Car Mods Australia – Another Ziller website.. - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

We are very happy to announce the launch of CarModsAustralia.com.au. Selling high performance car parts Car Mods Australia is an authorised distributor for many brands both domestically and internationally.

The website has been carefully designed around Car Mods Australia’s tight business model and offers a range of features including a slick design and very easy purchase and checkout.

Take the time to check out the site – any feedback via comments is encouraged and much appreciated.

One of the most celebrated sciences of web design is without a doubt, usability. User interface design can very well determine the success and lifespan of a website. Without a well-structured and organised website design, you may as well go back to the days of business cards and xerox to sell your business.

Information architecture and design forms the crux of any online business portal. Why? Because the design of your website will play a primary role in whether your customer came, saw, puked and left – or alternatively – stayed a while, browsed, engaged and perhaps bought something.

Good website design is everything.

On a myriad number of occasions, I’ve been trawling the world wide web searching for a product or service with an immense hunger for a website that is well structured towards meeting my requirements. It just so happens that my mind is ravenous for information of use to me, and all I seem to encounter is a cluttered mess of information, a calamity of keywords and links, a website that looks like a dog’s dinner.

It sounds harsh, right? Well, not in my opinion. The way I see it, it is the duty of every business owner to invest in good website design that not only sells the organisation well, but caters instantly to what the user is searching for without them having to sift through the ancient catacombs of lost static pages just to find anything of topical relevance.

Nothing annoys me more, and I’m sure you feel the same!

I thought that I’d take this opportunity to discuss 10 pitfalls of website design that never cease to have users scamper desperately for the ‘back’ button:

1. The website drawn in crayon and coded – for this one, you’re probably going to start laughing as soon as you see the screen shot. Sadly though, even in the futuristic year of 2010, many web masters still opt for the website design that causes a seizure upon opening. The following is a screenshot of a website for a prestigious educational institution in America, but the presentation is completely paradox. Without making any remarks regarding the navigation, the usability is null and void given the solar flare of colours.Nothing annoys me more than a website that makes me not only have to wear shades to look at my screen, but also makes me feel like my head is going to pop in the impending threat of a seizure. It’s like a scene out of Total Recall:

   

2. The 90s – good music, good TV, bad websites – I know that everyone needs to make an exception towards businesses who don’t have the time to update their web design with something a little more contemporary, but then again, what about governments? Nothing drives me crazy like an ‘informational’ website that’s still stuck in the 90s. I mean, look at North Korea, they can build nuclear weapons nowadays but can’t build a decent user interface? Come on guys…Don’t worry though, Iceland have got decent UI design covered…

   

3. Websites that go overboard with SEO – It has always been said, in order for SEO to be successful, at the end of the day you still need people to engage and interact with your website content once they’ve clicked onto one of your landing pages. Usability and SEO are difficult to balance, but there is a line you should never cross. Truth be told, nothing makes me abort from a web page faster than something like this:Ummm… Do you think that they sell flashlights? It’s almost so overwhelming that I actually forgot where I was for a moment there – easily one of the worst eCommerce web designs that I have ever seen. Want an Australian example? Without naming names, here’s the bottom half of the home page of one of the most popular digital camera stores in the market:

   

   The fact that the website design is so bad makes me never want to shop here. Very successful SEO, though!

4. Websites that seemingly scroll infinitely – Is it really necessary for me to scroll for eons and eons just to reach the end of a sentence? I know, I’ll just get in my car and drive my eyes to the other end of my 2.47km LCD computer screen… Or I’ll just leave instead. Make your content easy to skim over! Before you say anything, yes, this was Nintendo.com’s website once upon a time… The scrollbar = nearly as epic as the legend of Zelda!Want to know something ironic? Since updating in 2010, Google Images now deploys the infinite scroll function (vertically). They do it in a much more user-friendly fashion of course…

   

5. Blank palettes – These websites always seem like a) they’re too cool for information architecture b) don’t want to disclose anything to their users c) are just out to drive you mad with abysmal proportions of blank space or d) all above the above.You guessed it, they’re out to do all three. The below screen shot is one from the website of one of my favourite underground bands. They’re actually a pretty big band in Finland, but they’ve only got two links on the entire website. It doesn’t do much to promote them for the user, does it?

That’s about all I’ve got in me for the time being, but you get the picture, and hopefully you had a bit of a laugh too. I think that I have illustrated my point pretty well, without good website design, your online campaign will be dismal.

Good website design can work wonders for your company’s image, so why not make the most of your online asset and turn it into something alluring and captivating? After all, if you invest valuable time into website development, user interface design and information architecture, your customers will invest their time into engaging and interacting with your website.

