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4 February 2010

SEO Recap January 2010

Posted by Marc Elison

Welcome to the first Bruce Clay SEO recap of 2010. In the recap, we explore our analysts' favourite news and blog posts for the past fortnight. This week includes some updates of Google on Mobile phones, the launch of the SEOmoz Open Site Explorer, the moving of Google Social search to beta from labs and events listings with rich snippets.

Photo by boite-en-valise via Creative Commons

Optimised Search Suggestions for mobile using your location

This feature (available in the US and on Android powered & iPhones only at the moment) will optimise search suggestions from Google depending on your position.

From the Google Mobile Blog "when users in the Boston metro area begin typing "Muse", suggestions such as "museum of science boston" and "museum of fine arts boston" are provided because people near Boston frequently look for these very popular museums. On the other hand, users in San Francisco who begin their query with "Muse" will see suggestions for museums in the San Francisco area."

New Click to Call Phone Numbers in Mobile Ads

When you are browsing Google on your newest smartphone and see a PPC that might just answer your search query, there is a very simple way to connect with the advertiser. Just Click. You just click the number and your phone will automatically call the number listed.
Simple easy and effective, I really like this feature. What's more, the ads and phone numbers you see are based on your location.

So, if a store or restaurant has multiple locations, you'll be calling the nearest one. If you are an advertiser who wants to make use of this, check out the AdWords blog that introduces this feature.

SEOmoz launches Open Site Explorer

With the Microsoft and Yahoo search deal, rumours have been swirling that Yahoo may discontinue its popular link information tool. As result of this several alternatives have cropped up, the most recent being SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer.

Open Site Explorer provides a number of data points pulled from SEOmoz's Linkscape tool and its index of the web. It shows stats such as overall link counts and a count of domains that link to a URL, along with anchor text distribution and more. A helpful feature is the ability to compare two domains side by side.

Google Social Search now in beta

Google's Social Search technology is finally ready for the big time, with the company officially moving it from Google Labs to a 'beta' option within the main search system. Google Social search brings in relevant content from users' social networking friends, if they have been posting content that matches the search terms used. The general idea is that people will find results that are from friends or their own trusted online sources will be more relevant to them personally than say, Wikipedia.

Rich Snippets for Events

The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in. These events will be shown just under the entry in the SERP's. The events markup is based on the hCalendar microformat

I Hope you enjoyed this fortnights search engine optimisation recap. More to come in two weeks time. Happy searching.

Posted by Marc Elison on 4 February 2010 at 2:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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5 November 2009

SEO News Update | 5 November

Posted by Marc Elison

Photo by See-ming Lee via Creative Commons in homage to the 40th birthday of Sesame Street

After a lengthy absence the SEO news roundup is back. Enjoy what our analysts thought were the most interesting and high value blog posts, news stories and general journalistic efforts over the past fortnight.

Explaining (Some of) Google's Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff

This is a pretty long and involved article based on correlation and causation with regard to data extracted from SEOmoz data, the main points are:

• Links are important, but naive link data can mislead. It seems wise to get more sophisticated with link analysis.

• No single metric can predict rankings (at least, not yet)

• H1s (and H2s-H4s) probably aren't very important places to use your keywords

• Alt attributes of images are probably pretty important places to use your keywords

• Keyword stuffing may be holding you back (particularly if you're outside the top 15 results and overusing it)

• Likewise, overdoing it with (not-so-great) links might be hurting you

What Makes a Link Worthy Post - Part 1

This blog post details the analysis SEOmoz have been carrying out with regard to what kind of SEOmoz posts garner the most links, views etc, this article focused on In Linking Domains (ILD). The main ideas to come out of this article are:

• Content is most important thing to a posts but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.

• By adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of ILDs by good percent.

• Posts with videos included will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.

• Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.

• Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.

• Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

Dive in HTML 5, what does it all mean.

I really thought this was a great article on improving the HTML 5 structure of a site. Not only does it give some great insights and tips on improving the HTML 5 but it does it all in laymen's terms, even an almost complete novice coder could follow this and learn heaps.

You Haz No Blog Comments? Here's the Fix!

• Lisa Barone discusses blog comments and says that they are "an important health indicator for your blog".

• She gives 7 reasons why your blog isn't receiving comments and how to fix it.

• You don't interact with commenter's - Lisa says the way to fix this is to respond to your audience (people that comment)

• No one wants to be first - Lisa says "seed comments to get the ball rolling"

• You make me register first - Lisa recommends getting rid of the registration process and makes it simple for users to engage your blog.

• Your blog isn't passionate and borders between press release and infomercial

• You know everything and don't seem interested in me - Lisa says don't be a know-it-all by only giving readers some of the information and encouraging them to contribute their ideas.

• You act like an arrogant....island - Don't act like your better than other people. Leave comments of other blogs, link out to good people, etc

• Your community scares me - Set ground rules and ensure commenter's are not bullying others.

Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

Google Analytics has added some new features:

• Engagement Goals - you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. There are also 2 new goal types that measure user engagement and branding success on your site by setting thresholds for Time On Site and Pages Per Visit.

• Expanded Mobile Reporting - Google Analytics now tracks traffic to mobile websites from all web-enabled devices. This occurs whether or not the device runs JavaScript! Not only can you track your mobile website, you can also track mobile apps to measure your mobile marketing efforts. This is all possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website (support is for PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites)

• Advanced Analysis Features - Advanced table filtering allows the filtering of rows in a table based on different metric conditions.

• Unique Visitor Metric - When creating a custom report you can now select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.

• Multiple Custom Variables - it's possible to define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not) and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section).

• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates

• Analytics Intelligence - provides automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.

• Custom Alerts - set alerts for Google to notify you by email when a certain condition is met.

The Web in 5 Years by Eric Schmidt

• Internet will be dominated by Chinese language and social media content

• Super fast bandwidth in real time

• "The great challenge of the age" will be how to rank real-time social content

• Today's teens are the model of how the web will work in 5 years - jump from app to app

• More capable technology

• Broadband well above 100MB in performance

• More video distribution

• Real time information

• More social media companies - behind Twitter and Facebook

I hope you enjoyed this week's search engine optimisation round-up, have a good Thursday everybody.

Posted by Marc Elison on 5 November 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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14 September 2009

SEO News

Posted by Marc Elison

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 14 September 2009 at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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31 August 2009

SEO Recap | 31 August 2009

Posted by Marc Elison

Welcome to the fortnightly Bruce Clay Australia SEO/SEM/all things search related roundup. In this roundup we all share what we think are the coolest and least boring blog posts, stories etc that we can find on the web. This week there was absolutely no scraping the bottom of the bucket, fascinating topics included; Facebook Lite, 10 Common SEO Mistakes, How To Construct Rational Landing Page Tests, What's Your Online Video SEO Reputation Worth and The 10 Oldest Currently Registered .COM Domains.

Facebook Lite

Facebook has begun tests on a new service tailored for mobiles and narrowband internet connections. It's a cut down version of Facebook and it will be on trial in India and in the future it will be tested in China and Russia. It will be a faster, simpler version similar to the Facebook experience you get on a mobile phone. In developing countries, where the infrastructure for broadband is limited, mobile phones are emerging as the dominant way for the internet to develop. A cut-down version of Facebook that loads and runs effectively on a mobile platform would enable the firm to expand into these markets.

10 Common SEO Mistakes

• Not Starting Early Enough

• Picking a Poor Content Management System

• Use Crawler Unfriendly Development Methods

• Duplicate Content Pages

• No Canonical Redirect

• Pseudo Duplicate Content-e.g. E-commerce

• Thin Content Pages

• Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text

• Not Investing in Site Promotion

How To Construct Rational Landing Page Tests

• Different audiences, markets, brands, and campaigns have different characteristics

• All tests are not equal: different kinds of tests reveal different kinds of insights

• All confounding variables are not equal: some are more controllable, some have more influence.

• Treat each segment as its own experimental space--look for learning within a segment.

• Don't try to create "one page to rule them all"--pages are cheap; customers are valuable.

• Iteratively narrow your segments as long as doing so produces ROI--the digital world often rewards deep segmentation.

What's Your Online Video SEO Reputation Worth?

Not paying attention to what's going on with your brand, especially with online video, can give you more than just bad PR; in some cases, it can also cause huge financial losses. E.g.: the "United Breaks Guitars" YouTube video caused United Airlines' stock price to plunge 10% from all the bad PR that followed, costing their shareholders a whopping $180 million.

Video SEO reputation management tips:

• Find out what popular sites show in your target SERPs

• Use a monitoring tool - e.g.: Google Alerts, check out the web-based tools from The Search Monitor and Reputation Defender

• Monitor everyone directly related to, or directly competing with, your business.

• If you respond, then respond as positively as you can.

• If you respond, make your response where the original video audience can see it.

• If you respond with a lawsuit, be prepared for it to go public.

• Don't fake it, or you could be fined and prosecuted!

