The following is from a handout I developed for my presentation on the use of widgets in online retail at the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum earlier this year. It's a checklist of widget best practices. Enjoy! (There's also a Word doc version of this available for download: widget_checklist.doc.)

Thinking of developing a widget for folks' desktops, mobile phones, blogs, or social networks (e.g. Facebook or MySpace)? First off, you need to decide what type of widget you're going to be developing. There are three types:

When planning and developing your widget, it might be helpful to keep the following in mind...

FUNCTIONALITY / UTILITY
• Is your widget useful to your target audience? What's the hook (incentive) that will compel them to install it or use it? Does the widget solve the user’s business problems? Does it save them time or money, or make them more productive? Users listen to WII-FM ("What's In It For Me?").
• Are the functions your widget provides on-message with your brand?
• Is the data delivered by the widget always fresh and up-to-date?
• Are there features that leverage the community of users?
• Does your widget have the capacity to go viral? In other words, is it contagious? And is it "slippery" – in other words, easy to share or distribute to friends?

FINANCIAL
• Is your widget ROI positive?
• What are your objectives? Brand building? PR? Links? Lead generation? Driving conversions? Increasing the customer's AOV?
• Set realistic marketing and ecommerce goals for the widget and track success.
• What is your budget for widget development and maintenance? What if your widget is a huge hit…do you have an action plan in place to upgrade all aspects of service?

PERFORMANCE & RELIABILITY
• Monitor and evaluate the widget's server reliability (uptime). Fully QA and stress test the widget.
• Determine the widget's loading time and optimize it for maximum performance.
• If it's a blog widget, make sure it doesn't hold up the rest of the blogger's page from loading quickly if the server that serves up your widget becomes unresponsive.
• What is your adoption rate of your widget? Conduct traffic volume scalability testing to ensure your widget's servers can cope.

TECHNICAL
• If a web widget, does its HTML code validate?
• Is the widget code well-documented (for the benefit of your programmers)?
• If a web widget, will updated versions of the widget require that the blogger/webmaster update your code they inserted into their template?
• If it's a Flash-based widget, does it have an HTML wrapper?

USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY
• Evaluate the usability of the widget's user interface and of the installation process (via surveys, focus groups, and/or usability consultants).
• Does your widget follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle? Don't try to make the widget do too many things; stay focused.
• Design your widget for the market you are targeting. Use language that they identify with.
• Consider allowing the user installing the widget to customize its look to their own tastes.
• Check for browser compatibility on various versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
• Check for platform compatibility on various versions of Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Conduct international usability tests. Does the widget offer localized content for international users? Has the widget been translated into foreign languages?
• Is the site mobile device friendly?
• Is the widget usable for people with disabilities?
• If a blog widget, is the widget printer friendly? Or does it mess up the formatting of the page when printed?

SEO
• Don't neglect PageRank as your incentive to build widgets. If nothing else, a good widget can serve as link bait, driving lots of inbound links to your web site.
• Web widgets can pass PageRank from the website where the widget is placed to your site, but only if done correctly. To help increase your chances of the links being counted for PageRank:
• If your widget is coded in JavaScript, place your text links outside the JavaScript, or use a "noscript" tag.
• If coded in Flash, you can utilize progressive enhancement or an HTML "wrapper".
• For iframe widgets, place your text links outside the iframe, or use a "noframe" tag.
• The best widgets for SEO are WordPress widgets (written in PHP) or HTML-based widgets because the widget's HTML code, including links and content, is fully accessible to spiders and integrated into the rest of the blog's HTML. WordPress widgets are similar to WordPress plugins.
• Include relevant keywords in the anchor text of the links back to your site. For example, instead of a link saying, "Your Brand," spice it up some and say "Your Brand's Weather Widget," or other keyword text that describes what your widget is about.
• If it's a blog widget, have a plugin version of it for major blog platforms such as WordPress. Thus the links and content generated by the widget will become integrated into the rest of the blog's HTML code, and the links will appear more "real" to the search engines.
• Create your links with a "target=_blank" code so that webmasters are less inclined to remove the link. Some webmasters believe that widgets "steal' traffic from their website or blog.

You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:

[ http://videos.webpronews.com/video/frame2.php?movie_name=mentos ]

In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear.

Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive "special treatment" at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that's not the kind of attention that you want, Steve

What you don't see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It's hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I'd LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe

I'm here at ACCM in the session "Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget". Here's the session description:
As the cost of doing business online continues to increase, small businesses must be strategic and creative in how they expend limited funds and resources. This session will discuss ways to maximize your conversion and average order size without breaking the bank on expensive bells and whistles. Using solid web design, studying metrics and trends, taking advantage of strategic cost effective marketing and using strategic catalog mailings are all part of the frugal marketer’s playbook.

Mike Feiman of Pooldawg is up first. Pooldawg (a Netconcepts client, btw) was founded in 2003 and sells 2100+ pool cues. Pooldawg uses Google Analytics. Number of visits doesn't really matter, it's all about what they do while on your site. They are focused on visit length, visit depth, bounce rates, conversion rate. Have about 3000 pages total, fully indexed by Google, each page is a potential entry page. Very important to present a consistent feel throughout the site. Pooldawg buys PPC. Don't get caught in bidding wars. Focus on the long tail. Drop keywords that don't perform and focus on conversion and cost per action (CPA). They buy ads on Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing. By chasing keywords they cost per conversion skyrockets. "billiards" as a search term converts poorly. Long Tail is where it's at. Brand names + pool cues convert much better and are cheaper. They constantly evaluate keywords, trying to get them to perform by ad copy tweaks and landing page tweaks etc. and if they still don't perform, they drop them from their PPC keyword list. Mike says: I'm willing to pay $1 a click if it's costing me $5 a customer, but not $1 a click if it's costing $40 a customer. People who use their internal search convert at 4x higher rate than those who do not. Signed up with Celebros and conversion jumped from 4x higher to 6x higher. Look at the results for searches coming through and if the results are poor, do something about it. Added a "Related Searches" tagging feature, thanks to Netconcepts, put them on the product page, and people use them. That creates more pages for Google to index, and they're seeing search traffic already coming in directly to these pages. They just launched this but it's already returning ROI. Only 10% of visitors are using the internal search. It's really about taking advantage of their current customers rather than throwing money at getting all new customers. In terms of guerrilla marketing... Participating on message boards is hugely valuable to Pooldawg. They talk to the board leaders who then communicate to the forum users, sponsor the message boards. With blogging, they haven't quite found their voice yet. They write articles internally and get them syndicated. One of their most popular articles is "the Anatamy of a pool cue", get tons of traffic to that page and it converts really well, so the ROI on the hour it took to write the article was great. Before site redesign done by Netconcepts, only 30% indexation in Google. Now 100% and they rank really high. Affiliate marketing is great for low cost customer acquisition. 6-8 % of total sales. 1000 affiliates, and only 100 really drive any real revenue for Pooldawg. 49% of traffic from natural search, 9% from paid search. 85 of their Top 100 terms are in the top 5 rankings in Google, 80 of the Top 100 in Yahoo. Natural search is very cost effective. Give users engaging tools and content. Pooldawg is building a very nice library of proprietary content - over 100 articles - will be adding video too. They partner with trusted names and steer away from the shadier players in their market. Sponsor the WPBA, BCA, GenerationPool.com, AZBilliards.com - associate themselves with trusted names.

Steve Spangler, "Chief Mess Maker" (CEO) of Steve Spangler Science. Shows off his flaming wallet and how they took him to a private room at the airport. Steve is the originator of the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser experiment. Showing off some video of him on the Food Network, on the Ellen Show, on Denver's 9News. Hilarious! Steve originally moved from public speaking for generating revenue to the website to do so. In 2005 the Mentos geyser things started to take off. How do you leverage this into a business that supports 30 employees? How do you go from an obscure backyard demo to an Internet phenomenon in less than 12 months? (i.e. get to 2 million + views on YouTube). In 2004 he wanted a redesign with some Flash but Stephan said no he wouldn't do that but Netconcepts would create a blog instead. On June 1 2004 this amazing traffic spike happened. It was a brief mention of Instasnow and Steve Spangler Science on the blog BoingBoing. Stupid.com puts Instasnow on their stupidest products list and it gets on Good Morning America. Turned lemons ("bad press"?) into lemonade by blogging "It's great to be stupid!" The blog is a perfect place for all sorts of great stories and testimonials like how Instasnow got a teacher out of a speeding ticket. Really important to write attention grabbing headlines on the blog: not "200 teachers engage in inquiry based science" but instead "Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild". Not "Science project about pulling microscopic meteorites out of your gutter" but instead "A meteorite hit my house!" The blog post that really launched the whole Mentos geyser phenomenon, video news anchor wearing a beautiful St Johns outfit got covered with Diet Coke: "News Anchor Gets Soaked! Mentos Experiment Sets a New Record". Where else would he put the fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? called Steve and wanted to put a Mentos + Diet Coke question on air: the blog! Does the blog generate sales? Measured that and the answer is yes. Steve makes the Time 100 most influential people nominees list. Is blogging really worth the effort? It is! Currently blogging 2-3 times per week, have an editor helping find stuff to blog about. #1 in Google for "science experiments". Big spike on Cybermonday. 3,000 inbound links. 4% of total traffic is from the blog, but 12% of sales are attributable to the blog! Now Steve is looking at expanding into Twitter. Amy Africa in the audience says: "I love Twitter!" but she's being facetious. 1.8 million views on the Steve and news anchor Mentos + Diet Coke YouTube video. What should you blog if you want to make money: best-selling products, "Did you know?" product information loaded with keywords, company events - past and present, "Behind the Scenes" information, customer testimonials.

Late last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Alan, a true SEO veteran and head of SEO over at Expedia.com. Chris was one of my fellow speakers at the AMA Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conferences I chaired in Seattle and Boston last Fall.

Now this interview is finally available as a half hour long audio podcast for your listening enjoyment, as well as an abridged transcript for you speed readers who prefer the written word over the spoken.

Chris and I had a fascinating discussion about the unique challenges of search engine optimizing huge sites. One of the topics we covered was landing pages for SEO and how they differ from PPC landing pages. Chris explains that, unlike with paid search campaigns, in SEO you can't just switch out landing pages very easily -- at least not without some powerful technology. Furthermore, any changes to improve conversion on the SEO landing page can negatively impact the page's organic rankings, thus making it harder to pinpoint what's making the page less effective. What's needed is a solution that allows you to make changes to the page yet still maintain your rankings.

Chris understands the value of empirical testing. SEO is an experimental science. You can't just blindly implement SEO tactics prescribed by SEO experts on their blogs and in the forums. You need to test it for yourself. This is harder than it sounds when you're dealing with millions of pages indexed. That's why Expedia has a suite of very sophisticated tools at their disposal, that Chris could only briefly allude to.

Hope you enjoy this podcast!

The above quote was written in a CNet: Searchlight post about DIY Reputation Management. In that post, I take an in-depth look at this popular topic for businesses and professionals, and offer a ton of tips like: places to monitor your online reputation, what to do, what not to do, and some friendly reminders. I'd like to share with you one of my tips: set up Google and Yahoo! alerts for keywords, your brand name, or other things that relate to your reputation. By doing so, you can easily keep up with what kinds of content the search engines are serving up.

One of the areas that I'm starting to see a rapid growth in, is local search. It's important that business owners start taking advantage of this growth in popularity, so that they claim a stake in this soon-to-be competitive market. Believe it or not, there are a number of free tools where you can list your business locally through the major search engines. I talk about those tools and the importance of taking advantage of them in my article on CNET: Searchlight my SEO blog. One example of the tools I discuss is Google's local.google.com. By following a few, easy instructions, you are well on your way into the local listings.

Whether you post on blogs or run a website, at some point or another you've probably come across anchor text that reads, "click here." Every time you add anchor text with words like "here," "more," or "this," you are sending a message to the search engines that that simple word is what your link is all about. The end result doesn't change much for humans, but it does mean something to the search engines. If you are interested in ranking for particular keywords, you'll want to pay close attention to your anchor text.

My article on CNet, which can be found on my CNet: Searchlight blog, talks about why you should implement keywords in your anchor text links on your site to help boost your rankings.

Whether you own a small, online shop or a large retail site, you're probably scrambling to get some last-minute things done to gear up for a successful holiday season. In my article at CNet, I go into some great last-minute tips to help you achieve the success you want online. One of the tips I think would be the most useful would be to manage your existing blog content during this busy time. By planning posts in advance for future publishing, you'll not only save yourself some time, but will have the ability to reach out to your customers with great content that doesn't just sound like a sales pitch. If you don't have a blog, take advantage of all the social media networks out there and start reaching out to your customers.

For the full article, you can find it on my CNet: Searchlight blog. Hope you have a successful holiday season!

Big name companies often miss out on one of the basic concepts of SEO: Canonicalization, which means "identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source." How are they missing out? Grab a handful of your favorite companies and see whether or not they have a http://www.yourdomain.com and a http://yourdomain.com that leads to the same page. You'd be surprised how many "culprits" there are out there that don't have a 301 permanent redirect in place to preserve their home page's Page Rank. By having two sets of pages out there, it creates duplicate content because the search engines see pages based on their URLs. So instead of splitting your Page Rank between two, identical URLs, take control over your traffic and make sure you have a 301 permanent redirect in place.

For more on this topic, read my full post on my CNet: Searchlight blog.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryan Eisenberg, who is the co-founder and CPO of Future Now, Inc. Bryan is also a high profile speaker, author, consultant, blogger, and the publisher of GrokDotCom. In additional to his role at Future Now, Bryan is also one of the founders and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

My interview with Bryan was about personas and "Persuasion Architecture," a process that helps persuade customers to make a decision on your website when traditional marketing methods fail. As an inventor of Persuasion Architecture, Bryan shares a wealth of expertise into the world of crafting personas to get into your customers' minds in order to give them the content they need in order for them to make their next click decision.

There are several nuggets that we can take from Bryan's interview, that revolve around the idea of personalized search. I asked Bryan what the typical rate was for a typical online retailer. His answer? "The average online conversion rate for a typical retailer today is 2.4%." That's pretty depressing when you think about it. So how to you help your conversion rate through managing your content?

Persuasion Architecture is based on Bryan's idea that, "everybody does things for their own reasons." These reasons translate into four, distinct preferences, the how and why people do the things that they do. Once you understand the four basic personality types -- emotional, logical, fast-paced, and disciplined -- you can build perspectives or snapshots that give you insight into how your customers might want to purchase your products. Once you understand the "how," then you can build the "who." Who is buying your products from your site? That's where profiles come into play, small pictures to what Bryan says will "give us a little better understanding of who that grouping or that mode of behavior is going to be -- and then ultimately two personas."

Listen to my interview with Bryan Eisenberg for more about how to boost your site's conversion rate. This podcast is 40 minutes long, and is a 10 MB download. Enjoy!