Reasons You're Failing at the Internet

Originally written sometime in the early 2010s. Still applies. — KC

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Let's come at this website thing from a couple directions, the idea maker and the end user or customer. The framework and user interface of a website are both key concepts, very important. Technical stuff, not really in my wheelhouse. For the purposes of this article we're talking about search engine optimization or "SEO".

The unique optimization of your site is defined by the language you use to describe your idea. The variations of your descriptions and how you express your idea can be "optimized" based on region, dialect, syntax etc. Doing this creates text and gives your website "mass", if you will, on the internet.

How your ideas relate to one another within your website, how relevant the connections of your ideas to other ideas outside of your website, and how often someone refers to your website in a unique way all play important roles in making your website visible to search engines. These virtual connection points between websites and within websites create "paths" for search engine bots to crawl along. The more unique, intuitive, relevant, and non-redundant those paths are, the better your chances are that you will be indexed by search engines and thus seen by end users while they are looking for information unique to your product.

What does that mean in a nutshell? Content.

For the purposes of this exercise let's focus on the plight of the small business owner.

The internet runs on language

SEO or Search Engine Optimization all boils down to language. Specifically, the language you use to describe your service, idea, or product. Your website, as a whole, should be a unified representation of your brand and service, as well as a communication portal to and from your customer. It's both the face of your company and the interface your customer will use for most interactions. The language you use to describe your company will determine how people find your website on the internet.

What is it? NORLY?

In order to start a website you have to get a grip on what exactly your website is going to do. In other words, the action it's going to garner from your end user. Are you selling a product? Are you pitching a service? Providing information? Crochet instruction? Unionizing pipe-cleaner fuzzers? Piano sales? Message board? The language you use to describe an app building service is different than the language you would use to sell caskets.

Break your product down to its lowest common denominator. One method I use is to think of a website in terms of chemistry or physics, or better yet, music; everybody loves that shit. Each song is made up of stanzas, each stanza words, made more complex by a melody which is made up of chords and notes and of course rhythm. You have to document each facet of your product down to its finest detail. Not only is this a resource for potential customers, but the documentation is invaluable when it comes to choosing the notes with which you will write your melody.

Small Talk

Knowing exactly what it is you intend to do with your website, and thus how your customer will use it, paints a target on your audience. Each population searches using different language or "syntax". For example, a white male in his early 30's will use a different style of language than an early 20's female when trying to find the same thing. Language will also vary by region, even widely town by town. In the midwest "soda" is "pop", it's also "pop" in the Pacific Northwest, the South East calls it Coke, no matter what the flavor. South Westerners and the North East are both members of the "soda" bunch. By knowing your audience, you gain a greater understanding of how they would search for your product, and what language they would use.

Getting from point A (no website) to point Z (awesome website) you have to have traveled the route and back on paper. This level of preparation saves time, and ultimately money. By providing yourself with a framework of language, this will be reflected in a consistent "voice" which is essential to branding and brand trust on the internet.

What if all of a sudden your spouse was speaking in a different accent? You just got home from work, feet up, rugrats and/or cats milling about and all of a sudden your once British spouse sounds like she just emerged from the swamps of Louisiana? When you change the voice of your website it's much more subtle but no less jarring to repeat customers. Having a dense framework in hand before getting started ensures fewer surprises when you get home from work.

Your website doesn't need to BE at the hot gassy center of the internet in order to be found by your potential customers, it just needs to be built to suit their specific needs. If you WANT a website at the hot gassy center of the internet, it has to be built to withstand the tides and gravity generated by the massive players therein. To carry the music metaphor forward, you're singing outside a window with a guitar, and YouTube is parked behind you in a party bus with the volume cranked.

Dynamic Vs. Static

Static (once built never touched again) websites are essentially useless pieces of information that bog down search results. Stop buying them you're making the internet angry.

Building your Hierarchy

Hierarchy falls both under the visual and text based aspects of your website and determines how your user gets from one piece of information to the next. You need to determine how information is categorized and where it sits on your website. The big five are Home, About, Contact, FAQ or Services, and Blog. Within each of these major hubs of information on a website are several subsets of information that should be nurtured.

Home: Landing page, the first thing the end user sees when visiting your website using the direct domain.

About: The mission of your business or website, keep this to 350 words with your mission statement and a brief history of the business.

