Vanessa Fox. Nude.

This is part three of my series from BlogHer. You can read the intro, part one on relevance, part two on discoverablity, or just read on for tips about crawlability.

You’ve got great content. The search engines know about it. But can they access it? There’s lots of reasons why search engines may not be able to access the content on your pages.

Are you blocking the bots?
You can keep search engines from indexing particular sections of your site using a robots.txt file or robots meta tag. There are lots of valid reasons for blocking search engines from particular pages, but sometimes sites block access accidentally and then wonder why pages aren’t being indexed. Sometimes, choosing the wrong option in your blogging software (in WordPress, this is under “Privacy”) will do it. For instance, take a look at the Google Custom Search blog. If you look at the source code, you’ll see this meta tag:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

That’s keeping the pages from being indexed in any search engine. I’m sure it’s accidental, as I wrote about earlier.

Is your server having trouble?
If your server is down or having timeout issues when a search engine comes by, it can’t access the pages of your site. The bots will come back later and try again, but it can be good to know if this is happening, in case there’s a deeper issue you need to look at. You can see any issues Google had accessing the site in webmaster tools (Diagnostic > Crawl Errors > Web Crawl).

Is your content in text?
Search engines are text based. Your content needs to be in text in order to get indexed. This means that a site that anything in images, video, javascript (and subsequently Ajax), or Flash won’t be read. Does this mean you can’t use any of these elements? Of course not! Just use them wisely. This won’t just help search engines. It’ll help your visitors too. Anyone on a screen reader or a mobile device or (gasp) dial-up has trouble with these types of elements too. Flash has the additional problem that you can’t get direct links to any of the pages (as I’ve ranted about before) and who wants to get to a site just to see a “loading” graphic for twenty seconds?

So how can you incorporate these elements into your site wisely?

Images:

• Don’t put large blocks of text in images. Keep text in HTML and use images for, well graphics and pictures.
• Use alt text to describe images. You do this in the source code. For instance: <img src="http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/imagename.jpg" alt="My Cute Cats" />. Your blogging software may make this even easier for you. In WordPress, if you use the image insertion button, the wizard first asks for the image URL and then for a description of the image. That description is then used for the alt text. And make sure the alt text really is descriptive. “Logo” may seem descriptive but “Anya’s House of Cheesecake” is a bit more specific.
• Use descriptive filenames. anyas-cheesecake.jpg is better than logo.jpg.
• Give each image a caption and ensure the page has lots of text.

Videos

• If possible, post a text transcript of the video.
• At the very least, post a textual description.

Flash

• Use Flash sparingly. Put the text in HTML and use Flash for animated objects.
• Don’t put navigation in Flash. Search engines will never get past your home page.
• Do you really need a Flash splash page? Most sites don’t. They only slow down visitors trying to access your content. And search engines think your site is about “loading, loading, loading”.
• Don’t put your product pages in Flash. No one can link to them or bookmark them, and that makes your visitors very sad indeed. It also makes search engines see your site as one big page with one URL.

An easy test
How can you tell what search engines, those on screen readers, and me on my mobile device can see? Simply turn off images, Flash, and Javascript in your browser.

In Firefox, go to Tools > Options, then Content. From there, you can deselect the “load images automatically” and “enable Javascript” checkboxes. You can also install the Flashblock addon, which replaces Flash elements with a play button.

In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options, then Advanced. From there, deselect Play animations in webpages and Show pictures. You can also disable Javascript (why type it out when it’s laid out so nicely?). You can also use this add on to block Flash.

I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t check on Safari, but a quick search says that you can disable images in Safari, as well as disable Javascript and other elements. Want to see how a page looks in Safari with Flash disabled? Check out the page on an iPhone! (I kid. Sorta.) Actually, you can install this plug in.

Another thing you can do is check Google’s cache of a page. (The cache is the copy of the page that Google has stored.) You can see the cache of any page by typing in cache: followed by the URL (with no space after the colon).

For instance, take a look at the Nike home page. Since I have FlashBlock installed, I just see the play button. You can see what Google sees by doing a cache query. Google can see a few links and that’s it. (The word shoes is nowhere to be found.) And individual product pages? Here’s what Google sees. Notice that once you drill into specific shoes, the URL doesn’t change? How can I tell someone what shoes to buy me for my birthday? I can’t. Oh Flash, how you have failed me.

