Jon Samsel

I was recently invited to be part of a private beta for a new brand optimization/analytics platform called Heardable. The new service measures how well a brand is doing online, issuing a Heardable Score for every URL you scan into their tool. There is even a comparison scan tool that allows users to scan up to five domain names at once.

The platform examines over 20 unique on-site and off-site brand variables, including a website’s code, inbound links, usability, social brand presence, mobile readiness, and other unique characteristics. The highest possible Heardable Score that can be achieved is 1000. A score between 401-600 is average.

The tools on the site are very cool, with results displayed via an attractive AJAX interface that slides in and out to reveal more detailed information when prompted. My assessment after about one hour of use: Heardable is an extremely functional, insightful, and highly addictive platform that will surely appeal to online marketers. By addictive I refer to the fact that I couldn’t stop scanning URL’s that popped into my head. I wanted to see how each brand scored.

Perhaps the best part of Heardable is The Heardable 100, a ranked list of the top 100 Heardable Scores by brand. You may be surprised by which brand is currently ranked #1. (Hint: It’s a popular celebrity gossip site whose name is a play on socialite, Paris Hilton). According to the company founders, the Heardable platform will soon add hundreds of thousands of pre-ranked lists of brands, by category, which will be a very helpful (and time saving) research tool.

I think brand managers and C-level marketers are really going to like Heardable because it’s an easy way to measure how one brand is performing against a competitor, across multiple variables, plus providing drill-downs into exactly how and why one brand is doing better than the other. Kinda like opening the hood of your competitor’s brand and seeing their online strategy in action. Sweet!

So I decided to examine one category of brands that is near and near to my heart — advertising agencies. After, all, one might assume that the top creative minds in the land would have built websites that truly showcases their talents — both creatively and functionally. After all, they are pitching online marketing strategies and tactics every day to clients (and potential clients). Surely their own sites would have higher than average Heardable Scores, right?

Sadly, my scans revealed just the opposite. Instead of stellar scores, most creative agencies fell into the ‘poor’ or ‘below average’ range. Not what most of us would expect from today’s top-tier marketing agencies. Note to agencies: Don’t let your clients use this tool or you may be in trouble!

To put things into perspective, everyday brands scored better than expected — with higher Heardable Scores than most creative agencies I tested.

• Sears.com (573)
• Weightwatchers.com (531)
• Brides.com (442)
• Airtram.com (438)

Hat’s off to R/GA, an integrated, interactive agency that seems to practice what they preach with a Heardable Score of 537. R/GA had the best score of all agencies I scanned.

Here is a list of the advertising agencies that I scanned, rank ordered by Heardable Score. Any surprises? Be sure to Tweet about it.

Recently, I wrote a blog post titled, “Which SEO Agencies Practice What They Preach?” The article generated a lot of comments from professionals within the creative agency world–most of them lukewarm. Respondents fell into two camps: 1) Those who disagreed with the methodology of utilizing a free site grading service to evaluate and compare SEO companies, 2) Those who were embarrassed by the results. After rereading my post, I not only stand by my words, but I have decided to expand the concept of comparing leading class companies by WebsiteGrader Score into a regular feature on my blog.

Why compare firms by WebsiteGrader Score? Because looking under the hood can tell you a lot about what companies are doing to promote their brands–both on site and off site.

So which category would I zero in on next? Well, it didn’t take me long to decide. I stumbled across an interesting article by Linda Tischler published on FastCompany.com on Feb 11, 2009 titled, “The Fast Company 50: The Most Innovative Companies in Design” that purported to profile extraordinary design enterprises across the nation, part of a larger article looking at firms across various industries.

Prepping the List to Grade

I had only heard of two of the design companies profiled by Fast Company, so I looked up each company on Google and verified the corporate URL for each firm. Then went to Websitegrader.com and evaluated each site.

Here are the top 10 design firms ranked by Fast Company along with their WSG score:

1. Ideo 98.3
2. Marcel Wanders Studio 71.0
3. Rockwell Group 77.0
4. Pentagram 97.3
   
5. Whipsaw 53.0
   
6. Ammunition 71.0
7. Frog design 95.0
8. Fuseproject 88.0
9. Smart Design 93.0
10. NewDealDesign 59.0

Big Ah-Ha’s

Ideo had the highest WebsiteGrader score and they were also ranked #1 design firm by Fast Company. That’s a fairly compelling confirmation that this firm is as good as they appear to be. Pentagram, Frog Design and Smart Design each scored above 90%, so my takeaway is that they each made a respectable showing and deserve some props.

