Category Archives: search

Blogging First And Foremost

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Marketing First

That was the title I selected as the introduction for a post to launch the new free downloadable e-book: Marketing Right Now. I pondered long and hard on what title might be best. The book deals with the fundamental basics of starting up and growing a business. Almost by default I chose the title Marketing First. My implicit thinking was that any activity is best done if you first cover strategy and then work out the tactics. That is true in waging war and it is also true in growing your business.

expert blogging

An alternative title might have been Marketing Strategy First. When researching that title, I was struck by a website I found that dealt with ‘strategic marketing for growing companies’. The strategic marketing expert had assembled a lot of the right stuff. However I was somewhat surprised to find that the blog was buried almost in the footer and the archive of blog posts, shown on the right, suggested this was not a high priority.

Strategy First, Blog Second

Although there are many important principles in the E-Book, Marketing Right Now, if I could choose only one that would have the biggest impact then I think it would be the title of this post: Blogging First And Foremost.

The sad fact is that blogging does not get the respect it should have. Blogging is all about the dialogue you should have with your prospects and clients. Even if that were not sufficient reason, the other important factor is that Google loves blogs. The RSS news feed for your blog is an instant alert to the world that you have something to say.

Nevertheless blogs, like Rodney Dangerfield, get no respect. Of course they most often started off as personal musings or journals, so why would anyone else care. In addition, blog is such an unfortunate and ungainly name. I often recommend that clients use a different name. For example News and Views is an upbeat kind of title. For some websites, Fresh Ideas can be an even better choice.

Dialogue With Your Market-Place

If you are not using your blog to make contact with your market-place at least once per week, you might adopt this discipline. As your week draws to a close, ask yourself the question, “What did my prospects and clients hear from me this week? Of course there is another question you should be keeping in mind. What did my prospects and clients hear from my competitors? With that thought in mind make sure that early each week you have something to say to these important individuals in your marketplace.

If you have nothing to say, are you sure you’re working hard enough to grow your business. At the very least, you may have seen something in the market-place from your radar screens (Google Alerts, RSS News Feed subscriptions) that your contacts will find interesting. Remember every time you write a blog post, you are improving your visibility with Google. That’s where prospects are looking for a supplier just like you.

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Getting Your Local Business On The Map In Metro Vancouver

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Any local business should be easily findable in Google since many customers may use Google when they are trying to find a store or supplier. There is a Google Local Business Center, so you might think there was nothing easier than to add in your business coordinates there. Unfortunately that is not always the case. There are some distressing SMBs case studies mentioned in a Cre8asite Forum discussion. It is not just businesses that are affected. It can even happen to hospitals with much more tragic results.

Unfortunately Google does not seem to be willing to put in resources to ensure the veracity of the data. A number of people have been trying to get Google’s attention on this and the following are some of the more vocal:

Google does not have a local search facility as such. Rather within its universal search process, if Google guesses that local results might be beneficial it shows some within the total set of results. It is somewhat fuzzy in application but it presumably is the best Google can do with its fixation on a single search box. How much easier if Google followed the Yellow Pages approach, also used by its competitors, of having one box for the product/service and another for the location. Instead they go for the much more technically challenging single-box approach.

An additional way of flagging where your business is located is to use geotags on each of your web pages. This is basically the precise latitude and longitude for the location that is associated with the web page. You can find them using a Geotags locator. They can be handled invisibly using meta tags or can even be displayed on the web page if you wish. The geotags for this web page for example are 49.17467; -122.62195.

If you are not yet happy with the way the Google Local Business Center has referenced your place of business, what is the best approach for you. Rather surprisingly, the only way is to get more citations in as many other local directories as you can. Even though some of them are decidedly flaky, for example Yellow Pages, Google applies its algorithm to such questionable data. It’s not quite, Garbage In, Garbage Out, but the results might sometimes get you scratching your head..

The following is a list of references you may wish to use to maximize the chances that Google can find you correctly. They were featured in a Guide to Canadian Citations for Local Search by David Mihm.

He also added some citation sources not specific to Canada

The problem is that Google is relying on computer algorithms to handle this local data. Unfortunately there are often errors in the data that only can be corrected by a human review. Thankfully some of the above sources do have such a review process.

The CityDirect Network is particularly good in this respect. SMM BC is featured in the Langley Direct directory. This only occurred after a call from a staff member of CityDirect who verified that the business really did exist and operated out of the named location.

If your business is not yet featured in the CityDirect Network, I would highly recommend it. You can sign up via this membership link. You can have a free listing or you can pay for an enhanced listing. Once you have entered all your data, you will be called by a representative to confirm the validity of the data that you have entered. It seems to be a process that runs very smoothly.

The other bonus is that this may be a way of getting the Google local search process to get additional knowledge of where your company is located. That is indeed another major advantage. Plus you are featured in the CityDirect Network where other human visitors may find you. See you on the Map.

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Google Profile – Yes Or No

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Google wants you to profile yourself and it all sounds so inviting.  A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are.

As an extra inducement, they now give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name by showing Google profile results at the bottom of name-query search pages, at least in the U.S. and Canada.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent article on the mechanics of how Google profile results improve people search.  Barry Schwartz has also provided details on the slightly clunky way you can verify your google profile.  Since this is all linked to social networking, you might have thought it would link in with Orkut, their ailing attempt to create a social space.  Not so, in fact it requires you to at least create a profile in their Knol space, even if you do not feel the urge to add to the fund of human knowledge.

I wondered how many people are going along with Google in creating profiles.  It seemed to me that a good test would be to check out some of the 38 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization that had contributed to the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 study.  This is how they seemed to be working with profiles, at the time this was written.  Clearly results may change over time.

Google Profiles for SEO leaders
Good Profile with Verified Name (7)
corrected April 27, 2008
Good Profile with Non-Verified Name (10)
Minimal profile (6)
No Profile (15)
  • Andy Hagans
  • Ani Kortikar
  • Scott Smith (Caveman)
  • Chris Boggs
  • Eric Enge
  • Guillaume Bouchard
  • Jeremy Schoemaker
  • Laura Lippay
  • Lucas Ng (aka shor)
  • Mike McDonald
  • Natasha Robinson
  • Neil Patel
  • Roger Montti aka martinibuster
  • Scottie Claiborne
  • Thomas Bindl

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.  As Marshall Kirkpatrick points out You Can Change What Google Says About You whenever you wish.

Google also offers a way of deleting your Google profile, if you feel that is to your advantage.  However it adds the somewhat ominous Note: Once you delete your profile, you won’t be able to get it back.  Given that it is unclear how Google profiles might be used in the future, that leaves you with a somewhat risky decision.

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Are You On Google?

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What sort of question is that?  Isn’t everyone on Google to a certain extent?  However you probably do not believe it is something you join like Facebook or Twitter.

Well that has changed although you may have missed the memo.  As MG Siegler has pointed out, Google Profiles Is Taking An Important Social Step With Vanity URLs.

The problem with Google’s movement towards becoming more of a social entity is that it lacks one cohesive place to tie everything together. Google lacks a singular area – like a Facebook profile page – where all that Google knows about you can reside and be easily seen. Actually there is such an area, Google Profiles and Google is now making it quite a bit easier to find.

So are you on Google?  You can check this out with the following search for your name on Google Profiles.

google logo

If you already have a Google Account and have a Gmail address, then you are well along in joining this new potential social network.

Mike Elgan believes this will be Google’s ‘Facebook Killer’.  He feels that Google is just one acquisition away from offering a social network that does everything Facebook does, minus all the things everybody hates about Facebook.  That acquisition he is pushing for is that Google should buy Twitter.

The end result of this integration would be a social network far better than Facebook.  Rather than being a link dead-end like Facebook, Profiles would be a launching pad of discoverability for everything you want to promote. It would be cleaner, faster and easier to use than Facebook. And it would be a one-stop shop for both social networking and Twitter.

I believe he is over-valuing what Twitter would bring to such an acquisition.  Twitter has relatively rudimentary features and undoubtedly the Twitter owners will put far too high a price on their social network.  If Google was of a mind to add the social media trappings to Google Profiles, it would not be rocket science to do so.  The Google name would ensure people would flock to it.  Indeed how many of you reading this have already claimed your Google Profile once you heard about it.

All the concept needs is a little marketing.  Google Profiles is clearly a no-no. Thinking over possible names and remembering the precedent of the Google Chrome browser, one name jumps out.

Google Glitter!  The name would almost market itself.  The related concepts are multitudinous.  Status reports would be glints of course.  Perhaps if some related helpful ideas come to mind for Google, you could add them in the comments.   It undoubtedly would be much cheaper to buy the appropriate domain(s) and/or trademark(s) to allow the concept to shine than it would to buy that tottering whale.

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Three Tips For Choosing Great Blog Topics

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Writers Block
Image by bornazombie via Flickr

I noted this morning a blog post by Dean Rieck on 7 Easy Ways to Energize Your Creative Writing Powers.

His key message is that if you’re feeling like you’re in a creative daze, take a new path. Do something different. That’s one way to discover fresh ideas and energize your creative powers. He then suggests 7 others:

  1. Learn your craft.
  2. Get off auto pilot.
  3. Stop avoiding failure.
  4. Focus on important problems.
  5. Find new uses for old ideas.
  6. Break down false barriers.
  7. Set the conditions you need to create.

If you are bereft of ideas on what to write about, Google has a huge store of other places to find how What To Write About. Two that caught my eye were:

I must admit that I think they are all approaching this from the wrong end.  So much has been written already, why add to the mountain.  They all seem to be approaching this in the way an artist might decide to create a work of art, whether there is an audience or not.  It is what is sometimes called the product-driven way of doing business.

A much more productive way of doing business is to be customer-centric.  Let us see how that concept can be applied.

What are three great tips for choosing great blog topics.  Remember the problem is not lack of choice, but rather too many possible topics you might cover.  The solution is the same as the advice in running a successful business.  Focus, focus, focus.  The three tips to focus on are:

  • Picture your ideal reader and what they will be doing at the time they consider reading your fine prose.
  • Try to home in on something you know about that will really take their fancy and may even be a bit of a surprise and a delight to them.  Remember you bring your own unique perspective to what you will write about.  Make sure this will shine through your writing.
  • Now that you have your topic, think of the 3 most important aspects of that topic around which you can create the best blog post you have ever written.

Of course the fourth unwritten tip is if you are not happy with the result of this process today, then don’t do it today.  Instead make sure that, as you live your life today, you are keenly aware of your surroundings.  Smelling the roses or the coffee or watching how a young child delights in unexpected findings may just be the trigger that suggests what the topic should be when you go through the three tips  again tomorrow.

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Take The Google Challenge

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So many people are now Googling for answers to their questions, it is not surprising that Google brings a goodly number of visitors to most websites.  I was particularly struck by this after a simple analysis I did for an article on Search Engine Marketing in the Marketing Right Now series.


Free Online Polls

Before I show you the results, perhaps you would like to fill-in the small survey on the right, provided your own website has more than 5000 page views per month.  This restriction is intended to give slightly greater validity to the findings.  It is completely anonymous, so please provide truthful results. 

From whatever data you have available for a reasonable period of time, say at least a month, please signify which bracket covers the percentage of visitors coming via Google to your website.  That could for example be Google analytics data if you use that.  Other traffic monitoring usually give similar data.

 

I suggest the result may be indicative of how well your site is optimized for Google keyword queries.  It will be very instructive to see the range of responses.  I was extremely gratified for this SMM domain with the results that appear below.  That is based on 6 months of data. 

SMM Website Traffic - 6 months

Sources of website traffic
Direct 9.40%
Search Engines Google 71.24%;
Yahoo! 2.57%
Live 1.24%
Google Images 0.98%
MSN 0.69%
Total search engines 76.72%
Others StumbleUpon 3.05%
Wikipedia 0.64%
Google blogs 0.62%
Other 9.57%

71 percent of visitors coming via Google shows the SEO is very effective.  Can anyone top that? Please add your result in the comments if your website gets a greater percentage of Google visitors. Your views on what this all means would be much appreciated too.

Update: There’s a very interesting discussion on this at Cre8asite Forums. I encourage you to join in.

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2010 Olympics Motto – Or Should That Be Mantra

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A Motto Sells, A Mantra Inspires

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games (VANOC) has announced it will use “With Glowing Hearts” and “Des plus brilliants exploits” as the Games’ English and French mottos.

Both phrases come from O Canada. They will be used leading up to and through the Games. The phrases were recently trademarked by the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee. According to VANOC chief executive officer John Furlong: “With glowing hearts’ is connected and familiar to all Canadians through our anthem, O Canada, and it also embodies what it takes to be an Olympic or Paralympic athlete.” It seems that this really appeals to the athletes but the general public is more divided. At the present time in a Castanet poll the votes split fairly evenly:

Poll Question: Do you think words from the Canadian national anthem should be used as the motto for the 2010 Olympics?
Yes 342 No 321 Total Votes: 663

VANOC 2010 Vancouver Olympics Committee

In a way it is not surprising to see that split. It links to a topic raised by Guy Kawasaki on whether one should work on Mantras or Missions. Missions often tend to be long-winded and empty. He felt that mantras would better fire up the troops.. On the other hand, I felt that mottos or taglines were better since they tell your customers what you will do for them.

I believe what VANOC has delivered is a great 2010 Olympics mantra. It links in with all that good work done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Who better than Olympics and Paralympics athletes to feel that Flow “With Glowing Hearts”.

Related: Faster Is Better

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Knol – Wikipedia With Ads

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If Wikipedia is an essential resource of knowledge for you, you may find it is about to lose out against a powerful new competitor. Google announced last December that it would be encouraging people to contribute knowledge. Now we are told that Knol is open to everyone.

.. and what exactly is Knol? Well it is a website where you will find knols, which are authoritative articles about specific topics. And who are these authorities? It’s you and me. Provided no one else writes a better knol, then yours may stay as the authority. Your topic can be as important or as unimportant as you wish. For example, I wrote a knol on the humble exclamation mark!. I even included a relevant New Yorker cartoon on aliens and the exclamation point. That knol will stay as the authority until someone writes a more authoritative one.

Other commentators are quite clear on what it is all about. As ReadWriteWeb suggests, Google is taking on Wikipedia.

In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.

And as Matthew Ingram suggests, Mahalo may be an early casualty as the heavy artillery arrives.

TechCrunch is even clearer on Google’s motivation: they wished to create a monetizable version of Wikipedia. However they do raise questions on whether this initiative will have any long-term lasting value.

What is quite clear is that this will markedly affect the normal Google search process. Although new web pages often rank well in a honeymoon period, Danny Sullivan feels already that knols are doing even better than might be expected in the search results. It all just makes it that much more difficult to rank well with organic search engine optimization (SEO).

Instead it means you will be seeing even more Google Adsense ads. That clearly is the name of the game. Whether this ubiquitous presence for AdWords will induce AdWords blindness is an interesting question. It certainly may give opportunities for other advertising services such as Performancing with its Targeted Blog Advertising.

PerformancingAds

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Twitter Micro-Blogging

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Twitter is not just something birds do.

