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Some of you might remember my feelings about KFC's marketing campaign for its Holiday Feast for One... I really didn't think you could get any sadder.
I was wrong.
Fast food restaurants pull some pretty crazy stunts to get publicity these days. Not to be outdone, KFC has issued a press release asking for a papal blessing for their new Fish Snacker Sandwich. As Short Takes Blog points out, the company has taken metaphor to the extreme with a quote from KFC's CMO, James O'Reilly, who says: "It's perfect for an on-the-go lunch or any time of the day when you need a quick snack but don't want to sacrifice taste."
Holy mackerel.
KFC is part of the YUM Brands Inc. family, along with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Yum was recently under fire in NYC as local television stations ran wall-to-wall coverage of apparently well-fed rats running wild, and appearing at home, in a New York City KFC/Taco Bell joint.
Perhaps the rats had given up their favourite foods for Lent and were doing penance by eating at KFC and Taco Bell. Or perhaps they were trying to do a charitable act by closing down the joint...
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Yesterday I had the great pleasure to speak to the Montreal chapter of the Professional Organizers in Canada organization. Kathryn (of Zoonini Web Services) and I talked about the various elements that comprise an "optimized site."
Kathryn covered intuitive design and site architecture along with common design mistakes that can hurt a Web site's performance - with both the search engines and the site visitors. I tackled how to find your keywords, where to put them, and the final litmus test - does it sound natural to your potential clients? We also spoke about linking strategies - both on-site and off-site. It was a lot to cover in a short period of time, and we did our best to keep the talk jargon-free.
And that's no small feat. The search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) industries -- like all industries -- have their own lingo. SEO and SEM folks tend to babble about spiders, SERPs, keyword efficiency, Meta tags, alt tags, backlinking and on and on. I chat with colleagues about this sort of stuff day-in,-day-out and it becomes so easy to forget that the rest of the world doesn't talk this way.
And that's the thing that needs to be constantly at the forefront when writing any piece of marketing collateral - is the language that I am using match and connect with my clients?
Marketing people talk about staying on-message and on-brand, which is swell, but that "on-message" bit can't just be wrapped up in groovy buzzwords, marketing-speak or jargon that is a far cry from the lingua franca common language we all use.
And unfortunately it can come across like one of those people that you occasionally meet at a party. You know the ones: the "I do this and I do that, and anyway, as I was saying" people. All businesses, and especially SMEs, need to take a hard, cold look at their Web sites and marketing materials. Is it all about "our leading edge solutions" and "our commitment" and "we deliver premium service"? Where's the customer? We've all heard of the "What's In It For Me" approach, but is it truly there?
Kathy Sierra is a fascinating blogger, and last week I read a post that has stayed with me. I was instantly caught by the little drawing of the "loveocracy" It's this approach that needs to be applied to writing as well, not just keyword and SEO-optimized content, but all writing - what is best for my readers? What are they looking for? What questions need to be answered? What words resonate - do they instantly "get it"?
Look again at the words on your page - is it the language of your audience or your own industry talk?
Today - yep, today!- I'll be teaming up with Web designer extraordinaire Kathryn Presner, of Zoonini Web Services, for a presentation to the Montreal chapter of the Professional Organizers in Canada. We'll be talking about strategies for online success as well as covering some popular Web design and search engine optimization myths. But wait, there's more!! We'll also list the 10 Deadly Web Site Sins That Can Kill Your Business! (Who said I didn't have a flare for melodrama??) For more event details, visit OrganizersInCanada.com
Consistently the HTML title tag, or that little caption you see at the top bar of your Web browser, remains one of the most overlooked and under-rated site elements. Many times, it's completely forgotten about. Don't believe me? Run a search for "untitled document".
The title tag is an extremely valuable little piece of real estate on your site - for both the search engines and the people who visit your site. The search engines apply a fair bit of importance as the title helps the search engines gather information, or figure out what a specific Web page is all about.
Even if optimization is not a concern (what?!), the title tag is the ultimate multi-tasker.
As mentioned it's the top bar of your Web browser
- It's the first title we see in the search engines results
- It's found in the tabs that we open up in our browser
- It's the title that appears when we bookmark a page
- It shows up in our navigation and session history.
- It can be displayed as the headline in RSS feeds.
One word for the poor little title tag: Respect.
Now that we've cleared that up, here are a few tips & hints to maximize your title tag.
- Search engines truncate long titles - so try to keep it to about 40 - 65 characters including spaces
- Avoid a string of keywords, i.e." Dogs, Dog Treats, Dog Toys, Treats for Dogs, Doggie Toys, Doggy Toys, Dog, Dogs" These sort of titles don't look credible.
