Talk is Measurable

Last night Keith and I attended Centennial College’s Talk is Cheap 2.0 – an unconference on Social Media and PR (full disclosure – I teach at Centennial and helped organize the event). It brought together more 150 marketing and communications professionals, students and people just interested in social media for a series of thought-provoking participant-led sessions that covered the gamut from the corporate blogging policies, new technologies and how to use social media in a crisis.

Two thoughts really stood out for me this morning when I thought about the event and how it relates to what we do every day at Agito and the interrelationship between online marketing, social media and PR. One came from a discussion during the live taping of the weekly podcast, Inside PR, where David Jones from Hill & Knowlton pointed out that the lines between “earned media” and “social media” are being increasingly erased when it comes to RFPs. It’s the same when it comes to online marketing – years ago I think we called it “integrated” marketing – the point being that clients are looking for marketing partners that understand the “big picture” particularly when it comes to their online activities. And given that the results of traditional media relations programs, like newspaper or TV coverage, now find a way online, either on media websites, or picked up in blogs or sharing tools like Facebook, one has to look at how marketing efforts all work to influence each other. That includes integrating search marketing to make sure you are not only capturing the conversations that the marketing efforts are generating, but leveraging them to your advantage.

That leads to my other thought. There was a lot of talk last night about measurement and whether social media and digital marketing will be the first to be jettisoned during the economic slowdown because it’s hard to show any return on investment. I’d argue that done right, it’s not only possible, but also imperative, to show just how online marketing, including the effective use of social media, can prove its worth in spades. It all leads back to the ability to measure everything you’re doing online, and track it back to the source. At Agito, we won’t do it if we can’t measure it; and while it’s not always as black and white as tracking a pay-per-click campaign, we’re using the best analytics tools available (free, commercial, and home grown) to measure and correctly attribute site traffic and lead generation against everything happening in online media, the blogosphere, social networking spaces and beyond. On the Internet there’s a way to measure practically everything.

A shout out to everyone who attended Talk is Cheap - and to my colleague Christine Smith and the outstanding CC&PR Class of 2009 who did such a fabulous job pulling it all together.

So Google can NOW Index Flash? Really....

Every so often I hear that Google can now index flash files, sometimes presented as if it's a great gift to the world, and we can all now finally shed the archaic HTML system and build a beautiful new flashy Internet that we'll all be better off for.

This time it's started again with some big official announcements back in July:

• Adobe's big announcement
• The Google webmaster central announcement

And there's a lot of discussion about it again, mainly around the same topics that have came up before.

So is it real this time?
Yes it’s real, but there is still a big difference between being indexed, and being found on the first page of results.

Even now that Google can now index flash files, it is still is and will always be difficult for Google to understand the hierarchy of information in the flash file, so don’t think flash is going to be at the top of the search results any time soon.

Here are a few examples of the problems with flash, even now that Google can index the content:

1. What constitutes a page in a flash file? A flash file appears as a single page, and there is no way for Google to externally reference a specific section of the flash. Google likes to send visitors to the most appropriate page that matches their search, and visitors like going to the most relevant content. But you can only send someone to the home page of a flash file. This is not in Google’s interests, the site owners interest, or the visitors interest, so this factor alone makes it very unlikely flash files are going to start competing for top rankings.
2. Where are the titles, headlines, subheadlines and most important content? Since flash designers aren’t constrained to any of the HTML standards of defining title tags and headline tags, they may all do it differently, making the context and importance of content difficult to determine.
3. Images: Many flash files make extensive use of images and video. Google is still unable to parse words from images, so if your navigation or content uses images, it will not be indexed.
4. Meta data: There are standards for defining information about the information in HTML (meta tags, robots.txt files, no-index, no-follow commands, XML sitemaps) that help Google understand the information on a site. None of these exist in flash.
   

These are a few of the reasons why it will always be difficult to optimize, and get good search engine rankings, with 100% flash websites. Add to this the problem that it’s too easy for Flash designers to make non-standard navigational schemas and therefore make the site difficult to navigate, it still makes no sense to me why anyone would make a 100% flash website (except in cases where the site is intended to provide a unique “experience” and search engine visibility is completely unimportant).

This does not mean that you shouldn’t use flash. A marketer can still take advantage of all the benefits of flash by chopping it into elements that can be included in an HTML layout. It can still even appear as if it was 100% flash. The difference is that the site would be structured in a standard way that can provide context to the content, and the content would remain in a form that can be externally referenced (you can send someone to a specific page). It’s important when building a site like this that an SEO professional is consulted on how the content is built in Flash to maximize visibility.

It turns out I wrote a post about the difficulty of indexing flash and ranking in the search results with a flash site back in 2006. I wonder if I'll write about it again in 2010? My guess is yes.

Joe the "Plumbers" Win the Google Lottery

Move over Joe Sixpack, meet Joe the Plumber. Joe was mentioned 25 times during last night’s Presidential Debate, primarily by John McCain in a last desperate attempt to get something to stick to Obama. Joe has become an overnight star: The Guardian reports everyone on Facebook wants to be his friend; people are “tweeting” about him like crazy; he’s rocketing to number one on YouTube.

Anybody need a plumber?

