A reader asked a question a couple of days ago that posed an interesting mystery. I’ll quote it again here, because this is a topic of general interest.
Sylvia wrote:
I just remembered that a friend of mine did her own ministry site. She posted all her articles on it. Later, however, when she did a “search” for it, it wouldn’t come up on Google. I don’t know if she tried some of the other search engines or not. A ministry site that can’t be found is of little value!
She called a tech, and got such an involved answer that she finally thanked him and hung up. What can she do?
Randy sez: Yesterday, I asked Sylvia to email with the URL of this missing web site so I could investigate. She did, and gave me permission to discuss this on the blog here.
Here is the URL of the site: www.ThePathOfFaith.com.
I had a look at the site today. It’s quite “pretty” but it is, apparently, completely ineffective because Google and other search engines seem to be ignoring it. What’s the deal?
The deal is that Google actually does index the site, but it’s lost in the noise. Here are some of the things I did to test that:
1) First, I Googled the actual URL of the site: “www.thepathoffaith.com”. (I didn’t enter the quotes, just what’s inside them.)
The result was one single entry, the home page of the web site. We conclude from this that Google knows this site exists. That’s the first step. The site is not being blackballed for some strange reason. But there are obviously no incoming links to this site, because if there were, the search above would have found them. (As an experiment, Google “www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com” and see how many results you find. It’s about 1950 as of this minute.)
2) There is an “Articles” section on the site. As I understand it, the purpose of the site is to make these articles public. I clicked on the button to take me to the “Articles” section. I was taken to a page that told me to go to the Site Map in order to get to the articles. This is a needless roadblock for site visitors, and it may explain why nobody links to it–the articles are pretty well hidden. It would be far better to put links to all the articles on this page.
3) I went to the Site Map and clicked on the first article. It’s titled “A Barrier to Trusting God” and begins with the phrase “Mandy struggled with trusting the Lord”. I Googled this exact phrase (including the quotes). The reason for using the quotes is that it tells Google you want to find all articles that contain that exact phrase, with all those words in exactly that order.
Google responded with one result, which was in fact the article I was reading. So that’s the second result–Google has indexed the entire site. However, if you Google that phrase in the normal way that people usually do (without the quotes) then that page does not appear on the first three pages of results from Google. The reason is that the site is not considered “important enough” by Google to rate a result near the top.
How does Google decide which sites are “important” and which aren’t? Part of that answer lies with their famous “PageRank” formula, which determines the rank of every page on the web, based on how many incoming links that page has. The formula is not complicated, but solving the formula requires some basic linear algebra methods which I don’t dare go into here.
The owner of the site could help things immensely by getting some incoming links to the site. In fact, she’s already begun, because my blog now links to her site. So within a day or two, if you do a search for her URL, you’ll see that there are now two results. I won’t be surprised if the first result is this blog entry, but we’ll see.
All of this ties in nicely with what I’ve been saying the last couple of days. A “pretty” web site may be completely ineffective. There are many ways to be ineffective:
* Nobody knows about the site
* Nobody links to the site
* Nobody comes to the site
* Nobody “takes action” after visiting the site
“Taking action” is what happens when a site visitor does what you want them to do. That’s up to you to define, which is the whole point of setting the requirements for your web site. You need to know why your site exists so you can guide your visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do. If you don’t know, they won’t know, and so they won’t do it.
If you want people to be inspired by your site, then the bar is pretty low. You just have to have good inspiring content and make sure people arrive at your site.
If you want to sell thousand-dollar widgets on your site, then the bar is a lot higher. You have to get people to your site, make them a sales pitch, close the deal, collect the money, deliver the widget, and do it all well enough to avoid chargebacks. That’s a whole lot harder.
Let me comment a little more on “pretty sites” since that drew some comments today.
Rob wrote:
As humans, we are visual creatures. So, if someone creates a barebones or cheap-looking blog and website, then it can make it hard for customers to take an author seriously. It’s like you’re sending a signal to the world, “I care more about saving money, than investing in myself and looking like a professional.”
Believe me, content always trumps graphics..you must offer real value for any book or message to sell. But, it’s also important to “package” your message professionally, which establishes more credibility with your audience. It’s hard to take someone seriously if they look “homemade.”
There’s nothing wrong with saving money on a website or blog, but make sure that it looks professional enough to save your career.
Randy sez: Folks, Rob is a marketing expert who really knows marketing of books. Check out his blog at http://wildfiremarketing.blogspot.com/. I had a nice chat with Rob a couple of weeks ago on the phone and we’re on the same page on a lot of things.
I think both Rob and I will agree that “prettiness” is not everything, but it counts for something. The question I would urge every web-site owner to ask is this: “How much does prettiness count with me?”
If you are a professional speaker or a high-level author, then you probably need a pretty site, because that’s what’s expected of professional speakers and bigshot writers.
