Lori Ulloa, R2integrated Senior Web Strategist and in-house SEO guru, recently presented “Mobile Marketing, SEO & Visibility: Why You Should Care,” to the Baltimore Chapter of the American Marketing Association. From the importance of a mobile strategy for your organization to best practices in structuring your mobile site for search, Lori covers it all. Click on the presentation below to learn more.

Questions about R2integrated’s mobile website and mobile app design?

Marketers are generally tasked with writing Web text. Additionally, increasing Web traffic and inbound leads are common marketing goals. However, most marketers aren’t familiar with the technical details behind Web design. This guide bridges that gap. The following tips will help marketing professionals in disciplines such as graphic design, communications, and product marketing to assist in optimizing their Web pages.

1. Make sure analytics are installed

• Additionally turn on the internal site search feature

2. Write for the search engine, as well as human beings

• Include headers and sub headers & make sure they are formatted as h1 and h2 etc.
• Include keyword rich titles and description fields
• Try to make your content engaging and interactive to promote bookmarking

3. Update your site with fresh content (search engines like it)

• Somewhere in the site, designate a place for frequently updated content.
• When posting something new on your site, focus on key terms that your visitors would use to find the content.
• Users LOVE top 10 lists! (Hey, top 12 works too!)

4. Select a new domain carefully

• Interior URLs are another great place for keywords

5. Keep site hierarchy shallow

6. Do not design a site with little or no content

7. Do not design a site all in Flash

• Search engines see nothing unless there is content within the Flash (indexed but not well), or the presence of alternative content

8. Make sound optional

9. Incorporate numerous points for lead conversion

10. Optimize to increase conversions

• Users can find content via search and come to a gate with limited form fields to access the desired info/asset

11. Increase in-links

12. Our guide includes a few bonus tips to forward to your Web developers

Often, however, navigating though social websites can be confusing while determining which version of “you” to display.  No, I’m not alluding to multiple personalities!  Online, lines typically blur when business social networking or hobby social networking becomes a part of your daily web interactions.  It especially becomes difficult in determining how to fit the other versions of “you” into your personal social profiles.  Most people have many interests and versions of themselves aimed at various audiences.  However, most social websites only allow one account per email address.

How do you identity which foot to put forward and where?  If all of this confuses you, try mapping it out based on how you interact with others online.  This can be as lo-tech as a pencil and paper.

1.    First, you should identify the personas that you would like to share.
2.    Then list the things you would like to share and associate them with their respective audiences.
3.    The next step would be to include the accounts that you already have and/or the ones that you would like to have.

Let’s examine the following different personas for the same fictional person, Jane Doughnut.  Jane shares personal items of general interest with her friends and family as well as photos and information about her kids.   She shares cooking demonstrations with strangers, friends and family and information about her employment history and endeavors with colleagues, former colleagues and strangers.  In addition, she shares company (a zoo) information with anyone interested in her company’s work.

Personal Jane (janedoughnut555_5555@gmail.com)

1.    Jane’s Profiles:
a.    www.facebook.com – Since Jane wants to be connected to her high school friends, closer co-workers and people whom she’s known throughout her life, she signed up for a Facebook account with her own name and personal email address.
b.    www.myspace.com – Jane also has a MySpace account from a few years ago that she rarely uses but loves that when her friends visit the page, they can hear her favorite song so she keeps it live.
2.    Jane’s Kids:
a.    www.flickr.com, www.blurb.com, www.facebook.com – Jane is very proud of her kids and wants to update everyone in her circle about what her kids are doing.  However, only a handful of her family members have a Facebook account to read her updates.  Furthermore, a lot of her family only want to see photos of the kids and not all of Jane’s personal status updates.  As a result, Jane got a Flickr account so that she can upload pictures and videos of her kids and share them in a variety of ways including email.  For her grandmother who does not own a computer, she imports her Flickr photos into a photo album that she creates through www.blurb.com

and mails the book to her Grandmother.
b.    www.facebook.com – For those who are on Facebook, Jane imports the Flickr photos into her photos to share with her friends in the newsfeed.
c.    www.friendfeed.com – To keep abreast of her extended family, Jane has a private room on Friendfeed where she aggregates family blog posts, photostreams, status updates and tweets.

Hobby Jane (Healthy_Cooking_with_Jane@gmail.com)

1.    Healthy Cooking with Jane:
a.    www.facebook.com Since Jane loves cooking, she wanted to connect with others who share the same passion so with her existing Facebook account, she started a Facebook group.  This group allows her to post items about cooking that she can share with her members for discussion.  Jane is listed as an admin for this group so her name displays in the sidebar.  The group name is “Healthy Cooking with Jane.”  Since she does not know all of her members personally, she lists her contact in the group as her other gmail address, Healthy_Cooking_With_Jane@gmail.com.

b.    www.wordpress.com or www.wordpress.org – Jane also blogs about cooking in a blog called “Healthy Cooking with Jane” on Wordpress.  Jane can link to her blog from her Facebook group to share posts with her members. However, there is no automatic import so she manually posts links to her and others’ blog posts and articles to keep the group very active.
c.    www.twitter.com – To update everyone she cooks with frequently, Jane tweets on her personal Twitter account.  To keep things consistent with this version of Jane, she tweets under the name Healthy_Cooking_with_Jane (no spaces) so that she can be searched by people who may be interested in the same subject, healthy cooking.  Jane had the option of naming her Twitter account JaneyD as her friends used to call her but no one would search it and it would be limited to those who were already familiar with her.  In Twitter, she occasionally links to her blog posts but she mostly tweets links about cooking in general to truly be informative and not obviously self-promoting.
d.    www.meetup.com, www.facebook.com, www.wordpress.com – Jane also occasionally gets offline to demonstrate her cooking expertise.  She used Meetup.com to create a Meetup group that meets once a month at Jane’s house where she cooks her latest recipes.  In the Meetup group, Jane frequently lets everyone know that they can find her on Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter by telling them to search “Healthy Cooking with Jane.”
e.    www.youtube.com While Jane demonstrates her cooking prowess in her Meetup group, her friend records her demonstrations on video.  This video is uploaded to YouTube so that those who couldn’t make it to the Meetup group get to see her demonstrations on her YouTube channel.
f.    www.friendfeed.com Jane also has a Friendfeed account, mentioned in Personal Jane, under her personal email address where she can set up different rooms.  She set up a room for Healthy Cooking with Jane where she can aggregate everything else that she’s doing online.  On Jane’s blog (where she gets the most traffic out of all of her endeavors), she embedded image/link code (works best with Wordpress) that displays the aggregated feeds from Twitter, YouTube and her other favorite blogs about cooking.  She often gets information on healthy cooking from her Google Alerts (set up with her secondary personal email, Healthy_Cooking_With_Jane@gmail.com) so information to post comes to her email inbox.

Professional Jane (Jane@janeszoo.com)

1.    Personal Professional (zookeeper):
a.    www.linkedin.com – Since Jane likes to network professionally, she has her experience as a zookeeper on LinkedIn.  If she ever wanted to switch to a different zoo, LinkedIn will give her the ability to meet others in the zoo that she may want to work for.  She is connected to a large number of current and former colleagues and has several recommendations.  This account is linked to her personal email address so she is always able to access it.
2.    Company Information:
a.    www.blogger.com – Since Jane is tech savvy, she is responsible for the company blog on Blogger.  She blogs about zookeeping on a daily basis.  Although her name displays as the author of the post, the contact email that she chose to display is her work email.
b.    www.facebook.com – With her personal email account, she started a Facebook page for the zoo.  She is not listed as an administrator on the page itself.  The page looks as if it is only a representation of the zoo.  This page gives her flexibility to RSS the blog posts that she creates about the zoo.  She also posts polls and quizzes about animals as well as videos created at the zoo for the fans.
c.    www.twitter.com – To draw attention to articles on zoo keeping as well as her zoo blog posts, Jane tweets with the zoo’s Twitter page.  She frequently posts links on the micro-blogging site.  Tweets appear to come from the zoo and not from Jane.  This account was opened with Jane’s work email address.

In conclusion, Jane has properly linked her various accounts to their respective audiences and shares information of interest with each audience.  She understands the importance of targeting her different audiences so that she can provide only content that appeals to that audience and not content that they would find irrelevant. Jane also needs to get outside more often and drink less coffee as her proficiency with and affinity for social networks has left her with a severe vitamin D deficiency, carpal tunnel, eye strain and skin pigment loss.  It could be worse, however, as she could become interested in online gaming.

When considering a campaign as a means to increase website traffic, a business should think through the following steps:

1. Know your audience well enough that your campaign will drive searches that can increase website traffic in a positive way.
2. Since publicity can lead to web searches, make sure your site is search engine friendly.
3. Make sure that your website is architected in a way that walks users to a conversion.

A recent example of a publicity campaign, whether intended to be a campaign or not, which resulted in increased website traffic was the highly publicized lawsuit between guitarist Joe Satriani and the band Coldplay. According to Billboard.com, Satriani’s copyright infringement suit, filed on Dec. 4, 2008 in Los Angeles federal court, claims the Coldplay song “Viva La Vida” (tied for 1st place as the most downloaded song of 2008, reaching over 3 mil downloads) incorporates “substantial original portions” of his 2004 instrumental “If I Could Fly”. Satriani, a 52-year-old guitar virtuoso, is seeking a jury trial, damages and “any and all profits” attributable to the alleged copyright infringement.

Perhaps this accusation is based on merit or perhaps this was merely a publicity campaign to reclaim a piece of the spotlight. Regardless of the verdict, we will probably never know Satriani’s true intention. However, for the purpose of this article, this act will be viewed from a “publicity campaign” point of view due to its very public nature.

What does this have to do with my business goals?

As you can see in the Google Trends (measures search query popularity) graph and associated online articles below, regular press for Joe Satriani (A) didn’t quite increase search queries the same way that suing one of the most popular current bands* did (B, C).
*Popularity determined by download data.

A. Musician’s Friend Announces Grand Prize Winner of Joe Satriani Sweepstakes and Launches New VIP Swee
Melodika.net – Aug 12 2008
B. Coldplay denies copying guitarist Joe Satriani
NEWS.com.au – Dec 10 2008
C. Joe Satriani to serve Coldplay at Grammys
International Business Times – Feb 6 2009

Whether intended by Satriani as a publicity campaign or not, the controversial lawsuit resulted in increased instances of searches. Thus, this stunt gained public attention and curiosity and drove web users to query for more information. If your business has planned a means to gain similar attention and curiosity, read on.

How did this increase in Searches affect Satriani’s website traffic?

Compete.com, which compiles estimated website traffic data, notes that as of February 2009, website traffic to www.satriani.com was up 52.7% from the first of the year. If his inevitable goal, other than the possibility of getting royalties from Coldplay, was to increase his web presence, he accomplished it temporarily. Users made their way to his website via direct search and links from articles about the lawsuit.

What did Mr. Satriani get out of this?

Other than the possibility of Satriani winning the lawsuit as his primary goal, a secondary goal could be to get more users and/or fans to buy his music. This goal could be accomplished through his website which gained a significant increase in searches and traffic by way of this public act of intellectual property rights declaration.

Was this possible secondary goal accomplished? Since download data is not easy to find (last.fm provides good data but a user can’t manipulate the date range), I wrote to Gary Trust at Billboard Magazine. This is his response: “Just as you note that your research showed increased interest online, consumers responded to the story’s buzz as well. Satriani’s 2004 track had never before sold in triple digits when news of the lawsuit broke in December. At that point, the song vaulted to consecutive weeks of selling 3,000 digital downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Though sales totals then curtailed, the track still sold close to a thousand downloads as recently as February of ’09. It has sold 18,000 downloads to date. Approximately 75% of that sum has been logged since its December spike.

Will this be sustainable for Joe?

After a sharp increase in website traffic, there has been a subsequent sharp decrease in traffic as well. According to Compete.com, monthly data reveals traffic is down 40%, justifying a “temporary” sentiment to the perceived stunt. In addition, as Gary Trust revealed, sales slowed as well.

What is the takeaway?

For Mr. Satriani, I would say that if his plan was to generate more sales through publicity, he accomplished it temporarily. However, it could have resulted in something more sustainable had he considered a better strategy. Perhaps he should have timed the lawsuit with a new CD release or new website content (if, indeed, the lawsuit was a publicity campaign). A visit to www.satriani.com looks as though the most recent content was from April of ’08.

Regarding this application to your business goals, the lesson learned from this would be to have a plan. Whatever you do for publicity, if it gains attention or curiosity, you should be prepared for website traffic as either a primary intention or by-product. Joe’s saving grace was that users can listen to the songs on this CD on his website and purchase through a link to Sony. The by-product sales that Satriani experienced may not have happened if the downloads and link to purchase were not available on his website. However, if he timed this publicity with the release of a new CD, users or fans may not only have downloaded the 2004 song, they may also have listened and/or purchased new material. As a result, the fame could have been more than a very short lived blip on the web-dar. Your business needs to be prepared for any and all scenarios that could result in your blip and use them to your advantage.

How do you know when your website needs a redevelopment to get the best SEO results? The answer is simple: You’ve tried everything and your potential customers still can’t find your website. You’ve worked hard to adjust your content and have incorporated SEO best practices and you are still not seeing the results that you’re looking for. This means that you may have structural barriers to SEO that band-aids won’t fix. Structural barriers can be defined as your current site architecture, your Content Management System, or the technology used to build your site.

Although a redevelopment can often be time-consuming, if your website is not findable and functioning as a business generating tool, you may be losing potential customers.

SEO rules have changed throughout the years and placing a few key words on key pages will not yield the results of the past. Search engines soon realized the needs of their users and began the process of perfecting their algorithms (still in process). Now search results are based on content relevancy, popularity and proper structure. Google can assess how relevant your content is to a user’s search based on things in your control (popular and interesting content, page titles, user-defined key terms, user-friendly URLs , h1-h3 tags, etc.), things out of your control like domain age, and things that can be accomplished through redevelopment such as an up-to-date Content Management System that allows you to create friendly URL’s that are easy for Google to see therefore making your page more visible.

The good news is that SEO rules are easy to accomplish during a redevelopment and they are compatible with good usability rules. Making your site user friendly will make both users and search engines happy!

Unfortunately, SEO is too often irresponsibly applied to websites that are so in need of a redevelopment that no quick fixes will help. There is no switch that an SEO specialist can flip to magically “optimize” an existing website if the website has major barriers to SEO best practices. A site redevelopment may often be time consuming but if SEO is applied properly, your website can function better as a powerful business and lead generating tool. Often, companies will hire an SEO firm to “optimize” their website rather than go through a redevelopment. However, these companies are only able to make content change recommendations and some minor structural changes to optimize the website. Unfortunately, they are all too often limited in making major structural changes that would increase the chances of findability and customer conversion. Thus, these efforts would result in little new business.

Here are some examples of barriers to search even if your content and some structural elements have been optimized:
1. The website is built in Flash
2. The website is built in Frames
3. The website has no point of conversion.
4. The website is mostly images (alt tags do not carry that much SEO weight)
5. The website is more than 3 years old

1. Flash: To a lot of viewers, Flash is visually appealing. The problem is that search engines still can’t see it. Despite recent partnerships between Adobe and Google to read textual content and URLs, most Flash videos still don’t have visible content for search engine spiders to crawl. For now, Flash is better utilized on a website as a complementary element.

2. Frames: If your website is built in frames, it has obviously been a while since it has been updated. Frames are a barrier to SEO.

3. Not User Friendly: Although this is not a major SEO issue, it’s a usability issue. If your potential customers happen to find your website and it’s not user friendly, they will bounce back off before you know it. It you’re viewing your analytics and see an 80% bounce rate, that means that a lot of users are leaving your website immediately due to its structure. For example, if you have 10,000 visitors per month but an 80% bounce rate, that’s 8,000 potential customers you’ve lost!

4. No Conversions: Once again, this isn’t an SEO issue but relates to general structure. If your potential customers are able to find your website, what are they going to do? If you have no point of conversion such as a store, forms or some other action, how are your potential customers supposed to use your website? Most likely, they will use your website as a means to gather research and buy from your competitor because they have made it easy for them to do so.

5. Images: If your website is all images, Google can’t see content to index it. Like Flash content, images are a barrier to search. Even if you see text, if that text is embedded in an image, Google will only be able to read the alt tags, assuming alt tags are present. In addition, images can often create longer downloading time making it difficult for users with a slower internet connection to view the content on that page.

6. Your website is old: Like dog years, tech years are accelerated. In fact, the new technology that you’ve recently invested in will probably be improved upon next year. Thus, the technology used to build your website has probably been updated or outdated within the past few years. Often, older technology, such as Frames, is not considered by search engines when they improve their algorithms.

You may be saying, “duh!” However, many of your colleagues are not. For example, six months prior to this article, I was reviewing a website built in frames with all text embedded in images. When I argued that the website lacked content, I was met with a request to simply add white text to the white background. Of course, I added that would probably not be the best approach. As most businesses specialize in the reason they started their businesses to begin with, intimate knowledge of the inner workings of websites may not be their forte and that’s ok. It’s ok if you still like your 2 minute Flash spash page! It can be incorporated into a site redesign as a play option video with captioning!

In conclusion, SEO and good usability are elements necessary for your website to succeed as a business tool. Once you’ve realized that you may end up spending more over a longer period to band-aid your website than to just invest in a redevelopment, you are on the right track. Although SEO in a redevelopment is necessary, it’s not the only step that you should take. While redeveloping your website with search in mind, also keep your eye on the prize- the conversion that you would like to accomplish. Keeping these goals in mind will keep you and your web development vendor on task to make it easy for your potential customers to convert after they find your website.

After pondering that question, you should ask yourself:
1. Does my website effectively lead potential customers to an easily identified place to convert/purchase/take action?
2. Does my website provide anything of value to my potential customers for them to want to revisit and recommend the site to friends?

If the answer to these questions is no, you have answered your initial question.

The evolution of the website (HISTORY ALERT! – you can skip this section if history causes you to fall asleep at your computer): First the earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. Then came the internet.

There was a time when most businesses simply knew that they should be online but didn’t know why. As a result, their websites often resembled their glossy offline brochures. At that time, websites were visual representations of businesses but served no purpose in terms of functioning as a tool to generate more business. Those websites gave no consideration to usability rules (as most weren’t established yet) that would lead their potential customers to convert.

Then came the era when websites had to be flashy. The resulting situation was that users had no clue as to what the website was about, why it existed or what they were supposed to do…..resulting in little or no business. Users were often confused when they were presented with Flash navigation and things they could play with. Often, these things would divert the user’s attention away from the reason that they were on the site in the first place. In most cases, the entertainment value was short lived and the user would leave the site without converting.
Thus the question exists: Why invest money (a lot of money in some cases) in a glossy representation that no one knows how to use and has no return on investment? If you build it, they won’t necessarily come and if they do, they won’t necessarily convert into customers.

The Importance of the Conversion:
Conversions exist in many different forms. You may think of a conversion as a store where a user has to log in to purchase. In reality, any action you want to guide a user to complete could be considered a conversion. However, if your conversion is simply to capture data for email campaigns, it’s suggested that you trade something of value such as a white paper or online community participation. Think of the kinds of websites that you find useful or make you want to take action. Even if your site is meant to be informational, a conversion should still be present.
During a website redevelopment, make sure your vendor thoroughly understands your business goals and can tailor points of conversion that align with those business goals. If the vendor doesn’t ask detailed questions about your target audiences and conversions, they most likely base their site architecture and design on aesthetics and not functionality. The good news is that you can have both. When your vendor is designing the site architecture, make sure they are focusing not only on usability best practices but also on audience segmentation and pathways to conversions for those audiences. Remember that your website should lead your potential customers through a process to take action.

If the Site Does Not Provide Anything of Value:
If your potential customer gets onto your website and sees boring, long content about your company history, no conversions, an annoying flash homepage, and nothing new since five years ago, they will make the assumption that your products or services are not worth the cost. After all, if your business has not taken the time to understand their potential customers, why would those potential customers invest in that business?
Value can be perceived as anything useful to your audience. As a result, you should know your audience behaviors like the back of your hand. They may be interested in technical white papers, an online community to join or a quiz that helps them make a purchase decision. The perceived value should be different for your different audiences.
However, creating value for your website should not be a one-time effort. Rather, it should be a commitment. Users will revisit new and fresh content more often (not to mention search engines) and if they find the content useful, they will share it with others.

In conclusion, your website should function as a powerful business tool rather than a brochure. It should exist to lead customers to a conversion and should be interesting enough for users to want come back and share. Consider these points when going through your website and consult your web vendor as to what can be done to your website to make this happen. Ultimately, If users have stumbled on your website, they are researching or looking to take action. Make it easy for them!