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The Art of SEO

10/30/2009 by 11 Comments

One of our clients forward me an email message yesterday. The subject of the email was: “Fwd: Your Amazon.com order has shipped (#102-2280136-1739409)”. I scratched my head when I saw it, wondering what it could possibly be. Then I opened the email and saw these wonderful words:

“FYI, your book is now shipping :) Look forward to reading it”

Sweet!

You can order your own copy here.

Filed Under: SEO

SEMPO Mobile White Paper

10/19/2009 by Leave a Comment

Recently SEMPO released a white paper on the mobile market. The paper references data from comScore which shows tremendous growth (what a surprise!). The comScore data reveals that in May of 2009 more than 64.2 million in the US accessed the mobile Internet, a significant uptick from 36.8 million users from January of 2008, or a Neilsen study that showes 42.5 million users in July of 2008. This is a full 28% of US wireless subscribers, and 30% of all desktop Internet users.

Mobile advertising related to search is seeing some nice growth too. In the US, the Kelsey Group indicates that $39 million in mobile search advertising in 2009 is expected to grow to $2.3 billion in 2013. On reason for this, according to Noah Elkin, a Senior Analyst at eMarketer who is also on SEMPO’s Emerging Technologies Committee, is that mobile environments have higher click through rates due to less clutter and higher relevance. In addition, mobile searchers are often “in market” and closer to a decision point.

One of the factors helping drive this growth is the advent of the iPhone. The improved web browsing offered by the iPhone form factor has made the web much easier to access. This shows itself in the data presented in the SEMPO white paper as well, where iPhones represent about 20% of the smartphones available on the market, yet searches performed on iPhones represent 36.9% of all mobile searches.

My personal opinion is that at some point voice search becomes a big factor. According to Mr. Elkin voice based search is still a niche environment, because the quality is not high enough, and it is still too slow. Speech recognition algorithms do require a lot of processing power, and this is still not readily available in a smartphone. Over time it will become available though, and the notion of simply speaking your search command is pretty compelling.

What excites me about all this is that it represents yet another new frontier. There are many challenges ahead that need to be addressed, and people will need help with that. In addition, new brands will emerge from those that that capitalize on this new environment. If you missed the last gold rush, another one is underway. While pundits have been predicting the year of mobile to be next year many years, 2010 may finally be the year when it happens.

The white paper discusses a significant set of recommendations on what marketers should do to position themselves for the mobile environment. It is a challenging environment with many unique factors, including the lack of a consistent form factor or operating system. Check out the SEMPO paper to see how you can prepare to capitalize on this new emerging opportunity.

Filed Under: SEO

Interviewed by Richard Baxter

10/18/2009 by Leave a Comment

While I am known for interviewing lots of different people I recently got interviewed by Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget. In it, I speak about how I got started in SEO, and my favorite interviews. Richard also does a great job on an ongoing basis on the SEO Gadget blog. Check it out!

Filed Under: SEO

Less is More

10/11/2009 by 2 Comments

One of the fascinating trends of the 21st century (more or less) is the fact that “less is more”. This saying has been around for a long time, but this decade has brought it to new heights. In our industry there are two stunning examples. One of the best examples is Google:

Google Home Page

A quick spot check shows that Google currently has a market cap of $163 Billion. As we all know, a lot of technology goes into allowing Google to provide such a simple interface, and also to put them in the market leading position they occupy. But, for the user, one of the major advantages of the service is simplicity. Another great example is Twitter:

Twitter

Where else can you find a company without a revenue model that is valued at one billion dollars? Here the nature of how less is offered is a bit different. The limitation is that you can only enter 140 characters. This limit seems to drive people to particpate, because they can dash off a quick note really easily. Of course, the real time nature of the platform is important as well, but the “limitation” to 140 characters is actually a feature. I would assert that if the box allowed you to enter 400 characters that usage would drop quickly.

People want simple. There is too much complexity in the modern world. Information and advertising is coming at us from everywhere, and there is no reason to believe it will slow down. This also causes us to want to lean on personal recommendations from others more. Talking to someone who already has the product and seeing how they liked it is another defense mechanism, but that is not the subject of this post.

In the case of Google and Twitter, the utter simplicity of the products is a big key to their success. Just let me do what I want, do it quickly, and don’t flood me lots of other stuff I don’t care about. Key to this is that the functions served are in high enough demand. For Google, people just want to be able to search the web. They don’t want Google to provide content, just lists of web sites. With Twitter, I don’t want to write a book, or even a blog post, I just want to have real time connectivity with my friends / associates where all I need to do is send off quick notes.

A third example worth mentioning is texting. Many teenagers simply don’t bother with email, or even using phones to make calls. Too many features. Texting is sufficient, even on those phones where I have only a numeric keypad. Besides, this way I can use the same small device to communicate at home, the office, or while on the road.

Of course, less is not always better. There are times when the additional features are desirable. So when is less more? If a large number of people would say this about an activity: “I simply want to do __________ without any hassle”, you have an opportunity for less to be big. Will this trend continue? Our world’s complexity is not going down (it is increasing). The conclusion?

You can expect to see a lot more, of less, in the future.

Filed Under: Google