Irreverent Thinking

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.

Google is pretty innovative, actually it is very innovative and despiter having some obscene amounts of money to throw at projects a lot of good comes out of what they are doing. The latest Google “toy” that I am playing with is Google Suggestion Labs the idea is simple…..you are now too thick to search properly so we will make suggestions as to what you search for. You start typing and Google guesses what you are looking for and (usefully) tells how many matches it is likely to find. Very clever.

Except. It could “serve” you prefered answers from such sources as (gasp) commercial partners and advertisers. I noticed when I searched for Playstation 3 the first real prompt was in fact “Play.com” a well-known e-boutique selling, amongst other things, Playstation bits. Play.com had only 1 match but the entry beneath had (the word Play by itself) had 196 million matches. Ah, I here you say - it’s clever and showing the one with the least matches as that (quite rightly) would produce a better match should you stop typing there…..except that when I continued to type “Playst” it then gave me Playstation 3 (15m matches) above Playstation Portable (4m matches).

I am sure that true to form Google will also keep this algorithm secret and periodically update it so that once the SEO spammer brigade has sussed it out (ruining it for everyone) they can change it again and hurt hard-working regular sites that stay within the guidelines.