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Three Generations of SEO (Part II) September 17, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Digital Media, Web 2.0, startups.
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This is part II in a series of posts on SEO-driven businesses. Part I is here.

I see three generations of SEO optimization in the wild that build upon each other. Below are their distinguishing characteristics.

  • SEO 1.0: human-driven SEO. This is primarily about people tweaking content and linking structure. The main distinguishing characteristic of an SEO 1.0 company is that there are people on staff who spend a portion of their time optimizing content for SEO. The best example is probably About.com, with its 750+ experts and dozens of editors. The experts and editors choose which topics to write on and know how to write to drive rank. They know how to format titles and what words they should avoid and what’s the “right” length of an article, etc. They also know how to build a strong link internal structure, albeit mostly by hand. Our own TechTarget and THCN are pretty expert at SEO 1.0. For Internet marketing, HubSpot is a great resource which helps many companies get on the SEO 1.0 train. The biggest problem of SEO 1.0 is scale–it takes humans to optimize content.
  • SEO 1.5: adding UGC for scale. What you may not be able to do with a dozen or a few hundred experts you may be able to do with lots of contributors. Blogging sites are the main examples. They key here is to get to scale and avoid “poisonous” SEO–the type of content that actually can drive your rank down.
  • SEO 2.0: machine-driven SEO. If SEO 1.0 is about the human touch, SEO 2.0 is about software crunching through content databases. What SEO 2.0 lacks in human skill it gains in scale. The key is having good meta-data. WordPress.com is a good example. Although the content is UGC, nobody is teaching WP bloggers how to write for SEO. However, the smart folks at Automattic are taking the meta-data from blog posts, including but not limited to titles, tags, linking and visit histories, and using them to generate both new pages (for example, using the SEO tag) and new links in content (as in the auto-generated possibly related posts at the bottom of blog posts). E-commerce sites are great candidates for SEO 2.0 because products carry a lot of meta-data allowing new pages to be built by brand, price and other features. Many also do SEO 1.0 through on-staff experts/marketers writing about the products and SEO 1.5 by adding (or syndicating) reviews. Another good example is EveryZing, run by my friend Tom Wilde, which can add meta-data to media assets (podcasts, videos) and make them search-friendly by doing speech-to-text. Yet more examples are what BitPipe (now owned by TechTarget) or Scribd are doing.
  • SEO 2.5: content enhancement. I’m noticing an increasing effort, particularly with UGC, to use software tools to enhance the quality of content  that is produced as opposed to try to add value around it (such as through additional reading links, etc.). The idea is simple: the better the content and the more relevant links in it, the more interesting it is for the search engines and potentially for visitors. One player in this space is Zemanta (which Fred Wilson recently invested in), whose widget I’m staring at now as I write this post. I like what these guys are doing. At Plinky, we are taking a very different approach with the same goal–help people create better UGC.
  • SEO 3.0: it’s all about back links. If you have a lot of content with good meta-data you can create an amazing internal linking structure within the sites you control. But you need to have back links to drive rank. Domain squatters for years have built link farms across the domains they own and have tried to hide the coordinated nature of their linking from search engines. Then came the comment and review spammers who essentially poisoned much of that pool of UGC for search. On the legitimate side, businesses have struck content partnerships that increase back links for years. But it wasn’t until the last couple of years that many companies approached the problem of building legitimate, value-added back links with scale and automation in mind. We first saw this through site templates (MySpace or WordPress, for example) and widgets and the back links to their creators. I am now seeing a next generation of startups innovating in this area. The delicate balance is to add tons of back links that add value to visitors as opposed to look like a link farm.

The majority of SEO experts and consultants built their fame doing SEO 1.0. Some have experience with SEO 1.5 and can suggest manual widget distribution strategies to help with SEO 3.0. These people tend to be focused much more on content than on software. In my own experience and in talking to heads of marketing and CTOs at Polaris portfolio companies I get the sense that very few SEO gurus have any experience with building the foundational software systems that drive SEO 2.0-3.0. This is a big problem. It is not easy to build an SEO-optimized content management + publishing system driven by a large content database with largely automated editorial processes. If you want to take your business to scale, you have to think about your SEO strategy and architect your service for this from the ground up. This is not something you can bolt on. Also, unless you already have an SEO-knowledgeable architect on your team, expect to spend a long time finding one and consider building an SEO advisory board to augment the knowledge/experience of the person you’ll end up with.

The next part in the series will look at the economics of “free” traffic.

The Participation Gap August 25, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Web 2.0.
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Corinna @ Plinky pointed me to a Clay Shirky talk from the Web 2.0 Conference in April, which I missed. In his inimitable style, Clay uses back-of-the-envelope math to quantify what might be called the participation gap, a term (I just came up for lack of anything better) to describe the difference between where we are at any given point of time and a world where we are fully leveraging the architecture of participation.

