Nick Garner

This was blueclaw’s 1st time attempt at a conference and on the whole I thought they did a great job form picking the venue to getting the right people on board to speak. It’s interesting how much ‘digital’ there is in Leeds and ‘The North’ in general. Whilst London may be agency capital and the location for conferences like SES, SMX and so on, the SEO conferences I love the most are things like this one.

Sascon is coming up on 17th and 18th of May which is a bit like IonSearch, but more established. Its a great way to learn some new stuff and to meet some old pro’s.

Me….

Here are a few excerts from the article accompanying the video found here.

Here are a few thoughts on ‘query deserves freshness’ related to the video…

Essentially, big money phrases for sports betting like ‘grand national betting’ will get hit by QDF results, i.e. the incumbent affiliate sites will be swept away and news sites will be shown instead. Its going to hit sport affiliates hard and there is not much they can do, other than go for less ‘temporal’ phrases.
here is a good article on the subject

If you go to this site: trending topics, and pick a phrase, in this case ‘Volcanic ash’ you will see lots of news articles about Volcanic ash. in the past it would have been a small news block about Volcanic ash and a number of static sites going into the science behind this subject. Now its the other way around. I’ve screen grabbed the SERPS image here (hosted on Imgur)

My ode to Steve Jobs (taken from Reddit)

PR Moment Conference

I have had the pleasure of speak at a small conference around business to business social media.

The root theme: users go to search engine to find ‘stuff’. B2B is generally niche and so you woudl have to be huge in social to be picked up by the person who is in buying mode.

I also explain Zero moment of truth and how its so important for any business who are innovative enough to mix social with search i.e. they get positive reviews and feedback about the business and then get these ranked around their core phrases. All pretty simple really.

The conference

Prezi.com

And I’ve been experimenting on presentation technoques recently and I’ve started to use something called Prezi, a very alternative way of putting over ideas…

Here it is: (It takes about 20 seconds to load)

EIG Milan roundup

EIG was great fun. I had the honour of introducing the 1st of 2 keynote speakers for the event – John Palfrey.

John Palfrey - keynote

Essentially it ties in with a big theme of mine around social proof and how young people are far more likely to go out looking for this than their forebearers.

As a marketeer my job is to find opportunity in this. And it’ss to manipulate search results to show the stuff your potential customers want to see. Of course if there is a lot of negative stuff about your brand, then its going to be pretty hard to hide that, however on the whole brands just don’t say enoguh good stuff about themselves online – and especially around brand search phrases.

Here is a very informal interview with me and
Joakim Nilsson, Head of Social Media, Betclic Everest Group
Razmus Svenningson , Head of Social Media Strategies and Operations, Betsson Group

Joakim led this and because he knows what hes talking about, he asked some very good questions!

And…. here is the presentation I did for EIG with Joakim and Razmus – here is my segment:

It’s a short round up for how to do social media monitoring for free using various tools out there. I also cover organising and archiving data, which is really important if you want to go back and look at something retrospectively.

The text from my intro for the keynote speech:

Nick Garner

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Barcelona affiliate conference over the weekend and I did 2 sessions:

This was about how for gaming companies Facebook ‘social marketing’ is more or less a waste of time for acquisition. It’s important to break out acquisition from brand marketing. Essentially if you’re in my situation, it’s all about the directly attributable sale. Branding is lovely, but its difficult to track and so its hard to get budget for unless you are the branding person! So here i run through why Facebook does’nt work in this case and then offer a set of suggestions around ZMOT – the zero moment of truth.

What’s this  you may ask.. well, here are 4 stages in the buying cycle:

1. Brand stimulus
2. Social Proof / word of mouth / review, also known as the zero moment of truth
3. The checkout / Cart
4. Feedback positive or negative, which gets recycled and made prominent by Google (search engines) when users research online.

This presentation then wraps up with some ideas on how to work ZMOT to help make that sale!

1. Is it ethical to profit from ranking on an operators brand? (about 55% said… no! )
2. Will operators be able to keep affiliates out of their rankings (about 60% also said no! )

Personally I see affiliates as commission only salespeople who make money off the inefficiencies of operators, so if they rank on brand its because operators hav’nt done a good enough job on their own marketing. And yes I am on the case with Unibet

To make the presentation more interesting, I have also threaded in a cautionary tale about a guy who went from Mr White Hat all the way to Mr Black Hat, where his activities finally catch up with him

FFUUUU, FOREVER ALONE & TROLLFACE

(Clue on the above pic: Reddit FUUUUUUUUU section)

The important thing about hot topics of course is that as social animals, we are very tuned into memes and subtle social signals.  So much like with surfing, the idea is to wait for the right meme to come along and surf it by spinning up your angle on something everyone is already interested in.

IMHO there are 3 main categories of meme trackers:

1. The raw flow on consciousness (Twitter)
2. Filtered sources like Digg and Reddit where content is submitted and the community elect the top stories
3. Sources that are driven by utility like most popular tags or most bookmarked on Delicious

1st group….finding the underlying ‘raw’ ideas that people care about now:

Twitter - the ultimate meme finder

Twitter… is an amazing source of trending topics because so many people use it and because its so easy to just write something. Here are a few of my favourite trending topics tools

• Trendsmap: Pick a geographical area and then see the hot topics for that area. The UK is all about Glastonbury right now.
• Tweetmeme: monitors the URL’s posted on twitter and then aggregates them into ‘whats hot’ lists. Here is a list for ‘world & business’ for the last 7 days
• Twitscoop: It’s a top trending twitter topics tool. There is a lot of noise here, but with some persistence you will find interesting ideas to work some more.

