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!

Attending conferences is incredibly important for our business; as though we spend hours reading research materials (online and in print) there is nothing quite like engaging in a lively forum for generating new ideas and plans.

Here’s a brief run-down of our most important takeaways from this month’s slew of conferences:

LinkLove London

LinkLove is one of the events we make sure to attend every year, as it always has a good mix of features that relate to many aspects of our work. Caliber was there in full force with a team of seven delegates.

Takeaways:

• Content is crucial to building your brand. Developing excellent content on your site filters through to all other mediums including social and press while also boosting your search engine rankings
• Don’t forget about SEO when doing big marketing campaigns. Sometimes projects go viral but without proper SEO they don’t achieve their goals
• Reaching out via Twitter can be very effective – response rates jump up when you tweet people and then follow up with an email. Testing is key to good online outreach
• LinkedIn is also a fantastic tool for making connections online

Brighton SEO

This conference is an up and coming event for anyone in the SEO industry and we were happy to send a strong team to listen to representatives from Google and Bing. This is also a great chance to meet-up with others in the industry, catch-up over coffee or head down to the pier for some fish and chips!

Takeaways:

• Webmasters should try and remove all bad links pointing to their domains – this applies to links built both recently and historically. Bing acknowledged that social signals were increasingly important in their rankings, while Google was coy and suggested it was just one of 200 signals they considered
• Google maintained that the activity level of followers on social platforms is more important than the number of followers, friends or connections.
• Rich snippets were explained and their importance was emphasized – research data suggests that these may improve click-through rates by 10-25%. This shows that rich snippets will become an increasingly important part of any holistic search engine optimisation strategy.

Travel Bloggers Unite

Travel Bloggers Unite collects some of the world’s best travel bloggers and provides a forum for discussion in this incredibly exciting field. We provided a few presentations with Scott McLay and Michael Briggs discussing SEO, while Ian Humphreys talked about content and social media. Check out the links below for the presentations:
http://www.slideshare.net/ianphumphreys/tbu-socialising-your-content
http://www.slideshare.net/scottmclay/online-dating-getting-google-to-love-you

Takeaways:

• 77 per cent of internet users read blog, and those that do are likely to be influenced by them when making purchasing decisions – The Planet D
• Social media isn’t only about interacting with a bunch of your friends, but rather is way to curate unique content. Curation is key! – Jodi Ettenberg
• Working with people online is about developing personal relationships, not just lists – Andy Haynes
• Everything is a story. People often forget about narratives in creative projects, this rips the heart out of a creative piece – from a chat with Mike Sowden

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @Caliberi where we’ll be live-tweeting from all forthcoming conferences!

We are very proud of Michael Briggs, Scott McLay, Ian Humphreys, Katie Wallace, Jaimie Bell, and Sabrina Hackenbracht for representing Caliber at TBU Umbria! We hope everyone else enjoyed the conference as much as we did and we are already looking forward to the next one!

Here are our presentations so you can re-visit and share as you like:

Online Dating – Getting Google to Love You

Socialising Your Content

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.

Head of Strategy, Michael Briggs and Search Team Manager, Scott McLay will be laying down some epic SEO knowledge, while I will be doing two sessions on social media and online content. We’ll also be hosting one-to-one SEO workshops where the whole team (Katie Wallace, Jaimie Bell, and Sabrina Hackenbracht) will kick into action.

We’ll be tweeting throughout the conference so be sure to follow along on #TBUMBR. And if you’re lucky enough to be coming too – we’ll see you soon. A great weekend is ahead of us!

This has been made abundantly clear over the last half year as a flood of companies have released infographics on a wide range of topics. A simple Google image search brings up a dazzling array of infographics (some good, some bad, some laughable) on social media, health issues, puppies and just about anything you would care to think about.

Adrift in a sea of infographics

Does this flood devalue infographics in general? The answer is no, provided your visual is something truly captivating.

A year ago it was probably acceptable to throw out any old infographic safe in the assurance that it would be picked up by someone just on the merit of the medium. But in this saturated market we have to focus on creating pieces that are different, engaging and ultimately worth a reader spending time on. Here are a few crucial things to consider when developing an infographic:

1. Why should I care?!

Use this as your refrain whenever thinking up ideas; with so much data out there you need to ensure that there is an actual reason for people to read on. Does anyone really want to know how many clowns it would take to fill the Empire State Building to the brim? If the answer is no, don’t visualise it.

2. Do I have a right to talk about this?

Companies which produce infographics just for the sake of it, tend to latch on to catchy topics – celebrities and social media being the most popular. This leads carpeting companies to comment on social media, and has pet stores informing us about the latest celeb trends. Wacky! When you create an infographic, do it on something that you have authority on, otherwise what is there to make your opinion/data stand out from everything else out there? People share data from trusted sources – so talk about things that you are trusted for.

3. Don’t just make your design great, make it accessible!

The vast majority of infographics are incredibly inaccessible; they’re either long strips of images that take altogether too much scrolling to process, or overly complicated images that defy comprehension. Avoid falling into this trap by designing something that is easy to understand and appealing to the eye. Data visualisation is about making an issue easily understandable – never lose sight of this.

Many ingredients go into making a successful infographic. Yet these are some of the core principles we focus on whenever we kick off a project. By following them we create pieces which are easy to understand, simple and, most importantly, start a conversation which denizens of the internet world are keen to pick up; and that is the magic of infographics!

What’s your favourite infographic? Link it in the comments below.

Yes it’s Larry the Bird’s birthday today (shame on you for forgetting). On this day six years ago, Jack Dorsey, co-found of Twitter, tweeted the now famous phrase ‘just setting up my twttr’ – the original codename for the social networking site back in those days. What followed next was a worldwide success with over 500 million users all embracing the 140 character social network. Fast forward to 2012, and now you can’t go anywhere without hearing the word ‘trending’ or seeing ‘hashtags’ plastered all over newspapers, magazines or your television screens. It’s safe to say, Twitter is a part of all our lives (whether you like it or not).

In celebration of the micro-blogging six candles, here are five key facts.

1. Alexa ranks Twitter as the 9^th most popular website worldwide with over 5 and a half million sites linking to it
2. The musical superstar known as Lady Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter with over 21 million followers
3. Twitter is valued at around $8.4 billion dollars and recently received a $300 million investment from the Saudi Prince listed as the 26^th richest person in the world
4. Super Bowl XLVI set the record for the most tweets  received during a sporting event, with an overage of 10,000 tweets sent per second during the final minutes of the match between New York Giants and the New England Patriots
5. Charlie Sheen holds the record for the fastest time taken to reach 1 million followers at approximately 25 hours and 17 minutes in March 2011

So there you have it; some facts and figures that define Twitter.

Happy birthday Larry. Try not to eat too much cake. We’ll see you this time next year!

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.

Here’s the video that Facebook recently launched:

So what’s new?

With the Timeline only a month away and counting, here’s a quick look at what you can expect from the new Facebook Pages:

• Custom default landing pages will now be a thing of the past, with only fan gating left. Furthermore tabs are now 810px wide. However, Facebook might change its mind and offer an option for companies to setup a welcome tab again – who knows.

• ‘Likes’, photos and apps will operate at the top of the page under the cover image. Brands will be now allowed a maximum of 12 apps with the ability to rearrange them in order of importance.

Conclusion

With introducing Timeline across the board, Facebook has gone about remodelling its look and feel in an attempt to stem the tide of rival social networks and remain the undisputed king of the social jungle. In addition, by preventing brands from using call to actions in their cover images, Facebook has shrewdly increased the value of their Sponsored Stories and Advertisements, as Brands will now have to pay Mark Zuckerberg and co if they intend to continue advertising on the site.

Although there are noticeable negatives, namely the elimination of landing pages, Timeline for Pages will ultimately create an overall rise in engagement and fan interaction (fans will now be advised to send in their enquiries and queries via private message), as well as, an eruption of unique cover images and content once Brands, particularly small to medium sized one, get accustom to the re-design.

Wait for our next post about Facebook changes and how marketers can smoothly adapt to it.

Now tell us, what you really think about this new chapter for business on Facebook?

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.

One of the events was Build Communities Not Campaigns hosted by Comufy. Organised in a lovely restaurant, in-between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus, Build Communities Not Campaigns was a panel event which included top professional speakers from leading PR and social media agencies.  Taking centre stage was Ying Wong, Head of Digital at RLM Finsbury, Blaise Grim Viort, Head of Community & Social Media at EModeration, Neil Hallmark, Head of Digital at Kaizo and Rob Horsfield, Managing Partner at Brass Agency.

As the name suggests, the aim of the panel was to highlight the importance of brand communities over campaigns; how to build communities (with your brand advocates), and how to sustain engagement and interest within a community.  In the hour long event, each speaker took turns to share their social media wisdom and answer questions from the event mediator, as well as the audience. Below are some of the key points from each professional:

Ying Wong

• Part of the preparation is focusing on knowing who the influential people are – make them feel special and they will be your advocates when negative comments are posted
• Seed content and get people talking to one another – talking to community members offline will get them talking more online
• Getting a select number of people who comment and engage within the community is just as important as a million people who ‘like’ a page and bounce off
• Facebook ‘Likes’ don’t always mean a lot
• ROI is not that simple when measuring sentiment – look at share price and how much positive/ negative coverage over a period of time

Blaise Grim Viort

• Focus on people’s sense of belonging and influence, as well as monitoring if their needs are being met. From a community perspective,  engagement is essential, then you should look at engagement between members
• Keep things simple by asking communities for their feedback on products out now, not in the future
• Work with the 3 P’s – People talking about the brand – get a relationship going, make sure they are Passionate and then build a Process around them
• Make it clear to people that certain discussions will not be appropriate – alternatively, run a live social media crisis situation with fake social account, imagine a dispute and go through the steps of how to deal with the problem
• ROI depends on client objectives – is it to build and create engagement or is it to click through and buy

Neil Hallmark

• Communities are a group of people with shared influence (brand advocates) – the community will direct where the conversations go
• Within a community you can drive campaigns, but how can you start a community without a campaign
• Asked Unilever communities about the brands they love to give incentives e.g. designing packaging or giving a sneak peek of a new product – people love the fact that Unilever is listening to them
• Used Facebook for a Unilever campaign as this is where half the UK population is
• It’s all about content – what activities will you be doing with the community once you have them on board

Rob Horsfield

• Use campaigns to produce a readymade community – alternatively, use word of mouth (tell community members to ask their friends), mailing lists, customer database
• Set out expectations with terms and conditions to inform community members,  however, communities do tend to police themselves – don’t underestimate the power communities have to sniff out a disgruntled comment
• It’s not always about creating communities – there are lots of forums that already exist – it’s about finding them, accessing them and extracting the information you’re looking for
• How do we keep members interested – respect, good content and cash incentives
• If communication members fall out, find new member to replace them – sometimes people who join communities aren’t advocates

Key findings

The main conclusion to take away from the event was that the needs of the community members must always be met. Whatever the community, its members should always be respected, listened to and thought of first when planning, implementing and analysing community and campaign strategies. The other major point was that engagement is must successful through great content. For community members to participate and spread a brand name, engaging content has to be seeded to get people responding and talking to one another. This can be achieved by offering good incentives for communication such as sneak peeks, designing upcoming product packaging and cash prices.