| LED Digest 1758: Usability, SEO Guarantees, lots more |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. 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 ................................................ March 1, 2004 Issue #1758 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Usability ==-- ~ John Fallentine "Are the users getting frustrated with their experience and leaving?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Search Engine Marketing Company Guarantees ==-- ~ Sebastien Billard "This company most likely offers PPC management..." ~ Mike Jacobs "Sounds like this company will take your money and open Overture and Google Adwords accounts." --== Designing Sites for Different Browsers ==-- ~ Shari Thurow "What is great about usability testing is that it keeps us honest." --== Mozilla vs Internet Explorer ==-- ~ Kevin McDonald "Everyone I talk to complains about pop-ups and what to do." --== Unrelated, Unsavory & Unwanted Links ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "People need to calm down about these 'unsavory links'." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Australia's Spam Act ==-- ~ Brett Dorron ======= NEW ===================================== From: John Fallentine Subject: Usability I have been the web developer for an ecommerce site for a couple of years now. From my start until now, after optimizing many pages and implementing new strategies, our site traffic has increased around 4X. Strangely, the sales have not increased remotely close to the increase in traffic. I hesitate to spend time / money into optimization or buying keywords as it seems it is ineffective. This leads me to conclude that there might be a usability issue here. Are the users getting frustrated with their experience and leaving? Does anyone recommend a usability expert or have similar issues? John Fallentine www.greatwindows.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Sebastien Billard Subject: Guaranted Placement > Do any of these so-called Search Engine Marketing > companies have contracts with the Yahoos of the world, > or are they simply shilling to the uninformed? - Jim Berry, LED 1757 This company most likely offers Pay Per Click management (sponsored listings) via Google Adwords, Overture and various PPC engines. As the placement is determined by the amout of the bid, it is very easy to guarantee top placement, given you pay enough. They act just as resellers of those listings and won't give you any advantage. PPC can be interesting sometimes, but IMHO it should always be a complement to regular Search Engine Optimisation, as it is very expensive on the long term. Regards, Sebastien Billard www.sumhit-referencement.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Mike Jacobs Subject: SE Guarantees In regards to Jim Berry's post... Sounds like this company will take your money and open Overture and Google Adwords accounts. Bid high enough, and you can be placed in whatever sponsored link section you want. Click a few times and enter your credit card number and you, too can have an account with Yahoo/Overture or Google. Notice how they aren't talking about the "natural search" sections. Those are the hard ones, the sponsored links are paid for. Mike Jacobs www.webmogul.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Shari Thurow Subject: Designing sites for different browsers Hi all, This is in response to the recent threads about Mozilla vs. IE. In LED #1756, I thought Steve Marriott's observations were very astute and accurate. > Second there are the designers, ex print, multimedia, > graphic, those who just manage a website, whatever. > They need to reach a mass market, using whatever > mass marketing techniques are available and the > bottom line is not whether a browser is WC3 compliant, > it's which browser is in most households. As a designer, I really appreciated all of his comments. I felt he understands the designers' and programmers' perpectives in their entirety. I also wanted to put in my extra 2 cents on this topic - usability. One of the most difficult tasks for designers, developers, and programmers is to make both the client and the client's target audience happy. For example, we usability test a number of our site designs (or parts of a site) before we release them to the public. What is great about usability testing is that it keeps us honest. We understand that our personal browsing experience is not the same as others. CEOs or marketing directors in charge of a site often have the opinion that everyone has the same computer monitor, Internet connection, browser, etc. that everyone else has. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've heard, "Well this is how I would do it," or "This is what I see on my computer." Great. So you know how to use your own site. It's more important that your target audience knows how to use your site. It is very, very difficult to communicate that premise without focus groups or usability testing. With these two options, you can present a formal report with data to a client. Designing and writing for the largest common denominator? A fact of life for developers. We design primarily for IE, but we try to make sure the site looks acceptable in other browsers. Like Safari for the Mac. If you want an honest assessment of a site and don't have a lot of money, do a focus group. Don't use your family members, friends, or colleagues as testers because they are not necessarily in a target audience. And they might try to be nice instead of being honest. The brutal honesty of testing groups really, really helps us make better sites. Another option is a heuristic evaluation. A usability expert will rip a site apart and give suggestions for improvement. The folks at User Interface Engineering, Nielsen Norman Group, and Human Factors International offer this service if usability testing isn't in your budget. Kind of blows away the premise of paying $600 for a Web site and making millions of dollars, huh? Building and promoting a site takes time and expertise. Browser consideration is a part of the development process. Best wishes, Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director ~ Search Engine Visibility book now available http://www.searchenginesbook.com/ ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Kevin McDonald Subject: Mozilla > I would like to emphasize Mozilla is not Netscape. > Mozilla is slim, stable and faster than Netscape... > IE is still the leading browser in the web, no doubt. > But it is stagnating... - Viggie Bala, LED 1754 Viggie, I could not agree with you more. I have been using Mozilla (1.5 and Firefox (Firebird)) now for the last few months and found it to be far more stable and less of a headache. Everyone I talk to complains about pop-ups and what to do. Now, of course, the companies that make the pop-up blockers want you to pay to have their software, which I found in some cases were poor at best. Mozilla just seems to do this with ease. IE6 can't do it at all. So my question is why should I pay for a piece of software, such as pop-blockers, when all I need to do is install Mozilla? Kevin McDonald ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Unsavory links > When viewing my referrer information for the past weeks, > I see that I am getting visits to my site that were referred > by some very strange sites... - Donald Nelson, LED 1856 Just because a surfer's browser reports a given site to your Web server as a referring site, that is not necessarily so. People could have your page bookmarked and decide, after searching for something else, to go back to your site. They could also be searching for something specific in one browser window and trying links in another (I do this often). The browser can only tell your Web server what the last site visited was. It cannot tell your Web server whether there was any link from that site to your own. People need to calm down about these "unsavory links". In most cases, they don't exist, except in your concerns. And even if porn sites did waste their time with such links (it would be contrary to good SEO, btw), they wouldn't be hurting you in the least. Unless you don't wish to show your good, clean content to <GASP!> someone who has, FOR ANY REASON, visited a porn site. Michael Martinez, Author Understanding Middle-earth, Parma Endorion, and Visualizing Middle-earth http://www.xenite.org/ ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Brett Dorron Subject: Fighting Spam I thought the following article about Australia's new anti-Spam laws may be of interest to many LED'ers. This text was sent by my ISP, but the official URL is included below. Brett Dorron ------------------------ "Australia's new SPAM Act comes into full force on 10 April 2004 and will regulate the sending of email, SMS and other electronic messages of a commercial nature with Australian Internet links. "The Act still won't cover the vast majority of SPAM, which originates outside Australia. However, the Government is hoping that its tough measures will lead to similar legislation being implemented in the US and Europe. "The SPAM Act regulates commercial electronic messages ("CEMs") by providing that, subject to limited exceptions, they: must not be sent without the prior consent of the recipient. (That consent may be express or implied ("reasonably inferred") from the conduct, business and other relationships of the person or organisation concerned.); must contain a functional unsubscribe facility; and must accurately identify the sender of the message. "The SPAM Act also prohibits the use of address harvest software (as well as the lists generated by such software). "The Act draws a distinction between CEMs and "designated commercial electronic messages" ("DCEMs"), which the Act does not prohibit. A DCEM is defined as a message which only contains factual information and certain additional information about the sender of the message, but only if the message would not constitute a CEM without that additional information. Electronic messages from government bodies, political parties, religious organisations, charities or educational institutions are DCEMs. "BigPond has already taken an active role in the fight against SPAM, and you can rest assured that we'll be adhering to the new SPAM Act in order to ensure you can enjoy the best possible online experience." For a copy of the SPAM Act: http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/comact/11/6735/top.htm ------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, teach gym." - Woody Allen |
