1. The Basic Fundamentals of SEO.

From now on SEO = Search Engine Optimization or Optimisation depending if you live in the USA or not. This is not a frivolous comment as you will learn later.

If you think youve spotted a spelling mistake you may just be right but heres the first lesson what you think is right is not what someone else thinks is right. Always remember we are discussing the elusive and conceptual much of the time here. Its the Internet people anywhere in the world can tune it at the drop of a hat or click of a mouse is maybe a better way of putting itr.

When a person types a search phrase like waterlilly into Google believe me the person was looking for a waterlilly and if youre not around to help them because you always spell waterlilly as water lily then you will have a NIL chance of selling to that person.

Youll hear these terms all the time when web design discussions are taking place B2B (means business to business) and B2C (business to consumer).

Youll rarely hear what the conversation should be about namely P2P Or people to people.

The Internet is the ultimate, most fundamental one-on-one marketing medium. If you truly understand this and embrace it then you will succeed far more easily. Even if your target audience is a business rather than a consumer the fact remains that you will be dealing with an individual and that individual has a need to satisfy somebody this might just mean keeping the boss happy. The person may be working for a company but that person is doing a specific job. You need to talk to that person not to that company or business. In fact businesses do not talk to anybody . And only people have credit cards not companies.

In this book I always seem to talk about sales when I really mean Most Wanted Response to use Ken Evoys words, and the reason is simple. I want to keep everybody focused on an objective and making a sale is probably the best way to say the objective has been achieved better than any other word. However if your Most Wanted Response is to get a newsletter subscription or provide free family entertainment it does not matter you can only judge the success of your website by whether it makes the sale or MWR you wanted to get.

1.1. Fundamental number 1 ... Traffic and visitors to your website

There are so many really exceptional works of art, and design masterpieces on the web. Many are literally stunning but they do not get any visitors and do not make any sales. The main reason is small amounts of traffic.

On the other hand many websites are anything but design masterpieces yet get a great deal of traffic and make many sales. This I can tell you from personal experience because quite a few belong to me. I belong to the class of web designer that creates plain ordinary-looking websites that make money.

The first objective of any website design is to attract traffic and unless you have really deep pockets by far the best way to achieve this is to get free traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma and your favorite local engine (Ananzi maybe if you live in South Africa).

A large chunk of the rest of this book is designed to help you get that traffic. And on the Internet you need lots of traffic because conversion of any initial traffic to a final sale is typically not more than 1%.

What this means to you is that if 10,000 visitors arrive at your home page the chances are that a maximum of 100 will do what you want them to do. To get 10,000 people to visit your home page means that you will need to attract maybe 100,000 to the initial search engine results page or SERP. Already youre a little scared no doubt because these are big numbers and there is a mass of competition out there.

These numbers are very broad and in actual practice nobody knows the real numbers. Despite this lack of precision conventional wisdom as well as personal experience suggests these numbers are very close to reality for most.

Some initial definitions

Google Yahoo and Others To prevent repetition I talk mainly about Google. Most of what applies to Google applies to the other major search engines.

SERPs it is easier to show than to tell. Heres an image showing a completed search on Google for the term pond pumps

The results within the left hand side region are free or organic search engine results pages called SERPs. By free I mean Google does not expect any payment to get shown here whereas to appear within the area to the right of the page Google expects payment. These search results are called PPC or Pay per Click search results.

There are normally 10 SERPs per page and up to 10 PPC results per page (now up to 11).

If you or I as a searcher click on an organic SERP (left hand side) we go to the web page (note web page . not website) shown by the green URL for each individual SERP. On the other hand if we click on the right hand side results then the organization appearing will immediately owe Google money for that click. This vital approach to successful SEO is discussed briefly later. For the time being we are focused on the left hand side SERPs only.

SERP's (on left) and PPC results (on right) for Google search

The amount of traffic that will click through to your web page will depend upon where you are in this list of SERPs. Generally speaking position number 1 will generate about 3 or 4 times as many click-throughs (called CTRs) to your web page than would be the case if you were in position 5. This is why everybody wants to be number 1 on page 1 at Google and of course this is just not possible.

Position number 10 on page 1 will generate about 10% of the traffic that you would have got in position number 1. The bad news is that if youre only on page 2 it will be lower than this. The really bad news is that if your SERP detail is only on page 4 expect tiny amounts of traffic searching for the phrase pond pumps to ever visit your web page.

Let me stress here that these results apply to a single search phrase only pond pumps. If you saw the SERPs for the phrase pond pump you would see a different set of results although some of the same web pages may appear the same (owners of those web pages understand how to get found on search engines).

Im pretty sure if youve thought about whats just been said youll have realized one immediate opportunity to do better on any search engine increase your chances of being found by discovering lots of real search words and phrases that real people are actually typing into the search engines and not what you think they are typing in. We call these keywords. Keyword discovery and application are the subject of important later chapters. It is the discovery of these keywords that assists greatly in both getting found and getting attention the internet term is targeted visitors. This is what we really want to achieve through our SEO efforts not just visitors for the sake of it. We seek targeted visitors.

1.2. Fundamental number 2 ... targeted traffic because volume of visitors alone is not good enough

Your website will only possibly get attention if it is targeted to the search query made by that person doing the search at that point in time. Your web page must immediately seem to satisfy the immediate need of the searcher for the person to even consider further exploration of the website as a whole.

Searchers are fleet of foot, impatient and totally selfish.

Searchers with needs to satisfy do not care one iota for you, your company or your websites appearance. If you feel you need confirmation of this just think of your own search behaviour.

Once this fundamental is truly appreciated attracting attention to your web page is much easier but getting the attracted visitor to stick around is far from easy. Take a look at this graph for the month of April 2005 from one of my websites. It shows the number of people who saw my web pages and how long on average they viewed the web pages before leaving

Time Spent On Visitor Sessions to Website

During the month there were 43,731 sessions (ie visits to the website this included all web pages not just the home page). Of these sessions 28,472 lasted less than 10 seconds. This is quite sobering especially when you consider yourself better than average.

Look at this in another way as shown in this table

Table Showing Time Spent on Web pages

76% of all sessions lasted less than 1 minute and 92% less than 10 minutes. The point of introducing the table here is to confirm that website visitors are fickle and unless they see immediately that the website is likely to answer their immediate need they are gone just like the wind.

For your interest despite this massive initial bale-out the average time an eye was trained on one or other of my web pages on this single domain was 2 mins and 45 seconds.

Hits and other gobbledygook ... This is a favourite word of mine when I discuss computer speak so you'll see it more than once

People who like to boast about their websites will always tell you how many Hits the website got. Lets explore Hits for a moment Hits are a technical term and have little meaning for you or me. If you have a web page and that web page has 20 images (every image link for example is just that an image) then every time that one web page appears on screen 21 Hits are recorded. In simple terms that single page had 20 image files and the page itself was a file so a total of 21 Hits were recorded.

One page-view in this case received 20 Hits in web speak terms.

As you can see Hits are quite meaningless gobbledygook.

What is meaningful is that there was a single page-view and probably one visitor saw your web page although maybe only for a split second.

Always remember Hits do not carry credit cards, and neither do page-views either but visitors do. Hence a successful working website must get the attention of visitors encourage them to stick around a while. It is rather pointless to get thousands of visitors to your website only for them to find that what they see does not meet their requirements. This happens in an extremely large percentage of cases.

Visitor reaction to an initial view of a web page

There is something quite unique to the web here people are able to determine in an extremely short space of time (less than 5 seconds as you saw above) whether a web page might suit their need and deserve a more in-depth look.

Your own surfing or browsing experience I have no doubt confirms this.

Heres an image below of a web page that I use to illustrate a fundamental web design flaw to me as a surfer this website is about office furniture. As such unless Im looking for office furniture I would have no need to dwell on this page for more than 1 second.

However this page is the home page (or was at the time) of a web design company. Im pretty sure that if I'd typed web design into Google and then been presented with this page I could have mistakenly thought it was about office furniture and gone onto the next SERP.

Good SEO is just not about getting traffic its about getting targeted traffic and attracting the searchers attention so they look around and explore the website in more detail.

A Website That Easily Attracts the WRONG Kind of Attention. This site is not about office furniture

1.3. Fundamental number 3 ... Conversation. Turn traffic to attention and attention to sales

The point has just been made that traffic alone is not good enough. The traffic must be targeted and your web page must appeal to the searcher who discovered it via the SERPs.

Heres a very strong statement the vast majority of people searching the web do not want to buy anything. If you can accept this as being true (and it is) then why do so many websites offer to sell the searcher something on the home page?

This does not make sense unless you treat the Internet as just another catalogue. Sadly most companies do just this they take their offline catalogue, pay an expert lots of money to design a flashing, moving dancing and singing website and wonder why the traffic is poor and the conversion to sales almost non-existent.

