Search Engine Optimization For Newspapers Presentation
This is the presentation I gave today for the Minnesota Newspapers Association conference in Bloomington. Here’s a link to the power searches I promised (basic, advanced, power searches) and another link to the Newspaper SEO tips.
Stickiness 2.0: Toolbars Are The New Frames
Toolbars are not really new–Google & Yahoo have offered software that installs their toolbar as a browser add-on for years–but we are increasingly seeing toolbars pop-up that need no installation and are part and parcel of a given Web site or service. They are, in effect, the new HTML Frames.
Revenge Of The Customer: United Airlines Breaks Guitars
Dave Carroll is a musician spurned…by United Airlines…who broke his guitar. His $3500 Taylor guitar. And they refused to take responsibility for it. Read Carroll’s story at his Web site.
After being given endless run-arounds and finally being told he would not be compensated for the damage United’s employees inflicted upon his instrument, he did what he knew. He wrote a song; the first of three he vowed to create to carve out his pound of flesh.
And he did what any self-respecting, YouTube-wielding musician would do: He uploaded it to ensure as many people as possible would see it.
This is the first of Carroll’s musical trilogy:
Four days later, Carroll’s video was a hit.
As you can see from the screenshot below, as of this writing the video on YouTube alone has garnered nearly 1.3 million views, has an average 5 star rating from 13,725 people, has been favorited by more than 8,000 people, has shot up the YouTube charts overall and in countries in which United does business, and has been embedded or linked to by such top media outlets as NBC, The LA Times, Der Spiegel, and the Huffington Post.
From these stats, it looks like the mainstream media either heard about this story from Carroll himself, or they got wind of the video online and picked it up. That coverage then drove people to the Web to view the video online, further pushing up its popularity. The following graph shows the spike in search traffic for the phrases “united breaks guitars” and “united guitars:”
And what they saw after they searched was a branding disaster for United:
Your brand is what people say it is and in the age of the social Web, it is what people say it is, writ large.
Misery loves company, so when people found the video at YouTube they both encouraged Carroll in his quest for revenge and they shared their dislike of the airline industry in general or United in particular. As of this writing, nearly 8,000 people have left comments:
Another typical behavior in such cases is the sharing of content. This often happens through email but until the advent of the social Web, we had no way to really measure that activity. Now we’ve got social bookmarking sites like Delicious where we can get an inkling of how share-worthy content is.
Though this screenshot shows that 119 users saved the YouTube video to their Delicious accounts, keep in mind that Delicious users are particularly Internet-savvy and likely have multiple channels of distribution, so if they save something to Delicious, it’s probably going to their Twitter feed, their Facebook page, their FriendFeed, etc.
We’ve also got Twitter, and through the URL shortening service bit.ly, we can gain some insight into how many of their users shared the video with their Twitter followers: more than 40,000:
When people share content through their social network, it is much more likely to be consumed because it comes from a trusted source. And because social networks make it so easy to share content, word spreads effortlessly.
At some point, a Groundswell such as this creates an ambient awareness of the issue. People may not know the specifics but through a combination of online references, glimpses on traditional media, or through direct word of mouth, they find out about it.
These people tend to search to find out what everyone is talking about; combine that with those who saw it on TV or heard about it on radio and want to watch the video directly, and you’ve got a search spike:
More damaging to United, though, is the lasting branding issues that will linger after the initial wave of interest blows over. A search for “united” demonstrates this damage:
Because the listing for the YouTube video includes a graphic, the eye is drawn directly to it, so they will be aware of this issue when they search for the company if they hadn’t already heard about it. If they had already heard about this incident, it just reinforces the negative message that not only does United break guitars, they don’t care if they do and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
At least they think so.
During all of this, United appears to be silent. To their credit, they’ve been responding to the crisis on their Twitter account. On July 7, they responded to @Kelly_MacD’s post about the video, saying they have contacted Carroll and are trying to resolve the issue. Then, two days ago, they said they want to use Carroll’s video for training purposes, but it took three days for United to actually say they were sorry.
Those two words–we’re sorry–are the first step toward addressing this crisis. Why does is it so hard for corporations to bring themselves to acknowledge fault?
Acknowledge the issue, apologize for your mistake, and rectify the issue.
But a problem still remains for United. Those pesky search results; their Twitter activity will have no affect on that. On the real-time Web, speed kills. Even United’s press room, the typical venue in which corporations respond, is silent:
At least a press release would have a decent chance of getting into the search results. Right now, United is out of sight and therefore out of mind in this story. But even then, United would be competing with more than 21,000 blog posts.
A blog post optimized for the phrase “United Breaks Guitars” would have been the ideal response to get their voice into the story…if they had a blog. An optimized YouTube response would be even better…if they had an active YouTube channel.
United has been left flat-footed.
The lessons here are twofold: 1) if you’re a musician, seize opportunities! and, 2) if you’re a corporation, you’ve got to have in place an overall online communications strategy that utilizes the channels that people are already using, so that in part, you’ll have the infrastructure already in place to respond to any crisis that might arise.
This incident is Exhibit A for the need for corporations to include online communications and social media in their overall communications strategy.
The better strategy, of course, is to create a kick-ass product or deliver the absolute best service.
Customer service is the new public relations, folks.
Why Reddit Kicks Ass: Blog Marketing Using Social Bookmarking
I should lose my domain name more often.
In the last edition of this blog marketing series, I discussed marketing your blog using a Facebook fan page. This time I’ll discuss using social bookmarking sites to acquire new readers.
I wrote a post in 2007 that listed the demographics of the various social bookmarking sites. It’s a bit dated, but you might still find it useful.
Blog Marketing With Digg
When people think of social bookmarking sites, they usually think of Digg but while a central feature of Digg is the ability to bookmark sites, strictly speaking it is a social news site because the main activity involves not just bookmarking sites, but voting and commenting on those links. For our purposes, I’m going to lump social bookmarking and social news sites into the same category.
I have been using Digg and StumbleUpon for quite awhile. Digg has never sent me much traffic. This graph is the visits Videolicious received from Digg during the past year:
Yep, a grand total of 23 visits. I keep using Digg because one day I just may submit that post that becomes so wildly popular that it crashes my server. There has been a long-running debate about whether or not Digg is rigged and there’s some truth to it. There are people who traffic in Diggs and you tend to see the same people on the Digg leaderboards. Either way, the investment in trying to rank in the Diggosphere is too much to be worth my time.
Blog Marketing With StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon, however, has been hit and miss.
As you can see, I’ve received far more visitors to Videolicious from StumbleUpon during the past year (578), than I have from the 800 pound gorilla of social news.
I haven’t spent a great deal of time building subscribers at StumbleUpon, so I’m likely not making the most out of the site. That said, however, traffic from the site is unpredictable but does bring in a stream of steady, low-volume visitors.
The unpredictability has to do with knowing what content will take off. I haven’t found any silver bullet for figuring out what content Stumblers will like.
In 2007, I posted a short film called Bad Animals and titled the post When Mascots Attack. There was nothing particularly more compelling about this video compared to the tons of other videos I’ve posted, but When Mascots Attack got me 370 visits on the day it was posted.
The nice thing about StumbleUpon is that 97% of the visitors I get are new visitors.
Why Reddit Kicks Ass
I only started seriously using Reddit after I’d lost my domain. For whatever reason, it felt a lot like Slashdot to me, so the audience seemed far more techy than what I was posting at Videolicious.
As you can see though, I’ve been handsomely rewarded for giving Reddit a second chance:
Though I only just started seriously using it, Reddit has sent Videolicious the most traffic than any referring site since I first started posting videos at Videolicious in 2006.
The following graph shows visits to Videolicious from Reddit from April 1, 2009, the month in which I lost my domain name, to June 7, 2009:
So why the Reddit love? I think it’s because I only submit posts I think Redditers will really like and I write eye-catching but honest headlines.
The post that brought the most visitors (1,100) was a hilarious parody of a Cleveland tourism video. While the title of the actual post was “Visit Cleveland…Or Not,” the headline I submitted with the link to Reddit read: “Visit Cleveland…Or Not: Hilarious Homemade “Tourism” Promotional Videos.”
Hilarious, Homemade and Tourism in quotes were the three essential words, I think, that caused people to click. Everyone loves to laugh; people are interested in the cleverness of people like themselves, thus the appeal of “homemade;” and putting quotes around Tourism indicates that the video is a parody.
