Twitter is not the first online entity to be plagued by porn spammers, as it is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of the internet. As soon as a social site becomes somewhat popular, adult outlets will try to exploit it.
I’m sure many of you had some questionable followers as soon as you joined twitter. The problem has been well reported all over the internet. At least in this case you can block the followers and/or report them (even though it is a pain that Twitter should still address themselves).
However, what you cannot seem to do at this time is to avoid these porn spammers when searching Twitter for completely non-porn related words, or setting up a feed using the Twitter search on your website.
We at 10e20 have the Twitter Feed right on the sidebar ->. All it does is pull the recent tweets from a search for 10e20, which lets you, the reader, quickly see what people are saying about us.
Well, a few days ago, unfortunately that sidebar has been filled with tweets from 4 or 5 porn accounts in a row, because they tweeted about 10e20.
After checking some of those accounts, you can see that they intertwine their tweets between links to their porn sites and tweeting legitimate news and trendy topics. This way their accounts will show up for legitimate searches, and as we found out, in your Twitter feed as well.
Currently, there is no pro-active way for us to battle this. All we can do is write a script to black list those accounts from showing up in our feed after the fact. But I was definitely surprised to find out that Twitter does not have anything in place on their end.
It’s time for Twitter to get on board and introduce an adult filter that’s turned on by default, but can be turned off if a user wishes so (much so like Google applies onto their search).
It would then be up to community to report questionable accounts as ‘adult’ or ’spam’ (various labels can be introduced) and up to admins to label them as such – so that they don’t show up in the legitimate searches.
A good example of this in action is when you search for Obama on Google. You can be sure that there probably won’t be any porn, even if Google did not have an adult filter, simply because there are many more legit websites about Obama out there. Twitter, however, doesn’t work that way. If you tweet about Obama, you will show up on the search no matter what your account says. So an adult filter seems to be a must in such a scenario.
Furthermore, labeling accounts as adult can open an additional option for users to choose if they want to be followed by an ‘adult’ account or not. So essentially all Twitter activity can be filtered if the individual user wants. Of course, if you don’t mind receiving adult content then you should have an option to turn the filter off.
What do you think? Is it time for an adult filter and why do you think nothing currently exists?
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Cashing In with Other People’s Content: The Benefits of UGC
Sep 29, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | ContentA lot of folks still don’t quite understand the benefit of having user-generated content on your site. It seems logical to have someone else do the work for you, doesn’t it? They create the content and you reap the benefits of indexed pages, better rankings and more sales…or, in growing cases, a book deal. Below I’ve highlighted three sites that have scored book deals thanks to the content others have created for them.
F My Life
F My Life is a site that allows you to send in a message that begins with “Today” and ends with “FML” (f*ck my life). If your submission gets accepted, it’ll get published on the website and users can vote on it with either a sympathetic “I agree, your life sucks” or a “you totally deserved it.” Here’s a sample FML:
It’s a simple concept, and its success lies entirely upon user-generated content. Everything on this site has been contributed by its readers. It even has an Illustrated FML section where users can actually create art based on a previously published FML (FML fan art — can you believe it?). There’s no reward for contributing other than the satisfaction of seeing your sad anecdote showcased on a public forum. F My Life has a book out that I’ve seen gracing the humor section at Barnes and Noble, enabling you to pay for a hard copy of other people’s misery.
This is Why You’re Fat
This is Why You’re Fat is a site that showcases pictures of heinous, calorie-laden food concoctions sent in by users. That’s pretty much all it is — it’s like food porn. Sloppy, unhealthy food porn. Here’s a sample creation:
People are actually spending time and money to make the most shocking and unhealthy combination of food imaginable while the site owner sits back and lets the submissions pour in. In fact, the webmaster’s even set up a separate URL for the book (bad idea from an SEO standpoint), showcasing a quote from Entertainment Weekly magazine. That’s some pretty nice press considering it’s a book “written” by hundreds of free contributors.
Shit My Dad Says
Probably the most egregious (and hilarious) example of UGC leading to a book deal is the Twitter account called Shit My Dad Says. The account was set up by a young guy who lives with his parents. His dad spouts off hilarious non sequiturs and snarky comments that he’s turned them into a Twitter feed. The profile gained a little bit of traction from Follow Friday, and then someone submitted it to Reddit and it pretty much exploded overnight, gaining over 420,000 followers in less than 2 months. Here’s a sample gem from the account:
The LA Times did an article about the Twitter account and revealed that Justin, the “ghost tweeter” and son of a real-life Frank Costanza, has gotten numerous book deal offers. That’s right, a book deal for someone’s Twitter account. It’s the only example in this post where the guy didn’t even create the website — he’s using an existing user generated content platform to showcase another person’s comments and he’s the one reaping the benefits. Basically, it’s UGC within UGC (holy meta — I think my head asploded).
Back in the day it used to be a bit more difficult to land a book deal. You had to submit a manuscript, know the right people, cross your fingers, and often repeat the process many times until you (hopefully) got lucky. Sure, you could self-publish (as you still can today), but nowadays the Internet has made it easier for publishers to come across a well-written blog that’s attracted some buzz and attention. Writing takes skill, imagination, and a serious time commitment, so imagine how much sweeter it is to get a book deal based on content that others have provided for you. And that’s the beauty of user-generated content. 
Here are a few other sites that do a great job with UGC:
- Yelp — their whole site is pretty much dependent on user-submitted reviews of restaurants and businesses.
- Cracked — most of their lists that make it on Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are contributed by their users.
- Urban Outfitters — a clothing store that allows people to review clothes and merchandise online. Users can see review stats of other people, such as their average ratings, how many times their reviews have been voted as “helpful,” etc.
- Bleacher Report — the world’s largest sports network that is powered entirely by fan-generated content.
- Texts from Last Night — a site similar to FML that allows you to submit drunken text messages to be showcased on the website.
- TripAdvisor — one of the best vacation review websites on the web today.
What other sites successfully leverage user-generated content to their advantage? Tweet your responses to @10e20 or drop them in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed.
The Social Media News & Bookmarking URL Shortener Breakdown
Sep 28, 2009 by Greg Finn | Social Media MarketingIn the past, I have talked in depth about Digg’s URL shortner. While Digg gets the majority of the criticism for their shortener, both Reddit and StumbleUpon (the two next largest sites) have also joined the party. In lieu of these newer shorteners recently hitting the streets, I wanted to breakdown the various shorteners by how they work and how you can use them to help your business, so I wrote a post about them over at Search Engine Land.
Some Main Points:
- How Digg’s DiggURL Works
- DiggURL Marketing Benefits
- How StumbleUpon’s su.pr Works
- How to leverage su.pr
- How Reddit’s URL Shortener Works
- How to use the Reddit shortener to help your promotions
- How to Choose a Social Shortener that will work for you!
If you want a comprehensive breakdown on the big three social media shorteners, check out my post “How to Use 3 Social News and Bookmarking URL Shorteners” and find out what will work for you!
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BusinessInsider.com has a chart stating that Digg received 17.4 million unique visitors in August 2009, easily eclipsing other social news sites. Its dominance in the social news sphere brings to mind another company…
Top Search Engines According to a July 2009 comScore Search Report:
- Google (65% market share)
- Yahoo! (19.6%)
- Microsoft/Bing (8.4%)
- Ask (3.9%)
- AOL (3.1%)
Top Social News Sites Based on Unique Visitors in August 2009:
- Digg (17.4 million)
- Yahoo! Buzz (7 million)
- Propeller (800,000)
- Reddit (670,000)
- Mixx (660,000)
Digg’s dominance in the social news sphere is not unlike Google’s dominance in the search sphere. Digg’s strong community and constant roll outs like Facebook Connect, the DiggBar, and constant Digg Dialogues appear to be having a positive impact on the site’s popularity.
Amusingly enough, Yahoo! Buzz is like the Yahoo! Search of social news. Poor Yahoo! — always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Most surprising to me is how disappointingly Reddit appears to be performing — are they the Ask of social news sites? I remember a few years ago when it was all about Digg vs. Reddit, and now this chart depicts Propeller is beating Reddit in unique visitors and Mixx nipping at their heels (though I suspect the unique visitors for Reddit are incorrect–the number seems a bit low for them, don’t you think?). In any case, Digg fans must love seeing their favorite site spanking Reddit while Reddit fanboys are probably scoffing and saying they prefer the site’s “intimate” community.
Love them or loathe them, but clearly Digg is doing something right since they’ve managed to outshine their competition and seem to be establishing themselves as the predominant social news site on the web today. What do you think the other social news sites need to do in order to better compete with Digg and attract more users to their sites, or do you think that, much like with Google, Digg’s only going to get stronger?