What are your thoughts on the importance of good website design?

As a search marketer, nothing frustrates me more than anything else in the world than Google PageRank. Why? Because the concept itself is vague, and according to Google’s head of search, PageRank is a nominated assignment of a value that is calculated when the search engine adds up the total authority of your links that are, might I add, subjectively determined by the search engine according to their perceived value.

Now, when I mentioned ‘percieved value’ – it has been established that not only does the search engine divide up equal amounts of PageRank based on the number of links, but it also deploys a ‘decay’ factor as well to depreciate the value of certain links. This is to stop the infinite flow of PageRank in loops, and is applied without discrimination, even on sites that do not infinitely loop their link structure.

For a detailed breakdown, you can read the original article and conversation here.

One thing that did strike me curiously though, is Google’s changing stance on PageRank.

As of last year, and to date actually, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they want most websites to be passing PR freely, creating a perpetual flow of links for search engines to crawl and index without any impositions created by the web master.

In simpler words, Google wants a website’s link structure to be promoting ‘free love’ with the ‘rel=nofollow’ attribute used minimally and only when necessary.

It’s a total Woodstock for internal link love… But the effect it has on the PageRank of the website, does it really matter?

The answer is no.

Here’s why: While a website can still garner PageRank strategically through the sculpting of internal link structure, and can reap small benefits with regards to the performance of the website for organic search results, it will be of more benefit to your website to concentrate your efforts on (as Google put it) “a solid information architecture – intuitive navigation, users and search-engine friendly URLs” etc.

It makes sense, and through my own work, I’ve seen the truth in this statement first hand.

In fact, I can confirm that since the construction of one of our client websites mid-2010, we have increased the percentage share of search engine referrals consistently on a monthly basis for 5 months, with organic search referrals comprising of approximately 60% of our traffic sources despite the PR measure being zero. And did we achieve this by focusing on how our internal link structure was sculpted to pass PageRank? No way.

Rigorous user-interface testing and re-modelling, a search-engine friendly web design, external web marketing activities such as one way link building and seeding good old fashioned conversation in relevant online communities brought us our success.

So, why raise the topic in the first place?

After reading a lot on the subject lately, I just felt that we should disinter some of the myths surrounding PageRank and the effect it has on search engine performance. PageRank is a value assigned to web page based on the number of ‘points’ it receives from each link pointing towards it. But it is only one ranking factor out of god knows how many that Google has operating, and it is by far not the most important.

The PR metric can be both sluggish and inaccurate at times, with updates at irregular intervals. For one website’s PageRank to be recalculated, it could be a matter of months whereas another website’s PageRank value might be recalculated within a week of the site’s growth.

If PageRank has ever been your primary concern, don’t let it be. Your website can still rank exceptionally well across the board with or without it. Resolutely, there are much more significant and impactful elements of your SEO campaign that you could be devoting your time to.

This week, two representatives from Google and Bing shared an interview with one of the SEOMoz team members, and needless to say dropped a bit of a bombshell on search marketing after clearing the fog on one of SEO’s most vague of topics.

Do Facebook and Twitter, with their respective social authorities, have a an impact on SEO? The answer has been confirmed as yes.

It’s a revelation that has been a long time coming. After months of speculation after hearing of Google and Bing’s decision to buddy up with Twitter, and Google’s hint towards giving Facebook profiles more prominence in search results, a lot of us could see the possibility of the rumour becoming a reality – but we could never be certain.

In search engine optimisation, knowing the technical element of the practice made us a little skeptical towards acknowledging that search engines would one day let social authority influence search results – primarily due to the easy levels of manipulation that came with it as baggage.

But that’s exactly it. The answer is how the major search engines have coined the term, and how this term is to be literally applied to SEO.

‘Social/Author authority’ is something that both Google and Bing have deemed as having a legitimate influence on what users want to see when they’re searching for topics of interest, or trying to locate recorded conversation.

And regarding the influence on SEO? You’re only interested to hear about link weight, right? Well, let’s put it this way. Google and Bing are only interested in measuring signals indicative of ‘author quality’, implying that any link shared will be evaluated based on the impact of its context.

Something kind of like this:

One can envisage that the link weight would be calculated by things such as timing and relevancy, the surrounding content, the diversity of resources and even the level of engagement – but as to how the search engines calculate these factors, we can only speculate.

It looks likely that for now, the only way for a shared link in a social context to have any impact is for the user sharing it to be a powerful author/creator.

Google has even stated that author authority is independent of PageRank, however is limited to what topics of relevance it is applied to in search. It will be interesting to see how this kind of thing develops, however for the time being, unless you’re CNN or Ashton Kutcher – your social profile ain’t gonna have much of an impact!

But think about it… If a search engine were to try and identify and give value to a link placed within a viral context, how would it determine the link’s authority? Here’s a few interesting points:

1. You’d need to be the most popular kid in school – They’ve pretty much given this one away already, but for your link to be considered even remotely authoritative, the social profile through which you’re sharing it will need to be exceedingly popular. This is because the more users you have engaging with your social profile, the more human credibility you’re given. Google has always been about giving the users genuine material, search results that are generated by humans and targeted at humans. Bing also follows suit. It just makes sense.
2. The profile of the people interacting with you – If you are perceived to be a big fish, interacting with a pool full of sharks, then there’s going to be a lot more emphasis placed on what you say, and who you say it to. This would be a quintessential part of calculating author authority.
3. Reciprocity – The frequency of interactions and exchanges between profiles, who you are interacting with and who is interacting back.
4. Relevance of what you’re talking about – This one’s a no brainer. It needs to be relevant to something being searched.
5. Who you’re writing for – Obviously if you’re only out to give yourself a pat on the back, then the search engines aren’t going to regard your social commentary as important because you’re not contributing anything of objective, unbiased value.

What do you think?

to us, it’s clear that the major search engines are continuing their push towards more contextual organic search results. The good news is that its a significant step towards cleaning up search that is heavily populated by spam and artificial websites, the down side on the other hand, is that whist there will be a vast number of human-edited resources available, they may not always be as informative as intended.

For example, if I’m searching for a clear cut guide to caring for tropical fish, then I’m not going to want to have to dig through a whole heap of social conversation around the subject just to locate a solid answer to my question.

However, if I’m looking for experiences in caring for tropical fish – the vast availability of valued opinions is going to benefit me greatly, because I’m going to want to hear about what people have to say, and these guys will, too

As for online marketing, it may very well be time to sit down and re-assess your strategy, because the bond between SEO and social media just got even closer.

It’s time for another Ziller banana peel, and it’s been a long time coming too! The topic this month is purely internet marketing… And more specifically, what the concept of internet marketing should be and what it is currently as practiced by fellow online marketers…

Before I get started on an epic rant that could end up longer than the Magna Carta, or the Declaration of Independence for any of our U.S friends reading this, I just want to make it clear that in no way are we beating down on the hundreds and thousands of online savvy internet marketers out there (well, maybe we are just a little bit)…

It’s just that, well… We just wish for a bit of rejuvenation… For some companies to actually breathe life into this prosperous industry, without deadening it even further.

I’m talking about the paradox of internet marketing, why it will never go away, and how we’re using the world wide web as a dumping ground for exhausted online marketing schemes.

For those of you who are new to the internet marketing paradox, it’s basically this: online marketers preach genuine and objective content, but deliver abysmal search engine fodder. It’s all archived on your favourite search engine, and will lie in wait to taint your search results when you’re looking for an answer to something.

If you think I’m nuts already… It’s cool, I’m only just getting started. The truth is, we’ve all fallen victims to our own marketing ploys…. And what’s more ironic is, we know we’re surrounded by cliche’s. So why do we keep doin’ the dirty, and dishing out Jurassic-era spin techniques in order to bait just a smaller amount of traffic to our websites? More importantly, the main point of this article, why do we use the company blog as a billboard for our products and services, or a blank canvas to be stuffed full of target keywords, instead of giving our customers something they actually want  to read?

We’ve seen it everywhere online… Some of the most prolific bloggers, some of the most iconic websites, have all aptly demonstrated their commitment to making the great internet marketing paradox even more vacuous…

It’s the “We’re different from everyone else, because we have a blog, but we spew out the exact same marketing message!” opinion. And it’s everywhere!

Blogs are great for SEO… We get it already. But let’s visit the good ‘ol internet dictionary and examine what initially constitutes a blog:

“Full name: weblog – a journal written on-line that is accessible to users of the internet.”

Ok, thanks Dictionary.com… Now, for a bit more depth to our definition of what a blog is actually supposed to do, Wikipedia says:

“Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.”

So it’s a little long-winded, but read the above carefully: “most blogs are interactive”, which would suggest that the intended purpose of a blog is for people to actually read them, right?

Epitomizing the internet marketing paradox – the internet marketing company blog!

The company blog, as of 2010, has lost its original job title of attention grabbing thought provoker, and has instead settled in the dust with the title of ‘relentless marketing tool’.

Now, without trying to sound acerbic towards the efforts of online marketers, I’m trying to illustrate some simple logic here.

