websense

Sorry for the late post - this is a session review from the recent SES show in San Jose.

Successful Site Architecture:
Review by Josh Best, Sales Specialist, The Karcher Group

There were two speakers for this SES session: Derrick Wheeler from Acxiom Digital and Matt Bailey.

Both had solid information and were entertaining presenters. In my opinion, a key element of a good session is the presenter’s ability to keep the crowd involved and interested. In this regard, both Derrick and Matt did a good job. Derek seemed to provide the nuts and bolts of how to build a site with good architecture, while Matt focused on the legal implications and provided examples of sites that lack successful architecture.

Here are some of the keys points and observations from each:

Derek Wheeler:

To have a successful site, you must have these 4 things to offer your users / search engines:

• proper site architecture
• quality content
• a unique web site
• a user friendly web site

An acronym to help you remember the process of your site within the search engines and your users: C.I.R.T.A.

• Crawl
• Index
• Rank
• Traffic
• Action

It’s better to have short, to the point URLS than it is to have longer, keyword stuffed URLS
Some things to avoid or watch out for:

• Robots.txt
• Search engine crawlers don’t accept cookies
• Sessions IDs can cause a problem with search engines. This is due to duplicate pages and URLs being created
• Javascript

As I mentioned before, I thought Matt’s presentation was more focused on showing examples of sites with good/not-so-good site architecture. Some of the examples used were the Target corporation website and the Prince Tennis website, among others.

Matt Bailey

• Web site submissions are a thing of the past
• Useful tools available to all are the Google Guidelines and the Accessibility Checklist through www.wc3.com
• If you require a mouse action as your first step to accessing your site information, a search engine crawler will not be able to get into your site to index your pages
• Pay attention to alt text. It can save you from many usability issues

I hope this brief overview shares some helpful insights and tips that were passed along @ SES San Jose.

My goal with this blog isn’t to shamelessly plug The Karcher Group’s Services, but in this case, I can’t resist. We just started offering a really cool service, Hosted Microsoft Exchange.

It also makes me cringe, to some degree, to be promoting a Microsoft product. I’m a huge fan of the Linux operating systems, for obvious reasons; cost and more importantly, reliability. However, with the Shared Exchange option Microsoft has really brought a great product to market. Anyone who relies heavily on Outlook and or Exchange, knows how nice it is to have easy access to your email and contacts, via their OWA (Outlook Web Access). Shared Exchange takes it to another level.

I happen to travel a lot, so I have several devices that I keep my email, contacts and calendar on, and MS Exchange makes that pretty darn easy. Quick access to my email is just an expectation I have now. But many businesses and small business owners, especially, don’t have this because it can be cost prohibitive. ‘Til you buy the licenses, hardware and a person to maintain an Exchange Server, it can be expensive. By launching the Shared Exchange option, MS has made it very affordable for a small business to have access to the cool features and availability of Exchange.

You don’t have the overhead and management, of the hardware, software and personnel. You simply pay a service fee and someone else handles all of that for you, and you get your email, contacts and calendar on your desktop, laptop, pda and whatever other devices you want.

Yes I do in fact cave easily

I know I said in my previous blog about Development Requests For Proposals that doing an SEO RFP was something to be avoided at all costs (to the point that ramming a pen directly into your kneecap to get out of it would be a viable option), but of course this just guarantees that at some point your job is going to require you to do it. In order to spare you any unnecessary Bic-related patella injuries, we have gone ahead and put together a sample SEO RFP that is available for download at our site.

Please note that this Search Engine Optimization request for proposal is even more dependant on you, the client, providing information than its Web development counterpart. SEO strategies and Internet marketing campaigns are tailored specifically to your market, your target site users and what kind of communication medium you use your Web site for. Of course, your competition also needs to be evaluated and considered. So an SEO firm getting a firm enough grip on all of this through an SEO RFP is highly unlikely.

As with the development RFP, just download the SEO RFP template, change the fonts and page background to fit your company’s branding and then start sending out the pain to us, the sad response-preparers. We have also included a TKG-Branded version to give you an idea of how to brand it to your company - which doubles as a not-so-subtle reminder to, of course, remember to hit us with one when it comes time to distribute your finished SEO Request for Proposal!

Our hope is that this will at least get you asking the right questions. Hopefully if you do go through this process, you’ll still take the time to personally interview, and get to know the team you’ll be hiring.

Review by Patrick Quicci!

Today I had the privilege to attend the Fun With Dynamic Web Sites session conducted by Mikkel deMib Svendsen from deMib.com, Laura Thieme from Bizresearch.com and Jake Ballie from STNlabs.com. They did a good job of accomplishing their goal; a basic overview of common issues with dynamic web content, and a few do’s and dont’s.

Mikkel kicked off the session with a very educating, but basic review of some common misconceptions. Some of those include storing content in a database; ” “-marks in query strings and server side includes which are actually NOT problems. He also dove into problems that do directly influence the search engines, for example long urls, duplicate content and certain technologies such as AJAX when they aren’t implemented properly. Some of the indirect issues he covered were; requiring cookies for navigatoin, Java script and Flash along with Geo targeting and personalization. These are all items that can cause havoc with regard to getting dynamic content properly indexed.

Next up was Laura Thieme from Biz Research. Laura also discussed issues that your typical client may run into in the eyes of the search engines. If you were lucky enough to see Laura at SES New York in April don’t fret, she uses the same exact presentation. She went so far as to apologize for this, which wasn’t necessary because most presenters do th is, but it was a nice touch. She touched on basic areas that need attention when optimizing a site such as page titles, headers and text based navigation. She also touched on other factors which can result in the engines from shying away from your site. Make sure your E-commerce solution and Content Management System aren’t blocking the engines!

Finally everyone’s favorite SES speaker Jake Ballie stepped up to the podium. As usual Jake was in prime form interacting with the attendees and keeping everyone on their toes. Jake’s presentation started off by touching on dynamic telephone numbers, price elasticity and mining failed internal search terms. All areas that a dynamic web owner should integrate to squeeze the most out of their site. The highlight of this presentation was when Jake started talking about competitors and what to do if you find out they are stealing content (scraping) from your site. By stealing I mean image hotlinking, price monitoring and content lifting. To ensure this doesn’t become an epidemic all you need to know is the I.P. addresses of your competitors and how to work with Mod Rewrites. For example, if you find a competitor using images from your site you can use a Mod Rewrite to show them a different picture. “What you choose to show is your own personal preference, but I would recommend showing something they will regret”, wink wink. Some great ideas for ways to deal with lazy competition.

All in this was a very good session which I would recommend to anyone that’s just getting started working with Dynamic Websites.

Stay tuned for more updates from SES San Jose 2007……

I had a moment to stop by the Market Motive booth @ SES and chatted with Michael Stebbins and John Marshall for a few moments.

It was great to get an idea of where they’re headed with their team. In line with John’s passion to educate, it seems that that is their main focus. They’re hoping to educate both the market and the search industry itself. John made a great point that the more of our customers that are subscribed to their service, the more educated the market will become. Of course, that should result in desire to invest in SEO, Marketing and Analytics services, because they’ll begin to understand why they need them. This is very similar to the reason behind our Search Engine Marketing Seminars that we do in Ohio. So, of course, I’m all for it.

I’d personally like them to begin a training and certification program for search marketers. What better way to grow your search marketing staff than to have them trained by the best in the industry! Michael tells me that this is something they’re seriously considering, so we’ll watch for that in the coming months. They definitely have the knowledge and talent to put together a fantastic program.