Recently Trevor Claiborne of the Inside AdWords crew at Google informed us all that the Keyword Tool is now Updated With Search Volume Data. He illustrated this with the image shown below:

If you are not familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it would be worth your while to check out. This latest change provides for free what many expensive keyword tracking services had been providing. It’s no surprise that AdWords professionals, such as Xurxo Vidal, Bloom Search Services, are enamored by this new Search Volume Data service.

As Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Roundtable pointed out, some other experts are questioning its usefulness. Michael VanDeMar believes that the tool is useless for SEO, even though it shows exact numbers. Certainly the source of the numbers needs to be considered carefully. It may not provide an exact indication of the clicks your own particular AdWords campaign might produce. However for comparative purposes the figures would seem to be useful and clearly Google itself is the best source for Google click data.

The other advantage of the data is that you can download the figures into an Excel spreadsheet. Previously for all results, an indication of the search volume was presented as small histogram bars and only a rough visual comparison was possible. These quantitative results allow more intensive analysis, which is why it can provide a reality check for your business strategy. To explain this requires a short background review of Internet marketing.

Challenging Business Realities

An increasing number of businesses are realizing that the Internet is the primary way many prospects and clients will be communicating with them. Of course the Internet has a major weakness. That is because the Internet is a really, really crowded scene. It’s hardly surprising to hear that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, is working on tags to help find online information.

At the same time the Internet has a major strength. That is because the Internet is a really, really crowded scene. That means that for any product or service, however specialized, there will be a very large number of prospects who are active on the Internet. Since the Internet is a superb way of communicating, which is independent of geography, this gives great opportunities in Internet marketing.

Given that the Internet has changed the way the business world functions, clearly a business strategy must make sense in this modern reality. As Michael Porter has said,”Of course strategy is hard - it’s about making tough choices.” In other words you must decide what you will do and what you will not do.

The best reality check for your business strategy would really be provided by the views of those prospects you are aiming to persuade to become customers. One indicator of the prospects needs is how they go looking for solutions. What keywords might they use in searching for solutions? The Adwords Keyword Tool provides such data. Of course it is mixed in with keyword data for non-prospects who happened to be looking for somewhat related products or information. Nevertheless the Tool can help in confirming or rejecting a particular strategy.

Doing The Reality Check

The following is very much a Big Picture approach and cannot be pushed to the nth degree. It only confirms that a particular strategy has the necessary characteristics to allow success. It does not go beyond that to check that it has sufficient characteristics to actually be successful. However by applying the check, it may give insights into how a strategy can be tuned to improve the chances of success.

Step 1 - Determine the characteristics of your most typical preferred prospect and their needs.

Step 2 - Determine the most likely keyword phrase that would be included in a Google search for a solution

Step 3 - Use the Keyword Tool on that phrase in the following way. Insert the words of the phrase on a single line without quotes and allow synonyms to be included. What the Tool does is to explore the concept that is behind that keyword phrase and show you what closely related keyword searches are being done.

Step 4 - Download CSV files of the two lists of keywords developed by the Tool into Excel spreadsheets. The data should be combined into one spreadsheet of adjacent rows. Sort the rows based on the values in the 4th column in descending order. The fourth column contains the annual monthly average searches for the particular keyword or keyword phrase. Sometimes you will find a large number of closely similar keyword phrases that have high search rates measured in the tens of thousands. This may either mean trouble or opportunity. In other cases, very many fewer keyword phrases are listed. Provided the search rates are measured in the thousands, then you likely are looking at a potentially interesting strategic niche.

Step 5 - After comparing a number of different businesses and the key words that might be appropriate, one can develop a sense of what this analysis suggests for the corresponding strategy.

Step 6 - (optional in some cases) Repeat the analysis with the keyword phrase in quotes to produce a tighter comparison of what may be competition.

Possible Outcomes From The Reality Check

This approach is very much a work in progress. Accordingly it is not yet possible to produce a taxonomy of all the different patterns and what they may imply for a given strategy. The following represent examples of what we have seen in practice. Repeating the cycle and refining the ideas is often beneficial. Readers who try out this approach are encouraged to add their own experiences in the comments.

Case A - A Strategy Lost In The General Noise
Findings - The words with high search numbers clearly represented much more than just searches by the prospect niche. Clearly there would be many other online properties that such searches were accessing. A website focused on the keyword phrase would probably never stand out in this very crowded space.

Case B - Too Much Competition
Findings - There is only minimal information on the advertising competition for certain phrases (a scale from 0 to 100%). Nevertheless, if many of the keyword phrases have 100% competition, then clearly this is a market with a large number of competitors who are willing to spend money on PPC advertising. This undoubtedly translates into equal competition in organic search as well. Using that keyword phrase to define your target prospect may well be very weak strategy.

Case C - Prospects Don’t Use That Keyword Phrase
Findings - One analysis showed that surprisingly there were no searches at all for the assumed best keyword phrase. Prospects were likely using some synonyms that did have high search results. The strategy was refined using one of these alternate phrases.

Case D - Several Keyword Phrases All Somewhat Strong
Findings - In this case, a number of alternate keyword phrases had somewhat comparable search rates. The advertising competition for some of these was strong whereas for others there was little competition. One of the alternates with little competition was selected to define the ideal prospect and therefore the best approach.

A Robust Strategy - Focus, Focus, Focus

The common thread that often runs through these strategy check cases is that focusing on a tightly defined niche is often the best policy. The overall measure that counts is the size of the niche multiplied by the small percentage who will convert into purchasers. The advantage here is that by targeting a tighter niche, it is more likely that the prospect will be aware of the company and more likely that they will find that what the company offers is attractive. Given the crowded Internet, even what might be thought of as a micro-niche can be preferred. This will be more fully explored in an upcoming SMM Newsletter.

Other Related Posts

• May 24, 2008 -- Someone is wrong on the Internet
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 29, 2008 -- Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs

Website visitors can be either humans or robots / spiders from the search engines. Although human visitors are what you are seeking, those robots are important since their efforts will result in many other human visitors coming to your website. Many websites find that more than two thirds of the traffic may well come from Google. Luckily what works for humans usually works well for robots too.

The Website Structure

Having appropriate webpages that people may wish to visit is clearly important. The rules to follow are clearly laid out in an article by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian entitled Navigation - Make it Easy to Get Around.

Although written in 2000, the principles are still the same:

It isn’t difficult if you put yourself in your customer’s position and think about the things you would like best on a site like this. Here are some essential questions to answer:

• Where am I? - an aid to one’s present location on the site
• Where do I go next? - a roadmap or directory of the entire site
• How do I get there? - an intuitive or descriptive system of navigation
• Am I still on this site? - a consistent look-and-feel across different sections of the site

The Scent Of Information

In some cases particularly with larger sites, the human visitor may get slightly confused. He or she may have only a general notion of what they are looking for. Jared Spool has introduced the concept of the Scent Of Information. Just as a tracker dog may follow the scent to find their objective, your human website visitor needs some confirmation that they are heading in the right direction. Spool and his team at User Interface Engineering have refined these notions and a summary of their findings is available in their report summary at Designing for the Scent of Information

Tags

Although search engines such as Google are now very adept in determining the sense of any given web page, they are far from perfect. At one time the keyword meta tag could be used to flag important concepts on a web page. However it was effectively devalued by webmasters including vast arrays of keywords in this meta tag for their web pages. A much better indicator is now available for both regular websites and for blogs. It is known as a tag and is indexed by such services as Technorati.

If a few well-chosen tags are applied to a web page, then a human visitor interested in a topic can rapidly explore those web pages which have been tagged with that topic. More and more websites are using this approach to help human visitors find relevant pages by adding a Tag Cloud Web Page. What is particularly valuable here is that such tags are even more important to those search engine robots. Tagging web pages will bring improved search engine visibility.

Categories

The final signpost applies only to blogs. It allows a human visitor to look only at those blog posts that relate to a particular topic that is covered by the blog. It may be appropriate to have up to a dozen categories in the blog. The disadvantage of this approach is that blog posts are then listed in reverse time order with the most recent first. This is likely to be useful to only a minor fraction of human visitors. Nevertheless it is worth doing, because it again is a way of making blog posts more visible to search engines.

Conclusion

Getting a human visitor to a web page of your website is a challenge. Once they have arrived, you hope that your website will be ’sticky’ enough that they stay around. A big part of that is achieved by ensuring there are highly visible signposts to other web pages they might like to visit. Tags and categories are second lines of defense to ensure they do not click away.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• May 23, 2005 -- Search Engine Optimization’s Three False Truths
• April 30, 2004 -- A Rose By Any Other Name
• May 14, 2004 -- Do the Japanese always do it better?

If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.

If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.

If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.

I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.

I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.

With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.

Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.

For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.

When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.

If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.

I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.

Other Related Posts

• July 25, 2007 -- Internet Explorer Dilemmas
• June 30, 2007 -- RSS News Feeds To Stay Alert
• October 29, 2006 -- Favicons - How To Make Them Work For You

The level of chatter on the Internet about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is at an extraordinary level following the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle on June 3-4, 2008. It dealt with Advanced SEO. Given that so many business owners and Internet marketers are critically affected by how Google ranks their websites, this naturally is a topic of wide interest.

To help those who do not have the time to read all the chatter, we here offer a helicopter vision of what is going on at such a session. Indeed that is all that is possible currently, since there is a 30 day publicity blackout on the detailed contents of some sessions

What exactly is advanced SEO? Apparently it does not include enough Enterprise SEO as Brent D. Payne defines it:

Enterprise SEO: It’s SMX Advanced talk about how to do SEO from within an enterprise level company. I personally met with people from Time Interactive, Viacom, NPR, etc. and things are different for inhouse people at large companies. An advanced SEO seminar should tailor to some extent to the larger companies out there that are trying to accomplish big wins like capturing keyphrases such as britney spears, george w. bush, etc. How to work to rally hundreds of internal employees around SEO. How to build a proper presentation for niche audiences that are internal yet consist of 50 attendees per session. How to work with multiple CMS systems, inhouse CMS, etc.

Lisa Barone suggested that the conference content indicated that SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side. In other words, advanced SEO is more Black and Grey Hat than simple SEO. She cited some of the “advanced search engine optimization” techniques she had picked up during her time in Seattle.

• There are lots of old sites lying around on the Interwebz with great link juice. Buy them and capitalize on that. But do it carefully or Google will pick up on it and reset the score.
• Conditional redirects are awesome.
• Search marketers don’t need ethics. They’re marketers. Check the ethics at the door.
• You can never have too many .edu links.
• I need to grow some balls, stop fearing Matt Cutts and start buying links.

Her post has a daunting number of comments from many of the luminaries in the SEO world. Whatever Advanced SEO may be, it is clearly highly contentious.

Given the furor, Danny Sullivan, the conference organizer, has tried to clarify matters by affirming that Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming. In his post although he regrets some of the conference items, on balance he feels that progress is being made.

Indeed, I feel like search engines and SEOs have made great, huge strides coming together. Things like Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center - all offer tools and support that were hard for some, including myself, to ever believe would appear. At the same time, I feel like things are getting even more adversarial on other respects, most especially in the area of links and Google’s perceived domination of the web. And how to solve that, I really don’t know.

Meanwhile, if you can’t buy and sell links, even more attention is now focused on link baiting. Link baiting is all good, as Google itself has said on numerous occasions. But now look what’s happening. We have fake link bait — and then Google has to decide if those links can be “allowed” to count. In turn, that causes some people to think Google’s going too far. And when you have people feel one party is stepping over a line, it makes it easier for others to ponder why they’re following rules at all.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, was one of the keynote speakers and he has some interesting reflections on the conference:

So I did feel that the black hat material was a mismatch for much of the audience (inhouse SEOs and people doing their first search conference). At one point I felt like I’d stumbled back into 2003, when the search conferences had official panels about topics like cloaking. From that perspective, several panels of the conference felt like a step backwards.

So what lessons can those for whom even simple SEO is a challenge draw from all this? The only obvious one at the moment is the link bait topic that Danny Sullivan refers to. If your business can use as a hook something that is shady and of wide interest, then you can get the eyes and the links and in turn Google will send you the visitors. For SEO, that link bait hook is clearly the Black Hat version of SEO.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 30, 2004 -- A Rose By Any Other Name
• April 6, 2004 -- 7th International Internet Marketing Conference - Montreal - Day 2 Report
• January 27, 2005 -- Competitive Intelligence and Business Blogging

I was struck by those words at the center of the ad:

CREATIVE ACCOUNTANTS should no longer be used to describe book cookers, liars, little men in little rooms helping rich crooks get richer, or downright cheaters.

It is true that The Society of Management Accountants of Canada has applied for a Canadian trademark. If granted they, and only they, will have the right to use the trademark above on products they sell and on a series of services covering the following:
SERVICES:

• Establishing and enforcing guidelines
• training and educating
• disseminating information
• promoting and representing the interest of management accountants

Their new website, CreativeAccountants.org, (unfortunately in Flash), is really only new packaging around their existing resource-full website for Certified Management Accountants of Canada.

So why bring in King Canute? Well perhaps he might have counseled the CMA to go for some other trademark. As he tried to tell his advisers, sometimes you cannot turn back the tide. Just look at what Wikipedia offers as a definition of creative accounting.

Creative accounting and earnings management are euphemisms referring to accounting practices that may or may not follow the letter of the rules of standard accounting practices, but certainly deviate from the spirit of those rules. They are characterized by excessive complication and the use of novel ways of characterizing income, assets, or liabilities. The terms “innovative” or “aggressive” are also sometimes used.

It would seem the battle has been lost already. An appropriate choice of domain name is always a first consideration in doing a website review. CreativeAccountants.org is certainly a bold initiative but would seem to carry too much baggage to be the right long-term choice.

Related: SWOT That Domain Name

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• September 2, 2004 -- Can You Order Your Cappuccino Through Your Web Page?
• February 11, 2005 -- When will the Yahoo! Search blog tell us how to get Slurp to visit more often?
• November 27, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch Is Broken

Matt Cutts said something rather than someone. He went on to say:

That comic sums up the internet in one sentence: the scrum of jostling opinions on the web and the optimism that truth can still win out. I was reminded of that comic when someone asked me about a particular way that someone recently tried to get links.

His spam group is perhaps one key way human intervention comes into the Google search process. So his comments later in the post are particularly interesting.

If a website claims to have high-quality information and then deceives the user and serves up malware or off-topic porn, Google considers that spam and takes action on it. Likewise, if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn’t have to trust the links to that site as much.

I really don’t view Google’s role as judging the truthiness of the web. … But if someone is sloppy enough to get caught (or to admit!) making up a fake story, I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either.

It sounds very much as though Google will be acting as the judge. This prompted me to add the following comment to his blog post.

This all seems to be shaking out as it should, Matt. It raised one question in my mind. You did say I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either. I believe Google’s policy is to try to do everything in its search process by computer algorithms since this is scalable. Human intervention should therefore be very limited. Your spam group does that human intervention with an on/off button, I presume, as it applies to clear spam content.

I’m sure many would be interested to know how you treat websites you are no longer blindly trusting. Do you apply the off button for these with a reminder to check again in say six months? Or is it more like a volume control where you apply a down weighting factor? Or again, is it one of those minus X penalties in the SERPs that some talk about?

Since Google is now suggesting it will be more open than it has been in the past, I hope we will get some clarification on this.

Other Related Posts

• January 27, 2007 -- Removing Spam From The Web
• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy

Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, acknowledges in the Official Google Blog that Google Search Quality is overly secretive.

Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them - and in what order. …

Surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. … Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse. …

Being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.

He then proceeded to give a few more details of what is done, but nothing to grab the headlines. Matt Cutts in another blog post gave us a little more information by revealing details of the Google organization chart.

We almost learn more from Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, who wrote on a Webmaster View Of Google’s Latest Search Quality. At the end of the day, it all still seems somewhat shrouded in mist.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• March 9, 2007 -- Social Media - Bad News Travels Faster
• November 1, 2005 -- Google The Advertising Giant
• April 25, 2006 -- New Google Search Button

Choosing a website design is one of the most difficult decisions for any business owner to make. That’s because the only approval of the decision that counts is that of potential visitors to the website. Will they stay on the site? Will they find what they are looking for? Will they enjoy their visit? Jared M. Spool of UIE (User Interface Engineering) is an expert in Usability, which is involved in trying to make those predictions.

In a slightly technical paper, he surprisingly suggests A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives. It may not be the obvious way, but what he proposes makes eminent good sense. The case study he describes is as follows:

The company team is about to redesign their home page and navigation. They have three home page design alternatives and five navigation alternatives, created by an outside firm who didn’t do any evaluations of the designs. To help figure out which design to pick, the team has (finally!) received approval for their first usability testing study. While their site has been around for years, they’ve never watched visitors use it before now.

The obvious way might have involved a large number of users looking at all these different possibilities. The method that Spool proposes is much leaner than that and extremely practical. One critical step is the following:

Recruit from 2 User Groups
We recommended the team recruit both loyal and new users as study participants. The first day of testing should be loyal users of the site and the second day should be new users to the site. The loyal users would help figure out what the important tasks are. The new users will help determine what’s important for people new to the site, such as how they figure out the basics.

He describes much more detailed methodology, but the summary above brings out the essence of choosing between website designs. You must have a clear view of what you would like your visitors to do when they visit you. You must then make sure that your design functions well. Remember that you have the most tenuous of holds on a visitor who has clicked to your website. They can easily click away if they find the experience frustrating.

Other Related Posts

• November 8, 2007 -- World Usability Day 2007
• July 30, 2007 -- Sphinn Doctor
• March 25, 2007 -- 3 Non-blog Reasons Why Newspapers Are Dying

Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.

Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.

Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.

Some Tag Clouds Are Only Word Clouds

Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).

To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.

That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.

Tag Clouds That Get You There

Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.

The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.

We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.

Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA

Posts You May Like From The Archives

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1. Targeting keywords that people never use
2. Confusing keyword popularity with keyword appropriateness
3. Not considering user intent in keyword selection
4. Selecting single word keywords
5. Keyword misalignment
6. Not considering the competition
7. Failing to periodically review keywords
8. Not allocating enough resources and time to perform good keyword research

Detailed explanations are given in her article and there is a lot to consider there. It would almost appear that they are presented in increasing order of importance. Certainly her summary paragraph points to this:

A better strategy would be to take the time it takes to do the project right. A sound keyword process is one of the best investments a company can make. Take a few minutes today and review your keyword lists. Chances are you can save yourself and your company a lot of money and improve your return on your search campaigns by simply improving the keyword pool.

As it happens, her paper could well be an introduction to a post on SEO at the Cre8asite Forums by Ammon Johns, a top UK SEM consultant.

You enter a market where the top 30 sites on many terms are all using SEO. The top 20 sites are all spending around 100k per year, either on salaries of their in-house SEOs, on agency services, or commonly a mixture of the two. If you as a newcomer to the market can only afford 20k investment in SEO this year, then your only possible chance to make that work is to put all that resource into a focal point (the 100k budgets are spread across the market, so by picking one flank or one specific point and spending all your effort there you can plan to break through - the niche market).

You can’t bank a business on hoping to ‘get lucky’ and miraculously hire a better SEO for 20k than they hired for 100k. That kind of optimism is not business, that’s roulette. If a market leader has a three year head start, and is also spending twice as much resource and effort as the newcomer can afford, then it is quite reasonable to predict that you will never overtake the market leader.

If these are figures that surprise you, bear in mind that they are in UK sterling pounds so you double them to give an approximate US dollar figure.

The bottom line on all this is that there are no quick fixes on becoming visible in the search engines keyword reports. The Internet is a very crowded place. It requires good knowledge and thorough and persistent effort to outperform your competition.

Related:
Your Keyword Selection Strategy - Mark Beck
Keyword Strategy to Avoid Bidding War - Shimon Sandler
[Video] Keyword Research 101: Basic Keyword Strategy & Tips - Aaron Wall

Other Related Posts

• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• May 24, 2008 -- Someone is wrong on the Internet
• March 29, 2008 -- Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• January 19, 2007 -- Slogging For The Long Tail
• July 30, 2007 -- Sphinn Doctor
• April 12, 2005 -- Bragadocchio tops 10,000 posts at the Cre8asite Forums

Microsoft has finally said its courtship of Yahoo! is over. Perhaps it was never meant to be. Danny Sullivan has a very fine analysis of the whole saga and wonders whether walking away is perhaps Microsoft’s $5 Billion Mistake? There is still the same concern however that Michael Martinez raises. How can Microsoft succeed in Search?

The key question is: Should Microsoft have two brands? That same question came up two years ago. However that was discussing whether they should be running with both MSN Search and Live Search. A subsidiary question was how to pronounce the latter: Liv Search or Lyve Search.

Microsoft seems to be good at getting itself into these problematic situations. Just think Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8 as an example. In its strategic thinking it seems to follow the Tom Peters precept: “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.” How much better they would perform if they followed the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Sweetheart). There are many more eminent thinkers they could refer to who would support that approach.

Focus, focus, focus

Peter Drucker

The Null Hypothesis is presumed true until statistical evidence indicates otherwise.

Sir Roland Fisher

A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Albert Einstein

Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

Occam of Occam’s Razor

With Bill Gates adopting a more hands-off approach, the chances of Microsoft becoming more KISSy seem remote. They presumably will soldier on trying to figure out how to get their Search horse back on its feet. The prognosis is not good.

Other Related Posts

• December 31, 2007 -- Where Do You Shop - MSN, Yahoo or Google?
• July 25, 2007 -- Internet Explorer Dilemmas
• April 17, 2007 -- Make Your Website Search Engine Robot-Friendly

Spread the word, it’s RSS News Feeds Awareness Day. Although the International Labor Organization may currently be the biggest group celebrating May 1, that could change. Perhaps Daniel Scocco had forgotten about the ILO in coming up with the idea of designating May 1 as RSS Awareness Day. However given that RSS newsfeeds unleash the communicating power of the Internet, the word can spread very fast. I learned about this from the RSS news feed of Andy Beard, who had blogged about it. As we all tell our readers about it, then the momentum becomes unstoppable.

RSS news feeds have been around for many years. It’s the fastest way to be aware of what the BBC or CNN is reporting on. In order to subscribe to the RSS feeds of such favorite sites, all you need is an RSS reader. Here are three web-based and free RSS readers that you can use. All work well and it’s a question of what works best for you:

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Newsgator

Once you have your RSS reader working you can just head to your favorite website and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

Courtesy Andy Beard

Another important way of staying on top of breaking news is with Google Blogsearch. It went through a rough spot during recent months but it’s now back functioning well to alert you to Hot News Items. That too is relying on RSS news feeds. All in all, it’s good to be aware of the power of RSS news feeds. If making May 1 RSS News Feeds Awareness Day can help spread the message, then let’s all ping away.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Other Related Posts

• October 20, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan
• June 30, 2007 -- RSS News Feeds To Stay Alert
• April 28, 2007 -- Yes, The National Gazette Does Have News Feeds

The challenge is reasonable since according to Google, its mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. There would seem to be no limit to its ambitions. Perhaps not surprisingly, Google has just announced that it is crawling through HTML forms. This seems to be upsetting some website owners, but Google is unrepentant.

This experiment is part of Google’s broader effort to increase its coverage of the web. In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines. The terms Deep Web, Hidden Web, or Invisible Web have been used collectively to refer to such content that has so far been invisible to search engine users.

Perhaps it’s time for Google to revisit its mission statement. It is after all a publicly-owned company. It should endeavor to balance the interests of all its stakeholders. Perhaps some parts of the world’s information just aren’t worth accessing. At the very least it would be interesting to see a cost-benefit analysis done for all the different places it is seeking that information.

Footnote: if you want to know where to find Waldo, then Frank Taylor, who knows a bit about Google Earth, has some revelations for you.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• January 3, 2007 -- Will Google Start Marketing?
• May 23, 2005 -- Search Engine Optimization’s Three False Truths
• December 10, 2007 -- Customers Speak Out In The Internet Age

1. Design the website
2. Do on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the Web pages
3. Get links to the website from others.

That approach could certainly explain the following e-mail message I just received:

Since I offer a more holistic approach to making websites perform, I suggested a Google search might bring up names of people who could better meet their needs for this more limited service. I wondered at the time whether I could have offered some further advice to help the writer in his search. There are a lot of somewhat shady characters offering link creation services just as there similar individuals offering SEO services. Perhaps if I had been able to offer a simple 10 Commandments for Links, that might have been more helpful. A simple one page document with a list of things to avoid. Something like the Biblical 10 Commandments that gave unequivocal advice on what was not acceptable.

I looked around and thought perhaps The Ten Commandments of Link Building by Jai Nischal Verma might do the trick. However it’s not a list of things to avoid doing but rather some suggestions on possible ways of creating links.

1. Link Exchange
2. Social Bookmarking Websites
3. Link Baiting
4. Web Directory Submissions
5. Article Submissions
6. Press Releases
7. Blog Commenting
8. Forum Posts
9. Link Programs
10. Creating Contests

On further reading, I did not feel this was the solution I was looking for.

By chance I noticed a reference in Sphinn to a post on Defining Link Building Best Practices. The author’s nickname in the Sphinn discussion was LinkMoses. Surely he might have run across a suitable 10 Commandments if anyone has. The nickname is that of Eric Ward, who has been involved in Content Publicity & Link Building Strategies since 1994. Regrettably it seemed from his post that he was even reluctant to nominate Best Practices.

That’s hardly surprising. If everyone is made aware of Best Practices then everyone can use them and no one can stand out from the crowd. Perhaps defining 10 Commandments is easier. It’s a list of things to avoid doing, since they may almost guarantee failure. It’s a way of avoiding being grouped with the goats rather than the sheep. Perhaps just as for Moses, such a list is only available from on high.

As it happens, Google (Mountain View, CA) has almost developed this list for us. Just check out their Webmaster Guidelines. Most of the following are directly taken from those Guidelines with one or two additions. Some of these are more ‘evil’ than others.

Ten Commandments For Google Links

1. Avoid Me-too or irrelevant content that gives users no reason to visit your site.
2. Avoid broken links and incorrect HTML.
3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
6. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
7. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
8. Avoid valueless links from unrelated websites
9. Avoid links from low PageRank pages with many outgoing links
10. Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web.

Obeying these 10 Commandments should keep you out of trouble, although Google does add the following:

Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

This is only a personal interpretation of the 10 Commandments and could undoubtedly be improved. If you think the list should be amended in any way then your comments would be most appreciated. Please add them below. Based on such feedback a more polished version of the 10 Commandments will be produced.

Footnote: Thomas Schmitz (SOEinSeattle) has pointed out to me that Link Moses has produced his version of the Ten Commandments in a slightly less serious vein. Jim Boykin has also recounted how The Google Gods (in our heads) Speak to Us about Link Building. I did not find these when I searched. Apologies. Perhaps the best of these can be combined.

Other Related Posts

• September 18, 2007 -- Emperor Google Has No Clothes
• June 21, 2007 -- Three Golden Rules For Writing “Three Golden Rules” Articles For SEO

As far as we can tell this does not seem to be the case. Below are shown the starting text in the SERP snippets for the same blog post in four different language versions of Google. In each case the date is shown in the language of the searcher. In each case also, the snippet used the same 138 characters from the Description meta tag.

Google - English - http://www.google.com

Google - French - http://www.google.fr/

Google - Finnish - http://www.google.com/ig?hl=fi

Google - Saudi Arabia - http://www.google.com/ig?hl=ar

Danny Sullivan has questioned in Sphinn whether this is a real phenomenon. However it seems to be the case for blog posts that appear in more popular searches. The posts on the same blog that preceded and followed this post, which are less popular, still currently come up in SERPs without dates. Whether this dating becomes the general rule or disappears at some time can only be a matter of conjecture at the moment.

If you have any views on what is happening here, then please add your comments.

Other Related Posts

• March 25, 2008 -- Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?
• March 29, 2008 -- Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

The creation of those Google snippets is an entirely automatic process. In other words it’s a computer-generated snippet. Google does try to help you to get better snippets. Matt Cutts has even made a short video about snippets (just over 8 minutes) - tip of the hat to Kathryn Katz. A key element in getting good snippets is the description meta tag. There is an interesting discussion currently going on in the Cre8asite Forums about that. One most useful piece of advice from Ron Carnell is to have a sentence of not more than 155 characters and spaces in that meta tag. Since this is the length of a typical Google snippet, then it is highly likely that your engaging sentence will be used as the snippet.

That was true until about four days ago. Suddenly there has been a switch in the automatic snippet creation process, at least for blog posts. It is not yet universal for all blog posts but seems to occur for ones that frequently come up in keyword searches. Here is an example:

The snippet for such blog posts now starts with the date of the post displayed in the language of the searcher. In English this uses up about 17 characters of the snippet including the ellipsis (…). Since the total length is still 155 characters and spaces, this leaves only 138 characters and spaces for you to write that engaging sentence.

It’s still early days so whether this change will be applied to all blog posts or will remain a permanent feature for Google is still in question. Yahoo! and MSN/Live still seem to be working with the longer 155 characters snippets. Anyone with a WordPress blog who uses the All-in-one-SEOpack plugin is faced with a dilemma. It suggests that descriptions should not be longer than 160 characters, but that number should now perhaps be reduced.

Other Related Posts

• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• May 24, 2008 -- Someone is wrong on the Internet
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy

A surprising number of people, and indeed some surprising people, are now using Twitter to give status reports on what is happening in their corner of the universe. The strict imposition of no more than 140 characters and spaces seems to concentrate the mind most effectively. Tweats are of course produced by human writers. Twitter can certainly be rated a success.

Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps it’s time for Google to re-examine its snippets reasoning, because it is questionable how successful it is.

If you believed the Google documentation, you might believe that Web page Descriptions would be a key summary of the content of Web pages in their keyword search results:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

They even go so far as to encourage you to Improve snippets with a meta description makeover:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

In practice it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You need to choose very carefully the exact words of your Descriptions if they are to be used at all, as you can see in (You Must) SEO Those Descriptions For More Google Visitors.

A post by William Slawski suggests why this is happening. It relates to Google’s fixation on inlinks to a Web page. So they may well Use Anchor Text to Determine the Relevance of a Web Page. In such a case, perhaps they wish to justify their reasoning by including it in the Snippet they construct to show the item is Relevant. Bill’s advice if this is affecting your Google appearances runs as follows:

If you run a web site, you may have visitors coming to your pages based upon the content anchor text in links pointing to your pages instead of the text upon your pages themselves. If the term is one that you want to be found for, you may want to consider adding some text to the page, if possible, using that query term, to provide a more persuasive snippet for the search results.

Perhaps if you put that persuasive language in the Description, it has a better chance of surviving that snippet creation process.

Standing well back, you might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by a wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. Why else would you add in text taken from other related Web pages? The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

So do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps your comments here could trigger some rethinking.

Related: How to Optimize your Search Engine Snippets - Michael D Jensen

Other Related Posts

• March 31, 2008 -- Google Blog Post Snippets Are Now Dated Just For You
• March 29, 2008 -- Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

As we all spend more time in social media, such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or Sphinn, the ability to write catchy headlines becomes as important as it ever was. If someone skimming through a list of possible topics is intrigued by your headline, then they may dip in to find out what it’s all about. That’s why Brian Clark suggested you should be writing Magnetic Headlines. If you were using WordPress to write your blog, then you would presumably put that catchy headline in that field labelled Title. It all seems so easy, but in fact it’s a little too easy. In what follows to avoid confusion, we’ll call what appears in that WordPress Title field the Headline.

