What’s New at Google Analytics

Google Analytics is our favorite web analytics tool. There are three new things going on there now.

First, there is a new section called “Search Engine Optimization” including Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary. This section can only be used if you have Webmaster Tools for your site.We’re going to explore this for a while and let you know the practical uses.

Second, there are now real-time results. These are in beta testing, and you can request early access. Josepha is testing this for us, and we’ll report on it once we’ve tried it for a while.

There is also a new premium service at Google Analytics. Word is this service will run $150,000 a year, so we plan to wait and let other people try it out first. If you’re using it, we’d love to hear about your experiences. Google says this new layer of service will offer more data, advanced analysis, and support.

Google Analytics has been in competition with Adobe’s Omniture, CrazyEgg (heatmapping), Clicky, and various other free and paid services. The lack of real time data has been the most common complaint among serious users, so this new feature should make a lot of people happy. Adding a paid tier seems like a logical next step.

Is it Really Search?

When you check your analytics, you can quickly see how much of your traffic comes from search — or can you?

Not every visitor who arrives through Google or Bing is actually searching. Look at the example at left.

At first glance, it looks as though 38 people have typed a line from a poem into the search box at Google and ended up at our lab site. If we look more closely, though, we can see that this keyword has 0% new visits.

This is a visitor who types into the search bar, not the address bar, the query that got him or her to the site. Imagine: you searched for “turkey recipe” and found the one you wanted. Next time, you type in “turkey recipe” again rather than remembering or bookmarking the site, confident that you’ll see the same options you found the time before.

If we click through and check more data about this visitor, we can see that this was someone from Pakistan visiting over a period of a week or two. Looking further still, I learned that this visitor accessed the site from the Oriental College of Lahore, and also from a government office in Pakpattan. We can deduce that someone was doing some literature study over there in Lahore.

In this particular case, all we’ve learned is that the line of poetry is not a popular search term that we should focus on in future. However, if this were a business site, we’d also know that someone from this location was interested in us.

We often see, for business clients, that there have been multiple visits from a particular company or organization. This information allows us to tailor a message in the blog for that visitor. Seeing many different people arriving with a particular keyword tells us that the keyword in question could be an important one, for which we should optimize content.

Two different messages with two different actions — and more evidence that it makes sense to look closely at your analytics.

Bloggers: Get the Most from Your Photos

Not all blogs have images every day, but increasingly readers expect to see pictures. If you have a hired blogger, he or she probably takes care of that for you (we do), but if you’re responsible for your own blog, Facebook page, or other place to post pictures, then you have to come up with new images every day.

This can be time consuming and/or expensive.

Essentially, you can take pictures for your blog yourself (more advice on that at Taking Pictures for Your Blog), you can find them for free at sites which allow you to use their pictures for free, or you can buy them. Find a list of such places at Where Should You Get Pictures for Your Website?

Once you have a photo, you’ll generally need to resize and optimize it before you use it.

Take the opportunity to get multiple images from one photo. Pictures you take with a digital camera, or large size photos you download from stock photo sources, are big enough that you can crop small pieces out. The image in the example above is a very small part of the photo. Crop the background and resize it for a landscape photo. I also flipped it horizontally to get a different look.

Narrow in on a detail and you can get a picture like the one below. I also straightened the water in this shot. You can tell, if you look closely, that this is the same rock that you can see in the shot above, in the lower right hand corner. If I use these two images on different occasions, chances are no one will realize that they’re from the same photo.

Here’s another little piece of the picture — it’ll make a good picture for an article on climbing or something that suggests rugged terrain.

Here a shot of just the trees (flipped horizontally) gives a general background feel.

I hope this gives you some inspiration for using photos a lot of times. Crop, skew, and flip your shots and you’ll get different looks. Changing colors can also extend the usefulness of a single shot — not outdoor shots, usually, though we could turn the water in this photograph more blue and achieve an apparent change of geography, but objects can change colors and be reused.

One image can go a long way if you put in a little time time with your photo editor. For this example, I did it all with Microsoft Paint, which comes installed on most PCs; Adobe Photoshop  will give you lots more options.

Not Ready for a Website? Dos and Don’ts While You Wait

If you have a business, you need a website. No question. You are losing money every day you do without a site, so don’t even think you can’t afford it. Just get one.

