Bruceclay.com.au - September 2009 Archives - Search Engine Optimisation SEO Blog

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25 September 2009

SEO Tools | My favourites

So working in SEO means that a lot of the time half my Firefox screen is normally taken up by the website I am viewing and the other half by various tools and toolbars that allow me to do my job more effectively and efficiently, so I thought I would quickly share with you some of my most used and useful search engine optimisation tools.

Photo by Matt Browne via Creative Commons

Bruce Clay SEM Toolbar

Anytime I mention SEO tools, I am contractually bound to mention Bruce's Toolbar, JOKES. But seriously, this toolbar may not have all the functionality of some of the other tools but the fact that it seamlessly integrates with the Bruce Clay SEO Toolset (which I use all the time) makes it one of my most used tools. Even if you don't have a Toolset account, the free tools available with the toolbar are very useful, the keyword density analysis is excellent and can find a lot of on-page optimisation issues. The proxy support is great for those SEO's who practice their craft around the world and need to see search results that appear naturally in the country the site is being targeted/ hosted. The keyword statistics gives some great information including demographic information and a whole bunch of other cool stuff as can be seen in the image below. Now I didn't always use the toolbar as it only ran on internet explorer ( and I like internet explorer as much as I like a freak Sydney Dust Storm that covers my room in a fine red dust ), but a few months ago Bruce adapted the toolbar so that it runs in Firefox too (yay).

Download page for the SEM Toolbar

Web Developer Toolbar

This is one seriously in depth and extensive tool. It is in the form of a toolbar that seamless integrates with my Firefox. It's just so easy to do complex tasks with this tool. Want to see how the page renders with Java Script turned off? Two Clicks and you have it. Want to see how the site looks without the CSS file? Two clicks and you have it. Want to see the alt attributes of every image displayed next to the actual image? Two clicks and you have it, notice a recurring theme going on? The Web developer toolbar also integrates with 3rd party applications so it makes it easy to validate HTML and check the CSS files are working accurately. For anyone involved in any form of online marketing, be it web design, SEO or anything in between the Web Developer Toolbar is a must have.

Download page for the Web Developer Toolbar

Firebug

This a great tool for the more technically minded SEO/web developer/gummy bear out there. It is really great for analysing snippets of code or finding out how a certain element on a page actually works. As the Firebug website states "You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page". A great thing is that you dont even need web access for it to work; it runs purely within the Firefox environment with no connections needed (obviously you might need to connect to actually see the web site you are analysing). It is pretty lean on resource use goes into a suspended state of animation until you call on it. You can also use its tools to identify why your site might be loading more slowly than usual. The newer versions of Firebug also have some really cool AJAX analysis tools.

Download Page for Firebug

This is far from an exhaustive list and are just the 3 tools I probably use the most. The one thing that all these seo tools have in common? THEY ARE FREE, that's right, you dont have to outlay one cent for these impressive functions and cool productivity tools.

Have a great weekend all.

Posted by Marc Elison on 09/25/09 at 1:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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23 September 2009

Bending the Golden Triangle

I think it's safe to say most of us are guilty of it, and I think it's also safe to say a lot of the time we don't even realise it. Humans are initially drawn to colourful images rather than text. It's a part of our perception. It's why brands invest in good looking logos, why Microsoft moved on from MS-DOS, and why I keep choosing a Penang curry cause the photo above the counter looks 'so damn nice!' (proof we do eat with our eyes). It's an act we're inclined to do.

Photo by specialkrb via Creative Commons

But how is this inclination important to SEO?

In 2005, Enquiro Research released a study of people's eye tracking patterns when viewing search results. They discovered a common trend, calling it the Golden Triangle. According to the Golden Triangle, there is a tendency to view the results is a similar way, beginning at the top left hand side of the page, moving down and then right, once a title catches your attention. The top three or four positions are likely to receive most eye time and moving further down the page the amount declines. This pattern creates a triangle. The top spot on the page gets the maximum exposure and majority of hits. The links further down and sponsored links on the left get little attention, giving credit to the theory that a position on top of the second page may have a better click through rate than at the bottom of the first (a discussion for another day).

In 2007, Enquiro Research released a study detailing the impact of blended search on the Golden Triangle. They concluded that blended search results (results including images, video and maps from the different search verticals) change the way people scan the page. Instead of forming a triangle from the top left hand side of the page, people briefly look to the left hand corner, then down to the first image (or images). Once the image has been processed, the eye will then continue on down the page. So for example, if a YouTube video was to return in second place, people would likely skip past the first result, view the video and move onto the lower results, leaving the top ranked site at a disadvantage. Heartbreaking, isn't it!?

But let's not get carried away here, let's not send an email to Google HQ, or start a Facebook group called 'Blended search, meh!' (gotta love Facebook language). After all, blended search is on the way up. It is widely believed that Google's increase in the amount of search variables, 120 to over 200, coincided with the introduction of Blended search. And Bruce Clay recently stated that "we've not yet seen even the tip of the iceberg" when asked about the importance of engagement objects on websites and within search results.

You start to get the idea that videos and images will become an integral part of SEO.

The bright side is that blended search is relatively uncompetitive at the moment, is going to increase in use and (as Enqurio discovered) offers a more eye catching option. If a site can begin to rank well for images and video, they can begin to take up more hot spots within the golden triangle and attract more hits. Optimising images and videos can give a website that elusive competitive edge.

So next time, I'll stop and think about how the menu sells its products and the reasons why I chose one over the other. I may even move away the Penang, but probably to the Pad Thai because its image is slightly to the left.

Posted by Matthew Geale on 09/23/09 at 1:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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18 September 2009

SEO for PDF Documents

PDF files are being used more and more by both individuals and corporations. As a result of this they are finding their way onto the internet more often. So here are some cool PDF seo tips and tricks. If implemented correctly these tips and techniques will get your PDF more exposure on the search engines and also use the PDF's to pass link juice to important pages on your sites.

Photo by rillian via Creative Commons

Formatable Text

• Whenever possible make sure your PDF is created using a method that keeps most of the text as regular formatable text so that the search engines can read and index it.

• You should be able to tell what text is formatable or not in your PDF by selecting some text. If you can select sections of text, such as words or phrases, and copy and paste this text into another program, then it is formatable text, if not you should think about recreating the PDF so that it includes formatable text.

• You can use programs like MS Word or Adobe Pagemaker, so that the final product is text-based and can be crawled.

Optimise the text in the PDF document

• If you are writing or editing the document that will become an online PDF you should optimise it just as you would a regular HTML web page and include important keyword phrases in the body and headings.

• Regular occurrences of the chosen keywords and keyword phrases throughout your PDF document can help the PDF listing reach a higher position in the search results for the particular keywords and keyword phrases used in the PDF.

• A description that includes call-to-action phrases with the keywords being searched on highlighted should encourage more people to click through to the PDF.

Update the Document title

• If possible include an effective call-to-action (that includes your relevant keywords) as the document title, as most search engines will attempt to include the PDF's document title as the title for the search listing.

• In Acrobat (the development tool. Not the free reader) you can usually access the document title as follows:

o File > Document Info > General, or
o File > Document Properties > Summary

• The combination of a well written document title with the words and phrases being searched for highlighted should help entice people to click-through and look at the PDF document.

Link to the PDF

• To get the PDF indexed in search engines, add one or more links to it from pages on your web site, preferably on pages that are already indexed themselves and that are not too deep within your site.

• The same link authority analysis appears to apply to PDF's as it applies to regular HTML pages. For targeted keyword phrases you'll want to apply the same methodologies as you would for a regular web page such as including links to the PDF from other pages.

• Links to the PDF should be created from pages with a high authority ( or PageRank) and that contains related content relative to what information is in the PDF.

