I had the pleasure to sit with Jeff Cutler, former CRO of Answers.com and talk with him about the vision of answers.com during his time there. The interesting topic of monetization of the different interactive channels came up and this is a short excerpt from the conversation.

Jeff Said, “Not everything can be monetized, nor should be given a goal based on how effectively it can be monetized”.

We spoke about how they tracked their other interactive ideas such as their widgets, press releases, and news letters. When asked how they tracked all those channels Jeff said, “those were not tracked from a success standpoint; they just needed to be where people where on the web”. He then gave the example of their Facebook application and said, “that the demographic they targeted were not emailing to communicate, but rather using Facebook to be social. So they just had to be where their demographic was to get in front of them.

Knowing How Your Clients Perceive You Is Key

Short Post Based On Some Thoughts I Had. 3 Questions to ask yourself before you start redesigning your website or embarking on that new marketing venture.

Who Do I Think I Am?

Have you ever spoke with a client and they say “we are a X type of site or company”, and after looking at their site there is no way thats what they are portraying to the community. The old adage “you can’t know where your going till you know where you have been”, well in this case you can’t know where your going until you know how your seen. Not how you see yourself, thats biased, but how your seen by your clients or potential clients.

Who Am I Really?

This question is easily answered, simply ask your community what they think you do. Send an email out to your email list saying ” give me 1 sentence you would use to describe us”. you will be amazed at how different your view of what you are and how your outward facing website portrays you in the eyes of your consumers.

Hint:These sentences that you get back will be chalked full of keywords that people are using to search for your service or products.

Who Do I Want To Be?

Once you figure out what people are seeing you as, and what you see yourself as you can start to mold into who you want to be and build campaigns and your website around goals and the community, since the community is who will be using your site to purchase your products.

Should You Submit Your Sitemap To Google?

What is a submitted or off-site Sitemap: A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.  Submitting a Sitemap helps make sure the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process.

There has been alot of discussion lately about why a site should or shouldn’t submit their sitemap to Google’s Webmaster tools. So lets break this down and first look at some myths about submitting your Sitemap.

Myth Or Fact: If you submit your site to Google Webmaster tools it will automatically get indexed?

This is not true and Google even says: “submitting a Sitemap does not guarantee indexing”

Myth Or Fact: Submitting a Sitemap will help your rankings?

This is not true.  Submitting a Sitemap to Google has no bearings on rankings, becuase being indexed and being ranked are 2 different things.  Rankings come from on-site content, inbound links, and creating well engineered and well SEO’ed pages.

Google Says: “Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover”

I say: “If your not creating sites that can be crawled and indexed you are doing a disservice to your online business.”

Myth Or Fact: Submitting your Sitemap will help Google crawl your site?

Crawl frequency and crawl rate is not based on indexed URLs or URLs submitted. It is based on clean code, page size, and inbound links.

So should you submit a Sitemap to Google?

3 Reasons You Should Not Submit Your Sitemap.

If your site has indexing problems (poor navigation, poor internal linking, Flash, Ajax) it could cover these problems. You need to know a websites weakness so that you can fix it.

It gives Google the URLs without having to find them through natural methods such as internal and inbound links which helps with rankings.  The current thinking is this can actually hurt your rankings.

Google does not need to come to your site to find pages and therefor the crawl frequency of your site might go down.  If the current thinking by SEO’s is correct (that indexing and caching rate gives a better representation of page rank than the little green bar) than you want Google coming to your site often.

So basically if you have a well designed site that is engineered well, has good internal linking and inbound links you should not need to submit a Sitemap.

I have wanted an iPhone, and after waiting in line for almost 2 hours I gave up and opted to wait a month or so until the craziness wore off and I was able to go to a local store and maybe only wait an hour. But below are the top 5 iPhone applications that I have seen.

Most of the apps work on the original iPhone, too. The cream of the crop:

• AIM: Should need no introduction, although it was a major omission from the original iPhone’s slate.
• Bejeweled 2: A popular time-waster gets a suitably beautiful iPhone port.
• eReader: An eBook reader, well suited to the iPhone’s large screen.
• Etch A Sketch: Enjoy some grade-school nostalgia, using either mock-ups of the original’s dials or a feature that allows you to finger-paint on the screen.
• Pianist: A touch-screen mini keyboard, for the musician on the go.
• Pandora Radio: Like the popular website, allows users to generate custom radio station

This post sponsored by:
642-642 series is an obligation after 642-825 or 642-845 and in order to skip the series, you will have to do EX0-101 first, right after your 70-646.

Google - Will just ignore the link, as if it does not exist

MSN - will not pass link juice but will follow the link to discover new pages

Yahoo - will not pass link juice but will use it to find new pages

This post sponsored by:
SY0-101 and N10-003 is easier for those students who have at least 642-812 or 70-431 to their credit, as compared to having a 70-270 only.

