Why Web 2.0 Shouldn’t Be Called Web 2.0
By David Golding
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I don’t like it when people call anything cool or snazzy on the internet “Web 2.0.” Whoever came up with it was obviously thinking very geek-ily. Aside from sounding way too technical for the average web user, it connotes that we are in some very early stages of the internet.
My problem is this: I don’t think we ought to settle for just a 2.0 update. We got way passed 2.0 awhile ago. We should be thinking of the web at 5.0, in my mind. What are we going to do next year when developers roll out with websites that exceed the 2.0 expectation? Call those “rich Web 3.0 sites”? Why not simply say that this site or that one is “designed well”? Yes, I believe users at that point will just throw their hands in the air and say, “just give me a good looking, well-developed site!” Instead we have to come up with completely ludicrous tekkie words like “web 2.0.”
No doubt they were PC nuts… Like the latest Windows Vista idea (how many versions are they planning on rolling out now? like 20?): Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Home Premium, Home Basic, Ultimate…. If we’re like them, we’ll probably have to graduate from Web 2.0 to something like “Web Super Virus-Free Premium” or “Web Non-IE Deluxe.”
Of course, if the Apple nerds had their choice, we’d probably see something like “iWeb” or “iWeb Supro.”
“Web Sweetness” might be a good idea….
E-marketing is still Marketing
By David Golding
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You may have noticed one of those “magic e-marketing ebooks” they sell for $40 bucks. (Heaven forbid you paid more than that for one!) They try to pitch to you that somehow the net is different because it’s “special.”
Fact is e-marketing is marketing. It always has been, it always will. Do you think that Google hires folks that write the “magic e-marketing ebooks”? Heck no. They get Ph.D.’s in marketing to grace the upper echelons of their company. Even the dudes at the bottom of the totem pole there have to have a proven track record with degrees before they get come on board. Don’t let those “search engine optimization specialists” fool you into thinking that they somehow are cooler because they have the internet down. The things that work out there in the offline world, in terms of marketing principles, are what work online. Go find a smart marketing strategist to talk over the net with you before you ever go buy a stinky ebook.
Keyword Competition
By David Golding
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I’ve noticed power in using the competition ratio approach to optimizing sites for search engines. In theory, the more relevant a site is for keywords, the higher it will be placed in the results, right? But, there’s immense monetary value for high placement in results. This fact alone distrupts the purity of search engines. And so it befalls us to accept that and work against competition.
Pure Relevance is a fallacy on the net
As an example of what I mean, take libraries. When I do a search, my searching at a library is out of a basis for research. The publisher, at least directly, gains no money from the fact that I pored over several of their texts in the library. You’ll notice in that setting that relevance is somewhat pure. If you run into issues and brick walls, you go grab a librarian or a research specialist, and they will sift through the mountains of information and pull for you what’s most relevant to your queries. I’ve never noticed a librarian make a recommendation to me knowing that publishers were competing for my consumption of their material. Or that the librarian is somehow getting a commission kickback from publishers for helping me. At least, there doesn’t seem to ever be a tug or pull, moneywise, to get me to view material in a pure setting.
On the net, this doesn’t exist. There is not only a tug and pull for business, but a multi-billion dollar one. We can’t expect search engines to give 100% unbiased results. There’s too much money at stake.
It will always require money
That being said, getting a site to show up in the top is going to require money, one way or the other. You have two options: advertising or campaigning to get higher in search results. To get higher, most of the time, you will need more exposure on the net than the no. 2 guy. To get higher in advertising, you gotta pay more bucks than the no. 2 guy. Take your pick. But remember, it will cost you time and money for the first option and it will simply cost you money for the second.
I like to review competition ratios for keywords before trying to make that decision. A competition ratio for a key phrase is found by taking the number of searches made in a given amount of time and dividing it by the number of results that turn up for that phrase in a given search engine. Of course, it’s an estimate. But it’s valuable for comparing phrases.
“Monkeys” and “Pet Monkeys”
Take the keyword “monkey” for example. Last month, it had somewhere around 242,880 searches. The results are around 75 million. The ratio then is 310-ish. Compared to “pet monkeys,” whose ratio is 0.86, you can see that I could significantly fare better creating a page on “pet monkeys” than for a “monkey” in general.
I like NicheBot for that. It gives me competition ratios for whatever keywords I’m interested in. If money is on the line, I can tell that getting a no. 1 spot for my pet monkey site will be cheaper than going for no. 1 under just monkey.
