My short answer?

Forget about the search engines and start thinking about your customer.

To understand why, there’s a quick story for you, a list of fundamental questions you need to consider and then an outline of how you can tie it all together.

Quick story:

Once upon a time, Bluewire Media’s website was nowhere to be found on Google when you typed in “web design brisbane” – a pretty competitive keyword. This was not acceptable for a web strategy consultancy, so we set out to improve our ranking.

We used 2 sources: We posed a few questions to Reload Media and read Glenn Murray’s SEO Secrets e-book.

Armed with a better understanding of how the search engines worked, we were able to get to the first page of results. It was a good step but we still wanted #1.

We then focussed on “thinking like a publisher” courtesy of David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”. We co-created the Web Strategy Planning Template with him and started to share much more content with our audience. The number of our back links increased dramatically and from high quality web sites like News.com.au courtesy of journalists and other visitors finding our blog and content useful.

In the process, we saw major fluctuations of our rankings and our competitors’. Some websites that had been on the first page for years vanished to the anonymity of page 4 or 5. Our own ranking bounced around as Google changed their search algorithm with countless small tweaks and a couple of major overhauls.

Ultimately our ranking improved over a few months until we were #1 for “web design Brisbane” (where we stayed for 3 years) and quite a few others. We’ve recently dropped to #2 but that’s ok, we’ll be back (my logic is next).

It’s time to consider some fundamental questions:

Why does a person use a search engine?

To find information.

What then is the purpose of a search engine?

The sole purpose of a search engine is to help a searcher find the information they are looking for.

Why will a searcher return to use a search engine again?

A searcher will return if the results of their search are useful.

How will a searcher choose one search engine over another?

Primarily by the usefulness of the results. A secondary consideration is the speed of the delivery of those results.

How does a search engine make money?

By having searchers click on sponsored links or pay per click advertising. The more people search, the more likely they are to click on the paid links. The more often people search, the more often they will click on the paid links. The more often they click, the more money the search engine makes.

Who is the searcher?

The searcher is YOUR customer, YOUR prospect, YOUR future No.1 referrer, a journalist looking for a good story in YOUR industry. The list goes on.

So if the searcher wants useful results and the search engines make money by delivering useful results, what do you think will drive your business’s long term search engine rankings?

USEFULNESS, to your customer or buyer persona, in everything you do on the web will drive your long term search engine rankings.

How can you do this?

• By genuinely knowing your customer or buyer persona.
• By understanding your customers’ problems and providing great content to help them solve it.
• By structuring your web strategy around your searcher or buyer persona not around your products (try using our web strategy planning template if you need help).
• By knowing what they a looking for and knowing what they are typing into the search engines and using their language, not some mumbo jumbo, jargon filled rubbish.
• By providing such interesting/useful/entertaining/valuable content that people will link to it and share it – thereby building QUALITY back links that create long term sustainable rankings, not junk links from an unrelated forum.
• By building content so it will be picked up not just by your customers but by journalists who will share it with a larger audience.
• By having landing pages that your customers find useful and that are relevant to what they are looking for.
• By refreshing your content regularly to demonstrate that you care about the issues your customers are facing.

Yes there is a place for Search Engine Optimisation to achieve short term results using technical changes, backlinking and other techniques. But do you seriously think trying to keep up with every change made to the ultra secret search engine algorithm by Google’s 31,000 employees (qualified by this type of entry exam) is a sustainable strategy?

Their algorithms are going to continue to refine, to reduce the impact of technical details like metadata, to build in the social proof as demonstrated by the number of tweets and likes and comments and check-ins and reviews and ratings and quality of authorship….. Then the next big thing will come along and swamp everything we know about today and demand more change from our businesses.

But the one thing you can count on is that search engines servicing their customers will be at the heart of it.

Don’t waste your time trying to keep up with every tweak made by collective brain power of the world’s best and brightest – get the basics right and then focus on your customer. If what you do is in their best interests, if you’re genuinely adding value with everything you do, then you can be sure the search engines will catch up and reward you handsomely for it.

So… what do you think? Is SEO dead?

Who's hosting this party?

I have always been an avid user of the web, but understanding the nuts and bolts about how it actually functions was as foreign as an alien language. In fact, considering the possibility that there was some mothership in outer space, run by freaky little aliens who used some awesome energy source to store and transfer the information we are now sharing across the globe in an instant, was not so far-fetched for me. I mean why not? It was as close to any other theory I might have had.

Turns out it’s a lot less exciting than that, but an awful lot more practical than reliance on an alien race. Turns out, if you want to make your website actually accessible on the internet, you simple use a web hosting service.

Hosting is like the rent you pay to have your website online. It offers a physical location on a server somewhere, to actually store your files and webpages. You rent that space. There are numerous options for hosting. The company who develops your website will most likely have a preference. It is a good idea to be guided by your web developer since they have the most experience in knowing what is required. Listen to the options they suggest, but please be encouraged to question the advice, the final decision and the price.

Let's consider the budget

We all want a beautiful, unique, functional website for our business but many of us have no real idea what it might cost to get one. While not always fun, talking dollars and cents will act as a reality check on the scope of your website design project.

Whether you’re building from scratch or upgrading a current website, it’s important to have some understanding of website pricing and the various elements that can affect price. This will allow you to be ready to adapt if need be, once you send for quotes.

It’s common that website quotes can be extremely varied and this can make the whole process quite daunting. If one quote is cheap and one is expensive, it’s only natural to wonder which the truth is ─ is the expensive one a rip off or the cheap one shoddy? Unfortunately it is rarely that simple.

Bluewire’s very own web strategist and developer Lesley Hays, spoke to me recently about the different things that can affect price.

DIVERSITY IN PRICING

Price is affected primarily by two things ─ the situation of the person giving the quote, and the features you want on the website. Let’s consider the first factor.

Who is quoting?

The people quoting for the job might well be able to build the website, but at what cost? There are numerous external factors that can influence the final quote. For example a sole trader might be able to quote cheaper than a mid-sized web agency since they do not have the company overheads associated with running a larger business. The flip side of this is that the sole trader is higher risk in terms of long term reliability. There is no guarantee that they will still be contactable in years to come. With the mid-size agency you might receive a more expensive quote, but with that comes testing and quality assurances, along with long term reliability.

It’s important for you to consider what your needs are as a business. If someone in your team is tech savvy and likely to be able to maintain the website and upgrade and add to it as needed, then perhaps the reliability of an established company is not so important. On the other hand you might prefer to pay a little extra for the experience.  The answer to these questions will vary from business to business.

Website features

The second factor Lesley explained that can affect price is the features you want on the website. Obviously some features cost more to build on a website than others. Don’t let this stop you asking for everything you want initially. Even if you have a small budget, you should always ask for all the things you want in the initial website quote. If the budget blows out, you can adapt and remove some things from the website wish list. Here are a list of some of the more expensive features on websites:

• E-commerce
• Private member areas
• Interactive features eg. calculators
• Slide shows & image galleries
• Customising your “admin area” a lot (where you can edit your content without any technical skills)

Remember, when creating your website blueprint don’t let budgetary considerations limit your vision initially. Create your ultimate wish list in order of priority and then scale back as necessary.

The winner of this year’s Bluewire Media Award for Web Design is Tyler Alberti for his photography portfolio website.

The winning entry - www.tyleralberti.com

Here’s what Tyler had to say about winning the award:

“As a freelance photographer and graphic designer, I have always been an advocate for self promotion and marketing. My first point of contact for new or prospective clients has always been through my online presence. Having the opportunity to enter my professional portfolio into a competition such as the Bluewire Media Award really pushed me during my final year of study to knuckle down on the design and build a really simple and functional website that displays both my graphic and web design/development skills whilst also displaying my photographic portfolio in full colour.

“I chose to also deliver content to mobile users due to the nature of my image/bandwidth heavy website. Having the Bluewire Media award is a huge advantage towards my CV as it shows my prospective employers that I have industry recognition in the area of web design. Now that I have moved on from university, I will be commencing my freelance graphic and web design practice alongside my photographic practice in the beginning of 2011.”

“Having the Bluewire Media award is a huge advantage towards my CV as it shows my prospective employers that I have industry recognition in the area of web design.”

For us at Bluewire, it’s fabulous to see such a high calibre of graduates – Tyler’s work is slick, professional and demonstrates an understanding of best practices on the web. His integration of social media, search engine friendly copy, and “invisible design” show that Tyler is ready for work in the field.

Congratulations Tyler!

Capital Finance was founded in 1995. Since then they’ve become one of Australia’s leading finance companies. They’re in the business of helping companies and individuals achieve their commercial goals and personal dreams. Your business is their business.

Visit the Capital Finance website to find out more »

See what else Bluewire Media has launched recently in our Web Design Portfolio or call us on 1300 258 394.

In aid of the holiday budget, why not show off your web skills for the chance to win $500 through QUT’s Bluewire Media Prize for Web Design?

To be eligible, you must be a student at QUT. You can be from any discipline, in any year of study.

How to enter

You can submit a website built just for the prize, or one you’ve already made. You can go it alone, or team up with your mates. Tell us the URL, and include a short description of how your website meets the following criteria:

Web Strategy – What was your plan of attack? How did you achieve that?
Usability – How did you make the site user friendly?
Visual Design – How did you come up with such a good looking website?
Functionality – What can people use your site for? How do the site’s functions help the user?
Content – Who is your audience and how did you deliver your content to them?
Results – What real results can you show for the website? This can be anything from lots of visitors, great interaction through commenting or social media, or an example of how the goals of the website were met in any way.

Go to our website to enter. Entries close Monday 8th November, 2010.

Winners

The winner will be announced at the Communication Design graduation exhibition in early November.

Past winners have found the prize to be a great way to have their work recognised be industry leaders. Who knows, you might even bag an internship (or a job!).

“As a student, winning the Bluewire Media web design prize is a great addition to my resume. It shows that I can demonstrate good web design skills, judged from an industry perspective. When looking for a job after graduation, I think the prize will definitely give me a positive edge over other applicants.” Shelley Roach, winner 2009

“The prize is a great way to get yourself recognised as a web professional. You may even get a job – or be compelled to start a business – from it!” Matt Luscombe, winner 2007, Bluewire Media Web Developer

Questions?

Call Angela at Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.

If you’ve ever done a website project with us, you’ll know all about wireframes! They’re the black & white skeletons of a website that show where all the content and features will go before we delve into colours and images. They help us make decisions about functionality and positioning without getting caught up in how dark that gradient is or whether red is the right colour for this button.

We also use them to finalise how much copy is required, what areas of a page are featured, how many images we’ll need and whether they should be landscape or portrait, for starters! This can be very helpful for our clients to start organising content and photography without having to wait for a final design.

Let’s see ‘em!

To see some examples, check out “Wireframe Showcase“, which has the interesting task of comparing completed websites with their wireframes.

It’s really interesting to see the similarities and differences between wireframes and resultant designs, and also to see how different people create wireframes. Some are full of detail, others are simple; some use clean lines and text, others go for a ‘hand drawn’ aesthetic.

How do you make them?

There’s a lot more to making a good wireframe than having the right tool – user interface design knowledge, a thorough understanding of the project requirements and lots of experience helps, too! Having said that, the tools can be fun, so let’s talk about them…

Wireframe Showcase is supported by a popular wireframing tool, Balsamiq, but the examples (like real life) seem to use a variety of tools. Wireframing doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t, at the beginning) a pretty, technical endeavour. Sketches are the best way to start and some people don’t need anything else.

For those who like pretty mock up tool, there are lots to choose from! We’ve tried Axure, FlairBuilder and Mockingbird. I know other popular ones also include Balsamiq, Hot Gloo, Omnigraffle and MockFlow.

What’s your favourite wireframing tool you think we should try out?

Welcome to crowdsourcing.  It’s a new phenomenon enabled by the web & one that is proving very popular!

The idea behind it is that you “put your website brief out to the crowd”  (all 95,907 of them in this case) & choose the best repsonse.

You may think it seems absurd to blog about a service that can seriously under-cut the price of Bluewire’s web design offering, but I’ll explain shortly why it’s not.

99 Designs is the widely acclaimed company offering this service.  This is what they do:

We help you host a “web design contest”, where thousands of designers compete to create a design you love, or your money back!

1. Launch your design contest

2. Collaborate with the designers

3. Choose your favorite design

Simple & cool, hey?

So why would Bluewire, a web strategy company, be  thrilled by this surge in crowd-sourcing popularity?

Reason 1: It means our clients who wouldn’t normally be able to afford us now have access to cheaper alternatives & can still get their ‘website up & running’ .  They have the option of working with us on their web strategy whilst getting the actual implementation done via crowdsourcing. This is win:win as Bluewire stills serves as a trusted advisor and receives revenue from the consulting.

Reason 2: It will force web design companies to really decide on what value they offer to the market, especially since the cost of getting a website built is literally cheaper than ever.  This makes things more competitive and provides another opportunity for us to standout.

Bluewire Media’s brand promise is devoted communication and our laser focus is helping companies become Number 1 in their Market Niche. A crowdsourced website won’t achieve that on its own but working with Bluewire for the web strategy and combining with 99Designs for a crowdsourced website may well be a winning combination for many clients.

Web Strategy Sydney:  If you like the sound of working with Bluewire Media to develop your web stratgey, please call us on 1300 258 394.

10 Tips for Corporate Blogging – OPEN Forum
These are some pretty sound tips to get the most out of your forrays into corporate blogging.

The art of slow reading – The Guardian.co.uk
Can you read this whole article without getting bored? If not, maybe you should consider the art of slow reading: forsaking modern trends of skimming, summaries, reading the first two paragraphs. This article discusses the merits of reading in full to maintain our abilities to process and understand lengthy textual information.

HOW TO: Use Game Mechanics to Power Your Business – Mashable
A great article about using engaging, rewarding game mechanics to get people using and continuing to use your product or marketing campaign. Work backwards from your business vision, to user behaviours/actions, to the mechanics like points or levels that can be layered over those behaviours to create the game.

It’s a statistical phenomenon that has been popularised by Chris Anderson to describe the impact of the web on the business world. I’ve just finished reading the updated version of his book called “The Long Tail” (surprise surprise!).

To quickly illustrate the “Long Tail” concept, I’ll use Amazon.com – one of Chris’s examples in the book.

Amazon.com sells books (and many other things, but we’ll leave at that for the moment). It sells the bestseller titles (the “head” – green in diagram) that you’ll find in any of your local bookstores, but it also sells thousands of other titles (“the long tail” – yellow in diagram) that you will not be able to find in a store because:

1. Stores have limited shelf space and therefore have to allocate this space to books they think will do well
2. Demand for the book was small in comparison to the bestsellers (maybe it wasn’t fantastically written, maybe the topic was too specific, maybe the marketing of the book was terrible etc…)

Why then, is Amazon selling loads of these lesser known titles, the ones that hadn’t enough demand or were too specific for the book stores?

1. Amazon is not limited by shelf space because all of its inventory is online and directly links to publishers’ and distributors’ shelves rather than its own.
2. The web has enabled them to reach a market size that is simply impossible for a physical bookstore. All of a sudden the small demand that made it unfeasible in the market size of a physical store with restricted space, becomes feasible online with a world wide audience.

So that is the concept of the long tail. Thousands upon thousands of options, all previously unavailable to you, now only the touch of a button away… Feeling daunted?

The antidote for feeling daunted is one of the really interesting ideas from “The long tail” – the importance of the “filter“.

If you now have thousands of book options, how on earth do you decide what you would like to read? How do you sort through “the junk”? (Remembering that your “junk” might be your friend’s “treasure”!) How do you find something that is useful and relevant?

That is where search, social media and recommendations become so important.

What I love about Amazon is that when I login, it provides me with a whole host of recommendations filtered by what I’ve bought in the past and related purchases from all of Amazon’s customers.

By allowing me to search I can filter my results by topic, author, title, price, relevance, age of book…

By providing uncensored comments of others, I can filter my options by gathering other’s opinions and not just what a publicist thought.

I love this concept of filtering!!

When you are daunted by information overload, how do you filter it? If your customers are daunted by too many options, how do you filter it for them?

If you’re selling products, then learn from Amazon – they know what they’re doing.

If you’re in the service industry though, how is it relevant?

Here’s what I think:

Whether you are an accountant, lawyer or web strategist, your role is to be the filter. To take all of the inputs of your experience, knowledge and client circumstances and make the best recommendations and give the best advice you possibly can. Every client has a long tail of options – your role is to filter these options and help your client find the most useful and relevant for their situation.

The role of the trusted advisor is now very much the role of the filter.

It will be really interesting to follow this “filtering” concept. If anyone has any thoughts around it, please leave a comment or get in contact.

Thanks.

Sydney managed web strategy: Having trouble cutting through all the options on the web? Give Bluewire Media a call on 1300 258 394.