Widget: What do you mean by that?

As widgets -- those little chunks of code that allow "page-within-a-page" interaction on a website -- become more popular on the web, I foresee confusion.

The word "widget" has always been used as a placeholder for a type of product in business textbooks and off-the-cuff examples. But now that it's being used as the name of an actual marketing tool, will textbook makers and business school professors stop using the word? A professor saying "Acme Corporation makes widgets" can now have a whole new meaning. Is the professor trying to say Acme is simply manufacturing a generic product that isn't relevant to the conversation at hand, or is Acme an online development firm that specializes in producing interactive bits of code?

Use customized pages or DHTML pop-ups to keep searchers on your site longer

One of the reasons Google is such an effective site from a usability standpoint is that it's able to get users to the information they're looking for in as few clicks as possible, and with as little effort as possible. Your website should strive to do the same, whether it's reducing the user's path to a particular piece of content, or by making suggestions for content that you know a particular user will find relevant.

An idea I've been advocating for quite some time is customizing pages on your website based on the
entry path to your site. So for example, if the person comes to your site after doing a Yahoo search for "widgets", why not show them a page that says "Welcome Yahoo user! Thanks for searching for 'widgets'. Here are several links that might take you to what you're interested in." Of course the content on that page itself is usually going to be relevant to their search on widgets, but why not customize the experience and offer them more information that might help?

Back in March I stumbled upon a great example of this. Forbes serves a dynamic HTML (DHTML) pop-up for traffic that's originating from a Google search. The pop-up offers a welcome to Google users and links to several stories that are related to the user's search on Google (probably powered by Forbes' own site search). This image shows an example. I did a Google search on "logistics" and clicked the Forbes link, and here's what I saw when I reached the Forbes site.

I don't know how long Forbes has been doing this -- perhaps it's something they've been doing for a long time and I've never seen it before. But I tried it again today and it still worked, so they haven't given up on the tactic. So that leads me to believe it's effective at extending the visit length of site users, since I'd imagine they would have discontinued the practice by now if it wasn't.

You could easily implement this practice for traffic that's originating from other major sources -- perhaps a partner's website, someone who links to you and drives a lot of traffic, other search engines or directories, etc. Forbes is doing the same thing for Yahoo search traffic, and possibly others as well.

Lock up your web forms: Google has started indexing the "invisible web"!

Webmasters and web marketing managers should be sure to read a recent post in the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google is beginning to submit web forms in an effort to find additional content that resides behind them.

It's part of Google's effort to index the "invisible web" -- pages that aren't currently being spidered by the Googlebot. Up until now, when the Google spider hit a page that required you to fill out a form to continue, it would stop there. But now Google says that in some situations, the spider will attempt to submit the form so it can find out what's on the other side.

Is this good or bad? I'd say it's more good than bad. It's good for web searchers who use Google. And it can be good for webmasters and marketers, as long as you're aware of Google's new spidering policy and you design your web forms with the Googlebot's new capabilities in mind.

Take a typical B2B landing page. It's a single page with an offer -- let's say "Download our latest white paper on widgets!". But in order to get the white paper PDF, the visitor needs to fill out the form. Under the old rules, Google wouldn't be able to get to that white paper because it was housed behind the form.

But with this new initiative, Google might try to fill out that form and get to the white paper. Once it gets there, it would spider the white paper (because of course Google can index PDFs) and the white paper might appear in search results. So if someone types in "Widgets" and your white paper is relevant enough, it could appear high in the search results and people could be viewing it thanks to Google -- without filling out the form!

So if you have critical pieces of content like white papers that you don't want to appear in Google searches, make sure you exclude those form pages in your robots.txt file. (A simple Google search can tell you how to edit your site's robots.txt file.)