One of the reasons search marketing is so effective is that it delivers information on products and services to people who are actively seeking them out. People enter search terms into a search engine and the engine provides sites and ads that are relevant to the terms. This arrangement is beneficial for the user because they are provided what they want and it’s profitable for the company selling goods because their products are put in front of motivated buyers—so the potential for a sale is high.

The success of search marketing hinges on whether the keywords the searcher puts in the query box match the keywords the company has targeted in their online campaigns. If the company selling goods has properly identified the keywords a searcher might use to find products, then there is a good chance a conversion will occur.

The process of identifying keywords is wrought with pitfalls which can reduce the effectiveness of online campaigns. Here are eight common mistakes companies make in selecting keywords for their campaigns.

1. Targeting keywords that people never use

You don’t have to look very far on the web to find companies targeting phrases that visitors seldom enter into a search engine.

There are several ways this error can manifest itself. The most common is when a company selects keywords from insider jargon that they use within the company, but with which the outside world is not unfamiliar.

Even the most enlightened of us can fall into this trap. We use terms in our day to day vocabulary and the words are so ingrained in our mind that we overlook the fact that the rest of the world isn’t familiar with our internal corporate-speak. In many cases the company is suffering from a form of myopia: they are so close to the products that they don’t see that the rest of the world might call it by another name.

Another situation where obscure keywords are targeted is more nefarious. Although most online marketing companies are honest and want only the best for clients, there are a few bad apple SEO firms that have purposely selected off-the-wall keyword phrases so they can guarantee rankings on those phrases. Obscure keywords are usually not very competitive so the SEO firm can easily win the term.

They tell a client, “We’ll get you ranking on phrase X”—often the phrase sounds good on the surface. The trusting client approves the term, not realizing that the phrase will never receive any traffic or bring conversions. Alarm bells should be going off in your head if your SEO firm is claiming guarantees. Ask for popularity numbers of the phrases they are selecting, test the phrase in PPC to get real performance data, then decide if the phrase is worth pursuing in organic marketing.

2. Confusing keyword popularity with keyword appropriateness

Professional keyword tools like KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker are valuable tools for providing insight into the traffic potential of search phrases. This is useful information to have, but sometimes this one criterion gets blown out of proportion in importance. Other considerations like relevancy, user intent, and the competitiveness of a phrase are overlooked.

Something to keep in mind is that many popular phrases are also extremely competitive, making highly popular phrases an expensive choice. PPC bid prices will be higher and winning a top organic spot will require more work because more competitors are targeting that phrase. An alternate approach, especially for a small business, would be to pursue more focused, more relevant terms that are less popular but would be better choices because they convert better.

3. Not considering user intent in keyword selection

Selecting good keywords requires the ability to get inside the mind of the user to learn what they wanted when they entered the phrase.

The phrase a user enters reveals much about the state of mind of the user and where they are in the buying process. For example, a search for “car reviews” might indicate that the searcher is in the research phase and is comparison-shopping. In contrast, a searcher entering “fast auto financing” is actively looking to buy—he wants that hot car in time for the weekend.

4. Selecting single word keywords

Only on rare occasions is a single word a good choice, and this happens mostly for big powerful sites. If you are Maytag, the single keyword “washer” might be fine. For most sites, however, single terms are just overly competitive and expensive. They tend to be overly broad, too competitive, and not perform well.

5. Keyword misalignment

One needs to be careful when selecting keywords to make sure that you select phrases that do not unintentionally conflict with unrelated industries. For example, consider the phrase “mobile marketing.” A company selling advertising on mobile billboards might unintentionally be competing with a company selling advertising on mobile devices. Careful keyword selection can help prevent this misalignment.

6. Not considering the competition

Many companies blindly select keywords and don’t stop to consider the competitive landscape of that phrase on the web. Put the candidate term into a query box at a search engine and take a look at the sites ranking for the term. Do they have .gov and .edu extensions? Examine how optimized they are. Compare the backlinks of the sites ranking to your site. If you want to rank, you’ll need to outdo what the other sites are doing. Pick your battles carefully: can you realistically afford to pursue that phrase?

7. Failing to periodically review keywords

Language isn’t static. New words come into the vocabulary of people and other words drop from use. Scanning forums and blogs where people are discussing products like yours is a good way to watch for new terms. Wordspy.com is a favorite free tool for learning new expressions.

It is important to periodically review your keyword list to see if there are phrases you’ve overlooked or terms that are new or grown in popularity.

Another good reason to review keywords is that, upon closer inspection, you might find inappropriate keywords that are not performing well and are costing you money. Perhaps when you made your original keyword selection you only had limited data on which to base your decision. Revisiting your keywords when you’re armed with performance data can guide you to refine your choices.

8. Not allocating enough resources and time to perform good keyword research

Almost all online marketing has its foundation in keywords. The words you buy in pay per click, the terms you target for organic, the phrases you focus on in your images and videos, all depend on making good keyword choices up front. It takes time and resources to do keyword research properly.

If you were constructing a building, you would take measures to ensure your foundation was strong. It is the same with the keyword research process. Unfortunately, what happens in many companies is they rush the keyword process and do not allocate the necessary resources or time to do it right. This leads to poor keyword choices and costing the company more money in the long run.

A better strategy would be to take the time it takes to do the project right. A sound keyword process is one of the best investments a company can make. Take a few minutes today and review your keyword lists. Chances are you can save yourself and your company a lot of money and improve your return on your search campaigns by simply improving the keyword pool.

One of my favorite plug-ins is the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar. Don’t be fooled by the name. While it’s specifically designed for web developers, the toolbar has many options and features that are also useful to search marketers, usability consultants, and SEO analysts.

The toolbar has far too many features to describe in a single article, but here are a few highlights. Use them to quickly help clients see design options and/or problems with their sites and demonstrate a solution without actually changing the site’s code or layout.

Web Developer Toolbar Features

The toolbar is a quick and easy way to look for problems and errors on your own site. It’s also a useful tool to use when working with clients who are unsure about, or resistant to, making any changes.

Page Resize: Show your client how the page displays in different screen resolution sizes.

Maybe the site design uses an 800×600 fixed-width instead of a liquid layout. In seconds, you can show the client how tiny that “perfect” page looks to users with higher resolutions. Or what about that client who insists on a wide banner and large home page images? Demonstrate just how little page content displays “above the fold” to users with a lower resolution setting.

Here’s a real-world example: the Wine Enthusiast site loses all its bottom banner information at the lower resolution:

Turn Off JavaScript: Some site visitors who use assistive technology (like screen readers) don’t have JavaScript turned on. Neither do search engine spiders – those handy little bots that make it possible for visitors to find your clients’ web sites through the search engines.

With the Web Developer Toolbar, you can easily show your client how his site works (or doesn’t!) when JavaScript is disabled. Of course, you can do this without the toolbar, but the Web Developer Toolbar lets you do it with a single click instead of navigating through multiple screens.

Image Options: The three most useful are the “Disable Images option,” “Display ALT attributes,” and “Outline Images Without Titles” options.

1. Disable Images: This is a quick way to view the site through the eyes of a search engine spider. A client with an image-heavy site may be surprised to find out just how much important information is missing if images are turned off.

   There’s not much for the spider to index at the WineEnthusiast.com site:

   

2. Outline Images Without TITLES: The TITLE attribute can be used to add context and extra meaning. The TITLE attribute appears when the mouse runs over the image, so it’s a good opportunity to add additional information. For instance, if the image highlights a 50% off sale, add a TITLE attribute that emphasizes the day the sale ends: “Hurry! 50% off all pet food ends Thursday, April 3rd.”

   The Web Developer Toolbar outline images without TITLE attributes in red, making it easy to choose images that would benefit from additional context. Note that every image in the screen shot below is outlined in red. There’s a lot of opportunity!

   

3. Display ALT attributes: ALT text describes an image – “Save 50% on Pet Food When You Order Online.” Quickly point out images with no ALT text and images with less than descriptive text. These are important components of Web Accessibility standards. The ALT text is used when the image is not available (not loaded yet, or when using a screen reader or browsing with images off to save bandwidth). Note: MSIE also uses the ALT text as the rollover text when no TITLE attribute is present.

Edit Styles in Real Time, in the Browser Window: Help clients choose between fonts and color schemes with the “Edit CSS” option. The toolbar opens a side window containing the style sheet. Make changes and see them real-time in the browser window. Show your client a variety of options without producing a template or file for each one.

This is particularly helpful for clients whose sites have usability and/or readability issues that may be hard to describe. Show them instead. Search marketing may bring visitors to the site, but the site’s usefulness and usability keeps them there.

Look how much more readable this menu is with the font-weight changed to bold, even though the text size is slightly smaller. With the toolbar, you can easily show your client the difference, and reassure him that the change won’t break the layout.

The first image is a screen shot of the original page, and the second shows the CSS edit bar open with the suggested changes displayed.

Small Screen Rendering: How do most web sites display on the small screen? With small screen Internet access on mobile devices like cell phones and Blackberry PDAs growing in popularity, it’s worth knowing how your site stacks up against rivals.

