websense

This law suit against Target is amazing to me. What a shame.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m very much a proponent of accessible web design. As I would hope anyone who is serious about the web development business would be. Any web developer or development company who isn’t building sites this way yet, should be working hard and fast toward that goal. However, is the court room really the right place to effect change?

I personally believe that the market will prove to Target that they need to take their site seriously. Frankly, the inaccessibility of their site is probably the least of their worries, if it weren’t for the courts that is. Has anyone taken the time to notice that the average page is over 400K!. Should dial up users also start up a class action suit? How about they query strings in the URL? This site goes against almost every best practice there is. It is though; a free country. If they choose to turn away business by having a poorly built site; so be it.

Let other business, who choose to pay attention to the web, and build good sites that are accessible to all gain a little market share. What could be wrong with that?

Post Author: Jennifer Geh
Something we’re seeing in the SEO Industry is a lot of question and debate regarding how to charge for SEO. Since the industry itself is still in the early growth stages and determining how to set pricing, creating different pricing and package models etc. it can be exceedingly difficult for a site owner to compare and price SEO Services. Obviously, this makes budgeting for SEO equally difficult.

To my amazement many site owners and corporations will opt for huge PPC budgets in lieu of doing SEO simply because the process and the spend can be too confusing. PPC is usually pretty straight forward from a cost standpoint, or at least it seems so. In my opinion it’s a shame that a customer would rather spend more for less results (in the long run) simply because the industry has made pricing difficult to understand.

I don’t mean to be negative about PPC, it definitely has it’s place and purpose. However, when compared to Natural Search Engine Optimization, the long term impact isn’t as cost effective.

So, how do you budget for SEO:

Start by trying to answer the following questions before throwing a random number in a spreadsheet or your “SEO RFP“.

• Was your site professionally built? This can impact the amount of work an SEO/Development team will have to do to make it search friendly.
• Is it performing well/at all now? Do you know your current Search Engine Referral Rate? Are most of your search referrals using your name to find you or generic product/service phrases?
• Your Competition: Are they optimizing? Do they have professionally built sites?
• Your Market: Are they a savvy group? Heavy online users? This will give you and indication of how much business you might be missing out on by overlooking SEO.
• What are your expectations? Do you expect the web to contribute significantly to your sales?

If you start by answering these questions, you’ll begin to understand how important Search really is to you, what state your site is in now and whether or not you should budget a significant portion of your marketing budget to SEO.

At the end of the day, good SEO isn’t going to be cheap. It can cost anywhere from $10,000.00 per year for a small business to hundreds of thousands per year for a large business with a large site. So, in the budgeting process, it’s worth it to take your time, answer the questions above honestly and plan your budget accordingly. Your SEO budget shouldn’t be set by how much is left over in an IT budget, or Marketing budget. It should be determined by how much work there is to be done, and how important results are to your business.

For several years now, we’ve been operating on the philosophy that web development and search engine optimization are integrally linked. In other words, if done properly, they overlap each other significantly. Well, the SEO industry is finally becoming ready to hear that message. At SES San Jose, it seemed that the market was also looking for companies that can do both, in-house. In fact, we pitched a session called “Get it Together” at SES Chicago, and it got accepted.

Here’s the abstract from the SES site:

SEO & Development - Get It Together!
In this session you will learn why your Web development and marketing teams need to make nice. The audience will hear first-hand from a firm performing development and SEO under one roof. The discussion will include the client advantages/challenges presented.

At the end of the day, it seems like common sense to us. If you’re truly optimizing your site, you should be making significant changes to it, not just “putting keywords in the right places”. Why not have a professional web development team making those changes, rather than an “SEO Expert” who might just be uncomfortable with html, css and programming.

If you think about it; how can anyone take a “holistic approach” to website marketing, with out the ability to change more than text?

-by Collyn Floyd

Social media and I got off to a bad start. It started a few years ago when my college-age brother told me about MySpace and how I just had to be on there. After all, he already had like 110 friends. It’s not that I didn’t already spent a lot of time online, I just didn’t want to spend it picking out background wallpaper, theme songs, and whatnot (& the same could probably be for most of my friends). I saw the point, but MySpace wasn’t for me.

Then last year, there was the Digg phenomenon. I checked it out, but I like a friendlier online environment without all the incendiary comments. There was also Twitter – you know, so I can tell my friends, “I’m going to the bathroom right now”? Um, no thanks.

So, it came as a surprise when social media recently came to my rescue. I was stumped as to how to remove some decorative shutters from our home’s exterior. Google produced no help. I thought about driving up to Home Depot, but didn’t want to deal with the Saturday crowd, hunt for someone in an orange apron to help me, etc, etc. On a whim, I logged into Yahoo! Answers and asked my question, “How do I remove/uninstall exterior shutters?” Within several minutes, I had two answers. Within a couple of hours, I had several more.

These were good answers, mind you; a contractor responded, as did someone who had clearly gone through the process before. In total, I got eight responses. Even better, Y! Answers invited me to vote on the best response, and the answer with the most votes moved to the top of the page.

The size of the Y! Answers community is astounding. You can ask just about anything and get a response: Does butter spoil if left unrefrigerated? What should I do about the annoying guy at work? How often are there general elections in Britain? Of course, you could go to the USDA’s website to find out about butter or an online encyclopedia for British election info, but getting those experienced-it-myself, community-driven responses on Y! Answers makes for much more fun.

So I guess all is not lost for me with Social Media. It was just a matter of finding the right community.