It occurred to me to check where Joe is on Google this morning. No surprise, he had already made it to the top on Google Canada, right behind the guy who might just be the luckiest plumber in Canada this morning: Whitby’s Joe the Plumber. In fact, across the world there are more than a few ordinary Joes that might have a right to feel like they’ve won the lottery. I’m talking about Joe Lara (joelaratheplumber.com), Joe from Seattle (joetheplumberseattle.com) and the grand prize winner, Joe from Amarillo – joetheplumber.com. They should probably all invest in larger servers – and hire a few more plumbers. After all, from now on, what’s the key phrase that will come to mind next time anyone needs a plumber?

And while these average Joes may get pushed aside by the Joe the Plumber on Google for a little while, it won’t be long before his 15 minutes of fame is down the drain. Unless he wants to pay a plumber in Amarillo a sink full of cash for joetheplumber.com. The only downside for Amarillo Joe? There goes his tax cut.

October is a Good Month for Linking Info

October 2008 is a good month for anyone interested in Link Building for SEO. Three things have caught my attention:

1) A "public secret" for almost year (previously referred to with the codename "carhole"*), SEOMoz has unveiled their flagship SEO product on October 6th. And it's good. In fact, I'll say it's milestone event in the field SEO. It's called linkscape.

2) Google's Announced "Link Week" on their WebMaster Central Blog. Basic, but interesting reading for SEO professionals considering the source.

3) All three Search Engines confirm at an SMX East panel discussion that Links are #1

Here are the details:

SeoMoz's LinkScape:
What is it? Basically, these guys have built an application to save the entire web on some really big hard drives, and then analyze the entire linking structure of the Internet. No Kidding! They've actually tried to recreate the system that Google (and those there search engines) use to index and rank sites but keep so tight to their chests, so that SEOs like us can figure out how to manipulate site rankings better.

They haven't saved the entire Internet (yet), but they do have a database of over 30 billion of the most linked pages on the web. The index is already very similar to the ones used by the major search engines. They're updating the whole thing every three weeks or so, and they say they're working to make it bigger and refresh faster. It's a really useful tool for us because it exposes greater granularity and information about links and link graph based metrics.

Here are a few interesting pieces of Internet linking trivia they've pulled from the data so far:

• Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site.

• 1.83% of all links on the web are nofollowed and of these, 61% are external-pointing, while 39% link to pages on their own site. While those percentages may seem small, that's a massive number (~2 billion links) that are leveraging nofollow for link juice "sculpting."

• While 0.08% of pages on the web use the 301 redirect, 0.12% (nearly twice as many) employ 302 redirects. Another 0.005% use the meta refresh.

• About 1.5% of all pages use the meta noindex tag (which is a lot of content the engines don't get to see) and 0.87% of all pages use the meta nofollow tag.

• From our entire index of pages, the median page received about 77 links (both internal and external), while the average page gets 32. If your pages have more than 32 links, congratulations! You're above average :-)

Now that data is interesting, but it's nothing compared to what you get when you analyze your own site compared to your competitors! We're already using it to our client's advantage by:

• Finding the juiciest links of our competitors that we can get, too
  
• Finding out which of the links we've purchased, rented or acquired through any other means have the most value so we can focus on the most effective link building techniques
• Learning which of the links that we have direct control over have the most value so we can channel the Google juice more effectively

Congratulations to SEOMoz on building a great tool.

Google's Link Week
The Google webmaster Tools team decided to declare "link Week" and spill some beans on what they think about links. Here are links to all of the related posts:

• Linking Overview
• Linking Out
• Internal Link Architecture
• Inbound Links
  

Top Three Search Engines Agree: Links are Number one.
During the search engine panel at SMX East, all three search engines concurred that links are the number one indicator for the importance of websites when ranking them: (Another quote from Rand Fishkin's blog for this one):

When asked if links are the primary signal for search engine rankings, the engineers generally agreed that, yes, it probably is. Aaron noted that links are a far less noisy signal than many others, including some forms of on-page keyword use and clicks in the SERPs. Sean from Yahoo! said that while it may not be the "most important signal" by itself, it's more important than, for example, title tags (which SEOs generally agree are critical to the SEO process). There was no mention that links would be fading away anytime soon - or that any competing signals had yet entered the marketplace as a potential usurper.

So Until Next Time, Keep on Linking....

* Carhole is a reference to the simpsons - it's what Moe called Homer's garage in the episode where Homer was running a counterfeit Jeans operation out of his.

Important Google Adwords Changes

It's been two weeks since the implementation of new Quality Score changes at Google. What's been the effects?

(If you don't know, Quality Score is a factor Google uses to determine how much you have to pay to bid for any spot in the sponsored search results for a key phrase. A low quality score will force you to pay more than others for clicks on the same position.)

Quality score is getting more important - and more manageable
Since quality score focuses heavily on click through rate it does put pressure on advertisers to get more in line with Google's interests, but they aren't entirely against advertisers interests either.

Now that Google is showing us a score on a scale of ten versus the old display of a few words like "poor", "good" or "excellent" we can see to a greater degree of accuracy where the relevancy problems may exist and address them.

How do you improve your campaign?
Tightening the focus of campaigns and ad groups, more closely matching ads to keywords, having better landing pages - all of these changes will improve your quality score, and therefore decrease your average cost per click for the same traffic.