If you aren’t, then you probably need a much lower level of “prettiness”. Now I would never suggest that you intentionally make an ugly web site. But content is king and always will be on the web. Get great content and get the word out well. As your profile rises, make changes to your “prettiness” as appropriate. An unpublished writer simply doesn’t need a $3000 web site with Flash, dazzling graphics, and hard-to-read grayscale fonts. I would argue that a nice template for a blog might be a reasonably “pretty” and yet inexpensive investment for the beginning writer.
One or two more things about the Path of Faith.
The site looks quite pretty but it loads extreeemely slow. If I wasn’t intent to have a look I would have clicked away. I never even got to the content because I gave up when the article page wouldn’t load. The slow load is due to the image heaviness, the table based layout and all the foreign templates that need to come from somewhere. A simple CSS & HTML design won’t be as pretty but will be much quicker and more effective.
The page title of the home page is “Welcome”. There are millions of pages that start of with welcome. You just can’t beat it. It should be “The Path of Faith” or something that relates to the content.
Ditto for the file names. The articles page url is http://www.thepathoffaith.com/gpage2.html – The search engines pick up “gpage2” and it is meaningless content nobody will ever search for. Rather change it to http://www.thepathoffaith.com/faith-articles.html
The meta keywords are: “christian,articles,faith,prayer,sexual addiction,children,parenting,seniors,care giving,trust,stories,crisis,” This is all over the place and not reflective of what is on the home page. You should use every meta keyword at least once on the page it refers to. It indicates a consistency in what you are presenting. I also think that there needs to be a space after the commas for them to be picked up (nobody knows how clever the Googlebots really are). Every keyword is also very broad. Combinations such as “christian articles” would be much more effective.
These are three small changes (including speeding up the site) which will not turn the boat around or make a huge difference in itself. But with websites its all the small bits adding up (or subtracting) that makes them successful or not.
Thank you, Randy. You are Goooood! My friend asked me to relay her deep gratitude.
Yes, ThePathOfFaith.com is a very pretty site. I take it, then, that you are saying there is nothing technically “wrong” with the site — that it just isn’t generating enough traffic at the moment, because of no links, to appear high up on the Google search. Is that right?
Randy, you are helping me — one of those technically challenged one! — to overcome my fear of doing something “wrong” and a website and crashing my computer! You blogs on websiting are a blessing.
I did the same test for my site and got two hits but I leave my url everywhere (mostly forums) and I know it is linked back to my site. I am in the links section of a number of friends but they don’t show…
Any ideas?
Randy, when you say ““Taking action” is what happens when a site visitor does what you want them to do”, it made me realize that you should put a small graphic in between each of your blog posts that invites people to look at your products.
One of the first things I do when I come to your blog is scroll down and your products that you have for sale disappear from thought and the possibility of action.
To give my idea some feet, I put a sample graphic and a web page together for you at:
http://www.epictales.org/other/ForRandy.htm
For the graphic, I tried to match it to your site as carefully as I could, but the font doesn’t match what you have at the top, so that would probably have to be redone. Either way, it gives you an idea.
I broke the graphic into four parts, so the three on the right can be made into links that would go to product-group specific pages.
Anyway, you might think it too cluttered to put this in between your posts, but really, Randy, your blog posts are VERY long (read: very helpful), and I don’t think any of us would mind an advertisement in between!
What does everyone else think?
(a) Should Randy promote his own stuff more?
(b) Should he encourage us more often to take action and buy his products?
(c) Would you mind seeing an ad in between his blog posts?
(d) Any other ideas on how Randy can improve his site?
I tried googling my blog’s URL, and it showed up with 11 links, mostly posts from other sites where I left a comment…and my site was not the first one listed.
My blog is only a month old, so the fact that it shows up at all has to do with the backlinks to it.
Randy’s site is plain, easay to read, and I like the fact that I don’t have to skip over his products between every other paragraph. I know what Randy sells, and I have bought nearly all of his products. They offer very good value for the price, better than most I’ve seen.
I don’t think sticking in links to his products just anywhere would be at all a good idea. Too many do this. I do feel Randy should mention his products more, in an appropriate context and in the process, add a link so that people could check them out. And I think people would check them out, because his blog gives a lot of ‘freebies’ by way of advice on all sorts of issues that (especially) novice writers need and want. ‘BUY MY FICTION 101’ stuck between paragraphs would be awful. I have Fiction 101, not because it was discounted when I bought it – though that was nice – but because I had read enough of Randy’s web site and writings to know that he was GENUINE: as a human being, as an intelligent human being and clearly successful in his field(s), and also, perhaps most importantly for me, because he GIVES so freely.
I’m the lady with The Path of Faith website, and I want to thank everyone for their great comments. It has given me good insight as to what I need to do. I also want to let you know that because of Randy’s help, my website comes up now on the first page of a Yahoo search. Praise the Lord! I still need to work on getting it searchable with key words as well as reformatting it to a less graphic style.
Blessings,
Barbara Lighthizer