Design

August 21, 2008

How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Stuff Done

Ah, the internal battle of IT and marketing. How do you get the IT folks to actually implement your brilliant vision? I have no idea but our panelists Matt Bailey (SiteLogic), Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Sage Lewis (SageRock) and Chris "Silver" Smith (Netconcepts) think they do. Greg and Sage are last minute additions and don't have presentations. Moderator Jeff Rohrs (ExactTarget) will force them to reveal the secrets. Matt will do it at ten times the speed of light and make Star Trek jokes in the process while I fail to keep up. Hi, Matt!

Matt Bailey is up first. He's been on both sides of the fence, IT and marketing and knows the joys and pain of both.

Don't go back and start beating on your IT team without first understanding how it needs to be done and how to speak their language. IT people can smell blood in the water, if you don't understand, they'll tell you that it can't be done.

Things you need to know:
Robots.txt -- So many people get this wrong. It's the welcome mat to the site. You don't need to have a welcome mat but if it exists, it needs to be accurate. It's a very simple text file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /test

The asterisk means ANY BOT.

You can sink your entire site by writing Disallow: /

Redirects -- Change of URL
Change of Index page
There are two kinds, permanent detour and temporary detours.

If you redirect using a 302, you might not be getting all of your link juice.

Tool: WebBug -- will tell you where you have redirects and what kind they are.

Fix 302s into 301.

Inconsistent linking -- Pulls up Brookstone's site and thanks Derrick Wheeler for finding the example. Always link to the same version of every page.

Duplicate Content -- Products existing in different categories with exactly the same text. When you duplicate content, you're making the engines choose which is more important and it might not be the one that you want it to be. Getting rid of the duplicates can have immediate benefit.

Good URLs: Words are easier for USERS to understand and they consider it as measure of relevance if they see words in the URL. Do the rewrite not just for the SEO standpoint, but also for the user standpoint.

Use a Favicons for branding.

Diluted Content -- Too much content on one page. You end up scattering what the page is about.

Unclear Instructions -- [Mmm, USB Sushi] Make sure that there's enough information on your page for users to make a decision. That's a marketing problem.

RSS -- Outside of this convention, people don't know what RSS is. If you're expecting people to know what to do with it, you're missing out. Explain.

404 pages -- Do not use default RSS pages. "Error 404 page not found" isn't helpful to a user. Give them a friendly message, a way out, a search box and relevant links.

Know when it's not really IT's fault. Test your site, see if it's really marketing's problem. Try the site, test the instructions, make a good user experience.

More info at the SiteLogic Blog.

Chris "Silver" Smith is next. Like Matt, he's seen both sides of the IT/Marketing divide. He'll teach us to get in touch with our geek side. [I put on my wizard robe and hat...]

Check for problems: SEO Health Diagnostics.

Tip: Browse your Web site like a spider.
Tool: Web Developer Toolbar -- disable JavaScript, disable CSS, disable Images, etc. [http://chrispederick.com/work/]
Tool: User agent switcher -- tell sites that you're Googlebot or Slurp, etc. [Same URL]

Chris shows Coke.com through the eyes of a spider -- not a whole lot there. Just a few links and in the copyright line. This is a common issue.

Redirects that are also bad for SEO: JavaScript redirects and MetaRefresh. It's lazy coding.

Tool: Web-sniffer [websniffer.net] -- if the page redirects but also returns a 200 error, you need to fix it.

How are we today? Ongoing analytics.

Tip: Check visits referred from top 3 search engines.
Track $ conversions from SEO traffic vs other sources. If you're just getting traffic and not converting, that's not good.
Track Bot requests over time. Base it off your log files.

Watch for recurring issues!

CMS hell: Recurring CMS/Legacy issues. Check and recheck SEO factors - Titles, Metas, H1, etc. Don't assume that "once fixed, always fixed". CMS upgrades can reverse changes.

Befriend your IT colleagues:

• Befriend and collarobrate with IT
• Give credit where credit is due
• Understand that improvements can be handled iteratively. Be satisfied with babysteps towards goals.
• Follow standard IT process for prioritizing.

Be nice! Programmer's Day is September 13th!

You need to make your company recognize the value of SEO
1. make a business case for SEO -- use your competitor's success.
2. Equally important to success as user experience, legal requirements, etc.
3. Take every opportunity to educate about SEO

Once the value of SEO is recognized, it can be prioritized along with another project.

It should not take 6 months to make Title changes. If you still can't win, you need to go around them. That's only IF ALL ELSE FAILS.

• Go to another IT department
• Build a parallel system on a sub-domain if you can't get the legacy/CMS system to work. Scrape your own site and put it in a friendly version. It's not efficient from an IT standpoint but it's a patch.
• Use a proxy system.

You need to get started, that's the important thing.

Time for some thoughts from Greg and Sage:

Greg: We require IT people to be part of the process from the very beginning. They don't take the project if IT isn't on board. The thing that screws things up is that marketers go in blazing but don't have the language. Take a slidedeck and explain what is it that you need to do, why you need to do it and give them an example of why it's a problem if it's not done. Do it with the boss around so that everyone gets on the same team.

Sage: He's a big picture guy. His wife plans everything. I think this is going somewhere NSFW.... Marketers are big picture. IT thinks in steps. You need to empathize with the IT people and accept that they're good at their jobs because they're analytics. Make a plan with them that they can understand. Communicate with them the way they communicate.

Jeff: If I'm a marketer and I'm not technical, what training would you recommend to get me started? Is that even helpful having the training.

Matt: "Websites that suck" was a helpful book. MarketMotive, SEMPO, DMA all offering training classes. But the most valuable is getting a partner in the IT dept. The flip side is the IT manager who thinks he already knows everything about SEO.

Greg talks about smacking know it all IT managers upside the head with a phone book. Violence! He likes people who have code experience to be SEOs.

[It's funny, I've always thought of SEO guys as more like IT and less like marketing]

Sage: Figure out what you're using and take a class in it. If it's PHP or Microsoft, whatever. Value their position.

Q&A

What's the best platform if we're building a Web site from scratch?

Greg: Anything that's not Microsoft? Most companies work open source. PHP, MySQL. You can find something free or very cheap that's pretty easy to work with.

Matt: I would agree. Anything that's Microsoft is going to go through iterations and that's going to be hard to keep up. PHP is more scalable and you can always find a programmer to tweak it. Take the two slide decks and build your RFP: I need it to do this and this.

Chris: I don't think that marketers need to learn programming. It's useful to learn some of the basic SEO diagnostics stuff. Also thinks that PHP is the way to go. Look at how the search engines are Unix based, not Microsoft based.

IT changed the shopping cart and now sales are down. How do I find the problem and fix it?

Chris: Check the type of browser that you're getting abandonment issues on. If it's not browser based, it might be something else. Look at your log files. Call an expert on that particular shopping cart.

Greg: Don't think they won't lie about the error log files either. Because they'll cover their tracks in some cases. Ask about what an error means.

Matt: That's a great thing. If you can say 'what's this mean? Why does that happen?" You'll learn so much and it will help you.

[More troubleshooting the guy's problem ensues. Apparently the shopping cart was built in house. The panel 'ahs' knowingly.]

Greg: It is almost NEVER better to build it from scratch.

Jeff: Are there any good third-parties who can test for you?

Matt: Yeah there are. They'll hammer and find your problems in the lab. Finding them is a little tricky. He uses a state resource.

Greg: Use your employees. Send them home and make them test it, take screenshots to give back to the IT department.

Can a good CMS product fix SEO issues?

Matt: you have to define a good CMS product first. Look at it before you build it. Keep the Title and Heading separate. Insist on it.

Greg: Every good CMS system need to give Good URLs, no duplications and individual control over every on page element. They use WordPress a lot because it's customizable.

Sage: Wordpress, I'll concur is a great system. Joomla is a great system too.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Design, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, sessj2008

August 8, 2008

The Evolution of Twitter Profiles

Editor's Note: Before she wrote this entry, Rhea asked if it was okay to use images. I said we love them. Clearly one should watch what they say around Rhea. ;) This is our last guest blog, folks! Enjoy! --Susan

I hate the Bruce Clay blog. Seriously, it's boring (not the writing, I love Susan and Lisa), the bland white background and sparse imagery - as a visual learner it makes me want to poke myself in the eye. It's ironic considering my first memory of the SEO industry was my boss handing me the search engine relationship chart (much more colorful then than it is today) and instructing me to memorize it. So, for today's guest post I'm bringing color back with bursts of Twitterlicious backgrounds!

Rae Hoffman recently blogged (gasp!) about An Actual "Non Big Brand" Twitter Case Study in which she detailed steps for creating a popular Twitter account (this was a great read and if you hadn't already started doing something similar to this, shame on you). At the same time, Edward Lewis, aka PageOneResults (shhh... he's private or else I'd link to his tweet) was criticizing ugly Twitter profiles. I'm personally very active on Twitter as both a user and a marketer, so I was curious about whether both Rae and Edward's claims about improving profile designs had much merit. So, I took a closer look!

Before I dive into the results, let's journey back in time to see the Evolution of Twitter Profiles:

The infamous default Twitter background:

The minimalist (solid color background):

The repeating background:

The large image or photo background:

The personalized image or photo:

The repeating and branded background:

In late spring, I started noticing search marketers wise up to the full potential of Twitter profile designs. The first search marketer I observed who really branded their profile was Lee Odden:

I quickly followed suit:

Other SEOs were doing the same, but with their own well-established brands:

Corporate brands are no exception to having a Twitter profile and customizing the design. Unfortunately, most fail to implement their backgrounds beyond a simple repeating logo. This might appear to users as both unprofessional and illegitimate, which can compromise conversions.

The real question is whether any of this matters?

First off we need to know what percentage of users actually navigate Twitter using the web versus a client like Tweetdeck, twhirl or Twitterific. According to what appears to be a statistically insignificant (sorry Dave) Twitter survey (but the best work on the subject), Dave Roher found that of 100 surveyed users, 72 percent use Twitter with the web. My own informal observations show a number of followers still using the web and I personally use it several times a day along with Tweetdeck. I look forward to seeing more comprehensive studies done on the subject.

