Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers

Yesterday, Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now presented another webinar jammed packed with useful information. This session entitled ‘Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers‘ was sponsored by iProspect and moderated by Claire Schoen.

Chris was a perfect speaker due to his experience covering search and search engines since 1994. He is the author of several books, including ‘Google Power’.

Chris started out the presentation by outlining that he’ll cover why we might want to go global, what types of campaigns work best and how to do it.

The first slide discussed the fact that a lot of people perceive that Google has taken over the earth. Yes, Google is dominant and if you are running a search marketing campaign, you understand that Google’s reach can give you that global coverage. Chris said we may ask ourselves why should we should bother going multinational since Google has a global reach. But, Chris believes there are other opportunities out there.

The market share and what the reality really is.....

comScore does a monthly report on worldwide search share. Google does have the dominant share - about 63% - that’s just under 2/3 of all the market share worldwide. Despite the all the media about the Yahoo/Microsoft merge, the reality is that Yahoo worldwide, they are number one in terms of the number of people who visit them. In terms of search - they are number 2. If you aren’t using Yahoo, you could be missing out on certain benefits - particularly worldwide.

The number 3 player is Baidu.com - they are the dominant player in China. Over time as the Internet expands in China, Chris believes those numbers for Baidu will go in the double digits very quickly.

There is a tie for number 4 - Microsoft sites and NHN Corp. Finally, the other 90+ search engines have a 13% market share. If you actually start drilling down you’ll find some of these players are dominant in certain regions.

Key Players (source comScore)

• Google totally dominates North America and most of Europe.
• Yahoo is dominant in Asia, except for:
  • China (Baidu 61%, Google 20%)
  • South Korea (Naver 74%, Google 4%)
  • Russia (RIndex 57%, Google 23%)

Why Go Global

Almost 1/6 of the population is out there searching and doing about 61 billion searches per month. If you drill down, 75% of all searches are outside North America. To Chris, that is the most compelling reason you want to consider doing a multinational search marketing campaign.

To Translate or Not

Chris posed the big question…‘do we have to go through the details of translating?’

• Depends on your goals. You can have a strictly English campaign and it will work best for global brands and products with the same name in all cultures.
• An alternative is to mix campaigns that mix and match English and target market language (keywords, ads, creative landing pages, etc). Takes a bit of experimenting to discover what works best with this mixed approach.

Key: Search Behavior

• Varies from country to country.
• Chris discussed how people use different search terms, have different eye tracking, and result scanning patterns, different click through styles. Studies have proven the differences between North American searchers and others - like those from China.
• This means you will likely need to do translation, search optimization and cultural optimization. You need to make your content appealing to the search engines and the searchers through their various needs that they are expressing through their search behaviour.

PPC or SEO or Both

• Chris counseled us that if we are going multinational, we will have to commit a reasonable amount of resources to ensure the campaign is successful. Even before we being, we should consider whether a paid search or natural search campaign is more likely to be effective in a given market.
• Sherman feels that in larger markets - you are probably o.k. to do either - or both if you have the resources.
• However, for smaller markets, you should consider each individually. (In smaller countries where you could be targeting the millions or hundreds of thousand of people - you need to carefully consider who is the market leader in those countries).

Targeting Your Markets

• Use your marketing department to carefully weigh the probability of ranking with both country size and internet reach. Remember that Internet reach varies greatly (example, China is under 20% while other countries have much greater Internet reach - but with a smaller population).
• Do you have sales and logistics resources in a market? May not need them and may be able to successfully do it all online, but if you can’t you need to have the resources in place.
• Are we able to handle shipping, different currencies, duties and taxes?
• What about support? Do our support people speak the language? People may want to call or send an email. Do we have the people in place to handle this?

All of these things will impact whether the search marketing campaign can be successful.

Process

• First thing is to find good translators
  • Must know local idioms (need to understand the local dialect, terms etc).
  • Must be able to translate unique or technical terms for your product, service or brand
• Translate text, images and navigation. A lot of people overlook translating images and navigation - you need to make the user experience rock solid.
• Crucial - Make sure SEO is involved from the beginning. Don’t want to do SEO as an afterthought - get them involved right from beginning so that you’ll end up with a more effective website and the SEO specialists can help you avoid potentially costly mistakes.