Reddit has consistently brought Videolicious nice spikes of new visitors and has helped to bring the average daily visits up to about 400, 50 visits more per day than before I lost my domain!
But in addition to bringing me traffic directly from Reddit itself, my links on Reddit caught the attention of someone at the rather racy site Leenks.com. A link from that site to a post called Superman’s Awkward Moment In The Daily Planet Breakroom sent 2,155 of their visitors to Videolicious.tv.
It is for these reasons that Reddit kicks ass.
Blog Marketing With Gawkk
I don’t remember how I discovered it but Gawkk is great. It is essentially Twitter for videos. Gawkk users are obviously more likely to be interested in my Videolicious.tv posts than others, so posting links here is obvious.
The visits I’ve garnered from Gawkk have thus far been modest:
But because these are video lovers, I’m investing the effort to post links to Gawkk and it is paying off in more than just visits to Videolicious.tv. I’ve attracted more than 530 followers there thus far so even if most of those people don’t ultimately visit Videolicious.tv, they’re aware of the brand.
Plus, after you reach a critical mass of followers, the network effect tends to kick in and you get many more followers simply because you have a lot of followers. People figure if that many people like you, you must be worth following.
Blog Marketing Using Delicious
Though I don’t get a lot of direct traffic out of Delicious (the site was 8th among the top 10 referring sites to Videolicious.tv last month), I post all my content there for several reasons.
First, because of how people use Delicious by searching or browsing tags, it makes it easy for people to “discover” Videolicious.tv. When you discover something you like rather than being told about it, you’re likely to be more loyal to your discovery than if you found it any other way.
Second, though I have no proof, I have to believe that tagging content in Delicious can help with search engine rankings. Delicious is owned by Yahoo, and if I’m Yahoo, I’d be stupid not to take into account the data about content Delicious delivers when determining how to rank a given Web page.
Lastly, I use Delicious as a way to distribute content. Because everything is RSSified in Delicious, I can create any type of feed I want. So I have a Delicious feed going to my Facebook account and one going to my FriendFeed account as well, making it super easy to extend Videolicious.tv posts to other venues.
The Strategic Use Of Social Bookmarking/News Sites
The trick, I think, is understanding the audience of each site you plan to use and then only submitting content that you sincerely believe that audience will like.
Writing compelling headlines and descriptions can help a lot. If you take a look at the submissions on these sites of the exact same Web page, more often than not, the one with the clever or attention-grabbing headline will the most popular link.
There’s a reason I titled this post “Why Reddit Kicks Ass.” People who use these sites are naturally interested in them themselves. So when you submit content that has to do with the site itself, that content tends to get more attention.
I’ve seen this with other sites. When I post links to Twitter that are about how people use Twitter, statistics about Twitter, or parodies of the microblogging site, they tend to get more clicks than usual.
My Social Bookmarking/News Accounts
Friend me!
The One Big Thing: Google Wave
Just when it looked like the big news for the week was going to be Microsoft’s announcement of their latest attempt to grab search market share with Bing, Google comes in and rains all over their parade.
So, then, The One Big Thing you need to know about this week is Google Wave.
Earlier this month, I posed a question via YouTube for a Google executive who was a host of an IPREX conference about whether Google was working on a solution for aggregating and putting into context the disparate bits of a given conversation that tend to get scattered about the web:
It would appear that they were. While FriendFeed and Feedly try, and do a fairly good job, of doing this, they don’t really do a full job.
Google Wave may be the answer to this problem.
What is Google Wave?
In short, it is a hugely ambitious, real-time, embeddable, communication and collaboration platform. Mashable published an excellent run-down of Google Wave yesterday.
One aspect of Wave is that it integrate information from outside sources like Twitter or, presumably, any RSS feed, so that you can get a much fuller context of the conversations in which you are participating all in one place.
The one sticking point, as usual, is the fact that Facebook is a walled garden, so any conversations taking place within that network may not be available to Google Wave.
But by making Google Wave open source and inviting developers to build on top of it, Google may be hoping to force Facebook’s hand. If the platform becomes so ubiquitous and the ability to easily use your information wherever it may be so common, Google will have created an expectation among Facebook’s users that they should be able to use their information with Wave.
If Google Wave takes off, it could profoundly alter the manner in which people communicate, collaborate and behave online. That means communications professionals will need to understand how this platform works and how people are using it.
The following is the Google Wave developer preview at Google I/O, which provides a great demonstration of the platform’s potential:
Microblogging Fragmentation & How Yahoo Can Get Game With A Flickr Of The Switch
Microblogging is clearly here to stay, despite speculation that Twitter has jumped the shark. The function of microblogging has been adopted by LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and most recently, FriendFeed.
With Twitter as the clear leader, these are the big five. Here’s a chart of their visits during the past three months. It should be noted that Twitter is the only pure microblogging service among them:
Anecdotally, I’ve been noticing a decided spike in subscribers to my FriendFeed during the past three months or so, perhaps as a result of the new features they keep adding that likely make it easier to find other users. But Compete visitor number bear out my observations that the platform is gaining in popularity:
But we’re starting to see fragmentation, as typically happens with new Web platforms. We saw it with social networking with MySpace initially dominating followed by challengers, among them Facebook, which eventually surpassed market share through innovation and by being nimble.
With pure microblogging, Twitter has remained dominant while pretenders like Pownce and Jaiku (for which Google has released the source code) have fallen by the wayside. And more recently, the open source-based Identi.ca hasn’t really gained steam as yet.
But what we are seeing is the emergence of niche microblogging platforms that if not eat away at Twitter’s audience, at least provide more focused and/or more utilitarian alternatives.
On the business and private network side, you have Yammer and socialcast:
For commercial chatter, there is sfeed for microblogging about shopping and blippr for micro reviews of anything.
For discussing entertainment, Blip.fm helps you share and discover music, while Gawkk and Vodpod let you do the same with video.
There are microblogging networks for complaining (Bothered.me), for apologizing (Oops..I’m Sorry) and for pretty much anything else.
Microblogging infrastructure is freely available, as noted above, through the open source software of laconi.ca and through do-it-yourself services like microblogs.org and Yonkly.
Clearly, only a few of these will survive but if I had to place bets, I’d go with the music and video sharing sites as well as the micro reviews, because these sites are in keeping with online activity that is already wildly popular. It’s a natural fit for those who like to share that content already.
The glaring omission, though, is another hugely popular online activity: Photo sharing. I’m not counting Twitpic, because that’s a service built onto Twitter, not a microblogging platform in and of itself.
Yahoo’s Instant Microblogging Platform: Flickr
I cannot be the only one who hasn’t thought of this, but why doesn’t Yahoo! add a real-time microblogging feature to Flickr?
The infrastructure for such a feature already exists; with the Photostream, your Contacts and Groups you have activity streams for those respective groups, but they haven’t been combined.
There is a lot of commenting going on at Flickr within Groups and around individual photos, so how much of a stretch is it to allow users to post a link to individual photos like you can with songs using Blip.fm or with video at Gawkk?
Flickr is currently more popular than Twitter (but just barely) and it is quickly losing ground to Facebook, in which more people actually share phtos, so you gotta think Yahoo! is concerned over that development.
I gotta believe that adding true microblogging functionality to Flickr would turn that steady but flat growth line into an upward spike practically overnight.
Sixteen Essential WordPress Plugins For Online Marketing
People ask me all the time what WordPress plugins they should use to help market their blog. These are the sixteen essential WordPress plugins for marketing your blog online and the reasons why I think they are important:
- Google XML Sitemap – Automatically generates an XML sitemap and updates it with each new post so Google can find all the pages of your blog you want the search engine to index.
- KB Robots.txt – Gives you the ability to edit your robots.txt file from within WordPress so you can control what the search engines see and what they can’t look at.
- Landing Sites – When a visitor arrives from a search engine, this plugin shows them related blog posts based on their search query.
- Platinum SEO – The standard plugin for search engine optimization used to be the All In One SEO Pack but I’ve replaced it with the Platinum SEO, which has more options. Both plugins help you optimize your posts for search engine visibility.
- Redirection – The Redirection plugin allows you to control your 301 redirects and monitor your 404 error pages all within WordPress.
- SEO Friendly Images – Automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes, making your posts W3C/xHTML vali.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. It gets in the way sometimes by overriding parts of some hyperlinks, but it’s still worth the install.
- ShareThis – Makes it easy for visitors to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send a link of your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more using the ShareThis service.
