Archive for February, 2009

You’re home page is important for many reasons, as it’s linked to most frequently (for small business) and unless you’re coming in from a landing page or internal blog, it’s oftentimes is the first place prospective clients make the first impression of your company. Moreover, it’s an impression that is created in mere seconds while only absorbing 20% of home page information (source)!

It’s also the hardest to design and SEO because there’s the urge to convey everything about your business (which is often not helpful to both visitors and spiders).  Every business has to answer the question, “how do I design my home page to: present professionalism and credibility, intrigue customers to click to additional information, be friendly to search spiders, and ultimately convert customers.

Here are a few tips to effective design home page design and typical mistakes that we often see client’s make.

Typical Mistakes
1)    Using images that are too large for your content area
2)    Having more than 7 main links or long names in the navigation
3)    Use of random text sizes, fonts and colors that are different from your brand style guidelines
4)    Missing header <h1> tags
5)    Not knowing what the goal of the page is and understanding where it lies inside of the overall site goals. (This is the most overlooked and most important!)

Usability Best Practices
1)    Use bullets and numbers to highlight text
2)    Know design standards and understand when to break them or not
3)    Keep link text consistent and clear (all links underlined or all links blue, etc.)
4)    Design to your target audience (tween or baby-boomer?)
5)    Always be testing! (A/B testing or multivariate testing)

There’s  a few in the industry of web design usability and search that stand out.  Those are Jakob Nielson and Shari Thurow.  At the top of their game, their research and testing is top notch.  View the History of SEO interview with Shari Thurow.

If so, it’s time for a redesign!  Don’t whine about the cost of a redesign, the lost opportunities without effective SEO will cost you far more in the long run.  In today’s highly competitive Internet realm, it’s absolutely critical that your site is based on a search engine friendly structure; but what does this mean?

Your site should be HTML based, with limited use of Flash.  Your code should be simple, W3C compliant, and should be kept as light and error free as possible.  For instance, I’ve seen a site improve its design and include added functionality, yet cut its actual code length by over 70%.  This was accomplished mostly by employing CSS in the design, ridding the site of Viewstate code, and moving all possible elements to external include files.

In addition to having concise HTML, the following should be adhered to:

• Absolutely avoid any type of frame, unless you’re trying to hide its content from the engines
• Your navigation should be text based, with meaningful words that are simple yet targeted to the subject of each page
• Images should be optimized (condensed)  for the web and include ALT tags
• URL, Title tags, H1 headers, breadcrumbs, and hyperlinks should all be optimized around the particular subject of each page
• The content of each page should be targeted to the precise topic of that page alone
• Address, phone number, and other contact information should be in text – not image form
• Your SEO Friendly Content Management System should allow full control of all of the above elements

The typical lifespan of a website is 3-5 years before your customers will expect a fresh look and feel, with newly added technology and interactivity.  As you’re looking at the investment itself, think about the amortization of a new site.  Even a fairly expensive site, amortized over 5 years, is an incredibly inexpensive business tool likely to drive substantial ROI.

Keep in mind, the best design in a search friendly architecture still requires ongoing marketing.  Just like your offline business needs branding, marketing, and exposure to gain customers, so does your website.  Internet Marketing Services are offered in a myriad of formats, timeframes, and cost structures.  Shop carefully to find the right marketing partner for your business.

The honeymoon period with our Android based T-Mobile G1’s are now over.  Sure, both my wife and I love the phones.  They seem to work great, but was it really worth the money we laid out for them?  What kinds of tools exist that will make our lives better in some way?  Here I present to you some tips and review some of the applications that I use every day.  Most of these focus on personal use, business productivity will be covered in a subsequent article.

Google Maps

First, there is Google Maps which comes preloaded on the phone.  It integrates with the GPS already so finding where you are is easy.  I needed to drop something off at one of my utility companies; however I had never been to the office and I did not recognize the address.  Entering it in to Maps made it easy to find.  The integration is very nice.

It also has some of the “cool” features like a street view that integrates with the compass/accelerometer.  It actually changes the picture of the street based on the direction you are holding the phone.  Not very useful, but neat.  The directions and location; however, were very useful.

Quickpedia

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia.  I use it weekly to find information on just about anything, and more often than not, one of the first results when searching with Google is a link to a Wikipedia article about the subject. There are several applications that bring Wikipedia content to the Android, but the one that stood out for me was Quickpedia.  It seems that they agree with me over at cnet’s The Download Blog.

The free application makes it easy to search and browse Wikipedia for articles, throwing in a few tiny twists along the way to make navigating, reading, and learning interesting tidbits a breeze.

I have to agree with their assessment and would add that the formatting of the data is by far the best out there for a mobile device.  While other applications require you to flip pages or scroll endlessly, Quickpedia groups data into categories and lets you expand the sections you are interested in.  It is very handy to be sitting on the couch, in a restaurant or at a friends house and be able to look up information on something rather than promising to yourself to find it later (which we always do of course, right?).

Movie Finder

I love the movies.  I don’t go nearly as often as I like these days, but I still love them.  I cannot begin to count the times we have been running around town and started talking about a trip to the theater.

Me: We have have a couple of hours before we have to pick the kids up.
Wife: Yeah?  Let’s catch a movie!
Me: Sounds great!  What’s playing that you want to see?
Wife: I don’t recall.  How about you?
Me: Um…..
Wife: Hmmm
Me: Maybe next time.

Movie finder has a nice interface.  It uses the GPS to find your location and search out nearby theaters, or you can enter a zip code if you prefer.  From there, you can get a listing of the movies and times close by.  It also has links to trailers, IMDB entries and it gets user ratings of the each of the films.  We’ve used this a couple of times now to great enjoyment!  There are others out there, but so far this one seems to be the best.

Next Time

I hope you enjoyed some of these apps, tips and reviews.  Next time I will relate my experiences with Android productivity, including applications that help me stay on top of both work and home life.

Brand trust is simply defined by the general opinion that people have of your company and whether or not they believe you will deliver a quality product. Having brand trust is vital to the importance of every business.  The task of creating brand trust in an online world can be exceptionally challenging because your customers are buying a product that they can’t hold and touch, from a company they can’t see.  For this reason, the importance of brand trust is even more crucial when marketing on the web.

Here are three major aspects to consider when creating your brand trust strategy:

For startup websites, the most important factor in establishing brand trust is quality graphic design. Through graphic design, a one man shop can automatically give the impression of a multi-million dollar operation merely by having a website with a professional look. This is a huge advantage in the online world that every start-up should take full advantage of.  Have an experienced proficient graphic designer create a dynamic design for your website.  It will be well worth the investment.

Note: It can also help conversion rates to have security logos from the BBB or your SSL provider tactfully placed within your design.

The second important aspect to consider is customer service. It is essential to have contact information that is easily accessible and complete on your website. A 1-800 number is a must, as it allows someone to be contacted immediately if the customer has a question. If you do not plan on having someone answer the phone full time, provide an answering machine. Physical addresses, emails, and even contact forms displayed visibly on your website will increase your level of trust with potential buyers. Also, be sure to fulfill orders quickly and update customers with email notifications when their items have been shipped. Failing to complete orders in a timely fashion and allowing delayed product arrival to the customer will encourage them to look elsewhere next time they shop.

Finally, consider your website information. Customer reviews for your products, blogs, articles, and various other forms of content can help communicate information and knowledge about your industry to its consumers. It can also increase your ranking in the search engines and drive traffic to your site. Organizing all of this information in a user-friendly way is imperative so that customers can find what they are looking for. Clutter is bad, so always make sure that your designer is analyzing each page on your site to ensure that the content stays within design guidelines.

Establishing brand trust is not always easy or intuitive, but if it’s done right it can help set the foundation of future online success.

The comparison chart at the bottom of this post was sent to me last week.  I thought it was quite funny… and true.  In the world of SEO, we really have a love/hate kind of relationship with Google.

The fact is that Google is the best search engine out there.  They drive the most traffic and, for most of our clients, bring the highest level of conversion.  Unfortunately Google is the most expensive to advertise with through Pay-per-Click, and often the most difficult to rank well with through organic SEO.

Then again, they provide tons of free tools, and a high-level of advice and assistance in all forms of online advertising.  As analytics go, Google offers the most comprehensive full-featured analytic tool available (free).

I say, take the good with the bad. With a company like Google, there’s always room for comedy, sarcasm, and a bit of satire.  So fellow SEO’s, blackhats, whitehats, whatever you call yourself… enjoy this little comparison of blackhat (some say evil) tactics – to those of the do-no-evil, all whitehat (clean and saintly) search engine…

Interesting that the entire first page of Google results for SEO Friendly CMS returns blogs and forums, filled with folks trying to figure out what solution they should use for their business or their clients. See the SERP here.

The consensus seems to be that there isn’t really a CMS out there which was actually built with SEO in mind.  It appears that some can handle certain aspects like titles and Meta tags, but the overall vote is that you need to build your own CMS to be fully SEO friendly.

Similar to what is found on David Naylor’s blog, a majority of forum and blog contributors seem to agree that WordPress is the best SEO CMS option available.  One problem… WordPress is not a CMS!  Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is a great tool… for blogging!  I may smack in a loose nail with the butt of a flashlight, or screwdriver, if a hammer isn’t readily available – But if I were building a house, I’m pretty sure I’d invest the $20 for a hammer.  You need the right tool for the job.  For businesses, WordPress is not the right tool for managing a website.

Unfortunately, too many SEO’s are just SEO’s – and that’s it.  They didn’t come from a marketing or business background.  Many didn’t even come from a technical background.  They simply found themselves doing SEO and created a career out of it.  That’s perfectly fine – But without a cursory understanding of business, they still hold to the ‘do whatever it takes’ method of band-aiding tasks and processes and using tools and methods that were not created for sustained efficacy.

But really, what were these SEO’s to do?  Nothing existed that would do what they need it to do.  No commercially available CMS, free or paid, gave them the flexibility required to effectively optimize a website for organic search, while still giving a business the ability to work in a non-rigid web environment.   No CMS gave full HTML access, complete design control, total URL creativity, and complete flexibility over:

• Unique page titles
• Meta tags
• Sitemaps
• Internal links
• 301 redirects
• Image and Alt tag control

I admit I am completely biased about this because I use this tool and work closely with them, but I implore you to check out Pixelsilk.  This is not just an SEO friendly CMS – it’s a full on SEO-enabled CMS; the first of its kind, I believe.

It’s everything a CMS should be, and any feedback that they’ve already received from top SEO’s is already being implemented.  To be fair, feel free to read up on other CMS’ at either www.cmsreview.com or www.cmsmatrix.org.  You may find Pixelsilk on these very soon as well.