Caffeine ranking

Caffeine ranking

Yesterday was the first clear day in a month, clear and sunny enough to dream about snowy peaks, ski vacations, Christmas and presents… after the rain is gone, one can see clearly that we all are eager and busy to update our brand platforms, deeply immersed in Google Wave or Huddle’s tags-based collaboration. The localization of our branding platform in 4 new languages runs well, the last projects for 2009 are polished on a staging server.

Recently some clients of mine have been asking about Google changing the SEO game again, why all their linkbuilding efforts crashed, why strong on-page and off-page ranking factors are so messed and interwoven, why we optimized the websites of 3 direct competitors for top3, do we provide a top3 ranking guarantee – you got the idea.

Well, after the last month updates and Google Caffeine grabbing real-time results twice faster, chances are you are not top3 anymore, your competitors grab the most of the leads (don’t worry – they don’t). With only few organic results showing up above the fold of the browsers, recent changes at Google mean top3 rankings are more valuable than ever, and SEOs will have “few” more Christmas projects.

Crawling deeper, it means that we all need a brand new victory plan for 2010, a platform foundations upgrade, regardless whether to launch a new product, rebrand your company and emerge stronger.

So, get your brand moving again and grow on your global top5 ranking mission. Still I have to admit – there are some brand-building elements, where we have to forget about precise control and “the long-term healthy future” – it’s only the clear facts and the very moment of NOW which exists. The key metrics are still the same – Authority, fresh growing Content and relevant Anchor links. Website growth rate is getting very imporant, as well as organic brand growth.

How much of your time does it take, dear Mr. CBO? An hour to set up the platform, 3 hours to train the co-workers, an hour a day for writing, updates and monitoring, permanent linkbait and snippet links stacking /scultping. Brand-building is a process, not an event.

In the end of the day it gives us 3 sweet competitive advantages to outrank and outperform the competitors: top ranking, brand awareness in thousands of web channels and a brand-crisis proof shield.

So, don’t moan – act now! Fish where the fish are, in the muddy postcrisis waters. Only after that can we escape the “unable-to-stop” collective insanity, visiting dozens of global locations, collecting music, wisdom and tribal art, inspired and creative, full of fresh energy, as in the good old school days.

December is always full with tons of professional SEO webinars and seminars, so I’m looking forward to seeing you there or on our InterNations Christmas party!

Virtual branding escapism

Brand Trust

Oh my dear Nielsen,

I do agree that “virtual” and “real” friends are our best brand builders (not only on our birthday), but consumer’s recommendation from known people or strangers is not a form of advertising. You also missed the biggest brand trust builder -  Google’s top5 organic search results (I hope intentionally

Social media is the key for building trust in brands?
Yup, in a few “developed” countries, the rest of the world use it for time killing and enterprise resources wasting activities.

Consumers trust real friends, virtual strangers and brand websites the most? So, I have to start to trust my virtual friends same way like the people I know, right?

Yada yada. It’s like “the law of big numbers” by Mr. Power. You start a spammer’s “social network”, expose thousands of personal emails in their profile URL to Google and than you claim that Quantity is what matters. When you “build your network”, you do some business with 1 in 100 people, good businesses with 1 in 1000 and than “1 in 10000 of those people will become mentor, supporter, helper in your life”.

Well, I really have great ideas sharing and collaboration experience with hundreds of “virtual friends”, but I do care only for real friends I’ve met in personal (most of which started out as online ones .

Do we need a friend/girlfriend in every city?
Nope, just few real friends, who care, dare and move ahead, together eventually.

Just a recent example: When you share your birthday wish (to help few kids from “underdeveloped” countries get a color text-book and attend a school at least for few days) with hundreds of “socially responsible and concerned” western “virtual friends”, you get (accidental, inspirational and spontaneous) response by few “real friends” from your eastern neighborhood?! and zero feedback from them.

Hey Mark, where’s the “friends”-list sanitazing app? Let’s make every day a great one and let’s care about our real friends and Future. Yeah, birthdays, holidays, virtual or real…

THANK YOU FRIENDS for all your phone, facebook, email, twitter and sms birthday messages. I’ll have a small out of town/ traffic/ heat/ smog chill-out party with lot of music, cocktails, fruits and icecream… A big thanks again for all the birthday wishes, everyone!

Do you have virtual friends, who are as good as real ones (without huge exposure in facebook, twitter and other illusions ?

BrandBuild to the top

One of my best friends: CBO

Differentiation evolved from
“what it is” to “what it does” to
“how you feel” to “who you are”.

Globalism removed borders, we created tribes – intimate social worlds, which we understand and participate in. Brands are the little gods of our modern life – each ruling different need, activity, mind share, tattoo, mood or situation. What is your tribal identity, which tribe you want to join today?

When a prospect finds your offer or company (one-click away, first choice in Google, good color, strong contrast, irresistible arresting brand message, etc.) he thinks:

1. What is it (Who are you) ?
2. What it does (What do you do) ?
3. Why should I care (Why does it matter, what’s in it for me) ?

It’s always better to get a rough answer to the right questions, than a detailed answer to the wrong ones, right?  Otherwise it will be less that it could be. So, go ahead, ask them Why you climb Everest? Because it’s there, dude! Why we have to brand-build? Because the BRAND DEPENDS on others for it’s existence: on 72% online searchers of products in information in EU, on the 85% top3 Google search result visitors for any given phrase and market niche.

Why Branding is such a big deal now?

Because our society has moved from mass production to mass customization. We are info-rich and time-poor. Now people value feelings more than informations. Design and aesthetics are the language of feeling. Only one competitor can be the cheapest. The other HAVE TO use branding to become a guarantee of trustworthy behavior. Our purchase choices have muliplied in thousands (sometimes million companies/ websites) and we have to differentiate, to stand out of the crowd, to be in top 3. If we can’t be #1 or 2, or 3, it’s better to redefine our field or to change our tribe/ category.

When people talk to themselves it’s called insanity, when companies do that, it’s called marketing, when customers talk about companies, it’s called brand-building.

Here comes the CBO (Chief Brand Officer)

Lot of people talk about it, few understand it and even fewer know how to manage it but still everyone wants it. Brand-building is connecting strategy to creativity, logic to magic, communicating and managing the difference.
Brand-building is a process that can be studied, analyzed, learned, taught, replicated and managed. Go for the huge worldwide trend of tomorrow; don’t look just for tiny improvements of yesterday’s data.
The more a brand becomes distributed, the more it requires strong centralized management.
The CBO is focused around building and managing sustainable and successful world-class brands.
It’s not about likeness, it’s about understanding: a brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. The position and degree of trust is the determination and differentiation factor.
A CBO is the brand’s personal recession-proof brandometer – he will show you what the brand is and what makes it tick, he will manage your online reputation, write a brand education program, define the brand’s DNA for constant regeneration of corporate memory, he will control the chaos, necessary for brand’s innovation. If you are tired of thick quantitative studies and analysis paralysis, he will bring you some great brand building ideas into sharp focus, he’ll give you real market insights and new niche ideas in less than 3 days, using a rooster of worldwide research partners and databases. You will never skew or loose the focus.
The CBO is the executive, who lies awake at night, thinking “How can we build the brand?”. He will manage brand collaboration, innovation and strategy at the highest corporate level, forming a human bridge across strategy and creativity, connecting the left and right brain of your business.
A charismatic brand is any product, service or company for which people believe there’s no substitute. Any brand, backed by enough courage and imagination can become a charismatic brand, even yours.

Am I a CBO? I was for more than 10 years. Now CBOs are my best friends (and customers) in the great wild world out there. So, are you a CBO?

Brand name & Google ranking

Corn Brand wars (1340) proof

Choosing a name for your business, domain and brand is often the single, most critical decision you will ever make. Today it’s very easy to asses a solid, long-lasting, and highly profitable name. Can your brand name hook the brains in your niche? Yes, we all know that it should be intuitive, suggestive, benefit based, semantically short, easy spelled, memorable, sweet sounding, scalable and search-engine-friendly, so you will have a chance to hook them on mnemonics. Now what?

Before and after the launch of Google’s Chrome browser, more and more people love to skip irrelevant search engine results and attempt to reach websites directly by:
- Guessing and typing presumable URL domains
- Typing common brand names
- Using the search phrase suggestion tools in their browser
- Using search trends and social media “hot trends” tools
- Following links on web 2.0 status updates, social and RSS feeds

Sure, over 80% of the traffic still comes from the search engines (presuming the website is search-engine-friendly and optimized) and the first 3 SERP results still get 86% of the traffic for any given phrase, but this trend will change and we do see dozens of exceptions to this rule in our web reports already.

Google’s latest search engine ranking algorithm places Heavy emphasis on Branding, an enormous weight on branded search results. The top in most of our customer’s web analytics reports start with brand names, good brand names, burned, branded and tattooed into the customer’s mind, even in the marketplace.

SEO is not simple as the Florida update anymore. We notice more then 5 changes in Google ranking algorithm every single week. Smart brand’s CEOs and SEOs should incorporate the BRAND as the highest “trustful-content” factor and there are increasingly important signals from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his recent talk:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool, brands are not getting away, it must have a genetic component” he said.

If you love researching and reverse engineering (as I do) you can track the recent changes with hot phrases to see Google’s changes. In most of the cases brands have 7 to 9 of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords.

The trend is clear:  Google is promoting brands for big money core keyphrases. Further more Google’s Chrome tracks your behavior and content interaction through Google Accounts/Friends, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google DoubleClick/  AdWords, Google Reader, iGoogle, Feedburner, Youtube and other Giant’s channels.

Lately I see hundreds of URLs and company names, which are even hard to spell. If a customer doesn’t  agree on a name/ domain/ identity change, we reject branding or SEO services, due to poor results. It’s not necessary to start your name with a strong-sounding consonants (like the sounds of “D” and “T” in DECART), or set a song-singing rhyme in a combination of suggestive words like in “BrandBuild”, but it helps to emphasis, remember, get huge market and web authority.

The web is a vast wilderness in which your brand message can run in obscurity, so don’t work IN your business every day, work ON your brand equity and awareness and we will see us each other on the top.

Perfect time and place to buy?

Price trend for 60 days

These days I get trend alerts for services and products with over 520% price deviation! (my last booked fare moved from $650 to $3420 and back to $870 in just 2 months).

Today we can track service prices and scan product barcodes at the store, choosing the perfect time and source to get what we are looking for. Awesome, isn’t it? Same product, same quality, 526% price amplitude ? Welcome to 2009!

Name it as you want it  – crisis, shaking demand or branding wars…

SEO analysis & the Enterprise

SEO Analysis for the Enterprise

If we do a quick comparison of the last 3 enterprise SEO analysis reports, they all share the same onpage/ offpage problems:

• Mature and huge brands with rarely noted websites, scattered on 3-4 “fresh” domains on foreign servers;
• FRAME-based! corporate websites with zero URL visibility or rewriting;
• Thousands of products, hidden in ZERO crawl-rate framed pages and MISSING /duplicated metadata;
• Missing lead capturing system or CRM – 30% of the “requests” were found in the spam folders;
• Extremely low traffic, measured in raw log files, full of unfiltered dummy robot and spam visits;
• Corporate focus and business sectors are presented NOwhere, industrial slang EVERYwhere;
• Hundreds of “keywords”, stiffed on the homepage, leading to 0.4 -0.7% keyword density;
• Poor navigation, structure, internal linking, MERE external linking;
• Bad server response codes, HUNDREDS of bad crappy neighbor websites on the same shared IP?!;
• Less than 60% indexed content by Google. Yahoo and Live are doing better!?
• ZERO ranking for the 5 top priority phrases in ALL search engines;
• Top5 ranking (by a “SEO expert”) for a few phrases, which NOone searched in the last 3 months;
• Poor URL mentions in the search engines, some non-relevant poor quality links in local FFA directories;
• DMOZ and Yahoo virgin, ZERO blog links or bookmarks, mere brand reputation and web2.0/social media backlinks;
• Alexa…

I will skip the next 17 pages…

The fun part is that in the end of the day we won the SEO tender NOT with a statistically proved triple conversion and double sales increase strategy, but with the “sense that the consultants know why we don’t like our website look-and-feel”

The moral? If the line of business don’t gets the SEO part, shoot the Usability, Customer experience or even the CRM part.
… and keep brandmoving. See ya at the top!

Branding trends & friends

It’s a nice snowy Sunday afternoon up in the mountain.
High time to recap the branding landscape in 2009.

Top performance through Digital brand management.
It’s a whole new layer in the business management workflow.
When we add Search & Social (marketing), Leads & Sales (CRM),
Mobile & Local (services), Micro & Global (sharing), Grids & Clouds (computing), the sky is the limit for creative innovation.
Hot chocolate with icecream, please.

Caviar globalists? No more

Caviar days are over

Every year in late January, like today, heads of the leading companies worldwide go to the Swiss resort of Davos.

Around 2,500 participants from over 90 countries – politicians, artists, leaders and NGO campaigners jet off for a week of networking events and workshops “for a better world”.

