I just saw today what may be the first sign of a new direction for information consumption. A friend sent me a link to a little site in it’s first stages of beta, Qwiki.com. To say the least I was blown away and I won’t be surprised if Google snatches them up right out of the gate.
So what the heck are they? They are a search engine that literally takes a query and creates an interactive visual and audio experience out of it. Imagine in twelve months or less someone will be able to type in “define hydroxycut” and the search engine will start audibly spitting out facts about it in a sexy female British accent while displaying pictures, videos and anything it believes to be relevant to your question. The creepy part is it is already freakishly accurate. You can also click on sources and investigate further.
So you might be wondering why I am going off about this and what it has to do with SEO or internet marketing. Well if that becomes the way people search and learn, then we have a whole new game on our hands. The best and most successful marketers are the ones that predict trends and place themselves strategically to take advantage of them. Trend bubbles are not negative things for those who predict them. One thing is certain, consumers will only continue to demand more and more when it comes to information quality. I don’t know about you, but I want to find out how to get on board with the services that are taking this challenge head on.
Web indexing has come a long way since its birth, but the most rapid change has occurred recently with the global need for instant news and content relevant to the moment. Sites like Digg and Twitter are complete products of this. They emerged out of a mess of content attempting to display information on trending topics in real time. Their usefulness is directly a result of their ability to perform this. The demand for content sorted and displayed according to “the now.” Will only become more widespread. We saw it happen with the demand for location based search results and it is happening again with real time news.
What does this mean for those of us who feed our families by ranking websites? It means now more than ever we should be on our game. One thing you should be doing every single day is watching the trend sites like Digg, and Twitter. See what people are saying within your industry. Read the brand new articles pertaining to your content online. Look for emerging nuances, themes, and terms that could start to trend within search results.
Yahoo recently published an article saying that the hit song “Like a G6″ by hip hop band Far East Movement had produced a surge in search results related to finding out what a G6 was. The truth is a G6 doesn’t exist. G4 personal jets have become a major status symbol in Holywood and when coming up with lyrics for their song the band decided to use the term G6 because by their thinking, if a G6 existed it would be the only thing cooler than a G4.
Those who recognized this strange but major search trend immediately enjoyed traffic as a result of carefully catering content to those looking to find out what the heck a G6 was.
So next time you’re sitting up late at night thinking about how to blow up your sites with unique visitors…. remember the G6.
As you’ve probably noticed, Twitter got a new paint job. They say the recent changes to our favorite birdie were inspired by Pythagoras’ “Golden Ratio” which has been applied for centuries to everything from architecture to aerodynamics. Well that’s all nice and interesting, but what does it mean for those of us who try and drive traffic via twitter? Well the more user friendly twitter may have individuals spending more time on the actual platform rather than connecting using third party apps. Twitter may also become more interactive between users in the upcoming months. Both of these could mean huge things for bloggers and sales sites alike.
Here are some tips on how to effectively use the new twitter as a marketing tool:
1. Make sure to target tweets at users who might “retweet” them.
2. Try to develop your following by following those who would fit your customer profile.
3. Make sure to check your direct messages and send them often (not to the point of spamming).
With a little luck the brand new twitter could be a powerful source of traffic for your sites. It will be interesting to see how twitter’s user base adapts to the changes.
Social media clutters the web in a variety of happy colors. From the light blue of twitter to the bright orange of blogger, social media has made more than a playground out of the web. We shouldn’t have to say it, but shame on anyone who has neglected their social campaigns. Everyone loves to talk about SEO, but for the intelligent individuals who really understand how to harness the power of social media building links may fall a second priority to “wall posting” and “friending.”
Why is has social networking become so powerful, and more importantly how can you use it to drive massive amounts of traffic? Those are the questions we set out to answer. This is what we discovered.
Social networking started long before myspace, friendster or even my childhood favorite, AIM. It probably began somewhere in the mountains or in a desert where people left hieroglyphs for each other to discover and talk about. Or maybe it started with amoeba organizing themselves into groups and standing for something. Either way it was definitely not invented by hackers at 2 a.m. getting wasted in ivy league dorm rooms.
The value of social media in terms of driving traffic and ultimately profits online has been evident for years, but harnessing the beast is easier than identifying it. In our experience we have realized a few simple things when it comes to social media. Here they are:
1. You should spread yourself across only as many social profiles as you are capable of maintaining.
It can be easy to end up taking on more than you can handle. Each new social networking account can mean hours per week of maintenance. Make sure to get a good system down for updating and maintaining your current profiles before signing up for more. If you don’t have the time or energy to post fresh content to a new youtube page or facebook group at least twice per week, then it’s probably not a good idea to create one.
2. You should try to encourage interaction between your social media patrons.
Holding contests via a blog or “wall” is a good way to build buzz around your social media territories. This could be as simple as allowing entries and then voting with a prize attached. Companies like threadless.com have built entire businesses around this concept.
3. Make good use of messaging within every social media account.
Social media is a great way to open the door for direct communication with potential customers. Most social media services have some sort of direct or mass messaging feature. Use this to extend invitations to users such as visiting your actual website or checking out a partner product.
All of these things have helped us grow throughout the years and social media has certainly become a source of traffic we now depend on.
Social bookmarking has long been an important part of SEO. It provides a way for SEO professionals to get content indexed almost immediately. It can also be a means of some fast, cheap back links. It’s true bookmarking does not require a 90th percentile IQ, but there are right and wrong ways to build an effective bookmarking web. So how do you maximize the positive effects of bookmarking? Allow us to make a few suggestions.
