Texture design

On today's Webmaster Radio show I had the pleasure of chatting with Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design (they're the folks who designed our site for us) as well as Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People. Jim and I had out usual banter for the first 20 minutes however rather than bouncing through a few topics we discussed Design Universal quite extensively. The show is definitely worth a listen if only to get a better understanding of this interesting twist on search and the challenges it presents for search marketers.

But that's not what the title's about now is it?

While he was on our show Jeff discussed an interesting Design competition that they have running. Top rankings for an interesting phrase? Nope. Who can get a site into the top 10 fastest for a competitive phrase? Not even close. No, the fine folks at Search Engine People got a bit creative and are having a "write the best Design song" competition. That's right, if you can write the best song about Design you win their $1000 prize.

An interesting notion and I wish them luck. I assume the primary purpose of the contest is as link bait and I wish them the best of luck. it seems to be working well 'cuz here's a link to the contest. <

Posted by shor

The scholar Andrew Lang once said,

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination. "

Unfortunately, I end up using statistics like a drunken man uses toilets - incorrectly and with my head hanging over the toilet-bowl thinking, "How did I get here?"

Community Analytics┬?

With all the statistics available to online marketers, how do you decide what's useless and what's useful? Time to dredge up an old school metric called Signal to Noise ratio. SNR is a simple way to trend the health of the Designmoz community.

Appropriated by the blogosphere from electrical engineers, SNR measures the quality of your user comments. It is relatively easy to compute - divide a user's MozPoints by their number of comments - and as will be revealed could quite potentially unlock the mysteries of the Designmoz universe. I use 'potentially' because, like all well-intentioned drunken ideas, I have to admit I haven't really thought this all the way through.┬?

Daniel and Rae's F%^king Excellent Adventure

My first task is to calculate the SNR for Designmoz' top 100 members (I excluded the staff members because they're paid to play on Designmoz):

After I'd done so, it doesn't take long to realize DanielTynski is a hidden gem. At 102 points and just 16 comments, he may be a man of few words but when he speaks, we listen. Daniel boasts an amazing 6.38 SNR, more than twice that of the next best. Daniel must be the epitome of the Designmoz community, right?

Mayhap, because on closer inspection he has also submitted 3 (excellent) YOUmoz entries - one which generated 41 points - 40% of his total MOZpoints. Are YOUmoz points distorting the SNR?

Yes! Why? Um, I'm not sure, is there such a thing as analytics goggles? When I was drinking, SNR was looking a lot sexier.

Anyway, as my brain stumbles out of its stupor, I adjusted the original set of results with a little normalization to produce a handy weighted SNR.

With weighted SNR, Rae has everyone beat, coming in at 2.4 SNR (just ahead of Daniel at a very respectable 2.2). This immediately teaches me one thing.

Swearing a lot is the key to racking up MozPoints!

Welcome to drunken analytics, solving mysteries of the universe one at a time.

And If You Don't Know, Now You Know┬?

So now you how the metric works. What else can the notorious S.N.R show?

Stuff.

Designmoz' top 100 members (weighted SNR in brackets):

• SNR = 1.55 (1.44)
• Excluding staff = 1.35 (1.23)
• Designmoz Staff only = 2.08 (2.08)
• Premium Members only = 1.49 (1.35)

Premium Members have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than regular members. That's a great reason to sign up to Premium, right Rand?┬?

Designmoz top 10 (from SNR100, excluding staff):

1. DanielTynski
2. sugarrae
3. shor
4. Igor Mordkovich
5. stever
6. Bud-Caddell (who inspired this post)
7. Nathania Johnson
8. feedthebot
9. ciaran
10. WebGeek

Designmoz top 10 (weighted; excludes staff)

1. sugarrae
2. DanielTynski
3. shor
4. stever
5. WebGeek
6. kimber
7. microdesign
8. mbarr
9. willcritchlow
10. Dr. Pete

The comments of the top 10 are typically interesting and add value to the conversation (except for that shor dude, he talks about toilets).

SNR Head vs. Tail (excludes staff):

• Head, top 20 members: SNR = 1.43 (1.27)
• Tail, top 500 members: SNR = 1.29 (1.18)

Weighted SNR of Top 500 members, including staff:

┬?

Note the concentration of high signal users in the top ranks and, more importantly, there are very few users below the lower control limit - the Designmoz community is healthy!┬?

SNR is a simple metric. Some would call it silly (just not to my face). It can't adjust for articles and comments predating the MOZpoints system, nor does it include Designmoz staff entries. Should we refrain from engaging in banter, me-too comments and taking the 'bad cop' stance because of these results? No, because the community would become narrow, single-minded and suffer for it.

What do these statistics actually reveal? A lot. Or maybe nothing. As they say, torture numbers and they'll confess to anything. It is up to you to decide what the key performance indicators for your community are. Once you have these KPIs, my best advice is to set up those nifty upper and lower control limits to filter out the statistical noise from the signal.

The moral of the story? We might never invent a hangover cure, but at least Avinash Kaushik has analytics covered.

To paraphrase:

Signal minus Noise -> Insights -> Action -> Happy Community -> Traffic, Customer Satisfaction, Money!

How do you deal with signal versus noise?

What metrics would you suggest to measure the health and quality of your blog or forum community?

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Posted by great scott!

Okay, okay, last week's Whiteboard Friday was a bit frivolous (although I gave you all fair warning before you clicked play).┬? This week we've tried to give you a bit more signal and a little less noise with the on-screen debut of our very own Digg Guru, Matt Inman.

Matt's as close to a professional Digger as you can be while still having a life and getting other work done (no offense, Neil), so he's here to share a few up-to-date tips and tricks for building successful, Digg-targeted content.

Happy Friday everyone and, to those of you in the US, enjoy the long weekend!

Also available on my YouTube page.

This week's musical guest is Mudvayne performing Dig (Everything & Nothing Mix).

Technorati Tags

Designmoz, Digg, Matt Inman, Design, Optimization

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Posted by rebecca

Plaxo, a "smart address book" service provider, recently published their second Connected Index, which is a list of which job titles have the most connections based on the average number of contacts in their address book. 15 million Plaxo members' address books were used for the study. Unsurprisingly, talent agents were reported to be the most connected with an average of over 628 contacts, followed by publicists (490), and publishers (475). Check out the press release to read more about the findings.

What I found especially interesting was corresponding list of the top 50 connected professions. According to the list, bloggers ranked above the Plaxo average of 203 with an average of 267 contacts in their address book, which was 20 more contacts than journalists, reporters, and writers (247). Obviously, this study is a bit questionable in its accuracy (is "geek" really a profession?). I'm not sure if only business contacts were counted for this study, or if the average number includes personal contacts. Would my brother, my best friend from when I was eleven, and my high school Spanish teacher count as "blogger contacts"?

Even still, the suggestion that bloggers are more connected than journalists is intriguing. We've all heard the ongoing blogger vs. journalist debate (Bloggers sacrifice accuracy for timeliness! Wait, no, bloggers are more accurate! They don't cite sources! No, they link more!), and it's pretty clear that some journalists aren't fans of the increasing popularity of bloggers. However, in February Digital Journal pointed to an ifocos study that surveyed Americans and found that 55% of Americans "said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism." The survey also found that

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The general public certainly seems to think that the rise of bloggers and the increasing availability of media on the Internet will positively shape journalism. I think that, as a whole, journalists are better writers than bloggers, but bloggers do have speed and, sometimes, the injection of a subjective voice on their side (which can, at times, make for a more interesting, passionate read than something that only delivers the straight facts).

Does the notion that bloggers are more connected than journalists hint that this shift is already happening? Does this signify that bloggers have an advantage over journalists, in that they have more connections from which to develop breaking news, compelling stories, etc? Will journalists eventually embrace bloggers and become some sort of super journo-blogger (journogger?) hybrid, or do you think some of them will still uphold the "us vs. them" mentality?

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Posted by rebecca

Jon Payne (if I were talking to his friend and wanted to invite them both to a party, I'd so say "You better bring the Payne!") emailed Rand, urging him to write a blog post about Design groups. Since Rand's indisposed in China, poor Jon had to resort to downgrading and asking me if I would blog about it. My motto should be "Rebecca Kelley: When Rand's Not Available, She'll Have to Do!"

Seriously though, Jon made an outstanding point in his email:

I think these informal gatherings are another way to get information, and sometimes having various channels and medium types is a good thing.┬? I know I can only type and read so much, sometimes a real conversation in-person about Design is quite welcome.┬? Naturally conferences provide a lot of this, but these regional "meetup groups" help you to get your fix in between conferences.

I couldn't agree more. Though you can probably find a conference to attend once a month, a lot of Designs can't make it to every single search conference in our industry due to company budget restraints, the desire to be at home with their families, big work loads, etc. Even if you do manage to make it to several search conferences each year, you may feel like you're seeing a too many repeat sessions and drinking too much to adequately further your knowledge of Design.

