Forget about Search Engine Optimization!
Posted on | September 9, 2009 | 1 Comment
As I thought I had subjected everyone I know to my anti-SEO rant, I was quite surprised to be asked for some SEO advice on Twitter earlier:
I hate SEO because the focus is wrong. Whereas SEO is about getting the best search ranking possible, the focus should be on engaging as effectively as possible: content, conversations, and communities.
- Content: Search engine optimizers regularly tell people that they can polish a turd, but they can’t. Rather than throwing their money down the black hole of SEO, people would be better spending their time and money creating quality content that is worth visiting/linking to. Whether a traditional web site, a blog, a Twitter feed, or a YouTube channel, quality content is key.
- Conversations: Unbelievably many search engine optimizers believe you shouldn’t waste your time on commenting on other people’s blogs [number 6 on this SEO list]! The web is more than a brochure, it is a place for having a conversation, you need to join the conversation.
- Community: Build relationships with people online (and offline). Knowing the right people, and being known by the right people, is worth a lot more than being number one for “sombreros for chickens”.
There is no magic bullet to making an impact online, no simple rules, just a lot of hard work. But if you do the work you will get both the search engine ranking you deserve and customer satisfaction.
SEO should start and finish with making sure your web site can be indexed by search engines.
Naver: Looking beyond Google/Yahoo/Bing
Posted on | August 26, 2009 | No Comments
When it comes to search engine APIs, there are increasingly slim pickings from the big three: Google dropped the SOAP API for the AJAX API; Live/Bing dropped their link commands; whilst no one seems to know what will happen with Yahoo’s API in the future. With search engines potentially offering extremely valuable information it is worth looking further afield.
I’ve just finished writing a program using the Naver API for some colleagues in South Korea:
Whilst it was not an easy task to get an Naver API-key (in the end someone else got it on my behalf), and some of the words were stored as images (i.e., not much use to Google Translate), once the API-key was acquired Naver APIs were very easy to use. Naver has a host of indexes including blogs, images, videos, and academic documents. Unfortunately Naver doesn’t have any link operators, and the index contains less English language pages than would be found in the indexes of the American search engines.
Nonetheless Naver does serve as a reminder that there are possibilities away from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We just need to start looking at them; even if that does require the help of Google Translate.
Social Media Metrics and Scholarly Publishing 2.0: A couple more articles
Posted on | August 21, 2009 | No Comments
I have been lucky enough to be snowed under with work over the last couple of weeks, with a lot of my time being spent working on a couple of articles I have been asked to write: one on social media metrics; and one on scholarly publishing 2.0. As I’ve mentioned before, I love writing articles because it’s a great way to supplement one’s income and advertise one’s abilities. It also forces you to construct your thoughts in a coherent manner. Whereas a blog post is generally off-the-cuff, and presentations can rely too heavily on mere rhetoric, knowledge of an editor’s critical eye forces journal articles to be built on stronger arguments.
The two pieces provided me with two different problems. The problem with writing a piece on social media metrics is that you obviously don’t have carte blanche to ramble on for as many pages as you like, whereas when writing about scholarly publishing 2.0 it is all too easy to start slipping into ‘ranting blogger’ mode, rather than ‘objective professional’ mode.
Social Media Metrics are increasingly recognised as important, and will be the focus of an increasing number of books over the years to come. However with so many different technologies, being used for so many different purposes, it is quite hard to provide an informative article in just 2,500 words. It’s about finding a compromise between a piece that focuses too much on abstract concepts such as ‘influence’ and one that just provides concrete descriptions of some of the specific metrics that are possible.
When writing about Open Science and Scholarly Publishing 2.0 I find near impossible to not get excited about the opportunities that the new generation of web technologies offer to the advancement of science, but also despair at the lack of progress in terms of academics embracing these technologies. Something I have been equally culpable of as an academic. The positive feedback from the editor would seem to indicate that I managed to steer just far away enough from ranting blogger to make it into print.
Tom Watson MP at the Black Country Social Media Cafe
Posted on | August 12, 2009 | No Comments
We had Tom Watson come along to yesterday’s Black Country Social Media Cafe to share his thoughts about politics 2.0:
Tom gave a wide ranging talk covering everything from personal information rights to the importance of the computer games industry to the British economy. It was good to hear from a politician who understands the new technologies, their potential for social upheaval, and how important it is that institutions and organisations embrace the opportunities these technologies offer.
