Archive for May, 2010

Social-Media-See: how Facebook comments became KGTI radio

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

Facebook Social Immediacy – this is how Facebook comments became KGTI radio playlist on GrooveShark.

  • Chris Dumas, GTI Facebook fan created a KGTI playlist for us!  Thanks Chris!
  • Leann Lytle, another GTI fan, came up with the name: KGTI – Thanks Leann!

Link to KGTI Radio Playlist

Chris Dumas created KGTI as a result of a comment made by Bill Miller, GTI SEO Specialist.  Excerpt from GTI Facebook page, the convo went like this:

KGTI Radio

Bill posted this comment about how invasive music is when you land on a website page.

It is much better to give users the option to turn on a tune for a myriad of reasons, states Bill with the following four points:

  1. Who says I like your music?
  2. It will embarrass your visitor and chase them off your site-We’ve all done this, went to a website and music started playing and the boss is right next to you in the meeting.
  3. I want information not a tune, I’ll go t…o itunes for that.
  4. Top performing websites don’t have music ie Craigslist, amazon etc.

And with the immediacy of social media. this is the gist of the article’s title Social-Media-See – social-immediacy.
KGTI playlist looks like this:

Have a great week!

–Viktorya

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Posted in Social Media | 22 Comments »

Does your website meet a users’ expectation?

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

When a user lands on your website, do they find what they want within two to three seconds?  If not, ask yourself why is that?  Is it because your website design was driven by subjectivity?  What I mean by this is this:  Was your design lead by someone who really omitted marketing into the usability, and focused more on what was “pretty” to that one individual, or group of individuals?

Any type of design, whether it be a website or the interior of a home starts with a plan.  What are the goals and objectives of the site (or the space to be designed), what should an individual do once they land on the site, and what should they take away when they leave?

A website is now considered to be the highest qualifier for leads and direct sales through efforts such as Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Paid Advertising and even more so, Social Networking.  A website is a direct extension of a business’s brand, their philosophies, and client interaction.  There are some very simple rules we implement when building a website:

1)    Carry through branding from traditional print material and any advertising

Since branding and recognition is a direct function of marketing goals and objectives, a website should carry through a consistent tone, message, color palate and offerings.  This gives a seamless experience to the user regardless of which marketing platform presenting the company information

2)    Integrate Call to Action messages to drive the user directly where they should go

The number one rule of thumb is “don’t make them think” so a website should be architecturally designed to lead users where they need to go, quickly and easily.  Call to action    messages can change based on internal promotions, newsworthy items, or a “product or service of the day”

3)    Focus on multiple points of navigation

We know there are 3 different types of learners:
1)    Visual
2)    Auditory
3)    Kinetic

Each type of learner looks for the same product or service in different ways, so it’s important to meet all users needs and expectations.  Conversion results are much greater with this tactic

These are not all the elements we look at when building a website, but a sampling of what we include in our process.  The bottom line is that a website NEEDS to be thought of as a marketing tool while managing the users’ expectation.  A website typically has about 2-5 seconds to gain enough confidence in the user to encourage them to take further action, don’t let your website be an afterthought.   Plan your budget and resources accordingly to turn it into a true revenue generating channel!

Posted in Website Design | 9 Comments »

Search Results SEO and Search 2010 – Webinar

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Hi everyone! I attended a webinar on Tuesday May 11, 2010 and wanted to pass on some information about SEO and “Search 3.0″ – this webinar was by iProspect, Chris Sherman – Search Results SEO & the New World Order: Search 2010 – http://searchmarketingnow.com/search-results-seo-and-the-new-world-order-blended-search-2010-5492

Search 3.0 also known as Blended Search or Universal Search incorporates results from “non-web” info sources into “normal” web search results. For example, Google and Bing Universal Search currently scans web pages, news, videos, local, blogs, shopping, book search content in addition to live twitter feeds. In days of past, Search Engine Results brought up pure web pages only. Now when searching, you get the top 10 results PLUS, images, news feeds, real time feeds, local etc. There are so many more opportunities for our clients to come up in Search Results. Of course with that said, we need to optimize more than ever, from small details as saving image file names with keyword rich phrases, going one step further than even naming Alt Tags.

“In the next 5 years, video will become more popular than WebPages” stated Chris Sherman. Videos take more bandwidth and the way we build websites, layout and load times will continue to change and be important. Meta data in videos is huge, using lots of descriptive text on the page where the video is embedded. Another tactic, including URLs in the videos helps to encourage viral linking among views. Having the entire script of the video written out and added onto the page as a PDF or on the back end in the Meta description tag. I think a challenge will be getting our clients to hire a videographer and having them add video into their websites, but the ones that are ahead of the game with benefit.

Bing is very close to being the second most used Search Engine, Google being #1. With Bing and Yahoo merging, there are a few unknowns, and we’ll need to keep a close eye on both. Yahoo actually gets the most visits, due to their continued innovation with area’s they are good at – answers, business info, sports, health, entertainment, etc. Yahoo is seen as the “Media Destination”.

Images are also becoming more important than before, Google and Bing now use images as a part of their Search Results. Images should include a descriptive Alt Tag, file names should have keywords, and keyword rich text should be surrounding the picture (this means if there is a picture of a wine press, then the supporting copy should be talking about wine presses.) Images in Universal Search are more likely to appear in Searches for products, people or famous places.

The last point is that each page of your website should include location specific information, addresses, phone number (no more than 2 phone #’s), hours etc. There are many reasons to do this, more than you would think. Search engines, depending on which page is indexed, look for information like address and often times helps to display our clients in Google Places/Local Business, Skype highlights phone numbers so people can call them right from their computer, and it’s great usability for Searchers, etc.

I’d like to thank Chris Sherman from iProspect for one of the best webinar’s I’ve attended. I hope this info is useful; as it’s going to affect each of us in some way. This is a condensed version of what I learned but thought it was useful information to share. Contact us at www.gotrafficinteractive.com if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading,

Bill

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Posted in SEO, Website Design | 6 Comments »

SEO Short

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Content on your site connects with keyword phrases – your products and or services should relate to those keywords.  The emphasis we place on this relevance pays off.

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Posted in SEO | 3 Comments »