If you do, or if you hire someone that does, you may reconsider after reading this post.
I’ve struggled with this for years. Deep down I tell myself that if I don’t build a site or web app from the ground up, then I’m probably going to regret it in the future.
However, as the internet develops and standard models emerge, there are some “tools” that are becoming the basis of almost every site I work on these days.
If you are selling a product, service or technology, invariably you are going to run into the issues of marketing it. The question is, do you just tell people about it, or do you show them?
Yahoo! has been promoting their new “Search Assist” feature for the last couple weeks. While there’s been a little buzz of their kick-off party and of the new features, the new feature set hasn’t really made a large impact.
So Yahoo! has begun a new type of promotion… Rather than simply talking about all the features and talking about all the cool stuff it can do, they have decided to show us.
Up until now, I’ve read about all the cool things that Yahoo! has built into their search engine. However, none of it has really knocked me off my chair. I didn’t really see how useful it could be.
And that’s just it: I didn’t see how useful it could be.
Yahoo! has teamed up with the New York Times’ Puzzle Master, Will Shortz, to build a real application of how effective the new search tools Yahoo! built can be.
What Yahoo! has done is given the user a real-world example and a perfect situation to really show how useful their new search features are.
It’s very effective, click on the image above to see for yourself!
In the top half you get an enticing crossword puzzle, with enough functionality to make it very easy to use and not frustrating.
This point is important: If the application was hard to use or frustrating, it would defeat the purpose, and probably leave people with a sour taste for Yahoo’s Search Assist.
In the middle you have the new Search Assist features, and in the bottom of the screen you have the search results generated by the Search Assist features.
There are a couple things to notice with this example. First off, Yahoo! has ingeniously crafted a ‘perfect situation’ to showcase their new features. They are no longer just talking about it, instead they are showing and letting users see. In addition:
Many years ago, a new technology was becoming popular (although in the long run it never made it) called SVG (scalable vector graphics). Many people created tutorials and talked about all the cool things that it could do, but there were zero “real-world” examples.
So, I created one. I created a web site and a web application (with a real purpose — it allowed you to interact with photos of apartment buildings so you could select the floor and exact apartment you were looking for).
The buzz generated from this was amazing. I was offered one book deal, one co-authorship deal, was written up in the newspaper and business journals, and last but not least, was one of the top web site locations for people searching for SVG information.
All this simply because I created a real-world application and my competition was just people talking and showing you how to draw a circle with the technology.
Hopefully you are already thinking about all the cool “real-world” applications you could showcase with what your products or technology. There are a couple guidelines I would suggest:
1-800-Goog-411 has recently graduated from Google Labs to become a full-fledged Google product. It’s a free service that allows anyone to call in and find local business information.
However, what becomes more important than the service itself, is how to make sure your business is listed.
If you have been wondering how other businesses appear on Google Maps or in the search results when you are searching for a specific location, then the Google Local Business Center is your answer.
Local listing is the next frontier for the search engines. They have the game down pat for web-wide searching, but when it comes to finding something in your area, they do not perform as well.
However, Google is trying to stay the leader of the pack by introducing new technologies and products that relate to local searching.
What this means is you have additional ways to be found, outside of natural and paid search advertising.
I can’t honestly remember the last time I used a phone book, before I looked something up online first. …And I can guess that I’m not the only one.
Here’s an example: Yesterday I needed to buy a mattress (true story), and I did a search for “mattress store san diego.” There were three local search results that came up with a Google Map at the top of the search listings. Guess which one I picked? That’s right. The one that was closest to me with enough information and pictures on their site to make me feel comfortable knowing that I would be happy shopping there.
Because that mattress store was listed on Google Local Listings, they made an additional $530 that would not have come in otherwise.
The point is that times are changing, and local search is coming to the web. Either you get there first or your competitors do. It’s free and easy to set up, so no matter which way you look at it, it’s a good idea.
When you think of search engines like toddlers, the concepts for search engine optimization (SEO) get much more simple.
