I often receive notifications from various online entities informing me of scheduled downtime for their site.  Surprisingly, many of the sites simply 404 or 403 their pages while their site is down.  I was amazed by the large sites that were 404ing during maintenance.  It just goes to show that many webmasters are actually webamatures.  A client recently asked me for a best-practice recommendation on website maintenance which brought this topic back to mind and made me decide to write this post.

Choosing a Maintenance Time
The first thing you need to consider when choosing when to take your site down for maintenance is during your lowest volume hours.  The easiest way to do tell, if you don’t know already, is to look at both your sales volume and your analytics data.  Both should clearly point to period that should be off-limits to downtime.  When you look for an appropiate time of day, be sure to examine the same day that you plan on taking the site down.  If it’s going down on a Saturday, look at the previous Saturday’s data.

Google Analytics Report Showing Traffic by Hour - It's pretty plain that low tide happens from midnight - 5am.

When Do Search Engines Come?
It’s very important you don’t take your site down during your heaviest indexing time.  Google indexes each site a bit differently and the best way to tell when they are the most active on your site is to pull a raw log file for a week and use a program like Sawmill (my personal favorite) to analyze the log file and show you when Google is most active on your site.  Below is a screenshot of a Sawmill report on Googlebot’s hourly activity crawling a website. (The actual report is far more detailed than the line graph below)  Google’s spidering drops off during the same non-peak hours as human traffic does, and interestingly enough, Google’s 9:00pm spike in traffic coincides with an actual spike in user traffic.  Keep in mind that Googlebot and other search spiders do not execute javascript so they will not fire the analytics tracking code.  Your server’s raw log file is the best way to see their activity.

Sawmill report on Googlebot's hourly activity.

Server Side / NOC Processes
If your server is scheduled to be backed up at a particular time of day, every day, it’s important to either stop, pause, or postpone your backup if possible.  You don’t want your backup file corrupted when you take your server down.  Also, if your downtime is for a rather extended period, you don’t want your backup to pick back up during high-traffic and bog down your machine.

Website Maintenance Notification for Users
No matter how well you plan, you will probably still have some people visit your site during your downtime.  The best thing you can do is serve up a page notifying them of the maintenance in progress asking their patience and give an indication to when the site will be back up.  I’ve seen some maintenance notifications that put up a counter that counts down to when the site is expected to be live again.  A growing trend is to place an amusing graphic for users who happen to show up.  I saw the placeholder below on a site once and grabbed a screenshot.  It might not be appropriate for your website, but an amusing message can go a long way to bringing a customer back who otherwise might try a new company.

I can't remember where I saw this maintenance message, but it made me smile.

Website Maintenance Notification for Search Spiders
One visitor you definitely don’t want to ignore is a search bot.   You don’t want them to think even for a minute that your site is broken.  Sure, they are understanding, but imagine if you had to take your site down several times in the same week.  Not good.  I rarely allow a client to serve a 404, even when they remove pages.  404s mean BROKEN.  What’s worse than a 404?  Serving up a temporary holding page for every requested URL with the server returning a 200 OK.  I see this a lot.  It’s really not good.  When your site goes down for work, you need to return a 503 server response.

503 Service Unavailable:
The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay may be indicated in a Retry-After header.

Google’s own Webmaster Central Blog says that they prefer to receive a 503 response instead of a 200 or a 404.

Configure a 503 Response
Unfortunately configuring a 503 response isn’t as straight forward as flipping a switch.  There are several different methods of implementation depending on your server technology and version. I recommend a little bit of research and testing before D-Day.  Setup a single page to 503 and then test the server’s response using a response header checker.  Be sure your 503 response specifies the time you expect to have your site back up and running.

Back it Up Before You Take it Down!
Enough said.

To sum up, a little bit of knowledge and research will go a long way to retaining your rankings and customers during a planned site outage.

Feel free to bookmark this post and reference it again in the future when planning required website or server maintenance.

I was asked by a new potential client to review the SEO reports sent to him from the SEO that I’ll be replacing.  I was appalled.  I absolutely could NOT believe what the other company is passing off as “SEO.”  They were posting links on many, many spam link farms and calling it “link building.”  I checked 22 of the sites where they got links for this potential client and all 22 of them are complete spam sites.  The other “SEO” used the exact same anchor text for every link they created and obviously spent no time checking the quality of the linking sites. What a joke.

Another section of this report showed something they were calling “social marketing” which included posting “articles” to Google Knol.  I checked and 87/88 of the posts the “SEO” made on this company’s behalf have been flagged as spam posts.  Want to tell Google you’re a spammer? Spam one of their own properties!!  What’s worse than spamming Google Knol with these articles?  Posting the EXACT same articles – the ones that Google flagged as spam – on a couple dozen other sites.

