By Mike Sachoff

Consider all the angles

It’s no secret that online video is popular, from Hulu to YouTube the number of Americans watching video continues to increase. In the SES session “The Next Wave for Online Video,” the panelists focused on optimizing online video for search and other strategies.

Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, said video search optimization is not enough anymore. Video has gone social and mobile. A good strategy implements both.

Consider all the elements surrounding ranking on YouTube, including view counts, frequency, rating, sharing, favoriting, playlists, flagging, comments and thumbs up and down. There is a lot of speculation that Google is using Google analytics to influence website ranking. It makes sense that this would apply to YouTube as well.

Additional YouTube ranking factors are whether you have been awarded an authority channel (one box results), links, embeds video responses, subscribers, channel views and annotation usage.

Optimization keywords and tags:

- Research the competition at YouTube for your related keywords, tags and description. Learn from them but don’t copy.

- Use YouTube’s keyword suggestions. Or Google’s keyword tool. Simply type a keyword slowing into YouTube search and you can see what YouTube suggests.

–

Also use YouTube public insight data to help you optimize.

–

Tips for optimizing community factors:

- Make great and unique videos.
-Add subscribe, favorite and rate prompts/ calls to action to your videos either at editing stage or via YouTube Annotations.
- Post a video response on the most popular and relevant video at YouTube that day.
= Add comments prompting people to watch your video on the video watch pages of popular videos.
- Use some but not all the same keyword’s as your competition in your titles as the ones related to popular videos that are using in their titles, descriptions and tags to wind up in the related videos arena of their pages.
- Post new videos on Thursdays or Fridays to get visibility on the weekend.
- Join the YouTube partner program if you can qualify.
- Important: Use social media and web sites to submit/post your video links and imbeds and get the word out about the video to build links and embeds. Target affinity groups/users and automate this effort with tools like tweetdeck and Tweetlater.
- Submit your videos to multiple video sites using tubemogul.com and link to the YouTube video within each description page.
- Link your videos together
- Create Playlists.
- Monitor YouTube Insight and Google Analytics for your channel and videos
- Issue free and or paid press releases to trumpet your video.
- Adwords – advertise your video.
- YouTube Direct Sales. Buy brand channel, homepage and network placement $$$$
- Buy or lease a popular channel at YouTube

——-

The iPhone 3G S has a built in ability to upload video to YouTube
1 shoot a video on your iPhone
2 add keyword optimized title, description and tags.
3. Upload to YouTube.

Erin Bouchier, Business Lead, Google/YouTube Advertising, said online video is the fastest growing medium in the history of the world. Your customers are there and you should be too.

Ways to connect with your audience:

- Know your audience by using YouTube Insight tool.
- Be Proactive: Promote Your Video using PPC tools similar to search. This can significantly increase viewership of your videos.
- Create a brand channel on YouTube. YouTube can post all of your videos on one place branded to your site for free.
- Don’t forget about the content. You can run TV style ads within videos in 15-30 second spot preroll or midroll.

Mark Robertson, Founder, ReelSEO, said YouTube is now the second largest search engine in terms of search queries. In July 2009 there were 3.6 million search queries on YouTube.

- Social media + video working together
- More efforts into video discovery and retrieval.
- Mobile video is going crazy. There is a 1700 % increase from Jan July 2009 in this area.

The next wave in video SEO:

- Html 5 and open video — Firefox 3.5, safari, chrome beta

- There is a lot of progress with advanced recognition technologies such as speech to texts, object recognition and facial recognition.

Tip: How to get a thumbnail in universal search…

- Allow direct link to video file,
- Submit MRSS and or XML sitemap to Google
- Add relevant video to existing ranked pages.

David Burch, Director of Marketing, TubeMogul, said videos are mostly discovered through YouTube searches. The next most common source is referred videos, but not single source dominates. Search engines only refer about 11 percent of referred traffic.

A view only means someone clicked paly. On average most people don’t watch much of a video. Within 30 seconds over 66 percent of initial viewers have already clicked away.

