Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Over the past year in the world of search optimization, a new term has arisen called “trust rank“. Before trust rank, there was page rank, which was a method used by search engines to determine the “rank” of a specific page in relation to others within the same site and across the internet. When it was first launched, page rank was thought to be the end-all be-all for rankings. If you got a high rage rank, you got high rankings. After a while, people started to game the system by linking high PR (page rank) pages to other high PR pages and it went up and up. Now Google, and eventually Yahoo and MSN, take into account “trust rank”, which is how trustworthy or reliable the neighborhood of information is.

Let’s take academia for example. If I compare two sites called www.healthcare.com and www.healthcare.edu, which do you think I would obtain the most reliable information? The .edu extension most likely means that it went through some kind of committee or standard which evaluated the information to make sure it was reliable and repeatable. The .com extension, although it may be identical to the .edu information, could have been posted by anyone, from anywhere in the world. Hence, the .edu extension is given more “trust”. The case goes with other large corporate websites or major news portals. A link from the Chicago Tribune is probably worth more than some random blog reporting chicago news. Why? Because the Chicago Tribune has an editorial staff, web team, copy editors, etc. etc. who all scrutinize and verify information that goes on their website.

So how does trust rank work?
So far as anyone knows outside of the major search engines, it’s pretty much all manual. I can assume that they have created automated processes to give certain extensions (.gov, .org, and .edu) extra points towards TR (trust rank) and then they are given more points based on manual verification of information on those sites. You can also think of it as “how difficult is it to get content published on this website?” If the answer is extremely difficult, most likely the TR is high, if it’s “anyone can do it” the TR is probably really low (I’m looking at you social networking.)

Know something I don’t or left out? Let me know in the comments.

As many webmasters know, you often find “No Referral” data in your web traffic session mix. What is this “No Referral Data“? Where does it come from? Every visitor to your website has to have come from somewhere. They just can’t arrive out of thin air. Well, the short is answer is yes they can. The long answer is below.

1. Users arrive via a bookmark or by directly typing in your website. If you have a great brand name (Pepsi, Toyota, Amazon, etc.) you probably have a ton of this. Users arrive at your website because they know your company or know your brand and just assume that you own www.mybrand.com. Or you make it easy for users to “Bookmark this site” via javascript or del.icio.us. One way to track this could be by redirecting users to page that changes often www.mydomain.com redirects to www.mydomain.com/index/1234 or something. You could even have the /index/1234 hidden behind the scenes using some SEO trickery so as to maintain the user experience.
2. Your web server files are not formatted correctly. Needless to say, this is not good. There are a number of problems that this could have stemmed from, so I’ll leave it up to Google to explain.
3. Visitors are arriving by clicking on a link in an email you sent them. This is the case for most desktop email clients. Even web email clients should register that the user arrived via a web email client (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.). In order to check for this, you should set up an email redirect in order to catch this traffic. So when the user clicks on the link in your email they go to www.mydomain.com/email-redirect?www.mydomain.com/actualpage.htm or something along those lines. The redirect functionality shouldn’t be that difficult to set up, it’s just a matter of rolling it out into your email communications that may be a hassle. This will eliminate any most uncertainty in your traffic, as users could still type in your domain manually when they read it from your email.
4. UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) is not tracking properly. This is most likely the least of your worries. Again, I’ll defer to Google for the tech mumbo jumbo. But it essentially comes down to a lot of factors, over which you have little or no control unless you are an ISP yourself, in which case you better know what is going on.

Anything I might have missed? Let me know in the comments.

A recent study was released by the UN saying that “most websites” failed blind or otherwise disabled users on multiple levels in terms of usability and accessibility. The fact that a large portion of websites failed on a few parts isn’t that shocking - what is shocking though is the percentages of websites that failed key areas of standard design criteria.

From the BBC article:

KEY SHORTFALLS

• 93% failed to provide adequate text descriptions for graphics
• 73% relied on JavaScript for important functionality
• 78% used colours with poor contrast, causing issues for those with colour blindness
• 98% did not follow industry web standards for the programming code
• 97% did not allow people to alter or resize pages
• 89% offered poor page navigation
• 87% used pop-ups causing problems for those using screen magnification software

And if a recent lawsuit against Target is any indication of the future of web accessibility and design standards, I’m sure there are a lot of lawyers foaming at the mouth with the release of this article.

At what point does your “mom and pop” website become accountable for their lack of accessiblity? Ideas?

The Weather channel website is not really known for cutting edge technology, but today is different. The weather channel has taken it up a notch into the Web 2.0 world with their new interactive weather map. Using Microsoft Virtual Earth technology they’ve created a pretty handy little application. Google has a similar weather mapping utility, but it’s pretty lame compared to this. The only gripe I have with the Weather Channel utlity is that it does not currently have radar mapping all the way down to the street level. I think it would be cool to run outside and try and avoid the rain based on their mapping data.

