Category Archives: Consultancy

business, development, Traffic

Entre Card Is It The Best Business Website Card Yet?

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I have Just Signed up for my Entre Card to see what it is all about. Inspired by  Owen who has just developed a widjet so that you can see the last droppers (visitors). Could this replace blog catalogue and mybloglog who’s traffic to my site has dropped of recently. It seems a very fair system. You gain a credit every time somebody picks up your details by clicking on your Entree Card widget. This is by far the best system yet. The sign up process is very simple and you can get up and running in within  20 minutes. So if you have 20 mins to spare I recommend giving it twirl. I am looking forward to reporting back soon with more in depth thoughts about this. Don’t forget to check out Owen’s widget here.
 

 

 

Consultancy, Guest Bloggers, Marketing, Traffic

Small Business Guide To Optimizing Universal Search

The buzz in the search marketing media and increasingly, the business press, on the importance of unified or universal search is gaining momentum and is unavoidable. Small and medium sized business web site owners and webmasters are now presented with the challenge of making sense out of the recent rash of search engine interface and functional improvements and how to adjust their online marketing efforts accordingly. Many are not sure what to do. Hopefully this short guide will shed light on the fundamentals and give some basic direction on next steps.

Early this summer Google rolled out one of the most significant changes to its search engine ever called Universal search. This update was followed a week or so later by Ask.com announcing Ask 3D. After a leak and then a more official announcement late September, Microsoft Live officially announced the 2.0 version of it’s search engine to include universal search features and Now Yahoo and has followed suit with their version of Unified search, being called the “new Yahoo! search“. What does all this mean for most businesses marketing online?

What is Universal Search?

First, I should explain what Google Universal, Ask 3D, Live Search and the new Yahoo! Search are, and how they’re different from the way search engines have traditionally retrieved and displayed search results. As an overview, the latest and greatest versions of the popular search engines include more than the text based web pages in the search results that we’ve all been used to the past 10+ years.

These “upgraded” search features from the major search engines now also find and bring back results in varying media formats including: images, news, local listings, video, blog posts, products and more depending on the particular search engine. But let’s break it down a bit further.

Ask and You Shall Receive

Ask 3D means bringing in three dimensions of search into one set of search results, i.e. the three columns in the search results page. For example, if you search for “Shrek 3”, on the left are additional suggested search terms and related searches to other movies. In the middle are paid listings with regular text based results below. On the right are search results from images, video, Wikipedia and other sources depending on the query.


click for large view

One of the big challenges in making search a positive experience for users is to deliver the right answers according to the searcher’s intent. Searching more content sources than just web pages allows the search engine to deliver extra sets of relevant content that people may be looking for rather than making them sort through the typical web page results to find the content they’re looking for or worse, have to perform yet another search on another specific type of search engine.

Ask 3D is unique compared to Google Universal, Live Search and the new Yahoo! search because it most distinctly separates the different data sources on the page.

Google’s New Universe

Google Universal blends Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into the standard search results page. If we use the “Shrek 3” query again as an example, you’ll see listings from YouTube mixed in with the web pages including a preview image and the option to watch the movie trailer right within the search results. Normally, you’d have to click and visit another web page to do that.


click for large view

So rather than having to perform unique queries on Google, Google News, Google Images, etc individually, Google Universal searches all of those databases and returns the best matches in one set of search results. Findings reported in a recent study by Enquiro show that searchers are more engaged with content throughout the unified search results page rather than just the top 3 listings.

That makes sense because if you search for something and see a video thumbnail in the middle of the search results page, it will draw your attention – provided the title and description text are relevant of course.

Microsoft Search is A-Live!

The new Live Search promises better relevance, speed and look/feel enhancements as well as enhanced search results for queries related to “high interest” categories like: Health, Entertainment, Shopping, Celeberaties, Local, and Video. When a search is performed, like our favorite “shrek 3”, you’ll see video thumbnails displayed near the top of the standard search results with related searches suggested on the right. One neat, and surprising to me, was that the video clips play when you put your cursor over them. No clicking necessary.


click for large view

It’s A New Yahoo

With the new Yahoo! search, the same unified search characteristics apply. Yahoo searches it’s various databases or indexes of content and brings them back into one set of search results as you can see in this “shrek 3” example search. One interesting feature is that when you search for something location/event oriented, you get a set of results at the top of the page sorted by category, date and most popular. That information comes from Yahoo site, Upcoming.org. The other more notable feature of Yahoo’s new search is the “search assist” feature that suggest phrases as you type.


click for large view

While each version of “unified search” is slightly different, they all share the same characteristics of bringing back content from multiple data sources with the intention of providing a better user experience.

Why do these changes with the search engines matter to search marketers and web site owners?

First, it creates an online marketing challenge. A web site might have enjoyed certain positions on key terms within a search engine only now to find that their ranked web pages have been pushed down by video, image or local search results.

To address the situation, web site owners are faced with the proposition of making the effort to optimize their video, image, blog, local, news and product content. That’s easier said than done, because in most cases, small businesses have but a smattering of those content types at their disposal. If you don’t have the content format, you certainly can’t optimize for it. Even if you did, optimizing video for example, is a different thing than optimizing for news search.

The business of optimizing content for search engines just got a lot more complex.

With Challenges Come Opportunities

Many businesses won’t even notice why their search visibility has changed until it’s far into the game. Some will resort to beefing up their paid search campaigns, which you’d think might be an objective for the search engines, and some will roll up their sleeves and tackle the opportunity head on. With unified search results, there exist additional, high profile exposure opportunities where none of that type previously existed. The way for smart marketers to approach these opportunities is with a holistic perspective.

Optimizing holistically starts with an inventory of a company’s digital assets. Text, images, audio and video are all considered along with the incorporation of keyword messaging across company communications. Matching digital assets with channels of distribution provides marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers since each channel (blogging, email, media relations, social networking, forums, etc) can drive traffic independently as well as improve standard search visibility.

If a small business is not in the habit of creating content in multiple formats, then it will mean change. In fact, substantial changes may be necessary with content creation, approval and publishing processes along with the need for ongoing education. The key is to identify those content creation processes that are already occurring that could be altered or leveraged for the purpose of publishing more media content online. Process changes will still be necessary, but if a business can use some of what they’re already doing with other marketing promotions to improve their search visibility in a world of universal search, it will save effort, money and enable results more quickly.

Optimizing for Universal Search in Action

An example might be a situation where a new product is being released. In such a situation, many small businesses will post a new product page with a photo on the web site and email their list of industry publications and local reporters the announcement. They might even post a press release.

To take advantage of such a situation where unified search results can be leveraged might include the same process of updating the company web site with the product content. Such an effort would also include creating content in additional media formats, such as shooting a short video with an engineer or product manager explaining some of the features/benefits of the product. Just about all digital cameras can take a few minutes of video. The video can be edited with free video editing software like Windows Movie Maker to add credits or even add background music.

Promoting a Good Image

To leverage image search, the image file names could use keywords relevant to the product. Alt text used in the coding of the web page describing the image could do the same as well as a short text caption beneath the image. The image(s) can be submitted to image sharing web sites like Flickr.com with relevant keywords in the image category, title, description and tags. The description of the product on the image sharing site can include a link back to the product web page on the company web site.

Associating relevant keywords with the image will help media or image search engines understand what the image is, and subsequently categorize and rank it. The link from the image description on the image sharing site can send both visitors and search engines to the product page.

Video is the New Rock Star of Search

The product page on the company web site can also include the short video to give visitors another way in which to learn about the product. Embedding the video in the product web page also gives search engines another media format to index and display in unified search results. Submitting the product video to video sharing web sites such as YouTube.com with a relevant, keyword-rich description will make it even easier for the video to appear in video search and unified search results.

To take it a step further, you could upload screen captures of the video to image sharing sites and link back to the video from the description. The image and video could also be packaged with the press release to provide the media more interesting and engaging ways to learn about the new product. Submitting the press release via wire services can also leverage new search visibility. There are many more steps possible in promoting such content ranging from social bookmarking to blogger relations to the creation of viral linking campaigns, but this is a start, a foundation.

Making Universal Search Easier is Hard Work

The overall idea is to create, optimize and promote the kinds of media formats (text, images and video in this example) that both customers and search engines will respond to. Making it easy for search engines to find your text, images and video means it will be easier for those representations of your product to show up in unified search results.

It may sound like a lot of work but this is the reality of the new search. Optimizing relevant media formats to meet the information channel and format consumption preferences of customers is what will allow small businesses to continue competing against the “big guys” on the web.

The upside is that a substantial increase in media types being indexed by the new search engines all linking to a company web site will provide the kind of advantage standard search engine optimization no longer offers. In other words, optimizing for the different media types provides a competitive advantage.

The Work Will Never End But the Benefits Are Long Term

As long as there are search engines, there will be some kind of optimization for improving search engine visibility. What small business marketers need to consider are all the digital assets they have to work with and enable content creation, optimization and promotion processes to give both search engines and customers the information they’re looking for in the formats they’ll respond to.

About The Author:
Lee Odden is President and Founder of TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.

