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Professional Marketing For Your Website – Kansas City, MO
Six Ways Blogs Are Changing the Web
This represents a big opportunity for your business.
In the early days of the Internet, websites were static creatures. Once a site was published, that’s pretty much how it stayed. Websites were built by programmers and even minor changes required contacting the designer or a specialized web manager.
Then came the blog.
Blogging turned the once-boring website into an ever-changing, dynamic creature. With the advent of the blog came blogging software and the ability to quickly publish content.
With more than 9.5 million downloads of its latest version (as of this writing), WordPress on a self-hosted server is one of the most popular blogging platforms available. But WordPress is no longer just for blogging.
Ease of use combined with open-source development has turned WordPress into a powerful tool for building full-service websites. At this point it’s safe to say that WordPress is changing the way we use the web. In fact, Social Media Examiner is driven by WordPress.
Here are six ways WordPress is changing the web:
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 he forever changed the way we communicate. What took days or even weeks to produce could now be quickly mass-produced at a fraction of the cost.
And while history has yet to determine the impact of blogging platforms such as WordPress, there’s no question they’ve changed the way we publish information. It’s now possible for anyone to quickly reach a global audience for only pennies.
With a blog, anyone can publish information, voice an opinion and potentially reach a global audience.
Now, armed with little more than a cell phone, a high-school journalist can attend the same function as a Washington Post reporter, publish her version of the event and if she can attract the audience, compete on the same playing field as the Washington Post.
This puts the average citizen in a very powerful position. Along with the ability to quickly reach a global audience, incorrect information or an angry consumer can quickly do damage to large corporations.
WordPress is democratizing the web. Thanks to its ease of use and low cost (free), almost anyone can launch a website. Although hiring a designer has its advantages, it’s possible for an individual with little programming knowledge to launch a very nice-looking site for the cost of a hosting package.
Most web hosts offer programs such as Simple Scripts or Fantastico, which will install WordPress with the click of a button. WordPress’s “Famous Five-Minute Install” is now about a five-second install. Even better, it doesn’t require FTP uploads or messing about in the server database.
Once installed, WordPress plugins, themes and upgrades can all be installed from within the WordPress control panel with the click of a button.
Some themes come with extra widget options allowing for advanced design with minimal programming.
Publishing and changing content is just as easy. If you can manage a word processor, you can publish content in WordPress.
WordPress content management system makes it easy to edit and publish content.
In the old days, a blog was a place where somebody wrote about his cat. Not anymore. Businesses are finding that blogging software makes it easy to quickly change and publish web content. While many businesses are working to incorporate blogs into their websites, many more are using WordPress to build their entire website.
And it’s not just small businesses using WordPress to build their sites. Companies like UPS and The Wall Street Journal Magazine are building high trafficked, advanced websites using WordPress. Take a stroll around the WordPress Showcase and tell me if you can see the difference between a website and a blog.
UPS Racing is a WordPress site.
Blogs by their very nature are designed to be shared and comments are encouraged. As the separation between websites and blogs blurs, so has the way businesses are expected to communicate with their customers. It is no longer safe to hide behind the corporate walls. The discussion will go on with or without input from the company. Dynamic websites give businesses the ability to influence where their customers go for information, manage the discussion and quickly respond when the need arises.
Thanks to the fact that WordPress is an open-source program, there are thousands of plugins (modifications) and themes (templates) available that can make WordPress do almost anything you need it to do. Photo sliders, contact forms, podcasts and more can all be added using plugins.
Premium themes such as StudioPress allow users to install professional-looking websites with minimal or no programming knowledge. The Headway theme even uses a visual editor that allows users to drag and drop content and design pages without the need for CSS or PHP programming.
While professional design has its advantages, for small businesses or the budget-conscious, it’s possible to build very powerful websites at a very low cost.
As it gets easier and less expensive to create websites, they are expected to do more. Internet users expect a certain level of professionalism and often pass judgment based on a quick read of a company website. Sites that are not up to par reflect on the company as a whole.
