Good Afternoon Everybody,

The all important first search engine result page (SERP) on Google and the subsequent value of SEO seem to be running

Google Logo

a lot of web marketing ideas these days. Well, I am a web marketer. I am interested in SEO, but more important to me is the value and experience for the user. Does it matter how many SERs you have per page if none of these visitors to those results will end up customers?

I have been thinking a lot about this subject lately and I have come to the conclusion that SEO efforts that write for/attempt to market to search engines is just ridiculous. It leads us as marketers to black hat tactics and ultimately to experiences that the consumer does not enjoy. By Black Hat, I mean using trickery or unethical means of beating organic SERPs. Strategies like link farms, stealing or duplicating content, creating unmanned or spam social sites. For a list of tons more black hat (bad and stupid) ideas visit Beanstalk.

It seems to me that all of the big search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo are moving to algorithms that lend more and more credibility to user activity whether that be direct voting or off-site promotion of the content. So, you want a strategy that will get you a higher search engine result and one that will get readers more interested in you and your products. Here’s one for ya: create interesting, unique content on a consistent basis. If you do this readers will want to read and share and link to it. The bots will pick up on that activity and your new keyword strength and reward you accordingly.

Oh, and just to show that I am not the only one with this mindset. Check out this quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

-The basic common sense principle would be NOT to utilize anything that you would not implement if the search engines didn’t exist, or in short:
“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”

So go out and create great content and get users to share it for you. What are some of your most successful SEO tactics. Check out the Big 16 rules for SMO tactics on the Online Marketing Blog.

Best of luck,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Haven’t posted for a while, but I just wanted to share a set of guidelines for starting a new corporate blog. Blogging can be an amazing marketing tool. If you are thinking of starting a blog to help interact with your customers/ shareholders. Check out this plan and advice sheet. Hope you enjoy.

OVERVIEW

Listed below are guidelines that will help the you make the most of your new blog. These guidelines will help you to grow your blog into a powerful conversation tool. The guidelines are separated into five easy steps:

Step 1: Listen

The best advice anyone can follow before entering into a new method of communication is to become familiar with the tools and voices within that medium. Before a blog launch:

1. Take a month and read relevant blogs in the blog’s category.

2. Check out competitors’ blogs.

3. Subscribe to podcasts related to the blog’s industry.

4. Find groups on the social networking sites (SNS) that pertain to that industry.

This process can be as easy as visiting directories for each of these mediums and searching relevant keywords or industry stories. You can then follow trending stories and learn who the most popular influencers are in this category. You should join these relevant conversations and subscribe to receive updates from influential content producers. The following tools are suggested as a means to locate relevant discussions in different categories online:

Blogs:
Technorati (blog search engine):
Google Blogsearch (blog search engine):

Podcasts:
iTunes:
Podcast Directory (podcast search engine):

Groups:
Facebook:
Yahoo! Groups:

Once part of a group, your bloggers shouldn’t just sit back and watch. They should take a side on a relevant issue affecting their category. They should put their opinions out there for others to read. Before they begin their own publishing, they should let people know who they are and start building their reputation online. This will help the blog develop a relevant audience when they start to post.

Step 2: Plan

To please both the search engines and readers, it is important to regularly post relevant content. Plan ahead and post often. Make a schedule of who is going to be posting about what topic and when. Stick to that schedule. Try to post two to three times a week. Feel free to post more often if there are many product developments or a lot of news. It will be helpful to identify which blogger is exceptionally passionate early on and make them the default writer.

Ideas on Good Posting Content: Good content consists of breaking news, product innovations, money saving ideas, internal visual content such as photos or videos, humorous anecdotes and personal stands on trending stories in your industry. The best content is original, injected with personality and demonstrates authority.

Examples of Bad Posting Content: Bad content is blatantly self-serving content. Your bloggers shouldn’t spend the whole time talking about their products and services. The posts need to be interesting to everyone. Bad content is also content that meanders without a specific theme. And if the blog lacks focus, it will lack an audience.

Step 3: Socialize

Allow comments on the new blog (it’s not a conversation without comments). Respond to all comments in a timely fashion. Link to other bloggers, outside sources of information, and even competitors. Hopefully, they will link back to the your new blog. By providing a very robust source list, the new blog can become the ultimate source of information for users on this subject. This practice also provides the blog with a lot of valuable links and indexible information, both of which will help increase the new blog’s search engine ranking. If the new blog becomes the best source of information, users will submit the blog to social news-sharing sites, tell their friends and bookmark its stories.

Make social bookmarking and social news-sharing links available. Try to make it as easy as possible for users to share your blog’s content.

The new bloggers should make themselves personally available to their readers. The new blog should provide contact information such as a phone number, email and/or Twitter address to a real person. Once a relationship has begun to flourish online, the bloggers should meet up with their readers in real life. Tweetups, tradeshows, and group lunches offer great outing environments that will help the bloggers further connect with their readers.

Step 4: Customize

Blogs are one of today’s most versatile mediums. In fact, many companies are using blogs as their main Web vehicles. Your bloggers can easily add widgets or applications that do almost anything imaginable to the sidebar of their new blog. Some examples of widgets available today are current weather displays, news readers from major newspapers, games, photo albums and much more. Most of them are free. Visit Widgetbox or Google Gadgets and add them to the side bar of the new blog.

Add RSS feeds from other relevant blogs and online news sources to the blog’s RSS feed blogroll.

Write personal and detailed about-the-author pages. This is an often-overlooked opportunity. Don’t let the descriptive pages sound too corporate or be too short. Many readers will judge the blog’s personality and authority from these pages.

Step 5: Tracking

You should equip your new blog with Google Analytics. This tracking service will allow your bloggers to learn where their visitors come from and how they interact with the new blog. Use this information to research and contact sites that refer traffic to the new blog. Tune the blog to match the most popular keywords available to your industry.

It is also a very smart idea to employ an online reputation management (ORM) tool to follow the most relevant and trending stories within your category. ORM tools can help the your bloggers identify key influencers online and trending stories that the your blog can post on. This will take a lot less time then searching through all the blogs, podcasts and groups manually and is an easy way to inject this new blog into the heat of the most relevant conversations going on today which will help expose the new blog to new readers.

TOP 15 TIPS

1. Read other blogs and follow online conversations.

2. Comment and contribute to online groups and other blogs.

3. Develop a schedule and stick to it.

4. Write about what you know.

5. Write about what you are passionate about.

6. Take a stand on relevant issues.

7. Share photos and videos.

8. Allow comments.

9. Tell a compelling story.

10. Link to many other sites.

11. Go meet people in real life.

12. Customize your blog to fit your readers’ wants.

13. Keep an up-to-date and relevant blogroll.

14. Create a great about page.

15. Track and tune your blog’s messaging.

Hey Everybody,

I have been gone for a while, but now I am back. I just saw this video. I liked it a lot. It is a little creepy and I definitely don’t buy the whole Second Life thing. But I definitely agree in the prosumer idea and the selling of experience. I think that will happen.

What did you think? Were you creeped out? Let me know.

Best,
Will Flavell

Good Morning Everybody,

I often get asked how to improve an image online. Sometimes, by big brands who are looking for a full-on strategy. But I am often asked by individuals or smaller non-profits. This questions is akin to when people ask dietitians: How can I lose the first ten pounds. So, I wanted to make the post today on how to lose the first ten pounds. These are five simple, easy, cheap strategies to get you (or your business, non-profit, etc.) moving online. Consider them the first steps.

1. Listen: Get into the blogosphere and see what people are saying about your business, about your industry. There are more than 133,000,000 blogs indexed by Technorati, go find out which ones pertain to you and your business.
2. Google Yourself: Where do you appear in search results? Wanna be on the first page? With 2 billion searches daily on Google, you really can’t afford to be unfindable.
3. Tell Your Story: Every brand has a story, what’s your story? Can it be told in pictures, video, text, or audio recordings? The Web can help you share your story with millions of interested people; you just have to provide the content.
4. Tweet: Get a Twitter account. It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s where news breaks today. And it’s only 140 characters.
5. Get the News Delivered to You: Set up alerts and a RSS feed aggregator for the Web sites important to your business. This way, you won’t have to go look for your news everyday, it will automatically be delivered to you.

Need a little help getting started? Drop me a comment.

Until then good luck. Oh, and if you have any real advice on losing the first ten pounds, I would love to hear it.

Enjoy,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

I don’t know if anyone is using this yet, but I just read an article on Viewzi.com. It is a new search engine that aggregates search results from MSN, Yahoo, Google and more. It also does a great job of providing visual differences between types of search. It has beautifully different and vibrant user experiences per type of search. It allows you to search just cost and deals with products, or MP3s, or comparison search results, or cloud searches. Their weather radar display is also very cool.

With all this talk about Cuil, it is nice to see that some new search competitors are taking a completely different view of search. Viewzi is just really fun and easy to use. It keeps in mind a very important component of the new Web services, customized for each user’s experience.

Great article with more info on ZDNet about Viewzi.com. Thanks ZDNet.

Hope you all enjoy Viewzi.

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to share two stories that I recently read regarding free Wi-Fi access for Americans. If this comes about it will mean a big change for advertising and phone and internet access companies. The first story comes from CNN Money.comand it discusses three patents that Google applied for. Here is an excerpt.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) – More evidence has emerged that Google is getting ready to blanket the U.S. with free Wi-Fi, as Business 2.0senior writer Om Malik reported last year. Now, the company has filed for three patentsrelated to offering wireless Internet access. Search Engine Roundtable points out that the patents all have to do with serving up advertising through a wireless Internet connection maintained by a third party, whose brand Google would include in the presentation of those ads. Sounds a lot like Google’s latest plan to unwire San Francisco, where it has teamed up with EarthLink (Research). By teaming up with partners who would build the actual Wi-Fi infrastructure, Google (Research) could complete a nationwide Wi-Fi network much more quickly than if it had to build it itself.

The second story, which I just read this morning comes from MediaPost. It concern FCC regulations and the possibility of them loosening the reigns on the airwave space between the traditional channel signals. This is a real step forward I believe. Here is an excerpt:

Emancipation of the Web? FCC Considers Free Nationwide High–Speed Internet Service — But Big Wireless Carriers Would Take the Reins

Federal regulators may require the winner of airwaves being auctioned off by the government to provide free wireless high–speed Internet service across a large swath of the country. The Federal Communications Commission at its June 12 meeting will likely vote on an order setting terms of the spectrum auction that could include the free Internet service provision, the AP reports. A similar proposal was rejected last year.

Read the rest here on Bulldog Reporter. Traditional Media better watch out. If the Web is free and Mobile, it won’t take people long to realize that they don’t have to wait for 2 day old news in the print mediums. Also, watch out Comcast.

Thanks for reading,

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

I’m sure that many of you have already seen this video. But it is great. It comes from the Poynter Institute. It came out in 2005, so it is a little out-of-date. But it is really cool. This kind of shows how the Media could evolve. Very Interesting. It makes Google look pretty crazy.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Thanks,

William Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to share this story with you because I think that it is very cool. Google is an amazing company and this could be the leap that finally connects all of America to the Web. It could even be done completely ad-supported (in other words, free). We just have to hope that the US government is forward thinking enough.

By Eric Auchard and Peter Kaplan

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google Inc said on Friday that the company would bid on coveted airwaves to launch a U.S. wireless network, pitting it against established telecommunications players AT&T and Verizon.

The Internet leader said in a statement that it was ready to go it alone rather than rely on partners in bidding in the Federal Communications Commission-run auction of 700-megahertz wireless spectrum due to begin on January 24.

The Silicon Valley-based company said it would make its filing ahead of the FCC deadline on Monday for companies to declare their interest in joining the airwaves bidding.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world.”

Wall Street investors have reacted cautiously to Google’s latest move to expand beyond its core Web search and online advertising franchises, worried the potential upfront costs and eventual network build-out could exceed $10 billion.

But some analysts have speculated that Google was more interested in ensuring certain requirements for network openness and that it was bidding just to preserve those rules.

“The real question here is whether Google’s intent is to bid up to the reserve price and assure that the openness condition stays in place,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Blair Levin wrote to investors. “Or is the real purpose to actually win?”

And despite the excitement surrounding a Google bid, Stifel Nicolaus said in a research note that it suspects Verizon will probably end up winning the auction for the C block spectrum.

Read the rest at: Reuters.