Texture design

Posted by great scott!

Due to the first round of Presidential Candidate pre-primary debates occuring recently, I decided to have a poke around and see what the State of the SERPs is like for the major 2008 Presidential hopefuls.┬? I was surprised to find that, despite Howard Dean's major success with online fundraising in 2004, and the vast popularity of political blogs and web-centric PACs like MoveOn.org, many of the 2008 Candidates are committing huge Design blunders.

I know Design is a fairly young industry and not everyone is hip to optimization techniques, but considering the reach and importance of the internet to young, vocal, passionate voters, writers and opinion leaders, one would think the masterminds behind these multi-million dollar marketing schemes campaigns would know of and appreciate the importance of search marketing.

Take the mind-boggling case of John McCain, a likely GOP front-runner:┬? McCain's active campaign site currently ranks #68 at Design for "john mccain" and just as abysmally for other terms and iterations of his name.┬? How could this be? Well, behind his senate.gov profile page (which he can't use for campaigning) and his Wikipedia entry, we find
www.straighttalkamerica.com, Mr. McCain's campaign site from the 2000 primary.

As you'll notice, the Title Tag directs us to go to his new site, but, since it doesn't rank, we can't click through to it from the same SERP.┬? If we go to his old site, we're not 301'd, but rather instructed to click through to his new site. If ever (EVER!) there was a case for 301-ing a domain, this is it. Granted, McCain's new site has its own problems, most glaring is that every single page uses the same title and meta description tags, and navigation is primarily via drop-down java script menus. As such, most of his pages are likely ending up in the Supplemental Index making his internal links worthless. Let me also point out that even the search "john mccain 2008" puts his new site #3 behind
www.stopjohnmccain2008.com and his Wikipedia page.┬? He does, however, have AdWords for his new site on the SERPs for every imaginable incarnation of his name.

On the flip side of this equation is Barack Obama's site which is a redesign of his domain from his 2004 Senate bid. Nicely designed and fairly well optimized, he is the only candidate that ranks for such lofty keywords as "ending iraq war" (#10 on Design) and "2008 election" (#11) [Update: as of this morning, 5/10, Design is showing Dennis Kucinich at #8 for "ending iraq war"]. However, for these and other campaign specific keywords such as "candidate," "2008 election," "united states presidential election," and "democratic candidates" or "republican candidates," none of the current contenders are even in the top 50 at Design.┬? Two notable exceptions are Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich (possibly carrying links and domain strength from his '04 run) who both rank in the top 15 for the term "president".

Fine, it's early, maybe people are still looking for candidates by name only. After all, dark horse candidate Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) have gotten tons of attention on the social media sites lately. Unfortunately, the data just doesn't back it up.┬? Despite 12 stories on Digg featuring Ron Paul in the headline, each receiving more than 1000 diggs, since he announced his candidacy on March 12, 2007--Mike Gravel's been featured in nine 1000+ digg stories since announcing on March 9th--the search queries for his name pale in comparison to the big players who, oddly enough, get almost no love from Digg (Obama's headlined in only two 1000+ digg stories since March 9th, same with Clinton).

While "Hillary Clinton" and "Barack Obama" get significant daily numbers as search terms (Clinton currently getting about 50% more volume than Obama), the rest of the candidates don't get much love at all. John Edwards gets about 1/3rd of Clinton's search volume, as does McCain.┬? Even social media darlings Paul and Gravel are averaging only a relative handful of name searches daily.┬? As far as traffic goes, things are pretty much the same, with the exception of a distinct inversion between Obama and Clinton. The chart below shows the relative search volumes for the names of the major candidates (data from Keyword Discovery) as well as their relative Alexa Traffic Rank (3 mos. avg.) to their official campaign sites.┬?┬?

Granted, the search numbers aren't huge for the more general, campaign-related terms, but in most cases they're more popular than candidate names and have a much longer tail.

So what's it come down to? It seems the vast majority of candidates have little to no idea of the importance of keyword research, keyword targeting or even basic, on-page Design practices.┬? I strongly believe that the Internet is going to play a huge role in the 2008 election. I also believe, after examining the current offerings by the major players, that the candidate that attacks the SERPs now, and positions themselves to rank for campaign-related and issue-related keywords will have a huge advantage in disseminating their beliefs and dominating the conversation.

