Thursday, March 29, 2012

Content + Connectivity = Branding. Is Your Content Contagious Enough To Create Or Promote Your Brand?




The digital world has changed the way a brand image is created in the minds of the people. People today are creating an image about your company by going through the company website, reading the buzz on social media and reading what you post on your blog and the company social media profiles.

Many times by the time your potential customer reaches your online store or real time shop to buy the product he already has a lot of information about you, your company, products and services. This information does not only come from the content that you post on the web but also from the content which others post about your company , products and services.

Armed with so much of info. and a platform to discuss about the brand openly the customer is more confident of taking a decision but at the same time has very high expectations depending on what impressions he has created about the brand in his mind.

In such a situation it is very important that the sales staff or the online buying procedure on the site clarifies each and every expectation realistically.

So, basically it is the content, which is creating the brand. Content in all forms images, text, videos, audio, news, PR Releases, etc. and also the content on social media which gets linked because of the connectivity and all this thus leads to a brand image.

Content + Connectivity = Brand 

If your content is directly related to the image of the brand then having a content strategy is a must. Hence, it is not only about adding blogposts, videos and images to your website or go on a posting spree on the social media sites.

Having a content strategy is the first step. The strategy has to come before the technology you select to host and promote it.

A Content Strategy should define:

· The audience for whom the content is created

· What type of content is right for which type of message

· It has to be on a regular basis with the quality improving over time

· It should preferably in a continuous , engaging, interactive story form.

· It should encourage and make people add to the existing content via comments, social media posts and discussions


The ultimate goal of all this content creation should be the conversion of this digital content to a digital asset. As acquisition and maintenance of any asset requires investment, content creation and promotion also requires strategic investment and planning.

Hence, investing in a right team to create , correlate and promote content is one of the important online marketing decisions.

The following video puts forward this idea very creatively.

Coca Cola Content 2020 : We will move from creative excellence to content excellence. The purpose of content excellence is to create ideas so contagious that they cannot be controlled….




Is your content contagious enough to create or promote your brand?

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Saturday, March 24, 2012

How The Semantic Web, HTML5, Microformats And SEO Are Inter-Linked





The only constant (K) on the World Wide Web  and the SEO world is change. SEO and the web are constantly evolving .Google’s constant endeavor for improving the quality of search results is a known fact. Google introduced the PageRank technology to deal with the keyword spam that was prevalent in the mid 2000. But this innovation brought with itself the link building spam as an off shoot.

It also recently came up with the Panda Update to control the content spam and improve the quality of search results further. But this focus on content has already started an exodus of content in all forms on the web. How Google is going to determine the grain from the chaff is going to be the next big challenge now.

The following 4 quadrants explain the information and social connectivity very effectively.



created by Sebastian Faubel with Inkscape Vect...
created by Sebastian Faubel with Inkscape Vector Illustrator. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The next big evolution is the semantic search which is a much wider and deeper concept based on the science of semantics which has the potential to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the web eco system or within a closed system like the search engine index, to generate more relevant results.

The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, your word processor is today.

Semantics adds extra information to help you with the meaning of the information.

The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages.Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.
Data is the foundation on which such a web and search world can exist. Data in itself is meaningless but when data gets linked because of its relationships with various data sets available on the web, it becomes useful and meaningful and solves the purpose for which it was being searched as data becomes contextual due to the inter-connected relationships . The more it is connected the more powerful it becomes and gives more related information. Google Plus has that secret unlocked potential of correlating, connecting and linking all the data related to a profile and then integrating it with search with its data about people, places and pages.

Web 1.0 was about static pages linked together,

Web2.0 can be defined as the emergence of the web since the last boom of the .com’s (new web based sites/applications/technology- i.e.,Adsense, Wikipedia, Blogging), and the dynamic websites designed/programmed in terms of user interaction and web-based interaction .

Web 2.0 Meme Map


The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.

For such a semantic web, HTML5 which is a collection of features, technologies, and APIs brings the power of the desktop and the vibrancy of multimedia experience to the web and amplifies the web’s core strengths of user interaction and connectivity.

HTML5 includes the fifth revision of the HTML markup language, CSS3, and a series of JavaScript APIs. Together, these technologies enable you to create complex applications that previously could be created only for desktop platforms.

This is where Microdata comes in and it’s going to fundamentally change the way we discover and consume content on the web.

Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides others, like search engines or browsers, with more information about the contents of a page.

Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and Microformats.

Microdata vocabularies provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item. Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies available on the web. A collection of commonly used (and Google Supported) Microdata vocabularies located at http://data-vocabulary.org which include: Person, Event,Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Other markup vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas. Major search engines rely on this markup to improve search results.Content expressed as microdata on the web page gets correlated easily to the data vocabulary it is giving information about making it easy for the search engine find relevance and connectivity.

Google has stated they only support a handful of these Microdata types which include: reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music, and video content. If your website has any of these types of content, you’re eligible for a Microdata implementation.

In one of our previous posts we have explained how to use the hCard microformat on http://blog.webpro.in/2010/05/what-is-hcard-integration.html and it can be seen clearly that if you express the contact address on the web page in an hCard format it becomes data having specified fields for street address, city, country, etc. which makes the content more co-related and meaningful.

The semantic web adds more meaning to the query for a search rather than just mapping words during the search process.

As an SEO I think it is high time we started incorporating microformats wherever possible . Some of the content which can be represented as microformats or as data are as follows:

Reviews
People
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events
Video

To check your markup, use the rich snippets testing tool.

Google rich Snippets Tool



More details about microformats on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897

Panda or no Panda content has been king since the first web page was published on the web. It is Google who has become capable in picking quality content in 2012 and hence wants to reward sites with quality content with more visibility. But just adding content is not enough what has to be focused is how well the content is inter-connected to establish relevance.

More than the no. of inbound links it is important how well your web page gets inter-linked on the web as a whole. Sharing the links on social media and adding websites to Google web master tools and Bing web master tools help us achieve that purpose to a great extent but it is the representation of content in the form of data which ensures relationships and adds context will be the main task for an SEO in future.

The on-page SEO factors (used optimally, avoiding the over optimization) + The inter-linked connectivity of the aspects mentioned in the 4 quadrants above will determine the success of SEO campaigns in future.


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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Want Your Boss To Increase The Social Media Budget? Show Him The Economic Value. @Avinash Explains How?

We all want our boss or our clients to increase the social media budget, but have a tough time convincing them. Avinash Kaushik explains in the video below how it can be done easily by using facts and figures from Google Analytics - Social Media Reports.

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Friday, March 16, 2012

My Views On The WSJ Post “Google Gives Search A Refresh” – Semantic Search, Google And Bing





Lately The Wall Street Journal Post is dominating the social scene among the search marketers and anyone interested in a search presence or rather a presence on Google.

Search has been the Google domain ever since they started the company. Since then Google has been working on the quality of the overall search experience from the search engine and the user perspective.

First and foremost let me mention that as a search marketer or rather a SEO (As there is a lot of confusion nowadays related to this term I better be very clear, yes I am an SEO and I am proud of it) I am very happy about all the changes that Google has made to its algorithm in 2011 and the updates seem to continue on a good pace in 2012 too.

I think all these changes are drawing a clear, distinct line between organic search campaigns and paid campaigns. All of these developments will make SEOs and website owners think beyond rankings and keywords, because the true meaning of SEO is to ensure quality search engine presence on maximum search options by focusing on overall quality web presence — enhancing the quality aspects of the website and reaching out to netizens via various modes of social media.

Finally the search industry has matured and is qualitatively marching ahead. But, this has not happened overnight the search engines (Google And Bing) have been constantly working to improve the quality and display of search results by giving more and more search options over a period of time. The study of the user behavior being at the base of all the decisions as the user behavior is also constantly evolving over the years.


The WSJ Post says:

Image representing Amit Singhal as depicted in...
Image by Google.com via CrunchBase
Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of "entities"—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

I don’t know which interview they are referring to, as there is no link to the interview. But, Amit Singhal has been discussing and announcing the updates about the Google Algorithm since 2 years all excited like a kid in a candy store and Google has been working on Semantic Search for quite some time now and the launch of SPYW is the first step towards it which just has the social dimension to the relevance factor.

The semantic search is a much wider and deeper concept based on the science of semantics which has the potential to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the web eco system or within a closed system like the search engine index, to generate more relevant results.

Currently Google focuses on the Keyword-Search System. The WSJ article clearly mentions that… …“ Google isn't replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures.”

But it is also mentioned in the post that ….” Google is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search," which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”

Of course the real impact and implementation of this kind of update on SERPs can be judged only when Google blogs about it on its official blog and starts rolling out such semantic search results.

According to me if your site has a lot of relevant content and the content is kept fresh by updating it with the latest happenings and developments and the links are widely shared on social media and have a good amplification factor along with the possibility and potential of that content being inter-linked on the web then one need not worry about the SERPs or the search traffic for that site to be affected adversely.

If at all Google in the near future starts rolling out semantic search the relevance to the logic of the intent, the keyword mapping in the query and the freshness of the content will all matter collectively. The search engines have been working on semantic search since the advent of web 2.0 and the following PPT which was created for the first SEO Training conducted by me in 2007 where I spoke about web 3.0 and Semantic Search has an example.

(Slide 90 to 93) explains an example of Semantic Search which seems to be becoming a reality in 2012.The slides explain Semantic Search as follows: 


n  The Semantic Web is a set of technologies which are designed to enable a particular vision for the future of the Web – a future in which all knowledge exists on the Web in a format that software applications can understand and reason about. By making knowledge more accessible to software, software will essentially become able to understand knowledge, think about knowledge, and create new knowledge. In other words, software will be able to be more intelligent – not as intelligent as humans perhaps, but more intelligent than say, your word processor is today.

  n  The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.


  n  In contrast,  the challenge for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $6,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”


  n  The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages.Web 3.0 works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.
Bing too has been working on semantic search since a long time. The following 2009 video of Webpronews.com says it all where Javed Panjwani, the Business Development Executive at Wolfram Alpha , explained, a traditional search engine creates a Web of documents and essentially generalizes what a user is looking for. A computation engine, on the other hand, personalizes the search results, where the reference was to Semantic Search Results.



As an SEO I feel more than happy and look forward for all the coming updates (if any in the near future hopefully), because when the search is based on the relevance of content, social mentions , outreach and amplification and the logic of the query rather than only the word by word mapping of the query adds quality to the whole search process.

With this kind of the basis for search SEO will gain more meaning and the SEO industry will gain more respect and authority as the prime edifice on which SEO in this kind of search model  will be based on content, intent , social graph and the trust factor rather than link graph.

As Matt Cutts has made it very clear in all his SEO videos that SEO is all about putting your best foot forward and SEO is not spam. One of our past guest posts also points out the sentiment behind this that SEO is not magic but pure logic and hard work.

I have not got a chance to see the SPYW results as they have not yet been rolled out universally but according to my experience and what I have read on the search blogs I think SEOs should not rant about it but indulge themselves in research and rejoice at the fact that it is the true growth of the search industry and finally search has come of age and matured. Of course only Google can tell us when this will become a reality.Waiting for the next Google blog post to shed some more light on this and let us know when the changes mentioned in the WSJ post will become a reality.
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Tuesday, March 6, 2012

What Is Content Strategy And Why Do We Need One?






If you have a website and you are serious about its web presence then I am sure you must have heard the clichéd line “Content Is King”.

After the Panda update we see many people claiming themselves to be content writers and offering content writing services. I am saying this as the no. of emails that I used to receive for link requests which were nothing but requests for spammy link exchanges are now decreasing and the no. of emails from companies introducing themselves as content writers is on the rise.

An insight into my process of content creation...
An insight into my process of content creation for the web (Photo credit: Nils Geylen)
  
Content has been king since the day the first web page was published but now its importance by Google as a ranking factor has made content the most discussed aspect of web presence.

In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville write, "We define content broadly as 'the stuff in your Web site.' This may include documents, data, applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal Web pages, archived e-mail messages, and more. And we include future stuff as well as present stuff."

In today’s context the definition of content has a much broader connotation as along with the stuff on your website it also include the opinions that you share across the social media platforms , comments that you posts on other blogs and also the guest posts that you write, etc.

For such a broad spectrum for content creation, definitely one needs planning and a strategy to implement it successfully.

Usually, people start by publishing blog posts on their blog and think that the bit regarding content creation is taken care of but in fact that is just the first step and then it has to go a long way to reach out to the targeted audience and invite their opinions to add on to the content and make it more qualitative.

The basic questions to ask before creating content are:

· What content do we want to put on the web? 


· Why do we want to do publish that content?



· People ask question on search engines. To which questions we can provide answers for?


· How can we give more detailed information regarding the products and services we offer?


· What will be the best medium for that content (Text, video, infographic,etc)? 


The content on your site and associated to your persona on the web which is inter-linked on the web via a ripple effect which establishes your expertise. If there is consistency in the content created and shared, if the content is contextual and if your blog has developed a good community along with a good readership list then an authority is established.Hence, quality content contribute to the trust and authority factor.

One of our previous blog posts on http://blog.webpro.in/2011/10/after-link-building-spammers-it-is.html answers the following related to content creation and content strategy?



Q1) Why do we need more quality content ? 

Q2) What is quality content?


Q3) Can borrowed content or content written just for the sake of adding words to your site work in your favour?


Q4) How to come up with quality content regularly? 


Along with the regular content on the blog, posting comments on authority blogs, discussing on relevant topics on social media, uploading related videos are some other ways of adding on to the content correlated to your web presence.

In recent times the methodology of creating content has become very simple but to come up with the right strategy to accrue the maximum benefit from the quality content created is the major challenge.

Last but not the least creating fresh content is a constant and a continuous endeavor which does not reap immediate results. It takes years to establish an authority and an identity on the web hence keep going and do not quit.

I’ll share a poem I had read long ago but do not know the name of the author.

This proves the unique content you create may be remembered by generations and may outlive you so please make use of the Authorship markup by Google so that your content does not get published as “Anonymous” in future on the web like the poem below:


"Don't Quit," Author Unknown 


When things go wrong as they sometimes will;
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill;
When the funds are low, and the debts are high
And you want to smile, but have to sigh;
When care is pressing you down a bit-
Rest if you must, but do not quit.

Success is failure turned inside out;
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt;
And you can never tell how close you are
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit-
It's when things go wrong that you must not quit.

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