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Sweden joins Second Life

1/30/2007 by Leave a Comment

Now this is really cool. According to Yahoo News, Sweden plans to open an embassy in the virtual world of Second Life.

For those of you who are not familiar with it Second Life has more than 3 million “inhabitants”. We first blogged about Second Life in December after SES in Chicago. The success of this VR world is an incredibly important development on the web.

It proves that people will embrace Virtual Reality, even in relatively simple forms. Wait until VR worlds become truly immersive. Second World already offers commercial opportunities for the creative. Second Life has already produced at least one millionaire, and major brands, such as Starwood Hotels, already test market their future products in this world. And, now we have our first country establishing a presence.

This phenomena is going to continue to grow. For those of you looking for new frontiers to invest in, the notion of Virtual Reality is a good one. It is still small, but I think its potential is absolutely explosive.

In the Net Force series of books created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, they have created a future in 2010 where the web is completely centered around VR. Don’t laugh at the idea. It could happen.

Filed Under: SEO

Dennis Mortensen on Analytics and Click Fraud

1/29/2007 by Leave a Comment

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dennis Mortensen of IndexTools. IndexTools is an analytics vendor based in Hungary. We are currently evaluating their tool as part of a study we are doing comparing 6 different analytics packages.

Dennis has been heavily involved in the analytics business since 1996. Back then the model was one of manually analyzing log file data and manually reporting findings to clients. It’s a funny thing, really. Given how far the analytics business has come, not much has really changed.

For those companies that are using analytics as a business intelligence tool to systematically increase revenue and profitability, a lot of hands on labor is still required. As we begin to report more and more on our findings in our analytics study, you will see this as a theme.

Sure you can get some cool reports by installing analytics software and looking at the simple default reports. But the real juice comes when you think about what it is you need to measure and analyze to drive your business to greater heights. Used as a weapon, you can do far more than what Dennis refers to as “report surfing”. You can learn what makes your site tick, and what parts of your marketing strategy provide the greatest return. This leads to increased revenue and ROI.

In the interview with Dennis, we talk about these things. He also talks about click fraud, a phenomena which he believes is greatly over-hyped. He figures that it’s about 2% or so. Dennis points out that if you spend $8000 per month on PPC, and you have 2% click fraud, that it’s not worth that much of your time to chase down.

Of course, we all need to make sure that the PPC search engines do a good job of policing this issue. This is their solemn duty, or else our trust in those relationships will break down.

Filed Under: Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, SEO

Are you below the radar?

1/25/2007 by 1 Comment

Are you underneath the radar? Do you plan to stay there? This is a really good question to ask when you are thinking about your SEO strategy. Let me talk a little bit about why.

I was talking to a friend of mine earlier today. He is doing the webmaster work for a local day care center on a volunteer basis. This friend is pretty SEO aware, so it stunned him when he saw that one of his day care center’s competitors was using a massive amount of hidden text on their site.

Not through any fancy CSS tricks. Clear as day in the HTML.

And it works. The site is ranking for a whole bunch of search terms that relate only to the hidden text. No evidence of any support for these terms in the incoming links either, so it has to be driven by the hidden text.

It’s funny – I always thought that this was a slam dunk banning situation. Easily detected, easily acted upon. But I guess not. The only conclusion I can draw is that these folks are well below the radar. After all, my friend tells me that they are delighted with 10 unique visitors per day (and that’s great).

This doesn’t lead me to want to try it on one of our domains. Our job is to help our clients build sites that are leaders in their space – in other words, highly visible. No rock to hide behind there. If we did these types of things we would get reported. But it still fascinates me that banning these sites is not purely algorithmic on the part of the major search engines.

Filed Under: SEO

Increase the number of pages Yahoo indexes on your site

1/24/2007 by 2 Comments

Recently we had the chance to speak with Tim Mayer about Yahoo’s Search Builder product. Search Builder is the vertical search engine offering from Yahoo, that competes with products such as Google Custom Search Engines, Live Search Macros, and Eurekster.

