Web Marketing Business Blogging Blogs

I am a big fan of the Long Tail, the term coined by Chris Anderson, Executive Editor of Wired Magazine to refer to what happens in economics when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.

In this article I found it quite interesting that UIE applied the concept of the Long Tail to prioritizing where you spend the bulk of your time on design and usability. Sure, there are a few pages that get a large chunk of traffic, such as the home page, but that doesn’t mean that that is where you should spend most of your design time. Instead look at the buckets of pages that add up to a large chunk of your traffic. For example, if all of the articles on your site add up to a large amount of your traffic, then you should spend a reasonable amount of your time in your redesign focusing on the articles template.

I think this same argument applies to search engine optimization (SEO) as well as to design. If your product pages account for 50% of your traffic, half of your SEO time should be spent on the product pages (rather than your articles, FAQs, etc.).

Spend your time on the tail!

Filed under: Blogs SEO White Papers | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

The other day when I was on whitepages.co.nz I kept getting this tasteless banner ad:

Not only did I find the ad irritating and gross, I thought less of the White Pages brand after I saw it. It is an animated GIF banner, where the piece of poo actually flies across the ad from left to right and then hits the spinning fan, making the whole banner go brown. Nice.

Whoever at the White Pages approved that banner ad for publication should be fired.

I have also seen plenty of ads placed in email campaigns that hurt the brand. Here’s an ad in an internet.com newsletter that cheapened the JupiterMedia brand while simultaneously flagging the email for spam filters (the Alt tag associated with this banner ad was “Work From Home” — a terrible thing to say in an email campaign if you want your campaign delivered):

It always amazes me how email ads get approved when it’s so obvious that they are going to cause the campaign’s deliverability to tank. Like this one:

Some people think email marketing is horribly expensive. If only they knew about VerticalResponse. We give you the power to create, send, and track your email campaign, right from your web browser — for less than 1c an email! NO set-up fees, NO contracts, NO hidden charges. And it’s easy, too! See for yourself by creating your own test mailing — FREE. Get started today!

Some big no-no phrases in the above email ad, including: “no hidden charges” and “see for yourself”.

In short, your website and your email campaigns are a reflection of your brand. The advertising you accept for display on your site and in your emails is also a reflection of your brand. So think carefully before you take on an advertiser or accept a creative that isn’t “on message.”

Filed under: Blogs Email Marketing | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

They say that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But not if you’re a site owner! I’ve seen designs copied, content copied, even entire sites copied. It’s so easy for someone to “view source” and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright.

You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily with Copyscape if they’ve lifted some of your page copy. It’s much more difficult if they’ve limited their sticky fingers to just your design.

So far I’ve discovered by tip-off or by chance that our Netconcepts.com site design has been “pinched” at least 3 times. One of them was a fairly big company. More than a year and they finally stopped using our design, but the evidence of their misbehavior is permanently archived in the Wayback Machine (hint: pick a date in 2004 and compare with my company’s site). In fact, the Wayback Machine is quite useful in that it can serve as indisputable proof of who is the source and who is the copy: whichever site shows the design in use before the other is the source.

The way I see it, you have five options for dealing with an infringer:

• Do nothing,
• file a DMCA infringement notification with Google, to get them yanked out of Google,
• contact the infringing company’s CEO,
• “out” them on your blog
• have your lawyer send them a nastygram.

I have to admit that we’ve often done nothing, just because we’re so busy. Eventually they’ll redesign (maybe pinching another design from somewhere else?). Of course that’s not a great option if you’re serious about protecting your IP (intellectual property) rights.

With our most recent infringer, we’ve taken a more active role. We spoke to their CEO. He asked for 2 months to redesign, which we’ve granted them.

So, what would you do? What’s the most legally correct response? The most pragmatic response?

Filed under: Blogs Corporate Sites | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Microsites can be really good at going “viral” if they are clever and have “pass it on” appeal. Subservient Chicken, Burger King’s microsite was such a site. It featured a person dressed up in a chicken suit wearing lingerie. You could give it commands by typing them into a box. Pretty weird. Not surprisingly, it became quite popular and went viral.

You improve the chances that your campaign will go viral if it’s a microsite because then it’s at an arm’s length from your corporate/brand site. Corporate sites rarely go viral. Subservient Chicken, for instance, surely had more “pass it on appeal” as a separate site than as a subdirectory within the BurgerKing.com site.

Emerald Nuts launched a funny microsite called AngryLeprechaun.com, which they tied in with their very expensive Super Bowl commercial and promoted through press releases. The site was a spoof; supposedly a leprechaun was supposed to be in the television commercial and was edited out in the final cut. Consequently, the leprechaun was very angry about it so he set up his own website. Visitors can watch the ‘unedited’ video clips with him in the commercial. Cute idea.

Another funny microsite is the counterfeit Mini spoof site. Brilliant!

What are your favorite microsites? Post a comment!

Filed under: Blogs Microsites | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

I’m usually of the mind that home pages should be rich with textual content so the search engines have something to sink their teeth into. In most cases it’s your home page that gets the most weight of all the pages of your site, so you don’t want to squander that opportunity. However, there are (rare) exceptions to this — times when another approach is in order — where you strip away all but the most essential components (sometimes all the way down to just a search box).

This is referred to in some circles as “home page Googlization.” Usability guru Jared Spool recently blogged about home page Googlization. I pretty much agree with his take on this subject. However, we felt that the homepage of our client TrustCite was an exception that warranted Googlizing. The design is very minimalistic. Have a look at it. For this site, simplicity and responsiveness was of primary importance, because the site is meant to become a frequently used resource for New Zealanders. Its singular purpose is to help Kiwis find reputable tradespeople and service providers by relying on feedback from the user’s social network. The primary method of locating these suppliers is through the search box, although there are strong trigger words on the page tucked away under the “Browse categories [+]” link.

Other examples of sites where I think home page Googlization would be in order:

• Wikipedia (rarely are any of the trivia featured on the home page of interest to me, and never has this filler content been what I went to Wikipedia for)
• most bank homepages (all I care about as a customer is the online banking login form… take me to my money!)

Filed under: Blogs SEO Usability | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Just read this awesome post from Chris Smith of Verizon Directories (SuperPages.com), where he lays out his criteria for selecting an SEO firm to work with. In summary (I’m paraphrasing here), the SEO agency…:

• should have longevity and track record of at least somewhat related work
• should not have promoted itself using unrealistic promises and representations
• should have a clean record (no black-hat methods)
• should not have tried to impress with a cursory 5-minute site assessment leading to naive recommendations
• should not have insulted our technical work
• should not have made claims of secret methods/knowledge
• should have priced their services reasonably
• should have posted information on their website about the companies/sites they’ve done work for
• should have demonstrated strong technical work on their own site as well as clients’ sites
• should have good people and make that evident on their company site
• should have projected a professional demeanor
• shouldn’t have pestered or been hard-selling
• should be flexible in legal contract negotiations, once selected

Good stuff! Read Chris’ full article: “How major companies choose SEOs”.

(Disclaimer: yes, Verizon SuperPages.com is a client of ours, and no we don’t wear sandals to business meetings.)

Filed under: Blogs Corporate Sites SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

DMNews.com has relaunched with a new design and a new back-end, both done by us at Netconcepts. On their blog, DM News’ founder and publisher Adrian Courtenay talks about the relaunch and gives us such glowing praise that I feel myself blushing!

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.

Filed under: Blogs RSS Marketing SEO Web Development | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that’s just scratching the surface of CSS.

Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really humming:

• Reorder your content to sit above your top and left navigation in the HTML. That will boost the keyword prominence on your pages, which is good for SEO. Then use CSS to get the page to still display as you want. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this in action… for example, notice how the HTML doesn’t change between this layout with left-side nav and this one with right-side nav; it’s only the CSS that’s changing.
• If you must use graphical navigation or headings instead of text-based, then use the CSS “image replacement” technique to substitute in a text link or heading tag, respectively, when the CSS is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit). For example, northland.edu uses this technique well. Currently, this is much more effective for SEO than Alt attributes.

