First Scribe Holiday Closure Information

First Scribe will be closed in observance of the holidays on the following dates:

• Monday, December 24th
• Tuesday, December 25th
• Tuesday, January 1st

Please also be aware that you should expect limited services on Wednesday, December 26th and Monday, December 31st.

Servers are monitored 24/7, regardless of office closures. For our VIP clients, First Scribe Support will operate on emergency weekend services. If you should have a hosting emergency, please contact the technical support staff via the contact information listed in your hosting agreement.

All non-emergency calls left at 952-915-1600 will be returned on the next business day.

Happy Holidays from the staff at First Scribe!

Christmas Sales Building - Will It Be Enough?

Cyber Monday proved to be the start of a high-traffic week with lackluster conversions for our clients. Thanksgiving kicked off a flurry of excited shopping but it appears American wallets are pinched and shoppers are looking for discounts.

The Official Word On The Street

Internet research company comScore Inc. reported this week that total online spending from Nov. 1 - Dec. 7 has reached more than $18 billion, up 18 percent from the same period a year ago.

"It was a terrific kick-start to December, but we expect the upcoming week to be the heaviest online spending week of the holiday season as the procrastinators and late-season deal-seekers come out in earnest," comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a written statement.

Our Numbers Are Growing

We are seeing online Click Through Rates and Sales Conversion numbers increasing as we approach Christmas. The Monday nearest Dec. 15th generally proves to be the peak of online shopping. The 18th should prove the peak of Christmas shopping in 2007.

Trim The Fat

As we stated in our last post, now is the time to trim the fat from your marketing campaigns. You should have enough data in your PPC campaigns to know what is working and what is not. Cut anything that isn't working - put the money where the buyers are.

Use your traffic data to turn any "Red" marketing efforts into the "Black".

Marketing Tip:

Think Accessories - 2007 budgets are tight so make sure you're selling pushing your accessories and add-ons.

Google PageRank Algorithm Change

It appears that Google has updated their algorithm behind the PageRank (PR) bar in the Google Toolbar.

This would appear to be the second time they have worked on the PR algorithm in the last 2 years. The previous update did little other than dropping PR across the board. This change is targeted and has some marketing folks in a tail-spin.

Bad Links

According to Matt Cutts, a Google insider, the algorithm change is targeting "bad links". Google repeatedly says that you should not rely on traded and purchased links to boost your PageRank. They say that the best links are one way and freely given.

I'm here to tell you that idea works really well for Google but it rarely happens in reality...

How should you react?

If you are actively buying or trading links via an affiliate program you need to reconsider and quick. Google is highly sophisticated and they can tell if links to and from your site are mixed in with links to gambling, porn, cartographers, etc.

Do you sell Adsense content-network ads on your site? It's possible you will see a PR drop for links outside of your industry...

How Will First Scribe React?

We won't. We don't sell or trade links. We are listed in some small business directories and I can't see that as a negative impact on our site.

Our PR has fluctuated between a 5/10 and a 6/10 over the last 4 weeks. I'm seeing similar fluctuations on our competitions' sites so I'm not alarmed.

Interestingly enough - our organic search engine rankings increased as our PR moved. Some competitors are no longer on the first page...

Is it permanent?

Yes and No.

The change happened some time in the Sept. or Oct. and they will undoubtedly tweak it again this quarter. Google often makes algorithm changes that over-reach the target and then they tweak it back.

New Staff Member Introduced to SEO

Before I started working at First Scribe Inc., I thought I knew almost everything there was to know when it came to web design and web development. I didn’t know the importance behind SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

There is a science to integrated web development SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Future clients of First Scribe Inc. should understand the importance of search engines and how search engines correlate to the success of their online presence. To put it simply, if the search engine can’t find your website, a potential customer won’t find your website either.

Not only does your website need to look inviting to a potential customer with immediate calls to action. Your website needs to be search engine optimized. Some First Scribe Inc. clients have us optimize their website; others prefer not to have us optimize their website.

The First Scribe Inc. clients that have their website optimized by the First Scribe Inc. team have seen increases in online sales/leads that they have never dreamed of.

If you have an online business and you are wondering why your website isn’t generating sales/leads like you expected. Ask yourself this question; “If a search engine can’t find my website, will a potential customer find my website?”

The answer to that question is a simple "No".

Vista Fails to Penetrate Business Sector

Sunbelt Software, makers of the corporate anti-spyware product Counterspy Enterprise, recently released statistics indicating Windows Vista's penetration into the business sector. In their sample audience, which was generally composed of small and medium businesses and included windows only PC's, Vista adoption was a mere 0.32%. Windows XP has the lion's share (82.91%) followed by Windows 2000 (14.88%) and Windows Server 2003 (1.83%).

There are many opinions as to why this may be the case. While I can't speak for the industry in general from our experience Vista's small value add of a sleeker user interface provides very little business value considering it comes at the cost of Vista's aggressive hardware requirements, slow performance, obtrusive user account management, general incompatibilities, and poor backup utility.

With Vista's poor adoption, Apple's upcoming release of OS X Leopard at the end of October, and new distros (versions) of Linux shipping with a true, 3D accelerated user interface (Compix-Fusion) it should prove to be an interesting time for the desktop computer industry as a whole. Even PC manufacturing giant Dell has started to release desktop computers with Ubuntu, a very popular and user friendly version of Linux. Hopefully as more and more software becomes available for these non-Microsoft platforms companies will actually be able to choose which operating system they want to run rather than have the market dictate it for them.

Windows Statistics

Make your message clear

What do you sell? Does your website scream the message?

Today I was told about a 70-year-old CEO who didn't like the new design of his home page. The feature areas didn't have enough "meat" for him. He much prefered a 4th level page of the site comprised of 8 paragraphs of technical content speaking about his product. Text...

How presumptious to think that early visitors care what you have to say until you prove yourself. If you want to sell on the Internet, you need to push your vanity aside and provide for the audience.

Qualify before you speak!

There are many metaphors that say the same thing -- Let them look around before you tackle visitors with information. Don't presume to know what they want until you qualify.

Visitors to a website are like shoppers at WalMart coming in from the rain. They may be buyers or they may be seeking shelter in your magazine aisle. Either way, in their mind, it's easier to head right back out the door than deal with an over-zealous sales pitch 10 seconds in.

