It’s an interesting process SEO. Sometimes even keyword research can be enlightening; it’s been fascinating to watch key phrases change over the years as searchers have become more in tune with searching and search engines. Instead of typing ‘full blown’ questions into search engines (like the www.askjeeves.com model – now www.ask.com people now type in phrases which hardly make sense! And when this happens, it’s very difficult to insert those weird phrases into your ‘sales’ copy.

Recently, we came up against one such situation where we discovered a popular key phrase but found it incredibly difficult to get it "on-page". The phrase was: ‘pre pay credit card’. We discovered it after the customer gave us some reports from their AdWords campaign. They supplied us with visitor and conversion data. Over the period of one month there were 304 visitors for ‘pre pay credit card’, and 42 conversions (or applications). That makes the conversion rate of the key phrase ‘pre pay credit card’ an astonishing 13.8%!

I’LL TAKE IT!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of the client’s web pages ranking top 3 for that lovely key phrase!

The next challenge was how to get it on the page and integrated into a sentence. We thought we’d done it by simply wrapping the phrase in quotation marks… Like this:

"Get your (Customer name) ‘pre pay credit card’ by applying online now."

The customer wanted it, but they were unable to due to the phrase not meeting certain conditions (‘acceptable marketing language’) as set out in the reference guide supplied by the major (global) credit card vendor. Obviously it would be more appropriate to use ‘prepaid credit card’ (which makes tons more sense), but we’d already optimised the home page for that phrase! Dammit.

To get around the problem we decided to get a bit more lateral. We sat down with the client to discuss some work-arounds including:

• A FAQ section to each page, with questions like "Is this a pre pay credit card" and then an answer "No, this is not a pre pay credit card, it is a prepaid credit card..." etc – Turns out, this was ok!


• We were also allowed to put variations in the Title tag and Meta-tags, just not on the page.

We’ll be implementing the idea in the next few weeks… Let’s hope we hit the top! I’ll keep you posted…

Chris Thomas, Search Engine Optimisation Specialist

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by a true viral pioneer at last week’s Creative Social in London. Ed Robinson is co-founder of The Viral Factory, a London firm specialising in viral marketing, who have been behind-the-scenes on many of the most famous (and infamous) viral videos that have spread over the past six years.

It was a fantastic presentation (thanks Ed), and my main take-away was the change that has occurred in viral videos over the years. As Ed talked through many examples, there was a marked evolution from slapstick, violent and comedic short pieces towards more filmic productions.

Ed explained that changes in the way viral is distributed and consumed has bought about this revolution; virals used to spread by forwarding email attachments. Fast-forward to a land filled with spam and email security – it’s no surprise that in a Web 2.0 World viral videos are primarily viewed on YouTube, MySpace and viral portals such as Kontraband.

With broadband standard, file-sizes are no longer an issue, as a result viral videos are becoming longer and production values higher - viral has mutated from GIF animations to Cyber Grand Prix.

Some recent examples by The Viral Factory show how these trends have influenced their creative work for Samsung and Levis. Interestingly, even with healthy production budgets, the home-grown aesthetic is still popular. Are the public naïve enough to believe this is amateur’s at play, or do they just not care?

The famous Sony Bravia ‘Balls’ campaign went viral before it appeared on TV, and Ed hinted that one of their videos may soon be used as a TVC. Dorito’s screened a 30 second user-generated ad(the winner of a competition) during half-time of the Super Bowl. The lines are blurring between viral and above the line advertising. But as we have seen many times before, good quality content that delights, amuses, surprises or rewards the viewer can be a winner in any format.

What do you think is the future of viral? Make your comments below…

Tim O'Neill, Managing Director UK

Labels: Web Culture and Trends, Web marketing

Over the past year there have been a barrage of new technology announcements, especially from the big four (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo). You might’ve missed some announcements, or maybe you’re getting confused with all the names.

So to help you out we’ve made a quick list of some of the new web related technologies, with quick summaries. Some of the summaries are a bit controversial, don’t take it too seriously!

• Expression Studio – Microsoft’s products for designers. Think Adobe Creative Suite.

• Web – Used to create html and css for the web (competitor Dreamweaver).

• Blend – Used to build create WPF and in version 2 create Silverlight content (competitor Flash/ Flex).

• Design – Design tool which integrates with expression suite (Flash).

• Media – Media manager which allows users to edit and encode various formats for use with the expression suite of products (competitor: Adobe Bridge?).

• Silverlight – Microsoft’s competitor to Flash. Combines numerous technologies including Ajax, XAML, .NET, LINQ, and multimedia.

• .NET 3.0 –(formerly named WinFX) .NET 3.0 isn’t a rewrite of .NET 2.0, it’s more like a expansion kit. You get a stack of additional powerful libraries in the form of (WPF, WWF, and WCF).

• WPF – (Windows Presentation Foundation) This is the visual side of .NET 3.0. It’s built into Vista and can be used for local and connected applications.

• WWF – (Windows Workflow Foundation) Libraries, Functions and Tools for developing any type of workflow/transaction in .NET.

• WCF – (Windows Communication Foundation) Libraries, Functions and Tools for Data Exchange within Windows, or to/from Windows.

• WPF/E – (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) Microsoft dumped that stupid name, and renamed this product Silverlight.

• Vista – The latest version of Windows OS, it includes .NET 3.0. and IE 7.0.

• IE 7.0 – The long delayed update to the highly popular, highly flawed IE 6.0 browser. Now supports Tabbed browsing, with many bugs fixed, but still has some issues.

• Ajax.NET – Microsoft’s AJAX libraries. Previously named Atlas. Microsoft must stop renaming products.

• Adobe CS3 – The new suite of integrated macromedia and adobe software.

• Flex – A development environment for Adobe Flash. It provides a lot more structure for developing applications and doing server-side integration with databases.

• Apollo – A client-side cross OS application environment for running desktop applications developed in Flash, Ajax, Flex, HTML.

• SPRY framework – Used by Dreamweaver to provide AJAX functionality.

• PopFly – An online application that uses Silverlight to allow users to easily create their own mash-ups (see yahoo pipes).

• GoogleGears – A client-side cross OS tool which provides a database engine for online applications to sync and run offline.

• Yahoo Pipes – An online application that allows users to easily create their own mash-ups (see PopFly).

• Photosynth – A combination of fast image scaling technology and 3D environments constructed from images of a location.

What is the biggest battle?

From the web development perspective there is going to be an exciting battle between Flash/Flex/Apollo VERSUS Silverlight/WPF/.NET.

Who will win?

Well, we don’t have the crystal ball answer. The success of most technologies depends largely on the acceptance and use by the global community. Flash currently has the advantage due to the ubiquity of the player and it’s utilisation on some major sites such as YouTube, MySpace etc. However Microsoft’s automatic update functionality will help with speed to market and they are targeting the advertising and media industries to directly tackle Flash’s hold on the industry.

There are some clear patterns in the aims of most of these technologies:

• Improving the user experience
• Improving the ease of development
• Improving the reach of applications

So, the end-user is going to be the real winner in all of this (cheesy by true).

Links worth checking out:

Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
http://labs.adobe.com/

Other:
http://www.popfly.com/
http://gears.google.com/
http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Matthew Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Technology, Web Culture and Trends

Alright so this little thing has absolutely fried my noodle this morning!

A company in America called SeaDragon (recently acquired by Microsoft) have a written a piece of software which has a unique rendering engine to display images. Instead of loading an image and rendering all the information (or attempting to), the software appears to resample the image so that it only renders as much information as it can display (i.e pixels) at one time. This means you can have a very highly detailed image and you can interact with that image very very quickly and smoothly.

Now that unto itself is not that amazing however, they have combined this technology with a 3D rendering engine which is able to take a photos and using some pretty tricky algorithms determine similarities between the 3D model and the photo and display them in such a way that you can virtually walk through the space and view everything at an almost infinite level of detail.

As far as I am concerned if you need a way to explain the semantic web and how user generated content is going to revolutionise how we interact and access information then this is it!

Check it out at:

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
(Internet Explorer, Windows XP SP2 or Vista only)


For more info check out:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

Dan Oxnam, Interaction Director

Labels: Technology

Recently Apple boss Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates shared a live interview onstage at a web conference. Amongst the shared platitudes (BILL: you da man Steve. STEVE: no no Bill, YOU da man – I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea) a question was raised about the future of the personal computer, given the increasing power and flexibility of web applications.

Jobs fielded it, pointing out that the death of the PC has been predicted numerous times over recent years, and it has never eventuated... something he put down to the fact that offline
applications by their nature are more powerful than web applications.


While this may be true, desktop applications cannot compete with the flexibility and availability of an web application which enables data to be accessed from anywhere around the world.

Up until now, this has been the web application's greatest strength, yet also its biggest weakness – its Samson's hair and Achilles’ heel all rolled into one, if you will. As useful as web applications are when they are online and you have a functioning and responsive network, they are rendered useless without a connection.

Google is the latest company to announce a product that attempts to address this issue. Google Gears sits alongside Adobe's Apollo platform, and Microsoft's WPF framework in providing tools focused on developing applications that can seamlessly bridge the gap between the web and the desktop.

Launched (with not an insignificant amount of fanfare) as part of Google Developer Day, a Google technology showcase event held in 10 locations around the world, this is a big announcement for Google in a number of ways.


So what is the big deal?

Firstly for Google themselves, Gears will allow them to offer offline versions of their popular GMail, Spreadsheets, and Docs applications. Gears launched with an offline version of Google Reader, Google's RSS viewer, and one imagines Gears integration for the others cannot be far away, a move that will see the Microsoft Office suite of programs firmly
in Google's sights.

For us web developers though, enabling web apps to work offline is the big drawcard.

Anyone who has lost an internet connection mid-way through updating some important data online will know the pain that this can cause. Up until now there has been no easy solution, the updated data disappears somewhere between your computer and the server you are trying to access.


An application utilising Google Gears however, could allow you to keep working in this situation, with the data safely stored on your PC, waiting for the moment when you reconnect and it can sync up with your online database. This means you could work with an online application anywhere, connected or not, at a time that suits you.

With three of the biggest online players (Microsoft, Google, and Adobe) all releasing platforms that focus on achieving this outcome, it is fair to speculate that the offline web may be the next major technology battleground.

So while Steve Jobs may well be right - that iPod you have on your desk is evidence that he has a knack for predicting trends – there is no doubt that there has been a shift in the role of the desktop PC in recent times.

A few years ago everyone was rushing to web-enable desktop applications, and now it’s all about desktop-enabling web applications.

Simon Stefanoff, Developer

Labels: Technology, Web Culture and Trends