We Do Search Engine Optimization.

It never ceases to amaze me how many power searchers and search engine optimization consultants still do not understand basic statistics and data mining. Using Google for SEO research can barely be considered data mining, since the information is so easy to acquire.

When an SEO or anyone else tells you that the number of competitors for a particular keyword search are in the upper right hand corner of a Google search, politely inform them of the misinformation.

Below are 2 examples of competition using results and the differences of finding the exact number of competitors versus the number of word references on a page.

screenshot for the keyword phrase: los+angeles+florist
http://www.google.com/search?q=los+angeles+florist

this only shows the number of times the words appear on a site and is not accurate. There are not 414,000 florists in Los Angeles California.

When evaluating the potential of a keyword or keyword phrase, do an allintitle search before beginning any search engine optimization campaign.

screenshot for the keyword phrase searching only the title string: los+angeles+florist

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:los+angeles+florist

This will show you the true number of competing websites that are trying to rank for the keyword by only the phrase as it appears in the title tag.

This targeted search shows there are only about 12,000 florists and competing floral websites in Los Angeles California. This makes a lot more sense and is a logical number. I estimate there are only several thousand physical flower stores in the area, and the rest are floral websites, distributors, online order takers, flower directories and national florist chains with no local presence.

Here is an interesting piece of trivia: there are less than 100,000 fast food restaurants in the entire United States. It seems like there are millions of McDonalds, Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Subways, Jack in the Boxes etc, but this is just an illusion. The same is true for broad keyword searches, there are less true competitors than you realize.

Rand wrote more about search parameters, how this relates to keyword research and how to make meaning out of generic search data

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Many people have been predicting the death of newspapers since the early 1990′s, and the major print media publications are really feeling the web drain their core business.

Local Web sites continue to ride a wave that defies even the most optimistic forecasts. Local online revenues are growing at a phenomenal rate of 50% this year — even more astonishing considering that retail sales have suffered such a sharp drop.

In the online marketing research study “What Local Media Sites Earn”, local newspaper websites captured an average of 11.7 percent of local advertising dollars. The highest earner in the top 200 papers generated over 78 percent of local spend in its market.

This is not surprising, the largest 10% of a market generally gets over 75% of the revenue.

Expect revenue for print directories to decline more than any other local medium — 39% — over the next four years, from $12.7 billion this year to $7.7 billion by 2012.

Again, no surprise. The large newspapers, led by Tribune have developed reputable standalone advertising mediums including cars.com, careerbuilder.com and other online classified advertising properties.

This will be good for bloggers and startup publishers. It is much easier to compete against a Cars.com website than a New York Times print newspaper. A small & dedicated talented team of programmers could replicate CareerBuilder.com and create a profitable online site within 1 year.

Read more about the decline of newspapers and the growth of online advertising at pilgrim. and Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that newspapers would go extinct by 2003. Mr. Crichton was a bit optimistic in the date, but correct about the nature of mass media shifting.

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If you ask any recent college graduate how they get the majority of their information, they will probably tell you from online blogs. Press releases and newspapers are dying mediums and corporations that self publish quality news and information on weblogs will be at the top of mind and the center of awareness. It may even make you cool.

Professional service firms in consulting, IT, law, and accounting, need more than brochureware Web. These are usurped replaced by a new generation of web 2.0 sites (accurate, but not my favorite term) consisting of blogs, forums, tagging, RSS syndication, and expert opinion that create virtual business communities that attract and retain active users and clients.

The Bloom Group, a Boston-based market research organization found most business websites left buyers struggling to find details of their firms’ expertise and experience, and most sites failed to provide prospects an avenue to open a dialogue about their business problems.

Tips to serve active business seekers

• Provide more context for your content
• Implement guideposts – provide clear navigation instrucion locations and a large contact button on every page
• Use external credibility indicators and provide 3rd party reinforcement through testimonials, seals (BBB, trust-e, epinions, powerreviews)
• Contact forms & phone number are essential – prominently display a toll free phone number and address so visitors know you are accessible, open, and friendly. Companies that do not publish contact details loose trust.

