UW Wisconsin Madison, Executive Education, Interactive Marketing — Madison, WI
Search engine marketing
Creating a buzz — viral marketing
Web analytics
Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
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“What’s the top secret to developing a winning blog, one that draws an audience, grows your brand and improves your products sales?” writes Hallie Mummert, editor in chief for Target Marketing. In this article, Hallie writes about Steve Spangler’s relationship with Netconcepts Founder and President, Stephan Spencer. “Spangler works with Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts, an e-marketing services firm that specializes in natural search, to develop and optimize his blog.” Read this article to discover “a few lessons they have learned about what information to post and how to go about doing it so your blog becomes more than a one-way conversation.”
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AJAX-driven web applications are becoming increasingly popular on commercial websites. AJAX has an ability to enrich, yet simplify a user’s experience when used properly. AJAX can also provide a highly user-friendly interface that works smoothly, quickly, and often better than traditional programming.
AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language. Make no mistake about it — JavaScript and XML are not “new” technologies. Both programming models have been around for some time. However, the unique combination of JavaScript and XML is relatively recent, as are the problems AJAX presents for a site’s search engine visibility.
The primary benefit of developing a site with AJAX is the ability to work invisibly in the background of a site. AJAX is used to supply data to the client browser that renders up as a relatively seamless “application” instead of the click-and-wait-to-load functionality associated with more conventional web page constructs.
How seamless is the user experience with AJAX? Check out Google Maps or Google Suggest to see world-class AJAX applications in motion. You can find what you want, when you want it, with relative ease and accuracy when AJAX is in use. What you can’t find is a unique URL or navigational links for search engine spiders to crawl and index, which brings us to our first SEO barrier to overcome — the “J” in AJAX.
JavaScript has been a stumbling block for search engine visibility for quite some time. None of the major search engines show any indication of overcoming these types of scripted data issues anytime soon. Consequently, the single greatest optimization issue with AJAX is the tendency to not generate unique, bookmarkable, linkable and therefore indexable URLs.
The comparative shopping engine Become.com overcomes this barrier by creating and linking together static URLs of search results pages. A quick [site:www.become.com] search in Google reveals how well this AJAX-workaround in indexed.
Meanwhile, sites like Scion.com fail to make the same programmatic leap to provide a similar search experience. Imagine how the carmaker could promote celebrity built custom automobiles in the search engines if only static pages of a punked-out Ashton Kutcher or a blinged-out Usher-mobile were rendered and linked to throughout the site.
While AJAX can be a great way to enhance the user experience, not all visitors will have a great on-site experience when non-JavaScript-enabled browsers are being used. When it comes to site accessibility and SEO, it’s imperative that an AJAX-alternate experience be provided.
Because AJAX relies on JavaScript — as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XML – it’s relatively easy to provide an alternate experience for non-JavaScript users. The key is to tap into your CSS and XML files to render other versions of the AJAX application. This tactic is as “progressive enhancement.”
Progressive enhancement is a web design strategy that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, external style sheet, and scripting technologies. By layering designs in a concatenated progressive enhancement allows all users – and search engine spiders – to access the basic content and functionality of any web page.
When implementing progressive enhancement, a basic markup document is created, geared toward the lowest common denominator of browser software functionality. The web designer then adds functionality or enhancements to the presentation and behavior of the page using CSS, JavaScript or other combinations of Flash or Java applets. In tandem with user-agent detection, progressive enhancement will automatically render both user- and search engine-friendly pages.
You can observe progressive enhancement in motion by visiting Amazon’s Create Your Own Ring page. Simply turn off your JavaScript capabilities to see how the program maintains its AJAX-like functionality for all users. Also note that the initial load of the AJAX application contains the optimized elements such as title attributes, header tags and meta description, as well as a crawlable static URL. All of this is visible in Google cache and revealed in the page’s search engine snippet:
Amazon.com: Create Your Own Ring: Diamond Search
The Amazon.com Collection. Why Buy Jewelry & Watches at Amazon?
… More to Explore. Preset Engagement Rings … Create Your Own Ring …
www.amazon.com/gp/cyo/cyor-fork.html
To produce these particular SEO elements, server side scripts and .htaccess rewrite modules are required. (If site is not Apache server-based then the rewrite module may not be an option, but there are always solutions.)
When optimizing AJAX it’s important to remember three things: Search engine results are affected by on-the-page, behind-the-page and off-the-page factors. It’s essential to provide an alternate way for users and spiders to navigate their way through to all of your great content without sacrificing usability, accessibility and linkability.
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Elinor Mills, author for CNET News.com discusses the effect of SEO on Newspapers and the websites those newspapers maintain. It may not be a new concept to us but those folks working with the print medium have not had to worry about SEO, until now.
Headlines are a primary focus for print marketers. “Good” headlines can catch the reader’s attention and pull them into the article. However, “good” happens to be in the eye of the beholder. Clever and witty headlines may catch reader’s attention but search engines are not so easily persuaded.
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In this presentation to The Wisconsin Publishers’ Production Club’s (WPPC) Catalog Innovations meeting in January, Netconcepts’ Director of E-Business, Hershel Reese explains how Web 2.0 has great implications for catalogers and publishers online.
RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.
Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.
This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.
Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.
You Will Discover:
This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.
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The best thing you can do to grow your search engine referrals this year is focus on producing great content says PJ Fusco, lead strategist with Netconcepts in this article for Click Z. After all “content is king” and it’s all about crowning that king by speaking to your audience in a language that appeals to them. And Pat advises that when writing articles for the web, short stories are better than novels.
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Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.
In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.
Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.
Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.
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Web content guru Gerry McGovern, author of “Killer Content” - one of the best books on writing copy for the web - says that one of the biggest mistakes companies make in regards to their website content is thinking that customers care one little bit about the company. “Customers care about themselves (their loved ones and their community),” he said in an interview with founder and president of Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer. He went on to add that organizations need to be customer-centric, talk about benefits, and speak the language of the customer.
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HEADQUARTERS
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Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
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Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com
