There is one thing people don’t seem to get in the business world, and that’s admitting their mistakes when you’ve done something wrong.
Recently I was in a situation like this. I was involved in a group at the university I go to where we all where suppose to contribute to finishing our assignment. One of my group members didn’t contribute as much as the rest of us would hope (and expect). After the assignment was finished and handed in we told this group member that we would be handing in a group evaluation form where all the group members contributing to the assignment would be discussed and rated. This really upset the non-contributing group member and this made here react in a way that gave a different outcome. Instead of admitting here mistakes, she made a lame attempt to blame us for not including here well enough. This made the rest of the group upset and ended in us rating here even worse than planned just because of here trying to put the blame on us. A different approach could have been to admit to not contributing and state that you’re sorry, something, which may have lead to getting a higher rating on the group-evolution, forms.
This is something businesses should take into consideration as well. I’ve seen it many times before. Heck, I’ve even done it before myself. I would be willing to bet that most of the time you try to avoid a situation with not being truthful, it comes back to hunt you sooner or later. As they say, you can’t run away from the paste – so why try?
If you’ve done something wrong or done a bad job and you get caught with your pants down, why would you even bother trying to come up with lame excuses? Don’t. Just admit to your mistakes, offer to fix them and get on with it!
To end it all, here is a cartoon from Glasbergen.com.
Popularity: 64% [?]
Seomoz just jumped 10 steps ahead of all other SEO companies by making their new tool, Linkscape. This tool is amazing and gives everyone using it a huge competitive advantage. I bet Seomoz has their own private interface that provides them with a lot more info than they give us – why wouldn’t they have it? Their always going to be ahead of the rest by having this tool. Great work, Seomoz. My hat goes off to everyone who’s been working on this tool.
Read about it in their official blog post
Why is Linkscape great?
You can never get enough data, can you? Linkscape can be used to give you a picture on how the other search engines view your site. I bet Google is pissed off right now and their probably throwing darts at a picture of Rand over at the Google office.
So why is Linkscape great? It doesn’t only give Seomoz an competitive advantage, but by using it you can become a bit wiser too. This tool can be used to gain a good insight in your site is doing, how your competitors are doing and help you plan your future SEO strategy.
Some of the things you can do with Linkscape
You can use Linkscape to see how your site is doing in the search engines. Linkscape applies a lot of the same factors that the other big search engines uses, like Google’s Pagerank, to valuate domains and sites. Now you can get a full insight in how your site is doing.
Of course it won’t be 100% accurate if you want to figure out how Google values your site, but I’m pretty sure their close. So use this tool to see how your site is doing. Is it in a bad network? It probably is if all your inbound links are from other low-valued sites. You can also get a good overview of your inbound anchor links. Does it look like your spamming? If 99% of your ingoing links, from thousands of domains have the same anchor links – well, you might consider trying some new ones since this may be considered spamming by Google (unless your site is top notch).
You can also spy on your competitors. Do you have a competitor that outranks you no matter what you do? This tool might help you to figure out why. Maybe your competitors have some kick-ass inbound links from some big sites that are really relevant. Is there something you can do to get your link in on the same site? Or even better, have them replace the link too your competitor with your link? Your only limited by your own creativity!
Evaluate sites for partnership or maybe even a purchase. I’m not going to explain all over again what possibilities you have. Use Linkscape along with other tools to estimate the value of the site. This makes life so much easier.
If you’re working on link building campaigns this site is defiantly a useful tool. Use it to figure out where to buy links and how high the risk of buying a link on this site would be (Yes, I know – buying links is bad. I’m not telling you must go out there and buy links, so don’t start lecturing me, thank you!).
Popularity: 72% [?]
I normally check my facebook profile a couple of times a day. One thing that keeps surprising me is the number of companies trying to sell me their marketing services. I have marketing, seo and similar stuff in my interests on my facebook profile. What makes marketers out there believe that I’m interested in buying their services when I sell the exact same services myself?