With young children, you need to make things extra easy in order for them to understand. Take children’s books for example. They usually consist of a few words per page and cut right to he point.
The same thing applies to search engines. You need to make it crystal clear what each page is about, and when they understand what each page is about, they know how to rank you. The more clear, the better chance of top rankings.
A new trend is developing in the world of Social Media: Customer Clustering — A method of grouping your customers who have similar interests and adding the basics of social networking.
Seth Godin wrote a great post today on his blog regarding how the search engines have “broken the world into little tiny bits.”
I think it’s a great observation, and it’s not just search engines. It’s social media as a whole! Whether your site got stumbled, you have traffic coming in from your RSS feed subscribers, or your latest article just made the Digg front page, it’s becoming less and less common that all traffic starts at your home page and explores your site from there.
Below, is the way a typical site is laid out. Everything starts with the home page, you have your main navigation off that, and finally you get to the pages that contain the specific information visitors are looking for.
Whether you have a full web application or a simple data-collection form, you may want to consider turning it into an Rich Internet Application that will run outside the browser.
That’s right, the next generation of web apps will be the ones that you don’t need a browser to use.
In fact, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) can use a new technology, created by Adobe, called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) which allows it to act more like regular software.
The Social Arena includes hundreds of sites and millions of users. An understanding of these networks will turn your business into an automated vehicle for profit creation.
With the information below, you will have the tools necessary to drive extraordinary qualified traffic to your web site and build your brand as a knowledgeable expert in your industry or niche market.
Mindmeister (www.mindmeister.com ) is the coolest thing to happen to mind mapping since, well… since mind mapping software was created.
For those who don’t know, mind mapping is a way of outlining your ideas, thoughts and lists into an easy to understand visual. It allows you to group thoughts, attach notes, and define with icons.
Personally, I can’t live without mind maps. Whether it’s outlining a new web site or brainstorming on our next eBook, mind maps help me keep all my thoughts in one location and in an organized manner. They help you see the “big picture”.
Up until now, mind mapping software was just that… software. You could share maps, but it was difficult and many times required a special viewer. Collaboration was very limited, if available at all, and outside of the open-source Freemind, the software could run from $100 to $300 or more.
The mind map above was created in Mindmeister, and thanks to the collaboration abilities and publishing functionality, I had it placed within the blog post with a few mouse clicks.
Currently, there are few people collaborating on this mind map and if you would like to be one of them, drop a comment below and I will invite you!
Current collaborators:
- www.keymc.net
- www.n-re-k.com
- R. Alexander
This requires only flash to use. Mindmeister is all DHTML/CSS and JavaScript. No plug-ins required.
First off, I want to say that Mindmeister has not asked us to write any of this. We are just impressed and like to share great creations.
Claims were made against Target stating that their web site was inaccessible to the blind, and a federal judge in California has certified a class action lawsuit.
By not making their site accessible, Target is said to have violated federal and state laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled. The National Federation of the Blind is included as one of the plaintiffs.
Using alt and title attributes (in hyperlinks) should be part of your best practices no matter what. Not only do they help make your web site more accessible to people with disabilities, they also makes your site more accessible to the search engines.
If laws are passed, web site owners and companies may be forced to make these changes.
First off, read up on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Then, make sure you are using Alt and Title attributes in your site at the very least. You will be making your site more accessible to both your visitors and the search engines.
Here are 10 Quick Tips
to make your site more accessible from the WAI:
A huge thanks to AJAXflakes.com for compiling (and testing) a list of over 300 social bookmarking sites on the web. These sites are grouped into categories that makes it easy to find the type of site that you are looking for.
As an added bonus, the Page Rank and description for each site is also included!
Microsoft AdCenter Labs is a site that explores and announces some of their latest technologies in the works.
Although many of the working demos showcased in Microsoft AdCenter Labs include functionality that can be found in both Google and Yahoo, there are a few that hold some merit.
Xinu is one of the coolest tools we’ve come across lately!
Enter in your domain, and it will provide instant reports on:
If you want to save the information for later, in cases of benchmarking, you can export the data as a PDF.
With full-text capabilities, which means you can use quotes and other search operators, Google now allows you to search for patents using their engine.
In addition to just finding the patents, Google makes it easy to access all the information on the patents too. This includes downloading a PDF of the patent docs, viewing the abstract, drawing, description, claims and citations.
Find out what your competitors are doing. Want to know how competing products work, just search through their existing patents.
Find out how things work. Want to know how search engines work, do a Google Patent Search for ’search engine’. The patent documents explain how they work and what makes them unique.
Search within the patents. Don’t want to spend time reading through the entire document? Now you can search within the actual patent document.
Use the Google Patent Search here: www.google.com/patents
How else do you see this tool being used? Leave us a comment…
What’s better than writing a post about Microsoft’s newest updates to their search engine? Getting #1 in Google for the examples Microsoft uses.
We posted our commentary on Microsoft’s updates to their search engine earlier today. Within their blog post, they suggest doing a search for ‘Microsoft taco truck’. Well, before the end of the day, we were listed number 1 in Google for ‘Microsoft taco truck’.
You can read our original post here... or do a search for ‘Microsoft taco truck’ in Google.
Following the as-of-late penguin craze, Club Penguin (www.clubpenguin.com) offers social networking for kids. A place that is a “kid-friendly virtual world where children can play games, have fun and interact with each other.”
Free accounts are available, but if you want to dress up your penguin, decorate your igloo or be the first to discover new areas… then you are going to have to pay the membership monthly fee.
Safe, Niche Sites can Generate Big Revenues
There’s a very interesting aspect to Club Penguin - child safety. Currently, a number of online social networking sites are facing lawsuits and complaints about their safety. Has this niche site found a solution?
Club Penguin states, “The Club Penguin team got to work, consulting with educators, law enforcement representatives and other parents, doing extensive research into online safety, and conducting widespread testing. Eight whirlwind months later, in October 2005, Club Penguin opened to the public with about 25,000 users.”
By the summer of 2007, Club Penguin had grown to 700,000 paid subscribers and 12 million activated users. At $4.83 (annual fee divided by 12) per month, does that mean this site is generating over $3 million each month? This also led to Club Penguin becoming part of the Disney family.
According to the Club Penguin site, “Ultimate Safe Chat is the perfect solution for parents seeking the ultimate in online safety. This option limits what users can say to a predefined menu of greetings, questions, and statements, as well as emotes, actions and greeting cards. When it comes to chatting, these users can only see other Ultimate Safe Chat messages.”
Club Penguin offers, “Standard Safe Chat allows players to type their own messages to other users. Every message that is typed first goes through a sophisticated filter which blocks inappropriate words and phrases. Club Penguin’s filter also breaks up words and phrases phonetically in order to decipher and catch codes or other methods players might use in an attempt to get past the system. This added component allows the filter to block attempts to communicate a phone number or other personal information.
Although the filter is continuously updated, comments that could be offensive to some players may occasionally get through. In order to limit that and further protect the security of Standard Safe Chat participants, moderators monitor what’s going on and receive player reports of misconduct. An “M” icon on the upper, right-hand portion of the screen reminds participants a moderator is available to help. Players who engage in inappropriate behavior can be silenced or banned.”
Did these safety features combined with a specific niche market make Club Penguin the success that it is? Leave a comment…
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the latest updates to their Live Search Engine.
According to the blog post, you can now use Microsoft’s Live Search to find the secret location of the Microsoft taco truck. I’ve spent years searching for that damn truck! Where have you been all my life Core Relevance!!!
Microsoft says, “We’re always going to be fighting people who threaten the integrity of our results by using illegitimate or malicious techniques. With this release of Live Search you should find the amount of spam is down quite considerably.”
What’s interesting is the first two results returned by their “taco truck” example above link directly to a site full of spam links.
