In This Issue:
1. Web Site Planning
2. In the News - Amazon Launches A9.com
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Keyword-based Domain Names
5. Wrapping It Up
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Web Site Planning
After hemming and hawing a couple days ago, I added an article
to our web site's news database called "The Problem, the Balloon,
and the Four Bedroom House." The article comes from A List
Apart, an online magazine for web development people. You web designers
and programmers will probably appreciate the article as much as
I did, but in the end I decided to post it because it also offers
a beneficial message for those of you who own businesses and are
reading this because you want to know more about doing business
online.
The message? The most important part of any new project is the
beginning. That's when you go through the "discovery" of
goals and the development of plans to reach those goals. It's when
you create that blueprint that you can refer back to time and again
down the road during development, when the smallest of details
often blur the big picture.
This may seem painfully obvious -- "well of course you have
to have a plan, Matt!" -- but in reality, we recently lost
a client because that company had no interest in nor understanding
of the need to go through this "discovery" procedure.
This company took its business elsewhere after we asked what their
goals were and how they wanted the site built to meet those goals.
Imagine hiring a contractor to build you a custom home and the
contractor trying to do it without asking what kind of house you
want built....
In any case, I hope the business owners reading this will take
a look at the article. It's written for us web geeks, but I
think you'll find something worthwhile in there, as well.
The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House
A List Apart
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In The News
Within an hour or two after last week's newsletter was sent out,
Amazon.com made a splash by formally entering the search engine
industry with A9.com. Amazon.com? Doing web search? Yep.
On the surface, it's got an awful color scheme and it doesn't
look very interesting from a search standpoint. It uses Google
search
results; it adds in a book search from Amazon's store; it gives
some extra information about web sites with a "SIte Info" link
that shows up in the SERPs. Yawn.
But there's a lot under the hood if you're willing to play around
with it and think ahead to what they can do with A9 down the
road. If you have an Amazon.com account (which is pretty much
everyone,
right?) and you're willing to login with your Amazon account
details when you use A9.com, that's when things start to get
interesting.
A9.com will remember your "search history", including
all the terms you've searched for, which sites you clicked on,
and when you clicked on them. The benefit here, at minimum, is
the convenience of re-searching on a term you searched on a month
ago and instantly being able to see that site you went to for the
product or information you wanted.
But the possibilities go well beyond that: the more you use A9.com,
the more your "search profile" will develop. And the
more your profile develops, the smarter Amazon can be in giving
you the search you want. Remember a couple weeks back Google
introduced "Personalized
Search", where they try to tailor search results to your
interests? Amazon already knows a ton about me and what interests
me, now
A9.com lets them start using it to customize my searching. Just
as they do in the store, picture this: You want information about
digital cameras. You go to A9.com and search for "digital
cameras." A9.com gives you the search results, with this
extra feature: "Searchers looking for DIGITAL CAMERAS clicked
on these web sites...." There's nobody better on the web
at personalization than Amazon, and A9 is their attempt to bring
personalization to
the search industry. They're not making recommendations like
that yet, but they'll be able too soon.
And then there's the commerce aspect -- the integration of search
and commerce. That's what Google wants to do with its Froogle
product search, right? Well here's Amazon taking it to a new
level. They
don't point you to web sites that sell the products, they sell
it themselves! Sure, A9.com has just a book search now, but you
can bet that'll expand soon enough.
A9 is still in "beta" right now, but it's a very interesting
starting point. What remains to be seen is how Google will respond
to having its results used and enhanced like this. Is this the
point where the Google-Amazon partnership turns into a competition?
A9 also offers a toolbar with a unique "diary" feature
that lets you save notes about web sites as you visit them. Learn
more about that on the A9 Help pages.
A9.com
A9.com Help
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More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
Search engine users: Loyal or blase?
April 19, 2004 - Search Engine Watch
Searchers are loyal to their favorite search engine, and stubbornly
stick with it even if they don't initially find what they're
looking for, according to a new survey of web users.
Can Amazon unplug Google?
April 15, 2004 - Business 2.0
A9 is a credible step toward making a search engine that knows
you and acts as your agent online.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
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This Week's Q&A
Matt,
One thing I've noticed about the new Google design that you mentioned
a month or two ago is that when you do a search, Google now
shows the word (or words) that you searched for in bold if the
word
is part of the web page address. Does this mean that it's important
to have our keywords in our domain if we want to rank better
in Google?
Kelly
Hi Kelly -- The answer to your question is "no", but
let me clarify what you're talking about for anyone who didn't
follow the question.
If you search
Google for "travel" (without the quotes),
the first site listed as i write this is Travelocity. (Look below
the sponsored ads and the News results.) And where it shows the
web address for Travelocity in green, the word "travel" is
in bold.
In fact, "travel" is bold in the URL of
any page that has that word as part of the page's address. This
is
new -- Google didn't make keywords in URLs bold before their
recent redesign. Back to your question. This was asked not long ago at one of
the web development bulletin boards I read, and a Google representative
replied: "These are only changes to the UI; the scoring/weights/algorithms
for things like matches in the URLs haven't changed." (UI
= user interface, meaning the stuff you see on the page)
There are some web developers and search engine optimizers that
believe it's a good idea to have keywords in your domain name,
and you've probably seen sites with addresses like keyword-keyword2-keyword3.com.
But there's very little evidence to suggest that kind of domain
helps your search rankings. The more important issue is that
domains like that are often associated with web sites of, shall
we say,
questionable character. So I'd avoid going out of your way
to get a new domain with your keywords in it.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
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Wrapping it Up
Highly recommended: NPR recently concluded a week-long series
of news reports called "The Search Engine Wars" which
offers a good, albeit simplified, overview of the business of search
engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. You can listen online at
NPR's web site. Each report runs just about 5-minutes, so it won't
take up too much of your time. And I promise the typical business
owner will learn a lot.
The Search Engine Wars
Click on the name of each report (i.e., "Old School Search", "The
Breakthrough", etc.) and at the top of the corresponding page
you'll see a link letting you listen to the audio of that report.
Enjoy.
See you next week! Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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