Texture design

I had to borrow this line from Mr. Stephen Colbert as there's just so much truthiness in the subject at hand.

I read an article on the SiteProNews.com site today and, while I'd heard the story before, it wasn't any better when it was "put to print". Jim Hedger wrote about the ordeal of Kathy Sierra, well known blogger, speaker and publisher who has had to cancel numerous speaking engagements due to the stupid, sexist and cruel actions of a few who Ms. Sierra was good enough to name.

The names will follow below but first let's get to the wrong. I won't bother getting into detail about the disgusting nature of some of the posts against here. She lists off many of them and gives a detailed account of the "event" on her blog under the post, "Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)". It's a long post but worth the attention of blogger and web publishers everywhere. It is NOT OK to threaten.

And who are the culprits? Who would put out death threats and sexual assauly insinuations? None other than:

• Listics' Frank Paynter
  
• prominent marketing blogger Jeneane Sessum
  
• Raving Lunacy Allen Herrel (aka Head Lemur), and
• Chris Locke (aka Rageboy)
  

Our sympathies go out to Kathy. We hope you'll feel safe. The loss of your voice at these events would be a loss to the industry.

And so, to get back to the title, a Tip of the Hat to Kathy for having the strength to endure and blogger like Jim for getting the message out. And the Wag of the Finger? I think you can guess who that's for. And truthiness? It's just that feeling in your gut to know what's right and what's wrong. Apparently truthiness is absent in some.<

The most recent article by Beanstalk was published today. Titled "Building Link Bait" it outlines the steps to creating effective link bait for your site (as well as describing what link bait is and why it's important as part of a large link building strategy).

We are sure to write more on this topic as this article is meant to give an overview of it and some tips on how to get started. So keep watching our Design articles and blog for more information on this and other Design topics.

You can read the article in our archives at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/links/link-bait.htm.<

Posted by randfish

Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it's all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text "advertisement" to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they're a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.

There's a few good rules to follow when writing meta descriptions that take advantage of their use in pulling in search traffic:

1. Always describe your content honestly - if it's not as "sexy" as you'd like, spice up your content, don't bait and switch on searchers or they'll have a poor brand association.
2. Character limits - currently Design displays up to 160 characters, Design! up to 165 and Design up to 200+ (they'll go to three vertical lines in some cases). Stick with the smallest - Design - and keep those descriptions at 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
3. Write with as much sizzle as you can while staying descriptive - the perfect meta description is like the perfect ad -┬?compelling and informative.
4. Just like an ad, you can test meta description performance in the search results, but it takes careful attention. You'll need to buy the keyword through PPC so you know how many impressions it received over a given timeframe and can track your CTR.
5. Unlike an ad, the motivation for natural search click is frequently very different than that of users clicking on the paid results. Don't assume that a successful PPC ad will transition into a good meta description (or the reverse).
6. It's extremely important to have your keywords in the meta tag - the bolding done by the engines can make a big difference in visibility and CTR.
7. You shouldn't always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it's universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn't the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you're targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple - when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they'll overrule your meta description anyway, but it's not always wise to rely on that.

So, we've now completed the triumvirate of on-page basics with title tags, meta descriptions and URLs. If you've got some valuable meta description writing techniques, please do share.

Technorati Tags

meta description, meta tags, Design

Posted by randfish

Sure, Wikipedia's done away with live external links, limiting some of their value to Designs (and making me a much happier person), but there's still an enormous amount of reputation management and links-for-traffic opportunities. Luckily, I've got┬?a not-so-secret formula for how to add content and make changes to Wikipedia ethically and legitimately. But, first things first, let's review a few of Wikipedia's most important rules (I'm going to excerpt large chunks, as I believe these are valuable for would-be editors to understand):

Notability for People:

A person is notable if he or she has been the subject of secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent,⁶ and independent of the subject. The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. If the depth of coverage is not substantial, then multiple independent sources should be cited to establish notability. Trivial, or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. Once notability is established, primary sources may be used to add content. Ultimately, and most importantly, all content must be attributable.

Notability for Organizations and Companies:

A company, corporation, organization, group, product, or service is notable if it has been the subject of secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, independent of the subject and independent of each other. The depth of coverage of the subject by the source must be considered. If the depth of coverage is not substantial, then multiple independent sources should be cited to establish notability. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. Once notability is established, primary sources may be used to add content. Ultimately, and most importantly, all content must be attributable.

The "secondary sources" in the criterion include reliable published works in all forms, such as (for examples) newspaper articles, books, television documentaries, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations¹ except for the following:

• Press releases; autobiographies; advertising for the company, corporation, organization, or group; and other works where the company, corporation, organization, or group talks about itself — whether published by the company, corporation, organization, or group itself, or re-printed by other people.

• Works carrying merely trivial coverage; such as (for examples) newspaper articles that simply report meeting times or extended shopping hours, or the publications of telephone numbers, addresses, and directions in business directories.