However, this does create an opportunity for small businesses. As costs come down and ease of creating professional-looking websites increases, small businesses can create websites that compete with much larger corporations.
What do you think?
Are blogging platforms such as WordPress changing the way we use the web? Have you used blogging software to build your website? In today’s world of the Internet, is there a clear separation between “blogs” and “websites”? Let us know your thoughts and ideas below.
Jim Lodico is a copywriter and marketing consultant specializing in creating powerful content and teaching businesses how to use blogs. You can follow him on Twitter @jlcommunication. Other posts by Jim Lodico »
Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook [Paperback]
Darren Barefoot
Exerpt: It’s About Democracy: A Communication Revolution
To get a broader understanding of how social media fosters richer, more collaborative communication, let’s look at how it differs from traditional media. Admittedly, as the two forms blend and merge, this comparison becomes less explicit. Newspapers now pay more attention to their web presence, and you can see YouTube videos on the mightily news. Still, the differences help to illustrate the core values of social media.
Here’s a snapshot of the mainstream media in 1998. Some of the nation’s most celebrated papers of the day are the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Nielsen Media Research ratings for July 1998 put 60 Minutes at the top of primetime TV and have NBC Nightly News and ABC WorldNews Tonight battling it out for the nightly news top spot. TV news is delivered by anchors we know and trust–Peter Jennings on ABC, Dan Rather on CBS, and Tom Brokaw at NBC. Millions of readers and viewers consume hews from these sources, and individuals have little or no input into what news is reported or how stories are covered. The only audience feedback mechanism is the letter to the editor, which is often shortened or edited by the newspaper. The balance of power isn’t just attitudinal; it’s financial. The cost of broadcast and print communication that reaches a global audience makes news-making unthinkable for all but the biggest networks and corporations.
Flash forward a decade to 2008. The prevalence of broadband Internet access and social media technologies are disrupting the broadcast or one-to-many media model. Thanks to webzines, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube, midi consumers are talking back to media creators or beaming media creators themselves–all for the low price of a broadband connection. The Internet has become a public venue where the audience responds to news reports, suggests stories to cover, and even reports on stories. The media is well on its way to being democratized. As NYU professor Clay Shirky says,”The future presented by the Internet is the mass amateurzation of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?’”
Reporting the nightly news is no longer a file-and-forget exercise in serial publishing but has evolved into a developing discussion. The simplest example of this conversation is the ubiquitous comments form that follows nearly every blog post on the Web. Even staunch, mainstream media corporations-the ones with all the power a decade ago-are giving up some control, adding comments forms to articles published on their websites. The mainstream media even send out calls for amateur videos of news events to show during broadcasts.
The rise of citizen journalism is a poignant example of how the model is changing. Now the audience takes an active role in collecting, analyzing, reporting, and spreading news and information. Citizen journalism goes by many names: User-generated content, open source journalism, citizen media, participatory journalism, and crowd-powered news. Importantly, citizen journal are not trained professionals. Anyone can write about an event in her community and post it to her blog. You might upload digital photos of a news event to Flickr, send your own video clip to the nightly news, or simply post it on YouTube. And voila, you’re a citizen journalist.
Citizen journalism on the Web is most often expressed in one of the following ways:
Participatory news siestas like OhmyNews and NowPublic
These networks publish news submitted by citizen reporters from all around the world, and the sites are really taking off. In its first year, NowPublic published reports from thousands of citizen journalists in over 140 countries. Though some contributors may be professional writers, none of the reporters are paid for their submissions.
Collaborative and contributory news sites like Digg, reddit, and Newsvine
On these sites you can read stories submitted by both established media or organizations and by individual contributors. Unlike newspapers or television news, the front page stories are determined by the site’s own community. The community votes stories to the top of the page or buries them where they’ll get far fewer views.
Blogs and forums
Many bloggers do their own sleuthing and publish news stories to their personal sites, or forums. The political corm FreeRepublic.com blew the whistle on Dan Rather by correctly suggesting the documents used in his 2004 60 Minutes report about former President Bush’s military record were bogus.
