Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Probably everyone knows that the National Geographic has some wonderful photo galleries, but “Swarm Theory” really caught my eye. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots and the photos are amazing.
There was a great article on the BBC News site over the weekend talking about how users are going deeper into websites right from the start and seem to only be interested in finding what they are looking for.
What does that mean for your site? Several things, but first of all you need to make sure all of your pages are indexed by the search engines. Visitors won’t read what they can’t find and this new research convinces me that they won’t visit your main page and search. If a searcher doesn’t find just what they are looking for on their first try they will go somewhere else.
It looks more and more like only once you have them in your site and engaged can you get them to sample some of your other pages. That’s when internal links like this post that talks about internal links or the random posts on the sidebar menu on this page can be valuable.
Another good method to try is to link to one of your internal pages with content that related to your discussion when posting on other blogs, forums or social networking sites.
There’s a great post on the Wall Street Journal ’s Small Business site that talks about what can happen if you suddenly get some great free publicity.
A service called Bag, Borrow or Steal which rents high end designer handbags and sunglasses is getting a mention in the new Sex and the City movie. The company is doing some really great things to take advantage of the expected traffic. Things like adding bandwidth, contests, games and inventory.
You might think that there’s nothing that could be bad about this, but there is. What if they buy too much inventory or their mention gets cut out of the film? It’s a fine line to walk. A new customer might not come back if they can’t get on to your site or you don’t have what you want and too much inventory can easily put you out of business.
I think that Bag, Borrow or Steal seems to be doing things right and I look forward to finding out how this turns out. It’s an article worth reading and remember something this large might not happen to your business, but you can try to get free or paid mentions in your local media and then plan well for the results.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Skis-Direct.
A very simple site with only a couple of pages, but clean and easy to read with lots of open space.
The main picture gives the site some depth and you have no doubt that the site is about skiing.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Conceptis logic puzzles -the art of logic. Nonstop fun with the world’s best logic puzzles. Free online picture-forming logic puzzles plus many other different games.
This site has some great puzzles and has already kept me up long past my bedtime.
A couple of things happened to me this week that made me say Hmmmmmmm.
I find it interesting how often things happen in groups. Maybe when I’m doing or thinking about an issue I’m just “tuned in” to finding more.
First I got a postcard form my old High School, Taylor Allderdice. They are putting together an Alumni Directory and they want me to give my contact information to a third party company who will catalog it for them.
I’m not sure that I’m in favor of giving my personal information to someone who then plan to sell it back to me. They have a privacy policy that says they will not share it with anyone but alumni, but as we all know privacy policies can be easily changed with the stroke of a keyboard.
That same day I see a post on Bruce Schneier’s blog called Our Data, Ourselves and I thought Wow!
Then, the next day, I met with a Realtor about his site and we got to talking about the MLS. I have written before how I don’t like the MLS. You give them your listings and they sell them back to you. Not only that they make it complicated, secretive, and very expensive. I explained to my potential customer that someone is going to do this better, make it easier and probably free.
The very next day while looking for something else I found Real Estate Search on Google Maps.
To try it yourself go to Google Maps, select your area and click on “Show search options”
Then, Restrict results to: Real Estate and click search.
This could be it!
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
In an effort to open up their formally (and still) secretive formulas for ranking your web page Google has added to their Official Webmaster Blog. It’s a very nice post called “Introduction to Google Search Quality” and is written by Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality.
He (I think it’s a he) explains that web spam is just one part of their job. Their overall goal is to give their customer (the searcher) the best possible experience.
How does this help you? By letting you know a bit about how they work and what they want can go a long way toward helping you give your visitor the best experience by providing them what they are actually searching for. It’s a win, win situation for everyone.
If you are a site owner I would definitely advise that you read this and
A customer of mine, Talk’nTables asked me why he couldn’t be found on Google for his keyword choice of “tabletop advertising”. I explained to him that those words did not appear anywhere on his page. He needed to add them in the headlines and content of his page(s).
Within a few days he was on the first page of Google. That made me think that it probably wasn’t such a competitive search term because I have been trying to move up the results for the term “Pittsburgh web design” and it has been a painfully slow process.
He wrote me the other day that even though he was on the first page of Google he only was on the third page of Yahoo and how could he improve that.
I replied that all of the search engines use different formulas (algorithms). The best way to move up is to add new pages with your keywords in the titles and content. It’s also good to go through all of your current pages and add it wherever it sounds natural.
I also got to thinking that even though I couldn’t think of any keywords that would be better for his business, perhaps there were other more popular search terms that he should be trying to rank well for. Maybe I was missing some terms for this site that I could build on. Those questions lead me to search for some free keyword tools to suggest other search terms that might want to be considered to buy or optimize for.
I started with a post of mine about keywords from last year and then I found a very good post by Ann Smarty called
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Walters & Walters North Carolina Wedding Photographers.
When I first looked at this site I thought here is the kind of site where all you really need for human visitors are slideshows that showcase great work. It’s really some of the nicest wedding photography that I’ve seen. The site has good clear navigation right at the top and a place to sign up for their newsletter right on the first page.
This is a case where having a blog should provide plenty of “spider food” for the search engines to read even though it’s not on your main pages. Written content can be on any page provided that the site’s navigation is designed so that your visitors can easily find their way to the rest of your pages once they’re in.
When I clicked on the blog there was plenty of written content and more great photos, but I saw two problems. The blog wasn’t on their domain and likely because of that it didn’t look like the rest of the site.
Here’s a site that is beautiful to look at, but needs written words for the search engines to read. They do have plenty of words, but it’s posted on the WordPress site not their own. I believe that by combining them they could turn two really good sites into a great one.
They could also post their newsletters on their site to preview for their potential subscribers and for more content. I like to see the kind of thing that I’ll be getting before I subscribe to any newsletter, but overall this site is well worth seeing.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Planet Earth Game by the Discovery Chanel lets you be the executive producer for “Planet Earth”.
You will manage seven film crews across the globe to acquire never before seen footage for this groundbreaking new series from The Discovery Chanel.
It’s a very cool game.
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