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

So I saw this video this morning from TechCrunch and it shows a new search interface that Google is testing out more widely. I remember hearing about this last year and thought, I’d rather not. Seeing it again still kind of leaves me with that opinion. Here are my hesitations:

1. User Interface - Please don’t do this to the current interface. It’s kind of ugly. The reason I go to Digg is because I expect this kind of nuttiness. I go to Google because I want information, not a bunch of buttons to push.
2. Politics - There is a lot of competition out there for top search results. I’m assuming that if this is fully rolled out that voting up and down will only be a marginal part of the search ranking, or if you vote up or down or add/remove results, that it will only effect your ranking views when you are logged into Google.

My gut tells me that this is just another product team project that won’t make it all the way to the homepage. Only time will tell though.

Update: I received an email from Dan Lewis, an employee of Wikia Search, and he said that Wikia Search has been doing a lot of this stuff for a while now. Check them out when you have a second.

So I was doing some research today for a client project and I found this link below listed in Yahoo’s search index.

Any idea why they would continue to publish this result, even after identifying “Dangerous downloads”? I mean, don’t you want to provide the best customer experience possible to your users?

Does anyone have any insight into why they are doing this?

I saw an interesting video from Lifehacker and TechCrunch today about a possible Mozilla/Firefox interface. Overall, it’s a really interesting concept. It’s hard to evaluate as the touchscreen phone market is in its infancy right now and everything these days starts with whomever is first to market. So if most users become familiar with an iPhone interface, they are going to expect that other browsers behave this way. That is until another platform can come along and do it faster, easier, cheaper, or just make the whole experience better for the user. Regardless, I think it’s definitely a viable option for mobile browsing and applaud Aza Raskin for his efforts so far. Full video is below.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

No, I don’t actually agree with the title of this post, but apparently that is the idea that Fred Wilson has put forth in regards to the future of social media:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

Arrington rebuts that the future of social media is tying all of this disparate information together using data portability and integrating sites with each other via API’s and SaaS in order to enhance user interaction and integration.

The future of social media, I hope, isn’t in more tools to help us spew more content. Instead, we need ideas and technology that can leverage all this available online content (including status and activity streams) to enhance real world social interactions.

I wholeheartedly agree. There will always be a need for additional content on the web. The key to the future of social media is sharing this information across platforms simultaneously and unlocking the interface so that users don’t have to switch between platforms in order to perform a single task, or eliminating the need to duplicate content across platforms.

He also mentions mobile devices as the center of this content universe to both publish as well as consume content, which again, I totally agree. And again, much like social media, we need to get the big boys (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to come to a consensus on operating systems, user interfaces, and how they integrate with the web in order to provide easy-to-use, reliable, and consistent experiences.

It’s a painfully slow and frustrating process, but it’ll get there sooner or later.

Recently, Google announced that they were incorporating search within a site into their search results. At first glance, this may sound like a beneficial tool, but let’s examine it a bit more closely.

Bad for Users: Search Aesthetic
Most often, people search for two to three keywords in a search query. The results they are presented are then reviewed and if results are not found, the user will either abandon their search or try a new set of keywords, sometimes more in depth or different terminology all together using the berry picking method. In this new situation, a user may try two or more keywords, and then they are presented with an additional search box. Now immediately, the usability guy in me is questioning, “Doesn’t this add clutter to an increasingly busy interface?” The beauty of Google is the one box search method. Don’t like what you get, try searching again.

Bad for On-Site Marketers: Stealing Traffic
The search within a site feature also causes the user to spend more time with Google. Normally, I would be more than happy to spend more time with Google, but from an on-site marketers perspective, this is not always a good thing. For one, Google is displaying Adwords advertising the entire time. So the user gets one round of advertising based on their initial search and then another round, which is even more specific, on the second, third, and so on results. Again, for PPC marketers, this is fantastic. However, if you are buying or selling on-site advertising (text links ads, banner advertising, video placements, etc.) this is not good news. Impressions drop, clicks drop, revenue drops, and as a result, these methods become less “effective” in driving previously available results.

If I were selling this type of advertising, not that PPC hasn’t already cut into your profit margins, I’d keep an eye on this latest development. Anything i missed? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.

I read several usability and search blogs on a regular basis (Jeff Croft, A List Apart, 456 Berea Street, Matt Cutts, etc.), but UXMatters is consistently one of the best I read. And when worlds collide of search and usability, I’m especially interested. This article discusses using location and location based information as part of the information display, filtering, and user interaction processes. A great read, but it got me thinking about the future of mobile web and what it could mean for me walking down the street one day with my cell phone.

