We’re proud to say that yesterday our company donated $2000 to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to aid the conservation of gorillas in the wild. If you’re not already aware, gorillas are now endangered in the wild, and are under constant threat from poaching and habitat destruction.
If you would like to learn more about the cause, please check out our information page here.
We hope you guys had an amazing Christmas and New Year. Things are getting busy again here at the Ziller office – and to be honest, we haven’t stopped! We’ve got some massive projects lined up for 2012, and with our business getting larger, our ideas are as well. I’d just like to give you a heads up on a new project we’re working on in partnership with a company called The Trees and The Forests, a reputable digital marketing agency in Sydney. The project is called Ten Very Special Things, and we’re proud to say that we’ve both designed and built the website.
Ten Very Special Things is a not for profit charity eCommerce website, where users can register to sell a unique or interesting item via the store, designate a charity, and allocate a percentage of sales towards that charity. We’re pretty sure that this hasn’t been done before, and we feel that the website is going to be a huge hit throughout the online community.
Check it out for yourself. The site isn’t live just yet, but you can keep tabs on the web page here.
Bring on 2012!
Thought we would put up a real quick post to let you in on a website we are currently working on. Keep your eye on Ollio in the coming months and be sure to register your email to get early updates and access during beta testing.
We’d just like to give a quick shout out to the Christmas World clan for their fine Christmas decorations! Deck the halls with bells and holly, Trent’s feeling kind of festive, and so are our resident monkeys! If you ever need to buy some cheap, quality Christmas gear, then we definitely recommend that you check out Christmas World!
On October 10 this year, the Ape Conservation Effort held the first annual Gorilla Golf Tournament at the Brookfield Country Club in Roswell, Georgia. Ziller were proud to sponsor a hole and help raise money for gorilla conservation.
The Ape Conservation Effort are a Georgia based not-for-profit organisation, which is comprised of a number of volunteer members who like Ziller, share a passion for animals and a commitment to saving the great apes of the world (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).
In addition to supporting the Gorilla Golf Tournament, Ziller are also a proud partner of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Please check out their website to read more about their cause and plight for gorilla conservation.
The team here at Ziller is extremely excited, and proud, to announce that one of our recent projects has been nominated for 2 categories in the Online Retail Industry Awards. In light of this great news, we thought we’d shed some light on the client’s background and reflect upon both the challenges and achievements of the project.
Joe Button is a specialist online retailer of custom-made business and dress shirts. The company is founded by three entrepreneurial individuals who have shared the same passion, and frustrations, for business shirts. When the team at Joe Button approached Ziller, their needs were clear; they wanted to create a unique online shopping experience that allowed customers to build the perfect business shirt that would compliment their build with a flawless fit.
Due to the highly dynamic nature of the website, we were challenged to push our talents to the maximum to develop a capable, unique solution that met the needs of the Joe Button team. When we were briefed, a primary feature of the website was clearly the user’s ability to freely build and customise a business shirt to their liking, utilising different fabrics, colours, sizes and styles.
By all means, the challenge faced by our team was monumental. But for us here at Ziller, we simply just can’t say no to a challenge!
Conceptually, the client wanted a simple, elegant feel to the website to reflect the conservative, classy nature of business and dress clothing. Utlising the client’s brand guidelines, we managed to produce a design concept and information structure that is both visually pleasing and easy to use:
The second part of the project, was engineering what’s under the hood. The Joe Button website was another one of our websites to roll-out using our custom built and very own ‘Zorilla’ CMS. If you’ve had a look around the website, you’ll notice that one of the stand-out features is undoubtedly the 3D rendering of the dress shirts when you ‘customise your own shirt’. This was one of the most challenging features of the website to implement. Over 15,000 photographs of shirt sections were taken, and then developed and rendered onto 3D models. Once we got the modeling done, we then had to create algorithms to calculate every possible shirt combination the would appear to the end user. If you have a second to spare, try the feature out for yourself.
Pretty cool, right? Aside from the obvious fact that they also stock a shirt named the ‘Patrick Bateman’. Total 90’s glory, right there.
Anyway, we’d like to wish the team at Joe Button the best of luck in their nominations for ‘best new online retailer’, and ‘most innovative online retailer’. We’ll be cheering them on.
Trent hanging with Roger, the mascot of SEOMoz in Mozcon, Seattle!
We are just soooo excited to announce the launch of two of our latest websites in Joe Button and Antimall. Please check them out, we would love to know what you think!
