And as the bumper sticker clearly states, “If momma ain’t happy… Ain’t nobody happy.”
I have spent the last 7 years optimizing sites for search engines and content aggregators. Making sure that every piece of content is syndicated and notifying systems to generate non paid traffic. Over this time I have heard, and repeated, over and over that “Content is King”. This is true, the more content you generate the more content will likely be indexed by search engines and and the more traffic you are likely to get from long-tail keyterms. This simple idea created a a tsunami of content. Write write write and post post post. Have you noticed how everything has a blog now. Every TV show has a blog and every character on the show has a blog (a hint of relevance). For a brand new site this is not a bad strategy to get traffic moving. But then what. If you keep posting content without purpose you will begin to see your bounce rates sky rocket. So people are stumbling on to your site through long-tail keyterms only to leave immediately. What a waste.
This is where relevance comes in.
I should really say relevance and timeliness. Relevance in content goes beyond simply writing good copy that will explain what the majority of visitors are asking. Relevance is purposeful content plus the ability to segment that content into specific categories and extend that content into other systems. Most importantly, relevant content in this meaning is content that can be grouped so that it is relevant to the individual. WordPress and other Web 2.0 platforms have really beaten the path when it comes to making content relevant. By creating categories and automatically tag pages and automatically syndicating through RSS and automatic emailing of particular content and on and on and on. Content is sliced and diced so easily with Web 2.0 systems such as blogs and forums. However, relevance means elbow grease if you are maintaining an enterprise or a corporate website, with content that needs to change and or grow over time. OK that is pretty much common sense. What I am trying to say here is update your content while maintaining the URL and make sure that content aggregates and search engines are aware of the changes you are making.
Now add timeliness.
Timeliness for online marketing means “Today”. It means timely, relevant content for today, and if possible within the last few hours.
Here’s a scenario. You are interested in creating content for a blog or community for your company. You have prepared a few posts and while they are generally interesting they are unlikely to really spike traffic. You need a tie into current events. Some topic that the masses are currently interested in. So as an example I will take a look at Google Trends and I see the top ten items people are searching on today. Perhaps I can tie one of these items into my post. For example item #6 is “safety reliability methods” (just yesterday Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III safely landed flight US Airways Flight 1549 safely in the Hudson) so it is likely that people are searching on safety and reliability information today. So here is a timely reference that can help place a timely spin on your post or even inspire a new post. Your probably thinking OK that is pretty short lived and in this case you are correct. The interest of the masses changes quickly and while this did spike traffic this week, what about next week. Well this technique is better for blogs and next week you will have a new relevant post.
The point here is that content alone will not bring qualified traffic to your site. Sure content is King but without relevance the King will be a peasant in no time.
Writing timely unique content plus the ability to group, syndicate and notify content aggregators will establish a strong long term strategy.
There is something very appealing and yet unsettling about the design of Little Big Planet.
Either way the site is entertaining. http://mysackboy.littlebigplanet.com/
I have tried for 2 weeks to get Fusestats to work on this site and it has been nothing but frustrating. After signing up for the service I though I was off to a smooth start. I added some javascript to the site the reports show that data was beginning to be collected and I figured in the next day or so I would be able to really start to dig in and try out the the heat-map tracking. On day 2 I decided to log in to get a view what data had been collected. I logged in, and made to my account dashboard and was quickly greeted with the message ”No Data to Display”:, I was convinced something was wrong but maybe it was just to soon. So I went to try the heat map reporting. I was really only testing this out for the heat-maps anyways.
So I moved on and tried the heat-maps where I was then presented with another excellent message: “The page you have requested has encountered an error.” OK, at this point I am thinking, perhaps it is still too soon. Let me give it a couple more days. So I waited a couple of days and logged back in. Ah-Ha, clicking on the “Real-Time” link shows that it is collecting data. Now we are getting somewhere. Time to try the heat maps. I click on the heat maps link and I am logged out and presented with a username and password prompt. That’s OK, little glich, let me just log back in. I get back in to the user account dashboard click heat-maps and I am logged out again. What the hell… After doing this about 5 times I figure something blew up and my account is corrupted. I spend way too much time reading the support pages and checking to make sure I have Cookies working etc…etc… and still no luck. I submit a contact form asking for help and guess what, I received an error.
At this point I have already wasted too much time but I am also thoroughly invested so I want to get this thing working so that all this time isn’t actually wasted. Figuring that the account is somehow corrupt I create a whole new account set up the tracking all over again and wait , test the access to the account, make sure that it is collecting data again and wait again. So today I log in with my new account certain that I will finally be able to test out he heat map features. Guess what… Nothing but Errors. Again it says no data and The page you have requested has encountered an error. And of course, to quickly log out all I had to do was click on the heat map link.
So In short, if this is a real product it isn’t finished yet. Take down your site, apologize to the people whose time you have wasted and get your application working.
Now that that is out of the way. Can anyone recommend a good heat map tracking solution?
Someone recently brought up the topic of website usability to me . In terms of the business value of including website usability into the development process and even selling it as a feature to customers.
This reminded me of the video, It is a bit old (Apr. 11 2007) but still very interesting.
When you hear all of the items / issues to take into consideration when building a web application for a company like google or yahoo it is amazing they ever get completed. Even more amazing that so many of their applications work so well.
Thanksgiving 2.0 has not yet arrived. Looking around it does not look like the parade will be streamed online. Here are a couple links to poke around on.
I was forwarded a link to www.crazyegg.com today. I have always followed Marketing Sherpa heatmap research and use the built in click map tracking in Google Analytics, but I have never really tested heatmap tracking on my sites. It looks interesting but not worth paying for until I see the benefits. So is it worth it? Has anyone tried it? What insights has heatmap tracking shown you?
While looking around for a free heatmap tracking service I came across www.fusestats.com. This is more of a full feature reporting service but they do offer a free subscription level that may produce some actionable info. So I am testing fusestats on this site for the next week to see what happens. Look for a followup on heatmap tracking once I start getting some data recorded.