In the discussion, Tim reveals that sites that use Search Builder on their site may well increase the number of pages on their site that get indexed by Yahoo. It amazes me that there has not been more play regarding this point. It seems to me that I see people complaining all the time about the number of pages that they have in search engine indexes.

So here is one quick answer: implement a Search Builder search engine on your site. I would love for someone to try this on a site that has a limited number of pages in the Yahoo index and see if it helps.

Filed Under: SEO, Vertical Search Engines, Yahoo

High Quality Relevant Links and the Trust Box

1/22/2007 by Leave a Comment

I have seen two great posts about link building in the past few days. One of these is by Jim Boykin on the limitations of link bait, and the other is by Eric Ward at the Search Engine Land blog about the “Circle of Trust”.

Jim focuses on the importance of getting high quality links from relevant authority sites. Doing this takes more than sending out a link request email. It involves what my generation used to call “business development”. You build relationships first, and the links come later.

You might spend 40 hours working on one single killer link, or even more. For example, you may need to write a bunch of articles to position your site for the link first. Or you may need to go to conferences to meet people and build trust with them face to face. Or you may simple help them out somehow, by referring interesting contacts to them. To get links from these types of sites, you need to build trust with the people that own the decisions for that site.

This is not a concept you use on lower tier sites in your space. But it is the type of effort that bring huge returns with the best link targets in your space.

Eric’s post talks about how important it is to become trusted by the search engines, and the impact this can have on your ability to rank for competitive terms. There are two major elements to this:

  1. Build high quality relevant links from authority sites
  2. Time – let the search engines see consistent behavior from your site over time

Time remains a factor, even if you do a great job building links. You can get some traffic in the meantime, but getting fully into the trust box (or the circle of trust, or …) comes with great rewards.

Filed Under: linkbuilding, SEO

Yahoo Not Showing Site Titles as Search Result Titles

1/17/2007 by 2 Comments

Over at Webmasterworld, they are discussing a situation where Yahoo is not always using the a web page’s title tag as the title it shows in it’s search results. Barry Schwartz also provides some good data on this situation at Search Engine Land. It’s quite easy to spot. Once you do a search, if you see a result that is all in lower case, it’s likely that you have found an example. Here is the page that Yahoo shows when you search on “Custom Search Engines”

Yahoo Search Results for Custom Search

As you can see the 2nd and 3rd results are all in lower case. When you click through to the corresponding pages on those sites, you can see that thr title displayed in the search results does not match up with the title shown of the web page. Also, given that this is happening with high ranking pages at Google.com, there is no reason to believe that this is due to some sort of penalty (unless it’s really a bad mistake).

So let’s talk a look at a few search terms, and see how many of these results have had their title altered

Search term Altered titles (of 10)
brownies 1
cold play 2
computers 1
custom search 3
diabetes 0
ford cars 0
french fries 4
heart attack 1
ipod 2
lipitor 2
lung cancer 0
nirvana 0
oldsmobile 1
stereos 2

This shows that 18 out of the 140 (12.8%) titles I examined had the altered title.

The next question is whether or not there is a possible correlation between the search query not matching closely with the page title? So let’s take a look at a few examples:

Search term Page title
brownies 1
cold play YouTube – COLD PLAY
cold play www.myspace.com/coldplay
computers
custom search Google Co-op
custom search Custom Search – plone.org
custom search Dogpile – Preferences
french fries French fried potatoes – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
french fries CNN.com – House cafeterias change …
french fries CNN.com – Fried politics: Restaurant …
french fries Cookbook:French Fries – Wikibooks, …

Looking at this sampling, we see a lot of prominent sites shown. Every single one of them shows a portion of the site URL as part of the title. In most of the cases, the displayed title in the search results is the same as the search term itself, or a close derivative thereof.

Could it be that Yahoo is auto-editing these because it does not like this form of title?

Filed Under: Search Engine Algorithms, SEO
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