Pubcon is coming soon – November 8 through 11 in Vegas. Always a good event, with great speakers and keynotes. You can get a 20% discount by using the following coupon code: rc-3479915. Just go and register at the Pubcon website. Hope to see you there!
Pubcon coming up!
September 2nd, 2010Interview with Wordtracker’s Ken McGaffin
August 16th, 2010Back in June Wordtracker announced their new tool: Link Builder. Not long after that I interviewed Ken McGaffin to learn more about the tool, and their partnership with Majestic SEO. You can see a full transcript of the interview with Ken McGaffin here.
There are a few things that I find particularly interesting with Link Builder and Wordtracker’s approach:
- Wordtracker has a large community of existing customers. They should be able to mine many sign-ups out of that customer base.
- Link Builder provides a relatively simple interface, with less complexity than some other tools. Note that for many people, less is more, so this is not listed here as a disadvantage.
- This is only the top of the iceberg. Expect many more partnerships to leverage link databases, such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO. For example, another party, Influence Finder, has already partnered with Majestic SEO.
The space will continue to expand with more and more entrants, as the need is great, and the search engines are abandoning support for it. Check out the interview for more on Wordtracker’s Link Builder.
eightfold logic’s poll of top SEO writers
July 22nd, 2010Richard Zwicky of eightfold logic just released a poll to deterrmine the top writers in the SEO space. We are, of course, excited to be on the list! Take a moment and go vote for your favorite SEO writers (even if it isn’t me!). Thanks!
Eric Interviews Microsoft’s Mikko Ollila
June 27th, 2010When I had the chance to interview Mikko Ollila, senior product manager for Local Search at Bing, I was excited. Bing has done some nice things with their local search experience, and I wanted to learn a bit more about it.
Our discussion quickly shifted into a review of how Silverlight enables immersive experiences. The affect is really cool and worth a closer look, if you have not already looked at it. Consider the process you go through when you get directions to some place you have not been to before. With a few clicks in Bing Maps you can go from seeing a place a map, to getting directions, to seeing what the place looks like. In addition, you can move around the neighborhood around the place you searched on to see what is nearby.
Bing is also reaching out to developers to get them to create map applications based on Bing Maps. Partnerships also are playing a big role in the Bing strategy. Their recent announcement with Facebook is one example of this. Much more in the interview than this, so check it out!
New Social Media Powerhouse: Blueglass Interactive
June 23rd, 2010I know I am day late with this post, but this is not really a news blog 
. For those interested in social media marketing services, a new killer agency in the space has formed yesterday, Blueglass Interactive had formed. The company has many industry stalwarts, including: Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder, Brent Csutoras, Loren Baker, and Jordan Kasteler.
That’s a powerhouse team. The result is that they have the depth of expertise to handle a wide range of projects while providing highly expert service to all their clients. I look forward to seeing how the company evolves, but they have clearly established a leadership position for themselves.
Congratulations to all of those who make up Blueglass!
Shashi Seth Discusses the Future of Search
June 20th, 2010Today I have the privilege of posting an interview with Shashi Seth, the Senior VP of Search Products for Yahoo! It was a fun interview for me, because the very first interview I ever did was with Shashi back on October 24, 2006. He was at Google at the time, and they had just launched their Custom Search Engines product line.
The key point that emerges from the interview is that Yahoo! views itself as continuing to invest heavily in search. They view the 10 blue links part of search as a commodity, and Yahoo plans to experiment with many types of user experiences to get people who use their other web properties more engaged in search. Shashi refers to this as improving the process of discovery. He argues that if a user finds what they are looking for without ever going to a search box, that’s a good thing.
We touched briefly on the topic of how search is measured. Interestingly, after I interviewed Shashi, Danny Sullivan posted a rant about things being done by Yahoo! that end up manipulating the comScore search market share figures. Shashi and I did discuss the topic (but not Danny’s post since it was not out at the time) of how search volume is counted. He argues that search volume tracking should be more robust than it is today. If someone gets a search query result embedded in content without ever touching a search box, and then they engage with it, is that a search?
For that matter, is the total number of queries the best way to measure a search engine? What about user engagement metrics, such as number of searches it takes a user to find what they want, or the time the user spends engaged with search result content. These ideas, while conceptually interesting, remain hard to measure.
Overall, it was a great look at how Yahoo! views the evolution of search.
Briefing by Majestic SEO
June 14th, 2010My latest briefing of companies in the link building tools business was with Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO. In the near future I will publish a briefing about Wordtracker Link Builder.
One of the things that distinguishes Majestic SEO is that they have a huge data set – more than 1 Trillion links are cataloged by them. They have also built in to the tool ways to process that huge mound of data so you can more easily extract meaning from it. Check it out!
New Data on the Value of SEO
June 10th, 2010Presumably anone who reads this blog really does not need to be convinced of the value of SEO, but chances are that all of you have run into situations where you are trying to explain to someone else of the value of SEO. This is often a very challenging activity. New data from a survey by The Info Tech Group provides some great additional tools for when you need to make this argument. For example, a survey of 94 IT companies showed that companies that put high to very high levels of effort into SEO were far more likely to see traffic growth than sites that put in low to very low SEO effort:
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One of the more interesting surveys that The Info-Tech Group did demonstrated that SEO led to increased site stickiness:
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The fact that you are 6 times more likely to increase stickiness if you pursue SEO is pretty compelling. I have also believed for a long time that high rankings on key search terms brings a lot of value to your brand. In this survey of 95 IT companies, The Info-Tech Group found that 100% of companies that pursued a very high amount of SEO saw their brand gain value, while only 44% of companies that put very low effort into SEO saw their brand value increase:
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Last but not least for companies with investors, another Info-Tech Group showed that SEO has a major impact on impressing stakeholders. Creating a position impression among investors and shareholders is a must. SEO appears to do that quite well:
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This data is a great complement to existing industry data. When I am try to impress people on the importance of SEO, I am also likely to show them a chart like this one:
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This is an actual traffic chart for a pretty good sized web site, where 92% of their traffic comes from organic SEO (they don’t do PPC on this site). Of course, results vary from site to site, but even for major brands a search engine presence is essential. I discussed this quite a bit more in recent columns on Search Engine Land:
Whatever you do when you are trying to sell the benefits of SEO, make sure you follow the KISS (keep it simple stupid) rule. Before you go in to make your pitch, find out their level of understanding on the topic, and then tune the pitch appropriately. I also believe that it is critical to create visuals that express the concept. Few people learn as well from looking at a sea of text as they do from seeing graphics and charts. Senior managers have a lot of other things on their plate, and are likely to give you limited time to help them understand why they should invest in SEO. Use it well!
The Value of Linkscape Defined
June 9th, 2010This briefing by the SEOmoz Linkscape team is the first in a series of such briefings. In the near future you will see similar briefings of Majestic SEO and Wordtracker
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In the SEOmoz briefing we get a pretty good look at some of the things that make this tool so valuable. Number one for me is the mozRank and mozTrust metrics. With these we get new data that we never had before on how links compare in value to one another. mozTrust is the first trust related metric we have ever had as link builders. This data can playa real role in tweaking your link buildint strategy.
The other thing that stood out to me is the real focus on “link analytics”. We had an engaging discussion on how Linkscape could be used to get insight into what is driving the search rankings for a given query. We have all had that experience, of looking at a set of search results and just not understanding why a particular result was ranking so highly. With Linkscape data and tools, we can now get an understanding of why it is happening.
Briefing by Localeze
June 2nd, 2010Recently I received a briefing from Jeff Beard and David Dague of Localeze. In this briefing I learned about how Localeze is focusing on Business Listings Identity Management. The basic idea is to enable businesses to have much more control over how data about how their business is listed online. It’s an interesting concept, and I can see a strong possibility that there is going to be increasing demand for this ability. Check out the full briefing for details.
