Getting Found – Part II Websites, Search Engines, and Online Advertising
Company Space This is the area that is controlled by the company
Personal Space This area is unique to the individual and beyond the company’s control We expect to find: •
Buyer Remorse
•
Independent Opinions
•
Promotional Blog Posts
What & Where In the Company space, we see everything from direct messaging to brand building exercises In the Personal space, everything relates to the mind or the the heart
The Middle The center area represents the product, service or the company itself. In the middle, we will find three attributes: •
Aesthetics – how something appeals to the senses (subjective)
•
Function – how well something works (objective)
•
Meaning – something we ascribe to/have beliefs about (personal)
The Presentation Ring 1 includes things that are not part of the product, service or company, but do have a direct impact on how we might perceive it In the Company space, that would include things like product packaging, a sales demo or the retail environment where its bought In the Personal space, it would include a friend’s recommendation, a product rating or comments on a blog post – any trusted source that informs our purchasing decision
Communications The outermost layer includes all those things that while not directly associated with the point of interaction, do have an indirect influence on our perceptions In the Company Space, this includes advertising, direct mail, sponsorships and other activities that are related but removed from direct association In the Personal Space, this would include the Associated Press, product placement (movies) or parodies.
Watch Out For Browsers The biggest problem with website design today is
internet browsers Every browser handles website code differently Internet Explorer is the worst of all the browsers
IE doesn’t support standard CSS code and makes designers/ developers add numerous “fixes” to make sure that the site is properly viewed in each different version of IE If you don’t plan for this problem when designing your website, your overall user experience will be ruined because the site will not display properly or functions may not work
This is one of the reasons why Mozilla Firefox is quickly
becoming one of the world’s most downloaded browsers
Measuring Results No matter what kind of website you build, make sure to
include an analytics software of some kind There are a variety of different ways to do it:
Online – methods that embed a code into your website pages to track how many visitors are coming to your website Offline – download the log files from your website and process them with a weblog viewer
Either way, you need to know who is coming to your site,
what they are viewing and how long they are staying
Search Engine Optimization – Make Sure You Get Found
What Is Search Engine Optimization? Search engine optimization is the process of improving
the visibility of a website or web page in search engines via natural (organic) or unpaid (algorithmic) search results Started in the mid 1990s as the first search engines started to catalog the internet The phrase Search Engine Optimization was first used in 1997
How Does A Search Engine Work? “Back in the old days” – a webmaster would submit the
URL of the page to different search engines
The Search Engine would send a spider to crawl the page Extract links from it Return information to the Search Engine to be indexed and included
“Nowadays” – a webmaster submits the URL or an XML
sitemap to different search engines
The Search Engine downloads the pages to their servers where an indexer extracts information about the page Words it contains and where they are located Specific weightage for the words Links that page contains are scheduled to be crawled at a later date
The Rise of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, graduate students at
Stanford, developed “backrub” – a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages The quality and strength of inbound links – meaning the likelihood that a given page would be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another Google was launched in 1998 and this technology is now called Google PageRank
White Hat SEO Techniques that search engines recommend as part of
good design Produce results that last a long time Is not about following guidelines, but about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes is the same content that the user will see Best summed up as – creating content for users and making that content easily accessible to the spiders Effective marketing, making efforts to deliver quality content to an audience that has requested the quality content
Black Hat SEO Techniques that search engines do not approve of and
attempt to minimize the effect of Anticipate their sites will eventually be banned once the search engine discover what they are doing An example of a Black Hat tactic is adding text to a page that is hidden either as:
Text colored similar to the background In an invisible div tag Positioned offscreen
Another method gives a different page depending on
whether the page has been requested by a search engine or a human – known as cloaking
What Happens If Caught? 2005 – Google banned a company called Traffic Power for
using deceptive tactics to get sites ranked higher. Since they never told their clients what they were doing, only some of their clients were banned Feb 2006 – Google removed BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices Both companies quickly apologized , removed the offending pages and were restored to Google’s list
How Do You Make Sure Your Site Gets Found? Make sure you submit it to all the search engines from
Google , Yahoo and Bing Make sure that all “on page” elements are added
Body copy Title elements H1 heading elements Image ALT Tags Anchor text Keywords and keyword relevance
Getting It Right Make content users desire and will want to share Build usability and high quality design into your site Ensure that spiders can parse all content and duplication isn’t an issue Make it easy to reach deep pages in as few clicks as possible – The “Two Click” rule Chose keywords that will garner traffic and make sure they are in your content