Around the middle of Janurary, Google rolled out “Search Plus Your World” (hereon called SPYW), which means that logged-in users will get their organic search results augmented with socially shared content and markup, ostensibly from Google+. Danny Sullivan already wrote up two pieces about that (Google’s Results Get More Personal & Real-Life Examples of How Search Plus Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy), which cover the changes brilliantly, so I suggest reading those, before carrying on.
In case you didn’t read them though, the important points are that when you’re logged in, you’ll see:
Normal web listings, as they would normally be
Normal listings pushed up or down, by your search history, and/or social connections
Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos, and
Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you
There’s a bigger picture here though, and to see it we have to move beyond what Google+ is, and on to what it represents, bearing in mind Larry Page’s recent statement:
This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.
That sounds like Larry trying to channel a bit of the late Steve Jobs. A unified, beautiful product, and if you don’t like it, get out.
The Pledge
In magic, every trick has three parts: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. In the pledge, you’re shown something ordinary, like a deck of cards or a book. You’re asked to inspect it, to check it’s real. The point is of course, whatever is going on is so subtle that you won’t see it, even when looking. In the turn, the magician takes back the item and makes it do something extraordinary. A card gets shuffled in the pack, and the magician blindfolded. The book is shredded and the person put in another room. The places are set for something amazing to happen.
And then we get the prestige: the card is inside the bottom of your shoe, or the magician has had someone else write down a word, and it’s the one you chose. The part where everything defys the laws of nature and is put back together.
So what’s Google’s Pledge? Well, it’s to build a search engine. Lots of people were doing it back when they started. But they did a good job, and removed the clutter, and build a good product and refined it and many years later, here we are. They’ve monetised it well, and become a verb and done all the things that aspiring Valley companies aim to do.
The clever part though, was not stepping on too many toes along the way. By (pretty much) staying a search engine (although what they searched got bigger), Google quietly trundled along.
The Turn
And then Google got weird. Forays in to social, sponsoring of projects that had no real basis in searching for things. Gmail, a great product for email, but bearing no real relationship to search arrived. And the Android came along. Again, an interesting product, with no relationship to search. And most recently, Google+.
With all these projects, it looks like Google’s trying to compete with dominant players in an important space – with Gmail it was Hotmail and Yahoo, in the case of Android, Apple (and iOS specifically), and with Google+, obviously the target is Facebook.
But here’s the thing, saying that they’re trying to compete with those services misses the point. In waiting for the prestige, people keep forgetting that Google swapped the order of the trick around. But the trick takes so long to pull off, everyone forgot that they were told what would happen.
The Prestige
You can actually see what the prestige will be, over on Google’s About page…
Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Our goal with search has always been to provide the most relevant results possible. That’s why for years we’ve been working on social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your social connections no matter what site it’s on. Search plus Your World doesn’t change who has access to content, it simply helps people rediscover information they already have access to. We’ve taken special care with our new features to provide robust security protections, transparency and control for our users.
Google doesn’t care about social, or mapping, or your inbox, or even search really. Google cares about information; specifically storing it and holding it in a format that’s useful, so when you go to look for something they’ve got the answer, and ads to show you alongside it.
The Future
Google will continue to expand in to everything. They’ll push new technologies in every sector, so as they take off, it’ll fund their insatiable appetite for information. They’re working on driverless cars which will be vastly safer and more environmentally friendly. And of course, they’ll be able to suggest restaurants to you on the journey, and know your travel patterns and be able to advertise to you better because of it.
Google aims to be the Dyson of information, sucking everything in and, when you need them, giving the perfect advert back. A profitable way to run a search engine, certainly, but the best one? I’ll let you decide that for yourself.
Put simply, it’s the hottest new thing in social media. Pinterest, despite launching little over a year ago and still available by invitation only, has recently seen a phenomenal growth in popularity and usage; according to Quantcast, in March last year approximately 50,000 people in the US were signed up whereas in October that same year the figure was 600,000 and showed no sign of slowing.
The unique idea behind this social networking site is that users share images, rather than text, making the whole thing a very visual experience. You can quickly and easily share images from all over the Internet and categorise them by pinning them onto boards (think ‘albums’). It’s also a great way of encouraging consumers to make a note of products that they like so that they return later to buy them – whereas they might otherwise forget about that gorgeous lampshade you’re selling, with Pinterest they can pin it to one of their boards and see a visual reminder of it every time they log in. Plus, with no privacy options currently in place absolutely everything that is ‘pinned’ is then visible to the entire community – with a followed link back to the original web page it was found on – so you may find that just one pin leads to numerous sales.
Inspiration for creating Pinterest boards for your Company
Who uses it?
The majority of Pinterest users are female and, of course, drawn to great imagery. Top categories include bridal, home decor, hobbies and food. A quick flick through the most popular images will show you that users are drawn to anything stylish and unique in design.
It’s not just the general public using Pinterest though; from Whole Foods to Southwest Airlines a cross-section of companies are jumping on the bandwagon and promoting not only their products but also their brand as a whole. Southwest Airlines for example have boards such as Destinations (photos of places they’d like to visit), Vintage (old black-and-white photos of airports and aeroplanes) and Travel Style (comfortable, stylish travel wear). It’s a way of giving the brand a bit more personality and interacting with the customers in a way that’s friendlier and more sociable than pushy advertising. Plus the profile also links directly to the website so users inspired by the airline’s nostalgic or breathtaking imagery are but a click away from a site where they can buy their own holiday abroad.