Here are three examples:

Downloading the Free Toolbars

To use the toolbar, you first have to download and install a free copy of Mozilla Firefox. Then, download and install the Web Developer Toolbar.

Here’s how it looks installed, although it actually displays in a single row in the top of the Firefox browser window:

Other browsers have similar add-ons. Download the Internet Explorer Toolbar from Microsoft.

The Safari Web Inspector is part of the Safari WebKit. Its installation is a little more complicated, but it’s certainly worth the effort if you’re a Safari user.

Search marketing and web development are closely related: it’s hard to market a poorly-designed site. And many search marketing professionals have clients who paid a lot for a web site design. They’re often reluctant to make even the smallest changes. Use these Firefox Web Developer options to help clients understand how a few small changes can have a big effect on the potential success of the site.

Search marketing is the ultimate seductress. It lures you in with the promise of an interesting, exciting career that can actually pay the bills, but soon you’re regularly pulling 12 hour days with no vacations. There’s intense pressure to achieve high search rankings and triple digit ROIs to keep clients happy in a dynamic industry where the rules change frequently and the competition is growing in leaps and bounds. It’s no wonder search marketers feel stressed. Stress is running rampant in the search marketing industry and failing to address its effects on you and your client relations can destroy your SEM business faster than a low Google ranking.

So how do you avoid burning out?

A little stress can be good and helps keep us productive and focused. However, excessive stress over a long period can lead to burnout. Burnout is an unhealthy mental and physical state that can damage your health and business. It has made many excellent search marketers leave the industry in search of an alternate way of life. Anyone who has been in the industry for any length of time has faced the burnout syndrome at some point.

Signs of SEM Job Burnout

Remember when you first started in search and loved every minute of it? That was a time when you couldn’t wait to check your rankings on Google, travel to the next SEM conference, or pitch your services to that new client. That was good stress—the kind that helps launch a successful business.

But, over time, the demands of such an intense industry can become overwhelming as it gets harder to balance client, co-worker, and family demands. When that happens, the symptoms of burnout may start to appear:

• Irritable with family, clients, and co-workers. Do you start the day in a bad mood and never get better? Do co-workers and family members hesitate to approach you with problems and questions?

• Physical and mental exhaustion. This includes headaches, sleeplessness, fatigue, forgetfulness, muscle aches, and tension. Your body responds to stress and burnout by getting sick. If you’ve had more than your share of colds, headaches, and other illnesses, that’s a huge warning sign.
• Apathy and listlessness about your job and with co-workers. You may have little interest in new projects, be eager to leave at the end of the day, and pull back from socializing with your co-workers at work or away.
• Sense of hopelessness about your job situation. Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you have, think you’ll never get ahead, and have difficulty setting goals and priorities?
• Cynical and sarcastic reactions to everyday events. Of all symptoms, this is the most destructive to you personally and professionally. Your relationships suffer when every reaction you have is negative or cynical.

Burnout is a gradual process. You don’t just wake up one morning burned out, so it’s critical to recognize the symptoms before they get too severe and affect your business and personal life.

Ten strategies for avoiding burnout

Everyone is vulnerable to burnout, but people with an entrepreneurial spirit that the SEM industry especially attracts seem particularly susceptible. Getting a small business off the ground is a stressful but exciting adventure. Every small business owner usually starts as a one or two-person operation. There’s no distinct job description: you’re the manager, worker, accountant, search marketing guru, and customer service department all rolled into one.

But, as the business grows, so do the responsibilities. It’s hard for many owners to let go and spread the responsibilities across several people or departments. When one person tries to do it all for too long, he or she is inexorably headed for burnout.

A job doesn’t have to be that stressful for someone to experience burnout. The reason for burnout in most cases is the feeling that you have little or no control over your job duties and obligations. The best antidote for burnout is balance—in your professional life and personal life.

Here are a few antidotes to SEM burnout, from the personal to the broader aspects of your professional life.

Take a deep breath—literally. A slow, deep inhale of air followed by a slow, measured exhale is a stress-busting technique you can use anywhere. Slow, deep breathing lowers your heart rate, blood pressure, and reduces stress hormones.

Make time for exercise. For most search marketers, breaking away from the computer to go exercise is a foreign concept. It’s easy to say you’re too busy or too tired to exercise, but physical activity is a great way to keep stress from overwhelming you. Exercise tires out your body so you sleep better, releases endorphins to improve your mood, and makes you feel healthier and more in control.

Remember, doing nothing IS doing something! Okay, this is one of the hardest steps for search marketers who feel their work is never done. Stop feeling guilty about taking time for you. Nobody should—or is able to—work all the time. Get a massage, spend a few hours at the movies, or go on a hike. Do anything you personally enjoy that has nothing to do with work. Can’t spare an hour? Even 15 minutes of peace and quiet can help recharge your batteries and clear your head.

Keep your sense of humor. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, laughter really is the best medicine. A 2007 study found that “…mental stress is associated with impairment of the endothelium, the protective barrier lining our blood vessels,” but laughter helps protect your heart.

Don’t be “on-call” all the time. Schedule downtime. Make time for your family and friends. While the internet is open for business 24/7, you don’t have to be. Set your hours of availability, and guard your free time. Turn off the email, IM, and let the answering machine get the phone at certain times and don’t feel guilty about it.

Spread the work around. There’s no law that says you have to write every blog post yourself or take part in every conference call or review every piece of web site copy. Find good people you can depend on to get the job done and trust them.

Learn to say no! You don’t have to accept every speaking opportunity, agree to serve on every community board, or take on more clients than you can handle. Part of building a good business reputation is visibility, but accepting more responsibility than you can handle hurts your business and your health in the long run.

Choose clients carefully. Who doesn’t have at least one high-maintenance client who demands instant response and far more service than he’s willing to pay for? Unreasonable client demands can sap your time and energy and offer little or no payoff for the business. Chances are, the client has already burned through other hapless SEO consultants before landing on your doorstep. Show them the door as soon as you can.

Don’t sell yourself short. When starting out, many owners are tempted to give low price quotes to clients in order to build up a client base. But then you find yourself locked into low-paying contracts that take just as much energy as those priced more realistically. The original clients still deserve your best effort, so it’s easy to feel trapped by obligations and feel as though you’re doing a lot of work for (almost) nothing.

Return to what you loved about your job. As your business grows, you may find yourself removed from the work you used to enjoy the most. The National Federation of Independent Businesses describes how that can lead to entrepreneurial burnout, noting that business owners were dismayed when “…the intricacies of running the business overshadowed the thrill of growing it.” If that’s happening to you, delegate some tasks you enjoy less, and take on a project you do enjoy.

One way to bring back joy into search marketing is to keep a hobby fun site just for you. When regular work becomes too much, take a break and spend some time on your fun site. A ”play” site will allow you to keep your skills up and will give you a place to decompress and remind you why you love search.

What’s important is that the act of reclaiming a favorite task gives you a feeling of control and accomplishment. It helps you avoid this trap: “Entrepreneurs commonly suffer burnout when they feel like they no longer have any challenges or room to be creative in their work”

Burnout can hurt you physically and mentally— and it can kill your business. In a small organization, the owner/manager sets the tone of the entire group. If you’re unmotivated, depressed, irritable, and resentful, that attitude affects the people around you, including your clients.

Preventing burnout isn’t just a good idea—your business and your health depend on it!

The secret’s out: men and women are different—in person and online. Gender differences matter in web design, content, and marketing. It takes more than a girlish color scheme and soft focus photos of smiling children to draw women to your site and earn their loyalty. Color and design matter, but so do content, safety, and service. And oh, by the way: men want compelling visuals and for you to just get to the point. Surprised? You shouldn’t be, as these research findings demonstrate.

"Thinking pink" is not thinking at all

Many Web designers and marketers have a simple strategy to appeal to women: "Think Pink." Often this is a good opening strategy if women are your target market because they do tend to favor pink and purple hues. But color preferences are affected by a variety of factors other than gender, including age, personal bias, and culture.

Numerous women-oriented sites like Avon.com, Brides.com, and Komen for the Cure successfully use soothing, pastel colors to create a calm, inviting place to linger and browse. But they don’t stop at just using colors women like. The sites are well organized, provide interesting content, and let users personalize their experience.

Don’t fixate so much on pink that you ignore the larger role color plays in determining mood, purpose, and trustworthiness. Ideally, color choices should be based on your site’s purpose and products.

Common color associations include:

• Trust: blue and white

• Dependability: blue and black
• Danger: red and black
• Cheapness: yellow and orange
• Fun: yellow, red, orange, and purple

Even if women do most of the shopping for children’s toys at your site, a pastel color scheme conflicts with the site’s purpose. Colors appropriate for a toy site (red, yellow, and orange) would not be appropriate for a stock tip or medical information site.

Get more information about color choices by reviewing the results of Joe Hallock’s Color Assignment study.

