Personally, I was hoping for some more booty from the environmentally astute search engine as my green Google pen had degraded somewhat over the summer having sat on the back shelf of our car leaving the rubber knuckle thingy as tacky as a partially-sucked gummy bear.

No such luck.

Justin was also hoping for Eric to touch on Google and SEO in Pittsburgh during his address, but he lucked out there as well.

As Google’s own policy blog explains, the key points to Eric’s speech are as follows:

• History has shown us that cutting-edge technology and the free, open flow of information are key drivers of economic growth. Call it “Gutenberg’s Law”: there’s a clear correlation between the amount of information available to the average citizen and the economic growth and progress of that citizen’s country. From the printing press to the telegraph to the Internet, each has enabled more exchange of ideas and sharing of information, resulting in a corresponding boost to economic progress.
• Today, we are only at the very cusp of the technological revolution that the rise of the Internet will bring. Technology is changing almost everything about how we live, work, and play. Networks are getting ever-faster, data is being generated at an exponential rate, and devices are becoming faster and more powerful, able to store and do more even as they shrink. That means changes in the way we connect and communicate; changes in how we generate, find, and use information; and changes in how we interact with business and government.
• Technology has driven down barriers to entry in terms of knowledge, scale, cost, and geography, leading to increased competition on a global scale. Today’s entrepreneurs can leverage the Internet and technology in a way that only the largest multinational could afford 10 or 15 years ago. Size is no barrier to competition. This trend isn’t unique to the West — it’s visible all around the world, especially when it comes to clever business applications for mobile.

And here’s the video of the speech:

Just after my mother returned to Blighty I had another visit from an old buddy. He owns his own business – a two-man band installing UPVC windows and doors. His customer base is mostly within a 50-mile radius and while he has a domain name written on the side of their van, they don’t have a Website to back it up.

Obviously, one night we got chatting about marketing on the Internet and he saw it as more of a global medium in the way the key points in Mr. Schmidt’s speech are presented above. He hadn’t really thought of a Web presence being able to work locally.

So, I set about showing him how Google displays local companies when you search for a specific keyword with a geographic modifier as their top organic results and explained how PPC ads can be targeted to specific regions.

After about twenty minutes he uttered that I’d opened his eyes about small businesses being able to target potential customers locally in their home towns.

While that doesn’t mean he’s going to go out and throw a few thousand on getting a site built and marketed online, it does mean a light bulb has gone off – or on.

He’s infinitely more receptive to local search opening new doors, which is more than can be said for mine as he crashed through our outer glass panel door early Sunday morning leaving both glass panel and himself prostate on the floor.

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Of course, you could always ring a locksmith, or you could kick back and utilize your downtime by searching for “naked supermodels” on the internet.

Either this is what Justin was up to yesterday afternoon or he’d noticed the term as a referral in our search logs.

You decide.

Anyway, if you do a SERPs check yourself you won’t see the terms appearing anywhere in Google or Yahoo!, but Bing is currently ranking “naked super models” at 6 and “naked supermodels” at 16 (or 6 depending on the way the wind’s blowing) for a tag URL:

http://www.directom.com/internet-marketing-blog/tag/naked-supermodels

Make it Work…

This URL isn’t a post or a page but an archive of one of the many user-generated tags we’ve thrown up on the blog for the sake of additional context.

Wikipedia explains blog tags thusly:

Many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify a post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.

In other words, it’s a more flexible form of categorization for you blog content that is navigable.

So, Bing is ranking an archived tag page for a reasonably competitive – yet totally unrelated – term pertaining to supermodels in their birthday suits. By clicking on that link you’re only going to find a single post about the WVU eMBA scandal that never mentions naked supermodels or even contains a picture of a clothed one.

So, what if we look at the SERPs results for all the tags Justin originally associated with his post about the WVU eMba scandal:

Download the spreadsheet here.

What we see is Bing has the most tags appearing in searches when you type those exact terms into their search engine, Yahoo! has the second most, and Google the least. (And there’s been no linking to the tag pages other than internally from the bottom of the post.)

We also see other URLs to the one the tags were originally associated with; but that’s the same with all three of the main search engines.