And here ends my three part series on using search to drive traffic to your blog. For those of you who were at the BlogHer session, I had a great time talking to you! The important thing is to keep writing great stuff!

This is part two of my three part series from my BlogHer session. You can also read the intro, part one on relevance, or part three on crawlability.

Search engines can’t list your site in results if they don’t know about it. So how can you let them know your site is out there, among the millions of others? Links! Search engines access pages on the web and follow links to other pages. This actually makes things really easy for you, because you want links anyway so that visitors on other sites can learn about your site.

Basic rules for links from other sites

• Join communities you’re interested in, comment on other blogs, jump into conversations and let others know your site is out there. If they’re interested in what you have to say, they’ll check out your site and link to you if it’s relevant to their readers.
• Get your site noticed on social media sites such as Digg, Netscape, and StumbleUpon. I learned about a new site like this at BlogHer called sk*rt that you might want to check out. How do you get your site submitted to sites like this? Well, this isn’t an easy answer, but the best way is to write compelling content.
• Don’t get caught up in crazy link exchange schemes. Links should be relevant to visitors. If you get an email from a plumbing site saying that he’ll link to your knitting site if you’ll link to him and you’re pretty sure his plumbing clients are more looking for information on clogged drains than yarn, back away slowly.

  Why? Well, links are important to search engines for several reasons. One is that they let search engines know your pages exist. But they also help search engines know how popular your pages are. Some sites try to exploit this and figure that if they can get a whole bunch of links, search engines will think they’ve got popular pages. But search engines obviously want to know a page is actually popular. That other sites are linking to it naturally because it’s valuable and relevant, not because some deal has been made to artificially send links around. So, be very wary of offers to exchange links or to sell you a bunch. Search engines are on to that..

  Want to know who’s linking to you? Just hop over to the Links tab in Google webmaster tools or take a look at Yahoo!’s Site Explorer.

Basic rules for internal links
Once a search engine knows about your site’s home page, you can provide an internal link structure to the rest of the pages of your site. You don’t need other sites to link in to every page for you. So, what’s the best way to make sure you’ve got a good internal structure?

• Provide clear top-level navigation. This is generally easy with blogging software. For instance, provide links to major categories and archives. If your site includes pages other than blog posts, provide a link to an HTML site map that then links to the other sections of your site.
• Make sure your navigation links are in HTML, and not in Flash or Javascript. Search engines have trouble extracting links from anything other than HTML.
• Use absolute rather than relative links. For instance, when I link to previous blog posts, I link to http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/olderblogpost.php rather than olderblogpost.php.
• Use descriptive anchor text. Anchor text is the underlined text in a link. Help search engines know what the page you’re linking to is about. For instance, I wrote this post about Buffy and duplicate content is better than I wrote this post about Buffy and duplicate content.

Submtting an XML Sitemap
Another way to let search engines know about the pages of your site is to submit an XML Sitemap. Sound complicated? It’s not. You can simply submit your RSS feed!

If you can edit your site’s robots.txt file, you can simply add the path to your RSS feed, like this:
Sitemap: http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/feed

EDIT-Sebastian reminded me that your RSS feed should reside under your root domain in order to submit it as a Sitemap, so if you use Feedburner, you’ll need to use Feedburner’s MyBrand. If you use Blogger, Sitemaps integration is now built in, I believe. And if you use WordPress, you can use this Sitemap generator plug in to create your Sitemap.

Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask will all pick this up.

However, not all blogging platforms let you edit your robots.txt file. If you can’t edit it or aren’t sure how, you can still submit manually to Google and Yahoo!.

Once the search engines know your site exists, they’ve got to be able to get to your content. Which means it’s time for part three: crawlability.

This is the first part of a three part series on the session I gave at BlogHer. You can read the intro, or just get started here.

I’m going to dive into relevance first, because it’s what bloggers know best. Basically, relevance is just writing about your passion. It’s all about writing lots of great content. However, if you care about being found in search engines, there are a few things you can do to help ensure searchers can find that great content.

What is your site about?
If you want search engines and visitors to clearly know what your site is about, decide what you want your focus to be. What if you find yourself writing about several different topics? Well, you can do what I do and just ramble on about anything or you can create a separate blog for each topic. It’s really up to you. (You can also have your site be about lots of things, in which case, you can decide what each page is about and do the keyword research described below for each topic you want to talk about on your site.)

