet someone who just wants to stay in touch with fans, say, when my son’s music career takes off, then we can have a social media based campaign built around a central web site, using facebook or twitter as the defacto blog. But for the kinds of clients I have now, a blog is the ideal way to go. I can host them on other big sites like Blogger, WordPress, or Typepad and can funnel some PageRank and even some decent traffic (through shared tags and the like) to the web sites through an intricate, deep-linking pattern that develops over time from the various posts. I can build another set of information pages, like “about” or “contact” pages where I can vary the usage of keywords and go after phrases that I didn’t have room for on the main site.
I used Typepad’s paid pro service because it’s easy to do SEO on their blogs. Also, I didn’t have any blogs on Typepad, and you gotta spread the love around to as many different IP addresses as you can.
But mostly, I can keep it all organized. A blog is very natural and automatic way of organizing the tons of content that Emma creates. I can put testimonials up and assign them to the LA Caterer’s Testimonials category, and voila! A new, easily organized testimonials page!
The blog can even encourage new content! I’ve been after Emma to give up some of her recipes, like her red-velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing, and now, with the ease of posting to a blog, she can send me a roughly worded (she’s a chef, writing is not her strong suit) recipe, I can post it, assign it to the recipe category, and boom, there’s a recipe page. The blog is hungry, I plan to tell her, in an appeal to her instincts to feed. Now, I can get even more content out of one of my most prolific content creators, and it will actually be easier to deal with it! Blog for productivity!
Love Your Nuts Logo
One thing is always the same with these graphics: I name them with keywords, and when I use them on the web, I use a different combination of those keywords in the image alt tag.
The alt tag has slipped in terms of prominence in the ranking algorithms. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. It is, however, a courtesy to those people with slow connections, people who turn images off to speed things up, and especially to visually impaired people–the audio page reader will read the image alt tag out loud. But the alt tag is absolutely necessary if you want to win image searches.
We get a lot of traffic to our computer backgrounds photography site through the Google image search. Our Hawaii stuff site, which features free desktop wallpaper pictures of Hawaii, also gets a lot of traffic from image searches. The images that come up in these searches all have the keywords that are searched for in the image names, and in the alt tags. Often, the text around the image has the keywords as well, and the page on which they appear would be a good candidate to do well in a regular search for those words.
So, it’s a good idea to name your images using the keywords that your site is using. Even if the image doesn’t make it to the top of an image search, it still adds the keywords to the page on which the image is used. And it adds those words in a place within the HTML that the google bot isn’t used to seeing them. I’ve found this to be a bonus, albeit a little one. Every little bit helps. If you’re branding, and you should be, getting your logo out there in the image search can be a very valuable thing. Every time a potential customer sees that logo, you’ve etched it a little further into their memory, so why not do this little extra keyword work to get that logo out there even further?
One little detail about link building: it’s important to get links out on as many servers as possible. Since I host a lot of sites on one server, linking between them doesn’t count as much as if they were hosted on a bunch of different servers. It’s a shame, really, but it’s one way the search engines weed out guys like me, who have big crops of web sites that all link together.
How much does this cost me? Well, it’s debatable. But I have done tests and links in from other IP addresses are worth at least a little more than links from the same machine. A lot of other factors are involved, but two links from the same machine’s sites that are both PR4’s is going to be worth more than two links form separate machines that are PR2’s. Generally.
It’s frustrating, but there is a gold mine of old IP’s available to any webmaster that’s been doing this a while. For example, today I was link building for Hawaii clients, and I remembered an old site, the old site of my Maui Bed and Breakfast client, that is actually hosted on Maui.net–an old and authoritative site. And there’s the old site for a Maui vacation rental site of a client who doesn’t use the site anymore, but there it sits on the Maui Gateway server, wasting away its PR2…
If you’re like me, and you host on a server other than your internet access company’s, you probably have tons of free disk space on your access host’s server that you’re not using, and that qualifies for a free link from your access server. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I had some old ones that went away, unfortunately, when I moved and switched ISPs, and that is one problem, unless you’re going to get the same ISP no matter where you move.
Of course, if you’re getting a good deal on hosting, you’re not going to want to host every new site you develop at a new IP address, but maybe occasionally you can get a new server. Or maybe your client’s who are developing a new site will keep the old one. Take advantage of those old homesteads, and link to and from them!
As I recently mentioned in Discount Everything, a post on my Backstage w/ Supak blog, a lot of my clients are trying to find ways to offer less for less in these trying times. Since very few can afford the huge weddings that were so popular not that long ago (what better to do in your overvalued, dangerously leveraged McMansion than go further into debt for a wedding with a carbon footprint reminiscent of the zoom-back in Godzilla to reveal that they’re standing in the impression?), I have clients offering discount wedding catering packages and inexpensive beach weddings on Maui. Another client is offering lodging discounts to people who volunteer while they’re on vacation in Hawaii.
Knowing all this doesn’t prepare me for my weekly look at the Analytics. I saw an increase in visits from keyword variations on the cupcake delivery in Los Angeles theme. My guess is that things are so bad now that people would rather get a dozen birthday cupcakes than shell out for a big fancy cake.
So, one of the things that I’ve learned today from my visit to Analytics (this searching for value has intensified in almost all the searches from which my clients are getting click-throughs) is that I need to publicize the discounts and less expensive options being offered by all my clients. My in-laws’ Cooperstown restaurant is selling more desserts and appetizers than entres, and even the entres have included the occasionally less expensive items (like gourmet hamburgers made from grass-fed beef).
Even my more high-end clients are offering discounts. I haven’t gotten the details yet, but if you’re looking for a Kauai Hawaii beach house vacation rental that’s now slightly more affordable than it was before, you should follow that link. This client has told me that they’ll be offering discounts now (most likely in the off-season). So, if you’re willing to go to the Hawaiian Island of Kauai while the Humpback Whales are up in Alaska eating, you could save a few bucks.
Ironwood tree on Kauai beach in front of Hawaii beach accommodations
The point is that your analytics are trying to tell you something. Sometimes you’ll find little nuggets of gold in there, and you’re only getting a few hits for them because you’re coming in 10th for it, but if you work on it, and create some anchor text that points at pages that say what it is more clearly, you can move up to 1st, and you’ll be surprised how many more hits that will get you for some terms. I make it a point to try to spend a little time with the analytics once a week. And my most interested clients want to see them once a month (I use the automatic email to send out my invoices, too).
My only fear is that Google will figure out how dependent we’ve all become on Analytics, and they’ll start charging for it…
My friend in Hawaii, Cherie Attix, runs the Hale Hookipa Inn Maui Bed and Breakfast. She also cares very deeply about her home, the Hawaiian Island of Maui, which she blogs about on her Maui blog. Recently, Cherie was recognized by O Magazine (part of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire) for her efforts in Voluntourism, or volunteer vacations in Hawaii.
Of course, this is an ethical, environmental, community-based project that I was more than happy to do for a reduced rate (provided I get to be a volunteer on vacation in Hawaii sponsor). I knew I would be encouraging people to give a little back to Hawaii when they visit, to help leave the place a little better than you found it.
When we lived on Maui for a year, I remember a trip to Haleakala National Park where a ranger stopped my wife and asked her not to take rocks from the crater as souvenirs. She held out her hands to reveal several Japanese brand cigarette butts (the most common kind to find up there), and he apologized and thanked her. It is in that spirit of stopping those butts from washing down the mountain into the ocean where turtles eat them and starve to death that we launched this site.
It’s chocked full of information (content is king) about volunteer projects on Maui. It’s organized so you can narrow right in on the organizations you’re most interested in.
From an SEO perspective, this site is gold. There’s all kinds of content, and plenty of room to expand. It’s Maui centric, for now, but could easily be adapted architecturally to include all the other islands: a potential mother load of long-tail key phrases (the percent of searches longer than 3 words is ever increasing as searches get smarter).