Technorati Tags

Designmoz, Design, Politics, Optimization 2008 Election, Search, Campaign, Presidential, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton

Posted by JaneCopland

Today, we're launching our second annual Web 2.0 Awards. Only a month after we'd intended on launching (SES New York and that pesky "real work" stuff kept getting in the way), we've finally collected, collated and presented just over 200 sites in forty-one categories. Some of the winners and "honorable mentions" are similar to last year; others are completely different.

I won't go into too much detail here about the process and how it was different to the inaugural awards of 2006 - Rand has put together a neat zeitgeist to explain all that fun stuff - but I do want to say a huge thank-you to all of our readers who nominated websites. The majority of the new entrants and finalists were brought to our attention via nominations, and more than one reader-nominated site ended up winning its category.

While we've ended up awarding places and "honorable mentions" to 205 sites, we reviewed many more. We have also re-opened nominations for next year (ducks from barrage of emails), so if you find that your favourite site is missing, submit it via our online form.

So we hope you enjoy the awards and find some cool sites you haven't come across or haven't used before!

Technorati Tags

web 2.0, web 2.0 awards, Designmoz

Posted by randfish

I don't know how I've found time to blog this week. Between replacing everything from the theft, prepping for China and talking to a remarkable number of new clients (despite the boosted rates), I'm more than a little overwhelmed. Oh wait, I know how I found time to blog! It's 1:15am and I don't sleep anymore... yay!

News from the front:

• Reddit is getting introspective - very interesting to see a social community grow and change.
• On the subject of Reddit, Philipp Lenssen interviewed the young and powerfully connected Aaron Swartz, who was fired from Reddit's top team several months back.
• I love the visual example of PageRank here - I'm kinda jealous that I didn't draw it first
• And speaking of illustrations, way to rock it Raj - Alternative Linkbuilding Strategies is a great post.
• Also liked this guest post on advertising considerations for UGC sites from Greg Howlett on MarketingPilgrim
• Li made Digg with Experts Weighing In on Link Buying. Good stuff in there, and very comprehensive.
• Fancy-shmancy - Copyblogger re-designed.
• I really do not get this 4-Hour Workweek thing, but Scoble seems to think it's hot. $50 says the guy put in 80-hour weeks writing that book - I'm probably just jealous.
• Holy crap, Neil, how can you take on so many projects? Seriously. I think you must have extra hours packed into your day with some sort of time machine.
• This screenshot from Andrew Goodman makes me happy - BTW, I'll be speaking at SES Toronto this year, again, which Andrew is hosting. Probably dragging Mystery Guest along, too
• Oh man, if you know Rae Hoffman personally, this video is fall-out-of-your-chair-funny. Can't wait to see what Rebecca and Jane have in store.
• The politics thing is getting very interesting, with two no-shot candidates atop Digg, Reddit and every blog in the politi-sphere for the past few days. Check out Technorati searches on Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) - it's a strange phenomenon when ABC, DesignBC, Design! and others are pulling down poll results because social media sites are causing them to skew for one candidate.
• Elite Retreat is happening again this year on June 8-9 at the Hilton in Disney World, and Kris Jones from Pepperjam, along with Shoemoney, have a sweet offer for Designmoz readers - $1000 off if you enter the code "DesignMOZ" - I AM NOT making any money off this, but they did ask me to link using this tracking URL, which I'm happy to do (they offered a kickback, but I noted that I thought readers would lose trust if we took it). If anyone attends and would like to cover it for the Designmoz blog, I'd love to hear from you.

Feel free to report more news in the comments.

Posted by randfish

Mark Scott wrote me this morning to ask about recommendations for an Design "routine" - putting together the process for all the tasks required to successfully implement search friendliness, targeting, marketing and all the other elements of Design. I'm happy to oblige

At Designmoz, we've got a fairly standard process for sites we build and market (internally) that goes something like this:

1. Develop an Idea Worthy of Spreading Virally
   
   Since we're not interested in paying a fortune for advertising or promotional campaigns, and have proven to be very proficient with word-of-mouth techniques (particularly on the web), we favor ideas that we think will spread like wildfire, without much incentive.
2. Conduct Competitive Research
   