But which set of SERPs from which engine would you prefer? While Bing may offer you more overall terms, Google and Yahoo! are the search engines trying to rank the tags and explicitly match them with the content – it’s more targeted. Bing is ranking the tag URLs irrespective of whether there is matching content.

If you look at the results from a certain SEO angle then it appears you’re getting more bites of the search cherry with Bing. But, as a user I’m getting closer to the information if I’m being sent straight to a relevant page rather than an archived tag page that I may have to spend some time scrolling through in order to get to the same relevant page.

But, what would you think had you come across this site and the above post if you were trawling around looking for naked supermodels?

EXACTLY!

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• The term of the agreement is 10 years;
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
o Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
o Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

It could take up to two years for the deal to be finalized. That could be an eternity in search years.

As a user, it doesn’t bother me one iota. Yes, Bing is quite a nice search engine, but it’s going to take a bit more than that to pull me away from Google. Besides, it’s about results.

As an SEO it’ll make life simpler as there’ll only be two search engines to twiddle for and gather information from. It’s about results and conversions.

But, the only thing most SEO people agree on is the general usefulness of Yahoo! back linking data. We all use it and wouldn’t be overly happy if it disappeared.

Still, there’s an opportunity for the new search presence to make inroads if it offers better PPC click through rates than Google. Currently Bing offers 1.5% as opposed to Google’s 0.97%. With Yahoo! somewhere in the middle on 1.24% you’re looking at a far better advertising proposition with a 30% joint market share. If you then take the idea that good organic results help PPC ads and vice versa, you’re developing quite a compelling online marketing case.

A jazzed up tools suite for Webmasters would be nice. Y’know, get us onside.

But, the longer it takes to get fully up and running, the more time Google has to refine and redefine themselves.

Could be fun. Follow more of the story here.

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I’ll never forget my mate (who shall be shortly visiting) telling me about his Dad taping world championship darts off the television. That wouldn’t be a tale in and of itself were it not for the fact that this was pre-video recorder days and he’d done it via audio cassette attaching a mic to the t.v.’s speaker.

On returning from the pub he’d locked himself in the living room with just the dull thud of the darts and scoring announcements crackling from a tape masquerading as action. Unfortunately, it was but a C-30 tape, so he missed the result.

“Duf, duf, duf. One hundred and how much?”

It amazes me the hoops we’ll jump through in order to consume media that isn’t perceived to be ‘ours’. I’m even more amazed at the control we hand over to third parties that create ‘our’ own business media – our Websites.

I’ve been through the ramifications of not controlling your own domain name previously. While leaving your domain in the hands of a hosting company or your Web designer is possibly the costliest mistake you could make considering the price of the domain itself, there are other related issues that can be equally as problematic.

It’s not uncommon for companies to outsource the creation of their Web site to a designer or developer of some sort. It seems like the sensible option to let them deal with the domain registration, hosting and design of the site. And it is so long as you make sure you do the three following things:

1. Retain the login information and sole control over domain renewal. (More domain registration tips.)
2. Have the login information for your host (to enable you folder access) and be the billing contact.
3. Keep a copy of your site on every computer you own and physically on a cd or dvd.

You’ve no idea the number of times I’ve spoken to businesses held to ransom by their designers either on purpose or through neglect. It can also be a time consuming business chasing after the information.

I mean, would you give the only set of keys to the builder performing renovations on your yet-to-be-opened retail emporium? And would you take any notice of them if they told you they had to go through them and only them should you wish to do any painting or updating further down the line?

Maybe if it was owned by a housing association?

Numbers 1 & 2 are the most vital as you can download your site via ftp so long as you have hosting or server access. Both 1 & 2 are simple emails containing the information – that’s all.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of this article / interview on Forbes discussing how $65 billion in advertising dollars could be shifted from traditional channels to company Web sites and Internet marketing. Here’s one of the questions:

What aspects of their own sites are these marketers developing?

Page content, Web analytics, search engine optimization and site design. Most of them have invested in social networking platforms to create direct dialogues with their consumers.

So, while you may not be pumping $65 billion into your firm’s site, you might be getting to ready to update, start an SEO campaign, add social media functionality or incorporate a better analytics solution. You may not be planning on any of those things, but for the sake of the children I’d still get somebody on the case to ensure the above information is in your control at your disposal.