Know any other good weather mapping utilities? Let me know.

UPDATE: I also found this site called WeatherBonk, which has web cams tied to Google Maps for real time weather data. Still not the radar data I wanted, but getting closer to an all-in-one weather solution. And after chatting with David, one of the designers of WeatherBonk, I found out they even have Doppler Rader overlays (click on “Radar”). Or I could just look out the window.

photo © MIROSLAV VAJDIC for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

The RTA, Regional Transit Authority, just launched a new website to help commuters make more sense out of the debate between “Should I drive 20 minutes to work?” or “Take the bus, which takes 45 minutes?”. It’s really a cool site and you should check it: Drive Less Live More.

And I can definitely attest to this statement:

“feel fatigued or frustrated sitting behind the wheel”

If there is anything that will suck the life right out of you, it’s sitting in Chicago traffic. That’s why I will never if I have a choice, I will only take the train to work from now on. So much nicer.

According to Firebug they are:

I have used a number of job sites over the years to find and post jobs and find projects to work on in between my other jobs. I always thought these guys had a great little job website, but it doesn’t seem that they ever really had any selection. I think it was just a matter of lack of traffic. There was also FlipDog, which was a great job search engine, which had a really fun interface, but which was ultimately acquired by Monster and destroyed. Monster is now trying to resurrect FlipDog as a Google-like job interface, but I think Google does a pretty good job of that with their Google Base interface.

So who’s the new best job site in town? Immediately, you would think Monster or Careerbuilder, but you would be wrong (at least in my opinion). The best place around is in face craigslist. Don’t believe me? Check out this little grahpic courtesy of Alexa trend rankings:

And this little page has some comparative data as to the pricing structure in every major market. Craiglist is no slouch and definitely deserves a look in the future if you are looking to post or find a job. Know of any other great tech or other related job sites? Let me know if the comments.

Congrats MySpace! You have ousted Yahoo as the #1 site on the internet! Huzzahs and handshakes all arou–

Not so fast MySpace! Don’t think because you have the biggest site on the intarweb that you can just run out and buy that shiny new gold lamborghini with bald eagle interior. Oh no my friend. The end is nigh, you just don’t know it yet.

But Jeff, everyone who’s anyone has a MySpace page, how can MySpace go under? Never! Can’t happen! The end of the internet!

Not likely. MySpace will probably not go under with proper management, technology upgrades, a better interface for users to post and format their thoughts. It can last a good long while (at least until the next MySpace or Web 3.0)

The main reason that MySpace can only go down from here is your friends are boring. Let’s think for a minute: you create a MySpace page, you go crazy and friend everyone and their brother. Oh, I found my high school friends - let’s add all of them. Oh, I found a few of my college buddies - let’s add all of them and their friends. Awesome - I found that random guy I saw on the street. Ok, I have this page set up. Now…GO MySpace - GO! … Why isn’t anything happening?

I understand some people sit on MySpace all day and read about their friends and their friends friends and their…well you get the point, but MySpace in general is for two purposes:

1. Bands to connect with artists - which I think is fantastic and I love MySpace for.
2. People without a life.

Prove my wrong about #2 in the comments. I dare you.

This is what happens when a number of factors come together:

1. Insane deadlines
2. Competitors “out-scooping” you.
3. Burnout from creative demands.

And if you’re Google or Yahoo, I think people are going to notice.

Most websites that have been around for any length of time have some kind of traffic going across them - it just varies as to what amount. MySpace is running at 1.5 Million page views everyday where as my website gets 1 or 2 less than that, but pretty close If the purpose of your website is merely for informational purposes, I applaud your efforts and congratulate you on a job well done. You can probably stop reading at this point.

If your site is to generate word of mouth traffic, sales calls, purchases, conversions, a new lead, etc. you are asked to read on.

So you have this site and you have these visitors, but you don’t have any conversions. Here is a handy dandy check list to make sure that your users are actually seeing everything you want them to see:

1. Make sure your website is compliant in all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, etc.). If the content is a big jumbled overlapping mess due to browser rendering problems, this will definitely effect your users experience. Make sure fonts are big enough, colors are bright / contrasting / visible enough, and images are understandable.
2. Make sure your action items are prominent. Your phone number, address, shopping cart, website, etc. should be visible on every page where you want a user to purchase from. Look at your urchin or google analytics logs, web trends data, and other traffic avenues and see if users are arriving at your site but not at the pages you intended. You can use a funneling navigation scheme to ensure that they arrive at Point A, Move to Point B, and Purchase at Point C, perhaps without them even noticing.
3. Use language that the user finds engaging, enticing, fun, articulate - depending on your audience.
4. User color schemes and themes relevant to your audience.

Some of these are fairly obvious, but you should always take a step back and ask, “What is the point of this site and how can I improve my user experience?” which will then lead to higher sales and conversions. If you’re users are happy, you will be happy.