Below is my short hand version of the factors that affect the Google Quality Score:

• Click through rate (based on keyword and your whole account)
• relevancy of ad text to keywords (in the matched ad and the ad group)
• quality of your landing page
• and "other relevancy factors" (no kidding)
  

The bottom line is we need to keep optimizing
I just heard an interesting tip listening in to the PPC Rockstars podcast with David Svetela interviewing Brad Geddes:

Consider how Display URL is a factor. In display URLs the root of the domain has to match, but everything else is OK to change. This is important to understand. Giving the searcher information about where they are going to land, in the form of the display URL, is going to help.

Tweaks like this will influence click through rate, which of course influences quality score, which in turn helps us pay less for the same traffic. Or more likely - help stop from paying more.

The inevitable Integration of Search and PR

Traditional PR is not sacred in the post Internet world. Anyone can get to be on the front page of the news on the Internet today. And smart SEO companies are all over it.

It's a natural for us, because the news has become a search medium. It's mainly text based so we can optimize it for keywords.

Today, for a small fee and completely online, we can insert press releases into Google and Yahoo News and get them syndicated on industry and niche sites all over the world. The reach is staggering.

What's different now is that it doesn't even matter if your release is picked up by any traditional media. There is no longer any need for the intermediation of a journalist to get attention.

Yahoo News is currently the number 1 online news source. It's a news media of it's own with over 1Million unique visitors a day. And our press releases are listed right alongside releases from AP and Reuters.

You submit your news, and there it is, coming up at the top of the news for all of your keywords. Here's the reach of online news:

Yahoo News is the number one online news source

Journalists are only a tiny fraction of the people reading this news. The press release isn't for the journalist any more - it's direct to public.

The secret to success is to optimize our press releases for our money keywords, the words that get searched the most by our potential customers. We can be at the top of the news for whatever we want, but we have to make it the right words.

A simple press release can get thousands or tens of thousands of views in a few days after it's release.

But it's not just the people reading your release that makes this a great medium. If we pay a little extra to have embedded links with our own anchor text, these links are distributed within the release wherever it's shown. Readers of our release can click through and visit our sites. Maybe become a lead, or buy something.

But those aren't even the reasons why SEO companies are doing PR. The two main reasons why every smart SEO company is doing it are:

1. Inbound links. The syndication of your release on niche sites propagates links to your site all over the Internet. The press release itself contains links that can be deep links into your site on whatever words you choose. And bloggers (non-traditional news media) may comment on your release and link to it or your site. All of which enhances the value of your site to the search engines and puts positive upward pressure on your search rankings.
2. Universal search. In May 2007, Google unveiled universal search. What this means is that the search engine results pages (SERPS) now frequently contain blended results from different sources. Instead of simply listing the top 10 sites as before, depending on the search it may contain only 4 sites, plus 2 images, 2 news items, a video, and local listing. This has huge implications for search engine marketers: There's less page one space for regular site listings, which makes it more competitive, but there's new opportunities to grab more page one real estate if your a broader thinker. It's natural, and in fact required, for SEO's to broaden out into optimization and distribution of other media such as videos, images and of course, news.
   

There's a tremendous opportunity in PR that may be missed by many PR agencies:

Traditional PR agencies can get up to speed with publishing through online news channels, but they look at it in a different way. Under traditional PR management the value of links, anchor text and effective keyword choice and optimization will be underused or missed entirely.

And it's not just the online news that is shaking up traditional PR. The tremendous growth of social media is a new kind of news. The long tail of news split into a gazillion niches. Traditional media targeting campaigns are losing their punch as many readers opt for popular blogs, forums and social media sites to get exactly what they're interested in, bypassing traditional media altogether.

PR companies need to understand search. When you get picked up by online media, many times you won't get a link to your site. And in print or broadcast? No link either. The news generated by media hits in turn generates search traffic - and our clients had better show up for their company names and the terms used in the story. Whether it's in the organic listings, sponsored listings, or better, both.

SEO companies are better positioned to take advantage of social media and online news, but most have a lot of growing up to do.

Struggling SEO companies will see it only from the other side, looking only for the value of links and immediate traffic. Generally, SEO companies don't yet have the skills in traditional PR, and will miss the opportunities to leverage the tremendous power of the mainstream media.

There must emerge a new breed of integrated Internet marketing agencies that will have excellent proficiency in both PR, Social Media, and SEM (Search engine marketing):

These teams must interact both strategically and tactically:

The PR team will still create their typical media targeting lists, media schedules, pitch ideas, sponsorship ideas, key messages and backup materials.

And working alongside them, the SEO team will create highly targeted keyword lists, and help come up with press release ideas that can include the right keywords, and create a schedule to publish a news releases into the online news every 30 days (to maintain constant exposure).

The Social Media experts will weigh in with ideas on videos, images and multimedia ideas to be included, and add to the media target list names of high profile bloggers and plans to get in or leverage highly traffic sites such as DIGG, Reddit, BoingBoing, or other sites that reach your demographic.

The Web Analytics guys will be consulted in the very beginning to create and track meaningful KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the real success of the campaign.

Tactically, PR will draft all of the releases, and SEO will optimize them for keywords, and place keyword rich anchor text that strategically deep link into our sites. The SEO team will submit them for online distribution.

Some releases will be purely for immediate traffic and links. Others will coincide with traditional media pitches by the PR team. Other articles and new content will be tagged or otherwise submitted to dozens of social media sites.

Everything will be tracked, trended and analyzed for traffic, links, conversions, media hits and of course, sales. This integrated approach is a must to maximize reach in the new world of almost infinity fragmented online media that is eating away at traditional media more every day.

