According to Matt Cutts during the You&A session at SMX Advanced, Google Caffeine is live!

In the official announcement, Google reps have said that they created this new index because “content on the Web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates; the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”

What this means to the user is that content will be available to searchers more quickly. In doing a quick search for Matt Cutts, the latest post added to the index was that of Matt McGee of Search Engine Land only 26 minutes ago. That’s FAST!

What this means for the SEO is that creating and publishing new, valuable, optimized content on a regular basis is going to be key in driving large amounts traffic from the Google SERPs.

Google Caffeine Is Live!

Three months ago, 30 of us SEO geeks measured our body fat, then put together individual diet and fitness plans. The person who would lose the highest percentage of their body fat percentage by June 1 would win an iPad, or something of equal value.

The competition was fierce in the first month. People came in the office each morning bragging about running three miles, biking 10 miles, lifting weights and eating only tofu. Some malicious contestants planted booby-traps of cookies, brownies, donuts and chocolate cake around the office to repress would-be fitness gurus.

By the second month, the bragging subsided. By the third month, half of the competitors dropped out. In the end, only 14 returned to the Bod Pod to have their body composition analyzed. Of the 14 stalwarts, two of them actually gained fat percentage — one of them intentionally. So, out of dozen who kept up with their fitness plan, they lost 140.046 pounds of fat, which equaled a 218.22% loss of the total fat percentage.

Overall Winners:

1st Place, and the winner of the iPad: Michael Hasson. He lost 34.09% of his beginning percentage of body fat. Went from 31% to 20%
2nd Place: Dan Bischoff. Lost 30% of his beginning percentage of body fat. Went from 22% to 15%.
3rd place: Albert Mitchell. Lost 28% of his beginning percentage of body fat. Went from 18.6% to 13.4%

Woman Winner:

Tiana Smith. Lost 9.88% of her beginning percentage of body fat.

Total Fat Loss Winners:

1st Place: Michael Hasson. He lost 26 lbs of fat.
2nd Place: Andy Eliason. He dropped 23 lbs.
3rd Place: Rick Hardman. He shed 17 lbs.

Most Ripped (Total Muscle Gain Winners):

1st Place: Darren Bradley, gained 12.4 pounds of muscle.
2nd Place: Dan Bischoff, gained 7 lbs.
3rd Place: Albert Mitchell, put on 4 lbs.

Total Weight Loss Winners:

1st Place: Michael Hasson, dropped 29.4 total pounds.
2nd Place: Andrew Eliason: 21 lbs.
3rd Place: Dan Patterson: 18.512 lbs.

Extreme Last Place Loser. The Twinkie Award:

David Malmborg. He gained 35.714 % of fat from his beginning fat percentage. Went from 9.8% to 13.3% total body fat. He gained more than 6 pounds of fat and lost 2 pounds of muscle. And he recieved a box of Zingers for all his hard work.

Below is everyone in order of their rankings:

Michael Hasson 1st Place: Lost 34.09 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Dan Bischoff: 2nd place: Lost 29.9539 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Albert Mitchell: 3rd place: Lost 27.957 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Andy Eliason: 4th Place: Lost 22.6744 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Dan Patterson: 5th place: Lost 22.314% of his beginning % of body fat.

Scott Smoot: 6th Place: Lost 18.774% of his beginning % of body fat.

Darren Bradley: 7th Place: Lost 18.0645% of his beginning% of body fat.

Joe Bergevin: 8th Place: Lost 13.988% of his beginning % of body fat

Rick Hardman: 9th place: Lost 10.1695 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Tiana Smith: 10th Place, 1st for women: Lost 9.8765 % of her beginning % of body fat

Robyn Storms: 11th Place: Lost 9.009 % of her beginning % of body fat

TJ Welsh: 12th Place: Lost 1.35 % of his beginning % of body fat.

Nathan Blair: 13th Place: Gained 0.2989 % of his beginning % of body fat. Went from 8.9% to 9.7%.