Optimized Translated Content

• Chris warned us that English content that’s optimized does not automatically become search friendly when translated. Translation is an art and may alter the content in such as way that it doesn’t rank well at all in your target market.
• Similarly, you can’t simply translate English PPC ads and landing pages.
• Tip: Translate your keyword list first, before any other content. Get a good sense of those critical keywords that you are hoping to capture with the searchers.

The Long Tail Varies

• The long tail means targeting less common keywords or phrases - that long tail exists in all other languages but it is not the same in all other languages.
• Romance language searches tend to use fewer, more common words.
• English & Dutch/German searchers tend to use more terms and less common terms. Right now, long tail will probably be more effective in those languages.
• Paradox? In the UK - nine keywords account for 5% of all searches.

What About Duplicate Content

• Chris said he is often questioned about duplicate content in multinational campaigns. If you have the same language content on multiple servers in different countries, you may be subject to duplicate content penalties. Be aware, but don’t necessarily be alarmed. They may only be trying to find the main source of your content, regardless of where you are located in the world. However, if you are finding that search engines are getting confused, you may need to do some work changing content, or putting it into other formats etc. Really boils down to your individual situation.
• Content translated into different languages and hosted in different countries is not duplicate content to search engines (at least today…) May change but today isn’t a concern.

The Right Domain

What should the right domain be - a dot.com or a country specific domain?

• Boils down to your intent. If possible, go for both - especially for companies trying to target regions with regional pride, you will want to go for country specific domain.
• For example, IBM has one global website, with subdomains for individual countries.
• Sony, by contrast has local domains in all countries.
• Be careful of those ‘choose your country’ top level pages! If you have a dot.com and are going to redirect to another country - don’t make those pages search engine hostile! You want the search engine to be able to find the country specific domains. Make sure navigation on homepage - no matter what you do with it -better not block the crawlers from finding the content on all the different websites you create.

IP Address COnsiderations

IP Address gives the physical location of where the server is based.

• Chris said he has found that when search engines are ranking content, they will look at the IP address to decide whether it should give more weight in country specific results to sites with local IP addresses.
• Challenge: legal or residency requirements in some countries. In some cases, you may need to prove you have some legal presence in that country before you can get a local IP address.
• Google’s webmaster tools allow you to specify country, and Microsoft says this capability is coming.

Crucial - Localized Links

• Localized links are crucial when you are going into a multinational campaign. It is not enough to translate and set up a site in a different country.
• As with any site, it needs links pointing to it to rank well in search engines.
• And most of these links need to come from local authority sites, not from the mother ship or out of country sites.

Multi Country PPC

• Can be the most cost effective way to have multinational reach.
• Geotargeting can be very precise.
• Translate both ads and landing pages.
• Use PPC as a research tool to help identify most effective keywords in a specific language/country.

Global Brands in Multiple Countries

• For global brands in multiple countries, Chris suggested we trust the offline brand experts here.
• Some cultures like and accept global brands (ex. China) - others prefer homegrown, localized brands.
• Especially important - emphasizing brand attributes in a culturally appropriate way. You have to be sensitive to that and don’t neglect images!

Consider Smaller Markets

• PDF report ‘Global Search Report 2007′ by einternet is available online and has a wealth of information.
• Ex. China is on track to become the number one in terms of searches on the Internet but they have a low penetration of the population. Conversely, Denmark has 70% penetration and there is another search engine beyond Google that is popular. Report is full of good information that can help companies choose smaller markets.

Conclusion

• Chris concluded by stating that multinational search marketing offers a very appealing way to reach more customers, but it is not for everybody.
• Success requires deep, localized knowledge of markets. If you don’t have that knowledge, you need to reach out to a partner that has that knowledge.
• Campaigns must be optimized and tailored for both language and culture. Not enough just to take optimized content, translate, and expect it to work in another country. Have to tailor that information for the language and culture you are trying to target.

After this very informative presentation, there were a few minutes for questions.

How would we find out about legal residency requirements? - If you are trying to establish a site in a specific country, the hosts in that country will spell out what is require. For example, in Australia you need an Australia Business Number. Go directly to a particular host based in a country and find out the requirements that are necessary to actually register a site there.