--

If you want to read more on this, here's two older posts of mini-case studies of online press releases:

• B2B: Software industry press release (May 2007)
• B2C: Skincare industry press release (November 2006)
  

Business to Business Online Lead Generation 2008

It's leads, more often than not, that a Business to Business (B2B) company needs from their web site. We don't expect, or even want, to close sales online. Even more frequently with larger sales, they're typically closed on the phone or in person.

But how does our web site generate leads? And when we get them, how do we know where are leads are coming from?

We don't expect an e-commerce site that is ringing in sales all day, but we do expect a steady stream of qualified individuals that our sales team can follow up and close.

We want good leads. But how do we do it?

In a recent survey by Enquiro, 80% of B2B customers found the vendor, vs. 20% of vendors found the customer.

In every industry, every business, people are searching for solutions. As marketers, You have to learn the language of your customer, and be there when they search and where they search.

And search is not just the top 'search engines', like Google and Yahoo. For example, the top 3 business directories are:

1. Business.com
2. Knowledgestorm
3. Thomasnet

And that just scratches the surface. In every industry there are blogs, forums, directories, vertical search engines, associations, trade magazine web sites... and then there's the news. There's Google News, Yahoo News (3x bigger!), industry news, newsletters, news sites and on and on.

When there's something on our mind, we start with search. Most of us have become adept with knowing where to search for what. Want a local business listing? Yellowpages. Need a book? Amazon. A Heath Question? WebMD. A funny TV commercial? YouTube. A Song? iTunes.

Research shows, and it's not hard to imagine, that almost every browsing session includes a search. And that search is usually with Google. Google is bar far the market leader in search and reach.

Our questions lead us to search. And so should our marketing program.

Why? Because everything starts with search. Offline media like television and radio spawns search. News starts us searching. When we need a solution to a very specific business problem? We search.

When our customers are searching for a solution we can provide, we need to be found. Whenever, wherever, and every time they search.

But what are they searching for? That is the key. THAT cannot be understated.

Figuring out what they're searching for is so important we can't just do it once and call it done. We need to do it all of the time. Or at the very least revisit it regularly.

We don't just need to be found or our company and product names. That's just the very beginning. We need to be in front of all of the people searching that have never heard of us, never used our products. But want something just like we have. Here are a few questions to illustrate how the thinking should go:

• What are the generic names for our products and services? Not some of them - all of them.
  
• What do people think the solution to their problem is?
  
• What is the result or outcome that you provide?
• Do your customers typically buy or have something else before they buy your solution? What are the generic phrases around that?
  

The number of terms in search queries are getting longer and longer as we as a society get better at search. Four word searches now outnumber one word searches. We are getting adept and pinpointing exactly what we want. But we do it in so many different ways. We need to find the most common ways to describe what we have, problem we solve, or what we deliver, and get found for that.

Great. How?

Here's a quick and simple overview:

1. Understand your audience. Segment into major buying types so you can treat different people differently. You may want to create full blown personas.
2. Give them what they want. People want to find more information online. More than what's in the brochure. They want to qualify themselves and qualify you before they ever make a contact. Understand what they want so you can give it to them. This is where segmentation comes in. Different people, different roles, need different information.
   
3. Be clear about what you want - and ask for it. You'll have to be convincing. What will persuade your different buying types to pick up the phone, send an email, or fill out a request form? A whitepaper? Free trial? Case study, ebook, coupon, online discount, free gift, special offer, free membership, webinar, calculator tool, what else can you think of?
4. Know what they're searching for. At this step your site plan may have what they need and what you need, but how are you going to be found? You may sell point of sale terminals, but they may be searching for card swipers. You may be looking to lend money, but they want to borrow it. You sell control room displays, they want a video wall. You have to get the words right.
   
5. Create the content you need to be found. You may have to be creative to come up with content around the funny ways people describe your solution. But it's not that hard. You can write articles, a glossary, frequently asked questions. You can create your own "University". You can have a section on industry news or information. You can blog about the industry and cover a wide range of topics. How about an entire section that describes the problem that people have before they need your solution?
6. Decide what you need to measure, set goals, and measure it. You want leads? How many? What kind? From where? Who are they? It's OK to be optimistic, but be realistic, too. How many leads do you get now vs. how many do you want to get? Measure your results every month.
   

That last point deserves more attention. You must measure what you actually want to get. Don't buy into a search program from a web developer that 'also does search' and wants to measure success by your rankings for phrases that they suggest. High rankings doesn't equal leads. More traffic doesn't equal leads. Leads equals leads.

Remember that like most things, a good search program requires sustained, iterative effort. And the Internet marketing agency must be held accountable for bottom line results. If you follow the six steps above with a good partner, and keep plugging away the results will come.

If you plug away at it, the results will come. It may sound cliche, but it if you aren't doing it, your competitors are. Ask a good search agency to compare you with your top competitors. If you don't know where you stand, you should.

If you haven't started, nows the time. As each day goes by, the leaders in Internet marketing get more entrenched. It's not too late, but the barriers to entry get higher every day.

I'll sign off today with a few thoughts on where the opportunities lie:

1. The news. Google and Yahoo News get more than 1 million unique visitors searching every day. You can easily publish a press release and be inserted in the online news. There are far fewer press releases on your topic than there are web pages, and recency rules in the news. The premium shelf life of a press release in the online news is 30 days. Publish a new release every 30 days, optimize it for your money words, and you'll be nio the front page every day.
2. Universal Search. The search engine results pages (SERPs) are changing. Instead of 10 blue links in the SERPS, search engines are experimenting with blended results from many mediums. This is the future. So instead of 10 sites, we'll have a mixture of news, images, videos and sites. If you create the news, tag and distribute images and videos, you have a chance to not be in the search results, but dominate them.
3. Closing the loop. Knowing where to put your efforts is priceless. Work hard to create a system in your environment where you can track the source of not only every lead, but every new sale. Every new contact in your CRM system should have a source: tradeshow, search engine, keyword used, campaign clicked on, etc. Report on this and analyze it. What is delivering sales? Not rankings, not traffic, not leads, but sales. What is working and what isn't? Know this, and you'll be way ahead. You can optimize it further and your competitors and colleagues will wonder how you seem to be a media buying magician.
   

New Thinking After SES Toronto 2008

My mind is racing. I started to write this post as my key take-aways from SES Toronto, but as I fleshed it out it got more infused with other thoughts I've been cultivating. So I've had to change the name. It's no longer "Key Takeaways from SES Toronto", but "New Thinking After SES Toronto."

I really am thinking in a new way.

1: Search has become the center of all marketing - and life. It's built into human nature - it's the only way to find anything in our over abundant world of choice. Everything is about search more every day. Tivo's are search for TV. YouTube is search for video online. iTunes is search for Music. Netflix is search for movies. Millions of us search for news and weather every day. On your phone you search for everything: people in your address book, a local restaurant in your browser, an address in Google maps.

SideNote: What's search for your keys or wallet? Can someone please give me some RFID tags to put on them and build a phone to search for them? I am joking but I am not.

2: Seriously: search is not an option, but a required component for integrating media. People are searching on words they hear or see in the media to find what they've become aware and interested in. Do you want your competitors gaining from awareness generated by your TV commercials, radio, outdoor media, etc.?

In Fredrick Markini's cogent and engaging Toronto SES opening keynote, he told a story of a company in Norway that ran TV ads but didn't pay attention to the effect in search. Their competitor noticed the increased traffic in the organic results, and bought 50 phrases in PPC related to the TV campaign. They had to shut it down after 30 days because they could take no more business. The company that ran the TV ads gifted thousands of customers to the competitor.

One of his stats:

"40% of people going online because of an offline campaign make a purchase."

3: Vertical search is becoming more important, and it will continue to be so. Giants like Google can't provide the context and expertise that a vertical site can. That's not to say that Google can't buy, build or otherwise own many successful properties, but the point is that people want and need the context provided by vertical sites. Google is used more and more to find portals, directories and other search engines on specific topics.

This means as marketers we've got to search for all of the new places that our audience is searching for someone like us. We need to be in front of our audience wherever and whenever they are searching. All of the time.

4: Social Media is real and it's time to start paying attention. It's so incredibly friggin' big and so friggin' broad. It's the natural evolution of life on the Internet and it will evolve much more. It is not going away. But we are now really getting our hands around it as an industry. Social Media (SM) is different than search in that it shows feelings and expressions, while search shows intent. What can we do with feelings and expressions?

• Monitor reputation and brand attitudes. Reviews, blogs, comments, videos - there is a lot of discussion and data out there
• Catch problems in their infancy and allow us to address them quickly before they get out of hand.
• Join the conversation about our brands and make a positive influence. The conversation is happening with or without us.
• With creativity and some luck, you can even create a community around your brand. (But really think it though first... that can be a huge undertaking.)

These are all useful from a PR perspective, but without diminishing their value, they are more difficult to draw a straight line to improved financial results. There are other ways to use social to more directly influence the bottom line:

• Leverage comments, reviews and recommendations as third party proof sources to increase credibility and draw direct line to increased sales. The exact effect of various changes to content and pages used to be hard to measure, but with Google WebSite Optimizer and a skilled hand, it's now quite easy - and statistically provable.
  

• Social video like YouTube offers excellent opportunities for improved visibility through optimized postings and clever content on themes directly, or maybe even indirectly, related to your business.
  
  A directly related example: The company that makes information videos on their obscure product niche. People are searching for it, and there is no other video competition online.
  
  Indirectly related example: A shampoo company that posts videos about hairstyles (because people search for hairstyles, but shampoo's - not so much)
  
  
• You probably shouldn't get into SM just for the extra links to your site. But you can get a lot of extra links to your site. Links can produce traffic, improved search engine rankings (therefore more traffic), and traffic equates to more sales.
  

The incredibly targeted advertising promised by the very scary big brother stuff thats being built on demographics, interests and preferences has not really materialized in any big way yet. Facebook Ads are still in their infancy. But this has got a very long way to go, and it is going to get really interesting over the next few years. That's for both the incredibly targeting advertising and the very scary big brother stuff.

But now I have to stop. I have so much more to say but this is getting long and it's getting really late. To be continued....

Google having difficulty delivering to Gmail?

We are doing informal testing on Gmail deliverability today after a report from a client that they are getting some of our mail in their Gmail Spam account.

So far we've sent emails to about 40 different internal test Gmail accounts, a mixture of old and new, and sure enough, a percentage of emails are getting thrown into the junk folder. It seems fairly random so far, with identical emails going to both the spam and to the inbox in the same account.

So I did a few searches to see if anyone else is experiencing the same problem, and we are not alone:

Just this month, Andy Beard noticed false positives, and then while checking his spam folder found a Google email alert in the Gmail spam folder! (oh the irony)

After a bit more research I can see this this phenomena started happening after the new year, and has been continuing since:

January '08: Another Google mail in the Gmail spam folder

February '08: Gmail-false-positives-are-on-the-rise

March '08: GMail spam filter is throwing up some false positives today

April '08: Fish out the false positives

May '08: Are Gmail's Spam Filters Getting OverZealous?

The good news is that it is occasional - the bad is that it's random and so far unpredictable. We've seen message headers, content and IP addresses that are identical being both delivered and junked at the same time.

Can it be fixed? We'll see...

Two New Web Analytics Tools

This week a cool new tool came out that analyzes visitors in real-time. Techcrunch did a good review of Woopra here.

Google came out with something new of it's own through YouTube. YouTube Insight, as it is called, offers producers more details into the viewing of videos uploaded to the site.

Google Analytics Releases Industry Benchmarks

I remember wondering what Google was going to be able to do with all or the data it is collecting about Internet user behavior with the widespread adoption of Google Analytics.

As I am sure is only a first step, they are going to share some of that aggregate data with the world in the form of industry benchmarking - as long as you agree to share back. I don't see the downside. Mind you, I can think of many downsides other might percieve - but I don't share the same feelings about them. All the arguments I can think of against this are either paranoid, arrogant or naive.

Read the casual announcement of Google Analytics Benchmarking.

I am going to go turn on data sharing right now.

Google Analytics Tagging Best Practices

It's not as easy as it may first seem to get Google Analytics tags right. The decisions you make when assigning names to the various available tags in a campaign have consequences in the reports you are able to make. Getting the tags right allows you to make maximum use of the GA system. Getting them wrong may leave you frustrated when later you cannot get the answers you hoped to get. Trust me, I know this from experience.

Here are a few things that I have learned that have helped me:

1) No Cross Tabs
True cross tabulation is not available (A cross tab is a matrix of values with a one tag on the horizontal and the other on the vertical axis). You can build your own cross tab reports by exporting the data, but that's a time consuming pain-in-the-ass that you probably don't have time for.

Since you can't do a true cross tab, you'll want to plan in advance exactly what reports you want to see.

2) Tag your links the way the system was designed (and use a system yourself)
If you just guess and use whatever tags are seem appropriate at the moment, you'll find that you either end up with inconsistent data later, or the reports don't work the way you hoped.

There are two tags that must be used every time, and one that is highly recommended:

1. Medium (required)
2. Source (required)
   
3. Campaign (recommended)

Medium: This is used to define HOW the message was delivered; the mechanism or channel type. This is the one value you should NOT make up. GA prefills this in many areas to make out of the box reports work. Wherever possible, you should fill this field with an appropriate existing Google values so that your reports are consistent throughout the interface.

Existing values for medium are:

• referral - it was a click (paid or not) from a site that was not on a cost per click basis
  
• organic - it was a click from an organic search result
  
• cpc - it was a paid click, paid on a cost per click basis
  

There may be others, but these are the most important.

Source: This is should almost always be the name of the site that sent the traffic. The only exceptions are when the traffic did not come from a site (for example, email) or when you have partnered with a site that shows your content on many different sites (for example, an ad network, in which case you would use the name of the ad network.)

Source and Medium are the only two tags that Google lists as required. Another parameter that should ALWAYS be used is campaign:

Campaign: This one should be your internal name for your campaign. I have found two different uses for it, both are valid:

1. Tracking the results of many different "sources" as one single campaign. For example, say you are running a banner on 5 different web sites. You would tag all of them with their unique source (the web site name), but give them all the same campaign tag. This way you can see all of the sources of traffic within that single campaign to compare the effectiveness of each site.
2. Tracking results of multiple "campaigns" within a single source. For example, say you are running ads in 5 different categories of a major web portal. You can tag each category as a unique campaign, but leave the source the same in each. This way you can see which category performs best by running a report on the source, and showing the campaign segments.
   

Other parameters include:

Term: Used for tracking keywords
Content: Should be used for tracking versions of creative

Google has provided a URL builder to assist in creating the actual URLs.

EpikOne has a great Google Anlytics Blog. A good post is their top 5 Google Analytics resolutions for 2007

Google Will Dominate Mobile Like it Does Search

I think Google will dominate mobile phones like it does search, in just the same way that Microsoft dominates PCs.

Google announced, at the beginning of this month, their play in the mobile phone market - Android. This anticipated "Gphone" is not a phone at all - but an operating system. An open source operating system based on Linux. And they didn't announce this alone, they announced it alongside over 30 organizations all forming the open handset alliance - an alliance formed to develop free, open standards for mobile phones.

This alone may be a bigger play than the iPhone simply because any phone can be a Gphone.

Now if this isn't big enough - let's tale this a step further:

The connection of Google's open platform for mobile devices and their announcement of an open platform for social networking, opensocial, creates speculation about a combination of the two creating a massive mobile open social network that will help catapult the android phone platform into the same position in mobile as Google currently holds in search.

Networks already supporting opensocial, MySpace, Linked in, Salesforce, Hi5, Ning, Plaxo and Friendster to name a few, are already bringing well over 200 million registered users.

