25th November 2007
October U.S. Expanded Search Rankings
In the October 2007 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the pack with approximately 7.5 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.6 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1 billion), Time Warner Network (905 million) and Ask Network (493 million). Ask.com saw particularly strong growth, gaining nearly 23 percent in search query volume versus September, while Facebook.com entered the ranking at number 9 with 152 million searches.
25th November 2007
The great thing about the Internet in 2007 is the ability to integrate several different types of media into your site. Faster internet connections, cheap bandwidth and free third party multimedia hosting services have made it easy for even the smallest of small businesses to work multi-media into their sites. Since it’s well known that different people absorb information in different ways, smart small businesses are looking at the best ways to leverage social media and Web 2.0 technologies to better serve their customers.
Scott Baradell has a nice post over at Marketing Profs today exploring the best ways to integrate video into your site. Scott’s article is targeted at public relations types, but his concepts apply to general small business marketing as well.
Take a look at the factoids he’s put together:
- Most Web users watch online video today. In fact, 1 in 5 say they stream video every day. (Source: Pew Internet)
- Americans don’t get their news from static print sources anymore. Only 13 percent say they get their news from newspapers and magazines, compared to 40 percent who use the Internet and 32 percent who watch TV. (Source: Zogby)
- The media has a high demand for video content. Use of video by newspaper Web sites is expected to double over the next 12 months. (Source: Borrell Associates)
I’m not surprised to read any of those facts, but they do serve as reinforcement that well-integrated multi-media can only improve the usability and stickiness of your site. Heck, the new iPhones tout the fact that they have YouTube capabilities built right in. If that doesn’t tell you the techies are interested in video, I don’t know what would.
What do I Gain From Adding Multi-Media
There are quite a few benefits to adding audio, video and images to your site.
- Increased Search Presence – With universal search growing in popularity, things like video clips hosted on YouTube give you yet another chance to get your brand into the search results.
- Stronger Sales Pitch – Sometimes, you really need video to share the full experience of using your products. Why simply tell them about the wonders of your latest widget when you can show them?
- Portability – When you use sites like YouTube and Flickr to host your multimedia, you make it easy for bloggers to pick them up and share them with their own readers.
- You Spark Conversation – YouTube and Flickr, the two most popular sites for hosting your media both have strong communities and community features surrounding them. You can subscribe to a user’s feed and you can comment on their work. Small businesses who tend to these community features build up a more loyal following and gain valuable input from those who comment. Plus, if you serve up enough interesting content, folks are likely to sign-up to get notifications when you upload new things. These services basically act as another feed outlet for your work.
It Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune
When small businesses hear “multimedia” they tend to think “I can’t afford that.” Not true. Multimedia creation is pretty cheap nowadays. A simple microphone and a free program like Audacity can have you putting together a podcast in no time. Digital cameras are now quite affordable and many will also shoot several minutes of video. With free software from Picasa to manage your photos and your videos, it’s easy to get them optimized and uploaded to sites like Flickr and YouTube.
It Doesn’t Have to be Fancy
While you certainly don’t want to put up blurry pictures or shaky video footage, you also don’t need to invest in a professional production company to get something of value. Millions of site owners around the world are now leveraging sites like Flickr, YouTube and Yelp for little more than the cost of their time. Upload photos of your storefront to local search engines, join a relevant Flickr group and add to the conversation, upload video clips of people using your products to YouTube. Then make sure to stick around and take part in the conversation.
Once you discover the potential, you’ll be hooked.
25th November 2007
Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.
Shoppers are often hampered if they don’t feel they can get a hold of a real person or are limited in their contact options. With all other areas of the site working, a bad contact us page may cause someone to think twice about purchasing with you altogether.
Accessibility
Visitors must be able to find a link to your Contact Us page easily and obviously from all pages of your site. They should not have to hunt to find your contact information.
Contact options
Provide multiple options for contacting you including phone, fax, email and web form. Live support can also be valuable. While you may want to direct the options toward what is most convenient for you, not providing a contact option most convenient for your visitors can be a mistake.
Contact points
Larger sites should provide contact information for all major departments such as customer service, tech support, inquiries, general info, memberships, job apps, billing, etc. You might even want to include contact options for specific individuals such as CEO, SFO, etc.
Map and hours
If you deal more with local business rather than national, your hours of operation should be included along with a map pinpointing your location. This certainly won’t hurt national businesses either.
No advertisements
Your contact page should be free of ads, both for your own as well as other products/services. This page should maintain as limited focus as possible.
Web form
Your web contact form should require as little information as is necessary. Don’t use this as a survey. Just the bare necessities should be requested.
Your Contact Us page should not be complicated. In fact, simple is better. Provide the information that your visitors need and provide as many contact options as you can to cover your bases. This will ensure an effective contact us page that provides assurances to your visitors as they move through the conversion process.
Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.
25th November 2007
If you are the type of blogger who writes daily then it becomes important for you to post consistently because your readers begin to expect that from you. However, what do you do when you’re fresh out of ideas and still want to get something valuable out to your readers?
Below I have come up with 9 ways to help you keep your blog going:
- Hot Industry Stories: Everyday you hear about acquisitions, mergers, companies releasing new technology/services or even executives getting fired. Unless you are one of the first blogs to cover these stories, it becomes somewhat useless to your readers. Rather, I recommend you add your personal perspective on the story as well as help your readers leverage the news by offering advice on how to apply it to to their own businesses.
- Relationships with PR Firms: Try making relationships with PR firms who work for companies in your industry. It’s a win/win situation, you get hot news off the press and the companies get publicity in exchange. As you become more authoritative, PR firms will begin to approach you first.
- Google Hot Trends: This an excellent way to determine the buzz across the Internet, however you do have to apply your own filters per industry. Google Hot Trends also allows you to see a graphical trend on the level of interest for a given topic.
- Correlating Common Interests: You probably enjoy other interests outside of your niche such as sports or politics, so why not bring something your other passions into your professional life? I like to sometimes use Google Trends, Technorati and Social Bookmarking to reference the NBA or sports playoffs.
- Guest Bloggers: When you’re completely out of new topics try leveraging guest bloggers to offer their thoughts on new topics. This gives you a little break and gives your readers some fresh perspective to digest. Guest bloggers can be people from your industry or even fellow employees. Make sure to prescreen your writers so they adhere to your high quality of content.
- Reigniting Old Topics: Dig into your stats and figure out posts which have been historically popular (consider seasonality if appropriate) and then write an update to those posts explaining how strategies have changed or Part 2.
- Credit Other Bloggers: In any given week there are dozens of posts and articles around your industry which people should definitely read. This is your opportunity to categorize these other posts and spread some link love. Both Search Engine Land and Marketing Pilgrim both do this on a regular basis.
- Create a Compilation: Have you ever written 3 or 4 posts on the same topic which you think an organization can circulate around to it’s employees, then try combining those posts and offer them in a PDF version.
- Attend a Webinar: If you wanted you could probably attend 2 or 3 webinars everyday (and realistically 1 every 2 weeks) and for those who can’t make it, provide a brief summary for them detailing the “nuggets” from the webinar.
25th November 2007
There’s a conversation going on in our Small Business Ideas forum about domain registration and the impact it has on search engine rankings. Generally, when I hear small business owners ask about this, they want to know if the age of a domain has any impact on their rankings. In the case of this thread, the original poster is asking if the length of domain registration has anything to do with rankings. I’ve heard this question pop up more often in the last few months, so I thought it might be worth throwing down a few thoughts on the issue.
The line of thinking here is Google looks at domain registrations (they do) and they use what they find to influence rankings (they likely do.) They believe Google considers the length of time your domain is registered for as a sign of how serious you are about your business. By that, I mean many believe you will rank better if you register your domain name for 3, 5 or even 10 years rather than for a year at a time.
These folks believe Google will reward longer registrations because Google thinks a shorter registration period is a sign of a company who operates with throw away domains. They think spammers who are registering throw-away domains aren’t going to pay for more than one year’s registration, so Google gives more credibility to those who do.
While I have no definitive proof that Google doesn’t consider length of registration as part of their algorithm, I do think I can use a little common sense to explain why it would be a silly thing for them to consider when it comes to determining rankings.
Bringing Common Sense to the Table
As with any other potential ranking factor, I always suggest we go back to the Pinocchio Effect to consider whether or not the factor will impact rankings.
If you’re not familiar with my theory of the Pinocchio Effect, here’s a quick summary:
You see, deep down, search engines want nothing more than to be real boys (or girls). That’s right, it’s that simple. As search engine engineers gain more and more ability to tailor the algorithms, their ultimate goal is to help the search engines make choices the way that people do.
That means anytime I’m looking at a new potential ranking factor (even before I do any testing) I sit down and ask myself if a human being would use that factor as a way to judge the quality of a site. I also ask myself how easy it would be to “game” that factor. Ninety percent of the time, common sense rules the day. So let’s break this idea down using the Pinocchio Effect.
First, we need to ask ourselves if domain registration length is a good indicator of a quality site. Since I’m a big fan of analogies, let’s go ahead and port this idea over to the offline world.
Let’s say I’m looking to get my grandfather’s heirloom pocket watch fixed. One of the springs has broken and I need a skilled watch repairman to get in there and work their magic. I start hunting for someone to hire. I’m going to ask around to get some recommendations and then I’m going to consider a few things. Among the things I’ll consider is how long this person has worked as a watch repairman. The longer he’s been in business, the more confidence I have in his ability to get the job done. After all, you don’t stay employed as a watch repairman if you can’t get the job done.
What I’m not likely to consider is how long the lease is on his storefront. In fact, I can honestly tell you I’ve never in my life found myself asking a business how long their lease is before I’ve made a purchase from them. It’s just not the type of thing I concern myself with because it’s not even remotely indicative of the quality of a business. Might I worry the company will go out of business because they aren’t good at what they do? Sure! But I’ve never thought to myself “geeze, they don’t have a ten year lease on this retail space…I bet they’re kind of shady.”
Why should a search engine be any different?
As a human, I’m interested in how long a company has been doing business. Online, this translates to how long the site has been doing business as that domain. I’m interested in how much they’ve grown and expanded to meet growing customer demand. Online, this translates to new content and new offerings. I’m interested in the word of mouth recommendations I might hear from friends and colleagues. Online this translates to incoming links and positive customer reviews.
All of these things factor in to the way I, a human, judge the quality of a site. They also factor in to how search engines judge a site.
How many times have you, a human, found yourself checking a company’s domain registration to make sure they own their domain for at least 3-5 years before you’ll make a purchase from them? None? That’s what I thought. So why should a search engine care?
Still not convinced? That’s ok, let’s move on to the next thing I look at in the “common sense algorithmic approach” and ask ourselves how easy it would be to game this ranking factor.
Domain registration costs vary from around $7 a year to around $15 a year, depending on the registrar. Most registrars give you a bit of a discount if you register your domain for several years at once, so let’s average things out to $10 a year for a registration. That means a site owner might spend around $10 to register their domain for one year, or around $50 to register it for five.
Does anyone honestly believe $40 is a high enough price that someone aiming to build throw-away domains to gain quick rankings and make money will opt for the single year registration instead? Do you think Google believes it? After all, anyone who can’t make an extra $40 off a domain name in a year has no business building throw-away domains or trying to game the system anyway.
It’s ludicrous to think $40 is a high enough price to sort the serious businesses from the search engine gamers. I know it, you know it and the search engines know it.
So What Should You Do?
How long you register your domain for is entirely up to you. I know quite a few businesses who do register their domains for five or ten years at a time, though generally that’s to avoid screw-ups that might cause you to lose your domain. After all, it can be expensive and time consuming to recapture a lost domain name. Registering for an extended period of time simply for the convenience factor makes perfect sense. Registering for an extended period of time because you think it will help you improve your rankings? Seems sort of silly to me.
That said, if you aren’t convinced you can always register your domain for a full 100 years with Network Solutions. Of course it will cost you more per year ($9.99) than it will to use a cheaper service and set things to auto-renew, but you can rest assured you’ll be set if the search engines ever DO start handing out better rankings for longer domain registrations.
Like anything else in search engine optimization, only the search engines know for sure. Ultimately, I can only tell you I’ll continue to leave all of my domains on auto-renewal for one year at a time. (Granted, part of that is because I’m cheap…) Of course domain registration is cheap these days. $100 will easily buy you ten years worth of “security.” But I highly doubt it will buy you better rankings.
Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.