Most of the other firms on the list scored lower than I would have expected. These are not big dumb brands…these are cutting-edge design companies. It just doesn’t seem acceptable that any of the firms on this list score below ninety percent, yet 6 out of 10 did!

The two design firms that scored that lowest were Whipsaw and NewDealDesign. Yes, it’s true both sites were built using Flash. But in 2009, there are plenty of ways to optimize a Flash website in a way that makes them accessible to humans, search engines, and social media sites. These two firms, for whatever reason, chose not to put the extra effort in to make their online content and code up to par. Tsk, tsk.

Digging under the hood at NewDealDesign.com, you will see that basic SEO best practices were not performed at all. According to WebsiteGrader, meta descriptions and keywords were missing from the NewDealDesign website. Images on the site were missing ALT text. There were a surprisingly low number of pages indexed by Yahoo: 26. One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. NewDealDesign had only 577 inbound links, and the domain is 9 years and 9 months old. One would surmise that a leading design firm would have many, many more inbound links. No blog, no RSS feeds and no contact forms were detected on the site either.

In Conclusion: There May Be A ‘Return On Awesomeness’ After All

To be fair, NewDealDesign appears to be an offline design firm (packaged goods, industrial design, etc.) and doesn’t appear to offer web strategy & design services. Their client list is impressive: Puma, Samsung, Microsoft, Epson, Dell, HP, Kensington, Nokia, Logitech, SAP, Sun, Toshiba, Verison, and more.

But some of other design firms included on The Fast Company Most Innovative Companies list appear to do a fair amount of web strategy & design work. It seems fair to expect a design company’s website and online brand strategy to be deployed professionally and thoroughly. It surprises me when this is not the case–and the Fast Company list of innovative design firms did not disappoint.

So while many of the design firms profiled in this post failed the ‘practice what you preach’ smell test, they appear to be lauded by the press for their exceptional creative abilities nonetheless.  And the fact that they are being hired by the world’s top brands to transform the ordinary into extrordinary–through design–may be proof positive that generating a ‘return on awesomeness’ is possible after all.

Recently I was on LinkedIn and came across the following SEO question:

“Looking for one of the best SEO companies in the world. Can anyone recommend one that has amazing track record / recommendations?”

I read through the Q&A thread. Over 20 people responded by providing SEO tips, as well as the names of SEO firms to follow up with. Some were big name SEO companies, some were creative agencies, and some were unknown to me.

I decided to do a little detective work. You see, from my experience, not all search optimization firms practice what they preach. So I thought of a quick way to gauge which SEO consulting firms were legit and which ones are full of bologna–run a Websitegrader report on each firm’s URL and then compare the results.

Why use Websitegrader? There are lots of free tools online that measure this and that. I like Websitegrader.com because it looks under the hood of a company’s URL to uncover what developers are doing well and where they could use improvement–mostly from an SEO point-of-view. They also provide a score so you can compare one website against another.

Websitegrader is not foolproof, mind you, but the results are very insightful. And as long as Websitegrader applies the same algorithm to the each website they grade, a user should be able to benchmark the good from the bad, from the ugly.

I looked at 30 SEO firms mentioned in the LinkedIn Q&A thread. The results were somewhat surprising. Here is how these companies ranked by Websitegrader on a scale of 0-100, 100 being best:

99.9 - www.bigmouthmedia.com
99.7 - www.6smarketing.com
99.7 - www.primevisibility.com
99.6 - www.bruceclay.com
99.6 - www.webadvantage.net
99.5 - www.vizioninteractive.com
99.4 - www.submitawebsite.com
99.3 - www.seo.com
98.9 - www.oneupweb.com
98.2 - www.webmetro.com
97.9 - www.netconcepts.com
97.6 - www.iCrossing.com
97.3 - www.thinkseer.com
96.5 - www.purevisibility.com
96.3 - www.seojunkies.com
95.9 - www.increasevisibility.com
95.5 - www.reprisemedia.com
95.5 - www.rustybrick.com
95.0 - www.seop.com
94.0 - www.nowspeed.com
93.0 - www.ilikesem.com
92.0 - www.usawebsolutions.com
91.0 - www.tmpdm.com
90.0 - www.iprospect.com
85.0 - www.360i.com
85.0 - www.razorfish.com
71.0 - www.ip-seo.com
67.0 - the-ccg-group.com
43.0 - www.asenyo.com
27.0 - www.wsiim.com

