Several friends over at Facebook have commented and posted the link to the Cruzan Rum website. So I had to visit their site since it had been a couple of years.

Before I start my review I have to say that I do really love the design. It’s how the design was executed that I take major issue with.

The Bad aka “Why it should not be an all Flash website”

1. The site is Flash. That’s a huge problem. While there are “hidden” links they go nowhere. So it looks like there is only 1 page to the website. That is not a desirable web presence.
2. Design issues simply because it is Flash. Below are several screen shots taken at various screen resolutions and you can see the problems. Content can’t be seen in lower resolutions at all.
3. If you have a favorite section of the website you cannot bookmark it. While they do not have recipes on the website, and I think that would be a huge plus on the various different ways to use their great rum products.

Click on each image to view a full sized example.

640x480	800x600	1024x768
1366x768

What I would recommend doing if they truly intend on using the website as a marketing tool:

1. Keep certain Flash elements but only if they are truly do something useful and not as a gratuitous use of Flash
2. Use a jQuery mega menu for the navigation
3. Work on the “title” and META description tags. They need to be unique and relevant to the actual page content.
4. Move the site to a content management system. The more visible pages that a website the better, more pages makes search engines very happy, and quite frankly improves the chance of appearing in more search engine results.

As far as I can find there is no legal requirement to require a visitor to get past an age requirement for a website except for those falling under COPPA and that is typically for adult sexually related websites (pornography or dating). Then there is absolutely no true way to verify someone’s age when they visit a website. Kids fake their age all of the time.

The age requirement used on alcohol related websites is simply for “we’re trying” and the equivalent of the warning label of tobacco products. I can certainly understand the requirement if actual sales were occurring, but there isn’t any “tried and true” method even with the use of a credit card. I know my own son used mine without permission to setup hosting when he was much younger. And yes, he got into a lot of trouble with his mom.

References:

Advertising/Promotion on Facebook

COPPA

FTC and COPPA

Discus.org

With the price of postage today I simply cannot understand why some companies feel the need to send out “annual website search engine listing” pretend invoices.

Web Listings Inc. mailed one to me earlier in the week for a domain name that I own. There’s no site there just the parked domain. I guess they just hope you really aren’t paying attention in order to get you to part with $65.00 of your money.

They state they’ll submit to 20 top search engines. There are only 3 top search engines.

So my advice it to just throw it in the trash, or if you have a wood stove burn it.

First I will talk briefly about what not to do.

1. Do not submit to 1000′s of search engines. There are only 3 that count, Google, Yahoo and MSN. All other search engines get their information from the mentioned search engines.
2. Do not continually submit to them. It’s not necessary. Once you are in you are in. It won’t improve your position.
3. Do not use keyword spamming.

Now here is what to do.

1. Have great content and update it on a regular basis.
2. Add new features and pages.
3. Have great content. Content is what gets you ranked. Can we says it is content the search engines want? Yes, it is content!!
4. If your website hasn’t been crawled in a while update your site and manually submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN.
5. Create and then submit a site map to Google.

A big one, especially in Google’s mind, is having multiple websites with same content. Why do business waste time and money on having duplicate websites, but with different domain names? You should always focus on one domain versus scattering your effort, including the advertising budget.

There is nothing wrong with registering different versions of your domain name, and redirect one, but no more than two to the active domain. It is not necessary to have have hosting for a domain name. You can register as many as you want.

Another of the worst things you can do is to have absolutely no text on your home page. You know that nice expensive splash page you had to have? The really neat Flash intro? Well guess what! The spiders want text¦you know content! Content is king! They also want links!

Just because you have a website built it doesn’t mean they (customers) will come.

You also need to do print advertising, and possibly PPC. Depending on your market area radio or TV advertising.

Another thing not to do? Respond to one of those emails from some company will guarantee to you a #1 listing. No one can do that!

A very bad thing to do is to use the following META tags:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS CONTENT=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”>

What the above does is tell the search engine spiders not to index this page and do not follow any of the links on it. So that means that no one will ever be able to find your website unless they happen to know the address. Not smart! Very, very stupid.