Top 6 Tips for Companies on Pinterest
1. Pin Images and Videos
It sounds obvious, but the best way to generate interest in your brand on Pinterest is to upload as much content as possible. The more images that you have, the more often your profile will be found and viewed. Pinterest also allows video content and with fewer videos than images on the site this stands a good chance of being seen regularly, so if you have any great footage – educational tips, funny adverts, etc. – be sure to get it on there.
2. Install the Pin It Button
The ‘Pin It’ button works much like a Facebook ‘like’ or Twitter ‘tweet’ button. Get the html code from the website and add it to all of your products, to encourage your visitors to share the images that they like without even having to be on the Pinterest website.
3. Be Creative
However, avoid thinking of Pinterest as purely an advertising space. Board upon board of your own products is unlikely to get many users repinning – which shares the image and the link on their profile – so intersperse your own images with other high-quality and relevant pictures. Do you sell lighting for example? Try creating a board with ‘colourful lights’ and mix images of your coloured light-bulbs with eye-catching and artistic photos of fairy lights or disco lighting. This lets users see both the effect of coloured lighting and then, if they are interested (which most likely they are if they clicked on your board in the first place), the products that will let them recreate it at home.
4. Add Prices
A quick but highly-beneficial tip is to write the price of products that you are pinning in the description. This will automatically add a little price tag to the image and cause it to show up in the Gifts category which is exactly where people will be looking if they intend to spend money!
5. Be Social
Pinterest is generally organised by ‘most recent first’ so once you’ve created your boards they’re not going to keep generating interest for very long. The key to making your venture into Pinterest a successful one is to interact with your target audience, just as you would on another social networking site such as Facebook.
Repin other users’ images onto your boards where relevant – they’ll receive a notification and will very likely browse through the rest of your board where their image has been shared. For best effect, do a little research and focus your efforts – a user is more likely to buy a chair from you for example if they have just posted a board entitled ‘Chairs I’d Love to Buy’. You can search boards as well as image titles. Don’t forget to make use of the commenting feature or to follow users either to incite them to follow you back.
6. Run Competitions
Pinterest works best when users are promoting your images, not you. Try running a competition where entry requires users to pin their favourite items from your website onto a board, or to repin images that you have already posted.
Overall, Pinterest is proving to be a very popular and extremely fast-growing new website that, thanks to its unique set-up, opens up a whole new range of possibilities and allows you to promote your brand in ways that you may never have tried before. It may just be another passing craze or, who knows, perhaps it will be the next Twitter. Either way, right now it’s an excellent platform and I would encourage any and all companies to jump on the bandwagon quickly to take advantage of the fact that right now there is very little business competition on there at all!
“My, but we’ve come a long way”, we’ll say on the day when Google’s list of links finally disappears. And that day will come sooner than many think.
Over the past eight or so years that I’ve been working in the search industry, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Google News & Froogle (what was to become the Shopping search interface) had only recently launched, Google’s entire index was less than 6 billion pages, there was no Gmail, no mobile search, YouTube, Facebook, Bing was MSN Search and powered by Looksmart & Inktomi, Yahoo! was powered by Google’s technology…
More interesting though has been the lack of innovation in result UI. Oh sure, we’ve got much richer results now than we’ve ever had before, and the underlying technology is far in advance of what it was then, but in terms of how we actually deliver results, I’m not so sure.
A Future Interface
Let me clarify. Based on some recent comments by people at both Google and Microsoft, with regards to answering search queries, the interfaces of the future clearly aren’t going to look like they are now. Instead, they’re going to focus far more on actually answering the users question. We’ve seen the start of this with Google’s recipe search, and Bing’s travel search products.
However, these are just the beginnings of a greater shift in how we interact with the great database that is the Internet. For a more complete understanding, we rather strangly, have to turn to the world of TV game shows.
Search? It’s Elementary My Dear Watson
Earlier this year, Watson, a supercomputer built by IBM, trounced the two greatest human Jeopardy! players at their own game. Much like a modern web search engine, Watson runs thousands of algorithms symulatniously to actually calculate the correct answer to a question. Now, this is fine for where there is an actual answer (questions like ‘what is the’, ‘in what year did’, ‘where can you’ etc), but for ones where a user decision is required, we need to look beyond this.
At this point, we get in to the idea of a twin-structured search engine. In the first part, it’d simply attempt to answer a question presented to it. We can already see this done, if you ask an engine what the time is in a certain place, what a cinema is showing today, or if you want an answer to a calculation. It’s simply an extension (albeit a huge one) of technology that’s already in place.
In this particular area, SEO as we know it will die. Google will simply parse the question and deliver the answer. No links involved.
The second area though, where the user needs to decide based on information, is quite different. This is where the semantic web truly comes in to its own.
Second Site
The semantic web is a fairly old idea, the crux of which is that one day, all the data on the web will be understandable by machines. To kick-start this, Google, Bing and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of schema.org, a protocol similar to XML sitemaps (but with far broader scope) in that it aims to get the entire web marked up in a way that will facilitate this.
In this new web, a search engine would be able to grab any piece of data from any website, understand it, and then use it to produce better answers for the user. So if I were to type in ‘best small family car’, my results page would show me various small family cars, ratings by various associations, new & used prices, ancilliary information (videos, image galleries etc), and links to places to go to buy one.
This offers an exciting possibility for consumers – instant, well presented information on any topic, with the option to go out and view the original source information, with greater expansion on the subject if required. Think of it like an uber-Wikipedia. For a live example of something like this working, take a look at this results page for ‘yoga poses’ in Bing.