Create compelling video and audio content to demonstrate your expertise and strengths as a business leader. Webinars, newsletters, forums and blogs provide new opportunities to engage with prospective clients and allow informal engagement before a contract is signed or service plan purchased. Give users and clients the ability to control when and where they interact with resources and information on your site.

Smaller firms who take risks and provide information freely to prospective clients have seen this gamble pay for itself. A large company, has extra resources to attract more business, but is too slow to react to changes and generally too conservative to provide helpful information at no charge. Information wants to be free, and the websites that provide it will reap all the rewards.

Google started off as a 100% free service, with no advertising and they have parlayed a quality service and user trust into a 200 billion company.

Muzeview research firm in New York surveyed the top 50 accounting firm websites in the U.S. and U.K. The CPA websites had copious text, newsletters, briefings, thought leadership surveys, case studies, and event invitations. The majority did not use audio, video, social networking, blogs and other interactive capabilities. Only 4 of the U.S. websites studied included podcasts or RSS feeds, 2 had blogs, 11 provided a podcast or video content.

Here is a huge opportunity to get in the top of mind with younger, tech savvy users.

Get new customers, get better search engine rankings, get noticed: get a blog.

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DMOZ the open directory that gets huge exposure from prominent position as the Google directory is blogging. DMOZ bloggers are publishing major PR for their directory to encourage quality submissions and keep the project alive. I applaud this.

The comments below are from their blog post and seem out of synch with most DMOZ editors philosophy of natural linking.

I think we can all agree that the most exciting take away is that search engines love place a different value on free, human edited directories. The point is easily debatable. Perhaps a link in DMOZ is as valuable as any other link on the web or maybe it is worth more.

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold.

Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits.

Pointed out by the anti-SEO Shoemoney. It is quite ironic that DMOZ editors hate SEO’s multiple scales of magnitude more than Shoemoney, yet are advertising their benefit to the search engine optimization process.

The open directory project needs a huge sign that says: only quality sites need apply. This would drastically reduce the acceptance time for new website submissions.

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Microsoft Live Search has launched an initiative called Cashback which offers a discount for products purchsed on MSN search. This incentive is similar to an affiliate program where the publisher (MSN) receives a cash bounty for purchases made from participating advertisers. Microsoft only gets paid if a user buys a product, compared to normal Pay Per Click advertising (which provides 98% of Google’s revenue) which generates revenue for every ad click.
The interesting part of the Live Cashback promotion is that Microsoft gives 100% of the discount back to the consumer. So if you purchase a digital camera on MSN Cashback

Microsoft needs to do something drastic to get back into the search advertising game. They’re third in U.S. search market share with under 9.1% of the online search market. Six months ago Microsoft Live Search had 9.8% market share. Google, by contrast, has 61.6% and is growing steadily:

Statistics from eMarketer shows over 50% of web users in the US begin online shopping using a search engine. 14% of online shoppers begin a product hunt using a comparison shopping search engine. 15% of shoppers navigate directly to their e-commerce site of choice (amazon.com, buy.com, ebay.com etc.)

Listen to Danny Sullivan, Mike Arrington and Hugh MacLeod debate Microsoft’s new Cashback strategy. Podcast Recorded Thursday, May 22, 2008. download the GillmorGang mp3 podcast.

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From the department of redundancy department and bureau of subprime management bureau, the largest debt ratings company blames 500 billion in losses to a programmer error.

Nevermind the fact that Moody’s ratings were the same as the Standard and Poor’s debt ratings.

Moodys wants you to believe that a computer was responsible for the subprime mortgage mess and that get rich quick mortgage brokers, misguided financers, predatory lenders and unqualified borrowers were not at fault for the housing crunch.

So instead of admitng to widespread deception and fraud by all parties involved, blame the computers.

I find it odd that if there is a 1 cent error with computers at the supermarket checkout stand this bug will be fixed immediately, and the largest debt ratings company that is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars has a bug that goes unnoticed and unfixed for 4 years.

