PlattForm Life and Times

During the website creation process, weeks, and even months can be spent on the design elements and structure of the site. This is a good thing. However, In doing so, one crucial piece of the website often goes overlooked: the content. Even in today’s visually stimulated interactive market, the quality of your content can make… or destroy your site. To that end, here are 10 rules for creating effective content that keeps users engaged with your website.

1. Remember the first rule of real estate
Location, location, location. I know what you’re thinking. This is supposed to be an article about creating content, not where you should put it. But just like in real estate, you can have the best house (content) ever built (created), but its value is heavily determined by where it’s located. So where should you put it? Let’s start with what should seem so obvious, but many marketers don’t realize – the homepage.Many sites’ homepages consist of mostly images, while others are built exclusively in flash. When creating your homepage, it is essential to keep two entities in mind: your audience, and the search engines you rely on to bring you that audience. Having content on your homepage not only gives your brand a clear voice and message, it provides the opportunity to successfully optimize for search engine traffic.

2. Use just the right amount
As you probably know, there is such a thing as too much or too little content for your lead generating website. On one hand, visitors get bored fast. It is important to note that users do not intend on reading every word of every web page they visit. Additionally, a website rarely ever captures a visitor’s full attention. For instance, think of what you are doing right now. Are you just reading this article, or are you also:

Listening to music?
Drinking coffee?
Watching television?
Texting?
All of the above?

If your target audience is internet savvy, they are digitally multi-tasking on a consistent basis. All is not lost, however. They are used to this juggling media circus act, and more importantly, they are still on your site. So what did we learn? Avoid putting too much content on your web page. But we’re not done just yet. Let’s take a look at the other side.
As you may recall from earlier (unless you were distracted from texting), pleasing the visitors and the search engines is the best way to bring sweet music to your lead generating ears. Pages with very little content can be perceived by search engines to have very little to offer. While there is no magic number, it seems pages with at least two hundred words generally perform better in search rankings than pages with less content. So ultimately, how do you please both sides? It’s a good thing we have rule number three.

3. Use text separators
Text separators are a terrific way to break up content for easy digestion. A large block of text can seem overwhelming to website visitors, making them less likely to invest their time in the page. Generally speaking, readers will skim an article first before reading it to determine if it’s what they were searching for. What do they skim, you ask? Text separators. Text separators are anything that breaks up text or makes it stand out. This includes headings, bulleted and numbered lists, bolded words, horizontal lines, pictures and even a simple paragraph break.

4. Speak to your target

This is probably the most difficult challenge in web content writing. However, the task becomes manageable once you have identified three factors:

-Who is the target?
This one is a no-brainer but considerably important. The easiest misconception for web content writers is that the audience is just like them. More often than not, this is not the case. Market research is an unwavering buzzword in the internet marketing world, but is regularly underutilized.

-Who influences your target?
Within your target market is a small sector of those who are most influential to that market. While the importance of “influentials” may vary by industry, they all have some. If you can get these few on board with your website or product, others will follow. It used to be called “word of mouth”. Now it’s called social media. Either way, targeting your most influential visitors can generate substantial return.

-How do you speak to all of them?
While you must speak to the uniqueness of your market, at most consist of several different segments – meaning different geo and demographic differences. How do you please them all? Start by Determining the spectrum, or segments, and make sure your content is simple and clear for all of the possible users. You may even want to consider separating sections for different audiences, if their needs are drastically different.

This can seem like a mysterious balancing act, but if you address these three questions, your website will reward you.

5. Get to the point
Now that you understand your website’s visitors have short attention spans, are often multi-tasking, and are not automatically invested in your web page, this one is easy – get to the point. Don’t save the best for last. An employer will not read every cover letter he or she receives for an open position. The employer will read the first few sentences and often skip to the next applicant if the interest is not peaked. For the analogy’s sake, treating your website like a prospective employee and the visitors like a CEO will help you get the job.

6. Have a pulse
When a user identifies with the human(s) behind the website, the website-visitor dynamic usually creates a more engaged audience. A common misinterpretation of this point is in order to humanize your writing, its professionalism must suffer. Correlation does not equal causation. In almost every case, you can still have professional writing, while still speaking to the customer.

