I think I’m seeing a glimpse into the future of Google Buzz failure…
Le’ts think about this for a second, shall we? So now anyone can go into anyone’s Google Profile and “Buzz Bomb” (I’m coining that here first, folks) them with spam? I think this illustrates a considerable flaw in the design of this Social Network.
At least Facebook has privacy settings that prevent these sorts of shenanigans. If Google Buzz is going to compete in this space, they need to give the users a little more control over who can post what to where.
On January 22nd, Google announced the inclusion of event-related information in their Rich Snippets. The protocol will be based off the hCalendar microformat and will look like this:
Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this:
“Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:”
“With today’s improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:”
Let me start off by saying I’m not making a judgement here… I just want us to take a moment to consider what’s going on here. These improvements for the user can have a detrimental impact on your traffic numbers.
By offering more information to the searcher on the SERP itself, the developer is removing the need for the searcher to actually visit the website. In the above example, I no longer need to visit Wikipedia to see the height of the Empire State Building. As Google adopts more and more Microformat protocols, it seems logical that the number of visits siphoned off should increase.
What’s the motivation for developers to encourage proliferation of the protocols if your goal is to drive traffic to your website? Couldn’t this change your goals?
Let’s say you have a restaurant website with your phone number and address tagged with Microformats. Someone looking for your restaurant or a similar one, might find your Rich Snippet in the SERP and call your restaurant. Success right? Sounds like it. Now imagine how that looks to an Analyst when multiplied by 1000 times. I’d see a steady decline in visits to the site from Google and need for a way to account for that. The apparent success of the site would appear to be waning but the restaurant’s phone would still be ringing off the hook.
What’s next?
It’s not hard to imagine what else could be served up in a Rich Snippet. Why not figure out a way to display your actual lead or contact form right there? Imagine the havoc that would cause for conversion rates. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, right?
I think there’s opportunity for further discussion on the impact of Rich Snippets and Answer Highlighting on our analytics in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Links aren’t any different if they come from .gov or .edu. “It’s not like a link from an .edu autmatically carries more weight.” (1:58)
Most links on Twitter are nofollow. (We knew this but it’s worth mentioning again.)
I noticed that he didn’t mention links from Facebook Fan Pages, but he makes it pretty clear that all links are treated equally from the outset, but then Page Rank is applied to determine the linking site’s “reputation.” Keep this bit in mind people. It’s not always the number of links you have, it’s the quality of those links. You dig?
(for the experts out there… you may already know all this. however, this is core information that bears repeating for others out there who are just getting their feet wet. thank you for your understanding.)
Back in 2008 I posted an article about getting mod_rewrite working on a GoDaddy account. I thought it’d be a good time to update that information with another example. This time we’re going to be looking at making some changes on a GoDaddy account with a WordPress installation.
This implementation takes this: “domain.com/pagename.php?paramB=Y¶mC=ZparamA=X”
and turns it into “domain.com/DirectoryName/X/Y/Z ”
I like this set up since it fits in with my normal WordPress url structure. Just make sure that you pick a directory name that isn’t going to be used within WordPress.
Also, notice that the custom rules are inserted before the usual WordPress rules. This was the only way I was able to get it to work.
Hope this helps! Just let me know if you have any questions at all.
Use tools you already have to find ways to boost traffic.
Using a Site Analytics tool? Got a Rank Tracker or some free time to manually check some rankings? Here’s a way you can find and predict how much traffic you might be missing out on.
Aside from the fact that I just ended that sentence with a preposition which drives me nuts, let walk through the process, shall we? Super. Open up your analytics tool and your favorite spreadsheet app and let’s go.
Collect the keywords
Go into your analytics tool and find the report that tells you what keywords are driving organic traffic to your website.
Set your date report range for 30 days and make sure you can see how many visits each keyword/keyphrase drove to your site within that time frame. Get as many keywords as you can. I’m talking like 400-500 keywords if your report allows and if you have that much data.
Paste that data into a spreadsheet. One column for the keyphrase and one column for the number of visits. Good!
Get the rankings
Arguments about the veracity of rank-checking these days aside, paste that list of keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and fire it up. Or, you can always check them one-by-one if your list is manageable.
Plug in your findings into a third column on your spreadsheet. (I’m just checking Google here)
Forget about the #1 ranked items
Now, sort the spreadsheet and delete all the rows that have keywords that are currently ranking #1 for you. We’re only going to concern ourselves with anything not currently ranking #1 from here on out.
If we accept these numbers, you can start to calculate how much traffic you might be losing by ranking something other than #1. For example…
“red widgets” brought in 100 visits and you’re currently ranking #4. Based on our chart above, there’s a difference of 44.83% between #1 and #4. Let’s do the math: You could have had roughly 45 extra visits had you been #1. See where this is going?
You can use these numbers to help justify projects/man-hours geared toward trying to rank for all these other keywords. You can use them to give a ROUGH projection of potential traffic/lead increases. I can’t emphasize the term “rough” enough here. The math is not perfect all the time in all cases. You’re going to have two moving targets here:
The percentage of click-thru rates are not going to work out exactly for every market or set of search terms
The rankings you see might not be the rankings that everyone sees.
But overall, you can see how this can give you a rough estimate on traffic of which you could be taking advantage. You can also turn this into a monthly or quarterly exercise. I find it best to track the traffic I’ve gained by moving up the rankings on that initial list. I use the same spreadsheet we set up above and add columns by date that track the ranking improvements/setbacks. I then add a column after 30 days to see if the traffic to that keyword has improved.
