Using nofollow on yourself seems to be one pretty obvious way of sending the wrong signals — it may or may not be directly read as a “bad thing,” but it absolutely suggests something manipulative or untrustworthy about your site.

By using a NoFollow attribute to link to these [about, contact, privacy, etc.] pages, you’re basically telling Google that you do not trust yourself, you are not real, and you do not honor user privacy. Hence, the drop in ranking.

Loren Baker

There are plenty of ways you can leverage search engines. Why make use of a tactic which obviously sends a message of manipulation? It seems pretty straightforward to me: your code should reflect your intentions. Nofollow suggests that you don’t have faith in a page; that you don’t actually WANT to help people find it. If you’re using it to point to your own contact page, you are effectively saying that you don’t WANT to be contacted. (Or maybe you just don’t trust that lousy contact form you’re using?)

You have little chance of making your business a success if you are unwilling to trust yourself. You may not have intended to send that message; but it is definitely one signal which can be picked up from the use of nofollow.

The idea behind using nofollow on your own pages was, I believe, to focus attention on your other pages: your content bearing, keyword rich pages. It’s the myth of “conserving PageRank” — I don’t know where it started, but it’s been talked about many times. This particular idea about nofollow is described by one publication as follows:

The other side of the nofollow tag, is that you can take advantage of it inside your own web sites. Think about all the low value, or no money pages on your site… pages like about us, where to find us, contact us. Every link leaving your home page “bleeds” PageRank to those pages and you’ll want to stop that!

Instead of using normal static hyperlinks you can use nofollow links instead. This lets the “human mouse clicking visitor” find the pages on their own, but totally blocks the search engine from finding them.

So not only can you provide visitors with a rich user experience, you can conserve your PageRank and link popularity within your home page.

“Bleeds PageRank,” eh? Simple point: PageRank doesn’t “leak.” If you link out to a page, that page gains a small portion of your PR — that portion is not, however, subtracted from your page’s rank. Even if PageRank were a meaningful metric, this argument would be patently absurd. (And I’m not getting into that argument right now….)

Every page on your site is important. Do you think that your “About Us” page isn’t significant because it doesn’t have any products listed on it? It’s not a call to action? Well, think again. You’re not just selling your product: you’re also selling trust in your company. People will buy from a company which they think will deliver on their promises. These “no money” pages convey important information to give your potential customers faith in your company. Don’t try and sell them short.

Some clients will claim that they are OBVIOUSLY different — company X uses 20% nylon fabric in their seat covers where OUR seat covers are 100% cotton!

Sorry, folks, but that’s fine print. Fine print is a good start, but even though your differentiating factors may be related to it, it’s not necessarily the right place to focus.

It’s a jumping off point, however. Knowing your products are fundamentally different in some way can give you ways to pursue a more visible, search-friendly means of separating your site from the herd.

Choose your focus

If you want to be unique, you should find a unique characteristic and stick with it. Don’t bill your site as the best source for safe children’s games but sell exactly the same products everybody else does. You’re diluting your message by allowing options which don’t fit your profile into your store.

Make it visible

If you’re selling children’s games, and your particular product focus is that they’re safe, make that OBVIOUS. If you downplay the importance of safety in your game selection, you’re lacking in clarity. Your visitors need assurance that you’re providing what they’re looking for. You can provide this assurance by writing text which clearly emphasizes your specialty and by repeating this information when appropriate on your product descriptions.

Identify your competitors

Not every similar site is necessarily a competitor. Not every site you THINK is a competitor is necessarily competing with you. Look very closely at the sites of those businesses who are:

• Selling the same products
• Located in the same area
• Advertising in the same publications

Look closely: examine every possibility. The worst thing you can say is “Company X is offering THIS function. We need to do this, too.” Instead, say “Company X is offering THIS function. We can do something else which is better.” You don’t need to offer a function just because everybody else in your topical area is providing it. You’re always best off providing better functionality than your competition. Not MORE functionality; BETTER functionality. Look for anything they provide which is useless, hard to understand, or just adds to site clutter without being useful.

So what does make a site stand out?

That’s a tough question, isn’t it? Being different can make you stand out – but doesn’t necessarily make you successful. Being unique will make you stand out – but if you’re TOO unique, you might not find your customer niche.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that it’s even your website which will make your site stand out. The products you offer and your service may do you more good in the long run than any website choices — but a good website may help you gain new customers faster.

I’m considering just forwarding all my new clients on to Create Small Business Website On a Small Budget from Improve the Web instead, now. Yuri’s written an excellent and comprehensive beginner’s guide to pre-development web preparations.

There can be no question that the first steps on a website should be done long before anybody does anything so rash as to register a domain name. Yuri’s done a great job of touching on a lot of these bases.

Oh, and he also recommended me as a web designer with accessibility in mind, which I very much appreciate – although it just might bias me in favor of his article.

There are no automatic benefits to Sitemaps – this isn’t the infamous mass search engine submission of the late ’90’s. If you create a Sitemap and tell a search engine about it, they’ll happily crawl it. They’ll eagerly learn what you want to tell them about your site: what pages you consider most important, how frequently that page might be updated and when it was most recently updated. Having learned this, they might weight that factor in consider what pages to crawl and when. And, although I can’t say this with any authority, they won’t add your site to the Google Index just because you’ve submitted a Sitemap.

The Sitemap is more for you and your business than it is for Google. If you take a few minutes to look at the information that Google will give you about your site you can learn incredibly valuable information for your business.

What information can you learn from Google Sitemaps?

1. Crawl Data.

   When was your site last visited? Does your site have pages included in Google’s Index? What kind of errors has the Googlebox found? Talk about troubleshooting – has your traffic dropped abruptly? Well, maybe you should log in to Sitemaps and see what’s up. They might even tell you whether you’ve violated their guidelines – in which case you can immediately correct the problem and beg forgivenessrequest reinclusion.

   Maybe you’ve caused the problem yourself: have you blocked Google from your site using your Robots.txt file? Whoops! Google will tell you, and even allow you to actively test different versions of robots.txt so you can determine what you need to change.

2. Query Statistics.

   A search marketing campaign lives and fights on a diet of statistics. All of these statistics tell you valuable information: and Google is willing to provide you with a handful of very valuable information through the Webmaster Central console. If you’re interested in PageRank, for example, you can see how PageRank is distributed amongst your pages. And if you think that the trifold distribution graphs are too simplistic: well, PageRank is already a simplified system. Don’t worry about it.

   More importantly, you’ve got access to Query stats. What could possibly be more valuable than information from Google explicitly telling you a) what search terms have brought your site into the search results, b) what rank in the search results pages you had for that term, c) what search terms actually brought traffic to your site and d) what position in search results pages you had for those terms.

   Maybe you don’t know how these could be useful: but this is some of the most valuable information you’ll find anywhere. You’ll learn what terms are going to show your site; and you’ll learn what terms will actually bring traffic. You can download this information in a variety of formats and track it to keep a very close look on your site’s behavior. This can easily be the first indicator you’ll have that something is changing in your site’s indexing and ranking.

3. Page Analysis

   You can easily find out what the most common words are in your site. Google tells you this; but there are many other ways of getting that informations. It is, however, much more difficult to learn what the most common words appear in the text of links pointing to your site. Google will supply that information. At the moment, at least, they aren’t giving rich statistics: just a list in no obvious order which states the most common terms found. Nonetheless, if you’re not finding a good match between common link texts and your site’s content, you might need to think about how to build more valuable links. It’s information, and you can use it.

But this is just a sample of what’s available from Google Webmaster Central: setting the speed with which your site will be crawled by Googlebot, choosing your domain suffix preference (www or non-www), joining the enhanced image search program: all possibilities from Webmaster Central. The service is changing rapidly – to follow Sitemaps updates you’ll want to stay tuned to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, where Vanessa Fox and her team provide news covering uses of Webmaster Central as well as new features and processes they’re offering.

What does it mean for your website to quit?

Oh, it’ll still be there (maybe) – hangin’ out on the internet, showing off for the occasional visitor – but not really invested in your company. It will continue to be a part of your company – but instead of helping you increase your business profile, make sales, find qualified leads, or gain readership it will just be a leach on your finances. How does this happen?

1. You only care what it looks like, and don’t bother making certain it can really get the job done. It’s a very stereotypical sexist scenario in which the boss hires a secretary on the basis of her legs (or other body parts), but it sure seems to apply to websites. An incredibly complex Flash animation with doohickeys and gewgaws may be an incredible looking website – but you better have made sure it can also give your visitors what they need.
2. You’re asking it to do things it might not like to do. Sometimes, an employee might be asked to do something unethical. They might quit. If you’re expecting your website to invade people’s privacy by collecting personally identifiable information, or by automatically adding them to mailing lists, etc., you might find that behavior to backfire. Visitors don’t always like your service enough to put up with the hoops you make them jump through: and unless you’ve got something really great, they’ll just stop coming.
3. You’re not providing the right tools for the job. If your employee is working with a sad old Windows 95 machine which just barely stays running when they’re trying to type out meeting minutes, they will probably be a bit dissatisfied with their lot in life. Similarly, if your website doesn’t have the hosting package it needs, the bandwidth it requires, or a secure certificate to keep your customer’s data safe you might be screwing yourself. Don’t host your business site with a free service: remember, you get what you pay for. (Well…usually. Don’t just jump on the most expensive hosting out there, either.)
4. Don’t explain what it’s supposed to do. If your new employee doesn’t get any instructions, they’ll just be doing random things trying to keep busy. Is that what you want from your website? If you’re developing a site, make sure you know what you want from it. Don’t just add new features willy-nilly, and don’t just throw up your brochure because you think you need to have a web presence. Your website won’t really accomplish anything for you if you don’t have any clear intentions behind it.
5. Don’t change things too frequently. If you throw new job instructions at your employees every six months, expecting them to learn a new filing system, a new business process or a new shipping procedure they might well rebel. And although your site isn’t going to literally fight against your changes, it’ll certainly suffer: if you’ve reorganized product categories, you might cause search engines problems in finding your pages. You can protect against this, so it’s not an argument against ever reorganizing. However, those robots take some time to catch up – if you go through a reorganization too frequently, they’ll never arrive where you are. Your visitors might struggle, too. Some people like change and others don’t. Nobody will rebel against one redesign: but everybody will struggle with too many of them. Change can equal improvement: but not every change will.