Contact: What are ALL points of contact for the business. If you operate in multiple countries, include overseas numbers, even if you have domains specific to services offered overseas.

FAQ and/or Services: What EXACTLY do you do? How do you do it? When does it get done? Ask yourself and your staff oodles of questions then sit down and answer them. Eliminate redundancies and you've got an FAQ page. Keep this page updated with questions from your customers.

Blog: Dynamic content is king, more on that later.

BRAINSTORMING: Outlines are for suckers

Get out of the outline "habit". Building an outline will subconsciously put you in the frame of mind to write a paper or a book, which reads in a linear fashion. The internet is not a linear beast. Websites need to read three dimensionally from any given point of access.

Again this goes back to our little friends the bots.

If someone searches "piano maintenance" you want them to have just as rich an experience as if they had searched "piano tuning" or "piano sales" or even "piano care". The reference information on a website is just as likely (if not more so) to be indexed by search engines. By applying a three dimensional thought process to writing your website, you are visualizing how ideas will intersect, rather than concentrating on telling a story. Internet is show AND tell.

You can adjust and build flow by making pages that hold static information, for example "About My Piano Tuning Service". Or you can pigeonhole entries and posts on the website using "categories" or "tags". These are helpful information bottlenecks that give you the option of representing that information in multiple places on your website in many ways. From these funnels customers should be able to get to other areas of the website related to those front pages, as well as the brand itself.

Ideally these "lead in" pages would be both text and media heavy. This gives you the opportunity to backlink to dynamic content later without altering the text base you've established. Search engines like old content to stay the way it is and new content to appear frequently — they're simple like that, and old things changing frightens them. Best bet is to keep your search engine happy and build a rich text base from the beginning.

Where does all this content come from?

Record interviews with your executive staff, both video and audio, and embed them into the lead in pages as well as into other areas of your website. Your products and services are better described by a person, so record your staff talking about services and transcribe them to your website. Get your customers to record testimonial videos and upload them to YouTube or Vimeo — information is mass and mass makes search engines happy.

The more you can get others to describe your site in context, the less you have to assume when writing in search terms and keywords. Anyone that writes software knows that the more math the machine has to do the more likely "noise" will be generated when producing a result. This is a universal rule — try shrinking a photo by half, saving it, and then expanding it by 200%. The result is a pixelated mess. The same thing can be said for search engines: if you ask them to assume information, the results will be just as dodgy.

People don't search in terms of MLA formatting or AP style sheets, so don't assume the language of your customers is going to be overly formal. One of my favorite things to do is to try and "stump google" by searching for colloquial terms and phrases like "when is 'way back when'?" — for the record, google doesn't know, because no one has described it to google yet, but I digress.

How many pages should I make?

The short answer: "that depends." The long answer: "still depends" — on just how deep down the description hole you want to go with your company. Any "about" page should be a deep resource regarding the company or brand. It's probably going to be first in the search engine results and should be an informative and engaging face of the brand. I usually advise the "what, how, why" approach to building the hierarchy of a website.

What — Declarative: What is your product or service? What does the customer get out of engaging with you? What is the value? What is the brand? What is it related to? Generally manifests as an "About" page.

How — Informative: How do you do what you do? How does the customer feed back? How does the customer find you? How does this service work? Usually manifests as a FAQ or "Products and Services" page.

When: How long does it take for you to serve?

Where: Where do you serve?

Why/How — Engaging: Why do you do what you do? Why does your product react this way under these circumstances? Why is your product this way instead of that way?

This concept is better implemented through dynamic content, such as comparing brands, or "how to" entries in a blog. Again, crowd-source your content. Incentivize customers into feeding back — give them a discount for posting a video. I cannot reiterate enough the importance of engaging your end users.

The big players on the internet without fail convert spectators into participants. Take into account the features of the top sites: customer participation, intuitive framework, dynamic content, dense structure. Apply those concepts to your website.

By engaging search engines and your end user on multiple levels, you have the opportunity to "catch" your customer in multiple areas of their own cycle — buying, saving, or searching. By having a breadth of relevant NON-REDUNDANT information on your website you can target multiple sets of keywords within your established taxonomy.

