Don't do guesswork, get your answers

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Franz in Cultures

Update

Gian Fulgoni, Chairman of comScore had his views on why users should ‘EXPERIMENT’.

Yesterday on Twitter, I was kind of appalled by the ‘attitude’ of one Marketer, or dubbed as. I’d like to invite you look into #MarketingMondays on Twitter to see what I really mean. Marketing Mondays’ has just been started by @blogjunkie, an Internet marketing strategist who blogs about his love for all Apple and Mac. While I’ve had a question in my head for a while, I thought I could get at least an opinion on what Google’s doing with their linkage properties and how juice flows in a website.

This is my Tweet initially.

Then @blogjunkie replied me:

Then I was puzzled: He didn't answer my question.

Then he said: Don't worry too much about SEO, more content.

Then he recommended Cheng Soon (@bearwithclaws)

And then this is the one that got me.

Well, to be honest – I wouldn’t “don’t want to think too much about it”. After visiting the link, I got a bunch of content Google & Bing has been trying to tell us about; since the beginning of 2007 – Of course, in a simplified but more detailed version.

Guesswork is no authority

Of course I wouldn’t deny that in many things we do for online marketing, we perform a lot of guesswork. But in this case where (recently changed) a nofollowed link is also counted together with the volume of links in a particular page for juice distribution, I guess I NEED to worry about where I put my links, how many, and how much I vouch for to the other page.

To robots, linking to someone ‘COULD’ mean that you’re vouching for the page you’re linking to. That’s why you don’t see webmasters linking their own blogs to porn sites. Also in case of placing advertisement on websites, all links are nofollowed; or codes are provided in a way where: The JavaScript code excludes the ad from being followed or crawled (by means of using the hash# or an iFrame).

One of the things I hate to do sometimes is guesswork – Because you may not know what’s the outcome of your actions; and if you’re handling big clients like how Elioe.com is, then we’re into a lot of trouble if they are all guesswork.

Since the link to the document that @bearwithclaws vouched for does not include important things like flat site architecture, content placement for higher click rates, CTR for advertisement and structuring placement of documents in a website, I believe that really beats the whole point of explaining to people the basics of Internet marketing education. Also, a beginner will be wondering, “What can I do next? Why is my blog still so… low?”

Internet marketing is technical

We have to accept the fact that if we want to be an Internet marketer, we have to be technical. Strategies and clever concepts can really pave the way to success in Internet marketing – However, the question is: Are you really, really certain that this strategy is performing at its peak?

Let’s take for example: Dynamic pages that are created often uses the question mark sign (?) to define what page to be dynamically created. Now, this is not a very good practice for link passing because you don’t want link juices to go to pages that are dynamically created. For example, a blog search. It’ll end up like this: http://website.com/?s=keyword+term .

Instead, developers now use the hash (#) tag to ensure bots don’t crawl it. Because robots don’t pass/index links that end AFTER the hash tag, you can be sure that the JavaScript code will allow you to retain your link juice on that particular page. A lot of them use AJAX (JS + XML) to build interactivity and at the same time keep link juice from spreading all over their dynamic pages. It’ll appear as http://website.com/#page

If you want a good example of how this works, just look at Twitter, and see how that works.

Also, through a lot of our experiments, we noticed that the bold tag and the Italicized tag works differently. Albeit the underline text and the colored one. Google now also looks at your page as a whole and compare it with different patterns of its design, content and link outs/ins, to properly define whether you’re trustworthy enough or not.

Experiment and get your answers

One of the things Elioe.com does most and everyday is statistics, experiments and data collection. Even to the slightest bit of what Malaysians are talking about, what’s trending on Twitter and its indexation levels. Don’t expect Google to provide you with a lot of answers – Or any marketers out there to give you what you need.

If you need an answer, don’t guess. Go experiment.

One of the new experiments that Elioe.com will be doing is to test out “New Responses on Favorite Blogs for the F&B industry”. And we’re selecting one of our friend’s Wan Tan Mee stall to start.

Get your answers. Ignorance isn’t bliss. You’ll soon realize that being an Internet marketer isn’t just about clever concepts and ingenious ideas – It’s about how you put all of these knowledge together, pair it up with understanding of robots (that we don’t control) to suit one particular market.

Amen.

Tags: Marketer Attitude, Marketer Personality, MarketingMondays