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Intangible Values

A great talk from ted.com by Rory Sutherland. When was the last time you actively noticed advertising changing your perception of a brand or product?

Posted 18 October 2009 † yassine § Design ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Google Webmaster Tools test new Snippets Tool

Back in May this year the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that Google had rolled out support for what they termed ‘rich snippets‘ and further define as samples of content. This support for showing additional data in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) is based on using Microformats and RDFa structured data.

Example of a Rich Snippet

Today, a Googler has linked in the Microformats Discussion group a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to “check that their markup is being correctly parsed by Google for use
in Rich Snippets”. Try the tool out today by visiting it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

A couple points to note up front (from Kavi’s post at http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss):
- Currently Rich Snippets supports hCard, hReview, hReview-aggregate, and hProduct. Other microformats may not be recognized by the tool.
- Google don’t currently support the include pattern.

This new tool does not appear to be available in the main Webmaster Tools navigation just yet.

Posted 27 August 2009 † yassine § Search ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Which side of the consistency debate are you on?

Just when is it right to accept a free gift or money in exchange for an article or review on a website or a blog? Always, in my opinion, so long as you are open about that transaction and don’t dress your article as anything else than a paid piece of prose.

Michael Gray makes a challenge to the ethics of TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy, today in his post about the difference of ethics between types of writers; be they bloggers or journalists. Fair enough.

With spin being the staple of successive Governments and also of traditional offline PR, Media and Business it can hardly be that surprising that these same tactics are employed in the online environment. The sad reality is that payola in all of it’s guises is a publishing fixture and is likely to remain such so long as there are hearts, minds and importantly consumer spending habits at stake.

Aside from the potential infringement of numerous country specific regulatory controls regards honesty and integrity in communications it may not be immediately appreciated that a lot of good writing talent is forced to tow the line in creating biased copy.

The humble writer can be drawn into a murky world of paid constructions through their need to satisfy the ‘style’ guidelines of their employer and even perhaps the ‘brand guidelines’ of a brand that may be sponsoring the writing.

Complicating the matter more in the online world is a lack of consensus from the traffic driving search engines in defining where the lines of bias lay, as they themselves are not always completely transparent about their commercial benefits that they relinquish for bias (of positioning, thinking paid inclusion (Microhoo)).

I have worked with a number of demanding clients over the years and it is often taken for granted that clients understand the implications of actions that they demand in an online world; but they seldom do and nor are they keen on listening. Clients are pressured by what their competitors are doing and a need to be seen by their own executives to be responding.

Considerations such as a penalty being applied by a search engine for flouting a search engines definition of acceptable are measured against the risk of being caught out. This is not anything new, search for “Max Clifford” in your favorite engine to see shocking examples of media and populous manipulation.

I also agree that we are well enough into the era of online to understand that there are certain rules that should be adhered to. I do not think that the determining point on this whole issue are for the search engines alone to release their next iteration of how they each respectively determine if a link is valid or not, paid for or not. The argument is far wider than that and consistency is needed:

  • across international law dealing with advertising standards,
  • search engine policy applicable to not just links but persuasive text,
  • search marketing professional adopting a code of practice, and;
  • client organizing groups that are willing to drive change

I beleive that these combined have the power to endeer change to us all. Of course there are more important issues facing us such as plastics in our oceans.

Posted 30 July 2009 † yassine § Search ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Natural Talent at Googleplex London

Simply amazing performance by Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee and Beardyman at Googleplex London earlier this year.

Posted 29 July 2009 † yassine § Arts § Life § Search ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Content consumption changes

Like a lot of people I find that I spend time reading articles online. My favourite websites to read articles online are Times Online and Al Jazeera’s English language site. I enjoy reading an article online but do suffer from eye strain if I read too much off of the screen, so sometimes I will (eek!) print out articles and read them from the page. A Luddite in some respects? Absolutely!

Increasingly, due to the ease of fitting content into my daily routine I am finding that listening to both magazine format audio programs and watching video content presentations quite rewarding. Ones that I have subscribed to via iTunes include:

These audio and video programs provide me with ‘colour’ and background to the story that is being disseminated through their use of subtle cues. If I were to read these stories then my imagination would need to fill in most of this ancillary information.

I used to rely on Google Reader alone to manage my subscriptions to RSS feeds but I have discovered an application called EventBox that lets me consolidate most of my online media sources into a single manageable stream.

Whereas before I would duck into and out of all the varied data sources that I used: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Digg and Flickr I now have the EventBox software running on my Mac and find that it helps me to keep pace with the volume of information that I want to keep a track of without really reducing my productivity.

My own personal experience is that I am now chosing to aggregate data and content. I am more inclined to listen or watch content as opposed to reading it, that is unless the Headline and Excerpt really grab my attention span.

Posted 28 July 2009 † yassine § Life ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Boondoggle – Lost in Translation?

We all waste a certain amount of time when it comes to any task that we perform. This time-slip that occurs is part and parcel with the learning process of human beings. We learn at a great pace and cannot always be expected to have a focus on what is really important, deviation to explore new tactics and excuse to expand certain tasks will always occur and are excusable.

