Archive for the ‘website’ tag
Designing A Better Website
It seems like online publishers are starting to think about the digital-first experience.
In the past short while, we have started to see what could only be described as "true online publishing" taking on a new (and pretty) look and feel. It started not too long ago when Fast Company did a full overhaul of their website. If you choose an article on their site, you will mostly see a big and beautiful image, a bold headline and that’s when the scrolling begins. You intuitively move down the page for the content or left to right at the top of the page for supplemental images associated with the piece. The New York Times had a breakthrough with Snow Fall, which was their interactive coverage of the rise in fatalities from skiing. Reuters is currently previewing their latest web version and there are grumblings that a major redesign of The New York Times is on the way as well.
In response to responsive design.
While the language of how we design the Internet continues to evolve (thanks to HTML5), we are also now seeing responsive Web design and parallax scrolling techniques take hold. Websites will now adjust to the user’s experience (which could be happening on a computer, smartphone or tablet) and adapt (or respond) to the user’s needs accordingly. While it’s not as simple as it sounds in terms of the design and cost to get there, it’s an excellent concession position for online publishers (instead of having to design native experiences for the Web and multiple mobile app platforms). But, what makes these techniques most fascinating is the user experience. Instead of a fixed, square page buffered by banner ads, the user is actually moved through the piece because of the design experience it creates in flowing them along with the story. It’s no longer about having those annoying page numbers to click through at end of each page, and much more about a page that is unencumbered by any physical page limitation.
Beyond paper.
When television first came on air, it was mostly people performing radio in front of a camera. There was no real acting as we see it today. There were no multi-camera shots. It was mostly live and, if we’re going to honest here: it was boring. It was only exciting because we could see people and the technology was new. While the Web wasn’t boring beyond the recent changes in how we’re designing and publishing stories now, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that most online publishers were simply replicating the print experience. Copy and paste. We took our text from the newspapers and magazines and copy and pasted it on to a Web page. Sure, links added depth to these stories and comments enabled people to add to the discourse (or, as Arianna Huffington likes to say about blogging and the Huffington Post: "self-expression is the new entertainment"), but online publishing still looked and felt like traditional publishing. The thing is that now we’re starting to see and understand the landscape in a much more profound and powerful way. A web page is not limited to the same constraints as a printed page, consumers are better at understanding how to manipulate digital spaces, while tablets and smartphones add a whole new perspective with hand gestures. Plus, legitimate designers are now starting to take the Internet more seriously as a design medium. So, we’re moving beyond trying to make the Internet look, feel and read like paper, and this is the moment in time when it feels like the Internet is about to become a true publishing medium unto itself. And something a whole lot more interesting to look at.
No, it’s not just Twitter.
Blogging, Twitter and more are original ways to spread, share and create content. Facebook, tumblr, YouTube and even the latest entry, Medium, are all doing their fare share of the work in creating new and fascinating ways for content to be penned and distributed, but the majority of the design still harkens back to the day of the printing press. What is about to make all of this digital publishing most fascinating will be more than the words, images, audio and video content, but in how it is designed to create something new. Traditional publishers are no longer just publishing content online, but working – harder than ever – to create a true experience that is native to a digitally connected screen. This the true power and opportunity of online publishing. Articles suddenly look like microsites and stories suddenly have three-dimensional depth to them that could have never have been achieved in the classic formats. For some, these new experiences may be too busy or have too much going on. Personally, these nascent examples are the bedrock of what will make digital such a rich and interesting next-generation publishing engine. It seems like we’ve scratched well beneath the surface with the content part of the equation in the past decade, but now it is time for the designers and user experience people to really up the ante and move us beyond the limitations of pages and fixed spaces to help stories flow in new and interesting ways. The challenge (and there is always a lot of them) will be in figuring out if things like banner ads and text links can maintain their dominance as the revenue generation engine that supports these more robust forms of content.
What do you think?
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:
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You Don’t Have A Branding Problem…
You have a marketing problem.
How many meetings have you sat in where people want to refresh the logo, redo the website, create a mobile app, build a Facebook page, get new brochures and more because they think that they’re having a problem getting their message through to their potential audience? The issue is systematic. Unfortunately, too many marketers think that they have a branding problem. That the message that they have is simply not connecting to an intended audience.
Maybe that is all wrong.
Before you go changing things, take a deep breath… a few steps back and ask yourself this:
- What is the path to purchase? Do you know how people find out about your product (or service), learn more about it, make a decision and then finally buy from you?
- Tracking. How much of that process are you both tracking and optimizing? Do you know your true conversion rates? Where these potential people are in your sales funnel? Are you constantly tweaking that tracking with a better understanding of what it costs to acquire a customer, keep them and their overall lifetime value?
- Fixing what you have. Before a redesign of your website, mobile app or whatever, what do you really know about what is going on? How well-versed are you in web analytics? What insights are you culling from the data and tweaking/testing to ensure that with every move, you are making it simpler for someone to transact with you?
- Telling your story. Have you truly leveraged social media and traditional communications to uncover the real stories of your business? The types of stories that people will actually want to find and share? Making the content that you are creating as shareable and as findable as possible? Or, is this still a world of frustration because the trades won’t pay any attention to your standard press releases and nobody watches those boring corporate videos on YouTube?
- Finding like. Are you busy chasing likes, friends, followers and plus ones and spending little-to-no time engaging with those who actually care about the industry that you serve? Are you expecting everyone to come to you, when you spend no time going to them and being active in their community?
Tough questions. True questions.
All too often people think they’re doing something wrong… or not doing anything at all. My experience (twenty years and going) says this: most people don’t know what they have and spend too much time doing the whole, "the grass is greener" thing. So, even if they keep adding and redoing, they’re still not doing the hard work of figuring out who is doing what and why. It’s better to point to something else, blame a logo, think the website is not performing or buy more advertising instead of truly understanding what there is, what is working (and what isn’t) and what has been done to rectify and optimize. Yes, marketing optimization has been on the brain lately. It’s mostly there because we (finally) have the technology, data and information to know. To know everything. To fix it. To do the right thing.
And so… let’s fix the logo? Or… let’s fix our marketing?
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lifetime value of the customer
every noise at once
Trust me, it’s totally worth clicking around this site. Every noise at once is an algorithmically-generated non-analytical map of the musical genre-space, whatever that means. I just think it’s awesome.
Dynamic Content | The Future of the Web is Here
There is a new trend that is on the horizon. It’s subtle so you may not even notice its happening until it’s too late. It’s mostly referred to as Dynamic Content which doesn’t seem substantial enough to truly describe its power.
Here’s a thought to help clarify.
What if your website could change for every visitor to show them the content that is MOST relevant to them?
Do you think that would impact sales and conversions? As long as the information you know about the visitor is relevant and accurate, I think it could have a tremendous impact. Back in May of 2009, I wrote a post called Dynamic Relevant Content will Lead the Way to Web 3.0 that illustrated the use of dynamic content to drive a website. It’s kind of funny to look back at the post with its rudimentary graphics. But hey it was one of my first blog posts. Here is the future of the web I had envisioned back in 2009. Forgive me for the horrible colors; reflections and so much text it makes me want to punch myself in the face. Fortunately, it still illustrates the point pretty well though.
Dynamic Content will Drive the Future of the Web
Honestly, it isn’t too far off from what I envision today. The biggest change is that I don’t think this is limited to B2B marketers. I think it is absolutely applicable to both B2B and B2C marketers.
The Good News
The good news is that the technology to start making this a reality has arrived. Both Marketo, Hubspot and Pardot have been talking a lot about the power of dynamic content and using their platforms to drive one-to-one customization based upon collected and observed information from website visitors. Right now they are focused on smart forms that only ask for new information, smart calls to action and minimal smart on-page content.
“…relevant emails drive 18X more revenue than broadcast emails ( Jupiter Research ). Eighteen flippin’ times more revenue! And leads who are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities ( Annuitas Group ).” – Meaghan Keaney Anderson, Hubspot, on why dynamic content matters.
The Bad News
Business processes and marketers need to get prepared for using dynamic content. It requires an entirely different type of marketing process. It means we have to stop thinking in one-to-many and start thinking one-to-one. Does that scare you a little? Just imagine the challenges with creating content for a segment, now we have to understand every single customer and make sure we have something for them. It’s not quite that bad, for now you can use one-to-a few marketing tactics to scale dynamic content. But don’t think it gets you off the hook for thinking one-to-one in the long term.
Add Dynamic Sections to Your Website
The first thing to consider is what areas of your website should be dynamic. Should it start with a form and calls to action or are there more powerful areas where dynamic content would make an impact? Here are some areas to consider:
- Forms
- Calls to Action
- Product Recommendations
- Dynamic content fields in on-page content that customizes based on previously provided information like illustrated here by Pardot
Segmentation Options
The second thing to consider is HOW you will segment your dynamic content. There are a variety of ways you can segment your audiences to create dynamic content. Marketo put together an excellent list of options in this post that was incredibly comprehensive and better than what I would’ve provided, so I’ve included it here.