2nd group: seeing how these raw ideas manifest themselves within communities and main stream media

Newsmap

• Newsmap: Its like a tag cloud of headlines that are aggregated from places like Google News. It’s a great way to zone in on what subjects are getting the most attention right now. Here is one for the UK
• Digg: it has lost some of its ‘shine’ over the last 2 years, but it stil has a big community and from what I can see the trending topics are useful
• Reddit: I love reddit. I’ve even bought the Reddit tee shirt. But as a way of watching memes build, its only OK. It tends to drift off into the preferences of this rather ‘left’ community, which is fine if you want to appeal to this group.
• Mag.Ma is a meme aggregator for video. It’s very interesting to see what’s hot here, but with video, if you see something really ‘cooking’ its gong to be a challenge to get a meme surfing video in a hurry, so for me, its about taking these hot videos and writing stuff about them, rather than produce something to compete with them.

3rd group: seeing the popular vote work in places that aren’t entirely news driven.

Wikipedia Traffic Stats

• Wikipedia: It ranks highly across the internet and its reasonable to say that when there is a hot subject and you want unbiased background information on a given subject, its a place to go. So some clever people have set up a tool to monitor Wikipedia’s traffic.  Here for instance is their top 1000 list of most viewed pages.
• Google Keyword Tool: it tells you where the competition for phrases is. If there is a lot of volume and or commercial competition, then obviously there is a hot meme around there.
• Google Trends: Its the best tool I know of in the way it can give you long term growth or decline on a phrase and thus its popularity.
• Yahoo Answers: I had never really thought about yahoo answers until I had read the post from Viper Chill and on setting up a search, I can see how its actually a very good source for picking up on stuff people want to learn more about and for what is on peoples minds. I did this search for new filtered by ‘most answers’ and ‘most popular’. I think its very current and topical. As of writing If I wanted to surf a good meme, I would write something on your rights if you were burgled i.e. can you fight back without being imprisoned yourself?
• SEOMoz Most popoular: As a means for identifying memes in order of importance, its not great, but it does give you a general overview of whats of note.
• Delicious most popular tags: As you will remember, Delicious is a bookmarking service, so the hot tags will reflect the subjects users are most interested in

With more time, I’m sure I could find a load of other tools, but this gives you a flavour for what is out there. We are lucky today to have so many places to reach into the minds of the masses and if you pay attention to these flows of consciousnesses, it will only be a matter of time before you get a feel for the kinds of topics that will propel your spinned piece to prominence

Click on the image to enlarge it:

I'm a social media specialist!

Social has been heating up recently in my neighborhood. I’m spending a reasonable amount of time working on how my employers (Unibet) use social more effectively within the organization.

A couple of months ago I did a session for a Marketing Week conference where i talked about how social helps generate interest in something, acts as an honest reference point to others seeing the ‘conversation’. I then tied in SEO, explaining how SEO is one of the mechanisms by which this content gets exposed.

http://www.slideshare.net/nickgarner/marketing-week-conference

Broadly the areas im interested in are
- Refer a friend (mine the social graph)
- Influencing the businesses technical architecture to make our content more easy to navigate to and get a hold of (fuel for conversations & mindshare)
- Making our content easier to navigate around (if you’re interested in us, were going to be easier to reach into)
- CRM infrastructure to externalize our help content (social isn’t just Facebook, its happy users, so help them)
- Portability of data (where you are, we can be there too with content you might want in a widget/mobile/embedded on a page)
- Building a blog infrastructures, leading onto a content framework I.e the web sites then the writers

My main thesis is
- Social isn’t just Facebook and twitter, its people communicating together anywhere
- Social is about being authentic, helpful, entertaining, engaging
- Social is part of the DNA of a business, so that means getting the technology, staff incentives and staff freedoms right.
- Make our content accessible and portable
- Be worth engaging with anywhere i.e. forums, Facebook, twitter, other sites… and your own site
- Its ambient like brand, its the fuel that propels word of mouth acquisition – that 50% of all your new business you don’t know how to track

and there you are, simple really  

Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen

The greatest presentation I’ve ever seen is this:

He is a hard act to follow, but if you even get a tiny part of his magic in your presentation, you will probably be a great presenter.

As you my know a PowerPoint presentation can break out into

• A motivational theme
• Transmission of facts and information
• Or a bit of both.

Generally I assume:

• People can already read, so don’t repeat the words on your slide verbatim
• Keep the numbers of ideas to a minimum per slide
• There is a start, middle and an end in all presentations and generally people forget about the stuff in the middle!
• Come in with a BANG and go out with a BANG
• People get bored with “ummmmmm, ahhhhhh, OK” So I like to keep it flowing
• I have a great deal of work to do here !
• People like to be engaged, so look at them as much as possible
• And on engagement, ask questions….and do something with the replies
• Have takeaways – URL’s to tools and other interesting things they can use later i.e. create a google doc, add all you content there, create a bit.ly link to it – easy!

There are 3 books that form the basis of my presentation outlook

Presentation Zen review (taken from powerpoint ninja) The book on amazon

“an informative guide to presentation preparation, design, and delivery. If you’re not already familiar with the popular Presentation Zen blog, this book highlights many of his theories and techniques. If you’ve seen a presentation from famous presenters such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, or Steve Jobs, you’ll be familiar with the highly visual, stock-photo-heavy style that Reynolds advocates.”

My Comment: He is all about stripping out every unnecessary part of a slide, bringing it to the core so you can understand whats being presented to you. e is also about shifting the emphasis to teh speaker and not the slides – after all that’s why you’re there – right?

