Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Here’s a relatively new search engine optimization myth: The simpler a page markup, the more likely the page will be indexed and the higher its rank. This myth seems to have grown out of the movement toward valid XHTML and the separation of web content from the actual page layout itself. Instead of laying out pages using complicated table structures, designers are encouraged to use separate style sheets for a cleaner code and (conceivably) better search engine placement.

We tested two page layouts, each with the same target keyword with similar keyword densities, page titles, etc. to see if there was a difference in 1. WHEN the page was indexed and 2. Which page ranked HIGHER once both pages were listed in the major search engines. The first page used a simple, valid XHTML layout while the content on the second page was nested in nasty, redundant, overly complex HTML tables.

On the first point, WHEN a page was indexed, the complex page came out on top, showing up in Google almost a week before our simple page. Over the following weeks there was some jockeying of position but ultimately the complex page has settled in the top spot over the simple page. So for our Google test, it appears the venerable search engine doesn’t have a problem with complex markup and in fact may prefer it on some level.

Yahoo! had the opposite take on our test and placed the simple page layout on top of the complex page in their search results. If you’ve been keeping up with our test results on this blog you’ll know this isn’t the first or even second time that Google and Yahoo! have disagreed on such a seemingly fundamental point. Based on our limited testing it appears Yahoo! tends to reward many of the “traditional” SEO tricks while Google often yields counter-conventional results.

We have one more search engine ranking test result to share with you, then we’re out. If you have an SEO myth you’d like us to test, leave a comment here and we’ll put one in the hopper for ya.

As more and more software applications are migrating to the web it’s interesting to consider the various interface styles designers are using. Unfortunately it seems like many application designers making the move from desktop to browser interface are attempting to mimic Windows on the web. Others, however, are using the switch to rethink the idea of a user interface with great success. Some of our least favorite we based software interfaces that feel a little too Windows:

Joomla

The open source content management software is, like Windows, powerful software. Too bad it’s no fun to use. The Vista-style icons are a little too cutesy and the drop down menus are painful to use online. Some may not agree with me but I have never seen a javascript drop-down menu implementation that I liked - they are all awkward and mainly useless. If you have so many navigation links that you absolutely need drop-down menus I’d argue that your navigation is probably overly complex.

Volusion (click the thumbnail to see the full size images)

Back when I was shopping for an e-commerce solution the admin interface was a very important factor in making my decision. My partner and I ended up choosing Volusion partly because it had one of the best admin interfaces around - but it still has plenty of room for improvement. Like most other packages, the color scheme is clearly Windows inspired with lots of blues and grays. In an attempt to make the product editor form more ‘user friendly’ most of the form fields are hidden by default (much like the way MS likes to hide unused menu options in Office apps). Once you expand all the form fields to finally find the one field you wanted to change you realize you’re in way over your head - how many fields do you need for a single product listing!?

phpMyAdmin

First, let me say I love phpMyAdmin - I honestly couldn’t function without it on a daily basis. It’s a solid tool that does what it’s supposed to do and for the most part it’s easy to use. My biggest complaint is that the interface seems to drastically change with each new revision. The version I’m using now has gone to using icons to represent actions which is almost never a good interface decision. I always forget which little icon means ‘browse’ and which one means ‘properties’. Database administration software is rightfully complex but the constant interface changes and use of icons adds unnecessary frustration for users.

In a later post I plan on talking about some of the web software interfaces that are getting things right. Surprisingly the number of good interfaces I use on a daily basis outweigh the bad ones - stay tuned!

Online reviews have the power to shape consumer spending and that has some folks worried, particularly those who sell sub-par products or work in stodgy, old-line industries. But rock bands? Most of these guys are embracing the internet and using the power of reviews and word of mouth marketing to their advantage.

But not Metallica. After alienating much of their fan base by suing fans suspected of trading illegal copies of songs through Napster and other file sharing services, the band is now demanding that bloggers remove early reviews of the band’s forthcoming album. And this comes after the band invited said bloggers to hear demos of some of the early songs!

Yes, online reviews have shifted some of the power from producers to consumers and added a layer of transparency to every market imaginable from knitting supplies to rock music. Most teenagers don’t go out and buy an album after hearing the first single on the radio - they head to Amazon first to see what the reviews say about the rest of the songs. Metallica should know by now that they can’t control what people are saying about their music - they should just concentrate on making the best album possible.

Besides, rock and roll has always been about giving the finger to the critics - not whining when they don’t say what you want.

Many internet entrepreneurs make the mistake of counting on word of mouth as their primary means of marketing their new business. Heck, even offline entrepreneurs make the same mistake; I was involved in a small clothing company start-up recently and we assumed (incorrectly) that our clothes would advertise themselves as folks wore our shirts around town. We’re still waiting for the word of mouth to catch on…

The internet space is full of stories of the latest ‘viral’ phenomenon catching on like wildfire and it’s true, word of mouth marketing can be very powerful for some businesses. But even those who have seen word of mouth marketing work for their internet businesses know it’s a tough phenomenon to replicate. Word of mouth is a tough lion to tame and it’s a lot like trying to plan the weather. Sometimes it pours but more often than not you’ll see drought conditions.

Our mountain biking website is quickly approaching the magic 1M pageview / month mark and truthfully it’s taken some time to get there. We’re constantly pinging our members to find out more about them and one of the things we ask is “How did you first find out about our website.” It turns out that about 12% of our members claim to have found the site through pure word of mouth marketing - usually through friends or promotional items (t-shirts, stickers, etc.). We also get a decent amount of new visits through our Facebook marketing campaigns but I’m not sure if I’m ready to lump this in with word of mouth since this new from of ’social marketing’ is different in many ways.

Word of mouth will certainly accelerate at some point with your site, hence the use of the term ‘viral’ to describe the virtuous cycle of increasing visits. The more people who visit (and love!) your site, the more friends they will tell, and the more new visits you’ll receive. Of course Amway is supposed to work this way too but we’re not all selling cleaning supplies from our homes (yet!) despite its start decades ago. Remember that ‘accelerate’ doesn’t mean fast - it just means getting faster. To go from a single word of mouth visit to two word of mouth visits is a 100% increase - good acceleration but not really a meaningful impact on your site traffic.

Word of mouth is the holy grail of internet marketing but don’t make the mistake of relying on it to grow your site into a viable business - concentrate on making your product (your website) great while growing traffic in other ways and word of mouth will follow!

We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about search engine optimization and what it takes to improve search engine rankings so it seems appropriate to talk about some of the search engine friendly features included in Review App.

First, Review App makes it easy to create search engine friendly URLs for your page listings - just check the ‘Enable SEO URLs’ box and choose the field you’d like to use for your document name - and that’s it! All your listing URLs will be transformed from ‘item.php?c=1&i=2′ to something like ‘1/2/Restaurants/Famous-Daves.html’. For most situations your listings’ title field will be your best choice for the document name but with the ability to add hidden fields to your listings you can manually set the virtual document name to anything you like.

In addition to SEO-friendly listing URLs, Review App includes many features that will help improve your site’s search engine rankings. Custom lists and user contribution logs increase internal links and our category filters and tags add dozens of additional pages for the search engines to crawl. Within each section of your Review App site you can configure the page title and description fields plus you can quickly set overall meta keywords and description content with one simple form.

We’ve been steadily growing our own web businesses using these techniques - let Review App do the same for you!

Here’s another Monday morning softball lob SEO question: How important is the ‘meta description’ tag in getting your pages indexed and ranked in major search engines? This time the answer rhymes with scary

Instead of leading with our test results, let me first give you some anecdotal evidence of the importance of good meta description tags.  In my rush to create new pages I (sometimes) forget to add meta description to my pages - good descriptions, anyway. Invariably the new pages are slow to get picked up and indexed (if at all) and only when I go back and add in UNIQUE meta descriptions are the pages indexed by Google and others.

After launching our blog on singletracks.com in early 2007 we found that our blog posts weren’t being listed as unique pages by the search engines - only the blog homepage was being picked up. It turns out the Word Press software we were using didn’t create unique meta descriptions for individual blog post pages so we fixed that by excerpting the first sentence or two and using that for the page description. Within a week or two we found our blog page listings had multiplied. Easy fix, big result.

Now, to our test results: The test page we created without a meta description is ranked in Google above our page with the description included. I know, I know, I said this would be a softball question - so why the crazy result? Honestly I’m not entirely sure what’s going on but I do have a theory. Our test pitted two pages, each with our target keyword written 6 times in the body of the page at similar keyword densities. One page had the keyword in the meta description two times (once per sentence) while the other page did not include a meta description tag at all. As you probably already know Google prefers to use the meta description as the document summary but when one doesn’t exist it attempts to create its own summary based on the actual page content. Since our page content contains the target keyword 6 times (3 times in the first paragraph alone) it ranks above the page whose meta description (or, document summary) contains the keyword just twice.

Strangely Yahoo! agrees and prefers the meta-descriptionless page as well. Our keyword page without the meta description was not listed by Yahoo! at all.

So what does this mean? I certainly don’t recommend skipping meta description tags on your pages based on my own experience but I do think this test proves an important point. Optimizing your pages for keywords doesn’t stop at the page content and internet marketers should carefully construct meta description tags to include target keywords as often as possible. Our test was performed in a vacuum of sorts but in the real world your competitors will be optimizing both their content and meta tags - don’t be left behind!

One thing search engine marketers might lead you to believe is that the big search engines want to make it difficult for you to get your content indexed. The common wisdom seems to be that online publishers need to do everything just right or the search engines will reject the publishers’ pages. Even worse, some marketers tell you if the search engines think your site is ‘gaming’ their listings, they’ll ban you for life (or something similarly terrible).

The thing is, I just don’t buy into this line of reasoning. The fact is, search engines like Google NEED publishers’ content to keep their search engine results relevant. Google probably won’t start rejecting content from CNN.com just because CNN decides to start stuffing their meta tags with bogus keywords - CNN still produces valuable content that answers online queries.

Even if your site isn’t as big or as well known as CNN, I’d argue that your content may be even more important to the search engines. Google and Yahoo! are useful tools for finding niche content that simply won’t be found by browsing CNN or Amazon. If search engines pick and choose which sites they list they are no longer complete resources - and hence, their value to users is diminished.

Still aren’t convinced that Google needs your content? Consider Google image search. Google has basically cached (that is, saved a copy to their own servers) photos from virtually every website on the internet and serves these images in response to user queries. Some companies aren’t too happy about the fact that Google is making money off their content (images and otherwise) and some publishers have even sued to block Google from accessing their content. Publishers blocking search engines? I thought it was the other way around

Of course search engines do need to be on the lookout for sites that provide little value in response to search queries (i.e. spam sites that simply provide paid links to other sites with zero original content). These ’spammers’ are getting more and more sophisticated but rest assured: If your site contains original and useful content, you WILL receive fair placement in the major search engines. It may take time but don’t worry - the search engines want and need your content!

The idea of paying someone to write a review certainly isn’t new: newspapers and magazines have employed food critics for decades while magazines like Consumer Reports employ dozens of professional reviews who test hundreds of products and services each year. But what about the online space: Does the pay-to-review model have a place online?

Most online reviewers are not paid for their work; it is passion (good or bad) for a product that drives most users to share their two cents. Many bloggers choose to use their blogs as a platform for sharing their opinions on products or services and may indirectly receive payment via advertisements on their site, though rarely are they paid directly for their reviews. Some companies have attempted to pay bloggers to say nice things about them online, though once the word gets out  it can become a PR nightmare.

And then there are sites like EchoTV that pay reviewers to post video reviews on virtually any household product you can think of: bicycle pumps, cleaning products, etc. Reviewers are paid for the initial submission PLUS they get a cut every time the video is played. The thing is, before I even knew reviewers were being paid, I felt like most of the videos I watched on EchoTV weren’t genuine, as if the people were just going through the motions. It turns out their motivation to review wasn’t that they had feelings about the product either way - they just wanted the cash. I can just imagine one of these reviewers looking around her living room for things to review - TV, couch, books, lamp, etc. - anything for a shot at earning some money. Because of this the video reviews seem to fall flat.

Aside from being paid to provide reviews, some bloggers and online reviewers may receive complimentary product samples from manufacturers. I’ve been sent a number of bicycle-related products to review on my own blog and each time I write a review I feel a bias to say mostly positive things about the product, even if it’s just so-so. Some companies send “loaner” items for review which actually makes me more comfortable since I know I won’t be influenced by the manufacturer’s supposed generosity.

In the end it’s important to find the best way to motivate your reviewers and to consider how different arrangements may influence the outcome of the review. For bloggers and online reviewers it’s a good idea to give full disclosure about compensation when possible to build trust and to keep your readers coming back for more honest reviews. Stay tuned for some of our tips for motivating your reviewers without resorting to pay-offs.

I’ve been involved in building and marketing new websites for at least 10 years now and one of the most frustrating things about promoting a new site is converting offline impressions into online visits. In this post I want to talk about some of the things that have worked for me but more importantly I want to tell you about some things that DIDN’T work.

My partner and I launched Safarium.com, an online vacation rental by owner website, in 2003 to compete in a fairly new market. Of course we purchased online ads, launched an affiliate program, and even posted online classified ads for some of our property owners and saw a decent amount of traffic - but we wanted to reach vacation owners who might not be aware that a service like ours existed online. In the fall of 2003 we posted a $75 ad in the Denver Post Vacation Rental classified section about our website and waited. And waited. Not a single property owner in Colorado joined in the month that followed.

In 2006 I was working on an e-commerce website, messengerapparel.com, and my partner and I decided to try a direct mail campaign to increase awareness of our online store. We chose Birmingham, AL as our test region (so we could monitor the success of the campaign via our web analytics) and sent out more than 200 letters to leaders in our target market. The result? Nothing, not even a single hit to the website from Birmingham for almost 2 weeks.

When we first launched singletracks.com in 1998 we sent homemade flyers to bicycle shops in the southeast announcing our site and asking the shops to help promote our trail database. Though we didn’t have sophisticated analytics in those days I’m pretty sure the flyers had little to no effect. However, in the spring of this year we revisited the idea of marketing our site in local bicycle shops and so far things look promising. We’ve received several emails from shop owners in response to our mailing and friends have reported seeing our promotional material prominently posted in shops around town. So far so good, though it is still difficult to tie any increase in site traffic to this particular campaign.

Singletracks also sells t-shirts and we even give away free stickers to just about anyone who asks (and some to folks who don’t ask!). Our internal market research shows that out of 1,500 responses only 12 people say they first heard about our site when they saw a sticker or t-shirt. That’s less than 1% for those keeping track.

Based on these experiences and combined with some things I learned in business school, I’ve shifted my focus from building direct traffic on offline campaigns to simply working to increase brand impressions. You see, it often takes several “impressions” before consumers decide to take action with regards to a product or service. For example, a mountain biker may see our promotional map in a bike shop and tells himself “I’m going to check out that website when I get home.” Of course, he forgets but then one day a couple weeks later he sees a Google Ad for singletracks and it sounds familiar somehow - so he clicks. Once on the site, the logo is familiar and the customer is much more comfortable signing up for an account because the brand was first validated outside the online space. The promo in the bike shop didn’t directly drive the traffic but it prepped the customer to be more receptive to our message once they saw it a second time.

If you’ve tried offline campaigns in the past and haven’t seen the results you expected, consider that your message may not drive direct traffic to your site but may simply prepare consumers to hear your message a second or third time. Offline campaigns can help you build your online brand in a way that online ads and links cannot and should be a part of any internet marketer’s site promotion plan.

One cool feature we included in Review App is the ability to search for listings based on a zip code radius. Users can enter a zip code and Review App will return listings located within a specified distance from the search zip code. Zip code search functions are typically reserved for complex, expensive web software but we decided zip code searches are too powerful and useful to leave out of Review App.

You can add a zip code field to your listings by selecting ‘US Zip Code’ from the ‘Field Type’ drop-down menu in the admin control panel. We’ve also included the necessary zip code data table with almost 80K postal codes so you don’t even need to purchase this data separately. On your category pages you’ll see a zip code search box that allows users to restrict search results to a given area.

We implemented a zip code search on singletracks.com several years ago and we even posted the pseudo-code for building your own zip code radius function on this blog. The singletracks zip code search function is fairly unique because our users don’t actually enter zip codes for trails (since most don’t know the actual zip code anyway). Users are simply asked to specify the city and state for new trail submissions and our software automatically looks up the appropriate zip based on the location information entered. Once a zip code has been associated with a given trail that trail will show up in zip code searches - for example, trails within 25 miles of 30030 (Decatur, GA). The zip code field in our trail data table is neither input or output but works behind the scenes to help mountain bikers find local trails.

Review App can provide the same functionality with the ability to keep listing field inputs and/or outputs hidden. Your users will love the ability to zero-in on applicable search results geographically while zip code and city filters can add yet another dimension to your natural search marketing strategy.