Biznology Blog: December 2005

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December 29, 2005

New Low Price for Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Book

Great news! If you've been holding off buying our book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., wait no longer. Amazon has now reduced the price to just $27.99, including shipping—a 44% discount off the list price. I have no way of knowing how long this price will last, so don't let it slip past you. Likewise, if you needed one more reason to recommend the book to a friend, here it is.

Signed: Shameless Self-Promotion Department

Posted by mikemoran at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 27, 2005

Web Pages Are Events, Not Locations

Every time a page is displayed on your Web site, it is an opportunity to make a sale, to build a relationship, or to deliver your marketing message. Do you treat each page view the way an airline values its airline seats, or the way a TV network uses its commercial time? We tend to think of Web pages as places, but, like airline trips and TV programs, they are turning into events.

Regular readers are familiar with the Web Conversion Cycle, a model that helps anyone determine the goals of a Web site so that visitor behavior can be determined and measured. The basics of conversion measurement are the so-called "look to buy" ratio—counting the number of visitors vs. the number of conversions.

In the days of static Web pages, this calculation was simple. Your Web metrics system could analyze any URL to understand how many visitors that viewed that URL also completed the conversion. For example, you might have an offer of 50% off the price of an enhanced sound system in a new car. How do you measure the success of that offer? With a static site, you just count the number of time the page was shown and count the number of times the coupon was printed.

But dynamic pages have changed everything. The metrics system can't just count the page views of the URL anymore—each time that page is shown, it could contain a different offer on it. You can't calculate the conversion rate when you don't know how many impressions have been shown of the offer.

As metrics systems play catch-up with the possibilities of dynamic pages, a new factor is coming into play: personlaization. Not only can offers be randomly rotated on dynamic pages, but they can be changed based on less-than-random factors. Suppose visitors that have looked at that car site three times in the last week are the ones shown the sound system discount offer—because they are the most likely to print the coupon and buy that car from a local dealer. A personalized Web site can use information about the visitor to present the right offer at the right time.

Can your Web site personalize your visitor's experience? More importantly, can you Web metrics system count when content is displayed, rather than just counting a page's URL? Unless you can count the impressions of each unique piece of content displayed on a page, you can't tell what a dynamic site's conversion rates are.

When you start thinking of your pages as events—every page view can contain different content—you'll never look at your Web metrics system the same way again.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 26, 2005

Is Google a Threat to Your Web Site's Search?

You may use Google's search toolbar, but perhaps you haven't thought about how that toolbar is changing Web visitor behavior—it's a constant invitation to leave your site at any time. December's Biznology newsletter asks, "Is Google a Threat to Your Web Site's Search?"

Posted by mikemoran at 11:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 14, 2005

Themes from the Syndicate Conference

Search marketing is being transformed by changes in media and I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Syndicate conference to hear how. After my speech yesterday, I stuck around to hear how the new participatory media is changing the Web and in turn, changing search marketing.

Several strong themes were clear at the conference:

• The old school of media is under attack. One of the conference tracks was devoted to the battle between the entrenched media giants and "new media." "The edges of the network now inform the center, rather than the reverse," says Jonathan Schwartz, COO of Sun Microsystems. Larry Weber, noted author and CEO of W2 Group, predicted that "in five years, we'll be discussing how the circulation of the Wall Street Journal and the USA dropped under one million." One of the media giants, Dow Jones (the publisher of the Wall Street Journal), agreed--Senior VP Jessica Perry explained that Dow Jones business is increasingly online, including wsj.com and Factiva.
• The old PR game is changing, too. Because old media is giving way (in part) to new media, the old corporate game of seeding stories through press releases is changing. Some at the conference question whether press releases need to exist in a world of blogs, while others believe that press releases can be modified to be search-friendly and distributed using blogs, RSS, and other new forms that come along.
• And the change in new media popularity is just beginning. Just 4% of Web users are using blog readers today, so what about the other 94%? Scott Gatz of Yahoo! reports that "27% of Web users read RSS feeds, but don't know it," which looks like the way to expand usage. Microsoft is continuing this trend, enabling Internet Explorer 7 to be a simple blog reader, but Outlook 2006 will offer blogs as folders in your Outlook e-mail, which could be very powerful. Similarly, Gantz showed a beta version of Yahoo! Mail with similar capabilities based on an Ajax approach. Windows Live is built around search and RSS.
• And the technology is evolving to be even more powerful. Marc Canter led a large consortium of companies in the Structured Blogging announcement, where new "types" (similar in DTDs in content management) of blog entries, such as "events" and "reviews," complete with support in WordPress and Movable Type, two popular blogging packages. Marc is predicting the emergence of compound feeds that combine data from multiple sources, combined with filters to help readers give attention to what they are interested in. These technologies are critical in a world where there are already 20 million feeds and the number is doubling every few months. Chris Redlitz, the President of Feedster, says "RSS will be used far more ubiquitously to distributed any time-sensitive information."
• Tagging must evolve as well. Social tagging, as found on del.icio.us (just purchased by Yahoo!) is growing but experts doubt its ability to scale to solve the filtering problem. Elizabeth Lawley, a Researcher at Microsoft, says their research shows that people are more likely to make a Post-it note than to bookmark something, so only a very few people are willing to tag content—those people that do may be very different from the rest of us. Lawley believes we will see more human filtered searches—not based on your friends but based on trusted sources you identify.

