Jon’s In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

This is old news in some ways, but the update is still happening so I consider it fair game. You may have experienced a drop in both PageRank and keyword rankings. This seems to be a bigger update than usual.

Google’s new system, introduced in the last couple of years, was supposedly to be one of ‘Constant Updating’. The idea being that we wouldn’t see the sudden catastrophic drops across the board that the search word experienced before. Businesses who have been around for a few years online can tell you stories of Google updates that came close to putting them out of business.

The lesson there might be ‘Expand your marketing to create other sources of business’ instead of ‘Google Sucks…sometimes’, but I don’t want to preach. The current concern is that this update is reminiscent of those old days, bringing mass upheavals that have affected a lot of industries.

What should you do if your search rankings dropped? Keep working on your SEO, pushing ahead. Look for anything you might have done that created problems (like selling links on your site). Don’t Panic. If you’re doing the right thing(s) you’ll probably rise back up in time. And start looking for other ways of generating business. Depending on one search engine, especially the occasionally volatile Google, puts you at their mercy for your livelihood. Think about that and plan accordingly.

Hawaii is always behind the Mainland on trends and developments. Some say we’re 10 years behind, some say 5. That lag may have shortened due to the Internet, but it still exists. Frankly, the Islands’ slower movement forward is fine with me. While I lived on the Mainland I grew tired of the new ‘thing’ that was going to save us all from our boring lives. Usually this ‘thing’ was dogpiled on by hipsters and the clueless, whose greatest talent was finding a parade to jump in front of.

Here in Hawaii we aren’t as inundated with press lauding the latest 20-something who will lead us to the Promised Land with yet another new social/bookmarking software/site. It’s nice to be somewhat out of that loop. But, Hawaii is dangerously slow on adapting to the Internet market.

Hawaii needs to be expanding now to get in the web marketing and selling game. Otherwise, there may come a day when the catch-up factor may be too large for local businesses to overcome.

Many Hawaii businesses are still in the ‘I have a web site and that’s enough’ mindset of ten years ago. If the Islands are going to move away from dependence on tourism, one of the brightest alternatives is surely the Web. This is especially important as we lose longtime local businesses here more and more. If they could expand online, gaining access to new markets, they wouldn’t be pushed out of existence so easily.

With all the talk of protecting ‘Local Businesses’ in Hawaii, it’s time that we actually do something substantial to back it up. If we (ie the State government) don’t - and if Hawaii businesses themselves don’t act themselves - we’re going to be stuck here with Mainland and Foreign businesses taking over the market completely.

I’m always surprised by sites that either do not have a sitemap (or is it site map? I never know) or hide it away. It’s like they’re ashamed of it. They shouldn’t be, because it’s an important part of any web site. Some visitors actually look for the site map immediately on arriving. For others it’s the first place they think of if they don’t see what they’re looking for on the home page. So why do so many site owners make it so difficult to find. Answer: Beats me. But they shouldn’t.

Your web site should have a prominent link to your site map somewhere toward the top of your home page. And every other page, if at all possible. It goes back to the #1 rule of site building & layout - give the visitor what they want. It’s difficult to satisfy every conceivable want and need, though. Especially if you offer a range of products or services. So you do the next best thing as a backup - you give the visitor an easy way to find what they’re looking for. You do that by making it simple to get to the site map page, where they’ll see everything you offer. And, if you’re smart, that page is laid out in an easy to read & understand structure.

Now - your humanoid aren’t your only market. You also have to think of your other visitors, who are just as important. They are the search engine bots. Those guys from Google, Yahoo, MSN and everybody else in the search game today. You want to do the same thing for these visitors - make it easy to find everything, and everywhere, on your site.

That starts by putting a text link - NOT a graphic link - to your sitemap on the home page. Serve it up to them on a platter so they can go there and locate every area of your site. It’s easy to do, yet so many sites miss this. They use a graphic link, which search engine bots can’t follow or they don’t have a link to it at all on the homepage.

Do yourself and your visitors a favor. Put that sitemap text link on your home page and make it stand out. It’s that easy.

Target is being taken to court. Is it because of employee/employer issues? No. Is it because of unsafe products they sold? No. Is it because of alleged discrimination against a customer? No, but you’re getting warmer.

The National Federation of the Blind is taking Target to court over their web site. Specifically, the fact that they feel Target’s web site is not accessible to the site-impaired. It’s a case that could affect retailers everywhere. After all, every store and every business has a web site.

What this all boils down to is Web Usability & Accessibility - making and constructing your web site so it is easy to understand and to navigate. Not only by the blind, but by everyone. It’s a major point that many businesses miss. And that affects their profits more than they think.

Making your web site usable and accessible isn’t the same as adding a wheelchair ramp outside your shop. It’s much more than that. Usability and accessibility ultimately greases the slide customers ride from entering your store down into the Checkout line. If you can’t get behind it just from a legal obligation, surely you will appreciate it if you understand that it will affect your bottom line. For the better.

Not only does usability open the site fully to all your customer - it also will help your SEO efforts. After all, feeding content clearly to your visitors should also make it easier for search engine bots to collect and understand it as well. It’s a win-win all around.

The implications of Target’s case aren’t clear yet. But, requiring businesses to improve their site’s usability might be one of the few things the government could get completely right.

Marketing Sherpa just came out with the results of a new survey. They polled 2500 Search Engine marketers/marketing firms and found that SEO and SEM ran neck and neck. At least with the marketers.

This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve found that search advertising, such as AdWords, is as profitable and beneficial to business as search optimization. Besides, as I’ve said before, the 2 can work together to create a dual front effort that can cross-pollinate. It’s win-win if you do it right.

SEM has gotten a bad name with some businesses, unfortunately. Google’s limp response to the click fraud problem is at least partly responsible. At times they made Ford’s response to the Pinto look good. But there’s another factor in that perception - and it’s short-sightedness by the businesses themselves.

I have heard businesses over and over talk about how they won’t use AdWords or other search advertising because ‘you have to pay for it’. As if all the other advertising and marketing they do is free. And all the money they pay for organic search optimization is from their Monopoly game.

SEO & SEM are both great tools and great ways to get business. Both cost money. Both will pay off. Why would you not take advantage of both?

In the past, optimization for images & graphics consisted of stuffing keywords into the ALT tag. This tactic was so abused that Google no longer takes the ALT tag as seriously as it once did. Still, it’s worth using that outlet for a keyword or 2, as long as it’s done with a lighter touch.

The new SEO opportunity for images, though, is the image name. This isn’t completely a new discovery. SEOs have been using keyword rich names for their graphics for a while - just in case it did matter in the great search engine algorithm we’re always chasing.

What IS new is the Universal Search that Google now uses as their delivery mode. Searches can now get a mix of media in their results, including pictures, web sites, videos & just about anything else that might be relevant to the keyphrase used. The amount of ‘mixing’ you see will vary from search to search, of course.

Still, this Universal Search has elevated graphics and videos from just web site elements to something a little more important. At least in the eyes of the search engines. They’re now given a little more weight as they just might be what the searcher is looking for, rather than an entire web site, or web page.

What does that mean for you? It means you should start naming your graphics with keywords, but with one crucial criteria - doing it only when appropriate and relevant. Still, that opens a lot of opportunity. How do you do it right?

You must separate words, just as you would if they were written out. No words running together. That means using a dash (’-') as a divider. For example, if you sell convertibles, you might name a picture ‘Ford-Convertible.jpg’ or ‘Vintage-Mustang-Convertible.jpg’. It’s easy. You can probably use the underscore as well ( ‘_’ ), but it can create confusion as it is overlooked often. It’s position there on the floor can bring problems you never thought of. Trust me on this.

It looks like the other side of the coin is valid as well. A couple of posts back I wrote about studies that showed how search directly influenced offline sales. Now, another study has come out, done by Jupiter Research.

This time, the numbers told us something interesting about offline influencing online. According to the study, 2/3 of searchers have done searches on certain keywords as a result of exposure to offline marketing/advertising.

