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Every Word is a Keyword for SEO

by on Nov 09, 2008 (1) Comments

You have to look beyond keyword research if you want to be one of those companies that always appears at the top of search results. This implies knowing how to create traditional appeal in non traditional ways.

However, what does that mean specifically? We know that doubling conversion does not necessarily mean you have to double your traffic.

It means that you just have to create more lucrative cross-sections or co-occurrence of keywords (or pages) that appeal to your target audience. This feat is easily accomplished with SEO and within the context of your pages using cross-sections of keywords that will draw an audience based on the content and market focus.

This is the principle of funneling, which implies funneling relevant traffic based on “broad match” and “exact match” traffic as a result of information retrieval. What happens next is pure synergy, a person inputs words, search engine identifies patterns and based on indicators of reputation and relevance return a page from a website.

Considering there are millions of ways for each visitor to arrive at the same page or same conclusion, depending on their personal experience or manorisms. Since no two people are alike (although there are common denominators) each inevitably searches their own way.

Also, since most searches are unique (meaning they have never been executed before) that represents a tremendous opportunity for sites that target low hanging fruit (available keywords) while targeting more aggressive key phrases.

Keep in mind that every word when combined with another word is a potential keyphrase. Also, since you have no control over what a person may type in a search engine to find your website, you essentially do your best based on traditional keyword research tools, common sense and other metrics to gauge popularity and anticipated traffic.

However language barriers, personal preferences and other components of distinction can create hot spots as a website can double as a hub or springboard for other useful content. The gist is, by targeting enough low hanging fruit (root keywords within range), you systematically increase the volume of traffic and potential interactions with prospects.

This is the way a website can showcase a stable increase in traffic each month. By using content as spider bait, linking to more relevant pages in the context of each post and targeting non-traditional, less competitive keyword combinations.

Every top 10 ranking you produce is an indicator of your websites strength to search engines. Eventually your pages become powerhouses and funnel tremendous surges of link juice into different areas of the website which continually emerge is unique and uncharacteristic ways.

The conclusion here is to look beyond keyword research and tap into the raw and latent potential of LSI (latent semantic indexing and phrase rank) within each of the pages in your website.

Web 2.0 Gets Big – and Corporate

by on Nov 07, 2008 (0) Comments

As the economy totters, it’s easy to make fun of the concept of “Web 2.0” — the rallying cry of a generation of chipper start-ups spawned over the last few years with an unusual aversion to vowels.

Certainly, most of the venture capitalists I’ve talked to at the Web 2.0 Summit have said they are shying away from companies that are based on the idea of growing an audience now and figuring out how to make money later. However, after listening to the presentations here over the past three days, it is clear that some of the key concepts of the Web 2.0 movement are, in fact, taking root in deep ways.

One of the most significant trends is how the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies, particularly the notion of programs that talk to other programs. They are breaking up their technologies into discrete modules that can work alongside data and applications from others.

Facebook can be credited with taking the first step to open up large parts of its service to third parties. Last year, it let their applications on its site. Now, through its upcoming Facebook Connect service, it will let other companies build applications that use its list of people and who their friends are to deliver new services.

Yahoo, a vastly more complex site, is restructuring to allow others to use many parts of its service: the content, the search engine, the social relationships embedded in e-mail, and such. That means that Yahoo information can be used on other sites, and developers can create applications to run on Yahoo. “If and when we can get our 500 million users on our platform, the power is huge,” Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, told the conference. This, of course, involves reworking much of the software behind the site in order to connect politely and consistently with other companies.

Not to be outdone, Dave Girouard, who manages Google’s efforts to sell services to big enterprises, said that Google, too, developing a platform. “We want to you to have the same access to Google that our internal developers do,” Mr. Girouard said. He offered no details.

In a completely different market, Salesforce.com is transforming itself from service dedicated to tracking sales leads to a platform that allows many more options. Marc Benioff, its chief executive, told the conference about the company’s new platform, Force.com. Now customers can run their own applications on Salesforce’s computers, mixing its systems with those from other developers. The point is to help companies develop internal systems, Web sites for the public and even applications to run on social networks like Facebook.

By far the most ambitious effort along these lines is Microsoft’s new operating system called Azure, which is being developed under the direction of Ray Ozzie.

In the broadest sense, Azure is a system that enables a program to run on personal computers, on mobile devices and on Microsoft’s own data centers without losing track of important data. But as I talked to Azure’s developers here, it was clear that Microsoft is trying to incorporate both strands of Web 2.0 thinking into the new operating system.

First, it is designed to interact with many other systems. It can pull in data from other places and formats and create widgets that add features to Web sites. Microsoft insists that Azure will be more respectful of the various standards used on the Internet than the company’s other products have been.

Moreover, Microsoft has built what it claims are industrial-strength versions of some of the social features common to Web 2.0 applications, such as a combined list of updates modeled after the Facebook newsfeed but designed to keep track of relationships among hundreds of millions of people.

It’s too early to say which, if any, of these big-company efforts to build platforms will succeed. Some may well collapse of their own complexity. Others may be attempts by their creators to chase buzzwords. In 2001, you wouldn’t have been able to predict the Web sites that would prevail.

But I do think that we can count on moving into a world where very complicated computer systems are designed to talk to people and to each other, using the ideas developed in the Web 2.0 era, with or without vowels.

Intro to DotNetNuke

by on Nov 07, 2008 (0) Comments

DotNetNuke – another powerful content management system to add to the existing list. With so many CMS’s around and each one of them offering you a vast set of features, you feel pampered. A few years back, building your dream website for your organization and managing its content simultaneously, seemed such a daunting task. However after Content Management Systems have come into existence, publishing dynamic content in a consistently structured and customized manner has been astonishingly simplified.

With over 500,000 registered users and 5.0 million downloads in late 2007 (as per official sources), DotNetNuke has become one of today’s largest and effective open source CMS. It has been written in Microsoft’s VB.NET for the ASP.NET (also by Microsoft) framework. With an extensible core and a set of additional customization features that include modules and skins, DotNetNuke can be used to develop, deploy and efficiently manage websites, including extranets and intranets.

What makes DotNetNuke stand apart form the other CMS’s is the way in which it allows you to implement modules and skins, in order to customize your web application(s). Without any expertise of development in ASP.NET, web designers can develop skins for an application and it is this feature completely separates design from content. Only basic knowledge of HTML and understanding the inherent steps to prepare and implement the skins themselves is necessary. Skins have been implemented in DotNetNuke as basic HTML files with placeholders that serve as templates for content, menus and other GUI features. This includes support files such as JavaScript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and images.

The DotNetNuke architecture can be extended to provide an additional set of features and functionalities by the use of pluggable modules. The core includes almost a dozen of them that is included with the distribution and other modules can be downloaded from the official DotNetNuke website. These modules include pluggable add-ons some of which are forums, blogs, wiki, e commerce systems and mailing lists.

There have also been some criticisms associated with this CMS. The instructions for creating an appropriate module are cumbersome. A very important feature that lacks in DotNetNuke is the ability to dynamically localize the content of your website. There is no provision for providing content in languages other than English. There has also been debate on the fact that some of its older modules do not work as advertised.

However recently, the quality of the newer DotNetNuke releases have improved and are more stable compared to the earlier releases. The official portal features regular updates. Moreover, DotNetNuke has an impressive fan following. It has grown more and more popular with the passage of time. There are a number of online user groups available for assistance where you can learn more about the DotNetNuke platform.

I remember playing the “Duke Nukem” game once. Speaking of CMS’s, I often DotNetNuke!

SEO-sans Greetings – Taking advantage of Xmas through Search Engine Marketing

by on Nov 06, 2008 (0) Comments

While I’ve been involved in SEO for a while it still surprises me quite how unfamiliar many people are with the concept of Search Engine Marketing.

My Mum, for example, while she might not have been familiar with SEM she certainly is affected by its outcome. She, like many others will be doing a large proportion of her Christmas shopping online, the BBC reported last year how as much as £7bn will be spent online in the run up to the festive period, while the credit crunch is sure to have an effect the trend definitely is away from the uber busy town centres to shopping from the comfort of your sofa.

