If you’re anything like me, when you visit a website that’s overloaded with Flash, an abundance of images, excessive menus, and just a general maze of content, your brain shrivels up to the size of a raisin and your eyes glaze over with no focus of what to look at or where to find it. (As far as I’m concerned, the same problem exists for social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Creating endless posts and tweets just for the sake of having more content and saying whatever pops into your fingers is the quickest way to get me to block or un-follow your posts. Then I’ll never hear anything you have to say!) The idea that the more there is to look at, the more visitors, friends, likes, and followers you’ll get is simply untrue in many cases.  You can still catch plenty of flies with sweet, sweet simplicity.

Too many web designers and developers make choices that, while skillfully executed with complicated Ajax and fancy Flash elements, not only confuse and deflect site visitors, but also have the same effect on search engine crawlers. While when properly used (read: in moderation) these elements have the potential to add functionality and style to your site, it is often beneficial to limit or altogether avoid these in favor of a clean, easily searchable and indexed site.

Take splash pages, for instance. When a splash page is your homepage, it not only prolongs the amount of time it takes for your visitors to get to the actual content they’re seeking, but it also confuses search engines. Without your homepage containing index-able elements like links to the other pages of your site and keywords, search engine spiders will not be able to properly crawl and index your site. Get rid of that splash page!

Aside from splash pages, using Flash elements or images elsewhere on your site for headers and menus can often cause visual frustration and complication for visitors and search engines alike. Dancing baby Flash headers and image-heavy menus can be a dizzying headache, and crawlers simply can’t read text embedded in Flash and images. There are several great resources for web designers on how to keep your site design from being overly complex while maintaining SEO excellence. Make sure you mind your H1′s, et al.

Personally, I agree with the late Steve Jobs when it comes to valuing the beauty of a highly-functional, simple design. There’s something to be said for keeping a clean, easily navigable, minimal aesthetic. And I’m not alone in my love of minimalism in web design.  I’m not suggesting you go out and replace all your shirts with black turtlenecks, but I am suggesting that you consider what William of Ockham said and not unnecessarily complicate matters when you can simply state your case. When you embrace minimalism, everybody wins: you, me, and the spiders. And you don’t want to upset the spiders. Trust me.

Hard-hitting question time: if you were an amphibian, what kind of amphibian would you be?

A newt! (I’d get better.)

Tell us about yourself! Are you a NOLA resident originally?

I’m from a town a little south of New Orleans, but I’ve been living in and around the city for the past 6 years or so. If I lived on Sesame Street, I’d relate the most to Burt… Although in real life, I’m probably more of an Ernie.
Apparently, I am pretty terrible at answering the question “tell us about yourself.” I don’t know how I got this job.

You’re one of our newer employees — how long ago did you start? How’s SI been so far?

I started at the beginning of August, so I’ve been at SI for a month and half now. It feels like I’ve been here longer, but in a good way. I really like my job– the work is challenging, and there is always coffee. And now that the hazing has stopped, I’m almost completely healed! Just kidding. The hazing was gentle.

What do you find yourself doing around the office? Any particular favorites or disliked tasks?

I do all the usual stuff that IMAs do, like submissions and lots of copying and pasting. But lately, I’ve been getting a lot of graphic design tasks.
I was a freelance designer off and on for about 7 years, and any freelancer will tell you that it’s soul crushing. Designing at SI is heaven. Everyone’s been really open and supportive, and I’ve done everything from massive infographics, to logo retouching, to making a baby-on-board Photoshop of one of our (male) co-workers. (I still feel like I have to apologize for that every time I see him, too. Luke, I’m sorry!)

How did you get into graphic design? Any favorite tools of the trade? Do you do fine art as well?

