Financial Times polls users on new website in development

A true victory for the power of quantitive user research. We would like to commend FT.com for sending their new website design to their online subscribers. Inevitably the design has already been user tested with a usability testing house, but this shows a level of confidence from FT's web marketing / IT team and a hunger to ensure that their new website hits the spot in their competition against the likes of the Economist and the BBC.co.uk. You can review their development site at:
http://www.uploadlibrary.com/ops.ft.com/Falconland/index.html

Obama raised over $110m in online donation

Its great to the the 'leader of the free-world elect' is wise to the power of using the internet (read: web 2.0) as the critical tool in his campaign communication and subsequent fundraising. Has a Democratic candidate's campaign budget ever outstripped the Republicans, despite being perceived as the 'party of big business'. People Power indeed.
Barack's 1st move was to get Chris Hughs on board. Chris Hughs was co-founder of Facebook and was responsible for the creation of my.barackobama.com community site that was integral in the fundraising effort.

Upon election victory Obama emailed 70 million American donators with a very personal message:

“We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next,” Obama promised in his e-mail. 'Change has come'

If politicians can succeed in 'doing personal' on a mass scale then companies will quickly need to get to best of breed or risk 'old marketing' perceptions from an ever less attentive audience.

A deviation of subject matter

Well this blog is not normally about politics and apologies to anyone reading this who is offended by the deviation but yesterday's events in the USA need committing to paper (kinda). The historic significance of America voting for a very different perspective in its governance goes far beyond the fact that in only 70 years since abolishing afro-american slavery, an African American has made it to the white house. I don't want to belittle the significance of this, as the west lectures the world on human rights, but I would like to make some different observations, primarily around linguistics.

The language used by the Bush administration over the last 8 years has enabled the likes of Putin, Mogawbe and Israeli spokesmen to have an English language arsenal, for the world media that makes their atrocities far harder to interrogate publicly. Here's some expressions I'm excited of seeing the back of:

-Axis of Evil
-War on terror (Obama will call it something but may move from this?)
-Coalition of the willing
-Shock and Awe (gone anyway but no forgotten)
-Freedom lovers
-Pre-emptive strike
-Extraordinary rendition flights
-Electoral "folks"
-Rising insurgents
-Terror on our doorstep
-Enemy combatants (ie non-political or criminal detainees with no right to trial)
-Hockey mums (well we can but hope)

While the economy has dominated the election, it will be interesting to see if Obama, the man with a heavier burden of expectation than anyone I have witnessed in history, will:

-Return the right to trial
-End rendition flights
-End the military support (by sending weapons as aid) to Israel
-Close Guantanamo bay (he and McCain both said they would)
-End the War on terror?
-Ever be daft enough to say "we need an energy policy that encourages consumption"

PS - Sarah Palin no sooner yesterday announced her intention to run for President in 4 years time than was caught saying "Oh, is Africa really a continent" -
I pray that America has indeed changed and that this 8 year imperial, oil price fuelled war-mongering experiment is indeed marked in the history books to never ever happen again. For now at least the USA has sent a message to the world that they were not all blind to the Machiavellian fear bull-shit politics of the Bush regime -America has a chance to properly look itself in the mirror now and not to appease terrorists, far from it but simply to regain a respectful foreign policy and a position in the world that they can be proud of. Roll on 'regime change' in January.

Obama has a 1 trillion debt to fight alongside 2 unwinable wars (what on earth did victory look like anyway? - not a neighboring allied state loosing control of Pakistan's border region) - I rarely turn to God but after the impact of the last 8 years on global state sponsored terrorism, and unashamed oil commodity market destabilizing - Obama, may God protect and be with you all the way.

To end, a Bushism that should really be his epitaph:

George W - "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Meta Descriptions

I have been writing page titles and meta descriptions for one of my clients websites and I thought I would post some basic tips for writing optimised meta descriptions.

Many webmasters / web designers don’t give meta descriptions the attention that they deserve. We have seen many cases where meta descriptions or page titles have been ignored completely during the build of a web site.

While it is true that search engines apply only a limited level of importance to meta descriptions with regards to the ranking of a page, they are however an important way of marketing pages of your site as they are often used as your company 'snippet' descriptor within search results. Having a well written, compelling description can mean the difference between achieving just impression or gaining a click through.

