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Can Crowd Sourcing Deliver Effective International SEO?
By Andy Atkins-Krüger, Search Engine Watch, Jul 15, 2009 from http://searchenginewatch.com/3634404
LinkedIn caused a stir last month when it polled 12,000 of its users to see who would be interested in helping to translate its interface to bring in new users globally. One of the questions asked was what form of remuneration would be attractive -- but none of the options included any form of direct payment. A LinkedIn protest group was formed, topping 300 members.
It's good at least to know that the question has moved on from "Should we bother translating our site into local languages?" to "What's the best way?" But was LinkedIn simply trying to do this on the cheap?
And does it make sense, when search engines' organic results are your most important friend, to outsource your translation, and therefore your SEO, to a bunch of well-meaning volunteers?
Crowd sourcing evolved from the open source movement and is based on the idea that there's greater wisdom in crowds. This approach has been used by many, including Google, but is particularly popular with social networks, for the obvious reason that they have a database of engaged potential volunteers. Facebook and Plaxo have used 'community translation' before -- Facebook is said to have had their site translated into French in just 24 hours this way!
Crowd sourcing isn't all it seems, especially when it comes to international SEO.
Not Necessarily a Cheaper Alternative
There are hidden costs involved that make crowd sourcing more expensive than it initially appears. For example, Regina Bustamente, director of globalization at Plaxo, said they found it necessary to develop a "social translation portal," deploy moderators, and use professional translators to vet volunteer contributions when they increased the Plaxo interface to a total of 10 languages.
This meant that the costs were relatively high for the first language developed, but dropped significantly as the volume of languages increased. So, crowd sourcing, if it's appropriate, is more cost-effective for large-scale projects.
Wisdom of the Crowd
Groups of people can't translate a phrase simultaneously, so it has to be handled through an iterative process, with voting tools that allow certain terms to win over others. The people doing the translating mostly aren't professionals -- their wisdom comes from the collective. If the majority of people think a particular phrase is the most appropriate, then it most probably is.
Now what's good about crowd wisdom for translation is that all participants are generally qualified in one key area; they all speak their own language innately, having learned it at their mother's knee. Not so in SEO.
Here's the irony. Crowd wisdom already dominates SEO in another way -- just not through volunteers giving up their time for free or a slice of prestige.
By definition, if the crowd equals wisdom, then it would follow that the larger the crowd, the greater the wisdom, right? What bigger crowd than search engine users?
Keyword research looks at historical terms that people have previously used in search engines and makes the assumption they will do so again -- umpteen thousands of people. Then by definition, keywords have already been chosen by the wisest crowd, so they definitely should win over the slightly less wise, but very helpful and enthusiastic, volunteers.
International SEO Crowd-Sourced Success
The trick is connecting the wisdom of the keywords with the enthusiasm and language wisdom of the volunteers. The solution: source quality multilingual keyword research first, and then offer those keywords via the appropriate management portal.
The volunteers are offered a selection of keywords and choose the best fit from the list -- with the ability to override where an appropriate term simply isn't available or needs adapting. Even then, the platform should advise administrators what keyword was offered and rejected to enable decisions to be reversed or amended.
But that's just the start, because for most Web sites, you're also going to have to figure out how to do this on an ongoing basis, and it's a well known fact that volunteers come and go. It's likely to be tougher to get volunteers to participate in the ongoing maintenance of your project, unless they're truly fans.
International SEO isn't just about the words on the page, but it's the most important place to start. If you don't have relevant content in the target local language, there will be nothing to link to, nothing to host on a local server, and nothing to buy a local domain for. Yet most articles on this subject start with site architecture, and not with the product or narrative itself.
The world is changing, and for SEO folks it's getting much bigger by the minute -- witness the enormous growth of China. That causes a problem of scale for global marketers reaching new customers in new countries through their Web sites. Crowd sourcing enables you to reach more people more effectively through international SEO, but only if you meet certain conditions:
- Your only motivation isn't cost and your project small.
- Yours is a large multi-language project.
- You can build the keyword research into the process for the best SEO effect.
- Your site doesn't need frequent content updates.
- Your volunteers are likely to be really engaged with your product or service.
There can be other spinoff benefits to crowd sourcing. Bustamente discovered that the volunteers who had participated in developing the site became advocates and promoters of their work. So goes the crowd, if the conditions and process are right.
Local SEO: Using Multiple URLs for Rankings
July 14th, 2009 Posts by Matt Leonard from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-seo-using-multiple-urls-for-rankings/11863/22 Comments
One tactic frequently implemented successfully with Local SEO is the use of multiple URLs, or micro-sites. To help you better understand how this functions, I’ve chosen to use a real life example of a site network in current use that is neither affiliated with me nor with Search Engine Journal.