They also did something called “PDF Distribution” and I was amazed to see that they were “distributing” the exact same PDF to 11 sites at the same time.  Also, many of these “PDF Distribution” sites present content to Google as flat HTML, not as a PDF.  All Google sees is tons of duplicate content on multiple sites.  Google will make a determination which site, if any, is the original owner of the content and exclude all the rest from the listings.  This means that if Google decides one of the “PDF Distribution” sites is the site that owns the content produced for the client, the client’s PDF won’t show up anywhere.

This is the EXACT thing I talk about ALL the time.  The “SEO” company – that I wish I could name – is a disgrace to our industry.  The company is completely shooting their client in the foot and ruining their chances of ranking competitively anytime in the near future.  It’s going to take a lot of work to convince this potential client that I know what I’m talking about, I know what I’m doing, and I don’t spam because he’s trusted this other company for so long.

A guy contacted me from what seemed to be a decent size company.  It was a company related to one of my DMOZ categories which is how he found me.  We had a couple of nice phone conversations which led to him asking for a proposal from me.  Since my proposals take about two hours to put together I scheduled it for the following week.  I put together my normal proposal with summaries of all the different points on the website that need correction along with costs for fixing the problems.  Of course my proposals also include an outline of ongoing SEO services and the associated fees.  When the potential client received the proposal he called back very annoyed that the proposal did not include every detail of my plan.  He said that he and his partner were disappointed in it and that it seemed to be a “templated proposal.”  In all my time of doing this, I’ve only heard that once before.  It was a company that was hiring their own inexperienced SEO to be in-house and wanted expert direction without paying for it.  My proposals are detailed enough for someone who is not executing the plan.  After quite a bit more talking it became quite apparent that all they wanted were instructions for an SEO campaign.  For example, I said that his HTML was invalid and that we’d correct that – he demanded to know how.  Not “how” like we’ll check the code with the W3C validator and make corrections, he wanted step-by-step instructions for interpreting the W3C reports and implementing the fixes.

While this strange discussion was going on they were also trying to get a DMOZ listing from me even though their site didn’t qualify for one because it was a thin affiliate site. (strictly lead-gen; collecting and selling applications)  They kept insinuating that if I gave them a DMOZ listing and the detailed proposal I would for sure get the contract.  It was pretty clear that they were just trying to get the DMOZ listing and steal my instructions then run.

I say all this for the benefit of less-experienced SEOs.  If someone pushes for in-depth details of exactly what you are going to do to help their site become more search engine and user friendly, put up a red flag in your mind.  I’m not saying that you should entirely obfuscate your plan, but don’t give a detailed how-to.  Let them know that you will be link-building, but don’t reveal your proprietary methods.

I enjoy showing people why it’s important to include faces on websites near things that the want to highlight.  Studies show that the human eye is attracted to faces and those faces can have a profound effect on a person’s attitude about something.  Placing a smiling face near an item you want to highlight will increase the item’s exposure and make it more likely that  a user takes the action you want.  For example, if it is important to you that your users contact you, you should place a picture of a nice smiling person near the link to contact you.

Faces are so important to users that there have been several studies conducted about the effectiveness of faces on websites.  A technology developed by the military to track a soldier’s eye movement for weapons targeting was adapted to track a user’s eye on a web page and create what’s called a “heatmap” of their activity.  The hotter a region, the more people looked at it.  Below I will provide a couple of examples of how people look at web pages.

Below is an example of very effective image placement.  Notice that the heatmap has what looks like a couple of legs in the middle.  This can be attributed to how the human eye is attracted to the image.  Notice that both “legs” slant to the right from top to bottom.  This is because the user’s eye was attracted to the image from the top text and then pulled downward, then the users examined the text below the images.  If you have something important to promote, the item your’re promoting needs to be directly below the image because you can see that the users viewed the text directly below both images on the page.

Heatmap of a page with two strategically placed images. (click for a larger version)

Below is an example of an article containing a face.  Notice that the person’s image has the most concentrated views.  The face brought the user’s eyes down from the title, the bold text underneath the image also attracted attention, then the users eye moved down to the “register now” link.  Notice that users mostly scanned the text of the article after reading the title.  This shows that a good “hook” is important in the title to entice the reader to go farther.

