Pod1 Blog

We are holding a seminar on social media strategies for our clients and potential clients:

If you are interested in attending please contact:  flora.malein@pod1.com

Pod1 have teamed up with Westfield London to design a microsite that promotes Westfield’s Spring/Summer 10 Fashion campaign.

“The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth” campaign, run in conjunction with the Sunday Times, is a series of fashion events held at the centre throughout March. The site provides a portal for event information, ticket booking and email sign up. The site also provides value-added content such as key trends for the season, goody bag giveaway’s and styling tips.

As the fashion events occur, rich media content and event imagery will be added to the site for users to browse.

The main catwalk shows will be held on the 19th and 20th of March 2010, and will feature over 700 luxury and high street fashion brands.

Check out the site here http://londonfashion.westfield.com/

As part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve their Webmaster Tools, they’ve launched 2 new features which I think will make life easier for many webmasters.

The first one is called Fetch As Googlebot Mobile and it’s an addition to the recently presented Fetch As Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. The tool shows, in real time, what Googlebot and Mobile Googlebot sees when it accesses the page.

To access the tool:

• Login to Webmaster Tools
• Select your site
• Go to Labs > Fetch as Googlebot

The second addition in Webmaster Tools is the possibility of adding extra users to particular account, just like you would do in Google Analytics. This means that both you, the client, and in fact, anyone can access the same account. The down-side is the fact that the list of verified users has to be maintained and updated if needed.

To access the tool:

• Login to Webmaster Tools
• Click on Verify next to your site
• Click Add a user

Go to Webmaster Tools to check out new tools and visit our Search Engine Otimisation page to see how Pod1 Ecommerce can help you improve your website’s rankings

Google claim this will be the worlds most widely distributed sporting event, I’d like to see the same with the World Cup.

As with many media agencies web design companies, Pod1 definitely has no shortage of Apple fans. I, however, am the unabashed “Microsoft Guy” always looking out for the latest from the guys over in Redmond. I’m the guy in the office that owns a Zune HD and delights at streaming media from my Windows 7 desktop to my Xbox 360 – so it will come as no surprise that my interest has been piqued at Microsoft’s take on tablet devices, the Microsoft Courier.

The Microsoft Courier can best be described as a “digital journal”. The interface will be primarily touch/pen-based with some sophisticated handwriting recognition taking place under the hood. This interface is based on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series OS out in the final quarter of 2010 which in turn is an evolution of the ultra-slick Zune HD OS. In keeping with the new Windows Phone 7 emphasis on integration and sharing, the Courier has many ways to share and collaborate your journal elements with colleagues making any creation a group effort.

The Microsoft Courier places an emphasis on mobility and takes the journal metaphor further by being split into two screens that can fold in to create an ultraportable device akin to a notebook. It will be small enough to easily stash away in any backpack making it as essential a device to carry around as ones cellphone.

Other key elements to the Courier include a built-in camera (an obvious one-upmanship on the upcoming iPad), a 3.5mm mini-jack for media playback, ebook reader, contact address book and web browser.

Now that I’ve given a brief introduction, I’ll allow Engadget’s video footage to really show off the exciting functionality of the Courier in action.

Find out more how Pod1 can help you with Search Engine Optimisation

Hands up who uses Google Analytics and gets most Organic- or PPC Revenue from branded terms (Brand name that is). All of you? Thought so.

Here we often have discussions around why you should do PPC & SEO on branded terms when you get most of your traffic and possibly revenue from organic branded terms anyway. I guess we need to take a closer look at what’s happening here.

There are two reasons why you get more traffic from branded terms when using the wonderfully free Google Analytics.

Convenience
Many, (many many) users have Google or any other search engine setup as their start page. Rather than typing your URL into the address bar they just type it into the nice and friendly, large text field in the middle of their screen. Ask a random sample of your users if they know what the address bar actually is. Ask your office mates. I swear most won’t know what you’re talking about.

Last click counts
This is the second reason why you get so many “head keywords”. Users come to your site in different stages of the purchase cycle. They most likely start of on a long tail keyword like: “Pink polka dot jumper”. They find a few pages, check them out and might even land on your page if you’ve done your Search Engine Optimisation right. Now they do something else, go back to work; take care of the kids; go out for a coffee and then remember that website where they saw that great Pink Polka Dot Jumper. Most likely they have no idea how they got there or what the product was actually called (I’ll do a post about slang later this month). What they do remember will be your brand name. So instead of going back to Google and using Pink Polka Dot Jumper then click through endless results, they type in your brand name and, shazam, you have a head term conversion.

The problem with Google Analytics is that it only counts the last click from which a user came to your site. So even if they have come from a natural long tail keyword they are likely to convert on an organic head term or even branded PPC term. Analytics will only count this last click, but not the first one or second one or third one. So your stats will be skewed and it might look like only brand terms convert. There is of course and additional problem that many users will use their lunch break to research but convert at home, i.e. switch computers. Forget about these users; it’s going to be a while until we get those tracked.

So should you do SEO and PPC on your own brand name or the other way round: “Should you even bother with this nasty long tail optimisation?” Yes is the short answer. You actually have to do it as otherwise you’ll simply die a virtual death. Always think of the purchase cycle your customers are in. Unless you’re a really really really big brand (Coca-Cola level I’d say) your customers will start of on a long tail keyword search. Most searches are 3 or more keywords long (see: http://image.exct.net/lib/fefc1774726706/d/1/SearchEngines_Jan09.pdf) so it is fair to assume that is the same for your customers. Brand names tend to be a bit shorter. If they don’t find you for Pink Polka Dot Jumper they won’t remember your brand name as they won’t get in contact with it. Not doing PPC or SEO for your own brand terms (PPC even for the sake of getting cheap clicks and preventing competitors to bid on it) will lead to them, if they do find you on the long tail search, not finding you on a branded search.

Now that it is clear that you must do SEO for both, long tail and head keywords what should you attribute the traffic to?

I guess the only way to find out is to launch a PPC campaign on your own brand name and see how far organic traffic drops. The difference should be your convenience clickers, the rest probably very engaged customers.

Discussion more than welcome!

P.S. Yes there are ways to hack 1^st touch into GA, check this out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-get-past-last-touch-attribution-with-google-analytic

There was no need to watch the Oscars live this week you could have used Google instead, the search engine has released some lovely graphs to show how search traffic trended through out the night as different categories and winners were announced. I suppose this is one way to miss all those ‘gushy’ acceptance speeches. Anyway here is Google’s take on their lovely graphs, enjoy;-)

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:

Click on the image above for the full article

Pod1 NYC is proud to announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for global luxury brand Derek Lam.

Derek Lam Int. was founded in New York in 2002. Lam’s vision for his label is to create clothes that are both luxurious and wearable, with a feminin but unfussy beauty about them.

The site was built using the Magento Ecommerce platform.

Visit the new site at www.dereklam.com

Working within the world of fast fashion means that we don’t always have the opportunity of flexing our usability muscles on some of the ecommerce websites that come out of our well oiled machine. So when I came across this little gem, it urged me to start this new series of posts of sites that put the user at the heart of the website.

1. Nabru: they sell sofas

- Loving the mega top-nav drop-down

- BIG buttons and BIG words make me and my grandmother so happy

- Visual checkout

http://www.nabru.co.uk

Good work fellas.