AmCham Breakfast — Auckland, New Zealand
Four speakers from leading companies give you the good oil on how to succeed in the USA!
Speaker #1: Neville Jordan, Executive Chairman, Endeavour Capital
Neville Jordan, CNZM, is the Executive Chairman of venture capital company Endeavour Capital. He founded Lower Hutt-based MAS Technology in 1976, growing it into a $100 million-a-year exporter which successfully listed on the NASDAQ in 1997. Neville was recently inducted into the NZ Hitech Hall of Fame. As an entrepreneur who has “been there and done that” in the US market, Neville will share practical hints and tips on selling into, and doing business with the US.
Speaker #2: Dr Paul Cossum, CEO, Proacta
Dr Paul Cossum is CEO of Auckland start-up cancer drug developer Proacta, which was named Biotechnology Company of the Year in the 2004 Westpac New Zealand Hi Tech Awards. Paul has 20 years of drug development industry experience in the US. He was most recently Executive Vice President of Drug Development at San Diego-based NewBiotics Inc. Paul will offer insights on attracting investment from US companies, as well as outline some of the pros and cons of setting up shop in the US.
Speaker #3: Stephan Spencer, Managing Director, Netconcepts
Stephan Spencer is the founder and managing director of Netconcepts, an online marketing and web development company specialising in e-commerce, website auditing and search engine optimisation. With headquarters in Browns Bay, Auckland, and offices in Madison, Wisconsin, Netconcepts delivers interactive services to US clients such as AOL and Verizon. Stephan brought Netconcepts to NZ from the US in 2000. He has successfully grown operations in the U.S. and is in an ideal position to provide, from an American’s perspective, unique insights for NZ businesses on how to best operate and market themselves in the U.S.
Speaker #4: Nigel Kirkpatrick, CEO, Industrial Research Limited
Nigel Kirkpatrick is the CEO of Industrial Research Limited, New Zealand’s leading industrial scientific research company. Nigel has substantial international business development experience. Before returning home to New Zealand in 2002 to head up IRL, he was the Zurich-based global innovation leader for DiverseyLever.
The US is a key market for IRL and one where it has been successful in winning key contracts.
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MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Imagine an online ad that costs you nothing per impression, guarantees both a local and worldwide audience actively seeking your products and services, and offers 6 times the click-through rate of a banner ad… a search engine listing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ultimate targeted, low cost and high return weapon in the e-marketer’s promotional arsenal.
Learn how to maximize your reach through the “organic” (unpaid) results in the search engines:
- Which search engines to target
- Keyword research tools and tactics
- Writing copy that “sings” to the search engines
- Benchmarking against your competitors
- Link building strategies that work
- Optimal search engine architecture
- Best practices to emulate
- Scams exposed
- Case studies - including the “inside scoop” on what worked and what didn’t
- Making your e-commerce or database-driven site “search engine friendly”
- Measuring the return on your search engine marketing investment
- Developing a search engine marketing plan
- Criteria for selecting a search engine marketing agency
- Online tools and resources
Filed under: Copywriting Link Building Seminars SEO Webinars
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In order to start writing for maximum search engine visibility, you need to start thinking like a search engine.
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Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s got to be one of the very best speakers I’ve ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent — had everyone in the audience mesmerized. Here’s a sampling of the day’s take-aways:
- Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor’s action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
- 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That’s well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.
- Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
- Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
- Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes “hey, click on me… the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the “next step,” also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
- Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
- “Kill your darlings”: William Faulkner once said this. If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.
Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute… there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry’s book, Content Critical.
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Etail 2004 — Fort Lauderdale, FL
- Understanding the evolution of the E-Commerce operations of the panelists
- Discovering growth areas in your already seemingly optimized E-Commerce operation
- Understanding how operations, fulfillment and returns are the crux of your E-Commerce operation
- Unwrapping the key issues around the next holiday season and applying lessons learned from seasons past
Panelists:
Lorna Borenstein, VP & GM, eBay
Fiona Swerdlow, Vice President, e-Commerce, Tommy Hilfiger USA, Inc.
Ruth Crowley, VP, General Merchandise, Harley Davidson
Brian Klais, VP, eBusiness Services, Netconcepts
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Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with duplicates (this phenonemon is called a “spider trap”). Furthermore, having all these duplicates in the index causes the site’s importance score, known as PageRank, to be spread out across all these duplicates (this phenonemon is called “PageRank dilution”).
Ironically, Googlebot regularly gets caught in a spider trap while spidering one of its own sites - the Google Store (where they sell branded caps, shirts, umbrellas, etc.). The URLs of the store are not very search engine friendly: they and are overly complex, and include session IDs. This has resulted in 3,440 duplicate copies of the Accessories page and 3,420 copies of the Office page, for example.
If you have a dynamic, database-driven website and you want to avoid your own site becoming a spider trap, you’ll need to keep your URLs simple. Try to avoid having any ?, &, or = characters in the URLs. And try to keep the number of “parameters” to a minimum. With URLs and search engine friendliness, less is more.
Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce SEO
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Our favorite tips for online catalogers: automatic spell correction on search queries, breadcrumb navigation, keyword themes, top 10 lists, open source, 1-click ordering, and more…
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“My job is to make my boss look good, and when SecureWorks hired Netconcepts for SEO I expected them to make me look good - and they definitely did.”
“We are grateful to Stephan for planting the seed for one of the most successful Web projects The Carter Center has undertaken to-date.”
“… redesign of our database’s structure and ongoing co-operation with our website administrator has resulted in a continual increase in traffic, search engine rankings and registrations of volunteers and projects.”
