I'm please to be speaking at the .Net user group in West Palm, my old stomping ground!  Many thanks to Scott Klein, noted .Net author and coder for having me down to the beach to spend some time with the great folks down there.  I will be giving a lecture on the Atomic Data Model, the X-Y-Z method of site expansion, and an in-depth analysis of one of their website projects live while we discuss it.

The event will be held at the following address at 6:30 for pizza and 7:30 for the lecture:

1750 North Florida Mango
Suites 302 & 303
West Palm Beach, Fl 33409
561-840-8080

Get Directions

For more information on the Atomic Data Model, please see my blog entries about that at:  Atomic Data Modeling - Part 1

Proper SEO techniques will allow humans and robots to see your site

There is always a conflict between how accessible your website data is to Humans and to Robots.  The ability to “convert” a human to finalize a purchase is paramount so keyword spammy webpages that reduce conversions are simply not worth it.  However you also can’t convert humans unless the #1 lead source to your website is being catered to as well, whether overtly or behind the scenes. 

This method of targing both the human conversion and the robotic discovery is accomplished by implementing proper SEO techniques.  Many people ask me what the “trick” to Google is.  I can summarize it very succinctly.

TELL THE TRUTH

Google can spot a fake and if you are going to rely on black hat tricks and schemes, you’re simply going to see a short-term boost in ranking which will wither on the vine.

Humans and Robots have different needs

The example on the right demonstrates a clone avoidance technique using the NOFOLLOW rel parameter on anchor text (<a href> hyperlinks).  In a traditional website we tend to let Google see EVERYTHING which is not effective.  Think of a typical brick and mortar store.  We have a nice front entrance with customer-oriented displays that are less organized but are beautiful and pleasing.  We also have a back door that opens to highly organized inventory warehouse with bare cement floors and barcoded shelving units. 

Humans should enter our website through the front door and see things like the customer service counter and the privacy policy and featured items… and the checkout aisle.

Robots don’t need to see any of this.  They aren’t going to buy anything, they don’t need to see our investor information, and they don’t need unorganized but pretty FLASH movies or glamorous pictures.  Not only can they not see them… they simply don’t care.  The diagram above illustrates how we set NOFOLLOW on portions of our website that may be visible to humans but we want the search engines to ignore them. 

Avoid Cloning through NOFOLLOW

We also want to ensure that Google indexes our website in the proper order and we channel the “juice” as concentrated as possible to our “money pages” and the hierarchies that go with that.  Take a product where the customer can navigate there in two separate paths.  They may come to my Nike yellow tank top through /Nike/Tank-Top/Yellow or through /Tank-Top/Yellow/Nike.  This creates two separate URL signatures that land on the same, exact product… effectively a clone.

To avoid this, we set a “weight” on each parameter as to its importance.  In this case we believe that more conversions will be determined by Brand and then Type and then Color.  Any other “path” to this item is “NOFOLLOW” enabled so Google will only see the one path… however the humans will see both.

Protecting your paths will ensure SEO dominance and conversions.

Atomic Data makes search engine dominance possible

Online retail is not the same as brick and mortar retail.  When a brick and mortar store launches online they fall into this biggest trap.  Take an apparel shop… when you first walk in you find a men’s department and a ladies department.  The store is physically trying to demographically segment you.

If you create a data model that matches this, you will end up with the first <xml> node being <gender> which is a highly limiting path to follow for a search engine even though it may make the most sense for a human being.  You would then add data for teams, sports, colors, sizes, variants, materials of manufacture, and many other “parameters” for this data.  To avoid 3rd normal database limitation, you would start to peel this data out into separate tables… one for colors… one for teams…one for sports.  Then you would need to create many-to-many crosslink tables.  Over time, your table count just gets larger and larger as new needs arise.

The Root Object Classification

There is certain data that “hangs” off each sub-classification.  In this example the Item class stores who the manufacturer is (because most items have manufacturers).  The Apparel class contains the style information (because style is global to all apparel objects), whereas the Shirt class contains collar styles, sleeve variants, etc.

By localizing this information to class levels, once I define a “field” for the Apparel class, all future objects that inherit from that class will inherit that field.  Any objects that do not inherit from the Apparel class will not have the field at all.

Note how different this is from a traditional 3rd normal representation of data where we would have fields like “color1” and “color2” and “color3” simply to leave enough fields available just in case we might need them for a particular product application.

Maximum Flexibility for Customer Paths

Now that our data is structured with infinite flexibility while still retaining a core hierarchy (for default navigation purposes), when a customer walks into our store, we can simply ask Google “how they sent them” to us… and what keywords they used.  Now when the customer enters our “store” we can toss all of the inventory up into the air and literally rebuild our store to match the words they used in the order they used them.  Now they can enter as “ladies yellow tank top” and we structure our product data in terms of gender first, color next and product class third… but we also can welcome customers that ask for “white womens Nike shirt” which we do by scanning for aliases of class nodes, parent classes, and other permutations of the item for maximum comfort to the customer and higher conversion rates on sales.

Know a business that would benefit from our whitepaper on how Atomic Data Modeling can make search engine optimization possible?  Download it now:

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (369.99 kb)

They call it a website for a reason

Most first-time websites are designed with some flawed theories in mind.  The theoretical flaw is that the homepage must lead the customer quickly to what they were looking for which assumes that the customer enters at the homepage and then discovers what they need by clicking.  This “rapid funnel” concept is based on the idea that a customer doesn’t have the patience to “click through” too many pages and the site should be designed to streamline that as much as possible.  While the idea has some merit for the customer interaction, the biggest flaw is that customers simply do not enter your website through the homepage at all (at least the vast majority of them).

The Homepage is the Least Important Page of your Site

We will use the www.JaxTires.com website as the example to illustrate this.  If a customer owns a car in Jacksonville, Florida, they might think to type in www.JaxTires.com, but the vast majority are simply going to visit Google and type in “new tires Honda Accord” to find the specific product that they want.  If a website were a funnel, we would force them to enter at our homepage, click on Vehicles, then Honda, then Accord, then Tires.  In actuality, they click on Google, enter their search, find the results, and then they land directly on the specific item page for the Honda Accord at www.JaxTires.com.  Instead of the website funneling the traffic to the specific page, the tens of thousands of specific pages expanded out from the center like a web, trapping the web surfing customer with a highly specific keyword that best matched their search.

You can see now how the homepage’s job is not to be all things for all people… It’s simply the very center of the web that spawns out threads in circles around it in a web form with the purpose being to “capture” every possible web searcher and land them on the most specific, most highly targeted page.  The larger the expansion of that web and the more comprehensive the possible combinations, the more apt your website is to trap the flies that are buzzing around.

The Most Lucrative Keywords are the Most Specific Ones

Let’s take a look at an alternate way of looking at a website.  Here we have a diagram that more clearly explains how entry into the website actually happens.  Instead of making our homepage a “catch-all” with tons of keywords loaded onto that one page (a common mistake), we have a tightly focused homepage whose subpages lose focus and their specific targeting the closer to the outside that we get.

We now have millions of possible combinations of keywords that interlink like a spider web, lying in wait for a web searcher to put in that highly specific keyword combination… and once they do, they are landed artfully onto the very specific page that matched their search… not some general purpose “inbox” like most homepages.

Focus less on your homepage, and more on your specific micropages…

06-A-Website-is-a-web-Not-a-Funnel-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (390.99 kb)

Covering topics from recursion in table valued functions, hierarchical data models, and identical node naming in XML hierarchies to fifth normal notation in data structures, CLR Stored Procedures, and many more topics specific to SQL Server 2008 and XML with C#.net programming, this lecture continues the popular Jedi Mind Tricks for Business series by Jared Nielsen at the South Florida Code Camp at the following location:

South Florida Code Camp 2010 - http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp 

Devry University
2300 SW 145th Avenue
Miramar, FL 33027

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Jared Nielsen is an industry veteran with several decades of experience in sports marketing venues, business to business (B2B) commerce projects, and business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce and content management systems. He has been the lead software developer for the ATP Tour (Men’s Professional Tennis and Women’s Professional Tennis), Director of Business Intelligence for Football Fanatics (TeamFanShop), technical partner to Cook Marketing and Communications (for the Jaguars and Falcons contract), and now invests in online ventures such as Sports Mania (4 brick and mortar retail store locations), Team Sports Fan (http://www.teamsportsfan.com/), and other activities. His high profile projects include large projects for Yahoo! Sports, Interline Brands, and Big O Tires. He is a frequent lecturer and is always open to seminars and speaking engagements.

Call me today!
http://www.fuzion.org/
904-638-2455

It's about that time again so I'm going to be speaking once again.  Please join me at the Houston Tech Fest in Houston (naturally) Texas for my seminar on finding your Search Engine and Data "Superman" amid your "Clark Kent" business.  Being able to identify as a coder the business methods needed to get proper search engine (SEO) rankings while satisfying good design criteria an reusability is important.  This seminar will walk you through such advanced topics as:

• Atomic Data Modeling
• Fast Page Load with Highly Normalized Data
• Content Distribution Networks and Edge Caching
• SEO and SEM Techniques in Code
• Funneling "Juice" with your Web Traffic
• Comparison Shopping Syndication
• Expanding Marketing Channels through Code

Join my Houston Tech Fest Group on Facebook!