Search Engine Marketing and Mega Trends

Has my company and our sites kept up or ahead of the megatrends over the last five years?

Here's my list of what happened and how we've done.  The focus of course is on the negative since I'm more interested in galvanizing ourselves to action than being self-congratulatory. I could have built a different list which included items that we've done very well on but that tends towards smugness. So my dear colleagues, don't take it personally, I know that we are doing great on many fronts.

1.  Link Value Changes. The shift it towards Google recognizing higher value from important links, less or even negative value from irrelevant and repetitive links.  Let me start by saying one could say that there are three category of links:

A.  Good links embedded in relevant content on authority sites: newspapers, government sites, and other Google-authority sites.

C.  Good links embedded in relevant content on relevant quality sites

F.  Cheap links in signatures and on sites that are not relevant. 

In 2010, I would say that the:
-  F links might have had a conceptual value of 1 good point,
- C links had a value of 10
- A links a value of 25.  
This means that authority links were maybe 25x more valuable back in 2010 than just a unique link from a unique domain.

Fast forward to 2015, I'd say that the value has changed so that:

F links are a negative 1.

C links are positive 1.

A links remain a positive 25 or 50.  

When we look at our incoming links to our premier site, we have long been dominated by C links and have never had a great strategy for getting A links.  This might account for our slippage in the engines.

Action: Time to commit time and resources to a link strategy for generating A links.

- State school choice websites?

- School district school choice websites?

- PR aimed at generating links etc

2.  Local.  Without going in deep, a large percentage of the top results are now driven by local.  We have not figured out how to drive this to our advantage despite being sold, used, and supported all over the country. Our local strategy on our premier site is limited to having info on each state which fails to enter the competition for local search results.

3.  Social.  We have an average social strategy but I don't that we've optmized it to reinforce our SEO strategy by getting vast discussions with our name in it or generating lots of deep links to our site. I also don't think that it does much in terms of driving lots of traffic the way that I've heard that others due.

4.  Statistics. Search driven stats have become progressively less useful for many reasons. One simple one is that the line has blurred between search and navigation. Specifically, I mean that many users and visitors now routinely use search to get to our site. It's simple to start typing our brand name into the address bar, let Google autocomplete with our name, click on the first search result, and come to our site. So what use to be counted as someone who came direct to our site is now reported in Analytics as search. The result is that it looks like many users who we use to report as direct visitors for conversions are now counted as search engine conversions.  Ideally, we should use a negative keyword strategy to take out every variation of our name from Analytics conversions data and add it back into direct conversions. Has anyone out there done that? Is there a script in Analytics for people to do this?  When I look at this to scope the problem, I see our name and variations on it as the top converting keyword for us so I'm guessing it's very significant. The bottom line is that while our search-driven conversion Analytics data continues to grow, it's misleading in that it does not indicate that our search engine strategy is working, it is distorted by the success of our long term branding strategy being reported as search. 

5. Site Speed. google has increasingly counted site speed as a criteria and with the switch to mobile, it's more important still. I don't know if this is a strength or weakness for us since there is no historical or competitive ongoing reporting in this area.

6. Site management of feeder sites. They've lost their advertising revenue stream. It's not clear to me if they've kept up their traffic year on year.

Organizationally, I think we're headed toward having a person responsible for each of:
- Email marketing, writing, analysis, and results
- SEO and link building: analysis and results
- Paid marketing: PPC, Retargetting, Programmatic Buying, Banners
- Website management: sales funnel mgt, landing page optimization
- social media: analysis and results....

Where we've done well....

1.   Focus only on Quality.  We never had a strategy or stumbled into generating lots of F level links.  We've never had to disavow or remove any links.

2.    Technical marketing.  We are pretty good at reading Webmaster tools data and keeping our site maps and navigation easy and good.  Our basic workplan is good of grouping relevant content in the navigation and completing each page and menu with lots of custom title and alt tags, meta tags, and relevant descriptions and titles.

3.    Responsive.  We beat the deadline for 90% of our important stuff.  Quality work. 

4.   Unique valuable interesting relevant content. The heart of our strategy has been to focus on high quality ideas and writing for our website content. This is an ongoing challenge to understand our big ideas, articulate them in ways that appeal both to our audience including the arachnids. BTW, if you haven't read the classic article of Writing for the Web and Three Audiences, you should. Of course, it now needs an update with the 4th audience being the social media world.
5.   Updating outdated technology and systems.  Unified our email lists etc.
6. Focusing on users and topics in our wriitng, not on keywords.
7.  Thinking big. 

Travel Blogging

Travel. Blogging. Do these two words belong together?  In the view of thousands of people who are busily blogging about their travels, they do! (Disclosure, one of these people is my wife).

