It’s the people, stupid…
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on April 2nd, 2009
Another great session: It’s the People, Stupid – New Marketing Paradigms in a Web 2.0 World
Brian Oberkirch (www.brianoberkirch.com), Deborah Schultz (www.deborahschultz.com)
Again, I focused on the content and found a good summary
posted by someone who could type AND follow along…check that out here:
http://www.change-management-blog.com/2009/04/its-people-stupid-new-marketing.html
Thanks, Holger Nauheimer!
Web 2.0 Expo – Why Social Media Marketing Fails
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on April 1st, 2009
I was going to post my notes on this session for the folks back home but my notes FAIL in comparison to these:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=887
Summary of SEO Workshop
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on March 31st, 2009
I’m glad I accidentally flew in to San Francisco a day early… I ended up upgrading my conference package to include the workshops and the first session today was a 3 hour block on Search Engine Optimization by Stephan Spencer / Net Concepts. Great speaker and I took away a lot of good info – kind of blown away at the extent to which our site could change to be more SEO friendly.
Good takeaway in the first couple minutes: “A site without links pointing to is doesn’t deserve to rank”
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) vs SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – SEM covers SEO and adds to that paid placement (ppc), not to be taken as SEO is free – it is not. Doing SEO correctly may necessitate the purchase of keyword tools, or vendors/contractors to assist. Cheaper approach: If someone is doing it well – embrace and extend what they do.
86% of clicks on Google are from organic search results, only 14% are from paid search (based on eye tracking studies). However, people clicking on a paid ad are more likely to convert. In either case, when someone is doing a search they are primed and ready to act so placement pays. Clicks for the number one result are about 40% – this drops to 10% for the #2 result. Ranking in multiple areas doesn’t hurt either – natural results, paid placement, image search, content network search, etc.
Yahoo is no longer the #2 search engine – more people now search via YouTube, which has moved into the #2 spot
Keywords – the word the CEO searches for each morning may not be the best (except for your job). Pick the right keyword for your site, and speak your customer’s language. Kitchen electronics is a common product category, but not what customers search for. Baby products can attract more clicks via “baby names” than other keywords. Bottom line, keyword research is needed to identify what your market is searching for. Tools: Quintura (Free) or Google Suggest / Keyword Tool / Trends / Insight. Wordtracker is a paid tool, but based on less than 1% of the search market (dogpile and metacrawler users). Keyword Discovery is another paid service ($70/month), which shows historical trends and based on a larger user base. Advantage of Google tools is the large user base. Check out Google Insight for Search, extends the data found in Google Trends – can see top rising search terms
Getting crawled doesn’t mean you’re getting indexed. Getting indexed doesn’t mean you’re getting ranked. Getting ranked doesn’t mean you’re getting clicks and getting clicks doesn’t mean you will convert.
7 steps to ranking:
• Get your site fully indexed
• Get your pages Visible
• Build links and page rank
• leverage your page rank
• encourage click through
• track the RIGHT metrics
• follow best practices
Complexity can kill the crawl – Search engines are wary or dynamic pages (fear or spider traps)
Avoid:
• stop characters (?&=)
• session ids or long numerical strings that look like a session
• unnecessary variables
• frames
• redirects
• popups
• navigation in flash, java, javascript, pulldown boxes
Hurdles to indexing:
complex / long urls that add no value to the page keywords
content duplication
non-canonicalization
too many links and not high enough ranking (crawl equity) Higher Page rank at the top will allow more crawl equity for pages 10 clicks down.
Canonicalization: gvsu.edu/ should 301 redirect to www.gvsu.edu for all pages (no content duplication) same for / vs. index.htm. Use server header checker to verify 301/302 redirects and use google google webmaster tools to enforce this or live http header firefox extension.
Key word prominence is so much better than keyword prominence. Use a descriptive paragraph at the top of the page to introduce the rest of the page using important keywords. Title tag is the most important copy on a page and the homepage is the most important. Don’t dilute the title with your brand name – stick with the content keywords. Title tags and descriptive link text are will remain important SEO best practice.
