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Friday, February 10, 2006 The new homepage is up and we're still busy making changes to many of the other pages in preparation for a new campaign starting next week aimed at entrepreneurs and small business. As a company, we’re big advocates of entrepreneurs and those who tend to go against the grain and most likely against the better judgment of everyone around them and start their own businesses. For those born with that entrepreneurial spirit, the need to follow this course is a lot like the unexplainable force that caused Richard Dreyfus’s character in ‘Close Encounters’ to mold his mashed potatoes into the shape of Devil’s Peak mountain. We’re a team made up of this these types of individuals and each of us has worked with and been drawn to all kinds of interesting self starters throughout our lives. We know from the trenches how much work it takes to start a company, especially when you’re starting it on a shoestring budget with a handful of people that believe in you before making it big. This is why we’re crafting this next promotion to pay tribute to the self starters that drive new ideas and always push the envelope. Christine
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Friday, February 3, 2006 Perry Marshall said something in his newsletter yesterday that I just couldn’t agree with more. After a play by play recount of how Google squashed Yahoo, the biggest search engine of the day, he poses the question: How Google knew what was going to work? The answer: “By testing. Yahoo didn't test. Shame on Yahoo. (Shame on everyone who doesn't test, for they shall share the same fate.)” We’re about to do some testing on a different homepage layout. We constantly tweak little things here and there to see how they affect the stats and now it’s time for the homepage. After looking at stats, I know we’ve got too much homepage real estate tied up in entry portals that aren’t getting the click through rates I’m looking for. The new idea is a little unconventional, and I like it. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters are results. No one really ever knows what’s going to work. I’ve seen websites that graphic designers would be sick over get more traffic and more sales than a beautiful site with thousands of dollars worth of professional design elements. It doesn’t even matter how many friends or others on discussion boards critique your site. The only thing that matters is the way in which customers are reacting and interacting with it. That’s it. I don’t feel bad about the fact that we need to make some adjustments to get the results we want. I think that it’s fun. A made a simple change on a homepage once that took about 15 minutes and resulted in a 40% increase in people clicking through the homepage and people staying on the site 200% longer. That's just the way it works but for some reason it seems like people are ashamed if their first design concept doesn't produce exactly how they imagined. Instead of changing, they just continue to try to force people to like what they like. Unless the intention of a site is solely to represent an artistic viewpoint, it's suicide not to watch visitor stats and make changes based on them. The people I empathize with are those who spend thousands of dollars on a website based on a design concept that one or two people decided on, and then have no way to change it. Thanks Perry Marshall for reminding us all of just how important this is. Christine
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Wednesday, February 1, 2006 SEO Fun – I made a funny little discovery last night and now I’m wondering what to do about it! While looking through the site stats, I noticed that we were reached through an MSN keyword search for “plagerism finder.” When I went to take a look I found that we are ranking third for those words. The two above us are from the same site and, oddly enough, the link below us is the site that my page links to. Then I looked up to the top of the search page and saw that MSN had found the word “plagerism” was spelled incorrectly and offered a search for the correct spelling – I spelled it wrong on the page! The word is on the page twice in 2 different links. Once spelled wrong and once spelled correctly. When I checked our placement for the correct spelling, we turn up on page 15. So my question is, should I leave the misspelling? This is a brand new website that we recently released less than 2 months ago to completely run on the Easy Website Builder software that we offer to our customers. With a goal to complete an 80+ page website in a very short amount of time, I have not applied any SEO strategies – not even META tags – for any keywords other than our overall target keywords, “Easy Website Builder.” I added the plagiarism finder as just one of the many tools offered to fellow website publishers. I never intended to be picked up for that word, especially in third place. The fact that the misspelled word is actually a visible word on the page appears to have much more weight than if it were just a hidden META tag. The actual plagiarism finder tool that I link to doesn’t have the misspelled word on their site, but has a Google page rank of a whopping 8/10. I realize that Google pagerank and MSN search criteria are different, but it’s a good indicator of how long this tool has been around and its popularity. Have we moved into an age where we actually try, or intentionally leave misspellings in our published works? I can’t think of any time in history where someone may have questioned whether or not to correct a misspelling the moment it was noticed. I’m definitely interested to hear feedback on this one. Christine
send feedback I say leave it on! If I was searching for a tool like that I'd probably spell it wrong too.
- James Keep both in the META tags, but save face. Maybe have an invisible (white font, or whatever) misspelled one on the page text, too...
- Ian
Monday, January 30, 2006 Over the weekend I found a site with a really neat idea www.lightbulbproject.com. This is a project by Hugo Costeira in Portugal who is doing an experiment with online marketing. The idea stemmed from the widely covered www.milliondollarhomepage.com where Alex Tew sold advertising space on his homepage for $1 a pixel with a goal of filling up 1 million pixels. He did it and made 1 million dollars. A pixel is extremely small – Hugo wanted to see how much a huge ad on a homepage would be worth, and so was born the Lightbulb Project. I bought a 700x350 ad for $4 – wow. I had to completely design a new ad as there is just no other place on the internet that will support an ad of that size. I am fascinated by marketing and always striving to find exactly what works. So am pretty interested to see how the project turns out. Even more interesting is that when reading Hugo’s very open and honest blog, I saw in his journey the same obstacles every person starting a business or dream must endure. It's amazing that when you have new idea, no one believes in you and then when it gets big it's completely different. I commend anyone and everyone who has the courage to move forward with their ideas, especially in the beginning and when things are difficult, because it takes a lot of guts to go against the grain and pursue something you think is right. This is exactly why I enjoy working with start ups and small organizations. I like when people really have a passion for what they are doing. Christine
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Friday, January, 27 2006
Search engine optimization success! With this new site being up for about 2 months now, we are still in Google’s “sandbox.” The sandbox is debated by some, but undeniably obvious – websites less than 3 to 6 months old don’t normally show up in Google, no matter how much you optimize. MSN has no such sandbox and SEO efforts are working well and paying off. We’ve done a lot of optimizing for the homepage and have been showing up in 1st place for our target keywords since about 2 weeks after launch. We’ve built a lot of SEO functionality into the website builder itself, however, I haven’t had a chance to perform all of the SEO techniques on all of the pages – there are over 80 pages. That’s why I was thrilled to find that our page on creating a book campaign is coming up on the first page of the MSN search for the intended target keywords “book promotion campaign.” This is fantastic, since I haven’t even had a chance to enter META tags or META descriptions on that page. From what I can see this is a combination of: 1. having the keywords appear multiple times in the site title and: 2. giving the page itself a very descriptive name. James designed the code for EWB so that the name of the page is actually picked up in the site’s title bar, which results in pure SEO pages. I’ll have to check some of the other pages when I actually have a chance. It’s good to know though that the software is working for me even though I’m too busy to do it myself. Christine
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Thursday, January 26, 2006 Now that we've got the new site launched and 2.0 packaged up and ready to go, I finally have a few moments a day to add to our company blog. Maybe I'm nuts, but I kind of like having too much to do. Now that everything is finished I'm really excited to get to work on some of the new ideas we have in the pipeline. Today we launched the package deal that we’ve been putting together for several weeks now. Our entire goal with this package was to beat any other package deal currently available or – that we’ve ever seen offered and I think we’ve done it. I’m pretty excited about it because I think 2.0 is absolutely awesome and I can’t wait for others to try it! Christine
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