inter:digital strategies

If you pick most markets on the web, you’ll always find dozens of options to choose from. Barring certain very tiny markets, you will have competition. The only real question is how much competition you’ll have and how YOUR site will be differentiated from theirs.

Some clients will claim that they are OBVIOUSLY different — company X uses 20% nylon fabric in their seat covers where OUR seat covers are 100% cotton!

Sorry, folks, but that’s fine print. Fine print is a good start, but even though your differentiating factors may be related to it, it’s not necessarily the right place to focus.

It’s a jumping off point, however. Knowing your products are fundamentally different in some way can give you ways to pursue a more visible, search-friendly means of separating your site from the herd.

Choose your focus

If you want to be unique, you should find a unique characteristic and stick with it. Don’t bill your site as the best source for safe children’s games but sell exactly the same products everybody else does. You’re diluting your message by allowing options which don’t fit your profile into your store.

Make it visible

If you’re selling children’s games, and your particular product focus is that they’re safe, make that OBVIOUS. If you downplay the importance of safety in your game selection, you’re lacking in clarity. Your visitors need assurance that you’re providing what they’re looking for. You can provide this assurance by writing text which clearly emphasizes your specialty and by repeating this information when appropriate on your product descriptions.

Identify your competitors

Not every similar site is necessarily a competitor. Not every site you THINK is a competitor is necessarily competing with you. Look very closely at the sites of those businesses who are:

• Selling the same products
• Located in the same area
• Advertising in the same publications

Look closely: examine every possibility. The worst thing you can say is “Company X is offering THIS function. We need to do this, too.” Instead, say “Company X is offering THIS function. We can do something else which is better.” You don’t need to offer a function just because everybody else in your topical area is providing it. You’re always best off providing better functionality than your competition. Not MORE functionality; BETTER functionality. Look for anything they provide which is useless, hard to understand, or just adds to site clutter without being useful.

So what does make a site stand out?

That’s a tough question, isn’t it? Being different can make you stand out – but doesn’t necessarily make you successful. Being unique will make you stand out – but if you’re TOO unique, you might not find your customer niche.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that it’s even your website which will make your site stand out. The products you offer and your service may do you more good in the long run than any website choices — but a good website may help you gain new customers faster.

In the last month, I’ve made a total of four posts to this blog. From that list of posts, only one has been of any real substance. The fact is (to keep things simple): I haven’t really had the time to dedicate to this blog. I’m considering shutting it down.

All posts would continue to be available; I’d simply absorb this blog into my web development blog. I’d do all the appropriate redirects to keep the resource available – but I’d be maintaining one fewer sites.
Life would be simpler.

I haven’t decided for certain yet – but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

Running a search marketing consulting company is not actually in my best interest. As a web developer, the majority of my clients actually are search marketing consultants. Does it make sense for me to run a business which competes with my clients? Not really. Especially when I really enjoy the development aspect more.

I still intend to write on search marketing — I think there are a lot of important issues where search marketing, usability, and accessibility intersect and I fully intend to explore those issues. When writing such cross-topic posts, however, I’ve been hindered by choosing where to publish them! I’d rather make that a bit simpler for myself, and send everything to one place.

Anybody who has an opinion on this subject, please do chime in!

The “nofollow” microformat, intended for use to indicate to search engines that you don’t want this link to be followed, has been the subject of quite a few interesting posts recently. On the one hand, there’s Loren Baker’s 13 Reasons why NoFollow Sucks:

The NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming.

The theory is that if spammers are spamming in blog comments to get better SEO and anchored links for their sites, NoFollow would render such spam useless. Problem is, spammers still spam.

And on the other front, Ahmed Bilal, in response with Defending NoFollow Against Angry SEOs:

Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years – it’s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.

Apart from Blogger spam (and their plans to control all of the world’s information and then sell it to the highest bidder ), NoFollow is possibly an issue that gets Google the worst possible press.

But is NoFollow really that bad a move, or is it something that’s being used to beat Google over the head by people who have grudges against Google?

Now, in general, my feelings are that nofollow has proved to be entirely useless as a method to prevent spam. It’s vaguely possible that spam would be 10 times worse today than it is had nofollow not been employed on many blogs by default…but I doubt it. Nofollow, however, does have perfectly valid and understandable uses. Ahmed exposes the most interesting value to the nofollow microformat by pointing out the actual purpose it carries:

Anti-spam plugins prevent spammers from posting spam on our blogs. NoFollow prevents spammy comments from polluting the search engines. There’s an important distinction – Google’s responsibility is to guarantee the best possible results. When did fighting the world’s spam fall under their responsibilities?

NoFollow was never expected to stem the tide of spam: it was, however, hoped to reduce the amount of spam in search indexes, allowing searchers to more easily retrieve valuable information.

Whether that has been a success is, certainly, a very different question. But that is the question we need to analyze in order to determine whether NoFollow has really been of any use, not whether more or less spam has been unleashed on the world; but whether we can find that spam in Google’s search index.

Now, this is a difficult question to test. This is far from the only means that Google uses to stop spam – the fact that you can’t find the spam sites which are being linked to in your spam comments using Google doesn’t necessarily mean that NoFollow had anything to do with it. If you’re anything like me, no spam comment has ever been on your blog long enough to be indexed. So, in order to identify spam which has been blocked by NoFollow, it seems you’d need to confirm the following points:

1. This spam site has been successfully linked to using the NoFollow microformat.
2. This spam site has only been linked to using the NoFollow microformat.
3. This spam site has not been removed from the Google index using some other means.

And I’m not sure whether we can do that. Google may be able to; but I can’t.