David Malmborg: Dead Last Place: Gained 35.714 % of fat from his beginning %. Went from 9.8% to 13.3%

SEO.com Employees Drop Fat Percentage by 218 Percent

The three tier approach means separating your campaign into three major areas and then committing your resources to them in sequence. For example: Lets say you run a paragliding school and your ultimate goal is to obtain a top three Google spot for the term “paragliding.” Paragliding would become your third tier keyword, and you would set that on the back burner until you had reached your first and second tier goals. What are those you ask? Well a good idea for a second tier keyword in this case may be “paragliding school.” It is significantly less competitive than just “paragliding” alone and much more specific to what you are doing. The volume of searches may be far less, but you have to work up to your ultimate goal and this may be a good via point.

Now we just need to establish a starting point and choose a first tier key phrase. A good idea in this case may be something like “best paragliding school” or “paragliding school {your state/city}.”

Your campaign tiers should now look something like this:

1st Tier – Best Paragliding School
2nd Tier – Paragliding School
3rd Tier – Paragliding

As you are building links and optimizing be sure to follow your plan in sequence and exercise some self control in not going after your highest tier until you have achieved your goals for the lower tiers. When you have dominated this set of keywords you are ready to take on a new set. You could then take on a new third tier goal like “extreme sports” and come up with some new first and second tiers to help you get there.

SEO has been and always will be about strict methods and patience. If you have questions about your campaign, please call us and we would love to talk.

Define Your SEO Campaign

One of our favorite things about SMX Advanced is that it brings all kinds of cool people to town, and you know what that means: special guest stars on Whiteboard Friday!  This week one of our pals from across the pond, Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget, joins Rand to talk about how to get your content indexed faster.

When you’re covering poppin’-fresh, trending, news-worthy content, there’s no time to sit around whittling miniature canoes and waiting for Google to come crawl your site and index your new content. That sort of passive attitude will allow your competitors to dominate all of that awesome Query Deserves Freshness search traffic and make enough money to go buy real, full-size canoes whittled by fine Native American craftsmen.  You’ll be poor and jealous, and we just can’t have that. Watch this week’s video to learn several near-magical strategies to get your fresh content indexed faster than meth-fueled panther (that’s fast, people)!

Okay, you’re so fast that you ain’t got time to watch no stinking video, you just want the overview, well here you go. Mr. Baxter’s five strategies for super speedy indexing:

1. Normal Crawling

No, it’s not fast (usually), but it’s fairly reliable. That said, we don’t care about reliable; patient people are reliable and we’re not patient today, we want it NOW! Normal crawling is for sissies, ignore this point and move on to…

2. Update Your XML Site Map

There’s a link within your Google Webmaster Tools that will let you ping Google and let them know you’ve updated your XML, News, or Video Sitemaps. If you ping them, they will come. They may not come as quickly as they would if you put out a sign that says, "Free Beer," but it’ll definitely be much faster than their normal crawl pace.

3. PubSubHubbub

Say that three times fast! You won’t summon the Candyman, but you will remember the name of this awesome service that can help you get found super quickly. By publishing to a PubSubHubbub Hub (you can use a public one or create your own using Superfeedr), you’ll automatically reach all PSH-compatible services including Google Reader, Friend Feed, and Feedburner. One-stop-shopping, people (and Richard promises that it’s super easy)!

4. Twitter

Okay, okay, it’s not an official signal, but everybody who’s anybody thinks it’s highly likely that Google watches for new and/or popular content URLs that may be emerging faster than they can discover them. Makes sense, right? You and your friends can send word of the latest and greatest Hatchet-Wielding Super Hero faster than Google can find it; and if lot’s of people re-tweet it, there’s a good chance it deserves a little oomph in the SERPs.

5. Ping-O-Matic

Other than sounding like yet another wonderful device from the twisted mind of Ron Popeil, this service is like a combination of tactics 2 and 3. Ping-O-Matic lets you quickly ping a bunch of web services (such as PostRank, Bloglines, NewsGator, and Google Blog Search) notifying them of new content on your site. It’s as if there were a giant alarm that went off alerting the world of your amazing new content, and hey, isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to accomplish (as long as it doesn’t sound like the car alarm that keeps going off outside; I’d like to drop a meteorite on that car)?

There you go, five awesome tactics to get your stuff indexed and out to the public faster than a well-trained team of bobsledding ducks! Big thanks to Richard for hanging out with us this week and taking the time to work a little whiteboard magic.

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Whiteboard Friday – Get Indexed Faster! with Richard Baxter

We’ve got a very special bonus video for you today. Our buddy-and the Googliest spam cop to ever walk the webz – Matt Cutts stopped by to do a quick interview in front of ye olde whiteboard.  Watch in wonder and amazement as Rand and Matt discuss headers, status codes, how much of the web is worth indexing, porn, redirect chains, URL structures, geo targeting, leaking link juice, and amateur beekeeping!

Before you get all cynical on me and assume all you’ll hear in this interview is, "design content for users, not for engines," give it a chance.  Matt only brings up his trademark catchphrase once in the whole ~20 minute interview, and he is exceedingly candid and forthcoming throughout. I promise you’re gonna walk away from this knowing some things about Google you didn’t know before. If you don’t, I’ll stand on my head. Maybe. Not really. BUT I won’t have to because you’re going to be all super-smart and educated by the end of the video. So put on your learning pants and hit play, you uppity whipper-snapper, or, if you’re like Steve Jobs and are incompatible with Flash video, read the recap below…

If you need a refresher or you’re scared of moving images and prefer the company of fluffy, harmless typing, here’s a little recap of what Matt and Rand discussed.

Should Webmasters Use the ‘If Modified Since’ Header?

The ‘If Modified Since’ header can be used to manually indicate to Google whether or not you’ve made changes to content on the page. According to Matt, they started supporting it in 2003 when bandwidth was a big issue, but nowadays, it’s not very important. That said, he still advises it as a good standard practice, but also notes that it won’t necessarily help you get crawled faster.

Should Webmasters Use 503 Status Codes for Downtime?

503s can help avoid getting a page that’s under construction or experiencing problems crawled and indexed, which can be a big problem especially for large, popular sites (watch the video for Rand’s example of Disney running into this issue). Matt advocates using 503s in this case. You can’t specify when you’d like Google to re-crawl, but they will come back and won’t index the maintenance content of the page.

Does the Number of Outbound Links from a Page Affect PageRank?

For instance, to conserve "link juice" and/or funnel it more discretely, does it matter whether I have three outbound links versus two? In the original PageRank formula, yes, juice flowed out in a simple formula of Passable PR divided by number of outbound links. But nowadays, Matt says it is a much more cyclical, iterative analysis and, "it really doesn’t make as much difference as people suspect." There’s no need to hoarde all of your link juice on your page and, in fact, there may be benefit to generously linking out (not the least of which is the link-building power of good will).

If Google’s seen a Trillion URLs, How Many Do They Pay Attention To?

Since Google crawls in PageRank order, they see the "best" stuff first and avoid a lot of the serious crap.  The biggest issue is discovering duplicate or previously banned content. Matt said that about 28% of what they see is duplicate.  He also made the careful distinction between "quality" content and "popular" content, further illustrating that traffic isn’t a significant ranking factor: "PR does not reflect popularity in the sense that porn is very popular, but nobody links to porn…(those sites) don’t have the PageRank you’d expect if you went by usage."

Is a Trailing / Important in URL Structure?

Seems like a minor thing right? Do you use url.com/folder of url.com/folder/ in your URL structure?  Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document. That said, Google is quite good at differentiating so it’s not a huge deal.

Does Google Crawl from Multiple Geopgraphic Locations?

 Should I be displaying geo-specific content based on user IP? It’s a very popular question among SEOs dealing with international sites and users; but how does it affect what Google sees and what shows up in the SERPs?

Matt confirmed that, "Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don’t build different indices, one for each country." 

This means it’s very important to avoid showing significantly different content to users from different countries. As Matt says, "The problem is if you’re showing different content-like French content to French IPs-Googlebot may not see that."

Thus, you want to be sure to send everyone to the same content initially and allow them to navigate to geo-specific areas of your site. While Google has gotten better at submitting dropdowns, working with JavaScript, etc., it is still strongly advised that you provide this geo-targeted navigation via static links.

Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301–>301–>301)?

"It is, yeah."

Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won’t be followed.  He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects…but you already knew that, right?

What’s with the Bees?

