Maybe the reason why you can’t even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you’re not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how your serve your Web pages, especially when your modern CMS is backed by a database.

I have a theory that both where you end up on search results as well as how much money you can make advertising AdWords ads via AdSense depends not merely on SEO or surfing the right trends or even finding the long tail sweet spot, but also on how quick, responsive, reliable, and durable the server that hosts your blog or site is. The faster the page loads, the better your site will rank on Google search, all other things being equal. Take it to the bank.

When my server was really under-powered and unoptimized, I was averaging $4/day, then after moving stuff around and optimized, it went up to a more reliable $11-25/day. Then, the site started getting more popular from better ranking and then the reliability decreased and the daily take returned to $4-6/day or so.

Now, with more physical RAM in the box and some cloud-based back-up to handle big popularity spikes, I am seeing quite a few $15-$25/day pay-outs.That’s only one person’s experience, but that’s all I got.

What I am going to tell you is not hard science. I might even be recognizing the wrong patterns. And, my sample size is one subject over a long period of time, my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, which is a very big, old, blog with 6,894 posts, 4,631 comments, 4,244 categories, and 14,092 tags — all back-ended by a MySQL database and fortified with WP Super Cache on a dedicated server.

My blog gets about 50,000 visits-a-month and once-in-a-while I will get a spike to 20,000 visits in a day — for example, when I surfed the Royal Wedding coverage. I serve AdWord ads on the site and I have been noticing that all things being equal, whenever my system administrator adds RAM memory, is able to optimize the database, increase uptime, and add either bandwidth or resources to the box that in some way makes the site quicker to serve, especially when slashdotted or digg-dotted from popularity, then Google rewards me with more advertising revenue.

And this happens not only during the days when I am being crashed by being mentioned on Mashable or retweeted by Guy Kawasaki, adding hardware and software resources to my dedicated server that adds to the box’s durability, reliability, and especially quickness and responsiveness is what does it on a daily basis.

And, I understand why Google does this. Isn’t this obvious? They are looking to provide their visitor, their users, their searchers, with a seamless and splendid experience. So, amazing user interface and quality of research and content cannot be enjoyed from a site that has repeatedly shown that it is habitually slow or unresponsive.

I honestly believe that the time a page loads is an important variable in the algorithm that Google deploys when it is indexing and ranking resource sites. You make have your user interface and site architecture and content completely sorted out, you might have organic link-tos and a PR of 5 or above, but at the end of the say, Google won’t send its searchers to a site that won’t load fast.

Cheap, slow hosting is fine when you’re new, but when you get as big as the Chris Abraham blog, with almost seven-thousand active posts and an open-season on comments, you really need to make sure your hardware can match your traffic, your popularity, your spikes, and your database requirements–and exceed them–or Google might give you ranking demerits and you might lose the trust and faith that Google had in you, resulting in their needing to either rank you down a few or off the front page so as to prevent a negative user experience.

Don’t forget that this is especially important for someone who is using Google on a smart phone. These folks are searching for timely information, especially when they’re on the road having a mobile web experience. After suffering through EDGE or 3G bandwidth issues just to reach Google, getting a “database cannot connect” from your site or blog doesn’t make you look good nor does it make the search engine that referred you.

What do you think? What are your experiences?

Via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz

Related articles

• Organic Search, E-Commerce and Page Load Times (firstrate.co.nz)
• Google Adsense rewards super-quick page loads (mikemoran.com)
• Google Adsense rewards quickest page loads (socialmedia.biz)
• How to Dramatically Improve Page Load Times (singlegrain.com)

When it comes to marketing, you want your company Website the top of the page on the first page of a Google Search.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies work to make this happen. According to webfroze they do so by understanding the significance of keyword research.

There are many tools out there to help SEO specialists; here are a few of the good ones based off of a recent Crunchyblogger article.

1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you insight into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It helps you track your sales and conversions, while helping to measure your site engagement. It can track email campaigns, banner ads and offline ads, as well as identify your best revenue source.

2.  Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer helps you listen to your visitors by receiving direct feedback from them. It makes it easy to increase your site effectiveness and visitor satisfaction, which leads to higher conversion rates and a higher return on investment. You will also receive a clear report that helps eliminate guesswork, and will help you find out what leads to the most conversions.

3. MailChimp
MailChimp makes email newsletters easy. It can help you design e-newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate them with services you already use and track your results. Using Mailchimp through social sharing allows you to increase the impact of your message.

4. Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster helps to increase trafficking to your site. It allows you to find out how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site. It can analyze your search data, showing how many people see your site compared with how many people click on it. Google Webmaster can also send you email alerts to tell you if your site has malware or generates errors.

5. Mediafeedia
Your company can use Mediafeedia for its facebook profile and pages. It allows users to manage multiple accounts at once, receive email notifications from users’ fan pages and allows easy reply through email, as well as the ability to schedule posts with pictures and links. Mediafeedia makes managing multiple facebook accounts easy.

6. Cotweet
Similar to Media Feedia, Cotweet helps you manage your twitter accounts. Although Cotweet can be used for both Facebook and Twitter, you’ll most likely have a different social media strategy for facebook than you will for twitter. Therefore, by using Cotweet for Twitter and Media Feedia for facebook, you are able to easily differentiate between these two platforms to make sure each are reaching your target audience effectively.

SEO Specialists don’t have easy jobs-they have to thoroughly understand search engines and how to get businesses on the first page of a Google Search while at the same time maintaining their ethics. However, with the help of these six tools their job can be just a little bit easier.

Related articles

• Is Google Inflating Analytics? Search Engine Watch (#SEW) (hyperdiskmktg.wordpress.com)
• Some Nifty SEO Bookmarklets To Make You More Efficient (seomoz.org)
• How to Add Your WordPress.com Blog to Google Webmaster Tools (vibesbyrutchie.wordpress.com)

I make too many assumptions as to what folks do and don’t know because I come from nerd and geek stock. Now, I am in the world of corporate and B2B communications with folks who are new to the “back office” of search and SEO. So, when I found this list, 20 SEO Terms You Should Know, from the Daily Blog Tips blog (thanks, Daniel Scocco) and via Chris Abraham:

1. SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.

2. Backlink: Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.

3. PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.

4. Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example of linkbait are the “Top 10? lists that tend to become popular on social bookmarking sites.

5. Link farm. A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was effective in the early days of search engines, but today they are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).

6. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had “weight loss” as their anchor texts.

7. NoFollow: The nofollow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g., blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and advertisers). When Google sees the nofollow attribute it will basically not count that link for the PageRank and search algorithms.

8. Link Sculpting: By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.

9. Title Tag: The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.

10. Meta Tags: Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.

11. Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors (according to Google itself), including the PageRank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on.

12. SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.

13. Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.

14. Keyword Density: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.

15. Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.

16. Cloaking. This technique involves making the same web page show different content to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search engines.

17. Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it’s a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.

18. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on your website because it can get you penalized.

19. Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.

20. Robots.txt: This is nothing more than a file, placed in the root of the domain, that is used to inform search bots about the structure of the website. For instance, via the robots.txt file it’s possible to block specific search robots and to restrict the access to specific folders of section inside the website.

Twitter took another step towards advertising in the start of November this year. Promoted tweets appear on top of the list of a search result in its category. The effectiveness of the service has been proven by the companies that are part of the beta. Higher number of followers, Klout standing and other booms in their advertising strategies. Google, despite of having its own ‘Adwords‘, starts displaying promoted tweets on it search results pages. According to an article of Apprana Roy, “Twitter’s Promoted Tweets To Appear In Google’s Real-Time SERPs”:

Tweets already appears in Google searches. But, now onwards, Promoted Tweets will be displayed in Google’s real-time Updates search service in the US, where ads from brands such as Starbucks, AT&T and Verizon currently appear in a shaded box labeled “Ads by Twitter”.

A spokeswoman for Google said: “Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us.” She said Google is open to exploring other advertising models and systems.

The news comes as pressure mounts for the micro-blogging site to generate revenue to ensure its survival. And as Twitter seeks ways of making money from its content, some observers believe this could be the way forward. It is understood that about 30 advertisers have signed up to participate in the American version of the service, including Starbucks and telecoms companies Verizon and AT&T.

Marketing strategies are meant to be playful, if someone has succeed in with a particular plan, you might as well take part of the success by joining the parade. It’s all business, and it’s good as long as it is fair enough.

Kurrently is a brand new real time search engine for Facebook and Twitter. Not that there aren’t already a slew of Twitter search engines, but a Facebook search engine is something genuinely new and exciting. Patrick Chester over at PR Media Blog says:

This is revolutionary, as in the world of social media monitoring, Facebook has always been a “walled garden”, or a closed online network, for monitoring brand reputation. Twitter, blogs and forums are easy to access, and brand conversations can be recorded and packaged to clients (media monitoring services already do exactly that). Facebook is much more difficult to monitor however, as the social network covets its user data as much as its users covet their privacy. Kurrently will allow businesses to find out exactly how their brands are being talked about on Facebook. It will be a real boon for marketers, but perhaps to the detriment of online individual privacy.

Patrick is absolutely right! This is a great tool for making Facebook monitoring easier and stronger than ever before.

I think you should check out Michael Gray new article, Using Directories for Search Engine Reputation Management, because it is a very interesting article — essential reading — I have only excerpted a wee bit of it here because I think you need to go over there and spend some time with the article, which is really valuable and essential as a way of inoculating your brand in advance of anything going wrong.

Search engine reputation management (SERM) is a growing discipline under the larger umbrella of search engine optimization (SEO). If you deal with client services, and you don’t already have at least one reputation management client, chances are you will in the very near future. The more tools or options you have at your disposal for this type of project, the easier the task will be. In this article I’m going to look at one of those tools; directories. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

I think it is really important for me to start writing more on this topic.  I have written a few things on this topic: I, Online Reputation Manager, The Powerful SEO Benefits of Blogger PR Outreach, An El Al Jumbo Jets Chaffing and Flaring the Skies Analogy, Online Reputation Defense: Resistance is Futile, Online Reputation Management, and Online Reputation Management Needs to Be Proactive. Via Marketing Pilgrim and Chris Abraham.

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra

[...]

[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)

[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:

• More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
• More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
• Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
• Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
• Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
• Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect

[...]

At Abraham Harrison, we’re exchanging ideas with NetVantage, a Michigan based SEM and analytics firm.  Adam Henige will be guest blogging here from time to time.  We’re honored to have him here.

If you are a marketer, you should inherently love data.  In my own customer experiences (as well as my professional experiences) I’ve come to realize that many market research and data collection initiatives are focused on asking the question “Why?”  This question is asked to understand the triggers that make people perform a given action which is then used to generate plans to capitalize on those insights by reaching more of that target market.

Unfortunately, traditional methodologies for obtaining this data can be time consuming and costly, and typically do not correlate well with the different shopping and/or brand experience of a company’s web presence.  So if you’ve spent a lot of money on a website, you’re likely doing some basic tracking to understand where your traffic is coming from (particularly if you’re doing paid search or other forms of online advertising) and how well your site is converting visitors to customers.  However, if your site’s not generating business, or if you would like it to generate more (and who doesn’t?), you need to be looking into ways to ask your customers “Why not?”

I recently began working with a client to provide paid search management, search engine optimization and web analytics for their recently launched web store.  For the client it was their first venture into online retail, and they had no idea what to expect.  Upon our initial engagement, I was extremely impressed with how intelligently they had approached this initiative.  They chose an experienced developer who had put together a site which was aesthetically strong, had a logical navigational structure, and a robust content management system.  Upon first glance it appeared I would simply have to drive some qualified traffic to the site and the cash register would start ringing.

Not long after the contract was signed we had our SEO and SEM initiatives underway.  Traffic increased by over 500%, average page views and time on site were strong for visitors reaching the site directly as well as through organic and paid search.  We had only one problem…no one was buying.  The question, of course, was “why not?”

I began scouring the data available to me.  All of the baseline website health metrics, aside from sales, looked good.  So what was the issue?  The answer was found in a scenario analysis of the site’s shopping cart system.  Using most web analytics software these days allows the administrator to set up scenarios, or funnels, of defined steps users take through a process whether it be through a series of product pages or the steps to purchase through a shopping cart. 

In this instance, there were six pages through the purchase process from adding a product to the shopping cart to the final step which was an order confirmation.  When we took a look at the funnel, we saw that a large percentage of visitors were successfully getting through the first three steps, but when users got to the billing information page, 100 percent of users were exiting.  So we quickly jumped into the purchase process on the site and when we reached the billing information page, we put ourselves in the users’ shoes, and found the data had led us to the reason users were not buying.  At this exact step users were being asked to input their billing info after they had already input their shipping information, with no ability to mirror that information (a simple radio button saying “check here if the same as shipping address” would have sufficed).  This was redundant and annoyed users enough to make them not purchase despite the fact that they were halfway through the buying process.  Immediately after we fixed that step in the shopping cart, sales started steadily increasing and over time the funnel has continued to improve dramatically.

So in this instance, we were able to utilize web analytics to take data and determine the answer to “Why not?”  However, in sites that have more ambiguous goals, it can sometimes be hard to statistically measure if users are having successful visits.  In these cases, you may literally need to ask the question of visitors on your site.  Companies like Foresee Results have had great success instituting in site surveys to gauge customer reaction and generate a constant flow of feedback (you will run into this on sites like bestbuy.com and many others) for a broad array of organizations.  These solutions have been well received by clients, but in many instances, a much less intensive (read: free) solution can provide enough information to gauge your website’s pulse, and its ability to ask your visitors “Why not?”

One such solution I have used in the past is iperceptions’ 4Q, an in site survey tool that allows you to gather qualitative data to supplement your quantitative analytics data and help you answer some nagging questions about your site’s performance.  The tool itself is very easy to install, and once installed, provides a handful of customization tools to select the frequency of visitors who will be presented with the option to take the survey, select alternate answer sets, etc.  The 4Q survey asks users five questions, asking them to rate their experience, define the purpose of their visit, whether they were able to complete that purpose, what they value most about the website, and whether or not they were able to complete the purpose of their visit (here’s where you’ll find your “Why not?”).   

At Netvantage we constantly trumpet the Internet’s ability to generate accountable marketing decisions, and this is a prime example of what we mean.  Through the fluid ability to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, you can ask non-converting prospects “Why not?”  With this information you can continuously optimize your site and your online marketing efforts to break down those barriers and convert more prospects into loyal customers.

Adam Henige is a Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an Internet Marketing Consulting firm specializing in search engine optimization, search engine marketing and web analytics.

My guess is a tentative, temporary yes.

If you aren’t clued in yet, Yahoo! and Google have come to an agreement that allows Yahoo! to display Google paid search results on keyword queries on Yahoo! Yahoo! can now tap into Adsense and Adwords. The agreement is for 10 years and is not exclusive, meaning that Yahoo can create similar agreements with other parties.

There are pluses and minuses to this agreement. But for now, let’s focus on smaller agenices that serve smaller businesses and smaller businesses themselves.

The upside is that there could be less to learn and more reach for small advertisers. Using paid search can get you results on Yahoo! It may be unnecessary to do anything broad-based. That’s a good thing. It may make it easier to enter the arena of local search.

As AdAge points out:

When Google search ads are mixed in with Yahoo search ads for a particular search query, Google will almost always win the better placement, according to search marketers, because it has a better ad-matching and monetization engine. And if Google consistently wins, marketers may be less inclined to bother using the Yahoo system, instead choosing to put their optimization efforts toward a single system. In other words, less to learn, less to manage.

That’s the good part.

Now the down side. It could get more expensive to place search ads. Google’s system tends to be more expensive – and effective than Yahoo’s! That expensiveness will now be extended into the Yahoo! sphere, likely devaluing Yahoo’s! own paid search results.

My thoughts are that, at least initially, this will bode well for locals who are looking to add paid search to their mix. I’m thinking that because I’m guessing the biggest barrier is lack of knowledge on how start off effectively…as opposed to cost.

But that benefit may not last for long if competition becomes to intense for localized keyword searches. Because this does decrease paid search alternatives.

Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch poses the question as to whether Google Trend result will be a good predictor of the 2008 presidential election. He points to past statistics that show a relative symmetry between searches for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the results for the Democratic primary.

Blue = Barack Obama Red = John McCain

I think you can take all this with a grain of salt. Sure, there will be some relevance, but there are too many other factors involved that could skew the results. There are also a bunch of unrelated factors that can’t be prescribed to online search.

The electoral college is the deciding factor in elections and while you can break down searched by state, each state will have its own factors relating to voters and internet usage. And voters will vary as to how they get their political information. Evangelical voters will differ from young urban single people who will differ from Latinos who will differ from suburban housewives.

How thiis wold be helpful is to also measure terms such as health care, immigration, tax policy, and Iraq…and match them with each candidate. Better yet, match them by candidate and state. You’ll start to see what issues are important where.

Candidates then should create issue focused minisites that can directly address a candidates interests.

Hopefully, campaign advisors will look to do this as opposed to primarily run on slogans and attack ads that teach us very little.

Back in December, I made put forth my predictions for 2008, with #11 being “Conversion attribution will be a big bone of contention”. That’s about to happen. Only now, thanks to Microsoft, it’s called “Engagement Mapping”.

Conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically this. When we buy something, it is often because we’ve been inluenced by several marketing messages from different channels. The online arena offers little measurable sense of exactly what made someone buy, but an (almost) exact sense of where someone came from (a search? a banner?). So, conversion attribution and/or engagement mapping is basically is the call for the revenue from an ecommerce transaction to be dispersed amongst the marketing channels according to some sort of formulaic attribution system of that tries to weigh the influence of each channel. In Microsoft’s version – I’ll stick with engagement mapping – only online channels are mentioned.

This seems to address a issue of real concern, but it fails to address the whole picture. As a result, we’re likely to see an upcoming battle of Titans.

The problem I have with it is that Microsoft will be trying to implement industry wide measurement metrics – more than likely specifically designed in its favor – to get inside our heads and measure the amount of influence all of these marketing channels had when we buy something. I’d rather see something like this worked out by a consortium of companies in the online advertising space.

In all honesty, the current system is a skewed. In the pay-for performance world, which is heavily slanted toward search, we never really know what factors led to that click. I’ve long believed in search, but have had a hard time thinking a small text ad worked wonders all by itself.

Controversy will rise up big time if this becomes standard because Micorsoft’s rival, Google, will stand to lose the most. And that loss could be huge. That’s because EM will be taking into account online display advertising such as banners and boxes and skyscrapers. They have been much derided with their low click thru rates, something that I’ve always have felt was unfair. To me, it’s never taken into account any branding aspects or simple enhancement of name recognition. While Microsoft obviously has a foothold in the search arena, they are players in display advertisng as well. This will be even more true if their attempts to buy Yahoo prove to be successful.

Now it will be Microsoft’s challenge to convince the ad industry to play along. Advertisers – angencies and internal marketing managers may go for EM because it could allegedly give them a more quantifiable measure of marketing ROI spend.

But this cuts right into Google’s business model. They’ll be losing money because yesterday, someone saw a banner ad for a product and today they’re on Google because they put in a industry related keyword and came up with a text ad. But there really is no telling how much weight each played in the purchase. At best, I don’t think we’re there yet.

Microsoft’s plan is short on detail. Look for a lot of headed discussion on this issue. I’ll be following it intensely.

Penny Crosman wrote a pretty good review of a book I hadn’t heard of,  Web Dragons, by Ian H. Witten, Marco Gori and Teresa Numerico, which seems like a pretty :

‘How do search engines work? Howare PageRanks calculated? WebDragons, by Ian H. Witten, Marco Gori and Teresa Numerico, takes a textbook approach to such questions using historical analogies. “In Oriental folklore, dragons not only enjoy awesome grace and beauty, they are endowed with immense wisdom,” the authors note. “But in the West, they are often portrayed as evil — St. George vanquishes a fearsome dragon.” Search engines, too, are large beasts and have the capacity for wisdom, good and evil.”In addition to celebrating the joy of being able to find stuff on the Web, we want to make you feel uneasy about how everyone has come to rely on search engines so utterly and completely.”‘ –Penny Crosman of Intelligent Enterprise

This morning I read two important posts written by Greg Sterling on his blog Screenwerk. One is Nielsen – WebVisible Data on Local Search. The other is New Findings on SMBs and User Reviews. It left me more and more convinced how local businesses must view the internet as a marketing and business development source, and as a customer relations and reputation management tool.

Now I’m combining the results of two surveys both taken on line, so bear with me but Greg teamed with Opus Research and AllBusiness.com to put forward a survey that netted them 1200 respondents. AllBusiness.com’s users and members are SMBs (small & medium businesses). Of those 1200, 55% said that they had a website. That figure is smaller that I would expect – which is a good sign. That’s because it means that it probably wasn’t heavily populated by web savvy or tech oriented companies.

Now the Nielsen-WebVisible survey found that 86% said that they had used the Internet to find a local business to actually shop at. And as far as usage, 78% responded that they use the internet more today to find a local business than they had done two years previously and that an additional 20% use it the same amount. Combined, that’s 98%. Wow.

What we’re seeing is that a significantly large (and getting larger) percentage of people – people who are looking to conduct some sort of business- use the internet to locate businesses within the category of the product and/or service of what they need…on a local basis.

This obviously underscores the tremendous need today for SMBs to have websites. Not having one is ludicrous. But it also points to the fact that, in today’s arena, it PAYS to develop an online marketing plan for one’s SMB. It should include SEO and SEM for most. Banners at times. Email marketing to current customers. Each business will have different needs and all of these methods may not apply, but we also find out from the Nielsen-WebVisible survey that 52% use telephone directories less now than they did two years ago. Disclosure: I still use mine and have no plans to use it less.

Now there’s going to be a gap here. And the gap is that many smaller businesses mistakenly view advertising as an expense. And they’ll go for the tried and true. Yellow pages and flyers. Or they’ll rely on something that is very effective, but may not be enough: word of mouth.

To be sure, in Greg’s survey, 60% of the repondents said that more than 50% of their business comes from referrals. And 30% said that more than 75% come from that same source. You won’t find me dissing WOM…

…so I’ll say this. I think a lot of business owners put too much stock in their product and/or service and rely on word-of-mouth…which while being very effective can be very slow. Which is why I think they’ll need to invest in some online strategies.

But going back to WOM, we see the internet is increasingly playing a major role. Greg also found out that 64% or respondents knew of online review sites and that 30% regularly check these reviews. About one-quarter of them said that these reviews led to new business.

So people are searching for and finding local business via the internet. They are then reading (or writing) online reviews. More evidence that developing an online strategy is becoming ever more important.

Close to 60% of respondents felt that customer reviews are “a good thing and help us improve our business”. Improve means that a business sort of has a free focus group online. And then it adds their favorite marketing tool…word-of-mouth.

Now a lot of Greg’s respondents not only recognize the importance of these reviews, they apparently understand that it’s important to address – no, wait, I’ll say that word – ENGAGE – their customers/reviewers because over 50% had contacted unhappy customers to address complaints. That’s a very smart thing to do.

This brings me to a final point. Online reputation management. Still today, with 45% of the respondents here without website, it shows that many SMBs are very much behind the eight ball. Because a company doesn’t have a website, or they have one that one of the officer’s nephews built four years ago, doens’t mean that they’re not being talked about online. And, if you are a business owner, you want to be the most prominent, the most central web presence out there.

I see a tremendous opportunity for not only local search, but local marketing, bizdev, and customer/business relation management that’s going on RIGHT NOW.

Check out the article in last Thursday’s Times, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, that addresses how to handle consumers who develop a personal vendetta against your company. Well, you could send lawyers but legal cease-and-desists generally just make the customer madder than hell and it isn’t hard to just start yet another attack site.

I hate to say it, sucking less always helps. Start with treating your customers better. Also, be sure to register lots of domain names and work on your online reputation aggressively before it becomes a problem.

Online, the best defense is a good offense and an ounce of online promotion is worth a pound of cure. Here are some great commented-by-me excerpts from the article, Dealing With the Damage From Online Critics, so you can get a gist:

As the power of the Internet grows, businesses small and large find themselves confounded by disenchanted employees, suppliers and competitors who seek fertile ground to air grievances online.

Armed with little more than a Web connection and a keyboard, these detractors can do everything from irritate, via a scathing review, to causing serious business problems by using message boards to reveal company secrets or spread rumors of unethical behavior. They may also start a gripe site or register a Web address in their target’s name.

There is not a lot you can do here so the best way to make sure you’re safe online is by making sure there is a whole lot of conversation about you, your brand, and your company well before anyone says anything, and they will, eventually.

It’s from Stat 101: the more data points there are the less any particular one point will effect the total. If you’re nowhere online, then one attack can demolish you. If, however, you’re ubiquitous, then any negative ad will probably not even cross your first few pages on Google anyway.

And, if it does, an appeasement policy does work: this person is not Hitler, this person just feels like he’s not being heard. I mean, I have done this sort of thing myself with Media Temple.

Their Director of Customer Support called me but his appeasement sucked because his gift wasn’t what I wanted, it is what he was authorized to give. Not enough. I just wanted to be appeased and so he never got the posts off of my blog and never will. I ended up leaving MT and will never recommend them ever again.

In fact, I am adamant that people stay away from Media Temple because I think Media Temple sucks (see what I just did there?)

Remedies vary by case and by state, but lawyers, Internet specialists and others counsel that the best course with may be to ignore irritating posts because trying to squelch a malcontent can have unintended consequences.

Beware of the unintended consequence, something we call blowback in DC. Reacting, responding, or arguing in a comment thread is basically engaging with a Tar Baby. There is no way you’re ever going to come out alive unless you come in very open, very sorry, and have a legitimate solution. Otherwise, if you’re ornery, you’ll have your ass handed to you.

“Your reaction often, if you’re a small business, is to get angry and to fire off a letter,” said Barry Werbin, an intellectual property lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in New York. “Some big companies do it. More often than not, the person who posts the gripe site can’t wait to get that letter and post it.”

Sometimes, Mr. Werbin added, “it can worsen the damage because it just fuels the fire.”

This is super important — the best reason to hire a company like Abraham Harrison is because we know when not to react. As I always say, don’t respond, reply, react: message and counter-message!However, it is always smart to ask web hosts, web companies, the blogger, etc, very nicely to remove the content, especially after the issue has been resolved by you. Don’t get angry, don’t get even, get your “the customer is always right” hat on and start solving problems.

That the the owner of the gym in the article wouldn’t refund the $100 to the lady-in-question was just a seriously self-destructive rule. Katie Lambert is a moron. Now, she is known as a moron in the New York Times as well because this article makes her seam petty and cheap, surely prissy and pretty bad at customer service, that’s for sure.

Shit, if you own the company, “the rules” can always be ignored — rules are for dumb employees who have no authority so that spineless customers who don’t know their rights can tell their spouses that they tried and there was “nothing I could do.”

“New consumer opinion gets posted about every five seconds,” said Rob Crumpler, chief executive of Buzz Logic, which helps businesses identify influential bloggers.

Samantha DiGennaro, who runs her own strategic communications consulting firm in New York, says many companies either run scared from electronic media or fail to realize how quickly negative comments can jet around the Internet.

“People think, ‘It’s only on the Web. It’s not that important.’ But it’s almost more important than a newspaper or something in print,” she said. “Things live in perpetuity on the Web.”

Spoken words and even IM is “ephemeral,” meaning it is said and dissipates. When you post a blog entry or write a review, it goes on a permanent record. Since most companies have have websites that are essential “brochure-ware,” if there are enough negative reviews, these reviews can even place higher on Google than the company itself!

And, this “blog effect” even works for people who don’t have the Super Ninja SEO skills that I have just because Google favors deep sites, sites with lots of inbound and outbound links, sites with keyword-rich textual links, sites that are easy to “recognize” because they use predictable architecture, and also sites that are updated frequently. Google favors frequently-updated content above any other because Google is always afraid of missing something. Google wants to be first so Google will always index something fast and often if it is a site that is being constantly-updated — like a blog, a message board, or a review site! Ha!

Some large marketers may blog or respond anonymously. Ms. DiGennaro said appropriate responses were not one size fits all and must be tailored to the particular case. If something merits being addressed, she said, it can better be done in the name of the company rather than hiding behind anonymous postings.

Good lord, do not astroturf — it might seem like a great idea but it will give you nothing but pain!

Finally, Defensive Search Engine Optimization (Defensive SEO) works! It works! And here’s how, in a nutshell:

On the technical front, a search engine optimization expert can tweak a site so that it moves a positive posting higher in an Internet search, tending to bury the negative one. Shailen Lodhia, vice president for sales at Submit Express, an optimization firm in Burbank, Calif., estimated results could take three months to a year, and monthly retainers could exceed $3,000.

The best defense is a good offense. Useful practices include registering personalized e-mail addresses as well as gripe domain names — not with the intention of using them but to prevent others doing so. Registering common misspellings as well as derogatory domain names is a good precaution and so is covering extensions like .biz and .org. Costs are minimal, some lower than $50 a year.

And here is the money-shot of the entire article: you will not only be judge on the dumb or good things you do, but people know that you can really judge a company during a fit of rage, so you will also be judged by how you respond!

“Some people, for whatever reason, aren’t going to like or appreciate what you’re selling,” she said. “Accept this as normal, and you won’t stay awake at night letting a disgruntled client or a negative person who decided not to use your services bring you down with what will be transparently obvious to most people as sour grapes feedback.”

Angie Hicks, founder of Angie’s List, a member-generated ratings service where users report their positive or negative experiences with local contractors, said every company gets complaints at some time, but the way it responds can be more telling than the complaint itself.

“You can really see how that company is going to stand by their work based on how they handle problems that come up,” she said.

Don’t even try to attack, to counter-attack, to start making excuses, or by insulting or defaming your attacker. Remember what I told you about the tar-baby? Well, waging war with online conversation is an insurgency and requires asynchronous warfare techniques… I like to call them asynchronous marketing and asynchronous PR — forget about it, I already locked down the domain names!

With the issue of reputation management in the news, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent discovery that many of the Mattel toys made in China were painted with lead-based paints. This had followed several other unrelated incidents that had previously caused embarrassment to either Mattel or to China.

A company such as Mattel needs to have a proactive online strategy that could meet the negativity head on, to help suppress those damaging rumors that could hurt the company both immediately and permanently. A company needs to understand what is being said about them in online forums, on blogs, and, if necessary, it needs to help blunt and diminish the negativity headed their way.

For Mattel, it was the recall of millions of other toys that contained small magnets that could fall out of the toy and could be swallowed by young children. And for China, it was the massive recall of pet food earlier this year.

Oddly enough, a controversy erupted when Mattel apologized to U.S. consumers. The company had done the ‘right thing’ – or what is now considered standard practice – as they trotted out CEO Bob Eckert and put him on video with him stressing that Mattel will immediately look into the matter and make changes. And he wanted us to know that he, as a Dad himself, was concerned. Relational empathy works.

But the problem was that as Mattel was apologizing to US citizens, they were subtlety making it seem the problem was ‘with China’…which, if not exonerating the toy company, muddled up their role in the fiasco. In the meantime, the Chinese government was not thrilled as most of the recalled toys had problems with their very design as created by Mattel as opposed to lax Chinese standards or poor Chinese workmanship. As a result , Mattel made an apology to China, even though lax standards DID cause some of the problems.

So, as it often happens, we don’t know really who is to blame here. Or if any blame is damning enough to have either the company or the country or both scorned. Now that may be good enough and the issue may go away. But today, with the blogosphere in full swing, with online forums abuzz, with citizen journalism being heralded as a wave of the future, my bet is that problems like this will last more than a bit longer.

So, to me, companies such as Mattel (or governments, or associations, or any type of organization) and their PR agencies are going to have to either learn about or invest in the services of a digital consultancy that can help them manage, repair, or defend their reputation.

Disclosure: Abraham Harrison offers those services. But hear me out.

Businesses are going to make mistakes. Some honest ones, some callous ones. There will always be forces out that the will – very legitimately – call them on these mistakes. But mistakes can lead to rumors to that can spread very fast, to activist groups looking for the killer punch, to media outlets looking for that big story…when there may be no story to speak of.

Traditional PR practices still make perfect sense. Put the CEO on video, develop an new (and more effective) set of guidelines, work with the media. But today that may be enough.

A company such as Mattel needs to have a proactive online strategy that could meet the negativity head on, to help suppress those damaging rumors that could hurt the company both immediately and permanently. A company needs to understand what is being said about them in online forums, on blogs, and, if necessary, it needs to help blunt and diminish the negativity headed their way.

It’s a whole new ball game.

If I may quote the Holy Bible, “as I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.” So, Mark sent me an email with a link to Google Purges The Payola:

“Search engine marketing consultant and blogger Rand Fishkin recently compiled a list of more than 70 sites with names like LinksFactory.net and DirectoryDump.com, which have been relegated in the past three weeks to the hardly seen back pages of Google’s (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) results, even when users search for them by name.” Via Forbes and Andy Beard

So, I have to let you know: don’t mess with Google. I’ll drop it again: Don’t. Mess. With. Google. Got it?

I had an amazing site, memes.org, and then I turned to the dark side when I lost the dedicated server. I turned memes.org into a Splog and then it was all toast. Google removed memes.org completely from Google’s index. Completely. 100%. There was nothing left.

Over the next 13 months, we’re going to have to endure yet another campaign season here in the States. Two primaries and then a long, drawn out general election. One way to deflect these attacks is through defensive SEO. It helps suppress concerted attacks by depressing negative search results while increasing positive ones. And I think it will be vital. Hopefully, others will listen.

We’ve got a bitterly divided electorate here in the states. There doesn’t seem to be much give from the hard right or hard left. I fully believe that both sides will be going full force to destroy one another. That’ s not just the eventual nominees, but candidates from all levels, the interest groups that back them, and other assorted key players.

We’re going to see a lot of dirty tricks online. We’re going to see rumor mongering. We’re going to see sleaze come out of the woodworks.

That’s why I think that stakeholders must look to invest NOW in defensive SEO. They need to learn what is out there and what is likely out there. They need to have a rapid response mechanism that limits or eliminates damage.

In the online arena, information can spread fast. Damaging information can spread faster. We’re likely to see successful attacks out of nowhere. Sort of like we did back in 2000 when citizens of South Carolina were told, via telephone calls just before the primary, that US Senator John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child.

But this goes beyond those candidates. We’ll see attacks on advocacy organizations and on key influentials. Often people in politics like to destroy their opposition.

One way to deflect these attacks is through defensive SEO. It helps suppress concerted attacks by depressing negative search results while increasing positive ones. And I think it will be vital. Hopefully, others will listen.

Google hates high-design websites. Google needs plaintext. People hate high-design websites after they get past the wow-factor because high-design websites tend to lead with form over function, confusing people with innovations in design rather than innovations in usability. Graphic designers might be the bane of my existence as a technology strategist and an expert in SEO. PR folks aren’t the only people who don’t get Web2.0.

I spend most of my time undoing all of the mistakes that graphic designer have saddled my clients with: gorgeous sites made entirely with Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs.

If you want to develop a modern, powerful, informative, and current web resource, you need to lead with innovation, technology, usability, accessibility, and content. If you lead with design, you’re probably building a beautifully pathetic Web 1.0 web site, maybe even Web 0.0.

Abraham Harrison LLC specializes search engine optimization, Internet strategy, new marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, grassroots outreach, and online reputation management. My personal expertise is in what is known as Web 2.0.

These high-design site made of “sliced images” or “Flash blogs” are shallow sites devoid of text, architecture, copy, permalinks, meta-data, tags, categories, site maps, keywords, descriptions, or anything else.

After 15-years of surfing the web, you would think that graphic designers would learn to stop trying to bring print design to the web. There are many offenses that place graphic designers squarely in the camp of web 0.0 but the worst of which is the lack of the permanent link-to, making it impossible for bloggers, social bookmarking sites, or social networks to link direction to explicit pages on a larger site.

Many “Flash blobs” — web sites that are basically a platform for gorgeous Macromedia Flash-based websites — don’t offer ways to bookmark particular content such as the Contact page, the Directions page, or the Services page.

ZenithOptimedia is predicting that the percentage share of online advertising to advertising on a whole will increase from 7.5% in 2007 to 9.5% in 2009. I’m betting it’s going to be higher. And in part for the similar reasons they do.

Online video is improving and it’s becoming more and more common as a marketing communications vehicle. Broadband expansion is slowing down, but expansion, while important, isn’t the only factor. It’s also how we use and will use video that will cause a continued increase. Broadcast and cable will increase their understanding as to how to make online video more profitable with hopefully, little sacrifice in popularity.

Zenith also says that local search will fuel this increase. Once again, I agree. But I’d expand this. As more and more mid-size and larger companies realize the important of search – and search optimization – they’ll invest more in better sites, further increasing the importance of search. And, yes, those local companies will realize that their customer base is going online for local info. They can’t rely on tradtional methods they once did.

But I’d also add that the growth of social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube will fuel even greater online ad share growth. Right now, they’re in the process of figuring it all out. Once they do, more dollars will be transfered online.

To me, the increase will come from the greater use of improving online applications. My guess is that it will push it up closer to 12%.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Newspapers	29.7	29.0	27.8	26.9	26.2
Magazines	13.2	12.8	12.5	12.2	12.1
Television	37.8	37.9	37.9	38.2	38.1
Radio	8.6	8.3	8.1	7.9	7.8
Cinema	0.4	0.4	0.4	0.4	0.5
Outdoor	5.5	5.6	5.7	5.8	5.9
Internet	4.8	6.1	7.5	8.7	9.5

Source: ZenithOptimedia

As Facebook was enjoying an enormous growth in popularity this past summer in both popularity and new members, there was some grumbling that it’s platform was to restrictive for those inside that wanted to give their information exposure and for those on the outside who wanted to take a peek inside.

We also had what many consider to be America’s most prestigious newspaper, The New York Times, have something called “Time Select”, which placed key content behind unsearchable walls. Only those willing to pay could access it. That is, only those who valued the NYTimes as a news resource and would head over to the site. But what the Times didn’t realize in its arrogance was that there’s a heckuva lotta other new sources on the internet with a click of a mouse. Through a search engine that is.

So both companies made a good business decision. Facebook has lowered the wall and will allow search engines to take a peek inside. People can still opt out an have their profiles shielded from the outside world, but that’s going to be the exception as opposed to the rule. And the Times has now done away with their experiment, giving us all now the privilidge of accessing and reading the Grey Lady.

What this shows us is the continual importance of establishing a strong SEO presence. It shows that the likely most important reason to go online is still to get information that we want. It shows that Google and Yahoo and others are the gateways.

Now, not every profile on Facebook needs exposure. But as a whole, this relatively new but very influential site found it essential. As did the self-described most important newspaper in the country.

SEO gives you access to what you want: customers, visitors, users, and, $$$.

Okay, I have written several times about search engines(Microsoft Relaunches Live Search , Consumer Watch does Search Engines, Manage the Brand: Google!), often trying to emphasize the value of “trust” in the search engine results battle. Do you trust google to provide you with the best results? Do you ever use more than one search engine for the same search query? In a recent article on Mashable.com titled, Yahoo’s Quality vs. Google’s Quantity. Who Wins? some interest results emerge…

Okay, I have written several times about search engines(Microsoft Relaunches Live Search , Consumer Watch does Search Engines, Manage the Brand: Google!), often trying to emphasize the value of “trust” in the search engine results battle. Do you trust google to provide you with the best results? Do you ever use more than one search engine for the same search query? In a recent article on Mashable.com titled, Yahoo’s Quality vs. Google’s Quantity. Who Wins? some interest results emerge from a study compiled by Compete.com

In, fact these results go to the heart of my argument – the trust element.

What Compete looked at were the referrals from search queries done across Yahoo, Google and MSN/Live. An entire third of search queries performed on Google led to a dead end, meaning people weren’t clicking on a single search result.

Yes, you read correctly, an “entire third” of google’s searches go no-where. That is sad, or it could mean that google just has sooo much information that it is loosing control of the organization of all of this data. Also, perhaps people turn to google for more obscure searches – research based etc. In addition this study was only based on three months (June, July & August of 07) Also, one could look at the demographics of the Yahoo user as looking for different things. Do people turn to google for information and yahoo for shopping? I don’t know if compete.com breaks any of this out in its full study.

What is important to note, is that google has the quantity because we trust it, we are willing to use it because we believe it will do the best job. These results make one question the validity of that trust. If google’s reputation is going to get consistently questioned and smeared it is in trouble. The internet changes fast, people can easily migrate to a new product with no cost to them.

I am in no way saying that google is in trouble. I just think it is something to be aware of, google is only dominant because we choose to use it. Not because businesses choose to advertise on it. Those businesses would just as happily move to another engine – the cost structure of online advertising is so completely different from earlier mediums effectively enabling change to be far more radical and swift in the online realm.

The battle for trust will continue!!

The title of the article on Wired.com says it all: Revamped Microsoft Live Search Disappoints. And this it certainly does. Live Search is a rather sad attempt at replicating (and copying, only in looks and not in results) the search power of Google.

I did a basic test, first I plugged my own name into Google. And, well, I come up as the first few links on the first page. In fact, 13 out of the first 20 links on Google’s search are completely relevant to my search.

Let’s compare this to the same search on Live Search! Same search, very different results. Live Search brings back 3 out of 20 relevant results and only one of those is on the first page.

You would think that if Microsoft was gonna go out there and try and boast about its new “revamped” site that it would give Google some run for its money. Perhaps I am biased, after all I have been using Google for years and years. Heck, I can’t remember life before Google.

But, as I said in an earlier post on this blog, it is all about how much you “trust” the search brand. I will stay with Google as long as I get good search results, in fact not just good, but better then anyone else. I have explored some of the other search engines, always to return to Google. When Microsoft does something like this it only reinforces the mysteec and trust around the Google search brand.

Well, then again it never surprises me when Microsoft disappoints. It certainly ain’t no Apple or Google when it comes to living up to the hype it tries to create.

Better luck next time!!

Back in 2003 Consumer WebWatch did an ethnographic study and published their results in a report titled “False Oracles: Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work”. There are several findings that I think are worth mentioning . . .

The basic structure of the study was as follows: There were 17 participants from around the country, of varying income levels, ages and sex. Most of them had 5 years and more of experience on the net (remember this was 2003). They were asked questions before and after using 15 pre-selected search engines (about.com, alltheweb.com, aol.com, ask.com, yahoo.com, google.com, iwon.com, kanoodle.com, looksmart.com, msn.com, overture.com, infospace.com). None of the participants new anything about paid search results).

There are several findings that I think are worth mentioning.

First – “most participants had little understanding of how search engines retrieve Web pages or how they rank or prioritize links on a results page”. I think that this translates into most small-business owners (several participants owned their own businesses), and any number of regular internet users have no idea how the search ranking works. Wide open market!!!

Second – “majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results” and “not one participant went beyond the fifth delivered page”. – This is nothing new, we all pretty much know this already just based on our own behavior. In fact “88 percent of the result links selected were located on the first page”. Showing how important it truly is to get onto the first page. This was further emphasized by respondents “perception” that the first page always contains the most relevant/important or most visited sites. This is emphasized by the participants lack of knowledge of paid results being part of the “organic” search results.

Third – “two-in-five links (or 41%) selected by our participants…were paid search results”. The study attributes this to the fact that the participants “trusted search engines to present only the best or most accurate, unbiased results on the first page”. And once the participants found out that this was not true – that some of the links were sponsored or paid links they often grew a bit more distrustful of the search engine results. However they did not necessarily change the search engine that they used. What they did do is pay more attention to the results displayed on the page.

Fourth – “Search engine sites that were perceived to be less transparent about these related disclosures lost credibility amongst the group” – This is something that I think is critical. I explored all of the fifteen search engine sites that they studied. A couple of them had been bought out or closed down. Several of the others used the technology of either Yahoo, Google or Ask.com to drive their search results. Also, several of the sites had a horrible way of displaying the results. Several of the sites don’t clearly break the “sponsored links” out from the “organic results”.

However, brand trust is critical to the survival of a search engine. How many consumers really do a side by side comparison of results on Google vs Yahoo vs MSN etc? Not many! In other words people turn to the search engine they trust. After all we ask search engines lots of intimate and personal questions that we would not ask anyone else. Trust is central. I mentioned this in an earlier post Manage the Brand: Google! on this blog. The loss of trust and perceived accuracy of search results is, in my opinion, a danger facing all search engine sites. This is illuminated in this report by the reactions of several of the participants whose reactions bordered on dismay.

In the end what I got from this study is that the most powerful tool is still “organic SEO”. Get your site up the “organic search results” because this will be a longer lasting result. Not only will you come up for more relevant searches (several of the participants complained about how the sponsored links were often irrelevant or completely out in right field), but you will not have to worry about paying every time someone comes to visit you.

This report was written 4 years ago and in the world of online advertising this is a LONG time. It leaves me with several questions.
1) Have search engine users become more savvy and click on “sponsored” links less frequently, or at least intentionally?
2) The majority of search engine users utilize Google, Yahoo & MSN which display their sponsored vs organic searches clearly and therefore are less confusing then several other search engines. Are users of these engines more aware of the “sponsored” links and how to determine one from the other?
3) What percentage of users of the popular search engines click on paid links? According to the report 41% of links clicked were sponsored but these results included searches on sites like kannoodle.com which is a “paid links only” search engine, as are several others.

Either way it is clear that being on the first page – paid or unpaid – is where you want to be.

This morning, I opened my Journal to B4 and there lay three articles after my own heart: Raising Your Profile: Beyond the Basics (organic SEO); Keyword Play: How an Acronym Helped Unlock Marketing Puzzle (organic SEO); and Paying for Online Reviews Can Fan Fame (paid blog posts). Eat well, all my readers. Since WSJ is stingy, I will excerpt.

Keyword Play: How an Acronym Helped Unlock Marketing Puzzle

Now, instead of relying on an outside expert who might be unfamiliar with the data-management industry, Mr. Pittman can manage his company’s needs. His breakthrough in decoding the SEO puzzle came when a colleague unknowingly clued him in to a pivotal keyword.

For companies without a big budget for online marketing, knowing what customers are searching for is paramount, says Rebecca Lieb, editor in chief of interactive-marketing portal ClickZ Network, a New York unit of U.K.-based Incisive Media PLC. “It’s about getting very descriptive and looking for the terms your customers use,” she says.

In the case of Initiate, a company with $45 million in revenue last year, Mr. Pittman had to figure out how to make the Web site stand out to potential customers like banks, hospitals and insurance companies that want to manage their databases better. But after several months, the site’s traffic showed little improvement. During a staff meeting, it dawned on Mr. Pittman that the keywords were garnering so few hits because he still didn’t know exactly what Initiate’s customers were searching for.

At that meeting, a company manager repeatedly used the acronym “RHIO,” short for regional health information organization, pronounced “ree-oh.”

“Most of us in the room were like, ‘Ree-who?’ ” Mr. Pittman recalls.

After the meeting, he asked salespeople at the 200-employee company if they were hearing that term in the field and at trade shows. They said they were.

He then sent a note to key customers asking what the most important industry terms were. “RHIO” came out close to the top.