An example of the draw that a human face can have on a webpage. (click for a larger version)

Below is an example of a giant “sale” image that went completely ignored.  The users likely saw it in their peripheral vision, saw that it said “sale”, knew that it was an advertisement, and ignored it.  Had they been attracted to the text of the giant sale notice at all, there would be some coloration in that area.  To make this more effective, they could have made the “sale” smaller, included a person’s image on the top left of the ad, and then the important message of “dvd’s from 4.99 directly below the image.

A big SALE ad shouting but going unheard. (click for a larger version)

This brief discussion of strategically placing images on your website should serve as a good guide to get you started modifying your own pages.  Remember, the busier you make it, the more distractions there are from your main conversion goals, so choose your images and placement wisely.  The goal is to guide a user’s eye around a page to find what you want them to find.

I get to talk to a lot of folks about their SEO campaigns.  Unfortunately, I often hear from them after something bad has happened.  Today I spoke with a gentleman who runs a very respectable company that sells a great product.  Unfortunately he partnered with an SEO company that has been running his rankings into the ground.  By all outward appearances the company looked legit but ended up doing what I call “big company SEO”… putting inexperienced people in charge of the most important parts of the campaign.  The bigger the company, the more clients they have.  The more clients they have, the less attention the give to the details.  The more details that are overlooked, the more it hurts their clients.  All they had to do was care enough to educate themselves.  I found the problems affecting the site within a just a few seconds.  Unfortunately, the damage the “seo” company did will take a lot of work to undo.  The guy I talked to will have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars over many months to repair what these so-called experts did.  It just goes to show that just because a company is big, doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.

All you have to do is contract one of those cheap link building companies from India that send you spam emails.  I heard from a guy a little while ago who has a great baby name site that he spent a lot of money and time building.  He contracted a company to do “SEO” for him and within just a couple months he was ranking pretty well… in India.  Yep, the SEO company he partnered with must have farmed out their link building services to an Indian company that was just out to make a quick buck.  It looked like the Indian company had a large network of sites and all they did was just place a link to the client on each of their sites.  Since all the new links came from India, and the Indian links accounted for most of their link base, naturally their site ranked in India.  What’s the fix?  Well, it’s a painful one.  He has to get the site out of that network and start building real links.  The only thing is, when those Indian guys click “delete” most of the client’s link base will be gone at the same time making a huge spike in their link decay rate which will plummet their ranking.  That’s not that big of a deal since their only ranking is in India, but the problem is that it will take a long time to recover from that loss because they will have to start from less than scratch.  I wish the guy had the money for my services and I hope that if he contracts another cheap SEO company that he’ll know what to ask.

PDF (Portable Document Format) files are a great way to give your users a “take-away” from your site, but it’ll only work if you know the following tips.

Branding
Way too many PDFs in the search results are just blank documents with nothing other than their contents.  If a user stumbles across your PDF in the search engines, they should at least have a good idea where the content came from so they can visit your site.  You should always make a PDF a stand-alone document with your company’s name and contact information.  This will help users find your actual site if all they found was your PDF.  Branding the PDF is also very important for users that might print out your PDF for later reference.  If your PDF doesn’t have your contact info, they’ll never remember where they got it.  Think of it as if you have of a product that can be found in a brick and mortar store – you’ve got the same (or better product) with a better price than the box store because of your lower overhead.  Let’s say your product is a faucet.  Your potential customer may print out a product data sheet and hand it to their contractor saying that they want that product at that price.  If the box store can’t match or beat the price, the contractor will have to go search for the product again.  If you had branded your PDF, they would go right to your site to find it.

Proper Title
PDFs are often created using the PDF distiller to print a document from Word.  When you do this, the PDF is titled something like “Microsoft Word-documentname.pdf.”  That’s a terrible name, especially if you save your Word documents by product number.    The title in a PDF can control the blue link in the search engines for your PDF and if the title is “Microsoft Word-DM3429-r-1342.pdf” that’s what is going to show up.  That’s never going to attract a user.  You should save your PDF with a good descriptive filename of the product and also change the meta title to reflect that name.  (More on that in the next section)

Meta Data
Each PDF has meta data associated with it, just like an HTML webpage.  This data can help control what is displayed in the search engines for the document.  In Adobe Acrobat you can access this information from “File -> Properties.”  There are four important elements; Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords.

• Title: The title will often control what is displayed as the blue link in the search engines for the PDF.  Try to keep your character count, including spaces, to around 50 characters.  Title the document with a good description of the product and your company name if it fits.
• Author: The author is taken straight from the program you used to produce the PDF.  If you used Word, it will pull your first and last name.  If someone else produced the file for you, it will contain their name.  You should change this field to your company’s name.
• Subject: This data is pretty much the same as the description meta tag in HTML.  This field should be a nice description of the content of the document and be topically relevant.  You should try to keep this one to 150 characters or less, including spaces.  Google may still pull text from within the document to display as your description, but this gives you a better chance of controlling the info.
• Keywords: Fill in the keywords with words and phrases related to the content of the document.  Start with a quote, and put a quote at the very end after the last keyword.  Separate each keyword or phrase with a comma.