It’s true, there are bees in Mountain view. A rash of amateur apiculture has sprung up on the Google campus and a few members of the Web Spam Team have caught stinger fever (though not Matt, he prefers cats). Apparently they’ve ven gone so far as to color all of the hives in the apiary in Google’s traditional primary colors…what a bunch of geeks

Well, that was a whole pile of great stuff we were able to get out of Mr. Cutts (and we didn’t even have to ply him with booze)! Now, go venture forth and use your new nuggets of searchy goodness to clobber your competitors.

Another huge thanks to Matt for taking the time to answer our questions so thoughtfully!

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Whiteboard Interview – Google’s Matt Cutts on Redirects, Trust + More

So the headline-grabbing, first-mover, element of surprise is gone.

Starbucks has went ahead and made a PR splash with their recent announcement offering Mayors a discount at locations nationwide.

Is it time for small businesses across America to pay attention to location-based marketing applications?

Maybe. Probably. What do you have to lose?

But it is still very early in the product adoption curve for location based marketing applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt.  TechCrunch recently reported that Foursquare hit 1 million users — which means 99% of the population have yet to adopt “checking in” when they go somewhere.

But wait.

Did you catch the last part of the TechCrunch article? The part where it mentions:

It took Foursquare just over a year to get to a million users. By comparison, it took Twitter about 2 years to get one million users. Of course now, two years after that, Twitter has over 100 million users. Foursquare, undoubtedly, would love to see that type of growth — assuming they don’t sell first.

That means that even though there is somewhere less than 1% of the general population currently using location based check-in services, it is possible that many more people will be using it soon.

And using these services means that a conversation is being had – right in your very business – by customers using these services.

And since product adoption velocity seems to be increasing – if you are a small business, you may not have as long as you think to “wait and see how it goes”.

Are you a small business thinking about offering a Foursquare special at your business?

It’s Free.

And if you do it right, you might be surprised to hear not only what your customers are “shouting” in your business, but also what kinds of Foursquare specials they prefer.

Currently, potential Foursquare specials include:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal customer! (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days)
  (“Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of french fries!”)
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times.
  (“Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? That’s a free drink for you!”)
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins.
  (“Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!”)
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special.
  (“Show us your foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!”)

Is it time for small businesses to pay more attention to location-based marketing applications?

Only if they like building loyalty and listening to the conversations about their industry and business.

Do Small Businesses Need To Pay Attention To Foursquare?

Keep in mind this is not a brand new garage project with big dreams of cramping Google’s style. Yandex is a mature contender with combat experience against the big G. Yandex has a few good things going, and a few that are just wrong. Let’s break it down a little.

The Good

Clean SERPs – I’ve seen Rand Fishkin and a few others mentioning this around the Web, and it’s true. Duncan Morris of Distilled was quoted in a post on Search Engine Land saying, “After a very brief play I’m incrediblyimpressed at the relative lack of spam and the quality of the results that are being returned.” He also said it may have a better engine than Google. Over the next few months we’ll see how robust that spam filter really is.

No Ads –- No paid results is a moot point to me. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that the plan will be to ignore paid search all together in the global filter. They will be there soon enough unless Yandex is going to allow purchased placement.

Site Icons – I had to include this. The site logos look great next to the results.

The Bad

A Global Results Mesh — With a little more time, we’ll be able to see where the pain points are with the global engine, but at a first glance I can say that I have a problem with the lack of country specific results.

For example, a search for “beamer” (a popular German term for “projectors”) returns results related to the car and projector alike. The car results are English while the projector results are German. Searchers are intelligent individuals, but they are also lazy and impatient. Sifting through different languages to find what they need doesn’t cut it. I can see Yandex splitting the engine to be country specific in the future.

The Yugly

Go Somewhere Else — One last thing. Aside from displaying monthly search volume on the SERP, I hope we all notice that at the bottom of the Yandex results, they are recommending that we search Google, Yahoo and Bing if we don’t see what we are looking for. I love it! Maybe it’s just my opinion, but that doesn’t sound like a great way to get your customer to keep coming back for more.

If you’ve heard anything about paid search inclusion coming to the global filter, or if you are seeing any other flaws in the results, I’d love to hear about it. Yandex is a great engine, and I hope they find success in the global market. Otherwise, I’ll have to practice my Russian.

