“Thin Slicing”, a Powerful SEO Tactic

In my Search Engine Land column last week, I describe a powerful SEO tactic that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing”. The term originally comes from Malcolm Gladwell (as used in his best seller Blink) and has no origins in the online world.

Gladwell uses the term in the context of “rapid cognition”; where one makes snap judgments in their field of expertise. Surprisingly, those snap judgments are often times more accurate than considered opinion, i.e. assessments that have been labored over. The important caveat: it only holds true for experts, not for amateurs.

We’ve co-opted the term and applied it to SEO. In that context, thin slicing is a tactic referring to mass optimization across a large number of pages, done quickly, and confined to just one or more high value elements (such as title tags). It relies on the gut-level instinct of the search engine marketer. Spare the in-depth keyword research and analysis and just take a guess, then move on. When you have a daunting number of pages to get through, deciding on synonyms, verb tenses and word order should rely on your intuition. Trying to optimize every element on every page perfectly is not scalable and will only sap your energy. “Thin slicing” could be done on title tags, keyword URLs, H1 headings, or meta descriptions. You’d monitor for impact, and then refine based on those results.

There are two approaches to thin slicing, and which one you use depends very much on your web site’s infrastructure and what it supports.

• One is through your a forms-based web interface in your admin. We refer to this as “mass edit” capability. WordPress supports mass editing of title tags and URLs (“post slugs”, more accurately) – IF you have our free SEO Title Tag plugin installed. Through its mass edit screen, you can optimize all title tags across your blog – all your posts, category pages, tag pages etc., without having to go to each post’s Edit screen individually.

  One feature we found invaluable when using web forms for thin slicing was to make the number of rows displayed per page user-configurable. Some users will want to display hundreds of records per screen, others will want much fewer, as too big of a web page will cause their web browser to crash or time out.

• The other approach is “bulk uploading”, where you import an updated list of title tags (or H1s or whatever) into your website’s underlying database. You start with a database export in CSV (comma separated values) format of your current title tags — along with the corresponding item ID numbers for each record, of course. Load the CSV file into Microsoft Excel and do your title tag optimization in the spreadsheet. Then upload the optimized title tags back into the database.

  Note that if your database does not have a field for the title tag, you’ll have to create it and re-code your site to override the programmatic title with the contents of this new field when it is populated with data.

  Rather than having to maneuver through phpMyAdmin or rely on your database administrator, have a CSV file upload function built into the admin interface of your content management system (CMS).

When we added the “bulk upload” capability to our GravityStream proxy admin, our optimizers and those at our clients and partner resellers experienced a nice boost in productivity. So we can attest to the fact that “thin slicing” works.

Whether you prefer working in Excel or within a “mass edit” view in your CMS’ admin interface, “thin slicing” is a great tactic to add to your SEO toolchest.

Ferrit, RIP

New Zealand comparison shopping engine Ferrit is no more. They blew through an incredible amount of money, had their day in the sun, and now they are gone.

I’m sad about that. Not because they were a past client of Netconcepts (back when they had money). But because they were a comparison shopping engine that had a shot at making it – of successfully crossing over into the mainstream. Indeed, much of New Zealand knew of Ferrit, due in large part to the series of funny TV commercials they became known for. Here’s one of my favorites, below.

“A book on India”! Haha, umm, not exactly! Oh, and the donkey came from a “completely different website”. Classic!

Brand recognition of Ferrit was high among consumers. But yet they weren’t moving product.

Is there a lesson to be learned for the global comparison shopping engines? Certainly nothing to be learned by Google for Google Product Search. But for everyone else (Shopzilla, Become, TheFind, etc.), sure. I think the lesson is in how to “cross the chasm” into the mainstream and live to tell the tale.

Roomba Rider

Ending the week with such a deadly serious post (after all I was talking about your mortality), I thought I’d better lighten the mood a bit. Enjoy…

Roomba robot vacuum? Check.
Cat? Check.
Roomba-riding cat? Doh! I want one of them! (watch the vid)

Maybe I can teach Hazel to ride my Roomba. I’ll have to get a new battery for it first. In fact, I’d probably need a pile of replacement batteries. Roomba would go through batteries pretty quick with Hazel atop it!

Reading this book could save your life

The China Study has to be the most important book I’ve ever read. (Yes, even more than Getting Things Done, and many of you long-time readers know I’m a HUGE fan of that book!)

I appreciate good science, especially good biochemistry (after all, I do have a Masters in Biochemistry), and The China Study has it in spades. The book explains in very accessible terms the impact of what we eat on our health and longevity. It’s not opinion, it’s pure unadulterated science. The book is thoroughly referenced and backed up by sound, peer-reviewed research. In fact it chronicles the largest nutritional scientific research study ever conducted.

If you want to live well and not die prematurely, you MUST read this book.

I can’t believe the crap I’ve been shoving into my body (and I’m even a vegetarian!) — blissfully ignorant of the true and far-reaching impact. Heck, I might as well have been smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day!

Reading this book, along with watching the documentary King Corn (which I ordered from Netflix and watched a few weeks ago with two of my 3 kids – the eldest refused to watch it, grrr), really woke me up. As much as I love cheese, crackers, “juice” (which is actually just sugar water, or worse, HFCS-filled water — as in high fructose corn syrup) and other fast and filling highly-processed food, no more of it! I’m going to undergo a nutritional overhaul, and hopefully I’ll get an extra 20 to 40 years out of the effort!

BTW, did you know that just one soda a day DOUBLES your risk of Type II Diabetes (compared to just one soda a month)? Egads! Believe me, you don’t want diabetes (my mother has it and it is debilitating). Makes me think twice about the fringe “benefit” of providing all our Netconcepts staff that frig full of free drinks — most of it sodas.

Change your life. Read this book. </end preaching>

SEO workarounds for Country Selectors as the Home Page

On my first visit to EMC.com last week, I thought to myself “Uh oh, that’s not going to be good for their SEO”. It was a country selector. The only content on the page was a long list of countries. No keyword-rich copy. No keyword-rich links.

But then I took a deeper look. I did a Google search for “cache:www.emc.com” and was pleased to see the EMC US site’s home page, not the Country Selector page! EMC had done their homework on SEO and were detecting the bots and waving them on. Googlebot doesn’t have to select a country. Good for you, EMC!

Contrast that approach to Lenovo’s global country selector. A Google search for “cache:www.lenovo.com” reveals, um, nothing. Yikes, no home page indexed! Nothing for “cache:lenovo.com” either. Then I visited the site masquerading as Googlebot, using lwp-request (one of my trusty power user command-line tools):

lwp-request -H "User-Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" -S lenovo.com

I saw the reason for Lenovo.com not having a home page in Google: bots were being directed to the Country Selector page using the wrong kind of redirect — a 302 instead of a 301. Not only were bots getting forced through a cookies-based country selector (mistake #1) made worse by the issue of the 302 (mistake #2), but also the URLs are not being canonicalized (i.e. there was no www present in the URL “http://lenovo.com/planetwide/select/selector.htm”. Indeed, none of the site is canonicalized. “http://lenovo.com/us/en/index.html” should 301 to “http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/index.html”. Or vice versa if you prefer your site’s URLs sans www.

What would I do differently if I were the sysadmin at Lenovo? I’d detect for Googlebot and send Googlebot directly to the U.S. site via a 301 redirect. Or alternatively, I’d make the home page URL (“http://www.lenovo.com/”) respond with the country selector for humans and the US home page for bots without doing a redirect at all. That would mean the US home page would live at “/” (rather than “/us/en/index.html”) for everyone except for humans who have no cookie set with their country preference, and of course, crawlers. Those visitors to / with the cookie set to another country would get redirected to the previously chosen country, which would not live on lenovo.com but on the corresponding country code TLD (such as lenovo.co.uk, lenovo.fr, lenovo.com.au). And I’d 301 non-www URLs to their www counterparts (more on this here).

2 Days of SEO Training from Yours Truly!

Yes, you “heard” right! Two FULL days of SEO training from yours truly, coming soon to a city near you — or not, if you don’t live near Las Vegas, Chicago or Washington DC .

This is truly a first. In my 14 years since founding Netconcepts, I have yet to run this long of, and in-depth of, a public SEO workshop. Until now!

Brought to you by the American Marketing Association, as part of their excellent “Training Series”.

It will hit Las Vegas February 23rd & 24th, Chicago March 10th & 11th, and Washington DC April 21st & 22nd.

In the two days I intend to cover the following topics in some depth:

• Anatomy of a Search Engine — Spiders, Indices & Algorithms, Market Share & Trends
• Inside the Head of the Searcher — Searcher Behavior & Intent
• Hands-on Keyword Research & Keyword Portfolio Management
• SEO Copywriting — Optimizing Your Content
• HTML Optimization — Make Your HTML “Sing”
• Search Friendly Site Architecture, Design, Navigation & Internal Hierarchical Linking Structures
• Technical Optimization — URLs, Redirects, Tracking Parameters, Flash, JavaScript/AJAX and more
• Link Building — Tools & Tactics for Acquiring Valuable, Relevant Links Sustainably
• Social Media Marketing –- Leveraging Online Communities to Create Links & Buzz
• Paid Search Fundamentals & Achieving Synergies with SEO
• Search Analytics — Metrics that Drive ROI
• Tools of the Trade — The Essential Tools & Resources for your SEO & Paid Search Toolkit
• Vertical Search — Local Search, News Search, Product Search, Image Search, Video Search, Blog Search, Mobile Search
• Worst Practices — Beyond the “Best Practices” to the Dark Side of “Black Hat” Spam & Other Deadly Mistakes
• Site Clinic & Interactive Site Reviews — Apply Your Knowledge by Auditing Fellow Attendees’ Websites

Want more details or to register? Head over to MarketingPower.com. Or download the PDF brochure.

Crass Marketing Campaigns: Do They Work?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. i truly want to know!

Do crass, “low brow” marketing campaigns like this real piece of… umm… work from Domainz (the official -and at one time, only – domain registry for New Zealand and their .nz domain space) actually bring in respectable response rates despite unrespectable theme, copy, or visuals?

The following is a screenshot of the email campaign piece that landed in my inbox last month (it was an animated image; the screenshot shows what was the final frame):

There was matching messaging on their website too. Thankfuly this brain-dead campaign appears to have been put to rest.

I was surprised the email even made it into my inbox. With a Subject line of “Give Tough Times the Finger” you’d think it would have gotten reported by recipients to SpamCop as spam more than a few times.

In my opinion, marketers CAN go too far. Some even get into the realm of truly warped and downright offensive, like this disturbing example, also from New Zealand. When marketers offend our sensibilities we (the targeted recipients) shut down. It can even alienate us from their brand. I know I (a customer) lost a little bit of respect for Domainz because of this campaign. Not enough to move my business from them (i.e. transfer my .nz domains to another registrar). But It’s like they made a withdrawal from their brand equity “bank account”, with me. (I’m borrowing from Stephen Covey’s metaphor of the “emotional bank account”).

So what do you think? Should marketers who practice “crass marketing” deserve an “Attaboy!” or a smack? Or a demotion?