Girls just want design

A widely-reported study of design preferences from the University of Glamorgan found that women prefer sites designed by other women. The study also noted a clear difference in design and layout preferences:

“Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily. ”

Women users were far more likely to compliment sites that had been designed primarily by other women. Yet, when researchers looked at the composition of design teams, they found that 74% of sites studied were designed by a man or male-led design team. Female designers or design teams produced only 7% of sites. Over three quarters of sites designed to appeal to women had male design teams. An article at HumanFactors.com has an excellent analysis of this study and its implications for designers.

Certainly, this doesn’t mean that only men can design for men and women for women, but it does highlight the importance of soliciting different perspectives and opinions during the design process.

Usability testing should always be a major component of your design and redesign process. Bring in members of your target audience early in the process and listen to what they say. That’s a basic component of good web design, no matter who your audience is.

Women are online hunters and gatherers

Conventional design wisdom says that men devour data while women focus on pictures, but the results of recent eyetracking studies indicate just the opposite.

Usability and eyetracking research conducted by Eye Square, a marketing research and usability company, found that many of our gender assumptions about web content are just wrong:

"The empirical findings indicate that there is a big difference in the attentional behaviour between women and men. Whereas women tend to receive textual information very carefully, men start their orientation on a web site at photos and generally read less text. Concluding from the empirical data, we therefore describe women as being text orientated and accurate, and men as icon orientated and loose… women read and men do not."

A 2005 study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, How Men and Women Use the Internet, supports those findings. Pew’s study highlighted some important traits of female Internet users, including their propensity to:

"…penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest… Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process—one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges."

Most women aren’t impulse buyers online. They take the time to learn about the product and get as much information as possible before making a purchasing decision. That’s not always easy, though. Half of women consumers report that they’ve left stores and web sites because they couldn’t find what they wanted or been able to get enough information about the product.

Build a safe, personal community that emphasizes service

This is an area where small businesses can shine. Large companies may get thousands of emails and phone calls per day, and few are equipped to respond quickly and in a personal manner. We’ve all been frustrated by the canned email responses that arrive days after we sent a query and don’t begin to answer the question we asked.

Personalized service is key to building customer loyalty. This New York Times article discusses the buying clout of women consumers and describes how electronics retailer Best Buy moved from the business model of "…a boy store, built by boys, for boys," towards a more consumer-friendly orientation:

"Online, Best Buy has added ‘click to call,’ so that a shopper can ask a representative to call her back at a time she requests to help with buying decisions. In the stores, it has made the aisles cleaner and wider and added shopping bags as an alternative to carts."

As with a physical store, a welcoming environment entices visitors to your site, good information keeps them there, and a focus on trust and privacy helps turn them into customers.

Women users are more likely to trust your information if they think they’re getting the whole story. How can you persuade them that this is the case?

• Pay attention to your product descriptions. Make them complete and informative.

• Make it easy to ask questions. Online chat features are very popular because you can get instant answers from a live representative.
• Beef up your "Frequently Asked Questions" page.
• Clearly describe your return policy and shipping charges.
• Highlight your privacy policy and write it in terms non-attorneys can understand.
• Add an "Email page to a friend" link to your pages.
• Product reviews from other users are valuable because they focus on everyday experiences using the product—how it performs out in the real world, and not just how the designers thought people would use it.
• Have a phone number on your site! Most customers will never call, but they like having it as an option.

Small businesses have real opportunities to build personal relationships with their customers. One of the advantages of the Internet is that it allows you to build these relationships with customers who may live half a world away through phone calls, emails, and online chat. Women comprise half the general population, and 66% of them go online to shop and do research.

That’s a market no web business, large or small, can afford to ignore.

A friend recently presented me with a tiny kitten she and her daughter rescued from a busy intersection. This kitten was not particularly adept at walking and would occasionally fall over, but she kept trying, using her tail to keep her balance and become more skilled at walking.

I can hear you ask: What in the world does my new kitten have to do with paid search for small businesses? As I observed the kitten’s progress, I found myself comparing her transformation to that of a small business venturing into paid search marketing for the first time. Small businesses, like the kitten, need to start slow, practice, and use their tails (their tail words, that is) when starting out in paid search.

In this article, I’ll explore some of the obstacles that keep small businesses from venturing into the paid search arena. I’ll then recommend a series of initial first steps you can take to gain confidence and proficiency using this advertising venue.

Myth versus reality

In talking with small business owners, one theme I hear repeated frequently is that small businesses are afraid of investing and losing their life savings in paid search. They’ve heard horror stories. They’ve found the whole concept confusing and a bit overwhelming. To the uninitiated, the prospect of using paid search can be daunting. Sometimes, when we don’t know much about something, we hear one negative comment and it grows into a monster in our minds.

In November 2007, Microsoft adCenter released research results looking at why many small businesses avoid using PPC. Although the study was conducted with UK small businesses, it reveals insights into perceived obstacles that many small businesses (SMBs) around the world might face when testing the PPC waters.

According to the Microsoft study, 44% of SMBs did not participate in paid search marketing because they thought it was too time consuming. In addition, 56% thought it was too expensive and 33% felt it was just too complicated.

If you’re running a large, complex campaign across multiple engines, PPC can definitely be expensive, time consuming, and complicated. Large scale PPC can be so complex you may need third-party PPC management software to give you the visibility into what’s actually happening in your account(s). However, this is the extreme case and almost never applies to small advertisers.

Many SMBs with limited budgets run paid campaigns with great success. Small campaigns with a few long-tail, niche keywords may bring all the traffic you want. There is no rule that says you have to have a large campaign and whopping budget for PPC to work for you. The engines will encourage you to spend more, but the ultimate decision about the right amount of traffic and the extent of your budget lies with you.

Arm yourself with knowledge

Before you start something new, it’s always a good idea to do your homework. That usually means conducting a little basic research. If you’re like most small business managers, you don’t have a lot of time to devote to marketing. You’re usually so busy working in your business you don’t have time to work on your business.

The good news is, doing a little research is just that—a little research. It doesn’t mean you have to do research for a dissertation, but a bit of background reading can shorten the learning curve and help you understand the overall concepts of any topic, including PPC.

There are a number of good primers available on paid search. If you like books, my all-time favorite PPC book is Andrew Goodman’s Winning Results with Google AdWords. Online resources that provide good PPC starter information include Google’s own AdWords Demos and Guides, Jennifer Laycocks’s insightful article “Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign,” and the many great articles in SearchEngineLand’s Paid Search column area.

Learning to walk before you run

When you’re first starting something new, be it riding a bike or running a pay-per-click campaign, you should start out slowly. Beginning with a small PPC campaign minimizes risk and gives you the opportunity to understand the basic mechanics of how the process operates.

Learning by doing is one of the fastest ways to master a new subject. Since the engines have made getting started in paid search easy, there’s really no reason not to give it a go. Interestingly, many small businesses haven’t even tested paid search to see firsthand whether it works for them and to judge just how complicated it truly is. They simply read the horror stories and bow out before ever discovering whether this advertising medium would benefit them.

One statistic from the Microsoft research that was particularly startling was that “78% of SMBs not conducting search marketing are aware of the web-based tools available to them yet 92% of those businesses have not even attempted to set up a campaign.”

Small businesses can find comfort in this statistic because it proves they are not alone in their fear of paid search. It should also serve notice to those of us who live and breathe “search” to remember that the rest of the world is still in the infancy stage about the wonders of PPC.

Microsoft also found that over a third of the respondents held the misconception that it would take a day or more to set up a campaign. Ironically, the self-service basic configuration that most of the engines have followed makes it easy for a new advertiser to open an account and start advertising in less than an hour.

Use available safety features

What many small business owners might not know is that there are numerous safety features available within a PPC control panel. Those horror stories of people who ran up thousands of dollars in PPC debt in only a day typically come from people who didn’t take the time to learn about and set the available safety parameters.

You have control over what you spend, when you spend, and how you spend. What’s more, you can stop the campaign at any time with the click of one button.

Google allows you to set a daily budget so you can control the media spend. The daily budget is the dollar amount you are willing to exhaust each day on a particular campaign. Multiply the daily number by 30 to know what your maximum monthly amount will be. If you’re uncomfortable with the number, lower your daily budget to an amount that allows you to sleep soundly at night. As you gain confidence that the PPC advertising model is improving your return on investment (ROI), then you can inch the daily budget upward.

When you first set up your account, there are a few campaign parameters that will require your attention. This is one case where the default values are often not what you want.

For example, a small business starting out should turn off the “content network” (In Google, the default setting for the content network is “on”). The content network will display your PPC ads on every site that signs up for inclusion. In Google, part of the content network is called AdSense. You’ve probably seen these ads on other websites. Turning the content network off will limit your ads to showing only on the search results pages, not on millions of other websites. You can always include the content network later, but for those who wish to start slow, this is the best way to go.

Another way to limit clicks (and thus limit how much you spend) is “day-parting.” This is the practice of scheduling delivery of your ads at specific days and times. For example, if you run a small business that is closed on Sunday, it may not make sense to run PPC ads that drive phone calls to your office when there isn’t anyone manning the phones. The AdScheduling feature in Google allows you to select the specific times and days that fit your needs.

