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+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ OPTIMIZING VISIBLE RESULTS IN SEARCH MARKETING ********************* Catch and cache past installments of SearchWrite SearchNews in the http://www.searchwrite.com/Pages/searchnews.htm ********************** Microsoft decided to muck its high stakes poker hand and the wager that it could induce Yahoo's board to accept a $33 a share takeover offer and abruptly "left the table" last Saturday. Apparently spooked by the prospect of a widening ad share arrangement between Yahoo and Google, and the unfavorable possibility of other defensive maneuvers that would further diminish Yahoo's value, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer turned on his heels. Only afterwords, did Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, tail between his legs, try to explain he was open to the deal all along. Yeah, Right! Defending his company against allegations that they didn't try hard enough to deal with Yahoo, Bill Gates spoke out in Tokyo yesterday, "A lot of effort" was put into trying to work out a deal and that the pair should pursue "independent paths". Gates continued, "Now at this point Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy." To this observer, Microsoft made the right move. Not to devalue what Yahoo could have meant to a Microhoo alliance, but the prospect that 1+1 would equal something other than 1 in this equation was speculative at best. Ironically, many in the Search advertising world credit Microsoft with the more sophisticated technology when comparing the sharply innovative adCenter system with the often klugey Yahoo upgrade of a year ago, code named Panama. Microsoft's keyword research tools, demographic targeting options, and the potential of visual search with Photosynth are, for starters, all more impressive than Yahoo's technology. What Microsoft was seeking with Yahoo was simply popularity: the brand recognition (something it would ironically replace), and Web traffic,which can be fleeting. The joke on the street was that, for the asking price, Microsoft could buy the allegiance of Yahoo's installed base by paying each user a handsome bounty. What would a combined Microsoft-Yahoo alliance do for Microsoft that Microsoft could not do for itself? That question was far from easy to answer. Only now it will be up to Microsoft to find the path on its own. The results could come as quite a surprise for the stakeholders. Stay tuned!
Google.com now links to a special donation page titled “Support disaster relief in Myanmar (Burma)”. Google News has more information on the devastating cyclone that struck the country. <http://www.google.com/myanmarcyclone/>
What makes site search so important? At last week's E-metrics Summit, the session "On-site Search as a Crystal Ball" made the benefits of adding your own internal search offering crystal clear! * 65-70 percent of clients' visits originate from the search engines. Visitors are already predisposed to using searching navigation Site Search was made a part of the Google Analytics package as of last July. So what are you waiting for, and what should you be measuring with Site Search? In a nutshell, you should be measuring clicks, engagement indicators, action-ability, behaviors, and conviction. Qualitative data helps foster understanding of what intent the majority of search-engaged user are trying to accomplish. Once you have the most popular search terms visitors are using on your site, you can use them for: * Direct Navigation In summary, site search helps you to grow your business by making you aware of your content and telling you what terms to bring into your search marketing campaign. It works as a personalization application and helps with URL analysis, SEO and internal crawl development, new product suggestions, landing page optimization, behavioral targeting, etc. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Simmons Research, an Experian company, has chronicled the predilections of consumers in its National Consumer Study since 1960, and recently added social media to its survey. That includes social-networking sites, blogs, message boards, podcasts and e-mail. Simmons agreed to slice and dice its volumes of data for Advertising Age to identify social-media consumer profiles. Which category do your customers fall into? Approval Seekers — This group buys what others are buying and likes to follow styles and trends. They use social-networking sites to meet like-minded people, express their views, get music and entertainment recommendations, and keep in touch with family and friends Health & Image Leaders — Eager to try health and wellness products, experiment with diets, and spend to look younger. The majority are under 50. They prefer reading blogs over posting comments or creating their own blogs and prefer to read about TV shows, video games, music and art/literature. They also like social-networking sites: More than one-fifth visit them more than twice a month. Smart Green – Older (50-plus) and are most likely to go online for health or financial information. In the spirit of their eco-friendly attitude toward trees, they're 23% more likely to send electronic greeting cards. Brand-Loyal — This group shies away from buying unknown brands just for a bargain and prefers to buy brand-name goods. 21% more likely to read environmental blogs and 22% more likely to use professional-networking sites to make new contacts. Stay-at-Home Moms — They're 25 to 49 and have at least one child living at home. They use social media for a variety of reasons, including staying in touch and parental guidance. They visit parenting blogs five times more often than average. They're also active on social networks, blogs and chat forums but tend to stay away from podcasting. They visit blogs once or more a week and create their own blogs at a higher than average rate. Upscale Grays — 50-plus consumers with college degrees and household incomes of more than $100,000. These are lower-level social-media users. They are almost 40% less likely than the average person to have read blogs, visited chat forums or instant messaged and 70% less likely to have visited a social network in the past month. One of the only places they skewed higher than average were professional networking sites. First-Time Home Buyers — It makes sense that people in the market for a home would look online for information about not only real estate but other products involved in home ownership. But Experian found that this under-35 set also includes very active social networkers, bloggers and message-board users. They also rank high in texting, podcasting and business networking. They use social networks to keep in touch but also to find information. Divorced — Unsurprisingly, both sexes index high for dating sites, but women are more likely to visit social networks than men. Divorced women are also 20% more likely to buy something online, while men are 52% more likely to visit sports sites. Neither is into blogs or chat forums, but women communicate more than average via text message, while men use e-mail 45% more than average to communicate with their children. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Local search guru Chris Silver Smith, formerly a Verizon Fellow who ran the company's SuperPages business, has shared some awesome tips on using Universal Search and multimedia assets to leapfrog local rankings. Let's say you're trying to rank for "Zanesville", a small town in Ohio. By default the kind of sites that are going to make page one top 10 coverage are the following: Official City Government Websites, Local Chambers of Commerce, State/City Tourism Sites & Conventions & Visitors Bureau Sites, Wikipedia City articles, Local Town Newspapers, Yahoo! Travel pages http://travel.yahoo.com, Local Weather - (particularly by wunderground.com), Profiles of Cities (city-data.com), .EDUs - Local Universities, .ORGs (such as for events, local museums and such), Local Events Venues sites, Local Real Estate guides, Local School Websites One method Google could be using for this purpose would be Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) — identifying the geographic themes of the websites and associating them with other related sites about the local area. Chris posits that one way to trump the bias might be to create and post a YouTube video with the city name as the title!! For instance, when doing a search for "Snook, Tx" in Google, the third link down is a YouTube video posted by a Texas Country Reporter. In this case, Google's Universal Search process appears to have kicked in to interject the video link into the top of the search results.
Has it ever struck you as odd how Google frowns like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas when it comes to buying paid link advertising to drive traffic AND add link authority to your Website, but doesn't look askance at Websites paying directories like Business.com, BestoftheWeb, Yahoo.com and others hundreds of dollars for paid inclusion? The great rift between buying links at high PageRank sites, especially those that are relevant to your industry sector and market niche, and purchasing paid directory links seems contradictory. And yet, the plain fact is that more than 85% of search engine marketers, including both agencies and in-house corporate communication departments, will raise their hands if asked "Have you ever purchased a paid link?" In some ultra-competitive categories, paid link advertising is now moving from a black hat Stetson category to a gray hat Fedora, and even enticing a few green bereted SEO's. Want to learn more? While we'll stop short of publicly endorsing paid link advertising as a primary source of lead generation, we will let TextLinkBrokers.com speak out on their own behalf with the Beginner's Guide to Buying Links for SEO. <http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/link-buying-guide.html>
You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service. But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted.
YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask? Simply this. You can get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"! With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business. When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are: * the title What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords. Remember the words you are trying to rank for. Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. ****************************************** Catch past installments of SearchWrite SearchNews in the |
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