Pear Analytics

If you’re online today, you’ve heard about SOPA and PIPA. Today there is no Wikipedia, Fark, or Reddit, as these sites work to raise awareness of these two terribly written pieces of legislation. We are not going to delve into the technicalities, since that has been done quite effectively elsewhere (like on the EFF, Reddit’s Blog, or a great infographic, courtesy of Google).

Rather, I would like to briefly discuss just a little bit about how Pear started, how we grew to become the company that we are today, and how that likely would not have been possible had these bills been voted into law. This is personal to us; Pear is made up of people active on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, and a myriad of other sites. Our whole business model revolves around a free and open Internet. Functioning under the guidelines introduced in SOPA and PIPA would do great damage to our business model, and would have essentially prevented us from reaching the point that we find ourselves at presently.

Various portions of PIPA and SOPA would negatively affect nearly any business with an online presence. For example, SOPA would require that we actively monitor every outbound link on our site, as well as our clients’ sites, to ensure that they are not linking to sites with copyrighted materials. As a small company, we simply do not have the extra staff to create the monitoring ‘department’ that we would probably need. The alternative would be to create a new service, where we could be hired on to actively monitor client sites. Sure, we might be able to make some additional income from such a service, but–being familiar with start-ups in general–creating an additional layer of compliance issues would stifle innovation and small business.

As written in SOPA, search engines would be required to actively monitor potentially infringing sites. This means taking resources away from improving search algorithms and shifting them to filter search results. A large part of our strategy involves improving the content of our clients’ sites. As such, we rely on the continually improving effectiveness of major search engines. Taking resources from their improvement efforts means that poorer results will show up in search, and our efforts would provide less effective results.

SOPA and PIPA would severely hamper the sort of entrepreneurship that was required to get Pear off the ground in the first place. If we had started Pear with SOPA in action, we would have had to invest in legal counsel to ensure we had protections in place to respond to any claims made under the umbrella of SOPA or PIPA. Under SOPA and PIPA, Pear and essentially any other company with an online presence could be placed in a position where a mere accusation would require considerable resources to counter, outside of due process. When accusations mean presumed guilt or increased costs, you create a truly non-viable business environment. Unethical competitors could make claims and start a process that would cause business to grind to a halt.

Search has become a standard means of gathering information. It has become an incredibly useful tool to check facts, to verify quotes, to gather statistics. Search is not just a tool for business, even though much of our business is built on top of search.  By hampering continual development and improvement of search, we are really doing harm to individuals world-wide. SOPA and PIPA could even go further than just hampering development, though. They could break much of what we already have. The free flow of information is a necessary ingredient in a free society, and when we start to infringe on that, we are truly heading down a dark path.

So what can YOU do? While there are plenty of online petitions, these tend to be less effective than handwritten letters and phone calls. So take the time and call your representative. Use this service from AmericanCensorship.org to call your representative. Visit the United States House of Representatives to find the congressman that represents YOU in the House. Find your senator. Call. Write. Take action, while you still can.

No Comments »Tags: PIPA, SOPA

The adage “Content is King” is repeated over and over again in the SEO community, as well as among advertising agencies and web developers. Google wants to see that your site has great content too; convincing search engine crawlers that you have something worth reading or seeing is really the whole purpose of an SEO campaign. When it boils down to it, though, there are really only two ways to accomplish that: 1) tricking the search engine into thinking that your site has great content, or 2) actually having great content.

There are some ways to enhance the reach of your site’s content, but if you start with something sub-par, whatever inbound links you are able to create are going to come at a cost. That cost is generally going to be either your own time or the time of someone you’re paying to help generate inbound links to a mediocre message. Then when visitors DO arrive at your site, they end up underwhelmed by what they find.

We think that there is a better way. Our philosophy is to optimize a client’s site, not by artificial means, but by doing things that actually make the site more usable from a human perspective. Sure, we pay close attention to every technical detail. We experiment with and analyze a large dataset that we’ve acquired through tens of thousands of analyses done through our free website analysis tool, and we follow and contribute to the thought leadership within the SEO community, but the conclusion that we always end up arriving at is that to rank really well, the information on our client’s site needs to be excellent.

Visualizing data has been a great way to provide content that improves the quality of our clients’ sites. The process involved requires a considerable amount of work, both on the research side and on the production side, but the end product is something that truly adds value to a site. That value translates to increased natural inbound linking.

