So here’s the the pilot episode of a new wonderful series. Basically I go around with a camera and challenge SEO practitioners to a game of ‘Yes, No or SEO’. It’s one minute of SEO related questions, and the interviewee is not allowed to say yes, no or SEO of course. Here’s Jon Quinton, a new recruit at SEO Gadget:
Me: Jon?
Jon: Yes…
#FAIL
More to come at Think Visibility this weekend I hope.
SEO Ninja, Social Media Guru, Rankings Wizard
I see these words in your Twitter bio and I while I won’t take a personal dislike to you, I just think it’s lazy. What you’re basically doing is inflating the importance of your profession by giving it a mystical quality.
This sort of statement is typically interpreted by those who make it as just a bit of fun. However, it more than likely going to cause the people who you need to influence (clients, fellow workers), all the more baffled by the apparently mysterious ways of all things digital. It also causes is a contradictory disconnect of client and apparent guru, because it implies the client can’t possibly know what you’re talking about – because it’s magic.
If you think you are a guru, think about it: you are not. You are as much a guru in marketing as the print guys are about their media. You are as much of a guru as the milk delivery man is an expert in delivering milk. Sure you have experience in something, but please let’s drop the mysticism (which conversely means you have some sort of ancient wisdom – difficult in social /search).
You’re all marketers. Get over the fact that you can look at Google Analytics and make the graphs rise, or that you can make connections and ‘engage’ (meaning?) with a fanbase. There is no mysticism in this but understanding what you’re doing.
Stop thinking that old media is dead and you’ve seen the light. It isn’t, you haven’t. Get integrated.
We still work in a fairly unbalanced industry. I don’t think the masculine (oh yes they all are) additions to job titles help.
The askamum.co.uk site has been hit by Panda and search traffic dipped since April 2011. I was called to look at it in November 2011. In January we put out a release that was felt would correct a huge amount of duplication and crawl errors. It did – the release certainly consolidated the main site, but a significant problem remains – the forums.
The forums are an out of the box solution called Star Community – written in asp.net. I’ve taken the crawl report and pages in the folder /Community/ cause well over 90% of errors. In absolute terms that’s near 100,000 of them. It appears the forums are dragging the rest of the site down.
The forum drives hardly any keyword traffic – maybe a puny 100 visits a month.
Now as far as I can see there are a few solutions to this problem. Listed below.
I’m not sure about this, as Google still detects links that point to folders blocked by robots.txt. It also counts them as an error in Webmaster Tools. It would be a very cheap solution though. The duplication would be solved by the next crawl.
Despite this caveat, I’ve decided to do it in the interim, since we have very little to lose.
This is an option, but we’d lose over 1,000,000 comments and the legacy of users. There isn’t a huge amount of value in the user comments, but it could kill a lot of repeat visits again as users have their history wiped out. We’d have to change this when the site moves platform anyway, which is on the horizon.
This one seems the most difficult and most expensive. Because Star Community is licensed software, it’s also more difficult than just changing the code. We could sort out pagination through using JavaScript, but then there’s a rabbit warren of other ways to find low value pages.
Had anyone ever faced a Panda related issue like this one – particularly using forum technology? I’d love to have your feedback.
In the past two years I’ve read a lot of blog posts and been to a few conferences. I enjoy and gain from most, but one thing that’s had me regularly perplexed is the SEO world’s views on creativity, and what is necessary to ‘achieve’ great ideas.
The most regularly overstated method goes along the lines of something like this (and I’m going to use the toilet, since it’s my blog):
The Distilled Linkbait guide is a good resource (the SEO community certainly thinks so) but it is trivial on this point. It just says that you give a team “advanced notice of a brainstorm” – a couple of days. It doesn’t mention anything about research, or that actually, brainstorming isn’t a great process for creativity.
I recently attended a ten week course in advertising creativity at the University of the Arts London. Truth be told, it was extremely hard. My partner and I went in with ideas which, on the whole, were firmly rejected by the Creative Director. It took place every Wednesday – the day I normally feel at the lowest energy in the week. For the most part, it felt like getting the stuffing knocked out of us. At the end, we had a portfolio of six advertisements in print and TV, but it took over 40 hours to get there.
