The iPad doesn't have to do as much as a laptop. It just as to do as much as people need it to do.

It’s no secret that I like Apple.

I like the simplicity.  The design.  How everything is intuitive.

No doubt, there was a lot of skepticism when Apple announced the much anticipated iPad.  No Flash.  No multitasking.  No keyboard.  Simply put, it didn’t live up to expectations.

Know what?  Sounds just like the iPhone.  And I would argue many of the same reasons the iPhone was successful will be why the iPad will be successful.

First, the iPad is simple.  Those who are in the tech community take computer competency for granted.

The fact is, a lot of people still don’t get computers.  How many of your parents could set up an email client?  How about the WiFi in their home with networked printing?  Hell, most people don’t know how to reliably adjust the margins in Word.

There seems to be this mentality that the iPad is somehow deficient because it runs iPhone apps as opposed to full size Mac OS X apps.  Which is a valid argument if we say that more is better.  But more isn’t always better.  More is just more.

I remember when I was using Quicken to try to manage my finances.  It was an absolute nightmare.  Why?  Was it because there was some feature that Quicken didn’t have that I really needed?  Nope.  Quite the opposite.  It gave me more than I needed.  I just got lost in the thing.

People don’t need to get lost.  They need the basics.  There’s not many day-to-day tasks that I can’t do on my phone.  Search for an address?  Check.  Pay my bills?  Yep.  Check email, read the news, get the weather?  Yes, yes and yes.  I actually prefer to do email on my phone than on my computer.  It’s faster and easier.  And for 90% of people, that’s what they need.  They don’t need to run Photoshop, develop a website, or make a pivot table.  They just need the basics.

Second, the iPad is always connected to the web (well, the 3G iPads are).  The impact of this has certainly been overlooked by many.  Is your laptop always connected to the web?  On the train, in the car, at the airport terminal?  Unless you have one of those mobile broadband cards, the answer is probably no.

Think about what it’s like to constantly have information at your fingertips.  Compare that to before you had a smartphone, when getting lost meant you had to bring out a map and waiting anxiously for that important email meant you had to be at home to receive it.  If you had to choose between an always-on internet connection or the ability to do advanced spreadsheet functions, I’d be willing to guess you’d pick the connection (and apparently with iWork, you could do the spreadsheet stuff, too).

Finally, I think one of the big reasons the iPad will win is because Apple had the discipline to say no.  To say no to Flash.  To say no to multitasking.  One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes highlights this:

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

I’ll probably get a lot of flack for this, but Flash isn’t important.  I know 75% of online video uses Flash.  I also know that it’s not that hard to port Flash videos over to another format.  It’s way too resource-intensive for things that don’t need to be that bloated.  Besides, Flash would be an awful  user experience on the iPad.  Right now, Flash interfaces are designed for something the size of the mouse pointer, not the much larger size of your finger.  That isn’t a user experience I want.

As for multitasking, I’m on the fence here.  I understand that it doesn’t have multitasking because that leads to more crashes.  And frankly, I’ve had periods where my iPhone apps crash much too frequently.  So I realize I wouldn’t want more of that.  Still, when you’re surfing the web, it would be nice to be able to listen to Pandora at the same time.  Would multitasking be nice?  Yes, as long as it was relatively crash-free.  But it’s not critical for me.  And I’m guessing it’s not critical for most people.

I’m not blind to the flaws.  As opposed to the iPhone, which served as a replacement for existing cell phones that were absolutely awful, and the iPod, which replaced CD players that were bulky and required that you carry around a huge book of CDs, the iPad doesn’t replace anything.  Most people don’t have netbooks, but everyone had a cell phone before the iPhone.  Everyone had a CD player.  Those were easy upgrades to understand.

When I hear criticism of the iPad, I can’t help but remember the criticisms of the iPhone and think about how far the iPhone has come.  In the beginning, the iPhone was on a slower EDGE connection with no MMS, no copy/paste, no application development platform.  It was, in many ways, simple and basic.  It’s still simple today, but with 3G, MMS, and thousands of apps, it’s not basic.

The iPad will be the same way.  It’s basic right now, because developers have not been building applications for a 10 inch screen.  That will change, and I expect that developers will slowly unlock the full potential of a large, fast touchscreen device.  Apple has shown a propensity to release very focused, basic products and iterate on them.  The iPod and iPhone are the exemplars for this philosophy.  The iPad will follow that same model.

Apple succeeds by making simple products that often do less, but do enough and do it better.  That’s the first half.  The second half of the success equation is creating products that replace something consumers already have.

Half of the Apple success equation is present in the iPad.  Logical replaceability, however, isn’t as clear.  Will people ditch a laptop for a more basic device?  The answer to that question will be predicated not on whether the iPad will do as much as a laptop.  Rather, the answer will lie in whether the iPad will do as much as people need it to do.  Which, to be sure, is a very different standard.

I just wanted to provide another update to what I’ve been working on over at Spartan-Football.com.

We’re just about 72 hours away from kickoff.  Traffic was really huge the first two days that the site launched, since I got a lot of traffic from Spartan Tailgate.  It really drove more traffic than I could have imagined.  I’ve also seen the share of traffic shift from referring sites to direct hits and search.

In the first week, 88% of traffic came from referring sites, with 8.5% from direct traffic and just 2% from search.  Those percentages have changed pretty substantially.  In the past 7 days, just ~30% of traffic came from referring sites, 43% from direct traffic and 26% from search.  Over the past week and a half, organic search traffic has really started to pick up, and it appears that the site is slowly coming out of the Google sandbox.  It seems like the site was able to get a decent amount of initial traffic from referring sites since it was a new website that people hadn’t seen before.  Visitors wanted to see the new site, check it out, and now that initial “introductory” traffic has now subsided a bit.

Also, the growth of the Facebook page has been really interesting to watch.  The pace of growth of the Facebook page has just about doubled every week.

Spartan-Football.com Facebook Fan Page Growth

Unfortunately, it hasn’t translated into significantly increased traffic to the site as of yet.

Facebook traffic to Spartan-Football.com

Hopefully as we get into the season, and people get more involved in the football season, referring traffic from Facebook will start to increase.

Last time I updated, there were a couple of items that I wanted to put on the radar to work on.  Figured I would provide a progress report here:

• Getting Facebook Connect commenting enabled on the site: This one still intimidates the hell out of me.  There’s a tutorial that someone has put together to implement it in Wordpress, but there are still some elements that are over my head.
• Maybe add fields to the contact us page: This one is really easy, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Maybe tonight or tomorrow.
• Put together the reporting that I want for the site: Again, haven’t gotten around to this yet.  I’ve really just been checking the numbers on an ad hoc basis, which works fine for me, and is probably more effective for me than putting together reports.
• Drop down menu: well, I turned off the drop-down menu plugin that I was using previously and that was causing a lot of issues with the multimedia box that I was using at the time.  Eventually I decided to drop the media box altogether, and added a featured content box in the left column of the site.  I then found a dropdown menu tutorial that was based on CSS, and played with that until I got a working dropdown menu.  The tutorial had a fix to make the menu work in Internet Explorer, but I didn’t want to take the time to implement it at that point.  I still need to go back and try to get the menu to work with IE, especially since 42% of traffic is coming from IE (oh you poor, poor souls).
• Develop some kind of link building widget or badge: this is a low priority item right now.
• Finish putting together the content on those few remaining pages – Ethics, FAQ, Support, etc. etc. etc: Ethics and FAQ are done.  Still need to do the support page, which means I still need to figure out how I want to give people the option to support the blog.
• Google Website Optimizer: last time I asked if it even made sense to implement at this point.  I think it’s pretty clear now that this is premature.
• Add email subscriptions: this one was easy to implement.  I want to spruce it up a bit graphically, but it’s functional.

The key at this point is to just keep writing content, having a viewpoint, and hopefully build organic link equity from other sites that are talking about MSU football.  That should help to increase the traffic.  And of course getting into the heart of the season should help, too.

As I mentioned earlier in the month (or maybe it was last month), I’ve started working on a side project, a website called Spartan-Football.com.  The site has pretty much taken up all of my free time for the last 3-4 weeks, but it’s safe to say I’ve learned quite a bit in those weeks.

So far I’ve pretty much gotten all of the design elements squared away, and have started writing content for the site.  Which, by the way, is exceptionally difficult and was only heightened my level of respect for the sports bloggers that I’ve been following and who make it seem so damn easy.  The design probably took me 3 weeks or so, basically just piecing together different parts until it started to look like something resembling a serious website.  Shout-out, by the way, to Bugsy Sailor (the guy behind such projects as Yooper Steez, Hometown Invasion and Daily Fruuit) for coming up with the idea for the design of using the jersey mesh as the background to the site.

As you might be able to tell, I am building the site using Wordpress as the underlying platform, and Thesis as the theme (although I really consider it more of a code base).  This is my first time using Thesis and and must say I am exceptionally happy with it.  I’m not sure I would say that it’s so easy to use, as much as it provides so many options.  I still don’t understand how to program the hooks, but I can use the OpenHook plugin to do pretty much everything I need to do.

In terms of SEO, I think the site architecture is pretty well optimized, especially now that I was able to put together the footer navigation to the third-level site pages, which is really where the meat of the site lives.  The site is still very much in the Google sandbox, although just in the last few days I have noticed that the rankings that I’ve been tracking have improved a bit.

While I officially “launched” the site on August 9th, the site really was live a few weeks before then.  But it was under development the entire time, and August 9th was the date that I really wanted to have some initial content on the site and start pushing that content out via the Facebook fan page and the Twitter account that I set up for the site.  The site got picked up by SpartanTailgate.com the next day, and I saw a huge surge in traffic from that referral.

My goal has been to build up a following from Facebook and Twitter, and then when the students get back to campus hopefully see the site grow virally from the smaller social networking group we have right now.  So far, I think the site has a pretty good following.  There are roughly 180 Facebook fans and 180 followers on the Twitter account.  That’s one of the things I’ll be tracking as things move forward.

I’ve also been thinking about doing a podcast for the site, but I’m not 100% sure on that one yet.  Right now I’d probably say I’m leaning against not doing it, just because I want to see how much work the normal site is without adding a podcast component.  But who knows, I might change my mind.

I’ve also started considering how to make some money off of the site.  But I don’t want to bastardize the site by throwing a ton of advertising up all over the place.  So here are the ideas I have so far:

1. Sell t-shirts on the site.  I would probably need to find a designer who could make some cool shirts, but I could see this being a good way to make some money without throwing banners up all over the place.
2. Stubhub/Amazon affiliate – Stubhub, obviously it’s a sports site, people could by tickets, I’d get a cut.  Amazon, link to MSU apparel, people buy, I make money.  However, I don’t see the affiliate angle making much money, but who knows.
3. Throw banners up all over the place.  I really don’t want to do this, and I don’t think I will.  The only way I’m going to put up and banner type ads on the site is if they are really targeted to the audience.  I don’t want to just throw up some AdSense all over the place, but if an East Lansing business wants to advertise to a market that obviously would be interested in an East Lansing business, then I’d consider it.

Anyway, I am going to chronicle the behind-the-scenes stuff for the site here on EricPender.com.  Aside from writing the content, which pretty much never ends, the next things on the radar are (in no particular order):

• Getting Facebook Connect commenting enabled on the site.  The code for this looks pretty scary, and I wish there was just an easy plugin that would get it to work for Thesis.  But the plugin that does exists doesn’t seem to work with Thesis, and there doesn’t seem to be any information in the support forums from anyone who has implemented it successfully.
• Maybe add fields to the contact us page.  Probably a good idea, and it seems like it would be really easy.
• Put together the reporting that I want for the site.  Traffic, time on site, bounce rate, conversions, all that jazz.
• Drop down menu.  Ugh, the last one was problematic in IE and some versions of Firefox.  I need to give it a second chance, but I really wish it was just built into Thesis.
• Develop some kind of link building widget or badge.
• Finish putting together the content on those few remaining pages: Ethics, FAQ, Support, etc. etc. etc.
• Google Website Optimizer – does it even make sense at this point?  I’m not selling anything yet, and it seems moderate-to-advanced.
• Add email subscriptions.  I think I can do this easily in Feedburner, I just need to set it up.

That’s all for now.  Check back later for more updates.

I recently moved into a new apartment with a new roommate, after I had been living alone in Chicago for four years. I was an RCN customer at my last place, and my roommate was an RCN customer when I moved in.

After I moved and unpacked countless boxes, I was left with one box in my room filled with the equipment from RCN that came from my old apartment. It was the equipment that I still needed to return.

I had already hooked up my computer in my new room, but found that the wireless signal which originated from my roommates room on the opposite end of the apartment wasn’t strong enough to make it back to my room.

So I sifted through the box of RCN equipment that I had sitting on the floor, found the modem from my last apartment, and plugged it into the coax cable jack on the wall. Of course, it worked. Why wouldn’t it, it was already powering my TV and since I’m sure there’s one point of entry that then splits inside the apartment to the different room, there was no reason for it not to work.

This was an ideal situation. When I’m in the living room, or even the kitchen, I can hook up to the wireless signal coming out of my roommates room. But when I’m at my desk in my room (likely where I’m doing more internet intensive work on one of my websites), I can hook up directly to the hard line. I figured if I could just transfer the rental fee for the cable modem from my old account to my roommates account, everything would be fine.

I called up the RCN sales department to let them know that I had just moved, but that the wireless signal from my roommates modem and router just wasn’t strong enough to reach back into my room, so I wanted to transfer my old router to the new account and use it in my room.

The RCN sales representative told me that if I wanted a second modem, she could send out a technician who could hook up a separate line and she could add a “Roommate account.” No, I told her, I don’t want a second account, I want a modem that is added to the account that already exists so I can get internet in my room. She told me that she never heard of two modems working on a single line, and that I would need a second account that would cost me something like $32 per month.

“But I’ve already hooked up the modem from my last apartment, and it works, so clearly that statement is not correct,” I refuted. She knew I was right. She seemed to be relenting. “So you just want to transfer the old modem to the new account, for the $3 per month rental fee, correct?” Yes, that’s exactly what I want. “Let me forward you over to someone else who should be able to help you with that.” Great, thank you.

“This is RCN tech support, how can I help you?” Um, tech support? I didn’t think this would be a tech support kind of an issue, but whatever. Yes, I need to transfer a modem from one account to another. “Oh, um, okay, well…..so you want to add service, that’s more of a sales issue.” Wait, hold on, the last rep, who was a sales rep, was confident that you could help me, now you’re sending me back over to sales? Hold up. No, I just got sent to you from sales, she said you could help me. I don’t want new service, I just want to transfer a modem. “Okay, let me pull up your account.” Pull up my account, I just got transfered to you, don’t you get that information too? How long has your company been transferring calls? Forever, that’s how long, you should be able to transfer the account info too. But I digress.

“Oh, I see you already have an internet modem on the account. You would have to add internet service on a new account.” No, I don’t want a new account. I want two modems on one account. This can’t possibly be this hard. What do people in very large houses do? You can’t possibly be putting those people on two effing accounts. Get a grip. “Let me transfer you to sales, they should be able to help you.” They should have been able to help me the first time, but I agree that you likely can’t help me. Fine, give me sales.

“RCN sales, how can I help you.” I want to add a modem to an account that my roommate has, since I just move in. “Okay, what is the account info?” I give her the account info (I’m probably pounding my head on the wall at this point). “There’s already internet service on this account” Yes, I know. “You would need to add a second account to get internet service.” No, I just want to add a second modem. She clearly doesn’t want to deal with me. She’s much less polite than the last two.  Her answers are short, terse.  ”I can’t help you. Let me give you the number for your local support team.” Um…okay? What can they do that is different than what you can do? “They’ll be able to help you with your problem.” You didn’t really answer my question. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with this.” Fine, give me the number. Click.

Okay, really RCN? I mean, what do you do if someone calls and they have a very large house.  Do you make them open two accounts?  Of course you don’t, because that wouldn’t make any sense.  That would be dumb.  But you figure if you have two unrelated people living in an apartment, oh what the hell let’s just gouge them, shall we?  I mean, one line would be more than enough bandwidth.  Because hey, most of us would just connect that one line to a wireless router anyways, and that works for pretty much everybody.  But if that doesn’t work, well you figure you can just hit us up for another $30 per month.

Really RCN (and all cable companies), I don’t mind if you treat your dumb customers like they’re, well, dumb.  But stop treating your smart customers, the ones who are smarter than your sales employees and most of your technical support staff, like they’re dumb.  Because we are the ones that tell other people, write about the situation, and the echo effect begins.

