Nashville-based Web Design, SEO, Web Analytics, and Inbound Marketing » SearchViz: Get Found. » blog http://searchviz.com SearchViz: Get found. SearchViz is an inbound marketing agency that optimizes discovery and findability online. We offer search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), web analytics, email marketing, social media consulting, and web design, all with the intent of generating leads and conversions. Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:27:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 SearchViz State of the Web 2010: Building and Managing Websites Is Difficult http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/02/18/searchviz-state-of-the-web-2010-building-and-managing-websites-is-difficult/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/02/18/searchviz-state-of-the-web-2010-building-and-managing-websites-is-difficult/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:58:19 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=301 under construction

A few years ago, when debating pricing for a web project that involved a mix of design and development, I wound up on the losing end of the discussion when the account executive concluded, “It’s just a website.” I’ve also been in countless discussions with managers (none of whom have any true technical experience) where they set the expectations for a project (both theirs and mine) by asserting, “That should be easy.” And I’ve also been at the end of the assembly line of idea factories, where the non-technical people hold a brainstorming session and enthusiastically present me with all of them because they’re all good.

One thing that has long appealed to me about information technology and software development is that it is possible to do just about anything. It is possible to implement all those good ideas. The hitch to that as an applied technologist is that it makes it very easy to say “yes” to the question, “Can we do that?” But that doesn’t have any bearing on the answer to, “Should we do that?” or the similarly troublesome, “We need that by next week.”

I’d like to take a little bit of time to explore appropriate expectations for web and software development for non-practitioners who will be responsible for managing them. First and foremost, it’s okay and probably best to accept that web projects are difficult to build and difficult to manage.

I would imagine that 1% of web developers are the sort that have a rich grasp of everything that drives a website, from operating system to database to programming language to interface. Maybe 5% are the sort that can hack great code for years on end just for you. Chances are that you don’t have one working for you, and chances are that the agency building your website doesn’t either. This will complicate things slightly, but it won’t make them impossible.

Let’s remind ourselves of what a website is: it’s a collection of documents and elements (like Ajax modules and so forth) that, when requested by a browser (whether Web, mobile, or other), deliver markup (often some variant of HTML) that can be rendered in a predictable way.

Honestly, despite starting my life in the industry almost 15 years ago working for an internet service provider (ISP), I’ve never maintained a personal website. Actually, while in college, as a result of working as a consultant for the computer science lab, I wound up with some web space that I used for a simple personal site that vanished when I graduated. And that site was a collection of static HTML documents that I edited manually (probably with vi).

At it’s most basic, a web page looks like this:


<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello, World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello, world!</p>
  </body>
</html>

Easy, right?! It’s just a website!

(Here’s an aside. We maintain this blog in WordPress, which, for a robust blogging platform, still makes it surprisingly difficult to include examples of markup because of the aggressive desire for its editor to render everything. So I had to include a bunch of individual HTML entities to get the above example to show up correctly.)

Sure, it’s just a website. But it doesn’t have any images or links, it’s just one page, and I haven’t thought about how I’m going to manage it. I don’t know what the domain name is or where I’m going to host it. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a static HTML document or the output of a dynamic document (e.g., PHP). I haven’t thought about whether referencing the document reveals whether it is static or anything else about its implementation (e.g., does it live at /hello-world.html, /hello-world.php, or /hello-world with the help of server rules?). I don’t have an update schedule or anything else. And every website is different.

Let’s survey the common types of website that exist out there (and if you think I’m omitting anything or oversimplifying, please feel free to elaborate in the comments):

  • brochure: A mostly static site with relatively few (< 100) pages designed to present a person, place, thing, or idea with a focus on basic text and image content with occasional opportunities for rich media.
  • blog: A content-oriented site typically presented with posts in reverse chronological order and often providing visibility into most popular posts, tags/labels, and other ways of considering the content.
  • content: A rich content site like a news, government, or academic site that is constantly producing new content, often not in a simple, steady stream like a blog.
  • e-commerce: A site wherein any content is a pre-cursor to a financial transaction of some kind, whether a donation or a purchase.

Our site, for instance, is basically a brochure paired with a blog. I expect that someday there might be e-commerce considerations. Depending on what happens, there could be a content site in there somewhere.

All of the above types likely include some variety of form, which is the essence of interactivity built into the primitive Web. A contact form, an order form, a comment form, a rich text editor (which might need to be submitted to publish a news story, for instance). And forms invite the first of our series of complicated decisions: What happens to the output of the form?

Form submissions could be emailed. They could be emailed to a single email address or to multiple email addresses. They could be stored in a database. They could trigger a server-side action of some kind. They can do any and all of the above.

And Web interactivity involves all kinds of corner cases. Let’s say we’re considering a limited inventory retail operation. And let’s say it involves an online shopping cart. And let’s say I, a potential customer come along and, perhaps unknowingly, put the last item in my shopping cart. And then I remember that I have to run an errand before the place I need to get to closes for the day, and I leave. Maybe I even leave my browser window open. And then you come along. And you were looking for the item I just put in my shopping cart. Has the merchant considered how his or her site will behave in this scenario? After all, it’s just a website.

And all this is to say nothing of security considerations. After testing performance for a while, Google recently decided to make secure communication the default for Gmail. Not just for authenticating but for the entire session. For transmitting each message body. Google is judicious about its use of secure connections across its services. I’ve often wondered why secure connections aren’t the default for all web-based authentication from financial services to FTP.

Let’s get into the basics of what it takes to build a website:

Domain Name, Registrars, and DNS

The first thing you really need for a website is your domain name. Until Yahoo! shut down GeoCities, you could go there to get a free site. You can try Google Sites, but it’s not quite the same. And if you’re just doing a blog and you don’t care about owning this basic asset, you can do something like Blogger or WordPress, which will give you something like justawebsite.blogspot.com or justawebsite.wordpress.com. How do you do this? Well, geez. We’re just trying to pick a domain name, and we’ve opened a can of worms. Because a domain name gets us tied up in the Domain Name System (DNS). So first we need a registrar, and then we need to make sure that we can configure DNS appropriately to work with our web hosting environment (see next item).

Web Hosting

So you’ve registered your domain name. Now you need to make it so that when someone types in justawebsite.com and it successfully resolves to an IP address that the server at that IP address is listening, probably on port 80, and is ready to serve pages. I’ve mentioned previously that we host with A2 Hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

Most websites just need shared web hosting, which basically means a bunch of other websites about the same size (disk space, traffic) as yours are using shared resources. Which is fine.

I used to host some sites with TextDrive, which became Joyent, which seems no longer to offer easily understood web hosting services (despite TextDrive at one time having been a semi-official Ruby on Rails hosting service).

The two other major web hosts that I’ve seriously considered using in the past are DreamHost and pair Networks. I’ve also recently evaluated Media Temple for WordPress hosting. Yoast seems to like WestHost for WordPress hosting, but that could be helped by their paying him to like it. ;)

Managed Hosting

If, however, you’re doing something where you expect to be doing a lot of development or managing a number of services that require a dedicated server, you probably want a managed hosting solution like Rackspace or Tilted Planet. In these cases, you get access to a server or servers on a network that should be reliably managed, and you can get various packages and levels of management in the event that you don’t want to hire a system administrator (and, unless you’re doing something very innovative, why should you?).

Based on the coming of the cloud and the maturity of managed hosting and dedicated (and virtual servers), I would never encourage any but the most ambitious of enterprises to buy a piece of enterprise hardware. Someone else has already hired several sysadmins better than yours and is making the process of administration more efficient than you ever could.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems (and frameworks) are web software packages that typically give you a rich text editor, some basic formatting rules and templates, and let you run wild adding pages, posts, widgets, and the like.

In recent years, I’ve developed the most familiarity with Drupal and WordPress. Both have some maturity as platforms and both have vibrant developer communities that make support possible if not always reliable (especially as the ecosystem frays around the edges, sometimes even with popular modules and plug-ins). WordPress came to prominence as a blogging platform, but it’s now mature enough to be able to support brochure + blog sites if not outright content sites, although I still think Drupal is a better fit for full-featured content sites.

We’re about to begin work with a bastardized version of Joomla, and a professional acquaintance recently suggested that I take a look at MODx. I’ve spent a long time admiring TextPattern, although I’ve never used it. And I used to want to try Bricolage because it was built by default on PostgreSQL. For some reason, a number of local designers seem to enjoy paying for ExpressionEngine.

We also have done some projects that leverage Sitemason, a locally developed web-based content management system and hosting platform. While still a little more dotcom than Web 2.0 just because of the history of the company (where I worked as we launched into the dotcom implosion) and because of the dynamic nature of open systems (or closed systems that happen to be named Google), Sitemason continues to innovate quietly. In recent years, besides building incredibly innovative JavaScript libraries and a brilliant database abstraction, they also recently moved their entire hosting operation into the cloud, leveraging Amazon’s EC2.

Competing locally with Sitemason is Bondware. I can’t give Bondware awards for administrative interface, but I will say that they’re one of few products I’ve used where the Web and email platforms fit together nicely.

Which brings up a point I haven’t raised yet: the successful integration of a website among all the evolving marketing tools from email to social. There don’t seem to be too many people creating killer apps allowing small and medium-sized businesses to jump in and be truly in control of their inbound marketing. But that’s a topic for another time.

Blogging Platforms

What if you just want to blog? Well, we’ve already mentioned Blogger and WordPress. You could get a little funky and try something like Chyrp, which is pretty but carries the caveat of being a sole developer project.

E-Commerce

The first thing you’ll need if you’re going to build an e-commerce site is a merchant account. Then you’ll need to connect it to a payment gateway. Within the last decade, PayPal purchased Payflow, and CyberSource purchased Authorize.Net. I’m honestly not sure what other major players are even in this space. BancCard, a Nashville-based company, plays nicely with both Authorize.Net and PayPal.

I’ve used both osCommerce and Zen Cart, and I came away unimpressed. I’ve also done custom PayPal integrations, which were fine except that they were custom.

It’s recently been suggested to me that I give FoxyCart some consideration, and it looks like a worthy contender for any upcoming from-scratch e-commerce implementations. Also, somehow it had completely escaped my attention that they’re a Nashville-based company.

Custom Development

Here’s my position on custom development. It’s not all bad, but it should generally be the province of someone who is actually developing something innovative. If what you want is a 3-page instead of a 2-page pipeline for your online marketplace, you should be leveraging an existing e-commerce solution. If, however, you’ve got something you think is worthy of a patent, like single-click shopping, then develop your own.

We try not to do a lot of custom development. We try to strengthen standards for existing content management solutions by, first, relying on them and then, if necessary, extending them. We generally aren’t in the business of projects; we’re in the business of process.

But if you’re going to do it, even rolling your own involves some amount of choice. I’m only going to cover free and open source platforms, but I know there are plenty of sites out there implemented in any of ColdFusion, ASP, etc. Otherwise, popular choices include PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python. Of course, Google recently unveiled their own programming language, Go, so who knows.

With every language, it seems, comes a framework—Ruby on Rails or Symfony—which allegedly make development easier.

Maintenance

Wow. You finally did it. You launched justawebsite.com! Now what?

Well, if you’re not using fully managed hosting and instead you’re managing your own LAMP stack, you’ll need to keep up with Linux kernel patches, GNU/Linux distribution patches, Apache (or equivalent patches), database patches, and programming language/framework patches. If you’re leveraging a content management system, you’ll need to keep up with patches for the core system as well as for plug-ins/modules.

Generally, you can track security patches, but if you let your system suffer too much bit rot, APIs might change out from under you, so that a must-have feature becomes beyond reach.

And, of course, you’ll have dev, staging, and live versions of your site for testing with version control as necessary for any custom development.

Maybe we should just stick with hello-world.html…

Other Considerations

Recently, SparkFun had their Free Day on the same day that Google launched the Nexus One. Each site suffered. Chris Anderson wryly tweeted, “Google’s servers can’t keep up with Nexus demand; Free Day brings down Sparkfun. It’s 2010–why do we still have these scaling problems?” It’s a good question. To me, the cloud reached adolescence when Amazon EC2 came out of beta. It will reach adulthood when the elasticity is dynamic and demand-driven rather than reactionary on the part of admins who frantically allocate new instances as traffic swamps a site.

The End

My point in writing all this is to give some guidance to non-technical project managers and executives to remind them that asking for the moon is likely to get you the moon from your web development team, but it is likely to be late and over budget. And I also included a number of the individual technologies I’ve had exposure to, either directly or through my network of IT professionals in the hopes that webdevs everywhere will help me refine this post, which might take on a constantly evolving life outside the scope of the blog depending on response.

When you launch a website, you’re not completing a project; you’re kicking off a process that will live for the life of the site. It involves ensuring that the site itself doesn’t rely on moving parts that can’t be maintained. It involves ensuring that if the site is bound by a temporal dimension that it provides a user experience consistent with the passage of time. It involves ensuring that both the user and search experiences are continuously refreshed in order to be optimized.

Over time, my hope is that SearchViz actually improves the Web slightly. Both by helping create standards-compliant websites with an emphasis on both user and search experience and by working to ease the process of building and managing websites, whether by contributing to free and open source software projects like WordPress and Drupal or by building our own solutions for management of the resources required to operate a site. If you have any suggestions, or you’d like to participate as a customer, let us know.

Obviously, I’ve missed a world of options, but that’s what the comments section is for. Let me know what I’ve overlooked.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/02/18/searchviz-state-of-the-web-2010-building-and-managing-websites-is-difficult/feed/ 4 Fresh Thinking: Against Guruism, Unconferences, and Social Media Experts http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/01/10/fresh-thinking-against-guruism-unconferences-and-social-media-experts/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/01/10/fresh-thinking-against-guruism-unconferences-and-social-media-experts/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 02:49:02 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=231 twitter-icon
So tomorrow is the Nashville stop for Social Fresh. Remarkably, it seems that a number of area marketers will be shelling out $315 to learn how to forge better tweets in search of new business and better service. Tell you what, I’ll share a secret with you for free (although if you want to send me $315, anyway, just contact us): there is no unified theory of Twitter.

That is to say, social media in general is yet another tool in the ever-expanding marketing toolkit. And most companies that have demonstrated notable success with social media are doing so because they have freed members of their staff who have engaging personalities to engage with customers or leads on behalf of their employers; not because of some new corporate strategy that has grokking Twitter at its core. Social media is like Web 2.0-lite. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s a fad. It doesn’t really require any heavy lifting to get started. But that’s part of the problem. Or can be.

Nashville (really, JTMarCom) also recently hosted Chris Brogan. Given the level of excitement, I leveraged technology and watched from afar (somehow saving myself both the trip and the $40, although passing up my opportunity to get a copy of Trust Agents). And I’ll admit: I’m not exactly sure what I saw. Chris is a guru, which means he spoke in the equivalent of self-help jargon for digital marketers. His performance seemed remarkably similar to a sermon by a charismatic pastor as much as that of someone transferring valuable skills or knowledge.

Chris seems like a nice guy who’s doing quite well for himself. In fact, my guess is he’s the rare social media guru who actually gets it to the point of building real value for businesses and other organizations. But having followed his engagement with the Twittersphere, I’m not sure why I would want to pay him to do anything for my business. I’m not critical of his ideas or approach, which I think are generally positive and which have some overlap with my own approach to social media; I’m critical of the worshipful nature of Nashville’s geek community that someone from on high came and left us without a lot of added value. Maybe someone who attended will let me know that they learned something profound about engaging socially in a business context. But I’ll really be impressed if any attendees of Social Fresh experience a return on their investment. Just as I’ll be impressed if Social Fresh delivers attendees insight into how they might measure such a return. I’d recommend starting with Twitter 101 for Business.

Last year, having just opened the doors to SearchViz, I considered whether I should go to BarCamp Nashville. I reviewed the agenda, looking for learning, networking, or recruiting opportunities. In the end, I selectively went to presentations of a couple of people I knew were doing good work in the SEO space because so much of the agenda looked like marketing grain where I couldn’t separate wheat from chaff. I regret having missed Marcus Whitney’s presentation, which sounds like it was trying to say, “If I knew this was all we’d get, I’d never have helped bring BarCamp to Nashville in the first place!”

Fortunately, Marcus wasn’t just whining; he was actively working to help take Nashville to the next level with Enterprise LAMP. I’ve wound up a little too high up the stack to have been able to justify pushing my entrepreneurial schedule around to have been able to attend, but in my opinion, events like this are the ones Nashville needs to see more of. Events leveraging real-world experience and expertise with lessons for both enterprise and entrepreneurs.

Marcus cut his teeth in technology leadership at Emma and has achieved true success in getting his new web startup, Moontoast, off the ground. And his efforts, I hope, make the process easier for the rest of us who see ourselves as technology entrepreneurs.

I guess I have three primary points:

  1. Fly-in gurus who aren’t here to do in-depth skills-building aren’t going to put Nashville’s technology community on the path to sustainable engineering success.
  2. Unconferences, where expertise is actually democratized out, don’t give us any indication of who our actual experts are.
  3. Social media is most useful if it’s built on a strong foundation of deep technology entrepreneurship that extends into the executive suite.

I write all of this not to pop the Nashville geek community’s balloon of enthusiasm but to help us realize that it might not be a balloon at all but rather a bubble. We’re a healthcare, entertainment, and finance hub among other things, but we’re not really a technology center. And we can’t all be social media experts and expect to be. How many Nashville-area web or software startups can you name that don’t have their basis in music or healthcare?

Here’s my woefully short napkin list:

Personally, I think Sitemason and Emma are too mature to count as web startups. Please leave others in the comments.

And this is not to discount achievements that are being made in music or healthcare; but it’s to suggest that those sectors, not our technology sector, are driving innovation in the web technology space.

Fortunately, a few of our agencies recognize that the path to success for business in the 21st century will mean having engineering expertise involved. ICG Link developed their 111 suite of tools. Sitening is the team behind Raven, and they have engineered a number of other tools. And here I distinguish between custom developing unsustainable solutions for customers and developing tools that will be maintained across the life of the agency for fun, for internal use, and possibly for external use (the 37signals model). And CentreSource was recently recognized for having Nashville’s best programmer on staff.

