Daniel Coburn

Today I read an article about how sitemap.xml files are not as useful as some people say they are in the world of SEO.  The argument was just because you have a page in the Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. index doesn’t get it ranked.  And I completely agree with them that just because it’s there doesn’t give it rank.  So the question needs to be why use a sitemap.xml file, and once you have them what do you do? Also what about a human consumable sitemap? What’s it’s function and why should you have one that is bot friendly?

First lets tackle the sitemap.xml.  These things are must haves, for a few of reasons.  They help you get your full site indexed, they help you get new pages into the indexes fast, they allow navigation of pages that might be isolated because of no-follow strategies,  and they let you set information about each page, such as how often it’s modified and it’s page priority.

A sitemap.xml is only going to get your pages into the search engine, it will be up to the public (and to some level you) to “vote” on how important those pages are to the world. 

What are the first steps to creating a sitemap.xml file? There are several ways to create a file, the simplest is to find an application that will spider your site and create an xml file for you… easy enough, but what happens if you have massive amounts of pages? Firstly you cannot exceed 50k links per file or 10 mb max, so if you do have more you will have to split your map up into multiple pieces.  The syntax for the “root” is pretty simple

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_01.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
 <sitemap>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_02.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2007-01-08</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

This will allow a company to get million’s of pages indexed into search engines, vs. thousands.  Once you get the pages in the index, now the magic begins.  Let us jump to user consumable sitemaps and their SEO benefit or purpose.

A user consumable sitemap is one that a person could go to and click around to view pages, ALL pages on your website.  One of the major sin’s I’ve seen is the development of really cool looking sitemaps, that are dhtml/javascript heavy and use those technologies to render elements on clicks, or throw AJAX content into a div for user consumption.  The biggest problem here is that search engines cannot read any of it.  The pages need to be bot friend and user consumable.  This means, no more than 100 links per page and keyword rich links. 

“Daniel WHAT? ONLY 100 LINKS!” — yes 100 links otherwise you get link spammy and that’s not very good, it makes the spiders think you are a link farm.  So there’s this really cool thing called Pagination! And yes those links need to be bot friendly too so they can find the next page.

What this will do is help start creating an internal linking that will allow spiders to find your pages, and start building internal link juice.  This will begin to start allowing them to be one of the more popular kids on the block.  Now all you have to do is start working on external content…. but that’s down the road a bit.

In today’s topsy turvy world we see many people trying to figure out the “magic sauce” for making a long term profitable website. I have been reading some really good article around the web about how a disproportionate amount of money is being spend on SEM (PPC and other SEM tech) compared to SEO.  Some of the numbers are mind boggling to me and I’m really confused at why something that gets 75% of the clicks to generate traffic only gets 15% of the Online Budget and something the generates < 25% of the traffic gets over 80% of the budget.

Here’s a Google heatmap that shows what people are actually looking at:

Google Visual Heat Map

You will notice that a vast majority of the customers are on the left side of the screen, and the ppc ads on the right are only showing green/blue vs. red and orange.

I couple of months ago at my office I began looking at our SEO and created a presentation for my manager to describe what I thought we needed to do in order to become more solid in SEO.  I was happy to hear that about two months later the same issue was being brought up from our SVP.  The information from the deck was given some Bling by my manager, and presented up the chain.  I’m very fortunate that not only is my manager a good guy, but he also knows SEO well, and he’s been able to champion it and answer the questions as they were fired at him.  This is great because SEO is a fundamental change in how most organizations in product development operate.

While I helped turn around and develop SEO Strategy for another $1billion retailer, I believe the opportunites I’ll have here will be far greater since the potential increase from fixing the basics is in the $10′s mm.  Some times a company can feel like a big ship and it takes a lot to steer the titanic out of the way of an iceberg, but fortunately there are no icebergs, only great opportunity to improve things.  I’ll be posting some more about basic things we’ll be working on, and what type of results we see.  Also I do believe that PPC and SEO are both required for success, but SEO can bring a lot more bang for your buck in the long term, not just the short.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

So I just bought a Magnavox NB530MGX Blu-ray player and hooked it up to my Westinghouse 1080p 42″ LCD TV and nothing happened.  I brought the cable and unit back to where I purchased it and swapped out the cable since it when we tested the cable it didn’t work in the store, but another cable did.  Problem solved! WRONG!  I got home hooked it back up and still nothing in the HDMI inputs, none of the 4 HDMI hook ups worked.  After doing some research I finally found out that it was not the blu-ray player but in fact it was the Westinghouse 1080p 42″ LCD TV that was having the problem.  In order to fix the problem you need to “reset” the TV.  To do this follow these steps:

1. Turn the power off
2. Press and hold the power button for about 10 minutes seconds
3. Watch a big “W” appear on the TV
4. Reconnect the HDMI cable

This should be good news for people that get a blu-ray player, people that want to hook up their Playstation 3 (PS 3), an HD Connection on their xbox 360.

My friend Sean had this posted on his face book account, I thought it was good enough to share:

“Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.” -Helen Keller

I have been pretty lucky to work on several projects and my new job.  Many are exciting as they are breaking new grounds in defining relevance on the website, others are great because they are stretching beyond what is currently being done on the sites ad helping mold the future.

For me relevance on a website is pretty simple: Display something meaningful to the website visitor.  Now the method of doing this can vary.  If you are coming to a site via organic search, I would expect the page you land on should be relevant to the term you searched.  Also if you are searching for an item and you get a paid search, I would expect that the person that created the ad will land  you to a page that is meaningful to the search.

But what if you are already on the site? You are browsing products, articles, images or users?  What then? How do I make a page relevant when you are defining the path you are taking and not me?

First the amount of data that can be collected is astronomical.  Every click, every entry, every closure needs to be captured and processed.  There are several companies that specialize in relevance and that is all they do.  The one reason to work with third parties is simple.  They focus on relevance, where an internal IT group tends to focus on something immediately then move along.  Relevance engines need to constantly be tweak, otherwise you’d see very poor recommendations on sites like amazon.  I really love the idea of showing products that a customer might be interested in, and that might be because they are looking at a product another customer looked at in their shopping experience, and they bought something down the path.  So why not use this information to help jump the customer to the end of their search vs. the beginning?  What if 9 out of 10 people that viewed product A ended up buying product B?  Why not get product B in front of everybody buying A.

That is just an example of relevance, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

Imagine breaking out of product recommendations and moving into article recommendations, people recommendations, but basing all of them on the simple rules of monitoring shoppers.  It can be done and should be.

More later

My family and I have settled in Chicago, back to where I called home when I was young.  My oldest is in school and smarter than ever, my middle is at home cute and adventerous as can be, my youngest is still behind and once again left behind by the government.

I love my new job, I’m doing product management for a great company with an even greater group of people.  I’m really excited to be there and they have great plans, and I’m really happy to be a part of their future growth.

I’m working on personalization/customization which currently entails relevant item selections to show customers as they shop the site.  I do think people get confused between personalization and relevant items.  While relevant items displays are part of personalization, personalization is a lot more than just simply showing people items other people bought.

I see a truly personal experience based on knowing the customer, and knowing them well.  For example it’s my daughter’s birthday in a couple of weeks.  If I could be presented on a site suggestions for her birthday when I arrive, 2 things may happen.

1. I say, “Holy Crap I need to get her a gift”
2. I shop on the site to get her a gift

Either way the site has provided me a personalize experience, and hopefully I’ll reward the site with my purchse.

I was able to go a midnight showing on Thursday with my Brother-in-law to see the Watchmen.

A couple of things offend me about the whole marketing/release of this movie.  First they always refer to the best selling graphic novel, when it was originally a twelve part macro series.  I know this because I have the 12 originals in my collection (no I don’t collect anymore this is from when I was in high school).  Second I was pretty astonished at all of the interviewers that said it stuck to the comics too well.  I find this funny because what is one of the first things someone does for a movie? Create the story and storyboards, how simple just staple the pages up on the wall and done!

I will say I dug out my books to page through them after seeing the movie, it’s been a long time since I’d seen them.  And sure enough I paged through them and the movie was very visually accurate to the book, so I was really impressed by that.  They did make some changes to the story, and cut out a few things (think cast-a-way), but overall they story remained very true to it’s origin’s.  That made me surprisingly happy.

If you’ve never read the Watchmen, I think it could be a hard movie.  It’s very long and the characters are very deep.  It’s incredibly dark and they depicted violence visually unlike some of the comic books.  I will warn you that if you are not in to gore, sexuality, a naked blue man (and yes NAKED), and violence than this movie might not be for you.

Out of 5 stars, I give it a 4.5.

But Daniel, what does measure twice cut once have to do with any SEO, SEM etc?

Well a rule of thumb, if you cannot measure it don’t do it!  Simple as that.  If you have online ads, and offline ads, have different ways to measure it.  Of course you cannot control all offline, but you can control a vast majority of online.  If a person clicks on something you know what they clicked on, how many pages they viewed, and if you are advanced enough you can tell what phone number they called and all sales associated with them.

Don’t think that an online marketer isn’t aware of this, make sure you are smart about your money spend and understand that every lead going to your website should be counted as revenue from an online lead so you can analyze your ROI and make educated decisions on what really works and what doesn’t.

As always more later.

Every one  ages I have just recently celebrated my 21st birthday (again).  I was taken out to dinner (BBQ) and to a hockey game by my wonderful wife.  But as with everything we have times in our life that we face the truth of our mortality (so to speak).  As with many men my wife says I’m hard of hearing, and well I guess she was right.  If you look a hearing charts you’ll see there’s this wonderful threashold of “20″ if you’re above it you’re good.  If you’re below it, you have hearing loss.  Well I had A LOT below it so I am officially hearing impaired.  Now I’m ok with that, cause I was still able to function.  But when I’m in a room with a lot of people I really have a hard time singling out individual voices.

I was fortunate enough to be able to get some help from the state of UT and some really nice folks.  On monday I obtained my hearing aids.  And they were small, very small my wife didn’t even know that I was wearing them when I asked her, “What do you think?”  I’ve had them for 2 days now and they irritate my ears a little simply because I’m not used to having something in my ear’s all day.  Hopefully I’ll get used to them soon.

But why am I blogging about this?  Maybe someone will read it and realize that it’s not that big of a deal to get hearing aids.  They have improved enough that if you have a smaller hearing loss (just below 20) that you can get one’s that are barely noticible.  (My wife one time asked if I took them off and sure enough I hadn’t)

So go get your hearing checked!

So there’s this method called “Bum Marketing” and basically it’s a method to drive people to your site through writing articles and posting them about the web.  Now I’ve done a bit of this, but the level of success if far from “stellar”.  The basic process is discover your niche, find good keywords, write an article that contains them, and then put a link to your site in your resrouce box.

The idea is solid and overtime will pay off, but if you want to see $ now, you really need to figure our a better traffic driver like adwords.  Don’t get me wrong, it does work, you just need to give it time, and sometimes that’s the hardest part.

Probably the biggest deposit of article is at ezinearticles.com. I really don’t like the layout of the site, but there’s no denying it’s power and affectiveness.  Give it a whirl, write about something you love, then see if you can make money at it