B(abble)log - Archives
1) Prepare for the onslaught of brand names as web extensions in domains as early as 2009. In a move that will overhaul how the Internet is navigated, the BBC reports that Icann voted unianimously to relax the rules on top level domain names like .com, .net, etc., paving the way for virtually anything to be used. They also voted to allow characters other than the Roman alphabet, which will no doubt lead to an explosion in Asian and Cyrillic URLs.
2) Heading to Wilno, Ontario, and you want to find the best pierogies in town? Worry no more. GOOG-411 has come to the rescue. Mashable reports it’s finally available in Canada.
3) Twitter pal Collin Douma (the brilliant mind behind Radical Trust) shared this link, noting “Ouch! Sales strategy at capital one caught in photo from street below...”
4) On the clock, and you really shouldn’t be goofing around on Facebook? Colleague Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services sent over this clever little ploy – it makes web pages look like a Word document.
5) Apparently size does matter. At least if you’re a small blog. See why Google Trends for Websites is causing an uproar.
6) Enough already!! Business Week reports that Yahoo Tries to Heal Itself – Again. The company is trying to go on the offensive but it leaves the company explaining its stance to shareholders.
7) So, you’re thinking of making a social application? “Before you get a business model, make sure you have a pleasure model.” That’s just one of the fantastic sound bites from Best Practices for Spreading Your App Without Ruining the User Experience. (Thanks Iain Tait for the heads-up. )
8) Is visual search going to catch on soon? Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land retorts "Spare me the eye candy!"
9) Repeated exposure to bad pitches turns into some good advice. Richard Laermer stresses that the real challenge in pitching bloggers is that you need to give people a reason to embed or post.
10) Dave Fleet has some excellent tips on how to set up a simple online montoring system for free. A commenter added the extra dimension
of using Yahoo Pipes to funnel the results into one master RSS feed
that you can publish or place in a reader.
FRIDAY FUN
And speaking of Dave Fleet, thanks to him for sharing the link to this gem on Twitter: Creatives Grow Better in the South West.
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So what’s that odd looking box to the left? Why it’s the A.C. Riley Communications QR Code! According to Wikipedia, a QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.
Essentially it’s a type of two-dimensional barcode you can scan with your cell phone to open a website or access other information without the pesky bother of typing. It can contain a URL of up to 4000 characters. (Why you’d have a URL of 4000 characters is beyond me, but if you do a QR Code will save you from future carpal tunnel problems.) The binary can hold up to 2,953 bytes. So, company or product PDFs, gifs, jpegs, tiff files, etc. can all be scanned and read later.
You can spot QR in magazines, on billboards and posters, buses, flyers, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. QR Codes can be scanned or faxed.
Highly popular throughout Asia, QR Codes have not yet cracked North America. And cell phones here don’t automatically come with a QR Code scanner app - it needs to be added. But they are gaining momentum.
How do I know? The Pet Shop Boys, of course! Besides, you know it’s hitting the mainstream when there’s a Facebook app. What seems like an odd mashup is instead a tool that allows you to create gear (T-shirts, tote bags, etc.) with your own QR Code that links to, you guessed it, your Facebook profile. If someone snaps the image on the shirt, they can instantly friend you.
There are QR Code widgets for pushing out info on a daily basis. There are tools for creating secret QR messages
that you can embed into your website.
Imagine standing in a store and being able to access up-to-the-minute product information by simply scanning a code. The rather George-Clooneyish Marcello Di Pietro does an excellent job of explaining how they work and the marketing applications.
Want to generate your own QR Code? Check out Winksite’s QR Code Generator.
I stumbled across this image accidentally and loved the packaging so much that I just had to check out Innocent Drinks website. Often times "corporate personality" is an oxymoron, but not in this case.
The personality leaps off the page and out of the packaging. (Spend some time in the Label Museum, you won't regret it.) It was so engaging that I was eager to spend some time checking out the company. Honestly, when is the last time you enjoyed reading an "About Us" section? I thought so.
