Category Archives: Industry

Free SEO Clinic

Natural Search / SEO, Search, Vendors / Agencies,

Search Engine Journal launched a free SEO Clinic today for sites lacking experience with search engine optimization.

As you can imagine, they don’t have the resources to support everyone who walks through the door so each week, one challenge will be met by a respectable group including Loren Baker, Carsten Cumbrowski, and Garret French who will fully vet the quality and opportunity that exists with your domain.

Expect that review to include recommendations on site navigation, link building, usability, copywriting, and even social media optimization while addressing unique aspects of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.

A word of caution though, “winners” will be subject to public scrutinization as Free always comes with a price and the Journal will publish the results for review and no doubt, comment. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great opportunity.

To participate, simply contact the team here.

Add OpenSearch to your site

Search

I’m passing you off to another blog on this one as DeWitt Clinton has developed a wonderfully simple enhancement for your site that will add OpenSearch of your domain to IE7 and Firefox 2

How cool is that!?

What is OpenSearch you might be asking??
OpenSearch is an attempt to standardize search methodologies to share search results across platforms, engines, etc. Its more complicated than that or than I care to explain.

What it allows IE7 and Firefox 2 to do is add a search box to the browser that can be customized by users to search any site they want. The little tutorial posted at unto.net explains how to have your domain automatically added to that box (the user still has to opt in to making your domain a permanent addition to the list) so the next time they use it, they can easily search your site.

If you have IE7 or Firefox 2, checkout your search box, you’ll find SEO’Brien available to add.

buzzvote for anything – Create your own poll

Fun, Web 2.0

attap, an innovative company with potential to be a favorite of mine, has launched a fun enhancement to their buzzvote service that allows anyone to easily create and host visually appealing polls for product recommendations. Gone are the boring polls or product specific ratings with difficult comparison functionality; with BuzzVote you can display a poll for multiple products and allow users to give an easy thumbs up or thumbs down while displaying the results alongside one another for clear comparison.




(I considered a poll comparing Matt Cutts, Jeremy Zawodny, and myself but didn’t want to bruise any ego’s)

Unfortunately, the system is flawed in that the poll you create is only as good as the votes collected through your poll. attap has another time wasting (yet worthy) site at riffs.com that allows you to vote the same way on just about anything, creating a massive database of your likes and dislikes against which they then offer suggestions customized to your preferences. Through riffs, you can vote on people, music, books, technology, news, places, or even websites. Clearly, attap has collected previous votes for products which should be made available to the pollster; giving us an option to include those votes in a poll could add to the quality and depth of the poll results.

Both services are fun, innovative, and aestetically appealing but I hear you, how can I say this company has the potential to be one of my favorites with mere recommendation engines??
“Potential” is the keyword as forever languishing in closed development is lifeio, a product selected as the Top Connected Innovator of 2006 by TechCrunch. Perhaps this is a better link explaining lifeio for, as you can see from their website, they don’t even explain what it is. As I write this, I have no confirmation that lifeio will ever even see the light of day but I hope it does. All Things To All People (attap) is exactly what lifeio hopes to become by combining calendars, address books, to do lists, and more with riffs’ recommendation engine.

  • Have a meeting coming up in San Francisco around lunch time? Knowing that lifeio could display restaurant recommendations based on your previous preferences
  • View the calendars of friends and peers the same way you might be able to do with your corporate calendar system to easily book meetings, parties, and happy hour
  • Heck, conceivably, it could merge the movie votes from you and your wife to recommend something you’ll both enjoy when it knows you have a date planned
BuzzVote polls have some potential I wanted to share with you but stay tuned and cross your fingers for lifeio.

New Google Base Attributes

eCommerce, Search, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My favorite CSE, Google Base (I still prefer “Froogle” don’t you?), has made a significant enhancement to the quality of their product engine with the addition of product attributes to the feed specifications.

As I hope you know, Google Base allows stores to upload product feeds so that their audience can find, consider, and compare said merchant’s products. The unique opportunity Base provides as a comparison shopping engine is that, fundamentally, it is not a comparison shopping engine but a feed based inclusion platform with which anyone to submit content to be indexed on Google. Your products and the pages appear in Google Search index and the feed can (and should) include all of the pages in your store. Think of it as Yahoo! Paid Inclusion for free.

The single most significant factor in my favoritism of Google? It is all free.

A merchant data feed is a frequent topic of discussion on my blog as that feed, that catalog of products, is one of your most valuable tools.

These new attributes give merchants an opportunity to support granularity, that is, customers who want to search and navigate based on specific product qualities. To list a few:

age_range
aspect_ratio
battery_life
capacity
color
color_output
department
display_type
edition
feature
film_type
focus_type
functions
genre
height
length
made_in
material
memory_card_slot
occasion
operating_system
optical_drive
pages
platform
publisher
rating
recommended_usage
resolution
screen_size
shoe_width
size
style
weight
width
zoom

Unfortunately, few merchants have this data readily available creating a challenge for those of us that want to provide attributes. As a merchant, recognize that Google Base is free distribution so the cost of participation is only the effort required to create and optimize the feed; more granularity for Google’s audience means more qualified customers to your door.

A challenge for Google and merchants alike is that Google’s use of attributes can be thought of more like tags or labels in that you can put in anything you’d like for the same attribute: While you may think of size as small, medium, or large, another merchant may think of it as handheld or laptop. This flexibility gives Google a rich database of attributes but the lack of structure creates chaos preventing users from having a consistent experience. If I need a medium shirt, I want all medium shirts; this setup will overlook M shirts, average shirts, or sizing designations from other countries.

Obviously, the combination of those two challenges creates a poor experience for customers. If you, as a customer, are looking for a digital camera with a 24 hour battery life, some merchants not list it as 24 hours but 1 day. More likely, most can’t even submit their cameras with battery life so when looking for products with that information, those options will never appear.

This news is by no means doom and gloom, just the opposite: A great opportunity for comparison shopping, customers, and stores as it is a step in the right direction. Check out the new attributes and requirements for Google Base and if you can, take advantage.

Search Engine Optimization : Part 4 : Site content and page copy

Natural Search / SEO, Search, , , , ,

What do you say we get back to my 10 part discussion of search engine optimization with part 4? It has been a while so a quick review of my take on SEO and other articles you’ll find:

Too many attempt to cover the variety of initiatives that demand attention in a list or summary without spending time to fully explain the unique optimization opportunities. I thought I’d take a different approach, getting into each of the top 10 SEO tactics in detail, then summarizing them when we’re done to create a collection of SEO guides. We’re on #4; the first three covered website accessibility (the most important consideration being that engines can’t index your site if they can’t find it), site popularity (you may be perfectly optimized – though everyone would argue that’s not possible – but if no one acknowledges you exist, engines won’t either), and page titles (now that you can be found, be descriptive).

I consider the fourth most important focus, content. “Content is king” (which rather contradicts my argument that page titles are most important so titles must be the President. Or maybe content is just a Prince… in truth, both are just as important so let’s call the Title Queen and Content King.

The content of your site should be well written, attractive, appealing, and considerate of your audience’s language. There are two extreme schools of thought to content. The first, argues that you should merely write good content and search engines will appropriately index your site. The second is labeled “keyword stuffing” or with less negativity, “keyword selection.” This position suggestions you should write content with the keywords people search as the focus while ensuring the are used repeatedly to increase keyword ‘density.’ I favor a mix of the two: content writers should not write copy in a vacuum nor should the focus be keywords.

Be considerate of language of your audience
(And I don’t mean English or Spanish)
Engines favor fresh, frequently updated content the helps ensure their results are timely. No one wants results from two years ago when more recent information is available. Your writers can’t keep pace with good, frequent updates if they are constantly researching keywords. As such, your job as SEO is to inform them of the preferred terms; in doing so, they become considerate of the words your audience prefers to use, their language. If your company prefers to call a product a “Pocket PC” but your customers call it a “PDA,” more people search for “PDA” so your content should refer to the product as such. Perhaps you deal in “legal advice” but more people are seeking a “Lawyer,” “autos” or “cars”?
Build a rapport with those that write and design your site such that your well-oiled machine writes copy while being aware of the language your audience uses, the terms that matter.

With that practice in place, you are doing what the best SEOs would argue is the most sensible optimization. Still, no SEO would be worth their salt without at least understanding the importance of keyword density in copy.
Conventional wisdom suggests that Google favors keywords to content in which those terms appear about 2% to 3% of the time, that is a keyword density of 2-3%. Part of my preference for the blended attention to content is that Yahoo! seems to prefer a much greater density level. The problem that presents of course, is that giving Yahoo! what it prefers may cause Google to scrutinize your effort, consider it spam, and deem your content as being stuffed with keywords. Certainly, Google and Yahoo realize this and I expect their algorithms accommodate such risks but why press it?

Write good content, be cognizant of your audience’s language, and remember Content is King (or was it Queen?).

Redesign News from AOL

Search

Expected at the start of Q2 are a number of changes from the sleeping giant AOL. With over 100mm unique users, though not top internet portal nor media darling, AOL still has some tricks up its sleeve worth your attention (did you know that in Q4 AOL topped MSN on monthly uniques for the first time in a few years?). Their size and the highly female demographic make the network a choice partner for many advertisers.

I don’t have snapshots to share but the changes don’t warrant them.

The first is an addition to the homepage of AOL which will still look simliar to Yahoo! and MSN; the pending enhancement is merely the addition of “Marketplace” links which retailers can acquire to advertise from the homepage for a day (really no different from Yahoo! and MSN placement).

For the first time in years AOL Shopping will not experience a radical redesign though will introduce some welcome improvements. Merchants should be pleased that for the most part, participation with AOL Shopping is business as usual with the familiar ‘Lead Promos,’ ‘featured stores,’ ‘tower ads,’ and unique CPC based ‘Merchandising Ad Units’ dominating the pages. Most unfortunate is that the cumbersome process to submit recommendations for the Merchandising Units remains a burden for partners.
The best enhancements to AOL Shopping manifest in 3 ways:

1. Traffic from the homepage of AOL to Shopping will now be directed to contextually relevant categories. In the past, AOL attempted to build an audience for AOL Shopping by promoting a sale or product category specific event and sending the traffic to the main page of Shopping; a Music promotion would land users on the main page where they would have to click again from there to get into Music. This simple change will ensure customers from AOL’s homepage are sent where they expect to land delivering more qualified traffic into each of the categories. More relevant customers to each advertiser.

2. In what I believe is a first for Comparison Shopping engines, the Tower Ad that owns the right side of Shopping pages will transition from an equal rotation of category partners to a targeted ad unit (with an incremental CPC no doubt applicable to participate). Whether behavioral or demographic targeting will be available is TBD as AOL tests the best experience and performance before releasing a program.

3. I hope you’ve heard of the pending release of an AOL search product. Whiteboxed by Google, the paid search opportunities will be similar to those from the Big 3 yet branded and managed by AOL. Search enhancements will also be made to Shopping search with rumors of the Shopping engine being supported by merchant datafeeds instead of Bizrate/Shopzilla. Expect the feed specs to be as close the industry standard that exists as possible; I’ve heard they have no intention of asking for something unique so it shouldn’t take much to support an AOL feed.

Finally, I’m full of rumors today
It has also been suggested that AOL Search intends to be the first to enable video with advertisers being able to run a commercial spot on brand keywords. I for one am anxious for the new AOL Search product, access to AOL’s audience is nothing to disregard as the ‘AOL keywords’ and ‘Trademark layer’ still drive volume. Moving that volume from 3 terms to thousands means you should revisit your budgets.

Close the Loop Yahoo!

Advertising, Insights / Research, Search, , , , , , , , , , , ,

In early December, Yahoo! announced the results of a new online marketing study conducted by comScore Networks. The research, branded “Close the Loop,” measured the impact of display advertising on search activity and found that when combined, search and display advertising deliver “better” results than when used independently (yes, better is in quotes on purpose).

Accurately, they tracked a significant lift in site engagement (conversion, registration, etc.) and an increase in online and offline purchases by customers exposed to the integrated campaigns. When banner and search advertising were viewed together, campaigns are far more engaging and effective with an increase in the share of destination site page views relative to competitive sites by 68% and time spent by 66%. More compelling to most of us, purchases of the advertiser’s products and services were almost three and a half times greater online and almost 2x offline.

Compelling results no doubt confirming that you should do more advertising, right?

“This research clearly shows that search and display advertising, which are each very effective on their own, work more effectively in tandem,” said Yahoo! Executive Vice President of Sales, Greg Coleman. “Advertisers who approach their marketing holistically drive greater engagement, generate more purchases both online and offline and steal share from their direct competitors.”

Greg is right, but the results aren’t necessarily better.

Frankly, I hate the name of the study which implies the study covered everything you need to know to make the right decision. What this overlooks is that the cost of search and advertising need to be accounted for to determine the integrated ROI.

comScore also found that exposure to banner ads increased related brand searches (brand, company or product names) an average of 26% during the campaign flight (here’s a problem I’ll get back to later). This shows that interest generated by the ads carries over to customer search activity.

Consider the following simple example

  • I spend $100 in paid search to get $400 in sales from 100 visits
  • I’m presented with an option to buy a media placement that costs $300 and sign on the dotted line knowing that it will deliver through search and indirect sales
  • That $300 media buy sends 60 visits to the site (a $5 CPC), none of whom convert (not good news but typical performance of an online ad)
  • Luckily! Our customers respond more through search with 26% more searches (yes, now I’m generalizing but bear with me) and ultimately 3.5x in overall online sales.
Where does that leave us?

$100 for paid search + $300 in media costs + $26 in incremental search costs = $426 in costs

$400 original sales x 3.5 = $1400 in sales

ROI with just search? 4 to 1

ROI with search and media? 3.3 to 1 (about)

Don’t make the mistake of misinterpreting my criticism. The study is wonderful insight to average increases in activity as a result of integrated advertising. At the very least, the results should help you sell internally, the benefit of integrating search with other marketing activities. But the loop isn’t closed. Yes, my math is not necessarily reflective of your results, I meant that only as an example of the importance of asking the right questions and reviewing the results with costs included. Be sure to weigh the costs of the media and look at the long term impact on search by monitoring the benefits for 90 days, not just the life of the campaign.