Warmest Greetings,
Whatever You Do, Don't Say "Hi"
:: Friday, January 16, 2004 ::
The very simple gesture of a greeting has the gone the way of black and white Television, homemade chocolate chip cookies and walking five miles to school (the latter of which was pretty much gone by the time I was born, thank God!)
Recently my daughter interviewed my parents for a school project. I videotaped part of it. One of the special moments I caught was when she asked them how different society is from when they were kids, which was between the 1930's and early 1960's. They brought up all kinds of things but the one that struck me the most was when my Dad said it makes him so sad that he can't say "Hello" to kids anymore. They're taught to be afraid of anyone they don't know, and their parents give him nervous looks. So, he stopped saying "Hi" and just keeps on walking (or running in his case, since he's a runner.)
The act of saying "Hi" has taken a beating in email communication too. I get so many emails every day from people I don't know with a subject line that simply says "Hi". The body of the email is an unsolicited ad, or it's a virus, or it's packed with porn photos or something bizarre like wierd symbols.
It's so bad I have a filter for all "Hi" email, so if someone I really do know just says "Hi" in the subject line, I'll never see it.
How did it happen that the Internet opened up the whole wide world, and shut it down at the same time?
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Today's entry will be short. I'm quite sure that's a relief! (I tend to babble). If you miss me too much, I wrote a fascinating piece for the SERound Blog called Behind Every Click Is A Person which is a must read.
(Just kidding.)
Have a great weekend!~
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 1/16/2004 04:09:10 PM
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Can Adding Sound Enhance the Ecommerce User Shopping Experience?
:: Thursday, January 15, 2004 ::
Can the use of sound be duplicated on websites to get similar satisfying results as regular stores or do we associate sounds or music as a distraction when it's done on the web?
"I wonder if the fact that people are playing there own music while they surf is a clue, maybe they are missing the audio element that is present in every other multimedia experience?" (Asked in Cre8asiteForums)
Synchronicity is a funny thing. I've been wondering about sound (music in particular) and ecommerce websites that sell things like clothing, music, accessories, books, baby items, crafts, etc. and whether using sound can help create atmosphere. Would it hinder or enhance the online shopping experience?
Meet "The Maestro" of Maestro Media Services. He approached us at Cre8asiteForums about what his company does ("We provide a service to web designers who are bold enough to think about sound being a part of the web experience and how designers can apply sound to websites.") and I jumped on the opportunity to start a new thread and invite discussion on this subject.
You can join in or read the various opinions on adding sound here >>> Can Sound be used as "Atmosphere" for websites?
Some of the comments so far:
"There's an adage about the web that is very true. It says: Please a person and they'll tell their friends. Annoy them and they'll tell everyone."
"I feel that things like a little clip of sound that accompanies a small site identification (think of TV channel logos with their fanfare) that can also be included in all digital media for the client, a moving letterhead with sound for all their emails is probably something that a lot of companies would be interested in."
"With bandwidth costs dropping and broadband growing, I'm experimenting with MP3 files of the authors reading their work as just one example. Poetry depends so much on sound it only makes sense."
This last thought made me immediately think of narrated books and online story telling. How about customer testimonials that the user can listen to versus reading on a webpage?
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In the event that what I blab on about here totally fascinates you and you've come to realize you can't live without usability in you life, then I have great news for you.
My friend Scottie Claiborne of RightClickWebs.com is about to launch a newsletter called Successful Sites Usability and Marketing
"The goal of the Successful Sites newsletter is to provide you with common sense usability ideas and tips to enhance your web site. It's an easy-to-read monthly e-mail newsletter about getting the most out of your web site, whether your goal is to make more sales, get more subscriptions, build a community, or use your site more efficiently."
First issue launch is January 22 and delivery will be the last Thursday of each month.
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 1/15/2004 11:43:27 AM
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What is the best way to design a site with SEO in mind?
:: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 ::
Not so long ago, Webmasters weren't too concerned with website designs that would be crawled by search engine robots. Thousands of them had no idea what the difference was between a Directory and a Search Engine. Companies with websites cared more about "putting up a website" than making it a worthwhile website.
Well, times are changing.
Best Layout design for SEO was posted in Cre8asiteForums yesterday. I was happy to see someone ask! What do you think is helpful? Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight") has some pointers, including:
"A design that allows you to present a lot of content without looking cramped, or over-long can help greatly. Search engines often prefer pages that have at least 400 words of text in the body. Some prefer far longer at 600 words plus."
I offered some article links that focus on the combination of SEO and usability too.
