SEO study #7

Today's topic is more about good blogging skills & philosophy. I really liked that. Life boils down to having sound philosophy and taking sincere effort either it's building a blog or running a business.

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Google AdSense and automated spammy "can I buy a link on your site" emails have made virtually every important online publisher aware of the value of links.

In mid 2007 Google began editing toolbar PageRank scores and rankings for many sites that were selling links. It is getting harder and more expensive to buy your way to the top through link rentals.

At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. But how do you create content that people will like?

One of the easiest ways to predict a future and to predict what people like is to imerse yourself in your topic. If you are passionate about a topic, know more about it than anyone else, and openly share information, then eventually people will notice and link to you. If you know what people are interested in, rather than asking them to link to what you have, create something that they would be interested in linking at. Express your worldview and your bias in a way that matches their worldview.

Each of us is the most relevant thing in our own lives. It sounds selfish but it is true. If you promote other people they will be more likely to promote you. Popular bloggers search to see what people are saying about them. If you want someone's attention linking at them from a blog post on your site is an easy way to get them to notice you. This article about Paris Hilton explains how the concept works in the real world.
http://chartreuse.wordpress.com/2006/09/18/why-paris-hilton-is-famous-or-understanding-value-in-a-post-madonna-world/

Social interaction of any type leads to links. Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it. Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards. Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships.

But for people to take you credibly you need to make sure your website adheres to good web credibility standards. Is your domain name memorable? Does your design complement your copy? Is your content interesting and conceptually unique? Does your site have an editorial component and voice, or is it a boring low-value thin product database? Is your about page memorable? Is your site easy to use and understand? Do you have a brand people care about? You do not need to "have it all" to get started, but the more credible you look the faster you will gain momentum.

The Cluetrain Manifesto stated that markets are conversations.
http://www.cluetrain.com/
Blogs are the leading medium upon which those conversations happen. If you are a blogger, read the Blogger's Guide to SEO to get the most out of your blog.
http://www.seobook.com/bloggers
Even if you are not a blogger, the Blogger's Guide to SEO can help you understand the mindset of bloggers and why blogs quickly became a foundational part of the web.

Work to improve your site every day. Over the course of the year fixing or creating one thing a day will lead to a large advantage. Building up a leading market position can take years, but once you get at the top those years are the barrier to entry which prevent others from being able to replicate what you built up.

ps: You can get an overview of website credibility here
http://training.seobook.com/website-credibility

Source: SEOBook email, Aron Wall
(March 11, 2008)

(Pls notice: mostly the post is mostly excerpts from the "source" for the purpose of self-study and archiving. Therefore, when IPR issue arises I am willing to abide by the law.)

magazines' web sites are still proving more effecti...

Source: MEDIAWEEK, Dec 17, 2007 v17 i46 p24(2).

Title: Digital divide: magazines' web sites are still proving more
effective in attracting readers and ads than their digital
editions.(magazines)
Author: Lucia Moses

Locations: United States
SIC code: 7310; 2721

Electronic Collection: A172635719
RN: A172635719


Full Text COPYRIGHT 2007 Nielsen Business Media, Inc.

When Digital Editions of consumer magazines first appeared on the scene, they
dangled out the hope of bringing back wayward print subscribers and appealing
to advertisers with new, rich-media opportunities.

After a few years of dabbling in digital editions, publishers' hopes remain
largely unfulfilled. Large numbers of subs haven't materialized; for the first
six months of 2007, only 56 consumer magazines reported paid digital
subscriptions to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, up from 23 two years
earlier. As a result, few ads are sold against digital editions, which
essentially mimic their print progenitors.

Many publishers' experiments went no further than using digital issues to tide
over new subscribers until they get their long-awaited first issue. (One
reason is that, happily, magazines' Web sites are doing a better job of
attracting new subscribers.)

Chuck Cordray, vp and general manager, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, said
that Hearst found its Web sites are a better way to interact with readers than
digital editions are, and so digital editions have dropped in priority. "The
experiments we've had did not have the same legs as the Web sites," Cordray
said.

"For us, we've seen most of our growth on highly interactive formats that work
best in an online format." As for attracting ads, he said, "We're strong
believers that print has some pretty hard-to-duplicate advertising."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Cimarron Buser, vp marketing, Texterity, a leading digital magazine platform,
acknowledged that the advertising stream has been more of a dribble than a
gush. "It's not as often as we would like, and I think it's the process of
educating advertisers," Buser said. A belief among some publishers that
digital editions compete with their magazines' separate Web sites also could
be to blame, Buser said. (His company has evidence that digital editions
actually support the Web sites by linking readers there, he added.)

Still, some persistent publishers have found digital editions can serve useful
roles in courting niche audiences and readers living abroad.

"Publishers are realizing they have to do more than just put a digital edition
up on their site, that you have to build programs around it for readers,
advertisers," said Rich Maggiotto, president and CEO of Zinio, another leading
e-publishing platform.

Hearst's Popular Mechanics has used the software to create custom publications
that it has used as circulation builders. In July, it will publish a DIY
handbook that will contain subscription offers throughout and be sent to
current as well as prospective subscribers culled from Hearst's database,
publisher Bill Congdon said.

Others are using their digital editions to serve ex-pats. Playboy, one of the
earliest digital edition users, reported more than 40,000 paid digital subs in
the first half of 2007, 40 percent of them overseas. Phyllis Rotunno, senior
vp, subscription circulation for Playboy, said that the digital edition--which
includes videos, music and extra photos--hasn't translated into new print
subscribers. But it's helped Playboy tap into a new source of people overseas
who weren't already print subscribers, Rotunno said. "What it's doing for us
is bringing in incrementals," she noted.

Others are using digital editions to appeal to readers' eco-friendly side. In
honor of Earth Day, Active Interest Media's Yoga Journal offered subscribers
the option of getting the May issue digitally instead of in print.

Some publishing executives still believe the format has advertiser potential.
At Bonnier Corp., subscribers who have opted to receive digital editions of
titles like Wake Boarding and Cruising World over print have grown over the
past two years to represent 5 percent of Bonnier's total circulation. Peter
Winn, director of planning and development in consumer marketing at Bonnier,
believes the number is big enough to warrant talking with advertisers about
rich-media opportunities on the digital editions. "Now is about the time when
we're ready to at least expose advertisers to this as an option," Winn said.

Congdon sees new possibilities for digital editions as the publishing
platforms add more features, while laptops, tablet PCs and e-readers gain in
popularity. "On the ad, a 30-second video could be played," he said. "Or if we
do a story on building a deck, a two-minute video could have the editor
talking about how to do it."

Still, media buyers are skeptical about the format. Bill Bell, group media
strategy director at Lowe New York, questioned the value of a digital edition
to advertisers. "I don't think they go online to read a magazine," he said.
Online, he said, "you're there for a purpose. You're looking for something."

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Keeping It Cool: Texterity iPhones It In.

Source: Min's B to B, Dec 3, 2007 v10 i46 pNA.

Title: Keeping It Cool: Texterity iPhones It In.
\
Electronic Collection: A172029364
RN: A172029364


Full Text COPYRIGHT 2007 Access Intelligence, LLC

By Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor for min, min's b2b and min's Digital
Media Report

Sometimes being cool for cool's sake is good enough for me. Take for instance
digital magazine provider Texterity's impressive new iPhone versions of 52 of
the digitized publications in its stable. While generally I find most mobile
extensions of B2B products to be more sexy and novel than actually mission
critical and functional, this experiment in mobile design succeeds in charting
a path for more portable business pubs.

The version 1.0 of an earlier, less robust Texterity for iPhones greets you at
the door (IPHONE/TEXTERITY.COM/MAGAZINES) with the covers of scores of titles,
including Baseline, Pizza Magazine and even Powder Bulk Solids--not your usual
hip iPhone fare. Enter into any of the mags and a top line menu lets you see
full thumbnails of every page in the book or a menu of more precise
navigational tools. There is a full search function and a TOC as well as a
sharing mechanism for email links. The search tool is particularly good,
because it lets you search against specific issues of a title and customize
the appearance of the search results. The results themselves are beautiful
thumbnails of the relevant page with a quote that locates the keyword.

Because of the Safari browser interface, the actual pages look fantastic, and
a tap on any area of a page zooms in easily. The only thing missing, and this
is a limitation in Safari, is a cut and paste utility that lets you create
your own clippings. Generally, you can push and pinch, zoom in and out of
pages as you do with any Web site via the great Safari interface.

While Texterity's is one of the most deft Web applications I have seen for the
iPhone, there is a new world opening up to content providers on the platform.
Apple forced third parties to use "off-deck" Web-based applications to appear
on the iPhone in the original design, but the company recently announced it
was opening the iPhone up to third party developers by releasing a software
development kit (SDK) in February. This means that designers cannot get direct
access to the Apple deck and design full-fledged software applications that
integrate content with communications, mapping, calling, etc.

But why do iPhone applications matter at all to B2B publishers? After all,
with an estimated 2 to 3 million iPhones in the U.S. by early next year, this
is a pretty small target. In fact, the business utility of the iPhone is
limited, since it doesn't work well with many business networks and internal
e- mail clients. Apple made no secret that it is a consumer-facing device.

In fact, the target is broader than the iPhone, since all of the Web
applications that work on the iPhone also work on the new iPod Touch
multimedia player. The "Touch" is a phone-less iPhone essentially, with all
the touch screen interface and WiFi-enabled Web browsing of the phone.
Arguably, the Touch may sell more units than the iPhone, and it is that
platform of WiFi multimedia devices where the Texterity design gets
interesting.

Increasingly, mobile devices will have larger screens, fatter pipes and more
flexible interfaces. All of our content will move from the limitations of the
current WAP page and SMS messaging into mobile broadband on richer receivers.

When I spoke recently to Cimarron Buser, VP of marketing at Texterity, he said
that with good marketing and awareness of the alternative, up to 15% of B2B
readers are showing a preference for the digital versions of their business
pubs because of superior convenience and searchability. When the company sends
its e-mail ticklers to digital subscribers reminding them a new issue is
available, Texterity sees typically a 30% to 80% email open rate for the email
and a 10% to 50% "read rate," which indicates the user clicked through to
engage the magazine. Compared to the usual read rates of print versions of B2B
pubs, Buser says that percentage is pretty good.

The digital magazine format has always been in need of a technology on which
it can work more effectively. Back in 2001 when many of these companies first
emerged, the likely target was the laptop. Downloadable magazines (the early
model for this platform) sold themselves as fully portable apart from the Web.
You could read your stack of magazines from the laptop on the plane. When the
Tablet PC came out in the early 2000s, that too was touted as the perfect
reading device for digital magazines because of its oblong orientation and
book- like format. The new Amazon Kindle book reader also has magazines in its
mix.

The iPhone and iPod Touch, along with new mobile Internet browsers from Nokia,
are helping to revive interest in the portable multimedia device coming from a
different direction. While previous attempts try to shrink the desktop to
portable size, the newer approach seems to expand the mobile phone platform
upwards to embrace more robust browsing. Given the ubiquity of cell phones,
this looks like a better bet than Tablets or portable book readers. Hybrid
cell/WiFi devices could well be the sweet spot that digi-mags have been
waiting for. Experiments like Texterity's in iPhone magazine design could be
shooting just ahead of the tech trajectory, but our guess is there is
important learning here for the day when design and technology come together.

[Copyright 2006 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]

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