But how can search marketers take advantage of this?

Like most people, a lot of where those billions are spent will be decided by what appears on the search engines results pages and the search for the gift for the difficult friend or relative, provides a unique opportunity for websites small or large:

The run up to Christmas and New Year provides the perfect opportunity to create rich content that’s relevant and topical. From the simplest of ideas, like providing a helpful gift guide, to more complex campaigns with a wide variety of valuable editorial, it’s the ideal chance to use the holidays as a springboard for new ideas on your site.

The internet is a linked together place and you should work with those around you. The links between sites help people navigate around the web. These links are double-y useful; firstly someone can click on that link and go straight to your site. Secondly search engines like Google look at the links from other websites you have, so they can determine how popular your site is and how high on results your site should appear.

This works both ways, if there’s a relevant website or company your readers might be interested in you should point them in that direction. You might be a butcher and it might be worth having a link to your local Wine Merchant after a customer has ordered a turkey, these links are useful to you and your customers.

Keep an eye on what everyone else is up to. It’s always good to monitor your competitors online, they might be doing a special seasonal offer that you might be able to match, or they might be stocking some new items that you were not aware of.

If you are not selling gifts it does not have to stop you taking advantage of the festive season. If you’re a travel agent you can focus on special Christmas getaways or hot trips abroad away from a chilly December. It’s worth bearing in mind the affect the time of year can have on your marketing campaign all year round; many websites will see seasonal changes in their visitors. If you’re a recruiter January might be the ideal time to ramp up your online presence in the New Year for those wanting a fresh start in a new job.

When thinking about your sites search engine strategy remember to think like a searcher. It’s unlikely you’ll find a gift for your loved ones by typing only gift into the search box. Gift for sporty teenage girl, is far more likely to yield a suitable present. If you are using pay per click adverts be sure think about these longer more accurate search phrases.

The Christmas period offers plenty of chances to try new things online, its worth having a try if just to get away from the cold and the busy shops!

Also if you enjoyed this post you might also like these posts from last year about SEM during the holiday period…

Tailoring your Link Velocity to coincide with seasonal peaks in demand.
The Ultimate Guide to Adapting your PPC campaign for the Christmas Season

Has Google Cache killed Page Rank?

by on Nov 04, 2008 (0) Comments

This is an old post that I found in the depth of my documents, while the test is old I certainly think the point of the article remains

Ages ago Aaron Wall made a short post promoting a friends online web tool. In the post Aaron suggested, given Page Rank’s infrequent updates and old data that the date Google last cached your site was a better indication of how much Google “trusted” your site than the green strip in the Google Toolbar.

It got me thinking, quarterly updates of Page Rank with data from who knows when, while quite useful isn’t the most reliable indication of how respected you are in the halls of the Googleplex. With the rise of blogs, RSS, social media & user generated content how long ago the search engine spiders visited your site probably is pretty good indication of how important your site is.

So time dust of Excel and see if there is any evidence to prove Aaron’s hunch. The test was simple, three simple generic key phrases, take the first page of the Google.com search engine results page and see if the more recently cached pages appeared higher up the results.

Test One – “Movie Trailers”
First up “Movie Trailers” Apple’s trailer site was in top position and the cache theory seemed to hold water through the first 6 results. However after this it all got a bit messier. In seventh place joeblo.com was the most recently indexed site. To complicate matters further it was followed by movie-trailers.com which was indexed ages ago and seems to be an expired domain. Bellow these sites, at the bottom of the first page; movies.monstersandcritics.com/trailers/ was indexed more recently than the 5th and 6th place results. Hardly conclusive but the results seemed to follow the general trend.

Test Two – “Global Warming”
The key phrase “Movie Trailers” features regularly updated pages from some of the biggest online players, so for my second phrase I felt something a phrase likely to turn up more static authority pages with lower search volumes would be good test. Partially inspired by the SEO World Championship from back in the day. I opted for “global warming”. Surprise, Surprise, Wikipedia in top place. Here we have the opposite of “Movie Trailers” the lower order is arranged nicely in order of cache date but the top results aren’t following the pattern I was hoping for.

