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SEO Self Experiment, Week 3+4

Things are going down. Quite fast, actually. Web catalogs are slow with creating entries, bokmarking is not really a boost anymore once you have reached some basic values – and especially link popularity is quite far behind: 18 confirmed catalog entries, three blogs with over 50 entries each linking to the site – and google only recognizes 10 incoming links? These links contain only 2 catalogs, the rest are quite arbitrary posts from one of my blogs. Only eight from over fifty are counted; they are not the most recent ones, nore the most clicked, they are all from the same blog and they don’t differ from other posts at all – no idea why it’s them and not others (if it’s the pagerank of the linking page, that would mean that most catalogs are cheating about their rank. So let’s not assume that…).

Some conclusions for now:

• It does not grow by itself. You can keep search results growing by adding bookmarks, entries, links, but you can not fully control the growth. The quality of the links is to challenge: it’s usually the same domains that get ranked well.
• There does not seem to have been a page rank update since I’m running my stuff (some sites  say it will be on march 26), and the age (less then three months, which is mostly not registered by seo-analyzers) are further disadvantages.
• Creating bookmarks and catalog-entries is one way to stay visible; it requires a lot of work (or using some tools and spending money) and it creates some background noise.
• Efficieny is quite low – there are only a few directories that really make a change; it’s not that much effort to create an entry there.
• There is a strong hype at the beginning, but the number of search results shrinks down quickly.
• Referrer-analysis proves, that blogs, magazines, communities with high usage are the best traffic sources: you get qualified leads – and creating entries there is not such braindead work as creating web catalog entries
• Other search engines are more generous than Google (especially with link popularity) but for no good: alltogether they bring about ten percent of the traffic google brings.
• And finally: I’m also tracking the “real”, clickable search results from Google. At least they keep increasing (if you don’t care for some hype that obviously happened last week…

Next steps for me will be to create more comments and content oriented postings, and also to spread links in existing networks I built so far (which wil also be some endurance test for the network features).
I also submitted a simple sitemap (urls only) to see if that helps; especially because the results are generally quite old…

More updates next week…

 
 

 

SEO Self Experiment – Week 2

Search results are decreasing – quite fast actually. I keep adding web catalog entries, posting links on digg, delicious and stumble upon, but this does not have any important effect – at least not bigger then the negative effects from sorting out duplicates. That seems to be what the search engines are doing: some very efficient catalogs proved to have their efficiency only over a very short period (less than one week).
The good thing is: the number of real results (that are displayed and not filtered away) keeps increasing. And link popularity keeps rising. The strange thing is, that the link popularity reports do not show one single catalog entry, also many other links are missing – they display only results of an old blog of mine that I created more than two months ago.

The keyword results show a lot of movement: with the top two keywords, I’m still not among the top ten result pages, links to my domain now dropped from page 1 to page 4. The top three keywords deliver results between page 1 and 2 (detailed reports will follow next week).

The top search terms identified via Google analytics for my domain show, that people are obviously willing to click through a lot of pages. If i repeat the searches, I often don’t get any results at all from my domain among the top ten or twelve result pages. Maybe that also shows that there is strong movement among keyword results: Today’s search does not deliver the same results as yesterday’s search.

Search engine’s share in the referring sites is also decreasing (while visitors keep growing) – some people do obviously really click on the catalog entries. Decrease is quite slow; I will have to monitor it for another few days.

The age of the indexed pages does also vary a lot, not really depending from their publication date: some old, not yet beautifully indexed urls are still indexed, some result pages also display old page titles (changed three weeks ago).

Submitting xml-sitemaps will be one of the next steps, but only after a few weeks of further observation.

 

 

SEO Selfexperiment Week 1

SEO Selfexperiment

Facebook Hollywoodifies Our Lifes. And it Shortens Them.

I read news from a friend diving in south africa, participating in the famous london gorilla run and celebrating his daughters fith birthday. – what a life.

 Another Friend is posting pictures from Bali, New Zealand, Australia – that are his three holiday-trips in one year.

And friend 3 posts in his statusnotes that he just arrived from Shangai after a short stop in Berlin, is now having food at Vienna airport, shortly before leaving for Barcelona.

Very glamourous lives.

Everything is so spectacular, it’s happening at breakneck speed – and watching makes you feel really poor.

Some distance puts a lot of shine and glamour on many things. So many nice things are happening so fast – it’s really impressive. If you look at the good things only, that is.

Doing that in real life, too, is plain bullshit bingo. But we could look at it as another benefit of using social networks: they make us clean up our lives as if we were attending a party and having a nice conversation.

That’s a pretty good reason to use them anyhow.

SEO Selfexperiment, Week 1

A promised, some results.

It takes ages until contentmodifications of existing pages get displayed in search results. Some changes in pagetitles and metatags I made February 2 are still not visible (Feb. 16).

Results grow, but vary. Sometimes they grow exponentially to what I’m doing, sometimes slower, sometimes faster.
The same applies to the order of results: They change without any apparent changes on the pages themselves – the same results appear every day, but there ranking is different.

Search engines are very different in what they see: The number of results found reaches from 16 on live.com to 30.000 on yahoo.com (on the same day, with the same query).

Linksearch and Linkpopularity also grow with some delay. It took a few days, until Google found any links at all. The links that arelisted now in the search results are very old – I created them in the beginning of January. All other links are obviously not yet counted.

It’s too early to talk about success and the most important web catalogs yet – I’ll have to collect some more data. Here are just some charts on the basic development of results and links. The only thing I can say is Google may be ungenerous with links and results, but it’s of course the most prominent referrer.

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Blackberry addicted? Or just curious for life?

I heard two colleagues talk about blackberries on Friday; they talked about addiction, changes they bring into our lives and the stress you have checking for mail even in the evening or on weekend.

I think this is not something imposed on us by Blackberry or other mobile email technologies, this is an expression of how we look at life: Are there a lot of dangerous, bothersome, annoying things out there? Are we afraid of what is waiting for us?

Or are we curious for life, are we looking foreward to the things to come? A lot of my life is happening digitally that’s the way to stay in touch, to share something. And looking at work: I want to get things done, getting information earlier leaves me more time to handle things. So I want to get information…

I can’t know everything, I can’t care for everything and I can’t do everything at a time. But it makes me more comfortable to know that I should do something – even if I can’t or don’t want to do it right now. True relaxation is not excluding information, it’s ignoring it…

And efficiency, as we shold know, is not doing as many things as possible, but doing the right things at the right time (this is, once again, why we need information…).

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Too much socialising is quite antisocial

When I’m not sure if I like a website or an application I think of it as a persons who is talking to me. Sometimes that helps to make up my mind.

When I look at twitter, there is a multiple personality talking to me. Or somebody who is just namedropping, without actually saying anything. The more people you follow, the less communication is happening: you don’t see your real friends anymore you hardly care about what all these guys are saying it’s just noise going on…

This turns twitter from a communication to a publication media – the same antisocial stuff as your old tv station.

This tells me

• it’s in the responsibility of the user if a media is an information-, publication- or communication-media. That’s quite a lot of power and can also influence business models.
• I will unfollow all professional twitter users; they just waste my time for too little benefit.

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SEO self-experiment

I started an SEO self-experiment these days: How long does it take to promote a domain (without playing foul or spending money)? How long does it take search engines to react on changes (display new page titles, new meta tags)? How many new links do you get by entering web-catalogues, online-pr-distributors? How many links do you get by using social bookmarking?

The test arrangement

• registered an unusual domain (there are no other search results for this word then my own pages)
• set up around 100 pages with meaningful content
• followed the basic SEO-laws (use page titles, descriptions, keywords in decent length, use many internal links in the body text, name pictures etc.)
• creating three new web-catalog entries per day (I guess I’ll do this for about 3 weeks; it’s all manual work with individual descriptions)
• posting one article everyday on three social bookmarking services (delicious, digg, stumble upon)

What I’m checking daily is

• Number of search results for my domain name
• Number of links to my domain that search engines find

Softer facts I’m interested in are:

• which catalogues are the most efficient?
• which bookmarking services are the most efficient?
• when does it start to grow from alone, when do other users start to post links or bookmark stuff?

I’ll keep posting results on a weekly basis.

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Who is the Boss in the Media-Biz?

I’ve worked with many media companies in the print, online, and tv-business, and I’ve worked in media related positions in many companies from other branches.
There is still one question I can not really answer: Who is actually the boss in the media business (ok, it’s not the only question; probably I’m just in the right age to worry about that…).
Are there strategists who are really the big guys, who tell you were to go and what will happen in the next years? Actually I hardly met any strategists in commercial environments. There were a few who had a similar job title, but most of them where either vain outlaws who more or less sacrificed their job for the title (because it always proved to be a dead end road), very ambitious youngsters who disappeared as quick as they had risen, or some old and actually jobless friends of the CEO or the editor in chief or the CMO, who needed a job with a cool title and not too much work.
So should it be the marketing guys? Media marketing people are great in extending relationships, driving reputation and drawing nice pictures in consumers minds – and there is often a big gap if it comes to realization. I hate to say that they usually dont have a cue, but that’s actually the truth. And in most cases, they don’t care – because it’s not there job. If it’s just marketing, then it’s just making people think that something is great, it’s not making things great.
And what about the sales department? They are the guys who bring the money, we all want money, so shouldn’t we listen to them? That takes us very quickly to a very simple view of the business: It needs to be sold. And once it’s sold: Who cares? Advertisers wont get their money back, a few complaints can be handled. and if there is really some trouble – there are enough advertisers as potential new customers. If you remind them of what they actually sold or what plans have been made for the further development of the media, they either don’t remember or they ask you why it has not been done yet. And anyway: they won’t have time, because the have to be out there and sell something.
So there are the creatives left, the designers, the writers. For sure they have a lot of ideas, they know the product and they can realize what they planned; they are the ones who have to do it anyway. But do they know the commercial terms of the business? Have you ever met a designer who can really calculate his business?

