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miercuri, 25 mai 2011
Announcing Next Generation Fuel Economy Labels
The President and First Lady Meet the Duke and Duchess
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Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator Graywolf's SEO Blog
Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator Posted: 24 May 2011 10:27 PM PDT
A common issue online marketers have is coming up with unique differentiators. SEOs have this problem – it takes virtually no effort for an intermediate or advanced SEO to understand a competitors’ main link acquisition strategies in an hour or less. That allows new entrants into the field to easily duplicate your hard, pioneering efforts. Affiliates have this problem – there are so many people vying to sell the same thing that it’s hard to stand out. User friendliness and pricing no longer help – price comparisons, coupons, deals and reviews are now commodified. So let’s define the problem: Differentiating your site in a lasting way is difficult, because competitors can copy you without much trouble. But what about throwing up a language barrier? Suppose you’re an affiliate who starts producing content in French. The same problem applies to competitors – how are they going to source French language content? How will they proofread it? This simple tactical idea applies advanced SEOs’ 7 curiously obvious rules. For example, it questions the assumption that you need to do business in the same language as your competitors. Why not mix it up? And whoever moves first, will likely have a big advantage. Another example of applying the principles, is that this idea was inspired from experience. I’m currently planning a new SEO plugin, and my friend Jacob Share (who teaches folks to find jobs) asked me whether I’d want it coded in a way that enables translated versions. That seemed an excellent idea to me, as my first WP plugin – Internal Link Building (details on V3 here) – got loads of links from around the world, and was even translated into Russian and ported to other CMSes. If you liked this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO. The text is done, and we’re finalizing the cover for printing  Related posts:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
| Article Marketing in a Post Panda World Posted: 24 May 2011 11:30 AM PDT
Article marketing has been one of the foundations of link building ever since I got started in SEO. However, since sites like Ezinearticles and Suite 101 have taken a huge loss in ranking and traffic as a result of the panda update, should article marketing still be a part of your overall strategy? We need to take a step back and look at the big picture to find the answer … While many people will debate this, I don’t believe sites like Ezinearticles were passing much link equity for quite some time. The links acted more like pointers and helped with discovery. The pages themselves could accumulate trust/authority/pagerank, but they weren’t transferring much of that value to the website linked to in the bio paragraph. Secondly, if the article was republished somewhere else, it was most likely treated as duplicate content. Ezinearticles had more trust than the almost any other site republishing the article, so they were given credit as the original content “owner”. The real value from Ezinearticles was finding people who were interested in taking your content and publishing it in exchange for a link, then tracking the competition in the space to see what other link building sources/methods they were using. So should article marketing still be a part of your strategy? Yes–just a much less important one. First, you need to be honest about the quality of the articles you submitted. Chances are good that the $3 articles with 250 words that read like it was written by an ESL student working the night shift at an all night convenience store while his boss wasn’t around isn’t worth spending time/money on anymore. Most article directories have raised the bar for quality while trying to get back in Google’s good graces. So, if you are going to use article directories, you will need to send them higher quality content. Unless you are a brand new website, I wouldn’t create more than 15-20 articles a year: the ROI just isn’t there anymore. Keep in mind that you will have to point links at your articles from a variety of sources if you want them to have maximum effect. If you are doing any ORM work, article marketing is still viable. Get the person/company name in the title, point a few links, and, unless you are competing against major sources, you should be good to go. Your link building activities should never be dominated by just one tactic.You need to have a blend/mixture for maximum effectiveness. If you focus on just one technique, you run the ris:k of losing all your rankings if that tactic gets devalued. So what are the takeaways from this post
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
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Seth's Blog : Kingmaker
Kingmaker
Who can make a hit?
Zipf's Law is the inevitable distribution of items into a curve that follows the power law. For example, the letter "e" appears in English far more often than the letter "u". For just about every human thing we look at (record album sales, votes in political campaigns, income) there's a distribution with hits and with non-hits. Click on the picture at right to enlarge.
Chris Anderson helped us understand a huge implication of the power law curve in his classic The Long Tail. The relevant notion follows...
In any physical store, the store owner has to make bets. She needs to buy inventory, to choose this over that, to make decisions in advance about what's going to sell. With Christmas coming, the owner might need to make these decisions five months in advance, with no chance to re-order if there's a hit and nothing but the trash bin available for what doesn't sell.
The relentless physics of the situation, then, means that retailers needed the ability to not just pick hits, but to make them. And so they invented the speed table and the pile of stuff at the checkout. They perfected the end cap display and the free standing insert as well.
Years ago, getting our products on the table next to the check out at Target and Lechmere was enough to make the year at the software company where I worked. Two big retailers picked our product and that was enough.
Retailers want to be kings and they want to annoint kings. They want the lever to decide what sells and what doesn't, because it earns them power of pricing and profit (if the retailer can make your product a hit, she can extract better terms. If all she does is sell what sells, then the manufacturer is in charge).
Thanks to the long tail, the digital world ignored this thinking. The iTunes store, and Netflix, for example, take the position that, "We're going to sell everything, and a lot of it. We don't care which thing, because it's all the same to us. Just put everything in the store and the market will sort it out."
As a result, they have far less promotional power. They didn't build a lever. The app store doesn't make a hit, it contains hits. Most long tail retailers are staffed around this idea and have a culture that reflects it. They'll sell everything/anything, because the longer the tail, the better.
Marketers, of course, want their product to be the hit, and they're always in search of someone who will make that happen. They understand that the long tail sellers will do well because they sell everything, but marketers don't care about everything--they care about their thing.
And so sites like LivingSocial and Woot) built online levers, permission assets that allow them to become the new kingmakers. If they pick your product and alert their audience, you have a hit, at least for a short while (and sometimes at great cost to the marketer, which turns into profit for the kingmaker.)
Seeing the success of retailers who are able to make kings, sites like Netflix are trying to figure out how to transform themselves. Finding the lever, though, isn't trivial. The cultural shift from ubiquity to selection is difficult.
The challenge for online retailers (and perhaps for your company) is to build the attention and trust and leverage you need to make kings, to earn attention and trust and make hits. While it's digitally enticing to be the indifferent-to-choice long-tail retailer, the fact is that marketers will always be willing to pay a premium to someone with the ability to generate a hit.
More Recent Articles
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- How else are you supposed to take it?
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