PPC Keywords: Long Tail or Tall Neck? Fat Torso!

Ralph Wilson's newsletter today brought a new term to the in the long tail discussion. I thought Tall neck was a cool addition - but now we have the "torso" (which I from now on choose to call the "Fat Torso").

The principles are perfectly sound - it describes where the real value keywords are for PPC campaigns:

It's not the tall neck, where all of the generic, one word, high traffic, sometimes very high priced keywords are. Those keywords are typically reserved for those with more money than brains.

It's also not necessarily the long tail, where you'll find thousands of three and four word highly targeted but infrequently searched words. These are great - don't get me wrong! It's just that on many of the phrases the trickle of traffic may not be worth the trouble.

It's the Fat Torso! The part in the middle with typically two word phrases that have a decent amount of traffic, a reasonable cost, and good targeting. Andrews suggestion is that most people don't spend enough time making the torso as fat as possible. He pushes us to think of all of the variations of your possible words. Have you really got them all???

All good (or at least great) PPC managers will know this, and revisit the list frequently to make sure, but Andrew Goodman just named it. Congratulations on coining a new term, Andrew.

The full article is here:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/goodman-torso.htm

And wasn't I pleased to see that Andrew is from my very own city of Toronto, Canada!

Hey Andrew - if you are looking at your link reports or referring sites and come across this post, please drop me a line.

Affiliate Programs Help Drive Your Marketing!

Ken Shafer interviews Josh and Dallas, founders of DreamHost, about their affiliate program. Some good candid insights here for those thinking of starting affiliate programs.

Key concepts are:

• How affiliate programs help drive customer referrals
• How it helped them stop relying on paid advertising
• How they used affiliate codes in special ways
• How the blog helps drive traffic
• Even though they give away a huge commission they make money on LTV (Lifetime Customer Value)
  

Email Marketing: Debunking Summer Campaign Myths

Emails deployed in July and August actually out-perform those deployed in September - even in the B2B industry! That's perhaps the most surprising item noted in this Email Trends Report Q3 2006 just referenced in ClickWeekly.

What I don't like about this report is that 'clicks' are measured as a percentage of open rate, vs. a percentage of delivery. I think this is a misleading number because it makes your click through rate appear far better than it is.

It is being reported as such because the author of the report uses ConstantContact, a service aimed at small businesses, and they choose to report it that way.

Read the full report here:
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol101/vol101_b.htm

Mobile Web Best Practices

With the new slew of mobile devices out there, and the increasing availability of wireless Internet, mobile web access is growing by leaps and bounds.

As a web designer, it is great to see some standards being introduced by the good ol' W3 org.

Written for designers of Web sites and content management systems, these guidelines describe how to author Web content that works well on mobile devices:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-mobile-bp-20061102/

Toronto News Release Optimization Success Story

Finally, PR companies are seeing the value in optimizing for the online news search engines:
We just optimized a release for a PR company that is working for a skin care company. This company found us through Google, looking for "Toronto news release optimization". (We are number three if you select 'pages from Canada'... hmmm, I'll have to take another look at that because we can definitely do better there.)

Anyways, this is how it worked:

The first thing we did was research on the 20 or 30 appropriate terms to do wit their press release. Most of the terms are searched less than 10 times per day. One is searched more that 3000 times per day. So we chose the top 3 most searched terms and optimized for those. The release went out yesterday and here are the ranking results so far:

Google.ca News:
"skin care" - position #7
"lip liner" - position #1
"anti-aging" - position #1

Yahoo.com news:
"Skincare" - position #1 and #2
"Lip liner" - position #1 and #2
"Lipstick" - position #4
"Anti-aging" - position #1, #2

I cannot seem to find it in Yahoo Canada yet, which is strange. We'll check again later today. The results overall look very good so far! With the strong search traffic on the terms we chose it should be a huge success. Let's see what the traffic numbers look like in a few days.

If you are sending press releases, I highly recommend news release optimization and submission to Google and Yahoo news. The last release we did for ourselves quadrupled our daily traffic for several days, and we got a few very good leads in the first few days.

SEO: Top Google Ranking Examples

Cool! I just checked the search rankings for Agito Internet Marketing for the first time in a few weeks and found these NEW #1 positions in Google:

Google.com:
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company

Google.ca:
toronto internet marketing company
toronto e-mail marketing company
toronto web analytics company
webtrends 8.0

Brilliant SEO Video by Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallen

I was just e-mailed a link to this video by Andy and Brad. I've so far only watched the first few minutes but it is real Gold. I'll review the whole thing soon, but for now - check it out yourself:
http://www.convertlinks.com/whitehatseo

Links: How to Get Links for SEO

I checked out Stundubl today and saw he posted a great article on the 12 different types of links and how to get them.

