WebConnoisseur

Something recently reminded me of an event early in my web marketing and SEO career. For me, it was a very pivotal moment of my career; for you, it might be an entertaining story of a consulting douche bag and how SEO battles don’t change much.

Roll back the clock to a little over a decade ago when cell phones were bricks generally seen only in movies and Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999″ was forward-looking. I graduated from the University of Washington with a couple finance-related degrees and began working for, surprise, a financial company. After quickly proving that my abilities went beyond filling out paperwork for clients and managing portfolios, I spent my time on “special projects”, which included things like investing research, Y2K compliance, & building our web presence.

I quickly discovered the importance of search engines and was quite successful at driving leads & press to the site & company. In 2001, I had increased their assets by over $50 million, was named “Best of the Web” by Forbes three times, and was even selected by Inc Magazine as the best marketer of the year using techniques that have changed little to this day (but now have names). How was this success rewarded? They brought in a consultant.

My boss’s friend was unemployed after his start-up went belly up. I won’t name him, but will describe him. He looked very much like the Comic Guy on the Simpsons – he was large, sported a red goatee, and a greased back pony tail. His previous occupation was as a conservative radio talk show host (seriously – I’m not kidding) and as you can imagine, he was a talker. He loved buzz words, though a true understanding of them was of little importance. And now he was a consultant.

Things seemed a little backwards. If you looked at our resume’s & track records at the time, you would have guessed I was consulting for him. Considering it was my boss’s friend and upper management was wowed by the fancy words and whiteboard drawing, who was I to question the new relationship?

To this day, I can’t recall a single person I couldn’t work with–other then this guy. He was a bully and I was his young prey. His big idea was to change our various sites to a single flash site. When I warned him that search engines have trouble with Flash, his response was that “no one uses search engines to find websites.” Apparently countless web analytics reports showing all our traffic sources wasn’t enough for him, nor was an export of our client referral source records, nor the daily stories of new clients who found us via a specific search query. Facts meant little to this talk show host, unless the facts or half-truths supported his cause. After much back and forth, it was clear that it was his way or the highway.

I decided to take a very large risk (especially considering this was during the dot-com crash & a troubling time for the stock market) – I crafted an email to the President and Vice-president of the company explaining that the direction we were heading in was going to hurt us and that I was ready to leave the company if they continued to use his “services.” Clearly my boss would want to fire me for going over his head and making him look bad, but it was a risk I had to take to restore my sanity and keep the company from driving directly into the brick wall in which it was undoubtedly headed.

The story does have a happy ending. They did get rid of him and I used the existing sites to raise another $200 million (doubling the 20-year old company’s assets) before I left a couple years later to take my boss’s job at a larger company. The irony is that I am now a full-time consultant and he became an anti-consultant evangelist.

From that point on in my career, I decided I would never stay silent when I saw the company I worked for start to take a wrong turn, even if it meant losing my job because I wouldn’t want to work for a company that ignored evidence and experience anyways.

Just over a month ago, I was shocked when I was force-fed a twitter screen takeover while looking at my domain names registered at GoDaddy. Immediately, I did some news searches to see if GoDaddy had purchased Twitter because it seemed very out of place. There were no such announcements. In fact, there was very little news about this development.

Every time I’m in my account tweaking my domains, I can’t help but notice the twitter promotion overload. I can’t help but wonder why GoDaddy would take such a keen interest in helping to fuel more twitter accounts. From a service perspective, it is pretty lame because it is already incredibly easy to check name availability and sign up for twitter. I could think of a hundred other features GoDaddy should build and promote instead. If it were a two-way arrangement, where Twitter promotes domain registration for Twitter user names, then I could see the benefit.

So why do you suppose GoDaddy is pimping Twitter so much? Is GoDaddy going to buy Twitter? Is Twitter paying GoDaddy for this treatment? Is GoDaddy’s product development team overly caught up with Twitter & group-think led them to believe this add on would separate them from other registrars? I have no idea, but it will be interesting to watch this over time.

Here are more screenshots showing how much GoDaddy is pimping out Twitter within their domain dashboards:

If you think about it, LinkedIn is a natural beneficiary from massive layoffs. Upon being laid off, here are some user activities LinkedIn might not see otherwise:

• Status updates to let others know about layoff
• Recommendation requests to co-workers
• Recommendations for co-workers
• Profile updates and employment history updates
• Status updates about job seeking
• LinkedIn personal network job searches
• Contact info lookups to find names & phone numbers to fill out unemployment benefits job search logs
• Network inbox emails to ask for help with employment

Outside the unemployment-related activities I list above, there are, of course, many other activities that you might see even in healthy job markets like looking up potential bosses, researching organizations, growing network, Q&A activity, etc.