Here is Garr Reynolds explaining Presentation Zen to a group of Googlers. Its a pleasant watch, where he explains how you can use Presentation Zen (1 hour or so)

Resonate (review taken from their site) The book on amazon

By leveraging techniques normally reserved for cinema and literature, Resonate reveals how to transform any presentation into an engaging journey. You will discover how to understand your audience, create persuasive content, and elicit a groundswell response.

With Resonate, you’ll learn to:

• Connect with your audience empathetically
• Craft ideas that get repeated
• Rely on story structures inherent in great communication
• Create captivating content
• Inspire enthusiasm and support for your vision

My Comment: It’s an awesome book with some far reaching ideas that I do my best to employ. The main one is that a presentation moves people when it follows a path. Know the path and you will communicate beautifully.

Here is a webinar Nancy Duarte did for Ted Talks. Its full of detail… useful detail!

And finally…

Unfolding the Napkin (review taken from backofthenapkin.com) The book on amazon

Unfolding the Napkin teaches readers how to:

• Improve our three “built-in” visual problem solving tools.
• Apply the four-step visual thinking process (look-see-imagine-show) in any business situation.
• Instantly improve our visual imaginations.
• Learn how to recognize the type of problem we face and corresponding pictorial solution.

My Comments: It taught me to use pictures to explain how things can fit together. It has amazed me how visualising a problem makes it so much easier for everyone to understand what I’m talking about.

Here is Dan Roam explaining back of a napkin the preceding book to Unfolding the Napkin

Finally – here is me speaking – its not like the Benjamin Zander presentation, but – hey its ok!

Hi, I'm not here to help

Ahhhh - the money ££££

The List:

Whats interesting is how early on, no one knew how big this interweb thing would  be. Year 1, there were only about 12 domains registered (that are still live) and year 2 it climbed to about 55 domains.

The graph gives you an idea of the growth rate

Growth in registration of domains by date registered

Google Docs Spreadsheet with URLS etc here

Date registered | Domain Name | No of days after 1st domain was registered

3/15/1985    SYMBOLICS.COM    0
4/24/1985    BBN.COM    40
5/24/1985    THINK.COM    70
7/11/1985    MCC.COM    118
9/30/1985    DEC.COM    199
11/7/1985    NORTHROP.COM    237
1/9/1986    XEROX.COM    300
1/17/1986    SRI.COM    308
3/3/1986    HP.COM    353
3/5/1986    BELLCORE.COM    355
3/19/1986    IBM.COM    369
3/19/1986    SUN.COM    369
3/25/1986    INTEL.COM    375
3/25/1986    TI.COM    375
4/25/1986    ATT.COM    406
5/8/1986    GMR.COM    419
5/8/1986    TEK.COM    419
7/10/1986    FMC.COM    482
7/10/1986    UB.COM    482
8/5/1986    BELL-ATL.COM    508
8/5/1986    GE.COM    508
8/5/1986    GREBYN.COM    508
8/5/1986    ISC.COM    508
8/5/1986    NSC.COM    508
8/5/1986    STARGATE.COM    508
9/2/1986    BOEING.COM    536
9/18/1986    ITCORP.COM    552
9/29/1986    SIEMENS.COM    563
10/18/1986    PYRAMID.COM    582
10/27/1986    ALPHACDC.COM    591
10/27/1986    BDM.COM    591
10/27/1986    FLUKE.COM    591
10/27/1986    INMET.COM    591
10/27/1986    KESMAI.COM    591
10/27/1986    MENTOR.COM    591
10/27/1986    NEC.COM    591
10/27/1986    RAY.COM    591
10/27/1986    ROSEMOUNT.COM    591
10/27/1986    VORTEX.COM    591
11/5/1986    ALCOA.COM    600
11/5/1986    GTE.COM    600
11/17/1986    ADOBE.COM    612
11/17/1986    AMD.COM    612
11/17/1986    DAS.COM    612
11/17/1986    DATA-IO.COM    612
11/17/1986    OCTOPUS.COM    612
11/17/1986    PORTAL.COM    612
11/17/1986    TELTONE.COM    612
12/11/1986    3COM.COM    636
12/11/1986    AMDAHL.COM    636
12/11/1986    CCUR.COM    636
12/11/1986    CI.COM    636
12/11/1986    CONVERGENT.COM    636
12/11/1986    DG.COM    636
12/11/1986    PEREGRINE.COM    636
12/11/1986    QUAD.COM    636
12/11/1986    SQ.COM    636
12/11/1986    TANDY.COM    636
12/11/1986    TTI.COM    636
12/11/1986    UNISYS.COM    636
1/19/1987    CGI.COM    675
1/19/1987    CTS.COM    675
1/19/1987    SPDCC.COM    675
2/19/1987    APPLE.COM    706
3/4/1987    NMA.COM    719
3/4/1987    PRIME.COM    719
4/4/1987    PHILIPS.COM    750
4/23/1987    DATACUBE.COM    769
4/23/1987    KAI.COM    769
4/23/1987    TIC.COM    769
4/23/1987    VINE.COM    769
4/30/1987    NCR.COM    776
5/14/1987    CISCO.COM    790
5/14/1987    RDL.COM    790
5/20/1987    SLB.COM    796
5/27/1987    PARCPLACE.COM    803
5/27/1987    UTC.COM    803
6/26/1987    IDE.COM    833
7/9/1987    TRW.COM    846
7/13/1987    UNIPRESS.COM    850
7/27/1987    DUPONT.COM    864
7/27/1987    LOCKHEED.COM    864
7/28/1987    ROSETTA.COM    865
8/18/1987    TOAD.COM    886
8/31/1987    QUICK.COM    899
9/3/1987    ALLIED.COM    902
9/3/1987    DSC.COM    902
9/3/1987    SCO.COM    902
9/22/1987    GENE.COM    921
9/22/1987    KCCS.COM    921
9/22/1987    SPECTRA.COM    921
9/22/1987    WLK.COM    921
9/30/1987    MENTAT.COM    929
10/14/1987    WYSE.COM    943
11/2/1987    CFG.COM    962
11/9/1987    MARBLE.COM    969
11/16/1987    CAYMAN.COM    976
11/16/1987    ENTITY.COM    976
11/24/1987    KSR.COM    984
11/30/1987    NYNEXST.COM    990

