Just checked this morning and, finally, FastWebUpdates.com has broken into Google’s top 10 results for “website maintenance”.  PHEW!

This has been a long journey.  I started the special website in mid-2004.  Back then, my only choice was to spend about $1k a month on advertising.

It just goes to show that the formula for better search engine rankings works.  It’s pretty simple:

1. Be patient.
2. Add quality content.  Regularly.  That people read.
3. Format that content in a way that Google et al can understand it.
4. Repeat.

That’s it!
For most industries, it won’t take that long.  Website maintenance takes longer because we have hundreds of companies around the world trying to do exactly the same thing: break into Google’s top 10.

Some mistakes we made:

1. subdomains that pointed to the same content as our main domain.
2. non-user-driven content.  our content was originally designed more for people like us than for our readers, people like you.
3. pages that were, essentially, duplicates on the same domain.

…and a whole lot more.  The thing is this: you have to do things above board, no tricks, and then just stick with it.
One final thing: this may be a fleeting victory.  We may drop off the list at any time.  So our only choice is to keep adding good content.

So you jumped on board and created a blog to promote your website and it’s not working. The blog just isn’t attracting traffic. What’s wrong? The first place you should look is the content. Chances are, you’re not creating content that’s meaningful and accessible to your desired audience.

I add content to three blogs on a regular basis and I can always tell when I’m not putting enough effort into one of them. Visitor count goes down. And then I look at the last entry and it was from more than a week ago, or the content isn’t focused enough on the topic at hand. What do I do?

First, I re-evaluate my priorities and see if what I’m putting effort into is what is really important to me. For example, it might be fun for me to write my Pizza Thursday entries but that doesn’t really draw traffic to the website maintenance news site.

Next, I look at the topics I’m blogging about. For example, I can write about the technical nitty gritty of website maintenance. But do my customers really care about that? My customer is looking for someone to maintain their site because they don’t want to deal with the details. My ponderings on some obscure topic (XHTML special character codes, for example) don’t matter to my desired audience.

Finally, I look at the headline. Is there something in the headline that will grab my desired reader’s attention? Is it something that will stand out on a list of search engine results? If not, I rewrite it. For example, the headline for this entry has gone through three revisions so far.

A final tip: make your blog entries “skim friendly.” A reader in a hurry needs to be able skim the article and get the main ideas. Keep your paragraphs short, bold the main entries and make sure your text is readable.

Blogs can be a good marketing tool, a way for you to connect with new customers, but you have to add content that’s interesting from their point of view. If your marketing efforts aren’t working, take a hard look at what you’re writing about and how you’re presenting it. Chances are a few tweaks will make a big difference.

Start an experiement where you eat something disgusting for a week.  Chronicle your adventures on your website.  For an example, visit The Monkey Chow Diaries.

One of the questions at Crain’s recent Small Business Forum, Doing the Web Smartly, was how to keep in touch with users via email. Specifically, what is the right frequency for sending out emails?

I’m motivated to ponder this question because, just this morning, I have received my weekly market update from Perl Mortgage. Perl does a lot of business, and, at some point in my past, I worked with them to install a computer network in their office. Ken Perlmutter, the owner, is a good guy: high energy, positive and friendly; very can-do.

So what’s the problem?

I’m slightly irritated to get his email. To put the two opening paragraphs together, I’m irritated to get an email from a customer who has spent a few thousand dollars with me and whom I personally like and respect.

In other words, I’m predisposed to like Ken and to want to receive communication from him, and I’m still irritated.

Those who know me know I’m sometimes irritable, but that’s not the issue here. It’s that I’m not ready to receive the information that he’s ready to send out. Although he doesn’t know it, I’m not in the market for a new mortgage and, unless my situation changes radically, I won’t be in the market for one any time in the next few years (if I have my way, any time in the next couple of decades, but that’s another story).

So let’s get back to the root question: what is the right frequency for sending out emails? The answer given at the forum by the e-tailing rep, was more frequently is better than less frequently because you never know when someone will be ready to buy and you want to be there when they are.

That’s a very generic answer and I disagree with the assumption behind it. The assumption is that you don’t know your customers or, more precisely, that you can’t know your customers. Maybe the assumption is that it’s too expensive to get to know your customers. In any case, when you make the assumption and send out emails that people aren’t ready for, your emails inflict incremental relationship damage on at least some segment of your market.

You need to take the time to segment your messaging or you need to give recipients the tools to meaningfully self-segment. Your messages should go out with a frequency that matches your prospect’s interest level. If you produce a weekly newsletter, allow your recipients to set their delivery frequency to something that works for them. Quarterly is reasonable. Depending on your business, annually may be reasonable.

Going back to the example from Perl Mortgage (who, just to be clear, is far from alone on this issue), I’d gladly review a message from them on a quarterly basis. And if there was an option to select that frequency myself, I’d do it. As it is, the only option I have is to permanently opt out of his mailing list, which I’m not ready to do. (That feature mismatch causes some stress, but that’s also another topic.)

I don’t know that the emailing services (Constant Contact, Emma, MailerMailer, etc) have figured this out, but I’d be surprised if they aren’t working on something. If you send out email using one of these services, contact them (constantly!) until they do. It will help you keep a larger, more meaningful mailing list that gets better results over time.

Feedback? I’d love to hear it!

I talk to a lot of people who don’t have a clear idea of where they want to go with their website. Pretty much everyone just says, “More hits.”

More hits? More hits froms search engines? More hits from students doing a paper on your product or service? More hits from your target market? More hits from your target market who sticks around for more than a single page?

Ah yes–that’s sounds good: more hits from your target market, motivating them to convert (to buyers, to someone who makes contact with you, to someone who registers for your service, etc).

But how do you get there? I recommend the following progression:

1) Stop thinking about hits. Start thinking about unique user sessions. “Hits” covers everything from loading a page to loading a CSS file to go with that page. A single visit to a single page can generate donzens of hits. Hits are difficult to convert. Unique user sessions, on the other hand, are easy: one per customer, no matter how many pages they hit.

2) Work to increase the number of unique user sessions. Getter better PPC advertising, add more off line advertising, beg bloggers to mention you, etc. Whatever it takes, no matter what, you need to get more people to your site.

3) Evaluate what those users do. Do they hit one page and leave? PANIC. Well–OK, don’t PANIC, but don’t just sit there. You paid for these visitors and then they’re leaving after seeing only one page. What is an acceptable drop/bounce/single page rate? All depends on you. The nature of the web-beast is that you’re going to have a lot of these Looky Lou’s. It doesn’t matter–work to have fewer.

4) Evaluate what those users like. What pages do people visit? I guarantee you you’ll be surprised at the popularity of at least one of your minor pages. When you have a page that people like, expand it. Give the people what they want.

5) Evaluate where those users come from. When you first start, you’ll probably have a lot of people who come in from the PPC ads. That can get expensive, so your goal needs to be to get people to your site without spending a lot on advertising. In other words, you have to grow the number of return and referred visitors.

So: Concentrate on sessions, not hits. Increase the number of unique user sessions. Increase the average number of pages per unique user session and reduce the number of dropped or single page sessions. Increase the number of user sessions that are not the result of PPC advertising.

Some tools. I like (and have blogged about) Google Analytics. I use that combined with our own in house tool. (Analytics gives me great high level information. Our tools gives me unlimited detail. I need both.)

Some methods. So many–tune in tomorrow for some more detail.