The debate over the importance of content has been going on for—well, since human beings were able to create content and then deliver it through various means. Flash forward to the Web age and the current debate over the value of content, and the debate is intensifying. But are the questions on the right track?

The Content is King/Not King Debate

In a paper titled “Content is Not King” published in 2001, mathematician Andrew Michael Odlyzko argued that “connectivity is more important than content.” His claim is that content is subordinate to personal and business communication and that businesses can make costly mistakes when they think “Content is King”. Taking a different tack, Charles Warner wrote on The Huffington Post in 2009 that, “To say that ‘content is king’ in today’s world is like saying ‘a grain of sand is precious.’” In other words, all content being equal, and who can tell a gem from a fleck of dirt? Social marketing guru Chris Brogan, author of the book Trust Agents, blogged in November 2009: “Content is a means to deliver interest…. That doesn’t make it the king.”

Clearly, these authors are engaging in the “content is king/not king” debate. But let’s consider a completely different scenario. Let’s think and act from a different realm so that we don’t miss what is vital about how content behaves on the Web.

Content Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

On the Web, content is not king because it is not supposed to be king, it is not intended to be king. Content does not exist in a vacuum. This is true because there are two other aspects, just as vital, just as important, that must be considered when thinking about the function and design of a website. These are architecture and presentation.

The Website Triumvirate (or, Who Invited Him to the Party?)

Every website consists of three fundamental elements: content, architecture, and presentation. Every bit of a website—its pages, files, images, videos, and other digital assets—can be placed into one of the three fundamental elements. Content is what you have to say, architecture is the structure of what you say, and presentation is delivery. All three must work together to form a pleasing and comprehensive whole.

Let’s use the analogy of a person for a website. There are three fundamental elements to every person: psychological (the content of who and what they are), physiological (their physical architecture), and cosmetic (their external presentation). Now think of this person (this website) at a cocktail party, attempting to engage and interact with real people (website users). How and why does one website draw people to it and, more importantly, keep them coming back for more?

Interaction is key. People desire to be engaged, as in a good conversation, and the best websites provide the experience of being socially engaged. Learning. Being entertained. Completing tasks. This is done through valuable content, within an architecture that provides logical organization, delivered and showcased in an appealing presentation.

Who Do You Want at Your Party?

Your website, large or small, with dozens or hundreds of pages/files/pieces of digital assets, represents you at the party, which is the marketplace. If your website isn’t engaging the user, isn’t providing the user with what the user self-identifies as a “needed experience”, you can bet that that user will find another website at the party to do the job.

Very likely your site is at the party now. Re-visit it, have a look around, think about the website triumvirate (content, architecture, and presentation); and question and research what might need to change. Ask the partygoers (your website’s users) who they want to meet at the party. After all, the “life of the party” provides a needed user experience.

The web is a double-edged sword. What goes around, comes around. People can say great things about you and your website, link to your website, and help promote you and your services. However, disgruntled employees, unhappy clients, and crazy people can just as easily, but with probably more vigor, blast you online as well.

Indeed, if your blog has the word “sucks” in the title, you will immediately get spidered and ranked in other “sucks” websites. Unfortunately, even the best companies with the best customer service and attention to detail has unhappy clients. Sometimes, clients just can’t be pleased. Sometimes, you did make a mistake or one of your employees made a mistake, but whatever you do or did to try to rectify the error just didn’t sit well with the customer. So, they went online and bad-mouthed you.

Somewhere, some statistician made a claim to the effect that a happy client may tell one or two close friends about their experience with you. But, an unhappy client will broadcast their dissatisfaction to 25 strangers. According to the 80/20 principle, 20% of your clients will cause you 80% of your grief. So, it may behoove you to go out of your way to plug holes before they leak.

Is there anything you can do about online complaints? Yes. Is there some kind of web authority that will fix it for you or stop the bad guys from doing it? No. What about slander and libel laws? Well, what about freedom of speech and expression laws, is their response.

The best thing you can do is “own the first page of Google.” How do you do that, you ask? A few ways:

1. Ensure that you optimize your site for your company name
2. Register the domain name, “your-company-sucks.com” replacing your company name
3. Create sub-domains like blog.yourcompany.com, wiki.yourcompany.com
4. Create profiles on social networking sites in the name of your company
5. Create hosted blogs at yourcompany.wordpress.com and yourcompany.blogspot.com
6. Create profiles on social bookmarking sites
7. Work to search engine optimize all of your subdomains and network of blogs

What else can you do to help suppress unflattering comments and derogatory content that relates to your company?

1. Fix your system so that you don’t make future customers unhappy
2. Try to make amends with the people (customers or employees) who are unhappy
3. Ask the webmaster of the website with hate mail and badmouth comments to remove it
4. Contact an attorney and demand untrue, slanderous, or libelous content to be removed
5. Hire a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to help you suppress bad comments

It is a federal requirement that certain websites comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The purpose is to ensure that anybody, regardless of physical handicap can read, see, and/or listen to the content on your website.

As with many things, complying with Section 508 of the ADA does require additional work. But, the good news is that what you do to help persons with disabilities read and understand the content on your website also helps search engine spiders read, understand, cache, and index the content on your website. This is a good thing.

Indeed, the more pages of information that search engines, like Google, index the more likely your site will rank on the search engine results pages (SERP) when a potential website visitor or customer “Googles” your key words.

So, do yourself a favor, and at the same time help persons with disabilities better read, understand, and listen to the content on your website. Make your site Section 508 Compliant for Accessibility.

For more information about Section 508 compliance see the following websites:

• GSA BuyAccessible Wizard – The BuyAccessible Wizard is a tool to facilitate compliance with the requirements of Section 508.
• Section 508 – The Road to Accessibility explaining the 508 law, training, coordinators, accessibility forum, and events.
• United States Access Board – A federal agency committed to accessible design with links to the board, guidelines & standards, research, training, publications, and enforcement.
• Section 508 (Law) – United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Workforce Investment Act of 1998
• WebAIM – Web Accessibility in Mind, expanding the web’s potential for people with disabilities, with links to products, services, articles, resources, community, and training.
• WCAG 1.0 – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation.
• Web Content Accessibility Validator – Designed to identify errors in your content related to Section 508 standards and/or WCAG guidelines.

Free Section 508 Compliance Validator Tool

Test your site for accessibility and 508 compliance

]]> http://www.seo-quotient.com/section-508-compliance-for-ada-and-seo/feed/ 0 http://www.seo-quotient.com/youtube-plan-your-seo-campaign-strategy/ http://www.seo-quotient.com/youtube-plan-your-seo-campaign-strategy/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:40:37 +0000 Blake http://www.seo-quotient.com/?p=125 Washington DC web design and SEO 101

By Blake Newman

Serving Northern Virginia, DC, Maryland, Los Angeles, New York City

This is a great little tool for you to find out how your website ranks for a given keyword phrase across the top 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Indeed, one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site, catapult your search rankings and ignite the performance of your website is to leverage the power of what I call Social BookMarketing. It leverages Social Bookmarking sites for the purpose of Online Marketing. Get it … Social BookMarketing?

Step 1: Create social media chicklets that match the look and feel of your site
Step 2: Get the share source code to pre-populate the fields
Step 3: Implement the chicklets and source code in your header, footer or blog

Share this on Linkedin code

These are the variables that you need to use:

• http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?
• mini=true&
• url={articleUrl}&
• title={articleTitle}&
• summary={articleSummary}&
• source={articleSource}

If you are using a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal then you can automate this by dynamically generating the code using PHP and your MySQL database. Otherwise, you can just hand crank it out. Be sure to string these variables together and place them within a hyper link, e.g.:

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A//www%2einqbation%2ecom/blog/&title=Washington%20DC%20web%20designer%20and%20SEO%20consultant&summary=inQbation%20provides%20world%20class%20web%20sites%20that%20source=inqbation.com

Which results in the following link: Share this site on LinkedIn

You can also include a chicklet to make it look better (although chicklets are usually square), i.e.,

Share on Twitter code

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Check out DC web designer and SEO consultant – www.inqbation.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/icon-twitter.gif” alt=”twitter” hspace=”5″ border=”0″ /></a>

Share on Facebook code

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>” onclick=”return fbs_click()” target=”_blank”>Share this site</a>

Share on Delicious code

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.inqbation.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/icon-delicious.gif” alt=”delicious” hspace=”5″ border=”0″ /></a>

Share on Stumbleupon code

<a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=www.inqbation.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/stumbleupon-icon-logo-30x.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”stumble upon” width=”30″ height=”30″ /></a>

Social BookMarketing Chicklets

Putting them all together would look something like this:

SEOMoz, a resource center for professional search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, recently published their annual Search Engine Ranking Factors report for 2009. They created three primary lists:

1. Top 5 Ranking Factors (for SEO)
2. Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors (the risky or dangerous things that will get you into trouble)
3. Top 5 Most Contentious Factors (areas of disagreement among expert SEO consultants)

Not surprisingly, these are the Top 5 SEO ranking factors to get you the most bang for your SEO buck:

1. Keyword use in the Title tag
2. Keyword use in the first word(s) of the Title tag
3. Keyword use in the domain name
4. Keyword use in the H1 header tag
5. Keyword use in the Internal Link Anchor Text on the page

And, these Top 5 SEO negative factors would most likely get you into trouble or banned from Google:

1. Cloaking with malicious/manipulative intent
2. Link acquisition from known link brokers/sellers
3. Links from the page to web spam sites or pages
4. Cloaking by user agent
5. Frequent server down time & site inaccessibility

See the entire survey on SEO ranking factors.

The Google Sandbox

Google will typically quarantine new websites for a period of time to make sure that they are not fly-by-night spam sites. So, if you have a new URL (new domain name) that you have just registered or you are putting up a website for the first time, don’t be alarmed if you can’t find it on Google the very next day. Although we are creating tests to try to determine how long this quarantine typically is, we believe that it is somewhere between 7-30 days and perhaps as long as 90 days.

How to submit your site to Google

Certainly, one way to speed up the process is to let Google know about you. Because, unless Google knows you exist, he’s not going to visit your site, crawl your site, index your site and rank you on its search engine. There are two primary ways to let Google, Bing and Yahoo know you exist:

1. Submit the site directly to the search engines
2. Get linked to from other websites that search engines currently crawl

Submit URL to Google

www.google.com/addurl

Submit URL to Yahoo!

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Submit URL to Microsoft Bing / Live / MSN

www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

How to get links from other website

Fundamental to Google’s algorithm is a measure of how popular or important you are in the eyes of others. One way that Google makes this determination is through a count of how many websites have links or references to your website. One of the easiest ways to get a foundation of links is through social bookmarking (Social BookMarketing – a term that I coined in 1999) and through profiles on social networking sites. Many social networking sites allow you to specify the URL of your blog or personal website. Take advantage of these features. The following sites should allow you to get a solid base of inbound links:

• Delicious
• Linkedin
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter

Make sure your site is crawlable

Things to avoid if you want your site to be as crawlable, readable and indexable as possible by Google and other search engines:

• Avoid excessive Flash, particularly animated Flash intros (skip intro)
• Avoid using graphic images (JPGs and GIFs) instead of text in your headers
• Don’t force visitors to login or sign on to see what public (nonprivate) information
• Include a site map to give Google instructions on where to go and what to index
• Make sure your site is Section 508 compliant for people with visual disabilities

Make sure your site has valuable content

First and foremost, make sure that you have information that is interesting and relevant to the people you want to attract. Moreover, make sure you use the language and words that your web visitors use, not the more fancy words that you may use. Write in simple, plain language and use local dialects. Instead of using the word, “equestrian” prefer to use the word, “horse” or “horseback rider,” that is … unless your targeted web visitors regularly use the word, “equestrian.”

Diversify your title tags

The title tag is one of the most important pieces of online real estate on your website. So, make sure that every page of your website has a unique title tag that reflects both the subject of the page as well as the key words that your targeted website visitors would use on Google to find you.

Good luck. And, if you need help getting found on Google, give us a call and we will be happy to discuss your online marketing objectives.

Definition: SEO – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. This gives a web site web presence.

Definition: Black hat SEO pro – A black hat is the villain or bad guy, especially in a western movie in which such a character would wear a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. Black hat SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines. Some of the blackhat SEO tactics include keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming and blog comment spam.

Definition: Black belt SEO pro – A person who attained the rank of expert in the art and science of search marketing by following best practices and remaining attuned to evolving search algorithms and search marketing trends. SEO black belts are self-disciplined, scientific in nature and methodology but also study linguistics and target market research to achieve long-term results.

• SEO black hats typically follow “worst practices”
• SEO black belts follow industry standard best practices
• Black hat SEO pros typically violate Google’s terms of use and risk being banned
• Black belt SEO pros typically respect Google’s terms of use and work within the rules
• SEO Black hats typically achieve short-term gains at the expense of long-term results
• SEO black belts enjoy moderate success in both near- and long-term

If you want both long- and near-term success with regard to your web presence then you need to work with a SEO Black Belt with a proven track record of success. inQbation™ delivers search engine friendly websites and content management systems (WordPress). We follow industry standard best practices and are self-disciplined, thorough and rigerous in our practice of SEO. If you Google the following phrases, we will likely rank on the first page:

• DC seo consultant
• DC web designer
• DC wordpress designer
• DC web
• DC accessibility consultant
• Creative designer
• Section 508 consultant
• Secton 508 compliance coordinator
• 508 consultant

Blake Newman, inQbation’s SEO black belt, has been obsessing over SEO since he purchased www.photographer.com back in 1995. Since then, he has helped hundreds of professionals, business owners and web masters effectively rank well on the leading search engines using proven methods and techniques that. We have a proven track record of success and would love the opportunity to help ignite your website’s performance as well.

With a BS degree in Business, MS degree in Information Systems and 15 years experience in web marketing, Blake Newman can help you achieve your online marketing goals. Call now for your free SEO consultation and assessment.