My Digital Notebook

Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.

As ever, comments welcome.

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Sources Used:

“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]

“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]

“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]

“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]

Nick Griffin and the lost and found

By now Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been well dissected.

I’m not going to add much to what has already been said aside from agreeing with the Times, who borrowed a nice descriptive line from P.G. Wodehouse, comparing the BNP leader to Roderick Spode, Bertie Wooster’s nemesis and all-round pantomime villain.

Or, as Wodehouse said:

‘Big chap… with the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces.’ [link to article]

But from a search perspective, the case is worth examining a little more closely.

Ever since Obama’s beautifully executed digital strategy prised open the doors of the White House, commentators have been speculating about the effect the Internet will have on the next British General Election, which is at the very most only 195 days away.

Some already seem to be suggesting that it will be the Facebook election and swung by social media.

And (interestingly) just this week Charlie Beckett speculated that guerrilla videos might have an impact.

But nobody has said very much about search, especially paid search.

Paid Search and Keywords

For those of you that don’t know, paid search refers to the paid for adverts (referred to as sponsored links) that appear at the top (known as the blue bar) or to the right hand side of the search results.

Paid search rankings are secured by bidding on certain keywords in the Google Adwords Platform. Traditionally they have been most used by advertisers who have used paid search (or ppc/paid per click) to boost their online sales and increase brand awareness.

Political parties should (and will) start to use paid search in the same way very soon.

By ranking at the top of Google’s search results for desired keyword terms, a party, a company or an individual can control their digital footprint far more closely.

Let’s take an example from 22 April this year.

Here you can see that three people are bidding on the keyword term “budget 2009”. The first is direct.gov an information site run by the government who are hoping to increase awareness of their site.

Secondly we have the Conservatives. Budget day is obviously important for them and they have put in place a paid search strategy to direct the maximum amount of traffic to their website.

Thirdly we have some clever marketing by Anne Summers, who drily advise searchers that: ‘There is no recession in pleasure.’ Very nicely done.

It is a useful case study that shows how a political keyword term can be integrated into a paid search campaign.

Throughout the conference season last month, all the major parties missed opportunities in paid search. Off the top of my head, here are some keywords which might have been useful to marketing strategists at Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem HQ:

“gordon brown speech”

“labour party conference”

“tory party conference”

None of these were picked up on. For parties that are desperate to get their message out, it must be viewed as an opportunity missed.

Now we come to Nick Griffin. His appearance on Question Time has undoubtedly been one of the political events of the month, and it has been particularly keenly watched online: followed on Twitter and analysed in the blogs.

Here are Google Insights into searches for the keyword term “Nick Griffin” over the last seven days:

And if you click here you can see the rising number of Delicious bookmarks that have been saved under “nickgriffin”.

So last night it was interesting (and thank you to @matthewncube for pointing this out) that Channel 4 had opted to bid on the ‘nick griffin’ keyword. Here is what their advert looked like:

By appearing alone at the top of the Google search results for one of the most popular keyword terms on the Internet, Channel 4 might have doubled or tripled their site traffic.

Along with social and traditional media and SEO, paid search marketing has a role to play in the construction of a truly holistic digital strategy. So far we have seen political parties (or perhaps just the Conservatives) dipping their toes into Adwords, but their attempts so far can only be described as a scattergun approach.

Paid search has the potential to make an enormous difference. Already this year Jason Calacanis has called it the most important industry of the twenty first century. For a quick visual indication of the difference that it can make to a website’s traffic, have a look at what happened to Spiralfrog on Flickr.

It’s possible to carefully study and collect keywords, to manage and monitor huge campaigns that include short and long tail terms as well as other misspellings and oddities. With such campaigns set up, the parties could increase the number of visitors that come to their websites (the centre of any digital hub) and they could also reinforce their message on the search results – over and over and over again.

The question is this: do any of the major parties have the ability to do this in time?

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image credit: the G on Flickr
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Update: Martin Belam has written a post on this subject. It’s good for further perspective.

This week Derek Powazek wrote a very good post about SEO.

When I say it was very good post, I mean that it was an inspiring post, that it was clever and well-written and right.

He wrote:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

Instead he urged:

“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

This is an important debate. Millions of pounds are currently being spent by publishers in a never ending quest for immaculate SEO. Companies of all sizes have been blinded by the lights – by the the endless promises of impeachable page ranks and soaring keywords.

But you play  the game at a risk. Remember what happened to BMW in 2006?

What do you need to know about SEO?

SEO is a widely complex field, one part logical, one part mysterious. For any ethically-minded publisher, I’d say that looking at these two areas – when coupled with excellent, unique content – should be enough to be going on with for the moment.

Very quickly:

For on page SEO:

Go and read this document. Take your time. Understand it. Implement it.

Off page SEO:

Work out how to maximise the value of your content. Use it wisely. Imagine that you are running your own publishing network.

Submit your blogs to directories publicise them through social media and syndicate your content (written, audio or visual) by licensing it under the creative commons.

Pass it on, ask for a link. Build up your Google juice by merit.

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image credit: Dull Hunk

A sign of the times

This is from my colleague and all-round clever Swede, Magnus Nilsson.

A list of the ‘new’ super affiliates:

http://www.guardiandigitalcomparison.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/shopping

http://compare.independent.co.uk/

And let’s not stop at that. Why not scroll to the bottom of this page:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/

Yes. That big rolling banner? That’d be a big link to the ES’s affiliate page.

If you have no idea what I’m on about when I use the word affiliate, you might want to read this.

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image credit: adambowie

Well done everyone

It is about time that I got around to adding this snippet of news. We’ve just been voted number 16 in the Times’ Tech Track 100 list.

You can read a PDF of the report here.

Above is a picture of my big boss, Sri Sharma, looking like he is about to predict the lottery results.

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Update: Here is a little post on how the image of Sri (above) was created.

image credit: zipenfish

Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:

“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”

Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.

It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:

1. “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
2. “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
3. “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
4. “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)

When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:

“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”

Keyword journalism

SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:

“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”

Which is obviously very different to:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.

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Update:

As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.

Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.