Because it’s one of the first things a company you’re paying good money to perform such Web tasks will be asking for.

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All SEO is PR is one thing, but all PR is SEO?

I suppose that’s another thing entirely that various PR practitioners can thrash out at their leisure.

But there’s no doubt that when it comes to sandwiching the two together, the Optimized Press Release is quite an impressive way for anybody to get their message in front of the right people and more than you would were it not optimized in the first place.

Don’t take my word for it – a Marketing Sherpa survey of 1,900 marketing professionals had them rating the SEO Press Release as their most effective online marketing tactic. (Sadly, I don’t have a link so it appears that you’ll have to take my word for it after all!)

Anyway, About.com has written ten very good reasons as to the benefits of optimizing a press release (and I’m sure they’re pretty much in tune with what most marketers surveyed thought):

“• More and more people are using online news sources to find information on products, services, companies and ideas. Most news stories and press releases are read by the public looking for data.
• A correctly optimized online news release can get you to the top of page one for your chosen keywords in the news engines within 24 hours.
• If there is a relevant and timely news result on a keyword, both Yahoo and Google are displaying this news item above the number one organic position in web search.
• You reach your target audience directly – no reporters or editors to filter your message.
• You know that when someone reads your news release they are interested in that subject – they asked for it by keyword.
• Online releases can be tracked – for the first time you can get statistics of how many times your press release was accessed or downloaded. With the proper web analytics in place you can track click throughs to your website too.
• The article will get picked up and published on other relevant sites increasing the number of people who see your content and visit your site.
• If your article has been correctly optimized, it will have keyword links in it. Every time your article appears on another website it builds more relevant inbound links to your site, which positively affects your search rankings.
• Optimized online press releases migrate from the news search to the web search within a week or so and they can show up in the web search on your keywords.
• If you add the releases to your website and put them into an RSS feed you increase your visibility. Soon your articles will be showing up in news aggregators, Yahoo News and Google Blogsearch.”

So, if you’re a PR agency, a company or an online marketer, what are your experiences or thoughts?

We’d love to hear them!

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The oddest bit of advice I ever received in both its obviousness and insipidness came as a teenager from my then 2nd team cricket skipper. The guy was known as a bit of a hard taskmaster as opposed to a man manager, so being taken to one side for sage counsel was unheard of. He came from the finishing school of hard knocks where boys became men.

Anyway, I forget what day or night it was, and I don’t really recall any conversation prior to it, but it kind of occurred as we were both vying for position by the bar – and no, nobody was particularly tipsy.

Out of nowhere, I was transfixed in his steely gaze and was told in no uncertain terms that he was going to give me the most valuable piece of advice – EVAH.

As I anticipated his imparting of the knowledge of his trademark up-n-over pull / scoop shot, he quietly said as he took a sip of his pint: “You’ll get plenty of advice throughout your life, lad – but only you can sort the good stuff out from the bad.”

And with that he turned his back on me and continued to sup his pint and talk to his mates.

While it hardly shook me to my existential metaphysical core, I will always remain partially bewildered by what the devil he was going on about.

Not until I became embroiled in the world of SEO and deciphering and decoding advice from various SEO sources on the Web and trying to compare it to my own empirical evidence did I suddenly get an inkling of what he meant.

Second guessing search engine algorithms and sorting out good SEO advice from the bad might not have been exactly what he was referring to, but I’m taking his advice to mean what I need it to mean in this particular instance.

Now you may or may not be aware that in the not too distant future some new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) will become available to companies and organizations alike (individuals or sole proprietors need not attempt to cyber squat).

Instead of the existing format where you simply have .com, .co.uk, .net, .org or some variation thereof, the new domains will dispense of those entirely and allow for the usage of a single brand and / or keyword. Therefore, you could have .sport or .london, or something containing .nike (owned by Nike, of course).

Now the clincher is that these bad boys are going to sledgehammer your pocket to the tune of around $186K – and that’s if it doesn’t go to a bidding war.

Nothing is finalized as yet, so if you’re interested in the details thus far, go and have a look round ICANN.

