Widgets – what are they and what do they do?

The shortest definition of a widget would be a small bundle of software, using graphics and information to perform a function, frequently a mini website within another website.

This is not the greatest or most obvious definition, but widgets can be so varied that they are hard to pin down. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are simple games, others may even make money for you! There are entire websites dedicated to building and distributing widgets such as widgetbox.

Widgets and social networking
Widgets took off in terms of popularity when Facebook released their development pack allowing anyone to create a widget for their users. The allure of millions of Facebook users was very attractive to online marketers and a flurry of activity ensued. Over 14 000 of these Facebook widgets are currently available. Other social networks such as MySpace have now opened themselves up to allow the public to develop widgets.

Widgets and blogs
These are those small plugins you can drag and drop into your sidebar. Sometimes you will just paste some JavaScript in. They serve a variety of functions varying from the Top Commentators list to the Recent Visitors box from various blogging communities.

What is the attraction to online marketers?
The key attraction here is the opportunity for your widget to go viral and spread very fast becoming the next big thing. This opens your brand exposure up to millions of people. The opportunity to interact like this with younger people, potentially for a low price is of significant branding value.

What is the downside?
The biggest problem with this new found technology is that it is very hard to get it right. Many never go viral. Those that do, may hit the wrong audience. If the widget does not go viral or fails to hit the correct audience, the cost of development suddenly feels very expensive.

Due to the very nature of most widgets, they are gimmicky so they have very limited shelf life. The adoption curve tends to be bell shaped, showing it’s rapid rise to fame, but just as rapid demise, with very little time spent at the top.

If it is some sort of game, or offers some functionality, people just use it for those reasons. It is difficult to convert this attention into actual sales. This could also be due to the fact many of those likely to be attracted to the widget are of a younger demographic with a considerably lower purchasing power.

As widgets have become more popular, more people have began to associate them with advertising and marketing campaigns. As a rule people dislike being sold to, and there is some objection to advertising in social networks.

Who benefits?
Well those companies who get it right, can most definitely benefit. Popular widgets reach millions of people and create a lot of buzz with the best getting mentions in mainstream press. At the end of the day marketing is about developing this exposure.

Independent developers have profited from this new industry. There are said to be around 150 000 active developers for Facebook widgets alone. Those that succeed are able to make a lot of money.

We, as users of these networks can benefit too. Many of these widgets are entertaining or useful. Our enjoyment may not last forever, but many people enjoy playing little games and interacting with their friends online.

Many widgets are used for monetization purposes. These benefit the smaller websites who typically do not do well with more traditional online advertising techniques. The targeted ads can be very successful for selling products.

Will it last?
I can see widgets being popular for a long time, but not so much novelty widgets as a form of advertising. The costs involved together with the difficulty in converting the exposure into sales make them less and less worthwhile as time goes by. They worked because they were novel and now advertisers and marketers need to work on finding the next big thing.

The more functional widgets, such as those used to showcase products for sale with affiliate links will do well. Product based blogs will do well with these assuming there are relevant products available.

Let me know what you think. Can you see a future for widgets as a form of advertising?

Competitions – More than just generating buzz

Everyone loves free stuff. The bigger the give away the bigger the crowd it attracts. Contests have been marketers secret weapon in the offline world for a while now. Everything from cereal boxes to chocolate bars to TV shows use free give aways to draw in people. It does not take a genius to realise this concept is very effective online as well.

I personally have recently used a high value product give away in order to aid the launch of a new website. If you are able to generate some good publicity, the extra element of the competition is a sure fire way of helping yourself spread the news.

The competition can do much more than just generate buzz though. It is a bargaining chip. You can get something in return for the chance to win. This is where the true power of the competition lies. Typically we use competitions in order to gain details such as telephone numbers, email addresses or subscribers. These details we can use at a later date in order to direct attention onto a new product or service, or simply back to us in general. For blogs, the subscriber count is often key when it comes to determining a blogs success and therefore the cost of advertising.

The internet marketing niche is very crowded and new blogs have a hard time having an impact. The competition has become the weapon of choice for new guys wanting to make it fast. The right competition can put your name out there and get you instant fame. With recognition comes the ability to earn.

There are two great examples in recent times; Alan Johnson and Gyutae Park.

Alan Johnson of The Rating Blog had a big competition, with prizes ranging from $500 cash to $200 advertising accounts to $100 Amex card. These prizes as you can well imagine attracted a fair bit of attention. On top of this Alan worked non stop guest writing for many popular blogs and encouraged people to promote his contest tirelessly. The result was quite remarkable with Alan gaining 1000 subscribers in a month.

Gyutae Park of Winning the Web has become a household name in the last few months. He attributes his success to his competitions. His first contest offered a John Chow review and did well. Winning the Web are currently running their largest contest yet. This time prizes include numerous cash prizes the largest of which is $650 as well as a conference pass to Affiliate Summit East, membership to sites, and many other fantastic prizes. The buzz already is huge. If this does not prove contests are worth it, I do not know what does.

Barely a day goes by without new contests being announced. Each being bigger and better than the previous one. Bloggers strive to outdo each other in order to gain the all important internet currency – traffic. Competition amongst competitions has got to be healthy right?

Have you run any competitions? If so how did they work out for you? If not, give it some thought. It does require some planning, but can really speed up your progress.

What is SEO continued – On Page SEO

The first time round I explained the basics including:

• what SEO stands for
• what SEO companies do
• why you need SEO
• the difference between white hat and black hat
• some sources of confusion
• SEO is an ongoing process
• can you do SEO

Now we have covered these important basics I am going to discuss the techniques involved in SEO. These take up two categories: “On page” and “Off page”. The titles are pretty self explanatory and as you probably figured out yourself, on page refers to things you can change on your own website where as off page regards techniques that do not involve your own site, primarily link building. Today we will focus on “On page” SEO.

On Page SEO

Much has been written about SEO. Not a day goes by without a dozen new blog posts about the ultimate SEO techniques or a new tweak which will change your search engine results. One of the most popular resources is Aaron Wall’s SEO book. You will see this advertised on almost every blog. For beginners this is all too complicated and goes into too much detail to the point where it is overwhelming. For beginners there are a number of simple techniques, which are often no more than best practice which are key to any SEO strategy.

1. The title tags
These title tags appear at the top of every page before any content. As they are the first thing the search engine reads, and the title of the page, they should convey what will be found on the page. Some SEO experts such as Josh Spaulding regard this to be the most important on page SEO factor.

Choosing a catchy title to attract readers vs a keyword filled descriptive title is a tricky decision sometimes. It depends on your goals. In the short term the catchy title might do better, but this traffic does not last. A descriptive title including relevant keywords will rank well in search engines providing a long term constant stream of organic traffic.

2. Meta description
These no longer hold the value they once did. In the past search engines used this information to know what was on your page. If we could manually tell the search engines what was on the page then the system would be very easy to game. This is not the case so much now search algorithms are considerably more advanced and complex. Meta description has practically no influence on your rankings.

The important thing to do is write a good description of your page. This text is often displayed on the search engine results pages, and is what a user will read after your title, but before deciding to click. A well written meta description could be what convinces someone to visit your site.

3. Internal linking and navigation
It is important that search engines can navigate your pages easily. Flash or JavaScript navigation is a no no because of this. Many people favour snazzy flash designs because they look good. When no one can find your site, you will wish you went for the SEO friendly method.

Sitemaps come in two forms. XML sitemaps which you can register in Google’s webmaster tools (Familiarise yourself with these, you will keep coming back to them), and regular sitemaps to help users. The XML sitemap is a must have. It helps search engines navigate your website more easily and find new content. A regular sitemap can help your regular users navigate. These are particularly useful when the sites navigation is complicated or hard to see. If you go down the Flash site route, definitely add a sitemap.

Each page has a certain authority which can be passed on via linking, because of this it is important you link to and reference your own content. Remember to do this naturally and not just linking for the sake of SEO. This has the added benefit of showing off your other content to readers, increasing the sites overall page views and reducing the bounce rate.

4. Search Engine Friendly URLs
Originally almost all URLs were simple and easily understood as we created and named them manually. Now we tend to use database driven sites, powered by PHP. The pages are generated dynamically and have URLs which are long, do not consist of words, and are near impossible to remember.

Search engine friendly URLs are simple and clean. Wordpress and many other content management systems will do this automatically for you if you set it up. These clean URLs can take the format of your choice though most opt for a simple mydomain/article-title or mydomain/category/article-title. As we use the article title as the URL, we have relevant keywords in our URL which helps rank our page. The key is to keep them as short and simple as possible, but remember that you cannot have the same URL for two different pages.

5. Anchor text
This is used to determine keywords which are relevant to the linked page. It is important you put a little thought into this. If you want a page to rank well for the keyword “green widget” then use that keyword in the anchor text for any links to that page. The ultimate misuse of the anchor text is to use text such as “click here”, as this provides no information.

6. Accessibility and best practice
We should aim to make our websites as accessible as possible. Alt tags are important for every image. Broken links and forms should be fixed. The loading time of your page is another factor to take into account as it seems Google may start taking this into account.

Things NOT to do

Anchor text
As mentioned already, this is very important as it is weighted and ranked by search engines. Using “click here” as your anchor text gives no indication of what you are linking to.

Hiding links
This involves making links the same colour as your background, or in a div pushed off screen, or hidden in any other way. If you are found out the search engines will penalise you.

Keyword stuffing
This involves making text the same colour as the background and filling it with your keywords, or using your keywords over and over again in your title and a variety of other methods. As already mentioned, search engines do not take well to people who try to game the system.

Keyword density
Have you ever read an article that barely made sense because of the repetition of certain key words and phrases? This is the result of people attempting to write for search engines as opposed to for their readers. You will do much better in the long run if your content is actually useful to users.

Next week I shall be looking into off page SEO techniques.

Did I explain this clearly? Could anything be explained differently? Do you have any techniques I should add?

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