“Haha! You are obviously not creative,” I hear you snigger. The Italian sociologist Parento put people in two distinct groups – the rentiers (the stockholders, who hang onto their lot) and the speculators (who speculate). Better put, a speculator is ‘constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations.’ I am definitely one of those. On this dancer test, the figure moves to the right. See it for yourself.
If you are one of those souls who see it moving left, then you may be creative, but the chances are you’re more of a rentier that a speculator. It’s got to be said, you should probably leave more of the creative ideas stuff to the more creative people – else that brainstorm could turn into a thunder storm. Saying from experience, it can be very frustrating to get people in the room who:
Even if you are a speculator, coming up with really good ideas is never easy. Very few advertising creatives claim to have come up with a truly great idea. Indeed, most will be satisfied with one or two in their entire career, and no matter what your view of the advertising world, it is their job to be creative – they will probably be better at it than you. Trivializing the creative process often leads to “me too” content – the kind of stuff that disappears into white noise. You might get some links, but you’ll rarely make waves. The extra effort can take you much further.
My main beef with brainstorming is that it implies that great ideas are best come across via teamwork. While it would be nice to think so, most good ideas start and get developed by one or two individuals. Advertising creatives work in pairs of copywriter and art director – effectively words and pictures. You should be wary of working in groups bigger than this initially. Often, this may cause the fatal issues of ruling by committee – failing to address critical issues head on and not making decisions. You don’t want to fall into that trap, you also want to keep your best ideas guarded from everyone else in an embryonic stage. A quote from advertising giant David Ogilvy is worth recalling:
“Look through all the parks in all the cities. You won’t find statues of committees.”
It’s a basic note that committees rarely come up with great work. Indeed, getting everyone involved can lead to slow and draining failure.
If you do have an idea, it should really be up to you to nurture it into something that may lead to life. When you involve more people, the greater there is a chance of imperfection being pointed out. Instead, it should be left to individuals to develop ideas – if there are ideas that they struggle to get developed, and then these can be passed on.
The book I can best recommend on this subject is A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young – first published in the 1940s. The process is elegantly simple, yet far from trivial. In its simplest form it can be explained thus:
“…ideas are nothing more than a new combination of old elements.”
“In the first stage you have gathered your food. In the second you have masticated it well. Now the digestive process is on. Let it alone – but stimulate the flow of gastric juices.”
Basically, constantly thinking about your problem is not good. I can’t recount any time (creative course included) when I have managed to come up with a good idea during the process of thinking about it. A couple of my personal favourites have come on a cycle ride into work in the morning. A clear head paradoxically works wonders.
Only when you have caught this idea do you come to a meeting. Brainstorming is what happens after this process. The core component for coming up with ideas according to Webb Young is that you do a lot of research in understanding the client and their requirements. Once this research is complete, you attack the client’s problems.
Strategic ideas about your own business are somewhat different, because (provided you know what you are doing) you should already know quite a lot about it! Thus you probably don’t have to spend as much time researching as you would for your client.
The key to strategic ideas is to continue learning about your subject, but always consider your businesses’ problems in the context of what you’re learning, then inevitably ideas will flow.
It’s worth mentioning that I’ve usually found books and conferences the most useful source of executionable ideas. Rarely do blogs and web videos give me the same kind of encouragement. They give me tips, advice and tactics but rarely do they give me new ideas. Indeed, that’s why all the resources I’ve listed at the bottom of this post are books. If you are reading a blog, you are normally at work in an office, you will not have the required time to ponder and shape your thinking.
At this stage we must realise that good ideas are not necessarily 100% original. Good ideas can be borrowed from other verticals or concepts and reshaped to fit yours. On the web, it is common for executions using new technology to be seen as ‘innovative’ but not make much of a splash. Often it takes a few goes and the chance of hitting the right audience so the idea tips. Take Mahifx.com – as an idea it is a recombination of elements (negative sentiment towards filthy rich financiers) using new technology.
You just can’t make the idea too similar to something else. Intel’s Museum of Me and Take This Lollipop are similar technical ideas in that they access Facebook Open Graph information to be replayed to the users, but the execution of their creative is entirely separate, and they are almost indistinguishable from one another.
