Ullys' Online World

Who Owns Your Meme? User-Generated Content Ownership on Social Networks

2011-10-15T15:07:00.000+11:00

Who Owns Your Meme? User-Generated Content Ownership on Social Networks:

There have been instances of user-generated content (UGC) being reproduced as commercial items, like t-shirts or bumper stickers, without the express permission of the creator. Sometimes, when these items are sold by large corporations like Hot Topic, the creators and social networks can get riled up about the corporations profiting from a network’s creativity and hard work.

Maybe it wasn’t ‘hard’ to draw the rage guy, but you get the point.

Users aren’t clear on whether they still own the copyright to their rage comics, original memes, and other UGC once it’s been published to social sites like Reddit, Digg, or Fark. And sometimes, networks are defenseless against other parties re-posting and recycling their network’s goods.

Wait . . . isn’t that the goal of social networks (sharing, social diffusion, etc.)? It’s clear why this topic is so tricky. Let’s go network by network, and review the Terms of Service and all of those boxes you click accept to without reading, to find out if your content is free game.

TOS

Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You are sharing with the world. Though you retain a copyright, the content becomes public.

TOS

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Twitter.

TOS

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through yourprivacy and application settings.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain ownership of content, but grant unreserved rights to Facebook, and accept that other users will maintain the content even if you delete it on your end.

TOS

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with YouTube and users until you delete the content.

TOS

By creating and posting content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the content, agree that the content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the content on external sites linked to by the original submission.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to share it with Digg.

TOS

You agree that you are solely responsible for your own Submissions and affirm, represent, and/or warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Fark.com to use all patent trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the Submissions in the manner contemplated by Fark.com. You retain all ownership rights in your Submissions. However, by submitting the Submissions to Fark.com, you hereby grant Fark.com a non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Submissions in connection with Fark.com and Fark.com’s business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of Fark.com (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels/outlets.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Fark.

TOS

We do not claim ownership in any “Content” (which means any and all postings, e-mails, messages, recommendations, comments, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, works of authorship, feedback, bug reports, or other materials) that you post on, deliver to, or otherwise make available to the Services, but to be able to legally provide you with and promote the Services, we have to have certain rights to use such Content in connection with the Services, as set forth below. In return, we also grant you certain use rights to the Content that we (or our licensors) own and use to provide the Services to you and other Users, as set forth below.

By posting any Content on the Services, you hereby grant to us an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, perform, display, create derivative works of, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution method (now known or later developed) throughout the world. Additionally, by posting any Content on the Services and making your Content available to others (“Third Parties”) via RSS distribution, you hereby grant to all Third Parties an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to copy, display, and distribute such Content in any and all media (now known or later developed) throughout the world. No compensation will be paid with respect to the Content that you submit, upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.

LAYMAN’S TERMS

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with StumbleUpon.

TOS

Your Member Content is yours; AVOS does not claim any ownership rights in your Member Content. By posting, submitting or transmitting any Member Content on or through the Service, you grant us and our third party service providers and partners a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, distribute, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, broadcast, access, view and otherwise exploit such Member Content in any and all media or distribution channels (now known or hereafter created). For example, this license allows us to make your public “bookmarks” and comments available anywhere and everywhere in the spirit of the Service i.e., for use by other Members, our partners and via other media platforms. No compensation will be paid to you with respect to your Member Content as a result of your posting, submitting or transmitting Member Content through the Service.

LAYMAN’S TERM

You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Delicious.

CONCLUSION

Regardless of the forum or the TOS agreement signed, if you are lawyered-up, there’s still a chance that your UGC can be protected. For example, if a third party wrongfully posts your original content, then the TOS have been violated and are nullified in many cases (think stolen sex tapes).

However, under ordinary circumstances, a good rule of thumb is that if you posted it for free, it is free for general use. Also, under most TOS above and elsewhere, you grant explicit rights to the social network to use the content any which way they please.

2 of my favorite websites.

2011-10-08T15:03:00.001+11:00

www.moat.com

www.bounceapp.com

Using evolution to understand the challenges faced by business in the face of web 2.0/GFC and other hard to understand acronyms.

2011-09-28T17:52:00.002+10:00

Business analysts are constantly throwing around terms like the ‘web revolution’ and the ‘evolution of social media’ typically right before they ask you to buy something. But, are these metaphors actually useful or are they just the bubble wrap to soften the sales pitch blow?

In my experience the metaphor can be more useful to an organisation than the rest of the presentation and the sales pitch combined. The metaphor that I hear the most is ‘the evolution of social media’ and ‘the evolution of web 2,0’. It irks me, but not because the metaphor isn’t useful, rather because most of the people using it don’t understand evolution well enough to draw out the real lesson.. Evolution is a widely misunderstood concept and one that has been constantly updated revised and improved since Darwin, but it’s core is very simple. Darwins evolution is based on situations where there are too many individuals for a given amount of resources and therefore most die.

Those that survive to reproduce are those best suited to their environments and they pass on their favourable traits to the next generation. Thus the species changes slowly over time. The parallels to economics are obvious, there is a constant stream of competing organisations in a market that is unable to support all of them. Effective companies thrive, ineffective companies go extinct. It’s not a bad start but it’s based on a highschool understanding of evolution, if we unpack evolution in a more detailed way we can learn a hell of a lot more that can be of practical use to companies in uncertain times and competitive markets.

Not your great great grandfathers evolution

Our understanding of evolution has grown in leaps and bounds since Darwin and is still improving. Punctuated equilibrium is the theory most reflective of the the fossil evidence, the basic concept being that there are long stable periods where there is little change and the short periods of massive changes where new levels of complexity are introduced and the number and types of species is radically altered. There are also five mass extinction events recorded were many species went extinct in short time periods and recovery was slow. Much bloodier and more brutal than what most people picture when they talk about Darwin’s gentle gradual change, and also much more in line with the modern economic climate.

Evolution is at it’s core a mechanical process. Variation + Selection = Evolution, Selection in the absence of variation typically leads to extinction. Just like in business, extinction is by far the most common outcome, with 99.9% of all species that ever lived now being extinct. Winning at evolution is hard and millions of years of ruthless competition has created successful strategies that are of huge benefit in any competitive arena for those patient enough to decipher them. So how much can evolution teach us about commerce in the world of web 2.0?
let’s look at dinosaurs.

Why the Dinosaurs went extinct

The dinosaurs were sent extinct by meteor strikes, right? well, yes but not really. The theory is that a large meteor impacted the earth and created a cloud of dust so thick that it decreased decreased global temperatures and photosynthesis worldwide, it also created clouds of acidic gases, megatsunamis and quite possibly gigantic firestorms which is a mite more complicated than dinosaurs getting hit by space bullets but also a lot more useful. There was a stable ecosystem for a long period and just like a stable economic system this meant that certain strategies were favoured and species or organisations that used those strategies tended to dominate. Then everything changed. In biology we call this a shift in selective pressures, tech nerds refer to December 1974, the rest of the world calls it the start of the internet.

Just like a meteor the Internet is powerful not because of the businesses that it directly replaces but because it changes the environment that all organisations have to compete in, and the changes aren’t simple.Just as it was probably the loss of plants and drop in temperature that sent the dinosaurs extinct it’s the the increased levels of connectivity assocaited with widespread internet use that are changing our environment. Social media and web 2.0 are the meteors of our generation.

Social media is powerful in a way that’s fundamentally biological (more on this in other articles). Humans communication is built on a foundation of evolutionary psychology, the millennium old lizard brain that pushes us to survive and reproduce. As a social animal that is generally pale, weak and useless when alone (that might just be me) social connectivity is crucial for survival. The need to connect with peers and form groups is just as powerful in suburban Sydney and cosmopolitan Paris as it was for our early ancestors who roamed the Savanah. Because it is so fundamental to our nature anything that affects the way we communicate is able to acess our most primitive and most powerful biological drives. How powerful are these drives? They push us to work hard to succeed, determine who we choose to mate with and explain why we can’t all get along. Social media is more than just a facet of the internet, it is web 2.0 and it’s changing the way we connect and communicate. For companies this creates a simple scenario just like it did for the dinosaurs, we have to adapt...... or die.

But all the dinosaurs died, didn’t they?

Not really, birds are an offshoot of the tree that created dinosaurs, so are modern crocodiles, for that matter we are just a slightly more distant branch. Vertebrates were a diverse groups and whilst many went extinct some were unaffected and some were able to thrive in the new environment and become the dominant species in their ecosystems.

Just like meteors social media doesn’t affect everyone. Crocodiles are basically the same animal as lived when other dinosaurs were around. In fact the distinction between the massive hugely powerful reptilian predator and dinosaurs isn’t one I’d like to try and justify to a biologist (especially if that biologist is me). Other, smaller, avian dinosaurs survived much the same as they had before the meteors (we call those birds). Some companies will be entirely unaffected by the social media revolution, if your main business is in defence contracts or counterintelligence for example you probably don’t need a facebook page. Nor would I recommend a twitter account for a company specialising in mobility aids for senior citizens, at least not yet. But most of the dinosaurs weren’t crocodiles and most of our companies need to deal with social media.

But is extinction really that bad?

Most of the large land based dinosaurs were unable to cope in the new conditions whilst smaller warm blooded mammals thrived. Dinosaurs died out, mammals rule the world (and invented pants). This is where we have an advantage over dinosaurs, the strategies that dinosaurs had optimised to allow no longer worked but their collection of new strategies were limited by their biology. Literally how many different types of DNA they carried. The strategies we use in business aren’t limited. New environments mean the rules have changed.

The strategies developed and tested since the industrial revolution can no longer be accepted as fact. We have no idea what works this new environment. Strangely the answer is also found in biology, species can not anticipate meteor strikes, or climatic drift, or the formation of mountain ranges or any of a hundred thousand other things that can change the selective environment rapidly and completely. They don’t try to. Instead species that have survived have done so because of their store of genetic variation, differences in DNA that allow for different variants that may do better in different environments. A huge number of studies both in captivity and in the wild have shown that the more variation the more rapid evolution is and the more a species can change with it’s environment to avoid extinction. Multiple strategies creates multiple opportunities to succeed.

An article by David Silverman in the Havard Business School suggested that powerful and innovative companies were founded during the depression because consumers spending more time thinking about their purchases. I’d agree use evolution to suggest something else, when conditions are tough, be that because a connected world lost it’s shit on the back of bad financial management, or because giant rocks fell from the sky, it does more than create problems. The new environment means that the giants of yesterday have lost their advantages, it’s scramble time and those that scramble the best get to dominate the new environment. That’s just as true for companies that aggressively pursue new strategies and test ideas in the market as it was for mammals which rose to dominate most of the ecosystems on earth.

But I have to deal with the aftermath of the GFC, now isn’t the time for aggressive or flexible strategies

If I had a penny for everytime i heard business owners complain about the effect of the GFC I’d put them in a jar and put the jar under my bed, let’s face it, it’s safer than a bank. The GFC was heavily influenced by the speed at which information travels through the world and more important the speed at which the confidence of the community was shaken to it’s core. Speed enabled by the internet and bought home directly by social media. This, for me, is all part of the new ecosystem and we shouldn’t treat it as an isolated event but rather a sign of the increased power and pace of boom-bust circles in the connected world. I like to go back to evolution.

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that the size of change determines whether it needs to be adapted to. That’s not actually true. Any change that makes some species do better than others, no matter how small, will certainly send species extinct if they don’t adapt to it. Bigger changes just do it faster. So then the question isn’t even what do we have to do, we have to rethink the way that we do business, but rather how long do we have to come up with sucessful stratergies. It depends.... how powerful do we think social media is?
It organised the riots in london, toppled the government in egypt and the creation of Justin Beiver as an international megabrand suggest it might be a heavyweight to rival Mike Tyson. That means that those who don’t act fast won’t be around long enough to act at all.

If we view the new environment as an opportunity rather than a burden and move decisively

hate the new facebook ... go back to myspace!

2011-09-26T20:51:00.000+10:00

How to Detect Facebook Friends Who Have Unfriended You

2011-09-23T19:00:00.000+10:00

Facebook is all about creating friends and that the first time you signed up an account, you have nothing else in mind but to fill your friends list. As time goes by, you may have realized that it's quite unfit to have someone you really don't know personally seeing all your private information. In that case, you would "unfriend" them.

Self-preservation is innate to us and that is what also keeping us being a human. Anything that degrades us even in insignificant ways is factually frustrating; so we always tend to retaliate. This is very true when it comes to Facebook. Anyone who has "unfriended" us is not just right especially if we are not even notified about it with a valid reason. Not really degrading but sort of an offense to our ego if we have befriended someone in Facebook and yet that someone has actually "unfriended" you in unknown time.

The purpose of this post is not to make you bad but to keep your self-preservation intact. In simple term, I am giving you tips on how to detect Facebook friends who have unfriended you so you could delete them in your list.

The new Facebook allows seeing your timeline when you have activated it. This timeline feature allows you see a rundown of friends you have lost.

Here are the steps:

Activate your Facebook Timeline.
Choose a year in the timeline and find the "Friends" box.
Mouse-over and click "Made X New Friends."
As soon as the list is made available, scroll through it. Those Facebook friends with "Add Friend" next to their profile link (with photo of course), are the ones that have “unfriended” you.

This is just easy but quite an effort to some. Well, let's just hope that Facebook will have this notification feature on "unfriending" activities. But I think, Facebook has this in mind that it's just right not to have this "unfriending" feature to prevent people from feeling frustrated when they know someone has "unfriended" them.

¶ Could Mobile Apps Be Wilting in the Heat of Summer?

2011-08-20T22:37:00.000+10:00

Image credit: Financial Times

It’s hard to believe, but mobile marketing didn’t really get going in earnest until Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Three years later there are now marketplaces on all five major device platforms - Apple’s iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and Windows Mobile. What’s more, there seems to be a constant footrace between brands not only to be first to market with their own apps, but to refresh them for a fickle public.

Some of what’s driving this is the zeitgeist. Overnight, it seems, apps have become deeply embedded in our culture. To stand out at a dinner party you better pack some apps. The New York Times now has a weekly column covering them. And even Sesame Street, arguably a mirror image of American society, posted a video ode to apps on YouTube that has been viewed nearly 750,000 times.

This columnist, too, has gone ape for apps. A year ago I posited that, as smartphone and tablet adoption rise, mobile applications could unseat the web as the primary means we interact with content. Now I am second guessing myself. Things are once again changing.

This summer, the app ecosystem started to show signs that it maybe fraying at the edge. Several major players in media and social networking including the Financial Times, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Facebook have all launched rich web applications. These sites, thanks to the magic of HTML5, run in any modern browser and come very close to matching the functionality of their “native” app cousins.

Now none of these companies has abandoned their Apple or Android apps. Still, the sudden interest in web apps is notable. There are arguably three factors driving it.

First, HTML5 has finally matured into a strong alternative to native iOS and Android apps. These web apps can even run offline.

Second, it shows that perhaps developers are frustrated that they need to support multiple platforms. Android devices alone come in so many shapes, sizes and resolutions, that supporting them is a difficult and expensive challenge. Web apps solve this conundrum.

Finally, there’s freedom. Apple, most notably, recently changed the way that developers can sell content from within their applications. If a developer links out to their own online store, they must also allow consumers to purchase content using an iTunes account. However, Apple takes a 30% cut of the latter.

Most content companies have reluctantly relented to Apple’s rules. However, a few, notably Amazon, chose not to provide any e-commerce functionality in their iOS ebook apps. Amazon instead responded by launching the Kindle Cloud Reader, a web application that runs in a browser across multiple platforms. It features a rich, engaging shopping and reading experience that rivals their native apps. Downloaded books can also be read offline.

To date, no major brand has made the jump to prioritize an HTML5-based web application over a native app. This is for a good reason. Most consumers are still downloading smartphone and tablet apps in droves.

However, this could change over time as marketers get more comfortable developing for mobile devices, start dabbling with new web development tools from the likes of Adobe and aspire to exert greater control over user experience.

Here are three trends to watch when considering your own strategy.

First, there’s Apple. To date, the company has backed off on some of its more draconian policies. Still, they remain strict. However, if more companies start to prioritize their web apps over iOS apps, Apple may blink to protect its ecosystem and relent further.

Second, there’s Google. While Google has thousands of native applications in its Android Marketplace, the company has also been actively promoting HTML5 as an emerging alternative, starting with its own sites. Web applications are arguably more important to Google than native apps. They encourage users to browse and search more and thus could drive ad revenue.

Finally, there’s the global economy. The fragmentation in mobile space shows no signs of abating. Marketers may decide it’s more cost effective to develop a strong web application and control the experience end-to-end, rather than support hundreds of phone and tablet formats.

Time will tell how this all shakes out. Remember that just a few years ago there were hardly any mobile applications. Today there are hundreds of thousands of them. Things can change fast if developers are motivated.

How to Use Facebook Places and Facebook Deals for Local Business

2011-08-20T22:25:00.000+10:00

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAgiv6EE-g

Facebook Marketing for Local Businesses

As more customers become smartphone-savvy, local businesses can leverage the opportunities offered by Facebook Places and Facebook Deals to get new customers to come to their location and to reward current customers. Mari shares what you need to know.

Discover how to get more business from smartphone-savvy customers.

Facebook Places

You’ll learn how to claim your business on Facebook and take advantage of your Facebook Place page so you can make offers through Facebook Deals.

Find out how to claim your business so you can start offering Facebook Deals.

Facebook Deals

Find out about the four different kinds of deals and how your business can use them.

Individual deals: For one-time offers

Loyalty deals: To reward repeat business

Friend deals: To incite up to 8 people to check in at once

Charity deals: To get people to donate to a charity

And Mari shares how some brands are using deals to grow their business.

Hear how McDonald's used a Facebook Charity deal to promote their business.

Be sure to listen for Mari’s hot marketing tip to find out how you can also include Twitter to leverage your Facebook marketing with Places and Deals.

A Quick Start Guide and Checklist for Bing Search Engine Optimization

2011-08-20T22:22:00.000+10:00

Bing isn’t the top search engine used by searchers but it still is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your blog and most likely you’ve got a good percentage of organic traffic coming from Microsoft’s Bing – enough to warrant a bit of time learning more about it and how you can maximize some returns.

And the reasons are only getting stronger: If you add up Bing and Yahoo! search queries you might get an accurate picture of what the future looks like for your blog and it’s traffic from Bing since Yahoo!’s search engine is going to be powered by Bing (and co-branded with “Powered by Bing”) starting in early 2012:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

That’s worth noting – that’s worth mentioning and studying a bit, right? And even without a Yahoo! + Bing partnership it’s been shown that Bing’s marketshare is increasing year over year growing nearly 7% from 23.64% to 30% from 2010 to 2011!

Some people have suggested that at some point the possibility of Bing overtaking Google’s marketshare is possible:

Possible? Likely?

Now I’m not sure if it’s really going to happen but it’s worth my time (and yours) to understand at least the basics of Bing-related SEO strategies, right?

And, of course, we all get traffic via Bing already so it’s also worth it to optimize and maximize if possible:

I'll take any and all traffic, right?

So here are a few suggestions that are relevant to not only search engine optimization for Bing but also most other search engines as well.

Bing breaks it down into 5 main areas: Crawlability, Site Structure, On-Page SEO, Content, and Links:

Your Blog’s Crawlability:

XML Sitemaps – Make sure to have one! You can create one here if you have WordPress.
Navigation Structure – Make sure it’s easily accessed by crawlers. Learn more about site architecture here and here as well.
Limit Adobe Flash – Read more about SEO limitations here.
Limit JavaScript – Read more about SEO limitations here.
Limit Ajax – Read more about SEO limitations here.
Rich Media – If you do use rich media make sure that the user experience is clean and has a down-level experience and flow to it.
Keywords – Use clean and keyword rich URL structure. Permalinks and blog post slugs can help.
Robots.txt – Make sure you have one!

Your Blog’s Site Structure:

Logical Hiearchy – Make sure your content is laid out logically and with a focus on usability.
Internal Linking – Make sure your content has a great internal linking. Become a master architect!
Clean URLs – Make sure that your links have no extraneous parameters where possible. Examples are adding sessions, tracking, and other calls on the links when not necessary.
Sitemaps – Make sure you have sitemaps for both humans and search engines!
Rich Media – Make sure they don’t block links or cover up links. See SEO limitations as well here.

Your Blog’s On-Page SEO:

Good Titles – Should be unique relevant and between 60 and 70 characters in length. Read this kick-butt post on how to optimize your titles! Only one title per page please!
Meta Descriptions – Make sure they are unique, relevant, and 160 characters or less. You can learn all you want about meta descriptions and meta elements here. Only one description per page as well here!
Content Tags – Make sure you have the right content tags (H1, H2, etc) in your content. Learn more here.
Images – Make sure you are using images well and wisely with ALT tags as appropriate and descriptions with keywords. Learn about images here.
Keyword Targeting – Make sure you use targeted keywords for each blog post and piece of content.
Internal Linking – Make sure the links have the right anchor text.

Your Blog Content:

Keyword Research – This is so important that I dedicated an entire blog post to it! Learn more about keyword research.
Usability – Make sure your content is usable and is built for people, not search engines!
Design – Design is so important and even more important now for SEO.
Copy – Written copy is your ultimate weapon of choice when it comes to creating an attractive blog for search engines.
Architecture Depth – Make sure you create deep and content-rich pages.
Authority – Create amazing blog content and you’ll be seen as an authority via the search engines. Your level of authenticity helps with this as well
Consistency – Create a schedule and have the discipline to produce new content frequently.
Unique – Make sure your content is unique and not re-blogged or re-used from other sources.
Broken Links – Make sure you’ve captured any 404 errors, broken links, and internal 301 redirects. Have a useful 404 page as well.
Canonicalization – Make sure you understand the power and importance of the Canonical tag.

Your Blog’s Links and Link Structure:

Links – This is one of your top ingredients for optimizing your blog. Become a master link architect! Internal and external linking strategies!
Linking – Make sure your optimizing your links for SEO.
Viral Content – Make sure you know which types of blog posts often get a lot of viral traffic!
Paid Links – Stay away from paid links. Period.

changes.

2011-08-18T20:03:00.000+10:00

26 Tips for Using Images to Engage Fans and Followers

2011-07-22T18:42:00.000+10:00

You’ve heard this: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But can it actually help you engage with customers and prospects?

In this post, I’ll share ways you can ensure your images provide the best experience they can; ones that will help keep the conversation flowing.

Among the topics covered in this post are tools, tips and strategies that can be used to enhance the visual representation of your business.

As I’ve done in the other posts in the 26 Tips series, this post provides an easily digestible A-Z guide to which you can return time and again.

A-Z Guide

#1: Adverts

Location, location, location. Talk about good real estate. You can use the Facebook photo strip space for pictures that serve as adverts for your business. You can include descriptions, links and calls to action.

In the post How to Use the Facebook Photo Strip on Your Fan Page, you can learn more about optimal sizes for photo strip images.

The Facebook photo strip is prime real estate and a great place for free business advertisements.

Watch how Make It In Music created them in this helpful video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx1svhz8sE4

#2: Brand awareness

Ann Smarty suggests watermarking your images to protect your brand and increase brand awareness. She recommends a number of tools to get the job done; e.g., Fast Watermark and Photo Watermark.

Fast Watermark is a quick and simple tool that allows you to add a watermark to your photos.

#3: Creative commons

The service through Flickr makes it possible for users to offer their work under a creative commons license where people can search through images under each type of license: attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works and share alike. Before using a creative commons image, be sure to check out the license.

#4: Digital art

Greg Finn writes that digital art is a staple in social media news sites and suggests that design-related images should be “high resolution and content should be truly extraordinary.” He describes four examples of design images typically used in social media: design art, graffiti, web design and fonts. One outstanding example he references was created by Kevin Hulsey for Royal Caribbean, which can be viewed on his site, where you not only see a representation of the full ship but can go cabin by cabin through the ship. Pretty impressive!

#5: Effects

Create interesting effects with your images to help them stand out in the crowd. There are countless apps which can help to create all kinds of effects; e.g., collages, high dynamic range rendering, tiles, vintage, sketches and interesting textures. If you work on a Mac, you can check out the photography apps online.

#6: Facebook Photos Plus Comments

Photos and comments are the perfect duo for Facebook. While you may think you have the most fantastic photo to post on Facebook (and you might), sometimes it won’t be enough to stand on its own. As, Jim Lodico writes in his post, 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook Edgerank and Exposure, ”Photos and videos show up in the Facebook new feeds as thumbnail images. Due to their size, they almost require interaction as users click on them to make them large enough to see. Be sure to add a comment that encourages users to open the photo and add comments of their own.”

Use photos that represent your business.

#7: Google index

Text isn’t the only thing that Google indexes. That’s right. Google indexes your images too. Images are a very powerful way to add more Google juice to your site’s search ranking. Panda’s post 9 Ways of Optimizing Your Site for Image Search says, “If you have optimized your images correctly, you can get yourself a very attractive top 10 position by tagging your images correctly.”

Fun Tip: You can check how many pictures Google has indexed from your site by going to http://images.google.com/images?q=site:yoursite.com, and replacing “yoursite.com” with your domain name.

Google found 2,750 images on Social Media Examiner in 0.8 seconds!

#8: Hipstamatic

If you’re on the go and want to take some interesting photos with your iPhone, Hipstamatic is a great app worth exploring. Photographer Stephanie Roberts lists it as one tool to fuel your creativity in her article in Digital Photo magazine. She says, “Hipstamatic mimics the unique style of vintage prints characterized by vignettes, blurring, textured edges and oversaturated colors created with the original analog plastic camera. Using a square-format viewfinder, the app lets you switch ‘lenses,’ ‘flash’ and ‘film’ with the swipe of a finger. I often shoot with Hipstamatic because I like composing images in the square-format viewfinder and I like the creative constraint of choosing the ‘film’ and ‘lens’ before I shoot.”

Rich Brooks from Flyte talks about Hipstamatic and other apps in this video from 207, the evening news magazine on southern Maine’s NBC affiliate, WCSH.

#9: iPhoneography

Stephanie Roberts, author of The Art of iPhoneography: A Guide to Mobile Creativity, gives a number of compelling reasons for seeing the iPhone camera as a powerful creative device for photographers. My personal favorite is: “You rarely go anywhere without it, which means you increase the odds of your ability to capture fleeting magic moments as you move through the day.”

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I think I should have brought my digital camera when I remember that my iPhone, the constant friend and companion, is ready and waiting and very up for the task at hand!

Stephanie suggests loosening up and following your instincts and crafting your toolkit with apps to fuel your creativity. She recommends Photo fx from Tiffen, Iris Photo Suite, Hipstamatic and Adobe Photoshop Express.

Think of iPhoneography as a mobile method for making art as you move through life.

#10: Join the community and be social with your photos

Stephanie Roberts also recommends creating an Instagram presence. “Instagram is a rapidly growing social network of iPhoneographers sharing images in real time. The Instagram app displays a chronological feed of photographs shared by users you choose to follow. You can use Instagram to shoot an image (or choose an image from your photo library), apply an image filter (or not) and quickly share the image with your followers. Instagram also can automate image sharing to your online journal, or your Twitter or Facebook accounts.”

Instagram is a fun and quirky way to share through pictures.

Steve Kovach’s post, HOW TO: Use Instagram for Your Business recognizes the ways businesses can use Instagram to make their photos searchable with hashtags. As he says, “This is fun for the average user, but a huge win for brands that want to get more attention with the Instagram crowd.” He offers four tips for leveraging hashtags for your brand on Instagram: host a contest, target people by interest, create an RSS feed and encourage participation.

News organizations are using Instagram, too. In this recent post, Anthony Quintano, the community manager for @NBC News, offers three tips: upload original photos that share a unique perspective, thank and follow other Instagram users and search for user content.

You can also search for hashtags that interest you. For example, see who has tagged their photos #socialmedia.

#11: Keywords

Where would we be without keywords? They’re everywhere we search today. But when it comes to searching for the perfect image, they become even more important to understand. Getty images put together a very comprehensive guide to help users search for images. Whether you’re looking on Getty Images or not, the concepts are important to consider. For example, they suggest using keywords related to concepts, topics, people, age, sayings, image and footage styles, editorial-specific terms and human emotions. They offer advice for refining your search; e.g., combine terms, be creative, editorial and footage.

#12: Link

This may be an obvious piece of advice, but nevertheless it’s worth mentioning. Users have become accustomed to rolling over images in hopes that they will be able to navigate to a destination. So why not link the screenshot and take users directly to the website. This is particularly useful on web roundup posts. In this roundup, “The Art of Facebook Page Design,” the images represent the artwork of 50 Facebook pages. When the user wants to see more about the Facebook page, he or she can easily navigate to the page by clicking on the image.

Link screenshots directly to the website.

#13: Movies

Images needn’t be stills. With a variety of tools, you can create short movies with a series of photos, add music, embed on your blog, link on Facebook and wow, think of the impressions you can make. One such tool is Animoto.

Here’s a good tutorial by mentorMichel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=48194ShehLI

#14: Networking sites

Looking for a way to keep track of the images you’ve shared on different social networking sites? There are several options to help you. One such product is GRID, which “fetches all your photos from different social networks and lists them out by week. Currently GRID can rewind your memories from Facebook, dailybooth, Instagram, picplz, twitpic and yfrog.”

Pixable, another fun service, makes it possible to view your friends’ photos shared on Facebook. Young writes in the post, View Facebook Photos with Pixable, “For every photo you can see on the Pixable website, you can also like it, read its comments, comment it and see who is tagged in it. Very enjoyable, especially when your friends share many beautiful photos of themselves.”

See all of your images in one place.

#15: Optimize

In the post 9 Ways of Optimizing your Site for Image Search, we’re advised to: use descriptive file names, use the html alt tag, add descriptive text close to the picture, keep the most important images close to the top headline or title, put photos within articles and blog posts away from navigational elements, do not add code to break out of frames, use images that read well when thumbnailed, make the photos accessible, and use social photo sites like Flickr with links back to the relevant page on your site.

#16: Profiles

The placement of social icons on blogs is an important consideration. Cindy King points out in her post, 19 Ways to Use Images to Enhance Your Blog, “A blog is considered a social media platform and you want to make it easy for readers to connect with you on the social platforms they feel most comfortable with. This is why many blogs have easy-to-recognize social icons in a prominent position.”

#17: Quality of experience

While we’ve been talking largely about images and photos so far in this post, Greg Finn suggests six formats for informative images that work in social media: charts/graphs, flow charts, how-to’s, maps, screenshots, and guides. “The key for these images is to be easy to consume and to be comprehensive. The images should not only be helpful, but should also be designed well. Great design can make an ordinary informative image turn into an essential resource.”

#18: Resize images and use same sizes

Greg Finn offers great advice for using the same size for each image in your piece. Go a step further and make it part of your editorial standards and request that all images have the same dimensions. As Greg says, “This gives your article a more professional feel and gives the submissions a much more uniform look. Never use a jumble of different image sizes; your story will look much more amateur.”

#19: Screenshots

Sometimes nothing says it better than a screenshot, the “image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor, television, or another visual output device.” (Wikipedia) Screenshot images are often used to demonstrate a point and show users how to complete a task. Another powerful feature of screenshots is the ability to annotate them, and this is where you might want to explore software options. Recently I’ve started using SnagIt by TechSmith, which I’ve used in this post. The annotating features really help add pizzazz.

Annotate screenshots to demonstrate a point.

#20: Twitter

As discussed in the post, 26 Twitter Tips for Enhancing Your Tweets, images can be shared on Twitter via a number of Twitter image sharing services, SMS or email, Brightkite or FriendFeed, Skitch and Encoded Tweets. You can learn more about these options from Josh Catone in his post.

#21: User Photos

One of Facebook’s newest developments is the ability to tag pages in user’s photos. Right now it’s limited to pages categorized as “Brands & Products,” but it can be very effective for brands looking to expand their reach. As Josh Constine writes, “A tag of a brand or public figure represents a strong social recommendation of that Page, which will make a user’s friends curious to visit that Page and improve the chance that they’ll Like it themselves.

“Photos are Facebook’s most popular native application, receiving huge numbers of Page views. Tags of Pages in Photos could gain many impressions from a user’s friends over a long period of time, offering many opportunities for that Page to gain new fans.” Josh demonstrates this new feature in the Coke brand photo below:

Tagging products can expand a brand's reach.

# 22: Volume

While there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about the number of images to include in a blog post, I think most bloggers would agree that effective blog posts should contain at least one or two. Keep in mind that Images will help engage readers by breaking up long blocks of text and enhancing the readability of the page. Posts on Social Media Examiner for example, always include a number of images and the pièce de résistance, captions!

#23: Widgets

Cindy King discusses widgets and how most social networking sites provide widgets for you to embed on your blog. Cindy says, “This is a great way to grow your communities on social media platforms. It gives your readers the choice of where they want to connect with you. And as the communication styles vary on different social media platforms, it also lets your readers choose how they want to connect with you.”

#24: Experience

In the post How to Improve the Appeal of Your Graphics, Connie Malamed discusses research that indicates the ease of processing information (otherwise known as processing fluency) which influences a person’s aesthetic pleasure and contributes to positive experiences. Four features attributed to facilitating fluent processing are: symmetry, high figure/ground contrast, visual clarity and less information rather than more.

Use images as a way to facilitate a good experience for your customers, fans and followers.

#25: Why images

Adam Singer describes images as being vital to modern blogs for six reasons: content moves through the social web lightning-fast and strong imagery can’t be ignored; images are a signal to visitors that a site’s material is premium and unconsciously we elevate the worth of a site that has images mixed in with stories; strategic imagery helps bloggers build their brand—the imagery can help build a stylish brand associated with their sites; images are mood setters and help writers tell their stories better; images are a precursor to the inspiration that happens from effective copy and can give a blog an advantage over their competition; images help bloggers create viral content.

#26: Zero impact

At this point we’ve explored 25 tips and good reasons for using images in your social media to engage customers, followers and fans. With that being said, there’s really no good reason to use images that have zero impact. I’ll end with these last pieces of advice: with all the great possibilities out there, use images with the most dynamic impact and ones that are representative of the points you are trying to make.

How to Track Tweets, Facebook Likes and More with Google Analytics

2011-07-21T19:34:00.000+10:00

Don’t you wish you could track the traffic impact of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ using Google Analytics? Well now you can. Keep reading to learn how.

Google’s getting social in a big way.

Google has been quite busy lately, rolling out Google+ (Google’s social network) to a limited audience, the Google +1 button (a feature similar to Facebook’s Like button), a new Google Analytics interface and Google Analytics Social Interaction Tracking.

Google Analytics Social Interaction Tracking

This new Analytics feature allows you to track social interactions on your website, your blog or on your Facebook fan page. These actions include the Twitter button and the Facebook Like, Unlike and Send actions.

In this article, I will guide you step-by-step in adding this powerful new tracking feature to your Facebook tabs or web pages.

NOTE: Adding Google Analytics Social Tracking requires access to and modification of your web page files. It’s pretty basic, but you should be somewhat comfortable working with HTML files.

What is currently supported by Google’s Social Tracking

As of this writing, my testing shows that the following social buttons are supported:

Facebook Like, Unlike, Send

Twitter (only via the “official” Tweet button, not Tweetmeme or other third-party buttons)

Google+

I’ve not yet found a way to track the LinkedIn Share button. If anyone has had success tracking this button with the new Google Analytics, let me know in the comments!

As for WordPress plugins, you’ll have to wait for plugin developers to integrate social tracking into their plugins. The one WordPress plugin for adding Google Analytics social tracking only supports the buttons listed above.

Google’s New Google Analytics Interface and Tracking Code

In order to implement Social Interaction Tracking, you will have to update your current Google Analytics code to the latest version, and then add a few snippets of code to your HTML file.

In order to view the Social Interaction Tracking metrics, you will need to use the new Google Analytics interface, which is available as an option at the top of the page when you’re logged in to your Analytics account:

How to Get Your Updated Analytics Code

To get your updated Google Analytics code:

Log in to your Google Analytics account.

View the new Google Analytics interface by clicking “New Version” at the top right of the screen (see above image).

Click on the domain account you wish to access.

Click the “gear” icon, in the orange bar at the top right of your screen:

Click on the “Tracking Code” tab: Under “Standard” tab and below “1. What are you tracking?” select either “A single domain” (if you’re tracking a website or blog) or “Multiple top-level domains” (if you’re tracking a Facebook fan page).

Copy the code under “2. Paste this code on your site”. It should look like this, but with your “UA-xxxxxx-x” account number:

<script type="text/javascript">

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxx-x']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {

var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

</script>

You now have your updated Google Analytics code.

Putting the code in all the right places

The new version of your Google Analytics code should be placed before the closing </head> tag of your HTML file. (Yes, this is different. The old version was usually placed before the closing </body>, but that was then…)

Between your Analytics code and the closing </head> tag, insert this bit of code that calls the JavaScript that enables the social tracking:

<!-- Google Analytics Social Button Tracking -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://app.tabpress.com/js/ga_social_tracking.js"></script>

The end result will be:

<script type="text/javascript">

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxx-x']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {

var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

</script>

<!-- Google Analytics Social Button Tracking -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://app.tabpress.com/js/ga_social_tracking.js"></script>

</head>

The “UA-xxxxxx-x” will be replaced with your unique Analytics ID for this domain.

Now let’s add the Like/Send button code

As I mentioned in my Social Media Examiner post on Social Plugins for fan pages, Facebook generates the Like/Send button code for you on its Social Plugins page. For the Like/Send button, you just need to enter the URL you want people to “like”, select whether you want to include a Send button and a couple of other options, then copy the code in the popup dialog, which will look like this:

<div id="fb-root"></div><script  src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=201748293206869&xfbml=1"></script><fb:like  href="www.hyperarts.com" send="true" width="450" show_faces="false"  font=""></fb:like>

The “#appId=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” is a random app ID that Facebook generates that allows you to access Insights for the button, but it’s not necessary for the button to work. In my example, I omit the appId value from the code, which will work fine.

IMPORTANT: You must add the snippet of JavaScript (shown below) to the code that Facebook generates so that actions on that button trigger Google Analytics:

<script type="text/javascript">_ga.trackFacebook();</script>

Add the above code before the <fb:like /> tag:

<div id="fb-root"></div><script  src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><script   type="text/javascript">_ga.trackFacebook();</script><fb:like  href="www.besthawaiianvacationrentals.com" send="true" width="450"  show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like>

Paste your Like button code anywhere between the <body> </body> tags.

Viewing your Google Analytics Social Tracking reports

As mentioned above, the Social Tracking reports are only available in the new Google Analytics interface. (See above for how to choose the new version option.)

NOTE: It usually takes a few hours for Analytics to reflect activity on your web pages, but it can take up to 24 hours. See “Troubleshooting” below.

After logging in to your Analytics account, click into the domain for which you want to view reports, then in the left menu go to “Visitors > Social“:

You have three options for viewing the social interactions:

Engagement: You see two metrics: 1) Not Socially Engaged and 2) Socially Engaged. This shows you how effectively each page is in motivating users to Like or Tweet your content:

Action: This shows you the specific actions taken (Like, Unlike, Send), how many of each and percent of total actions:

Pages: Details on which page’s actions were taken and what those actions were.

Adding the Twitter button to the mix

Google’s Social Tracking will also track tweets made with Twitter’s Tweet button. Interestingly, Tweetmeme now recommends using the Twitter Tweet button.

After logging in to your Twitter account, go to the Twitter Tweet button page, where you can select one of the three available options:

Once you’ve made your selection, just copy the code that is generated for you and paste it somewhere between the <body> </body> tags of your web page. Your code should look like this:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share"  class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal"  data-via="hyperarts">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript"  src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

Add a bit of JavaScript to activate Twitter Social Tracking

Before the closing </head> tag, place this bit of JavaScript to activate the Google Analytics tracking (the social tracking won’t work without this tag!):

 <!-- Load Twitter JS-API asynchronously -->

<script>

(function(){

var twitterWidgets = document.createElement('script');

twitterWidgets.type = 'text/javascript';

twitterWidgets.async = true;

twitterWidgets.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';

// Setup a callback to track once the script loads.

twitterWidgets.onload = _ga.trackTwitter;

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(twitterWidgets);

})();

</script>

I don’t think it matters where you put the above Twitter-tracking code, as long as it’s inside the <head></head> tags. I put it right before the closing </head> tag, after the Google Analytics tracking code and the call to the “ga_social_tracking.js” JavaScript.

A word about Google +1 tracking

As Google states on its page about Social Interaction Tracking,

Out of the box, Google Analytics provides integrated tracking with the Google +1 button. This means if you have set up both Google +1 and the latest version of Google Analytics on the same page, all +1 social interactions will be tracked automatically.

As I mentioned above, the +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook Like button. I’ve added it to the HyperArts website and blog, but I haven’t seen much traction with it yet. However, adding it can’t hurt, and as it grows in popularity it will help your content reach a larger audience.

Troubleshooting

If you implement the above instructions accurately, you should see tracking results within several hours of initiating tracking, although Google says it can take up to 24 hours to display results.

If, after 24 hours, you don’t see any social tracking results (and I’m assuming you will have done some testing of the buttons to ensure they work and to provide some data to Analytics):

Double-check your code. Make sure you have placed the code as instructed above, and make sure your URL values are correct.

Check the Google Analytics date range. By default, Google Analytics displays the past month of data up to the previous day. You can manually change that range to include the current day by clicking the arrow next to the date range and changing the end date to the current day:

Adding Social Tracking to your WordPress self-hosted blog: There is already a plugin for this feature.

Although this may look a bit, um, complicated, it should be pretty easy for those who are comfortable working with web files.

Google+ Has Some Pluses, But Facebook Needn’t Worry

2011-06-30T01:27:00.000+10:00

The threat to Facebook posed by the Google+ project became a reality Tuesday with its official rollout — or did it?

While reaction to the debut of Google+ was mixed, the consensus was that Mark Zuckerberg will still have a job when he wakes up Wednesday morning.

Here are some highlights of the online reaction to Google+ and how it stacks up against Facebook, starting with the official introduction of the project from the official Google blog:

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper, or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.

Not all relationships are created equal. So in life, we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food — wrapping everyone in “friend” paper — and sharing really suffers:

It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.

It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright.

It’s insensitive. We all define “friend” and “family” differently — in our own way, on our own terms — but we lose this nuance online.

In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time — with their circles.

From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: We brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new — just like any other day.

From GigaOM:

I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice.

One of the reasons why I think Facebook is safe is because it cannot be beaten with this unified strategy. Theoretically speaking, the only way to beat Facebook is through 1,000 cuts. Photo-sharing services such as Instagram can move attention away from Facebook, much like other tiny companies that can bootstrap themselves based on the Facebook social graph and then built alternative graphs to siphon away attention from Facebook. Google could in theory go one step further — team up with alternative social graphs such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr and use those graphs to create an uber graph.

From TechCrunch:

“We believe online sharing is broken, and even awkward,” Google senior vice president of social Vic Gundotra said. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public. Real-life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.”

From the little that I’ve seen so far, Google+ is by far the best effort in social that Google has put out there yet. But traction will be contingent upon everyone convincing their contacts to regularly use it. Even for something with the scale of Google, that’s not the easiest thing in the world — as we’ve seen with Wave and Buzz. There will need to be compelling reasons to share on Google+ instead of Facebook and/or Twitter — or, at the very least, along with all of those other networks. The toolbar and interesting communication tools are the most compelling reasons right now, but there will need to be more of them. And fast.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Yes, it has been hard to get sharing into software. That’s why Facebook was created seven years ago. That’s why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trotting around the world for the past five years telling everyone that the company’s mission is to facilitate “sharing.” That’s why Facebook is now used by nearly 700 million people worldwide. That’s why Facebook is basically subsuming the Internet.

From AdAge Digital:

The major difference between Facebook and Google+ is that instead of having a massive friend list, users collect each other into groups — called “Circles” — like family, work, and friends. This context has been missing from Facebook and has gotten some people in hot water — for example, those who post their wild weekend party photos that may be seen by family and colleagues. And on Google+, there are no friend requests. People do not need to agree to be friends with one another and can view updates without sharing their own.

From paidContent:

Circles: This seems a clear poke at Facebook’s groups and lists features, which are not the easiest thing in the world to use. Google has created a way to let Google+ users create groups of friends, colleagues, and family members that’s almost exactly like creating a new folder on your hard drive and adding pictures. Simply drag the name of a friend or connection into a newly created circle to assign them to that group, and when you create a new post, you can select which circle will receive that update, allowing you to share the latest off-color South Park clip with your close friends (but not your uptight boss) and your goofy family reunion pictures with those who won’t judge (and not that first date that you’re hoping will turn into a second).

From Mashable:

Circles is well-implemented. It’s far easier than creating a Twitter List or a Facebook Friend List. The drag-and-drop functionality is a welcome addition, and the cute animations that appear when you perform actions give the product personality. That doesn’t necessarily mean users will take the time to create friend groups.

From Wired Epicenter:

Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called “the stream” that’s an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called “Sparks,” related to one’s specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users. Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members of Facebook or Twitter constantly check those continuous scrolls of personalized information.

The Buzz disaster came just as Facebook began to look like it may make good on its goal of signing up every human on the planet — creating a treasure trove of information inaccessible to Google’s servers. People at Google began to worry that Facebook could even leverage the information its users shared to create a people-centric version of search that in some cases could deliver more useful results than Google’s crown jewel of a search engine.

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Apparently, Facebook got wind of the Google+ feature, now called Circles, that allows users to share information with only select groups of friends, rather than their entire Facebook network.