How does this affect search marketing? Debby Richman, a Senior VP at LookSmart, believes that "We are following the same progression that TV followed to cable—marketers can target demographics that have different interests—it's inevitable that this will happen" in a broad way. "Search will become more personalized," says Technorati's Community Manager Niall Kennedy, "and will even help you find friends based on what your interests are." Adds PubSub's Salim Ismail, "Retrospective search is gradually giving way to alerts when something new arrives that matches your interests." Yahoo!'s Gantz sees the benefits of RSS moving from efficiency to relevance (you can see the search tie-in there), and becoming more social (incorporating social tagging into search and other discovery methods). Richman summed up the biggest impact on search by saying that "Search needs to stay agnostic and index whatever form of information is out there." As the content on the Web changes, search marketing will as well.

Posted by mikemoran at 6:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2005

Blogs, RSS, Podcasts, and Search Marketing

One of the most powerful ways to boost your organic search campaigns is with the "new publishing"—blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, and other new forms of Web content. Today, I explained the basics of search marketing to attendees the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco.

Most of what you need to know about search marketing for the "new publishing" is not so new. You need to identify your marketing goals (branding, eyeballs, or conversions) and you need to calculate your opportunity before you know how much to invest. And you need to follow the same steps as with a typical Web site, but you can add a few tweaks for the new stuff:

• Step 1: Get your site indexed. All the usual advice applies, but you can also take advantage of RSS to aid your indexing. Use Ping-O-Matic to alert the search engines whenever your blog is updated and it can be indexed as quickly as the next day.


• Step 2: Target Your Keywords. In addition to what you'd do for any Web site, don't forget to add words on your site such as "blog" or "podcast" so that searchers looking for that form of content will find yours.


• Step 3: Optimize Your Content. Just as with a regular Web page, it is important to sprinkle your keywords into your title tags and other emphasized text, but you should take care to do the same with the titles (including channel and item titles) of your RSS feeds. And don't forget to make your channel and item titles heading tags in your feed template so that they stand out to the search engine.


• Step 4: Attract Links to Your Site. Blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, and other fresh content are natural link magnets. In addition, you can use trackbacks to other blogs to give yourself links.

Search engines love blogs and other fresh content, which is good, but spammers are noticing too, which is bad. Spammers are placing fake trackbacks and comments on legitimate sites just to give them links back to their own sites to boost their search rankings. But maybe the worst development is spam blogs, called splogs, in which spammers siphon content from legitimate blogs to create completely fake blogs chock full of links back the sites they want to boost.

Search marketers can't do anything about these spam activities, but the search engines will. And as with all anti-spam measures, some legitimate sites will be hurt when the backlash begins—it's unavoidable. For now, legitimate sites should continue to publish their content as usual, but should expect that search engines will change their treatment of blogs to reduce their importance at some point in the future. When spammers target you, you've arrived. So, congratulations, bloggers.

Not all the trends are bad, however. Podcasts and video formats are taking off and search engines are noticing. Search engines have some work to do before they handle audio as well as they handle text. Today, audio is not often handled much better than images, where the names of files and the text surrounding the files is the best way to find them with a search query. Audio has the potential to use speech recognition to index all of the words, but search engines will have to figure out how to find the most important words—there aren't any podcast headings and bold text to clue you in. Some research shows that intonation can help identify important words in running speech, but it will probably take a while before this is a reality. Expect that speech recognition will make audio full-text searchable by the major search engines in 2006, but without the same ability to discern the most important words they way they can in text.

Podcasts, RSS feeds, blogs and other new forms, such as video and vlogs (video blogs) are on their way to becoming full-fledged members of search marketing content types. Download the full set of charts on search marketing and blogs from my speech today.

Posted by mikemoran at 6:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 3, 2005

"#1 Search Book," says about.com

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is at the top of Wendy Boswell's Top Ten Search books at about.com—just in the time for some holiday shopping, she says.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack