Listen, if anyone tells you that your website isn’t as important as printed marketing materials they’re dead wrong. Your website is your online identity and its look needs to match the branding of your company. How you setup the site and the visual elements directly effects the kind of traffic you get on the website. Key components and information about your company should be accessible.

Here are some things to watch out for when you’re putting a site together:

• If you have a search box, make sure it’s placed in a position that makes sense. Search boxes are very useful to have on a large scale website because it allows people to find the information they need quicker.
• You should absolutely have a phone number somewhere obvious on the website. Don’t bury your number deep within contact areas. Always consider placing the phone number somewhere near the top right of the website.
• Break up your content so that it’s readable. You have to realize that when people come to your website they are looking for particular pieces of information. They’re not coming to your website to read everything you have up there. They’re coming to you to find an answer to a very specific question. So, breaking up the content into different blocks or adding sub-headings helps people navigate your website easier.
• Widen your color palette beyond 2 colors. Look, some of us out there like to have things as uniform as possible, but in the marketing world you need buttons and other elements of your website to jump out at people. Now, I’m not suggesting that you use bright neon colors (please don’t do that). Just think about your marketing goals and understand how people browse a website.

Keeping your site in line with the companies goals is an important part of the overall process.

Websites are meant to bring in traffic and revenue. Don’t spend your money developing one if you’re not willing to think outside of the box.

Or will they? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Web experts like Jakob Nielson and Donald Norman seem to think the way we search for information will remain largely the same. Nielson, however, explains in an article by Search Engine Land that he doesn’t think search engine optimization services offered by Web development companies will be sufficient enough to get to the top of search engines like Google. He goes on to talk about how SER (search engine results) will probably be organized by what Google deems the most informative or helpful resources rather than positioning websites by the number of keywords stuffed into a title tag.

Something I thought was interesting was that Jakob is leaning more towards the ideology of behavior based SER. Hmm…Let’s ponder that for a moment. So, are you telling me that where and what I click on while I’m visiting a website will be captured by search engines in some fashion? This brings up another point which I won’t write much about right now, but by far, Google is dominating in the realm of search engine usage. Millions of us are using Google Analytics, chances are your site is using them right now. Analytics is a very powerful utility for your website and for Google. Why Google you ask? Because Google is saving all of this information!

If they wanted to switch gears tomorrow and change the face of the search engine world they could do it because they have all the information to back it up. That’s why behavior based SER is such a high possibility. Google knows where you’re clicking, reading, leaving, etc. Using this data they could monopolize the entire market by being the one search engine to display search engine results this way.

Would they monopolize the market? I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why. From a corporate standpoint, the information their collecting would be an extremely hot commodity and many of their competitors would pay a substantial price to see the information they’ve collected over the years. I’m not certain if that would qualify it to be unethical or not, but it’s definitely leaning towards the other side of the fence. As long as Googles terms and conditions mentions their data collecting policy they can do almost anything they want.

It’s not like they’re taking over the world…or are they?

As the world of search starts to become more natural to more people, a recent study has found searchers are less likely to use 1-3 generic keywords in their search, and are starting to get more detailed and use 4-6 words. This is known as long-tail searching.

This is according to a story from Hitwise, Longer Search Terms Becoming Popular.

To break it down - the first percentage is from February 2008 and the second is from February of 2009:

6-word searches: 4.38% –> 4.71%
5-word searches: 8.29% –> 8.72%
4-word searches: 14.53% –> 14.98%
3-word searches: 21.84% –> 21.68%
2-word searches: 24.73% –> 23.47%
1-word searches: 21.04% –> 20.48%

As you can see, six, five, and four word searches are increasing. While three, two, and one word searches are all decreasing.

This tells me that people are learning from search. Someone can’t just put in “coffee grinder” and expect to find what they’re looking for. They need to type in “krups automatic coffee grinder.”

This is exciting for another reason, as well. Research suggests that the longer a search term, the more inclined someone is to buying a particular item or service. This makes absolute sense, right? If you were just browsing for a toy car for your son, you’d type “toy car.” But if you were looking to buy a “yellow hot rod toy car”, you would search for that particular model with the intention to buy that product.

Ultimately, this trend is good for both searchers and for businesses. Searchers can skip the fluff and spam while going to websites that are selling exactly what they’re looking for. Optimizing your website using search engine marketing has never been so crucial. Find the audience looking to buy your product and rank high on the search engine result pages for business success!