Who would have thought BigMouthMedia would outperform so many larger competitors? Of course, these results don’t mean that any of the above-rated SEO firms are not good at doing search optimization for their clients. I am pretty sure many of them are just busy doing client work…so busy that they have neglected their own website optimization efforts. However, for prospective companies considering doing business with any of these firms, wouldn’t a prudent client take a close look at an SEO company’s track record–both client results AND the quality of the SEO firm’s website as well? I think so.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm to assist your company optimize its website for search engine rankings, you might want to run a Websitegrader report on the SEO agency first. Not only will the resulting grades be useful in evaluating two SEO firms against each another, but you can use the scores as a conversation starter when talking to the sales manager from an SEO firm trying to sell you their services. It really trips them up when you ask them why they scored so poorly next to competitor X!

Did I just say that?

Good luck.

1. Apple’s design process revealed!
2. Hilarious video about ‘Death By Committee’ group decision making processes. Love the logo designs!
3. Naming tools to help get your creative juices flowing.
4. The Components of a Writing Business Plan.
5. Website up-time tool.
6. What every web designer needs: A handy Lorem Ipsum generator!
7. An online font tester!
8. 100 things on the Internet that might be of interest to you.
9. Type in a word to find rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more.
10. Life of Pi - Interactive promo. The mood that this creates is almost like a movie. Awesome.
11. The website is down: Sales guy vs. web dude. Funny!
12. ZeFrank’s song about social networking
13. Good site for hiring freelancers to work on social media gigs or web dev projects.
14. Quantcast - Free, competitive website analytics.
15. See every mouse movement and every click on your website. Record & more.
16. Fun brain teasers and exercises.
17. Need to quickly translate text into another foreign language?
18. Nice gift idea - give a personalized book to your child or relative.
19. SEO tool. How many desired .edu or .gov links does your site have?
20. Over 1,500 stories about coffee’s impact on real lives. Very cleaver marketing.
21. Social search engine. Pretty cool.
22. Where’s WaldObama? 1,474 mega-pixel picture of the Inauguration. Wow.
23. Mint or Rudder - which is best online tool to manage your money?
24. Runners. Track your distance, pace, progress & calories with this cool NIKE tool.
25. Looking for the perfect Web 2.0 domain name? Try Dot-o-mator.
26. Download free Web 2.0 logo designs!
27. UGC traffic to triple by 2012, according to Cisco.
28. UGC / user reviews are critical. See latest Nielsen findings.
29. “The Crying Game” of viral marketing. So well done. Click till you see the surprise ending!
30. U.S. real estate prices from 1980-present plotted to a roller coaster ride!
31. I just love Howcast - learn about almost anything!
32. Creepy girl. Watch as her eyes follow your cursor.
33. Amazing interactive simulation by Motorola.
34. Heatmap simulation for any image you upload. Sweet.
35. Design for Emotion and Flow.
36. Website User Journeys, Needs, and Trust: A Volkswagen Case Study.
37. Very helpful usability blog site by Craig Tomlin.
38. Net Promoter Score: Pro’s? Con’s? Full of bologna?
39. Get Elastic’s landing page optimization webinar recap.
40. Consumer purchase preferences by zip code.
41. Free version of the Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.
42. Social media marketing case study: Will It Blend.
43. Free 34 page ebook - The New Rules of Viral Marketing.
44. Social Web Analytics eBook 2008.
45. Introduction to Good Usability - Free PDF Ebook.
46. How to think virally w/ Jeff Benjamin, the creator of  Subservient Chicken.
47. Customer Feedback Usability Insights.
48. 5 new skills for the future of marketing.
49. Bring Holistic Awareness to Your Design.
50. Long live the Cluetrain Manifesto! 95 theses ahead of their time.

Source: http://twitter.com/jonsamsel

Unless you’ve had your head buried in a hole for the past few months you have probably stumbled upon a blog post or two touting Google’s interest in purchasing Twitter as a way to leapfrog forward (and dominate) the real-time search market. Whether or not Google is actually interested in acquiring Twitter is not as important as what is says about the prospect of social search as the next big thing. Move over SEO, SEM and social media. Social search (as its own channel) has arrived!

Social search is an emerging new marketing channel. It’s not paid search, nor organic search, and it’s not social media either. It may be a close cousin to each but it’s a channel in its own right–and it is growing at a fantastic clip.

Trust is the Linchpin

As many of you have already heard in popular search marketing presentations, Google currently functions as every company’s home page. Seventy-two percent of all U.S. searches are done using Google, and people tend to type in branded URL’s even though they could just type it into the address bar to get to the site directly.

Most people trust Google but if you asked these same users if they trust Google’s results, you might elicit a difference response.  For many, trusting Google’s results depends on what they’re searching for compared to what’s presented on the results page.

A recent search for the branded term, Allstate Insurance, for example, yielded 3,210,00 results. Something tells me the majority of these results are bogus, spam, or at least, somewhat insignificant on the relevance scale. So does a Google user trust only the results that appear on page one or should all 3 million+ results be trusted as well?

Compare Google with your own person social network. Most people trust their social network. And this trust seems to be manifesting into actions.

Take a look at these recent statistics that showcase social media’s impact on the retail purchase decision and consumption process:

“60% of consumers are actively involved in generating and sharing buzz.”
- Forrester Research

“80% of consumers say recommendations are the best sources of information.”
- Universal McCann

“Over 90% of consumers say WOM influenced their purchases”
- DoubleClick

Social Search Is Not Paid Search *

• Community is at the heart of the web experience, hence the rise of social media
• Hundreds of these communities are emerging
• And there are thousands of services that help connect these communities and share data amongst these communities
• Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals
• Brands are trying to figure out how to become part of these communities because they know that effective listening is critical to business success
• Social media advertising is an oxymoron. You can’t buy your way into this club
• Social is not about advertising at all

Social Search Is Not Natural Search

• The big search engines are already playing a role in social search
• Most engines are morphing their algorithms and business models to account social content (Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind)
• Some social networks, like Twitter, have built in search (and user love it)
• New vertical search engines and social listening services are emerging to help people tap into this mountain of real-time, word-of-mouth content that can appear in many formats
• But is social search similar to natural search optimization?
• It’s not about tweaking a web site’s content & code
• It’s not about adding localized content pages to a website
• It’s not link building
• Social is not really about optimization at all

Social Search Is Not Social Media

• Social media is more about testing, influencing and monitoring
• It’s about user-centric conversations
• For companies, activities inlcude actively monitoring brand, reputation, and threats
• It’s also about tracking sentiment and buzz volume over time
• And its also about customer service outreach
• For some companies it’s about sales & promotions too
• But social media is not social search

The Social Web (of Opportunity) Is Huge

From a size & scope standpoint, the social web is already huge (and it’s growing!). It’s made up of content that lives as DATA, which does not necessarily reside on a single, traditional website. Consumers are publishing unprecedented quantities of data across all types of networks, sites, services, and feeds.

And the scary part is that the social web is already impacting opinions, brand perceptions, purchase decisions, along with the public psyche.

Social search can be thought of as the mechanisms used to tap into this emerging mass of trusted knowledge. These mechanisms are a combination of popular search technologies we already know and use today (Google, Bing, etc), new platforms (Hunch, Collecta, Cha Cha, etc.) and intra-search tools that help users navigate the popular social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).

New types of search engines are entering the fray, allowing users to:

• Conduct real-time searches
• Review conversations, reviews, comments, ratings & tags
• Helps find multimedia content, RSS feeds, blogs, and other web 2.0 content

The big takeaway around social search is the enormous opportunity–and challenge–it presents to companies around the globe. To be successful in social search, businesses must formulate a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why certain results are FOUND whenever, wherever, and however a social search is performed.

That’s no easy task. The good news is that nobody has mastered it yet and it will be years before the rules of engagement and optimization best practices are etched into stone.

* Several of the bullet points in the ‘Social Search Is Not Paid Search’ section of this post can be attributed to Rob Key, a panelist at SES NY, March 2008.

Ken Moss is a very smart guy. He led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years. So why did he, of all people, launch a Twitter search engine known as CrowdEye? Yes, there is a huge demand for identifying, cataloging, monitoring, and just plain making sense of the deep web of conversations and content accessible today online. But a social search engine? Looks like Ken recognized that the social web has reached a tipping point–it’s huge, it’s still growing, and it’s impacting the way people acquire knowledge and make decisions. Social search needs tools to help people find what others are saying.

So what is Social Search anyway? Social search is all about uncovering nuggets of information from real people (like me and you) in multiple formats such as text, video, blog posts, reviews, comments, tags, tweets, pictures, audio, bookmarks, and events. These word-of-mouth exchanges are the new content that is now dominating the web. Try it yourself. Google a major brand and count how many results are company-generated versus consumer generated. One out of eight results, on average, across engines, can usually be attributed to someone other than the firm who controls the brand. This is simply amazing.

Social content tends to be deemed more authentic than prepackaged corporate propaganda–and, thanks to a plethora of easy-to-use web tools and conversation hubs such as Twitter, social participation is booming. The social web is having a MEASURABLE impact on how search works and how consumer behave.

Social content is having so much impact that it’s spawning the next generation of search tools.

Take WhosTalkin? for example. It’s a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest.

Pipl is a people search engine. AT it’s core, social is about personal conversations–so it makes sense for a social engine to search through public records, social sites, and the web to uncover information about individuals.

Collecta is a real-time search engine. Instead of searching ‘old stuff’ like standard web sites, they monitor the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so they can show you results as they happen.

Then there is Socialmention, a site that allows visitors to search terms around specific categories of the social web such as blogs, comments, etc.

Caterina Fake recently launched Hunch, a tool for finding answers to a wide variety of questions. What makes this tool unique is that it makes decisions based on a database of responses provided by real people–and the results get better the more people use it.

OneRiot is a service that uses a person’s own social network and takes into consideration what’s currently popular within someone’s network when providing search results.

ChaCha has answered 150 million text inquiries/conversational Q&A’s over the past 18 months. ChaCha uses expert guides (in-house staff trained to use their proprietary search tools) to provide answers to any question–mostly via cellular phones.

These new social search engines approach ‘finding results’ in a way that standard search engines don’t offer. From a marketing standpoint, these new generation of social search tools are helpful, but ’social’ is not yet a fully baked channel that can be targeted and optimized. Social is evolving. There are some standards and many variations–making indexing results a real challenge.

Social search is an emerging topic. Many of the tools to find, sort and serve up results are primitive–and the various types of social conversations they do find are not easily placed into context. However, social search is hat our doorstep and it’s evolving very quickly.

So why should social search be at the forefront of of every company’s online marketing strategy?

1. Paid search can only grow and be optimized so far. At some point you reach the point of poor returns (long tail search terms are one example) and paid search cannot be expanded in a way that makes profitable business sense.
2. Natural search tends to be inward-focused, concentrating 80% of its effort and output around website optimization. Companies tend to take a web development approach to SEO by identifying a small cluster of valuable keywords and then optimize the content and code around them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but SEO can be so much more. Search engine optimization is about producing relevant, engaging content in multiple formats. It’s about empowering employees and customers to participate in content publishing and syndication. SEO is about about link building. It’s about harnessing feedback. But when SEO is controlled and bottlenecked by an overzealous technology department, marketers are often left with few ways to innovate, expand, and improve organic search results.
3. Social search, on the other hand, is about tapping into the deep web of conversational data exchanges to uncover jewels of knowledge in which to monitor, influence, or act upon. This hidden web presents an enormous challenge and opportunity to marketers because it’s an emerging channel, research are scattered and not easily aggregated and accessible, metrics are emerging and evolving (they are different than traditional search), and how best to join in the social dialog is a hot topic for debate within some companies due to the legal and regulatory risks some belief social media poses.