Usability
I can't go to the local shopping Mall without thinking about how to make the online shopping experience just as profitable and interesting. While we've made great strides with web design and intuitive software, we have a long way to go to bring the physical senses into the Internet act. Shopping online lacks sound or texture. It lacks humans and all the good and bad that come with being one. Sometimes ecommerce websites lack a way of asking "Did you find what you were looking for?" and many times they simply don't sell because the design is bland or not logically targeted to people.
I recently tested a website for a famous line of sunglasses and found pages and pages of sunglasses styles, but they were all lined up on white web pages. Granted, the styles were very cool. The prices and descriptions were there. But what I wanted was to see what they'd look like on my face. I couldn't try them on via my browser. I would have appreciated it if the company had placed models with various body shapes and sizes, or faces wearing their sunglasses, or sketches of face shapes with various styles of sunglasses on the website. In a real store, sunglasses displays have mirrors so you can see what styles look good or awful on you. For a company selling an expensive line of something to wear, they must be crazy to think a little uninspiring graphic can make customers part with their money without proof it's going to look right on them or the people customers are buying for.
(For more on this subject see Why Ecommerce is Not Ready for My Daughter or Me)
While I know it's imperative to find ways to design online to sell, it's not always practical to mimic brick and mortar versions. In my article I write about how clothing stores pipe in background music. Stores targeting teens want music that's cool. This adds to their shopping experience. I've been known to linger in stores a bit longer just to finish hearing a favorite song. But how do you add sound to an ecommerce clothing store without driving away your customers?
Well, there's the "TaDa" approach. Someone is actually studying this. See Auditory Information Design. I was surprised it was written in 1998!
"The prospect of computer applications making "noises" is disconcerting to some. Yet the soundscape of the real world does not usually bother us. Perhaps we only notice a nuisance? This thesis is an approach for designing sounds that are useful information rather than distracting "noise". The approach is called TaDa because the sounds are designed to be useful in a Task and true to the Data."
Also on this subject is an article by Dirk Knemeyer called From Brick to Click - Bridging the DividePart 1 of 7: Understanding eCommerce
"We have only barely begun to take advantage of the opportunity presented by eCommerce. This is despite the power of broadband connection and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of personal web-enabled devices. Despite visionary and innovative eCommerce companies. Despite the best efforts of traditional companies to best leverage and even transition over to an eCommerce-centered model."
Search Engine Optimization
Remember the thread I mentioned yesterday about whether or not it's "worth it" to remain in the SEO biz? (Is it time to get out of the SEO business?) Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com showed up and weighed in with his views, as well as many others. It's a great read. Here's some snippets:
Danny Sullivan:
"The even more successful ones understand they need to transition from SEO, pure optimization of web pages, to SEM. They become search engine marketers and understand how to balance both paid and unpaid listings, getting the benefit of both worlds. The really successful ones will brand out into conversion analysis."
Ammon Johns:
"If you ever for a moment thought that SEO was about 'slapping keywords on a page' or about 'random link exchanges' then where on earth have you been? This forum has been telling everyone that all that crap of keyword stuffing and reciprocal links was a doomed shortcut, nothing more than crass corner-cutting, ever since we opened. The people who post regularly in these forums have been saying it far, far longer."
Barry Welford:
"I think there has been a great deal of wise commentary in this thread. I always use SEO to mean Selling Effectiveness Optimization. This includes not only Searchability, but also Saleability (the customer-centric USP approach, etc.), Usability and Credibility. You've got to have them all. High rankings are great but they're only a small part of the equation."
John Scott:
"Brute force SEO always wins out over the gentler, page-elements SEO. If the ability to spam hundreds of blogs and guestbooks is something to be proud of, I'm missing it. In my book, SEO is manual labor."
Ammon again:
"Not just manual labour - it is craftsmanship."
And that, for today, is the final word.
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 1/14/2004 10:20:45 AM
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Stemming, semantic web and SEO copywriting
:: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 ::
Last night I compiled a series of questions into a Cre8asiteForums post that have been rolling around my head concerning how the new search engine technologies are changing how search engine optimization is done; if in fact, there will be any changes at all. This is what I asked in Stemming, semantic web and SEO copywriting
Is there a difference between stemming and the term "semantic web"?
How does this search technology/filter effect the practice of writing optimized copy for web pages?
Can I assume it has no effect on keywords in URLS?
What about keywords in anchored hyperlinked text?
If you have a bunch of variations of a term on one page, does that count towards keyword relevancy almost by accident? (You didn't purposely put in a variation of a term, but it appears there anyway.)
Do incoming links from sites with a version of a word found by stemming count towards PageRank?
John Scott jumped in with an interesting finding. (Note: In Google you can now choose whether or not to search using stemming or not using a "+" sign in front of words. See Google stemming for more.)
Asks JS:
"...if word variations were taken into account, these two searches should yeild identical results, no?
http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+marketing
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%7Einternet+%7Emarketing
But they do not yeild the same results."
Meanwhile, Ammon Johns (aka "Black Knight") provided the answer to the stemming/semantics question. Research on the "Semantic Web" has been out for awhile. Ammon presented a link to a paper about semantic technology and "the need for smarter search engines" back in December 18, 2002 (yes, over a year ago) in Cre8asiteForums. The paper is called Patterns in Unstructured Data Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization (For those with time to read!)
Ammon wrote:
"Stemming is about finding the root of a word, and all words derived from the same root.
House > Houses > Housed > Housing
Stemming cannot make semantic leaps, so House cannot equate to flat, apartment, semi-detatched property, etc.
Semantics is the thing that makes the leaps. It may lose the specific meaning sometimes in the translation. It can even cross languages:
House > Casa > Mansion > Home > Hut
There's a world of difference.
Semantics are the more tricky, because of the translation effect. For any accuracy, semantics has to be somehow placed within context, and that can be difficult within a two or three word query. It may however explain Google's sometimes strange behaviour regarding stop-words over the last year."
The thread is just starting out and you're welcome to join in, or read it (even as an unregistered guest) to learn more.
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NEW! RSS Feed
I'm still tweaking it, but for those interested in RSS feeds, this blog is now setup to make your day. You can grab the URL by clicking on the orange "XML" button on the right side of the page.
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, that's okay. I'm still learning about it myself. In fact, I decided to share the experience in Blogs, RSS Feeds and Aggregators. You can watch me launch the feed, ask questions from Bill and Stock from Cre8asiteForums who are helping me, and learn more about what it's all about.
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Is anyone else wondering Is it time to get out of the SEO business?
"A trustworthy SEO firm is already about as hard to find as an ethical timeshare promoter and it wont be too long before clients catch on that there is no magic formula, no thousands of search engines to submit to, no secrets of the search engines."
Hummmm.
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And finally for today (I think), Robert Clough has added an article to my column on his website.
"Why Ecommerce is Not Ready for My Daughter or Me" is a humorous comparison of brick and mortar stores and the online shopping experience via ecommerce, with some hints about keeping those website visitors on your site after they've located your site in search engines. See today's Search Engine Guide's Search Engine News (or click on my name under Search Engine Guide Contributing Columnists).
"We assume that the top 20 sites in search engine results are the best of the best based on our search keywords. That, I'm afraid, is the saddest shock of all. Top rank doesn't equal the best online experience once you click into that website. That part of usability wasn't tested for you by the search engine or directory. That's not their job."
Thanks Robert!
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 1/13/2004 09:06:37 AM
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:: Monday, January 12, 2004 ::
Although I "retired" from performing SEO services in 2002 to focus soley on website usability testing, there were clients I continued to assist as needed. Some clients were like family to me. One of them contacted me with an urgent email because their number 1 spot, which they'd enjoyed for a long time and took for granted, suddenly disappeared into somewhere in the 500th spot range.
They found this dismal shock in Yahoo!.
Their Yahoo! Directory listing was intact. They're simply lost in Yahoo!'s search engine, which had been powered by Google. But in Google itself, their site is in the number 8 spot. Since they're in a competitive business, I was relieved to see the site was still in the top 10 at all, especially after the "Florida" fiasco. Although their products are featured in top women's magazines and on a TV talk show called "The View" (a highly rated daytime talkshow), they weren't actively seeking links. I'd venture to guess that their media exposure has been helpful, but as far as the present situation in Yahoo! is concerned, they're understandably reeling from the shock of Yahoo!'s engine changes.
Clickz churned out an article that looks helpful. It's called Yahoo! Drops Google (Get Out Your Wallets)
"If you, like Todd, haven't invested in submitting your pages to Inktomi's database, your problems will get worse before they get better."
"For those planning an SEM budget and anticipating being in Inktomi's CPC program, increase expected Inktomi spend by as much as 10 times through at least the third quarter, and hope that's enough.
By September or November, your Inktomi bill could drop a little when MSN launches its own index (assuming no MSN paid-inclusion program). But for at least 10 months, be prepared to open your wallet and say aaahhhh!"
Other than SEO
Nice usability/user interface oriented web design blog >>> Design By Fire
:: posted by Kimberly Krause on 1/12/2004 01:15:21 PM
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