The Shifting SEO Landscape

Search engine optimization will undergo a huge transformation over the next several years. If you want to hear me prognosticate, then you’ll want to check out my article titled “The Shifting SEO Landscape”, published on page 58 in the brand new DM News’ Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Download the PDF of the Guide here (5.2 megs). Enjoy!

The death of the pop-up

Seems like just about every toolbar out there includes a popup blocker (e.g. Google Toolbar, Yahoo Companion Toolbar). Plus, many web browsers are offering this capability built in. In addition, there’s antivirus / personal firewall security software like Norton Internet Security that blocks pop-ups (heck, Norton is so overly zealous, it strips out referrers so web marketers can’t tell where their traffic came from!).

Furthermore, don’t count on content within a pop-up getting indexed in the search engines. That’s because pop-ups rely on JavaScript — a roadblock to search engine spiders.

The short of it is, my advice is this: stop using pop-ups.

Online retailers doing wikis?

In the past I’ve made the case for using wikis for online marketing.

Perusing Amazon.com recently I saw that there were already over 7500 product wikis contributed by Amazon customers. Cool! (Unfortunately not a single one of their wikis is indexed in Google because of the search engine unfriendly way they’ve implemented wikis on their site. Indeed, I couldn’t even find a way to link to their wikis from here, because links like this one expire and stop working after a while.)

It made me wonder how many other e-commerce sites were embracing wikis as a way to augment their product information and encourage customer participation in the site. I haven’t heard of any other online retailers doing this.

Know of any etailers experimenting with wikis?

There is the ShopWiki website, which is not an online retailer but a site targeted to online retail. ShopWiki was founded by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman (DoubleClick’s former CEO and former CTO, respectively). There is some good stuff in ShopWiki. For example, if you are looking to buy a compound bow, there is great buying guide as well as an explanation of how a compound bow works, type of material used in its manufacture, etc. (Unfortunately, like with Amazon’s wikis, ShopWiki’s wikis — including their buying guide on the compound bow — aren’t making it into Google. Fewer than 72 wiki pages are indexed).

Not strictly an online retail wiki, yet it overlaps partially with the ShopWiki is wikiHow, a how-to manual launched by the dotcom eHow. I am unclear why eHow started a separate wiki rather than folding it into eHow.com. I think they should have just opened up their eHow site for user contributions.

I think a wiki is especially suited to applications such as buyers guides, encyclopedias, glossaries, manuals, travel guides, etc when you want to elicit user contributions without making visible a lot of back-and-forth discussion. The real value is in the final product, not in the discussion that got to that point. That is where a wiki really shines.

When advertisers hurt your brand

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.” 

What to do about copyright infringement of your website?

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?

Microsites with “pass it on” appeal

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!

We’ve Googlized a client’s home page!

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!)

Ecommerce Best Practice Tip #8: Incorporate discussion forums into your ecommerce site

Discussion forums encourage customer participation, getting customers and prospects to stay longer which means more interaction with your brand. They drive repeat visits too. Some customers become “regulars” on your forums — which should, hopefully, lead to you being top-of-mind more often when they are in the market for products that you sell. In other words, discussion forums make your site sticky. Not a bad thing!

Woot.com is a great example of an ecommerce site that encourages participation with forums. They consistently get dozens of comments per day; frequently it’s even hundreds. For example, this blog post from a week ago generated 1200 comments in their forums! Their weekly contest is brilliant: they get customers to Photoshop images to a particular theme (which changes week by week) and then post their creations to the forums. Viewing the submissions is a lot of fun.

Online forums also generate wonderful search engine fodder. If the forum is architected correctly, each forum posting will become a separate page that ends up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. And each of those pages will have been engineered to rank well (the HTML, the URLs, the anchor text of the back links, etc.).

We set up a forum for Van Dykes Furniture Restorers for their core customers (furniture restorers) to collaborate, share tips, ask and answer questions, etc. This user-contributed content is written in the language of the customers. For example, if a post is written about “gluing wood to metal” and that’s the language that furniture restorers are using, rather than the product-focused industry lingo that the supplier is using, then that’s new search engine visibility that hasn’t been captured before by the online catalog. Multiply that effect out by the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of forum posts and you’ve got the beginnings of a Long Tail search optimization strategy.

Changing the world, one blog at a time

For the past couple months I’ve been jotting down random ideas on how to make this world a better place. But they don’t do any good sitting in a Word document on my Mac. I could blog them on my own blog here, but frankly I don’t think they’ll get much attention that way.

One of my goals is to influence the thinking and budget allocation of an organization that has the money to make a difference, like the Google Foundation (Attention: Larry Brilliant!) or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A pretty lofty goal, I know.

Another of my goals is to find individual champions to see some of the ideas through.

So I decided to create a separate blog as a repository for these ideas and ensuing discussion. I’m pleased to announce that I have just (soft) launched that blog, at ChangesForGood.org. Check it out.

And give it a link if you feel so inclined.

Currently it’s just me blogging there at the moment, but that will (I hope) quickly change. I want it to be a group blog, because I don’t have the corner on the market of ideas! I’ve already got a few bloggers who offered to participate, but I need many more!

Any of you bloggers who are reading this keen to occasionally contribute to such a blog?

Non-bloggers who want to become bloggers are invited too!

Free SEO Site Evaluations by Yours Truly

Unless you read Practical eCommerce magazine, you are probably not aware that for the past six months I have had a column called SEO Report Card where I “deconstruct” an online store of an Internet retailer and provide some hard-hitting tips and bits of advice to improve their search engine visibility. Because the articles are password protected on the Practical E-Commerce site, they have been unavailable to most web users. That is about to change. 

I have gotten permission to re-post the articles on my company’s website. Over the next few weeks I’ll get them all posted. So far I’ve just gotten the first article of the series posted (here).

Here’s a sampling of my findings from the first site evaluation that I did in my column, of small specialty retailer BalancedLifeProducts.com: 

• URL on the home page immediately redirects to another more complex URL. In many cases, this causes PageRank dilution because PageRank doesn’t always flow from the first URL to the destination URL.
• Site is completely devoid of .edu or .gov inbound links. A quick check didn’t reveal any high PageRank authoritative pages linking to this site either. The site doesn’t even have a Yahoo directory listing. Furthermore, the inbound links include spam sites like ultimate-hgh-human-growth-hormone-releaser.com and wazoopoker.com. Apparently they participated in a link farm or signed up for a link spam campaign in the form of a “Submit to thousands of search engines for $99.” Ouch. The likely ranking penalties they are receiving will be hard to recover from.
• The links out include reciprocal links, some of which are totally off-topic. I would add a rel=nofollow to all the reciprocal or irrelevant links on the links page, so that no link gain (e.g. Google PageRank) is passed to those sites.

For the rest of the findings (nine bullet points in all), read the full article.

ALSO… Over the next few days I’ll be working on the SEO Report Card for the July issue. Since the topic of my SEO How-To article for the July issue is blogs and SEO, the Report Card article will be evaluating the blog of an online retailer.

If you’d like me to evaluate your blog and you’re an online retailer, then email me and I’ll consider you.