Beware when you see the words ‘brainstorm’ on blogs and hear it at conferences. While the technique may be useful if you’ve already done your homework, remember that coming up with good ideas normally takes considerable research and planning before you get to this point.
I’ve been on the search for viral formula for some time and think I’ve got some way to it. If you look at Time’s 50 Best YouTube Videos, then there’s some criteria within content that can lead to virality:
Now there’s also the ‘extraordinary conclusion to mundane events‘ but one more addition – animals.
Animals and babies are the biggest stars on the Internet. Getting them doing every day things in an extraordinary manner is one path to viral gold. So I thought about it, and then reckoned being in the animal business would be a marketing dream. Think of being in the marketing department of Whiskas - those guys spend a ton on TV. How much would it take to reach the same number of people online – albeit with a different message?
Cats are the main stars of course. Even if you don’t like cat videos, then it’s still difficult not to like this genius piece of commentary:
Add an Apple product in the mix and it gets even bigger. Cat with an iPad is always a good one, but in this particular video not much really happens. It’s just a cat looking at a screen. But this one, of an African Bullfrog licking ants on an iPhone, has a brilliant conclusion. I particularly love the way the frog’s little arms wave around and the little shriek:
What I can’t understand about all of this is that no companies have noticeably got on the bandwagon. Presumably their marketing departments are fixated with budgets and purchasing media space because that’s always been the way, because it beggars belief as to why this trend is passing them by.
So I thought, maybe it’s my calling. Set up a marketing agency that only deals with animal videos for clients. Shame it’s already been done:
It’s one of the things about online communities – we all love them, but we’ve got to remember some of it just don’t make sense. So much, in fact, that I thought I’d do a roundup just before bed time. Maybe it’ll be a regular thing, maybe next week there’ll be less nonsense – unlikely. So here’s the first of many Community Nonsense top five roundups.
Code Year sounds like most New Year’s resolutions. A load of people got excited about how 2012 was gonna be so big. Then they went back to their normal lives, where they went to the same job, drank too much, continued to smoke, didn’t exercise and didn’t learn anything that seemed too hard. So Code Year signed up 97,000 people? Even the mayor of NYC got involved. I wonder how many people are genuinely taking the lessons when that email arrives on a Monday. I made the pledge, I didn’t follow it up. I also had a beer last weekend. If you don’t know how to code, keep calm and carry on.
I asked Jimmy Wales, I didn’t ask anyone else. Please don’t give me your opinion on SOPA if I ask him, even if it is a public question – I see so many other people’s view about it every time I look at my timeline. I asked Jimmy Wales because I genuinely want to know what he thinks.
I didn't get an answer from Jimmy himself, only his minions - it's a good question though! Please don't answer it - you are not Jimmy Wales. Unless you really are Jimmy Wales of course. Jimmy? Jimmy?! JIMMY?!!
To be fair to Jimmy Righteous, his actions have got onto the front page of The Metro this morning, which is nice. They’ve also broken Wikipedia’s stance of political neutrality, which is a dumb precedent.
Now maybe this will annoy people who do care, but I really don’t care about SOPA that much. It’s a dumb law and I doubt it will get through or be workable. Saying that, I did see ‘Rupert Murdoch doesn’t understand how the internet works’ on The Guardian. I really liked this quote:
“He cannot see past old models of owning content and selling it and cannot see new ways to make money through using content to generate signals about people and built relationships with them to target higher-value, relevant content, services, and advertising.”
I agree, but I also loathe the seeming failure of the anti-SOPA movement to properly acknowledge copyright theft as a virulent problem. Basically the response seems to be ‘the entertainment industry are all douches.’ I am pretty neutral – if this makes you angry, please right an offensive comment.
NOTE: Can we also stop using the ‘X doesn’t understand how the Internet works’ or other bollocks for titles? Thank you.
Do some work then. Stop tweeting about it.
