This Cobbler’s Child Is About To Get Some Shoes

This High-Tech Cobbler is intent on making shoes for my children this holiday season.  Let me explain.  As a busy consultant and owner of several small independent businesses, I rarely get to focus on the online marketing efforts of my consultancy, SmokeJumper Strategy.  I often hear from clients who I’m delivering SEO, SEM or Social Media services to that my website must be super well optimized for search engines.  I have to embarrassingly tell them “no actually.”  Well like the Cobbler who is so busy making shoes for paying customers that his own children run around barefoot, my website runs around the Internet with no SEO-optimized shoes on.

Hopefully that will all change soon!  As part of my renewed efforts to raise my professional profile but moreover share all that I’ve learned about products, innovation, strategy and marketing in my almost 13 years in Silicon Valley working at Netscape, AOL and Apple and consulting to dozens of Internet and software companies, I’ve renewed my blogging efforts and that has prompted me to focus on my overall online presence.

The foundation of any business’s online efforts these days is their website (though some might argue it has become Facebook) and that a website should be well optimized for search engines.

So let’s take a look at the current state of SmokeJumperStrategy.com.  Before making any changes to the site, I’d like to establish a baseline of stats:

For starters, I entered smokejumperstrategy.com on Quantcast.  The result is that I found no statistics or information about my site’s visitors or its traffic patterns.  I need to get “quantified”.  What this means is I need to embed some basic tracking code on all the pages of my website in order to receive accurate data from Quantcast.  This is a free service but will require a little bit of my valuable time to implement.

Next I head over to Hubspot and input www.smokejumperstrategy.com into their Website Grader tool.   I’m not surprised by the mixed results my site receives.

Overall my website gets a grade of 85 (out of 100).  From Hubspot: “A website grade of 85/100 for www.smokejumperstrategy.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 85% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.  The website www.smokejumperstrategy.com ranks 454,635 of the 3,100,485 websites that have been ranked so far.”  Not bad but once I got serious about school, I aspired (and often) got “A’s”.  So I’m not satisfied with B or B+.

Hubspot then breaks the site into categories for more specific analysis.  The report can be found here:  http://websitegrader.com/site/www.smokejumperstrategy.com

I. Content

A. Blog Analysis = I have a blog so all is good there.

B. Blog Grade is 93 = I’ll focus on the blog later.

C. Recent Blog Articles = Aren’t receiving many re-tweets or inbound links.

D. Google pages indexed = None.:(

E. Readability Level = Graduate School.  Yeah, my mom would be proud.  But apparently my erudite tendencies are actually a negative from an indexing perspective.

II. Optimize

A. Meta Data = Missing page titles.

B. Heading Summary = Found 1 heading.

C. Image Summary = Found 16 images (too many) and no alt description for images.

D. Interior Page Analysis = Page descriptions missing.

E.  Domain Info = Domain is set to expire over a year from now.

F.  MOZRank = 4.

G.  Last Google Crawl Date = Nov. 25th, 2010

H.  Inbound Links = 162.  Not bad considering I’ve put zero effort into this.

III.  Promote

A.  del.icio.us bookmarks = N/A.  No one has bookmarked my content.

B.  Link Tweet Summary = Couldn’t find any.

C.  Twitter Grade = 97.  Yeah my efforts on @SmokeJumper on Twitter have paid some dividends apparently.

IV.  Convert

A.  RSS Feed = Found

B.  Conversion Form = Found.  Not sure what form they found.

V.  Analyze

A. Traffic Rank = Top 10.35%.  Just goes to show you how few websites get traffic of any magnitude if mine is in the top 10%!  At least I’m not anywhere near the tip of a very long tail!

Wow, I have my worked cut out for myself.  Hopefully my clients are too shocked and appalled by my dirty laundry and “do as I say, not as I do.”  Off the top, my gameplan looks like this:

1.  Housekeeping (quantify the website, review google analytics for further insight, signup for Google webmaster tools).

2. Keyword research. I want to find the keywords that I can focus my content development, blog posts and all meta data around.

3.  Site implementation.  This will be a painstaking, page-by-page revision and update of the website based on the intelligence I’ve gathered and target portfolio of keywords I’m going to commit to.

4.  Measure & review.  Once implemented, I will need to measure regularly (likely weekly or monthly) to see how my grade, traffic and conversions have changed over time.

Would love your thoughts on this approach and any additional tips I should consider along the way . . . .