This is actually a more useful article than the 101 ways to get links (from SEO Book) that I blogged about the other day. Here's what I liked in Todd's article:

#1: Authority Links: Going through the Google directory in your niche - duh, what a great idea! I am shocked at myself for not trying this one. It sure beats searching for "keyword phrase + add url, add a site, submit link, submit site, etc". Not that the searching isn't a great method, but the directory method here offers some fast quick hit ideas.

#11: Comment and Profile links: Matt Cutts shows us a cool method of obtaining x-ray vision for no-follow links (It's a hack for Firefox). So it makes sense to use this if you are big on commenting on blogs (a great way to build profile and get backlinks to your blog.)

The other ideas were pretty straightforward, but kudos to Todd for creating a no-nonsense list of the 12 different types of links.

Free Internet Marketing Tool Collection: Part One

I've been finding more and SEO / Internet marketing tools on sites these days, so just for fun I've decided to start a list. I've named this post "Part One" because I am sure there are PLENTY more out there, and I don't want to make this first post an exhaustive list. Here goes:

http://www.urltrends.com
Interesting trending idea upgrade for them to make some money.

http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
Linkhounds seems to be trying to create an all over linking resource site. Cool that their software is open-source. This requires some more looking in to.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Keyword ranking trending. Requires free login, but nice charts.

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Nice link popularity, search engine saturation and keyword ranking tools with many industry benchmarks.

http://www.submitexpress.com/tools.html
Really cool meta tag checker that shows keyword density and tag relevance to page content.

http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm
One of the more in-depth keyword density and prominence tool I've seen. The free access link is near the bottom of the page.

If any of my thousands of readers knows of any more, please feel free to add them to the comments. :-)

Update: September 4th: The Big List of SEO Tools:
Ok, these guys at seocompany.ca seem to have the biggest list of all:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/18-toolbars.html

SEO: Search Engines to adopt new link tags

Want a laugh? It's about time all of the search engines got together and released some standards on linking that we can all use.

SEO: Link Building in 2006

Aaron Wall posted a great set of tips for link building in 2006 here.

Here's a one I like:

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

This is still an opportunuty in many industries, but don't underestimate the investment required to make a great quality portal. Our own new business networking events portal, BizNetworkNews.com, increased it's own search engine traffic by 250% last month.

But of course that's nothing to the guy that is making a killing selling Viagra (through affiliate links) because his hilarious Viagra prank ranks number 8 in Google for Viagra, a very, VERY, competitive term due to all of the back links from the Viral nature of his site.

A classic example of link bait that I don't see on Aaron's list.

AOL Search Data Insights for Local Search

Ken Mccarthy brought up an interesting point about the AOL data that was mistakenly published a few weeks ago. In his blog, attributing this point to Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal (published free here), these are the top 10 most searched words in the list:

1. free
2. new
3. lyrics
4. county
5. school
6. city
7. home
8. state
9. pictures
10. music

The fact that county, city and state are some of the top 10 most popular phrases seem to point to an increased number of local searches. This is huge to local search advertisers. Seems like my prediction of the death of the yellow pages (a fairly obvious prediction to me) is coming true (of course).

Another interesting point was the fact that so many searches start with the 5 W's: Who, What, When, Where, Why. It seems that searchers still like to put searches in the form of questions. You would think that AskJeeves would have done better than it did then, but there is still an opportunity here.

Perhaps we should be using more questions on our site linking to answers. FAQ's are an obvious place to do this. Also, working up personas and the questions each would have, and then posting the questions and answers on the appropriate pages would help bring search traffic.

The Long Neck vs. The Long Tail

Sounds kind of like a research paper on evolution of a certain kind of pre-historic mammal, but it's not. It's a discussion on targeting web sites to a specific audience.

We've heard so much lately about the "long tail" - the long list of occasionally searched unique keyword phrases for every topic that follows a short list of frequently typed phrases.

Search engine optimizers and Pay Per Click marketing specialists like myself are quite interested in the long tail because there is so much value to be had there. For PPC the long tail is important because bidding on a huge list of less frequently searched phrases brings lower costs and better value for advertising dollars. For SEO the long tail is important because optimizing for these phrases is easier and more likely to succeed than optimizing for the most competitive phrases.

Well, Gerry McGovern, in his infinite wisdom, just coined a new one (as far as I know) with the "long neck"- and it is equally if not more important for the Internet marketer.

Check it out here: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-08-14-long-neck.htm#cc

Search Engine Spammers Say Big Thank You to AOL

AOL, in an apparently innocent release of search history information to the 'research community' has released 2GB of searches over a recent 3 month period.

They thought they didn't release personally identifiable information because they didn't include user information, however in reality it is possible to identify many AOL users simply by their search history. The files released link each search together by a randomly assigned user ID number.

Since many people do 'ego searches', that is, searching for their own name, address, etc., this alone can identify users. Linked with location searches, hobby searches, etc., many users can be identified by those looking with almost guaranteed accuracy.

What about those searching for pornography, new jobs, dating sites, illegal drugs, and on and on? Over 650,000 users have had their online privacy violated.

Of course AOL apologized, and removed the link to the data quickly, but the damage has been done.

Search Engine spammers will use this information to build massive automated sites on the 'long tail' of searches; optimizing pages for thousands of rarely searched terms that are easily targeted and will each bring a trickle of affiliate sales or adsense revenue.

Others will use the information for honest keyword research. This Internet marketer was lucky enough to grab a copy from a mirror site last night.

Google's Matt Cutts Answers Questions on SEO on Video

Fascinating that Matt decided to answer SEO mail via video.

Put a face and voice behind the always informative Matt Cutt's blog:

Links to his videos:

1. On quality of good sites
2. On SEO myths
3. On whether sites should be optimized for search engines or users
   

What he had to say in a nut shell:

• It's fine to have multiple sites on the same IP, unless you have thousands of sites :-)
  
• If you are publishing millions of pages at once (crazy I know) you should launch them more softly.
• You should optimize for search engines AND uses (duh...) Keep users interests and search engine interests as aligned as possible.
• Google has a lot of tools to detect spam, but they are not public. You can look at Yahoo's site explorer, there are tools to see which sites are on one IP address, definitely check Google sitemaps
• Cleanliness of code is not of ultimate importance. Since 40% of all pages have syntax errors we can't exclude everything that does not validate. It is a good idea, but it is not at the top of the list - good content is at the top of the list.
• About sitemaps: pageviews are not a factor on when things are updated on sitemaps. Each of the elements in the diagnostics are updated on a separate schedule.
• In general, the number one mistake people make in SEO is not to make it crawlable. If you can get through your entire site through a text browser you will be OK. Try Lynx.
• Have good content so people will want to link to you. Good idea to have viral kind of content that people will want to link to - something interesting that sets you apart from the pack.
• Think about the people that will be interested in your content and make sure they know about you.
• Google uses the Dmoz snippet instead of the valid meta tag when it is a better match to the query. Snippets are actually query dependent. Very interesting! You can use a meta tag called no ODP snippet.
• Google favours bold over strong tags, just a little - but not much.
  

Fortune 500 execs DO use Internet for research and decisions

Since it's often an uphill battle convincing some people that executives actually search and read web sites, it's very exciting then when reports like this come out:

This from DMN.ca:

A study dispelling three Internet myths confirms that marketing, sales and product development professionals rely most heavily on information from the Internet for their daily decision making.
http://www.dmn.ca/Click/articles/vol85/vol85_c.htm

This study was apparently published by OutSell Inc., but I can't find it on the OutSell web site, and unfortunately DMN didn't quote the name of the study. Anyone that knows more about it please let me know.

Google SiteMaps Are Good For You

Recent enhancements to Google's SiteMaps tool are a boon to seo webmasters.

I had previously questioned the value of creating Google SiteMaps because it did not make a measurable difference in search results - but the true value is appearing as something different than expected:

Matt Cutts just made a post that mentioned enhancements to sitemaps diagnostics that made me quiver. I quickly validated my site with the service and found it reveals fascinating information about your site:

• What crawl errors were found
• URL's that timed out
• unassigned pagerank pages
• top words in your site
• top words in links to your site
• and very interestingly - top queries that returned your site in the top results

This last point showed me that my web site showed up on the second page of an important query that I wasn't even tracking yet. This is clearly going to be one of the growing arsenal of tools for Internet marketers.

Kudos for Google for being so democratic in their sharing of information.

Top Ten Reasons B2B Companies Under Invest in Their Web Sites

June's issue of Jacob Nielson's alert box inspired me to pound out all of the resistance I almost invariably see while speaking with our B2B customers and prospects about their web sites.