As the company no doubt continues to grow, I don't know if they will be able to keep up their Lest We Forget section, but I think the gesture of acknowledging past employees tells volumes about the company.
It's really uplifting to start a Monday with brilliant copywriting that makes spending time with a company very enjoyable indeed. When corporate personality shines, the user experience is ameliorated by roughly a gazillion times. (At A.C. Riley Communications it's all scientific, mathematical evidence all the time.) Hip-hip-hooray Innocent Drinks.
1) If you are involved in improving your local search results, Search Engine Roundtable points us towards David Mihm's guide to Local Search Ranking Factors.
2) An SEOs Introduction and Tutorial to Google Webmaster Tools by Eric Lander gives a great overview for people who are just getting started. Strangely, it is presented with as a static PowerPoint, but the information is good. Hat tip: PageTraffic Blog.
3) What people say online about you and your brand is receiving more and more attention. Here is Part 4 in an excellent series by Mark Story What to do When Something Goes Bump on the Net.
4) Talk south of the border has been on the impending financial downturn. With the Canadian economy so closely tied to our largest trading partner, perhaps we should pay attention when the Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog suggests that now is a good time to consider 7 Strategies for B2B Marketing During a Recession.
5) Have a suggestion for how to improve the advertising business? AdRants tells us about how mysterious writer Sabrina Duncan has launched the fifth column to let agencies know how to do it better.
6) Another prime example of how outdoor advertising is evolving and pushing boundaries. AdAge reports
on the HBO campaign "Voyeur" by BBCO winning the Grand Prix in Cannes
and it featured a massive video projection. Creativity online has a video case study on the innovative campaign.
7) The WidgetWebExpo in Brooklyn this week featured the panel Micro Interactions: Can portable experiences go mainstream?" AdAge.com talks to two panelists about the Far-Reaching Impact of Distributed Web Services.
8) Sometimes you just need some good photography and you haven't got it your own shot to fit the bill. Dave Fleet comes to the rescue with 5 top Online Photography Resources, giving us some great tips on searching Flickr for Creative Commons photos.
9) Forrester Research Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang has started an FAQ for social media. This week is #6: Who "Owns" the Social Media Program?
10) On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising is one of the longest posts I've seen on the topic, and as one of the commenters stated, it should be a white paper. It's excellent. But, adding another level of interest is that it was written by Dave Allen, ex-bassist from the post-punk band Gang of Four who is now Director, Insights & Digital Media at Nemo Design.
FRIDAY FUN
I am a firm believer in extending your brand personality into a site's error pages to improve user experience. Recently, Christine Lu posted a link on Twitter to the slightly disturbing iStockphoto.com 503 error page that she discovered. For more images, look for images tagged "sitedown" on Flickr.
BONUS
Of special interest to Canadians is the introduction of Bill C-61 which seeks to reform the copyright law. The changes are far sweeping and will effect everything from copying a legal CD that you own onto your iPod to unlocked cell phones, foreign DVDs and ink cartridges for your printer. It's a complex law but Dave Delaney offers a great starting point to understanding the issues and points to additional resources.
Here are a few generally-agreed upon practices. That said, always – always! – consider your site visitor first. If it doesn’t read well, or seem natural, don’t do it.
Okay, let’s look at typical places to put keywords on any given web page.
URL Page File Names
Keep it simple. If you have a page all about your blue widgets, you might want to have this:
www.yourcompany.com/blue-widgets
But trust me, don’t go berserk loading it up, because it looks spammy to people and to search engines.
www.yourcompany.com/blue-widgets-aqua-widgets-indigo-widgets-more-widgets
Ridiculous.
Title Tags
Instead of just your company name site-wide, it’s a good idea to include your keyword phrase where possible in your title tag. Again, use the ‘concise & descriptive rule’, keeping it short and highly relevant to the page.
Meta Keywords & Description
Meta tags are not a magic bullet. Due to previous spamming, they are largely ignored by search engines. But I tend to include a pithy, well-written meta description anyhow. At the risk of becoming repetitious, keep it relevant to the page, and never "keyword stuff.” If you are going to use your meta keyword tag, a handful of phrases that relate to the page are enough and common misspellings as well. (“blue wigdet”)
A meta description for our blue widget seller might be:
See an array of blue widgets including ordering details and prices. Your Company ships blue widgets across North America.
Heading Tags
H1 tags are also one of the countless factors search engines use to evaluate a page. But use them wisely. It is generally similar in concept to the page title, but not exactly the same. Sub-titles that aren’t as important should be in H2.
Content
Integrate your keyword throughout the copy. The first paragraph is important so make sure your keywords are there. And, really, that is just common sense – if the page is about a specific topic, obviously the lead paragraph is going to use the keyword phrase a couple of times.
Pepper your copy with your keyword phrases periodically. The keyword phrases should never be forced, or sound unnatural. Read your copy aloud. If it doesn’t ring true – rewrite.
Search engines are smart. Go ahead, mix it up a bit, use variations such as plural, singular and various tenses for verbs. Be as descriptive as you can about your products and services as this will give your page a rich vocabulary as well as draw in some long-tail keyword phrases.
Bold/Strong/Italics
Sure, why not? Effective usage can help words stand out on the page, which can add to a better user experience. But don’t overuse this technique. When too much is emphasized, nothing is.
Hyperlinks
Use keyword phrases in hyperlinks leading to and from the page.
Alt and Image Tags
This is good for SEO but also good for accessibility/usability purposes. Keep your tags descriptive of the image, but also consider keywords where it makes sense.
1) Marketing Magazine reported that Scotties is running a designer box promotion, encouraging consumers to create their own box online. (Kinda smacks of the Smarties "Gimme Colour" design-your-own-box campaign doesn't it?) But, it's got a nice user interface, and is a fun way to kill some time on a Friday afternoon... On a another note, hey Scotties.ca what up with the McLovin' site music?
2) SearchEngineLand tells us how Google and Yahoo have made a non-exclusive, 10-year agreement on paid search.
3) Like the Hippocratic Oath, Adam Audette from Audette Media has delared that he has Six Principles of Ethical SEO to help heal his clients.
4) Cognitive Web design takes the user experience to the next level by analyzing a visitor's clicks and then serving them pages designed for their style of browsing, and increasing conversions. MIT Technology Review tells us about how the Sloan system is Adapting Websites to Users.
5) Ideas are "like a really good cheese, they need to mature." Mark Boulton at A List Apart inspires some thought with Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas.
6) No matter who you are, you need an elevator pitch. The Canadian Marketing Blog coaches you through developing a good one.
7) Is your company getting ready to dive right into a social media presence? Mack Collier at Marketing Profs tells us that first you should test the waters by monitoring what people are already saying about you.
8) Once you've gotten wet in the social media waters by monitoring, consider how brands have to think creatively about how best to engage in social media. ClickZ tells us about How Three Brands Got Smart About Social Media.
9) With so many social media technologies to choose from, now you'll have to figure out which ones to use. Jay Moonah tells us which applications are In and Out in the fishbowl.
10) KD Paine is THE expert in PR and social media measurement. In one of her latest posts about the M word in social media, she talks about how most organizations can't articulate what it is that
they want to achieve, and so they attempt to apply the wrong metrics to social media.
FRIDAY FUN
I love this. Thanks to Adrants for the tip-off to this very funny commercial.
I kid you not, I have stumbled across “optimized copy” that reads something like this:
We sell blue widgets. Our blue widgets are very blue, as far as widgets go. As blue widget sellers, we offer all types of blue widgets. Our blue widgets range in price, with smaller blue widgets starting at $50 and larger blue widgets running up to $100.00 If you are looking for a blue widget, we are the blue widget professionals.
Gee, what do you think their keyword phrase could be? It is to laugh.
While you may be able to trick the search engines with that sort of blaring keyword stuffing, you cannot trick people.
And really, that’s what it comes down to – people.
People buy your products or services, not search engines.
Let me repeat…
People buy your products or services, not search engines.
So, yes, as a blue widget seller, go ahead talk about your blue widgets. But cast your net a little wider, use a mélange of words and phrases. Your copy will be a little richer, and far, far more engaging for your reader.
On the list for tomorrow – where to put those keywords.
This is the first tenet of my SEO copywriting manifesto.
To be blunt: optimized copy cannot fix your crappy site.
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell the story of how James Carville helped simplify the Clinton political campaign message to “It’s the economy, stupid.”
To paraphrase, “It’s about the user, stupid.”
The site is not for you (the company) it’s for your client.
Before optimized copy has a hope in Hades of working, other elements must be considered:
- The look & feel of the site must match user expectations.
- Do the pages load quickly? (Speed of accessibility, Fair Reader, is critical.)
- Navigation must be intuitive – with no “mystery meat”.
- Don't torture your user. (If you’re not sure what this means, refer to my “site architorture” rant.)
- The purpose must be clear. (Why is the user there? What is the take-away for the site visitor?)
- Is it easy for the user to access the relevant information? The content has to be relevant, with a clear call-to-action.
- The content MUST be interesting, and please, please axe the “keyword stuffing” repetition. (More on that tomorrow.)
If your site doesn’t work for your user, it doesn’t matter if you have a #1 ranking. It’s one thing to get traffic to a site, but it is another to convert them from visitor to client.
1) With Twitter's downtime, I've told you about Plurk. But FriendFeed, a combination RSS aggregator and social network, is getting a lot of attention as a Twitter alternative too. To get the most of of the service follow the series of tips by Louis Gray, starting with parts 1, 2 and 3.
2) And if all of these social networks are making you crazy, check out the post from Leigh Duncan-Durst on MarketingProfs.com Social Networking: Application Overload!
3) SEO by the SEA brings us How Search Engines Can Index Pages in Parts looking at how Microsoft, Google and Yahoo will be indexing information at the block level instead of the page level.
4) I thought I was losing my mind, but no. Google DID change their favicon to a lower-case g. SearchEngineLand says that according to Google, it's simple and playful. Uh huh.
5) Feeling creatively blocked? Smashing Magazine tells us to look outside and shows us 10 places for design inspiration.
6) Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist for Google and is so passionate about analytics that it's hard not to be enthralled. For a twist on the concept of being stranded on a desert island, we're told to Pick One, Just One Web Analytics Report, Go!
7) Queue Up: Gaining a Competitive Edge By Optimising for Colloquialisms tells us how adopting an international SEO approach can be very successful.
8) Bad PR pitches continue to spoil it for the good practitioners. Christopher S. Penn tells us about PR Pitches that miss the mark.
9) FutureLab featured a discussion on High vs. Low Design and I loved this quote from David Armano: "Whether we’re developing using a high-end design or a low-end technique, we need to focus on what the project does and what kinds of needs it actually fulfills at the end of the day. We should think about usability as a continual process." Amen!
10) This past week Chris Brogan launched a three-part series telling us how to Develop a Strong Personal Brand Online (Part 1 and 2) and then revealed The Real Power of Personal Branding.
FRIDAY FUN
Common Craft has just released Social Media in Plain English, to help you explain social media at your next business meeting. If you don't know Common Craft, they create paperworks videos to illustrate complex concepts in simple terms and have done a library of great videos that you should definitely check out.
BONUS
A fascinating study released this week by Universal McCann shows that globally 73% of Internet users are reading blogs. That represents a fundamental shift in how people are getting information. This is the third research study by Universal McCann and it surveyed 17,000 people in 29 countries about their use of digital media and the Internet. (Annoyingly, the Universal McCann site loads with the sound of chattering people; the off button is on the left.)
