Mad flow from The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) is back with another marketing rap. This time he describes how web standards and proper design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on your site.

Lyrics:

Your site design is the first thing people see
It should be reflective of you and the industry
Easy to look at with a nice navigation
When you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
A clear call to action to increase the temptation
Use appealing graphics they create motivation
If you have animation
Use with moderation
Cause search engines can’t index the information
Display the logos of all your associations
Highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
Create a clean design you can use some decoration
But to try to prevent any client hesitation
Every page that they click should provide an explanation
Should be easy to understand like having a conversation
When you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
But make sure you use correct color combinations
Do some investigation, look at other organizations
But don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
Design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
Follow these instructions when you move into production
Your photoshop functions then slice that design
Do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
Make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
Remove font type, font color and font size
No background colors, keep your coding real neat,
Tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
Better results with xml and css
Now you making progress, a lil closer to success
Describe your doctype so the browser can relate
Make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
Check in all browsers, I do it directly
Gotta make sure that it renders correctly
Some use IE, some others use Flock
Some use AOL, I use Firefox
Title everything including links and images
Don’t use italics, use emphasis
Don’t use bold, please use strong
If you use bold that’s old and wrong
When you use CSS, you page will load quicker
Client satisfied like they eating on a Snickers
They stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
And then they convert now that’s the real kicker
Make you a lil’richer, your site a lil slicker
Design and code right man I hope you get the picture
What I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
If it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
Everyone will want to follow you like Twitter
Competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
If you trying to grow your company will get bigger
Design and code right man can you get with it

Thanks to Lucas for this one.

Since I posted the item about Briton’s use of porn online I’ve seen a steady flow of traffic from the search phrase “Porn Online”.

Trawling back through my online traffic metrics, and I’ve pulled out some of the more interesting or peculiar search terms that have some relationship to pornography over the past few years. In no particular order, they are:

• there’s something about miriam porn
• photos of japanese pornographic ladies
• hermaphrodite sex pics

…and for the pièce de résistance, there is:

jakob nielsen sex

Now, why anybody would be entering that as a search term, I have no idea. Furthermore, how people have reached my site using that term is simply a laugh. However, I can see that I would be getting traffic from the combination of the terms “Nielsen” and “porn” due to the aforementioned article, even though it is a different “Nielsen”

So, now I bet you’re wondering who Jakob Nielsen is? He’s the self-confessed king of usability. Ok… that’s cool you’re thinking, but is he a good looker? Well, I’ll leave that one up to you.

Google takes another step towards global domination with its new product Google Romance.

Whilst it is currently in beta, Google Romance will be a place where you can post all types of romantic information and by Soulmate Searchâ„¢, get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life. Then they’ll send you both parties on a Contextual Dateâ„¢, which Google pays for while delivering you relevant ads that Google’s advertising partners think will help produce the dating results you’re looking for.

Potential names could include: Snoogle, Shaggle or even just Ogle. Here’s the press release.

Anyway, here’s a few of Google’s previous April Fools jokes here, here and here.

More lists! This time we turn to Google for their annual zeitgeist. From top search terms in general to the significant and seemingly frivolous events of 2005, here’s their view on what we Googled.

What I did find interesting was the traffic levels for BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera at the times of the London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. It’s not suprising that there was a massive traffic spike for the BBC when the London bombings occured, but what struck me was that there is a significant delta in the mean traffic between BBC and CNN. Considering the sheer population of the United States, I thought it would be enough to outweigh that of its peer. Perhaps it gives one an insight into which news source is more respected. I know I use BBC as my first point of call for international news.