Fighting the crisis or having some fun in the snow?
Economic times have become harder. Paying members are about 1,000 companies, non-business participants attend meetings for free. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are not attending this year, Bono and Peter Gabriel are.

US president Obama has told several of his biggest people to stay at home.
The key players of the world economy China and Russia are side by side.
The event is just a very high-powered talking shop. Some launch global initiatives to fight poverty and epidemics, other get an opportunity to make their case and meet people who have the money to help them.

Caviar, lobster and Dom Perignon are out. Ham, cheese and wine are in. Caviar parties by top Wall Street bankers used to be the top buzz for the annual Davos forum, but the belt is tightening today. Leading banks like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, are not holding parties anymore.

Aren’t these people who want to solve the world’s problems the same who caused them?

Bad news for our Caviar SEO campaign today.
I should stick to tiger shrimps for dinner.

See you at the top!

Success vs Failure

Success vs Failure

While it still works to inspire a  weekend Google Bomb and make the government #1 failure, we can’t change the optimistic human mindset and drive for Success.

The search volume for Success (успех in Bulgarian) is over 12 times higher than the search for Failure (провал).

Millions of creative optimists out there…
See you at the top!

Traffic vs. Conversion

Traffic versus Conversion

The holiday’s shopping fever is over. While the visitors trend to our caviar and fashion website projects dropped down to their “normal” levels, reflecting the worldwide search volume trend for December/January, ecommerce conversion jumped 3 times. The battle is Quality vs. Quantity. Performance matters, beyond trends. In the end of the day the 80/20  ratio is rock solid.

How is your conversion doing lately ?

Smart & Creative gadgets 2009

After a deep research for my smart tools upgrade, Santa brought me a new smartphone, camera, monitor and MIDI controller.
They all share a common trend for 2009:  slim and stylish design, hundreds of consolidated features, precise touch control and web-native applications.

Smartphone

HTC Touch pro

If you need mobile office power, fast clickable touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, GPS and Wi-Fi,  you probably will check the top5 business smart-phones: BlackBerry Storm, Palm Treo Pro,  Nokia E71 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, Tmobile G1 …

…but you may end your holiday with HTC’s Touch Pro, like I did.

All you need – wherever you are.

Digital Camera

Canon PowerShot SX1

Recently gone through some hunting, I  decided to compare Canon EOS 450D with the new Powershot SX1.  The pictures from the dSLR were comparable to the ones by the SX1, which is a great hybrid – crisp macro and enormous telephoto zoom in a one-hand package was a perfect fit.
If you wanna get rid of your old and heavy SLR,  Canon SX1 is empowered with features never seen before on a compact camera:

• 20x wide-angle optical zoom
• 10 Megapixel CMOS
• new DIGIC 4 processor for fast performance
• 4 fps continuous shooting and
• full HD movie capture!

2009 will be the year of the rich, detailed, crisp full HD images in a wide ISO range of shooting situations with full manual control on the move.

All-in-one LCD Monitor

Samsung T260HD

I was tired of messing with 3 screens in the studio, so an upgrade to a full HD, crystal clear LCD monitor with integrated DTV tuner was a perfect fit.
The Samsung T260HD is a 26″ Widescreen full HD+ (1920×1200) resolution with embedded DTV tuner, 10000:1 dynamic contrast, 2 invisible built-in SRS TruSurround speakers and 5ms grey-to-grey response time.
The viewing angle in both axis is over 160 degrees, so I can follow what’s is going on literally from everywhere, even from the bent glass bathtub. Finally all video cables go to the same unit – Analog RGB, DVI, HDMI, Component, and TV.  The only problem I had was, that there is no VESA wall mount, so I had to mount it on a wall TV swivel/ tilt stand.

MIDI controller/ Stage piano

KAWAI mp5

8 years later I’m happy to get back to daily jam sessions with hundreds of native sampled instruments, played on an advanced hammer action professional stage piano. After testing CME VX8 and Yamaha Motif XS8, I decided to stick to KAWAI and their 80 years of piano sound experience. The new KAWAI MP5 is sure to satisfy the most demanding performer’s need for impeccable sound quality, responsive touch, 4 zones and powerful control.  Not to mention using it as master 88-key MIDI controller in your  home-based studio. Boasted with 256 high-quality instrument sounds,  including Kawai’s famous Concert Grand piano, the sound is awesome! Hope to find a KAWAI K1 library, which was my favorite 12 years ago.