But, what I’m interested in are the SEO benefits of such a domain and whether you’d advise somebody to purchase one. Just a few things to consider:

1. Would you be better off spending close to $200K on some other aspect of SEO?

2. Considering the rarity of these domains, what kind of CTR (click thru rate) would you anticipate?

3. Will these new domains operate the same as any other new domain such as a .com or will search engines deem them more trustworthy from the get-go? Would you deem them more trustworthy if you saw them in the listings (see #2)?

4. Do you consider .com (or other domain extension) to be an integral part of an online presence, or is it too much of a mouthful in general?

Your thoughts are much appreciated; after all, I’m just trying to sort out the good advice from the bad.

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Oh I know how you love your stats late of a Wednesday.

Well, another recent study shows how Europeans are abandoning brand searches and plumping for more sophisticated longer search terms instead. Not that the study / report indicates what kind of search terms we’re looking at, although it claims the predominant nationalities for long-winded searching are the Italians, Germans and the British.

Now I’ve always been interested in the search process and admit to laying a little egg of excitement every time I type something into my browser’s search bar.

I’m quite happy to throw as many words into a search as I can muster. I’m also no stranger to asking questions directly or typing complete phrases.

But, there are also quite a few other cute little tricks you can type into Google to help your search experience.

Flights: Did you know that by simply typing in two airport codes you can do a flight search? Try atl jfk.

Weather: Just by typing weather followed by a city or zip code you get, well, the weather. Try weather wheeling wv

Movies: By putting in movie star trek you can easily find local show times as well as a host of reviews.

And those are just three of a multitude of operators, calculators and search shortcuts you can perform to make life a little bit easier for yourself. Here’s the full lowdown that you can play about with.

Now I’m presuming you’re all fairly clever little soldiers and if you don’t know all of them, you can pick up on the ones you find useful fairly easily.

But, I do think the ability to search is something that should be cultivated in the young. Not just the ability to search quickly and efficiently, but also to revel in the sheer enjoyment of having all this stuff at your fingertips and utilize it properly.

“Check me Boolean operators out.”

Of course they’re doing this in schools, but there’s no harm in starting them off early or helping them along the way, is there?

So why not use the following teachers’ resource:

Tools for Teaching Stupendous Search Habits

It contains a whole host of interesting ways of teaching kids how to search and perform research using search engines.

Go on, have a dabble – I dare you! If nothing else you’ll learn AlltheWeb is still going!

And you might even learn how to cut your search terms down by a word or two.

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It’s also fairly rare to find a client who has a budget, but gives you free reign to do as you see fit to generate the end result. Granted, this increases the more you prove yourself over an extended period, but it’s still quite infrequent.

The other evening I shared a pint with an unhappy CEO currently with an SEM company contracted to perform SEO duties for his ecommerce site. This CEO had more than your average sprinkling of SEO nous, but didn’t consider himself an expert by any means. There’s always the potential for the rutting of the alpha male SEO stag when you have clients with SEO knowledge (a little of it being a dangerous thing and all that).

Depending on said knowledge it can be a little like having a homeowner standing over your shoulder as you’re performing some kind of home improvement.

I’ll never forget when I used to paint furniture in a former life.

One Friday afternoon, my buddy who I shared a unit with, asked if I could help him fit some custom alcove shelves that he‘d built for one of his customers. I was promised we’d be finished no later than 3pm and that we’d be drinking pink gin and homemade ginger on the client’s patio before teatime.

Shame the job went on way into Sunday afternoon as my buddy hadn’t taken into account the irregular brickwork in the alcove, meaning we had to hack two inches of plaster off the wall prior to fitting.

What made it slightly worse, besides the horrendous mess we created, was that the guy was a former cop and stood in copper mode at the back of his living room with his hands clasped behind his back rocking to and fro from the ball of his foot to the heel of his toe offering increasingly irate DIY tips.

While we may have rendered his living room dustier than Death Valley during a drought, we did manage to sort it, clean everything up, and leave him with some fabulous looking alcove units. If only we’d sent him away for a weekend with the wife. You see, I’ve never seen any kind of makeover job, project or renovation look remotely alright part way through a job.

Personally, I love either a fully informed client with current SEO knowledge or one that trusts you to weave your magic and show you the results once you’re done. A little knowledge and a protruding nose can be a bit of a hindrance. But, it takes all sorts, which simply means one has to bite one’s lip and learn the art of email diplomacy.

