April 2006

Some Hawaiian words are easier to spell than others. This can be important when choosing a name or a domain name for your company.

People usually only search for things they can remember & spell.

If your business is based on the Big Island, you probably don’t have this problem. Kona and Hilo are both easy to memorize and spell. You’re probably safe with a geo-location based domain name. Businesses on Maui aren’t as fortunate. Both Kahului and Lahaina can be hard to spell properly for people on the mainland and the names aren’t as familiar or as easy to remember as Honolulu or Kona.

If a person can’t remember how to spell your company name or domain name they will be forced to guess or broaden the scope of their search to something more generic they Can spell like Maui. This can lead to increased competition in the search results. The search term Maui is extremely competitive for this reason. Instead of searching for “Kahului Widgets” they need to back up search for “Maui Widgets” where every widget maker on the island is struggling to be on top.

Instead of “Kahului Widgets”, you might be able to use “Valley Island Widgets” instead.

Google can usually differentiate multiple words in a URL that are bunched together.
(valleyislandwidgets.com) and credit the website for those words, but anecdotal evidence suggests that putting a hyphen between the words can increase your page rank slightly so I always place a hyphen in the URL when appropriate. (valley-island-widgets.com). Hyphens also usually work much better than underscores with Google. In my opinion, hyphens also help to make it slightly easier to read.

Sometimes you have a choice. I think humuhumunukunukuapuaa.com would be a cool URL to have, and it’s probably for sale but I wouldn’t expect a lot of people on the mainland to memories it. (I don’t think I would want it for an email address though.)

It’s always best if you can keep the URL short, descriptive, on topic, easy to remember and spell.

The Hawaiian Okina can also create problems in the search engines. It’s “Correct” but… if you are fortunate enough to have an easy to spell name, you might sabotage your website by using the Okina in the text of your page.

Search engines are looking for a text match. No one searches for Hawaii with the Okina, so if you use that character, Google will not be able to match the query to the copy on your page or page title.

Browsers also have a problem displaying it properly on the web. My Blog isn’t set up to display the character properly either. If you can’t avoid using it, you can usually manually insert the Unicode hex value 02BB (decimal 699) but it can still cause appearance problems in some browsers.

That’s all for now,
Aloha,
Dave.

Sad but true. People don’t read websites. They “USE” them.

• People who pick up books and magazines are called “Readers”
• People who watch TV are called “Viewers”
• People who use the internet are called “Users”

You don’t have readers or viewers you have users.

If you have not designed your website with usability in mind and to be useful to the user in some way, you might have a problem.

People are in a hurry, they don’t want to read your website and they certainly don’t want to watch it. Not for long anyway. They are usually hoping to use it to solve a problem they have.

People love to use a website that can solve their problem quickly.
Just something to keep in mind.

Aloha,
Dave.

Can you produce a useful and pleasing website that generates traffic and sales? If the answer is a big YES!… Keep reading.

If you can build yourself a website and drive some traffic to it, you can place Google or other affiliate ads on your site or sell links or whatever and earn yourself a few bucks. It shouldn’t be too hard for you to create a website that will generate at least $5 per day.

$5 a day is not a huge number for a person who is good at driving web sales and traffic, etc. It shouldn’t take forever to reach that kind of cash flow either. Just pick a topic like weddings, flowers, travel, golf, pets, real estate or whatever you like.

If you can make $5 a day with one website that focuses on something like “Hawaii Widgets” you can probably create a second website on “California Widgets” and make another $5 a day.

Once you’ve made your first one, it shouldn’t take you forever to create the second one… or the third… or the fourth…

If you have 50 websites that average $5 a day… You are making $91,250. per year!

I have met several people with hundreds of websites like this. They whip one out about every two weeks or so.

If you are NOT a great Webmaster or Online Marketer… This is just one of many reasons why finding a qualified person to help you build, design and market your website, isn’t usually very cheap.

Aloha,
Dave.

Lynda Arakawa form the Honolulu Advertiser wrote a great article last Sunday that covers the basic search engine marketing strategies and gives several examples and success stories. I was surprised to see it, because it’s rare that people in the media will write about the topic of search engine marketing. I hope more people will see the value of the medium.

I have a lot of experience in helping local websites rank highly in the search engines and I completely agree with Bruce Fisher’s two main points that he made. No one gets to the top of the results for a competitive keyword by accident & you need to have great content because that’s what people and search engines are looking for.

However… I did see a couple of things that might deserve being elaborated on.
One key piece of the puzzle that was not mentioned in detail is the point hinted at in the bottom line of the article. You need great content & a sales strategy. The article focuses on increasing traffic but what business owners “Need” is not necessarily traffic but sales. Monetizing the traffic is just as tricky as getting it in the first place.

It is amazingly easy for someone to burn through a huge pile of cash in no time at all by “nickel and dimming” themselves to death with PPC ads, and then having nothing to show for it. PPC advertising seems deceptively easy, but there is a real learning curve with these things and it can be very expensive to learn the hard way.

Acquiring the traffic is only half of the battle. When someone visits your website, there is no guarantee that they won’t simply hit the “Back Button” about two seconds later. Having a professionally designed website that provides a good user experience will usually convert PPC visitors into paying customers much better than a website that hasn’t been updated since 1996.

Getting a new website to show up near the top of the free and un-sponsored listings for a highly competitive keyword is a real struggle. The system is inherently biased against obscure websites due to social networking theory.

1) Very few sites have many links pointing to them and many websites have very few.

2) Highly ranked websites are much more likely to attract new links, while obscure websites are disproportionately likely to attract very few links if any.

The first phenomenon is the 80/20 rule or the ”Pareto principle“ where the rich get richer.

The second one follows the “Mathew effect” where a disproportionate level of attention goes to people who are already famous and not necessarily to people who might be more deserving of the attention.

These natural behaviors are extremely difficult to change. This is why attracting free traffic to a new website for a highly competitive keyword in Google, usually requires a long term and consistent effort.

Creating a website that is “Remarkable” seems to be one of the key ingredients for success. By remarkable, I simply mean the website is worthy of a positive remark, or worth pointing out to a friend. (A Link) The more remarkable the website is, the faster the natural social networking process will occur and the faster the website will earn the top spot in a highly competitive niche.

This post was also inspired by the work of Seth Godin & Mike Grehan.

Aloha,
Dave.

Google Stock Crashes in After-Hours Trading due to the newly installed BigMommy data center refusing to interface with the BigDaddy data center. Hopes of producing a family of BigBaby data centers now seem unlikely for the Internet search giant this quarter.

One problem Google is having with the Data Center reproduction effort could be caused by the data centers being kept in captivity. “They are a big attraction here at the Googleplex. Privacy could be an issue.” said Sergey Brin, co-founder and President, Technology of Google Inc.

Another problem seems to be the performance of BigDaddy’s hardware. “His hardware performance is unreliable. There’s a lot of down time. BigDaddy just doesn’t stay up as long as we would like. I just can’t keep it turned on. It’s the first time this has ever happened to Me.” said senior Google engineer Matt Cutts.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president of Products indicated that the data centers may have serious compatibility problems. “Both data centers are under tremendous pressure. No data center can interface with every other data center 100% of the time, especially under these conditions.” Said Page.