On the web we can only generalize

Searchers are, in general, and most of the time just looking for information to resolve a problem, or they are looking to make comparisons if there is an intention to perhaps buy at some stage. Or they are trying to find out if you are reliable, know what you are talking about, are honest and trustworthy.

Presenting a catalogue on the home page rarely provides the level of comfort required. The result is the searcher goes elsewhere. Do seriously consider this truth below the source of this information is a wonderful data base called Wordtracker (May 19th 2005)

It is important to gain trust before trying to sell because after all on the web we are ultimately asking people perhaps thousands of miles away to part with credit card details, home address and whatever else.

It is extremely difficult to sell on the Internet and presenting a catalogue does not help until the time the catalogue is required conventional wisdom talks about 7 (seven) distinct contacts are required before a successful sale is made.

1.4 You don't have a plan website but it does help

Dont get me wrong. There is a place for prize winning web design and no website should be so ugly it is detracts from its main job which is to tell the searcher they have arrived at the place where the searchers problem will be resolved better by you rather than anybody else. And as youve seen youve got less than 10 seconds to do this.

There is however something far more important than the appearance of ANY website and that is giving the searcher what theyre searching for. Think about a searcher who is looking to save money on short term insurance premiums car, home, trailer etc.

Lets follow a typical web searcher through the search process and in this case we will use the South African search engine Ananzi and we will query it for the 3 word term, save insurance premiums.

STEP 1 EXAMPLE SEARCH

Heres the SERPs page on May 19th 2005 (SERPs do change)

Searcher Enters query save insurance premiums on Ananzi

STEP 2 EXAMPLE SEARCH

Number 1 on the SERPs page after the Sponsored Link Ad includes the words Save Insurance Premiums in the heading of the SERP and tends to confirm in the mind of the searcher that this is a good result to click on (URL called insuringdirect.com also confirm that this is probably a good SERP to click on).

SERP Confirms Save query and gives searcher confidence to click

STEP 3 EXAMPLE SEARCH

On arrival at insuringdirect.com this is what the searcher sees. There are 3 instances of SAVE. This is meeting exactly what the searcher is looking to do. The chances are extremely high that this web page will get true attention from that searcher. The question of site appearance does not enter into the argument.

Three Times the Searcher IMMEDIATEY Sees SAVE on the web page visited from the SERP

The image below shows a section of the web page no work of art, no prizes for appearance but its done the job and most searchers will be happy with their click result. This does not mean to say the conversion has been successful. It just means the searcher will probably read more of the web page.

If the searcher had clicked on the sponsored link this image below is what would have been seen. There is no mention of the word SAVE in fact the site is not about the searchers needs at all which is a BIG mistake.

A competing sponsored links page

1.5. There are many tricks and spam techniques but not in this book

This book will not help you if you want to get high rankings using spam techniques of any kind.

The term used by the SEO world for spam tactics used to generate high rankings is Black Hat people like me belong to the White Hat brigade.

1.6. Beware promises ... nobody can ever quarantine page 1 rankings for useful markets on any major search engine.

Youll see promises like this all the time and I can even make the same promise and probably succeed but not for search terms with any meaningful traffic or commercial ROI. It is impossible for anybody to make such guarantees.

If you do fancy your chances with a guarantor make sure you get the actual search terms you want guaranteed written down on paper and by when you can expect to see results and what happens if the guaranteed results do not appear.

1.7. CSS and DWT

I have one highly significant regret about 4 years down the track of doing my own websites.

My big mistake was not to take the trouble to learn CSS (cascading style sheets) the jargon and web speak scared the life out of me. Not learning and implementing CSS has cost me a great deal of wasted time and no doubt lots of lost money-making opportunities. And you know what the sad bit is Basic CSS is a piece of cake, a walk in the park. Its just made to look difficult for some reason best known to the web community.

Heres a place you can go and get 4 free chapters of a book (as at May 2005) and thats about all youll ever want to know unless you want to become a proper web designer.

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant1/ this is where I learned the bit I know

Im not going to teach you any CSS here but if youre gong to do your own websites take up this minor challenge and before you do your very own first website learn basic CSS.

By the way DWT stands for Dynamic Web Templates for now be aware that if you use them theyll give you, as a mere mortal, great web design power

This chapter has been a quick and maybe rude awakening. It covers in the broadest possible terms much of what successful Internet Marketing is. Everything else in this book is geared towards taking these fundamentals and making them work for us in practice.

