Posted: 4 December 2011 | Author: Chris Unitt | No Comments »
I was asked to do a talk at last week’s Arts Marketing Association‘s first Tweet Meet - essentially a bunch of concurrent regional get-togethers with a shared Twitter hashtag. Firstly, a big thanks to Tim and Amy, the West Mids coordinators, for asking me to talk and for risking a subject that (useful as it is) doesn’t exactly scream excitement.
The people in the audience were unlikely to get into the code of their organisations’ websites but they were more than likely to produce content destined to go out online (marketing/press copy, blog posts, show information and that kind of thing).
What I wanted to do was give a brief skim over the main issues, demystify things a little and give some tips for improving the simple, day-to-day stuff they’re responsible for.
Here are my slides, with links to lots of resources and tools below:
Tools:
Resources: Occam’s Razor (essential reading), Search Engine Land, SEOMoz, SEOBook, Search Engine Journal, State of Search, Search Engine Watch, Google Webmaster Central.
My final tips:
- Use keywords in your titles and a couple of times in the body of your copy (preferably early on, too)
- Don’t use ‘click here’ as anchor text
- Use alt tags for images
- Do a bit of research
- Think about what people coming via search engines might be looking for
- Seriously consider Google’s Analytics and/or AdWords qualifications
- Don’t let SEO get in the way of good content
Posted: 29 September 2011 | Author: Chris Unitt | 3 Comments »
I keep going back to that Culture24 report, ‘How to evaluate online success’. There’s quite a bit in there to digest and a few threads that I think are worth teasing out – it’s probably going to be good for a couple more blog posts at least.
Anyway, I flicked through the key recommendations earlier. This sentence in particular couldn’t be much clearer:
invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) first, then mobile versions of websites and then social media
Despite that, it’s social media that dominates the conversation among the arts/digital chattering classes (aptly, I suppose). You rarely hear a peep about SEO and mobile doesn’t figure that much either (at least not in a practical way – it’s all bespoke apps, Foursquare and QR codes).
I think I know part of the reason for this. SEO and mobile platforms (sensible ones that people will actually use) are boring, technical and often need to be budgeted for and commissioned. On the other hand, it’s fun to chat to people on social networks, the tools are more readily available and ‘success’ is harder to measure (or easier to obfuscate, depending on your level of cynicism). Let me know if I’m very wide of the mark.
So I thought I’d kick off some chat about boring SEO.
What’s SEO and why’s it important?
Culture24′s report showed that the overwhelming majority of visitors to the participating organisations’ websites come via search engines. The process of making your website more easily discoverable via Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s a complicated area but, in the simplest of terms, it comes down to this:
- On-site SEO is about making sure the website is built properly and contains relevant content. This is so that, when a search engine crawls your site, it can find all the content on it and work out how it might be relevant to potential search queries.
- Off-site SEO is to do with links coming to your site from other, relevant websites – the more the better. Each incoming link is proof that your website is important. The more links pointing to your site, the more likely you’ll turn up when someone does a search on a relevant topic.
It’s actually a lot more complicated than that but you get the idea.
What does investing in SEO look like?
This was explained pretty nicely by Jake Grimley in a comment on my previous post. He said:
They recommend investing money and/or time, I’m not sure they recommend commissioning your local SEO shark.
This ‘SEO is common sense’ meme is barely half true. Yes content is important, but SEO is a bit more than that. It has to be designed into the structure of your website. SEO = Design
What he’s saying (although you should read the very excellent comment below) is that for on-site SEO you should make sure that your website has been put together properly. It should be well structured with valid, cleanly written code, good metadata, descriptive links and so on. This should come as standard from a good web design agency (*cough*Made*cough*). It also helps to have lots of pages containing relevant keywords.
For off-site SEO you want to find ways to build up the number of links to your site. It helps if the sites linking to you are authoritative and the anchor text used includes good keywords.
Some rough analysis, building on the Culture24 research
Although the Culture24 report concluded that SEO is important, there was no analysis of how well the participating organisations are doing (which is fair enough, it was outside of the project’s initial scope). So I thought I’d run off a few numbers, see how they compare to each other and see what, if anything, that would tell us.
BIG CAVEAT: This is a very quick, very crude bit of analysis. It’s meant to serve as a conversation starter rather than something from which we can draw any firm conclusions.
Here are the figures, with some explanation of them below:
With thanks to m’colleague, Ian Ravenscroft, who lent a hand pulling the figures out. Those columns explained:
- Google Page Rank – out of 10. Higher is better.
- Alexa Traffic Rank – lower is better.
- Quality – a score out of 100 based on high-level factors search engines take into account when deciding whether a site is trustworthy or not (domain age/expiration, indexed pages and so on).
- SEOMoz gives us MozRank and Domain Authority – higher scores are better.
- Majestic SEO gives us figures for the number of Pages on a site and the number of Links pointing to it from other sites.
I should point out that Google has been down-playing Page Rank for a while and Alexa is more than a little flawed. Still, the indication of the websites’ status that they give is pretty much in line with the other measures.
Conclusions and recommendations
As I said before, it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions from a quick snapshot like this. A more serious piece of research would look at whether things are improving or worsening over time. Some keyword research wouldn’t go amiss to see what terms the sites are ranking for (compared with terms they’d like to rank for/areas of the site that are currently hidden), we’d want to tie that in with how useful that traffic is to the organisation and… well, I could go on.
Still, this much we know:
- These are all big sites
- They all have a lot of links pointing to them
- They’re regarded by the search engines as authoritative sources of information
On the surface, it looks like these organisations are doing pretty well – many website owners would commit atrocious acts for those kinds of results. That’s not to say they couldn’t do better so, to the extent that these arts and culture organisations should invest in SEO, they might (if they don’t do this already):
- make sure they’ve got their websites in order from a technical point of view. Kew’s James Morley spoke about this at the Let’s Get Real conference. The Culture24 report suggets an annual SEO health check;
- consider doing a content audit to see if those thousands (and millions) of pages are organised and presented as well as they could be;
- depending on the results of some keyword research, consider some specific SEO work around particular areas of the site that could do with being made more prominent – new exhibitions and event hire are favourites for this sort of thing.
All to be weighed up against the return that kind of investment will give, obviously.
So there we go. I wrote a post about SEO. Thanks for making it to the end.
Posted: 22 September 2011 | Author: Chris Unitt | 9 Comments »
Culture24 have published the findings of an Action Research Project, with the final report titled ‘Let’s Get Real: How to evaluate online success‘ (PDF download). It’s good, and well worth a read.
Having instigated the project, they coordinated efforts between 17 cultural organisations, with the aim being:
to help the sector to improve the way that online cultural activities are evaluated so that we can better understand online user behaviour and hence improve the quality and reach of all of the sector’s online services
If you read nothing else…
The report makes two top-line recommendations:
- Be clear ‘what’ you are trying to do online and ‘who’ it is for
- Focus your online investment
Expanding on the latter, they say:
if we wish to develop our audiences we need to change the focus of our investment in our online platforms; invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) first, then mobile versions of websites and then social media.
The key recommendations
The report makes ten key recommendations:
- Adopt Google Analytics for basic reporting to government along with central government use of an ISP level alternative (such as Hitwise) for balance. Widespread adoption will allow for in-depth sector analysis and benchmarking.
- Adopt this report’s guidelines on best practice for configuring Google Analytics software to ensure consistent reporting. This should cover basic health checks, user segments and goal definition.
- Revise the ‘whole’ suite of metrics you care about and also the tools you use to measure them. Google Analytics and Hitwise are not the solution; they must be used as part of a multi-tool solution that will require good problem definition before we start.
- Engage with and consider ways to enhance Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) through investment of money and/or time. This is still the main source of most of your traffic.
- Consider where, when and how you use social media to be most effective. Investment can buy you popularity but it can’t buy you engagement.
- Define your online audience targets specifically and map them to your overall business objectives and targets. Online access for everyone is simply not good enough.
- Don’t think about digital activities as something separate from the physical. Build links between your overall mission and business strategy and all your activities. Define your overall strategy before you deploy any specific tactics – digital or otherwise.
- Build links between your web team, your marketing dept, those who create your content and your executive. Work together to define shared goals that can be used for reporting.
- Get ready for mobile. Ensure your website is mobile friendly and you can respond to the growing trend of mobile access. Consider what your users want to on the move?
- Remember to look at the patterns, not just the numbers. Small can be beautiful.
All of which sound perfectly sensible to me. As I said, if you’re interested in this sort of thing then the report is well worth your time.
The Conference
The report was launched at a conference held at Bristol’s Watershed. In the morning, Tom Uglow and Matt Locke (in the pic above) spoke about the general context into which culture fits online. Culture24′s Jane Finnis then gave an overview of the findings of the report and various participants in the project generously shared examples of digital efforts they’d made that had fallen a little flat but had taught them some good lessons.
In the afternoon we had the choice between sitting in on the ‘crit room’ where websites had been submitted for review by Channel 4′s Adam Gee and two UX experts, or flitting between the ‘talk tables’ I went for the latter and spoke with people from Culture24, Building Digital Capacity for the Arts and the people responsible for the social media aspects of the report.
Other bits and pieces
I had a chat with one of the people behind The Ice Book, which is a lovely little thing. They’ve been brought in to work on a stage adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, so that’ll be interesting. I also went a bit fanboy when I spotted the man behind this talk. Only a little bit, mind.
Some links
