Traffic Building

Yahoo! charges $299 for a link in their directory - is it worth it?

In my opinion, no.

For most small businesses, it would be much more cost-effective to use that $299 to buy AdWords or other ads for your site. At even $0.25 per ad, that’s almost 1200 qualified visitors to your site for the price of that Yahoo! directory link.

Not that a link in the Yahoo! directory isn’t worthwhile, but its primary value is not in the traffic it sends to your site, it’s that it provides a quality backlink to your site that can help you rank higher in the Google rankings.

If you’ve implemented other search engine marketing techniques and have reached the point of diminishing returns, the link from the Yahoo! directory could provide a boost but it wouldn’t be first on my list of tactics.

SEO Myth : Search engine rankings for your site can be guaranteed

You’ve probably seen the offers - “Rank first in Google or your money back! Guaranteed!”

Ever wonder what the catch is?

First, no rank in any search engine’s organic results can be guaranteed. Especially when it comes to competitive industries, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars, several months of work, and possibly some risky tactics to even make the front page for competitive searches.

If you’ll look at the fine print of these “guaranteed rankings” offers, you’ll typically find that they will:

1. Get you the top AdWords ad for a search term.
Quick and easy, just pay enough money to Google and they’ll rank your ad first tomorrow. This might do you some good, but you certainly don’t need any search engine marketing expertise to log into an AdWords account and give Google some money.

2. Rank your site first for an obscure search term.
Assuming Google is already indexing your site, getting a page ranked for a non-competitive search term should be fairly easy. The fact that ranking first for this term will do your site absolutely no good is rarely mentioned.

3. Any of a number of other word games that will result in a page on your site technically ranking “first” for some search term that will do your site or your business little good.

There are no short-cuts and no guaranteed rankings. Be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that there are.

It’s tempting to save a few dollars when you’re registering a .com domain name and not register the .net, .org, .biz, and .info versions of the name as well. After all, you’re not going to put any content there right?

First, the main issue is not what content you might put there but what content a competitor may put there once your site becomes popular.

Imagine you spend a year creating useful and relevant content for your industry and branding a particular .com domain name only to have a competitor register the .net and .org versions of the name and redirect them to their site. It may not hurt your search rankings as visitors almost universally go to the .com version by default, but it will certainly dilute the value of that branded domain name and, at best, confuse some potential customers about who they’re actually dealing with when they think of your brand.

In addition to preventing potential poachers, these secondary domain names can be useful for publishing other content that doesn’t fit on your .com domain. If your .com domain is focused on bringing in new business, you may not want to dilute that message with company news or pages of information that only applies to existing customers. Use one of those secondary domains as your support site, one as your blog site, and one as a strictly informational site for potential customers. That way, you can focus one message for one target audience and not worry about trying to address all issues for all people on one domain.

Another benefit to multiple domain names is that it’s difficult to get inbound links to a strictly commercial site. If you want to earn backlinks, it’s much easier to get them for a strictly informational or blog site than it is for a strictly commercial site. Use one of your secondary domains to answer questions, provide information, or otherwise act as an industry resource. That domain will earn backlinks and you can easily provide appropriate links to your main commercial domain from it.

When you’re moving your business online, it’s tempting to save a few dollars and only register a domain name for one year. That way if things don’t work out on the web, you’re only out the $15 or so dollars you spent to register the name.

Search engines are thinking the same thing.

Information on for how long you register a domain name is readily available to search engines and they use that data as a factor in ranking the pages in your site for relevant search terms.

Which site would you rank more highly, one that has its domain name reserved for the next five months or for the next five years?

Which scenario says “We’re here to stay” and which says “We’re really not serious about this web thing”.

If you had to recommend a business to a customer, would you choose one whose business license was expiring next month or one who had already printed up next year’s Christmas cards?

Search engines don’t stay in business by linking to temporary or low quality web sites, they stay in the business by providing relevant and quality results for their customer’s web searches.

If you act like you’re not serious about offering a quality web site for them to recommend to their customers, they’re not going to treat you seriously and rankings for your web pages will suffer as a result.

The biggest question in the blogging world is “What do I write about?”

If you’re a business trying to generate leads or sales online, your offline customers are your best source of content.

Think about what questions you get asked on a daily basis by potential customers - even things like “Where are you located?”. If someone has taken the time to call your business to ask a question, you can bet there are a few more like them typing the same question into Google or Yahoo! search.

The questions might take on a different form online like “dallas dry cleaner” instead of “how do I get to your store?” but the intent is the same. If you do a series of blog posts that answer frequently asked questions like these, you’ll naturally be creating unique and useful content that your potential customers are likely to search for.

In addition to questions asked by prospects, answer questions asked by current customers at all phases of your sales cycle. We’re increasingly turning to the internet to do extensive research on products or services before we even contact a potential vendor and you want your blog posts to match the industry phrases and common queries those doing research might use.

Content really can be this easy - just pick a question, use it as the title of a post, and answer it in your blog.

Akami recently released a study that found “Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.”

Although you may not be running a retail site, understanding what your users expect and how they’re likely to evaluate your web site when they visit is critical to keeping them around long enough to see your marketing message.

Think about how you evaluate web pages and how long you’ll search a page looking for the information promised by the search result that brought you there. Chances are you put pages on a pretty short leash. After all, there are tens of thousands of other pages in that search results page just a back button click away.

If the site you’re looking at doesn’t deliver quickly, you simply don’t have enough time to give it a second chance - you just head back to the search results and try the next site in line.

What if you could put your most important content in a spot where most people look first when visiting your web page? That way you could get your message across quickly and hopefully grab the visitor’s interest long enough to keep them on your site to explore the rest of your content.

At www.useit.com, Jakob Nielsen conducted an eye-tracking study and generated several ‘heat maps’ that show the dominant reading patterns of visitors on three different types of websites.

I’ll leave the in-depth study of the results to their website, but one interesting similarity between all three heat maps generated from the study is that a visitor will almost invariably look at the portion of your page to the right of the left navigation column and below the header.

Wouldn’t it make sense to put your most arresting content or message in that spot?

Another interesting tendency is for users to look for visual cues while scanning the page. Looking at the heat maps, you can see that visitor’s eyes fixated on the top left of the content area, on the content at the top right of the page, then jumped to the tops of paragraphs and lists as they scanned down the page.

When writing for the web, it’s important to keep this tendency to scan in mind. Break up your content into several paragraphs and highlight important content by placing it in a list or segregating it from the normal flow of your page. It may be more natural to write a few longer paragraphs instead of many short ones, but you’ll get more of your content absorbed by breaking it up and making it more easily digestible.

Also remember that the typical visitor is only able to read text on a computer screen at around 80% of their normal reading rate for printed text. Considering the extra effort needed to read your content, making it as easily scanned as possible will go a long way toward keeping those visitors around once they find your site.