BI Revolution

How To Map Your Homepage
This Curagami post shares a simple idea capable of producing big return (why is it simple ideas are the best at producing great ROI we wonder). Map your home page clicks as we did for Moon-Audio.com and you may discover a simple change costing pennies and sure to return dollars (as we did).

See if you can see the problem in the graph above before reading the post: 

http://www.curagami.com/google-analytics-how-to-map-home-page-clicks/?v=7516fd43adaa

PageRank Matters
We love it when goofy stupid people say stupid things. But we hate it when friends who should know better say goofy stupid stuff. The other day at a lunch with SEOs and web marketing friends from around my Durham, NC home a friend who should know better said, "PageRank (PR) doesn't matter anymore". 

I pointed out that PR is one of the few FREE and universal metrics. I went on a bit of a rant about how any metric can be modeled into significance. The new PR is a valuable, universal (everyone is treated equally by Google more or less) and FREE metric capable of helping anyone's we marketing. 

This post discuses why PR is important and what THEIR (competitor) PR can teach you Google uses PR the way an instructor uses a pointer. They hold up and reward examples of what they want. If your competitor's have PR 2 to 4 points higher than you then emulate what they are doing.

Never stop at emulation. Once your site's "emulation" "cost of poker" feet are under it DISRUPT and reset your industry's deck. Emulation + disruption is one of the formulas teams I've managed made more than $30M in B2C commerce sales.

I paid for lunch to show my friend his momentary brain fart was okay (lol). M  

**** Added a correction from my friend Mark Traphagen. PR, at least what you can access with free tools, is DEAD. Mark recommends the paid tool we use (MOZ.com). Shouldn't be a huge surprise that FREE is gone. All great FREE things cost money now. We've used MOZ.com for customer work, but thought we could model with PRChecker too. Not so much as it turns out sadly. Appreciate Mark's note. M 

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

5 Ways To Avoid The Online Competition Trap
Never ceases to amaze me. Team +Curagami sees the Hatfields and McCoys squared off and fighting tooth and nail over nothing all the time. Here are 5 ways to avoid the Online Competition Trap (be sure to Read Mark Traphagen's excellent note in comments on the attached too):

* Use Google Adwords to discover REAL DEMAND for keywords (use exact an broad match too and if you really want to get depressed use "exact match" to see how few people are actually searching for that new widget you just created).
* Create something like our Curagami Keyword Efficiency Index (cKEI) to calculate where #blueoceans live (keywords or phrases with less competition but healthy search volume and YES these are getting harder and harder to find). Use "long tail" analysis to find these.
* Understand your "poker table stakes" keywords - words you have to have content for but won't win in this lifetime.
* Know what they are spending (use +SpyFu) and then SPEND DRAMATICALLY LESS because you've out thought them. One way to do that is look for a #contentmarketing "fighter pilot" in your space and toss them into your ecosystem (I did this with +Red Bull during my keynote to a group of #smbs at +FedEx conference and they found it eye opening to say the least). 
* Think about using new tools such as Curagami, tools that help create #community so you do LESS but win MORE hearts and minds. Would classify +Paper.li +Scoop.it and +Optimizely in this category of get more spend or do less tools.

Source: RKG [download page]

Notes: Mobile's 33% of Google search visits in Q1 2014 represented only a slight uptick from Q4 2013 (32%), but a more robust rise from 27%

As basketball nirvana approaches for millions of college hoops fans, we take a look at the big trends for last year’s March Madness and the early search trends for 2014’s NCAA tournament.

Bang Ouch Blow Up SEO Infographic
Our post (http://www.curagami.com/bang-ouch-blow-up-seo-infographic/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and infographic shares how easy it is to blow up had won seo due to inadvertent code, name or content changes. DON'T DO THESE 5 things!

We've done 3 out of these 5 (and we know better). It is EASY to damage your relationship with Google's spider and not even know it. Don't do these 5 THINGS and you will avoid some of the SEO pain we've experienced.  

Why I'm Not A SEO
Thanks to readers and those who share the first part of our 3 part Why I'm Not A SEO triptych is now #1 on Google for the term. THANKS!

Why I'm Not A SEO on Scenttrail Marketing
http://www.scenttrail.com/why-im-not-an-seo/  

Time Management
Time is a TACTIC many Internet marketers forget or don't fully utilize. Here are 5 ways we've learned to tell time:

Time Tip #1: What's Happening NOW?
The web is becoming more and more obsessed with what is happening now. Why? Not sure and who cares (lol). The closer to "real time" your content the more authentic and real it becomes. We use this in our favor in three ways:

* Note and share when content is scaling fast.
* Records are important even when they are YOUR records. Fastest, biggest, most are valuable words in Internet marketing. They are also TIME based. Use fast, faster, fastest to help your content scale.
* Now slips away, but using time parameters provides benchmarkes and scale. Earlier I Tweeted about a Haiku Deck that reached 225 views the fastest and then included (12 hrs).

Time Tip #2: Use History 
The web's time is always NOW, but you can create interesting juxtapositions with the past. When your following reachers the NY Times 1950 subscription level NOTE IT. When you compare a modern web EVENT to a past "real world" event you gain gravitas and understanding. BTW, good luck finding NYT circulation in 1950.

Time Tip #3: Process Is Product
Easy to forget that whatever you are doing NOW is, when published and shared, a product. This is why I like multiple publishing platforms (blogs, Scoop.it, G+ are my most frequently used platforms). Sharing your process as close to CREATION as possible brings the NOW into your content (see tip #1).  

Time Tip #4:  Redux Is Truth
We lucky few Internet marketers are like scientists. We test, test and test content, ideas and memes. When you find something that pops DOUBLE DOWN and keep doubling down (publishing a post about the post, publishing a II or III version) until you exhaust upside. Once you reach the point of diminishing return make a note and move on. First time ANYTHING can be a fluke. If you can repeat the same or better results over and over you've found EVERGREEN content you need to OWN. 

Time Tip #5: Don't Forget TIME Is In The Web's Algorithm
Everyday millions of things happen online (maybe billions). With that much NEW going on TIME becomes a way to TRUST you (or not). every day you build or lose clout, reputation and status (authority). Crying over yesterday's losses is foolish and expensive. Gear up, learn and move on. Always remember you can't do anything TODAY the web won't remember TOMORROW.  

Easy to model your Not Provided (or branded) keyword revenue down to where it belongs - the keywords that deserve it if Google was playing fair :). 

 1. Remaining - Subtract the rest of your keyword revenue from your massive Not Provided total. 

2. % Remaining - Divide your "Remaining" or non Not Provided keys into the Remaining total. This gives you the % for each non Not Provided key of the total revenue associated with non Not Provided keys. 

3. Allocate - Now multiple your Not Provided total by your % Remaining. 

4. Finally ADD your new Allocations by non Not Provided keys to their Google reported income (A + C). 

Follow Thomas Power on G+
An interesting conversation broke out on Thomas Power's G+ profile (https://plus.google.com/114149296801704936672/posts/8AYn6gwG1wc ). Funny how relevant the conversation is to Future of Web Design 1 & 2 Haiku Decks (http://sco.lt/7r6zkf & http://sco.lt/61eqNF ). 

Here is a riff I just added to the great conversation about Google and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

Note To Thomas Power based on his thread...
Decline and fall of the Roman Empire for Google for sure. I think social scared them about as much as a company can be scared sort of like how scared Microsoft was of the web.

Turns out they both were right to be scared (lol). As we move toward semantic web, a web of meaning and context checked by social, what we know as Google will be all but gone.

I just created a Haiku Deck about how web design changes in a semantic web time (http://sco.lt/61eqNF if you are interested and sorry to pimp your post). 

The reason the big G is worried and closing the gates is app-ification + semantic could be a difficult combination for their $. Google's system depends on the VOTE of a link (or link expressed as social share). 

What if we LINK LESS? What if we SEARCH LESS? In an app-based world where I watch my Amazon movies without every appearing to go to Amazon (at least as far as Google is concerned) how relevant and true is Google's traffic analysis? 

Last night I fired my Amazon app to watch Inspector Morris and Google has NO VIEW into that click or time on site, none. As the mobile web dominates we will app-ify all of our code. 

My deck speaks to our adoption of the Google float. Once our websites are What If math then we can be said to be fully app based too since what Google's spider "sees" is nothing. 

Nothing because what you see when you go to my website will be different than what someone else sees based on your cookie. That cookie will say what persona you belong within and so what website you see. 

If Google has value in the world described in the Future of Web Design it will be VASTLY different than counting links. I think THIS anticipation of OUR future floats is why Google is insisting on having us all logged in all the time. 

Once we are logged in we are using Google's app in a similar way as my use of Amazon's last night. We disappear to anyone other than Google allowing Google to create a new value system NOT based on links. 

Semantic web is that new value system not based on links. Google will have so many signals and so much big data on behavior they can craft a new voting booth for their SERPs pages - one that may just remain elegant and relevant even in a world of meaning controlled by apps.  

Great infographic showing the cascading waterfall of SEO and Google's river responds to a changing Internet.