This is just a short update, but if there is anyone in the neighbourhood between July 27th and 29th, then Trent will be attending Mozcon Seattle as part of his tour of the U.S. This is kind of a big deal for us because it means that we get to mingle with some of the industry’s finest, including the founder of SEOmoz: Rand Fishkin. If you’re just starting out in search marketing, then I would suggest subscribing to the SEOmoz website. They’ve got a ton of great stuff, and through them, we aim to learn a lot more about search through this convention.
So, if you’re in America, namely Seattle&emdash;drop by and say hi 
We thought it would be cool to make our next blog post a little more personal. Recently, Trent Allan, the head honcho hear at Ziller, gave a speech at a Toastmasters presentation talking about what he is most passionate about – Google search. The objective of the speech was to generate interest in how the world’s biggest search engine works, and how it ties in with search engine optimisation below. You check out the vid below. We’ve also featured a clean transcript for you to take away from the video – enjoy!
“I’d like to talk to you today about the logic of Google search … The purpose of my speech is to tell all of you a little bit more about the Google search engine and how it works, to tell you a little bit about the structure of a search engine results page, tell you a little bit about how Google goes about finding all the websites that it includes in its search engine, and lastly the ways in which it organises all of the results listed on the results page by order of rank.
To begin with, let’s look at the structure. Now if you could all visualise the Google results search page, on the left you have what is called the organic or natural search results. Up the top, and down the right, you have the paid results. Now the difference between the paid results and organic results is that basically the top and the right search listings are advertisements. You pay to get placed in that area of search, however you can’t pay for high inclusion into the ‘organic’ listings on the left. You can however pay people to optimise a site to rank higher organically, which delves into SEO, but you can not control the exact outcome of where and when you will appear higher up in organic search results.
Believe it or not, 90% of Google’s profit is actually made through paid search – or the ads on the right. This is an extraordinarily important part of Google’s business, and because of that reason they need to make sure that their search engine is the damn best search engine there is because if they start delivering incorrect results, people will not pay to get listed, and they would subsequently lose their primary revenue stream.
Obviously in order to be the best, Google needs to have a vast knowledge of the most relevant websites to include for search results. To calculate which sites to include, Google regularly crawls and identifies websites at different frequencies. Known as the ‘crawl rate’, this facet of search dictates how frequently the search results relating to a website are updated. For example, sites that are perpetually generating content, such as news websites for example, would be crawled and have their search results updated probably 10 times more than that of a standard website with static pages. This is because Google identifies that certain websites will be updated more than others.
Now that you have an understanding of how Google crawls websites to include them in search and update them, let’s look at how Google actually ranks them in terms of priority, or rank. For example, if you go to Google and punch in a search term. Let’s say, ‘public speaking tutorials’, for example. When you punch in this search term the search engine will return listings ranked in order of 1-10 on the search engine result page. Google’s job is to make sure that the first result listed for that search term is of maximum relevancy to what you searched for.
There are 2 main factors that determine the rank of a website search result for a keyword. These are relevancy and popularity. Relevancy obviously refers to the relation of the topic of a website to the search term. If we searched for ‘public speaking tutorials’, then we would expect that the content contained within the pages of the website ranking 1st are close to 100% relevancy to what we’re searching for. Once Google has determined how relevant the website is to the search result, then it begins to look at the popularity of the website being listed. For example, if a lot of people are linking to the website and sharing links to the website, Google can identify that the website is highly sought after and therefore should be placed conveniently at the top of the search engine results page for the relevant search term.
The way that popularity, as mentioned, is based on links. For example, if website A links to website B, then Google considers that a link ‘vote’ for website B. One funny story of link popularity is back when George Bush was running for election, what a bunch of guys figured out is that if you linked a whole heap of anchor text using a keyword to the Whitehouse website using the keyword ‘moron’, when you Google’d ‘moron’, George Bush appeared as the very first search result. This was 10 years ago though, and Google has changed their algorithm so that your website must include instances of that keyword before it can be considered to rank strongly for a specific keyword.
I hope by now you have a better understanding of how Google works. The reason why I brought up this topic is because it’s popular conversation between friends, and it seems that a lot of people are interested in this general topic so I thought it would be cool to bring up. I’ve talked you about the structure of the search results page, and how Google goes about finding the websites to include, I’ve spoken to you about the crawl rate, I’ve also talked to you about the ranking factors, popularity and relevancy, and yeah… While this knowledge obviously won’t land you a job at Google, at least now you can walk away with a better understanding of how it all works and the significance of what it does. Thanks.“