The life cycle of a video peaks very early. So you want to have call to action early in videos and you also want to have a lot of videos to fight these two trends.

YouTube dominates in terms of average views per video. However, if you syndicate to just 6 more video sites you can double your viewership.

For more related information click here..

By Tinu AbayomiPaul

Social Media And I thought to myself: “Um. Why not?” Since I’m not really sure what they meant by that, I’m going to assume that this person mean “Why should I use social bookmarking in my business?” – with

a full understanding of all the risks associated with “assuming”.

I figure that if you’re reading this, you have that question, or a similar one.

There are three reasons.

1. More links
2. More traffic
3. More credibility

More links are always a good thing.

Think of links as the road traffic moves through on the web. If there are no roads to where your business “lives” online, namely its website, it’s far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you.

That’s true whether you’re talking about search engines or links from other sites. Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword.

In addition, the “nicer” the road, the more traffic will flow through it – think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes.

More traffic, also good.

From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted. Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they’re going, and why they’re interested in getting there.

It’s like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That’s what pulls them in, they see a headline – to get to the story they are compelled to take another action.

The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we’ll go with another analogy.

Let’s say I made a movie and I thought it was fantastic. If I’ve never met you before, and I tell you, “hey, I made a kick-ass movie, come see it!” – you may come see it, you may not.

It depends more on how much time you have and if you’re interested in that kind of movie, even how nice of a person you are, than my opinion.

Why?

Because I’m the one who made it, so you can’t know whether to trust my opinion, at least in relation to how much YOU might like it. Of course I think it’s great, but I have no way of knowing whether you will.

Now, if you knew me and my taste, and how alike our tastes are, you may be a bit more inclined. So if I’m, say, Michael Bay, and you liked my last movie, and my new movie is on the same type of thing, you might go see it based on the trailer alone. You know you’re taking a gamble but it’s a safe bet.

Now watch this.

Your best friend, the one who likes all the same things you likes, the one you hang out with and trust the most, calls you on the phone and says: “I’ve just seen the best movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I have to see it again. When are you free, I’ll come pick you up.”

The only thing that could make that deal sweeter is if your friend has also said “My treat.” At least as far as recommendations go, the person who what you like the most is likely to be the person whose advice you’ll follow.

If you know that friend, and that friend has similar tastes, or at least knows what you like, you’re more likely to see the movie.

My sister and I have similar taste in movies, but i’m a little more patient with beginnings and endings and like more indie-fare. Yet, no matter how many times I have suggested we watch a movie together that she ends up not liking as much, if I rave about a movie, she’ll at least give it a chance.

Now, let’s take that back to social bookmarking. Imagine you can find hundreds of people, all around the world, with tastes similar to yours, sharing information you wouldn’t find on your own.

Or maybe you can just connect faster and more frequently for suggestions from people you already know. Wouldn’t you be more likely to follow their suggestions than some stranger?

That’s the power of social bookmarking. It’s put a technology behind word of mouth sharing of web sites that anyone can use.

And they do.

Now all you have to do is learn how to be the person or company everyone is spreading the word about. Which is another conversation altogether.

Fore more related article click here…

It’s Important for Ranking

Google and Bing have both talked about site architecture issues lately on their blogs. Site architecture is an important part of search engine optimization, and crucial to ranking.

“You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines,” says Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center.

If you have time, and site architecture is not your strong suit, I would suggest reading both Microsoft’s post and Google’s, but to sum them up, here a few tips from each of them.

Bing’s Tips

1. Use descriptive file and directory names

2. Limit directory depth

3. Limit physical page file size

4. Externalize on-page Javascript and CSS code

5. Use 301 redirects for moved pages

6. Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirects

7. Implement custom 404 pages

Google’s Tips

Google starts out by talking about some site architecture myths, and also shares a couple slideshows (they talked about the topic at SMX London).

Finally, they offer these tips:

1. Check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and isn’t returning an error

2. Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new “Change of address” feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.

3. Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages — particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic — are blocked inappropriately.

4. Make good use of the rel=”canonical” attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain.

As I said, Google and Microsoft both have plenty more to say on the topic in their respective posts. The Bing post is actually the third installment in a series.

For More related information click here…

A lot of people can recognize good design when they see it on the web. But most people don’t really know what makes that design good.

How do you define “good design?” Is it subjective, like your favorite flavor of ice cream? Although there is some subjectivity within good design, there are artistic principles that good design is built from. Here are a few that form the foundation of good design.

1. Proximity

Because items that are in close proximity to one another become one visual unit, items that are related to one another should be grouped together. Laying out related items on a website page this way helps the eye associate the information and enables the viewer to mentally categorize the information easily. The flip side of this principle is that items that are not related should not be placed in close proximity to one another.

The purpose of the principle of proximity is to organize information in a way that enables viewers to quickly and easily comprehend. When information is organized, people are more likely to read it and respond. People are also more likely to remember information that is organized.

How can you determine if items form a visual unit? Squint your eyes and look at the page on a website. Now count the number of times your eye stops as it views the page. On a page that is using the principle of proximity well, your eye will stop three to five times. In other words, there will be three to five groups of information for the eye to comprehend separately.

2. Alignment

You’ve seen website page layouts where the text and graphics are placed wherever there happens to be space. The effect is messy, with no impact. Nothing should be placed on a page arbitrarily. There should be a visual connection between each item and something other item on the page. When items are aligned, it creates a cohesiveness that the eye appreciates.

The purpose of alignment is to unify the website page. Imagine a well-organized kitchen. All the pots and pans are stored in the organizer, the fruit is nicely displayed in a basket on the counter, the spices are all on the rack-everything is in its place. A page layout needs the same thing.

Look at a website page that you feel is good design. Now focus on the main visual element. Where does your eye go from there? Do you see how other elements are aligned with that one main element both vertically and horizontally?

3. Repetition

Good design repeats some aspect of the website design throughout the site. It’s this repetition that makes all the pages in a site look like they belong together. Color scheme, graphic elements, typefaces-all of these elements should be repeated-used consistently-throughout.

The purpose of repetition is to create consistency and to add visual interest. Repetition creates a professional, polished look that the eye is drawn to. When a website design uses repetition and is consistent, it is more likely to be viewed and read.

Here are some was you can create repetition beyond simple consistency in typefaces and colors: Use some element in your logo as a major graphic element in the design. If you are using a ruled line, make the line more interesting visually by perhaps making it with tiny dots or dashes, then repeating the line element throughout the design. Create patterns that are repeated throughout the design. Take a small element and place it somewhere on each page for a whimsical look. Just be careful not to overdo the repetition, or viewers will be annoyed rather than pleased.

4. Contrast

The principle of contrast states that if two items are not the same, then they should be different-very different. Contrast creates an organizational hierarchy of the information and graphics on a webpage. When using contrast, you can’t be a wimp! The contrast must be strong to be effective.

The purpose of contrast is two-fold: to create interest on the page, and to organize information. A page that is interesting to look at is more likely to be read. And contrasting elements will help a reader understand the way the information is organized.

Contrast can be created in many ways. You can contrast large type with small type, a serif font with a sans-serif font, bold with light, smooth texture with rough texture, a small graphic with a large one, a dark color with a light one.

A design that integrates these principles will automatically gain professionalism and polish that it would otherwise lack. Next time you stumble across a website design that makes you say “wow”, cheek for these principles-you’ll find them quietly working to make that design a good one!

For related articles click here…

(Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter)

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ’90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn’t be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

The Open Conversation

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone’s argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn’t been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you’ll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

For More related news click here…

Decision Engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

For more click here…

While the world has focused on Google Wave as a mash-up of chat, e-mail, and document sharing, it’s really something else: Google Wave could be the Twitter that everyone really wants. Maybe it’s the Facebook, too.

Shown for the first time on Thursday at Google’s I/O developer conference, Wave is described as “equal part conversation and document” for its uses as a collaboration tool. But, the leap from what Google says Wave is today to what it can easily become is a short one.

