Convert or Die Blog by Darwin Hall

Certain things receive minimal credit with me. If I’m e-mailed a chain letter entitled, “Forward this to 3 other people so you’ll have a good day”, or something like that. I will simply ignore it. Why You ask why?! Well, because I’m not superstitious.

I feel the same when someone sends me an article in an attempt to make a point. For instance, told a client their websites navigation was broken. And their directory structure was a tragedy. As far as usability goes, broken thought architecture from beginning to end. Very few links on the site navigation traveled to information relative to the visitor’s root wants. Close to 65% of traffic from the front page bounced. To make things worst the average page view was seven. Which tells me right away that targeted search traffic is having a hard time finding what it wants.

My recommendation was to utilize an solid site structure. Unfortunately this recommendation was met with resistance from their web department.

Because my recommendation was data-driven using sound SEO techniques and 11 years experience driving targeted traffic I don’t think they could find a valid augment to counter the facts. So what did they do? They emailed the stakeholders an article about how Web Redesign is a bad strategy.

In any case, the article was not against redesign in general. It was referring to is when current sites process development responsible for the unoptimized state.

Being Critical

But on a brighter note, the beautiful thing about being a web marketer is having the opportunity to tap into my natural tendencies to be critical about the formation of data into information. My goal is never make assumptions about what will and will not work online. Instead allow the data to tell the story.

The Internet God’s will honor your obedience.

Never count the cost for success, but make it a point to revel in the glory of victory.*Convert traffic or Die trying* ~Darwin Hall - 2008

Google’s VP for Search Quality, Udi Manber, resently posted on Google’s Official blog about the search quality team and what they do to keep Google in the forefront of search.

This is a must read for any search marketer (especially natural search). Mr. Manber reveals some very interesting components of G’s algo that made me go… hmm? Some of the most interest things was the amount of testing they do to make sure their algo’s (androids) produce useful results. Also he mentioned language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, dicritics, misspellings) query models, time models and pesonalized models.

I found it to be a very insightful read and I felt it re-enforced things that I already knew, but didn’t have a name for. Check out the article of Google Search Quality.