The interview of the week is a podcast with Jonathan Mendez. You can a transcript of the podcast here. … [Read more...]
Archives for 2007
Upgrading to WordPress 2.3.1
For the longest time I let my blog remain on the 2.02 version of Wordpress. One of the reasons that this was the case is that upgrading Wordpress used to feel like a potential nightmare. While I am moderately technical, I am no web server geek by any means, and in the past there were steps in the process that felt like they would … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Microsoft’s Mike Nichols
This week's interview is with Mike Nichols of Microsoft. It was an intriguing discussion about image search, Microsoft's new video search, and celebrity search. Read the interview to see what I learned in the discussion, and if you would like to comment on the interview you can do that below. … [Read more...]
SEOs Must Work Closely With Development
Have you ever written up a beautiful technical SEO plan for a site and then have it come back from development all messed up? There truly is no win in making a set of SEO recommendations and throwing it over the wall to the development team. The results come back wrong a stunningly high percentage of the time. There are many … [Read more...]
Sep Kamvar and Eric Enge Talk About Personalization
Sep Kamvar is the engineering lead for personalization at Google, and a consulting professor of computational mathematics at Stanford University. Prior to joining Google, Sep was the Founder of Kaltix, a personalized search engine company that was acquired by Google in 2003. Interview Transcript Eric Enge: You and I spoke … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Google’s Sep Kamvar
Our interview of this week is with Google's Sep Kamvar. It provided a lot of insight into Google's views on personalization. Check it out by reading the article. If you want to comment on it, please go ahead and do so below. … [Read more...]
Webmaster Radio Interview
Just a quick note to point you to my interview on Webmaster Radio. In the interview Dave Davies asks me about my thoughts on the SES Chicago event, and where it's going. Nothing earth shaking there, but hey, you get to hear my silky smooth voice! … [Read more...]
More on the Topic of Paid Links
Here is a great post from SEO Blackhat titled Don’t Buy Links - Buy the Whole Site. It offers some good and practical advice about paid links. Here is a great summary quote from the post: Generally, the sites you can still buy links from that can pass link juice (help you site rank in the SERPs) will be small to medium sites with a … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Microsoft’s Grad Conn
This week's interview is with Grad Conn of Microsoft. We spoke about Microsoft's unique new health search product, and how they have integrated that into the core experience of Live Search. Read the interview for the details of how and why Microsoft put it together, and comment below if you want to discuss it. … [Read more...]
Eric Enge interviews Live Search’s Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols is Group Program Manager for Live Search. He is responsible for the planning and design of verticals such as Image search, Video search and News search, as well as Query Suggestions to help people get to exactly what they're looking for. Nichols joined Microsoft in 1996. Prior to joining Live Search in late 2006, he was … [Read more...]
Eric Enge interviews Live Search’s Grad Conn
As senior director, product marketing, Grad Conn is responsible for both the enterprise and consumer sides of the Health Solutions Group (HSG) at Microsoft Corp., including market mapping and segmentation, brand and communication strategy, and all marketing communication and sales enablement implementation. In the enterprise and … [Read more...]
Foosball at SES Chicago!
SES Chicago will begin tomorrow, and STC will be there. We are holding a special event on behalf of Search Engine Watch, an open foosball challenge. This takes place on Wednesday at lunch (12:30 to 2:00) at booth #100 in the Exhibition Hall. The first doubles team to beat the team of Eric Enge and John Biundo will win a pair of … [Read more...]
Planning for Complex Site Hierarchies
Large sites have a variety of problems. They are inherently more complex than smaller sites to manage from many perspectives. Some of the major ones include: Content management is a major challenge Providing users a quality user experience (e.g. an easy to understand navigation system) may be difficult And, yes, SEO can be a … [Read more...]
Widget Case Study
Earlier today I release my latest "By The Numbers" column on Search Engine Watch. This is a Widget Case Study that includes never before released data from Offermatica, Otto Digital, and StepChange. The case study outlines the success story of a widget called CLIQ, and discusses the basic underlying reasons as to why it worked. … [Read more...]
Seth Godin interview: Meatball Sundae
Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. Godin is author of seven books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. The titles of these books are: Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival is Not Enough, … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Seth Godin
With SES Chicago coming up I asked Seth Godin if we could chat about his new book, which is also the topic of his keynote at SES. The interview was entertaining as always, including a discussion with Seth about his opinions on SEO. Check out the interview, and feel free to comment below if you want to discuss it. … [Read more...]
Integrating Display and PPC Advertising
This week I went in a new direction in the By The Numbers Column on Search Engine Watch. The column is called How to Integrate Display and PPC Advertising. I worked with Dustin Engel of Range Online Media on this one. It looks at how you can operate your display advertising and PPC campaigns in cycles to optimize your total … [Read more...]
