An interesting post that hints Google and others will start to penalise sites that have been over-engineered for SEO – and those with ‘too many’ adverts above the fold. I’m guessing the Google algorithms will look at keyword frequency, but it’ll be a delicate task stripping out strong content-sites like a magazine or newspaper from an well-constructed and SEOed adsense-only site.
Make an HTML5 app
Wondering how to develop an app for an iPhone/iPad ? These support HTML5 as a default, this is a useful guide to help your tinkering you can create what looks like an app (but is actually a cached HTML5 page).
Pre-selling
Commercial publishing remains an industry – despite the move to online – with relatively high content development costs. Agreed, the individual blogger can push out expert content for free, but for the larger publishers there are the costs of contributors, editors, designers and the production teams.
So with this in mind, I wonder if there’s anything to learn from the pre-selling model used by the fabulous Threadless (where every turn of the t-shirt process has been nicely wrapped up with the potential consumers), and is working well for Kickstarter (where ideas can be showcased and pre-sold before the manufacturing starts).
Of course, you could argue that printed book publishing was the pre-cursor to all this – reps would go out with a sales sheet and pre-sell to bookshops. The publisher would tally-up these pre-orders, the determine the print-run.
Web designers at play
Love this – http://producten.hema.nl/
Wait a couple of seconds, then the action starts. Nicely irreverant fun by this company”s web-dev team! (Even the logo and menu get trashed)
(ps. thanks for the link, Gordon)
Elastic pricing models
Publishers are starting to look at elastic pricing models – where the final price of the book (or magazine) driven by the community of readers and consumers.
Take a look at Logos, one of the few commercial publishers trialling this approach. The deal is simple: be completely transparent on production costs, show how this reflects on the final theoretical price to the consumer, then ask said consumers to give their feedback.
Perhaps there’s something here for publishers of perishable products (such as events, and so on)?
Taxonomies on WordPress
Drupal still rules the CMSes with its powerful taxonomy features, but if you’re using WordPress you can extend the default tags to support basic taxonomy functions. It”s nicely described here
Make an HTML5 app
I’ve been playing around with ways of developing an app for an iPhone/iPad… These devices support HTML5 as a default, and this is a useful guide to help create what looks like an app (but is actually a cached HTML5 page).
Customising landing pages for visitors from search engines
Ok, a clunky title, but I’ve been working on ways to present information to a visitor before they start to navigate (ie the ultimate is that your site provides the answer to the question).
Given that most visitors will find your site via a search engine, the simplest way is to query the search engine for the search string used. It’s incredible how few sites use this powerful facility. Some sites query the IP address and then navigate the visitor to a country-specific site but customising the information you present back to the visitor based on their search query is incredibly powerful.
I’m working on this to present a custom view, custom content and custom menus based on the search string used.
Here”s a nice piece of php code that can help http://www.willmaster.com/library/statistics/getting-search-terms.php
Mapping site relationships via keywords
A good way of boosting your pagerank and getting useful traffic is to link to other sites covering the same topic areas as your own. (Google pagerank emphasises the importance of links with similar subject material as your own site.)
To find these sites, you could search for ”link: yoursite.com” in google (or yahoo, which I find is better at these relational links) but then you need to go through the rather tedious job of checking each site for relevance.
I’ve been using the wonderful www.TouchGraph.com which is brilliant! Completely free, just enter the keywords/phrase about your site and it maps all sites and how they link together. Suddenly, you can see your competitors, where they link and very quickly discover who to target for link-exchanges.
In short, it exposes relationships you probably didn”t realise existed between your site and others.
B2B publisher ratios
B2B (business-to-business) publishers have been analysed recently in one of the trade magazines and the suggestion is that specialist directories should form between 1-3% of total revenue for any B2B company.
There’s little additional detail – which is a shame. Directoreis are great for providing a channel to market, but print products are a declining model; online is better but the model is changing from straight advertising/enhanced-entry listings to a lead-generation. For example, Yell.com currently charge the company a fee based on its advertising; Kellysearch.com charges based on lead generation bringing new business for the firm.
One site that’s transforming how the model works is www.yext.com which recently presented at the www.Techcrunch50.com forum. It works on a cost-per-action model overlaying a traditional local directory.
In the UK, the DPA (data publishers’ association) www.dpa.org.uk represents publishers in this sector