NLC is excited to announce that Helen M. Overland, Director, Search Engine Marketing, will be presenting at the SMX Search Analytics Conference

Search marketing isn’t just about website optimization and paid search campaigns. To really know if your efforts are paying off, you need to test, measure and refine. Continuously.

The NLC IA team  (Molly Anglin and Katral-Nada Hassan) were onsite in Memphis Tennessee at the 2009 IA Summit.  The event was a whirlwind of leading edge UX ideas, blues and barbecue.

IA Summit Podcasts

Podcasts for many of the sessions will be made available within the next week or two at www.boxesandarrows.com . 

IA Summit Presentations

While we anxiously await the podcasts, I thought I’d share the roundup of IA Summit PPT slides that I’ve managed to track down across the web.

This month’s monthly meeting is tonight, Wednesday, March 25, 2009.  The topic for tonight’s session is  Manage Document Life Cycle in SharePoint using K2 blackpearl.  Bill Brockbank will demonstrate how K2 can be used to manage the governance of a document library, authoring new documents and editing existing. Then provide a multi levels of approve before publishing the new or edit document.

Sitecore has released a number of known issues affecting users of Microsoft’s latest browser, Internet Explorer 8.  While none of these issues are critical NLC is recommending clients not upgrade their browser until Sitecore has completed full regression testing for Internet Explorer 8.

Most of the issues with Sitecore and IE 8 are limited to cosmetic issues such as missing buttons or backgrounds.  One of the more visually noticeable issues is a flicker on many of the context menus, particularly we find on the insert options.

A more serious functional issue is the inability to use the drag and drop features of the Content Editor.  Also for developers working on layouts or controls, you need to be aware that the Preview may redirect to the login page after editing any of the presentation objects.

Toronto, ON - March 9, 2009 - non~linear creations, an e-business integrator with a focus on content management and enterprise search solutions, announces the release of our newest whitepaper, The Non-Technical Manager’s Guide to Successful Google Analytics.

Hitwise, an Experian company released a report late last month that shows search behaviour is changing—searchers are using more words in the search queries they type. As the following figure suggests, this shift in behaviour is small but significant. The percentage of queries using five or more words, for example, has increased at more than 10% each year.

Search Query Length at Google and Other Engines

What does this mean for SEO?

Long search queries present a challenge for search engine optimization. They tend to fall in the long tail of the search spectrum, as we discuss in on our post on How People Search. It’s hard to justify optimization activities focused on rarely-sought terms, so you’ll need to rely on your content management solution to embed best practices.

What does this mean for conversion rates?

The answer to this question is not clear. In fact, there has been remarkably little research into how conversion rates vary in relation to the number of terms in the search query. My gut tells me that a person searching on something specific – like “Sony Bravia, 52 inch, on special or sale, Boise” – is more likely to purchase than someone searching on “bigscreen tv.” But actual on-the-ground evidence is thin.

Last year, NLC undertook a detailed analysis of search behaviour based on data released by AOL. As part of that multi-page post, we noted that OneUpWeb released a study in 2005 that found that searchers using longer search queries are more likely to convert - but this study was performed four (long) years ago. To the best of my knowledge, no follow-up studies have been done on this topic.

The evidence at non~linear creations

Today, I pulled NLC’s analytics for the last two years to see if visitors using longer search queries had stronger conversion rates on our website. As the following figure suggests, they most certainly did not. In our case, visitors searching on a single word are almost three times as likely to convert as those entering a three-word search query.

The trouble is, we have no way of knowing if this is the norm. Perhaps visitor behaviour on our site is atypical. Certainly, many of those downloading our whitepapers are searching for single-word brand names, particularly “Sitecore”. This might skew the data in favour of short queries. On the other hand, our whitepapers show high conversion rates for those searching on “content management best practices” (8.6% conversion rate) and “Google search appliance implementation” (10.7% conversion rate).

The Bottom Line

Searchers are using more terms in their search queries, and we have yet to understand the impact this has on conversion rates.

I hope to find out.  Here’s my call to action – send me evidence from your web sites.  I’ll publish the results here and perhaps we can arrive at a consensus of sorts.

Our friend, Danielle Brigida, from the National Wildlife Federation shared her thoughts on developing and measuring effective non-profit social media campaigns this weekend at SXSW. Accompanied by Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of the United States; Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross; David Neff of the American Cancer Society; and moderator Beth Kanter; the group recited, rhymed and rapped their way through their social media successes.

Holly Ross of the Nonprofit Technology Network posted video outtakes of the session:

On Thursday, March 12, 2009, non~linear creations (NLC) hosted a breakfast seminar jointly with Microsoft on Enterprise Social Computing & Sharepoint.  Over 60 people attended from a variety of industries to gather insights and see a demonstration of NLC capabilities in delivering exceptional solutions around Enterprise Social Computing in SharePoint. 

NLC has made a submission to the Microsoft Canada Ignite IT Awards. The competition recognizes and rewards the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers.

We are very proud of the solution we built for Service Alberta, an integrated CMS/.NET faceted navigation implementation. We transformed their outdated, performance-challenged website into a stable, scalable and high-performing solution. As our solution and development process made extensive use of Microsoft technologies, including ASP.NET, SQL Server and Team Foundation Server, we felt it would be the perfect candidate for submission.

We encourage you to view our submission and cast your vote!