Showing posts with label semantics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label semantics. Show all posts

Sunday, July 05, 2015

What is the SEO value of offline marketing?

OFF LINE MARKETING HAS EXTREME VALUE WITHIN THE ONLINE MARKETING BUSINESS!

Those who do not understand the connections between off line marketing and online content need to listen up and take action!!!!!


In the post hummingbird era all search engines introduced a very large number of new SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) which ran along side the old SEOVI and added extra value to your keywords in ways that enhance the context and intent of your online content. These new Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators are mostly in the form of Semantic Trust and associated inter-connectivity of different digital entities, and come from the OPSEO side of things.

OPSEO or off page Search Engine Optimisation is not that well understood, and most do not comprehend that OPSEO has two separate components.  The first is ONLINE and the second is OFF LINE. So from a #FUFISM based marketing perspective we have three sectors of Search engine Optimisation that need to be considered and then integrated into your total marketing plan. These are

1) #IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation
2) #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation
3) #OLSEO or Off Line Search Engine Optimisation

The value of In page and off page search engine optimisation is discussed in many places but who talks of the value of Off Line Search Engine Optimisation? 

Off Line Search engine Optimisation or OLSEO,  is the part where you use your off line marketing to PLANT SEMANTIC SEEDS into the thinking patterns and thought processes of your intended target market, hoping that these seeds will grow into so called GOLDEN SEARCH QUERIES.  Golden search queries are those search queries where your intended target market audience uses your KEY WORDS and semantically related terms in their search queries, which result in your online content being at the top of the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

As always understanding your target market audience in great depth is the core issue that needs to be addressed here,   because you want them (your target audience) to be exposed to your key words, so that you can expand on this in your social media marketing and other related online areas to nurture and nourish the semantic seeds that you planted in the off line media.  In other words you need to ensure that your target audience knows what your business, organization or event  is all about, so that they can use the correct terminology in their search queries to surface your online content.

If you simply assume that your intended target market are experts on your subject matter, then you are losing out.  You need to encourage your intended target market to use your desired key words in their search queries, and this process starts by introducing these words and related terminology within the off line world.  Here we are talking about 
  • news  paper advertising and marketing
  • magazines and industry specific periodicals
  • radio interviews and talk shows
  • speaking events and road shows
  • flyers and bill boards 
  • business cards and brouchers
  • any other off line opportunity where you have face tine with your customers, clients, suppliers and other interested parties
 Your SEO starts with the creation of your In Page content, and is then enhanced by your off page work which is basically supplemental marketing, or marketing that supplements your online marketing.  Your supplemental marketing uses all the same research as your original online content and here we are talking of things like  the list below, but include many not mentioned.
  • product, event, company or subject matter research
    • purpose
    • what this is used for
    • how this is used
    • what will the end user needs this for
    • what are the benefits
    • what are the detraction's
    • who should use this and why
    • costs,
    • shelf life
    • availability
    • origins
    • so many other research issues  most of which are subject matter dependent
  • target market research
    • who should read your content and why
    • language issues
    • culture issues
    • demographic issues
    • male / female
    • target market groups and lay out preferences
    • education and literacy skills
  • Target market selection process
  • Topic research
  • key word research
  • Image selection
  • Additional meta data
  • Additional mark up such as schema
  • Author and publisher issues
  • design criteria for online content

Your off line marketing team needs to be aware of  these issues and make wise use of the research notes and other related documentation of both previous as well as future online content.  This will assist them in their choice of words, images, context and related marketing issues, so as to ensure that they are able to plant your desired semantic seeds in meaningful ways,  which will encourage your intended target market audience to use specific words (your key words) when they construct their search queries.  Your social media team will also need these same notes and research data, as they will be expanding on this within their marketing efforts.  Your blogging team will also be using the same set of notes to develop their online content.


It is thus of extreme importance. especially from a #FUFISM based marketing perspective to get all your marketing folks around the same table,  at the same time,  to discuss your total marketing plan, and show each different marketing team, where and how their part of the puzzle fits into the big picture.  This will ensure better documentation of all processes, and enhance cross media marketing efforts.

It is of extreme importance that all your marketing is done within this basic outline, so that each marketing effort can be seen as a stand alone effort, but that it also fits into and augments or supplements your online marketing efforts.  This is an awful lot more important today than it was just a few years back, and the reason is the rapid expansion of the smart phone market and the volume of search traffic that comes from smart phones and other mobile devices.

You should not forget that mobile search is now larger than desktop search, and that many searchers are using last minute searches when in your brick and mortar establishment to ensure that they are getting the best deal, be it price, product support or after sales care.

What this means is that your target market is more educated and more aware of your competition, so you need to ensure that your online content is found above that of your competition, and that your social media team are on the ball, and ready to answer questions at the drop of a hat.

Once again your customers journey starts when they first discover your off line content, and then use the info found within your off line content to venture further, by searching online to discover more about you and your business.  The next step along the way is usually your social media space, and that is the reason that you need to expose your target market to your social media presence within the off line environment, and associate your social media presence with your product, service, event or other information.

