Website Optimisation Wisdom: Continuous is Best

Urgent or easy tasks all too often delay website optimisation to the detriment of small and medium business (SMB) sites.

And not just SMBs either. In years of advising large and small businesses how to optimise their websites, I have often found that initial enthusiasm for changes is lost and changes don’t get made. Competing agendas push things down the priority list. Or the need for change is forgotten as clients struggle to keep on top of site maintenance, fulfilling orders, the day to day stuff.

Checking my YouTube subscriptions I came across some very useful insight into the importance of “continuous incremental improvement” and how to achieve it from three wise men of online marketing.

Shoulder to shoulder, Dr Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg talk through the issues — useful viewing for anyone struggling to find the time to make website changes because other tasks get in the way…

Bottom line: Make little changes to your website experience all the time to keep up with your competitors or fall behind. And find time for them by understanding what is important as opposed to urgent when maintaining your site.

Note: This is an issue I want to explore in depth in a future post because it is an issue that I come across a lot with clients both in terms of the value of my services and getting sites in the shape I recommend.

Think Your Website is Optimised?

Just quickly: If your website satisfies the 400 requirements in “The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period” then you should be patting yourself on the back. Or, maybe, giving yourself a stern talking to for being so complacent.

Put together by Search Engine Guide columnist Stoney deGeyter , the list is a comprehensive reminder that your website is never really optimised. There will always be something you should be doing…

Junk Website Content Bad For Business

Dumbed-down website content so devoid of value it’s effectively junk can’t be good for the web. It’s definitely bad for anyone trying to build a respected business…

Sites like www.guru.com and www.elance.com demonstrate an alarming trend with respect to the value of website content. Their website content job listings are dominated by people offering $1-3 for 500 word articles. Why? A distorted view of an effective internet marketing tactic based on a quantity not quality-based search engine optimisation strategy.

The alarming thing is that these [irony] enlightened [/irony] internet marketers are not short of people, often from the Indian sub-continent, willing to produce [irony] articles [/irony] for them.

Three problems:

1. I can’t see how quality content can be the end result of these projects. So they simply add to the junk people have to wade through to reach quality content and waste search engine bandwidth as the engines try likewise to find the quality content.
2. The people producing the [irony] articles [/irony] are being exploited.
3. The overall value of website content is dragged down by an over supply of junk content.

Truly Alarming Disdain for Fair Pay, Copyright, etc.

The problem is epitomised by this Getafreelancer.com job posting requesting bids for 60 thousand word “articles” with a $250 budget.

“You can just use content from ezinesarticle, ehow or any famous articles site and rewrite it.”

Who would think $250 was a reasonable price for 60,000 words (half to two thirds of the latest novel from your favourite author) of content? Well. Twenty three bidders think, on the basis of an average bid, $172 is about right.

[irony] I s’pose, if all you need to do is copy others’ work…[/irony]

Why Would People think There Was Value in Exploitative Junk Website Content?

The demand that drives this sort of unhealthy scenario bastardises legitimate article marketing.

Rather than producing keyword savvy articles and distributing them to build links and demonstrate expertise beyond your own site. These internet marketers, often specifying keyword density, are adding little value to the Web’s content in their attempt to get search engine rankings via back link text. They may see some search engine visibility payback but spamming content sites with articles of dubious value devalues their brand and the payback won’t last…

Recent buzz about Google algorithm changes reducing weight attached to back link text are an indicator that, as with all spam tactics aimed to influence rankings falsely, the search engines will catch up with this.

Bottom line: better 10 articles that actually say something than 100 articles that just use words to create some space around keywords. Paying a few dollars for thousands of words smells a lot like your average sweatshop…