Test Three – “Brighton Function Rooms”
For the third query I thought I’d go nice and niche with “Brighton Function Rooms” A lot less traffic than the previous queries and fewer indexed pages. The results were a bit spammy with plenty of Adsense reliant directories. Unfortunately the results deviated from the “Most Recent Cache Date = Most Trusted” formula more than any of my three queries. The dates were all over the place some really recently indexed others up to six weeks old.

Has Cache Killed Page Rank?
Aaron’s prediction wasn’t quite as simple to prove as I’d hoped. The sites most recently cached weren’t the highest in the rankings. However I don’t think this entirely discounts the theory. My test only checked how recently the pages had been cached, not how frequently. Some of the sites in my test might have been spidered recently but been waiting weeks for their visit from the bots. I haven’t given up on the idea, I’m going to try and test the cache frequency see if Page Rank really is dead.

The Pre-Cyber Monday Shakedown: Is Your Ecommerce Strategy Optimized For The Holiday Rush?

by on Nov 03, 2008 (0) Comments

Across the globe, retailers are bracing for a challenging holiday shopping season. If you run an ecommerce site, what can you do to be sure to get the most out of “Cyber Monday” (the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States which falls on Dec. 1 this year) and beyond? At Agency.com we have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s strongest online retail brands, all of which are as concerned as mom-and-pop retailers about how they will fare during this holiday shopping season.

In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.

Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.

Offer free anything. Regardless of the economy, shoppers love to get something for free. Adjust your pricing, messaging and infrastructure now to put a little free shipping or holiday perk into the mix to sweeten the deal. Online shoppers are not just price sensitive, they are total-cost sensitive. If you can put together a better total deal than the competitor a notch down in the search results, you will have a better opportunity to make the sale.

Get ready to pay more for search marketing. Seems a bit of a no-brainer, but it is important to understand that from this point forward this year you will need to be paying more for search. For even the largest retailers, holiday shopping time is when they earn their bread, so it makes sense for online marketers to spend more in the hopes of making more. Just be sure that you are not spending blindly, and that your paid campaigns are tied into your ecommerce back end so that you can see what spending makes sense.

Optimize XML for feed-based shopping engines. If you have not jumped into comparison shopping, now is the time. Using your data feed (unfortunately only a few of the engines accept XML feeds) get into comparison shopping engines to compete for the cost-conscious consumer. As household budgets shrink, people are looking for the best deal they can find, and comparison shopping is projected to be one of the bright spots in the ecommerce mix this year.

And don’t forget the flavor of the month: social shopping. Although it accounts for a very small percentage of total ecommerce revenue, social shopping is emerging as a way for certain kinds of consumer products to accelerate into high-touch communities of influencers.

Take fullest advantage of that XML feed by creating a seasonal shopping widget or Facebook application or other externalization of your catalog so that you can give your customers and advocates the best possible opportunity to carry your proposition into their communities.

Do a thorough analytics review. Make sure that your site is ready to handle the increased number of visitors. Check your shopping cart and conversion funnels for holes and work to be sure that you get the most out of every customer. Remove barriers to transactions and increase the visibility of the calls to action.

Tweak your merchandising and cross-selling. If you are selling a printer, include an offer to buy replacement cartridges. If you are selling running shoes, why not merchandise a warm-up jacket in the same color? Perhaps the purchaser of that particular fragrance will also like to buy a scented candle? You have them in your shopping aisle, why not try to get another item or two into their shopping cart! Embed a layer of social shopping into your cart so that you can cross-sell by showing the other items that people have purchased in conjunction with the item that is currently being viewed.

Optimize for promo codes and coupons. Any large brand has a segment of their customer base searching for promo codes for use in an online store or for coupons to be transacted offline. Build a page specifically targeted to this search behavior and extend your ability to connect with brand loyalists that are just looking for a bit of a discount.

Santa has already taken the reindeer out on some training flights, and you too should be tuning up your ecommerce strategy to make the most out of the holiday shopping period. This year, more shoppers will be looking online for better deals and for ways to save the incremental costs like the fuel it takes to drive from mall to mall. Advance preparation will ensure you get the most out of this holiday shopping season.

Election Night TV: Networks Aim to Dazzle With Gadgetry

by on Nov 02, 2008 (0) Comments

It’s election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago.

But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.

“Everyone is doing something virtual this election year,” says CNN Senior Vice President David Bohrman, the guy who pushed the technology. But Bohrman believes CNN is going where no network has gone before by employing Hollywood-style effects. “Virtual elements in a real set look so much better than a real person in a virtual set,” he says.

Election night is like the Summer Olympics and Super Bowl for network news divisions, and each is carting out eye-popping technical toys to draw viewers.

“For the big game, you see all the bells and whistles. The real challenge this year is new stuff that will travel easily on multiplatforms,” says Andrew Tyndall, publisher of TyndallReport.com, which monitors television network news. “Not only must this look good on TV, but on portable devices like cell phones.”

Shooting Someone Who Isn’t There

There are plenty of reasons for the gimmicks: This year’s race has been intensely followed, and is expected to draw tens of millions of voters — and viewers — on Nov. 4. Significantly more people are expected to watch Tuesday night’s results than in 2004, when about 64 million viewed election-night results on network and cable TV, according to Nielsen.

USA Today got an exclusive peek at the holographic technology, which CNN hopes to unveil prior to the election on “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. CNN is still fine-tuning the technology.

“It’s so complicated,” Bohrman says. “The crew is basically shooting someone that isn’t there.”

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

Bohrman won’t disclose the cost, but says, “We’re on our budget for election night.”

‘Information and Context’

The movie studios have used similar technology as far back as “Star Wars,” says Bohrman, who has dreamed about the prospects for a decade. But until recently, the networks have lacked the computing horsepower.

Borhman flew to Israel the day after the vice presidential debate to enlist the help of two tech companies — Vizrt, which works on state-of-the-art virtual studios; and SportVu, a developer of a real-time camera tracking system used in live sporting events.

CNN correspondent John King, who is closely associated with the network’s Magic Wall, which shows detailed election results, says broadcasters have to be careful with new technology.

“Is it really part of telling a story or some sort of eye candy to make people go ‘wow?’ We have to add information and context.”

What Others Are Doing

  • Fox News has built three new HD studios for Tuesday night’s broadcast so it can make better use of the additional TV real estate with updated county results, comparative numbers from previous elections and poll-closing times. A giant wall with touchscreen technology will provide electoral map results.”We’ve been planning for this night for two years,” says Jay Wallace, vice president of news editorial product at Fox News.
  • ABC’s digital maps make their debut, letting correspondents look at up-to-the-minute votes by county, and compare votes as far back as 1960. Also, a double ticker line at the bottom of TV screens will display current popular and electoral totals for Barack Obama and John McCain. Beneath that will be results for Senate and gubernatorial races, says ABC News Creative Director Hal Aronow-Theil. For HD viewers, ABC is providing more information on the left margin of the TV screen.
  • NBC spent the past year designing two studios that make the most of visual technology. One features intricate exit-polling information that digitally appears on a wall. The other studio lets political director Chuck Todd analyze presidential results by region, state and county. “We finally figured a way around using pie charts,” jokes Phil Alongi, executive producer of election night for NBC News and its cable channel, MSNBC.NBC, too, plans to make use of a bigger HD screen size with detailed results from the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races. And it has partnered with social-networking giant MySpace Latest News about MySpace on Decision08, an online section that includes video, news feeds and blogs from NBC News.
  • CBS News will analyze national and state exit-poll data, using state-of-the-art technology to display vote-counting and demographic data.Touchscreen technology will allow anchor Katie Couric to drill down on state and county results for all races, including propositions. “It is very fast technology using real-time data,” says Frank Governale, vice president of operations for CBS News.
  • Comedy Central, a go-to cable channel for political news for many young people, is teaming with a social-networking site. The TV home of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is using the services of Meebo to host chat rooms for users to share their political views.Among CNN’s other innovations on election night are a virtual Capitol Building used to illustrate the changing balance of power in Congress. But the most promising election winner is the hologram. “Either this is an evolution in the way we do live interviews on television,” Bohrman says, “or it’s a nice try.”