3 Ways Panda Rewards the Strategies in ARS
At my recent family reunion, my cousin Scott made the following claim:
Google nearly killed our business
Scott’s in the publishing business. His company publishes resources for diabetics and pre-diabetics. It makes its living selling ads from primarily pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Whether the company can sell ads and what it can charge for them is dependent on traffic. As you can imagine, where its content ranks in Google is no small matter. The difference between, say, ranking in the top three and ranking 9th for a keyword like blood sugar levels might make or break his company.
When he made the above claim, he was of course referring to Google’s Panda Update, which caused many of his most valuable pages to slide down the rankings. Why would that be? The company is in the content business. The main variable that determines whether the company makes money or not is content quality. Panda is supposed to reward companies that publish high quality content and send content farms and other low-quality sites down the rankings.
Well, like most Web publishing companies, his company has hired an SEO consultant or two over the years. These folks advised them to focus on volume when developing linking relationships. Many of the sites that linked to Scott’s pages got seriously dinged by Panda because they were content farms. Through Panda, Google stripped the link equity from those sites. Lacking their former link equity, Scott’s pages moved down the ranking.
Towards the end of the reunion, I gave Scott a copy of our book and told him to pass it around his office. He asked if any of the information was out of date since the Panda update. Without bragging, this was my response:
Our book was ahead of its time because it focused on creating quality, relevant content for the target audience and using social media to naturally attract links to it. These are the strategies and tactics that Panda rewards. It is one of a very few books on search that doesn’t promote the activities for which Panda penalizes companies.
He didn’t say anything to this, but by the look on his face, I knew he was skeptical. If my cousin is skeptical about a statement like this, chances are our readers might be as well. So I thought I’d write up three ways our book helps companies improve search effectiveness post Panda. If you’re interested, please read on.
Book Review: Content Rules
It’s been six weeks since I came down from my Confab cake high and I’m still trying to process all the new information–well, new for me anyway. One of my favorite talks was given by Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. The keynote excited me so much, I had to buy the book that the talk was promoting, Content Rules, which she co-wrote with C.C. Chapman. I was so impressed with Ann’s talk, I bought the book at the conference bookstore and asked her to sign it at the author table.
I must confess I haven’t read the whole book yet. Not that it isn’t a good read. It’s just not an easy read. Not for me anyway. You see, I have one of those brains that questions everything. So I typically take a long time to read stuff, especially if it contains a lot of information relevant to my areas of interest. The better the book, the longer I take to read it.
I spent the better part of five years reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I nearly destroyed my paperback copy with dog ears, underlines and notations before I was able to find a hard-back copy. During that time, I didn’t read anything else except commentaries of the book. And I read constantly, at least when I wasn’t eating, teaching, writing or sleeping. The content of that book so consumed me, I could barely think of anything else. I still consider it the greatest book on language ever written (thought certainly not the most clear).
So it’s a compliment of a book that I’m still reading it after six weeks. It means there’s enough content in the book to occupy my mind in the intervening time since Confab, and then some. Also, as an author, I don’t just read books related to Audience, Relevance and Search. I study them for conflict and convergence.
This is at best a first pass at a critique of Content Rules. It won’t be the last time I refer to it in this blog. Here I will only focus on a few of the insights that struck me as particularly relevant to our book. In brief, I love their emphasis on content marketing. But I think they don’t go far enough to use content marketing not just as a way to promote publishing efforts, but as a rich source of audience information. If you’re interested, please click to read more.
Confab Impressions Part II: Content as Conversations
As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently attended Confab and was blown away by the quality of the content. Tops on my list of all the great speakers was Ginny Redish, author of Letting Go of the Words–for my money the best text on web writing out there. The book and her Confab talk combine deep linguistic understanding with practical web wisdom to create a compelling model of effective web content.
The venerable Ginny Redish
Her main point is that web content is inherently conversational. It is only effective to the extent that it engages the audience in compelling conversations geared towards the tasks they need to accomplish. In this respect, the web resembles more of a telephone than a book or brochure. When we answer the phone, we engage in a conversation with whoever is on the other end of the line. They typically have a task to complete when they call, and we listen intently to what they need, attempting to give them the info they need in the shortest possible time. Unlike the phone, the web allows us to converse with multiple people at one time and to do it when it is convenient to all parties.
This struck a chord with me, partly because it rings true to my experience and partly because it resonates with one of the foundations of our book. We have often been criticized for insisting on putting a bunch of essentially theoretical stuff in the front of the book rather than getting down to nitty-gritty tactical stuff. I of all the authors insisted on this because I felt the practice of developing web content needed these foundations. Conversational content was such a radical departure from the kinds of things my stakeholders published, I thought it required firmer foundations than “this has worked for me in the past.” Yet it is heady stuff. I have often doubted after the fact that we needed to delve into the foundations in such depth.
I entered the talk with lingering doubts about how we open the book. But I was intensely pleased to witness such a venerable speaker make a case for a complementary point of view. Frankly, it is the kind of validation we need for more people to pick up our book and take it seriously. And it eased my doubts significantly. But it won’t do simply to tell you that our points of view are complementary. I need to show it. If you’re interested in that demonstration, please read on.
Agile Content Strategy: Scrum Favors Generalists
Last week I attended Scrum training in New York, led by Rob Purdie, our Agile methods coach on the Digital Strategy team. The session opened the eyes of everyone on the team, who have tried to be more agile, but have not seen the benefits of the methods for whatever reason. Primarily, the methods have been difficult to implement in our highly distributed environment, where specialists work on a lot of different projects at the same time. Agile methods were developed in part to solve these problems, but they only work if you embrace them together as one package, rather than taking bits and pieces and otherwise not changing the environment that prevents them from working.
One of the features of Scrum that is difficult for us to implement relates to specialization. We are indoctrinated to focus our talents on one primary field or specialty. When specialists work as a team, they contribute their unique work at the prescribed phase of a project and otherwise they sit on the sidelines and watch the progress. While they’re on the bench, they might as well work on other projects. So it is not uncommon for one person to be involved in a dozen or more projects with the hope that the timing will align and they can do their part when needed in all of them. Of course, it rarely works that way. Project plans overlap. So specialists typically vacillate between crazy overtime and burnout.
For example, I am often called upon to offer my unique work as an SEO specialist. Traditionally, I have been brought in to clean up web pages that search engines can’t find or display to the target audience because the code prevents search crawlers from finding and indexing the content. When I have worked on content teams, I have typically been hushed when I attempted to influence other parts of the content process, despite the fact that I have deep editorial knowledge and long experience as a web editor. “That’s not your job,” is the message I have often received. Indeed I have spent most of my relatively short career as an SEO specialist arguing that search work needs to be integrated into all web processes, not just the code. I even co-authored a book on the subject.
Agile methods discourage specialization. Ideally, a scrum team is made up of around seven generalists who can work on any aspect of a project at any time. They self organize around what needs to be done in the time frame it needs to be done. This is a radical concept, especially in corporate America. And it is not always implemented with generalists as much as specialists who can dabble in related fields. But I personally embrace the change because I see myself as a generalist, who learned his skill set primarily by identifying organizational needs and filling them whether I was totally qualified or not.
This is how I developed my SEO specialization. As editor in chief of ibm.com, I helped people develop more clear, concise and compelling content for the web, much of which never met the eyes of the audience because they couldn’t find it. I thought this was a huge waste of effort and opportunity, so I set about training the whole company to make their content more available through search. In short, I developed my expertise as I went.
It occurs to me that this is how most content strategists developed their skills. So I thought perhaps there is something about agile methods that give an inherent advantage to content strategists in our future agile world. If you’re interested in this point of view, please read on.
Confab Impressions Part I: The Search Haters
This week I attended Confab 2011 and, as I have been telling everybody, it was the best conference I have ever attended. That’s saying a lot because there was a period between 1997 and 2003 when I attended dozens of them as EIC of ComputerUser.com. Congratulations to Kristina Halvorson and the kind and cheerful staff of Brain Traffic for doing such an awesome job.
At the conference, I attended several great keynotes and other talks by such notables as the venerable Ginny Redish and the awe-inspiring Ann Handley. I have a lot of great things to say about their talks, but it will have to wait until the next two blog posts. First I have a rant about a couple of other talks I witnessed.