Independent news and information websites like the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report
These independent news sites look lot like traditional media, but they aren’t part of a media conglomerate, so they have more freedom to cover news stories and voice opinions than CNN or FOX News.
For marketers and PR professionals who rely on the media to get their messages out to audiences, understanding the shift toward citizen journalism, collaborative communications, and the growing power of alternative online media sources can affect how thy shape their media strategy, who they contact, and how they internet with these new influencers.
InfoKwik Web Design, Search Marketing – Kansas City, MO
How To Rescue Poorly Converting Web Sites
Aug 13, 2010 at 6:00am ET by Kim Krause Berg
Twice this year I got the call too late. Two online businesses were in their final death throes. Their owners begged me for emergency help with sinking conversion rates. Both believed that I could find what was “broken,” repair it with some magic usability tape, traffic would flow again and sales would return. Though I could provide plenty of recommendations, many of them easy fixes, it would have taken time to implement them and get measurable results. These owners had under a month left to survive. I wished they’d found me sooner.
I’m not a numbers person. To me, the numbers either go up or down. The arrows go up or down. Some people are really good at spouting off conversions stats and I’ll listen, but all I really want to know is if the arrow is going up or down and if the numbers have a negative sign in front of them. No matter how many hours I spend staring at Google Analytics pages, I feel challenged when I see any sign of a slump. Even worse is when the traffic arrow is going up and up, while conversions are in the negative range. This is the danger zone.
I approach conversion repairs from three areas: usability, search engine optimization and information architecture. A fourth area, social marketing, is worth including in cases where conversation marketing is part of the business plan. Each group contains hundreds of conversion oriented heuristics and can be broken down in sub-groupings such as usability/persuasive design/forms user interface. To build it out would end up becoming a book, so I thought I would put together some solutions that I’ve seen work quickly or are typically simple to implement.
Usability/UX
A few critical elements items should appear in the top third of your home page, because the page fold moves nowadays with different monitors and resolutions.
Company name. Some homepages play head games with who they really are and where they’re really from. Trust and credibility are key to conversion rates. If your company name differs from the logo, get it up top and not in the footer.
Why choose us. State why your site visitor should choose your service or product. (You have about 3 seconds to convince them to stay on the page.)
Why we’re better for you. Clearly state your product niche or service and in your content indicate you know who your visitor is and how you can meet their needs. I’m always amazed at how many sites ignore this.
How to start. Place your lead call to action task in this space. It can be a button (“download free trial”) or a short form (“get started now”). Avoid forcing anyone to scroll to complete the top user task.
Here’s how to buy. Start a conversion funnel here. Some visitors will have been to your site earlier. They want to get past the formalities and start a task.
Other things to consider:
Ads. Why are your pages crawling with ads for other web sites?
In cases where traffic is up but conversions sink, it’s time to look at the user interface. Is it confusing to follow? Are there distractions? Are there too many links? Is there too much to do? This is the area where I find the most problems. Your slumping conversions may be tied to a poorly designed web site.
Color contrasts. I find issues on nearly every web site I audit. Related: Choosing the wrong colors. Some web sites are too tense, or intense. If you make visitors feel anxious or frustrated, they will leave.
Forms are another key abandonment trigger. Registration forms have too many steps and are prone to functional errors. Shopping carts are poorly designed or don’t work properly in all browsers. Sales lead forms require personal information and a sample of your blood before they’ll work (I love the requirement for a FAX number. The other one is requiring a Mr./Mrs./Ms/Dr./etc. just to make simple contact). Limit required fields because if someone can’t fill in that field, the form will throw an error. Conversion lost.
If you offer customer service, make this information clearly visible. Make your toll free phone number easy to locate and read. Indicate office or call-in hours. Create a customer service page that offers assistance by answering commonly asked questions. Rather than scattering this information willy nilly about the site, gather it up into one page. Every customer that has to hunt for answers or help is a conversion risk.
Add user instructions during every task. Missing user assistance is another very common conversion killer.