Do some keyword research
Once you’ve picked a topic, find out how your audience thinks of that topic. How do they search for it? Are you writing about it with the same words they do? Lots of resources exist to help you with keyword research. Keyword research will help you figure out if alternate words are more popularly searched for, as well as expanded terms for your topic. For instance, you can use Google Trends to find out what synonyms are more popular.

As well as find out if one topic is more popular than another.

Once you’ve settled on keywords, you can find out what similar or expanded keywords have the most overall search volume. The Google AdWord Keyword Tool, for instance, can help you know what people are searching for related to your chosen term.

Go after the long tail
It may be difficult to rank highly for a competitive keyword, but if you use the less-competitive synonym terms and expanded phrases in your content (known as the “long tail”), your traffic for those combined searches could far outweigh what you could get if you just concentrated on the initial term.

For instance, let’s say that 50 people a day search for the word “peas”. Your site is about peas, but you find that there are lots of great sites out there that already rank well for that. You’ve got your vegetable advisory board and your pea council and your future pea farmer’s of America. Those sites have all been around for a long time, have lots of great content, and tons of links. How can you possibly hope to rank more highly than they do for the search “peas”?

Maybe you can’t.

But don’t lose hope! Look at some of the other related terms people are searching for. Let’s say 10 people a day search for “split pea soup” and 8 people a day search for “sweet peas” and 2 people search for “peas in a pod”. You may think it’s hopeless to rank for “peas in a pod”. But then you do a little math. And you find that if you can rank for several long tail terms, you can easily get more traffic than if you concentrated on the “head” term.

Use those words
Once you’ve found the right keywords, make sure you use those words in your content. Don’t get all crazy spammy robot about it, of course. No one wants to read a sentence like “this site is all about Buffy so if you like Buffy you should come to this site and read about Buffy episodes and download Buffy wallpaper and Buffy screensavers and Buffy ecards and other things about Buffy.” Even I don’t want to read that and you won’t find a bigger Buffy fan than me.

But I sometimes find that writers are so close to their content they don’t realize they aren’t using their keywords at all. I talked about this in a guest post I did on Matt Cutts’s blog:

You know what your site’s about, so it may seem completely obvious to you when you look at your home page. But ask someone else to take a look and don’t tell them anything about the site. What do they think your site is about?

Consider this text:

“We have hundreds of workshops and classes available. You can choose the workshop that is right for you. Spend an hour or a week in our relaxing facility.”

Will this site show up for searches for [cooking classes] or [wine tasting workshops] or even [classes in Seattle]?

It may not be as obvious to visitors (and search engine bots) what your page is about as you think.

Try searching for your keywords on your site and make sure they come up.

Where and how to use your keywords
In addition to using your keywords in your blog content, you should carefully consider the following:

• Your domain name: The keywords in your domain name matter. Don’t believe me? Take a look at my stats for July.

  

• Your URL structure: If you can, set your blogging software to use the title of your posts in the URL rather than a set of numbers. why-my-cats-are-better-than-yours is much more useful to search engines and visitors than ?p=123. In WordPress, for instance, you can set this under Options > Permalinks (choose “date and named based”).

  

• Your title tag: Each page of our site should have a unique title tag. The title tag is in the <head> section of your source code and looks like this: <title>My Keyword-Rich Title<title>. This is what shows up in the browser title bar. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be. Most blogging software will generate a title for each page automatically. You just need to check to see how it generates it. Does it generate a title for each page that matches your blog name? If so, you’ve got the same title for every page without keywords that match the page’s content. In most cases, you can set your blogging software to use the title of your post as the page title.

  You may even be able to customize it. For instance, it’s a little better to have your important keywords at the front of the title, so if your blogging software puts the title of the blog first and the title of the post second, swap it around. This blog for instance has the order swapped. In order to do that, I had to go into the template and swap it in the code.

  

  You may also be able to find plug-ins to help make this easier. For instance, I have Stephan Spencer’s SEO Title Tag plug in for WordPress installed, which lets you specify a custom title tag for each post. (You may have seen Stephan’s daughter Chloe speak on the Professional Blogging: Ways and Means panel at BlogHer).

