July 26, 2008
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I recently covered this topic on my specialized physician marketing blog, but felt that it was worth a reprint on Fast Company. You can read the original "Are You Selling Your Cosmetic Services Too Hard?" entry, for a more focused discussion on how you should be selling your services on the Internet.
See, when marketing on the Internet, one has to grasp the fundamental
concept that people first and foremost use the Web for information
exchange. Yes, often times it is the purchase of a product or service
that they are researching, but before they make any such decision, it
is gross information that will ultimately satisfy a Web browser.
A Web site, especially in the corporate realm, should be more than a sales pitch. While your user interface should act as a digital storefront to some degree, it will ultimately prove
helpful for you to think of your online domain as a portal for industry
specific information first and foremost. The Internet was developed
with free, open exchange of knowledge in mind. Today’s browsing
behavior is testament to that concept.
It is
imperative that you supply your potential patients and eager Web
visitors with free access to your expert advice and professional
recommendations regarding your business' area of expertise. Only after
they feel satisfied and secure with your helpful advice will they think
of pursuing a consultation or treatment at your medical facility.
This soft-sell approach is necessary if you wish to succeed in your online marketing endeavors. Such tactics should not only be applied to your Web copy, but rather in passive sales pitches that appear in the realms of
social media marketing, when drafting press releases or when authoring
your blog posts.
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 26, 2008
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Not a week goes by where I don't espouse the virutes of corporate blogging. Blogging regularly every week is perhaps the easiest way to add fresh, newsworthy content to your Web site. These updates are key for market visibility, as search engines count a total number of pages indexed on a domain and new additions to a Web site as key metrics when determining your position on their results pages.
By implementing a blog on your primary domain, you can write about the latest, breaking news that is going on in your industry. Because you essentially are an expert in your field of choosing, there is a great chance that if you publish an aggregation of news in conjunction with your professional opinion, you will have good chance of getting your blog scraped for quotables or for reprint by larger sources in the online and print media forums.
For more information about adding a corporate blog to your Web site or to learn about for-hire blogging services, check out the original article that this post references: "Physician Blogging Revisited: Keeping With the Times" at cosmeticSEO.com.
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 26, 2008
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For front-end developers and Web designers, now is the time to no longer to feel initimidated by server-side scripting languages. Since the early 2000s when big Web companies began opening their stores of data to developers via simple APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) there have been clever ways in which Web masters can take advantage of such dynamic data harvesting.
The integration of select APIs into your Web site may have the
potential to generate a great amount of traffic to your domain by resulting in large amounts of relevant, contextual content added to your Web pages. Remember,
that this relation to traffic and increased Web activity is correlation and not causation. We are assuming that, say, if
you were to automatically fill a section of your page with related
links and blurbs from Yahoo! News that just so happen to reference your targeted keyword phrase, you have essentially added quite
a bit of topically relevant content to your Web site. This new, fresh
and dynamically updating content will subsequently aid in your ranking
on the search engine results pages.
Some of the Web companies that offer APIs are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr. Yahoo! in particular offers easy and various ways in which you can get at their data. Based on RESTful architecture, Yahoo! allows developers to access their Web content, page data, news, images and maps data stores.
Typically, these APIs allow you to use just about any popular programming language and can return results in various different output formats.
For more information on using APIs to spice up your Web content, you can read my three part series where I walk you through a sample Yahoo! News scraping application at ITKnowledge Exchange:
Adding User Interactivity - Part I; More on Using APIs to Spice Up Your Web Content - Part II;and Building Your News Service API - Part III.
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 22, 2008
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Since I inundate myself with code on a dailly basis - be it procedural or declarative - it is quite alarming when I realize that many Web designers and developers are still using simple HyperText in error.
One of the prime mistakes I see rather often is the misuse of the hierarchical header tags. These header elements are referenced by the h1 through h6 tags and have the ability to separate your pages content into contextually relevant chunks thereby also giveing your code more linguistic meaning.