“You can present dynamic content based on a variety of information, including:
- Demographics: Characteristics about the individual, including name, company name, job title, phone, and email address.
- Firmographics: Characteristics about an organization, including location, annual revenues, number of employees, and industry.
- Past behavior: Responses to emails or actions taken on your website can help inform a person’s interests and/or place in the buying cycle.
- Products or services already purchased: Using information about past purchases can help you up-sell or cross-sell relevant products or services.
- Psychographics and preferences: This takes into consideration a prospect’s interests, attitudes, and opinions.
- Behavior of related contacts: Understanding the actions, interests, and preferences of others in the recipient’s company is critical in a purchase that involves many stakeholders.” – Dayna Rothman, Marketo
The Worse News
This is all truly amazing progress for user experience that I’m personally super excited about. But here’s the bad news. The tools that are powering the information and technology to launch this are marketing automation providers. Sure, your web developer could customize something similar but it’s the DATA that really drives this. We used to make arguments about only collecting the data that we could use right away, now I’d argue we should collect everything we can because we never know when we will be able to turn it into something actionable. Now that you have the technology to make the information more useful you are going to want MORE data. If you haven’t been collecting the data for the last couple of years, you are at a distinct disadvantage. It doesn’t mean you can’t start; you should absolutely start as soon as possible. Recognize that if your competitors have had marketing automation in place for a few years, they will have significant amounts of data that you don’t have yet.
We Must Handle Data with Care
Clearly, we need some guidelines for how we SHOULD use this data versus how we COULD use the data. First, to be responsible we need to start providing a way for people to opt-out. Right now it feels like we are night crawlers going in and stealing up as much data as we can. We love it because we feel like we are doing things that are beneficial for the user, but let’s be honest for a second. Most users have NO idea how much information we have collected in our databases about them. Some are collecting information they are giving us, and even appending it with data from purchased sources to have a more holistic view. Part of me wants to hide it so people don’t stop giving it to me. But the responsible part of me says we need to be more transparent about the information we are collecting and how it is being used or it will come back and bite us, either in the form of nasty regulations or a nasty lawsuit caused by dynamic content gone wild.
We also need to be smart about how we actually use the data. There is some information that is helpful in customizing content and other information that is just creepy. Nothing will get more people using incognito browsers faster than sending an email for funeral services right after someone posts a status update that their grandmother passed away. Let’s be responsible folks.
If I were a financial advisor and knew that you are 38 and have two kids named Johnny and Maggie it would make sense to show you investment options on my site that are appropriate for you based on your age and helping you save for college for your kids. If I’m a B2B software company and have the same information it’s straight up creepy to customize based upon information about my age and kids. Remember that the user still views your site as a “corporate brand”. I could totally send an email from a sales rep that mentions a conversation we had about your kids provided it’s relevant and in the right tone, but to put it on my site as a dynamic content area is strange. Think it through folks. What is the right balance of customization that makes the information relevant and doesn’t freak people out.
Finally, we need to allow people to correct misinformation. For example, I research a lot of tools for clients. So I may provide information on THEIR industry to get some specific information one time, but the next time I may be looking at it through the lens of another industry or want information for myself. The example of customization in the article from Pardot is based upon the company’s CRM system. I have clients on all of those systems and may need to change the CRM system to get the information I need at a later date. Make sure you understand the audience enough to know how they research and don’t customize so much that they can’t back out of those customizations if they aren’t correct.
If you ask me, I’d say that dynamic content and the potential it holds is a huge step forward for business, for marketers, and for user experience. It’s one that we will be doing some experimenting with over the next several months, for sure.
What potential do you see with dynamic content? Are you using it now? Leave a comment and let’s talk about where dynamic content can take us.
What are you optimizing your pages for?
by Mike Moran
SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you’d be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren’t actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you’ll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.
This was all brought to mind by interactions with two different people the last few days who each are concerned about the same thing–search traffic dropping to their sites. When I dug into the situation further, I found that neither had any idea what kind of sales they were generating from their sites. One, in fact, knew that the page that had recently dropped in search rankings had an extremely high bounce rate, so they couldn’t have been selling very much.
Now, for both of these people, the lack of sales was not a crisis, but the drop in search traffic and the drop in search rankings was a crisis. It was hard not to chuckle at how times have changed.
I guess you’ve been in the search business a long time when you can remember when you had to prove every nickel that would come in because we did this new SEO thing. No one believed it would work and no one wanted to do it.
And look at us now. Now there are people walking around that have such a rabid belief in SEO that they think it is an end in itself–that high rankings or even high traffic is some kind of magical elixir. It’s not.
Getting people to the front door of your Web site isn’t the end of the game. Unless you are optimizing your pages to actually sell things, online or offline, you’re not ready for SEO. In fact, if your Web site stinks, you should probably try to have as few people find it as possible. If you don’t know why you want people coming to your site, then figure that out first. Once you know your site can sell stuff, then it makes sense to use SEO and any other means at your disposal to drive as many people there as possible.
Originally posted on http://www.biznology.com Blog
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[Video] Email Marketing: Use website content to increase list size
Optimization Summit 2013, held May 20-23 in Boston, is just weeks away. To help get you in the proper mindset for four days of hands-on learning and expert-led presentations, we’re continuing our series of video shorts highlighting the most memorable sessions from last year’s event.
As MECLABS’ Managing Director Flint McGlaughlin said at Optimization Summit 2012, “Best practices on the Internet are typically pooled ignorance.”
In the following video excerpt, Nathaniel Ward, Manager of Online Programs, The Heritage Foundation, and Tim Kachuriak, SVP, Innovation & Optimization, Pursuant, talk about how the conservative think tank tested and optimized its landing page by looking beyond established best practices and experimenting with new ways to use the website to build a quality email list.
[Please note, while MECLABS neither agrees nor disagrees with the political leanings referenced in the video, we seek to discover marketing lessons from all marketers. At Optimization Summit 2013, you can learn how Obama for America generated $500 million in donations using A/B testing.]
Ward and Kachuriak seemed to agree with McGlaughlin about best practices. During this session, they questioned several “sacred cows” of webpage design, such as inundating pages with email capture fields. Kachuriak spoke about how The Heritage Foundation put its website content into action with a short questionnaire about Obamacare, based on the popular children’s board game, “Operation.”
Kachuriak said, “Guiding people through that mental conversation that makes them more predisposed to want to accept our offer.” Indeed, while this short questionnaire added an extra step in the name capture process, it led to a significant increase in name acquisition conversion.
By garnering visitors’ names only after they completed the questionnaire, Kachuriak’s team was able to engage in a conversation with users, giving them a better understanding of the organization’s value proposition and reassuring them of the type(s) of content they would receive in exchange for entering in their email addresses.
This additional series of steps increased name acquisition conversion 282%, and a 900% increase in email sign-ups over the nonprofit benchmark.
Related Resources:
How The Heritage Foundation increased donations 274% – Full, free video replay of this case study
How The Heritage Foundation Increased Online Donations 274% Using the MECLABS Methodology – Complete slide presentation from Optimization Summit 2012
Marketing Strategy: How to find answers to the most common marketing questions
Baking Brand Storytelling Into Your Lunch
Any restaurant is rich in stories, from the founding of the establishment to the experiences of its patrons. Because of that, the restaurant business is an interesting venue for content marketing, social media and brand storytelling.
I like to think that the best part about going out to eat, particularly with friends, isn’t the food (though don’t get me wrong; I adore food). It’s the stories we share and the stories we create. It’s like the times spent with my wife reviewing our plate of nachos in hopes that someday we’ll cull all those reviews into a blog just about nachos (though that’s a whole other story). It’s the times spent with friends catching up and reminiscing about old times.
Restaurants have a unique opportunity to tap into brand storytelling, and there’s a restaurant in the U.K. doing just that.
An Irani Dish With a Side of Story
Dishoom is a Bombay-style café that takes its roots and stories very seriously. So seriously, actually, that they’re baked into its dishes. Since Dishoom is an Irani café (an Iranian- or Persian-style café in India) that holds tight to the traditions of 19th-century Bombay, it wanted to capture people’s experiences at other old Irani cafés.
“Irani cafés of Bombay were eating, meeting and drinking places for people from all communities where rich lawyers could find themselves drinking chai next to sweaty taxi-wallahs,” reads its website. “This melting pot was where stories began.”
The campaign started with 80 plates into which were baked personal stories of Irani cafés as recalled by the older generation in Bombay and the U.K., according to Adweek. Now visitors to the site also have the option of sharing their stories and even designing their own plates! The best stories and designs are chosen and added to the collection of plates.
The effort is unique and memorable, but most importantly, it’s talkable. Patrons will share the unique elements of the Irani café with their friends. I’m thousands of miles away and, even having never been there, I’m sharing it with you.