If a blog is supposed to be interactive and engaging, how can it possibly captivate someone if the intention of posts is to sell or spin a product or service? It’s almost as if that because we’ve been told that blogs can be advantageous to SEO, we’ve left innovation and thought-leadership behind us to instead splurge out on some regurgitated, keyword rich content written for the search engine and not the user with the hopes of scoring a few Google points.

The end result? Nothing. If you’re lucky, you might rank moderately for one of your vague long-tail keyword targets. The cold, hard truth of the matter is that unless your blog has readership. It will do nothing for your search engine rank.

How about them apples, eh!?

This is the major pitfall of the company blog – and 90% of the time, it goes against what the company stands for! How can you preach company values of innovation, and industry leadership, when your blog is spinning keyword bait or your article is ghost-written from content already cited a million times Mashable.com or Problogger?

Work that is genuine, work that is your own, is harder to produce. But in turn, this is what can make your business unique.

Only until you put the time and effort into developing your blog’s identity, will your company‘s website reap the benefits of perpetual search engine referrals with well indexed content via a strong readership.

It’s been a while since we last updated the Ziller blog, but there has been a lot happening here at Ziller over the past few months.

To give you the low down…

Our most exciting thing to share at the moment is our attendance at this year’s PubCon 2010, in the one and only Las Vegas! Our head gorilla, company owner, or ‘silverback’ as you will (Trent), was privileged enough to be able to sit down and collaborate with some of the most esteemed search engine veterans on the web.

If you’re not too sure what PubCon is, it’s a consortium of the best industry leading search engine optimisation and social media innovators ever assembled. Held annually, PubCon is an extremely valuable learning opportunity that allows search marketers to learn more about their chosen profession guided only by the best in the business, as well as attend exclusive workshops.

Who do we mean by best in the biz..? Take a look at the lineup and see for yourself – even Matt Cutts will be in attendance!

After fraternizing with the who’s who of internet marketing, the guys here at Ziller are eagerly awaiting Trent’s return with a large compendium of innovative ideas to sink their teeth into.

With internet marketing, it’s all about staying ahead of the curve, and we’re keen to maintain our advantage over the competition with the knowledge we’ve attained from this year’s PubCon gathering.

In fact, Ziller the gorilla has already started brainstorming some ideas back at HQ:

Who knows, before long he may have his own exhibit set up at PubCon Vegas 2011. We think it would look a little something like this…

We require a web programmer to start in a new role ASAP. The successful applicant will be responsible for the development of web projects, while also being heavily involved in the planning process providing ideas and feedback.

Why you want this job:

- Be responsible for the development of large scale projects
- Great opportunity to grow with the company
- Increase your knowledge & programming skills
- Become part of a young, small and down to earth team
- Work in a very relaxed work environment
- Great Surry Hills location

The role is suited to someone with particularly strong PHP skills however we also work in .NET C# so would need the applicant to be able to handle this as well.

The role will involve:

- Programming custom web development projects using a range of technologies
- Creating enhancements for existing websites
- Being involved in the planning of projects and having your voice heard
- Working in a team environment
- Having fun while you work

To apply YOU MUST HAVE:

- At least 3 years work experience in a web agency
- Advanced knowledge in PHP, .NET C#, Javascript, Jquery, MySQL, SQL, AJAX
- Model View Controller Architecture and Object Oriented Programming experience
- Good understanding of the Software Development Life-cycle
- Good basic knowledge in HTML and CSS
- Experience in testing
- Experience with Linux & Windows Server Environments
- High attention to detail
- Be a hard and quick learner
- Speak fluent English

The following skills would be highly advantageous:

- Ruby, J2EE, XML, XSLT, Sphinx
- Relational Databases, Zend, CakePHP
- Subversion Control
- Project planning experience (GANNT Chart and UML)
- Advanced Linux operating system knowledge (ubuntu)

SO… what are you waiting for? If you have all the mandatory skills and feel your suited to the position please send your resume and cover letter to sales@ziller.com.au

Hey All,

The team here at Ziller would just like to give a warm shout out to the guys overs at the white board blog and their unbridled support for one of our most valued clients, Hitachi Australia.

One of our proudest projects was recently featured in the whiteboardblog, one of the UK’s largest and most extensively read interactive whiteboard journals. You can check out the post here.

It’s good to see someone else spreading the word about an online community dedicated specifically for Hitachi starboard users requiring tech help and support.

Thanks again guys!

We would like to thank everyone who voted for Ziller in the 2010 Sydney City Business Awards. Unfortunately we were unable to take out the big award but none the less were very proud to once make the finals for the Information and Communication Technology category. We had a great night at the awards dinner and hope to be back next year.

We are very proud and honoured to be the Westpac Surry Hills Business of the Month for July. Ziller are a long term customer the Westpac bank and are proud to be presented with the award.