But back to my unhappy CEO – as he unfurled his SEO company story, I expected him to have been more of the hindrance type. But, like I mentioned before, he was a genuinely sound chap who simply wanted the SEO company to take his online presence to another level. As the tale unfurled further I became more astonished by what the company had or had not done in the name of improving his online lot.

For example, I’ve never heard of a client trying to talk an SEO firm from going for ego keywords – normally, it’s the SEO firm trying to talk the client down from the ego keywords precipice and push for their longer tail cousins as they can rank and convert easier than generic terms.

He also spoke in terms of sales and conversions, while the SEM company rattled off visitors and traffic. It was like some weird role reversal where the SEO lot were trying to fluff online egos and the client was talking less traffic but better engagement in the buying cycle.

They sounded like a bunch of SEO shysters – the types who are fully paid-up members of the union of the snake oil.

I could only nod in agreement and consider him to be as right as any customer ever had been.

If only there was an online equivalent of the ‘copper’s stare’.

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The big news a few months back was that Adobe had made several changes to its Flash product and was working with the search engines to make it easier for developers to not absolutely tank a site’s search results by using it on the site.  It was kind of funny watching the dueling pr statements from Adobe and Google about who bowed to whom in this new “partnership.”  While it’s very much a work in progress – like video SEO – it’s getting better.

Optimizing PDF Documents for the Search Engines

One Adobe product that doesn’t get nearly as much attention in the SEO world is the PDF even though it has been as ubiquitous for 15 years as Susan Boyle is at the moment.  Generally we’d prefer to work with standard html (or php or asp or even that bane of our existence cfm) than pdf documents.

But there are ways to optimize pdf’s for the search engines and we’ve put together a starter list for you in – what else? – a pdf document:

How to Optimize a PDF for SEO Purposes

Happy optimizing!

* While I don’t know that any SEO’s actually burst into flames after working with flash-heavy sites or that there were any lawsuits from such accidents brought against Adobe, I don’t know that they didn’t happen either.

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Twitter is one such carcass – a fleshy one, but it’s still being picked over nonetheless.

Some awful twaddle is being talked about Twitter, but when I saw this headline in The Guardian this morning I didn’t know whether to hurl or hurl my monitor.

Moldova forces regain control of parliament after ‘Twitter revolution’

Besides the headline, the only mention of Twitter came in the form of this lone sentence.

One analyst called the uprising a “Twitter revolution”.

THAT. IS. IT. (I’d link to it, but they don’t even deserve a nofollow – just search for the title if you must.)

No argument or name supporting the claim – not even a link to the tweet that was obviously the guy’s source as ‘analyst’ (and I’m maybe being kind in that assumption). Still, with daily cries of the death of newspapers, you can’t blame them for squeezing in a little Twitter morsel to try and up those page views.

There may be other reasons that compound your hatred of Twitter besides the incessant hype. All this technical talk can remind you of your own shortcomings and leave you burdened with the thought of learning a new skill set in the vain attempt of jumping on another bandwagon. Not only that, but you’re probably thinking all this social media stuff is for the young ‘uns, which only exacerbates your feelings of technical impotence.

Not so fast meine Damen und Herren.

A Comscore study out yesterday highlights us old fogeys as its key user base. Take a look at this graph:

[…] 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

Even the 65+ age group is adopting Twitter at a faster rate than so-called ‘early adopters’. Comscore goes on to explain why this might be the case:

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.

So there you go. Old folks are the new early adopters.

If you’re feeling slightly emboldened by finding yourself at the cutting edge of the Web, I could spew out one of those posts listing the 48 best tools/tips/practices for using Twitter.

But I won’t. It’s hardly a decent enough reason.

However, I will point you in the direction of Twitscoop, which shows all the trending subjects being talked about on Twitter at any given moment in real time. You can watch the terms ebb and flow as more or less people mention them. Simply putting your cursor over any of the terms will bring up the latest few tweets to put them in context. And at least one should have a link to take you to a full story somewhere.

You can watch the Web’s very own ticker tape morph before your very eyes on any topic whatsoever.

Then, once you’ve done that, do a search for your business, the products you sell, or terms related to your industry and see if anybody’s been talking about those.

That should give you something to chew on.

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