Ever fallen prey to the “physician, heal thyself” rut where you seem to work on so many other projects that you can’t ever seem to find time to get your own stuff up and running?
Well, that was pretty much all of 2009 for me. I think the last real post was sometime in March of ‘09 or something. Yeesh!
In an effort to change to change all that in 2010, I’ve completely wiped out my old site and and currently in the process of back-filling all my old blog posts into WordPress here.
It’s actually terribly interesting (to me) to go back and look how my thoughts and opinions have changed since I last started blogging regularly. I use the word “terribly” since I don’t necessarily agree with everything I thought a year ago. So much changes so quickly in this industry. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so hard on some people (I said “maybe”), for example.
Well, there it is. The Mea Culpa to myself for letting this go for so long. Please pardon the generic WordPress theme for now. I’ll be trying to personalize stuff as much as possible over the next few weeks.
“But Peter Yared, CEO of marketing firm iWidgets, said he thinks some of that spending is going to shift to where the viewers, and the traffic, increasingly are. ‘Soon the [search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization] spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to social media,’ he said.”
- http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135112
This all just smacks of the same sort of thing that got everyone into the financial crisis. (sorry. just watched jon stewart face off against jim cramer last night).
I can’t say that my mind is boggled by the fact that the CEO of a marketing firm, specializing in Facebook widgets says that Facebook is becoming the center of the universe. A bunch of people who run companies specializing in Twitter and Facebook tell the masses that Facebook and Twitter are the most important things ever and your company will die if you don’t start utilizing it? Meanwhile, no one knows what the heck to do with Facebook and Twitter. Know why? Because their companies don’t FIT into that model.
“So what do brands need to know as they convert their Facebook pages to regular profiles in the next few days?”
What the? In the next few days? Don’t assume we’re going along with this because they say we just HAVE to. It smacks of fear-mongering. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to keep them in business. I could be wrong though. It’s possible that I don’t see the big picture and am just old-fashioned. (Quick question: How much activity does that MySpace page you just HAD to build get?)
Or…-maybe it’s not best for YOU to go out and have a huge facebook and twitter presence (although some is probably worthwhile). Now, I suppose it’s possible that people start these companies because there actually IS a market for this. It’s possible that I’m totally wrong here and that Facebook will become the nexus for all internet traffic. But how does it turn into leads? Brand recognition? Ok, that I CAN see. For example, use your profile to start a Group that a lot of people can get behind. Creates brand affinity and awareness, and it’s NOT advertising. There ARE ways to use Facebook. There Are!
“Soon the [search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization] spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to social media.”
The way I see it is like this. I don’t care about the quantity of eyeballs. I care about the quality of eyeballs. If you take all the SEO and marketing people off of Twitter, you’d have like 53 people using it. 50,00,000 people looking for a drunk Brittany Spears on YouTube does not, in my mind make that the best place for me to place all of my marketing budget for selling cement mixers. Facebook has 175 million active users. All of whom CHOOSE who they talk to and listen to. Do they want to add someone to their friend-update-feed that’s just selling them something? Highly doubt it. They get enough ads from everywhere else. This is where they go to talk to their “friends”… only. I could be wrong though.
Is a potential customer going to accept your site as a friend just to receive product offers from you? No. Maybe if you provide some genuinely useful content that someone everyday could use (because remember, these applications are getting checked EVERY DAY, every HOUR even). I just think that the only ones who are going to care, or “Friend” you, are marketing people, your employees and your competition.
UNLESS… you provide a supplementary offering so wonderful and out-of-the-box that ordinary people are compelled to want anything and everything to do with you.
I just think there’s something inherently wrong with the model of blatantly trying to sell people something by acting like just another one of their “friends” on a social network. It’s never going to happen (famous last words). Ever see a company’s Twitter Followers vs. Follows numbers? Most of the time there are like 2 followers (employees) but they are following like 5,000 people. Most of whom just block the company from their feeds. It’s called spam. I get it all the time. “Get a free laptop!” No thanks. But, I’ll take your addition to MY “followers” number because it makes ME look more important to everyone else. It’s all BS, folks.
The bottom line is, just be careful when reading articles saying that you have to start migrating everything to Facebook and Twitter or else you’ll miss out on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Look at who is being interviewed. Are they CEOs of companies who have something to gain by telling you that you NEED this or you have to do that? Just think about it and spend wisely.
There seems to be something in the water given to SES panelists that compels them to continue to stress the importance of YouTube being the #2 most popular search engine behind Google.
I just saw another article this morning on Aaron Wall’s SEObook.com site.
Here’s the quote from Jonathan Mendez, a speaker at SES New York:
“…This is clear as YouTube is now the #2 search engine, Facebook, eBay & Craigslist are in the top 10 search engines and Twitter is trying to position itself as a real-time search. Search is integral to the web experience.”
While statistically true, is this really a relevant statistic? I think not.
Are you going to tell someone selling tractors or cement mix that they NEED to be on YouTube because that’s where people are searching? Has anyone ever searched for a birthday present on YouTube? My guess is not a one.
Here’s the bottom line. YouTube’s #2 Search Engine status says nothing about the CONTENT of those searches. I asked a panelist about this at SES Chicago. Another panelist agreed with me and the other guy just got sore. Don’t let the experts make you think you HAVE to have some kind of YouTube presence just because THEY say it’s the #2 search engine. There are quite often other, more practical, efforts you can prioritize.
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