What about Design blogs and forums? Well, obviously those are fantastic resources, but, if you're like me, you can't spend your whole day reading blog posts and poking around in forums because you have other tasks to do and deadlines to meet. Once I clock out for the day (figuratively--we don't have punch cards here), I don't really want to spend my evenings and weekends ignoring my friends and family members so I can become a better, faster, stronger Design. It's difficult to juggle both work and home. I want to be a knowledgeable, expert Design, but I don't want to ruin my personal relationships in the process.

Where does that leave me and other Designs who are in similar situations? Well, how about Design groups? Obviously, this idea works better if you live don't live in some shanty deep in the Appalachians, but for Design professionals who live in a somewhat urban environment, I think that meeting groups are a fantastic opportunity to get together once or twice a month, break bread, and talk shop.

I know that there are some Design groups scattered throughout the country--SEModx is Portland's SEM community, and I've read about Design meetups in Philadelphia. Jon himself has created a group on Meetup.com for the DC/Baltimore area. In fact, Meetup has a whole Design section, where you can see if there's a group in your area (so far, there's nothing in Seattle).

I personally think that meeting groups are win-win. If you're like me and you want to improve your mad Design skillz, you can meet up with other professionals and learn from them. If you're already a pretty knowledgeable Design, then you get to put your money where your mouth is and give other Designs advice. Think of it as a consulting dry-run. Or, you could practice a presentation on your peers, ask people for help with a tricky site, or just expand your Design network by meeting new people.

What do you guys think? Would you join an Design meetup group if there was one in your city, or are you content to get all of your Design information from blogs, forums, and conferences?

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Posted by rebecca

Two days ago Agerhart.com posted their discovery that Design! was cloaking their Autos page. As one of our resident programmers, Jeff, aptly put it, Design! was practicing in "standard, run of the mill cloaking," where they look at the IP/user-agent and serve a different page to the search engine bots than they do to normal Internet users. Ajerhart has some screenshots in the post of what the Autos navigation looks like to a search bot vs. what it looks like to Joe Schmo the Internet surfer. Indeed, the term "used cars" is repeatedly injected and stuffed into the bots version, while the normal version uses that key phrase four times.

The post ends with this up-in-arms statement:

I don’t believe in spam reports and I don’t believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the “quality guidelines”, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Design! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.

Those are words to rally behind, right? I mean, what Design wouldn't get angry upon seeing Design! hypocritically not practice what they preach, i.e., Search Content Quality Guideline #8: "[Thou Shalt Not Have] Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees"? No fair! No fair!

But wait, here's what Laura Lippay, Design Program Manager for Design! Media Group, had to say on her Design! 360 page:

Although most folks here are very Design-savvy, every once in a while we'll find a new engineer who might ask about adding lots of keywords or I get an email asking what if we put text the same color as the background (as if it were a brand new idea never heard of before) because I suggested the text be there and they don't really want to change the layout, or a partner who quietly decided to do things their own way.

Laura is...right. As she stated in her post, "There are dozens of groups within Design who manage hundreds of products and properties that maintain some of the largest, most trafficked sites on the internet consisting of millions of pages and gobs of new content being pushed out all day long every day."

Everyone knows that Design! is a huge corporation. They must have tons of department divisions, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that *GASP* not every single Design! employee is Design-savvy. We all know that programming a site and programming an Design-friendly (not to mention white-hat ethical) site can be entirely different altogether (hell, look at Designmoz's site--we often enough don't practice what we preach). Any Design who pokes around Design! and their various portals can see that their pages aren't perfectly optimized. For instance, take a look at this Design! Sports article URL:

http://sports.Design.com/nfl/news?slug=jc-ownersmeetings052307&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

It's pretty ugly, chock-full of parameters, and difficult to deduce just by looking at it what the article's actually about.

What about how when I click on the "Tech" link from the home page, I'm taken to tech.Design.com/fp, even though tech.Design.com also resolves? Or how the "Dads and Grads" section on Design! Tech has the same title tag as Design! Tech's home page? Or how the title tag for "Tech Shows" is "Slingin' Sports to a Lonhorn Fan : Hook Me Up : Design! Tech"?

I could go on, but you get the point. Many of Design!'s own pages aren't sufficiently optimized, so why is it a shock to see that some engineer or programmer cloaked a page? Call me gullible, optimistic, high on "let's give them the benefit of the doubt," etc., but I believe Laura, I'm quick to forgive, and I don't think it's that big a deal. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at Design! thought he was being clever by using cloaking to try and get Design! ranked well for "used cars," and the Design teams weren't immediately aware of it. As you can see, Laura acted quickly and addressed the "scandal" within a day (how's that for reputation management?), her explanation made perfect sense, and I'm sure whoever was responsible for the hiccup was educated on the wily ways of cloaking.