• Don't forget the Video SEO strategy! - The further down you bump the problem links, the less attention they get.

The 10 Oldest Currently Registered .COM Domains

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

I hope you enjoyed this recap and that it gave you some insight into what is going on in the search engine optimisation world for the past week.

Posted by Marc Elison on 31 August 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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5 August 2009

SEO Recap-5 August

Posted by Marc Elison

This SEO recap centers around the Yahoo and Microsoft merger as well as some interesting observations from Rand Fishkin about what makes an SEO.

Photo by Edgeworks Limited via Creative Commons

Why Buy The Milk When You Can Get the Cow for Free?

Aaron Wall discusses the Microsoft & Yahoo deal. In terms of SEO he raises the following questions. What happens to:

1. the Yahoo Directory?
2. Yahoo link data (site explorer)?
3. Yahoo SearchMonkey & BOSS?
4. Yahoo's paid inclusion?

There is the possibility that all will disappear!

Only 1/6th of Online Video Marketing is about Advertising

The business use for Online Video consists of at least 6 elements: Advertising, Branding, Communication, eLearning / Training, Promotion and Social Media. As the title states only one sixth of online video is used for advertising.

A recent study conducted by Sally Cole, Marketing Director for Google's DoubleClick, in conjunction with Dynamic Logic MarketNorms shows that video with rich media builds brand online better than Flash.

Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO

• SEO for Bing is Worth Your Optimisation Effort-15% of search market share is worth the optimisation effort

• We May Lose Yahoo! Link Data-Microsoft killed their link calculator, might do the same with yahoo

• PPC Consolidation-Adwords not the only PPC player on the block anymore, Rand suspects more people will buy ads from MSN AdCenter, which is likely to increase ad relevancy, quality and competition

• Bing's Webmaster Tools Are Important

• Yahoo! & Bing Local Become More Essential

• Bing Will Get more Spam-loopholes open in Bing that spammers will find

• Bing Will Get Lots more Data

• Important Yahoo! Properties May Disappear

• Yahoo! Will Become a More Powerful Content Competitor

What Makes an SEO

Rand sees three ways a professional can be categorized and assigned - technical, Self constructed and peer validated.

Technical: An SEO is one who practices search engine optimisation.
Self-Constructed: I practice search engine optimisation as a significant portion of the professional work I undertake and am, therefore, an SEO.
Peer Validated: A community of peers in the SEO field has recognized this individual's achievement and views them as qualified for the title.

Rand goes onto say he would not classify someone as a SEO unless they have these 3
Qualities:

• Knowledgeable in the Basics of Search Engine Operations (not just SEO, but the fundamentals of how search engines work)
• Actively Practicing SEO by Influencing Change to Websites & Pages and Measuring the Impact
• Consistently Formulating & Testing Theories About Metrics/Variables that Influence Search Engine Results

Posted by Marc Elison on 5 August 2009 at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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20 July 2009

Search Engine Optimisation-Recap 20 July 2009

Posted by Marc Elison

Not too much pure SEO in this week's recap, but for all those lovers of figures, today's recap will be a smorgasbord of delightful information. This is part 1 of the recap; part 2 will follow later in the week.

Social Media Statistics

Photo by $ydney via Creative Commons

Some great statistics from this article that show the growth and activity of many of the most popular social media sites on the web right now. Some of the most illuminating stats were:

• Twitter grew a massive 1,928 percent in the US from June '08 to June '09, now reaching a total of 21 million monthly unique visitors.
• Facebook had 87.3 million unique visitors in June.
• MySpace leads all social media sites (excluding YouTube) in unique video viewers, with 12.9 million.
• Facebook is quickly growing its video reach - from 2.4 million unique viewers in June '08 to 12 million in June '09.
• Twitter users spent an average of 31 minutes, 17 seconds on the site in June. This excludes users of clients like TweetDeck.

Finding and Using Niche Blogs

This article had some great ideas in terms of why you want to find niche blogs; how to find niche blogs, how should you target the niche blogs and what you should do once you have located a niche blog that you want to interact with.

The main takeaways from this blog post is that the reason you want to find and use niche blogs is in order to get links, receive traffic and benefit from the niche blogger's expertise on the subject matter.

There is a good list and process for finding these niche blogs and an idea of what to do, once you have located the blogs.

