I am posting this so I can refer people to this post when they call me… and I get around 7-10 calls daily for sites from people who want every bell and whistle they can think of on the site. From the start. Without any budget or forethought.

So this was a refreshing read about website simplicity and landing pages. Well worth the read. In the article they call out these six methods for web design that can drive away clutter and improve user experience.

1. Only what you need.
   The biggest aspect of simple web design is only showing what’s needed to make the sale, and nothing more.
2. Reduce clicks. The less clicks it takes for a customer to buy a product, the higher returns.
3. The “Grandma” rule. If your grandma (or any elderly person) can figure out how to buy a product for your site, odds are it’s put together pretty well.
4. Reduce the number of columns. Each time you add a column to a page, the content is pushed into a smaller and smaller space.
5. Give less options. There is an added stress put on web shoppers to make decisions.
6. Keep it clean. A clean design keeps visitors happy.

Examples are given that any smart retailer or merchant could follow for success.

You get VIP listing placement, a full profile, and more.  If you have a local audience and want to rank better for your regional searches, this is a no-brainer as BOTW has always provided good quality link juice (even if the page rank bar shows nothing yet.)

SIGN UP NOW and good luck!

As PPC marketers we will want to remain aware of the phrases that are suggested for our “money terms” and bid accordingly. Phrase match and Exact Match will start to become more important in many cases as Suggest “structures” the queries.

According to onestat, the 10 most used numbers of word phrases compared to October 2007 in search engines on the web are here…

I think that Google Suggest will shift these numbers quite a bit, and with it, the need to react as search marketers.

A few other thoughts.

1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines - without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without search suggest offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
2. Google Suggest Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position. For example, typing “ipod case” into Google with Suggest shows the first suggested feature as “ipod cases at Wal-Mart” - grabbing people and then offering up the organic page free from PPC ads that use “Wal-Mart” in their keywords.
3. Google Suggest Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
4. Google Suggest SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your tradename is offered in Google suggest results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
5. Google Suggest Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google suggest constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
6. Google Suggest Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google suggest can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
8. Hijacking Google Suggest May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google suggest so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.

I think that this will have a measurable impact on how people search - possibly forever.

“The [seo] challenge comes from a combination of:

• The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to
• Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

…. “Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

One undercurrent effect here is that there is a shift in responsibility for the success of a site from the SEO (with his bag of tricks, magic levers and dials) to the site owner (producing relevant, domain specific content worthy of links.) It also may spell a major shift in the role of SEO to content producer for some companies, and not a lot of SEOs will be able to deliver on this.

I’ve seen, time and time again, that getting a company to assign (talented) resources to the production of content is very difficult. Either because of laziness or lack of long-term mindset, there is a rift that develops between the consulting SEO’s recommendations and the company’s willingness or ability.

So, the clients nod at the ‘you’ll need to produce quality content‘ task discussion, when time comes, nothing gets done. Either they will avoid the task altogether or they’ll assign “an intern” or someone that’s already doing 3 jobs to the work… and the output hardly counts as link worthy.

That rift causes huge levels of stress and can be interpreted as a lack of ability on the SEO’s part. Saying “but you’re producing crap content” hardly mends the issue. It will be the responsibility of the skilled SEO to not only identify and recommend the content production, but also in educating clients on the value of this activity.

Image: Mikel Ortega

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As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

With the new Keywords + Placements feature you do not have to create seperate campaigns for keyword and placement-targeted campaigns. In each Ad-group, you now have tabs for each content network method… cool!

This will let you isolate areas of weak or strong performance. So if you’re targeting a home improvement portal with your placements, but you only sell plumbing supplies, you can more accurately limit ad display to pages with plumbing items.

When you choose to run your ads anywhere on the content network, AdWords compares your keywords to available ad placements to find good matches for your ad. (If you have the keyword digital cameras, your ad is likely to appear next to content about digital cameras.) When you choose ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target,’ your ad can show only on the places within the content network that you select yourself.

We should be able to see better stats now on reports, and also be able to tweak bidding based on the quality of a placement-keyword ad’s performance.

So… what’s improved:

1. precision in targeting by adding a “dial” for keywords used in placement ads. You don’t have to appear on irrelevant pages in a given placement when it is not matched to your keyphrases.

2. bidding control - adjust bids to suit the quality of the placement

3. bidding CPM with keywords, not just placements. So you can do either or both.

4. Ability to do better testing with placements. Even though I’m going to approach this carefully, it gives us the chance to split test and multivariate test performance of keyword-specific ads in the content network. This could help with reducing the time necessary to get statistical significance on the sample size

How it works

Keywords are scanned and then Google will scan the content network and find all matches for a given keywords. Your settings determine what happens next. Either it will kick in the whole contextual network or it will use your placements list, and filter it based on your keyword choices.

AdWords also takes keyword matching down to the page level. If a placement has many different pages, only those pages that match your keywords can show your ads. For instance, suppose placement A is a website about flowers, with 100 different pages: five about red roses, and 95 about other flower varieties. AdWords may identify only those five pages about red roses as a good match for your keyword. Your ad won’t appear on the other 95 pages of A, even though you’ve targeted the entire website, if those pages aren’t a good match for your keywords.

What I expect

In addition to saving time on campaign creation, this should help clickthrough rates (CTRs) and performance of campaigns on adsense properties which have general content on most of the site, but have an area of interest to you that has specific content.

I have some campaigns right now that will benefit…Looking forward to using it!

Venn Diagram photo by Lisa Williams used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

Some of the concepts covered

• Make sure the filenames are SEO friendly
• Update your Meta Data
• Check the password protection
• Add a specialty introduction page to help search engines
• Use reading order tags

Enjoy!

It also rekindled my thinking that I need to finally change the name of my firm. You all know what a joy doing that is, especially when you have strong search rank for your old domain name.

I hear this all the time

“I’m a designer and I don’t really do I.T.”
“I’m more of an I.T. person, I don’t really do design.”
“I looked at competitor sites and built something similar.”
“We don’t really look at our site’s statistics much.”
…and on….

I’m old. I’m blessed (cursed?) with a background EXTENSIVE in both I.T., Design, and Search Marketing. What I realized even with the different viewpoints is that SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is far more important than any pixel tweaking or snazzy coding ever was or would be to the growth of a web business. I imagine I see the world like those flies that have 100s of lenses each giving a slightly different angle on things.

In 1998 when I started, I was all about web design and meta tags, but over the next 3-4 years, through 2002, I did more and more real search marketing. By 2004, it was almost full-time, a split between organic SEO, PPC, and landing page optimization. Design was done as a necessary vehicle to achieve search rank - sort of a super-landing-page project (in my mind at least.) Site Creations, Inc. doesn’t fit anymore. I’m going to have to rebrand soon to be faithful to this change.

I feel that no design should be started without a true SEM expert present at the meeting, and throughout design. This introduces confusion into my sales activity, of course. Most people come to me wanting web design, often for abysmal product offerings. I want to help, but unless they have a great offer, and truly understand how conversion-driven design works, I have a hard time staying enthused unless we can address some of the underlying issues first. I thought David Rodnitzky did a nice job of summing up one way this can work:

….frequently pitch clients on a combination of ongoing SEM consulting and a one-time usability tune-up. Again, this is a win-win situation – I get more of the client’s business by charging for the usability assessment, the client gets a much better converting Web site out of the deal, and we both end up satisfied with the increased success of the search engine marketing campaign….

….it’s important as a consultant to try to bring these folks at least a little closer to earth and establish realistic and clearly understood goals at the beginning of the relationship….

I realize that I.T. and design skills are both vital to the success of many sites - features, functions, branding, and identity are naturally very important. But when “expertise-egos” get in the way, you lose. When that feature is taken too far for no good reason, or when that customer-driven design compromise makes you feel defensive, it’s time to hand over the keys.

From Google:

“Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information. The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or lower than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic. Automatic matching won’t allow your spend to exceed your budget, and it also won’t affect the traffic you’re currently receiving. In addition, automatic matching will have no impact if your campaigns already capture the majority of relevant traffic.”

I’ve not used this system ( I wasn’t in the beta ) but even just reading this email I can already list at least 9 things I dislike about it.

1. It does the equivalent of keyword research on the fly, trying out keywords to see if “they stick” based on Google’s data. This removes the human from keyword research. My experience is that 80% of keyword research is ELIMINATION of poor quality choices before you spend money on using them in your campaign. In other words, there is a lot of intuition applied based on advertiser domain knowledge and automatic match eliminates that phase. While some may think this approach is a good way to learn keywords to use, I think there are better ways, especially when they involve harvesting keyword data and then doing some smart detective work on the results.

2. The almost impossible task of creating negative keywords that will negate the constant algorithmic display of Google-chosen keywords. Think “automated embedded match without the associated automation on the negative embedded match side…. How often will you check it? How often will amateur or new advertisers? I’m guessing never. So you will very likely end up advertising for phrases where you do not offer the product being searched for - a classic waste scenario.

3. The enabling of the system by default. Many advertisers won’t know what hit them. While Google has assured everyone that this is an optional system, it would be likely that it will be turned on.

4. It further dismantles the smart idea of keyword-specific URLs and landing page parameters, not to mention dynamic keyword insertion. Caveat - I have no idea how Google will handle existing exact match and phrase match keywords - I’m assuming it will use the old rule of most-restriction-first-shown.

5. It spends your budget. All of it, on your behalf. With my clients, I prefer to ease “up” to their daily budget. That means starting with precision matches and loosening them gradually to find a sweet spot between relevance and volume. This way you don’t waste money or possibly reduce quality score while you tweak your campaigns or testing (by throttling our ads.)

6. It encourages lazy adwords management. When your ad campaigns are running, having them unattended can create an unhealthy black box between you and your pay per click. The variety of auctions, bid types and match types already has advertisers perplexed - and adding another dimension will make it worse. I really worry about “rush” and “fire and forget” Adwords solutions. They are insanely wasteful. This is why I hate turnkey PPC setup programs.

7. The only way you can see what queries are generating ads is to turn on a Search Query Performance report and watch for irrelevant queries - then create negative keywords for them as they come up, whack-a-mole-style. A never ending cycle that few advertisers will remember to do.

8. Advertisers will need to look at the special Automatic Keyword Performance data in reports to see how well these automatic matches are working and add special tags to your destination URLs for logfile analysis. This means yet another tag on the URLs.

9. Google does a pretty bad job of limiting broad match. With this already causing grief, are we really going to make things better by loosening it further? Yes, I know - some of you will say that broad match has its place in pay per click marketing. As Brent Hodgson expertly points out, perhaps that it’s a way to cast a net and capture heretofore unknown keyphrases. If you have endless funds, yes. But it’s a bit like testing newly designed bulletproof vests on real humans - it’s nice when you get it right - but when you don’t, it’s bloody expensive. I think other keyword development tools + log analysis + intuition + internal search logs make a hell of a lot more sense.

The right way to do Adwords

Take the time to grow a keyphrase list, divisions into thematic adgroups, and built up a collection of negative campaign and adgroup keyphrases that use phrase and exact match. Easing into your budget using split testing of ads and optimization of landing pages, you can eliminate broad match (conceding: except on your experimental campaigns.) This process alone can improve the conversion performance of your campaigns by a factor of three or four.

I should underscore that I’ve not used the system, but I’m very familiar with adwords and extended broad match issues. Is there a chance that the algorithmic remnant-sale system will work? I guess, but only if your Adwords campaigns were AWFUL to begin with and you’re willing to throw money to the wind and see where it lands.

