Following on from a post a while back I have been re-visiting Psychological Profiling and found this great little site which goes, at some length, to explain the different types of people.
I can’t help thinking that there is a great deal of mileage in working out the Psychological Type of visitors to a website and dealing with them appropriately.
Have fun establishing yours 
I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.
You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.
Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.
It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?
And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Myspace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …
I was in a meeting last week and the conversation swung to SEO. I was told that it’s a technical science and needs all sorts of specialist skills to be able to carry it out properly. On further discussion it became clear that there are a number of technical “must do’s” in terms of web build but these are pretty well documented and understood and talking afterwards to our web build team it was clear that we were doing these things already.
So what is SEO? Is it a standalone service/skill that companies provide or is it integrated within a web build? This got me thinking about the aims of SEO which are, quite simply, to drive high quality traffic to the website via natural search listings.
One of the fundamental cornerstones of getting good listings is understanding PageRank which was created by one of the Google founders, Larry Page, whilst at Stanford University. This is a complex algorithm but not complicated at a philosophical level and revolves on the basis that better (i.e. more useful) sites have more references on the web and that those references are of a higher quality than worse (less useful) sites. Makes perfect sense and outside of some immoral activity such as Google Jacking it seems to be a really open, clear and fair method for rating sites.
So what has all this to do with e-PR?
If your aim is to increase the number of high-quality inbound links then you need to talk to high quality (high PageRank scoring) sites and get a link from them to you. A good example is the BBC site which is PR9 so an inbound link from here will help your site enormously. To get it, you need to form a relationship with this organisation, and others, and make sure they are both happy to link back to your site and know the right URL. This is a modern-day equivalent of a Public Relations type exercise, hence the term “e-PR”.
In part, SEO now involves building real relationships with real, high-quality organisations and providing them with useful content that they can link to. It’s no secret that the internet is a great place to find useful information so all you need to do is target certain sections and pages on your site to the world’s media and they will, after a while, find you. You can accelerate the process by forming direct relationships with them by, for example, becoming one of the expert companies that the BBC will consult with on a given subject.
There is more to it than this though. You can create your own network of e-PR.
I’m been keeping online diaries for years, long before it became known as Blogging and I was an early adopter in paying TypePad for a professional blog platform (2004). Up to now I have written just for me, but I’m starting to get comments and so I’m becoming a bit more serious about it. I’ve just come across a post from a Canadian Blogger called Eric about How NOT to be a successful blogger. It made me chuckle and is one of the best posts I’ve seen this year - definitely worth a read.
See if you can count how many mistakes I have made. I got to 9 and gave up. Oh, well, I’m learning and will get better hopefully
It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-
1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink
2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station
3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness
4. He knows I am male
Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.
So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.
More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.
I frequently see organisations, large and small, using Google’s Analytics (GA) as their method to measure RoI or whatever else they think they need to establish and I wonder what drove them to that decision. I know it’s free and I know that Google is all cuddly but there are a couple of issues that I am torn on:
1. Google’s role as an advertiser and a reporting agent are in direct conflict. I am sure that one does not directly affect the other but they will gather market data and the temptation to mine this for commercial gain must be huge. Avoiding using GA would remove this all together. Have a read of “Google minding your own business” from Donna Bogatin to see an expansion of this topic
2. Session-based analytics are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that 1000 people visited your site today and 10% of them converted from the search term “blue widgets” might, on the face of it, tell you a lot but misses out so much important information such as “which people are the 10%” and “how much did these 10% go onto spend over x months”. These are real e-business questions that Google Analytics fails to answer.
3. GA works by running a script on the page, this script has a size over 5k - doesn’t sound a lot but the Google search page is just 12k. A good target size for your landing pages are 25k so this is a 20% increase in size = 20% longer to load the page.
4. There are some legitimate privacy concerns as Google is acquiring information about private individuals such as their IP address and their buying and browsing history. Now you could argue that this is not personal information but I think if you look at it from a moral standpoint it is, in many ways, far more personal than, say, my date of birth or maybe even my name. Tracking me via my IP address is far more reliable and finds every place I go - tracking me by name only works where I use my name so I can choose whether I can be found. You don’t have the option to switch off your IP address.
5. If GA is so good then why does Google not use it themselves?
