We’ve been around a while, in fact we’ve been around pretty much since the explosion of the Internet in the late 90’s and during that time we’ve seen our fair share of snake oil come and go. There is one subject that stirs up more than it’s fair share of opinions and that’s SEO…or Search Engine Optimization if you’ve lived under rock for the last 10 years.

Never been a fan really, pretty much decided early on that if you follow the Search Engines’ (read: Google) guidelines and build sites using best practice then you’ll work out nice and dandy. But there does seem to be a huge following and the most diverse advice in this field, so much so that almost every SEO ’specialist’ will give you different and conflicting advice (for a price, mind).

I do accept that there are some tricks and neat stunts that, to a certain extent, can pull the wool over the engines’ eyes but not usually for long and not usually with any kind of long-term gain. So, making me chuckle this week, then, is SEOMoz telling us all that there is a science to how well you rank. Really? Fantastic!

Except, if you elect to use science to ‘prove’ something then you had better get the science right. SEOMoz may have misunderstood statistics and, worse still, cloaked this bad science in sciencey-sounding words like Mean Spearman Correlation. This has generated a flurry of arguments discussing the various merits of using different methodologies to analyses data. Worth the read, but only if you’re secretly hiding a love of stats.

Some nice rebuts too from Ted Dziuba and Dr E. Garcia – both who warn about paying attention to this kind of science. Alternatively, you can read how Google suggest you go about working with search engines (PDF).

Mobile browsing has grown fast over the last few years thanks to the wide availability of smartphones and despite most sites work great in mobile browsers, they can still be a usability nightmare. Other options have been made available in the form of CMS plugins allowing you to apply a more app like experience to your site.

Not ones to ignore conventions (where they make sense), we’ve applied our own iPhone friendly skin to our site allowing you to get straight to our content wherever you are.

Let us know what you think!

In fact, we recently ran a test on a client web-site that had, over time, morphed into a rambling page with various (ahem) marketing items starting to push (important) calls to action down the page. This has reached a point where the [Submit] button on the main CTA form actually fell under the fold. Shock, horror, “burn them” I can hear you crying. However, when tested with the button above and below the fold is made no statistical difference.

This didn’t worry us – we believe the results, not the opinions of experts – and it seems we are not alone in terms of myth-busting. What should we learn from this? Always test your ideas and then re-test them again frequently.

The copy approach could certainly work, it would be certainly cheap and (sort of) embraces the “crowdsourcing” philosophy that is gaining traction. However, if you are only as good as the next guy then you are simply “keeping up with the neighbours”. It’s not going to give you a competitive advantage unless your competitors are blind; which many probably still are.

True innovation, tested properly, can give a company competitive advantage if properly implemented – so real thought-leading organisations need to plough their own development and testing furrow whilst keeping an eye out for what others (not just competitors) are doing.

Not testing yet? You’re screwed, probably, even if you’re not screwed you’re certainly handicapping your marketing efforts.

All objectives must be SMART.

SMART stands for:

1. Specific – Objectives should specify what I want to achieve.
2. Measurable – I should be able to measure whether I am meeting the objectives or not.
3. Achievable – Are the objectives I set, achievable?
4. Relevant – Is the objective relevant to the project?
5. Timely – When do I want to achieve the set objectives?

A lot more information can be found here.

1. Corporate babble – meaningless waffle about “management teams”, “strategic partnerships”, “proactive solutions”. Sometimes “stakeholders” creep in as well. If you hide the company name then these pages would fit any organisation from NASA down to Rotherham Pet Supplies Ltd.

If you are a me-too company with a me-too website then this style will suit well.

2. Heroic personal story in the Victor Kiam genre:

“I made my first Badass Snow-Board from a sheet of titanium I found in a dumpster…”

People love stories and this type of page can be a back-up if the rest of your site is failing to tell the company story with layout, images, and copy.

E-commerce hot-shot Johnnie Boden tells a great story without even mentioning what he sells:

“After five burglaries, one office dog, nine Christmas quizzes, twelve nights spent in the warehouse…”

Every other page on the Boden site is selling the dream – and this page tells us that Johnnie is living the dream as well.

3. The missing about-us page. Amazon don’t have one. Neither do Apple. Zappos? Zilch. All rely on the rest of the site and the power of the brand.  And they want you to get on and buy something – not read empty spiel.

How many real-life shops have a museum of company history? Photos of the directors? Maybe they use the space for better things…

How does A/B testing work?

The idea is to change some part of your website and see if the new version does better than the old.  A good place to start is just changing words – maybe a headline. You call the existing version “A” and the new version “B“.

You already know that the page is converting at 2% so you could just try the new headline for a few days and check the new conversion rate.

Trouble with this method is that conversion rates change from day to day. You can guess at some of the reasons: weather, day-of-week, competitor activity.  So you may be trying a bad headline on a good day or a great headline on a lousy day – and make the wrong decision about the headline.

Focus on what has changed

We can remove these other factors from the test. We show A and B at the same time. Software randomly decides if a new visitor to the site is going to see A or see B, then tracks visitors through to conversion and measures if A or B is doing better.

• If it’s raining – people will see both A and B.
• If it’s sunny – people will see both A and B.
• If a rival starts a price war – people will see both A and B.

You have removed the other factors.

Is it significant?

We use a statistical test to check that results are significant – and not just random effects. Sometimes improvements are small, but still worth having. Several 2-3% increases start to add up.

Is it just Connected doing split testing?

Amazon, Zappos, Google, eBay, EasyJet – all the big names use A/B split testing. Join the big boys – with our help.

The makers of Basecamp (37signals) have recently improved the way the user login system works. The change will make your account more secure, easier to sign in should you ever forget your details and also allow faster and easier switching between multiple Basecamp accounts. Part of this will be a new ‘launchpad’.

Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work.

It’s not just us!

Seth Godin, a kind of visionary in this new world actually makes the radical suggestion of “Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp“. That is, I’ll grant you, a little extreme but as the the post is aimed at “catch-up” audiences he’s probably right – we’d certainly agree with him.

ps: If you do sign up using the link above then, thanks, we get a small reduction in our monthly bill, ta x