kickstartllc.com – insights

Congratulations to my client FINNEGANS for winning an Effie Award last night.  The team at martin | williams has provided excellent creative direction and the people at FINNEGANS are passionate, dedicated and always positive.  Cheers!

Having a computer blow up can so easily lead to other types of blow-ups – to your data, your schedule, maybe your emotions.

Thankfully, when a company laptop crashed recently, the fact that we are good about backing up our data meant that all we faced was inconvenience rather than data loss.

A lot of companies outsource work to us and we’re believers in outsourcing, too. So we took the PC for (we hoped) repair to a local shop that we hadn’t worked with before.

It was a miserable experience: Not because they couldn’t fix it.  Not because they misdiagnosed the problem. Simply because they failed to live up to very simple expectations – expectations set by them, not by us.

How did they fail? Did they promise a rock star performance or genius-level analysis of what was wrong?

Nope. They said they’d look at the laptop and call us with what they saw. Pretty simple.  Did we get a call? No.  Niente.

Woody Allen famously said that “80% of success is just showing up”.  So when you tell someone you’ll be some place or do some thing, turns out you can succeed just by doing what you said you’d do.

Amazing how many companies fail to live up to this simple standard.

“Manufacturers shipped more smartphones than personal computers in the fourth quarter of 2010,” reports the FT, hitting a milestone much earlier than predicted and “crowning mobile devices as the computing platform of choice.”

In an article published last fall, Chris Nutall, the FT’s San Francisco-based Technology Correspondent wrote :

“Morgan Stanley predicts that two-thirds of Dell’s revenue and half of its operating income base are at risk from declining PC and server growth in 2011.”

Jen-hsun Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, says 2011 will be the year of “superphones” and tablets.

The PC will remain important, he says, but “everyone had better be well-positioned in mobile and cloud computing, because that’s where the new growth is coming from. The whole supply chain is affected from retailers, where consumers buy their computers from a Verizon store rather than Best Buy, to the software industry, where people aren’t buying shrink-wrapped products but are downloading apps and services over the air.”

Much of the accelerated growth was due to unexpected gains in Google’s Android operating system which passed Apple’s iPhone and Nokia’s Symbian OS as the most widely-adopted mobile platform.

Despite being outpaced by Android, however, Apple saw a doubling of its market share in 2010 eclipsing RIM’s Blackberry and taking over as number two.

It seems as though no sooner have I completed a website redesign for a client that their thoughts turn to search rankings. They may ask the question is a variety of ways and with varying degrees of sophistication but the one thing they all want to know is “How do I get listed on the first page of Google results?”. The flippant answer is you need a staff of 10 and a million dollar budget.

To get a real and more useful answer to the question, we turned to Greg Bassett of NorthPoint SEO. “There’s not a lot with SEO that requires advanced technical expertise,” Bassett told us. “That being said, success with SEO requires an attention to detail, a willingness to experiment, and monitoring results over time so you learn what’s working and what’s not.”

Bassett’s advice falls into five categories. Here’s what he told us.

1. Keep it real. Make sure you use real words that reflect what you do and what make your company unique. Those words can appear in a variety of places – your metadata, your keyword tags, and – perhaps most importantly – search-friendly URLs. What are those? “A web address that tells what the link is in human-readable form. Like ‘/my_great_service.html’.”
2. Don’t click here. “Using the phrase ‘click here’ is an easily avoidable mistake,” warned Greg. “This isn’t the 90′s. Everyone looking at their browser knows that an underlined phrase in a different color is a link – so use the real words as your link.”
3. Less is more. Keep the list of keywords and the number of words in your phrases short. He advises us to “focus on the words and phrases that uniquely describe who you are and what you do. People search in iterative rounds starting with a broad phrase that they gradually refine until they get a set of results that reflect what they’re looking for. When you’re on that list, you’re in front of someone who is looking for you.”
4. Be true to your words. “That is to say, the words and phrases behind the scenes [in the metadata and in the links], should be echoed in the copy people can read on your pages.”
5. It’s a process not a project. “Success will be experienced over time as the client gets familiar with how people are being led to their site through search. Experimentation and analysis will reveal what’s working and what isn’t. Treating the SEO exercise as a process rather than a project almost always yields excellent results.”