Accession Media

Google Now Crawls Flash!

The folks at Google announced yesterday that their latest algorithm release will now be able to crawl and index text-based content that is inside Flash files. I love their wording…

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines.

…understatement of the year! So now all the designers will be jumping for joy since they will have a comeback to the old SEO speech they’ve been getting for years. While we’ve always sustained that Flash and SEO efforts can be harmonious, this news certainly takes it to a whole new level.

So I hear you asking - “doesn’t this put the SEO’s (YOU Josh!) out of a job?” Not hardly. It basically makes our lives a bit easier in that we can focus our SEO conversations on important stuff like content and links, and perhaps set aside the whole Flash vs. HTML religious war. Hallelujah!

However, one important point to remember…

At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

The old best practices around having well-written, keyword-rich text information on your site still apply folks. Only now the text can sing and dance too!

Twittering Is The New Blogging

So in my last post I pointed out a nice example of a corporate blog I came across. These days corporate blogs are a dime a dozen - old news (but still effective internet marketing tools). Now the “web 2.0″ thing to do is Twitter. I know…I can’t take it either.

Twitter is a tool whose functionality is somewhere between blogging and instant messaging. It’s the ultimate in fast (short) and easy communication between you and thousands of your friends. And once you have a group of people talking together, they are sure to start bitching about the products and services that they come into contact with in their daily lives. The smart companies are now joining the conversation.

I was able to find the following Twitter profiles that represent large, well known corporations..

• Zappos - online shoe retailer
• Southwest Airlines
• Comcast Cable
• JetBlue
• Delta Airlines
• General Motors
• Dell Computer
• Carnival Cruise Lines

If you dig into some of the conversation strings linked above you’ll see that these firms are doing three main things with Twitter…

• Promoting products and services to the Twitter community
• Reacting to negative customer situations in a friendly, personal, and helpful voice - if not with a solution, then at least with a sympathetic ear
• Proactively interacting with customers to improve their products/services, or avoid situations that will ultimately require them to react to negativity

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a newbie to Twitter, and at first I had no clue what was going on or why it was worth my time to participate. However, as more and more of my friends and business associates started Twittering, the more interesting and fun it became. In just the past few months Twitter has “crossed the chasm” - gotten past the “tipping point” - gotten through “the dip” - or whatever business B.S. phrase you want to use to say that it is being widely, adopted by many, and business is getting on board the train.

Nice Example of a Corporate Blog

I stumbled across this “company backed” blog today…

http://blog.mahindrausa.com/

The company is Mahindra Tractor, makers of various types of farm tractors. I read through a lot of the postings and I think it helps do what blogs are supposed to do…

• Identify with the customer: not only does Mahindra build tractors, they know what their customers are going through. Bad weather, back breaking work, less than stellar harvests, etc
• Spread the word: as a farmer - I’d much rather read about how this customer of Mahindra’s (that writes this blog) gets by working with their equipment than I would read their marketing and sales copy. It just feels more honest to me to hear it from a fellow farmer
• Gives me a reason to interact with the brand even if I don’t yet own a Mahindra: I want to come back and check in on the farming family - are they going through the same issues I am? The blog is obviously sponsored by Mahindra, but they don’t beat you over the head with it

I’m not sure if their ad agency put this together for them or if it was an in-house idea, but its a great one.

Our Take on the Microsoft Bid For Yahoo!

The big news this week of course is that Microsoft has unveiled a bid to buy Yahoo! for $31 per share in cash and stock. That equates to a $44.6 billion offer. As most industry analysts and pundits quickly realized, this is basically Microsoft’s latest attempt to try and stack up in the search market vs. Google.

Microsoft has tried repeatedly to build, rebuild and optimize the various incarnations of their own search engine product and its associated pay per click market tools. To date, in my opinion, they haven’t come close to being successful and remain the third tier player after Google and Yahoo! in the lucrative paid search engine advertising market. So it makes a lot of sense that they would buy the number two player to combine forces and get a bigger piece of the market.

