Archive for January, 2006

One of the most difficult barriers to overcome in beginning a relationship with a new organic search optimization client is the need to face up to the reality of a broken website. “Broken” doesn’t always mean page-not-found errors or web servers going down. Gorgeous, 100% uptime sites with the latest bells and whistles can be very much broken from a SEO perspective. The problems are woven into the “essence” of the site. All SEO work is compromised, as is traffic, for the lifetime of that website.

Cut to the meeting…Here we sit, looking at your website (the one you just spent a lot of time, energy, and money to develop) and I may have to tell you the site is broken.

We’re facing a tense moment of truth. How clients deal with this is telling, and predicts well how any SEO project is going to go. The designer has had free reign to make this shiny thing for you without the hassle with talking to an SEO consultant during development. It’s eye candy, and now we’re going to shred it. Crap.

It’s about this time some designers; fearing for the health of their masterpiece, chime in. All we need to do is tweak the tags! Google does index flash! We can add a site map! … the client is now completely confused, and tension builds. The SEO effort is in jeopardy, and everyone’s motivation to develop a relationship is reduced. The site is doomed to a quiet existence, fed only by the 15% of potential traffic that regular PPC injections can bring.

How can we avoid this? I have an idea…

Our neighbor is doing renovations to their house, and I’ve noticed a stream of municipal vehicles coming by, presumably to issue permits for various phases of the job. Electrical has to sign off before plumbing, plumbing before drywall, and so on. Since each trade is trained in a specific discipline, a process of quality assurance is required by law to reduce the chances of a homeowner being faced with a costly re-engineering of any part of the project, possibly hidden under plaster and paint.

While websites are not physical things, they are still constructed in logical stages. Smart use of CSS and server-side include files can help, but the regular advice of a SEO may guide more than programming. It might help to direct content development, marketing plans, and even some nuggets of opportunity.

Engage the SEO when the site is just getting started (in new design or redesign) and have the site plan audited. Bring them in with the directive of focusing on organic placement, usability, and analytics deployment. Listen to them, and encourage a positive, friendly relationship between all site developers.

With a little planning, we can avoid ripping out walls and ceilings, enjoying the bounty of a well indexed and beautiful web site.

I’ve been noticing a lot of buzz lately about on and off-line media buying being pushed down to the self-service module or into transparent markets. These stories were in the news this week.

• Ebay-like buying and selling of media space. ( see update)
• Lots of folks wanting to move to a transparent media market, something like NASDAQ, but for ad space.
• Google starting to use its auction-based approach to off-line media such as newspaper and radio ads.

But as the media buys are pushed closer to the buyer, will the buyers get it? Will the enabling of simplified media buys and self-service ad marketing generate results or just let a few amateurs get a thrill out of seeing their do-it-yourself ad get flashed on a cable network (but then brought to earth by the silence of their sales phones?) You’d think this type of waste would be short-lived, but my recent view of a two year old Google Adword campaign that had wasted tens of thousands of dollars without any significant sales tells me it might not be so simple.

Many layers of the media buying process may be removed but I think that the demand for skills will move to the analytics side, at least for the smart firms. Those who know the key performance indicators of their business and are able to directly tie each media buy to them will be in a great position to succeed.

UPDATE: 2/6: Rocketboom.com is auctioning off its video blog ad properties on Ebay, bypassing media buyers or ad networks completely. <- this is the future, folks.

I’ve encountered quite a number of potential website development clients this week who’ve sent emails to me that cover 10-12 topics per message in a frantic, nearly desperate fact finding activity. I usually have no idea how to answer their questions.

Stop. Slow down. Breathe.

Categorize your website marketing ideas and thoughts before you call anyone. VERY few web designers have a strategic marketing experience or business development knowledge, so don’t let them organize this for you! It’s your job.

