Twitter Users By Age c. of Nielson

Here’s what I think:

1. Teens use social media outlets to dialogue with groups of friends. They prefer images, videos, and real time conversation to occasional text updates, especially when they can get “real time” text updates via text messaging services. This makes sites like Facebook and content-rich social media sites more popular option for this demo.
2. Working people use social media to communicate with a network of acquaintances. They are generally busier and don’t have time for a full update or conversation. Text-based social media sites like Twitter are perfect for this demo because they aren’t overwhelming in terms of bandwidth (literal and figurative)..
3. The Nielson data set is skewed. (Who came up with “the terrible twos” to “just under-cheaper-car-insurance age” as a reasonable demographic? 2 – 24 years old. Right, those are all teens )
4. Teens do use Twitter, particularly if their friends do, too. Group participation can make even a mostly text-based site like Twitter meaningful for the teen demo.

To put things in the old instant messenger parlance (the admitted inspiration for Twitter.com): teens are chatting. People at work are posting away messages. If you want to talk to your friends about their lives, there are much better options than Twitter. But, if you want to make people feel connected to you without actually having to say very much, a 140-character soapbox may be all you need.

Bing and Yahoo to Merge Search in 2010

As news of Microsoft and Yahoo’s search partnership deal has darted around the blogosphere and across the world, SEMs and SEOs are coming to terms with the realities:

1. BingHoo has gained some search market share, but not enough to really threaten Google’s dominance in the short term.

[The Most Important Facts, and Some Opinion, Techcrunch.com, 07.29.2009]

2. Yahoo is out of the search game.

[It's Finally Over..., SearchEngineLand.com, 07.29.2009]

3. Bing will be the new Yahoo search engine starting in early 2010, and will profit from ads displayed.

[Yahoo gives up, Wired.com, 07.29.2009]

4. Yahoo will assume online advertising and relationship management services for both companies.

[It's Finally Over..., SearchEngineLand.com, 07.29.2009]

5. Microsoft just bet heavily on “Middle America”, Yahoo’s primary demographic, and wants their input into their Bing search algorithm.

While these are all worthwhile insights, the most interesting to me is the last. In a period of economic downturn, Microsoft has chosen to shell out vast sums for a 10 year partnership which gives them open access to Yahoo’s search functionality, the single most powerful revenue generator for the site. What remains to be seen is how the Yahoo user base will shape Bing’s evolution, and whether Yahoo’s search will be completely integrated or remain slightly separate.

Bing was hot right out of the gate, and continues to fare well with users looking to make purchases, but recent research shows users choose results at roughly the same rate from all 3 major current search engines in a blind test. Microsoft seems to be betting that there is a demographic overlap with buy-motivated searchers and Yahoo’s enormous user base, but this is questionable in the short term, what with global economic depression felt particularly in the middle-income manufacturing belts of the US. The current stereotype is that people go to Yahoo to “waste time” — how does Microsoft turn that into a buy? Extended sales pitches targeted directly to your Yahoo user patterns? Across weeks at a time? Will BingHoo turn into the new place to subtly place the seeds of brand for travel, shopping, health and local search?

The real challenge in understanding how to improve your website comes in installing and interpreting analytical software.  Now, I won’t drone on about all of the benefits to installing Google Analytics.  Just get it done and start to look at your traffic.

Monitoring what people are doing when they get to your site (”bouncing” vs. clicking) and where they are going can help you determine what features your site might be lacking.

What I see most often is that visitors love to click on pictures.  Pictures are incredibly important – they convey your website’s style and priorities all at once.  If your homepage images do not lead to something valuable on your website, begin there and watch the flow of the traffic.  A picture is worth a thousand clicks – a new (and bad) cliche.

OPO is about user experience.  It can be difficult to look at your own website through fresh eyes.  Try to lead users to your product as quickly as possible, while still providing the most essential information to help them stay oriented on your site.  NOTE: Users tend to read left to right, top to bottom, in English-speaking nations.  The top of your homepage needs to grab and entice immediately (without providing so many options that users bounce feeling overwhelmed).

Websites are maps to important information or a goal of some sort.  The more roadblocks there are between the user and the goal, the harder the conversion.  Make it easy to win, hard to lose, and fun to succeed.  Use attractive images, high-value space above the fold, and your own goals to pave an easy path for your users with OPO.

As an SEO, determining what constitutes a bottleneck for your client’s website is a high priority. After identifying SEO problems, you can define strategies and tactics to overcome them. These days, we see the most common SEO bottlenecks occur in the accessibility-useful-intuitive portion of a visitor’s conversion path. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this concept was first introduced for website prioritization by Bryan Eisenberg. While Eisenberg mostly sticks with a modified sales funnel metaphor, I think a bottleneck model is currently more relevant, as really any part of the SEO process can have a dramatic effect on ROI.

SEO Conversion Path Bottleneck

One of an SEO’s many jobs is to reduce the number of people who “bounce” from the webpage at a bottleneck, by specifically addressing the five high priority optimization levels seen above.

The 5 Levels of SEO Explained

1. Functional

— The website has a goal or goals which all visitors can complete. (Exists for a purpose and “works” in the most basic sense.)

2. Accessible

— The website can be found by search engines and other entry points. (Has “SEO 1.0″ in place, i.e. title and meta description tags, as well as “alt” attributes for images)

3. Useful

— The website fulfills its intended purpose and is easy to use and navigate. (Relevant, info rich, “gets the job done”)

4. Intuitive

— Visitor personae goal paths are established and easy to achieve. (Aesthetically pleasing, attention-drawing, multiple navigation scenarios, “happens by itself”)

5. Persuasive

— The website converts visitors to sales or leads with good content, products, and copy, images, and videos. (Call to action.)

I find these levels helpful when thinking about how to prioritize a website’s opportunities, as it provides convenient categories into which you can sort your many options.

Turning Your Conversion Trickle Into a Flood

Conversion Path without SEO Bottlenecks

After you determine where the bottlenecks for a website are, attack them! It doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get a flood of conversions, but the odds are much higher. Additionally, by dealing with the first 3 levels (functional, accessible, useful), your site’s “rating” for the intuitive and persuasive levels will naturally rise. With the right content and the right product, there’s nothing to stop conversions pouring in.

Low Hanging Fruit

When a client comes to you with a new website project, it’s easy to get excited by the prospect of all the little and large SEO 1.0 and SEO 2.0 changes you can make with regard to making a website more search engine friendly. Better branding, better web design, more aesthetic appeal, new copy…where to begin? This brainstorm is a necessary part of the process. You have to have blue sky sessions where all possibilities are explored uncritically in order to prioritize your project for maximum ROI, but are all these ideas relevant today? How do you choose?

Low Hanging Fruit

Time and again I find the most important and appreciated service we offer our clients is website prioritization. From among the hundreds of changes you can make to boost natural rankings, it’s a good SEO’s job to tell you which ones will give you the most bang for the buck. This is what entrepreneurs often refer to as low hanging fruit:

Targets or goals which are easily achievable and which do not require a lot of effort.
~UrbanDictionary.com

Evaluating Your Client’s Priorities

Since each business, organization or individual’s website is at a different point in its life cycle, in order to prioritize, remember general top level priorities for all sites online. Most websites should be:

1. Easy to maintain
2. Easy to extend
3. Easy to scale
4. Easy to navigate
5. In line with best webmaster practices
6. Memorable
7. Visually appealing
8. Easy to use
9. Regularly updated (1 update/month min.)
10. Relevant and info/media rich
11. In the spirit of the website’s community
12. Easily accessible by the visually impaired

~ List adapted from w2mw.com’s website priorities

What is going to give your client the greatest benefit for the least cost/effort? What are the sweetest fruits within easy reach? This is how you prioritize a website.
0. Adaptable
1. Functional
2. Unique
3. Accessible
4. Usable
5. Useful
6. Intuitive
7. Entertaining
8. Persuasive
The exploration process for a good consulting firm can take a week to a month or more, depending upon the state of the company and the website in question. Do your research on your client’s full website, their ecommerce system / back end, their competitors, their keywords, their demographics, and their business model. As well as understanding what they would like the website to be, understand what role the site currently plays in their overall business model and workflow cycle before making recommendations. A discrete list of the top 5 to-do’s that will help most for a given area of SEO, web design, web development, or internet marketing is often the best place to begin. Overall, accurate prioritization is the most important service you can offer as a web consultant.

Videos create a lasting impression for visitors, engaging users to stay on websites longer and make more purchases. Research indicates that embedded videos are not as highly-valued as proprietary site-run videos. Some have reported a 55% jump in conversions after enabling videos about their services on their website!

If you or your client are looking to boost traffic and sales, getting them involved with a quality video production company might be just what they need. Make sure the video is:

High quality
Completely original
Informative
Linking to the product or services you offer directly

Happy SEOing,
Tanya

Today, as I was doing my usual somewhat coherent hunt through Wordpress plugins, I happened across a great little contact form utilizing AJAX and JQuery to achieve some snazzy effects. While SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) (contributed to the WordPress Community by Eric Martin) doesn’t allow much out of the box customization in terms of fields you can add or messages displayed straight from the admin, it’s nonetheless an impressive and slick tweak you can make to your wordpress blog or website that will enhance your visitor’s contact experience from first setup.

SMCF even checks for required fields, displays a thank you upon click ’send’ and more.