Don’t be a bad boss – invest in your website just like you would an employee. And if it’s not doing the job – fire it and get a new one.

Hey, I can’t count! I’ve added another one…

Sitemaps.org, although certainly having little-to-no visual connection with Google, seems to still be hosted by Google, per the 404 error (hey, I went looking for http://www.sitemaps.org/sitemap.xml – it wasn’t there.) This is pretty fair, given that the joint use of the Sitemaps standard shouldn’t also force Yahoo and MSN to use Google branding!

Nonetheless, the Sitemaps protocol is pretty deeply associated with Google, so this is somewhat of a branding coup for them.

This unification between the “big three” in search on an agreed standard is a great development: I’m looking hopefully forward to a day when I can get similar information on the behaviors of each major search engine on a site through a “Webmaster Console”. Or perhaps an API release so a 3rd party can create a unified sitemaps monitor for all the search engines using the protocol!

The announcement comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN, but that isn’t to say that others can’t become involved: the protocol is intended to be an open standard, and any who choose can make use of it. Danny Sullivan comments at Search Engine Watch on his own hopes:

How about unification around other search standards, such as improving the robots.txt system of blocking pages. Again, this is something the search engines (specifically Google and Yahoo when I spoke to them), say they’re interested in. So fingers crossed, we’ll see more of this down the line.

Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.

No question, it’s an exciting development.

Your website is no less a reflection of your business than your physical location is or than your are yourself in a business meeting, and the design and detail of your site should be given just as much thought as any other aspect of setting up your business.

Although there are certainly vast differences in the visual impact of a site which can be appropriate, there are certain common factors which all sites should have in common. Rand lists a great number of these issues: but they all come down to one thing – the essential mistake a business can make with their website is not thinking about their customers throughout the development process.

Taking a few of Rand’s points for examples:

3. Quitter’s choice. These site owners started and got frustrated that things weren’t happening fast enough or they got too busy or [insert a whole list of excuses] and quit.

7. Stale abandonment. The site is out of date and out of touch. Some stuff may not work anymore causing errors. This is akin to having a busted window but the breeze you feel is the viewers rushing out.

13. Glad that’s over. Thinking the site is launched and won’t need tracking, adjustments or follow-up. Every site is a work in progress no matter how complete it is for the moment.

Anybody making these mistakes? The common theme: not thinking about the customer. Your website is about you: but it’s not FOR you. Always approach your site as if you were a customer. Try and put yourself in their shoes: if you knew nothing about your company except what’s on the website – what would you do?

I’ve had too many cases where, in an otherwise beautiful design, I’ve had to work with clumsy, out of focus, poorly optimized images. All the copy in the world may not help you if you’ve got low quality pictures.

The internet is a place where people can make decisions based on concrete issues – they can look at how an item is manufactured, what materials it’s made of, whether it’s non-toxic, and read reviews. But at the end of the day, gut feeling will inevitably play a part – and part of that gut response is going to be based on whether they can visualize your product in their life.

When you’re purely dealing with issues of search optimization, your written content is absolutely the most important single issue to focus on. But that only solves part of the overall marketing question: getting targeted visitors to your site. Convincing them to purchase your product can be greatly helped by strong visual impact.

Tips for Better Images

1. It’s not JUST about the product.

   Setting the stage for your product isn’t just a matter of going into your shop and taking a picture of it on the shelf. Do your storage room’s utility shelves help sell your product? NO. Depict your product either in use or in an appropriate abstract environment.

2. It’s ABOUT the product.

   Yes, I know what I just said – but even though the picture isn’t just about the product, it is mostly about the product. Don’t make people search for the product in your picture.