Rescue conversions by adding a way for visitors to contact you when something doesn’t work. For example, I went to buy a popular product online the other day. Their cart kept refusing the company credit card. No matter how times I re-entered the information (the form never indicated how to enter a credit card number), it kept saying the card couldn’t be processed. No valid reason was offered. I left the site. and they lost that sale. The next day, upon verifying the credit card was valid, I realized my problem was that I was using Chrome. When I attempted to purchase the product with the same card in IE8, it went right through. Not every potential customer will think to switch browsers to make a purchase work.
Every form, application or shopping cart should have a link to a feedback form so that visitors can let you know why they couldn’t complete a transaction. This one fix alone could make a huge difference in sales,and your overall customer satisfaction reputation.
SEO considerations
Create a text tagline containing your site’s unique selling proposition with one or two top keywords in it. This verifies in an instant that a search query has found a good match and the user will remain on the page.
Opening page content should back up and clarify with more detail what the meta description presented in search results. If your meta description is written in a way that creates incentive to click, be sure to fulfill that desire.
Add a text version of your leading call to action prompt. So that special-needs users can complete a task, be sure there are alternative workarounds for JavaScript, image links and online forms.
Maintain fresh content. Sometimes a conversion is lost because there’s no sign that anyone’s home.
Avoid missed opportunities. Believe it or not, 404 not-found pages can be huge opportunities that many squander. It may be a long shot but some people come up with creative, compelling reasons to continue with the main site when directed to something promising.
Write page topic focused content. You can tell when a site owner is overly enthusiastic about what they have to offer. An overwhelmed visitor becomes frustrated and is more likely to leave for the organized competitor.
Create robust product descriptions. Avoid the lone image with a “click to learn more” link. I can just picture search engines and people just dying to do that. Every product deserves a keyword rich teaser description with a clear reason provided to learn more or take an action such as adding a product to the shopping cart.
Landing pages are often done so poorly they’re the kiss of death in conversion funnels. When attached to a PPC campaign it gets worse. Be sure that an ad landing page matches the topic the ad claimed it would be. Never mislead site visitors.
Information architecture
Build global navigation that offers directions to groupings of pages (hubs). Base their line up order on what you know about your target user. Navigation should be designed to meet their top needs and interests. This means “About Us” might be best moved into the last link.
All navigation labels must describe a category in terms your customers use (machine parts and products fall into this rabbit hole).
Don’t put every product category in the top level. Guide visitors into drilling down into your deeper pages with logical taxonomies (item groupings and familiar terms).
Don’t lose anyone! Breadcrumb navigation offers visitors a sense of place and guides them forward or backwards. Getting lost on a web site is a key reason for page abandonment.
Avoid orphan landing pages. It’s like sending the worker ants out to find food and then moving the ant hill so they can’t get back. Cohesive information architecture is easier to track so that you can watch how someone moves from page to page on your site. You want to be able to monitor visitor movement. That’s easier to do when visitors come in through the front door.
I’ve seen the smallest details produce an instant increase in conversions. I recommend fixing the low hanging fruit first. Things like navigation and making a page easier to read fall into that area. Increasing font sizes for easier reading is another. Conversions are something that your site visitors participate in. If someone is unable to read your sales lead form, or choose the right path to find an item they wish to buy, that’s a lost conversion.
Everything I’ve suggested can be implemented quickly and without much fuss. By implementing the practical recommendations above, I’ve heard countless happy success stories. When the arrows and numbers start to move up, there’s excitement and incentive to keep at it.
One final note. If you wonder about making a change to a page design or moving a call to action prompt to a different location, try split testing first. Set up a test site and experiment. If you have a functional piece like a shopping cart or proprietary application, make sure it’s tested for functionality on all browsers and that error message testing is performed. Conversions that are tied to unfinished tasks can be repaired.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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InfoKwik Search Engine Marketing and SEO – 14 Years Experience
10 Things I Know About… SEO
By Linda Sevier
Special to the InfoKwik Blog
07/05/10
Linda Sevier is founder and owner of the Northborough-based Internet marketing firm Pagetender LLC.