How do you find translating services in a specific country? You can go on the web and find translation services, the key there is to get a translation service that can also work with an optimizer. The best thing to do is seek out a local SEM firm or a global SEM firm and see what they can do because they are probably going to have the contacts to do this type of work. Do not rely on automated translation systems - these are rough only and will backfire in an overall search marketing campaign.

Directories? They are emerging as a good resource and they are gradually becoming better at accommodating advertising needs. Directories are very good if you have the time and resources to find the good ones. They can give you very good reach for not a lot of cost/effort.

Source: http://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/02/13/multi-national-search-marketing-effective-strategies-for-global-marketers/

The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing

Social media is hot. Everyone wants to be on Digg's home page. Link baiting, especially using things like numbered lists, imperative rules or controversial hooks is the SEM strategy du jour. There's just one -- major -- problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users.

Social media traffic does not monetize.

Social media is easy to hype because there is a lot of traffic on social media sites. But if you try to do anything with social media traffic to convert it to revenue, you will be hard-pressed -- unless you are selling CPM-based advertising.

Google, in its 2007 Q4 results press conference, complained that it was having trouble monetizing social media websites. When I set up an AdWords campaign today, Google recommended I try the MySpace network. They are desperate to get anyone they can advertising on that network because the traffic has so little implied intent and so little value, and Google is already locked into an expensive partnership.

Man eats world's largest turkey in single sitting

Who would read the above line and be inspired to buy?

Trying to appeal to larger web communities using shock and awe, at the expense of creating content that your community and subscribers find relevant, costs you trust and attention with each swing and a miss. When you finally hit a homerun and get exposure on social media sites, most of those people leave within 30 seconds. Few link to your site, few buy, and few subscribe.

Leading publishers even worry about too much social media traffic deflating their CPM ad rates. And StumbleUpon, a leading social media site, sells traffic for 5 cents a visitor. So is it really worth the effort to target social media?

Why social media usually fails

Within your own field you likely know what people care about, why they care about it, and key emotional touchpoints that you can appeal to. But if you can't get exposure in your own market it is going to be even harder to appeal to larger and less related markets.

When social media actually works

The most effective way to target social media is to find something on a network that already relates to what you are doing and co-brand it, rather than trying to create a new hit from scratch.

Community gold

Get featured or referenced on a site like Search Engine Land and thousands of people interested in SEO and SEM are going to see that reference. If you create useful content and get covered by leading editorial channels in your field, what are the odds that some of the people who passionately subscribe to content directly related to your topic will also read, subscribe to, link to, trust, and/or buy from your site? Many will.

The relevancy is so great that you do not need a large stream of traffic to create a lot of value. Why does search work? Great relevancy. Why does social media work? It usually doesn't, at least when you factor in opportunity cost.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/080214-080046.php

What is your robots.txt file telling your competitors about you?

Have you ever thought about your robots.txt file, beyond how the various crawlers interact with it? Chances are that if you have one, you probably haven’t looked at it in since the day you created it. Well, it is time you take a fresh look at it and see how it looks not just to a bot’s eyes, but look at it through the eyes of a competitor.

You would be surprised at the number of sites and companies who use their robots.txt file as a way to keep bots out of certain directories on their site, but not considering the fact they have just pretty much handed the keys to those private areas over to their competitors. How? Because many people create their robots.txt file thinking that if the bots aren’t indexing those pages, no one will find it… but when you include those directories in your robots.txt file, you are telling real people exactly where those directories are. And surprisingly, many of those “secret” directories allow competitors to access it without requiring any kind of authentication or password.

Another thing people often give away in their robots.txt file is what they are working on adding to the site, even if they haven’t officially announced it yet. And of course, since webmasters are thinking future SEO value even in pre-launch, the directory names are always very telling because they are often keyword rich. One client was able to launch an entire section to their site because they noticed their competitor was doing something very similar when the directory popped up in the competitor’s robots.txt file but before they had either announced it or officially added it to the site. And like any good businessperson, my client beat them to the punch and launched it first. If only that competitor hadn’t jumped the gun by robots.txt-ing it, my client would have been none the wiser until launch day.

