(a humorous look at Barack Obama's website)
It seems to me that Barack Obama has used the Internet like never before to mobilise his supporters. He has raised around half a billion $ so far online mostly in small donations of around $100. So I thought I would take a look at his website. I can only imagine how easily he would have won the election if he had had a decent website! Firstly it took about 5 minutes to find it. Various web searches such as 'Obama Internet' 'obama net' showed nothing. I eventually found it: www.barackobama.com I really was amazed. The home page contains no Keywords that you might expect i.e) Change, 'Barack Obama' etc. This was obviously why it was hard to find. Also the front page took a very long time to load. Surely with 3 days until the election it would have been worth him spending some of the $ Billion Dollars on upgrading his server! I am sure he is getting a lot of hits but really... Also the splash screen just crashed. I appeal to Barack to hire us to fix his site before it too late. Barack give me a call now, please :-)
A review of John MaCain’s site to follow...
Sunday 2 November 2008
Tuesday 28 October 2008
Location, Location, Location
I have been involved the Internet since 1994. When I started using the Internet commercial activity was officially illegal and the web browsers at the time were text only and not able to show images! At this time Internet users tended to in general be quite bright. In the 1990s and early 2000s if you built a good/interesting website and posted the link on some forums and posted them to search engines there was a good chance that people would find the site. These days such is the extraordinary amount of sites available it is getting increasingly difficult to get your website noticed unless you have an online and offline marketing budget. Around 10 years ago some of the biggest websites at the time in the UK were sites like Friends Reunited and Jobserve. I remember reading about how these sites had been developed and launched. It seemed that they were launched in the founders bedroom with almost no marketing budget and basically because they provided a good or interesting service they became incredibly popular. It seems to me that this just does not happen any more. Firstly, it is increasingly hard to find anything that has not already been done. Also as less technically knowledgeable people and some less bright people, come to the Net it also seems that a company can market itself to success even though they provide an inferior service. I am increasingly seeing websites launched with huge TV/billboard and Cinema advertising campaigns. The culprits will remain nameless however often their sites seem to be doing well even though they are not the best service available.
I am amazed by some of the questions that I get asked from time to time by people that our otherwise intelligent regarding their use of the Internet. To give some examples of things that I have encountered recently:
1) A CEO of a small company that did not see any difference between putting the name of his website into a search engine and typing in the correct URL into his browsers Address bar.
2) A marketing executive who demanded that I put his site at the top of Google (natural search) the same day it launched.
3) The CEO of a well known London media outlet that had not heard of Podcasts.
4) The Chairman of a software company who when I described standard software integration techniques reacted by saying he did not understand how it could be of any benefit to any software company.
I must say rather embarrassingly that all of the above occurred in my home country (England). I must also say that I do find that in general I do not see quite the same level of tech-ignorance when I travel to the US or major cities in Asia. I have definitely encountered similar knowledge gaps by people in European countries though. I do find it incredible that some of these senior European executives just literally have not got a clue about emerging technologies or even current technologies. They quite often seem almost proud of the fact that they have a massive knowledge gap regarding Internet technologies. The only way of explaining how these people are able to survive is just quite how important the leading search engines actually are. If someone who can not distinguish between the Address bar and the Search bar then the Search is everything. I would guess that there are quite a high number of people that don't really know the difference between Address bar and the Search bar (and they are probably quite proud of it). It is therefore possible to draw a business analogy between your position on Search Engines and your physical position. If Search Engine Optimisation is done well you may have the equivalent of a prime position on the High Street. You will end up with the equivalent of a shop in the middle of the Sahara Desert, if the Search Engine Optimisation is done badly. As they say in the property business there are 3 important things Location, Location and Location. I believe that this is also true of the Location of your website on the search results.
I am amazed by some of the questions that I get asked from time to time by people that our otherwise intelligent regarding their use of the Internet. To give some examples of things that I have encountered recently:
1) A CEO of a small company that did not see any difference between putting the name of his website into a search engine and typing in the correct URL into his browsers Address bar.
2) A marketing executive who demanded that I put his site at the top of Google (natural search) the same day it launched.
3) The CEO of a well known London media outlet that had not heard of Podcasts.
4) The Chairman of a software company who when I described standard software integration techniques reacted by saying he did not understand how it could be of any benefit to any software company.
I must say rather embarrassingly that all of the above occurred in my home country (England). I must also say that I do find that in general I do not see quite the same level of tech-ignorance when I travel to the US or major cities in Asia. I have definitely encountered similar knowledge gaps by people in European countries though. I do find it incredible that some of these senior European executives just literally have not got a clue about emerging technologies or even current technologies. They quite often seem almost proud of the fact that they have a massive knowledge gap regarding Internet technologies. The only way of explaining how these people are able to survive is just quite how important the leading search engines actually are. If someone who can not distinguish between the Address bar and the Search bar then the Search is everything. I would guess that there are quite a high number of people that don't really know the difference between Address bar and the Search bar (and they are probably quite proud of it). It is therefore possible to draw a business analogy between your position on Search Engines and your physical position. If Search Engine Optimisation is done well you may have the equivalent of a prime position on the High Street. You will end up with the equivalent of a shop in the middle of the Sahara Desert, if the Search Engine Optimisation is done badly. As they say in the property business there are 3 important things Location, Location and Location. I believe that this is also true of the Location of your website on the search results.
