Does Your Website Matter?

This week I have been contemplating meaningful experiences. Some sites make me feel clever because they provide "inside" information. Other online experiences incite my sense of exploration, transporting me to other, sometimes new, experiences (Yahoo's Music Engine comes to mind). These online experiences are meaningful. They touch on aspects of who I am and what I desire.

I revisited my websites and overlayed the matrix of meaningfulness upon them, asking, how is this web page meaningful to a site visitor? And also, is there something that is keeping this page from being meaningful? It's a different way of looking at a site, similar to the visual artist's shortcut of viewing a painting through a mirror to find compositional errors.
When someone clicks on a tell-a-friend link, does that mean that the web page has been meaningful?

Inspiring Website Loyalty
Being meaningful may have something to do with relevance, but it can be far more than matching a search query to an answer. Web forums provide answers, but they also offer a home for people with common interests. Craigslist is meaningful because it is useful, so useful in fact, that many couldn't imagine a world without it. There is meaningfulness in being a part of a community, in utility, in extending and expanding yourself, even in exploring a shopping site and discovering something you didn't know you wanted. Websites that consistently deliver that experience are rewarded by site visitors with their loyalty.

I purchased Hydrangeas for my mother-in-law three years ago. I can still remember the name of the online store and have recommended it to others. My kid's shoes are purchased online from a store in Connecticut called PreSchoolians. I visited their brick and mortar store last year and immediately felt connected. Why? Because I knew their toddler shoes are among the very best, because the owner of the company personally intervenes to make sure every online customer is satisfied. They make the consumer feel special for knowing the product is good for their kid's feet, and they make the customer feel special because you get the feeling that they care. That's meaningful, because the worst experience you can have is to think you're buying something good and it turns out to be bad: you feel like an idiot. Preschoolians does the reverse, their products confirm your good judgement.

So does this mean you suck?
Meaningful affirms your sense of humanity. The opposite of meaningful is what inspires the suck sites. They offend your sense of humanity in some way. Take for example the following website called, Arlington Tour. It is about a city called Arlington that not only attempts to suck his soul, but stuns him with the (according to him) daily foolishness of the residents which can apparently be found in every corner of this small town.

That site lambastes a city that he finds bereft of meaning. To read the commentary is to understand that this city not only does not offer anything to the author, but that it is actually reaching out and trying to make him a smaller person.

Have you looked at your site and asked, is this meaningful to anyone? Does this website really matter?

Mother of All Link Building Strategies

Good content is, in my opinion, one the most important components of the link gathering process. This was so important that I made a point to devote a major portion of my Paid Links Presentation at PubCon to content. Sounds odd, and it was different from what the other panelists talked about, but it was important to stress because paid links will not benefit your site in the long run in terms of organic backlink growth if the content is less than good. You might as well be watering a rock instead of a seed.

There is nothing like engaging, well written content, authored by an authority (preferably credentialed) in her/his field, to open doors to one way inbounds. It makes the inbound link gathering process so much easier. The move to quality content is not about receiving a pat on the back from Matt or getting the white hat award and feeling good about telling your family about your site. Producing quality content in today's algo intensive environment is increasingly another strategy for obtaining more traffic and revenue. Quality content, and lots of it, is a sound business decision.

What is Quality Content?
We all think we know what quality content is, but I am consistently amazed at how many clients confuse sales copy for actual content. Sales copy is not content. Quality content is useful and helpful, generally written by someone possessing a quality that makes them an expert. For example, for a travel site, it could be that the writer actually lives in the country being promoted, or has actually visited the cities.

Two of the higher quality content producers about SEO, in my opinion, are rustybrick and Aaron Wall. Both produce solid waves of well-informed content, engagingly written, easy to read, and lots of it. I don't know if it's a conscious style or just their natural voices, but they have a knack for organizing their thoughts and presenting them in a clear manner. I think their model of quality writing can serve as a template for just about any niche.

The quality of their content doesn't stop at what they write, either. It's in the visual presentation, including the ability to quickly scan the page for information, graphic elements, and navigation/user interface. All of these elements play into establishing and reinforcing the quality aspect of their writing and the site itself.

Intergrating Quality Content with a sales pitch
Keeping to the topic of trave, suppose you have a destination site. You can plug the individual hotels, but you could also write content relevant to the travelers researching things to do on a vacation and tie it in to that hotel. Instead of pages of content about the hotels, do something to catch the demographic likely to stay in the hotel. For instance, if you're plugging hotels in Cordoba, you can do pieces about the attractions and restaurants in the historic Jewish Quarter, then tie it in with the conveniently located hotel that is walking distance from all the major attractions, and how the hotel makes it great to enjoy the vacation etc. This hotel tends to sell out rooms, so you may want to check reservations here... click!

The content isn't sales copy, but it does have a sales component, but it's also helpful and useful to the user. These are the qualities that will help a site, any site, obtain more one-way inbounds over another site that is less useful.

Credibility and the quest for one-way inbounds
My experience with one-way inbound links is that many site admins are looking for information about the authors of the content. Many seek information about the authors, and this is where an About section plays an important role. Do take the opportunity to use the About page as a sales tool aimed at site admins considering giving you a one-way inbound link. Sell your authority and credibility to them, give them a reason to link to you.

Has the Directory Model Reached the End of the Line?

Someone remarked that they were struck by the fact that the Yahoo directory has been relegated to a link from the search bar. Perhaps that's not so surprising, Yahoo seems to have been moving away from that for quite some time. In fact, most of the industry seems to have been moving that way as well.

Today there are only a few directories that stand out in terms of quality, and quite possibly someone with less than the fingers they were born with can count them on one hand. The source of this trend can probably be traced to algorithms designed not only to weed out those who would go beyond optimization but to actually influence their rankings, but also to gather together a set of sites that can be said to genuinely offer answers to search queries, i.e. authority.

Directories have been around for awhile but new forms of the directory are arising. You might not recognize them as directories, but they are directories, nonetheless. The important thing to remember about directories is that directories helps you find information. An important change that has arisen is that the directory does not necessarily have to link out to another site, the information can live on the directory itself. About.com and Wikipedia are good examples of this trend.

An important thing to keep in mind is to not let others define things for you. So the old thinking that a directory should contain links can be cast away if you are a building a directory of places of business that don't have websites. After all, if you are looking for someplace close to order a pizza or have your brakes replaced, all you need is the phone number or a recommendation for the most honest shop to take your car, or the best pizza to order, right? Who needs to click yet again in the quest to find the information?

It's not just Yahoo that is seemingly pushing the directory aside, even Google has been at it as it eliminated the DMOZ indicator last year from their toolbar. I'm not discounting a Yahoo or DMOZ directory listing as an indicator of a site's authority, I'm only pointing out that Yahoo and Google seem to distancing themselves from directories on their consumer products. Even Looksmart walked away from their human edited directory, ZEAL, in favor of FURL.

We think avid Zeal users will appreciate the large and vital community at Furl.net (www.Furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps save information that’s important to you, share it with friends and see what others are saving.

Now that is an interesting epitaph. While ZEAL was a community of contributors, websites like FURL are a community of contributors who are also users. We can only assume that it's a larger community when the users of a service are also the contributors. But is FURL a directory? I would argue yes, it represents an evolution in the directory.

1: Not every business has a website
2: A directory can deliver leads
3: A directory can deliver information
4: A directory can be user generated

There are directories that are in the forefront of preserving their quality, and are going to be hard to duplicate. Nevertheless, I believe there are opportunities for those with the programming skills and the vision to look beyond what has been done and tackle something new that encompasses the above listed attributes.