One downfall some small businesses face is opening their PPC ads to too broad of an audience. For instance, if your company builds swimming pools in Texas, you don’t need to advertise to homeowners in Michigan. PPC campaigns offer local and regional businesses the ability to “geo-target” their ads. Targeting by geographic location is a way to get the ads in front of local shoppers and avoid showing your ads to people outside your area.

Monitor your performance

When first starting out be sure to watch your account closely, especially those first critical hours. If something is configured incorrectly, it will likely show up early on. The quicker you catch a problem that could cost you money, the less expensive your campaign will be. If things aren’t going well, then simply “pause” the account (click just one button labeled “pause”) and the campaign will immediately stop while you figure out what needs to be corrected.

Define success—in your terms

Before you begin any PPC campaign, you’ll want to decide what needs to happen for your campaign to be successful. Obviously, you’ll want to make more money than you spend. When you’re starting out with paid search, it’s easy to get wrapped up with the idea that clickthrough rate is your most important metric. In fact, the engines encourage this line of thinking because it puts money in their pockets. Clickthrough rate does play into your quality score and affects the price you pay for each click as well as your ad position. It shouldn’t, however, be your top metric. As an advertiser who is paying for every click, you want traffic that converts: you don’t want just any ol’ traffic. Thus, tracking conversions (PPC clicks that ultimately turn into specified actions) is more important than clickthrough rate.

To properly track conversions, you need to first identify what a conversion is. To different sites it can mean different things. A conversion could be a customer filling out a form, whipping out a credit card and buying something, or simply downloading a white paper. You have to have a predetermined measure of success in mind and have the tracking in place to gauge it so you can tell if your PPC is working.

Google and some of the other engines provide conversion-tracking options where you can add JavaScript to a thank you page in order to record the successful conversion from a PPC ad. If you’re a small business this may be the easiest way to go. Once you see what’s working, log into your account to view the performance data (all located in one place). Keywords that are converting well should be left alone. However, keywords that are not pulling their weight should be turned off.

Selecting appropriate keyword phrases

Selecting the keywords for your advertising campaign is a critical first step in cost-effective search marketing. If you’re a beginner to paid search, here are a couple of tips. Don’t use single words. What’s more, avoid broad match search, at least in the beginning. The reason for both is the same: they can deliver unqualified traffic.

Broad match search in Google can be especially dangerous for a small business on a limited budget where every click has to count. Google’s broad match is a very liberal, expanded match where the connection between the displayed ad and the keyword is often not obvious. (To read discussions about Google’s broad match option, type in “expanded broad match problem” into Google.)

Watch for inappropriate traffic

Using an analytics program to oversee your performance is another exceptional way to monitor the success of your pay-per-click advertising. Cost is no longer an excuse for not having an analytics tool. Google Analytics is free and is an excellent program. Many large companies have concerns that using Google Analytics is passing coveted conversion data onto Google. But for a small business that has a more restricted budget, the benefits outweigh the risks. Having a free, good analytics program that will share your data with Google is better than not having any performance metrics at all.

Once you get the analytics program in place, you’ll want to keep an eye on your “bounce rate.” This *may* be an indication of inappropriate traffic. It could mean the landing page isn’t in sync with the PPC ad and/or the keywords, or that the visitor’s expectations were not met on the page. Either way, a high bounce rate can signify a waste of money and should be a red flag that spurs you to take a closer look.

A useful tactic that can reduce inappropriate traffic is including qualifying words in the ads. This is a technique used to weed out unnecessary or inappropriate clicks. If you’re selling a luxury item and you want to discourage clicks from people who are geared toward bargains, you might include a phrase such as “starting at $XXX” to key the visitor in that this is not a discount product. Qualifying visitors beforehand will save you money on unqualified clicks.

Karon Thackston’s ebook, How To Write Successful PPC Ads, is geared specifically toward writing paid search ads and can show you several techniques for qualifying visitors through your PPC copywriting.

Summary

Are you ready to expand your online presence? It may be time to test paid search advertising. Done carefully and with close monitoring, PPC can be a cost-effective way to drive high-quality traffic to your web site. Test the PPC waters gradually, then ramp up your spending once you feel comfortable and have gained some experience.

Oh! Are you still wondering what happened to my kitten? She perfected her walk and has become extremely proficient at PPC, too! Seriously, she’s thriving and is now quite the little acrobat!

“I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted…I just don’t know which half.” It’s not a joke: it’s an astute observation from pioneer marketer John Wanamaker. John was a Philadelphia businessman who conceptualized the department store in the early 1900s. Today, 100 years later, we share the same problem Wanamaker faced of identifying which advertising works and which doesn’t.

The challenge is compounded by the need for better accountability of our advertising dollars. The days of unlimited online marketing budgets with no responsibility are over. CMOs, CFOs, CEOs, and other C-level managers are demanding to know whether their advertising dollars are bringing an acceptable return.

The struggle we have as online marketers is to find ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising, including those elusive offline conversions. Offline conversions are simply sales that start online but are completed offline—either by way of a phone call or a visit to a physical store. The challenge is tracking that customer behavior after customers leave their computers.

With more competitors entering the online arena and pay-per-click (PPC) bid prices soaring, the ability to optimize and streamline PPC and other campaigns is going to be increasingly important in the future.

Online analytics programs do a decent job of collecting online conversion data. However, when the subject of offline conversion tracking comes up in a business meeting, it’s usually accompanied by loud sighs, groans and looks of despair. Measuring offline conversions and proving on paper that the online marketing triggered the offline conversion is difficult, because you can’t often directly measure the process from start to conversion.

Online search drives offline sales

In March 2006, comScore conducted a study for Google that showed 63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches were made offline. This means consumers called or went to their local stores rather than purchasing an item from a web site.

With the holiday season fast approaching, small and local businesses should sit up and take notice. History repeats itself in marketing, just as in life, so there’s a good chance this upcoming holiday season will produce similar statistics as previous years.

The comScore study found some extraordinarily high offline conversions in several areas. For example, the video games and consoles category showed a whopping 93% of buyers converting offline! These were buyers who started an online search then left their PCs to purchase in store. The study is a compelling story showing the influence of online search driving offline sales.

Why are so many purchases made offline? For many companies, offline conversion is the preferred mode. B2B companies and companies with long, drawn-out or complicated sales processes prefer to speak directly with customers to provide clarification, create higher persuasion environments, etc. Their lead-generation strategies may purposefully direct online prospects to offline channels for conversion.

Local search behavior dictates purchase method

A Neilsen//NetRatings and WebVisible local search study revealed some interesting insights on local search behavior. The study found that consumers using a search engine to find a local service shopped very differently from a searcher on Amazon or eBay where the transaction occurred online.

According to the study, the local searcher would find a local business via search, but then use the phone 68% of the time to make contact with and/or purchase from the business.

The results of this study send two loud and clear messages: if you’re a local company that is not advertising online, you should. And secondly, if you are advertising online and your company completes much of its transactions offline, you need to track offline conversions to get a complete picture of your marketing performance. And just which methods are proven to offer accurate offline tracking?

Methods of tracking offline conversions

Here are a few methods used to track conversions offline. I’ve grouped these methods in increasing order of sophistication and cost.

1. Simple Methods for Offline Conversion Tracking

The easiest technique is to make an assumption based on a change in sales. If sales go up after an online advertising campaign, then you can assume it’s due to that campaign. This method isn’t so much of a method as a practice.

Another example of a simple method is using anecdotal data to gather statistics. Here you might ask your salesman or call center to inquire of customers how they learned about your products. You can also use in-store surveys to ask customers how they located your products.

The obvious problem with these simple techniques is that, although they are easy to implement, they are VERY imprecise.

2. Intermediate Methods of Offline Tracking

Most small businesses lack the infrastructure or resources to spend on higher-end methods. So one intermediate method for tracking offline sales is by gathering some data in a trial program and then extrapolating it to future sales or a larger campaign.

For example, we ran a trial PPC campaign for a client who had businesses in many locations across the country and wanted offline information but didn’t have the resources to continually track offline conversions. We built a short-term campaign targeting a mini-site with a custom 800 number as well as an online reservation form.

At the end of the pilot test, we calculated an online to offline conversion ratio that we were then able to apply to a much wider PPC campaign targeting multiple sites. This allowed us to have a real-world estimate of the online to offline conversion ratio even though the client could not continue to dedicate the resources to track the offline conversions directly over the long term.

Other options that give offline accountability include the tried-and-true coupon code or special offer codes. This method relies on the customer entering a special identifier that both gives them a discount and also allows you to track where the customer came from.

A more subtle approach is to configure your site to generate a special price based on the source of the traffic. While this does not require giving a discount (other than a few cents off to achieve the special price), it does cause possible confusion for both the customer and your sales staff due to the variability of the pricing.

3. Advanced Offline Conversion Tracking Techniques

Now let’s look at some higher end techniques.

Customer tagging is one method used especially by companies who have loyalty or frequent buyer programs. To implement customer tagging, the customer needs to be uniquely identified on the site, usually through a log in, a customer ID or an order ID. The customer starts the purchasing process online, then comes in or calls the store to complete the transaction. The ID can then be used to tie the offline sale to the online behavior.

Unique phone numbers for referrers. Another advanced method for tracking offline conversions is the use of persistent unique phone numbers based on referrers.

This approach can be used to track offline conversions from a variety of lead generation sources. Javascript on the landing pages identifies the source of the referral and displays a unique phone number. The visitor is also tagged with a cookie, so as that visitor explores the site the same unique phone number is consistently displayed. Even if the customer bookmarks the site and returns at a later date he will view the same telephone number.

Pay-per-call. Commercial pay per call services can work with your paid advertising campaigns to track conversion performance across different search engines. These vary in sophistication, but basically they work by generating a phone number for the visitor based on the source of the traffic. In addition, they track the call performance using their proprietary systems, so you can get call length, conversion, and other information without the need to dedicate a phone number to that particular campaign.

4. Graduate level offline conversion tracking

One of the advantages of pay-per-click advertising from an online conversion perspective is the ability to track a conversion back to the specific keyword phrase that brought the visitor to the site. If you know a specific keyword brings in converting visitors, you may allocate more of your budget for that keyword.

Call tracking of keyword-driven traffic. Sophisticated call tracking tools provide the ability to track offline conversions with a similar high level of detail as online analytics. Obviously, asking a customer what search phrase they used to find your site online won’t likely be effective. An automated service is the best approach if you need that fine-grain concentration of detail when tracking conversions.

This is a level of service that would be difficult to achieve by a site owner on his own. Tracking offline conversions down to the keyword level requires the dedication of perhaps hundreds of toll-free numbers, and would then still require a lot of back-end integration with your phone system to capture all the conversion information.

Online Metrics Are Not Enough

James Lamberti, the VP of Marketing Solutions at comScore captures the problem that search marketers face today in the following quote. “Web-only metrics such as click-through rates and online conversions don’t provide a full picture of search campaigns. The ROI being realized here is significantly higher than the analytics packages can pick up.”

We may be doing a great job as marketers driving qualified leads and great traffic to a site, but our web-only metrics don’t show the real value. The ROI realized is significantly higher than the analytics packages can pick up.

I totally agree with Jim and I’ll show you an example of what he’s talking about from my own experience with one client.

The chart below is from a popular analytics package called Omniture SiteCatalyst that we use with many of our clients. Here we are looking at a conversion funnel for a client. You’ll notice that in this snapshot of time we acquired a large number of visitors (over 200,000 visitors), but only seven online conversions according to the web analytics.

    Picture shows Omniture Conversion Funnel for client who prefers offline conversions.

If you saw this chart and didn’t know the background on this client, you might be alarmed. This fallout report could be highlighting a couple of things: Something may be seriously broken on the site causing people to bail, or maybe the persuasive flow of the site isn’t working well.

Or—as was the case here—the preferred method for conversion was the phone. This particular client does over 90% of its business by direct phone calls driven from their web site, but none of that is captured in their online analytics.

If we didn’t have a way to measure offline conversions we’d be in trouble with this client. Fortunately at KeyRelevance we use an in-house solution to track unique phone numbers and are able to trace the offline purchases back to their online sources. Because we were able to show the client that his online campaigns were driving the offline sales he was delighted instead of being upset.

Offline conversion tracking gives you the information you need to make better marketing decisions and to better allocate your advertising resources. If your company is using web-only analytics, and is not doing offline conversion tracking, you are missing an important piece of the marketing puzzle.

Since the 1990s, usability experts and site visitors have been chanting the same web design mantra: Make your site easy-to-use, professional… easy-to-use, professional…

Research into how people interact with sites shows that visitors make snap judgements—often within seven seconds of landing at our virtual doorsteps. In fact, the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility Study found (not surprisingly) people evaluate a site largely on its visual design. If the site looks professional, that look enhances the company’s credibility.

An outdated, non-intuitive, unprofessional site can hurt your online image—and excellent reason to undertake a redesign. Similarly, you may have had a shift in business goals that open the door to change. Some companies, however, blindly revamp their sites for no apparent reason other than they are tired of the existing color scheme. For most companies, and especially for small companies on limited budgets, undertaking a redesign is a non-trivial expense. Still, how can you tell if an existing site is on the verge of needing a redesign or has even far exceeded its usefulness? Here are nine questions to guide your decision.

1. Do your analytics show your site is performing? How well does the existing site convert? Are visitors coming to your site only to immediately leave? Identify important metrics that give feedback on your site’s performance and then let real numbers determine your site’s effectiveness. If you have been tracking site metrics over several years and see a general trend in the wrong direction, you may want to look hard at your site and try to identify the problem. On the other hand, if most of the site is performing well, you may want to re-think sinking large sums of money into a new design.

2. What specific elements of your site are good (and bad)? Arbitrarily changing your site just for the sake of change is wasteful. Without direction, you may inadvertently remove some of the most important elements that users find helpful. Many companies churn randomly through design after design, never paying attention, tracking or learning from previous revisions. For all their effort and expense, their sites aren’t better—they are just different.

Building a new web site is a costly endeavor. Conduct a usability test on your existing site to identify specifically what’s working and what isn’t. Retain the positive features in the new design while eliminating the negative. The study may even show that minor modifications are all you need as opposed to an entire redesign.

3. Are you willing to upset your visitors by introducing change? There is an element of risk involved with redesigning your site. Users may react negatively as most humans are naturally opposed to change. In fact, there is an entire discipline devoted to the topic of change management. This discipline is designed to assist individuals with overcoming change resistance in businesses. The new design has to merit the inherent risk in changing what is familiar, especially if you have a large number of customers who regularly return to your site.

Think about it from your visitors’ perspective. It’s as if they came home one day and all their living room furniture had been rearranged. Their favorite chair has been moved over next to the window. The television is on the opposite side of the room. They may not recognize that this is a better design initially… they only see that what was familiar is now chaotic. This reaction explains why it’s not unusual to have a temporary drop in site performance numbers immediately following a new design launch. Regular visitors may be reacting negatively to the change simply because it is new (despite the fact that the redesign may be a dramatic improvement over the old).

4. Does your current site design comply with Internet standards and accepted practices? In the book Homepage Usability, Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir deconstruct home pages from 50 companies. One of their interesting findings was that there were certain expectations about where common page elements were expected to be. Through simple repetition throughout cyberspace, these locations became the places users looked for certain elements. If the element was located in the tried and true location, users found the site easier to use. In addition, their overall impressions of the sites were more favorable. Sites deviating from these unwritten guidelines, however, were considered less user-friendly by visitors. Familiarity was key.

Abiding by common site conventions makes perfect sense if you think about it. Users don’t want to have to learn your site. They have busy lives. If the site isn’t intuitive and easy to use, they will leave and find another site that is. Here’s a case in point.

One company I worked with came to me with a fresh, innovative design they’d developed in-house. They wanted to stand out and be bold. What a horror! The main navigation was hidden in an oversized graphic in the middle of the page. In addition, important information was only visible if the user happened to mouse over certain sections of the page. Different wasn’t better; it was a usability nightmare. A handful of frustrated, live usability testers and huge bounce rates in site analytics finally convinced the company that perhaps a more conventional design might perform better.

5. Have company changes dictated a new design? If your company has been acquired or gone through major internal restructuring, the need for a new web design to reflect the change is obvious. The same applies if your company is altering its brand or direction. Perhaps you’re expanding into a new area and want the new emphasis to be a focal point of the site. Your web site needs to reflect the goals of your business.

6. Is the current design hurting your company in the search engines? Does your existing site use architecture or technology that is search engine hostile? Are you using frames, javascript, forms, session IDs, flash or other elements that may limit the ability of a spider to crawl your site?

A tried and true method of improving a site’s search engine compatibility is improving its crawlabilty. If your site has roadblocks, search engine spiders may have difficulty with crawling, and consequently your pages may not be getting the recognition they deserve.

Search friendly web design is an important component to a good search presence. If your current design is limiting what spiders can index, take heart: You may only be one redesign away from new traffic. Make sure you pick a designer that is knowledgeable about spider traps. For added insurance hire an experienced optimization firm to consult with your web design company as the design is developed. It is much cheaper to fix the design during the planning stage than “retro-fixing” after it’s been launched.

Web Designer Pat Strader of Matterhorn Marketing Solutions advises, "If you intend to hire an SEO, allow them to interact with the design team before starting [the design process]. There are a growing number of talented, creative designers who will deliver a beautiful, artistic website. However, without certain elements or considerations, that elegant design could prove worthless if your goal is to drive traffic from organic search."

7. Does your existing site show its age? Just as on Fifth Avenue, there are also fashion trends in web design. Someone with even a little industry knowledge can often approximate the date of your site based on its characteristics. Black backgrounds with yellow text and visible hit counters are the shag carpets and avocado appliances of the online world. They haunt us from a distant era—in this case the late 1990s. If your company is trying to project a modern, sleek image spinning globes and blinking text is certainly not the way.