7. Be consistent
So you probably already know this. However, it is essential to monitor your content’s consistency and accuracy, rather than assuming its flawlessness. Some common mistakes include: using the writer’s perspective (we, I, [company name], ect.); formatting numbers (does it say $49.99 one place and $50 somewhere else): and not keeping your website up-to-date. If the reader can tell your last update was over a year ago, they may discount its relevance, even if the topic doesn’t justify it.

8. Provide direction
You can lead a visitor to your website, but you can’t make her buy… unless you tell her to. Tell your visitors what to do. Make a point to have adequate call-to-action and direction within your text. Website visitors will often ignore advertisements and call-to-action buttons on the top and side columns of a website, and only look at them when they want to navigate to another page. Directive text may not be as pretty as a starburst “Click Here”, but it speaks to the audience when their interest is peaked.

9. Incorporate pictures
I should have the restraint of avoiding this cliché, but… a picture is worth a thousand words. Although using content instead of pictures is not recommended, the combination is key to captivating a visitor.
[insert picture here??]

10. Integrate keywords
Remember the concept of pleasing the visitors of your website, as well as the search engines that send visitors your way? The magic solution is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of altering a website to increase its organic rankings for targeted search queries. Integrating targeted and well-researched keywords into a web page is an important SEO tactic. While the users read this integrated content, the best SEO is that which goes unnoticed, unless your name is Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Many businesses and people think that once their website is redesigned, that is it. Just redesign the site and sit and wait for all of the [insert goal of web site here: traffic, leads, subscriptions, etc.] to come pouring in. Despite the utopian thoughts, this is unfortunately not the case.

Your web site can be compared to a car – a common comparison when it comes to internet marketing. You can purchase a brand new car and 3,000 miles later, you need to get an oil change. About 20,000 miles later, you need to change your wiper blades and fuel filter, and 40,000 miles later you need to change your tires (note: these are estimated timeframes and I am not a mechanic . Point being: even a brand new car needs up keeping.

The same goes for a website. You might have just launched your new site with a fantastic, cutting-edge design in the best CMS with all the latest interactivity, but the biggest mistake you can make is to just sit back and watch the analytics. Continuous updates help to not only maintain it, but also make it perform better, be more recognizable to search engines, and keep users intrigued. This is no easy task, but it’s worth it. At PlattForm, our SEO teams look into our websites everyday – to figure out the proactive steps via the analysis of traffic and see what changes we can make that have an impact. Testing different elements of a site is not just “cool to do” anymore – it’s a necessity if you want to make substantial gains.

Testing is a perfect way to establish performance metrics for your website. From testing different photography and imagery to testing the content or fields of a contact form, constant testing of individual elements will allow you to pinpoint specific areas that affect traffic and conversions. At PlattForm, multiple teams within our Interactive marketing department test different aspects of many websites across the company. We then utilize our findings company-wide to establish best practices for all teams. This is why most of the sites we re-launch have higher conversion rates than their previous versions. But it doesn’t stop there. After the new site is launched, we continue to test and tweak different elements to keep that conversion rate creeping up and to the right.

Think about your conversion rate for a minute. Let’s say you are getting 10,000 visits per month and your conversion rate is at 3%. You are getting roughly 300 leads per month. Now, if you are able to raise your conversion rate by only .2%, you get 20 more leads per month (20 leads per month times 12 months = 240 extra leads!). Could you use 240 extra leads per year? Think about .5% or even 1% increases…

Continuous improvements based on test results need to be completed on an ongoing basis, and it’s becoming a huge part of web design and development. Many companies are capable of producing a great design – not many companies are good at building on that design to make it increase [insert goal of web site here: traffic, leads, subscriptions, links, etc.].

Back in February, the regulatory commissions in the US and EU approved a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft, clearing the way for these two companies to form what they have coined a “Search Alliance”. While we have joked around the office about the obvious Star Wars reference in the name, this merger is serious business and warrants our attention over the next few months.

What is the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance?
If you are unfamiliar with the business dealings of these two search giants let’s start with a little background. About 2 and a half years ago Microsoft began talks with Yahoo! to buy their company. These were tenuous discussions and were opposed at the time by the founder and CEO of Yahoo, Jerry Yang. Talks fell apart and both parties seemingly went their own way to try to compete with the industry heavyweight – Google – alone.

A little less than a year later Yahoo, under new management, made a strategic decision to focus on content delivery and display advertising as their core business, leaving the ‘search’ piece of their business for sale as they moved vital resources previously allocated to search over to their new, more focused core business. After a very brief courting by both Google and Microsoft, Yahoo came to an agreement in principle to sell their search business to their competitor Microsoft. Under the agreement Microsoft will leverage their technologies to serve organic and paid search advertising on all Yahoo content properties and Yahoo for all intents and purposes will cease to be a search engine – allowing Microsoft to be more competitive with market leader, Google.

Originally, the plan was for Microsoft to launch their search technology on Yahoo properties by late 2011 or early 2012. However, the plan has changed and now the launch of Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the search provider for all US and Canada Yahoo properties is anticipated the second week in October 2010 – in order to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

So Now What Happens?
I’m sure you are saying to yourself that all this background is interesting and awesome but how will it impact me? After the changes take effect, both organic and paid search results on all Yahoo properties will leverage Microsoft technologies, so anyone performing a search on a Yahoo owned property will receive Bing search results. There is no plan to change the look and feel of the search results so to the end user of those search results there will not be a noticeable change. To the advertiser and the agency, however, there are several changes that will require your attention:

1. Take Action:
Most importantly, the Search Alliance will leverage Microsoft’s AdCenter technology to manage all pay per click marketing campaigns on all properties. Yahoo’s management interface will cease to exist. This means that as an advertiser you will need to move any Yahoo campaign you are running into the MSN interface. This is not as simple and straight forward a move as one may think. There are several changes that will need to take place to make Yahoo accounts work in Microsoft’s program, so make sure you give yourself plenty of time to make the switch. Make sure you utilize your account rep at Microsoft when you need help.

2. Be Careful:
An additional consideration is that this will be a rolling transition, meaning that only portions of search volume will be switched over to run through the Microsoft/Bing search at a time. This means it will be important to transition all your accounts to the Microsoft interface and run them concurrently with your Yahoo account to avoid losing search volume.

3. Understand the Limitations:
The final consideration for this transition to Microsoft/Bing is advertisers will no longer have a choice whether or not to run on Yahoo or Bing. This is an important point since in some cases we have found Bing or Yahoo to be ineffective at lead generation. Once this shift occurs and for the foreseeable future, your ads will show on ALL Yahoo and Bing networks. From an advertiser standpoint this is one of the larger downsides of this merger.

Outside of the technical challenges and work involved in transitioning the accounts to Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, the jury is still out on the effect this merger will have on advertisers. Some industry experts believe that there will be no noticeable impact where other believes the opposite. In my opinion, if there is an impact on our clients, the effect will be minimal and most likely result in slightly higher CPL’s. Only in cases where we have clients who do not currently have a Microsoft (or Yahoo) campaigns should we see an increase in volume from pay per click traffic. It is also difficult at this moment to tell how the market will react to this change. We may see a slight increase in cost per click on the new search alliance as more advertisers enter the space that may have previously only used one or the other of these ad outlets. As for overall search volume, I do not believe we will see any impact. The average user will not know what is going on under the hood of this search alliance, as their favorite search engine will function and look the same way it did before the transition.

With only a month left before the transition begins, we have a firm grasp on what steps advertisers need to make the move from Yahoo to the Search Alliance. What remains unclear is the impact, if any, this merger of two industry giants will have on their advertisers.

Behold the future. And it is good.

Fire up your smart phone (Droid, Blackberry, HTC or even your fancy shmancy new iPhone 4G) and keep reading.
 
You’ve heard of 1-800 numbers, Purls, Texting, and even the most ancient form of response – the reply slip in the #9 envelope. Introduce, the Quick Response code, aka QR code.

If you were at the Career College Association’s Annual Convention this year, you might have noticed that there was a funny block of black and white squares (similar to a bar code) on the registration form for the guitar giveaway at the PlattForm booth. If you happened to scan that with your smartphone, and applicable app, you would have been taken to a mobile-ready mini site that had several links to PlattForm related topics. Such as the “We’re not Gonna Take It” video, PlattForm’s main website, and several other informational pages. That block of squares is what is known as a QR Code.
 
