When functionality and SEO collide

November 30, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

I was thinking about this problem earlier today – so many “SEO optimized” sites are ugly, not functional, or link spam.

What gets me is people focus so heavily on “engineered” SEO, and trying to work the system.

I’m wondering about this. This hype around SEO – is it because people want a magic elixir to have their site rank without having to create relevant content all the time?

Isn’t it about fresh content more than keywords, content that people find valuable? Every conversation I’ve had with people who actually create search engine algorithms (they never talked in more than generalities – they can’t) has focused on to keep the design solid, follow basic conventions, keep it updated, make it relevant, useful information, and don’t try to game the system and you’ll do well, regardless of the technical implementation.

Many SEO firms have you do completely dysfunctional things like not use a content management system (yes, some CMS systems seem to be better than others) or create sites that are just plain ugly and unfriendly to users.

Check out what Calacanis says on his blog – as much as I have friends in the SEO business too, I gotta agree. I went and took a look at their various optimized code in various implementations – and it’s just well tagged or files labeled well (and sometimes, not so well). An excerpt from Jason:

Note: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means “gaming the system” to 90% of us.

Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google closes the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.

In short – SEO / SEM looks like, at it’s best, just over-hyped solid web design that people buy because they think it’ll be a magic bullet.

Thing I’m wrong? Fire back in the comment session. Just beware – I might return volley :-)

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Filed Under: Interaction Design, Rant, Web Sites

Nice custom home page by Logan’s Roadhouse

November 27, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

I thought it a very nice touch today when I went to the Logan’s Roadhouse website, and it had a custom home page / interstitial for Mondays and Tuesdays, highlighting their $12.99 for 2 meal deal.

What I thought was great about it was that it was perfect for a restaurant application. In some instances, I’ve seen images for a certain day, or other types of timing or cookie-driven dependencies, but this was nice because they realize what exactly I was going for and gave me what I wanted as a full page, and presented the value statement WITH the menu items covered and a link to find out if my local one participated.

It gave me all the information and didn’t bury it, which allowed me to make a smart decision – and that will be to go there for dinner tonight.

http://www.logansroadhouse.com to see what I mean (only on Mondays and Tuesdays).

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Filed Under: Kudos, Web Sites

Content Is The King

November 25, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Well, unless you’re reading in Tennessee. As I remember from my trip to Memphis, Elvis is “The King” there.

But everywhere else, content is the number one thing that will make your online presence great, yet it’s the very last thing anyone seems to want to create.

It’s the number one project killer. Someone will want a website, podcast, or other piece of media – but have no idea what they want to say, even an idea of the message.

All too often, business, organizations, and entrepreneurs think that a list of bullet points suffice as what’s needed.

When it comes to product or service sites, commonly, it’s the lack of a clear value statement and making it about the visitor.

Other times, it’s doing meta overload and relying too much on others, creating too little unique, interesting content. After all, more and more web users are employing Google Reader, Bloglines, and other services to pull that content in for themselves, and the use of yet another meta-site is declining by the day.

It goes down to a theory you will see repeated over, and over, and over, and over again – it isn’t one thing.  It’s the combination of things that make interactive successful, and for the most part, there needs to be a significant majority if not all the part there for it to work.

Content is one of those parts.

Filed Under: blogging, Interaction Design, Podcasting, Web Sites

PRWeb Podcasting (A.K.A. Sales Puke-Cast)

November 21, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

PRWeb is putting out a service that is basically a softball, PR interview with submitted-press-release inspired questions for people who do a certain level of press release distribution with them.

Podcasting is supposed to be a conversation – unique, compelling content that happens on an ongoing basis. These are one-off 5-7 minute advertisements, and I can’t imagine would create a relationship with customers since they don’t provide value. This example is not about giving value, it’s about a one-shot ad with PRWeb.

Let me give you an example of the intro of one doozy, which is the first bit of voice at the beginning.

“The MSX classic is manufactured by one of the worlds leading faucet manufacturing companies, and features chrome and brass surfaces, ceramic valves, and state-of-the-art protective finishes. Nothing but the best.”

Gag. It’s a 5-7 minute radio infomercial ad.

It goes on to talk about “easy cleaning” and “motorcycle inspired.” The whole thing is an ad that give me no value whatsoever. Also, there is no emotional connection (which is a major benefit to podcasting) between the company and the listener.

PRWeb doesn’t get it. Of course, it’s a business opportunity. It makes them look cool to the majority of marketers who do not have a clue what Web 2.0, podcasting, or blogging actually is.

And it doesn’t make them any money to put the thought into creating a campaign, the man hours, for each individual client, it’s a factory model – it’s making a podcast a “check mark” on the list and just getting it done instead of getting it done right.

I am a fan of Jeffrey Gitomer and his philosophy of giving value to get value – and NO ONE wants to sold, but they love to buy.

This is sales puke to me. It’s one thing if it’s a sponsor and all I had was an ad, but why would I subject myself to 5-7 minutes of some PR person spewing on me why they’re the greatest?

Other issues include the cover art being PRWeb-branded, not subject branded, as well a the media player on the site requiring the entire podcast episode to be loaded and so it does not play immediately, and you cannot easily “drag and scan” through the podcast.
It’s the infomercial radio approach dropped on a “podcasting” framework – and another large company wanting to be on the “bandwagon” with a top-down approach to the medium.

Not to mention, the entire podcast, both host and subject, being on the phone is just grating.

p.s. – I do give them credit for using Ogg Vorbis. Few use the format right now, but it’s open source and that’s a good thing.

Filed Under: Podcasting

A peek into the pitfalls of UGC (User Generated Content)

November 19, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

This blog post from NIN.com – Nine Inch Nails – highlights a very, very interesting situation online.

The media titans, while fighting each other, have created a bit of an uncertain environment.  So many sites rely on UGC – but the blog post correctly highlights that there are tons of sites that could be affected adversely if it’s shown there is no safe harbor with uploaded content that may or may not be copyrighted.

Ars Technica had a great excerpt that was mentioned in the NIN piece:

The DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions aren’t just important to video sharing sites; they’re important to almost every sector of Internet-based business.

“Nearly every major Internet company depends on the very same legal foundation that YouTube is built on,” said von Lohmann. “A legal defeat for YouTube could result in fundamental changes to its business, potentially even making it commercially impossible to embrace user-generated content without first ‘clearing’ every video. In other words, a decisive victory for Viacom could potentially turn the Internet into TV, a place where nothing gets on the air until a cadre of lawyers signs off,” he said. “More importantly, a victory for Viacom could potentially have enormous implications for Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, and many other Internet companies, because they all rely on the same DMCA Safe Harbors to protect many facets of their businesses, as well. The stakes are high all around.”

Filed Under: User Generated Content, Web Sites
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