If Google wants to compete, head-to-head, with Twitter and Facebook, Wave is the perfect start. It may not be a competitor when it first becomes publicly available, perhaps because the merging of documents, feeds, photos, e-mail, instant messaging, event planning, and other features is likely to seem so unfamiliar to users.

It will likely take time before would-be users really understand what Wave does and can be used for. How much time? Months, not years.

Then give Wave a more public face–documents, chats, IMs, etc.–to be shared with everyone on your contact list or the world at-large and Wave does everything Facebook and Twitter do And more.

It is not a foregone conclusion this will happen. Outside its core search business and related tools, Google has faced an uphill battle for user acceptance. However, Wave, by combining so many otherwise separate Google features, could finally provide the compelling experience users seek.

Build, Not Buy

For months there have been rumors that Google would buy one (both?) of the big social network players. Why didn’t it? With Wave almost ready to release, why spend the money to purchase a large distraction?

Another important thing: Google already has a built-in, advertising-based business model that customers understand. That is a huge thing, considering that Twitter and Facebook are still looking for ways to monetize their users.

While Google has not announced a release date, it only describes availability as “later this year,” the company has started a developer program, released a set of APIs, and is providing limited access to developers seeking to test their Wave-based applications. An active developer forum now exists, as well as a Wave development team blog.

Waving For Business

Google Wave has obvious business uses, combining tools that businesspeople use every day. It will be important that the Wave mail client and other applications learn to work with closely what we already use and for Wave to be something people can adopt without disrupting how they already work.

That has been a challenge for Google in the past, but if Wave is to achieve its great potential it must be easy to adopt and add to the way people already work.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook need to be looking over their shoulders.

For more click here…

As Twitter continues to sweep the Internet, it only makes sense that users are adding more and more followers each day. And while services like TweetDeck can help manage all those incoming tweets, not everyone is using them. That presents a problem for those using Twitter to market their brands. How do you stand out amidst all the noise?

Twitter is an excellent tool for finding breaking news. As such, many users scan their Twitter accounts quickly to find something of interest. Pay attention to how you scan Twitter, and you might find yourself looking at users’ images more than the actual list of tweets. That’s because as you become accustomed to the value of a particular user’s tweets, you look for them specifically. It’s much easier to pick out an image of value rather than the entire tweet. Therefore, it’s important, as a brand, to have an image that is instantly recognizable – one that stands out. That way when users are scanning a long list of tweets, the chances increase that they will stop and read yours. That all depends, of course, on the value you are providing with each and every tweet associated with your image.

For more click here..

Conducting a competitive analysis is an important part of the job if you’re a usability engineer or information architect. A good competitive analysis not only produces usability metrics but also aids decision makers in their strategic goal-setting and planning. Done right, a good competitive analysis can steer a Web development project in the right direction.

The day will come when you’re sitting happily at your desk and someone from marketing or business development will come into your office and ask you to do a competitive analysis for them. The company is launching a news site or portal, and the decision makers want to be sure that their site will stand up to the competition.

Suddenly, you’re not just in the world of usability and information architecture — of theories and deep thinking about cognitive psychology. You’re now in the rubber-meets-the-road world of business. Although you’ll be doing old-fashioned usability analysis work, you’re also expected to guide the team toward increasing return on investment. You’re expected to provide baseline readings from which to measure success. And you’re expected to help the team snoop out what the competition is doing.

If all this sounds a little out of your league, don’t worry, because it isn’t. Let’s start with the basics.

First things first

The first thing to realize is that a Web site competitive analysis is usually performed for a team of business specialists who know nothing about design, usability, or information architecture. They don’t have a clue about labeling systems, search ergonomics, or affordance. All they want to know is what the competition is doing and how they can do it better. Obviously, your expertise is in usability and user experience design, so you’ll be evaluating sites along the lines of your domain expertise, but the data you gather must always point toward making a smart business decision.

Your audience will also expect a presentation and a written report. The presentation can knock the tops off the mountains, but the report better have some detail in it. They expect your findings to be well organized, moving from executive summary to appendixes loaded with relevant details.

The end result of your analysis is a decision — a business decision that affects the rollout of design and development. Your recommendations could be as “trivial” as adding search functionality and a look-and-feel upgrade to an already crowded deployment schedule, or it could have more far-reaching ramifications, such as adding to a budget for content acquisition or a shift in messaging. That’s why your conclusions are so important. Arriving at them is not just an academic exercise.

Next we’ll discuss who and what you’ll be analyzing.

Who’s the competition?

It’s very likely that you’ll be given a list of competitors. Every company that has a handle on their market space knows who the competition is. And just about every company has a list of companies on their “target list” — that special subset of companies that they want to beat soundly in the marketplace.

Regardless, the list you get will likely be incomplete. That’s because the people giving you the list will have their “business” hat on, not their “functionality” hat on. For example, if the company you’re doing the analysis for is in the freight cargo business, you’re likely to get a list of other sites or portals belonging to companies in the same business. However, it might be smart to add sites like travelocity.com, which specializes in consumer travel, because their site contains functionality that might be universal to all transportation applications (i.e., departure and destination points are common to freight trucks and airline customers).

Along with a list of competitors, you’ll likely get a list of items that they want you to focus on, or at least, a list of items they want to do better than the competition. For example, the team might be fixated on the number of content items deployed on their own site. If Competitor X has 500 content items, they’ll want to know how many content items Competitor Y and Competitor Z have. The subtext will be, “How fast can we have more content items?”

Resist any impulses to follow subtexts at this point. To follow our example, you might dig deeper and find out that those 500 content items deployed on Competitor X’s site are outdated, badly written, and generally not useful to their audience.

If the company you’re doing the analysis for doesn’t know who the competition is, then you’ll need to do some sleuthing. Find out the company’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code and then look up other companies in that same category. Try to find out what the company is striving to achieve with their own Web offering and match targets appropriately. Some relevant criteria for determining worthy adversaries are geographic location, total revenues, total profits, and strong branding.

If you’re the one drawing up the list, always check with someone at the company who is in-the-know (usually someone in marketing or business development). This can save you lots of pain and heartache later, and could also save your credibility when you deliver the results of your work.

What to analyze

Now that you have a list of competitors, you need to draw up a list of items to analyze when you visit their sites. I’ve developed a categorized list of items over the years, which are included below:

• Home page. How informative is the home page? Does it set the proper context for visitors? Is it just an annoying splash page with multimedia? How fast does it load?
• Navigation. Is the global navigation consistent from page to page? Do major sections have local navigation? Is it consistent?
• Site organization. Is the site organization intuitive and easy to understand?
• Links and labels. Are labels on section headers and content groupings easy to understand? Are links easy to distinguish from each other? Or are they ambiguous and uninformative (“click here” or “white paper”)? Are links spread out in documents, or gathered conveniently in sidebars or other groupings?
• Search and search results. Is the search engine easy to use? Are there basic and advanced search functions? What about search results? Are they organized and easy to understand? Do they give relevance weightings or provide context? Do the search results remind you what you searched for?
• Readability. Is the font easy to read? Are line lengths acceptable? Is the site easy to scan, with chunked information, or is it just solid blocks of text?
• Performance. Overall, do pages load slowly or quickly? Are graphics and applications like search and multimedia presentations optimized for easy Web viewing?
• Content. Is their sufficient depth and breadth of content offerings? Does the content seem to match the mission of the organization and the needs of the audience? Is the site developing its own content or syndicating other sources? Is there a good mix of in-depth material (detailed case studies, articles, and white papers) versus superficial content (press releases, marketing copy)?

I provide a rating for each question on each site visited: 1=bad, 2=poor, 3=fair, 4=good, 5=outstanding. Naturally, you may want to tweak this scale to fit your needs, but it’s important to have some kind of scale to make the job of comparison easier. The list of resources contains links to other criteria you can use.

Conducting the analysis

Now that you have a list of sites to visit and a list of criteria to compare, start your analysis. Be sure to conduct your analysis with some rigor. Don’t be haphazard, and don’t do things differently with each site visit. Try to analyze a site without interruption. In other words, do everything you can to reduce bias in your investigation.

Here are some additional guidelines:

1. Visit one site at a time, and take the same (or at least, similar) paths through each site. Follow the checklist of criteria.
2. For each criterion, take lots of notes. You’ll refer to these notes when you organize and write your report.
3. Try to give a score for each criterion as you complete them. That way you’ll have scores for each major category as well as for each site.
4. If the company that you’re doing the analysis for has an existing site, then remember to rate them last. After visiting the company’s competitors, this will give you some sense of objectivity. This also provides a good measurement comparison for the readers of your report.

When you’re ready, you’ll need to do some number crunching. Although a discussion of statistical methods could easily fill several books (and has), there are, at minimum, a handful of important calculations to make for each site:

• Mean: The mean is derived by adding all values in a set and dividing by the number of items in the set. For example, in a data set comprising scores of 3, 4, 4, 5, 3, 2, and 5, the mean would be 26 / 7, or 3.72.
• Median: The median is derived by lining up all values in a data set from smallest to largest and picking the one that’s right in the middle. To continue our example, in a data set comprising values of 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, and 5, the median would be 3.5 (with an odd number of values, split the two around the middle). Some feel that the median is a better representation of an “average” score, but I think that using both the mean and the median give you a better overall picture.
• Mode: The mode is derived by calculating the highest frequency value in a data set. In our example data set, the mode would be 4 (there are more 4s than any other value).
• Maximum, minimum, and spread: The maximum value in a data set is the largest value, and the minimum value is the smallest. The spread is the difference between these two values. To complete our example, the minimum value is 2, the maximum value is 5, and the spread is 3.

Together, these values (mean, median, mode, maximum value, minimum value, and spread) start to tell a story. They don’t tell the whole story, but they certainly illustrate and make plain the results of your work. For example, Web sites that have means and medians that are far apart indicate more weight on extreme ends of the scale (either more 1s or 5s in the established rating system). Mode values that are significantly different from medians and/or means also indicate clumping of values away from the normal, expected curve. Web sites with large spreads between minimum and maximum values might indicate a high level of inconsistency in the different portions of the site; in other words, a site might have poor search functionality but excellent content organization and site navigation.

You must remember one thing: the numbers you assign to any part of a Web site are, as much as you’d hate to admit it, somewhat arbitrary. Although you may be an expert at usability or information architecture, any number of factors can cause bias to enter the process. You might be in a hurry, have a pressing deadline distracting you, or your mind may wander while you’re finishing an evaluation. You might be evaluating a Web site belonging to a big competitor, and there may be some tacit pressure to downgrade any scores you give them.

Be as fair as you possibly can, and make it understood that the numbers you assign are subjective scores, not the results of ironclad science. They’re assigned and used primarily to have something quantifiable to point to and discuss, instead of just guesses and raw opinion.

You can perform this task of crunching numbers manually or with a spreadsheet. Excel and other spreadsheet tools provide built-in functions for calculating means, medians, modes, and other statistical values.

Writing the report

Eventually, you’ll need to take all your notes and all those numbers you’ve crunched and put them in a report. Most usability engineers and information architects I’ve met would rather do anything than write, but this is one case where what you write is as important than all the other work you’ve done.

Why? Because your report will be used by decision makers, and I don’t mean as filler in their inbox, either. They’ll read it, digest your findings and conclusions, and try to make decisions that affect company strategy — or at least, Web site deployment strategy.

