The SEO Girl

This post takes a bit of a detour from my usual SEO/social media related posts, but they’ll be back soon!

I’ve adored coffee since I was 16, but over the last few months the taste has been growing just a bit blasé to me. I found myself absorbed in the wonderful loose leaf tea blends of Teavana.com one evening, and in the months since, enjoying the taste and soothing ability of tea so much more than coffee. Since then, it’s been love! Recently, while browsing the site, I hit their 404 error page, the dreaded “concrete wall” in online user experience. This time was different, and instead of the regular old “Page Not Found” text, the following met my delighted eyes:

The text reads:

You found an error on our site, so perhaps it’s a good time to enjoy a cup of tea. We will start working to fix the problem now. If you were trying to view our homepage, it’s likely the entire site is down. However, if this wasn’t the homepage, it is probably just this page that is down.

So you can try to move forward with some of the links to the left or below or call us at 1-877-TEAVANA for immediate help. Or just type a keyword in our search box above and we’ll try diligently to find a page that works.
Not only does the text capture the soothing and somewhat witty personality of their site, but it makes me feel like I’ve just done Teavana a favor by tripping over this page, as if I’m somehow reporting the problem page to them. Plus, including a few of their most popular products on their error page keeps me wanting to browse around the site, rather than immediately bouncing and visiting one of their competitors’ sites.

In the time it takes you to enjoy a cup of their heavenly Tiki Twilight tea, you can plan out a creative 404 error page that might even attract a few quality links and get people chatting about your site. It’s time to break away from those tired old error pages, and blend something new!

Yes, yes, and a thousand more yes’s to this question! The page title, or meta title, are the words in the blue bar at the top of your Internet browser, or the words engulfed by <title> in the source code for a website. Including one or two keyword phrases that are relevant for your site in your page title is a common SEO best practice, and as long as it’s not abused, actually does contribute quite well to a website being ranked for those keyword phrases, particularly the keywords in the homepage page title.

I recently heard an SEO say that they prefer not to put the site’s name in the page title. I strongly disagree – creating a page title similar in structure to: Keyword Phrase 1 and Keyword Phrase 2: Site.com, is a must for the following reasons:

• Reinforce Branding – In an age where searchers want to find the lowest price product, and want to find it fast, you need to do everything possible to instill your brand name in their minds. Adding it to your page title keeps it right in front of their eyes as they flip through your website.

• Search Result Listings – A search engine will typically pull your site’s page title as the title of a search engine results page listing. Imagine seeing a slew of search results, all with relatively generic, keyword-rich titles. Then, you spot one that includes keyword phrases, but also has the site’s brand name. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to click on the one with the brand name?

• Bookmarking – Whether it’s social bookmarking or simply bookmarking a site to your Internet browser, the bookmarked listing for a site usually is pulled from the site’s page title. Once again, branding is everything, and when the person who just bookmarked 10 relatively similar sites goes back to look at their list, their eye, and mouse, is going to be attracted to the one that has a brand name listed.

Including your website’s brand name in your site’s page title is a practice that only makes sense. When you’re at the mall, do the stores have “Clothing Store”, “Clothing Store 2″, “Bath Store”, “Bath Store 2″, and “Shoe Store” on their marquees? Nope. They distinguish themselves from each other by highlighting their brand names wherever they can, and that’s what sticks in our minds and has us stepping into their stores again and again.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a bit of debate in the corporate side of the company I dwell at over the importance of establishing PageRank as a measure of SEO success. PageRank certainly has its place in our industry, but I’m more of the “establish a desired increase in non-paid search engine traffic/keyword traffic” as a success metric. Here’s my reasoning, in a nutshell:

• PageRank is great when determining the quality of a site to connect with for link building or checking out how your competitors are fairing, but a high/low PageRank doesn’t necessarily translate into increased traffic/revenue. A website thrives or dies by the amount of traffic coming to it, and focusing on PageRank, a metric that doesn’t have an exact correlation, just doesn’t make sense to me.
• I’ve had instances where I’ve checked a client’s PageRank only to see it giving me a “0″ PageRank when a day ago it was a “4″. The next day, back to a “4″. With a metric ultimately controlled by Google and so accustomed to variances, it’s just not reliable.
• A high PageRank can be the reward of a great SEO campaign, but not the “end result” a site owner wants to see. As a site owner, you want more people coming to your site as a result of the fruits of your SEO labor, not just an uptick on a tiny green bar.
• You’ve spent time creating a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website, with valuable resources and interesting information on the site. You’ve also spent considerable time in drumming up the site’s grand opening by syndicating press releases, buying ad space, and using social media effectively. You get thousands of visitors the first month the site is up, yet your PageRank continues to be “0″. Other sites in your industry have much more antiquated, difficult to navigate websites, yet have a higher PageRank, and their Compete.com data shows you’re in the traffic lead by a long shot. Now, how much do you care about PageRank?

