Blog•
on March 17th, 2010•
Research company Hitwise just reported that Facebook passed Google as the most visited website in the USA last week. Facebook had 7.07% of all visits to the web and Google had 7.03%. The bigger side to this story is that Facebook’s traffic is growing at rapid rates while Google’s traffic has more or less plateaued.
This has enormous implications for online marketing. What this says is that people trust Friend Results more than Google Search Results. This may be obvious to marketers everywhere, but have online marketing companies changed tactics for their clients?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seeks to place a website high in Google rankings. This is still valuable. Extremely valuable. You’ve heard the joke, ‘what do you call someone who is #1 in google for a particular keyword?’ – A millionaire.
But SEO is step 1. If there are 30 movies at the movie theater, which one do you see? You see the one your buddy John recommended. Same is happening with websites. Google may point you to the best 30 websites for purchasing a used guitar, but your buddy John, who purchased a guitar last month and had a great experience, will help you weed through the noise.
This is the power of a Facebook network. I see my friends make posts all the time that ask for recommendations for certain products or services. And many people respond with good or bad experiences from specific companies.
Other ways we are seeing recommendations take place are in sites like Angie’s List. Angie’s List allows people to rate contractors. You need a plumber, you search here and see what your neighbors have ranked plumbers in the area. Now, you are not trying to do a Google search to find a random plumber, but you are basing your decision on reputation.
Blog•
on March 12th, 2010•
You’ve probably seen URL’s that start with the following:
http://tinyurl.com
http//ow.ly
http://bit.ly
What these companies do is to take your super long URL – http://www.yoursite.com/store/clothing/t-shirts/large/white/productnumber2389qw2345987 and turn it into a very short URL.
There are many reasons to shorten a URL. Here are some of the most important reasons:
- To paste in an email. If you convert your long URL to a short one, it looks a lot nicer when you link to that URL in an email.
- To hide a URL from the search engines. For instance, if you are working on a website for a client and have a question about that site in a forum, it is better to hide the URL by using one of these services.
- You can create a catchy phrase. Services like TinyURL let you create a custom alias. So, you could have http://tinyurl.com/custom. This might be easier to share with someone than a long company name or a URL that is extremely long.
- Twitter – with a limit of just 140 characters, you almost need to use a URL shortener if you are linking within your tweet.
My personal favorite one is TinyURL. I’m a little biased, as the founder of TinyURL was an acquaintance of mine growing up in Minnesota. I’m really proud of Kevin Gilbertson for starting TinyURL.
For more information on URL shortening services, click here.
Blog•
on March 10th, 2010•
For a recent website design of mine, I received some interesting feedback from a blind user. It had never crossed my mind to design websites in a way in which they would make sense if they were read aloud to the user. Blind users likely access your site through a Screen Reader, meaning they hear your website instead of see it.
The more I got to thinking about this, I realized that creating websites with the blind in mind just might help in search engine rankings as well.
Consider the following suggestions that I received from the blind user. Most of these will also assist in your Search Engine Optimization techniques:
- Use Alt text for every image. This is SEO 101, but be descriptive in the alternative text you use for the image. The blind user will hear this text, so describe the image using keywords relevant to your page copy.
- Use a healthy balance of text and images. I know the trend is fewer words and more images, but make sure the point of each page is clearly stated not only visually but also in your text copy.
- Don’t have music auto-load when the user opens up the website. For someone hearing the site read out to them, this interferes and can be difficult to find where to turn the music off.
- Use Alt text for links. I rarely do this, but think about it. If you just post a text link in your page copy without including alternative text, the full link is read aloud, numbers and all, instead of “Link to Atlanta Plumber.”
- Flash cannot be read to a blind person. Flash is read aloud as a button. Google can’t read Flash, iPhones don’t display Flash, and the blind user can’t hear Flash. If you are going to use Flash, don’t place it at the top section of the page. This will be the first thing the blind user hears. If your entire page is Flash, you have completely alienated the blind user.
You can find further information on website design at the links below:
American Foundation for the Blind
I made a discovery over the weekend that has pretty big implications for my website design. There has always been a limitation in designing Search Engine Optimized (SEO) websites and using different fonts. As a designer, I tell the web browser which font to pull for a particular website. That user’s computer must have that font loaded for the page to show as intended. If the user does not have that font, then it goes to another font such as any sans-serif font loaded on that user’s computer.
In order to make sites that show up the same on most user’s computers, you are thus limited to very few fonts that you can use (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Helvetica to name a few).
One way around this is to create an image of the text in the font that you like and insert that into the page. The problem with this is that Google can’t read the text within an image. They can read the alt text for that image, but placing “Atlanta Plumber” within <h1> tags places more weight on the term than having a fancy font image say the same words.
So, to make search engine friendly sites, one had to use a handful of fonts that limited design capabilities.
Until now…
Cufon has introduced a simple Javascript-based solution that solves the design and SEO problems. This solution transforms text on a page into your font of choice while keeping the actual text within the code of the page.
If you have an <h1> tag around “Atlanta Plumber,” you can now specify the exact font to use and Atlanta Plumber will still show up as an <h1> tag in your code for SEO purposes.
Below, I have listed the basic instructions on how to implement this into your website. This solution works in all major browsers (IE 6.0 and up, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). You can also utilize this feature using a basic HTML website or for a website using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla.
Instructions
- Locate a font of your choice at Font Squirrel. Font Squirrel offers an array of fonts that are 100% free for commercial use.
- Download this font. It’s in a zip file and the actual font will be in an .otf or .ttf format.
