Showing posts with label PageRank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PageRank. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

SEO Takes Care Of Itself


Darren Rowse, the top blogger in the world perhaps, has a Google Plus post on SEO.
While I once did spend more time on SEO (particularly on structuring my site right, getting keyword density up, interlinking my posts lots and quite a bit of researching keywords) I've increasingly found more value in working on other areas of my business and have found that the result in doing so has been that SEO has to some extend looked after itself....... more search traffic to my blogs .. direct traffic, traffic from social, referral traffic .. Understanding the needs, problems and challenges of readers (and potential readers) is key. ..... you're writing on topics people are searching for, it means that when they find your content they are content with it and are more likely to share it (link to it) - all of which helps to increase search rankings/traffic. .... I work hard and getting inside the heads of my readers by surveying them, running polls, running focus groups, asking questions and giving them space to share what they are doing, learning and struggling with. All of these gives me a fantastic picture of how I can serve them better. ...... the creation of content that is both relevant and useful. This is a daily process of writing, commissioning our writers with assignments and editing their work. ..... ensuring high quality of work but also keeping the quantity up .... More articles mean more doorways into the site. ..... Community - giving readers ways and spaces to engage with you and one another brings a blog alive. .... a reader who feels a sense of belonging is much more likely to be sharing links to your blog than one who never interacts .... I spend a lot of time monitoring our site 'outposts' (Facebook, Twitter etc), creating community centred content (discussions, homework/challenges), focusing our team upon our forum area and investing into customer service (I have a dedicated team on this). .... the dPS Email strategy. .... That blog was well optimized for Google and naturally ranked well. The result was 90% of our traffic was Google traffic. All was good until the day came when Google changed its algorithm and the blog all but disappeared from Google. ...... for the next 6 weeks 90% of my traffic (and income) disappeared. It came back almost as quickly as it disappeared 6 weeks later but the experience taught me an important lesson - to work on other traffic strategies. ..... the graphic with the regular spikes and troughs pattern. The troughs are weekends and the spikes.... are newsletter days. .... Our newsletters drive massive traffic to the site. .... While I wouldn't want to loose the search traffic - the site is now at a point where we wouldn't need it to survive because we can now drive our own traffic each week. .... We now have 100,000 Facebook likes on dPS and it too is sending more and more traffic than previously. The same's true for Twitter and even sites like Pinterest. ..... diversifying our focus on multiple forms of traffic (particularly those we have complete control over like email) gives us a much much much stronger foundation than if we only focused our time and energy upon SEO
In short.

(1) Actively seek to understand your reader's needs.
(2) Write quality and quantity.
(3) Build community at the blog. Hello Disqus.
(4) Email/newsletter can be powerful. Facebook and Twitter are useful.
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Saturday, July 28, 2012

Soccer Secrets


PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies
Many readers will have watched the final of the Euro 2012 soccer championships on Sunday in which Spain demolished a tired Italian team by 4 goals to nil. The result, Spain's third major championship in a row, confirms the team as the best in the world and one of the greatest in history. ...... Spain's famous strategy of accurate quick-fire passing, known as the tiki-taka style. ..... a quantifiable representation of a team's style, identifies key individuals and highlights potential weaknesses. ..... think of each player as a node in a network and each pass as an edge that connects nodes. ..... the Spanish team pass more often..... image captures 417 passes by the Spanish team versus 266 for the Netherlands. ..... That the goal keeper was the Netherland's best connected player itself speaks volumes. ..... Players with a high betweenness centrality are crucial for keeping the momentum of the game going ..... the famous PageRank algorithm which measure's a player's popularity, as judged by the number of passes he receives from other popular players. ..... adding another node to represent the opponents goal and would record the number of shots .... measure the accuracy of passes .... The defensive strength of a team could also be incorporated in the model by tracking passing interceptions and recovered balls .... a way of collecting and analysing the data in real time to produce a network-based analysis of a game as it happens ..... In terms of data analysis, football has always lagged behind more statistically-friendly games such as American football, baseball and cricket, because it lacks the long pauses during which data can be gathered and analysed. That looks set to change.
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Sunday, September 25, 2011

Water: Top Word

Google Logo officially released on May 2010Image via WikipediaWater has overtaken Brazil as the top search term for this blog. And this blog post is now the top visited post at this blog: Why I Liked The Charity Water Party.

Brazil

What happened? My passion came through? I am so impressed with the Google search engine right now. Their algorithm seems to be able to sense the passion in your voice.

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Chris Dixon Kind Of Person

Caterina, Chris and meImage by Zach Klein via FlickrThere Are Two Kinds Of People In The World

This blog post by Chris Dixon has been making the rounds of the blogosphere. It has generated many comments at the blog itself. I happened to see the post soon after it came out, and I was the first or second person to leave a comment. I returned a few hours later, and there were already close to 100 comments. Obviously the post had sparked something.

Future Of The Internet: Easy, Says Dixon

One of my favorite Chris Dixon posts is equally short, it is one where Chris is relaying as to how the Internet stands to transform anything and everything.

Monday, January 04, 2010

Twitter For The Masses

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
2009 was Twitter's year, no doubt. But towards the end of 2009 Twitter's growth had plateaued. What could Twitter do to reach the masses and end up with hundreds of millions of people using the service? Simplify, simplify, simplify. Right now it is so easy to get lost in the service when you are a new user. You first start out by not believing something worthwhile can be said in 140 characters. That is too brief. You may be do not desire to share with the world what you had for lunch. You might not know who to follow. The people you personally know are not necessarily the people with the most interesting tweets. What's a tweet anyway?

Twitter has to evolve as a service. A stangnant basic service that is hoping to only scale will not cut it. Twitter at once will have to become feature rich and simpler. The biggest bottleneck to Twitter's growth has been how primitive the search function at the site is. I can't even get it to deliver to me tweets I posted several months ago. And all those tweets reside on Twitter's servers.

SAN FRANCISCO - MARCH 10:  Twitter co-founder ...

Twitter necessarily has to grow and eat into its ecosystem. That is how Windows grew. New, exciting, independent software programs found themselves eaten up in the next version of Windows. The Sun engulfed the nearby planets and grew.

Before they introduced the lists feature, Twitter had become unmanageable for me. The retweet feature I like, but I can see why it has generated much controversy. One big reason is the old way you could edit the tweet before retweeting it. To that I say, you can still choose to do it the old way.


Google WaveImage via Wikipedia
But I have to keep coming back to search. Bing and Google are not doing it. When I first went to Bing's Twitter page weeks ago, I saw the mistake they were making. They were basically using Twitter to collect votes for the hottest news articles for that day. That is only one of many uses of Twitter. And I think Google News does a much better job of bringing me the news for the day. And it is not true Google is doing real time search now. Just because you display a few tweets on the topic I just conducted a search on does not quite cut it.

My Twitter account has to be the starting point for my Twitter experience. And one thing could add to that experience more than any other: the ability to search all tweets that might have ever been posted. I should not have to use Delicio.us. I should be able to store all links of interest to me right there on Twitter, and I used to do that. Then Twitter stopped delivering.

Just like PageRank is not going to be enough for Google, just like Google is going to have to make sense of webpages in their own right to see how much value they have, Twitter search is going to be able to read tweets, and make sense of a large number of tweets with the same keywords to give me a feel for what the masses are thinking and feeling. Right now I don't have that. Show me on one screen what the masses are saying in a million tweets. Where is that search and display function?

But real time is not just for now. Real time archives are also valuable. Tell me how Obama supporters felt about Obama in the summer of 2008. Collect all the tweets on the topic and make sense of them all for me.

Money talks, and Twitter does not have enough of it to truly get ambitious as a basic feature of the web experience. I still think Twitter should go for an IPO so it will have a billion dollars to become what email would be if it were designed today. Maybe it will not be Wave, it will be Twitter. It still can be.

Twitter has had a scalability problem because it has not had 300 million dollars to pour into its infrastructure. Twitter has to be always on if it can be part of the basic infrastructure of our web experience. 
The Twitter fail whale error message.Image via Wikipedia


If email were invented today, it would not have a subject line. I would not need your email address to be able to send you an email. The email would always be short. I should be able to read a million such emails in less than a minute. A celebrity should not feel overwhelmed by all the emails she gets because the search feature is so good. Because Twitter makes sense of a million tweets on the same topic in as much time as Google takes to deliver search results. Well, Twitter does not, not now.

And Twitter DM is a joke. You have so little control over it. I get so much spam, I stopped reading DMs months ago. 

The Twitter trending topics list is so feature poor, it is not even funny. I should be able to do time travel with that list. I should be able to do topics, and sub topics, and sub sub topics with that list. I should be able to have a trending topics list based only on my followers. The trending topics list needs to be a full blown creature.

Twitter today is not all it can be. If Twitter is going to end up with a billion users, it is not going to be the Twitter that we know today.

Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Google Wave For The Masses

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