Your Off Line marketing thus has an awful lot of value and importance to your online marketing, and needs to be taken seriously.  You need to ensure that all three of the SEO sectors are addressed and properly integrated into your total marketing plan at the highest level.  preferably at the C-SUIT  (Chief Something Officers) level

Once again these three sectors of SEO are, 1) IPSEO, 2) OPSEO, 3) OLSEO

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Google humming bird algorithm and FUFISM

Google humming bird algorithm came about due to the many devious and sneaky issues associated with semantic search, and Google's continued efforts to ensure that semantics are included in their efforts to supply us as end users of most information with the best possible SERP's for each SQ that we perform

Some acronyms that I use in my posts explained for easy reading

SERP = Search Engine Results Page
SQ = Search Query
SEOVI = Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator
FUFISM = Functional User Friendly Integrated Social Media

Semantics is playing an increasingly important role in many parts of our society both online and offline. The many different languages spoken in the global village and the issues associated with translation  can only be addressed through the application of semantics, as idioms and associated meanings get completely lost during translation from one language to another when words alone are translated.

This issue is of extreme importance when translating any language into machine driven responses where automated responses are issued, like supplying a SERP to an SQ and this has not slipped past Google's engineers without any complaints and an awful lot of casual conversation around the many jokes that have been circulated on the internet,  alluding to misinterpretation of the translation associated with idioms.

I live in sunny South Africa, where we have (only) 11 official languages, and a host of dialects as well as many widely spoken languages which are not officially recognised, and we have many localized jokes about the misinterpretation of spoken or even written words, some of which cause great anguish and many harsh words at public meetings where there are a diverse range of people with many different opinions on what should be done and why.  I am talking here about town planing meetings at the local municipality level, where decisions on local issues are made, and the local meaning of many words does not exactly match the official government versions, causing upstream complaints and even blatant hostility from those at higher levels where a different version of things is presented due to the missing semantics of the translated meeting notes, and the fact that these officials have no proficiency in the language used at the meetings where decisions were made.

The issues of semantics are not new to Google, and the engineers at Google have been working on these issues for many years, in many different parts of the world on a rather large scale, but most people have ignored the issues and been rather happy doing so.  The lessons that Google has learned in human speech semantics have been well researched and Google has managed to adopt many of these issues into the semantics associated with digital images, videos and the many audio visual presentations online.

The recent update in Google images, where image search has now got the added advantage of semantics being associated with images in new and novel ways is a great step for google. These changes within image search are of extreme importance to the #Googlehummingbirdalgorithm (humming bird) as they now reflect many keywords, and  meta data   which will be directly associated with, and then linked to  an image.  This introduction of semantics to images allows us to search images by key words and specific items associated with the image content which we can identify within the image.

So how does all this relate back to FUFISM and the HUMMING BIRD ALGORITHM

FUFISM is a marketing philosophy where the social media forms the core  functional element of the communication factors involved in online marketing and is used to integrate all the different marketing strategies into one coherent and integrated project where each marketing campaign may be worked on in isolation, but remains connected to the whole through its links to the social media as well as the publisher and the author or authors of the various online components of each campaign.

All online marketing has the same issues with the core issue being how to ensure that your online information is displayed on the screens of your intended target market group, so that these persons may be enticed to perform your pre-determined call to action by following the onscreen prompts. (some times marketers hide these in plain sight by using very sneaky semantics and insinuations)

Google's humming bird algorithm looks at the content of your search query with new eyes, and has a much deeper understanding of the context of your query, as it is capable of understanding some of the semantics associated with the in-page information, and has the ability to compare these semantics to the semantics of other online resources, such as blogs, web sites and social media posts.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines all have systems and strategies in place to gather as much information about you as an individual as they can, and they use this information along with the semantics of your search query to try and understand exactly what it is you are looking for.  They input all this information in to their search algorithms and the result is a SERP (Search engine results page), which contains a list of pages where they feel that you would most likely find the information that you are looking for.

If you have applied a FUFISM based marketing strategy then your Authorship markup, publisher Markup and social media activities as well as blog posts and web site content marketing  will be aligned and reflect a common semantic element that is threaded through your work which would link them all together in Google's eyes

When put together here in this short article it sounds so simple, but it is in reality a very difficult task to achieve as there are so many misunderstandings of the interpretations of the work that an SEO consultant or practitioner does, with the primary reason being that  people do not realise that Search engine Optimisation is the collective efforts of your entire workforce to ensure that your intended target market finds your online information when using a search engine of any nature, and that these persons then follow your intended call to action statement.

This infographic of Google's Humming Bird Algorithm should help you put some of the things I discussed in this post into perspective.


online pages visited during research for this post.

this list is not exhaustive and some may have fallen through the net.  If so I do apologize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/google-hummingbird-where-no-search-has-gone-before/
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229506
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/26/net-us-google-search-idUSBRE98P11O20130926
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/google-hummingbird-means-content-marketers-143119302.html
http://www.copyblogger.com/google-hummingbird/
http://www.ciol.com/ciol/news/199368/google-hummingbird-update-affects-websites-black-hat-seo
http://realbusiness.co.uk/article/24523-seo-guide-to-google-hummingbird
https://plus.google.com/+MarkTraphagen/posts/JH1gMKtwcfR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crvqKS-CRNM
http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/fighting-facebook-google-sprucing-up-photo-features-on-google-plus-1.1282871
http://fourdots.co/blog/humming-in-google-minor-231/
https://plus.google.com/+MarkTraphagen/posts/fPpN8wGqPoA
http://moz.com/blog/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS3V-FkUinI#t=739
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJZIg3WlL74