LINKEDIN UNEMPLOYMENT CORRELATIONS
The numbers don’t lie: LinkedIn certainly benefits from this increase in activity and the activity is well-documented. In terms of pageviews, LinkedIn went from 272 million pageviews in March ‘08 to 872 million pageviews in March ‘09 (252% growth according to Compete.com data).

Not only does an increase of unemployment catapult activity (as measured by pageviews), it also greatly benefits reach (as measured by uniques). Check the graph below that I created that shows LinkedIn uniques visitor growth and the unemployment rate for the past two years:

Look out super multi-taskers. As of January 1st, texting while driving is illegal – at least in my home state (Washington). According to the Washington State Department of Transportation, cell phone distractions are responsible for less than one percent of the collisions.

The good news: it’s only a secondary violation, meaning you have to get pulled over first.

The bad news: the greater than 99% causes of collisions are still out there.

The worst news: starting July 1st, talking on your cell phone at all while driving will be illegal unless you use a hands-free device. Hands-free device providers must be excited. Bluetooth even use “Seattle” as the code name for their next generation of hands-free devices.

These new laws will become confusing when the lines between technology begin to blur. What happens when people can receive texts on built-in dashboard LCDs, using voice recognition software to send texts, or even right now when a person uses the speaker function on their cell phone instead of a hands-free device? Judges and officers will also have to define what exactly is texting. What about sending or taking pics with your cell phone, or checking your phone for the time or sending pre-drafted or templated messages that require just one or two clicks?

Personally, I think texting while driving is a bit dangerous, though a quick glance to read an incoming text in Seattle’s typical stop-and-go traffic is not a big deal (no worse then loading in a new cd, checking a map, a crying back-seat baby, or a talkative passenger).

I feel the hands-free law is probably over the line. True, it is safer, but I believe the ability to drive while on the cell phone is up to the drivers ability then anything else. If we want to we want to create blanket laws for all drivers, they might as well outlaw drinking coffee, listening to the radio, talking to a passenger, doing make-up (actually, this one should be a law), picking noses, and reading billboards or bumper stickers while driving.

I love seeing people using the Internet to change entire industries. Radiohead is geared up to do so by releasing their latest album, In Rainbow, as a download for as little or as much as the fan wants to pay. They are taking a gamble that people won’t download it for free, or they figure those people will find a way to get it for free anyway.

I love the idea and hope the best for Radiohead as this will make a big impact in the music industry, but was a little disappointed after I visited the site. From a search engine and usability standpoint, Radiohead made some major mistakes that might come back to haunt them. Let me list out some of the mistakes and explain the possible implications.

Radiohead In Rainbow Site mistakes:

• 302 redirected their existing site homepage (radiohead.com) to new site: www.inrainbows.com, but…
• www.inrainbows.com 302 redirects to www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html
• The more logical site domain, inrainbow.com (no “s”, which matches the album title) wasn’t registered, purchased or used. Instead a domain parker will receive lots of traffic.
• Title tag for In Rainbow site mainpage is “Radiohead”
• Site mainpage only has images with no search engine readable text
• 2nd page only has images no search engine readable text and same title tag
• 3rd page only has images no search engine readable text and same title tag
• Home links go to the 3rd page
• Shopping cart very awkward & buggy (keeps losing track of my order)
• Grammar mistakes confusing
• Amounts only shown in British Pounds
• Question mark help icon doesn’t provide any help or explanation
• There is actually a 1 GBP minimum, that’s $2.04 more than free
• There is actually a 99 GBP limit. Want to be an extreme fan and buy it for $1,000? Too bad.

Radiohead In Rainbow Site Mistake Implications:

• With the 302 mistakes, not only are they begging for a search spammer to hijack their site traffic, but they are linking to a page that they will probably change URLs over time.
• With all the search engine & readability mistakes, they will essentially allow standard retailers and online stores to steal away their direct payment opportunities by allowing them to rank higher for their own album and even site.
• The usability issues will also turn people back to iTunes or other dealers.
• Their main site may suffer rank decreases and traffic losses for a long time.
• The download for free concept won’t be given an honest shot, which may deter other artists like Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, REM, Metallica and other likely candidates from trying a similar experiment.

