Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Sometimes we get too smart for our own good
My daughter Lydia was wondering the other day whether one of her favorite TV shows had been renewed for another season. I suggested that she check online for news. I laid out for her how I would go about such a search—what terms I would use for a search of recent entertainment news, how I would do a search of discussion groups to see if comments by fans revealed any news that had been announced. I poured out for her advanced search techniques and proudly awaited to see which of them she'd use.

She nodded her head at my insights and then headed for the computer, saying, "I think I'll check the show's website."
Jeff

Two months and counting
It's been about two months now since I relaunched this site. I still haven't done much actual promotion beyond a few strategic links. Am I supporting my family strictly off the site yet? No. But I'm very encouraged. Every day I'm seeing more signs that the site is building a following. Traffic is rising, subscriptions to my newsletter are rising, referrals are rising. My logs showed last night that halfway through June, I've already had almost as many visitors as in all of May. And sales are already ahead of May.

And again, I still haven't pulled out some of the main promotions strategies yet. So I'm feeling pretty good. There are many miles to go, but I like the direction I'm heading.
Jeff

Black hat or white?
In an seo forum I visited today, someone railed against search engine optimization professionals as being just a bunch of people trying to trick the search engines in order to gain high rankings.

Which brings up the topic of black hat seos versus white hat seos. A black hat is the kind of seo professional the forum member was talking about. Black hats try to find loopholes to gain high rankings dishonestly. Eventually, they caught and the sites they optimize get banned. At which point, the black hats discard the banned sites and build new ones to try to find some new loophole.

White hats try to figure out exactly what the search engines want and optimize their pages to conform to that. They try to provide valuable content to customers and see their sites as the equivalent of a lifelong marriage instead of a disposable, one-night stand.

In my opinion, black hats are merely compulsive gamblers who get an adrenaline rush out of "beating" the search engines. They ensure themselves of having a continuing game by using techniques that will eventually get them caught. Then they can move on to obtain the next "win," this time using another unsuspecting client's money.

So they feed their habit of gambling against the search engines by finding an ongoing string of suckers to stake them to their next game.

You can probably guess by now that I don't like black hat seos. But I'm not going to get all self-righteous on you with how pure and noble the white hats, to which I aspire, are.

That's because I don't believe there are any true white hats—only lighter shades of gray.

See, if you truly go by the guideline Google lays out of, "don't do anything to your site that you wouldn't do if there were no search engines to get better rankings in," you wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't research keywords to find what people are searching for. You wouldn't optimize your site to make sure that your pages clearly communicate that they are about whatever keywords you are targeting for those pages.

You wouldn't go out of your way to find sites to link to or sites to seek links from. You would simply put up your site blindly and hope for the best.

I try to be as light a shade of gray as I can be when it comes to optimizing, but I realize that the desire to get high rankings is still a motivating factor for me and that it guides me to spend a couple of days each month finding ways to improve pages and their rankings.

But I can't quite see myself as the pure-as-the-driven-snow white hat that a lot of colleagues portray themselves as. And maybe that's why I try to draw a firm line regarding what I'll do and what I won't to get results. I know my weaknesses and want to keep them in check. And hopefully, that will serve as white enough.
Jeff

Better writing through SEO
Today was a search engine optimization (seo) day for one of my client's sites. Whenever I set out to improve the ranking of a page, I'm constantly amazed at how the search engine algorithms seem to encourage better writing.

One SEO problem I constantly find in my writing is low keyword density in the body of the page. So I try to boost the density up where I want it by looking for things I can cut without cutting keywords.

Invariably, I find lots of places where I was overly wordy or included information that wasn't really relevant for the page. I cut the fat and, lo and behold, I've reached the density I want and have made the page much more useful to visitors as well.

Hey, those search engines aren't so dumb after all.
Jeff

No magic wand
I've gotten active enough in the webmasters' forums lately to notice a sad trend. There's a lot of good discussion, but too many threads start out something like this:

"Hi, I'm new to ecommerce, but I'd like to make a lot of money in it. Could you please tell me where I can find some free software that will make me able to make a lot of money right away without working at it?"