Welcome to the Jungle
Now, for the record, I don’t know what Microsoft or Google’s intentions are. But it’s increasingly clear that if they wanted, this is a direction that they could move in. With their increasingly titanic data stores, they’re in an amazing position to completely transform how we interact with the world’s information. For now though, webmasters need to consider three things:
Marking up your data probably won’t help your rankings in any particular area at the moment
Not marking up your data almost certainly will stop you ranking in different forms of search interface in the future
The websites that act now will, as always, be better placed when change comes along
So do you need to worry about getting your data marked up today? No, but have it in the back of your mind, and make sure you do it sooner rather than later.
We speak to a lot of Clients who don’t realise that it is extremely important for their site navigation, (commonly referred to as internal links or information architecture) to be extremely well considered so that the right pages get indexed easily and regularly by the search engine spiders. Connected to the site architecture is the preference that no one page contains more than 100 links, this keeps the quality score assigned to each link at a respectable level and helps the spiders move through the site properly.
Crawl Priority
To start, it helps to understand how the spiders prioritise the pages, and then crawl the site.
Spiders will visit popular pages more often, popular pages are defined by the number of back-links and the site architecture should correlate with this. For example:
Your homepage, and chosen landing pages, should be the most popular with the most back-links
First and second level category pages should be fairly popular but containing less back-links than the homepage
At the bottom of the priority are the deepest pages, these will be pages such as news pages, product pages, service price lists etc
The spiders will enter the site via a landing page, this doesn’t need to be the homepage, they will then follow links through each page looking to index the whole site. They don’t like being sent in circles and they don’t like feeling lost in too many links, so it’s important that your site architecture makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to do their job, whilst getting all the pages which need indexing, indexed. Ideally you want the spiders to be able to index everything within three clicks of arriving on the site, regardless if that is your homepage or your deepest category page.
XML Site Maps
XML site maps are seen as the quick fix for architecture issues, and this is what they are. They do not resolve problems in the site architecture and internal navigation, they merely hide the problems so that you are unaware of them.
In an ideal world, you would not add an XML site map until you know the website architecture is sound and secure and most importantly indexing on it’s own. Below are some basic architecture tips to get you started.
Keep Architecture Flat
You want to keep your architecture as flat and easy to navigate as possible, whilst retaining the three click rule (if a spider lands on one of your deeper pages, can they reach the other pages within three links?)
In a brand new website the following structure is a common one used with the 100 links per page being the absolute maximum you should have on each page.
At the top: Homepage with no more than 100 links per page First Level: Categories – no more than 100 pages (each page has no more than 100 links) Second Level: Sub-Categories – no more than 10,000 (each page has no more than 100 links) At the bottom: Detail/Products – no more than 1,000,000 pages
Index and rankings are determined by how much authority each page has, the higher the domain authority of your site the more links you can realistically get away with including on each page. As a rough guide, if your website already holds some domain authority (DA) you can increase the links on each page as follows:
DA 7-10 = 250 links
DA 5-7 = 175 links
DA 3-5 = 125 links
DA 0-3 = 100 links
So, the smaller the number of links the spiders have to follow to index the whole site, the happier they are and the more weight each page will hold.
Faceted Navigation
This is a common and useful aspect of ecommerce sites, which allows you to pick facets of a product which are important to you. For example, you could pick the category of T-Shirts, pick the colour black, and the size Medium, the results you are shown then directly correspond with what you specifically want. In essence the website has ignored anything which doesn’t contain the facets you have chosen.
Setting up faceted navigation can be tricky, and you need to keep in mind that the primary facet pages won’t rank, you want the deeper facet pages to rank as these are the one’s that will help the spiders discover all of the product pages.
When setting up faceted navigation, some of the things to keep in mind are:
URL
You must have a unique URL for each facet level. The URL’s should be clear and not complicated and hard to follow:
You also want to ensure that whatever route somebody takes to reach this facet level the same URL is shown so for example:
Somebody clicks on Tshirts, then Medium, then Black the URL they end up on should still be www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium and not www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/medium/black which would result in you creating unnecessary duplicate content issues!
Adding & Removing Facets
You should make it easy for your customers to add or remove additional facets as they see fit.
As they add facets to their search these should be displayed as follows so that any or all facets can be removed by the user:
Tshirts [remove]
black [remove]
medium [remove]
So that they can easily choose which facets can be automatically generated from the results meta data so it is easy for you to display the number of results within that facet, for example:
Blue [35]
Green [23]
Yellow [1]
No Index
Any pages which could be considered as duplicate content should be no-indexed, the spiders will still visit these pages but they won’t index them. To keep a page out of the index you want to add some code to the page as follows:
<meta name = “robots” content = “noindex”> – This will make the page no index
<link rel = “canonical” href = “domainname.co.uk/tshirts/black”> – This will take the spiders back to the correct page.
Filtering & Pagination
Another common aspect of ecommerce sites is filtering results. This is where you can choose a filter which will sort the products in a certain way, for example only showing 10 items per page (creating pagination or multiple pages), or showing lowest priced items first.
The ideal way to deal with pagination in category results is to programme the page to show all results rather than writing each page of results as page 1, page 2, etc.
Once the main category page has been created you can then use javascript to create the pagination. Search engine spiders don’t follow javascript so you don’t risk duplicate content from having multiple pages under each content, but all of the products are indexed.
