B(abble)log - Archives
When companies approach me about optimizing their site there is often a varying degree of knowledge about what that means. The scale goes from "what do you mean you can't optimize my Flash site -can't you just put in some meta keywords?!" to "I have a good understanding & appreciate the value of what SEO and SEM can do for my organization". I think it is important as an optimizer to sit down with each person, explain what I do and how I do it. To put people at ease, I have my stock-in-trade line of "SEO is not rocket science, it's like carpentry or knitting - it's a skill that takes patience and time to learn. Not everyone wants to knit their own sweaters or make their own tables; people appreciate the effort and time, and want to be able to buy them..." (or something like that!)
However, I came across an article written by Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, and formerly of SearchEngineWatch. More than an an article, it is a wonderful, extensive overview of the debate "Is SEO overrated?" (BTW I highly recommend that you listen to Danny's keynote speech from the December 2006 SES Chicago convention.) One line from his article that I quite liked was this:
This is rocket science. SEO is only not seen as rocket science BY THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW IT. Everyone in the industry forgets how much knowledge they've acquired, learned, absorbed to the point it becomes second nature.
Word.
It's easy to forget. So Danny, my promise to you is that I will never again say, "SEO isn't rocket science" - although I still might compare it to knitting or carpentry!
In the meantime, here are some basics that we should all do:
- Each page should have a unique title that relates to the content
- If you redo your site, use a 301 redirect from your old pages to your new pages. Ideally, try your best to keep the same file names and extensions.
- Ensure that you link consistently to and within your site ("canonical URLs") - so if you declare www.company.com to be your homepage keep it that way: not company.com, not www.company.com/index.html
- Write quality copy that first and foremost is of interest to the humans that visit your site, but be savvy with those keyword phrases and work them in. And as Gord Hotchkiss so bloody brilliantly said, "Make sure the content and your target customer share the same vocabulary."
- Give people a reason to come back to your site - a blog, industry trends, quality articles, podcasts, the sky is the limit...
- Build quality incoming links
- No dupe content - so, if you have PDFs and printer-friendly pages, use a robots exclusion protocol
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Be sure to visit Get a First Life by Darren Barefoot. It's a wonderful parody and a brilliant little send-up. Love the line "Go outside, membership is free."
It's a handy reminder that sometimes --just sometimes-- we need to back away from the computer and explore and connect in the world around us!
This morning Search Engine Land launched a new column Let's Get Social that comes out every Tuesday. The inaugural column is a primer for people who are familiar with AGYM (Ask.com, Google, Yahoo MSN) but want to learn more about the new ABCs of social media...the DNRS (Digg, Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon).
While Netscape isn't one of the first social media platforms that immediately springs to mind for me, there are a few others that will, no doubt, be covered more indepth in the future - MySpace, del.icio.us, YouTube, Second Life and countless others. (You can scroll below or go here to read about my own hapless adventures on Second Life.)
The new column will be written by Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis - so keep an eye open for it on Tuesdays!
I stumbled across this today - a spam calculator. It's created by MX Logic and it's incredible. We all know and understand that spam costs us time and money, but whether you are a single owner/operator company or mega-corp, it can be shocking to see the dollar & cents value applied.
I don't know about you, but this sort of tool seems like a sales-clincher.
If I were MX Logic I might consider a text-based link or graphic banner link ( "How much money is your company losing on spam?" ) from the homepage. If not, this calculator should be included in the sidebar links of their services pages.
Let me commit an act of heresy – I don’t get Second Life. Don’t get it at all. I feel bad just saying it – it’s like I’m not creative enough, or hipster enough.
And when I heard that Sears was opening up a Second Life store (Well, there goes the neighbourhood.) it seemed to confirm that the hype was outta control. And the slippery slope was looming on the horizon. This week it’s Sears, soon K-Mart, Wal-Mart and various dollar stores will be getting in on the action. What's that splashing sound? The sound of higher-end brands abandoning ship, of course!
However, one of my pet peeves –and I do have many, Fair Reader – is people who say they don’t like something without trying it or understanding it. (Heroin, aside.) So, for the sake of unbiased journalism, I went from being A.C. Riley to Moxie Muggleston.
After signing up, you are presented with a variety of characters for your 3D avatar. Sticking to my own gender, I could be the girl next door (boring!), something called “urban city look” with odd Pippy Longstocking pigtails (errrr, maybe…) a goth girl (so clichéd), something else that I’ve forgotten, or a large rabbit (what the …?!) So urban city chick I became.
Then I tried to move around. I fell off the "newbie island" and spent some time walking under the water for a little while. I finaly returned to terra firma eventually only to bump into a few people. Literally. In the first five minutes of my (Moxie's) existence some guy hit on me until an avatar without a top on walked by. (Men, avatar or not – they’re all the same!!) Watched others heave themselves about the sky, and finally had a go at it myself.
