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The Hottest 2011 Web Design Trends

2011-09-09T21:23:00.000+08:00

Since we are over seven months into the year I decided it was time to give my take on what may happen in web design in 2011. (At least I thought I should probably write it before the year was over.)

So, over the past several weeks I have read a number of my favourite web design magazines, web design blogs and articles and viewed a number of cutting edge websites, particularly outside of North America, so that I could share some thoughts about what appears to be some of the major trends in website design for 2011. There is nothing scientific contained here, just some observations.

1. Less Use of Flash

It is not the fact that Flash is not a great technology...(when used appropriately it is)...but in the past year or so it has been over used, misused, abused to the point that it has developed a bad reputation. Certainly, the ongoing shenanigans between Adobe (creator of Flash) and Apple (iPhone and iPad) are not helping the situation. Today, websites need to have a clean, uncluttered design, fast loading and above all must be Search Engine friendly. This is a problem for Flash and now with the coming of the new web coding languages of HTML5 and CSS3, together with the explosive growth of web surfing on mobile devices perhaps it is the beginning of the end of Flash in web design.

2. Simpler and Cleaner Design

Simple. Minimal. Uncluttered. There's nothing quite as "attention grabbing" as an honest, straightforward message on a quiet backdrop. Quiet can be interpreted several different ways. Forget black and white or shades of gray, although these are still very popular in certain industries. Think of green, yellow, red or even blue as your primary color. However, limit your palette to two or three colors. Work within the shades of each color for variety and depth. It can be truly remarkable what a few colors can do for effective messaging.

3. Mobile Ready Design

Smartphones, tablets, netbooks, the list goes on and on. There's a dizzying amount of mobile products available to the consumer in 2011. This means your web design must be responsive to multiple devices. Creating a mobile ready website is not simply removing the bells and whistles from your existing design. One of the most important advances is that you can design a whole site and allow your coding to conform to the user's viewing medium. It may be tempting to just create a dedicated mobile site, but that may no longer satisfy your audience. Increasingly, mobile sites include the option to visit the original site. If you do not offer this option or if your original site is not optimized to mobile standards, you are simply not ready for 2011. Forecasters predict that smartphones will outsell personal computers this year, and by 2013 more time will be spent surfing the internet on a mobile device than on a personal computer.

4. Large Photographic Backgrounds

Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and covering the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience. Massive images were once taboo for web designers, but thanks to better image optimization, faster internet connections, and smarter loading methods, designers can gain a lot in some sites by pushing image sizes to the maximum. Trends also point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not overshadow your content, but harmonizes with it.

5. QR: Quick Response

You may have noticed those square barcodes (looks like lots of squiggly unrelated lines) popping up on business cards, magazines or elsewhere, so you may already know that they are a hot trend for 2011. These barcodes are called QR, short for Quick Response. And how exactly does QR translate into web design? Quite well, in fact. Simply take a photo of the unique barcode with your camera phone. Like magic, your phone will call up the website associated with that barcode. The beautiful thing about QR is the flexibility. Feature your QR on your website, in order for site visitors to have a shortcut to your mobile site. 2011 is all about mobility and it will be smart to take advantage of this new medium.

6. Thumbnail Design

Our good friends at Google have introduced the average internet user to thumbnail browsing. The days of clicking through to see the content of a website are now gone. Now, you just click on the magnifying glass and hover. And just like magic before your eyes is a glimpse of what waits on the other side of your click. This is another issue for Flash-based design that is definitely going to be a problem. The preview will not display those elements of your design. As the average internet surfer becomes more internet-savvy in 2011, expect to see more people navigating by these means.

Reviewing Google Plus

2011-09-07T21:20:00.005+08:00

Social networking has grown steadily in scope and importance over the last decade, and over the past few years, Facebook's position as the top dog of social networking services has been solid and unquestioned. Enter Google+. Google's attempts to step into the realm of social networking have been plentiful and almost undeniable failures, but Google+ is undoubtedly their strongest showing yet, and has the best chance of success. It is growing steadily in popularity, but how well does it work and what sets it apart from its competitors? Read on.

Social Networking, Google Style

Google has a long, tumultuous, and mostly unknown and ignored history with social networking. The following is a rundown of their previous attempts.

Orkut: As far as I am aware, this is Google's earliest and (until now) most successful attempt at a social networking platform. It didn't ever gained much popularity in the United States, but it is huge in Brazil to this day, and it also has a following in India and other various countries.

Open Social: Launched in 2007, it's not technically a social network in and of itself. Open Social is Google and MySpace's attempt to create a common programming interface that can be applied across several social networks, allowing programmers to easily integrate these networks into websites and other applications. This has largely been drowned out by Facebook.

Friend Connect: Launched in 2008, Friend Connect was Google's next attempt at a Facebook or MySpace style social network, but it took the approach of using various open standards (including Open Social) to create this network across different types of accounts and websites. I had not even heard of it until I started researching for this article.

Google Lively: This was Google's attempt to create Second Life style 3D environments that could be installed onto any website, where users could log in with their personas and interact with each other. It only lasted for a few months before it was discontinued in 2008.

Google Wave: This was a communications format that was intended to combine features from e-mail, message boards, and social networking schemes to enable a conversation-style information exchange (or wave) that could include various type of media added by various networked contributors. Google has basically abandoned the project, but it still exists under the name Apache Wave.

Google Buzz: A social network that has been integrated into Google's e-mail service, Gmail, since 2010. It allows people to share information with one another in a social networking format right inside the Gmail interface. Ironically, Google Buzz has barely generated any buzz at all.

So what's to say this attempt will be any better? Read on.

Circles

Circles are the core concept of Google+, and the key feature that sets it apart from its competitors. Anybody you wish to communicate with goes into one or more of your "circles", or groups of people you know. You can have a circle of friends, a circle of co-workers, a circle of family members, etc, and nobody but you can see what circles you have or who is in them. Then when you write a status update, you also choose which circles to share it with. This makes privacy a breeze, a fact that sets Google+ firmly apart from Facebook, where privacy settings are terribly complex to manage and seem to change every few months. Even better, when you're setting up your personal information in Google+, there is a place in every field to specify with which circles that information is shared. For example, I have my phone number set up to only be visible by friends and family, but I have my profession set to be visible by all my circles. It's a snap. Then when you go to look at status updates that others have posted (which is in an interface similar to Facebook in basic appearance), you can filter the information by circles with just one click. It works extremely well, and you can color me impressed.

Hangouts
Another unique feature in Google+ is the concept of a hangout. A hangout is basically a video chat room, where you can invite friends and talk freely amongst each other. Webcams are becoming very widespread, and are even built into laptops and netbooks. It sounds great, but it is not without its setup. To even get started with hangouts, you are asked to download and install the "Google Voice and Video plugin", and then you have to find a fríend who is on Google+ (and is in one of your circles) who is willing to do the same thing. However, once you're done with all that, the streaming video seems to work flawlessly so long as you have a good internet connection. Even through the limited resources of a netbook, I didn't run into any hiccups. Once again, I'm impressed.

Missing Features

With all of its clean look and smooth operation, there are some features that are conspicuously missing from Google+. Most notably as of the writing of this article, Google+ lacks any way to set up an account for a business or organization (called "Pages" on Facebook). In fact, Google is actively taking down standard user accounts that are set up for organizations. They claim that they are working on some sort of platform for business accounts, but demand is high, so they risk alienating new users if they take too long. Another conspicuously absent feature is a way of setting up an event, or any sort of calendar entry for that matter.

Conclusion

Google+ is definitely a top-quality effort by Google to break into the social networking field, but only time will tell whether it can topple Facebook from its position as top dog in the pack. For my money, though, it has a good chance. It doesn't have all the features yet, but with its clean interface, simple no-brainer privacy, and fun methods of interaction, I highly recommend checking it out.

Update your bookmark, My blog has a new home!

2011-06-14T02:03:00.000+08:00

IloiloSEOnews.blogspot.com is the new crib on the block. Nothing fancy same old interesting content. The blog is currently experiencing drop in visitor data since the sub-domain transfer so I need to populate again my social media sectors to update my links.

So what else is new? Got a new Facebook fanpage as well for DarkRoom Media (https://www.facebook.com/darkroommedia), you can visit and check the wall for the latest SEO trends gathered from our selected Top Notch SEO authorities.

So update your bookmarks and connect with us again! Be seeing ya! ;)

What are you gonna do now after the Panda update?

2011-05-18T08:06:00.000+08:00

Many of you want more guidance on what you can do to improve your rankings on Google, particularly if you think you've been impacted by the Panda update. We encourage you to keep questions stated below in mind as you focus on developing high-quality content rather than trying to optimize for any particular Google algorithm.

One other specific piece of guidance is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

Here are the questions (with some skeptical answers from Will):

* Would you trust the information presented in this article?

Definitely not. This is a public relations piece which ventures far from the truth. It is patently dishonest.

* Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

Amit may be an expert, but this post is the very definition of shallow. It presents no useful information. It's worse than an eHow page.

* Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

Definitely. This post is yet another regurgitation of Google's standard content-free public relations platitudes.

* Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

It's Google -- we don't really have a choice any more. Google has handed the top SERPs to bland brand sites which lack relevant content -- forcing everyone else into AdWords. Coincidence? Cui bono?

* Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

This article purposefully contains serious factual errors. It is written to obfuscate the truth, which is that the Panda update is a dismal failure which has penalized quality web destinations like MerckManuals and AskTheBuilders.

* Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

Based upon Amit's unwilling to provide honest answers, it is pretty clear that he isn't "driven by genuine interests of readers of the site." This is a bait-and-switch page. The readers came looking for information and were delivered only prevarication.

* Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

Nothing in this post is original. This is simply a mashup of half-truths and misdirection which Google's PR droids have already posted elsewhere. This page should be removed from the search engine results by the duplicate content filter.

* Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

This page provides no value at all. It purports to discuss the Panda updates and instead lists a number of attributes which Google would like web pages to possess. The vast majority of these attributes, however, are not algorithmically measurable. This means that they cannot be part of the Panda algorithm, or any algorithm. This is purely duplicitous behavior on the part of Google.

* How much quality control is done on content?

Quality control on this article was performed only by the legal and propaganda departments. This article has no technical quality to measure. Simply put, the quality is vapid.

* Does the article describe both sides of a story?

Absolutely not. The article equivocates regarding Google's side of the story and completely fails to address the concerns of web publishers.

* Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

Blogger, as a free web hosting platform, cannot be considered an authority on anything.

* Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?

Blogger content is mass-produced by a huge number of creators, many of which do not give their individual pages significant attention or care.

* Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?

The article looks like a cheap cut and paste job from Google's webmaster forums.

* For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

I would definitely not trust health information from any should who could not clearly and objectively explain their diagnosis. This article clearly fails to meet that standard.

* Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

Definitely not. Blogger is a spam pit.

* Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

Definitely not. This article is virtually content-free. It provides absolutely no useful information.

* Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

Definitely not. This article eschews analysis, and in fact recommends against analysis.

* Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

Definitely not. I wasted enough time reading this drivel. I would hate to be responsible for another person being subjected to this soul-sucking post.

* Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

For some reason, Google won't run AdSense on their own pages. Perhaps that should be a hint for the rest of us.

* Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

No one but Google would publish this article, because it is completely lacking in honesty.

* Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

There are no helpful specifics. The "content" is completely unsubstantial.

* Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

There are no details, only broad and useless platitudes designed to deflect criticism of Google's failure.

* Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

The comments are full of users complaining about this content.

Clearly, the entire blogger domain should be penalized for hosting low-quality pages such as this one.

Your Site and the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011

2011-05-16T10:16:00.005+08:00

On April 12, 2011, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and John McCain (R-Ariz) announced proposed legislation that could become the first federal privacy and data security law. If passed into law, The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights will have a huge impact on how personal information is collected, used, and shared by eCommerce websites. And penalties for failure to comply could be high, very high.

The Way It Was - And Still Is

A little background information is required for perspective.

Prior to 2000, the Internet was essentially like the "wild wild west" in terms of privacy and data security. Essentially, there was no regulation. Generally speaking, except in California, privacy issues were not high on the radar screens of government regulators.

In 2000, California became the first state to have an agency dedicated to promoting and protecting the privacy rights of consumers. In 2003, California passed the California Privacy Protection Act of 2003 (OPPA), which was the first state law in the nation regulating operators of commercial websites on online services to post a privacy policy. OPPA in essence became a de facto federal statute because it applied to any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world), and no commercial website would want to attempt to screen out California residents from participation in its services or the purchase of its products.

When OPPA became law, there was no federal privacy legislation of general application. The Bush administration essentially wanted to stay out of the way of the commercial development of the Internet.

Despite the lack of a federal statute of general application (which continues to this day), the feds did get involved with online privacy enforcement through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Empowered by The Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC may take legal actions to prevent unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.

Beginning in 2000, the FTC issued a report to Congress outlining four core principles of privacy protection. Since then, the FTC has taken action against companies that fail to comply with their own privacy policies or otherwise misrepresent their information management practices.

So, although the requirement for a privacy policy originated with California's OPPA, the feds, through the FTC, are empowered to act if a website is deceptive in failing to comply with its privacy policy.

