Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Who Knows Your Association Is There?
30 Nov 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
We all have a tendency to think the world revolves around us. It is, after all, all about me. For associations, that means assuming that they are a household name in their particular niche. It means the certainty that the association’s priorities are everyone’s priorities, that what’s important to them is important to us.
But, well, sorry. No. The world revolves pretty much independently of any of us. In fact, sometimes we are simply unaware that an association exists. You think you’re everywhere you need to be, running the flag up the pole as often as possible and in all the right places. But for whatever reason, I haven’t seen it. Other times, I’m aware of something but it’s so irrelevant or so inconsequential that it just isn’t worth paying attention to.
The latter problem is about the value proposition. The former is about awareness, plain, old, garden-variety marketing and PR.
A lot of associations are still on the fence about social media, both in the guise of member engagement and of marketing. Many have the valid opinion that their members—often middle aged, male, non-technie types—don’t use social networks. What they’re ignoring is social media marketing’s ability to build awareness in lots of ways.
As you see, the benefits of SMM are the same as any plain, old, garden-variety marketing-awareness campaign, but turbo-charged by the online medium. Exposure, increased traffic, SEO, qualified leads, closing the sale and, hugely important these days, lower cost.
Who can argue with that?
300 Links
20 Jul 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Every designer on my staff has a copy of Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information. I’ve found nothing better about how design serves information and what that means to the relationship between editors and designers. Tufte has an interesting article in the current issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review called How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them). He says:
“The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. …
How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called ‘sharing our values,’ ‘participation,’ and so on?
No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing our company’s values.”
When you think about it, this is comparing “apples to elephants,” according to Laura Chavoen, Imagination’s EVP of strategy. The number of links on a site should be determined by what you’re trying to accomplish and your strategy for accomplishing it. If you just throw up a bunch of links because it’s easy and cheap, your site is essentially a trash can. And who wants to gather around a trash can?
But Tufte, as always, is being provocative, so it did make me think about association websites and how they use links both to achieve their membership and their SEO objectives. I looked at several sites, selected because they serve a diverse membership and aim to be the single source of information for that constituency. (I may define “links” more narrowly than Tufte so I excluded the major navigation tabs and their pull downs. Links take you somewhere else, somewhere specific—an article, a conference, a webcast. They are more correctly associated with search than with navigation, at least to me.)
Of the sites I looked at, the one doing the best job is the National Council of La Raza. The Hispanic civil rights organization has 130+ links on its home page to everything from human rights issues to the housing crisis and what it means to Latinos.
Another excellent “vortal” is the National Federation of Independent Business Owners with 95 links to a wealth of information covering the gamut of issues for small business owners.
In many instances, the sites that do it well have several links for every piece of information. You can click on the image, the headline or the Read More.
It does seem that sites with the most links are issues-oriented rather than product and service oriented, or simply awareness oriented.
- An association that just wants you to know it exists and tempt you to join should focus relentlessly on its value proposition. In that case, both the navigation and the links will take you to the same places—who we are, what we do, what that means to you.
- An association that wants to sell you products and services links directly to those products and services. The content shows why you should care and want to buy without a lot of extraneous stuff to distract you from the potential purchase.
- An association with a strong policy agenda or a heavy advocacy stance must aggregate, curate and create content than fulfills all a user’s information needs on those issues.
In the first two instances, however, there won’t be a lot of repeat traffic and search results aren’t going to be great. So if the goal is to drive traffic, create stickiness and repeat visits, frequently updated content—lots of things to link to—and user friendly linking are the key.
Counting the links on your home page is no automatic route to success. But it is an interesting exercise—as long as you stay out of the apples and elephants trap.
Who Is Tufte?
In case you’re not familiar with Tufte, he was described by the New York Times as “the da Vinci of data.” He has written seven books and, if you’re ever preparing a power point presentation, go to his website for yet more reasons to hate both working with power point and having to sit through most PPT presentations.