3. Work large.

   Assuming you’re not going to have a professional take your pictures, don’t make the mistake of reducing all your images yourself. You should always do any editing work at full-size – and you should always deliver full-size originals to the web professional who’s working with your site. You may think that they’re just too big to be useful, but trust me – your marketing team wants the best possible image to start from!

4. Never get rid of the originals.

   Thought you’d save yourself some hard drive space by deleting all your full-size digital images or scans? Whoops! Now all you’ve got to work with is your web-scaled .jpg. Face it – you never know when you may want to re-purpose an image.

5. Don’t be satisfied with just one shot.

   How do professional photographers work? They take a lot of pictures. Yes, professionals also have the benefit of years of experience and training in photo composition and lighting, etc. But anybody can take a great picture with patience.

6. If you don’t like the picture; don’t use it.

   You are a good judge of your product. If you don’t think that your picture is presenting the best view of what you’re selling, you’re probably right. Sometimes deciding between different great pictures is difficult – but you should always be able to eliminate the bad ones right away.

Take the time on your images that you do on your copy – it’ll pay off. Remember that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Google can’t read them, but your customers can.

The vast majority of customers for any web site are amateurs. Amateurs buying ski gear, amateurs buying computer equipment, amateurs looking for medical information. They aren’t likely to be professional researchers, either. So you should never assume that they actually know anything specific about your product.

After all, why would a beginning canoe enthusiast know that your particular brand of tortured plywood kayak is the best? For that matter, do they even know what "tortured plywood" is? Probably not. But they do know that they’re looking for a boat which is light, easy to portage, hard to overturn, and they may even know whether they’re going to be using it on whitewater or flat water.

Even assuming amateur customers, you’ve got to assume some knowledge at some point…

But the key point here is that you can’t just describe your product – also describe how it’s used and what advantages it has. Not only will this provide you with a wider variety of search phrases to be found for, but your potential customer will be able to learn more about your product sooner. It’s a win-win situation.

A good practice technique to use when thinking about product searching and product descriptions is to go shopping for something else. Specifically, some product you don’t sell and don’t know a lot about.

Searching for gifts is a great way to explore this whole avenue of thought. You’re looking for a product which you know little about and you can’t ask the nearest expert without giving away the secret – the perfect opportunity to try and discover what a good product description is in this industry.

Escaping the barrier of your own knowledge is such a challenge in writing product descriptions. When you are an expert in your product line it’s easy to find yourself focusing on the nitty-gritty details and ignoring the more widely known characteristics in your writing.

Providing your detailed specifics certainly doesn’t hurt you – but don’t write your description just for the product’s designer.

Kevin Potts, of GraphicPush, wrote the other day about making a prospective client remember your pitch. In it, he points out that you can use fancy words, politically savvy speech, and all your business expertise to make your point – but, when it comes right down to it, the most memorable statement might be:

I make your shit look good so it sells more stuff.

Short, to the point, and says what you do.

Your website needs to consider memorability in addition to any other sales pitch. Granted, cursing at your visitors is possibly not the best tack to take. However, grabbing their attention and seizing the opportunity to make certain they’ve noticed you can be the best thing for your business.

So, what about your site can really seize attention? Obviously, there are "better methods" and "not-so-good methods". You could fill your site with pictures of scantily clad bikini vixens. (Ooh, I’m going to catch some "unique traffic" now.) Of course, this may not be the most appropriate way to move custom-designed office furniture. On the other hand, it may be very effective for selling surfing supplies. Considering your market is pretty critical.

It’s an unfortunate truth that being obnoxious is a great way to catch somebody’s attention. Using pop-up ads or slide-in ads, animated ads – any of these will grab the attention of your visitor. They may be very obnoxious, but they can serve the purpose you need. There are good ways and bad ways to implement them all, however. If you are so obnoxious that you chase your visitor away, you’ve lost your market. But, if you give them an easy way to stop what’s bothering them (close advertisements or stop animations), then they’re more likely to let it pass – and you’re one step closer to making a sale.

Remembering your site is one of the reasons a good domain name is critical. If people are struggling to remember your site’s address (What was that url…digitalstrategy.com? Internetstrategies? Digitalinternetstrategies? Hmmmm…) then they’re less likely to come back. A big part of what makes a site successful is being remembered.

But the core of catching attention and keeping it needs to be in the content of your site. Writing text filled with industry buzzwords and technical terms is a great way to make your site disappear from my memory in 30 seconds. A text laced with unfamiliar terms is keyed to be forgotten. Copy which features well-known, common terminology to explain a task will be much more easily remembered.

Getting visitors to your site is a pretty minor part of effective internet marketing – keeping them there and bringing them back are also important challenges.