“You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a ‘randomly selected and statistically significant’ set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results.” — I guess “Microsoft taco truck” wasn’t statistically significant…
“Snippets”? Oh! You mean the “description”, got it.
Microsoft Live now searches 20 billion web pages. Four times the size of their previous index. “Enough said”, says Microsoft.
So, what does Google have to say about it?
According to Google, “Search engines’ published metrics for index size measurement vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable. Often, for instance, web crawlers retrieve duplicate entries for one page or links to documents that they haven’t crawled, and whose content thus isn’t in the index. At Google we believe the essential quality of an index isn’t the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness - which unique documents are in the index. So we don’t count duplicate or uncrawled pages. According to our internal testing, our newly expanded search index is more than three times larger than that of any other search engine.”
Hmm… Interesting.
Microsoft explains, “It’s our job to be doing the smart thing to figure out what people really mean.” Which means, that Live Search will now assume it knows what you want to say. In their example, they assume that when you type in “nw”, you really mean to type in “northwest”.
Does this apply to the Paid Results? Um… no.
Again, using their “nw” example, we tried a few things on our own. It turns out the assumptions are only made for the organic search results. It doesn’t seem to be used within their paid advertising. If you type in ‘northwest care’, you get sponsored sites for ‘northwest’ and ‘care’. if you type in ‘nw care’, you get the same organic results, but the sponsored sites are now mainly about ‘care’, it doesn’t seem to know that ‘nw’ is the same as ‘northwest’.
comScore announced the top web sites and fastest growing web sites for a number of countries around the world based on data for August 2007.
Now you can provide your users the ability to create custom home pages within your web site. Netvibes will now “deeply integrate” into any company’s web site and enable users to personalize the delivery of RSS feeds, podcasts, photos, videos, stores, widgets and more.
You have control over how the content is branded, which means you retain the traffic, navigation and revenue generation.
The Premium Universes allow you to embed it into your web site, with your own navigation, so you don’t loose site visitors and keep all advertising revenue generated from the page. These Universe pages are also Search Engine Optimized.
According to the Netvibes press release, web sites like Tagged and Miva have already integrated this functionality. Two French newspaper sites have also added it to their user’s home pages.
Currently, you have to contact Netvibes through their contact form in the developers section. They do not provide any pricing or integration information on their web site.
Netvibes pioneered the personalized homepage, an alternative to traditional web portals. With millions of users in more than 150 countries, Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the Web. Founded in 2005 by Tariq Krim, Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) has offices in Paris, London and San Francisco.
This article is related to AdWords Ranking only.
A high Google Quality Score will give you better ad rankings, placement on relevant sites in the content network, and lower minimum cost-per-clicks.
Last month, Google published a number of items that will reduce your Landing Page’s Google Quality Score if used.
Web sites and landing pages that use the following will be penalized with low landing page scores:
I wouldn’t suggest trying to fool Google either. If a user complains about your landing page for using the techniques listed above, Google may ban you from further advertising.
The Google Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. By calculating a “variety of factors”, it measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query.
In general, the when you have a higher quality score, you will pay less for each click on adwords, and achieve a better adWords ad position.
Google put this in place to ensure that only the most relevant ads appear for each search performed.
Google Keyword Trends allow you to see how your selected keyword or keywords (separated by commas) performed over a period of time. Currently, you can view keyword trends both on the Search Volume and the News Reference Volume. However, Google Keyword Trends does not provide you with actual numbers for the scale, it’s all relative.
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Recently, Google has published a whole set of Google Analytics Tutorials on YouTube. These Google Analytics Tutorials include over 11 videos and have over 4 hours of tutorial footage.
If you’re like many of our clients, you don’t have 11 hours to spend watching tutorials. However, to make qualified decisions both for your web site and the business you run, you should have a basic grasp of what can be gathered and what data is available with Google Analytics.
Here are the few Google Analytics Tutorials that I suggest:
Social Media Marketing takes time and patience, but when done correctly has tremendous rewards. The following are some ideas and exercises to help you get started in the right direction…
