Archive for October 2009
Beefing Up Your Content
image by DolliaSH
Written on September 15, 2009
Is the content on your site linkable? Does it need to be beefed up? Do you deserve to be ranked on the first page? No, yes, no? We’ll use Austin Restaurant Week to illustrate the idea behind creating sumptuous, linkable content to garner incoming links. Google is hungry and you need to feed it.
First, what is Austin Restaurant Week? Between September 13th- 16th and September 20th – 23rd, those fortunate enough to be in Austin can visit a number of fine dining establishments to feast on a delicious menu set at an affordable fixed price, between $25 – $35. Call in a reservation to ensure you and your significant other a seat and eat up (if you’re looking for a date idea, I think this fits the bill perfectly)!
Second, how does this have anything to do with SEO and beefy content? Rewind to last night. I’m sitting in my living room nearly comatose from the pizza and football I’ve gorged myself on for the past few hours. Of course, my mind’s nose picks up the scent of Austin Restaurant Week and I head to the website. I click the links of two places I’ve not been to,Roaring Fork and Green Pastures Restaurant, and notice links to their respective menus:
Now, like I said, I’ve never been to the Roaring Fork and am making no assumptions about the quality of their dining. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard nothing but good things. When I mentioned this blog idea to a co-worker, she said, “Roaring Fork is one of my favs.”
However, looking at these two menus, which one has you salivating? Which one has beefier content? Which menu would you rather link to? Which menu provides the most information about their offerings? I think the information provided in the Green Pastures Restaurant menu makes their food sound much more enticing – they didn’t even dress up the language with adjectives – and I’d be more inclined to link to their menu.
If I or a search engine only had the information provided by the menus, and could look at the popularity of each by way of incoming links, to determine the most relevant menu for a search term such as “austin fine dining” or “austin restaurants,” then who would likely rank in first position?
The same idea should drive your analysis of the content on your own site: if someone came across my site, would the information I’m providing them about “Software Development Life Cycle” be enough for them to link back to my site? If I visit a competitor’s website and notice they’re providing beefier content that likely attracts incoming links, then why should I be ranked ahead of them?
To summarize, be honest about the quality and/or quantity of the content on your site: Is it informative? Should more be added? But not simply added to attain a mythical keyword density. Is it linkable? Smoked salmon or The Upland Game Plate: Quail, Quail and Some More Quail? Serve your visitors with healthy portions of information.
And, in case you’re wondering, I’ll be making a trip to The Melting Pot tonight.
Twitter as a Real Time Search Engine
Written on April 8, 2009
It took me awhile to join the Twitter wagon. I signed up about a year ago, tweeted that same day and then let my account sit for three months. Who wants to hear about me cutting my fingernails, I thought. No one. Life can be quite banal. No, scratch that. Life is banal (it’s also many other exciting things, so no existential hand clapping). Cutting your fingernails is banal. Boring. It’s meant to be experienced by you alone. Again, no tweet needed to inform the world of my clicking and snipping. Then, about three months later, I sent out an email to the SEO team asking if anyone knew of a program for such-and-such task. I received one reply; it was an answer, so the part where most of my teammates ignored me was okay. With the answer came a post script, “This is the sort of question Twitter is good for; you should check it out more.” Interesting. Twitter as a search engine.
Fast forward to last week. By now, I’ve fooled around 90 people into following me on Twitter. I follow approximately 80. By now, I’ve mastered the art of including @ replies anywhere within a tweet. I use is.gd, budurl and tinyurl simply because I can – why limit yourself? I follow hilariously pointless accounts like AutomatedHouse and enjoy The Odyssey immensely. By now, I make sure the number of characters I use in a tweet allows space for people to retweet my message (talk about thinking what you have to say is interesting…sheesh). Basically, I’m in it. I understand the ecosystem. I have enough followers to ask Twitter a question I cannot ask Google, Yahoo or MSN.
While reading a blog I come across the interesting picture at the top of this post. Didn’t know the name of the painting and didn’t know who painted it. In a situation like this, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Mahalo and every other search engine out there wouldn’t be able to tell me the name of the painting and who painted it. I even right clicked on the image, selected Copy Image URL and pasted it into my address bar hoping the person who put it on the internet named the file the painting or painter’s name. No dice – http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg didn’t tell me what I needed to know (see, tag everything on your site properly; it enhances usability, user experience, findability). If you search for [gruen] on Google you get to learn about the Gruen Watch Company or Sara Gruen, both interesting I’m sure (side note: if you do a Google image search for [gruen] you can find the answer to this question, but we’re not all that internet savvy, now are we…?).
