Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan had a nice Q & A with Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager; Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management at Google and Google software engineer Corin Anderson to get some more details about the specifics of SearchWiki.

Here is a video directly from Google explaining exactly what SearchWiki is and what it can do for you.

Do you think this will change the way SEOs do their job? Give me your opinion in the comments below.

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

I was talking to my sister a few months ago and asked her why she never commented on my blog or if she ever read it. She told me that she read it all the time but never understood anything I was talking about. Since she is the exact type of everyday business person I am hoping to sell my services to, this is a big problem.

Writing for the web doesn’t have to be hard; you just have to know your audience and follow a few important steps. By keeping your web copy simple and free from jargon, your message will be more easily understood be your users.

K-I-S-S

After reading any page a user should be able to answer a few simple questions about the content. Let’s look at a product page as an example.

What type of product is it?

Who is the product for?

What can the product do for me?

Why is the product better than the other products just like it?

I’ve been involved with a lot of writing projects and amazingly these points often get over looked simply because they think their “target user” is already aware of these facts. The problem is that your web page can be viewed by users with different levels of understanding about your product, and your content needs to make sense to all of them.

Content that is straightforward and provides users with all of the relevant information will always outperform industry jargon. Keep you content clean and consistent across your website and you will offer your user the ability to connect with and understand your content. Try different call to actions on specific pages to find what type of content works best for your readers and use this data to further refine your copy.

Over time, you will find the style that works for communicating clearly with your audience.

What about you guys, do you have any other methods to consider when writing new content for your website? Post them in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: web copy, writing, copy, SEO

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

Hopefully the radio talk show with BPM is going to be an available podcast download. I’ll let everyone know as soon as I know. I’ve done many presentations at Jackson Dawson this past year for special groups of writers and various companies, but the NCMPR conference was the first conference that I was invited to speak at and it was a great learning experience.

Now, with all the work that I’ve put into my presentations and interviews, it’s time to take a break. The blogging is going to be a little light around here for the next couple of weeks but since I’ve only been posting about twice a month, you shouldn’t even notice I’m gone.

*** This post was supposed to be published on Oct 20th…whoops. I’m back from vacation now.

Technorati Tags: NCMPR conference, speaking engagements, SEO, Jackson Dawson

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

I am one of those people that likes to find new places to purchase my computer items and after a little research I came across Super Warehouse. I was delighted to see that Super Warehouse carried Apple computers and products.

Super Warehouse carries numerous products that I use on a daily basis like the ipod shuffle and the iphone and the site offers free shipping on select orders, product specials, buying guides, and much more.

Searching around the site I found a variety of cases and ipod accessories for my Apple products and I can’t wait to get home and order a few new items that will make my next trip more enjoyable.

Getting work done while you travel is never the easiest task, but setting yourself up with the best products is the first step. The next time you need anything computer related branch out from your regular stores and see if Super Warehouse can help.

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

I remember a few years ago when inbound links started getting very popular. Everyone in the SEO world was scouring the web for as many links as possible because we learned that inbound links were one of the big determining factors in how well your website ranked.

A lot of the suggestions I read about required building a widget or some other device that people could use on their site, which would then link back to you. This is a fantastic idea, but I’m not a developer in the true sense of the word, so it wasn’t the best method for me.

However, being an avid Wordpress user, from time to time I liked to develop new themes. When I was finished developing my last theme, I decided to release it to the public.

Elements of SEO launched in early August and has been downloaded 3,549 from the Wordpress Theme Directory and numerous other times from other directories.

Each download has a wonderful little link back to my site with the keyword of my choice.

One drawback to the mass amounts of downloads and links back to my site is that not everyone using my theme has a site devoted to SEO, web design, development or any other topic I talk about. In the eyes of Google, a link from a related site is much more powerful than an unrelated link.

But after doing a decent amount of research and looking at the sites that are using my theme and linking back to me… a lot are related, so I’m chalking this up as a win. I guess true rankings will be the final decision maker, but I’m confident were going in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: inbound links, website promotion, online marketing, wordpress, wordpress theme. theme development

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

Blogging gets even harder when it’s not your full time job and for a lot of people, it isn’t. I personally write for four different blogs and as much as I would like to post something every day on all of them, I just can’t.

Being surrounded by SEO, design, and development all day long between my 9-5 job and freelancing, you would think that I would have a slew of topics to write about, but everyone gets writers’ block occasionally.

A lot of times I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to come up with something fantastic, which doesn’t always have to be the case. Take this post for example…it’s not earth-shattering information, but it will be useful to someone.

The Easiest Way to Generate Ideas

Listen, listen, listen.

A few months ago I wrote how to get blog post ideas which talked about places you can search to find interesting blog posts, but what if you’re too lazy to do that?

A simple strategy is to talk with people about your subject and they’re bound to give you some topic insight that you can write about. A lot of times it won’t be a completely new topic, but if you can write about the same topic with a different perspective, then that’s good enough.

The company I work for has roughly 100 people from account executives to creative copy writers, and I constantly get asked questions about website optimization, promotion and marketing. When I’m feeling particularly smart, I write down the questions so I can post about it later, sadly that doesn’t always happen. But that doesn’t mean the content isn’t there for the taking.

So listen to your peers and they can be a great source of ideas and inspiration.

Technorati Tags: writers block, blog post ideas, blogging

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

Have you ever wondered what steps Google takes to maximize usability? Most people might look at a results page from Google and think they just wanted to keep things simple - white page with 10 links to websites and very few distracting elements.

Ben Gomes from Google goes into detail about usability as it relates to search quality and how Google strives to make their search results user-friendly so you can find the websites you want as quickly as possible. Here are a few bullet points from his article:

• A small page
• Complex algorithms with a simple presentation
• Features that work everywhere
• Data driven decisions - experiment, experiment, experiment

Check out Ben’s full post to get all the details. Also check out Udi Manber’s post on the introduction to search quality and his previous posts on Google’s rankings and the technology behind Google’s rankings.

Technorati Tags: Google, usability, accessibility, search quality

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

After submitting my theme to the new Wordpress Theme Directory, I was required to make a few tweaks. Elements of SEO 1.1 now has some exciting new features, including:

• Gravatar support
• Tag support

While I was making these edits I also decided to fix the widget bullets that were appearing. Ordinarily, if you downloaded the theme, uploaded it and didn’t activate any widgets then you would have the exact same setup in the sidebars as the demo site.

After reviewing a few sites that were using the theme, I noticed that a lot of people were implementing widgets. The problem that I was seeing was on the widget sections, there was a random bullet being added to the heading.

I didn’t really like how that looked since nothing else in the design had bullets styled like that, so I decided to remove them. Now you can add widgets all day long and it will look exactly the same as the demo site.

Download Elements of SEO 1.2 to get the new features and fix the widget heading bug.

Technorati Tags: Elements of SEO, Wordpress Themes, Wordpress development

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

There are many ways to test your website, but the most important step is to just get started. You can debate with colleagues about color and style for weeks, but in the end you have to let the users determine what works and what doesn’t.

1. Examine Your Current Situation

Before you begin changing every element on your website in the name of conversion rates, it’s best to review your current situation. Look at your analytics and see how your site and keywords are performing at the present moment.

I see people all the time that want to make drastic changes, but they never take the time to analyze what is happening right now. After six months of edits, you may find that you really don’t know what you’ve accomplished because you didn’t take the time to understand what factors were impacting performance at the outset.

2. Determine Realistic Goals

Most websites have a purpose. Whether you want people to email you, pick up the phone and call you, or buy your products, you need to make sure that your message is clear. Determine what you want your users to do and then decide how to attack it.

3. Page Layout Adjustments

In order to get users to do what you want, you have to make the choices very obvious. Have you ever noticed that a lot of landing pages are usually single columns? Since single column pages aren’t like every other page on your website they immediately get the user’s attention.

Single column layouts are also nice because they get rid of the excess noise on the page. There are no twinkling banner ads, no confusing navigation, and no lists of recent post to distract you from the objectives of the page.

When you eliminate the extras, users are more inclined to do what you want. Take a look at your most important pages and see if there is any noise that could be eliminated.

4. Graphic Adjustments

If done correctly, graphic adjustments on your page can drastically affect the way users interact with your site. Here are a few ways to tweak your site:

1. Test variations of your navigation
2. Test variations of product shots
3. Add captions to your product shots
4. Use creative graphics to get the users attention
5. Test different call-outs
6. Put the most important features above the fold

5. Content Adjustments

Content can be one of the best ways to increase your conversions because at the end of the day, hopefully users are reading your content to understand your message.

You can spend the rest of your life tweaking content and ideally for the life of your website you should be. Here are a few ways to make some adjustments to keep the user involved:

1. Test headline sizes and colors
2. Increase or decrease the amount of content
3. Feature benefits
4. Use lists
5. Feature testimonials

The important thing to remember about converting visitors is that it takes patience and diligence. A lot of your testing time frame is going to depend on your traffic. If you get 10,000 visitors a day, you could get away with testing a particular landing page for only a few weeks, but most sites don’t receive that much traffic, so you’ll have to conduct your tests over a longer period of time.

Google offers website optimizer, a powerful tool that makes it easy to test pages. You can test all of the suggestions above with their tool and easily keep track of your results. After running a series of tests on your own site you will be able to determine the most effective layout and content as well as identify new ways to continue improving your conversion rates.

The overall message here is that you have to run tests to find results. You don’t have to have multiple websites with thousands of pages to get results; you can simply tweak one page at a time on your five page site to determine what’s working. So get in the game and start testing!

Technorati Tags: website development, website design, converting users, website optimizer, Google

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions

The Cure is a blog that I started at my 9-5 job, Jackson Dawson, to try and bring them up to speed in the blogosphere. I am very proud of JD because, while a lot of companies say they want to get involved, for some reason or another they never do. It took JD a while to get on board, but they’re finally coming around.

The blog is one of many upcoming projects for JD, and I’m glad to see it getting underway. It’s very exciting to be behind the scenes in a corporate environment, making changes and shaking things up.

I’ve worked on a lot of SEO and website development projects, and it’s nice to share my experience. I have always done quite well with freelance work providing professional and affordable SEO services to smaller organizations, and now I get to play with the big boys and big budgets.

If by chance you’re looking for an SEO with a lot of experience but without a huge price tag, give me a shout. I gladly help out and advise people all the time, whether they’re clients or not.

What about you? What ways do you try and make your company better? Got any tricks for me?

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging advice, website development, seo, search engine optimization

Post from: Website Promotion and Online Marketing Strategies - Alibi Productions