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Ron, JimWorld, and a Little S.E.X.
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Topics in this issue
· Ron, JimWorld, and a Little S.E.X. · Preparing for Profits · Web Standards: Are You Ready Yet? · Part One: The Death Of Meta Tags · SEF Spotlight · Under Construction · Moving Forward · Payment Due Notice · How To Unsubscribe |
New Blood |
| RON, JIMWORLD, AND A LITTLE S.E.X. |
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By Ron Carnell
When Jim Wilson first penned the words, "Promote or Die," I was
still an Internet newbie.
As the new (and very much unproven) Editor-in-Chief of the Gazette, I keep hearing the same question over and over. "What are you going to do with it?" My answer has been both simple and consistent: I want to go back to the roots that made this newsletter great. Considering the footsteps I'm following, that's not an easy task. Jim published the first issue of the Gazette on April 25, 1997, about eight months after opening the doors to VirtualPromote.com in August, 1996. My company, a software house specializing in mainframe financial application for the insurance and mortgage industry, had put up a few sites for clients in 1996, but it was honestly more of a distraction for us than anything else. It wasn't until I sold my company in mid-1997 and retired to Michigan that I started taking the Internet a little more seriously. By the time I registered my first domain, in October, 1998, Jim had already put out 64 issues of the Gazette. I stumbled across VirtualPromote.com and searchengineforums.com in November and, as you'll soon see, it completely changed my life. That first issue of the Gazette in 1997 went out to 245 subscribers. The last issue Jim wrote before his illness intervened was in April, 2002, by which time the subscriber base had increased to over 250,000 people. In between those 245 people and the quarter million, Jim Wilson and this newsletter made history over and over and over. In the past month, in preparation for the daunting task of following Jim's lead, I've tried to read every word he penned in that six year period. Here are just a few of the milestones along that path. * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-1/ Jim's very first promotion tip in the Gazette was to participate in the Usenet newsgroups, quickly followed by sending out something called Web Cards. He spent a lot of copy that first year talking about the awards VP had won, encouraging others to apply for awards as a great way to increase traffic, and a lot more copy reviewing the plethora of auto-submissions tools available. The Internet has changed a LOT since those early days. Interestingly, however, the second issue of the Gazette carried an article by Jim about finding link partners that, with just a few updates, would be as pertinent today as it was then. Jim's secret strategy? Find out who is linking to your competition. That was in 1997? * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-8/ Over the years, many of the best known names in the marketing industry would appear within the pages of the Gazette. Here's just one early example, dated 6/13/1997, that brought me a nice chuckle when I read it. "Danny at Calafia Consulting, http://calafia.com/ has taken all of the information from his popular 'A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines' area of his site and given it its own home ... at http://searchenginewatch.com/ ... Good luck with this, Danny. And congratulations on the launch of a very nice site." Danny Sullivan would go on to write a few articles for the Gazette and, of course, become one of the best known and most respected names in the search engine industry. * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-21/ As gregarious as Jim was, he didn't often really talk much about himself. In this issue, while discussing how a site can make money, he gives a pretty darn good history of how VirtualPromote got its start. It's fairly comprehensive and a little bit surprising. Oh yea, this is also the issue (okay, one of many) where Jim lambastes Internet Explorer 3.0 in favor of Netscape (the original one, not the one designed by committee). Why anyone would design for a browser with less than five percent of the market was a question Jim would ask often (and often loudly). Yep, the Internet has changed a lot since those early days. * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-26/ "The All-Knowing Spider of the Web has something stuck to the bottom of its shoe and it is foul and rancid. At first glance you would think that it could be scraped off with a stick. Unfortunately, a stick isn't going to get the job done." Those were the words that prefaced what would become a JimWorld staple. In the next issue, Jim describes the overwhelming response to what was his first Scumbag article and promises us he has a "never ending supply of Scumbag examples every day in my email in-box." In the years to come, Jim would wage a crusade against the Scumbags of the Internet, culminating in a whole site at http://www.scumware.com/ devoted to what he felt was the worst of the bunch. * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-38/ There was a recent thread in the Members' Lounge and an even longer one in the Staff Lounge, trying to determine just when Jim opened the doors to the Search Engine Forums. Well, wonder no more. Jim announced SEF in the Gazette on January 23, 1998. Not incidentally, the UBB software that powered the original forums (and would for many years to come) was a brand new product that, for several years afterwards, would come to dominate the market. Even today, with many other options like vBulletin and phpBB available, the look and the feel of the UBB remains a standard. That arguably would have never happened without Jim's support. * http://jimworld.com/gazette/archives/issue-45/ In mid-March, 1998, Jim opened another set of forums, the Get High (Traffic) forums, centered more on traditional marketing methods and less on search engine traffic. I always wondered why Jim put his forums on two different domains, and in reading this issue of the Gazette, I discovered the answer. The original UBB software only supported nine forums. Go figure! My first Moderating billet for Jim was the CGI forums at GH, and it will always hold a special place in my heart -- even though GH no longer really exists any longer. Come to think of it, my second forum was Excite at SEF (that was the pre-Google years, when Excite was "the" big player, powering both Yahoo! and AOL) and that one no longer exists either. If there's a pattern there, I don't think I want to pursue it. :-( * JimWorld Gazette - Issue #129 - April 21, 2002 I couldn't find a copy of this issue on-line (something I'm sure John will correct soon!), but I wanted to close this overly-long introduction with some of the final words Jim ever wrote for the Gazette. "A money-back guarantee on your offers will make your response soar. It will. And the more powerful, the more outrageous your money-back guarantee; the better your results will be! In fact, a powerful money guarantee has been shown to be a hot button in getting people to buy. One of the key reasons is that all people really want in life is S.E.X. S.E.X.? "Yes, people want Security, Essentials, and the Xtras of life. And in that order too. And a money-back guarantee is tied into giving people the security they want." I'm not Jim Wilson, nor will I ever try to be. What I am, instead, is an avid student of Jim's Helpware philosophies. Over the course of the next several months (no one wants a steady diet of me), I'll tell you a bit about how Jim, VirtualPromote and SEF changed my life. My job here will be to simply pass on a little of what Jim Wilson and others have given to me, in the hope it can change your life, too, and knowing that the day will come when you will be asked to pass it on to another. You ready for the big wrap-up? Please pass this issue of the Gazette on to a friend or two. Spread the word, as so many spread it in 1997 and 1998. Write me (at ronc@piptalk.com ) with comments, suggestions, and questions, as so many wrote to Jim in 1997 and 1998. I want to go back to the roots that made this newsletter great, and that means listening to YOU, just as Jim so carefully listened in 1997 and 1998. In return? Every two weeks, I'm going try really hard to fill your mail box with at least the Essentials of Internet Marketing, and maybe a few Xtras of life tacked on for good measure. And (if you knew Jim, you just had to guess this was coming) it will absolutely always come with a one hundred percent money-back guarantee. :-) Here's to S.E.X. ! :-) |
| PREPARING FOR PROFITS |
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By Ron Carnell
October is a favorite month around my house. A busy one, too.
For me and for many others on the Internet, October marks the end
of our slowest quarter and the beginning of our busiest. If the
holiday shopping season is important to your site, whether in
terms of traffic or in profit, October is when you need to start
preparing.
Probably our biggest concern in October is getting ready for the search engines. If we throw up a few Christmas pages the day after Thanksgiving, those pages may not be indexed and bringing us traffic until somewhere around New Year's Eve. Not a real big help. Yet, most of us, I think, are understandably reluctant to start pushing the Holiday cheer too early. It always seems a bit tacky to me, and maybe even a little irritating, when Wal-Mart and Sears advertise Christmas specials before I've even had a chance to chow down on turkey and cranberries. Sorry, guys, I can only concentrate on one holiday at a time. So what do we do? The first thing we have to do is ignore our gut feeling and realize the Web is a bit different than traditional retail sales. You can't wait until Christmas Eve to buy your significant other a gift on eBay and expect to receive the appreciation you so richly deserve because, duh, ordering on the Internet requires a bit of lead time. Web site owners can use that need for lead time to our advantage by starting earlier than their concrete-based brethren. Do it right, with a little common-sense restraint, and your visitors not only won't be irritated, they'll appreciate your forethought on their behalf. One of the best suggestions I've seen for getting an early start on the Christmas season is to offer a Holiday gift wrapping service. Most e-tailers seem to feel November 1 is a good time to start pushing Christmas specials, though many seem to be moving to an even earlier October 15. A link to a page offering Christmas wrapping, however, could be put on your home page tomorrow without seeming inappropriate. You're not really pushing Christmas, yet, so much as letting everyone know what will be available. Both your link and the page it leads to should be carefully considered, of course. Yea, you want to remind your visitors that Christmas is just around the corner, but your *real* goal is to get that page ranked well in the search engines early enough to bring you some good traffic. If you want to be found for, say, "Christmas book gifts," then you want to use that keyword phrase in your link, your title, and throughout your gift wrap page. Just as importantly, though, you want to remember that your gift wrap page is going to become an ENTRY page into your web site. It has to be about gift wrapping, but it also has to be a good introduction to your site. It has to convince visitors to click on a few more links. It has to convert to a sale. Hey, no one ever said this stuff was easy! Here are a few more useful suggestions for preparing early to reap the rewards of Fourth Quarter 2004.
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| WEB STANDARDS: ARE YOU READY YET? |
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By Diane Vigil
As some of you know, the term "Web Standards" does not mean just
building websites to comply with standards adopted by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3c.org), nor even that a web page's code is
certified to be valid by the W3C's validation tools. Rather, "Web
Standards" refers to modern coding that makes websites accessible
to a variety of browsers and, as they say, "devices" ... making
it unnecessary to create, maintain and pay for multiple versions
of a website to support "devices" now in existence or yet to be
conceived, designed and marketed. (More at
http://webstandards.org/about/ )
At its most basic, Web Standards means using a more advanced form of HTML (XHTML) in conjunction with, minimally, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control how it looks. This is pretty exciting: building one website that can be accessed by browsers, phones, PDAs, printers, screen readers and who knows what. Not doing so could mean locking out potential customers. And there's the rub: if you've ever visited a website that displayed the menu as a vertical list of links, followed by screen-wide panels of text, you've seen WS coding without it's "styling" (the CSS-controlled images, decoration and text formatting). While Web Standards folk call this a "functional" website, it's difficult to argue that a website with all visuals removed, not a table in sight to organize the on-page elements (here's the menu, there's the content, see the nice fonts?) is truly functional, much less compelling to customers. In the "old" days (1998), we argued that websites needed to "degrade gracefully"; that is, they should look good (if not identical) in older browsers so as not to lock out potential customers. Unfortunately, Web Standards-compliant websites do not degrade as gracefully as one might wish because some coding specifications were adopted by the W3C and browser makers long after the issuance of older browsers, and coding to Web Standards means more than page layouts looking a little misaligned. Yet not doing so can again mean locking out potential customers using devices in which it may be difficult or impossible to view or use websites built of complex tables and other structural or display elements. So the question that webmasters, web designers and business owners must evaluate is: when to move to Web Standards? That can be a tough call. The Web Standards folks would have it that you're long overdue, and that coding to WS means faster designing, quicker updates and less overhead while serving more customers. On the other hand, there are those older browsers. What can you do now? Evaluate. Check your website server logs; for many of our clients, most visitors are using very up-to-date browsers, so WS coding may add to -- rather than subtract from -- their markets. I'd also look at your business. If you're selling stocks (flowers, gift items, hotel reservations, paid content) over the Web, perhaps customers with PDAs and Web-enabled phones might appreciate the ability to place orders or read while they travel. As will you, when those orders and subscriptions come in. What else can you do? If you're not using Cascading Style Sheets, start. You'll be surprised at how much download time you can save by converting font tags to CSS. Move that CSS to an external file (referenced by each page) and you can change fonts, colors and sizes across your website with a few keystrokes. CSS can take you further, allowing you precise control of elements on a page -- but you'll never get there if you don't start. If you're using CSS for fonts and positioning of elements but still use a lot of tables, look into cutting these down and shifting the control to CSS. You'll make it easier on yourself and, if and when you decide to move to Web Standards, you'll be way ahead of the game. And, if you haven't already started, start learning about Web Standards compliance. While it can be said that WS-coding is very simple, there are basic issues to wrap your wits around before it becomes easy *for you*. Not to mention that not all browsers display the same way; certain browser makers have guaranteed that once again you'll be looking for workarounds. Oh. The Web Standards folk haven't necessarily caught on to this yet, but did I mention that Web Standards-compliant websites can be blissfully easy to optimize for search engine rankings?
Diane Vigil (best known as DianeV in the forums) has been
coaching others in the industry for a number of years, and is
founder of DianeV. Web Design Studio ( http://dianev.com ) in Los
Angeles. She is a long-time proponent of what is today called
"holistic web design" - the use of a variety of disciplines to
create effective market-oriented websites.
* Ron: "Diane is one of those Renaissance people, like de Vinci or Michelangelo, who is really good at a whole lot of very different things. I sincerely hope we can convince Diane to write many more articles for us on her principles of holistic web design and, especially, how it affects search engine marketing." |
| Part One: THE DEATH OF META TAGS ... |
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Ron Carnell
... has been greatly exaggerated. :-)
As soon as someone begins researching search engine placement (our SEF forums are an obvious good start), they'll likely hear that meta tags are not the answer most beginners think they are. Over the years, they're quickly told, too many webmasters have abused the meta tags (read that, lied through their teeth), with the inevitable result that search engines no longer trust webmasters to be honest with them. All of which is true. Mostly. The meta-keywords tag was designed as "a way to insert text into an HTML page that is not visible when the page is viewed through a browser." This definition, along with a good history of the meta tag, is available from Danny Sullivan at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2165061 (along with a perhaps premature pronouncement of its death). (Note: If you don't who Danny or SEW is, you should set aside a few score hours to explore the site. Danny also offers a Member's Only section that will consume even more hours. Highly recommended!) As Danny said almost exactly two years ago, Inktomi was then the only major search engine still supporting the meta-keywords tag and, in his opinion, it was no longer worth using. Knowing, as Danny surely did, the amount of unnecessary worry the keywords tag has caused people over the years, I sure can't fault Danny's logic. Except, that was then and this is now. We're not just talking about tiny, little Inktomi any more. We're talking about Yahoo! (who bought Inktomi and used it as the foundation for it's new search engine), and Yahoo! has the potential to deliver a LOT of traffic. Take a look at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/ranking/ranking-02.html where you can find Yahoo's advice on using the meta-keyword tag: "Use a keyword meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page." So what exactly does that mean? Maybe the best way to answer that question is to look at some examples of how Yahoo! takes its own advice. At http://autos.yahoo.com/ we find the following keyword meta-tag: <meta name="keywords" content="cars, auto, autos, car, kelley blue book, kelly blue book, auto insurance, car insurance, kbb, car reviews, car pictures, used car prices, new car prices, blue book, compare cars, auto show, car shows, car search, car ratings, car safety, yahoo autos, buy a car, build a car, auto warranty, auto loans, auto loan calculator, car specs, auto insurance quotes, car models"> Frankly, that looks a bit spammy to a conservative old man like me. Note, however, the alternate spellings for kelley and kelly, one of the principal uses of the meta-keywords tag. For several years, many have recommended only including keywords in your list that can actually be found on the page -- and that is absolutely wrong! You should also include misspellings and synonyms not on the page. Note, too, the keyword phrases are separated by commas, which answers another frequent question in the forums. This particular keyword list runs about 370 characters, much less than the 1,000 or 2,000 character limits I've seen recommended by others. Use that information as you will, but remember to consider the source (Yahoo! should know, after all). Let's dig a little deeper (literally) at the same site. At http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html we find this keyword meta-tag: <meta name="keywords" content="Cars, new cars, sports cars, hybrid cars, suv, trucks, vans, convertibles, minivans, wagons, sedands, luxury cars, makeslist" /> I'm guessing "sedands" is a typo (proving even Yahoo! makes mistakes), but the important thing to notice here is that this keyword list is substantially different than the first. Apparently, when they say we shouldn't use "one broad set of keywords for every page" they actually mean it. If Yahoo! gives little weight to the meta-keyword tag, and other engines like Google and AltaVista reportedly give no weight and may not even index it, is it really worth the effort to devise a different keyword list for every page on your site? That's going to obviously be a personal call. Certainly, they aren't a panacea or silver bullet to great rankings, even on Yahoo!, and there are a WHOLE LOT of things of greater importance. Use them. Don't use them. But don't obsess either way. Personally, I have always used the meta tag for keywords more as a comment field than anything else. Six months from now, when I revise the content on a page, it's helpful to know what keywords I was targeting. If Yahoo! is giving weight to my internal notes, so much the better. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the meta tag for keywords is truly dead and perhaps long past burial, as Danny admonished us two years ago. Before you make that call, however, I'd like to offer one last suggestion. Remember that typo in the page we looked at earlier? Go to Yahoo! and do a search on "sedands" (no quotes, of course) and see what page comes up in the number one position. Try the same search on msn.com and on teoma.com (who claims they don't even index the keywords meta tags). Seems to me the keyword meta tag has a bit of life left in it yet. :-) Next issue, we'll talk about our meta-keyword's little sister, the description meta tag, and discoverer why it is not only NOT dead, but is perhaps the most overlooked and potentially useful meta tag in your SEO arsenal. (If this issue was passed to you by a friend, you won't want to miss our discussion of the description meta-tag. First, take a moment to thank your friend. Profusely is okay, but try not to slobber. Then, jump over to http://www.virtualpromote.com/apps/gazette-subscription.php and get your own subscription to the Gazette.) |
| SEF SPOTLIGHT |
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Ron Carnell
If you don't spend every waking moment in the Search Engine
Forums (shame on you!), you should at least take a few minutes to
check out these important threads.
Trying to understand Yahoo! Ron: "Running similar sites, and especially inter-linking them, can be increasingly dangerous on Yahoo! This thread offers some insight on what might happen to you and some suggestions on what to do about it." Google Indexing Flash Text Ron: "It's been a long time coming! It appears the big G can now not only follow links in your Flash presentations (been happening for a while), but can also index the TEXT as well. This is going to change a lot of SERPs." Lost all Yahoo listings? Ron: "Our veteran JimGuide, MakeMeTop (Barry Lloyd), offers some great advice on both affiliate sites and cross-linking." Tool Combines Overture and Wordtracker tools/ Ron: "This long-running thread only gets better and better, as digitalpoint.com fine-tunes and enhances a new keyword tool that has taken SEO by storm." 301 redirect Ron: "Long a useful tool on Google, the 301 Redirect is finally coming into its own on Yahoo!, too. Great advice, straight from the proverbial horse's mouth (hey, no offense, Mike! :-)" |
| UNDER CONSTRUCTION |
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Archive Article by Jim Wilson
When we invite people that have never visited us to the house for
dinner, we don't meet them at the door and start telling them
about all the home improvements that aren't done yet. We don't
try to entertain them with stories of the room over the garage
that may never get built. Nor the plants we wish we had planted
instead of the plants that are there now. The kitchen would be
much nicer if we had the outside wall moved another 10 feet out.
There's nothing wrong with the house the way it is right now. While all of these, and a few dozen more, enhancements would be nice, and the house would look even better, the bottom line is: the house is big enough to get lost in and everyone seems to like it just the way it is. They'll still like it when upgrades get made. I have always treated my web site the way I treat my house. What I have at any given time is all I have. It is complete as it is. It may get more complete later, but right now I have a lot to offer and here it is. Just as I don't paint doorways on the walls of my home to show where the game room might be someday, I don't put links to pages that don't exist and then show people an under construction sign. If the page is finished, put in the link and show them the page. If it's not done, why talk about it? Why frustrate people with links to pages that may never be finished? I'm not in the least ashamed of where I live. It is a wonderful house and home. I don't care if other people have nicer houses. That's great for them. I hope they invite me over for dinner. I'll judge my evening with them on the conversation, food and fellowship. Not on what they may want to do someday to the house. If your site is so lacking in value and content, why is it open to visitors? If it has value and there is enough there to be worth visiting, why spend the whole visit pointing out all of its deficiencies? Why keep pointing out that it is nothing now, but will be great someday if it gets finished and if the visitor will just give me the benefit of the doubt and come back when the site isn't just some pages of crap? If you think that broken internal links and construction signs don't portray that impression, you are wrong. That is exactly what they say: 'This site is crap, but I have big plans for it. I'm just not organized enough to finish it.' Don't invite people to dinner while your house is still being built and don't invite people to a web site that is still being built. Don't eat dinner in a dining room that is covered with drop cloths while the painters are repainting it, and don't invite people to view web pages that don't even exist. I have a composition notebook next to my computer. In it are literally hundreds of ideas for information I wish were on VirtualPROMOTE. A searchable directory of web promotion providers. 20 or so products that I should review. Tutorials on good copy writing techniques. How to write press releases. How to promote specific types of sites..... But then I think about what is there. Every time I log onto VirtualPROMOTE, I get a nice little feeling... pride. There is so much there that I don't have to apologize for anything. It is absolutely worth visiting. Some of you have been using the site since the very beginning. I know who you are. If you have been finding help for all this time, why do I have to tell you what I'm going to do someday? If your site is worth visiting, don't apologize for it. Brag about what it is, instead of pointing out all of the things it isn't. Spend some time this week removing every link to under construction pages. Get rid of every apology. Polish what remains. Brag a bit on what you have. Let people know that yours is a site they will be glad they visited.
* Ron: "This article was originally published in Gazette #28 and
is a good example of the common-sense wisdom that was Jim Wilson.
It's also an excellent reminder for many of us, I think. This
won't be the last work of Jim's I pull out of the archives,
either. The man made too much sense not to deserve another go
around the track."
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