Today, I sat in on the “Pimp My Site” session, which kicked off with a bunch of trumpeteers coming in with the speakers, playing “The Saints Go Marching” while spreading confetti over the audience.
They reasoned that this is because one of their clients, who sells confetti, had her company fall apart after Katrina, and she credits Pimp My Site with saving her business.
After some talk by the confetti lady, the guy from Pimp My Site shows what her site used to look like. FlutterFetti.com (yeah, I know) had a splash page, and worse, all the text on it was just an image. When he mentioned that, the crowd went “Oooh”, like we already knew how bad an idea that was. Great quote: “Computers are not philistines. They do not appreciate art”.
He goes through a lot of examples of things that search engines like, that users like. You have to use descriptive titles. Give your product a non-descriptive name, and watch as people get confused and search engines stay away. When you can elaborate, do, it’ll always help. If a person is confused, a bot is confused.
They managed to pull a lot of freebies from ad companies to help the site, including $1,000 of free ads from MSN, $500 from Ask, $200 from Yahoo, among other companies. In thanks, everyone got covered in even more confetti. Quite a good commercial for the site.
Next came up was Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide, who talked about “The Lactivist”, a site about breast milk banking. She mentions the Google sandbox, which terrifies webmasters, by keeping their site from getting anywhere for six months. She says there is a way around the sandbox: Creating a completely unique site. If Google doesn’t have anything decent indexed in a category, you’ll never be sandboxed, and you’ll get top rankings super-fast.
I didn’t blog all of what she said, but it was all really good. Jennifer’s writing at SEG is top-notch, and she’s just as good, if not better, with a mic and PowerPoint.
The last person up spoke about many things, among them “cool” but useless product names. You need to pair the generic name with the brand name, so as to let search engines and regular people know where the hell stuff is they’re looking for. Giving a product the greatest name in the world means nothing if it doesn’t say what it does. Sure, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry when they create an “Xbox”, but if you don’t have worldwide reknown and a multi-billion dollar budget, you need to list it as often as possible as the “Xbox video game console system”.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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