Update:  I got frustrated the more I thought about this, and I really didn’t think the Local Support team was going to be able to help me any more than the regular sales team, so I called RCN back.  This time they forwarded me just once, but brought an “internet” guy onto the call.  Um…okay?  So I talk to this internet guy, and he says the same thing, that I need an additional line.  He says “it’s our policy to add a line of service if you add a modem.”  Okay, fine.  I’ll tell you what, I’ll let you make the call.  I can either pay about $50 or so to buy my own modem, hook it up, and you get no money.  Or, you can rent me the modem for about $36 per year, and you get that money.  Do you want that money?  ”I’m sorry sir, but we have a policy.  This is your decision.”  Okay, fine.  In that case, my decision is to pay $50 for my own modem, or pay $720 over the course of the year with your solution.  In that case, I’m choosing to pay for the modem.  ”Alright sir, well is there anything else I can do for you today?”  No, you are unable to make a rational decision, to make money for your company, and to make my life a tad bit easier.  So no, there’s is nothing else you can do for me.  Goodbye.

I know posting has been nonexistent for nearly two months.  It is because I have been working on a new website dedicated to Michigan State football news and commentary, called Spartan-Football.com.  We’re going to be covering everything from players and coaches to recruiting and statistics.  While the new site is still going through development, we have already posted some great information, such as a list of commitments for the 2009 and 2010 recruiting classes, the complete upcoming Big Ten football schedule for every team in the conference, and a depth chart by class so you can see where the team is experienced and where we need help.

Follow Spartan-Football.com on our Facebook fan page and get MSU football updates directly in your News Feed.  You can also follow Spartan Football on Twitter at Spartan_FB.

I just ran across this article from Time titled “What Will the World Do with More Search Engines?“  My first reaction and answer to this question was “it will ignore them,” and for actual search engines, I think that is true.  User habits have already been ingrained, and chiseling away at market share is no small task, as Yahoo! and MSN can attest.

However, CNN (and now Time) have recently run articles regarding new “search engines” that have come to market, no doubt influenced by the recent public launch of highly-publicized (and frankly somewhat disappointing in scope) Wolfram Alpha, which isn’t so much a search engine as much as it is a computational engine.

The Time article isn’t so much about what the world is going to do with more search engines, as much as it identifies how search has become an innovator’s dilemma.  Much in the way Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” how the semiconductor chip industry saw improvements in technology that surpassed the needs of the existing market, the Time article exhibits how the capabilities of search engines have begun to exceed the needs of the existing search market.

Search engines continue to add features, whether it is Google, Yahoo, MSN, or otherwise.  However, for most queries, a user can find the answer they are looking for from any of the major engines.  No single engine holds a meaningful and distinctive feature that places it head and shoulders above it’s competitors when it comes to organic search.  As Time puts it:

“The trouble with the search-engine business is that its future may have almost nothing to do with whether search results get more accurate. Google’s information is already more than adequate for the huge majority of people who want to find information online. At some point, and that point has probably been reached, people cannot tell the difference between flying in an airplane that is at 32,000 feet and one that is flying 1,000 feet higher. The change in perspective means nothing to them. All they know is that they are as high as they have to be to get where they are going.”

In a classic innovator’s dilemma, this would mean that search technology should be able to serve other markets.  I think in many ways, this has already started to manifest.  Google created Gmail to increase the real estate in which it could deliver targeted advertising, but through it’s search technology brought a superior cloud email system to market.  And it is probably no coincidence that Apple brought a superior PC search feature to it’s OS X operating system in Spotlight while Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been on the board of directors.

Meanwhile, competition comes from downstream, not upstream.  Wolfram Alpha, in my opinion, doesn’t compete in quite the same way as Google, and I anticipate this will create problems for Wolfram Alpha when it comes to monetization.  Google is an intermediary, in that users come to Google to find information, and to be taken to that page on the web.  Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, seeks to aggregate information from various sources on the web, and present them to the user in concert, on the Wolfram Alpha site.  So Wolfram Alpha’s goal is not to be an intermediary, it is to be a destination that pulls information from a backend, in this case the backend is the world wide web.

