There's no doubt 2007 will be remembered as the year social media exploded. Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Flickr and quite a few other social media sites entered the mainstream as companies scrambled to figure out how to approach this new form of marketing. There's no doubt 2008 will see continued growth of social media, but you have to wonder what the "big" explosion for 2008 will be. Logic + Emotion's David Armano thinks 2008 may be the year of mobile media.

David writes:

The way we interact with technology is changing. Computers used to be about work. Then they quickly became about play. Then work and play began to blur all together. Laptops and wireless set us free, but then laptops started feeling like work again. Social media, though it has real business applications feels like play?it's fun and quite addictive. 2007 was a big year for social media. 2008 may be the year mobile media really begins to take off.

I'll admit, I've always been rather skeptical of "mobile search" and the "mobile web." After all, who wants to surf web sites on a tiny phone when they could simply login with their laptop? The user experience is cumbersome, download times are slow and very few sites are created so they'll run well on a cell phone. That said the last month has seen my skepticism about the value of the mobile web changing to raving fandom.

What sparked the change?

I got an iPhone.

The iPhone doesn't use the way-lame mobile browsers I'd tried on other cell phones. It uses Safari. In fact, 95 times out of 100, I don't even need to use the "mobile" version of a site. I simply type in the URLs I want and head there to do some surfing. My pop3 email accounts are integrated as well, giving me full access to my inbox no matter where I am.

Admittedly, I got the iPhone because I thought it would be a fun toy. I really didn't think it would be practical in terms of surfing the web. I was so very wrong.

I now send about 40% of my email from my phone and do about half of my surfing on it. Yes, I use it while I'm out and about, but I also find myself using it around the house pretty often. I have two toddlers, one of which is still at the age where my laptop is the most fascinating toy ever. Trying to work in a room while watching two kids, one of whom is obsessed with my laptop hasn't been easy. The iPhone? Well, that fits in one hand and can easily be raised out of reach. If the kids aren't napping or watching cartoons, I work via my iPhone instead of my laptop now.

And it works. It's not a compromise I came up with to try and get something done. It's actually practical. In fact, I find myself surfing the web in the evenings on it rather than my laptop because the user interface is that good. It's been practical in every day life too.

On Black Thursday I was out shopping with the hoards. I found myself in Radio Shack eyeing a GPS unit as the salesman told me they'd "slashed the price" and the units were selling so fast they only had two left. As he went to check on another customer, I pulled out my iPhone, logged on to Google and ran a price check. Sure enough, Linens and Things had it for the same price and we had a 20% off coupon. Then I spotted it on Buy.com for $100 less than I could get it at Linens and Things. The salesman came back over as I was finishing up.

"You're checking prices on your phone, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"You found it cheaper, didn't you?"

"Yep."

And off I went, having saved about $150.

Just last week I found myself stuck on the tarmac in Chicago during a snowstorm. While we waited I logged on to Amazon.com and ordered a few gifts for my husband and kids. The packages arrived at my house the day I came home from my trip. (Message to Wal-Mart: if you didn't rely on flash, I'd have bought things from you too.)

Suddenly, the mobile web didn't seem like such a dumb idea anymore.

David has noticed this too and credits products like the iPhone for next year's probable boom.

Apple has proven that the mobile experience doesn't have to suck and in fact can be delightful. It's kicked the mobile industry in the ass and is forcing them to innovate. This means that the mobile experience is going to get better for all of us, whether we choose to buy an iPhone, a Verizon Voyager or something else. The iPhone effect is making people feel like they need a "smart phone" the same way the RAZR made people feel like they needed a thin phone that did less but looked really cool. Better mobile experiences will eventually lead to more mobile behavior.

Of course it's not just phones. In my house, I can now get online with my choice of two desktops, a laptop, a Wii, my iPhone, my husband's Nintendo DS or my iPod Touch. Those last three are all "mobile" options. As more and more affordable, wi-fi enabled "non-computer" gadgets show up, the mobile market will continue to expand.

You may have ignored mobile search and the mobile web this year and gotten away with it. Are you sure you can ignore it again next year?

It's no secret bloggers are the hot new target of new media savvy public relations professionals. Everyone wants to get coverage on the hot blog in their industry. What may be overlooked, however, is the continued power of newspapers when it comes to sparking a trickle-down conversation through the most popular blogs. Joe Mandese at MediaPost shares data on a new Millward Brown study showing that individuals who read online newspapers are more likely to be top "influencers" in the blogosphere than non-newspaper readers.

Joe writes:

According to the newspaper Web site influencer study, readers of newspaper sites are 52% more likely to be categorized as influencers - based on Mediamark Research Inc.'s definition of the consumer segment - than non-newspaper Web site readers.

The study found that, on average, adults who use newspaper Web sites influence 18 people weekly, 38% more than Web users who do not use a newspaper Web site.

The article goes on to point out that most consumers still feel an ad or article in a mainstream newspaper carries more credibility than ads on blogs, random web sites and social media networks. While I question just how much of a difference there is in judgement of credibility (anyone who has ever watched a focus group knows what people say and what they do don't always match up), there's no denying the fact that mainstream media DOES spark conversation.

What does this mean to you? Well, it means that while it may sound easier to root out the popular blogs and to fire off an email to them, there's real value in taking the time to craft a targeted press release or make a personal contact with the mainstream media. You don't need to have a subscription to one of the fancy media service directories to do this. In fact, it's pretty easy to keep a running spreadsheet file with the names and contact information of journalists who write articles that are relevant to your business.

In fact, I wrote an article about building relationships with the media earlier this fall outlining some tactics for building up your own media database. In it, I wrote:

Over the years I've built up a pretty decent list of journalists who have covered topics related to my various blogs and clients. Since I'm reading news related to these topics on a daily basis anyway, it's easy to pull the name and email address of a reporter into a database. If the article is of special interest, I may dash off an email or a blog comment to the reporting sharing my thoughts or simply thanking them for bringing attention to a specific topic. These contacts can come in extremely handy down the road when you're working up a story pitch.

A helpful hint? If you build a database like this, make sure you leave a field for links to articles they've covered and another field to make a few notes about what the article was about. You'll get a lot further with a reporter if your pitch includes reference to something they've written in the past and a creative way to tie your pitch into the past coverage.

Sitting down and crafting a media list and trying to come up with a pitch takes time. It certainly isn't easy. (This is why PR firms aren't cheap to hire.) That said, taking the time to add a name to a database after reading a really good article takes about a minute. Much like the pennies you find on a sidewalk, that effort can add up over time.

So keep working on your pitches to bloggers, but keep in mind that one good piece of media coverage can land you a ton of blog coverage as well.

Had an email this week from Kalena Jordan asking me for an update on the Bento Yum "blocking Google" series I started earlier this year. I'd launched the project back in May as a new series about a building a business without the benefit of search traffic. The goal of the series was to rely on word of mouth, blogging and social media to build a successful web site. While the project had serious potential, I only managed to get five or six articles out of it before I had to call it quits. That doesn't mean there weren't valuable lessons learned though.

The first lessons?...the perils of a good idea and a lack of time.

I launched the first article for Bento Yum back in May and managed to churn out several articles about how we were leveraging social media to help build the site. I hit a huge stumbling block when the community I'd joined discovered I was a marketer and assumed I was only there to game the system, but I managed to recover when many of them realized I'd been there before the series and pointed out that while I was a marketer, I was also adding value to the community.

Unfortunately, I picked a bad time to launch the series. We did booming business for the first several months after the site was launched. In fact, Abigail was barely able to keep sets in stock. Now it might be easy to say the site did so well because I was writing about it here, but the reality was sales were coming from our social media marketing efforts. I was tracking our traffic and sales using ClickTracks and it was easy to see my series was sending traffic, but the sales were coming from the bento communities on Live Journal, Flickr and other blogs. Even without the aid of search engine traffic, we were seeing excellent growth in blog traffic and a steady stream of sales and links.