Lets look at it from different points of view.

The Travel Industry. Think about the Hotels, the Tourist Boards of hot destination spots, the cruise companies, and so on. They use to host all sorts of junkets for the travel agents trying to get them to steer traffic their way.  But, as travel agents go the way of the dodo bird, the tourist promotion people are not sure what to do. They alos use t host lots of travel writers for different magazines but as the number of magazines and newspapers continues to shrink, they are again left looking for their new media for travel promotion.

The Audience.  Travel is a huge industry and people want to be informed buyers. They want to be educated about where they are going and what to do there. Of course, the first stop is usually Wikipedia or a travel guide but they tend to be strictly the facts or overly professional in their descriptions.  The travel bloggers tend to give readers a much more impressionist feel for the experience of visiting. Also, traffic bloggers write about some of the most interesting and surprising things. For instance, France in Miniature.  Notice the kids on the left side that give you a sense of the scale of this version of Notre Dame!

Miniature France

The Travel Bloggers.  What's not to like? They like to travel anyway and as travel bloggers, they get additional attention and often access to preferred tours and information. It also provides an agnle to the travel which makes it more ao f thoughtful visit. Of ocurse, it's alos an awful lot of work. Great photography is key to a good travel blog and the best pictures seem to require getting up at before dawn to be in position or at sunset which requires excellent timing.

Here's my favorite posts:

France Miniature Theme Park

American Colony Hotel, Jerusalem

Remedios Cuba

Miniature Sagrada Familia by Gaudi - Colonia Guell

My online social media identity is a mess!

I run a company of some size, we have over 50 full-time employees. However, I do not sit in an office removed from the day-to-to-day fray.  At this size, I think the president should still be part of the team and helping with key messaging, building blogs, and social media.

Well, I might be wrong on this and maybe it's time for me to be a little more strategic and less day-to-day. So I'm beginning to rethink my own online strategy.  

Twitter. My biggest day to day involvement is having my own Twitter account:   @VSpellCityMayor

While the Twitter account is not listed on any of the four major product sites that we run, it does have over 750 followers (started it for real in October). I do get some help with retweets from the people who tweet on behalf of our different product lines.  The two product lines that I'm closest to with this account are:

VocabularySpellingCity - 6770 followers

Science4Us - 470 followers

Facebook. I also, under my role as VocabularySpellingCity Mayor, have a Facebook account which I do not do much with. I've thought of having my Tweets automatically feed into my Facebook account so that it has some activity.  I also have a personal Facebook account but I think I keep that separate from work and have it private so only friends can see me. I'm not sure however. 

LinkedIn. This part is pretty well done. Each of our four major business units has its own linkedin profile and my profile links to each of the four.

Forum. At this point, our most active public forum is for the parents of our homeschooling students.  We also maintain a private forum for our home school high school students called Time4Friends.  Our forum for non-religious homeschool parents is also big.

Blogs - I have a number of blogs on different blogs. 

Wearing my small business technology hat, I write this blog covering issues like online marketing techniques, financial management, HR and benefits, issues of investment, and cashflow.  

I have other blogs on other topics such as credit card processing, my sports life as an over 50 athlete, and  homeschool online education.  

Travel Bloggers: New Media Strikes Again!

We all know the world is changing. Newspapers get thinner and thinner. Magazines disappear entirely. Five years ago the smartphone appeared. Three years ago, the tablets arrived and took over.  Most industries, except for education, the one that I'm in, get rapidly reinvented.   Through a persona connection, I just got a close-up view at another industry being turned on its head.  Travel.

Back in the day, the focal point of much travel industry marketing were travel agents and travel writers for magazines and newspapers and the travel guidebooks The resorts, hotels, cruise lines, restaurants, and travel promotion groups all had programs for hosting and encouraging this industry to pay attention to them and direct some travel and attention their way.

The wave of the future turns out to include Travel Bloggers. Hundreds, even thousands, of individuals have taken to the web to document their voyages and it turns out, this is now a key part of the marketing strategy for many companies.  And for travelers, having a widely read and followed blog and smart marketing are the key to many subsidized trips and meals.

Why do I know this? I know this because my wife is a travel blogger. Here's a few of her posts:


Hotel Danieli - Best Breakfasts Ever

Arriving in Europe at the Crack of Dawn

I went with her recently to a Travel Blogging  Conference  called TBEX in Athens Greece. It had about a thousand attendees. On one side, they had brands who were looking for exposure to the travelling public. The big areas were Greece, Cancun, and Thailand, areas that had hosted or will host a TBEX conference soon. 

On the other side, there were the travel bloggers who were looking for some help with their traveling lifestyle in exchange for attention.  Of course, many bloggers are like journalist so asking for a review is always a little risky.  Careful what you ask for!

The conference itself dealt with facilitating this marketplace. They had a blogger bridge which set up a set of speed-dating meetings between bloggers and destinations.  They had sessions for bloggers teaching them to promote their blogs and develop larger audiences. These focused on the mechanics of social media, on developing each blogger's brand, and on picking a positioning.  I didn't see any sessions on writing in ways that would both entertain and educate their audience but then, I only attended a fraction of the sessions.  Click her for more info on the  TBEX Travel Bloggers Conference.

Whats a real blog?

I read an interesting post that took a new spin on a question that I've discussed at some length in our How to Blog Course. What is a blog?

We were interested initially (the course has evolved) as teaching blogging as a type of creative writing. For us, it was related to the diary, journal, or confessional but had an episodic or serial structure and most importantly, the writing included elements of audience participation, promotion, and an involvement in the world around us. Our approach to explaining blogs was to create categories saying that there are personal blogs; there are hybrids of personal blogs with either business, advocacy, or non-profit purposes; and there are sites which use blog software as a CMS (content management system) but which aren't blogs at all.

Edward De Leau has a post in his blog Why the whole world is wrong about weblogs in which he makes the distinction between weblogs as a media format and weblogs as the technology or CMS behind a website. He belabors it at some length but his definitions are tight and his cartoons are nice.



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Warriors Collide

This blog is not about MMA (mixed martial arts), its about the web and how the marketing online world works. Here's a lesson. Market around events.

Example: I have a blog on my training and from where I train, there's alot of interest in the local amateur fights since our training partners will be there. People want to know more. So I try to pull together info for them and apparently, people really like it.

So, if you want the latest info on Warriors Collide or Warriors Collide 6, go to the Black Belt at 50 blog.

If you go to conventions or conferences, they are a great subject. Talk about why you are going. Talk about what you hope to accomplish there and who you hope to meet and why. Use it as a way to focus your own thoughts and set your own goals. Perhaps use it as a way to communicate with others. AT the conference, take a few minutes a few times a day and jot down how it's going. If you are quick, you could be one of the first blogs to hit the search engine on certain topics.

Learning from a blog....

Good listening and learning by a vendor...

I read on a blog about an interesting effort by a vendor to learn about their members and how their services work and can be improved. It was a learning experiment.

And I quote:

The blog - web home schooling - was started by Time4Learning as a learning experiment.We asked half a dozen parents (actually, all moms) of students using Time4Learning to write on this group blog about the details of their homeschooling program. What their days were like and what they worried about. And were happy about.

More specifically, we wanted to know what was working for them and what wasn’t in terms of their use of online educational materials.

--- it continued for awhile and concluded with......

What did we learn? We learned a lot of details and about other products that are used in conjunction with us. We learned that most homeschool curriculums are a home-made eclectic mix optimized for each child. And that there is different mix of planning, routine, and spontenity for each family. We were stunned to find out how unique and useful our service really is. My favorite posts:
The gifted child, with autism, with Time4Learning
How the Internet changes everything….for homeschoolers
T4L - How it helps everyone. Mom too.



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Why do People Blog? It blows up the couch potatoe theory.

I've been studying this question of why do people blog.

I think it's interesting since the amount of time and energy going into blogging real blows the "couch potato" theory of modern people out of the water.

I have a few explanations of why people blog:
- novelty. Maybe it's a craze that will end in another year of so. A little like pet rocks, flag pole sitting, hippydom, and disco.
- new life style ambitions. an enormous interest in making money from home and gaining independence
- a staggering commitment to self-expression and finding souls and community of similar interests
- self education and improvement by reading and learning

I just took a beginners course on blogging which was one of the funnest things I've ever done online. Took about wo hours a week. Very social (albeit online) and I learned tons. Phenomenal experience. Highly highly recommend it.




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A Writing course on blogging

I just took a course on writing blogs. Unlike most of the literature on the web, this did not focus on how to make money. The course taught how to define your persona, find your voice, write an interesting blog,get it up on the web, and to begin to attract and interact with an audience. it also covered other beginner topics like netiquette and safety.

The feedback from the people in the course was "it was awesome". As one woman (it was seven women and me in the course) said: "Thanks for course about the blog. I was definitely a reluctant "blogger" from the get-go, but the class has got me plum excited about the whole idea. ".

The class was entirely online. It's not expensive ($99). I made a set of friends (virtual friends). I got personalized feedback from the teacher and lots of feedback from classmates. And it's probably the best course that I've ever taken as an adult. Logistically, there were online class meetings once-a-week which I missed a lot of but really would have liked to attend. The assignments and feedback was all online. Technically, not difficult. The woman who taught was great and was fun to deal with.