Regardless of the mistakes I list, this will be an effort worth watching for those in the music industry, movie industry or any other industry where self-distribution online could be a big opportunity.

Just found out Andy Beal has created a free SEO eBook based off two years of scholarship entries. There were some educational entries and some funny entries. My entry was all about humor and was shoved near the bottom of the book, despite its popularity because it probably embarassed Andy a bit – heck, I called him a “Master Baiter”. Kudos to Andy for working hard to make the scholarship contest more valuable.

The ebook is availble for a free download here (2.1mb pdf)

In related news, I was recently quoted on Omniture’s iPerceptions integration.

My blog has been a bit offline due to server issues, DNS changes, sickness & being incredibly busy. I realize not blogging and making excuses is lame, but I just wanted to drop a note that I am still here and the blog is very much alive. In fact, I fully expect a plethora posts in the near future.

March is here and I’m seeing New Year’s resolutions fade left and right. Offline, fitness centers worldwide are emptying out as people give up on their New Year’s resolutions. Online, blogs go empty and stale as their sites are forgotten by their most important user: the blog administrator.

Sadly, I must rope myself into this group. I started 2007 strong, even with posts that actually grabbed the attention of my industry peers (tough to do with a newer blog), but by mid-February, I had failed myself. I didn’t post anything for weeks. I have my excuses: I’ve been terribly busy – which is true, but I can’t let myself off that easy. Why blog if you aren’t committed to at least bi-weekly updates?

So, consider this post my wake-up call and maybe yours, if you’ve fallen to the same trap! I’m at my busiest point of the entire year and will be on the road for the next two weeks, but I’m commited to continue adding my voice to the topics I have chosen to cover (more on my blogging strategy in the next post).

I remember about a year ago I was desperately searching for data on how people printed pages on the web. The reason I was curious, is because I noticed flash ads would often mess up pages printed straight from the browser, often not printing the content of the pages. This is a bad user experience which could cause visitors to start using a competitor’s site instead.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any studies. I thought with the millions of sites that have “printer friendly pages” that someone would have published the results. I decided to do the research myself and slip it into a survey during some pre-redesign research for a top 150 website. I surveyed over 2,000 users, asking them how they printed pages on the web. The results may surprise you.

Here are the results:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

• 19% of users use File > Print in their browser
• 63.1% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
• 2.5% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
• 12.3% of users copy and paste the text into Word
• 3.1% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

A couple notes about the survey participants. The site this was conducted on would be considered a sampling of the average Internet user. A site catering to web-savvy users would have different results. The site has also long had “printer-friendly” links, so long-time users would be more likely to use them. To remove some of the long-term user bias, here are the same results but filtered by only users who have used the site for less than 3 months (over 375 users).

Here are the results for newer users:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

• 25.3% of users use File > Print in their browser
• 49% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
• 3.1% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
• 17.5% of users copy and paste the text into Word
• 5% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

I realize a survey isn’t the most accurate method to get at this data, but this data is difficult to collect any other way because it is impossible to track anything other then the printer-friendly pages of a site without conducting an expensive in-person behavioral study (preferably on the users own computer).

If you know of any other research on this topic, please share it in the comments.

I believe there is an untapped opportunity in video disbtribution for local news stations. When it comes to unexpected events, news station camera crews can not possibly be in the right place at the right time. If someone were to build a video upload service aimed towards local news syndication, I think many stations would be willing be interested in buying rights to the videos.

There are plenty of sites that facilitate the sale of video clips, but I have yet to see one target distribution to television stations. For example, take a look at this video from Oregon after yesterday’s storm hit:

Oregon Drivers Crashing on Slick Streets Video

I imagine the person who captured this video had to go out of their way to get the video to the news station (hopefully they didn’t drive down that street). The local news station may have paid them a small amount of money, then distributed it to their sister stations. Imagine if the user could have uploaded the video to a site, set their own price and let anyone pick up rights to use it or pay extra for exclusive rights.

News stations desperate for video could simply visit the site, preview the video in a flash player, download the video and edit it as they please. Far too often news stations lack video so they pull out old videos or play the same exact video throughout the day, over and over and over. My wife has been filmed working in the lab and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen the same video clip used for every DNA-related piece of news for the past four years. The video distribution service I’m imagining would not only connect traditional media with user-generated videos via the web, but it would be in a good position when the lines between the web and T.V. continue to blur.