This really annoys me, but it’s becoming completely obvious that it happens more than we’d like to think. I write a blog, people often tweet me or leave comments repeating what I’ve said in the post in a ‘yeah but…’ kind of way, or arguing against me with a statement I have made in the post. Wow that’s dumb. It’s like people read the headline, look at a picture of a toilet and then write a comment. Oh…
So you’re in digital marketing. You write / create / produce good content? If you think you do, then this article may not be for you. However, it might well be, because you may be blissfully aware of your own issues with style. I see it time and time again – the same mistakes by bloggers and professionals alike, and often a failure to address style problems that offend many a web reader.
The major problem with online style errors is that they are more noticeable than spelling mistakes. You’ll see from the issues below, writing alone, no matter how great it is, is unlikely to get you very far online. If you then deploy your copy in sloppy presentation, with no help to the reader of navigation, you are close to doomed, and the ‘reader’ will probably bounce.
While I was a copywriter for the early part of my career, I quickly became aware of its limitations in the online world. Copy just doesn’t get read enough by impatient users. While there are statistics to back up what’s read (or indeed what isn’t) online, I rather like this quote from the advertising world, from Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This:
I don’t think people read body copy, long or short. I think we’ve entered a frenzied era of coffee guzzling, email sending channel surfers who honk the nanosecond the light turns green and have the attention span of a flashbulb. If the first nine words of body copy are ‘May we send you beer and money for free?’ word ten isn’t read.
Online attention spans create headaches for writers, because people generally only scan web pages. You might be an SEO copywriter who satisfies search engines; contextually, that’s a good skill, but it isn’t necessarily related to creating great content that humans genuinely want to share and link to.
Currently we are closing in on 200 million blogs on the Internet. Almost every blog I read relies on the same old font systems: Arial or Verdana, while a few might break into Georgia. It amazes me, particularly when there are 404 fonts currently available for free from Google.
Rarely can you reflect the character of your brand by writing in a font that everyone else uses. I’ve made sure I have a different font for my personal blog, and in a recent relaunch of Grazia, we made sure we examined a number of different fonts which would fit the brand. The font gives a huge amount of personality – make sure you pick an interesting and reflective one.
Before we concern ourselves with the production heavy benefits of adding media, writers need to be clear on what good clear online content really constitutes. The best guide available is simple The Yahoo Style Guide.
1. Omit Needless Words:
I often think to myself that the fact of the matter about New York City is that it is so frightfully smelly.
Which could be translated into:
New York City stinks.
Cut the crap.
2. Make it Interesting:
3. Use Subheadings:
A subrule of this point is to use the correct elements. Using bold text for subtitles is an error. Use <h2> or <h3>.
4. Do not abbreviate unless the abbreviation is more common:
There is a chance your reader will not know who you are talking about, thus go to somewhere else to find out, or that Google won’t know who you’re talking about, and thus you’ll rank lower.
5. Break things into lists wherever possible:
Of course, I broke the rule to make the point:
Any copywriter who uses a list format within an online paragraph should be:
Now you’ve followed the simple rules for body copy, we can consider imagery. Imagery is vitally important – without it, I would say articles are again doomed. Just check out this article on Kate Middleton from the Daily Mail. Did anyone read the copy? I didn’t. The images make the point.
The simple rules are as follows:
People who align images to the left due to laziness should be:
Let’s take this a bit further. So few content producers ever consider creating their own imagery for their posts. Normally, they’ve got Google images as a library of whatever they want, so they just rip it from there. Naughty.
Instead of infringing the copyright of content producers who invest in original imagery, you should attempt to do the same. Go out for a day and create as much stock imagery as possible. The following would be great:
It all depends on the context of course, but in the digital age, the cost of producing imagery is your wage, a camera and a photoshop elements license.
Additionally, it also goes a long way to consider amusing scenarios and customise your images. Microsoft Word has some superb action point tools, such as speech bubbles, to help you. You can make cartoons and humorous things as easily as the below:
Think that you are not just a copywriter or a journalist, you are a content producer.
I’m a massive advocate of using video online. Although apparently costly, it can vastly increase engagement metrics and influence buying decisions. Start taking it seriously in your content strategy.
Regarding the presentation of video always align center in much the same way as you’d use for images. Left aligns are punishable by firing from a cannon.
You can always use a video from YouTube to back up a point, but I’m a much bigger fan (again) of creating your own.
The apparent barrier for entry is that it is prohibitively expensive: not so. While it is rather expensive to edit videos and make them look entirely professional – very rarely do you need to do this. Consider the video:
Like the other forms of online content mentioned above, you need to be aware of what makes video interesting. You have 15 seconds to persuade your viewer to keep viewing. Give us a slow start and you won’t get many completed plays.
So this has been a crash course in content styling, but if you apply the rules above, you will almost certainly make your content go a lot further. If we apply an 80/20 rule, that extra 20% of time required to make your articles look the business will often give you 80% more traction. Be unstylish at your peril. Make your content look like a supermodel:
Gratuitous use of Kate Upton in one of my posts
I can’t go a day on Twitter without seeing something about Pinterest. There are plenty of blogs about how amazing it is and how to use it for marketing gains, and most of them speculate it’s going to be the next big thing.
But there’s a mantra worth following, if you’re seriously considering using Pinterest for business aims:
I’ve seen some statements along the lines of: ‘if you’re a digital marketer and not on Pinterest, then you’re not a digital marketer,’ by people with big followings. This is most unhelpful. It’s another addition to a long list of social media properties that marketers ‘should’ (apparently) care about. Let’s consider four from the last year:
And of course our stalwarts, which people have varying opinions on, but are largely past the hype (although boy they went through it):
I leave out Linkedin, because I don’t really feel it’s a social network for much but recruitment.
So we now have seven networks to care about, added to this is the delightfully ridiculous in scope ‘inbound marketing’ mix:
Er – say what? Aren’t we getting a little overloaded now?
I find it incredible, and naïve, to suggest that people should get into the latest thing just because it exists. How many inhouse departments are there were the digital marketing department is a solitary individual? I haven’t done a survey, but needless to say there are plenty. I’m in one myself (with support from other teams).
The problem with this love of the latest fad is that it fragments and distracts from proper strategy. Often, rather than presenting new and better opportunities, you start from scratch speculating that this is going to be big, when your time would be far better spent nurturing your current social media connections into something meaningful, rather than largely meaningless numbers of Likes and Followers.
What about all this other guff that has fallen into a digital marketers remit? Not to mention using any evil paid ‘outbound’ methods (which work by the way, despite what the book says). We’re slipping towards unfocused doom, where everybody’s theorising about the latest fad and few people are actually doing things.
If I was a boss at a business that focussed on all seven of the social networks above, and had the social media execs to do it all well, then I’d fire some of the execs – because most of it is unnecessary. Let’s start with the top four networks I mentioned. Let’s be honest and say you can largely forget about taking them seriously for business.
Also, consider that these networks simply don’t have the numbers to make them particularly viable in the UK – US perhaps – but there just aren’t enough people living on Blighty that care!
You’ve got three networks to focus on. If you’re not working them to their potential before jumping on the ‘next big thing’ stop what you’re doing and have a good think. Ask yourself if the potential offered really is bigger than any of the big three. Ask yourself again. Ask again. Now consider the golden rule:
If we’re going to be serious about Inbound Marketing (and this blog is) then we should follow a simple structure that doesn’t include ludicrously long lists of media that you ‘should’ be fulfilling. The below structure is easy to follow and helps to shape strategy:
Sideward Arrows = spend on a particular discipline. This is adjustable according to requirements.
Upward Arrow = a relationship between departments. Web Analytics effects all departments, but Web Development only really affects Content Placement above it, which correspondingly affects Inbound Marketing above it. For instance, Inbound Marketing requires strong Content Placement to build links, and Content Placement relies on strong Web Development.
It is damaging to consider the marketing mix in the fragmented way of the previously used Inbound Marketing image as if being able to do it all makes you ‘awesome’. Consider the following:
If you can’t focus on simple structure and fulfilling the basics, you will be like a chef who bases his menus on Marco Pierre White’s most advanced dishes yet can’t cook an omelette. It is a recipe for disaster. You will flit from one apparent focus to the next, being mediocre in most in remarkable in none.
Distance yourself from this hype. Think what’s big – think of what you can coax out of the big. The latest fad is always small, particularly in the UK. Thinking big there is difficult.
So in my last post, I put my number one pet hate in SEO for 2011 as being told that I should learn to code. There’s a camp that says it’s wrong to point this out as bullshit (coders), and a camp to say it was right (non coders).
