Elementary - Stuart Watson

Social Data as a factor in Search Results

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:06:05 -0400

How do you know if something is valuable before you even get to see it? Well if you are Google you’d use links (or more accurately Page Rank which is derived from links). There is however one massive limitation with links, only content producers create links.

Based on a social media content creators report produced in Feb 2010 only 1 in 10 internet users actually create online content. Which means that 10% of users are making a massive impact in content discovery. This started to change in mid 2004 when websites such and Digg.com and Reddit made an appearance, users were able to have a say in the value of content by marking (voting) the content up or down which would increase/decrease the exposure to users.

The value of the Digg system didnt go unnoticed at Google and during 2008 they were in discussions to by Digg.com for a purported $200 Million. Unfortunately for Digg the sale was cancelled during the due dilligence process - but by then the idea was formed:

Social Voting allows non content creators to help systems evaluate the value of content.

This is great at a wholesale level giving broad community opinion but it doesn’t help when I search for “Great Music” and get returned Justin Bieber because 100,000 pre-teens have voted for it. Facebook took this idea and brought it to the social network level with the Like button - allowing you to see the “likes” of friends and acquaintances - people with whom you no doubt share interests and preferences.

Its taken three long years for Google to get on the bandwage and produce the +1 system. A method of both voting for preferred content and seeing the preferences of people in your network of friends:

If fraudulent voting can be accurately detected and filtered by Google I think we’ll see the weighing of +1 data heavily factor into the search engine results. Perhaps even rivalling link data.

Useful Design Resource: Background Patterns

Sun, 29 May 2011 12:51:00 -0400

Whilst looking for background images for this site I ran across Colour Lovers and was impressed by the depth and quality of the tiling background available. I’ll be changing the background on this site regularly so you’ll be sure to see some of these patterns make an appearance from time to time.

Modern SEO is a Side Effect

Sun, 29 May 2011 12:24:00 -0400

In the internet stone age of the late nineties Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was a black art. Techniques were closely guarded by webmasters to limit competition for high rankings on valuable search terms and avoid the wrath of search engines. Of course ongoing exploitation of loopholes in search algorithms led to an arms war between Search Engines and those undertaking SEO.

Fast Forward 10 years and the Search Engines have largely won the arms race. Sure some SEO guru’s find parts of the algorithm they can take advantage of - but its short lived and they run the very high risk of suffering a penalty when (not if) the algorithm is changed to intercept the exploitation. Does this mean that SEO is dead? not at all! - its just changed so much that it is now a completely different beast:

Modern SEO is a Side Effect

of following two simple rules:

1) Creating quality content that has a demand.

2) Participating in your digital community through as many avenues as possible.

Which ultimately leads to four questions:

1) What content is in demand?

Or put another way - what are the people we’re trying to attract looking for? green widgets, blue widgets, pretty widgets, designer embossed structurally engineered widgets. Creating a snapshot of your entire market in terms of words and phrases customers may use to find you can be a time consuming and difficult task (even for the staff running a business who should know their market better than anyone) - however once the task has been undertaken it provides a valuable resource which paints a picture of the market the business operates in.

However to really see the power behind this list we need to add one extra dimension - demand figures (how many people are looking for these words and phrases?). Thankfully the search engines provide some level of access to their usage statistics which makes this possible. Combined we now know the content our market is looking for - and which content they are looking for the most, this allows us to create a content generation plan to meet the proven needs of the market.

2) What are the rules for quality content?

I think we all remember having essay and report writing lessons drilled into us throughout all levels of schooling. Assignments would be returned with red marks pointing out elements such as:

- Spelling

- Sentence, Paragraph and Document structure

- Content Relevance

- References

Search engines are no different, except its a computer program marking your internet published content and it looks at over 200 different factors to determine how good the content is.

3) Where do i participate in the community for best effect?

Do you go to a Florist for advice on choosing your accountant? - hopefully the answer is no otherwise your accounts may look pretty but they’ll fall apart in a few days. Where are we going with this? the most effective business recommendations come from people in the same industry as the one you are looking for.

Search engines look for these recommendations (in the form of links to your site from related sites) and use that as a measure of the assessing the quality of your content in conjunction with that detected by virtually marking your content. Links can be generated in all manner of ways including:

1) Direct requests

2) Participation in relevant online communities

3) Content generation external to your website

4) Advertising or sponsorship

Its important to note that all links are not created equally, just as a recommendation on your singing voice from Britney spears is as not as valuable as a recommendation from Michael Buble, Norah Jones or Pavarotti.

4) How do i do SEO for free?

Ok so I had to throw in at least one good trick question. SEO is not free despite what you may have heard about a lifetime stream of free traffic from the Google gods by changing a few meta tags (geek code) on your website. Content and links do not create themselves and there is certainly a time cost involved in the research phase. SEO can be however a very cost effective method of generating a long term channel of visitors to your site if done with a bit of thought and strategy behind it.