How did government become the coolest digital industry?
Think of the top three industries that seem cool to work in. I’d be surprised if you are my age and listed government as a top three coolest digital industry. But working on digital government projects seems to have become cool.
So cool, that last week Matt Cutts of Google fame announced that he will be leaving Google for the US Digital Service. Matt Cutts was the head of Google’s spam SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) team, and built up a large following across social media channels from webmasters around the world. There are forums set up to discuss every detail of his speeches and YouTube videos, to try to outsmart the chief enemy of SEO spam. Continue reading The Coolest Digital Industry to Work in→
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The Buffer outdoor office – customer service Buffer style
Lots of interesting links below, across a whole host of subjects from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), crypto-currencies, Minecraft and an amusing (inept) bank robbery.
At the end of every year, I’ve listed my highlights of the previous year. See the post from 2012 with links to previous years. Here are some of the highlights from 2013:
Favourite New Gadget
An unflattering photo wearing Google Glass
There are several contenders from 2013. After 4 years with my previous work laptop, I took the plunge and went for a new convertible tablet/ laptop, the Dell XPS 12. It’s good, in fact the speed is still as fast as the latest laptops in the office, but my original intention was to stop using my paper notepad, and the XPS with the touch screen just can’t replace it. If you are looking for a decent laptop and have the budget available, I recommend the XPS – but keep a paper pad close by.
Continuing the Google theme, in December we bought Google Glass at work, and I’ve used them as much as possible. Google Glass is the future without a doubt, however I think it’s a generation (of users) too early. After watching colleagues and some customers struggle to use them in the office, it’s fascinating to watch my kids use them so naturally.
The prize for my favourite between these three? Sorry to wimp out, but it’s a tie between the laptop and Glass.
Favourite Book
I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s still my favourite read of 2013
I’ve been fortunate to read several good books this year. Removing the fictional titles (I rarely read fiction but my ex-manager at Endava guaranteed I’d like a particular author so much that he’d pay for the books if I didn’t like them), here is my 2013 reading list:
The Tao of Twitter provided inspiration, and results, of higher levels of engagement on Twitter.
I’ve recommended the SEO book to everyone I’ve met this year who has shown interest in natural SEO – it’s written in a simple, friendly manner with practical suggestions on almost every page.
The Arnie book caught my eye at Heathrow airport on one of my business trips this year. If you’re unsure about the book, just read the back cover – you’ll be surprised how much he’s achieved in his life.
However the award for my favourite book goes to Doc Searls. I didn’t like (or perhaps a more appropriate word is ‘appreciate’) some of his earlier work such as The Cluetrain Manifesto, and even in The Intention Economy I didn’t agree with all parts of the book (my major criticism is his firm view on open source – why isn’t his book open source if he believes in it so much?) If you need some inspiration for corporate digital transformation, this book will offer it. At Endava we are working with large consultancies who list The Intention Economy as mandatory reading for their senior directors.
Favourite iPhone/ Smartphone App
I’ve had to rename this since defecting to Android!
Strava is still my favourite. It’s the best cycling app available, mainly due to it’s implicit gamification. I sent them some suggestions for improvements which they implemented within a few weeks, so a big “Thank You” there.
A very close second is OneNote. I like how I can create a note in OneNote and it appears on my computer in OneNote. It’s quick to use, and comes with the Microsoft Office stack, so there’s no additional app to install such as EverNote.
Favourite Award
The Top 100 Digital Agencies Report 2013 – Endava came 17th
A huge well done and thank you to the team at Endava for ranking us as the 17th largest agency in the eConsultancy Top 100 Digital Agencies. The award was presented for our 2011/12 accounts due to Endava’s financial year finishing after the Econsultancy entry deadline, and so next year is likely to look even healthier.
This is likely to be my last post of 2013, so I wish you and your family a wonderful festive season, a Merry Christmas, a Happy & Prosperous New Year, or just some good old-fashioned time off.
