Engage Youth Online With Social Interactivity

Youth between the ages of 18 and 35 — are a unique group of consumers. They tend to be socially fluid and highly connected, emotionally searching for their identities, and mentally fickle and creative. How can you engage these youngsters online? By applying four design approaches: social interactivity, immediacy, literacy, and individualism.

Provide the ability to communicate with others. To youth, media and content aren't resources for passive consumption. They're pieces of sharable conversations. Enabling communication and content sharing encourages youth to include content from sites in their online conversations.

Offer tools for self-expression. Youth aren't satisfied just consuming content. They want to create their own. Companies need to find ways to embrace these users' creativity and satisfy their need for self-expression.

For most companies and brands, it doesn't make sense to try to redesign an entire site to provide better youth experiences. Instead, customer experience professionals need to identify the most likely activities that youth will be doing on their sites. How can they do this? Execute a simple survey asking people what they're trying to do on the site, and then look at the responses. With more sophisticated analytics, you can also identify the most frequent paths these young users take.

Firms looking to engage younger users with social interactivity should ask two simple questions about the experiences on their sites: 1) Does it provide the ability to communicate with others? and 2) Does it offer tools for self-expression? By asking these two questions in the context of relevant user goals, brands can identify places to increase social interactivity. You can then draw on the best practices of other firms and other industries to take advantage of the opportunities.

Factors to get higher Page Ranks

In the past few days I have been interviewing lots of candidates from Search Marketing agencies as well as the potential candidates responsible for managing digital clients and providing Client Servicing and Account Management. Whenever I ask a question on Page Rank and what are the factors that determine higher page ranks I get different answers. I thought this post would help us to put some of those criteria's and thoughts in place.

Ranking plays such a large part in search engine optimization. Let’s look at just what affects ranking. Keep in mind, however, that different search engines use different ranking criteria, so the importance each of these elements plays will vary.



Location: Location doesn’t refer here to the location (as in the URL) of a web page. Instead, it refers to the location of key words and phrases on a web page. So, for example, if a user searches for “puppies,” some search engines will rank the results according to where on the page the word “puppies” appears. Obviously, the higher the word appears on the page, the higher the rank might be. So a web site that contains the word “puppies” in the title tag will likely appear higher than a web site that is about puppies but does not contain the word in the title tag. What this means is that a web site that’s not designed with SEO in mind will likely not rank where you would expect it to rank. The site www.puppies.com is a good example of this. In a Google search, it appears ranked fifth rather than first, potentially because it does not contain the key word in the title tag.



Frequency: The frequency with which the search term appears on the page may also affect how a page is ranked in search results. So, for example, on a page about puppies, one that uses the word five times might be ranked higher than one that uses the word only two or three times. When word frequency became a factor, some web site designers began using hidden words hundreds of times on pages, trying to artificially boost their page rankings. Most search engines now recognize this as keyword spamming and ignore or even refuse to list pages that use this technique.



Links: One of the more recent ranking factors is the type and number of links on a web page. Links that come into the site, links that lead out of the site, and links within the site are all taken into consideration. It would follow, then, that the more links you have on your page or leading to your page the higher your rank would be, right? Again, it doesn’t necessarily work that way. More accurately, the number of relevant links coming into your page, versus the number of relevant links within the page, versus the number of relevant links leading off the page will have a bearing on the rank that your page gets in the search results.



Click-throughs: One last element that might determine how your site ranks against others in a search is the number of click-throughs your site has versus click-throughs for other pages that are shown in page rankings. Because the search engine cannot monitor site traffic for every site on the Web, some monitor the number of clicks each search result receives. The rankings may then be repositioned in a future search, based on this interaction with the users.

Page ranking is a very precise science. And it differs from search engine to search engine. To create the best possible SEO for your site, it’s necessary to understand how these page rankings are made for the search engines you plan to target. Those factors can then be taken into consideration and used to your advantage when it’s time to create, change, or update the web site that you want to optimize.