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Link Building Through Virtual Relationships
Sep 24, 2009 by Greg Finn | Link Building, SEO, Social Media MarketingLast week Jake wrote an awesome post about leveraging relationships for link building and it got me thinking. Seeing that I am a hermit who lives in front of the computer, how the heck do I build links without those daily “real-life” relationships? Well, believe it or not, I do actively build links with relationships without meeting people in the flesh and wanted to share some of my tips and tricks for doing this across my social media networks.
The main thing to remember is that if you are helpful and can provide value to someone else, it is basically a virtual handshake and a way to fire up your virtual relationship. Simple things like a vote, comment, retweet or even just praise can strengthen your relationship. Here are a few things to do to meet people in Social Media, and turn them into friends (who can help you build links).
Make it Easy for People to Contact You
Put your instant messaging name up on all of your social profiles so that you can connect. Internal messaging on many social sites is lackluster, and getting someone’s IM name can allow you to get in touch when you need to. A few tips for messaging would be to create a separate account for your “public IM name” so you won’t overload your personal account with voting/favor requests. Also, create an account on all of the main messaging platforms. Many people prefer using Gmail over AIM, or Yahoo! over Gmail, so set it all up and use a service like digsby or pidgin to neatly manage it.
Many times you can instantly help your friends by giving votes which will go a long way when you need a favor. People who are asking for votes/re-tweets/comments probably have a website that they are promoting – and guess what? If you have a good relationship, you now have a friend on IM that you can use if you are looking for a link!
Allow People to Easily Find You
So now we see the power of people who are actively promoting social media content, and how targeted they can be for links. To expand your networks, make it simple for people to find you across all social networks. Place your Digg profile link in your StumbleUpon profile description, and include your Twitter account in your Digg profile. The more places where people can find you, the more relationships you are going to build. Also, having the ability to help people across multiple sites will just add to your cause when asking for a link.
Act Like You Would in Real Life
When a person finds your IM name from a social network, many times they “say hi” by sending you a link in which you should vote on. This is one of the things that amazes me on a daily basis. I rarely meet any people who try to get something from me without even saying hello. When contacting people, you should try to really connect with them. Say you met someone from StumbleUpon, subscribe to their favorites and let them know when you really liked a story that they found. Find out where they live, what their name is, see what they like; basically, you should act like a human to them and you will work your way to a real relationship! The more information you have on someone, the more you can help them, and in turn, the more you can ask from them.
All-in-all, while I might not have as many “real life” relationships as Jake, I have found ways to acquire links while using social media and building my networks. To me, the biggest benefit of these virtual relationships is that the people you will meet will have a high probability of having a website where they could link to you, and you can easily help them to start a positive relationship. So even if you don’t have a wealth of personal connections offline, don’t fret! These tips should hopefully help you reach your link building goals!
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Social Media Marketing Continues to Grow in Priority
Sep 23, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Social Media MarketingLast week I attended and spoke at IMC Vancouver. It was a nice little conference that featured a lot of different speakers from the SMX/SES shows. While my sessions focused on SEO, there were a number of panels that discussed social media marketing. I heard a lot of feedback from attendees praising the social media information, saying it was valuable and tactical advice.
When I came back to work I noticed this eMarketer article that highlights a Unisfair survey asking marketers what their top plans and priorities are for 2010. 60% of the marketers surveyed said they were going to focus on acquiring new customers. What I found especially interesting about the survey is that 75% said they plan to increase social media in their 2010 marketing efforts (vs. 51% who said they’d focus more on web search and SEO).
I also found this chart to be really interesting. It depicts which social networks marketers find most valuable:
Based on the survey and what I heard at IMC Vancouver, I think a lot’s been said about social media marketing lately. Namely:
- Social media success is multi-faceted. I still hear a lot of people touting Digg as a huge piece of the social media pie, yet only 1% of the marketers surveyed felt that Digg was the most valuable social networking tool. Yes, Digg is extremely beneficial from a traffic-driving standpoint and can bring links into your site. However, there are tons of other important social sites that are equally as valuable as Digg, especially if you’re looking to build relationships by networking and if you want to seek out and acquire new customers. Lots of people are finding value in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, so it’s important to cast a wide net as well as figure out where your time is best spent. Some people will get the most value out of Digg, while others benefit from networking on LinkedIn or CafeMom. It depends on what your goals are, where your audience is, and what’s the best, most logical fit for your brand.