However, Jill Whalen makes a valid point on over at Search Engine Land when she calls out some Search practitioners for busying themselves with tasks that are unlikely to have an impact on bringing valuable traffic to a website. Fixing keywords Meta data, submission to search engines and the like are the staple of many Search practitioners and may be in part a result of misinformed stakeholders and years of mis-information.

boondoggle: work of little or no value done merely to look busy.

I believe that the foundation to any successful campaign is bringing the key stakeholders along for the ride. They need to take an active interest in defining the SEO road map as the people responsible for driving the budget lines and determining the commercial milestones of any acquisition or even retention strategy.

Search practitioners alone do not always have a grasp of the business drivers and without buy in from those that hold the commercial interests will often find that they do indeed ‘boondoggle’.

It may also be a byproduct a wider failure to communicate, rather translate, new media practices into terms those traditional marketing managers and communications directors understand.

The task of translation which can involve simplification of the concepts involved in order to communicate the benefit more clearly is one that I believe all those that are involved in creating search marketing strategy should equip themselves with.

What are your thoughts and experience on this?

Posted 26 July 2009 † yassine § Search ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Understanding your Link Space

I have always found that link building quality links is one of the most time consuming tasks that can be done when implementing an SEO strategy. There is the whole discussion about which links you should obtain and at what speed they should be sought and Arron Wall over at SEOBook.com has a great post today about the Link Growth Profiles that adds even more to the mix.

An element of Arron’s article (regards the geometric link build) conjures up thoughts of the fabled 200+ signals that Google says their algorithm looks for — notably a subset of Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) caught my train of thought. With the proliferation of blogs that are created and crafted purposefully to obtain rank advantage for a site it begs to ask that there must also exist, along with QDF a suite of dampening levers to ensure that only sites that pass those filters truly benefit from so called freshness.

Anyway, moving on as I got sidetracked there. I have always found it quite helpful when it comes to addressing the link building task to commit to a period of thorough research of your market; the image of the search results landscape that your site will be competing within. This is going to be composed of your direct and indirect competitors along with highlighting potential commercial opportunities for you. Typically you create this image (or graph) as a follow on task to your keyword research.

Steps to produce the Competitive Focus Graph:

  1. Undertake your keyword research
  2. Use a tool such as Advanced Web Ranking to scoure the main search engines for the top 40 results against each of your target keyword phrases and produce a CSV version of the Top Sites report.
  3. Import the extracted CSV data from Advanced Web Ranking into Excel into a new Workbook and call it ‘Competitive Research’. You should have a number of columns of data in this sheet if everything went well.
  4. Advanced Web Ranking exports the Full URI, so you will need to create a copy of this column data and run the new column called ‘Domain Name’. I have found it best to do this at the end of the data set so that when I run the Text To Columns tool (deliminator of /) my ranking data is not overwritten ;-0
  5. Name your data sheet ‘Data’ and add some columns to this Excel sheet called ‘Competitor’, ‘In-Direct’ and ‘Opportunity’.
  6. Select all of the data in your ‘Data’ sheet and sort it on your new ‘Domain Name’ column.
  7. Manually filter through the data and mark each of the rows in your newly created columns with an x if it is a competitor, in-direct competitor (newspapers, portals, blogs, government sites) or opportunity (if it is a directory site, ebay, amazon, affiliate, or other potential commercial opportunity).
  8. Create an Excel pivot table on this data sheet and apply thresholds (auto-filters to limit the data that you are looking at) on the SUM of the top 10 results across all your checked keywords and keyword phrases against the domain level of the data that you have extracted.
  9. You now have the basis of data to understand where and who your search landscape competitors are and importantly where they are getting ranking traction from (assuming that you are filtering also on keyword concept areas).

Now that you have this new understanding of competitors you have a lot of power in focusing your efforts on those competitors that are worthwhile to uncover where they are getting their inbound links and also making an analysis of their on-page/on-site optimisation tactics.

Link Assistant is a fantastic tool that I use to understand where a competitor is getting their links from. SEOmoz also has a great tool, LinkScape, that allows you to enter in a competitors domain and export upto 3,000 of their inbound link partners.

Both of these tools provide you with tutorials on how to assess which links are those that are potentially valuable for your own optimisation efforts so I will not repeat that in this post. As with anything, there are many ways to do this task and folks develop preferences for one tool of another. I encourage you to go ahead and look at the tutorials and try their tools before committing to purchase and adding them to your SEO tool-belt.

Posted 26 July 2009 † yassine § Search ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Game Theory and it's Impact on Iran

I seem to be addicted to ted.com talks these last few days and happened to find a very interesting talk about Game Theory that was given earlier this year by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. The talk was entitled “Three predictions on the future of Iran, and the math to back it up” and below is the video from ted.com.

I find it amazing that such a limited number of knowledge points can allow us to make a prediction. I am also reading a few interesting books right now about Game Theory and think that it will be just a useful in analysis as NLP has proven to be when working with people and managing expectation.

Interestingly, akin to “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” I spotted a familiar face in the audience at the end of the talk.