Identifying a Strong Infographic Candidate

Of course, not every client is a natural fit for data visualization. Most do not have access to proprietary industry data, which often comes at a considerable cost. Surprisingly, though, through brainstorming sessions and out-of-the-box thinking, data sources can be sought out and identified across a fairly wide variety of subjects. For our discussion, we will focus on two case studies–two actual examples of infographics we developed for our clients.

Infographic Construction: Drupal Module Expansion

To develop a data representation around Duo Consulting’s target audience, we had to dive into the world of Drupal. Now, we are quite comfortable finding our way around a Drupal install, and we provide consultation services for and implement changes to a variety of Drupal sites–but creating a successful infographic that highlighted some of the growth in the Drupal world proved to be a challenge. Determining how many sites rely on Drupal is nearly impossible, and comparing Drupal to, say, WordPress or Joomla in terms of compatible data points likewise provided little in the way of reliable data.

We returned to the drawing board a number of times with this project, going back and forth with our client to find both a dataset that worked well with the direction of their company and one that would translate well into a graphical format.

In the end, we finalized the dataset with the number of Drupal modules developed through the past years, along with a comparison of which areas were most well-represented. That finished step one, but we had taken on more than we realized!

In creating a visualization of the Drupal data, we ran into some difficulty. Doing a breakdown by year of the number of modules, along with an overview of the general growth of the platform presented an issue with scalability of the design. When we worked to include the detail, the image became too large and unusable, when we attempted to provide more of an overview, the design lacked the depth we had hoped for.

In presenting to our client, we ran into the age-old problem of the graphic not making immediate sense to them; we had been looking at, digesting, and dissecting the data for too long, and what seemed intuitive to us was lost on new viewers–definitely a problem for any data visualization.

So it went back to the drawing board again, and with the help of a dedicated team, we revisited the entire design. The end result was simple, and illustrated exactly what we had intended to convey. The creation process required more hours than we had anticipated, but in the end we had created a design that helped people see the exponential growth of the Drupal community quickly and succinctly.

The original design can be seen on Duo Consulting’s blog, here: Robust Functionality Found In Growth And Variety Of New Drupal Modules.

We learned a lot from this creation process: the importance of identifying the right topic to address; the “fudge-factor” we needed to account for in budgeting the time allotted to a project like this; and probably most importantly, how easy it is to be too close to the project at hand. Client input is an absolute must!

Coal Seam Gas Polling

Another data visualization project we undertook revolved around Coal Seam Gas. In this instance, the client had already compiled the data, and we recognized an opportunity to help them increase the likelihood of inbound links to their blog post by visually representing the data. This was a straight-forward project on our end, and we were able to deliver the final project with minimal revisions.

Even though our visualization was not incredibly complex in this instance, and the data was basically handed to us, the addition of a visualization of their data made their poll numbers come to life much more readily than the numbers by themselves.

This design can be viewed on Reachtel.com.au’s blog: Coal-Seam Gas polling in Queensland.

The most important thing, though, is that in both cases we were able to either provide original content, or improve the existing content of a client’s site. With each client, we were able to secure several immediate inbound links from a variety of sites with high domain authority and potentially grab additional, natural links from the wild.

On top of that, at the end of the day both sites ended up with visually appealing, graphical representations of subjects related to their industries. They ended up with content that will appeal to their human visitors, not just to search engine crawlers.

Infographics are going to continue to be a part of SEO strategies we implement for a variety of our clients, and I think that it is a trend that will stick around for quite some time.

We will have more to say about infographic value, design, and implementation in future posts–it is an exciting product that we are very happy to be able to offer!

No Comments »Tags: data visualization, infographics, seo infographics

If you were a search engine, you would probably want to show pages in your results that were built with the proper protocols for the Internet.

Sites that are riddled with countless HTML and/or CSS validation errors will likely not appear as frequently in the search results as would pages that follow the proper syntax and validation protocols.  Even so, the effect is probably somewhat negligible when you consider the more than 200 indicators Google uses for ranking websites.

Content Management System Effect

Sometimes we see that the CMS is responsible for the invalid HTML or CSS, and that the problem can not be solved unless the entire theme, or design is changed.  This is where you would need to balance the time/cost benefit of fixing these errors, versus just leaving them until the site is fully overhauled.

SiteJuice uses the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to look for errors on your page based on the DOCTYPE specified.

4 Comments »Tags: content management systems, doctype, Html and CSS validation