Clay’s main point is that much social surplus is trapped in countless hours of passive media consumption.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Think of the participation gap as the opportunity cost of passive as opposed to active, participatory engagement. Not all passive engagement is bad and not all participatory engagement is good but it is hard to argue that there is an imbalance.

 

Artificial Scarcity For Entrepreneurs, Not Just Economists August 22, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Web 2.0, startups.
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Ryan Freitas @ Plinky pointed me to Aaron Schwartz’s riff on 37signals’ advice on how entrepreneurs should launch startups using the “Holywood method” (teaser, preview, launch).

Aaron makes a solid point that web sites are not movies. Movies are fixed content. They are what they are. All the tweaking has been done prior to launch during editing (after test screenings and other ways to gather feedback). Movies are also easy to grasp–a couple of hours in a dark room, you get the point, you go home. Most Web sites are constantly evolving. They could also be deep and take much longer than two hours to explore.

If your product is like a Holywood movie then perhaps the Holywood launch might work for you. Truth be told, most of the sites that 37signals launches are clean, simple, easy to understand and of pretty high quality.

For others, Aaron’s suggestion is to go with the Gmail model of creating artificial scarcity. Aaron doesn’t use the term himself but quotes mojombo:

Artificial scarcity is a great technique to generate excitement for a product while also limiting growth to a rate that won’t melt your servers. We worked through a huge number of problems and early users gave us some of the ideas that have defined GitHub. By doing a Hollywood launch, things would have been very different and I am convinced, very much worse.

I’m a big fan of artificial scarcity as a way to gain leverage. I don’t think startups use it enough. The broader concept can be applied to many situations in addition to how to launch web sites.

I learned about artificial scarcity first in my highschool economics class. Apparently, in the 80s the US government threatened Japanese car makers with tariffs because they saw their vehicles as threats to Detroit manufacturers. The Japanese, being both smart and courteous, replied along the lines of “Oh, we are so sorry. We understand your concerns. No need to impose tariffs. We will impose voluntary export restrictions to lower the quantity of Japanese vehicles entering Europe.” The result was that consumers ended up paying more for Japanese cars, just as they would have under a tariff. However, the additional revenue went into the bank accounts of the Japanese auto-makers as opposed to the US government coffers. (For the econ geeks, supply became perfectly inelastic at the voluntary export restriction level, leading to a jump in vehicle price and profit/vehicle.)

Not everyone is a fan of articifical scarcity as it, perhaps unfairly, advantages businesses. Some more discussion on the topic here and here.

Designers vs. Users July 31, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Web 2.0.
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I received a piece of relevant “spam” yesterday from IDEA, the Institute for Dynamic Education Advancement–a message alerting me to a new study on how people interact with web sites. The interesting aspect of the study is that it compares the opinions of users to those of web designers. No surprises here but there is a significant gap.

  • Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site. Respondents consider a site “effective” when visitors are satisfied with respect to enjoyment, can find information somewhat easily, and never get lost in the site. By at least one point on a five-point scale, visitors have higher expectations for effectiveness than do designers. Nonprofit organizations believe that effective sites do not have “information gaps between what visitors want and what the site provides” and that visitors are at least “somewhat satisfied” with their sites. Designers should give greater consideration to overall effectiveness, thereby reducing the chance of failure for a user to find the information they seek.
  • Designers are overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation. In the survey, the ability to maintain orientation was defined as visitors’ ability to know “where they are, where they can go next, and which pages are related.” About 70% of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation. That drops to about 30% when non-profit organizations express their view. In contrast, only about 10% of visitors report being able to almost always maintain their orientation. Fewer than 5% report that they tend to get lost frequently. Said another way, your visitors don’t know your site as well as you do, so make sure it is obvious how to find information through meaningful menus, prompts, and not too much clutter.

Worth taking a look at the full report.

Amazon Funds AWS Darling Animoto May 15, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Digital Media, Facebook, Industry News, Web 2.0, amazon web services, cloud computing, social media, startups.
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My friend Stevie Clifton, CTO at Animoto, pinged me early this morning with the news that Amazon has funded his company. This comes on the heels of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos using Animoto as a great example of how to leverage Amazon Web Services. Get the full story from Stevie who recorded a video telling how Animoto scaled from 50 server instances to 3,500 server instances after their Facebook launch.

Congrats to the Animoto team. They’ve built a very cool service and deserve to get a little breathing room.

Flash vs. AJAX is The Wrong Question February 27, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Flex, Macromedia Flash, Mobile, Web 2.0.
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Following my post on the Flex 3 and AIR launch, a number of you have pinged me privately about the Flash vs. AJAX question. It goes something like this: “I know you are going to write that you prefer Flash/Flex because you were chief architect at Macromedia but what are you telling your own companies? Should they go with Flash or should they go with AJAX?” Flash vs. AJAX is the wrong question for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being that Flash is an application runtime environment and AJAX is a design/implementation pattern for applications.

In the next few days I’ll collect my thoughts and do a post on real question, which is about technology/tool/platform choices for building Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and Mobile Web 2.0 applications.