I think I’ve been using Photoshop to make graphics for my various websites since version 5.0, maybe? That was in the 90s. I know Photoshop better than I know most people, and we’ve come a long way together.
My favorite nerd tool of all time is my Wacom tablet (an Intuous4). I bought it last year, and it’s completely changed the way I think about design. It’s like drawing with pen on paper… but, like, way more amazing. I could go on and on about layers and tilt sensitivity, but I also still want to sound interesting, so… yeah. Wacom tablet. It’s awesome.
And I draw all kinds of stuff! I have a Tumblr that gets seasonally neglected, but I post illustrations and doodles when I’m in the mood. And I’m almost always scribbling on something.

Thanks to Kate for her tireless work making SI’s projects beautiful inside and out! Keep an eye on this space for many more informative and innovative graphic pieces in the near future.

Site Load Time

Site speed has been a significant factor since about this time last year. Reading some of the comments on Matt Cutts’s blog post could be an exercise in patience, but as always over-concerned webmasters bring up two good points: javascript and CMS design.

The first is that things like javascript, Flash, and messy implementations of HTML and CSS can slow down a page’s load time. While standard wisdom says to avoid tricky solutions to simple problems, common analytics and advertising packages are among the last things to load on a page and are often causes of frustratingly long load times.

The Big Panda update may have added a factor of ad density to the list, though simply removing ads isn’t an option for many sites. Additionally, removing an analytics package most likely would do more harm than good if you’re tracking your internet business. And to change your entire layout for one factor is farcical at best.

Yahoo’s Developer Network offers a whole host of solutions that don’t involve tons of man-hours put in. Three major best practices are easy to implement and should solve a number of speed issues. The first is to keep scripts and CSS off the page. This makes sure you’re saving time by letting your user cache the component parts of your site. Secondly, keep all scripts on one file, all CSS in another, minimizing the amount of files you have to call per page. Finally, if you’re sure you’re not going to be editing your scripts and CSS, you can Minify your code, which removes white space and comments. This is especially effective for large files, though it can make reading and editing the code more difficult.

But really, optimizing site speed is just clean coding. You shouldn’t be surprised that shrinking your megapixel images to 50×50-pixel thumbnails or making a slough of HTTP requests for each page would keep things slow. What happens, though, when it’s not your fault?

You use a CMS because you didn’t want to have to deal with all that. You expected what “real” coders created would be following best practices. This is especially grating when you bought a CMS and paid good money for it.

Here’s where there aren’t always good answers. To start, CMS’s almost invariably use databases to house their content and other components; this immediately adds steps to your request chain. And while plugins and hard-coding the CMS are always options, these can be either cost- or knowledge-prohibitive. For many CMS’s, simple things like being SEO friendly are hard enough to accomplish without fighting a losing battle against site speed.

Some suggest using a caching plugin, but even a benchmarking report from a year ago shows a forest of options just for WordPress, none of which look different on the surface, but can offer extraordinary ranges of performance. Not to mention the added headache of working “with” these plugins as you write for your site. It almost seems like Google wants you to have a “flat” HTML site.

Take a deep breath. First, remind yourself that this is one factor, and a small one. Linking and on-page optimization are the most important factors. After clearing your head, try to follow the same guidelines as much as you can — Minifying code, using simple solutions, and avoiding inline CSS and scripts will take you farther than you’d think. Once you’ve done all that, do practical tests: how fast is your site from a user’s perspective? Would you be turned off because of it?

If the answer is “Yes,” then you have bigger concerns than just one factor.

Alligator dogs from Dat Dog's Yelp page.

As a stereotypical New Orleanian, I’m obsessed with great food. I have always noticed and been upset when a business doesn’t rank #1 for its own name, or even in the top 3. Recently I saw the phenomenon three times on the same weekend, so I had to blog about it.

I was hungry for something inexpensive, but really good and meaty, which means I had approximately 1,298,450 locations to choose from in this city. Many of these will never have websites. Somehow it came down to Courtyard Grill, Cowbell and Dat Dog (I have been to only one of these restaurants but can tell from the reviews that I’m going to love the other two). Since I only trust hours of operation posted on official websites, I searched for the restaurant names with city names behind them. These were the results (from 3/28/11):

Aesthetically, most would agree that these sites are beautiful, but since Google is a robot, it does not share this opinion. Of course I don’t expect a year-old restaurant to rank #1 for the term Courtyard Grill, but including the city name should be enough to make that happen. Same goes for the other two. Why are these restaurants not ranking first for their name?

Who dat? Ain't Dat Dog.

Yes, they all are getting outranked by Yelp and Urban Spoon pages with a bunch of reviews, but the big problem here is a lack of on-site optimization. Breaking the most fundamental rule of on-site SEO, Dat Dog and Courtyard Grill both fail to include any content on the home page. Furthermore, they all lack meta-descriptions and only one has a decent title tag. Cowbell performs the best in the results because “cowbell” and “new orleans” are mentioned next to each other twice in the text of the home page; not to mention the address is in text at the top of the page.

Unless you have a unique name, or a URL that perfectly matches your business name — (Bouligny Tavern has both, as you can see here) — you will need on-site optimization to save you from these problems. On-site optimization is so important that even Google, which is secretive about their search formula, has written a guide to this which can be found here. I highly recommend it to web designers and webmasters because it expresses the minimum that you should do to be favored in search results.

Who cares if my site isn’t first? I have 4 stars on Yelp!

You should be concerned about making sure that when people are looking for YOU that they can find YOU, and not another site that is talking about you. Otherwise, why would you have a website in the first place? You want to be in control of your own destiny, and it helps to lead the conversation. Let’s say you have 4/5 stars overall on Yelp, but the most recent rating was a 1; do you want a potential customer to have this information branded in their head so early in the relationship? Even if a customer has a good experience, reading bad reviews can lead to Yelp-fulfilling prophecies. Yelp is a great site, and if you want people to see your Yelp page, link to it with a banner, just like Lock Busters did.

I know I’m not first for my name and city, but x means the same thing as my city.

Even though I am talking specifically about NOLA, it’s a lesson we can all learn: think about the words people are saying when they search for your business, and optimize based on those words. Locals often call New Orleans Louisiana “NOLA” (and it happens to be a component of the URLs for the 3 sites we are comparing), but chances are that when someone is looking for you they are not using this word. The screenshot below is from Google Insights. Not only are people searching for New Orleans a lot more than NOLA, but as you can see at the bottom of the image, people are searching for “nola jobs” and “nola news,” which undoubtedly refers to our friends at www.nola.com, and the term “nola restaurant” probably refers to the Emeril’s establishment called NOLA Restaurant.

Nola What? Nola Who?

On-page optimization does not guarantee you will rank for your name, but you don’t have much of a shot at ranking for anything without content and metadata on your home page. There are other ways, like being linked to via anchor text from an awesome blog, which we are glad to do for 3 great local businesses, but small business owners should go for the low-hanging fruit first.

Flash technology has been in use in websites as a way to provide visual and audio interactivity on a website. Great Flash movies engage users and trigger their curiosity. What would happen if a Flash user clicks on a button or drags an icon on the page? Flash movies can answer that question.

While Flash is able to capture a user’s interest, the first step is driving users to the site. There are some problems with Flash affecting optimization. Here are some of them:

• Flash provides no beneficial information for crawlers
  To install a Flash movie on a webpage, the file can be put in an EMBED or OBJECT tag . Regardless of the choice, the code itself offers no support for search engine optimization.

  The lack of juice becomes a problem on sites that rely heavily on Flash and lack content. Sites with little else besides the movie file are missing out on additional ways to increase their web presence. While off-page optimization (social linking, articles, etc.) is an option, on-page optimization is more reliable than off-page optimization since the domain owner has control over what gets placed on the page.

• Flash is not 100% cross platform compatible While Flash is installable on a variety of browsers, it does not work on many mobile browsers. Since system memory is more limited on mobile devices, adding some way to translate Flash would consume too many resources. Flash also has its programming interfaces blocked by Apple products, preventing access to the necessary code to make the movies work on the extremely popular Iphone and Ipad products.
  