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Arianna Huffington – how to harness (and monetise) content in the digital world
I like reading autobiographies to understand what makes people tick and how they meet their aims. (Incidentally I have ‘Drive’ on my reading pile at home at the moment). The Guardian website has a great article on the daily routines of history’s most creative minds. It’s very interesting, and in itself it’s a summary of the book Daily Rituals, by Mason Currey.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a skill that everyone in Digital Media should understand. I try to brush up on my SEO skills every couple of years, so I’m halfway through SEO: An Hour a Day. I’ve read a few SEO articles and wanted a book which I could concentrate on without distractions. It’s comprehensive and approaches SEO correctly – i.e. from a business goal point of view and not ‘I just want to appear higher in Google results’.
The Tao of Twitter is the best resource I’ve read about how to use Twitter. It was easy to read in a couple of days. I then went back through the book with a highlighter pen over all the simple hints and tips. Thoroughly recommended.
Publishing
And finally, I read an academic white paper called “RIPTIDE: What Really Happened to the News Business”, subtitled “An oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, 1980 to the present”. It’s over 120 pages and has taken me a couple of months to read (I have too many distractions when reading a PDF).
If you have any interest in content publishing – digital or traditional, you’ll like this paper. Some of the biggest names on the Internet and business contributed to the white paper, include Sir Martin Sorrell, Eric Schmidt, Arianna Huffington, Tim Berners-Lee, Dick Costolo, and the list goes on. The paper was produced in September 2013, so it also covers Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post.
A highly recommended read, full of nostalgia and incredible business deals.
Google Authorship alone improved blog traffic significantly
I’ve been applying a bit of Search Engine Optimisation to this blog over the last couple of weeks (successfully I should add – visits are already up over 30%) and one of the most recommended techniques is to assign authorship to articles.
What this does, is tells Google that the web site owner has trusted this particular person to add an article to the site. You might think that for this blog, the site owner and author is the same – but Google doesn’t mind this because it just wants to know there’s a human at the end of the keyboard, not another spammy robot knocking out (or copying) content. It’s the age old sign of trust of putting someone’s name at the bottom of a document adds credibility.
The way Google trusts that the person is a real human is by linking the ‘byline’ to their Google+ account. This is clever for so many reasons:
Improves Google+’s own PageRank of more incoming links (theoretically, and probably practically within Google’s control but it is now proven through this method)
Gets more people using Google+ (all those authors, who don’t want readers to land on an empty Google+ profile page)
It has moved Google along the journey of becoming the user authentication on the Internet.
A friend of mine sells furniture online. It costs him a small fortune to deliver it to customers, and with the distance selling regulations, he often gets customers who tell him after a week of delivery that they don’t want the item any longer. He reckons he can tell who is ‘trying it on’ to check whether he’ll offer a refund without bothering to collect the item again. He estimates that these “customers” go from site to site trying to take liberties from companies.
Wouldn’t it be a better system all round if a user bought an item from a website, and that site could look in a central place for delivery and payment information, and whether this user was trustworthy or not, before dispatching the item.
Another player in the market who might try to create this central authentication system is Apple. Combining Apple ID with fingerprint recognition and perhaps phone based GPS information could be a secure system.
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It’s a sobering thought that on some searches the 3rd result is below the fold!
practical tips and advice, Hugh Jackson from MediaCo, an SEO company, gave a good, practical presentation on two of the latest Google algorithm changes and how to take advantage of them, despite all the bad press they’ve received.
The two algorithm changes are Panda and Venice.
Venice
Results are now based upon the local results of where the user is located. (My Note: Actually, they’ve always been local, so if you searched for ‘Spurs’ in the UK you’d end up with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, and if you searched for Spurs in the US you’d see the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. Now, results are localise for everything, down to a far more granular level).
So if you type in say, tyre dealer, you’ll get very different results if you’re based in New York, London or Manchester.
This is the only way results are ranked organically (i.e. not paying for an ad in the results) for generic terms.
To take advantage of Venice, you need to create truly unique content for your user’s locations. National companies without local offices are at a disadvantage.
