Four critical components for Web site success

Web spam works well when it’s done right. Most spammers don’t do it right. Most SEOs don’t realize when they are doing it.

Take Topix, for example. This well-known news and discussion community resource has been around for years but it has all the hallmarks of a traditional made-for-advertising site: it republishes content you can easily find elsewhere, it is advertising-supported, it produces no unique or original content of its own, and it invites people to comment on its content.

You cannot get any lazier than that when it comes to producing a Web site. Everyone else is creating your content for you and all you have to do is package and present it. Nonetheless, Topix has a lot of inbound links, an active user community, and its search visibility is extensive and successful. Nor is Topix unique in this respect. There are other repackagers out there with similar success. The day of the syndicated article is far from over, but the syndicated content market has both tiers and glass ceilings. You can see the next tier but you cannot easily get to it.

What distinguishes a site like Topix from the typical made-for-advertising (or made-for-affiliating) spam site is intent. Topix intends to stay around for the long hall. Spammers assume their Web sites will be burned out a few weeks, maybe a few months at most. But many other people make mistakes similar to the basic, fundamental errors that typical spam Web sites commit.

Content management systems have been the delivery tool of choice for most commercial Web sites now. You set it up, you pour content into your page molds, and you serve the content dynamically as people show up. The basic CMS makes it easy for you to change the look-and-feel of your Web site, makes it easy for you to add content, and makes it simple to slip your Web site into a forest of other Web sites that all look just like it.

The soft, dirty underbelly of CMS-driven Web content is that it all looks sterile and vacant. I have never yet found a CMS-based site to be interesting in its presentation. That doesn’t mean the CMS stands in the way of your marketing success. Quite the contrary: how you manage your Web content really doesn’t matter for marketing.

There are four aspects of a Web site that contribute to its success: Structure, Organization, Presentation, and Content. As with all things where you have multiple components, you can compensate for deficiencies in one area by developing your strengths in other areas. If your SEO is based largely on links and you’re dissatisfied, all you have to do is produce more content. If your SEO is based largely on content and you’re dissatisfied, all you have to do is produce more links.

So if your structure is adequate, your organization is adequate, your presentation is adequate, and your content is adequate, you have an adequate Web site. Adequate equals Mediocre. If you’re not outperforming your competitors in some area you’re just another tree in the forest. These four components of Web site success work like a graphic equalizer: you can crank it up somewhere, and you MUST crank it up somewhere in order to stand out from the crowd.

If everyone else in your field is hammering presentation, the last thing you need to do is improve your presentation. You don’t compete successfully by following the crowd; you compete and win by leading the way into a new direction. If your competitors have weak structure, you need to improve your own structure. If your competitors have weak organization, you need to improve your own organization. If your competitors have weak presentation, you need to improve your own presentation. If your competitors have weak content, you need to improve your own content.

These four aspects don’t carry equal weight. Wouldn’t it be nice if they did? But if you’re assuming that one in particular consistently outweighs the others, you’re wrong. In some markets, presentation matters more. In other markets, content matters more. You can give yourself a temporary boost by stepping outside the market space’s expectations and doing something different, but once you’ve captured that attention you have to deliver everything else according to the market’s expectations (and it’s better to exceed those expectations because that raises the bar for your competitors and makes you the leader).

Spammers don’t exceed market expectations. They inundate the market with (at best) mediocre or (at worst) useless, purposeless content. They rely upon minimalist presentation because their objective is not to keep you on their sites or have you come back, it’s just to get you to click on a link. Spammers don’t care about structure or organization because their Web sites tend to be very shallow, very simple, very basic.

Is it any wonder that some innocent Web sites are hurt every time the search engines implement new spam filters? If you don’t invest the time and resources into building your Structure, Organization, Presentation, and Content into a unique, useful Web site, you’re just being lazy. You’ll get what you deserve and you won’t deserve much.

Every now and then, when I see people complainig about their poor search visibility, I think of an anecdote that circulated through the SEO community a couple of years ago. Matt Cutts was sitting on a site review panel at a search conference and someone in the audience asked Matt why a particular Web site was not working. Matt’s reply went something like, “Well, you’re linking to 50 other Web sites, none of which looks very interesting” (I’m paraphrasing Matt to make my point).

I have looked at some of the sites these 50-domain wonders produce. They link to every other domain in the footer of every page. They use the same or similar templates for all the sites, just swapping out logos and color schemes. Most of the pages have more boilerplate text and advertising than actual content. I’ve never found myself as a Webmaster or Web directory operator linking to such a site.

Why should I?

Matt very gently (in my opinion) made the point that if you’re building a lot of Web sites, you probably are not investing as much time and care into those sites as you would invest into a single site. I’ll be more blunt: the lazier you are about creating Web content, the more worthless your Web content will be.

I can build some pretty worthless Web content if I want to but if I tell you about a Web site it’s going to have some love and care put into it at some level. I, personally, suck as a Web site designer and everyone knows it. Michael Martinez is not well-known for creating beautiful Web pages. Nearly every pretty page I’ve ever built had someone else’s finger prints all over it. Sometimes I’ve gotten a little lucky. But I invest my heart and soul in content, structure, and organization. Those are my strengths and they compete well against other sites.

Spammers don’t bother to bring anything useful to the table: they don’t build out their content so they have nothing to organize and really no need for structure. All that leaves them is presentation and they make virtually no effort to do anything about presentation. In the Web spam world it’s all about volume. Upload 1,000 new Web sites every day. Get 10 cents per site every day. Whatever.

Spam is not sustainable because it’s predictable mush. The best spam sites I’ve ever seen (and I outed one last April) look really good, have a lot of depth, a lot of content, and they look like people are really involved with them. You do a double-take when you hit one of these sites. You ask yourself, “Is this site real or is it a very clever mock-up?”

It takes a lot of time to create a pretty Web site that looks like people are interested in it. Anyone can buy a burned out spam-script that autoloads spam blogs with RSS feeds. Those sites don’t last long on Blogger or Wordpress. By the time I find them in the blog search, they are usually gone.

RSS-feed driven spam has been around for years and I doubt it’s going away any time soon. But the news reporting industry has maintained its competitive edge over spammers because those companies have full-time employees (or contractors) who spend their days working on Structure, Organization, Presentation, and Content. There are plenty of spammers who buy original articles for their sites, but most of them still fall victim to their own laziness.

Content Management Systems drive laziness in Web design. They are the enablers of the Cheap Web Design Addiction world. If you build your sites through a CMS, the odds that you are competing on Presentation are almost non-existent. If everyone in your field is building “beautiful” Web sites with their CMS tools, no one is competing on Presentation. That is, it’s a yard competition and nothing more. Your success — such as you have found — is coming from Structure, Organization, or Content (or maybe a combination of them).

You can build success through a CMS-based presentation but the odds of your achieving that success plummet dramatically if you allow the CMS to become a crutch. If you build a pretty site today with your CMS, and based on that happy, warm feeling you build another tomorrow with the same CMS, at the end of 50 days you’ll have your own little forest obscuring each of your trees.

The easier it becomes to create Web sites, the more greedy people become. The more greedy you become in a world where it’s easy to obtain what you think you want, the more careless and lazy you become. And as you indulge yourself in your quick-and-easy schemes an objective third party will look at what you’ve done and honestly say, “This is crap.”

Successful Web sites are built through hard work. Once in a while someone gets lucky and hits the jackpot by doing the right thing at the right time but most Web sites need consistent love and labor in order to succeed. The four critical components of Web site success will always be Structure, Organization, Presentation, and Content. You cannot outperform everyone else in all four areas but you can develop your strengths and compete in ways that leverage other people’s weaknesses against your strengths.

And that is how you become Topix in a world filled with spammers, so that eventually people care about and respect the work you’ve done regardless of how little originality you bring to the Web.