{Interactive Web Design Blog}

As students of the Interactive Design program at Capilano University we have been assigned many group projects over the course of the last 2 years. But none have been quite so satisfying as our recent SEO challenge that spawned Robot Salmon.

Our Challenge

To create a Blog (or a website) that would be able to draw interested users to it and send them on through to the Interactive Design programs website to learn more about what the program has to offer, the teachers, the facilities etc. We had just under 2 months to create our web presence, build a following of interested viewers, generate content that would keep our new readers coming back and make Robot Salmon a know name in the web design community of Vancouver.

Our Process

Step 1: Coming up with a name

The very first step that our team at Robot Salmon took was to decide on a name for our Blog. We knew that since we were under such a strict time crunch the name that we gave our Blog was going to play an important role in our success. We wanted to choose a name that represented us as west coasters, as tech nerds, and as designers that were launching ourselves into the digital stream of the future.

We wanted a name that you could hear once and remember – being memorable on the web is often a big hurdle as there are so many other people out there generating the same content and starting the same conversations with their users. We landed on the name Robot Salmon as a group, the robot representing the tech side, the future, and the geek (geek is a good thing here!) inside each of us, the salmon representing the west coast and the will to drive on and swim upstream to reach our goals.

Step 2: Identifying our target audience

Since the challenge of this project was to use our skills with search engine optimization to drive traffic towards the Interactive Design labs website the Robot Salmon team decided hone in on select sections of our potential audience and speak directly to them as a solution to our time limitations. We decided that we would target:

Potential students: doing research on web design schools in Vancouver, or just generally interested in hearing about other web design student experiences

Local businesses: wanting to hire web designers

Local agencies: scouting new talent

Teachers and professors: from other schools (but still within the industry)

Users interested in current trends: in the web design industry as well as the tech gadget market

We decided that these sectors of our audience would be receptive to our efforts and join in on the conversation that we were striving to strike up with our readers. We wanted them to engage with the site and we hoped to generate interest in the program that had helped us along our journey to become Vancouver’s newest and brightest web designers.

Step 3: Approach

Social Media:

As our Robot Salmon team had a limited timeline to roll out all of our grand plans to reach our target audience we identified the need to streamline our efforts into one focused approach. With all of the buzz around Social Media these days we decided to put it to the test for our project. Social media offered us the ability to reach out to a large section of our target audience quickly. We choose a mulit faceted approach that would utilize  several of the social media communities to get Robot Salmon and all of our newly generated content out to our audience.

Facebook: Before we even had full access to our Robot Salmon wordpress account we jumped right onto Facebook and created a fan page. We did this for several reasons. Google: Unique Facebook URL’s rank highly with Google. To ensure that we could get a unique URL from Facebook we first had to get 45 fans. We reached out to our personal networks of friends and family, as well as past and present students of the Capilano Interactive Design program to gather up fans.

This enabled us to get the unique URL of www.facebook.com/InteractiveWebDesign.CapilanoUniversity. Another reason to use Facebook to drive traffic through Robot Salmon and onto the INTE labs site was the fact that we could post links to our latest articles that would encourage any interested fans to click through to Robot Salmon to continue reading.

Twitter: We created a Twitter account for Robot Salmon. We kept the branding consistent using the logo designed by State Side so that Robot Salmon could continue with our effort to become a recognized name in the Vancouver web design community. Duder spent many focused hours working on the Robot Salmon Twitter account to ensure that we were following as many influential tweeters from the industry as was possible. Each new post that was written for Robot Salmon was sent out through our Robot Salmon Twitter feed as well as each of the teams personal Twitter feeds.

Dig: Each article that we wrote for the blog was submitted to Digg in another effort to reach out to our online community and get our content out there to as many viewers as possible.

You Tube: A You Tube account was created for Robot Salmon and again branded with our Robot Salmon logos and color scheme. We took the time to create some short video clips of our process behind creating the Blog. We wanted to give our viewers another chance to see in behind the scenes of our Blog and offer them the opportunity to learn from our process.

Shout Space: One of the comments that we received on Robot Salmon from a viewer was that we should also be putting our articles out there on Shout Space – another social media community on the web much like Digg but mainly posting American content – so we did.

Design and Branding: The design of a Blog is crucial, after you have done all of the leg work to bring your targeted users in to your Blog you want to entice them with the design, impress them and keep them coming back for more! To nail the “cool” factor with your design seems like an essential factor when considering the longevity of your Blog.

We were very lucky with our team, as we had 2 skilled designers onboard.We decided to have a Robot Salmon layout design slam – where both Stateside and D.O.G. developed a concept for the design of Robot Salmon. Duder, Big Red and myself then voted on the design that we liked the best.

This plan slightly backfired on us (as it was a challenge to force the designers to meld their two design concepts) – but in the end everything came together as a successful collaboration and we agreed to use Statesides branding (logo and icons) and D. O.G.’s layout design. We wanted the design to offer a unique experience to our users, giving them a few different options for viewing content and sorting through all of our various posts.