  Many of the image replacement techniques physically move the text off the screen (text-indent: -9999em; left:-9999em;display:none, etc). This isn’t desirable as search engines are starting to examine external CSS files more closely to look for spam. There are a few image replacement techniques that don’t do this type of hiding and are still accessible, namely The Leahy/Langridge Method, The Gilder/Levin Method and The “Shea Enhancement”. Each of these methods have their pluses and minuses, which the Mezzoblue article outlines quite well. (Thanks to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

• Learn to code in “CSS shorthand.” With shorthand, hex codes for colors, margins, box dimensions and borders can all be abbreviated, for instance. More about this here. The efficiency of CSS shorthand translates into not only a speedier download for your customers, but also compact and tidy code that’s easier to maintain.
• Make code that “degrades gracefully” (or, as they prefer to say now in geek circles, “enhances progressively”). Creating a separate “low-bandwidth version” or “printer friendly version” or “mobile version” of your site will sound ludicrous in years to come (heck, I think it sounds ludicrous NOW!), because CSS makes such a thing unnecessary. Check out how gracefully gotomedia.com degrades on a cell phone or PDA, for instance.
• Correct for browser incompatibility snafus with browser-specific CSS. Does something look awry in your page layout when loading your site with the Safari browser, for instance? Internet Explorer doesn’t always play nice with the other browsers. Until the days where all the browsers follow all the same standards to the letter, browser-specific stylesheets are a useful crutch.
• Separate the presentation layer from the content layer as much as possible and move it into an external stylesheet (in other words, a separate .CSS file). That way it gets cached by the web browser and doesn’t have to reload with each new page.
• Plan for site-wide changes. Things change — colors, sidebars, ads, copyright dates, etc. Utilize CSS files and/or server-side includes to make future site-wide updates as painless as possible.
• Make use of the cascading nature of CSS. Most of the styles you define will be used site-wide. Some will only be for one particular page. Then there will be occasions where you’ll want to “cascade” styles, and have certain sections of your site adopt a particular look/layout/theme that overrides or branches off from the site-wide styles. Clever use of cascading styles can lead to very efficient and elegant code.

  Warning! Geek speek ahead:

Be careful of overriding previously declared statements. And also be aware that specificity is important in the cascade. Declare all your tag styles first then declare your id and class selectors down the doc. That way the cascade works and can be overwritten with new selectors. (Thanks again to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

CSS coders: the Web Developer Firefox extension is an awesome tool for coding, debugging, and tweaking style sheets. You can display the stylesheet and the rendered page simultaneously side-by-side and then interactively edit the CSS, immediately viewing the effect of the change on the rendered page. And it makes identifying errors (be they validation, CSS, or JavaScript) a piece-of-cake. Did I mention the plugin is free?

Filed under: Blogs SEO Web Development | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Data now out from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were all brick-and-mortar retailers:

1. “home depot”
2. “walmart”
3. “target”
4. “sears”
5. “best buy”

SearchEngineWatch Blog then arrived at the conclusion that:

These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it is they want.

I disagree. I think most Americans already know where their local Home Depot is. Instead, these searchers are looking to buy online. Some will opt for in-store pickup (which both Sears and Best Buy offer). Some may be on the hunt for product information, buyer’s guides, or the current circular with the week’s in-store specials.

I believe brick-and-mortar brands dominate shopping-related searches because those are the brands that are the most pervasive/popular/trusted in the marketplace. Their online shops offer a safe and familiar place to buy online.

A huge number of Internet users are searching for “home depot” when they could be typing in homedepot.com directly into their browser’s Location bar. Why is this? I imagine that for many people, typing in “home depot” into the Google Toolbar or into the search box on their Start Page is just easier or most comfortable. Perhaps some, like myself, even configured their Google Toolbar to display the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, to go straight to the first search result.

Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word: