Online branding is perhaps one of the most important thing SEO should do. Most companies enter the web without any thought of creating an online presence and that’s a wrong approach. If you think about it, many companies don’t create an offline brand either, relying only on a bit of PR, a bit of marketing (more along the lines of advertising) and a bit of customer relations (an outsourced call center).

But what is this brand everyone speaks of? Well, it’s an identity. It’s not a name, or a logo, or a catch phrase, it’s like a person… A brand is a story, it’s something Pavlovian for the customers, something that makes people behave in a certain way when they’re exposed to it. A brand is something to help people chose a product from a million identical ones. It’s something people identify with. It’s something that draws people to a company or product. A company without a brand is like a person without an identity, it’s not memorable because it’s anonymous. How many people remember who Steve Something is who presented something at a conference a month ago? But how many people remember Steve Jobs? He’s probably one of the best examples because he is a walking talking brand. He is what Apple means to people. He’s cool and elitist and makes the fans tremble at his announcements.

Now that we (don’t) know what a brand is, let’s talk about how to get one. A brand cannot be bought, although it costs a lot of money. Rather, a brand is made, it’s a process of little steps which one by one build an entity, a sum of stories and reactions which define a company’s interaction with its customers. Which brings us to what a brand is again. A brand is in a sense more than PR, and it’s more than the product’s characteristics. A brand is how a company does everything it does. It’s style, and it’s passion, and it’s uniqueness. It’s breaking the mold in a way, or making the mold in another.

But enough talk about brands, what is so different online about a brand? Well, since the web is a very interactive place, a brand on the web has to be interactive too. You have a cartoon character as your mascot? Make him talk, interact with people, get a fancy yet highly seo unfriendly website where he talks. But be careful about his voice, his tone, the way he moves, there are so many details you can get wrong on the web… So many companies get this wrong… Many people lack the detail orientation needed to truly understand a web campaign.

What is the difference between a 10$ photograph made by a student and a 1000$ portrait made by a pro photographer. Well, aside from the gear, it’s the fact that the pro will always get it right. He’ll always take something to help your personal brand grow. Just look at concert posters and tell me how many look like they’re made to match the person, the music, the lifestyle. And tell me how many look like they were simply botched together.

Online media is easy to create but the fact that so many people can do whatever they like with it is a bit daunting in the sense that think of how your website may look. Think of different flash versions, think of different browsers, default fonts, not to mention screen sizes (think installed toolbars, etc) and so on. Then there’s RSS which can end up anywhere and so on.

But online branding is in a way trying to tell not one story, like in conventional media, but rather many stories at once. One on youtube, one on slideshare, one on digg, and so on. Also, unlike conventional media, anyone can say whatever they want about your story using the same channels. Anyone can comment, anyone can complain and anyone can say a nicer story than you since it costs them nothing. The Internet is a challenge.

And how is branding important on the web? Well, think of it this way. When I want to check out a movie, what do I do? I go to imdb. It’s a reflex, and I know what the movie site is called, and I know a lot about them. Sure they don’t really have a story, but they have something to say. They have all I need. However, if I’m searching for subtitles, I go to… umm… I’ll google it. Or song lyrics, yeah, google too… A brand is what makes people come to your site instead of Googling the information. So technically, the more direct visits the better…

Another example as to why a brand is important is word of mouth. Say you have this amazing authority site that’s first in Google, about tennis shoes. And there’s this kid who doesn’t feel that mike’s tennis shoe emporium extraordinary says anything to him so he just tells his friend to google custom tennis shoes. Sure enough, mike’s website comes up, but what if some day joe makes tennishoe, a catchy name (albeit stupid i know) with a better optimized website. Sure prices are higher and goods are somewhat poorer in quality, but to the kids it’s the first result that matters. So without a brand you’re lost if something happens. Maybe like me you do something that destroys your htaccess file and google thinks you’re gone… And you only have people who search by brand, or who go directly to the address.

Also, a brand is important in differentiation. Unlike brick and mortar stores, online stores have the big disadvantage to the seller that they’re only a click away from each other. In real life, I’m more willing to go across the street to buy a new keyboard, but online I don’t care. It gets shipped to my home anyway and I can buy one anywhere I want. Also, there’s no sales rep to convince me that I really need to buy that one from there… Which is again where brands come in play. Will I shop at bestbuy or bhphoto? Or maybe that small second-hand dealer whose prices are a lot lower and merchandise just as good… Brand is memorable, and on the web people forget all the time. If I look at my history, I’ve visited at least 200 sites today. Do you think I remember any of them? Well, some due to use all the time. But I know I watched vids on YouTube and Metacafe. I know I checked my Gmail. I know I’ve read xkcd and not from concentrate. I know I’ve checked engadget. Because all are known brands to me. I know what each does and how each offers me something. I may not know why they’re called that but they got stuck in my head.

That’s it for today, check out the blog tomorrow for a bit on brand protection.

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I’ve seen many people asking about this, and I’ve seen even more people generally mystified by the way Google works. So most people don’t understand how and when Google crawls and are generally thinking it’s a secret.

It’s not really that big a secret, but it is a bit of a thing to predict when Google does come. Of course if you deal with this stuff as often as I do, you start to become used to the schedules. What is a bit confusing though is how this crawl schedule changes like hell depending on a million factors Google finds important.

We’ll start off with a bit of information from the Google Webmaster Center. As always they give us the follow the guidelines and it depends on many things crap, but a few factors come out as obvious in the process:

• PageRank
• links to a page
• crawling constraints (such as the number of parameters in a URL)

Ok, so we know what helps us. PR is the most important, then links, then the ability of your site to be crawled (that number of parameters refers to the fact that Google doesn’t like many php parameters - use mod_rewrite). So we have a starting point. But as always Google is cryptic and doesn’t really help… So we move on.

As early as 2002 people were asking about the Google crawl schedule, and some were guessing at it. However, results were strange and back them high PR sites were a lot more. However, many have seen Google full crawls at around 1st June, while another had it in May and still moving on in June. An interesting piece of info was that for large sites Googlebot came in at about every three minutes indexing about 2-10 pages a second, which I feel was a bit of a slurp but was made to keep a bit of the strain off the webserver. Their discussion goes offtopic then on, but for the purists, go read…

Our next source is a for dummies book excerpt, in which we get a bunch of terms related to the crawl. In doing research for this I was really surprised to see there’s very little info to be found. Then again, it’s not such a hot topic for SEO, but is somewhat important. They say the deep crawl occurs about every month and that fresh crawls occur randomly. Also, they consider the index as static between deep crawls, in a form called everflux in the strange update given by fresh crawls. My opinion later

There’s not much else on the web, except a mention of the Google Dance. I find all these names so amusing, since they don’t really explain the phenomenon and there’s no dancing involved. I guess they got bored of using crawl in everything. It’s basically the deep crawl, and we get the info that it usually begins at the end of the month, lasting 3-5 days, and usually updates PR. Also, for the people out there who know how to monitor server logs, deep crawl uses an IP range of 216.239.46.x whereas fresh crawl uses the 64.68.82.x range. Also at that link above you can find a so called Google Dance Tool, which could be useful to see what pages Google finds important and crawls, but you could just use webmaster tools for that.

Now for my take on the whole thing. I feel that there’s not two, but three kinds of crawls. Firstly, there’s an almost immediate crawl, from pings and links and basically whichever spider Google uses for Google alerts. That happens at once, and crawls the title and the post, but does not index it. It only notices it’s there. Then, in a few days to a week, the post becomes indexed completely, and starts showing up in Google results (on a quite high position at first, then gradually lower if no further activity on that post is detected, or no search activity for that keyword is detected). The next kind of crawl is a longer-term crawl, which usually includes the homepage, and is done every week, or two weeks, or even a month for less active sites. This updates the cache on your active pages, but doesn’t touch the others. And the last kind of crawl happens about three or four times a year, and reindexes everything. This usually happens in February or March, June, November, or in some cases any other month. Google tends to vary this stuff, presumably due to factors on and off the site. So be prepared for a couple of crawls this year in June (beginning) and mid-November or so, and see if it happens as I’ve predicted.

One more thing, an important factor to crawling is the kind of servers you are hosted on. Use GoDaddy or any other established host rather than hosting on your old machine, so Google can download the data properly. The crawl intensity depends a lot on that. Also, Google does not have the same schedule as Yahoo for example. Yahoo just performed a deep crawl for my site a few days ago, whereas Google didn’t. So if you’re interested, here’s a pretty graph to oogle at - not much data yet, but still representative:

Green is Yahoo, blue Google, and that other thing MSN. And with this I must end this post. Enjoy

Also, for more info about Google crawling check out this older post called Google secrets: How to speed up Google Crawl Rate
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Since I promised it to Dan, here’s an article about the recent Googapple SMO prank which I started in anticipation of April 1st. It was launched early to get a bit of momentum, but I had a problem that one of my biggest referrers has become 404 for the past day or so. So don’t be surprised by the fact that views may be lower when closer to April 1st. For this prank there has also been a special landing page for users from YouTube etc which was watched via statcounter.

So, without further ado, the scores today. First, we start with the in-house scoreboard, wp-stats, which reports the graph for the article as:

You can see the initial boost via the initial SMO care to it, and then an organic growth up until the 1st when my main referrer failed permanently and it dropped like a stone.

I’ve also generated a couple of heatmaps for it, one for average attention (but ran out of log space so it’s only for 14 viewers):

And the other one is a regular click heatmap:

What I find really interesting here is that many people have also clicked on the Google.com link, which was a trap, leading to the same large image html, but preyed on the fact that people would want verification of the fact Gotcha!

Also, we have the stats for the landing page:

Here you can see a very natural progression, with most hits on April 1st, as was intended

Also, the scores for the other places it appeared are:

• YouTube: 101 views
• metacafe: just 23 views - more on this lower
• slideshare: 114 views
• digg: 6 diggs - more details lower

Ok, so explanations for the above; firstly, metacafe has so few views because it was pulled down for a few days for a presumed copyright infringement, and then restored after I explained it was a parody. And secondly, digg registered few views because it was less than believable, having no verification link… However, it did generate some comments, which are always welcome

There has been another quite powerful referrer but it’s down now so I can’t really give you any stats there. This has been my first actual SMO attempt, from the viral point of view, and it’s been quite good, giving me twice the normal traffic, and with no cost at all, I’d say it’s been a success. I’ve also enjoyed the comments, and the feed count has increased so all is well

Try to learn from this experiment, see what I did well, what I did wrong because SMO is very powerful right now. However, you will get a bit of a regional bias to the US, since social networks are used more there.

And, as always, leave your comments and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

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This is in a way a follow-up to my previous article, how online marketing fails you where I explained some of the major errors that most companies make when entering the web unprepared.

So, this is an article about how you should start up your website and its marketing.

First, do not launch the website without content… If there’s one thing that can make your site go flop, it’s starting it without stuff to see. Think of it as launching a supermarket which only has a box of coke, one tv for sale and a shelf of apples. That’s all. Not many people will revisit. Why? Because maybe they want more than coke and apples. It doesn’t matter to them if you offer the best damn apples and that you’ll stock up on everything else really soon, if there is someone else offering something similar. So make sure you have articles, goodies, press releases, events, everything anyone would want to find so that when you do get visitors you have what they want. Also, to build a blog (and I’ve seen other professionals do this) you need to have some really cool posts in order to make the people who come once or twice come again, expecting that cool stuff.

Second, establish a brand. there is nothing more important on the web than a brand. It doesn’t mean that has to be a personal brand or a company brand, you need to have a brand. For example, I’m now designing and setting up an academic blog for a management professor and this will aid him to build up his personal brand. This personal brand will grow and help him get more opportunities. Let me explain better. Say you have this awesome website that people just love. Say it’s on a topic that’s very common, like seo. Now think that it’s you who’s visiting. How would you make sure that you find the website again? You could set a bookmark, but odds are you’ll never remember it again. (I know I have hundreds of bookmarks marked important which I haven’t looked at in years) So you need a recognizable brand so people can search you and not have to sift through pages on Google to find you. I’ve created such brands (YouTubr, Googapple, and of course my personal brand eydryan - for seo as well as photography - and more).

Third, make sure people find that brand everywhere. You can find my brand(s) on social networking sites, youtube, facebook, linkedin, twitter, metacafe, slideshare, a bunch of photo forums, a bunch of computer forums, some seo related places, a lot really, Google gives you about 7000 hits for eydryan. Make sure people can connect with you and make sure people can find your stuff.

And fourth, make sure you think up an SMO campaign, make an idea of how you’ll promote your new website (videos, slideshows, images, etc) and start it as soon as you start the website… get viewers visiting, and there will be many who will come again if you provide them with good stuff.

Also, a good idea would be to also include an RSS feed for those who don’t have the time to check regularly. Oh, by the way. Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed or who knows what you’ll miss out on. You can also subscribe by email.

I hope you have enjoyed this, stay tuned today or tomorrow for the April Fool’s SMO experiment and explanations.