Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart’s women’s lifestyle website, marthastewart.com. At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007.

We thought it would be interesting to take another look at Martha Stewart’s website, to get an indication of how mainstream websites have evolved over the past 3 years.

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The design of marthastewart.com hasn’t changed much since we last checked. It has the same pastel green color scheme and is organized in much the same way, around lifestyle categories: Food, Entertaining, Holidays, Weddings, Crafts, Home & Garden, Pets, Whole Living, Community.

However if we look more closely, several things have taken more prominence on the site compared to 2007.

Martha’s Blog

The first is an increased focus on Martha’s personal blog. In 2010 Martha has a daily updated blog, called The Martha Blog, with the tagline "up close and personal." This marks a change from 2007, when the main blog was called Bluelines and was written by the editors of company magazine Blueprint. The Bluelines blog was shuttered in July 2008.

The Martha Blog was started in August 2007 and began to be regularly updated in October 2007. The content on the blog appears to be written by Martha herself, although one can never be sure with celebrities. Regardless, it showcases the power of blogging – which allows average people and celebrities alike to speak in a personal voice to the world.

There are other topic-focused blogs on marthastewart.com, including a light-hearted one authored by "Martha’s two adorable French bulldogs, Francesca and Sharkey."

Twitter & Facebook

Of course, it’s 2010 and so that means Martha has to have a Twitter account and Facebook Page.

Martha’s Twitter account has nearly 2 million followers (1,909,707 as of today, including this author now). She seems to be a regular Tweeter, which is great to see. Many of the tweets are promotions of her TV show, but then we’re all guilty of self-promotion (ahem). You can see that the tweets are genuine though, for example this one about a late guest on her show: "who could this person be?- so irresponsible when he/she knows the show is live at ten!!! it’s 9:39 we are all apprehensive!!!! oh my."

TV Show Promotion

Another change from 2007 that we noticed was an increased tie-in with Martha’s TV show. It is given prime real estate on the homepage of marthastewart.com, with previews of the latest show and links to the archive.

Despite the TV show being a big focus, the website doesn’t have a lot of multimedia content on it. The videos that are on the site are largely promotional.

This section includes ‘how-to’ articles that complement the TV show, for example this article on how to make a Tie-Dye-Effect Scarf (as featured on a recent TV episode).

Evolution of Martha’s Website

Martha Stewart’s website is clearly meant to be a complement to her main media businesses, the TV show and magazines. So you won’t find much ground-breaking use of the Internet – there’s little or no original video produced specifically for the website, for example.

There also wasn’t a lot of personalization, which was promised in 2007. The community functionality in 2010 seems much the same as in 2007: message boards and the blogs. Although, Twitter and Facebook are both being used to enhance community.

It’d be nice to see more Web native content and personalization. The Web isn’t Martha’s main media presence, so we can understand why those features are lacking. However traffic seems to be on the decline, so perhaps Martha’s web team should consider upgrading again.

2010 Martha Stewart website

2007 Martha Stewart website

2005 Martha Stewart website

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YouTube comment threads aren’t exactly known for offering highly intellectual discussions. Today, however, YouTube is introducing a new experiment that is meant to highlight the best comments on any video. This experiment will offer a “highlights view” of comments that shows the top rated comments and comments from the uploader at the top of every comment thread.

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To opt-in to this experiment, just click here.

More Updates

This experiment also introduces a new way to view ratings. Just a few weeks ago, YouTube abandoned its star ratings in favor of a like/dislike system. In this new experiment, YouTube will now show exactly how many people likes and disliked a given video. Until now, any video you likes was also saved as a “favorite.” Starting today, likes aren’t automatically saved as favorites anymore.

To round up today’s updates, YouTube will also start to surface “Most Liked” videos in various places on the site. According to today’s announcement, the YouTube team hopes that “‘most liked’ becomes a reliable signal that helps you find quality videos to watch.”

Fixing YouTube Comments: Is it Possible?

As we noted earlier this year, the new watch pages feature a far more minimalist design than YouTube’s current layout. With today’s updates, however, YouTube isn’t trying to tweak the site’s design as much as the comment culture on the service. It’ll be interesting to see if these tweaks will help to bring up the level of discussion on the site, or if giving this much prominence to the uploader’s comments will actually reduce the overall number of comments people will post on YouTube.

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It’s great to have everything customized to suit just you, right? You like your bed a certain stiffness, your oatmeal a certain thick and your coffee a certain sweet. How about your search results? According to an article by The Register, Google is working to “‘personalize’ as much as 20 percent of your web searches”.

While this might be good for some things, we’re thinking it could also be like formulating an answer before someone even finishes asking the question.

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The Register quotes Google software engineer Bryan Horling, who spoke this afternoon at the Search Marketing Expo, as saying that one in five searches are customized using a user’s location, web history or online contacts. “Between these three techniques,” Horling said, “just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

Horling explains that many of the changes, however, are rather subtle and usually involve rearranging a few results on a page and not providing an entirely different set of results. Google has tailored results on a large scale, such as by country, for years, Horling explains, but is now “applying it at a finer granularity.”

While people we are in contact with are often of the same mindset and our location comprises much of our interaction with the world, do we really want Google to assume this for us? If we are researching a topic that is normally completely out of our realm, do we really want the search engine to pull us back in, however subtly? Take Google’s “social search” for example.

“The idea behind social search is that we surface content from your social circle,” he said. If you know a particular person, for instance, Google may ensure that a document they wrote receives particular prominence on the results page.

Customizing search results, it would seem, can be like putting us in an echo chamber of similar ideas and opinions. If we look up technology related topics in Google, suddenly we are fed links from our tech savvy contacts that Google pulls from our Buzz stream. But what if we are looking for the outside perspective? Even if we aren’t intentionally looking for the outside perspective, we’re suddenly being subtly driven back to our own world view, as repeated by our peers.

While some examples, like searching for a bus schedule or searching for the words “coffee shop” seem self evident, we have to wonder how these one in five results are changing the way we search the Web.

And if nothing else, we’d rather be able to opt-out if we need, without having to sign out, delete our cookies, clear our cache and reboot the system.

Discuss

LinkedIn has launched new custom company profiles. These let companies and other organizations create rich, multimedia overviews of what they are all about for prospects to view and engage with.

The custom company profile displays content that company’s can easily tailor and update, and the content dynamically adapts to the viewers, based on their industry, job function, location, and seniority. This is good for targeting.

 "Customers can target multiple groups with differing content, and refresh the content periodically (up to 12 times a year), says LinkedIn’s Prasad Gune. "The product offering also provides ways to drive users to the company profile. Companies can also receive monthly usage reports indicating ‘demographic’ information on visitors to the profile."

Here’s an example of what a custom company profile could look like:

The custom profile creates increased visibility for a company’s employment brand. A second tab appears on the company page for "careers," a Career Center module takes prominence, and it links to the company’s custom content on the Career Tab.

Company’s can include items like recruitment messaging that appeals to prospects on a personal level, employee spotlights, a polling feature, video clips, who to get in touch with, and links to the career site to help a candidate take action.

As your website grows, your grasp and understanding of SEO should also. The tendency for search engines is, the more content you have, the more keywords and topicality can overlap which may leave search engine algorithms in a quandary attempting to parse and identify which pages have priority over others.

Although phrase based indexing and retrieval is a prime method for extracting relevance and context, there are multiple layers involved ranging from site architecture, internal links, external deep links and accessibility that all contribute to the formula that decides (based on the least common denominator) which pages are the best match for any given query.

To Assist Search Engines We Suggest that You:

• Define Ranking Objectives.
• Plant Seedling Keywords.
• Determine Preferred Landing Pages
• Reinforce Competitive Keyword Categories.
• Strengthen Internal Linking, Consistently.
• Use Succinct Titles and Meta descriptions (as they can pull their own rankings alone).
• Manage Site Wide Duplicate Content (Custom templates, Noindex, Follow, 301 Redirects, XML Sitemaps).

Define Ranking Objectives – Depending on your keyword positioning and ranking objectives, you will need to select the best method to accomplish them. For example, if your focus is on the Long-Tail of search (meaning less competitive keyword combinations), then link prominence (links from other sites only to the homepage) and flat site architecture (all the pages in the root folder) will work just fine for accomplishing this type of result.

If the market were more specialized and you had less competition (like a high ticket item like MRI equipment), then you could elect for a smaller site with key nodes of relevance (like tips of an iceberg) to wrap up singular, plural and other popular keyword combinations over time.

By adding a series of keyword rich naming conventions and using pagination such as breadcrumb navigation you would reinforce 2 out of the 3 primary metrics search engines assess for relevance (url naming conventions and anchor text) within your own site to subsidize off page ranking factor.

The more work or more streamlined and granular your layers are optimized the less dependent the site becomes on getting a jump-start from other sites and the faster it develops its own authority (to rank on its own coherence/merit).

This strategy would differ from a large ecommerce site with thousands of SKU’s (stock kept units) which means that the model numbers would be the keywords and there would be a large degree of duplicity across the website due to generic mfg. descriptions, etc.

Each keyword has a threshold and tipping point and term frequency within a document, how clearly the hierarchy is promoted within your own website and how large of a footprint your website and link profile make (compared to your competitors) all determines how buoyant your rankings will become.

Plant Seedling Keywords – With keywords, keyword research, modifiers and action words the last thing you want to do is work backwards after the fact. Keywords are the foundation of organic optimization and are the wireframes that eventually support the schema of what a strategic page acting as a piece of the puzzle can accomplish based on its position in the pyramid of relevance.

That pyramid is (1) stable site architecture (2) relevant landing pages based on keyword continuity and (3) a strong internal and external link profile. However, before you can progress to stage 2 or 3, you need to have your hit list of keywords ready to engage the market and search engines alike.

There is no need to recreate the wheel, just look at search trends, related searches (in Google in the footer), keyword research tools and common sense to find a nice cross-section of relevance to use as your blueprint to frame out the site.

If you have a site that lacks coherence, it is not too late to add a new segment to consolidate the ranking factor, execute 301 redirects, add new naming conventions and implement a clear structure that implies a hierarchical method of consistency.

We often implement a an optimized blog on clients sites to concentrate ranking factors that allow us to bypass poorly implemented errors or dated site structures which omit crucial metrics for search engines (such as meta tags, internal links, a one size fits all template, etc).

By baking SEO into the template or new section, you know it is only a matter of time if you manage the areas which impact relevance over time. A stable search engine ranking for a competitive keyword can take anywhere from 4-12 months, but you have to remain focused on the ranking objective over time.

It is not uncommon that when you finally give up and think you have done everything possible to acquire a competitive position (and just relax) that it takes a top 5 or #1 position. The main thing is not to get frustrated or abort inadvertently since you may not see the real result without patience.

So, instead of targeting a handful of keywords, target an entire set of keywords to build the relevance for that subject/topic. By adding internal links to reinforce each other, your pages can implement the buddy system to feed off each other and steamroll the competition since you are using a tight niche of keywords.

Stay tuned for more from SEO Design Solutions Blog, where we share free search engine optimization tips, tactics and strategies that you can actually use to get ranked.

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Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

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SEO for Large Websites Part 1