Downtown Eugene


Monday, December 15, 2008

A Web Strategy for a City



I'd like to suggest a city-wide initiative for Eugene, Oregon.

In these tough times, citizens and supporters can give our local economy a boost, through a deeper understanding of how the web works.

If we cooperate to reach our true potential, to contribute our lives and works to the global conversation on the world wide web, we will make Eugene an international heavyweight. If the following strategies are pursued by everyone, with very little individual effort, everyone will benefit.

All for one, and one for all

Web strategies always have an "act locally, think globally" quality. Typically a business, in one location, usually acting alone, tries to get the world's attention. But imagine the effect of all Eugeneans and their institutions acting together, providing better information to, and hosting more relevant online activity for a global audience. It pays to help the world, as we will see in a moment.

Let's start with the basics.

Local and Global Rank

An important measure of a website's success is its rank in Google search results for particular search terms.

As an example, take this blog. If you type downtown Eugene into Google, you get a third of a million results, but this blog is listed as result number two or three. That's pretty good ranking, but that's only a local search term.

Let's look at a local website doing well on an international scale. When you type Tango into Google, as of this writing, you get 47 million web pages. Number 41, out of 47 million, is The Tango Center in downtown Eugene. This high international ranking helps the Tango Center to survive, which in turn helps the local economy. Think of it like this: we're the 41st most common application of the word 'Tango', worldwide.

Our extreme visibility on the web helped locals and visitors to find us. It led artists, musicians, performers, organizers and instructors to collaborate with us ... people have moved to Eugene and attended the University of Oregon because our website gave them a lively and full impression of the local Tango community.

If every project in town had this kind of global presence, linking and referring to each other, the overall ranking of everything in Eugene would rise. I'll explain this momentarily.

Strategies to achieve rank are called "SEO" or Search Engine Optimization. Individuals, companies and institutions invest a great deal of time, money and energy to achieve a high rank, for certain search terms. This "drives traffic" to their sites ... in other words, more people visit, more often.

Not just metaphors

Google's engineers work continuously to automate the process of awarding rank to websites. A website's content must be relevant, and the site must be linked, in relevant ways, to many other well-ranked sites. I think of this as a "heft" given a site by other "heavy" sites, a bit like a spider's web re-shaped by dew-drops of various sizes ... or, if you've ever taken discrete mathematics: this is like a weighted graph. Google uses the metaphor of websites "voting" for each other with links, providing "winners" for certain content on the web.

So, a critically important web promotion strategy is to get other good websites to link to your website. For example, if the Register-Guard writes an article about your business, make sure they provide their readers a live link (not only text of the link, but something the user can click) to your business.

It's quite reasonable to cooperate with other websites in this way, for mutual support, linking to each other to form a kind of connected subset of websites. This cooperative group needs to represent real diversity of origin, and the references to each other need to make sense ... Google has analytical methods that can sense feigned diversity, and sense "link farms" and the mere "trading" of links between sites.

Act Now

So, citizens and supporters of Eugene, let's cooperate to improve our mutual ranking, our relevant contributions, and our international standing.

Follow these simple rules:

1. Get ALL of your good content onto the web.
2. Make sure all of your web pages always link to any relevant local content.

In other words, a community must put itself online, to be globally relevant. This means that everyone must get to know the strengths and diverse qualities of their community, write about them, and link to them as much as possible.

All members of the community must become more self-aware, and more generous with promotion of each other, online.

To effect our real-world economy, we'll all need to do our part.

Eugene has thousands of under-promoted world-class businesses, websites, stories, people, etc. To give us our due internationally, we only need to cooperate with each other.

Meeting Potential and Fixing Problems

Let's look at an example with much room for improvement: a page in the Register-Guard online version of Ticket:

(Register Guard Ticket for Nov. 28 - Dec. 2, 2008)

Every line in this calendar could have local links, which would help to increase the ranking of both the Register-Guard and each of the artists, groups, businesses, venues, non-profits, agencies and sponsors involved. Some are local, some are not, but that doesn't matter. Associating the name and link of a non-local group or organization with a local venue or organization will help raise everyone's profile ... and that's how page rank is supposed to work. When you type into Google something like "Tango eugene oregon", you should get both The Tango Center and the artists who've been there, whether international, like Cecilia Gonzalez or local, like Mood Area 52. By helping to connect others, we raise our own profile on the web.

So, everything we put on the web must be stuffed with relevant hyperlinks ...

The Long Tail

But we also need to get more of Eugene onto the web. The tactic of putting volumes of relatively historic or obscure material on the web, targeting smaller, niche audiences, is usually referred to as The Long Tail.

For example, it seems that none of Eugene's local papers or magazines are trying very hard to get their back issues onto the web. Recently, The Register Guard even reduced its online content significantly. This immediately lowered their ranking on Google, reducing successful traffic to their site, and reducing traffic to everything in Eugene they write about.

This is a fixable problem, however. With available labor, improvements in scanning software, and initiatives by Google to get more content online, we could have every issue of The Register Guard, The Eugene Weekly, The Oregon Daily Emerald, Eugene Magazine [update: Eugene Magazine now archived], all the TV and Radio stations, and all their predecessors, online, earning ad revenue and driving traffic to other Eugene businesses.

Let's look at the University of Oregon, a potential helper in this city-wide initiative. Improving the chances of an appearance in search results of any kind of research, would help our local economy. An example off the top of my head: the UO is a world-leader in developmental biology, due to the success of zebrafish studies. However, if I type developmental biology into Google, and look at the results page, "Oregon" is not visible. I see Guelph, Canada, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and Arizona ... dig a little deeper, and you can see that this is because those Universities spend a little effort, and no money to speak of, to collect some resources for the public and for their colleagues. The Internet is a place where being helpful makes you popular! As we do this, we will in turn make the UO, Eugene and Oregon, successful.

In this example, how would that be done?

Lengthening the Long Tail

Imagine many helpful pages on Developmental Biology at the UO, linked to pages by all the students and staff of the relevant departments, which would then link to all their local and non-local connections and interests. Imagine if local developmental biologists initiated more international online cooperative projects, such as open-source initiatives, social networks, and wikis for developmental biology. These are simple to initiate, and not hard to make successful, if we actually use our wide international influence to do so. All these nearly cost-free efforts would improve web content, while promoting Eugene and the University.

The same efforts could be made by every employee and student in the 4J, the entire staff of the City of Eugene and Lane County, and every organization ... we need to uncover everything ... and get the entire city, its interests, quirks, opinions, history, research, findings, stories, photos, videos and arts online, and cross-referenced.

Anyone promoting themselves would do this ... but if an entire city did it, its online businesses' sales would increase dramatically, its non-profits and institutions would receive more grants, its population would be retained more often for its technologically savvy and innovation, and it would be providing the world with better information services.

Remember, anything you do will help. You can start right now ... use the comments section of this blog to promote Eugene and downtown businesses, non-profits, and special people, to the world. If you have your own web content, scour it for potential links, as in the calendar example above. If you have no web content: why not? Eugene is full of people with something to say. Get a blog, get a website, start a Social Network (here's one of mine), or publish pages on MySpace, Flickr, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. Create good web content, the best you can manage. Help your friends and neighbors to get online, show them what you've learned, think of new approaches, and, continually, link to each other. It's not only symbolic -- it will have a real-world effect!

7 Comments:

At 12:45 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eugene Magazine now archives content starting with our Winter 2008 issue.
Eugene Magazine Archive

 
At 11:15 PM, Anonymous SEO Services said...

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At 4:01 AM, Blogger 梁爵 said...

2020.04.04酒店工作印象中的和現實面有很大落差嗎?
現實和酒店上班印象中當然有很大的落差啊
因為我們一般收到酒店打工訊息 大都是從電影報章雜誌而來
而會有新聞報導價值的酒店PT新聞 通常是很特別很誇張的 這些新聞報導也許是有些接近酒店上班事實 但不是八大行業全部
(就如同捷運上有電車痴漢 但不是每班車隨時隨地有色狼啊 我們也常安全到家啊)
加上一般人的想法 這行總是只有負面 (當便利商店店員也會遇到砍人強劫)
其實凡事都有負面啊 端看自己怎麼面對
這行雖然不是賺錢最好的方式之一 但卻是最快的方式之一
我們只建議多了解多比較 看完環境 再做決定
別人只說這行的美好 但我們強調得失之間 去創造自己想要的生活
給自己一次機會 跨出第一步 若自覺不適合這行 就盡早打消夢幻的念頭 趕緊找其他出路 不是嗎??

 
At 12:53 PM, Blogger 梁爵 said...

2020.10.18酒店小姐的基本介紹跟工作內容第一次是剛入社會工作時,陪主管到台中出差,他們帶我去的;那晚,看到2個已婚主管大解放的樣子,讓我有點驚恐…他們玩得很瘋,我和一個年紀比我小、和我一樣菜的小姐,2個躲到隔壁沒人的包廂「避難」。
我問她:【酒店小姐】【酒店公關】不敢來酒店上班-酒店打工的原因?為甚麼來這裡工作?
她說:不敢來酒店上班-酒店打工的原因?趁年輕多賺一點,給家裡,以後也想自己開咖啡店。
我說:主管說要帶我開眼界…
她又問:酒店酒店小姐酒店上班到底都在做麼?好玩嗎?
我說:酒店兼差不是一個複雜的工作環境?有點恐怖….
可能年紀相近吧,我們聊著在職場被前輩、被客人欺負的零零總總,一直聊到主管大聲叫我們,我們才趕忙走回包廂。上個月,去了第2次酒店。認識10多年的客戶大哥,約我到東區的酒店;這次優雅多了,純粹因為大哥喜歡這裡的氣氛,想在這談事情。陪在包廂的幾個「資深小姐」和大哥都熟,談吐有趣、懂進退;她們試著和我這個新面孔攀談,想找出共同的話題。聊到「投資」的話題,大家的話匣子被打開了。其中一個小姐說:「剛入行的時候,每次領到獎金、每年過生日我都會到名牌專櫃、刷個精品犒賞自己。」
另一個小姐氣噗噗說:「幾次需要現金週轉,把名牌包轉賣,才發現我幾萬、幾萬買來的包,根本不值幾個錢,嘔死了。」其他小姐跟著起鬨說:「名牌包像渣男的愛,貶值得厲害。」「名牌包像女人的身價,變中古就不值錢了。」她們聊開了,完全忘了眼前我是個男人….汗。
我好奇問:「現在不買名牌了嗎?」
小姐A說:「以前送自己名牌包,現在送自己名牌股票。」
我問:「什麼是名牌股票啊?」
她們回:「公司穩到不會倒、名聲大到不行的公司啊,像是OOO、OOO….」哈哈,聽了她們講出的幾個名字,果然都是大名牌。
原來小姐A,聽了恩客的教導,開始懂得投資股票;這幾年,手邊有閒錢就一張一張的買。其他小姐看她像個「包租婆」每年有股息、股利可領,也「跟風」開始學她投資,用包包換股票。A驕傲地說:「年輕小姐在比手上的包包,我們資深姐姐是在比誰手上的股票多。」
那天晚上的聊天很有趣,很替小姐們「投資有術」開心。手拿名牌包,得到的是虛榮;手裡有錢,才能活得有底氣。不是等有錢了,才理財;而是開始理財,才會有錢。崴爺看到不少人,還停在「買名牌包」、「等有錢才想理財」的階段,希望酒店裡的小故事,讓你有些啟發。

 
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