Writing good meta descriptions

Here are some considerations when writing meta descriptions.

The number of characters that search engines display varies by engine. We recommend limiting descriptions to 160 characters which is the smallest character number and what Google display within search results.

Write meta descriptions to act as a summary of the individual page of your site. They should describe the page accurately and succinctly. If the page description is not accurate, the user experience is poor.

Sell your page to the searcher - use a call to action in the meta description and highlight the key points of the page, whatever the purpose of the page. If a page is promoting a product, highlight the key attributes of the product. You should include brand, model numbers and consider including prices if possible.

It is important to include the page’s target keyphrase in the description. This is not done for ranking purposes but to indicate to the searcher that the page is relevant to their search query. Keywords from the query will appear in bold within the results which can have a positive impact on the click through rate.

If you are promoting a bricks and mortar business or location, then include a phone number in the meta description. People viewing the page with a mobile device like the Apple iPhone or other mobile browser can dial your business directly from the search result. This also applies to users with Skype’s browser extension and is becoming the norm for mobile browsing.

If you have a large database driven site with thousands of product pages it is possible to create meta data dynamically changing variables in the description. I would recommend that at least 4 variables are included within the description to avoid meta descriptions appearing too similar or in the worse case spammy.

Avoid duplicate titles and descriptions across multiple pages. This will limit the ranking ability of pages and as search engine duplicate content filters are getting tougher. Anything that can be done to differentiate pages will help pages being filtered out.

Search engines only want to present searchers with the most relevant information in relation to the search query. They may scrape any relevant content, keyphrases or content surrounding keyphrases and present this as the snippet. For pages targeting many 'long tail' keyphrases the best strategy can often be to allow search engines to extract the most relevant data from the content of the page and present that to users.

Search Engine Optimisation - The Archaic way

Today we received from our very reputable domain and web hosts, Namesco, an ACT NOW! offer:

{Last day of the offer} - "You can get your website listed and noticed with our FREE search engine submission service worth £50 with any new annual website hosting plan." Namesco Ltd customer email - 29.9.08

Why does this stuff even exist?
Well in 1997 / 1998 when around 30 search engines controlled about 80% of the total searches made by consumer and the technology that their 'spiders' or 'robots' used to gather website information was far less sophisticated than it is today, it made some (limited) sense to build software that 'pinged' search engines saying "come and look at my site'. Some of these web services even made a sales differentiator out of annoying the search engines with a daily request for them to visit your site. This served to get new sites increased brand name web exposure and therefore increased traffic due to the spread of search engines used by your customers. Now however, a great way to get exposure on Google, Yahoo and MSN (the 3 that really matter in 2008) is certainly not to tap them on the shoulder everyday.
If you would like to have a conversation about how to increase you market share through increased traffic from Google's organic search listings then give us a call. DONT take up offers like this one.

Is the time now?

The technology sector has been guilty of starting every article with one of a variety of “The time is now” statements. Many incarnations of this statement have underpinned key changes in the evolution of the digital marketing medium.

There were, to my mind, two points in time when the captains of our industry were most active in playing town crier. The 1st was undoubtedly upon the commercial roll out of the World Wide Web in the late 90’s when messaging centred around “get online or become a business dinosaur.”

Now that broadband arguably becomes the standard 81% of all UK internet connections* (up 20% on 2005) and we enter into the next phase of the growth in the role of the internet in the lives of consumers, many clients look to take independent advice on opportunities for increasing traffic to their site and converting more of that traffic into customers and in understanding how changing media patterns should affect how they plan their marketing.

The way we consume media has already changed greatly and the modern digital marketer needs to embrace the idea that they are no longer in control of the mode of communication. Long gone are the days of revelling in the infallibility of a TV advertising slot within News at 10 or Coronation Street.

New media marketing communication as a discipline is about adaptability to change – sponsorship will increase in prevalence as the next bedroom born user generated content (UGC) phenomenon explodes to levels of popularity that we have seen from Friends Reunited, then Bebo, then Pop Bitch and Facebook.

*(BMRB Oct 06)