However, beyond just search, Yahoo! also has massively trafficked and advertised upon content properties like Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. So they bring more to Microsoft’s table than just search, they are also a major competitor to the MSN content network.

But, in my mind the underlying theme in this potential transaction is that Microsoft seems to be saying “I give up” in trying to compete with Google on its own. By buying Yahoo! they can get a jump start in the right direction and get away from the “software company” stigma. As Google continues to build out web-based (and FREE) tools and applications for the enterprise (which we use here at Accession Media and love), Microsoft needs to remain relevant in this reshaped market - buying Yahoo! could be a big help.

Of course, since this announcement the big question to Google has been “are you scared?” I’ve seen at least two interviews with high ranking Google execs where they were polite - but you could tell they were holding back laughter. My feeling is that, if Microsoft does pull off this purchase, and THEN manages not to totally screw up Yahoo!, the combined entity will still just be second best in the paid search market. A little closer to Google, granted, but still second best.

Has The Search Marketing Industry Gone Too Far?

Oh my…I think the SEM/SEO industry may have gone too far…we have our own “awards show.” In the spirit of the Emmy Awards…we have the Semmy’s. I guess it’s kind of cool to be part of an industry that is so enthusiastic about what it does that is has its own “awards” for thought-leading blog postings in the space. However, Matt couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Dundies” episode of The Office.

Much Ado About Social Media Marketing

Back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, every marketer wanted a website for their company/product/service. The website would be the silver bullet that would kick-start their marketing and open their business up to massive international markets. They built their sites and ignored them. Mission accomplished!

By the mid-1990’s some of them were noticing that their websites were static and useless cost centers - unless they were going to put in the time and effort to get some honest to goodness consumer friendly content onto them on a regular basis. That thinking is now taken for granted.

In the past 3 to 5 years the revelation that if your site can’t be found in the major search engines it could have a massive impact on your business has also come to fore of the average marketers mind. Now when sites are built or rebuilt, the fact that they need to be “search engine optimized” has ALMOST reached the point of being taken for granted. Most developers and agencies have finally realized what a critical piece of the pie SEO is and it is included in projects as a matter of course…for the most part.

Next up was blogging. Every marketer keeping up with the latest buzz words knew they wanted a blog, but they weren’t sure why. Now every news site worth its weight has a blog, and several blog-only “media networks” have sprung up and are experiencing some success with advertisers.

So what’s next? Social media of course! This WebProNews article (thanks TJF) by Matt Bailey encapsulates the current thinking on social media like no other I’ve read to date. Every time the new buzzword comes about, marketers see it as an “easy” way to get traffic, get recognized, etc. Nothing is easy - just new/different. Just as blogging well takes time, effort and work - participating well in online social sites takes time and effort too.

The key here is that in order to benefit from social sites you actually have to PARTICIPATE, and not just attempt to play your TV or radio spot in the social environment. It’s not a broadcast medium (just like the rest of the web). You actually have to take the time to become part of a community and give more to it than you actually take. I’m just not sure marketers will ever truly get this concept. Come to think of it - doesn’t this lack of understanding finally make marketing as a “department” or “function” within a company pretty much obsolete? Is it time for a new “department” or “function” to be the voice of the product/service inside of the corporation? Or is that the point really - the voice of the customer is the only one that matters and the voice of the product/service have just been talking to itself for quite some time now…

Regardless - why, it has been many years since the Cluetrain Manifesto was written, yet most marketers STILL don’t get it?

Web Marketing 101 vs. Marketing 101

We are always getting asked lots of questions that are both tactical and detailed regarding our client’s and prospect’s internet marketing efforts.

“Should we use HTML or plain text email?”

“Should I advertise on Google or Yahoo with my pay per click dollars?”

“How can I get page XYZ to come up in Google for the search phrase ‘ABC’?”

“I want a Flash animation on my home page, is that bad for usability?”

While these all may be great questions that justify detailed responses and explanations - the way we go about getting to what we believe is the best answer is to back up…way up.

