Queen Bee Marketing’s Blog About Marketing, SEO, and Design.

One day I was surfing the web looking for some design inspiration for a project I was working on. At some point in my search I eventually came across Patrick Haney’s flickr set. It seems that Patrick Haney has had the same problem, and he collected all the websites that inspire him into one online photo album. “This is perfect!” I thought to myself. “There are hundreds of websites here and they all look fantastic.”

After my initial feelings of shock and joy something began to creep up and gnaw at the back of my mind, like a hamster trying to get out of its cage. Then it hit me. “How dare they!” I shouted. “Who do these people think they are to make such masterpieces?!” I began to sob and hit my head on my desk while repeatedly saying “Why not me, why not me?”

This started to remind me of how some women get angry and upset when they look through a catalog full of models. I was in the same situation and I found myself faced with two options. I could become anorexic and hope that great design shortly follows; or I could say screw it and focus on my inner beauty because that’s what really matters right? After all my content is interesting, my website is accessible, and my use of DOM scripting is just dreamy. If someone didn’t know enough about those things to appreciate them, then I could just thumb my nose at that person and call them shallow. After all, I know that the search engines like Google don’t care what a website looks like when it comes time to index, and if people can’t even find a website then they won’t care what it looks like any more than Google does.

I was talking with some potential clients and ran into this again today. I fully understand nepotism and it’s role in our society, but I don’t understand holding your business back or closing your mind to new ideas because of it.

I review business websites on a regular basis and am continually surprised by the amount of “search engine unfriendly” and/or poorly designed sites I find. Many of these sites are advertised in the company’s brochures, business cards, newspaper ads, etc.

I can quickly identify a poorly designed Website; one that is all frames, has a poor link structure, all flash, or other problems. The challenge becomes explaining to a business owner that their Website is horrible without offending them. I have also run across several advertised sites that were not even operational! What kind of message are you sending your customers? I am a tech savy client, if I have a choice between two different companies and one has a well designed site and the other doesn’t, which company do you think I am going to use?

Here is a quick list of the common problems I see with many small and medium sized business websites:

1. All Frames- It may be easier or cheaper to design your site this way, but it is a sure-fire way to get overlooked by the search engines (and therefore potential customers).
2. WYSIWYG- This stands for “What You See Is What You Get”, and from a business standpoint, you aren’t getting much. Programs like Frontpage & Dreamweaver are commonly used by the average office worker that wants to design the company’s site. The problem- most of the time they don’t fully understand what they are doing to the Website (I ran across a GoLive website today, and for those of you that know what that means…it leads me into my next point).
3. Never Updating your Site- If you know you’re only going to make changes to your site once a decade, don’t put the last time you updated the site on the front page (hit counters are also very 90’s = outdated; you can find out how many people are going to your site without telling the whole world).
4. Over-use of Images- A good website is a combination of several different factors: coding, images, links, text, databases, and multimedia. Many companies will load their site down with poor pictures that take forever to load. Understand the search engines can only read the Alt Tag of the image.
5. Not Hiring a Professional- Every business owner would like to reduce expense, but this is an area that can cost you money if done incorrectly.

No honey, I don’t need to see the doctor about this, our son has been watching Grey’s Anatomy and ER, he can stitch me up and it will be just as good.

This is an obvious in-your-face link bait blog.

There are SEO Experts out there that will charge an arm and a leg for link bait services. The sad thing is that they are often successful because like lemmings, the general online public thrives on drama, controversy, and entertainment and will be happy to jump off the nearest cliff.

What is link bait? Depends on who you ask, but the general understanding is that is it something done to obtain natural links to your site via the many social online networking systems available. Normally it involves something new, interesting, funny, controversial, a free give away, or something as simple as valuable resources like freeware or good links.

I want more links to my blog and/or my website so here is my link bait for all of you (I realize this may not work as effectively because I am telling you the purpose of this post, but oh well). Please don’t forget to be a lemming and link to this post or the whole thing won’t work the way it’s supposed to.

Now that I have set the table time to serve some dinner…

Web Designer will blog for links.

The time has come for you to get a business card. The only problem is you have no idea what it should look like. The appearance of a business card is important. The last thing you want is for someone to pick up your card and his or her first impression is, “Wow this thing is uglier than sin!” When designing your own card (or someone else’s), follow these helpful tips to avoid a professional embarrassment.

Read the rest of this entry »

What you search for on Google is never anonymous!

You may have heard about this recent news story about the burglars who were trying to crack a safe but couldn’t, so they used Google to find out how. This isn’t the first time Google searches have been used to learn more about a crime that was committed. These types of stories are becoming more common.

There’s a prevalent myth that internet = anonymous, but it’s just not true. I know there are people that will say there are ways of masking your identity online, but the average Web surfer doesn’t know how to do that. It’s amazing to me how many people think they can do or say anything on the internet and it will have no consequences. Don’t forget that even something as simple as a Google query is being tracked.

Well, I did it again this week. For all the joy Google brings me, sometimes I just need something different.

Most of the time I just try to reword the search, but because of the limitations (Google and other search engines just can’t read some sites, maybe it’s a really obscure subject matter, or the sites with the information just aren’t friendly to search engines), sometimes I have to go elsewhere. There is a lot of directory bashing to be found (some justified), but trying to catalog the amount of information streaming through our world is unimaginable. Sites like Wiki and Google do a fantastic job of distributing and organizing data, but old fashion directories still have some strengths.

The largest strength of directories I see involves the aging of the World Wide Web. I visited a great website again this week:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

This is an attempt to catalog the history of websites which is brilliant! An online database of World Wide Web (WWW) history. Many people confuse the internet with the WWW, they are two very distinct and different entities. The differences may be easier to understand this way: The internet is the hardware, the actual network that connects all the computers. The WWW by contrast, is the software that allows them to communicate.

When discussing aging and directories, I’m thinking of all the sites that are build and then become “stagnant” as well as those that are still active. “Stagnants” are kept alive (hosted), but with no interactivity. A recent post about 6links of separation shows that the WWW is not just your classical spider web, but an evolved web that is not only horizontal and diagonal, but even more than 3 dimensional. It’s the synergy created via the infrastructure of the internet. The longer the internet supports the growth of the WWW, the more information within our society will exponentially expand.

As well as aging, good directories can direct you to sites you would have never found on your own. How can you look for something that you don’t know exists? The best example would be specific or topical directories that limit the directory to it’s area of expertise or specialty. You can run across a related website that you weren’t trying to find, but achieve the same or better results.

Some of my other Google mistresses this week were:
http://www.msdewey.com/
Not as effective (or quick) as Google, but entertaining and better to look at. Also gave me the idea for this post.

http://www.reporter.org/desktop/
I do a lot of work in Business and Real Estate and this is a fantastic resource. Many of the sources here may be difficult to find via search engines.

So when and why do you cheat on google?

Google recently added Local Business Reviews to its local search. This type of service isn’t new. Mashable posted this list of sites that are already geared towards this service. And Yahoo has been offering this for a long time.

What is different about Google’s review service, is that you don’t have to leave Google to read reviews. Many people turn to Google to find businesses in their area - whether it’s directions, a phone number, etc. I would guess that most of these people don’t even know other business review sites exist. When someone does a local search on Google they can read/write reviews without going to another site, which increases the visibility of those reviews. It also allows people to find the information they are looking for faster and easier. This works the same way with Yahoo, but since Google has a larger market share the reviews are exposed to more people.

How can business owners use this to their advantage? They could ask a few of their loyal customers to leave a favorable review for them. These reviews are another form of advertising for a business. Having testimonials from real customers may encourage new customers to come into that store instead of another.

What would the Buzz Blog be if we didn’t talk about some buzz words. Well I’ve rounded up a few that have been swarming the web lately and I’ll be talking about whether or not they are worth the hype. For certain people some of these things can be very useful business investments that will make you lots and lots of money. For others they are just fancy new toys to keep up with Jones’ company.

Read the rest of this entry »