To whom it may concern: Please stop calling companies and telling them you can save them over 85% on their AdWords spend. Please stop calling them and saying you are “SEO Certified by Google”. That’s right “SEO Certified by Google”. Google does not SEO certify anyone! If your company does not know the difference between SEO, SEM or PPC you don’t deserve to be in the business. Yes, and please stop calling.

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Tom Lynch Categories: Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web

A couple months back, I spoke in Miami to members of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA) about publishing to mobile devices. These are typically niche publishers, each offering unique value to their readers and each with unique editorial and technology requirements. Mobile is an exploding market for content delivery, offering enormous possibilities and potential value.

One of the first major decisions you make when deciding to go mobile is App or Optimize. In other words, are you talking about building a mobile-friendly website that almost any smart device can display (optimize), or do you need apps on various mobile platforms (app)? Here are some tips to help you make the right decision, which will likely lead to better results for you and yours.

App Advantages

• Max control over brand, user experience, and rights management
• Expanded options for ad revenue
• Enhanced feature set for media-rich content
• Enhanced ability to view content offline (plane)
• “Cool” factor

App Disadvantages

• Typically higher production and maintenance cost and time
• Access is limited to devices you can afford to support
• Potentially more difficult to integrate with existing publishing solutions
• Reduced flexibility in a rapidly evolving industry

Mobile-Optimized Website Advantages

• Standard rich content formatting language for Web/Email
• Free, flexible and open – works on most devices
• Typically reduced production costs and time
• Typically easier to integrate directly with existing content management systems (Webany)
• Easier viral distribution and linking, with methods to deter unauthorized copying
• Control viewing access (rights management)

Mobile-Optimized Website Disadvantages

• Lack of complete control over brand and user experience (esp. with RSS)
• Fewer options for flexible rights management
• Fewer embedded/easy ad revenue options
• Reduced ability to add interactive features
• Reduced offline content access without additional software support

The recent iPhone release on Verizon is good timing for Apple since Android had been out-selling it in the last months of 2010. More choices of carriers should lead to an increase in sales.

I hope this was a helpful breakdown of some of the considerations. Our process has helped several clients make the right decisions when going mobile. Let me know if you have any questions.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

One of the most fun and valuable things we do as a company is training. I do the SEO training. I have worked with groups over 350 and as few as two.

Over the years, the sessions have been mostly skewed to publishers. And what publishers do is what everybody who wants to score well on search engines should do: Publish lots of content that people want to read. Sounds like a no-brainier but many companies either publish once and forget it or make editorial choices in a bubble that excludes external research. Research not only for topics and keyword popularity but the competition for each one.

The sessions are usually a full day and we cover everything from “is your site search engine friendly” to “how to select editorial” and “how to optimize an article”.

Check out these tools for help with the selection process: semrush.com, wordtracker.com, socialmention.com, https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, and http://www.google.com/insights/search/

The selection processes should be based on where someone is in their life cycle of search.

Some Optimization Tips:

Keep your html titles under 65 characters, and meta descriptions under 150 characters including spaces & punctuation so they don’t get clipped off in search results.

Lead with the target keyword phrase in the html title – and get it into the meta description as well. The meta description will not bump your rankings but search engines often boldface the words that match the search and it helps your search results stand out.

Name your images-what-they-are.jpg or .gif or whatever file format you choose. The top search engines present images in search results and you will rank better not only for your page but the images may appear separately and help drive traffic to the site. Better then a 1234-unrelated-file-name.jpg

There are lots and lots of tactics. But none will have any impact if your site is not search engine friendly. To see if your site is indexed on Google you can either sign up for a Google Webmaster account or you can do a quick search on Google like this:

site:put-your-domain-name-here.com.

Use your company’s website url exactly as it appears entered after the : sign and then hit search. You will see what Google has in their index for your site.  If you see every page of your site there – good.  If not you need to find out why. Happy to help.

Feel free to hit me up with questions regarding this, the slides, or tools.

The good news it’s all about testing. You can test and learn. Your brain may hurt a little but it’s at least safe.

