Todays hottest 100 website is home to the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Ok, so she’s an ex-model so it had to be pretty and she’s French so it had to be stylish, but as an ambassador for her country it also had to be practical and it is. A fashion first – no Flash!
See for yourself www.carlabrunisarkozy.org/en
How much time do you think visitors spend at your website? I know most site owners like to think visitors will spend in excess of 15 minutes browsing pages in their website whilst sipping on a cup of tea. Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, has an interesting article about the power of 10 and roughly how long each website action should take (or not take)…
Read the article here to make sure you aren’t losing customers in the first second. Not sure if any of these apply to your website? We can audit your website to find out.
I’ve been ignoring Bing as a search engine, mostly because it’s made by the evil Microsoft. However, it’s now overtaken Yahoo for most of our clients sites as the second largest search engine referrer. That is no threat to Google as the Big G still takes about 90% of the search engine credit, but I’m surprised it’s overtaken Yahoo so rapidly. It could still be the novelty factor, but it could also indicate real competition.
So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:
If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!
Read more over at Bing
If you feel like killing some time, this is a hilarious article published in the Guardian.
Who knew Microsoft thought Windows was cool enough to have its own launch party for Windows 7?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/28/charlie-brooker-microsoft-mac-windows
Of course the solution is Linux…
p.s. I am not a snootier, insistent advocate. I only mention Linux as a solution for those who aren’t familiar with it.
I have a large collection of site’s I admire, either because they have a great look or really intuitive navigation or great use of colour. Either way, it’s a shame to keep them to myself and the sites deserve a round of applause. So begins the Hottest 100 Web Design List.
First on the list:
www.printerspost.com.au
Love the colour and navigation. The site feels easy to use and has been cleverly laid out.
p.s. This list is not a collection of our clients sites, although they are obviously very cool!
I’m still sitting on the fence regarding the use of social media for B2B online marketing. However, Twitter have created Twitter 101, a guide to encourage you to use it for your business.
They provide some novel examples of how Twitter can help your business. Well worth a read to see if there could be something in it for you.
I think if you have a retail shop, either online or offline, it would be worth tweeting about any sale or special offers you have – especially if the sale is only for a day, but again, that is B2C, not B2B – so I move back to the fence…
BTW – sorry for delay in posts. We’ve been busy – BlackMax Media has merged with CodeSense to create a new company called Digital Finery! So now we provide SEO, online marketing, web design and development with the added touch of software and application development.
–Update–
Smart Company also have an inspiring list of 55 things your business can tweet about.
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20091006-twitter-ideas.html
This morning we had a client lose all of the hard work we’ve applied for the last four months. This client was making their way up the rankings for a number of competitive keywords and were sitting at page two in Google, about to make it into the first page. Then disaster. Not on page two, three, four or five, but relegated to page six, and for some terms, past page ten!
It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.
And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description. So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.
That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.
These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.
I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.
We are pleased to launch stand alone link building services. With Google finally admitting link building a significant factor in getting a high ranking, we thought it was time to offer these services to the general public, instead of just our SEO clients.
From Google:
“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
We do recommend you carry out SEO on your website before engaging in link building as the end result will be much better. Prices start at $AU450 per month. Click here to order now.
Aaron Wall has written an interesting post about the latest Google update and how the search engine giant is currently favoring big brands in the rankings.
It sounds not particularly automated and more of a manual manipulation of search engine results. It’s not a good sign for small businesses or new businesses without heavy branding.
Read the article here.
UPDATE: 9 Dec 2010
Matt Cutts, Google, has released this video to explain more about why we can’t guarantee a number one ranking.
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I think one of the hardest aspects of our industry is making the client understand what you are doing. Having just had a conversation with prospective client this morning, she was at a loss to really understand what is good SEO and what is bad. She’s been using an SEO guy for about six months who appears to have done nothing to her website at all, but just provided her with automated reports, but since she didn’t understand them they weren’t passed on to her webmaster.
I sympathise with her. For a small business owner, you should not be expected to know the technical details about SEO, you should be able to trust the person or agency you’ve engaged to increase traffic to your website and they should be able to demonstrate this with monthly reports.
I’ve since emailed her a number of links to try to demystify SEO somewhat and thought they would be really useful to a lot of small business owners. Obviously you don’t want to know all about SEO, but you are going to have to know the basics if you want to avoid getting ripped off.
Google have provided a lot of information to dispel myths. Don’t forget to download and read their Search Engine Optimization Guide.
I recommend you start reading here, these provide good background information:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&cbid=1qsbnd1hhxbgs&src=cb&lev=topic
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&cbid=-1jjfbjsqd41j6&src=cb&lev=topic
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432&cbid=1gbt9m2gel4jv&src=cb&lev=topic
The link below has more links to relevant information about appearing in Google. If you click the link below, I would suggest reading the link, “Site not appearing in search results, or appearing lower“.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8524
This link also has a list of articles that are relevant to you:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522
From the above link I recommend you read the General guidelines: “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)“. Actually this is probably the most important link. It will provide you with information about what to look for in an SEO agency and when to run away from a dodgy one.
Don’t forget to ask questions if you don’t understand. Your agency should be able to help you to understand what is needed to be done to improve the ranking and traffic of your website. You should get some information about their past success, either written references, data or be able to speak to some of their clients.
Once you’ve done that, check us out. We provide ethical search engine optimisation packages and link building services.
Digital Finery Pty Ltd | Phone 1300 912 718