Bloglines Eric Engleman Discusses the Blogosphere with Eric Enge
Eric Engleman is the General Manager for Bloglines at Ask. He also severs on the advisory board for iQ212. His experience prior to Ask includes: Vice President at Hands-On Mobile Director - Product Management at Yahoo! Director - Product Management at EarthLink Director and other titles at Excite At Home Producer at iGuide - … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Bloglines Eric Engleman
I recently had the chance to interview Eric Engleman of Bloglines. We discussed the blog market, recently released features, and more. Check it out, and feel free to comment below if you want to discuss it. … [Read more...]
Is Google Going to Expand its Punishments of Paid Links?
Search Engine Roundtable put up a post yesterday asking Are SEOs Still Buying Links?. Based on this post, I thought I would update my thoughts on whether or not SEOs will continue to purchase paid links. First though, let's start with some poll data from Barry at Search Engine Roundtable. The post starts by presenting the output … [Read more...]
A Look at Bid Management Look Back
This week's By The Numbers column on Search Engine Watch takes a look at Bid Management Look Back. With the help of Marin Software, I take a look at the issues and the solutions. Check the article out, as it provides a look under the covers of why modern day bid management is hard to do. … [Read more...]
Eric Enge interviews Live Search’s Ramez Naam
Ramez Naam is Group Program Manager of Live Search at Microsoft responsible for overseeing Live Search queries including relevance and the index. Naam joined Microsoft Corp. in 1995, and has worked on teams for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer. He is the author of a nonfiction book … [Read more...]
Latest Interview: Microsoft’s Ramez Naam
My latest interview is with Ramez Naam of Microsoft. The interview focused on core technology improvements recently made my Microsoft to Live Search. It turned into a great discussion that illustrates many of the complexities involved in a modern day search engine. Check out the interview for details. Feel free to comment below … [Read more...]
7 Points About Paid Links v.s. Editorial Links
What's the difference between "paid links" and "editorial links"? This is a critical thing to understand when you are trying to put together your link building strategy. This post will lay it out in clear terms that reflect my understanding after numerous dialogues with Google luminaries on the topic. A "paid link" is a link where … [Read more...]
Eric Enge speaks with Live Search’s Garry Wiseman
Garry Wiseman is the group program manager leading the commerce search team within the Live Search division at Microsoft. His responsibilities include overseeing all of the product and classified search related developments, as well as the MSN Shopping and Windows Live Expo consumer destination websites. Wiseman has held a variety … [Read more...]
Bounce Rate as a Ranking Signal
I received an e-mail from a reader who was interested in a post talking about bounce rate, and how that might be used by search engines as a possible ranking factor. The concept is that a higher bounce rate would be seen as an indication that a site is of relatively poor quality. For example, does a bounce rate of more than 70% … [Read more...]
3 Surprises in the Google PageRank Update
Now this is beginning to look like a complete update. Previously on Search Engine Watch I reported that many new pages that had been added shortly after the last update had not been updated. Now those pages are beginning to show PageRank. Clearly this is a general update. The big news remains the apparent punishment in PageRank … [Read more...]
Problems with Anchor Text as a Ranking Signal
Periodically you see articles that talk about what the most important are for search engine ranking. One of the really good ones is the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors survey. Nearly every such article identifies anchor text used in links to your page as a major ranking factor. For example, only one factor got a higher score … [Read more...]
Jack Dorsey and Eric Enge talk about Twitter
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter. It was an engaging conversation about the Twitter phenomena, and the future of the site. Interview Transcript Eric Enge: How did you come up with the idea for Twitter? Jack Dorsey: Well, it's a long story, but for some reason since I was 14 years old I … [Read more...]
Live Search Local, Maps, and Mobile
Today's post will cover the Local, Maps and Mobile search presentation made by Microsoft at the Searchification event on September 26, 2007. We have also written a post about the Core Improvements in Live Search that you can also read. 1. The presentation was made by Eric Jorgensen, a 13 year veteran of Microsoft: One of the … [Read more...]
Eric Enge Interviews Google’s Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky. Matt wrote SafeSearch, … [Read more...]
Discussion with Matt Cutts
During my recent trip out to California I had the opportunity to site down and speak with Google's head of the Webspam team, Matt Cutts. It was enjoyable to chat with Matt, and you can see a transcript of the Matt Cutts interview here. The major topics we covered were: Google's tracking of Javascript encoded or redirected … [Read more...]
Core Improvements in Live Search
This post will provide some more info on the September 26, 2007 Searchification event that Microsoft put on. In particular, this post will focus on the core search engine improvements part of the presentation. I will provide some brief comments on each announcement, as well as pictures of the speakers. 1. Introduction by Brad … [Read more...]
Eric Enge Interviews Yahoo’s Tim Mayer
The following is the transcript of an interview of Tim Mayer, who is responsible for the product direction of Yahoo! Search Technology. Tim brings over 10 years of search experience to Yahoo! with previous roles at Overture, FAST Search & Transfer, Inktomi and Thomson Corp. Tim was previously Vice President of Web Search … [Read more...]
Drupal and Search Engine Optimization
Drupal is known for being a very SEO friendly content management system (CMS). The way it assembles its pages is crawler friendly. This makes it a popular choice for people looking to build dynamic web sites. However, there are a number of potential SEO problems with Drupal as well. These need to be dealt with to ensure that you … [Read more...]
Eric Enge Interviews Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen is a widely recognized usability guru. Here is a sampling of some comments about him in the press: "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine) "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times) "the world's leading expert on Web usability" (U.S. News & World Report) "one of the top ten minds in small … [Read more...]
Google Shared Stuff
Tony Ruscoe over at Google Blogoscoped has found out that Google has released a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff. If you have a Google account, this service allows you to get started simply by dragging Google's Email / Share button onto the bookmark toolbar in your browser. Once there, all you need to do … [Read more...]
Using NoFollow to Manage PageRank flow.
Recently, in a conversation that Matt Cutts had with Rand Fishkin, Matt confirmed that Google does not see the use of NoFollow on your web sites as a spam tactic. Here are Matt's exact words: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of … [Read more...]
Gary Price and Eric Enge talk about Mobile Search
In late April of 2007, I interviewed Ask.com's Gary Price about the topic of mobile search. While this interview is therefore a bit dated, I still find a lot of interesting stuff in it. This is typical of speaking with Gary, who is a walking encyclopedia of everything taking place on the web. Few people have better command of all the … [Read more...]
Relevance, Importance, and Usefulness
There are so many different aspects to SEO. It's a complicated topic, and it can often be difficult to explain to clients. We try to use an approach that helps our clients quickly get an understanding of what is driving the various recommendations we make. We do this by breaking down the major aspects of SEO into these 3 … [Read more...]
An Interview With Incisive Media’s Kevin Ryan
Recently I spoke to Kevin Ryan, the person at Incisive Media that has taken over responsibility for the Search Engine Strategies shows. Here is his bio for his career prior to Incisive: Search Editor, iMedia Communications; CEO, Kinetic Results; VP, Interactive, Wahlstrom Interactive. Kevin Ryan' s current and former client roster … [Read more...]
Some Clarity on Paid Links
Hoo boy, with that title, this better be good ... The paid links discussion raged hot and heavy at Search Engine Strategies San Jose last week. Whenever the debate comes up again, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation that gets put out there. Keeping in mind (here is the ritual disclaimer) that while I do not work for … [Read more...]
Web Analytics Shootout – Final Report – a 2011 Perspective
Initially Published: August 27, 2007 Perspective Four years later and the conclusions drawn in this groundbreaking report still stand the test of time. STC was the first company to scientifically prove just how different the results are from analytics packages: The industry has gone through some changes, and (Clicktracks, … [Read more...]
Part 2 – 2007 Web Analytics Shootout – Final Report
This is the second part of the Final Report of the 2007 Web Analytics Shoot Out. You can see Part 1 of the Report here. Section 6: JavaScript Placement Matters One of the things I heard from the vendors was a concern about where their JavaScript was placed on the page, with respect to that of the other vendors. The notion is that … [Read more...]
2007 Web Analytics Shootout – Final Report
Introduction to the 2007 Analytics Shoot Out - by Jim Sterne In this updated 2007 Analytics Shoot Out, Stone Temple Consulting takes the same approach of head-to-head comparisons of major web analytics packages on real websites. Yes, they evaluate things like ease of implementation, use, and reporting. Yes, they look at the … [Read more...]
Final Report of the 2007 Analytics Shoot Out Now Available!
The 2007 Analytics Shoot Out Final Report is now available. This report is the final report in our study of 7 different analytics packages running across 4 different web sites simultaneously. Here are the sections you will find in this new report: Section 1. An executive summary of the report, findings, and key … [Read more...]
Two Golden Rules of Blogging
Our blog is now more than 1 year old. In fact, our first post took place on August 5th, 2006, just before last year's SES San Jose. This post represents the 181st post on the blog. So to commemorate the anniversary of the blog, I thought I'd share a few metrics on how it's worked out for us, and then the why of it all. First, the … [Read more...]
Content Development for Large Web Sites
This is the second in our series about building multi-million dollar web sites. In the first article we provided a general overview of the major elements of the process. In this article, we are going to take one of the concepts discussed, and expand upon it. Today, we talk about content. Content for Users Good content is at the … [Read more...]
Interview of Market Motive’s John Marshall
The following is the transcript of an interview of John Marshall, CTO of Market Motive. John was CEO of Clicktracks, until very recently when he left the company to put together Market Motive. A Netscape alumnus who is responsible for two other successful software companies, John Marshall brings 20 years of experience in the software … [Read more...]
Danny Sullivan Interviewed by Eric Enge on July 30, 2007
Widely considered a leading "search engine guru," Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade. Danny's expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los … [Read more...]