Live in Watford. Work in London. These are my thoughts.
“Cash in on Content and Social Media Marketing in 2012″ screams Forbes. “It has been predicted that 2012 will be the year of content.”
Hang on a minute. Wasn’t this predicted for 2011?
What about 2010?
2009?
Yep.
Good content attracts visitors. Nothing new. I think people know this by now.
I say Fireworks night because that’s what Guy Fawkes night really means to people!
Each year fireworks are the big attraction on the Saturday nearest November 5th at the Watford Council organised event in Cassiobury Park.
Relative areas from counts of “bon” and “work” in referring keywords - cc(0) clker.com
Looking at the search terms queried which resulted in a visit to CassioburyPark.info on November 5th showed that traffic sent by fireworks related keywords outnumbered that from bonfire searches by 33-to-1.
It isn’t all Fireworks though. The bonfire remains but gone is the Guy Fawkes judging contest, and effigies of him or “celebrities”. Along with the main display there is also an earlier Fireworks display for small children and a stage featuring music from local musicians.
“Sounds like the worst ‘firework’ display ever” writes Mike Duce on Twitter. (yF).
Traffic
For the past three years there has been a noticeable rise up to the day of the Fireworks display which has been the busiest day of the year.
Guess when the Fireworks were!
There has been massive year on year growth in the number of event related searches. This year saw more mobile visits to the site on the day of the event than visits from all platforms to the site a year ago.
Comparing November 5th 2011 with a year earlier (November 6th 2010):
On November 5th 2011:
Mobile visits peaked in the same hour as total visits but the significantly slower falling limb on the graph below shows that people were accessing the site from their phones whilst attending the display.
Social Media
Interaction increased. There is a one-click Twitter follow button on the homepage of the site which helped the associated account gained the greatest number of followers it has added in a single day. Throughout the day I tweeted photo updates from the park many of which were retweeted, and there were several @mentions in the evening.
The effect on the @CassioburyPark Klout score can be seen below – very temporary though due to the decrease in tweeting levels after the event.
Variants
On the day of last year’s event on Saturday 6th November 2010 it was colder but perhaps more importantly for the past 3 years events I had been away at University so wasn’t able to nip over to the park to provide regular updates and as a result social activity last year was considerably less.
That said for both years the site featured Fireworks on its homepage and full details on the events page.
What mobile devices are people using?
Apple devices are the most popular by far with traffic from iPods exceeding the total mobile traffic served from the SymbianOS, Windows, Nokia and Samsung operating systems combined! They other devices aren’t all phones either with iPads accounting for about 20% of all mobile traffic.
The proportion of mobile visits which were made from an Apple device fell from 81% in 2010 to 73% in 2011 but this was more than offset by a 342% increase in the absolute number of iOS visits.
Keywords and Google Suggest
Continued evolution of Google Suggest and its ability to impact search queries is apparent with 3 of the top 4 search terms ending with “2011″ compared to just 1 ending “2010″ the previous year.
The average length of each referring search query also increased, from 2.8 in 2010 to 3.2 in 2011.
How does this compare to the rest of the year?
In every year for which Analytics has available data, there was a higher proportion of mobile visits on the day of the event than over the year as an average. This is unsurprising given there are few other times a year when there are tens of thousands of people in the park at a time.
Both the proportion of and absolute number of mobile visits are increasing year on year. The growth in mobile traffic from 2010 to 2011 was 300%, and the proportion of visits made from a mobile device has risen rapidly from 9% in 2010 to 22% this year.
The site
There isn’t a separate mobile version of the site and truth be told I haven’t ever seen the site on a mobile phone other than my own. I will have to try accessing it on some of the most popular devices to ensure that the site looks okay on them.
The Event
In the old days an “anything goes” approach was taken to bonfire building. Nowadays it’s much smaller and pretty much all pallets.
Me standing in front of the large bonfire in 1999.
In the 1990s there was the Computacenter hot air balloon, glow sticks, sparklers, hot-dogs barbecued at various places and the crowds were held back by rolls of orange mesh fencing. They even used to let cars park on the grass.
Nowadays the park resembles a building site by the end of the preceding week with large steel fences rather earirly erected around nothing but empty parkland in the days before the event. The barbecues have been replaced with a semi-circle of professional catering trucks, a truck load of portable toilets are dropped off, the bonfire has moved up the hill, the fences further back and cars aren’t allowed to park near the event.
Don’t get me started on the Rainbow Festival.
You aren’t an SEO Ninja.
Or an SEO Rockstar.
This is a Ninja:
(too late! you missed them)
This is a rockstar:
(well maybe some day)
This is SEO:
If you work in SEO the only time you can be a rockstar is in the evenings or at the weekends, unless you are Found’s SEO Manager who was playing his Ukulele in the office the other day. Still, not really rock is it.
When did you last see a rockstar or a ninja use Excel, worry about whether the now almost daily Firefox update would break their toolbar plugins or talk in a language of numbers as high as 301s, 302s and 404s. As for H1, well H isn’t even a note.
Advertising for an SEO ninja does not make you seem fun and quirky, it suggests you haven’t grown up. And you don’t even stand out from the crowd as lots of agencies and even big boring i’ll-hold-your-money-when-I-want-to corporates use these cringeworthy phrases.
SEO Ninja? No thanks. Consultant, Executive, Specialist. Yes Please.
Photos: Empty Box (z287marc), Rockstar (Andrew McFarlane), Dual Monitors (Sean MacEntee). All CC BY 2.0.
Working in SEO (almost!) and having an obvious interest in GameMaker through my Game Maker Blog I had to address a recent, closed, GMC topic in which a user asked whether the software was officially called Game Maker or GameMaker.
Connor Wilkins succintly explained the reason for the rebranding from Game Maker to GameMaker:
“YoYo Games’s (paraphrased) reasoning: A ‘Game Maker’ is someone who makes games, while ‘GameMaker’ is a tool to create them.”
Another user replied with:
“I think one of the main reasons for the change is because searching for Game Maker gives more general results than searching for GameMaker. It’s better marketing from the customer discovery angle. And, really, does a space make all that much difference as to even warrant a discussion about it?”
Which is a load of tosh.
The (logged out) Google.com results page for “Game Maker” returns 4 YoYoGames.com pages, followed by some non-GM Google news articles, the GM Wikipedia article, Game Maker hosted on a download site, two Game Maker YouTube videos, a “rival” product and finally Game Maker hosted on another download site.
A total of: 4 official Game Maker links, 5 unofficial Game Maker related links, 1 rival product and Google News.
Total Game Maker specific results: 9/10.
The (logged out) Google.com results page for “GameMaker” returns the same 4 YoYoGames.com pages in a slightly different order, the GM Wikipedia article, Game Maker hosted on a download site, a Game Maker video, a Swedish curriculum which has no apparent link to YoYo Games’ Game Maker, a rival product and a historic product with the same name.
A total of: 4 official Game Maker related links, 3 unofficial Game Maker related links, 2 different non-YoYo Games products and an education course with the same name which does not use the software.
Total Game Maker specific results: 7/10.
7 < 9.
"Better marketing from the customer discovery angle"? On both queries YoYo Games have the top 4 results.
[game maker] also has more than 4 times as many global exact match searches on Google than [gamemaker]
The user continues:
“When marketing a product, you want users to find your specific product when searching.”
Yes. Both searches yield the specific product, with the [Game Maker] first page being more specific to YoYo Games’ product than [GameMaker].
“Perhaps Google, yes, but there are other search engines. For example, searching “game maker” on Excite has YYG at the 4th result, dogpile.com has it as the 3rd, it’s 4th at WebCrawler, sixth at MetaCrawler, etc. The reason for all of these drops is because other sites involving “game” and “maker” (some about university courses in game design) show up first. If removing a single space would bring GM to the top of all these engines’ pages, then it’s a good marketing move, and there’s no reason to be against it. It’s just a space, after all.”
Ummm no. Firstly let’s ignore the fact that the combined marketshare of all the mentioned engines is minuscule. The only reason these results don’t appear at the top is because both these search engines do not distinguish their sponsored search results from their organic listings in a clear manner at all. No idea how this is even allowed from either a an advertising provider point of view (both use sponsored Google and Yahoo listings) or the “hiding ads from the consumer” angle.
Take a look at Excite.
Dogpile is even worse.
I now know exactly what that Dog pile is! Dog S***.
WebCrawler and MetaCrawler are the same. YoYoGames.com is the top natural result for [Game Maker]. They just don’t clearly distinguish paid and organic listings. MetaCrawler isn’t as bad as the others at this though.
Excite, Dogpile and MetaCrawler also return YoYoGames as the top result for [GameMaker], the only different being that WebCrawler returns the official Game Maker Community ahead of the GameMaker page at yoyogames.com
Inconsistencies across YoYo Games’ own homepage certainly don’t help. But GameMaker definitely does not yield better results than Game Maker.
If you want a free dofollow gov.uk backlink you can get lots from Knowsley Council’s blog.
I’d seen this previously but never wrote anything about it until I was prompted to when I was looking at the inbound links to an affiliate site and saw it had one from the Knowsley.gov.uk domain.
The Knowsley’s blog section of the their website (last updated June 2009) is no longer linked to from the council homepage (PR 6) but the main blog is PR3. It contains just a handful of posts all of which have at least 500, mainly spam, comments. The first few comments on most posts are genuine messages left by local people or those involved in subject of the blog, a Chernobyl Aid Convoy. One of these posts is currently attracting new SEO comment spam at the rate of about 10 per day.
Two of the blog posts actually have a Page Rank of 1 except I can get neither of these to load because the pages throw ASP exceptions!
Here are some examples of some of the many domains that Knowsley Council’s domain links to. It should be pretty obvious which are legitimate links and which are comment spam!
The ASP exception page suggestions that the CMS being used here is Immediacy, couldn’t find any prices on their website so no doubt it costs an arm and a leg.
Pretty sad to see Knowsley Council taxpayers money being used to promote all these websites.