The Ocean Agency

Content is plebeian without research.

Mr. William Shakespeare–you may have heard of him–once wrote “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

What he meant by this was that much responsibility comes with the title of “king,” and sometimes that responsibility is too much. I mean, just look at King Hamlet: he’s a ghost now.

Search engine optimization is extremely important for your business as 95% of all site traffic from search engines comes from page one results (icrossing).

While the importance of being on page one for your business has not changed, social media has shaken up how you get there. As social networking has increased, search engines are forced to pay attention to tweets, (public) facebook updates, forum discussions, Youtube videos etc. The list goes on.

Via

In Today’s web, Social media matters to the search engines,  which makes optimizing your businesses’ social media presence a top priority. Recently, Brian Solis wrote a fascinating article about optimizing your social media presence in order to improve your search engine positioning.

25% of search results, for the world’s top 20 brands link to user generated content (Socialnomics July, 2009).  This number is bound to get higher as social network interaction increases.

Facebook has just surpassed Google as the number one traffic driver on the web.

From these statistics it would be easy to paint a portrait of a world where Facebook could eat the entire web, and SERP is completely determined by social content. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves — Posting items about your business to Facebook and Twitter everyday is not enough to rank well on search engines, or communicate your message to your target audience.

Good content that encourages interaction and sharing is now more important that ever to your search engine ranking position.  Spending time crafting resourceful content that is engaging and shareable, combined with patience, hard work, and clean coding will get you to the top of the search engines.

Curating content, both your own, and content that offers value to your target audience syndicated expertly on social media channels is a necessary addition to any SEO campaign.

How is your business or SEO company integrating social media  to improve your search enginge rankings?

As I wrote in Part I of this series, SEO companies can learn a lot from Ernest Hemingway. But they can also learn a lot from a more unlikely source, one of my other favorite authors and the one who inspired me to pursue writing for a living: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr..

The iconic writer, known for a unique and humorous style that is near impossible to duplicate, was a dark optimist who had a clear love for writing. And while his tips on writing are important, his insights on readers are more important. And, though a lot of this is attributed to fiction, the lessons transcend type and make for great arguments in search engine optimization.

We “computer people,” as Vonnegut would call us, have been handed the most impressive and awe-inspiring medium since the printing press. It is important to remember that when writing content of any sort. As Vonnegut says, “what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.”

We are obligated, as writers, to both know and care that we are “dancing animals,” especially when choosing topics to write about. As a copywriter, it can be easy to lose focus on the audience of a piece–easy to forget we are writing for other people. Topics should cover things that are important, interesting and, ultimately, usable.

Users are looking on the Web for usable information. Remember, for an Internet reader, content is usually a means, not an end.

Vonngeut offers two great bits of advice on how to know you are targeting usable content and how to write it.

His seven steps for creative writing couldn’t apply more to SEO companies if he had written it to do so:

1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers.

To put it more simply, in terms that would be used today, don’t fake it. Readers are just like writers. If you don’t care about a subject, why on earth would your reader? If you don’t keep the reader in mind or keep a piece short and readable, what motivation would anyone have to read it? In Part I, I mentioned that the purpose of writing is to communicate. But it is important to remember the basic rule of communication is empathy. If a reader doesn’t care about what you’ve written, why have you written it?

But even when following these seven rules, there is still one thing to remember: nothing is certain. Writing is like picking ponies at the horse track: You can never be sure who will win or what will work. If you’re smart, you can win consistently, but, to win big, you have to take a chance.

As Vonnegut puts it:

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

The author series takes the wise words of the best writers of the past century and looks at them through the eyes of an SEO copywriter. If we are to learn, it should be from the best. And thus we shall.

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

At our Chicago SEO company, we content developers spend hours struggling over the perfect words for the homepage of websites we create. Organization and layout are crucial, and we consider every possible connotation of each selected word. To put an exclamation point or not can be a serious point (pun intended) of contention! And all this careful attention pays off– we nail down the message in just a few sentences right there on the first page that the average visitor sees.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

We obviously talk a lot about SEO content at The Ocean Agency – making sure we’ve got keyword-inclusive <h2> tags, bolding the right keywords, linking the right way. It’s all part of the effort to increase page rank and drive site traffic. Lately, I’ve seen a shift in SEO strategy from doing the right technical things to creating plain good content, and that’s really what it should be. Junta42 wrote a cool blog called 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010 with folks like Seth Godin and Jason Falls chiming in. The biggest takeaway that I saw: quality content trumps frequent crappy content. Enter editorial calendars.

SEO Editorial Calendars = Quality Content

Beer is inherently social, and people love to talk, drink,  and share their beer. It is most definitely a powerful conversation starter. Essentially, beer is the perfect object for social media

.

Case in point: Facebook has a gift program, that allows you to place a gift on other people’s profiles. They charge a nominal fee for the gift, and brands can also pay for gift placement.  When they were trying to get their gift program off the ground, one of the free gifts they offered was a beer mug filled with delicious brew. It was a huge hit. Facebook leveraged free effectively, and today Facebook gifts are everywhere, partly thanks to that little beer stein.

Beyond the obvious qualities that allow beer to connect people, companies that make beer, especially those who make hard to find micro and specialty brews, portray themselves as especially social — just regular folks who enjoy drinking with friends and savoring the flavor of life. Even larger brands, such as Sam Adams, have adopted this approach, featuring “brew-masters” in commercials who describe their passion for beer.

These tactics allow beer companies to appear open, likeable, and as beverage experts. At face value, many of these micro-breweries market themselves so effectively that you would swear that they would give their beer away for free if they could.

So the goal of most breweries is to appear open, social, and friendly. Social media allows brands to connect with their fans, appear transparent, and increase their likeability. So, I’ll come right out and say it. Beer companies, especially small micro-breweries with a following of passionate fans, need to use social media.

By using social media specialty and micro breweries can further their already effective branding, and be as social as possible. Beyond branding, Social media also gives you amazing niche marketing. Micro and specialty breweries definitely cater to a growing niche market, that probably is engrossed in social media already.

So, to all you micro and specialty breweries out there, leverage this passion and further your branding by using social media. Whether it is creating a facebook fanpage where you advertise events and talk about new brews, or using twitter to interact with your fans, or a great company blog that illusrates your personality, social media is key for growing your business. So get started today.

For some great examples of micro and specialty breweries that effectively use social media, check these out:

Dogfish Head Brewery. Not only do they have great beer, but they have an impressive Twitter presence as well, check it out.

New Holland Brewery. They have great blogs that really illustrate their personality. Makes me want to go hang out in Michigan, which says something about the power of their social media presence.

New Belgium Brewery. They have a great site, a facebook fan page, and a strong Twitter following. Also, their Skinny Dip is one of my favorite summer beers. Yum.

We at The Ocean Agency were very excited to hear about Chrome OS yesterday. Now that I’ve had a chance to read quite a few articles about Chrome OS, I’m ready to offer some insight:

1) Chrome OS is a direct attack on Microsoft for releasing Bing.

Google is definitely getting a little revenge. Chrome OS screams: “You step on our search turf, we’ll step on your operating system turf”. Not to liken the Google and Microsoft feud to gang violence, but it seems pretty clear that these two camps don’t get along. While this is fun to write about, it is also a little worrisome. I can’t think of too many business innovations that stem from hatred or revenge. Hopefully Chrome OS will be legitimate innovation, not just a cheap plot to take some of Microsofts’ OS market share.

2) Is a Web Based OS the Future of Computing?

While this is an extremely enticing idea, I’m not sold on it just yet. While Google applications have come a long way since they were first introduced, it seems a little premature to deem desktop applications irrelevant. Do you think Google OS will be able to run Photoshop or Final Cut Pro?

While desktop applications are slowly becoming overshadowed as web applications become more powerful (think about services like mint.com to replace Quicken or  playlist services like Blip.fm, Last.fm, or Pandora to replace Itunes), desktop applications are by no means irrelevant.

While web applications offer certain advantages, such as infinite backup and cloud computing, the sheer power of desktop applications has not been matched. In other words, Chrome OS cannot succeed unless it is powerful enough to run the most powerful of desktop applications.

3) What does Chrome OS mean for the future of online interactive marketing?

The development of Chrome OS reflects that people will want their desktop applications integrated with web services and applications. As people begin to store more and more data online, online and interactive marketing will become even more important. As marketers, we will have more data than ever before, and ads will become even more well targeted.

The fact that the Google OS is even a possibility reflects just how far the internet has come and that it will be even further integrated in to the fabric of our daily lives. This is great news for online marketers, and bad news for techno-fobes. At Ocean, we’re excited. Are you?

Some great further reading:

Mashable

Buzz Machine

Here in Chicago, everyone loves to eat. The restaurant and bar scene in Chicago is both vibrant and cutthroat. While there are plenty of diners and drinkers, there are also plenty of restaurants.