Then summer hit and I had back to back to back trips for speaking gigs. All that traveling left me struggling to keep up with my "real" job here at Search Engine Guide which meant Bento Yum had to go to the sidelines. I was still making bentos at a pretty good clip, but couldn't find the time to post them. Abigail, who had a toddler of her own landed a part-time freelance job at about this time and also found herself with little time to spare.

While Abigail continued to post her bentos to the Bento Yum Blog, she wasn't able to find the time to join the communities and post as an active member. When I stopped posting to them, traffic and sales went down. Soon it was fall and I found myself with a child who went from having four teeth to having a full mouth of teeth in a single month. (Translation: zero sleep for either of us.) That was followed by a horrific ear infection that led us through another month of no sleep. Getting work done was nearly impossible. Getting non-essential work done wasn't even an option.

Around that time, Abigail and I pow wowed via email and made the decision to go ahead and allow the spiders into the site. Since neither of us knew when we'd have time to devote to the social media marketing again and since I'd had to suspend the series here at Search Engine Guide, it didn't make sense to continue to cripple the site. I uploaded the new robots.txt file on December 2nd and the engines came crawling the next day. In fact, the site ranks #5 for the phrase "bento" on Google now. Not bad considering the site isn't at all optimized.

Ultimately, this experience proved the points I was trying to make fairly well.

Point #1: You CAN Build a Site Without Google

When we put Bento Yum online and blocked the search engines from indexing it, people thought we were a little nuts. What I wanted to prove was that you can build a web site, even a successful web site without search traffic. Based on the traffic numbers, the sales and the continued growth of the site, I'm confident in saying I was right. There's no doubt things grew more slowly than they would have with the benefit of search traffic, but the site DID grow and the site DID make sales.

Point #2: The Best Way to Build a Business Online in 2007 is to Go Niche

The bento community is a small, but passionate one. It's growing quickly online, but ultimately, there were very few quality sites out there offering up information on bentos. There were even less sites selling bento kits at affordable prices. Finding a need in a niche and filling it was one of the biggest keys to our success. It's a lesson I learned back when I launched The Lactivist and launching Bento Yum cemented it.

Yes, you can launch another widget factory, but the fastest and easiest way to build a lucrative business online today is to find a niche. The Internet reaches the entire world. That means the business that never could have made it a ten or fifteen years ago now has the chance to attract small pockets of people from around the world. Those small pockets can add up to big success.

Point #3: People Respond to Passion

While the Internet has done a great job of bringing small pockets of people together from around the world, it's also done a great job of giving us an infinite number of places to spend our time. There's always another new and exciting site just around the corner. Always another innovative product to tempt you into buying. Catching someone's attention and holding it in this type of environment can be tough. That's where passion comes in.

If you're in business ONLY to make money, you're going to need to put a lot of time and energy into marketing and advertising. If you're building a business around something you love, the passion you hold for your product will spill out into your content. That enthusiasm will not only help draw your visitors deeper into the site, it will give them the motivation to help you spread the word through links and conversations.

Point #4: Social Media Marketing is Not a One Time Endeavor

The biggest take away here is the need to approach social media marketing as an ongoing thing. Social media marketing happens when you join the conversation. If you leave the conversation, social media usually stops working. As part of my social media marketing plan for Bento Yum, I had joined six communities at Flickr, joined one community at Live Journal and was regularly reading about a dozen blogs. All total, I was putting about an hour a day into the social media marketing for Bento Yum. That's not an outlandish amount of time (especially for the pay-off we were seeing) but it is a significant amount of time.

When I stopped posting, we saw drops in traffic and even steeper drops in sales. At first I wondered why the sales drop was steeper, but I quickly realized the communities I had joined were seeing a constant influx of new members. The LiveJournal site had multiple posts each day from members who had just heard about bento and just joined. The constant posting I'd made as a member of the community made us a first stop for many of these new bento addicts. When I vanished from the communities, the lingering memory and traffic from those who'd already found us wasn't enough to keep up a steady stream of sales.

That puts social media marketing into the same category as paid search. While it can be used for short term boosts in traffic, branding and sales, you only reap the full benefit if you budget and plan for ongoing efforts. Turn off the campaign and while you'll still see residual benefits from the traffic you've already built, you'll significantly reduce the flow of new customers.

Overall, while the project didn't go where I wanted it to, it was a valuable learning experience. I was able to reinforce some of the ideas and thoughts about social media I already had, and I was able to learn some painful, but important lessons about how marketers can be received in the social media environment. Abigail plans to continue running the site and I'm holding out hope things will calm down eventually so I can rejoin the community and continue to share the fun that is bento making.

Last week at Search Engine Strategies I finally had the pleasure of meeting up with Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home. Wendy and I have been emailing since last April when she first contacted me to interview me for a feature she was running on her site. As we sat and chatted about some of the things we've worked on together and some things that are coming up, it reminded me of just how important it is to take the time to reply to your emails.

I've long promoted the idea that link building is relationship building and social media marketing is about being part of the passion. My general philosophy of online marketing is to treat people well and to provide them with value. I trust that in return, I'll eventually gain some value myself. In fact, I wrote a three part series about using the tenets from Andrew Carnegie's book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as the basis of your online marketing campaign.

The same thing holds true for your inbox.

See, last April I received an email from Wendy telling me about an article she was writing on the "Moms of SEO." She was looking for some information on the industry and reached out in the hopes I could provide it. I'd never heard of Wendy, but I fired off a quick email telling her I'd be happy to help and to send over the information she needed. She sent it, I told her what I could and she got the article up.

That first email resulted in a flurry of emails back and forth over the next few days and we totally hit it off. I made mention to Robert of the article and he got all excited, telling me "That's the eMoms at Home lady! She's awesome!." Surprised that he'd heard of her, I made my way to her site and started reading. What I'd thought was "just another blog" was actually one of the fastest growing resources for work at home parents on the Internet. In fact, Wendy was also writing a column for Entrepreneur Magazine.

Feeling a little embarrassed, I sent Wendy an email admitting I'd had no idea who she was, but had now started reading her work and just loved it. We had a good laugh and not long after, we became an advertiser on her web site. A week or so later, Wendy published an interview with me. Things spiraled along from there. Wendy invited me to go head to head in Daily Blog Tips "Blogger Face-Off."

We've since gone on to talk about working together on some projects, to team up for Search Engine Guide to sponsor one of her readers to attend BlogHer, to bounce ideas off of each other and to help build each other's networks. Wendy landed a speaking gig for me earlier this year and I've asked her to come on board as a speaker at our upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference.

Why do I say all this?

To make you realize there's a potential business gold mine in your inbox, just waiting for you to discover it. While I built a relationship with Wendy because we hit it off personally and because I now consider her a friend, there's also no denying the business benefits we've both reaped from our relationship.

It's easy to focus on power networking...building those key relationships you know will help you get ahead. It's easy to skip over the email in your inbox from the name you don't know. It's easy to find yourself asking "is there something in it for me" before you take the time to give something to someone else. Ultimately, it's easy to miss opportunity.

Meeting Wendy last week and having the chance to chat with her, meet some of her friends and introduce her to some of mine reminded me that the very best business relationships often come from taking the time to build a friendship. When I answered Wendy's email last year, I figured it would be a one-time thing that ended up with some content for Wendy and a link for me. Little did I know we'd both end up gaining significant value from our relationship.

If you are a small business looking to build links, network, leverage social media and increase your online reputation...consider starting with your inbox.

A website is much like a home. In order for it to function as intended it has to be built to be structurally sound from top to bottom. On the web you can think of search engine spiders as the building inspector who come by from time to time making sure that all areas of your site can be properly access. This isn't a perfect analogy, of course, because the search engines don't issue citations if your site has blocked access to a bedroom. That, and the search engines are also taking stock of the valuables within your home, something that we probably wouldn't appreciate any home inspector to do!

But you can also think of your human visitors as friends that you invite over. Not only do they admire the contents and aesthetics of your home but they also want to make sure they can find certain, ah, facilities, should the need arise.

A properly built web site will ensure that the search engine spiders are able to access all pages of your site with more importance placed on the more important pages. It will also insure that the human visitors are able to accomplish their goals, either finding the information they came for and/or purchasing your product or service.

When optimizing a website we are often faced with tough decisions. What changes should we make? What will be the effect of those decisions? Ideally you want to make changes that only enhance the search engine and user experience. In the last installment I looked at three paths of SEO that quite simply are not your best options. When updating or changing your website any recommended change that falls into any of those three categories should simply be avoided. Today I'm going to discuss three more paths. While none of these are ideal options they do present better choices than the paths addressed previously.

Path 4: Bad for spiders, indifferent for people



Some changes we make really don't have a significant effect on your site visitors, but they can greatly effect what the search engines do. Such changes are usually architectural rather than visual. When making these changes that are not meant for the visitor, be absolutely sure you're not doing anything that will ultimately screw up the search engine's ability to spider and index your site.

A while back we started working on a new client and we had created a robots.txt file and uploaded it to their server. This file really has no purpose for the human visitor but it does tell the search engines which pages or directories should not be indexed. When we created the file we inadvertently excluded the entire site. A few weeks later we were scratching our heads as to why the site wasn't being indexed. This is an extreme example but it exemplifies they types of changes that you must be careful of. A move that is bad for search engine spiders that provides no benefit to your visitors simply isn't going to help you in your optimization efforts.

Path 5: Indifferent to spiders, indifferent for people



With these kinds of changes there is no net gain and no net loss. If a change falls into this category you simply have to ask yourself, "why?" What's the point of making this change? Your human visitors won't care, it won't improve conversion rates and it won't improve search engine spidering. It's a change for the sake of change.

Granted, making a change with no negative effect is a far cry better than any of the changes mentioned previously. Those changes you simply don't want to make at all. Here, there is just no need to make the change. At the same time, if its something that makes a webmaster or boss feel better about the site then by all means make the change. But also measure just to see if any ill or positive effect was made after the fact. You never know, it could ultimately turn out to be a change for the better (or worse!)

Path 6: Bad for spiders, good for people



This is where we start getting into changes that can actually be a tough call to make. And ultimately, the decision to move forward with such changes is a matter of degrees. How bad vs. how good?

Sometimes you absolutely have to make a change that is going to benefit your human visitors that will have a negative effect on search engine performance. Is it worth it to lose that number one ranking in order go increase your conversion rates? Maybe. That question can be answered by asking if any increase in conversion rates will more than make up for the total loss in conversions. But a simple no doesn't automatically make this a bad choice.

Perhaps the change will reduce the total number of conversions from search engines but improve the total number of conversions from other forms of advertising. While your ROI in one area goes down it can go up substantially in another area. All of this has to be factored into any decision you make.

Let's say a change causes your cost per conversion on your SEO efforts to go from $25 to $50. But your radio and TV ads that deliver traffic to your website saw a drop in cost per conversion from $100 to $75. We can't yet tell if this is a good decision or not. We also need to factor in the number of conversions that each form of advertising deliver. Let's say that both methods deliver 100 sales. The cost of the change on the SEO side went from $2,500 to $5,000. On the other hand the cost on the radio and TV side went from $10,000 to $7,500. That's a draw, no savings and no loss. But if just one more sale was made each month on the TV and radio side then you see that the change, while being negative for SEO actually improves your return on investment.

These numbers, of course, are very simplistic and the value changes considerably if the radio and TV cost per conversions drop from $100 to, say, $70. But the point is you have to weigh to total effects of these kinds of changes. Sometimes a simply change to a title tag can cause a considerable drop in rankings but produce more sales than before. That alone can make a change that is a net negative for spiders a big positive for your business.

Deciding what changes to make and when is never easy. But more importantly is understanding why and looking forward to seeing what the end result might be. The thing to remember is that we don't always get these things right. Sometimes we think a change will help but it doesn't. But the great thing about the web is that all changes can be undone quickly. No matter how confident you are about the effect of any change always be sure to measure and track the true results after the fact to make sure your suppositions were correct. If not, you can always reverse course and try something else.

In the next installment I'll discuss the final three paths which are the most beneficial of them all.

Hey Jill,

I am in the process of changing all my URLs from things like news123.html to OurCompany_Announces_New_CEO.html

Are there any problems associated with these wholesale changes, apart from making sure to have a redirect for external links?

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Lorenz

Jill's Response

Hi Lorenz,

I would highly recommend *not* changing your URLs at all. It is a common misconception that keywords in URLs are somehow helpful to search engine rankings, when in reality, they have very little (if any) effect on rankings.

The reasons why people believe they help rankings are many, but generally center on a mixing up of cause and effect, as many people learning about SEO are apt to do.

For instance, when you do a keyword phrase search at Google, you will see your keywords bolded on the search engine results page, including keywords that appear in the URLs. People see this and assume that it means Google factors the bolded words into their relevancy algorithms. Yet, the software that does the bolding is just that ? software that is programmed to bold the queried words that show up in the listings. It's a huge leap to think that the bold type has anything to do with Google's actual algorithm.

Another reason why people wrongly assume that keyword phrases in URLs are a factor in getting a page to show up in the search results is because the top results do indeed often use keyworded URLs! But (and this is a big but) websites that use keyword-rich URLs are using them because someone, somewhere is attempting to optimize the pages to show up in the search results ? which means they are doing a lot more than simply putting keywords in URLs as part of their website optimization. Very rarely will you see a page show up in the search results if the only place the keyword phrase appears is the URL. Most likely the phrase is also being used in the Title tag and other visible places on the page. So again, there's a mixing up of cause and effect.

What has happened over the years is that the mixer-uppers have spread the word that keywords in URLs will help with rankings, so others believe it and make changes to their own URLs, making more and more keyword-rich URLs appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Which, of course, feeds the myth-monster even more!

All that said, this is somewhat of a tricky one to prove one way or another, and it certainly doesn't hurt to use keyword-rich URLs when building a new website. It often makes it easier to remember the URL, which is why on our new High Rankings site most of our URLs will have keywords. It's not for SEO purposes, but for usability purposes. If we didn't have to change our URLs due to switching backend platforms, we definitely wouldn't go changing to keyword-rich file names. But since we had to change them anyhow, I figured we could use our site as a test bed to see what happens when you change URLs. (And yes, I realize we could have done some complicated things behind the scenes to continue to keep our URLs the same as they were, but in this case, we felt changing them and redirecting was our best solution. Especially as I can probably get a few good articles out of it later!)

I can't stress enough that you should never change URLs simply for SEO purposes. But if you do have to change them, and you do want to eke out any possible search engine benefit that you might get, then you should not use underscores between the words, but hyphens instead. Even though Google recently announced that they were going to start reading underscores as a word separator, traditionally they haven't. They do read hyphens as a separator, however. So if Google decides to use URLs to rank pages, then you'd want to at least create them in a way they can read. You would also not want to put two words together like "twowords.html" as they don't separate words that are mashed together that way either.

Where you may benefit from a keyword-rich URL that has its words separated by a hyphen is when another site links to your page by using just the URL because it becomes somewhat of a keyword-rich anchor text link. For example, if someone links to your page with this URL www.example.com/keyword1-keyword2 (instead of using traditional anchor text) you'd still have keyword1-keyword2 as part of the anchor text, which does tell the search engines that the page they're about to go to is at least somewhat relevant to those keyword phrases.

So in answer to the original question, instead of changing the existing URLs, make sure you've optimized the page elements that do matter ? especially the Title tag, the anchor text pointing to that page, and the words on the actual page itself ? and don't worry about the URLs. Changing them can lose any "age equity" that you may have built up with your old URLs, with minimal (if any) effect on rankings.

If after all this you still feel the need to change them, be sure to put 301-redirects in place from the old URLs to the new, and use hyphens rather than underscores.

Hope this helps!

Jill