Your website is the same. Realize what you are doing if you fill your home page with too much content. You are pitching them a white paper while they are shaking off the rain.

Stores have Aisles

If clients come in for soup you've insulted them by showing hair nets, motor oil, fruit juice, mascara, and push pins all at the same time.

WHERE'S THE SOUP!!!

Too late, they left!


Fix your home page before your next customer comes in. Organize your content and save the sales pitch until they've qualified.

Keyword Research and Design lead to Increased Conversion

In early June Stoney Wolf Productions, which sells videos for sportsmen contacted us for help. They were slipping in the rankings for their keyword terms and showing decreased traffic and a decreased conversion rates across the board.

Our first step in the process was to make the site have more of a structured feel. The past design had quite a bit of text on the home page and the content area had around a dozen different directions available from the home page. The content in the shopping cart area was organized into a few broad categories with too many choices.

Our Approach

First, we re-organized the shopping cart area into more specific categories to make things more intuitive to find. Next we cleaned out the content area of the home page, trimmed the text down and added some nice photographic images to depict a few of the more popular categories. In the end, only 4 categories were show-cased on the home page.

After design came the all important keyword research. The first thing we looked at was the old keyword terms in use. We saw a lot of fishing video, hunting video, etc. but became evident that the last time this site was optimized there was not YouTube and internet videos were not the norm.

In today's searchable content videos are all over the place. We concluded people were coming to the site to see hunting videos, and when they found out it was DVD's they quickly left the site which was hurting our conversions. We researched new terms around DVD's and VHS to get qualified traffic to the site and raise conversion rates. The results surprised even us...

July 2007:
We made our changes the last week of July.

August 2007:
The first full month after the changes have gone live. A 7.1% conversion rate blows the previous conversion rates out of the water.

September 1-20 2007:
About 2/3 of the month as an example. Conversion rate is over 8%

Quality analytics helped us track the conversions on the site allowing us to show the client the immediate results of our work on their site.

iPhone price drop highlights obsolescence

The "neatest, niftiest, coolest gadget ever" that you purchased for $499 less than three months ago is no longer available. That's right, this morning Apple announced that the 4gig iPhone is no longer available and they are slashing the price of the 8gig version from $599 to $399.


Obsolete already?

There are too many variables in the question around "how long does it take a computer to be obsolete?" For most people a computer is never completely useless. You can still type a report on a 286 processor from 1990 but you'll have a tough time finding a printer with 17-year-old drivers.

Although you can still use your mid-range, 2005 Dell computer for many applications, there is a measurable gain in productivity by moving to the same grade produced in 2007.

A few points:

• In 2003 the state of Texas reported that they plan for a 4-5 year desktop computer life cycle. In 2007, 2-3 years is a common report.
• By the time you see a computer advertised at a retailer, the next generation is already in test.
• In 1990 the top of the line IBM PCs ran on an Intel 80386 processor clocked at 4.77MHz, 8-bit I/O buses. In 2007 a mid-range cell phone has many times more processing power.
• According to a Time Magazine article, an outdated computer is worth roughly $6 in recycled raw materials.
• Those annoying animated gifs were all the rage in 2003.

Can a pack mentality help your SEO?

In the wild a pack of wolves thrives from a hierarchy determined by strength and attitude. Not always will the strongest, biggest wolf be the alpha dog. Attitude plays a huge role in your pack rank. When working with an outside client it’s essential to find your role within the “pack.”

Finding the Leader

With most small clients the person in charge of the web site is the owner of the business, with larger clients it could be the president of the company, a marketing manager, an IT manager, or perhaps the web site designer. It’s critical to find out who makes the decisions and who you need to contact to make sure your SEO efforts are productive for the client while still keeping them happy.

Joining the Pack

The use of “we” can be a large part of joining your clients team. Most of the time clients are looking for sales or contacts from the web site. One way to make your client feel more comfortable is to talk like you’re all one team. For ex:

“When we get a contact from the site, what are we going to do with that information?”

With one simple sentence you’ve made your stance clear to your client. I’m part of your team when it comes to the web site, and it’s in all of our best interest to make sure we’re on the same page.

Your Role in the Pack

With some clients you are the alpha dog, you make all the calls on the web site. Typically these clients assume you know best so they just expect an update on what you’re trying to do. With larger clients things aren’t always this simple. There may be a few different sections of the company who want something different from the web site. It’s your job to make sure they know that you only want what’s best for the site.

As an example, Web Designers and SEO folks will frequently disagree with what’s best for a site. Both sides will have to give up something to make a happy medium.

A Large Pack

With larger clients it’s hard to make everyone in the room happy. As much as you might know about SEO or SEM it might not matter to some clients. They still have their comfort zone and might not like some of the changes you have in mind. You need to be clear that there are some things you might be willing to give up in order to get some of your other changes through the pipeline.

If you get traffic levels up, and conversion rates at an acceptable level you’ll be off to a great start in keeping your clients happy.

Budgeting SEO & SEM for the holidays

A prominent, international clothing company contacted us this week in search of a U.S. Internet marketing firm to guide them through SEO of a pending redesign and PPC through the holidays. I can't state the organization's name but suffice to say that an annual website budget of 7-figures is well within their reach.

We are honored to be considered for such a prestigious client and their request for proposal brings up a few good points worthy of a blog entry.

How do you budget SEO and SEM for the holidays?

• SEO - Get all of your SEO work done by September or you're behind the curve. This client will release their new website in early November, too late for Google to fully realize the site before Christmas. So, what do we suggest?
  
  Gamble a bit, ignore Google short term, and go after MSN & Yahoo. Hit the site hard at release time and "over optimize" for MSN and Yahoo. Use slightly more keywords than Google would normally like long term without going near Black Hat SEO. Yahoo is prone to fall for a little spam they will pick the site up fast.
  
  MSN will pick the site up in this short time frame and could realize full potential in time for Thanksgiving. Remember, the busiest online shopping days fall near the 15th of December so you have plenty of time to reach that market share.
  