Posted 19 July 2009 † yassine § Life ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Our Legacy of PET

From TED.com this year a talk about the environmental impact and more importantly the legacy that we have all created for our children and their children.

Posted 18 July 2009 † yassine § Life ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Decision processes: Keywords

Just how do you go about deciding which keywords and phrases to use when optimising your site? Tough decisions also need to be made when planning keyword usage for your tactical paid search (PPC) indeed any pay for performance marketing activity where keywords are used in context to best trigger your product or service messaging.

Practitioners that are familiar with this type of semantic research will agree that a seemingly simple task as this in our measurable world of search marketing is often one of the most time consuming tasks to undertake at the outset of a campaign, let alone when it is reviewed periodically as a part of an overall optimisation strategy. Especially so as our campaigns get more and more complex and need to target products and services to many different consumer groups.

Effective keyword and phrase marketing needs to appeal to a variety of consumers

I have provided an example research outline below for gathering, refining and evaluating your candidate keywords and phrases that I hope will save you time when creating or optimising your next campaign project. There are of course other ways to undertake this process, so feel free to adapt it, pick and mix for your particular needs.

There are some underlying focus areas that can be used to guide you in your selection process. I have grouped these into 3 memorable areas:

  • Collection – use keyword research tools to uncover keywords and phrases that are up to 5 keywords in length.
  • Potential – how much traffic ‘volume’ will a phrase potentially drive?
  • Risk/Reward – what are the servicing (Agency, tracking, your time) and click costs involved in capturing the potential and what is the benefit in terms of success events (sales, sign-ups, leads generated, ect…)

Collection

When collecting keywords and phrases I use Excel as it provides me with the ability to create filters and assist with the later segmentation process. There are three primary sources that I use to uncover candidate keywords and phrases and they are:

  1. Your website analytics data – this is important to capture for existing sites so that keywords and phrases that are already driving traffic volumes are not overlooked. Collecting the value of page loads for these historical keywords will help you understand their relative traffic volume importance later on and contrast against volume estimates that Step 2 provides.
  2. Google Keyword Suggestion Tool – this data is indicative and provides you with an insight into the volumes to expect which we use later in judging the potential.
  3. WordTracker.com – to understand the ‘modifier’ keywords that are used in combination with your keywords and phrases. Modifiers are words that infer an action like ‘buy’, ‘purchase’ or a question ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’. Most often people are trying to answer a particular question when they search and placing your thoughts into that particular questioning mind-set when you are collecting your keywords and phrases can help you do a fuller job.

Potential

Once you have completed the keyword collection you will likely have a *massive* list of potential keywords, some of which will not likely gain even a single impression each month! So it is very important that you you narrow down your collection and begin to segment your data into groups of keywords that express a similar concept. This process of judging the potential will also enable you to create a campaign structure later on for your SEM activity that is mapped very tightly to your SEO content hub pages and/or PPC landing pages. The process I use to gauge the potential within the collected keywords and phrases for a project is:

  1. How much traffic has a candidate keyword or phrase received historically on your site? Uncover this data by looking at your website analytical data or web server log files collected earlier.
  2. How much traffic does Google Traffic Estimator suggest a keyword will receive per day? This can provide you with an indicative measure of the traffic volumes to plan for.
  3. Does the keyword phrase contain any combination of my brand or trademark terms? If Yes, you may want to split out these keywords into a distinctive ‘Brand’ keyword set for cost efficiencies later on. If not then you want to group keywords and phrases of similar concepts into respective listings.

Once you have made your analysis against your collected keywords and phrases and filtered them into Brand and various concept segments you are ready to evaluate the Risk/Reward of the collection.

Risk/Reward

This aspect of the research can be the most challenging. It requires that you have an understanding of the commercial drivers and minimum margins in your business to define the reward or success targets. You may have this data in your business already, in which case great news! If not, and your proposition is new then the only sure fire way to gain the necessary insight is to engaging some tactical PPC activity for your defined concepts. The results from your trial/s should empower you to judge the future investment into SEO and other online context channels in the medium and longer term more effectively.

Working on the assumption that you have the historical reward or success data it is best practice to establish your success targets. The simplest measurement of success is made where a consumer takes a converting action, like a sale or a sign-up. The logic is quite straight forward:

For every £1 that you spend on your online marketing (advertising) how much money do you make as a result?

With the best online agency/client relationships the online agency will seek to work to a deeper level of success meaning, one that is more aligned to your business’ success than pure Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS).

With this deeper level of success measurement comes the need for more open and transparent relationships between clients and their agency partners. More complex ways of measuring effectiveness such as a multi-point Return On Investment (ROI) scoring, which I will explain in a future article, can help clients that are particularly sensitive about their margins and true costs/benefits ratios.

The Risk/Reward calculation in it’s easiest form is based on what the projected cost for a keyword or phrase or even concept group is over a defined period of time v’s what is the benefit (based on success measures) that the business will obtain in that same period. These are typically referred to as the hard-line conversion metrics. Once this data is put into a formula and applied to the data that you have collected and segmented in your collection you will immediately see those concepts that demand your fullest attention and those that require more effort to deliver successfully.

Posted 20 June 2009 † yassine § Search ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , ,