May
18, 2017
Search Engine Optimization;
Ethical and Unethical Web Statistics.
By Mike Hampson, owner,
Helicopter Links.
(San
Diego, California, USA): Most businesses want to
see lots of traffic to their website. But how does
a company get legitimate traffic? In my book, there
are
ethical ways to get web traffic and there
are unethical
ways to get web traffic.
When people use Google
and type in search terms to find websites and
an internet user visits some of the the first web
sites
to appear in a Google Search Results
List, this is usually due to good Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) of each website
and is usually the most ethical way to get web
traffic. While Search
Engine Optimization
is a complex process and while search engines,
such as Google, seem to have a endless amount
of changing SEO requirements each year for web
designers,
I hope to provide some basic information about
SEO Best
Practices standards. Also, I think it's
important to include ethical about your own
web statistics.
There
are multiple ways to have your website
search engine optimized. One of
the best ways to start, is have
a good web professional working
on your website, a writer and graphic designer.
A website professional is not, I
repeat NOT — a
professional writer. While
website professionals must be able to work with
graphics, a website
professional is not, I
repeat,
NOT — a graphic
designer.
If you don't know the definition of
a graphic designer, it's
a person who can take images, graphics, fonts, text
(from a professional writer)
and manipulate all of these to make a web graphic,
banner ad, poster, book cover, flyer, book, magazine,
newsletter, signs, business card (or anything in
print or digital to read) and
the
information
is easy to read and understand for their
intended audience.
As opposed to an illustrator who is someone who can draw by hand or by using
programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop, to
create an original piece of artwork or graphic.
Some graphic designers are illustrators. Some are
not. Most graphic designers can create simple background
illustrations for projects but might not be able
to create intricate and jaw-dropping artistic illustrations.
As in all professions, you can find
graphic designers with excellent skills and you
can certainly
find
mediocre graphic designers. The same is true for
any profession, including web designers, writers
and even business owners!
A half-decent web
professional should be able to read this article
without being too confused by
the terminology. If a web professional is reading
this article, I hope
they
will learn
something
and
I also hope I'll get an email
or tow with
recommendations with
tips
to add to this article.
However, if you are
an administrative assistant and asked to make
graphics, or to build
and/or maintain a website,
then I recommend you get a new job — or put your
foot down and tell your boss to go take a hike.
Tell your boss if he wants to send you to school
and pay you the salary of a web designer, then
so be it. Otherwise, tell your boss that he/she
needs
to hire a web designer.
The Reality Of The Job Market
Of course, writing articles
and the reality of the job market are two different
things.
I've seen many job titles requiring a web professional
to know how to program in multiple languages, be
a professional writer/editor, be a graphic designer,
be an illustrator, to have a thorough knowledge
of Google Analytics and more.
Yet, is there any company that actually pays
a salary that actually compensates the employee
for
the plethora
of technical skills that only a genius would have?
Is there anyone smart enough to be highly proficient
in all
these
things?
Maybe.
But my guess is not that many.
If you are a boss and you have an
administrative assistant working on your business
website, you
are really
hurting your own company and being unfair to your
administrative
assistant, all at the same time. Imagine
if a boss asks an administrative assistant to do
the job
of a graphic designer. No one bats an eye. (However,
I bet the graphics will be amateur at best.)
However,
if a business owner asks their non-licensed administrative
assistant to repair a
helicopter
engine,
this would be extremely unethical and illegal.
People would think, "Why is this crazy
boss asking an administrative assistant to work
on a helicopter engine?" The same is true
when a boss asks an administrative assistant
to
do the work
on
graphic
design and/or their website.
It's an unethical business
practice for a boss to ask employees to take on
a job task that they are not professionally trained
for, even though it's not illegal.
However, this type of thing happens, I'm sure,
many times with a
small businesses.
From the employee point of view, "Oh
wow, my boss thinks so highly of me, that he's allowing
me to work on their website. I can list this as
another skill on my resume!" Meanwhile the boss
is thinking, "I can save a lot
of money
and
time
by asking my administrative assistant to work on
the website. Two problems I see there:
- While the employee can add their
work duties to revising a website, that's all
they say, if
they are going to be honest on their resume. However,
the employee does not have the training and skills
of a good web professional. The exception to the
rule would be if the administrative assistant
was actually interested in becoming a web professional,
started taking classes and then got additional
pay for their work on a website, I see this as
a good outcome.
- The boss who thinks they are saving
lots of money by having an administrative assistant
work
on their website is not making sure that updates
to navigation, search engine optimization techniques,
and other items will be ignored and the website
will suffer and visitor traffic could be reduced.
Signs Of A Good Website
The sign
of a good website is that the content is well
written (grammatically
correct and with correct spelling), there is a
web page explaining the purpose of the company,
all products and services are explained well with
well taken pictures, has real word questions
and
answers in a Frequently Asked Questioned section,
has a history of the company, has a news section,
has e-commerce (if can apply to that company) and
has
easy to find
contact information.
- One needs to remember that your business website
is your online brochure and
for some companies, it is their online store.
If you can quote prices and/or sell products
through your website, you are doing better
than many businesses.
- Having a complete and up-to-date
website is critical to good Search Engine Optimization
(SEO). Content, content, content. Good
content means your visitors can
easily find the overview of your company
and understand the
purpose of your company, understand each product
and service and knows how to purchase these services,
find the location of the company and
know how to contact the company.
- Having a
website where it's difficult to understand the
purpose of your company and your products/services,
is a disservice to all your visitors and hurts
your company because
you are not providing enough information for
potential buyers.
- I'm seeing a alarming trend in small and large
corporations to reduce the amount information
on their website about their company.
Web designers are making websites for businesses
without an "About Us", "Contact
Us" and "FAQ" (Frequently Asked
Questions) pages. I am now seeing product and/or
service web pages for many companies which now
have very little information. If a company feels
that having minimal information on their website
is appropriate to sell their goods and services,
then why have a website?
- Important to have web pages include: "Industries
Served" web page, product and/or services
web pages, an "About" page
(which actually explains what the company is about),
a "Contact" page with full address,
phone numbers and email addresses, Frequently
Asked Question (FAQ) page, press release/blog
section, media section (including logos and photos
that the media can use when writing articles about
your company), key personnel (if this is necessary),
a shopping cart (if your company sells a product)
and a history of your company.
- A word about FAQ pages. The best FAQ pages are
actual questions from customers. Are your FAQ
questions actual questions or are the FAQ questions
just made up? Do you have answer to these types
of questions? What payment methods do you accept?
Do you take cashier's checks and money orders?
Paypal?
What does it take to set up an account? Do you
ship worldwide? A FAQ page which is updated throughout
the year, based on actual questions which customers
and potential customers have asked over the phone,
is a FAQ web page that is very useful to your
online customers and visitors.
- Never have "under construction" pages
on any website. This is something which people
did in the 1990s and at time, we thought that
was cute. Not any more.
- And last but not least, is your website a responsive
web design? That means, does your website resize
itself so it fits nicely on a cell, iPad, laptop
or desktop screen size? Google wants all websites
to be responsive and they will reward you with
higher search engine optimization. However, I
still haven't figured out how to make Helicopter
Links a responsive website. So, I do think there
are exceptions to the rule where your site simply
won't work on all devices. Here is the definition
of "Responsive
Web Design" on Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
Your Might Be Competing Against Amazon
Remember,
people have lots of options to purchase products.
Take
for
example,
Amazon.
If
you sell
products and Amazon sells the same products
for a lower price, it would probably be helpful
to
have to a very informative website detailing
each product and explain why it's better to purchase
products from your company versus buying on
Amazon.
You might have excellent customer service by
phone, guarantees, excellent customer support,
expertise, repair services and etc., that Amazon
can't provide — to
help people to decide to purchase the product
from
your company and not from Amazon.
The competition
with Amazon is so difficult, many small and
large businesses have already gone under.
Good
ways to ethically increase traffic to your website.
To help keep your website
search engine optimized you can: Go over all web
pages at least
once a year to update when necessary, recheck
spelling and grammar, update content, add new
photos, revise navigation to make it easier to
use, add more history each year to your history
section, ask other websites to link to yours (such
as vendors, industry associations and other businesses
you are friendly with).
Write blog articles and always include
links from each blog article back to your website.
If a magazine or newspaper writes an article about
your company, ask them to put a link at the end
of the article back to your website.
From your social media pages,
post links to your
web
pages. Explain why a particular web page is
important, post a sales-only post about your
product and include it's web page, or a post that
questions "Have
you seen our company history web page?" Ask
vendors and industry associations to post social
media posts about your company with a link back
to your website.
Buying advertising space on Helicopter
Links will provide a multiple
links back to your website. Advertising
on Helicopter Links is for one full year and when
you renew your advertising each year, these long
lasting links will help with your website's search
engine optimization.
Unethical
Ways To Increase Web Traffic
Let's use the example of
a magazine or newspaper unethically trying to
increase their web statistics, this is how its
done.
1)
Post a link to an article on your Facebook or
Twitter
page. 2) That link goes to your
website. 3) However, when the visitor goes
to your company's website, the article is not
on your company website because you've posted
a link on your website which links over to the
actual article which is hosted on another website.
This type of deceptive business
practices will 1) Increase visits to their website,
2) Increase clicks to their website and 3) These
false higher web states can now be used to tell
their potential customers about their high visitor
rates
on their website which is why they should be paying
high rates for their advertising. It is also unethical
to this because 4) You are wasting people's time
by making them jump from website to website to
get to their final web destination.
Another way to try to increase the
amount of web traffic to your website is to make
several websites which are either related or not
related
to your
main business web page and then place many links
from your other websites to your main website.
You can simply lie to your customers about your
visitor rates.
In summary, I hope this (long) article
can help you to see the importance of having a
full-time web professional and that keeping a
website up-to-date and filled with content is
a key for good search engine optimization. We
have not covered all items for good searching
engine optimization here and I would always suggest
that company's pay for their web professionals
to take classes online or in a classroom to stay
updated about the latest news on search engine
optimization.
I would always recommend the company
provide a subscription to Lynda.com for their
web professionals and graphic
designers, to read articles about good search
engine optimization and to attend one (or possibly
two) seminars each year held for web professionals/graphic
designerss.
-End article.
If you have any questions
for us, please feel free to give us a call
+1 (858) 413-7074 or email us at staff@helicopterlinks.com and let's discuss how Helicopter Links
can
help you
advertise
to buyers
in the buying process.
Back
to 2017 news stories
|