When you are working on something that you plan to launch in the future - especially launch with a splash to get publicity on it, don’t put it in your robots.txt file… all you need is a competitor to come along and see your robots.txt entry to discover what you are working on (and worse yet, if you end up having that directory open so they can spy on all your work-in-progress) and then launch their own copy of it first. Ideally, it should be completely password protected or done on a test domain that isn’t connected to your site.

Don’t want to worry about what your competitors are seeing in your robots.txt file? Carefully look at it and see what it is revealing. Do you have a super secret directory listed on there? Remove it from the robots.txt file, password protect those pages and add the no robots meta tag on those pages for good measure.

Are you working on something new for the site but haven’t announced or launched it yet? Again, password protect it or move it to a completely different unassociated domain you can lock down with robots.txt (since hopefully your competitor won’t know about that site). Or the best solution is to simply leave it offline except for brief testing periods pre-launch. This means if you want to check how it is working online, you upload it for only the amount of time you need to see it, and then delete it off the server.

Play it smart with your robots.txt file so you don’t inadvertantly hand your competitors the keys to your site or give them the edge up by alerting them to what you are working on. And for fun, check out some of your competitor’s robots.txt files… you can usually find something interesting on at least one or two of them.

Source: http://www.jenniferslegg.com/2008/02/12/what-is-your-robotstxt-file-telling-your-competitors-about-you/#more-56

The SEO Success Pyramid

John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach ever, never talked to his teams about winning. He talked to them about preparation and about the process of becoming a great team.

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. (Seriously, if you don’t know what his Pyramid of Success is, visit CoachJohnWooden.com.)

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

I would never compare myself to John Wooden, but I do like teaching others about online marketing. So, with that in mind, and inspired by the great coach, here is the….

SEO Success Pyramid

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment:

Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning:

Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different.

Product/Service:

Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information:

You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience:

True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability:

Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research:

If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics:

How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools:

Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability:

A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc.

Content:

This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links:

Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability:

Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible.

Reputation Management:

It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust:

In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/

Five Simple Linkbait Metrics (& How To Measure Them Cheaply)

Many people jump into social media marketing because they feel they "should be doing it". Many times companies don't take the time to identify their goals and why they want to engage in a campaign. Identifying and measuring social media metrics can be easy and inexpensive. Here are some simple things to keep in mind and free ways to track them. This list is based on a viral marketing / linkbait campaign where you are tracking one URL.

Traffic. Is your goal to get more traffic? Are you looking for more brand recognition? Do you have CPM based advertising on your website? Measuring traffic generated by a viral campaign is one of the simplest benchmarks. Simply measure the traffic generated to the specific URL through your web analytics package. Check out Tamar's great breakdown of 6 Free (or nearly free) analytics packages here.

Links. Are you looking to naturally build links to help with your search engine optimization efforts? Linkbaiting can be extremely effective for this but you should track where the links are coming from and whether or not they are helping you. I recommend checking links at the 1 and 7 day marks using either Technorati or Google Blog Search. Then at the 30 day mark using Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools (use this FireFox plugin from Joost de Valk for extra info). Simply put the full URL (yourdomain.com/viral-piece.htm for example) into any of those engines and see who is linking back to you.

Buzz. Are people talking about you or your company due to the social media work you are doing? You need to know who's saying what and most normal search engines won't track this. You can use free services such as Serph to help track what's being said in places like forums and social networks. You can use Serph to search for things like your company name, the title of your linkbait piece or tool, etc.

Bookmarks. Bookmarks will tell you how many people felt your content was important enough to want to revisit at a later time or share with their own network. There are tons of online bookmarking sites out there but I like to use del.icio.us to gauge the overall interest level. Simply go to the del.icio.us URL page and input your full URL (as explained above) - it will then tell you how many people have bookmarked your site and the different tags they used (which is important to see if people are tagging it with what you had intended).

Conversions. At the end of the day everything should come down to this and many people want to discount direct sales via social media marketing but that should never be the case. I firmly believe that you should craft your viral pieces in a way that will help to generate conversions and track them closely for such. Sometimes this might have to come after you have launched you have promoted your piece via the major social networks but other times it might be the whole goal. Define what conversions you want to have happen and then track each. Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Subscribe to your RSS feed? BUY YOUR PRODUCTS? You can do this simply and for free using Google Analytics.

