These are my links for February 7th from 14:01 to 15:59:
- Six Pixels of Separation: Stop lurking and step it up on social networks – There aren't a lot of great videos about digital strategy (hmm that gives me an idea…) but this one by Mitch Joel to promote his book Six Pixels of Seperation is really great and focus on the 'why' of digital strategy, rather than asking about the 'what' (the tools and technology). Spot on the money, and I'll be developing some further thinking on developing the 'how' through my clients and on this blog during the year.
- Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization – I loathe the 'science' of search engine optimisation (or 'snake something oil' as a social media person I knew called it), but I'm realising in work I'm doing currently that it's actually still quite critical as a low-cost way to get the traffic to your site that you deserve. I'm recognising a growing gap between the 'being good' (aka 'built it and they will come') social media 'evangelists' and the web science as commerce SEO people (whilst I think both approaches alone are flawed, it seems hard to get these two groups to work together). This Aug 2009 is priceless, and could probably be described as 'the only SEO article you need to read ever'. It explains what the most crucial on page elements are and how you can optimise copy for them, but intriguingly contains a chart that reveal that on-page copy only accounts for a horrifying 15% of a web page's success. It's all about reputation, time in market, and link juice – thus showing that we need social marketing to make sites work.
- Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens – Travel writer Fiona Cullinan's blog is an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism. This 4 part article on how she used web 2.0 tools to crowd-source a top 10 article on romantic destinations was particularly interesting to me as I spent nearly 5 years editing a travel website (www.pilotguides.com) and wrote quite a few top 10 articles for magaznes too. The process is largely subjective, but Fiona tries to put some scientic approach to opening out access and reviewing the data. The verdict: crowd-sourcing takes nearly twice as long, with larger margin for off-the-mark content, but perhaps makes editorial richer and more diverse.