Quick Response (QR) code is a 2D glyph that serves as, well, basically think of it as a paper based hyperlink. These customizable glyphs were developed by in Japan by Denso Wave in 1994. They are widespread in Asia, becoming mainstream in Europe, and are just starting to emerge in the United States. The QR code reader currently has to be downloaded as a third party application, but are starting to be included as standard issue on modern smart phones.
 
To use a QR code, simply take a picture of said code with your super cool smart phone, and you get magically whisked away, or in technical terms, redirected to a website using your phone’s browser. What’s even cooler, is that these codes can be scanned from computer monitors so you can transfer information directly to your cell phone.
 
QR technology provides cell phone users the ability to scan paper-based content using the cell phone’s camera to decode information, on a magazine, business card, gift card, coupon, or dah-dah-dah, DIRECT MAIL PIECE. Once the QR code has been scanned and decoded, the user has access via their cell phone to the information or destinations programmed into the block.
 
What can you do with a QR code?
Consumers are finding codes in magazine ads, maps, food packaging, posters, leaflets, business cards, emails, websites, billboards, on the sides of buses, and more. With these vehicles in mind, the current technology could be used in the following manner:

Encode a 2 page document
Enable an easy connection by a mobile device to a website. You could also encode a map with directions for company visitors
Link to a video
Track print-based media effectiveness – track by concept, list, creative, etc.
If you can put it on a website, you can direct them to it through scanning the code

PROS
· 70% of cell phones have cameras
· 2D reader software available for easy (and usually FREE) download
· You don’t have to type in a URL to navigate to a website
· Codes are cheap to create
· Fast way to provide complex information to mobile users
 
CONS
· Not widely used in the USA yet
· Probability of short term user confusion as 2D codes are known by many names
· Most cell phones in the US do not come with 2D reader software installed
· QR codes can not be edited, they must be replaced
· The more information you store in a code, the harder it is to decode.
 
So, get ready for the future. The most effective way to determine how QR codes can work for you – test them. Need some help? We’d be glad to fire up the Delorean and come visit.

What is Caffeine and why should I care?
As the seasons change from Spring to Summer, Google has also brought forth a change to its indexing process, implementing its “Caffeine” update.

On June 8th, Google implemented the Caffeine update across the web. According to the Official Google Blog, this update “provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

There are many articles, blog posts and resources out there discussing the Caffeine update, but we wanted to provide a distilled version of the update and how it will impact your web sites.

Overview of Caffeine
As Caffeine is an update to the indexing infrastructure, its intent was not to modify the Google’s ranking algorithm. In the past, the crawling and indexing system of Google worked as a batch process. A set of documents (content pages, videos, images, etc.) would be crawled and then those would be processed for information (content detail, anchor text and inbound link information, etc.) and then ultimately added into the index. This again was done on a batch basis, so it was not an immediate process. With Caffeine, every time a page is crawled, it goes through the entire process pretty much immediately, and the piece is added into the index. This allows content to be added into the Google index and ultimately the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) much more quickly than in the past.

In addition, the new infrastructure allows further data to be collected about each document. With more relevant data being collected about the characteristics of the document, there’s potential for the document to rank for additional long tail keywords. Basically, Google is setting their indexing system up so that it can eventually add in additional ranking factors into their algorithm as the web continues to evolve.

What does Caffeine mean?
Fresh, new content is getting added into the SERPs more quickly. This also implies that older content will have more pieces to compete with in the search results. So although this is not viewed as a ranking update, with additional fresh content competing with existing content, rankings may fluctuate.

What can we do?
To continue performing well in the search results, within the new parameters Caffeine is putting out there, consider creating new content on a regular basis, and getting (or remaining) active in the social realm as well. If Google is highlighting fresh content, frequently creating updates, new pages, images, videos and adding them into a blog, web site or social media presence would make sense in an effort to capitalize on Caffeine.

PlattForm’s SEO team is staying on top of the situation and will report additional insight and information as it becomes available. Stay tuned.