| LED Digest 2254: RSS Going Mainstream |
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The new IE7 browser features seamless RSS integration. This will remove many of the barriers that keep RSS largely a specialized protocol. Also, a discussion of usability and search, high rankings for Flash sites, and more. ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. September 26, 2006 Issue no. 2254 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== RSS Going Mainstream ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "I think it will still be necessary to educate your visitors..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Meta Tags (and More) ==-- ~ Ralph Spence "...it's a case of 'buy me results'." --== Usability and Search [was: Meta Tags...] ==-- ~ Shari Thurow "People search and don't realize that they are searching." --== AdSense and Competitor Ads ==-- ~ John Brumage "...you [can't] have Google and Yahoo ads...on the same page." --== Small Biz & Search (and Flash) ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "Google can index Flash content just fine." ~ Rick Gortatowsky "Flash, graphics etc. are accents just as are catchy displays in retail stores." --== Dropping PPC ==-- ~ Michael Motherwell "The real issue with click fraud is the simple process of determining [ROI]..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Emails with Just Keywords ==-- ~ John Quinlan ~ Tom Aman ~ John Smart ========== NEW =================================== From: Steve Pronger Subject: IE7 - RSS is Going Mainstream In LED 2247 [ http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1035/55/ ] Tom Aman discussed IE7 in relation to RSS: > Maybe, as use of this browser becomes more common, RSS will > become a significant mode of communication, but that remains to > be seen. For those who might be interested in the new IE, try > http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx ... I've just got around to installing IE7 and I'm wondering how many other LEDers have given it a run? Tom is right, RSS has been implemented well. Visit a site where a feed is available and an icon will indicate the fact. Click the icon and the feed headlines will be displayed, along with a link to subscribe. Feeds can be managed in IE along with traditional bookmarks. All very easy and logical to use. Seems to me that RSS is about to go mainstream. If you're not blogging and adding the auto-discovery tag for your blog feed URL, then you will be missing out on an opportunity to encourage repeat visits by anyone who surfs by your site on IE. And as good as Firefox may be, we all know that means just about everyone. But I think it will still be necessary to educate your visitors, including those who are already on your mailing list, the benefits of subscribing to your feed and how to go about it. IE7 will just make it easier. No more telling your visitors to download an RSS reader or use an online reader - it will all be right there in their browser window. The benefits? To your subscribers; they don't have to give their email address, name or any other personal details. They don't have to confirm their subscription (double opt-in). They will not be prevented from receiving your messages by spam filters. They can stop receiving your messages anytime, permanently, and they don't have to say why. The benefits to you? People who want your message will receive it. No spam filters. No false positives. No ning-nongs who click on a "this is spam" button in Hotmail when you send them something they specifically asked to receive. One other tip on RSS. Burn your feed at FeedBurner.com. There's a whole bunch of useful tools and you can monitor your feed stats. Another significant thing I noticed on IE7 - a Live search box, prominently displayed top right of the browser window. Time to check your rankings on MSN? The search landscape could be about to change. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Ralph Spence Subject: Meta Tags and Duplicate Content On the subject of meta tags and duplicate content. I have an interest in car dealer websites I search competitors using Googles [ site:www.domain.co.uk ]. It's interesting how many pages they report and how many they omit as duplicate content. There's one dealer who has only one in over a hundred pages showing as a result. Recently two pdfs joined the results. If you ask for those omitted to be included all pages are reported. Every single page has the same page description which boasts being the biggest and best. I think it's called building the brand. Then go to view source and the keywords have been copied from page to page. The only difference in the pages are the titles. Keywords are the same. Descriptions are the same. The pages contain no content/text being made up of fancy features. I doubt this site could be found with a torchlight. Still being the biggest I expect they can afford the PPC expense. As someone said last week it's a case of 'buy me results'. And I imagine when bosses cry about performance the marketing manager can say they're doing all they can and have spent the budget. If they get fired for poor performance they can always boast at an interview their responsibility for such a large budget. Personally I prefer to write an attractive headline for a page which will appear as the page title in a search. Then follow it with an interesting paragraph of text which appears as the page description. Too simple and not macho enough I know but it costs nothing and ensure what's written on a page is interesting and useful. Not manufactured by fancy features. So yes, meta tags can muck you up. Copy pages to edit whilst leaving the old page as an archive has the same result. Regards Ralph Spence ralphspenceuk, yahoo.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Shari Thurow Subject: Designing for the User not the Search Hi all- This is in response to Nathan Holley's post in LED #2251 [ http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1069/55/ ] in which he stated. > ... don't create your site for the search engines! Create > it for the user. If good design, thoughtful navigation and > usability, and gripping content are all put online, it's only > a matter of TIME until the traffic starts coming. First and foremost, I want to say that I agree with his statements. Google is not going to spend thousands or millions of dollars on your products and services; your customers will. So I always design for users first. I say that all of the time at conferences. Nonetheless, people search. People search and don't realize that they are searching. For some odd reason, the word "search" came to mean querying information retrieval systems, and people still cling to that narrow definition of search, even people who should know better (i.e. search engine optimizers, especially the black-hat folks). Search encompasses a wide variety of behaviors, and it is rarely a linear process. I wrote an article about it earlier this year: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3607336 The thing is that even though you should not design, write, program, etc. a site only or primarily for the commercial Web search engines, you do have to accept the fact that people search, and your site should accommodate the variety of ways in which people search. Following Web site usability principles certainly does address a wide variety of search behaviors, but few usability professionals truly recognize how important querying behavior can and should be accounted for. Even worse are business owners who choose not to recognize that search optimization is a subset of Web site usability. I understand genuine ignorance. What I don't understand is choosing to remain ignorant. I forgot where I read it, but some usability folks have decided that they do search optimization and not search engine optimization. They want to differentiate themselves from the black hats. Nonetheless, they are being as stupid and/or ignorant as many black hats by not acknowledging that querying is an important search behavior to address, and that people really do query. On the white board above my desk, I have written "Get over yourself" as a reminder to not focus on my ego. It's been there for years. Stop the ignorance, man. If you are going to call yourself a search or Web site usability expert, you need to recognize and accommodate for a wide variety of search behaviors. If you don't, then you are really not a search expert, are you? My 2 cents, and stepping down from my soap box. Sincerely, Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director Grantastic Designs, Inc. http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/tips.html -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John "Zeke" Brumage Subject: Competitor ads > If you have Google Ad Sense on your site, can you also > have Yahoo's (or whomever's) "Ad Sense" on your site? - Nancy Cardinali, LED 2253 My reading, you can have google and yahoo ads in the same website, but not on the same page. You can have other ads on the same page but thay cannot be "Content sensitive" ads. The other thing to be careful of: You are not allowed to contact advertisers and solicit ads directly for your site. I keep a complete version of important pages with a set of google ads, and with a set of yahoo ads. In case there is a server meltdown, or a run of low quality ads, i can switch quickly. John Brumage Disco Legend Zeke -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Flash Sites (and small biz search) > ... you can also get top 10 index placement without > a single HTML character on a page. How? Well, > that's something I had to figure out myself... - Mark Whitman, LED 2252 Great points in your post, Mark. Especially agree about the usefulness of Flash and graphical stuff for viral marketing. These can be crazy effective. I'd love to hear about your techniques for achieving high rankings, but I understand why you'd like to keep them close to your chest. Any other LEDers have experience with ranking Flash sites? I'll throw my .02 on the table and fill everyone in with what works for me: Incoming links are quite important, although these *may* be discounted in coming Google updates (interesting discussion on how the [ miserable failure ] search has changed recently, and possible reasons why: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/8916 ). I'm not intending to step out onto linking territory here - there are others far more qualified than I am in that regard. I'm just saying that this factor *may* change. I'm still using it for Flash sites (and other sites), but I'm keeping things in mind should they change future algos. Let me do this a little differently so I don't go on and on. Here's a bullet list for SEOing Flash (and image-only) sites: - Optimize incoming links. - Meta tags. Be sure to input metadata via your Flash development tool of choice. - SE-Flash is a cool tool that gives you an idea what the search engines see when spidering Flash movies: http://www.se-flash.com/ . - The Flash search engine SDK is your most important tool for these multimedia sites. One thing this tool allows you to do is extract text from Flash streams. It's called "swf2html" and it's especially cool - it lets you pull text / links from Macromedia Flash and dumps it in an HTML file: http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/ . Once you've got the generated HTML you can go in and tweak / optimize it to benefit from common sense usability / SEO: placement of your keywords, titles, etc. Make sure text and links aren't duplicated in the file and fonts / backgrounds provide a readable contrast. - Provide alternate pages. Okay, not really what we're talking about here, but having alternative pages for humans and spiders is a good idea. One tricky blackhat technique that I DO NOT recommend is used quite often. That's the creation of invisible text layers that act as spider food instead of the Flash movie. So a spider sees text and the visitor sees the Flash. Do not choose this route! I'm only listing it here because you'll no doubt run across it online. Hidden anything is bad in the eyes of the search engines. Also, Google can index Flash content just fine. Try this search for an example (look for the word "flash" in blue print to the left of the results): [ strongbad filetype:swf ] Any other tricks of the trade people are using? Nathan Holley -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: Small biz search > ... a site should be targeted to a specific purpose > and sometimes demographic group. Using graphics > only and Flash only has gotten excellent results > when used for the purpose of being viral marketing > tools. - Mark Whitman, LED 2252 While I can appreciate your statements it's somewhat clear you have not worked with a lot of the big guys on the web. Flash, graphics etc. are accents just as are catchy displays in retail stores. If one is building a site that perhaps covers let's say Weddings this all makes sense, movie reviews etc. But for sales you will be hard pressed to find any large corporate reseller using these newer technologies for anything but accent. The largest winners in eCommerce going from Amazon to Target, Walmart, Home Shopping Network, CompUSA, Circuit City and many many others. They focus the energy on using graphics and animations etc. as ways to present product to the end consumer in an attractive fashion, nothing more basically and it works. Consumers are interested in finding what they want easily and at the best price as well as timely delivery and no hassles. That's it. If the overall site navigation is good, it's attractive, fast, easy to use and the consumer doesnt have to worry about this or that its chances of success are MUCH greater. While we are re-working our software sales site as I noted prior our previous one did so well in search engines several just whacked our ranking. But, even at that.... We stock some 4000 software titles and the traffic we obtained through exceptional SE ranking was NOTHING in comparison to the traffic we derived from simple software review sites. For every 10 or so purchases coming in via search engines we'd see 200 coming in from places like Gamespot, PC IGN, various independent software review places linking us. Again... To ANY small business, do NOT put EVER SO MUCH attention towards search engines. Its nice to have them yes... But in comparison to building your own portal using say Joomla or Mambo, diversifying your various web presences and utilizing other portals and sites you will get MUCH more traffic and MUCH more in the way of people bookmarking your site. There simply is no comparison. We'd pop into sites like Gamespot etc. where there are forums and leave posts... "Microsoft Freelancer can be found here for only $7.99"... The users do the rest, they go to other game sites, "Hey $8 over there!". Before you know it, you have 1000 copies sold just like that. Rick Gortatowsky -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Motherwell Subject: Dropping PPC > In spite of such professional coverage and investigations, > some, as represented by Mr. Motherwell [issue 2251], seem > to think that the click fraud issue just isn't that important - David Yancey, LED 2253 What an absolutely appallingly unjustified, and evidence free, MISrepresentation of my views. I have never said, nor written to this group or anywhere else, that click fraud doesn't happen, or that it isn't an important issue. Not once. Not ever. Allow me to clarify my position for you. There are many issues that directly relate to the field of Pay Per Click keyword advertising, such as Google AdWords. Click fraud is, indeed, one of them. How important? That depends upon many factors, and also an acceptance that "importance" is, in this context, relative and not absolute. Click fraud is AN issue (as in one amongst many) that directly affects PPC advertising. Click fraud's "importance" or otherwise is relative to all the issues affecting a specific account, and cannot be generalised in any grand manner. Some of these issues affecting a specific account will be more important than click fraud, and others less important than click fraud. That is my position and, although I can't speak for 'folks like' me, what that has to do with your 6 points is beyond me. I won't dignify these points with individual responses because they range from emotive arguments ("it costs small businesses money") to unjustified figures (20%, 25% and 30% click fraud are all quoted, without any explanation of what the term means or justification) and a bizarre set of hypothesises questioning everything from the intelligence and technical ability of the "unbelievers" to the desire to avoid a drop in Google share price, none of which has anything to do with the importance or otherwise of click fraud, ane merely serve to demonise those you choose to oppose. The real issue with click fraud is the excruciatingly simple process of determining whether AdWords or any other advertising is worth it. That equation, which is such a ridiculously simple equation that it defies belief it isn't at the heart of all Click Fraud discussions, is this: An Advertising medium is justified if and only if the revenue generated, multiplied by margin if relevant, is greater than the money spent advertising. That is the equation I promote; the only one that, in the end, matters. How click fraud affects this equation is the main issue. I am happy to debate emotions, security commissions, Mom And Pop's survival, the environment, obesity and any other issues people wish to throw out there. Unless, however, each and every point raised relates back directly to either the equation above, or to some specific example of a way to reduce click fraud that is cost effective, I don't think such debates prove anything. Lastly, that you chose to attach MY name to your odd collection of "unbeliever arguments" and some imagined and nebulous position that I have never held, and indeed no one has ever held, whilst neither responding to, nor quoting, anything I ever wrote, is the textbook example of a straw man argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man, an old fallacy indeed. (And - "Present someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, refute that person's arguments, and pretend that every upholder of that position, and thus the position itself, has been defeated" - is a pretty accurate assessment of what your post did) I object mightily to having been cast in the role of the Osama bin Laden / Goldstein / Satan of this issue; the bad man who personifies all that is wrong. I find the attaching my name to your set of arguments appallingly bad form, and deeply regrettable. That "folk like (me)" also get caught in your net is of no comfort at all. I would ask that, in the future, if you wish to attach my name to a set of views, or indeed anyone name, that you quote actual arguments, and not put words in my mouth. Mr Michael Motherwell ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John Quinlan Subject: Keyword emails > Lately, I have been receiving spam emails [consisting > of just] a whole bunch of words (I think they are keywords) > that don't make sense... I am wondering how the > spammer will find this useful to send. - Thomas Yoon, LED 2253 Regarding Thomas Yoon's question about random words in an email. Rather than the words being key words or detectable by search engines and the like, I think that you will find that the whole point is for the email to be considered "genuine" by spam filters. John Quinlan http://www.sioli.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Keyword emails These strings of words or apparent conversations / stories are the spammer's attempt to get the SPAM past any filters. Usually these emails will include their real message as an image although sometimes the message is also in plain text. If you do not use an email client that displays the images, you would not see the real message when it is sent as an image. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: John Smart Subject: Keyword emails Keyword e-Mails are one thing. Dumb-ass e-Mails are another. Our domain is internetdesign.com and daily I get 4 or 5 empty e-Mails sent "from": This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Other than testing for bounce backs (although the headers show faked data) I see no reason for doing this. It must be costing someone money to send me these things -- so who are they and why are they doing this? John Smart InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Silence is one great art of conversation." - Anon. |