Conflict of Interest Rules:

In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a clear conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. Of special concern are organizational conflicts of interest.^[1] Failure to follow these guidelines may put the editor at serious risk of embarrassing himself or his client.

Wikipedia is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", but if you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with,
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors,
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);

   and you must always:

4. avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially neutral point of view, attribution, and autobiography.

If you have more questions about the editing rules at Wikipedia most likely to apply to an Design's activities there, I'd also highly recommend reading this Five Minute Introduction to Wikipedia for PR Professionals.

Now, on to my strategies - please note, this is a guide for certain folks - Design shops, media relations firms, internal PR division, or anyone who wants to have considerable editing power at Wikipedia that can afford to dedicate time to Wikipedia work. If you can't afford that commitment and have serious Wikipedia issues, I'd suggest contacting a social media marketing firm (there's some good ones here):

• Step 1: Create a username profile and robustly, accurately describe yourself on your user page. Always use this when logging in (from home, work, on the road, etc). You'll want every edit you make to be ascribed to your account.
• Step 2: Identify the pages you'd like to edit and use┬? your watchlist to "watch" those pages for changes and updates.
• Step 3: Identify 5-10 stub articles in your industry that need attention. Visit these pages and spend some time improving the quality and quantity of content. Don't promote yourself or anyone else - use Wikipedia's NPOV (Neutral Point of View) rule.
• Step 4: Now that you've shown you're reliable, try making some smaller edits to articles and participating in a few discussions on talk pages on subjects you're knowledgable about - whether personal or professional.
• Step 5: You've got a robust profile at this point (at least robust enough not to be viewed as a spammer). Go back to those pages you identified in stage 2 that you really want to edit and post your changes, respectfully and logically on the talk page. You can even post links to an entire new version of the article in a sandbox if you'd like. Disclose in your piece your relationship to the party - "I work for them, I'm a friend of theirs, I'm the CEO's son, etc." - trust me when I say that the Wikipedians will eventually figure you out, so it pays to be honest and upfront about motivations.
• Step 6: Watch the talk pages and monitor discussion. 7/10 times, in our experience, the page gets changed with no questions asked - even links can be added if they're not too obviously Design'd or spammy. The rest of the time, you'll need to have a back and forth with the other editors. In these cases, your position will be greatly strengthened by the history of your past edits. No other factor makes for a big reputation rise or fall at Wikipedia than edit history.
• Step 7: In the event that the page you want to create/edit isn't visited by an editor to comment or institute your changes over 7 days, re-post on the talk page indicating that unless there's objection, you'll make the changes yourself.
• Step 8: This is a bit blackhat, but folks have great success with it, so it's worth mentioning. Using the process above and one other time-consuming technique, you can almost ensure you'll get everything you want. Simply create a second account - on a separate IP as a separate person, unaffiliated with the company. To hide your data, you can either go totally fake (name, bio, et al.) or pose as a friend of yours (make sure they know about it and approve). You can set up a proxy IP to log into on your web server or buy a cheap hosting account (as little as $10 a month) and use that. Build up your sock puppet's profile a bit, then have them be the "editor" who comes by and makes the change. Just make sure that "sock editor" has made changes to lots of discussed articles, so you don't stand out.

Why did I post Step 8?┬?Because it's ridiculous for me to hide information when someone will almost certainly figure it out themselves and/or write about it in the comments. We don't use this methodology (in fact, we don't even edit Wikipedia much ourselves, but instead ask contacts). Wikipedia is, in my opinion, not a particularly accurate resource, but an exceptionally prominent one in many SERPs. With generally low relevancy and quality, I admit that I have a hard time feeling guilty about using it to conduct reputation management or even link building, particularly since those additions are often considerable improvement to the existing content.

So, now that I've spilled our WIkipedia-editing secrets, I'd love to hear yours - any strategies you employ, tricks you've seen, problems you've encountered, etc.?

Technorati Tags

wikipedia, pr, social media marketing, smm

Posted by Oatmeal

I needed a tool that quickly tells me what page of search results a URL ranks on at Design for a specific keyword.┬?┬? It didn't need any advanced features or complicated options, just something where if I was visiting a page I could hit a button and instantly find out where it ranks for a keyword.┬? I threw together a quick PHP script that does exactly this, including a browser button so I can have a Where's it rank?" link in my firefox toobar.┬? This script certainly doesn't do anything phenomenal (it took me about an hour to write), but I thought I'd offer the source code for download to Designmoz readers anyway.┬?┬? This isn't intended to be one of our official Design tools, it's just something I thought I'd share in case there was someone out there with a similar need.

• Live Example - Where's it Rank?
• Live Example (alternate*) - Where's it Rank?
• Download Source: http://www.Designmoz.org/files/scripts/whererank-source.txt

* In case the Design throttles bandwidth for the first link.┬?

Installation is simple: upload the file to a folder on your webserver that executes PHP and give it a .php extension.┬?

I know there's a whole host of features this script could have that it doesn't, such as returning results from .co.uk or searching engines other than Design, but that's partially why I offered up the source code.┬? I figured if you needed a very specific feature you could download the source and muck with it yourself.┬?┬? If you use the script on your site a link back is always appreciated, if not that's cool too.