Sunday 31 August 2008
The Credit Crunch - Tech Services
Britain is facing "arguably the worst" economic downturn in 60 years which will be "more profound and long-lasting" than people had expected, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, tells the Guardian today.
Reports of doom and gloom are everywhere. Every time you switch on a TV, web connection or pickup a newspaper tales of doom and woe abound.
Despite this my business for one seems totally unaffected. Our turnover has actually doubled over the last 6 months. I started to think that, in these hard times, maybe people are using new technologies to cut costs. Maybe all the problems retailers are facing on the High Street are not just be part of the economic cycle but instead because people are increasingly using the Internet instead of the High Street. This was illustrated by a shopping trip that I went on yesterday. My friend and I were doing some window shopping in some expensive shops in West London. At one point my friend stopped to look at one item which he really liked. He asked the shop assistant a series of searching questions and was happy with the answers. Later on I asked him if he was going to buy the item. He said yes. I suggested that I go and help him collect it from the shop. At this point he burst out laughing. Why would I do that, it will be cheaper on the Internet, he said.
It seems that High Street shops with their high rent and high staff costs must operate at a massive disadvantage to online businesses, who do not in many cases even have to hold stock. It seems to me that spending on IT and Internet services is very robust and I do not see any reason why that should not continue. What do you think?
Reports of doom and gloom are everywhere. Every time you switch on a TV, web connection or pickup a newspaper tales of doom and woe abound.
Despite this my business for one seems totally unaffected. Our turnover has actually doubled over the last 6 months. I started to think that, in these hard times, maybe people are using new technologies to cut costs. Maybe all the problems retailers are facing on the High Street are not just be part of the economic cycle but instead because people are increasingly using the Internet instead of the High Street. This was illustrated by a shopping trip that I went on yesterday. My friend and I were doing some window shopping in some expensive shops in West London. At one point my friend stopped to look at one item which he really liked. He asked the shop assistant a series of searching questions and was happy with the answers. Later on I asked him if he was going to buy the item. He said yes. I suggested that I go and help him collect it from the shop. At this point he burst out laughing. Why would I do that, it will be cheaper on the Internet, he said.
It seems that High Street shops with their high rent and high staff costs must operate at a massive disadvantage to online businesses, who do not in many cases even have to hold stock. It seems to me that spending on IT and Internet services is very robust and I do not see any reason why that should not continue. What do you think?
Saturday 16 August 2008
Search Engines Listings: Black Art or Science
We have just launched a new website for our web design agency http://www.limetreeonline.com/ obviously, it is important to us that this site achieves a good ranking on Search Engines. However, we are a new company and at the moment we have a relatively low Google Ranking. We also provide Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services ourselves and so it is very important to us to get well listed high on Search Engines as soon as possible. Over the last week, I have taken on the role of optimising our website. I do have a good knowledge of all the issues however I have not done any hands-on optimisation work for some time. Our site has a nice clean, simple easy to use design. As the site is completely new it initially had a Google Ranking of 0 along with all other new websites. I have now written a lot more content, which I hope the site visitors will find useful. The best way to get people to visit your site is to provide interesting content. As the CEO I would normally delegate the task of SEO, however, I felt that to increase my understanding of it I would work on it myself. What I have realised this week is just how time consuming SEO is. It has taken up a very large amount of time to fully optimise the simple 10 page website that we have for our company. The main reason for this is the sheer amount of data entry necessary. For every page, it is necessary to conduct analysis of The Meta Tags (5 or so different ones), The Title Tags, Links, H1 and H2 tags. In order to do this properly, each one of these needs very careful consideration. Following the rules and placing something in each of these areas of the page is the easy bit. The hard bit is deciding exactly what to write. This is a task which should really be carried out by a creative writer or copywriter rather than a programmer. The difficulty is that at the moment there are very few such people that would have the correct technical skills to be able to correctly optimise the page. Very slight changes in the wording of these pages can make a huge impact on how many people visit your site and also how much you have to pay per click for advertising. In order to get it right some experimentation is necessary. For example including the words free, cheap, etc might drive a huge amount of traffic to your site, but is it the sort of traffic you want? In our case, this could lead to our sales guys having significantly more useless sales leads. It is also necessary to try to keep the content interesting whilst at the same time mentioning as many keywords as possible. This in itself is an interesting exercise. The good news is that as I write our site has been given a Google Ranking of 2 and all 7 main pages are now listed. This was achieved through following the guidelines to the letter on the Google Webmaster site and also due to the amount of sites that have now started to link back to us.
What I have realised is that in the future I will always be careful in making sure that our clients get the best mix of SEO skills, because I now fully realise what is required. SEO is not a black art, it is a creative science. It requires careful attention to detail, some technical knowledge and also very good copywriting skills. There is also large amount of information needed on each page even for a simple website like ours.
What I have realised is that in the future I will always be careful in making sure that our clients get the best mix of SEO skills, because I now fully realise what is required. SEO is not a black art, it is a creative science. It requires careful attention to detail, some technical knowledge and also very good copywriting skills. There is also large amount of information needed on each page even for a simple website like ours.
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