  Source: Reticulating — Flickr

  I’ll stop for a minute and provide a counterexample – Youtube. Normally, Youtube provides its videos in Flash format for viewing. Despite Flash’s limitation on mobile devices, Youtube still works on them. The reason? HTML5. While HTML5 can play the animations designed in Flash, it does not support the interactivity of Flash. That means that Flash through HTML will be a strictly visual experience.

• Some target demographics don’t know about Flash There are technologically challenged people in the world today. If you’ve ever worked in customer service or helped an older family member with a computer problem, you know what I’m talking about.

  As far as they know, Flash could be a computer virus. Or something good for their computer. Or some form of scam.

  Because these people are uneducated about the technology, they may not decide to install the program. Without the program, they will not see the video and miss out on the marketing. While providing a non-Flash version on a page is an option, the downgraded version will lack the audiovisual and interactive capabilities of a full-fledged Flash version.

Some tips on using Flash without hindering optimization:

• Don’t offer a non-Flash version, redirect to one. Doing so means the user has less clicking to do and can be exposed to marketing more quickly. On non-Flash pages, offer the option to increase the viewing experience with Flash if the user chooses so.

• Use Flash to do things regular HTML/CSS can’t. Good example – HTML and CSS can handle basic navigation. No need to make fancy menus when HTML/CSS is just as capable. Menus are also a good source of keywords on a page, so don’t deny the crawler the keywords it loves with a Flash menu. Reserve Flash to create unique experiences for the site viewer.

• Don’t skimp on content. Site content can provide engine for search engine optimization. Flash movies provide no value to optimization, so use non-Flash content to help out.

Remember, Flash should be used as a complement to a website and not as the website itself. All of the pretty effects and animations mean nothing if there is no person to view it.

Damn it feels good to be a Panda.

Over two weeks ago, Google scared the SEO community by publicly releasing what even they called a “pretty big” change in their algorithm, “noticeably” affecting 11.8% of queries. This change, coming on the heels of competitor Blekko.com blacklisting certain content farms and the announcement of a Chrome plugin to block websites from search, is part of what analysts at Sistrix call a “quest for quality.” This is old news to anyone paying attention, but a wide variety of opinions are still circling about what this update really meant. Most people pointed at “content farms” as the target of the update; yet it becomes clear that these sites were not the primary target nor were they targeted intentionally as “low quality.”

Pandas munch only on bamboo…

The Big Panda update is the culmination of a long line of work; Matt Cutts, Google’s spam god himself, points to the Caffeine update from way back in 2009 as the beginning of his team really looking at low-quality results. The spiders were finding so many new pages that they had to do something about plagiarists, scrapers, aggregators, and meaningless fluff content. While Cutts was happy with the low amounts of straight V14gR4-style spam, he was worried about that fluff — what he called “shallow content.”

Moving forward two years to the end of this January, Cutts announced a small change which attempted to make some programmer-centric search terms rank Stack Overflow and other providers of original user-created content over sites scraping that content. This affected a whopping .5% of queries, including such high-converting gems as “pass json body to spring mvc” and “aws s3 emr pig.” Obviously, ma and pa aren’t going to see these changes.

But the ones made a month later, seen first on February 24th, are the kinds of searches the average user would be making. Demand Media, owner of eHow and other alleged content farms made an almost-snarky blog post that either thumbed its nose at Google’s change or reaffirmed the company’s legitimacy, depending on how much bile you smelled on the words.

By the time Google officially announced the change on its blog on the 28th, webmasters, SEO experts, and even CNN had weighed in on the change. Website owners noted major changes in their rankings and traffic, and they were rarely happy with the results. Finally, on March 1st, a heart-to-heart with Cutts and algorithm genius Amit Singhai at TED 2011 explained the change in depth.

…Authoritative, quality bamboo.

This talk laid out how Google designed its algorithm. Instead of trying to find factors and hope that said factors are in line with users’ expectations, they asked questions of real people about a variety of websites, then built the algorithm to match the answers to those questions. These questions cut to the core of what’s important on web sites: Would I give this site my credit card information? Would I use this information for my sick child? These questions should be at the core of website development and content creation — unfortunately, Google has to step in and play Gatekeeper and Keymaster.

