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.

Ranking #1 on Google is a great objective, but dominating the web so exclusively that your competitors get starved out is even better.  This method of Exclusionary Dominance™ is the secret to many online success including our case study today of Football Fanatics that has managed to dominate the JU Dolphins T-Shirts search result.  We will delve into how they managed to accomplish this and see if we can learn from their success for our own website projects.

First we need to Google for "JU Dolphins T-Shirts".  We have chosen a very niche product name so we can see this exclusionary effect on the competiton.  This is a keyword phrase that is broad enough to have competition but specific enough to predict that a buyer typed it in and he's looking to purchase a JU Dolphins T-Shirt.

See how they dominate search results #1-#10

• Football Fanatics (FF) is the central money portal
• College Football Store is the pay per click venue
• Football Fanatics is the comparison shop channel
• eSportsMania has 2 competitive placements
• YahooSports is an FF private label store
• ShopNCAASports is another FF store
• JaxFanShop is an FF hyper targeting domain
• Note the other ShopNCAASports double tap
• Shopping.com is an FF comparison shop channel

13 out of 16 listings exclude competitors

All channels are being targeted including:

• Military Procurement (AAFES)
• Bizrate/Nextag comparison shop
• Froogle/Vast shopping directories
• Amazon/Yahoo/MSN marketplaces
• eBay auctions
• Affiliate websites (de-ranked in Google on purpose)
• Hyper targeting domains (super-focused on keywords)
• Private label (Yahoo Sports, NCAA) with Google ranking

Other techniques ensure dominance:

• Double tap stacking (two listings per natural result)
• URL rewrite ensures keyword relevance
• Verbose and repetitive descriptions (title, META)
• High density and unique keywords (META + content)
• Keyword Domain matching (JaxFanShop targets Jacksonville)

Traditional advertisers are spending in the millions to target these products and consumers.  The natural consequence of a television ad 10 years ago was to “remember” the brand or to write down a response PO box and send a letter.  Now the customer simply remembers the brand and product (not the domain name necessarily) and “googles” for it.

This causes search engine “piracy” where the traditional advertiser motivates the customer to purchase, but when they go to purchase, the top ranked websites covet the “conversion.”  This means that whomever ranks substantially #1-#10 have the highest chance of converting the sales that were funded by the other advertisers…  Effectively the top ranked sites get the majority of the benefit of the entire industry’s advertising in that topic.

In physical commercial real estate there are thousands of good “street intersections” to sell JU Dolphins T-Shirts.  On the internet, this single search result page is the ONLY PAGE ON PLANET EARTH (statistically speaking) where the competition can compete for online conversions.  This makes the value of being listed on this page high and #1-#10 dominance very exclusionary.

Jared Nielsen will be Speaking at SQL Saturday

This event is hosted by the great folks at SQL Saturday including Brian Knight of Pragmatic Works and many of the top industry leaders.  I will be giving a presentation on SQL and SEO - Data Modeling and Web Marketing with an emphasis on how proper SQL database design can make search engine optimization even more powerful and flexible.  I will be reviewing such topics as the Atomic Data Model™ and Exclusionary Dominance™ techniques.

Make sure you attend or send your webmaster or DBA to be there and enjoy the event.  My speech is at the UNF Computer Conference Center at 10:15am on Saturday, April 17, 2010.  You can find out more information on my session at the SQL Saturday Website

To consult with Jared Nielsen you can reach him at the FUZION Agency at www.FUZION.org or you can call him at 904-638-2455

Seminar Materials for the SQL Saturday Event

01-Exclusionary-Dominance-on-Google-by-FUZION.pdf (673.09 kb)

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (367.28 kb)

03-Advanced-Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-by-FUZION.pdf (215.98 kb)

Atomic-Data-Model-Presentation-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (2.85 mb)

CustomerObjectives.pdf (398.88 kb)

Jared Nielsen will be Speaking at SQL Saturday

This event is hosted by the great folks at SQL Saturday including Brian Knight of Pragmatic Works and many of the top industry leaders.  I will be giving a presentation on SQL and SEO - Data Modeling and Web Marketing with an emphasis on how proper SQL database design can make search engine optimization even more powerful and flexible.  I will be reviewing such topics as the Atomic Data Model™ and Exclusionary Dominance™ techniques.