I’m not interested in buying your SEO services. However, I am interested in clicking on your ad to see what company that thinks I might be within their target market. That means that they have to pay for my click and I’m sure there are several other marketers who does the same. After all, were all interested in ads, marketing and such stuff, so we do pay attention to ads – I know I do. And I can assure you I’m not a potential customer for some SEO firm.
One can argue that advertising yourself to your competitors can be a good think in case any of your competitors get overloaded with work and need to outsource some of its jobs. First of all, if their your direct competitor and your targeting the same market – do you really think they would give YOU any work? No, they would of course rather pick someone in the same line of business that targets another market (maybe another city or some other country). And if you’re not fighting over the same market, do you still think they would pick you? I would say no. They, like everyone else in this business, have friends whom they know, whom they trust and whom they know will get the job done.
So please all you marketers out there trying to land some new clients for your marketing services – don’t target those who have marketing in their interest. Their either your competitors or students.
Popularity: 60% [?]
I edited some pictures from a shoot with Elin Vardeberg. The pictures where taken this summer in Norway. I bet the river was freasing cold!
I did the editing in Adobe lightroom, which currently is my favorite tools for photo editing! It’s just great. Editing time goes so much faster now, so I will highly recommend learning lightroom to anyone who is even slightly interested in photography. It’s not just good for editing, but it’s also great for sorting and arranging your images, plus it makes publishing so much easier (I published the images to flickr using Lightroom!).
Thank you Adobe.
Popularity: 67% [?]
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Many have tried to define it before, with various luck. To me SEO is making your website more friendly and trusted by the search engines with the hope of better visibility in their search results on search terms related to your website. The popular search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN.
SEO is one of the most effective ways of driving relevant users to your site. What makes the users sent by the search engines relevant to your site is that the search engines strives to always deliver its users the best possible results when they search for something. Let’s say that you run a web shop selling mountain bikes. If the search engines would consider you the most relevant website for users searching after “mountain bikes” they would place you first in the search results for that keyword. As you probably can image, users searching for “mountain bikes” would be highly potential customers for a web shop selling mountain bikes. And the best thing is that no matter if the search engines sends you a 100 or 10 000 users on any given day, you don’t have to pay a single cent for it.
Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?
The majority of the traffic on the internet is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo. Today most users on the internet use the search engines as their main navigation to find information, products, services and more. Millions of searches are made each day, so if you’re selling a product or service there can be quite a lot to gain for search engine optimisation. If your site cannot be found when a potential customer is searching for your products or service… well, you’re missing out on a potential customer then. I’m sure you can image the importance of not doing so.
SEO can be considered a way of marketing. SEO makes your site more visible for users searching for something you can offer on your site. Many companies have experienced that SEO can make (or even break) an organisation’s success. Having targeted users sent to your can provide you with increased revenue, publicity and exposure. Investing in SEO is one of the smartest things an organisation can do with their internet strategy, either it’s paying a professional to do it taking the time to do it themself.
(It’s worth mentioning that many of the search engines categorized under “Other” get their search results from Google).
Why can’t the search engines make my site visible without SEO?
Good question. Why should the search engines pick your site as the most relevant to a search term? Image a highly trafficked street. This street has five hair salons, all targeting the same customers. You want to get a new haircut, so which one do you choose? There are several factors you have to consider. Which one gives you more value for money? Will you get the haircut you want? Do you like the inside of their salon? Do you like the people and the service they provide? These are just some of hundreds of questions Google tried to answer when evaluating which site should come first when users search for a specific term. Considering the fact that every day there are millions of new sites that get launched and another millions of sites that change or get improved somehow, it’s very hard for the search engines to keep track of everything that happens on the web and that’s why it’s important for websites to make sure their accessible and presented in a way that makes the search engines job easier.
So how does SEO work?