Key Provisions of the Proposed Law

If The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act becomes law, this will change - in a big way. For the first time, we'll have a federal privacy statute of general application.

So, what's new with the proposed law? Here are some of the key points:

* Covered entities - any site that collects, uses, transfers, or stores "covered information" about more than 5,000 individuals during any consecutive 12-month period.

* "Covered Information" - personally identifiable information and any unique persistent identifier associated with an individual or networked device that may be used to identify a specific individual.

* Rights to security and accountability - included is "privacy by design" which requires the implementation of a comprehensive privacy program that incorporates privacy practices throughout the product life cycle.

* Rights to transparent notice and individual participation - notice includes clear, concise, and timely notices of privacy practices; opt–out mechanisms for (i) specific uses of covered information, and (ii) use of covered information by third parties for behavioral advertising; opt–in mechanisms for (i) use of covered information for uses other than processing a transaction, and (ii) use or transfer of previously collected covered information if there is a material change in privacy practices that would create a risk of physical harm; access to covered information; and de-identification of covered information when individual service terminates.

So, what's new with the proposed law? Here are some of the key points:

* Covered entities - any site that collects, uses, transfers, or stores "covered information" about more than 5,000 individuals during any consecutive 12-month period.

* "Covered Information" - personally identifiable information and any unique persistent identifier associated with an individual or networked device that may be used to identify a specific individual.

* Rights to security and accountability - included is "privacy by design" which requires the implementation of a comprehensive privacy program that incorporates privacy practices throughout the product life cycle.

* Rights to transparent notice and individual participation - notice includes clear, concise, and timely notices of privacy practices; opt–out mechanisms for (i) specific uses of covered information, and (ii) use of covered information by third parties for behavioral advertising; opt–in mechanisms for (i) use of covered information for uses other than processing a transaction, and (ii) use or transfer of previously collected covered information if there is a material change in privacy practices that would create a risk of physical harm; access to covered information; and de-identification of covered information when individual service terminates.

How to Choose the Right Copywriter for You

2011-05-14T06:16:00.000+08:00

What Type of Copywriting Are You Looking For?

What kind of copy are you looking for? There are many different kinds. First, there is copywriting by niche specialty. For example: copywriters who only write for alternative health, or financial, or self-help markets. Second, there are copywriters who specialize in the type of copy: landing pages, white papers, video scripts, etc. There is advertising copy. There's corporate copy such as marketing collateral, newsletters, and product literature. There's slick ad agency copy. There's branding, direct response, and B2B. There's web SEO content and web sales copy.

For the sake of this report I will divide copy into two primary types: copy designed to sell and copy designed for other reasons. Now there is some copy that is supposedly designed to sell, but has no way of measurement. The most powerful type of copy and the hardest one to find is the one that sells. If you just want content, you can find that cheap anywhere.

Think Marketing Strategy First, Copywriting Second

What will your marketing strategy be? Unless you yourself know and understand marketing strategy it's important to get some feedback on this. Copy is one part of three things: Your message (the copy), your list (or target market), and your marketing strategy (the process of getting the prospect to your copy, through your copy and to your order page).

Good copy multiplies sales results. But you can't multiply zeroes. If your strategy is off you'll get zeroes. Almost every copywriter offers a "free" consult. But that's like trying to go to your doctor and asking for a free visit for him/her to tell you what's wrong with you. A good doctor will tell you he must be paid for his time, just like any qualified professional.

Usually you get what you pay for, and paying for marketing advice is a good investment because without the correct strategy, the quality of the copy is irrelevant. Keep in mind that you may THINK you know what you need, but unless you are a marketing expert, you may be way off. The right copywriter will be able to help you formulate and clarify an effective marketing strategy, not just write the copy for you. The right copywriter will be a marketing consultant first and foremost.

Which Skill is More Important: Sales or Writing?

Think sales ability first, writing ability second. Advertising is salesmanship multiplied. You'd be far better served having a door-to-door sales person write your copy, than an English teacher, novelist, or business writer.

Why is this? Good writing is persuasive. But getting a person to open their wallet or purse to give you money is going another step further. There is a structure to sales. There is a process that takes a person from not interested, to interested, wanting to know more, and deciding to make a buying decision. That process is different from any other style of writing. In fact great copy can easily be transferred from one media to another. For example, a great sales letter can be turned into a script for a live sales presentation. Conversely, a live sales presentation can be edited and turned into a sales letter.

Experienced professional sales closers are rare. Even more rare are those that can write. There is lots of copy under the category of "marketing copy" that doesn't really get the job done. Copy written by ad agency copywriters, freelance writers, and even journalists who specialize in commercial writing. Unless the copy has the underlying structure of sales and is asking for a response from the reader that is measurable, it's really not copywriting that sells.

There are many wannabe writers out there. And even more wannabe copywriters since it's been turned into a home-based business. Many, who have no background in sales or writing, are attempting it. Sadly, there is an ocean of mediocrity. And with all the deception it can be very easy to be led astray. If you have to choose between sales or writing ability, choose sales. Sure it may not be the most elegantly worded copy, the rhythm may not be perfect, BUT at least it will have the structure of sales. And that's what you are ultimately after, right?

Know What You Want the Copy to Do

Know your outcome. This comes straight from Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Or you may have heard it from Tony Robbins. It's critical to know exactly what you want. Few who go in search of a copywriter have this clarity. This requires some thought beforehand. What specifically do you want the copy to accomplish? What do you want the reader to do as a result of reading the copy? Signup for your free ezine/offér? Compel them to watch a free video. Get them to make a purchase?

When you know your outcome, you will be much more likely to find the copywriter that can help you achieve that outcome. If you are unclear about it, how likely will you be able to find a copywriter who can achieve it? When you can tell the copywriter specifically what you are trying to achieve, they are much more likely to hit the nail on the head.

How Much Will You Invest in Your Copy?

What is your budget? If you only have a few hundred dollars, you may be better off getting a copy critique of your copy or writing a rough draft of your sales pitch yourself and then having a writer edit it - or getting some basic courses on marketing so you have a better idea of what good copy entails.

There are wide ranges in fees: Anywhere from $500, to $1500, $2500, $5000, $10,000, even as much as $25,000 plus royalties on sales. But even at that price range you aren't gonna get a guárantee of results. With business there are risks and rewards. There are too many different factors for anyone to promise you a certain result. If they do, that is a red flag. It can be very risky to take the advice of a rookie copywriter. Like taking legal advice from an inexperienced attorney when you are charged with a crime. Either you purchase a copy critique from a known professional copywriter or have a buddy read your copy.

Make sure what you are saying comes across clearly, Find out if there are any spots where they stop reading, and ask them if the claims are compelling and most importantly believable. If not, why not?

Do You Have Realistic Expectations About Copywriting?

Have realistic expectations. Almost every copywriter promises to make you more money. The truth is, copy is only one part of successful marketing. And even the absolute best copywriters in the world bomb 20% to 30% of the time. Yet no one seems to talk about this. That is why the typical assurance you will see is this: if you don't make money, we will happily rewrite it for free. That's ok on the Internet if you aren't spending a ton of money on your marketing campaign. But what if you ARE spending a lot on advertising or marketing offline to promote? If anybody could actually promise you success, they would promise to make you money or else refund their fee. But they won't, because they don't want to work for free.

Why You Should Consider a Marketíng Partner

How to get the best chance for success: Partner with him/her. The deal that all clients are glad to make that no copywriter wants is this: I'll pay you after I see the sales with a percentage of sales that your copy brings in.

What's wrong with this? It's pretty lopsided. Clients fail to implement correctly or something else goes awry. It's far too easy for the copywriter to end up getting nothing out of the deal. What is fair? Paying a reasonable up front fee and then a portion of sales generated. So be willing to put some skin in the game. The copywriter will work very hard for you when motivated by a share in the potential revenue. Wouldn't you? This is how it has worked with several of the largest marketing companies for many years. The best copywriters in the world realized at some point that they were creating assets for these companies. And that as such they should share in some of the revenues generated.

When you follow these guidelines you can find the best copywriter for you. Especially if you are looking for a copywriter that can boost your sales. You don't need to hire the most expensive copywriter to get the job done.

Stirring Up SEO Trouble

2011-05-06T11:40:00.000+08:00

When you've been in any industry as long as I've been in the search marketing industry, it's easy to get bored occasionally. At those times I find myself stirring up the sh... stuff on Twitter or in comments on others' blogs, forums, etc. You'd think at my age I'd know better. And yet, I continue to do it. I'm not sure if it's a conscious choice, or just a crazy compunction, but no matter the reason, I've been on a roll the last few weeks.

As part of my stirring, I often write what appear to be outrageous tweets and comments on a subject near and dear to SEO hearts (a few still do have hearts, you know ;). The funny part is how quickly people will jump on a comment that seems a little "off" to them. I imagine it's partly their own boredom or perhaps they're trying to find the next interesting thing to blog about.

It's Hard to Argue With Logic

But I love it when they challenge me on my little points of outrageousness because every seemingly nutty comment I write is backed up by a well-reasoned, logical message for which I've spent ages preparing -- usually in the form of an article I've written in the past. While they can challenge the kooky sound byte by using it out of context or saying it's so stupid or how it's finally time to lock me up in a mental institution, they can rarely refute my actual reasoning - if and when they read it. It's much more fun to trash what they *think* I mean.

This weék's bit of fun came when someone mentioned "doing SEO for long-tail traffic" in a blog comment and I corrected them by saying, "Optimizing for the long-tail isn't SEO." BAM, take that!

Of course, long-tail keywords are very near and dear to every SEO's heart because they make up (in aggregate) a huge percentage of website traffic, so my comment was taken with amazement by some of those reading the blog.

Let's face it, you can rarely convey everything you mean in a single comment or tweet. Even though I further explained my reasoning when asked, it didn't matter at that point. The original sentence was set in stone, with my meaning left to be interpreted by others however they wanted.

And interpret they did. The chance to call me out was too great for many to resist, especially since I've been tearing into certain SEOs through my recent rants on link spam. Some Twitter comments were truly golden, such as, "Comment o' the day to disagree with 'Longtail traffic isn't SEO' uttered." And "You can't seriously mean that long-tail keywords can't bring more than a few visits/month?" Even more amusing was the flurry of articles saying things like "He has clearly lost touch with reality. SEO is all about the long tail." While I may have lost touch with reality (that happened after my first child was born!), anyone -- other than a company such as Demand Media -- who believes SEO is "ALL about the long tail" is either an incompetent SEO or hasn't been in the industry long enough to know what SEO for a business website is all about.

Instead of embarrassing themselves, they could have read my article from October, "The Great Misconception of Long-tail Keywords", which explains what long tail is and isn't, as well as the value it brings to most websites. But where's the fun in that?

A Question of Semantics

The irony of this whole situation is that, aside from the snide remarks, I agree with much of what was written about the long tail by others. My main beef is with how some people were defining long-tail keywords.

Because there is no formal training in SEO, we often have different definitions for the same industry terms. But using search marketing terms correctly has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, because not doing so has many consequences. This is why I try to use the original definitions of words -- those that haven't been bastardized by others who don't ever quite grasped the original meaning. For instance, in the case of the term "long tail," I use Chris Anderson's interpretation of it because he's the one who originally coined the term.

Because I can't seem to come up with a clever ending to this article, let me leave you with the following takeaways:

   * SEOs get bored easily.
   * SEOs love to call other SEOs out.
   * SEOs need some standardized industry definitions, but it's likely to be an impossible task.
   * I'm a nut job who doesn't know anything about SEO

How to Monetize Your Web Content

2011-05-04T11:35:00.002+08:00

Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions for webmasters has to be: How do I monetize my web pages? How do I earn revenue from my online content?

As a full time online marketer and webmaster, this is a question I have considered many times and found my own answers through many years of trial and error. Of course, I have taken the passive route in my quest for that online income. This means instead of producing my own products, I market and promote affiliate goods and services. I do no direct selling on any of my websites. I collect no money and I don't even have a payment program or system in place.

All my income and commissions come from referring traffic or clients to the affiliate companies which I promote. Totally passive.

These companies do all the selling, delivery of products, customer support, everything... I just get a small percentage for having referred that customer or client. This passive method has worked extremely well for me but keep in mind, selling your products and services will be much more lucrative since you will receive the majority of the income instead of just a small commission or referral fee.

However, if you're like me and want a more "hands-off," passive income from your web content, here are some of the things I have learned over the years. You might find some of these tips helpful in your monetization. I have placed these tips in the form of a "q and a" format...

1. Should I use Google Adsense?

While placing Google Adsense ads on your site or blog is very easy, the rates are extremely low. You can make 10 to 100 times more by using affiliate links instead of these ads. For example, for one Adsense clíck you could get anywhere from a few cents to several dollars, whereas with an affiliate program you can get from $10 to $100+ for a click which turns into a sale. However, Google is one of the most respected and reliable companies on the web. They pay on time and should not be ignored. I have used Adsense for years mainly because you can't always find affiliate programs for some content and besides, you can place both affiliate links and Google Adsense on your pages.

