Net Neutrality & Building a Business Model (11/05/2009)

For class this week, we had a debate on whether Net Neutrality regulation is necessary. As passionate as one may be (in this case me) about the issue, we had to leave our opinions aside and focus on the resolution that "Net Neutrality Regulation was unnecessary". I was on the pro side (and we won!). The debate not only added to my know-what of the whole issue, but also from the dangers of letting govt. get involved. Some dangers include infringing on people's access to information, interfering with free market, hindering innovation, management costs that would be borne by the taxpayers,and the how-what-why-where-when regulation would be carried out. The biggest question I guess is CAN GOVERNMENT BE TRUSTED TO REGULATE INFORMATION CONTENT ON THE INTERNET? Given their inefficienty in times past with use management of the ARPANET, the far from below expectations from recent examples (SEC vs. BOA), and the fact that rules to protect the consumer are already in place, I personally arrived at the conclusion to best let the internet be and engage the powers of demand and supply.

How To Develop a Business Plan

The prof introduced us to a very relevant topic. For any business to be successful, one has to draw up a business plan/model as to how Goals and objectives will be met. He broke the up into the following categories:

• Value Proposition
• Marketing Strategy
• Management Team
• Competitive Strategy
• Competitive Environment
• Revenue Model
• Market Opportunity

Sherpa Studios Dude (10/29/2009)

Search Engine Optimization:

Organic:SEO

Organic SEO is based on the site content and structure who links to it and who does not which is 70% of traffic to most websites.

Sponsored Clicks:

Every time someone clicks on your add, kaching! Every time does a query, there is a micro auction. Pay-per-click means "you pay to play".

There is a high correlation btwn sponsored clicks and organic searches. Drop positions in search results when cpc is turned off despite Google's denial that any correlation exists.

Search Engine Marketing is an umbrella for both SEO and PPC. Sometimes used to interchangeably mean PPC by amateurs.

Two things that control pages - on & off page trackers(everything you do not have much control over e.g. linking to your website). On page trackers are things you have control on: e.g code, org, structure, server of the website.

They matter because of :

Deployment ease:

iterative: manipulate factors and quickly see the effect: e.g. changing texts and Urls within web page to have as much keywords as possible. e.g small tortoise.

control: all within your control.

weighted: top ranking influencers in non competitive environment.

Keyword Density:

Assumption is that the higher the ranking the better the quality and that is not necessarily true.

Google is great target market. Bing and Yahoo less frequent in updating their search engines. When doing SEM, design for both Search Engines & Humans. e.g. Tankless Water Heaters page: The design is appealing to the eye and is structured and designed to draw in customers but the source code is optimized for search engines. Some text appears bold when in actual fact is composed of headers.

Important Factors for SEO

1. Title Tag: In SEO its all about key phrases.
Best practice - Use few but exact keywords.

2. Body Tag:
Better practice: frequent use (keyword density)

Best practice: withing first 200 words (keyword placement)

3. H1 H2 H3: It is better to use the entire Hx family.

4. <'bold/strong'>:emphasizing keyword with <'strong'> links

5. Domain/URL: include keyword in URL keyword.com
Homepage has most weight

6. Filename - including keyword in page name.

Best practice - keep files near root directory

7. img ALT-including keyword image alt tags
Best practice - use short, brief descriptions.

8. Inbound link anchor text: include keywords in internal links
Best practice: avoid superfluous words

9. Inbound link popularity: increasing number of links to an internal page
Best practice: use the to superfluous pages - "link sculpting"

10. Use clean, lightweight markup: separating presentation (formatting)
from data (content, images).

Best practice: separate css file

4 Negative Factors:

1. server often inaccessible to robots: cannot crawl a website that is
not up.

2. content similar/duplicate: splits the power of links and serves penalty

3. External link quality - not all external links equal;

bad links are harmful

4. META keywords - does not hurt to use them, but its best to avoid doing
keyword research for competition.

5. Stop using plural as much as possible.
Research has shown volume of traffic/conversion were much lower.

6. Find out how consumers type searches.

e.g. tankless water heater gas vs tankless gas water heater. Research
has shown that consumers searching for tankless water heaters type
"tankless water heater gas" versus "tankless gas water heaters".

Find out what consumers type in from resources such as
"Google Adwords traffic estimation"

Some useful links:

1. The Web's Best SEO Resources

2. Search Engine Marketing Blog

3. Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist

4. Search Engine Journal

5. Internet Marketing Services

Find·a·bil·i·ty as defined by Peter Morville is:

a. The quality of being locatable or navigable.
b. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
c. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation
and retrieval.

It is the ability to direct one's target audience to their website.

In his book, "Building Findable Websites", Aarron Walter lists the disciplines of findability as:

• SEO
Search Engine Optimization helps a website become findable. Implementation of SEO techniques help in page rank, relevancy and search visibility.
• Accessibility
• Us·a·bil·i·ty
Usability refers to the ease with which a User Interface can be used by its intended audience to achieve defined goals. Usability incorporates many factors: design, functionality, structure, information architecture, and more. (sitepoint.com)
• In•for•ma•tion ar•chi•tec•ture
In their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld define it as:
1. The structural design of shared information environments
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within web sites and intranets
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape
• Development
• Marketing
• Copyrighting
• Design

General Iphone Web Pages Best Practices:

• Make your web page unique but user friendly e.g. using accelerometer features for tapping, shaking, etc
• Test, test and then re-test again!
• Provide adequate support
• Make sure you are current with SDK updates
• Ensure that image resolution is not too big

Here is a good link with information on ViewPort & CSS for the Iphone => Iphone Tips