Based on those findings, let's assume that a significant portion of users are accessing profiles via the web, the next question is, what are they seeing? I went to Twitterholic to take an informal survey of the top 50 Twitter users (yes, that's small, but I don't get paid to fill in for Lisa lounging on a beach) to see if there was a correlation between popularity and their profile backgrounds. I found six design categories: default Twitter background, solid color backgrounds, one large photo or image, repeating non-branded backgrounds, repeating branded backgrounds and non-repeating branded backgrounds.

Background Design Categories for Top 50 Twitter Users:

• Default Twitter background: 14%*
• Solid color: 30%
• Large image: 16%
• Repeating non-branded: 10%
• Repeating branded: 14%
• Non-repeating branded: 16%

*Two of these users are Twitter employees, so their non-branded background could in fact be considered a branded background.

If there's a correlation between design and popularity it appears to be with solid backgrounds, which I find suspect. This made me wonder if there was another variable causing the top 50 users to be so popular (besides the fact that they're all famous as a brand or personality). Perhaps the number of friends each top user followed had something to do with it? Maybe it's their number of updates?

I used the figures on Twitterholic to do some basic crunching, but between my bastardization of basic math and the small sample size, it wasn't worth massaging the numbers purely for speculation. The one figure I'd be interested in investigating further is the daily frequency of tweets for each top 50 user. I think this is the only area where significant correlations might be found. Unfortunately, to calculate the average tweets per day of the 50 top users, I would need far more time than I'm willing to commit to this post. Any takers?

Conclusion:
The Bruce Clay blog now looks a heck of a lot prettier. As for Twitter, the top 50 users probably aren't popular because of their profile design (in fact some are quite off-putting), but rather because of engagement with their followers and prospective followers (check out TweetPro!). Figure that part out and you won't need the right ratio of tweets per day combined with followers and aesthetically pleasing backgrounds. Be genuine, be yourself, don't be bland and have fun with it - the place is called Twitter afterall. Happy Friday!

Quick SEO and Marketing Twitter Tips:

• Your Bio: Did you know that as long as a web address is proceeded with www it will be active? Email addresses work the same way (with @__.com, not www). This adds another location on the main profile for backlink real estate.
• Testimonials: Want a fun idea for increasing your brand's credibility? Go favorite every tweet about your services, product or company. Then create an area on your web site that dynamically pulls the top five or ten favorites from Twitter and voila!, you have instant testimonials.

Rhea Drysdale is currently the Online Marketing Director for, Less Everything Inc., a ruby on rails development company, where she manages search marketing strategies for internal and client projects. Rhea is also an associate editor for Search Engine Journal and speaks locally on search engine optimization techniques.

Posted by Guest Author on 08/ 8/08 at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Design, Social Media

August 6, 2008

CMS is Not a Four Letter Word

Editor's Note: Our second blogger today is Megan Slick. Megan and Smart Solutions would like to get your thoughts on CMS.

The Content Management System (CMS) was born out of needs. These needs included:

• Non-technical website owners having the ability to update their sites in a friendly WYSIWYG
• Scalability for medium sites to grow into enterprise websites

When websites tipped and every company needed to have a website, the CMS solved many a company's woes. However, in giving non-technical people 'control', developers inadvertently took control away because the people using the system needed to be managed. I have often thought the word 'management' in content management system has a dual meaning. Non-technical users have the ability to manage their content, while the CMS manages them by performing functions they would otherwise not be able to perform. That in a nutshell is the past of CMS.

Fast forward to the present, we all have more needs and desires when it comes to our CMS. This has sadly led to huge, bloated CMSs that do 'everything' but when it comes to changing those little meta tags, uh-uh, no way, that's automatic. Many systems do not allow you access to the code. So in an effort to overly help non-technical people, the CMS has taken away most of the control from the technical people. It is no wonder that the SEO and design communities are disgruntled by them. Most SEOs and designers inherit horrible CMSs that confine their creativity and make their jobs much more difficult.

"SEO Friendly" is all the rage among CMS companies now. What does that even mean? One of the definitions provided by Merriam-Webster.com is "not hostile." I'm sorry, I expect a little more from a CMS than not being hostile to search engines. So now the CMSs are using crawlablitiy as a selling point. Depending on the competitive nature of your keywords, it is often not good enough for a website to be crawlable; SEOs need the ability to optimize. As a result, SEOs have taken steps to allow more control over the code for companies that still need CMS. This includes:

• Open source CMSs with plug-ins
• Custom CMSs

Both of these solutions have given control to the technical people (the SEO firm, the IT department, the designers) but what about the non-technical people that need access to the company website (the Marketing department, the PR firm, etc...). Using an open source CMS with plug-ins to soup it up is hardly going to be user-friendly and don't even get me started on the subject of umpteen versions in a given year. Custom CMSs, while they are going to be perfectly suited to your needs today are only possible for a small percentage of businesses that can afford to take on an initiative so large. Once the custom CMS is developed, the company is going to have to invest untold resources on updating.

In the movie, Little Women, Jo March says, "Necessity is the mother of invention." That means we are on the precipice of a CMS that steps up to the challenge. Go ahead; call me the Pollyanna of CMS but I know that it will happen. These needs are starting to hurt and when needs begin to cause discomfort, a solution is born. The CMSs of the past solved nearly all of the hurdles of that day. Well, the hurdles of today are different. The internet has matured. There is more competition, meaning companies cannot afford to do things wrong. The companies of today need a more mature solution from CMS. The future holds a CMS that is flexible and robust enough to handle the needs of the sophisticated SEO, developer and designer, while continuing to be easy for the non-technical owners.

What present and future needs do you want addressed by a content management system? Readers of the Bruce Clay Blog, loyal followers of The Lisa, I have a simple question, what is your beef? Non-technical and technical users of CMS - We want to know? No pain is too small or insignificant to report - so let 'em rip.

Thank you Lisa and Bruce for the opportunity to guest blog! It is quite the honor, since I am quite the fan.

Megan Slick writes website copy for SEO firms including Smart Solutions. Smart Solutions provides a comprehensive, online content management system and search engine optimization with a focus on award-winning website design.

Posted by Guest Author on 08/ 6/08 at 1:49 PM | Comments (3)
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August 4, 2008

An Insider's Look at the REAL Search Engine Marketing Play Book

Editor's Note: With Lisa away, we're kicking off a week of guest stars. Up first is thoughts from everyone's favorite usability guru, Kim Krause Berg of Cre8pc.com/UsabilityEffect.com. --Susan

Since my High School never won a football game, it wasn't until I went with a boyfriend to a big game between Lehigh and Lafayette Universities that I got to watch a real, honest to goodness game of men smashing each other in front of cheering crowds. I was bored out of my mind. The only part I understood was the Touchdown. Other than that it looked, well, stupid. Why was I freezing my butt off for this?

Flash forward to the present. I spent years as an SEO before switching over to the touchy-feely behavioral usability side. It matters not what I do, however. Explaining it is as impossible as describing football is to me. I simply say to folks, who ask what I do, "I help web sites score a touchdown" and they'll nod and act like they understand.

As luck would have it, I gave birth nearly 15 years ago to a bouncing baby future football star (according to him) named Stefan. He's teaching me football. I'm listening because as of last week, he dead pressed 315 pounds, plus I referred to baseball runs as "points" in my blog. I'm not a hard core, experienced sports mom. He got mad at me when I tried to put aloe on those marks weight lifters get above their knees. Screamed "Ouch" like a baby and everything.

For those of you who wonder at the hoopla I sometimes make over SEO and Usability, I'll try to help you out. I asked Stefan to let me borrow his 70 page Freshman High School Football Playbook, but I had to promise not to share any details on the actual plays with you because he was afraid Bruce Clay blog readers might try to come to Pennsylvania and spy or something.

Spying. Deception. Cloaking. Keyword analysis. These are the very same lessons SEO's learn. They're doing battle. They can't tell you every detail of each marketing play because Google would always win, and where's the fun in that? (And money.)

SEO is like the Offensive line. According to the Playbook, there are 44 plays the team has to memorize. Each guy has a position and according to whatever secret coded phrase the QB (Quarterback) mumbles in the huddle, this is a cue for where each player runs. I asked Stefan what happens if the QB mumbles and they don't all hear him right. He said they just try to bash the first guy they see.

Again, this is what search engine optimization is like. If you didn't hear the QB or learn the proper play, you just keyword stuff away like someone lit a fire under your butt and hope for the best. Or better yet, if you don't like where your web site ranks, you can execute a play based on data analysis and practice so its more likely the results get you closer to a conversions Touchdown.

What I found fascinating in the early days of SEO was the number of search engines and directories and all the different methods there were to get web pages indexed and ranked. Bruce Clay saved us a ton of time when he created a colorful diagram to keep up with things such as what search engines were fed by Inktomi and who was acquired by another search engine.

I kept my own less colorful text version of his chart on my Cre8pc site in those days. I had listed each engine and directory with direct links to where you submitted your pages, their fees, rules, tips and what was connected to what. The sheer volume and scope of what SEO's have to memorize is not unlike what I now understand to be what football players also need to know.

According to Stefan, some of the Coaches' rules are:

"You have to be aggressive."
"You have to know the game plan." (And if you don't, Coach throws you off the team.)
"You must demoralize your opponent."
"No soda. It's 'poison'."

Usability is like the Defensive line. Once the Offense gets the game going, eventually the Defense comes barging in to make the kill. An efficient, well built web site has the same affect and has been known to bleed customer wallets dry and break servers. There are only 22 plays for the Defense to memorize in Stefan's Playbook. Probably because it takes less thinking to block and tackle, konk, drive, slug and pile on top of the guy with the football.

As a Fullback and Quick Guard, Stefan has to learn a lot of plays with odd terms like Cadence, Running Game, and Pass Protection. I think a hungry macho man invented plays with names like Wedge, Molasses, Trap Blocking, Waggle Strong Protection, Zorro, Jack (Lisa's Kitty!), Sex, Stud, Man to Man and Rocket Laser.

How so like the usability industry football is! We memorize plays like usability, user experience, human factors, engabability, accessibility, captology, persuasive design, understandability, findability, information architecture, user interface, performance, and Jakob Nielsen.