- People want to hear about tactics, not have their time wasted with anything else. Mona Elesseily, the Director of Marketing Strategy for Page Zero Media, presented at IMC Vancouver and said that she was really impressed by the quality of social media information being given at the show. She mentioned that a lot of conferences are more basic and introductory when it comes to dispensing social media marketing advice, but at IMC people drilled down into specific tactics and shared valuable information. When a new(ish) marketing strategy like social media emerges, people want to know how they can use it to their advantage and to bring success to their business. They don’t want to waste time hearing about how “social media is the future!” and other pointless, fluffy claims and generic speak. They want useful, applicable advice on what they need to do on these sites in order to use them efficiently.
- Social media is being accepted as an important facet of marketing. More people plan to focus their efforts on social media than on SEO in 2010, and I think that’s because they see a clearer line that attaches social media to marketing than the one that attaches SEO to marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I see obvious benefits of SEO, but I think that to businesses, social media marketing is an easier and more valuable concept to grasp because it’s simply marketing across a new medium. It holds the same principles of marketing and customer interaction and networking and relationship building, only it’s over the Internet and using new websites and tools.
- Email campaigns aren’t dead! I know that email marketing is considered more old school while social media marketing is the NKOTB (that’s New Kid on the Block for those of you who weren’t adolescent girls in the early 90’s), but 49% of the marketers surveyed said they plan to ramp up their email marketing efforts next year. I think that email campaigns can be very valuable if they’re done right. If you’re able to bring a social element into your email newsletters and marketing materials (Yelp does a great job of marrying traditional and social in their newsletters), I think you can have a very successful campaign.
- Social media marketing isn’t a fad. I’ve heard some SEOs and marketers grumble about how sick they are of social media marketing, thinking that it’s just the next big thing that will blow over soon and get replaced with a new up and coming fad. I think the problem is that, as with SEO, there are a lot of people in the industry who can give the craft a bad reputation because they’re messing around in a sphere they don’t know much about. However, like I said, I think that social media marketing is just an evolution of traditional marketing and will continue to be important as the Internet remains an essential part of our everyday lives. The core of marketing is all about promoting, selling and distributing a product or service, and the best way to do that has always been reaching out to your audience and resonating with them in a way that will make you memorable. Social media is exactly that — it provides you a new medium to reach out to your audience and make some sort of imprint. To say that social media marketing is a fad is to dismiss marketing itself as a fad, and we all know that marketing’s been around for hundreds of years and doesn’t show signs of slowing.
I’m happy to see that there’s an increased awareness of social media marketing and its importance/benefits. It’s rewarding and promising to hear about people wanting to hear more about it at conferences and planning to dive into it more in the coming years.
Ah, relationships. Good relationships are strong, meaningful bonds that act to hold people or objects together. Like the furniture maker’s forgotten “dovetail” joint that once held a strong piece of furniture together and is now replaced with weak staples between faux wood fiberboard, relationships seem to be the forgotten glue that once held the business world together. Oh relationships, where have you gone?
Actually, relationships are alive and well, out there, calling your name with opportunities awaiting just beyond that first handshake. And why do we love relationships? Relationships lead to links online! Some of the best links that a business can acquire to their website are those developed through real-life relationships.
The best advice to grab these links is to get out from behind that keyboard and monitor (don’t worry, you can take your iPhone or BlackBerry with you) and go meet some real PEOPLE.
By meeting people and developing real relationships with them, you have the opportunity to garner quality links to your website. If you’re networking in the right places, these links are often targeted and of relative high value for SEO and for traffic purposes.
What do we mean by “real-life” relationships? These are relationships with people that you’ve spoken to on the telephone or have met in person. These are actual people you’ve developed a rapport with at some point at an event or in online social networking.
How does one go about garnering links from real life relationships?
First, you need to initiate or develop the relationship:
- Start by attending industry conferences and social events. Those who you meet at industry conferences, if you have a similar philosophy, will allow you to link to them and visa versa. The great thing about industry conferences is that you meet targeted prospects for link opportunities. Sometimes there are dot-org (.org) website owners who run trade or industry sites and are willing to link to you. We all love .orgs, don’t we, for many of them are trustworthy and non-commercial in nature.
- If you’re not able to afford major industry conferences, it’s helpful to look for local networking groups and informal gatherings within your industry. It doesn’t have to be a huge once-annual event to attract a strong, focused group of attendees.
- Within industry magazines, find vendors who are offering related products but aren’t direct competitors. Approach them and let them know that they have an opportunity with you.
- Within industry trade journals, find other businesses and organizations that you can call on to work up a relationship. Offer up lunch in your neighborhood and then discuss with them your online opportunities.
- Look to your local Chamber of Commerce, get involved and become active as a volunteer / member. Make sure to get some linking going from the Chamber website.
