Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

I have survived Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference … albeit on information overload. It isn’t really that there was so much information that it was overwhelming. Taken in small pieces everything is perfectly digestible. It’s when I over fill myself that I waddle away overloaded. All that aside, I have to say that my first day was pretty good. I attended 4 sessions and learned something new from each of them.

Stoney introduced Rob and me to some pretty fun people. Rob asked me how it felt to be going to dinner with 12 guys, and I said: “Popular.” I also felt quite popular with all the rubber necking our Pole Position Marketing team shirts caused. We were quite the collective object of many a heads turning and fingers pointing. You could read people’s lips Check out the cool shirts. I bet next year there will be impersonators.

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Last week, while driving to work I completely lost my way. For about 10 minutes I had no idea how to get here, I was supremely frustrated and I feared that all of society was about to collapse into anarchy. No, I was not drunk.

Before I tell my harrowing story of the road, I want you to think about your website. Honestly, are you doing all you can to ensure usability? Is it enough to have 95% of your links unbroken? 97? 99? Do you just expect people to overlook the occasional link to nowhere, and just find their way?

How many bad experiences will turn a user against you?

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There is a great deal of talk within the search marketing world concerning the future introduction of personalization factors into search as a way to improve SERPS relevancy. Many regard this as the death of SEO. It is reasoned that if each user is getting a unique and personalized search experience; the SEO cannot deduce the unique personalized signals used by search engines to help sort the search results. Furthermore, that any SEO techniques employed to optimize a web page would probably boost rankings for only a handful of searchers.

I strongly disagree. In fact I see personalization as ushering in a new era of SEO, in which search optimizers are able to target specific audiences with great precision. This will be, as Stoney has so eloquently defined, the era of Destination Marketing.

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Color psychology is an area of research which explores how colors affect human emotions and behavior. The direct applicability of this information to professional marketing has long been known and continues to be a cornerstone of advertising development.
In fact, at its core, advertising is simply the art and science of influencing human behavior via impersonal mediums such as printed ads.

Color psychology, as an area of academic research, lacks a coherent, accepted body of knowledge; however, information gleaned from marketing professionals who have put the principles of color psychology into real-world application, can provide some heavy artillery for your web marketing arsenal.

The following simple color key presents as a primer for understanding how web site color schemes can be employed to influence user behavior. It is important to note that there are sharp contrasts in color interpretation across various cultures, therefore doing your homework on your target market is essential. Click here to keep learning

I was recently browsing the web for new information on website quality evaluation when I stumbled across Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. While lightly perusing the guidelines for any updates, I thought that it might be worthwhile to explore the guidelines in-depth. However to make the review more interesting I will be approaching each guideline in one of 4 possible ways. Each of which reflects a different perspective in the search world.

• P – Paranoogle – “Shhhh! Googlebot can Hear You…”
• N – Nihiloogle – “Guidelines are Meaningless… just like the Universe”
• Z – Zealoogle – “Google is the very fabric of my existence”
• J – Jasonoogle- Unfiltered and honest thoughts by yours truly.”

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While this session was largely dominated by Daniel Goldman’s Opera discussion (which was marked with many mysterious references to the Nintendo Wii, or more specifically the Opera Browser contained therein), there were a couple of interesting bits that I captured from the panelists:

• Even those that evangelize the use of well formed CSS and HTML still find tabled designs acceptable.
  I personally agree, at least until we get some cooperation between browsers.
• Reducing code bloat brings discipline to an unordered arena.
  If the unordered arena is WYSIWYG generated web pages, then I wholeheartedly agree with this concept.
• Using well formed, streamlined code strengthens semantics.
  I have been saying this for a few years now and was pleased to hear some support from an expert panelist.

To insure that we got the most out of PubCon, our fearless leader assigned sessions to each team member. My first session was SEO & Big Search, moderated by Jake Baillie.

This was an interesting session in that it was primarily an opportunity for some of the primary search properties to discuss their own in-house SEO campaigns. This is what each had to say:

AOL: Represented by Melanie Mitchell, Director of SEO/SEM. Melanie gave a detailed account of AOL’s SEO initiatives. She described their approach to SEO as focusing on 3 key areas:

• Indexing – Insuring crawlability and page focus.
• Ranking – Achieving prominent rankings for targeted search phrases.
• Metrics – Defining clear and measurable objectives and acquiring tools for measuring progress.

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Over the last several weeks I’ve been working on a new version of our website and was able to finally rolled it out. Its not a complete re-design, just a minor upgrade over the previous version of the site. Take a look at it here.

Here’s what’s changed:

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While the debate on the Grand Sierra Resort logo has been raging, one commenter was kind enough to point out that this blog might have its own logo issues. I was reminded of Luke 6:41 which says

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

OK, fair enough. Let’s take a look my own plank: the EMP logo. Now, I have to say that I absolutely love this logo, but that’s because I get it. I know what it represents, or at least its my own interpretation of what I want it to represent. But before I spill the beans on that, lets upon this up to see if anybody else gets it.

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I’ve been doing SEO for years and I can’t get past the fact that optimization continues to be the “after thought” of website development. This was all well and good in the late 90′s as SEO was just beginning to come onto the scene, or even in the early 2000′s when SEO was moving into it’s prime. Back then websites were always developed first and then considerations for online marketing came later.

But in the past couple years, as online marketing becomes more and more important to the success of any business, online or off, it simply no longer makes sense to wait until after a website has been developed to start thinking of how best to market it on the Internet. The two are so completely intertwined that doing one before the other often times causes you to have to go back and redo, or worse, undo things in order to create a compatible synergy between the website and its marketing campaign.

I often get calls from people exploring search engine optimization but want to wait until their website is fully developed and operational before they sign on with any particular SEO company. It makes sense on the surface because they want to make sure the site looks and performs properly before dropping money into a long term commitment to an online marketing firm. But that’s like making sure your brick and mortar store is up and running before you develop your business plan. It should be the other way around.

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