10. THE BASICS
The goal of SEO, or search engine optimization, is to tell Google and other search engines what your website is about.
9. DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. Select keyword phrases related to your business that will have a decent number of monthly searches.
8. KEEP IT SIMPLE
Optimizing a web page with a single keyword phrase will give you the best results.
7. ENTICING TITLE
The page title, which is displayed the top of your browser, is very important. To be most effective, put your keyword phrase at the beginning and make it 70 characters or less.
6. BE SPECIFIC
The heading for your page (known as H1 in HTML code) should include a keyword phrase, not something generic like “About Us.”
5. PRIORITIZE
Search engines consider words that are in sub-headings, in bold, or in a bulleted list as more important than just plain text.
4. THINK LINKS
No one searches for generic phrases like “Click here.” Use descriptive keywords as anchor text when you create a link.
3. DESCRIBE IMAGES
Image descriptions (also called “alt attributes”) should include keyword phrases if possible. Be sure to describe the image for those with visual impairment.
2. NO TRICKS
Adding a bunch of keywords in the meta keyword field of your HTML won’t help. The search engines don’t look at the keyword field. It is for your reference only.
1. BANG FOR THE BUCK
Good SEO is more effective and less expensive than buying pay-per-click advertising.
HTML5 Video From Microsoft’s View
There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view.
The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.
H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g. a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.
Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.
Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.
Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer
21 Steps to Fail Miserably in Social Media
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Business Blog FAQ
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Google Maps could start generating substantial revenue for the Mountain View, Calif., company and related businesses, but the search engine will need to more closely tie the app to geographic-location targeting on mobile and work out the bugs. According to several SEO professionals patiently waiting for a fix, citations have been spotted showing up under the wrong business in Google Maps.
Matthew Hunt, founder of Small Business Online Coach, first pointed to the problem after noticing the disappearance of citations he posted under the More About This Place section in Google Maps for Diana’s Seafood.
After searching, Hunt found phone numbers, addresses and reviews that had been indexed and sourced under reviews under a completely different business unrelated to his client. Hunt explains that one workaround for the problem requires the business to claim the information in Google Maps under “business owner.” But that means disrupting the listing of the business under which his client’s information now appears. Some indexed information in Google Maps comes from Yelp, which provides user reviews and recommendations of top restaurants, shopping and Entertainment.
The glitch could have a negative influence on search query rankings, Hunt says. He believes citations play a factor in rankings for Google Maps when the local company serves up information in organic search queries on google.com.
One conspiracy theory has been that hackers hijacking the listings have got the upper hand, but SEO Google Maps guru Michael Blumenthal knows better. At one time Blumenthal thought he generated the page that confused Google after tracking back and fixing errors that caused misapplied citations on two of his clients. Many other similar incidents have occurred as he waits for the six- to eight-week cycle for Google to index information, so he’s wondering if there’s another way to force the change.
Search engines need to take some responsibility for errors in organic queries. Blumenthal says Google’s aware of the problem, but he’s seen no word yet from the company on a solution. Imagine if your company listed incorrect telephone numbers, address or reviews. Blumenthal says the biggest problem occurs when people search for information on emergency services — hospitals, pharmacies, or ambulances — and get wrong information. It happens.
Blumenthal tells me issues with citations in Google Maps first surfaced a couple of years ago, but the company quickly solved the problem. Then in fall 2009, as Google began to categorize social commentary as reviews commentary, capturing more data and adding it to clusters, the result was also misapplied citations, he says.
“It wasn’t one piece of the database cluster that moved, but a whole tree or branch of the cluster,” Blumenthal says, acknowledging he lacks expertise in database design. “I’m not sure technically how that happened, but it did. When Google indexed the link on my site, when it made the initial mistake, they brought all the other citations over.”
Citation, one ranking factor, hasn’t affected Blumenthal’s clients. He believes Google somehow accessed the information from social commentary more liberally and disrupted the placement of citations.
“This is Google’s secret sauce, their black box, a way to avoid spammers,” Blumenthal says.
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