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 Page Rank 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.

And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So “who do you trust?” becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.

So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.