If you think you have a great website idea, it’s worth the time to organize your thoughts. Learn how Google works (yes, the “Advanced Search” button is actually very good) and use it to seek out your competition. Search as a customer would. What are you finding? If it’s not a good idea, it’s not a good idea. I’m sorry, but a website won’t make it better. If it is a good idea, who did it already? How is it different than what you want to do?

Once you feel that you have something, write down your goal events. What are the required steps, goals, entry pages, exist pages, and answers you will need to count a visitor as a customer? If you’re selling products - what are the items that are least competitive, most profitable, and how do you intend to stand out from the mix?

A goal path might be…

Search for “widget”
Click on my site
Click on widget details
Click on buy widget
Click on Check Out
Enter Payment Info
Enter Shipping Info
Thanks for your order <- goal page!

So… what are the chances, then of getting customers through all of those steps? Are you making any money on this order? After your TIME, materials, and the item’s cost, are you walking away with enough profit? Can you do it long term? What is the value of a customer? What is the average profit on a sale? How will you deal with vendor headaches? Returns? Credit Card fraud?

Lastly… to succeed on a website, you have to be very comfortable with computers, email, Google, buying online, searching, and such. I am sorry if this is hard, but it is a prerequisite. If you hate computers, a website is not for you, unless you have a full time staff member who can own the site. I read a competitors’ site the other day that said “Not very computer literate? No problem!” C’mon.

So many brilliant ideas cross my desk. I always wish I could get involved with them all! Feasibility studies are one of my favorite services because I get close to the idea, and learn so much along the way. I hope there are more of these in 2006!

I just got this neat Internet Phone Wizardfrom Actiontec. It’s a little box (about the size of a mini-hub) that you plug into your PC with USB. It then has a phone plug that you stick your phone into.

It makes using SKYPE the same as your regular phone. I can use my much loved Plantronics headset for all calls rather than having yet another pc. of hardware laying about my messed up desk.

So far, it is working great. I have it hooked to line “2″ of my phone system. This way, I can choose local or long-distance calls easily. The Skype voice quality is very good but it is a few db quieter than the same call on an analog phone. Some folks said I was quiet. I’ve boosted my mic some and that helped.

Another neat thing is now I can conference in lots of folks AND record the calls using my “Pamela” Skype tool. So far it’s working great. Hopefully I can both improve service and save a little mula as I work.

Ask yourself this question:

“Within 15 seconds of visiting my site, does the visitor unambiguously head towards the goal(s) I need them to accomplish for my website to be profitable?”

If you’re like many, the answer is “not even close.” Over time, websites evolve until they’re blurry. They lose their focus as demands of new features, sections, and other add-ons come to life.

We recently split websites for one of our best clients. The original site had two goals, and it could not do either very well. Now, they have two sites, each with their own goals. One of those split sites is a lead generating engine, and results have skyrocketed.

Perhaps it’s time to take that smudge test on your own site.

I headed over to Cingular.com to see if they had the new phone I’m considering. The Sony walkman phone caught my eye… I thought I’d check it out. Bad idea…. their site opens a trap door and sends you falling into the world of WTF…….

Please… just show me the phone.

This, I admit is a pet peeve. You’ll be looking at an ad, magazine, newspaper, or some other printed medium, and at the bottom of the page will be the following:

visit our website
http://www.notarealsite.com

My response to this is… no… I’ve got better things to do and while you feel your company should be intriguing enough to prompt me to enter the URL and check it out… I will not. And neither will anyone else.

So let’s look at some printed ad URL references that WOULD work:

Pet Supply Store:

Check out our KITTEN CAM at
http://www.notarealsite.com

 

What it would take: $40 logitech camera, a USB cable extension, and the internet connection you already have (and a kitten.) Put the cam software in the startup folder and have it run minimized. It won’t bother anyone, and kitten cam (and your web traffic) will live!

