Texture design

Posted by randfish

Our field┬?has grown tremendously over the last 5 years. When Danny Sullivan launched the first Search Engine Strategies conference, I'd estimate that less than 5,000 people worldwide called themselves Designs. Today, the number of self-referencing┬?"search marketers" is probably closer to 100,000 and may well be much higher. But, a number of features separate the Design/M expert from the novice, and today I thought I'd point out a few of these. The following refer specifically to consultants in search - people who help other companies get the most out of their search traffic.

• Brand Level Experience
  
  While experts generally carry experience with a few Fortune 500s (or 1000s), novices often haven't dealt with a recognizable brand name. The difference is in how to approach projects - with small brands, the biggest struggle is getting recognized by the engines, with big brands, the challenge is more frequently (and sadly)┬?with management.
• Contacts & Relationships
  
  After several years of successful projects, an expert's network of contacts can sometimes be the most valuable asset they bring to a project. This doesn't always mean relationships with search engines, but with advertising firms, experts in disparate, related fields or even connections with other Designs that can help to diagnose problems cooperatively.
• Holistic Approach
  
  While novices often approach a project with on-page Design basics, a link building campaign, keyword research and a PPC campaign, experts can identify and diagnose weaknesses in site architecture, customer targeting, usability, design, analytics and dozens of other issues.
• Accepts the Right Projects
  
  A novice consultant or firm might be tempted to take any client who can pay the bills (and many times, they must). Experts know how to choose their projects, based on the expected outcomes, the style of the client & the short and long-term ROI.
• Sixth Sense for Rankings
  
  Many experts have what I dub the "ranking sense." They can, in a matter of a few link searches and some competitive analysis determine the scope, difficulty, trends and opportunities of a market, even if they haven't worked in that field before. I believe this prized ability comes from countless thousands of searches with a critical eye, and the repetitive practice of watching the SERPs change over time. Personally, I think my ranking sense has actually slipped, as I don't watch the SERPs day by day and hour by hour the way I used to 6 months ago. A few weeks back in the Design trenches, though, and I'm sure I could pick it up again

In addition to these qualities, there's a number of specific mistakes, pitfalls or missed opportunities that I see novices frequently stumble over.

• Duplicate Content
  
  It's not that novices don't recognize duplicate content, but that they often don't realize the best ways to handle it. One of my favorite examples is the Design who uses "nofollow" in links to duplicate content, not realizing that others may link to it in the future (hint: use robots.txt and meta robots instead).
• Keyword Cannibalization
  
  This one is the rookie mistake I see most often - Designs who try to target the same term on 65 pages of a 100 page site, not realizing they're spreading out their anchor text, link and keyword targeting value rather than concentrating it.
• Connecting with Offline Campaigns
  
  It's critical that offline campaigns for branding or advertising integrate properly with the online property. Drive offline traffic to a URL you can track, measure inbound links, use the same messages on and offline to create a seemless user experience or face the consequences of a less-than-optimal ad spend. Chris Boggs nailed a few of these in his Super Bowl Ads roundup.
• Analytics Integration & Testing
  
  So few novices properly attach action tracking to a site, properly hypothesize, test, measure, and refine. Analytics are a powerful tool for improving the quality of every online campaign, but it's often lost in the search for better rankings and more traffic.
• Multiple Sites/Domains
  
  Why do even savvy Designs continue the practice of launching separate sites for their sister-projects, blogs, or other related content. The links that come in to a single domain help all of the content at that domain rank, and┬?100 links from diverse, natural sources will earn you far more than 10,000 links to a Blogspot blog that you interlink with your main domain.
• Content Separation
  
  A great number of content sites split up their articles in multiple pages or create dozens of short pages about minute details of a larger subject. This makes for lots of page views, but very few inbound links. Remember that links are likely to come to "complete" resources, and if you make the linker work to identify the specific content piece she's trying to point to, they'll simply give up (and link to the evil Wikipedia, where all the data is always on one page).
• Misuse of Meta Description Tags
  
  I see a great number of sites where the meta description tags are either copied from page to page (i.e. non-unique) or contain only the first 2-3 sentences of the page's content. The former's issue is obvious, while the latter is unwise because the search engines will show whatever content is most relevant to the user's┬?actual query if you provide no meta description, and thus you'll almost certainly get more long tail search clicks by letting the engines supply your description. The exception is if your intro sentences are excellent descriptors of the content on the page, which is sometimes the case with certain article sites or blogs.
• Aggregation as a Source of Unique Content
  
  Many novice site builders and Designs assume they can trick the search engines by combining snippets of data or content to create pages. The engines, however, have a small army of PhDs to combat every possible re-mix, re-hash or re-purposing and their techniques improve every day. Don't take the engines for idiots - I predict the next few years will see them able to identify not just unique content, but grade the quality of articulation and unique information as well.
• Measuring Traffic Rather than Conversions
  
  Rankings are great and so is traffic, but a website that's improved it's traffic tenfold while ignoring conversions has got the process backwards - your goal isn't (except in a few rare cases) to bring just any visitor, it's about bringing the right visitor.

