This is the presentation made at the Open Coffee II Event to Chania Software Developers.  The presentation was an introduction to web design to a mixed audience at the beautiful Sailing Club headquarters in the old harbour area of Chania in Crete. The presentation was focusing on the core principles of web design and usability using detailed case studies from Catch22 Marketing’s portfolio.

Key Principles Included:  3 Questions every user asks, the need for data capture, the importance of calls to action and the process of measuring results and applying changes.

Download Presentation PDF   or View Slideshow Online (Not in Chrome).

Presentation Resources

1. Book: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. > Steve’s Website
2. State of Search (Infographic)
3. Top 3 Search Engines – Search Engine Watch
4. Websites Shown:  WLA Before and WLA New Website
5. Websites Shown:  Gentleman & a Van
6. Catch22 Marketing – Before and After Gallery
7. Guided tour of Google Analytics and Download Analytics Free
8. Catch22 Marketing – Website Startup Guide

Please Leave Me a Comment or Suggestions of Improvements Below

The film examines how are they joining forces by bringing together an international collection of design service providers, education experts, and businesses that have incorporated design as part of their core approach. Design the New Business features inspiring case studies and insightful discussions, helping to illustrate the state of the relationship, and how it needs to continue evolving to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

The documentary has already made it to the official selection of several esteemed film festivals such as Design Indaba Filmfest, and has been screened in many more locations around the world.

KnowEm was developed to assist everyone – from individuals to Fortune 500 companies – in discovering where their names, brands, or trademarked terms are available (or stolen) on Social Media networks. KnowEm helps you secure your name across the vast social media landscape but we can also show you how to contact each site in order to have the name released and returned to you.

To date KnowEm claims to have helped to reserve over 350,000 profiles and reported back on over 25,000 issues of squatting and misrepresentation of a brand, username or trademarked term. This is all done with local employees in New Jersey, New York.

They have a free domain checking system on their site (which is really quick) and a number of commercial packages.

]]> http://www.catch22marketing.com/news/03/business-tips/how-to-find-and-secure-a-brand-name/feed/ 0 http://www.catch22marketing.com/news/02/seo/how-google-plus-affects-seo/ http://www.catch22marketing.com/news/02/seo/how-google-plus-affects-seo/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:23:31 +0000 Cameron Clark http://www.catch22marketing.com/news/?p=43 Since the early days of Google Buzz, the +1 button has been a bit of mystery to users and arguably to content producers. But the integration of a social factor into Google’s algorithm has long been the goal of Google, and with Google+ now growing rapidly and the +1 button becoming more prominent I thought it would be a good idea to review it’s status.

Google defines +1 as a feature to help people discover and share relevant content from the people they already know and trust. Users can +1 different types of content, including Google search results, websites, and adverts. Once users +1 a piece of content, it can be seen on the +1 tab in their Google + profile, in Google search results, and on websites with a +1 button.

The plot thickened last month when Google launched Search plus Your World. Jack Menzel, (Director of product management for Google Search), explained that now Google+ users would be able to “search across information that is private and only shared to you, not just the public web.” According to Ian Lurie from the blog Conversation Marketing, in Search plus Your World, search results that received a lot of +1s tend to show up higher in results.

In typical Google fashion it has described the purpose of a +1, but the specifics and impacts to search rankings and SEO practices are light on the ground. So let’s document what we know and fill in a few blanks…

Does a +1 Affect my Site’s Performance in Social Search?

The +1 has an indirect effect on your site’s search rank. This does not mean the more +1’s a link has, the higher rank it achieves in traditional search results. Take this scenario:

When a Google+ user +1’s a piece of content, he gives it his “stamp of approval.” Then, say one of his connections from Google+ searches for the same or related topic. Because of Search plus Your World, his friend is more likely to click on the same link the original user +1’d (when a signed-in user searches, his Google results may include snippets annotated with the names of connections who have +1′d the content). This follows the logic that content recommended by friends is more relevant than content from strangers.

This is also true for users who are not signed in to their Google account when they search. When a user searches for the same search term, the results might display the total number of +1’s a link has received, which is another level of validation that it’s a relevant link.

How Does This Relate to SEO?

Since the +1′d link has a chance at a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR), there is a greater potential the link will be shared, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any social network. An experiment by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, tested the relationship between Twitter and Facebook shares and search results in Google. He found a positive correlation between the number of retweets and shares a link received and its search ranking. This means, the more the link was passed around on Twitter and Facebook, the higher the search rank of the page. This in turn led to better SEO.

The Verdict?

Well, a Google +1 can indirectly lead to a better page rank and a greater number of +1’s increases a link’s potential for a high CTR, which could lead to increased social sharing, and subsequently increase its page rank. What’s important to note here is the correlation, not causation, between +1′s, other social shares, and search rank.

The bottom line is, the SEO effects of a +1 are essentially indirect, which means business as usual for our SEO practices. The fundamental SEO methods such as link building, relevant keywords, and URL structure have a more significant impact on page ranking (See How to Raise your Site on Google).

The Google + button is still very new, and more data needs to be gathered to create a clearer picture.

Are you seeing the effects of Google +1 on your SEO? Do you think +1 eventually have a very direct impact on search rankings? Share your views and experiences in the comments.

To find out more check out Google TV

Check out the official guide to How Google’s search engine works

Search Engine Optimisation was and still is, about providing quality content in a way Google can understand and order, so it can provide relevant results fast. Help them and they will help you. It’s an eco-system which the more people buy into, will make the web a better place to be.

1. Title tags

Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we’re putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.

2. Content

The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn’t mean just throwing them in there like you’re cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.

3. Quality Links

Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody’s recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won’t work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.

4. Quantity Links

Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you’ll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose “link-swaps” to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can’t buy Google’s love that way. In fact, you’ll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.

5. URL

The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don’t like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can’t read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they’re the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.

6. Spider Food

Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.

7. Site Architecture

There’s a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.

8. Frequently Updated Content

You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It’ll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.

9. Start a Blog

A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you’re in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It’s not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there’s useful content on it and legitimate linking.

10. Don’t Forget Humans!

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There’s an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what’s the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you’ll want to check out. He’s been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.