But if there is a paradigm shift in the way that people seek information, and how they want that information presented to them, then Wolfram Alpha can be a real threat to Google.  Google is pushing forth an agenda of getting webmasters to contextualize the information on their sites in a standardized way through their recent announcement of Rich Snippets.  This will help all search engines, and even non-search-related technologies on the web, not just Google.  If another company is able to capitalize on the proliferation of this added semantic markup, Google could find itself entering a very real competitive battle.

Much has been said about the opportunities that Internet-enabled mobile phones and so-called smart phones bring to advertisers.

While I agree that the next 3-5 years will bring about significant innovation with regard to mobile advertising, current mobile-based advertising has shown a lack of effective execution.  Granted, my view is biased toward advertising on the iPhone, simply because the iPhone is the device that I use on a daily basis.  However, along with the Blackberry, the iPhone is certainly the most sophisticated and advanced cell phone available, and should offer a good case study of advertising execution.

Below, I offer an analysis of various advertising on iPhone apps that I use daily.  I have also given each ad a letter grade.  To determine the grade, I considered the the advertisement itself (i.e. the banner or text ad, whether it had a call to action, placement), the landing page after tapping on the ad (usability on a mobile device, messaging) and whether or not the ad was tracking a conversion, thereby delivering the ability to track a true ROI for the campaign.

Weather Channel

The Weather Channel application places a small advertisement at the top of the screen.  The current advertiser when I pulled my screenshots was Zyrtec.

Zyrtec ad on Weather Channel application.

The drop-down ad is actually pretty good.  The unopened ad says “The fastest 24-hour OTC allergy relief.”  There is not a call to action, but the ad is simple and easy to read.

When I tap on the banner, the offer drops down.  There is a clear image of the Zyrtec product and a very clear message.  So far, so good.  However, the second screen fails to execute well for a mobile device.

After I tap on the expanded offer, I am redirected to what appears to be an internal page from the regular Zyrtec site.  The page has extremely small type.  While I can zoom in on the text, it would be better to have a landing page that is optimized for a mobile device.

Once I zoom in, I can see that there is a “Download PDF” link to redeem a refund if I was not satisfied with the product.  When I tap on the link, nothing happens.  Why would the advertiser require that the user download a file if they are on a mobile handset?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  It would have made better sense if the user could enter their email address and receive the necessary file in an email that they could print off later on.  While conversion tracking may be implemented on the “Download PDF” link, it is irrelevant because it is not possible to download, let alone print, the form to be sent in.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D-

New York Times

Similar to the Weather Channel application, the New York Times hase an advertisement on the home page of the app.  While the New York Times has featured various different advertisers in it’s in-app advertising, they also fill those advertising spots with ads for their own content and features.  This was the case when I reviewed their advertising execution.

New York Times mobile advertisement

The NY Times runs ads on the bottom of the screen, as opposed to the Weather Channel which ran its ad on the top.  The landing domain m.nytimes.com is listed in the ad, along with clear messaging “Find movie showtimes.”

New York Times landing page

The landing page is optimized for a mobile device and lists current movies.  From there, the user can view showtimes or reviews from the New York Times.  The user can easily get the information they are looking for on this well optimized mobile page.  The conversion metric here may simply be click-throughs, however it is feasible that the NY Times is tracking clicks through to reviews and/or showtimes.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: A

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune iPhone-optimized site uses Google AdSense to serve advertising on the site.  The Tribune runs AdSense on the article pages of its iPhone site.  The Trib also runs small banner ads on the homepage of the site.  However, like the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune was advertising its own content, so I opted instead to take a look at the AdSense.

AdSense on Chicago Tribune

The ads on the Tribune’s iPhone site are located below the article.  It seems very likely that many users would finish reading the article and neglect to even look at the ads.  But, as Internet-marketers know, we don’t need many users clicking on the ads.  If we have enough traffic on the site, we just need a small percentage of the traffic clicking on ads, and that makes the system work.

University of Phoenix ad

I tapped on an ad for what appears to be a University of Phoenix affiliate site.  The landing page does not appear to be optimized for a mobile phone, however the page is very simple and actually works quite well as a mobile landing page.  The first page captures information such as citizenship status, prior level of education completed and email address.  Then, after tapping on the continue button, the user can submit additional information such as address, phone number, and whether or not they want a University of Phoenix representative to contect them.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: B+

ESPN

The ESPN iPhone optimized site serves ads on the top of the site, above all of the content.  It is similar to the Weather Channel and the New York Times in that it is analogous to what we think of as a traditional banner ad.

Knight ad on ESPN iPhone site

In this case, the ad includes the company name, a call to action and a landing page domain.  However, there is no indication of what is being advertised.  I am not familiar with Knight, and to be honest I have absolutely no clue what they are advertising.  I’m not sure if it’s software or an ISP or financial services or what.  With all of the other ads, I had at least a decent idea of what the advertisement was trying to push.

Knight ESPN iPhone ad landing page

After tapping on the banner ad, I found that the landing page was actually on the ESPN.com mobile site and not on an external site.  The landing page simply has a small amount of text from the advertiser and a URL.  However, the URL for www.knight.com is not clickable.  Despite trying to touch the URL to go to Knight.com, I was not able to be taken anywhere on the Knight website.  While the advertiser may be able to track click-throughs, they are not capturing visitor information to record any type of conversion.

Mobile Ad Execution Grade: D

Conclusion

Based on the four mobile advertisements reviewed, it appears that the biggest area of improvement for mobile advertisers is in the area of mobile usability.  Two of the four ads sent users to non-mobile  optimized landing pages, and another sent users to a page with the advertiser URL that couldn’t be clicked on.  Many of the advertisers were able to strike a good balance between short messaging and clear phrasing letting the user know what is being advertised.  Surprisingly, but thankfully, conversion tracking seems to be something that most of the advertisers had the capability of tracking.  While mobile advertising is certainly progressing, advertisers need to consider and account for the mobile medium when creating ads, as opposed to retro-fitting existing assets that are better suited for a user on a fully functional computer.

It’s important to know what your capabilities are, to know what you can accomplish.  It’s just as important to know what you cannot accomplish.  Today, I had one of those situations.

A former coworker of mine had a friend who is a photographer and who wanted to launch a new website.  My coworker referred him to me as potentially being able to help him with his search engine optimization efforts.  So today I received an email letting me know that he was interested in doing SEO, that he wanted to do things right from the start, and asked if I would take a look at one of the templates he was thinking about using.

Okay, wants to do SEO.  Cool!  Wants to get things right from the beginning.  Great!  Wants me to look at a template.  Hmmm.  Not necessarily terrible, but starting to put up red flags.

As I mentioned before, this gentleman was a photographer.  Sounds like it was a one-man operation.  Maybe he’s working with someone else, but it’s not a big company.  It’s your typical American small business, where efficiency is key, and squeezing the most out of every dollar is critical.

I took a look at the template that the photographer sent over.  It was from a company that builds templates specifically for photography studios, where the photographer basically just has to plug in their content, probably into a web-based interface, and they’re good to go with a pretty attractive website.

The template that the photographer was looking at, however, was a Flash template.  Totally, completely, 100% Flash.  One of those Flash sites where you take a look at the source code, and it’s about 25 lines, max.  A head section with a title but no meta description, and a body section that pretty much just puts in the Flash movie and that’s it.  All of the menus were in Flash, and there were no unique URLs between pages.  You know the kind.  A total, complete, 100% Flash SEO disasterpiece.

Next, I took a look at the competitive landscape.  I thought about what keywords I would use to find this type of business, and typed them into Google.  Every result on the first few pages had the keywords in the title tag, and many on the first page had the keywords in the URL.  I clicked through to some of the sites, and it was evident that many of them were doing some pretty serious SEO.  Clearly a very competitive arena.

I knew exactly what I needed to say to this guy.  I asked him to call me, and when he called, I told him that given the competitive landscape and some other factors, that his marketing dollars would probably be more effectively spent somewhere else, and not on SEO.

A home is only as good as the foundation it is built on.  The same goes for a website.  A templated website can be very attractive, and can get the job done, but in the long run you will likely have very difficult challenges when it comes to customizing the site and getting it to rank for competitive terms.  Add to that very limited resources (not just money, but time as well) and you are looking at a no-win situation.  I knew there was no chance I could take on this project and come out successful at the other end.

This doesn’t mean that the photographer’s business cannot be successful.  Or even that he cannot be successful driving leads from the web.  He may be able to drive leads cost effectively through paid search, through social sites or perhaps other ways.  But given the time, effort and money that would need to be invested into an SEO campaign for this site, relying on SEO to drive leads was not going to be a viable strategy.

It’s important to know when a project is going to be too much.  It could be a budget issue, where there is not enough money in the budget to invest in the amount of time needed for effective SEO.  It may be an expectations issue, where the clients expectations simply are incongruous with what can be reasonably attained.  It may be a structural issue, where the website architecture and platform do not allow for the types of changes necessary for effective SEO (this is also a bit of a budget issue).

Any way you slice it, you have to know what you can and cannot accomplish.  By not taking on projects that you know will not be successful, you will protect your own reputation, and will gain the respect of a potential client because you did not waste their hard-earned money.

If you are plugged in to my Twitter feed you may have already seen this, as I posted this earlier today.  I found this while I was doing some competitive analysis of the SEO efforts for Toyota and Honda, among others.

Both Honda and Toyota, among others, are getting Google Sitelinks to their deep pages.  We’ve all seen Sitelinks for companies whose websites are highly relevant for a specific query.  But I have never seen Sitelinks going to a deep page before.  Not only are they Sitelinks for a deep page, but they’re Sitelink for a deep page on a subdomain!

Google Sitelinks for Civic Deep Page

I think this is a great example of why very good internal site architecture is critical to search engine optimization.  Historically, automotive manufacturer websites have been experiential sites, often using a lot of Flash not only for the imagery but for the navigation menus as well.

Honda's Flash Navigation Menu

As experienced SEOs know, these Flash navigation menus create significant crawlability issues for the search engines.  Honda is using an HTML underlayer beneith their Flash naviation that mirrors their main Flash navigation.  Not only are they using an HTML underlayer, but they have programmed it so that they layout is attractive to the user.

Honda's HTML layer underneith Flash

It is important to point out here that using an HTML layer under your Flash is completely okay in the eyes of the search engines as long as you mirror the Flash content. If you create an HTML layer under your Flash and just plug a hundred different keywords, that’s not okay. But if the HTML text is a replicaiton of your Flash content, you should be in the clear.

Honda doesn’t muddy up their HTML layer. It is just a very basic, well-laid out replicaiton of their Flash navigation. The search engines can easily crawl these links, and if users have JavaScript or Flash turned off, they can still easily get to the deep pages of the site.

By creating very clear internal site architecture that can be easily crawled by search engines, even Honda’s deep pages have been able to achieve sitelinks. I would be curious to know the click-through rate and traffic increases for users whose search returns a Sitelinks result versus results that do not include Sitelinks. So far, I have seen some reported cases of traffic increases exceeding 30%.

If you are doing SEO for an e-commerce site, it is critically important to optimize your category pages.  In fact, there may be cases in which it is more important to optimize your category pages even more than your product pages.

Natural search visitors to your product pages with naturally convert well.  Odds are that the searcher used your branded phrase to come upon the listing for your product page and clicked through.  If someone knows exactly what brand and product they are looking for, to the point that they type those words into a search engine, they are very likely interested and more apt to convert.

Category pages are a slightly different beast.  Category pages are less likely to be high converting entrance pages, at least relative to your product pages.  Think about it: the user does a search for a generic term, say HDTVs.  There is a good chance that they will find a listing for a category page that has HDTVs of all different sizes, brands and price ranges.  At this point, they may just be doing research on a new TV.  They will browse through the category pages, click through to specific product and then back out to the category page.

Category pages will naturally have higher traffic than product specific pages.  This isn’t always the case, but it will be like this more times than not.  Visitors to these pages are in a different phase of the buying cycle, but they are in the buying cycle nonetheless and it is important to try to capture these visitors.

When optimized correctly, your category pages should have the opportunity to rank for more generic non-branded keyphrases, with the exception of brand level category pages which obviously would rank well for the specific brand phrase.  It can be easy to run into indexation issues with category pages that have many products and thus many pages, although this can be alleviated by creating work-arounds where search engines see all the products for the category on a single page.

When you do SEO for an ecommerce site, it is easy to give priority to optimizing product pages since that is where the conversion happens.  However, category pages get significant levels of traffic, and neglecting these pages can mean neglecting a very large audience that has a high likelihood of converting.