Volunteer on Vacation in Hawaii has all kinds of link bait potential… The original idea for the site was a page on the Maui B&B site about Voluntourism that was found, and linked to, by the good folks at O Magazine. Cherie’s been talking to all the organizations about whom we did a page, and we’re expecting all kinds of links back from a bunch of great-ranking .orgs! Maybe we’ll manage to get a .edu or a .gov!
Another aspect to the link bait is the do-the-right-thing mentality that powers a large part of the net. After all, this site is helping drive volunteers to projects that badly need them! It also drives money to them, and saves the volunteer a little too: Cherie is offering guests of her historic Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast a five percent discount on their stay, and is donating 5% of the cost of the stay to the organization for which the guest volunteers! This, of course, works as a marketing gem for Cherie, too!
So, that’s yet another link-bait aspect: save 5% on your stay and earn money for the organization of your choice! Volunteer! Talk about your Calls to Action! The ethical aspect of a site like this should not be underestimated. We’re hoping to drive a herd of volunteers into these programs, thereby making Hawaii a better place in terms of environment, culture, and community. We hope for the sake of all involved that this gets a lot of attention.
One of my clients wanted to promote less religious certainty as a way of making religion less dangerous. His way of doing this is one of the best marketing ideas: provocation. What is this red-flag waving in front of a spiritual bull of internet rage?
You’d be surprised at how angry this makes some people. The mere suggestion that Satan wrote the Bible makes them red faced and fork tongued with bile. Luckily, none of those angry people have let go of their rage on my friend’s site. In fact, the conversation is down-right civil over there at the Satan Blog, which has been getting more and more traffic lately, mostly through word of mouth (I haven’t been retained to promote the site on a regular basis).
The basic essay, which is a logical argument that is only slightly satirical, that Satan Wrote the Bible, is just a small part of the site. The Satan Bible Blog actually has a wide variety of Bible commentaries and religion essays written in the folksy style that Thomas D. is so gifted at. His most recent post, What is Heaven Like, includes some organic gardening humor that even black-thumbed indoors types will get a giggle out of.
This site and blog is a great example of how to spread your message through provocation. But, you folks actually selling a service or product might want to temper your temper tampering, so as not to provoke so much that you scare off the customer. Note that on the first page of Satan Wrote the Bible, Thomas D. says:
If you come here feeling anger at the notion anyone would have the audacity to claim that Satan wrote The Bible, I apologize. It is not my desire to cause anyone to feel negative emotions. If your neck is stiff or your shoulders are up around your ears, please take a moment to relax. Take a deep breath. Put a smile on your face even if you don’t at all feel like smiling. I hope that makes you feel a little better.
Right away he’s trying to settle down the fracas he’s sure he’s started for most people who might have stumbled across his site. One of the keyword phrases that we settled on is “Bible Commentaries.” Most people searching for Bible commentaries are probably not very receptive to the thought that Satan wrote the book they believe God wrote. So he’s immediately appealing for cooler heads by getting it out there that this is more of a thought experiment than a slap in the face to Christians. Smart. And effective.
I sincerely meant/mean to post more in this blog, if only for my clients who would like to know more about the technical aspects of what I do. But life is hard for me these days, and it requires a lot of my time just to make the rent each month. And then there is my garden, which has, because of the incessant rains, been covered in weeds and slugs (and these little “soft-shell” snails that our box turtle just loves), and that has really soaked up a lot of my time.
But there has been work in between all that weeding and snail harvesting. Some of that work has been for a client who has helped me with even more than the rent. Since we have family visiting over the summer, and this house collected a lot of dust and grime over the winter, I’ve been actually looking forward to the latest house cleaning blog posts from Margaret at The Clean Sweep, an East Bay Maid Service and Housekeeping Agency serving Contra Costa County near San Francisco.