Serving Up Fresh Content
Dishoom’s commitment to brand storytelling and content marketing doesn’t stop at the creative story-driven plates. It consistently creates content on its beautiful blog, which features vibrant imagery and articles (once or twice a month) on topics such as Bombay, design, events, food, heritage and life at Dishoom.
Even when you first land on Dishoom’s website, you’re greeted with storytelling. The top of the website (and a good majority of the content above the fold) is dedicated to a horizontally scrolling montage of photos depicting a day at Dishoom. From a cup of chai at 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. dinner and tipples and nibbles after dark, the visitor to the site is given every reason to stop by Dishoom anytime, day or night.
Dishoom’s Facebook and Twitter presences are engaging and on brand and boast quite respectable fan/follower counts (both more than 6,000), considering Dishoom’s small geographic footprint (just two small cafés).
The Brand Takeaway
You don’t have to run a restaurant to learn from Dishoom. Its commitment to content and storytelling can be applied to any brand. We’ve seen a number of other lesser-known brands make this commitment and reap the rewards, notably Warby Parker and Hiut Denim.
Dishoom has unearthed its brand story and found innovative ways, both online and off-, to express various chapters of that story along the customer journey. As one follows its digital footprints into the physical store, its strong culture and history are omnipresent, creating an emotional connection to the guest.
Dishoom is memorable and talkable and fosters a community atmosphere that keeps guests engaged (online) and coming back for more (offline). It provides customers with conversations—something to tell their friends long after they leave the restaurant—and it’s conversations that drive action. Or as our CEO, Kirk Cheyfitz, would say, “It’s the conversations, stupid.”
Which other brands have you seen that have this type of commitment to storytelling?
Isn’t It About Time Your Brand Adopted a Mobile Strategy?
I received a sobering yet enlightening Facebook message from my aunt two weeks ago. After getting over my shock that she even knew how to use Facebook Messenger (she is not a technophile), I read her message:
Aunt: Guess what I got today?
Me: What?
Aunt: The iPhone 5
[cue jaw dropping]
I was reading this on my iPhone 3Gs, yet I’m the one who works at a global post-advertising agency. That’s when I knew it: Mobile has reached significant penetration and can’t be ignored by brands.
There’s more proof than just the fact that my aunt owns her first smartphone (three generations newer than my own). This past Monday, during a panel discussion of mobile marketing at OMMA Global (where Story happened to take home an OMMA award), moderator Matthew Snyder, founder-CEO of ADObjects, Inc., said, “We’ve been hearing since 1995 that next year would be the year of mobile adoption and exponential growth. I think 2010 was finally that year, and now we’re moving toward the next stage of mobile innovation.”
The stats back Snyder up. According to the Flurry Blog, 78 percent of U.S. adults between 15 and 64 years old own a smart device of some kind. The adoption rate of iOS and Android devices has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history; it’s 10 times faster than the one that marked the ’80s’ PC revolution.
A July 2012 survey by Google found that 67 percent of users surveyed are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site than they are from one that’s unfriendly, and 61 percent of users surveyed said they’d leave a website if they couldn’t quickly find what they were looking for. So if your site isn’t optimized for a mobile device, then you may as well just redirect your customers to your competition.
A Flat Tire
What Zappos.com is to your feet, TireRack.com is to your car. When I blew out the rear right tire on my car last week (pictured on right), I was instantly in the market for new tires. As I sat on the train yesterday, I thought I’d price tires on TireRack.com and possibly purchase them right there. But its website completely ignores the mobile visitor. Instead of a seamless mobile version, I got the full site, which took ages to load and had me zooming and swiping all over the page. I made it only halfway through the search process before I boiled over with frustration and gave up.
I could just have waited until I got to my laptop, but by then it was too late: My installer had already gotten back to me with prices, and I ordered through him. Data from Viacom indicates that 96 percent of tablet owners in the United States use their devices in their living rooms. Even when laptops or desktops are near, users still turn to their smart devices.
I’d been there on TireRack.com, on my phone, with time to kill and a need to fill, and the sale was lost because of a bad mobile experience. The value of e-commerce is in its 24/7/365 nature. Without mobile optimization, TireRack is leaving money on the table.
Speaking of Zappos, its mobile site is fantastic, and it also offers an iPhone application. The search function (for the mobile site) is right on the front page and has big buttons and simple criteria. No extra fluff, just a smooth user experience that creates the shortest path between customer interest and product sale.