It was a bizarre experience. I was told to click a button to get some water and then “wear” it. This caused my avatar to drink water non-stop. So then I just lurched around bumping into things while slurping water. I don’t know if by “interact with brands” the marketing folks at Second Life mean plowing into buildings with a glass of water in hand, but that’s my experience. I'll keep you posted.
This morning I was reading a fabulous article by Tessa Wegert in which she says, "If the ads are the invitations, the landing page is the host." This wonderfully crafted statement is spot-on. It seems so simple doesn't it? And, yet, as Tessa points out, many campaigns still direct the people who click on the ads or banners to a corporate homepage where people are left to fend for themselves and figure out where to go next.
I said it before, and I'll say it again because it bears repeating...This sort of thinking needs to be applied not only to PPC campaigns but to site design. In the organic search world, more and more site traffic is directed to pages deep within the site. In today's era of information and connectivity the online market is hyper-competitive. This convergence means that all pages must be treated like the homepage or a carefully created landing page.
Hopefully, but not all the time, companies have a marketing strategy in place for their homepage. The point of the homepage is to engage the visitor, and get them interacting with us - try our demo; visit our product page; sign up for our newsletter, etc.
Imagine a Web site where each relevant page is designed with both text and graphic united to respond to user interaction. Search is not just how people query major search engines for particular phrases, but how they scan and search your site - where does the visitor click, once on a page, how does the eye move to catch those "candy" areas? Each click becomes a step in the persuasive process, an act of conversion. But more importantly it represents a living, breathing person. Make the experience a good one.
Search engine marketing/optimization has to look through the bigger lens. It isn't about moving from 17th place to 3rd in Google. It can't be. It needs to move past being simply "search engine friendly" and into the realm of "visitor friendly." (A little customer hug, if you will!) So, if you are considering a new site, think about this: what do your prospective clients want? How will they search for it, interact with it, and, ultimately, utilize it?
Welcome to the age of persuasive architecture.
Hello Fair Readers,
Anyone who knows me knows that I hate-hate-HATE clichéd business talk, overused buzzwords and meaningless marketingspeak. Drives me nuts. "Paradigm shift" is enough to send me into primal scream mode. And "meme"?? (To be fair, maybe I just hate people who know how to pronounce it correctly.)
So, this article from David Meerman Scott made me chuckle. It's from October 2006 but for anyone writing a press release (like I am today!) it serves as a good reminder to stay away from gobbledygook like "best of breed", "next generation" and "easy to use"!
Hey there... lately I've been pondering the whole "long copy vs. short copy" arguement that has been going around. Many people take the approach that, if it is about lead generation, shorter, teaser copy combined with a freebie (PDF download or whatever) work well together. Others think that when you need to close a sale, longer copy sells and has a higher conversion.
Nick Usborne (author of one of my favourite books, Net Words) argues that it really doesn't matter if the copy is longer or shorter, but rather it should be based on the users' expectations. Crikey, there have even been experiments on the subject!
On a personal level, when I see long, direct-marketing writing with the PS, PPS and even PPPS and the "buy now" button between every second paragraph, I tend to cringe. Don't get me wrong: long copy, and by this I mean really fabulous long copy, is an art form. And a rarity. It is one of the most difficult things to write, because it is a process of concentrating on the customer, greeting them, going through and answering every concern or sales objection that they may have, and --here's the kicker-- maintaining their interest from word one to word 1000 or 2000 or more.
So, it isn't the length of copy I have a problem with (unless it's bad of course!) but rather my associations with long copy. Honestly, how many times have you seen scammy, over-hyped product - "Make Millions in Less than 60 Seconds! Web Marketing Secrets that Will Make You RICH!" Sometimes the writing has been really great, but the product was, quite frankly, not worth the time of day. It's this sort of thing that has produced a Pavlovian reaction in me.
With all this Web 2.0 hullabaloo about making connections, building relationships, loving our neighbour... whatev... you'd think that long copy would be the route to go. Period. Point final. But something is happening. There is the beginning of a copywriting revolution. Influential writers like Michel Fortin, who has previously written extensively about long copy and why it works, are saying things like:
I’m seeing long-copy salesletters losing their effectiveness, and shorter copy starting to outsell them. As a proponent of long-copy salesletters myself, you can imagine how much of a wakeup call this was for me. And if you’re a copywriter or a marketer, it should be your wakeup call, too.
Wow.
He's written a fascinating (and free!) 50-page PDF book titled "Death of the Salesletter" and it is a must for any writer. You can go here to download a copy for yourself. In it he says that the scrolling long-copy sales letter is a bit of a dinosaur, and that because of the interactivity of the ever-changing Web that people want more control, more interesting ways to get the same amount of copy- but in different formats: text-based, audio, visual, etc. Multisensory information. And this is what we have to start thinking about: samples, videos, demos, sales presentations, virtual tours, tutorials, and on and on. Let's not forget user-generated content (think product reviews) which is one of the reasons companies like Amazon and Expedia thrive. Once again, if you are doing any kind of business online - go get Michel Fortin's Death of a Salesletter.