- Use online social networking sites like Meetup.com, LinkedIn.com and even Twitter.com to network with users who have like-minded interests. The search features in these sites are solid and can lead you to some of the most valuable relationships anywhere.
- Visit targeted users’ websites from their profiles to see if they could be a good linking candidate.
- Find local MeetUp groups with people who are interested in like-minded topics or even topics that are slightly related. For example, if you’re in the art-supply business, find a MeetUp of artists such as photographers, painters and/or sculptors. Attend the MeetUp, be friendly and good things will happen.
- Twitter can be a great resource for finding links because the search is efficient, targeted, pretty much real time, and the initial pitch only has to be 140 characters in a direct message!
Once you’ve established a relationship, simply brief the target linker on the potential of the relationship. If you think it’s a good linking partner based on audiences (and not solely on SEO weighting), chances are this is a very easy pitch and beneficial to both parties. Engage and see if there can be a meaningful way to share information between sites and help each other out in whatever form would work for both parties.
Granted, in a fair amount of cases you may end up with reciprocal relationships, but a targeted and natural-looking reciprocal link may be better than no link at all, both for SEO purposes and for actual traffic over time! In many cases too there are simple, overlooked opportunities to garner one-way links directly back to your site and content.
Linking is a cumulative effort. Don’t expect to get hundreds of links overnight from this method. This is an organic, methodical process and not one which will bounce you to page #1 for all of your target or most competitive keywords in a day, or even a week. BUT, if you start out and say to yourself, “I’m going to garner quality, meaningful links over the course of time through hard work” - and set your goals to do so – it will happen. If you take the opportunity to ask for a link from most encounters and relationships you develop in your industry, good things will happen.
Relying on real-world networking, going out and pressing the flesh and meeting people in your industry (both at events and in online social networking websites) allows you to start on this path of natural linking success. You’ll find that your business “dovetails” with some of the best places on the Internet!
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How To Track Social Media Using BLVD Status
Sep 17, 2009 by Greg Finn | Analytics, Social Media MarketingA little over a year ago 10e20 covered the launch of BLVD Status over at Search Engine Land, and since then a few new features have been launched that really make this a powerhouse platform for Social Media analytics. In case you haven’t heard of BLVD Status in the past, one of the best attributes is that it provides real time tracking, and it has been beefed up on steroids in this new version. Here are a few of my favorite features for Social Media use:
Keyword Vitals
This is a really nice upgrade in my eyes because it really allows you to see and track the value of social media promotions on search engines in real time. Talking about the intersection of search and social is always a hot topic, and BLVD can give you quantitative statistics on how your SMM promotions carry over to the SERPs. Here is a quick sample of what you would see for a very long term keyword:
Basically, BLVD status allows you to view all search engine traffic from the entire domain and display by keyword. This data can also be filtered by URL as well, which makes it really powerful. The data provides the initial rankings of the page, the average rank for the time period, and the current rankings for that keyword and the overall conversions. So tracking the time period after a social campaign vs. the time period before the campaign would easily give you data for how traffic, conversions and rankings increased from a search engine standpoint. Pretty powerful stuff.
Here is a 1/4 day example (with today’s data!) for an article that Chris wrote earlier this year:
I could also see this feature executed down the road showing overall traffic from different social sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and the like to give you some real time social tracking vs historical data.
Alerts
Another new development with BLVD Status is to harness the power of the real-time reporting to kick out alerts to you and your client. This new feature allows you to have reports generated based on traffic, referrals, campaigns or keywords. Now any SEOs could see the power of having a real-time keyword alert for a drop in the SERPs:
…and how they could use this to be proactive (rather than reactive), but it can be leveraged for social media as well. Having a real time traffic alert is crucial to see if a campaign has become popular or is getting social traffic. You can see if you hit traffic levels that are abnormally high:
This will alert you to not only the traffic, but also help you find the location of this traffic. So say you have a bit of success on Reddit that was unknown to you … well, these alerts will help you fan that fire and keep the momentum going.
Now referrer alerts can help you get more granular. Right now there isn’t a particular alert that lets you know when you are getting pickup from a social site (ex. Digg) but with the right tweaks you can replicate this data! Say you want to find out if you may have just been dugg – you can set up an alert that tracks traffic from a specific domain. If you set up an alert to track 20 visits over a 10 minute period from Digg, you could have a great notifier for any stories that were dugg. Or if you wanted to be alerted if a story reached the homepage of Digg so that you could watch the comments or monitor server health, you could implement the following parameters:
The alerts that have been updated in the newest version of BLVD status help notify you when something is happening to you or your client’s site, and the benefits for social media are numerous (and out of this world for SEO too).