If/When Bing turns off Yahoo’s search operators: URL citations
Posted on | August 1, 2009 | 1 Comment
Bing-powered-Yahoo search will give the two organisations more bargaining power with potential advertisers, but it is bad news for innovation in search and the third-party users who build around the companies’ offerings. Yahoo and Microsoft have very different attitudes to sharing their data, whereas Yahoo have provided the great API – Yahoo BOSS - with extremely useful link search operators, Microsoft turned off their link operators.
The future of Yahoo BOSS seems unlcear, but I think the writing is on the wall. At the recent Bing roundtable I discussed the lack of operators with the general manager of Bing’s Search Technology Centre Europe. As he explained in a follow up email:
…the Bing API is designed to help people build a customer-facing search solution and to foster an ecosystem of sites and application that use Bing as their content service to augment the information they have with the corpus of knowledge in our indexes.
Basically Bing isn’t looking to be an innovative company using the wisdom of the crowd, they are looking to be a powerful company who will tell the crowd how it can us its data.
Whilst they recognise “…we may lose some customers like yourself with the decisions we’ve made”, with the likely loss of Yahoo BOSS, there are few places for customers like myself to go. Nonetheless it is time to start investigating some of the alternatives that are available.
In addition to the ‘link’ command available through Google API and Exalead (which finds links to a specific page rather than a whole domain) you can also search for URL citations. URL citations are mentions of a hyperlink in a web document whether they are linked or not, and searching for a domain name in Google also returns those sites which link to a page in the domain.
For example:
link:blog.webometrics.org.uk
Just returns 93 hits. The majority of which are selflinking pages, which are hard to get rid of as Google doesn’t seem to like the link operator and the site operator being used in the same query.
For instance link:blog.webometrics.org.uk -site:blog.webometrics.org.uk returns 2,710 hits, despite including an additional exclusive clause, because it stops treating link:blog.webometrics.org.uk as a single command and instead searches for the terms link blog webometrics org uk.
In comparison:
“blog.webometrics.org.uk” -site:blog.webometrics.org.uk
Whilst Google’s claim of 189 hits is an over-estimate, it nonetheless returns 95 pages, none of which are self-linking pages, and many of which link to specific pages or even photographs on my site. Without URL citations I would probably have never known that there was a picture of me on a site called “Enjoy Satan“!
Whilst URL citations are a partial solution, if Yahoo loses its operators, it is an opportunity for a smaller search engine to start making an impact. I think those worried about the loss of BOSS would be better petitioning an alternative search engine to provide a similar service rather than bothering trying to persuade Microsoft to keep it open. Yahoo BOSS is unlikely to fit with the Bing vision.
Outsourcing your ‘Link Building Services’?
Posted on | July 28, 2009 | No Comments
If you’re lucky you will have a couple of weeks spam-free when you first set up an email address. Today I received my first piece of spam in my new email account:
‘Link building services’ are a particular pet-hate of mine. Whilst I accept the need to market web sites, trying to buy your way to the top of Google is not the answer. It’s basically an immoral practice where the only people who gain from ‘link building services’ are the people selling the links.
Scenario 1- The links are worthless
Most of the links being sold are worthless. A brief look at the domain this email came from, the associated domains, and the lack of links they themselves receive, quickly indicates worthless nature of this particular offering.
Scenario 2- The links are worth something
Whilst a lot of the links sold are worthless, there are some that may actually enhance your ranking, at least in the short term. Eventually someone will spend more on link building, or Google will recognise the links as spam, and you will have to buy even more links. A vicious cycle of link buying with little purpose. If your site or your content is not good enough [and it's not if you're having to buy web links] then people are not going hang about. All you are doing is wasting money and potential customer’s time.
Whilst ‘Ruby’ may “look forward to my response”, I doubt my response would be appreciated when it arrived. For the sake of politeness let us leave it as a “No thanks”.
Spend your money on creating a quality site and service; you will get the search engine ranking and traffic you deserve naturally. If you really want to give your site a kick start, why not be honest about it and spend the money on Google Ads.
Enterprise 2.0: A simplistic diagram
Posted on | July 27, 2009 | 1 Comment
Despite it only being Monday morning, my first full week as an independent web analyst and consultant is already looking positive. So far this morning I have confirmed a consultancy contract that will see me become a multi-millionaire (unfortunately in South Korean won rather than British pounds), and sent off an article I was asked to write on the topic of enterprise 2.0. Not only do I enjoy writing (although you wouldn’t always realise it), but articles can provide both a useful method of supplementing a consultant’s income, and advertising his competencies.