With these different metrics, its important to put a realistic expectation for each in place before you launch your campaign. Think about what you want to accomplish and define your goals as specifically as you can get. Tracking your results and measuring them against your goals is the most effective way to tell if your efforts were successful and had a positive return on your investment (whether that investment be through time or money).

Source: http://searchengineland.com/080205-084849.php

10 common errors when implementing accessibility

Web developers attempting to build accessible websites often make the same mistakes time and time again. Although they're trying their hardest sometimes their overzealousness gets in the way and actually hinders the accessibility of their websites.

The below 10 guidelines tell you what not to do, so you too don't fall foul to these same common accessibility errors...

1. Don't use verbose ALT text

Accessible web developers often insert far too much ALT text on to images, in the hope that this will help screen reader users. ALT text for information-based images should be short and succinct, and contain no more and no less information than what's in the image.

Decorative images should always be given null ALT text, or alt="", so that they're ignored by screen readers. Assigning ALT text that adds no real value makes it harder for screen reader users to work through the page as so much unnecessary content is being sent in their direction.

2. Don't use random characters to separate links

One of the more minor accessibility guidelines states that adjacent links should be separated with non-link text. The reason this guideline exists is that some very old web browsers had problems with adjacent links, whereby they ended up making all adjacent links point to the same page.

This guideline is no longer relevant but can often cause accessible web developers to insert invisible characters (usually vertical bars) in between links. Unfortunately, each vertical bar is announced to screen reader users as ‘vertical bar’, which is of course nonsensical and makes it harder for these users to work through the page.

3. Don't insert text into empty form fields for the sake of it

Another old and outdated guideline states that any empty form field should have placeholding text inside of it. This guideline originally existed as very old screen readers weren't always able to pick up empty form fields.

All major screen readers now pick up empty form fields (and have done so for some time now) so it's safe to ignore this guideline and not insert pointless text into a form field. Indeed, screen readers often don't announce this placeholding text so screen reader users may enter their text in addition to the placeholding text without realising it.

4. Don't use access keys

You can assign access keys to any links or form items so as to provide keyboard shortcuts to them. In theory this sounds like a great idea as screen reader and keyboard-only users should easily be able to activate key links from anywhere on any page.

Access keys shouldn't however be used as they can override keyboard shortcuts for screen readers, rendering key screen reader functionality useless. The other problem with access keys is there's no convention so the few sites that use them do so in whichever way they choose. Site visitors are unlikely to spend the time getting accustomed to your website's particular access keys.

5. Don't use the table summary (unless it actually adds value)

The table summary can be inserted on to any HTML table and is essentially a summary of what the table is. Screen readers read aloud table summaries before reading through the table, providing them with a summary of the table content prior to listening to the whole table.

The table summary should always be omitted from a layout table. Websites using a tabular layout sometimes have table summaries of ‘layout table’ which of course add no value at all.

Even with data tables, a table summary is only needed if there's insufficient information provided about the table on the page (which isn't usually the case).

6. Don't forget about the content

The way that content is structured on any website is an enormous part of accessibility. A website may be perfectly coded and conform to the highest coding standards. If its content is poorly structured though, the site will prove difficult to impossible for some special needs web users.

There are a number of important accessible content considerations, some of which include:
Front-loading content so that each paragraph begins with the conclusion
Ensuring content has been broken down into manageable chunks with descriptive sub-headings
Using lists wherever appropriate
Ensuring that plain and simple language is used

7. Don't worry too much about accessibility statements

Many websites attempting to offer great accessibility create lengthy and what they believe to be helpful accessibility statements. Typically these pages contain information on the accessibility features of the website, how to resize the text etc.

In reality, disabled web users very rarely look at accessibility statements. As web users we don't tend to consult 'help' guides on any site - rather, we stumble along attempting to complete our goals. Although there's nothing wrong with making an accessibility statement page there's no need to spend too much time on it as it won't really be used.

8. Don't agonise over acronyms and abbreviations

Declaring whether something is an acronym or abbreviation is easy to do in the HTML, simply by using the [acronym] or [abbr] tags. The full acronym or abbreviation can then be expanded upon within this tag.

Screen readers don't support these tags though so they don't really offer much of a benefit to these users. The users they benefit are sighted, mouse-using web users - when they mouse over one of these items the full expansion of the acronym or abbreviation appears as a tooltip. This can certainly be viewed as a small usability enhancement but doesn't really count as an accessibility benefit.

9. Don't change the tab order (unless you have a very good reason to do so)

The tabindex attribute can be used to change the on-page tabbing order but is rarely necessary. The default tabbing order is usually perfectly logical so doesn't need changing.

Screen reader and keyboard-only users tab through links and form items in the order in which they're placed in the HTML source code. Provided that users tab within each section roughly from top-left to bottom-right (which they will) then the tab order is perfectly adequate.

10. Don't forget to listen with a screen reader

Whilst you're building your accessible website don't forget to keep testing the pages as you build them. In particular, you'll want to listen to them with a screen reader to check that accessibility features you've implemented do work as planned.

For example, if you've inserted invisible text to aid screen reader users using display: none; you'll find that this won't actually be read aloud. Screen readers ignore text with this CSS command assigned to it so position the text off screen instead.


Source:     http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/errors.shtml

How to Deal with Negative Search Engine Results

Negative search engine results pages (SERP’s) can be a huge turn-off for people looking to use a company’s products or services. In fact, it’s estimated that 40% of people who do see a negative search engine result are put off completely and simply won’t use a company.

These are not search results that you aren’t ranking for, but search results that revolve around your brand name, staff names, product names or even service names. They tend to be ranking highly (otherwise they wouldn’t be much of an issue) and are negative in one way or another, something no business owner likes to have.

Examples

Before I dive in and explain the best ways to clear these things up, I thought I would share some examples of what you might not want to see.

1. Paypal

Paypal are a very large, eBay owned payment processor and are incredibly well known. Services like these have to be trusted if they are going to handle your money, yet there’s a high ranking website named ‘Paypal Sucks‘.

2. Telkom

Telkom are a major communications provider in South Africa (a bit like BT in England) and are a heavy criticised company throughout the county. A quick search on their name provides an unflattering micro-site named Hellkom.

How to Deal with Negative Results

1. Start Creating New Pages to Rank Higher

This one is simple and probably the most obvious. If somebody is ranking highly for a product or service name, create extra pages on your own domain. You should have the authority and relevance for those key terms so if you are creating more relevant pages (such as a Product FAQ) then those should start ranking higher as well.

This is not removing the negative search engine results but it is pushing them further out of sight.

2. Create New Pages / Profiles on Other Sites

Not only can you get more positive pages ranking on your own site but you can also get pages on other sites ranking well. Such ways to do this could be creating a lens on Squidoo and a page on Hubpages then sending some links back to them.

Profiles sites also tend to work well such as MySpace, Wikihow or even Twitter. These rank well because the domains have some authority but if the negative results have authority they aren’t going to rank on their own.

3. Respond to the Negative Issue if Possible

I’m sure if Paypal or Telkom got in touch with their negative counter-parts, a simple plea wouldn’t be enough to get the site owners to take down their domains. However, if the issue is a blog or forum post, try and respond to it in a professional manner and help the person if you can.

This is for the simple fact that one day, somebody will probably find the page anyway so if there’s something positive and you are showing good customer service then you might just save yourself from another person being put off what you have to offer.

4. Create your Own Negative Results

This might seem cheeky to some or a little crazy, but it works. Simple as that. Basically the thought process behind this is that people look for negativity before trusting to use a service. Therefore, terms like ‘Company problems’, ‘Company issues’ may be part of their search vocabulary.

To counteract this, you can create positive articles that cover those negative keywords i.e. ‘Company Name: No Problem lowering Prices’. If you get a little creative you can apply this to many keywords and really protect yourself from those inquisitive searchers.

5. Be a Better Company

We all understand that companies have their critics, who doesn’t. Often, those critics pick up on pesky details that is more their problem rather than with a company or its services. Other times, you have to be honest with yourself and think whether you could handle certain services or situations better to benefit the customer.

If you are getting a lot of people complaining about something, solve the issue and get back to them. Be transparent in your dealings or the negative search engine results you have now will only continue to get worse.

Source: http://www.viperchill.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-negative-search-engine-results/