lancewig.com

Well, Micheal Jackson died last week, and I don’t want to speak too badly about him, but I do want to rant and rave about the media circus that followed. An interesting article was posted at CNN about how the death of Michael Jackson nearly brought the internet to it’s knees. Twitter went down. Micheal Jackson’s fan site slowed to a crawl. CNN traffic was up six-fold. Even today, 3 days after the death, 95% of the videos on CNN/Boxee are still Micheal Jackson related. People are dying in Iran right now fighting for freedom, and we are obsessed with what was really a ‘loony’ celebrity.

As a web designer/developer, one of my duties is often to set up some search engine optimization for sites. This is often the most loathsome duty I perform, because trying to explain to clients how search engines work is often futile. We do small sites for local businesses, and they always want to know why, after paying several thousand for a web site, that they are not #1 on the search page. Of course, there is a very professional way to respond to this. You’re supposed to say, “The proven methods of promoting your pages in search results are:”

• Building keyword rich paragraphs of the product/service you are selling.
• Use keyword rich page titles and paragraph titles.
• Update content often. Add a news section to your site with press releases, articles and relevant information. Hire a copywriter or temp to do this job if necessary.
• Get links from other similar sites. These sites should also have higher page ranking.
• Sell something unique that other sites don’t have.
• Focus on your town name along with our product. Cater locally.
• Create relevant landing pages that do a ‘one page sell’ for return on investment.

And then you say, “Even after all that, nothing is guaranteed.” That is the professional tale. But, sometimes I feel like saying, “Look, your silly clothing site is not going to get hits because you don’t have nude Britney Spears T-shirts yet. You have to swim in the cesspool.”

The problem with a lot of older businesses is that they wrongly assume the majority of internet search traffic is people their age with common sense. Sure all ages are making internet searches, but only the youngest generations are making massive searches. And just what are the masses searching for? Google has a very interesting page called “Zeitgeist” which means “Spirit of the Times”. Part of that page is the “Top 100 search results” which is always interesting to look over. While some search results seem somewhat legitimate, most of it is based on celebrities, porn, drugs and some such other degrading junk. Today’s search shows heavy inquiries for “michael jackson death photos”, “tom morello”, “nation lampoon barely legal” and “oxycontin”.

Google also does a yearly Zeitgeist. For the year of 2008 we had the following list:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

It was the year of Sarah Palin, the Olympics, Facebook and another celebrity death, Heath Ledger. Several Facebook clones like Poland’s “nasza klasa” and the Spanish based “tuenti” were also hot. The idea here? Most people like to jabber with their friends on social network sites and find out about celebrity gossip. Oh, and don’t forget the flocks of 10 to 15 year-old girls obsessed with the Jonas Brothers Plague.

But back to your every day businesses. Take things like small time home builders, insurance agents, restaurants and other common products and services. There’s so many of them. It’s very hard for them to rise to the top of search results in the first place because they are all selling the same thing. Add the fact that big nationwide companies have the money and resources to build big powerful sites and it gets worse. Then consider, that most of the time people are more interested in Michael Jackson death photos anyway, and you get into the cesspool.

So say you had a business for car repair in Lancaster, NH. Your web site not only needs to focus on the keywords for ‘car’ and ‘repair’ but also the town name of ‘Lancaster, NH’. The town name is just as important as the service or product. When people search for car repair only, they get all kinds of portals like About.com that just generalize. Eventually, they will think to use the town name as well.

That’s all fine and good for a local business, but for a national business, you almost have to jump into the cesspool. Now you have to compete with the world. Sometimes, the only way to do that is to start digging up cesspool searches like “Britney Spears”, “Michael Jackson” and so on. Desperate business owners will find any way possible to relate the hot terms to there store/web site. That’s one unscrupulous way to do it. Another is just plain and simple ‘hard work’. I think one of the best things to do is build a page into your site each and every day. Just like my blog here. I try to write a new page each day in the hopes that, after a year, a good 300+ articles will get written with lot’s of “lance wig” and “Asheville” key terms. Of course, peppering in some cesspool key terms occasionally, like I’ve done today can’t hurt. I once went off about how silly BestBuy is and now a search for “BestBuy Asheville” brings up my post in the #2 position of results. Even if you want to steer out of the cesspool, you can still use a lot of big name terms. I like to say, “an article I read at CNN” all the time because it’s a common keyword.

Most of the SEO stuff is pretty common sense. Have your page focus on a small group of keywords that describe your product or service. I think the hardest thing to focus on writing copy that has ‘keyword density”. There are several tools like this one that can measure the keywords in a web page.

Even with those tools, many site owners just get lazy. The truth is this. Most sites only get revisited if the content updates often, and only then if it’s interesting. Most businesses are busy with every day tasks, so it may be wise to hire a copywriter or intern to write stories about the product/service. Keep growing the site. Make it a defining source for what it’s about. You’ll never get the traffic that Michael Jackson did this week, but you can optimize just enough to snag a handfull of customers.