If you live in the east San Francisco Bay area (you can see their maid service service map here), you can take advantage of the professional cleaning services and spare yourself. If you live somewhere else, or you just can’t afford a professional cleaning service, you should check out their house cleaning blog which includes free tips and hints on house cleaning, home organizing, and home improvement.
I’ll have some more posts coming up very soon, including on a new site for a friend in Hawaii involving Volunteer Tourism in Hawaii.
My wife makes great beef jerky. As people who have long been into organic living (I had one of the world’s first organic gardening web sites), we knew we’d want to use grass-fed beef if we ever tried to make a business out of it. Well, we’ve finally started doing it, using this central New York grass-fed beef from our friends at Nectar Hills Farm, operated by Sonia and Dave. On Saturdays, you can find Sonia at the Cooperstown New York Farmer’s Market where she will be selling her pasture-raised meats, our Happy Hobo Grass-fed Beef Jerky (web site someday, I hope), and my wife Robin’s delicious, chocolate-dipped, organic biscotti (made with eggs from Nectar Hills Farm).
The meat, jerky, and biscotti are also available at the Nectar Hills Farm store which is open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, in Cherry Valley, New York.
What does all this have to do with search engine optimization and internet marketing, besides the obvious fact that I’m creating deep links to the new web site I made for our rancher friends? Well, Sonia and Dave have been running this farm for about 6 years now, and every so often they would tell each other that they really needed a web site. Since we all like to barter, and we needed some top round to start our grass-fed beef jerky business, we traded. And in her excitement over her new web site, Sonia started notifying some very prominent sites to link to her (like Eat Wild and Local Harvest). Of course, being authoritative sites, Google immediately saw a link to a new site, and jumped on it before I was ready.
Eventually it won’t matter, as I’ve since managed to get a little robots.txt file up, along with a site map, and more information, including some variants on the key phrases that I wanted to get in there. Google will come back and recrawl soon, hopefully, since I’ve now submitted the site map to Google webmaster tools. So, hopefully this little glitch won’t really matter.
But it does allow me to again prove my point that robots.txt files and xml sitemaps make a big difference. I’d be willing to bet that if I had finished the site, submitted through webmaster tools and Google Local Business listings simultaneously, I would have beaten the original referring site on a search for the actual name of the farm. I’m pretty sure I would have come in much higher for central New York grass-fed beef. But I’ll never know, and now I have to work a little harder to make that happen–rushing in links from Google-bot frequented blogs, for example, hoping to encourage the bot to go back and look at a site it just indexed. Could take weeks.
So let that be a lesson in communicating better with a client, and putting a big NO INDEX up front in the robots file, protecting yourself from early crawling.
You know that an organic search result is the one you don’t pay for on the search engine results pages (SERPs), meaning you don’t pay the search engines for placement on that page. You may very well have paid me to design, maintain, and market your site, but the actual non-sponsored search results on the SERP are called “organic” because they’re the ones that get there without any synthetic fertilizer (pay per click).
Back in the early days of the web, I had a little FAQ on organic gardening that evolved into one of the first organic gardening sites on the web. I still keep that organic gardening site around, of course, because it’s one of my passions and still gets a lot of readers. I like to think that my wife and I, since we started getting public about our gardening choice, have converted a lot of people to organic through Supak.com.
I’ve never actually done any metrics on it, but I’ve often wondered whether the organic in gardening could ever help the organic SEO SERPs. But now I’ve been seeing signs that Google, and the rest, have gotten quite good at disambiguation. Plus, as noted in an earlier post, people are getting more specific (or at least wordier) in their search strings. So, it’s not likely that putting a link from my organic gardening site to my organic SEO site will do me much good.
But, what the hell… Maybe I’ll try it, and it will turn out that the disambiguation might be worth a point in The Algorithm.
Bald Mt. Press
Supak.com
Destination Hawaii Maui Weddings Blog
Hookipa Aikane – Maui Hawaii Blog
Organic Kona Coffee Farming in Hawaii
The Rose and Kettle Cooperstown Restaurant Blog
