March 2005 - Welcome |
| to the second of our monthly newsletters, through
which we’ll aim to keep you up-to-date with developments
in web consulting and analysis, and let you know about some
of what we’ve been up to lately. |
| If you’d rather not receive this in future
please reply with the subject “unsubscribe”. |
| Please note that links to other websites open
in a new window. |
| Important!
– please join us and the Royal National Institute of the
Blind (RNIB) in supporting Tom Brake MP’s early day motion
calling for more accessible websites in accordance with Section
21 of the Disability Discrimination Act. You can read more about
this from our home
page. Thank you. |
“Google bombing” and what it can teach us… |
| This week sees a new entry in the annals of Google
bombing. Many of you may remember the infamous example of how
the US White House biography of George W Bush was returned in
top place for the search “miserable failure”. John
Prescott MP has been the victim of similar efforts, although
for the sake of those with sensitive souls, we won’t repeat
the relevant search phrase here. |
| So what does this tell us? It should tell us that
search engine optimisation (SEO) isn’t all about stuffing
pages with keywords. We promise you, the phrase “miserable
failure” does not appear in either the content or the
meta tags for George Bush’s biography page. So how is
it done? Google bombing involves creating links to a certain
page using the target keyword in the link. This is a legitimate
form of optimisation, even if it is a method abused by the Google-bombers. |
| All too often, organisations pay too little attention
to the role that incoming links can play in SEO. And even when
they do get incoming links, nine times out of ten, the link
is just the company name or worse still, an image. This is a
wasted opportunity because if the organisation name is also
in the website address, most organisations will occupy the top
position already. |
| It should be noted that for popular search phrases
– unlike “miserable failure” – a few
incoming links using keywords won’t propel your pages
to the top of the results page. But as part of your optimisation
programme as a whole, it can have a positive effect on your
search engine performance. |
Major retailers begin to address website accessibility
issues |
| We’ve recently been asked to give a presentation
to a large European mail order company on the subject of website
accessibility. They’d become concerned about possible
exposure to penalties under the Disability Discrimination Act
and decided they needed an objective grounding in the relevant
issues as applied to their own websites. |
| An indication of the seriousness of this company’s
commitment is that they are looking to ultimately provide genuine
accessibility, rather than a check box exercise against the
minimum WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints standard. |
| The vast majority of UK retailers’ websites
(and of course websites in general) still fall some way short
of meeting even this most basic standard. Certainly, these companies
could not claim to have made “reasonable adjustments”.
|
| However, we came away from this meeting feeling
a little uplifted that there are at least a handful of businesses
ready to join John Lewis and M&S in taking a more inclusive
approach to their web business. |
Blogs – a force for good as well as for evil… |
| Blogs – online journals – often
get a bad press as places where companies and products can
be mercilessly pilloried, and they have caused reputational
harm to some high profile organisations. A recent example
(now unavailable) is the blog of a worker at Morrisons supermarket,
that became the focus for disgruntled employees and customers
alike to vent their spleens. The story became national news
when the Sunday Times picked it up. It’s amazing to
think there are still businesses with no policy in place to
monitor and respond to internet activity that may lead to
reputational harm. |
| However, the real point to be made here is that
blogs can be an opportunity as well as a threat. Our campaign
lobbying for people to write to their MPs in support of an Early
Day Motion in the House of Commons (see our website for more
information) was picked up by a blogger. She wrote to her MP,
and included information about the Early Day Motion on her blog.
That resulted in a quite a few of the blog’s readership
sending letters to their MPs. Additionally, a number of other
bloggers picked up on the campaign and posted information about
it on their sites, leading to still more people writing to their
MPs. |
| Having brand advocates on the internet
can be a very powerful – and cheap – means of marketing.
|
| That’s all for this month’s net-update.
If there’s a specific issue you’d like to see covered
next month, please let us know. |
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