The online folks are going ga-ga for Plurk. Getting over my aversion to the name itself (Doesn’t it sound like it is an onomatopoeic word for something perfectly dreadful??!) I dove in.
This is how it looks:
While the cool factor is definitely there, I have a hard time following the horizontal timeline – especially one that shows the newer events on the left and older on the right. But I think I might be in the minority there, as there are plenty of folks who love the side-to-side timeline. However, if you followed more than a handful of people the visual clutter of the “plurks” (shudder) would pile up immensely. It would be too cluttered, not a good feature on any social media platform.
A lot of people are saying that Plurk is the new Twitter, but Chris Thomson has put together a wonderful compare & contrast of Plurk and Twitter to prove they are different animals indeed, complete with a lovely chart of features.
The signup process is painless (nice!) but after that, it’s easy to flounder around trying to find people. Everyone seems to agree – a search tool would be a very nice addition and the ability to import Twitter pals would be appreciated.
Leslie Poston wrote a great article at Profy.com called Too Much Wurk to Plurk that outlines some of her issues with the new, shiny social network du jour. She notes:
Without a clear direction for using the site, no easy way to add people to your friends list, no way to determine how it might be useful to you, and issues like usability, Plurk is already getting negative feedback on Twitter and even on its own site.
So, I went to register my own name and goof around with it for a bit. Will I go back? Hmmm, I’ll probably experiment with Plurk, but as Twitter pal @GeekMommy pointed out, no doubt the novelty will wear off soon.
Are you using Plurk? What do you think? Love it? Hate it?
Not being too much of a science geek, I didn’t have a lot of interest in the minutiae of the Phoenix Mars lander, but ever since I stumbled across the lander’s Twitter page – I’m a convert! In case you can’t read it on the screenshot the cheery bio reads, “I dig Mars!”
Recently Wired Science landed an exclusive interview via Twitter, and the article reveals that the voice of the $420 million dollar NASA project is Veronica McGregor, a Jet Propulsion Lab staff member.
In the past few years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s media team has adopted many Web 2.0 technologies, including producing podcasts, posting videos on YouTube, blogging and setting up a Facebook page.
As the voice and personality of @MarsPhoenix, McGregor has been posting messages that burst with personality. Samples include:
Peter Smith says team has nicknamed the ice area "Holy Cow!" Those were the first words uttered in the ops area when image was received. 11:28 AM May 31, 2008
Looking forward to moving arm today. Will bend the wrist and flex the elbow. It's been stowed for 10 months so I'll move it slowly/gently. 09:24 AM May 28, 2008
But more than provide missives about the tasks the lander is performing @MarsPhoenix also answers questions and responds to comments tossed its way. (@newmars That's right! A loose screw on Mars can't stop me now. 11:19 PM May 30, 2008)
According to the Wired article, the experiment has gone so well, in fact, that the team is planning to continue tweeting throughout the mission, even though they'd planned to close up shop after the live landing.
The Twitter experiment has also captured a lot of press attention. Last Friday, The New York Times commented on how the NASA spacecraft has adeptly leapt into the world of social networking.
In the article, McGregor says that the Twitter format of 140 characters changed the direction of the tweets:
“If I had to write ‘the spacecraft is,’ that’s too many characters,” Ms. McGregor said. “I am” is much shorter.
What a fab-ola way to make science more interesting and relevant to tweens, teens and 20-somethings.
And from a social media business standpoint, it’s also a whopping success. The @MarsPhoenix project drove over 15,000 followers by word-of-mouth. Not a whiff of spam to be found. Many times, PR or marketing efforts will make the mistake of mass following thousands, but @MarsPhoenix doesn’t follow anyone. Neat, huh?
That’s the power of voice, personality and engaging content.
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