Plan, Plan, and Plan Again
Don’t under-value the benefit of properly planning your website. Most of our examples have referred to ecommerce sites, but the same principal applies to brochure sites. Plan to succeed and your website will be a spider’s navigational dream and you will be rewarded with good search results and no duplicate content issues.
In summary, the number one rule for you to keep in mind when you are planning your navigation is that you want as few pages as possible to be indexed, whilst allowing for each and every product page to be indexed.
TL;DR: Whilst it might be very efficient to get lots of poor outsourced content written on the cheap and pushed on to article sites, it’s nowhere near as effective as great content published and promoted properly on your own site, when it comes to attracting link weight, traffic and brand awareness.
Due to the recent Farmer update, there’s been a lot of discussion about various link building methods in of late. Based on the discussions I’ve seen going on, I’ve decided that it’s time to come out of blogging retirement, and for the first time in about two years, weigh in on the debate.
The Three Axis of Everything
Before we get in to the details of how to go about building links that have real, long term, lasting value, we need to recap slightly on the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency:accomplishment of or ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort
Effectiveness:adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result
Notice the difference between these two. It’s entirely possible to have a process that’s exceedingly efficient, but that has very limited actual effectiveness. So how do people get trapped in these forms of processes, where they’re being efficiently ineffective?
Well, with just about everything in life, we have to choose the amount we’re willing to invest in each of three things, which determine the results of all our efforts:
Time
Cost
Quality
The more important each of those is, the more the others have to suffer. It’s at this point that we see why some organisations fail to do linkbuilding (or any other area of execution) well; their prioritisation is incorrect. In an attempt to reduce cost and time invested, quality suffers drastically.
The Devil & Idle Thumbs
Unfortunately, due to a lack of good education, a moral requirement to do something for the money being charged, and the ease with which certain things (like outsourced, low quality article marketing) can be done, it lets people get in to a situation where they’re happily busy doing things, irrespective of the efficacy of those activities.
This effect is unfortunately compounded by the way linkbuilding works, with repeated links from a domain having ever decreasing value. Thus whilst submitting to the same batch of article sites will initially produce useful returns, over a sustained period it will eventually lack the necessary utility to see that growth sustained. (In my experience, most sites will need to look at other methods to of linkbuilding after around 18-24 months, depending on post frequency and site strength)
To truly produce sustainable, long term growth, with solid benefits that will aid the site for years, we have to look beyond this approach, and move on to something a little more creative.
4C & CBEL
It’s at this point that we turn to two methods of linkbuilding that provide markedly more value and long-term traction. At SIM, we refer to these as 4C and CBEL – Creative & Compelling Content Creation and Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding. We’ll look at these in more detail separately.
First up, linkbuilding through great content:
4C: Creative & Compelling Content Creation
Welcome to the internet. There’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff here. And a lot of boring stuff too. Can you guess which of the two camps of content people view and link to the most? If you can’t, or you guessed wrong, please send an email to i_shouldnt_be_allowed_near_computers@muppet.com.
When it comes to content, the key tends to be putting yourself in the position of someone completely different, and then going looking for the tiny ponies.
I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.
I made a lame joke in my mind about how the horse is there, but it’s not the one wearing the blinders. And then I pictured what would happen if the horse pooped in the middle of the floor of the Apple Store, because I am nine. I laugh to myself. The woman next to me looks up from the 17″ laptop in a judgmental fashion, probably because she could feel the immaturity radiate out of my body. She looks back down and Facebook looks back at her. “Great, the one thing she notices is me being a moron.”
Play it cool, Frank. Play it cool.
THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing. I wondered: if there were kids in the Apple Store, would they notice? “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they would.” Kids have a magnetic connection to animals. But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny. And if you have a child, you probably can not afford Apple products.
But, if a child were here, they would see the pony, because when you’re a kid, you notice everything, because everything is new. My niece is like this. “Did you see that that dog loves that other dog because they got their leashes tangled up outside and then they laid down beside one another?” Or, “Once you have a baby, you can’t put it back, can you?”
It’s in this way that you need to look at your company. You need to step back and see the interesting details. Here’s a few quick examples of interesting stories told through creative ideas:
1. Video
TV’s are fairly boring, when you get right down to it. It’s a box that lets you watch pictures. So to successfully market a new television requires some out of the box (pun most definitely intended) thinking. There’s two separate approaches we can look at here.
Firstly, we’ve got Sony’s famous Balls and Paint adverts. I’ve embedded them both below so you can watch and see what we’re talking about, in case you live under a rock.
Balls
Paint
Both these adverts created huge mindshare when they arrived, due to their amazing visual impact, and the frankly absurd lengths Sony went to to create them. This was reflected in the search volume, which you can see in the graph below:
On the more low-budget front, video can be used very effectively when combined with a strong emotitive pull. Humour and incredularity work fairly well. As a couple of examples of sites that have worked this angle to great effect, let’s take a look at Zero Punctuation and XXXX
Zero Punctuation
That video was Liked on Facebook more than 54,000 times, and received more than 1,100 retweets. It would seem therefore that being consistently funny is a fairly good way of getting people to notice you. On to the incredulity front, we have:
The Cog
The Cog, by Honda, is a wonderful example of something that could be done on a relatively small budget in terms of actual cost, although this is obviously the high end. However, it’s not hard to see how someone could adapt the Rube Goldberg style to something with a much smaller budget.