The SEO strategy to take advantage of Venice is to create landing pages and change the site structure to reflect localised pages. The example Hugh gave is Autotrader, which now has regions, and then local cities where car results are displayed for that local city or region.
The tried and tested SEO technique for Titles and Descriptions has been slightly updated, so you should now use:
Title + location + brand
for AutoTrader, the example given was:
‘Find used cars in Manchester – used cars | Autotrader‘
Also, inbound links should ideally include the location in the anchor text, although Hugh pointed out that Google sometimes perform U-turns on best practice for inbound links.
Other techniques to improve natural results include having local reviews, directions to the location, a local address for the business, and a local phone number. These are recommendations though, not necessities.
Finally, put your local addresses in the site schema.
Panda
It’s [almost] always about content, content, content…Panda uses real world, human user data to verify the quality of sites. So a site that simply provides links to other sites, and users spend a very short period of time browsing, will be hit hard by Panda. This real user data comes from Google +, Chrome usage stats and toolbars.
You can now have a page with little text, perhaps just a couple of sentences, followed by a video, and this may perform well. The reason is that users will stay on the page (watching the video), and this gets fed back to Google, who then interpret this as a sign of a real user finding the page interesting. This is very different to previous SEO techniques where keywords were the most important SEO consideration.
To create inbound links, Hugh recommended that you create Infographics and distribute these to other websites, making sure you have credit for the work, through good quality anchor text.
It’s important to ‘announce’ new content by promoting it on social networks – Twitter, Google+ and Facebook for example. This builds authority and will help develop you as a thought leader and people will link to your page.
Another good technique, which Google has been vocal about, is to attribute content to a particular person by linking to their Google + page.
Of course, Panda and Venice are details. The main reason why natural searches are still so important is because when a user performs a search on Google (or Bing, or any other search engine) and arrives at your website, the chances are that you have a genuinely and fully qualified lead!
If you’re looking for a “How to” guide to online or digital marketing, I recommend the following graphic (care of Unbounce). I’ve sent this to many people by email and Twitter as the best starting point for any online marketing campaign. It doesn’t necessarily need a large advertising budget behind it – it just needs some time.
There’s so much information in the graphic that I’ve tried printing it on several A3 sheets but it didn’t look particularly great. My brother-in-law (thanks to PhotoPaperDirect) has managed to print it as a 6 foot long print on a screen printer however there resolution isn’t good enough to remain clear (it’s OK, but not brilliant).
I watched my nine year old son doing some homework this week on the computer and noticed for the first time that Google didn’t just point him in the right direction to answer a question, it actually provided the answer.
He didn’t think anything of it. He thinks that Google is there to provide answers, and is an absolutely reliable source of those answers. He doesn’t question the validity of the source any more than I would have questioned Encyclopaedia Britannica when I was his age. I found that it was a further leap for Google-kind than even, two years ago.
The question was “Who watched the ancient olympics?”
He actually typed in “who watch the ancient olympics?” which actually brought the answer closer to the top of the results than the grammatically correct question. That’s a separate issue I’ll have to deal with and it was difficult to ascertain whether he typed in the incorrect grammar to obtain the best results rather than a genuine mistake.
Education is changing at an amazingly quick rate. My son’s [state funded, primary] school has an interactive projector in every classroom, and is aiming that within two years will have a laptop per child.
Children are being taught to use Google to search for answers.
In Richard Watson‘s book, Future Minds, he describes how it took less than a generation to go from reading long form (e.g. a paper article on Ancient Olympics) to consuming bite sized snippets on a screen. I don’t have a major problem with this leap, except for the fact that we need to understand and accept that general knowledge will deteriorate because children will only know exactly what they’ve searched for, rather than anything broader.
Reading the paper article, or even one of the search results’ full articles would have taught my son that the games used to be one day long, then five days long, the different events, and even that in boxing, the boxers would wear hard leather straps with metal over their knuckles – ouch.
Probably the most important quote from this article is the following:
“While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.”
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![It's [almost] always about content, content, content...](https://bradbox.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2013-09-11-15.07.27.jpg)