Yandex Global Search – the Good, the Bad, and the Yugly

Last week, I gave a 45-minute presentation at eMetrics London on a variety of analytics for SEO topics. The presentation slide deck is embedded below:

Metrics for SEO by Rand Fishkin (eMetrics London 2010)

The presentation went into more depth in person, but topics included:

Some basics:

• Measuring traffic against macro query growth
• Measuring against search market share
• Measuring against temporal trends
• Keyword selection based on traffic quantity, quality and difficulty of ranking
• Choosing keyword messaging to optimize conversion rate
• Tracking CTRs on search results
• Identifying crawl errors using a variety of tools
• Tracking rankings – when, where and why it’s useful 

A handful of intermediate level tactics:

• Getting beyond "last-click" attribution
• Evaluating indexation for SEO
• Tracking vertical search results using filters

And some more advanced items:

• Evaluating metrics for predicting search results ordering and valuing links/content
• Applying metrics to improve your SEO
• Valuing social media together with search
• Discussing the relative impacts (both primary and second-order effects) that social has on rankings

Happy weekend everyone!

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How to Measure & Improve SEO: eMetrics London 2010 Presentation

Link building sucks.  You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. It can be slow, tedious, and exhausting. It’s also one of the most crucial aspects of complete search engine optimization.  So what do you do when faced with the intimidating challenge of building links? Once upon a time, you could’ve just submitted your site to a few hundred cheap directories (or a few thousand like so many of the $99 "SEO" shops offer), arrange for a few dozen reciprocal links from sites with decent PageRank, and maybe even negotiate a nice, keyword-targeted footer link from a reasonably popular blog. Bing-bang-boom, you’ve got several hundred good links with super-optimized anchor text…hellooooo rankings!

Those of you who’ve been playing this game for a while are probably thinking, "ahh, 2004, those were the days!" Everyone else is either looking at the screen incredulously or laughing hysterically, "this stuff doesn’t work at all anymore!" Oh really? Doesn’t it?  Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory links often have a bad rap because in the last several years they’ve largely become synonymous with cheap, spammy, dishonest, and largely useless scam SEO offers. But here’s the catch: if you’re careful, reasonable, and practical, these oft-maligned practices can still be effective.  Don’t go screaming black hat on me, watch this week’s video to learn the how, when, and why of what can make these black sheep of the link building world viable tactics.

As discussed in the video there are times when these strategies can be legitimate.  Rand covered these in a lot of detail in our recent PRO Webinar on Advanced Competitive Link Building, so if you’re a PRO Member, be sure to watch the recording. For now, let’s look at some situations where these strategies can still work.

Sitewide Links  The early oughties (aka 2000’s) were the like Studio 54 for sitewide links: shady links were snorting coke off of hookers in the dark recesses of footer navigation across the web. Then Google raided the joint looking for manipulative link patterns like the IRS looking for cooked books–the jig was up for footer and sidebar sitewide nav links.  To this day you can occasioanlly stumble across a rogue footer containing a few links out to ridiculously unrelated content (one local theater here in Seattle has links out to branded baby care products), but by-and-large this practice is no longer used…except for when it is.  Does Disney link to other sites in its content network? Does Lulu link to their SEOmoz and PC magazine awards? Does SEOmoz link to service partners like Distilled and Exact Target? Yes, they/we do and we do so in sitewide footers. These are legitimate and natural relationships. There’s nothing strange or fishy here. In fact, if any of these links were paid, they’d be better off on one or two strong pages rather than on a sitewide navigational element. Basically, you should consider these bad if/when they seem unnatural and/or they’re done alongside other shady stuff.

Reciprocal Links  First things first: within niche industries, natural reciprocal links are compeletely natural. In fact they’re often difficult to avoid. Think about the SEO space; SEOmoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and all the others…we’re constantly linking to each other, but do we ever call up Aaron or Loren or Matt and say, "hey, I’ll link to your page if you link back to mine with this exact anchor text"? No, that’d be ridiculous. ‘Reciprocal’ becomes a four-letter word when it becomes clear that your site has an unusually high proportion of 1-to-1 links (you and other sites link to each other only once), often with suspiciously consistent anchor text. Those are the phenomena that start to look shady and draw attention.