Create a Text Based PDF
You must create a text based PDF.  If you create a PDF using photoshop, you will get one large image file.  Search engines cannot read text in images therefore your document will never rank.

Save One Version Older
Save your document as one version older than the current version of whatever PDF editor you are using.  Search engines and users are both slow to upgrade to support newer versions of things, so it’s best to use the last version of Acrobat.

Initial View
A PDF’s initial view should be specified by you so the user gets the first page, every time.  If not, it is possible that they could enter mid-document.  The Initial View settings are controlled under “File -> Properties” on the “Initial View” tab.  You should change the Page Layout to “Single View.”  Another option within this window is “Show:” that lets you select what title is displayed at the top of the page.  You should change this setting to “Document Title”

Fast Web View
Fast web view is a great option that allows the PDF to be loaded one page at a time instead of all at once when viewed on the web.  This will get the content to the user faster.  For documents larger than two pages, you should be sure this option is enabled by checking it in the preferences found here: “Edit -> Preferences” and on the “Documents” setting.

“Right-Size” Your PDF
Often when PDFs are created they are saved with the most detail possible which is great for future editing, but can cause serious bloat for the web.  Thankfully Acrobat comes with a feature to optimize the file size for the web.  I use it with every client PDF and have seen some go from 8MB to 700KB.  It’s a pretty amazing difference that makes the file load much faster.  This will make sure the search engines will index the files because if they are too big, the robots will just give up.  This option is available from “Document -> Reduce File Size”

Certify Your PDF
If your budget allows, you should get a certificate to certify the documents.  These certificates are available from the major security companies and Acrobat offers the option from the “Sign” button.  There is an option for “Getting Started With Digital Signatures” from the drop-down menu.  Certs are kind of expensive at around $400 per year, but it’s a nice thing for your users to see.  A digital signature will report to the user that changes have been made to the document in case the document gets scrapped and re-listed on another website and tell them the original owner.

Link to Your PDF
The only way a search engine is going to find your PDF to list is if you have links to it.  You should link from prominent pages on your site that are indexed regularly.  You can also build links to your document from other websites to help increase it’s popularity and get better positioning in the search engines.

Even if you don’t run your SEO campaign or create your PDFS, at least now you know what your employees should be doing.

A great feature of Google Adwords is called Dynamic Keyword Insertion or DKI for short.  Implementing DKI with your PPC campaign allows on-the-fly insertion of a keyword from your adgroup into the title or description of your display ad if the search query that served the ad contained the word.

Let’s say you sell apples online.  Your product line includes granny smith apples, red delicious apples, and McIntosh apples.  Utilizing DKI in your campaign will allow you to present the exact apple that matches the search query, and best of all, it’ll be bold.

In order to make DKI work, you need to define a default word (or words) that will be replaced in the event a query exactly matches your keyword.  You define the word by placing braces around it.  You must remember that the total character count for the field (title, line 1, or line 2) must adhere to the limits Google sets or your DKI won’t fire.

Let’s look at the title tag.  In Adwords you have twenty five characters to communicate your message.  Your default title might read Fresh Apples Shipped Free. We will assume your adgroup contains the apple types listed above.  In order to make DKI work you would enter {Fresh Apples Shipped Free} But wait, that’s 27 characters!  It is 27 characters but since the braces are special operators, they are ignored in the character count.  Since you’ve defined your whole title as the default for DKI, anytime someone searches a word or phrase in your adgroup, it will replace the title in your display ad and be bold.  If someone searches “granny smith apples” your title will display as Granny Smith Apples. Remember that Google won’t capitalize the words on it’s own so you have to enter them into your adgroup as you want them displayed.   Keep in mind that any phrases that are longer than the character limit will not fire DKI and your default ad title will be displayed.

In addition to using DKI in the title tag, you should use it in the ad text and the display URL.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the ad for your apples website displayed this as the URL? www.onlineapples.com/Granny Smith Apples

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is just another trick that can help your ad look different than your competitors.  I think making your ad stand out is nearly as important as it’s position.  If you optimize your ad with DKI and special characters it will likely perform better than the ads around it and will increase your CTR, lower your CPC, deliver more relevant traffic, and raise your overall ROI. Anything you can do to raise PPC ROI will pay you back for the time you spent implementing it.