I found this site organization very good and well put together, they have stories for each category, everything is well organized and put under the appropriate headings. The categories would make sense to the users, the categories are well structured. I find it very useful that there is a search on the site and that adds very well to the information architecture.

I observed a friend using the site to find out about the mobile phones, they wanted to go to the virgin mobile website but all it did was bring them to an error. They wanted to find out about the virgin phones and see what kind of deals they could get and obviously this didn’t help them. With an error like that, virgin could have easily just lost a customer.

The design of the site is very uniquely made with flash, it’s very distracting and can be annoying at some point, if I wanted to look at a certain thing and the animation just kept moving, I would get frustrated and move on. Even when you aren’t directly on the page, the animation still moves. Although inside the animation, it has all the places the company has business and what they have inside the business, which is good.

The overall effectiveness of the content is it leaves an impact, it’s very professional wording, which concludes they are very serious about their company and believes in what they are trying to sell you. It’s easy to read so you understand what you’re reading; yet it’s informative about their company while keeping a professional businesslike attitude in their words. The keywords are very important for making people use the site and search the site. The layout helps the keywords of the site pop out and people can find what exactly they are looking for.

My overall assessment of the site is that the site is a very well put together one, it has a lot of good information that could potentially help out a lot of users, I myself find the animation get to be too much once your on the site for a long period of time, maybe if they could make it that the animation only moves when your directly over it. But other than that it is a well-put together site and gives out a lot of useful information.

Website

Search Engine

Web

Free

Search engine optimization

What is your opinion of that keyword tool? Did it do a good job? Any surprises?

I thought the keyword tool was not that bad, it’s good if your looking for a curtain word or top 10 words on a site. I thought it did a pretty good job at finding the keywords on my blog. I thought for sure I would have had more keywords and different ones.

Traffic Estimator

All estimates are provided as a guideline, and are based on system-wide averages; your actual costs and ad positions may vary. To view estimates based on your keywords’ performance history, use the Traffic Estimator within the appropriate ad group.

Average CPC: $2.11 (at a maximum CPC of $18.72)

Estimated clicks per day: 6-9 (at a daily budget of $20.00)

If each of your keywords were clicked 22 times per month – how much would your monthly budget be? Please provide the working math for your calculation.

What happens if you set your maximum CPC to $1.50? What happens to your AdWord rankings?

There was no change to my AdWord ranking. It stayed all the same.

So if you wanted to advertise your blog content via AdWords and you wanted to get the best CPC and the most click thru’s- What Keywords/Keyword Phrases would you use to get the most leads? What is the optimum monthly budget you’d set and how many leads would you estimate you’ll get?

The Keywords/Keyword Phrases that I would use to get the most leads are: Search Engine Optimization, Free, Web Design, Marketing and Blog.

It’s all about getting attention online!

Planning for Valuable Traffic

• Effective traffic plans assess the volume and quality of traffic generated.
• Key tool for traffic-building analysis is cost-per-action: the number of visits that end in a particular action divided by the cost of the campaign.

Traffic-Building Goals

- Basic goal: best traffic at lowest cost

- But how to define best traffic?

• Best Traffic with Least Cost- Maximum Profit

- Minimum Cost-per-action

- Maximum Actions

Search Engine Optimization

- The power of landing “Above the Fold”

- Top placement in search returns is key to generating organic Web traffic

- User’s willingness to investigate falls sharply as items drop on the return list

• Higher click rate on top-rated items.
• Few users go beyond first page or two.

- Improving search engine placement.

• Get indexed on main search engines.
• Use meta-tags and develop content with appropriate keywords that trigger higher search engine rankings.
• Structure site content and navigation to reinforce search engine algorithms.
• Cultivate links from appropriate sites.

Keyword Advertising

• Clickable, text-based ads bring in billions of dollars of ad revenue.
• Ads steer traffic to an organization web site; fee charged only if click occurs.
• Competitive bidding process determines a keyword’s value.
• Evaluating keyword portfolios

- Identify a site’s most relevant keywords

- Test and expand list, based on conversion and click-through rates.

• Bidding and tracking

- Higher bids increase chance at higher keyword position

- No click costs more than maximum bid

- Price charged depends on intensity of cometition

• The inverted pyramid is a method for presenting information where the most important information, represented by the base of the pyramid, is presented first and the lease important (the tip) is presented last.
• Information designed using this model begins with a lead that summarizes the information, followed by the body, where the information presented in the lead is elaborated on and substantiated, in descending order of importance.

Web Writing for Many Interest Levels

• Clear, usable content is easily created by writing for many different levels of reader interest. Every person has a certain level of interest in every piece of information.
• A writer should help each reader get their desired level of information as quickly as possible. Knowledge of and writing to these levels will increase the satisfaction of all readers.

Levels of Interest

- Every person has a certain level of interest in every Web page. This may be:

• No interest
• Title only
• One sentence summary
• One paragraph summary
• Major points
• Minor points
• Detailed interest
• Thirst for more information

Writing to Each Interest Level

• A Web page which caters to each level of reader interest will result in more satisfied visitors.
• A user is happy when they get the information they want quickly and easily.
• Luckily there are specific techniques which can be employed to cater for reader at each level.

- What do you want to communicate to your audience.

- As you create your goals, you will want to keep in mind that the content you create for your Web site should:

• Reflect best practices in Web writing.
• Be informative and engaging.
• Accurately portray your mission in action.

2. Adhere to Best Practices for Web-Site Content

- Content for your Web site may come from a variety of sources- print collateral, an existing Web site, other media.

- Or, the content could be brand new, generated from Web team meetings to develop you Web-site strategy.

• Here are tips to get this collection of content “Web-ready.”
• Appearance
• Tone
• Length

3. Engage and Organize Help

- Developing content for a Web site is rarely a one-person job. Create a “content task list” to help keep your content providers to task. This list can be created in any popular word-processing or spreadsheet program.

- Crucial categories for the content task-list include:

• Where does the content git on your Web site? (Use your site map as a guide.)
• Who is responsible for developing the content?
• Description (style and length) of the content. Examples are: “250-300 words, paragraph style,” “bulleted list of key points,” or “testimonial no more than 500 words.”

4. Provide Multiple Ways for Users to Locate Content

- A search box appearing on your home page is still a must.

- A-Z indexes for larger site or “Quick Links” are a big help to visitors looking for a very specific item.

- Less popular are graphical representations of your site map. If your navigation is intuitive enough, a site map on your Web site should be redundant but you have to do it for Google.

5. Test Your Site

- Perform a “scanning exercise” after populating your Web site with the new content to test the readability and user-friendliness.

- Hand pick individuals for this purpose. Give them the pages to browse and a time limit, since a member or other committed individual may spend longer than a random visitor.

- When they are finished browsing, ask them what they recall. What were the key points? How much do they remember? What were their first impression? What did they “feel” about your organization?

- If you’ve met your goals, your testers will not only remember key points in the text, but they will be more informed about your organization, will have gotten an immediate impression of your organization’s identity, and will be able to describe examples of your mission in action.

WordPress can be made more findable by modifying come of its configuration options and by extending its feature set with third-party plugins.

Defining Update Services

Our  first modification to WordPress will be to extend the number of update services that are pinged when you publish new content. Services like Technorati and Goggle Blog Search, keep tabs on all content published by blogs throughout the Web. WordPress sends a brief message- called a ping- to these services so they can update their indices with your latest content.

Using FeedBurner as an Update Service

Another update services option is use FeedBurner to publish you RSS feeds. FeedBurner is a service that transforms RSS feeds into new content formats and provides enhancements like quick subscribe buttons, podcast support, and advertising that can generate revenue for your site.

Remapping Your Permalink URLs

The structure of your site’s URLs can influence how well search engines crawl your site and the keyword density of the page. WordPress provides some really great options to automatically generate URLs in your blog that are very search engine friendly.