Very Near Future Me
As I’m strolling down the street, I walk by a restaurant and open my phone/mobile device to see a message from the restaurant itself (opt-in of course). After doing a quick lookup of my phone number it says “Hey Jeff, come on inside. Lunch special today: Roast Beef Sandwich, $4.99.” As excited as I am about a roast beef sandwich, I click on the name of the restaurant in the message to get their Yelp page, just to make sure it’s a decent restaurant. I like the reviews, why not give it a shot.

After lunch, I walk outside, take a quick picture of the restaurant, add it to Flickr with some tags for “delicious sandwich”, Yelp with a positive review, and my blog. Other folks, ready for lunch, see the posting on my blog and head out for the same lunch special. I hit “locate” on my phone and see where all my friends are instantly. Everybody’s busy so I head over to Borders to see if they have that DVD I was looking for. Once I get there, I take a picture of the UPC code and it instantly pulls back the price of the DVD and the price of 5 other retailers, online and nearby.

Soon enough

image courtesy of Sufjan Stevens

Yesterday, the ChicagoTribune’s urban entertainment site, Metromix.com, got a bit of a face lift. My initial thoughts - I like it. Let’s go through the pros and cons of this new design.

Pros:

1. No tables - To start, it’s a LOT better than the previous iteration, which was entirely table based and a hodge podge of information presented to the user.
2. Cleaner experience - The new version is much cleaner and has more dead space which makes the experience much lighter than before. And if you really want a clean, adless experience make sure to install AdBlock for Firefox. Sorry Metromix advertisers.
3. User Friendly URL’s - I like this a lot. The old site was pretty good about this, but the new information architecture is a bit more discoverable, although I don’t know why they needed to add “/content” on the end of each URL. Seems like they could have changed it based on the function: “/print” or “/email” depending on the user action, leaving “/” as the default url suffix. Examples: Big Ten Bars
4. Prominent Calendar - Although the old site did feature a calendar, it wasn’t featured as prominently as it is here. At least that seems to be my primary use for this site. Just hit Metromix and see what’s going on tonight, tomorrow night, or this weekend. Here are some other competitors in the “social calendering” scene: Gapers Block, Upcoming.org, Going.com, and Planyp.us.
5. Search Prep - This is the SEO nerd in me talking for this one. I’m impressed that they redirected all the old pages to the new pages. I’m not sure how involved the mapping process for that must have been, but I’m sure it was good times. In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, this link was indexed in Google today and redirects to the new site right now.
6. What’s Nearby - I love this feature and it’s been a long time coming. When you look up a business, you can see what else is nearby. Here’s one of my favorite sushi places: Grande Noodles. Yelp has been doing this for a while now, so it’s smart for Metromix to incorporate this feature.
7. Sharing - They’ve also added a “share” feature to each page to post to Facebook, Del.icio.us, etc. as well as a feature to post your photos (ala Yelp) for your business. Both of these are nice features, but just a wee bit late to the game, although I suspect that is mostly due to the size of this project redesign.
8. Nice font - Unlike the Tribune’s choice of logo fontage, this one is much cooler.

Cons:

1. Already been done - Although I like the features Metromix is bringing to the table here, it’s nothing earth shattering. The website functionality will not end up being the big draw, it will be the content.
2. Stylesheets for mobile - If you disable stylesheets, which is how most sites appear on my cell phone, the site gets pretty ugly. Although most of the content is still there and easily readable, it’s kind of an ugly read.
3. Clean up your code - Looking at the code, I found some proprietary statements and some other stuff that I don’t think needs to be in there “Begin SiteCatalyst code version: H.0. Copyright 1997-2005 Omniture, Inc. More info available at http://www.omniture.com” or “/************* DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ! **************/”.And if you’re going to use style sheets, let’s do it across the board and not have inline stylesheets:
   <li style=“float:left;display:inline;height:12px;line-height:12px;”>
4. Video player doesn’t really fit - This is nit picking, but the overall look and feel is slick and then there’s this vanilla video player in the middle of the content. Perhaps a bit of styling can be applied?

So overall, I’m liking this site. Nicely done Tribune. Many of the dislikes I had here are resolved here. We’ll see who ultimately wins out in providing the best information for my nights out on the town.

I haven’t checked the Chicago Transit Authority’s Trip Planner in a while, but it looks like they’ve done a bit of a redesign on the interface.

The new interface is a nice grid layout (point #4 on my recommendation list) as opposed to the previous layout, pictured below. They’ve added some nice MaqQuest-like iconography and moved the form over to the left, making it easier to jump right in to get directions. They still haven’t added any visual mapping of where you’ll be going during your journey across the city, but that’s still not imperative I guess if you fully trust the CTA to get you from point A to point B. It would still be nice to have a map of the beginning and end points at least so you have SOME orientation of where you are in the city.

