Experience Branding" ? How to Survive as an Online RetailerWritten by Jake Gorst
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Today, this method can be applied to anything - including web based businesses. An online vendor can give an experience to viewer that will make a lasting impression. Some provide games for their viewers to enjoy. Most find that providing special information - an article giving background of a given product presented with a human-interest slant ? is sufficient. Viewers can be invited to "register" - giving them access to an area of site that general public does not, where special information can be presented. This gives viewer feeling that they are part of something special - a private club. One example of this method of online "Experience Branding" is WeightWatchers.com. A registered user has access to message boards and a special catalog of diet recipes. A registered viewer becomes part of a community. It's an experience that will keep them coming back! "Experience Branding" is also helpful to non-profit organizations. JohnTaylorGatto.com, an alternative education resource, provides an online discussion forum that attracts teachers and parents, encouraging them to debate educational topics and share war stories. The Odysseus Group, organization that owns JohnTaylorGatto.com, reports that interest in their web site skyrocketed when forum was launched. So what do we learn from this? Gone are days of impersonal service. If you want to survive ? offer your customers an experience!
Jake Gorst is a writer, film maker, and president of Exploded View (http://www.explodedview.tv), a new media advertising and design company. He also is a frequent contributor to various trade publications on topics related to Web site and architectural design psychology and trends. Previously, Gorst served as Vice President and Chief Creative Officer for E-Media Publishing, Ltd. and as an Internet content developer for Citibank and other Long Island based corporations.
| | Doorway Pages by Any Other NameWritten by Sid Hale
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downgrade results attained through use of those pages, refuse to list those pages, or ban site from listing on their service altogether I could have written this article just based on regular reading I do, but then I would have just been passing on someone else's opinion. In order to respond to my reader with absolute confidence, I first researched over 3 years of articles from a myriad of sources. From those it was easy to see trend build, and then come into disfavor. Finally, I went to search engines themselves to read their current policies and guidelines. Some mention Doorway pages specifically, but even those that require a little interpretation are pretty easy to understand. The major search engines disapprove of methods that present different content to their spiders than content that is ultimately presented to viewer. For your own edification, here are just a few of listings I found, with snippets from their guidelines: From Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. From AltaVista: http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new#rls Pages that duplicate content, either by excessive submission of same page, submitting same pages from multiple domains, or submitting same content from multiple hosts Pages that are machine-generated with minimal or no content, whose sole purpose is to get a user to click to another page Pages that contain only links to other pages From AllTheWeb: http://www.alltheweb.com/info/about/spam_policy.html exclude Page Spam documents from our index or at least disregard links from it when computing static rankThe Alternative: If your keyword phrases are relevant to your site content, then it follows that content will naturally include those relevant keyword phrases. If not, then you need to either rethink that content and its presentation - or rethink your choice of keyword phrases. It's really that simple. Each page of your site can and should have its own topic and its own set of relevant keyword phrases. Make sure that every page of your site contains a Title, a Meta description, and Meta keywords (again those keyword phrases that are relevant to that page). Then when you submit your "home" page to a search engine, it can spider your entire site through your linked pages, picking up all that Meta information so that each page gets listed properly. In a sense, every page on your site becomes sort of a "Doorway" to rest of site. Concentrate on building content, and give engines just what they want to see anyway: relevant content. When submitting your web site to directories, submit each page you want listed (with relevant search terms for that page). Then of course, it is a matter of sitting back and waiting unless you opt for one of "express" listing services or "pay-per-click" placement - but those are separate topics, deserving of their own articles. With straight submission, it will take some time for your site to even get listed, but once you're there you can get very targeted traffic for a very long time to come. Copyright © 2003 Sid Hale
Sid Hale is the founder of the ad-CLiX Traffic Exchange, publisher of the ad-CLiX Newsletter, author of the Insider's Guide to Affiliate Showcase, and co-founder of Headlines2Go - a brand new Headline Testing Service for serious marketers. In another life, Sid is an Information Technology Consultant, serving small, medium and large corporations.
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