I absolutely abhor SEO spamming techniques. It is unethical and does not work in the long term.

Recently a website that I have been working on (not my client but under a subcontract) had been contracted out to an SEO firm. When the files were returned the DOCTYPE was missing from all of the pages. When I contacted the firm as to why they had been removed they told me that they always remove anything that has nothing to do with improving SEO. Groan.

The DOCTYPE is just HTML, but it tells the browser(s) how it should interpret the code on the page. In fact spiders treat HTML as just HTML. They don’t index it at all. This SEO firm used lots of œcomment tags thinking it will help. It won’t. It is a myth. Comment tags are HTML and are ignored. They had added so much info to the tags that it added over 3KB to one page alone.

What the spiders pay attention to are:

1. META description tag
2. META keyword tag (Google no longer pays attention to the keyword tag because of it being used as spam.)
3. Title tag
4. Alt tag used with images. The description should be appropriate. If it is a pool say so, but there is no rule against saying where the pool is. Incorporate the information in.
5. Title tag in links. This also should be appropriate to the site and particular page.
6. Content, content, content. The content should be updated on a regular basis. Spiders love to see fresh content.
7. Clean and well written code. If the code is bloated (think of pasting content from a Word to HTML), ending tags are missing, excessive use of nested tables well the spiders will decide enough is enough and stop spidering the site.
8. A good site map. Think of an index that is in the back of a book if you have a decent sized website. If it’s also a very large site having a search feature would be an excellent tool for visitors.

The SEO firm also used poor grammar just to fit keywords and keyword phrases in and just looks unprofessional.

Register your domain name as long as you possibly can.

Use appropriate search terms in the œtitle tag of images to appropriately describe the photo or image. Example: The website is a hotel site. You could use the following in the alt tag: œHotel Meridien is a luxury 4-star hotel near Central Park in New York City”.

The œtitle tag in links. Example: <a href=”directions.html title=”To find directions to the Hotel Meridien from La Guardia and Kennedy Airports click here”>Directions</a>

As I previously mentioned the importance of using a more complete description in the tags remember not repeat it in the textual content that immediately surrounds it the image or link. If it is the same it looks likeappears as duplicate content to the search engine spiders.

By Jill Whalen

There are so many SEO/SEM firms cropping up that talk a good game but don’t deliver results. This is in part because there’s so much information that is freely available about search engine optimization. On the surface, SEO sounds easy “ and it really is “ once you’ve had a number of sites to experiment with. What’s even easier than SEO, however, is discussing SEO as if you know what you’re actually doing (when you don’t)!

Here are 10 signs to watch out for that may very well indicate that your potential SEO is a quack. Please note that one of these individually may not be bad, but if you notice more than 2 or 3 of these when speaking with any SEO company, you may just want to head for the hills!

1. Your SEO company talks about Meta tags and Google PageRank (PR) as if they are the magic bullet to high rankings.

For the most part, there’s no reason to even bring up the keyword Meta tag nor toolbar PR in a discussion about what needs to be done to get better search engine exposure for your site. Both of them are issues that quack SEO companies will talk about because they actually believe they are the key to SEO success. They are not. I’ve discussed in previous articles the Meta keyword tag’s lack of importance, so I won’t go into that again here. In regards to PageRank, increasing the little green bar graph’s number should never be the ultimate goal of a professional SEO campaign. A good campaign will automatically increase your real and true PageRank (as measured by Google) without your specifically setting out to increasing it on your own. Since PR doesn’t bring you traffic and sales (nor rankings), increasing it should not ever be the main goal of your campaign. This fact is of course lost on SEO quacks.

2. Your SEO company’s site (or those of their clients) has the same Title tags on every page. Sounds crazy I know, but I’ve seen this more than once!

I once got a client who had previously used a very major SEO company that most people have heard of. They had been with this firm for a whole year, and yet the Title tags on every page of their site were all the same (the name of the company). Since Title tags are probably the most important (and easiest) thing to change on a site, any SEO company that can’t do this one basic thing for their own site or their clients’ is most definitely a quack!

