Search Dominance in Your Grandma’s Internet

For almost as long as I’ve been aware there was a Google, I’ve heard people foretelling its imminent demise. Historically this is a smart bet when it comes to search engines – Over the short lifetime of the World Wide Web, quite a few search engines have come and gone. A number of them – Webcrawler, Altavista, Lycos – were the kings of search in their heydey, only to end up losing market share, dwindling in search volume until someone bought them up. They now live out their technological lives on the sidelines, as ‘out to pasture’ as a company can be and still exist. So it’s not hard to see why man people think Google’s time has come. A many search for google jump shark returns almost a million pages – that’s a lot of tongue-wagging.

Well, I’ll just come out and say it. The naysayers are wrong. Google will be king of search for a long time to come, and here’s why:
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One of the more annoying features of Netsuite is the inability to get rid of their name & branding from a Netsuite-hosted e-commerce web site. The shortcut icon (that little graphic that shows up next to the site title when you create a bookmark)
Shortcut Icon
defaults to a Netsuite ‘N’ graphic. I’ll show you how to overwrite that with a custom icon. You will first need a 16×16 pixel graphic named favicon.ico. If you don’t know how to make one, here is a tutorial.
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I remember the first time I heard this phrase – I was in fourth grade and one of the older classes in my school put on a play that in retrospect was completely ridiculous and silly, but I wasn’t quite as critical when I was 9. It was a series of scenes designed to exemplify the law of GIGO: garbage in / garbage out. The scenes got more obvious until they finally explained the whole thing in a terrible song & dance number at the end so even the slow kids could get it (I didn’t get it myself until I heard the song).

So what have I learned since then? Well I found it’s like gravity – once you notice it, you see it working everywhere. It’s easy to think of computers as magic; a big nebulous black box that does stuff way too complicated to explain. That’s only partially true, of course… yes it’s too much to explain quickly, but computers are nowhere near smart enough to correct sloppiness, muddy thinking or poor planning. This to me is the big lesson if GIGO.

Organization is what it comes down to for me. Programmers and database guys learn real early on that there’s a big difference between throwing your ideas together and a carefully planned approach. More average users are starting to discover the same laws – people with years of emails are starting to notice that old messages are getting harder to find. Anyone who’s been online for long will know the frustration of trying to find that bookmark they know they have, only it’s lost in the mish-mash of poorly organized folders.

So what’s my point? As we trundle on towards an increasingly digital world, the laws of GIGO will eventually catch up to everyone. I could have titled this ‘gigo – not just for nerds anymore’. More and more companies are storing all their critical information in databases large and small, but how many users are being taught how to cultivate the data? Every database administrator knows of the prevalence of junk data in systems as they age, and it’s a real problem. Everyone who uses a computer should learn how to clean up after themselves and ensure they are conscientious about their information.

Think of your computer or database as a finicky car, and the data is the fuel. Make sure it’s pure, and you’ll get great performance and avoid a lot of breakdowns.

As a Netsuite customer and consultant, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard talk of Netsuite’s IPO plans. In all the usergroup posts and official Netsuite notifications, nothing has ever been mentioned, which strikes me as strange. Maybe it’s not, who knows.

At any rate, it seems like more than a possibility at this point. A few quotes from some articles I found:

The San Mateo hosted software firm plans to file IPO papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the second half of 2006, when the company expects to reach profitability.

The company’s head count grew from 300 to 450 in the last year, including adding a new worldwide marketing director and product marketing director. Nelson hopes to employ 500 by year’s end. CFO McGeever said the company’s biggest hurdle to growth is hiring and training enough professional services staffers to help Netsuite’s 7,000 customers implement its software.
Full article

We’ll all know a lot more when NetSuite actually files its registration statement. Clearly, if they are on pace to double revenues and reach profitability, the company seems well positioned to have a successful IPO particularly given the rabid appetite for SaaS plays. However, expecting NetSuite to be afforded a valuation similar to that of salesforce.com may be a tad aggressive.
An interesting take on Netsuite’s prospects

And another article about it for good measure.

I think for a while there was some debate about whether Oracle would snap up Netsuite, but I think it stands to do pretty well on its own in the market, especially considering how hot SaaS (Software as a service) is for investors. Netsuite is rumored to be expecting twice its 40M in sales from 2005 in this year, and to become profitable. Add in an IPO and a near doubling in headcount, and that’s a big year for a young company.

As a customer I’m mostly concerned about how they handle their growth – I’ve worked with a lot of businesses as a consultant and seen many that couldn’t handle the transition from one order of magnitude to the next. I’ve always believed that it was the talent of the employees that makes the biggest difference to a company, and hiring great people is a big challenge. I love reading about the hiring practices about the world’s most progressive companys – first it was Microsoft and their famous day-long interviews, and now Google has gleaned a rep for picking talent.

I think the only safe bet is that it’ll be an interesting year for anyone following Netsuite’s story.

