VijayWeb.com

Metadata is structured data that describes the characteristics of content. It is loosely defined as data about data and is primarily read by machines to manage documentation and help search engines identify and index relevant content for search results. The HTML format used to define Web pages allow for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, which now include content embedded in Web pages.

Meta Data on New York Times Website:

Changing Scenario
The Semantic Web is an evolving development in which the meaning of information and services on the Web is defined, making it possible for the Web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the content on the Web. With Semantic Web taking shape, metadata is evolving rapidly. For example, Google recently introduced rich snippets, which produce small samples of content, such as the following snippet pulled from a search:

What is to all?

While organizations like W3c and Dublin Core setting up the standards, there are plenty of new web applications and Search engines are already adapting to include semantic Web technologies and standards to more effectively deliver relevant and personalized content to end users.

Whether you are a usability professional or designer or web anlayst – it is a great opportunity to explore on doing better personalization, targeting, and new ways of understanding your website visitor.

Here is the best example on Real-time optimization of marketing spend online.   This is really superb.  Marketers can count on availability of such tools very soon.  The demo starts after the second minute in the video:

More often, the three factors that influence a purchase decision are “Cost, Convenience and Trust”.  It is a question that we need to ask ourselves when doing analysis to increase the sales or your website sales conversion rate.

Cost: When was the last time you ordered a product online or offline without comparing if the price you are paying is comparatively reasonable with the similar products available in the market.  The majority of customers are price conscious, when they have made a decision to buy some “x” product or service…we really have to ensure them that the price they are paying for the product is reasonably okay.  Building a pricing analytics process within your current organization and providing quick access to some of the price comparison information would not only persuade the user to make a quick price decision but also improves your business’s credibility score in the eyes of the customer.  Make sure you provide information upfront on all costs that are going to be incurred for the prospect upon his/her sales transaction.

Convenience: When the visitor has already made a decision to buy a product or service. It is imperative that you take him/her thru entire purchasing process more seamless and friction less. HFI stresses the importance of convenience with a rat box below.  If the cheese is the product offering and electric grid is the purchase process on your website.  Users take pain and order something if the product offering is too enticing, reducing the friction in the shopping cart would improve the conversion rate dramatically.

Trust: Trust is the only big thing in entire purchase transaction process.  It doesn’t matter how cheap price the product is being offered and how easy and persuasive the user experience on the site would be, unless the visitors reassured on each step in the shopping process..you are going to loose him.

Building Trust is not just Branding your business but also ensuring the user that they are protected while transacting with your website.

Here is a nice tool called “Personas Web built by MIT Lab”   This tool analyze the content snippets avilable on the internet and summarizes how you are seen online at a high-level. http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

Analysis in Process:

Final Summarized Report:

You can also find out what people think about you brand by just entering the brand name in the text box. I guess it doesn’t work if there is only one word…like hewlett packard works instead just hp.

I found some thing that got my attention today – it is an ad on economic times website.  I immediately clicked and surprised to see it is a website that sells Diversity Visa Programs Application submission.  And, I immediately closed the browser.  One “ad dollar” was wasted for the business that was advertising.   I am wondering if we count such $’s how many million it would add upto.  And, this is served from advertising.com network.

Diversity Visa Program or Green Card Lottery is run by USCIS which is a governing body for issuing US Visas.  But, I am not eligible for the Diversity Visa Program or any Indians.  It would be a waste of money in targeting Indians for this service. In fact, for any service or product that we would like to sell – It is always important we select the right audience.  This is where the analytics play an important role.

10-years back we all excited with the buzzword “targeting”, we all had said targeting makes the difference between traditional and online advertising.  But, are we really targeting NOW?

With the advancements in technology we are able to identify where the user is located, even based on browsing behavior we are able to say if the user can be a male/female, and other demographics, probabilities of really converting that user to a lead or  a sale.  Spending a portion of the ad-budget really in some exciting tools would really produce greater results with less ad-budgets.

When comes to Advertising especially if you are offering some niche solutions, it is always recommended to go for qualified traffic than un-targeted traffic that hits in volumes.

Usability Analytics: The four most key factors measured in website usability testing include: learnability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.  Though, it is not a perfect alternative for the traditional one-to-one usability testing methodologies, but very economical and fast when we already have web analytics data with us in form of reports example, Google Analytics Data.

Learnability:

Effectiveness:

Efficiency:

Satisfaction:

Tag Cloud for VijayWeb.com

Tag Clouds became very popular in Web2.0, though tag clouds are started widely for secondary website navigation  mechanism…it is being also used for various other fields. I feel it is a great tool to visualize the Search Keywords in one small graph like above.

There are free tools popping up for us to leverage this technique for Search Analytics.  One can also use this tool to visualize the theme of the web-page content and accordingly use for Search Engine Optimization benefits.

Free Tag Cloud Tools for Search Analytics.

• http://www.wordle.net
• http://tagcrowd.com

There is also a free script available from IBM to download and run from our side.  I am posting the direct download URL for the file (you may have to register and login if the link doesn’t work for you) – Click here to download IBM Tag Clouds Software

URL means Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it.

An URL structure generally includes a domain name, folders, files and extensions in it.  We are going to discuss the best practices in URL Structure for the benefit of SEO, Usability and Branding too.

A domain name has several levels to it.  In domain name “www.vijayweb.com ” -  “.com” is called as the Third Level or Top Level Domain, “vijayweb”is actual domain and it is also called as Second Level Domain, and finally “www” is just a sub-domain.  We use www as prefix or a subdomain more commonly as the interent has been branded in that way from the beginning. It is just a custom than a technical requirement.

Choosing a domain name was the most difficult part in the beginning of the DotCom story than it is now One had to really do a lot of research and brainstorming, even taking consultants assistance to really choose a right domain for new dotcom business.  The main factors that were used to rate “a domain name should be easy to remember, easy to recall, easy to pronounce, spell, write” are some of the main requirements to choose a domain. But, with Web2.0 they all have really not a big stand and any catchy word will work, for example, reddit.com, digg, del.icio.us, youtube, flickr etc.,    Earlier there was great option to depend on the domain name for branding the business or service, now with all the domain names are gone with cybersquatting, we are left with minimum options.  Now, we are left with chosing a catchy word and brand the domain name with the unique solutions we are offering.

Best Practice: Choose a Catchy Word, still keep in mind the basic rules (easy… that is usability).  Be particular about choosing a country specific TLDs (top level domain) if your target audience belong to specific countries.  Country specific TLDs are one of the factors that will win Search Engine Ranking Positions in your country specifc search engines while still play in the global search engines.  (I don’t really see it is important to choose a keyword rich domain  that doesn’t meet the above prequalifiers unless you are building the site specifically for the purpose of search engine rankings).

After Domain Name,  a url structure can have one or more levels  to it. And, this is where the most difficult and confusing part as there is a direct SEO benefit.  There is no one formula works for all when creating search engine friendly urls for SEO purposes as there are only 10 positions every other person want to rank in.

There are different SEO URL structures in practice:

1. Creating content theme by having all similar content into one folder or category.

2. Having all static and dynamic files originating from the root of the domain.

3. Use Keyword rich file name and folder name.

4. Not keeping more than 2 or 3 levels down in the url.

5. Having static pages with no query string parameters

6. Having underscores between the words

But, these are pretty old practices…with the social web in web2.0, SEO will also majorly depend on how users are liking the content and sharing on the web.

Best Practice: While keeping the above guidelines in mind, thinking about the user and how he behaves after he lands and what you want him/her to do on the site would give great inputs in how you can align this with the above SEO practices.  Providing seperate identification in the URL for important sections and features of the site would enable visitors to remember the urls and land directly to the pages. Provide short and easy to copy and share urls.

Opinion Cloud is a firefox plugin for YouTube.  It got a very interesting features which summarize the comments into positive and negative while showing the comments in a nice tag cloud.

This tool though gives the feedback on the video, it can be better used to infer the feedback on the product or service.

You can install Opinion Cloud plugin from firefox website:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11283

I found it is interesting that SmashingMagazine.com has only 2.5K pages but get about 3 Million daily unique visitors per month.  The below I compared with couple of sites which mainly were built to drive traffic from Search Engines…And there are a ton of them coming everyday to make quick ad $ (I must confess I did test this

No. of Pages Indexed by Google:

Smashingmagazine.com – 2530 web pages
SM has hand picked topics and well written content. Having high userbase every topic is discussed in comments and linked from high quality sites, and social bookmarking sites which is a direct SEO benefit.

Hotklix.com (A Times Group Venture) – 370,000 Pages
A web scrapping site from Times Group, the site gets updated with small snippets of the content from other news sites, blogs as and when they are posted.

Kosmix.com (a $50 Million funded startup) – 225,000 Pages
This is also a web scrapping site but received a big media attention as it is a well funded startup and good PR Campaigns. They came up with a concept which is very similar to universal search results page, but organized various components/data elements coming directly from API’s thru algorithmically.

And, most of the pages from Kosmix, Hotklix and similar site are dropped from search engines as they identify the duplicate content patterns.  These sites may ultimately be banned from search engines which will obviously result to lesser traffic to a zero traffic.

It is always advisable to focus on “Content Quality, Uniqueness and Popularity in Social Web” to get the same sustainable results with much less effort.