Like it or not…ready or not…social search is already here. Yes, the onus is on smart marketers to monitor and make sense of it all. But analytical search tools are arriving every day to help makes things easier.

Companies have a choice–they can dive in now and start monitoring their brand reputation, conducting competitive research, identifying opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends, resolving problems, and even selling by providing unique offers and incentives. Or they can choose to bury their head in the sand and wait for social search to ripen as channel…sitting still as their brands are talked about, hijacked, or even transformed by consumers who are hungry for authentic opinions, insights, news or feedback.

The social web is happening with or without listening to the marketer’s side of the story. The business stage is now set. It’s your move.

If you’re an Average Joe like me, you probably search for your own name using a search engine once and a while to see what pops up in the search results. Call it curiosity or vanity, I would classify it as ’smart sleuthing’ to see how the engines display ‘who you are’ to the world.

The more common your name, however, the more likely YOU may not even appear on page one results. The more unique YOUR name is, or the more active YOU are online, there is an increased chance your name will be served up in the organic results for web, image, news, video, audio, or blog search queries.

There is good news from Google. They have created a new tool to help people JUST LIKE YOU exert greater control over their PERSONAL BRANDS.

Just type ‘me’ into the Google search bar and the first paid result will be a message to ‘create your own profile on Google.’ Having a current Google profile about YOU could help make it easier for people to find YOU versus someone with the same name that isn’t YOU.

Google Profiles is just one small piece of the larger brand-management puzzle, albeit a useful one, and I encourage you to try it.

Google software engineer Brian Stoler recently wrote in a posting at the Internet firm’s website that when searching for yourself on Google to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren’t always what you want people to see.

For example if you type in the name “Nick Lange” you’ll generate some Google search results that are quite disparate.

• Are you the Nick Lange who, according to one forum poster, “BEWARE OF SCAMMER: Nick Lange, aka Nick20, UWisconsin77…DO NOT do business with Nick Lange from Florida!******”
• Or are you the Nick Lange from the 1991 graduating class of Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, CA?
• Or perhaps you are Nick Lange, illusionist, at www.nicklange.com
• And then there is author Nick Lange who posted a very opinionated research paper for the University of Illinois titled, “Interracial Relationships and Korean American Families”

If your name (aka personal brand) was Nick Lange, would you be concerned about what was already out there live on the web? The brand of Nick Lange is not unique. In fact, there are several real (or seemingly real) people all using the same name (brand). In the Internet, real people sharing the same brand can cause headaches for you if they are not managing their brand the way you would like them to. To the unsuspecting searcher, how are they to know one Nick Lange from another?

Besides the real Nick Langes co-opting your brand, anybody could pretend to be you and easily inflict brand havoc if they wanted to. And this scenario doesn’t necessarily cover the identity thieves who are actively trying to steal your persona for financial gain. These evil-doers can also inflict much pain on your brand if you do not catch the intrusions early, and rectify them.

So now that you’ve seen how a simple vanity search can provide valuable insights into how well you’re managing your personal brand and the dangers that may already exist, what are some good pointers for improving or protecting your egosurf results and the BRAND OF YOU? Here are five:

1. Establish your online brand baseline. The brand of you starts with a simple search on Yahoo, Google and MSN. Taking a snapshot of your search results is a great first step in managing your reputation
2. Publish your personal brand. Launch a blog, a resume website, or a personal website all about you could help boost the quality of your unique vanity search results. Better yet, ensure that there are unique image labeled as you, word docs, PDF’s and .ppt files branded you and live on the web, or go so far as to create and publish podcasts, videos, press releases, and the like — as you, about you or authored by you. Search engines don’t just serve up web page results, they serve up results in multiple media formats
3. Take action against online brand fraud or mistakes. If you find that your personal brand has been misused, take action against the site that has posted it. For example, if an unflattering photo of you has been posted on Flickr.com by an old high school buddy, ask that is be taken down or moved to a web service that is login protected so as not to cause you embarrassment
4. Stake your claim on social media sites. Utilize social networks to clone your online persona to be present everywhere. I nice service is KwonEm.com, which can check the availability of your brand across 120 of the most popular social networks. For a small fee they will register your brand on all available social sites on your behalf
5. Be diligent. Check and re-check your egosurf results often to see what others may see when they search for your name or brand. If you are surprised by what you find, imagine what others are thinking! Stay on the offense and you will be much farther ahead of the next guy or gal in managing the valuable brand of you

After several requests, I have decided to publish my eight stage website planning process. If you are a web designer or developer tasked with building a new website, or if you are a web executive contemplating a redesign of your corporate site, think of this outline as a handy checklist for each stage in the web planning process–from discovery through optimization.