I think that the most successful companies for the remainder of the century will be those that are capable of innovating in software. I.e., those that recognize that having development capacity whose expertise is geared toward business interests will thrive. This is true of content companies (where, surprisingly, Gannett, the dinosaur at tennessean.com seems to be outpacing SouthComm, the fresh-faced media startup), retail, services, etc. Just as with print, non-digital companies will never die, but those with more innovative ways to develop new business will not just keep pace; they’ll set the pace.

Managing web projects is an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming prospect. It’s better conceived of as a development challenge than as a design challenge. And customers are better served by agencies that leverage existing frameworks and APIs than by those that hand off a pile of hodgepodge PHP for an application that starts suffering bit rot as soon as the vendor agreement is concluded.

I think there’s actually a lot of room in the marketplace for an agency that is exclusively geared toward developing sustainable solutions built on solid technology foundations. Leveraging free and open source software (FOSS) would make this about as cost effective as software development gets, and the services that could be bundled with such an agency would both add value to customers and be profitable for vendors. Optaros seems to have built some success with this model.

And I think what creates so much space is the digital divide as considered in the marketplace rather than society at large. Finding a trusted technology adviser is possibly even more difficult than finding a trusted technology practitioner. Who could assist with bridging this divide?

The Nashville Technology Council has lumbered for years as the voice of institutional and enterprise technology in the area. Somehow, despite not really being a part of the target audience, neither the Nashville Linux Users Group nor the irrational exuberance of the dotcom-1.0 era (when everyone suddenly realized they were web designers/developers) supplanted it or created an alternative outlet focused on LAMP-oriented entrepreneurs. But now it has a competitor in Digital Nashville, which seems to be speaking to the irrationally exuberant online marketing community. As I consider membership in both organizations for 2010, I’m laboring to understand why both exist, and I’m not sure either has discovered how to speak effectively to Nashville-area engineers and true geeks.

In many ways, this post is an extension of thoughts Luke Kanies left with Milt Capps (N.B. the comments section) as he relocated Reductive Labs and its flagship product Puppet to Portland as he capitalized it. There simply weren’t enough engineer-level geeks in Middle Tennessee to help him get where he wanted to go.

Though the Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD and Emacs/vi debates continue to rage, I’m constantly amazed that there is less agreement over everything from best hosting provider to best cloud solution to best content management system to best source code management system in the web development community. There’s probably neither time nor interest in creating groups around every framework that gets off the ground, but maybe a content management framework group would be useful. And maybe Enterprise LAMP will continue the process of tech-oriented meetups they began last year to keep people focused on deep tech.

As a computer scientist by degree, I am made anxious by reports that people are not pursuing academically rigorous pathways into IT. Yes, Google and search have made troubleshooting a breeze, but reviewing the online documentation for PHP is not the same as having an understanding of how to plan for scalability, how to design a database, how to manage and deploy releases (including how to roll back a release), how to ensure portability (by vendor, by platform, by version), and many other difficult problems (some of which, to be sure are as much project management as software development, but the interplay is significant between the two).

Engineering builds value; marketing lets people know about it. So who am I, at the helm of a young inbound marketing agency, to be spouting off about the value of engineering? Well, as a developer by background who has only ever worked deep in databases, on glue code, or around the periphery of actual software, maybe I write all this with a sense of longing. One of my goals for SearchViz in 2010, in fact, is to have at least one project under development in what I hope becomes a vibrant laboratory for web development. I remain, ultimately, a web developer entrepreneur who hopes to be able to build a true web startup or at least a collection of useful or interesting tools. For now, though, I’m someone who believes strongly in the principles of engineering that apply to success in web design and search engine optimization (SEO). The best web designers are secretly programmers who simply think about programming problems differently. And the principles I’m talking about include analytics (evidence), development (e.g., integration with frameworks, new modules/plug-ins/add-ons), and troubleshooting (debugging). So I need Nashville to have great developers as much as anyone.

For anyone who’s made it this far, I think one of the best essays for anyone interested in Nashville’s success as a technology center is Joel Spolsky’s article, “Finding Great Developers.” (In fact, if you do anything with the software end of technology and you’re not reading Joel on Software, you should be.) I offer it knowing that I could never get hired by Joel. I’m not focused enough on being a great hacker. I developed a curiosity but not a deep passion that could get me to true greatness in the last decade because my curiosity is too expansive. At this point, I’ve ranged the stack from system administrator to database administrator to database programmer to system programmer to web developer to internet strategist and marketer. I wound up a generalist, not a specialist. But we need specialists, and we need to be able to bridge the gaps. And I think if we stay trapped in the realm of gurus and unconferences we risk not recognizing that we don’t have enough great developers in Nashville. Or, if they’re here, we risk not leveraging their expertise to develop the next generation. Here’s another great essay by Paul Graham on how to start a startup.

Bottom line: I support the people who are working on Nashville Geek Breakfast, BarCamp, Social Fresh, Digital Nashville, and the Nashville Technology Council, but I want us all to recognize that we need to find a way to engage, recruit, retain, and reveal the great developers among and around us. We need marketers, and we need to be able to engage non-practitioners, but we also need experts and developers to give us something to market. I look forward to continuing to participate in this effort.

I offer all this as constructive criticism in hopes that the Nashville geek community will find new opportunities for collaboration and sharing of best practices as well as a profound technological curiosity that elevate us beyond having our enthusiasm constrained by events that amount to little more than online marketing self-help.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2010/01/10/fresh-thinking-against-guruism-unconferences-and-social-media-experts/feed/ 4 What It’s Like to Be One of Google’s Favorite Places http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/12/23/what-its-like-to-be-one-of-googles-favorite-places/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/12/23/what-its-like-to-be-one-of-googles-favorite-places/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:26:35 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=232 favorite-place-googleOne of our customers, McLemore Auction Company, recently received a letter notifying them that they are now a Favorite Place on Google.

favorite-place-on-google-letter

I thought this was worth remarking on for a couple of reasons:

  1. The novelty of getting a letter from Google telling you you’re one of their favorite places makes for a neat moment and a nice picture.
  2. Google has been pretty explicit about their favorite places being those that achieved a certain level of activity in Google Local Business Center.

