No man is an island, but your web site … it might be. Technically your web site is supposed to be a part of the grand interconnectedness of the web. You’ve done the SEO, provided great outgoing links and you’ve even built a few doorway pages to help people find your site. But they’re still not coming — or at least they’re not coming as frequently as you want and you can’t figure out why.
Well, simply stated, it’s because the times they are a changin’. Back in the old days (circa last year), building bridges to your web site was something you did essentially by yourself using technology. Most of your efforts were centered on SEO (search engine optimization), advertising and building more technology (such as doorway pages) to increase your web footprint. All these efforts were combined to make sure that all of the little robots that scour the web would bring more humans to your sites. The problem is that the robots don’t care … and they’re not friends with the humans.
Fast forward to this moment
The web changes quickly and so do the people using it. When I first discovered Google, I could literally spend hours searching — just to see what would appear. Today, I certainly still Google a lot, but I also have a much more powerful method for getting information: I ask other people. I trust my friends and I know how they can help. I also trust my online social groups and I like their recommendations. So very often now, I go to my social networks and ask the questions.
Just taking a quick peek at my Twitter stream right now, I see the following list of tips, news, questions and feedback:
- “How to use StumbleUpon – A Step by Step Guide”
- “The Helium 3 on the Moon and on asteroids could be mined to give us stable nuclear fusion and …”
- “Who should be in the new A-Team film?”
- “Is Google doing anything with GrandCentral? I have an account & nothing has changed since the beginning (except I can’t invite any more)”
- “I really want to help my community by implementing an economic gardening program. However, I’m not independently wealthy. Ideas?”
People have questions. People have answers. People have recommendations.
Your web site might be an island because you’re not enabling people to question, answer and recommend. If you don’t enable your readers, the barriers to sharing are high enough that it doesn’t happen. Have you made it easy for your readers to recommend your site (or page) on Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, etc.? Do you have a comment form? Do you also provide an RSS feed and a Twitter account to follow?
You see, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. You can work and work and work to feed the robots, but the work of enabling personal recommendations is better. As your visitors become fans, they’ll recommend your services and products through their social network.
Make it easy
If I have to choose between recommending a site that provides me a link to share and a site that I have to manually copy and paste information to share it, I prefer the first. The great news is that enabling sharing on your site isn’t as hard as it used to be — and it’s getting easier. Services like ShareThis and lijit provide turnkey solutions for sharing, aggregating and searching your sites. Feedburner turbocharges your RSS feeds and provides for advertising revenue within your feeds. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are providing solutions for comment forms and other social tools that work on your site with little or no coding required.
As these tools evolve — and they certainly will — strong interconnectedness with communities of people will be a primary differentiator of web sites. As such, niche sites will have an increased opportunity for success because they won’t be competing in the SEO world, but in the community world and the community will always care more than the robots.
Coming soon…
Within the next two to three weeks, I’ll be showing concrete examples of how to socially enable your web site with some of the drop-in tools listed above and also with some of the more technically intense options available today. Stay tuned!
Comments:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }