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webRED Issue 20 - July 2006 |
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webRED Issue 20 - July 2006 |
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In this issue:
Hi everyone, and welcome to our July issue of WebRed. It's been a busy month for us here at Optymise with the launch of Traffik Driver, our DIY search engine marketing tool and keeping up to date with the search world. This month, we talk about the importance of developing a search engine promotion strategy, and we provide a few pointers to get you on your way. Also is a brief rundown of the new updated Digg news site, which is now largely user-driven and very interesting! As usual we have a review of a new search engine - this month something special, an all Kiwi search engine! Great news. Happy reading Until next month Back to top >> Whether you're planning the launch of your first site, or wondering why your site counter is actually moving backward, stop. You need a strategy to promote your site to search engines and to visitors. A plan of action based on key factors, all of which should be weighed carefully before you take another step. Here are five important considerations in the development of any search engine promotion.
What are your expectations for the website? These will usually point you to the site's objectives. In the case of commercial sites, the broad objective is straightforward - to sell enough goods and/or services to become profitable. However, you might also want to educate, motivate, persuade and inform in addition to, or instead of, selling. A top-down analysis of your site's objectives is the place to start the development of your action plan. Once you've determined the site's objectives, keep them front and center during the entire development of an search engine promotion strategy. It's important that any search engine understands your site's objectives on the very first spider visit. Who are you trying to reach (your target audience)? What do the members of your demographic need? How do they make purchase decisions? Are they computer savvy? Critical to the design and implementation of a search engine promo strategy is to consider your market. Believe it or not, the best place to learn is from your competition. Do a Google search on the competition to see how the successful sites do it. This is a perfect guide to see what works and what doesn't. Don't stop there - market metrics are also a part of a successful promotion strategy. The development of multi-dimensional metrics will be useful in virtually every step of the design, development and search engine optimization phases. There are plenty of metrics software packs on the market. Some are even free. Analytics gathered using a variety of apps and tools must be properly correlated and analyzed to develop an effective search engine strategy. It's not enough to have the data. You must understand and interpret the numbers in order to take actionable steps. An over-achieving website doesn't just happen. It must be crafted. It requires highly-specialized knowledge of everything from human nature and consumerism to HTML and SEO. Search engines spider sites in a variety of ways. The simpler and clearer your site is to an search engine spider, the greater the likelihood that your site will be assessed and ranked properly. Conversely, if the technical design of your site isn't dead on for search engine spiders, a site may be mis-indexed or even banned from search engines altogether for what spiders perceive as black hat tactics. You might as well hang out the 'Going Out Of Business" sign! Techno-factors come into play during the design phase (see our FAQ), the development and testing phases and after the site's launch when optimization, content updates and routine site maintenance are undertaken. Any well-considered strategy must provide the means to design (or redesign) the site, develop it, promote it to the search engines and optimize it over time. Search engine promotion and site optimization aren't goals. They're part of the process. Once the technical aspects of the site have been incorporated into your strategy, turn your attention to the presentation layer. The presentation layer can make or break a site, regardless of how well-designed the technical structure supporting the site's skin. Navigation should be simple. Buttons and links clearly labeled. The user should always be able to go 'Home' from any page. Check-out should be clear, uncluttered and instill buyer confidence. A site map is useful to visitors and SE spiders. Anything less will hurt the bottom line. The site skin also presents the look, feel and tone of your on-line enterprise. Stately and dignified, WiLd & CraZy, helpful and concerned - all determined by the look of your site. Color combinations, type font and size, type placement and the tone of the content make up your public persona. Header placement, number of headers above the fold, keyword density and other SE search parameters must be fine-tuned for successful search engine promotion. Once your site is live, you've only just begun. The world of ecommerce is fast-paced and cutthroat. And if you don't promote your site to search engines and to potential buyers your chances for success diminish accordingly. Today, site success depends on promotion - search engine promotion and eyeball promotion. You can promote on a shoestring or you can launch a pedal-to-the-metal campaign with banner ads, Google Adwords, links building and opt-in cultivation. If you aren't optimization-experienced, you'll be best served by professionals who can track site activity, develop useful metrics and devise and implement a strategy for great site performance. The same goes for the process of optimization. Sites must be search engine optimized and conversion optimized - two very different things. Much of optimization takes place behind the scenes. That's why it's essential that you use SEO pros to actually build your site. This is not where you can cut a few corners. Then there's conversion optimization - converting visitors to buyers. Most of this takes place at the presentation level. Does the site meet or exceed the visitor's expectations? You have 6.4 seconds to convince a visitor to explore your site. That's how much time web users devote to site evaluation. 94% of all ecommerce ventures tank. Down in flames. Many of these failures are based on poor business models, but just as many are due to poor site design, lack of SE recognition, an off-putting presentation layer or a home page that looks like a carnival midway. If you're a start-up and you don't know much about SEO and SE promotion, do not let your teen-aged nephew design your site. And if you're the owner of an underperforming site and you can't figure out why, don't waste your time tweaking. You're losing sales every day. If you know ecommerce, develop a strategy that encompasses all five of these critical facets. If you don't know ecommerce, hire somebody to do it for you. It's the best money you'll ever spend. Source: ISEDB.Com
