What I have been warning customers about is that standard search engine optimization (SEO) as we all know it will start to go away in favor of real-time, updated content in your website that is constantly added on a regular basis. In other words, you won’t be able to add keywords to your website and wait to come up high anymore – it won’t work.   I ‘ve been preaching to customers and at networking events for some time that we are “leaving the information age, and that we are entering the participation age”.   This was the topic of my Ignite Sussex presentation a couple of months ago – that business owners need to consider who in their organization makes up the voice of the company’s heart and soul, and then pass them the microphone and let them talk to the world. Without telling your company’s story, you won’t have an easy time competing in today’s social-driven marketplace.

Even Google is feeling the social heat, where real-time news and information sources like Twitter, Facebook pages, and countless other online sources are competing to be the most timely source for certain information. So now, we have Caffeine.  Caffeine, is Google’s new secret sauce that helps them index a staggering amount of web pages simultaneously, so that they are updating Google search results with a much higher frequency.  This means that new content will enter Google faster, and older content will leave Googles top search results faster.

This is very good news for some, and very bad news for a lot of business owners.

Most business owners that I meet have a very hard time believing that there aren’t some secret magical tricks to coming up high in search engines.  They believe that if certain words are organized and linked just so in their site in just the right way, that they will dominate search results.   It is true that this is how it worked for many years, but with search results becoming more real-time, it will be impossible to constantly pay a search engine marketing company to tweak your site.  And lets be honest, “tweaking”your site will NEVER be as good as adding genuine, well-written content on a regular basis, that people will want to link to.

Truth is, SEO, and the search engine marketing companies that peddle their wares, have offered questionable value recently, because adding keywords to your website isn’t adding value.  It isn’t adding a soul to your site.  It isn’t making people come back to your site again and again.  SEO doesn’t make someone trust you, OR your website.  Also, if you get people to your site because of SEO alone, but the site isn’t designed well, doesn’t have decent content, is confusing to use, doesn’t look trustworthy, or has a multitude of other issues with it, NO ONE WILL BUY FROM IT!  But we see people time and time again that spend hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of dollars per month (really) just to boost traffic to an under-performing website.  That is madness, stupidity, and a waste of money. Sites like this one that have a link at the bottom to every local city and town name are just trying to game the system to get traffic from Google.  Hopefully, we will see an end to this spammy strategy in the future.  To me, someone who knows what he is looking at, it makes your company look sleazy.  And I am not alone – as web users become more and more savvy, they can recognize a site loaded with keywords as a desperate attempt to gain traffic.

I say good riddance to SEO.   SEO is becoming automatic. This latest move by Google proves that this is where things are headed.  Want to know what to do to take advantage of this? Simple.  Hire better writers.   If you interview two prospective employees with equal credentials, hire the one who is a better writer. To me that applies to any position that involves use of a computer.  This is a REAL problem that honestly shocks me when I see it.  I’m talking about the number of people I meet that couldn’t write a simple business letter or article unless you held a gun to their head. Even then they probably couldn’t do it.   Those people…. the ones that can’t write and produce content…  Those are the people and the companies that should be scared about this new social marketing economy.  This economy, this public, and now search engines too, are demanding that you show your best stuff.  That you prove that you are an expert.  You can’t cheat with keywords and hope to milk the Google cow for money.

How big is this change with Google?  Its huge.  And its magnitude will sink in slowly as the rules for website “optimization” are again thrown out the window.  I think it is time that companies start to think about their own marketing voice optimization. This news about Google is GREAT NEWS for companies like mine.  Why? Because more people will soon realize that they need MULTIPLE PEOPLE in their companies working on their website content instead of just the IT guy or marketing person. THAT is how you will need to compete.  To have multiple people in your company editing your website content safely, you will need a solid Content Management System (CMS), like ours.

I remember how companies didn’t want to give their employees Internet access just 10 years ago.  “They will all surf the web all day!”  And that was a valid concern back then.  Today, we can’t imagine doing business without almost all employees having broadband.   We depend on the Internet.   And now, the Internet is demanding that you give something back to be noticed.  You can’t hide behind that old, tired brochure website.   You had better have good writers, AND good content, AND a Facebook page, AND a high-performance website, AND a blog, AND a twitter account, AND a good source of information to get noticed.  Or else you won’t get noticed anymore.

The Google Maps module is now live for all Delaware.Net CMS/Ecommerce customers as a free, automatic upgrade.    These automatic feature upgrades come about once per month (or more frequently), and this is one of the major benefits of using our CMS over other open-source solutions.    Free upgrades, free support, free training, and better integration.

Training videos for the new Google Maps builder are being uploaded today, so you will be able to see training videos directly in our on-demand help system.

These are not the reasons we want you to stop using Internet Explorer!

Last week, vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer Versions 6, 7 and 8 were exploited by the Chinese government in an attempt to hack into Google’s Servers. This is now very well documented all over the web. Last week, Google made headlines because they traced massive hacking attempts on their GMail mailboxes that originated in China. Google responded by threatening to block China entirely and shut down their operations in China. Why would China try to hack Google? Because certain human rights activists use GMail. The security holes that allowed these attacks are only part of the problems with IE.

The only reason that we don’t push the IE issue too much with customers, is because there are still archaic companies that are stuck in 1999 by forcing their employees or customers to use outdated technology that is just plain not safe. Probably the worst offender I have ever seen is TrendMLS.com, the company that currently has the contract for Delaware area real estate multi list services. This practice of standardizing on one browser needs to stop. Now.

Most people don’t realize that Microsoft creates their own standards for how they render web pages. This is changing slowly over time, and Microsoft has stated that their next generation browser (version 9), will pass most of the standards tests to render web pages properly. This literally can’t happen soon enough. The problem is that many, many, many people use old versions of Internet Explorer. IE6 is an incredible pain in the ass for web designers. As recently as 6 months ago, we had to spend days making a standards-based website work in IE6 with stupid coding tricks because a customer’s wife works for the State of Delaware and she states that the State of Delaware won’t let her upgrade her web browser. This is incredibly shortsighted and dangerous.

You have many options for a much faster, safer, and more fun web experience. What is the best web browser out there? That depends who you ask. Google Chrome is very fast, and Safari is very fast on the Mac. My main web browser is still Firefox. Firefox has regular updates, is very fast, and it has an amazing number of plugins that make it a joy to use.

Take a moment, and get a better browser now. Please?

Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/

What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.