John W. Heywood is a technologist and new media enthusiast. He co-founded Blogadilla.com: The Tijuana of the Internet in 2007 after returning from a Fulbright Scholarship to Estonia. Check out his projects and connect with John at jwheywood.com.
Portal A Interactive: How has online search changed over the past 2 years and how have individuals and firms alike responded?
John Heywood: In terms of sheer numbers, the extent to which people rely on search engines to find content is increasing significantly every year. From 2007 to 2008, for example, the number of online searches from US users increased from 113 billion to 137 billion – a whopping 21%. Over the same period, the total number of Internet users in the US increased from 183.6 million to 190.6 million—just 3.8% (ComScore). Internet users are getting more and more savvy with search as well, using more keywords and longer search strings in Google, and on average only search 3 times before either finding what they are looking for, or giving up and starting a new search.
While people search with Google every day to find the content and information they are looking for, it’s important to remember that Google’s search product is only part of their business. Google has continuously tried to refine and improve natural search results—both from tuning and tweaking their web crawling algorithm to implementing Universal Search in 2007 to incorporate more rich media into search—but this is as much for the user as it is for themselves. The more Google can attract users, the more appealing sponsored link ad space is, the more money Google makes.
But just as Google Ads—a.k.a. “paid search”—are important to Google, they’re equally important for advertisers. For some search terms, it will be near impossible for a company or an advertiser to get to the top of Google’s natural (a.k.a. unpaid or organic) search results, and to do so takes time and effort that many companies and individuals simply do not have. On top of this, 68% of Google searches don’t go beyond the first page of results. 92% of all searches end within the first 3 pages of results. ( iProspect) What this means to you: top Google real estate is extremely limited and can be costly, if you’re thinking about employing a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy.
Instead (or for large companies, often in parallel), content creators are opting to learn and employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, which are ways to tweak content and content structure based on how Google’s search algorithm evaluates and ranks content and web pages. If SEO tactics (which range from proper HTML structure to the number of incoming links a site has, and the structure of these links) are employed properly, a person’s web pages will rank better in Google results, yielding more traffic to their site, and if you’re selling something, hopefully more conversions.
PAI: What are some tips you would give to online content producers with little or no budget to get their work in front of as many people as possible?
JH: Here are a few suggestions:
1) Unless you’re selling a tangible product right now, forget SEM for the time being and get a good book on SEO. I recommend The Truth about Search Engine Optimization, by Rebecca Lieb, which you can snag off of Amazon for under $15. If you’re just starting your site, SEO might not need to be your immediate focus, but there are some basic things you can do that will serve you well as your site grows.
2) Publish your content multiple places. Put it on your own site, send links to your content to friends, post it to your social networks, tweet about it, digg your story, submit it to del.icio.us, stumpleupon, and other social bookmarking sites. Get your content out there, and make sure that wherever you post it, you leave information on how people can find & contact you. It’s hard to know where and when you’ll connect with people who really enjoy what you’re producing, so if you can reach these people, make sure they track you down and stay in touch.
3) If you’re producing video content, put it on multiple video sharing sites. For us Americans, YouTube is obvious, but if you’re thinking more internationally, get on some of the other video sharing sites like DailyMotion or Metacafe. I’ll leave it to the Portal-A guys to school us all on online video, but the bottom line: posting a video to YouTube by itself is not enough. Create a channel. Upload multiple videos. Comment on other people’s content. Encourage people to subscribe to you. Make friends and engage your audience. You might just get your video featured.
4) While doing all of the above, keep in mind that very few sites rise to success overnight. Focus on creating quality content designed for your readers and viewers, and pace yourself. Try to balance content creation with marketing and stick to deadlines that you can meet, be it to post something every day, every week or whatever suits your schedule. It’s better to start slowly and gain momentum than to speed out of the gates and burn out.
PAI: YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the internet. How do you explain the boom in video search over the last year?
JH: When I first read that YouTube gets more search traffic than Yahoo, I must admit that I was caught off guard, and I know I wasn’t alone. It seemed hard to believe that a) there was enough content on YouTube for this to be possible, and b) that the content was of a decent enough quality for people to satisfy their search needs and immerse themselves as they’ve done.
But when you consider the fact that every minute, 10 hours of video are being uploaded to the site(!) and think about how Americans generally have consumed video (read: TV), the picture of how YouTube, with a searchable interface, would have tremendous appeal, becomes clearer.
PAI: In addition to your own projects, you previously worked for a professor studying new media at Columbia Business School. How is it different to approach the changing media and technology landscapes from an academic perspective as opposed to a business one?
JH: This is a great question, and I want to pick my words carefully, because I still have friends in academia who I respect tremendously. All jokes aside, there are benefits and pitfalls to both perspectives. As an academic, you are equipped with a certain ‘freedom’ from some of the practical minutiae that shapes and constrains real world business. This freedom is both positive and negative—it allows scholars to do some extremely high-level thinking, but at the same time, the impact of such thought exercises, papers, speaking engagements and articles is difficult to measure and not always known.
On the business side, much of life is oriented around profits and losses, and is much more real than academia; much more dollars-driven. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, and many people thrive on the pressures that come along with the private sector. What I dislike about the business world, however, is the old world view of new media that often surfaces—that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity on the whole, and that the Internet’s disruptive nature should somehow be harnessed.
Take Time Warner’s announcement today that they are implementing Internet usage charges in New York, Texas and North Carolina. The businessman in me understands why this sort of decision is made, but my academic side worries tremendously about what this sort of decision will do to the Internet and the many complementary services that are or will be based on Internet service in the future.
