This is a guest post by Zac Kenni.
On Monday August 15, 2011, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It is a rich and impressive deal, and it has far-reaching implications for the greater technology industry. There is no secret here that Google made this purchase for the sole purpose of access to Motorola’s patent portfolio, a diverse collection with more than 17,000 prized items.
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Top Google rankings fast is the goal of most search engine optimization (SEO) projects. Particularly if a new article is about a hot news item, it is advantageous if it appears as quickly as possible in Google searches.
The voicemail-hacking scandal that destroyed the British tabloid News of the World last week raises questions about the security of voicemail either from your cell phone or from your land-line telephone. But as the Times of India points out there may be other ways in which your privacy may be violated. You may be the subject of blagging or pinging:
The phone-hacking controversy has brought to the fore the dubious ways in which sensation-driven British tabloids secure bits of information that are then splashed across the front pages with screaming headlines.
This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley.
Everyone now-a-days talks about smartphones and tablets (or netbooks for those who are poor and uninteresting ) aka smart or iPhones and iPads ( for those who are very rich and very interesting aka “smart”) like they are the be-all, end-all of technology. Sure, they’re incredibly useful and mobile, but some people even go so far as to say that desktops are stupid, clunky, and irrelevant. Even obsolete!
ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web as Michael Arrington noted. That makes the launch of a new search engine Topsy, which had been in stealth development for three years, particularly propititious.
Links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. Results show popular links and also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic.
Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers in determining Influence. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes indeed, retweets are the new currency on the web.
If your topic is particularly newsworthy or appeals to the masses, then getting a large number of ReTweets is not very surprising. If you are writing on something that has a limited appeal, how do you get your readers to tell others via Twitter about it. What tweaked my interest was that a recent tweet about a blog post got 30 ReTweets at this time when checking via a Topsy search for ‘PageRank Null Hypothesis’ (note – some of these had different short URLs). The Tweet was as follows:
Topsy even indicates that there were 16 associated ReTweets of the corresponding Sphinn entry. Others may find the reasons for this good performance of interest and value.
If your blogging software is set up to automatically send a tweet to Twitter when the blog is published, then you should make sure that the Titles ReTweet Well.
You may wish to add appropriate hashtags to your post title as well, although we have more to say on that below. Chris Brogan also had some related tips on how to Spread Your Wings And Get More Retweet Action.
There is no harm in letting the software do its job, but it may well be appropriate to take its output and make a more twitter-visible tweet. Louise Doherty has a formula for getting retweeted and that is a good start. However there are some further tips that are worth mentioning.
The most important is of course to make sure the title has words that are likely to draw your readers interest. In the above example, it is probable that the phrase ‘Null Hypothesis’ tweaked the interest of all those who have struggled through their statistics courses and wondered how it could possibly come up here. If you can find a short catchy phrase like that, you are a lot farther ahead.
A hashtag such as #google ensures that all those who watch out for tweets that have been labeled with the google hashtag are likely to see your tweet. It is a way of targeting a particular audience. Which hashtags are worth using? Clearly popular hashtags are the only ones. You can get an idea on this by doing a Twitter search for say #google.
Check out how old the tweet is at the bottom of the search results page. Currently for #google it is about 2 hours ago, which is fairly good. You will get the same result for #seo. #pagerank on the other hand is about 7 days ago, so it is still worth considering but is less popular. Just to give a point of comparison, a search for a current trending topic such as “Swine Flu” shows tweets at the bottom of the page that are only from 2 minutes ago.
The other point that is worth mentioning is that the addition of hashtags does not seem to influence twitter searches so that a search for Google will include entries with #google as well. In other words the ‘#’ is ignored in the Twitter search for the non-tagged version of the word.
Having crafted the best ReTweet-able Tweet you can, all that is left to do is to seek a little help from your friends. If you have done your work well, they will probably be delighted to do their bit.
SMM has now launched a very useful website mini-review service. In doing market research on other website review services, some interesting aspects came to light that many will find of interest.
That innovative thinker, Chris Anderson, will be publishing his new book, Free, at some time in 2008, we presume. This will discuss giving zero cost products/services away for free and then making money on upgraded versions. That’s one of the opportunities this zero-cost virtual world now gives us. A more important sub-theme in the book is that of course everyone pays for such products or services by investing their personal time in them. This means that you should be even more skeptical in checking the teeth of any gift horses. Looking after that horse could involve major effort and expense.
This is particularly important in thinking about website review processes. Whatever you learn from such a process may well involve you in major effort to implement the findings. Given the importance of your website and of your time, it’s important to make the right choice.
Whatever objectives you as the owner may have for your website, they can only be achieved if there are enough visitors to the website and if they can take the actions that you hope for. So it boils down to good visitor traffic and visitors having satisfactory experiences on the website. Both aspects are tough to evaluate. If you do not think so, just spend a little time checking out the excellent research work that Jared Spool, and his team at UIE (User Interface Engineering), do on website usability. There’s more to the way visitors move around a website than the you might have imagined.
Assuming that you are not about to invest in a massive program of visitor testing of the website, some simpler process that looks at all aspects of performance must be found. All aspects of performance covers a lot of ground. To get a sense of this, you might wish to review a very long checklist for website review put out by Polson Enterprises. Unfortunately this has not been updated since 2006, but most of it is still very appropriate. It stretches to fifteen pages and includes almost 300, often meaty, paragraphs on different aspects of website performance.
A website review covering that degree of detail is a major undertaking. A better initial step is to take a ‘big picture‘ or ‘helicopter vision‘ approach. This will help to identify where work may be needed. If you are searching for free resources for this big picture approach, there are two main alternatives. Some Forums offer such ‘big picture’ website reviews and some experts will do such reviews but require the freedom to publish their work.
The type of website review you will get from a Forum depends on the interests of its members and their skills and experience. You should only consider active forums where you’re likely to get a number of members commenting. Three Forums seem to do a reasonable job in this respect:
If you do not mind an expert giving a public review of your website, then there are a number of experts you can consult.
For example, Jackie Baker at Search Engine Guide offers a weekly site clinic column. As she says:
Small businesses are invited to submit their websites for review. Can’t beat a little free advice, right? I’ll be looking at the design, copy, usability, SEO, marketing, and any technical issues that may prevent websites from drawing loyal, active visitors and meeting goals. Each week, I’ll give the top five issues the website owner/manager can address to significantly improve performance.
Scott Hendison offers a Free SEO Site Review. As he explains:
For a limited time, you can get a video made of your own website, seeing how it complies with generally accepted search engine optimization best practices.
…
In exchange, all I ask from you is that you agree to allow me to make my information public, so that others may learn from the experience. Selected video reviews will be shared on my site and on my blog.
Such expert views are likely to be well-founded, particularly since the expert is also going public and their reputation will be affected by what they reveal.
There is a risk in having your website reviewed in public. The UK Web Design Forum outlines this well:
When posing a link to a site to be reviewed remember that some people may not like your site and could leave comments to that effect. These threads can appear on a search engine results for your website or other searches, so if you get negative comments people who search for your site may see these.
Please be sure that you don’t mind that some members may not like your design and may criticise the work you have done. Most of these members will offer opinions on how to improve, which is what this section of the forum is about. So if you are looking for helpful advice and a honest view of your site this is the perfect place to do it.
Really all we are saying is post your sites at your risks, this forum will not be held responsible for any loss of business or negative things that happen due to you deciding to place your site here for a review.
Each webmaster will decide for herself or himself how to balance the usefulness of the website review, its cost and the time it takes to get it. However it is done, it is important to have your website performing well and that requires knowledge. SMM is now offering a Website Mini-Review service that gives good value in getting the right big picture view. It’s not free, but it may be less costly, taking everything into account, than these other free services.
If you have your preferred method of assessing the performance of a website that you think others might find useful, why not give details in a comment.
You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his protégé has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.
Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.
A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.
If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.
If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.
It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.
Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.
Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.
<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
in del.icio.us</p>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. WordPress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.
You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.
Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:
<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>
The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.
Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.
Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You
Banking is one of the most essential functions for most of us. We are also increasingly on the move. Clearly the bank that we can contact on the mobile web is more likely to get our business.
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We recently announced that AnswerTips Comes To BPWrap, our associated blog. We’ve been so pleased at how well AnswerTips performs that we’ve added it here too (top right) and on the other SMM properties. We think it’s a very neat gizmo and all credit is due to Answer.com .. oops that should read Answers.com. The gizmo has since then been removed in an upgrade of the websites.
You see in telling the world we did say Courtesy of Answer.com. Our error was quickly pointed out to us by Marjolein Hoekstra of the CleverClogs Blog and by Gina Larson of Answers.com. The CleverClogs Blog was one of the beta testing websites for the AnswerTips gizmo. Within minutes the correction was made and the news feed aggregators repinged. However for a short time Google and others were working with that Answer.com version of the title.
Perhaps the mistake was a natural one. I decided to do some exploring. It reminds me of a related domain. Some were concerned as Ask Jeeves sacked Jeeves and became the simple Ask.com. What a great domain name that is. I for one always felt that it was almost a no-brainer to go with simplicity. Of course you should Ask your questions. As far as one can tell it has been a very positive move. An alternative way of responding to questions is to give an Answer. So Answer.com would seem to be an ideal domain to do this. Surprisingly typing in www.answer.com currently gives a Server Not Found message. The domain does exist as a Internic WhoIs search will confirm with the following information:
Domain Name: ANSWER.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: GATEWAY1.PLATINUM.COM
Name Server: GATEWAY2.PLATINUM.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 26-jun-2006
Creation Date: 27-feb-1992
Expiration Date: 28-feb-2008
Why would someone sit on such a fine domain name?
Doing a Google search for “answer.com” gives over 90,000 web pages. Some of these are composite domain names that include answer.com. However many show that precise domain name, answer.com. Even if there is no active website at that domain, many mistakenly think so. Perhaps it’s only a small surprise to find that the #1 item in this search is the Answers.com website. There is no mention of ‘answer.com’ on the answers.com website but the Google cache shows that it appears in links to the website. Try the same search in Yahoo!, MSN/Live or Ask and you’ll get the same answer. Perhaps in our confusion I and many others have helped spread the illusion that, if you type answer.com, you really intended to find the answers.com website.
People now a days don’t often type in a domain in the address bar. They more often type the name in the Google search field. Or they click on a favourite link. This tendency will be even stronger as people use their cell phones to surf the mobile Web.
Does this mean the value of these shorter domains will be reduced? They really will not bring the traffic they used to. At this time, the keyword “answer.com” would seem to be the property of Answers.com, at least in the eyes of the major search engines. Given my satisfaction with Answers.com for their AnswerTips, I think they’ve earned that answer.com visibility.
Related:
Should Your Domain Name Be Monday?
SWOT That Company Name
Mobile Local Search, the most popular Internet application. It certainly is not true today but it won’t be long before it is. In other words, this forecast is that more Internet visitors will use Mobile Local Search than will use any other Internet application. It’s only a question of time and probably not too long a time.
Some may find this forecast suspect, but there are strong reasons for stating this so confidently. Indeed part of the argument can be confirmed by a little personal reflection. Before getting into the reasoning, it is perhaps worth mentioning how this provocative scenario came to mind. It was triggered by a thoughtful post, Local Search at Rest, and Local in Motion, by William Slawski, who is one of the most erudite commentators of this scene. He and Mike Blumenthal have had some communications on whether Google Maps (Local) data will become more accurate and useful over time. They are both pretty sure that it will. However it is not the product development that drives the forecast I discussed earlier but rather the market demand. Let’s spell out the reasons.
A) The Mobile Web is/will be very much bigger than the regular Desktop PC Web. This is being seen most clearly in Asia with Europe coming along and the U.S. at the back of the pack.
B) Local Search has always been an important demand even before the Internet existed. That’s why most homes and offices had directories of all kinds: white pages, Yellow Pages, local directories, trade directories and the list went on. Remember when you could speak to a human being at 411 and together try to figure out where that Italian restaurant was with the funny name.
C) That demand still exists and regrettably the various Yellow Pages never seem to have leveraged the incredible assets they had. Their search functions are still very error prone, serving up telephone numbers for completely nonsensical companies and not always including the one you’re really looking for. If you’ve bothered to use an online 411 process, just think of the last half dozen searches you’ve done to confirm the truth of this.
D) Of course the data is not very clean as William Slawski and Mike Blumenthal pointed out. However the demand, particularly on the Mobile web, is so strong that whoever gets it right will have a real gold mine. Particularly when on the go with your Mobile device, the Mobile web is the only way to go to find what you’re looking for. Directories are irrelevant.
E) Given this, there is every incentive for Google to put a lot of effort into this application. No one else is likely to catch them.
As William Slawski notes in one of the comments on his Local Search post, “The intuitiveness and ease of use of a service like 877-520-FIND can help grow a user base for the information, and that may be incentive for many businesses to put more effort into getting their business information into those local searches.” I don’t believe there’s a need to grow the user base. We’re all eager to get such data and have been for many years. It would seem to be a big win/win/win opportunity for everyone.
Tags: Mobile, local search
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