Linked Up Design

I read a great article this morning about Google Caffeine. When I first saw this I thought that Starbucks and Google got together and made up a new drink for us web designers that would make it so we did not need to sleep any more so we can spend more of our time designing and less time sleeping! Well I was wrong about that.

Google Caffeine is a new search engine network that Google is going to be launching after the first of the year. I would suggest that you read the article yourself for more information about what Google is doing.

A few key points that I saw in this article that is very important for all of us. First was the point about when Google got started in 1998. One of their key ideas was to make it easier for small and medium sized companies to be able to be found in the search engines. At that point, the bigger companies with what seems like a bottomless pit of money for advertising were basically able to buy their way to the top which is still the same today but Google set up their search engine to rank sites based on their keywords, description, title, content, hits, etc, etc! One thing that Google did that made it easier for the big business to be able to jack up their page ranking was with back links. The more back links, the higher the ranking of a site. So of course companies popped up that made programs to build up back links and so the big companies were able to take over the rankings again.

Well Google Caffeine is going to try and change this by going back to the basics and start to rank sites based on the basics as well as how easily sites load to the browsers and now the amount of social bookmarks a site has. Well what is a social bookmark, this is your links to social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, etc. Basically Google has seen the light with regards to the latest web trend, our social media market which really has taken off over the last few years. Hell, you are reading this blog, aren’t you and I have a crap load of links to my and my clients sites so the proof is in the pudding here.

Unfortunately this concept of Google will be short lived. Social Media Marketing is a hot trend and if you take a good look at the multinational companies, you will see more and more on their sites, print and TV advertising “Follow us on:“.  These companies will start to co-op the social media market which will then give them the edge in the market again within a year or so. You will also see that the social media big boys will really be able to capitalize on this trend which means bigger buck in their pockets and less for the little guys out there. At least for now, all is good and those who are catching up to this social media marketing gravy train will be able to make a few bucks!!

Social Media Marketing has been a subject that I have been a bit backed off from for a few months now thinking that it is a bit immature use of the internet for a company. In fact as I started looking in to it more and more I still felt this way. Why the hell would I as a business owner and a designer, tweet? Actually until 2 days ago, I did not even know what the hell a tweet was.

As I studied more and more about this I started to think, the internet has been around realistically for about 15 years lets say so to say anything is immature about the internet is a bit early. Here you have one of the most amazing forum to work from, anyone or any company can put up a website and with the right SEO work done on it, the site will have the ability to make the company a lot of money for very little money spent in comparison.

I set up a twitter account as well as a facebook page today. I am still not digging the value of the twitter account but it does have some great advantages to the right type of company that needs to stay in touch with its fans or followers. The advantage I see to it is in a retail sense. Let’s say you have a cupcake company and you would like to drive in clients so you tweet to your follower that you are offering a 3 for 2 sale for your follows that come in with a tweet promotional code. Maybe you are launching a new product or you have really good news that you clients need to be made aware of, or, or , or. Another point I thought of was for a client that is an actor and filmmaker. Tweets can be used to instantly tell people what is going on with future projects or if he is looking for a particular location to film in so he needs to reach out right away.

Think that I am underplaying it a bit? I might be, I will have to use it some more so become a follower to my company and we will see what we can do with it, maybe I will offer 20% off SEO work with a tweet promotional code.