Web marketing is just an extension of your overall marketing/advertising/selling tactics. We think it is critical that when our clients go about making web marketing decisions, those decisions are made with their customer’s demands in mind. It’s about getting back to basics and asking the simple questions:

• Where does my customer shop?
• What about my product/service satisfies their needs better than my competition?
• What about my product/service makes them happy…and willing part with their hard earned dollars?

The inspiration for this musing is an online (FREE) marketing 101 lecture I just reviewed from my teacher and friend Dr. Neil Hair, a Professor of Marketing at my alma matter the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Saunders College of Business. If you are currently confused, lost, stuck, or befuddled by what your next move should be in your marketplace, let Dr. Hair get you back to basics and clear your head.

Excellent job Professor!

Plan Before You Move (or Redesign)

For those of you that know that I just moved into a new house, and that Accession Media moved into a new office-this posting isn’t about either of those. Though some more planning on our house move would have saved a ton of aggravation…

No, this posting is about moving your website - or rather, redesigning it. If you have an existing website that you are planning on rebuilding or redesigning, make sure you consider what your regular sources of traffic are. Especially if your site is larger (10’s to hundreds of pages) and depends on advertising revenue! Ask yourself these questions as you prepare to launch a new version of your website:

1. Is one of your major sources of traffic the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc)? What percentage of your monthly traffic comes from these sources? (Hint: check your web analytics referring traffic or acquisition reports to find out.)
2. When you launch the new version of the website, will the URLs of some or all of your sites pages change? Meaning will this http://www.yoursite.com/olddirectory/oldpage.html change to http://www.yoursite.com/newdirectory/newpage.aspx?

If the answer to #2 is “yes” and the answer to #1 is “a lot” or “about 40-50%” then you need to be sure to take a few steps to mitigate a looming problem after you launch your shiny new website.

What problem you ask?

The old assumption was that a new website launch would increase traffic. The shear beauty and usability off the revised site would inspire more visitors to stay longer. The press releases around the rebuild would drive far more traffic than was already coming on a daily basis. However, this was before the skyrocketing use of search engines in the past 7 or 8 years (I’m looking at you Google).

In that time search engines went from being a novelty that didn’t work so well to being the place to start your online session when you are looking for anything from new pressure gauges, to info on Multiple Sclerosis, to a local Indian restaurant, to a new car. This was in no small part due to the rise in the amount of content on the web, and the ever increasing ability and efficiency of the big search engines to index it all and present users with relevant results for their queries.

So where does this leave us today? Most websites (especially ones that have been around for a few years) that don’t have registration or for-pay login functionality will find that traffic from the search engines make up a big portion of their monthly traffic - usually anywhere from 40-80%! Once you launch that pretty new website you have officially broken all of the links that Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others have in their indices. When users perform relevant searches and your old pages come up, people will click on them and most likely get a 404 (”Page Not Found”) error. In short order the old pages will fall out of the index, but it may take a while for the new pages to get indexed and rank as well as your old ones did. The result can often be a significant dip in traffic post-launch.

So what can be done to mitigate this? Three critical things:

1. Make sure you look at your stats and see which pages are bringing in traffic from the search engines. Make a list of those URLs - say the top 100 - then 301 redirect (301 is important!) those old pages to the URL of the same or similar pages on the new site.
2. Look at backlinks in the search engines. Which of your site pages have attracted lots of links from other sites online? Make sure those pages are also 301 redirected to appropriate new site pages if they weren’t caught in step 1. Then attempt to contact the webmasters of the sites that link to your pages and get them to update their links. This can be arduous, but depending on the value of those incoming links may just be worth the work.
3. Make sure your new site’s 404 page is friendly and helpful. There will probably still be pages of your old site that weren’t caught in steps 1 and 2 above, and 404 pages are a fact of life online. However, if you make sure your 404 error page offers users options, you can help keep that traffic on the site. Example: “The page you are looking for couldn’t be found - use our search box above or click here to go to our site’s home page.” This is a basic example, but you can take this even further with 404 page functionality that senses the referring keyword of users hitting that page from search engines, etc. (You may find this book helpful in this area)

While these three techniques seem like basic, common sense “webmastering,” I’m constantly seeing many site owners forget about these basics in the flurry of activity that leads up to a new site launch deadline. These items are often left at the bottom of the project plan as a “nice to have,” but if not addressed before the launch can come back to bite you.