Mark Zuckerberg took a personal interest in meeting this threat from Google, and put a team on it last summer. The result: Facebook Groups, which launched in October.

It doesn’t seem to have taken off — at least not like hugely popular features like Facebook Photos — which suggests maybe this is a solution to a problem most people don’t worry about. That doesn’t bode well for Circles.

How to Use the Google +1 Button Callback Parameter to Unlock Exclusive Content

2011-06-28T09:40:00.000+10:00

Since the release of the Google +1 button for websites in early June, many webmasters have been trying to figure out the best ways to implement it across their sites. In its most basic form, the +1 button is relatively easy to add to a webpage. You can grab two line of code, add them to your webpage, and be on your way. That said, Google has provided several parameters you can use with the +1 button that control how the button looks, what is displays, which URL should receive the +1, and which function you want to call when someone clicks the +1 button. Wait, did you catch that last part? Google added a mechanism for webmasters to trigger a JavaScript function when someone clicks a +1 button. The mechanism I’m referring to is the “callback” parameter of the +1 button, and it opens up a world of opportunity for webmasters. Let’s explore the parameter in greater detail, including what it is, how to use it, and how to avoid problems down the line.

What is the Callback Parameter?

As I mentioned earlier, you can implement the basic +1 button on your site with just a few lines of code. You need to include a JavaScript tag and then the +1 button tag. It’s essentially two lines of code and you’ll have a +1 button on a webpage. But, if you review the Google Code page for the +1 button, you’ll notice several other parameters. You have count, size, and href, which control the display of the +1 button, as well as identifying the URL that should receive the +1. Then you have the callback parameter, which takes the name of a JavaScript function as the value of the parameter. The JavaScript function you trigger can do anything you want (ok, not anything), and I’ll cover more about this soon.

Here is what the google +1 button code would look like when using the callback parameter:

<g:plusone callback="helloWorld"></g:plusone>

When you include the callback parameter in the +1 tag, you provide the name of a JavaScript function that will be triggered when someone clicks the +1 button. In this example, the function called “helloWorld” will be triggered. Note, helloWorld() needs to be part of the global namespace, meaning it needs to be included in the page or referenced in the html file via a script tag. The function will receive a JSON object, which includes both an “href” value and a “state” value. “href” will include the URL that received the +1 and “state” is either on or off (where on represents a +1 and off means someone removed a +1). That information is good to know and you can handle each situation separately. More about this soon.

Example: A Simple JavaScript Function

Below, I have included a very basic JavaScript function that’s called when someone clicks a +1 button. It simply throws an alert displaying the state of the button when clicked. Note, this function could either reside in the page itself or it could reside in an external JavaScript file that’s referenced in your html page (via a script tag).


 function helloWorld(plusone) {
 window.alert('+1 Triggered, State=' + plusone.state);
}

How the Callback Parameter Can Be Used

Based on adding the callback parameter to the +1 button, Google is enabling webmasters to creatively use the functionality to interact with users. For example, you could reward users that +1 a page on your site. There are some rules, though. Remember, +1’s impact rankings, so you don’t want to “buy” rankings. I attended a Google webinar last week that covered best ways to implement the +1 button and Google made it very clear that you should not pay for +1’s. That means you shouldn’t incentivize users with money, product, or services based on those users clicking a +1 button on your site. Here is the actual language from Google’s policy page:

“Publishers should not promote prizes, monies, or monetary equivalents in exchange for +1 Button clicks.”

The reason Google doesn’t want publishers incentivizing users with prizes or money is simple. +1’s impact rankings, rankings should not be manipulated in any way, and paying for +1’s is like paying for links. Don’t do it.

Unlocking Content is OK

Although you can’t provide products or services, Google explains that you can unlock exclusive content. Here is the language in Google’s policy regarding enabling content and functionality:

“Publishers can direct users to the +1 Button to enable content and functionality for users and their social connections.”

If someone +1’s your new blog post, you could unlock exclusive content for that user (and you can use this approach creatively, depending on your specific industry, business, etc.) For example, you could provide a study that goes deeper into a topic, you could provide additional tutorials on the subject matter, provide additional news about a topic, etc. Just make sure you wouldn’t ordinarily charge for that content. Yes, this seems like a slippery slope, since exclusive content might already have a price tag associated with it. As a webmaster (or marketer), you might need to build new content that could be part of your +1 program.

An Alternative Approach – Catching +1 Removals

Earlier in this post, I mentioned the “state” value that gets passed to your JavaScript function in the JSON object. That value will tell you whether someone +1’d a page or removed a +1. Knowing that someone just removed a +1 is important information, and you can act on it using the callback parameter of the +1 button. For example, maybe you can ask the person why they removed the +1, ask them to reconsider their +1 removal, or redirect them to a page that provides a more creative approach to catching +1 removals. Now, you don’t want to go overboard here. If someone just removed a +1, they obviously had a reason. You don’t want to add fuel to the fire and push the limits of getting that +1 back. That said, the right messaging could act as a legitimate confirmation that a user will be removing a +1, which could potentially save some of those votes. It would be interesting to test this out to see how many +1’s you can gain back by using the callback parameter.

Unlock Content, Get More +1’s?

As you can see, the callback parameter can be a helpful addition to the +1 button code. Depending on the “state”, you can either reward users with exclusive content, or you can address the removal of a +1. Remember, +1’s impact search rankings, so they can be extremely valuable to your organic search traffic. Just be careful about what you’re giving away to users that +1 content on your website. Make sure you aren’t giving away prizes, money, or services. The last thing you want is for a creative use of +1 to get you penalized. And if history has proven anything, you can bet that some webmasters are going to try and manipulate the system to gain more +1’s. As I said earlier, don’t go down this path. It’s not worth it. Play by the rules, be creative, and gain more +1’s the right way.

By the way, have you +1’d this post yet? :)

The Photo Strip: Facebook’s Most Underused Free Ad

2011-06-14T13:53:00.000+10:00

Many brands trick out their Facebook pages with flashy apps while ignoring some of the most valuable (and free!) tools available. Case in point: the often-neglected photo strip that came as part of the new Facebook Pages format rolled out in March. When done wrong, the photo strip makes an otherwise impressive page fall flat. When done right, the photo strip creates a stunning page design. A little bit of creativity and upkeep can transform the photo strip into a powerful branding tool.

How it Works

By default, the most recent five photos uploaded to a page – either as wall photos or in a photo album – are displayed in the photo strip. Although only 5 images will show at one time, an unlimited number of photos can be set to appear in the photo strip. New images uploaded to the wall or photo albums can be hidden from appearing in the photo strip by clicking on the X in the top right corner of the image. Hiding all but a select 5 photos enables page administrators to control which photos appear in the photo strip.

Clicking the X in the corner of an image hides it from the photo strip.

Unlike with personal profiles, the images on a page’s photo strip appear in random order. Every time the page is refreshed, the photo order is shuffled. Presumably, Facebook did this to keep brands from using this as static advertising space. Many pages get around this challenge by embracing the randomness and using images that work regardless of order.

The Tropical Northern Queensland tourism board's photo strip has Nemo move each time the page is refreshed.

Here’s where it gets tricky: the image that appears in the photo strip is actually a thumbnail cropped from a section of the uploaded image. Even more tricky: the cropped area used in the thumbnail cannot be chosen (unlike with a profile picture). Instead, Facebook automatically crops an off-center part of the image as the thumbnail. Figuring out exactly which part of the photo is cropped is difficult, but properly formatting images is crucial since some photos appear unrecognizable when resized as thumbnails.

Dairy Queen's Photo Strip: When Bad Cropping Happens to Good Pages

Alternatively, making making photos the same dimensions as the thumbnail (98 x 68 pixels) prevents them from being cropped. The downside to this method is the image appears very tiny in the photo viewer.

Kool-Aid uses images already sized as thumbnails to prevent cropping

After much weeding through Facebook pages, I’ve found some brilliant ways brands are using the photo strip.

1. Incorporate the Profile Picture

It takes a great concept and well-designed photos to pull this off, but the results are awesome.

Secret’s creative use of inner tubes melds the profile picture into the photo strip in this celebration of reaching a million fans.

Lysol’s banner tying in the profile picture is on-point with their “Mission for Health” initiative that promotes weaving healthy habits into communities.

2. Product Placement

This one’s obvious: feature products in the photo strip! Another no-brainer: including a description and link to the product in the photo caption. However, making the product photos too promotional may turn off fans. Focus should be on adding aesthetic value to the page and clarifying what the brand is about.

A white background and consistently sized images make Nikon’s cameras pop across the top of their page.

Chevrolet uses the same color cars and labels each model in these attractive, brand-focused photos.

3. Show Gratitude

When reaching a milestone, such as X number of fans or overwhelming participation in a contest, the photo strip space can be used as a thank you.

Dove said thank you in different languages when they reached a million fans. This is also an example of selecting more than 5 photos to use in the strip, since this design can be used to spell out “thank you” in many languages.

Nutella also used the space as a thank you when they reached 10 million fans.

4. Highlight New Stuff

Placing upcoming products or services in the photo strip builds buzz and awareness around a new product launch.

Chicken McNuggets swimming in sauce isn’t the most appetizing visual, but these colorful, consistent images are still a nice plug for McDonald’s new dipping sauces.

In a more indirect approach, Panda Express advertised their new extended hours with a night sky.

5. Be Useful

Since this is the first thing fans notice on the wall, why not make it a quick reference tool?

Redbox’s photo strip allows fans to check the page each week for new releases.

Dole Bananas features photos of recipes made with bananas. The photos’ captions are links to the recipe on Dole’s site.

6. Say it with Words

Using words instead of pictures can effectively showcase brand messaging, services and products, or compel fans to take action.

Involver uses compelling words to promote their Social Markup Language.

These simple words entice to fans looking for discounts and coupons.

7. Play with Color

Creatively using colors can really make the photo strip pop.

UNICEF USA uses splashes of their signature cyan color to pull together these photos of children from around the world.

Crystal Light’s same photo in different colors has a powerful effect.

8. Sequential Randomness

In contrast to playing up randomness, using images that belong in sequential order is a playful way to get fans refreshing the page continuously to put the photos in the correct order.

Seattle’s Best Coffee is not only nicely using product placement, but their numbered levels of coffee make for a great out-of-order set of pictures. I may have spent a few minutes trying to put these in order (unsuccessfully).

9. Do It All

Why use the photo strip to promote one thing when you can promote everything?

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese uses the photo strip as a cross-promotional tool for their site’s recipes, new products, other social profiles, and a Facebook app. This manages to not feel overly promotional since it is so well-designed and subtle.

Facebook’s New Ads Power Editor Replaces the Bulk Uploader with a Streamlined GUI

2011-06-04T22:51:00.000+10:00

This week, Facebook launched its new Ads Power Editor desktop software for buyers who work directly with a Facebook ads representatives. The new multi-pane graphical user interface presents a streamlined way to create and manage multiple Facebook ads simultaneously. It also integrates with Excel, and replaces the Facebook’s bulk uploader ads tool which will be deprecated on June 30th, 2011.

Alloffacebook has provided a functionality overview of the Facebook Ads Power Editor and present some questions regarding how the enhanced native tool impacts third-party tool provider working off of the Facebook Ads API.

Until now, Facebook provided four main ways of purchasing and managing ads. The public self-serve graphical user interface ads tool, the bulk uploader for managing ads through Excel, the Facebook Ads API for programmatically managing ads, and a direct relationship with Facebook ad sales representatives for the site’s biggest advertisers. Now, those working with ads reps have access to the Power Editor that combines and strengthens the features of the self-serve and bulk uploader tool.

While Facebook has continued to augment the self-serve ads purchasing tool and Ads Manager with more conversion and reach metrics, new ad units such as Sponsored Stories, and new targeting options such as broad category targeting, the design of the graphical user interface has for most part remained stable over the past few years. For those that needed to create and manage large scale optimized ad campaigns, the self-serve tool and bulk uploader were a bit too clumsy.

While the Power Editor doesn’t support Sponsored Stories, it makes generating and editing multiple ads at once much simpler.

New Features

Downloading the Power Editor

For now, the bookmark for the Power Editor only appears in the ads accounts of ad buyers who work with Facebook ad sales representatives and are running the Google Chrome internet browser. Those who qualify can download and run the software locally from their Windows, Mac, or Linux machine. Users then download their existing ad account and campaigns into the software from Facebook.

Multi-Pane Interface

Power Editor users are shown three panes shown in the image above:

Left pane (A)- Select between ads accounts and their campaigns

Main pane (C) – Use tabs (B) to view all the campaigns or ads from the account or campaign selected in the left pane

Bottom pane (D) – View editable fields for the campaigns or ads selected in the main pane

This tiered interface makes it easy to navigate between and edit a huge number of ads from different accounts and campaigns. The old Ad Manager required many more clicks and page loads to access all of this information.

Performance Metrics Settings

Users can check boxes to select which metrics will appear in the main pane. These include standard metrics such as clicks, impressions, and bid, as well as new metrics such as Facebook content and errors, and basic targeting attributes such as age and sex. Users must set a date range with the stats drop-down to load the new metrics.

Creating New Campaigns

Users can create a new campaigns in three ways:

‘Create Campaign” flow – Fill out various fields inline

Duplicate – Clone an existing campaign and then edit fields

Copy from Excel – Copy a campaign from the Power Editor into Excel, edit it, and paste it back into the Power Editor

Creating New Ads

Users can create new ads in four different ways:

‘Create’ Ad flow – While in the ‘Ads’ tab in the main pane of the desired campaign, click ‘Create Ad”. Fill out fields inline using typeahead functionality, and select an image from the image library or upload a new one

Duplicate – Select an ad in the ‘Ads’ tab of the main pane and click ’Duplicate’, then edit fields

Copy from Excel – Copy an ad from the Power Editor into Excel, edit it, and paste it back into the Power Editor

Import from Excel – Create multiple new ads or new campaigns in Excel, import the spreadsheet by copying it into the Power Editor or clicking the ‘Bulk Import’ button, and upload a zip file of images

The Power Editor is backwards compatible with the Bulk Uploader, so spreadsheets from the Bulk Uploader can be imported the same way as they are from Excel. Whenever edits are made in the Power Editor, the ‘Upload’ button must be clicked to sync the changes with a Facebook Ads account. Changes since the last Facebook account upload or download can be undone using the Revert Changes button.

Power Editor and the Facebook Ads API

The Power Editor provides some of the basic functionality offered by tools built by third-party developers on the Facebook Ads API. Specifically, the ability to create and manage multiple ad variants for A/B testing can now be accomplished through Facebook’s native tools. This to some degree commodifies a core selling point of third-party tools — namely that a significantly level of efficient A/B testing could not be achieved without an Ads API tool.

However, many Ads API tools provide better ad creation than the Power Editor, with visual trees and the ability to cross several creative and targeting variables to instantly produce permutations. Third-party tools also provide deeper analytics, cost per fan and conversion-based optimization models, auto-optimization algorithms, and support for Sponsored Stories. This means that for now there should plenty of value for Ads API tool developers to offer big ad buyers.

alloffacebook is following with Facebook about the direction of both the self-serve tools including the Power Editor, and the Ads API. We’ll return with insights into how advertisers should choose the solution that’s best for them, and how the tools of Ads API developers should look to differentiate themselves from Facebook’s native tools.

Site Speed For Dummies Part 1 – Why Bother?..

2011-06-04T19:03:00.000+10:00

Since starting in SEO, I have followed countless numbers of blogs and read a huge amount of information (most of which I don’t understand). What I always found irritating was reading a blog post, knowing the actions you need to take but lacking the technical know-how to put those actions in place. Take site speed, for example.

Site speed is a funny old thing. Ever since Google first announced in April 2010 that they were using it as a ranking signal, everyone has known that they need to optimise it. The problem is that most people just don’t know how to do it (like me: personally, as soon as I see code, I run for the hills).

To that end, this blog post is for all those SEOs out there that know they should be improving site speed, but instructions like “combine images into CSS sprites” means nothing to them. Originally this was going to be one blog post, but after researching it’s turned into what will likely be three posts. Part one will cover the reasons behind wanting to improve site speed, part two will be getting down and dirty with all the techy code stuff and part 3 will be how you can actually get developers and customers to buy into it and how to influence change.

So let’s get started!

How Important Is It?

When looking at how important site speed is, I decided it was important to look at it from various points of view:

Is it better for the user?

Is it better financially for the business owner?
Does it result in higher natural search engine ranks?

Let’s take these one at a time…

1. Relationship Between Site Speed & User Satisfaction

I think it’s fair to say that common sense applies here; people don’t like browsing at slow speeds, that’s why we don’t use dial-up any more. (Plus the dial-up noise was really annoying.)

Image Source: Here

So we already know that people prefer to surf as fast as possible, but since we are geeks, we need proof, right?

For starters, Google, and in particular Larry Page, are obsessed with speed. Have a look at this article on the BBC (from 2009). The “Fast Flip” concept is mentioned, where we Twould be to be able to flip through online content as quickly and easily as we can with a physical magazine.

Additionally, Google themselves ran a test to see if slowing down the search process effected users’ behaviour. They essentially made Google slow down very marginally for a set period of time. They had two groups: a control group, who use Google as normal, and a test group. The test group’s searching habits were monitored over a period of 6 weeks while delays between 100 – 400 milliseconds were applied to their search environment. The test simply showed that the longer the delay was, the fewer searches people were likely to do.

The impact ranged from 0.2% to 0.59%, and what’s even more interesting was that in the longer delays, even after they returned to Google’s regular fast speed, they maintained their newly modified search habits.

Put simply, the effect of a slow user experience changed their search habits for an extended period of time. Bing also found that a 2-second slowdown changed queries per user by -1.8% and revenue per user by -4.3%. That’s pretty amazing. These numbers might not seem like a big difference, but think how quick Google is already: if we were dealing with a site with delays of 4 or 6 seconds, this could have a much bigger impact.

So I think that answers the first part. Yes, a fast site is definitely better for the user… duh.

Oh, yeah – Google also like to remind you just how quick they are every time you do a search:

2. Will a fast site make you more money?

So we now know that it’s better for the user, but do happier users actually make us more money? Is improved site speed worth implementing?

I dug around a little and found a great article, Velocity & The Bottom Line, which has some great case studies that are worth having a look at. I picked a couple that are great examples of how site speed can affect your bottom line.

AOL

AOL conducted experiments to see how their site speed effected the way people viewed their site. For each visitor, they monitored the average load time of the pages. They then broke this down into percentiles of the highest to lowest and examined the number of page views of each group from fastest to lowest. This showed some nice numbers across a range of industries.

Image Source: Here

As you can see from the image above, the faster the site is, the more pages the user navigates through. This is true across all the areas of the site shown. More site views on a site like AOL is very important as more page views = higher advertisement revenue.

Shopzilla

Another site which is used as a case study in that article is Shopzilla. If you are not familiar with Shopzilla (I wasn’t until writing this), they are a product comparison site which allows you to compare prices of products and help you get the best deal. They got some great results from speeding up their site and even in some aspects that you would never expect. Before the change, their site was averaging a load time of between 4 and 6 seconds per page.

After making the changes they were averaging less than 1 second consistently, and this had a dramatic overall effect.

This proves that if your site is fast, people are:

more likely to want to spend time there,
less likely to leave it, and
feel more secure. Since they don’t have to wait about as much, they don’t have time to panic when they hit the buy button.

Can you imagine the testing you would need to do to achieve a conversion increase of 7-12%? Then what about the infrastructure costs? 50% is huge, especially with a site this size. Most small businesses won’t have such high infrastructure costs, but it’s still interesting to know that money can be saved in areas you don’t expect. This is the ideal situation, as sales increase + operational costs decrease = WIN.

I think you would agree this shows that faster sites can definitely increase your bottom line.

3. Does it increase your search rankings?

The short answer to this is yes. Google have publicly said it’s a ranking factor, so improvement here will definitely increase your rankings.

What’s not to clear is how high up your to-do list it should be. According to Google, in April 2010 search speed affected only 1% of queries. That’s not a huge result, but I think we can assume that this number will increase over time.

But if there’s still doubt, I always refer to common sense. Browsing at speed is better for user experience, therefore Google should prefer fast speeds. Building on that, the following is based on my opinion and has not been tested, although I welcome anyone to test and let me know the results.

Personally, I think the increase in ranking may not be a direct effect of increasing site speed. I don’t think Google place enough weight on this single factor to make dramatic rises in the SERPS. Still, consider all the positive things that happen as a secondary effect of updating the sites:

Users use the site more
They view more pages
Conversions increase
Less down time
Lower abandonment rates

These are all excellent things from a user point of view, which is obviously Google’s number one priority.

And a close second is making money. When you look at the size of Google’s Adsense network, for example, do you think they would be in favour of getting a 25% page view increase across the network as a whole by way of increasing speed? Of course they would. Results that big could mean millions of pounds every year.

It also makes sense that Google would track site user stats as well. If a site gains all the above stats, that site deserves to rank higher.

I think the secondary increase in relevancy and user experience would drive the increase in rankings, rather than the primary increase in site speed.

It’s all about the big picture in my opinion.

Site Speed For Dummies Part 2 – How To Do It

2011-06-04T19:01:00.000+10:00

Let me first apologise for the size of this post. It’s massive, but learning ain’t easy. A lot of this does get pretty techy, and you may have to accept that you just can’t do some of the stuff unless you’re a developer. So to make this post as actionable as possible, I wanted people to know what things are achievable for them, based on their knowledge and ability. For this reason I developed an extremely sophisticated algorithm that will automatically let you know which stuff you can do and what you will get the highest ROI from. Without further adieu, I give you “The Dummy Scale”:

This little guy means that almost anyone should be capable of doing the task. It involves mostly copy and paste and will give you the tasks you can do with the least amount of time. Examples would be installing analytics code.

Next up is this guy with the sticky up hair. He’s not quite as simple as the previous character, so if you have a little bit of knowledge of code you should be able to handle it.

Lastly, this guy has glasses: need I say more? This stuff is pretty heavy-handed. Don’t go near these ones without at least six cans of Red Bull and a couple of all-nighters planned. OK, it’s not that bad, but they do involve things like the .htaccess file, which I wouldn’t recommend going near unless you know what you’re doing!

OK, let’s get cracking…

I’m going to run through an example, use some tools that Google recommends and see what the outcome is. Once I have a list of recommendations from the tools I’m going to talk through actually implementing them.

I have picked three sites that are all in the same (kind of) market. The three sites are:

WH Smith – http://www.whsmith.co.uk/
Waterstones – http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/ (301 in place)
Penguin – http://www.penguin.co.uk/

Compare Site Speed

Step 1

To compare site speed, I used a great tool at http://www.webpagetest.org which allows you to add a URL and time how long it takes to load the page. What’s cool, though, is that it allows you to compare multiple sites side-by-side. Once a site is fully loaded, the screen goes grey to help easily identify which sites load first and last. So have a look at the video below comparing the three sites:

WHSmith with a load time of 9.9 seconds
Waterstones at 10.3 seconds
Penguin with a whopping 31.4 seconds

To be clear, even though it won, WHSmith is by no means the Usain Bolt of the internet. Amazon, for example, renders in a cool 4.4 seconds! So what can we do about this? Let’s analyse each of them using some cool tools.

