posted by Nicolette Beard @ 4:14 PM
As one blogger put it: “Who cares where they rank (sic), if the #1 rank is below the fold?”
With the advent of Universal Search and now Real-Time Search, we can look fondly back to the time when competing for a page one ranking seemed comparatively easy.
Every business is now competing with
- Paid listings
- New product listing ads
- News
- Organic results (1-4)
- Shopping sites via Google Merchant
- Video via YouTube
- Organic results (5-10)
The above list reinforces why it’s so important to know how to promote your site, products and services in all the areas included on a page one result. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) has morphed into “search optimization.”
Although on-page optimization is still important for effective crawling and indexing of your most important Web pages, it’s no longer enough if you want to be competitive in today’s market.
As Google continues to acquire even more data from mining Social Data Sources, they will be increasing their knowledge about a business ten-fold over the next few years.
This data will eventually be significant in how they rank Web pages not only in Local Search but in Organic Search as well. And we haven’t even factored in Mobile Search.
As detailed in a recent Webinar, the time to develop an holistic engagement strategy is now. Reputation management will be critical to the ongoing survival for any business.
What are the positive online signals your company is sending?
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1.23.2009
posted by Robin Tooms @ 7:45 PM
In the current Jan/Feb 2009 Issue of STEP Inside Design on “Emerging Talent,” I wrote about the effective design and marketing behind the change.gov website as compared to other government sites, and how this site continued the trends set forth in the earlier campaign site.
From the article:
“There are many historical firsts from this year’s presidential election, but one worth noting is the first highly successful use of websites and social media in a presidential campaign. In looking back over the past year, why this worked seems obvious now, but that is with the knowledge of hindsight. Is it no surprise then that the most brand- and media-savvy candidate to date is also continuing these methods into his transition to president. It’s positive to see good design and communication practices in a government site, so there is hope for the role of design in government yet.
As a whole, government sites are notorious for being confusing and poorly designed. And, for the most part they don’t leverage the latest in online communications trends. While we watched the presidential inauguration this week in person, on TV and of course online, we now turn our attention now to the post-inauguration communications. Yes, January 20, 2009 has passed, but on that date the new whitehouse.gov Website went live. As I expected, the whitehouse.gov site changed drastically from the previous version on that day – not just a design refresh but a reworking of the site approach. Some of the visual hallmarks from the earlier change.gov site are there and there is a distinct emphasis on the free exchange of information. The site is even licensed under Creative Commons, so the intent is for the information to be distributed.
The recent publicity around recovery.gov also got me thinking about the accessibility and transparency the web can provide for the government (or companies) that want to keep open lines of communications with their stakeholders. What does this new transparent government also mean for corporate and investor communication trends? What do you think?