• Your post titles: Generally, your blogging software formats your post title in an H1 tag, which search engines use to help figure out what your page is mostly about. And as you can see, putting keywords in your post’s title can also help get the keywords in your page’s URL and title tag. But using descriptive, keyword-rich blog titles are important for other reasons:
  • The title helps your readers know if the post is relevant to them.
  • The title helps readers who are getting your post through RSS know what it’s about at a glance.
  • Often, other sites link to you using the post title. Search engines (and potential visitors!) consider the anchor text of links when determining what a page is about. By using descriptive titles, you are more likely to get descriptive anchor text in links.
• Anchor text: As I just mentioned, the anchor text to your site is a factor in how search engines figure out what your site is about. If all the links to your site are “click here”, well, search engines might think that’s what you’re about. You can’t always control how people link to you, but using descriptive post titles helps. You can also use descriptive anchor text in internal links and it can’t hurt to email someone who’s linked to you and ask if they’d mind changing their link text.

  Want to know how sites are linking to you? Check out Google’s webmaster tools (Under Statistics > Page Analysis):

  

• Your meta description: Each page should have a unique meta description tag. The meta description tag is in the <head> section of the page and should contain a short description of that page. By default, some blogging platforms use the same meta description on every page, so you should check this and set it to use something like the first paragraph of your post or a custom description you write for each post that incorporates our main keywords. With WordPress, for instance, you can install the Add Meta Tags plug in.

  Not sure if all your pages use the same meta description? Do a site: search in Google by typing in site:www.yoursite.com and see if all the descriptions that come back are the same or if they uniquely describe each page. You can see that a site: search for my blog shows that my meta description is the first part of each post. Another way to check is to choose View > Page Source when looking at your pages in a browser and see if the meta description tag for each page is the same.

  <meta name="description" content="what, you were expecting pictures?" />

What kind of links do you have?
Links are great for lots of reasons. Readers of other sites can find out about your site, search engines can get insight as to how other sites describe yours, and search engines can get a signal of how valuable other sites find yours. If lots of authoritative, relevant sites are linking to yours, then your site is seen as fairly important to search engines.

Once your site is well-indexed, and you’ve done a good job with your keywords, if the site still isn’t ranking well, it may be that it just doesn’t yet have very many links. I talk more about links in the next part of this series.

In fact, now might be a good time to jump over to part two: discoverability.

When I was speaking at BlogHer on Friday, the thing people wanted to know about most was how to actually implement the things we were talking about. (Well, actually, the first question was what the heck is up with that domain name? Seriously, you’re trying to break into porn, right? And the second question was, so you left Google, huh? What, did you get tired of seeing puppies and rainbows and fireworks everyday? But then third was about implementation.)

I talked about the basics of what you should look at in your site to help you get traffic through search engines, and I did a fairly comprehensive write up of the subject when I spoke at BlogHer Business in March, so this time, I thought I’d jump right into some examples of implementation.

Why should you care about being found through search engines? Well, a lot of people are searching out there. According to comScore, Americans did 8 billion searches in June. Each search is for something specific and if you can provide exactly what someone is looking for, you’ve gained a loyal visitor who will keep coming back and will spread the word (and maybe some links) about your site.

So how do you make sure your site shows up for these searches?

You should look at three things:

1. Relevance
2. Discoverability
3. Crawlability

I wrote all this up as one post but then it ended up being this crazy long thing and I figured I should break it into parts. So, just click on the above links to get started. And I hope you have some popcorn, a comfy chair, and a whole heck of a lot of time.

I tried to stick with the basics, but if you have any questions, please post them!

You can also check out the presentation Elise Bauer and I did, as well as get lots more about what Elise covered (the technology around community building) on her site.

Happy blogging!

With the road trip and the moving and the time off work, I hadn’t been on a flight in over a month up until last week. Now I’m just off another plane, and I am remembering all the tips that I forgot. With the move, I haven’t repacked my extra bag ‘o electronics, and so not only did I have to run around like a crazy person this morning, but I apparently didn’t pack a power cord for my (er, second) laptop.

It works out though, because this hotel room has exactly zero free outlets. But who needs the lamps plugged in, right?

I’m in Chicago for BlogHer, so if you’re here, please find me and say hi! I’ll be speaking about driving traffic to your blog and a bit ‘o SEO tomorrow and I’ll try to get some notes about the session up here over the weekend. Is there a burning question that you have about those topics that I might be able to answer? Post it here and I’ll try to cover it in the session and in my write up.

If your question is why the hell haven’t I been answering my email, I know. I’m behind again. It’s been a busy week. But I will definitely be caught up by next week. After a few more plane trips. And once I track down a power cord.

Last night I thought I’d try out that old-fashioned method of social networking and rather than send my friends Facebook gifts, I invited them over to my house. Crazy I know. I might get a rotary dial telephone next. SES Travel is in Seattle this week, which means people are in town so I actually can make them physical cocktails rather than send them virtual ones. The other day I was saying how much I love the internet because it brings people together. I also love planes for that reason.

When everyone had left, I peered into the laptop with great trepidation. Here’s what I found. Don’t you all think Mystery Guest should start her own blog?

MWAH HA HA … We’ve taken over Vanessa’s computer, and while we could be unearthing all sorts of important information, including her pin number, the Google algorithm, and compromising photos of Matt Cutts, we instead wanted to take a moment and mention how awesome Vanessa is.

1. She doesn’t know how to use her own grill (”Make your own food, bitches.”)
2. She smells like cookies. Cookies and vodka.
3. Her ice machine is broken, but if you ever need ice, she’ll totally make Paul (a.k.a. the Belltown Crapper) go buy them.
4. Her home is so immaculate and well-decorated, you’ll forget all about the time you saw her cat puke all over the place.
5. She can pause any Buffy episode, fill you in on the backstory, and resume the program in 15 seconds.
6. You can cut glass with her abs.
7. She invented Chex Mix.
8. Once, I saw her kill a bear.
9. She can speak fluent Klingon.
10. She once cut off part of Ann Coulter’s ear for cutting in her line at the ladies’ room.

Postscript from me again: My ice machine isn’t actually broken, I just can’t figure out how to turn it on. And I didn’t make Paul buy ice — just walk to his house and bring me back all the ice he owned. So, yes, he’s now iceless, but we had vodka. Clearly we needed ice, right? And the bear had it coming.

The word “friend” has taken on a whole new meaning in these days of social networking. Pownce is very endearing about it: “RandomStranger wants to be your friend!” Aww, that’s so sweet, really. Facebook is much more suspicious: “We need to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with CrazyStalker”.

Someone called me a social networking whore the other day because I have so many people on my contact lists. He implied that I add people indiscriminately because of some deep hidden need to have friends. But looking over my lists of contacts, I do in fact generally know the people I’ve added. Really. I’m not trying to make up for a scarred and bitter friendless childhood. All that much.

If you’re looking to add friends (not necessarily me, the scarred and bitter one) who you don’t know well to your social networking circles, I have some tips that might help make your friendships successful and long lasting rather than end before they begin in a tragic “I do not even know this person” Facebook-style rejection.

• Be selective: Don’t upload your contact list and randomly add everyone unless you want to build your network with your mother-in-law’s best friend from high school and that guy who once emailed you with his safe and effective viagra-like homeopathic remedies. Or maybe that’s what you’re going for. Who am I to judge?
• Remind me: If you’ve met the person you’re adding, but possibly just the one time in passing or in a large crowd, or it was a while ago, remind them of that. We’ve all done a lot of tequila shots been really busy since that last meeting, and if you jog my memory about it, I’ll totally be your BFF.
• Provide context: If you haven’t met the person you’re adding, don’t send the stock invitation. Mention why you’re adding the person even though the two of you haven’t met and you’ve popped up from the crazy blue sky. Good things to say might be:
  1. “We’re both friends with Angelina Jolie (if this is, in fact true; otherwise substitute an actual mutual friend) so clearly I’m good friend stock and not a covert spy who’s looking to use your hidden profile interests to further my nefarious deeds.”
  2. “I read your blog/saw you speak/read your article and like what you had to say about global warming/snowboarding/lolcats”.
  3. “I see you’ve joined these various groups that I too have joined, so perhaps we are interested in the same topics and after all, isn’t that what this social networking craze is all about, to connect people around the world in a global wave of unity and discourse? What, are you going to make the whole thing fall apart because you’re unwilling to talk to someone new?”
  4. “Remember me, your BOSS? You damn well better add me.”

  When I get a request from someone I don’t know, I’m much more likely to add them if they give me a context. Otherwise, I’ll just assume they’re randomly looking for people to ask to Digg their stories or view their hot webcam pics when they’re bored on a Saturday night.

And if you don’t want to always be the one doing all the friending, I recommend making your profiles readily available. That way other people can see where you’re at and ask you to be their friend! And then you can say you don’t even know that person. It can be difficult to search on these sites and who has the time to scroll and scroll and click and add? Well, me if I’m home on my couch watching Buffy, but you might have actual useful things to do with your time.

• My about page lists various social networking profiles I’ve got scattered about.
• Sphinn is a great new place to keep all of your social networking, blog, and forum stuff straight.
• Or you could check out a social networking aggregator.