If you had gone back in time to 1984, you could have bought and then resold:

1. Insure.com, sold to QuinStreet for $16 million in 2009.
2. Sex.com, sold for $12-$14 million in 2006.
3. Fund.com, sold for $9.99 million in 2008.
4. Porn.com, sold for $9.5 million in 2007.
5. Business.com, sold for $7.5 million in 1999.
6. Diamond.com, sold to Ice.com for $7.5 million in 2006.
7. Beer.com, sold for $7 million in 2004.
8. Israel.com, sold for $5.88 million in 2004.
9. Casino.com, sold for $5.5 million in 2003.
10. Toys.com, sold to Toys ‘R Us for $5.1 million in 2009.

It was for a financial services conference. Since this is a very broad area, I decided to go for a generic presentation covering some big ideas I always use when I explain SEO, PPC and conversion optimisation.

I find numbers bore people, so there are only a few of them, instead its lots of pictures and concepts that hopefully the audience could take away with them and use as their foundation for understanding the high level forces that shape SEO , PPC and Conversion.

Google Dance

If you don’t know – a Google Dance is where Google change their ranking algo (the software that controls what websites rank where) because for whatever reason Google feel the need to fix one issue or another. The msot recent fix has been to combat a plague of article sites ranking across the Internet that allegedly provide useful content, but in fact are no more than ‘thin content’ with large amounts of advertising.

Ironically much of this ‘content pollution’ has been perpetuated by Google themselves. They have a programme called AdSense. You may have seen the AdSense adverts in body copy in various websites. These AdSense ads contextualise to the content they are embedded in. Users are reasonably ok with the ads since often they are – sort of – relevant. So the ads get clicked, giving the site owner revenue.

The content has the appearance of usefulness and with  link building, you can get them to rank nicely. Good rankings on decent traffic terms gives enough visitors to probably generate reasonable revenue through AdSense.

But its all got a little out of hand and there has been a clear out of the rankings recently. This update has been called the Farmer/Panda Update.

Below is a history of the major updates so far that have rocked the SEO world.

(Click on the image for a full size readable view.)

The Dance of Dances

Thanks to http://level343.com/ for the seo inforgraphic

Great if you know how to grow it!

Recently I was discussing the relationship between affiliates and operators. The question was: what does each party care about.

I then sent them a long-ish email and I thought I’d post and amended version for you.

What affiliates care about when they are looking at choosing an operator?

Me in a suit

The programme was:
- Strategy for social, covering all the three states of user of commercial intent – background knowledge, specific questions, decision to buy

- Prerequisites to get on the starting line – corporate culture, brand love, popularity of the subject, site architecture

- Targeting resource for maximum ROI

- KPI’s that actually mean something

- Putting it together as a actionable plan

Instead of getting bogged down in the area of social signals in SEO, I decided to take a different approach to the question of search in a social world and essentially I put out the idea
“social = validation, search = navigation”

I then dug into the idea that users (often) use social exchange points like forums to get information and resolution about things they want to buy. Of course to find these hot spots, they have to use search engines.

So its great to work your Facebook, but so often the real value is helping those important conversations where people evaluate your product and cast a vote. If they are good, then promote them! Social proof/validation is about the most powerful endorsement you can have online.

Here is the powerpoint:

Cool geek gets laptop stolen.
Eventually remotely tracks down machine .
Hacks in.
LoL’s follow!

Lovin it

and it all worked – so nice

Then you can get £5000 for 1 hours work, like this guy

Great name!

I was in Rome last week doing a speaking gig on practical marketing in a regulated market – Italy being the focus. The thing about regulated markets are that if you have a licence, you can do more or less as you wish, as long as you don’t sell to minors and do follow the local advertising standards authority guidelines for the respective country you are operating in. Of course in a regulated market, if you don;t have a licence, then its not so good….since there will be several barriers to your entering the territory, things like being unable to do traditional marketing without fear of censure from the authorities. Since I couldn’t really think of much around ‘special’ activities for licenced operators, I came up with a general presentation covering some of my favourite topics:

• SEO
• PPC
• Social
• Conversion

and I did a piece about how the market in Italy which is now becoming regulated, will become a feeding frenzy where the cost of acquisition will go up and up as operators burn through budget to gain prominence before the market settles down. My PPT:

and some pictures:

Morning Light in Rome

Mobile Phones

Serious

Audience

(copied from their post)
ref http://www.igbaffiliate.com/content/seo-masterclass-rank-big-money-events
Session Title: SEO Masterclass: Rank on Big Money Events
Filmed at Budapest Affliate Conference

Part 1:

Part 2

Part 3

Session Description: Join our exclusive SEO master class and learn the secrets to ranking when it really matters. This is a rare opportunity to learn from two of iGaming’s most respected SEOs, where they will cover winning offers and promotions that drive acquisitions and tactics to optimise your search campaigns for specific events and strategies on planning ahead to achieve maximum ROI. Having the strongest and most accurate metrics for campaign tracking, practical tips, including advice on how to make money now. Session Highlight: Google said it was the “biggest betting event ever”, discover the simple ’7 step event strategy’ and learn how these SEO veterans made a fortune on the World Cup when it mattered most.

