Interflora Visits Search-Marketing-Blog.com

Online brand protection. Important to have a policy, but can be difficult to implement.

The first thing is to be aware of the buzz about your brand online - news, forums, blogs, myspace, etc. If you're not aware of what's being said, you can't counter it in a timely manner.

The guys at Interflora are doing at least the first bit right. My blog is so new it has very limited visitor numbers still, but this morning's stats show a visit from interflorahouse.co.uk. Within 12 hours of my post mentioning Interflora. Probably an automated news-clipping service rather than a real person, but who knows?

On another positive note, it means my blog pinging service is working!

Got A Brand? Why Aren't You Using Pay-Per-Click?

As the only form of advertising spend that allows ROI to be calculated down to the last penny, paid search naturally was first adopted by the ecommerce community. If you sell something off your website, there is no better way to drive new customers to your site and grow revenues. But, what if you don’t sell anything from your site? Your website is not ecommerce, you are a brand?

The answer is actually very clear, but has yet to be fully understood and effectively embraced by many big brand owners. If you have a brand, you should be using paid-search as a significant means to communicate with your customers.

It is cost-effective, immediate and reactive engagement with your customers – at the instant in time they are actively involved in searching for either your brand or terms you would wish your brand to be associated with. The jury is no longer out, the jury has returned and found the big brands ‘guilty’ of not effectively using paid search to support messaging and engagement vital to brand building and protection.

Online Advertising Hits The Big-Time In UK

Very roughly, online advertising accounts for about half the UK national advertising spend. Of the online total of £2bn, paid search is roughly 60%. Historically, paid search has been the ‘tail’ of advertising spend, but with online overtaking national press and showing continued strong growth as other media falters, the tail is now wagging the dog.

Or, it should be. By that I mean it is not a practical strategy to simply leave PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to the procurement department.

The difference between a ‘great’ PPC campaign and a ‘good enough’ PPC campaign can be an order of magnitude in ROI. With paid search grabbing an increasing share of spend, it is even more important to ensure that a paid search campaign

1. is carried out by professionals with proven expertise, preferably able to guarantee ROI, and
2. is carried out in a manner that closely integrates online with offline advertising and other events that stimulate search activity.

Brand Association Online is there for anyone to see

If you don't actually sell anything on your website, or ask for customer sign-ups, applications or subscriptions, there is a question about whether PPC has any value to you. This is a question that major brands are starting to tackle. Underlying the use of PPC for brand building online is the point:is brand association visible online?

Google Trends is more than a toy (but only just)

I wondered, last month in the run-up to Valentine's day, whether there was a connection between 'Roses' as a search term, and the brand 'Interflora'. So I went to Google Trends. This is what I saw.

There appears to be correlation between searches on the two terms, during February of each year. Note that the seasonal fluctuation is required to show the correlation - if both lines were flat or equally curved there would be no evidence of specific causes that connect the two.

The correlation is most evident around peaks about 14th February. Note that correlation does not imply cause and effect - what this chart is showing that about the time of those peaks, the causes of the spike in searches for the term 'roses' are connected to the causes of the spike in searches for 'interflora'.

(Note the interesting reduction in correlation for the second spike in each year, .. demonstrating that people are less interested to buy roses for Mother's day than they are for Valentine's day. Sorry Mum.)

So then I looked at another example. 'Fitness First' is a well-known chain of gyms.

The correlation, or association, between 'gyms' and 'Fitness First' is written large. The drivers that make Joe or Jane Public search for gyms are the same as those making them search for 'Fitness First'

One final example. BSM (British School of Motoring) and 'driving school'.

What does this mean if I have a brand?

What it means is this: brand association exists and is very strong online. If you have invested in a brand, there is absolutely no excuse for not using search marketing to enhance your engagement and messaging with your audience - not just by SEO but by PPC also, even if you don't sell anything off your website, you should be intercepting your customers online activity at the time they are most likely to be receptive - when they are actively searching for terms you wish to be associated with.

tag:cool

Navigation is THE most important thing after content

There are literally hundreds of blogs that I would rate as 'excellent' in terms of content. But the vast majority do not deliver in terms of navigation.

The idea of a 'blog' or weblog started as a kind of online diary, a blog maybe had a theme but mostly was intermittent ramblings of an individual, in chronological order.

If the blog has great content, it can be difficult to find exactly what we need, or to 'discover' something cool, or just browse an area of interest without having to scroll back through pages and pages of historical posts.

How to create Great Navigation on a Blog - Start with Structure

To start with, navigation is not the same thing as structure. Structure refers to how the content is stored in a framework. A good example is a directory structure, for storing information on a hard drive. Most of us are familiar with this. Search-Marketing-Blog.com uses exactly that - a directory structure. On the server hard drive is a tree structure of folders, according to subject. Each blog entry is in fact a text file stored within that structure in the correct folder.

Tags are an Excuse for Muddled Thinking

Tags have become very popular as a way to mark a post, so that it can be found easily. They are helpful but certainly not the full story. Tags do not make up for an ordered structure combined with an effective search tool. With information ordered by topic/subject, tags are better deployed to help cross-subject theming and searching - for example the tag 'stats' show posts with statistical content regardless of the subject folder they are in.

• Search tool. Such a fundamental requirement for any website. How come so many blogs don't have them?

• List of recent entries. Seems essential that a visitor landing on your site (any page) can quickly see the most recent entries you have written.