And that bulleted may have seemed like keyword anchor text stuffing, but hey, look over here! Something shiny!

Happy friending.

Yesterday, someone asked me to take a look at their blog. It had been indexed in search engines fairly well, but had been migrated to WordPress a couple of weeks ago and since then, everything had taken a dive. They wondered how long it took Google to follow redirects.

I started checking things out. Were all the old URLs redirecting one-to-one to the new URLs with 301s? Yep. Do the 301s seem to be redirecting correctly? Yep. How does the robots.txt file look? It’s allowing everything. Looks good so far.

Then, I checked out the site in Google webmaster tools. Which is a pretty handy program. You should all really looking into it! I noticed that the query stats weren’t reporting any data. This could mean that the site hasn’t come up for any searches lately. Not a good sign. Then I checked the crawl rate information. Indeed, the crawl was slowing down.

And blogsearch hadn’t indexed any new pages since the day of the migration.

Huh. My first guess was that it was taking a while for Google to pick up the redirects because it wasn’t crawling the site very quickly. So, I got set to figure out why that might be. But then I thought I’d just check one last thing.

And sure enough. There it was. In the source code of every page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

The search engines were following the redirects and getting a locked door. Suck.

What likely happened is that the designer put up the meta tag during the development phase and forgot to take it off once the site went live.

We could have spent days investigating the redirects and how they were being followed and indexed and speculated about possible penalties or sent out perky yet persuasive link exchange requests in a far-flung effort to increase PageRank and kick start crawling, but sometimes, the simplest explanation is the right one.

The first rule of indexing: make sure you’re letting the site be indexed.

As a sidenote, through webmaster tools, we found that some of the old pages were giving 403 errors, which means that when they shut down the old blog, they password protected some of the pages. Obviously, search engine bots won’t be able to follow redirects to the new pages if they can’t crawl the old ones, so watch for shutting things down too quickly. We also found a list of old pages that were returning 404s, which was a handy way to see what redirects were missed.

I think that meta tag thing might mostly do the trick though. Just a hunch.

A while back, I ranted about the difficulties of shopping in ways other than those involving browsers and mice. I may have implied that online shopping was a utopian shopping dream, full of kittens and ice cream and crispy potatoes. Although not all together like in a pie or something. The joy of browsing through pictures while sitting on your couch drinking a cosmo and then having those pictures show up real size at your door mere days later cannot be underestimated. Particularly if someone else makes you the cosmo.

However. There is more to a site than the clicking and the buying and the showing up at your door in a large box that you then have to find a way to get rid of and maybe that way involves “borrowing” a truck and tying super crappy knots and being a bad ass tool having type person with a plastic knife.

I moved recently, so I’ve been looking stuff up online and shopping and doing the kinds of things one could never ever dream of doing from one’s couch in the 80s. I love technology and the future. But I digress. I’ve noticed just a few things, particularly from sites that also run brick and mortar businesses, that bring sprinkles of rain into my utopian dream of sunshine and rainbows. Like when you order cornbread and there are kernels of corn in it. And you have to eat around them. You still enjoy the cornbread, but it could have been so much better.

Little tips that brick and mortar businesses could use to improve their web sites
I started building web sites in 1995. Back then, the web was very non-commercial and most businesses had to be convinced that they even needed a web site. Oh how things have changed. But in some cases, it seems the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Some businesses that are very strong offline use their sites primarily for ecommerce. Ecommerce is obviously a fantastic invention and I cannot tell you the despair I feel when I go to a site only to find that you can’t actually BUY anything on it. You can only look at things you could buy if only you weren’t wearing pajamas and slippers and weren’t so lazy that you could get into your car and fight traffic and stand in line and I’m tired just thinking about all of it. So, I am a strong proponent of ecommerce.

But if your business is not web only and has an offline presence as well, you’ve got to consider all those visitors who aren’t going to the site to buy things, but for other reasons. And you should think of your visitors as customers of your business and not just the online division.

1. Don’t make me guess where you’re located.
Don’t hide that “store locator” link in tiny type in the footer of the page. Why are you trying to keep me out of your store? I know that in some companies, the online division is measured on how much revenue it brings in and perhaps you are trying to trick people into thinking your stores are somehow no longer available and the only shopping option is on the site, but that is not the way. We still know the stores exist. Really. If the issue really is that you are trying to get customers to buy online rather than in-store to meet numbers projections, change the metrics used in success measurement. Make a convincing case for tracking how you drive people to the physical stores.

If the issue is that the store locator option doesn’t go well with the online shopping menu options, there are lots of ways make it both easy to find and non-obtrusive. But I think mostly it’s not these things, it’s just that the designer is focused on thinking of visitors who are coming to buy and forget that sometimes, people are coming for other things.

2. Give me lots of data about you.
I needed to go to a particular store the other day and was wondering when they closed. So, I went on the site and found the store locator link pretty easily. But instead of store hours, I got this message that each location may have different hours, so to call them up and see. Really? Do your stores change their hours that often that you can’t put a process in place to keep the site updated? I’d also like to know your return policy and things like that. And since I’m wishing, why not give me inventory numbers so I know if you even have what I need in stock before I get there. It’s the age of technology! Let’s mash up your inventory system and your web site and call it web 2.0 reloaded!

3. Give me the same deal if I buy online, call, or go into you store.
I am dealing with a company, not with the the online storefront or the physical storefront or the floating-on-the-clouds-you-can-only-get-to-us-if-you-own-an-air-balloon storefront. I’m buying something from your company. Why could I find the discounted price for that monitor on the web site, but when I called, the rep on the phone had no clue what I was talking about?

Airlines are particularly bad with this. They not only have different fares online than on the phone, but they charge you extra to book elsewhere than online. In that case, I get that they are trying to save money on telephone agents, and I suppose if you are trying to transition to an online-only business model, more power to you, but it can make it difficult for me, the consumer, to do business with you, the company. For instance, in the case of airlines, I can’t use the value of an unused ticket online, but if I call to use the credit, I can’t get the online price. That makes entirely no sense.

And why have some of your merchandise be web only? You don’t have enough room in your stores for it or it’s not quite good enough to make the physical floor space cut? I’m suspicious.

4. Make returns easy.
Take some of the risk out of shopping online. Going back to the I’m doing business with your company, not your online division mantra, let me return my online purchases at the store.

5. Let me contact you.
If I’m in the physical store, I can talk to an actual physical person. I’m spending just as much money online as I would be at the store. And yet when I click the contact us link, I get an email address. So, I’m supposed to formulate my question in an email, wait for a response, ask a follow up, and so on, until maybe in a week or two, I’m ready to buy. In most cases, there is a phone number somewhere, but it’s like a treasure hunt to find it. As fun as treasure hunts are, I’m more in the mood to give you money for stuff that you’re selling. Let me do that. In fact, put your phone number at the bottom (or top) of every page just to make it easy. Believe me, I’m much less likely to abandon the purchasing process if I can just glance over at your number when I need it.

6. Please God, don’t put all your products in Flash.
Right. This one really doesn’t have anything to do with a brick and mortar business, but how can I send the link to that perfect shoe around to all my friends and see if they too think it’s perfect or if I am simply caught up in a shoe-buying frenzy that comes from the easy click of a button if I have to say, go to this one page and then click this and then that and then scroll in the tiny little box in the middle and then eventually you’ll see this shoe, it’s got these checkers and … That’s just not good for anyone.

7. Make sure the web site works.
This is really for all ecommerce sites too, but since I’m ranting, I may as well throw it in. It doesn’t matter how well optimized the site is for search engines or how many backlinks it has or have pretty and usable the site is. If the customer gets to the end of the purchase process and the billing doesn’t work or the shopping cart errors out and the customer can’t actually buy anything, well… it’s possible that if that customer has spent all this time comparing items and researching and placing them into her cart and then when she clicks buy, her cart empties or the site won’t actually ever take her credit card, she might just fire up her blog and post a rant about it. Just sayin’.

It’s hard to know if those of you who read this blog are mostly looking for advice on how to use plastic utensils to succeed in any situation, rants about how I’m too old for Facebook, or more talk of cats. Mostly, I just ramble on about whatever I happen to be thinking about. But do you want to hear about the worky stuff? Or is that just too damn boring?

On the off chance any of you have an interest in any of that, you can read my take on the latest Google webmaster central release and how I spent my first week on the new job.

Oh, and are any of you going to BlogHer in Chicago at the end of the month? I’ll be there talking about how to build search traffic to your blog. My first tip may be to not use the word “nude” in the domain if you’re looking to be found non-naked terms. If you’re there, I’d love to chat with you!

Now back to your regularly scheduled lolcats.