hal9000.ie

Google launched their latest iteration in search recently with the +1 button.

You’ll start to see this appear across the web in search results, and on websites. It’s the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘Like’ button and it’s Google’s attempt to get some of the social data that Facebook has in spadefuls.

It’s a social layer that is being built in to search and your results will be influenced by those in your social network and the items that they have ‘plus oned’. Having said that, your social network are contacts you have in Google (in Gmail and Google profiles), which is not the social beast that Facebook is.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online.   TechCrunch

So how does this affect search engine optimisation (SEO)? Well the number of people who have plus-oned a web page may become a ranking signal for Google. If  people are recommending it, then it’s a strong case for the quality of a page.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too crazy about the ‘+1′ naming of the concept, but let’s see how well it takes off.

You can take a look at the top right of this post to see it in action (feel free to ‘plus one’ it).

You can get one to add to your WordPress site by using this plugin. Others are available for different platforms.

Your website will probably be the foundation for your online presence, so be sure to put the right bricks in place before you start.

Read on to see some factors involved in the decision and get some inspiration from seeing how others have done it.

Cool Domain Names

Ma.tt – This is the blog of Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, the open-source blogging and CMS platform. The.tt is the country code for Trinidad and Tobago. As you’d expect his blog also has a great theme. The Digital Marketing Institute’s site is built on WordPress.

Jenn.ie - Actually, I haven’t got this one yet, but I’d rather like to..

Appvise.me -another way of creating a cool domain name is to get a.me. This young Icelandic company is building a recommendation engine for apps.

.Me domains were formerly the domain names for Montenegro until they became so popular with the ‘call to action’ and virtual ‘me’ brigade. It’s quite difficult now to find available .me domain names that have active verbs.

Ow.ly – this is a URL shortener used with Hootsuite. So, of course it’s short. It’s also the ccTLD for Libya.

Sift.ie – sift.ie is an Irish start-up and the name has a nice ring to it. They offer a service to ‘sift’ through the deals from voucher sites like CityDeal and email only the relevant deals based on the user’s preferences.

Optim.al – this company aims for ‘optimal’ Facebook ads. It’s easy to remember and optimal.com was taken many years ago. The domain is Albanian.

Sociable.co – the domain hails from Colombia and the similarity to a company suggested these might become popular. But there aren’t too many.

Brand Building

It’s generally advisable to try and register the different TLDs for your name to protect your brand. Also, re-direct them to your main domain. Visitors often forget whether it’s a.ie or a.com when typing in a name, so it’s good to have both. Even if your business starts off small, allow yourself the online real estate for future expansion.

Next.com – you might think this was the UK clothes retailer, but you’d be wrong. This one is owned by Apple and re-directs to the new ‘white’ iPhone 4. A neat idea. But to find clothes, you’ll have to go to www.nextdirect.com.

DropBox.com – one of the most useful services I use is DropBox. This is a great name that is easy to remember. You ‘drop’ documents into the ‘box’ on the cloud and then you can access them from any device online.

hal9000.ie – when you go to develop your brand you need to do some research on domains and see what’s available. You may choose a name that you feel reflects your business. For us, the name hal9000 was chosen as it refers back to the supercomputer called Hal, Series 9000, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was a time before the internet, or digital marketing, existed. Hal reflected futuristic computer technology at the time, but now technology has moved on radically, so it serves as a play on the original name.

It wasn’t possible to get the hal9000.com domain and this is a weakness. Having said that, our target market is primarily Irish and the .ie is the most relevant.

Read more about brand building.

Irish Businesses

.ie domains are the best for those sites which target Ireland only. However, you generally need to be a registered business or trademark to get the name. See Irish Domain Registry at IEDR.ie for more details.

Irish domain name registrations are very popular and are currently running at an increase of 37% each year. Because they are more difficult to register, they tend to be higher quality sites and less spam-like. In fact,.ie domains are amongst the top five safest domains in the world [IEDR.ie]

Why.ie – this one belongs to the IE Domain Registry and the name says it all. It aims to promote.ie domains. This is a useful site giving you the advantages of a .ie domain.

123.ie – there’s a sing-song vibe to this and the radio jingle has been very effective for the company. It’s an example of a domain name that has no keywords but has established a brand name to set them apart. It’s distinctive. Avoid names that are hard to say, for example those with hyphens

Ireland.com – the Irish Times scooped up this one a long time ago (14 years ago – older than Amazon.com). Domestic and international traffic is guaranteed with a name like this.

International Markets

In targeting international markets, it’s generally best to have a country-specific top level domain name (TLD) of the country you’re targeting. For example,  .co.uk in the UK or .fr in France, .de in Germany etc. However, sometimes this is not possible. In France, for instance, you need to have a physical presence in the country in order to register the domain. China has experienced a huge growth in .cn domains.

www.Pants.com -   this might have you think undies (or maybe nonsense!), but in the US where this .com is presumably targeted, they’re selling trousers. This illustrates the importance of having the right keywords for your target market. Even if you start small, you may be exporting globally eventually.

WWW or non-WWW

The www at the beginning of your domain name is optional and leaving it out will make your name shorter. Also Google (in Webmaster Tools) allows you set a preference for the www or non-www version of your domain name. For search engine optimization (SEO) reasons, re-direct the www to the non-www (or vice versa), so that all links are being counted by Google to the one domain.

Quick Top Level Domain Overview

A top level domain (TLD) is the last part of the domain name. Here are the main ones:

.com – most popular and used for sites with an international audience

.org - for non-profits and informational sites

.net – used for business

.info – relatively cheap and so often used by spam sites

.eu – with a European audience and theme

.edu – used for educational (mainly US-based)

.tv – useful for multimedia sites

.mobi – mobile sites – often a subdomain of a main site can be used to hold the mobile specific site which can be picked up by a mobile browser. However, building an app may be a more appropriate solution.

WordPress has gazillions of plugins to perform a variety of functions. Here are a few that are my favourites, either because they save time or look good – or both.

While you may have come across some of these before, hopefully there’s something new.

1. Social

One of my favourites is the TweetMeme Retweet button. It easily allows your posts to be retweeted and shows a count of how many times. You can see it above this post.

And it’s used by TechCrunch, so you’ll be in good company.

2. Mobile

If you check your analytics, you may  be surprised how much of your traffic is coming from mobile platforms. WP-Touch is one of the most popular plugins to render your site for the smartphone screen size. There is now an updated version available, WP Touch Pro with more colour customization.

Here’s what a website looks like rendered on a smartphone without any plugin or mobile-enabled functionality – very difficult to use:

And here’s what a blog site with WP Touch looks like:

3. Sitemap

This site map is for your visitors. If your site is more than a few pages then it’s always a good idea to give your visitors a sitemap in the footer to supplement the navigation and help them find what they want. The one I use is Dagon and was recommended to me by Inspiration, a Dublin Web Design company that specialises in WordPress implementations.

4. SEO

With WordPress, you need an search engine optimization (SEO) plugin in order to customize your meta title and description tags. All In One SEO by Michael Tarbert is probably the most common SEO plugin, but Yoast’s WordPress SEO has more functionality.

5. Broken Links

Broken Link Checker is a handy one to tell you your broken links. Links can become broken either because of typos or because the site your linking to has changed. This one is a time-saver. It’s better for you to find your broken links than Google’s spiders.

6. Related Posts

If one of your readers gets to the bottom of your post, then they’re probably interested in what you have to say. So, offer them some other related posts. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is great for this. It allows some customization so that categories or tags can be excluded and it can also display them in your RSS feed.

7. Widget Placement

This is one of my favourites. You can choose to display a specific widget on the pages/ posts of your choice. In this way, you can customize your sidebars to be more relevant to the page. It’s called Widget Context.

8. Back-ups

In anything to do with computers, back-ups have to be the most boring task. Let this plugin take care of it for you behind the scenes. BackUpWordPress can back-up your entire site, including database, each day. You can even choose to have it emailed to you. Email it to a gmail account and have Google store it for you for free.

You’ll find all of them at WordPress.Org.

What’s your favourite plugin?

Here is a sneaky way of finding out who else is targeting your keywords. It’s a Google search parameter called ‘allintitle‘. This is a quick and easy way of seeing which other web pages have this keyword in their page meta Title. Having a keyword in the meta title indicates that the site is targeting this term for search traffic (if they’ve done any SEO work anyway).

You simply type in allintitle:your keyword into Google and the results will show pages that have this in the title. You can then refine the results for a more localised Irish picture by selecting ‘Pages from Ireland’ on the left sidebar.

For example if you are targeting the term “online credit card payments” then this is what it will look like:

You can use parentheses to get an exact match or no parentheses to get a broad match.

If you use this in conjuntion with the Google Keyword Tool to research search volumes for terms, then you have a valuable insight into what’s being searched for, and how competitive the term is.

Shift Happens

WorldNet TPS are running an event in May to explore the changing nature of online payments. It’s called Shift Happens and features presentations from some key people in the industry including:

1. Dermot Daly, founder of Tapadoo, one of Ireland’s leading app creation companies
2. Damian Lawlor, Managing Director of Google Media Business Solutions
   
3. David Johnston founder and MD of Owjo
4. James Grimes, Sports Book Product Manager, Paddy Power
   
5. John Clarke, Head of Product Innovation with WorldNet TPS
   

It’s an invite-only event (due to space restrictions) and will be on May 5th 2011 in the Guinness Storehouse (and yes – there is a pint on for the attendees).

Discussions will surround the need for merchants to support multiple online platforms for their customers and also how different channels are opening up new opportunities for growth.

“Multichannel” retailers, those with traditional and online outlets, are gaining in market share against the internet “pureplays” (Amas)

Mobile Commerce

51% of UK’s population buy online and 15% do so via a mobile phone (Amas).

Social Commerce

1 in every 11 people are on Facebook (642 613 700) [Q2 2011](SocialCommerceToday.com)

For those who can’t make the event, we’re going to video the presentations and tell you the key takeaways from the afternoon, for your delight. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, prepare your jaw for dropping with the following infographic from SocialBakers:

Engagement is the holy grail of online marketing today and one of the emerging digital trends is the ‘gamification‘ of online platforms. It means the adding of game-like functionality or features to non-game applications.

Everyone likes to play games right? So, give them something fun to do and you’ll keep them longer, and they’re more likely to come back. The key thing is making it goal oriented. One of the biggest examples is FourSquare where you can attain the goal of becoming Mayor of a place.

The approach takes ideas from games and applies them to other areas where the aim is to encourage certain behaviours, such as returning customers. This Google Insights chart shows the rise in interest in the term as shown through search. The graph largely reflects US search, resulting from the more mature online market there.

Ways of gamifying include:

• giving badges for achieving goals (eg. FourSquare)
• showing a progress bar for things like form competions, profile completions eg. LinkedIn
• achievement levels for customer loyalty
• games with virtual rewards
• games with real rewards like entering a draw or getting a discount
• adding small games to entertain and encourage site retention

One of the recent ones created in Ireland was for Tourism Ireland and is a game on  Facebook. You can play it for yourself at IrelandTown. What would be interesting to see is how successful the game is and how the success is being measured. Tourism Ireland seems to be the first national tourism agency to use a game like this to promote their country and it is certainly an innovative strategy to use. By playing the game the user agrees to:

• allow IrelandTown access to the user’s basic publicly shared data
• allow direct emails from IrelandTown
• allow wall updates
• allow IrelandTown access the user’s data

This is valuable data and is most likely well-targeted in that people who play the game will probably already have some interest in Ireland.

But it’s not just a digital marketing trend, gamification is being used in training and various kinds of product design.

In the online context, it’s a little like the incredible popularity of social networks – people like to be social. Like all the best ideas, it’s obvious in hindsight. The online technology and broadband facilitated this growth. Similarly, people like to play games and earn things. Again the technology is there (and accessible) to facilitate. The key thing is tapping in to human behaviour.

Learn more about gamification in Business Week’s CEO Guide to Business Gamification.

Here is a cool SEO (search engine optimization) tool to visualize competitors with websites in your space that are ranking with Google. You can easily see the terms that they’re ranking for and it also shows the relationship between them.

You can create an SEO Visualization Graph for one term and then layer other terms on top. The graph will show how the various websites are related in targeting these terms.

The tool uses Google’s search results to show the top results for the given terms. The graph then displays the results in a great visual way to provide clarity.

Take a look at the following graph created for the search term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ with the term ‘Digital Marketing Dun Laoghaire‘:

You do see some spurious results however. For example, one of the results for the term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ is for a wedding photographer presumably because he has a footer link on his website with anchor text to an SEO company.

If you add in another term, ‘online marketing Dun Laoghaire‘, this is what the picture looks like:

They also have a similar tool for personal use with Facebook which shows how your friends are connected to one another (but you probably know that already).

Create your own at TouchGraph.