Writing a report isn’t that difficult; in fact, it’s about the easiest piece of writing that you’ll ever undertake. Why? Because a report is very structured, and the structure can aid your writing. A good report shouldn’t contain any surprising twists and turns. In fact, the readers of your report will be expecting something along these lines:

• An executive summary, which contains a summary of your report. You’ll probably write this section last. Subsections of the executive summary should include a section summarizing why you undertook the analysis, a summary of the sites’ rankings, and a summary of recommendations for further action.
• A methods section, in which you explain the methodology you employed for selecting and rating the sites, including what criteria you looked at. This section provides insight into your thinking when you undertook the analysis.
• A findings section, in which you summarize your findings for each site. Start each subsection with the name of the site, the site’s URL, and the overall score for the site. Then go through each part of the site and describe how it ranked, including a site section score. Do this for each site. The findings section will comprise the bulk of your report.
• A discussion & recommendations section, in which you provide future direction for the team. This is the appropriate section to mention integrating other sites’ best practices to the site being deployed by the company.
• One or more appendixes, in which you provide detailed information. It’s appropriate to list raw data of your findings here.

As for process, the best approach is to create a file in your favorite word processor and fill in all the headers that mark the sections. This sets up an informal outline that you can “fill in” as you go. My advice would be to write the methods section first, as you know what methodology you employed. Writing this section first will loosen you up and get the writing flowing.

Next, write the findings section. This section is the longest of the entire report and will take you at least a day, if not more, of solid work to complete. Once you’ve finished with the methods and findings sections, knock out your recommendations and then complete the executive summary.

Add the appendixes to the back, and let the report rest for at least a day. Then go through it again, from top to bottom, and clean up the verbiage. Remember that shorter is better. If you can say something in 10 words, find a way to say it in 7 or 8. Cut out as many adverbs and adjectives as possible. Remember that those reading your report will want to get to the heart of the matter and won’t appreciate flowery language.

When you’re happy with it, give the report to someone else and have them review it. Don’t pick a pushover or someone who will return it with hardly any comments, either. Pick someone with a discriminating eye — someone who will ask lots of questions and nitpick. The more you cover in your report, the less stupid you’ll feel when you give your presentation.

Giving the presentation

Giving a presentation strikes more fear into people’s hearts than writing does. Usually, this fear stems from nervousness, not knowing the subject matter, or fear of boring the audience. However, the kind of presentation you’ll be giving isn’t any cause for concern, because all the obstacles have been removed for you:

• You know the subject matter intimately.
• Your audience is genuinely interested in what you have to say.
• The subject matter is bound to captivate the audience.

When you give your presentation, avoid the impulse to talk to the slides. Instead, use the slides as visual confirmation of what you’re saying. Speak with an easy, even tone, as though you were telling a group of friends something important.

I personally don’t believe in using Powerpoint slides whenever I give a speech, but for this kind of presentation, you’ll need a few well-chosen slides that highlight your findings and recommendations. My advice to you is to create 5-7 slides with bullet points and/or data tables for this purpose.

Start by introducing yourself and then launch into why you performed the competitive analysis. As with writing, providing this information first will loosen you up; after all, you know both of these topics very well.

Next, talk about your methodology, and get on to the findings as soon as you can. Don’t give a blow-by-blow of each of your findings — instead, summarize, and use visuals to punctuate your summaries. For example, instead of talking about each segment of each site, provide a summary of where each site succeeded and failed, and provide that information as a table on a slide.

Finally, follow with your recommendations, and then open up the floor to Q&A. With any luck, the process of analyzing competitor’s sites, writing (and polishing) the report, and rehearsing your presentation will mean that you’re well prepared for any and all questions. If you do get a question you don’t know the answer for, don’t squirm, equivocate, or sidestep. Tell the audience that you don’t know the answer to that question and that you’ll find out. Then follow up appropriately.

You can distribute the report as an email attachment or as hard copy at the meeting, or both. It’s my opinion that handing out a hard copy report is good, as this gives the decision makers something tangible to hold. Don’t give out copies of the report until the end of the presentation; otherwise, you risk having your audience looking at the report instead of listening to you.

Summary

Conducting a competitive analysis is an important part of your job as a usability engineer or information architect. A good analysis and subsequent report can provide the necessary information to influence a decision regarding Web site deployment. Done right, a competitive analysis can steer a team in the right direction, as well as lend credibility to your career and position in the company.

Resource: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/us-analysis.html