A good football game is nothing without bouncy cheerleaders and screaming, beer jugging spectators. Internet searchers and web site visitors at home or the office are not unlike a crowded football stadium watching pigskin being cradled by fully grown beefy men in tight pants. A ticket to a football game can cost as much as Google Ads and be just as coveted.

It's our job, as online marketers and site developers, to make our jobs look easy. I think many of us do a great job at entertaining our spectators and maybe even some clients. We can't be softies. We have to know our playbooks, understand and support teamwork, drink during work hours and smile for our clients even if their site just slipped in rank. There are wins and losses. A web site that ranks number one and has championship conversions is worth the million dollar contracts we charge.

According to The Lisa, her favorite "Bruce-ism" is "It's not the job of SEO to put wings on a pig. It's the job of SEO to genetically re-engineer the pig into an eagle."

He sounds like Stefan's coach.

#

Usability consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of Cre8pc.com, UsabilityEffect.com and Cre8asiteForums. Her work combines usability testing with a working knowledge of search engine optimization.

Posted by Guest Author on 08/ 4/08 at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
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July 9, 2008

Bruce's Guide to Appropriate Use of Flash

There has been a lot of controversy over our post about Flash not being the SEO solution that a great many people hoped. Our statements, along with many other intelligent voices, claim that Flash is not off the hook yet as a search engine-unfriendly technology.

What I find amazing is that so many designers just don't get it.

Designers, especially Flash designers, understand the impact Flash can have on an audience. In this time when engagement is important, I agree that Flash is a formidable weapon, capable of entertaining and even amazing the end user. It certainly has a place in the overall realm of Web design. Properly implemented, Flash can help your site achieve its goals in a very attractive and engaging way. However, it can also act to the point of distraction. Remember <blink>?

Some designers have apparently forgotten the software development process, probably because tools have made it too simple and it's what schools are pushing out today. But in the beginning, programmers wrote source code. It was compiled and the output produced by an executable file was all the user could see. Today on the Web, SEO-savvy designers produce source-level design for marketing purposes (which include SEO), then it's "compiled" by search engines and hopefully granted high rankings. From there, and after a user's click of the mouse, it was presented in a browser. What the user sees is not what a search engine spider sees.

Remember when WYSIWYG editors changed everything, pushing the lazy designer past the source code? The search engines did not understand the generated code and rankings for sites created with such editors were poor. Most CMS systems also fail to generate optimized code, so this is not an easy task even with source-level control.

Flash is similar. It doesn't care about search and obviously does not care about source-level design. If the search engines could only see what the user sees, then Flash would be a great tool. But search engines do not see what we see (they read by Braille) and they can only parse what is visible to them (underlying source code), similar to a compiler placed between the Web designer and the user.

Source-level design offers specific control over that presentation to the search engines. When properly prepared, site information is readily seen and understood, and high ranking can be obtained. Flash does not present the rich information to the search engines in a format they can understand, certainly not at a level that would warrant you higher rankings over another site that is properly optimized. Flash goes from designer to end user without giving sufficient care to build the quality code for search.

Question: How many page URLs are in a multi-page Flash site? How should each be indexed? To a search engine your 40 pages of content are all in that one page URL. Engaging for the user, but ignorant of the needs of the search engines. How do you deep-link into that Flash sub-page? How can a search engine index just one of those pages? How do you nofollow a link? How can you block access to the XML that may be included? Can you keep underlying content from being exposed? How can you silo by theme within a multi-theme site? And this does not address the lack of universal Flash support (like on mobile devices) or that a third-party product is needed to run it. User experience aside, we have an obligation to our clients to get them search engine traffic.

Our major issue with the recent Flash announcement was with designers who now feel it is okay to tell users that this Flash update is the answer to their ranking problems. These Flash designers simply either do not get it or they are out to scam end users. It is not okay to say that this release of Flash is sufficient to compete against an optimized HTML site, and to tell users otherwise is unethical.

Of course, if the client does not care about search engine traffic then our argument, although still very valid, would not apply. For designers that are using Flash as a high impact technology in some great niche markets, you should not be concerned because ranking is not your objective. Our only complaint is with Flash designers that are promising rankings they simply cannot achieve.

As for our own site, we believe in a tactical use of Flash. Our Search Engine Relationship Chart ® is a simple but specific use of Flash, our video player is also appropriate, and our navigation simplifies our top-of-page SEO-centric source code and I contend that this is also fitting for our SEO purpose. Even our sIFR implementation met an objective. We rank in the top 10 of Google for [search engine optimization] so we are doing something right. Our next version of the site (in progress) will contain even more Flash. But it is difficult to imagine a 100 percent Flash site ever offering the content and the links to sub-pages across domains as used on our site.

Flash has its place, as does source-level design. Including appropriate Flash in most sites can assist you in getting your site to rank (through its use in a link magnet) but that is an entirely different thread.

Just accept that the Flash announcements are not statements that 100 percent Flash sites will suddenly rank well in search engines. HTML'ers should think more about effectively using Flash, and Flash fans should keep their eyes on the ball. Traffic makes the Web go round.

Posted by Bruce Clay on 07/ 9/08 at 8:54 AM | Comments (5)
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July 1, 2008

Don't Build Your Web Site In Flash

I'd like you to do me a favor. Please disregard everything you may have read this morning on Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts' blog and even on the Official Google Blog. Flash is still evil; please don't use it to design your entire Web site.

No, really. Don't.

I think it's great that Adobe is helping Google and Yahoo to read Flash files and even extract links out of them. TechCrunch explains how Adobe has created a special Flash player for the engines to use which will translate the .swf file into something they can read and understand. The engines will be able to click around and interact with a page the same way a user would. Even better, site owners will have to take no additional steps to get their content crawled. Google did note, however, that the crawler will not execute any type of JavaScript, so if your page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, you're still out of luck.

It all sounds very cool and will be a great boon to the search engine optimization industry. We'll no longer have to fight Google as we try and create workarounds to get previously invisible content to rank and in front of users. However, the news that Google may soon be able to index this content changes nothing. It's still up to you to convince your clients to avoid Flash. As pretty as it may be in small doses, a Web site entirely in Flash still presents a poor user experience. No one wants to sit through that. I don't care how indexable it is. There are still far better ways to present that content.

As excited as the SEO nerd in me was to hear Google's announcement this morning, it also makes me worry.

Before today, Flash was considered mostly unindexable by the search engines. Sites were encouraged not to rely on it knowing that the search engines spiders would get tripped up and that their content would not be searchable. And despite all those warnings, how many God awful Web sites are out there designed completely in Flash? About a gazillion. And how much do you hate them? About a gazillion times over. And now Google is giving designers the green light to use Flash? Oh my goodness, Batman, get ready for a total Flash onslaught. Do not want!

Flash Web sites are still teh suck. They're a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. You should be using your content and product/service offerings to do that.

HTML and Flash may be becoming more equal to the search engines, but most users will still favor an HTML Web site that they can navigate easily. Today's announcement is something worth watching, but I don't think it changes anything yet. I also wonder why Google had to wait on Adobe to "invent" some kind of special Flash player for them to use. It seems to me that if it were that simple Google would have done it years ago, no? Or are the brains at Adobe really smarter than the ones at the Googleplex?

I don't know. My SEO advice: Stick with creating HTML-based Web sites that users will want to interact with. Save the Flash stuff for the movie Web sites no one really cares about anyway.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 1/08 at 10:51 AM | Comments (45)
See more entries in Design, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

June 4, 2008

Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues

Back from lunch. Carrot cake is delicious and Vanessa Fox is now moderating the Developer's track with speakers David Golightly (Zillow), Jonathan Hochman (Hochman Consultants) and Chris Silver Smith (Netconcepts).

Vanessa says we're going to talk through the kinds of things they look for when they're going through sites and trying to locate issues. There is also a case study because case studies are delicious. Like carrot cake. Or maybe 3 mini carrot cakes. Don't judge me.

Vanessa says you have to look at the things that really matter and prioritize. You want to hit the big stuff first.

What really matters: The pages should be accessible and discoverable. You want to know whether or not you're found in the results and if users are staying on your site. Are you offering searchers something that makes users want to click through?

She's zipping through slides without ever actually stopping on one. I think she doesn't want me liveblogging. I'll be here drinking my water.

Chris Silver Smith is up to talk about basic stuff because he figured there would be a lot of newbies in the audience. He didn't get the "Advanced" memo.

Diagnosing Crawling Issues:

How Big Are You: Do a search command on your site to see how many pages are indexed in the various engines.

Query for Session Ids: [inurl:sessionid] will help you spot these in the results. The same page indexed multiple times with different session IDs can cause duplicate content.

Check the Robots.txt exclusions in Webmaster Tools. You don't want to accidentally block your site from being indexed.

If you have a redirect going on, you want to make sure the bots can hop through it. Check the headers that are returned by the server. FireFox Header Spy Extension is good for checking status codes.

Is Content Crawlable: Check in Lynx Browser like http://seebot.org. You can also use Firefox's Developer Toolbar to view your pages like a bot.

He also recommends Firefox's link counter extension. It shows you how many links are going out on a page, how many are nofollow'd, etc. Helps you analyze how much PageRank you're passing off to other sites, as compared to how much you're retaining.

Acxiom's Marketleap - Benchmarking Link Popularity: Type in your top competitors and it will tell you how many pages are linking to each competitor and the link popularity over time.

Use Google sets to identify your competitors as the search engines see it and also to see if your site is being categorized appropriately. Your competitor may not be who you think it is. You can see who Google thinks is equivalent to you.

Next up is Jonathan Hochman.

Essential Tools:

NoScript: When activated, it blocks all client side scripts like JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight. You can safely view pages with malicious code. See what pages look like to bots. See if content is accessible.

He brings up the SMX site and shows that with NoScript turned on the page doesn't render correctly. It won't affect rankings but it may affect people's impressions of the page. Only 2 percent of people surf without JavaScript turned on. It's not a high percentage, but they may be an influential percentage.

He brings up the Gillette Web site which is all in Flash. They use a JavaScript function called swfobject that switches on HTML content if Flash is off. It's good but they do it in an ugly way.

