Caliber France
Talking About Page Segmentation
May 10, 2012
There’s no denying Bill Slawski is a bit difficult to understand. It doesn’t mean he’s not interesting and well worth the read if you can wade through it. So, to save you some time, I’ve summarised a few of his comments about web blocks and linguistic features.
Slawski writes about how a page can be broken down into segments such as the main content, header, footer, advertising, navigation, etc. Each of these blocks can be considered as “separate semantic units” that can be connected or standalone in relation to the page topic (they can also be physically connected or broken up into smaller segments).
In a patent filed on behalf of Microsoft in 2003, this analysis is described as an “…independent approach to detect content structure. It simulates how a user understands web layout structure based on his visual perception (emphasis mine).” If you think about how you read web pages (in a kind of zig-zag pattern, amiright?), the segmentation approach is not far off.
As a writer, I’m interested in the way content is structured and that includes the selection and placement of words and links. We already know that links in the middle of the page have more weight than those in footers, but what I didn’t know was that a search engine might actually assign PageRank for individual segments.
For example (according to the patent), a section of page with hyperlinked, capitalised words in short phrases, which appear in the sidebar or at the top of the page, indicates the main navigation. It sounds like common sense, but understanding how a search engine sees a page is really essential to SEO. These basic linguistic features – i.e. syntax and punctuation – are the means by which search engines are classifying and indexing pages.
*Puctuation Owl is impressed with your new-found wisdom:
So, if you write content for the web, it’s important to keep in mind how a search engine might segment it, but also remember that this patent was filed in 2003. A similar patent from Google followed in 2004. In other words, search engines have been thinking about segmentation for nearly a decade, and they’re continuing to improve their understanding of page semantics all the time. Watch this space!
Caliber heads to TBU!
April 19, 2012
This annual gathering of the best and brightest in the travel blogging industry is taking place in lovely Umbria, where pizza, pasta and Peroni await. We’ll be there to listen, learn and meet some new faces while also contributing a few nuggets with presentations of our own. (more…)
4 Reasons You Need Killer Content
March 14, 2012
Internet marketing isn’t all search engine algorithms, email lists and targeted on-page advertising. If you’ve taken much of a look into the subject recently you will no doubt have been overwhelmed by the amount of attention being paid to content marketing. This sudden increase in coverage of the subject underlines the importance of content in a changing digital marketing environment and highlights exactly why you should prioritise it in your online offering. Content marketing covers everything from the copy on a website, to podcasts, advertising videos and blogs, infographics and white papers, and everything in between. Each facet of this chameleonic marketing discipline can have a different effect on your business. Four of these effects are laid out below, as well as some examples of a piece of stellar content marketing that has fulfilled these objectives.
SEO
As a leader in SEO we’d be remiss not to mention the benefits that excellent content marketing can have for SEO: simply creating targeted, search engine friendly copy for your sales pages can be a huge boost to your website’s visibility, but there’s much more content can do for you. Dating websites such as OKCupid and Zoosk create dozens of inbound links to their websites by putting out well-timed infographics that relate to current events, including the Oscars and the Super Bowl, while Basecamp creator 37signal’s corporate blog drives a lot of traffic and links their way.
Exposure and Branding
Dollar Shave Club launched in April 2011, but noise around the start-up soon fizzled out. To drive interest, Mike Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club, put together the following advert that cost a measly $4,500 to produce. The effects were staggering; Dollar Shave Club managed to net 5,000 subscribers on the video’s launch date, despite the website becoming unavailable for large swathes of the day as it struggled to cope with the additional traffic. That number is now in excess of 12,000, with the company’s social networks seeing a similar overnight boost. The success in both sales figures and brand recognition has drawn comparison with the hugely popular ‘Old Spice Guy’ adverts.
Community Building and Management
There is no better example of what content marketing can do for your community than Lady Gaga. This megastar is more than just one of the most marketable celebrities on the planet, she’s also a social media powerhouse. With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and a billion views on Youtube, Lady Gaga has built her following up through creating engaging content for fans both old and new and also by engaging with fan created content. Gaga regularly reposts “fan art” created by her fans and creates her own content in response to input from her fans. By “giving the people what they want”, Gaga has built up a loyal and extremely responsive community.
Sales and Investment
At the beginning of February Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Productions and creator of some of the world’s most enduring and popular video games, launched a project through crowdfunding platform Kickstarter aimed at creating a new adventure game – a genre seen as commercially risky to most investors and publishers. Initially seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month to fund both the development of the game and a documentary detailing its creation, the project reached this goal in just nine hours thanks to Schafer’s cleverly crafted content marketing strategy that included videos and minigames, as well as the enthusiasm of fans. After 24 hours the fund had netted more than a million dollars and by the time the project closed on Tuesday the total had rocketed to three million dollars, making it the most successful Kickstarter project in history.
Boosting Personalised Search
February 22, 2012
While Google (and others) may guard their secrets very closely, expert SEOs follow how these secrets are evolving. Generally, search engines are inching away from matching keywords in documents (and examining how searchers interact with the results they’re given) towards considering searchers’ interests and motivations.
There is much to be learned from watching search engines, particularly if you’re interested in selling things online. Personalised search means the focus is shifting away from matching keywords to looking at user intent. Keyword matching hasn’t disappeared off the radar – it’s still important – but information gathered from searchers is another factor to watch.
GSPW
Enter Google Search Plus Your World, which has gotten a lot of attention lately, particularly considering recent privacy debates in the U.S.
If users are signed in to their accounts on GSPW, they can select and share information under different categories. Although officially it’s about sharing information, it’s also a quick and easy way of finding out what peoples’ interests are.
Boost Score
According to a patent entitled “Variable Personalization of Search Results in a Search Engine”, filed on behalf of Google engineers in 2010, Google is looking to deliver queries for logged-in users based on what it calls a boost score. Although initial results will be centred on more familiar relevancy and quality factors, more specific queries can be made according to a user’s personal interests.
Boost Score vs. SEO
Consider: Google builds a directory of websites categorised by human interests, for example, health. If a user selects health as an interest, any site listed in Google’s directory will have an associated boost score determined by relevancy. When the user’s query returns a site about health, that site’s boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied – improving its ranking.
The score is calculated by seeding sites with high relevancy score in the directory, finding a list of sites that are “heavily linked” to by the seed sites, and then finding sites that are linked to by those sites. The weight is the boost score.
What’s important to note is that links are still an important ingredient in Google’s idea of relevancy. Although the boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied to “boost” retrieval of information, it is old-fashioned relevancy and quality that kicks off the process to begin with.
As many of you know, it doesn’t matter whether users are signed into GSPW because “Google’s recent policy change allows them to transfer interests collected from Android, G+, Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and other services into a super profile used to personalize search.”
Google is certainly not underestimating the activity happening across social media. It is considering people and peoples’ associations as ranking signals, and using tweets, likes, comments, shares and upvotes to gauge value.
What do you think? Should everyone see the same results when searching for the same keyword or do you support the idea of having results tailored to your personal interests? Do you use GSPW? Let us know.
SEO Predictions 2012 – Caliber White Paper
January 17, 2012
2012 is here and there’s a lot in store for SEO, partly because the internet is as busy as ever. There’s Pinterest, SOPA, micro formats and HTML5. There’s Google’s new Search Plus and Danny Sullivan’s insightful response. Caliber Interactive is adding to the conversation in the form of our new white paper – Communities and Conversations: SEO Predictions for 2012.
The white paper includes insights from our leadership team – Tony Samios, Michael Briggs and Jonny Scott – as well as input from Scott McLay, Danny Denhard, Karine Nasciemento and Ian Humphreys. Touching on social media, content, online PR as well as the brass tacks of SEO, it represents what we expect to see in the coming year.
Here are some of the key insights from the report:
• SEO as an industry needs to grow up and become transparent about what it does and does not do for clients.
• Social had an impact last year, this year it will have a much larger part to play. Social noise will have to be replaced by authoritative signals from trusted social networks.
• To succeed, agencies need to develop on-brand, topical, innovative and visually appealing content. This means moving away from the traditional scrollable infographic towards a whole menu of options including, but not limited to, white papers, blog posts, videos, UGC, games and interactive infographics.
Have questions about the report? Let us know in the comments section and we’ll do our best to answer.
The report was compiled by myself with artistic prettifying courtesy of Jaimie Bell.
The Panda Made Caliber Do It
November 2, 2011
At Caliber we love a good marketing slogan – all too often these days we are bombarded with cheesy, tepid puns that fail to capture attention. That’s why it was amazing to see the WWF (no, not that WWF) come out with one of the best tag-lines we’ve seen in recent years: The Panda Made Me Do It. It is a call to action that is charming and which brings to mind images of gun-wielding, yet adorable, pandas hi-jacking SEO offices across the UK. Hopefully this campaign will help the SEO industry forget about algorithmic bears and focus on the real ones.
The cause behind this catchy five word line is even better. It’s about doing little things to help protect the natural world, whether you want to adopt a turtle or sponsor an acre of sustainable forest.
As their site says: It’s about you – and all the simple but effective things you can do to help protect the natural world. Whether you’re an experienced environmental campaigner or brand new to the whole thing, we’ll make it easy to get involved. Just tell everyone the Panda made you do it…
To help raise awareness of this event, Caliber will be participating in what will hopefully be a huge online awareness. Tweet the hashtag #ThePandaMadeMe between 7pm and 8pm GMT tomorrow (Thursday the 3rd) so we can get these belligerent pandas trending!
Better yet, you can head to the WWF’s site to get involved in this cool, and catchy, campaign. Also be sure to check out their excellent short film.
Also, does anyone have any ideas for the WWF’s next tagline? Anyone who can top The Panda Made Me Do It deserves numerous gold stars.
Link Strategy Questions
October 28, 2011
Some people think that you can just go out and build X amount of links with a particular anchor text and rank for their top keyword, sadly it’s not that simple and a detailed strategy is necessary for any campaign. The easiest way to start planning is to ask yourself the following questions:
Is the landing page the best it can be?
This is one of the most important questions and one that quite a few people miss out when developing a link strategy, if Google thinks your content isn’t that great then no amount of links will help you rank. Since the Panda update was launched, more and more high profile websites have taken a hit and have only recovered their rankings when sufficient updates to the content were made.
Another major reason to consider the landing pages is that if you manage to get a great position in Google then you might get visitors — but that does not mean you will get conversions, so if the landing pages aren’t up to scratch there is no point wasting your time on SEO.
Does the anchor text profile look natural?
When it comes to judging an anchor text profile most people look at their volume against the competitors. In fact you shouldn’t base volume of anchor text on what your competitors have because if you hit a keyword too hard, chances are you will be penalised.
The majority of anchor text into linking pages should be brand orientated followed by your “money keywords” and then a large number of long tail variations. Building a diverse profile should provide that extra safety net for future algorithm changes.
What type of links do I need?
With all the Google algorithm changes over the last two years, simply building more links than your competitors just does not work, but your competitors link profile can help you succeed. To get above them you need to profile the top ten ranking websites and look for similarities in what type of links are powering each keyword group.
With extensive analysis of competitors you should see what holes you need to fill when comparing it to your own. For instance, you might find out you need links above a certain metric value, links that provide velocity, or a larger social presence to help Google identify you as a brand.
This level of investigation should help give a clear indication of how you are going to obtain the links you need to start moving up in the rankings, and how long it could take before you see an impact.
Epic Guru Post on Banning Awesome Ninjas and Rockstars
October 14, 2011
The online marketing world has always had its own lexicons, though in the past these tended to be more technical than colloquial. Over the past few years as digital marketing has matured and come to the forefront of public attention: this has come hand-in-hand with an effort to make the medium sound cool. This has caused a handful of words to be taken out of popular usage and twisted to fit into a digital marketing context that they really, really don’t belong in. This post started out as a list of my own most hated digital marketing buzzwords, but it turned out to be a great exercise in crowd sourcing too:
Ninja – Submitted by Paul Madden and Dan Sharp
Definition: a member of the ninja who were trained in martial arts and hired for espionage, sabotage or assassinations; a person skilled in ninjutsu
This old favourite has been doing the rounds since the IT geeks were confined to the basement. Ninja, albeit a word that conjures up some pretty cool images, has got to be banned! Unless you lead a secret double life, dishonourably dispatching evil dictators and tyrants by night while working as a SEO consultant by day, you’re probably not an SEO ninja.
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