We’ve been telling you about the future collaboration between Yahoo! and Bing in a past post: Is the Yahoo! switch to Bing an anti-google strategy?. Well, it is now official, the first tests have been made in the USA and Canada as stated by this morning’s post on the Bing Community Blog. According to Yahoo!’s post on Yahoo! Search Blog, 25% of the paid and organic traffic now generated on the US Yahoo! search results are from Bing.

Preparing your site for Bing & Yahoo!

It seems that there will be some changes in the way the Bingbot will be crawling websites. One will have to concentrate on only one bot when it comes to search engine optimisation now. This means that the Yahoo! Slurp will be killed and that webmasters will have to make full use of the Bing Webmaster Center to optimise their SEO on Bing. If one has not done it until now, it will now become an important element as all will go through only one pipe now

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

Bing Webmaster Center, the new place to be.

With this new roll out, the Bing Webmaster Center will prove to be a valuable source of information and will also be a great toolbox for the optimisation of one’s website. Even if you rely a lot more on traffic generated by Google Caffeine, you will have to make sure that your indexation and your presence in results pages at Bing’s are really correct as the same elements will be used in Yahoo!.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
2. Microsoft Bing for you!
3. Is Google stepping up to Microsoft Bing?
4. About the Microsoft-Yahoo! partnership.
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

Let’s go back to some old school and traditional form of customer acquisition on the web: email marketing. Many might think that the age of email marketing is over. Email marketing actually is one of the most powerful vectors of conversion generation still in use. It is one of the reasons why newsletter subscription forms have never disappeared from websites. An email marketing campaign can be a great tool for conversion and also a tool to increase client confidence in your products and keep them coming back to you.

Email marketing campaign target.

To maximise an email marketing campaign the first thing to do is to maximise WHO must be contacted in priority and how to personalise the messages sent out. This calls for the indentification of influential people, the prescribers. Those are the main targets as they have different levels of influence on the prospective clients. There are 3 levels of influence.

Level 1 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

These are those influencers who are in immediate interaction with your clients and who have a real impact on their business. They are those who will have an influence on the choice of your products or those of your competitors. They will be the ones inciting the client to chose a brand compared to another as their own work depends on that.

For example, for a small business management tool publisher, accounting experts are level 1 influencers as in at least 1/3 of cases, they are the ones who influence on the software the company will be using.

Level 2 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

This level of influencer is in contact with the your final clients and can influence their choices. This, however, has very little impact on their own activity.

For example, a washing machine manufacturer can counsel a client on the type of washing powder/liquid to use but this will remain at the level of counsel, it doesn’t impact on how this manufacturer will build machines. A specific garment manufacturer for instance will be a level 1 influencer at this point.

Level 3 influencers for your email marketing campaign.

Level 3 influencers have direct or indirect contact with clients but are merely a link in the whole system. The final client’s choice has no impact on their activity.

For an insurance company, for example, a car dealer is a level 3 influencer because the choice of a car insurance has no impact on whether the final client buys the car at this dealer’s or not?

Related posts:

1. Delete, unsubscribe or mark as spam?
2. “Bio” products on the Mauritian market.
3. The “home page” dilemma.
4. 15 Google Wave invite winners.
5. 5 tips to a successful seo-oriented web project.

Targeting a site’s readership, especially when one has a blog, is not an easy task. On going over some websites, I have seen that many would publish their level of hits or visits in one day. Some are pretty awesome when imagining some 30,000 visits in one day. Everybody would dream of that. This would mean huge monetisation programmes, nice level of side income, “influence” and all that goes with it. When delving into SEO and community management, one has to take into consideration another parameter, which might actually be a better indicator than the level of traffic. This indicator is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is what really defines the success of a website. If people are entering and leaving your site in less than 5 seconds, you might need to have a serious talk with you community management and your SEO experts.

Bounce rate fluctuations.

You might have noticed that a bounce rate can either fluctuate a lot on a website or stay put over a long period of time. This goes with the quality of your traffic. Most of the time, the fluctuations will be of more or less 10%. Higher fluctuations and, at that, frequent ones mean that there might be something weird happening on your website. Even if these are not what you would first look at, I sincerely think that important bounce fluctuations should be used as alerts on the health of a website.

3-5% Bounce rate?

Now, you might have come here to see if it can really be done? The answer is “yes”. This very blog, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, has been set up to do this. After the first weeks of its launch I tried to find a way of making this site stand out. There were too many odds against it as there is no real web design community in Mauritius but the idea was to get to that very small web engaged community out there. And it worked! The aim was to target that specific traffic and this is what is happening today. Below is a screenshot of one year’s publications. 3.19% bounce rate over a whole year.

Related posts:

1. I increased my traffic by 179%, find out how.
2. When social media killed Google.
3. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
4. Beating Google Adwords competition by using your competitor’s brand name.
5. Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?

In terms of traffic management I primarily focus on organic traffic as it is the type of traffic that is really targeted and that comes to a site to really use the content that’s generated. The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has always been proud of its 3% bounce rate over 2 years. Now, Google Adwords and PPC traffic is a whole different thing. Getting your fingers in such a cogwheel implies that you’ve tried and tested the techniques on small or medium sized campaigns before entering the big picture. My biggest picture has been a 1 year campaign at 3000€ per month for a client. I will not be giving a lecture on how to use Google Adwords and make the best use of it. There are better people than me when it comes to explaining this subject, I can just invite you to meet them over at PPC Hero.

Beating the Google Adwords competition.

So what is this beating the Google Adwords Competition about? When you go on a Google Adwords crusade, you usually have competitors on the same line, bidding higher than you to reach the top positions in the sponsored links to drive traffic to their site. Now, the big problem is: where do you hit the hardest to get the Google Adwords treasure? The answer is brand name! As weird as this might seem I’m going to give away one of Google’s most mysterious tricks to beat Google Adwords competition with the use of brand names. I stumbled on this by chance and readily understood the implications. This one is not a secret but it is not talked about too much.

Use your competitor’s brand name.

Provided you’re not going to fight Ebay, Amazon or Coca-Cola, you can use your competitors’ brand name to divert their traffic to your site. Here’s how this goes, you can use your competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords in Google Adwords. This depends on whether they have set a record at Google’s to have the keywords reserved or not. Many companies, maybe even your’s, don’t know that there’s this little loophole in Google Adwords and have not done the necessary to shut down the traffic diversion. This is all explained in this discussion I found in the Google Adwords archive. Many big companies seem to have arrangements with Google Adwords, otherwise anybody can bid on a trademark as a keyword. This smells fishy, especially if you’ve registered your trademark, but it actually is true.

Real life experiment.

I wouldn’t be giving out this trick to beat Google Adwords competition without being 100% sure that this can be done, would I? I did a test on Google. One big trademark would be the famous Kawasaki motorcycles. I just typed the trademark name in Google and, hey presto, Google Adwords showed me what their competitors (or sellers) were doing with the keyword.

Related posts:

1. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)
2. When social media killed Google.
3. Google MAYDAY update is affecting long tail keyword rankings.
4. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
5. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Google Maday update as well as Google Caffeine, the new algorithm. Though this would seem like talking over and over about the same thing, we must take into consideration the huge impact that this new algorithm has on the whole web, search engine optimisation and users ecosystem. The web is an ever changing entity and the “addons” that influential web companies publish always have an effect on the way users will be interacting with websites. This is what Google did by launching Google Caffeine.

Fresh content, the new El Dorado.