I’d still like them to add the ability to export the directions via email or SMS, both to myself or to a friend. That would make it easy for me to tell my friends or relatives who are unfamiliar with chicago transit how to get around easily without having to explain the interface to them or give exact directions.

Overall, it’s a great next step. Clean design, CSS based layout. There are still a few things I’d like to see (embedding directions, sharing with friends, easier use on my cell phone*), but I can look past those things to the next iteration of the transit site. Thanks CTA!

* You can make it easier to use on my cellphone by either hiding the upper navigation (shown in the image below with CSS disabled) all together so I can skip right to the form to get directions, or providing me a link to jump right to the form “Click here to jump to directions”. Otherwise, I have to scroll past all the navigation items to get to the form.

As many good SEO’s out there know, your page title is one of the most important aspects of properly optimizing your page. So often, I see page title after page title completely identical to the previous one. “Product 1″, “Product 1″, “Product 1″, even though all three pages have different information - pricing, specifications, and where to buy, as an example.

Another problem arises when you have a deep information architecture with multiple levels. Say for example I have an auto parts store. I might navigate to a brand specific spark plugs page. Your hierarchy might look something like this: Car Place X > Auto Parts > Engine Parts > Spark Plugs > Rapid Fire Spark Plugs. That’s a lot to display in a page title, but not unbearable. The problem arises when you try and index this against Google, which limits the amount of characters in the page title to around 70-80 characters. You might end up with several pages all being indexed for the same page title, only due to truncation.

What you need to be sure of is that you move the most unique aspect of the page title to the front of the [title] tag. This will ensure that your most unique part of the title tag is indexed and is bold when displayed in search results. That’s really the most important point here. Google will always index everything in the page title, and even return results for it, however, you will get more clicks and therefore higher relevance if users see the term they searched for highlighted.

Picture of La Seo Cathedral courtesy of stewdawg7

Some pretty interesting things going on at the Tribune today as they redesigned the layout of ChicagoTribune.com. Compared to the previous layout, it’s quite different. Lots of white space, lots of easy to read text. Here are the things that I like:

1. CSS based layouts - Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! No more table nightmares. Thank you Tribune. Screen readers, search engines, and web designers every where applaud this choice.
2. Prominent Search - I like the prominent search box in the upper left hand corner. If I can’t find something within 10 seconds, boom, search.
3. Sectioned content - The old tribune page had LOTS of content all over the place and not really in any real organizational manner. This version at least makes an attempt at that.

Here is what I am not that fond of:

1. chicagotribune.com - That’s it? That’s the title of the site? No “Chicago News, Sports, and Weather - ChicagoTribune.com”? We’ll see how long that lasts when people start clicking on Paid Listings, Topix links, or CBS2Chicago’s link in search results because they don’t immediately see “Chicago news“. If I were another media company in Chicago, I would be ALL over paid listings to try and drive people over to my site before the Tribune changes this.
   UPDATE: So it appears that the Tribune has seen the light and added the “Chicago News, sports, …” back into their page title for the homepage.
2. Helvetica-ish logo - Really? Pretty first year art school if you ask me. No finesse my friends. Plus, the Chicago Tribune font itself is so classic. Why change a good thing?
   
3. Where’s sports? - The new tabbed navigation is nice in that it allows me to see a few stories with a few clicks, but what if I want to go right to sports. First I click on the Sports tab, then I click on either the story itself or click on the “Go to the Sports Section”. I can also access Sports by scrolling down the left hand side of the page. I understand from a business perspective that Classifieds are a money maker and you are driving people there for a reason, but people use this site for lots of reasons and a newpaper site should display the big sections above the fold immediately and within one click - Local News, Sports, Weather, and Traffic.
4. BLUE - Nothing else? Everything is blue. No gradients, no call out color, no subtlety, just white and shades of blue. Kind of boring.
5. All text / no icons - On each drill down page, the tribune has provided some easy to use tools to manage each content piece. E-mail, print, single page view (which I really like) and reprints (which I don’t imagine are they important, but ok). The one thing they missed though are easily identifiable iconography. Why not an envelope next to email? Why not a printer next to print? They could also provided the somewhat industry standard “A” and “a” for larger and smaller text instead of an up and down arrow. An up and down arrow indicates movement and not an increase or decrease in text size. Just my opinion.
   
6. Dead space on the top of the page - I understand the need for white balance and white space, but did the header bar need that much space for the logo and a small weather icon?
7. Old hat - Didn’t we already do this at least once? USAToday did it better than both, I think.

What else am I missing? Am I completely off base here? Let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: My brother in blogging, Lucas, has pointed out that this has occurred across multiple Tribune properties as well.