In an online world where everything.com seems to have already been registered, people are turning to alternative domains more and more often. If you cannot get the .com, then you may be able to get the .co.uk or the .net and this raises some potential issues for people with regard to branding and visibility of their website.
If you are in also involved with children and schools then you need to be especially careful about who you are seen to be playing with. This week shows up a very bad mistake for the National Schools Film Week who’s mission statement says “Our core purpose is to enrich the education of young people across the UK by providing schools with unique film and cinema based learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that are directly relevant to the curriculum, placing film at the heart of their cultural experience.” They have picked up the domain name www.nsfw.org unfortunately many people on the Internet will already be aware of the much more common meaning of that 4 letter acronym Not Suitable For Work. NSFW is usually seen on posts where content or images included are not suitable for viewing at work normally due to nudity or pornographic content and indeed the more commonly visited version of the domain would be the .com which in this case does feature pornographic content.
National Schools Film Week now run the risk of enriching the education of young people in a completely different manner to that expected if any of them visit the nsfw.com domain instead of the nsfw.org one.
The lesson to be learnt is to carefully check other people using the same or very similar domain names to make sure you do not inadvertently end up sending completely the wrong message to your visitors through a common typo or a mistake in the top level domain.
Everyone wants to drive people to their websites, for some people this is to increase sales in an ecommerce platform or an online shop, or to increase awareness of a brand, company, charity or organisation along with the goods and services that it can offer. There are many different methods that are being used to achieve this goal with viral marketing and social media campaigns being the current flavour of the month. These can both be very effective methods to drive a lot of traffic to your site in a short period, however in most cases you will see a sharp peak in traffic which quickly drops off once the viral has finished or the push on the social networks is no longer being pushed as hard. Videos are increasingly being used to drive promote companies and sites and to be able to share a lot of knowledge in a relatively short time.
These methods can be great at promoting a site, however there is one thing that can always generate traffic for you and this is your search engine rank or position. Recent research by Chitika has shown just how much of a difference moving up the results can have on the amount of people visiting your site. Their figures clearly demonstrate how important it is to be on the first page of results with less than 24% of all the traffic in the study coming from results that were below position 5 and they note that making the single step from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1, a change of just 1 spot in the rankings has the biggest jump, percentage-wise in traffic.
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September 16th 2010 search
Further evidence that it pays to include social media in any attempts to promote your sites.
In an off the wall experiment conducted on real time search results from google, it took less than 13 seconds from a post being made to it showing up in google search results.
Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, have been named by Google as Special Partners meaning posts on these sites get shunted into google results much faster than in other cases.
With more and more organisations turning an eye to the blogosphere and social media in an effort to increase market share and brand awareness, it is very easy to drop the ball on security of your internet presence.
Whilst it is easy to focus budgets on new marketing opportunities and exciting new projects, existing web sites need to be maintained. There are two main aspects to this maintenance.
- Regular content updates – Nothing will keep a site as fresh and trending as new content, that however is something for another post
- Regular security audits and updates – which we discuss here
Your search engine optimisation activities rotate around trying to improve your position in search results and any good SEO campaign will reap benefits for you in this area. However you can find that within a relatively short period, your carefully constructed internet site can become exploited by less conscientious groups in an effort to improve their own ratings at your cost.
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January 20th 2010 Infrastructure, search
