BPWrap

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. Or you can subscribe to a combined news feed for all SMM publications. Thanks for visiting!

Firefox 3.0 Looks Much Better Full Screen. That was written by Geoff Fox of PC Magazine and I think he has got it exactly right.

If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.

If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.

If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.

I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.

I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.

With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.

Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.

For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.

When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.

If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.

I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.

The level of chatter on the Internet about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is at an extraordinary level following the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle on June 3-4, 2008. It dealt with Advanced SEO. Given that so many business owners and Internet marketers are critically affected by how Google ranks their websites, this naturally is a topic of wide interest.

To help those who do not have the time to read all the chatter, we here offer a helicopter vision of what is going on at such a session. Indeed that is all that is possible currently, since there is a 30 day publicity blackout on the detailed contents of some sessions

What exactly is advanced SEO? Apparently it does not include enough Enterprise SEO as Brent D. Payne defines it:

Enterprise SEO: It’s SMX Advanced talk about how to do SEO from within an enterprise level company. I personally met with people from Time Interactive, Viacom, NPR, etc. and things are different for inhouse people at large companies. An advanced SEO seminar should tailor to some extent to the larger companies out there that are trying to accomplish big wins like capturing keyphrases such as britney spears, george w. bush, etc. How to work to rally hundreds of internal employees around SEO. How to build a proper presentation for niche audiences that are internal yet consist of 50 attendees per session. How to work with multiple CMS systems, inhouse CMS, etc.

Lisa Barone suggested that the conference content indicated that SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side. In other words, advanced SEO is more Black and Grey Hat than simple SEO. She cited some of the “advanced search engine optimization” techniques she had picked up during her time in Seattle.

• There are lots of old sites lying around on the Interwebz with great link juice. Buy them and capitalize on that. But do it carefully or Google will pick up on it and reset the score.
• Conditional redirects are awesome.
• Search marketers don’t need ethics. They’re marketers. Check the ethics at the door.
• You can never have too many .edu links.
• I need to grow some balls, stop fearing Matt Cutts and start buying links.

Her post has a daunting number of comments from many of the luminaries in the SEO world. Whatever Advanced SEO may be, it is clearly highly contentious.

Given the furor, Danny Sullivan, the conference organizer, has tried to clarify matters by affirming that Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming. In his post although he regrets some of the conference items, on balance he feels that progress is being made.

Indeed, I feel like search engines and SEOs have made great, huge strides coming together. Things like Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center - all offer tools and support that were hard for some, including myself, to ever believe would appear. At the same time, I feel like things are getting even more adversarial on other respects, most especially in the area of links and Google’s perceived domination of the web. And how to solve that, I really don’t know.

Meanwhile, if you can’t buy and sell links, even more attention is now focused on link baiting. Link baiting is all good, as Google itself has said on numerous occasions. But now look what’s happening. We have fake link bait — and then Google has to decide if those links can be “allowed” to count. In turn, that causes some people to think Google’s going too far. And when you have people feel one party is stepping over a line, it makes it easier for others to ponder why they’re following rules at all.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, was one of the keynote speakers and he has some interesting reflections on the conference:

So I did feel that the black hat material was a mismatch for much of the audience (inhouse SEOs and people doing their first search conference). At one point I felt like I’d stumbled back into 2003, when the search conferences had official panels about topics like cloaking. From that perspective, several panels of the conference felt like a step backwards.

So what lessons can those for whom even simple SEO is a challenge draw from all this? The only obvious one at the moment is the link bait topic that Danny Sullivan refers to. If your business can use as a hook something that is shady and of wide interest, then you can get the eyes and the links and in turn Google will send you the visitors. For SEO, that link bait hook is clearly the Black Hat version of SEO.

There is a rather large advertisement in today’s Vancouver Sun. At the center of the full-page is the following:

I was struck by those words at the center of the ad:

CREATIVE ACCOUNTANTS should no longer be used to describe book cookers, liars, little men in little rooms helping rich crooks get richer, or downright cheaters.

It is true that The Society of Management Accountants of Canada has applied for a Canadian trademark. If granted they, and only they, will have the right to use the trademark above on products they sell and on a series of services covering the following:
SERVICES:

• Establishing and enforcing guidelines
• training and educating
• disseminating information
• promoting and representing the interest of management accountants

Their new website, CreativeAccountants.org, (unfortunately in Flash), is really only new packaging around their existing resource-full website for Certified Management Accountants of Canada.

So why bring in King Canute? Well perhaps he might have counseled the CMA to go for some other trademark. As he tried to tell his advisers, sometimes you cannot turn back the tide. Just look at what Wikipedia offers as a definition of creative accounting.

Creative accounting and earnings management are euphemisms referring to accounting practices that may or may not follow the letter of the rules of standard accounting practices, but certainly deviate from the spirit of those rules. They are characterized by excessive complication and the use of novel ways of characterizing income, assets, or liabilities. The terms “innovative” or “aggressive” are also sometimes used.

It would seem the battle has been lost already. An appropriate choice of domain name is always a first consideration in doing a website review. CreativeAccountants.org is certainly a bold initiative but would seem to carry too much baggage to be the right long-term choice.

Related: SWOT That Domain Name

Matt Cutts of Google has an intriguing slip in his post, Something is wrong on the internet!. He is referring to this cartoon by xkcd.

Matt Cutts said something rather than someone. He went on to say:

That comic sums up the internet in one sentence: the scrum of jostling opinions on the web and the optimism that truth can still win out. I was reminded of that comic when someone asked me about a particular way that someone recently tried to get links.

His spam group is perhaps one key way human intervention comes into the Google search process. So his comments later in the post are particularly interesting.

If a website claims to have high-quality information and then deceives the user and serves up malware or off-topic porn, Google considers that spam and takes action on it. Likewise, if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn’t have to trust the links to that site as much.

I really don’t view Google’s role as judging the truthiness of the web. … But if someone is sloppy enough to get caught (or to admit!) making up a fake story, I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either.

It sounds very much as though Google will be acting as the judge. This prompted me to add the following comment to his blog post.

This all seems to be shaking out as it should, Matt. It raised one question in my mind. You did say I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either. I believe Google’s policy is to try to do everything in its search process by computer algorithms since this is scalable. Human intervention should therefore be very limited. Your spam group does that human intervention with an on/off button, I presume, as it applies to clear spam content.

I’m sure many would be interested to know how you treat websites you are no longer blindly trusting. Do you apply the off button for these with a reminder to check again in say six months? Or is it more like a volume control where you apply a down weighting factor? Or again, is it one of those minus X penalties in the SERPs that some talk about?

Since Google is now suggesting it will be more open than it has been in the past, I hope we will get some clarification on this.

Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, acknowledges in the Official Google Blog that Google Search Quality is overly secretive.

Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them - and in what order. …

Surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. … Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse. …

Being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.

He then proceeded to give a few more details of what is done, but nothing to grab the headlines. Matt Cutts in another blog post gave us a little more information by revealing details of the Google organization chart.

We almost learn more from Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, who wrote on a Webmaster View Of Google’s Latest Search Quality. At the end of the day, it all still seems somewhat shrouded in mist.

Choosing a website design is one of the most difficult decisions for any business owner to make. That’s because the only approval of the decision that counts is that of potential visitors to the website. Will they stay on the site? Will they find what they are looking for? Will they enjoy their visit? Jared M. Spool of UIE (User Interface Engineering) is an expert in Usability, which is involved in trying to make those predictions.

In a slightly technical paper, he surprisingly suggests A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives. It may not be the obvious way, but what he proposes makes eminent good sense. The case study he describes is as follows:

The company team is about to redesign their home page and navigation. They have three home page design alternatives and five navigation alternatives, created by an outside firm who didn’t do any evaluations of the designs. To help figure out which design to pick, the team has (finally!) received approval for their first usability testing study. While their site has been around for years, they’ve never watched visitors use it before now.

The obvious way might have involved a large number of users looking at all these different possibilities. The method that Spool proposes is much leaner than that and extremely practical. One critical step is the following:

Recruit from 2 User Groups
We recommended the team recruit both loyal and new users as study participants. The first day of testing should be loyal users of the site and the second day should be new users to the site. The loyal users would help figure out what the important tasks are. The new users will help determine what’s important for people new to the site, such as how they figure out the basics.