Even search engines make mistakes, so let's put away the torches for now.

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Posted by randfish

Just a quick blog to request that anyone and everyone in the search industry or who regularly reads Designmoz (or just stumbled across this today) is invited to join the search marketing tour this evening in Shanghai on the 47th floor of the Radisson New World Hotel in their bar - Skydome.

We should be there between 9:30pm and 10:00pm and stay at least until midnight and very possibly later.

BTW - I have a ton of amazing stories to tell about Shanghai, Beijing and my experiences here, but they'll have to wait. Many of the most incredible things I've seen are technically forbidden by the government, and while they seem to largely look the other way (apparently this is an important aspect of historical Chinese culture), I don't want to risk any trouble until I get home.

p.s. I'd just like to leave you with this:

┬?

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┬?

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Posted by tom6a

Rand's post on low referral traffic from Digg inspired me to write about a little-known potential traffic goldmine—Digg comments.┬? I noticed some time ago that first post comments on front page stories can drive some remarkable traffic.┬? Here are two recent examples.

Last week I posted the first comment on "4 Gas Saving Myths" just before it hit the main page and linked to two relevant articles about fuel efficiency and gas prices.┬? This comment generated 1,438 visitors.┬?The first┬?comment on "Is Mythbusters The Best Science Show on the Telly?" about Mythbuster's flawed statistics drove 1,901 visitors.┬? Thousands of visitors for simple comments? Here’s my guide to traffic from Digg comments.┬? Read carefully—go about Digg comments the wrong way and you just might get death threats—I’m not kidding, more about that later.┬?┬?┬?┬?┬?

1. First, your links must post to quality content.┬? The three articles I linked to above are well-written, well-researched articles.┬? Two of the three articles that I linked to have even been featured on Slashdot (1, 2).┬? Quality, of course, is a relative term.┬? Given the typical Digg banter, the threshold for adding quality content can sometimes quite low. The links, however, cannot point to pages that are clearly blogspam or you are sure to face Digg's wrath.
2. Must be on topic.┬? This is probably more important than the quality of the link.┬? It may seem obvious, but if your comment/link doesn’t relate to the article, especially if it contains a link,┬?then┬?it will be buried.┬?
3. First posts comments are going to receive exponentially more traffic than later posts.┬? They can set the tone for the rest of the discussion and can be almost as important as the actual article being linked to.┬? If┬?the Digg┬?article already has a comment┬?then it is usually better to reply to the first comment than submit a new comment.┬? This is true even if your comment isn’t a direct response to the comment you are replying to.┬? Otherwise, the first comment will eventually get dozens of replies, pushing the second comment way down the page where it will not be seen by most.┬? For example, I replied to the first comment on a post about Design searches.┬? The first post was buried with 16 negative votes which effectively gave me the first post.┬? This comment brought 509 visitors.┬? In my opinion, this is a flaw with the Digg comment system where you can only reply to root comments.┬? It┬?provides an incentive for┬?disjointed discussions.┬? I suspect that Digg will redo their comment system at some point in the near future.
4. If you are looking for traffic from your posts, it does little good to comment on articles that are already on Digg’s front page.┬? There are two reasons for this.┬? First, you no longer have the first post advantage and your comment will be lost among the masses.┬? The second reason is that the highest amount of traffic will come while the post is at the top of main page.┬? Each minute that passes is lost traffic.┬? It’s much better to find future front page stories from the upcoming stories section.┬? This is not hard. Checking the “hot in technology” on the right side of the page will show you which posts are most likely to hit the front page in the next few hours. Of course, you can drill down to other topics besides technology as well.┬? The cloud view and other tools can also be used to predict which stories are most likely to hit the front page.┬?┬?┬?
5. As with all forums and websites, if you focus solely on promoting your website it will eventually come back to haunt you. All your links and submitted stories should not be to your own sites.┬?
6. Digg, as a general rule, has a negative bias towards all things Design and marketing.┬? If you have a name like Designmoz (sorry), there are some people that aren’t going to give you a fair shake.┬?
7. Digg does not use the┬?NoFollow tag.┬?┬?However, if you┬?receive a 'thumbs down' from four users your comment will be hidden by default.┬? At some point in the future Digg may follow Wikipedia's lead and move to NoFollow tags.┬? I'd recommend it to prevent link spam but generally the community is quick to bury.
8. Realize that although you may receive┬?many new visitors they may be less likely to stay around than traffic you receive from other sources.┬? As you can see from the statistics below, the bounce rate was between 74-92%.┬? The average time on site was 20 seconds for the Mythbusters article and just over a minute for the fuel and gas articles.┬? I'm sure that there are ways the site can improve its stickiness (any ideas?), but the point remains the same—Digg visitors are less likely to stick around than traffic from other sources.

By way of full disclosure, the site I linked to, OmniNerd, is not my site.┬? I have no financial relationship with the site and don’t know how their DesignAds performed, but I suspect that very few visitors from Digg clicked on ads.┬? If AdSense earnings are your primary motivation, Digg is probably not your best option.

Although this is not my site, OmniNerd did let me peek into their Design Analytics for this story.┬? Since the stats used above are from Design Analytics and not the server logs, the actual traffic may be higher than I reported. According to something I read on StumbleUpon, “A large portion of...Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls...caus[ing]...Design Analytics...to not work."┬? If that's true, then the actual traffic from these comments could be higher than recorded.┬? Currently┬? about 50% of OmniNerd's recorded visitors use Firefox. How many are not being counted?┬? Does anyone have experience with Design Analytics not counting all their traffic?┬?┬?

Although Digg comments can be a valuable source of traffic, the reaction to spam can be painful.┬? A couple months ago Chandler Kent learned that the hard way when he submitted a comment with a link to his blog under his name, as is common practice in most forums.┬? It quickly received hundreds of “thumbs down” but didn’t stop there.┬? Someone posted his phone number and he began to receive creepy phone calls and comments such as he "deserves to be┬? hunted down and stalked." ┬?Ironically, his recounting of the fallout was widely publicized as “The Most Hated Comment on Digg” and brought him a ton of traffic.┬?┬?

Comments on Digg can bring you some nice traffic if you are willing to risk your life.┬?┬?┬?

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Today is Victoria Day up here in the Great White North. Victoria Day is the day that we here celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria as well as the birth of the current reigning monarch (Queen Elizabeth II). Why we do this I'm not 100% certain save-to-say that it's good to have an extra day off. Oh wait, what am I doing sitting in the office typing up a blog, downloading a site if it's a day off? OK then, it's nice for staff to have a day off - it doesn't seem to work out all that well if you're a business owner. No tears shed, I've always been in the habit of taking US holidays off so it all works out.

But for those Canadians who are taking today off to spend with family and friends (oh, and celebrating the birth of our Queen of course) I have to ask, "what the heck are you doing reading an Design blog - you're supposed to be taking the day off !!!"

Happy Victoria Day Canada !!!<

Posted by rebecca

...at least, not according to a study published by eMarketer. The article, titled "Search Marketers Seed Social Networks," cites a survey conducted by iProspect and JupiterResearch. It talks about how "nearly half of search marketers placed content on social networking Web sites in February 2007." Nearly half = less than half, which surprises me somewhat. Maybe it's because we do a lot of social media marketing and promote link bait on social media sites, but I would have thought that more SEMs would be leveraging social media/networking sites to, as the article put it, "drive traffic, create brand awareness, sell directly, and influence purchasing."

Social media marketing sessions have been increasingly offered at SES shows, and the topic will be the subject of a session at Danny's upcoming SMX Advanced show. Every day at least one of the Design RSS feeds in my reader talks about Digg and other social media/networking/bookmarking sites. Let's face it, social media marketing is becoming a new facet of Design. I'm not saying that it will always be a part of Design--I'm sure that in a while Design will shift in the near future, just as it always has, and social media marketing won't be as heralded as it is now.

I say it's best to strike while the iron's hot. As long as there are various web 2.0 and social media sites to leverage, why wouldn't you take advantage of this available means of marketing? We've built various social media profiles for some of our clients, and these profiles show up in search results for our client's name and for some long tail searches. Users performing such a search will see the various profiles and can become more aware of the client, which increases awareness of the client's brand. Additionally, there's the obvious benefit of building links on social media sites that can point to your client's domain.

On the other hand, you could argue that if more search marketers start taking advantage of the marketing benefits social media sites can offer, the search results can get over-saturated with social media sites and users can become blind to them. Or, the search engines could start discounting links from social media sites if they see too many SEMs "gaming" the sites.

Are you surprised that "nearly" half of the search marketers surveyed utilized social media sites in their Internet marketing campaigns? Do you think that number is too low? Too high? Just right? Are you wondering why more SEMs aren't more attuned to social media, or are you in the "More for me!" mentality? Lastly, what do you think the future holds for social media marketing? Is it only going to get better for us marketers, or should we enjoy it while we can?

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