February 7th, 2010
Chris Baggott co-founded ExactTarget, the world’s leading Data-driven Email Service Provider, and Compendium Blogware, a company focused on helping corporations use blogs more effectively to obtain new customers from search engines. One of the things that stood out for me in this interview with Chris is his focus on the fact that people buy from people.
With so many new methods becoming available for marketing to broad audiences, Chris has instead focused on methods for personalized marketing, and is clearly a thought leader in this space. Want to get some ideas on personalized marketing? Check out the interview.
Posted in SEO | 3 Comments »
January 30th, 2010
I have been taking the opportunity to speak with various industry people who have deep experience in enterprise SEO. The next in that series is Adam Audette of AudetteMedia. Adam is well known for his work with Internet megabrand Zappos, but has also worked with other large well known brands such as Michelin and the University of Phoenix.
One of the key points that emerges from the interview is that large enterprise organizations are vastly different in their approaches (and acceptance) of SEO. As a result, the challenges in each organization can be quite different. Check out the interview to learn more.
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
January 26th, 2010
At SES Chicago in December of last year, I did a couple of video interviews. One of these was with Abby Prince of WebProNews on the subject of syndication and duplicate content, and the other was with Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today on the topic of link building. Check them out!
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
January 22nd, 2010
It amazes me when people obviously use scrapers to harvest email addresses and then blindly send out mass emails looking for business. Below is an email I received this morning, with my comments in ():
“Hope you are doing well. (I am glad that she is concerned for my well being)
Haven’t heard back from you, just wondering if you are interested in our services (if she had looked at any page at all on our web site she might be able to guess why we are NOT interested in your services). SEO is one of the most economical and targeted way of marketing (really? I didn’t know that).
As the markets are down and businesses are shy of making fresh investments, it is a good time to increase the efforts and get on top. Most people are holding their investments and it’s comparatively easier to get ranked on the search engines (hurray! my job just got easier!).
Get ranked before your competitor does.
Let me know if you are interested and we can discuss this further. We have some special offer on this New Year.
Kind Regards,” (kindly stop contacting me!)
In our business we spend a lot of time talking about the social web, and the need for businesses to better target their customers. Guess she has missed those discussions.
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Social Web | 2 Comments »
January 10th, 2010
Google is obsessed with speed. A tremendous amount of corporate energy is being put into initiatives to speed up the web. Google’s Let’s make the web faster web page asks the question “What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine?”. This clues us in to their goal – instant response.
To see Google engineers talk about this, check out the 3 1/2 minute video on this page. You can also check out the video on this page which includes the statement that 100 milliseconds is a recognized threshold for users to notice some sluggishness. You can also see more on Google’s thoughts on performance in this Jake Brutlag post titled: Speed Matters. The testing discussed in this post showed that small increases in load time of search results pages, less than 1/2 second, resulted in a decline in searches performed of 0.2% to 0.6%.
Google seems fully prepared to take on the task of rebuilding the Internet if need be, and they are challenging some of the most basic protocols on which the web was built. They have an initiative in place to re-design the HTTP: protocol. Their proposed protocol, known as SPDY: is designed for today’s web environment, which HTTP was not. Testing they have done on SPDY shows a 50% uplift in performance – not bad.
Google has also launched its own Public DNS. The DNS infrastructure plays a critical role in the web, that of converting human friendly web addresses, such as www.stonetemple.com, to machine friendly IP addresses, such as 206.130.117.215. Today’s web pages often involve multiple DNS lookups to load. Speeding up these transactions can only improve overall performance.
The we have Chrome. CNet published a study comparing the Javascript performance of Chrome against two versions of IE, Firefox and Safari. Chrome offered 5x to 10x the performance in running the Javascript tests. Similar data was shown in tests performed by codemeit.
Google is providing some interesting tools for publishers as well. In December 2009 they announced Speed Tracer, a tool for monitoring page load time performance. One key component of the tool is that it allows you to graphically locate trouble spots and then drill down to see what the source of the problem is. In addition, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to get a close up look at your site’s performance:
The tool will also let you drill down and get specific suggestions from Google on how to improve site performance:
Last, but not least, at Pubcon 2009 in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts stated quite clearly that Site Speed would become a ranking factor. Of course, that does not necessarily mean it actually will be done, but when you look at the overall commitment that Google has to web performance, you can count on it. So when should you begin working on your site performance? I’d say now. Turn site speed into advantage for your business!
Posted in Google, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | 9 Comments »
December 13th, 2009
I am embarking on a series of interviews to cover enterprise SEO. This week I am publishing an interview with Brent Payne of the Tribune Company. In it, we explore some of the unique challenges of SEO for a major national network of news properties, as well as some of the unique solutions to the problems that Brent encounters.
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
November 15th, 2009
In this interview with Josh Cohen of Google News, we go into a lot of detail on the inner workings of Google News. Perhaps the most interesting bit of information was confirmation that Google uses click data as a ranking factor for Google News. If the Google News team is using it, it seems likely that the web team is using it as well. This is something that has been long suspected, but I am not sure I have seen it confirmed before.
We also cover other aspects of what Google News requires, and how it can be an important way that sites who publish news oriented content can obtain visibility for themselves. Check it out!
Posted in Google, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
November 8th, 2009
The impact of a few deep links appears be greater than what you might first expect. In today’s post I am going to explore why that may be the case, and how to leverage it. First let me go into my theory on the matter. For this example, let’s assume we have a high PR home page (PR7, 8 or 9). Let’s say it has 3 layers of content, consisting of an upper layer (categories), a 2nd layer (sub-categories) and a 3rd layer (detailed content).
If we apply the traditional PageRank algorithm, even the 2nd layer and 3rd layer pages should be somewhat competitive because they receive of PageRank from the rest of the site, but there are a lot of times when this does not seem to happen. It looks like the domain authority and trust is not distributed across a site in the same manner as pure PageRank. My theory is that this is caused by a filtering mechanism, which restricts the way that the lower layer pages on a site can accumulate the trust and authority of the domain.
Perhaps the page has a potential amount of link juice it can receive from its own domain, but if the page does not get any links on its own, then not all of that link juice is credited to the page. Here is an illustration showing what I mean :
When you get a deep link to a 2nd layer or 3rd layer page, our testing at STC shows that it has a much bigger impact than you might expect. Even a relatively low value link seems to bring large benefits to the ranking and traffic potential of the page, beyond what you would expect the value of the link to be. This may be because in addition to the link juice of the link, it also enables more of the link juice available to the page from the domain to be passed through, as shown here:
And as you add more links the affect becomes more pronounced, as shown here.
Summary
Chances are the the actual algorithms that result in the behavior we have observed over time are actually quite different in concept from what I have outlined here, but this mental model of the value of a deep link does work for our purposes. When you have a 2nd, 3rd, or deeper layer page that you want to push in the rankings for competitive terms, you don’t necessarily need to get it hundreds of links. Just a few links will provide the page with benefits on a much larger scale than you might otherwise think.
Posted in Online Marketing, Page Rank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, linkbuilding | 23 Comments »
October 30th, 2009
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.
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | 6 Comments »
October 19th, 2009
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.
Posted in Online Marketing, mobile | No Comments »
