Ideas for Business

I agree. Spammers are no fun to hang out with. That’s why you need to be real careful about your comment policy. WordPress automatically makes all links no-follow. That means a link that you create from a WordPress blog back to your own blog does not compute for link building purposes. Get all the links you want and you are not going to help your link building strategy.

But, wait a minute …

WordPress has a plugin. Bloggers who install the WordPress do-follow plugin are setting themselves up for spam. As soon as you make all of the links on your blog pass on the link juice then everybody and pet dog wants to get in on the action. You essentially become the easiest girl in your class. Is that the kind of reputation you want?

I understand the desire for webmasters to want to reward their comments with the much coveted link credit. But know that when you do that you are opening up the spam dam so the flood can rush through. A better alternative might be the plugin that passes do-follow juice only to the top commentators on your blog. New commentators must earn the right to get that juice by leaving well-thought-of useful comments over a period of time.

Sounds like a good compromise to me. I’m sure Matt will agree.

Read why blogging is an essential business practice.

Well given that I have a bit of an unfair timezone advantage right now (GMT+6) I may be one of the first folk to gaze on the new Irish Times website:

IrishTimes.com - New Irish Times Website homepage

So what do I think?

So this is all subjective, and should be read in that light. The first thing I have to say is that this is a great improvement over old ireland.com site. It’s looks like a newspaper website. The homepage uses a 3-column layout, and for now I’m basking in the vista of an ad-free Irish Times (wont last more than an hour or two I’m sure, and even then I can easily block it all).

There are a few things that I really don’t get/like. The main navigation tab mechanism is far too subtle, and really does not tell me in a glance where I am (the main purpose of the tab function):

Irish Times Main Navigation Tabs

Personally the location indicator just isn’t obvious enough. If you drill down to a further level I think it becomes more visible:

Irish Times Main Navigation Tabs Tier 2

And again, this time changing to a different Tier 1 page:

Irish Times Main Navigation Tabs Tier 1 New

I think this could be easily improved by using a new background colour for both the current Tab and the sub-navigation. Convention is a very strong tool, and this is how using an active background colour might appear:

Mock Up of Irish Times Main Nav Using Active Background Colour

Would anyone agree that the active state background-colour contributes to an easier indication of current location? My poor mock-up may not be the best example however, and a strong high-contrast solour would do the job better I’m sure.

Related to this - I think the tabs used in the Popular Stories element are rather poorly designed:

Irish Times Popular Tab Function

“Site Index”?

Again, why break with convention? It’s a “Site Map” so why call it a “Site Index”? The feature itself is very slick, using Javascript to ease the hidden element into sight, and the layout and design of the site map is great:

Irish Times Site Map (Index) Function

People are used to looking for a ’site map’. That’s the convention, and I can see no advantage at all in using terminology some people will not be familiar with.

Lightbox

When I was viewing the page without CSS (I often do this to see what the spider sees… sad eh?) I noticed large chunks of text that I couldn’t see on the rendered page. Always triggers a suspicion with me. But I found the text in quite a good Lightbox implementation:

Irish Times Homepage Lightbox

I like that, and I’m sure it was controversial given that they could have increased their Page Impressions by simply putting each image on it’s own page.

Where’s the fold?

On my current set-up the Homepage fold is in a rather interesting position:

Irish Times Homepage with Fold Indication

Now that fold location will be different for most users, but the main problem it causes for me is that the fold occurs at a horizontal element which spans the full width of the page. That in turn removes a visual cue that there is more content further down the page. Had the fold occurred somewhere at the 3 column area, or if the page retained the 3 columns deeper down, I’d have an instant indication that there was more. A very small issue, but worth noting all the same. (For an interesting read about how important visual indicators are have a search for info on why Google included the copyright on their results pages).

Other Nice Features

The Carousel looks nice, but I have the feeling the CTA isn’t clear enough. Do I click on these, and if so where will it bring me? Maybe it’s just me (it all too often is BTW), and I’m sure many people will day it’s obvious. But it made me stop and think for a minute (always a bad sign IMO):

Irish Times Homepage Carousel Feature

Other thing worth noting is that some of the description below each item are wrapping down into the overflow which is hidden. Small bug, and I’m sure it will be fixed. Same thing happening in the Masthead feature, which I’m sure will be cleaned up:

Irish Time Masthead Feature

I think the the homepage voting feature is very much adrift (did you even notice it?), and there’s something weird about the red play button on the 3 video thumbnails that I just cant figure out. Of course no blogs as we’d expect from the IT [Update: Damien found them, I'm obviously blind]. The weather feature is a great touch (hover over the weather in the masthead).

