Mark Hurst with goodexperience.com has written a very clever post he’s calling an “exercise in customer experience.”
He asks: Which of these is a better experience?
IN A RESTAURANT:
1. When you walk into the restaurant, the hostess welcomes you warmly and takes you to your table. The interior decoration and overall ambience are attractive and comfortable; the food is delicious.
Or, at a different restaurant…
2. The restaurant is called “The Jungle Experience.” Upon entering, the hostess asks you how many are in your “safari.” As you sit at your table, a fine mist of water sprays from a sprinkler hidden in the plastic foliage surrounding the dining area. The menu items are all named after rare tropical animals. You have the simulated experience of dining in a jungle, although the food isn’t very good.
Add Your CommentsA Clickz article titled “Is Your Search Marketing Campaign Lopsided?” takes a look at how demographics affect search engine marketing.
It says that “depending on the demographics of your target online audience, your SEM campaign may require more emphasis on paid over natural SEM strategies, or the reverse.”
Why? Well, according to the study cited in the article:
- Women find paid search advertisements more relevant than men.
- Searchers with college degrees select natural search results as being more relevant to a sample query.
- Unemployed searchers choose a natural search result as more relevant over half of the time.
- Users who indicate they use the Web four or more times per day, 65.2 percent click on the natural search listings.
- Individuals who have been online longer find natural search results to be more relevant.
So, it could be inferred from the data that if your audience is male, has been online over three years, has a college degree and is fully employed, being found in the natural search results takes on more importance.
Conversely, if your audience is female, new to the Internet, and non-degreed, you may need to skew your campaign more toward paid search ads.
MediaPost: How To Spot A Fraudulent SEO Firm
Looks at the different forms of search engine spamming and what affects they could have on your rankings. According to the article, the 5 major forms of fraudulent SEO include:
- Shadow domains: production of multiple websites by using several different domain names to artificially boost search results for one Web site.
- Doorway pages: duplicating similar content on several pages in an attempt to expand keywords and drive traffic.
- Invisible text: writing text in the same color as a website’s background.
- Link farms: creating links to a site from irrelevant or illegitimate “affiliates.”
- Cloaking: showing a web surfer one version of a page while showing a search engine a completely different page for its index.
As a result of these techniques, “legitimate companies are getting bumped from Google and Yahoo! for illegal search engine optimization (SEO) practices, and most don’t know why.“
Pornography still rules the Internet. Even the top search engines combined can’t compete. Research company Hitwise says that online pornography websites get about 3x more visits than the top engines.
% of Total Web Traffic
- Google = 2.7%
- Yahoo = 1.7%
- MSN = 1.1%
- ‘Adult’ = 18.8%
There are no “rules”, only “guidelines” when it comes to search engine optimization. This makes it very difficult for webmasters to understand what constitutes search engine spam.
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, thinks its time that search engines start to come clean with their policing policies. He believes they “should agree to publish lists of companies they’ve banned. That would help consumers seeking SEM firms to understand which to avoid.”
A good idea that likely won’t happen. So what can you do to protect your website from being banned? You can get professional advice from a search marketing firm who understands the guidelines and works to insure that they are not violated, or you can live by these words:
“Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.” - Google
Clickz: How to Calculate Lifetime Customer Value
A look at calculating the lifetime value of a customer - problems, solutions and a how-to.
Search engine Ask Jeeves has snapped up Tukaroo, a desktop search technology company.
Desktop search and file management software enables consumers to access, view and manage their information in real time. It’s recieved alot of attention recently and is considered to be the next evolution of search. Google and MSN have both been working on their own solutions.
Here is some great advice from ISEBD about Internet Marketing:
“In reality, you need much more than merely getting clicks to make a profit, especially as competitive pressure builds up. As a minimum, you will need (a) good website design and information architecture, (b) reliable, safe, and easy-to-use ecommerce, (c) responsive support and (d) not just clicks, but highly qualified leads to load into your sales pipeline.“
