Dear Client,

This is a proposal for consulting work. Regardless if you use our services, we want to suggest that these are important aspects for a successful online presence and that they be pursued internally or by consulting with experienced professionals.

Keyword Research

• Research keywords, keyword frequency and value, competitor keyword ranking
• Deliverable: list of keywords to track and to design web page content (pages and blog) in order to achieve high SERP on target keywords
• Keyword-based domain name strategy

Brand, Offering Design Articulation

• The set of visuals communicating the brand (favicon, avatars, 140 character bios, tagline, trueline, etc.) needs to be clearly articulated especially for social media integration and deployment
• These are graphics and tightly designed text. Business cards are one deliverable

Search Engine Submission, Analytics Configuration

• Google, Yahoo, Bing registration (which gains access to the search logs) and sitemap.xml registration.
• Create Google Analytics account, configure async code for speedy delivery, with options, configure conversion settings

Website Design and Usabilty

• Initially we generally recommend using an open source content management system such as WordPress (or Drupal) as the content wrapper and CMS for any given website. Any additional programmed functionality or features such as client management tools can be wrapped by a CMS and operate "inside of it" as a separate but apparently integrated system. Re-inventing the wheel such as sitemap generation and search engine updates, RSS feeds, etc. is simply too time consuming, when WordPress and other tools have these as built-in or easily configured extensions.
• Design needs to be done by design professionals for a modern look and feel. We work with local award-winning graphic artists who have designed dozens of sites and can get the brand meaning communicated visually with a crisp visual value proposition
• Websites should be tested with real users but can be iterated quickly

Customer Acquisition Strategy Research

• Size of market
• Cost of customers
• Expected profitability of customers
• Customer acquisition channels (advertising, referrals), etc.
• Adwords, banner ads

Linkbuilding

• Backlink analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Linkbuilding plan and execution

Content Strategy

• Content strategy
• Content work schedule

Social Media Integration

• Social media account creation and configuration
• RSS and other syndication configuration

Ecommerce Strategy

• Ecommerce research, recommendations
• Ecommerce implementation

Resources

• Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug
• Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Neilsen
• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik
• Designing For The Social Web by Joshua Porter

Technorati code FHQC4ZMK2Q3J

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This post languished as a draft for many days, sorry for the delay, hope it was worth the wait!

Day 15 means we are halfway there! Thank you everyone who has followed some of our 30 links in 30 days linkbuilding campaign series. The daily requirement (even though sometimes the blog postings bunch up) has been very helpful in working through this part of the tactics we endorse and use for our clients's success.

SlideShare is Social Media

Unlike Docstoc and Scribd, SlideShare remains pure Social Media with an emphasis on networking and embedding. Their flash player has improved over time and their uptime and website responsiveness which is still occasionally flaky is now much, much better than it was in the early days.

Share, Share, Share Alike

The best way to use SlideShare (all links are nofollow, so that sucks) is to get people to intensively engage with what you have to offer. That means providing a high quality experience. Once can do that two ways:

• The Presentation is valuable, the information "disappears"
• The Information is valuable, the presentation "disappears"

Engagement with media that is portable, embeddable, and linked, that is the high value, rather than the PageRank value of the links (SlideShare is very stingy with link-juice).

The value of Presentation and the Presentation of Value

There are many powerful ways of presenting information using presentation software. In an earlier life, I created this presentation which demonstrates four distinct presentation genre. This particular presentation is done only in one of the four, the unfinished task is to create four different presentation genre to really show how the same information can be presented in very different ways with a different effect.

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Panoramio is Image Sharing Integrated into Google Maps and Google Earth

Enough said. It is a free photo sharing site. Ok, maybe not enough. As of July, 2009 Panoramio photos are being included in certain Google searches.

A Different kind of Link

Panoramio is a different kind of link-building process. It consists of links that are essentially geographical and visual as the link is between an image (and more importantly, it's metadata) and the image (and more importantly, it's metadata) in the map interface.

It's All About the Metadata

Consider maps as merely an interface. In some cultures they are much less prevalent, such as Thailand where maps are not taught and rarely used, even by those with university degrees. Regardless, it is the metadata, starting with the geographic coordinates, which is valuable. Just with any link from a conceptual perspective it is the thing linked from (generally text but also in the case of images, binary data) and its connection to the to, namely the presentation of those coordinates and the interface in another context.

One aspect of Metadata is language. The suggested use of two languages in the metadata cannot be emphasized enough.

Objects on a Map are the Reverse of Links

In this sense, what is of interest and value is the objects doing the linking, and not the object linked-to. After all, the value of a map is not the two-dimensional surface, but the features displayed on it, the roads, buildings, etc.

In this sense we need to be very clear on the value we are providing (namely the incentive to click on the link which is an image, as well as the accompanying metadata (title, description, keywords and most importantly the links to our sites).

Early Days and First Mover

When it becomes easier for the thousands of images at a given map location to be made available, the some of the same metrics Google uses for PageRank and SERP ranking will likely apply to which images will be displayed in the Google Maps, Google Earth and other Google and non-Google mapping interfaces:

• Age of image (older is better)
• Metadata (title, description, keywords)
• Links to the image
• Social behavior (favoriting, ratings, etc.)

It is incumbent in this environment to begin deploying the most important images to sites such as Panoramio.

Panoramio Profile and Link

A nice follow link is available on Panoramio Profiles, for exampel this one for SEO Indochina.

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Colorblindness

Colorblindness affects approximately 5-8% of the population, mainly males. The visualization of these kinds of colorblindness is eye-opening, to say the least.

The most common form of colorblindness is deuteranomaly, which is red-green. The colorblindness simulations show the color red as indistinguishable from a certain shade of green.

Actually to my eyes the dichromatic treatment renders both green and red as amber or ochre. Which means that yellow, orange, green, and red are seen as a light yellow to dark yellow spectrum, with purple as a darker form of blue.

This means that the use of red and green as distinguishably different should be avoided. The use of red-yellow distinctions or green-yellow distinctions could work.

Also now that the blue-purple distinction also gets muddled, which is not useful for the dark blue link and purple visited-link color standard in html.

Online Marketing

There are three online marketing graphical components which should be made colorblind-safe

• Company logo and other visual brand design elements
• Website color scheme, including background, headers, subheads, links, and visited links
• Any graphical banner advertisements used anywhere on the web

Just like the company or brand name and website URL, which may not be changeable, the company brand colors and logos may be off-limits to optimization. However, any kind of navigation or non-core imagery should be viewed through the lens of the colorblind customer.

Rules of Thumb

Some rules of thumb can be generated from these research findings

• Do not mix green with either red or orange
• Use a darker green against light backgrounds, as light green appears as yellow
• Do not mix blue and purple, and avoid shades of blue to purple, they won't stand out
• Use the VischeckJ tool (below) which will show how differentiated a given logo and graphic scheme is from competitor brand visuals

As per the usual, the idea is to be different, but in a good way.

Software

• ImageJ and VischeckJ
• For colorblind people, the What Color tool helps identify colors on a screen for those who cannot do so visually
• Visicheck has an algorithm called "Dalton" which changes colors to make the distinctions between colors more noticeable for the colorblind
• Visicheck also has online tools to check websites and images

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