When I was talking to Chris Bennett (owner of 97th Floor and one of the brainchilds behind the project) at SES San Jose and he was describing the changes, he kept calling them a “game-changer,” and after testing it out, I agree with him. If you are still looking for more information about BLVD Status, there is an extremely detailed write up on all the new changes here, and you can also sign up at BLVD Status today!
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Savvy Internet marketers know the importance of keyword targeting for ranking and usability, but as a refresher (and for you beginners out there) I thought I’d run down a list of various areas on the page where you can include your core keyword. It’s not a completely comprehensive list and I’m not going to bother with percentage of importance or how crucial it is to target these particular spots — this is just my opinion of areas to be mindful of and possibly include a keyword if you can, because it can potentially help with rankings and should provide a solid user experience. I’ll use “vintage clothes” as an example — it’s a pretty competitive term and currently has nearly 33 million search results.
Title Tag
I’d have the keyword first or close to the beginning of the title tag and keep the tag to about 65-70 characters so the entire tag can display in search results.
<title>Vintage Clothes, Indie Clothing and Great Styles | HipstersRUs.com</title>
Meta Description
While the meta description isn’t much of a ranking factor, it’s still a good place to include your keywords because search engines will bold the terms the user searched for, and if those terms are in your meta description they’ll help draw the user’s eyes to your search result. You can dynamically generate meta descriptions (for example, if you have an e-commerce site with millions of products and want to automatically generate descriptions for individual product pages) or leave them blank and let search engines pull what they feel is a relevant description for the page, but I think that if you can write up a meta description for certain core pages (e.g., the home page, your blog page, contact page, etc), you should control how those pages are being described to searchers.
Think of your meta description as an advertisement for your page — how will you craft it in order to entice a searcher to click on your result over 9 others being displayed? Make your description readable (don’t just list keywords one after another; they won’t help your rankings, anyway) and keep it to about 155 to 170 characters to avoid it getting cut off in the search results.
<meta name=”description” content=”HipstersRUs offers hip vintage clothes and indie-style clothing in impeccable quality and at affordable prices. We have great styles of vintage clothing in mint condition.”>
URL
It’s nice to have the keyword in your main URL if possible. Redwidgets.com is better for ranking than SpunkyMonkey.com, a brand that specializes in red widgets. Some engines seem to assign a bit of weight to keyword-centric URLs but even if they don’t (or claim not to), a URL with a keyword in it will probably get more keyword-centric anchor text than the brand would. If I linked to redwidgets.com and SpunkyMonkey.com using their URLs as the anchor text, redwidgets.com would likely have the edge in ranking for “red widgets” than SpunkyMonkey because the keyword’s already built into the anchor text.
That being said, if you’re building a brand and don’t have the keyword in your main URL but still want to rank for certain keywords, you can still have optimized URLs. For example:
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-accessories
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-dresses
http://www.hipstersrus.com/vintage-suits
You could potentially have a URL that’s hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing but that has its upsides and its downsides. One negative is that you’re possibly pitting two pages against each other, which we in the biz affectionately refer to as keyword cannibalization. If you have multiple pages that appear to target the same keyword (via duplicate title tags, thoughtless keyword repetition, similar URLs, etc), you’re forcing the search engines to choose what they feel is the most relevant page to display as a result for that keyword, and the downside is that what they choose may not be the page that you want ranking. You wouldn’t want to have something like hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-1, hipstersrus.com/vintage-clothing-2, etc, and attempt to rank all of them for the term “vintage clothing.”
However, if your home page is ranking for “vintage clothing” and you also have a page that talks about vintage clothing in some regard (maybe it’s a page of newly arrived clothing or you talk about where you acquire your vintage clothing), you could end up ranking both pages for that keyword — your home page as a top result and the vintage clothing page as an indented result. You’re occupying more search result real estate with your brand, which is great for your business.
Here’s a search result for “books”:
Amazon has two pages ranking for “books,” their books page and the home page. I mostly see indented results occur with the home page and a secondary page, so if you make certain that both pages aren’t exact dupes of each other and have unique content, you might end up ranking both for the same keyword.