Building Your Taxonomy

The language you use in your content is without a doubt the most important part of your website build from an SEO perspective. The internet is made up of words. The words you use to describe your product or service act like a key into a lock that can fit a million other keys. The idea is to make your key the best damn key on the internet, thus owning the "lock".

When a potential customer puts a search term into google they are presenting it with a problem or "lock". The more closely your website matches the customer's request, the less math the search engine has to do to fit your "key" into the customer's "lock".

Sieging Search Engines

Search engines place your website in the hierarchy of search terms based on how well your brand is described therein and how well it's described on other sites then linked back to your site. Search engines also take into account how well it's connected to itself in "keyword-y" terms, how often those connections are made, how many sites link into your website, and secondarily by general traffic statistics.

Generating a "set" of keywords based on your product or service opens your website up to the language of "sub-sets" and related search terms. For instance, a blacksmith might specialize in working iron, but he's sure to have skills and information about bronze, tin, silver and other metals, as well as general information on metallurgy. When targeting keywords you want to stay away from redundant targets. Don't just keep aiming for "pianos" — take out "piano parts", "piano services", "piano lessons" with just as much enthusiasm.

The prevailing question in branding on the internet is "what if they've never heard of me?" Simple answer: you aren't building your website specifically for your customers, although it will serve a purpose to them as well. If a potential customer can't find your site based on your description of your product, you've pretty much lost the battle before you've strapped your armor on.

Keyword-y-ness

When building your taxonomy, sometimes called "keyword profile", it's important to think of your brand from as many angles as possible. Not only will search engines see your site in "keyword terms" but "related search terms" and "relevant search terms".

Again, we're back to pianos. What is this particular piano? What does your company do with pianos? How does your company do it? Is there another name for pianos that someone might search like "keyboards"?

Nearly 25 million people search "piano" every month. You probably aren't going to sell 25 million pianos next month — let's target a manageable number. Get down to specifics: the type of piano, say a Yamaha, the model, maker, factory, color, as much information as you can gather. Make your "song" as rich an experience as possible. If you're writing music about how beautiful your significant other is, the song isn't going to go "she's got eyes".

Developing the Language

I cannot over stress the importance of being thorough in the language development process. Ask your customers, ask experts, ask employees, even ask the janitor. Ask people within and outside of your target expertise or brand interest: "how would you search for my product if you didn't know its brand name?"

Some companies fall under what I like to call the "kleenex" or "velcro" shadow — producing a product that already has a HUGE brand name, put in the position of trying to re-brand "facial tissue". If a stripper wants to make their own tear away clothes, they won't be searching for "hook and loop strap". If you are in a ubiquitous market overshadowed by a major brand, it's even more important to describe your product EXACTLY with stunning detail in a non-redundant fashion.

The Starting Point of No Return

You may ask yourself "why all the hullabaloo? It's just a website!"

We have passed the point of "approaching" and are currently barrelling past the point at which "the internet is the world's marketplace" and what has been seen cannot be unseen.

If you put bad content out into the internet with the intention of eventually replacing it with good content, you really are "throwing good money after bad". The time it takes to generate any content is valuable — so why not lead with the best? If you go back and delete bad content, all of those websites that referenced specific pieces of your website will get a 404 error. The internet caches pages so a shoddy website that goes up for six months as a placeholder takes a lot longer to replace than the time it would have taken to get prepared in the first place.

Workflow

Your website must continually be a fresh source of information about your brand and all services regarding your brand. Establishing the method by which your website consistently reflects that brand is essential to maintaining high search ranking and a happy work force.

This workflow is something that will be passed between personnel. Without a doubt if a website is essential to your business, it's going to be around longer than the person currently running updates. Document the process from photography to best practices for generating descriptions of products and services. Make a spreadsheet — or "idiot sheet" as one of my more colorful professors called them — to check off each step as it's completed.

This is where the taxonomy you've been generating really comes in handy. These keywords and their subsets give content generators a target to shoot for when building descriptions, finding photographs, related videos, etc. Having optimized content at your beck and call gives you multiple keys to fit into those search engine locks.

The really hard part to building a workflow is finding a system that satisfies your quality control standards, with few enough moving parts to break down.

The Tamagotchi Effect

Think of your website as a pet. If you or anyone you know wants to derive joy — money, views, actual joy — from that pet (website), you will have to exercise, entertain (create content for), and feed (upload content to) your pet (website).

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— KC Hoye