When talking with clients and explaining how SEO works I like to speak of the 3 cornerstones of SEO. These three factors are closely related to each other and if you do a good job with all of them you are more likely to get good results in the search engines.
First of we have the technical bit. The way your website code and framework is structured plays an important role to how the search engines read your website. There are a lot of things that can be done on this part, varying from serious issues with your site to not so serious ones. The worst thing a website could possible to would be to actually block the search engines from reading their website. You’d be surprised how many organisations do this without knowing it.
The second part is the content on your website. What content you have, the quality and uniqueness of the content and the way your content is presented on your websites plays an important role. It doesn’t matter if your content is better than your competitor’s ones if you’re not presenting it in a good way, both for your users and the search engines. It’s important to do research to find out how to present the content on your website. Keyword research one of many ways to do this (this will be discussed later on the blog).
The content part and the technical part are obviously related to each other. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if you’re technical bit of the site is a mess and the search engines can’t find or understand your content. And the other way around, it doesn’t help how good and structured your site is on the technical part if your content is no good.
One of the “traps” many SEOs fall into when doing the technical bit and working on their content is that they focus so much on being search engine friendly that they forget their users. On the internet, you have to find a way to please all parts.
The last part, but for from the least important one, is the trust your site have. The trust your site have is mainly measured by the links pointing to your site. A website with good trust in the search engines needs to have a steady stream of new incoming links, from relevant and natural sources. This is another part where many people go wrong when they try to buy links from websites in bad neighbourhoods.
Read more about Search Engine Optimisation in my SEO Guide.
Popularity: 80% [?]
Being the owner of a larger webmaster forum in Norway I figured I should do my duty to the webmaster community and report back on how well Google Chrome have been accepted among webmasters. Norwegians are normally known for being early adopters when it comes to the internet, specially the webmasters.
Here is the stats:
Firefox: 45%
Internet Explorer: 36%
Opera: 8%
Safari: 5%
Chrome: 3%
These are the stats for the last 10 days. I read a post from Patrick over at Blogstorm where he predicts that Chrome will be bigger than Firefox by Christmas this year. I would just say I disagree. Unless Google steps it up a few notches, there is no way they’ll reach Firefox’s market share by Christmas. Here are the reasons why:
- Firefox have fans, Chrome just have users.
- Firefox have been hyped for years. True Firefox fans (the same that actively promote their favourite browsers won’t start promoting anything new any day soon)
- Chrome is owned by Google. People worry about their privacy.
- Sneaky Google tried playing Big Brother, but changed their mind.
- The interface doesn’t look THAT good. Honestly.
- Doesn’t really play that well with JavaScript, yet.
So no, I don’t see Google Chrome getting anywhere at the moment. Sure, they might be promoted by the biggest internet site in the world, but believe it or not, that’s not going to be enough.
What are your thoughts?
Popularity: 73% [?]
I’ve updated my blog.
Congrats to me.
Popularity: 72% [?]
So you want to setup a web shop and you hire a company to build your site for you. You’ve already given the layout and colours of the site a lot of thought and you know how you want it. Is this a good idea? In most cases it’s not.
- You, the store owner, don’t know what sells
- You’re customers don’t know what sells
- Even the media company won’t know right away what sells
A great design doesn’t mean you’ll maximise your sales. Would you rather have a perfect design with 50 sales a day or a good design with 80 sales a day? If you’re thinking business, you would go with the design that gives you the best conversion. And that’s exactly why your opinion and what’s a great design is almost worthless. Even your customers don’t know. The only way to find out is to test it. Put one design up against another. Move the elements around. Change the content. Change everything. The answer will always be in your results.
This is why there is no point in asking your friends or you mom if your site looks good. It won’t matter. If you’re looking for sales all that matters is that your site maximises your conversions.
Keep that in mind the next time you think you have the best looking site in the crowd or next time you ask a agency to build you the site that will sky rocket your sales.
Popularity: 71% [?]