Header Tag
There’s been talk that using keywords in your H1 tag used to be a bigger ranking factor but is now waning in importance from a pure ranking standpoint. However, I still think it’s a best practice to include your keyword in your header tags, if not for ranking reasons then at least for usability. If someone searched for “vintage clothing” and clicked on your result, they’ll probably expect to see the keyword they searched for on the page in some form or another. Header tags operate the same way as a standard outline, so just use them the same way. For example:
<h1>Widgets</h1>
yada yada yada
<h2>Red Widgets</h2>
yada yada yada
<h3>Sparkley Red Widgets</h3>
yada yada yada
<h3>Striped Red Widgets</h3>
yada yada yada
<h2>Blue Widgets</h2>
And so on. For our vintage clothing example, the following would be a good H1 tag for the home page:
<h1>Vintage Clothing at HipstersRUs.com</h1>
Body of Text
Don’t get all aggro and obsessed with keyword density and think, “Derr, I have to have a density of 23.78% in order to rank #1 for my keyword.” Just write natural copy and use your keyword where it makes sense. Be mindful but logical — if you have a page that repeats your keyword over and over again, users are going to wonder what the hell is wrong with you and a human editor might think you’re trying to spam your way into the SERPs.
Which reads better?
Vintage clothing at HipstersRUs.com. Vintage clothes men’s vintage suits women’s vintage dresses and great vintage styles. Our vintage clothes are affordable and stylish. We offer free shipping on vintage clothing orders over $50. Vintage clothes in great shape and styles.
Or this:
At HipstersRUs we offer stylish vintage clothing at affordable prices. Fashion trends come and go, but classic vintage looks always stand out. From the essential black dress to a sharp three-piece suit, we’ve got all sorts of vintage styles and clothes that look great without breaking the bank. Complete your outfit with HipstersRUs!
Internal Anchor Text
If you’ve got a page that you’re trying to rank for “red widgets,” it makes sense to link to it internally using “red widgets” as the anchor text instead of “here” or something of equally low value. Be mindful of how you link to pages in your navigation, via breadcrumbs, and contextually. For example, if HipstersRUs.com has a page that’s targeting “vintage dresses,” they’d obviously want to link to it whenever they mention the page using “vintage dresses” in their navigation, in blog posts, etc.
External Anchor Text
As with internal linking, you’ll want to have optimized anchor text for any links pointing to you from other web pages. Unfortunately, unlike internal linking you often don’t have control over how someone links to you (which is why, as previously mentioned, it is nice to have your keyword built into your main URL if you can). If someone’s linked to you using a less than ideal anchor text, you can try and contact that person and say that you appreciate the link and was wondering if he/she can change the anchor text for you. If you have any control of the link whatsoever, be sure to incorporate your keywords in the anchor text.
Ex. “I bought a super cute dress at HipstersRUs.com, which sells tons of vintage clothing.”
Social Networking Profiles
Another possible strategy is to include your keyword in your social profiles. While this won’t help your main page rank, I think it’s great to associate the brand with that keyword so that people associate the two with each other.
For example, if HipstersRUs.com had a Twitter profile, they could register “hipstersRus” as the URL but optimize the display name:
Twitter seems to limit names to about 20 characters, so you might need to be a bit creative. You could go with HipstersRUs or try to target keywords (in the above example, I went with “Hip Vintage Clothing”). In the description hit up the brand and your keyword within 160 characters (just like you would a meta description):
HipstersRUs is an online vintage clothing store specializing in vintage looks, styles & accessories at affordable prices. Our vintage clothes are chic and hip!
Try to work in the keyword if you build a custom Twitter background that includes contact info too.
With Facebook, you could create a page called “HipstersRUs Vintage Clothes”:
Target the keyword in your page description and when you post notes. Like I said, although this doesn’t have a primary effect on your page rankings, you’re branding yourself and strengthening the association between your brand and that particular keyword; that way, if someone later does a search for “vintage clothing” and sees your page in the search results (whether you’re in position #1, 4, or 10), she might recall your social media profile and may click on your result. Reinforcing the keyword continues to strengthen that bond so that when the person hears “vintage clothing,” they’ll think “HipstersRUs,” and vice versa.
Obviously, with all of the above strategies the most important thing is to be logical with how you use the keyword. You’re optimizing not just for search engines, but for your users too, and it’s better to be user-friendly than to be solely search-engine friendly. Thus, you want to be sensible, smart and strategic (none of this Malkovich Malkovich nonsense).
Here’s where I turn it over to you — how do you target your keywords? If I’ve missed any tactics or strategies, please share them in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow 10e20 on Twitter.
Having an inspirational routine can be a great process for anyone. Sometimes inspiration comes from motivating factors like staying alive or from family and friends. Other times the things you see, read, taste, touch or hear can inspire you. I look through a wide variety of sources for inspiration and that thing to make me think differently. Inspiration can keep your ideas and artistic process fresh and fun.
