Our client Steve Spangler is quite the renaissance man. In addition to being the CEO of a catalog company, he is also a toy inventor, an Emmy award winning television personality, a magician, an educator and a certified professional speaker. Just the sort of person you’d want blogging and podcasting.
The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!
Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.
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Visit The Site: Steve Spangler Science
For Further Reading: Testimonial, Case Study and Steve Spangler Portfolio
ShopperANSWERS offers a retail marketing and measurement solution that helps retailers keep informed of shopper behavior at the moment of purchase across a wide variety of retail outlets. Their corporate website gives an insight into the minds of shoppers. The site isn’t just marketing fluff; it educates the visitor on such topics as observational research and intercept interviews.
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Visit The Site: ShoppersAnswers
Geneva Health is a recruitment company specializing in the health sector, including nursing, medical, clinical support and allied health professionals. Geneva Health has three websites targeting their three primary markets — the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Each is a functionally-rich job site with supporting helpful articles, including such things as CV guidelines, making an overseas move, registration requirements and more. Job applicants can of course apply online. The site is built with search engines in mind, and includes spider friendly URLs along with optimized HTML and content.
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Visit The Site: Geneva Health
eTail East 2005 — Philadelphia
Another innovation at eTail. Set away from the hurly burly of the conference, we are providing you with the opportunity to get an in-depth diagnostic treatment for your site.
4 dedicated stations will help you optimize every element of your website, from Search, to Analytics to CRM and Visualization, there is a cure for every pain point! Make sure you sign up for your 30-minute session today.
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A brand microsite for Freudenberg. Freudenberg manufactures cabin air filters that help remove dust, pollutants and odors from a vehicle’s passenger compartment, enhancing driving comfort and improving air quality. With this site, built by Netconcepts, microAir are able to offer their customers easy access to product information and the ability to purchase products online with no hassle. With the touch of a button the site can add, edit and remove products, view orders and process online credit card payments.
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Visit The Site: micronAir
I found the eyetracking study from Enquiro and Did-It unveiled last week at Search Engine Strategies and covered in Search Day fascinating. The aggregate heat map shown on the right (larger version here) shows where participants focused their eyes (and their attention) the most. As you can see, the first listing not only drew the most attention; the full listing was read more fully from left to right, than other listings.
Visibility drops the further down the search results you go, and clickthroughs drop even more markedly (as you can see from the graphs below). This got me thinking about Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s Law is applicable to Top Ten Lists, as Seth Godin explains, perhaps Zipf’s Law might be applicable to the SERPs (search engine results pages) too? (In general terms, Zipf’s Law states that being #1 is much, much better than being #2 which is much, much better than being #3 and so on. So dominating a Top 10 list is critical.) Although these graphs don’t follow Zipf’s Law exactly, nonetheless given this data I’d consider it foolish to be complacent if your search listings are not at the very top of the SERPs.
What is it about searchers that makes them so blind to relevant results further down the page? Is this due to the “implied endorsement” effect, where searchers tend to simply trust Google to point them to the right thing? Or is it just the way humans are wired, to make snap decisions, as Malcolm Gladwell insightfully explains in his new book, Blink? According to the study, 72% of searchers click on the first link of interest, whereas 25.5% read all listings first, then decide. My guess is that both effects (”implied endorsement” and “rapid cognition”) play a role in searcher behavior.
A few other important take-aways from the study:
In all, a superb research study. Great job Did-It, Enquiro, and EyeTools!
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This ecommerce site offers a range of items from cabinet hardware to telephone booths and from rubber duckies to magnificent clawfoot bathtubs. AntiqueHardware.com offers original restored antiques as well as flawless replica pieces perfect for any home or office. Visitors are greeted with their own account pages and an easily navigated shopping cart experience.
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Visit The Site: Antique Hardware
A LEM USA site, Lemcellguard.com promotes LEM’s battery monitoring technology in a search engine friendly and easily navigated site. Information rich, this site was built to serve LEM’s customers with extensive insight into LEM battery monitoring sensors. Content that would then transalte into search engine visibility because search engine optimal linking and code.
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Visit The Site: LEMcellguard.com
A microsite of the Evangelical Christian Union (ECCU), dedicated to generating loan inquiries from churches specifically. Being a search engine optimized website, the site generates qualified prospects from natural search listings. This content rich website provides an easy to fill in inquiry form whilst asking the inquirer if they would like to join the ‘More Than Money’ electronic newsletter offering educational articles on managing and growing ministries.
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Visit The Site: MyChurchLoan.com
Circulation and the Internet: Co-hosted by American Business Media and National Trade Circulation Foundation, Inc. — New York City
Gloria Adams, Pennwell - Moderator
Laura Wilson, NEJM - Panelist
Sean Fulton, GCN Publishing - Panelist
Brian Klais, Netconcepts - Panelist
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