What if you don’t have a business, though? We know a girl who is getting ready to launch a nail polish company as soon as she figures out the manufacturing issue, and a guy who has a dream business he’s going to start once he finishes school. They’re not ready for websites yet.

We also know this band, which will provide our example. They don’t want a website yet because they don’t have enough recordings of their music, they don’t have time between classes and day jobs to look after a website, and their bassist moved to Austin so they need to replace him before they can accept any more gigs. They’re not ready for a website.

If you’re in this position, what should you do while you wait? “Nothing — I’ll think about it when I’m ready to build a site” is not the right answer.

Do

• Get your domain name. Right now. It costs very little to register the perfect domain name, and it can cost a lot to get it out of the clutches of someone who buys it for the purpose of selling it to you. If the name of your company (or band) is available, get it. If it’s not available, get the closest you can, or change the name of the company to something you can get. Read more about this issue: “Should You Choose a Global Domain?” and “Choosing Your Domain Name.”
• Gather ideas about your brand. Basement Brew has a hard time thinking about things in visual terms, so they’ve looked at some other bands’ sites, and they commissioned a few headers to get some ideas about what they might like. Having a clear idea about how you want your site to look can really speed up the process. Use a site like Pinterest to collect images to help you clarify your thoughts.
• Get your content together. Basement Brew is working on getting some good recordings, photos, and videos. A company like ours can help with these things, but it can be a lengthy process if you want lots of things on your site: product photos, testimonials, reviews, and such should be gathered up and kept in a file so you can find them easily.
• Establish an online presence. Basement Brew set up a page at Bandcamp and a Facebook page. You can do as much of this as you are likely to keep up. When you get your website up, go back and add links.

Don’t

• Set up lots of free sites. Some companies create and abandon multiple sites at free venues while they’re thinking about having a proper website made. See our social media advice on how to determine whether or not to set up your social media profile all over the place. With the caveats in that article, it’s generally good to have control over your company name in as many places as possible. However, it’s not good to have badly designed sites all over the web with your name on them. They will come back to haunt you.
• Establish a negative social media presence. Without a website or an IRL business, you may feel anonymous. Don’t get to feeling so anonymous that you think you can post nude hot tub photos or engage in virtual screaming matches with people. Once your site is up, people will search for your name. You don’t want competition from stuff you should have kept private. Hint: nothing on the internet is really private.
• Wait too long. The longer your site is up, the better it will perform; longevity is part of the search engine algorithms. As soon as you can, get that site up and working for you. Basement Brew isn’t quite ready, but they can expect to get more gigs with a website than without, and websites can be updated easily. If they have a website but don’t work to promote it, they won’t suddenly be overrun with traffic and fans. Neither will your business.

SEO Tip #21: Don’t Duplicate Content

5 Accessibility Issues You Might Have Missed

Making sure that everyone has access to your website is important, just in principle. It can also be important for the bottom line at your business. When your site is hard for prospective customers to read, they’ll go elsewhere — people have lots of choices online.

We’ve written before about the most common accessibilty issues:

• Acessibility and Visibility
• The Light on Dark Website
• Websites for the Tech Challenged
• Planning a Website for Older Users
• Using Flash Correctly

We do our best to persuade clients that they need high contrast text, navigation buttons that look like navigation and also like buttons, and alternate content for their Flash, videos, and images.

We also posted once about the Web Accessibility Initiative. I probably should have posted more than once. I was recently reminded of some things I hadn’t thought about much. Have you overlooked these accessibility issues?

1. Assistive devices like screen readers can’t currently recognize the new semantic markers in HTML5. We might think that this is a problem with screen readers, but until they get it together, it’s also a problem with our HTML5 sites.
2. People using screen readers may turn off Javascript on their computers. If they do, then they are not counted by Google Analytics, or other analytics programs using Javascript.
3. Mobility limitations can keep people from using a mouse; many tech adaptations for people with limited use of their hands are modified keyboards. What’s more, a mouse requires vision to operate, while a keyboard may be operated by touch. If your navigation relies on hovering with a mouse, you’re shutting people out of your site.
4. If color conveys meaning on your page (beyond the most abstract understanding of the phrase), people who are colorblind or using screen readers will miss it. Having required fields in a form in a different color, for example, or color coding a table without providing a summary of the data — this kind of use of color limits access.
5. There are disabilities that make it more likely that a user will make an error. People with limited access to or comfort with computers are also more likely to misunderstand or to make errors with websites that rely on tech knowledge. For example, it’s more common now to use the site logo as a Homepage button. What if you didn’t know that? How would you find the homepage?