Mobile Media Consumption

Some great mobile consumption habits were listed here. It was the result of a Universal McCann-AOL study. Listed below are the important statistics from the study:

Why/where they use mobile:

• 95% of respondents said they used mobile media to fill downtime
• 82% use it at work
• 81% while shopping
• 80% at home
• 65% while commuting to work

Content/activities:

• 73% use maps and directions
• 55% said they participated in social networking or sought out restaurant and movie listings or reviews
• 44% read/consume national news and information

The cross platform platform:

• 77% said they use mobile and TV at the same time (does this replace the laptop?)
• 55% of mobile users follow brands across multiple media
• 56% said they have been driven to mobile from other media
• 42% said they have been driven from mobile to other media

Acceptance of advertising:

• 38% of respondents said they had taken action based on mobile ads
• Just under 30% said mobile ads had led them to share information
• 22% said mobile ads had influenced a purchase decision

Part 2 of the Search Engine Optimisation recap will follow later on the week.

Posted by Marc Elison on 20 July 2009 at 4:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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10 July 2009

AIMIA Connect 2009 Recap-Part 3

Posted by Marc Elison

This is the 3rd and final part of the AIMIA 2009 Connect Workshop

Managing Your Online Presence and Online Opportunity Conversion

Peter Crowe, CEO

Corvus Consulting

Steve Beger Photography (Beger.com Productions) in Homage to Nikola Tesla

The question Peter asks to start off his presentation is how to leverage the consumer uptake in location-based services?

Why would you bother with this?

• Customers are buying local
• Customers are supporting local
• Customers are engaging with local media
• Local customers deliver higher profits

Local search is growing, this is because more people are searching for local listings in contrast to broad, generic searches. The search engines are trying to leverage that fact, evidence of this is the '10 pack that Google offers', that even appears for some searches that don't contain any local information. The 10 pack occupies key real estate and search engines are increasingly aware of your location.

Three main players in the local landscape, namely: Yellow Pages, Google and True Local. In order to get listed correctly several things need to be done:

• Make sure all your locations are listed with the Yellow Pages / Google / True Local
• Identify and update any relevant vertical directories
• Create a content page for every branch location on your website
• Develop an inbound link strategy around the content page / location
• Don't forget regions. E.g. 'Inner West', 'North Shore'
• Standardise your location data

The Power of Ratings & Reviews

• 84 percent of Americans say online customer evaluations have an influence on their decision to purchase a product or service
• 66 percent of respondents checked some type of online review forum when looking to purchase a particular brand of product or service.
• 50 percent relied on online reviews in the first stage of their buying cycle.
• Ask your known happy customers for feedback and give incentives

The important lesson I took away from this presentation was the vital importance of local search and how it impacts on both the quality and amount of visitors you get to your site. You need to dedicate resources in order to make sure your local listings are accurate and appear in the Google 10 box for the search phrases you are targeting.

Cracking the Quantum Code

Tim Cheng, Digital Creative Director

Euro RSCG Australia

Euro RSCG needed to create a promotional tie-in with the 007 movie, Quantum of Solace, generate deep engagement with the Sony Australia brand and to position Sony as a market leader in the consumer electronics category. The challenge was to recreate a 'best ever' promotion by driving double-digit incremental volume. The target market was:

• Active technophiles
• Early adopters of new technology and influence the opinions of their less tech-savvy friends
• The target market also enjoys high-involvement entertainment experiences
• James Bond fans

The strategy was to recruit thousands of ordinary people as "spies" and to use Sony products in order to save MI6 agent, Constance Newlove, crack a mysterious code, save the world and win untold riches and SONY/007 prizes in doing so. To live the intriguing double life of a secret service agent, players scanned QR codes to receive video mission briefings on their mobile phones.

Their missions took place on mobile, online, and in the real world. Players collaborated (and competed) using social networking platforms including blogs, forums and Facebook. The final mission was a live event at Sony's flagship store in Sydney.

The campaign was a massive success has achieved the following milestones:

• Over 8,000 unique mobile players
• Over 23,500 mobile views from 35 countries
• Over 10,000 You Tube views
• Generated total sales valued at 33% over target
• Engaged individual customer registrations measured at 42% over target

Learning's included; the intelligence of communities far exceeds that of one person, updates need to be made in real time to keep the game organic and fluid, create multiple entry points, players are part of the game and finally everyone wants to be Bond . A very well presented module supported by a great video supporting the case study, thoroughly enjoyable.

Like your high school librarian

Julian Cole, Digital Strategist

The Population

Why use case studies to convince people to use social media:

• Case studies build confidence
• Australian case studies build even more confidence
• They also help stimulate new ideas

FMCG Case study

• Listerine-Listerine earlier in the year had an academic report linking the product to cancer, Listerine wanted to find out the real impact of the report.
• KFC-they set up a Facebook page for their Australian audience, they amassed over 20,000 fans in 1 week from a Cayan burger promotion. Use a promotional kick-start to get this rolling.

Fashion Case Study

• For the release of the new Dosh wallets range, they targeted a number of influential blogs, they managed to get presence on many style blogs and they achieved this by getting straight to the point with publishers.
• Billabong Lil Weeds-aligned with stab magazine to create a talent scout community, much better results than MySpace.

Television Case Study

• Needed to get people interested and engaged in the second season of Football Superstars, so they created a Facebook fan page with 3000+ fans, in summary, reality TV is perfect for social media.
• Last Ride-director set up a blog talking about the production of the movie, this gave an insight into creating a film, this worked as the blog targeted passionate people.

The importance of case studies was the main take away from Julian's presentation. If a case study is researched thoroughly and well written it can prove to be a valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of any company. The information Julian shared from the case studies was very fascinating and showed how social media can work across a wide variety of industries.

I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, it had a little bit of everything, the vast majority of the presentations were well thought out and delivered with much enthusiasm and gusto. Kudos must also go to AIMIA for hosting an event that ran like clockwork and from what I can tell was very well received. This was a digital conference and being in the search industry I would have liked to have seen some more emphasis on search engine optimisation, let's hope next year SEO gets its own dedicated session

Have a good weekend everyone

Posted by Marc Elison on 10 July 2009 at 3:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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9 July 2009

AIMIA Connect 2009-Part 2

Posted by Marc Elison

This is part 2 of the recap of AIMIA Connect 2009

Future of digital advertising

Mike Williams, Interactive Advertising Manager

MCN Connect

Photo by earcos via Creative Commons

Online technology is becoming very fragmented and user media consumption behaviour is changing from year to year, offering many different opportunities to advertise on a multitude of mediums.

Some interesting online video facts:

• UK Internet traffic to video websites up to 40.7% in a year and 1 in 35 Internet visits is to a dedicated video site
• In Australia, video viewing time on PCs has increased from 2.5 hours/week in 2007 to 4.6 hours in 2008
• In the US in 2008 99% of video viewing was done through the TV; YouTube, Hulu, iPhone and all other web and mobile phone media combined accounted for less than 1% of total video viewing [Amazing! - Kate]
• In 1995, there were 225 shows across British television that delivered audiences of more than 15 million. By 2005 there was none, this shows the extreme fragmentation taking place.

The new mantra is create once, publish often. This should be done through interactive TV advertising, which drives sales leads and can be used as a brand building activity. Enhanced TV can offer the viewer interesting tips and facts whilst still watching the shows. Personal Digital Recorders (PDRs) change the TV landscapes and does not ( as is the common view) eliminate TV ads, in fact, when a household obtains a PDR, television watched within the household is increased by 17%, in essence, 4% more live ads are shown . PDR's allow video on demand advertising, which entails reaching people when they are interested.

Addressable ads are the next frontier where ads can be tailored to the market, i.e. dog food ads to households with dogs. When TV + online ads are used together, the average uplift across all brand metrics for all tested categories was 18%. Purchase consideration was raised an average of 21% points, by exposure to both TV + online ads.
In summary, measurement and accountability will become vital with new measurement tools and techniques becoming available. Let the idea lead the medium while the same rules apply - content is still king. Need to advertise to where the eyeballs are and where the opportunity exists to make ads more targeted and more accountable.

A New approach to online news

Richard Slatter, GM

Wotnews.com.au

Richard starts his talk about the different approach to news that wotnews.com.au takes and how they won the AIMIA news and reference prize. They were the complete underdog and managed to come out on top. There is a shift going on within the news industry.

Wotnews.com.au is a news search engine that uses semantic search to analyse aggregate and organise the news. They are expanding into the UK and the US. News comes from so many diverse sources and their mandate is to try to bring the relevant news to the right audience.

Print media is on the decline, advertising and audiences are connecting elsewhere; traditional publishers no longer own the agenda. Hyper local news is now a possibility where you can get news on a neighbourhood based level. Citizen journalism on sites such as topix is experiencing a massive growth. Wotnews mines the news for business intelligence to track, monitor and understand what is going on in the world today. [The citizen journalism website on youtube is really cool too, check it out if you have not already - Kate]

In summary, people are reading more news than ever before, systems are consuming more news than ever while people are interacting with the news more than ever before. Rapid media innovation is everywhere and media organisations are being forced to innovate and improve.

A global and local view of the online video and internet broadcasting industry

Nick Bolton, Head of Sales & Marketing

Viocorp

3 billion videos are watched online every day, in 1 minute you can learn so much more from video than you can from a picture and text. The average US home will consume over 1 terabyte of digital content per month by 2010. This is because every plasma TV is the US is sold with Ethernet and internet connections and as a result of this newspapers are in big trouble, 2 major cities in the US already don't have a major newspaper.

4 different on-line video business models

1. Free-You tube
Free to view, advertising supported, its content is generally short, it's tough to monetise and control.

2. Corporate-Viocorp, governments etc
Content viewers won't pay for this content, content owners will pay to have content delivered, mostly corporate, governments and sports clubs are involved in this, very good for brand building.

3. Premium-Sydney Opera House
Niche content, content is more easily monetised i.e. viewers are prepared to pay for content.

4. Broadcasters-ABC, Seven etc
Multiple revenue sources, probably a traditional broadcast model sitting behind this.

Viocorp has had previous success with various clients, using video to reach millions of people on the web, the clients profiled were:

• Tourism Queensland
• Palm Sunday Mass
• QBE
• CyclingMasters.tv
• Obama's inauguration
• March Madness

Hulu, BBC, ABC and Facebook are the current leaders in this field. The future is HD, however bandwidth and processing power are major issues. Main tech landscape is dominated by Adobe, Microsoft, Akami and Boxee. Challenges are infrastructure, behavioural and cultural.

Photo by William Hook via Creative Commons

EA Mobile Case study

Anton Sher, Director

Front Foot Media

Front Foot has successfully created and managed some of the most successful mobile content products and services in Australia. Front Foot's mobile technology is featured in the Australian Technology Showcase. The case study that Anton presented was regarding the relationship between Front Foot and the electronic game maker Electronic Arts.

Front Foot had several objectives while working with EA, including:

• Direct‐to‐consumer destination
• Customer insight & relationship
• Integrate with other sales and marketing departments
• Focus on mass‐market mobile handsets
• Generate revenue

To reach these objectives several elements of the gaming market needed to be understood including:

• What do we already know?
• What do we want to know?
• Would existing and new customers use it?
• Would we use it?

A complete mobile solution was developed and included the following elements:

• Content management
• Content vending
• Mobile payments
• Integration across EA business
• Reporting

It seems the close relationship that was formed between Front foot an EA resulted in a solid and effective product that was marketed, sold and backed up with expertise and ultimately garnered success.

Mobile - More Consumers, more Response

Jennifer Wilson, Chair

AIMIA Mobile industry Group

Some great stats were announced by Jennifer, many of these figures are taken from industry reports while some were best guesses from some very smart people:

• 23.2m mobile handsets in Australia (111.4% penetration)
• 3G handsets in Australia - est. 9m
• 30m iPhone sold world-wide (25m 3G)
• iPhone represents about 1.5% of all handsets Worldwide
• 650,000 iPhones in Australia
• Mobile internet use (Australia) : 5m active monthly users
• Telstra 2.3m; Optus 0.6m; Vodafone 0.5m; Hutchison/3 Mobile 1.6m

Key reasons to go mobile:

• Responded to very quickly (96% SMS read in <20 mins)
• On 24 x 7, nearby and accessed often
• Response to mobile advertising incredible:
• 3% - 7% response rate
• 10% - 20% conversation rate
• 6 times the ROI on mobile compared to other forms

Audience Measurement:

• On TV, the total audience data that can be captured is 1%
• On the web, the audience data that can be captured is 10%
• On mobile, the audience data that can be captured is 90%

If you are a brand:

• Mobile is a consumer touch point, not just an advertising or marketing channel
• Consumers will expect to transact through this channel

If you are a marketer:

• Use mobile as part of you strategy (integrated with others)
• If you want to do something new/different - mobile can help
• Consumers are sophisticated - clever concepts are better

If you are an advertiser:

• Be patient. The market is coming (and can be counted)
• Be aware of the context. Popular might not be appropriate

In summary mobile is the ultimate interactive media consumer device - in your pocket.

Part 3 of the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will follow on Friday.

Posted by Marc Elison on 9 July 2009 at 4:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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6 July 2009

AIMIA Connect 2009

Posted by Marc Elison

AIMIA Connect was marketed as "A one day Digital Media Industry Conference designed to educate and entertain you with a selection of case studies on recent AIMIA Award winning Australian digital media projects and campaigns. It will also bring you the latest forecasts and trends by some of the most prominent thought leaders in the industry" and I have to say this description was pretty apt.

The speakers were chosen from winners of the specific AIMIA sector award, i.e. Front Foot Media won the AIMIA Award 2009 Best Mobile Product and by virtue of this was chosen to speak at the event.

Most of the speakers were enthusiastic, captivating and entertaining, therefore making a whole day slip by as if it were a hour. For me "mobile" seemed to be the topic of the day, even invading presentations that have very little to do with the mobile industry. There was so much great content provided that the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will be spread into three posts.

Paul McCarthy - What does it mean to win a AIMIA Award?

Paul is the Chair of Judging of the 15th Annual AIMIA Awards. After a short introduction to the awards he gave a quick recap regarding the AIMIA awards and what can result if you win one of these prestigious prizes, this means:

• More business
• More clients
• Opening doors to developing alliances
• Corporate recognition

Paul then went on to introduce the first speaker, Jennifer Hiley.

United Nations Voices Project

Jennifer Hiley - Mobile Integration Specialist

The Hyperfactory

Jennifer starts out with a slide showing how much noise is the marketing environment in today. How do companies get through all the spam out there? Irrelevant of channel or platform, all the public wants is to be given a voice and heard.

The United Nations Voices campaign was started to give people who are not normally heard a voice. Using mobot (an image recognition technology) you (member of the target audience) would photograph the person's mouth with your mobile phone (from an outdoor display unit) and MMS the picture to a specified number.

The person whose picture you captured would call you back shortly after you sent the picture and tell you their unique story. Each call lasts about two minutes and the revenue generated is donated to the relevant UN charity. Extracts of these conversations were played and were very emotive and seemed to carry the theme of the campaign excellently.

Over three months an awareness increase of 82% was recorded and 76% of participants who listened to the end of the conversation made additional donations. Another interesting fact was that the average engagement time was four minutes, which is incredibly long for this type of campaign.

Jennifer also came out with some impressive statistics, especially how mobile traffic has tripled in the past year, in May, with 32% of people reaching the mobile world was done through Wi-Fi networks.

One underlying messages to come out of this presentation is " mobile is the conduit to all digital platforms, this is the one device we all lean on, we should utilise it." This was a really effective emotive presentation and was a great way to open the workshop.

Retail Spaces: Who's hurting Who?

Andrew Apostola, Creative director

Portable Content

Why would anyone shop online when the real world shopping environment is so much more tangible and socially enjoyable? Only 3.57% of people who visit online retailers purchase products online. Conventional retail is an expensive proposition, rent, wages, overheads etc. Mortar and bricks retail is now just window dressing and used to enhance the brand for online products.

Apple redefined the retail environment from taking products that used to be behind closed glass to being out in the open available for anyone to use and interact with.

Online retail will eat into physical consumer space, you have to look to start migrating your offerings online now!

"Jump the Web" Project

Joshua Hunt, Digital Producer

Soap Creative

This was a web campaign was for the Jumper motion picture. The objective for the campaign was to drive hype for the movie launch online and create a rich digital experience without a website destination. The idea was to utilise online portals to recreate a scenario from the movie. Put simply characters would be able to fight and teleport in and out of online content.

The timings were very tight so everything had to be right first time. There were three key stages in the production. The script, the shoot and the animation. Before the main shoot a test shoot was done to trial the script and the footage required to execute the animation.

This campaign had great results with the jumper animation seeing 365,000 visits with an average interaction time spent of four minutes. The after affects of the campaign included a significant shift of most of Soap's clients towards high impact, entertaining rich media creative.

Part two of the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will follow during the week.

Posted by Marc Elison on 6 July 2009 at 3:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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23 June 2009

Search Engine Optimisation Recap

Posted by Marc Elison

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week, including : HTML 5 video tags to be released in 2010, 7 unruly tips to creating successful viral videos, new ways to PageRank sculpt, quality SEO pays for itself and the Nofollow Kerfuffle.

Photo by cobalt123 via Creative Commons

HTML 5

HTML 5 (HyperText Markup Language Version 5) is the next major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. HTML 5 provides a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. The video tag is supposed to replace Flash by linking to video files in the same way that the image tag links to images. Key Elements of the HTML 5 tags include:

• In a year or so HTML 5 will be released and it will specifically contain tags for audio and video

• Soon video can be added to a page via

• It will be important to search engine optimisation because every piece of audio and video can be specifically tagged and have attributes, such as meta-data, title, alternative text, etc, built into the tag making it far more noticeable to the search engines.

• Following is an example of the new HTML 5
< VIDEO> Tag:

• There is speculation that this will negatively affect the popularity of Flash videos.

Creating Successful Viral Videos - 7 Unruly Tips.

The focus below is specifically on tips for viral success of videos - how to produce and distribute a video that will get people talking about and sharing the content.

1. Get under the skin of your audience-think about the type of viewers you're hoping to reach and find out what they like to talk about with their friends.

2. Choose appropriate viral triggers-once you've got an understanding of what makes your audience tick, you'll be better placed to identify the viral triggers most likely to hit your target audience's sweet spot.

3. Turn the volume up to 10-once you've decided on your viral triggers, focus on making them as strong as possible.

4. Take it straight to your audience-it's often difficult to predict exactly where viral activity will take off, so it's a good idea to adopt a multi-platform approach to viral dissemination.

5. Make it portable-do allow downloads, embeds, comments, and use URL shorteners e.g. bit.ly to create Twitter-friendly links.

6. Get your timing right-at every stage in the process, timing is crucial.

7. Work those viral hotspots-once your clip is out there, be sure to track where the viral activity is taking place in order to identify and capitalize on niche communities where the clip is proving particularly virulent.

Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow.

This post starts with a quote from Matt Cutts that states "So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are Nofollowed?
Let's leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without Nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the Nofollowed links didn't count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without Nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each."

Another interesting question came up on Matt's blog

Q: Okay, but doesn't this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?

A: I wouldn't recommend closing comments in an attempt to "hoard" your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Rand also brings in some classic techniques to sculpt PR:

• Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don't want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)

• Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)

• Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links

• Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

Rand also posts a comment of Danny Sullivan's from Matt's post:

"Rather than clarify things, I feel like this is what your post is going to do -- cause people to consciously reduce the number of links they allow on their pages. We're going to see an increase in iframe usage or other techniques to reduce links and flow more PageRank to the remaining links, for those who really worry/believe in such things."

Quality SEO Pays for Itself

Cost is usually the wrong question to focus on when choosing a search engine optimisation (SEO) firm, as it implies you are buying a commodity. Strategic effectiveness and search marketing profitability impact are much more appropriate questions. The following are factors why confusion is created in the SEO firm selection process:

• Most executive management teams don't yet fully understand the economics and far-reaching business implications of SEO
• Search engine marketing's transformation of legacy enterprise profitability is in its infancy
• Most people outside of the search engine community do not fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift from push to pull marketing
• Management teams must understand SEO to effectively manage it
• Measuring SEO is still an imprecise art form, which Google appears determined to prevent from becoming a science
• Search engine marketing might be the largest change management project in history
• Executive recruiting needs to look beyond the job title to hire effective search engine marketing leaders
• Search marketing-centric organisations will outperform

Once understood, it becomes quite clear that SEO is a senior level strategic activity affecting enterprise profitability. The selection process followed should reflect this fact by being as granular and comprehensive as possible. With the result being the best possible SEO firm is selected for the firm's needs.

Following the Nofollow Kerfuffle.

Talking about Matt Cutts PR admission (more than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows ) - if this really did happen 1 year ago how can an industry, that is so hung-up on testing, not have realised this?

Scenario 1: Matt Cutts is Telling the Truth

1. Maybe PageRank sculpting itself was not doing as much as people thought.
2. Maybe it was, but there are too many variables at play with the sites that were using it, so the change in Google's algorithm went unnoticed among other shifts.
3. Perhaps in the process of implementing the PageRank sculpting, the SEOs made other changes to the site's structure that did have an effect, which still worked even after Google's changed algorithm.

Scenario 2: The Competitive Advantage Theory

In this scenario, Cutts is still telling the truth, but it turns out that some SEOs already knew Google had made the change, but kept it to themselves. [Raise your hand and say 'I' -- Kate]

Scenario 3: The Conspiracy Theory

The conspiracy theory version of this situation says that PageRank sculpting works, and works so well that Google is uncomfortable with so many SEOs using it. They think that Google never changed its algorithm regarding Nofollow, and that it still works fine, but Google is trying to dissuade SEOs from doing it.

Scenario 4: The Pity Theory

A final scenario goes like this: PageRank sculpting with Nofollow never worked, and Google is finally letting everyone know they're wasting their time. While it was fun to watch SEOs debate the intricacies of a technique that took lots of time and energy, Google started to feel bad for sending them on a wild goose chase for so long.

From the amount of articles centered on the change of the Nofollow attribute and its effects on PageRank, there still seems to be a fair bit of confusion and consternation regarding this matter, any new significant developments will be covered right here on the Bruce Clay Australia blog.

Posted by Marc Elison on 23 June 2009 at 8:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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