The potential for this mobile social network is clear once you've seen the incredible applications developed for android that are just waiting for the phones to be available.

Heck you'd think Google invented social networking on the web in this 57 minute campfire video on the announcement of OpenSocial.

Overall, I see the new mobile standardized OS battle playing out very similarly to the original Apple and Microsoft battles... you know, back in the day, when Apple made a beautiful operating system and sold it bundled with perfectly designed hardware, while Microsoft "just" made an almost as good operating system that ran on any hardware. Microsoft's OS approach proved to be the clear winner in the market. It created an almost universal platform for application development, and spawned an era of incredible pace and volume of application development and adoption.

This time around it's Google and Apple instead of Microsoft and Apple. Google takes the place of Microsoft this time, except with an open operating system - and the incredibly compelling advantage of built in, GPS enabled mobile social networking that's already well past critical mass.

Combine Android and open handset alliance with opensocial, and it's clear that Google is positioned well to make a play to combine and dominate the mobile phone market through an open standards operating system a mobile social network with critical network mass.

Google may well dominate the mobile audience as it does the search audience today.

Facebook Ads Launched, Google, Myspace also Launch New Initiatives

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old CEO of Facebook announced his new advertising platform called Facebook Ads, a new way to for advertisers to target Facebook's 50 Million users.

The new program has three components, advertisers can:

1. create branded pages
2. run targeted advertisements
3. gain access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site's more than 50 million users.

The ability to create the branded pages and for users to become "fans" of products is particularly interesting. Here is the first coverage of the Facebook Ads launch.

Also this week, Google launched it's own new initiative, OpenSocial. While MySpace also launched it's own new advertising platform called HyperTargeting.

ConstantContact Goes Public and the Changes Begin

Just last week Constant Contact went public and, as suspected, the changes are problems with this are already beginning. The first major fallout seems to be a quick change to their acceptable usage policy which now prohibits using the service for any communications related to gambling.

Gambling911.com was informed by ConstantContact yesterday that they would no longer be able to use the service. This started a flurry of blog posting from other people that are frustrated because of the number of telemarketing calls they receive from ConstantContact, or believe ConstantContact employees are masquerading themselves as happy customers on blogs. The latter does seem a little crazy to me... I can't image why a company with so much to lose would engage in such bad behavior purposely.

Anyways, for anyone looking for an alternative service to ConstantContact, we run a Canadian email marketing service called BetterMail.ca that you may want to check out.

B2B Presentation on B2B Lead Generation

So I just sat through the new webinar from Bulldog Solutions on "The Four Costliest Mistakes Marketers Make in Support of Sales". Presenters included Bill Golder from Miller Heiman, Rob Soloman from bulldog, and Ellis Brooker from btobonline.com

The one thing about these presentations is that it takes so long to develop context for the "meat" of the presentations that sometimes you wish you would have a Coles notes version so you could get the point quicker. This is actually the point of this post - a short version for you...

Summary:
To achieve stellar sales results, Sales and Marketing need greater integration in their efforts. Companies are focusing so much on lead generation these days - but many of the leads are being wasted for many reasons. Some of these problems can be solved through better communication between sales and marketing.

Details:
It was said that typically about half of the leads handed over to the sales department can't be followed up on by sales people. At its worst, this causes sales people to view the marketing department as wasting money on lead generation that is useless, and marketing looks at the the sales department as not following up on leads.

Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus
The reason, it was suggested, that sales and marketing speak different languages. There is no cross accountability, and the hand off is clumsy. The CRM system belongs to the sales department and the marketing department doesn't have access to it. The sales department, on the other hand, has little or nothing to do with the lead generation campaigns. The sales department wants hot leads, and the marketing department wants volume.

A SiriusDecisions report (March 2007) showed that lead generation is the number one marketing priority (and biggest spend) within US companies today. If half of the leads are being wasted - this is a huge problem!

Driving Better Alignment between Marketing and Sales
These are the four solutions presented:

1. Define organization goals. You should define what is a win for every body. How many leads does sales need? What are the attributes they need? What makes a good prospect? What is the call to action?
2. Define Measurements. What are the industry groups, the job titles, the problems they have? On the other hand, what geographies can't you support? What industries do not work? What companies are too small? Bill Golder added that this was key to the Miller Heiman strategy. This point helps move part of sales (qualification) more towards marketing. And perhaps most importantly, this allows sales and marketing to develop benchmarks.
   
3. Prepare for Sales Engagement. This point deals with the hand off from sales to marketing. One major point was dealing with the timing of the hand-off. In some cases it is taking 4-6 weeks from a new lead to get to the CRM so the sales person can follow up on it! For the poor sales person following up on leads that are this stale, they might as well be making a cold call.
4. Assess Results and Focus on Improvement. The numbers seldom lie. To me, this step is the most important in almost any marketing process. They discussed "shooting the losers" is as important as keeping the winners.

For the complete details on this webinar, they were nice enough to let us download the PPT file as a PDF. I did it and uploaded it here.

Overall I thought this was an excellent presentation, ideal for heads of sales and marketing departments. For more info on this topic, I have written about these issues before here, and here.

Beautiful Visual Link Exploration Tool

Neato. I am not sure where I can across this but it is really cool to play with.

http://walk2web.com/

Just type in a URL and it will give you a visual map of 6 related links. Incoming links are green, outgoing links are blue. Just click on any of those links and it will map the 6 inbound/outbound links for that page. Any links on that page that link back to previous pages will be mapped too.

What a cool way to visualize how neighborhoods are linked together. You could spend hours on this.

You can change the number and ratio of links if you want. I think I'll continue to play with this for a white to see if any real useful process can come out of it. Maybe not, but it is fun anyways.

Top Ranks for $10/Click Keywords Going to Doorway Pages

I just did a random search for a top three word phrase for a client to see where they stand organically - and keep an eye on the competition. My client currently bids around $8.00 to be #3 for this phrase in the sponsored results, and is ranked #7 organically. The top bid for top position in Adwords is well over $10.

The top organic result for this phrase is extremely keyword rich to say the least. The three word phrase is repeated twice as the first six words of the title, once at the beginning of the snippet, and once in the page url.

The landing page is rather ridiculously over-optimized for the phrase; it begins the headline, begins the first paragraph, is repeated again in the first paragraph, and is the start of the next five paragraphs.

No legitimate business would ever want to do this because it kills your credibility, would destroy your brand, and cannot possibly convert very well anyways. You've to hand it to them though - they do rank #1 - so if that is the extent of their short-sighted goal then they have certainly achieved it.

Still, I can't believe that it is as simple as over optimizing a single page to end up number one for a phrase that costs $10 - $15 a click for the equivalent in Adwords. This position is literally worth thousands of dollars per day.

So at the very least, this deserves a deeper look:

At the bottom of the page there are links to dozens of similar sounding pages, under the heading "other articles". These pages are comprised of several groups of extremely similar variations of related high value phrases. Only one of the three words in the phrase are different in most of these phrases.

Each of these pages leads you to a unique page of content that is super optimized for that phrase. They've created a matrix of very similar, but unique, super optimized pages. They've created one page for each variation of their targeted phrases, and each of the pages are linked from every other page using the appropriate link anchor text.

It's classic, beautiful search optimized content and architecture, but one problem I see is that all of these links are buried at the bottom of the page, and therefore shouldn't be considered to point to pages as important as the links in the main navigation on the top of the page. So why is all this working so well?

A quick check of the source code reveals that those links on the bottom are very near the beginning of the HTML - Only a tiny amount of code and and text content of the page is before them. These links are also placed in a way that they appear to the search engine to be embedded in the copy, which will make them appear to be very important links.

The most unusual thing about about all of this is how close to the beginning that main text area is. It starts right at the beginning of the body! Where is the header and the main navigation area? The main navigation has dozens of links and sub links that should come before this. These links aren't even on the page anywhere! A few searches of the source code for URL's and visible phrases in the main navigation turn up totally blank.

Hmmm. Where are these visible links, where is the header?

Aha, the entire header, navigation and links are all hidden in 3 javascript files included in the head tag. Cunningly, the entire main web site main structure (this section is only the tip of the iceberg) is hidden from Google on this page, and all of the super optimized content and links have become the new site to Google. The visible navigation, which takes visitors to the main site, is quite prominent on the visible page. Their strategy, it appears, is to get visitors to this page and hope that they'll click any main navigation item to get into the "real" site - never to find their way back to this over optimized page again.

A lot of work has gone into this, but I couldn't see how anyone could allow their whole web site to look like this. It's a step above the old auto-generated doorway pages from the nineties, because each of these pages had to be written by a human, but I still couldn't see them as a serious business so far.

So then I go to the home page, and I see that the copy is written quite well, and they seem to have a lot going on. This company has actually been in business since the 80's selling packaged software. Clicking around I noticed that all of the very similar links found on the original Google optimized page were nowhere to be found. I looked at the site map, thinking that surely they would use this page to link to their optimized page section, but I can't even find the links there.

Going back to the optimized page reveals a clue, the breadcrumbs show that I am in a section titled "articles". Looking at the footer on the home page reveals a link to "articles" that is not even in the site map.

Except for the over optimized content, it's quite cleverly done. If they were a little less aggressive with the keyword stuffing in the content they could easily argue that these pages were all legitimate articles about key phrases that their customers were searching for. They would be "legal search landing pages" instead of the much feared "illegal doorway pages". Yes, it is a fine line, and one that they still walk very carefully even if they are stumbling over the edge.

Each of their optimized pages truly are a unique article written by a real human being. It may not be auto generated, but any sane human being would agree that they must be written for something other than intelligent humans. The search engines wouldn't know this, of course, because the content won't be picked up by a filter that is searching for extremely similar pages, for too many similar phrases, or even a filter to detect randomly generated content - so they get away with it.

I wouldn't recommend some of these tactics, because they could easily land you with an over optimization penalty and get you kicked out out of the the index all together for a while. I do , however, think it is a very good illustration how aggressive you have to be to rank well these days.

NY Times Explains the Google Search Engine

If you are not in the Internet marketing industry, and want to get a feel for what exactly is all the fuss about search engine marketing, there is a good article on Google in New York Times last month that I just found, ironically, while searching for references to the Google search quality team: New York Times on Google

Keyword Research Secrets Revealed from SEO Book

Aaron Wall provided some of his "secrets" to keyword research on the WordTracker blog. It's about ensuring you have developed the best possible seed list - because the final list is only as good as the seed list you start with. This goes pretty deep, so it is a good read for ideas on your next keyword research project.

http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets-1/