There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.
- SEM
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
- SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
- Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
- Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
- PPC
Pay Per Click
Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search - the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing - bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
- SMO / SMM
Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.
I recently had to setup a search facility on a website driven by SQL Server 2005 Express. My natural choice was SQL Server’s Full-Text Search feature, but setup was not entirely intuitive, and the web was full of misinformation. I’ve put together a tutorial to save you time.
If you’re not sure if your have Full-Text installed, read my post on installing SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search.
Once, Full-Text is installed, managing your index is actually very simple:
- Browse to the tables of your database, right click and select ‘Design’
- In the main window, right click and select ‘Fulltext Index…’
If you see the message, ‘You need to define one or more full-text compatible indexes on the table to create a full-text index’ and the ‘Add’ button is greyed out, it’s because you don’t have a column the database can use to uniquely identify each row. Make sure you have a primary key, and if you’ve no success, start your troubleshooting with this video - it discusses unique indexes about 1/3 of the way through.
- Otherwise, click ‘Add’, and you have a new index.
- To configure the columns in the index, click the ‘…’ button next to ‘Columns’
- For each column, select the column, and select the appropriate language
To understand why the language parameter is important, see my post on use of the FORMSOF and INFLECTIONAL keywords in SQL Full-Text Search
It’s that easy! Any questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.
It is often hard for those needing a website to justify the costs of design. Design is often viewed as a ‘talent’ before a learned skill, and as something that we either have or we don’t, and it naturally follows that if you ‘have it’ should be able to produce it without greart expensive.
Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent presentation at the An Event Apart 2007 conference (Chicago) that helps communicate the complexity and process of design, and the value a strong design can contribute.
Luke’s presentation focuses on the web form, which is any interface that accepts user input - common examples are login/registration, enquiry, and eCommerce checkout forms. It’s clear that many businesses depend upon their customers completing these forms to generate, maintaining and convert leads, and logically follows that the quicker and easier a form is to complete, the more likely those customers will do so.
Luke presents three simple variants of webform design to demonstrate the potential impact on revenue the design of the form can have. Each form input field has a label that tells the customer what information to put in that field. Luke’s variations placed the label above the field, and to the left of the field, either left-aligned or right-aligned. His referenced studies found that customers completing forms with right-aligned labels surprisingly did so twice as quickly as those with left-aligned labels, but that quicker still were those customers completing forms with top-aligned labels.
Clearly, big differences can be made to conversion rates by assessing the quality of your web form. Luke’s presentation is available on his blog, and goes on to discuss the consideration of required/optional fields, primary/secondary actions, contextual grouping and progressive disclosure, tabbing, the path to completion, inline validation and assistance, and feedback mechanisms.
He also provides excellent example of both good and bad web forms in a very accessible presentation that will ensure you know what to expect when commissioning the design of a web form.
“Web Standards” is like another of these modern-day web buzzwords, like “Web 2.0″ and “The Blogosphere”. But buzzwords become popular for a reason - let me give this one a simple definition, and explain the business benefits of web standards, namely reduced website costs and risks.
Web standards are, quite simply, a set of coding guidelines developed by a consortium of experts to reduce the risks involved in producing a website. The simple principle is that if everybody codes in the same way, the standard way, then everybody is compatible. More >>