Although your Headline may be written to attract human beings, it may not work well in a search engine keyword ranking. Since the largest proportion of the traffic to your website will come via search engines, it may be worth using something that the search engine robots will find attractive. The problem is that WordPress uses the expression in that Title field in a number of different ways. It is of course used as the headline in the < H1 > heading for your blog. It is also used as the Title element in the head of your blog page. This is the text that appears in the bar across the top of the screen. If you have nominated Pretty Permalinks, then the WordPress will also use the same text to develop the URL for the post.

Creating Optimal Titles

This is where the dilemma arises. The Title in the head of the blog page is very important in search engine rankings. The URL may also have a slight effect on these rankings. Optimizing the text for search engine robots will likely produce something, which is not necessarily one of those Magnetic Headlines that was being suggested.

Luckily help is at hand from a variety of sources. For example, Stephan Spencer and his colleagues have developed SEO Title Tag 2.1.3, which allows you to specify a Title for the blog post, which can be different from the headline. A more complete solution is provided by the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn from Uberdose. This not only allows an independent title but also has a number of other useful features. Even used ‘out of the box’ with default settings the PlugIn will achieve a good part of what is needed to optimize your blog posts for the Search Engines. Katy Castro has a good description of how to use it.

Getting the Meta Description Right

An equally important element in getting search engine traffic to your blog post is the text in the Meta Description for the blog post. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to prepare a separate description for each page. If you don’t, the default is that it will take the first 155 or so characters from the start of the post and use that. That avoids a problem Google has in indexing blog posts that all have the same Meta Description. Checking your website with the Google Webmaster Tools website will tell you whether duplicate descriptions is a problem for your blog.

By writing the most engaging description of your blog post in 155 or less characters, you increase the chance that this is what Google will show in its search engine report pages (SERPs). Most such snippets are a jumble of words that Google selects to try to show that its selection may be relevant to the keyword search. A well-crafted sentence will encourage many more visitors to click through to your blog post.

Although the Keywords MetaTag is of limited value nowadays, the plug-in does allow you to specify what keywords are most appropriate. Again if you do not specify keywords, the plug-in will select keywords by default from either the categories or from any tags that post may have.

The URL Of The Blog Post

A secondary factor in the optimization of the blog post is the URL for the blog post. Selecting the Pretty Permalinks option is one important step here for a WordPress blog. Unfortunately as mentioned above, this is again derived from the Headline of the blog post. You will find the text used in the Post Slug element in the right hand column of the Edit screen. It is derived by taking the Headline of the Post, putting all letters in lower case and adding hyphens between the words. This is not something where the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn helps. However as the WordPress Codex recommends, if you want to create a more memorable URL, then you can create such a one using lower case words and hyphens. Often taking the Title you have derived for the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn and converting it will be a good way to go.

Conclusion

Users of the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn are effusive in their praise of how well it works, even using it ‘out of the box’. If at least for your more worthy blog posts, you go the extra mile by crafting individual entries for the PlugIn, then you will see a significant increase in your visitor traffic. If you want to see how such a post appears, you can check this post. The headline was of course, Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots. However in the Title bar at the top of the screen, note the Title of the post, Write SEO Titles For High Rankings. A version of that also appears in the URL. Check the description by viewing the source code. It’s all extra effort but a very good use of your time.

Other Related Posts

• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 31, 2008 -- Google Blog Post Snippets Are Now Dated Just For You
• March 25, 2008 -- Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?

Pierre Far, in a guest post on Techipedia today asks the question, Is Social Media the Final Frontier of Marketing? Given the popularity of such activities as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, it’s clearly a question that many marketers must be asking.

As confirmation of the topicality of the question, only three days ago Business Week had a long nine page article suggesting that Social Media Will Change Your Business. A few quotes will show how Business Week is seeing all this.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they are going to shake up just about every business. … Given the changes barrelling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They are a prerequisite. And yes, that goes for us, too.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals-and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Overall Business Week seems to suggest that the big mainstream companies will still be the ones in control. Perhaps they’re missing the real point about social media. Pierre Far sees it in a different light.

The point is that consumers now have a more potent aggregate power: someone with a problem can now reach others with the same problem faster, build a community around this shared problem easily, and mobilize lots of people behind the common cause more efficiently. That’s what’s new: a significant leap in efficiency. This gives consumers a loud voice that companies have to listen to.

This message has been around for some time. It started with the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999. As the authors said then, As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. If Business Week does not fully understand even now, how long will it take for the mainstream companies to realize that others are now in charge?

Related:
Business Blogging Now
Riding The Internet Tidal Wave
Smart Advertising On Cell Phones

Other Related Posts

• January 25, 2008 -- I Twitter Therefore I Am
• March 18, 2007 -- To Twitter Or Not To Twitter
• March 9, 2007 -- Social Media - Bad News Travels Faster