8. Does the old design not support all the growth areas? We’ve all seen sites that give the impression that new items have been tacked on to an existing design. This lack of assimilation gives the user a patchwork feeling instead of a cohesive feeling about the site.

After awhile the web site looks like a messy bulletin board. If the original design no longer supports the added material and the added elements detract from the site organization, it may be time to develop a new design.

9. Was the original web site created to be “pretty” rather than functional? Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has a few poignant points concerning sites that were built without regard to functionality. "This is where you see that a great deal of money has been spent to create flash graphics, splash pages, pop ups, etc. Little money may have been invested in developing valuable text content, and little time may have been spent considering how the site will be used by humans. In cases like these, it’s the designer’s job to redesign the site so that the backbone of it shifts from gimmick based to text based."

"It never comes as good news to the client that they wasted their investment on something that is actually tripping up the [search engine spidering] bots or driving business away from them, but the sooner they find this out, the better off they will be. They can then formulate a plan with the designer to offer an experience that is simpler and much more informative for the end user. Flash elements, such as a video, can certainly enhance that experience, but should not be the overall format of a website. This scenario tends to be most prevalent among large, well-funded companies who have been sold on the idea that being ‘cool’ is where the profit is. In a few cases, this may actually be true, but for the most part, I’ve found that being simple and useful is where the profit is."

Redesign Is A Weighty Consideration

A site redesign is not a casual decision. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, redesigning could involve a considerable expense. Do your research. Take the time to conduct usability studies, perform surveys of your visitors pertaining to your site functionality and pour over your analytics to see what your site’s strengths and weaknesses are. Once you’ve compared positive to negative and pro to con, combine the information with your answers to the nine questions above and the decision about redesigning should become crystal clear.

Online maps: we use them everyday for purposes as varied as finding out how to meet our friends at a new restaurant to sending out invitations to our child’s birthday party. Maps are valuable graphical presentations of how to get to a certain place.

Most companies that depend on local customers are beginning to recognize that including their full physical address as well as a map on their web site is a must. But often, if a map gets included at all, it is slapped on a web page without much thought. With just a bit of effort, you can include maps that are truly useful to your site visitors and that will help draw them to your business. Here are five simple things you can do to fully leverage the power of maps on your web site.

Make your map useful. Recently I traveled to a city I didn’t know well. While I was planning my trip I tried to find a hotel near the city’s convention center. I went to several hotel web sites and immediately looked for a map on their site so I could see how far a walk I would have to the convention center. Only one hotel site I visited offered a map that actually gauged the distance for me. The same hotel site offered estimated walking times and distances to a variety of landmarks in the area. Excellent!

The other hotels’ maps showed the location of their hotel, but the image of the map was static (non-zoomable) and showed zoomed-in view that only showed two or three streets around the hotel itself. I couldn’t zoom out or view a big picture of where the hotel was located in proximity to the general area, so it wasn’t really a helpful map for me.

Since I didn’t know the town well, I wanted the flexibility to zoom out and get a feel for where the hotel was in relation to landmarks I was familiar with. The hotel with the "good map" figured out what was important to many travelers and provided that information on their site. All the hotels I researched had been equal in my mind up until that point. Providing a helpful map on their site pulled that one hotel ahead of the pack and favorably influenced my buying decision.

Interactive maps are extremely helpful for travelers who are new to a city. With Google’s announcement of an easy-to-use, cut-and-paste version of Google Maps, you can now quickly and easily add a map to your site. If for some reason an interactive map is not an option, include two maps instead. One should be a regional map showing your business in relation to popular attractions/landmarks. The other map should display your location in relation to its immediate surroundings. The smallest details (such as which side of the street your business is on) can be of great importance to out-of-town visitors.

Include GPS coordinates. Summer is the time for travel. While most people take to the road in a car or SUV, many also pull large recreational trailers. This can sometimes complicate things. When you’re pulling a rig, you want to know exactly where you’re going. I can tell you from experience, backing up and turning around while pulling a 30-foot horse trailer is no fun! For this and other reasons, drivers have begun using GPS systems to improve their chances of arriving at their destinations without any hiccups.

As good as Google Maps and the other mapping programs are, there are errors in the databases. An address might appear on the wrong block or some other glitch may make it impossible to find the location you’re seeking. The accuracy of street addresses seems worse in suburban and rural settings, so many small business site owners in the tourist industry are now including GPS coordinates on their sites. The GPS coordinates allow travelers to lock in and get the exact location easily and accurately.

A related idea: If you have a parent or friend who is touring the country in an RV, direct them to Google Earth. Many RVers try to avoid mountain passes with tight switchbacks because it makes driving more difficult and dangerous. Google Earth can show the traveler where twists in the roads are so they can chose a better route.

Provide directions from a variety of starting locations. Not everyone drives to your business from the main interstate or the airport. One bed and breakfast owner in a remote area included very detailed directions on his web site from a number of locations. The addition of photos depicting landmarks along the way helped travelers find their B&B regardless of where they were coming from. The site owner also placed his phone number on the directions page so travelers could call from the road using the printed directions if they got lost.

Orient your location. Frequently, you’ll find that business web sites neglect to reference the landmarks they are near. If your business is in a small town which few people have heard of, mention a larger, nearby town as well. This will not only improve your chances for increased search engine traffic, but will also help customers find you in person. Searchers are more likely to use the larger town with a generic description of your services (New York dentist) than they are to use the name of a small town (Hastings dentist).

Case in point: Recently I was hauling three horses cross-country when I had an emergency with the trailer. Repairs had to be done before I continued my trip. It was 103 degrees and the work was going to take hours. I needed to find a safe place to board three horses for a half a day—no easy task! So I turned to the Internet for help.

I remembered a friend telling me about a business that provided overnight stabling. Ironically, I was fairly close to the "horse hotel." I couldn’t remember the name or exact location so I started my search with a query that included the name of the larger town where the stabling facility was located. No luck. I tried a variety of searches and still didn’t find the place… frustrating since I knew I must be within a few miles of the stable!

Finally, through sheer determination, I found the facility in an online stabling directory. I was able to contact the stable, which boarded my horses in comfortable, safe stalls for the day while the trailer was repaired.

While visiting with the barn owner, I happened to mention my problem finding her site through search. Since she was within 10 miles of a larger city, I suggested that she was probably missing out on business from people looking for her services by not mentioning the larger city. The next thing I knew, we were having a deep discussion about keyword tools and adding geographical descriptions to her web site. Hopefully the next horse traveler who comes through the area will benefit from our conversation!

Include business hours on the map page. It only makes sense to have all the information a site visitor needs to contact you on one page. That includes your business hours, physical address, phone number and a variety of maps on a single page. You have to make it easy for visitors to find you if you want to ensure their business.

Remember that new customers are just that: new. They may not know your store or your city very well, if at all. Take a fresh look at your site through the eyes of someone who hasn’t been there before. See if a person who is unfamiliar with your company or your town can find you using the map and directions currently on your site. If they can’t, it’s definitely time for a change!

Christine Churchill is President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service search engine marketing firm. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Last week in Part 1 of What You Don’t Know About Your Web Site Can Hurt You, I revealed a few scary secrets most small business webmasters learn about the hard way. If that didn’t scare you away, here are a few more to help the weary web site owner stay in good standing with search engines and your visitors.

1. You suffer from relative linking issues

Every webmaster knows it’s good insurance to regularly check your site for broken links. However, one of the most common types of broken links is self-imposed and thus preventable. What is it? It sounds woefully easy, but using the right kind of relative links can save your visitors a lot of frustration.

What’s a relative link? An example of a relative link is “staff.html”—in an anchor tag this would appear as:

<a href="staff.html"> Staff</a>.

Many times designers will use a relative link because of the ease during migration from design site to live site. The problem with this simple type of relative link is that they can break as your site grows in complexity and you develop a hierarchical directory structure. The relative link gets its name because it is “relative” to the current directory. If you happen to move the content to a different directory you can end up with a 404 “file not found” error because the relative links are pointing to pages that no longer fall under the current directory.

Another option is an absolute link reference that uses the full http address in the domain name. An example is the Search Engine Land staff page (http://www.searchengineland.com/staff.html). In an anchor tag an absolute link to this page might appear as:

<a href="http://www.searchengineland.com/staff.html">Staff</a>

A number of sites have gone to the use of absolute links due to being scraped or the fear of hijacking. The downside of this practice is that many companies use a staging server to test sites prior to uploading them to the open web. The reference to an actual domain complicates the testing process when the site is in a developmental environment. Consequently, many designers prefer to use a relative linking structure.

Here’s a typical situation when sites grow. Small businesses often start with small, flat sites. That is to say, every page links from the home page, but goes no deeper. Over time the webmaster creates subdirectories to logically group files that contain, for instance, new product lines. The webmaster cuts and pastes all his/her previous footers and other navigation (that used relative links) into the new subdirectory. However, since the pages do not exist in the new subdirectory, errors begin popping up all over the place. What a mess!