While there are no guarantees that these mitigation techniques will get your new pages ranking well very quickly (this is still going to depend on the other traditional SEO factors), they will help stave off a big post-launch traffic dip for sites that owe much of their traffic to the major search engines.

If you have any questions about this posting, or would like help analyzing your site traffic in preparation for a new site launch, we are always happy to help.

If You Had to Pick Just One thing…

We were asked by a potential client the other day - “I know there are a billion factors that go into ranking well in search engines, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?”

Without pause the answer was: “it has to be backlinks.”

High quality, regularly updated content has the most influence in search engine rankings - but what is the measure of high quality content in eyes of Googlebot? Backlinks, a.k.a. inbound links. These “votes” for the quality of your site from other site owners are the most important key to increasing your natural rankings in search engines.

Put simply, backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Search engines consider many factors when analyzing your inbound links. Google and other search engines will analyze the number of inbound links your website has, and also the “quality” of the sites that those links come from, and use this as an indication of how it should treat your pages in the listings. The name of the game is to get as many quality inbound links as you can. The site linking to yours has to be relevant to the keywords and subject matter of your website.

How does your site currently stack up in the inbound linking department? To find the number of links you have to your site, you can go to Google or Yahoo! and do a search for “link:www.yoursite.com”. Click here to see an example of this for our favorite auto racing site. This will bring up a list of sites that link to yours. Google and Yahoo both have tools that show the quantity of inbound links and which pages on your site have the most links. If you want to get really deep we highly recommend Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Building your site’s portfolio of quality inbound links can be tough…perhaps we can help!

Google Analytics Relaunched - Heavenly!

Google has provided website owners its Google Analytics website traffic tracking and analysis tool for free for quite some time now. When we heard that they were about to put a new face on what was already an excellent analytics tool I must admit that some of our clients and I were quite skeptical about how such a great offering could be improved upon and remain free. Oh how our skepticism was unfounded!

The new interface, features, and functionality are simply fantastic. We work with several clients who have various levels of analytics need. Our larger clients rely on detailed user segmentation that tools like HBX and Omniture can provide. But packages of that caliber come at quite a price…five figures a year and up usually. So the common question from our smaller clients is “what do these large, expensive platforms offer that Google Analytics doesn’t? What makes tools like HBX and Omniture worth all that money?”

Our usual answer focuses heavily on the availability of ad hoc analysis features, virtually limitless and sometimes instantaneous data segmentation, and data portability (being able to pull the data via feed or API into other applications). Also, HBX’s Report Builder tool is worth its weight in gold. However this new release of Google Analytics really pushes the envelope into a few of these areas, namely ad-hoc analysis and segmentation.

The ability to slice, dice and filter data in the new interface is enhanced and the mostly-Flash-based application is incredibly fast. The new layout of key metrics, with a big focus on “key performance indicators” like pages per visit is a huge nod to the works of Stephen Few and Eric Peterson (two people of which we are big fans!). Additionally, the “spark lines” for quick trend visualization and super clean interface overall are a literal nod to the modern godfather of graphical representation Edward Tufte.

You can also set up auto emailed reports that are delivered to your (or your bosses) email inbox at whatever frequency you wish (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly). This feature is huge for busy executives and business owners who don’t have the time to login to an analytics tool everyday and check on their traffic. With this feature, the info you need is sitting right in your inbox as often as you need it.

Finally, with the new Google product it is possible to segment your analytics data by user type, or a user behavior. For example: if you can get users to tell you their occupation via a web form, you can segment your traffic on that information - show all your stats for just the doctors, or just the landscapers, etc. You could segment your data by those visitors that purchased and those that didn’t. Those that filled out a contact form and those that didn’t. How are their behaviors different? How can you encourage the more desired behavior? There are a million and one possible things that can be done with this, too many to list here.

There is a lot more to say about this new release of Google Analytics, but the bottom line for our clients is: Google just got you get even closer to the high-end analytics tools, with a much lower investment. The product itself is still FREE, the only cost is the time taken on setting it up and customizing things to track your sites conversion goals, funnels, etc specifically.

Please contact us if you would like to talk about how implementing Google Analytics can help you understand your online customers better. If you’re in the NYC metro area, the coffee’s on us, you bring the questions

Welcome New Clients - And Some Much Needed Help!

It’s been a while since I last posted as 2007 is proving to be a very busy year thus far. It’s definitely the right way to start a year off and we’re quite excited. I did want to just do a quick posting to welcome some new clients whose websites we’ve just launched or relaunched recently:

VETOPROPAC.com: Roger Brouard, creator of the VETO PRO PAC tool bag line hired us on to help him get his site showing more effectively in the natural search results of the major search engines. We started with a full rebuild of the site’s interface code (HTML). Now the site sports web standards compliant HTML with much more information that the search spiders can actually see. Next we’ll be keeping on top of SEO every month as well as managing a scaled-up pay per click marketing program test. It has been a great pleasure working with Roger and his team so far and we look forward to helping him grow his business this year.

blogs.KARLDirect.com: There is no more cluttered advertising market than the one our friends at KARL Chevrolet HUMMER compete in. How can you get your voice heard and engage your customer in a respectful conversation rather than just firing radio and TV ads at them until they cry uncle? How about a blog? KARL Chevy had us put together a blog for them and host it as well. The blog of course runs on Wordpress (as does this site) and is well optimized for the search engines as well as readers. We are only a few weeks into this project and already they’ve had some interesting feedback. If you are a “car person” you should head on over and check it out.

HCGExperts.com: Steve Holloway hired us to give his existing website and email newsletter a face lift so that it integrated with his new corporate identity and his print marketing materials. To keep the costs down we started with a web standards compliant template and customized from there. I think the result is quite pleasing and has captured many a newsletter subscriber since its recent launch.

And finally, everyone that I talk to has been telling me that having too much work is a GOOD PROBLEM - and I know it is - but it is a problem none the less. To help me out with some of the more business and analytical related stuff we’ve brought Matt Tarsi on board part time to help out. Matt is a recent graduate of Western Connecticut State University with a degree in business. He’s an amazingly fast learner and has been helping us out tremendously these past few weeks. We’re happy to have him aboard. If you are one of our existing clients you’ll probably be meeting Matt (if only by email) very soon. Welcome aboard Matt!

Microsoft Breaks Email Marketer’s Hearts

I’ve come to expect moves like this from Microsoft, but it makes no less annoying to deal with. Apparently the new version of Microsoft Outlook, Outlook 2007, will use the HTML rendering engine from Microsoft Word to display HTML email. Previously Microsoft Outlook used the rendering engine from, logically, Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer. What does this mean to you, dear email marketer?

Aside from having to test your existing HTML newsletter layouts in the new client thoroughly, you will also most likely need to back-date your newsletter code about 5 years. That’s right folks, its back tables galore and in-line styles! If you aren’t the person who has to code your HTML emails and you have no idea what that means, suffice it to say, there’s probably a lot of work to be done.

Why has Microsoft elected to do this you might wonder? From the links above and common sense it sounds like security is most likely the reason. There are just so many ways to exploit the Internet Explorer rendering engine that it makes Outlook a great entry way for malicious worms and viruses. But do they think that that Word rendering engine will really stand up long against the inevitable onslaught of spammers and other would be email “evil doers?” I think not.

We’ve done a few email newsletter templates for our clients that should stand up to this issue pretty well. You can check them out here and here. But who knows until we actually get to test them out. Anyone running a beta of Outlook 2007 who can run those through it for me?

3 New Years Resolutions for Web Marketers

With everyone setting corporate and personal goals for the coming new year, we figured we would perhaps help out with three key things we would recommend you get on top of (if you aren’t already) in 2007 to help move your business forward:

1. Start tracking something. Anything. Analytics is free now; everyone should be using it to some degree or another. Think about what the measure of success for your website is or should be. Is it the number of page views? Unique visitors? Online sales? Do you know how you did in any of those areas last month? In the last three months? This month last year? If not you should make use of the free, and/or not-so-free but excellent tools that are out there in the coming year. You have no idea where you are going, or how long it’s going to take to get there, if you have no idea where you are starting from.
2. Discover and keep track of how well you rank (or don’t rank) in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for the keywords that your customers are using to find your product/service/information, etc. Do you come up at all? Do you want to come up higher? Aside from doing spot check searches, the analytics mentioned above can help tremendously with this. A majority of web users start their surfing sessions on search engines. Whether you use search engine optimization to rank well in the natural search results, or use pay-per-click marketing to buy your way to the top, or some combination of the two (which is what we usually recommend) - there is no better marketing mechanism than putting you offering in front of the people who are seeking it when they are seeking it! Sounds so simple - but it’s really quite revolutionary - refer to Google’s stock price for proof.
3. Implement and/or optimize “pull” content and technologies instead of only focusing on “pushing” visitors to your site and hoping they do what you want them to. Start blogging on a regular basis, and make sure it includes an RSS feed and a Google Sitemap. Start a regular email newsletter. Include genuine helpful content in these publications with no strings attached. These tools can help create or put a fresh spin on your brand and create an audience and readership where there was none previously. Imagine an ecommerce site that sold only three products that the customers didn’t need but once a year - at best. If that site included a blog or newsletter that kept the customer in touch and interested in the brand and the company between those long purchase cycles - what are the chances that they would buy again in 1 year’s time? Much better we have found! Like Godin says: “Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers“

Those are some of our basic thoughts - admittedly high level. We’d love to hear some of the goals and plans that some of you out there have for 2007. Use the comments field below. And as always, contact us if you want to discuss your needs or if we can help you out in any way.

Happy New Year!

Is This SEO Firm For Real?

I had an interesting conversation with a potential client the other day. They were looking for some help with search engine optimization or SEO as we like to call it.

SEO is the component of search engine marketing that aims to get your website pages highly ranked (on the first page of results preferably, at the top of the list even more preferably) in the natural search results…not the sponsored results where you buy your spot. A company purporting to help you rise in the natural search results of the major search engines is often referred to as an SEO firm, or just an SEO. Sponsored search is called pay-per-click marketing, and a very different discipline, which I can address in a later posting.

Anyway, this potential client I was chatting with was interested in knowing about us and what we can do for them, but midway through the conversation he stopped me and sort of broke the ice by asking me (and I’m paraphrasing here) “how do I know if some of the SEO companies I’m interviewing are for real? They all guarantee different things. They all say they can deliver the world for a large monthly retainer. How can I tell who is legitimate and who is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge?”

This excellent question changed the tone of the conversation a great deal because I went from being a guy trying to sell my services, to someone trying to counsel a fellow business person through a scary territory in which I have a good bit of exposure, which is generally how I would rather approach things. Then today I happened across this excellent posting by SEO guru Jill Whalen on ISEdb.com that basically answers this same question in the same way I answered it for my potential client. I highly recommend reading Jill’s posting before starting out on an evaluation of SEO firms.

If after reading my rambling you don’t have time to read Jill’s posting, they just know this one thing: the absolute favorite scammy SEO sales pitch, one that a cold-calling SEO sales person actually tried to tell me once, is that their firm can guarantee you top placement (or any placement) in Google’s (or any other large search engine’s) natural rankings. This is an absolute lie. If you read Google’s advice for choosing an SEO firm you will see this spelled out plainly!