Two speakers at the conference exploited tired old search myths to dismiss search as a legitimate concern of content strategy. Steve Rosenbaum gave a talk about how the flood of data is overwhelming search algorithms, leaving human curators to do the work of machines in helping people find the content they need. Christine Perfetti claims that if users are forced to search for information, it is an indicator of UX failure. The arguments they use to defend these claims are flawed. In fact, as the flood of data overwhelms users, they turn increasingly to search for a short-cut to navigation. I’ll explain why after the break.
3 Questions: The Content Strategy Discipline
As I prepare to attend Confab May 9-11 in my home town of Minneapolis, Kristina Halvorson asked me to develop some questions to help the attendees think about how they see their discipline. This post explains the questions I came up with. But first, a bit of context to make sense of the questions.
I got some mixed feedback from my last post, the book review of Erin Kissane’s book The Elements of Content Strategy. Most of it was positive, but one emailer, who shall remain anonymous, said the post ended awkwardly, when I wrote the following.
[Our book] is perhaps the only book that covers the who, what, when, where and why of digital content strategy from one point of view. The point of view is media determinism as it applies to the central digital user behavior–search.
When I wrote that, I didn’t mean it to disparage Kissane’s book. I think her book is great–it now graces my shelf between Strunk and White and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make me Think. But the anonymous emailer said it sounded like I was trying to say our book is better than Kissane’s. And that wasn’t my intent at all. In retrospect, I can see how someone would read it that way. Erin, I apologize for not making myself clear.
This is not a competition. As I see it, our books complement one another. I have not quite figured out all the connections between the two books. Outwardly, they don’t appear that similar. The main obvious thing they have in common is they both describe the practice of content strategy. In the review, I expressed some disappointment that Kissane’s book focuses more on content strategy deliverables and the people who make them than on any single over-arching view of the discipline of content strategy.
Not that that was her mission. Far from it. My lament was more about the state of the content strategy discipline than about Kissane’s book. As her book makes clear, this is a discipline for generalists. People come to it from editorial, human factors, information science, rhetoric, technical communication, web analytics, SEO, design, and other disciplines. In this respect, content strategy is no different than past emerging disciplines. It is a mark of the discipline’s maturity that we now seek to unify these generalists under one vision.
I say “we” because I am only one voice in the growing legion of content strategists. My purpose is not to say my vision is the right one. But to ask some questions and to offer some answers by way of example. Hopefully, what I write after the break will help spark the legions to collectively develop a vision or visions.
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Book Review: The Elements of Content Strategy
I’m fond of little books. My favorite book related to my chosen profession is The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. In 85 8X5 pages, the authors manage to convey the essential aspects of writing clean, concise and clear copy in the English language. I’m not the only one who likes the book. According to Wikipedia, more than 10 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. And reams of little books have been published under the “The Elements of…” meme since MacMillan first published the revised version of Strunk and White in 1959. Erin Kissane’s The Elements of Content Strategy is one such book.
Though no book can live up to the standard set by Strunk and White, Kissane manages to live up to the meme, which I take to be the most concise statement one can write encapsulating a practice or discipline. In this case, the practice is content strategy. Kissane manages to encapsulate a new and highly fragmented discipline into 75 pages of clear prose. But she doesn’t just follow a well-worn formula. She manages to inject her lively wit and well-earned wisdom to add life to the narrative.
It is a narrative that needs such life. Let’s face it: Content strategy can be a challenging field full of hard work. There are no shortcuts. When describing the field, it is easy to lapse into procedural gorp. Case studies tend to focus on the crappy state of web content because there is just so much crap, content strategists can’t keep from stepping in it. Light-hearted prose that makes the field seem fun and exciting is noticeably absent from the literature on the subject. For most of the book, Kissane manages to describe the practice in a light-hearted way, even if she is unable to call such things as content audits fun in good conscience. That alone is worth the price to be paid in time and attention.
I highly recommend this book, especially since you can read it in one flight from New York to San Francisco. However, no self-respecting reviewer can review a book without having something critical to say. If you’re interested in my criticism of the book, please read on.
A Common Thread of Intelligent Content and SXSW: Analytics
I thought when I was invited to present the Search-First Content Strategy at Intelligent Content 2011 (#icc11) in Palm Springs, Calif. and later to serve on a panel called Not My Job: The Ultimate Content Strategy Smack Down (#notmyjob) at SXSW in Austin, Texas, I would have plenty of blog fodder with which to increase my blog volume. Little did I know that presenting at conferences makes blogging harder, not easier.
Blogging demands clarity of mind. Conferences do more to disturb clarity of mind than most any type of event. This is mostly a good thing. Conferences are like heavy spring rains: They muddy the waters, refreshing and revitalizing the river ecosystem. But it takes some time for the river to settle out and return to its former clarity. Just so, conferences muddy the mind and revitalize one’s thinking. It takes me at least a week for the rivers of my mind to return to their former clarity after a conference.
Because I had two conferences so close together, as ICC11 and SXSW were, I had to experience both and let them both settle into the river bed before I could get back to blogging. The insights that I gleaned from the two conferences are all together in my mind, as though it was not two, but one event with a single central theme: intelligent content strategy. By that I mean using the data we can gather in digital media to inform our content decisions across an enterprise. If this topic interests you, please read on.
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3 Ways Watson Manifests the Future of Search
In my last post, I made the claim that it won’t be long before people have a Watson in their pockets, a system users can access from mobile devices through the Internet that gives accurate answers to just about every human question. I said that this system represents some sort of future ideal state for search. But I didn’t elaborate on how it works or why it is so good at answering human questions. Perhaps if we can better understand how it works, we can understand what the likely future of search technology looks like. That’s what I want to do in this post.
Like most of my IBM colleagues, I made a point of watching the PBS program The Smartest Machine on Earth, about IBM’s quest to invent a computer that can beat the top Jeopardy! champions in the history of the show. As Watson competes on Jeopardy! next week, we are all eagerly awaiting the outcome, as I’m sure hundreds of thousands of IBMers did when Deep Blue took on World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov almost 14 years ago.
Win or lose, Watson has already made history. Jeopardy! producers would only allow a computer on the show if it played the game like a champion. I want to tell a part of that history here and along the way explain three facets of Watson that manifests the future of search. If you’re interested, please read on.
4 Ways to Avoid Chasing the Algorithm
Matt Cutts recently posted a short compelling video on the practice of chasing the algorithm:
This was in answer to a question related to his talk at Pubcon. The question was about specific planned algorithm changes. The interlocutor wanted to know how he could advise his clients on how to tune their pages for future iterations of Google.
Cutts’ advice is: Don’t bother chasing the algorithm by perpetually tuning pages to keep up with the changes. Rather, focus on what your users find valuable. Beyond a few core SEO principles, if you focus on creating relevant experiences for your target audience, you will develop pages optimized for what Google and Bing will be by the time the content is live. It’s like throwing a pass. You don’t throw it where the receiver is, but where he will be when the ball gets there. Google and Bing are perpetually trying to create better user experiences. If that is your aim, you can lead the algorithms and develop content that is optimized for search users.
This advice was a discrete goal of our book. We wanted to give the audience content strategy advice on how to write for search engines that went well beyond mere tactical coding. Writing a book about the algorithm as it is now is particularly pointless. Google changes its algorithm daily. Even if we knew the algorithm well (which nobody outside of Google really does), by the time we published that knowledge in print, the information would be obsolete.
Years down the road, Google might not even be the search leader. But search will be the preferred way to find information for a large and growing majority of users. Sooner than you might think, users will have a Watson in their pockets: A computer that has the best available answer for every question. As search engines approach the Watson ideal, and more users access the web through mobile devices, we think users will ever more prefer to search for information rather than browse or navigate.
To be clear, sometimes users don’t have a clear question in mind as they browse. So search will not be the only experience. But the users you want to attract are those who have a clear question in mind and want a clear answer in response. These are the users who search.
So we wrote a book that transcends the algorithm or even a particular search engine by looking at the use case on which search engines are built. Namely: Returning a list of content for a user query in descending order of relevance. The book answers the following question: How does the writing practice change when the primary way users access content is through search engine results? Read the book to get a detailed answer. Read the rest of this blog post for a quicker (though still long) four-part answer. Sorry, there’s no short answer to this multifaceted question.
