Uba Kontrovasie

URL fun with The Ever Project

Well thanks to Seth’s tip yesterday (yes people Seth Godin, quite a surreal sentence I know) I decided to check out ever.com or The Ever Project as it’s officially called.

It kicked off towards the latter end of last year and it uses most of the known Squidoo functionality, this is great for people who are already avid users of Sqidoo .

The USP of the site has to be the game play it provides. Firstly you sit there for a good 10 minutes or so playing about with all the possible url combinations. You’re then left to hunt the web to find facts in order to justify what your chosen URL claims.

Real novelty factors, and I can see a younger demographic getting into the whole Squidoo system early on in their web years. This is not only because of the novelty features, the existing lenses shown on the homepage scream good CTR’s:

Sexiest.cheerleader.ever.com
largest.hamburger.ever.com

Who wouldn’t be tempted to click through to those URL’s? Just to check out the claims out and have a good chuckle if not anything else. Ever.Com has been around for just under a year and there already seems to be quite a significant community building up around it.

cutest.chick.ever is my url

I’m keen to see how the ever-lenses perform in natural search results and how much weighting Google gives the unique URL’s. Some URL combinations might be worth gold dust, and the ability to add a 1000 chars leaves good room for optimised text also.

I did some playing with Google suggest and it can act as a handy to tool to help you pick URL’s.

Interesting times ahead for The Ever Project.

Tags: ever project, ever.com, Google, natural search results, Seth Godin, social media, social network, squidoo, web years

Act like you deserve your top spot in Google!

Modern approaches to NSO (post meta keyword stuffing) encompass many overlapping disciplines such as PR, User Experience (UE) and good design.

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.

Tags: Amazon, car kent, client side web-masters, content, Google, Google UK, HTML, natural search landscape, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), natural search results, paid search, search forms, search results, UE, web-masters