Remembering that inspiration can be found from any creative field, even if that field isn’t related to yours specifically, is the key to expanding your ocean of creativity and finding inspiration everywhere.
Online
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading is a nonprofit that started in 1984 (love the Orwell reference) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The website is packed with videos from some of the greatest creative minds. Prepare to be inspired!
Sometimes randomness can yield the most inspiring and out of the box results. A site that keeps me inspired, and clicking, is FFFFOUND!!! an image bookmarking site that can be filtered down to images you may like by the previously clicked image.
More user submitted randomness can be found at the ever inspiring Notcot.org.
Flickr is huge- sometimes I can get lost on this photo sharing social site. I am always bookmarking specific pages that inspire me, like this Business Cards set.
Wooster Collective is a blog that was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world. They even asked their 10,785 Facebook fans What lately has been inspiring you?
The FWA: Favourite Website Awards was established in 2000 to showcases the latest and greatest of
cutting edge website design. They showcase a site everyday, every month and one a year to take it all.
The great moderators at Boing Boing always bring inspiring, interesting pieces from all over the Web to
their blog everyday.
Art21 Blog is from the producers of the amazing PBS video series, founded in 1997 with the mission to
increase knowledge of contemporary art, ignite discussion, and inspire creative thinking by using
diverse media to present contemporary artists at work and in their own words.
Design magazines:
Creative Review is a monthly magazine for visual communication with an aim to inspire, inform and stimulate debate among their readers in graphic design, advertising, digital media, illustration, photography and all other fields of visual communication worldwide. They have a great blog also.
HOW magazine has a goal of helping designers, whether that designer is the little guy or the top dogs. The insight into the creative whys and hows behind specific projects is a huge resource to any creative looking for more knowledge and tons of inspiration. Check out this Behind the Design: Restaurant Identity article below.
Communication Arts is an old school mag with lots of clout and amazing work. This magazine is the premier source of inspiration for everyone involved in visual communication.
Juxtapoz Arts & Culture magazine was created in 1994 to both help define and celebrate urban contemporary art. The website has tons of interviews and useful information about upcoming shows in major cities around the world. Currently it has the largest circulation of any art magazine in the United States and this is for a good reason- it inspires!
Books:
I am always inspired by book covers. They need to be designed so that they will catch a potential reader’s eye, so Darwin’s theory holds true to book cover design also. I check out this blog Judge A Book… for some inspiring compositions, use of typography and imagery. Smashing Magazine has a cool post on Excellent book covers and paperbacks.
Design books that cover niche fields and genres are always great to have on the shelf; being able to pull one down and flip through some pages of visual inspiration can sometimes become that push you needed to catch an idea.
Edward Tufte’s books are some that inspire my work. The books alone are beautiful works in and of themselves. Envisioning Information is one that I revisit again and again. The book shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information.
Other times it is the words that inspire. David Lynch’s ‘Catching the Big Fish’ goes through his creative process in some of his films and early years as well as other areas of life and meditation. Hearing another creative individual’s stories and words on how they do things can become stepping stones to new avenues for your own creativity.
Outside
Nature did it first. The beautiful color combinations and hues that make up the the flora and fauna can inspire new direction in color palette in any design project. Simply taking a walk outside with an open mind and eyes can bring inspiration back to the drawing table. Scientists, architects and engineers take inspiration from nature all the time. And some scientists discover art through their scientific disciplines.
Colourlovers has some great posts about being inspired by nature. Check out this beautiful post on Color In Nature: Beetles; the palettes created as well as the patterns are sure to inspire.
Opacity.us has an extensive collection of urban ruins from all over the world.
I always think of Jackson Pollock’s quote when asked by Hans Hoffman if Jackson painted from nature? He replied by saying, “I am nature.”
Museums, Galleries and Culture
By looking through the halls of the history of art in a museum or contemporary gallery, we can gain understanding and new insights into our own design challenges. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one that I visit a lot here in New York; you can subscribe to the Artwork of the Day feed for some daily inspiration.
For a great site that has some listings of cultural events, check out Flavorpill. They share the most exciting and worthwhile events happening in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and London — with more cities on the way.
Way Offline
Dreams can be great sources of inspiration and can take our minds to new places and possibilities uninhibited by the conventions of our waking lives, which can inspire new thinking. Sometimes a problem can be worked out in the subconscious over night in a dream and then thought of in a new light when working on it again.
What inspires you in your field?
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