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"The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools" John Dewey (American Philosopher, Psychologist and Educator, 1859-1952)I've been with Base One for a few weeks now and was told that my settling in period had come to an end, the kid gloves were off and I was "asked" to produce my first post for the company.
I was racking my brains about what to post about when, over 200 miles from my home an incident occurred. A single action; followed by a difficult decision, leading to an outcome that has seen a man's reputation destroyed and talk of economic consequences to the countries involved.
I speak of Thierry Henry and what is now being dubbed "La main de Dieu" (Hand of God). For those that don't know what happened, France progressed to the World Cup at the expense of the Republic of Ireland. The decisive goal, scored by William Gallas was set up by Thierry Henry who handled the ball before crossing to his team mate.
Now I won't be discussing the incident itself, instead I am looking at the part played by Social Media in the syndication and resulting emotional outpouring from large numbers of individuals across the globe.
The power of the press is Waning, yielding to the Power of the People. Nowadays anyone with a link to the Internet and an opinion can affect the views of the masses, and generally steal a march on the larger press by publishing instantly. This news is swiftly syndicated through the various bookmarking and newswire websites and then Social Networking is utilised to provide a platform to discuss, debate and in some cases "vent;" like a child wielding his dads' rifle.
It was through this medium that I watched Thierry Henry's fall from grace. People from different countries and different walks of life fuelled a relentless wave of different opinions and different emotions, the overwhelming emotion being anger.
Taking Twitter as my first example, within minutes of the incident, whilst the match was still playing in fact, the torrent had begun. By the full-time whistle Tweets appeared to be coming in at around 195 every 30 seconds. Within the hour after the final whistle "Thierry Henry" and "Henry" had become trending topics. At 10am, on the 20th of November (Over 36 Hours after the event) the tweets continue although flow has calmed to a handful a minute.
Where Twitter quickly built to a deafening crescendo and dissipated in much the same way, Facebook built quickly and seemed to maintain some momentum. Immediately after the incident my "Live News" was full of related comments which continued into the night and the following morning,
I also came across the Facebook Page - "We Irish hate Thierry Henry (The Cheat)" which was created after the match. By Midday on 19th November, the page had 30,000 fans then by 10am on 20th November the number of fans had swelled to over 80,000 and was then removed Facebook due to the nature of the group and the offensive nature of the comments being posted.
YouTube was also pounced upon with multiple videos posted, commanding views numbering in the tens of thousands. Replaying, berating, and making fun of Thierry Henry including a depiction of Adolf Hitler's reaction to the goal.
A man made a choice; that choice was instantly scrutinized worldwide, and brought to the attention of millions by angered voices without hesitation, or thought to the possible fallout. This led to threats of violence, unchecked widespread racism and other ugly human traits in true "Angry Mob" style.
The beauty of Social Media is that it provides total freedom of expression, but that total freedom can also show its dark side; when it is used to personally attack someone or something.
Social Media can be an extremely effective weapon, with the power to change lives.
Is it too easy to wield?
Is there anything we can do about it?
If there is, do we want to?
I can't imagine not wanting things tailored to my interests. I'm not as bored when exposed to advertising, I dare suggest I'm even, on occasion, informed! Except for that spotify advertisement about killing motorcyclists while I drive (complete with splat noise), b/c I don't even have a license.
What do you think? Are these Americans simply naivete to the benefits of target marketing which results from online tracking? Are they justified to be flipping out about privacy concerns - that marketers are "spying" on them when they visit the marketer's sites? Let me know!
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If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only on business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.
But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is very your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.
By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.
To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.
In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.
Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!
With these metrics in your custom report you can now in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.
In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoons between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and the majority of entrances happened on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.
Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.
Doesn't that sound like fun!? Naturally, I want to use my Saturday preparing to encourage my neighbors to use an overpriced Microsoft product (I vote Linux). Don't forget - Microsoft wants pictures!
I was laughing really hard this morning, as I learned how to host my Windows 7 party (yes, they are serious):
Having gone through a series of SEO evaluations those last few weeks, I was shocked to come across so many cases of websites with bad internal linking structure. I now think it's essential to stress on good internal linking since I have the impression that web designers often overlook the importance of having a well structured site in terms of internal linking. The current situation is very sad since a lot of websites are not benefitting of the power of internal linking. I therefore compiled a short list of factors that one should consider while building the website structure.
Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines. We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation. Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines. If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.
XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website. Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website. Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.
Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.
Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy. It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text. Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.
Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website. I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages. It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage. But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all. And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.
Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl. This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website. Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date. In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.
Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links. I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent. Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page. The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs. Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages. In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.
Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines. It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase. Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.
Earlier this month, Seth Godin wrote a blog post entitled 'Lessons from very tiny businesses'. This piece outlined 5 different things we can learn from small businesses, using examples of companies he has encountered. His second point was 'Be micro focused and the search engines will find you'.
Shortly after reading this, I was searching for a carpet cleaning service. I had used one earlier this year, but couldn't remember his number, so I went to his web site. Now bear in mind this is a one-man show, so what you would typically expect is at the most two pages - landing page and contact page. What you get is something else: 9 fully-optimised pages, a blog, and even a Twitter stream!
The thing that impressed me most, however, was the blog, 'My carpet cleaning blog'. Since November 2008, Chris (the carpet cleaner) has been diligently writing up many of his daily jobs as blog posts. Each one is titled with a variation on the phrases 'Carpet cleaning' or 'carpet cleaner', plus the location of the job, either as a postcode (W4, W14) or as the name of the location (Fulham, Wandsworth), and includes some detail on the job in question. In this way he is targeting relevant searches for carpet cleaning all over Greater London. Oh, and he follows these posts up with Tweets as well.
But that's not all. When he came to clean my carpets, Chris also explained how he has managed to get himself placed in Google Local Business ads for not one, but four different postcodes! By asking customers to write reviews, he is managing to come top of the list as well.
Ok, so not everything is rosy with his site from an SEO point of view. URLs need optimising, his blog is one of those 'wysiwyg' ones, and he has literally no incoming links at all. Still, with little technical background and knowledge, Chris has realised the importance of Google as a targeted traffic generator, learnt some of the basic rules of SEO, and applied them assiduously, and with great effect to one set of keyword combinations. Since last November, the site has been appearing on the front page of Google for many local London search related to carpet cleaning, and the number of contacts from his web site has literally doubled!
What's the lesson for me in all this? It's just as Mr Godin says - or as I interpret it anyway: sometimes, as we work on SEO for large organisations in highly competitive markets, we spread ourselves too wide, and look to achieve too much, making it far more difficult to deliver tangible results. Instead we need to identify where we can make a difference, and we need to focus on it. If an inexperienced one man band can do it, we have no excuses.
The Renault UK results page (#7) has matching breadcrumbs on the destination page:
Today, a search for mobility provides the same results with "normal" URLs:
So what does this mean? Should we all style out our sites with Hansel and Gretel in mind? Keeping Google's usability priorities in mind, I think bread crumbs should be a mainstay in any site anyways. Also, I do believe this is a feasible full time change we may see some time in the future. Displaying breadcrumbs in SERPs clearly maps out for searchers what section of the site their query result is located within; this will enable searchers to better read those URLs and have a clearer idea of whether or not that result is appropriate for their query. Also, if this is a going to be a major SERPs change, it's important the breadcrumbs don't go too deep since as always, there is limited character space.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this alteration plays out - if you see any more examples shoot them to me @ChelseaBlacker or chelsea.blacker@baseonegroup.co.uk .
The question begs to be asked, if we can add keywords to the end of a display URL why not incorporate those keywords before the domain via display URL subdomains? Just to clarify, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger root domain, they read like this in a URL:
To my surprise, not many advertisers are utilising keywords in display URL subdomains. It's a great opportunity to include an ad group's targeted term at the front of the display URL, so users read those relevant bolded keywords first. Take advantage of it!
The ad above with the subdomain "nokia-mobile-phones" goes to the page "www.top10co.uk" which clearly doesn't include such a subdomain:
Google's AdWords help section confirms that this is a legal technique which is acceptable by AdWords. However, when I phoned our Irish friends, the Adwords representative I spoke with told me this was not permitted - it's such a rarely used technique that even the Adwords rep's don't know about it!
So be sure to utilise this technique in your AdWords ads. Also, remember that you can delete the "www." in display URLs which means 4 more characters for optimising your display URL. Now go... re-optimise those ads!
I was mostly concerned about tools on tracking twitter traffic. For sure, there are a lot of 'cool' tools out there allowing us to track number of hits, geolocalisation and even do real-time traffic analysis but it was not always convenient to have data separated from my main web analytics software. My approach to web analytics is to have a consistent, reliable and integrated view of the traffic thus ensuring a clear vision on what is going on in my campaigns. Furthermore, after testing several twitter analytics applications I didn't find the statistics from the different tools meaningful enough. So I revert back tracking my tweets on Google Analytics (GA). It is much more powerful in my opinion when considering all the functions that we have on GA. It would be wiser to use them to track our twitter campaigns. For example, we can track and analyse goals and conversion rates knowing very well how conversion rate analysis is imperative today.