As a restaurant in a saturated market, how do you stand out?

Restaurant that needs some online marketing

Online marketing, especially a strong social media presence, can build a brand awareness for your restaurant and bring in waves of new customers with a small investment. Here are some tips on how local restaurants can leverage the power of social media and online marketing to shine in a cluttered market.

1) Use Twitter and Facebook:

While this seems obvious, there is more to these outlets than simply advertising your weekly specials. Facebook is ideal for creating a community around your restaurant or bar, with testimonials and pictures to prove that your place truly is the most fun. Moreover, a facebook fan page that is updated regularly implies that you both have outstanding customer service and a customer base that values your product. Facebook fan pages are a great way to sell an experience, to illustrate the ambiance and clientele of your bar or restaurant in a powerful way.

Twitter is a great way to advertise specials and hold interactive contests. For example, let’s say your trying to start up a happy hour business at your mostly nighttime bar.

What if you design a contest through twitter where anyone who includes a hashtag with your restaurant in it gets a free pitcher of beer from 3-6 PM? This a simple way to get your potential customers both curious and involved.

2) Food and Drink Bloggers are Powerful

Reaching out to food and drink bloggers (maybe even offering a free dinner in exchange for a review), is a great way to promote your restaurant online. Identify bloggers who have lots of online clout, meaning those who receive generous amounts of traffic, and those who are active across all social media platforms.

There is nothing better than having a potential new customer hear that your bar or restaurant is great from someone that they trust.

3) More People than ever are finding restaurants and bars online, As a restaurant or bar owner you need to manage your web presence.

As sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Metromix become more and more popular, as a restaurant or bar owner, you need to pay attention to what is being said about you.

While you cannot control what is being said on the hundreds of sites where customers can express their love or hatred of your establishment, you can interact with them, and respond to them in a manner that shows you care about your customers.

If there are customers that are especially angry, maybe you can offer them a free drink or appetizer next time they come in. Now instead of talking about a bad meal or terrible service, they’ll talk about your wonderful social media presence and generosity. Constant monitoring and interacting on social media channels is the only way to keep manage your bar or restaurants image online.

4) Search Engine Optimization is increasingly important.

Imagine this. After work a group of co-workers want to meet up at a bar. Because they live 20 minutes from where they work, they aren’t especially familiar with the bars or restaurants in the area. So, one of them types “Chicago Loop Happy Hour Bar” into google, then looks at the Googled sponsored results, looks at the Yelp, Citysearch, Metromix, and Chicago Tribune reviews, and then decides on a place based on a combination of user reviews, posted daily specials, and placement within the google search universe.

In that scenario, how would a customer find your bar or restaurant? Think about the previous scenario whenever you are managing your online presence. How are the title tags for your website? What about your html code, is it search engine friendly? Do you have a blog and strong backlinks?

While online marketing and social media expertise are important for all bars and restaurants, it is especially important for small and local restaurants, as they do not have the brand recognition that larger chain restaurants and bars do.

The good news is that small local restaurants can build effective brand recognition and find customers harnessing the power of online marketing. Build an interactive community around your restaurants, monitor your online presence, and make sure you rank well on major search engines. Then watch the customers stream into your doors.

Happy Friday!

To get your weekend started here are some links that have our office buzzing this week.

1) Mashable highlights the importance of appearing generous in one’s online strategy. This does not necessarily mean giving things away, but rather having an open brand that rewards interaction. This generosity needs to be expressed by celebrating your customers and sharing more about yourself. 

This goes for web design as well, having a clean and user friendly interface definitely makes brands appear more generous and inviting. Rounded logos and bright color schemes definitely portray generosity as well. A great example designed by Ocean: Earth Mate Lighting. 

2) Another from Mashable, CrowdEye is looking to challenge Twitter in real time search. For us SEO geeks, this means paying more attention to real time information as more web traffic finds websites from real time conversation, rather than more traditional web channels. 

3) From the Econsultancy blog, Bing’s traffic has been rising steadily since its inception two weeks ago. Microsoft has placed a lot of capital into a television marketing campaign that definitely seems to be generating buzz. With the rise of both real time search and Bing, Google’s exclusive hold on the search market may be eroding slowly. Knowing Google however, innovation to squash its competitors should be on the way. 

4) Another post from the Econsultancy blog, looks at the redesign of a furniture website and how it has translated in to an extreme bump in sales. Great example of how good web design can improve your business exponentially. 

Alright enjoy your weekend, and feel free to share your thoughts on the linked articles!