Writing on enterprise 2.0 was one of the few occassions I found myself tempted to include a diagram. I didn’t for two reasons: 1) the diagram would have necessarily been an over-simplification; 2) I don’t have an artistic bone in my body. Nonetheless if I had decided to include a diagram it would have looked something like this:
Organisations need to decide the extent they want to use the technologies to create a more open organisation, and the entent they want employees to have freedom to use the technologies as they wish. However somewhere between traditional knowledge management software and the ideals of enterprise 2.0 is a line that if crossed will damage an enterprise. Where this line lies will be different for each organisation. The most successful oranginations will be those that can get as close to the line as possible without crossing it.
extending Professional Active Life – Another perspective on engagement
Posted on | July 20, 2009 | No Comments
Much of my work last week focused on the topic of social media non-adopters. After an enjoyable Black Country Social Media Cafe on Tuesday discussing social media non-adopters with the social media crowd, I spent the Thursday in London at an ePAL consensus building event discussing how to leverage retired professionals’ skills and expertise with the help of new technology. Whilst I was there as a ‘technology expert’, the majority were experts in being ‘retired professionals’; on average 30 years my senior.
With a rapidly aging population, and increasingly competitive global economy, it’s not surprising that the European Commission are interested in leveraging the skills and expertise of retired professionals. However, whilst social media tools provide useful networking opportunities, the general consensus was that any input from the EC can only be from a distance with the lightest of touches. In much the same way as social media must be seen as an enabler rather than a driver, so must the EC. A ghettoized social networking site specifically for networking amongst retired professionals would be a far poorer solution than providing money for groups already working with retired (and retiring) professionals to introduce and support the use of existing and forthcoming social media tools.
ePAL was a great opportunity to discuss social media with a group of people with very different perspectives to my own, a refreshing change to discussing social media with the usual 20-something/30-something ‘social media experts’. It was also enjoyable to take part in a discussion where technology is not seen as a fait accompli, but rather a means to an end. Whilst this is the way it should always be discussed, too often those espousing the virtues of social media are those with vested interests in its being adopted.
Bing Roundtable: Where was the innovation?
Posted on | June 30, 2009 | 4 Comments
I spent yesterday evening at a roundtable with some of the people from Microsoft as they got feedback on Bing. Jordi Ribas, seen in the video below talking about the Microsoft Search Technology Centre in London, took us through the things Microsoft are trying to do with Bing. Basically:
- Get the fundamentals right
- Become less US-centric
Whilst it’s good to hear that Microsoft are moving away from a US-centric vision of search, and whilst we understand the importance of getting the fundamentals right, Bing is being built squarely within the existing search paradigm. For Bing to gain a significant market share of search they need to start thinking outside that cliched box.
Whilst O’Reilly described Google as “the standard bearer for Web 2.0“, in many ways search is still stuck in web 1.0; big search engines designed to meet the needs of the average user. Surely search 2.0 is about opening up the data and encouraging the community to create the thousands of search engines that are needed to fill the needs of the extremely long search tail.
Theoretically some of these needed search engines could be built through the Application Programming Interfaces that the search engines currently provide. However these APIs are very limited in comparison to the data the search engines actually have, and Bing’s API is the worst since the removal of some of their commands back in 2007 [Nb. "...back online as soon as possible.." has not yet materialised 2 years later].
If Microsoft want to gain search engine market share, then they need to allow programmers and researchers to work with them. Give us an API (and more) that we can really work with and we will build a million little Bings that won’t just get Microsoft its coveted second place, but first place.
UPDATE: Phil Bradley goes into far more detail of the actual discussion over at his blog.
How much do Digital Marketing Companies really know about the web?
Posted on | June 18, 2009 | No Comments
I have just been compiling a web analysis report for a digital marketing company about the web presence of four different digital marketing companies. At the end of which I find myself wondering: How much do digital marketing companies really know about the web?
The company web sites were, on the whole, very professional looking sites. However, whilst a lot of money had obviously been spent by the organisations creating something very flash and glitzy, beyond the glamour they were fundamentally first generation web sites. Although they may have looked modern, they were failing to make use of the latest web technologies to engage with their customers and potential customers.
The failure to engage is shown in the network diagram below:
The four organisations, which had eight web sites between them (the yellow nodes on the diagram), only manged to attract links from a paltry 77 other organisations in total. That they only manage to play a peripheral role within this small network, despite the fact that it is based on their connections, also emphasises their inability to engage successfully on the web.
I don’t doubt that many of these organisations know a lot about marketing, but in the ever-changing and increasingly important world of online marketing, they are failing to demonstrate that their skills are transferable.
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