He describes much more detailed methodology, but the summary above brings out the essence of choosing between website designs. You must have a clear view of what you would like your visitors to do when they visit you. You must then make sure that your design functions well. Remember that you have the most tenuous of holds on a visitor who has clicked to your website. They can easily click away if they find the experience frustrating.

The box you see at the top of the right sidebar, which is labeled Popular Tags, contains what is called a tag cloud. All the SMM blogs are now displaying such a tag cloud since, as explained elsewhere, Tags Attract Eyes.

Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.

Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.

Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.

Some Tag Clouds Are Only Word Clouds

Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).

To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.

That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.

Tag Clouds That Get You There

Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.

The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.

We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.

Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA

Christine Churchill has an excellent article today listing costly keyword research mistakes. They are

1. Targeting keywords that people never use
2. Confusing keyword popularity with keyword appropriateness
3. Not considering user intent in keyword selection
4. Selecting single word keywords
5. Keyword misalignment
6. Not considering the competition
7. Failing to periodically review keywords
8. Not allocating enough resources and time to perform good keyword research

Detailed explanations are given in her article and there is a lot to consider there. It would almost appear that they are presented in increasing order of importance. Certainly her summary paragraph points to this:

A better strategy would be to take the time it takes to do the project right. A sound keyword process is one of the best investments a company can make. Take a few minutes today and review your keyword lists. Chances are you can save yourself and your company a lot of money and improve your return on your search campaigns by simply improving the keyword pool.

As it happens, her paper could well be an introduction to a post on SEO at the Cre8asite Forums by Ammon Johns, a top UK SEM consultant.

You enter a market where the top 30 sites on many terms are all using SEO. The top 20 sites are all spending around 100k per year, either on salaries of their in-house SEOs, on agency services, or commonly a mixture of the two. If you as a newcomer to the market can only afford 20k investment in SEO this year, then your only possible chance to make that work is to put all that resource into a focal point (the 100k budgets are spread across the market, so by picking one flank or one specific point and spending all your effort there you can plan to break through - the niche market).

You can’t bank a business on hoping to ‘get lucky’ and miraculously hire a better SEO for 20k than they hired for 100k. That kind of optimism is not business, that’s roulette. If a market leader has a three year head start, and is also spending twice as much resource and effort as the newcomer can afford, then it is quite reasonable to predict that you will never overtake the market leader.

If these are figures that surprise you, bear in mind that they are in UK sterling pounds so you double them to give an approximate US dollar figure.

The bottom line on all this is that there are no quick fixes on becoming visible in the search engines keyword reports. The Internet is a very crowded place. It requires good knowledge and thorough and persistent effort to outperform your competition.

Related:
Your Keyword Selection Strategy - Mark Beck
Keyword Strategy to Avoid Bidding War - Shimon Sandler
[Video] Keyword Research 101: Basic Keyword Strategy & Tips - Aaron Wall

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

Microsoft has finally said its courtship of Yahoo! is over. Perhaps it was never meant to be. Danny Sullivan has a very fine analysis of the whole saga and wonders whether walking away is perhaps Microsoft’s $5 Billion Mistake? There is still the same concern however that Michael Martinez raises. How can Microsoft succeed in Search?

The key question is: Should Microsoft have two brands? That same question came up two years ago. However that was discussing whether they should be running with both MSN Search and Live Search. A subsidiary question was how to pronounce the latter: Liv Search or Lyve Search.

Microsoft seems to be good at getting itself into these problematic situations. Just think Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8 as an example. In its strategic thinking it seems to follow the Tom Peters precept: “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.” How much better they would perform if they followed the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart). There are many more eminent thinkers they could refer to who would support that approach.

Focus, focus, focus

Peter Drucker

The Null Hypothesis is presumed true until statistical evidence indicates otherwise.

Sir Roland Fisher

A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Albert Einstein

Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

Occam of Occam’s Razor

With Bill Gates adopting a more hands-off approach, the chances of Microsoft becoming more KISSy seem remote. They presumably will soldier on trying to figure out how to get their Search horse back on its feet. The prognosis is not good.