Will McLemore, proprietor, is an enterprising fellow and had signed up for Google Local Business Center well before Get Found Friday (and well before he was a customer, in fact). His business is constantly selling things, but it’s not a store. It’s not the kind of place that gets a lot of retail foot traffic. In short, it doesn’t fit the profile of a lot of other local businesses, some of which I’ve worked with, that seem like more natural results of a Google Maps search or even just universal search results that include maps.

So we’re both interested in what put him over the top. It’s possible that having a maturing business that has been pretty smart about the Web and search for its duration meant that just being an early adopter of Google Local Business Center has given him more exposure. It certainly makes for an interesting Google Analytics challenge, as I look to see whether queries like [nashville auction] can be correlated meaningfully with the numbers mentioned in the letter for people who “found” McLemore Auction and then people who requested more information. Unfortunately, both seem like statistics that Google keeps to themselves.

Now Will has a barcode on his door. It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone scans it. And even more interesting to see what Google does with the results.

you're-a-favorite-place-on-google

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/12/23/what-its-like-to-be-one-of-googles-favorite-places/feed/ 0 Search Engine Terms of Service and SEO Toolkits http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/30/search-engine-terms-of-service-and-seo-toolkits/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/30/search-engine-terms-of-service-and-seo-toolkits/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:46:26 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=213 black-hat-white-hat-seo-cowboysOne reason I’ve been hesitant to run wild with any of the popular SEO toolkits on the market is that, having worked previously for a company that created one, I know that it evolved to violate Google’s Terms of Service after Google discontinued their SOAP API for search results. As someone who is only willing to take on customers who are interested in white hat SEO tactics and as someone whose background is in web development, I’m skeptical that many of the available toolkits can operate without either, 1) explicitly violating various TOSes, usually by scraping (or otherwise illegally acquiring) data, or 2) licensing large amounts of data. I know that there are some services that create their own tracking code to collect data rather than scraping, but I also suspect that several services scrape search engine results pages (SERPs).

To my mind, if I’m focused on generating relevance and avoiding penalties for my customers, section 5.3 of Google’s TOS has relevance:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

And a statement in their webmaster guidelines confirms my right to be suspicious, especially on behalf of my paying customers:

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

So here’s a question: Is it possible to create a disclaimer or other indicator of certified white hat toolkits? Would it even matter without a more open review of toolkit source code? Should there be an independent SEO certification authority of some kind, and would SEOs even trust it? Or would Google (and other search engines) consent to creating a standard badge that a data (or other relevant) license of some kind exists between the two parties?

To other people in this space: Does it matter at all to you whether services, many of which are probably charging you money, are operating legally? Do you have some mechanism I’m missing for identifying toolkits that are thoroughly white hat?

Consequentially, I wonder what the ramifications are for the companies that are building black hat toolkits. With the rise of cloud computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) and IPv6 (and, thus, essentially unlimited/untraceable IPs), can Google and the other major search engines even identify SERP scrapers and the like?

I’ve heard tell (can’t find a quotation at the moment) that Matt Cutts is dismissive of scrapers as any sort of threat to Google (presumably in the context of bandwidth as the scrapers hit their servers), but I don’t know whether that means there is any kind of internal effort to track SERP scrapers. I’m personally more interested in whether they could wind up creating a cascading penalty if it were determined that SEOs were using a toolkit that was in flagrant violation of TOS, such that sites being tracked by an SEO wound up suffering.

A bigger social question: Does the ease with which TOSes and copyrights can be violated online make us all likelier to be criminals? Or is it justified as online civil disobedience?

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/30/search-engine-terms-of-service-and-seo-toolkits/feed/ 2 Get Found Friday: A Google Local Business Center Promotion http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/03/get-found-friday-a-google-local-business-center-promotion/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/03/get-found-friday-a-google-local-business-center-promotion/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:53:07 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=193 black-friday-posterThe American economy seems to be just pulling out of recession as we enter the fourth quarter, which, thanks to the holidays, is the saving grace for many retailers. We know that for many businesses this has been a difficult year and that last year was not an easy one. We’d like to help. We know that it’s challenging to close the sale once someone is in your store, but it’s even more challenging if they never make it there in the first place. Starting today, we’re launching Get Found Friday. We’re going to help one local business per day get listed in the Google Local Business Center for free until Black Friday, Friday, Nov. 27th (although we can’t be held responsible if people participate in Buy Nothing Day). Sign up now!

Here are the criteria:

  • Your business must be independently owned and located in Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County.
  • Your business cannot have more than two locations.
  • Your business cannot have more than 50 full-time employees.

Our focus in this promotion is helping small, locally owned business that are building their brand get found. Being listed in Google Local Business Center is one of many important steps a business—particularly in retail or restaurants—can take to get found by potential customers. And it improves the search experience, too. A customer might find out that you exist, and might even learn your address. But are you making your hours of business easily available to them? Are you learning how people found you? You should be.

Search and search engines (including variants from the general purpose heavyweights, like Twitter Search) are the Yellow Pages of the 21st century, and we want you to be listed.

And before you know-it-alls protest, yes we know that Google Local Business Center is a free service that anyone can sign up for. But we also know that some businesses are just getting their online presence off the ground and might not be as familiar with the Web and how to leverage it as you are, smartypants. We want them to get found, too, okay? And we want to ensure they put their best foot (and information) forward as they get started. And if more local businesses sign up on their own and discover how to leverage the dashboard, then more the better!

We look forward to supporting our independent and local business community. Sign up today!

Even if you don’t qualify or if you’re already listed in Google Local Business Center but want to learn more about the process of getting found, please contact us. We offer services that aren’t free, too. ;)

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/11/03/get-found-friday-a-google-local-business-center-promotion/feed/ 3 Relevance: SEO as Ideology http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/30/relevance-seo-as-ideology/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/30/relevance-seo-as-ideology/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:02:25 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=168 RelevanceIf I’m interested in something, I generally try to develop a certain amount of expertise in it. Some of this is natural (enough exposure to various of the arts, for instance, creates a natural, if possibly informal, familiarity), and some of it is intentional (e.g., reading a programming book or web development documentation of some kind). And generally I try to identify trusted authorities. In search (where Google remains particularly dominant) and search engine optimization (SEO), the trusted authority is Matt Cutts. Matt is a sort of oracle when it comes to Google-related search information. He doles out bits of information about the algorithm, and he offers advice to webmasters and SEOs. Anyone who has followed Matt for some time will recognize that his descriptions of search results hinge on relevance.