  There is a chance that Google will boost the site into high SERP placement in the short term and then drop it after a week before gaining again long-term. Watch Google and see what they do. If Google picks the site up and holds it longer than a week, you must back out some optimization for risk of being spammy in their eyes. You never know, it may stick right off the bat.
  
  This is a short-sighted approach and you must remember to budget for a second pass to properly optimize the site after the dust clears in January. Sometimes you can push the date of a release back a bit to time the peaks for the 2nd week in December but it's tough. It's a bit like playing chicken but it's fun to watch the search engines deal with a brand-new, 2,000 page site with a 7/10 PageRank.
  


• SEM / PPC - When it comes to online shopping before the holidays you need to budget adequately for the promotional holiday periods. Three peaks should appear on your radar:
  
  1.The Monday after Thanksgiving through the following Monday - Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) is not the biggest online shopping day of the year as has been stated. However, Monday's are typically the heaviest traffic days of the week, and this is a big traffic day to start the season. Keep your budget high to the following Monday, which has been the biggest online shopping day of the year in previous years. This is your big week, target big-ticket items and address top Christmas gifts in your ad.
  
  2. The Monday nearest December 15th - Monday through Friday of this week is a mad rush of sales to the last-minute shoppers. Change your ads to address the looming last-minute date to safely ship. If you can, offer discounts on shipping to get these people to buy. If you can't offer discounts on shipping, consider free in-store pickup.
  
  3. The week after Christmas - The week after Christmas is when we all shop for ourselves. You will see a shift to the "Ship to:" address being the same as the "Bill to:" address. Rotate your terms and ads to target your line of accessories. Talk about your sales - make sure they feel like they can shop your site without going broke.
  
  
  Divide your expected PPC budget into these three segments and adjust your bids down so that you are still in the running at the 15th of December. If you are on a limited budget, target Mondays and Tuesdays for all it's worth.
  
  Finally, remember to turn off ads for the items that are out of stock. Keep a close watch on your PPC budget and it will pay for itself in folds.
  

Differing Opinions of SEO

I received a comment on a past blog post today and it really struck me as great feedback. Essentially the comment stated that they like our blog because their opinion(s) of SEO often differ from my opinion(s) here at First Scribe.

Perfect!

SEO is an evolving skill set where you must continue to learn or the competing market will pass you by. There will always be more competition, more finicky visitors and refinements to search algorithms. We don't work for the search engines so we need to look for subtle SEO symptoms and then track the symptom to the source.

I try to dedicate 20% of my time to competitive research but it usually amounts to less than 10%. I will start by saying this - If you find an SEO symptom/trend, you must test it yourself or there's no point in wasting your time. NOBODY is going to tell completely spell out their philosophy. You must read between the lines and try it for yourself.

Here are the sources of my research, in order of preference:

1. SEO forums - The forums tend to be chock full of new SEO staffers who freak out and ask questions every time their rankings slide. These cries for help have turned me on to algorithm changes earlier than any other source.
2. Competitors - I generally don't look at my competitor's websites because SEO firms rarely dedicate their full efforts to their own website. Go to their latest portfolio entries and look for strategy.
3. Blogs - Find an active blog written by someone you feel is credible. You don't need to agree with them, in fact it's better if you disagree but you need to trust that they aren't intentionally disseminating false information.
4. My own websites - The last place I look (for research purposes) is at my own websites. If I'm looking at them for research purposes, I specifically look at the sites with volatile SERP results.

Keyword Strategy is the Heart of SEO

What is your keyword strategy?

Most people we speak with can't answer this question. They may have chosen a keyword that they know they want to rank in Google but thought rarely goes beyond selection to a bonafide strategy.

A keyword strategy is something much bigger than a simple keyword selection. You need a long-term plan in order to be successful in organic search. Your plan should identify a broad spectrum of similar keywords including those that you rank on today and many to target in the future. You should also include a realistic schedule for future content additions.

Here's a list of items that we think make up a good strategy:

1. Keyword selection map - By now you should know the small keywords on which you rank well. Add to that list a group of keywords with heavier volume and competition. Create a spreadsheet to keep track of where keywords are in use and where they are going. Knowing where work needs to be done is the start of your strategy.
2. Schedule work - Your website should be a work in progress with ongoing SEO efforts. Pick the next higher keyword phrase and schedule resources to target that month.
3. Analyze - Chances are good that you will need a few months of effort to rank on that term. Run your reports on the new keyword and analyze the traffic pattern.
4. React - Are you getting traffic on your new term? If not then schedule more effort for next month. If you are seeing an increase then you need to decide if the preliminary traffic has a positive ROI.
5. Change direction - Either your efforts on this new keyword are showing an ROI or they aren't. At some point you will run into a phrase with too much effort for the return and you'll know it when you see it. When you do, back away and go down a different path.

SEO is much more than picking the top keyword of last month and spreading it through the site. You need to roll up your sleeves and keep track of your project. It will pay off in folds if you do.

PPC Click Fraud A Growing Problem

Pay Per Click (PPC) bids are running sky-high these days and the latest reports say Click Fraud is growing in scope. Estimates from auditing group Click Forensics put the percentage of fraudulent clicks at 15.8% in Q2 of 2007.

What is Click Fraud?

PPC advertisers bid for ranking on a certain keyword. The more advertisers are willing to bid per click on that term, the higher they will rank. Click Fraud is where some one or some software clicks on an ad without any intention of doing business with the advertiser.

Click fraud happens for various reasons with two being the most common:

1. The fraud perpetrator will make a profit from the "click".
2. The perpetrator wants to deplete the advertising budget of a competitor.

Fighting Click Fraud

Sixteen percent of our PPC budget is a hefty number to write off so we do what we can to fight fraud. We call on two tactics to fight click fraud:

1. Turn off your PPC advertising in "content networks". The networks of websites drive their own revenue by running PPC ads along side similarly-termed content. They take a cut of the PPC dollars spent on their sites so they are more likely to call on fraud.
2. Watch your stats for high click through and bounce rates. We recommend a quick look at your PPC stats every day. Look for drastic changes out of the "norm". If your click through rate of a specific campaign jumps out of the normal range, temporarily shut it down and report to the PPC company immediately.

Is PPC Worthwhile?

We find that PPC advertising has a lower ROI versus a successful optimization campaign but that is not to say that PPC should be avoided. PPC has comes with an inherent cost of doing business but a good PPC campaign to a point of purchase website can drive a positive ROI.

Most importantly - PPC starts working immediately.

First Scribe Adds Blog to home page

Blogs are a perfect way for you to get the latest word out to your visitors but it can be tough for your visitors to know where to look for your latest posts. Sure, they can subscribe to your news feed but we believe that task is a little out of reach of the less-savvy users.

Make your Blog Easily Accessable

Many corporate sites bury their latest news, press releases and/or their blog deep within the "About Us" or the "News" section of their website. Latest news quickly becomes old news before your visitors find the content. Why not help your visitors by pulling your latest news to the forefront of your site?

If you have something important enough to call news - then dedicate a corner of your home page to a few links to your latest content.

First Scribe Blog

Our home page is dedicated to our top services and we feel that one of our top services is to provide up-to-date information from the Web Design and Internet Marketing fields. Which is why we dedicated prime home page real-estate to our news.

First Scribe Renovates Offices

First Scribe has outgrown their current office configuration so we're renovating to regain some space.

Cubicles will be added, the reception area will be configured and a new employee office will be built by Brownsworth office furniture services of Minneapolis. All of the work should be done over the weekend of July 7 & 8 with little interruption to First Scribe activities.

iPhone to Support Third-Party Web 2.0 Applications

Apple® has decided to lock down the iPhone™ preventing people from installing third party applications but is encouraging development of Web 2.0 Applications targeting iPhone users. You can click here for more details.

The idea behind Web 2.0 is using the Internet as a platform to develop rich, interactive, and user-friendly applications that can be used entirely from a web browser. The applications are designed to give users the tools they need to create, control, and share data with each other. This blog is a great example of such an application. In theory the more people contribute the more valuable the application becomes. Web 2.0 applications provide you with a multi-platform application you can access from virtually any device that has Internet connectivity and a web browser with standard JavaScript support.

Web 2.0 is still evolving and First Scribe continues to find new ways to offer feature rich, highly interactive applications to our customers that solve their business needs. Contact us for your web 2.0 application development needs.

Paris Hilton teaches us SEO

Paris Hilton made the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records as the world's "Most Overrated Celebrity" (Showbiz Tonight). This is certainly a dubious award but what does Ms. Hilton have to do with the Internet Marketing world?

Granted, she has an obvious impact on corporate productivity due to extended water cooler conversations regarding the latest Hilton Headlines but is that all she is?

Honest Boss, I'm working!

Surprisingly, Hilton has much to teach us about the Internet in regards to the search algorithm and SERP standings.

How so? Well, we would argue that the best way to learn about search engines is to start with a high-level look at a situation with the following variables:

• "Accidental SEO" competition - a lot of similar content without obvious SEO involvement
• Big PageRank - We consider 7/10 to be a good starting point
• A non-saleable item - The lower the profit possibility the better
• Some certainty of new pages

Enter Paris Hilton

Hilton meets all of our needs.

• News pages almost always rely on a replication of the Editor's headline when writing page title, description and lead content in the story. Therefore the content almost never adheres to common SEO practices.
• There are many news and gossip websites with PageRanks of 7/10 and beyond.
• The news industry is in search of heavy readership but there is no direct profit off each page.
• Hilton is a wealth of information from public record (everyone sees the same arrest report at the same time). She is a constant character in the news of late so we can count with some certainty on the news agencies to pour out news stories about her on a daily basis.

The news industry becomes an accidental petri dish of sorts for us to ponder - and an entertaining one at that.

"So Paris, How do you rank?"

• By volume
  Search volume for "paris hilton" is respectable at 55,590/day in Overture - Digital Point Solutions. Not bad compared to the bar-setting "porn" at 126,342/day. Compare Hilton's search volume to "iraq war" at 1,780/day and we have the pulse of America but that's for another post.
  
• By SERP
  Today a Google search of "paris hilton" gives the #1 placement to Wikipedia - a site well known for fast-loading pages and new, relevant content. Interestingly enough, we found this page was updated with news of Hilton's release no more than 12 hours after her release.
  
• New Content
  Hilton was released from prison this morning which means that there are bound to be new stories to that effect for us to find. A Google search for "paris hilton release" brings up quite a few copies of the same Associated Press story on June 23, 2007. The top listing is from hollywood.com - a 7/10 site with a big text link front and center on the home page that points to the new content.

Vista hurts First Scribe productivity

Windows Vista was released in late January of this year and the tech industry anticipated it would be a huge step forward, visually at least, for the stale PC platform. Vista toted many enhancements over Windows XP including an enhanced user interface, superior security/connectivity, and better integrated backup. While many of these features are well deployed Vista also has its share of quirks and issues.

Improvements and Features

The new user interface, Aero, is visually light years ahead of previous Windows versions. The new desktop allows windows to be stacked and shuffled on screen which makes multi-tasking much easier. It also sports transparent edged "glass" windows which make it look pretty slick when compared to the standard blue or grey XP windows.

The security center is something that has been available since Windows XP Service Pack 2 but the Vista variation better integrates anti-virus, anti-spyware, and Windows updates. The improved connectivity mostly deals with wireless and more complex networks and doesn't seem to have much value to a standard Ethernet based LAN.

A more robust integrated backup solution had been needed for a while. While the standard backup tool provided in Windows XP did an ok job it was difficult to schedule and not very reliable. If the computer wasn't left idle after the backup it was difficult to determine if the backup was successful without digging through event logs... not something your average user wants or knows how to do. Vista makes scheduling routine backups very easy and provides noticeable feedback if problems occur. Some versions of Vista also provide a "Complete PC Backup" option which essentially creates a disk image. This is much easier to restore and more complete than the file backups.

Drawbacks and Limitations

While these enhancements are overall a step forward for PC computing, Vista also came with some unforeseen negativity. The biggest drawback is performance. Two years ago the average workstation had a 2.4 GHz processor and 1 - 2 GB of RAM and rarely was the First Scribe staff disgruntled with the performance. Since the adoption of Vista computer performance has greatly suffered even though current computer hardware is more that adequate for the limited number of applications run on them. The average machine now has a dual core processor and at least 2GB of RAM yet the performance is dismal. Often users have to restart and get "Low on Memory" errors even with only a few running applications. Most production work is done in Adobe Fireworks and/or Dreamweaver and these often become unstable after only a few hours of usage. Users are forced to close background applications, like Outlook, in order to try to keep the main applications running. These problems ultimately lead to lower productivity and the need to sink more money into hardware to try to bring performance up to par.

Another problem, common to any new operating system, is limited driver support. Many basic pieces of hardware such as scanners, printers, and graphic cards are lacking basic driver support and have no support planned going forward either. Major vendors like Hewlett Packard, ATI (AMD), and Adaptec all have products which functioned great on Windows XP but will no longer work within Windows Vista. These components need to be replaced or valuable IT resources need to be invested to develop workarounds when possible.

The bottom line is Windows Vista has brought several great features but at a cost. Vista is currently deployed on less than half of the workstations at First Scribe and will likely get no further adoption. The market offers other competitive products that better fit First Scribe's business needs by providing better performance and a more robust user interface. These are essential for any small business and lead directly to higher employee productivity. That is why the next iteration of workstations at First Scribe will likely be Macs.

Is Your Website Apple iPhone Compatible?

Internet technology and marketing trends change change rapidly. Twelve years ago Google was nary a thought in some one's head and now they eclipse the Gross National Product of most countries.

The next big wave is coming...

If you've yet to hear of an iPhone™ -- Then you better sit down.

On June 29, 2007 Apple Inc. is set to release the iPhone. It is a touch screen cellular phone that can surf the Internet at near broadband speeds. For all intents and purposes, they built a pocket-sized Macintosh with the handiest connection to the Internet yet.

What is the impact?

Only a small segment of Internet traffic will be surfing with any intensity from an iPhone for the foreseeable future. That being said, this technology will likely impact businesses in the next 6-9 months.

Most businesses rely on some portion of their business from one of the iPhone's target audience. You should reconsider your web presence if you sell goods to any of the following marketing (more obvious) segments:

1. Young people between the ages of 20 and 35
2. Affluent teenagers
3. The traveling "jet-set"
4. "Mobile" employees who do a portion of their work on a "work site"

Segments 1, 2, and 3 are obvious. These people tend to be the technological trend setters and the first to absorb the latest technology. You need to act quickly if this is your core market.
The problematic segment 4
Segment 4 is less obvious but it concerns us the most. Segments 1-3 are used to new technology so they will absorb a few glitches in trade for the coolest technology. Segment 4 folks generally represent trend followers so they may be forced into this new position and therefore they're not receptive to bugs.

Think in terms of the real estate at a home site with a client. They need information from an MLS listing and they need it now. The sites they visit on the way had better work on their phone.

Or possibly the remodeling contractor compiling estimates, the electrician ordering product, the surveyor updating maps, or the Over The Road trucker away from home.

All of these examples represent a demanding web visitor with a smaller tech. pain threshold - it needs to work. Some of them will have just received their new iPhone and they're under duress to integrate it into their routine.

Their FIRST VISIT to you make the difference between a frustrating departure or a lasting client relationship.

How do I get on board?

The iPhone has two primary issues when it comes to surfing the web (versus a desktop computer) :

1. Slower download speeds
2. Small screen resolution

Both of these issues can be mitigated by judicious use of style sheets to control the user experience with your website.

Download speeds - As broadband Internet becomes more prevalent, it becomes easier to forget that a solid portion of visitors are connecting at sub-broadband speeds. Remember that the latest and greatest is fine for certain markets but dial-up and mobile connection rates demand a fast website.

Screen resolution - The wide-screen iPhone has a screen resolution of 320 by 480 pixels. The interface allows you to zoom out to see an entire page and the touch-screen enables left to right scrolling.

We encourage you to develop your new iPhone web design in a way that senses the mobile visitor and shows them a website with as little scrolling as possible on their iPhone.

Make it work for the iPhone

Build your website to load fast and scroll less and your visitors will appreciate it. There are also new JavaScript plugins which will recognize the iPhone's mobile browser and serve a mobile version of the site.

Apple Releases A Browser For Windows

Apple Inc. released a beta version of its Safari Web browser for Windows this week to compete with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox.

"What we've got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during his keynote speech at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference.

Unfortunately, we downloaded the beta version for Windows XP, Service Pack 2 and the browser was buggy enough that we decided to uninstall and wait for the next version. - Download Safari

Regardless of our initial experience, we are excited to see some competition in the browser world.

The new iPhone will enter the market at the end of June, '07 and Safari will undoubtedly be the browser of choice on that equipment. We suggest testing your site(s) in Safari and fully expect to see more Safari visits in your analytics as Macintosh, iPhone, and Safari for Windows grow in market share.

Changes in Google caching?

We are noticing a significant difference in the amount of time it takes Google to cache and subsequently rank a new page.

Two months ago, 3 to 6 weeks was a fair estimate to cache status with a PageRank of 0/10 in Google. A quality page rank would arrive somewhere on order of 3 months later.

Now we are noticing a cache time of 6 to 10 weeks with a grey PageRank bar and quality rank on order of 4 months later. This is calculated off of existing pages with an exiting Page Rank of 5/10, and a quality text link pointing to relevant content.

Could it be that Google is sending people to the Sandbox for a longer period?

The only good advice is to consistently add quality content to your website. MSN seems to pick it up first and Google will appreciate it later.

Blogs drive Spiders drive Visitors

When it comes right down to it, Google likes current, relevant content. You will increase your search engine ranking by consistently adding relevant content to your site. Obviously, the easier it is for you to add that content yourself, the more likely it is that you will do so.

Enter - The Blog

Let's take a minute to dispel all the myth and mystery around blogs. All they are is a simple way for the average person to publish information to the web. They are nothing more and nothing less.

Blogs come with a special benefit for search engines - they are highly conducive to search engine spiders. We are noticing a significant traffic benefit to the addition of a blog on our client websites.

One simple example:

East Silent Resort - Minnesota Family Resort

Match the Template

Be sure to set your blog up correctly so that the template closely matches your website design. Your visitors will appreciate the similar look to your site as they navigate.

Optimize Your HTML Code

Is Google passing you by? Never quite getting that deep index you need?

