Thinking at Your Search Marketing Sideways
Earlier this week I wasted part of an afternoon playing with Jonathan Feinberg’s nifty little Wordle cloud creator, and wondering if I would ever get any work done. Several experiments and much amusement later, I purposefully created this:
This is my studied, on-purpose Wordle
I say “purposefully created” because this Wordle is made from a carefully constructed list of words I put into Notepad, with emphasis where I wanted it, so that the correct words were the correct size. The idea was that I wanted something I could put on the back of a T-shirt that would make the right impression at a glance – hence, the casual observer should be able to read voodoo, google, metric, intelligent, ppc, search, adwords, and pay, without a lot of eye trouble. A closer inspection will reveal quality, adcenter, strategy, forecasting, score, seo, conversions, even magic.
The reason I went to all the trouble was because the original URL-based Wordle on my blog made me think “wow, I need to put that on a T-shirt” but it was too wordy and had stuff in there that I didn’t want (like Dave Snyder’s name – heh):
Original Wordle run on MetricVoodoo.com
So after I figured out a new list of words, which was based largely on the original Wordle anyway, my brain started off down the CafePress avenue… t-shirts, yeah, and a poster would be cool too, oh and I need mouse pad and maybe an apron for cookouts – that would really make an impression on all my geeky friends… I wonder if I can have this made into a tinted window screen for the back of my jeep?
That’s when something occurred to me. A Wordle Cloud image of your landing page should be able to function as your AD for whatever it is that landing page is selling.
There ya go… sideways SEO research. Here’s what you do – go to Wordle and test the text on your landing page and if you are not willing to use the result as an ad for your product, your page needs work. Imagine what Googlebot thinks of it? Hmmmm.
Here’s the simplest way to run the Wordle-test on your landing page:
Run a keyword density listing on your landing page.
– My favorite way to do this is to use the Keyword Density tool on SEO Quake toolbar for Firefox because it gives you a plain text blurb at the bottom that you can copy and paste without a lot of hassle.
Copy the total text of the page as “read” by the analyzer.
Paste the text into the free form text box on Wordle and click “go.”
Study the resulting Wordle Cloud… would you be willing to put that on a T-shirt or on a billboard?
See anything interesting?
Stay tuned for part two, as I Wordle through some real life examples.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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