Now, SEO is only one part of the SearchViz approach to getting found through inbound marketing, but it’s an important one. In a recent video in the excellent Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel, Matt answers the question of how he would run his own online marketing company. While he doesn’t give the million dollar secret to SEO success, he suggests that reputation and transparency are reasonable hypothetical foundations for good services. And that’s something we generally strive for at SearchViz. We’re not in the habit of doing things we’re uncomfortable telling our customers about, just as we’re not in the habit of doing things where we have to explain to the customer, “Look, we did this special for you, but it’s… unconventional. So we wanted to let you know this is how we did it, but don’t tell anyone, okay?” In short, when it comes to SEO, we’re not trying to game the system; we’re trying to ensure demonstration of relevance.

If some SEOs seem to wear black hats or practice dark arts, it’s likely because search is a black box. The proprietary algorithms used by the major search engines are one of the primary domains of market competition. If Google itself were a truly open system, it would be possible to tailor sites exactly to the algorithm, regardless of actual relevance. Viagra spammers could likely adapt to an open algorithm to ensure that they did well in queries for [art museum]. An interesting question is whether an open search algorithm would increase or decrease relevance in search results. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to create an open search algorithm that has achieved any sort of liquidity. So because search is currently proprietary, SEO research and development frequently yields short-term tactical advantages for those quickest to market with reverse engineered discoveries about the algorithms employed by the search engines. As these tactics become disseminated, their value decreases. With standard search engine results pages (SERPs) containing 10 results for most search engines, each keyword or search phrase has a supply/demand problem based on relevance.

We’re not really interested in the black box churn. To us, SEO is akin to an ideology, but it’s one that is evidence-based while still taking a long view. Here at SearchViz, our strategy is relevance, and our tactics include mostly widely known best practices designed to highlight relevance for the search engines. We’re not going to charge you to stuff a bunch of useless paid directories with your site, and we’re not going to promote articles about your site to sites you’ve never heard of unless they’re high-quality sources of information relevant to your site. What we will do is ensure that you have quality semantic structure that matches your content and markup that matches the recommendations of the search engines. We will make sure that you’re in quality directories and have quality inbound links that reflect the best relationships you already enjoy but might not be fully leveraging. We will keep up with the practices recommended by search engines and leveraged by SEOs to ensure that you are exposing your relevance.

The simple truth is that there remain a number of sites on the Web that, largely because of an unfortunate legacy of Web standards existing prior to standard tools for creating documents, are non-optimal for the search experience. Imagine if copywriters could create Word documents without using Microsoft Word akin to the way web designers hand-rolled their own HTML with no validity checking built in. Basic documents would have been nearly impossible to read or to transfer between computers. Try asking a web designer sometime, for instance, about designing for IE6. With Word, there are very few compatibility issues between versions or across platforms. With the Web, there are countless rendering issues across browsers and platforms. In some ways, our role is to improve the Web by returning to standards and exposing relevance.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be partnering with someone willing to put on the black hat at least occasionally?” You can if you want, but that’s one of many reasons why SEO isn’t the only part of our strategy. Remember: We’re an inbound marketing agency. This means we use a variety of tactics to help you get found. As long as you’re creating quality original content, you will be relevant to search, in social media, in email, and wherever else you’re likely to engage your audience. In the long run, we think this strategy yields more value to our customers than Googlebombing ever could.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be letting search engines know just how relevant it is, please contact us.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/30/relevance-seo-as-ideology/feed/ 0 Analytics Intelligence: The Impact for GAIQs and Certified Partners http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/21/analytics-intelligence-the-impact-for-gaiqs-and-certified-partners/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/21/analytics-intelligence-the-impact-for-gaiqs-and-certified-partners/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:35:04 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=157 sparkline-simple

Google just announced a slew of new features for Google Analytics.

There are a number of features here that should be useful for more refined data mining and ultimately generating more conversions. For instance, I can already picture how Advanced Table Filtering would improve the resolution of the picture for an e-commerce company. There are also some subscription-based and user-based sites I’ve worked on in the past where Multiple Custom Variables would’ve come in tremendously handy, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to dig in with them on upcoming projects.

But the feature that puts the Google engineering I suspected would one day come (and will probably continue to be enhanced, including in other product lines) into Google Analytics is Analytics Intelligence. No more poring over trend lines to find singularities. Google will now find them for you and alert you to their presence.

So does this mean that Google has robbed people with Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) and their Certified Partners of a livelihood? Of course not. No more than it means that improvements to the algorithm or results interface mean that SEOs are out of a job. In fact, it means we get to stop spending as much time on mining and get to start spending more time on meaning. As in, what caused that singularity? E.g., “Why did the Bounce Rate jump?” rather than “Oo! the Bounce Rate jumped! Right there! I see it!” Ultimately, this means more interesting work for analysts and more value for customers.

Refinements to algorithms really just make the process of analysis more efficient. When the search algorithm changes, SEOs interested in R&D test the changes and refine best practices, allowing sites not optimized for relevance to meet Google halfway. Similarly, analysts get to move their workflow downstream and into the deeper pools.

For instance, now, using either Custom Alerts or Automatic Alerts, I’m likely to be able to jump straight into the right table and likely use Advanced Table Filtering for a given profile instead of having to review dozens of profiles scanning to find points of interest or singularities.

The next iteration of this process might result in Google making elementary recommendations, possibly about funnels, goals, and conversions. The greatest singularity of all will be when Google has refined their search algorithm and their predictive analytics to the point where SEO and analytics truly hold no value. But because that concept so closely resembles infinity, it’s a long way off. Until then, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Please contact us if you’ve got a lot of work that needs doing to help you get found.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/21/analytics-intelligence-the-impact-for-gaiqs-and-certified-partners/feed/ 0 On Business Value: Toolkits, Reports, and In-house SEO http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/16/on-business-value-toolkits-reports-and-in-house-seo/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/16/on-business-value-toolkits-reports-and-in-house-seo/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:56:57 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=152 85-tool-swiss-army-knifeSo as SearchViz has geared up, I can tell that the industry I’ve re-entered as an agency (after going in-house with a customer for a few years) has matured by the pitches some of my customers are getting from other search engine optimization (SEO) firms. What’s puzzling to me, though, is why so many of these companies are pitching toolkits or packages of reports instead of actual business intelligence.