Speakers:
Paul Reilly, Head of SEO, Stickyeyes
Nick Garner, Head of Search and Social Media Acquisition, Unibet

• I have tons of respect for affiliates.
• The good affiliates rank above all the odds and that’s awesome.
• They are still here, so Google has not won the affiliate war yet!
• The conference was really well run and great fun
• I’m grateful for having the chance to share my knowledge

Here is the slideshare:

SEO Masterclass: Rank on Big Money Events

View more presentations from iGB Affiliate.

And here are a couple pics of Me and Paul doing our thing!

Uh!? Should my site have a theme?

Fortunately Google have been pretty good about giving you tools allowing you to tighten up your on site theming. So I thought I’d run through a few of these tools to maybe give you a little inspiration.

I’ve worked these as case studies since it will help you contextualise this better.

So lets say you want to get your site to rank better on the long tail i.e. not the core trophy phrases, but those 2nd level ones with 2 or 3 words in the phrase i.e. “RSS Widget Feed”

Step 1

Go to the Google keyword search tool (Either the Adwords one or this:  http://www.google.com/sktool/#)

And do a search for your root phrase across your chosen site. In this case I chose the apple site and the keyword “widget”. See an example here & Below.

Thats useful!

Keyword  - Webpage url
“hotel search widget” – http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
world clock widget for – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
create dashboard widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss dashboard widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
widget freeware – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/index_abc.html
dashboard widget that – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss widget dashboard – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
make dashboard widget – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/index6.html
dashboard widget rss – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
rss feed desktop widget – http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/
freeware widget – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
widget pour dashboard – http://eg-www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/dogtags.html
minutes dashboard widget – https://ssl.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/index_abc.html

Now you have the pages Google thinks are relevant to your chosen keyword, in this case “widget” and the other variations of the phrase it thinks is most relevant to the word “widget”.

So its got: “hotel search widget” that refers to this URL:

http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/ (popout)

You have an initial line up of the 2nd tier phrases and their associated pages, now its a case of giving those pages even more internal prominence and diverting a whole load of nice relevant internal links to these pages.

Step 2

Point as many related pages to an appropriate single page to give it internal prominence.

Go to http://relatedlinks.googlelabs.com/ and follow the instructions (here is one I made earlier! )

Cool!

As you will see, you now have a list of other pages on the domain that Google thinks relates best to your phrase and that page.

Keyword here is: “hotel search widget”  and the page is: http://movies.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/ and the domain is apple.com

Now all you do is take those URL’s and link those into your root page that you want to have rank and now you have done a nice internal page rank reworking.

To take this further, you could take each of the pages from the 1st search for ‘widget’ and use those pages as your root  related page and link those into your initial page i.e. instead of having 10 links into your target page, you now have 100.

Step 3

It’s time to do some external link building!

This is a huge subject, but a good pointer is to use Google sets to help you come up with a nice mix of anchor text that is on topic. Essentially if you linkbuild and only use your core phrase i.e. “widget” then you are likely to not gain rankings because the engines can see its a manipulated link acquisition programme.

So the game is to have a natural mix of anchor text. This is where Google sets comes in so nicely because they tell you what associated phrases to use!

See example here for “Hotel + Search + Widget” and from that you have a huge list of words you can write content around!

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=widget&q2=hotel&q3=search&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set

Nice mix of relevant words

I hope that was helpful.

I had read this great article by Andy Beal on Google suggestion and how you now need to account for it when you are doing keyword research.
So I thought I’d add a quick “how do keywords research extra”  too,  since I haven’t seen this anywhere else.

Step 1

My general view is that a site should have a root keyword theme. In other words this is a word or a few words from which the whole theme emanates. Forinstance, you might have a site for widgets. You do lots of variations of widgets, but at the root of the site is the word “widget”.  So that’s is the starting point for the journey.

Step 2
So you have your core phrase, in this case “widgets”. Next step is the Google keyword finder here.
Now you also have the other related phrases in order of volume.

Step 2.1
Google have a search based keyword tool that lets you add a site and a keyword you’re interested in i.e. your root phrase for a site and it gives you a list of phrases and the pages it thinks are best related to that given phrase. In this case I have used http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ because it ranks for KW “widget”.

See the keyword results here

From this I can get a feel for what words to optimise the various pages for on your site. Nice.

Search Keyword Tool

Step 3
With your core phrases,  in this case “widgets”,  go to a Google search page and type it in.
You will be given some suggestions:
widgetbox
widget software
widget logic
widget uk
widget locker
widget world
and so on
Now you have phrases around your core phrase that Google thinks relates to your search. This is good, since you now have other words to optimise for. (Assuming Google has got it right when they assume these are genuinely related searches)

Google Suggest

Step 4
So you have your root phrases, your associated phrases and now you are after broader set of phrases that Google associates with your root phrase ‘widget’:  here

Google sets give you the words it thinks associates with a given keyword or phrase. they get this data from the relative placement of one word against another i.e. widget+google or widget+Wordpress and so on.

This information is great when writing content that is on theme since Google’s algo sees these words as naturally associating. So in this case if I wrote a piece about “RSS” then in the algo’s interpretation#, this is a closely themed piece to “Widgets”.  In general I use this tool to help create variety but keep things on theme.

Google Sets

Roundup: Keyword research is an endless cycle, depending on how deep you want to go. In my experience its a case of being pragmatic and not trying to go to deep, other wise you will get swamped in complexity.

of all the tools, I think Google sets is the most interesting in that it helps you theme your content without overtly keyword stuffing.

the original post

Search over the years

This is an excellent collection of infographics, and IMHO the most interesting of which is this (see thumbnail) :

Marketing Pilgrim post

The infographic on search engines:

Cracked Iphone 4 screen

A buddy of mine just got an iPhone 4 about 3 days ago. So he went out, had a drink pulled out his phone to show his friend, phone slipped and BANG!
Apparently he didn’t drop the phone hard, it just kind of…. slipped out of his hand.

This design flaw where the phone will self destruct if its dropped, is serious.

I got wood!

All it means is that you cannot use the iPhone 4 without a case. And that is going to mess up the Apple iPhone brand, because instead of an object of beauty, it becomes ‘the case you use on the phone‘.

So let this be a warning tale to you iPhone 4 users without cases.

My show and tell of the iPhone 4 cracked screen.

BEWARE!!!! if you are the sensitive type DO NOT WATCH THIS?
iPhone 4 being dropped and screen shattered in a random drop test. It’s a painful watch.

It’s such a bad problem, there is even a teardown video showing you how to replace your screen!

My image gallery. These thumbnails go to a hi res image (about 1.3mb) giving you some really nice detail on how the screen has been cracked and how it even carried on working.
(by the way, these pics were taken using an android nexus one – my personal phone)

So with that in mind I’ve thought up a very rough reputation management framework that can double up as a process for getting ranked on the terms that bring in the money.

Its more than an SEO trick

The broad model here is to get

• Feedback on what a business is doing to make iterative changes to the products or services from the feedback cycle
• Manage reputation, both positive and negative
• Use the online ‘ecosystem’ to spread the good word about a product or service.
• Keep clear of trouble from regulatory authorities who can affect you

The Preparation

Agree messaging for Professional / trade / consumer

Define online hotspots of interest and commercial intent:

• What keywords should the product or service be found on
• What kind of site / blogger / thought leader should be associated with this and how can their positive comments be given prominence around
• Most relevant searched phrases
• Brand terms for the client

Create the right environmental conditions to ignite consumer demand.

• Build a ‘tribe’ of followers, who you support and in turn will evangelise on your behalf. This is where you have a two way ‘conversation’ with your community of customers.? This was famously done with the Obama online campaign or with Lady Ga Ga and her ‘little monsters’
• Manage reputation very carefully.
• Be seen as transparent, honest, serving the user/customer as best as possible on value and service standards.

The Actions

Monitor sentiment towards the brand online using online monitoring tools like Google alerts and http://www.trackur.com/

If there is prominent negative sentiment:

• Respond to it immediately and be transparent and honest
• If its something where the brand has done wrong and can’t / won’t rectify, then abondon the client! or bury it by up-ranking other content above it (the resource calibrated by the reputation damage caused)
• If there is positive sentiment towards the brand, but the content is not prominent, then use SEO to get it up-ranked for critical phrases like brand phrases and get it referenced in other big conversation hotspots

Reach out to thought leaders who can evangelise the service or product

• As with Offline, if you can make it easy for these people, they will find it easier to write about you. Give them the ingredients from which they can make up their own minds about the product or service.
• In online there is a massive long tail of writers and thought leaders. In accumulation they are very valuable. Have online press packs and all the ingredients from which they can write up their own informed views
• Give your tribe the resources to feel included and tools they need to talk about you
• Have a contributing presence wherever there is an important and prominent conversation about you or where there could be an important conversation i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Chat Groups, Linked in
• Your comment / feedback points on your site or 3rd party sites

Give prominence to the positive feedback on the product or service

• Have these reviews rank on search engines on keywords users would naturally search for when thinking of the product/service
• If possible, gather reviews and testimonials from users and re-publicise them.

Structure feedback into:

• Reviews with ‘useful? yes/no’ and ask for ratings. Ratings out of 5 stars (standard rating formula online) so you can get a positive rating for the company / service that you can disseminate to 3rd party sites
• If its a product then encourage existing customers to write about your products on 3rd party sites i.e. reviewcentre.com Amazon.com

Support/Education:

• Have a comprehensive help section online
• Online Press pack (giving evangelists the information they need to propagate the service)
• Forum with knowledgeable staff at hand to answer specific questions
• A staffer out online engaging with users who are asking questions. This person would also engage in important conversations that ‘can be found easily’

As I was saying earlier, this is only an outline, but hopefully it will give you a sense of the scope of activities that can be undertaken.

More reading on the subject:
http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/articles/ElixirSystemsOnlineRepMgmt.pdf
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html
http://www.radicallytransparent.com/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/25/word-of-mouth-marketing-stats/

• My 2000 calorie diet in preparation for the kayak marathon World Championships in September, where I’m racing doubles in the masters class.
• Going on a Bing Diet…

Yes, I thought it was time to give Bing a go and I found it worked! You can try the? search engine blind tase test and see for yourself! (popout)

(FYI as of July 2009 the overall results were:? Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%)

The main difference between Google and everybody else is that they pad out their brand so we become too inert to move somewhere else for our search results. There is a high chance you use one or more of these? services? (wikipedia/popout) and every time you do, you probably love Google a little more for giving you some great service for free.

