Shareability Also Increases Website Value 161.0

I-Marketing Guru Regnard Requedan shares the insight
To increase a website’s value, it is not enough to just build in SEO or search engine optimization techniques. In this era of social media, easing a website’s shareability ought to contribute a lot to its value.

From the beginning, I have designed SYNTHESiST with SEO in mind so my first act was actually to build the key word list (1-word, 2-words, etc) to entice the Google spider to visit. I uploaded the sitemap to Google quickly to further aid the process.

Using these key words in titles and content made reading the post difficult. Among other search strategies like the right layout – all white hat, I did get to page one and the PageRank 3/10 quickly.

SYNTHESiST is first a content site dedicated to “enriching the conversation” on innovation and change management and not strictly a marketing or income-generating site.

After sorting out most of the content issues, 2010 will be the year for marketing ideas to a wider audience beyond the narrow casting and promotion I have been doing to innovation practitioners, teachers, and researcher-students here in the Philippines and travels overseas.

From the effort, I have started to receive invitations to conferences in the “learning from Asia or from emerging market” modes.

What I have not done yet is being aggressive in having like-minded practitioners and friends to cite me in their blog rolls. A very good technique is to join a blog magazine or to become part of, say, a newspaper or a big organization. For me that will happen much later.

Congratulations, MarketManila! In this sense, I congratulate MarketManila for a single-handed, content-driven and advertising-free site with a Google PageRank of 5/10 and an Alexa rank of #91, 078 as of today. That’s a really heroic and passionate work. You may link to MarketManila, a food and lifestyle blog, from our BlogRoll, Blogs I Follow, on the Sidebar at right among other blogs I am monitoring and from friends.

Alexa Enrollement. To add another dimension to getting to a wider audience, I enrolled on Alexa on December 25 with a starting rank of #8,700,000. Unlike Google that uses a complex and citation-driven algorithm, Alexa uses visit and page view counts taken from its toolbar.

Their ought to be a correlation between the two metricscthough I have seen sights with out-of-sight Alexa ranks and zip Google PageRank. I suspect these sites use a lot of black hat techniques to drive traffic for income; Google frowns on such techniques,

Today, in less than one month, SYNTHESiST’s rank is higher at #2,395,773 much of which I suspect is due to the logarithmic curve of Alexa’s formula over the first three months of the monitor and not to any particular efforts on my part.

Still, I hope for that rank to go well above the #1,000,000 rank by March 25, three months after enrollment with the math and other enhancements I am doing as below.

Shareability and Searchability.To implement Regnard Raquedan’s internet marketing insight that, in the era of social media, shareability adds to the value of a page, I have installed a Retweet button on each post.

I had a short debate with myself whether to put it on top or at the bottom. Putting it on top has the risk of visitors and friends leaving the page too early.

At the end, I decided to take the risk thinking that the sophisticated readers today would not be excited with the new feature and would just read on and come back later if the post is interesting to share.

The other adjustment I had to make is to make the title and/or the sub-head snappier to be tweetable within 119 characters. That is the remaining length from 140 allowed in Twitter after giving an allowance of 20+1 space for the shortened URL. That actually fits into traditional journalism’s eight-word maximum rule of thumb for titles and a short message for the retweeter.

Some Content Tweaks. I did add up on the content side to make the front page for interesting and sticky, I hope.

• A new poll feature that I am still trying to get a handle on;
• Return of “Books I am Reading Now” that links to Amazon;
• Return of Amazon search box that keeps the link to SYNTHESiST and initialized on the category of innovation;
• Already, as already reported a live tweet box from myself as marvinbeduya, my Twitter username, and a follow me on Twitter button on the right. I have move the share/save button to the bottom of individual posts on the assumption that readers of the whole, lengthy post will do their sharing from there.

One Year Anniversary. SYNTHESiST’s first year anniversary is coming up on February 25, 2010 (also the anniversary of the EDSA People Power revolution in the Philippines).

180 Posts. I am struggling to meet the 180-post goal I have set for the twelve-month period or roughly one post every two days.

I am still working to make it to that level of sharing and an improvement of readership in visits and page views by then. I am happy for you continued support!

Note: Click here for link to Regnard’s blog post on shareability viz searchability.