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Tom Lynch Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Search Engine Optimization

I was really impressed by this post from Craftzine’s Director of Technology regarding a failed attempt to move the publication’s popular blog to WordPress and his plans to try it again. As we all know, sometimes mistakes happen and in the now-right-now world of the Web these mistakes can be especially hard to hide. Luckily, as long as they are handled well, people’s memories for screw-ups tend to be just as short as their patience at the moment they happen. Whether it’s a typo in an email or a full website crash there are a few common-sense rules to handling mistakes in your web marketing:

1. Correct the mistake as quickly as possible while ensuring no additional mistakes are made during the correction.
2. Be transparent. Don’t ever lie about your mistake, there’s just too many trolls on the internet who would love nothing more than catching a company in a lie and turn a small mistake into headline worthy scandal. (Wikileaks anyone?)
3. For larger mistakes, offer a quick and sincere “mea culpa” followed by an executable list of what you will do right in the future.
4. Use humor (carefully) to diffuse any tension around smaller mistakes like typos – but keep it self-deprecating, never nasty or sarcastic. Resist the urge to make a joke at the expense of the people who called you out on the mistake. And never make light of a situation in which anyone was physically hurt or suffered material, financial or data-related losses.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Marketing, Social Media, Web

I had a blast giving a presentation at the Chicago Creative Collation last November. My 2-hour presentation “How to Translate Your Design Expertise into Amazing Websites” was enthusiastically received by about 20 graphic designers and creative professionals.

In the beginning of my presentation I covered some “Basics” of web design that I thought might make for a good blog post here. Here are some of my tips for print designers who are ready to take the leap into Web design.

It’s all about the pixels.
People who work on the Web measure in pixels, not centimeters, inches or points (font). To clearly communicate with the rest of your development team, be sure to reference distance and font sizes in pixels.

Always work in 72 dpi.
This is as high resolution as the web gets. You can work in a higher resolution, but it will only bloat file size and slow down your website.

Design sites to 984px wide or less.
900px is a bit safer, 800px is very safe. Though this width will likely increase over the next several years as monitors improve, right now about 95% of web users will be able to see the full width of your site as long as it is about 900px wide. To learn more about this and see real-time data about the width of browser sizes visit browsersize.googlelabs.com.

Plan on the “fold” for your website at about 450px tall.
The term “above the fold” comes from the newspaper world so it shouldn’t be an unfamiliar concept to most print designers. When web folks talk about “above the fold” we mean what can be seen without scrolling when someone first opens a site. Again, this height is slowly expanding as monitors improve and you can check in on current data at any time at browsersize.googlelabs.com.

Main Text should be no smaller than 12px.
Though this is not a hard and fast “rule,” in my experience, everytime I build a site for a client with text less than 12px font, they come back to me at some point and ask me to increase the size. This can degrade clarity, hierarchy and layout if it’s done after the design phase so my suggestion is just to start with 12px as your minimum font size and chose the size for headers, etc. off of that. (And if you were wondering, yes, on the web pt and px are the same.) Here is a link to a site that shows pt to px conversions: http://sureshjain.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/53/

There are a limited number of Web-safe fonts – stick to them.
Here is a list of the 13-15 web-safe fonts currently available to designers. If you go outside of this list, you will need to either specially code your site using a technique like sIFR which can greatly increase development time (and budget) or you can convert the text to images or Flash which is definitely not recommended for the main text on your site since it can have huge impact on Search Engine Optimization, accessibility to visually disabled users, and site load time.

Do Not Build Your Sites Entirely in Flash.
Though there are some great uses for Flash, like an animated header or a contained interactive element, a site built entirely in Flash is generally something you want to stay away from for several reasons. 1) It’s terrible for SEO – Yes, Google’s getting smarter about indexing some Flash sites, but HTML is still the way to go. 2)The entire site is “one page” – people can’t link to a specific page on the site. 3) iPhones won’t be able to see your site. Remember, many animations can be done through Javascript or HTML5.

Present Your Designs on a Screen, Not a Piece of Paper
Resist the urge to print out your designs to present them to a client. Colors are based in light, not pigment, so contrast is ruined. Size issues like balance and legibility become impossible to evaluate. I recommend exporting review documents as exactly sized, medium quality JPGs and if possible post them for review in an environment that shows the client the JPG in a browser window (Basecamp is great for this.)

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization