Google and 'social signals'

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Two years ago social media were mostly just for fun. Now Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on are used by millions of businesses across the world to drive traffic, win loyalty and build brands. 

Google and other search engines are starting to take 'social signals' into account when ranking websites in the search results pages. But are they using social signals per se? No. It's actually subtler than that. When you Tweet a link to your Twitter community, for instance, and a bunch of people click on the link, your site experiences extra traffic. Apparently it's the extra traffic that search engines respond to, not the social signals themselves. 

So it's important to make sure your website benefits from social signals. How? When you Tweet a link on Twitter, make sure the content you're linking to sits on your website. If you upload a photo to Twitter instead of your site's own directory, for example, all that lovely 'link juice' flows to Twitter, not your website. 

There are countless social networks to choose from, and they wax and wane in popularity. If you're running a small business there's no way you can get down and dirty with all of them. It takes time, effort and creativity to do it properly. It's best to choose your weapons and stick with them rather than trying to spin too many social media plates at once. Pick a maximum of three networks and stick with them, and you'll stay sane as well as eventually making a decent-sized impact! 

Here's a list of the types of content that you can broadcast in an effort to encourage traffic, bookmarks and back-links: 

• blog posts
• articles
• white papers
• ebooks
• images
• infographics
• fresh site content and redesigns
• landing pages
• competitions
• new products
• bright ideas
• revolutionary information
• contentious stuff

It's all about link bait. Link bait is the kind of content that people love to link back to, re-Tweet or whatever. If you choose Digg as one of your social networks, people will 'Digg' content they like, which pushes it to the top of Digg's front page. Much the same goes for Reddit. StumbleUpon lets you 'stumble' around on the internet and 'like' content based on your interests. Every network performs differently, and each has their own personality. 

Happy networking!

What is direct marketing? And is it relevant online?

Thursday, February 16, 2012

The internet is a fascinating commercial landscape to operate in. Search engines test numerous new variations of their search algorithms every day. Online businesses rise and fall. Social networks spring up then die back. New technologies, tools, platforms and widgets pop up and take us by surprise. It's a proper moveable feast. 

Luckily, whatever the marketing medium, us humans behave in much the same way when we're buying stuff. Which means direct marketing is just as relevant online as it is offline. 

So what is direct marketing? 

Direct marketing drives attributable sales. The words and design push readers towards a buying decision. You provide at least one response mechanism in your campaign. You include strong calls to action. People buy as a direct result of seeing your advert or email, auto-responder message or web page. And you can track them back to their origin, establishing what return on investment you have or haven't made on a campaign by campaign basis.  

Brand advertising is about creating brand, service and product awareness and nurturing desire, in the hope that you'll eventually fall in love with a brand and buy what's being advertised. TV adverts are usually about brand building, as are posh ads in glossy magazines. If there's no 'ask', it isn't direct marketing. Car, cosmetic, retailer, food and fast moving consumer goods adverts don't usually end with an appeal for the viewer to 'call this number and buy now'.

When you think about it, every business website is a miniature exercise in direct marketing. Most online businesses want people to respond directly to the site's content by either phoning, emailing or buying instantly. Very few business websites these days are simply 'brochure sites' with no purpose beyond passive brand support.     

One of the best things about today's best content and customer management platforms is the way they take direct marketing principles and practices into account up front. You don't need to set up a separate account elsewhere to run email campaigns and set up a suite of auto-responder messages. There are facilities for data capture and manipulation. You get a load of integral stats so you can track exactly what's happening, when and why. All in one place. Which goes a long way towards getting your business in good direct marketing shape. 

Ask Chris about Adobe Business Catalyst. When your business sits on ABC, it's as easy as one, two three!  

Looks matter - Why savvy small businesses redesign their websites regularly

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Great design is about much more than beauty. It's also about functionality. And, whether we like it or not, there's an element of fashion too. All you need to do is keep a weather eye on Twitter and you'll notice a constant stream of people announcing site redesigns. Follow a few links and you'll notice how different websites look these days. 

Yesterday I ran across one of those text only sites from the very early days of the internet. Weirdly it was still ranking in Google, but that's another story! 

The page had a white background with four different text sizes and four different fonts, one of which was Times Roman. Which is a lovely font. But it looks very odd in an online context when almost everyone uses sans serif fonts for readability. Big, bright blue headers were emboldened and underlined, with red subheads and black body text. No illustrations or images, no interactivity, no columns... just a page that looked exactly like a very amateur, poorly formatted Word document. It was extremely nasty to look at and didn't exactly encourage trust. Quite the opposite.

Whether you consciously realise it or not, when you spend time online you become accustomed to the way new sites look and over time, ageing sites start to look old fashioned. 

A redesign can make your site work better, load faster and provide a much more enjoyable visitor experience. It can make your sales conversion process smoother, more efficient and more logical when your designer brings the latest technologies and tools into play. A redesign can even help boost your site's visibility in the search engine results by using the latest coding protocols and taking SEO into account automatically. 

An attractive, modern, crisp website with a nice, simple flat structure can do wonders for your bottom line. If your site is more than three years old, it's high time you took another look. 

Our Chris is your man, and he designs directly onto one of the planet's best back end CMSs, the marvellous Adobe Business Catalyst platform. 

Google's new privacy policy

Thursday, February 02, 2012

There's been discontented rumblings about Google's privacy policy for ages, so it's good to see a new, simpler, more straightforward policy released last week. 

What's been the problem? It's all about targeting. Imagine how big the internet it. It's vast. Absolutely huge. Search engines need to figure out which sites come top on the first page of the search results, and which belong lower down in the results pages. As t'internet grows, it becomes more difficult to 'decide' because the market is so crowded. So they've been bringing targeting into play, tailoring the search results to your 'behaviour'. 

Which sounds OK... or does it? When you think about it, maybe not. Targeting involves working out what you like and giving you more of it. Which is fine except you end up only seeing the stuff you like, a sort of abbreviated internet based on your preferences and search behaviour. At the end of the day it means you never see stuff you might dislike... but which could be fascinating. 

Targeting in this way restricts what you see when you search. And the more rebellious amongst us don't want to be cosseted in this way. We want to see the internet in all its horrid glory, not an edited version decided upon by Google.  

Google might be amazingly good at targeting content to your habits and preferences, likes and dislikes. But bear in mind that it's only as good as its algorithms, and algorithms are nowhere near clever enough to suss out the complexities, vagaries, eccentricities and subtleties of human behaviour. So its good to know that their new privacy rules make it much easier to switch off the targeting side of things. 

You can turn off personalised search in a few clicks, opening up your search experience again so you see more of the real world, without interference. If you have a Google account, you can reject personalised search via the Dashboard. 

Google also uses cookies to figure out your preferences, present 'relevant' adverts and track user trends. Luckily you can re-set your browser to refuse cookies or let you know when one's been sent. You can also view and manage your advert preferences via their Ads Preferences Manager and opt out of their Doubleclick advertising cookie. 

Last but not least, when you stay signed out of your Google account instead of remaining signed in all day, your searches aren't as heavily personalised.  

Although it's new and shiny, Google's updated privacy policy is still a bit of a work up and there's a lot of information to trawl through. Thankfully it's in reasonably plain English, which helps. But it'd be better still if Google simply added a 'yes' or 'no' button to their home page, so we could opt out of all personalisation with one click. Maybe one day!