Enter the “absolute relative link,” sometimes called the server-relative or domain-relative link. This is the hybrid version of the absolute and relative link. (And no, I didn’t make up the name. I read about them after being burned by plain relative links back in the late 1990’s. It was a lesson I never forgot!) An absolute relative link includes an initial backslash to tell the server to start from the root directory and follow this path to the page. An example in an anchor tag would be:

<a href="/products/fun-product.html">Fun Product</a>.

The absolute relative (server-relative link) offers a flexible solution that will make your web designer happy because s/he can test the site on a staging server and migrate it to a live server without domain name problems. It also allows him to use a standard navigation scheme, which works even if the links are referenced from different subdirectories.

The good news is it is EASY to check your links. There are numerous automated link checkers including Zenu Link Sleuth that can scan your site and report bad links to you. Remember that links are the pathway engines use to crawl your site. You don’t want the spiders and bots to crash into a dead end at your main navigation, so use a link checker.

2. Spider traps are keeping your site from being properly indexed

Your marketing department “ooo’d” and “ahh’d” over the web designer’s concepts so you paid big bucks to have it coded. Now you have a drop-dead-gorgeous site that spiders can’t crawl easily… if at all.

Google’s technical guidelines tell us, “…if JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.” Sadly, most of these problems could have been remedied before they were a problem if the webmaster knew they were issues.

As a small business webmaster with an “un-crawlable” site, you have several options. You can arm yourself with knowledge about spider traps and look for them yourself, or you can bring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant on board to review the design and techniques used on the site. A knowledgeable optimizer brought on during the design phase can advise you on how to create a beautiful site—and even keep some flash—while ensuring the site is easy to crawl. You don’t have to give up glitz to do well in the engines; you just have to be careful how the site is constructed.

A fast way to view your site in the way a search engine would is to download the Lynx text web browser and run your site through it. This is a free Open Source piece of software originally developed at the University of Kansas that lets you see your page as a search engine might read it: in text format.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are a great resource for learning more about designing crawler-friendly sites.

3. Previous SEO firms used shady tactics that cast your site in a bad light

Shady tactics come in many forms. They become a problem when you go past visible text and start embedding keywords in the code at every opportunity. Invisible text, excessive keyword stuffing, doorway pages, cloaking practices or any number of other shady tactics can cause the engines to put your site in Search Engine Hell. There are a number of “tricks” that ill-informed or unscrupulous SEOs and webmasters might use in an attempt to coerce the search engines to rank a site higher than it otherwise deserves. The problem with these tactics is they are short-lived. As search engines continue to improve the sophistication of their indexing and ranking algorithms, more black-hat tactics will be detected and dealt with (usually by banning your site from the index).

Note that while many of these tactics involve manipulating the content in some shady way (cloaking, doorway pages and hidden text being the worst offenders), bad linking tactics can also cause your site to be viewed as shady by the search engines. Ever used a cheap linking company to build links? Well that’s likely what you got: cheap links! While the initial monetary cost was low, now you have to pay the real price. Oftentimes, companies like these link your site to link farms and bad neighborhoods. Or worse yet, you get ninety percent of your links from comment spam.

If you’re unsure of your link status, sign up for Webmaster Central and let Google tell you the known links it has indexed. If you see that all your links are the same type (e.g. all are reciprocal or are all from spammy sites), you have a problem.

If you have already been caught by Google and been banned from their index, you should take a hard look at your site to determine what the cause might be. Remove the offending tactic then humbly request re-inclusion.

Want more information on other tactics that can get you in trouble? Check out Google’s guidelines.

4. You have canonical domain name problems

Does an engine see “www.mysite.com” and “mysite.com” as separate sites? What are the downsides of ignoring this problem? If you don’t redirect one version of the site to the other, Google and other engines will see the two as separate sites. Yep—that means you could have major link-splitting and duplicate content problems.

The most common fix to this issue is to create a 301 permanent redirect from one to the other. Also, Google’s Webmaster Tools now allow you to specify to Google which version you prefer. This will help with canonical domain issues in Google, but not other engines.

For instructions on creating a 301 on an Apache server see the Apache Web Server documentation. IIS redirects are handled differently.

“What about using the DNS CNAME entry,” you may ask? It is acceptable to set up a DNS CNAME entry to point alternate names back to the primary name. This would be done as follows:

<table width="50%" border=0> <tr> <td>mysite.com</td><td>    A    </td><td>aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd (IP address direct)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>www.mysite.com</td><td>    CNAME    </td><td>mysite.com</td> </tr> </table>

This tells everyone (not just browsers and search engine spiders) that www.mysite.com is an alias for the preferred mysite.com.

Is it possible to handle canonical name issues this way? Yes. Does it work with the search engines? Yes, if properly implemented. Is it recommended? No, because it is easy to make implementation errors that result in an infinite loop on the DNS resolution. In addition, this involves getting the IT department or the ISP staff involved, which may take longer to implement than a 301 redirection rule.

5. You’re haunted by an unreliable server

Going cheap on hosting often equates to unreliability. Look for providers that include telephone support (not just email) and have extended operating hours. You’ll also want to check their time zone, especially if you live on the coasts.

Consider setting up an outside service to monitor your server so you know how your ISP is really doing. While most brag about 99.99% uptime, you may find they are stretching the truth. There are several low-cost server-monitoring services out there (Red Alert and Server Check Pro, for example), that can ping your server every 15 minutes then let you know when and if it is down. This type of service can also detect slow-performing servers.

Some have chosen to use a server checker on the hosting company’s site in order to decide which host to use. You should be aware that the performance of the hosting company’s site may differ from the sites they host.

In addition to affecting the customer’s experience on the site, a poorly performing server can also have a negative effect on your site’s search engine performance. If the site is down or slow in responding, the search engine spider may get tired of waiting and decide to de-list that page.

6. All your web content has been stolen

Your web site is publicly accessible and the content is available electronically. These two facts make it simple for an unscrupulous webmaster to snag a copy of your site’s content and clone it on the web. Automated scrapers are stealing content daily making it possible for others to use your content for their gain.

The easiest way to detect when this has happened is to grab a long text snippet (perhaps eight to 10 words or so) from your site and drop it into a search box, placing quotes around it to indicate an exact match search for that phrase. Assuming the content is original and unique, the only page that shows up should be your own. There are also tools like Copyscape.com that can check for violations of your content rights on a regular basis.

If another site has stolen and published your content, Google may think your site contains the duplicate content and the offending site has the original. At Google Webmaster Central Blog, Adam Lasnik wrote a great piece called Deftly Dealing With Duplicate Content.

If you find yourself the victim of stolen content, Google has spelled out the steps to filing a copyright infringement complaint. A great way to prove your ownership of the copy is to use the Way Back Machine. This free tool will allow you to show how long the content has been on your website.

7. Bogons can eat your web site

No, this isn’t the name of a new monster flick. This is a bizarre and unusual situation involving Internet traffic from IP addresses that are not currently assigned to ANY ISP. Since these lists are manually maintained and can lag behind current legitimate assignments, search engines may be unable to access your site through no fault of your own. If you recently changed your hosting to a newly commissioned data center or if your ISP recently assigned you an IP from a newly commissioned block of addresses, you should see this hosting issues article for the details. This unusual case falls into the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction category, but since we witnessed at least one account of it firsthand, we know it can happen.

In these two articles, you’ve read about a diverse list of issues webmasters and SEOs look at when diagnosing potential web site problems. To be sure your site is operating in an optimal state, review this list with your IT staff and/or your hosting company. Spending a little time on preventative maintenance now can ensure you don’t suffer from a cyber tragedy later on.

Christine Churchill is President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service search engine marketing firm. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

It’s tough to be a small business in today’s fast paced world. Small businesses not only have to know their core industry inside out, but now they have the additional burden of being proficient in online marketing. Since many small businesses have limited staff, most people within these companies wear multiple hats, from CEO to webmaster. Unfortunately, this often means the person responsible for the web site knows very little about it. Everything may seem to run flawlessly for a time, but then, when something goes wrong, they are left scrambling for help and at the mercy of their Internet service provider (ISP).

This is the first of two articles designed to raise the awareness of small business owners. Take heed: little details associated with your web site that are ignored can have a negative affect on your site and your business. Some problems affect the business mechanics; others affect your search positioning. The good news is, most are easy to fix once you’re aware of them. Being informed of potential challenges provides you with the opportunity to prepare and avoid serious consequences down the road.

If you wear the webmaster hat, you’ll want to carefully review the following list for some helpful information and tips. The more you know, the less time and money you’ll waste later on.

1. Your domain name is about to expire, and you don’t know it

Every domain name has at least three contacts associated with it: administrative, technical and registrant. When the domain name is about to expire, renewal notices are sent multiple times. Unfortunately, in many cases, the person whose email is on the account no longer works at your company. The notices are still sent, but since that email address is no longer valid, they go unread. What happens? Your domain name expires and your site “mysteriously” goes offline.

Your domain name is extremely important and worth protecting. Don’t assume everything is fine. Do a WHOIS search and find out the details on your account. You may discover the information is wrong, out of date, or not what you expected. More than one company has been shocked to find they didn’t actually own their domain name… and now they have to buy it.