Let us jump back to what Google told web professionals on Google Caffeine some two weeks ago. The core elements to take into consideration are:

[Google] Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index. [...] Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

This means that the way the Google index worked before, though not completely removed, is currently pushed aside to favour a new way of indexing. This new way of indexing takes information as it is published, analyses it and sends it directly into the first (freshest) results that the search engine will be delivering to its users. The impact is that fresh information will always have a lead, be it small, on the old system of having capitalising on age for a page indexed on a given theme.

Impact on companies.

This crosses one of my everlasting belief that companies need to produce more fresh content to keep up with the pace at which the whole system is running. A company can have a website and be communicating on it but if the new deal is that the company regularly publishing content on its own field gets the topmost ranks in search engine results pages then the cards are being redistributed.

This also means that everything like tests and sandboxes are being shattered to pieces (though Google Caffeine must have a sort of filter on that). A younger company with a younger website publishing fresher and to the point content will now be able to compete with the old mammoths. Result: increased competition directed by the Big G. Could anyone have thought that Google Caffeine would have had that much influence on business communication models?

Blogs are not crutches but tools.

Right oh! The solution, as anybody would have imagined is to implement professional business blogs on company websites. Blogs have the flexibility of being readily editable and can produce a lot of tools to improve indexation, social media interaction and drive leads. These are the new tools for indexation and traffic and community managers will be the new guardians of web traffic and notoriety.

It will now become a standard if one wants to stay in the race as Google Caffeinee is implementing it. New search habits are bound to crop up and new SEO techniques will show their face. What business need to understand now is that blogs might be the best way to catch up with the others. As things go, many companies will be launching up blogs with a lot of content copied and pasted from other sites or from their “paper material” but here things will be different. Real blogging rules will have to be used, those levers defining the quality of content and the targeting of traffic will become real in business spheres and those who will be using these as tools rather than crutches to their SEO will be those getting something out of Google Caffeine.

EDIT 24-06-2010. To illustrate the words.

This edit comes 18 hours later. I’ve been following the indexation of this article and as shown above, this post has, for example, hit Google’s first search engine results page when searching for “google caffeine” just after publication just because of the freshness of the article.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
2. When social media killed Google.
3. The new Yahoo! & Bing search engine is being tested.
4. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
5. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)

Most, if not all, web designers know the notoriously popular site Smashing Magazine as well as its newly built network, the Smashing Network. Now, what made Smashing Magazine one of the most popular web design related sites out there is the great use, and even a bit of abuse, of the “listicles”, the list posts concept. They have not been the inventors of this concept but sure turned it into the trend it now is (in the web design world).

Trending and whoring.

Some brief Internet history. Once the Smashing Magazine concept took up and proved to be efficient and overtly performing (in terms of traffic hence in terms of revenue on advertisement), hundreds of clones started sprouting all over the place and, let’s admit it, started performing well too. The trend was on and the trend whores have been running around since then consuming, copying, listing, writing, “yes-manning”, “great listing” the content and the concept.

What goes up…

The major problem in all this ran around two major drawbacks.

First one, the popularity of such posts and the traffic generated has brought round a huge amount of link addicts. These are the people leaving two words to two lines comments on the posts, usually positive “great article” comments, just for the sake of putting a link to their own website either to catch link juice or to drive traffic elsewhere. This stiffled discussion and did not add value to the original article.

The other problem was that, at some given point, the whole thing started getting a bit cranky. Some of the lists posts were really light, no analysis whatsoever, just lists of, say, screenshots. I’m not a lists fan but I do read some of Smashing Magazine’s articles and some were really, really shallow. Worse, the other copying trend whores were publishing even shallower posts (I might even have one around in my own archives when I was testing what type of posts I would be publishing).

Setting the record straight.

I can’t say that it started out from there but Paul Scrivens at Drawar went back on how he launched Whitespace and how the concept caught up to be eventually made popular by Smashing Magazine. In this article, Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me), Paul explains how this concept slowly started breaking up the web design community. What I found great in it is the mature response of Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine’s CEO, who stated that there were changes coming on the site.