Random things:
• seomoz.org – link scape
• Get more links – link baiting. Put out funny / useful content that others are baited into linking to – the SEO perspective of viral marketing
• use rel=”nofollow” to tell google to not index certain links on your site (use this to give less importance to login pages, etc.)
• seobrowser.com – tool for viewing a site as a crawler
• siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – check links into your site
A little Catholic humor
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on March 28th, 2009
This one comes courtesy of Eric’s blog – I thought my family would get a laugh out if it too.
Each Friday night after work, Bubba would fire up his outdoor grill and cook
a venison steak. But, all of Bubba’s neighbors were Catholic. And since it
was Lent, they were forbidden from eating meat on Friday. The delicious
aroma from the grilled venison steaks was causing such a problem for the
Catholic faithful that they finally talked to their priest.
The Priest came to visit Bubba, and suggested that he become a Catholic.
After several classes and much study, Bubba attended Mass…and as the
priest sprinkled holy water over him, he said, “You were born a Baptist, and
raised a Baptist, but now you are a Catholic”.
Bubba’s neighbors were greatly relieved, until Friday night arrived, and the
wonderful aroma of grilled venison filled the neighborhood. The Priest was
called immediately by the neighbors, and, as he rushed into Bubba’s yard,
clutching a rosary and prepared to scold him, he stopped and watched in
amazement. There stood Bubba, clutching a small bottle of holy water which
he carefully sprinkled over the grilling meat and chanted:
“You wuz born a deer, you wuz raised a deer, but now you is a catfish”.
Preparing for Vacation
Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on March 28th, 2009
I head to San Francisco on Monday for the 2009 Web 2.0 conference – I’m expecting this conference to be great from what I have heard. This is the second conference in San Francisco I’ve been to in the past couple years so I am not as excited to tour the city after the conference ends each day, but this may have more to do with the fact that I am out there by myself this time. I hate eating out by myself and drinking alone is even worse so my first goal is to meet people that I can hang out with while I am there. I’m staying at the W Hotel which should be great, I know I’m the picture of the trendy traveler they are angling for…
I’ve shifted topic areas/conferences over the years so I’ve yet to find a group that goes to the same conference as me every year like others in the office. Maybe this will be the one that I want to attend every year…but I am already more interested in SXSW next year based on the topics and excitement my coworkers returned with a couple weeks ago.
Holly’s spring break starts on Thursday so she is flying out to SFO that night to meet me there – so far our plan is for me to pick her up after I pick up a rental car so that we can head to the second half of our trip once my conference ends on Friday. We are heading from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe where from what I’ve seen will be equivalent weather to Michigan or colder. We’ll stay there for 2-3 days before heading to Yosemite to take in a bit of nature and a lot of scenery. This is the first year in some time that we haven’t traveled to Key West with friends over Spring Break – I will really miss the warm weather and cold Coronas by the pool… Don’t get me wrong…I am excited about this trip too, it will just be different. I’m honestly looking forward to seeing new parts of the country, and seeing amazing scenery that I’ve only seen in photos before. Sadly, I won’t be able to visit the Ponderosa Ranch from hit TV show Bonanza, in Lake Tahoe, as it was closed and sold several years ago…bummer. No matter what, I am ready for a break!
In other news…I was able to pull together a trip to Key West in October with some of my friends – sort of an extended guys weekend. This will be my first time in Key West during Fantasy Fest and from what I’ve been told it is a crazy party, like Mardi Gras on steroids.
I am going down there with a unique group and our diversity is something only rivaled by MTV’s The Real World. We have a police officer, an IT guy, an MBA/sales guru, a City Administrator and a University Student Affairs specialist – all with more degrees and masters degrees than we know what to do with. The chances of this trip coming together were slim to none (which may explain why our wives said we could try to plan it) but everything fell in place last week. We found a house with a private pool and 5 beds in our price range, which was nothing short of amazing. Airfare has been booked and now all that is left is for everyone to start working out again before we head south.
Holly and I still want to plan one more trip around July/August for our anniversary but we haven’t made any plans yet. Let me know if you have any suggestions! The idea of going back to Middle Island was thrown around but I wouldn’t mind camping a bit more this summer. Hopefully we’ll have plenty of time to spend at the cabin as well – I have a long list of projects I’d like to start on up there!