Or:

"Hi, I'm new to ecommerce, and I've heard I need to do [whatever they heard they need to do], but I'm afraid that if I do that, there's no guarantee that I'll get more out of it than my customers will. How can I do this so that I'm assured that I'll always get the better end of the deal?"

There's a sad number of people out there looking for a magic wand that will make them rich and happy without any effort on their part. And they saddest thing is that they truly believe that that magic wand exists!

It reminds me of a guy who lived in the next apartment way back when I was just out of college. He lived off money his parents still gave him. His idea of work was that each morning he bought the Minneapolis newspaper and looked at the Lost and Found ads. Then he would wander around the neighborhood all day hoping that he'd find something from those ads and get a big reward.

Too many people have a belief that it's somebody else's responsibility to make things happen for them—that all they're responsible for is getting a good idea and then waiting for everybody else to fall into place for them. But that's not the way that life works.

We reap what we sow. And sowing can be hard work. But that hard work fades into insignificance when we experience the bounty that comes from following through to completion.
Jeff

A new Sunday feature
I've been thinking lately about sharing some of my favorite web design/web marketing sites on my site. I've certainly bookmarked a bunch. Enough, really to make my discoveries a regular Sunday feature, at least for a while. So here's the first batch, this time related to web design.

And all, by the way, are free.

Web Page Analyzer
This one I go to a lot. It's a great resource for finding places on any of your web pages where you can cut down on your load time. Enter the URL you want to analyze and click the button and it will create a report of how effectively your page loads. It will also make recommendations of elements that you can condense or reduce. A great tool for getting a quick idea of how quickly your site is loading for your visitors.

Web Monkey
Want a good tutorial on virtually anything related to building a website? Here's the place to go. Whether you're a raw beginner or a grizzled veteran, you'll find reference guides and tutorials to help you build your website.

CSS Zen Garden
A fun site that shows you how much CSS (cascading style sheets) can do for your site. Experienced designers are invited to try their hand at redesigning the site. They take the existing text for the page and create their own style sheet for the site. The results are startling.

Click from one stylesheet to another and see the difference Not a one of them looks anything remotely like any of the others. In keeping with the name of the site, it's actually kind of relaxing to click from one to the other and see the surprising scope of ingenuity that the different designers bring to the basic structure they work with.

TechEncyclopedia
OK, maybe this one isn't strictly design, but if you've ever been baffled by the techie terms that flood down on you, here's the place to go. Personal warning, though. They love to use bleeding edge ads that can get rather annoying. But hey, they're techies!

That's all for now! Hope you enjoy this new feature.
Jeff

It's all in what you're looking for
The way you look at life has a lot to do with what you get from it. Take the example of Dr. Percy Spencer. In 1946, he was doing research on improving radar systems. As he worked on some new equipment, he discovered that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. It was a mess.

Now most people faced with that would probably see that as a bit of back luck. Dr. Spencer saw it in a different way. Instead of saying, "Bummer," or whatever was in vogue to say in those days, he viewed the loss of his candy bar with curiosity. "Hmm, why did that happen?"

So he tried a few more experiments regarding that equipment and other foods. And out of those experiments came the realization that the type of radiation that equipment emitted could cook food faster than conventional cooking—a lot faster.

That melted candy bar led to the invention of the microwave. Actually, though, it wasn't the candy bar—it was Dr. Spencer's outlook. Remember how I said that most people would have simply written off the melted candy bar as bad luck. We have microwaves today because Dr. Spencer didn't take that outlook.

He was too busy looking for good things to happen to see it as bad luck. So instead of dwelling on the pile of goop in his pocket, he looked for what he could make of it.

He looked for what could have caused this strange occurrence and how he could use it. And by doing so, he made a lasting mark on everyday modern life.

Look for what positives you can make out of the things that don't go the way you planned. Granted, not every miserable mess of goop in our lives can lead to something that changes millions of lives. But everything that takes us off the path we expected gives us a chance to view things in a different way and act on opportunities we didn't expect—if only we're willing to see them as the opportunities they are.
Jeff