Category Archives: Web Development

Using Open Graph to Control Branding

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An important aspect to building a brand identity is controlling the brand. Large companies have entire documents defining the logo, colors, verbiage, etc. of their brand. However, it is often the little things that get overlooked. In social media there is a multitude of ways to disseminate and support your brand; this is about one small way that could have a big impact.

Anyone who has posted a link on Facebook has seen the thumbnail that shows up associated with the link and site blurb. You may notice that it will often give you options to pick the thumbnail you want. You may have even noticed that oftentimes the company’s logo or any relevant picture is not in the list. Where do the blurbs and thumbnails come from, and can you control what thumbnail is associated with your site?

The most basic thing that Facebook does is simply read your page. You should already have a “description” meta tag for SEO, and that is used as the blurb. Any images embedded on the page (through img tags – not included in CSS as backgrounds, etc.) will go into the thumbnail list. You may try to trick Facebook by including a picture but obscuring it, etc., but there is a much easier and reliable way to do this.

The answer is through Facebook meta tags, made available in the Open Graph protocol.  With those meta tags, not only can you specify a picture for a thumbnail, but you can specify real-world location information, your site name, description (that blurb), and more.

There are four required meta tags to make use of the Open Graph: title, type, url, and image. To specify the thumbnail, you need to include the following meta tag in the head section of your html:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”imageurl” />

You can even include multiple instances of this tag to give multiple thumbnail choices. You could change the image seasonally, for promotions, or just to keep your brand current. The tags override the automatic thumbnail production based on the images on your page. Also, note that the first thumbnail shown will be the largest image in the list, so make sure your primary message is the largest image.  This will ensure that when someone shares a link to your site, instead of a random or even unrelated image, the message, brand, or logo you want to portray is there.

Read more about the Open Graph protocol, available meta tags, and image parameters at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Extra parked or redirect domains don’t show up in search engines

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Extra or redirect domains that redirect to a different “primary” domain do not help you by showing up in search engine results.  For example, if Bevelwise were to own the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com which is full of keywords and redirect that domain’s traffic to bevelwise.com it would not help us in search engine rankings at all.  If someone were to look for the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com in Google, it wouldn’t be found.

If search engines were to see this extra domain and try to index it, they would see that there is not any content on this domain, it just redirects to a different website.  Therefore, it has no search engine value and the search engines will completely ignore it.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, people used to type in the address bar a keyword and add “.com” to try to find something.  For example, someone who wanted to buy office furniture might type in “officefurniture.com” and hope they are taken to a legitimate website.  People who wanted to capture this traffic would purchase these domain names and put up websites or redirect this traffic to a different site. This is sometimes called “blind” searching and it is very rare to find people doing this today.  Search engines have  removed the need to do blind searching.

There are a few reasons to have and keep these extra domains.  The primary reason is to ensure that no one else (like your competitor) buys the domain.  That is a very good reason why you would want to buy the “.net” and “.org” version of your primary domain, you wouldn’t want your competitors to have those domains.

The other reason to have extra redirect domains is to capture the traffic of common misspellings of your primary domain name.  For example, Google owns the domain gogle.com and if you go to that address it redirects people to the primary domain of google.com.

Outside of the two above reasons, we do not recommend to purchase additional or extra domain names unless you intend to create unique websites for those domains.