This week I attended the WordCamp Fraser Valley session in Langley. It was excellent with a great deal to learn about the WordPress blogging software from some fine speakers. However the biggest revelation to me was that Vancouver is perhaps the Twitter capital of Canada.

Like many others I had wondered about the allure of Twitter. It is a very simple webpage with a box where you can tell the world something about your current status. What you type will be seen by any of your followers, if they happen to be looking. You can send that message from your mobile phone if you choose, and it all seems very simple. How could so many in the audience be such enthusiasts? I was at the other end of the spectrum with people like Steven Hodson, who proclaims that Twitter is Not a Micro-Blogging Tool.

My shortsightedness on this is explained by the fact that I never read the instructions. Indeed how could such a simple tool need instructions? How wrong I was.

The major item that has come onto my radar screen is that Twitter now has Search. It acquired Summize and has integrated this as Twitter Search. Just check out some of the Search Operators. You can type these search operators directly into the search box. (Alternatively, you can use the advanced search form to automatically construct your query.) Just look at some of the examples they give:

  • "happy hour" near:"san francisco" containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
  • movie -scary :) containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
  • flight :( containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.


How does a search function distinguish between a positive attitude and a negative attitude. It’s still one of the unanswered questions I have.

Of course 140 characters and spaces is a very short post even for a micro-blog. However you can tag individual tweaks by using what is called a hashtag. Provided you register with hashtags.org then you can do searches such as #haiku to find all tweaks containing the hashtag “haiku”. You can also have Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags if you wish.

Once I realized that Twitter was more than just a small box I decided I should read the instructions. They are labeled the Official Twitter Commands. These allow you to keep Twitter under control from phone, IM, and most 3rd party applications by using the designated Twitter commands? On all devices they give you fine-grained control of Twitter updates.

For example type in STATS and this command returns your number of followers, how many people you’re following, and which words you’re tracking. Twitter Tracking is a feature allowing you to receive on your mobile devices all Twitter updates that contain a word of choice. Send track+keyword to Twitter from your phone or IM to get updates containing that word. For example: track Obama to receive updates matching Obama. For now, track is for phone and IM only but Web support is potentially coming soon.

If you have not read the instructions for Twitter, studying the above information will be very worthwhile. Who knows, if you find blogging would be too much of a challenge for you, perhaps micro-blogging will give you similar pleasure for much less effort.

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Tags Attract Eyes

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Tags take you where Google doesn’t.

What is the most popular three letter word on the Internet as far as Google knows? We probably should disregard words that describe the Internet such as net (4.95 billion entries) or Web (4.33 billion entries). If you’re thinking sex (824 million entries), you are wrong. It’s that humble word tag (1.04 billion entries).

Surprisingly, Google does not have a definition for tag, but you can see lots of examples all around you.

tag mind map

Tag is a word you’ll be hearing more and more about. Another word, you could use would be label. The search engines using computer-based algorithms sometimes have difficulty finding that article you know exists on say, ‘artificial intelligence’. If only the author had tagged or labeled his article ‘artificial intelligence’, then your chances of finding it would be much higher. You can use a service like Technorati, which tries to tag as much of the Web as it can.

To make the popular tags in a blog more visible, you can use what is called a tag cloud. This has been added to this blog in the right sidebar, and it is also being displayed in the other SMM blogs. This is a feature that is simplicity in itself to implement if you’re using the WordPress software. If you click on any link in that tag cloud, then you will see a list of the posts that carry that tag. The tag archive web page also displays a longer list of tags, together with the categories under which posts here are listed.

If the simple logic of the tag does not convince you, then further proof is in this week’s news item that the tag is getting a powerful friend. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, is receiving a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to help refine news searches by employing more sophisticated tagging, way upstream. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate “source tagging” into routine journalistic workflow.

If you are not using tags yet, isn’t it time you should start. Guten Tag.

Related:
Effective Tagging For Both Usability & SEO – Stephan Spencer

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