Last week, Tim O'Reilly posted about self-linking as a journalistic practice, where one article on the Web refers to another story at the same site instead of an external link. For example, at BusinessWeek.com, a new feature article may link phrases and terms to other articles at Business Week for more explanation.
Whether the incentive behind building one’s website is business related or personal, it is important that one’s website must look professional in its design. Along with a beautiful and professional design a website must be very interactive and structural. When designing a website one wants to keep the user in mind. One wants their content ...
I've been fighting this sinking feeling that we're headed for another four years (or eight) of a Republican President. Not that I have anything against John McCain except that I'll never vote for him. But I'm a pretty staunch Democrat, and it'd be nice to blame my own party for the world's problems for a change.
In the last presidential election, I formulated a theory that the most social media-savvy party would win. John Kerry and the DNC pretty much screwed the pooch every chance they got. Bush, on the other hand, had some remarkably media-savvy folks doing everything from real-time blogging and spin of debates to carrying their Swift Boat campaign to YouTube.
Kerry, of course, went on to lose by 3 million popular votes and a lot more states.
Could John Kerry have reached another 3 million people online? Dunno. But surely a few smart moves online could've helped when his image started to crumble.
Fast forward. It's 2008. The Democratic National Convention is going on now, and the Republicans start theirs in a week or so. So I decided to compare their respective convention sites based on simple stuff.
I may just have to change my party affiliation.
I checked the Republican National Convention site using Integrity. 1000 pages, no broken links. A few timeouts, but that was it.
I checked the Democratic Convention site. 2000 pages, 200+ broken links. Ouch.
Democrats lose.
Then I checked each site for social media 'hooks': Ways to easily follow each party on Digg, Twitter, etc.
The Republicans seem to have their act together:
The Democrats don't. They opted for 'gavel to gavel' hidef video. Which is neato, but not quite as helpful. Plus they made a totally unexplainable technology choice. But I'll get there in a second.
The Democrats have billed their convention as open to all. Their home page, though, looks more like a Nike commercial:
It's pretty. It's also utterly devoid of any updates, any text, or any call to action for me, a long-suffering Democrat. Oh, yeah, and given how many e-mails and phone calls I've gotten from the party asking for unity, don't you think the home page should, I dunno, ask for unity?!
Oh, yeah, and the DNC home page still shows 'one hour to go' as one of the blog headlines, 24 hours later. Way to stay up to date, guys.
The Republicans' home page, on the other hand, is kind of folksy, like you're going to a county fair:
Not my style, but I'm not their audience. And their page has several calls to action: Form a local 'watch party' (which somehow makes me think of the McCarthy era, but no one's perfect) or sign up for e-mail updates. The DNC site has the e-mail signup too. But I could actually find it on the Republican site.
I'm old, so I'm not sure I used 'Phail' right. But the Democratic National Convention site uses Silverlight for all video:
Huh?
Why on earth wouldn't you use YouTube, or another video streaming service, or at least use Flash on your own server?
So, playing video on the DNC site required that I download not one, but two plugins. Not a major hardship for me. But kind of dumb if you're trying to spread the word to as many people as possible.
Oh, did I mention the dire warning message I got when I tried to install the plugins:
In 2012, when you're running to unseat John McCain, try using Flash, which has a ridiculously large user base. Or at least get up-to-date certificates for your plugins.
I know, Microsoft probably wrote them a big honking check to use Silverlight. But isn't "we're for sale" kind of the wrong message to send when you're trying to elect a President? Even if it's true?
The Republican National Convention site has its problems, too: Two conflicting e-mail signup forms, a writing style that makes me cringe and a candidate that can't remember how many houses he owns.
It cost about $15 million to prepare the Pepsi Center for the Democratic National Convention. Plus a whole lotta money for security.
I'd cheerfully have built their web site for, oh I dunno, $250,000. My therapy bills would probably top that by the time we were done.
For this tiny slice of the pie:
I would have cheerfully made the effort run a link checker on the damned site. I would've thrown in a few social media links for good measure, made sure their plugins worked properly, and hit them with furniture when they mentioned using Silverlight as their video platform.
I hope I'm wrong. At least a President from my party will take my money and give it to the poor, instead of taking it and giving it to Iraq. But if not, you guys know where to find me in 2012.
Recently in several SEO forums I noticed a number of threads discussing ways to find and build "economical" links. The forum participants wanted to know how they could initiate "safe" reciprocal linking as well as "fast" submissions to free article directories. They reasoned these tactics were worth doing because both linking methods were "economical" and "easy" to use.
I understand some linking techniques can be expensive, tedious to implement and extremely time consuming, but tying your online business success to linking tactics deemed "easy", "fast" and "cheap" seems counter-productive. If you limit your linking to low-cost tactics or look at the practice as "link building" instead of "marketing for links" you're almost guaranteed to fail.
When I attended South by Southwest 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a panel where four somewhat lost panelists were (with difficulty) trying to come up with metrics to measure success from a social media marketing campaign. I was a little annoyed when they concluded that there were no metrics available right now, and that someone would have to come up with a new way of measuring social media success.
While many people argue that the current metrics are no longer applicable, here's a look at how we can adapt the currently available methodologies and apply them to social media marketing campaigns.
Posted by randfish
This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."
The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets.
There's just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you're pursuing this process:
That's it for this week's headsmacker. I've got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we're also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned!
BTW - If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny's brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination.
There's a social network for everybody -- and that's not an exaggeration.
Coby Electronics probably hasn’t had this much press in the existence of the company. At the CeBIT expo in Germany at the first of March, the value – oriented consumer electronics company picked up its share of the buzz because of a brand new smartbook as reported by Engadget. The buzz isn’t about great styling, ...