Photo thanks to Lorelei Ranveig.

Web.com president Dr. Jeff Stibel is one of the inventors of search engine interfaces and has a paragraph of titles after his name.  In a recent blog post and Harvard Business Review Podcast he claims that the brain is a reasonable model for understanding the internet.

I disagree.

Dr. Stible argues that the internet is a brain, and Google is its memory. In the brain the most powerful thoughts are formed by connections of billions of synapses, and these memories are the most likely ones to come up in daily thought.

Others are accessed by sending “thought queries” to the brain, bringing up memories we though we had forgotten.  Of those, only the top few receive attention.  The rest are ignored.

A similar system exists online. The more pages that link to a website, the more important that website is and the more often it is “remembered” (shows up on search results).  But the more specific the query, the more less-important sites will become more relevant.

This analogy is good for conceptualizing. Links=synapses, websites=neurons, internet=brain, etc. In fact it’s a pretty accurate model for the construction of the internet.

But the model falls apart when you realize that it takes more to be “remembered” on the internet than the intrinsic quality of the memory itself. Stibel’s advice to small business owners (from his blog):

So what should you do? Follow the brain.

Stop trying to game Google and focus on building value. Improve the quality of your site, remove the clutter and focus on attracting relevant sites to link to your site. And if you are looking for a good model, look no further than Google’s website: uncluttered, massive links in to the site, and a nice big button for sending your information on.

A real memory’s worth is the intrinsic value of the memory. But a website, although it may be beneficial and relevant, must be configured in such a way as to allow the memory engine (Google) to remember it.

In practice, “gaming” Google is just as important as providing value. The fundamental difference between the brain and the internet is that online memories (sites) must to be configured correctly to be remembered (ranked well). It’s not enough for a site to simply be valuable.

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If you think it’s tough getting people in your company to agree, you should see the design process at a web developer.

Everyone is an expert in their field and wants to set up the design a different way.

All those personalities clash (and mesh) spectacularly.

Imagine this meeting…

____________________

Frank Lloyd Wright:

That was Donald Trump and he wants a website. He says that we can make it however we want but if it sucks, he’ll buy our company and fire everyone.

Andy Warhol:

I see a bright, shiny homepage with light pinks, yellows, and greens, offset by a dark red border, symbolizing Trump-like responsibility…

Ernest Hemingway:

(Drinks swig from flask and slams on table) The copy should be solid. That’s most important. Small words. Big meaning. Whitespace everywhere: no colors. Maybe some gray. But no frills. Sites need words, not pictures.

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Photo thanks to Jan Tik.

If you haven’t heard already, Adobe made waves last week when it gave “flash player technology” know-how to Google and Yahoo, enabling both search engines to crawl links presented in a flash video object. (Microsoft opted out of the deal, citing competition issues with Adobe.)

Before this announcement web developers frowned upon using tons of flash technology on a website because the search engines had no way to follow flash links. And if search engines couldn’t see your content, chances were that users wouldn’t either. Flash SEO was, effectively, an oxymoron.

Adobe’s announcement brings up some interesting questions and concerns:

Does Flash SEO Really Work?

Yes.

Thanks to some up-to-the-minute testing by Gary Moyle and Co. over at Guava, we can be assured that Google’s internet-crawling robots actually can follow links contained within in a flash movie. Adobe’s announcement was met with some initial skepticism but it appears that everything is working as planned.

Flash SEO = Great Rankings for Existing Flash Websites?

No.

Because existing Flash websites couldn’t be crawled by search engines, designers had no motive to make them search engine friendly. They paid attention to aesthetics and pictures and colors, but not to things like keyword density, page titles, or internal linking structure. I.e., the things that search engines use to rank pages.

Most existing Flash sites are constructed so poorly that while Google’s ability to crawl them might boost their rankings initially, they will be no match for optimized sites in competitive search terms over the long run without drastic modifications.

Flash SEO vs. Regular SEO

The field is so new (less than a week old), that best practices for Flash SEO are completely unknown. Today’s SEO industry evolved over 15+ years of trial and error. Original SEO’s evolution involved optimizers finding easy loopholes to boost rankings, Google shutting them down, SEO’s finding more loopholes, Google shutting those down, etc.

Google consistently works to bring the best results to its searchers and has gotten pretty good at it: the easiest way to rank well today is to provide relevant, up to date content. And the best people to do that on today’s web are still proven SEO’s, not flash developers.

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A quick thought before I leave:

I went to the Wal-Mart site to look for some workout equipment, and a survey popped up in my face.  Annoyed, I agreed to take it and lie to show them how annoying pop-ups are.

The first question was an age question, with seven answers ranging from “Under 18″ to “65 and over.”

I chose 65 and over, obviously.

Suddenly the survey shut down, took me to a page thanking me for my time, and closed the window.

After the first question? There are four possible reasons Wal-Mart would do this:

1) They wisened up to people lying on surveys

2) They don’t think people 65 or over can take an online survey

3) They don’t care what people 65 or over think

4) All of the above

There’s a 75% chance they have a negative opinion of their customers.  If I were them I’d just skip the survey and pay for some focus groups, rather than run the risk of making a customer angry.

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Photo thanks to colros.

Are you doing business online?

If so, you’ve probably met your nemesis.  She is lurking in the shadows of ebay and Amazon ready to snatch away your customers.  She sells what you sell, but for next to nothing.

She doesn’t think like you.  She doesn’t analyze expenses and sales.  She got her (your) product for free, or as a must-buy.  She has no use for it anymore and wants cash.

Not as much cash as she can, but some cash.  Less cash than you have to charge to keep your business going.  She can look up how much you charge then set her price at less than yours.

When everyone sells something online, many people will end up selling what you sell.  And they don’t have operating expenses to cover or people to pay.  They can undercut you easily.

When the market is everyone, price is easy to beat.  But quality isn’t.

You’ve got one huge advantage over these guerrilla sellers:

The resources to communicate quality.

You must convince your customers that your new golf clubs are worth the extra money, the money that separates your product from Uncle Frank’s “twice-used” golf clubs.

As a business with marketing money to spend (although maybe not a ton), you can blow mom and pop out of the water by communicating value.

A couple ways to do that are:

• A well-managed internet marketing campaign
• A modern website
• Stellar customer service

Independent sellers can beat or equal you 100% of the time on product and price.

For businesses selling on today’s web, the other two P’s are astronomically more important.

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