2. Embeddable Content
Embeddable content, such as video or imagery is nothing new. However, there’s lots of ways that you can use the fact that people share and re-post things to your advantage. We’ll take a look at the example of infographics here, to get you started.
The trend for making infographics has really blossomed over the last 18 months or so, and unfortunately has produced a lot of really bad content. As such, before we go in to some examples of great infographics, I’m going to define what makes them great:
Visual Impact: if it doesn’t look amazing, no-one’s going to want to share it
Data Clarity: if you can’t understand the data being presented, it’s of no use
Intuitive Visualisation: it should be immediately obvious, even when doing a squint test, what’s going on
The Point: by definition, an infographic needs to make a point, or it’s going to be dull
Sharability: make sure you’ve got embed code, and retweet and Facebook Like buttons going on
So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at some people who consistently produce amazing infographics:
These places should serve to inspire you. Anyone can product something a poor infographic. A great one takes somewhat more skill. So how should you go about getting on together?
Well, I’d say first off hire a designer. If you’re not really good at visual design, you’re not going to be able to pull off something slick enough to get the kind of attention you need.
If you are doing it yourself though, we need to address the other points. Data clarity is vital in infographics, especially as you’re often going to be dealing with large data sets or numbers, which can’t be easily represented in a traditional way. Think about ways you can abstract the data, to make it more relatable. Could you show energy used by a light bulb as the amount it costs, rather than the wattage per hour? How about showing money as wheelbarrows full of notes, instead of numbers? Think outside the box.
For presentation, the graphic should have a clear visual flow, and it should be immediately obvious what the meaning behind the visual is. For some great examples of this in action, go download these slides from Extreme Presentation. That’ll give you some ideas as to how you can represent concepts visually without having to explain them in depth.
Finally, make sure you know what you’re going to try and get across. Is it just presenting data? Is it showing a point of view? Is it to quickly convey information which you’re going to expand upon below, like this post does? Know the purpose, and then build the infographic.
3. Great Writing
Nothing beats great content. Look at the best blogs, and they’re all where they are because they consistently produce great content, with a large percentage of that being written, day in day out. Again, knowing the audience is key. Sites like Engadget, The Beeb and SEOmoz all get the attention they do by having a tightly aimed focus on their audience.
The key point to note here is that the audience doesn’t have to be restricted to a small area. Whilst SEOmoz only deals with the digital marketing community, Engadget is tailored to anyone who loves gadgets and the technology industry, and the BBC aims at just about everyone. What makes this work isn’t the tight focus on writing around a certain topic, but writing for a certain audience. This means that you can have breadth in what you write, as long as it’s tailored to what your audience wants to listen to you talking about.
For some guidance on how to go about writing great content, I’ve included some resources below:
Obviously, this isn’t an extensive list. There’s widgets, images, licensed content… Lots and lots of things you can do to create content that people will want to grab and put on their own site or talk about. It’s really up to your imagination at looking at what your industry shares, what it likes, what there’s a need for, and how you can product content that satisfies those criteria. However, before you can do that, you need to create that content, which is what we’re going to look at now.
Creating Your Own Content
Pretty much irrespective of what the content you’re creating is, the process that you’ll go through is the same: Brainstorm, Execute, Promote, Analyse. Each of these parts breaks down into a distinct set of processes, so we’ll look at them one by one, and see what you can do to make them as efficient and effective as possible.
The Process: Brainstorm
In this first stage, you’re going to be sitting down and coming up with various ideas. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll imagine that we’re working for a site that sells clothing, and who’s lead product is jeans. The first thing you need to do is map out everything you can think of to do with jeans. So that might include:
A brief history of jeans
Famous things featuring jeans (adverts, tv shows, celebrities?)
Various styles of jeans
Current issues/news stories related to jeans
Fashion trends over time, and how they’ve impacted jeans
The history of famous jeans-related brands
Current/future jeans-related fashions
Denim usage outside of the fashion industry
…and so on. For each of these you should then be able to generate a few ideas related to that topic, for a potential link building campaign. For example, for the brief history of jeans, you might want to do a jeans related infographic, along the lines of 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee from The Oatmeal. If, like me, you spend way too much time on teh internetz, then this shouldn’t take you too long. You’ll be able to tell if this is the case, because you’ll know where this is from, and find it funny:
Having created your list, it’s time to whittle it down. There’s an element of research that you can do into this, looking at what the community that you’re targeting likes. The best way to go about that is to try and find where the community hangs around online (is it on Twitter, social forums/sharing areas like HackerNews, certain blogs (and if so, which ones and who writes them), and see what’s gotten links and attention. Pay attention to stickied forum threads, greatest hits/most visited/best of style blog posts, YouTube videos (sorted by view count), power users on social sharing sites, the number of inbound links to particular pages… What you’re looking for are the key influencers in the community, both from the point of view of the people who have influence, and the topics that influence the discussion.
By running a process like this, you can ensure you’ve got the best possible chance of getting a good result for your efforts. In the end though, you’re going to have to take a gamble as you can never truly guarantee what’s going to take off (unless you’re known enough in the community already that you can leverage that into promotion).
The Process: Execution
This is a harder part to explain, as the method that you use to execute varies wildly based on your content type and distribution channels, budget and timeline. However, the principles behind how you should execute are fairly consistent, so I’ll try and guide you through those, and then you can apply them to whatever your content type is.
Firstly, the most important thing is the quality of what you’re producing. There’s a subtlety here that deserves attention though, which is that what you perceive as quality, might not be the factor of quality that your audience cares about. So whilst to you, it might mean depth of content, to your audience it might be production value. Nailing this comes down to understanding your audience, and what they value. This is where the research you did during the brainstorming section comes in handy, because you’ll be able to see across the various types of content you found that went big before, what the community values. Is it in-depth content, is it amazing presentation, is it evidence-backed claims, is it a humorous or sober tone, is it a pretty face or a “real” person? These are the questions you need to answer, before executing, to make sure that what you produce matches the expectations of the audience you’re going to put it in front of. So we know that we need to deliver quality, and how our audience defines it. What else?
Well, the second key point is sharability. Again, this is research-led, as you need to understand where your audience are, how they share. It’s pointless having Reddit, Twitter and Facebook voting buttons on your site if you’re targeting silver surfers, as they share via email. Similarly, you wouldn’t target a tech crowd by using Send to a Friend email buttons. Knowing your audience and how the community with each other is vital to reducing friction, and enabling them to share you content as easily as possible.
Thirdly and finally, we need to consider timing. If you’re launching something to do with jeans (staying with our earlier example), it’d probably help to tie it in with something like London Fashion Week, where you can ride off the back of the promotion of that to help get your content out. Look for natural news events that you know will arise over the course of time to coincide with your content where possible, as if something’s already on the mind of your community, and you’ve got a hook in to it, it makes it more relevant for them, thus more useful, thus more likely that they’ll take the actions that you want.
The Process: Promotion
As with execution, a lot of the ‘how’ behind the promotion of your content comes down to what the content you’ve created is. For example, if you made a video, you’re going to want to get it on a video site, like Vimeo or YouTube. If on the other hand, what you’ve created is an infographic or a piece of long-form content, then a video site isn’t going to be of much use. There are however some guidelines that we can look at again though, to give our content the best push possible. So first up we’ve got:
Suitability. Video for video sites, humour for channels that appreciate it, more series forums/sites for places that appreciate a more business-like tone and so on. Make sure that your chose distribution channels match the types of content you’ve created. You’re only really able to stray outside of this is you’ve really, amazingly exceptional content, in which case the community will pick it up themselves; you don’t want to try and seed at these sorts of places.
Second, watch out for the reaction to the content. If people don’t like it, stop pushing it quickly, and come out and apologise. Acknowledge your mistakes when they happen, and the community will thank you for it. On the other hand, if something’s clearly getting good traction, engage and do what you can to keep that going and watch it snowball. But in either case, you’re not going to be able to make sure you get the best community reaction possible, if you’re not engaging there and watching the discussions that take place.
Finally, don’t be afraid to call in favours. If you’ve previously done some guest blogging for an influential member of the community, ask if they’d care to take a look at whatever it is you’ve done, and if they like it to put word out. Understanding how to leverage your relationships, without being too cheeky or overbearing is vital in the early days, as until the community start to view you as a trusted source of content, you’re going to have to build credibility, and having people they already regard as trusted experts talking about you can expedite that.
The Process: Analysis
So you’ve done your research, created your content, and the community has loved it (or not). Time to do a post-mortem. Try and gather as much data as possible on who shared, you liked your content, who didn’t, what times people shared, what methods the community used to distribute your content, where they engaged, where conversations happened… Everything you can possibly get to ensure that however well this piece went, next time it goes better.
Doing this will require a lot of monitoring to be done whilst the promotion is going on, so make sure all hands are on deck for that 24-72 hour period, so that you’ve got people checking the channels you previously identified. Also, make sure your developers are around, as if you get really high server load, you may have to scale fast, and they’ll need to know that that may happen, so they can prepare for it.
The key to this is remembering to do it whether the campaign worked or not. If it fails, you’ll learn a lot about why it failed – was it that people didn’t share in the way you thought, the content didn’t engage them, no influential people talked about it etc? Or if it worked, why it worked, where could it have worked better, what bottlenecks were there and so on. Whatever happens, this is a vital step to ensuring that things go better next time, which too many people skip. Don’t’ be one of them!
CBEL: Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding
You’ll notice that a lot of the content creation section above talked about engaging communities, researching communities and becoming known in communities. However, you might not know about how to do those things, so that’s what we’re going to look at now.
Many people miss this key aspect – it’s not a case of if you create it, they will come; it’s if you create it and they know about it, and like what you’ve done, then they’ll come. But to know what they’ll like, and to be able to tell them, there’s some work to be done. That in mind, let’s take a look at some channels we can use to engage a community.
Note that not all of these methods are applicable to all audiences, so make sure you first go around and see what methods a community uses.
Blogging
A lot has been written on the subject of blogging, both from the point of view of how to do it and how to promote your blog, so what I’ll do here is give you a brief introduction, and then provide some links for further reading.
The first key point is to understand the difference between writing to your subject, and writing for an audience. You can have breadth in what you blog about, as long as you’re ruthlessly focused on writing about subjects your audience are passionate about. As such, if you run a blog on lifehacks, you can probably also talk about diet and nutrition, fitness, and to an extent, technology. Why? Because these are all things that your audience will also likely be interested in. It also serves to break up the flow a little, and add some variety to the conversation, allowing you to better get a view on who your audience are, and where you should take your blog over time.
The second is ensuring that you don’t write unless you have something to say. It’s better to blog once a fortnight than every day, if what you put out on the slower schedule is gold-plated amazingness every single time. Look at A List Apart for instance. Low content production level, but ultra-high quality. Quality trumps quantity.
Finally, watch your stats. See where people come from. If you get a link from another blogger, thank them for it. Engage them. Develop relationships with your readers, and with other bloggers in the niche. Those relationships will prove key later when you want to promote content, or want guest blog spots, or if you need a guest blogger (if you’re going on holiday for example). As with all these methods, it’s all about asking yourself what you can do, every day, to be useful to those around you in the community.
Everything Everywhere – an example of remarkableness and engagement garnering attention
Social Site Presence & Etiquette
Different communities like different forms of social sites, and engage in different ways. For some, it’s all about Twitter and Facebook, with others people hang out on blogs. And with still others, it’s forms of forums. There’s an element here of making sure you’re known so that you can promote content effectively. However, I’d emphasise again that that’s a secondary benefit from the primary motivation, which should be to be useful to the community.
For instance, if content only gets voted for when it’s been seen on certain blogs, then you need to make sure that you’re known on those sites as a good commenter, so you can forge a relationship with the bloggers of that site, so when you product your content you can leverage that relationship into helping to push it viral. However, the reason you should have that relationship is because you want to be useful to that blogger. Do not go around pretending to be useful only so you can get something back. You get back what you want, as a result of being focused on others. Leave your self-interest at the door.
Reputation Monitoring
As a last point for community engagement, set up Twitter and Google alerts, and anything else you can get hold of for monitoring mentions of your brand online. That way, whether someone has a good or bad experience, you can jump in. If it’s good, thank them for their custom or comment or whatever it was, and reinforce that good will. If they had a bad experience, acknowledge it, and offer to do what you can to fix it. It won’t always work out well, but do what you can. As a whole, people will appreciate it.
Edit: Tom from Distilled just informed me that RM isn’t available anymore. With that in mind, I’ll post sometime soon on reputation management, and how to set up your own services for doing it.
Wrap-Up
I hope this has been useful. If there’s anything that’s been raised here that you’d like more information on, feel free to get in touch with me by email (pete@this site’s domain name), and feel free to share and talk about it over at HackerNews or on Twitter.
People are always interested to know how many more clicks they are likely to receive if they appear at position 1 of the search engine results pages for their chosen key-phrases. There are many different studies and statistics available about organic click-through rates on the internet, many of which are contradictory. This report details findings from some of the more well known studies and how much you can actually learn from them.
Study 1
Below is a chart detailing the data from the famous AOL data leak in 2006. Although old, this data is still often quoted as gospel.
Study 2
This study was conducted by Neil Walker, a UK based SEO expert. Some Blog posts suggest Walker’s study is based on Webmaster Tools data across 2700 keywords. Walker himself claims that the data comes from a study of Webmaster Tools in 2010, the AOL data of 2006 and an eye tracking study conducted in 2004.
Study 3
Another well known study conducted in 2010 was by Chitika, a data analytics company in the business of advertising. For their study, they looked at a sample of traffic coming into their advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.
What can we actually learn from this?
Well, it is clear that if you are at position 1 in the search engine results pages, you are very likely to receive substantially more clicks. However, there are always exceptions to this rule.
A famous example:
For a long time, if you searched for ‘mail’ on Google, Gmail would come up at position 1 and Yahoo would come up at position 2. Still, Yahoo received in excess of 50% of the click-throughs. Studies indicated that this was because people searching for ‘mail’ were looking to login to their Yahoo mail account.
This example illustrates that if people are looking for something specific, they will not always click on position 1 if it doesn’t seem to offer what they are looking for. Another example is Wikipedia: they are often displayed in high positions for a wide range of phrases, but won’t always receive a high click-through rate because people aren’t always looking for general information.
In summary, at position 1 of the search engine results pages you are extremely likely to receive the most clicks, but exactly how many more than the lower positions is impossible to say. However, the figures in the studies detailed above can give a good indicator of what to expect. Search engine results positions and click-through rates will always be dependant on high quality SEO, your choice of key-phrases, and the area of business in which you operate.
Most companies with a website are probably guilty of claiming on their website and internet marketing activities that they are ‘the best’ in their field. However this will be a risky claim to make from 1st March 2011 when the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) extend the advertising rules around making these claims to include online advertising.
What Is Covered?
The law will stretch to cover claims made on a companies own website, as well as advertising on other websites. What is meant by advertising are paid adverts such as banner advertising and PPC campaigns all of which will come to mind when thinking about online advertising. Probably most surprising, however, is that activities which are considered as non-paid advertising are also included so any claims made on free directory listings, wiki pages, and even social media such as Facebook and Twitter, must follow the rules.
What Will Happen if the Rules are Broken?
It will be possible for the ASA to impose any of the existing sanctions for offline advertising. In addition, they will be able to extend sanctions to include removal of paid for advertising that link to the page making the false claim as well as using the company as an example in ASA paid for online advertising.
Exceptions To The Rule?
As always there are exceptions to the rule, and in this case press releases and public relations material, editorial content, and natural search engine listings do not fall under the ASA remit. The ASA have also excluded any historical advertising, meaning that advertising which has been posted prior to 1st March 2011 is exempt.
Simply put, if a company is going to claim, to be the best, the cheapest, the supplier of choice, they had better be able to back it up with valid evidence.
2010 was a busy year for search and particularly Google who have upped their game yet again. In this post we’ll review some of the major highlights for SEO in the last year.
