The spiders are watching you

Category: e-marketing
Posted by Lloyd on 23rd November 2006

You’ve updated your website or created a new page and now you’re waiting for the “spiders” (such as Googlebot) that crawl the net to find you, rate you and place you in their search index…If you’re already ranked, you might be indexed overnight; if not then it might take a few days for your new content to be found. The fact is that these particular spiders have poor eyesight and the solution that is now re-emerging to solve this problem is “tagging”.

In the old days (pre-Google), webmasters would add “meta-tags” to their pages to help search engines index their pages. This practice failed when unscrupulous people started adding tags that bore no resemblance to the content on the page in order to skew the search results. Google seized this window of opportunity and attempted to solve the problem by ignoring the tags and, instead, reading and interpreting the actual page content – and it seems to have worked! So far, so good?

But, have you ever been annoyed by the mass of Google results that now include largely irrelevant forums or blogs? That’s because Google likes content (words) that are relevant to the title of the page, that are updated frequently and that contain links to source material and other references. Now, as the preceding article states, there are currently 60 million blogs – most of which are of no value except to the writer and his/her friends/family/club. So, is there a way to differentiate blog content and extract the quality? The answer is yes: through the social networking – folksonomy – of tagging. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati are endeavoring to introduce humans into the process of site ranking.

How does it work?

Your content is simply tagged with a keyword link or links (rel=”tag”) and your page is submitted either by you or through readers’ votes to social bookmarking sites like the ones mentioned above. The more votes - the higher the rank - the higher the article’s visibility. With the relevant tags, the right audience will read your post and, if it’s good (that is, content that is valued by the readers), it will rise to the front page. As it rises to the top of these sites, Google ranks it more highly, making it more visible within the wider web.

Why is this relevant for B2B marketing?

In the wild and open web, mass audiences are voting on all manner of content and one of the problems for user-based, democratic sites such as Digg et al is that the lowest common denominator is now rising to the top of the rankings. But, for B2B, we have the opportunity of exploiting our marketing advantage: compared to a broad consumer audience, our customers are specialized, highly qualified subject matter experts and tend to make considered, lengthy appraisals before purchase. This thought-equity can be applied to content ranking – if B2B professionals in this area rank it, then it must be good. Customer advocacy is marketing gold. To have your company extolled in the blogosphere should be a key goal of your communications programme, and tagging provides a highly effective means of targeting your content to your key audiences.

Why is this relevant to you if you don’t blog?

You might not blog yet as an organisation, but do you send out press releases? Do you post company news on your website? Have you updated a product or launched a new one? Yes? Then we recommend that you tag the content, distribute it using the most effective channels to reach your target audience and let the human spiders read and rank it for you.

Tagging is as complex as you want to make it, and is essentially one (simple) end of microformats – a huge project in its infancy for Web 2.0. Want to know more?

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