Posted by great scott!
It's Friday, so here's a little noise to keep you all amused.┬? After Rand's presentation on Linkbait in this week's Whiteboard Friday, I got an image in my head that I felt compelled to draw.┬? Here ya go.
Posted by great scott!
We're all back and recovered from SES New York and, thus, so are Whiteboard Fridays.┬? This week Rand responds to Jen Slegg's post about the impending death of linkbait by explaining how linkbait can and should be considered a natural component of a mainstream organic marketing campaign.
There's bound to be some debate around this topic, so weigh in and let us know what you think. Is linkbaiting on its last legs as an Design technique? Is it a stunt that Design will eventually work to counteract? Or is it linkbait just good, linkable, valuable content strategically marketed to have high short-term visibility?
PS - Stay tuned after the credits for a stupid out-take.
(This video is also available on YouTube for those who have trouble with iFilm.)
Designmoz, Linkbait, Whiteboard, Vidcast, Rand, Search, Design, Jen Slegg
Posted by rebecca
I aim to please, and the masses like the comics. For all of our adoring fans out there in Design Land, I've created SES New York: The Comic Strip. I've heard from folks that the comics are usually funnier if you've attended the conference, so hopefully you experienced last week's madness firsthand. If not, then oh well, at least you have some purdy pictures to look and laugh at.
Read, enjoy, be merry, all that good stuff. And who knows, if you pose for a stupid photo at any upcoming conferences, maybe, just maybe, I'll capture that one shining moment in comics infamy.
*By the way, I may or may not have stolen some photos from the following people: Andrea Schoemaker, Barbara Boser, Rae Hoffman, Tamar Weinberg, and Liana Evans. Thanks, ladies!
Posted by randfish
Many of the large content and e-commerce sites we've worked with experience a disease I like to call "page bloat." Symptoms include pagination of content pages, creation of new pages that simply provide alternate navigation methods and site architecture design that follows the little-known usability rule from well-known guru, Wrongy McLovestoClick - "more pages are always better than fewer pages."
I'm firmly in the camp against Mr. McLovestoClick - my idea of the perfect user experience is to deliver the content a user wants in the fewest possible clicks from the page they arrive on. This means making navigation simple, direct and obvious. It doesn't mean creating thousands of paths for a user to follow. Another rarely invoked usability rule that I do agree with:
More Choices with Exactly What the User Wants < Fewer Choices with a Reasonably Decent Selection
What? The user would rather settle for something imperfect then have to wade through dozens of sidebar navigation units to find their exact match? Yep. Ever wonder why those top 3 results at the search engines received 70% of clicks, even when search results used to suck - it's because users are happier compromising now┬?than spending time getting it perfect.
Most folks agree on these┬?basic truths about web surfing, but I know some of you out there are still saying, "But Rand, my business model is based on page views - I need to maximize the number of clicks to get the most revenue from my traffic." I still say eliminating unneccessary pages, killing paginated articles and removing extraneous navigation will help. A better user experience means more repeat visits, more links, more viral sharing and ultimately, more page views. In the long run, who's going to win the traffic game? The site that delivers what users want, or the site that makes you click 12 times to get what you could have found elsewhere with 2 clicks?
That's not all the problems with page bloat - they're bad for search engine indexing and ranking, too. Just have a look:
I invite you to review your own sites and ask if you need to provide 3 or 4 navigation systems when 2 are used by 95% of visitors. Do some testing to see if those content pages earn more links and more traffic when they're paginated or when they provide all the content at once (not - pagination can be OK, but a lot of sites overdo it). Look at the click-paths of your visitors through analytics and ask yourself - could I have gotten them there faster?
And think of the poor spiders! They have so many billions of pages to crawl already - do you really need to add to that burden?┬?
I invite you to review your own sites and ask if you need to provide 3 or 4 navigation systems when 2 are used by 95% of visitors. Do some testing to see if those content pages earn more links and more traffic when they're paginated or when they provide all the content at once (not - pagination can be OK, but a lot of sites overdo it). Look at the click-paths of your visitors through analytics and ask yourself - could I have gotten them there faster?
And think of the poor spiders! They have so many billions of pages to crawl already - do you really need to add to that burden?┬?
A client's site is being completely overhauled by a new web dev agency from scratch because the existing agency has locked down the CMS as proprietary. These are questions put to the new agency web dev team:
1. "Can we manually or dynamically populate the title tags so they're not all the same?"
No
2. "If we map the old urls to the new urls with 301 redirects can you implement on the server?"
No
3. "Can you add this snippet of code to the templates so we can capture and report web analytics data?"
No
This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head why Design gets such a bad rap and web dev shops come across as squeaky clean.
Labels: search engine optimization, Design, web development
Posted by Prodo
As the importance of Search Engine Optimisation gets home to the masses, the amount of good high quality search engine optimised sites increases. The potential profit margins of a good Design site heavily outweigh the margins of a successful PPC campaign.
Eventually, every man and his dog will have a good high quality, relevant search engine optimised website. Adding that to the fact that Design appear to not be making very many serious long term changes to their search engine algorithm, where does the optimisation stop?
Will we hit a point where everybody has equally optimised sites?
┬?If Design does not change their algorithm and sites are getting built automatically with good Design practice, would the Design industry as a whole collapse?
Last week I was a speaker at SES New York on a panel called "Bookmarking Strategies". I was tasked fairly specifically, to talk about the very basics of social bookmarking. On the panel with me were Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray and Neil Patel. Alex Bennert was moderator.