Jason Calcanis tastes like Bamboo to Big Panda.

The next day, Jason Calcanis, CEO of “education site” Mahalo.com known for quipping “SEO is Bullshit,” laid off 10% of his workforce and halted all written content production in response to the site’s losses in search engine ranking, when a month earlier he boasted of doubling the size of the company this year. While not talking to the press, he tweeted: “We were the right size for a certain market opportunity, and overnight that changed.” Somehow that sounds like AOL and Netscape, too…

Later that day, Google set up a thread in their forum to try to assuage the growing litany of discontented site owners. Google knew people were watching, and they were quickly responding. Most posts complained of losing a majority of income from the algorithm switch, and pridefully stated nothing could have been wrong with their websites. SEO gearheads wagged their heads in frustration and more or less told everyone to chill out. Without copying what Ms. Fox said, not much has changed in SEO — don’t try to “win” at it by doing the bare minimum and don’t base your entire livelihood on search engine ranking. That’s not comforting to someone like the owner of Fonerbooks, who claimed to see everything but his original work in the rankings, or HealthCastle, who saw a 40% drop in traffic and wanted to know “why Google named us low quality.”

Demand vs. “Thanks”

Two companies represent diametrically opposed business plans and responses to the Algorithm change: Demand Media and Mahalo, the well-rounded shrug and the panicked crisis. I think that the differences in approach to content farming truly showed the reason why the sites were affected differently by the Big Panda algorithm change.

Demand Media owns eHow, one of the most egregious of content farms. Yet, according to most data, it rose in the rankings. While this is enough to aggravate “legitimate” content creators, how eHow is supposed to be used sets it apart and mitigates much of the spamminess it’s known for. Adweek explains the concept well:

The company’s evolving media strategy, according to Rosenblatt, is to attract users to eHow and other properties by answering highly specific search queries, and then drive them to other branded channels, hoping they become loyalists. “We are constantly trying to figure out ways of bringing people in [and] give them a much broader experience on our network,” he said.

They use long-tail and specific search phrases to drive traffic to niche branded sites. These sites have meaningful authors and sponsors: Lance Armstrong, Tyra Banks, and Rachael Ray among them. I’ll even admit two Demand Media-owned sites are too often in my history: David Wong’s Cracked.com and Fancylad’s i-am-bored.com. What sets Demand Media apart from some of the other content farms is the high level of community loyalty and interaction these sites enjoy. Most stories and links on these sites have plenty of user comments, and their Facebook pages enjoy a level of curation and personality that rival traditional content providers like bloggers. The links are strongly shared and enjoys some market saturation — an “article” on the flaws in alien takeover strategies has 1.3 million views, 10,000 likes, and 1600 comments over the course of 32 days. That’s better than most SEO companies’ biggest clients.

Branding for the Bored

Compare this to Mahalo, which hardly enjoys the same kind of saturation. A much more broadly marketable subject, “Super Bowl Commercials 2011,” garnered only 37 tweets and no comments over the same number of days. Mahalo, though designed cleanly and conspicuously missing any ads, refuses to market themselves to an audience, happy to provide something that doesn’t work over and over. This piece of poetic gold shows the difference in style of laziness:

DreamWorks forthcoming animated comedy “Kung Fu Panda 2,” featuring the voice talent of Jack Black, had a trailer debut during Super Bowl XLV. The ad features the film’s tag line: “We Will Wok You,” along with the lead character attacking enemies with a wok…

While Demand might pump out three articles on the same fluff topic, there isn’t the lack of attention to meaningfulness seen on other farms. Don’t forget that Mahalo is trying to brand itself as a one-stop-shop for learning, while Demand revels in its content for content’s sake mission.