Last month, in the opinion section of Smashing Magazine, Kari Patila restressed the point on the trends that are driving web design today, trends that seem to be depreciating the community.

Changes at Smashing Magazine.

Great changes are those that are not those that jump out at first sight but do great things. Has anyone noticed that the number of comments on the latest Smashing Magazine articles have suddenly fell from the usual 300+ comments (mostly “great posts” ones) to under a 100 mostly well discussed ones? Yes there are changes there.

The team at Smashing Magazine must have analysed of what was polluting the articles and have made 2 major changes. They have been promoting more content oriented articles while keeping some great well-written list posts but the best move I think is the pure and simple removal of comment authors’ website link in the comments. This gave no more incentive to link addicts.

Related posts:

1. The list trend.
2. When social media killed Google.
3. What will the future of websites be?
4. Round up of the best posts of April 2010 on the Bureau.
5. Design trend: tags.

You might have been working on a new website project for some time or are planning to launch a new site. You have prepared your project, secured your host and domain name and prepared your database. You will now be heading for either deployment or development but know that your site will not be online for some time. You will most of the time use a dummy, a “coming soon” page. This page must be optimised for search engines!

Anatomy of a “coming soon” page.

Most of you have heard of “coming soon” pages. There’s a huge collection of those online teasers for great new apps or sites that will be found on the server some time in the future. For many projects, a deadline for launch is settled, for others the launch can vary from a week to a year in extreme cases, and maybe more… So it might be a good thing to prepare your “coming soon” page.

Such page usually consists of:

• Information on what the future website will be about.
• What the website will be marketing.
• Launching date.
• Update/launch signup forms to acquire prospects.
• Providing short updates for buzz.

Other uses?

Many companies use their “coming soon” page to pre-establish their brand-name by working a lot on the visual impact and the message. Other strategies include the creation of Twitter accounts to gather some followers as well as Facebook pages, all interlinked with the “coming soon” page. There is a lot to get from such a page but you can try getting even more by SEO-ing the page.

Why should you SEO it?

The “coming soon” page must be optimised for search engines for many reasons. First of all we must take one important fact into consideration with search engines basing ourselves on the Google algorithm.

The Google Sandbox.

Google gives weight to older pages and domain names. This is why the Google Sandbox exists. It is here to prevent younger sites from hitting on older ones which already have the big G’s respect. You might not know when your site will be launched but optimising it will help you have an online presence and above all be out of the Google Sandbox when you launch it if you have been lagging a bit behind.

Nurturing your future ranking.

You have competitors on your main keyword on Google. Optimising your “coming soon” page for that keyword will get the domain name and the page to start competing for better rankings on it. At the time of the launch you might even be surprised by how fast your ranking will be evolving. This is one extremely good reason to do this.

Getting Google page rank.

Google page rank is one thing some webmasters live by. Even if it is not as important a factor as it was before it is an indication of the good health of a site. Good page rank is simply built through backlinks and site age. If your site is taking a whole year for launch, why should you lose one year’s PR and backlinks (which you can start building through comments or links from other sites)? A good example is inhousegrind which has a Google page rank of 3 while still bearing a “coming soon” page.

Related posts:

1. When social media killed Google.
2. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)
3. Yahoo! Search will be switching to the Bing engine – anti Google Caffeine?
4. The new Yahoo! & Bing search engine is being tested.
5. Facebook in Google’s index.

It is now official. Speeding up a site’s page delivery will be beneficial for each page’s ranking in the the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). So speed is now a ranking factor at Google. This has been officially announced on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Satisfied users.

If you still haven’t grasped the concept: Google has always emphasized that it liked pages made for users and not for search engines. A faster loading page means a satisfied user and as Google has all to win when it concerns satisfied users it is using what satisfies them, fast pages, as a ranking tool. Now, those having never seen the usefulness of Google Webmaster Tools can start running there to open their accounts.

How to?

