Aaron Hoos

Was sent this link a while ago from Jeffrey Priebe when he and I were collaborating on a project for his client.

Search engine optimization is a great buzz word that gets kicked around a lot (and I’m frequently asked to “include” it in my work, although the asker doesn’t always know what it even means).

Here is  a great article that describes SEO in light of Google’s changing algorithm. To my clients: If I’m including SEO as part of your work, it’s likely that I’ll use this as the go-to resource to guide me.

SEOmoz | How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time.

Note: The blog’s author also references another blog about SEO ranking that is also a must-read.

This book is a “must read” for businesses that are online. Tapscott breaks the different ebusiness models down into a handful of categories that can help business owners understand what they are, what they aren’t, and how to succeed with what they’ve got.

Wired is one of those magazines that I always mean to read but never seem to get around to. Not sure why — other stuff always seems to be slightly more pressing, I suppose.

A friend put me onto an article by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (who you might remember as the author of The Long Tail, which is essential reading in my opinion). This guy’s smart. Listen to what he has to say.

The article, “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business“, talks about why giving stuff away for free is good for business. And it’s not referring to the calender you get from your local real estate agent each year.

The article opens with Gillette’s impact on the marketplace (he gave away razor handles and made a fortune on disposable blades). We’ve seen a similar phenomenon with computer printers that are nearly free while the ink cartridges cost a fortune.

The last half of the article outlines a taxonomy of 6 categories of free offers. The article is long-ish, but you need to read this part. It’s gold. Read it and think about how a free offer might impact your business. You might be surprised.

(On a side-note, my favorite line comes from off-beat genius Stewart Brand in 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.“… Brilliant!).

This is interesting, particularly because of an article in The Guardian in which the Financial Times editor said that “almost all” news sites will charge for content within the year. It might happen as a desperate move by some but as long as we have citizen journalists, Twitter, and a competitive environment where content is offered free as a way to attract eyeballs, we’ll have free content. The only way that the media can charge for their content is if they can prove that they deliver more insight (or some other kind of value) than bloggers/tweeters/free news sites. The Economist does this well right now, and so does Harvard Business Review. But there aren’t a lot of others, I think.

To bring this back to the Business Diamond Framework: Traditional Newsmedia isn’t delivering enough on the Value-Add Diamond to be able to sell anything on the To-Market Diamond; and their Support Diamond is so bloated that their costs are way too high.

“Content is king”. That is a rule of thumb adopted by website creators because they know that high quality content helps to attract and retain customers by positioning the company and by building relationships with people.

Seth Godin, in his excellent free ebook Everyone is an Expert, says that people aren’t searching for anything online… they’re going online to make sense (page 9). That’s a brilliant distinction and it supports the belief that content is king. We need content to help us make sense.

It used to be that content would get piled on top of content on the first page. Website owners wanted links to many things on their first page to help position the company as the expert. They wanted people to click to their home page and see that there were many options to choose from.

But lately, things are changing. Businesses still know that content is king — that people will still go to their site to find trustworthy information to help them make sense. But those businesses are beginning to realize that overwhelming people with links on the first page is not the way to greet prospects and customers.An excellent example to show this difference can be found by comparing the websites of software giants Oracle and SAP.

Here is a screenshot of Oracle‘s home page.

It’s not easy to tell from here but there are 72 “primary” links on this page (“primary” meaning highlighted in the main body of the page, not the smaller ones in the the header or footer). 72! That is a lot for any web visitor to read through even if they are sorted the way Oracle has them.

Here is SAP‘s home page.

Again, it’s hard to tell at this size but there are 10 primary links (with only 5 ever showing at a time).

What a difference! Oracle’s page has an overwhelming number of links that could turn off any prospect or customer. SAP, on the other hand, has a simple, clean site with only a few links.

In my mind, SAP has made a huge change. My advice to Oracle? Better fix your site quickly!

It is so important to guide your visitors rather than to simply present them with all of their options at the beginning. The whole web 2.0 environment has a clean look with much fewer links. Just click to web 2.0 companies like Skype, Facebook, Box.net, Flickr, and LinkedIn to see how these companies are using a minimal amount of links to greet customers.

The point of this blog is not to simply suggest that your homepage should have fewer links. Rather, it’s to illustrate much more important concepts:

• People want to be guided. They think they want all of the options but they really don’t. They want a way to get to the right options quickly. The thinking used to be that businesses give all the options up-front to reduce clicking through a long content pathway from one page to the next. But people would rather click for quick sorting and clear, “bite-sized” content. It creates longer content pathways (by requiring more pages on a site) but it makes choosing easier because each click narrows the choices they have to make.
• Content is only king if it is useful. If content is presented en masse, it requires effort and it can be difficult to place that content within a context. Content becomes more useful when it is presented in manageable pieces within a context. And that context is created with high-level choices presented to the website visitor right on the homepage.

I’m a fan of Don Tapscott’s work. Although this isn’t my favorite book of his (Sorry Don, but Digital Capital and Creating Value in the Network Economy are two of my favorite books), Wikinomics is timely and relevant with plenty of online content available. A good read.