New Ranking Factor Announced: Page Load Time
In April 2010 Google announced that the speed your page loads for a visitor is a factor considered in their ranking algorithm. Basically if your page loads slowly then you’ll drop down the rankings. Don’t panic though, its only likely to affect really slow loading sites but keep your eye on this factor and if you are in a very competitive market and your rankings are slipping this could be an area to improve.
The Bing-Yahoo Integration
In the USA the integration was complete and Yahoo’s independent index was retired thus giving Bing a leap in market share. Of course they are so far behind Google that they cannot be compared at all however Bing is now a competitor worthy of attention.
Google’s May Day (or Brand) Update
Google applies an extremely complex algorithm which takes into consideration hundreds and hundreds of different factors and they are constantly tweaking and improving it to ensure that the results presented are the best they can be. Sometimes there are more significant tweaks, or algorithm updates, that have a more dramatic affect. The May Day update resulted in many websites losing long tail traffic (up to 10 percent or more). The sites that suffered seemed to have a low number of deep links. The winners were “high quality” sites and big brands.
Google Caffeine
This was not an algorithm update although its often confused as one especially as it was introduced close to the May Day Update. Caffeine was an infrastructure change which related purely to speeding up the indexing system. Caffeine allowed new content to be indexed almost instantly rather than in batches which was slower.
Google Instant
In September Google Instant impacted the user experience in a very noticeable way by showing suggested search phrases as you typed your phrase into the search box. The idea being that if you saw what you wanted appearing in the list then you wouldn’t need to finish typing. It wasn’t just the suggestions popping up that was so noticeable it was the fact that all the results changed as you typed too – it could be quite distracting. Google Instant also impacted the long tail as more people gave up typing in longer phrases & went with the suggestions.
Around a year ago, Google introduced their new database architecture, Caffeine. This changeover was done for several reasons, the first of which was to allow Google to continue to index all of the web in years to come, and the second of which was revealed last week: Instant.
The main issue with Instant, from Google’s perspective, is that it generates between 7-10 times the volume of searches per second than the previous version, as Google loads search result pages constantly as people are typing. With the expected rollout of this into browser bar-based searches (like the Chrome bar, the Google toolbar etc), this will almost certainly expand steadily from only appearing to logged-in users, to being the default state for Google.
Ten Blue Links?
So, the main upshot of the changeover to the Caffeine system is that it allows for vast amounts of real-time data to be added to the index almost as fast as it’s created. But what does this mean in terms of rankings?
Well, in short, it allows fresh data to be displayed to users much more rapidly. As a result, we’ve seen greater emphasis on results featuring video, location-based services, news items, personalised results and the like over the last year. This has had the effect of changing the strategy for SEO in certain industries, as it has created new avenues for search marketers to reach their intended audiences.
Instant Coffee Anyone?
A lot has been written about Instant over the last couple of days, some of it accurate, some of it less-so. To save time, I’ve compiled some basic takeaway points as to the nature of Instant, what it brings to the table, and how it affects SEO and PPC.
Does Google kill SEO? No, but it does change keyword research slightly, as marketers need to pay greater attention to the suggested keyword searches
Negative keywords need to be paid closer attention to in PPC, as a search for “U2 new” will return results for “U2 new album”, where a user might type their full query as “U2 new zealand tour dates”
PPC ad impressions will only count when:
the user clicks anywhere on the page after beginning to type a search query
the user chooses one of the predicted queries from Google Instant
the user stops typing and search results are shown for at least three seconds
The nuts and bolts of how SEO is conducted on-site and in linkbuilding hasn’t changed
The nuts and bolts of how PPC is conducted hasn’t changed either, although it is now pretty much the only good way of getting impression data for search volume numbers for keywords. Keyword tools will soon be relegated to being only useful for generating keyword ideas, not for estimating volume
The credit crunch isn’t going to dent the volume of sales made online this Christmas, in fact its more likely to bring increased sales as people search for bargains. The season starts early on the internet so now is the time to ensure your site is ready for all those lovely visitors.
Here are some tips to get your website ready for Christmas:
Have Special Offers on your home page – not too many to overwhelm people but enough for them to see that these are great deals. Think of offering loss-leaders and products that will encourage sales of additional products.
Have Featured Products on your home page – these get indexed by the search engines quickly and attract more attention from browsing visitors.
Make your Delivery Policyvery clear – free delivery under X £££s and say how many days it will take to arrive. At this sensitive time of year make it very clear what is your last date for ordering to ensure delvery by Christmas
Can your Images be improved? Great images sell product, its a fact!
Make sure shoppers can easily find your Returns Policy – it will give them confidence that you have their interests at heart.
Make your shop window Seasonal – the same way that shop windows in high streets are decorated for Christmas your website shop front can do the same to inspire that seasonal spirit.
Customer Service is essential, especially as the big day approaches – make sure people feel they can get the support they need. A phone number is ideal and online support is also effective for demonstrating that your website is attended. We recommend Provide Support for this.
It may sound obvious but do your visitors know what you sell? I have seen many ecommerce websites that sell such an eclectic mix of products that its really not clear where they are positioned. You have only 3-5 seconds to make a good impression and grab your customer’s attention so don’t confuse them with anything – keep it really simple.
Good luck for the coming season – CapGemini recently predicted that online sales in the UK will increase by 60% in the three months up to Christmas so this is definitely the time to be paying attention to your online marketing strategy. Give us a call on 0845 838 0936 if you are interested in driving more traffic to your website this season – there is a very good chance we can help you quickly.