So, I head to Twitter. I tweet, “does anyone who know painted this? *url inserted here*?” Within 5 minutes – no it’s not a microwave – I get two replies, “isn’t that hieronymous bosch?” and “looks like Bosch to me too.” The plot thickened when I received a reply that read, “Matthias Grünewald 1515 “The Temptation of St. Anthony”…different from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych version a decade earlier.” The point, of course, is that I used Twitter as a search engine. I couldn’t upload the image to Google for the answer. I didn’t want to instant message each person on my AIM account because that’d be annoying and it only contains co-workers, so the likelihood someone knew the answer was low (you want high conversions, right?).
This is what Twitter has become, a real-time search engine. Of course, there are still people who tweet about the banal things in life, and that’s okay, do you as they say, but there are also people out there that use Twitter to provide information to followers, links about search marketing or the hunger issue in your town. Importantly, there are millions of people using Twitter and some are potentially talking about your product, service or your company.
From a broader perspective, Twitter is not the end-all-be-all social medial platform and will never hold that crown – no platform will hold that crown. The internet is a rapidly changing environment and the crowd moves from one platform to the next. As a business, you need to follow the crowd. Will the crowd always move to a platform that is easily trackable and readily monetized? Of course not. But, in the age of the internet, it’s about the crowd. It’s not about the business. My favorite Seth Godin line, and one I perhaps refer to too often, goes something like this: the internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me? It’s, “how are people using the internet and how do I help them achieve their goals?” Taking that same spirit, if I had to create a social media strategy in one sentence, it would be “follow the crowd.”
UPDATE:
Twitter recently struck deals with the search engines that will further incorporate tweets into the search results pages. Google had already been pulling status updates from Twitter and returning them for people queries – for example, I check my name on Google often because I use it as a sort of testing ground for how things rank and have seen my updates in Twitter for months. However, this deal could signal the beginning of the search engines looking to these updates as more of a signal in determining how relevant a page/person is to a query. Even with the links on Twitter nofollowed, it would be entirely antithetical to this deal if tweets didn’t score as a relevancy signal – even if it’s blunt at this point in time.
Link Love
image by Dunechaser
written on June 12th, 2009
Link: What is Location Prominence?
Love: unraveling local search ranking factors. So you’re a small business (or a large one for that matter), and after doing some reading on SEO, you’ve gone to Google Local Business Center and claimed your business’ listing. You’ve read about PageRank and the importance of attracting high quality incoming links with your sparkling content. But what other factors go into the ranking algorithms for local search? How do you climb up that 10-pack? How do you improve your “Location Prominence” score–the equivalent of PageRank? In this post, Mike Blumenthal takes a look at a Google patent to help provide insight into the factors that explicitly help determine this Location Prominence.
Potential Factors in Ranking a Website Highly for Location Specific Searches:
- Incoming links – not simply directory links, but links from other authoritative sites; sites with a high PageRank or Location Prominence score.
- Reviews – I’m particularly interested in how Google uses reviews as a factor in local search rankings. There are the metrics that are already quantified–the actual number of reviews a business has received on a site like Yelp for example and rating itself, 3 stars, 4 stars or 5 stars. But how do you quantify the content of the review? How do you turn “good”, “bad”, “efficient”, “okay”, “disgusting”, “spicy” or “pusillanimous” (maybe you rented a guard dog, alright) into a number? What’s the scale for all negative words? What’s the most negative word you can give a restaurant? Does that mean that word passes along a -100 score?
- Citations – it’s not merely about links, but how many times your business and its accompanying address appear on a website, not as a link.
- Information about the business – search engines want information. It helps them develop a rich tapestry of search results. They’re machines, not humans. They can’t decipher meaning like you and me. Providing the search engines with little information about your business is like the difference between a picture from an inexpensive camera versus a professional camera. If you don’t participate in sites like Yelp, Google Local Business Center, comment on industry blogs, add your business to Best of the Web, then you’re taking a picture of your business with a cheap camera. Google wants you to use that Nikon D3X! What’s the business’ annual revenue? How many employees does the business have? How long has the business been in existence and how long have they been present in listings across the web?
Link: Page Speed
Love: the need for speed! Recently, Google announced they were open sourcing a nifty Firefox add-in, integrated with another superb tool called Firebug, called Page Speed. Page load time is a factor in quality score on the PPC side of life and there have beenrumblings about whether or not page load time plays a role or will play a role in natural search rankings for some time now. Let’s assume it doesn’t play a role in natural search rankings, though. Does that mean I should compress the images on my site, enablegzip compression or remove unused CSS from my site anyway? If you happen to have a site that takes a bit longer than usual to load, I’d vote yes. Users find pages that take too long to load annoying, which translates into users bouncing away. The thinking behind improving page load, and as a corollary the user experience, is driven by five best practices:
- Optimizing caching – keeping your application’s data and logic off the network entirely
- Minimizing round-trip times – reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
- Minimizing request size – reducing upload size
- Minimizing payload size – reducing the size of responses, downloads and cached pages
- Optimizing browser rendering – improving the browser’s layout of a page
Aside: “…reducing…cached pages.” Hmm, interesting. Nofollow links to your About Us page, AND robots.txt them out?
Link: Web Data Quality: A 6 Step Process to Evolve Your Mental Model
Love: data, but don’t allow imperfect data to cause you to freeze and not act. One of my favorite lines from this post says there is no limit to the amount of data to you can collect and store on the Internet, and it’s headache-inducingly correct. I’ve mentioned in previous posts the importance of collecting data, analyzing data and then providing an interpretation of that data for insight into what action should be taken, and I of course still feel that way, but I’m not a Quant. There’s a point where granular becomes so microscopic that the difference in dataset A and dataset B will not cause your client to change his or her decision. Therefore, you need to accept imperfection and act. I know we’re big into models and science and equations, but so was Wall Street, and we saw what happened there. Certainly collect your data, but don’t allow it to bog you down into indecision, and don’t allow incomplete data to bolster that indecision. After all, it’s all incomplete (esoteric alert!).
“How do you measure the effectiveness of your magazine ad? Now compare that to the data you have from DoubleClick. How about measuring the ability of your TV ad to reach the right audience? Compare that with measuring reach through Paid Search (or Affiliate Marketing, or …). Do you think you get more useful data from Neilsen’s TV panel of between 15k – 30k US residents to represent the diversity of TV content consumption of 200 million American television viewers?”
Link: 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites
Love: social media for something other than retweeting, posting pictures or helping you acquire links. Social media websites work because they facilitate communication and sharing amongst users (and they allow us to talk about ourselves, of course). The good ones also work on a different level–user interface. Thinking about your website in this way, and incorporating these features, can help drastically improve your conversion rate. Remember, it’s all about the user, not you!
Link: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive
Love: scientifically proven ways to do anything. Who doesn’t want to be persuasive? You’re a business, right? You’re trying to tell your story in order to persuade the potential client to help you write the next chapter, right? A few favorites from the post:
- Too many options necessitate selection, and hence frustration…
- How restaurant mints are a personalized affair
- Asking people to substantiate their decision will lead to higher commitment
(Thanks to @ifss who tweeted this post)
3G5UC76ZKDFC
Peter Drucker on What Businesses Can Learn from Non-Profits
Synopsis of an article, of the same title, written by Peter Drucker in the Harvard Business Review (1989). Point F is incredibly poignant considering the growth of search (write for your customers, optimize your site in their language so that it is found and ranks well) and social media.
a. In two areas, nonprofits practice what businesses preach: strategy and the effectiveness of the board
b. In the most crucial area, the motivation and productivity of knowledge workers, they are pioneers
c. Management is vital to nonprofits as they are not motivated by the “bottom line.” This serves as both a blessing and something of a curse. Good intentions still require organization and leadership, for accountability, performance and results. Training ground for future managers
d. Non-profits are more money conscious than business. There is never enough money. Employees are business savvy with regard to effective saving and spending
e. Non-profits do no base their strategy on money or make it the center of their plans. First and foremost is the mission. This involves looking outside the non-profit and focuses the organization on action. It defines specific goals, how they will be attained and, consequently, a disciplined organization.
f. Remaining mission focused with an eye towards the world outside the organization, non-profits are always seeking and listening to the “customer” to be. It is, after all, what the customer wants – and even more so in the internet age.
g. A clearly defined mission facilities and encourages innovation
h. Emphasis on training, training, training of new volunteers means the organization must make use of the current volunteers expertise. Training is absolutely necessary. Knowledge workers demand responsibility – above all, for thinking through and setting their own performance goals. They expect to be consulted and participate in the decisions that affect their work and the work of the organization as a whole. In addition, opportunity for advancement is a requirement so long as their performance warrants such responsibility.
i. Non-profit workers expect their work to be evaluated against pre-set objectives. They expect those workers who do not make the grade to be moved to a different position that takes advantage of their skillset or even encouraged to leave.
j. The move from volunteer to unpaid professional “may be the most important development in society today.”
k. Finish with a quote,”This development also carries a clear lesson for businesses. Managing the knowledge worker for productivity is the challenge ahead for American management. It requires a clear mission, careful placement and continuous learning and teaching, management by objectives and self-control, high demands but corresponding responsibility, and accountability for performance and results. There is also a clear warning to American business…The students in the program for senior and mid-level executives…most of them also serve as volunteers in nonprofits…When I ask them why they do it, far too many give the same answer: Because in my job there isn’t much challenge, not enough achievement, not enough responsibility; and there is no mission, only expediency.”
Seth Godin’s Tribes
Image by boopsie.daisy
Written on March 30, 2009
I recently bought Seth Godin’s latest book called Tribes. I’ve decided to read and take notes along the way and hopefully turn those notes into a somewhat cohesive blog post. So, in an effort to get that cohesive ball rolling – imagine a softball sized ball of tape, rolling along the floor, nabbing hairs and dirt along the trip – here ya go!
Primary thought after reading first quarter or so of book: Social media allows businesses, organizations, associations, anyone to lead a tribe. SM is certainly derided as frustratingly difficult to track (and I agree to an extent), but it provides a potentially explosive opportunity to businesses. Standing on the sidelines because you personally do not like social media is short-sighted, egotistical and, in the end, it’s really not about you. People are already talking about you whether you like it or not. It’s about the user. Your constituents. That’s the beauty of the internet.
Joel Spolsky is Changing the World
- Joel’s passion is talking about how to run a small software company
- By its nature, search is about the how – people are looking for information
- Tribe = group of people, a leader and a connecting idea
- Tribes need a leader and an idea
- To be a tribe, a group needs a shared interest and a way to communicate
- As a business with a website, you have commons, a meeting place
- Obviously, have a way to communicate
Grateful Dead
- Did not necessarily succeed economically – at least it was not their primary goal, but they created a blue print for a tribe
- Humans want to belong to a group
- Tribes make our lives better
- “…being in a tribe is a big part of how we see ourselves.” Page 3
Tribes Used to be Local
- Internet eliminates geography
- Explosion of tools that allows us to connect with people, other tribes, to connect interests
- Becomes more about our interests as opposed to who we know as a first move (Facebook, Myspace)
- More on interest networks
In Search of a Movement
- Many groups stuck – they drown out dissenters and those with views different from the status quo
- These people are aching to be a part of a movement
- Similar to The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
Tribes Aren’t So Squishy Anymore
- Prior to internet, tribes hard to connect
- Instant communication makes things taut
- Barack Obama can raise $50 million in 28 days
- Important point: the internet is a tool, it’s about us, about the people. You don’t need a keyboard to lead, but the desire
- We are hardwired to be social, internet – Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Yelp – allows us to be social
- Okay, if you don’t the desire, let someone else who does have the desire lead the tribe
- If you are the CEO, the director of marketing, it’s important to recognize those individuals in your company that are impassioned by blogging, tweeting, facebooking. If they can sell you on their efficacy, then give them the power to use their authenticity to garner recruits to your tribe. Nothing worse than disingenuous online interactions – people pick it up and revolt (see uproar about Guy Kawasaki and his use of twitter)
- “generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the self-efforts of someone doing it just because she can.” Page 7
- Googlers view on authenticity, et cetera
- It does not cost much (just buy Red Bull for the knowledgeable 23 yr old in your company). It can yield long term ROI.
- http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2009/03/top-web-analytics-questions-twitter-edition.html
More to follow as I read along and write.
The Devil Only Knows What Choice Depends On
I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few months about the recession, trying to figure out exactly what happened in order to understand various why answers that have been thrown out there. Something I’ve noticed about the recession, and that generally bothers me, is the use of science, math, numbers, equations (whatever) to create models of prediction – models that attempt to predict human behavior. I’m sure certain models do quite well, but to fall in love with an equation? Crazy. How do you turn happy, sad, greedy, desire, depression, irrationality into an equation? The numbers in these equations are not all rational actors. That’s a strategic point of view.
Certainly, on a tactical level it seems the crisis is very much about how our banking/economic system functions (housing is only a part of the problem!), but, again, on a strategic level it’s about how we regulate ourselves – through politics, government. If we concede our irrationality and desire to do what’s best for me, then I don’t understand the view that we do not need to regulate our markets.
The equation is enticing. It’s final. It’s complete. It gives you hope and security. But what happens when people start to act all too human? Makes me think of this passage from Notes from Underground:
…Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science … and pulled myself up. And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices; that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula; then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the chances; can such a thing happen or not?
Karimanifesto
From Karim Rashid‘s manifesto on how non-professional designers can incorporate design sensibilities into our lives.
1. Don’t specialize
2. Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you disseminate.
3. Know everything about the history of your profession and then forget it all when you design something new.
4. Never say “I could have done that” because you didn’t.
5. Consume experiences, not things.
6. Normal is not good.
7. There are three types of beings – those who create culture, those who buy culture, and those who don’t give a shit about culture. Move between the first two.
8. Think extensivesly, not intensively.
9. Experience is the most important part of living, and the exchange of ideas and human contact is all life really is. Space and objects can encourage increased experiences or distract from our experiences.
10. Here and now is all we got.
CRAP Design
Website usability is design. Robin Williams’ four basics of effective graphic design fits flawlessly with effective website design:
Contrast. “If the elements (type, color, size, line thickness, shape, space, etc) are not the same, then make them very different.
Repetition. Repeating visual elements “helps develop the organization and strengthens unity” or your website, brochure, etc
Alignment. “Nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every element should have some visual connection with another element on the page.”
Proximity. “Items relating to each other should be grouped close together.”
3G5UC76ZKDFC
Federated Login and OpenID
Written on September 26, 2008
There’s a scene in the HBO sitcom Lucky Louie where the main character Louie is going to apply to flight school. He heads down to the library to make a copy of a document and, once finished with the difficult task of pressing Copy, ship out the application – flight school there he goes. However, when he gets to the library, he finds out the copy machine isn’t working. Louie says screw it, that’s too much effort. He doesn’t apply to Flight School. That does not happen in real life, does it? It does, sorta…
Who else out there has stumbled upon an interesting website, your finger kicks into high-gear, click, click, click, you notice a mouth watering link within the website, click, click, boom! The last click takes you to a form. You need to fill out a form to join the website (read the information, play the game). Form? The arrow on your screen darts up to the StumbleUpon extension and you’re whisked away to the world wide web once again. No flight school for me.
Well, according to recently released research from Google on Federated Login:
when users are presented with a traditional signup page that asks for your E-mail, password and password confirmation, it is quite common for 30% – 50% of users to not finish the process.
In other words, the words of Michael Jackson, you are not alone. Google, please count me among that 50% (I already know you’re tracking my behavior anyway, so I probably don’t need to tell you that).
I know what you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, so what you’re telling me is that I’m losing customers because of a measly form?” So it would seem, particularly because it asks for e-mail, password, and password confirmation. Ring a bell?
And, “What the heck is Federated Login? How will it affect my business?” Well, let’s take a real world example to explain the basic premise of Federated Login.
According to the OpenID website, “OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience…OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to…For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.” Federated login is the elimination of the need for multiple usernames across different websites. In this example, OpenID is merely one protocol currently in use that eliminates this need across a number of websites.
Rather than continuously creating more and more accounts across numerous e-commerce websites, for example, all you would need to do in order to log in is provide your email and your identity would then be validated and the appropriate information would be provided to the website. Google has been testing user interfaces similar to those found on Buy.com:
The report on Federated Login states that federated login has been the “holy grail” of the identity community, but has failed to find a model that:
- is simple for end users
- had a reasonable trust model between the the website and the entity that will identify you to the website
The study is a testament to the potential that lies ahead for the online world – specifically the business side of the online world – in terms of usability. Equally, businesses with a presence on the internet should also look to this study as more evidence that while increasing rankings and traffic is absolutely necessary to accomplishing your goals, once that traffic hits your website it needs to be usable and effective.