If you are the rightful owner and your ownership laspes, you have a grace period of 30 – 60 days to renew (depending on the registrar). After that time, the domain name becomes available for anyone to purchase. Recapturing your domain name after it has been released and purchased can be an expensive process that often involves lawyers. The secondary domain market is a booming business. The players know the value of established domain names and fully intend to take advantage of them. Avoid this heartache by checking your company’s domain name status today and then registering it for a long period.

In an article entitled “How to Protect Your Domain Name,” fellow Small Is Beautiful columnist Matt MaGee tells a true story of his experience helping a small business owner who lost his domain name.

2. Your robots.txt file has banished search engines from your site

This is one of those invisible problems that can kill your site with regard to rankings. To make matters worse, it can go on for months without anyone knowing there is a problem. I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but don’t assume your company is immune to this problem. We’ve even seen it happen to widely known and publicly traded businesses with a dedicated staff of IT experts.

There are numerous ways to accidentally alter your robots.txt file. Most often it occurs after a site update when the IT department rolls up files from a staging server to a live server. In these instances, the robots.txt file from the staging server is accidentally included in the upload. (A staging server is a separate server where new or revised web pages are tested prior to uploading to the live server. This server is generally excluded from search engine indexing on purpose to avoid duplicate content issues.)

If your robots.txt excludes your site from being indexed, your site will drop from the engines’ databases. You may think you did something wrong that got your site penalized or banned, but it’s actually your robots.txt file telling the engines to go away.

How do you tell what’s in your robots.txt file? The easiest way to view your robots.txt is to go to a browser and type your domain name followed by a slash then “robots.txt.” It will look something like this in the address bar: http://www.mydomainname.com/robots.txt.

If you get a 404-error page, don’t panic. The robots.txt file is actually an optional file. It is recommended by most engines but not required.

You have a problem if your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

A robots.txt file that contains the above text is excluding ALL robots – including search engine robots – from indexing the ENTIRE site. If you have certain sections you don’t want indexed by the engines (such as an advertising section or your log files), you can selectively disallow them. A robots.txt that disallows the ads and logs directories would be written like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /ads
Disallow: /logs

The disallow shown above only keeps the robots from indexing the directories listed. Some webmasters falsely think that if they disallow a directory in the robots.txt file that it protects the area from prying eyes. The robots.txt file only tells robots what to do, not people (and the standard is voluntary so only “polite” robots follow it). If certain files are confidential and you don’t want them seen by other people or competitors, they should be password protected.

At SES New York 2007, Danny Sullivan hosted a robots.txt summit where search engine representatives talked about the frequent misuse of the file and how webmasters accidentally excluded their sites from indexing. To learn more about the robots.txt file see http://www.robotstxt.org. Here’s something good to know: If you are using Google Webmaster Tools, Google will indicate which URLs are being restricted from indexing.

3. Your site is scaring your customers with expired SSL certificate notices

If you’re a small business conducting ecommerce, you’re probably familiar with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates. These certificates enable encryption of sensitive information during online transactions. When the certificate is up to date the technology protects your web site and lets customers know they can trust you. Sadly, many times the person who originally set up the certificate moves on. Because their email no longer works, the renewal notices fall to the side. So you plod along unaware of the lurking danger. Sales plummet and no one can determine why.

Finally, someone notices the “scary security messages” that appear when someone starts the checkout process. If you’re lucky, a customer will call and tell you about the problem. If you’re smart, you’ll have an employee periodically verify that your checkout process and SSL certificate are working properly.

To check your SSL certificate, visit a secure page on your site then double click on the padlock icon in the bottom right corner of your browser. A window will pop up showing the SSL certification details including the expiration date. If the certificate is set to expire in less than 2-3 weeks, you should begin working with your IT department or ISP to get the certificate renewed.

4. Your content management system (CMS) is limiting your search engine success

Search engine optimizers have a love-hate relationship with CMS. The CMS can make adding content to a site easy for the non-programmer, but often times the system is hostile toward search engines. A CMS that doesn’t allow unique titles, META tags, breadcrumbs, unique alt attributes, and other on-page optimization techniques can limit a site’s success. For more details, I highly recommend you read an article by my colleague, Stephan Spencer, on search-friendly content management systems.

5. When you changed domain names, your redirects were set up improperly

Google and other search engines will treat various types of redirects differently. To ensure that the current domain inherits all the link equity the old domain has earned, verify that your site utilizes “301 permanent” redirects rather than “302 temporary” redirects. These numbers are codes that your web server sends to browsers and search engine spiders telling them how to handle the web page. If your server tells the search engine spiders that the new location is only temporary, the search engines will ignore the redirection and not transfer the existing link equity to the new site.

To properly implement this, you need to ensure that every page of the old site is properly redirected to the corresponding new page. If the domain name changed, but the site architecture did not, then simply redirecting the old domain to the new is sufficient. If the page URLs changed as a part of a larger redesign, insure that every page in the old site is properly (301) redirected to a page on the new domain.

Lisa Barone over on Bruce Clay’s blog wrote an excellent “non-scary” article on how to set up a 301 redirect that is easy for even the non-techie to follow. And Aaron Wall at SEObook has a detailed 301 case study on how well the different engines recognized and followed 301s on his site.

6. Your site is sharing an IP address with a spamming site

Many small businesses choose to use a virtual or shared hosting service rather than purchasing their own server. This arrangement is usually less expensive than dedicated hosting and meets the needs of the small business. In many cases a virtual hosting arrangement is fine, but keep in mind that the search engines pay attention to who your neighbors are on that shared server. Some sites have the unfortunate luck of being placed on a server with sites using known spam techniques. Since your site is on the same IP address as the spammy guys your site may be unjustly penalized by the actions of other sites. In other words, you might be a victim of guilt by association.

Even if you are running your own dedicated server, there is a small chance you’ll face a similar issue. Dedicated servers are grouped into something called “Class C IP blocks.” Basically, all the IP addresses are the same except for the last number. Frequently, all the sites in these situations are owned by the same company so, in essence, while your site might be legit, there may be 253 other servers out there besmirching your site’s good name. If you are concerned about being in a bad hosting environment, ask your ISP for the names of the other sites being hosted on your IP address (in the case of shared hosting, more than one site may be served from the same IP address). Also ask them for the domain names of the other sites that differ only in the last number of their IP address.

7. You’ve got the overloaded server blues

Does your site take forever to load? If your page file size is reasonable and you have a fast browser connection, the problem may not be with your site, but with the server at the hosting company.

The hosting company may have too many sites hosted on one server. They may also have you on a server with a site that is extremely active and monopolizes the server resources. The overload can result in your server timing out when a request is made from a spider. If this condition is chronic, it could result in the engine thinking your site is down. That could result in your site being dropped from the index.

Another problem with a slow loading site is that it can cost you business. Most web surfers are impatient. If they don’t see your site loading within a few seconds, they leave. They don’t care what the cause of the slow loading is; they simply move on.

If your ISP provides a service level agreement (SLA) regarding performance, uptime, etc. you are likely OK. Any provider that offers such a guarantee will have implemented procedures that would make triggering those SLA thresholds unlikely. If your site is consistently sluggish, however, request that your site be moved to a new server. Note that this will cause some hiccups because your IP address will change, so make sure this is the actual source of the sluggish performance before requesting the switch. Consider moving to a higher class of service or a dedicated server. If your web site is a core part of your business, pay the marginal costs needed to improve the service.

8. Your site is broken on Firefox

During the “browser wars” of the late 1990s, it was important to check your site under multiple browsers (including browsers for Macs and Unix) because many times a site would “break” or render oddly under different browsers. As Internet Explorer (IE) achieved dominance, many IE-centric web designers thought of browser compatibility as an issue of the past because IE was very forgiving. IE would properly display even sloppily coded sites

With the enthusiastic spread of the Firefox browser, the compatibility issue has reared its head again. Firefox is a more W3C-standards compliant browser so sites that look great under IE sometimes break under Firefox. Pages that use proprietary tags that only work under one browser (usually IE) or pages that contain syntax errors (especially unclosed tags or strange nesting) can cause a web page to render poorly in Firefox as well as Opera or other standards-compliant browsers.

In June 2007 a OneStat study on browser use reported that Firefox commanded a 19.65% share of the US browser market and 12.72% globally. If you’re in a high-tech industry, your percentage of visitors using Firefox may be even higher.

In parts of Europe, adoption of the Firefox browser is even higher, especially in Germany where the share is over 26% (that’s better than 1 in 4 visitors!). The browser wars get even more interesting when you consider that the most widespread browser in China is Maxthon, a browser of which most Westerners have never heard.

What this means to the small business webmaster is that you can’t ignore browser compatibility any more, or you may be giving 20% of your visitors a bad experience.

Enough is enough

These are more than enough problems to keep you busy for now. Next time we’ll have a new batch of lesser-known issues small business webmasters might find lurking in the dark!

Christine Churchill is President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service search engine marketing firm. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.