PubCon is the mecca of all search engine marketing events world wide. After being in the SEM field for a while you begin to expect a little repetitive information when attending SEM conferences. But I have to say that PubCon was the best conference I’ve ever been to. Plus the fact that it’s in Vegas added to the vibe. If you decide to attend only one search engine marketing event next year, you will definitely want to go and hang with the PubCon folks. It doesn’t get any better.
BlendTec's George Wright shows their blenders are more than just hype. It blended this rake in 5 seconds flat.
Me an Bill Hunt. (Wrote the Enterprise SEM bible - Search Engine Marketing Inc.)
Here I am hanging with Alex, Damien and Noam - A few of the world's best web marketers. I also had the pleasure of hangin with Matt and Chris (picture not available)
I’d like to give a shout out to some of the good folks I met at PubCon Vegas
Recently a clients sites PageRank went from a PR7 to a PR8. Since PR is such an esoteric topic and my client is pretty non-SEO savvy, I attempted to explain PR to them like this;
PR rank is a Google quality score that ranks the usefulness of a website by analyzing inbound links.
After giving that explanation of course you can imagine the next question. You guessed it; “How did it happen?”. I’ve gone over Google’s PageRank equation before, in a nutshell is all about inbound links, or should I say the quality of inbound links.
The only increase of inbound links had come from a social networking site. Actually this clients social networking had gone somewhat viral a few months before the PR change. They have been amassing a few hundred new profile links every week.
What this means to Web marketers is that Google’s “Social Value Ranking” is alive and well and making an incredible impact on sites that tap into it properly. My clients site is currently breaking records for traffic and revenue. Let’s hope this upward trend continues.
Here’s in my opinion, a very good video on Social Value Ranking and Open social by Themezoom.
Many times when I hear a person talk about “usability”, they really mean “subjectivity”. Sometimes, usability is one of those buzzwords that web developers use when they don’t want you to know how much they don’t understand. According to Wikipedia, usability refers to the methods of measuring the principles behind an objects’ perceived efficiency or elegance. Or you could say, “how to measure why Web visitors do, what they do”.
Is it possible to control a Web visitors behavior?
Control would be the wrong word. Maybe producing a stimulus response or some sort of behavioral theory would be plausible, but control would be something else entirely. Usability is the concept of using analytic s to determined if a sites purpose and function are aligned.
Many years ago, when I was a young Web developer, I designed a Web site for a publishing company. The sites purpose was to inform those interested in writing how the publishing company could help them publish a book. After a few months the site owners realized they were getting a lot of emails asking how to break into the book publishing business. The publishing company were very responsive to answer any question, obviously with the hopes of increasing business. After a year of responding to many email questions, the publishing company wanted to know how they could get so much traffic, having questions, but couldn’t convert any to clients. After analyzing there traffic, it was pretty obvious that their visitors were using them as a source on “how to get a book published” as opposed to using their publishing service.
My suggestion for the company was to re-align the “purpose” of the site to match up with the “function”. By adding a forum to answer questions on how to publish a book they could benefit in two ways. First, they would benefit from all the rich user-generated content and second they added a level of loyalty by requiring their users to become members of their forum they now could develop an on-going relationship of engagement and ultimately get some to use their book publishing service. The process of aligning a sites function and purpose is called “Reciprocal Evolution”. We change it, and it changes us until we’re organic. A synonym for reciprocal evolution on a large scale project would be a form of semantic design.
Your only real control in Web usablity are your measurements. Be 100% certain that what you are measuring is what you want to measure. I’ve had clients whose metrics were all over the board. Everyone’s analysis seemed to be about empowering their department as opposed to improving general operations. Setting the best metrics can be tricky. Think of Maslow’s Hammer when analyzing data,
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem begins to resemble a nail.”
Increase your tools and understand how to use them. Avoid a tool belt that only has a slot for a hammer.
3 Steps to Measuring Interaction
1. Know what you want to measure
2. Figure out a way to measure, compare and contrast data correlations
3. Determine the interaction that’s causing the reaction
The September 26th Google toolbar update has come and gone for many websites, literally. Many websites that received a Page Rank increase late September 2008 have seen the newly acquired Rank revert back to it’s previous state by Friday October 3.
Page Rank is a Google quality score which is dependent on the number of quality inbound links to your web site. Content or on page optimization technique do not effect page rank.
The reasons for a normal Page Rank decrease can be numerous. And would be difficult to determine without historical knowledge of the inbound links. Google does a Page Rank update every 3 to 4 months whenever the feeling hits them, and Page Rank usaully has a 3 or 4 month lag. So when your Page Rank changes, you are seeing the update in your toolbar that actually happened 3 or 4 months ago.
The reason for the October 3rd decrease probably has more to do with there being different data exports, which in essense means Google may have given authority to some of there datacenters to update Page Rank independently. In 2007 during a Page Rank update, aka “Page Rank Shuffle” this happened once before. After a few days it seemed to settle down and go back to normal.
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