Jakob Nielson always teaches me something when I visit his site. Today he taught me what I already knew, but made it clearer, cleaner and more concise. Always write to the people you want to visit. Write to their needs for when they get there and write to their needs and what they seek, so they can find you in search engines.
Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won’t find your site.
“Speak the user’s language” has been a primary usability guideline for more than 20 years. The fact that the Web is a linguistic environment further increases the importance of using the right vocabulary.
In addition, as my new book documents, Web users are growing ever-more search dominant. Search is how people discover new websites and find individual pages within websites and intranets. Unless you’re listed on the first search engine results page (SERP), you might as well not exist. So, the first duty of writing for the Web is to write to be found.
There are many elements to search engine optimization, but SEO guideline #1 is our old friend, “speak the user’s language.” Or, more precisely, when you write, use keywords that match users’ search queries.
Winston Churchill said that “short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” Churchill was talking about how to write punchy prose, not about SEO. To be found, precise words are often better than short words, which can be too broad to accurately describe the user’s problem. For example, people are more likely to search for “usability” than for “easy” — at least those people who are in the market for my research reports and seminars.
When it comes to web site building tools, no one does it better than SiteSell. It is the most all-inclusive feature filled web site building tool sets available. Everything from dozens of templates, to weblogs and easy to manage content capabilities. The real key though is the built-in tools to help you optimize your site for the key terms and phrases you want. They even provide tools to help you discover what your customers are seeking. If you want tools to build a web sit e that will help you sell and market more and will be optimized for search engines then this is the way to go. Even if you already have a web site, their tools should be used to create content heavy sites for keyword optimization.
Nice. Now if they will just circumvent cable and satelite for me, then we are really talking…
Adotas » AT&T Turns on Internet TV Service
AT&T, the largest telecom in the U.S. has announced the launch of AT&T Broadband TV, a television broadband service created in a partnership with mobile TV provider MobiTV.
Broadband TV is a browser-based service that will enable users to view live TV on their home computers and on wireless broadband devices. The service will launch with 20 channels including Fox News, Bloomberg, the History Channel, Comedy Time, and the Weather Channel. AT&T plans to eventually add more channels. The service is available to consumers through a monthly fee of $19.99.
I can completely sympathize with this and I can see that his criteria are probably on the money for any business-to-business(B2B) organization. Consider this criteria when analyzing your prospects. Take it from me, I have been in the position of needing revenue and taking a client that later, I regretted on a repeated basis. New companies are usually a problem unfortunately.
Take a look at your current best, most profitable clients and you’ll likely find a common thread between them. Ours are clients who have been referred to us, who have owned their own business for ten years or more, and who take action quickly and decisively.
I had an enquiry last week about the redevelopment of a web site. I thought I’d pre-qualified the prospect pretty well — including assessing his budget by asking him “Is $8,000 the sort of budget you have?” — and proceeded to put together a solid web development proposal based on a full days’ analysis, six telephone conferences and numerous emails.
When I gave the quote to the prospect — via telephone, because he lives in another state — he said, “I’ve fallen off my chair with that price!”
This prospect needs a sturdier chair. The price was great value for money and completely in line with the expectations he’d told me he had for the project’s budget. The prospect asked me to “revisit” the quote, because he’d received five other quotes from web developers and we were the most expensive.
It was at that stage that I told him that, unfortunately, we couldn’t adjust our pricing — we’d included the best value we possibly could within this quote — and he might be better suited to go with the cheaper developers.
I agree that businesses should make things accessible, but this could result in a nightmare of lawsuits flooding sites.
September 08, 2006 12:04 PM US Eastern Timezone
Federal Court Rules Online Businesses Must Comply with ADA; Mindshare Interactive Campaigns Advises Accessibility Audits
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sept. 8, 2006–A new federal ruling issued yesterday raises the bar for online businesses, requiring them to meet the terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act just as offline business have been required to do since the law’s passage in 1990.Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, LLC advises all businesses and organizations, which offer goods or provide services through websites or interactive means, to conduct accessibility audits of their online practices to see whether they might be in jeopardy as a result of this week’s federal appeals court ruling.
“What this means is that any place of business that provides services, such as the opportunity to buy products on a website, is now, a place of accommodation and therefore falls under the ADA,” said Kathy Wahlbin, Mindshare’s Director of User Experience and expert on accessibility. “The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive. And it provides the additional benefit of making accessible web sites easier for search engines to find and prioritize.”
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. The suit charges that Target’s website is inaccessible to the blind and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act.
Mindshare’s Kathy Wahlbin has more than 10 years experience consulting with clients using technology for business improvement. She has won awards for design and implementation of accessible Web sites from Knowbility’s Accessible Internet Rally (AIR). As the Director of User Experience Services, she uses accessibility as a cornerstone to effect change.
Mindshare Interactive Campaigns (www.mindshare.net) helps organizations leverage the communication opportunities created by technology. Since 1997, we have worked around the world with many of the leading corporations, associations, non-profit organizations and governmental entities to accomplish complex objectives. Mindshare’s award-winning efforts have set the standard for innovation, creativity, and results.
Mindshare is headquartered in Washington, DC with offices in Austin, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
If you are interested in discussing accessibility for your news article on this issue, contact Kathy Wahlbin at kwahlbin@mindshare.net or via telephone at 512.652.5613.
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Trade Ideas Web Traffic Generation Campaign |
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Note: This sample is from the MarketingSherpa article: Case Study: How to Get Bloggers to Evangelize Your Product |
Results of your Marketing Survey are here!
by Andrew Neitlich
http://www.sitepoint.com/examples/downtobusiness/SmallBusinessSurvey06.pdf
The above URL will let you download the Sitepoint Small Business Survey of 2006. Thanks to Sitepoint again for setting this up with me. Let me know your interpretation of the results, and here are some of my observations:
1. The survey respondents are 86% men. Let’s get more women into this field!
2. Respondents are all over the map in terms of years in business. But 61% have been in business for 3 years or more. Despite this experience, 49% are generating less than $50,000 in revenue and 71% are generating less than $100,000. There is lots of opportunity to increase revenues for those who want to! Note that 17% of respondents say that their firm generates over $200,000 in revenue. Why not you?
3. About half of respondents put in 5 hours or less per month for marketing. That may help explain why about half of respondents are earning less than $50,000. YOU HAVE TO MAKE MARKETING A PRIORITY IF YOU WANT TO EARN BIG DOLLARS.
I have automated notifications setup for myself, my company, Venali, and others, but there are a number of good tools in this list I did not think about. This is a great way to track the effectiveness of your marketing, PR, and promotions efforts.
If you are a blog publisher or business owner, tracking what people are saying about you is an important part of business. So what’s the best tools out there for keeping track of your online buzz?
I’ve recently been playing around with some tools to help track the effectiveness of our blog. I decided to post the results of what I found was hot, and what was not. My tests for these services was to simple – put in our domain name and check where we are linked from. I also compared the results against other sources to see which had the most accurate and useful results.
For mentions from around the web