Big Panda vs. Old Dinosaur

But all this talk about content farms is a red herring. This was not Blekko; this was not a targeted swipe at a business plan. If that were the case, Fonerbooks, who had allegedly well-respected web sites with large amounts of original and informative content, would have no problems with the “Farmer” update. The Wall Street Journal took up his case, citing his innovative computer troubleshooting techniques, and using it as a screed against the latest update’s failure to address the “real problem.” The article compares Demand Media’s eHow 200-word summarization to the detailed article 10 times the length that eHow supposedly “stole.”

Here are the two pages in question: the first link on Google for “toshiba troubleshooting” and the first result for “toshiba troubleshooting fonerbooks.” The difference is striking.

Sure, eHow has two other articles linked that have nearly the same title, though thankfully with different content. Sure, eHow has 7 ads in the first 900 or so pixels of the screen, and even more below the fold. Sure, eHow’s writer has written such crucial treatises on computer repair as “How to Take Crease Marks Out of Posters” and “Fitness Requirements for the Army Reserves.” But what page is more useful to the reader?

Is this really quality?

Is it the one with poorly laid out tables, walls of text, veiled insults to the reader, and links to static gif flowcharts, culminating with an ever-present plug to buy a $25 self-published book? Or is it the one that someone can look at immediately and see if the information is useful? Comparing site statistics shows that users spend the same amount of time on both sites — can you read 2000 words in under 3 minutes?

This isn’t to indemnify the owner of Fonerbooks; rather to show that this update was really about user experience, rather than a content-based punishment. Are you providing a brand to your readers? Will they come back, recommend your site, and consider you a valuable source of information? 4 people “Liked” the eHow link on Facebook — that kind of user interaction is absent on Fonerbooks, excluding buying his prose.

Playing numbers games with Big Panda

At the heart of all SEO is trying to figure out what Google wants. How do we deliver what the algorithm deigns important, while still remaining relevant to the clients of our clients? Eight factors seemed relevant across the posts and stories about the “Farmer” update. Big Panda doesn’t want to play games; the factors suggested are a product, not a cause of good marketing and website design. These factors were culled from a variety of sources, though Searchmetrics’s confidence in visitor statistics like bounce rates, saying they “have obviously been part of the quality guidelines of the update” provided an excellent starting point to develop a way to examine. Search Engine Land’s “Why Me?” post also provided important metrics to test, such as website authority and ad density.

1. Duplication of Content
2. Author Authority
3. Ad Density
4. Overzealously Using NoFollow Links
5. On-site User Engagement
6. Off-site User Engagement, i. e. Social Media
7. Link Profile
8. Visitor Statistics

Using these eight metrics, I tested the top winners and losers from reports by searchmetrics.com, seoclarity.net, sistrix.com, the Google support thread, and other news stories. My method tried to discern if any of these suggested metrics truly held weight.

Using a random article, page, or product linked from the home page of the site, I checked each metric. My method was hardly scientific, and limited by the process of doing it by hand and the subjective nature of some of the variables.

Duplication of content was checked using articlechecker.com or Googling random paragraphs, depending on what gave any results. No duplication was 0; otherwise it was a count up to 20 duplicates on the web. The goal is always 0 duplication, though this method ignored any canonicalization.

Author Authority was a subjective 0, .5, or 1 denoting the author’s specialization of his writing. A writer in a wide variety of fields or with no name received a 0; one who wrote in one general field, such as electronics, received a 1. Those that I felt could have gone either way got a .5. Clearly, more authority should be better.

Ad density was a simple count “above the fold.” My screen is set to 1440×900, falling into the majority of web users according to W3Schools. This helps determine purpose of the page — too many advertisements could mean a low-quality site.

Nofollow links were the percentage of outbound links with a nofollow tag. If a site doesn’t want to pass its link juice, how can we trust those links are helpful to the reader?

On-site User Engagement was a simple count of comments on the page. This usually means a site has repeat visitors and is building a brand.

Off-site User Engagement was split into tweets and Facebook posts. I searched the titles of the pages, long and shortened URLs, and keywords in Tweetscan.com and youropenbook.org. Rarely did these numbers match what was on the site; I’m not sure if this is a weakness or not as Google might not index old tweets or private Facebook pages. Either way, more social involvement means people find your site useful, and should bring your rank up.

