Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

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Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman

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By Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NYTimes Bestselling Author, bryaneisenberg.com

I will be updating this page and editing it throughout the week. (slides)

How Not to Improve Your Conversion Rates

  • Don’t do slice & dice optimization – don’t try too many variables at once

one of the most important things to test is marketing message or unique value proposition

Every single keyword you’re targeting, either by SEO or SEM, needs its own landing page. The conversion rate goes up exponentially. You need to create dedicated landing pages for every channel. Use form analytics if use Omniture to see how users are interacting with forms.

Call tracking needs to track what keywords are generating calls. 43% of all conversions happen over the phone.

Tools

You have to have a quick loading site. MUST LOAD IN UNDER 2 SECONDS!!! Pagespeed, loads.in, websiteoptimization.com (look at 56k download speed)

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Strategic Use of User- Generated Content for SEO

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By Michael DeHaven, Group Product Manager, SEO, for Bazaarvoice

Bazaarvoice manages User-Generated Content (UGC) for over 1300 brands.

Compared user reviews from the audience for a chocolate caramel square to the marketing text on the package. Some negative and positive reviews.

User-generated content

80%-90% of UGC on major brand web sites is actually written by users.

Language styles – the words that you typically think of (or marketers think of) are totally different than what actual users write when writing reviews.

7 Principles of User Generated SEO

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  1. Don’t forget the fundamentals of SEO – UGC will not fix a site with poor SEO
  2. Search engines get bored – they want new stuff. By leveraging UGC, you can keep content fresh.
  3. The Primanti Principle – a primanti sandwich has French fries in it. You want to have the right amount of fries. The same applies to search.

Information Architecture for Great Websites

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By Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive

Information Architecture & SEO

information architecture is the art and science of organizing and labeling website content to support usability and find ability. This is not technical architecture (301 redirects, canonical tags, robots.txt,meta.)

Why should we care about IA?

Read the rest of Information Architecture for Great Websites

  • lost customers
  • brand value – even if your site is # 1, if they can’t find the information they’re looking for they go to the next link in the results and they don’t go back to your site, even if you fix it, because they don’t know you fixed it
  • design and development costs – if you mess up the IA on launch, you have to start from scratch on a redesign. Use wireframes. You should never code a web site unless you’ve done wireframes or prototypes. It’s too expensive to go back and redo it.

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

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By Shari Thurow, Funder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive

What is duplicate content? Search engines don’t see layout, just copy. Exclude our site search via robots.txt and meta robots tag to avoid submitting duplicate content to Google. Duplicate content is not considered spam, but it can be penalized. The biggest issue, however, is usability. IMPORTANT NOTE: Duplicate content is not penalized, it’s filtered out of the SERPs.

How do search engines filter out duplicate content?

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  • Crawl time filters (duplicate URLs)
  • Index-time filters
  • Query-time filters

Index-Time Filters

  • Broilerplate strippings (search engine removes broilerplate elements to determine the content fingerprint)
  • Linkage properties (# of inbound and outbound links)
  • Host name resolution (what domain resides on which ip address?)
  • Shingle Comparison (Andre Broder – Google Scholar and shingles)
    • Every Web document has a unique content signature or “fingerprint”

SES Chicago 2011

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I’m excited to be at SES for the first time and will be blogging throughout the week. I won’t necessarily be live blogging, but I do want to get my thoughts and observations down before they slip away. I’m planning on attending some interesting sessions on different topics that affect me personally for my job and for personal web projects.
Here’s what I have planned for today.

  • Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
  • Information Architecture for the Modern Website
  • User Generated SEO
  • Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman

Jared Spool – Mobile & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 23, 2011

 

h2. Mobile & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm

Session 1 – Jared Spool

The UX aspect of mobile has really exploded recently.

Examples:

My Coke Rewards – mobile site had to have Flash. Excluded all iPhone users.

Fox Weather “Alternate content should be placed here.”

MikePanetta.com – QR code on sign, but no mobile site.

Mariott Hotel – connect to wifi via mobile

h3. Sturgeon’s Law

Theodore Sturgeon “90% of everything is crap!”

United airlines email link to 404 page

Coke has fixed the flash problem, but shows the entire site when user is trying to input a code.

You would think by now that we now how to show sites on mobile now, but companies still have issues: verizon wireless, att, apple, air canada

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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

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Kate Brigham – PatientsLikeMe: Adventures with Data Visualizations

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Kate Brigham - PatientsLikeMe - Adventures with Data Visualizations
Kate Brigham - Adventures with Data Visualizations

8 in 10 internet users have looked online for health information

patientslikeme helps patients track chronic conditions and learn from the experience from other people who are experiencing the same symptoms, medications and conditions

People share stories as part of a typical conversation. PatientsLikeMe tracks all data about members by translating stories into data.

Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve and how do I get there? – establish a baseline for member engagement

Make it easy for people to create data

If you’re asking people to invest time and energy to give you the data, let them know how it will benefit them.

Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Make forms easy

Start with questions that are easy to answer and don’t use jargon…

Read the rest of Kate Brigham – PatientsLikeMe: Adventures with Data Visualizations