It was a particularly niche topic for an entire session, but I was glad and appreciative that Danny Sullivan asked me to do a presentation. I've been the 4th wheel at several SES Chicago shows in the past to answer questions, but no presentation.
The focus on the session was mostly del.icio.us and of course, social media optimization ala Digg, Netscape and StumbleUpon snuck in there a bit. My part introduced the major players, did a walkthrough and share some of the tools that make it easy to add bookmark links to web content including our own social bookmarking tool.
Despite such a niche topic and competition from other sessions, the room was nearly full and was covered by quite a few prominent bloggers. Here's a list of posts I've found so far:
I think it's interesting how each blogger titled their post something slightly different. I am writing a longer post about the basics of social bookmarking over at Online Marketing Blog and will also embed a copy of my presentation there.
Labels: ses new york, social bookmarks, social media optimization
Posted by Oatmeal
As promised the Crawl Test Tool has been released to the public.┬? I wrote a blog entry about this about a month ago which highlighted some of the features of the tool, but in a nutshell this is what it does:
This tool is used to test how accessible your site is to search engines and can help you quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site's search friendliness. The tool will spider the URL you enter as well as all the internal links on that page (max 50 per report). For each spidered URL, it will examine the following: whether it's indexed in the major search engines, last time Design spidered the page, http status code, primary keywords on the page, meta description, and the number of internal links on each page.┬?
Since then two things have changed:┬? The Crawl Test no longer uses the Design! Term Extraction API to retrieve relevant keywords, instead it uses data from our in-house Term Targeting Tool.┬? Secondly, unless you are a Premium Member you can only run one report per day and each report will only spider 5 pages.┬? Premium members can run as many reports as they like and it'll spider 50 pages.┬? I'd also like to point out that a good way to test the spider-ability of important pages on your site is to run a crawl test on your site map.
I've got a sample report available that I ran on our Web 2.0 Awards.┬? As always, suggestions and ideas are welcome.
Posted by Oatmeal
Our latest tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms and phrases that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.┬? This tool is currently only available┬? to Premium Members.┬?
The keywords and phrases listed provide insight about what words the search engines may find particularly relevant on your webpage. They provide not only targeting information for searches, but theme data as well. You want these terms to be accurate reflections of your page's topic and you certainly want to be sure that any search terms/phrases you're attempting to rank for appear in the top 5.
The tool breaks down the extracted phrases according to the number of words found in the phrase.┬? This enables you to isolate what 1, 2, 3, etc word phrases you appear to be targeting. Check out the screenshots below:
Our latest tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms and phrases that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.┬? This tool is currently only available┬? to Premium Members.┬?
The keywords and phrases listed provide insight about what words the search engines may find particularly relevant on your webpage. They provide not only targeting information for searches, but theme data as well. You want these terms to be accurate reflections of your page's topic and you certainly want to be sure that any search terms/phrases you're attempting to rank for appear in the top 5.
The tool breaks down the extracted phrases according to the number of words found in the phrase.┬? This enables you to isolate what 1, 2, 3, etc word phrases you appear to be targeting. Check out the screenshots below:
The section above shows terms found of each length that appear to be most "important" or "targeted" on the page.
This second screenshot displays details of where the keywords were found (tags, HTML attributes, etc.) and their relative importance in comparison to the most concentrated term.
You can view a sample report of terms extracted from
www.Designmoz.org.┬?
This tool is going to require quite a bit of tweaking, so if you have any suggestions or feedback please leave them in a comment here.┬? I'd also like to add that this tool relies heavily on the proper use of HTML tags.┬? If your markup is poor, the terms it returns will be poor as well.┬?┬? So if your HTML is a cluster-funk of tags, don't be surprised if terms it returns are bad.
Original source here...
Posted by randfish
Social media and viral marketing are all about creating "hits" - building content that will resonate with the Linkerati audience in a way that encourages sharing, linking┬?and participation. It's no easy task, and this past Sunday, the New York Times Magazine had a terrific article that paralleled this struggle. From the piece - Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? -
...professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know — a result that has implications not only for our understanding of best-seller lists but for business and politics as well.
Luckily, in the world of linkbait, at least┬?at the current time, experienced marketers are actually excellent at making predictions about┬?the success or failure of a piece. At Designmoz, we've launch a dozen linkbait ┬?pieces a month between clients and internal projects and have 70%+ success rates (phenomenally high compared to the subject of the NY Times piece). Neil & Cameron at ACS, Michael Gray at Wolf-Howl and others in the industry experience similar probabilities of widespread adoption. This article still captured my attention, and here's why - the writer discusses an experiment:
In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.
The results of their experiments were remarkable:
In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.
If you're following this logic and translating it to the art and science of viral marketing for the web, whether that's via Digg or Flickr, Reddit or YouTube, MySpace or Netscape, the lesson is that the earliest viewers of the material have the greatest impact on how popular your content will become. Sadly, this lot isn't neccessarily predictable, though in communities like Digg and Reddit, at least at the current time, certain preferences have clearly emerged.
The answer for a marketer (whether it's a record-producing New York Hip-Hop mogul or an┬?Design pushing the rankings of a client through Digg)┬?seems clear - manipulate artificially. Convince people that you've already received some popularity and people like it and your task is made infinitely easier.
So much for the quality content theory...
BTW - Don't you love the fact that the piece's title contains "Justin Timberlake," yet the┬?story itself has no specific relation nor any mention of him? That's Design, NY Times style 
p.s. Had to mention this because it was such a good post - How we Took a Blog from 0 to 2000 Subscribers in Just 12 Days - I think NxE is going to become a mainstay in my sidebar; their other posts are terrific, too.