Google analytics by default shows traffic coming from twitter but wait.. it shows traffic coming from Twitter.com only and today most of the people using Twitter never even visit twitter.com! For that reason, I prefer to manually add some utm codes on my URLs and this allows me to track my tweets wherever they are, even if someone forward my tweets by email.
As you know, tweets that include a URL use some type of URL shortening service, like http://bit.ly or http://cli.gs, but we will be using the classic Tinyurl.com which shortens a URL by creating a redirect that is hosted on www.tinyurl.com. The trick is to add GA's campaign tracking parameters to our Tiny URL, thus encoding campaign info into the URL we use in our tweets:
?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog
Of course you can change the utm_campaign and utm_medium names to anything you like but be sure they makes sense since you will be using them in your analyses later.
Example:
http://www.itjoblog.co.uk/?utm_campaign=itjoblogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog
After adding this code to the URL, we shorten it using TinyURL and finally use the 'shortened' URL in our tweets which will be traceable by GA.
Below is a picture on how the data appear in 'All Traffic Sources' report in GA:
This is very cool, but it's even nicer to use all the power of Google Analytics in your web analyses, for example you could use Advanced Segments feature to subdivide your visitors based on operating systems they used to reach your tweets (Windows, Mac, Iphone, etc). Or if you like you could create your own segment that makes sense to your campaign.
As said by Gail Ennis, senior vice-president of marketing at Omniture: "Online marketers recognise the importance of brand reputation management in the social media environment," and I believe that accurate twitter tracking is fundamental and can help a lot in social media campaign analysis.
1.An Ace Nickname: The Username. I'm a big fan of creating plausible usernames - in this case I used my real name. As a newbie, using a normal name like "Scott Osman" or "Miranda Mocco" helps sets the precedent that you're not a bot out to spam.
2.It's all About Looks: Your Avatar. This needs to be unique from other users and if possible, consistent across social networking sites. I threw a relatively ugly yellow border around my image, as an easy way for people to indicate it's me. Check out some successful avatars and get a little feedback on what people think of yours. http://avatarwall.com/toprated. Again, I found that as a newbie, people like seeing a face, it makes communicating more friendly, but as always different people like different things.
3.Hang Out in the Cool Places: Share Your Profiles! Digg permits members to share tons of profile links, be sure to take advantage of this so your future friends can easily contact you. Be sure to include your: Twitter, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Gchat, last.fm, facebook, linked in, reddit, and stumble upon profiles.
4.Make friends with the popular crowd. Long ago Digg had a top users list (sometimes referred to as the "holy grail"), but it was deleted. I used an alternative list set up by SocialBlade to friend top active diggers.
By friending them, you will become their "fan" whereby you receive updates on their Digg activities; it is only when they accept you as a friend that your status is certified as "mutual friends" and your activity will be received by them.
5.Identify stylish trends: Pin Pointing Submissions with Front Page Potential. How do you find the high potential articles when the majority of submissions are spam with one or two Diggs? First and foremost, digg your friends submissions as they appear, especially if the friend sends a "shout" (like a facebook wall post) promoting a certain submission. You're allowed 200 diggs a day - depending on how much of a life you have, try to use all 200.
I'm a huge fan of the Digg Noise Filter, which pulls up articles with your requested number of diggs in it. Or try the Flash based Digg Watcher.
6. Back Stabbing: Talk about your Friends. I cannot stress this one enough. You must comment on submissions, and the more people who vote up your comment, the more recognition you get.
I've certainly struggled to figure out what makes a popular comment; supporting Obama, comic book heroes, and protests all seem to be green lights. Whitty banter, sarcasm, and jokes are usually popular, and comments like "interesting submission" often get a thumbs down for being too obvious.
Being one of the first people to comment on an article that goes to the front page is a great way to build up your recognition. People who view the article will see your comment as it appears at the top of the page, hence more are likely to vote it a thumbs up, and hopefully friend you.
Check out where your popular friends are commenting and be sure to "reply" to their comments. This will call attention to yourself and hopefully be enough to convince them to friend you back.
Spend about 1 month following the above rules. In part II (which will also take me about 1 month to write!) I'll go over great strategies for submitting content that gets notable traffic. In the mean time, get commenting!