Google's Attention Span

For simple argument's sake, let's say your website has 30 seconds of Google's attention every month. Half a minute to spider your website, capture a copy of each page, and move on to the next website. You lose a full month if a single page of your site takes a minute to load.

Your website better be up to the challenge!

Fast Server

Are you hosting with an anonymous hosting company that you found on the web? Are you paying "$3.00 a month!" for hosting? Then you may want to test the response time of the server to see if you're saving money at the expense of a slow server.

Face it, hosting is cheap but it's not that cheap... They're making money by over-taxing the server with many more sites on the server than there should be. As a matter of fact, I found one hosting company that boasts cheap hosting of more than 15,000 domain names. It's possible that they are all on the same box.

Do the test yourself: Click here

If your home page loads slower than 3-4 seconds you have a problem.

Fast HTML

The first step to any of our Search Engine Optimization plans is to cut the fat from our client's html code. Each of our websites are developed with extensive use of stylesheets to keep unnecessary formatting code out of the individual HTML page.

A stylesheet contains all of the text, spacing and color attributes for the entire site - all in one place. This creates 2 benefits for your website:

1. Formatting is easier - A stylesheet allows you to change a formatting attribute in one place and the change instantly appears throughout the site without opening any of the HTML pages.
2. Fast loading - A stylesheet contains all of the formatting information so your HTML is more content and less formatting. Google will spend less time wading through HTML and spend more time reading your text.

Does it work?

Our team made a concerted effort to increase the response time of an established online retail website. Their home page response time fell from around 6 seconds to 1.5 seconds off the same server. That's a significant change from HTML development.

Additional benefits?

We need to keep the dial-up users in mind when we build websites. While dial-up use has decreased sharply in the last 2 years, there is still a large number of dial-up use on the web. A 5 second download on a 2meg connection is at least a 20 second wait on dial-up.

Google should dive deeper through your site and your conversions will go up if your site responds quickly to their requests.

Google Unified Search

CNN.com posted an interesting Technology story this morning and then the story quickly moved off their site. I thought it was an interesting topic so I mention it here.

Link to the story: Click here

The story doesn't appear to be written by a search engine expert so it's a little vague on some important points.

The gist of the story is that Google will combine it's various search results into one "page". The new service "will present Web sites, news, video and other results on one page."

Google's search already does this...

The story speaks strongly about new "ad" potential but it never actually speaks to the Google search algorithm.

Bottom line -It sounds to me like they are allowing AdWords advertisers to bid on terms for videos. They plan to roll out on 5/23 so we'll know more after that.

Search Translation

The end of the story introduces what we see as the single greatest improvement to search technology in 5 years: Automatic translation of search.

"The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web."

Now that's exciting.

Grey PageRank Bar for Supplimental Results

We are noticing a lot of grey PageRank bars on random websites these days.

A grey PageRank bar used to mean that your website was outright ignored by Google. A good-quality website with few links would receive a 0/10 rank and a site full of spam would receive a grey bar.

There is another reason to receive a grey PageRank bar these days - Supplemental Results.

It appears that Google is now displaying a grey PageRank bar on website supplemental results. (Example from CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9603/n_korea/)

Supplemental Results

Supplemental results are pages on your website that the Google algorithm deems as less important than your main content. The pages still seem to count in your total page count, but for whatever reason they don't appear to support your main topic so Google decreases their importance.

Supplemental pages are:

• Old,
• Short on content,
• Deeply buried in the architecture,
• Spammy,
• Rarely viewed, etc.

You can find out how many supplemental page listings you have by opening Google and typing site:http://www.YourURLHere. com . Page through to the deeper listings but you will almost certainly have a few supplemental pages.

Supplemental pages generally do not appear in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs) unless the term is extremely specific to the page.

Is this a problem?

That depends. If your home page and/or your domain shows a grey PageRank bar you have a serious problem. We have only found this a few times in the last 2 years and each time the websites were complete spam.

If a small percentage of your pages are deemed supplemental then there's no real issue. Constantly update your site with fresh content and supplemental results will fall to the background.

We often hear "Google loves Blogs!"

The truth is that Google loves new content and hates spam. Create good content on your site and your site will outperform your competition.

Marketing Your Services Online

Is it possible to effectively market a service online?

We're talking specifically about services here - no physical products. We often hear that services can't be marketed online. While it may be difficult to market online the amount of competition for services such as home remodelers and cosmetic surgery says this is a lucrative medium.

Certainly services are applicable to the Internet Marketing rule but you need to be careful when applying your marketing message and judging ROI.

It's easy to judge ROI of a point of purchase website. Trap organic and PPC traffic coming in to your pages, analyze purchases for each traffic group and you have your return on investment.

Services are different.

There isn't an online reservation system or final point of purchase in your log files so your tracking tool is unable to measure specific sales. Add the fact that some services have significant price points and an extended sales cycle and you have a real battle measuring ROI.

Marketing services online is easy if you remember 3 major points:

1. Remember your market - For the most part you will do well to expend marketing energy only in those areas where you can deliver your service. A product can be shipped worldwide but a service has a short reach. You can use the Internet to market your service globally but that's rarely applicable to services.

2. Fine-tune your message - This is the easiest step of all. Use a quality analytics tool and respond to the traffic trends in your website. Create a call to action on your main services page and watch the traffic flow (conversion) through that message. Adjust your message if conversions go down or stay flat.

We rely heavily on Unica NetTracker in our office because the tool is the best we've seen at creating conversion scenarios. Find a good analytics tool and measure your conversion. Then go back and adjust your message until you get it right!

3. Relentlessly measure ROI -Roughly 1/3rd of all people who contact us for our services contact us by our online form. That means 2/3rds of our initial contacts occur in a way that is difficult or impossible to measure from our tracking tools.

a. Email - Create an email address specific to the website and offer it as an additional contact option.

b. Telephone - Get a different phone number that only appears on the website.

c. Ask the question - Ask each new client how they found you. Most importantly, write the information down so you can measure it at the end of the year.

Services are highly appropriate for the Internet and your competition is undoubtedly already taking part in the frenzy. Be smart about where you market and tenaciously measure success. Increase budget to measurable returns and cut out of low conversion efforts.

10 Tips To Optimize Your Design

Website design and marketing professionals spend the vast majority of their time working towards two ends of each website: Make it pretty and drive more traffic.

The assumption we have is a beautiful website with a lot of traffic will sell more goods - End of discussion, right?

Imagine if Internet traffic were suddenly metered and your website is granted exactly 100 human visitors a month. Is your conversion rate high enough to cover your bills on that volume of traffic?


Optimize your design

• Homepage impact - Do people get a feeling from your website from 5 feet away? Most visitors will not read your introduction so your home page must instantly establish a basis of trust with your target audience through visual impact or your visitor will flee. Change your text to Greek - does it still say "art, business, bank, family or mother" to you?
• Architecture - Stand back and take a good look at your content. Now, throw out any old or duplicate content and architect your navigation in a logical manner to lead visitors down the path to contacting you. Supermarkets provide shopping carts at the entrance and a checkout at the exit. Everything in between is logically oriented - your site should do the same.
• Short messages - State your point and link to more information. Opinions conflict but you have somewhere around 200-300 words to say your piece before your visitor moves on. Quickly state your point and provide an outlet for the next step.
• Get their attention - Bold text on a plain page goes a long way to attract the eye. Highlight a point and combine it with a call to action.
• Keep their attention - Keep choices to a few. Consider every path through your website to be a store hallway. If visitors are moving towards a goal, do not distract them from that goal.
• Be polite to their eyes - Fight the urge to go overboard with your attention grabbers. Animated gifs are akin to water torture and big, red, bold, underlined text is unfitting to a professional design.
• Calls to action - Tell visitors what you want them to do. Statistically speaking, your visitors are shopping your site while they are at work and they don't have time to "figure it out on their own." Tell them what to do and they will be more likely to do it.
• Show your products - If your website is a point of purchase for goods - provide a good-quality picture of the item standing alone. We strongly encourage you to include an enlarged image and an alternate view if possible. We are trying to overcome their urge to leave the site to shop around. Emulate the experience of shopping in a boutique - if they want to see the back, show the back.
• Quick loads - Optimize your images for the web and streamline your HTML code so your pages load as quickly as is possible. This is an old tip but we can't say it enough.
• Get rid of your splash page - Delete the file and purge it from your memory.

Finally - Get a 3rd opinion
Think you have thick skin? Ask your neighbor to test your site.
Remember "think outside the box" from the 1980's? Well, get completely out of the box and show the site to someone who has zero vested interest in the project.
The higher the cost to bribe, the more likely you will receive helpful information. The more offended you are by their critique, the more assured you can be they are right.

Local Search Is Real

Rarely will an Internet Marketing Firm give away their secrets but here is a great one:

People use Local search in large numbers - and in many cases it's FREE.

What is Local Search?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. A local search is not unlike opening up an old fashioned Yellow Pages™ on the Internet.

Demographically speaking, there is a vast number of people on the Internet who do not know how to make the search engines work for them. They get search and receive too much irrelevant information. The get confused and they search for something familiar - a Yellow Pages.

Prominent Local Search directories

There are many local search directories but here are a few of the prominent locations:

• www.google.com/local
• local.yahoo.com/
• http://www.dexonline.com/

Local With Maps

Yahoo and Google have the added bonus of seeing your search over a map which is nifty but the text-based directories seem to drive more traffic (for various reasons). Cover your bases and submit to each of them.

Listings are Free

Free listings are available for the city listed in your mailing address. Most of the directories offer a broader area for an additional fee but beware - the fee structure is steep.

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing

Did First Scribe save .travel?

A prospective client approached us in August to help with some Google ranking issues. Apparently their website was indexed by Google to roughly 800 pages and then promptly plummeted to about 15 pages. Needless to say, they weren't ranking on any search terms and they were at their whits end as to a solution.

My initial thought is that they were spamming, duplicate content, fighting with a new algorithm, or just plain new.

Then I realized something I hadn't before. They had a one of the new .travel domain names. With a little research I found that all .travel sites were dealing with the same situation.

A search in Google for "site:.travel" returned 113,000 pages. When I clicked on the "cached" link next to any of the returns - each page had not been cached. As far as Google rankings were concerned, the pages didn't exist.

The same search for pages in Yahoo found zero pages.

No PageRank

On further inspection of their home page I found that the page would load fine but it didn't have a cache and no page rank. Not just zero page rank, but a grey bar. I haven't seen a grey bar in 2 or 3 years.

Note: A 0/10 PageRank in Google generally means that your website is of little importance to them. For the PageRank bar to be gray generally means that Google is not even indexing the home page of the site.

My advice to these folks was to buy a .com domain and forget about the .travel domain.

All .travel sites blocked?

As far as I could tell, none of the .travel sites had a page rank. Grey bar for all - no exceptions. None of the sites had cached pages in Google or Yahoo.

The Canada.travel site: http://www.canada.travel had no page rank, no cache. The tourism board of Canada was blocked...

What to do?

After 2 weeks of intense investigation, I let the client know that he was out of luck and he had 2 courses of action:

1. Buy a .com domain and start over.
2. Contact Google directly and ask them to fix the problem.

Big Choices

The client obviously had some clout in the industry (and a great deal of budget invested in the new domain name) because they opted for #2. Turns out they are on speaking terms with Ronald N. Andruff, President & CEO of Tralliance Corp.

Tralliance Corp. was the sole purveyor of .travel domains and is a real company. (I.e. They don't appear to be a fly-by-night organization.)

Mr. Andruff emailed Vinton G. Cerf at Google directly. Mr. Cerf is Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist of Google. From my perspective, he is the top of the food chain and by all accounts a really nice man.
http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint


It couldn't be Google's problem - Please go away.

At this point I was very politely assured that I was mistaken.

Of course, I wasn't mistaken so we continued the pressure.

After another round of assurance that we were quite correct, Google conceded that the .travel was not being cached and engineering looked into the problem and subsequently fixed the problem.

Yahoo has yet to recognize .travel.

With Traffic - Less may be More

First Scribe is just like every other company out there with a website -- We receive a lot of spam. One recent piece interested me more than most - Qwestdex Online services has a running offer for guaranteed Pay Per Click traffic for a monthly price.

This made me think - I don't necessarily want more traffic; I want more qualified leads.

Does more traffic mean more leads?

Heavy traffic may lead to more leads. Statistically speaking, more visitors to your brick and mortar store will equate to an equal percentage of increased leads and purchases. But with websites that's not necessarily true...

One of our clients sells a natural head lice remedy (http://www.liceice.com/). A great deal of their traffic comes from free searches for "pictures of head lice" and other noncommittal terms. Frightened parents want to verify that their children have lice while they're hoping to learn otherwise.

This traffic seeks our resources, they do not necessarily want a product (or any product for that matter). As a matter of fact, they may call us to ask about identifying head lice with no intention of a purchase. Further sapping our resources without intending to purchase.

Do we want this traffic? Yes we do.

Qualified Traffic

What we are talking about here is qualified traffic and that is a very valuable commodity. While they may not be seeking your product specifically, at least we have what they need once they identify the problem.

We now have a client in our store with head lice, here is the chance to hit them with a "call to action" and ask them for the sale. Every page of your website should have an obvious statement of what you want the client to do next: "Buy our product" -or- "Contact us for information".

Qualified Keywords

We are "marketing to the tail" with qualified keywords. We may have only 3 or 4 main keywords that perfectly describe our product but there are dozens of similar phrases to support our product. Each of these visitors give us a chance to convert to a sale.

Optimize around all of these qualified terms and then practice converting a higher percentage.

Geographic qualification

Service companies often forget that the Internet is without borders but their business is not. Your hair salon in Minneapolis may capture search engine traffic from Houston but you will doubtfully convince people to travel to receive your services.

Be conscious of the fact that travel may limit your service-customer base.

Avoid unqualified keywords

In this example we have been talking about head lice. We want to target terms like "head lice pictures" and "identifying head lice" while avoiding terms that do not qualify our product. Terms such as "bug pictures", "body lice" and "children ailments" do nothing to support our content and should be avoided.

They may lead to more traffic but they will not lead to more sales.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Taking Hold

According to the latest at Dailytech (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5712) Internet Explorer 7.0 is starting to take off as a prevalent browser of choice.

The latest browser usage figures show IE7 has achieved 100 million installations to date. This number should climb rapidly once Microsoft Windows Vista is released on January 30th with IE7 as the standard browser.

IE7.0 was released on October 18, 2006 and reached the major milestone January 8, 2007 - quickly eclipsing the user numbers of FireFox within 90 days of release.

The current browser statistics stated by DailyTech show Internet Explorer holding a full 87% of all visitors to U.S. websites in January:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0 - 62%
2. Internet Explorer 7.0 - 25%
3. FireFox 10.7%

We are currently testing all of our new designs on IE7 and FireFox 2.0. Compatibility issues appear to be minimal with the latest upgrades inherent in IE7.

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing

Flash in Google

Rumors have floated around the web design world for some time regarding Google indexing text from within Flash .swf files.

For years web designers have repeatedly told clients that Flash looks fantastic but it isn't worth a lick in search engines because Google is unable to read the text. Well, now everything has changed.

What we have here is a run of the mill html page with a simple Flash show full of junk text. One keyword stands out above the rest "**keyword deleted**". It's a junk term with zero competition on the Internet.

One would assume that a single html page with this text string would quickly rank on the term simply because it would be the only page on the Internet containing that string. Historically speaking of HTML pages, that was the case. Historically speaking of Flash pages, no matter how hard you wished for it - Google couldn't read Flash so it would never rank.

Google Reads Flash

We posted the page as we would have posted any other. There is absolutely nothing special about this .swf file. Roughly 2 weeks after posting this page to our website Google cached the page; cached the Flash show; and ranked it on the term "**keyword deleted**".

We have our proof -- Google can index text within Flash.

The next step is to test to see if Google can index links from within Flash. We have a page cooking at the moment to test links. Go to our test page (above) and you will see the link to test that item.

Conclusion

We don't think it's time to run out and start building every site out of Flash. Certainly there are many wonderful uses for Flash and in some cases Flash sites are the way to go. More than 75% of all the websites we build have some element of Flash in the design. Obviously we find Flash to be a very important design element.

Feel free to look around the First Scribe site and look for Flash elements. I think you will find many more Flash elements on this site than meets the eye.

But, due to the cost overhead and the *many* remaining issues of search engine optimization of Flash, we will continue to build websites in HTML.

Remember - "Ugly websites work!"
More often than not the most effective website is the ugly one. Graphics and Flash continue to hinder the search engine optimization process. Look at Google, EBay, and CNN - each of them have a very functional look to them and they are the dominant leaders in their markets.

There may be a magnificent way to use Flash to make you look amazing and stand above your competition - but the whole thing is useless if it alienates search engines and visitors.

Our tests will continue...

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing

New Blog!

We have re-entered the wide-world of blogging.

Our previous blog at http://blog.firstscribe.com wasn't quite performing the way we would have liked so we shut it down and moved it over to http://www.firstscribe.com/wp-blog/ . This new home seems to be a more appropriate place and should perform.

Blogs are an interesting piece of this information age - A blog is a very simple tool yet it has vast power to build and disseminate information. Type, save and publish without any real knowledge of the Internet. It's great for those folks with something to say via a low-tech voice.

The Internet is supposedly the great flattening tool of the business world, presenting information without caste or borders, as it were. Now Blogs come along to flatten the world even more. Not only are they simple, free and pervasive, but they are a good idea. What could be better than that?

For one thing, it's easy to abuse.

Blogs have this mystery to them that enables a great deal of opportunity to apply "soft definitions" to their true nature. Blogs have become synonymous to the snake oils of old when it comes to Internet Marketing. Blogs are great for speaking your piece, they are not the answer to the eCommerce puzzle.

You're not alone if you've heard that a blog is the key to ranking #1 on keyword "X". Blogs will attract return visitors but they're not the only answer.

So, why do we have a blog?

Well, as it turns out we have a lot to say about the truth of web site design, hosting and Internet Marketing. As our business evolves; as we uncover tips; and as we find promising directories we will post them on our blog to inform our visitors.

Please visit often and leave us your comments!

Ken Kralick
Director of Search Engine Marketing