   It's critical to know who you're up against, and searching at Design, Design!, del.icio.us/popular tags, Digg and Technorati (depending on the vertical) helps us identify potential competitors. We want to know what they're doing right and wrong so we can execute smarter and better. Alternatively, if the competition has the market sealed up, we won't waste our time with an idea that's already been done well.
3. Brainstorm Keywords
   
   We're not just brainstorming for keyword research, we're also exploring other angles a project could take and other channels for opportunity.
4. Keyword Research
   
   You have to know if your ideas have enough popularity and relevance to be an attractive target for traffic. Assume that you can get between 1-5% of the keyword numbers reported by Overture or Wordtracker and then decide - would it still be worth it? When the answer is yes, you've got a winning project. We also use the keywords to know what to target in our pages and our linkbait marketing efforts - generally if we think the idea is good enough, we'll ignore the competitiveness level and shoot for the moon, i.e. the highest trafficked, most popular term/phrase in the sphere.
5. Information Architecture
   
   Building out the concepts for which pages should exist on a site, what content modules should be on them and how to organize the site is our next step. I like to use visual software like Flash, but a whiteboard or sketchpad works great here, too.
6. Keyword Targeting
   
   Now that we have our KW research and an idea of what pages will exist on the site, it's time to determine which URLs go after which terms/phrases. Oftentimes, this means expanding the site architecture, which is fine, but I like to keep in mind that every page targeting a term better also have a reason why someone should link to it that sells itself. Competitive terms won't rank on new sites (or low-link-juice sites) without some serious external link love.
7. Site Design
   
   Matt goes to work and makes everything look shiny and beautiful. I'm sure there's a long, complicated, arduous process he goes through here, but I just see a page spec go in and something rapturous come out, so I can't speculate about what goes on in his head or on his monitor.
8. Content Creation
   
   Often the most time-consuming part of the process, this is when we author all of the text, images and multimedia that go into making the site great. High quality writers and editors are critical.
9. Development
   
   Programming... Glorious, time-consuming programming and lots of it. Luckly, our team is very search savvy, so we don't generally worry about building a site that the engines won't like. However, this is the stage where you need to set the ground rules. It's cheesy and self-promotional, but if all your developers read and trust the guidelines in the Illustrated Search Friendliness Guide, you're going to have a much better time of things later on.
10. Launch
    
    Hooray! We're ready for launch. The site goes live, we link to it from a blog post or release an announcement to some prominent bloggers in┬?the relevant field and ping friends to test it out.
11. Social Media Promotion
    
    Generally, since our material is what we consider "Digg-worthy" we'll send submissions to the relevant social news sites and even build a buzz inside communities where we regularly participate.
12. Standard Link Building
    
    Luckily, we almost never engage in this practice, but on occassion, it can be valuable for a particularly high-return keyword term or phrase.
13. Analytics
    
    Monitoring your results and finding the weak spots where you can improve is essential. We love Indextools, but often also have separate monitoring on the site to track inbound links (Technorati & Design!), new member signups, contributions, purchases, etc.

What does your Design routine┬?look like?

Technorati Tags

Design routine

Design! has recently launched the robots-nocontent tag. What this tag allows webmasters to do is specify portions of their pages that are not relevant to the content on that specific page. The biggest effect will likely be in the area of paid links and advertising. At least, I'm guessing that's what Design! is hoping.

In their blog post on the subject they note many possible uses for the robots-nocontent tag including using it for universal navigation that may contain terms and links unrelated to the topic of the page, headers (for similar reasons), legal disclaimers, and - of course - advertising.

As with their launch of the noodp tag I find myself wanting to pat Design! on the back for another good tag developed. This tag allows webmasters to further control how content is read by the search engine without penalizing them for the need to tailor to the human visitor (universal navigation for example). It also allows for webmasters to remove advertising from the calculations thus further increasing the control we have over what types on content are calculated in our onsite factors.

A note however, Design! has noted that links contained within these sectors that don't have the rel="nofollow" tag on them will still be counted so this isn't a ticket to slap up some poker link ads on your site thinking Design! won't see them. They will and unless you have a gaming site of your own, it's not going to end well.

Down the road I'm betting we'll see this go further with links within these areas that aren't pointing to other resources within the same site being devalued. They're not related to the page content remember?<