“Query intent can be classified, according to Google, as Action (“Do”), Information (“Know”) or Navigation (“Go”)”

Well, it turns out that Google’s “quality raters” checklist got leaked, and while it wasn’t a bombshell of secret information, it does provide some useful insights (thanks for the 16 points of insight SEOMOZ!)

Do you have information on your website for all 3 different types of intent on your website? Here’s some ideas to be sure you actually cover with content on your website, this example is for a real estate site, but just think it out for your own industry.

Action: Search for a home, Get CMA, List a home, get a buyers agent, get a sellers agent
Information: Learn about community, learn about home buying/selling
Navigation: Your Office/business location, contact info

Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.

Words are a powerful thing, it can convey a boatload of meaning, and yet at the same time if you’ve listened to any politician answer a question he doesn’t want to you can see that words can also be meaningless. The question for business owners, and website operators is whether or not you’re writing content just for the sake of drawing more visitors by getting better rankings, or if you’re writing content that will be helpful to your current and potential clients. My advice is that you embrace the idea that being an effective website is about providing relevant content. Let your website be judged on the character of your content!

When it comes to web content, irrespective of whether it’s sales copy, informative writing or random thoughts and musings on a blog, it should be easy reading! Reading online shouldn’t be made a tedious task and for most of us, perusing websites and blogs is a leisurely activity.

Words can be to much of a good thing..

Personally, if an article (no matter how interesting its title) starts like a rocket science manual, I’m out of there! By all means, vary your vocabulary – by the same token I hate to read posts where a blogger evidently doesn’t know another word for ‘good.’ But stretching out a word count by fluffing up the content is annoying. Concise content makes for quick reading, ideal for the busy workaholic society we live in.
Now, I’m exaggerating with the title of this post, in complaining about ten words where one will do. More often than not, my peeve comes where writers use two words in place of one. Of course, sometimes there’s a need for this and child like sentences devoid of adjectives, for example, would make for bland writing. There’s a fine line between ‘concise’ and ‘bland’ content.
So, examples?

Unnecessary adverbs and adjectives

"A Sentence with to many adjectives is like Coffee with to much sugar."

There’s a time and a place for adjectives and sometimes they just sound out of place and long winded when read out loud. Take the sentence, “He was an incredibly intelligent fellow, but had an extreme lack of common sense.” When read out loud is lacks punch and crispness. A revision to, “He was an intelligent fellow, though lacked common sense,” is easier reading. That’s a 14 word sentence versus a nine word one.

Unimportant Information

If you’re writing an article on Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms, you would want to let your readers know what the changes are, how they would be affected by the changes and the obstacles the President faces. While it’s easy to wander off on a tangent at times, writing about Obama’s educational background or going into too much depth over the history of health in the US fluffs the article up and takes away from its point. After writing, read out loud and be critical. Ask yourself what the point of each sentence is and if you can’t find a purpose of a sentence, delete!

Repeated Information

Sometimes we repeat ourselves without even realizing we’ve done it. Even if you’ve worded it differently, the same point or fact made twice (even at opposite ends of an article) is just more words than necessary!

Squeeze Out More Words

Look for opportunities to crush and squeeze your verbiage. - Photo by Tomf

Once you’ve cleared out everything you think you can, read through again (preferably out loud). Look for opportunities to tighten up your sentences in ways not described above. An example could be changing:
“Whenever the Jones family got news pets, the neighbour’s children always tended to take to them quicker than the Jones boys,” to
“The next door neighbour’s children always took to the Jones’ new pets quicker than the Jones boys did.”

I know I’ve barked on about concise content here, but this should never come at the expense of meaning. The idea of concise content is saying what you need to say as tightly as possible – not about cutting points out in order to shorten a piece. Think punchy, crisp and natural sounding content and you’re well on your way to great copy.

Bottled at the Source!

You’ve all done it…you stare at your Google or Raven seo analytics trying to figure out why your bounce rate is so high. You follow the click paths, create client funnels, follow referral sources, and pour over charts and graphs until your eyes bleed but you STILL can’t figure out why the client left the page. ..You’re missing the most obvious source of feedback! The purest source you can ask for is your client! They have a usually have a “pretty good grasp” on why they would want to visit your website, what they’d like to have as a feature, what web content they’d like to read and why they might not like your current site! So how do you tap this reservoir of recommendations??