Of most importance from a search engine optimization perspective is the h1 tag, which serves as a document's on-page title. The title tag, aptly named, is used rather to supply the document's title in its meta-data. Given the nature of titles, you should only declare one h1 per page.
As headers are hierarchical in behavior, the next header tag you should use after your h1 is an h2. This will target a more contextually specific page division.
When increasing specificity after an h2, use an h3. If you were moving onto the next topic that was more or less within the same scope as your h2 - you would then use another h2 for the next content division.
Think of the proper use of headers as analogous to skimming through a big novel or technical book. You have one title, a few parts, and within those parts you have the chapters. Since Web copy on a given page does not exceed very long lengths (typically), you shouldn't have the need to go past the h3 tag when drafting your markup.
Back to our analogy: book title -> h1; book "parts" -> h2; book chapters -> h3.
I provide a more detailed example of how to properly use HTML headers in "SEO How-To: Using Hierarchical Headers." Also, I discuss header usage outside the scope of Web copy body text (using headers for headlining sidebars, navigation, etc.).
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 22, 2008
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On July 14, 2008, Outsell Inc., projected that companies will spend over 105 billion dollars on online advertising - well over the $98.5 billion projected for TV, Radio and Movie advertising budgets combined. It should be noted however, that these figures also included the cost of Web site development, contstruction and maintenance - and in my opinion, rightly so.
The Internet, just like TV, Radio and Movies is also a platform for advertising. However, it shouldn't only be treated as such. Yes, a successful business Web site needs to consider the finer points of online marketing when contracting its construction, however, the finer points of online marketing is essentially creating a Web presence that is loaded with informative content, unique applications and aninteractive user experience that will send your competitors into the backseat of your industry.
So, yes. The Internet is more than a platform for advertising. It is an extension of our physicial world which also has a marketing mechanism. Craving out your company's top spot in this virtual or digital landscape by keeping innovation in mind will automatically fuel the marketing component.
I originally spoke about this topic on blog that relays information for the medical industry. You can read the original entry here at "Online Advertising Will Surpass TV, Radio and Movies."
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 22, 2008
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Not a week goes by where I don't - somewhere - make mention of the importance of having a blog installed on your primary domain. See, just having the ability to add content to your Web site without contacting your Web master (if you currently don't have a content management system), is worth the trival five-minute installation alone. And if you think you have the motivation to post entries on a regular basis, even better.
Search engines crave new content - there is no doubt about it. If you are adding three blog posts per week to your site, you are essentially keeping the spiders crawling on a continual basis. By doing this, you are also adding three good pages of content to your domain (excluding tag, category, archive pages - which should be included in your Robots Protocol). Adding these pages beefs up yet another metric used to calculate your position in the SERPs.
What I like to do, when runnning short of creative ideas for blog entries, is to find the latest breaking news for a landmark topic in my related industry. I then sum it up in a meaty post and give my two cents on the exposition. To add more reputability, I'll add on some anchors to external resources, information, etc. The sooner I get this entry out, the sooner I have the chance to have journalists scrape my entry itself or I'll have a better chance of ranking for a soon-to-be popular keyword phrase. This keyword phrase will be the topic of the original news source that will undoubtedly have a great amount of people searching for it when it makes the national news. Even if the queries die out after the original source article loses popularity I'll have gained some pretty impressive visibility in the long run as well.
I seem to write about this on a weekly basis, and I hope there are a few out there who are heeding this advice.
You can read more about this technique at "Marketing This Season's Fad Procedures" where I flesh out the above with a medical-industry-specific example and at "Physician Blogging Revisited: Keeping with the Times" - the formal entry that inspired me to relay this topic on Fast Company.
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 19, 2008
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If there are any late approaching developers who are just getting their feet wet with proper declarative markup, they may find themselves running back to table based coding quicker than they expected. Most browsers handle CSS quite differently from each, and when working with such temperamental on-page elements like HTML forms, many developers start running for the hills.
Using nested tables for forms, however, is semantically incorrect. According to the W3C, if you are not marking up tabular data, you should not be using table based markup.
Floats are a convenient way around such problems, yet their correct implementation requires knowledge of cross-browser CSS targeting - if you want them to behave the right way.
For example, if you were to float an item in a parent container, you are essentially removing bespoke from the flow of the document. What happens next is that the parent container will collapse, essentially losing its intended layout.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to use an easy-clearing or clear-fix method that will expand the collapsed float.
For my preferred method of fixing such problems (and this works in every browser - even their legacy versions), navigate over to "I Still Ain't Afraid of No Floats: Part II" at my ITKnowledgeExchange Blog entitled "Taming the Wild Wild Web."
Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.
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July 18, 2008
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I recently started guest blogging at ITKnowledgeExchange under a column called "Taming the Wild Wild Web." Ill give a formal introduction to the column here only because I'll be discussing largely the same topics and development best practices I do here:
Taming the Wild Wild Web will focus on the importance of
developing sites by keeping Web standards in mind. Great attention will
be paid to front-end coding practices using advanced XHTML and CSS.
Learn to create effective user experiences by utilizing progressive
enhancements with Javascript and how to implement and integrate
back-end code to simplify and demystify the abstractions laid over the
Internet. The relative importance of utilizing Web standards to promote
search engine optimization, accessibility and usability will also be
covered in great detail.
For my maiden-post, I covered the importance of the correct usage of floats when styling your Web documents.
However, when doing so, I had to make a distinction between designers and developers to further my thesis.
This got me thinking about the real difference between the two and has inspired me to write a length article about the topic at hand. So, as I do see more community interaction on this domain than any other, I'd like to open the question up for user feedback:
What is the difference, to you, between Web designers and developers?
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July 18, 2008
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After my analogy between LEGOs, Play-Doh and CSS (see "A Bettery Way for Organizing CSS"), I'll go out on a further limb and compare the best practices for URL canonicalization with what the Catholic Church has been doing since the Second Vatican Council.
So like church canon, your URLs need to point to definitive and unique sources if you don't want to get caught up in a duplicate content filter on the major search engines.
I explain the analogy in further detail on the flexible philosophy with my URL Canonicalization, the Catholic Church and Your Web Site entry, but on Demystifying the Web I'll save you the reading and provide you with the SEO best practices:
If your site is hosted on an Apache Web server, you want to set up .htaccess files to make sure all URL requests point to either a www or non-www version of your domain. We also want to fix the problem of trailing slashes and default document redirects. Both of these things will shave off your typical duplicate content problems on new domain installations.
Follow the steps in my URL canonicalization entry after you create an ASCII encoded file called .htaccess in your root directory.
Oh yeah, this does not apply to those who are hosted on IIS servers unless you have software that imitates Apahce's mod_rewrite functions.
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July 18, 2008
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I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm going to.
Title tags are extremely important when determining a page's position in the search engine results pages!
Again, I repeat, in bold face:
Title tags are exremely important when determining a page's position in the search engine results pages!
Ok. With great attention and care should you craft the title of your Web documents. They carry huge semantic meaning as they are a component of the page's meta-data - that is, the information about the page itself.
With this being said, the title tag is the first place you want your targeted keyword appearing and as close to the beginning as possible at that.
A good heuristic to follow is keeping the length of the title to about 65 characters or less as that will typically be the cut off size for most major search engines.
But forget the search engines for now. The title of your page is what is going to attract your visitors. Well, this and anchor text, but how often do your get to control outside sources' anchor text?
So, when you craft your title, design it with tabloid-like headlines in mind. Grab the reader's attention. Go check out the front-page of Digg and scan for titles that begin with "[Company Name here] - Our News." I'll save you the time. You won't find garbage like that on the front-page.
Again, engage the reader and use your targeted keyword.
For more about crafting good titles, check out the original entry I wrote "From Title Tags to Traffic: Trapping Topical Web Visits."
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