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Search Engine Strategies Conference 2011 – Day 2

Looking forward to day 2 of SES. On the schedule for today is

  • Social Media Signals in Search
  • Panda vs. Human: Advanced eCommerce & UX
  • Navigating “The Dip”: Planning a Successful Site Relaunch
  • Local + Social: The Future of Promotion
  • Building Brands without Big Brand Budgets
  • SEW White Hat, Black Hat Unconferenced
Here's what I think about , ,
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Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman

By Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NYTimes Bestselling Author, bryaneisenberg.com

I will be updating this page and editing it throughout the week.

How Not to Improve Your Conversion Rates

  • Don’t do slice & dice optimization – don’t try too many variables at once

one of the most important things to test is marketing message or unique value proposition

Every single keyword you’re targeting, either by SEO or SEM, needs its own landing page. The conversion rate goes up exponentially. You need to create dedicated landing pages for every channel. Use form analytics if use Omniture to see how users are interacting with forms.

Call tracking needs to track what keywords are generating calls. 43% of all conversions happen over the phone.

Tools

You have to have a quick loading site. MUST LOAD IN UNDER 2 SECONDS!!! Pagespeed, loads.in, websiteoptimization.com (look at 56k download speed)

Read the rest of Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman

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Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

By Shari Thurow, Funder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive

What is duplicate content? Search engines don’t see layout, just copy. Exclude our site search via robots.txt and meta robots tag to avoid submitting duplicate content to Google. Duplicate content is not considered spam, but it can be penalized. The biggest issue, however, is usability. IMPORTANT NOTE: Duplicate content is not penalized, it’s filtered out of the SERPs.

How do search engines filter out duplicate content?

Read the rest of Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

  • Crawl time filters (duplicate URLs)
  • Index-time filters
  • Query-time filters

Index-Time Filters

  • Broilerplate strippings (search engine removes broilerplate elements to determine the content fingerprint)
  • Linkage properties (# of inbound and outbound links)
  • Host name resolution (what domain resides on which ip address?)
  • Shingle Comparison (Andre Broder – Google Scholar and shingles)
    • Every Web document has a unique content signature or “fingerprint”
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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

Read the rest of Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

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