Googlebar (Not Google Toolbar): One click for Google's cached pages. Highlights search terms. You can run any Google search. Back to the Gillette site he found that the page wasn't being cached so that makes him ask why. He opens up his next tool...

Live HTTP Headers: Will expose redirects.

Optimizing Rich Internet Applications: Feed the bots something they can understand. Add (X)HTML content to pages with content generated by JavaScript, AJAX, Flash or SilverLight. (X)HTML content can be generated by server side scripts accessing the same database as the rich media application. This ensures consistency and avoids the appearance of cloaking.

Coding Options

1. Replace HTML content with rich media content by manipulating the Document Object Model. Open source solutions for Flash: SWFobject 2.0 or sIRF
2. For JavaScript/AJAX, modify DOM to replace HTML content, or use noscript tags.
3. For SilverLight, create your own search engine optimization-friendly insertion code. Better yet, nag Microsoft to provide a ready-may function.

SWFobject: Part of Google Code so it's okay to use.

Xenu Link Sleuth: A free spider that crawls a href links just like search engine bots. Generates a list of broken links and outputs a site map using each page's Title tag. Use site map to look for missing pages, bad titles and duplicate content. You can check for broken links before deployment.

FireFox Web Developer: You can disable/enable JavaScript. Report JavaScript errors. Disable CSS. Edit CSS or HTML. View alt attributes on images. Looking for missing or inaccurate Alt attributes.

Watch out for search problems with frames, iframes, Flash and SilverLight. Each object is treated as a separate thing, not as part of the host page. This may hinder external linking to deep content. Cannot add a unique title and description. Someone can navigate into a frame and there's no navigation because the menu is in a different frame. It creates orphan pages.

Up is David Golightly to talk about his experiences at Zillow. He's the case study.

Zillow's Search Interface

A front end for Zillow's powerful distributed search engine, serving a database of 80 million homes.

Goals for the interface:

• Highly configurable for different data sets (For Sales listings, Recently Sold, Most Popular, Regions...).
• Responsive to a range of user actions (Filtering, sorting, map interactions...)
• Dynamic back-button support
• Bookmarkable URLs (cross-visit state preservation)
• Offload presentation-layer processing cycles to user's machine.

Implementation: AJAX

Server provides config and initial search results as JSON text embedded in initial HTML.
Browsers builds everything - filters, map control, result list, breadcrumbs, etc -- based on server provided config using client side templating

The interface they created was very heavy and complicated JavaScript. Without JavaScript, users and bots saw nothing. No support for users without JavaScript or Flash including screen readers, text-based browsers or search engine bots. They also had really cryptic URLs.

Result as of 1/2008:

• Of 80,000,000 homes, only 200,000 were indexed in Google. Only 20 percent of search referrals did NOT contain Zillow-branded keywords.
• Of top industry keywords (real estate, homes for sale, etc), Zillow didn't rank in the top 10 pages of Google results.

They haven't rolled out their new search UI, but it was obvious what should be done.
Start by using some semantic HTML. Start with a basic, usable Web site using page refreshes, build page structure with semantic HTML. Then, use JavaScript (where available) to enhance the HTML baseline.

By doing this they would gain accessibility for non-JS-enabled user agents and decrease their page load time.

Guiding the Bots:

• Footer and site map are entry points to their search results.
• Provide a top down navigation tree
• Link each from home detail pages laterally to other
• Provide a transparent URL structure

Summary

Bots reward accessible application design with better rankings, more thorough indexing
Don't do in the browsers what you can't do on the server
Duplicating code on both browser and server is sometimes a necessary cost
SEO should work in concert with great UX
AJAX on top, not on bottom
The next generation: Microformats.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, liveblog, smxseattle08

Search Friendly Development

Good morning, Friends. It's time for Day 2 and I'm coming to you live from the brand new Developer Track. The Developer Track is awesome because it comes complete with a fancy waterfront view. I'd also mention the yummy bagel I'm eating but I think Michael VanDeMar is going to come and kick me if I do. He's over my bagel stories.

Vanessa Fox will moderate as speakers Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Maile Ohye (Google) and Sharad Verma (Yahoo) get us started.

Up first is Nathan Buggia. He says he rewrote his entire presentation last night based on what people were talking about on Day 1.

Microsoft is working on lots of big, hard problems. Stuff like:

• Affiliate tracking
• Session management
• Rich Internet application
• Duplicate content
• Geo-location
• Understanding analytics
• Redirection
• Error Management

Advanced search engine optimization is analytics. That's what differentiates it from regular search engine optimization. It means you're at a larger company with more resources (um, not necessarily). Implement things in a logical order. See what the impact is on your customers and the engines and decide if that's the right thing to go forward with. Do not implement something because you heard someone on a panel say it was a good idea. PageRank sculpting is a good example of that. Everything on the Web is an opportunity cost.

Nathan says to watch out for complexity. If you build cloaking or situational redirects into your Web site, you can add a lot of complexity to your site. It becomes hard to notice if you have problems on your site because stuff is hidden from even you. You want the simplest architecture you can have. Microsoft says cloaking isn't all bad, but it's never the first, second or third solution they recommend.

All Web sites have the same first problems. The first problem is accessibility. That's where people should start. Can a crawler get to your Web site? Are they hitting 404s? Do you use Flash or Silverlight and are they monopolizing the user experience? Take a look at canonicalization. Are you dividing all your PageRank and reputation?

Search engines are always changing. Someone can come up on the stage and claim they have the big new tactic for search engine optimization and then that may change in a year. What is consistent are the Webmaster Guidelines. Those are things that in spirit all the search engines agree with. If you go to Google's Webmaster Guidelines and adhere to the spirit of them, then you're working with the search engines instead of against them.

Nathan gives us an example and uses Nike.com. Nike is a brilliant company. There are few companies that can do the type of branding that they did with Just Do It.

When you go to Nike.com you see the Flash loading. Then you select language, region, etc. Then you get another loading screen because they're going to play a full minute video. It takes eight seconds to get to that video. Maybe people don't have eight seconds. Maybe they only have one second. The second run experience is 3 seconds because of the cookie Nike puts on your computer. The cookie resets every day. If you are blind or ADHD, you have a really bad experience on that site.

The site also isn't great for search. He shows us the HTML behind the page. There's no Title tag. There's nothing. It's just a Flash application. Basically they're cloaking. The site is also really complicated. Nike has over 2 million pages on their Web site and they're cloaking for a lot of them. He shows what the Nike SERP description was for a few days after their cloaking broke. It was a user error.

Every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing all in cloaking, there are other people out there NOT investing in those things. If you type in [Lebron James shoes], Nike doesn't come up.

Alternate Implementation

Throw your rich object at the top of the page and then use JavaScript at the bottom to detect what the div does. (If I mangled that, please feel free to correct me in the comments. As awesome as Nathan is, I don't speak tech geek.)

Advanced search engine optimization is not spam.
Search engine optimization does equal good Web design.
Design for your customers, be smart about robots and you'll enjoy long-lasting success.

Sharad Verma is up.

Sharad says he loves his job. This is an opportunity to serve his customers. When he's not working he loves to travel. Last week he was in Machu Picchu, Peru. He's giving us a bit of a history lesson and telling us how he took trains and buses on his journey. I'm not sure where this I going but it will tie together soon. Oh, I get it. The moral of the story is that Machu Picchu is accessible and easily discovered. I see what he did there.

As a site owner you're serving both your users and robots. You need to design your site so you're not alienating either of them. There are three cranks behind the box - crawling, indexing and ranking. You have control over all three, but more control over crawling.

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

They start with the URL, download the Web page, extract links from the Web page and then follow more links. Sometimes they find invisible links or sometimes they see links but decide not to crawl the content. That could be because the links are excluded in your robots.txt or because they're duplicate links.

Search engines find your contact via the organic inclusion from crawling. All you have to do as a site owner is put up your site, get links, and let the crawlers in. They'll do the magic. If you're not satisfied with what they're crawling, then you can supplement that with feeds.

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

Search engines do not understand JavaScript. They're starting to understand it but they're far away from being able to full crawl it. He recommends turning off your JavaScript and seeing if you can navigate your Web site. Is all the content reachable?

Flash: Make sure your site can be read by a robot. If you're using Flash, make sure you're offering up alternative navigation.

Dynamic URLs: Difficult to read, lead to duplicate content, waste crawl bandwidth, split the link juice and are less likely to be crawled and indexed.

Best Practices:

• Create user friendly, human readable URLs
• 301 redirect dynamic URLs to static versions
• Limit the number of parameters
• Rewrite dynamic URLs through Yahoo! Site Explorer

He asks how many people use Site Explorer and their Dynamic URL Feature. Log in and authenticate your Web site. It allows you to remove parameters from URLs.

Duplicate Content

Consequences of duplicate content: Less effective crawl, less likely to attract links from duplicate pages.
Solutions to duplicate content: 301 duplicate content to the canonical version, disallow duplicate content in Robots.txt

Other Best Practices:

• Flatten your folder structure
• Redirect old pages to the corresponding new pages with 301/302
• Use keywords in URLs
• Use sub-domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove the file extension from the URL if you can
• Consistently use canonical URLS for internal linking
• Promote your critical content close to the home page

You can also get your content included through feed based crawling. You can provide feeds through their Sitemaps Protocol to tell the crawler were to find all the pages on your site, especially your deep content. Sharad recommends using all the Meta data supported by Sitemaps Protocol.

Do not exclude your CSS content in the Robots Exclusion Protocol because the engines want to see the layout of your page.

Search engines want your content. Break down those accessibility barriers and let them do their job.

Maile Ohye is up last.

Google wants to help users create better sites. If you have better sites, we all have a better Internet. Aw. She's going to tell us how to enhance your site at every stage of the pipeline. Maile talks like an infomercial.

Crawlable Architecture

Consider progressive enhancement. This means you don't just begin with Flash. You start with static HTML and then add the "fancy bonuses" like Flash and AJAX later. Then the fancy stuff becomes a complement to your Web site instead of your entire site.

She looks at a page/site that's rich in media with HTML content and navigation - the Dramatic Chipmunk video on YouTube. The video is in Flash, but there's descriptive content on the page (title, description, user generated content in the comments) and HTML navigation.