Comment or start a discussion in our forums: http://www.workconnexions.com/forums/Regional/UK.aspx

Consultancy, Guest Bloggers

Inferno Buying The Blog Research Launch

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“86% of businesses with a blog credit blogs with generating more business opportunities”

From Inferno Communications:

86% of businesses with a blog credit blogs with generating more business opportunities A significant new survey is released today showing that blogging is becoming a key business tool, providing a valuable way for companies to create new and genuine relationships with their customers. The research, carried out for UK PR agency Inferno Communications by Loudhouse Research during August 2007, polled 300 UK companies with over 250 employees. It reveals that 50% of those companies surveyed now undertake some form of blogging – either having their own blog or encouraging employees to comment on blogs.

Of those companies that do have blogs, 64% were launched in the last 6 months. And 86% of these blogging companies state that their blog has generated additional business opportunities. Blogs also compare well to other forms of business information, ranking with business decision makers as equally important as trade shows and internet searching, and more influential than TV and radio advertising.

The research questioned UK managers with direct sales and/or purchasing responsibility to discover how they and their companies use blogs to interact with existing and potential customers and how they engage with the blogosphere to inform their own business decision making. The main findings of the research found:

· 50% of UK companies now undertake some form of blogging

· 64% of UK corporate blogs have been launched in the last 6 months

· 86% of companies that have a blog credit it with generating more business opportunities for their company

· 66% of managers in the survey have visited blogs in the last 12 months

· 80% of blog users visit blogs during working hours

· 33% of blog visitors will access a blog on a daily basis

“The research shows that blogging in the UK is fast becoming a serious business tool,” Grant Currie, Managing Director of Inferno PR commented. “There are many parallels with ‘Internet 1.0’ in that there has been a lot of hype and questions asked about ‘Web 2.0’ technologies and mistakes are being made. But the fact remains that it appears blogging is one of the Web 2.0 technologies that is now taking serious hold in the business world. UK companies are now beginning to adopt blogging as part of their business strategy and those that have done so are pointing to specific business success and opportunity being created. It seems the hype is over and the real business of blogging is on its way.”

Currie also cautioned businesses to understand what is and isn’t achievable in the “blogosphere”before developing their own blogging strategies. He said, “Businesses shouldn’t view a blog as another billboard from which to shout their corporate messages. Starting a blog is essentially starting a conversation and as in verbal communication, conversations have conventions, rules and boundaries. Those businesses in our survey who have derived new business opportunities from their blogs, will have found that these successes came indirectly from the blog, rather than directly. A blog is not the place to sell and businesses should get suitable advice before embarking on their blogs.”

Prominent UK blogger, Neville Hobson, author of the Hobson Report echoes these thoughts, saying: “A business blog is a powerful communication tool, as many companies who successfully use them can attest. Blogs also represent disruptive change and a challenge to traditional business thinking. Companies who recognize the social characteristics of effective communication are those likely to gain the most from business blogging.”

The research also cautions businesses looking to exploit the blogosphere revealing significant difference in opinion between buyers and sellers over what constitutes a ‘good blog’. For instance, only 30% of respondents felt that corporate branding was a positive thing raising questions over the validity of trumpeting the company line on a blog versus allowing individual views to flourish. Furthermore, those respondents with spending responsibilities saw blogs as the second best source for informing a business
decision (behind industry reports), while those with selling responsibilities saw blogs as the least favourable source (behind industry reports, trade press and trade events).

Ask a Question, Consultancy, Personal

The Biggest Problems are Solved by the Simplest Solutions

We have to day been working on a printer problem. we needed to replace quite a bit of the electronics.

The only problem was we could not gain access to the part we needed. After searching on the internet brought no results.

We turned the device upside down and where able to locate a spring key which removed the undercarraige. allowing us access the part and solve the problem.

Hence the biggest problems are solved by the simplest solutions. I like that motto….

Links, Owen, Traffic

What is Link Bait?

Internet Gurus will know what it is, but many that are new to the internet an e-commerce will not.

What you have to do is:

Think of a topical piece of news, that concerns you and your readers.

They will return the link because they think it is interesting or funny what you have written.

This is one of the keys to getting listed higher in google or social networking sites.

Then link in all relevant parties who have been discussing this.

It could be a list of your favorite websites, or list of resources.

Then let people know that you are linking to them. Like this one to Owen

Consultancy, Marketing, Networking sites, Work Connexions SMO

Who are we marketing to with www.workconnexions.com

Our market is Businesses and Working professionals for our Wcx site. At present there is no social networking site that offers businesses this or the chance to interact with each other using Web 2.0 communication. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc are all aimed at the individuals. While some of these social networking sites are used for business. We believe they are fatally flawed for business, in that they concentrate on the individual’s private life, and most professional people do not want to be exposed and interact in this type of environment.