Bravo Michel!! Encore, encore!
My four-year old is untroubled by logic or "how things are supposed to be." A cow can fly a rocketship. A truck can have butterfly wings. (And all knock-knock jokes are hilarious with the addition of the word "bananapants") She talks to me about the world and tells me all about it. I adore her world.
I try to bring that open-eyed, unpractised approach whenever I sit down and write something for a client. To play with ideas and words freely. I do my best to get to the emotional core of the piece. Because appealing to the id is primo when writing.
One of the best pieces I've ever read on how to be creative --art, business, whatever-- is from Hugh MacLeod, who is a Web 2.0 marketing strategist for Stormhoek, a marketer for English Cut, and a pretty fabulous cartoonist. (I laughed and laughed when I came across his corporate hierarchy cartoon. Everyone's worked for a company like that at some point in their life. I know I have.)
Some of my favourites that I try to bring to work with me everyday are:
- Ignore everybody.
- Put the hours in.
- You are responsible for your own experience.
- You have to find your own schtick.
- Write from the heart.
To see the whole list and then read a gorgeous, on-the-mark piece about creativity, visit How to Be Creative, from gapingvoid.com
Enjoy!!
For reasons known only to my blog's backend, (hashcash violation- what the hay is that??) a comment concerning my December entry about the Mediamark site was marked as spam. Unable to restore the comment, or even find out who I could attribute it to (someone from Mediamark, obviously) all I can do is post it here:
Love the rant. Just an FYI the Mediamark website is being completely re-done, should be launched by the end of this month. Most of the programming is complete but we still need to test it all. The new site is written entirely in .net and makes use of MasterPage's and ASP:Content controls instead of the old school frames, you make reference to. As for the MRI+ link that "whisks you to another site" that is because it is another business, owned and operated by Mediamark Research, but it is its own entity and not under the mediamark.com umbrella for that reason. However thanks for taking the time out to review our site, even if it was negative. We always appreciate constructive criticism.
Fair enough. So, a little constructive criticism:
Even though MRI+ is not under the Mediamark.com umbrella, do not have a separate site as part of the navigation menu. People expect top-level navigation items to be part of the site they are browsing. It's very confusing to click on it - zoom! - off I go to MRI+. Instead, put external links in a sidebar, and make it 100% clear to the site visitor that they will be transported to an external site. Perhaps make it a graphic banner: "Visit MRI+, the leading database for magazine planning resources." As well, you could add all other related sites to the bottom nav: "Other Mediamark companies: MRI+"
The minute a top-level navigation item is no longer valid, remove it. Do not have a pop-up window with the message:
Mediamark Research Topline Reports
Mediamark's Magazine Pocketpiece, Cable Table and Cyberstats Topline Reports are located at MRI+, the Web's richest magazine planning database.
You'll be prompted for your email address and MRI+ password at the next window. If don't have a password, click on the Register for a FREE Account link on the login page. If you are not automatically redirected within 10 seconds, please click here.
Add a news section to the homepage, where you can keep site visitors apprised of these sort of changes, or showcase your latest study. People like it, and so do the search engines. Remove old news from last September off the homepage...it can make a company look out-of-date and stodgy. Make it easy for people to get updates & news - perhaps an RSS feed?
Change "Staff Directory" to the more standard "Contact Us", and do your staff a favour - at least encrypt their email addresses to reduce spam.
Mediamark is a huge corporation - show you care... What's your privacy policy? Who are you? How do you do what you do? What do you believe in? (A little About Us is always a good idea.)
Make it stupidly simple for me to move about the site and find stuff. So your logo goes back to the homepage, well, it would also be welcome to see a little button that says "Home." A site map might be nice. Text-based bottom navigation, some Quick Links to your most popular areas... you get the idea. Also, it's not only industry types that visit the site, steal an idea from those nice folks at Nielson Media and have something like "Resources for:" with a list following (Journalist, Students, Job Seekers, etc.) There is a lot of information at Mediamark.com - incorporate a site-wide search tool.
Hey, you're an industry leader... why not have a blog? Keep us posted about news, trends, events, fun industry stuff.
The possibilities are endless. Good luck on your site remake, Mediamark. Keep me posted.
Welcome to 2007! If you are making a few personal resolutions, why not make some for your company? Here are 7 Website Resolutions from my latest article in Enterprise Magazine.
Okay, self-promotion aside... what's in store for 2007?
Well, Mark Kingdon sees six key areas of development in online marketing. It's a great read covering niche social media, user-controlled online advertising, mobile video and more - so be sure to check it out. As well, the ever-informative-and-entertaining Mitch Joel offers some of the best advice to date: stop trimming down, expand! And much thanks to the insightful-and-extremely-talented Maggie Fox at SocialMediaGroup for alerting me to this gem from Joe Marchese.
I'm back to work January 8, 2007 - so we'll talk then!
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