I have also included a PowerPoint version of the 8 stage website planning process here.

Stage 1: Discover
Purpose of site
Top 5 business goals
Top 5 user goals
Approximate page count
Style, tone & brand positioning
Top 5 unique features
Traffic sources
Onsite advertising
Calls to action / lead routing
Domain name / URL
How site complements current strategy
How site augments current strategy
Websites this site might emulate
Competitive sites
Timeline / launch date(s)
Definition of successful launch

Stage 2: Plan
Project team & roles
Financial overview
Marketing overview
Communications overview
Project management process
Key project phases
Content requirements
Assumptions & dependencies
Visitor personas & task paths
Major site features & functionality
Design, navigation & architecture
Publishing platform/CMS
Databases, integration & technologies
Tracking & reporting
Natural search & ADA requirements
Hosting & service level agreements

Stage 3: Build
Wireframes & design mock-ups
New content / rights clearance
API’s and RSS feeds
Prototype pages
Usability testing
Searchability testing
Source codes & phone #’s
Landing pages / transactive pages
Legal & compliance
Change control process
Quality control
Staging & user acceptance testing

Stage 4: Publish
Article creation / RSS feeds
Asset management
Publishing sign off process
Syndication
Publishing calendar
Subject matter experts / moderators
User generated content
Multimedia publishing
Publishing platform/CMS
Legal & compliance sign off

Stage 5: Maintain
Up-time requirements
System administration
Software/hardware upgrades
Hosting/security
Documentation
Capacity
Page load times
System performance tuning
Back-up/archiving

Stage 6: Market
Paid campaigns
Natural campaigns
Inbound link building
Landing page overflow
Inter/Intra site linking
Syndication of content
Campaign tracking & reporting
Integrated / stand alone
URL promotion

Stage 7: Measure
Analytic packages
Tagging, tracking & reporting
Cookies & logic
Campaign set up / mods
Natural vs. paid breakout
Tracking to goals
Social / delayed response
Banner performance
LP funnel performance
Site load time / up time

Stage 8: Optimize
Direct response testing
Multivariate testing
Landing page testing
Banner ad testing
Best practice sharing

Let’s Make a Deal - The social network for venture investors. DealHorizon.com is new, but it’s yet another intriguing web concept from Aussy, John Sharp (CEO of Authentium.com, creators of Safe Central, an amazing end-to-end secure web browsing solution).

Live Video - Flixwagon provides a network for the live broadcasting of video feeds. Whenever I am on this site, I find myself refreshing my homepage every few minutes. There is something exciting about not knowing what’s going to steam across my laptop screen next.

Percentage Calculator - A simple site where you can calculate percentages and percentage increases. I use this all the time.

Spin Your Own - Make your own discs. Yeah, physcial CD’s are a dying medium, but there’s still nothing like burning a fresh disc packed with mp3’s favs and sharing it with friends.

SEO Tool - A nice SEO tool for seeing how well your website is doing in four key areas: 1) Inbound links (especially .edu and .gov links), 2) Number of indexed pages, 3) Site age (via Wayback machine), 4) DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory listing.

Need a Rhyme? - A rhyming dictionary every writer should have in their bag of bookmarks.

Free Translation - What’s not to like about Babel Fish, a quick and easy tool that translates online text and web page language into over 30 languages?

The Future of Search? - Ms. Dewey is an experimental Microsoft video search engine launched in 2006 with a touch of humor that plays prerecorded clips of Janina Gavankar, an actress who entertains you with her witty commentary based on your searches.

Poem Power - Selected poetry of e.e.cummings, a modern American poetry icon. Need I say more?

Do-It-Yourself Videos - A fun video search site. I especially like Revver’s how to section. So many magic trick reveals and Photoshop how-to’s. Sweet.