I’m not discounting the validity of PageRank, I just feel its place is not as a success metric. What about you? How do you feel about using PageRank to determine the overall success of an SEO campaign – yay or no? I promise I won’t bite

I encountered an issue with a client today where their site’s section pages were in JavaScript – the entire site. Search engines basically ignore JavaScript, so they’re passing over nearly ever single page on the site! Not only that, but they had just gotten a site redesign for all their sites and relied on the programmer/designer to be up on his SEO knowledge, as most site owners would, so they had just paid quite a sum of money for four sites that will barely be indexed/rank. It’s just a shame to see what happens when a programmer knows little about SEO.

There’s tons of programmers out there who are phenomenal at creating an SEO friendly site right from the time the site goes live, and I applaud you. I feel that every programmer and designer should at least know the basics of SEO, consult the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and put those guidelines into practice. Save the more advanced SEO strategies for the SEO specialists, but at least give the site a fighting chance. Same goes for us in the SEO industry – know at least the basics of what goes on behind the scenes of a website and the structural elements that can make or break a site’s SEO.

JavaScript can be a great tool, but use it in moderation, just like everything else in SEO. Think like a human visitor would – say the person wanted to link to my client’s section pages, only to find that they’re not real links – they’d be completely confused. Search engines ultimately want to please real, human searchers, so do what seems logical.

I was watching a very interesting online presentation by David Meerman Scott today, and a metric he noted really caught my attention:

“The back button is the third most used web feature.”

How true – I use it so frequently throughout the day, rarely thinking of why I didn’t like the site and wanted to be elsewhere. It can be difficult to view your own web site objectively, so ask a friend or family member with a reputation for brutal honesty to tell you exactly what they don’t like about your site, and what they would prefer instead. Understanding your web site’s weaknesses and working to correct them can keep the back button from being the first used web feature on your site.

Never let your hard-earned SEO efforts go to waste with bad usability on your web site. Whether you’re professionally e-mailing surveys to your past customers and asking them for suggestions (in exchange for say, a coupon code!), or sitting down your best friend with a piece of paper and a glass of wine, it’s vital that you learn where your web site needs to improve.

Be strong, young web site caterpillar.

I know this might sound a bit snarky, but I always have to chuckle a bit when an SEO company outs itself as perhaps not knowing as much about SEO as they say they do. 1Choice4YourStore, a Yahoo! Store developer, blogged about a test they were developing to see how fast they could get indexed by Google, in their post “This is to prove how quickly we can get into google”.

Now, anyone who knows their stuff in SEO, and I would hope anyone selling SEO services would (pipedream, I know), would know that getting indexed by Google really isn’t that difficult anymore. The hard part is getting ranked by Google for competitive terms. When you have a new site, you should submit it and verify it through Google Webmaster Tools, but it’s most likely going to be just a matter of days before it’s indexed and ranked for it’s own url. If it takes longer, you could be facing penalization issues, but that’s another blog post.

The focus in SEO should be on the qualified traffic and revenue your site is receiving from your SEO efforts. We’re in the modern age, and there’s no longer much of a need to worry about your site not getting indexed. Once it’s indexed, worry about it being ranked for the competitive terms your audience is searching for. The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is a great place to start.

Moral of the Day: Beware “Oh my gosh! Check out this crazy experiment that shows we know little about SEO!”.

And that is my evening rant. Goodnight, my wonderful readers

You probably wouldn’t think a simply 404 error page could have much impact on an SEO campaign. Ideally, it would be nice if both search engine spiders and visitors to your site didn’t hit on one at all. But let’s face it – some things in life are just destiny.

Optimize Your 404 Pages
Everything else on your site is optimized, so why not capitalize on the advantages of optimizing your 404 error page? Ah, but you ask, it’s not like that page is accessible via your homepage, nor do you want to exactly promote an error page. But what’s an site owner to do when a visitor slams into the bland brick wall that is a 404 page, such as the awful Barnes and Noble 404 Error Page and only slightly better Boston Red Sox 404 Error Page? (But I’d love to score some tix!)

Customize It, That’s What!
Customizing your 404 page is extremely helpful for decreasing bounce rate for both human visitors and spiders. Here’s some guidelines to follow to ensure your 404 Page is both people friendly and SEO friendly:

• Carry the same shell, or template, as the rest of your site.
• Include a search box so visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
• Include links to popular section pages, as well as a link to your sitemap. That way, search engine spiders can navigate back into your site through these links.
• Be nice to your visitors. Apologize for the error page, and offer them a coupon code for 5% off their total page. Not only will they stay on your site – they’ll order, too!

TheSEOGirl applauds well done, well done to these 404 error pages:

• http://whitehouseblackmarket.com/seogirl.html : Includes links to Customer Service, FAQ, has a search box, carries template, and links to major product categories
• http://starbucks.com/seogirl.html : Suggestions for better browsing, link to homepage, carries template
• http://www.vegas.com/seogirl.html : Carries template, ability to choose new travel dates/itinerary directly from the error page. (Yes, I need a vacation!).
  

Anyone have more ideas for ways to optimize your 404 Error Page? Leave a comment. If you’d like some tips on customizing your own 404 page, email me at theseogirl@gmail.com.