How a Fancy Pants Flash Website Could Hinder Your Sales

First published for the Ladies Who Launch blog

Your high-concept, artful, playful website could be making you all but invisible in the search engines, nearly impossible for people to send a link to a specific product to their friend, and could negate any positive impact from social bookmarking sites like StyleHive.com. Most of the big designers use these types of sites, and I say more power to 'em. It just means that my little well-optimized website will get more exposure.

To define, a fancy pants website is usually built with a lot of Flash, or another program that animates things to make them extra cool. The website pages sometimes look like pages, but they may not generate their own URLs. Your whole website may run off of www.mywebsite.com. Let's look the super cute shoe company, Seychelles Footwear. Go to that website and play with it. It's very fun. Luckily, it can be fun because they sell all of their shoes through stores and other websites that are much better optimized (aka appealing or readable) for the search engines.

The Link Problem
Years ago, I bought some Seychelles. I was so excited that I blogged about what I bought, and the other cute styles. I wanted to link directly to the shoes I was talking about. On the web, it's best to get to the point as quickly as possible. With Seychelles, no can do. I can only link to their home page and figure out ways to finagle some images from other websites like Zappos.com to show what I'm talking about. In fact, I'd be better off linking to Zappos.com, since my readers could fall in love with the shoe, and buy it right then.

The Search Engine Problem
Search engines love links. Links are like vegetables to them. When a search engine visits your site, it 'crawls' or 'spiders' as much of your website as it can by traveling through all the links you have placed. If you have images linked to images, and no text, or no links that go to places that are forbidden to search engines, they stop and miss out on all of the stuff you can SEE on your site. They like to read things. If you have words that are images, for example, and not actual words, the search engine just sees a file called our_mission.jpg. It has no idea that there are words there.

The Usability Problem
If products are spinning by, it's visually exciting at first, but when you go to click on something, it can be a slippery experience. Making your site as easy to use as possible is a good goal to ensure that your users are happy and seamlessly turn into customers.

The Social Bookmarking Problem
I call this Socialness. Social bookmarking is when a web page gets bookmarked on a website by a person. Other people can see what that person bookmarked, and then visit the page. StyleHive.com has a lot of highly interested users looking for fun things, and they will buy. Your products can show up there (if bookmarked , or 'hived' by someone if that product has its own web page. If every product shows up on www.yourwebsite.com, and not on www.yourwebsite.com/products/398lfoifjlsfjow or something obscure to humans but very important to how the internet works, then you could be missing out on a potentially effective bookmark that could drive highly interested people to your products. Example: Coco Ribbon sells very pretty things on their site, and they just redesigned their website. I must confess, I do miss their old one because, I think, each product had its own URL. So, if I go to put something on StyleHive, StyleHive picks up the product image, price, and description and automatically publishes it on their site. However, with their current setup, pointing out pictures and assigning it to one page is tricky. All of their lingerie items, for example, are under this URL: http://www.cocoribbon.com/collections/lingerie, so I can't link to a direct one, which would get users there quickly, and help that product rank in the search engines. If you don't care about search engines, then this isn't a problem.

The Bottom Line
Using animation and other swirly things is fine. It's great. Just ask yourself, before you fall in love with a concept, where you are using it, and how it will affect your users, who ultimately, can be your biggest evangelists.

If you're website's been stolen...

Like if it is being hosted on another host under another domain name that you've never heard of, let alone given permission to, here's what Vertical Response did, who is a major and trusted enewsletter provider:

http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2007/10/someone-tried-t.html

You need to be a sleuth. Quiet and stealth-like as you backtrack.

First, check the WHOIS Directory. This tells you who owns a domain, the domain that is hosting your stolen site. Or even if they are hotlinking (aka robbing you of your images while sucking your bandwidth), you can check here for some clues. This can be made private, and numbers can be falsified, so it's a chance.

If an email was involved, like with Vertical Response, see if you can track the IP address who sent it, or call your host or enewsletter provider to see if they can help you track it down.

If there is a phone number or any type of contact information, use it. But be nice. They could suddenly dissapear.

Oh, and to get tipped off that this actually happened, set up a Google News Alert for your domain name and see what people are saying about you. Or try Andiamo Systems which is another system, but I've never tried it.

ps: If your website has been stolen, tells us about it via Comments!

pps: hi Vertical Response! I know you just Andiamoed this article. :)

How to Find Good Blog Post Ideas from your OWN Website

Stumped for a blog post idea? Chances are, you're like Dorothy with her ruby red shoes - you have the answers the whole time. Instead of clicking your heels three times, just log into your your site stat program and check your Keywords.

What are site stats? They are the statistics of who is coming to your blog, how they got there, which websites sent them, which keywords or keyword phrases they used in a Google or Yahoo or any kind of search. Most hosting companies provide these for free, but there are better ones out there, also for free. Look into Google Analytics and StatCounter. Both stat programs are free and invisible.

The Keywords people are using to find your blog are actual words typed into search engines by people interested in what you have to say. You may be scoring on the term "best ceramic flat iron" or "moms who make a million dollars" (I just made these up), but what are your smaller searches for? When you look into your keywords for which terms you're getting, look for the terms that are bringing in 1 search, or 7 searches, or 20 searches.

Small potatoes, right? Yeah, well, it also shows that your blog is coming up deep in the search engine rankings for this term, but you need to do a better job of optimizing for it to bring in an easy 50, 400 or 900 new searches. And chances are, you didn't meant to optimize for it at all. A combination of words from different posts, or you side panel, made your post rank for this particular term. Now all you have to do is write a well optimized post for it.

Gold SEO Nugget Example:
One rainy day, I was sifting through keywords, curious as to how people were finding FashionMista.com. A keyword phrase caught my eye: "do I have to be a good drawer to be a fashion designer."

Excuse me? No, of course you don't. But you had to ask a search engine that question? Fine, I thought. I'll give you the answer. I titled my post that exact question because the Title is the Page Title for that web page, and the Page Title is a very hot ticket for optimizing for SEO. Next, I made sure to weave those phrases throughout my copy in a way that made sense, and I included a picture, filled in the alt tag for that picture, and linked the picture. All very important steps for SEO. Search engines do look for images, and if the image has an alt tag, and is linked, the engine considers those terms especially important, which give you more exposure via higher rankings.

The result? FashionMista is at the top of searches for related queries (yes, people continue to ask the question), and the image I posted is on page 1 in Google Images for "fashion drawing".

So, it pays to sift through your keywords for a quick and easy blog post idea. Happy hunting!

ps: if you do want to learn how to draw for fashion, get the fashion drawing book, 9 Heads, which is fabulous. There are lots of poses, pleats, and ruffles to chose from as you practice.

If Someone is Stealing Your Code, Can They Crash Your Site?

If someone is stealing your code and providing it to others to use directly from your website, aka hotlinking, then yes, they can crash your site. If the code they are using contains an image, for example, from your website, and that image is coming directly from your server, like img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/yourimage.jpg, then it is your bandwidth that is allowing that code to work.

It's like using your electricity. If your neighbor somehow spliced into your electricity, and used his air conditioner and TV all the time, and one day you went to blow dry your hair, and you blew a fuse, this would be the equivalent to your site crashing. It would not come up anymore for your visitors. You, not knowing that your neighbor is stealing from you, you call the electric company to get more power. Ok, you don't do that for the electric company, but you would do that for your hosting company. And they would of course charge you for the additional use of bandwith, to prevent your site from crashing again.

How can you avoid this? Start by setting up a Google Alert for your website. Make it for www.yourwebsite.com. If code is being publicly posted somewhere for others to take and use, this will alert you to it. Next, put on some hotlink protection, which only allows specified domains to display images from your website. Learn what to consider if you do this.

Hotlinking and Your Bandwidth

I discovered a most disturbing thing: a scetchy free blogging software company was providing my free desktop wallpaper to its members. But not only that, it was offering it from my website, meaning, if someone were to plug in the code the way they suggested, then every time that blogger's website showed up, it would be pulling the image from my website using my bandwidth. You can see a picture of it on my Spammy Scammers blog, where I've exposed them. Now, as you all may know, I do offer pretty, feminine free desktop wallpaper. So, as with any file, purchased or not (like an e-book), it is subject to being thrown online somewhere without the owner knowing.

Posting an image directly from another person's website is called "hotlinking" or leeching. It's when you steal an image and the bandwidth from one website and to display it on your website. Bandwidth is basically the invisible stuff you pay for that shoots from your server at your hosting company through fiber optic cables and into people's computers to allow them to view your site. That's not the exact definition, but basically what it does. You know how when Daily Candy features a website, and sometimes you can't get to it? Well, it's because it crashed because it exceeded its bandwidth. There were too many people trying to access it at once, trying to pull images and text from it just by viewing them.

You can prevent a bandwidth crash by contacting your hosting company to ask them to increase your bandwidth (and your monthly charge). Or, if you know you're going to be on Daily Candy, increase your bandwidth for that month. But if you're doing well, then you'll have to keep that bandwidth increased for good...hopefully! A hosting company that has a technical system in place to provide more bandwidth on demand (like an overdraft safety account with your bank) is MediaTemple.

So. How can you prevent Bandwidth Theft, as I call it? You can get hotlink protection, and block every domain from displaying images from your site, except domains you specify. This does not prevent people from "grabbing" images off your site, uploading them onto their servers, and displaying them. Which isn't always a bad thing for PR reasons. Social bookmarking sites like StyleHive displays and shows off your images if someone socially bookmarks one of your product pages. BUT, if you have hotlink protection and did not allow for StyleHive to be an accepted domain, then your images won't show up there for people to drool over. Get it? So just make StyleHive an accepted domain in your code for your hotlink protection.

I went the route of hotlink protection because I was getting monthly alerts from my server that I was exceeding bandwidth, but my traffic was remaining the same. Mysterious, right? I attributed it to the fact that I used to store and serve all of my images for my blog, FashionMista, on my Katie-James.com server. As FashionMista started to pick up, particularly one image in Google Images that was doing particularly well, I was basically stealing from myself. So I got real hosting for FashionMista and started putting images over there. But, I was still getting the alerts. And now I think I know why. Hotlinking.