The Proof Is In The Eating…

You know… Content Is King. So possibly the most important pages are the actual story pages. Other than the boilerplate issues I mentioned above, you cant fault the story pages. Great layout, obtrusive ad elements pushed away from main content element, and nothing to break the flow of the readable content:

Irish Times Story Page

You Haven’t mentioned SEO Once?

Well there’s not too much to say just yet. But here’s a few things I noticed.

1. Homepage article URLs after rotating inside site?

I’m not sure what will happen, but I noticed that homepage articles have /homepage/ in the URL. It will be interesting to see what happens after they rotate off homepage - will the URL change? Need to watch that one, but for now I’m not sure.

2. Robots.txt contains a few unneeded lines in there that just duplicate earlier Disallows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dublin/
Disallow: /eurotimes/
Disallow: /survey/
Disallow: /promotion/
Disallow: /Storage/
Disallow: /ITImage/
Disallow: /photosales/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /Storage/
Disallow: /ITImage/

User-agent: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler
Disallow: /photosales/

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /photosales/

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /photosales/

User-agent: nutch
Disallow: /photosales/

User-agent:* should cover all the other User-agents listed below (if they are well-behaved), which makes those extra directives superfluous.

3. http://Ireland.com 301 redirected to www.irishtimes.com:

http://ireland.com/

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Age: 20
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:20:03 GMT
Content-Length: 230
Connection: Keep-Alive
Via: NS-CACHE-6.0: 101
Etag: "KXJLNKAMKKTLYTZXY"
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.irishtimes.com/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Meanwhile www.ireland.com is giving a 403 Forbidden. Update: this was obviously something to do with migration as it’s since resolving:

Ireland.com Homepage Lightbox

Don’t you just hate it when you Lightbox doesn’t cover the full page height?

4. Damn Ugly redirects…
Try www.ireland.com:

http://www.ireland.com/

<html>
<head><meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=index.jsp"></meta></head>
<body></body>
</html>

Which leads to:

http://www.ireland.com/index.jsp

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:04:11 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store
Expires: 0
Location: http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive

Which heads off to:

http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:04:13 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store
Expires: 0
Location: http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie?pid=0
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/illegal

Well it seems that the http://ireland.com 301 redirect to www.irishtimes.com has been fixed now, but given the canonical URL issue with http://ireland.com combined with those 3 redirects above I have a feeling ireland.com is going to cause some indigestion…

And How About Ireland.com?

Not much to say really - doesn’t flick any switches for me personally:

New Ireland.com Website

I’m sure they are going to build this out over time, but I had expected Ireland.com to become a destination portal. There’s lots of opportunities to monetise this baby - I wonder have they got an affiliate marketer in there yet?

Conclusion

Apologies for the long post (and God forbid you’re on dial-up for all those images…). Overall I think www.irishtimes.com is going to be a great success. I hope that they iteratively improve some of the boilerplate items that could be more usable. I have to commend the Irish Times for putting users ahead of monetisation - it’s clear to see that content has the highest priority, and adverts have not been positioned to disrupt the flow as is so often the case with newpapers these days. Compared to many other news sites I would have to say that I’m very, very impressed with the new Irish Times. Well done IT!

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Local businesses have special needs, or do they? Well, whether your business is local or global you’ll still need to perform search engine optimization on your website, blog, and other online marketing collateral. But how you go about it will be different.

An online florist only needs to optimize her website for words like “florist,” “flowers”, and related terms. But a local florist in Flint, Michigan will have to optimize her website to receive local traffic also. How do you do that?

There are several ways to perform local optimization on your website. The most obvious way is to include your brick and mortar address on your website. But are there other things you can do as well?

First, let’s clarify what we mean by including your address on your website. Just adding it to your Contact page isn’t enough. It needs to be on every page of your website. If you create a footer and include your footer on every page of your website then that will take care of that. Your footer should include physical address including zip code, phone number, a link to your contact form, mailing address (if different than your physical address), and links to other web properties like your blog.

Other than your footer, however, there are other ways to optimize your local business website:

• Include your local geotargeting terms in your keywords meta tag
• In your description, include your primary geotargeted keyword
• Add your zip code to your keywords meta tag
• Mention all the local communities you serve by name on at least one page of your website
• Set up a separate landing page for each community or zip code that you do business in
• When link building, use local geotargeted phrases for anchor text
• Include your city name in the URL of your web address (for instance, BooksinFlint.com)

These are some very simply ways to go about optimizing your website for local search terms. And since you are dealing with a smaller geographic area it shouldn’t that difficult to rank for your important keywords.

…set up shop and offer commercial PR services to Irish companies wishing to engage the online channel.

Not wishing to be outdone by Grandad, and just to tell the world that I too joined the illustrious list, I can announce that I too was on the distribution for the PR detailing the latest news about the Irish Times.

No more Pay-Wall, and moving to IrishTimes.com

I had heard about the changes when I met Roan Murphy (Commercial Analyst at Digitalworx) at the inaugural meeting of the IIA’s Internet Marketing Work Group. Nice guy, and I’m sure quite busy right now. At the time he mentioned some of the forthcoming changes, I of course had to ask about how they intended handling the migration (my mind has now been programmed to think first about crawlers…). It will be interesting to see how that’s all set up tomorrow when the sites are separated out.

But Back To Damien…

I don’t think there’s a brighter mind in Ireland when it comes to using the social aspects of the Internet to create dialogues. Not one that I’ve connected with anyway. I use the word ‘dialogues’ because that really is the basis of the social web - multiple interactions between parties. No more of this push-marketing now you know.

The PR I received is a great example of how old-school media technicians are still grappling with how the rules change online. Here’s a short list of what I see wrong with the Irish Times PR, and why I’m talking about the PR rather than the message:

1. Email had no message - just the boilerplate signature of the sender;
2. Not personalised in any way (nothing to personalise) - unlike SeedCorn
3. No introduction or overview - it’s nice to get a short overview of what I’m looking at (like most people, time is at a premium for me). The PR could easily be paraphrased in a few bullets, followed by why this might be of interest to me, and then close by mentioning that more detail is attached if I need it;
4. Email was sent from a @yahoo.co.uk email address, even though the boilerplate included a @q4pr.ie contact email. Very weird, and unfortunately spammy-looking;
5. Combine (1) and (4) above and I cold be forgiven for thinking twice about opening that attachment;
6. All recipients listed to To: field. Well at least we all know each other now. Not to mention that Grandad got a good chuckle out of it

The distro list on the mail was quite small, and I saw 6 bloggers on that list. So far it hasn’t been such a successful strategy - Grandad took the mickey out of the distro list, Damien used his usual down-to-earth language in describing the PR, the other 3 blogs haven’t carried anything yet, and I’m being me LOL.

So Seriously Business People…

Use your good-ole PR agency for doing the good-old fashioned PR ’stuff’. Talk to someone who actually really understands online PR for all this new-fangled Interweb stuff. He might be outspoken, but if you appreciate someone who calls it as they see it, and who really ‘gets’ this stuff, then you need to speak to Damien.

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When you’re building links for your small business website, where should you begin? Who are your potential link partners? Do you know?

Link building for small businesses is easier than for large Web-only businesses because you don’t have to have a lot of inbound links really to stay competitive. If you are a book store owner in a small town, for instance, and you have a website then most of your prospects are going to be local people. Will you sell over the Web? If not and you only want to have a Web presence to drive traffic back to your brick-and-mortar store, then it’s pretty simple.

What you want to do is identify who your competitors are, direct competitors. Keep in mind that as a local business you are not competing against Web businesses that do not have a presence in your community, especially if you aren’t selling on the Web. You may be competing for a general keyword search term like “books” or “book stores”, but as a local book store you are primarily targeting a geographic area, which a large chain store or Web-only store wouldn’t be. So your strategy should be different.

Therefore, who are your local competitors? Write them down then find out what inbound links they have. If your competitors don’t have websites then that will be easy. If you are in a large urban area and you have chain competitors then consider them competitors.

Next, write down all of your suppliers, business partners, etc. See if they have websites and find out who their link partners are.

After you have found out who the link partners of your competitors and partners are then you’ll want to examine their websites to find out if those websites will make good link partners for you. Some will, some won’t. But it doesn’t hurt to analyze it.

That’s where I’d start my link building process. After that, you want to go a little deeper.