That makes a solid case for traditional advertising/marketing being far from dead.  Some have trumpeted the end of these outlets in the past few years, but this study has shown those funeral notices to be premature.

Even better news for offline efforts - 39% of those who were ‘influenced’ to do an online search made a purchase on-site. That’s the kind of traffic businesses want to get.

It backs up my belief that offline/online advertising and marketing can serve each other, building both sides of the business to new heights.

Google, more specifically Google AdWords, has just launched a new site dedicated solely to click fraud - info on it, info on fighting it, info on what they’re doing about it. At least that’s what they say the site will be. Right now there’s not much there:

http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/index.html

Check it out for yourself. At the time of this writing the front page has 3 very brief entries. 2 of them are just listings of upcoming conferences for AdWords professionals/advertisers. The few other pages have very little content as well. If this is supposed to be a show of force in the war on click fraud, it’s apparent they only brought a popgun.

It’s another sign that Google doesn’t get it. True, it’s just the initial launch. But for a problem of this magnitude, a limp effort like this doesn’t inspire much confidence. To say the least. It looks like more of the same from Google. That ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto they trumpeted so loudly is becoming harder and harder to hear these days. As they say ‘Money Changes Everything’. Maybe that should be Google’s new motto.

2 new studies and their findings were revealed recently, one of them commissioned by Yahoo. The Yahoo study involved 175,00 subjects who were divided by theri exposure, or non-exposure, to online ads. Their demographics and ‘behavior’ patterns were identical otherwise. Very interesting data emerged that showed the strength online advertising gives to your offline sales:

> Those shown ads online did more pre-shopping, ie research, and they spent 41% more in-store than their non-exposed counterparts.

The 2nd study, by comScore surveyed 3,000 consumers. They found that these local searchers (ie people specifically looking for a store, product, service offered in their area) followed up their online research with offline contact 82% of the time. That contact took the form of a store visit, phone call and/or purchase. Of those who made the offline follow-up, 61% of them made a purchase. That’s not a bad payoff.

The lesson here is that online advertising - whether that’s Google AdWords, Yahoo Ads or MSN’s program - bring profits and business to you offline as much, even more, than through online means. An AdWords campaign that doesn’t produce emails or other online interaction isn’t necessarily an unproductive effort. There’s more to online marketing than just having a website.

Google has been taking Squidoo pages out of its index today - and it looks like a house cleaning, not a case of taking out a few bad apples. Is it a case of the good being taken down with the bad or is the site’s problem that widespread?

According to news and industry reports - the problem is really that Big. Squidoo has been  notorious for some time as a place for spammers and Black Hat SEO practitioners to thrive. It’s been discussed openly for over a year and a half in SEO/SEM forums. It was a known issue, but it just wasn’t deal with until now. This is another problem with the User-Created Content that has made Web 2.0 the Big Deal of  the past 2 or 3 years.

Sites like MySpace have made stars of people who normally would have flown under the radar. In some cases, it’s made stars of people who should have remained under the reader and out of my sight, like Dane Cook. The problem is that the free reign can be manipulated fairly easily if you have the time and motivation. And Black Hat SEOs have both.

What does this mean for Community/User-Created Content sites from now on? Does it mean closer policing by Google or by the site’s overseers? I’m betting on inside policing. After all, with Squidoo’s pages being banned now, traffic to their pages has dropped like a stone. And that only took a few days to happen.

Basically, without the Google traffic, Squidoo can’t offer its members much. After all, that’s the whole point of  the pages - attention. At least for most people who actively use them. Cut off the source that provides the audience and you’re left with not much to sing about. Sure, you have a page you can send your friends to, but you can do that anywhere on the Net.

The lesson is that Squidoo, and sites like it, need to do a better job of keeping an eye on their store. Sure, it’s difficult, but would they rather be doing that or enjoy life outside of the Google index, which is where they are now? Just because it’s User-Created, doesn’t mean the User can’t take you down with them. Catering to Black Hat SEOs is not good for long-term business. Just ask Squidoo.