Bottom line - be careful and do your homework. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

———-
UPDATE: here’s another article with great advice on this same topic

Adding a Sitemap - More Than Just Usability

Does your website have a sitemap? A sitemap is a page on your site that lists all the other pages on the site, usually in a tree structure so that a user can easily navigate to any part of the site without rooting around through navigation (here is our sitemap). Aside from the usability service that a sitemap offers your site’s human visitors, it also makes a nice place for search engine spiders to go and quickly understand the layout of a website and index all its pages in a fast and effective manner. It wasn’t long before Google realized this and embraced an XML format version of the classic sitemap as a tool for webmasters to help the Googlebot crawl their site in an orderly fashion. They launched Google Sitemaps (here is our XML sitemap).

I’ve been using it for some time now for a few client sites and it is a marvelous tool for understanding the Googlebot’s activity on a given site, and also for helping the Googlebot find the important content on a site. However it was only useful with Google. The use of the XML sitemap protocol had little to no understandable effect on rankings in the other two major search engines - Yahoo! and MSN. However, last week Yahoo! and MSN announced that they too will be adopting the Sitemap protocol and will offer a tool set to manage their search engines interaction with XML sitemaps. Yahoo!’s sitemap functionality is part of its already excellent Site Explorer tools, and MSN’s functionality is yet to be launched.

If you already have an XML sitemap, you just doubled (or tripled) the bang for the bucks (or the time) you put into it. Submit it to Yahoo! and enjoy. If you don’t have an XML sitemap, here are links to an array of tools (mostly free) that you can use to get one implemented.

• Official announcements from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
• Learn about the sitemaps protocol here: Sitemaps.org
• Create XML sitemaps for your site with these tools: sitemapspal.com, XML-Sitemaps.com or for your Wordpress site with this plug-in
• Submit your sitemaps on Google and Yahoo! (Microsoft is still testing their tool internally)

Need help getting your site ready to capitalize on the benefits of XML sitemaps? We’re always happy to help…

Is Flash Bad for Business?

One of the most popular questions I get from new clients is “can we put one of those cool animated movies of my product/service/slogan/etc. as the first thing a users sees when they come to the site…and they we’ll go to the home page?” Wanting your site to move, play music, or speak to customers rather than just display text and images is a very common desire among business owners. Many people see these features as a way to set their sites apart from the competition. Do I agree with these views? The answer, as always, is “it depends.”

Many web marketing experts loathe the use of animation (specifically the use of Flash-based animation) in website design and development for several reasons. A few of those reasons are:

• Flash intros, even the ones with “skip intro” buttons, are only cool the first time your customer seems it. Do you want repeat traffic to your site? Are you prepared to put people through that animation EVERY time they come? Does that intro animation really help you get more leads/sales/etc? Or is it just something that you are the business owner think is “cool” but really acts as another barrier between you and your sale?
• Sites that are built entirely in Flash usually (but not always) are impossible for search engine spiders to crawl and index. The result? Sites built entirely in Flash rank terribly in search engines. Usually if you search the brand name in Google the home page will come up, but that’s it. No other rankings for all the other important keywords that potential customers are using if they don’t know the name of the company.
• Usually (but no always) Flash sites put more emphasis on looking and behaving cool and cutting edge than they do on usability. Always remember your sites goals (make a sale, gather a lead, get a newsletter subscription, etc). If your sites “cutting edge” interface is so cutting edge that people can’t find the “buy now” or “click here to sign up” button, it is ultimately a very expensive waste of time.

I happen to agree with all three of the points mentioned above, but I’m not an anti-Flash zealot either. It is possible to use Flash in ways that both mitigate the problems listed above, while capitalizing on the “cool” factor that Flash offers. Creating a search engine friendly all-Flash website is possible, but it takes quite a bit of extra work. A highly practiced Flash designer can create an all-Flash site that has very good usability and makes it easy for users to achieve goals on the site. As for Flash intros…I have no excuse for them. I can’t ever think of a reason to put a roadblock between your site and your users.

All that said, it is important to consider the additional cost of “cool.” Building an all-Flash website can cost considerably more than a regular HTML site. Building an all-Flash website that works well with search engines can cost even more. The question for the web marketer on a budget then becomes – just how important is cool? Can you achieve you site goals with conventional HTML pages? Do you really need Flash animation to get your customers to engage with your site/product/service? Far more often than not I would say the honest answer is no – you don’t need a Flash site. Sacrificing some of the immediate “cool” factor of an all-Flash site for HTML can often get the job done in less time, with less expense and better long-term results.

Have questions, comments? Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below. Need help with your site? We’re always happy to discuss.

Let’s Start With Some Basics

I figured the best way to start providing useful information to the small business owner or department head responsible for a corporate web presence would be to cover some of the basics of online marketing today…the points below make up the high level questions I ask when I meet a client for the first time and am trying to get an understanding as to the level of sophistication of their website and online marketing efforts…

Do you know what users are doing on your website? Analytics is free; there are no excuses anymore for not knowing what’s happening on your website. Since Google bought Urchin and set it free as Google Analytics, anyone with a website can now get a fairly advanced level of understanding as to where site visitors come from, what they do when they get there, where they leave, and a whole lot more. If you don’t have analytics on your site yet, check out these great Google Analytics blogs to understand some of the more detailed ins and outs of how to use GA. If you would like help installing and customizing Google Analytics on your site we would be happy to help. Yes it tracks commerce revenue by campaign too!

Is ranking well in search engines important? It is important that your customers are able to find your site on the major search engines! It kills me when I speak with small business owners who say things like “I don’t really care about showing up in Google because I’ll send people to my site from my magazine ad and it’s on my business card too.” If you are looking to get more customers for your product or service, there is no larger market than the major search engines. Ignoring it could be a MASSIVE mistake.

Do people know what they are supposed to do on your site after you get them there? Have a call to action on your site. Seth Godin’s book “The Big Red Fez” puts forth the idea that every single page of your site needs to have JUST ONE goal. If you are trying to get leads, the contact form or the phone call is the goal of every page. If you are selling products online, getting that checkout process underway is the goal, along with maybe getting customers to add that one additional item to their cart on the way out the door. If you have an advertising supported content site, the goal is keeping them on the site and getting more page views. Whatever it is, make it painfully clear to site users what they are supposed to do next.

Do you have goals for your site? Yes, this is the part where I start to sound like a life coach, thus indicating that it’s time to wrap this posting, but having goals for your website is critical! How can you measure success unless you have a very well defined understanding of what success is? Make the goals for your site realistic and give them a time frame. “I need the site to sell an average of 20 widgets a month by the end of the year.” “I want to increase the number of leads I get through my website by 20% this quarter.” A metric and a time frame. That’s all you need!

A Beginning…

Well, if you are going to purport to have some level of knowledge about blogging as part of your company services package, it would stand to reason that one way to demonstrate that would certainly be having a blog on your company website! So here we are, the first posting of the new Accession Media weblog. So why are we here? What are our plans for this blog? We’re glad you asked.

While blogging is generally a pretty fluid activity that can change and mold itself based on where the author and the community that (hopefully) develops want to take it, the goals at the outset of this blog are three-fold:

1. Help our clients stay informed and up to date on the rapidly changing “web 2.0″ world of marketing a product or service online
2. Help us reach out to folks that don’t yet know our little company and hopefully build some awareness and trust that we know what we’re talking about
3. Provide a platform for our own ongoing learning about blogging and the web in general…in this business when you stop learning you’re toast

Our goals for frequency are ideally once a week, if not more. But like we mentioned earlier…who knows if it might be more or less. However often we can post, if the blog becomes a resource for anyone involved in building website and marketing online, it will have done its job.

We’re glad to have you along for the ride, and hope you stay tuned (use our RSS feed to help!).