1.8. Summing up why you need targeted traffic first and foremost

Compare Pick n Pay off-line shopping with Pick n Pay online shopping. Lets start with the real thing. The store as we all know it if you stood outside the store and monitored the number of people who bought something what do you think your answer would be?

My guess is that not less than 98% come out having bought something.

Shopping in the off-line store converts at very high levels

Now go and sit outside the virtual Pick n Pay (if you could) and see the percentage. Now I dont know the answer but if it is 1% or more Ill be greatly surprised.

So here is the same great company with the same products. Why is there such a vast difference? It has much to do with experience, habit, comfort and lack of internet skills by both store and searcher.

The home page of Pick n Pay on the web

The point of this comparison is to drive home the need for lots of Internet traffic to make any level of significant sales.

1.9. The great 5 page website rip-off

I could not leave this chapter covering the fundamentals of success without commenting or maybe warning is a better choice of words about the ethics, or maybe its just plain greed, of some website designers out there. The section below is an article I wrote some time ago and yet it still remains appropriate.

ARTICLE REPRODUCED FROM OUR WEBSITE

This offer was found today (not for the first time) on a South African website and it got the blood boiling again. I have used my own words but the content is essentially what was offered with no material changes. And this is not an unique event it is the going rate for website design maybe even on the low side.

"You can get from us (name withheld) a 5 page site for R 450 per page or a 10 page site for R 333 per page or a 20 page site for R 255 per page"

Now it is not so much the price I am concerned about because the company concerned needs to charge for the services it offers and frankly the rate although high at R450 per page is not grossly excessive assuming that a good job is done. However a good job in my opinion would include all the marketing research, text creation and layout including feedback form design. No mention is made of this work so I would assume it is not included in the R450 per page. Quite frankly however a 5 page website is a waste of money unless it is the starting point for something much bigger.

What use is a 5 page website?

It is not possible to do a good job for any commercial enterprise no matter how small that enterprise is with 5 pages and of more concern is what happens after the 5 pages have been completed.

The following is what is wrong with any static 5 page website ...

If an ambition is to remain at 5 pages then any money spent will likely be a complete waste of hard earned cash (talking of websites with profit motivation attached to them and one hoping to attract targeted traffic from search engines). Remember hosting is a monthly cost. Once the 5 pages have been created the costs do not stop.

Unless the website of 5 pages is for a simple personal web to show your family and friends then a 5 page website stands virtually no chance of succeeding on the internet for the simple reason that the market niche envisaged cannot possibly be covered with 5 pages and neither can sufficient content be added to the site to make any marketing impression. For a basic personal 5 page website rather do it yourself for nothing using hundreds of free products available.

If you are tempted to go for the 5 page website and pay the prices shown then what happens when you want to change the website later? - and I guarantee you will within 1 week. It did not appear to me that you as the owner of a 5 page website could do this. You would be required to pay R180+ per hour for site maintenance and a similar charge for each extra page.

IMPORTANT consideration: You realize of course that the content of each of the 5 pages would have been prepared by you and submitted by you in electronic format to the website company almost certainly. You would also have been asked to supply any images probably. You will also be asked to proof read and sign off. Under these circumstances why do you want to pay someone else to copy and paste this information for you? Ask yourself a simple question - what value are you getting? How will you recoup the cost? And do this before you sign up.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IN PRACTICE: The company preparing this basic 5 page website would have taken the information supplied and copy and pasted it into a basic website design template. This would have taken a couple of minutes and another couple of minutes to paste images maybe after some basic format changes such as reducing file size or a bit of cropping. After adding some basic HTML tags which would take a couple more minutes the 5 page website would have been complete. At most given this scenario the work would have taken a maximum of 30 minutes or 6 minutes per page. At 6 minutes per page a 5 page website should cost about R300. How do these companies justify R2,400? This excludes VAT by the way if you are an individual looking to create a website.

I know for a fact that starting from scratch using Front Page I could finish the task in less than 30 minutes.

This information will help you to understand why we (and you should too) get angry with the internet industry in South Africa. There is a complete failure to provide true value for money from Telkom right down throughout the chain. It is almost a deliberate intent to take advantage of the general population in the country and it is leaving a sour taste and holding back Internet development in South Africa. The tail is wagging the dog.

As an organization we encourage everybody to do website marketing and design themselves or at least truly understand what is important so that others can be taught and lead professionally by yourself (it is NOT rocket science I promise you, just more work). At the very least *YOU* must organize your own hosting and domain registration.