In This Issue

• Marketing Your Online Business
  • Quick & Easy SEO
  • Rankaholism

• Image Matters
  • Outsourcing Overseas

Welcome to the June edition of Scribbles!. In this issue we'll take a look at a good reason not to become a "rankaholic", i.e. a site owner who obsessively checks their search engine page rank. Plus, a simple DIY Search Engine Optimization technique that you or your web designer can apply to your web site. We’ll also touch on the subject of hiring a U.S. design firm to create a web site versus going overseas to save a few hundred dollars (while burning through a whole lot of international calls and e-mails.)

It's a Go for Easy SEO, and a No for Rankaholism

Small Talk

Funny where idle chit-chat at a social gathering can lead. I learned a couple of new things about SEO from an internet marketing pro I met at a wedding last week-end:

Make the organic SEO elements (title, meta-tags, repeated text, etc.) different for each page of the site.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but when I create sites I generally ask my customer for one or two search phrases, and then apply those phrases to the entire site. And though historically that technique has gotten the job done it is now better practice to customize SEO words and phrases for each page of the site. This type of targeted SEO is typically applied to site pages that have specific audiences as well as firm conversion goals.

Page rank can go up and down depending on the datacenter that the Search Engine's front end is accessing at any given moment.

There again, as an IT guy who's fairly well read I should've put two and two together and realized that Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live et. al. have enormous datacenters scattered hither and yon across the globe because a) redundancy is survival and b) load balancing is the only way to handle millions of queries at a time. Here's the thing - different datacenters can return varying results for either paid or organic links. That's one of the main reasons your site's page rank will appear to fluctuate several times during the day.

Knowing that search results can vary continuously should help to keep site owners from becoming raving rankaholics. The take-away is that page rank, like overall SEO strategy, is a long-term thing.

Outsourcing Overseas

Don't outsource your business image

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance who is now also a customer. She has been brokering web sites to some of her clients (she's a beauty supply sales rep who also does value-adds such as brochures, print ads and web sites). At any rate, she usually outsources her customers' websites to designers in India. When it came time to redesign her own site, however, she contacted me.
   I gave her an estimate and a time frame, but knowing her connections to inexpensive overseas designers, I didn't think I'd get the job. Much to my surprise she sent a deposit and asked me to go ahead with the work.
   While working on the project I asked why she had picked me instead of one of the cheaper overseas firms. "It wasn't worth the hassle anymore to save a couple of hundred dollars. I was spending hours on phone calls and e-mails every day just trying to get a concept across to someone who isn't culturally aware of the audience and business issues I have here in the States. Plus, these guys promised custom design and I caught them trying to use the same templates I resell."
   Templates. Ugh. Those of you who have known me for many years know that I consider templates anathema. More telling though was her observation that it is difficult for someone in India to address the target audience and business norms of a small business here in the U.S.A.

Parting Thoughts

Next time I'd like to touch a little on the idea of Internet Time vs. Real World TIme: how not knowing when to switch from one to the other can cause problems professionally and socially. The other topic on the table will be that of productive procrastination - is such a thing possible?

Cheers!
Ed Moore
www.animai.com