This is a little tongue and cheek, so if you've had any of these thoughts and don't like my comments please don't be offended. The Internet is changing so fast I can hardly keep up; I lose sleep over it. Just because it was true last year doesn't mean it's true today. Challenge your beliefs! You can use the Internet to generate leads and assist the sales process - and you can prove it for yourself.

Here we go:

#10: We are not involved in e-commerce because we don't sell our products online. (People don't buy cars online either, so that's why the auto industry isn't online as well!)

#9: Our sales process is much more complex than B2C sales so it can't be done online. (Or you don't know how?)

#8: We have never received a lead or sale from our web site so it doesn't matter. (Umm... Shouldn't that be your first clue there may be a problem?)

#7: Our customers don't look on the Internet for information in our industry. (Sure! The Internet is probably only used for e-mail and porn anyway.)

#6: Our customers come from referrals and is closed by salespeople so it doesn't matter. (And, of course, they would never check your site before a meeting, and especially not before someone else in their company authorizes the purchase order.)

#5: Nobody searches for what we do. (Because when you checked the numbers were...?)

#4: The people that do search for what we do aren't our customers. (Because you've never got a good lead from your site? See number 8)

#3: Our product information changes too frequently so we just don't put any of it online. (I suppose it is cheaper to cut down trees?)

#2: Our customers are CEO's and Presidents, and they don't have time to look at our web site. (So they also don't have time to do any research before making a major purchase?)

And the number one reason? We don't want our competitors to know what we are doing! (Eureka! It's better just to keep everyone in the dark about the company!)

So there you go. I've cautiously hinted at my feelings on the matters. In my next blog post I am going to deconstruct these arguments and turn them on their head. I hope I can give you some ideas.

But, then again, I am sure none of my B2B prospects are reading this anyways, so I am probably just wasting my time. Hmm.... maybe I should cut my blog budget....

Creating Killer Web Content

It's pretty cool when one industry heavyweight interviews another. That's exactly what happened yesterday when Jared Spool, of Usability Interface Engineering, published in his newsletter his interview with Gerry Mcgovern. Jared is one of the top two usability experts in the country (the other being Jacob Nielson). Gerry McGovern is probably the most well known content and information architecture consultant in the world.

Here's a couple of great excerpts from the conversation with my comments below:

You've stated that only a small percentage (approximately 10%) of content really makes any difference online. Does this mean that the bulk of content is a waste?

Essentially, yes. Most organizations face two challenges when it comes to content: data management and content management. Organizations produce huge quantities of content/data that needs to be stored for legal and other reasons. Nobody’s interested in this sort of stuff, unless in exceptional circumstances.

Then, you've got a small quantity of content that the customer wants‚—that will help make the sale, deliver the service, and build the brand. This is what I call the killer web content. The other stuff is the filler web content. If you mix the two together, the filler smothers the killer. The job of a web manager is to identify the killer web content.

The lesson here seems to be that even if you need to put up all of that filler content for legal or other reasons, you need to be ruthless in determining what the killer content is and make sure it is front and center, so that your customers and prospects can easily read what is interesting to them without hunting for it.

The number one skill that every web team should have is the ability and desire to relentlessly focus on the needs of the customer. Web teams must enjoy being around the customer, they must be stimulated by thinking of the customer. You have those skills and everything else fits into place.

The number one skill of an editor is not the ability to write. There are many people who are technically good writers but their content is not engaging. The editor must know their reader/customer inside out. They must also have empathy for their reader—be able to think like them, feel like them.

I find many of the organizations we deal with to plagued by what I call "inside out thinking". They view their web site in their own frame of reference; what they think is interesting, what they want the customer to be interested in, speaking in their own language instead of the language of the customer, etc.

It's a tough discipline, but you need to practice "outside in thinking". Put yourself in the shoes and mind of your customers and prospects. What will they be thinking? What kind of prejudices, concerns, thoughts do they have about your business, your industry? What kind of problems do they have that they want to solve. You should only be focused on your customers problems, their concerns, their hopes and dreams. How can you help them move from where they are now (the problem that they have), to where they want to be?

You may find that thinking about your web content in these terms produces very different kinds of content that you have now.

The full text of the interview can be found here:

http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/importance_of_customer/

Google to become even more important for search engine optimization

Google and Dell announced on Thursday that Dell will be pre-installing Google software on their computers.

This is another made another major breakthrough for Google in their fight with Microsoft and Yahoo to own the world's search market. Google has a 43% market share currently, growing for the ninth straight month in a row. With Google partners included, Google provides the search results for more than 50% of the worlds searches each day.

With over 5 billion searches each month, optimizing your web site to get in front of your relevant traffic has never been more important.