Digging into the News Social news site Digg has expanded from technology news into broad-based coverage of many popular topics, with stories ranked according to their popularity among Digg users. Digg calls itself "a user driven social content website," and then rightly asks "Ok, so what the heck does that mean?" It's a simple idea, really-allow users to suggest news stories, blog posts or other web content, and then have the user community vote to promote the story to the front page ("digg it"), comment on it, or get rid of it ("bury it"). The result is a dynamic, rapidly changing view of popular content on the web that's also extremely fresh. This approach leads to a very different view of news and current events than you see at most traditional news sites, where editors make the decisions about what's important and what's not. The sheer diversity of Digg's more than 300,000 users surfaces a lot of unusual content you might not ordinarily see in the course of your daily web activities. Until recently, Digg focused on technology news, but added new subject areas and. an area allowing users to suggest and digg videos posted to sites such as YouTube and Google Video. Of course, everyone has topics that they're more or less interested in, so the new version of Digg also offers a lot more control over the types of content you can view. Each of the major topic areas now has sub-categories that allow you to zoom in to specific categories:
You can customize these categories, removing topics that you're not interested in (you can always add them back later). When you look at the stories that have been voted to the front page (called "popular stories") you see a title and a brief description along with the story's URL and the number of diggs the story has received (very similar to search results). There are also links to digg or bury the story yourself, and to email or blog the story if you use any of the most popular blogging tools. The real value of Digg and other social sites like this lies with the collective opinion that causes interesting content to get surfaced. An interesting related site is DiggTrends, which offers interesting stats and charts of Digg content. The "forecast" section attempts to predict which upcoming stories have enough momentum to ultimately be promoted to the front page, while the "missed" section shows those that almost made it but didn't acquire enough votes to make the front page. So if you are a fan of these user driven social content sites, be sure to check out Digg! Source: Search Day Back to top >> Search Engine for New Zealand Searching for all things Kiwi? Check out Link NZ, a search engine with over 41 million New Zealand Web pages. It's available at LinkNZ There's a lot of information on the front page including pointers to database stats, visitors, Link NZ's perspective on pagerank and the likes. (Lots of nerdy stuff. I like it.) The search form is shoved off to the site a bit - it's for simple keywords and you can specify Boolean OR or AND for the search. I did a search for agriculture and got over 1200 results. Results list relevance score, title, snippet, and options to limit your search to the domain where the search was found or the URL path (very nice.) Link NZ invites any New Zealand based or New Zealand related site to submit its URL for spidering, but does warn that sites with offensive content will be removed from the index. How nice to have an all kiwi engine! Just another sign how the search world is progressing! Source: Research Buzz Back to top >> Question: If I'm redesigning a website, when should I start thinking about search engines? Answer: If you've already started redesigning your site, STOP! You should already be thinking about search engines. If you planning on redesigning your site in the new future, then start thinking about search engines now, before you hire a designer. The first step in designing a website is to go and see how people are searching related to your products or services. When you know what people are seeking, you will be able to create content and a site map that gives them what they want. That means happier visitors, and smoother customer relations. By creating content based upon keyword research, you can position your site to win for a wide range of specific keyword phrases. To find out how people are searching the Web, go to Overture.com and use the Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in all the keywords you can. Go to your competitors' websites and see what keywords they are using. Type those keywords into the Overture tool. Get out a thesaurus and find more keywords. Type those keywords into the Overture tool. Pretty soon you'll have a rank-ordered list of thousands and thousands of keyword phrases related to your products and services. Group those into families, and create content around the families. By creating a site map based upon the known searching behavior of your potential customers, you are increasing the usability of your site. You are "speaking their language," so to speak. You are also setting yourself up to win a wide variety of very specific searches. These are just a couple of key things to consider when redesigning your website but if you would like to know more, feel free to contact us today. Source: Seo Logic We hope you enjoyed webRED this month. If there are any topics or questions you'd particularly like us to cover or answer, why not CONTACT US and tell us. All views expressed are those of Optymise Ltd and articles/ features are written by Optymise staff unless otherwise stated.
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