metaViper

There are two key components to any valuable web site: its content popularity and traffic. Design is also important, but I’ve visited many poorly designed sites that enjoy thousands of visitors every day so I won’t focus on that now. This article will focus primarily on content popularity.

Many of you are site owners or bloggers trying to build presence and authority. Let’s take a look at a couple of widely known web sites: Blizzard.com and the home page of their wildly successful MMORG, WorldofWarcraft.com.

Below is a drill-down of statistics generated by popuri.us for each site:

Blizzard.com (12 years old)	WorldofWarcraft.com (7 years old)

The Google PageRank, Alexa, Compete, and QuantCast ranks indicate that WorldofWarcraft.com is the more popular site because each number in this area is lower for WoW. Interestingly, two of the three search engines indicate there are more backlinks to Blizzard.com, perhaps because it’s had more time to attract link love. Then with the last three statistic Technorati, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Bloglines subscribers, WorldofWarcraft is the clear winner. What surprised me here is that Blizzard.com has no Bloglines subscribers. Looks like an opportunity to advertise/create a company RSS feed!

World of Warcraft enjoys a gigantic userbase with over 6 million subscribers and clearly they’re linking back to the game site and finding its content very valuable. Both sites are popular but WoW has outpaced its parent, as children are wont to do :-}

dnScoop happens to agree with this analysis valuing Blizzard.com at $8,932,000 and WorldofWarcraft.com at $10,693,200 !

There are two main ingredients in Google’s formula: (1) Publish quality content that people find useful, and (2) Prove that your site is worthwhile by networking with other web site owners and convincing them to link to you. But tread carefully here because gaining links in a “shady” manner can earn a boot out of Google’s index.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you subscribe to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog to keep up on what they expect from site owners. Then focus on making your site content-rich, and free of hidden links or stealthy web-rings. In essence, avoid darklinking. Google also recently introduced their anti-malware team to the public, which is focused on identifying sites that distribute bad software (badware).

eBizBlog wrote an article (more…)

The biggest part of what makes Google’s Adwords and Adsense platforms successful is their unobtrusiveness. They’ve managed to present advertising alongside relevant content in a way that isn’t distracting, and has the real possibility of adding value (link farms aside). And that’s a basic tenet, businesses must add value to ethically exist.

But along comes Mr. Sponsor who isn’t getting the kind of conversion rates he wants from text ads. Maybe he’s seeing lots of pageviews but no clicks, or maybe his cost per click is sky high for the keywords he’s interested in. Rather than innovating his online brand through adding quality content or virally marketing, he chooses to research alternative advertising. Still wanting to target the online surfing community he stumbles upon voice advertising.

“Look!” Mr. Sponsor says during usability testing “he stopped what he was doing to click on our talking person, it’s already working!” What Mr. Sponsor doesn’t realize though? The tester was trying to figure out how to mute the talking advertisement so he could concentrate on the body text he was reading, and his heart is beating fast because his speakers were turned up loud.

Voice advertising can certainly play a role in selling goods and services online, but my recommendation is for it to come alive later in the exploration process when the visitor is looking for more detailed information. It’s a big faux pas to blast a visitor with your any blatant sales pitch in the first 3 seconds. That said, with the right timing voice advertising on the web can be very effective in creating more conversions. Make sure it adds value.