But if you are tired of the slow erosion of the search results with real time search, video search, news search, then maybe like me you might try a simpler easy engine like Bing.

And it seems I’m not the only one. According to Hitwise who published some interesting stats recently, it’ s all go for Bing!.

(Since this is a quick post, I’ve copied and pasted from Search Engine Roundtable:

Microsoft relaunched their search engine Bing on June 1, 2009, just over a year ago.

On June 1, 2009 Bing’s market share, according to Hitwise was 5.25%. A year later, according to Hitwise it is 9.85% share. If you do the math, that is about 88% growth year-over-year, not too far under double growth!

Here are some of the latest stats from Hitwise:

Of course, growing share from 5% to 10% is nice, but it still shadows Google’s share. In June 2009, Google had a share of 74.04%, June 2010 Google’s share is 71.65, so that is a 3% decline.

Google really doesn't listen!

A friend of mine who manages a BIG PPC account with Google told me the other day (over a beer) that when he sends an enquiry to Google about some random account management issue, if he telephones, there will be a 30% chance? they will actually pick up the phone. It takes on average 5 different conversations to resolve the problem.

So thats? about 15 ‘no contact’ calls to fix an issue.

If he emails, he gets a response between 3 and 12 days. These responses are generally generic, so he usually has to email back and query Google’s response between 2 and 4 times,? which takes another 3 to 12 days to get a reply on per query.

So thats at least 15 days for a useful answer.

BUT… if Google have an outstanding invoice with my buddy, they chase every day and often twice a day. When he responds to the Googler chasing the money, 4 out of 5 times he doesn’t get a reply from his contact. So the other month, he was put on final reminder!

Conslusion: Google have? really bad customer service. But we know that of course.??

BTW – Bing do care and believe it or not they do have attentive and helpful customer service staff, I just hope they win more market share!

Nick's Technology Charter

I’ve been working on a code of practice when it comes to marketing and technology. It’s just a personal thing that ive been thinking about for a while, so I thought it would be helpful (to me at least) to write this out.

The idea is to have a simple charter, so when suppliers offer marketing technology services, the purchaser has a core set of principals to work by.

For instance, if you want to reduce the cost of your IT marketing spend, a good way would be to :
- never be dependent on a any supplier,
- use open source code so you don?t get tied into expensive licensing agreements
- reuse code to reduce the security and cost overhead.

My personal charter for technology in outgoing marketing.

Strategy
- Low coss
- Secure
- Reliable
- Flexible
-?Easy for end users to use

Supplier / vendor
- Non dependence on any supplier
- Never be taken advantage over, through licence cost escalation
- Own the source code / have the right to use the code in perpetuity

Characteristics of Software
- 100% open to code level inspection i.e. open source code
- Commonly used
- Secure
- Flexible
- Understood by the business
- Inexpensive to implement

Technical development infrastructure
- Version controlled where possible
- Reusable i.e. build a library of code
- Standardised i.e. work to a set of agreed coding standards
- Interoperable code where possible i.e. coded in a modular way, so chunks of code can be reused

Visuals
- Working to brand guidelines
- Fulfils usability guidelines

Process optimisation
- Multi streaming of projects i.e. High / Med / Low : Security Risk, Complexity, Degree of Integration

Simple!

The clever part is building up a standard framework, so as the diverse parts of a company do their thing, each new piece of technology can then be potentially reused on some other part within marketing.

In practice, this means separating the content management system from the dynamic elements of a site. Making those dynamic parts modular and easily reusable on any part of the content management system so you get the benefit of accumulated libraries of code. The other thing (for most marketing) is that the content management system should not be the expensive bit. Open source CMS’s are getting better and better and cheaper to roll out.

A good place to look at open source software ‘out of the packet’ is http://www.opensourcecms.com

I was riding home tonight on my motorbike thinking of the reality that has struck home. Yes, the era of SEO’ers gaming the system wholesale might just start getting a lot tougher. And today I saw a the most visible sign yet of harder times for this species of online marketeer.

To preface what I am about to explain, its worth understanding a little about how Google think. If you have ever read complexity theory, you will know that within eco systems, there are depths of complexity we will never know about. A good example of a ‘micro eco system’ is a flock of birds flying in an apparently random way, but somehow working cohesively as a ‘mega mind’. It looks impossible, but in fact its all held together by a few simple rules:
- speed of a birds reaction
- external forces in play (wind)
- distance from the next bird
- desire to follow the bird in front
Change any of these variables and the whole character of the flock will change.

Have a look at this video and it will make sense to you:

And so with Google, they think ecosystems. They understand that great complexity is ruled by relatively simple forces.

Now you are thinking in a certain way, let me carry on…

Google have announced they are now beta testing this:

https://google.com

Whats relevant? – it’s the ‘s’, as in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections . They justify the test by saying this:

“A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn?t reduce the data sent to Google ? it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It?s a helpful addition to users? online privacy and security, and we?ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings.”

Ref their announcement / The Register comment

So off the back of
- a number privacy disasters including Facebook and Google buzz,
- The federal trade commission and its efforts to stamp out bad marketing practice on the Internet
- European legislation on ‘opt in to store cookies‘
There is a pro privacy climate.

That’s good, sort of if you’re a consumer. For marketeers of course is just more stuff to deal with when trying to accurately target customers. (I won’t go there right now)

Google now tell us that we can surf privately. We can avoid being snooped on, so its got to be good for you. In thory – yes,? in practice NO. When did you last hear about a user suing because of surfing habits being revealed?

But what this does do, is make google a ton of extra $$$$$$$$$

How?