The famous media persons are generally the creative ones, usually close to the editors, or some have formerly been editors.
The rich ones are rather from the business side.
That’s no so much astonishing, what bothers me more, is that there are still single persons around, we are still acting as if Mr. F in person had founded this daily newspaper or as of Mr. B. did really have anything to do with the TV Channels he owns, but we know, that it’s simply not possible to combine all this smartness…

That’s another reason why I switched more to online media, and to the more functional part of the media business. Do you know the big names? And do you have an idea of what they are actually doing?
I have the impression that – with highly movable and flexible media – our perception shifts from big guys to big things: We don’t bother what HE does, we think about what features IT provides.
Probably back in the days when everybody was just publishing newspapers, you had to invest a lot in vanity and you had top think about how to stand out personally. Now, there is more space to focus on your product: Make it be something special (that’s the creative part) and make people understand that it’s something special (that’s the sales and marketing challenge). – But still, you can stick with the product, you don’t have to worry so much about yourself.
Why bother? It’s not only that there are no clear paths and visions for your career, there are also no best practices. In a lot of companies I left, the people who stayed are now the big guys. Just because they stayed. In other companies, there were more almost-retiree-strategists than developers. And then, some companies consider you as their hero, if you can do everything: writing, programming, handling Xpress or Indesign, talk with the system admins and talk the business lingo – just because there is nobody else who can keep up with you.

Conclusion: Just keep on doing what you like. The rest is’nt woth bothering in our business. If you really want to question if you’re successful with what you’re doing – keep on doing it and ask again in five years. I think that’s a pretty average time period that should malke you notice some differences…

 

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Uphoff: Fixing Microsoft’s Media Business

socs – Service Oriented Content Sourcing

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I just spent six hours in a meeting with internal communication managers trying to find a define content for their internal media.

They switched from general rules to detailed content and back, reinvented everything, broke every agreement they achieved in the meeting and then agreed on it again – so it was quite an ordinary meeting.

But I had a few ideas on what are basic guidelines for content sourcing and defining contentguidelines, be it for print, online or audiovidual media.

Guideline #1: It does not really matter what you do. You will never come to an end if you try to define topics, typical stories, and content areas. It’s more a matter of how you do it: You can put everything in your media, as long as you do it in a way that attracts your audience and suits your company.

Guideline #2: It’s people who sell. You need faces, lives, quotes, emotions, personal experience, personal power. Build your content around people, use people as the main ingredient. Don’t say anything, let people say everything.

Guideline #3: Do tell stories. That corresponds directly to #2. Facts are ok, but only if they can be told, if the narrative dimension is ok too. And a narration is only worth reading,if it’s about people.

 

Guideline #4: Don’t worry too much about what you what to tell. Nobody cares about that. Do worry more about what your audience wants to read, and, foremost, why they should read your stuff at all. That depends on your audience and on the type of media.

 

Today’s discussion was about employee magazines. Employees expect benefit from their employers; they work for money, so they want get something out if they out something in. You can write about whatever you want; as long as people understand it as something they can do too, something they should not do, an offer or a rule, something that can push their career or facilitate their lives, they will read it.

It helps, if you think about content examples, but you will never have a complete listing, probably not even an inspiring one. Actually, the more precision you try to bring into these lists, the more boring they get.

If you focus on the kind of service you want to deliver, you can probably describe it in three lines. It will help you find new contents, it will help your audience understand your media, and it will create additional value that is obvious and understandable for everybody.

That’s why I call it SOCS – the Service Oriented Content Sourcing approach. No matter what you what to publish – focus on how you want to publish it, how you want to tell it and want service you want to deliver to your users.

That also reveals the sad side of it: You have to know your business. You can talk, negotiate, define for ages – if you don’t have the experience and the feeling for what makes a great story, then you need professional help.

You can learn to write, you can learn to take pictures and you can also learn how to find, invent, describe or tell great stories – but you need to be aware that this is a discipline on it’s own.

Every successfull media have their guidelines, sometimes they are explicitly written, sometimes they are part of general guidelines, sometimes they are just there.

Some samples for SOCS-Guidelines:

Every story in xxxxx Magazine is there to activate our employees. Its tells them what they can do and how they can start it.

We always present the full view. Our readers are able to participate in any discussion with colleagues or customers, and they will always be well informed, they will not be surprised by anything.

We don’t have managers talking. It’s always employees who tell the story.

And, as an example from a more general perpective:

We tell dramatic stories from all over the world – but we always look for a connection to our country.

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