While Google’s announcement sounds great, there are still significant SEO and more general internet marketing issues that they haven’t addressed:

The Link Value Of Internal Links

Yes, Google will crawl all those links in your Flash animation. But will they give them the same value as links in an HTML page? They’re not saying.

Content Value

Will keywords in Flash files get the same attention? Probably not, because:

• Semantic markup: You can’t designate H1 and H2 headings in a Flash file. So there’s no way to show search engines the structure of your Flash content.
• Paragraph markup: There’s also no tag that I know of in Flash.

Testing SEO And Flash

Google is secretive enough with their regular crawler algorithms, but we can use text-only browsers like Lynx to see how our sites will behave for a spider.

How do we test for SEO? There is not a way to do this yet.

User Experience

Flash still has all the same usability issues. If your home page takes 10-20 seconds to load and then jumps around and moves, you’re going to lose customers no matter how easily they find you.

So I would suggest: Use Flash With Caution.

1. Link out to bad neighborhoods: Google follows links that are on your site and linking out to unrelated sites, spam sites, or link farms will put your site in a bad neighborhood. This will drop your quality and trust score and ultimately your rankings within Google.
2. Implement a massive link campaign: Gaining inbound links to your site from reputable, relevant high page rank sites is one of the building blocks for good rankings. This can actually hurt you if you do it too quickly. Building links should be a gradual process (or at least appear as one).

A few years back design firms would put their link on the bottom of every page of sites they would design. This massive influx of links from those sites threw up a red flag with Google as if they were participating in link farms that spammed the search engines with links. This actually had the opposite effect that they were hoping, and Google started ignoring those links because they looked like spam.

I guess it’s a double edged sword, you would not want Google counting a bunch of spam links that your competition put out there pointing to your site and subsequently hurting your quality and trust score. So in that regard it helps, but it also blocks a site from gaining hundreds or thousands of links overnight even if the intentions are good.

3. Adding thousands of pages to a site overnight: There are sites that create many pages quickly or have many articles they add to their site at one time. The best thing to do would be to release these in waves and not all at once. Again, this throws up a red flag in Google and the fate of those pages is either, they are instantly dumped into the supplemental results and the only way to get them out is to build quality links to those pages or even worse they will not be indexed at all.

It seems as though Google has started showing approximate keyword search volumes in their keyword tool.

They warn though that:

“Approximate Search Volume. This column shows the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network in the previous calendar month.”

So like with other keyword tools take these keyword results with a grain of salt and be sure to take into account how your audience might use these words to search for what you offer.

My customers bookmark or remember my URL after they buy from me one time right?

Not necessarily. Your customer does not bookmark or remember your URL until they have visited your site many times. You can drive them back to your site through email if the left behind their email address. You can also use your keyword marketing campaign to retain customers too. Chances are they will return to you using search engines.

One key piece of information customers give you when they enter your site the first time is the keyword they came in on. I have a customer who sells running shoes and 50% of their traffic comes from the word “running shoes” however only 20% of sales originate from this term. Over 70% of their sales come from 3 and 4 keywords grouped together in a keyword phrases like Nike distance running shoes.

So if you want to retain customers you must retain the keywords that encompass the original buying cycle. For example, in the case of the running shoe site, they utilize search terms “running shoes” and more specific keywords like “Nike distance running shoes”. It is likely searchers will return to your site each time using similar search criteria “running shoes” to check inventory or pricing, and more specific terms such as “Adidas marathon trainer” for price comparison, or to purchase.

So as you pursue more highly searched keywords in your search engine optimization campaigns, do not simply focus on the generic description terms (”running shoes” “furniture” ‘jewelry’) but remember to include those specific keywords already creating sales.

Quick Thought:

Did McDonald’s Choose Red and Yellow From A Psychological Standpoint?

When looking back on all the color choices over the years of businesses, most will either pick a dark blue or green, something that symbolizes strength and a solid foundation. Most would not think to pick two colors that so contrast one another and are really not great colors for a business, well until McDonald’s came along that is.

From a strict business standpoint red and yellow are unique and 98% of business won’t event attempt to use them in their color scheme when starting their marketing which makes them stand out and become more vibrant in the grand color scheme of the land.

But still why would McDonald’s choose these crazy contrasting colors for their golden arches and signage? Well the heart of the answer is not necessarily the uniqueness of the colors but more about the psychology of the two colors.

When McDonald’s was on the rise so were some of the great thinkers in cognitive and subconscious thought and with the rise of these minds came the study of color schemes and how the eye and mind recognizes them.

Ever wonder why fire trucks are red and taxi cabs are yellow?

Answer: What studies have shown are that the first two colors the eye processes and sends to the brain in the grand scheme of light and color processing are red and yellow.

So the two colors are very unique but the question I have for you is did McDonald’s choose these colors based on their unique nature or were Dick and Mac McDonald even smarter then they appear.