When deciding how to include bookmarking as part of your link building campaign, don’t make the most common mistake of all: blasting the page you actually want ranked with bookmarks. Say your site includes a category page that you would like to improve rankings for. Rather than simply submitting that URL to every bookmarking site you can think of try the following. Write a few blog articles that contain one back link each and post them on some blogs with decent page rank (4 or 5 if possible). Then submit the back link location URLs to social bookmarking sites at a steady pace of about ten a day each for 5-7 days. Then repeat the process. Bookmarking each of the URLs where your new back links are located will force search engines to follow them over and over again in a short period of time. It will amplify the effect of those quality, followed links giving you a much better results for your effort.
One scenario where you may want to heavily submit your URL to bookmarking sites: only when the URL is brand new and unindexed. Bookmarking can help you get a page indexed very quickly and with some decent authority right out of the gate. What you don’t want to do is spam social bookmarking sites with links to an old URL. This will not improve your rank and will only look like what it is: a desperate spamming rampage. Social bookmarking can be a fantastic tool if used correctly, but if you don’t know what you are doing you may just be getting yourself lost in a sea of happy icons and strange domains.
The Kelsey Group, a research firm out of Chantilly, VA, recently released new research statistics concerning mobile device usage. Their Mobile Local Media Forecast, back-dating two years and projecting three (2008-2013), estimates a 130.5% growth rate for local mobile search and an 81.2% growth rate for overall mobile advertising.
Local search advertising is expected to go from from $20 million to $1.28 billion over the same few years.
For us the most important part of the whole projection is that the largest area of mobile usage growth is local. Social media usage on mobile devices will certainly grow and so will things like mobile banking etc., but the explosion of mobile traffic will be centered around things like looking up addresses or phone numbers online, seeing what is nearby, or city specific searches.
Now we just have a few questions for you: Is your website mobile friendly? And how much do you focus on local search? If The Kelsey Group is right, sales via mobile devices and local search could shortly be the new internet.
Probably the most important thing you can do to grab traffic as the worldwide mobile frenzy continues is be relevant for terms people will search on their mobile devices. This means SEO specifically with mobile in mind. Take a good look at your site and try to think about what local and mobile centered keywords you can target. It helps to think about the perspective of the mobile user. They generally want information faster than someone sitting at a PC and their search terms may be more concise and specific. They also have the limitations that come along with a miniature screen and a baby-sized processor. If at all possible you may want to consider creating a very simple mobile version of your site that you can direct mobile users to. One service that may be worth checking out is http://sem.keynote.com/keynote/ they offer software that will simulate mobile experience so you can test your site out and see how it looks on a variety of different handsets.
Taking a few steps now could mean giant returns later, and actually according to The Kelsey Group, later might not be so late after all.
Reference: http://www.kelseygroup.com/visitorsearch/view-MLM-Summary.asp?DocID=2049
All those of us who have been tortured with Apple / Verizon rumors for the past couple years might have just received a shining ray of hope. The Wall Street Journal reported that cellular giant, Verizon has struck a deal with Apple Inc. to start selling the company’s iPad device directly in their stores. This is not the iPhone announcement many were hoping for, but it definitely proves that the two companies are attempting to work together.
Verizon still will not offer an iPad data plan, so why are they selling a random tech device in their stores? Well they are bundling it with their mobile wifi hotspot device. What’s almost amusing about the bundle is that the price is oddly comparable to the 3G enabled iPad from AT&T. Data plans for the mobile hotspot and the 3G iPad are strangely similar in price as well. Verizon is taking the position that their hot spot will provide internet connection for not only the iPad that comes with it, but any other wifi enabled device as well.
We’re excited to see what develops between the two companies over the next several months as consumers decide which cellular company they would rather work with when it comes to America’s favorite tablet. Hopefully it will break down some long standing barriers between the two companies and open the way for more partnerships…. (iPhone please.)
How many languages does your website speak? Over the past few years the web has grown 10x faster in countries like Mongolia than it has in the United States. Large companies like Facebook and eBay recognize the importance of a website that is friendly to all languages and cultures. While your site may not be an attempt at an international phenomenon it’s still a good idea to set the stage for that possibility.
There are a lot of simple ways to make your website friendly to a wider multinational audience. A study performed by a British research group reported that only 38.3% of internet users wanted to browse sites written in English. If your site is the kind that would appeal to non-English speakers in any way you should at the very least have separate language landers (if not entire sites) that you can send viewers to.
One particularly helpful fact is that translation services have never been more available or more affordable. They range in quality from Google translate (the free translation service), to full service web linguistic firms that will recreate your site in as many languages as you can name.
We encourage you to consider your website and the audience it can possibly appeal to, then make it as universal as reasonably possible. You never know, it might just become a Mongolian hit.
Google just recently introduced what they are calling Google T.V. Basically it is a cooler version of Web T.V. which came out nearly a decade ago, but never really caught on. This is a major move by Google for several reasons. The first being that they are now entering an audience of over 5 billion human beings. Also, because T. V. has never been bound by traditional anti-monopoly software regulations (Thank you Microsoft) Google could potentially control every aspect of web browsing through television if their new little box were to gain major adoption.
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Picture this: you are the marketing director at a large internet retail firm. The owner walks into your office and says “I want you to rethink our entire internet marketing campaign and spend as much money as you need to.” What would you do?
After you got over the shock and realized the pressure, you would probably turn to your whiteboard and start drawing a chart that looked something like an explosion. Then you might go about signing up for different kinds of ad networks
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