Just to clarify – (and this is rather difficult on Twitter) the position stated is not that coding sucks, or that no one needs to learn how to code – of course there are massive benefits to this. I think in SEO you must at least know HTML and some CSS and XPATH functions, otherwise how on earth could you do a site audit?
But to always say that learning to code is nigh on necessity, as Will Critchlow (@willcritchlow) did at Search Love and Dom Hodges (@thehodge) did at BrightonSEO (for the record, I thought they were both great presentations… but), just doesn’t really ring true. Unless I have a mentor with someone to bounce ideas back, it will be an expensive investment of time to start learning a server side language. And why should I when I work with a team of developers who would be far superior?
I also think it’s more advantageous to focus on things I genuinely have a passion for – such as social media and search integration. There are loads of specialisms in SEO and skillsets that don’t require coding, but can still make you indispensable to your business: good ideas are helpful. Often the best creative people might not have a coding brain, but they can come up with sensational ideas such as Devastating Explosions or Take this Lollipop, and get technicians to execute them.
Do advertising copywriters need to code? Is this SEO? I’d argue that big ideas now fit into an SEO team’s remit. Just ask Sam Crocker (@samcrocker) after the production of mahifx.com.
I find it a little annoying, and quite misleading to imply that SEO is a purely technical discipline and that coding is a necessity. I would like to learn, but I’m probably not going to unless it becomes a necessity.
Please stop telling us it is.
Talking toilets haven’t been around much of late, basically because I didn’t have enough time to write about bullshit. But Yuletide is a slightly less busy time of year, and I can focus on what I do best.
So without further ado, I present you the Top 10 Toilets of 2011 – a roundup of the biggest bullshit that prevails in the SEO industry:
This is a nod to all those SEOs out there making pointless, worthless changes and then charging them back to the client. Stop worrying about microscopic detail and concern yourself with the bigger picture.
I’m amazed at the number of blogs which are just copy – a white screen with shapes on that I probably can’t be bothered to read. We’re all guilty of it when short of time, but jeez, put something in to help the reader through your writing. Amazing how many bloggers fail with basic style issues as well – no bold, italics or subtitles. Please refer to this, failing that, start using some video and imagery, fast.
Seldom have I come across a more unproductive feedback session than this thread. And after giving them so much to go with, it obviously wasn’t the use of the h1 tag that had us utterly penalised.
I’m feeling a bit left out because I don’t have many moz points. Also, I fundamentally reject that ‘inbound’ marketing is always better than traditional media just because it’s free. It’s still a great resource, but don’t believe the hype all the time.
I read this post by Jane Copland this morning. Frankly, chat like that mentioned in the first paragraph in any context is appalling. And WTF is with this booth babes thing? I’ve never seen it personally, but I’d actually find it seriously off putting. SEO companies, you are not Zoo Magazine – don’t try to be.
Anyone who says this is wrong, and largely missing the point. It is highly unlikely that Google will give more weight to social sharing than links anytime soon. If it does, a search for car insurance will probably return more cat videos than meerkats. Love your links.
Amazed by the number of agency workers who say they don’t use any black hat techniques. Hmmm, I don’t believe you. There’s always some form of manipulation that you can use to your advantage.
If you’re in SEO and Facebook is an afterthought to Google +, Twitter, Pinterest and God only knows however many other smaller social networks there are, then you should probably consider jumping out the window. There are 800 million people on there, and it has the largest display network in the world. Do something!
Good – I’m very glad your low quality site written by a fisherman in Thailand, who you paid $1 to write muddled English, no longer ranks for ‘how to get over your ex-girlfriend’. Panda is a good thing.
Oh Lord! Here’s another ruby developer at a conference saying ‘SEOs should learn to code’ or that you’re not good at your job if you don’t know Python. I can get by just fine with some decent developers, and while I can speak their language, I can’t write it and I don’t intend to. I have no support team and I wouldn’t know where to start building my own tools – and why bother when there are so many good ones out there! Please, conference speakers, go look at some art work and think creativity can exist in SEO without the need to start outbuilding Google. Richard Shove – I salute you.