Consider sIFR for Flash

JavaScript detects if Flash is in installed.
With No Flash, it displays the regular text. With Flash on, you get the Flash.

If you do that the text must match the content viewed by enabled users. It must be accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Consider Hijax for AjAX

Format JavaScript with a static URL as well as a JavaScript function. She gives us a long URL and says that the search engines often ignore fragment (#f00=32) but respect parameter (?foo=32). I'm hoping that makes sense without you having to see the long URL.

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster Tools: They give crawl errors if you verify your site. In crawl errors, be sure that what you see is what you expect. They'll show URLs blocked by robots.txt, make sure that's what you want. They'll also tell you about time out errors and unreachable links. Use it to verify your link structure and that all your links are findable.

Promote your quality content. Set preferred domain to www or non-www. You don't want to run two versions of your Web site. [As a note, this doesn't always fix the problem. Be consistent in your linking and don't rely on Google to do your work for you.--Susan]

To reduce duplicate content, keep URLs as clean as possible, internally link to your preferred version and store visitor information in cookies then 301 to canonical version.

Use a cookie to set the affiliate ID and trackingID values.

Proper Use of Response Codes

Use 301s for permanent redirects.
Signals search engines to transfer the properties like link popularity to the target URL. This applies to situations like moving a site to a new domain and modifying the URL structure.

Anatomy of a Search Result

Create a unique, informative title. It acts as informative signal of the URLs contents to a search engine and user. You don't want your title to say "Untitled". She talks about how Webmaster Tool can help you locate Title tag issues.

Snippets: Provide the user more content about each search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your click-through.

Influence snippets with Meta Description. Meta Descriptions can be utilized by Google in search results. Meta keywords are of low priority.

Final thoughts from Maile:

• Verify Crawl errors as expected
• Creative descriptive titles, consider adding useful meta descriptions
• Submit site maps for your canonical URL
• View Webmaster Central blog posts

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, Google, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

May 6, 2008

eMetrics Keynote: Optimizing eBay - Improving Customer Experience at the World's Marketplace

Happy Tuesday. Time for a morning keynote where everyone gets free coffee mugs and are then blinded by strobe stage lights. Yey! Jim Sterne welcomes Elissa Darnell and Deepak Nadig. I think. His voice is really distorted over the microphone. Elissa and Deepak are from the eBay.

Up first is Deepak Nadig. He's going to give us an overview of eBay. The microphone is really bad. This should be interesting.

In the beginning, eBay started out as an experiment. The founder had a broken laser pointer and thought it would be interesting to start an auction to see if anyone wanted to buy it. He set the bidding price at $1. At the end of two weeks, someone had paid $40 for the broken laser pointer. He contacted the guy to make sure he knew it was broken. The guy said he knew and that he collects broken laser pointers. An industry was born!

In 1996, eBay had 41,000 users. In 2008, they have 276,000,000 users with over a billion photos. The site gets more than a billion page views a day. An SVU is sold every five minutes. A sporting good sells every 2 seconds. There are over ½ million pounds of kimichi sold every year. It's in 39 countries, in seven languages.

Elissa jumps in. eBay is really about the people who use it. To optimize the user experience, they need to know who they are and what they do. Users trade in over 50 thousand categories on eBay. They want people to have a fun shopping experience and to find good value. They want to help sellers find buyers. They want to know more about their buyers and sellers - what motivates them, how often do they use the site, why do they go to other sites, etc. They break their buyers and sellers down on their experience, frequency of use, and lots of other metrics.

What do they mean by user experience? They're talking about things like the utility of the site, usability, desirability, and the brand experience.

They use an assortment of research methods, including lab testing, field visits, participatory design, surveys, eye tracking and card sorting. They want the users to help design the user experience.

For lab testing they bring in representative users individually into their usability labs. They observe them perform assigned tasks. They use either prototypes or the live site itself to test. This enables direct observation of target users as they interact with the Web site or a design prototype. They're able to identify areas that are confusing and potential fixes. Testing is done iteratively through the design process.

Sometimes they'll have people use low fidelity (paper) lab testing where the designs are shown on paper. The researcher or designer acts as the computer and the participant uses their finger as the mouse.

They also do RITE testing - Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation. It forces more rapid testing and retesting of the design based on a very small sample.

They have a program called Visits, also known as Field Study or Ethnography where eBay employees go to their customers' homes and watch them use eBay. They've taken their CEO, CMO, designers, finance people, etc into peoples' homes. They want everyone to understand the customers.

Visits involve going into peoples' homes and spending several hours watching them use eBay. They don't give them a set of tasks; they just let them do what they would normally do. The eBay rep takes notes or films video. The findings are summarized across participants. It reminds eBay employees that they are not their customers even they though have experience using the site. They have to get to know their real customers.

When they do Visits, they get to see people use eBay. They see them on their computers, switching between computers, what kind of connection they have, what kinds of equipment they use with the site, etc. They see them with life's normal interruptions (talking parrots and messy desks). They see that people weigh objects using their bathroom scale. People let their guard down when you go into their homes. They followed people to the post office to see how they ship their items.

Questions they focused on during the Visits:

• What is the larger context of use?
• What issues exist and WHY?
• What can we do to address the issues?

The visits are not about the numbers, or the question "how many users experienced that?"

To optimize the user experience they do research. In the beginning they do strategic research to inspire (field visits, competitive evaluations). Then they do design research to inform and assessment research to track.

Case Study

They redesigned the View Items page this year. They wanted to increase BID/BN efficiency and to improve the user experience by reducing the complexity and the clutter. They use a combo of qualitative and quantitative techniques. They used research from multiple teams.

She shows us what the View Item page used to look like in 2000 and how it's evolved over the years. A new design will be unveiled soon.

Research Overview

• Understand the User Needs: They conducted a compelled lab study to understand user experience. They also did participatory design studies to try and come up with the ideal design.
• Concept Testing: Held focus groups.
• Iterative Design: Used Rapid Iterative Testing to gauge use reaction.
• Visual Design Research: Use a desirability study. Tested the tabs, a new visual element they added.
• Implemented a Diary Study: Had users give input about how they're using the site at home.

How do they know the View Items page will be a success? Research was conducted through the product lifecycle to evaluate the current strategy and design at each stage. They had focus groups on the early concepts. They did desirability studies, and used eye tracking to help them pick the best tab design.

Deepa is back up.

Experimentation Lifecycle

1. Hypothesis: Idea and learning
2. Experimental Design: DOE, define samples, treatments, factors, etc.
3. Setup Experiment: Setup experiment samples, treatments, factors, implementation
4. Launch Experiment: Serve treatment
5. Measurement: Tracking, monitoring
6. Analysis & Results: Metrics, reporting

Automation

• Dynamically adapt experience: Choose page modules and inventory which provide the best experience for that users and contest. Order results by combination of demand, supply and other factors.
• Feedback loop enables system to learn about improve over time: Collect user behavior, aggregate and analysis offline, deploy updated metadata, decide and serve appropriate experience.
• Best Practices: "Pertubation" for continual improvement. Dampening feedback loop.

What they think about during and experiment: The fidelity (how representative is it of the product?), the cost (total cost of designing, building, running and analyzing an experiment), the iteration time, the concurrency (how many experiments can be done at the same time?), the signal/noise ratio, and the type/level of the experiment.

Challenges to Experimentation

• Stickiness to the user
• It gives you the "what", not the "why"
• Duration and long term effects
• Minor vs Major differences
• Extend of generalization

Qualitative research such as lab test and field visits give us rich data about usability problems, discoverability, navigation, terminology, more complex problems.

Understanding the customer experience requires insights into what they do, why they do it, attitude, motivations, etc. Qualitative and Quantitative both have their advantages and limits. Using them together helps you gain a holistic understanding of the user experience.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 6/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Design, eMetricsSF08, liveblog

March 24, 2008

Worst. Web Site. Ever.

Fact: The best way to ruin anything is to take away the simplicity and intuitiveness of something and complicate it with technology and/or stupidity.

Seth Godin hit on this topic in his recent post about the world’s worst toaster. In case you didn’t know, the world’s worst toaster is the one that requires 10 steps just to burn a piece of bread to a level that makes it edible. I’d argue that law isn’t reserved for toasters.

Think about it.

• The world’s worst email list is one that takes five steps to allow someone to unsubscribe.
• The world’s worst Web site is one that throws unnecessary hurdles in a user’s conversion path.
• The world’s worst brand is the one that makes it hard for users to embrace it.
• The world’s worst boss is the one employees have to go around in order to be creative.
• The world’s worst customer service representative is that one that pulls customers through a chain before giving them what they want.

If you want your site/product/company/life to be great, take out all the unnecessary stuff. Trust me, it works.

All of my most favorite companies and/or sites are those that are the simplest or the most initiative to use. I’m talking about sites like shirt.woot that only require me to say, “I want one!” before prompting me for shipping address. And now that I’ve registered, I don’t even have to do that last part. I just hit “I want one!” and a present shows up at my doorstep 28 hours later. That level of simplicity is dangerous. For serious. I once bought $60 worth of chocolate in less than five seconds from Woot. [And it was delicious. --Susan]

This is what your customers are looking for – instant gratification and no fuss. They don’t want to hold your hand or cuddle with you afterwards. They want you to solve their problem and get out of their way. They definitely don’t want to suffer through 11 clicks on eBay just so they can collect six dollars. At that point, dealing with you is actually costing them money.

When you’re a business owner you often find yourself having to make a lot of hard decisions: What should our Web site look like? Should the navigation go up on top or should it go on the left? Should it be light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background? What kind of employees should we hire? Is experience more important than drive? How can we gain the necessary exposure needed to push our competition?

These are important things to take into consideration. However, the most important decision you’ll make is this: Are you going to make things as easy for user to understand as possible or are you going to make them work for it?

Users will always gravitate for the sites and brands that make things easy.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 03/24/08 at 4:30 PM | Comments (2)
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February 28, 2008

SEO & Usability: They Can (And Should) Coexist

I'm running so late. Okay, here's the next panel: Moderator Gord Hotchkiss (Enquiro) who I have seen so many times this week. Speakers are Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing) and Lance Loveday (Closed Loop Marketing). This is presentation only because the site clinic is next session.

Shari Thurow is up first and my fingers start hurting preemptively.

She's going to be establishing a common vocabulary for us all and some key concepts of search usability.

What is usability? She provides Jakob Neilsen's.

People should be able to get the scent of information before they get to the actual web page. Usage-centered design is a focus on the use of the product, what you're doing, trying to accomplish. Search usability is usage-centered, not user centered.

Search does not mean query. It also addresses refining, expanding, foraging, pogosticking, browsing/surfing, negative search behavior, etc.

There are at least three types of query behaviors but the majors are navigational, informational and transactional. Your Web pages need to accommodate all of these types.

Usability affects search engine visibility.

Key Concepts:

• Using and validating the user's language - search engines do this by highlighting the words used in the query.
• Sense of place
• Scent of information
• Information architecture
• Interface
• User confidence

There's a lot of swearing that goes on in usability testing. Ahem.

Headings are important not just for ranking but also for user confidence. It validates their search.

Sense of place answers the questions: where are you, what page are you viewing whose site are you visiting? what content is this page focused on? is this the information I was looking for?

Scent of information:
Is makes of textual and graphical cues. You need to have both.
Ensures that visitors will be successful in finding what they need
Answers the questions: is the information you desire on the page, what can you do? Where can you go? How do you get there? How do you get back? Where have I been? Nothing irritates a user more than messing with the link colors.

Information architecture:
How Web content is organized and grouped
How files are arranged on a Web server
How Web content is categorized
How Web content is labeled

Interface always FOLLOWS after architecture.

Navigational labels and cues should be written in the users' language whenever possible and applicable -- often contain keywords

The interface should always support the site architecture

Pages will end up more focused.

Reinforce your primary navigation with your secondary navigation.

Keyword research always comes first. Important keyword phrases should be a part of a site's information architecture and corresponding interface which means that effective search engine optimization begins before a site is being built, not after. Search usability addresses all search behaviors, not only querying behavior.

Usability testing and a focus group are not the same. It's task oriented, not focus group questions. The goal is to balance between user expectation and business goals.

She goes through a case study.

Just because something isn't your particular taste, doesn't mean that it won't convert. Get over your preconceptions.

She finished her presentation in exactly 25 minutes. Gord is impressed.

Next up is Lance Loveday. He's got his own lavaliere mike. It's keen but a little feedback.

Let's start with some philosophy: Some Web sites are better than others. Better Web sites make more money. ROI depends on making your content visible and effective. You need to get traffic and convert that traffic. In other words, you need SEO (get traffic) and you need usability (convert traffic).

Extreme design can get in its own way. Extreme usability can be equally oppressive. Jakob Nielsen's site is both very usable and very search engine friendly but it's boring as heck.

MYTH: Applying SEO to a site limits design flexibility and inhibits usability.

We want to think that there's one right way to do things and there's got to be a number one. The reality is that there is no inherent tradeoff between the three. It's just more work to do it.

First, remember what the engine is seeing. It's just the HTML. There's a separation between content and interface.

A word about Flash: You can still design in it but it's more work.

What people say to defend Flash: "Having a deep immersive experience is more important that search engine rankings" "We'll sacrifice search engine rankings for the experience."
What they mean: "SEO is boring." "We want to use Flash."

What people say to defend Flash: "Usability needs to be balanced with design, branding and user experience objectives."
What they mean: "Usability is boring." "We want to use Flash."

[Gord: It's funny because it's true. Quicksand is an immersive experience too.]

All Flash page/site can't be crawled.

Options:
1. Ideally, don't design entirely in Flash. Use elements instead.
2. Provide important Flash content in alternate manner visible to search engines using Progressive Enhancements. (HP's site is a good example of this.)

Major SEO Considerations:

• Title
• Description
• Copy (length, keyword density)
• Links

None of these are usability conflicts.

URLs:
SEO -- Use keywords in the URL and use static appearing URLs
Usability -- doesn't matter Matters.

Recent Marketing Sherpa results: "Long URL Length contributed to more clicks on… the next ad down the page. Those viewing the listing on the long URL clicked on the listing immediately following 2.5 times more than those viewing the listing with the short URL. The long URL repelled the click as it was interpreted as being less relevant. The long URL may act as a visual wall, directing attention to the next ad."

Lance shows a few sites that are doing things right.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 3:44 PM | Comments (0)
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Industrial Strength SEO

Mornings at SMX go so fast. Just a keynote and one session then it's off to lunch. In this case, the session is industrial strength SEO and so we've got some industrial strength speakers Martin Laetsch (Covario, Inc.), David Roth (Yahoo!, Inc.) and Marshall D. Simmonds (The New York Times). Don't worry, moderator Detlev Johnson (Search Return) is industrial strength too. He'll keep everything in order.

We're kicking things off with Martin Laetsch. The reality is that if you've got a small site, the basics are not that hard and you can optimize it pretty easily. But for a very large site or sites, with hundreds or millions of keywords, there just aren't enough hours in the day. How often do you do an audit of your site? Once a year? Twice? Monthly?

What you did yesterday for SEO isn't sufficient today. The algo is changing, your competitors are changing, your own site is changing.

You need well defined policy and procedures. Standards and best practices should be planned. Step one should be a detailed audit of your site. You should be looking for your weak points and problems. Are there template problems? Look for major issues. Get a baseline so that you know where you've been in addition to where you need to go. Look for coding traps, spiderability. Map your keywords to content pages. It's not enough to rank for A page. You want to rank for THE RIGHT page. Audit your site semi-monthly or monthly. You should be on top of any potential problems.

Define and Deploy your standards and Best Practices:

• Create consistent processes and written standards
• Provide comprehensive training to all key shareholders
• Create communication and collaboration protocols and expectations.

If you're working on a large site you MUST have a style guide. You need to be able to hand your style guide ot an experienced designer and have them know exactly what it means to do SEO in your organization.

Collect and share your best practices with the whole team.

Ensure continunous improvement. SEO doesn't stop. Do page level audits. Use tools and technology to keep up. On a very large site, you CAN NOT do it by hand. You need to use tools. Be able to pull out the points and say 'fix it'.

Searchers only give you three seconds to decide if you're the right choice for them. Make sure they're landing where they need to. You'll have to have analytics for this.

Define and Deploy a Tool Framework for Analytics Management Reporting

You need to prove that what you're doing is worthwhile and you have no way to do that unless you're measuring and reporting your progress. You need to report at least once a month. Make it macro level and tell them what it's doing right.

Monitor pages ranking for specific keywords
Create a monthly to do list of pages to be audited for optimization
Workflow management focusing on the highest value keywords and pages first.

David Roth is our next speaker. I've seen his presentation at Pubcon. It was pretty darn good but he's taken out all the Van Halen jokes. (so he says.) I encourage you to check out that link for more information on how big sites do their SEO.

Search is still the best way to get new customers. They use Lifetime Value to determine the value of optimization. They determine what a customer is worth across the life time of their conversion.

They just launched Yahoo! Buzz and the SEO team at Yahoo gets access to that as well as pairing with yahoo search on certain tools.

Yahoo is a very decentralized company. His team works on getting the training, education, best practices and standards implemented. The actual work is done elsewhere. (This goes back to making sure your standards and practices are exceptionally well-defined.)

[Commentary: Overall, I think people need to realize that big sites are going to be doing a lot of very basic SEO. They need to do it really really well and build it into the bones of the sites but at its heart, they rarely have the bandwidth or need to do the more high-level stuff.]

Measuring Success -- they use an SEO scorecard internally to track how successful they are. They built an index based on the same methodology as the predictive model and track it over time. They refine it as necessary. Dashboards are helpful for giving an at a glance view of where you are and how your doing against your self and your competitors over time.

If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

The companies that do really well with SEO have it built into the culture. You need to get everyone to believe in it, believe in the value of it. That's really the ideal spot.

Marshall Simmonds is going to tell us about SEO at the NYT. Hee! Detlev called him MDS. We're going with that. Ooooh! MDS's team is responsible for removing the login for the NYT. I love you, MDS!

There's actually a lot more to this than just the NYT really. NYT has a huge number of sites that require SEO. And every site requires something different. There's no SEO out of the box solution. Everyone should be able to optimize a title tag and move the company name to the end, that's easy. But there's not SEO 101, then 202.

Oh my god, MDS, slow down! He mentions everything from SEO to Social Media to branding as concerns. Seriously. EVERYTHING.

For the NYT, they had some things they needed to do:
*Get the SEO Basics down
*Template optimization
*Pull down registration wall (PREACH IT!)
*Expose archives
*Monthly network-wide communication -- Tell people about successes. Build momentum and get buy in.

NYT's growth because of these small changes has been very good. He doesn't agree that you need to audit every month but you do have to do it regularly and you have to put checklists in front of people so that they understand their roles and their part in the process. Know what your IT department is doing. They're trying to be more efficient but it can screw up SEO as well. Make sure writers and content creators know SEO and can create for it.

He goes through several case studies for ToysRUs, TVGuide, Time Inc Interactive. I'll skip it because he's going really fast and it's not really relevant.

[Commentary: It's all well and good to say that you need to build company awareness but how about something concrete about HOW you do that?]

Find one person in each department that can be your evangelist. Make it their responsibility to build enthusiasm.

What to Avoid:

*Walling off content
*Under-communicating Success
*Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales
*Meta Keywords Tag -- automate it if you can. Just be done with it
*Implementing the changes-- know who is doing the actual optimization and talk to them the whole way through, not just the project managers but the actual people.
*Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- It takes a long time. Build in that expectation.
*Lack of editorial oversight: If you're automating the Title or Meta Description tag, stop.

For tracking, give information back but give it back in a way that makes sense to the level you're speaking to. Give a high level as well as the ability to dig down.

The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Your search/promotion strategy is going to be messed up. Plan for it. Lastly, tracking.

Aw, he finished with a picture of babies! Hi, babies!

Q&A

What are your suggestions for coming in after the site is built?

MDS: Identify the quick wins first, open up the site and start building into the DNA and training.

Martin: I agree with that completely. Auditing and reporting, getting things in front of the right people to get buy in. Use the carrot and the stick. Show them who is doing well and who need things done.

David: The only thing I would add is that most Web sites is that companies have IT/Web developers. You should be converting them

Detlev: Be the benevolent dictator and get them to buy in.

Good backlinks and terrible inter-linking. How do you fix it?

No one really seems to have a direct answer. David says site maps are good, they do a lot of internal linking as well. [I suggest siloing--we've got lots of articles on it, go check them out.]

[Much pushing of getting analytics. Do it. Do it now. I'm serious.]

Solutions mentioned:
Omniture
WebTrends
Organic search insight -- designed for big sites, extremely expensive

When you have millions of pages, do you go for flat or deep architecture?

[Have I mentioned our siloing series? It's really good.]

MDS: NYT site architecture is automated. They use Teragram(?).

Detlev: Think about how you want to distribute your linking in a pyramid.

MDS: We always say no more than three and if you say that to IT they'll throw things at you but it's not really necessary.

Martin: The engines WILL penalize you for deep directory structures. They look at how far down it is and they'll say this isn't important. Think about what's easier for users. Shallower is better.

Marshall, what are the top technical issues you face with wireframes and CSS, etc?

MDS: Excessive JavaScript. We had to do a triage. Where would we have the biggest effect? Movies got picked first. We've consolidated the templates.

Martin: The problem isn't technical it's that the agencies are designing things based on looks not on search. Flash is fantastic but you can't have an entire page in it. If you want Titles, they've got to be H1s, not an image.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/28/08 at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
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February 26, 2008

Search Marketing & Persona Models

Back from lunch. Tamar gave me her apple which makes her the best ever. Now that we're done, it's time to head over to the Paid Search track for more fun sessions. Speakers Brian Bond, Future Now, Inc; Ian Laurie, Portent Interactive; and speaker/moderator Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro (along with Q&A mod Anton Konikoff, Acronym Media), are going to be talking about persona modeling. Pay attention, everyone, this might be the Paid Search track but you organic search optimization folks can learn from this too.

Gord Hotchkiss asks how everyone doing and how they liked their hot lunches. You don't get that at just any conference. We cover how to ask questions again.

He asks how many people are using personas right now, it's a fairly small number. Most people seem to be here to learn a little bit more about how to get started with that.

Why do we use personas?

Used in psychology and neurology. We believe that people make rational decisions and they optimize their decisions to do the best thing. Prior to 1992, emotions had almost been removed from psychology and marketing. We are rational beings and we make rational decisions has been the assumption for hundreds of years. In truth, there's a whole underlying stew of experiences and emotions that affect decisions. Personas help you mine into those underlying factors that go beyond what would normally be rationally considered.

People manage reward, risk, emotion and knowledge. Find where people lie on the multi-dimension axes is a tricky but necessary part. This is made more difficult by the fact that much of it is subconscious.

You need to understand objectives and how it changes through the various stages of a decision.

• Define decision criteria
• Shortlist candidates
• Determine Budget Scope
• Basic Decision Research
• Detailed Decision Research
• Vendor Contact
• Purchase
• Navigation to Information

While every person is unique, we're more alike than we're different. Humans are one of the least genetically diverse species on earth. The vast majority of people will fall into a relatively narrowly defined norm. It falls on a regular bell curve. As an example, he displays a bell curve of IQ distribution. Most people fall plus or minus 15 points from 100.

Most people are fairly simple. He illustrates this with the familiar eye-tracking study that we've all seen, how people interact with a search engine in the first few seconds of reaching a search results page.

Humans have a fairly narrow channel capacity--four or five things at a time. They don't really stray past the first four or five listings. They like to see an organic result and they judge the paid listings on how good the organic listing is. This is part of why the "golden triangle" is so consistent.

We make broad to specific decisions. You start off with awareness of it, elminating what doesn't work, emotional and psychological drivers play a part. Satisficing is the next step, things become more rational. Then humans build a comparison matrix by defining what's important to them. Head to head detail work comes next and this is the most conscious, with less but not no emotional response. Emotion always trumps in the end so you can remove it from the equation.

Intent makes a difference. The difference between 'find someplace you'd like to stay' and 'book a room at this hotel' is huge in a heat tracking study. Design your Web site with this understanding.

Images can make a huge difference as well, depending on the size and relevance of the image. They can be used to guide people through the page. Universal human behavior is to look at an image and read the text beside it.

Gender differences above the neck: Women use both sides of their brains more often than men do. Search engines are by and large, male territory. Web sites tend to be more female territory. Women use twice as much of their brain for every decision. There isn't so much of a difference that they've seen in how men and women interact with a search page but the differences for a Web page are huge.

Ian Lurie steps up to get us from theoretical to practical matters. It's time to learn how to create a persona.

From Wikipedia: "Personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product." According to Ian: "A persona is your brand's imaginary friend." It's like when you're a kid. You used your fictional archetypes to test out what the world was going to be like and then you played it out in the real world.

The short version of "why we care" is that "All good marketing requires empathy" (David Ogilvy).

Step one is research. Learn the demographics. How old, how much do they make? What sort of cell phone or car do they have? How good are they with technology. You also have to have psychographics. What's their personality? Likes and dislikes? Ambitions. What will make them change their minds?

You can purchase data from all sort of sites but there's free sites as well. Adlab.msn.com is wonderful. [He also lists several other sites that you very much should check out in his slides.] You cannot build a persona purely based on keywords. Your last and best source of information is people. Trainers, sales people, customers (via surveys) are all great resources.

He's not a fan of focus groups. They can be useful for very large branding products but in the search marketing world it won't get you that much. Listen to your gut.

Brainstorm & Write:

Things to avoid:

• the CEO data source -- "I know my customers" Get away from the tunnel vision
  stereotypes (He's Jewish but still eats bacon.)


• Quest for perfection -- the perfect persona is the one that you never use


• Thesauritis -- persona on the team will only work if people read them and read them multiple times. If you use 'therefore' you've probably made a mistake.

He shows a screen shot of a sample persona and mentions there's a typo in it. It starts with a representative quote, goes to demographic data, shifts to psychographic data, mentions how she'd find the company and what it will take to get and keep her as a client.

Create your campaign -- Based on the persona, look at your keyword list and discover the sort of things that she'd be looking for. Understand the trends behind what each mean.

Personas can help resolve conflicts as well. It's a more practical and emotional template that allows you to say 'this person' not just 'our audience'.

Segment Your Audiences: Tracking is key.

Measure, Adjust, Repeat -- Online marketing allows you to tweak and refine. Use that as an advantage.

Brian Bond is up next. He's going to be reinforcing the power of personas, discussing the critical elements of personas and then getting into what personas are like in the real world.

We can start looking at our customers as data points, instead of as real people with motivations, fears and desires. Personas are stand-ins for your visitors. The power of a persona is the ability to create a deep empathy. You can rally people around a persona's needs and wants. They can be debate enders because "Emily needs this", not just "we should do this" without the empathy to back it up.

Personas represent your audience so you can craft a message to speak directly to them. If you had to write a letting to a crowd, that's impossible. If it's someone that you've heard of or see but don't know personally, it's a little easier and you can mold it a bit. Stereotypes fit into this level, they're dangerous because you can't have empathy for them yet. Now imagine if you're writing a letter to your closest friend. What will they care about, what do they need, how will they respond? You'll be able to say something very concrete and engaging.

While you don't know your customers as well as you know your best friend, this is where narrative comes in. You can learn who they are. As insight increases, so too does empathy. Your Male 25-35 years old isn't as engaging as Todd the Tech Guy who is similarly less engaging than Todd Hill who you know about and care for.

It's not about how much you have sold. It's about how much you could have sold. That's the focus of personas and analytics. You need to see both the people who are converting as well as finding out why people aren't converting.

In action:

• Pick the persona you want to start with
• Refresh yourself with their needs, motivations, wants, fears, limitations, etc.
• Become empathetic to that persona - really put yourself into their head.
• Too hard? Get a team together to act the parts…but be careful in your casting choices. (Don't cast a competitive person as a competitive persona. It's cross contamination.)

Build your campaign to woo your persona.

Match your advertising to the persona. One small change can have huge returns.

Gord steps in before the Q&A: Personas are a tool and just like any tool, they're only as good as the use you make of them. You need to get buy in. Apple is an extremely good example of a company that is totally bought into embracing user-centricity.

Q&A

You talked a lot about the persona based on search data. In most large companies the data already exits, how applicable is that to search and why should you spend more time developing search specific personas?

Brian: You can use that kind of data. People behave differently when they're using search engines to find something.

Ian: The problem with research is that you need to believe what people do, not what they say they'll do. Take a holistic approach. Make your personas work in all situations.

Gord: We used it as a starting point.

Are there any tools, software, templates that you should read?

Brian: The User is Always Right (book), Grok.com (site)

Scent tracking is expensive and I don't have the budget. How can I do this without an analyst?

Brian: You don't need to detect scent, to do this. Just look at it and determine what you should be seeing, what you need to be seeing.

Gord: One of the curses of search is that we measure everything and we tend to get analytically obsessed. One of the best tools we have is our gut instinct. You don't need to run a psychological profile of your best friend to write that letter, you're already there. You're a human looking to connect with other humans. It's not about crunching numbers in a spreadsheets, it's about people.

Ian: No one has ever held up a spreadsheet to sell a car. I didn't buy Apple because of the spreadsheet. It's about empathy.

Gord: Marketing is a persuasive conversation and that's what personas help you build.

Gord: Customer service is a goldmine and we're all trying to outsource it!

How do you filter out the people you don't want?

Ian: You use different ad copy to cater to different groups and track it to see how people react.

Can you recommend resources on the difference between men and women?

Gord: Think Pink is a book on marketing to women. Pick up a book on evolutionary psychology.

Brian: We're publishing a book in about a month, "The Soccer Mom Myth" that's on this topic. It's on Amazon. [AN: Hey, Bruce, can I buy that?]

How do I get the CIOs instead of just the lower rank IT guys?

Ian: It's not just about the keywords. What ad copy will they respond to, what page do they need to see?

Is there a score card?

Gord: [Very passionate explains what I'm going to summarise as] No.

Embrace the messy, qualitative, subjective. It's good for you.