Directory Links Here’s the litmus test for a directory: Do they care who you are? Good directories endeavour to actually create a high-value resource by excercising editorial control and restricting listings to sites and businesses that will be of value to their users. Bad directories endeavour to maximize the number of people willing to pay them money to be listed next to Der International Haus of Spamcakes because, hey, it’s a PR3 link! It’s really that simple. Directory links of the good variety can be really solid link sources (they’re often niche or local), but the bad kind (of which you can probably find 20,000 for $99) ain’t gonna do a damn bit of good for you.

When it comes down to it, you simply need to use good judgement with your link efforts. Is this a link someone would not be surprised to find on this site and in this location? Is the link from a site you could or would legitimately link to in a blog post? Would your site or page be a good resource for someone visiting a particularly directory? What about the rest of the content and links, do they seem legitimate?  A little honest evaluation and some common sense is really all you need to avoid engaging in bad linking practices.

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Whiteboard Friday – Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory Links

But, since I want to show you how cool I am for being there, here are my main takeaways:

The supply (and value) of conversion optimization (CO) best practices is limited.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, there is plenty to read, learn, and apply in a general sense. However, if you’ve been scarfing down CO goodies for a few years now, there aren’t a lot of new items on the menu that you haven’t tried.

I’m not saying that the CO field is getting stale. Quite the opposite—conversion optimization is a dynamic playing field wherein the majority of opportunity lies in the ability of a marketer to

1. Discern their customers’ needs and
2. Test potential solutions for those needs intelligently.

There are plenty of behind-the-times companies that would benefit from a shot of tried-and-true CO best practices, but the opportunity for huge growth lies in continual, smart testing. Learn definitively what works best for your customers, not just for the majority of other businesses, and keep trying to improve their experiences with your company’s website.

The opportunity to gain a competitive advantage through CO is huge … but going fast.

The secret is out about conversion optimization. It’s a lot easier to boost profitability by significantly increasing your conversion rate rather than cramming increasingly more traffic through the same mediocre website experience.

The proliferation of cost-effective, even free, analysis and testing tools has made CO more accessible and potent than it has ever been. If you aren’t getting on board now, you may find yourself hopelessly behind your competition a few months from now.

Conversely, if you establish a ninja-style culture of testing in your organization now, you’ll spin circles around your competitors and entrench yourself as a market leader.

You think you know your customers, but you don’t. You REALLY don’t.

Michael Summers and the great Jakob Nielsen threw a one-two punch that floored me.

What assumptions have you made about your customers and how they interact with your website? You think people get it because you get it.

You’re wrong. Most consumers aren’t wired to use websites the way we’ve decided to build them. Until you see people in action with your website and understand their thoughts and reactions, you will miss opportunities to deliver a more effective, helpful website experience.

Don’t just deal in averages from your data. Take the opportunity to engage in qualitative analysis to add depth to your analytics data, as well as break down your over-educated opinions about it.

In conversion optimization, the cool kids all say “gobbley gook” instead of “clutter”.

Tim Ash, conference organizer and SiteTuners founder, and Matt Mickiewicz, creator of 99designs.com and SitePoint, dropped “gobbley gook” in their presentations.

Inconsequential? I think not!

“Gobbley gook” is a much better descriptor of the absolute mess some companies make of their website and the confusion and frustration they heap on their customers.

Clutter doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Heck, I’ve got a little clutter in just about every personal space I own or occupy and it doesn’t seem to slow me down much.

On the other hand, gobbley gook gets in my way and makes life difficult. My little girl’s tricycle in front of the garage door? Gobbley gook. I have to deal with it much more quickly because it’s agitating! Your Web visitors can’t move the tricycle to get to your garage. They just bounce from your site and write off your company.

Maybe you haven’t started optimizing your website for conversion because the clutter doesn’t really seem that painful. Well, your would-be customers see gobbley gook everywhere and it’s bugging the crap out of them.

Start cleaning up the gobbley gook today!

Statistically Insignificant Slice of Wisdom From Conversion Conference