All You Gotta Do Is Ask Her Nice

Here’s my recommended tactic that you can use to get feedback from your clients to discover problem areas, services you don’t offer and type of content people are looking for. A simple interview.  First, Jot down a set of questions like:

• What would you expect to see on a site for (insert industry here)
• Is there any services our business can do for you online that would make you more likely to be our client? Like Schedule appointments?
• Do you have any unique ideas that would be neat to see on our website?

Second, is to set the client at ease first after approaching them for the survey. Perhaps a cup of coffee or a soda or if you’re a restaurant treat them to a free meal (you’ll definately make a bigger return on the investment of a single meal).

Lastly, make them feel like they’re special, and that their feedback matters deeply(which it should!). The  benefit from this tactic is that beyond drawing out some possibly new ideas, or reinforcing your current methods,  it will make an impression on that person! That additional level of contact could lead to word of mouth advertising as they tell their freind about their experience. If  your lucky, and the person is web-savvy then you could even garner a Yelp review, a blog post, tweet, facebook post or myspace comment about it as well!

Have you used this method to get feedback? Do you have some tips to making it go smoothly? Please feel free to share!

BTW:

Find the best paid search engine marketingservices from an interactive agency.

Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names

Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…

I was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!

If you thought that video websites were only visited by bored, disillusioned youths in America, then the recent 2008 stats from Youtube should open your eyes!

The virtual audience actually has the highest percentage of users making an annual income of $50,000 – $74,999 annually, with 27 %. Even more surprisingly, nearly half of Youtubes users have an annual income that actually exceeds $75,000 dollars!

Adjusting Marketing to address your Audience

The numbers are there, America is becoming more and more enveloped with video, and websites that ignore this type of content for their site are losing out on a huge piece of the pie. As a site owner here are some quick ways to get into video

1. Film a product introduction for your site
2. Produce helpful tips for your industry
3. Cover an industry event like a convention or meeting

There are a variety of hosting platforms that are free to use, and embed into your website. You could use Youtube, Vimeo, or Viddler. However, if your video is quality and you want to get the biggest splash, then I recommend using http://www.Tubemogul.com where they syndicate out and track your video across a wide number of platforms. You of course can choose which platform you grab your embed code form, but this method will get your site out as far as possible. Natually you are also going to want to follow some good content writing and seo advice!

Don’t let your Images become a messy pile

Utilizing Images to Enhance your website content

There are many different types of content that people could be looking for online. People looking for the same subject are often going to be searching differently if they want to see different types of site content. With Google’s Universal Search playing a larger and larger role to accomodate these different types of searches, you need to make sure that you are incorporating media properly in your page content. In the Google Webmaster chat about Optimizing Images for Search it became clear that the context of the image is used to help determine it’s relevance to a keyword. So, as you add content to your site, make sure your images aren’t just piled up, and thrown willy nilly about the page. Your images should align with the content to further the message. No one wants to read through blocks of text with no relief. Additionally, that content you’re adding has it’s Alt text(title) description, so that Google can see how that image lines up with the information being conveyed in the text itself.
]]> http://footinmouthdisease.net/2008/08/06/treat-pictures-like-visual-content/feed/ 0 Foot in Mouth A Pile of Clothes http://footinmouthdisease.net/2007/12/14/deconstructing-the-concept-of-under-construction/ http://footinmouthdisease.net/2007/12/14/deconstructing-the-concept-of-under-construction/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:23:18 +0000 Jeremy Rivera http://footinmouthdisease.net/2007/12/14/deconstructing-the-concept-of-under-construction/ ]]> I was assisting a client in moving their content from one company to another, and they had added an under construction page, and put up an icon like this to make people aware.

I think that the “Under Construction page” should become a thing of the past. I think that putting up the under construction page forces Google, Yahoo and MSN to drop all of the links it had to all of the internal pages of your site. This could set you back greatly because GYM will check the site less for new content if it thinks that there is no content there and it will take longer once you remove the under construction page to re index and rank your site.The primary fallacy of an under construction page is the idea that websites are like traditional buildings. When a building is under construction it is of no use whatsoever, however even a fledgling website, if done with thought, can be useful to visitors even if it doesn’t have every thing the creator imagined. Aside from the icons looking like they came from the 90′s dot com bubble, people can of course tell that site isn’t complete.

As a site owner, you should know that Google doesn’t like “stubs” or placeholder pages that have little or no content. The best way to build your site, is to build it page by page, and publishing when it is filled out. This isn’t to say you can’t add embellishments, or more pictures later on. Ditch the cheesy gif files, and remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was any good website.