Competitors Web Design

Client projects and tech blog posts about Competitors

Google's Sidewiki 101 for Brand Managers

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the empowerment of average users. With Twitter and Facebook pages, individuals can now respond back to companies and organizations with a few strokes of the keyboard. Google's recently entered the fray with an intriguing project called Sidewiki. Once again, companies and nonprofits interested in managing their online brands need to be aware of the new medium and how to track it.

What is Sidewiki?
Google started its sidewiki project in September 2009. It's a sidebar that can attach to any page on the internet via the Google Toolbar. Users gain the ability to comment on any page on the internet. Google uses a ranking system based on votes and various algorithms to determine the order of the comments.

When a user of the Google Toolbar visits a page with Sidewiki notes they see a small blue button of the left side of the page with two white chevrons (see screenshot on the right). Clicking on this opens the Sidewiki sidebar. Here they will see comments left by previous visitors. They are be able to add their own comments.

Visionaries have long dreamed of a web with this kind of two-way communication but similar sidebar commenting systems have failed to gain enough momentum to become viable. If this were just another venture-capital-fueled attempt, it would be something marketers could ignore unless and until it became widely used. But with Google behind Sidewiki, it's a service we need to take seriously from the start.

Users Talking Back
When we put together websites, we get to control the message of our little corner of the internet--we have the final say on the material we present. If Sidewiki becomes popular, this will no longer be true. Fans, disgruntled employees and competitors can all start marking up our sites--yikes! But those brands that have embraced the Web 2.0 model will love another place where they can interact with their audience. Today's marketing goal is mindshare--how much of a user's attention span can you win over. The more you get visitors to think about your brand or your message, the more likely that they will buy or recommend your product or service. You need to be active on whatever online channel your audience is using.

Watching the Conversations
What's a good brand manager to do? The first thing is to make sure you have the latest version of Google Toolbar installed on your working browser (get it here) and that you have the Sidewiki service enabled (I've started a Sidewiki for this entry so if it's working you'll see the blue button in your browser).

Brand Management
Google allows website owners the first comment. If you are registered as the owner of a site via Google Webmaster Tools, then you get first say: when you post to the Sidewiki of a page you control, Google gives you the top spot. This is very good. Should you do it?

Probably not. At least not yet. I don't see people using Sidewiki yet. Most websites still don't have any comments. Even Google's projects often fail to gain traction and there's no guarantee that Sidewiki will take off. If your page doesn't have any comments, I wouldn't recommend that you make the first. If there are no Sidewiki entries, the blue button won't be there and visitors probably won't even think to comment.

If you notice that a visitor has started a Sidewiki for your site by leaving a comment, then it's time to log into your Google Webmasters account and leave an official welcome message. Even though you're second to the conversation, you will get first position thanks to your ownership of the website.

The introductory note should briefly welcome visitors. It will appear alongside your website so there's no need to repeat your mission statement, but it is a place where you can give helpful navigation tips and stress any actionable items that the casual visitor might miss. You might consider inviting visitors to sign up for your site's email list, for example.

The Future
Users can tie their Sidewiki comments into Twitter and Facebook accounts. They can leave video comments. If the service takes off there will surely be a mini-industry built around comment optimization. Spammers will get hard at work to game the system. But none is really happening now. Despite a bit of fear-mongering on marketing blogs, Google Sidewiki is a long ways away from being something to lose sleep over. 

More Information:


Categories: Practical 2.0
Tags: Algorithm, Attention Economy, Brand Management, Brand Manager, Comments, Competitors, Conversation, Facebook, Fans, Google, Google Toolbar, Google Webmaster Tools, Marketing, Mindshare, Sidewiki, Techcrunch, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikipedia | Edit

Extending customer relationships through social media

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.



Categories: Analytics , Facebook , Niche Marketing , Web Design
Tags: A/B Testing, Analyytics, Corporate, Customer Relationships, Facebook, Marketing, Oreilly, Real Time, Social Media, Websites | Edit

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

I've always thought such tricks were pathetic and bound to lose over the long term. Search engines want to feature good sites. It's in their best interest to make sure the sites listed are the ones people want to see. A search engine that returns unsatisfactory results quickly becomes a has-been in the search engine competition. So as soon as a site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skewing the rankings they tweak their secret search algorithm to fix the SEO loophole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

Categories: Beyond SEO
Tags: Google Yahoo, Loophole, Search Algorithm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Results, Search Engines, Seo, Yahoo | Edit

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

Every web designer under the sun talks about search engine optimization (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic principles are ignored. I'm in-between jobs right now, which means I'm spending a lot of time looking at potential employers' websites. I've decided to start a series of posts on SEO myths and realities that will talk about designing for maximum visibility.

I'm not going to focus on any of the underhanded tricks to fool search engines into listing an inappropriate page. Google hates this kind of tactic and so do I. You get visits for having good content. Good search rankings are based on good content and the best way to boost your content is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the content they want. Part one is on website analysis and tracking.