One of the best features of having a database-driven e-commerce site is that there is one centralized place to store all your product information. You can then manipulate the data in all sorts of ways, and all of these applications can be updated in more or less automated fashions, integrating all the changes you’ve made to your one central source. Some examples:

• Build a print catalog
• Create an offline browsable catalog
• Create data feeds for shopping sites like Froogle, Amazon.com, shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and many more. These sites (except Froogle) charge you to either directly sell your product on their site or send you highly qualified traffic.

It’s always a good idea to grab the low hanging fruit (i.e. taking opportunities that are relatively easy to implement and have a large potential upside). Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine, is my pick for shopping sites. Not only is it completely free, but it gets a good deal of traffic and isn’t likely to dry up anytime soon. Since it costs nothing but some time (and this guide) to implement, I would recommend it to any e-commerce vendor on Netsuite. Froogle really likes a fresh data feed – you will want to set up a recurring reminder for yourself so you can submit a new feed every two weeks or so (it’s really easy after it’s all set up).

Set Up Your Google Account

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In previous articles, I introduced important IA concepts and covered the first steps involved in organizing your site’s information. All the steps and preparation have led to this final stage, where it’s time to implement all those ideas and concepts and create a site map.

If you’ve been following the steps from part 1, you should have a long list in excel or on notecards with each piece of content you will have on your site. Obviously this list can get pretty big for sites with a lot of depth/content/products, so try not to get overwhelmed – we’ll break them down into manageable chunks. Organizing your site’s information is crucial to long-term success and efficiency – don’t skimp on this part.

The First Sort – Top Level Categories

This is the most important step of the entire process – it is where you put all your content into ‘piles’ that would make sense to an end user (and with an eye to SEO and your most important keywords). Take your big list of content and sort them into no more than five to seven piles, grouping things in a way that makes sense to you. [continue reading…]

So what is information architecture and why should you care about it? In simple terms, it’s the way you organize the information on your web site. The decisions you make when deciding how your users will navigation your site have far-reaching effects, including SEO, usability, and conversion rate. I’ve written a lengthy introduction to information architecture concepts. I will now go into the process of building your site’s structure.

The Process

There are, of course, no hard and fast rules for organizing your site. For any given site there are probably a number of ways to set it up that will work well, and any number of methods to get there. This is a general description of my method, gleaned from my experiences and readings over the last 8 or so years of working with web sites.
Step 1: Keyword Research
This will be a crucial component of your web site, from start to finish. You should never really stop doing keyword research, but once you have generated a pretty big list and determined what your most important keywords are, you will be able to move to the next step. I will write more about this very involved topic later, so if you are new to the concept you may want to do a little reading on it. My favorite keyword research tools are:

• DigitalPoint’s free keyword suggestion tool
• The SEObook.com keyword tool

Try to find the top few keyword phrases that get the most search volume that describes your site as a whole, as well as for each major category. You will define the categories more explicitly later, but for now you should already have a general idea of the major categories of content that your site will have. During this process you will no doubt be returning to this step to refine things.
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One of my favorite topics in web site design is information architecture. That’s a fancy term that basically corresponds to how you organize the content and navigation for your site. In other words, the method by which you put your content into groups or categories, and thereby build the site’s navigation structure. It’s a question you can consider at any time in your web site’s life, but it really pays to figure it out up front. Having to change the structure of a site that’s already running presents a number of challenges that are best avoided. I’ll start by introducing the concepts, then in my next article I will walk you through the process.

An Overview

When it’s time to organize or reorganize your site’s content, what should be kept in mind? The short answer is a lot. If you don’t want to do a good deal of research to fully understand the concepts, I would suggest hiring a consultant to help you out. I’ll try to cover as much as I can.
Theme Pyramids
The basic structure of almost every site out there is hierarchical – you start with one home page, then move to a number of top level categories. Each of these can have items (like articles or individual products) or other categories. The structure can be drawn like a pyramid or organization chart. The basic idea is to make your home page about your broadest topic – whatever your site as a whole is about. You then break that concept up into logical categories. There is a terrific introduction to the idea of theme pyramids at Search Engine World.
Here are some caveats to keep in mind while creating a theme pyramid:

• Usability studies have shown that too many choices = no choice at all. Most users won’t take the time to read long lists. I like to limit the top level categories to between 4 and 7.

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So what are canonical URLs? Due to a number of factors, it’s possible to display the exact same page on some sitse with a bunch of different URLs – this situation causes its own host of problems that search engines have to deal with. They attempt to solve it by figuring out what the canonical, or master URL for a page is. This way they can filter out all the other pages that have exactly (or nearly) the same content, and provide better results for their users. There is an excellent write up by Google web guy Matt Cutts on his web site
An example:
All of these URLs have the same content, but would be considered unique pages to a search engine without extra work:

• https://domain.com/
• https://www.domain.com/
• https://www.domain.com/index.html
• https://www.domain.com

So why do I care?

Right about now you might be thinking, ‘well this is a problem for the search engine, not me’. Well not really – their problems are often the webmaster’s problem when they affect the traffic the search engine drives to your site.
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