In order for WordPress URL remapping to work you’ll need to have mod_rewrite installed on your Apache server and you’ll need to change this permission of your .htaccess file to 666 (allows read and write access) so WordPress can write the necessary code to the film. If you’re not clear on how to set file permissions with an FTP client like WSFTP Pro or Fetch.

A permalink is the permanent URL for a blog post. Because blog content can be displayed in various locations- such as in categories, on the blog home page, or in an archive- a permalink is important to create one uniform location for each post.

Using Categories to Archive by Topic

WordPress lets you display your post by categories or by a chronological archive. A topic-ordered archive is preferable because it adds keywords to your pages and better suits users’ search behaviors. Using WordPress’s category listing will create the findable navigation system described. Each time you write a post in WordPress you can assign it to a series of categories that you define. Most WordPress themes will display a category listing by default that will be automatically updated when you post.

Displaying Your Most Popular Posts

Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin keeps track of your post, archive, and category views as well as the number of trackbacks and comments on postd so you can determine which posts are most popular. Seeing which posts your users are reading the most can help you determine what you should write about in the future. Follow up popular post with more details on the topic.

Tagging Your Posts

A tag is a keyword that servers as meta data used to describe blog posts or other content on a website. The more descriptive information that is associated with you content, the  better users and applications will be able to locate it. Through tags often link to other services like Technorati where related information that shares the same tag can be found, WordPress tags link to related posts within the blog.

There are a lot of really great blogging platforms on the market, so many that it would take an entire book to compare them in detail, and even more books to talk about each individually. WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging platforms. Its popularity stems from its great feature, quick setup, ease of use, and massive community support.

From a findability perspective, WordPress is pretty alluring. Its simple themes system makes building your own templates with a semantic, standards-compliant structure easy. It has an open architecture for which anyone can develop plugins to add features that were not originally included. Thousands of plugin are freely available to extend and customize your WordPress blog to do all sorts of things that can improve the findability of your blog.

Creating Your Own Themes

WordPress can be skinned using themes, which consist of a series of PHP files that logically divide the blog into modular sections including a header, footer, sidebar, etc. Descriptive functions – called template tags- are used in themes to display dynamic content like post information or archives.

It’s a good idea to create your own theme for your WordPress blog rather than using one of the pre-installed themes. Creating your own themes gives you the opportunity to optimize your code for search engines, and will let you create a design that is unlike thousands of other WordPress blogs.

The content and structure of your blog play a big role in generating search traffic and helping users find points of interest on your site. After blogging for a while you’ll start to discover what types of content your users are most interested in. Using some traffic analysis tools, you can see which posts are read the most and which keywords in your posts are generating the most traffic. This information can help you define the topics of future posts so you can continue to provide content relevant to your audience.

Blogs are an amazing tool for discovering niche issues that attract a surprising amount of interest because they cover a lot of sub-topics within a primary subject. When you discover that one of your posts has generated a lot of interest, follow it up with a related post. Look for posts that have received the most comments. If you’re getting mostly positive comments or you’ve discovered a hot-button issue that people want to debate, keep the momentum with more posts.

Put Keywords in Your Post Titles

Heading tags are an important place to position your keywords to help encourage search referrals. When you build your custom templates for your blog, use a prominent heading tag to assign greater prominence to the keywords within your post titles. Choose your post titles wisely can create a good keyword density and prominence that can generate search referrals.

Add a Popular Post Section

Your best posts that have attracted the most traffic can get lost in your archives if you don’t help users find them. Including a popular posts section on your blog can help users find the content that many other users have found useful.

About Duplicate Content Indexing

It’s a common misconception that search engines will penalize the page ranking of sires that publish duplicate content. If this were true a large part of the Web would incur significant ranking penalties.