Read the article about Moody’s debt rating software bugs at Financial Times and get an unbiased discussion here.

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Everyone talks about social networking, social marketing and online collaboration and these topics get lumped into the broad category web 2.0.

Ztail is putting money where your social mouth is and has created a website to share pricing information for everything.

Curious what your 1987 nintendo NES is worth? Wondering if you could actually sell your pair of Blu Blocker sunglasses on ebay and make a profit? Do legos hold their value? Post your product online at Ztail and get a valuation.

To post an item for appraisal you can either enter a description manually, or search through a database of over 1 million products provided by Shopping.com. Ztail uses third party sources including ebay.com to display photos, descriptions, reviews and current pricing data. Next, the item is added to Ztail’s “Get Worth” pool, displaying the item to other users who can provide their pricing opinions. Sellers can also create a Ztail widget, which can be embedded in the usual locations including facebook, blogs and other social networks to collect valuation opinions of friends.

After establishing a price, Ztail allows sellers to sell an item on eBay using established listing detail. This seems to be a no brainer: upload a product to get real world pricing data, then automatically post the item to ebay for sale. This should dramatically increase the effectiveness of auctions.

Ztail makes money from display ads, but I suspect the majority of their revenue is from the Ebay partner network and their encouragement of listing items for sale. They solve many problems with a variable pricing marketplace and enable transactions.

If they added their own affiliate program and an API to share data this would be one killer app.

Read more from the Ztail blog DemoGirl and TC.

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Gmail has become my primary email application, and I have it open all day long. The Gmail blog recently announced speed improvements of 20% which will help me be 20% more productive!

Google engineers reduced the weight of each server request itself by eliminating or narrowing the scope of some cookies. They changed all our images were cacheable by the browser, and consolidated small icon images into single meta-images, a technique known as spriting (sprites are 2d transparent raster images that originally started with video games). They combined several browser requests into a single combined request and response. The result is that it now takes as few as four requests from the click of the “Sign in” button to the display of your inbox, down from 22.

This is excellent, because a site like msnbc.com or abcnews.com can take up to 180 http requests to fully render.

Gmail does it again.

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Research shows that the highest performing site pages match exactly the motivation of a visitor, and that on retail websites most visitors fall into one of two categories:

1. Hunters. They already know what they want and are looking for the quickest, easiest, and safest way to get it and go.
2. Browsers. They may have ideas about a purchase but need more convincing, or they’re simply “window shopping.”

The problem most online retail sites face today? Their homepages have been developed without a clear understanding of the motivations and sequences of thought in the minds of visitors. You must create a site architecture to convert visitors into buyers.

Have an e-commerce optimization team look at store homepages and Value Propositions from your eCommerce site to get specific recommendations to improve your sites’ ability to engage both types of visitors – and convert them to customers.

MarketingExperiments.com has more details on e-commerce store conversion tactics: http://www.marketingexperiments.com improving-website-conversion/optimizing-ecommerce-websites.html

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Here is a recent article from the Los Angeles times discussing title tags and the multi million dollar decisions that come from a properly worded title. The article is about the Hollywood film industry, but it could also be written about websites.

It is not possible to overstate the importance of a good title.

A savvy marketer knows that the title is the most important element to a story. Most writers & advertisers will spend 10% creating the content and 90% of their time rewriting and optimizing their page title.

Helpful Movie Titles

• American Gangster – anything American is cool
• Disturbia – mashup of disturbing and suburbia
• Kramer vs. Kramer – relationship film
• Raiders of the Lost Arc – knockoff of the 30′s 40′s and 50′s adventure films
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby – a long title is a rarity, but this reeked of satire and alluded to a satisfying comedy

Harmful Movie Titles

• Cinderellla Man – historically accurate, but has no relation to boxing
• Gigli – you need to be able to easily pronounce a title
• The Shawshank Redemption – solemn, ponderous title gave no indication of redeeming prison film
• Step Into Liquid – surfing documentary missed its target
• Tears of the Sun – generic name for a Bruce Willis action flick.

Read the story as only the hollywood reporter los angeles times can write it.

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