Recently, I spoke with someone who wanted a Facebook like button on their company page. While there’s no technical issue there, there is a bit of a conceptual gap. Her business was a very narrow, technical firm which is likely to handle less than 20 clients a month. What relationship are they hoping to have with their customers through Facebook?

It’s not meant to pick on her specifically, but rather to ask a legitimate question: are you using social media as a tool, or fighting what it represents?
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• On a blog site, “previous page” and “next page” are surprisingly ambiguous, because content is typically ordered so the latest content is on the first page. “Newer Posts” and “Older Posts” avoid any uncertainty. Or alternatively, take a page from firms publishing Japanese comics and add a “Warning: you’re at the end of the blog” interstitial at the front of the site.
• Custom internal search is a “do it right or don’t do it at all” thing. If you’re using a canned package, like a shopping cart or a CMS, try the custom search. Does it blow up on typical customer needs? A common example of this is only searching product titles. If so, you might be better using a Google-powered search box instead; while less tightly synched with the database, it will be the search experience customers know and trust.
• Here’s the math on registration: Is emails from 30% of your users worth irritating 100% of them, and abandoning 70% of them? I’m looking at you, every company who ever published a white paper.
• The promise of personalized content comes with an implicit guarantee of perfect personalization– or, at least, perfect as you know it. AmazonMP3 seems to love to reccomend me the very album I bought FROM THEIR SITE. TEN MINUTES PRIOR. Are they hoping I won’t notice and buy it again? Or do they solely want to undermine my trust?
• While on the subject of reccomendation engines– understand the difference between one-way and two-way purchase relationships. Someone with a printer may buy toner, but someone who owns a toner cartridge is unlikely to buy the corresponding printer.
• Give your site a spin through a translator. It’s a great way to see if there’s images storing valuable content that could be released as text. In addition, how badly it gets garbled can be an indicator the language itself may be too complex or specialized for a mass audience.
• Online video, especially in the current environment of “compromise with Flash”, can be a huge performance drain if you want to keep several on a window at one time. No site works well when the browser takes 20 seconds to scroll. Better to look at a slideshow presentation where only one video frame is in play at one time.
• The “fix the bad fields” error message is unproductive, because it requires users to skim the entire form for the marked incorrect fields. If the form is several screens tall, or has breaks in it, this can mean a lot of scrolling. A better answer may well be a list of the faults identified.
• Tiny regionalization faults can lead to big comedy and undermined customer faith. You’d be surprised how often the stock photos of “American” businesses show stacks of pounds, euros, or roubles. Not to mention the common “Enter your postal code” or non-standard address format support. All together, it tends to give your site a delightful 419-scam flair.
• Recognize when persistent preferences make sense. Hulu: I’m looking in your direction. Did I not just enter my age to see a video 24 minutes ago, and now need to re-enter it to see the next one? Bull. Flash lets you set a cookie; it caused the privacy advocates to have kittens, so surely you heard about it. Use it.

Web-Op has dealt with countless companies – large and small – that have found themselves on the receiving end of negative press. It only takes a few comments on pissedconsumer.com or ripoffreport.com to have a negative effect on your business’s online reputation. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to push this negative press off the first page of Google.

(1)   Create profiles for your company on websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. Remember that it is important to show activity on these websites to get them to rank. Just creating them isn’t enough. Post something regularly, build a few links to them, and watch each profile page rise in the search engines. Below are a number of websites you can create profiles on. Each one of these rank extremely well.

1. Twitter.com
2. Linkedin.com
3. Facebook.com
4. Digg.com
5. WordPress.com
6. Google.com/profiles
7. Quora.com
8. About.me
9. Formspring.me

(2)  Buy other domains such as websitenamereviews.com, websitenametestimonials.com, and websitenamecomplaints.com. We recommend looking at Google suggestions to start. These days keyword rich domains rank extremely well. Your $8 purchase will be well worth it.

Remember that negative comments added to powerful domains like pissedconsumer.com can rank for your business name extremely fast. Being proactive about your online reputation can minimize the impact of one unhappy client’s comment.

A conversion funnel is a structure provided by most major analytics packages, such as Google Analytics. It aggregates the click paths of many visitors as they follow a pre-determined course through your site. In short, it lets you watch as visitors more from “arrival on site” to the destiation your site exists to encourage– the conversion. Typically, a conversion is a purchase, a request for information, or activating a contact form.

Much like a funnel in the kitchen, a properly configured conversion funnel will start with a large opening– the 50,000 visitors who hit your site in a month– and narrow down to a smaller number– like the 200 who buy– at the end. At each step, it should get narrower. There’s value in all of these factors– how fast it narrows, as well as how many people enter and leave the whole process.
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Trevor got this interesting email today regarding a domain we purchased a few months ago. The email is shockingly deceptive:

Attn Bailey, Trevor

This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your search engine registration for COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by Jan 26, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Your registration includes search engine submission for COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by Jan 26, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.

The email points to this link – which is clearly an invoice.

The domain is registered to:

Mark Denaro
RG
200 Park Avenue South
New York
NY
10003
US
Phone: +1.13474605327

Which I’m guessing is a faked registration as the number format appears to be invalid. Fortunately Google provides some good advice on how to steer clear of these scams. From the Official Google Blog:

How to identify scams and other schemes

In general, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Here are some pointers on what to look out for:

• Before you fill out a form or give someone a credit card, do a web search to see what other people are saying about the company and its practices.
• Be wary of companies that ask for upfront charges for services that Google actually offers for free. Check out our business solutions page before writing a check.
• Always read the fine print. Watch out for get-rich-quick schemes that charge a very low initial fee before sneaking in large reoccurring charges on your credit card or bank account.
• Google never guarantees top placement in search results or AdWords — beware of companies that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a special relationship with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Sitemaps program — you can do these tasks yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Yes, I’m the last person to tell you that the phrase of 2010 was “App Store”. Whether it’s Apple’s shops for iThingies and Macs, the Android Marketplace and its off-brand cousins, or even the quaint little App Catalog on my Pre, everyone is offering a single-stop shopping experience.

The most significant one, from a direction-of-the-market perspective, may be the Google Chrome Web Store. While nominally presented as a means to obtain addons and compatible sites for a specific browser, it strongly represents turning the open Web into the same app-store format. Although everyone sees it as the trend of 2010 and 2011, it’s really a trend of 1996. (more…)

Google has been moving heavily into increasingly localized search recently. It used to be, triggering a local search required a regional qualifier, like a city name.

Now, many of the same searches will go directly to intensely local results without qualification. They rely on geo-location of your IP address, or perhaps your information in your Google profile.

Now, the reasoning for this is sound, from a business perspective. (more…)

Check out the attached screenshot of Google’s serp result for “cop-usa”

In the footer down below you will find the following bit of html:

<font size="1" face="Tahoma" color="#FFFFFF">www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com</font>

Tyson alerted me to this change in our SERP for “Arizona SEO”. Google has started substituting our brand name “Web Op” (in this case without the dash) for our actual page titles on several searches.

That page’s actual title is:

Arizona SEO: Search Engine Marketing – Internet Marketing Strategies

For years, the common SEO logic was that the order of keywords didn’t matter. “Widget purple” and “Purple widget” will perform roughly the same in terms of results.

While this has been good for promoting more awkwardly-phrased domains, it appears it no longer holds water.

Compare, for example “arizona seo” and “seo arizona”. While we conquered them both, notice how the lower listings are completely in different orders.

This is significant for two reasons:
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