Make sure you attend or send your webmaster or DBA to be there and enjoy the event.  My speech is at the UNF Computer Conference Center at 10:15am on Saturday, April 17, 2010.  You can find out more information on my session at the SQL Saturday Website

To consult with Jared Nielsen you can reach him at the FUZION Agency at www.FUZION.org or you can call him at 904-638-2455

Seminar Materials for the SQL Saturday Event

01-Exclusionary-Dominance-on-Google-by-FUZION.pdf (673.09 kb)

02-Atomic-Data-Enables-Search-Engine-Dominance-by-FUZION.pdf (367.28 kb)

03-Advanced-Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-by-FUZION.pdf (215.98 kb)

Atomic-Data-Model-Presentation-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (2.85 mb)

CustomerObjectives.pdf (398.88 kb)

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)

I'm pleased to be speaking to the Miramar group of the Florida Dot Net group at www.FlaDotNet.com.  You can register for this event at the following website:  Click here to register.  I will be discussing how proper search engine capabilities start at the database level using atomic data modeling practices.  The samples of the atomic data model will include how to layer in object inheritance at the SQL Server level, utilizing some new features in SQL Server 2008 including the intrinsic Hierarcy data type and a nice overview of search engine techniques that can benefit from a highly optimized and atomic database.  I hope to see you there!

You can get a head start by reading my blog series on the topic at:

www.NielsenData.com - Atomic Data - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data

There are other resources that ascribe to the Atomic Data Modeling concept which you can find at:

Zimbio.com - The Atomic Data Warehouse

Wikipedia.org - Data Warehousing and the use of Atomic Data within the Data Mart

Other announcements of this event include:

• CommunityMegaphone.com
• DeveloperFusion.com
• Upcoming.Yahoo.com
• TechVibes.com

I'm pleased to be speaking to the Miramar group of the Florida Dot Net group at www.FlaDotNet.com.  You can register for this event at the following website:  Click here to register.  I will be discussing how proper search engine capabilities start at the database level using atomic data modeling practices.  The samples of the atomic data model will include how to layer in object inheritance at the SQL Server level, utilizing some new features in SQL Server 2008 including the intrinsic Hierarcy data type and a nice overview of search engine techniques that can benefit from a highly optimized and atomic database.  I hope to see you there!

You can get a head start by reading my blog series on the topic at:

www.NielsenData.com - Atomic Data - Best Business Practices for Product Catalog Data

There are other resources that ascribe to the Atomic Data Modeling concept which you can find at:

Zimbio.com - The Atomic Data Warehouse

Wikipedia.org - Data Warehousing and the use of Atomic Data within the Data Mart

Other announcements of this event include:

• CommunityMegaphone.com
• DeveloperFusion.com
• Upcoming.Yahoo.com
• TechVibes.com

While my experience with Dr. McGlaughlin was brief (over a span of six months or so), I really enjoyed learning as much as possible from him.  He is probably the most thoughtful and insightful person I've spent time with.  Dr. McGlaughlin owns MarketingExperiments.com which is a web marketing/SEO/SEM research laboratory that takes existing e-businesses and engages in live, results-oriented research projects that have a precise and tactical improvement on various objectives of each site.  His methodical approach to fact-based marketing (as opposed to intuition-based marketing) was very refreshing and turned me on to many techniques and strategies that I believe carry a lot of value.

I don't believe that instinct and intuition is obsolete, but when that is "validated" with the proper research and benchmarks, it really starts to sing.  Dr. McGlaughlin helped me find that balance that has really helped me professionally.

His sales approach also was a breath of fresh air.  I had often settled with employers and customers for an "hourly fee" but he demonstrated to me that businesses operate on the concept of the value of the solution.  If you can provide a key, critical solution, then determining the value of the "fix" can really help you determine your own "worth"... at least in relation to that business need.

Beyond that, Dr. McGlaughlin demonstrated to me that even determining your "worth" based on raw revenue-generating facts was doing yourself a disservice.  His consistent and dedicated work in the religious community and his non-profit work in India highlighted to me the supreme lack of intrinsic value that money actually held when compared to living a life of dignity and respect.

Now that Dr. McGlaughlin has completed his acquisition of MarketingSherpa.com he will only climb higher in the web research space, so perhaps I'll have the privilege of working with him again in the future.  I look forward to that.