Why our competitors rank better than us for our own content? Video ranking too [FAQ]
Hey Aji,
We’ve noticed that when searching for some of our most popular widget like Indian Truck or Maxx Machine, other sites rank higher than us in the search results.
Many of the sites belong to the ABC Group, the leading online widgeting group in the world, whose claim to fame is SEO.
Their sites include www.awidget.com, www.widgetwidget.com and www.a10.com, among others.
Could you tell us what the sites ranked above us for our own widget are doing in terms of SEO? We’d mainly like to imitate what they are doing, since these are the activities most relevant to our industry.
Regards,
Another one in the same line
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:59 PM,
Aji,
This is important.
Search for ‘Indian trucks online widget’ and see what happens on google.
Why are there so many sites before us (the original creator of the content)?
Do they have text, blogs, or what??
I will readily do what they do coz there success with seo is clearly demonstrated…
This is what we need to crack!!!
Also most intriguing is how widgetwidget.com is getting ‘video links’ tags for our flash widget?
I mean after seeing that thumbnail, anyone will go there!!
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
My answer to these queries
Logic is very simple.
Google can’t understand who owns the widget …
example kbhwidget.com/swf/indian_truck.swf is where the widget is hosted, what is inside it is hardly visible to Google.
Google though claims that they can read flash http://goo.gl/yrH9
Google can index following files
http://goo.gl/apI5You can get the video indexed using video xml http://goo.gl/HYdn
We can also rank a video in Google, examplehttp://goo.gl/Rk5P ..
We generally use Youtube to Rank because it is easier, we can do this with site hosted videos as well.
How Google Ranks:
- It checks the title
- It checks the content of page
- It checks the other pages that are linking to this page. (I have checked other webpages, most of it has good internal linking structure)
- It checks the external pages that are linking to this page.
- It also checks the power of the overall site. (We are lacking here) The company’s marketing can do a lot of contribution at this level. We need to get links whenever it is possible, when we are giving interview, going for lectures and for all possible places. Such links matter a lot.
Let us improve the ranking for “american trucks online widget” and then give our logic behind it.
Can you pass us another 4 widget related keywords where you feel we need to rank (just for a test basis).
Best Regards,
Aji Issac
Social Media Trends at Fortune 100 Companies
A study on 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500 list by Burson-Marsteller found that 79% of them use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.
- Twitter – Is the most popular platform with 65% of Fortune 100 Have Active Twitter Accounts, including similar percentages in the U.S. (72%) and Europe (71%).
- Facebook Fan Pages – Over Half of FortuneGlobal 100 Companies Have Facebook Fan Pages, U.S. companies are the most prominent on Facebook, with over two-thirds (69%) having fan pages.
- YouTube channels - 59% percent of U.S. companies in the FortuneGlobal 100 have YouTube channels compared with 52% in Europe, 35% in Asia-Pacific and 33% in Latin America. Entertainment/electronics and auto companies are most likely to have YouTube channels.
- Blogs – Are More Popular In Asia-Pacific, One-third of the FortuneGlobal 100 companies have active blogs. Corporate blogs are even more popular in Asia-Pacific, partly because Asian corporations are still more comfortable with online communications where they can closely manage the conversation.
The State of The Internet
The latest stats on internet by JESS3
1.73 Billion – Internet users worldwide (Sept 2009).
90 Trillions – The number of emails sent on the internet in 2009.
247 Billion – Average number of emails per day.
200 Billion – Average number of Spam emails per day.
1.4 Billion – The number of email users worldwide.
81% – The percentage of emails that were Spam.
234 Million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
126 Million – The number of blogs on the internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
84% - Percent of Social Network sites with more women than men.
2.73 Million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (Nov 2009).
4.25 Million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
260 Billion – Facebook serves page views per month, That’s more than 6 million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year.
30,000 - Severs as many as Facebook needs and they are still growing.
350 Million Now 400 Million - People on Facebook.
2.5 Billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
4 Billion - Photos hosted by Flickr (Oct 2009).
30 Billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
1 Billion - The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
12.2 Billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (Nov 2009).
924 Million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (Nov 2009).
182 - The Number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
148,000 – New Zombie computers* created per day (*used in botnets for sending spam, tec.)
2.6 Million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
The other side of Online presence – Reputation management
We have heard a lot of positive stories about Web and we have personally enjoyed the benefits and extra dollars. Also we have enjoyed the power it offers to a customer to raise their voice. Let us take to the other side of online presence, Negative (Fake/Real) reviews/stories. I will also like to tell you a real story.
My encounter with Casino Owner from Panama (Bad people with Good stories)
I had this opportunity to meet a Casino Owner from Panama who wanted to shell a heavy money to promote a fully spammy-crappy-scammy stuff. I was very interested to understand their network. I gave my 2 full days to him understanding the network. They survived on fake reviews. I searched for his network and their name, the whole web is full of great stories about them. Most of which is paid press releases, article submission, blog reviews. No negative stories at all, all positive unless I searched for “Scam” + “Their network name” AND WOW! A hell lot of negative stories. Somehow these fellows hid all the negative stories by promoting positive stories for their brand. It was very effective for a non-technical user.