What it means for your brand
Given that there are businesses that still don’t believe they need websites at all, it may seem premature to try to move the masses toward mobile development. But for most brands, having a website, even one that’s continually updated with fresh content (for inbound marketing and SEO purposes), isn’t enough anymore.
If your brand values consistent and recurring engagement, you’re doing it a disservice by creating a torturous (read: non–mobile optimized) mobile experience for your audience. Mobile optimization is not just for e-commerce sites, either. It’s for all sites. The fact that smart devices can access full websites doesn’t mean that the experience translates well. On the contrary, it rarely does. In fact, PostAdvertising.com is very bad as a full-site web experience, which is why it’s optimized for mobile and available as an iPhone and iPad application.
It’s About Time
Whether they concern moving a print magazine to the iPad, creating a mobile-friendly e-commerce site or constructing a stand-alone mobile application, these statistics and stories are, as Google put it, “a sobering reminder of just how quickly and deeply users’ attitudes about companies can be shaped by mobile site experiences.”
How has your brand embraced the mobile world?
What Panda, Penguin and Social Media Really Mean for Brands
With additional reporting from Cyrus Karimi, Director of Audience Generation at Story Worldwide.
An article recently published on Fast Company has caused a bit of a stir in the content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) communities. Written by Veronica Fielding, CEO of Digital Brand Expressions, it explains how the recent Panda and Penguin Google algorithm updates mean that social engagement rather than search engine trickery yields top results.
While her heart is in the right place (encouraging active, useful social engagement by brands), neither the algorithm updates nor Fielding’s interpretation of them reveals a direct correlation between social activity and SEO relevance. Though extremely important for an effective content marketing strategy, simply interacting with your fans on Facebook, sharing relevant tweets, and uploading useful videos won’t (in and of itself) boost your brand website’s SEO ranking.
Let’s take a look at what Panda, Penguin and social media really mean for brands.
Panda and Penguin
The 2011 Panda update aimed to remove low-value websites from Google rankings. These are the sites that repurpose (or copy word for word) content from other sites and those that are used solely for linking: in other words, sites that a user couldn’t or wouldn’t want to interact with. The update affected 12 percent of listings, penalizing, for the most part, overly optimized sites that provided a poor user experience. Since Google wants users to use its search engine repeatedly, that users have a positive experience throughout the content search, including when they click on a result, is paramount.
The 2012 Penguin update was driven more by users’ experience. The update, which affected only 3 percent of listings, focused on eliminating the sites that use black-hat web spam SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, cloaking and link scheming. Together these updates cut the legs from under those sites that weren’t offering searchers any value, leaving the high-quality, content-rich sites still standing.
This is good news only for brands that are continually focused on creating highly useful and relevant content across a variety of channels.
Social Media and SEO
Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn, also plays a role in the updated algorithms but not in the exact manner Fielding described in her Fast Company article.
First, some social-media channels weigh far more than others, mainly because of technical barriers that search crawlers see when indexing them. The weight of these channels are based on how much information Google can crawl without being stonewalled by the social channels.
For example, because of privacy constraints, what you post on Facebook isn’t seen by Google and has no bearing on your Google SEO listings. Google sees just your Facebook profile and info tab. And if your description on your FB profile and info tab has keywords and links to your other brand properties, you have used that channel for SEO.
?When you use Twitter, the keywords in your user handle and bio, as well as the link included in your bio, help searchers find you. What you tweet can be seen by the engines (not Google as much as Bing, because of a partnership deal), but most tweets by brands that tweet often may never be seen by an end user, because search engines display only a handful of their latest tweets. ? ?YouTube is a lot like Twitter, except that its individual “posts” are videos that have a longer shelf life than that of a timely tweet. One can optimize YouTube profile pages as well as individual video clips that are seen by the engines (especially Google).
Ultimately, no one knows (or at least, nobody has proclaimed publicly) how significantly these social channels are affecting search results. Only a handful of Google employees even know the algorithm at this point. ? ?
The Strategy is This:
Create useful, relevant and shareworthy keyword-optimized content, share across other owned properties, and don’t worry about what Google may or may not do. As long as your brand always keeps the end user in mind and commits to putting out great content, it will be fine.
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Zagat Take Two: Google To Acquire Frommer’s Travel Guides
Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is selling the Frommer’s brand, publications and content to Google. Terms were not disclosed. Frommer’s is the publisher of the venerable travel guide, website and related content. Frommer’s was founded by Arthur Frommer in the 1950s and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.