The page’s Link Profile was checked via a random smattering of off-site backlinks from the Yahoo Site Explorer. I rated the links on a 5 scale, where 1 is least spammy (AOK) and 5 is most spammy. A spammier link profile should mean a lower ranking, if backlink quality were taken into account.

Finally, visitor statistics of the domain were checked for the most recent time period on Alexa. I checked the bounce rate and time-on-site. Ideally longer is better, though you can’t beat a timewaster like Facebook, who reigns supreme at 32.7 minutes per visit.

The data is embedded and linked at the bottom of the post; I invite anyone to seriously crunch the numbers, but a quick analysis can show “direction,” that is, whether a given factor positively or negatively affects ranking. For a 90% confidence interval, we can see that 4 metrics definitely matter: ad density, social networking, link profile, and visitor statistics. All of these metrics fall in line with the expected effect on ranking described above. In short, Big Panda works.

So what does it all mean?

Deeper study is always needed, but for a designer or marketer, Big Panda brought the web back to the user. The goal, more now than ever, is to create a site that people will want to interact with. Compelling visual designs, interesting and relatable content, and user loyalty both on and off the site will reign supreme.

But that’s been the standard operating procedure of advertising and content production the whole time. In many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Now, Google is whole-heartedly supporting your efforts and rewarding you.

If you’re having trouble surviving with a Big Panda in the room, it’s time to change how you do business on the internet.

Big Panda Data Spreadsheet

Man of Steel Vs. God of Thunder, You Do the Math

Along with being a search marketing expert (that’s right, I said it), I am a huge fanboy (that means I like comic books A LOT). Very rarely do my two worlds meet but recently there was an article posted about the social media battle of rival comic companies Marvel Entertainment and DC (Time Warner) and I could not resist responding and explaining to how small businesses can win at social media. Despite my unending love for DC Comics, Marvel Entertainment does far better jobs at internet marketing. This post will explain how you can make your small business’s internet presence “marvelous”. 

Why Marvel Wins at Fan Interaction

It's a Dinosaur in a Dinner Jacket

When you compare the Twitter and Facebook accounts of Marvel and DC, you can notice that Marvel has a larger and more active fanbase. Why I would love to say this is because Marvel has more interesting characters (frankly a red t-rex with a dinner jacket trumps a sociopathic underwear pervert with a bat fetish IMO), but the truth is Marvel makes an effort at interacting with their fans. This is something I tell clients over and over, replies are key to gaining and sustaining fans. The more you reply the more successful and active your followers will be. Though there may not be any measurable ROI in tweets, you can increase your brand awareness locally, as well as, have a have a group of individuals who you can promote specials and discounts immediately.

Why Marvel Wins at Site Design
Around the turn of the century, there was a stark increase in light-weight, interactive business sites. The age of minimalism is over and businesses like Marvel know this – people like when content is interesting. And what is more interesting than promoting new products, specials offers, and general business information? I am not saying your site should be a Trapster’s sticky cesspool (if you don’t get the reference, its not important), but it should reflect what you are promoting current and updated often. Marvel Entertainment does a fantastic job of promoting their different business lines on their homepage in an easy and interesting way. The easier and more interesting, the longer visitors stay. Visitors who stay are visitors who will buy.

Marvel's Homepage Services Their Various Product Lines

Why Marvel Wins at SEO
SEO is the backbone of success for any business and obtaining high ranking on new phrases related to your business is key to dominating search results. Marvel has done so with the emerging digital comics market. Not only are they the first and second Google positions on the phrase “digital comics”, the Amazon.com result mentions them by name. Digital comics is a market which has high ROI than the standard print format, so dominating these position in organic search gives Marvel an advantage. Another astonishing fact, DC Comics’ site doesn’t appear anywhere in the first two pages of search results. Applying this methodology to other industries is simple, research new technology and developments, create landing pages and start optimizing before competitors are even aware of the potential.

Marvel Dominates "Digital Comics" Results

As internet marketing becomes more and more important to small businesses, SEO and social media will continue to mutate. However, being active with fans, having well thought out site design, and great positioning on emerging search phrases, will always be important to growth. So the next time you start questioning the value have having an internet presence, remember you can either be the Invisible Woman in the room or you pull a Dr. Doom and dominate the web for your small business.

Superman Vs Thor Image From Wizard Universe

Devil Dinosaur image from Weekly Crisis

The next thing you know, the site does not rank on any search engine and you turn to a SEO company to see what can be done. After implementing SEO tactics, if your site is still not ranking when searched organically, you may have the great problem of duplicate content.

Many times, companies that create Web sites tailored to particular industries (such as Internet Dental Alliance and Mentor Solutions) use template site layouts and content. All of the information filling your Web site about your procedures or services are not unique and are most likely being used for another client somewhere in the country and what’s worse: it may be used for another client in your area.

In a market as small as New Orleans,  you may still rank on the first page of Google – along side your competitors – in spite of the duplicate content. This is the case for certain New Orleans dentists that have used Internet Dental Alliance to create their Web sites: City Park Dental Care (neworleanscosmeticdental.com), Today’s Dental Cosmetic and Family Dentistry (cosmeticdentistneworleans.com) and  NOLA Dental Care (cosmeticdentalneworleans.com). However, there still has to be a winner and a loser and the winner in the search for  “Cosmetic Dentist New Orleans” is City Park Dental. (Click to enlarge.)

Superficially, all these sites look somewhat different, but they all have a similar structure. Although, there is not duplicate content on every page of these sites, the two dentists above that offer the Invisalign procedure do enter the duplicate content zone. Check out their sites:

City Park Dental Care

NOLA Dental Care

In some ways, the sites are different visually,  but the images are the same and, most importantly, so is the text. The problem of duplicate content has nothing to do with plagiarism, by the way, but search engines can tell when content is duplicated and will grant authority to a site through a varying combination of factors including which has the “original” content, which is has an older domain, or which the greater number of authoritative inbound links. If scales don’t shift in your site’s favor, then you will be pushed down the rankings, especially if your market is highly competitive.

Though there are several factors that deem a site “authoritative,” any way you search for it, NOLA Dental Care does not rank as well as City Park Dental Care for the invisalign procedure. In this case, the only solution is to rewrite and completely restructure the page and its content to increase in rank.

Search Influence Account Manager, Eva Moran, recommends that business owners or staff members write their own unique content capturing their particular voice, sentiment and expertise on the subject and then passing it off for optimization review.

Also, you may think twice before using a service that guarantees you (and everyone else!) an effective Web page. It is worth investing on a Web site that isn’t generated from a template to avoid duplicate content and gain visibility on search engines.

For more information on duplicate content in other situations, Google has some great insights here.

Please go have a look! And of course, feel free to look at the below and comment in either place.

—

My good friend and colleague Aimee Ellingsen, a fabulous designer who’s portfolio is a little overweight in plastic surgeon web sites, is helping me out with a redesign of the Search Influence web site.

Like many sites, the Search Influence site has grown organically and is now a bit of a jumbled mess.

So, Aimee being a diligent designer and a little obsessive has put together 3 gorgeous site layouts. They are by no means press ready but they sketch some broad strokes of concepts, colors and sensibility.

I’m not going to say which is my favorite (mostly because I have more than one) but I have elements of each that I love. These represent a great variety from which to choose. The biggest challenge is one of self-definition: who are we? what do we do? with whom do we want most to work? — all that kinda stuff.

Good questions. I know the answers to some and hopefully in this design process we’ll find answers to the rest.

You may click the image below to see the full size mock-up image.

Layout #1

Layout #2

Layout #3

Thanks in advance for your feedback! I’m excited to get this finalized and implemented (hopefully by the new year).

Will

Update: It occurs to me, since I’m asking for your opinions, if you have sites which you think are good examples of what we’re after here please feel free to link to them in your comments.