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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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Verizon’s Superpages.com may be #1 in the search engines for online shopping, but Netconcepts feels there is room for improvement. The company has scored a deal with the US telecommunications giant to improve its rankings in the search engines.

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If you haven’t heard about RSS yet, you need to check it out! RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard designed for syndicating headlines and other web content to other websites. It has evolved into a popular means for individuals to keep up with the latest articles and musings across favorite websites — using RSS newsreader software (which is starting to get built into web browsers and email clients). RSS is widely used in blogs (including this one — just check the RSS link on the bottom right column) and on news sites such as the BBC and CNN.

RSS, in my opinion, has the power to turn email marketing on its head. RSS represents a separate web-delivered channel that, quite unlike email, is impossible to spam. If the subscriber doesn’t add your RSS feed to his or her newsreader software or web-based news aggregator (like My Yahoo!), then you can’t break through to him or her. What a brilliant idea! I think it’s inevitable that most newsletters and promotional content will eventually be delivered through RSS feeds rather than to our email in-boxes. The overload of spam is driving many consumers to RSS as a secure and unspamable way of getting news and commentary. And, as David Sklar opines, RSS will hopefully become the standard for companies to actually conduct real business with their customers. David is spot-on when he calls RSS the “ultimate opt-in.”

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There’s a brand new meta search engine on the block called Jux2. Its premise is to find the overlap between the top 10 results across two major search engines. So far I’m really impressed with it. It even has a toolbar for Mozilla FireFox.

Jux2 conducted some tests to determine just how much overlap there is in the top search results on Google versus Yahoo! The results of their tests are very interesting. Such as:

• Analysis of Google and Yahoo! search results on the 500 most popular search terms found that, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results. Furthermore, 30% of the search terms had 2 or fewer overlapping terms, and only 17% had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.
• The overlapping set of top 10 results between Google and Ask Jeeves was even smaller: 3.4 out of 10. And between Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, smaller yet: 3.1 out of 10.
• Analysis of 91 random searches on Google and Yahoo! found that the two engines share only 23% of their top 100 results. Furthermore, only 4.8 of Google’s top 10 results even made Yahoo’s top 100. And only 5.4 of Yahoo’s top 10 made Google’s top 100.

For me, Jux2’s findings were a good reminder that the algorithms of the major search engines are markedly different, more so than one might imagine. So a metasearch engine that compares and contrasts two partially overlapping sets of search results makes a lot of sense. I think I’ll try Jux2 for a while and report back on my experiences.

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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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• 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.

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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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The lack of search engine visibility was costing equipment company Northern Tool between US$100,000 and US$250,000 in lost sales. Netconcepts has given the company a boost in its search rankings on Google.

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Northern Tool says the upfront costs for its SEO project with Netconcepts brought about a 81% increase in traffic from natural search and were a worthwhile return on investment.

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