As an SEO, I’m actually glad to see so much competition in the toolkit space. Honestly, I’m still evaluating a number of available tools (reviews likely forthcoming in a later post) to see whether there’s anything that I can regularly use to benefit my customers outside of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and the AdWords tools (Keyword Tool and Placement Tool), which are all extremely helpful.

But for people who know enough about SEO to understand that it can add value to their businesses but also know enough to know that they aren’t equipped to manage SEO effectively themselves, it’s hard for me to see what benefit a paid toolkit or automated reports offer.

If you operate a business that maintains a website but is small enough in terms of personnel and revenue that you don’t maintain a full-time or even part-time webmaster or other Web professional, I’d doubt very much that you’re going to be able to leverage comprehensive reports or have time to spend interpreting your search engine result page (SERP) trends for important keywords. I mean, you might get out of it the sort of thing that a CEO or CFO gets out of seeing an overview of projects, but you’re unlikely to be able to spend any time leveraging the information immediately in a way that advantages your business.

And if you operate a business that is large enough or mature enough to have a full-time in-house SEO on staff, then this person probably has a preferred set of tools for doing the important work of SEO.

We hope you’ll consider us for the middle ground if you can’t afford a full-time SEO. Because there is added value in getting found. And no matter how smart and refined the search engine algorithms become, there will still be room to optimize the search experience. Because search engines don’t (yet, anyway) control your content; you do. And for a decade, we’ve seen sites designed to look good but not perform well in search. Here at SearchViz, we will still focus on SEO web design by making text text (instead of images) and exposing previously unexposed and uncrawlable pages on entirely Flash sites. Our SEO web design process means we’re designing for both users and search engines.

I’ve known some people who have stated that the concept of business success is making money while you sleep. And the Web and real-time commerce certainly enable this concept. Retail sales and subscription-based revenue models do not require you to be minding the shop to book revenue. But in the world of SEO, just like with much of the Web, where we’re only now seeing some maturity in the content management system (CMS) space, automation is often used as a poor substitute for added value.

Often, the most valuable thing I bring to the table for inbound marketing projects is the consultative process. I should be the one reviewing the analytics and implementing changes recommended by the results I interpret. What I shouldn’t be doing is signing up my customers for a recurring Web-based service that sends an email every now and again and hoping they mostly forget about the monthly charge and never call me.

I tell our customers up front: the day we stop delivering value, you should fire us. I stay very focused on the bottom line. We typically know something about the value proposition and revenue stream of our customers, and we’re lucky to have customers who trust us with their numbers and their data. One of the core SearchViz maxims is that you can’t improve it if you can’t measure it. I’m measuring all the time, and when I cease being able to improve for one of my customers, I either cut my rates (assuming that if I continue measuring, I might see something later that can be improved) or walk away.

Similarly, all of our recurring services come with customer time built in. We want our customers to understand what we’re doing. We offer transparency and thoroughness. That’s where our value proposition is. Customer service as a concept has been remarkably devalued in the big box, franchised, IVR marketplace. We’re prepared to bring it back as an agency.

There might come a time where we develop our own toolkit that meets our business needs perfectly, and that’ll be great. But we won’t use it as an excuse to have to stop talking to our customers. Providing better customer service adds value to our business.

So if you’re tired of seeing a monthly charge on your business credit card for a report you never read anyway or a service you logged into a few times several months ago, and you want to renew your focus on getting found, please contact us. We like customer interaction, and we have great customers.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/10/16/on-business-value-toolkits-reports-and-in-house-seo/feed/ 0 Principles of SEO Web Design: Continuity http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/09/28/principles-of-seo-web-design-continuity/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/09/28/principles-of-seo-web-design-continuity/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:33:06 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=129 cloverleaf-aboveWe just completed our first redesign project. So far, we’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have great customers, and Rick Wells of Vero Group (a local vendor of top shelf auto auction software) is one of the best. Rick understood the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) from the moment we walked into his office, and he chose our favorite design from among the comps we presented. Because he was preparing for a trade show coming up in October, he wanted to go ahead and get some basic on-site SEO in place before we began the redesign process. We did a pretty standard treatment and offered assurances that our initial work would be integrated into the new design.

Here’s the old:

vero-old

And here’s the new:

vero-new

We’ll do a more thorough case study of the design process soon, but for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on SEO web design. Our design process ensures that SEO is taken into account throughout the design and relaunch process. SEO web design is an approach that delivers sites that look good, are built to be able to perform well in search engines, and include measurement capabilities for analytics. Here are some highlights about the importance for SEO of continuity in a redesign project.

The Setup: Flat Files to Managed Content

So the site we came to was just flat HTML files on a server, edited directly through FTP with a text editor. One nice thing about dealing with managed content is that it can be driven by templates, dramatically reducing design integration overhead without sacrificing much, if anything, in the way of control. Modern versions of WordPress and Drupal have particularly flexible and powerful theming. We selected WordPress for this project because the interface for managing content is, in our opinion, the most graceful and user-friendly among the popular content management software currently available.

We were able to develop in place without disturbing the current site by giving WordPress its own directory. When we finished our design and content migration, all we had to do was follow the steps of a well-defined process. This involved little more than moving the old index page out of the way and replacing it with the WordPress index. Otherwise, we had to ensure that the .htaccess directive used by WordPress for configuring its permalinks reflected the live directory structure of the new site.

Snippets

This is relatively easy, but I would imagine it’s easy to overlook if you’re not doing SEO web design. We had already ensured that the old site had good snippets. For the new site, we just ported them easily by using Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack, which allows per-page/post control over titles and descriptions (and keywords, if you’re into that kinda thing). When we improved snippets as part of on-site SEO in the flat-file site, we followed best practices for title tags, and the All in One SEO Pack does the same by default, so preserving good titles was easy.

