media seo analytics | push2digital

As I was making notes on the 2010 SMX East conference on the train home, I resolved to not let these three days go to waste without pushing the most important action items into ... well action. So what is at the top of that list?

"How about Action?" -- Yeah that's a good one, I resolve to not let the mountain of e-mails, phone messages and meeting requests that are waiting for me to deter me from acting on this list.

"Server Logs" -- never had access to them before, but now I have a better idea about the valuable information contained within and will ask my dev team for access.

"Development Requests" -- this is a big one, I will be more dedicated to creating, better documenting and pushing high priority development requests such as ability for on-demand 301 requests, ability to add custom meta tags on the fly, the automation of semantic linking, integrate with Facebook's social graph API, among others.

"Crawl Efficiency" -- make better use of the Google Bot's time by reviewing the pages it's crawling and removing sections that do not need that attention. Also, target page load times as a means to increase the number of indexed pages.

"Local Content" -- huge opportunity around the relative scarcity of good local content that is and will be in more demand by advertisers. Brainstorm ways to help sites create more tageted local content more efficiently and increase UGC contributions.

"Segment those Analytics" -- spotlight the different content consumption trends of users according to referral source (search, other referrals and direct).

Also see: 6 "Hmmm" Moments ... on Day 2 of SMX East and 5 Ideas That Stuck ... On Day 1 of SMX East.
 

I'm much smarter after Day 2 of the SMX East conference. I've learned that staking out a seat with a desk is worth the effort; eating the day's third brownie is not. In regards to the sessions here are the quotes, stats and thoughts that stood out.

"Voice Your Updates" -- COO Geoff Donaker talked about Yelp's 38M monthly uniques and desire to go public in the morning's keynote, but their R&D around voice recognition was super interesting. Imagine the impact of speaking your mobile updates rather than typing. Closer to home, he said, "There isn't that much local content out there -- there's less than 1 review for every business in the U.S." Really good, really local content is a commodity.  

"Lovers, Haters of High-end Analytics" -- as someone interested in analytics, I heard from both camps on high-end products like Omniture, Core Metrics. Two major media types said they like and get good info from the products. Another speaker said he's prepared to ditch his for Google Analytics. The difference?  Both media types had teams of 3 to 5 people to implement and manage the product. The speaker did not, and said he could get 90% of what he needed from GA.

"10 Percent" -- the amount of CNN's site traffic driven by search.

"8 seconds to 4.8 seconds" -- The amount that MySpace decreased their average page load time. Great news for users of course, but Tony Adam, MySpace's director of online marketing, said the real benefit was it more than doubled the number of pages indexed by Google.

"Semantic Linking" -- we all need to be doing this, automated internal linking of terms that synch with topic/content pages that all already on your site.

"One URL or Multiples" -- architecture expert Brian Piepgrass advocated for one URL in most cases. You should have a very good reason for splitting your site authority and links.

Also see takeaways from SMX East Day 1.

When I returned from SMX East '09 this week, I asked myself -- what's the one quote I heard that stuck with me?

There were several contenders including CNN.com SEO guru Topher Kohan's "don't ever ask Google to figure something out that you can specify yourself." (General paraphrase there, I wasn't taking notes at the time.)

There was Danny Sullivan's "you guys suck" reference to Google, Yahoo and Bing representatives regarding lack of official press releases. (Although fun, it doesn't provide me much actionable insight.)

But I think my favorite was this gem from Ben Huh, Cheezburger Network CEO:

"Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but reward simplicity."

-- Ben Huh, Cheezburger Network CEO

That got me thinking, as new technologies are developed for our sites, are we asking the simple questions like "Does the user get it? Need it? Use it?" I've worked on media sites for going on 10 years, and I've seen my share of bells and whistles, but often they’re deployed with little regard for the user.  

In fact, I was present for the mother of all poorly envisioned technologies, the Cue Cat, which served as a shining example of a technology that evoked the trifecta of "huh?" "why?" and "I'll pass."

Because weather is a prominent feature of most broadcast web sites on which I work, it was like a stick in the eye when I saw an entirely different angle on relevant weather coverage that left me asking, “Who doesn’t need that?”  It included the required technologies, but only as a means to an end, not as the centerpiece of the offering. It focused on one idea, a simple universal need that rivals toothpaste or toilet paper. The site, listed on Rand Fishkin's review of "single-purpose homepages", immediately struck a chord with me.

UmbrellaToday.com delivers the one piece of weather information I need every day, offers it to me in multiple ways (web, sms, e-mail) and allows me to decide when and how often I get it. Oh, it offers one more very important thing ... nothing else.

So when it comes to the choice between Ben Huh's “admiration of complexity” vs. the “reward of simplicity” ... this concept exemplifies a keen combination that favors the later. And it prompts the knee-slapping question, "Damn, why didn't I think of that?”

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