To begin, allow me to say that I will not be writing about how to implement this. You will be able to ascertain by reading between the lines how to do this (or by reading this post from the bottom up).
Rather, I will be explaining exactly how I was able to reverse engineer the SEO strategy of this particular business and the thinking that leads to my methodology.
My journey began with a search for the term ‘Warminster carpet cleaning’.
Directly below the Google Local results, appearing in position one, was the following:
I clicked through to this site and noticed something very odd….
The site had a handful of pages, but was specific to Warminster only?
Now, for anyone unfamiliar with Warminster (PA), it is a pretty small town. There’s no way a real carpet cleaning business would only service Warminster. There are dozens of towns within a few miles of Warminster yet the site does not mention any of them. That doesn’t make sense.
Between that oddity, and the fact that the URL exactly matched my original, non-branded search of ‘Warminster carpet cleaning’, I was able to conclude that there may be something worth looking into.
From here, I chose to begin searching for ‘carpet cleaning’ in other nearby towns to see if I could find something similar. After all, it’s only logical that if someone would use this tactic that they will own similar nearby geo URLs.
I chose to search in ‘Lansdale’.
Sure enough, when I searched for ‘Lansdale carpet cleaning’, I found virtually the exact same result:
The only difference was that the URL was an exact match for ‘Lansdale’ instead of ‘Warminster’.
The two sites are virtually identical (ie duplicate content) in every way if you look at the sites themselves.
So, now I wanted to know how many sites (geos) are within this network and how they are linked. I wanted to know how big this is, and how successful it is.
I could have simply done a domain lookup to see exactly what the registrant owns, but I also wanted to see their linking strategy for myself.
For this reason, I chose to use see how, if at all, there is inter-linking in play here. Plus, honestly, I was curious to see if the URL ranked because of the exact match or if the site may be buying links.
After choosing to have Site Explorer show links ‘Except from this domain’, this is the result:
It’s now clear that the only site linking to ‘Warminstercarpetcleaning.com’ is ‘AllClean1.com’. The same holds true for ‘Lansdalecarpetcleaning.com’.
This means, when I go to ‘AllClean1.com’, I’ll probably find the core of this network and some of the answers I was looking for.
Sure enough, right in the footer of ‘AllClean1.com’, is the list of every geo included in the network, with links to outside ‘<Geo>CarpetCleaning’ URLs.
I have now been able look at a single ranking, and use a bit of competitive intelligence to rip apart the local SEO strategy this company is effectively implementing.
This is not only an effective tactic for competitive intelligence, but for education as well. It’s a great way to learn SEO or SEM. It’s also a great test project to give an employee to see if they can determine the correct answer.
This particular case study left me with a bunch of questions I’m hoping the readers have answers to. Do you think that the mainly duplicate sites pose a long term problem to the current effectiveness here? Is there an opportunity to create your own business model from what you’ve just seen? Do you look at rankings and do this in your free time, too?
Leader: The mobile internet stretches far beyond the iPhone
16 July 2009 | By Justin Pearse from http://www.nma.co.uk/opinion/leader-the-mobile-internet-stretches-far-beyond-the-iphone/3002464.article
The high cost and restriction to O2 means iPhone market share is in single figures still
Man cannot live on Apples alone. It’s likely, as a new media age reader, you have an iPhone. It’s far less likely your potential customer does. The high cost and restriction to O2 means iPhone market share is in single figures still.
This isn’t to downplay the iPhone effect. Its users are far more likely to browse the web and download apps. But brands and media companies need to cast their mobile net wider, especially to reach the younger generation.
Although the iPhone effect overshadows the regular use of the mobile internet, it’s growing fast. According to BMRB, the number of people using the mobile web rose 52% over the last year, from 2.8m in May 2008 to 4.3m this May. These people aren’t all going through Apple for the brands and media properties they want to reach on the move.
The reason Apple has grabbed the headlines is for the simple fact it took a fractured, clunky medium and, as with the iPod, made it beautiful to look at and use. The shock of this, following the mobile operators’ awkward attempts to build the mobile internet over the past few years, jolted the media and marketing industries out of their mobile apathy. But it’s important to remember access to the mobile internet remains largely in the hands of these operators. The non-iPhone user - that is, most of the UK -; goes online via their operator hotkey. Orange, for instance, saw 3.25m people on its Orange World portal between December and February 2009.
The problem with the operators’ approach to the web has always been their desire, to varying degrees, to keep consumers in a walled garden. So it’s great, after new media age has argued for years that consumers want full internet access, to see one of the biggest brands from that era, Vodafone Live, dismantled and embrace the open internet.
Operators are essentially engineering companies, not media companies. But they’re trying to change. The mobile internet isn’t all about apps, as Alex Farber stressed in his column last week, and it’s crucial to ensure your brand is accessible to the whole mobile internet population, not just Apple’s faithful.