Step 4: Research

Research is the secret to a good SEO plan.  You can sit around and brainstorm tactics, targets and ideas with your team until IE  is finally laid to rest (and who knows when that day will finally arrive!) – but unless you back your ideas with cold hard research and numbers you will be working blind.

We decided to take our top 5 target user categories and focus in on the keyword and key phrase search results that we wanted Robot Salmon to try and rank for over the two months of the project. Each team member took a targeted audience area and spent time working through each word and phrase using the Google Adwords tool.

All of the search results were then listed on a Google spreadsheet so that the entire team had access to the research and the document could continue to grow as the project moved along. This tactic helped us zone in on the keywords and phrases that should be used and highlighted in each article, it also helped to steer us away from writing on topics that were not currently of interest amongst our target audience on the web.

Step 5: Delivery of Content

Choosing our blog categories was also a major decision in the development of Robot Salmon. The categories that are listed today have been slightly adjusted to better suit our target audience. We decided to Blog under the categories of: School, Media, Tech News, Tutorials and Top 5. We chose these categories as we thought that they would offer our target audience a fast and efficient means of navigating to information that they were particularly interested in or looking for.

School: articles that would be targeted at both future students and interested educators.

Media: articles that muse about new media, interactive media, media design etc. This category was created to list our articles that local agencies may be interested in reading.

Tech News: no web design industry Blog would be complete without a section to talk about the newest product launches – hello iPad fan boys!

Tutorials: this category was created to generate useful content that would keep the users coming back each time a new tutorial was posted. We were also hoping that the tutorial content would get picked up on the web and reposted by some of our users.

Top 5: we wanted our top 5 category to speak to several sectors of our target market audience: our audience that was interested in current trends, potential students that were tech nerds already, as well as employees at local agencies that may have need a bit of a distraction from a tedious contract.

Results and Successes

Facebook

Facebook was very successful in generating traffic for us but we did notice a few interesting factors that arose with the Facebook account. Through our Google Analytics we could see that a huge portion of our traffic was coming through Facebook, but not much of our traffic was engaging with the Face book page itself.

When launching a social media initiative to generate users a large focus is to try and  create a conversation with your audience. Facebook was useful for directing traffic but missed the mark on conversations. Not many of our fans actually commented on any of the posts on our page, though we could see that many of them were reading them.

Twitter

The results from our efforts to utilize the Twitter community were almost instantaneously apparent. Robot Salmons Twitter account was useful as we saw a direct increase in traffic resulting from users clicking on our post links that we tweeted.

Twitter proved to be more successful tool in our effort to create conversations with our users and viewers, as many of them clicked through to Robot Salmon from our Tweets and then went as far as posting comments on the individual articles on the actual Blog itself.

Dig, Shout Space & You Tube
We did use all of these platforms as well to launch Robot Salmons content onto the web but we saw a much lower success rate when trying to drive traffic through to our Blog and then onto the INTE labs site.

Feature Articles

We had some great successes with several of our articles over the two months.

Kris Krug – D.O.G. interviewed a local social media guru and the article resulted in the highest daily traffic that we logged during the whole 2 months of the project.

An article by No Code featuring Interactive Media at the 2010 Olympics and highlighted some of the work done by a local Vancouver agency, Switch Interactive. Duder subsequently ended up at Switch for a practicum interview. When he mentioned Robot Salmon as one of his current projects his interviewers knew about the Blog and had seen the article – the Robot Salmon team was satisfied to learn that their work was making it out into the local Interactive Design community.

Design

A local Blogger found Duder on Twitter and discovered Robot Salmon through Duders tweets. He was so impressed by the Blog and the overall design that he has hired the Robot Salmon team to help him launch a redesign of his Blog Shuck the Oyster.

Traffic Results

We used Google analytics to monitor the success of Robot Salmon closely throughout the whole project.

From January 18th to March 15th these are our stats:

936 people visited this site

• 1,969 Visits
• 936 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 5,965 Pageviews
• 3.03 Average Pageviews
• 00:03:36 Time on Site
• 57.59% Bounce Rate
• 47.28% New Visits
• 17.57% Direct Traffic
• 67.09% Referring Sites
• 15.34% Search Engines

Sources	Visits	% visits
facebook.com (referral)	509	25.85%
(direct) ((none))	346	17.57%
google (organic)	295	14.98%
stumbleupon.com (referral)	290	14.73%
twitter.com (referral)	190	9.65%

Keywords	Visits	% visits
robot salmon	100	33.11%
vancouver interactive design school	26	8.61%
interactive web design capilano	25	8.28%
robotsalmon	22	7.28%
capilano web design	13	4.30%

The Conclusion

The team behind Robot Salmon set out just over 2 months ago to create a Blog that would interest viewers both within and outside of the web design community in Vancouver. We wanted to make a statement with our design, choose a name for the Blog that would stick in peoples minds and generate content that was useful, interesting and creative. We wanted to spark our users interest in the Interactive Design program that we were all attending at Capilano University. It seems that we have done just that!
The Robot Salmon team is thrilled with the results of our efforts to create this Blog. The content is original and was generated entirely by our team. Our users were engaged in the conversations that we were fostering every step along the way. Even though our SEO challenge has ended, the Blog will continue, so stay tuned and check back often!

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