• Related entries. When looking at a post, related entries should be listed. In a folder structure this is easy, just display the titles of the other posts in that folder and its sub-folders. When viewing search results, in addition to full entries displayed upfront, there should be a list of all titles found.

• Calendar. It should be easy to quickly display the posts of a certain month, and move back/forward from year to year.

• Breadcrumbs. These are the Home >> You >> Are >> here type of links so that a visitor can easily identify his location on your site. At any point in the information structure, it should be easy to see the sub-folders from that location so that browsing and discovery is easy.

• Sitemap. At any time, a complete list of all folders and topics is just a click away.

Wouldn't it be cool if a blog had ALL of these navigational devices?

Yep, sure would. You're reading it!

tag:geek

A Beautiful Baby Of A Design

Having chosen Blosxom as the engine for driving this blog, I next needed to think about the template. I had a very clear idea about the navigation structure I wanted, but the design itself and its implementation took quite some thinking about.

Best Tools For Blog Website Design

A couple of years ago, when I built websites for friends or myself as a hobby, I used Microsoft Frontpage. I had no time to learn Dreamweaver. Frontpage was fairly intuitive to use and suited my purposes. But, then I learned about CSS. What a revelation! What a change to the way I build websites.

The ONLY software tools used to build this site:

• NOTEPAD2. A great little text editor, designed as a setp up from the Notepad that comes with windows.

• PAINTSHOPPRO V9. I usually prefer free or open-source software but I hate the Gimp. PSP is great.

• FIREFOX with the WEB DEVELOPER extension. What a fantastic tool. When you switch it on you can directly edit CSS in-browser to see the effect on the live page. So many other features. Sometimes, I will use the FIREBUG extension which has some similar features but is a more complex to use.

• FILEZILLA for FTP. It works perfect and does everything I need. You can set it so that when browsing your remote directory, by clicking on a file it automatically pulls the file into Notepad2; when editing is complete it will automatically re-upload the file back to the remote directory.

• FASTSTONE CAPTURE. A truly great piece of free software. I use it every day. It has a very easy colour-picker tool, as well as being able to capture full-screen, part-of-screen, or even a complete web-page (by automatically scrolling the window).

That's it. No Frontpage. No Dreamweaver. Just Notepad and a few utilities.

The Layout and Design - Online Resources

I wanted the design to be simple, but with enough 'panels' for navigational elements as well as content. Also, I am not a designer and don't have a lot of time to try to do anything fancy... I am not one for re-inventing the wheel.

Here are the online resources I used:

• YUI Reset CSS This code is used at the top of the CSS stylesheet to reset fonts and settings, to make sure the look of the site is consistent across all browsers. In fact, I use the 'Foundation' code which includes Grids as well.

• Grid Builder this is a very useful tool for creating a standard CSS-based framework. For example, it generates the code to make a 3 column CSS template instantly. There's plenty of flexibility as to number of rows, columns, column-widths, etc.

• RoundedCrnr this amazing tool creates the CSS, HTML and images for the rounded panels on this site - both the solid background as well as the rounded borders. Chuck at Roundedcrnr asks for a small donation, but it is well worth it.

• ColorSchemer an easy to use tool for picking colours.

And that's it. A small selection of tools, but powerful.

tag:geek

Can I have my Geek badge please?

In the jungle of platforms available for bloggers, the big beasts of Blogger and Wordpress stand out. I experimented with both.

• The 'old' original Blogger was super-easy to use - taking literally just a few minutes to set up. I wanted to host on my own domain, and old Blogger allowed this. New super-duper Blogger does not, though.

• Wordpress takes a while to come to grips with, and many hosting companies have a simple-install option to get Wordpress running on your site in no time. I really liked it and spent several happy evenings playing with all manner of plugins. But then, I got scared.. scared by the simple blank and empty screen staring back at me when the Wordpress database failed. Luckily, there was nothing of value lost. Of course, there are plugins to assist with back-up and restoration of Wordpress databases, but it was still scary stuff for me so I decided to look for other options.

A Hit-List Of Must-Have Blog Features

I thought about what was important for a blogging platform.

• Good navigation facilities
• Hosted on my own domain
• No database to maintain
• Excellent navigation capabilities
• Easy to customise template
• Simple to write and edit articles
• Great tools for navigation
• No licence fee
• Flexible structure

Powered By Blosxom

I think over a two-week period I must have looked at every blog platform available. There are some really wonderful systems out there. In the course of my investigations I found something called 'Blosxom'. This is about 500 lines of Perl code (runs as a CGI), and not much else. The project dates back to 2003, is open source, and there are quite a few plugins available for additional features. The Yahoo-based support forum is full of spam, and the SourceForge forum is quiet. I didn't know Perl, but felt adventurous enough to try to install Blosxom. It was actually pretty simple (or maybe I was lucky). I was struck by it's minimalist philosophy, drawn to it, moth-to-light like.

So, this blog is powered by Blosxom. In the last month I have done quite a lot of tweaking and customising (having learnt Perl), but at the core is the Blosxom code.

Watch for these future posts:

• Template design of this blog
• Navigation design of this blog

tag:geek

Google gains but still not as dominant as in UK

Comscore has released the latest data on share of search in the US:

"In February 2007, Google Sites captured 48.1 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.6 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 28.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent)."

tag:stats