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NOISIA: Split The Atom – the importance of on-page SEO

Whilst doing some research for an album I wanted, I found a pretty good example of why on-page SEO is important.

The artist NOISIA recently released their new album Split The Atom. Having heard various excerpts on podcasts and so on, I was keen to find out more – so I dropped ‘noisia split the atom’ into Google.

In essence, this couldn’t be a more qualified search term: it contains the band name along with the name of their new album (which, no doubt, will be associated with all sorts of press releases and similar). And, in fact, that’s rather the problem:

Noisia aren’t even on page 1, despite being the producers of the music: in fact, they’re usurped by the likes of ‘Filestube’ (which, for the unitiated, is an illegal file download repository). The BBC feature first – which is understandable given the authority of that domain.

Things aren’t all bad, however: at least their Myspace profile is up there at #3…but this isn’t great.

In honesty, whether this is an actual failure for Noisia is debatable, since Play.com features ahead of them and they’re clearly only interested in selling their music for them…I suppose the question remains as to whether they care – or want to sell directly to their fans. Perhaps this isn’t an issue for them.

For those interested, you can buy the album here on Amazon.

2010
08/25
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Kiss Flights (Flight Options) collapses into administration

Following on from my other post about Sun4U, another UK travel operator has gone bust – this time it’s Flight Options (more commonly known as Kiss Flights). A quick look at the site shows there’s only a holding image on the homepage – but the Google cache reveals a bit more content.

For those of you who’ve been let down by them, here’s their contact details:

Reservations & Customer Services – telephone: 0871 737 4155

sales@kissflights.com
E-mail Sales with pre-booking enquiries, for quotes and group bookings, or setting up an account with us.

customerservices@kissflights.com
E-mail Customer Services with post-booking enquiries, to discuss amendments. General enquiries welcome.

As per my entry on Sun4U, here’s a critical look at their website:

  • No tracking code; there’s no code in the site to tell them how many visitors they were getting…how’re they supposed to measure ROI? No wonder they went bust…
  • Basic design; no crime here (unless you’re the style police), but come on – it hardly encourages me to part with my hard-earned money.
  • All content opens in a new window; If you visit http://www.kissflights.com//CustomerInfo.aspx, clicking on any of the left-nav items opens the content in a new window. Bizarre practice.

Bye bye, Kiss Flights.

Note: According to Wikipedia, Kiss Flights was sold to Flight Options Ltd in January 2009 following the collapse of XL Leisure Group. It was founded by Michael Smith and Paul Moss, who had previously worked at failed tour operator XL Airways which also went into administration in September 2008.

Perhaps it’s time for these people to stop running travel businesses?

2010
08/18
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Solving pagination issue with Monochrome WP theme

If you’re using the Monochrome WordPress theme from Mono-Lab, you may have noticed a problem with the pagination function at the bottom of the post list:

Monochrome pagination

When clicking any of the numbers, it breaks and returns a 404. This can be solved by editing navigation.php and changing the following line of code from:

user_trailingslashit('page/%#%/', 'paged');;

to:

user_trailingslashit('index.php/page/%#%/', 'paged');;
2010
08/13
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Sun4U go into administration

Sun4U collapsed late on 11th August, stranding hundreds (BBC article explains a bit here). The website directs people to call ABTA for more info, and all looks lost.

To be honest though, looking at that website, I’d be VERY hesitant to trust them in the first place:

  • It looks like a dog’s dinner: this isn’t a crime in itself, but the homepage is a complete bombsite – bad Flash animations, little in the way of content, inconsistent wording/capitalisation…it just looks crap.
  • It’s been built entirely in Dreamweaver: again this isn’t a crime, but hardly the hallmark of an industry-standard website.
  • This is a 12-page site (including the homepage) – and the way it’s built means it’s very un-search-friendly…yet it has managed to become Pagerank 2 (I know PR supposedly doesn’t stand for a lot these days, but still)
  • Commented-out code: again, not a crime – but it’s for content that was from Easter….?
  • The Google Analytics tracking code is in the header: definitely not a crime, but it’s meant to go in the footer
  • No robots.txt

All in all, it looked like a bad idea from the outset in my opinion. Bye bye Sun4U.

2010
08/13
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Bidding on brand terms in Google PPC

As has been mooted for a while, Google UK have announced that anyone will be able to bid on brand terms in PPC campaigns, where before it was restricted only to the legit owners of those brands. September 14th is the date that this will start.

Google have been accused of profiteering off brands who’ve built trust for their brands via search – but Google say that it simply widens the footprint of those brands by allowing 3rd parties to use that brands’ name in their PPC copy. I am quite split on the issue: on one hand it does indeed widen the footprint of a brand – but this is perhaps being naive about what Google will gain out of this.

“Why is it naive?” some may ask. Well, it’s worth remembering that Google isn’t here to help people find what they want – it’s primary business is to sell advertising online: that’s what they do. It’s in their DNA. Kidding oneself that they care about any given brand’s presence online is wrong. What they care about is making money. If people can find what they want in the process, that’s a nice bonus (and helps their “Don’t do evil” image).

Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t think that making money is wrong (far from it). But working under the illusion that Google ever does anything that wouldn’t benefit their bank balance most certainly is wrong. You don’t get something for nothing.

The point is that Google stands to make a lot of money from people – brand owners, their competitors, interested parties, novices who want to try something new – everyone. They’ve basically changed the bidding format and made it completely open. And, yes, the much-vaunted Quality Score will help keep the costs down as it should weed out people who’re just trying to bid on brand terms for products that aren’t related/relevant – but for competitors who’re selling an identical product but, say, at a better price, this could see quite a bit of cash arrive in Google’s wallet.

How nice.

I also wonder how this will affect affiliate relationships. They are often restricted on bidding on brand terms, so what does this mean for these rules? Will affiliates have to submit to a new tranche of rules to keep promoting a brand’s products? Will we see an increase in grey/blackhat affiliates try their luck anyway? Or will it mean affiliates and brands embrace a stronger, more communicative relationship – a gentlemans agreement-esque approach whereby they agree not to bid? What about competitors affiliates? Might they be encouraged to bid on competitor brand terms to steal away business?

Although I really cannot stand PPC, that last point could see some interesting tactics emerge…

2010
08/10
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Channel 4 “The End Of The Line”

It seems I’ve been overdosing on More 4′s documentaries – but this is also particularly good: on last night, More 4′s “The End Of The Line” is an excellently written/presented documentary about overfishing the world’s fish stocks.

Useful links:

2010
07/28
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Channel 4 “The Cove”

Just a quick note to say that if you’ve not watched The Cove (shown on Channel 4 last night), then it’s worthwhile finding out more and watching/buying the DVD.

The Channel 4 website doesn’t have any information on how to find out more about the issues raised in the documentary, so:

2010
07/21
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Is ROI on Social Media a waste of time?

I recently wrote a fairly long (rambling?) post about Social Media, and whether it was right for business. I included a bunch of bullet points around why, how and where it could be used. I also included a bit around tracking ROI, and stipulated that regular success metrics were not geared up for the intricacies of this new era of online interaction. It’s this point that I’ve been mulling.

Perhaps controversially, I wonder if trying to track ROI in Social Media is actually completely missing the point of it.

By its very definition, Social Media is – rightly or wrongly – basically an alternative for regular socialisation: a digital proxy for human interaction, where we can talk, recommend, ‘like’ things, spread the word about whatever takes our fancy…it’s doing nothing more than broadening the reach of interaction and speeding it up at the same time. Essentially, this is not drastically different to any other major socio-computational advance in the last 40 years or so.

So: is trying to place a dollar value on this digitised interaction – whether it be a Facebook fan, a Tweet in your favour, or an emailed-to-a-friend product – actually pretty futile? Shouldn’t the focus of Social Media be more about people than business, and if a business benefits then it’s because of quality interactions undertaken by humans being…well, human?

Zappos are often cited as a best-practice example, because they use Social as genuine customer service channels.  Whilst digital channels can’t communicate the intricacies of human interaction, such as the various undertones & overtones of body language, speech inflection & intonation, etc – it does offer the speed & reach already discussed which is perfect for helping other humans do human things (I don’t mean having a poo in the woods, here – I mean carry out their various tasks successfully).

Can a value be put on that? Should a value be put on it? Shouldn’t companies just be as human as possible and just be helpful or interesting?

Perhaps an irrelevant comparison to draw, but stepping back for a moment, imagine being sat in a pub 40 years ago. Mmm beer.

2010
07/12
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The Guardian’s “New band of the day”: Bim

A bit of tireless self-promotion amongst the Rosier ranks ahoy:

My sister is in Bim – and they are The Guardian’s ‘New band of the day’ today.

Bex & Tim: BIM

To quote The Guardian article:

We like Bim, a new duo from London who make soft electronic pop songs, but met at a hard rock gig in Bristol. And we like the way they operate. Unsigned, they disseminate their music in a modern way, even if it’s not exactly seminal. Quite modern, yes, in a 1990s St Etienne/Cardigans way. You can hear their synthy lullabies on their website, where they’ll be putting them up to listen to for free, each one a few days apart…

Go now: read, listen, enjoy. http://www.bimmusic.com/

2010
07/06
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Schuh.co.uk – redesigned

Quite a while ago, now – back in July 2008, in fact – myself and my esteemed colleague, friend and all-round niceguy Martin found ourselves looking at the Schuh.co.uk website. Back then, it was dire: any regular readers will know the various reviews I’ve written about the evolutions of their site.

Today I was going through a bunch of old files, and found OUR attempts at a redesign for Schuh. Given that there’s been a fair bit of time (and indeed they’ve changed their site since), I thought I’d share them with you.

Bearing in mind that these designs are pretty old now in the scheme of things, here we go!

A fair bit of thought went into these, including:

  • Overall function for the site (why were people there? what were the most popular lines? how would you show them?)
  • Keeping the brand greeny colours
  • Insert opportunities for cross-selling (right-hand navs)
  • How it could all be built & maintained

We rather liked it, but then we were young and naive. :)

P.s: All the above are copyrighted to us, but if you ask nicely and get our explicit permission, you can use them. ;)

P.p.s: the thumbnail gallery above was automatically generated by WordPress 3! How clever is that?! I love it.

2010
07/04
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