Get down with the Freshness, Google on Caffeine

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Last week Google rolled out an update to their algorithm that is designed to enhance real time events in the query. Though it will impact 35% of search queries, that should not be mistaken with “keywords”. However, it proves a point that I have been harping on for years. Google thinks fresh content is important. This is one of the reasons why I encourage business owners to blog.

If you get into a habit of it, it will do more than help your search rankings. It creates a way for your website visitors to interact with your business. If you are excited about your business and you share that excitement, personally, with your visitors and they engage back, you have accomplished a primary goal of your website. Obviously, Social Media strategy plays into this, but your website, your blog, should be the center of that activity.

So you have three options.

1) you can get engaged yourself and manage your web content and social media

2) you can have your already overtasked staff do it on their lunch break

3) (my favorite) Hire a professional person or firm who does this stuff all the time

But sooner or later your website is going to have to “Get down with the Freshness”.

 

More on the Google update:

Search Engine Land Article

 

 

 

The Cobbler’s son has no shoes

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So the old adage goes. It has often been a topic among my peers that the things we do everyday for other people, we are not very good at doing for ourselves.

I have been tasked with speaking on a panel on the subject of blogging. What makes for a good blog? Why should businesses be blogging? Those types of questions. As I have been in conversations about it, I became grouped in an entertaining sub-group of “bloggers who teach others how to blog, but don’t actually blog themselves”.

While the categorization is partly right. The question then becomes what constitutes a blogger? And what is a blog anyway?

What I am writing right now is a blog in a variety of ways. It is being written in WordPress, a common and practical blogging platform. On this particular website, I only have my blog content as opposed to my other websites, where I have information and sales and marketing materials. And when I write here, I usually contribute via a post, which again is typical blogging behavior.

Now therein lies the real question in this article. How often do you post? In my case, that happens to be less than most.

Origins of Peregrine Digital

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So my clients have been asking, why ‘Peregrine’, often mis-pronouncing it. Pronounced [per•a•grin]. New brands are such a touchy thing. I mean you put all of this time and thought and meaning into something, but then when someone asks, you say, ‘derrrugh’. So, I want ed to take a minute here and tell the story of how Peregrine Digital came into being.

I was driving to Denver with my family and I saw this beautiful hawk flying over the highway and I thought, ‘Peregrine Media’ sounds cool. So I looked it up the word and the first thing it says is ‘mobile, mobility, pilgrim, stranger’. I thought, hey that makes sense. Falcons were used as one of the first international communication systems. They brought connotations of mobility, power, vision, ‘a hawk eye’s view’. But better yet, it brought this idea of strangeness, being foreign, which for me is a day in the life of the internet for most of my clients. It all snapped into place and as our business grew, we needed a bigger name. A better vision. More speed and accuracy. A better view of the competition. We needed to bring meaning and definition to the strange and intricate world of the internet. We proudly became Peregrine Digital Media.

The Perfect Website

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I have a client who asked me, “so how do you ever get to the perfect website, I mean you can’t, right?” And the interesting part is that he is doing nothing instead. Now I know he will eventually get around to improving his site and I hope I am the one to do that for him, but the question raised remains. Can you have a perfect website?

The pursuit of perfection has driven mankind through the ages, and many religious practices aspire to achieve perfection. However, the pursuit is always a journey. It takes many careful steps. You have to nurture it, and focus on it. You have to devote yourself to it.

This is impractical for business owners, but it is important to realize that to achieve perfection you must first begin somewhere, anywhere. Start with your own team around you who can foster your social media buzz. Start by keeping a web designer on retainer to make regular updates and modification to your site.

To truly achieve the perfect website, there are basic principles in design and function that need to be adhered to. You must know your audience and give them an appropriate user interface. You have to let them know what you want them to do. That sounds odd, but perfection can’t happen without giving your website over to your customer. Give them what they need. They came to your website to answer some basic question.
And when you give them what they want. It is perfect.
(But, you must start from where you are.)

Designers Vs. Programmers – You need both

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Seth Godin wrote in his 2001 book “The Big Red Fez” that there are two world views when it came to website design the “Engineer’s version” and the “Marketer’s version”. These days that can be boiled down to Designers vs. Programmers. Designers make pretty sites and Programmers make sites that work and can be found on Google. There are of course exceptions to every rule.

However, these days you have to have both. Long gone are the days that you could publish a beautiful site and not worry about the technical aspects of it.
These days you need a 1) beautiful site 2)with solid user-friendly navigation and 3)technically optimize it so that Google, Yahoo and Bing can find you.
If your site is ugly, you will lose credibility with your visitors.
If your site does not (to quote “The Big Red Fez”) “Give the Monkey the banana” your visitor will leave your site immediately and likely not return again. (Your bounce rate).
And if your site was not built with Search Engine Optimization in mind (SEO), you will not be found and your site traffic will suffer.
When working on your next web project, assuming that someone besides your cousin or nephew is building it for you, ask your developer these three basic questions:
1) What will it look like?
2) How will my visitors know what is important when they get there?
3) Will your efforts help me rank high in the search engines?
If the person you are looking to hire can’t definitively answer all three, keep looking. Or email me and I’ll help you

Talked about Video in the Social Media realm today

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I had :07 minutes to cover a topic, that I could take 2 hours on. That’s ok. My spot was part of an ongoing conversation with Cliffdweller Productions about integrating video and websites. The real deal is that your website can be it’s own social media and video website. The question is can you come up with a website strategy that keeps your customer engaged, while providing a reasonable ROI in what you spend getting them there.

To SEO or No

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Search Engine Optimization evokes a series of thoughts for most people that begins with clouded confusion, spins into thoughts about spammy websites, and rests on “what exactly am I paying for?” At the same time it is one of the hottest topics in media circles.

In reality it is both simple and complex. At the end of the day, you and I (and Google) really want people to find exactly what they are looking for. As Brad Geddes put it, “the search process is driven by giving someone the correct information at the correct time.”

The reason that SEO is confusing, is that it is actually best delivered out of the center of your marketing campaign. But, most days it is the last thing we think about or plan for. SEO is site development. It is a focus on developing keyword-rich content, creating easily accessible channels into your site based on an evaluated understanding of who you want to reach vs. who you are currently reaching. SEO is about developing mutually beneficial linking relationships with top-visited, top-ranked websites.

If there is one new marketing initiative for businesses to tackle in 2011, it is integrating a search strategy as the foundation of their marketing efforts.

Discovery

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It is very difficult in the modern world to keep pace with shifting technologies fast enough to actually be effectual with a product before it is out of date, and replaced by the next generation that will have it’s own learning curve.
The real problem is timely discovery.
By the time I discover what I actually need, I have wasted countless hours on inferior, dated solutions.

 

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