Michael Richard Murphy

Note: This is a rough, rough draft written over two or three days at well past midnight. The topic is something that comes up quite a bit and that I have a lot to say about. This is an explosion of some of those things. It’s somewhat (dis)organized in some places. In the interest of time (and mostly so I can move on to something else), I’m publishing this as is. There are some gems in here if you have the time. If not, the takeaway is right in the title. You don’t need to read any further than that. On with the show…

This is something I’ve talked about in the past, both here and in person to clients. It was a topic in Sitepoint’s March Newsletter and the basis for some recent converstions I’ve had as well.

Content is king!

I think for people with little knowledge of the Internet outside of recreational use, comprehension of this concept comes in stages or unfortunately, not at all.

1. Let’s assume you have a business. I don’t care if you work for yourself selling homemade pot holders or if you’re the CEO of a 500 employee manufacturing company. At some point somebody has probably told you that you need a web site and that this web site would answer all your (business-related) prayers. At this stage, that’s not only believable but you can’t wait to get that site online and watch the $$$ come rolling in.
2. The site is online, you put your feet up on your desk, and…nothing happens. The big letdown. No bags, piles, or stacks of money. You think you know firsthand why the tech bubble burst and the e-Toys stock you bought to send Johnny to college now won’t even pay for a week of his day care. I digress.
3. Your web site really let you down. But you have money and time invested in it so you’re not entirely ready to give up. Good news! You get an email one day claiming to be able to get you umpteen-million visitors. XYZ Company will get you registered on a million search engines, they’ll get you setup with a pay-per-click campaign, and they have tons of SEO tricks that will land you the #1 spot on Google. Cool. You’re on cloud 9 again.
4. You’re paying hundreds a month in pay-per-click and ongoing SEO fees but you’re not getting any more orders or phone calls or walk-ins or whatever you’d like your site to accomplish for you. ‘The web is just hype’, you think.

I think this is an all too common scenario. It’s not necessarily that the web developer or SEO company is no good. It’s just that they didn’t take the time to truly understand what the goal was and what is required to meet it. There’s the old saying, ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Some developers just develop.

Simply having a web site is a good start but not necessarily enough. If I never put any work into this site and had only one page, it would contain information about my background, skills, experience, and a way to contact me. That little bit of information would work for me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It would be like giving everyone I see my business card, only it contains way more (useful) information.

That’s the minimum it accomplishes. I don’t do pay-per-click or search engine optimization. I’m not interested in it. Honestly, I don’t really believe in it. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe that paying the highest amount for specific search terms will get a site listed the highest for that those search terms. I also believe that optimizing your web site for a specific search term will get you listed higher for that search term. What I don’t believe in is the benefit of it.

Ok, I should probably clarify that. If you’re not explicitly selling something, I don’t believe that pay-per-click is beneficial. ‘Everybody is selling something’, you say. You’re right, this site pitchs me. I said explicitly, meaning, you’re selling…a widget for $25. If you’re a straight up e-commerce company competing with other companies that have the same service/product/etc. and the only difference is who gets to the consumer first, then have at it. Pay-per-click is your best friend. Buy your way to the top, it’s worth it.

If you’re doing anything else (which encompasses a lot), then I just don’t think it’s a productive use of time or money. Let’s use a familiar example: this site. I can pay hundreds (or more) dollars each month to get this site to the top of Google for web design. If you click through and are greeted by a message that says something like, “This site best viewed with Internet Explorer 4”, or terrible MIDI music, or references to clearly outdated technologies, it’s not going to inspire a lot of confidence and it won’t be long before you’re back at Google resuming your search and my hard-earned money is wasted.

My point is that high rankings don’t mean anything if your site doesn’t appeal to your target market and satiate some desire of theirs. Whether it is to purchase something or obtain some piece of information or whatever. When I search for something on Google and I click through on a result, I give that site an assessment in about 15 seconds. If it’s not readily apparent that it will meet my needs, I hit the back button.

I prefer organic results. That means that my site appears naturally for the search terms that it most closely relates to. In my mind this kills two birds with one stone.

1. I don’t pay for listings but my site still appears. Albeit for fewer, more specific search terms but it’s more relevant to the user. This should make that person happy. Making the user happy is very important.
2. I’ve taken the time to provide quality information so my site because useful. A utility. A tool. People come back, instead of this being a hiccup in their search for what they really want.

You can use pay-per-click campaigns and search engine optimization tricks (both legit and illegit) to get traffic to your site and/or make it more appealing to search engines but ultimately, search engines don’t buy your product or service or visit your office or any of those things. So why would you design specifically for them? That’s like manufacturing a product for one audience but marketing to another.

There is not substitute for useful, relevant, current content. Just in case you didn’t get that. There is no substitute for useful, relevant, current content.

that I’m number 2 on Google for the search term i love mike murphy.

I found that as a search string in my stats. At first I didn’t believe it but it’s true. Try it.

I don’t mean to brag but it looks like Google and MSN love me! I’ve been paying pretty close attention to my stats since I switched servers and the Googlebot has visited this site about 7 times each day so far this month. MSN isn’t far behind with 5 visits per day.

In my not too distance past, I’d hear constant whining and crying over search engine rankings. “Content, content, content…”, I’d say. Never one to say, “I told you so.”, I’ll let the stats speak for themselves. I’m also not including Inktomi, etc. or blog-related spiders. Alexis found a post here about reddit on Technorati and commented on it within hours of it being published.

I think my point here is that while people offer up lots of tricks to get indexed or high rankings, nothing worthwhile ever comes without hard work. Content is king. Scratch that, fresh content is king. I try to write here regularly to make it worthwhile for people to come back. Search engines are no different.

This recent article at SEOChat.com about Konfabulator is fairly timely considering a conversation I recently had with a coworker.

Because I live under a rock, I only checked out Tiger for the first time recently. While I’ve been aware of this “thing” called Dashboard, I wasn’t aware of the striking similarity to a little app I’ve used in the past called Konfabulator. For those of you that live under a much larger rock than I do, Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets exist in a semi-transparent world on your desktop and present you useful information like the local weather, cpu usage, a stock ticker, etc. Anyhow, I remarked to a coworker how similar the two are and we assumed Apple had either purchased Konfabulator or at the very least licensed the technology. It was shortly thereafter that I stumbled upon the above article that enlightened me.

It seems Yahoo!, not Apple, recently bought Konfabulator to beef up their desktop search in response to competition from Google and Microsoft. Dashboard and Microsoft’s Sidebar rely on consumers having specific operating systems while Yahoo’s new Konfabulator obviously doesn’t. Google’s APIs is still in beta giving Yahoo a huge headstart in this department.

I’m looking for some feedback here. Not too long ago Google announced a BETA of their sitemap program. The idea being that you can submit an XML feed of your sitemap directly to Google as a way to improve the indexing of your site. This feed lists all the URIs on your site and has optional information such as frequency of modification to those files, you can assign higher priorities to the most important pages in your site, etc. According to their website, Google claims this should result in better indexing of all a submitted domain’s pages, fresher crawls, and a “smarter” crawl because now Google knows when pages were last updated and how often they change.

I know this is in BETA but what I want to know is, has anybody participating in this noticed any difference in their search engine results? I’ve participated in this program now for a few months with some of my employer’s domains and this personal site. Although I see from my control panel at Google that they are downloading my sitemap files every few hours, I don’t see from my logs that this has resulted in more frequent visits by Google regardless of how often my feed says my pages are modified. What I do see is the same results in the same positions as before. While Google specifically states in their FAQs regarding the program that participation will not change PageRank or the way a page’s results are calculated, again I still don’t see pages not previously indexed but included in my sitemap appearing in Google’s index or a greater frequency of visits by Google despite regular updates to my site.

Is anybody else experiencing the same thing? What do people think about this?