3. Your SEO company talks only about optimizing for the œlong tail.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with long-tail keyword phrases, as they can bring a lot of traffic when all is said and done. But you don’t need an SEO company if those are the only phrases you’re interested in “ you can do it yourself just by writing articles. Your SEO company should not be afraid to optimize for the actual keyword phrases that most people would use at the engines to find your site. Yeah, it’s gonna take time and money to go after the most competitive keyphrases, but there’s usually a happy medium. Most sites have plenty of phrases that are somewhere between long tail and highly competitive. Those are the ones you definitely want to target.

4. Your SEO company tells you it’s ALL about links (or ALL about content).

SEO isn’t ALL about anything. It’s about lots of things all added together to make the perfect combination for your site. A linking campaign alone will never be as effective if you neglect your on-page content, and vice versa. Be sure that your SEO company looks at your site from all angles andmakes sure all your bases are covered. Otherwise, they’re probably a quack!

5. Your SEO company tells you that you need a linking campaign even though you already have tons of links and are a well-established popular site in your niche.

Not every site needs every SEO service out there. Just because your SEO company likes to sell link-building doesn’t mean you actually need it for your site. Why should you pay for something you don’t need? The same thing goes for sites that already have great, well-written, optimized content. If you’ve got that, perhaps you just need a linking campaign to help boost your traffic and sales. Don’t allow an SEO quack to fix what isn’t actually broken.

6. Your SEO company is almost surely 99% quackish if they tell you that they can rank your brand-new site in Google for keywords that will bring you traffic within a few months.

In fact, if they claim they can do it in less than 9 months, they’re either inexperienced or lying. Google has an aging delay that is most certainly related to the age of the site, as well as a certain trust factor. It is only the very rare and wonderful site that can get around this delay. But if your site is like most, you’re going to have to look to the long term for your Google results, regardless of what the quacks might try to convince you of.

7. Your SEO company never mentions that they may very well need to redo your site architecture so that your important pages are prominently featured within your site navigation.

In this case it’s very possible you’re dealing with an inexperienced, quack SEO. This is usually something that is not a quick fix, so most quacks are reluctant to discuss it with you (if they even know it’s important). But if your site architecture is not search-engine-ready, everything else you do will have much less impact.

8. Your SEO company can’t provide you with any quality references.

This one pretty much goes without saying, but do be sure to get references, and do be sure to actually call them. Yeah, a reference may very well turn out to be their cousin, but you should be able to get some feel for the company you’re choosing if you can at least talk to some references.

9. Your SEO company tells you that you have to have a DMOZ listing or your site will never be able to get high rankings.

Sure, a DMOZ listing is great, but it’s a link just like any other. Submit and forget about it. If you don’t get in, it’s no big deal “ there are plenty of other links you can get instead.

10. Your SEO company’s site mentions that they’ll get you high rankings in AltaVista, Fast, Inktomi, Lycos, Excite, HotBot and the like.

If it does, you are 100% positively dealing with a quack! ˜Nuff said!

Jill

Jill Whalen of High Rankings ® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings ® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill’s handbook, œThe Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) a local networking organization.

The moment to start planning the œwhen and how your website will be found is before one line of code is written, a design is created, or even before you select a domain name. It should never be an afterthought.

Let’s just say I have seen first hand very poorly executed websites that were home grown because of the œit won’t cost me anything if I do it myself to the œmy friend, kid, relative¦fill in the blank.. did it for me”. Then they wonder why one can find them, they aren’t indexed in any of the search engines, or show up under certain search terms or key phrases..

The problem with DIY or having the friend, kid, or relative do it is that your site will most likely have to be completely redone. It takes a lot of work, careful planning, and time to get a website picked up by the search engines and obtain a decent position for keyword phrases.

You cannot just build a website and expect customers to find you. You do have to advertise. If you are only targeting local customers advertise in the local newspaper(s), join the Chamber of Commerce, send out a press release and use SEO to target geographical searches.

If you are seeking global customers then you need to spend the time and money on good SEO. If your products or service is fairly generic then using Google AdWord, PPC or other paid services may be necessary.

Having good incoming links also help. Remember not all links are created equal. Avoid link farms like the plague.