ad:tech San Francisco: Why HTML5 Matters
Session Description: The way consumers interact with the Web is changing. The impetus for this change is twofold—the appearance of a variety of new devices and increasing broadband penetration—both of which let you deliver richer content in a variety of new ways. The needs of the Web consumer have shifted dramatically in the last decade, especially within the past year. Much of that change comes from the new HTML5 spec that we all hear about, but not everyone quite understands. However, HTML5 has tremendous advantages for marketers as it represents the largest shift in Web standards in the last 15 years. HTML5 enables a richer experience for mobile, video and a myriad of other channels that can help revolutionize your marketing strategies. Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader of Circ.us, will do a deep dive into the numerous marketing and advertising implications of HMTL5 and the various things you need to know to prepare yourself for the next generation of the Web.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader of Circ.us
This session blew me away! Having taught myself HTML years ago, this got me super jazzed and excited to start learning HTML5 and getting some more tools in my toolbox.
Bullet Point Review!
- Why HTML5 Matters.
- Standards are safe.
- Consumers are familiar with standards.
- Web standards can save you money.
- Web standard content is easier to find in Google.
- Broadband growth 2001-2009 ^ 63.5%.
- 31.5% YoY growth total video streams.
- YouTube 8.4 billion total streams, 2:23 average time on site.
- Some current browsers don’t support this new web interaction.
- The way we use the Internet had changed, but the nature of HTML hasn’t.
- The app will not save us.
- We need standards, not 1000s of app stores.
- Kind of a bridge.
- People have to spend more money for all platforms and it slows things down.
- The future of the web? (AOL) unable to grow within the walled garden, had to open up.
- 20% of people use a free app the next day after download, only 5% after 30 days.
- HTML5 is a set of standards.
- HTML5 is the new.. HTML.
- Important elements:
- The canvas.
- More creative things can be done.
- Geolocation.
- You don’t need to build a specific app to access the gps info.
- Browser now becomes location aware.
- Audio & video.
- <video>…</video>
- It’s not perfect… Yet.
- Miro video converter.
- Local storage.
- Google got rid of Gears in favor of HTML5.
- Drag & drop.
- Forms.
- Input types.
- New semantics.
- More meta tags actually describe content & make it more easily found in searches.
- It’s still the wild west of html5 compliant web browsers.
- Html5test.com to see if your browser is compliant.
ASE09 Session: SEO Tools You Can Use Today
Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today. The speaker was:
- Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)
I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times. It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager. This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed. He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!
Bullet Point Review!
- Tool: Google Insights
- Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
- Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
- Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
- Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
- SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
- Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
- Ranking is a big distraction.
- If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
- Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
- Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
- Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
- Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
- Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
- Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
- A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
- Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
- Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
- You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
- Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
- Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow. Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
- Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change. Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
- Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
- Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
- How is a product getting hot? How do you rank for it?
- Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
- Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
- Suits = slow = opportunity for you
- Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete. Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
- Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
- You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark. Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
- Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
- Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
- It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
- Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
- Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
- Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
- Wikipedia links help.
- Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
- Tool: SeoQuake
- Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
- Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.
Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked. It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:
Online Marketing Glossary: Meta Tag
Meta Tag:
- A way to describe various aspects of a webpage that is not intended for users to see. Meta tags pass information to Web crawlers and spiders along with browsers and other applications.
Remember when I said there were basic tools out there to optimize your website for search engines on a very prime level? This is one of the easiest ones. There are many tutorials out there on where to put meta tags in the head html area of your website that will assist with search engine results.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: XML
XML (eXtensible Markup Language):
- Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems. It is used both to encode documents and to serialize data.
Related to HTML, XML aids webmasters in what they can do with their websites. It’s another programming language out there.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
PHP Affiliate Link Masking
If you’re like me and have jumped into affiliate marketing head on, you may not know some of the nuances of using affiliate links. Recently, James Seligman of JMCA Media schooled me on how to really easily set up PHP redirects for your affiliate links to make them a bit more user friendly. Let me share this knowledge with you!
- Open up Notepad or a similar text editing program.
- Add the following code:
<?
header(“location:affiliate-link-goes-here“);
?> - Replace the portion in italics above with the tracked link from the program of your choice.
- Save the file as a .php file with whatever name is easiest for you.
- Upload it to a designated diretory or folder on your website. Some possible names for the folder are recommends, deals, however you can call it whatever is easiest for you.
- When you want to add an affiliate link, just add the code <a href=”/recommends/affiliate.php”>Affiliate </a>
It’s that simple! I had head of PHP redirects before but, not knowing PHP very well myself, I never looked into how to do it. Luckily James was there to show me just how easy it is! And now you have a weekend project to go mask all your affiliate links!
Read MoreChanges A-Foot
Frequent visitors here to TrishaLyn.com will notice that the design has changed, among other things. I haven’t updated in awhile because I’m trying to fix the issues first. This is all in an attempt to NOT corrupt my source feed.
As with all budding bloggers, I’ve screwed the pooch a bit and now having to fix what I broke. Apparently a combination of “Pretty Permalinks” structure and my old theme are killing my RSS feed for some reason. Whenever I change the permalink structure the source feed dies and I get an XML not well parsed message.
So I admit that I’m at a loss and don’t know how to fix this without going back to the ugly default permalink structure. And that also kills all the links that are out there & doesn’t sync previous Disqus comments to their posts, so I really do NEED to go back to the pretty permalinks… but how do I do that without losing the feed?
I’m working on it… if you have suggestions, throw them at me PLEASE. I’ll, of course, share the solution once I find it. I’m not giving up!
I’m getting some help from a heavy hitter in the blogosphere/affiliate marketing world… so let’s all hope this works out. By the by, I changed the design because I thought it was my old theme that was mucking things up, but I actually really like this new theme. Professional but still “me”. Meh anyway… HELP 😛
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