I'm recommending the class. Try it: Best Blog Writing Class.

I'm also signing my Mom (age 75) up for the class since I think she'll like it and it makes a great present.

I think it's amazing how many really great blogs emerged from the class. Here they are:
Family in Shape
Everyday BBW
The Daily Grind -
She-Parent
Topsy-Techie
The Renovators
Black Belt at 50



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Getting paid to blog

This How to Make Money Blogging with Paid Blogging Networks is incredible. I had no idea that this was such a big industry and idea. No wonder everyone is blogging and trying to get their share of the $$$s. And no wonder google is trying to track and eliminate all of the paid links from affecting their rankings. I wonder if Google might just eliminate counting links from blogs?

Still think the writing course for bloggers is the best idea that I've heard in awhile.




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Social Media Networking Integration with this Blog!

Ft Lauderdale, FL February 18th, 2008 - For Immediate Release - I finally got some help and got some of the social media stuff tightly integrated in my blogs. For instance, in this post, you will see at the bottom, you can just click on these links and help share this story with others and bookmark it for yourself.

Now I grant you, this is not much of a post. But have you seen my recent series over at the blog on homeschool curriculum? My recent series is great! At least I think so - Take a look

History Today - Kosova's War of Independence or Serbia's Civil War...you decide.
Textbooks & Education
Why did we adopt the constitution? Part 2
Why did we adopt the constitution?
Homeschooling and the internet



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Blog Status - How to Compare

In our course on blogging (primarily a writing course but which teaches writing with audience-participation as an integral part of it), we are looking to give guidance to our students on how to "rate" a blog. Obviously, writing cannot be simply rated. But status can.

How can a newbie quickly and simply compare the status of blogs? Our current answers (all of which are fallible...we're looking for ideas)

1. Check the google page rank. Sites with zero are probably inferior to those with a 3.
2. Technorati. Three numbers: Authority, Rank, and blog citations. I have a little karate blog that I have listed there and it has an authority of 3, a rank of 2.2 millionth, and 4 blog citations. Pretty weak but I've changed it's name and URL a few times and so far, it hasn't really settled out.
3. Other approaches?

Based on this, I guess I'll claim this blog in technorati. But each time I've tried to do that, I've run into technology problems on the technorati site.

Reader & subscriber status. These are essentially useless as each site has it's own system.
Number of posts. Not easily counted, not clear that it shows anything other than number of posts.

PS - the reason to want to compare blogs is that as bloggers start, they should expect to find their best response rate when they correspond (comment, trackback etc) with bloggers of similiar stature. Or at least, expect to get snubbed by the big boys when your blog is still getting started. Unless you have something really interesting to say and you say it really well. In my experience, your judgement on these issues grows with your rank. Although there is room for cause/effect questions.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Blogging Software - Todays problems

I have a few problems with the current generation of blogging software. I wonder if my list is very different than most others.

1. Sticky. Most forums allow the moderator to mark a comment or thread "sticky". This means that this posting, even when it's not the most recent, stays at the top. I can't seem to find this feature in the blogger or wordpress, the two blogging systems that I use. I'm about to try Typepad so stay tuned..

2. Subscribe to updates by email. This elusive feature is one that I would really like. The comments section allows users (including the moderator) to get emails about new comments but I'm talking about having a simple subscription method to get emails about all updates to the blog. I gather that RSS would be better system but I don't seem to understand RSS and I'd really like it to be a simple email system. Even the feedburner addition to wordpress and blogger is lacking this.

3. More HTML functionality such as tables in blog posts. While it's cool to be able to post videos and images, I sometimes try to put some info on a blog post that is best done as a table. While I succeeded after laborious efforts, it should be simplified (by the way, I did figure out some of the bugs and workarounds in blogger for tables but I can't seem to find my write-up here. Maybe it's on another blog, maybe it's on a forum. Ask if you want to see it)

4. Integrated trackbacks, stats, and subscriptions. Basically, I like that google bought feedburner and is integrating them. I just want it done already plus, I'd like them to remember us mortal non-techie users and provide us simple emails subscriptions and de-emphasize the glitzy rss feeds that handle everything including podcasts (another technology that I've not yet gotten involved with).

5. Promotion. It would be nice if there was more automated pinging built into the blogs. Or, if there is more than I am aware of, more documentation on them. I tend to update my content and then to manually use:
www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.pingmyblog.com
www.autopinger.com
www.kping.com
But I can't tell if my efforts are useful or wasted. I do know that if I correctly join and participate in the blog communities, I do well.