Entries from Category Organic Search Optimization

The case of the National Federation of the Blind v. Target should send a bone-chilling shiver down the back of an e-commerce website owner. Jeffery Bashaw’s (University of Washington School of Law, Class of 2008) legal abstract makes the message clear:

Get your website in line with the American Disabilities Act or get a lawyer…. A good one.

The case ended with Target Corporation paying out over $3 million with an additional 6 million dollars in a settlement fund to further compensate because their Target.com site was not easy to use by the blind. Not being accessible to the blind is a clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And yes, websites are governed by this law.

Does my site need to follow ADA Compliance?

Is it an e-commerce website? Then yes.

While you may think of Target as a normal store, the court proved that since Target.com extended services to Target customers and that it was considered a part of the stores. So it had to be ADA compliant.

What if my business is 100% online, am I OK?

Nope. Those are included too. A good example is the Attorney General of New York v. Priceline.com for failing to have a blind accessible website. Priceline.com settled the lawsuit before any ruling was even made. Be afraid e-commerce site owners, be very afraid.

But how could this be legal?

Department of Justice’s Amicus Curiae states that the definition of public accommodation includes entities that operate solely on the Internet. 100% online sites are public accommodations as defined by the ADA. Every website is governed under these rulings.

How Do I Make My Site ADA Compliant?

The visually impaired use browsers that will read the page and all image names. The browsers must be able to correctly read the page and lead the individual on where to click. Parts of Target’s site was gibberish as random image names were read and user’s couldn’t figure out where the pointer at all times.

It’s time to save yourself from lawsuits and get working on your site.

Is there any good news to come from this ruling?

In the case of Target, they were able to save face by becoming compliant and was given an award by The National Federation of the Blind to commend their work on making their site accessible. All it took was 2 years of work, countless dollars spent on fixing the problem and the massive settlement.

Side benefit: organic search engine optimization benefits

The real good news is adding in the ADA compliant fixes also have SEO benefits for your website. This allows more visitors to find your website through searches on Google.com and other search engines. Effective search engine optimization can be the difference of little to no traffic to your website becoming a household name.

What are you waiting for?

Don’t wait for your site to be investigated by the Department of Justice or an Attorney General.  Get into compliance now and save your company from potential headaches down the road.

There are countless excuses for why this might not be a focus for your company, but none of them are worth the potential fines you may receive for non-compliance.

Is your content management system too old?  Get a new one!   Are you not properly staffed for this project?  Find some efficiency tools and hire an intern!

The SEO side benefits alone are enough to get your site into compliance today!

Last week I had the honor of speaking at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management for a class entitled BA 1905 — “Internet Search Economics, Google, and New Business Opportunities” - a great name for a course covering this relatively new industry, with some truly engaging curriculum around my favorite topic of conversation: Search Engines, Marketing, and creating a business model around increasing visibility on the web.

With a blank canvas to work with and many possibilities for conversation, the professor and I decided that it would be best to do an hour long presentation on Google.  The presentation pretty much wrote itself from that point on.  Here is the full slide deck:

Since I am so closely involved with, and dependent on Google (I use their products, actively read their blogs and use their search engine every day) the talk came naturally for me.   The presentation was mostly just an “off the top of my head” overview of what I know about Google from various books that I have read, interactions with teams, etc.  Here is a loose outline of what I talked about:

* “Really neat info on how to make money from Google.  Very informational, straight-forward.  Good presentation.  Cool guy.”

* “I thought this was a very interesting presentation. I learned a lot of fascinating things and this opened my eyes to a completely new industry that I was unaware of before.”

* “I thought the presentation was really good.  The presenter is very knowledgeable and passionate about what he does.  I liked hearing about what we have been learning, from the perspective of someone who is in the business.”

* “Jeff was really great.  He is very knowledgeable and willing to share information.”

* “Presented and covered many relevant topics about how Google’s innovations have made the company successful.  Suggested possible market or venues that Google could venture into.  Answered hosting and marketing questions and gave advice to explore interests in internships and find contacts and connections.”

* “He was interesting and very knowledgeable about Google.  He also had a job related to Google which made the presentation especially interesting.  Interesting to learn about the new company.  Fun to see different things about Google.”

* “I liked the real-world timely examples given.”

* “Would have been interested to hear more about Three Deep Marketing and how they grew their company.  More relevant info about online business growth and models would have been helpful and interesting.”

* “Very interesting to get a real-world perspective on some of the issues/topics we’ve talked about in class!  Very worthwhile/interesting!”

* “Some of the information was review, but speaker was very informative and gave a really strong overview of Google.  Really gained my interest when he started to analyze why Google does what it does and how to be successful through Google.”

* “I thought the presentation was very interesting.  Jeff had a lot of good, useful information that was very relevant to the class.  I like the fact that he had experience and real-life examples of certain things (such as the stories about domain names) because it was so real and put things into a good perspective.  He knew a lot about the topics he talked about and presented it in a way that was clear and easy to understand.  I learned a lot.”

* “The presentation helped to link all the different Google ideas into the real business world and how they relate.”

* “Good and clear information provided.”

* “The information about starting your own website was very useful and interesting.”

* “Useful overview and review of Google with insights from the real world.  Great personal anecdotes that related to subject matter at hand.  Material was presented in a catchy and eloquent manner but did not go over my head.”

* “I found this very interesting and I was very engaged the whole time!  Jeff knows his stuff and has a great way to get his information across and was a great speaker.  It made me want to get into starting my own website.  Great presentation!”

A few weeks ago, we received a concerned call from one of our clients.  Apparently, they had been solicited by another company that offers similar online marketing services to Three Deep, and they were directly questioning the work we had done for them.  The solicitors did a great job of undermining our efforts by simply putting the URL through a free service called Website Grader, printing a screen shot, and clicking send.

Frankly, they made a compelling argument; the grade the site received was not great by any means, and was a definite cause for concern at a surface level.  Nobody wants to receive a poor grade.  At the same time, I was equally concerned with the implications of these results, because I personally built much of the site, entered content, and did a quality job of making the site search friendly for the their local market and the services they offer.

It looks bad, but it's not really THAT bad

I have spent many hours with this client over the past several years, working hard to make sure they were happy and that we were meeting their objectives.  So when the work that we had done on this website came into scrutiny, it hit me like a ton of bricks.   Were we not properly servicing this client?  How much work will it take to fix?

Rather than dwell on the poor score we received, I spent the next 45 minutes skimming through the criteria that this site used to grade SEO scores (honestly, I feel the criteria is very out of date and I don’t agree with much of it).  I then found the elements of the site receiving poor grades (90% of the grade comes from home page only) – “fixed” it – and reran the grading program.

Voila! In no time I had increased the score by 51%!  Now the site was no longer a laughing stock, but actually a leader among its sitegrader peers.

But what exactly changed on the site during those 45 minutes to actually make this site better for SEO?

Continue Reading Automated SEO Services like Website Grader – Thoughts →

Here at Three Deep’s offices, we are always talking about our craft, whether email marketing, SEO, reporting, etc, and how to improve the service we provide our clients.  We are presently in the process of building out a model for how we can best serve our clients… and also educate them on how SEO best fits into their overall marketing mix.  Through much trial, continued learning, and a few hundred whiteboard sessions, we have made major inroads in establishing an equation as to where exactly SEO fits in to our clients marketing mix (the answer is everywhere).

Given all of the time that we have put into working on this equation, it’s a little surprising that we don’t have any excellent infographics to help visualize what we are working to achieve for our clients.  Fortunately, there are many bright minded and artistically gifted bloggers out there who can help fill the gap.  This weekend, our president Dave Woodbeck sent us the following graphic (courtesy of SEO superstar Matt McGee):

SEO Success Pyramid

You can read the full breakdown here, but the basic premise is that rather than relying on one or two tactics to simply try to “exploit” Google’s ranking algorithm, the most successful sites focus on building quality content that engages users, presents something of value, and is easily “linkable” from other sources.

Continue Reading SEO Success Pyramid – Strategic SEO →

Two weeks ago, I bared all and showed you our worst SEO project results. Today it’s time to brag a little about some good results. Not very timely coming mid-way through 2009, but here we lay out our best project from 2008

What was your most successful SEO project? What went right and why?

Our most successful SEO Project in 2008 was the re-launch of <redacted>.com in 2008.  This project was very complex from an SEO standpoint, because it involved merging two completely different web sites into one unified site.  Under a truncated timeline and much pressure, Three Deep was able to analyze the new site from and SEO perspective and give detailed instructions on how to structure the site for maximum SEO results.  Specifically, during the transition process, we were able to accomplish the following:

Continue Reading SEO Q&A – What Was Your Best SEO Project? →

Another question we answered during the RFP process for a potential client.  As you can see, they did their homework.  Fortunately, our answers to the question below, as well as our questions about performance based SEO and others helped us get the gig!

What are the practical search engine changes you see that are going to impact your SEO in 2009?

1) Personalization of search rankings is increasing every day.

Continue Reading SEO Q&A – Search Engine Changes in 2009? →

Several of the SEO Q&A questions coming up in future weeks come from various RFP’s that we have been asked to answer.  Now that this process is over, we are displaying some of our highest quality answers on the blog.

Worst SEO project?  What went wrong and why?

The worst SEO project Three Deep worked on last year (2008) was for <redacted>,

Continue Reading SEO Q&A – What Was Your Worst SEO project? →

This SEO question came to me indirectly through Twitter. Three Deep is developing a good relationship with the excellent ladies at the Savvy B2B marketing blog, and in order to keep up with one another, we follow our mutual Twitter updates. When @michellelinn had a question about WordPress (which is my favorite thing in the entire world), I knew I could help. Here’s how it all went down (in true multi-channel fashion):

My website, built on WordPress, is only showing up in Bing (not Google or other search engines). Any ideas on what I can do? Many thanks!

2:18 PM Jul 1st from TweetDeck

Continue Reading SEO Q&A – Search Engines Can’t Find My WordPress Site →

Got this question from a potential client earlier this year during the RFP process, and thought it would be worthwhile to share with our readers.

What is your agency position on performance based SEO?

There are several factors that need to be taken into account when discussing performance based SEO in order to ensure that the project is successful and cost effective for both parties. 

Continue Reading SEO Q&A – Performance Based SEO →

I’m going to make an attempt at a series of posts around SEO questions/issues that often come up in my day to day workings.  If you have specific questions that you would like to have answered, please feel free to leave a comment on any SEO Q&A post, tweet @ThreeDeep or by filling out the contact form.

Q: Why do you recommend creating unique files and/or file names for each page on a site when you can just use AJAX, Flash, Lightbox or Div tags to show/hide content without refreshing the page for a better user experience?

A:  There are several reasons why you would want to paginate your content.  Here are 4 prime examples:

1. SEO is important!  You took the time to invest in an SEO consultant, now listen to their advice so that your site can be properly optimized for search.  If you don’t have pages dedicated to your keywords, how do you rank?

   Continue Reading SEO Q&A: Navigation Elements →