Example 2: Collegiate Athletics Store

Check out the Wildcats Rumor Mill
Visit http://www.notarealsite.com

Example 3: Clothing Store

Free Outfit Drawing 2/1/06 ($300 value)
Enter your name at http://www.notarealsite.com

Example 4: Insurance Agency (Yes, even they can improve)

Underinsured or Overinsured?
Free: 2 minute calculator at
http://www.notarealsite.com

…. in short, make me WANT to go to your site. Make it worth my time. BE CREATIVE - think about your business like your customers do.

At the Shmoo Con hacker conference, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics called Billy Hoffman says he has a web crawler that acts like you or me. It hits links, javascript, flash, and other page elements like a human does, slowly, with indeterminate pauses. Not only that, Hoffman’s crawler acts like a browser by keeping a cache - downloading only what’s changed as it moves from page to page, killing another tale-tell crawler characteristic. Web crawlers typically ignore javascript, images, and some Flash animations to save power. It’s faster to grab a web page text and index that than to try to grab everything. This makes spiders easy to detect… and to optimize for. Analytics software can treat that traffic differently than human traffic, and our reports can divide it out.

You see, part of the analysis and optimization of web pages in current techniques depends on the spiders not looking at javascript and images. We’ve become used to looking at the site from an efficient, fast crawler’s perspective, and leveraging these elements in SEO work. But a human simulation crawler would throw a wrench into this part of SEO.

It would also make it hard to block bots that were sucking up bandwidth. If you can’t tell what the bot is about, you’ll have to assume it’s human.

I think I’ll write a crawler, too. Mine will be sixpackbot. It will stumble through websites, sometimes three and four times, in circles. It’ll stop for a nap occasionally and then start up again, stopping to hit the john a few times. I’ll ignore robots.txt files, though, cause when sixpackbot is drunk, he goes wherever he damn well pleases.

Happy Friday….

Clickz pointed me to the test being done in NY for hotels in Manhattan. This is expected, and not a huge shock, but what will be important for the future is the use of LOGOS in the details area.

Oddly, in the test, the little details page that pops up did not link the URL shown. So www.holiday-inn.com was not linked in the little box. The title, however, was redirected to http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/hi/1/en/hd/NYCBY.

A click on the sponsored links in the left side of the box ONLY brought up the map bubble, and did not bring up the site, and there were no alternatives to that other than to then go over to the bubble and click. I would have hoped for a rollover affect to SHOW it on the map and a click-to-site effect on the ad. The question is, will advertisers pay for the map data display or the second click on the header?

Hotstop is a map site with subway and bus directions in New York, Boston and Washington DC, but it brings some innovation to the table that pushes forward the public transportation and local advertising paradigm a few notches.

First, Hotstop gives you transfer information for public transit that you can put on your mobile phone, PDA or printout. So, enter a source and destination and you will have not only a great map, but the transfers you need to make to most effeciently arrive. You set the maximum distance you are willing to walk, the maximum number of buses and trains. Very cool. Google also has a pet project called Google Transit in Portland, and there’s every reason to believe they’re watching Hotstop closely. For tourists, one really nice feature is the “point to location on map”

The advertising initiative is the first time I’ve seen a map site actually put street-level ads on directions pages. So if you say you want to go somewhere on 5th Avenue, it may eventually suggest some places for lunch - perhaps with a coupon.

Innovation: Combine Windows Live Local and local advertising and you get a rather high octane mix of cool and targeted marketing. Take that to the cell phone, and you have context. This is where I see this going. Proximity marketing with visual clues, and ads delivered with content to your phone. I wrote about proximity ads a bit last year. We’ll see what happens!

Then, get some of the gamers involved and we can do live paid placement ad properties in urban games. These spaces are left blank by game developers and the properties are sold as placement ads in accurate virtual worlds. Think of it as digital billboards in a virtual world.

Other idea is to allow a pre-visit to a place you’re heading to. Scope out, via virtual reality, the area so you can get around better, and also explain to someone else where to go.