Lesson: If we hadn’t intentionally preserved snippets, the search experience could’ve transformed for the worse with what showed up in the descriptive text in search engine results pages (SERPs). Also, if we weren’t moving to managed content or a system that employed good title tag functionality, we could’ve damaged SEO by not paying close attention to what was in the title on each page.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps go hand-in-hand with robots.txt in terms of ensuring that what you want to get crawled gets crawled, and they can help provide priority cues in the event that copywriting or design might not suggest appropriate priority. We typically use them as an easy-to-implement standard part of ensuring the integrity of the crawling process. In this case, we went from a hand-rolled Sitemap to one built using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in for WordPress. It autodetects an existing Sitemap if it’s in a standard location.

Lesson: Any change of platform without regard for an existing Sitemap would leave an out-of-date Sitemap, which could result in crawl errors by search engine robots.

Redirects for Moved URLs

Generally, we were keeping the same pages, although we were moving from flat files to managed content. As we did so, we were making small improvements to the information architecture: consistent capitalization, separation of words with dashes, removal of file extensions (which can also be a security feature).

We used the Apache Redirect directive in .htaccess to indicate that these URLs have permanently moved by providing a status of 301. Google provides additional information about 301 redirects in their Wembasters/Site owners Help.

Basically, all we need to do is include an entry like so for each URL that changed:

Redirect 301 /old.html /new-hotness/

Now, if someone were to visit http://www.vero-group.com/old.html, they’d automatically be redirected to http://www.vero-group.com/new-hotness/.

Lesson: If we had made these improvements without regard for the old URLs, we would totally have abandoned users who had any of the old URLs linked or bookmarked, and search engine indexes would probably have been out of date for at least several days, likely resulting in HTTP 404 / not found errors for people visiting either from search or referring sites. This is bad for search experience and the broader user experience.

Analytics

What good would any of this be if we lost our ability to measure it? Fortunately, Yoast’s Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows for seamless measurement. All we needed to do was install the Analytics Account ID, and we ensured that there was no gap in analytics data.

Lesson: I’ve personally seen unfortunate data loss when existing measurement tools fail to migrate appropriately with platform or infrastructure changes. This is typically indicative of two problems: 1) Insufficient attention to detail on the part of the provider, and 2) Insufficient attention to analytics on the part of the site owner. It’s a critical mistake not to ensure that if Google Analytics (or any other analytics platform) tracking code were installed originally it needs to be installed in the new setup. Similarly, if this were not discovered for weeks or months, it might indicate that the data being supplied were not being valued highly enough by the site owner. Bottom line: you don’t want to miss a beat with your analytics.

Quality Control for Web Projects

The main point of this post is highlighting the importance of inventorying what is important for both the search experience and the user experience. This is why I refer to our web design process as SEO web design. Unfortunately, having enough knowledge and experience to create this inventory is difficult for people–both owners and design firms–with little experience with significant web projects, especially when they involve content migration or wholesale changes of platforms or infrastructure. And I know of no good way at the moment for someone selecting a web services provider to ensure that their designer/developer has sense enough to care about the right things.

For me, this comes back to the fundamental question of why you have a website in the first place. If it’s for generating leads and, ultimately, conversions, both the search experience and the user experience through search matter. I hope that by elaborating on some of the things we consider when undertaking a comprehensive redesign project, we can give website owners a few tools for assessing their web vendors through basic survey. E.g., “Tell me what will happen to my old URLs and show me an example of the new behavior.”

If you’re not sure that your recent redesign project kept the search experience optimized, please contact us.

]]> http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/09/28/principles-of-seo-web-design-continuity/feed/ 2 Advertising ROI: How Do You Measure Success in Print Display? http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/09/18/advertising-roi-how-do-you-measure-success-in-print-display/ http://searchviz.com/blog/2009/09/18/advertising-roi-how-do-you-measure-success-in-print-display/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:17:35 +0000 Freddie http://searchviz.com/?p=102 dino-reading-paperI spent the last few years knee-deep in strategy in media. In 2006, I began a consulting project that culminated in the rebirth and relaunch of NashvillePost.com, an online-only business and public affairs journal in Nashville that had gone dormant in late 2005 and was resurrected after an outcry from its community of paid subscribers. I joined The Nashville Post Company full-time in 2007, and by 2008, they had been acquired by SouthComm, which is trying to grow a portfolio of local niche publications.

Despite my years in the industry, I’m left with a nagging question: What is the value of print display advertising? If you’re an advertiser, what is the return on your investment? How do you measure it? Even more importantly, are you getting found? How do you know?

In IT, everything generates data: web servers, database servers, operating systems. Growing up in the industry on the side close to the machine, I was encouraged by the Web’s adherence to the importance of data. The same trends that could be visualized with regard to server performance could be visualized with regard to website performance. And all of this data could be converted to information used to improve IT systems.

When Google Analytics became freely available, the ability to convert website data to business intelligence became widespread. And it has only improved with services like Ominture (recently acquired by Adobe and demonstrating that this space is still very competitive) and Clicky, which is offering real-time analytics. And with the built-in ability to link AdWords to Google Analytics, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and search engine marketing (SEM) can be measured seamlessly with overall site performance and goals.

Print advertising is incredibly expensive. Interactive advertising is much cheaper by comparison. You can cover more media outlets, do much more sophisticated targeting, and much more easily measure both impressions and conversions.

I’m not suggesting total abandonment of print display because I recognize its utility in some contexts. I know that some print advertising goes beyond mere display and offers opportunities for some basic metrics, e.g., coupons. And sometimes for events or other time-sensitive campaigns, blanket media coverage can be advantageous.

But for retail and restaurants, for venues and value-adds, I’m interested in the efficiency of print display campaigns. If you’re a print display advertiser or media buyer, I’d love to hear your thoughts about how you decide on a budget for print display advertising versus online advertising in the comments. If you’re a sales rep who pitches print display, what’s your pitch?

And if you need to advertise and you’d like to lower your costs, measure and improve your success, and get found, I encourage you to contact us. And if part of the issue is that your website isn’t serving your business as well as it should, then we can help with web design, too.

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