Step 1: Organize content based on audience needs

Organizing content based on your audience’s needs is a best practice for managing your agency’s website. Your primary form of navigation should be one of the following:

- by subject (topics, life events) nby task or service

- by audience group nby geographic location

- by any combination of these factors

- Because navigation by organizational structure has traditionally been less effective for web users, you should use this as an alternative — not primary — form of navigation.

- You should know your audiences and communicate with them regularly to analyze their wants and needs. Organize your content based on that feedback and other research.

Step 2: Have a good homepage

Having an effective homepage is one of the best practices for managing your website. A homepage serves as the front door of your website. You should design your homepage to feature the public’s most requested information and services and to serve as a top-level directory to access the primary sections of your website.

The homepage is the main tool for sending your visitors in the right direction.

- Research shows that more than half of all web users evaluate websites based on homepages alone. If you have an ineffective homepage, many visitors will immediately be turned off and may never come back to your site.

- Web visitors want fast, efficient service. On homepages, they expect to find what they’re looking for with little or no scrolling.

- Web users are impatient. They don’t want to be distracted by text or graphics that don’t help them find what they want or that increase download time.

Step 3: Use common content, terminology, and placement

Using common content, terminology, and placement is a best practice for managing your agency’s website. If all government websites presented similar content in standard ways, it would help the public find information and services across government websites.

1.  Contact Information (“Contact us” page)

2. Organizational Information (“About us” page)

3. Site Map or A–Z Index

4. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

5. Products and Services

6. Resources, Forms and Publications

7. Jobs and Employment Information

8. General Information

9. Site Policies and Notices

Step 4: Use consistent navigation

- Using the same general navigation scheme across your website is a best practice for managing your website.

Why It’s Important

- Consistent navigation makes websites easier to use because visitors don’t have to learn a new navigation scheme on each new page.

- Visitors are more likely to get what they need from a website if they are familiar with its navigation scheme.

Step 5: Don’t duplicate existing content

- Your audience can become confused if they find overlapping or inconsistent information on the same subject

- The best practice to ensure accurate and quality web content is to create it once – by the organization having the greatest expertise – and use it many times, through links. By focus your efforts on creating content related to your own mission – and using links to related content – you save time and resources.

- It normally takes much less effort to spend some time looking to see if content already exists than (re)creating it.

Step 6: Manage links

Managing internal and external links is critical for keeping content current and accurate. Here are the 3 steps that are important in managing links:

Step 1: Establish and maintain a linking policy

Step 2: Link to required content

Step 3: Review links regularly

Step 7: Apply metadata

Using standard metadata is a best practice for managing your agency’s website. If all federal agencies use standard metadata, it will help the public locate and use government information and services more effectively and efficiently.

Why It’s Important

- Metadata is important for many reasons.

- Provides a standardized system to classify and label web content

- Supports website maintenance and administration

- Improves search relevancy nProvides an audit trail (information about who created the information and when it was created)

- Helps identify redundant, duplicative, and possibly obsolete content

- Identifies similar content so you can establish logical links and other relationships

- Disseminating (publishing) and sharing information.

- Providing advice.

- Working collaboratively.

- Selling goods and services.

- Providing online services.

- Conducting business transactions.

- Soliciting responses and feedback.

- Providing a public record of special political, social or cultural events.

Six Guiding Principles

1. Accessibility: Information is easily accessible to those who need to use it and are authorized to access it.

2. Usability: Information meets the needs of employees, clients, partners, and stakeholders and is timely, relevant, accurate and easy to use.

3. Accountability: Accountability for the management of information in the custody or under the control of the company.

4. Integrated Approach: Information assets are managed throughout their entire life-cycle regardless of the medium in which they are held.

5. Planned and Coordinated Approach: Coordinated planning for the management of information is linked to business and budget planning.

6. Optimize the Value of Information Assets: Information assets will be managed to optimize the investment of the company.

Managing Content

- Focusing on site objective or main purpose

- Design Templates nKnowing Your Audience

- Organizing and categorizing content

- Writing for the web

- Keeping content current

- Archiving content and web records

- Managing specific types of websites

- Content management systems