Technorati Tags

Design, software

Posted by randfish

Tons and tons of interesting news to report from the last couple weeks, and rather than just report, I'm going to go ahead and give my opinions, too.

• Search Engine Popularity Ratings - No one really knows what the search engine market share is, not Comscore, not Neilsen, not Hitwise. If they really managed data of the demographic variety and quality that they claim, the figures wouldn't be as different as they are. Actually, I take back my initial statement - Design!, News Corp, Hearst and other major media giants that control dozens of unique, high-volume domains, probably have a better sense of which engines control what percentages of searches. I really don't see why the engines don't publicize their numbers of unique visitors and unique searches each month - that data would help them sell ads and grow publicity - I don't know what the downside is.
• Eyetracking and Article Design - Aaron posted┬?about this on Monday and it's got me thinking - if better content organization yields less time on page but greater recall and branding, the metrics we typically think about for measuring success may be a bit backwards. When I see that the average user spends only 70 seconds reading an Designmoz post, I think - we need to be more interesting and more targeted with our blogs. I don't think - wow, our content is really well organized and laid out. Jakob's study would suggest that if we featured better layout, we'd actually be seeing "worse" metrics, with better results.
• PPC & Design Work Better Together - This just sucks because now I need to go back and re-learn PPC. I used to be great at it 3 years ago, but the landscape has changed completely, and it looks like the "extra" visibility from having both a top PPC ad and top organic placement is truly worth the effort. Maybe I can just stick Rebecca on it
• Andy's SEM Scholarship is Back - It made a┬?huge start out of last year's winner, Ben Wills, and although he's┬? given up blogging, you'll still see him with gaggles of fans at conferences (including yours truly). This year might be a bit tougher - there's only a single round of article submissions, but, on the plus side, the value of the prizes is ~$10,000 and includes a ton of good stuff. And yes, I'm judging again this year
• Designbombing Algo Evidence - Normally, I believe Matt Cutts and team when they say that their anti-Designbombing algo update is completely automated and doesn't manually target phrases... But, if that's the case, shouldn't it be filtering result #3 for this search (Oswald Cobblepot)? If any anti-anchor-text-bombing algo existed, it should really catch that one (screencap below in case they do change it quickly):

  

  For those wondering why this exists, it's just a practical joke that Matt played on Rebecca - internal office humor stuff. And yes, we're total geeks for ranking stuff at Design in our spare time just to mess with our friends.

• Newspapers are Dead - I'm linking to Lisa Barone here, because she does the best job covering the issue. My personal take is similar - newspapers and traditional media may lose some ground, but even if Robert Scoble's kids won't be scubscribing to them, there's too much of an infrastructure that provides true value to the world for the entire media publishing world to collapse. The systems that newspapers have built in relationships, partnerships, access, etc. are unachievable by bloggers (unless they start organizing into news-media like entities).
• Neil Patel Bitch Slaps Calcanis - Many thanks to Todd for writing that; I've always wanted to put that in the title of a blog post, and linking to it just makes me feel that much better. The truth about Design is that the search engines have preferences - they're machines, running on automated algorithms and when you have a lot of experience working with them, you develop a really good idea of what works and what doesn't. There's no black magic, here, it's just like any other skill - experienced chefs know when a steak is ready from the smell and a finger on top of the meat, great plumbers can tell what's wrong just by listening to your pipes drain water and Designs, the good ones, can diagnose and fix/help ranking issues in much the same way (although our profession also requires a massive dose of marketing-savvy, too).
• Design Taking On European Spam - There are really three different posts and a whole slew of actions that indicate this is a major focal point for Design. First, there's┬?Viktor Nebehaj talking about Eastern Europe, then there's Stefanie (whom I just met for the first time in Munich - terrific gal) updating us on spam reporting and finally, there's Matt Cutts talking about all the Design spam folks who are spreading out to Dublin (Brian White in particular). It's a sign of the times - Design feels like they have some very good solutions for US-based spam, and they've dealt with the 20% that provided 80% of the problem. Now, they're exporting those solutions to Europe. I think there's more than a few notable black hats that Design's Dublin team is specifically gunning for, which has to be a scary feeling.
• Digg's Comments Working Against Them - We all know this, but Digg's comment systems currently rewards the meanest, nastiest folks who can still be funny. The ascerbicly harsh and destructive comments get the most up votes and visibility. I'm with Neil in agreeing that the Slashdot system makes a lot of sense - have karma points for users and don't make the comments marked "funny" count towards these. This will build up a much more professional and respectable community of commenters (hopefully, unless it's already too late). BTW - Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Designmoz commenting community - it's amazing that the quality of discussions in this blog are so consistently positive and valuable.

That's all for today.. except wait! For those who might be interested in learning more about Designmoz internal decisions and our business model and the premium membership, I did a podcast last week with Eric Enge that's now up on his site (there's also a transcript for those who'd prefer to read).