Update:  Some real world data about this feature has been posted by Jim Gilbert and Mike Churchill

Ok, it’s the middle of the night and I’m sitting in a rock hard airport chair, but my mind is on the takeaways that I have from the SMX Social Media conference. Much of this I knew, but it was heavily re-enforced.

The bigest benefit, as with most of these small shows, is the contacts and friendships I have started or continued. I think the best in the world were at the show, and for clients who seek out these people, huge success awaits.

While I think the overall presentation quality was high, my favorites were Randy Woods‘ well-grounded discussion and Rob Key’s insightful discussion about tribal culture and Second Life. I was also impressed by Brent Csutoras’ discussion about link building.

But the client-marketer relationship was the one thing that bugged me most. Nobody seemed keen on sharing information about this essential element of the SMM profession, yet I could definitely sense lots of folks were seeking it. I often wonder if conference organizers should think more about the harsh, real-world realities of getting programs like these in place. Or perhaps there’s just no way to wrap that up into a single presentation.

20 Take-Aways:

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is terrific for link building, not for conversions. This is a major change for many marketers to internalize and incorporate into their offering.
2. It takes a special kind of client/consultant relationship to make SMM work. It’s closer to organic SEO work than any other web marketing in the “grind-it-out” nature.
3. SMM cannot be sold as a one-off service or “by the campaign.” Too many external variables mean you have to execute many campaigns over time to hedge your bets. To sell as a one-off service is to invite failure and client ill-will.
4. SMM requires incredible organization on the part of the marketer. Both to keep track of a campaign and to make sure not to break out of acceptable tribal ‘participation.’
5. SMM link building requires a keen eye for linkbait that relates to your marketing goals and finesse to make sure it’s not overtly sales-like in presentation.
6. Vertical social networks should be an important part of any campaign. Smaller numbers of highly enthusiastic players are using these sites.
7. Explaining SMM to clients is going to be very, very difficult. But those who have an inherent curiosity and willingness to participate will earn a strong competitive advantage.
8. Having a strong network of friends is essential to SMM, and that network requires daily nurturing.
9. Wikipedia makes Digg look like a baby traffic wise, and there are opportunities…but…
10. Wikipedia sessions feel a lot like COBOL classes. Even if the people are smart, that whole thing requires a really strong level of patience and persistence. But 5m+ page views daily makes marketers salivate.
11. People need to create policies to outline who owns SMM profiles, what happens when there is a change of hands.
12. To succeed in social network marketing, plugged-in individuals who know the “tribe’s habits” will win. 20-year PR veterans need not apply if they are still in the mindset of the press release or are unwilling to spend time participating before promoting. Plenty of people have got in trouble.
13. There are a lot of really smart people in SMM. Compared to other forms of marketing, the growth and opportunity aligns with trends towards authenticity, word-of-mouth, and making up for short consumer attention spans.
14. One of my greatest worries is that clients will write off SMM while their competition runs with it. I worry because catch-up is a tough game to play in SMM and you can’t rush it.
15. Even one SPAM slip-up in a social network can ruin an entire branding or SMM effort. Social networks have zero tolerance for screw-ups. Re-building a profile can take 6 months or more of hard work.
16. SMM is risky if your brand is fragile or an easy target - putting your brand out in the public eye requires awareness of the cost-benefits. Almost always it’s worth it - that is if you sell a decent product, but you will need to weather the storm of negatives that will come your way with skill.
17. Advertising agencies don’t get it, for the most part.
18. SEO/SMM are joined at the hip for many things and a link building effort can stack up dozens if not hundreds of authority links…but direct-click traffic itself, independent of the SEO/link advantages, can be significant.
19. Participation in social networks - real participation - is a requirement, and is very time consuming. I left wondering who will pay for this time.
20. Red-eyes suck.

A few other places to get SMX social-media related information. Add more to comments and I’ll add to this list with ‘follow’

Coverage of the Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales panel
More coverage of the Social Search: The Human Challengers
Social Media Marketing Essentials
Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking