4 ibm.com examples of Web Effectiveness
my dW screenshot
A few weeks ago, I was asked for some examples of Web site effectiveness. Here are a few from ibm.com.
What elements make a Web site effective?
- Think Global: Not everyone speaks English or lives in the US. Make it easy for people to choose a country, region, or language no matter where they begin their site experience — country and language selection should be available everywhere on the site, not just the home page. At IBM, Country/Region selection is available in the top-right of the masthead on every page and people can choose not only country, but have a choice of languages for each country as well.
- People focus: Understand it’s not about the Web site, it’s about the people. Social enablement is key — on your site and off. On big sites like IBM, with so many products and services, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, To help with that , we make it personal on sites like My developerworks. My developerWorks allows IT professionals, students, IBM product experts, and newbies to interact in their own personalized space on the IBM My developerWorks site as well as connect and integrate and their activities with facebook, twitter, and other social sites.
- Content portability: Make your Web content available wherever your audience wants to access it — this is beyond making your site search engine friendly (although ensuring your site surfaces in search engines is one of the most important components to Web effectiveness). Have a validated Web feed and make it easy to find, particularly if you have frequently updated content. Understand that your audience may not want to come back and check the site every day. Let them decide when and where to read, view, or listen to the latest update — on a feedreader, on your site, on an iPod, or somewhere else entirely. Feeds put your content wherever it needs to be. And don’t forget to create content-type specific feeds for videos and podcasts, like the feed listed on the IBM Web site for IBM podcasts and this site on iTunes with an IBM iTunes podcast feed.
- Provide answers: Most people navigate to a Web site with a question. The first goal of any Web site is to provide the answers on the page, by creating content that people can actually use. But when the answer is a little more complicated, the site has to make it easy to get answers, when, where, and how the customer wants. On the IBM Software site, many pages display a number to call or an option to ask via Web interface for a Call back, a quote, or a response e-mail, such as on the Rational Change and release management offerings page. In some cases, IBM site users will even get a pop-up with an offer for live help from a real person.
gradient zeitgiest
Seth Godin says I need to work on my presentation/graphic skills. Well, not me, particularly — everyone. As a word-focused SEOer, I tend to ignore graphics. In fact, I have an adversarial relationship with graphics. But I’m trying to branch out. On my list of graphics educational material is Presentation Zen — this site and book recommends a particular way of presenting, not just a particular type of graphical presentation. And suddenly I am noticing graphics in a way that I have not before.
But now I am wondering if it is just me, or do all the graphics released this year all look the same?
Help the Oregon Food Bank
Please enter "blog for food" in the tribute field
I stole this directly from Food Dude at Portland Food & Drink because he moved me to donate to the Oregon Food Bank with his post.
When you look at what the OFB achieves, it’s really quite staggering. Less than 5 percent of expenditures go to fund raising and administrative costs. They distributed 792,000 emergency boxes in one year and 4 million emergency meals at soup kitchens and shelters. Imagine!
A large group of bloggers under the organization of Tami Parr have gotten together to raise funds for the food bank. Money is tight, but surely all of us can break loose a few dollars to support this cause: $5.00 - $1000.00… whatever you can afford. Just click the banner on the front page of this site. When you get to the donation page, please enter “blog for food” in the tribute section on the donation page so that it counts towards our campaign. You are also welcome to send checks directly to the Oregon Food Bank at PO Box 55370, Portland, OR 97238. Again, please mention our campaign.
While money does more to help than anything else, you can also drop off canned food. Sarah at Savaveza on 1004 N Killingsworth is collecting food throughout the month. Also, folks have spontaneously started to drop off bags of food at Vino in Sellwood, 1226 SE Lexington.
| Posted in blogging | No Comments »06.11.08Reflections on SMX Advanced Seattle 2008
This is not a summary of what I learned, just some random thoughts on the conference itself. I am not an SEO insider. I do inhouse SEO and do not mingle with the big players.
First off, this was far better than Search Engine Strategies conferences. I’ve attended 2 SES in the past (last one in December of 2005 — wow, times flies) and those confs are just too broad, too long, and the food is just terrible. At least it was last time I attended.
SMX Advanced was far more focused. Even if there was some serious black hattery, At least now I know what SEOs are really up to.
On the Presenters
- MS Guy — not the right guy for the panel. All I will say is you should not be on the Bot Herding panel if you don’t know whether MS Live search honors the NoFollow tag. Everything he said after that I ignored because he had no credibility.
- Yahoo peeps — very nice, but really did not tell me any thing I did not know or offer anything up that was truly exciting.
- netconcept guys — really enjoyed their presentations and learned some stuff. And I will be mining their http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/articles for data.
- Matt Cutts — OK, even though he makes me mad sometimes and I don’t think he always gives the full story, I was pretty excited to see him talk. Interesting how everyone was talking smack about him, but still his session was packed.
- Danny Sullivan — I brushed past him in one of the sessions. it was like walking past a pop star. Not that I think he acts that way and I have seen him at other conf, but I feel like I should ask for an autograph or have my picture taken with him. I am not so gauche as to ask, though,
- I won’t call out the individual non-search engine rep presenters here, but I have two main comments on the sessions overall
- What about a good user experience?
How about using blogs for something other than spam? Because as the blog manager for dW, I spend a fair amount of my time cleaning up the spam people are using as some sort of sick black hat SEO campaign. How does that improve the user experience?- Some of the black hats were a little too irreverant for my tastes
At one session, someone used an extremely offensive and homophobic example. Not cool. I think that if it had been racist, even in the mostly white audience, someone would have said something and the presenter would not have gotten the laughs and implied approval he did. That example left a bad taste in my mouth about the conf. But then, what do you expect from black hat spammers?Thoughts on Seattle
This is only my second trip to Seattle. Compared to Portland, Seattle is more hilly, bigger, and with more water. Otherwise exactly the same.
To save money, you don’t need to stay right at the conf center. I stayed a mile away and took the free bus (free during all the hours I was riding around and within the area around the conf center).
I also did a fair amount of walking. Pike Place is super sketchy after 5pm and so is the area around the conf center. I still had to walk a few blocks from the bus to the conf center, so I would not recommend public transportation in these areas after dark.
05.13.08iso openid plugin for blog
Not sure what I am doing wrong here. Both OpenID plugins I have tried have blown my blog away. I want to support this technology, but I also want my blog to load.
Anyone have any OpenID wordpress comment authentication plugins to recommend?
04.30.08blogging about twittering and twittering about blogging
Great list of pro and con articles and tools for twittering at SEO 2.0 blog: Twitter Dilemma: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Pros, Cons, 50+ Links & Tools.
I was late to the twitter party and I admit it can be a huge time waste. The best use I have found for it is site status updates — the text alert functionality. But mostly I use it to report what I am eating for lunch and dinner (and sometimes breakfast). And because most of my team is in another time zone, it takes the place of the rambling hallway and doorway conversations I used to have with co-workers. And now I have these discussions with people I don’t even work with too. So that is fun.
Is there an overall value? From the list on the SEO 2.0 blog, obviously there are a lot of opinions on that. The post has a lot of twitter content I have not yet come across, so it makes a nice reading list for those of us trying to determine the value. Is twitter good for findability? Well, certainly it is good for claiming your online persona and associating hundreds of thousands of posts with your name. And considering that nothing ever posted on the Web can ever completely be removed, do I want what I ate for lunch on a Monday in January 2008 preserved for all time? Good question.
03.18.08linkbuilding — white hat version
Recently, on my advice, our site turned down a submission for an article on link building. My gut reaction when asked about any article on link building is that is too much a gray area of SEO and we shouldn’t even open ourselves up to that. I admit to an invested interest here in keeping things white hat only. My position has always been if you build good pages with compelling content the link building will happen organically. This is easy for me to say because I work on a large corporate Web site with a huge online presence.
But there is value in link building, if done carefully. My guide has always been Aaron Wall’s post on good link building and bad link building.
And I just saw Eric Enge’s post up on SEOmoz: So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time and I’ll be adding that to my link building resource list as well.
There are eight solid tips in Enge’s post that reflect the same white hat values as Aaron Wall’s post (and I am sure many many others), with some new ones as well — for example, links on edu and .gov links are often overlooked as a good source for establishing authority. This post covers everything from Social media to PR to the blogosphere. All good stuff. But Enge also doesn’t lose site of the goal. His final paragraph includes this comment :
Match your content to the target and you will have a much greater chance of success.
I concur. Keep your end result in mind and your link building will be successful. Don’t spray your links all over the interwebs and expect your target audience to take the action you want them to take. Instead, take some time to match your link to the audience, get quality links, and good things will happen with your linking campaign.
01.18.08blog buzz, SEO, and desired user action
This post on SEO Moz: R0n Paul is the Snakes on a Plane of 2008 got me thinking about the goals of blog buzz and also the goals of SEO. I think there is an assumption out there that all links are good links and all blog buzz will help your product or strategy. And when I say “out there” I am talking about marketing and PR people who think that if you get enough buzz going with blog mentions or with links on traditional Web sites — what I like to call the “static” web as compared to the “dynamic” web 2.0 web — then you have succeeded in your marketing campaign.
I did not follow the snakes on a plane market outcome too close. I enjoyed the parodies and saying “snakes on a plane” is still pretty funny. I assumed that the buzz did lead to movie ticket sales. It did not. Or at least, considering the hype, it did not do as well as expected for that level of exposure. I didn’t see it in the theater, but I did Netflix it.
I agree with the analysis in the post, and want to add that the audience that actually experienced this viral marketing was probably very small. The target audience for all the snakes on a plane spoofs and discussions was most likely people like me — people who are online all work day and online after work just for fun. And for a movie to make the required huge box office numbers, you have to get more than just the geeks going to see the movie. It is an interesting exercise in viral marketing, but essentially, it did not lead to the desired user action. This action being, 100s of millions of people going to the theater to see the movie.
But I also have another takeaway from an SEO perspective — all links are not good links if they do not lead the user to take the desired action. Listings for your site in the Google SERPS are not always worth it for the link juice alone. Being #1 for a one word keyword is not more important than being number #2 for a long-tail multiple keyword query.
But none of this can be quantified as easily as the snakes on a plane viral marketing example. And part of this is because SEO is mostly about Web sites and bringing in visitors. High rankings bring in more pageviews — that is true. But is the goal of a Web site pageviews? Not for all of them. In many cases, the goal is to get the user to buy a product. And in many cases, getting a #1 listing in Google brings in pageviews, but does not lead the user to the desired action.
The goal of SEO is not to get a #1 listing, it is to lead the user to your site, so that you can offer the searcher what he or she is looking for. If the searcher is looking for something more basic than what you are offering, then a #1 listing on a basic keyword query is not going to help you reach your goal or the user reach his or her goal. So you will be wasting SEO time and bandwidth and the searcher not only is dissatisfied with the link, but perhaps even leaves the site and returns to Google with a bad opinion of your site. It’s like reverse branding.
I do still believe a viral campaign is a very powerful thing and I love links (from Google and other web sites). But I think both should be invested in prudently and efficiently to serve both you (the SEO, Web site owner, and/or marketer) and the searcher.
01.15.08wordpress upgrade complete
That was not too bad. I am happy to be back FTPing. Getting back to my roots. ha
12.27.07Still getting used to this wordpress thing
I wouldn’t say I am a super-user of any particular blog software, but I do know my way around Roller and Blogger. But WordPress has so much more to offer. It is overwhelming. I think I have done all the theme tweaking I need to (and some I probably did not need to). Now I need to organize all my various Web 2.0 bits and pieces into this one spot.
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