- ShiftThis WordPress Newsletter Plugin – I have installed but not yet used this but I include it because it is the only plugin of it’s kind that I can find. It gives you the ability to publish an email newsletter within WordPress and to easily include posts and pages from your blog in your newsletters.
- Similar Posts – It does what it says: displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post.
- SMS Text Message – Allows you to update your readers via text message.
- Widget Logic – Allows you to control where your WordPress widgets appear on your blog. Only want your blog roll to appear on the front page? Done!
- WordPress Mobile – Makes your blog work well on mobile phones and lets you post to your blog from your mobile device.
- WP Email – Allows visitors to recommend/send your blog’s posts/pages to a friend.
- WP Greet Box – Shows a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. Customizable. I love this plugin!
- FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all your blog feeds to your FeedBurner feed so you can get more accurate RSS subscriber data.
FriendFeed’s New Real-Time Design
Making Your Content Facebook-Friendly
I’ve noticed when posting links to my Facebook account that some web pages do not display as they should. The Post Link function in Facebook uses the Title tag content of a given web page for the wording of the hyperlink it displays and uses the Meta Description tag of a given page for the accompanying explanatory text.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But some sites, like the Pioneer Press‘ TwinCities.com site, do not display this information. Instead, the posted links generate only domain name information, like so:
I did some testing to try and discover why TwinCities.com content displays as it does but I’m stumped. The pages to that site use unique Title and Meta Description tags, so there’s no apparent reason why they do not display in the Post Link function. The only thing I can think of is some of the ample JavaScript on the page is creating an obstacle.
Whatever the reason, the problem highlights the importance of paying close attention to how and where your content is used and what it looks like when redistributed.
People have been sharing links to online content long before the advent of social networks like Facebook; it’s just that these networks make it much easier to do so.
Because of this, it is important that your content display as well as possible in all of these channels. As you can see in the above illustration, the link to the Pioneer Press story hardly makes you want to click on it. The members of my network with whom I share such links would be far more likely to click on that link if the wording of it included the actual headline to the story, rather than “www.twincities.com.”
That may only result in a few page views but it’s a few page views more than they would have had otherwise and throughout a network, those page views add up and have a direct effect on the bottom line in terms of advertising effectiveness: The more page views, the more chances for someone to click on an advertiser’s banner. And, I might add, the more compelling the headline, the more likely members of my network will be to share that story with members of their own network.
UPDATE 5/19/09: Gregg Hilferding has written a great, specific, and short blog post about the mechanics of optimizing your content for Facebook Share.
UPDATE 3/2/09: I am no longer as stumped as I was as to why Facebook displays some links poorly. I just tried to post a couple of links to my Facebook account from this and my video blog. I’ve never encountered this problem when posting links from these blogs but I did just encounter the formatting problem with both of my blogs.
I waited a half hour and then tried again and this time, the links formatted normally with an accurate title and description. That, then, indicates that the problem is not with the page of the URL you post, but a glitch with Facebook’s Post Link function.
While that problem is solved, the more broad point remains as important as ever: Be aware of how your content is delivered through all channels.
Feedly
Someone at work asked me recently if they needed to be on FriendFeed.
While I find FriendFeed fascinating and I understand it’s allure, at this point its practicality as a communications medium is limited. Limited to Robert Scoble and his friends and admirers. I figured that once the audience diversifies beyond the usual suspects of social media/technology geeks, I’d start paying closer attention.
That was until I came across Feedly on, of course, a Scoble blog post. I have spent little time following my feeds in Google Reader of late because I haven’t had enough time. Feedly is a Firefox add-on that makes it much easier to digest the zillion feeds to which I subscribe:
As you can see, Feedly displays your Google Reader feeds in an extremely useful fashion, highlighting the items that have gained some measure of popularity or attention, helping the more interesting content to rise to the top.
The Scoble post I referred to features a video interview with Feedly’s founder who, in the first part of the video, provides a superb explanation of how conversations occur on social media sites. In the second half, he describes how Feedly discovers those conversations and makes it easy to join them.
Feedly has just become my default tool for following my feeds.
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Blog covering all aspects of Internet marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, blog marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing & online pr.
David Erickson is Director of e-Strategy at Tunheim Partners strategic communications company.
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