And, with the built in Wordpress Plugin Editor and a text editor, you can customize to your heart’s content – as long as you know a little php and CSS, the rest is pretty much gravy. For further customization info you can visit the WordPress Plugin Page for the SimpleModal Contact Form and refer to FAQs.

This is great for SEO because it allows fluid interaction between a visitor and a website. Your point of contact should be dynamic or all-available, meaning that it doesn’t take a user away from the page they’re on and disrupt their navigation experience.

Occasionally I hear someone talk about copying relevant content from other sites to bulk up their website. While it’s great to add syndicated feeds of new article excerpts, photos, or tweets from others online, when you do so you typically link back to their website. Simply copying someone else’s writing is not only unethical — it will not give you an SEO boost, and may in fact hamper your long term efforts.

Unscheduled Creighton Interruption!

Unoriginal content on your website will actually negatively affect your search engine rankings, unless you use the “rel=nofollow” modifier when linking to these pages (in which case it won’t hurt you, but won’t help you expand your site’s reach). The “nofollow” tells Google “hey, we know this page isn’t original. But, we think our visitors will find it useful. Don’t penalize us for copying content and don’t add this page to your index, please.”

As though Google trolls through and simply counts the number of pages you have, cataloging them mindlessly to show to anyone who might possibly want to find a BIG site. It might work for about a minute, but Google has a brain or two on the case for just this purpose. They quickly push the earliest-published version to the top of their rankings.

NOTE: If you have hired help to build content, be sure it is completely original. A good writer will charge around $30 for a quality, unique 750-word article. Always check your content against what is already available online.

To check your content, go to www.copyscape.com. Make sure that your content is relevant to your field, and that it matches your site theme. The search engines know when you are using copied content, and they can tell where it came from and when!

The best way to increase your content with useful information is to hire freelance writers who are knowledgeable in your online market, and find a great editor to help your articles and copy stand out from the crowd. Only a library of original content and webpages (published and found FIRST on your website) will bring you a boost for SEO.

Happy SEOing!
Tanya

Search engine optimization in its earliest form (let’s call this SEO 1.0) was all about matching titles and domain names to products & keyword search phrases, making the site as easy as possible to crawl for Google and other engines. While these basics are indeed important to start with when building your online market, much more can be done. The businesses who still use this antiquated approach to optimization are probably looking for a 2.0 version, but end up spending up to $1,000 per month for 1.0 tips. How do you make sure your SEO company is using 2.0?

SEO 2.0 is all about improving your rank on search engines for relevant and appropriate reasons. Say you go to a job interview. Just because you dress nicely doesn’t mean you’re going to get the job. It might help, but you can’t just be an “empty suit”.

In the same way, having basic SEO practices in place is a good idea, but will probably not give you a major boost in engine ranks. Today’s SEO 2.0 focuses on how your website “behaves” and interacts with users. How do your users navigate your website? Are there sufficient incentives to staying on the site longer, keeping customers poking through your pages out of curiosity, pleasure, or need? Are your page titles accurate? Do you have unique content? These are the starter questions for SEO 2.0, and Google Analytics can help you get some answers.

Gone are the days of simply needing an excellent domain name. Google and others have caught on to the tricks and techniques used by websites looking for false leads, and they simply don’t work as well. Start looking at where your traffic is coming from, how much time visitors spend on the site, and what they are interested in when they get there.

Happy SEOing,
Tanya

Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

Google tries to automatically find every webpage in the world and present the most relevant pages in its search results.

The first rule of SEO: make yourself easy to find.

By looking at these sample search results, we see that for every website, Google displays the same “template” of information. This template includes:

1. A webpage title.
2. A page description or excerpt.
3. The webpage’s URL.
4. Supplemental info such as date of last update, number of authors on a forum thread, etc.

The Current Google Template (06/01/2009):

Google's Default Template as of June 1st, 2009

This means that your website needs title tags, meta description tags, easy to understand urls (static or dynamic), and (for best results) newly published text, images, videos, or other media on a regular basis.

Google is going to make a guess about your website no matter what, but they are biased toward trustworthy websites. (This is because they want to have trustworthy search results for Googlers.) If your site is ‘what you see is what you get’, Google considers it trustworthy.

This is the second rule of SEO:

WYSIWYG
(follow the Google Template)

Websites that give users ‘expected’ results (i.e. a hyperlink takes them where they think it will take them or info-rich, easy to scan descriptions) are more usable, more trustworthy, and so more likely to be at the top of Google’s results.

A good SEO helps you choose what info Google will display in its default template when it finds your website to draw you the most traffic appropriate to your stated goals. Google guesses, unless you tell them otherwise – and you can tell them otherwise! The easiest way is with Google’s webmaster central toolkit.