By switching over to https surfing, off the privacy card, Google will block all referrer data and IMHO they will also block this data in Google analytics. This referrer information will no longer contain keywords users came to the site on and also what they converted on.

If you are a professional SEO’er, you are gaming Google to get your site in places where ‘the money lives’. Every time a user clicks and converts on your SEO driven result, that is money Google could have made from AdWords.

To accurately game Google, you need to know what phrases convert, so you can spend money on linkbuilding for that phrase. Of course you can run an AdWords campaign and it will give you very good keyword intelligence. Now imagine you have this data and you run your expensive SEO programme but you cant track anything from Google natural search. You are getting conversions, but where from? How can you manage spend when you have little idea on what actually converts?

Now you are driving with a fogged up windshield. You will know what your rankings are (probably) But you won’t know be able to attribute ROI to phrases.

That means

>> less resource and accuracy within SEO

>> which in turn means more intensity within AdWords auctions

>> which makes Google loads more $$$$$$$$$

And all because they use a simple lever: imposing secure search.

There are other things going on that will affect their positive revenue uplift:
- More blended search / News search / Real time search / wikipedia pages, pushing out commercial natural results
- Reduction of the long tail. Webmasters are already seeing a drop of between 5% and 15% in long tail search volume, therefore concentrating users around fewer keywords and so making it easier for advertisers to advertise on these results.
- Category wide downward revision of quality score which I have seen recently with brand phrases.
- Bigger emphasis on ranking brand sites, knowing how bad they generally are with converting uses on anything other than dedicated landing pages.
- Attacking any sector where search is a factor: Product search, travel, mortgages
My guess is that this intensifying of AdWords auctions will uplift their revenues by 15% – 20% overall within 12 months.

So what am I doing about this?

Well, I’m going to restructure my sites, so I an run unique ‘join now’ buttons per page and then use tools like SEM rush to work out what pages rank for what and then match this all up to give me a reasonable idea which pages produce the best results and rank for the biggest terms.

It’s all a hack workaround, but its better than no accurate data.

So to wrap up, Google used to say “don’t be evil“, but they have dropped this mantra in favour of “You can make money without doing evil.”

They are not evil as individuals. But as a collective they are great at misdirection, deception and silence. They are moulding the shape of the Internet in a way that makes them more money and sell us the idea that its good for us.

You can say Micro$oft are evil, but I see them as a heavy thug barging smaller people out of its way. At least you know that’s what they are about. Google on the other hand are feeding us with happy pills (gmail / docs / youtube / tricks in the SERPS) and getting us to love them whilst sucking the financial lifeblood out of us until we can pay no more and our ROI goes negative.

I know this sort of behaviour has gone on for generations, and its just what happens when business goes greedy. I only hope Bing comes good and takes Google on.

—

BTW – I’m on a BING diet – and I’m liking it much! Here, try this: the blind search engine taste test

and you might like BING too

Were talking about Glenn Beck, who Wikipedia describes as

Beck has become a well-known and polarizing public figure, whose provocative views have afforded him media recognition and popularity, along with controversy and criticism. To his supporters, he is a conservative champion, defending traditional American values from progressivism, while to his detractors he is notorious for conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric.

He airs the Glen Beck show on Fox TV. It’s a commercial channel and it needs advertising to warrant the show to be shown. No advertisers equals no show.

No show means he can’t disseminate his vitriol as effectively.

So this group stopbeck.com have been lobbying advertisers to NOT associate their brand with this guy and its working! As of the last month, no sponsors have been associated with the UK show and if you look at the list of current advertisers versus ones who have walked away, you can see there is a ratio of about 1:2

It tells me that brands are more sensitive than ever before to how easily negative perception can escalate. Once they could have relied in people not talking amongst themselves, but with the Internet that has all changed. This IMHO is a great manifestation of markets becoming conversations

Smackdown: WordPress loser on security

I’m such a fan of WordPress, I’m speaking at the 2010 UK Wordcamp ? and I’ve met Matt Mullenweg (founder of wordpress, who I found inspirational). In fact I advocate WP nearly whenever I can for small / medium sites.

The bits where WordPress are great on? is flexibility and massive community, so tons of great add-ons.

But where I work, we are obsessed with security and because WordPress is? moving so fast, every change on the CMS means a security review and every change on a plugin means another minor review. That’s fine, except it’s lots of reviews and so lots of time spend rubberstamping.

The other BIG issue is the security gap betweenWordpress and MT - the article explains it in more detail. I don’t have up to date info on WordPress and security holes, but I imagine it has improved a lot over the last 2 years.

Wordpress V MT security

Another reason I?m not a fan of WordPress for enterprise blog / news publishing is that MT can handle hundreds of users across hundreds of blogs in a single instance of the CMS. Of course you can say that WordPress? MU will do it, but from what I can understand, its a whole world of complxity and hacking to make it work well. Forinstance, things like extensive role management are native in MT, in WordPress the role manager is a 3rd party addon.

With Movable Type as you may know, it renders static files with a few dynamic elements. In other words you get a server full of flat HTML files that don’t need a database to render them. Of course WordPress for the most part is dynamically rendered.

This is important because its nearly impossible to do a cross side scripting attack on Movable Type. This is demonstrated by their security record. More secure = happier ?powers that be?.

WordPress gets upgraded about 3 times more frequently than MT and if you don?t upgrade, you are likely to get hacked. Upgrade = security review because its new. And on it goes.

So there you go?I still love WordPress, but for BIG multi user, multi blog I’m waiting for a little more maturity.

All things Google

Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized image (580px ? 3959px)