- Copy this javascript code and place it at the root level of your website (FTP client required) in a javascript file titled cufon-yui.js.
- Use the font file generator to transmit your font of choice into a JavaScript file.
- Upload this generated JavaScript file to the root level of your website.
- Place this code within the <Head> section of your website:
<script src="cufon-yui.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Vegur_300.font.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Cufon.replace('h1');
</script>
- This will replace all <h1> tags with the Vegur font in this case.
- Now take a look at your <h1> tag text on your website and notice the new font.
Benefits
- Use any font imaginable on your website.
- Easy & fast to implement.
- Solves the SEO problem listed above of using different fonts while still being Search Engine Friendly.
- Exceptionally fast.
Caveats
- Can’t apply a hover status to links, although links still work.
- Can’t utilize some CSS code for the text such as text shadow.
- It’s JavaScript, it must load, and could take a little more time to load your page, although this is the fastest solution available at the moment.
- If the user of the website does not have JavaScript loaded, fonts will show up as dictated in CSS instead of your new fancy font.
Click here for further instructions such as utilizing multiple fonts on one page.
I am convinced that many website designers will not have a job within a few years. So many options are available that make designing & developing a website with little website knowledge easier each day. Soon, anyone with basic Internet know-how will be able to put together a fairly complicated website that looks nice.
But this doesn’t mean that every company, band, person, or organization will be able to develop a website that best meets their needs. How can they best inform, market, or sell their product online? What strategy should they pursue for Search Engine Optimization or in Online Marketing? Simple design options will not answer these questions.
Therefore, the future belongs to the website designers who act more as consultants than designers. They are the people willing to challenge their clients with the direction of their website instead of designing based upon specs provided by the company. They are the people spending as much time studying new online marketing strategies as they are the newest design methods.
As my entrepreneurship professor recently said, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be the major focus of a website developer, as long as the year is 2005. SEO is the process of optimizing your website through keyword research, competitive research, keyword strategy, and then deploying this strategy through Meta tags and website content. It also consists of obtaining links to your site from people who recognize your worth.
In 2005, SEO was important. It still is, and being #1 on Google for a particular word or phrase is guaranteed website traffic. But SEO is no longer enough. Thousands of pages of websites are added to the Internet every day. It is becoming more and more difficult to get high placement on Google just using SEO techniques.
The major pitfall of SEO is that even if you get high ranking for a certain product, and people come to your website because you are #1 on Google, why should they trust you in making a purchase on your site?
This is where online marketing and social media tools come into play. When I speak of online marketing, I am not just referring to the bland Google Ads or flashy banner ads, I am more referring to the utilization of social networking tools and blogging tools.
SEO may get you high placement in the search engines, but it does not build trust.
Social networking tools and blogs have the ability to build trust. Blogs in particular have the ability to portray an expertise in a given field. For my website clients, if I feel their particular business will not rank high in Google due to competition or low search for that niche, I recommend another approach. I will still optimize their site to the best of my ability, but the approach I recommend is for my clients to show that they are experts.
Many of my clients are experts in what they are doing. They have traveled the world and have done business in areas you don’t read about in the papers. Their stories would be more entertaining and educational than any graduate school text book. If they began sharing these stories through blog postings, people would begin to find these blogs and come to think of that person as the go-to person for questions or consulting in that field.
If my clients are not experts in their field, I still recommend blogging. But their blogs should not be an attempt to portray expertise, but as a story-telling method of where they are in their business. If they are entrepreneurs, I suggest writing about the process of getting their business up and running. Of writing about successes and failures. A photo of you on your website will let people in a little bit. Opening up and writing about your business struggles will have people connect with you and will build trust that is the foundation of any business interaction.
It is then the role of the social media outlets, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc to point people to these blog postings. Also, by writing these blogs, content will be continually updated on a website for topics that relate to your business. You will be fulfilling SEO strategies by continually adding keywords to your site that reflect your business.
I recently moved a blog from Blogger to WordPress and was quite impressed at how easy the process was. Here are the basic steps written out below:
- Set up a new WordPress blog. Full instructions here. Also, the hosting company GoDaddy makes a WordPress blog set up super easy.
- Once logged into the admin area of your blog, find Tools within the menu options.
- Click Import
- From here, you can choose a number of different Blog options in which to import from, including WordPress.com, Blogger, and LiveJournal.
- If you choose Blogger, just sign into your blogger account, choose the specific blog to import, and click the button to proceed. This will move over all posts and comments associated with your blog.
- Once everything has been transferred over to your WordPress blog, it’s a good idea to forward your Blogger blog URL to your new WordPress domain name.
If you have any questions about this process, let me know. The reasons to move to WordPress from Blogger are numerous. The main reasons I moved my music blog from Blogger to WordPress were the availability of thousands of templates to choose from, a number of Plugins to add incredible functionality to your blog, and the ease of use.
Blog•
on February 27th, 2010•
I have just launched a redesign of the EPR Creations LLC website. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time. I am excited about this redesign because I am using many of the skills I have picked up in the last few years. I love that this design is simple, that it works on the iPhone, and that it is interactive.
This redesign allows for much interaction. I have opened up the testimonials page for current and previous clients to submit their thoughts on my work. I have also written about each of my designs so far, what I used to create the website, and what I learned in the process. The user can also comment on each of my website designs.
Another reason I am excited about this redesign is that I now have a blog set up within the website. I plan to blog periodically on items I have learned related to website design, search engine optimization, and online marketing.
I have come to deeply enjoy website design and development over the past few years of EPR Creations LLC. I enjoy working closely with my clients and advising them on the best strategy for their particular niche on the Internet.
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