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The Importance of a Vivid Web Design in a Fast-Changing Google World

November 25, 2011 By Nancy Evans 5 Comments

Thanks Nancy Evans for your contribution to Internet Marketing Source! Read on for this weeks guest post and to learn about Google, SEO and Web Site Design from the renowned technology and business writer.

For the average technology user, Google is a company that can do little harm. It offers email, maps, searches, books, images, and more – all free. And with impending upgrades to core programs like Gmail it will soon offer such services as business VoIP, which could certainly make it one of the web’s most accessible VoIP service providers.

But for those of us in the web design or search engine optimization world, Google is an all-powerful force that often makes our lives better but can also sometimes make them more difficult. For those who manage and worry about their website’s PageRank, every minute change in the Google search algorithm can have tremendous reverberations.

Along these lines, recent surveys have highlighted a change in Google’s search that hasn’t drawn much attention, either from SEO people or from web designers. For some time now, Google has offered users the ability to preview web pages when conducting an internet search. By just hovering your mouse over a grey tab that appears to the right of the search results, you can see a preview of the webpage that takes up about one third of your screen. The preview highlights and magnifies important pieces of text (ie text that matches your search terms), which thus allows users to see if the site interests them without even clicking.

The recent surveys show that this feature has had an impact on user behavior. People report that they click on fewer sites than they would otherwise as a result of the preview feature. Since a preview does not count as a page view, this change has the potential to impact traffic and alter a site’s PageRank.

So what does this mean for web designers? On the most fundamental level, this means that your site needs to be vivid and compelling – even when viewed in a shrunk down thumbnail. In the past, designers built sites that attempted to keep the attention of the target audience once they clicked on it. Now, web designers need to convey a purpose and an appeal to that audience before they even click. Large headings, images, and a clean but vivid layout are just a few things to aim for when building your site with the preview in mind.

After all – as we all know – when Google makes a change, a shrewd designer or SEO manager will be quick to adapt.

So what do you think? Increase SERP’s clicks through improved web design OR don’t you think that Google Preview plays much of a role at this point? Comments below…

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Why I Follow… Gary Vaynerchuk

August 2, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

I was introduced to Gary Vaynerchuck by a work colleague over a year ago and was instantly drawn in by his passion for social media and marketing online. Soon after I read his book “Crush it” in a few hours (and i’m not usually a book reader). As an online guy myself, I certainly had a “head start” on building my online brand. Gary’s enthusiasm easily rubs off on you and helps you get into gear and to establish yourself in your field.

Gary’s focus is wine, being founder of Wine Library TV and the Daily Grape, much of his efforts are focused on that. Gary doesn’t fail to keep up with the times though and report to his audience through video at garyvaynerchuck.com, which is where I find it interesting to learn his take on new technologies and platforms as they become available and progress online.

Much of what I have learned in social media and online brand building has stemmed from my initial following of Gary’s brands.

If you haven’t heard of Gary or looked more about what/who he is, I suggest checking him out today.

Following on Twitter @garyvee

Or his blog at garyvaynerchuck.com

Follow these links if you’re interested in reading “Crush It!“, or his latest book the “The Thank You Economy.

Thanks Gary!

What have you learned from Gary Vaynerchuck?

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What Can You Learn About Blogging From Mashable?

July 26, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

I’ve been reading mashable.com for about 18 months now. In that time the blog has continually made minor updates and tweaks to improve performance, reader engagement and help SEO. Since Mashable is such a huge blog and has a large following, what better site to attempt to emulate in its build and functionality? Obviously this internet marketing blog is a much smaller scale, but there have been improvements made to Mashable that can be implemented on a much smaller scale. Below are a four features of Mashable, that I have incorporated into internetmarketingsource.net.