When you design a new site, or update or redesign your website, consider these factors. If your population includes people with special needs, you have to make accessibility a high priority. If your population doesn’t include people with special needs — are you sure it doesn’t? Why limit your audience in that way?

Our New Alltop Badge

I’m writing today about an NFL football player — a profile for an online magazine. NFL players have a lot of little awards and honors and stats: being on the cover of Sports Illustrated, being chosen for a Pro Bowl, having so many sacks or what have you. It’s a matter of sorting through and picking out the ones that will best support the claims I plan to make about this guy.

Your field probably includes some little awards and honors and things. Maybe not as big as being on the cover of a magazine, and maybe not as many as the average NFL player has, but there are bound to be some. Maybe you’re a certified partner of a major company or a member of the Chamber of Commerce or something. We’ve been nominated for Best Business Blog, listed as one of the best copywriting blogs, invited to join Google Pangaeans and Amazon Vine, featured in the Google Doodle, and an assortment of other stuff like that.  Again, it’s not the Pro Bowl, but most good companies have some stuff they can offer as proof that they’re good at what they do.

The question is: how do you put this on your website for best results?

I was featured in The Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago; I think I’ve mentioned it occasionally in blog posts, but if it had happened to a client of mine, I’d have made sure to get the most juice out of it for their company. For my own company, I’m troubled by modesty. The ball player I’m writing about doesn’t have this problem. His website features a sort of rock star photo with ethereal backlighting augmented by Flash effects that cause him to glow in a pulsating manner that’s hard to describe — but definitely not modest.

So we’ve recently been listed in Alltop, an aggregator site that gathers “all the top stories” (get it?) on the topic of your choice for a filtered page of the best stuff on your particular subject. We’re on the SEO page. Inclusion in Alltop puts us in the company of Smashing Magazine, Seth Godin, Lifehacker, and other sites we really admire. We’re overcoming our modesty enough to put the badge they gave us on our website.

But there’s a choice of badges, so we have to decide what effect we want to create. We can go with self-deprecating humor:

We can choose boldness:

We can be modest yet recognize that it’s an honor:

We can choose a neutral message in a great big size, implying that we’re modest while visually demonstrating that we’re not:

Or choose a visually smaller badge with a fairly boastful message, hoping that the smaller size and humorous catch phrase nature of the boast mitigates the bragging:

Each of these options sends a different message. When you choose among a banner or a badge or a callout or a listing on your About Us page, you are again choosing among possible messages. If you decide to send out a press release and post that on your website under a Press tab, you’re making a different impression from the one you make if you choose to blog about it or to mention it in passing.

How can you decide?

First, consider the overall nature of your business and the tone of your site. Are you a bank with a very neutral corporate site? Then you shouldn’t announce that you kick a**. Frankly, people who write “kick a**” probably shouldn’t go with that choice, either, though it’s not inappropriate for a creative company (that’s what’s on our website at this moment, thanks to Josepha, who probably says that when Rosie and I aren’t around to depress her exuberance, but it may not be there by the time you read this). A neutral corporate site should choose a neutral announcement. A more lighthearted tone on your site overall lets you use humor.

Second, consider the design of your site. I probably shouldn’t mention this with our site as an example, either, since we haven’t yet taken the time to tidy up our badges visually. Maybe that will change before you read this, too. But in the spirit of “Do as I say, not as I do,” I’m still going to suggest that you consider the design of your site when you make your choice. If we went with the largest badge option and added it to our sidebar, it would become the most important thing on the page.

Our site for Bill West Roofing lines up all the certified partner and select vendor things as badges in a sidebar.

For rock band Trout Fishing in America, though, we used the phrase “four time Grammy nominees” and laudatory quotes from reviews by major media sources as the text in their banners. Rocky Grove Sun Company’s certification is in a callout at the bottom of the page.