2. Should I use Amazon?

Another very simple way to monetize your content is to place Amazon products and referral links on your pages. Amazon's referral rates are slightly better than Google Adsense especially if you have high volume sales, but they are still lower in general. However, I have found users tend to really trust Amazon and purchase from them more frequently and more often so conversion rates are much higher than any other affiliate program I have used. For this reason alone, Amazon should be on your list if you want to earn money from the web. I have been using them for years and find building your links is really easy. So too is building whole "A Stores" on a particular topic or line of products.

3. What is ClickBank and Should I use It?

ClickBank is one of the biggest affiliate networks for downloadable products such as ebooks and software. They pay some of the largest commissions. 40% to 50% or more is very common. Very reliable. I have been using them for years and you should include some ClickBank products on your pages. Please note that ClickBank does deduct a small percentage of your commissions to cover any returns, but it also means you don't have any dropped commissions - once you make a sale, you will get paíd for it.

4. What are Affiliate Networks?

Affiliate networks, like Commission Junction and LinkShare, are major players in the online affiliate world. These affiliate networks represent thousands of companies which provide products and services that webmasters can promote. They handle all sales transactions and send out your commission checks each month. Most of my affiliate programs are through these affiliate networks with CJ being the top one mainly because they have excellent feedback and tracking.

5. How do I Find a Profitable Affiliate Product or Service?

Regardless of what you're promoting, you must be very careful to pick quality products that are closely related to your content. These two factors will mainly determine your conversion rates, although product ads and display images do play a small part. If you use a network like Commission Junction, they will indicate which company is making the most sales and will also tell you which ads are getting the highest return with the actual dollar amount (EPC earnings per 100 clicks). I always use this data when picking which companies and products I promote on my sites.

6. Why do I Need to Create Different Income Streams?

The real beauty of running an online business is that you can have many different income sources which pay you each month. You should plan on having at least 10 to 20 income streams. If one should dry up, you will have the others to depend upon. Once you have quality traffic coming to your website, it is just a matter of placing different affiliate links on your pages. I like including at least three or four different companies on a page, this way you can easily create different income streams for the same page. Don't just rely on one company or product. Have many different affiliate links and companies throughout your site.

7. What Should be Your Main Strategic Objective?

Don't make this mistake - instead of making one sale and getting paid for it once, pick products and services which give you a recurring or residual income. You do the same promotion and work but get revenue for years to come. I am still earning income on sales I made five years ago. This will significantly improve your bottom line or your return on investment. Products and services which have a monthly billing element are good candidates for residual income... such as web hosting, autoresponder services, telecommunications and so on. Don't rule out forming partnerships with businesses in the same niche as your website. You might be surprised at the response you get.

Effectively monetizing your web content will largely determine if you succeed or not, so try some of the tips above. Of course, there are many other ways to monetize your traffic such as selling direct ads and links on your pages. The list above is not my full list but does include some of my top-performing programs and should also work for you and your web content.

Killer Web Video Techniques: Audience Engagement

2011-05-02T11:31:00.002+08:00

We are inundated with advertising messages from the time we wake to the time we go to bed. Some of these messages are welcomed and some are a source of irritation. The difference between noise and communication boils down to relevance, and relevance is a function of how advertisers deliver three basic ingredients: substance, style, and technique.

Our brains have a built-in spam filter that can filter out much of the irrelevant and absorb the significant. In a room full of people all talking and laughing at once like at a party, your brain is able to recognize your name being spoken while everything else is a cacophonous blur. The goal of advertising is to make your message significant like the sound of your name, significant enough to demand your attention. So, is your marketing communication significant, or is it merely noise?

Most Advertising Is Just Noise

The advertising industry has for the most part failed in making their clients' messages significant. Instead they turn up the volume and boost the visual pollution in an effort to standout and be heard, but it doesn't work. It all becomes background noise and confusing clutter easily filtered out by a brain designed to know the difference between significance and irrelevance. Any subliminal effect achieved is offset by the irritation that accompanies junk information.

If you want your audience to listen to you, you first must have something relevant to say, and second you have to know how to say it so that it makes an impression. Substance, style, and technique make a Web video communication significant and therefore worth remembering.

The Substance Every Business Can Deliver

There is a clothing store chain called Syms whose motto is, "An educated consumer is our best customer." It's a brilliant tagline and an even better marketing strategy. Educating your audience creates trust and that is one thing lower prices and more features can't compéte with.

It's one thing to provide information, it's quite another to provide understanding. How-to-do-stuff is a major industry because people suffer from what Richard Saul Wurman calls, "information anxiety." So much to know, so little time to learn it. Your audience craves information, but what they really need is understanding.

If you really want to connect to your audience, gain their trust, and build a relationship. You should start by educating them about how to get the most out of what you sell - the real reason why they will continue to do business with you. In a world of copycat products and services, the difference maker is trust and trust begins with clients who understand exactly what you do and how it will improve their lives or businesses.

Everyóne in our organization is constantly learning new things. Each of us receive dozens of newsletters on all kinds of subjects, some of which are directly related to what we do, and some help us better understand the world we live in and the needs of our clients. And some of it is just intended to make us think.

Substance Without The Pitch

I recently got an email with a video from the Editor of AE Tuts Plus, Adam Everett Miller. AE Tuts Plus produces a website that specializes in After Effects motion graphics. After Effects is a high-end software program used to create all those fancy motions graphics we all love. Most of the information is pretty sophisticated and aimed at a specialized design community but in this case they sent out a video that wasn't about how to do something but rather why something was the way it was.

Would the video make anyone a better designer - no. Would the video provide its viewers with a technique they could sell their clients - no. The video merely explains to people why Hex Color Values are what they are. There is no sales pitch other than a subliminal message that AE Tuts knows what it's talking about, is in business to help its audience, and can be trusted to deliver on its promise without always feeling the need to sell something.

Video: Aetuts Plus Hex Value Quick Tip

Style Enhances Identity

From a branding and marketing point-of-view this video establishes an approachable, friendly style that helps define the AE Tuts brand, and indirectly makes their audience wiser and more informed. It's interesting, memorable, and entertaining; and it makes viewers a more knowledgeable audience.

The style portrayed is not a random accident. The video uses a number of techniques intended to deliver a carefully thought-out image designed to gain audience acceptance as the industry knowledge leader.

A Casual Non-Pedantic Approach

The Web has changed many things not the least of which is how people expect to be taught. Your standard old fashion no nonsense schoolteacher approach is just so pre-Web and quite frankly turns people off. If you really want to educate an audience you better be approachable and entertaining in your delivery, and that is exactly what Adam has managed to do.

Everything from the casual monochromatic attire to the geek-chic glasses and beard are designed to deliver the impression that Adam is just like his audience: just one of the guys with some cool stuff to tell you. The presentation focuses attention on Adam and the accompanying mnemonics by placing everything within a plain white environment, slightly enhanced by a gradient spot to frame Adam, who is placed slightly off center nicely qualifying as a good example of the Rule of Thirds that provides space for the onscreen text and graphics.

The language Adam uses is down-to-earth, delivered in a cadence and rhythm that is just fast enough so the audience doesn't get bored but slow enough so the information can be absorbed.

Each point is highlighted and emphasized with some onscreen graphic, text, or sound effect. Some of the points are accompanied by a humorous visual and verbal aside that maintains the presentations rhythm while at the same time allowing a small mental respite so the brain can absorb one idea and get ready for the next. And it's all packaged with a Sesame Street style music score that goes unnoticed but is critical to the overall impression of learning can be enjoyable and doesn't have to be tedious work.

The Last Word

It takes a lot of knowledge and know-how to make something look easy and this video does a damn good job doing it. Every detail from concept to content was carefully thought-out and the execution was spot-on.

Educational and how-to videos are very popular - there is no great revelation in that, but much of what is on the Web is quite frankly terrible, and that applies to both amateur and professional efforts. In order to benefit from your audience's desire to learn, enhance your brand, and build confidence and trust in the marketplace with educational Web videos, you first must understand how people process information, and how to present material so that it is both enjoyed and retained.

Landing Page Optimization 101

2011-04-28T11:29:00.001+08:00

Landing page optimization is perhaps the most important Internet marketing tactic you need to master if you truly want to succeed online. Having an effective landing page that maximizes your conversions will help you dominate your niche market. This applies to both product vendors and the affiliates promoting for them.

In fact, if you're into Google Adwords you should already know the extreme importance of landing pages.

What is a Landing Page and Why is it Important?

A landing page, as you may already know, is a page that you drive traffic to. It's part of your overall website, but different landing pages can be customized to suit the product or the traffic source. Depending on the type of landing page, it can also be known as a squeeze page, sales page, opt-ín page or money page. However, the basic purpose for any landing page no matter what it's called is to get conversions.

When you have your landing pages setup, you need to go out and get traffic. You may have heard that traffic is the lifeblood of any affiliate marketing business. The more tráffic you get, the more money you make. Although that is true, there's only that much traffic you can get with a limited budget and time.

The real lifeblood of an affiliate marketing business is conversions. If you can convert your traffic to sales more efficiently than others, you'll be the dominant player in your niche market within a short period of time. As far as optimization goes, there are basically two kinds of tests you can do on your landing pages.

Landing Page Optimization with Multivariate Testing

Hardcore conversion experts preach about Multivariate Testing or MVT. In a typical MVT, you will test multiple variations of elements on your landing page simultaneously. MVT can handle complex experiments and deliver great results, but it has two drawbacks.

The first flaw is that you need to get loads of traffic for MVT. If you cannot get a few thousand impressions per day, then it will take forever. As a matter of fact, MVT just doesn't work well for low-traffic websites and landing pages.

Besides that, the other flaw of MVT is its sheer complexity. If you really want to do MVT, you need to study MVT. You need to be able to develop effective test cases and elements. You also need to be pretty good at interpreting results. There's a tendency for low-traffic site owners to accept variations that are not yet proven to work. That's when MVT backfires and actually drags your landing page conversion rates down.

Landing Page Optimization with A/B Split Testing

A/B split testing on the other hand is much more simple. You start with web page A (the control) and web page B as a test page. Both web pages are identical except for the single variable you want to test. For example, both pages may be identical except for the main headline, or the signup link.

Once you've setup your simple A/B test, you split your traffic between the two pages and observe your sales or leads. After both pages have achieved a reasonable number of conversions, you'll be able to see the winning page. The losing page is removed and replaced with another contender.

You repeat this process with different layouts, different ad copy, and different headlines until you find the best possible landing page. You'll know this when your split test results no longer show any significant difference between pages.

Can you test more than two pages at a time? Of course you can, but keep in mind that the more pages you add to the A/B test, the longer it will take for you to get any kind of meaningful result. That's why I recommend that you test no more than three pages at a time.

With A/B split testing, landing page optimization gets much simpler and faster. You can get really meaningful results with only a small number of website visitors, and get higher conversion rates consistently. You don't need much technical knowledge either.

Pitfalls of Landing Page Optimization

Although the benefits of optimizing your landing pages are immense, there are several pitfalls to avoid. The first is inconsistency. Make sure all other aspects of your landing page remains the same when you're doing your tests. Do not change your landing page designs, your source of traffic or other elements when testing a page. Doing so will only give you skewed, inaccurate results.

Redundancy is the other big pitfall that you need to avoid at all costs. Keep track of the elements you have already tested. Do not repeat tests when you already know the best possible variable for the test. It's very easy to be running around in circles instead of moving forward.

The final pitfall in landing page optimization is ineffective software. Keep the time you spend setting up and managing software to a bare minimum. Instead, you should redirect your effort and time to the content and sales process of your landing pages. If you have to constantly upgrade or troubleshoot the software you're using for landing page optimization, you're really not doing your business any good.

Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail

2011-04-26T11:26:00.000+08:00

A good website builder knows that solid links mean solid rankings, but it's an ever changing challenge to get them. Learn how to avoid a loss of link juice now.

Links are incredibly important in getting relevant traffic and good position in search results, but links are like any other relationship... they can go sour. Here's a list of ten reasons why otherwise knowledgeable link builders blow their efforts. Pay attention and don't fall into any of these traps. As a website builder you have got to get this part right or you are heading for disaster.

1. One Hit Wonder

The worse thing that can happen to websites that stumble onto a source of links or who only rely on one method of building links is for that accident or that plan to actually work. That sounds counter intuitive, but if you convince yourself that only one method is needed, you're heading for a fall. You need to diversify your efforts and not have all your eggs in one basket.

2. Quantity Not Quality

The link builder who writes an article, spins it and then uses article submission software can easily develop 1,000 links to a web page in no time at all. The only problem is those links will be worth next to nothing. Building links is not just a numbers game. Links gain their value from the value of their source. A single link from a PR 4 is worth 1,000 links from PR 0 websites.

3. Forgetting that the Webmaster is a Human

Email requests for a link that are addressed to "Dear Webmaster" are the first to be deleted. If you want to pitch a website for a backlink take the time to find a name to address the request to.

4. Staying Strictly Digital

If you are an expert in your field don't be afraid to tell the world... face to face. Volunteer for speaking engagements for your professional organization or even your local chamber. The story on their website will inevitably carry a link to yours.

5. Reliance on Black Hat

Black hat tactics will work. Time after time somebody has found a way to manipulate the system and anyone who has used it has experienced short term success. But the success is short term and sometimes comes with penalties that get your web pages de-indexed. Black hat isn't worth the loss of listing.

6. Failure to Keep Up with the Industry

Link building, like so many aspects of internet marketing is constantly changing. Don't allow yourself to get complacent. Don't rely on a strategy that could become ineffective tomorrow. Take an interest in the industry and stay current.

7. No Support Network

This is a real risk for the small business website in more ways than one. You're not working in a big SEO shop and you can't stroll over to a colleague and bounce an idea off them. Try to develop a network of talented website builders that you can call on for help and be ready to help them when they call you.

8. Loss of Creative Spark

There's more than one way to skin this link cat. Keep your mind open to creative ways to get other quality websites to link to yours. Doing something that is newsworthy for your industry is a sure way to get relevant links back.

9. Building the Perfect Link that Doesn't Get Implemented

Action and consistency are more important than perfection. If you're one of those people who are afraid to click on the submit button because you think your link request isn't absolutely perfect, then just get over it. Live wild and click that button. An imperfect link request has more value in building relationships than a perfect request that isn't ever sent.

10. Becoming Lazy

OK you could change lazy with complacent, but it's the same thing. Link building is a tough skill and not nearly as much fun as website design or even creating content. If you have built a few successful links don't count on those being around forever. Continue your efforts and you'll continue to enjoy quality traffic.

Link building is a task that every website builder has to have at least a working knowledge of. If you see yourself slipping into one of these ten common symptoms of link trouble, snap yourself out of it and double up on the building efforts. The leads and conversions that you gain from the relevant links are your reward for diligently performing this important function.

Can Google Truly Make Quality Content King of The Web?

2011-04-24T11:23:00.000+08:00

For those webmasters and e-marketers who can remember a web without Google, life was much less complicated and a lot less tumultuous back then. Since Google came onto the scene and became the dominant search engine in the world... things have changed drastically.

And not necessarily in a negative way, those same webmasters probably jumped for joy when they reached the top of Google for their keywords. Then they complained just as loudly when Google made one of their never-ending changes to their algorithm and these webmasters saw their rankings drop or in some severe cases, disappear from the web altogether. In those early days, most of Google's major updates were kept secret until the fallout got webmasters fuming or rejoicing.

However, in recent algorithm updates or changes, Google has openly broadcasted these changes to anybody who was listening. The same openness applies to Google's recent changes dealing with "content farms" and "low quality content" in Google's SERPs. Matt Cutts stated in his blog, "we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content."

Basically, what Google is trying to do with these changes is to improve the overall quality of their search results by lowering the rankings of sites which it perceives as low quality and containing little or no original content. These would be sites that have scraped content from other websites and that have displayed it, usually along with ads and/or links to affiliate products or other related sites.

At present, this only affects search traffic in the States, but this is no small update since 11% of the queries have changed. And as some webmasters have noted, these changes are indeed improving search results.

One interesting find comes from Alexis Madrigal at www.theatlantic.com that looks at Google's new improved search results for the keywords "drywall dust" and shows that there were indeed less "content farm" listings in the new results.

However, it's Google's definition of "content farms" which has many long-time webmasters concerned. As an online marketer who attributes most of his success to article marketing, Google's recent updates have me somewhat worried. I contribute articles on a regular basis to many online article directories, most of which are free for other webmasters to use as long as they keep my resource box and links attached. These articles get picked up and displayed on countless sites around the web. I also feature many of those same articles on my own site. I am sure there are thousands of webmasters who do the same thing and who are also worrying how Google's new changes will affect all this duplicate content.

In most cases, my articles in Ezinearticles usually get displayed at the top of the rankings in Google, sometimes even above the same article on my own main site. This is understandable since Ezinearticles is a much more respected authority site in the eyes of the search engines. Also, all sites come with their own unique keyword ranking "DNA," which means they optimized for those keywords and any keyword related content which is added to those sites will rank higher in the search engines, especially Google.

Years ago, I tried on several occasions to use "spin software" to make all my articles unique, but I could't ever bring myself to accept the resulting spins or versions of my articles. They just didn't seem right and didn't have the right flow. For me, writing has always been more of a pleasure than a chore and corrupting it in any way is just not worth it. Besides, I have been horrified more than once by seeing fragments of my articles mutilated on some of the aforementioned low quality sites which have scraped my content from the web.

Instead, I started writing unique articles or content which I placed on other sites. One of the main directories for this was Buzzle which switched over to only accepting unique content two or three years ago. I have monitored Buzzle over the years and noticed that it's traffic stats keep increasing in a steady line upwards, probably due to adding all this constant, unique content. Other article directories seem to have a more see-saw flow to their traffic numbers, if you compare them on sites like Alexa.

I believe this whole issue comes down to quality content and what the search engines perceive as quality. Just because something is unique, doesn't mean it's quality content. Google has to judge the quality of the content it finds on the web and it has over 200 ranking factors which it says can filter out the top content and present it to the searcher. The recent "content farm" update is difficult to evaluate... just because content is duplicated or appears on another site doesn't mean it lacks quality.

As a webmaster, I have always placed related videos and press releases on my sites to complement my own content. I also reference other sites and data in my articles to back up an opinion or to prove a point. Although going forward, I will be very wary of placing content on my sites which is not unique.

Sometimes I find it ironic that Google, since day one, has not created any unique content... its robots crawl the web and compile that information into search results. The quality of those results largely depend on the quality of the scraped content and how well its algorithm can filter out the low quality stuff.

Supposedly, no human eyes judge this whole process which I don't believe for a minute. Google's engineers are constantly monitoring the results and constantly adjusting its algorithm to filter out what they don't like which brings us back to the question at hand. Can Google really perfect a system where only the quality content on the web rises to the top?

Obviously, they can use such factors as bounce rates, time spent on-site, pageviews per visitor, direct access, backlinks from authority sites... and bookmarks in the social media/networking sites. Let's face it, if a piece of content has 2,000 re-tweets, it must contain something of interest/quality for a lot of people. Likewise, if a piece of content or video has 5,000 comments attached to it and 10,000 Diggs or Likes... chances are good that it is of high quality.

Of course, there is also the technological/mechanical side to site quality. If a site loads slowly and has countless dead links, then it can be easily ranked as low quality. Google has always maintained a user/surfer's experience is important to what it lists in its results. Content farms and sites with little or no unique content would probably be high on Google's líst of what not to display.

However, judging the quality of a piece of information or writing, without human eyes viewing it, is not so easy. Unless Google has a thousand little Watsons running quietly in the background, intelligently reading and rating all that content, making only quality content king of the web will be extremely difficult for Google to do. Time will tell.

Create On-Site Content that Provides Benefit

2011-04-22T11:20:00.001+08:00

In the world of SEO and Internet marketing, content is the reigning king. Content comes in many forms - blogs, videos, articles, white papers, posts on social networking sites and more. It doesn't matter what kind of content your company is producing, as long as it is relevant, engaging and quality. Indeed, the Google Panda Update showed us that producing content that is anything less has the potential to negatively impact your website, aside from not providing any real benefit in the first place for you or your readers.

However, companies shouldn't just be focusing on the content they create that gets published offsite; they also need to focus just as much, if not more, on the content that fills their own pages.

All the SEO efforts in the world aren't going to provide any real advantage for a website if the site doesn't help itself. This means the site needs to be well-optimized, have a solid structure and contain content that provides real benefit to the readers and that helps convert traffic to leads or sales. Visitors to a site that hasn't taken the time to do these things often feel like they've been tricked into coming to the site. The link that got them there promised relevant information and instead they get a lot of generic, boring content. While having a large amount of traffic being directed to your site is great, seeing them go as fast as they arrived means something is wrong. Your site isn't measuring up and your page content is the most likely culprit.

Your website's content is what is going to convince visitors to stay and, hopefully, encourage them to act. So give them a reason to do just that. If a visitor comes to your site because they were looking for information, (perhaps an answer to a question) your content better give it to them. One way to make sure this happens is to create a FAQ page. Not only does the FAQ page provide answers for common questions people have about your company, it can have information about your industry in general.

Say you own an auto shop and someone searches for "getting rid of paint scratches" or something to that effect. Your FAQ section can answer their inquiry by talking about common remedies they can try at home, while simultaneously prompting them to come into your shop if the damage is too great for a simple touch up. Not only have you answered their question, you have also placed your company in their mind as a possible solution to their paint problem. You weren't just trying to sell them on your services, which can turn a lot of visitors off. They don't want to be sold to, they just want the information they were looking for. Your content has to give them that information and convince them that your company has even more to provide.

If your industry has its own terminology, why not create a glossary for your visitors? Educating your target audience makes it easier to communicate with them. Some keywords your site may be targeting are probably industry specific, but not well known to the general public. How do you get people using those terms to conduct searches? You teach them. Companies that work in technology, manufacturing, medical or any other industry that relies heavily on industry verbiage need to educate their website traffic in order to turn them into customers. Plus, those glossary pages can become entry points for your site. When someone searches for "definition of cloud computing," your glossary can answer their question and direct them through to your site.

A common problem many sites have is that they break their content up and spread it across too many pages. Yes, your company might provide a dozen different services and you want to rank well in the search engines for each of them, but does each service need its own page? Say you run a boutique marketing firm.

One of your biggest draws is your social media management services. There are a lot of components that make up social media management - consulting, training, profile development, brand management and more. Do you give each one of these facets of social media management their own page of content? Are you going to be able to write enough quality content to justify those additional pages? Sometimes it is better to condense multiple pages of thin content into one or two pages of solid information.

You don't want to make it hard for a visitor to find what they are looking for when they arrive on your site. Don't bury the real information in webpage fluff just to get your word count up. Why write an essay's worth of content for one page and make the reader search for what they want. Any content that is below the fold - the point where users have to scroll down - has less of a chance of being read because people don't want to go hunting for information. It's a fine line between too little and too much content on a page, and really good website content is developed over time.

The bottom line is that you have to create website content that provides as much value as offsite content. Content that gets produced elsewhere helps build your brand, but your site needs to measure up to that promise. Don't let good traffic go to waste with inadequate page content. There is no guarántee that the "first draft" of your page is going to be the best. Sites have to monitor visitor traffic to see what is and isn't working. Where is your content too thin? What pages need to be rewritten? Can you turn one page of content into two without losing value?

Good website content has to be clean, easy to read and understand, and provide real value to the reader. Just like offsite articles, guest blog post submissions and other forms of content marketing, your webpage content needs to serve a real purpose. If all your offsite content were to disappear and you were forced to rely on it, would your site content be enough to drive visitors to action?

Avoiding the Obvious

2011-04-20T11:18:00.001+08:00

Now, I'll go out on a limb here and say that Intel isn't actually racist. But just look at the image and try to imagine it in any other context. There is very little else that six black gentlemen bowing to a white person can evoke in most peoples' minds. There is the obvious connection to speed, but even a single image of the sprinter - after all, the same guy has been Photoshopped in six times - would have been fine, especially by itself. Instead, the obvious athleticism of the "sprinters" works against the picture, because it's six very strong and muscular looking men doing homage to a nerdy office type.

The thing is, this should have been painfully obvious. It certainly was to consumers. The moment this thing was shown, the backlash was incredible. It actually prompted Intel to pull the ad and apologize for the obvious blunder. The public figured it out, the Internet still laughs about it and, all in all, the whole thing raises the question of just what in the world happened. It's pretty clear that either Intel didn't do a focus group test, or that their focus group is just as insulated from the real world as the people who came up with the ad in general.

Advertising isn't the only part of branding, of course, but this incident in particular brings up an issue that is important to all branding efforts. Specifically, it involves getting away from the idea of marketing, and getting to know your market.

Markets are made up of people, and their value to a branding campaign is the word-of-mouth they can provide. Be it genuine face-to-face discussions or a video going viral, getting people to talk about a product is the best way to make it a success. Conversely, it's also the best way to kill a product.

Take a similar, more recent incident. Sony was attempting to market its PSP handheld gaming console. Given the recent success of low-budget, clever independent productions, the company decided to give this style a try. They started a guerilla marketing campaign, spray painting graffiti style images of kids holding and playing PSP handhelds. Then they began a campaign about their new, white-framed model of the device, and attempted to portray it with billboards of a black woman and a white woman fighting. Finally, they had an actor pose as a 'random' user of the PSP and promote it on video sites such as YouTube.

As the satirical humor site Cracked.com pointed out, these efforts all fell flat. The graffiti efforts were picked up as blatantly obvious corporate marketing from the get-go, the billboard catfight advertisements were ridiculed as bizarrely racist - incidentally, what is it with advertisements being accidentally racist? - and the video series was picked up on as corporate shilling quite quickly as well. Sony finally got the hint and went back to more traditional advertising efforts, moving out of guerilla marketing almost completely.

Again, these efforts scream of a disconnect from the target audience that should have been fairly obvious. Even a brief test marketing to the public would probably have revealed the flaws in each of Sony's efforts.

Part of it lies in an inability for some branding efforts to take their audience seriously. The market is made of people, not robots. You can't throw a switch and get a result. People have varied and subtle reactions to things, and if you make an idiot of yourself they will notice. You have to give your market credít if you want to succeed.

In particular, the graffiti and YouTube ads were the most patently condescending in this sense. They were outright lies; the company tried to make it look as though grassroots support for its product had spilled out into urban and online culture. Sony was caught out almost immediately, and suffered appropriately for it. To its credít, Sony did own up and apologize, saying it had gotten the message. But the lesson definitely should be clear for everybody: The Internet has made it much harder to lie to people. If you don't respect your market, they are not going to respect you.

So the take home lessons are:

1) Don't skip the all-important step of marketing your product to a smaller test audience before you go public with it. Ask people their honest advice about things, preferably people outside your immediate market as well as those you intend to market it to. A diversity of opinion can be a rewarding return.

2) Respect your market's intelligence and don't try to be more clever than they are. One company only has so many minds, and cannot in the end outwit the omni-mind of the world wide web.

Google Algorithm Changes: Some Farm Aid for the Afflicted

2011-04-19T10:35:00.000+08:00

By now you've surely heard of the recent Google algorithm changes dubbed the "Farmer Update."

According to Google, about 12% of search queries were impacted by this update. The SISTRIX blog provided additional insight by posting the top 25 websites that overnight stopped showing up inGoogle for numerous keywords. I was interested in learning about this update, and SISTRIX was kind enough to share their big list of over 300 sites that have had deep traffíc losses. In addition, I've had various people send me their sites to look at.

I hoped to analyze the data to spot similarities between the sites that got hit so that I could understand the specific factors Google used when deciding which pages to nuke. As you can imagine, there was a lot of data to sort through and I feel as if I've only just gotten started. However, I do have some preliminary findings to share with you as quickly as possible.

Please note that just because I noticed similar things on sites that got hit, it doesn't mean those things were the cause of the loss of Google traffic. It's far too easy to make assumptions and mix up cause and effect in nearly every aspect of SEO. So I caution you to treat the information I'm providing, as what it is -- preliminary findings that make me go "Hmmm." Also note that I've barely had enough time to look at the potential on-page factors that might be causing issues, and haven't even started to look at the off-page links that are pointing to these sites. Because we know that links and anchor text are Google's main squeeze, my on-page analysis could very well be completely off base.

With that caveat out of the way, below are some of the interesting things I noticed that made me go hmmm...with the small set of sites I've looked at so far.

Semi-hidden Content

One surprise finding, which may or may not relate to the loss of Google traffic, was that many of the sites had content that was behind tabs, and not visible all at once to someone using a typical browser. It's possible that this type of design element is so common on websites these days that many sites from a random sampling would also be using it, but it definitely struck me as odd. What made it especially interesting was that most of the sites using the tabs had a very large amount of content contained within them. With tabs such as these, a person only sees the content in one tab at a time, while Google sees all the content from all of the tabs, as if it were contained on one page. (Technically it is, because it's all one URL.) In many cases all the tabbed content put together added up to thousands of words, and often hundreds of links as well.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with using tabs this way (and many sites are currently using the technique), some cases might trigger red flags.

There are many different coding methods to "hide" content behind tabs. The code on two of the sites I reviewed that had lost Google traffic were using different methods. One had this code: "display: none; visibility: hidden;" and the other had this: "overflow: hidden;".

Why Google might not like it: Each site was using their tabs for different reasons, and I doubt that the "visibility: hidden," in and of itself, caused Google to no longer like those pages. But perhaps Google took issue with the extremely long pages of content because they might appear to be less user-friendly (if Google didn't realize that the content is tabbed). In addition, the numerous extra links in some of the tabs might appear to go overboard.

In one instance, I set my default browser to Googlebot and tried to browse a page that was using tabs with tons of content behind them, but I got an error message that the page couldn't be viewed at all. The error seemed to have something to do with a very strange, hidden ad link contained in the tabbed content.

In another case of semi-hidden content, the pages were designed in a way that is very cool and easy to use for people, but all the content from the various hidden areas, when viewed on one long page as Google saw it, ends up looking like a disgusting keyword-stuffed mess! I have no idea if the site was purposely designed to stuff keywords in that way or not, but before the Farmer Update it was apparently working for them.

Completely Hidden Content

Another common finding between some of the sites I reviewed was having the real "meat" of the site behind a registration wall. While there would be some keyword-rich content on the page in question, you couldn't read the whole article unless you registered for it. Google hasn't ever been a fan of that, and even offers their "First Click Free" program so that content publishers who require registration to read their articles can still get their content indexed. But the site must show the entire piece of content to people who have not registered if they got to it from a Google search. The sites I reviewed were not using the First Clíck Free approach.

Why Google might not like it: They believe that if you want your content indexed, you should play by their rules, which in this case is the First Click Free rule. They probably also believe that a page with just a summary of information related to the searcher's query is likely not the best page for the user to land on. So it doesn't surprise me that those types of pages may have been hit in the Farmer Update.

Merry-Go-Round Sites Containing Mostly Ads or Links

Interestingly, I recognized one of the sites on the big SITRIX list as one I had done a website review for last year. I have to say that it was one of the craziest sites I had ever seen, and I was shocked that Google was even showing it highly in the search results. So when I saw it got nuked big-time by Farmer Google, I wasn't surprised. I noticed some similarities between that site and a few of the others that got nailed -- mostly that you felt you were going round and round in circles as you tried to find the information you were originally seeking at Google.

Here's what happens on this type of site: You get to a page that uses the keywords you typed into Google, only to find that you need to click a link on that page to really get the information. But when you click that page, you either end up at another site, or on another page on the same site -- and you still don't quite have the info you wanted. It seems that you could keep clicking that way forever and don't ever find what you were looking for. Yet you always have the feeling it is you doing something wrong, not that the site simply sucks wind. (Of course, the pages are also always full of Google AdSense and other ads.)

Similar to the merry-go-round sites, others I reviewed were simply aggregating others' content in one way or another. In many cases, it would make sense for Google to just show the original site (or sites) rather than a page with a list of sites -- especially when the list of links is actually just running an ad platform that appears to be links.

One site was a niche comparison site, which seemed okay on the surface. But I found that when I browsed to a particular product and then tried to view it on the website that was listed as the cheapest, in many cases I was brought to either the home page of said site or a page that contained a product similar to the one I was looking at, but not the exact one. Ugh.

Why Google might not like it: Google stated that part of this update was to improve the quality of the results their searchers were receiving. All of the above types of sites have numerous pages that meet the "poor quality" label, assuming anybody ever paid attention. In these cases, I can see where it makes sense for Google to show the pages being linked to directly in their search results, rather than the page that's doing the linking.

So there you have it -- my first impressions from a very small sample of sites.

What You Should Watch Out For

With everything I've seen, the consistent themes seem to be usability and the intent of the page in question. I can't say how Google is technically figuring out intent, but they appear to be going after pages that might frustrate users. Google's goal is to satisfy the search query of their user -- the searcher. Their goal is not to provide their searcher with pages that link to the pages, that link to the other pages, that satisfy the original search.

With all that said, after writing up my findings, I also looked at some of the new Google results, and, sadly, there are some even worse pages that show! In one case, the site I was reviewing, while not satisfying the search query itself (other than having the search words on the page), was beat out by a pathetic little made-for-AdSense site that had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. How that one survived the Farmer Update, I'll won't ever know.

It's key to remember that this update is most likely just the beginning. About the only thing I'm sure of at the moment is that Google still has a lot of tweaking to do over the next few months to truly sort things out.

The New and Ancient Social Network

2011-04-18T10:33:00.000+08:00

For those of us who grew up during the Leave-It-To-Beaver or Brady-Bunch generations, these words resonate as an all-too familiar admonishment for the wrong doings of Theodore Cleaver, Jan Brady, and millions of other kids in America. It was the common penalty for the common misdeeds of the day. And being banished to the lonely solitude of one's bedroom, isolated from one's friends and family, was a powerful and effective consequence. Yet for today's youth, being sent to one's room would be met with no more than a shrug of the shoulders. In fact, most kids would probably be confused by their parents' punishment choice of sentencing them to the most comfortable, pleasurable, and socially connected place in their entire world - their own bedrooms.

By now it's cliché to state that today's youth is the most socially connected and culturally aware generation in mankind's history. The statistics bear out what we already intuitively know: these kids are wired in. Over 85% of teens have their own cell phones. Even for kids between ages 10 and 14, cell phone ownership exceeds two-thirds. Three-quarters of kids between the ages of 8 and 18 have TV's in their rooms, and the rate of bedroom TV's for kids under 12 is 55%, and growing fast. As for computers, we know that (at least) one-third of kids have their own desk-tops or laptops with Internet access. And that doesn't count the "smart phones," or "X-Box Live" systems (where you can merrily engage in simulated mortal warfare with a fellow teenager somewhere in, say, Europe).

Now, lest you think this article is about to give some preachy lecture on poor parenting skills in the modern cyber era, let me reassure you, it's not. After all, that would be a fantastic hypocrisy for someone like me since there may be no greater example of the trend towards electronic overkill than the bedrooms of my very own three teenage sons. In fact, our kids' digital excesses are so daunting that I'm less worried about the common concerns of cyber bullying, lack of sleep and sedentary lifestyle issues than I am about merely entering their rooms without becoming entangled and electrocuted. To be honest, the last time I saw such overburdened electrical outlets was in Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacatíon.

The New Social Networks

The startling reality is that our kids are most connected to their own friends and the outside world when they are sitting in their own bedrooms. The moment they step foot outside of their rooms, they become instantly less connected. It's no wonder we have more difficulty prying them from their rooms than sending them to their rooms. This is a complete reversal versus prior generations who needed to emerge from the privacy of their rooms just to catch a glimpse of any current events at all. Dr. Ron Taffel, a prominent child psychologist, wrote a book on this very subject called, "The Second Family." Its subtitle aptly summed up his topic: 'Dealing With Peer Power, Pop Culture, The Wall Of Silence -- And Other Challenges Of Raising Today's Teens.' (I wondered, with a title like that, how could he have not outsold the Gideon's Bible?)

Taffel asserts - and has the statistics and clinical observations to back it up - that these technological advances have dramatically altered the sphere of influence for today's youth. Specifically, whereas in prior generations the primary influences were parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and prime-time television; today's primary influences are friends, pop culture, instantaneous news information, and...friends, again (in that order). It is this modern sphere of influence - mainly the friends and the pop culture - that Taffel calls "The Second Family." As a result, the so-called "First Family" (that's us) has been rendered less relevant to today's kids. That's because the kids pretty much have everything they need right at their fingertips (literally) while perched comfortably on their beds or desk chairs. They are at the helm of "Planet Youth," as Taffel likes to call it, and they're in complete control.

But, before we get too depressed, Taffel tells us that this is not a sociological disaster for the human race. It's merely progress along the process of evolution. In fact, he offers a basic solution to our parental plight of becoming detached and irrelevant. And it's simply that we should learn to form an "empathic envelope" around our kids; in other words, we should become technologically and culturally tapped into "their" world by using "their" Internet, watching "their" YouTube, listening to "their" music, and playing "their" X-treme sports. In doing so, while we might end up a tad offended and a bit bruised up, we would at least be part of "their" Social Network.

Technology may have redefined the meaning of "Social Network," but the concept is as old as the human race itself. The desire to be connected to other human beings is a basic instinct of our species, and it is hard-wired into our behavior as social animals. We are unavoidably dependent upon one another for contentment, sustenance, and survival. We operate by the basic sociological principle that as social beings we are naturally driven to survive, and we realize that our survival is best achieved by operating cooperatively in groups. Thus we are destined to seek ways to work together in such groups - in families, clans, tribes, communities, nations - to better our mutual existence. And any threat to that group existence will be met with the reactive forces of the group. The instinct for group connectivity and group survival supersedes all.

It's A Revolution

Technology has put a new face on how we "social animals" operate as cooperative groups in the modern era. Teenagers give us a contemporary close-up of how these tight groups - a.k.a. "Second Families" - can be formed without the teens hardly leaving the confines of their individual bedrooms. And the world is currently seeing other powerful examples of cooperative group dynamics being played out via technological means.

At the risk of elevating Mark Zuckerberg's ego any higher (he's the 30-year-old billionaire who founded Facebook, and was subject of the recent movie, "The Social Network"), there isn't a political pundit alive who would deny the pivotal role that Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools have played in the recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and other revolutionary hot spots around the globe. As Newsweek recently observed, "in Iran the massive demonstrations of 2009 have migrated behind closed doors, where activists spread the word of resistance via instant message, satellite television, and what authorities fear most: social networking." Yóung Iranian revolutionaries are not taking to the streets to effect historic change, they are taking to their keyboards to do so at home.

On the surface, comparing the American teenage "Second Family" to the revolutions in the Middle East seems trite if not absurd. But consider this: the common denominator for both phenomena is the power of "the group." The so-called "social network" is not new to teenagers or revolutionaries. It's always powered both forces. The microchip merely put a new face on it all.

So in all aspects of our existence we should respect the power of the group. And if we don't heed that lesson, at least heed this one: when you want to hand out a punishment, don't say, "Go to your room!"

Designing for SEO

2011-04-16T10:28:00.000+08:00

Is it possible to design a great looking website and achieve a high level of search engine optimization (SEO)? It sure is and we see evidence of this all over the web, as well as in mobile platforms. In recent years the heavy emphasis on web standards has enabled designers to develop more creative, engaging interface designs without compromising SEO goals. Effective SEO is no longer a mystifying goal that only trained SEO consultants can achieve. Think of the combination of good SEO and quality design as just sound site development. To dig in further, this article takes a closer look at how to achieve both without having to sacrifice design principles or effective SEO.

Lessons from the Design Studio

Here are some things to think about well before, and during, the design process:

1. When setting up a page structure and composition, designers tend to start with a specific defined grid system. Designers look at the grid as a foundation for positioning elements on the page. You should take it a step further by considering how the grid can support elements for SEO. Not only where images and text will be placed on the page, but also setting up a clear hierarchy of information, logical page titles and text links, headings and sub heads. This approach not only supports users' browsing behavior but also makes it easier for search engine spiders to move throughout the site.

Aarron Walter's, Building Findable Websites, makes the point that designers should think about human interactions first and not try to trick the system to get to the top of search rankings. "Build for humans first and at the same time make sure our content is accessible to machines as well, which is going to help us reach more humans to make it more findable."

The first place to start is clear page titles. The page title is essentially what displays in a Google search results page. It needs to be clear and express your brand and what you do. An example of how we set up our home page title is: "Interactive Agency, Web Content Management & Application Development - Siteworx." It covers who we are, our top areas of expertise and company name. The same title technique should be applied to all sub pages so each is unique.

2. Search engine spiders read clean semantic markup and basic HTML. They read from left to right and top to bottom. It is important to make sure that unnecessary tables do not obstruct your HTML code. Most competent designers today would not consider building a site with tables and are on board with standard and validated code practices.

JavaScript at the top of your page can also inhibit search engine spiders. Some developers suggest placing the JavaScript at the bottom of the page. Be careful if you take this approach since it can substantially slow down page load times. In addition, for global drop down menus that may be overlooked by search engines it is recommended to have a set of redundant navigation links in the footer and as inset sub page navigation. Also be sure to use cascading style sheets (CSS) to emulate rollover effects and don't use images in the place of text.

3. As a designer, I have always enjoyed the benefits of the interactivity of Flash and bringing Flash into components of a website. Flash as an early web tool allowed designers to think more about the emotional user experience and less about technical considerations. Designers could think about interactive immersive environments and less about the Web as a page metaphor. In addition, Flash allows typography and video to render uniformly across a variety of platforms, which removed design limitations found in straight HTML-based sites.

The catch with using Flash as it relates to search is that search engines have trouble getting into published .swf files and cannot effectively index the content embedded in Flash files.

One work-around has been to imbed a smaller Flash component into your HTML page and keep your navigation links and supporting content outside of the Flash component. For example, YouTube uses a SWF video player and is a highly visible and searchable site. It uses effective titles and descriptions embedded in the HTML parts of the page to make the SWF videos more visible to search engines and more findable to users.

To learn more on this topic, I'd recommend a very good interview with Justin Everett-Church from Adobe

where he speaks about how to make Flash accessible. There's also more information from Adobe at Adobe's Developer Connection: Search Engine Optimization Technology Center.

4. Type should be type and not a graphic representation. Search engines do not see graphics the same way as text. They see only a single associated alt tag. If you present text elements as graphics, you are putting your site at risk for lower search engine rankings. Instead, use system fonts for text, which is also a basic principle when building a purely HTML site.

So much has evolved in the area of web fonts that there is no reason for a designer to render text elements as graphics. You can still start by laying out your text in your illustration or painting program of choice. Having the flexibility to try different font selections, move type around, and mix and match to communicate the brand direction is essential. Once your design is approved and you are moving onto the build phase, take the time to acquire your Web fonts and build the tags into your code. There are very affordable ways to license Web fonts if that's something you're considering.

5. An area for designers that is not discussed often enough as part of the SEO equation is information architecture and design conventions. The ability for users to find a web site depends not only on how well the site is built from a technical perspective, but also on good user experience principles. By focusing on-site architecture and sticking with some basic conventions, you'll produce clearly defined content and pages for your site. Your users will find what they are looking for, visit more of your site, stay longer and tell others about the site. After all, that is what you should strive for.

Design conventions are somewhat like rules that have become part of a visual, non-verbal language for the Web over time. Conventions allow a designer to solve common design problems so he/she can focus on other specific issues around content, branding and features. Typical conventions for example are a company's brand mark in the upper left corner of the page, while search typically is located at the top right. Underlined or blue text indicates a clickable link. There are conventions for button styles and link styles. Peter Lynch and Sara Horton have developed a site that touches on design conventions and other Web style suggestions that you can view at Web Style Guide 3rd Addition.

Ultimately, it is possible to have a well designed website that is visually appealing, content rich and emotionally engaging - while also achieving high search engine rankings. As designers, we shouldn't ever pursue top search ranking to the detriment of usability, accessibility and brand integrity. If you plan for both, and realize that as a good designer, SEO and compelling design are your responsibility, this will lead you to creating findable sites and enjoying the kudos of happy clients.

Understanding Business Cycles and How They Relate to SEO

2011-04-15T16:43:00.000+08:00

As the song by The Byrds goes "To everything - turn, turn, turn/ There is a season - turn, turn, turn/And a time for every purpose under heaven." The same principle applies to Internet marketing - different aspects of Internet marketing campaigns run on different cycles. These business cycles have to be understood and accounted for when developing any SEO strategy, because they can directly affect the success of the campaign. While one company's business cycles may greatly differ from another, especially when comparing B2B companies with B2C businesses, the bottom line is that you have to be aware of your company's business cycles to more effectively measure SEO success.

There are three main types of business cycles a company should keep track of: the sales cycle, the conversion cycle, and the SEO cycle.

The sales cycle begins the moment a company gets a lead. It could be a phone call from a prospective customer or client, someone submitting an online form and so forth. Each business has to decide when they are dealing with a real lead that is worth pursuing. The sales cycle doesn't stop until that lead has either gone cold or been successfully closed. Some leads may remain active for months as potential clients hem and haw over making the final purchasing decision. Depending on the complexity of the products and services your company sells (medical testing equipment versus office supplies, for example), your business sales cycle could take a few days or even up to a year to complete. E-commerce sites typically have a much shorter sales cycle since visitors arrived at that site with the driven intent to make a purchase. Typically, the more expensive and complex the product/service being sold, the longer the sales process takes.

So how does the sales cycle relate to a company's SEO? Let's say your company sells scientific equipment used in chemistry labs. Your average sales cycle from getting the lead to closing the sale takes about nine months. If it takes you six months to really ramp up your SEO activities (from on-site optimization to really working through a strong link building plan), you can't judge if the SEO efforts are having any effect on your business until nine months after they are in full swing. You have to allow for your average sales cycle to occur, since that's how long it takes to see ROI anyway. Deciding a few months in that your SEO campaign isn't delivering any new leads is preemptive, and you can cut the legs out from under what could have been a very successful plan.

The conversion cycle is all about prompting website visitors to action. This is a common point of failure for a lot of websites, but B2B sites in particular seem to have the hardest time. What is the goal of your site? What actions do you want visitors to take once they find your site? A site has to lead visitors down a predetermined path and encourage them with the appropriate call-to-action. If the goal of a site is to get visitors to pick up the phone, there better be a phone number listed everywhere. Don't make it hard for visitors to act or find the information they need to turn into a lead for your business. Offering demos is a great way for B2B websites to start a relationship with visitors and engage them to start the sales cycle.

Many argue that SEO shouldn't worry about the conversion cycle, that SEO is just about delivering the traffic. They argue that it's the website owner's job to see that traffic gets converted into leads. But SEO professionals and marketers in general have to be accountable for every dollar of the marketing budget. They have to prove that SEO is worth the investment of time, money, and manpower. A good conversion rate is essential to proving ROI. Sites need to be built so as to not sacrifice the brand in favor of SEO, or SEO in favor of the brand. SEO and user-experience go hand-in-hand when it comes to conversion.

The SEO cycle is how long it takes for a site to start seeing their SEO efforts be rewarded with better ranking for targeted keywords in the search engines. A company's SEO cycle ties into several factors: the level of competition, the past and current SEO efforts of competitors, and the room for growth available. Websites often find themselves facing two common scenarios when they are trying to determine their SEO cycle.

Scenario one: the competition is dominating the search engines. Even if you work in a small, niche industry, one competitor who incorporated SEO into their Internet marketing a few years ago has carved out a pretty sturdy place for themselves in the rankings. They have the trust of the search engines and own top ranking spots for industry keywords. If you find yourself facing this kind of scenario, be prepared to buckle down for the long haul. Your site is the new kid on the block trying to usurp the king of the playground.

Scenario two: what every site should hope for when they begin their SEO - no one is doing a good job! Regardless of industry size or level of competition, if no other company is dominating the online space, this is the perfect time for your company to seize ownership. If your site has been online for a long time (5+ years or so), it already has a good level of trust with the search engines. Even basic SEO tactics can help propel the site to the top spots of the SERP. This scenario also gives you more room to go after competitive industry keywords and win.

Business cycles vary from industry to industry, company to company. They depend on the type of product being sold, whether a site is B2B or B2C and the amount of competition in the field. But sales cycles, conversion cycles and SEO cycles are all critical components of any Internet marketing plan. They can directly affect the success of your SEO efforts and should always be considered when evaluating the overall outcome of your onlíne marketing campaigns. Failing to take them into consideration could mean you end up stopping a campaign just as it was starting to gain momentum.

Reviews Can Help you Rank

2011-04-14T16:41:00.000+08:00

If you're running a business that depends on local traffic, you probably know that good reviews can bring more customers through the door.

But did you know that getting reviews - and not necessarily just good ones - can help your business rank better in search results?

It's true. Getting customers to review your company on your Google Places listing, in Yahoo! Local, Bing, CitySearch, Yelp and other review sites helps you in a couple of ways:

- Ninety percent of consumers consult the Web before they head out of the house to make a local purchase. Yes, you read that right - 90 percent, according to digital marketing analysis firm eMarketer Inc. If your business has plenty of reviews for people to read - and most are enthusiastic, or at least positive - you're likely to get some new customers. That's because 70 percent of people believe in the validity of reviews written by strangers, according to The Nielsen Co.

- Having reviews of your business in several places - including your website - can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and help you rank higher in search results. That's because search engines now look at reviews as an indication that a business matters. And if you've got plenty of reviews, you may be able to occupy more than one place on a page of search results.

Take a look at how much "real estate" Voodoo Doughnuts takes up on this search engine results page, called a SERP in SEO-speak. The company has hit gold with the top three spots. Voodoo also has the top spot in local results - the list headed "Places for donuts near Portland, OR" - and yet another spot lower down in local results.

Note that Voodoo Doughnuts' place page shows 3,015 reviews. That's a lot of reviews, and they're clearly helping this already-popular shop get noticed by anyone searching for donuts in Portland, Oregon.

I'm Not a Doughnut Rockstar. How Do I Get Reviews?

The good news is, it's not that hard to get more of your customers to review you. Adopting just a few practices recommended by local-search guru Mike Blumenthal can help your company's website, Google Places page and other listings appear higher in searches - and win you more business.

A quick summary of how to get more reviews:

   1) Get your company listed everywhere on the Web it makes sense for your business.
   2) Ask for reviews - see suggestions below.
   3) Deliver great customer service so people will want to review you, and so the reviews will be mostly good.

First, Stake Your Claim

There have always been directories and listing sites on the Web, though the ones most in favor with searchers tend to change over time.

Some good places to get listed:

GetListed.org offers free help for getting your business listed at top sites on the Web, including Google Places, Yahoo Local, InsiderPages.com and others. GetListed tells you which listing sites are free, which cost money, and advises you which paid sites might make sense for your business. The site also offers a tool called Local Dashboard that helps you track your online listings.

Yelp.com - Yelp is famous for its reviews of restaurants and other retail and service businesses. Local search expert David Mimh, who runs GetListed.org, says the site is essential for any bar or restaurant to list on Yelp.

CitySearch.com - It's not as popular as it was a few years ago, but CitySearch is still where many people go to choose a restaurant or other local business.

Use any site where you know your customers are. Mike Blumenthal suggests choosing the sites that your customers favor. How would you know that? Well, you could Google your direct competitors to see where they've been reviewed, and make sure you have listings on those sites. If you own a pet supply business, and you know of sites where pet owners exchange news and tips - and you can list your business there - do it.

AboutUs.org has a page about virtually every site on the Web. Each website profile has editable fields where you can add your contact information, a short summary about your site and your logo. There's also a wiki section where you can write as much as you like about your site and your business, and include links back to your site on keywords that matter for your business. Under the AboutUs DoFollow policy, those links can become follow links, and add some SEO value for your site.

How To Get Reviews: Make it Easy

Mike Blumenthal says you must make it very easy for people to review your business. One great strategy is to create a special page for reviews on your website - for example, '''http://www.MyLocalBusiness.com/reviews''' - so people can leave their comments easily on your site. You can put the URL for that page on your business card, and hand it out to everybody. You could even print up a special thank you card with the reviews page printed on it, and slip it in with your customers' purchases when you bag them.

Mike also suggests creating a QR code for your reviews page, and having it printed up fairly large, to display in your storefront window. A customer can then scan the QR code with her phone, and maybe even write a review of your business right then and there. Or have the QR code link to your Google Places profile.

Once you've listed your business at the sites mentioned in the section above, you can also print the URLs for those listings on a card, or use QR codes, to make it easy for people to get to your review sites. One caution: You can't directly ask people to review you on Yelp - that can get you banned from the site. Nonetheless, lots of people know and use Yelp, so it's still a good idea to be listed there.

How To Get Good Reviews

It may sound simple, but the best way to get reviews is to deliver a good experience. Treat customers with courtesy and respect, provide a good product or professional-level service, and most of your reviews will be good.

Another easy way: Ask for reviews. When someone tells you how pleased they are with your company, ask them if they'd be willing to put it in writing. Guide them to the location where you'd most like the review to appear. Making it easy for them makes it more likely they'll do it.

Anticipate that things will sometimes go wrong, and give people a way to let you know what's gone wrong, so you can put it right immediately. Display your phone number prominently on every page of your website, so people can call you. If the phone isn't the best option, or you want to give more options, put a big "Contact Us" button on every page, and provide full contact options on the page it links to. It goes without saying that when people contact you with a problem, you must help them quickly and graciously.

Providing quick and easy ways to contact you engenders trust in people who come to your website. If you're willing to be contacted that easily, you must be trustworthy - the exact opposite of those shady sites that provide no contact information at all.

Another big benefit: Helping a dissatisfied or perplexed customer can earn you an enthusiastic fan who's more than willing to give you a good review. And that review is one more building block for growing your online presence.

Web Marketing Strategy & Tactics: The Take-Away

2011-04-13T16:38:00.000+08:00

Consultants are always talking about "deliverables," a term used to describe the final product provided to their clients. Consultants understand that business people are loath to paying for mere advice even if that advice is critical to their business, but they are open to paying for something tangible like a deliverable. The so called "deliverable" is usually a nice thick report bound in one of those fancy expensive folios that may contain some useful strategies and tactics but quite often is filled with platitudes and generalities accompanied by colorful graphs and charts of equally dubious value. As a consequence, business consultants, have a generalized reputation that lies somewhere between politicians and used car salesmen.

Somewhere along the evolutionary development of the Web entrepreneur a lesson was learned, unfortunately it was the wrong one. Deliverables are good; useless unusable stock solutions, even if wrapped in a nice shiny package, are bad.

The How-To Video Strategy

How-to videos have become an essential marketing strategy for featuring product knowledge and market expertise with the goal of creating confidence in a company's ability to deliver what they promise.

Let's say you are an expert in something. It really doesn't matter what it is because there is a market for educational and instructional material for just about anything from guitar playing to poker, from makeup application to origami, from drawing lessons to app development.

Tapping Into The Knowledge Deficit

In today's fast paced environment tapping into the knowledge deficit is one of the best ways to grow your business. One common business tactic used to exploit how-to opportunities is to provide teaser videos so that people get a taste of what to expect. Anyone interested in learning anything has watched his or her share of teaser videos, but all too often these videos only lead to frustration and a quick click of the mouse onto the next website offering instructions.

I've heard many experts fret about giving away too much information without getting paid for it. After all, why would anyone pay if they can get it at no charge? And here's where the whole idea of deliverables comes in, but first let's stop thinking like a consultant and start thinking like a marketing executive. What's important is not the deliverable but rather the usefulness of the material provided. Let's call it "the take-away:" the knowledge learned that improves one's ability to perform and at the same time inspires confidence in your company's ability to provide worthwhile instruction in the chosen field.

Commercials Aren't How-to Videos

If you're an expert in a particular area you should be able to giveaway all kinds of tips and tricks that your potential clients can use without running out of ideas or instructional expertise. Providing interested site visitors with a fancy PDF report, PowerPoint slideshow, or series of less-than-helpful teaser videos all obvious attempts to merely sell the real stuff will only turn people off. Commercials should not masquerade as how-to videos.

Web business is not like brick and mortar business. On the Web you are distanced from your audience by the great digital divide that creates a natural reluctance on the part of your visitors. This remoteness is the biggest obstacle you have to overcome because it creates a natural fear of being cheated. And the best way to solve the problem is to provide something of value that demonstrates your reliability and expertise, and inspires confidence in your ability and desire to deliver what you promise.

The Four How-To Video Elements

Even if you intend to provide useful instruction to your website visitors, you can still get it wrong if you don't understand the four basic elements of giving instructions.

1. Create Expectations

Tell people what you're going to teach them. This lets them know what the video is about and what they can expect to learn. It also implies what they aren't going to learn so they won't be frustrated after watching five minutes of something they're not interested in seeing.

2. Provide Useful Instructions They Can Use

Provide appropriate instructions so that the audience can actually implement what you are teaching them. Don't leave out or skip over critical steps because of a fear of giving away too much. These teaser videos don't have to be a complete course in whatever it is you do, but they should be complete as far as the particular tip or trick you are providing.

3. Alert Them To Common Errors

The most common mistake made in providing instruction to people is not alerting them to common mistakes. Make people aware of the usual signs that what they are doing is going wrong. This will inspire confidence in your ability to teach and to deliver something that is truly useful. Nothing is more frustrating to a potential client than to think they have followed your instructions and the result is just not right.

4. Summarize

Remind your audience what you told them in simple memorable terms so that they feel they've actually learned something that they can take-away and implement on their own.

The Bottom Line

In the final analysis, if your audience doesn't leave your website with the feeling that they are actually taking away something useful that they can use, then you've failed, and you won't ever get them to order. The bottom line: you have to give something away, if you expect to get something in return.

16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

2011-04-12T15:11:00.001+08:00

In my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it.

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can disregard from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

1. Meta Keywords: Lord help us! Today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it's easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines - and it always will be.

2. XML Site Maps or Submítting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn't going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won't help your pages to rank better in Google either!).

3. Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your "click here" link's title attribute? (For example: Click Here.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee's knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that's great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.

4. Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time on, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren't, and they aren't. They're simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it's always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it's wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.

5. Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn't going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it's especially not going to be helpful if that's the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)

6. Keyword-stuffed Content: While it hasn't ever been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today's competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you're having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you've used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

7. Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You're not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You're just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher's question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren't putting the one word "lawyer" into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word "lawyer" all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you're providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don't even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do "just in case" someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they provide. You won't rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won't make you any sales.

8. Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you're offering there.

9. Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use this form of marketing - just don't be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.

10. Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may provide lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it's not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it's a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, do sometimes still see this technique work, but it's still not advisable to do it.)

11. Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It's the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you're linking out to. 'Nuff said.

12. Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can't provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) isn't ever seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there was something magical about doing this, again, you're only talking about one keyword phrase.

13. Republishing Only Others' Stuff: While it's fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that's all your blog consists of, it's not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what's good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It's all about adding value.

14. Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.

15. Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you're not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That's all well and good, but don't fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won't.

16. Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn't. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don't do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they're in the category sections themselves.

2010 SEO Predictions That Came True

2011-04-04T17:47:00.001+08:00

Each time a year ends, we encounter countless bloggers and writers who share their thoughts about the incoming year. Some predictions are theoretically supported and some are just plain wild guesses. Predicting what's in store for the next year is almost a tradition for writers, even those not involved in SEO and Internet marketing. Sports writers, business analysts, music critics, and amateur writers - they all follow this unsung tradition. Many think that this tradition is worth following because nailing a wild guess or a well-researched fact means only one thing: respect from your readers.

It's only the third month of the year but some predictions from last year have become realities. People didn't ever expect that the realization would be this quick, but, unbelievably, many predictions are coming true right now.

The Power of Content Length

This was a common prediction that was heavily criticized. I read on some blogs last year that Google would be considering a site's content length as a determining factor for site ranking. Experts and SEO veterans commented that this was an amateur's prediction, but they all ended up wrong. As a result of this latest algorithm update, many guest blogging sites have increased their minimum article length to 450 words, and some are requiring even lengthier articles. Perhaps this recent update caused content-related terrors to some SEO geeks. They'll just have to remember that quality is still better than quantity.

Mobile Search Growth

Both local and global search benefited from the rise of high-tech phones which provide consumers mobile Web browsing. The growing rate of free Wi-Fi zones over the country also made browsing even more accessible to mobile phone users. Mobile browsing changed the way people use the Internet. Browsing the Web has become a daily part of people's lives - not only Americans and Europeans but also people from highly developed Middle Eastern and Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Qatar and Dubai.

Social Media Expansion

2010 was the year of Facebook and Twitter. Countless companies vied for the most numbers of "likes" and "followers", not only for branding and popularity purposes but for online presence strength as well. These two social media giants have become major advertising tools. No SEO campaign would be complete without social media and no advertising method would be fruitful without Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social media expansion is an advertising basic for many businesses.

Although confirmed as a hoax, the rumor of Facebook closure struck many businesses. It isn't easy to find a social networking site as powerful and effective as Facebook. The shocked Tweets from many businesses owners that day prove that advertising and SEO without social media is impossible. A business' online presence is major determining factor of success.

Website Speed

It took a year for all SEO practitioners to understand the value of site speed in SEO. Google first announced that site speed would be part of their algorithm in 2009, but it wasn't until late 2010 that a majority of website owners seriously incorporated it in their SEO strategies. It's not a surprise that many site owners are now aware of site speed's importance. There are reports that many businesses suffered a major decline in rankings because they took site speed for granted.

Site speed can be a determining factor for website traffic. With the millions of websites available today, a slow-loading website can force a viewer to transfer to a faster site that can provide them the information they need.

Other Search Engines

Google is still the leading and most reliable search engine today and the main reason we obsess about search algorithms and rankings. Some business owners pay large sums of money just to get their sites to the top of Google's search results. Google has set the yardstick in Web search and brought balance and fairness to the competition for rankings, so that anyone can now get first page search result placement. But, there are still other search engines we can focus on. Not all Web users rely on Google to find what they need. There is still a significant percentage of users who prefer other search engines that you too should consider when doing your SEO. Yahoo! was once the leader of the search game, and it's realistic to think that there are remaining Yahoo! loyalists out there who put less importance on Google results. Then there is Bing, the Microsoft search engine that draws yóung Web users because of its homepage and features.

Bing and Yahoo! are continually improving their search algorithms because they know they have a large following and an increasing number of users. It's fairly certain that these two search giants are making plans to erode Google's current standing as the Web's dominant search engine.

The Reincarnation of Blogs

Blogs didn't ever really go out of style. Business owners use blogs to reach a wider sector of their target market and audience. Many have invested time in establishing domain authority and positive online reputation management, temporarily putting link building aside. Some articles previously stated that "link building is dead", making SEO practitioners abandon the method and focus on other SEO strategies. However, many experts have reinstated and proved link building's ability to provide traffic and rankings. Link building is becoming popular again, and we all know that the best way to practice effective link building is through blogging.

In addition, local search's popularity has made blogging more appealing to a local audience. There are blogs today that specifically cater to a locality. Blogs, treated as micro websites, have proved their worth to local businesses, making blogging the most effective way of building links and networks.

Local Search Dominance

Global search has become popular over the past few years, but many people choose to concentrate on local search to get more specific results. As local search continues to escalate its way to dominance, the strength of the American local market today can be attributed to the growing number of local search users and the improvement of local SEO methods. The strength of site authority, anchor texts, and traditional link building is evident this year. Behind this strength are the ever-growing Local Listing (e.g. Google Maps Optimization) and SEO Resellers that focus solely on providing and introducing SEO to the local business scene.

The 5 W's of World Class Customer Service Training

2011-04-03T17:44:00.002+08:00

The preamble to the United States Constitution begins, 'we, the people.' I feel strongly that we, the people, are what makes the difference in life, both personally and professionally.

The interaction anyone has at any level with your employees, including you, gives a customer -- whether current, potential, internal or external -- a chance to make a judgment about you, your company, all companies like yours. I'm not just talking about call centers here. All technical support or help desk personnel are included as well. As a matter of fact, anyone who is in the customer service business period.

With continued focus on customer satisfaction, customer retention, and lifetime value of the customer, it is no surprise that contact center operations continue to gain in importance as the primary hub of a customer's experience. For the customer, the person on the other end of the phone is the company. The contact center is still the most common way that customers get in touch with businesses. In fact, Gartner reports 92% of all contact is through the center. And it's been reported that 70% to 90% of what happens with customers is driven by human nature, having nothing to do with technology. State of the art technology is a necessity today, but it is meant to enable human endeavors, not to disable them.

I often talk about taking customer service and 'kicking it up a notch.' In the food industry, the word 'lagniappe' is often used. Its definition is "a small present given to a customer with a purchase". For example, when you go to the bakery and purchase a dozen donuts or bagels, you oftentimes get a 'free' one or a baker's dozen. That's what customer service should be about -- giving the customer more than they expected! Let's bring lagniappe into the contact center industry.

If we're going to speak about world class customer service, let's have a working definition of it so we're all on the same page. Customer service is those activities provided by a company's employees that enhance the ability of a customer to realize the full potential value of a product or service before and after the sale is made, thereby leading to satisfaction and repurchase.

Let's look at the first W which is Why?

The state of customer service today is not good, be it over the phone or self-service. Because 92% of people feel their call experience is important in shaping the image of a company, this reinforces the importance of centers in branding the image of their companies.

In a Mobius Management Systems Survey, here's what happened because of poor customer service:

   - 60% canceled accounts with banks
   - 36% changed insuránce providers
   - 40% changed telephone companies
   - 35% changed credít card providers
   - 375 changed Internet service providers

Are you one of these statistics? I certainly am.

In a study done by Purdue University and BenchmarkPortal.com, in answer to - (1) how did agents satisfy your needs and handle the call, and (2) based on any negative experience, would you stop using this company in the future? - the findings reveal a strong correlation between the participant's age and the tendency to stop using the company after a bad experience.

What does this mean? Younger participants were less tolerant and more likely to move to the competition. People over 65 were found to be more demanding than those in middle age.

What can you do? Give younger callers a 'wow' experience to maintain their loyalty. People over 36 probably have more of an 'emotional bank account' with the company they are dealing with - maybe had some good experience and therefore are more willing to 'forgive.'

In a recent study (CRM Magazine/PeopleSoft Web Seminar on How Usability Helps to Drive a Profitable Contact Center), the number of applications required for agents to access customer inquiries were:

    3.7% just 1
81.5% 2 - 5
    7.4% 5 - 10
    7.4% more than 10

As you can see, the majority of applications are 2 - 5. The goal, of course, is to link every point of contact to one central location for a customer-centric, synchronized approach, satisfying customer experiences with every interaction.

Strategies for success for world class service should include:

   - Respond promptly
   - Handle requests through the customers' choice of medium
   - Be brief and clear
   - Reduce back and forth communications (especially in writing, i.e., email, kick it up to a phone call if it goes beyond two)
   - Personalized service
   - Delight the customer

What do we mean by delighting the customer?

   - Inform and educate them
   - Establish your expertise and professionalism
   - Provide options
   - Diffuse upset, anger, when and if necessary
   - Escalate, if required
   - Take Ownership of the call

Remember we're still on the first W - the Why. Today's pressures on agents are different than in the past. They are asked to handle more customers, more volume, more complex and/or complicated calls. After all if we could handle our issues with self-service, we probably would not call. But if we tried self- service and it didn't work, now we're upset and it's an escalated call from the get go.

They're asked to provide more information, do it faster and be available and accessible. But they are to lower costs, generate revenue, incorporate new technologies, ensure closure and commitment, deliver 'great' service and when? Yesterday, of course.

As a matter of fact the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has said that the causes of death for people under 65 are:

   * 21% - environment - war, accidents, crimes
   * 9% - health care system - doctors, hospitals, medications
   * 17% - human biology - not because of lifestyle
   * 53% - because of the way people choose to live their lives!!!

This is the good news and the bad news. It's bad news because it's more than half. However, the good news is that this is something we can do something about, it's about choice.

10 Ways to Turn Online Reviews into More Loyal Customers

2011-04-01T17:14:00.000+08:00

Companies like Google, Yelp, UrbanSpoon, CitySearch and many others have made it easy and convenient for customers to share their thoughts with the world. And they're not just talking about what they had for breakfast.

They're telling the world what they think of Your Business.

Smart companies are using these online reviews to attract and keep more customers. Here are ten ways you can use Web 2.0 tactics to turn online reviews into more customers who keep coming back.

1. Respond to Every Review

Like emails and voice mails, online reviews are easy to ignore. Especially the icky ones. But don't. Instead, think of your online reviews as conversation starters. Someone has reached out to you. And when a person speaks to you, it's bad form to ignore them.

So, the polite thing to do is to respond.

Your response might be just to thank them. Or you might ask them further questions about their experience. Or maybe you share some details about the product or service they mention.

By engaging them you are affirming their choice to do business with you and developing a better relationship with them.

2. Always Thank People for Their Reviews

When a customer takes time to give you a review, they are going out of their way. So thank them for their time and effort (even if the review is negative). Remember, their review can be valuable information for you to improve your business. And it might help you attract more customers. Isn't this worthy of thanks?

3. Wait Before You Respond to a Negative Review

You open your web browser. You check on the latest reviews of your business. What you see enrages you. Someone has done more than just taken you to task. They have flamed you (or so it feels).

So the urge is to fire back, let them have it. But don't do it.

Step back from your computer or move on to something else. Do anything but do NOT respond right away. Let the message of the review simmer in your brain. When you come back later you'll have a much more reasoned response. And it will serve you better in the long run.

4. Néver Post (or have someone post) a Fake Review

Because the Internet appears to provide us such anonymity, some folks believe they can manufacture reviews to make their businesses look better.

Don't do it. You'll get caught.

Fake reviews take your eye off the ball. Your goal should be to give your customers such a great experience that they generously give you wonderful reviews that encourage others to do business with you. That should take all your time and effort.

Fake reviews are simply a distraction that will not help your business.

5. Leverage the Power of an Apology

When someone has a bad experience at your business (no matter what the cause) the fastest road to a resolution is an apology.

Your apology does two things. It shows them you care. And it tells them you're willing to take responsibility for a solution. And, because most employees and businesses don't apologize (or don't do it well) then your apology will stand out.

6. Néver Threaten a Reviewer Online

No matter how angry you are at a review, don't strike back by posting threatening or even hostile comments. Remember, the whole world can see what you post.

If you feel an online review is so awful it warrants legal action then take your concerns to the website where the review is posted. They have guidelines and terms of service that the reviewer might be violating.

Also, try to contact the reviewer privately through the website's private messaging service if they have one. Or simply ask (in your online response) that they contact you privately so you might discuss a resolution.

7. Be Consistent

Your business should have a policy and procedures for handling complaints. If not, think about how you might respond to negative reviews in various situations. Do you provide a refund? Do you invite them back for a do over? Based on the type of complaint, what do you feel would be reasonable and effective in getting customers to come back?

Whatever you decide, be consistent about it. Because many of your responses will be online, other people will see them. Inconsistency might cause other customers to feel slighted.

8. Use Online Reviews to Improve Your Business

The best thing about reviews is they are feedback direct from the people who matter most: your customers. And as customers they know best what it's like doing business with you. So take their feedback seriously and use it to improve how you do and what you do.

9. Keep Your Attitude and Message Positive at All Times

When you respond to an online review, your purpose is to improve your customer's experience. If their review is positive, your response affirms that. It shows them they made the right choice doing business with you. If their review was negative, your response might help mitigate the damage to your reputation.

Either way you help improve their experience of being your customer. And you do that by always focusing on the positive.

10. Tell Them What to Expect

The ultimate way to get a steady flow of online reviews from your customers is to give them an experience they want to talk about. The best way to do this is by going beyond what they want and expect from you.

When you tell your customers what to expect (and this message is based on what they want and what you do well) then they have a ruler to measure you with. You've made it easy for them to define their customer experience. And you've made it easy for them to talk about it.

Because your message is based on what they want, it's important and relevant to them.

Because it's based on what you do well, it's something you can deliver on.

This positions you to deliver an experience worth sharing. And with online review websites your customers now have an easy and convenient way to share their experience with the world.

And that will drive even more customers to your business.

On-Page Optimization Tactics You Don't Usually Practice

2011-03-31T17:09:00.002+08:00

Backlinking, backlinking, backlinking - it seems to be the only part of SEO anyone ever talks about these days! Let's get our noses out of everybody else's sites and back into ours.

On-page optimization is often overlooked and neglected, but your on-page SEO builds the foundation for all of your off-page optimization efforts. We're going to cover some of the basics here: domain names and title tags, but we're also going to get to topics less discussed when dealing with on-page optimization. I'm talking about things like stemming, your outbound links, your use of synonyms and more. Let's get to it!

Domain Name

Your domain name has a powerful effect on how you rank. Having an EMD (exact match domain) for your keyword is going to do a lot for your ranking. However, this is not crucial to your ranking success. Many people, such as myself, choose to have a domain name that they can brand. It depends on what you're looking to do with your site. If you want to make a small niche site targeting a single keyword, then clearly you will want to get an EMD.

But what if the EMD is not available?

This is a very common problem for internet marketers. From a SEO standpoint, you want to choose an EMD with a non-.com extension first if available. If none are available, then tack another word onto the end of your domain name. You will still have your keyword in your domain and receive SEO benefits from this. For the record, it is better to start your domain with your keyword first. For example, it would be better to choose "dogtraineronline.com" rather than "mydogtrainer.com".

Another trick is making your domain name the plural or non-plural version of your keyword. Google now uses a process called "stemming" that understands plurality and "ing" endings on words among other things. If you add plurality to your domain name, you will rank almost as effectively as for the non-plural version. These same principles can be applied to your title tags, header tags, and meta tags.

Title and Header Tags

We're going to apply the same ideas to our title and header tags. You want to include your keyword, but you can't always just use your keyword. In this case we are going to do the same thing we did with our domain name. Put your keyword first then add more text. Also, with stemming in mind, you can use different tenses or plurality for your keyword. There is also another clever strategy you can use to rank for your keyword without even using it!

Ranking with Synonyms

People don't talk about this too often, but Google actually considers synonyms when choosing results for queries. What does this mean? It means that you can rank for the word "manual" with the word "instructions". Do a Google search right now, seriously right now! Pick a word (manual if you'd like) and put a ~ in-front of it. Example search: ~manual. Every bolded word in the results page is considered to be a synonym. This means that using these words more often is going to help you rank for your keyword as well. They are like super-related LSI keywords.

Text Formatting

There are ways to optimize your text besides keyword density. Text formatting is using bold, italics, font-size, and word placement to improve the relevance of your page to your keyword. Making your keyword bold and/or increasing its font-size will add importance to it in the eyes of the Search Engines. Also, where you put your keyword has an effect as well. Placing your keyword in the first and last sentence of a body of text will improve the relevance of your page as well. With this in mind, here's how you can make a super-optimized blog-post or article:

1) Place your keyword in the title
2) Include your keyword in the first and last sentences
3) Bold your keyword both times
4) Wrap your keyword in the first and last sentences with h1 and h2 tags respectively

and here's the final tip for internal linking or backlinking

5) Use your keyword as anchor text AND bold it

This last trick gets ignored a lot. It's a great way to add even more influence to the importance of your keyword and get more out of your anchor text. These are the little steps that people who say on-page optimization doesn't really matter either forget or don't know about.

The biggest on-page optimization blunder of all is negligence of your link profile and how you link out. The links leading to your site aren't the only ones that affect how you rank!

Outbound Links

How you link out to other sites affects how Google trusts and ranks your site. In the TrustRank white papers that included a patent adopted by Google, they mention how good sites link to other good sites. They also say that "good sites seldom link to bad ones". Use this knowledge to enhance your rankings. Link out to authoritative and trusted sites. If you have a ton of links leading to spammy sites it's going to hurt how your site ranks. You can't control who links to you, but you CAN control who you link to, so don't harm your rankings by linking to bad sites.

As an example of this principle in effect, check out Huffington Post's homepage. Their articles rank very well in the search results and they have a PR 8 homepage. If you scroll to the bottom of their site, you will see a massive amount of "dofollow" links all leading to other major, authoritative sites. It's no coincidence that they rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This is a clear example of a site benefiting from linking out to other good sites and gaining trust from Google.

We have complete control over our on-page SEO, and this means our content and our links. We just talked about outbound links and that leaves us with only one other type of link.

Internal Links

Internal links are the links that lead from one page on our site to another. Now is a good time to state a quick fact about search engines and how they index the web. Search engines do not index websites, they index web pages. This means that a site doesn't have authority; rather a web page has authority. The reason all the pages rank well on an authoritative website is because of internal links.

When a large authority site makes a new page, what does that page have? It has a ton of powerful links from other authoritative pages already on the site. This all occurs because of internal linking. So what does it mean for us? It means we need to have a solid internal link-structure to take advantage of our own link juice.

There's no exact science to how you link your pages. Just having a consistent nav-bar is a start, but there is a lot more you can do. If you use Word Press, there are many different related posts plug-ins you can use that will automatically create links to other related posts for you. I recommend having more internal links than external links. A 1 to 3 ratio is a good reference for your outbound to internal links ratio.

There is a practice called PageRank sculpting that involves severely limiting the number of outbound links you have in order to keep more link juice internally. It sounds like a decent idea, but it fails in practice. PageRank moves more cyclically than recognized and a lot more will stay on your site naturally. Also, we just talked about how outbound links can help you rank - don't be afraid to link to other great sites.

Conclusion

I know that many of us have read through (and possibly purchased) countless guides on SEO and been over the same on-page optimization basics again and again. But that's the thing, they are just the basics! This is why everybody assumes that there's nothing more to it and it's deemed as less important than backlinking. Don't fall into the trap! Take care of your site, optimize the way you use your text, optimize the way you use links, prune it daily like a precious shrub.