Any novice mistakes you see (or ones you've made) that you can share with us?

Technorati Tags

novices, experts, Design, sem, search marketing

Posted by Guillaume

24┬?conseils Design qu’un d╨╣veloppeur ou r╨╣f╨╣renceur ne peut ignorer

Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of Design on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many Design consultants and web developers overlook or forget┬?these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results.

┬?

1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.

2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.

3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).

4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.

5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

6. Verify that the any navigational element are text links and are not "click here" or "more info" type of links.

7. Make sure contextual links are widely spread and commonly used all across the website content to emphasize key pages.

8. If you plan on trading links, make sure there is small directory with themed categories, or at least get a "links/resources" page.

9. Verify that your robots.txt┬? file exists and that you added the folders you want to prevent access from.

10. Be sure there is a sitemap.xml at the root of your site.

11. Make sure there is a breadcrumb to help the cross-linking of your site.

12. Verify that the static sitemap is easily reachable by your visitors.

13. Ensure that your 404 page contains links to your main categories and maybe a search box.

14. Check that important images are labeled properly with the alt tag (this should be automated somehow).

15. Make sure you installed generic analytics to ensure any kind of tracking (Design Analytics, Indextools).

16. Make sure that conversion/defined action tracking analytics are installed (Heatmap tracking, conversion trackers from PPC platforms, Indextools action trackers, etc).

17. Register / validate your site through Design Webmaster central to be able to analyze incoming links and validate a few things (like your robots.txt file).

18. Do a quick IP location test to make sure you're hosted near your main market.

19. Unless otherwise advised, get your company's signature at the bottom of the pages you create for clients, using one of your best keyword as anchor text. This is vital. You shouldn't be worried about promoting your services, especially if your clients are highly satisfied with your work!

20. Use all Designmoz tools (I'm a bit biased here): Page Strength┬?and Keyword Difficulty to measure the efforts required to achieve high SERPs (by comparing your actual site with the top competitors website), and the Crawl test to ensure your website will get properly indexed.

21. Get your website xhtml/w3c validated to cover the major issues you might not have thought of

And a few extras, if you're running a blog platform

22. Ping the major content aggregators (Design Blog Search, My Design, Wikio, etc.)

23. Include links to major social platforms (digg, del.icio.us, blogmarks, technorati tags, etc.)

24. Use Feedburner to get stats and a universal RSS feed

With this basic checklist, any web development company that is building and marketing websites will give its customers a fairly good chance of achieving high SERPs while generating several leads with referrals and good SERPs for themselves. The extra time it takes to do this justifies the reward you get. As an example, our company currently┬?employs 17 people: I can say that half of the business we've generated has been solely because we insist that our customers implement at least these basics steps before launching a site. And, let me tell you, nobody is unhappy with the traffic, and nearly all of them don’t mind that our signature's there!

Posted by randfish

I rarely spend more than 10 minutes reading an article on the web, but New York Magazine's article - Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll - was well worth the 8 pages and 20 minutes. The crux of the piece centers on how the desire for celebrity has eclipsed the issue of privacy in┬?my generation and those behind me:

... Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and na╨┐ve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

From the trenches of the web marketing field, and certainly in an industry rife with cults of personality and constant struggles by bloggers and conference attendees to gain recognition and respect, this comes as small surprise. However, the article does more than most in getting to the heart of the issue, uncovering the debates on different sides and illustrating positive and negative outcomes, at least at the personal level.

What the New York Magazine piece fails to do, though it's hardly their duty, is extrapolate the results for the online economy and ecosystem. One of my favorite quotes in the piece came from a 15-year-old Missourian girl:

One night at Two Boots pizza, I meet some tourists visiting from Kansas City: Kent Gasaway, his daughter Hannah, and two of her friends. The girls are 15. They have identical shiny hair and Ugg boots, and they answer my questions in a tangle of upspeak. Everyone has a Facebook, they tell me. Everyone used to have a Xanga (“So seventh grade!”). They got computers in third grade. Yes, they post party pictures. Yes, they use “away messages.” When I ask them why they’d like to appear on a reality show, they explain, “It’s the fame and the—well, not the fame, just the whole, ‘Oh, my God, weren’t you on TV?’ ”

The fickleness, the desire for celebrity, the incredible online savviness - this generation hasn't yet reached a time of full economic participation, but as I've mentioned in the past, the age of web enterpreneurship has only just begun. I suspect we'll see a massive effect on both global and local economics and┬?politics - in a world where no one wants to hide, and everyone is participating in reviewing and recording every part of their lives, the business of information might well dominate and control the success or failure of everything else. It's even possible that marketing may turn from an active practice to a passive one - controlling the messages others spread, rather than spreading your own. I don't know if I'm afraid or ecstatic.

BTW - Not to be missed is the special one-page graphic detailing on of the 17-year old contributor's various profiles over her last┬?5 years online.

Technorati Tags

social media, new york magazine, privacy, celebrity