- That said, do put your specific keywords in your title. If you have an accounting company in Vancouver, it might be something like this, "ABC & Partners - Corporate & Personal Accounting - Vancouver, BC"
- Make sure your title is a concise summary of your page, and is meaningful to the human readers who might bookmark your site.
- To cap or not to cap? To the search engines it doesn't really matter as they aren't case sensitive, but I find that "title case", or putting a capital letter at the beginning of each word give the title a nice clean look. While it has no effect on the search engines, I would advise against all caps as it tends to look "spammy" and extremely unprofessional.
Lately I've been having a lot of discussions about duplicate content, and wanted to share some of my thoughts.
First of all, let's establish what duplicate content is; duplicate content is the same text (or largely the same text) repeated on your own site, or on other sites. It comes in many forms - as multiple sites or domains with the same content, Many times companies -- very innocently -- product duplicate content through print-friendly pages, or inconsistently linking techniques. (For instance, www.company.com. www.company.com/index.php, http://company.com, etc.)
Will this your site get banned? Not likely. Not unless you are intentionally trying to manipulate search engine rankings. So why the big fuss about duplicate content? Well, mainly because search engines do their best to provide the most relevant and best quality, results for any given query. So, they actively "filter out" content that is by and large the same.
In fact, Google issued a statement on duplicate content that said:
"During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in 'regular' and 'printer' versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments ... so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index."
This means in a nutshell, is that if you do have duplicate content on your site, or across multiple sites Google decides which pages will appear in its indices. Not you. So, how do you avoid this? Here are a few techniques, as supplied by the official Google Webmaster Blog:
Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the "best" version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don't want us to index the printer versions of your site's articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
Use 301s: If you have restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, the Googlebot, and other spiders.
Be consistent: Endeavor to keep your internal linking consistent; don't link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm.
Use TLDs: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that .de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than /de or de.example.com.
Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we'll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer.
Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools: If other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can let us know which way you prefer your site to be indexed.
Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. This means not publishing (or at least blocking) pages with zero reviews, no real estate listings, etc., so users (and bots) aren't subjected to a zillion instances of "Below you'll find a superb list of all the great rental opportunities in [insert cityname]..." with no actual listings.
Understand your CMS: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.
Don't worry be happy: Don't fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it's highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site's presence in Google. If you do spot a case that's particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.
Here's a fascinating look at how marketers are turning to search engine queries to help drive product research and decision making as well as tweak the marketing of various products. Siemans Medical Solutions is even using search queries to help name an upcoming product. Consumer research is nothing new, but Web-query research (now there's a mouthful!) is still in its infancy - and has nowhere to go but up.
Yesterday it went out on the wires that Yahoo! released the long-awaited Project Panama. The result is Yahoo! Search Marketing replacing Overture, which Yahoo! bought back in 2003. The way the paid search results service had worked previously was that Yahoo would decide which ads appeared for any given search query based on which advertiser paid the most. In the new model, Yahoo! says that quality and ad performance will also be considered when determining paid advertising position, with the ultimate aim of making the search results more relevant to user queries.
The New York Times reports that it was complacency with the Overture model that delayed the project, and they are now playing a game of catch-up. Hopefully, this critical overhaul will make Yahoo's paid search more relevant. It was no industry secret that often Yahoo's paid results were often way off the mark. With eMarketer estimating that annual spending on keyword ads is expected to reach $10 billion dollars by 2010, the stakes for Yahoo! are enormous.
And while no one is going to deny that Google is far and away the leader, the market is going to get more competitive, with Norway-based Fast offering AdMomentum, a private label contextual advertising. Or in other words, they cut out the middleman and provide a way for companies to sell ads to advertisers directly without going through Google, or an agency or network.
All very exciting news in the world of paid search. But, I'm sure you know my take - with conversion rates virtually the same, I think it's worth the investment to appear for your keywords naturally. Organic optimization and paid search can work hand-in-hand, and appearing in the search engines naturally for your keywords should never be ignored. It can also save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars monthly. So, what's not to like??
Sorry for the brevity... I'm fighting a most miserable cold...
This caught my eye yesterday: In an effort to promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Cartoon Network's parent company Turner Broadcasting launched a campaign that involved attaching magnetic lightboxes to various bridges and overpasses around Boston, New York, Chicago and several other American cities. Strapping blinking electronic devices that contain circuit boards and dangling wires to bridges in a post 9/11 world...?? Doesn't seem like a stellar idea. Unless, of course, you wanted a ton of guerilla-marketing-gone-wrong publicity 
On the other side of the pond, Uplifted Lingerie's PR company sent out a rather odd pitch asking women to give up their old bras for Lent in a campaign called "Bra Amnesty." (I kid you not.) Simply package up your old bra, send 'er in and get a 15% discount on a new brassiere at UpliftedLingerie.co.uk. The old bras are then given to homeless women. No comment from the homeless on how they feel about this.
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