That was a great panel.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/26/08 at 2:44 PM | Comments (0)
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February 21, 2008

Being Sexy On The Internetz

It’s Thursday and I’m sitting at my desk dreaming of dandelions and remembering what it was like to live in an area of wooded trails and open fields where the damn things grew out of everything. I’m remembering the summers and the hours spent laying belly up cloud gazing and dandelion decapitating. Long Island summers in the backwoods of Blydenburgh Park were the best. Basically what I’m saying is that if I’m totally unproductive and sentimental today, it’s Mark Laymon’s fault.

Mark used the subject of remembering his favorite flower to start a conversation over at the social media-inspired Collective Thoughts blog. Readers were asked to create a review for the site on StumbleUpon and then leave feedback sharing their favorite flower. In doing so, Mark was able to start a conversation with his readers that is both genuine and personal (and get the post Stumbled a bunch of times!). He was able to form a connection and a rapport with his audience that will last long after his favorite flower post is retired into the archives.

Mark Laymon is one sexy fellow. ;)

From a social media perspective, Mark’s post was smart. It tugged on the heartstrings and then gave readers a clear call-to-action. But Mark wouldn’t have gotten anywhere had he not filled that post with some seriously sexy writing. Writing that provokes a response and makes you feel something. Writing that puts you in the exact mindset a company needs to show you how much you need their product.

We talk about how content is king and how the search engines and users will use it to determine if you’re relevant to their needs and how much of an authority you are. But content is so much more than that. It’s your chance to really engage the visitors on your site, to bring them into your world, and to dazzle them, not with bullshit, but with your ability to be completely alluring at a moment’s notice and draw them into your world.

All the top Google rankings in the world won’t increase your ROI if your SERP listing is so boring that users don’t even notice it. How many times have you passed over a number one ranked site because you read a more interesting description? It’s no secret that we associate with brands and companies that make us feel a certain way. So stop being boring and start being colorful with your language.

Learn to draw people in and leave them hanging on every word you say. Be an exceptional storyteller. In a world where everyone is selling variations of the same product, that’s what’s going to set you apart.

Earlier this week we commented on a post written by Sally Falkow that talked about the true importance of Meta tags and their function as your first contact point with users. When you’re crafting your Title or Description, don’t plug in boring, keyword-rich text. Sex it up and entice users to click. Just because you own a Web site doesn’t mean you have to act like the nerd you are on the inside. Summon your inner sexpot and get your customers to do exactly what you want them to do. Use words that your customers will read and not just glance over. Make it impossible for visitors to ignore what you’re saying. And then put in the keywords to make it rank.

When it comes down to it, you can’t be afraid to spice up your site. Just because your competitors’ Web sites look like they copied their text out of the boring side of the dictionary, doesn’t mean you have to be equally boring. Be better. When we say to “write for your users” this is what we’re talking about. Your site content doesn’t have to be bland. A little tweaking can go a long way. It’s why Susan and I have jobs. When you write to engage it changes the entire feel of your Web site and makes people want to associate themselves with you. It builds that relationship that your audience is looking for.

Think about it: Would you rather read the home page of any Web site or read their blog? Probably the blog because that’s where you get a sense of what that company is really like and how they’d treat you as a customer. The home page may be filled with more information then you can ever want, but the blog is where you get to be sexy and show people who you really are. This is exactly why I’ve been put in charge instead of Susan. I’m far sexier. ;)

As an aside, my favorite flowers are forget-me-nots. Our address can be found here. That’s all. I hope you’re having a sexy Thursday! [Why are you keyword spamming "sexy"? Was this a dare? --Susan] Why are you speaking? Don’t you have a donut to not eat?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/21/08 at 12:27 PM | Comments (7)
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February 20, 2008

Instilling Fear In Site Owners

I’m always a little concerned when I head out into the SEO forums and find people talking about absolutes and how doing X will tank your search engine optimization rankings. It’s even more concerning when such threads get picked up and broadcasted.

Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Tamar Weinberg comments on a thread going on over at WebmasterWorld where the topic at hand is whether it’s a good idea (from a search engine perspective) for site owners to edit their Web content. Based on excerpts from the thread and Tamar’s own insight, it seems like the popular opinion is no, site owners should not edit their pages for fear of tarnishing already established rankings. Instead, just pile on new pages. Everyone loves new content!

See, now that makes me nervous. And it makes me even more nervous that newbie SEOs will stumble across that thread or Tamar’s post and now be afraid to touch their Web site in fear of tanking their rankings. We have to get people out of this fear element when it comes to search engine optimization. SEO is not supposed to be scary. Okay, maybe the blackhats are scary, but that’s it.

I agree with Tamar and other forum members that adding fresh pages to your Web site is beneficial to your search engine optimization goals. You want to be seen as a subject matter expert, and one of the best ways to do that is by creating authoritative content that brands yourself as a resource to your users. However, let’s not turn our Web site in a museum for legacy Web pages that we’re afraid to touch. The goal is to get quality traffic, not to collect dust.

Take a look at your site and your analytics. If your home page and important landing pages are ranking well for your keywords and are still relevant and up-to-date, then don’t touch them. Freeze those pages and work on improving the others. But if the information needs to be updated, your keyword objective changes, or you think the page can simply be improved in general, don’t just leave those pages to die out on their own. Edit them.

Let’s be honest here. Are we going to rewrite our entire web_rank page (the one that ranks for search engine optimization) from scratch? No, probably not. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t touched it in the last 10 years either. As your competition changes, so do things like optimum keyword densities and page requirements. You have to tweak pages to stay current and keep meeting the search engines requirements for relevancy.

As Tedster points out in the forums, if your page is highly dependant on on-page search engine optimization factors, then any substantial changes may affect your rankings. However, chances are your stronger pages are also ranking due to off-page SEO factors like incoming anchor text and backlinks. As long as you’re not changing the focus of the page and discrediting those links, you should be okay.

Often these “Don’t Do X Or Lose Rankings!” threads instill unnecessary fear into site owners, which in the end, hurts their site. If you never change the content on your site, how are you going know if your conversion rate is as high as it can be? Why would the spiders continue to visit and respider your site if the content is the same each time they visit? What if you think of a better, clearer way to word that call to action? What if you find a new keyword that you think would greatly increase your overall revenue? Are you really going to sit on it because you’re afraid of doing damage? Not acting as a result of fear is no way to live or to run a search engine optimization campaign. Your site is your baby, it’s okay for you to fuss with it.

But fuss with a purpose. When it comes to content, it’s quality over quantity. Adding copy that won't convert and doesn’t help to strengthen your brand or explain your services won’t help you.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/20/08 at 12:16 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Design, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

February 13, 2008

How To: SEO Web Design

We take on a lot of SEO design projects where we help clients design sites from the ground up in a way that will be conducive to search engine spidering and eventually competitive rankings. You’ll often hear how search engine optimization shouldn’t be an afterthought in site design, but what does that actually mean? For us, the SEO Design process looks something like this

Step 1: Select Keywords

If you tell your design/search engine optimization company that you’re looking to create a new site and they don’t immediately ask you what your keywords are, run! I’m not kidding. If they try to build you an SEO-friendly Web site without first finding out your key terms, they’re clearly not in the right mindset and you shouldn’t be working with them. Knowing what keywords you’ll be targeting is essential so that you can start brainstorming what topics you’ll need to cover, how many pages you’ll need, who your competitors are, etc. This information is going to lay the framework for your new Web site. If you don’t know what words you’re going to be putting on the page, how will you be able to intelligently make any of these decisions and avoid placing things out of sequence?

Step 2: Define Architectural Structure

Once you know the keywords that are most important to your site, you can start laying out the framework and planning the more technical elements. This is when you should start brainstorming your silos, thinking about how all of your pages and topics are going to come together to create solid themes, and exploring different URL structures. Some CMS programs spit out some ugly, ugly default URLs. This is an issue you want to deal with before the site goes live. You should also be thinking about your style sheets and how you’re going to design your site without having 2,000 lines of JavaScript cluttering up your code and pushing down your content.

Step 3: Create Content

You’re not going to get too far into the SEO design process without having something to put on the page. After step one you should know what pages and site sections are going to be important in helping you reach your ranking goals. You should be working on creating optimized content and thinking about potential link magnets. As you’re writing content, make sure that your keywords are being used properly throughout your pages and site. This means including them in the heading (h1, h2, h3) tags, throughout the body, and as anchor text for internal linking. You can check out our Copywriting 101 or How to Use Keywords for some more information about.

Step 4: Wireframe Review

You know your keywords, how things are going to be structured and you’re working on getting the content pieces together. Now it’s time for the wireframe review so that everyone on the team can take a look and agree that things are moving in the right direction. Wireframes are a stripped down version of your site, very similar to a blueprint for a house, and help ensure that you’ve created a solid foundation for your overall site themes. You don’t want to launch only to realize that you’ve forgotten to connect the roof to the top of the house. This is also a good time to really look at the site from a usability perspective. And when your SEO provides you with a wireframe, don’t just tack it on the wall. Make notes and give it back to their team. Comment on how you want things to be displayed, what headings you think should be on each page, and other SEO-related decisions. You can find some good examples of wireframe templates at StrangeSystems.

Step 5: Façade

Once all the technical stuff has been taken care of, it’s time to consider design. You have your content, but how are you going to display it in a way that appeals to visitors? Consider what’s going to be above the fold, what kind of calls to action will be on the page, how your navigation will look, how you’ll visually represent your brand, whether you’ll include graphics or video, if your pages will be printer-friendly etc. You don’t want to invest all that time creating your structure and making sure you’re following SEO-friendly design methodology, only to develop the ugliest site on the planet. Sure, your information is what users are after, but if it’s not presented to them in a way that is easily understood and visually appealing, they may not even take the time to appreciate the information you’re offering. It’s an MTV world, my friend.

Step 6: Implementation

If you’ve made it this far (and, um, hopefully you have), it’s time to launch your brand new SEO-friendly Web site. There may still be content to write and minor tweaks to make, but the foundation and the site structure that is going to be conducive to being spidered by the search engines are all in place. When you launch, make sure you have some hefty analytics in place so that you can stay abreast of how your visitors are interacting with your new site. If you find that they’re getting stuck on certain pages or abandoning the conversion path at a