Mr. Pittman’s marketing team altered the company Web site within weeks, using the phrase “regional health information organization” several times, including at the very top of a new Web page and in press releases.

After a month passed, 167 visitors had come to Initiate’s Web site after plugging “RHIO” into a search engine — up from five the previous month.

Mr. Pittman scrambled over the next few months to expand the use of RHIO throughout the site, in press releases and in research reports the company posts on its site for prospective clients.

“We fed the monster,” he says.

After nine months, the number of monthly RHIO-related visits rose to more than a thousand.

Mr. Pittman began to read trade publications and attend conferences about Web searching. Initiate’s Web-design agency revamped the site to allow Mr. Pittman to make updates himself.

[...]

Now he frequently presses salespeople for the latest industry buzzwords. RHIO, for its part, has taken a backseat in the industry and leads to fewer than 50 site visits a month.

Choosing keywords based only on software reports “doesn’t replace talking to people and getting the words directly out of their mouths,” Mr. Pittman says. Still, each month he also re-evaluates keywords using Web-traffic reports the company produces itself.

Optimizing a site “doesn’t require a huge budget. It doesn’t require whiz-bang technology,” he says. “We’re much more willing to try new things.”

Raising Your Profile: Beyond the Basics

Search-engine optimization, or SEO, makes a site more friendly, or “optimal,” for Internet search engines such as Google Inc.’s, Yahoo Inc.’s and others. SEO can improve a site’s listing in “natural” search results — the unpaid rankings on search engines that many people use to look for information online.

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Focus each page on one theme. The keyword or keyword phrase you choose for a page should directly reflect the page’s content. Headlines, subheads and formatting, such as bold and italics, also should be related directly to this central subject. These indicators will signal to search-engine spiders that the keyword or keyword phrase is more prominent or prevalent than other words on the page, increasing the likelihood of a higher search ranking.

At Bankrate, Mr. De La Garza showed editorial employees that, for some articles, deciding on about 10 main keywords before writing could help increase their number of page views. Writers were already vying for bragging rights to the most popular articles. He told them: “You know what, guys? If we apply a few SEO tactics here, I can help you win the weekly battle,” he says.

They began to coordinate metatags — Web coding describing a page’s content to search engines — headlines, and keywords’ frequency, formatting and placement. Content that’s higher on a page, where spiders will read it soon after beginning to scan the page, tends to help get that information featured in search rankings.

“I would get one or two writers to take part, and it would slowly, over time, creep into the process with everyone, because they all wanted their stories to do well,” he says.

Resist the temptation to overload pages with keywords. Among other factors, search engines may look at keyword density — the percentage of words on a page that match the keywords — when determining whether a Web page is relevant to a search term or just “keyword stuffing.”

“You can out-optimize yourself,” he says. Bankrate’s target keyword density range is 2% to 9%, he says.

When writers don’t think about keywords, they can easily leave out the search terms that could help readers find their story online, he says, “but when you get people mindful of it, it’s not that hard to get it into the right range.”

 Paying for Online Reviews Can Fan Fame

More than half of the traffic on Apogee’s Web site now comes from blogs, compared with about 10% before the paid-posts campaign began. The number of site visitors who complete online-inquiry forms is now in the low hundreds each month, the company says, up four- to fivefold.

The campaign costs in the “low thousands” per month, Mr. Combs says, a small chunk of the $20,000 monthly marketing budget. Apogee posted about $7.5 million in revenue last year.

Paying for reviews is like word-of-mouth marketing, says Mr. Leake. “I’m inviting people to a discussion.”

Chris and I gave my best friend, Frank Merfort, a composer and sound design expert in Berlin, Germany a crash course on SEO last week, and look what Frank pulled off – pole position on Google! – and that with a Flash site that presents his music, compositions, and sound design for radio shows, albums, videos, and multimedia.

Text-light Flash sites are generally at a disadvantage with the text-oriented search engines, but Frank did all the right things, and Google sat up and took notice. Good work Frank, and congratulations! Now keep it up with those techniques we taught you…

Excellent advice on how to write white hat SEO titles that will make Google your new best boyfriend. By Heather Lloyd-Martin via Top Rank Blog:

• There should be unique titles for every page on your site. Yes, every page.

• Titles should read like a headline with keyword phrases in them to draw readers in. The search engines like the keyword phrases and human visitors are compelled to click on the search results when there is a compelling title.

• Make sure the title is no more than 75 characters long, because both search engines and human readers will stop reading after a while.

If you want to know how to design a website, think Web Accessibility for People. Google “looks” at sites much the same way people do. Here are some useful tips that will also really make Google love you, too:

Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites

1. Images & animations: Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual.
2. Image maps. Use the client-side map and text for hotspots.
3. Multimedia. Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video.
4. Hypertext links. Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid “click here.”
5. Page organization. Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style where possible.
6. Graphs & charts. Summarize or use the longdesc attribute.
7. Scripts, applets, & plug-ins. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.
8. Frames. Use the noframes element and meaningful titles.
9. Tables. Make line-by-line reading sensible. Summarize.
10. Check your work. Validate. Use tools, checklist, and guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG

So, there is something about SEO or SEM and maybe Affiliate Marketing (but less so) that gets at my goat. I guess the thing is that if you are writing a blog about a topic, or an issue or what not you should get to be known and found because you write good content. This is the thing with SEO/SEM, it doesn’t reward necessarily quality, it rewards technical know-how.

I guess one could say this helps you get your message out there when people don’t know about your ramblings. Sure, I can see that. It is like you open up a new business and you go around the neighborhood and flyer the local cars, or you use the local paper. Makes sense. The thing is you can advertising your restaurant, but if it sucks no one will come back and you won’t make it into Zagat’s rating – no matter what you say, or what flashy signs you put up outside of your location.

But, from what I can tell, SEO/SEM doesn’t care. You can have a horrid blog, or site talking absolute crud and if you have the money and knowledge you can climb up the pages to the top rankings.

Correct me if I am wrong. Please. Perhaps I have this whole thing miss-read.

Suffice to say, it is weird that SEO/SEM is even something that has value. I mean why should I trust the sites that show up on the first few pages of google? For all I know they just happen to be a bunch of computer geeks who know nothing on the subjects they choose to write about, but plenty about the in’s-and-outs of SEM/SEO.

I am gonna have to think about this more and I hope to get some comments.

Microsoft‘s adCenter platform has another high profile client: Digg.com. Digg decided to relieve Google of their duties and go with Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Though it won’t be an enormous reduction for Google’s bottom line, it is a moral victory for Microsoft to be gaining ground amongst the nascent web2.0 companies. Microsoft’s adCenter also arranged a deal with Facebook about a year ago.

A digg executive described Microsoft as “young and willing to take risks.” So Digg is looking for the bad-boy type huh? I guess Microsoft does look pretty decent with its shirt off with a five o’clock shadow on that motorcycle. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, if and when Digg starts to get wrinkly.