Good people with bad stories
I guess this is not rare at all. You can get a hate community for almost all famous objects, from celebs to corporates, companies to ideas. Example: George bush and miserable failure. Even Walmarting across America is great to watch.
Recent survey says opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising
Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries.
How do one handle online reputation management?
I have read many books, blog posts, tried various reputation management tools but nothing convinced me enough but atleast they are better than nothing at all. Most of the tools will fetch results from web where your brand is mentioned with a combination of words like “sucks”, “scam”, “kudos”, “didn’t like” etc to highlight possible negative ones.
You can monitor
- Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
- Yahoo Alerts – alerts.yahoo.com
- RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
- Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com
Don’t run from web but fight against it tactfully
(There can be serious cases where a competitor might run after your brand with a knife. Do you have a choice? No, Not at all. Only option you have is to clean the house, find the culprit and scare them using IP tracking. Even if you remove your name from various places they will add it across the web). Follow this 10 points to rule the web:
- Have a website and link all your public profiles from the website. Anyone can create a profile with my name, I better make it by letting the world about my official presence. Make sure that the website ranks #1 for your brand name.
- Customer do understand: Provide them the platform to discuss and interact with the company. A blog can act us the best option, followed by monitored blog, contact us forms, live chats etc. Make sure that these are connected to your top bosses for such queries. If you don’t provide the platform they will find one, which may not be under your control. As a customer, I am interested in solving my problem rather than creating problem for companies but if they refuse to listen to me then I am left with no option.
- Interact regularly: When we were handling communities, we kept informing the community members about possible negative reviews. We had 50,000 community members watching for our brand reputation and fighting to correct it. You need more fighters in your team. Address problems on your blog with your explanations. Address proactively.
- Monitor Google alerts works well. There are other options like trackur, brandeye etc.
- Resolve: Don’t panic, there is no need. It can be handled and such stories can be buried inside really soon. If the post is done on a third party site, contact the site owner, request them to remove it. In case if they are not ready to remove it, ask them to add your feedback just below the comment. This works. Don’t blast the negative review, answer the concerns and if possible interact with the person in concern. We had instances where the person with negative mouth became the biggest fan of the company. It happened as the CEO of the company addressed the problem personally.
- Get hold of top 20 spots on search engines and the monitor the top 20 traffic sources. For a traveling site tripadvisor, kayak, lonelyplanet are as important (if not more) as Google or Yahoo. So one need to monitor these top sites very closely using notifications. Get the best reviews ranked in Google for the brand name. Even get few article published with words scams, sucks explaining how people needs to be aware of fake negative feedbacks.
- Time is the key: The faster you address the problem, the better it is. Monitor it hourly and act as soon as you get a negative flag.
- Syndicated results: Even after removing the posts from the main source, it might reflect on many other sites (through syndication), get it removed personally. Use the phrases used in the original thread to find syndicated results.
- Learn from your mistakes: A negative feedback can also be motivation to improve our processes. Do take care of customers properly and accept failure when it happens. I heard that some of the top hotels even bring the unsatisfied customers back to their hotels for free. Law firms returning back the money to save their online reputation. SEO companies offering few months of free services to compensate.
- Web is powerful: It can spread like fire, so keep a dedicated team for it. Build reputation, take care of negative ones, document the trends and keep improving.
connection between branding and bloggers
“wat do u feel about the connection between branding and bloggers? I am preparing a write up…so need your take on this topic…..” (Answering it as a blogger and a brand manager handling over 10 brands)
Remember my presentation about blogs http://www.seoforclients.com/blog/misc/kolkata-bloggers-meet-webreps.html
“The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world”
World is changing, customer is very powerful now with a big mouth
We bought 2 lenevo computers 3000 G430 and both of it is flickering. I haven’t spread it across to many but just few fellow members at CCD and they are facing the same problem. Now I will be making others aware about this problem with Lenovo computers through this blog post. Nobody (people whom I talked with) is recommending Lenovo to me, I am stopping people from buying lenovo. After this post there will be over 2000 people who will be aware of it (who follow this blog) and if each are influencing 100 on an average, it becomes 2000 * 100 = 2,00,000 and it will just grow. Now you can understand how powerful one customer can be. If Lenovo takes care of this problem and explains it on their website and ask other bloggers to explain the problem then the problem can be corrected the same way it was created across the web. I get over 100 visitors for SBI Mutual fund and I am expressing my opinion about their online mistakes. Sadly, they have no time to answer a blogger (which can be dangerous in long run).
Now this is one type of blogging. Now people are doing the same message spreading across Facebook, Facebook needs to be watched more carefully than blogs as the communication is much simpler there.
Why Bloggers are considered a special group from branding perspective
As mentioned in Tipping point, “The Law of the Few”, or, as Gladwell states, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. According to Gladwell, economists call this the “80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the ‘work’ will be done by 20 percent of the participants.” Bloggers certainly belong to the 20% when it comes to spreading the word about new ventures, brands.
- Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” They are “a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack [... for] making friends and acquaintances”. He characterizes these individuals as having social networks of over one hundred people. Aren’t we all connects now, check our Facebooks.
- Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.
- Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them.
According to me bloggers are the species who are connectors, mavens and salesmen at the same time, so they contribute significantly to brand and branding.