Other PDF optimisation Guidelines

• Place a link(s) to your web site and email links within the PDF so that people may contact you or click through to your site while online (link to important pages in your site from your PDF as these links pass some link juice).

• Submit your PDF to PDF specific search engines like http://www.PDF-search-engine.com/

• Your PDF can reside anywhere on your site, but the same rule about spiders not being likely to crawl content that's too deep applies. The safest thing to do is to put it as close to the root directory as possible.

• Define the document's and metadata's properties within the PDF file; this is done in Adobe Acrobat. Details: File -> Document Properties Advanced - > Document Meta-data (use the description menu to define -- this will give you the opportunity to fill in the Title/Author, Subject, and Keywords. Use commas to separate the keywords and keyword phrases).

• Include text captions under any photographs or images that are incorporated into the PDF file. The search engines will index the image captions just as they would the "alt attributes" on an image within a website.

• Use related keywords in the actual file name for the PDF file. If you are using a keyword phrase to name the PDF file, use hyphens to make it easy to distinguish all the words used. For example: filename-keyword-phrase.PDF. PDF files often rank very well in search engines.

• If you have a very large PDF, consider breaking it up into several documents. This will ensure that the maximum amount of content gets included in the search engine's index. Try limit your PDF to a maximum of 100k.

This is a pretty new and untested element of search engine optimisation so I would love your feedback on how some of these tips helped or didn't help your PDF or Site.

Have a Good Weekend All.

Posted by Marc Elison on 09/18/09 at 2:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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17 September 2009

Google Video Sitemaps | What Are They and How to Create One

Online video is increasingly becoming an important element to consider from a search engine optimisation perspective. What if your company has just recently released a great promotional video on their web site and after a few of weeks of continuous monitoring, using the company's analytics software, you realise that the video has not been indexed by Google at all ? So how do you get that video indexed in Google and increase exposure to the online World ?

Photo by googlisti via Creative Commons

The simple solution for this is to create a Google Video XML Sitemap which makes use of the sitemap protocol with the addition of several video specific tags. Creating a Google Video Sitemap is an integral part of Video SEO that must not be ignored if you want your videos to be indexed and ideally rank for relevant keywords. In the Google Video Sitemap you can add information about each video such as title, description, rating, duration, category, expiration date and more. A Google Video Sitemap is a great way to alert Google that you have a video at a specific landing page.

Before we get to how to create a video sitemap there are a few important points to remember:

• The video sitemap must be less than 10MB uncompressed and contain less than 50,000 entries.

• The video sitemap must be a separate file (eg: companyvideos.xml) and cannot be incorporated into a standard sitemap.xml file.

• Make sure you are not blocking Googlebot from indexing the directory that contains the video file in the robots.txt.

• The video types that are compatible with video sitemaps (that are not streamed and can be accessed via http) are ; .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm and .flv.

• If your video gets indexed and is about a product it may not only appear within normal Google search results and Google Video Search but also Google Product Search.

• Your video does not have to be hosted on your web server (you could have your videos on YouTube) to create a Google Video Sitemap.

With the above points in mind, the first line in the video sitemap starts with an xml declaration:

The next step is to define the location of the landing page containing the video and the video location and video player location as follows:

<url>
<loc>http://www.company.com/videos/myfantasticcompanyvideo.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.company.com/awesomeseocompany.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.company.com/videoplayer.swf?video=awesomeseocompany</video:player_loc>

Then you can add further information about your video such as the thumbnail location, video title, description, rating and more:

<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.company.com/thumbnails/awesomeseocompany.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>X Company Product Video</video:title>
<video:description>How to use the X product from X Company. </video:description>

The below declarations are all optional whilst the previous declarations above are all required:

<video:rating>4.8</video:rating>
<video:view_count>248</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2009-09-13T15:41:35+06:00.</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-10-01T23:59:59+06:00.</video:expiration_date>

The <video:tag> is where you can indicate the relevant keywords for your video:

<video:tag>x company</video:tag>
<video:tag>x product</video:tag>
<video:category>X Company Product</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>

The duration of the video is declared in seconds:

<video:duration>600</video:duration>

Finally each video must have closing </video:video> and </url> tags.

</video:video>
</url>

Once all video locations have been added to the sitemap it closes with the following declaration:

</urlset>

Congratulations you're almost done! Just save this file as an xml file naming it something relevant but not sitemap.xml (as that is declared for the standard sitemap). The following steps just need to be applied to add your new Video Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

1. Simply login to Google Webmaster Tools using your Google account and expand the "Site Configuration" link on the Dashboard in the left navigation and click on the "Sitemaps" link.

2. Click on the "Submit a Sitemap" button.

3. Fill in the page name and extension of the video sitemap and click on the "Submit Sitemap" button.

Finito!! Now just monitor the progress of the indexing of the Sitemap to ensure that Google doesn't report any errors and if all is good you have now alerted Google to your video/s and they will be indexed more quickly and efficiently in future. Now that you know how to create a Google Video Sitemap it's time to go use your SEO skills and further optimise those video landing pages for when the search traffic starts rolling in.

Posted by Grant Hilton on 09/17/09 at 9:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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14 September 2009

SEO News

Once again our SEO analysts have been scouring the web to bring you some great informative posts in the world of search engine optimisation, search and online marketing in general. This week's roundups includes; How To Integrate SEO Into Your Business, 5 SEO Tips For Maximising Facebook Visibility, How Rapid Growth in Mobile Technology & HTML 5 will Impact Video and Learn from your competition.

Photo by ben matthews via Creative Commons

SEOmoz-How To Integrate SEO Into Your Business

• if you have an ecommerce website
- add friendly reminders (otherwise known as calls to action) to link to your site in your thank you emails
- Keep key phrase research in mind when naming both product categories and products themselves

• if you have a content website
- Motivate your content writers with analytics so that they get excited about writing content which gets lots of page views/SEO traffic

• if you have a physical presence
- Engage in the local community (get links)

• if you have UGC on your site
- Build your systems in such a way that the data inputs from your users structure your data in an SEO friendly way
- Ensure that your community manager understands the importance of link building and SEO in general

• if you have a PR agency
- Ensure that the PR they're generating gets you links
- If your PR agency isn't focused on getting you links then make sure someone follows up with any places which mention you but don't link

• if you are doing PPC or conversion rate optimisation
- Don't leave your PPC or CRO guys locked up in a dark room separate to your SEO team, instead make sure they talk to each other

5 SEO Tips For Maximising Facebook Visibility

1. Search results continue to include people's profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications.
2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.
3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes.
4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimised for important keywords, especially the content's title tag.
5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select "everyone" in privacy settings > search.

ReelSEO-How Rapid Growth in Mobile Technology & HTML 5 will Impact Video

• Back in February, Cisco released its Visual Networking Index, which forecasts that mobile traffic will reach over an Exabyte per month by 2012-2013.

• To help put that in perspective, the online web hit the Exabyte milestone in 2004, more than 30 years after the first email was sent.

• However, the mobile web will reach this milestone only 18 years after the first text message was sent.

• Michael Boland (Program Director of Mobile Local Media for The Kelsey Group) says there are mobile browsers supporting HTML 5 already such as the latest Safari browser on the iPhone. Because HTML 5 allows you to pull in location directly into the browser, it's opening up capabilities that only native apps had previously. He's essentially hinting that "apps" on mobile devices might be made obsolete by the use of HTML 5; you won't need to download apps, because they'll be browser based.

Search Engine Journal-Learn from your competition

The article discusses what factors you should analyse on your competitor's websites. This was a rather long post so the key points taken from the article.

On-Site Competitive Intelligence:

• Site URL Structure: tracking the URL structure and file naming structure of your competitors, you can determine the best route to gain a competitive advantage over other companies

• Site Development & Coding Structure: Which language is the site coded in? Are there any conflicts in programming language or separate Ips?

• Use of Analytics: Is the competitor tracking user behaviour and referrals via GA, Hitbot, and Omniture? Looking into their analytics systems help give an idea of how much information they are capturing from their visitors and how advanced their internal tracking is which may define how advanced their SEO team is.

• Directory files and URL structure of listings pages: This will be used to determine which techniques these competitors are using for their individual pages, their content, meta and URL structure and how these reflect in the Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings.

• Page Title and Meta Title Review: Page titles are one of the most influential HTML elements used in an optimisation campaign. Since the optimisation of this variable is connected to rankings and actual links in the SERPs.

• Navigational System Review: Search engine spider, or seek out new content based on the links they find to resources on a page. Navigation systems are the most consistent manner for building internal link popularity.

• Broken links: If a site has broken links, broken files or list non-existent pages then Google will lower the ranking of that site because the engine believes that the site is under construction.

• HTML Code validity: using the w3c validation tools your competitors web sites have been reviewed. This allows the engines to promote sites that deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Run each site through the validation tool and reported back the number of errors noted

• Design & SEO: Similar to the internal navigational structure, the use of HTML elements are preferred over others for SEO purposes

Off-site Competitive SEO Elements:

• Local listings: Determine the local SEO listings that your competition has made on Yahoo Local, Citypages, BOTW local, MSN Live and other local search engines or local profiles. These differ from the results shown in organic web search sometimes and can be an indicator of local seo techniques used.

• Number of inbound links: Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, report on the number of inbound links to each of the analysed web sites. As a rule, the more links and the more relevancy - the better. Search Engines like Google use inbound links to help shape the overall level of authority of a website.

• Linkbait or Viral Marketing: How are these competitors building links? Are they running link baiting programs and actively having articles submitted to Digg & StumbleUpon?

• Social Media: Do they actively use social media to market their business? Does their company have a Wikipedia page? How do they rank for their own brand name and are social profiles served in these results? Have they even secured their brand across all social networks? Do they distribute online video? This research will help you determine a social media plan and also identify competitive advantages that you can use to your advantage.

• Blogging: Do these companies blog and who is doing their blogging? Are the blogs on a subdomain, a whole other website or in an internal directory file? How often do they post? How many subscribers will they have? This information will assist you construct your blogging strategy and possibly unearth some ideas.

• Paid Link Search: It is difficult to say with certainty that an inbound link has been purchased. There are however signs where common systems like Paid Directories and Link Networks are used on a site. Research of inbound, paid links to your competitors from sidebars, ads on newspaper sites or bad paid linking in footer links may give you some insight as to which anchors they are targeting.

• Site Visits & Traffic: Using a mix of data from Alexa, Compete and other web traffic estimate tools, estimate the traffic of the competitors in terms of visitors, time spent on site, top referrals and other information driven by third party tools.

• Page Rank: Compile a list of competitive metrics including Google PR, SEOMoz PageStrength, Deliciious bookmarks, StumbleUpon, page indexing etc.

Hope you enjoyed the fortnightly SEO recap, have a good and productive week.

Posted by Marc Elison on 09/14/09 at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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11 September 2009

If House was an SEO

I love soccer, I really do, I play as much as I can, normally about 3 times a week. On Saturday I was playing and managed to completely mangle my foot (I would post a picture but I don't want to scare away what loyal readers we have). So I hobbled into work the other day [after a full 3 days of not pitching up might I just add - Kate] with my pimp cane [it is not cool, sorry to burst your bubble... - Kate] and was quickly dubbed House. It could be the designer stubble, the arrogance, the complete and utter narcissism or the fact that I call people numbers but it's probably the cane and the limp. It got me thinking, if House was an SEO, what would he be like?

Photo by LiGado em Série's via Creative Commons

House is a maverick, a brilliant physician and a master at diagnosis, he is also slightly mentally unstable and a loner. His methods are often unconventional and put him at odds with his superiors and co-workers and his character has many similarities to Sherlock Holmes. With all these bizarre character traits what kind of SEO would he be?

Well first of all I reckon house would be a freelancer, his loner status and inability to play nice with others would mean this would be his most productive role. House only takes cases which are interesting to him and being as good as he is, means he could cherry pick his clients and only take the interesting cases. House would be a master at diagnosing why a site is not ranking or why traffic is on the downturn. However, House is very abrasive and probably would do what he thinks is best with no regard to what his current employer/designer/marketing department wants, I could see him quoting Henry Ford when he said "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse". I could see House getting up at an SMX site clinic and not only completely ripping apart the site on view but also his fellow panel members (be interesting to see how Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin would respond to that). [I think even mighty Matt would just wanna grab an autograph! - Kate]

In the TV series House is addicted to Vicodin, in my quasi world with House as an SEO he would be addicted to Redbull staying up all night long analysing hundreds of thousands of lines of codes to see why his client's site is doing badly [Sounds like the BCA analysts - Kate]. He would also come up with new, inventive and innovative search engine optimisation techniques to boost the sites under his control [thats more like the BCA search managers... - Kate]. House is one of those people who are missing the brain-mouth filter and it would be a joy to see him in conversation with a bluechip CEO saying exactly what he thinks of the current online marketing activities.

I think House would be one engaging, entertaining, brilliant and infuriating exponent of SEO and would love to see someone of his ilk actually in the SEO world, do you know of any House-esque characters in the online world ?

Have a good weekend all.

Posted by Marc Elison on 09/11/09 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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9 September 2009

Google Caffeine

Every time Google does something on even the smallest scale a big brouhaha is normally made by all and sundry, when Gmail went down last week even for even a few hours, countless trees were sacrificed in order to bring the news that even the infallible Google could still hiccup. When Google announced a 'change under the hood' of their market share leading search engine, there was the requisite incredulous response, so without further adieu (or any more fluff) I give you our take on Google Caffeine.

Photo by limaoscarjuliet via Creative Commons

According to the official Google Webmaster Blog, Caffeine is the first step in an iterative process that Google will use to take search into another evolution in terms of index size, indexing speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness. Is this a response to Bing or as Google says simply the next stage in a project Google has been working on for months? Whatever the answer to that question is, there are some substantial differences between the regular Google search and Google Caffeine.

Speed. In today's instant gratification world where speed is everything, the already lightening fast Google has been improved by Google Caffeine. Most Google Caffeine searches take about half the amount of time to process than the regular Google search. This change in milliseconds might not seem like a big deal however a research paper authored by Google, suggests that web search latency of 100 to 400 ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%. When you are talking about many millions of searches every day, this becomes a big deal.

The Caffeine Google index seems to be much bigger that the regular search index, there could be many contributing factors here. Maybe the Google spider has been re-engineered to be more efficient and find more content. Another reason could be that Google Caffeine has measures implemented within it to make real-time search more visible and relevant, so more items like tweets, friendfeed info and more are being indexed by Google. This means the big G can be on the forefront of breaking news and present this news to its searchers. With Google Caffeine, Twitter accounts seem to be ranking much higher than in its regular search results. Here is an example to show the increase in the size of the index.

Preliminary research indicates more pages in the index at a high level but more emphasis as the search phrase lengthens. A strange things happens with really long phrases though, when a really long phrase is entered ( 6 words or more ) the index for that search results seems to be bigger than the regular Google index, i am a little stumped by this one, any genius PHD's out there care to venture an explanation? So more options when you are searching a broad subject are offered while the focus narrows when you conduct longtail searches (for the most part).

So with Matt Cutts saying "Biggest update since the Big Daddy update in 2006" and "It is the re-architecturing of the Google indexing system" what SEO considerations should we afford to Google Caffeine right now? Nothing. Dont look at me with that shock and horror in your eyes you didn't let me finish, nothing right now. Google Caffeine is just a test, it's a demonstration that Google is still striving to be the best in search while also asking our feedback in the process. There are however a few elements from Google Caffeine that will be melded into the regular Google search algorithm sooner rather than later, these elements are:

• Long tail searches will get increased accuracy and relevance

• Search results including social media pages will increase

• Search results which include breaking news from real time engine i.e. twitter, friendfeed etc occurring for more queries

• Query deserves freshness becoming more of a ranking factor.

Personally I think alot of the improvements made by Google Caffeine have already been implemented in the Google algorithm and the engineers are just waiting for the say so from the higher powers to turn up that dial. Whatever the case is, Google caffeine shows a commitment by Google to be continually innovating, never resting on their laurels and striving to be the best, no matter how popular they currently are.

P.S we are conducting some small internal tests with Google Caffeine and will let you know the results once the tests are completed.

Posted by Marc Elison on 09/ 9/09 at 2:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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8 September 2009

How to monetise great content

One of the things I love about working at Bruce Clay Australia is the fact that the organisation really does foster an entrepreneurial spirit amongst its employees. Several of the great people (Mr Awesome, Google Gal, War Hammer etc) I work with have their own ventures that they work on during their own time and I am no different. I have an editorial content site (I would never shamelessly plug a link, mainly because the site isn't ready) but as with all great content the clincher is monetising it. An interesting thought occurred to me; if I am having trouble figuring it out, some of you might also, so I did a bit of research and here are some of the best methods I came up with for monetising a great content website.

Photo by depone via Creative Commons

Advertising and affiliates

This can be a big winner especially if you have a great site/blog whose focus is around high paying keywords (insurance, loans etc). However it is also the most likely method that will irritate your visitors to the point that they leave your site. Like everything in life, moderation is key; pick and choose your advertising and affiliates by doing some research and select only those with the best reputations and best creative's; Google Adsense is not the be all and end all. Then do some research into the best practices for ad placement and once again be prudent - dont overload your visitors with massive, kitschy ads or you will see an alarming slide in visitor numbers. Personally I would use affiliates if your destination is at the very end of the consumer buying process i.e. just before the person is ready to purchase a product, this will enhance conversions and ultimately your profits. I generally use a CPC model as, unless you are getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, a CPM model will make you less than peanuts. The main thing to keep in mind is that the products you advertise needs to have a pretty strong tie-in with the content on your site.

Ebooks

Ebooks are flying high at the moment with their popularity soaring. They are a great way of making some money if you have loads of great content. Their disadvantage is the initial time and effort that goes into creating the ebook. You will have to spend countless hours creating original useful content, designing an ebook cover and creating a sales page. Some people become daunted by the amount of work ahead of them but if you can do it correctly and your ebook starts to sell like hotcakes then passive income dreamland is just around the corner. One last caveat here is that if you are going to sell your ebook it has to be not good but brilliant or word will surely get out that you have a less than fantastic product and sales will be no more. Another interesting way of selling an ebook I heard about recently is burning it to a CD and selling it on eBay and Amazon; I would use this method if you are finding it difficult to get exposure for your selling page.

3 September 2009

Google Wave

Yesterday, I went to the Fourth Estate Domain to see Lars Rasmussen being interviewed by Mike Walsh about Google Wave.

For those who haven't heard of it yet, Google Wave is a communication and collaboration tool that has been developed in Sydney, Australia by the team led by the brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, co-creators of Google Maps.

History
The initial idea behind Google Wave is to replace the ageing e-mail system, which was invented in 1961 at the MIT, even before the invention of the Internet. After four decades, it was about time someone came up with a way of rethinking this technologic dinosaur! So after Lars and Jens had finished developing Google Maps, Jens came up with the idea of re-inventing the way people communicate and collaborate on the web.

So, what is Google Wave? Well, according to Lars, "it stands in the middle of a triangle between e-mails, instant messaging and collaboration tools". E-mail really is the transposition of the mail in an electronic version: Writing to a recipient, a standard e-mail conversation is made of multiple e-mails being exchanged between multiple recipients.

In contrast, Google Wave lives in the clouds, at the centre of the conversation. The participants are being invited to participate, exchange files and more, allowing Wave users to centralise the collaboration and communication processes into one place, therefore saving time, and ensuring full tracking and recording of the collaboration.

So in summary, this is how Google Wave looks like: The first narrow column on the left hand side contains the navigation and the Contact list, the second column is the Inbox, listing all the waves (communication threads), and the column on the right hand side is displaying the active Wave. It really doesn't look that different your standard e-mail account.

Obviously, there is a reason why I went to see Lars talking the other night, which is honestly, I am a big fan of this project, and here is why:

Decision Making
Google Wave can potentially significantly improve the decision making process at any level, be it with your friends to decide which movies to go and watch like in the Google I/O example, or with your business partners, to efficiently arrive to a conclusion.

Document collaboration
Second, it can improve the collaboration process when working on documents. With Wave, many collaborators not only will be able to edit a document together simultaneously, but they will also be able to discuss it, and exchange other types of information like maps or meeting request, all within one wave. When collaborating on a project and exchanging multiple documents with multiple recipients, e-mails are really getting confusing these days. Obviously, cloud computing solutions such as the famous Google Apps suite or Microsoft Office online allow us to collaborate efficiently on documents, but each tool is imitated to its application.

Future development
Finally, what I think is the most interesting part of Google Wave is its growth potential and future development. It is an open-source protocol in which everyone can participate, constantly improving it, and potentially applying it to multiple uses, using the Wave API.

However, this project is still under development, and even when it becomes fully operational for everyone to use it, some questions remain as to how this new Google project will be like:

Project Scale
There are 1.9 billion e-mail users out there, and having them adopt this new protocol is a very very ambitious project, and honestly, only a few companies could dare trying to implement such a large scale project. On a company perspective, taking into consideration that some still have issues migrating from Windows 95 these days, migrating the entire communication system will take time.

Resistance to change
As a direct consequence of the previous point, and like Lars admitted: Google Wave requires some practice. Users might not have the patience to adopt this new protocol. Companies might be reluctant to migrate to Wave, considering the cost of training and implementation compared to the potential time saving and efficiency benefits resulting from its adoption.

Wave - E-mails compatibility
Realistically, it seems difficult for an organisation or individual person to adopt Google Wave without being able to use it to communicate both with e-mail and Wave users. Lars mentioned that some developers might be working on this, but nothing official has been announced yet.

Previous Google communication projects
Mike Walsh joked about this point with a point of sarcasm when he mentioned that the previous communication projects initiated by Google such as Google Talk and Orkut have not exactly been major successes. So what to expect from such an ambitious project?
Realistic or not, this project is really exciting, if there is one company that can revolutionise the 60+ years old e-mail technology, Google is to me the best candidate.

Monetisation
We can't expect from Google to develop such a project without finding a good way of making profits out of it, which is fair enough, but how?
Will Google place targeted sponsored ads like it does on Gmail? If this is the case, it will only be able to do so for their Google Wave interface.
What about the applications or extensions of Google Wave? Are they going to be free, like the Firefox extensions, or will it become a new iTunes-like market place with free, free-limited, and paid apps? Lars briefly mentioned paid applications based on the wave protocol; let's just hope that this will not be the case for all of them.
For those of you who are interested about learning more about the Google Wave project, here is the Google I/O one hour presentation:

Alternatively, the 10 minutes abridged version of the same conference:

For those of you who, like me, haven't got a Wave account yet, you can request an account on the Google Wave sign up page, and if you are willing to get involved and contribute to the wave project, you can request a Google Wave developer account. Also, dear developers, if you wish to crack your head a little (or a lot) on this, you can visit http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/.
Google announced the release of new accounts on September 30th, and Lars mentioned this release will be split even between standard users and companies with existing Google Apps accounts. So Google, if you don't mind, swing a wave account my way? Thanks.

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Posted by Martin Orliac on 09/ 3/09 at 3:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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