Step 2

Download Google’s Page Speed tool: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Step 3

Go to the site you want to analyse. In this case, we’ll look at Penguin. Open Page Speed and click Analyse. You will then get an output that looks something like this:

Woo-hoo! All you need to do now is use efficient CSS selectors, combine images into CSS sprites and enable compression! Ehh… what?! If you are like me, that means nothing to you. I don’t know how to do a single thing on that list. But I’m going to find out how.

So in no particular order….

Use Efficient CSS Selectors

This took me a while to get my head around, so I’ll try to explain it the best I can. Apparently, when you load a page, the browser scans that page looking for information that it can put into a tree-shaped diagram. This is known as an “internal document tree” and looks like this:

This helps the browser break the page down into its simplest elements and organise them in a way it can read. Reading the image above, we can see that on this page there is a body element and within that there are another two elements, the <H1> and the <P>. Then under each of those there is an <em> element.

Now let’s assume that I tell you I want to make the words in the <em> element within <P> red. If you write the code: Em {colour : blue} not only would it make the <P> <em> blue, but it would also make the <em> element under the <h1> blue, as well as any other <em> elements on that page. In order to select only the <em> under <p>, I would need to write: p em {colour : blue}. That would only colour the <em> element in the <p> area. What we have just done is written a descendant selector.

Put simply, a descendant selector means isolating one element within another element. This is done most efficiently when you don’t make the browser keep looking for something when it’s already found it. To be honest, though, it’s pretty techy, and unless you’re a developer, you’re not going to be able to correct your code. This site explains the process pretty well.

Prefer Asynchronous Resources

Doing things “asynchronously” is a strange concept. You would think that in order to make your site load quicker, you’d want to do as many tasks as possible at once, so the page could load faster. Although multi-tasking generally makes things happen faster, when it comes to loading a web page, the more things done at the same time actually slows you down. It’s much better to load pages asynchronously, simply means not doing things at the same time.

Doing things asynchronously allows you to prioritise the items which you would like to load first. When opening a new page, the only information you need to load immediately is the information that’s above the fold. The rest of the stuff isn’t visible to the user until they scroll down, so it makes sense that the priority should be given to making the stuff above the fold load first. Likewise, some items like tracking scripts are never visible to the user anyway, so it would make sense to prioritise all visible content ahead of that.

So our original Penguin site speed report shows two items which should be changed:

The image above shows that the Facebook info and the Google Analytics could be changed to load asynchronously and allow the rest of the page to load more quickly. The Analytics one is an easy win: all they need to do is update the code to the latest Analytics code, and it will be asynchronous. As for the Facebook part, you would need to go the Google-suggested route and use a script DOM element.

Get Site Speed Stats In Google Analytics

This doesn’t speed your site up, but the news broke as I was researching this post, so I thought it was best to include it (plus it’s really easy to do). It’s possible to get site speed tracking data straight from within your Google Analytics account.

Step 1 – Install the latest version of the Google analytics asynchronous code on your site.
Step 2 – Add the line: “_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime'])” to your analytics code.
Step 3 – Enjoy all your new juicy data.

Specify Image Sizes

This one is nice and simple and actually makes sense. When loading a page with no image dimensions in the source code, the browser needs to guess where to put everything else around that image until it’s finished downloading. Then when the image does download, it needs to go back and do reflows and repaints (kind of like loading it again) and place it at the correct size and reshuffle the page to make it fit.

If, however, you specify image dimensions, the browser doesn’t have this problem. It’s kind of like saving a seat for your mate in a really busy pub. When he finally gets to the pub, he already knows where his seat is and can go straight to the bar and get a nice cold beer! Mmmm, beer!

OK, so how can we get these poor images on the Penguin site some cold beer? Let’s look at the current page and source code for one of the images.

One of the images that the test highlighted as not having dimensions was the image of Jeremy Clarkson. So let’s look at the source code for it.

The highlighted part above shows that the image height is specified but not the width. This is an easy fix and just needs a small tweak as shown below.

Can you taste that beer?

Obviously, this is a really simple example, and to do all the images on a site the size of Penguin’s would take a long time, but it does show these things should just be done right at the start.

One more thing to note is not to resize images on the fly. If, for example, we wanted a large version of Mr Clarkson’s face (don’t know why), it’s not best practice to simply scale up the numbers in the highlighted section above. Instead, use an image editing software to adjust the image to the size you want and then save that version.

Combine Images into CSS Sprites

Let me start by explaining when sprites are useful, as this will help the explanation later seem easier. Social media buttons are a good example of this. Lots of social media buttons are animated, meaning when you hover over them they do something, they might light up, move, get bigger, etc. This is mainly done to let you know you can interact with the object.

Whatever they do, this is achieved by having two separate images. One shows when you are not pointing at it, then another image shows when you hover over it. Think of it like the little flip animations you used to make as a kid:

By changing quickly between all the images in the flip book, it gives the appearance of character movement, and the same thing happens with lots of hover features. The trouble with this is that it uses lots of images (if you’ve ever drawn one of these books, you know how much of a pain it is drawing 50 images that are pretty much identical). Well, to put it simply, browsers can’t be bothered requesting all these pictures from different places, either. Fifty images means fifty URLs that the browser needs to go to and pull that image from, and that takes time!

The whole purpose of sprites is based around the 80/20 rule of optimisation. Apparently the majority of time spent rendering a page is not down to downloading the image. The main cause of slow rendering is excessive HTTP requests. In other words, stop referencing so many places to pull images from. Sprites solve this problem because instead of having 10 images with 10 separate locations, you combine those images into one big image using a sprite, and then just reference the part of the image which you want to show at that particular location or time.

So sprites are created by ripping all the pages out the flick book and sticking them to one big sheet of paper in an organised order. This then becomes one big page instead of 50 individual ones. Now the browser only needs to go to one URL to get all the images.

So how does this actually work? Well, you tell the browser which part of the bigger image to show by referencing an area of pixels. A really basic example would be changing the colour of a square when you hovered over it. Look at the three images below.

If you wanted to make this change from red to blue without using sprites, you would need to request two different URLs. You would tell the browser that by default, it should show the image “http://www.mydomain.com/red-image”, then when someone hovers over it, show the image “http://www.mydomain.com/blue-image”.This causes two HTTP requests.

If, however, you want to use sprites, you’d create the bigger rectangle image, which is the two smaller ones stuck together with one pixel gap. You would then tell the browser grab the image URL “http://www.mydomain.com/new-bigger-image” but only show pixels “0 to 50” x 50 (the red part) as a default. But when someone hovers over the image, you would tell the browser to show pixels “52 to 101” x 50 (the blue part). This means that while the total number of pixels is only slightly increased, the requests have been reduced from 2 to 1. Obviously, this is a very simplistic example, but if you do this across a whole site with lots of images, it can make a considerable difference. Check out one of Amazon’s sprites for example:

Doing this can be difficult, but thankfully the tool which Google suggests, SpriteMe, is really good at talking you through the process. Sprites can seem counter-intuitive because logic tells you that making big images slows pages down, but based on reducing the number of requests from say 10 to 1, the benefits of the reduced calls outweigh any increases in the image size.

Leveraging Browser Caching

Thank God for something that was easy to understand. Learning most of this has been a challenge, so when I saw this it made me smile. While easy to understand, it’s not too easy to do, so it’s mega geeks only for this one, I’m afraid. Like previously mentioned, making lots of requests to external sources – whether its images, CSS, JavaScript – takes time, and if they can be reduced or avoided, it can only speed your site up.

Browser caching is great for doing this, and I have to say it is one of the quickest wins I’ve seen so far. Essentially, leveraging browser caching is a cross between giving your browser a better memory and a camera. If there was no browser cache, then every time you went to a website, you would need to download everything again. Thankfully, that’s not the case. There are ways to make your browsers memory last longer. Most sites have a lot of content that either never changes or very rarely changes. It therefore doesn’t make sense to keep making your browser download the same stuff time and time again. Instead, if you know what items on your site are not going to change for, say, a year, you can tell browsers to remember things the way they are now until a year’s time.

This means that for the next year, instead of downloading stuff, the first time you visit that site those items are stored locally in the browser cache and allows the browser to load the page much quicker.

This isn’t suitable for all sites, of course. e-Commerce sites, for example, have a lot of changing products. So if you are going to be updating the product range regularly, it’s perhaps not worth your while to set the browser cache to a year, though certainly setting it to a month can help. This is probably most likely why the Penguin site does so badly in this area: the site is updated quite regularly with new books and special offers.

To actually do this, you need to use the .htaccess file. Unless you know what you’re doing, I would recommend getting a developer to do this. There is a post here on how to do it, but read the comments at the bottom as some people had some issues with this method. I could write the code out, but I’d just be repeating what’s on that post.

Combine External JavaScript

The theory of combining JavaScript is the same as using sprites. The point is to reduce the number of calls that the browser needs to make to external sources. In this case, it’s JS files rather than images, but the idea is the same. Rather than calling lots of different JS files, let’s just put all the JS code together into one file and reference the correct part for the job.

Points to note – sometimes JS need to be completed in a certain order, so don’t just throw it all together willy-nilly. Look at the page you are optimising, and take a note of the order of the JS files and the location. This should be used as the order in which to paste the code into the new document. So let’s see an example. If we look at the Penguin site again, one of the recommendations is:

So first, we had better make sure this is the order in which they are loaded. To do this, view the source (Ctrl+U) then find (Ctrl+F) and search for “gettopup”.

By searching I have found the order of the JS is slightly different:

I also can’t seem to find the file that ends in “/jquery/all.js”. But for the purposes of this example, let’s assume it’s a perfect world. We could then create a new document in a text editor and call it something like “newjsdocument.js”. Then we would paste the JS code (in the correct order) into that document, save it and re-upload it. Now any time the other documents are referenced, the browser will refer to the one document instead of three or four.

Additional notes to consider

Always make copies of your JS code before you go mixing it up.
If you use JS resources that are constantly changing, this may not be applicable.
Many times there are good reasons for having separate JS files, none of which I understand, but I’m told they are good enough reasons.
Additional savings can also be made by minifying the new big JS document (just about to explain what this means).

Minifying CSS

Minifying in general is good practice. When websites are written using CSS, the actual CSS document can be pretty large. Depending how fancy the site styling is, there can be thousands of lines of code. Unlike people, browsers don’t need text to be spaced out nicely and formatted in an easy-to-read and user-friendly manner. If the code is correct, it can all be jammed together by removing unnecessary spacing and commas. To use this blog post as an example, how much space do you think would be saved if I didn’t use spaces, commas, line breaks, etc.? The answer is lots. When it comes to code, Space = Speed.

According to the Firebug speed test, sites could save 20% on load times by minifying CSS files. That’s pretty cool for something that’s really easy to do. So how do you do it? Well, thankfully some clever people have made quite a lot of tools that are really easy to use and do the work for you. All you need to do is paste your code into them, hit the Compress button, save the output in a new document and upload it.

A word of warning: if you minify CSS and then want to change anything in the CSS file later, it can be very hard to find the correct parts you need. Always make a nice, easy to work on version before the compression is done. That way, if you ever need to make any other changes, all you need to do is use the saved version and make a new compressed copy! A good tool for doing this is http://www.csscompressor.com/.

Enable Compression

Enabling compression is one of my favourite optimisation tips, not least because it’s one of the easiest to understand, though admittedly it’s not the easiest to implement unless you know what you’re doing. Enabling compression pretty much works the same as regular compression on your computer. If you have lots of files to email someone, you could attach them one by one and clog up your poor mate’s email inbox, or you could put them all in a folder, zip them up and send it as one small file.

In web design this can be done by the servers. It should be noted that if the user doesn’t have this enabled on their browser or are using a really old browser, this won’t work. To be honest, though, most modern browsers today do support it, so I wouldn’t worry so much.

So if it’s done at server side, what do we need to actually do to speed our site up? We need to tell the server to send the compressed version if the user’s browser supports it. This is done in the .htaccess file again. I would strongly advise against going anywhere near your .htaccess file unless you really know your stuff, as it’s easily the fastest way to ruin your site. In the interest of not adding on another 1000 words to the blog post, I won’t go into the hairy details, but enabling compression is definitely into Dev territory. This post covers it in more detail if you want to know more.

There are definitely big gains to be had by enabling compression so if you have a developer it should be top of your to do list. The firebug plug-in for our Penguin example shows that a 426.7KiB (75% reduction) in transfer size could be achieved by enabling compression, and that would be a huge win

Minimize DNS Lookups

Although they are separate items on the list, I thought I would talk about minimising DNS lookups and parallelising downloads across hostnames together because there are conflicting arguments to each.

Let me explain minimising DNS lookups first. DNS stands for Domain Name Servers, and they work like the phone book. When you tell a browser to go to www.mydomain.com, the browser essentially uses a kind of phone book to look up your domain. Beside your domain will be the DNS code/number, which gives the browser the location of the files on that domain. Looking up those numbers takes time, so the more sites that you need to look up, the longer it takes. Doesn’t that sound much simpler than ‘minimise DNS lookup’? #DummiesFTW!

So when the speed tip says “minimise the number of DNS lookups”, it essentially means try to limit the number of different websites you list. So if your website requests information from four different URLs like:

That would be a total of three DNS lookups. Why not four? Because, http://twitter.com/ and http://twitter.com/#!/CraigBradford have the same DNS. Anything on the same domain has the same DNS. Easy, right?

So when would you request information from URLs? If you want to pull in style sheets, JS, social API data, those are all DNS lookups. So how do we minimise the number of DNS lookups? Well, the recommendations I’ve read are to essentially do either of the following:

Anything that’s on a sub-domain, change to a directory. In other words, if you reference “something.mywebsite.com”, change it to www.mywebsite.com/something. This is confusing because it’s still on the same domain, so it shouldn’t be an extra DNS lookup, right? Wrong. Apparently the browsers treat these as separate lookups, even though they are not.
If you are pulling in stuff from several websites, anything that can be put onto the same domain should be. This would be applicable if you had lots of images getting pulled from different sources. If you could stick them all on the one site (the same DNS), like Flickr for example (*wink wink), you have just limited the number of images being hosted on your site and also reduced the number of DNS lookups.

The following example is completely unrealistic but makes it easy to understand. Let’s say you have an e-commerce site with 1000 images on it. But because you’re slightly cheap and dodgy, you just use other people images from a thousand different sites. That means that when loading your huge page, the browser needs to go do 1000 DNS lookups. But if, however, you set up a Flickr account and hosted all your items there, you would only have 1 DNS lookup as every picture would be Flickr.com/image1, Flickr.com/image2, etc.

So if that’s the case, why doesn’t everyone just put all images on Flickr? Well, that brings me to parallelising downloads across hostnames. As you probably guessed from the name, it has something to do with doing things in parallel.

Parallelise downloads across Hostnames

When your browser loads a page, it looks at all the files it needs to download and then the number of places it needs to get those things from. To use the example above, let’s say your page lists:

20 Facebook profile pages
20 Twitter profile pages
20 YouTube videos
20 images from Flickr

At this point, the browser does some quick sums and says I have 80 files to download, but there are four places I can get them from, so I need to get 20 from each! Now comes the catch. Most browsers only allow 2 connections to any one host (DNS) at one time. So for the browser to download the 20 files it would need to do 2 at a time and put the rest in a queue. TSo there would be four queues of 20. From this it’s clear to see why hosting 1000 images on Flickr wouldn’t be a good idea as it would be a huge big queue.

This is where the idea of parallelising downloads across hostnames comes in. I think I’ll compare this to toilets at music festivals….

If there are 80 people waiting to go to the toilet and there is only one toilet and these festival goers don’t mind going two at a time, then it would take 40 toilet sessions to clear the queue. If there are 4 toilets and again people don’t mind sharing, it would only take 10 toilet sessions to clear the queue. So it’s easy to see the advantage having more than one toilet (host). Common sense really, once you get past all the jargon. This is where browsers thinking that a sub-domain is a different DNS can be useful. By hosting items of “something.mydomain.com” instead of “mydomain.com/something” you have given the browser an extra toilet to reduce the queue. Just in case I didn’t explain the toilet metaphor correctly, the queue of people represent the time it takes to download the page, so you could consider each person as a second if you like.

I hope you can see the conflict of interest here; I literally just corrected myself from the previous recommendation. Here is a breakdown of the pros and cons of each.

Minimize DNS Lookups

Advantage – Speeds up page by reducing the time it takes to find all files.
Disadvantage – Increases the bandwidth on each location, so if there are loads of files, it can make a queue, which can actually slow your page down even more.

Parallelise downloads across Hostnames

Advantages – Reduces queues at each of the file sources, spreads the bandwidth load
Disadvantages – Increases the number of DNS lookups.

This is a balancing act and is down to the number of files on any page. Doing either one of these to an extreme will likely slow down your site, as it would have a negative effect on the other. To use another extreme example, if you had only four files it doesn’t make sense to make two subdomains. Assuming these files are not massive, you wouldn’t stand to gain very much. Where this becomes useful I think is more when it comes to using JavaScript and ordering the way your page loads.

“A lot of site speed comes down to setting priorities.”

A page fully loading and the user perceiving the page as fully loaded are two different things. If you have a lot of images, for example, it is really obvious to the user if there are big gaps all over the page. Therefore it might be worthwhile putting the images which are above the fold in a short queue to make sure that the first thing the user sees when they land on the page at least looks like a fully loaded page. The rest, meanwhile, can load below the fold. From my research, a lot of page speed comes down to setting priorities.

If I had to pick one to focus on, I would recommend parallelising downloads as you stand to gain the most if you do correctly.

Conclusion:

I started this series in the hope of being able to make speed optimisation a realistic and achievable goal for almost anyone with little web or code expertise. The reality is that this should really be left to the clever guys. Undoubtedly some of you will finish reading this and feel that a lot of it is still unachievable (myself included), but I hope there are enough quick wins that you feel you can achieve something and have at least learned the areas that you will require assistance in achieving. By learning about the tasks above, it also allows you to delegate the tasks to developers without them saying they can’t do it because it will take them two years to complete. So if anything, you can at least be in a knowledgeable position to outsource.

So what is the take away from site speed?

1- Optimising for site speed should not be a priority. Unless you are a big site, the ROI will be pretty low. Only have developers working on it if they have nothing else to do.

2- A lot of the recommended tweaks that the software suggests will not be suitable for every site. Often there are reasons why things are that way, and it’s best to leave them the way they are. What you gain on one thing could have a negative effect on others.

3- New sites should get this stuff right at the start. It’s easier to do it correctly the first time than go back and pick out tiny pieces of code.

4- Always make copies of all code before making changes. This makes updating much easier.

5- Speed is a project, not a task, so plan to make the changes over time and do them in order of gains. Also keep in mind the consequences of any changes.

6- Lastly, my little bit of wisdom for the day would be, if you want to learn something, teach it to others; it’s the best way to learn.

I hope this post has made a very techy subject actionable for some people. The plan was to have a third part, but I really don’t feel it’s necessary. If you have a big site, the examples in Part 1 speak from themselves. For big sites, there are big wins; for smaller sites, put it on your to do someday list. Thanks for reading, feel free to shoot me questions and comments and I’ll help where possible. You can also get Craig on Twitter: @CraigBradford

Google +1, AdWords, and The Effect on Landing Page Strategy – Will Advertisers Be Penalized for Using Campaign Landing Pages

2011-06-04T18:49:00.000+10:00

As you’ve probably heard by now, Google released its +1 social recommendation engine in April. There are several reasons Google is doing this, including trying to make search results more relevant, enabling you to recommend pages (and ads) to your social connections, and combating the Facebook Like button. At this point, your social connections are your Google contacts, but this should realistically expand to other networks as well. As I just mentioned, the +1 button is a direct shot at the Facebook Like button, which is now plastered across the entire web. Both Google and Facebook want to gather as much information from you as possible, which can then help fuel their advertising programs (which is how they make most of their money). Many people outside of Search don’t know that Google makes almost all of its money from search advertising. It’s 96%+ of its revenue. Facebook also makes most of its money via advertising, although at this stage, it’s a much smaller piece of the pie (for now).

Organic and Paid +1’s

When you +1 a page in the Google search results, the button will activate and show to your social connections. It can also show to people who aren’t part of your social connections, but only as aggregated data. For example, you might see “95 other people +1’d this page”.

Here is a screenshot showing what a +1 looks like in the organic listings:

But, this isn’t just possible for organic listings. Paid Search ads in Google can also be +1’d. More on this below, but +1’s can show up in AdWords ads when someone clicks the +1 button next to the ad, or when that page has been +1’d in the organic results. There’s an important piece to what I just explained…

If someone +1’s a page in the organic listing, and that’s the page you are using as your SEM landing page, then +1’s can show up in the ad as well.

SEM and Landing Pages

If you work heavily in Paid Search, then you probably know how powerful landing pages can be. I’m not talking about the standard webpages on a website where some marketers drop visitors. I’m referring to strategically-crafted landing pages, based on visitor intent. Visitor intent is determined by the customer segments you are targeting. Your SEM landing pages might look much different than a typically webpage, even one holding similar content. For example, you might provide stronger calls to action, rearrange content, limit navigation, etc. Remember, your goal in SEM is to convert at the highest level, since you are paying for every visitor.

In addition, dedicated SEM landing pages enable you to use split testing or multivariate testing to increase conversion. You know the traffic source, the visitor segment, etc. and you can easily limit the variables impacting your test. This is part of the reason landing pages can be so powerful. But, since SEM landing pages can contain very similar content to your organic pages, many marketers block the search engines from crawling and indexing those pages. Note, they don’t block Adsbot-Google from crawling landing pages (due to the possible impact on Quality Score), but Googlebot is blocked from indexing and caching the landing pages.

The Problem for Paid Search Marketers

Jumping back to +1’s for a second, remember that +1’s can show up in your ads when someone +1’d the ad or the landing page in the organic results. If your SEM landing pages are not being crawled or indexed, then they won’t show up in the organic results. If they don’t show up in the organic results, they can’t be +1’d. If they can’t be +1’d, then those potential +1’s can’t show up in your ads. That’s right, you might be penalized by using an advanced SEM strategy… campaign landing pages.

What About the Canonical URL Tag?

Some marketers might be using the canonical URL tag in their SEM landing pages and point back to a page on their standard site that has similar content. Until this can be tested with +1, it’s hard to say how Google will apply +1’s in ads when the canonical URL tag is being used. In theory, Google should apply landing page +1’s to the canonical URL being specified in the tag. But will +1’s at the canonical URL apply back to the landing page you are using in SEM? It shouldn’t, which would still mean problems for +1’s in your ads.

But What About +1’ing Ads?

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think many people are going to start +1’ing traditional ads in AdWords. The logistics don’t even make sense. How will you know that you like the content if you are just reading the ad? You won’t. So then you’ll probably click through to a landing page (which might not indexed by Google) and you can’t +1 it (at least yet). Google will be adding +1 buttons for pages, but it’s not available yet. In addition, I’m not sure how many people are going to legitimately +1 a marketing landing page… For example, many marketing landing pages are not equivalent to a thoroughly-written how-to piece (even though it could be). More on that below.

Will Advertisers Run Ads for Organic Content?

My previous point brings up a good question. If +1’s are going to impact organic rankings (which Google said they very well could), then will advertisers try and gain more +1’s by running ads to that content. They might not be interested in the immediate conversion from that content, but the additional +1’s could possibly help the rankings of those pages. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that this will happen if +1’s impact organic rankings. That’s unless Google adapts and flags +1’s via paid advertising versus +1’s via organic search (or other sources). Yes, this gets complex, like many other things in organic search. :)

Will Advertisers Be Punished for Using Landing Pages?

I’m confident some very smart people at Google are thinking about the paid search impact, and if advertisers will be penalized for using campaign landing pages. Most people in SEM understand that landing page testing is important. Google even has its own product to help you with multivariate and split testing (Google Website Optimizer). You would hope that Google will ensure that +1’s can help your ads, even if you are using SEM landing pages. If not, you might see some paid search marketers revert to just dropping SEM visitors on their homepage or major category pages. Then +1’s can help both organic results and paid search ads (I guess). It seems click-through rate (CTR) might be higher due to +1’s showing up in the ads, but conversion could be lower (since it’s not the most targeted content for the visitor).

In closing, this important step forward for Google Social could end up being a step backwards for AdWords advertisers. That just doesn’t seem right. Let’s hope it gets addressed soon.

Does Facebook Hurt Relationships? [INFOGRAPHIC]

2011-06-01T11:28:00.000+10:00

13 More Tools for Testing the Performance of Your Blog

2011-05-31T19:13:00.000+10:00

Body Builders train and "test" to the extreme. If we only did a fraction of that for our blogs...

Developing great blog content is as much the actual content as the way in which it is delivered. I’ve spoken multiple times about this but it’s worth repeating: The speed of your blog impacts your search engine ranking and your user experience!

In fact, I mention this briefly in the first post of the Blog Content Series as one of the often-overlooked elements of your content strategy!

In addition, I’ve already shared 5 sites that help you test a web host as well as 10 sites to test site speed, page load, and caching but I wanted to share my entire list of “blog performance” resources that I use to test a blog so that you have everything that I have when doing diagnostic tests and such.

So here are 13 more tools for testing your blog so that you can optimize your blog to the max! Be certain that some of these are a bit more “nerdy” than the one’s previously mentioned; in other words, you might need a bit more technical knowledge to use them well.

Oh, and yes, I did in fact just say “to the max”.

1. Fiddler Debugging Tool

Fiddler is a browser-based HTTP debugging tool which enables you to analyze both incoming and outgoing traffic to your blog.

2. Cuzillion

Cuzillion helps you analyze how pages on your blog and the components can interact with each other. If you’ve got custom templates for your blog this can be especially helpful. The author is the same guy who created YSlow!

3. Httpperf by HP

httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance.

4. IBM Page Detailer

IBM Page Detailer is a graphical tool that enables web content providers to rapidly and accurately measure client side performance of web pages. Neato.

5. Monitor Us

Mon.itor.us offers elegant, all-in-one web server monitoring as a service for sysadmins, webmasters, bloggers, individuals and small busness owners.

6. PushtoTest – Test Maker

PushToTest Test Maker is a free tool to test your blogs scalability and performance.

7. Pylot Performance Tool

Pylot is a free, open-source performance and testing tool for your blog.

8. Wbox HTTP Testing

WBOX is a free HTTP testing tool. Analyze your server’s file compression capabilities.

9. Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer is a super-simple web-based performance tool.

10. Site Perf

Another simple tool to test load speed, Site Perf simulates natural browsing behavior and provides you the results.

11. JMeter – Apache Testing

JMeter allows you to test an Apache web hosting setup.

12. The Grinder

The Grinder is a java load testing framework tool. It helps you create automated tests for you as well.

13. Open Web Load

Open Web Load is an open-source load testing web app.

Finally, as I mentioned in the beginning, here are two other posts that cover performance-related tools and testing that you might want to check out:

10 Sites to Test Your Blog’s Performance (Page Speed, Caching, Server)

5 Sites That Analyze and Test Web Hosting Services and Providers

[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Image from sgroi.]

13 More Tools for Testing the Performance of Your Blog

2011-05-31T19:12:00.000+10:00

Body Builders train and "test" to the extreme. If we only did a fraction of that for our blogs...

In fact, I mention this briefly in the first post of the Blog Content Series as one of the often-overlooked elements of your content strategy!

Oh, and yes, I did in fact just say “to the max”.

1. Fiddler Debugging Tool

Fiddler is a browser-based HTTP debugging tool which enables you to analyze both incoming and outgoing traffic to your blog.

2. Cuzillion

3. Httpperf by HP

httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance.

4. IBM Page Detailer

IBM Page Detailer is a graphical tool that enables web content providers to rapidly and accurately measure client side performance of web pages. Neato.

5. Monitor Us

Mon.itor.us offers elegant, all-in-one web server monitoring as a service for sysadmins, webmasters, bloggers, individuals and small busness owners.

6. PushtoTest – Test Maker

PushToTest Test Maker is a free tool to test your blogs scalability and performance.

7. Pylot Performance Tool

Pylot is a free, open-source performance and testing tool for your blog.

8. Wbox HTTP Testing

WBOX is a free HTTP testing tool. Analyze your server’s file compression capabilities.

9. Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer is a super-simple web-based performance tool.

10. Site Perf

Another simple tool to test load speed, Site Perf simulates natural browsing behavior and provides you the results.

11. JMeter – Apache Testing

JMeter allows you to test an Apache web hosting setup.

12. The Grinder

The Grinder is a java load testing framework tool. It helps you create automated tests for you as well.

13. Open Web Load

Open Web Load is an open-source load testing web app.

Finally, as I mentioned in the beginning, here are two other posts that cover performance-related tools and testing that you might want to check out:

10 Sites to Test Your Blog’s Performance (Page Speed, Caching, Server)

5 Sites That Analyze and Test Web Hosting Services and Providers

[This is part of the Developing Great Blog Content Series. Image from sgroi.]

Search marketing stats round up

2011-05-31T00:22:00.000+10:00

Here's a selection of recent search stats, taken from a range of sources, including UK Search Engine Benchmarking report, the Internet Statistics Compendium, and others.

Topics covered include mobile search, SEO budgets, overall market size, Google's organic CTR, and user behaviour...

Mobile search (Performics and ROI)

According to a Performics study, people used mobile search at home in the evening (81%) followed by at home on weekends (80%), and at work (61%).

66% use mobile search when watching TV, something which should get advertisers thinking, while 61% said they use it at work.

71% use mobile search to find information about a product or service having seen an ad, 68% use it to find the best price for a product.

Mobile search advertising (Efficient Frontier)

Recent stats from Efficient Frontier found that, on average, mobile CTR is 2.7 times as much as desktop CTR, though this varies between sectors. It can be as much as five times desktop CTR.

Cost per click from mobile search advertising is lower, at 60% of desktop CPC on average.

According to our recent Search Engine Benchmarking report, the proportion of companies using mobile search doubled from 8% in last year's report to 16% this year.

User search behaviour (Performics)

88% of respondents will click on a result that has the exact phrase they searched for, while 89% said that they will alter their search query if they don’t find the results they’re looking for.

89% will ultimately change search engines if they don’t find the results they’re looking for. 79% will go through multiple pages of results, if their query isn’t answered in the first page

53% of respondents said they're more likely to click on a listing if it includes and image, and 48% said that they click on a company or brand if they appear multiple times in the SERPs.

26% said they were more likely to click on a search result if it included a video.

Multilingual search (Econsultancy / Guava UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2011)

Only 9% of companies are currently using multilingual paid search or SEO campaigns. The majority of companies (75%) have no plans to run these types of campaigns.

The majority of companies (69%) have no plans to run multi-territory paid search or SEO campaigns through their agency, while only 13% are currently running multi-territory campaigns.

SEO budgets (Econsultancy)

52% of companies carry out SEO entirely in-house, while 17% use an agency exclusively. Some 29% report they use both an agency and in-house resources for SEO.

On average, 22% of marketing budgets are spent on search engine marketing.

Just over a third of companies (35%) are spending £5,000 or less on SEO per year, while some 65% are spending more than £5,000 on SEO each year.

US search market size (Econsultancy / SEMPO State of Search Marketing Report 2011)

The value of the North American search market rose to $16.6bn in 2010, and is predicted to reach $19.3bn in 2011:

More than half of client-side respondents to the survey (54%) plan to spend more on SEO this year. On average, respondents expect to increase their SEO spend by 43%, which would bring overall SEO spending close to $3bn.

Companies are also expecting to spend 31% more on PPC, and while that is less than last year’s expected increase (37%), the overall trend is still upward.

UK search market size (Econsultancy SEO Agencies Buyer's Guide 2011)

During 2010, we estimated that the natural search marketing industry in the UK grew by 16%, reaching a value of £436m, up from £376m in 2009.

This represents approximately 12% of the value of the total UK search engine marketing sector last year, which Econsultancy estimates to have been worth £3.63bn. The paid search marketplace in 2010 has been valued at £3.19bn.

Google's organic CTR (Optify)

The average CTR for the top three positions in Google's SERPs are 36.4%, 12.5% and 9.5% respectively.

A listing above the fold on page one of Google produces an average CTR of 19.5% and being on page one produces an average of 8.9%.

The second page has value, but far less (a 1.5% CTR), although the first position on page two produces a slightly higher click through rate than the last position on page one.

How To Succeed At Facebook Advertising

2011-05-28T17:58:00.000+10:00

Gordmans opened two new stores in Minneapolis and promoted them with several Facebook campaigns, working with BlitzLocal.com.

They created two different types of campaigns: one advertising an event, and another advertising a tab. Both were targeted at the city level. Because the scope was so narrow, tests included adding the city name as part of the ad image itself. Overall though, these ads definitely helped in garnering more visitors.

Highly Engaged Content Equals Positive Fan Growth

The creative refresh demand of social requires you to be able to iterate much quicker, to refresh your content and creative much more quickly than other types of online marketing. Gordmans knew they needed to rotate ads to keep them fresh. Facebook ads are typically served to the same users multiple times, often in the same day, so they quickly tune-out repeat ads.

Gordmans also used the Webtrends Apps platform to develop fresh and engaging applications rewarding customers for engaging through fans-only promotions.

While apps have about a 10-to-14 day shelf life before people start to drop off in interaction, ads have around three-to-five days before you see a dramatic drop off. But because Gordmans’ wall postings resonated well with the brand, only five percent of fans have unsubscribed from the page.

Geo-Targeting Works

The average human attention span is about 30 seconds. In fact, successful Facebook advertisers try to relate images to their audience, for example by serving an image of a local landmark or in Gordmans case including the city name is another way to garner more attention.

By injecting the city name in the ad image in conjunction with the geo-targeting, the ads were more appealing and relevant.

Gordmans found that geo-targeted ads with the city name on the ad image performed better than the ads without it. With geo-targeted ads that offered fans the opportunity to check in and claim deals, Gordmans was able to drive customers to their brick and mortar stores.

More Earned Media At A Cheaper Rate

By measuring the number of impressions the Facebook page generated over time, then estimating a $5 cost per impression, we can determine the earned media value of the brand.

Earned media represents impressions generated for free, from efforts outside of the traditional ad spend, which includes viral and word-of-mouth publicity such as likes and shares.

This type of exposure has a high quality because it leverages the trust of friends. With over 38 million impressions over a period of 79 days, at the aforementioned $5 CPM, we get $190,000 earned media value for that time period, which represents how much ad spend would have been required to achieve the same number of impressions via paid media.

Extended out over a year’s time, the value is $879,000 per year, or $4.5 million in perpetuity, assuming we’ve applied a 20 percent discount rate to the projection of earned media over time.

What’s Next?

Now in the works is a new Facebook places strategy— to drive check-ins, shares, and coupons.

Gordmans has had a lot of success in running Google Adwords campaigns with a focus on letting users redeem coupons. Running similar campaigns on Facebook will reinforce the Google campaigns, and with Facebook’s social twist tied into the coupon redemption strategy, they expect to see excellent results.

Veronica Stecker, is marketing and social media planner at Gordmans. Dennis Yu is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal.com.

What Works on Tumblr

2011-05-10T17:17:00.000+10:00

The biggest misconception when it comes to Tumblr is that it’s just another blog platform and good content is good content. Brands on Tumblr have yet to catch up to what “the kids” are doing. There are Tumblrs with tens of thousands of followers. People who sit by their computers just waiting to reblog the next thing posted. In a world where trends last for only a day top, the circulation of this content from within the communities is never-ending. Popular Tumblr accounts have a lot of things in common.

A lot of the content may seem very young, and it is. Over 37% of traffic comes from people ages 18-34. (Naturally there are geeky tumblrs too). This is the perfect platform for brands who might want to share quick, light hearted content that is easy to consume. Some small clothing brands are using Tumblr for a branding initiative. Other brands are using it as a way for loyal consumers to see a little closer into their world, creating a unique brand experience. We have seen many different ways that brands are using Tumblr for their business, but maybe the reason it doesn’t CLICK with users is because brands treat their Tumblr account like a blog.

Listen up brands, because here is what works on Tumblr.

1. Re-blogging Popular Content

A great way to find popular content and topics is by looking through the Explore section of Tumblr. This will show you where the popular kids hang out and how they got there. Taking content from these top users and reblogging it with a comment is sort of like drawing a mustache on your index finger…..Everyone is doing it. If you are a brand or just a user on Tumblr, it would be a goal to end up on this list.

2. Asking & Answering Questions on Followers Tumblogs

One of the biggest differences between Tumblr and blog platforms in general, is that Tumblr is a true social networking community. More often than not, the amount of followers one has is a direct result of how much effort and activity is going in. Having a growing list of people who you follow gives you an ample amount of content to reblog, and users to ask questions. Many users post their questions / answers live on their Tumblr. This exposes both the brand / user relationship. This can be a great idea to let the community know about excellent customer service. (This sounds awfully familiar to Twitter)

The reblogging process can be broken down into 4 Steps. Here is a lesson from popular Tumblr user, Rachel.

a. Search through your followers on your dashboard for the best content to be reblogged.

b. Reblog what is most relevant to you or your brand, with commentary of your own.

c. Watch the engagement between what you posted, your followers, and the original users followers.

d. Thank the community.

3. Participating in Tumblr trends

Creating fun / artistic gifs. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/gif

Mobile images – This shows a human side and what the user is currently doing or interested in.

Images of baby animals being cute.

Posting pictures of what you ate or beautiful pictures of food.

Creating original stick figures or “Forever Alone” cartoons.

4. Using Popular Tags

Pay close attention to the tags underneath the posts of the people you follow. Many people tend to over use tags in their posts because they want to target a certain audience. The way to follow content that you might be interested in as a user is to type a tag into the top right corner and click “Track this tag“. Discovering what tags are popular and most commonly used will help to get content to show up on lists people are tracking. By using many tags, there is a greater chance of showing up on these lists and exposing your Tumblr to new sets of eyes.

While brands are slowly but surely catching on, the everyday Tumblr audience is not biting the bait. The immediate professional conclusion that comes to my mind, is that the brand has not fully integrated into a user on Tumblr. This reminds me of when brands on Twitter would not take the “persona” route and be very cautious of what they would tweet, when, how often, etc. As time went on, brands would soon develop themselves as personas on Twitter, giving users a way to interact and engage with the brand on the social network on a social level. It is totally normal for a brand to be cautious and stick its toe in the water to test the temperature, but it becomes inevitable to adjust to a social level in a social environment. More brands will engage and join Tumblr on a social level, and what works will work for brands and users alike.

Are you on Tumblr? Well then follow BlueGlass here!

* Top photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smoy/

Fat Pandas and Thin Content

2011-05-05T18:28:00.000+10:00

If you’ve been hit by the Panda update or are just worried about its implications, you’ve probably read a lot about “thin” content. We spend our whole lives trying to get thin, and now Google suddenly hates us for it. Is the Panda update an attempt to make us all look like Pandas? Does Google like a little junk in the trunk?

It’s confusing and it's frustrating, especially if you have real money on the line. It doesn’t help that “thin” content has come to mean a lot of things, and not every definition has the same solution. To try to unravel this mess, I'm going to present 7 specific definitions of “thin” content and what you can do to fatten them up.

Quality: A Machine’s View

To make matters worse, “thin” tends to get equated with “quality” – if you’ve got thin content, just increase your quality. It sounds good, on the surface, but ultimately Google’s view of quality is defined by algorithms. They can’t measure the persuasiveness of your copy or the manufacturing standards behind your products. So, I’m going to focus on what Google can measure, specifically, and how they might define “thin” content from a machine’s perspective.

1. True Duplicates (Internal)

True, internal duplicates are simply copies of your own pages that make it into the search index, almost always a results of multiple URLs that lead to the same content. In Google’s eyes, every URL is a unique entity, and every copy makes your content thinner:

A few duplicates here and there won’t hurt you, and Google is able to filter them out, but when you reach the scale of an e-commerce site and have 100s or 1000s of duplicates, Google’s “let us handle it” mantra fails miserably, in my experience. Although duplicates alone aren’t what the Panda update was meant to address, these duplicates can exacerbate every other thin content issue.

The Solution

Get rid of them, plain and simple. True duplicates should be canonicalized, usually with a 301-redirect or the canonical tag. Paths to duplicate URLs may need to be cut, too. Telling Google that one URL is canonical only to link to 5 versions on your own site will only prolong your problems.

2. True Duplicates (Cross-site)

Google is becoming increasingly aggressive about cross-site duplicates, which may differ by their wrapper but are otherwise the exact same pieces of content across more than one domain:

Too many people assume that this is all an issue of legitimacy or legality – scrapers are bad, but syndication and authorized duplication are fine. Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t really care. The same content across multiple sites is SERP noise, and Google will try to filter it out.

The Solution

Here’s where things start to get tougher. If you own all of the properties or control the syndication, then a cross-domain canonical tag is a good bet. Choose which version is the source, or Google may choose for you. If you’re being scraped and the scrapers are outranking you, you may have to build your authority or file a DMCA takedown. If you’re a scraper and Panda knocked you off the SERPs, then go Panda.

3. Near Duplicates (Internal)

Within your own site, “near” duplicates are just that – pages which vary by only a small amount of content, such as a couple of lines of text:

A common example is when you take a page of content and spin it off across 100s of cities or topics, changing up the header and a few strategic keywords. In the old days, the worst that could happen is that these pages would be ignored. Post-Panda, you risk much more severe consequences, especially if those pages make up a large percentage of your overall content.

Another common scenario is deep product pages that only vary by a small piece of information, such as the color of the product or the size. Take a T-shirt site, for example – any given style could come in dozens of combinations of gender, color, and size. These pages are completely legitimate, from a user perspective, but once they multiple into the 1000s, they may look like low-value content to Google.

The Solution

Unfortunately, this is a case where you might have to bite the bullet and block these pages (such as with META NOINDEX). For the second scenario, I think that can be a decent bet. You might be better off focusing your ranking power on one product page for the T-shirt instead of every single variation. In the geo-keyword example, it’s a bit tougher, since you built those pages specifically to rank. If you’re facing large-scale filtering or devaluation, though, blocking those pages is better than the alternative. You may want to focus on just the most valuable pages and prune those near duplicates down to a few dozen instead of a few thousand. Alternatively, you’ve got to find a way to add content value, beyond just a few swapped-out keywords.

4. Near Duplicates (Cross-site)

You can also have near duplicates across sites. A common example is a partnered reseller who taps into their customers’ databases to pull product descriptions. Add multiple partners, plus the original manufacturer’s site, and you end up with something like this:

While the sites differ in their wrappers and some of their secondary content, they all share the same core product description (in red). Unfortunately, it’s also probably the most important part of the page, and the manufacturer will naturally have a ranking advantage.

The Solution

There’s only one viable long-term solution here – if you want to rank, you’ve got to build out unique content to support the borrowed content. It doesn’t always take a lot, and there are creative ways to generate content cost-effectively (like user-generated content). Consider the product page below:

The red text is the same, but here I’ve supplemented it with 2 unique bits of copy: (1) a brief editorial description, and (2) user reviews. Even a unique 1-2 sentence lead-off editorial that’s unique to your site can make a difference, and UGC is free (although it does take time to build).

Of course, the typical argument is “I don’t have the time or money to create that much unique content.” This isn’t something you have to do all at once – pick the top 5-10% of your best sellers and start there. Give your best products some unique content and see what happens.

5. Low Unique Ratio

This scenario is similar to internal near-duplicates (#3), but I’m separating it out because I find it manifests in a different way on a different set of sites. Instead of repeating body content, sites with a low ratio of unique content end up with too much structure and too little copy:

This could be a result of excessive navigation, mega-footers, repeated images or dynamic content – essentially, anything that’s being used on every page that isn’t body copy.

The Solution

Like internal near-duplicates, you’ve got to buckle down and either beef up your unique content or consider culling some of these pages. If your pages are 95% structure with 1-2 sentences of unique information, you really have to ask yourself what value they provide.

6. High Ad Ratio

You’ve all seen this site, jam-packed with banners ads of all sizes and AdSense up and down both sides (and probably at the top and bottom):

Of course, not coincidentally, you’ve also got a low amount of unique content in play, but Google can take an especially dim view of loading up on ads with nothing to back it up.

So, how much is too much? Last year, an affiliate marketer posted a very interesting conversation with an AdWords rep. Although this doesn’t technically reveal anything about the organic algorithm, it does tell us something about Google’s capabilities and standards. The rep claims that Google views a quality page as having at least 30% unique content, and it can only have as much space devoted to ads as it does to unique content. More importantly, it strongly suggests that Google can algorithmically measure both content ratio (#5) and ad ratio.

The Solution

You’ve got to scale back, or you’ve got to build up your content. Testing is very important here. Odds are good that, if your site is jammed with ads, some of those ads aren’t getting much attention. Collect the data, find out which ones, and cut them out. You might very well find that you not only improve your SEO, but you also improve the CTR on your remaining ads.

7. Search within Search

Most large (and even medium-sized) sites, especially e-commerce sites, have pages and pages of internal search results, many reachable by links (categories, alphabetical, tags, etc.):

Google has often taken a dim view of internal search results (sometimes called “search within search”, although that term has also been applied to Google’s direct internal search boxes). Essentially, they don’t want people to jump from their search results to yours – they want search users to reach specific, actionable information.

While Google certainly has their own self-interest in mind in some of these cases, it’s true that internal search can create tons of near duplicates, once you tie in filters, sorts, and pagination. It’s also arguable that these pages create a poor search experience for Google users.

The Solution

This can be a tricky situation. On the one hand, if you have clear conceptual duplicates, like search sorts, you should consider blocking or NOINDEXing them. Having the ascending and descending version of a search page in the Google index is almost always low value. Likewise, filters and tags can often create low-value paths to near duplicates.

Search pagination is a difficult issue and beyond the scope of this post, although I’m often in favor of NOINDEXing pages 2+ of search results. They tend to convert poorly and often look like duplicates.

A Few Words of Caution

Any change that would massively reduce your search index is something that has to be considered and implemented carefully. While I believe that thin content is an SEO disadvantage and that Google will continue to frown on it, I should also note that not all of these scenarios are necessarily reflected in the Panda update. These issues do reflect longer-standing Google biases and may exacerbate Panda-related problems.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen very few success stories of Panda recovery at this stage, but I strongly believe that addressing thin content, increasing uniqueness, and removing your lowest value pages from the index can have a very positive impact on SEO. I’d also bet good money that, while the Panda algorithm changes may be adjusted and fine-tuned, Google’s attitude toward thin content is here to stay. Better to address content problems now than find yourself caught up in the next major update.

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14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project

2011-05-03T20:47:00.000+10:00

14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project: "

I was alerted to a post titled “Failed SEO – Who’s to Blame” recently and Julie Joyce asked for a comment response from the PPC perspective.

My comment started to get pretty long so I turned it into a blog post with questions you need answered before you start a new PPC project. But, most of these are applicable to any marketing initiative, including SEO.

1. Who is the decision maker for the client? Frequently you will work with numerous people that represent your client. They may all have valuable input but, you need to agree on which one is in charge. Who has the final say if a decision needs to be made? If you don’t determine this before moving forward, any answers you get to the following items may come into question if there is a problem down the road.

2. What are the fees and terms? You need to have a contract that outlines how much the client has agreed to pay and what they get in return. You also need to include a minimum time commitment to ensure that you have enough time to properly optimize the campaigns and try to meet the client’s goals.

3. What is the budget? The client’s budget is an integral part of the campaign development process. If you don’t know what the client’s budget is when you start, you may start developing a strategy for a budget that is not in line with reality. Without knowing the budget you really shouldn’t discuss any other facets of the campaign including which networks you’ll advertise on and what the goals are.

4. What is considered a conversion? Which type of conversion is most valuable? In most cases, it’s fairly easy to look at a website and understand what is considered a conversion. But, your client may have different goals for different products or services, may want more phone calls than emails or may not consider anything but an actual sale a conversion. You need to clearly define what will be considered a conversion, how conversions will be tracked (AdWords code, Analytics, etc.) and the value for each type of conversion in order to properly set up your campaigns and reporting. If your client doesn’t want phone calls, you wouldn’t want to use click to call ads. If your client doesn’t consider form submissions to be conversions, only actual sales, you may still want to track the form submissions but not count them in your CPL calculations.

5. At what point does getting a conversion become the client’s responsibility? You can send a significant amount of qualified traffic to a client’s website but if the landing page doesn’t convert (more on landing pages later) or if the leads are not handled properly, the campaigns won’t be successful. Even if you are meeting your cost per lead goals, the client may tell you that the leads aren’t turning into sales so the campaigns aren’t profitable. Before you begin advertising you will need to agree on what part of the process you are responsible for and what part the client is responsible for. You will need to agree on what a qualified lead is and you may need to review how they handle those leads so you can ensure that they are converting at a reasonable rate, giving the campaigns a better chance at succeeding.

6. What are the goals of the campaigns? Each client will have different goals but you should always set client expectations and have goals that you both agree on to measure the success of the campaigns. If your client can’t give you any guidance on goals or doesn’t know how much they can spend to get a lead or sale, you may not want to rely on them being around long term. You should be able to determine an acceptable CPA goal, number of leads, traffic level or other acceptable metric. This should be an attainable but aggressive goal to get the most out of the campaigns. The goals can be revisited at a later date if they are too lofty or too easy to attain. Yes, if the goals are too easy to attain you should revisit them. If you aren’t challenged by the project, it’s too easy and you may be doing your client a disservice by not trying for more.

7. What is the timeline for the campaign? Short term campaigns and long term campaigns are managed somewhat differently. If you only have 6 weeks you’re going to need to be much more aggressive with changes than you would be with a 6 month campaign. You may also choose not to use certain keywords on a short term campaign since they are keywords that are generally associated with a consumer in an earlier stage of their buying cycle.

8. Can the client withstand the initiation period where you may not meet their goals? At the launch of new campaigns, there is typically a period of time where you may not meet the goals you set. Optimization and finding the right mix of bids, keywords, ads and landing pages can take time. You need to make sure your client is prepared for this and that they can afford it.

9. Does the client have a creative resource? You need to determine upfront if your client has a designer they want to use for banners and landing pages. In some cases, you will use the client’s regular site for PPC landing pages. In many cases you won’t. You need to determine if they have someone available to design and build these landing pages or if they expect that will be included in your fees. You also need to make sure that you have access to the designer so you can steer the development of the pages and banners. If the designer has never designed a good PPC landing page, you’ll need to be very involved in the process to ensure your campaigns perform well. If the client doesn’t have a designer available, you’ll need to build this cost into your fee structure. Make sure you are very detailed about what those fees will cover (10 banners and 4 landing pages with two rounds of revisions for example).

10. Does the client need to approve the ad text or the keywords you choose? In some cases, it is necessary for clients to review and approve the ad text and keywords you use. This is very common in highly regulated industries and for large corporations that have brand guidelines. Make sure you know if the client is expecting to review and approve everything before you get too far into the process.

11. Is there anything you can’t or shouldn’t do with the campaigns? Some clients may have restrictions regarding where and how they can advertise. They may have specific websites where their ads cannot appear which you need to block from display network campaigns. They may not be able to ship their products into certain states for legal reasons. They may also already have a lot of intelligence about what has and hasn’t worked with other advertising. Asking for this intelligence upfront will save you and your client a lot of time and stress.

12. Who do they consider their competition? Through your research, you will find many of your client’s competitors but there may be competitors that are not advertising or that do not have a strong online presence. Asking your client who their competitors are will give you insight into your client’s mindset and may expose new keywords or advertising opportunities. You also need to ask if your client has any issues with advertising on their competitors’ brand keywords. It may seem natural to you to have a competition campaign but your client may have agreements with competitors to not advertise on each others’ brands (yes, it happens), may have legal restrictions or may just not feel comfortable with it (not matter how much money it could make them).

13. Is the client comfortable letting go and allowing you to be the expert? It can be hard for some clients to allow other people to make decisions that will affect their bottom line. You need to understand that your client is the expert in their business, and therefore has valuable information to provide to you. But, you also need to make sure that you have the freedom to properly manage the ad campaigns and that your client won’t also make changes in the campaigns which could affect the outcome of your optimization efforts. If you sense that a client will be uncomfortable if they are not able to be hands-on with the campaigns you will need to discuss this with them candidly. If you discuss it and still feel that they won’t be able to let go of control, the success of the campaigns could be at risk.

14. What are your client’s expectations for reporting and communication? Some clients are very hands-off and are happy with a monthly progress report. Others need weekly or even daily contact to feel like there is progress being made. You should agree on how frequently you will provide progress reports and how other communication will be handled. It’s generally a good idea to also discuss the best method of communication. Does your client only check their email once a week? Email may not be the best way to contact them. Do you only answer your phone when you have to (me)? It may be good to let your client know that you may not be available by phone regularly so they don’t think you’re ignoring their calls.

Official Google Australia Blog: Google Shopping arrives in Australia

2011-05-03T19:05:00.000+10:00

Official Google Australia Blog: Google Shopping arrives in Australia

7 NEW Tips for Running a Twitter Giveaway

2011-04-26T00:29:00.000+10:00

I've written before about running competitions for link building, but given the increasingly important role of Twitter in online marketing and SEO, it's time to address a popular mechanic: Twitter competitions.

Historically, there were two particular reasons to run competitions through Twitter: firstly to increase the number of followers (and hence, the influence) of a Twitter account. The other important reason was usually branding: a competition that successfully 'goes viral' would introduce the brand and the website to huge numbers of new people.

However, now that social media data is used by search engines and appears to have some influence in their rankings, sites like Twitter are no longer just an adjunct to search marketing - but must be a part of SEO strategy.

Various posts abound with guidance for running a competition on the site, including from Mashable and Social Mouths. These focus mainly on the 'older reasons' for running a competition, but the workflow is still similar: define the prize, the start & end dates and - crucially - the entry mechanism.

The method of entering might be one of:

following a particular account
mentioning the account name in a tweet
using a particular hashtag in a tweet
retweeting a whole message

At the most basic level, if we're actually going to get any SEO value from the competition, then we need the entrants to include a link to a particular page on the site, which leads us to:

Tip 1: People should link to the site from their tweet as a way of entering the competition.

Great, now we're getting on Google's radar with some social links to our site. You could implement this by giving people an exact tweet to copy and paste, but the requirements could be as simple as having to mention the company twitter account and a given URL in your tweet to be entered.

Links to the site are good, but if this competition is going to generate a real rankings bump for the linked page, then it makes sense to put this weight behind a real landing page. This could be done by tying the giveaway into a particular product or category from the site, then putting the promotion instructions on that product landing page, and making *that* the page that people should link to in their tweets.

Tip 2: A landing page from the site should also carry the competition information, and be the page that entrants link to.

After the competition has ended, this page will have the benefit of any weblinks / social links generated during the competition. (In addition, doing this keeps you white hat and above board - in contrast to the 'bait and switch' pulled by some sites who run a competition or publish link bait on a URL which is later 301ed to a commercial landing page - leaving lots of sites unwittingly linking to pages that they never intended to.)

You can see this tactic in use at the moment by Food Service Warehouse, they're running a bar supplies competition, right there on the related category page.

On a related note: if you're getting hundreds of people to link to a page for you, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of getting targetted anchor text as well. One way to do this is to make sure that the competition has a name that you'll be happy with people using to link to it

In an old post about getting domain diversity and good anchor text, I made two recommendations that could be useful here: firstly give the competition a name that will benefit you when people link to the competion.

These giveaways from Nordstrom were branded diferently - the second giveaway in the list received richer anchor text from links than the one show above.

A second suggestion - which is particularly relevant to running a promotion on Twitter - is to take advantage of using a short URL with keywords in it. For example, the competition above could have used http://bit.ly/bartending-set instead, to get some keyword rich links.

Tip 3: Get good anchor text by using a relevant name for the promotion, and using keyword-rich short URLs.

When it comes to promoting the sweepstake, the first people to reach out to are Twitter users that are interested in the type of prize that you're giving away.

Tip 4: Search for relevant Twitter users, to tell them about the promotion.

You can search for people by interest on Twitter - type a phrase into search, then click on the 'People' tab. For example: people on Twitter with an interest in 'home brewing'.

Alternatively, FollowerWonk is a third-party service that does a brilliant job of mining Twitter user data to find appropriate people to talk to.

FollowerWonk's list of users interested in 'home brewing'

NB: if you're logged into FollowerWonk with the account you're promoting, it'll also tell you which of the listed users already follow you.

There are various resources that go into depth about doing outreach via Twitter. It's unnecessary for me to cover that again now, suffice to say: please don't be a spammer! You're running these promtions to help your brand and SEO; this is no time to ruin the company's reputation.

Beyond doing outreach to relevant Twitter users, it's also appropriate to do regular link building, and traditional online outreach to appropriate webmasters / bloggers. This step shouldn't be overlooked, as promoting a good giveaway should be easier and more effective than trying to get links to any kind of commercial content. Which leads us to:

Tip 5: Just because the sweepstake relies on Twitter as a mechanic, you can still do traditional link building.

The sweepstake niche also has a lot of dedicated directories and listing services that you can submit to. These might be good for SEO, but are usually excellent at sending large numbers of people who can enter the competition (and in the process, promote the Twitter account and create social links to the site.)

As well as the sites I listed on this post, sites like CompetitionHuter.com, SweepsAdvantage and Online-Sweepstakes are worth looking at. (The latter sent very healthy traffic to a competition we recently ran, when the giveaway was added to the site by a member.)

While all this is going on, you'll be able to see entrants mentioning the company account name in the @replies tab or Twitter's internal search. However, this information isn't easy to parse and will disappear relatively soon.

Tip 6: Monitor discussion of & entries to the giveaway while it's in process, and record this data for use later on.

It's worth using a service that will monitor and record all this on your behalf. Right now, Distilled is using Rowfeeder, and I'd definitely recommend it.

The service monitors Twitter for particular account names and hashtags, stores all those tweets for you, creates useful charts/graphs and (perhaps the simplest feature, but one that I really like) will dump all the information into a Google Docs spreadsheet for you, in real time.

Depending on how the promotion is run, this data might be useful while it's in progress - e.g.: to track the viral spread around the country / the world (since RowFeeder stores user location if it's available) - but it's worth storing the data to process after the event. In fact, that should probably be a tip as well:

Tip 7: After the promotion, analyze the people who entered or mentioned it on Twitter; look for any relationships that could be nurtured.

An example here would be to look for the most prominent users that entered, or any entrants who are particularly influential in their niche. It would be worth sending them a message (via Twitter, email or otherwise) to properly introduce yourself, and try to foster a relationship with them.

I expect we're about to see increased interest in Twitter competitions in the next few months (and the same could be said for Facebook promotions that are aimed at getting SEO benefit, though that's another post) - I hope these tips help you stay ahead of the pack and make sure you get as much SEO-bang-for-your-buck as possible.

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The Validation Era

2011-04-25T23:59:00.000+10:00

If there's a clear lesson that emerged out of the past decade, it's this: you can have too much of a good thing. Our excesses get corrected and sometimes in dramatic fashion. This too includes our current obsession with all things social. There are early signs that the social media boom is fraying at the edges and that we are entering a new age of intimacy.

Don't just take it from me. If you dig into media consumption patterns and, in particular, who the public considers an authority, you can see the signs. History is also your guide. Big shifts occur around every eight years.

Back during the Internet's first age, the Commercialization Era (1994 - 2002), only deep-pocketed corporations were able to establish themselves as authoritative sources. During this time big media companies and a handful of well-capitalized first movers, like Yahoo, became our trusted sources.

The dot-com crash and the glut bandwidth and storage, in part, created an environment that gave rise to social media and the Democratization Era. This age, which began in earnest in 2002, started with blogs, then branched out to include Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and, of course, Facebook. The end result is that anyone and everyone could command authority. Brands rushed in too as not to get left behind.

Now, however, we have a new challenge: people overload. This is leaving us gasping for quality.

Perhaps driven by peer pressure, the public - brands included - have been engaging in a friends arms race. Now there are signs that we know we overdid it. The result is that we are now entering a new age - The Validation Era.

Consider that according to a study conducted by GoodMobilePhones, people don't know 20 percent of their Facebook friends. Or that USA Today recently reported that social media users are 'grappling with overload.' Finally, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, my employer's annual tracking study, notes that experts are now far more trusted than peers and friends. This is a dramatic shift from 2006 when the opposite rang true.

In the Validation Era, intimacy is in and publicness may be out - or at least on the decline. Quality is the new black. What this means that both individuals and businesses will need to increasingly work harder to earn their way in and remain in our stakeholders' circle of trust.

One sure sign of this trend is entrepreneurs, who naturally, are among the first to spot opportunities.

During the last few months, a host of intimate social networks have started to attract attention from the public, the media and investors. Many are tied to texting. These emerging players include Path, Beluga (now part of Facebook), Instagram, GroupMe and others.

While it's still early and these services are still nascent, the fact that there's even a market for such networks indicates change is on the horizon. Recall that many of us could not see the true impact of the Democratization Era until the mid-2000s. Startups saw it first. Should this trend hold, and I believe it will, there are at least three potential implications.

First, companies that take a liberal approach to social media will benefit the most. The reason is that as workers personally forge more intimate connections, it will benefit their employers as well.

Second, in the Validation Era, expertise rules. Businesses that activate their domain-level experts to share their knowledge across several spheres of media, will likely to see their ideas penetrate more private networks, either first-hand or through pass-alongs.

Finally, given that intimate social networks do not offer the same reach as wider platforms like Facebook, some of them will potentially explore gently partnering with major brands. GroupMe, for example, recently rolled out several branded partners, including MTV.

Ultimately what this all means is that the ante to stand out is only going up. Many of the conversations that influence buying decisions will become invisible to us, after years of being out in the open. Pure-play advertising-centric campaigns that overlook the power of validated messages will simply be ignored - either by audiences directly or, worse, by algorithms. And social media will need to become one percent of 100 people's job, rather than just 100% of a one.

What do users want from iPhone apps?

2011-04-25T23:57:00.001+10:00

Broadly speaking, customers want apps with a purpose, and that reflect the values of the brand, according to a new benchmark study of iPhone apps.

The eDigital App Benchmark study looks at 46 iPhone apps, using 'mystery shopper' surveys. These include mobile commerce apps, travel apps, news and media and directory and guide apps.

The study provides some useful information about the kind of features users are looking for from apps...

News apps

News apps achieved the highest overall scores from users in the study:

What was good about these apps?

From news apps, users were looking for simple and easy to use navigation and up to date content, while video content was well liked by reviewers.

The Sky apps, which both feature in the top four, have plenty of video content, and the Sky Sports app was praised for its use of video and image to enhance the articles.

Drawbacks

Users disliked having to open up Safari to view articles in full, as was the case with the Yahoo app. It also means that they had to reopen the app after they had read something. Articles should be available to view within the app.

Another criticism was the lack of content on offer. Users want to see a broad range of articles across a number of topics.

There are some good news apps missing from this category though, such as those from the BBC, Guardian, and Telegraph.

Directory and information apps

These apps are potentially very useful for people on the move, but this turned out to be the lowest performing category.

What are people looking for from directory apps?

The reviewers appreciated features such as maps which plotted the positions of businesses and services they had searched for.

They also want shortcuts that make searches easier and reduce the amount of typing they need to do, such as using the iPhone's GPS to search for services near the user's current location.

Detailed information and descriptions of businesses and locations, along with user reviews helped people to make a decision.

What are the problems?

Slow loading times was a major issue for the mystery shoppers. The nature of directory and guide apps means that they are used when people are out and about, and this perhaps means they are more vulnerable to variable connection speeds.

Among the worst marks were for those that used the apps merely as a portal to mobile sites, which defeats the purpose of an app.

The RAC Traffic app was marked down for poor usability, difficulty searching for traffic updates by postcode or city, and the lack of traffic alerts.

Mobile commerce apps

What did users like about mobile commerce apps?

Customers were looking for a similar experience on apps to that on desktop e-commerce sites, meaning the same stock availability, product information, and the ability to make a purchase.

Mobile usability is crucial, and the best apps were praised for ease of navigation and good filtering functionality.

Not surprisingly, Amazon was the top rated retail app, and this is because it ticks most of these boxes. The product pages are detailed, and most items contain plenty of reviews, while it has an easy payment process. If you already have an account (and plenty of its customers do), then making a purchase is very quick.

People also like the barcode scanning features on some of these apps. Amazon's has this, as does the recently released Debenhams app.

Drawbacks of retail apps

The Sainsbury's app received the lowest score, and this is because people are not able to make a purchase, just view store details and offers.

As the report points out, people who have downloaded a retailer's app are more likely to be engaged with the brand, and not providing a route to purchase is a missed opportunity.

Other criticisms included limited stock, in the case of the House of Fraser Gift app, and a lack of product photos and information on the Interflora app.

Hotel apps

What did people like about these apps?

Booking.com was the top app here, thanks to an attractive design, good usability, and the ability to actually make a booking through the app.

Users want good information about hotels, including clear photos and customer ratings. These features help people make a decision about which hotel to use.

Geo location features which show nearby hotels on a map and provide directions were valued by users.

Where are these apps going wrong?

The lack of customer reviews and contextual information about the local area (things to see and do, restaurants etc) was a common criticism.

People also wanted to be able to make a booking through the app. One of the reasons that the Hotels app was marked down was that it directed users to an external website. It also didn't show availability.

To see more, download the App Benchmark study from eDigital Research (registration required).

How to use Google Analytics to find the best time to send emails

2011-04-25T23:57:00.000+10:00

In my experience, the day of the week and hour of the day at which marketing emails are sent is often based on little more than the gut feeling of the email marketer and the performance of previous emails, rather than real data.

As someone who could put the anal in analytics, I think that's a rather inexact science. Surely there's a more accurate way to figure out whether the assumption is really true?

There are clearly some days of the week and hours of the day that result in higher conversion rates than others. So theoretically, if you can get your email marketing to your customers' inboxes at the time they're most likely to convert, or just before, your efforts should result in better conversion rates and more revenue.

Fortunately, there is a better way to determine the optimum mailing time, rather than using gut instinct - you can do it via Google Analytics.

However, it's actually surprisingly challenging to pull this data out of GA.

In fact, it's currently not at all trivial, without resorting to some advanced segmentation and some ingenious interface hacks that allow you to use Analytics in a way in which Google never intended.

On the plus side, no coding is required. It can all be done via your browser.

Step 1: Create your segments

In order to find the time of the day at which your site's conversion rate is at its highest you'll need to create some advanced segments to separate transactions into time period segments.

You can make as many of these as you want, but for a reasonably accurate picture three or four ought to suffice. I went for morning (7am-12am), afternoon (12am-5pm) and out of hours (5pm-7am).

If you notice that the out of hours segment seems to provide particularly good conversion rates you may want to add an additional segment for the evening, splitting the day into quarters, giving you slightly more precision.

To create these advanced segments click Advanced Segments > All Visits > Create a new advanced segment. Then click Dimensions > Visitors > Hour of the day and drag the bar to the "dimension or metric" placeholder at the top. Click the "and" link and drag a second Hour of the day bar to the "dimension or metric" placeholder.

Enter the time periods into each field to segment the traffic up according to the time period. Or, to save yourself the time and effort, just click the links below and the segments will automatically be added to your Google Analytics account.

Time: Morning

Time: Afternoon

Time: Out of hours

Step 2: Finding the best time

Go to Advanced segments > All visits > Custom segments, then check each of the segments you just added or created, then click Apply.

Now click the Ecommerce button on the left hand navigation. At the top you should see the All visits conversion rate, and the three conversion rates for the time segments you just added. If one of them is better than the others, then that is when you should send your email.

Use the date widget to check different weeks, months or extend the length to cover a year or more, if you've got sufficient data, so you can double-check that the data you're observing is consistent.

Once you've identified your peak conversion rate time window, it's worth drilling-down a bit further, so go back to the advanced segments tool and create some extra segments for the time periods that fall within.

This will allow you to determine whether the highest conversion rates occur at 7-9am, 9-10am or 10am-12am. You'll want to time your mailing so that it covers all of the peak conversion rate times.

Step 3: Hack your browser

Given that we've just made advanced segments to visualise time periods with relative ease, you'd think it would be straightforward to do the same for days of the week. But you'd be wrong.

Finding the best day of the week is the particularly tricky bit! I scratched my head for quite a while on this one, and I don't think it's even currently possible to do this in GA at the moment - at least not without some browser witchcraft.

The current interface of Google Analytics doesn't allow you to compare data for specific days of the week to see which one provides the best historic conversion rate, because there's no dimension for it.

Weirdly, the day of the week dimension functionality does appear to exist within the GA software, but it appears not to be enabled.

However, it is possible to hack the GA interface to get at the dimensions Google doesn't provide in the current version, which allows you to analyse data in ways the average GA user wouldn't be able to do.

This sounds really complicated, but you can actually pull it off very easily using Firefox and a couple of browser plugins: Greasemonkey and Google Analytics Report Enhancer from ROI Revolution.

Simply install Greasemonkey, restart your browser then click this Google Analytics Report Enhancer link and Greasemonkey will install a browser hack. When you next visit the Google Analytics site you should see an additional logo next to the GA one at the top left.

Step 4: Finding the best day of the week

To find the day of the week that has the highest conversion rate, go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines, then click the Sources button in the first column of the table.
This will open a mega menu style drop down and you should see a link called "Day of the week" under "Custom variable keys". Click it, then click the Ecommerce tab.

You should now see a list of days of the week, along with the metrics for each one - including the all importance ecommerce conversion rate.
Pick the one with the highest conversion rate, or the one which spans a few days with high conversion rates.
Combine this with the hour of the day data from the earlier steps and you've now pinpointed the theoretical optimum time to send your email marketing.

Helpful tips

Create advanced segments for distinct time periods and drill-down where required in order to get greater precision.

Use Google Analytics Report Enhancer to add extra functionality to Google Analytics.

Determine the best time of day and day of the week based on the best e-commerce conversion rate for your site. Chances are, it will differ from site to site.

Check your data before acting upon it. Look at multiple months, just in case it's a seasonal effect.

Use GARE to check the best days of the month. Does conversion rate go up around pay day?

Do a split test on your email database to see if there's any improvement in its performance. If it works, and you can repeat the experiment successfully, go with it.

If you spot a pattern, also consider trying a similar thing with PPC ads. Bid up when conversion rates are high. Reduce bids when they're low.

How To Measure Facebook Page Engagement

2011-04-25T23:45:00.000+10:00

How To Measure Facebook Page Engagement: "

Are you trying to figure out how much your fans really like you or your brand? This guide outlines a few things you should never miss when monitoring your Facebook page performance.

Monitoring Active Users

While most companies pay attention to the number of fans as the greatest metric of success, measuring your active users is much more important. Fortunately, Facebook provides detailed information about daily, weekly, and monthly active users on your page. You can find this information in tFacebook’s insights area. While these numbers will differ from one page to the next, the most important thing is to strive to increase the number of active users you have.

The best way to accomplish this is to post regular high-quality updates that get users to post comments and likes.

Daily Story Feedback

While engagement numbers include the number of impressions you get on each post, your ultimate goal should be to boost likes and comments on each posting. Compelling content that drives people to respond to your posts is important to boosting your overall numbers. Ultimately, the more your fans engage with your content, the more people that will see it. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by asking questions which generate a significant response from your fans.

You can monitor all interactions on the main insights page as pictured below.

If you aren’t receiving comments or likes (relative to the size of your overall fan base), there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to see your post impressions drop. As such, comments and likes are the most important metrics to focus on.

Like Acquisition Channels

While the first thing you should focus on is increasing engagement among your existing fan base, you’ll want to also expand your reach. This comes through optimizing your various fan acquisition channels. Fortunately, Facebook provides detailed information about where your new fans are coming from. By visiting your insights area and then navigating to the area labeled “users,” you’ll be able to view the new likes sources chart (pictured below).

You should focus on two things: your largest sources and those sources with the greatest room for improvement. For our page, our blog is the greatest source of new fans. As such, we focus on optimizing the placement of likes around our website. For some pages, suggestions are the greatest source. For those pages, asking fans to refer their friends to your page can have significant results.

Monitor And Adjust

As you monitor your insights, you can make adjustments to the types of content you post over time. This can include the types of media (photos, videos, links/articles, status updates, etc), the time of day, and the frequency of posting. I highly recommend exporting this data to excel or another spreadsheet tool in order to track your performance over time. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free account with our AllFacebook Stats product which lets you track your page performance and your competitors’ page performance over time and export that data if necessary.

Do you have any questions or suggestions for other page administrators? Please post them in the comments section below!

How To Succeed At Facebook Page Marketing

2011-04-25T23:43:00.000+10:00

If you want your fans to see your posts and interact with them, and if you want your page to be a positive place that helps you get more business, this post is for you.

How you manage your Facebook page is critical! If you do it well, the benefits are:

Engagement: Greater interaction

Visibility: Facebook shows your posts to more of your fans

Free fans: You get more fans for free — one Fortune 1000 company combining good advertising and engagement tactics got more than half of their fans for free.

Testimonials: Your fans become so positive that they give spontaneous testimonials which convince fans who are still just prospects how great you are

Reputation protetction: Overwhelming positivity on a fan page wards off negative attacks from critics and provides volunteer defenders

But if you post haphazardly, with no plan and no best practices, the risks are:

Silence: Your posts are ignored

Invisibility: Fewer fans see your posts (as few as 20 percent)

Higher costs: Your fan acquisition cost can be doubled because you miss out on the word-of-mouth potential

Underlying this fan page marketing strategy is the fact that: Your Facebook page posts are unlikely to be seen by fans who never like or comment on your posts.

Have you ever thought, “Oh, hey I haven’t seen so-and-so on Facebook lately!” and you go to their page and there is plenty they’ve posted that you haven’t seen?

You haven’t interacted with them enough for Facebook to know you care. So you comment or like something they’ve posted, and next thing you know, you’re seeing them in your news feed again.

That’s EdgeRank. Like it or hate it, you need interaction to remain visible.

Arousing Fans’ Desire for What You Offer

Don’t forget that all Fan Page posting is in the “D” phase of the AIDA marketing process.

Your job as a Facebook page marketer is to stimulate discussion and arouse DESIRE so that people are more likely to take action and buy or become a lead. In Social Media, strong sales messages are turn offs, so you need to work harder on the DESIRE phase.

How To Get More Interaction On Facebook Pages

With that in mind, how can you increase fan interaction with your Facebook page?

Questions

Contests

Interesting Content

Formulas

Ask Questions

Keep it simple (I like to call Facebook Marketing “No-Brainer Marketing” because complexity blocks comprehension and responses) and ask them about the Dream.

What is the Dream? It’s what your product or service makes possible for them. It’s not just the “benefits” aspect of copywriting terminology, but how they’d like their life or business to be and that your offering helps make possible for them.

For example: if you’re in real estate, instead of just talking about houses, talk about living by the lake, or living on the ocean, or a great safe fun neighborhood for kids. You might then ask questions like:

What do you look for in a neighborhood for your kids?

Would you enjoy living on a lake? Why or why not?

Woohoo! Walking from my house to the beach with my boogie board! What would you do at the beach today if you lived on the Ocean?

Contests

I’m not a big fan of contests for fan building, because unless the contest is built to only attract relevant fans, you get a lot of untargeted prize-seekers who probably aren’t your real prospects.

Facebook ads are the best way to build fans. Our Facebook marketing students who get profits all have used Facebook ads to target only people who are good prospects for their offerings.

But if you want to excite your existing fans and arouse their desire for your product, why not give one away? The people who enter and don’t win have effectively told themselves they really want it. If they don’t win, they’re more likely to buy than they were before the contest.

Interesting Content

Your job on the Facebook page is to lead the conversation.

To stimulate people, you need conversation pieces. Just like people put interesting objects on a coffee table or in their home to stimulate discussion, you need to post videos, pictures, and ideas to get people talking. Just make sure it moves the conversation toward their Dream or the Sale.

Formulas

The formulas that work so well for fan base building also work in posts. For example:

Click like if you love this picture!

Someone told me about a great example (I would give attribution if I knew where it came from!) that gets both Likes and Comments:

Click like if you think Kobe will score 30 tonight. If not, why not?

Putting It All Together

If you want to become a better Facebook marketer and sell more of what you offer so that you can enjoy business more and live the life you’re dreaming of, follow my advice above and also share this article with all your friends on Facebook!

See what I did there? That’s what I’m talking about: Benefits —> Dream —> Action

Brian Carter is chief executive officer of FanReach Facebook Marketing Courses.

Server Headers 101 (Infographic)

2011-04-25T13:06:00.000+10:00

For newbies in the business of crafting websites, the purpose and technicality behind server header responses can often be a little mind baffling to get to grips with. Although there are essentially so much to learn, only a few are common and essential to web professionals and the average user.

So what is a server header response, anyway? Well, let’s shed some light on them by delving deep into the most common server header responses.

Click here to enlarge.

Infographic by SEOgadget, a boutique SEO agency and blog located in London and maintained by a small team of passionate tech geeks and search wizards.

About the Author

Oli Archibald is a search consultant and blog writer at SEOgadget. Follow them via Twitter as @SEOgadget for plenty of great articles on SEO, Excel, Microformats, and technology in general.

Using rewriteable URLs to help user experience and SEO

2011-04-25T13:03:00.000+10:00

It doesn’t take much to send a story viral on Twitter, but a
recent quirk in the URL system at The Independent saw a flurry of humorous web
links scattered across the Twittersphere.

I was first alerted to the incident when one of our leading
techies at dotCommerce, Stuart Gill, sent
me a link that was doing the rounds on Twitter, seemingly exposing an
entertaining URL on a story about Kate Middleton’s head
in The Independent.

Namely:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html

While it
initially looks as though a sub-editor at the paper has been neglectful, this
is actually an example of a little URL rewriting feature that is common to lots
of content management systems.

As long as you have the numbers at the end, you
can put anything into the URL and it will still work normally.

For
example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/why-we-are-cancelling-our-Guardian-subscription-2269573.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/dotdigital-group-wins-national-business-awards-and-all-the-oscars-2269573.html

Not just for
the URL of it

Laughs
aside, URL rewriting is something that we, and many other websites, use quite
frequently. Why is this? At the basic marketing level, it allows us to generate
memorable URLs for campaigns or print marketing.

But,
with database-powered ecommerce sites, things get more interesting and the
trick becomes a lot more useful.

Addresses
UnfURLed

Take
Go Native for example, a website offering serviced
apartments we developed. Pages on the site are constructed automatically based
on the contents of a central database. However, this means you end up with URLs
classics like this:

http://www.gonative.com/property_searching/property_information_page.aspx?propertyId=10494

This
is actually an information page for the Forbes
Building in Aberdeen (their ID is 10494).

But
it’s a really ugly URL, so we do some magic using rewrites to change it to the
much prettier address:

http://www.gonative.com/apartment/the-forbes-building/10494/.

Note
you can put any text in the URL you want, and it still works:

http://www.gonative.com/apartment/land-of-the-gods-with-a-double-en-suite/10494/

Behind the
Scenes

So
what’s going on here?

The
logic is built into the URL format so that, no matter what is in the text
field, it’s the number ID that is searched for.

So
when the machine sees http://www.gonative.com/apartment/$text$/$number$/, it takes a look at the
last bit of the URL and returns the following:

http://www.gonative.com/property_searching/property_information_page.aspx?propertyId=$number$

Naturally,
the same works in reverse to ensure that the more complex URL is shown in
simple, user-friendly terms.

What are the
advantages?

1. It looks professional and it’s reassuring to users to see that the
URL contains the name of whatever they were searching for.

2. Google does catalogue these pages if they become popular (as the Independent found) so there’s SEO value
here. If the name of the search is in the URL, this may help your rankings. It
also means you can keep the URLs even if you change your CMS – so you don’t
throw away all your SEO juice.

3. It can, in some circumstances, help to secure your site. If URLs
become less easy to guess by potential hackers

At the end
of the day we’ve all had our fun, but let’s not forget the valuable role this
function serves for marketers every single day.

Oh go on
then, one more:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/INSERT-SOMETHING-FUNNY-HERE
-2269573.html

The Future of Geolocation: What is Coming?

2011-04-23T16:22:00.000+10:00

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Other apps have been popping up as well, as geolocation takes center stage in the mobile arena and users flock to apps that create games from typical situations and offer rewards for users.

Two years later, check-ins are old news and the still-young area of geolocation is evolving to keep users interested. Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

Foursquare rewards users with badges for checking in.

Obviously the gaming aspect is a huge draw, as evidenced by the millions of users checking in across the globe, but developers continue to chase after our elusive social graph to make geolocation as indispensable as microblogging and photo sharing.

If there are any golden rules when it comes to geolocation, I would say they are 1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value. It’s up to both developers and businesses to do what they can to ensure these services have as few boundaries and as much value as possible.

In this article I’ve highlighted some of the ways developers are pushing toward these goals and what we can expect from the future of geolocation.

Recommendations

Possibly one of the most obvious and expected developments is the integration of recommended places to check in to. Foursquare’s most recent version includes a section called Explore, designed to recommend places around you based on your friends’ favorite places and your own check-in history.

Tell us what you're looking for and we'll help you find something nearby.

Scoville integrates with your Foursquare check-ins and collects your favorite places on a weekly basis. As more users sign up, these recommendations will create a ranking of places in each city, allowing Scoville to recommend check-ins based on popularity.

Scoville brings location and bookmarking together to help you keep track of favorite places.

Bizzy is trying a different angle, collecting place ratings and reviews as users leave a venue, through the check-out feature.

Bizzy recommends local businesses based on user ratings.

Some newer apps are focusing more on adding valuable content to recommendations, such as special offers or information. Lowffer recommends nearby deals and special offers based on user recommendations and your location, acting somewhat like a mobile Groupon app. Like Foursquare, a game-like leaderboard is emphasized to motivate user participation.

Deals and special offers with a local twist from Lowffer.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason has his own ideas about taking the popular deals site mobile, with the upcoming release of Groupon Now. Using Groupon’s successful deals focus, the new mobile app offers users two options: I’m hungry or I’m bored. Each option, combined with the user’s current location, returns special offers nearby.

The age-old human conundrum—where to eat lunch.

Like any other location-based app, the take-off will be slow until enough users get involved to make it worthwhile, but with Groupon’s proven success in the daily deals space, this could be the end of that all-too-common question, “What will I have for lunch today?”

Spot, another soon-to-launch app, is hoping to fill a gap some other apps have opened up by offering an easy way to collect location recommendations from friends and save them for later. Alan Danzis’ Wish List for Foursquare 4 suggests similar features that could be added to Foursquare’s next version, allowing users to recommend deals to friends and save their favorites, and providing check-in reminders.

Social Connections

Connecting with those who are already part of your social graph is pretty much expected when using geolocation apps, but connecting with strangers is a whole new game. Unlike recommendations, this is a feature that’s seeing somewhat unexpected traction in location-based apps. Following the success of sites like Chatroulette (for web-based conversations) and social networks like Twitter, it may not come as a surprise that meeting new people is a popular activity online, but using geolocation takes this much closer to crossing the cool-or-creepy line.

Randomized video conversations create new connections on Chatroulette.

Yobongo is one such app that’s slowly rolling out across the U.S. The premise of Yobongo is to create connections with strangers nearby, using your location to show other users around you. By setting up a room of 10 to 15 users, the app aims to help you break the ice and create new friendships. Founder Caleb Elston told GigaOM that offering up your location data to the app (but not other users) is a worthwhile trade for the value you get back.

Yobongo offers a location-based way to meet new people.

Taking this idea a step further is the Situationist app, which aims to bring strangers together to participate in random situations. Although the app is based on a political agenda, it offers simple tasks to complete to bring users together in a more casual way as well. Using your location data, the app alerts you to users nearby who have predetermined which situations they are comfortable with; for instance, hug me for 5 seconds, or let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such.

Situationist app helps you create spontaneous connections.

Location-Based Info

Moving away from discovery and meeting new people, Glympse is designed to enable sharing location data with people you know. Using SMS or email, you can send a Glympse to any of your contacts, showing them a map of where you are, and where you’re going. The map updates using real-time GPS data to show when you’ve reached your destination and how long you will be there.

Glympse offers an easy solution for privately sharing your location.

This idea is taken a step further with Geoloqi, a mobile and web platform that works in the same way, but adds functions like Geonotes, layers and automatic Foursquare check-ins.

Geoloqi adds new functionality to sharing location data.

Automatic Foursquare check-ins is an impressive feature that we will likely see more of this year in various geolocation apps. By choosing your favorite Foursquare venues, you can set Geoloqi to automatically check you in 10 minutes after arriving, taking the effort out of check-ins without removing the reward.

A lesser-known feature of some of the more popular check-in apps, Geonotes is front-and-center in Geoloqi as a way to use location data to make your life easier. Using Geonotes, you can leave notes for your friends, which will show up when they arrive at a specified location. You can create reminders for yourself as well; for instance, reminding yourself to get milk when you arrive at the supermarket.

Task Ave is an iPhone app focused exclusively on this idea, but with future versions of Geoloqi (which is free to download) integrating with popular to-do app, Remember the Milk, I would be surprised to see anyone paying $2.99 for Task Ave.

Location-based tasks from Task Ave make your to-do list more manageable.

Push notifications and SMS alerts are proving to be popular for other purposes, as well. Location-based question-and-answer apps like LOCQL and LocalMind connect users to share information by asking and answering questions based on their location. Push notifications are used to alert users who have agreed to answer questions about a place when someone has a question, promoting both a social connection and the sharing of information.

The mobile advertising company Chalkboard publishes ads from local businesses inside supported apps when the user is within 1 mile of the store. Although this is a similar idea to previously mentioned Groupon Now, the focus of Chalkboard is taking the user action out of the equation, providing ads to users automatically, based on their location.

Mobile advertising goes local with Chalkboard.

Automatic Check-Ins

Chalkboard is not the only app taking the manual action out of geolocation. Geoloqi, as mentioned before, offers automatic check-ins for your favorite Foursquare venues, and will most likely add support for other popular check-in apps in the future.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) technologies are going to become much more popular as geolocation apps continue to evolve and developers look for ways to make sending and receiving location-based data easier. Both of these technologies allow communication (such as sending a post or completing a check-in) with a specified tag by just swiping a device, such as an NFC-enabled phone.

Foursquare has already begun testing NFC check-ins and Coca-Cola used RFID at last year’s Coca-Cola Village teen camp to enable Facebook Likes and status updates to be sent with wristbands.

Teenagers were given a plastic bracelet adorned with what resembled a Coke bottle cap. The cap was embedded with a 125 kHz passive RFID tag.

What Else Can We Expect?

There are some exciting innovations emerging in geolocation already, but there’s surely much more value to be had from this technology. Some of the developments I’m most interested to see are:

A collection of user-generated information about a place, like a location-based Wikipedia

Mobile check-in for flights, bypassing the long check-in counter queues

Mobile check-in at doctors’ offices, sending the secretary an automatic notification of your arrival

Mobile identification, providing entry to adult-only venues like nightclubs (our phones are already replacing cash, so why not our photo IDs?)

Digital, geotagged nightclub stamps to prove you’ve paid to get in

Bookmarking for places with push notifications, so you’ll finally remember to check out that café your friend keeps recommending

Interactive maps attached to promotional material (with QR codes?) so you can easily find the new pizza place that sent you coupons in the mail

Weigh In

What do you expect to see in the future of location-based services and what would you like to see? What tools or services would benefit your business most? Leave your comments in the box below.

Ignore SEO, just produce good content

2011-03-21T14:42:00.000+11:00

Ignore SEO, just produce good content "

Producing content just to satisfy SEO targets and pressures is dangerous because that’s when you get into the realms of publishing content for content’s sake and clearly, Google doesn’t like that given its recent Farmer Update.

More importantly, your website users don’t like that. While SEO clearly has its place, it shouldn't get in the way of producing great content...

I was going to start this blog writing about why having quality content is so important and I’m still going to do that, I just hope I don’t eat my words in a few weeks time.

My opinion on content is and always will be this: if you’re in the content publishing business, always have content that you genuinely believe is interesting, that is useful, that is informative. It has to have a purpose, else why are you doing it?

Don't publish content for content’s sake

No-one can deny it’s easy to get pushed along by ideas that get chucked at you from within a business but sometimes you have to push back.I completely believe you shouldn’t be producing content for SEO; you should be producing it because it adds something to users of your website.

For example, say you’ve dropped in the rankings for one of your target keywords; the business’ automatic reaction is to want more content around that keyword. But, I’d fight against that, unless there is some relevance in producing content around said keyword.

Google is obviously punishing content farms, so don’t be one. If you feel you’ve strayed into this way of publishing content then seriously think twice about what you’re doing and why.

Put yourself in your customer’s or reader’s shoes

For me it’s simple. What is it you want to see when you visit a website? And are you doing that?

For example, if you sell car insurance then have a 30 second video on how to cut the cost of car insurance. That’s useful isn’t it? Don’t send customers an email with content they can read in a thousand other websites, that’s just insulting. Give them something they can’t get elsewhere. Give them quality.

Whatever you do when deciding what content to generate, don’t just do it for SEO. Don’t write an article and stuff it full of keywords because you have keyword targets to hit or have committed to producing x amount of articles about your products.

Some SEO agencies believe this is the way forward, I don’t. I believe this forces you to produce content that’s not necessarily relevant or interesting. Dreaming up ideas just to tick SEO targets isn’t how content is supposed to be produced. That’s not how the best publishers do it, and it’s not how you should do it either.

Getting the right people to help you produce content is also part of getting the content production process right, but that’s a discussion all in its own and one for another blog.

Another Facebook infographic, and how the world is obsessed with Facebook

2011-03-01T10:17:00.000+11:00

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Online Schools has created an infographic showing the far-reaching hands/tentacles of Facebook, and how the social networking website has become more than just a website. Some of these facts are quite an eye opener. Inspired by the infographic, Alex Trimpe created the video you can see above, while the infographic itself is embedded after the jump.

Via: Online Schools, LaughingSquid

User-Friendly SEO basics.

2011-02-28T11:36:00.000+11:00

Some web designers (and many web content writers) view on-page SEO as a necessary evil to an effective content strategy on the web. However, when properly executed, SEO can actually enhance a site visitor’s experience, rather than detract from it.

In this article, I’ll run through several examples of how SEO can be improved with the user in mind. Reviewing these examples should help site builders gain a solid understanding of SEO practices that work together to create highly effective sites.

Changing Your Perception About SEO

Misperceptions about SEO generally arise from outdated ideas about what SEO is all about; when people are still under the assumption that keyword stuffing, mammoth blocks of links and stilted wording are still valid SEO tactics.

Rightfully so, web designers and web content writers object to these practices because they interfere with a visitor’s ability to make sense of the site.

Google and SEO have come a long ways since those practices were in vogue. Today, the crucial thing to understand is this:

Google trains its spiders to think like humans. Therefore, best of class SEO practices are best of class people practices.

When someone conducts a search, Google (and all the other search engines) wants to show results that are relevant and valuable to people. Accordingly, Google designs its search algorithms to reward meaningful content and punish those who try to game the system with user-unfriendly content tricks.

With that in mind, here is a brief review of seven tips of on-page SEO that demonstrate how good SEO, good writing and good design work together to create an exceptional product. This is not an exhaustive list of content optimization techniques, but websites that get these issues right have an extremely strong foundation.

1. Insert Primary Keyword Phrases at the Beginning of Headlines

The primary keyword phrase on a web page should clearly and concisely describe the main topic of that page. For maximum effect, the phrase should be written at the beginning of the main page heading (<h1> tag).

The example illustrated below is taken from a site we recently did for our client Track Your Truck, a firm that sells GPS tracking systems.

The headline, "GPS Tracking Systems", is superior to, say, "Manage Your Fleet Productivity".

When people scan a web page, their attention is drawn to the headline. If they have to pause for even a few seconds to discern its meaning and relevance, they may just click away instead.

Using keywords in the headline helps readers, which is why search engines like Google reward the practice.

2. Use Bold Text for Keywords

Another way to tell search engines — and site users — that content is important is to put it in bold type. Restricting the use of bold text to keywords is a good discipline all the way around. Too much bold text, especially used in a haphazard fashion, confuses the reader. No bold styling creates a clump of undifferentiated text that turns the reader off.

What we want is to focus the reader’s attention on the main theme of the page, so again, SEO and user preference work hand in hand.

Placing text in italics also attracts the attention of search engines and readers, but I discourage its use because italics in body copy can sometimes be difficult to read.

3. Use Bulleted Lists

Search engines are attracted to bullet points because they think bulleted content has high importance (otherwise, why would someone bullet it?). Humans think the same way.

Any time content can be transformed from an undifferentiated block of text into a short (3 to 5) list of bullet points, the writer is helping visitors and search engines quickly and decisively grasp the meaning of that page.

As a general rule, extremely long lists are undesirable: they overwhelm the reader and, for that same reason, search engines probably devalue them.

4. Use Keywords in Call to Action Links

By conveying the content of the link using keywords, you alert the reader and search-engine to what the new page is all about.

Some will make the argument that "click here" is the better choice, because readers are more likely to follow a clear command. While I can accept this argument for landing pages and email blasts, I don’t think it applies very well to websites. If the "click here" approach is used globally, you wind up with a site where every link looks the same and thus all of the urgency of the command is lost. For obvious reasons, this situation is bad for both the user reading your site and for web spiders crawling your links for context.

5. Insert Primary Keywords at the Beginning of Meta Titles

A web page’s <title> tag is probably the most significant content on the page, as far as search engines are concerned.

Most designers and web copywriters are indifferent about meta data in general, because there is the perception that human readers don’t see it, even though what goes inside the <head> tag of an HTML document is important.

Site visitors do in fact view meta data. For instance, the <title> tag’s value appears in browser bars, browser tabs, and in a search engine’s results pages when people perform a search. Also, they’re picked up automatically by tweets through most Twitter apps.

The browser view is quite important in my estimation. If a visitor has several tabs open, I want him or her to easily understand what page(s) of our client’s site is open. Ideally, the tab will display a perfectly constructed meta title, with keywords at the beginning and branding at the end, as you see in the example above.

Constructing great titles can contribute to better usability as well; Usability expert Jakob Nielsen suggests using the passive voice to front-load keywords in headings and page titles, even though the active voice is, overall, better for readability of web content.

6. Build a Strong Internal Link Structure

When web pages within a site are linked together in a logical way, search engines perceive them as being logically connected; that they rely on each other to tell a story. This interconnection causes the search value of these pages — and the domain as a whole — to rise, because the content is seen as important not only on its own, but as part of a bigger picture.

A strong internal link structure is a major component of the overall information architecture of a site and, from the user experience perspective, crucial to a visitor’s ability to maneuver around the site.

Whether internal links manifest themselves as breadcrumbs, footer links, text links or a combination, if the links are easy for the reader to follow, they’ll be easy for search engines to follow as well.

Internal links (and links in general) are strongest for SEO purposes when keywords for the target page are used in the anchor text. The footer links in the example above, part of a design scheme our company uses for many lead generation sites, are optimized for the most important site pages.

7. Optimize Site Images

Very few sites have well optimized images, which is unfortunate on many levels. Poorly optimized images cause sites to miss out on great search opportunities, detract from the user experience, and pass up excellent conversion opportunities.

There are three ways to optimize images for SEO that I want to focus on, because they’re also great for usability.

Fill in the alt attribute. The alt attribute describes the image in plain English. It’s extremely useful for infographics and images that convey complex ideas or valuable data. If a visitor is not able to view the image, he or she will be helpless without an alt attribute; it’s a fallback mechanism for users who have issues rendering images, have images turned off while they browse, and for readers who are unable to see their screen and must rely on screen-reading software.

Keyword-optimize the title attribute. The image title appears when hovering over an image. What impression do you want to make on your visitors? Will they see "IMG40481105.jpg" or "Business Grammar and Punctuation Tips"?

Add a keyword-optimized caption. In my view, a caption strengthens most any image, especially on interior product and service pages. A reader will quickly zero in on an image and is very likely to read any content around it. Here is a golden opportunity to highlight a key product benefit, a unique service capability — and give search engines more content to index and rank.

Image search can be a superb source of highly qualified traffic. People search for images for many types of products, and since fewer sites are optimized for image search, there’s less competition.

How Many Words on a Page Are Too Many?

SEOs and designers furiously debate the issue of word count. SEOs want more words, because all other things being equal, Google will rank a page with more and richer content higher than a similar page with less and lacking content.

Designers, on the other hand, fight for fewer words for the sake of elegance and impact. Both sides can make a strong case, and as a content writer, I am often caught in the crossfire.

Here, then, is a web content writer’s take on this very important issue.

First, the issue isn’t how much content to have on a website, it’s where to put it. Although intuition tells us that too many words will put off the visitor, some visitors at some point become interested in detailed information. If we can agree on that statement, we can resolve most word count issues.

For a home page and overview-type interior pages, too much above the fold content will backfire. On pages such as these, visitors are looking for a quick impression. Design effectiveness is paramount.

One way we have tried to balance SEO and design considerations for content on home pages is to "layer" the content. Above the fold, we strive for strong design elements and concise content. Below the fold, we add more detailed copy that incorporates keywords.

Here is the home page for Track Your Truck that follows these practices:

This is not an ideal solution, because in a perfect world, our keywords would be concentrated toward the top of the page, where search engines value them more highly.

However, from an overall UX point of view, I like this approach. If the top part of the site is engaging, some visitors will scroll down and read because they have been inspired to learn more. Others will bypass the optimized content and proceed directly to an interior page or the contact page. Whichever happens, the site scores a win.

In contrast, product and service detail pages can be content heavy above the fold. When visitors get to these pages, they are no longer browsing, but searching for information. A lack of detail can actually detract from the site’s credibility.

Keep in mind that many people who hit interior pages come directly from a search for that product or service. Presumably, such visitors have clicked through because they want detailed information, and for many sites, these interior pages will generate the lion’s share of unbranded search traffic. As a result, high word counts on interior pages serve SEO and users well, and home page word counts become far less significant.

Designers, SEOs and Writers: Why We Can All Just Get Along

Successful web development requires a high level of teamwork. This is the conclusion professional designers, SEOs and writers always reach in the end. When designers disregard SEO, websites fail with search engines. When SEOs disregard design, websites fail with people. Either outcome will fall woefully short of client expectations, because virtually every e-commerce and lead generation site is in pursuit of more search traffic and more conversions.

Writers, too, cannot afford to be purists or operate in a vacuum. The emphasis Google places on quality content is undeniable: Recently, Google announced a new algorithm to combat content spam, a clear signal that it means to punish manipulative SEO techniques and reward high quality, relevant web copy.

Nevertheless, writers who consider themselves "above" the SEO fray are arguing for a strategy of "build it and they shall come." Unfortunately, this strategy almost never wins: Apple and McDonalds may be able to ignore Google — can you?

The strategy that is likely to win is one that balances design, SEO and writing through every step of the development process. This post attempts to describe some common ground, but still, getting all team members on the same page (so to speak) is not always easy. I hope you will share your experiences about this challenge in the comments.

12 sure-fire ways to spot a dirty Twitter spammer

2011-02-28T11:04:00.000+11:00

In recent weeks I have seen a definite increase in Twitter spam, and it's something that I think Twitter needs to get on top of and smother. Make no mistake: spam is always a threat to the user experience.

Sometimes spammers will follow you. Other times they’ll just send you a tweet. All of the time they totally suck.

It’s not at all difficult to spot a spammer... here are 12 ways to identify one of these timewasting losers on Twitter. Spam, be damned.

They have no avatar

If you can’t be bothered to upload a picture of any kind then it sends a bad message. My brain instantly tunes out to all tweets that I see that are not accompanied by an avatar.

They have a sexy avatar

A common tactic among spammers is to grab a picture of a nubile girl and use that as their avatar. Hotpants and cleavage are trending in this area.

They have a ridiculous following-to-follower ratio

A tried and tested way of spotting a spam account is to look at the following to follower ratio. Following 2,000 accounts in the hope of a few autofollows back is the name of the game. It’s a sucky game. More often than not you'll see accounts with zero followers. Quite the giveaway.

They have posted no tweets

Nobody in their right mind follows hundreds or thousands of people but fails to use Twitter to tweet! That said, spammers are wrong-minded…

They post the same tweet over and over and over and over and over again

Spammers love repetition. They can’t get enough of saying the same thing. CTRL+V is the spammer’s favourite weapon of choice.

They use the same link in all of their tweets

Sometimes the messaging will be mixed up, but the links will all look the same. In an age of URL shorteners it's a telltale sign that the account owner is playing the numbers game. And that's what spammers do.

They aren’t followed by any lists

Automated – or low-rent - accounts tend not to be added to Twitter lists created by other users.

They include a random number string in their user name

You see this a lot. Numbers in user names set off alarm bells in my head. More often than not they are an indicator of spam.

They don’t bother with conversational tweets

Most human-powered Twitter accounts will mix things up a bit. There will be tweets with links, and tweets without links. There will be retweets. There will be @replies and conversational tweets. If you don’t see enough variety in a user’s tweetstream then it could be that the account is powered by rules and built on feeds. Never a good sign.

They don’t have a bio

Some genuine people don’t do bios, but most do. Many spammers don’t bother.

They have a dodgy bio

Alternatively, some spammers include a bio that will often include the phrase “make money”. Run away, as fast as you can!

They camouflage their bio link

I’m always a little nervous when I see a Bit.ly (or other URL shortener) used for a bio link. However I’ve used one in the past, simply to track click activity, so it’s not always a sign of a spammer (I use an about.me now, which has a great stats dashboard). If you are ever unsure of a Bit.ly link just add a ‘+’ onto the end of the link and you’ll access the stats page, where you’ll also see the long link.

What did I miss? How else can you spot a shyster?

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Web Designs

2011-02-08T16:25:00.000+11:00

At the end of the day, the quality of a web design can only really be measured quantitatively in the results it brings a site. As they say, results speak for themselves.

Being a web analyst for more than four years now and regularly working side-by-side with a designer, the biggest thing I have learned is Data identifies the problem and Design solves it.

This article looks at web design from a web analytics perspective. We will focus around the questions that a web designer should answer using metrics and tools to measure the impact and effectiveness of a web design.

Stages of Visitor Engagement

At any time, website visitors are in one of the following stages:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

Satisfaction

At each stage, a visitor has different expectations, and it’s the design that leads the way to making sure those expectations are met.

Designing for Grabbing Visitor Attention

Questions to ask: Does the design grab the attention of your visitors in just a few seconds? Does the design help visitors quickly find the information they are looking for?

While different approaches need to be applied to landing pages and inner pages of a website, one thing is sure: If you don’t manage to garner the user’s attention quickly, she is gone to the next website.

Headings are known to have a strong impact in grabbing user attention.

What to measure: Bounce rates and exit rates.

Solution: Most web analytics tools out there will tell you how many times you failed to grab the attention of your users.

Exit rates will tell you how many people left the website through a particular page, while bounce rates tell you how many people left the website without visiting a second page.

You can go a step further and measure the bounce rate as being the rate of people spending less than 10 seconds on your website. The more people are bouncing off your page, the less your design and content have helped them spot the information they were looking for.

Designing for Raising Visitor Interest

Questions to ask: Do visitors think they are in the right place? Can you convince them that the information on your website is (or might be) right for them?

If you manage to get the visitor interested in your site, he will spend more time reading and engaging with it. In such cases, design should make it really easy to scan, read and engage in interactive actions on a page.

How long does it take to read an article versus how much time do most visitors spend reading that article? For example, according to some sources, the average reading speed of college students is between 250 to 350 words per minute. If your article has 1,000 words, it could take between 2.8–4 minutes to read the article fully. If the average time on the article web page is only 5 seconds (in other words, only 4–8% of the time required to read the entire article), it means most of the content isn’t being read and isn’t engaging enough to keep the visitor’s interest. This problem can be pointing to web copy issues, design issues, or both.

Other examples: How many people click the Play button for a video, or check the other product images of a certain product? While content is what generates interest, design is what makes the content easy to spot and engage with.

Web analysts call these interactions and events micro conversions. The more such micro conversions happen, the larger the number of people that will eventually engage in buying, signing up or filling in a lead web form (macro conversions).

The way people interact with a website denotes their interest for what the website has to offer.

What to measure: Number of interactions with a design. Time spent on web pages.

Solution: One way to go about measuring how well web designs keep visitors interested is to dive into advanced features of Google Analytics by tracking events of every action that can be interpreted as the user becoming more interested in the web page (such as clicks, scrolls, comments, video plays or anything else you can think of).

You could also give ClickTale a try, a tool that records entire sessions of website visits and allows you to play them back. It can offer great insights about how visitors interact with a web page. Six Revisions uses ClickTale on the front page of the site.

Designing for Increasing Desire and Taking Action

Questions to ask: Does the design explicitly engage the imagination of your visitors and make them feel they will get value from what you’re offering? Do visitors click on the call-to-action buttons?

Every product or service out there on the web is unique, and it’s the web design’s job to point out what makes it different and why the visitor should choose this one instead of another.

If the design does its job well, the path to a user clicking on call-to-actions is a short one. In the very moment the user decides to sign up or buy the product, it’s crucial for the call to action to be within quick reach.

A heat map displaying mouse clicks on a call-to-action button.

What to measure: Call to action clicks.

Solution: Click-tracking offered by solutions like Crazy Egg will give you the answer about how people interact with your call-to-action buttons.

As for increasing visitors’ desire, multivariate testing and A/B split testing will help you test different designs and find the one that’s most effective.

Designing for Visitor Satisfaction

Question to ask: After they’ve clicked, does the next page satisfy your visitors by providing exactly what they wanted?

The design of what comes after the click is crucial for getting what site owners are looking for: a conversion. You have already managed to get the visitor’s attention, interest and desire so, from now on, design should only have two main roles.

The first role is making the conversion process as easy as possible (e.g. optimizing the checkout process and optimizing the web form submission process).

The other role of the web design is making sure that any question a user might have about the process is answered right there on the spot so that she doesn’t have to abandon the process to search the site looking for her answer.

It would truly be a pity to lose visitors at this stage because of a design flaw.

Funnels give a clear image on conversion success rates.

What to measure: Funnels and/or paths taken.

Solution: If you have the budget for it, I would go with Kissmetrics, MixPanel or Performable for tracking funnels and paths to conversion.

Otherwise, you can stick with Google Analytics goal- and funnel-tracking, or use PadiTrack, a free Google Analytics app for building funnels on the fly. (Disclosure: PadiTrack is developed by the company I work for).

Conclusion

In the end, what matters is the impact of every element of a website on reaching its goals. Data-driven, informed design, in all of its forms, has a strong say and quite a big responsibility when it comes to a website’s performance.

New Facebook Deals Page Offers Promotion Locator for Users and a Guide for Admins

2011-02-02T11:43:00.000+11:00

Facebook’s new introduction site for Deals, its location-based promotions service, helps users discover nearby Deals and teaches business owners how to offer them. The locator displays a list and Bing map of local promotions, while the instructional videos and downloadable Deals Guide for Businesses .pdf explain best practices for creating Deals campaigns.

By facilitating the business on-boarding process, and allowing users to purposefully search for promotions, the site should help Deals become a more popular way for businesses to incentivize foot traffic.

Facebook originally launched Deals with a handful of brands in November, but it was only available in the U.S. for iPhone and touch.facebook.com users. Though a powerful way for businesses to court customers, a lack of understanding amongst both business and users led relatively few to implement or use it.

In the months since, Facebook has rolled out its location service Places to Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia, added access for Android devices, and today launched Deals in Europe. Now that it has expanded the potential user base and gotten feedback from businesses who’ve tried it, Facebook is prepared for a more aggressive push.

Deals Locator

Facebook.com/deals starts with a quick overview video and a Facepile of friends who’ve claimed Deals. Below, visitors see Your Local Deals — a dynamic Bing map displaying nearby Deals based on a user’s IP address. Mousing over a Places icon reveals a hovercard with the business’ address, and links to directions and the current Deal on the location’s Places page.

To the right is a list the actual promotions offered, along with their associated Likes and comments. Users can use a search bar to view Deals in other cities, refreshing the map and list.

Previously, there was no aggregated list of Deals, making discovery cumbersome. Users could only see if any of the closest businesses offered Deals. This meant they’d often miss Deals that were in their city, some within a mile of them. The Deals locator will help those specifically hunting for promotions to find and claim them, exposing their network to the Deals feature as a whole. This exposure could snowball into widespread awareness, which would inspire more businesses to offer Deals.

Educating User and Business Owners

Under the How to Claim Deals tab, users can find a more detailed introduction to determining which businesses offer Deals and how to redeem them. The video tells users to look for yellow stickers on storefronts, which Facebook has mailed out to some businesses running Deals. Images walk users through the Deal redemption flow and illustrate the four types of Deals they’ll encounter: Individual, Friend, Loyalty, and Charity.

Users will also find links to the Help Center FAQ about Deals as well as a panel citing the devices and countries with access. Currently, this list is outdated, as it doesn’t mention Android devices.

The For Business Owners tab includes a “How Deals Work” video describing the value of incentivizing check-ins, and a “Creating a Deal” video tutorial for admins. The site also links to a downloadable .pdf ”Deals Guide for Businesses” hosted by Box.net. The .pdf and videos outline the three core benefits of using Deals:

Acquire customers

Spread the word

Build customer loyalty

The guide also includes a detailed breakdown of the differences between the four Deal types, the creation flow, and best practices. Some of the tips include:

Offering at least a 10% to 50% discount

Providing clear and succinct Deal summaries and redemption instruction copy

Monitoring campaign progress to avoid Deal fatigue and opportunism

Training employees to redeem Deals

Ensuring sufficient supply of offered gifts and staff to administer them

Setting up policies for handing issues with customers

Working with Facebook’s account managers to set up Deals across hundreds of locations if necessary

Buying Facebook ads to promote Deals

By providing these best practices, Facebook can reduce the likelihood that businesses will have an unsuccessful or stressful experience with Deals. The last point is the real motive behind the otherwise free feature. As with the recently launched Sponsored Stories ad unit, businesses can pay Facebook to increase the distribution of their Deals. If Facebook can demonstrate that Deals are simple to create and generate a solid return on investment, businesses will be eager to buy ads for them.

Facebook calls Deals “A new way to connect with customers”. While other location services like Foursquare have local promotions, Deals has greater potential because it’s self-serve and free for admins, and incentivizes users to expose or even bring their friends to a business. The educational and discovery resources on Facebook.com/deals will help the feature approach the tipping point to rapid growth.

Algorithm change launched

2011-01-30T15:29:00.000+11:00

I just wanted to give a quick update on one thing I mentioned in my search engine spam post.

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Thanks to Jeff Atwood and the team at Stack Overflow for providing feedback to Google about this issue. I mentioned the update over on Hacker News too, because folks on that site had been discussing specific queries too.

Affiliate marketing: death of the long tail?

2011-01-30T12:03:00.000+11:00

With increasing regulation and scrutiny coming in to the affiliate channel, including the extension of the ASA digital remit, what does the future look like for different affiliate models?

There has been considerable talk in the trade press about the extension of the ASA digital remit, but the discussion has mainly been about the impact on social media.

One thing that has been overlooked is the fact that affiliate marketing will fall under the ASA’s remit for the first time, and this has some pretty serious consequences for a channel that is becoming increasingly influential.

The ASA generally concerns itself with advertising that a brand has generated itself, governing on complaints about misleading claims. Within the affiliate space, brands are ceding control of what is claimed to 3rd parties, or affiliates.

The view has always been that because affiliates are taking the risk, spending their own time and money to drive traffic and only being rewarded if a sale takes place, that they should be allowed to operate within a loose set of guidelines to drive that traffic as they see fit.

The concern amongst brands will now be that the claims made on their behalf by affiliates hoping to drive traffic, could see the brand winding up in breach of ASA regulations.

I say “could” see, as at present it seems that there is quite a bit of confusion about who would be held responsible if a breach of the ASA code occurred: would it be the affiliate making the claim, the brand who are implicitly approving the copy by paying for it, the agency running the activity on the clients behalf, or the affiliate network who control the relationship with the affiliate?

Let us have a look at a couple of examples where affiliate marketing could be affected.

Product feeds

Many affiliates populate their site using product feeds produced by brands. This will automatically update the affiliate site and contains data such as price and availability. Were the feed not to be updated and wrong information about these aspects were reported, that could be a breach of the code.

Voucher code sites

Voucher code sites list valid codes, deals and offers that encourage the consumer to click through to the brand site to take advantage of them. Clearly, promising a deal or offer that is not available on the brand site would be a breach of the code.

Outdated content

While brands generally employ significant sized tech teams to manage their content, and their sites are regularly updated, this is not always the case with affiliates.

Many are featuring many merchants on their sites and requests from merchants to change things can often go unnoticed. If these changes relate to something governed in the ASA code, again this could lead to a breach.

So where does this leave the world of affiliate marketing?

In some cases I foresee no change. Many brands out there manage their affiliate campaigns closely already and hold strong relationship with their affiliates meaning that they are unlikely to be affected.

However, I do see a situation coming where more brands will be looking to protect themselves by ensuring that they only work with a smaller number of affiliates whom they know and trust.

Unfortunately this goes against the original concept of affiliate marketing, but we have seen plenty of precedents where brands have culled affiliates on their campaign over the last few years to afford them greater control of their brand and against fraud.

I feel that the forthcoming involvement of the ASA could act as a catalyst for more brands to do the same.