Don't assume that your website is easy to navigate. One of the neatest things about the web is that we have instant feedback on use. With just a little tracking we can see what pages people are looking at, how they're finding our site and what they're doing once they're here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are currently using four different tracking methods. Most utilize javascript "bugs," tiny snippets of code that send individual results to an advanced software tracking system. I put the code inside a Moveable Type "Modules Template" which is automatically imported to all pages. Installing a new system is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Template and rebuilding the site.

AXS Visitors Tracking System
This software installs on your server but don't let that scare you: this is one of the easiest installations I've ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can narrow it specific pages on your site, or even particular search engines or search phrases.

There's also a option to view the lastest traffic by visitor. I love watching this! You can see how individuals are using the site and where they're navigating. I've been able to identify different types of visitors this way and understand the complexity of the audience.

It doesn't seem like AXS is not being developed anymore. The latest stable version came out over two years go, which is a shame.

HitTail
This service watches search-engine links and makes recommendations for new keywords. I wrote about this service yesterday in Blogging for the Long Tail.

Reeferss.com
This is a simple simple bit of software. Like every other tracking system it keeps track of referrers: search engines and websites that bring traffic to your site. But unlike the others that's all it does. Why care then? It provides a real-time RSS feed of these visitors. I bring the feed into my "Netvibes" page (a customized start page, see below) and scan the results multiple times a day.

Google Analytics
The internet's gatekeeper bought the Urchin analytics company in April 2005 and relaunched the product as Google Analytics shortly thereafter. This is becoming an essential tracker. It's free and it's powerful, though I haven't been as impressed by it as others have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It's easy to find out what people are saying about you online.

Technorati
This service tracks blogs but you don't need to have a blog to use it, for Technorati will tell you where blogs are linking. Give it your URLs (or those of your competitors!) and you'll know whenever a blogger puts in a link to you. You can also give it keywords and find out when a blog uses them.

Google Blog Search
Google can also let you follow blog references or keyword mentions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type "site:www.yourdomain.com" into the main Google search page and you'll see who's linking to your site (or to the competition). There are lots of other services that track blogs and mentions--Sphere, Bloglines, etc. They all have different strengths so try them and see what you think.

Feedburner
The best RSS massager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They've recently introduced page tracking software too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it's as good as Feedburner's other offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It's easy to get overwhelmed by all of this information. Most of the tracking services provide RSS feeds (See The Wonders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a customized start page, to pull these all together into a single page that I can scan every morning. Here's a screenshot of part of my Netvibes tracking page--the full page currently shows fourteen tracking feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With tracking you find out what people are looking for on the internet. This helps you create pages and services that people will want to find. You might be surprised to see what they're already finding on your site. Some examples:

  • Analyzing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bringing in high Google traffic. I looked at these pages again and realized they did a good job of describing the company's mission. I consequently redesigned the site homepage to feature them and I made sure that those pages contained direct links to its most important services.
  • When I started work for another client I looked at their site and suspected that they're most important articles were not being seen--visitors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of tracking confirmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to convince the executive director that we made some small modifications to the design. Having this strong content linked right off the homepage helped bring in Google traffic.
Categories: Analytics , Beyond SEO
Tags: Design, Google, Maximum Visibility, Myths And Realities, Search Engine Optimization, Seo | Edit

Simple Design does not mean simple execution

Every website should try to serve a clear set of purposes. Even a personal blog has a target audience, one's friends or family perhaps. While a good site looks simple, it is often very complicated "under the hood."

Google went from being a grad school project to the world's most important search engine by ditching the design clutter of its competitors for a very clean homepage with maximum white space. This effect focused one's attention on the search function. More PhD's are said to work at Google than at any other company in the world, yet the complicated engineering and the tremendous computer infrastructure that brings that logo and search box to your computer is invisible to the average user.

Even websites without PhD designers need to marry a simple outward appearance with a more complicated set of calculations around intended audiences. The average visitor looks at one or two pages on a site and then hits the back button. Often they'll be following a search link and looking at a page buried deep in your site. They'll be there seeking out specific information and you only have about twenty seconds to pitch your site and keep them there. You need to give them a very concise description of yourself or product and you need to entice them with related material.

Any site that consists of more than three pages presents visitors with more information than they can handle. Good design works to funnel visitors to the specific content they are looking for. It's relatively easy to get a first-time visitor but successful websites keep them on your site and give them reasons to return. The key to this is defining your audience and presenting your material with them in mind.

Once you've identified your constituency and built your design, the next step is release. You don't want to pander to a potential audience, but instead converse with them. It's fine to mix different elements of your life together and to write creatively off-topic once in awhile. There are a thousand generic websites crammed full of useless bu zzphrases and unused featured. What you want is one that will have a voice, that builds a niche that no one else might ever have identified. When it comes time to produce content, forget all the slick marketing calculations you've done and let your quirkiness shine.

Categories: Web Design
Tags: Design, Google, Grad School, Personal Blog, Phd, Search Box, Search Engine, Search Function | Edit

Hire Martin! I build sites and online promotion campaigns to your specs and budgets and can be your guide to social media marketing.

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