Depending on the nature of your site, Help and FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions) can span a few or many pages.

Building up these sections of your site can greatly enhance your visitor’s experience with your website. These pages are often sought out by shoppers who are looking for just a bit more information to help them feel confident about their purchase.

Building comprehensive Help and FAQ pages gives your visitors confidence that you’re there to provide them the information and help they need to be comfortable purchasing from you. Solidly built pages can often reduce visitor confusion, lessen support call frequency, and create higher conversion rates as more shoppers are satisfied and confident that you can meet their needs.

Help pages

Help pages should not be limited to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) but should provide links to user guides, contact details, product support, customer support downloads, and anything else that will guide your visitors to the answers they seek.

Avoid marketing

Help and FAQ pages should not contain any marketing hype or sales material. These pages are there simply to guide your visitors to the answers they seek. Stick to the basics.

Info search

If your site has a search function and robust Help and FAQ sections, it can be helpful to allow visitors to search these sections exclusively. If the information being sought cannot be found in the Help or FAQ sections, the search should produce more results from the rest of the site.

Printable text

Help sections should be printable, or have printer-friendly versions. Visitors often print up the answers to their questions to show other decision makers. Having easy-to print pages benefits you and your visitors.

The most important aspect of your Help and FAQ pages is that they are robust enough to answer as many potential questions that can be determined in advance. You’ll also want to update these frequently as new questions get asked and answered.

I’ve seen a few conversations recently where people have suggested building generic over niche sites, as a general way to develop a stronger presence online.

The most recent is Rand Fishkin’s Five Reasons Why It’s Better to be Big & Popular than Small & Niche.

The trouble is, Rand’s post confuses niche development with microsites IMO.

Microsites vs niche

My personal definition of a microsite is something created just to target a specific keyword. I’d say MFA sites play on this a lot. It’s not really anything to do with targeting a niche - it’s just a narrow string of keywords. You set up a site, just to have some kind of limited presence in that area.

Niche sites in the proper sense, as I use it, actively develop themselves into useful resources in their niche. And the amazing thing about hitting a niche is that it’s incredibly easy to become an authority in a niche, especially in emergent markets. Anyone with SEO/marketing knowledge already has an unfair advantage here.

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Last week I discussed the best tactics for achieving rankings in Yahoo, the web’s number 2 most popular search engine.

Now it is time to pick on the third most used search property - MSN, which has 6.6% of the search market (src: Hitwise) and is currently found at www.live.com. MSN’s ranking algorithm has its own nuances which will be noted in this article but in many cases the rules of optimization may be the same as Yahoo’s in which case I will occasionally duplicate information from my “How to Optimize for Yahoo” article or source it for more information.

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I got into a very engaging conversation yesterday with a web developer at work on the topic of social aspects of the web.

So, what does social really mean?

According to Answers.com it is defined as: Living together in organized groups or similar close aggregates.

So what does social mean on the Internet (also known as a social network)?

According to Wikipedia it is defined as: A map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.

The discussion started with an assumption that blogs are social entities on the Internet, whereas other (traditional) websites are not.

So, this led to a very specific question, are blogs inherently social?

I think not. A blog is actually short for web log as know as an online journal. This is not anything that implies social. in fact a journal is not a conversation, rather a form of communication that has a single path. Now, many blogs, just like this one, allows comments from readers and that is a social aspect, however, the blog is not defined by it’s social aspects, rather the social aspects are defined by the blog.

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Posing a Monday Question, Sandy asks:

“Like you, I’m a writer by training and since become a SAHM (stay at home mum), I’ve mastered the basics of blogging and writing articles and am starting to get into simple product creation.

Some of this other stuff like SEO is beyond me. I bought a couple of dummies books and know some basic HTML and can do a simple page. But the PHP and MySQL programming stuff is way beyond me. Help! I am feeling overwhelmed and although I’m doing ok now, I can’t help feeling that I won’t be able to master it all.

Please advise what I can do about this.”

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This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs.

For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out. These observations are relevant for any business blog:

* Don’t make readers register or login to make a comment. What, you’re too lazy to manage all the comment spam? Or install a better spam filter? You’re lucky to get people to your blog in the first place. Why make it inconvenient to interact?

* Please don’t publish content in PDF of MS Word format that would be just as fine as a web page. I hear you saying, what? Yes, there are a few blogs out there that post using a blog content management system, but publish longer articles, white papers, etc in other formats. At least warn readers before they click on the link.

* Why oh why must so many blogs make it difficult to subscribe? Get an RSS button up above the fold. Add your RSS url to an auto discovery tag in the head template. If you really want to capture extra readers, add an RSS to email option like the one offered at Feedblitz.

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Blogs are an evolution, and keeping it up is a big commitment.

Usually you end up focusing on just creating new content on some sort of consistent interval, but the biggest problem with keeping a blog up to date is revising all those elements you once thought you would use, but now realize are not useful at all. This is my 400th blog post on this blog, and I recently rebranded the blog slightly to make the name simpler. Now I am thinking about to carry through the theme of simplicity to improve the user experience on the blog even further. Here’s my list of ways that I plan to rethink the interface of my blog or have elements I have already replaced:

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Is it possible to steal customers looking for your competition in Google Maps? It not only appears as if you can, but it might be trivially easy and somewhat troubling that it’s possible.

It’s also a good reason why it’s important to register your business with Google Maps and other local search services and have at the very least a single page website listing your company info.

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