Must Design

We Live In Google's World
If the web is the wild west then Google is the organizing and calming sheriff. There latest moves including slapping artificial intelligence into their algorithm and moving to real-time updates mean  we live in Google's world perhaps more than ever. 

Google's ability to balance an ever changing world on the head of a pin can be admired, feared or detested depending on where your website is coming out, on how much traffic your site is losing or gaining based on the latest.

These changes mean a favorite too, the Penguin Tool ( http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/) is about to lose it's relevance. The ability to overlay Google's moves on your Google Analytics is yet another "not provided" move. Google wants to hold and control their data since control translates into the ability to sell those tools back to us.

As my friend and Google Watcher, Bill Slawski told me he thinks web marketers should be boning up on AI. As we lose our ability to SEE and learn from the web's data Bill is right. We better know AI or diversify our multichannel marketing FAST. 

We live in Google's world perhaps now more than ever!

http://www.curagami.com/google-penguin-4-rankbrain-love/?v=7516fd43adaa 

http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

Canonical URLs Explained
The Yoast post provides an easy way to understand why rel=canonical is a powerful new SEO tag. Yoast has a dog in the hunt. They make a Magento plugin that easily writes the rel=canonical tag into a product page's head.

The explanation about WHY canonical URLs are so important is only half right. We have a million ways of expressing and sharing URLs these days. Without rel=canonical we end up duping content to distraction.

Here's the rub. All ecommerce sites dupe content. They must. When I was a Director of Ecommerce a single product accounted for 50% of our profits. You better believe I merchandised that product into every nook and cranny our site offered. I duped that product and it's content to distraction.

There are other ways to limit duplication including:

* Use of your Robots.txt file.
* Locking content behind a firewall.  

* Use of blockquotes & rel=canonical tags. 
* Rewrite duplicated content so it's not as duplicated (lol). 

We included our email output into a folder with a "no follow" line in our robots.txt. You may think such a move is enough. It isn't. Be sure NOT to drive links from spiderable content INTO that folder or you eliminate the effectiveness of the robots.txt.

In the end every ecom site worth it's salt MUST duplicate content. Rewriting sounds like a good strategy, but it isn't. Content = time and time = money when managing million dollar commercial sites. You will be duping content.

Best to use rel=canonical because it shows Google you aren't trying to STEAL anything. Reminds me of what a friend shared about the disavow tool (used to deny inbound links or signal they may be untrusted).

 My friend was using the disavow tool daily on his clients accounts. "So you are brown-nosing Google," I kidded him. "Exactly," was his answer. Rel=canonical tells Google you are TRYING to do the right thing and sometimes that is enough. 

Web designers shouldn't be SEO experts since keeping up with DESIGN is a full-time job. Nothing has made that truth more apparent than my first week learning CSS, SCSS and the like at The Iron Yard Code Academy in Durham, NC this week.

But web designers are where SEO rubber meets the Google Road so understanding a handful of ideas is critical to the online success of any designers creations. This deck was created to share with The Iron Yard's Cohort 3 Front End Engineering class Friday January 16th.

Includes our favorite FREE SEO tools and how we use them. Good luck and let us know your SEO / Design experience and we will curate into an upcoming post on http://www.curagami.com.

Designing G+ In
Crazy to suggest using G+ as a tool to power your online marketing right? Maybe not. Greatest return always comes from the least understood ideas. GooglePlus is a "least understood" idea these days.

Their leader left and TechCrunch said G+ the social net is dead. They may be right, but that is beside the point. G+ has always been more than a social net. G+ is a suite of tools marketers can use to find blue oceans.

Blue oceans are the as yet unspoiled places where marketers can still swim without fear of a herd of sharks. Oceans where sharks eat themselves are "red oceans" such as Facebook.

We suggest designing G+ into your marketing and site. Hold weekly hangouts, you don't need a G+ profile to use hangouts now, and created a branded community if only so you rule your name in #seo. Finally we suggest curating the great comments you will receive on G+ as a source of future content.

We've never been able to figure out how to use circles in a unique way, but they too beckon with possibility. By creating weekly content based on Hangouts and Community you get lots of GoogleJuice, the least expensive #videomarketing we know about and great community development tools that cost you NOTHING.

The linked post discusses Mark Traphagen's call to use G+ as a hub of your marketing. That's a great call since the price is RIGHT (free though you may spend some making G+ play the way you want it in your design). Designing G+ tools INTO your community creates the cheapest, biggest and best online win we can think of.

So the death of G+ is greatly exaggerated and, if you are smart, you will find a way to design the tool's many possibilities into your marketing.

Google Features Work of Artist Agnes Martin
When I lived in Chicago the Milwaukee Art Museum was having an Agnes Martin exhibit. One Saturday I decided to drive the hour and a half to see the exhibition since I love the Milwaukee Art Museum (and this was before they got their amazing "cap")..

On the outside looking in you might think painting lines over and over again for most of your life would be boring to do and even more boring to view. You would be wrong on both sides of the equation.

Agnes Martin's work is a study in quiet power. Google's use of an Agnes Martin image today celebrating a great but hardly well known American artist teaches valuable design lessons including:

* Embrace the seemingly disparate.
* In a noisy world QUIET Design works.
* Simple and clean is the hardest design to do.
* Quiet repetition works too.
* Brand the unknown but beautiful.
* Share your brand authority with high quality but unknown memes.

If your designs can do any two of these six ideas you would be a hero and your company will WIN. Today Google did all six, but then they are GOOGLE :).

Voice Search = Next Big Thing
As of 2014 we know 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis. Now with virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and voice recognition. 

Marty Note:
The way you get your content into their voice box is all about how you structure DATA. This post gives a great overview of schema and how to use it to win hearts, minds and loyalty as Siri shows your stuff instead of theirs.  

Might want to sprinkle a little predictive analytics and  AI-like branching too. Read this post and understand the new SEO. 

Google SEO Buzzcut
Google can cut our website's hair, but they aren't alone. We can be vicious barbers. Our unintended actions often mess with our URLs and that messes with the infinite universe we create whenever we publish.

Lessons shared here including an October update will help your site recovery from a bad Google or self inflicted haircut.  

17,162 People Later
We've been asked to make the presentation that created our most viewed Hiaku Deck again at the Iron Yard Code Academy again (made the first presentation six months ago). There were important ideas we shared last time:

* SEO THRIVES or DIES with graphic designers.

* Graphic designers are heroes under siege by many groups.

* Set REALISTIC expectations.
* Set reasonable boundaries (with gorillas looking for bananas).
* Shared a few easy to remember tips to help designers improve their technical SEO skills.

Obviously we hit a nerve. We will be updating benchmarks shared six months ago to see how those we mentioned fared since.  Remember technical SEO is important, but your content must engage, be exciting (visually too) and develop sustainable online community to win over time. 

Good luck and if you have SEO questions we didn't cover email them to martin(at)Curagami.com and we will include and send you a Curagami Rules tee.  

Knowing your website's navigational taxonomy can mean the difference between millions in traffic and money. Here are 5 Simple Navigational Taxonomy Rules.

* It's About THEM not YOU.
* Create A Commons.
* It's FREE and EASY.

* Srart with Brands & Work OUT.

* Find Engagement & Work IN.

Easy to follow rules so your site's nav WINS traffic, hearts, minds, SEO and loyalty needed to be around for a bit.