The point is that you can reference your certifications, honors, awards, and whatnot in a wide variety of ways, when it comes to design. There’s no reason to spoil your design for the sake of fitting in your badge.

Third, think about your audience. Our house painter client lists a whole page of stuff, almost like a resume. A tradesman’s customers are very concerned about qualifications, since they let these people come into their homes and mess around with the place where they live. This client has an impressive roster of certifications, awards, and honors, and the sheer quantity of listings will prove reassuring to their audience. Do my prospective clients care about my HTML certification and “Expert Author” status at article sites? I don’t think so. Just as with the football player I’m writing about, the goal is to choose the things that will best support your claims.

Want an Alltop badge? Unlike most of the honors and awards we’ve received, this is one you can apply for. Go on over to Alltop and add your voice to the mix. Or just make a news page for yourself and enjoy the efficiency of getting all the top stories in one place.

Video Production

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about our video shoot. We’ve now gotten the video completed and uploaded to YouTube. Since we produce videos every week for our own sites and take part in client’s videos in various ways on a routine basis, this may not seem like much of an event. However, it was our first video production involving anything like drama, so I’d like to share with you what we learned.

Start with a script. We didn’t exactly learn this; writing video scripts is something we do around here. It’s essential, though. When we have a video with just one person, we’re informal about the script, and sometimes people use a simple outline instead of a script. This gives a natural, relaxed effect. It can lead to lots of “umms” and rambling, though, so it’s not usually the best starting point.

If you’re creating a scene with a number of actors, you need a script formatted to make it very clear just what each actor is to say and do. Writing for Visual Media by Anthony Friedmann is a useful resource for all aspects of script writing. Final Draft is the industry standard software, and will make formatting your script automatic.

Next step is a storyboard. A storyboard lays out the shots, so it’s an essential item for the cameraperson and the film editor. It’s a series of cartoons showing each shot. You can make notes on the type of camera work or editing you plan to add, such as a close up shot or a dissolve to another scene.

With the script and the storyboard in place, you can shoot all the scenes in the order that’s most convenient, rather than having to work chronologically through your story. For example, we shot all the outdoor scenes together and then moved indoors. This speeds up the process and allows for continuity.

Prepare the shoot. There are some things that we didn’t do, but which we could have done for the most professional result:

• Location scouting means going to all the locations being considered with a camera to check on the available light and the sound. We had to stop for airplanes at our location, and there were wind issues. There was also a certain amount of adjustment of lights, which could have been avoided with advance planning. Fortunately, one of the kids was able to keep the dogs out of the scene and nothing else happened, but you should think about all the possible problems at your chosen location and do your best to make sure there isn’t a wedding scheduled there at the time you’ve chosen.
• Props and costumes were left to chance in our production. Angela had the idea of dressing each member of the cast in a color to represent a different browser. Rebecca is a Google Earth Pangaean and Haden Interactive is a Google Engage agency, so we have quite a bit of Google logo gear hanging around and we initially thought we’d strew it around among the actors, since we’re joking about the Google Police.  Josepha was in her Google T-shirt when Eric arrived looking all dapper in a black suit. Josepha quickly dressed up, and Angela’s T shirt was also black, so it worked out. The thing about chance is that it doesn’t always work out.
• Prepare a model release for anyone in your video, have it signed, and keep it on file.
• Rehearse.
• Have more than one camera in case you miss something with one. We did this, actually. This step can also give you multiple angles.
• Have extra stuff on hand. “Stuff” means batteries, rope, lightbulbs, water, duct tape, etc. Film production companies have golf carts or even trucks kitted out with gear, including things like foam core and first aid supplies (I know this because I once wrote copy for a film equipment website). Your location scouting will tell you whether you’re more likely to need white umbrellas for bouncing light or snakebite kits.

Shoot your video. This video was done with a Nikon 7000 series camera and another videographer I admire uses a Canon VIXIA HF S30 Camcorder. We usually use a webcam or Flip cam (Rosie now covets one of those snazzier cameras, of course), so you can easily compare the visual quality by watching another of our videos along with this one and comparing the two. Use a tripod, whatever camera you choose.

We had no external microphones, largely because we didn’t think about sound. The narration was recorded with a Logitech USB desktop microphone. If you need more detail about how to use cameras and microphones and so forth, Professional Web Video: Plan, Produce, Distribute, Promote, and Monetize Quality Video by Richard Harrington and Mark Weiser is  a thorough, readable guide.

Edit your video. Editing this video took about four times as long as shooting it. Rosie did the work with iMovie from iLife ’11 on her Macbook Pro.We’ve tried out several different video editing solutions, but this continues to be the favorite. If you’re ready to get really serious, the industry standard is Adobe Premiere, but we haven’t tried that yet. Rosie, being an Apple fan, is leaning toward Final Cut.

We like to use a logo-based animation for our video intros, but in this case we used the logo Eric Huber created for our group just as a still intro shot. The music is purchased stock music. Adding these touches doesn’t cost as much as you’d think, and it makes your videos look a lot more polished.

Publish your video. We just uploaded ours to YouTube and embed it with the WordPress Video plugin, but there are plenty of other options, including saving it on your own computer and embedding it into your website via FTP. When you decide how to format your videos, you should discuss with your web people how you plan to publish them, since it makes a difference. Uploading this particular video took about an hour.

As you can see, preparing a video, even a little video like this one, takes a lot of time and effort. This one was a lark, and it involved a total of seven people, with a total work time of about 15-20 hours — not counting the initial slightly larger group that developed the idea at a party. We had a professional cameraman, copywriter, and designer, all the equipment and software we needed, and experience with acting, video editing, and the use of YouTube. If you have a whole professional crew and cast, it will be faster. If you try to do everything yourself, it will be slower.

From concept to completion took more than a month, but there was a lot of time in between discussions, waiting for everyone to be in town, and communicating through Twitter and Facebook. I asked Rosie, who does our project management, how long it would have taken if we had done it as work. “You always have to wait for people,” she shrugged.

So, if you’re planning to make a little video for your website, you know now what you’re getting yourself into.

Update Your Browser!

Submit to Hundreds of Search Engines

I’m told that telemarketers get in trouble if they let anyone say no or end a call pleasantly. The kindest thing to do is therefore to hang up on them, preferably while they’re speaking — “No thank you! click”  doesn’t show up as a failure on their part to follow through.

However, last week I got a call that slipped past my telemarketing shields. I’ve been doing linkbuilding for a software company, and the caller began by talking about the link I’d placed at his company’s directory.  Sometimes calls like this matter — there may be an error or a further opportunity, so it’s worth listening.

In this case, it was simply a sales call. As discussed in “Be the Directory,” having a directory at your site can be quite beneficial, and this company has taken the next logical step by calling up the people who list their companies, and selling them things. Specifically, the caller wanted to submit my site to hundreds of search engines for me.

“We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines every month!” he crowed.

“Really?” I probably sounded as excited as he did. While I get those emails offering to do this, just as you probably do if you have a website, I had never actually spoken to anyone who knew which hundreds of search engines they had in mind. “What hundreds of search engines do you think are worth submitting to?”

‘Twitter,” he said, enthusiasm slightly dimmed. I don’t think they expect people to ask questions like that. “Facebook, the Yellow Pages…”

The first question is this: is Twitter a search engine? From a tech point of view, Twitter does include a search engine. So does Facebook. So does this site, for that matter. Every place you can go online and find a search box has, and therefore in some sense is, a search engine.

Twitter, Facebook, and the Yellow Pages are even used as search engines sometimes, in the sense that people go there to find information. But people also go for information to many things that aren’t search engines: watches, their parents, magazines… Even those lists of search engines which are open minded enough to list LinkedIn as a specialized people search engine don’t list Twitter or Facebook. Directories, especially important ones like Thomas.net, are often listed as search engines, but they’re still directories.

Still, let’s accept just for the sake of argument that Twitter is a search engine. How exactly would “submitting your site” to Twitter every month be beneficial to your website? Participation at Twitter can be very effective for bringing in traffic and leads. Having your website tweeted once a month by a marketing company? Not so much.

The company followed up with an email headed “Dear RebeccaHaden, Submit to 799 handpicked Directories & 6000 Search Engines guaranteed.” Apparently they felt that I wasn’t impressed enough with hundreds of search engines and needed to be offered thousands. With capital letters.

Here’s the thing: Google has the largest market share by far, and Bing is the only serious contender for second place now that Bing powers Yahoo’s search. You should submit your site to them. Once. If it’s not already indexed by them. The old competitors, including AOL search, HotBot, and All the Web, are either defunct or powered by Google or Bing.

For some fields, there are specialized secondary search engines that are worth submitting to. For example, Cheatsearch is important for game cheats and Trulia is worth doing for real estate. If you have lots of customers in China, you should make sure you’re noticed by Baidu. If you use a specialized search engine yourself in the course of your work, then you should make sure you’re included in its searches.

6000? Don’t waste your time.

Your Website’s Call to Action

When you’re driving on the freeway in the U.S., you’ll be sure to see a hamburger on a billboard. Not just any hamburger, but a hamburger with lusciously red tomatoes, crisp onions, glistening lettuce, plump buns, juicy meat, and cheese melting into a perfectly placed sigh of gooey deliciousness. This highly styled burger may have little in common with the sandwiches available at the place that pays for the billboard, but it is designed to catch the eye of a hungry traveler. There may be a bit of text, even a slogan, but the important part is the name of the restaurant and the “Exit 86″ or “5 miles, left on Broadway” announcement.

The idea is that people on a freeway often have driven for a while and are far from home, they are likely to be hungry, and the sight of this perfect hamburger will tempt them to leave the freeway and drive to the restaurant mentioned on the billboard.

I saw one of these billboards the other day. On the other side of the road, I saw another billboard: “EXIT Buy real estate.”

Huh? Drivers might get hungry and pull off the freeway for a meal. Will they see a command to exit and buy real estate and think, “Gee, you’re right, I ought to look into a ranchette right now”? Not likely.

Just so, your website’s call to action needs to be appropriate for the visitors to the page it’s on. At your homepage, that’s pretty straightforward: the main thing you do, your primary selling point, should be right there. “Here’s what we offer and here’s how to get it” is the effect you want.

Sometimes, though, there’s an inner landing page that needs its own call to action. This is true for Dr. Jane Bluestein, an educational consultant and speaker whose #1 most popular page is an interior page with an article on conflict resolution. Jane built her own website, and we suggested she simplify the navigation and make it more usable.

However, this particular page has gotten some pushes from Stumblupon and similar sites and gets thousands of visitors who aren’t coming to Jane’s site to buy her book or hire her to speak.

The page in question is a handout from one of Jane’s presentations, though, and it is based on her books. People who are interested in this article (and analytics tells us that they stay on the page long enough to read it, so we can safely assume that they are interested) may also be interested in the books and presentations if they have the options pointed out to them.

It would make sense to add a callout, a special button for the people who have come to this page by seeking information about conflict resolution.

A callout is a visually striking button that is separate from the main content of the page and leads the reader on to another page — usually a sales page.

At right you can see an inner page of the website for Kansas City roofer Bill West Roofing. There’s an infographic about ice dams which brings visitors to this page, and it includes a callout — the bright colored circles on the far left.

This page has changed a lot since then, actually, and it no longer has the special offer. That’s one reason to use callouts: to call visitors to take action on something temporary. Adding a button which is not part of the main design allows you to remove it when the special offer is past.

You can also add one to a particular page without having to alter your basic design. However, you may want to use a callout button as part of the design of your inner pages, as the Kingsmill Resort does. Someone who reaches their inner page through search can easily book a room without having to navigate further.The callout is a golden bar — assertive, but not aggressive.

A callout is often a sunburst or other eye catching shape, but it could just be a strong text link if that’s what you control at your website. For Jane, the cover art of the book could be a good option to drive traffic to her bookshop, or a visually strong line saying, “If you enjoy this handout, hire Jane for your next professional development meeting.”

Once she places the callout, she can watch her analytics to see whether more visitors to that page respond to it by clicking on the button, and of course she’ll watch to see if her hires and book sales increase.

The key, though, for this type of call to action is to identify the products and services which will appeal to the visitor to the landing page in question. From Jane’s analytics, we can see the keywords that bring people to the page and the pages they tend to go to next, so we can match up the callout to their apparent needs.

Just as the hamburger billboard is probably more successful than the “EXIT Buy real estate” one is, a call to hire Jane or buy her books on conflict resolution will be a better choice than an ad for her book on handwriting.

SEO Tip #20: Social Media = Dating

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