1. Article Linking

You’ll probably notice as you ready through posts on Mashable that the content links to other posts or categories with specific keywords. This is good practice for a few reasons, a. It helps readers navigate your site and learn about more topics relevant to the article they are reading, b. this in turn is good for SEO because it helps search engines find all pages on the site, and c. if these links are set as anchor links with relevant text used as the hyperlink, it further strengthens the SEO for the site since relative words are the actual link and terms like “click here” are not hyperlinked (which tells search engines nothing about the content that is linked to).

2. Share Button Usage

One piece I notice about Mashable is that they are constantly tweaking their share button organization and arrangement. They add the latest buttons that become available such and most recently, Google Plus. This provides readers with ample options for sharing content and thus encourages shares, regardless of which share platform the reader is familiar with.

3. Minimize Outbound Links

I’ve noticed that Mashable keeps outbound links to a minimum. Oftentimes, the site reviews an online service or website that requires linking to. They will usually only provide one link to this source within their content. This helps retain visitors on their actual site. With Mashable providing a lot of content and resources within its own platform, it is easy for them to link to their own content instead. It is important however, to make sure that you link up relative offsite resources too, you’ll be doing those external sites a favor and build rapport with these sites as well as your own readers. Sometimes I find that Mashable does not externally link enough. I have found it difficult to find the link to the new website or online product before.

4. Disqus Commenting

When I first installed my WordPress blog, I utilized the commenting system built in with the platform. While this works reasonably well, I found that it was susceptible to spam, which grew and grew and grew. I did install the captcha plugin, but that too began to be abused. In the past I had been reluctant to install something requiring registration to comment, through fear of losing engagement, but now the spam had made this a necessity. Mashable uses the Disqus platform and so do many other sites in my field. That said, I chose to use the same figuring that many of my audience will already have a Disqus account and would minimize the loss of engagement. Disqus also appeared to be a clean and robust platform. I was happy to find that by migrating to the Disqus commenting system, the plugin allowed for the transfer of all previous comments and reactions over to the new system #awesome.

There are many elements to a website these days, we’ve come along way from animated gifts and static html. I think we can all learn something from the successful websites out there, like mashable.com.

Which blogs or websites have you learned something from?

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Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis Roundup

June 10, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

It was great to have the opportunity to attend Online Marketing Summit earlier this week for Day 2 and the Social Media Workshop on Day 3. It was unfortunate that the workshop was reduced to half day, but that’s ok. Generally speaking, the event appealed to me with its serving up a variety of topics and discussions that i could identify well with having had my hand many different online channels for several years. From social media, to paid search to email marketing, OMS had something for everyone.

On top of the insightful sessions, I had an awesome time connecting and reconnecting with fellow industry peers from the area.

Aaron Kahlow did a great job putting the event together and engaging us all.

I’ll attempt here to give a quick overview of the days I attended.

Day 2 – June 7, 2011

The day began with Gina Debogovich, Senior Community Manager of Best Buy, giving us a run down of how Best Buy have been successful in the social media campaigns. I believe, their success has not only been because of their involvement, but is largely driven by their willingness to participate across the board. Essentially, everyone engaged in social media is a marketer to some degree as they are publicly representing the brand online.

The next session I chose to attend was led by Lee Odden, I hadn’t heard him speak before, but had heard a lot about him. Now I know why. He really knows his stuff when it comes to SEO and Social Media and really spoke to my interests giving me an insight into areas I can develop. His presentation style certainly helped keep attendees engaged.

I’ve recently began experimenting with QR Codes both in print ads as well as signage. It was good to learn more about them in Angie Schotmuller’s session. I appreciate your time Angie after, talking over my specific ideas!

In the afternoon I attended the Social Video Marketing, Social Email Marketing sessions, along with Integrated Marketing Success with Adam Proehl. Adam shared some great tools for analytics and testing, and although they are probably beyond what I have the capacity for right now, they are certainly intriguing and warrant a closer look. A few he shared were:

usertesting.com

feedbackarmy.com

fivesecondtest.com

theclicktest.com

The last couple of sessions that I attended were SEO Best Practices with Chris Aburime, who offered some great advice on using title tags on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. While the closing panel discussion warranted some interesting takes from various angles, that included, Kim Albee, Marie Lettman and Julie Heltunen. My main take away from this discussion was how to segment your social media (personal) from social media (business). The simple approach of using Twitter and LinkedIn for business and saving FaceBook for personal seemed to make a lot of sense.

While I attended these sessions in person, it was fun to “virtually” attend the other sessions by following other attendees on Twitter and monitoring their Tweets. This was an unplanned bonus, that i’ll use again no doubt!

Social Media Workshop

June 8, the last (half) day of Online Marketing Summit, was a lot different to previous event days. The attendance was much smaller and split into two workshops to choose from. I chose “Managing your brand within Social Media Outlets” with Julie Heltunen and Amy Kilgour. The setup made for great discussion surrounding social media outlets, included, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and blogs. Various levels of social media experience in the room. Julie and Amy did a great job of keeping the discussion alive and providing something for all levels. I will certainly be maintaining a connection with them.

While writing this it occurred to me that there will likely be several “round up” type posts across the web from the summit, it would be great to aggregate them here, to learn what others got out of the event.

I’ll begin with a post from SpyderTrap here.

Know of any others? Post them in the comments below, thanks!

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Title Tags are One of the Low Hanging Fruits of SEO – Go Pick Them!

April 11, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

Of the approximately 200 variables that make up the elusive Google Algorithm, research shows that the <title> tag is probably within the top 10 of the most important on the list.

To make this a little clearer before I continue this post, the <title> tag is the section of text given to the words/phrase that appears in the very top of the browser window. In Internet Explorer, this is generally a blue bar, in Google Chrome you’ll be looking at the tab, same goes for the latest version of FireFox.

On this page look up and you’ll see the following for the <title> tag on this page:

Title Tags are One of the Low Hanging Fruits of SEO Go Pick Them!  |  Internet Marketing Source Blog

Another method for determining the <title> tag of a page is to look at the code view. Title tags are placed in the “head” section of the source code and formatted like this: <title>title text for web page here</title>

Since a large percentage of web users rarely pay attention to the “blue bar/title tag”, this leaves the tag wide open for SEO domination. In other words, we can use whatever keywords/phrases that makes sense for SEO, even if it doesn’t make sense for users (although naturally it will make some sense, but you get my point).

Furthermore, <title> tags are generally extremely easy to implement. On straight html-based pages, the tag can be changed in a matter of minutes. With more dynamic-type websites, the CMS usually includes the option to define the <title> tag, such as with the Internet Marketing Source site.

With this information, it is surprising to know that very few web sites utilize the <title> tag for SEO purposes. In many cases the tag simply says “Welcome to the official site for XYZ Company”. While that is a nice way to introduce the site, and like I mentioned earlier, not only do few web users pay attention to the tag, but a phrase such as this does not tell search engines anything about your site’s content.

That said, one should carefully write their <title> tags to be specific to the page on which it resides, use intentional keywords and phrases that surround your company and industry. There is no harm in placing your company name in the <title> tag for reference, but place this AFTER your keywords/phrases. Why? Search engines tend to focus on the first 70 characters within the <title> tag for ranking purposes. If you put your company name first, unless your company includes relative keywords, you are taking up valuable real estate.

One final point to mention is that your <title> tag has a value off your site also. When search engines display a list of results for a given search, the <title> tag is the text that is displayed as the link for each listing. For example, in Google, this is the large blue underlined text at the top of each search result. For this reason, I tend to write my <title> tags in “phrase” format, that would somewhat help incentify a click. After all, a user is most likely going to click a readable sentence vs. a string of keywords.

Hope this helps put the <title> tag in perspective for you… now don’t hang around, get picking! Then tell me about your <title> tag success story in the comments below.

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