There are some simple ways of improving a site’s speed. First things first, use pingdom tools to evaluate your page’s load time. What I like with this new factor is that web designers will have to go back to the basics, re-use the core of web design coding, i.e. writing standards based code.

Standards.

Great day for standards. Using semantic and clean code will definitely help improve a page’s loading time. Using basic and clean tags will help your pages load in a whizz. Make sure you do not use deprecated tags and keep to your document definition (strict, transitional…etc.). Moreover, when using standards you get yourself a step ahead in optimising your code as the latter is easily maintained and you can just get any other coder to dive into your page to optimise it.

With the use of standards, you are bound to reduce the number of lines of code you would have originally used. Thus, pages are lighter and load time is decreased. All benefits!

External CSS.

Using standards implies the separation of presentation and content. This is done through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and, more important, the use of external CSS. This also has an impact on your page load time. Why? Having all CSS in one external file means that the file will load only once (on the first page a site is visited) then, the same file is used by the browser to load all the other pages’ presentation. This means that your site’s pages will load faster as the CSS will be read only once and you will not have duplicate code to maintain all the time in each page if your CSS is written in them.

To get the most out of your CSS in terms of load time you can also improve the CSS file itself. Check out a previous article on how you can make pages load faster by minimising the CSS file.

External behaviour.

Should you be having behaviour on your pages (be they through Java or DOM scripting), the same advice as that for CSS goes. You need to externalise all the code to one external page to avoid constant recalls to all your functions each time a page is loaded. You can also think about progressive enhancement to improve the page loading when scripts are not activated or fail to load. All in all, keeping these simple and short will help improve your page loading capabilities. Other enhancements include the loading of all scripts after the content.

Related posts:

1. [GMU Redux] Testing bandwidth and load times.
2. What will change in 2010 with search engines ranking? (Google speaking only? Not sure …)
3. Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.
4. Dropping unnecessary tags in your HTML code.
5. You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.

Understanding and mis-understanding form part of our daily life. Mauritians have a particularity though. The “outside” view is really important in our society. Showing-off. Along with that we hold on to concepts that everybody rejects publicly but doing all the time. I would put it as it is sometimes the case of “doing better than the Joneses”. How many tuned cars do you find in Mauritius? How many “competition lacaze” have you seen? All in all, in our society it is a “I’m [better/smarter/richer/...insert adjective here] than you” race.

Coming to this, I thought that by launching the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, I would be able to join a real community of Mauritian web designers. I was dreaming of networking and exchanging passionate findings with other web designers from Mauritius. I was longing to help them in understanding SEO and web design to its core with an objective of bettering the whole system. I hoped for a strong social media driven network where all Mauritian web designers would be exchanging and showing with pride what we could accomplish from our small island. How wrong was I in believing this! There is no community in Mauritius and will not be for a long time.

There’s no “I’m better than you” in my endeavour but a real want for networking and sharing. The problem is that the Mauritian ego is what pervades and that ends up in people not accepting positive criticism. For them only the word “criticism” comes out and they forget the “positive”. Everybody in Mauritius is best at what it does (irony!). Others are even declaring themselves guard dogs of the Internet in Mauritius. You can’t be all. Either you’re a web designer and can at least discourse on Zeldman’s “Web Designing with Web Standards” or you’re a jack of all trades and master of none.

Working in a specific field means that you have to know what is going on in the office next to you where UI designers or web marketeers are working. You have to listen and learn from them all while explaining your job to them. You have to know what is the use of community management as well as that of server redirects through a .htaccess file. You have to see what are the advantages of deploying a website through a CMS than building from scratch. You have to understand why such type of code is incompatible with SEO… Where the magic happens is when new techniques are uncovered, great ROI is achieved or just simple genius is created from the mixed research of all these teams.

Networking seems to work right with all people in other fields gravitating around web designing: SEO, expert web management, content building, copywriting or programming but never with web designers. Problem: ego again. You can have a point of view and stand behind it but you also have to accept that others’ ideas can be different. You can discuss about the pros and cons without adding a “g*g*t” or a “f*l**r m*m*”. Sadly though, I’ve seen too many of these around. Few web designers are in for community building and sharing. Many treasure their misconceptions as gold because in the world of the blinds the one-eyed are kings. This goes for companies too.

The web is not mature enough in Mauritius and the cultural tissue very strong. The Internet is an online society that recreates part of our common culture. This is what is happening, the Mauritian culture is seeping through on the online community and recreating what they usually do in everyday life. This is where the Mauritian web design community is failing!

Related posts:

1. Community managers: the new kids on the block.
2. Untamed businesses in Mauritius.
3. Web designer = Web consumer.
4. Are Mauritians that bad at design?
5. MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?

What have we done? What has “web 2.0″ brought upon us? The web is maturing and democratisation is on its way. This is why non-techs are making heaps of money over the web with blogs while having 0 knowledge of the way it all works. Mind you this is great as the web is now open to everybody and people are using it as easily as possible but some things are really hard on us web designers and web project managers.

We are family!

Buy computer, get broadband ADSL, surf! This will turn you into a web expert. It is true story that a lot of web designers face the problem of having people who use their own experience and have the “my kid made his own website” syndrome when faced to web professionals. Below are some of the glorious things I personally heard.

“My boyfriend spends hours surfing the web and is a huge Internet consumer, and he says that this website is crap”. This is what I once heard from one of our SAAS managers in a company where I used to work. She was good at selling the web service but when it came to criticising any web designer’s work it was the boyfriend that got into the picture just because he spent hours over the net.

“I have led the reflection over what my website should be doing. I only want people having the same level of approach to my business as I have to surf my site. Others can just sod off. I know it is easy to filter them. I am a pioneer and not a follower, so I will not accept SEO oriented text and I want my site to be WOW but not use the same codes as others. I am used to the web, I surf all night and I want to be on everything that a person types in terms of keywords on Google. Build a website that seduces me!” All this nonsense is what I have been hearing from… a private school director in need of a new website to bring in new recruits!

“We want a paper archive (800 PDFs) on our website. I believe it is an easy add.” This one came from a director preparing a huge conference.

The problem.

The underlying problem in all this is not that these people will end up having websites that will not work or will be the opposite of all the objectives they should be aiming for along with the loss off money, it is that web designers have made things too easy. Actually, they have not made things too easy but they have made things look easy from the outside.

This is the core of our work, building tools that accomplish goals but in a specific way: being user centred. The sole fact that the tool is user centred means that the use of the website must be thought out beforehand and that the user navigates easily and has a great experience and accomplishes the goals without feeling the technology lying behind. We all did a great job and succeeded in this endeavour but the problem is that a majority now thinks that if the front-end is easy to use, the back-end’s implementation must be as easy.

This also runs for web project management where, for some clients it all boils down to choosing the titles of each navigation tab or SEO experts where clients just end up saying “stuff the damn thing with keywords as well as our competitor’s name and we’ll get the first place on Google”. All seems too easy now.

No way out.

I won’t be getting into the details here but apart from the horrors I hear in my day job, the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius does get its share of eccentric demands everyday. However, a great resource to see what type of incongruous thoughts clients have is Clients From Hell. So what happens now? How do web designers and all work with such type of people?

Well, major web design blogs have lists of personae of the type of client you should avoid. For others, it is experience that makes it all. You see the client, you judge him/her at the first contact and you run off if necessary. Just don’t waste your time. It is sad to say so but if one has to spend precious work hours trying to educate a client, that person should leave the business. This said, it can be done is you work as an in-house web designer.

Related posts:

1. Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?
2. What will the future of websites be?
3. The aliasing issue.
4. MBC’s new website: a corporate failure?
5. Web designer = Web consumer.