Since Internet Marketing and web design are so closely intertwined, it makes sense to take a close look at the AJAX web application design trend and how it impacts your web site.  

AJAX is simply a way of creating more dynamic web sites that respond to user requests on the browser rather than going back to the server to refresh a page.

Alex Bosworth has a great list of AJAX Mistakes that warrant some consideration. The "Blocking Spidering" is the most pertinent mistake item when it comes to optimizing your web page for search engines.

With search engines, you very rarely get a second chance at first impressions. By this I mean that once a robot or spider has visited a page and stored its content, it typically expects links on that page to refer to other pages; not dynamically alter the current page as AJAX does.

i-Dialogue incorporates some AJAX techniques for the admin/design interface, but for the customer facing experience we prefer to leave as much the site as static as possible. Namely because robots and spiders want to know what your page offers when they visit, and if they must traverse through an infinite number of dynamic links they will most often give up and assume their first impression of your page is the best impression.

Exceptions to this rule might occur when providing a lead capture or profiling form to a user that can be asynchronously sent back to the server for processing while the user just sees an "Updating our records..." message. This lets the user continue contemplating what action to do next in the portal without disrupting the experience.

Since this site is brand new, it's a great opportunity to measure our Google PR on a nightly basis and create some time-series analysis graphs as we do SEO.

Having stabilized on PR5 with our parent company site, it's rather disconcerting to start from 0 on i-dialogue.com, but the goal is to organically grow some key i-dialogue pages to PR6 over the next several months.

So, how will we do that? There are a few basic areas we focus on when doing SEO:

Keyword identification: What are customers looking for when they're seeking a solution such as ours? Personalized email marketing, customer portal, and customer segmentation are just a few areas that we specialize in.

On Page Optimizations: Before worrying about inbound links, we first make sure we've done everything we can do to the pages themselves. Each page's META tags (Title, Description, and Keywords) get a couple passes at copy writing. H1 and H2 tags are built into the page template and force the copy writer to develop both pithy and verbose summaries of the page.

The sitemap link in the page footer is actually auto-generated by i-Dialogue Customer Portal. It's important that web crawlers have the ability to access any page within the site in 2 links.

All pages are accessible as top level pages; i.e. no pages are buried in sub-directories. This approach requires a naming convention that embeds any hierarchical or categorical structure into the page name itself.

Frequent Content Updates: Search engine love new content. The assumption being that if you are adding new content, your site is more worthy of being visited relative to one that is not changing.

Google SiteMap Integration: Google now supports XML sitemaps that they claim will not improve your PR, but will give GoogleBot a better understanding of your sites structure and frequency of change.

i-Dialogue portal auto generates a Google SiteMap. They last I checked, it appears GoogleBot is pulling this sitemap down 1-2 times a day.

Inbound Links: This is really the core of Google PR. If a site is authoritative for a particular topic then several other sites will link to it. Unfortunately, too many nefarious folks have attempted to artificially inflate their PR with link farms and a variety of other tricks which Google eventually figures out anyway.

Authoritativeness and the frequency of content changes are closely linked. The objective is to make real information available that others will find immediately useful. The more informative your site is, the more authoritative it becomes.

Brochure-ware web sites are difficult to optimize without at least 1 or 2 free white papers, a top 10 list, or some piece of information that prospects and customers will find useful.

Measure and Optimize: You won't know if you are improving unless you actually measure your page rank and make changes in response to real data.

I'm happy to announce the launch of this web log for i-Dialogue.com (or i-Dia"blog"ue ). This blog picks up with where my previous blog left off discussing customer facing Internet technologies, CRM, and customer portals; but focuses exclusively on the B2B and occassionaly B2C Marketing aspects of the Internet.

"So who are you?" you're probably asking. By formal introduction, my name is Michael Leach and I'm the Founder/CEO of i-Dialogue.com. But since blogs are a space for keeping things loose and informal, you can just call me "Mike"; and please feel free to post any comments you like. I'll do my best to review and comment on most of them.

Your next question must be "So what is i-Dialogue?". Every entreprenuer, by virtue of their role, is required to be able to provide the answer to this question in at least 3 different ways:

1) A 3 word description
2) The 15 second elevator pitch
3) The business plan

So, here it goes:
1) Precision Internet Marketing
2) A hosted internet marketing solution that automates several common interactions between businesses and their customers via personalized emails, auto-responders, and personalized customer portals.
3) Don't ask. Not enough space on this page

I hope you'll subscribe to this RSS feed and check back often as I delve into topics such as search engine optimization, email marketing, one-to-one marketing, customer self-service, and effective email marketing.

Until L8R!

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