Search Engine Tigers

Last week my 6 year old daughter came home from school all excited…

Daddy, Mr Buchheit (her school principal) kissed a pig today

Really?

Yes, her name was Daisy. Daddy, you have to go to Google…(thinks for a moment)… dot com and search for Daisy the Pig

So upstairs we went to the computer, and yep there at the top of the results for Daisy the Pig was Mr. Buchheit’s new friend Daisy the pot bellied reading Pig.

There are a couple of things that I like about this.

1. This small business man was using his ranking to market himself. No need to tell the kids the URL of his site, instead just tell them to go to Google and type in the pig’s name.
2. My daughter was excited about searching on the web for something that she was interested in, and there was the added bonus that she was going to find the result that she was looking for, because it was known to be there.
3. My daughter now understands a little bit more of what I do for a living.

This morning I received an email claiming to be from Blogging Zoom (I say claiming as the email address used to send the note was from  insert_your_email_address_here@server.hostgatorz.com, based on the the fact that this is also over on their blog, spelling and grammatical errors and all, I believe that it’s legit and they just messed up on the email). This note complains about the number of cut and paste submissions that have been showing up on BloggingZoom.

No More Copy Paste!!! We have made over 5 post since the birth of Blogging Zoom letting Bloggers know that they are not allowed to copy paste submissions. Your description has to be original. Now we had given an opportunity for new bloggers to get accustomed to the system and we hoped once they read all the post about submitting with copy paste, it would stopped. Unfortunately this has not happened… Every time you copy and paste your content in a submission let it be here at Blogging Zoom or any other social voting site you are giving yourself and Blogging Zoom a duplicate content filter penalty with Google.

So what do they intend to do about this?

One warning will be given, if the following submission after the warning is a copy paste submission we will be forced to BAN the URL from Blogging Zoom.

So, if there’s someone that you want to get banned from Blogging Zoom, just simply go and submit a couple of their articles over the next few days, cutting and pasting text from the article. Would they care? Well, according to Blogging Zoom, they should, as they’re bigger than Digg*

*Blogging Zoom is heading toward one day being a much stronger site then Digg and any other social site. If you need proof of this look at our Alexa vs Digg we are month ahead in traffic for the same time of Digg. If you want to be a Power Zoomer and grow with Blogging Zoom please help the community.

If you’re interested in going to SES-London in 3 weeks, but haven’t bought the tickets yet, here’s a little deal sweetener for you:- Use the code 20spgst to get 20% of the price of the conference pass. Go on, you know you want to.

…and that’s about all I can say about it at this point. This is purely a tease piece. Well, ok, I can say that there are other SEO’s involved, and that my first post on the topic involves a Little Britain character. That should be vague enough

Tune in on Friday to find out what the heck this is all about, and why you should care…

Ok, you twisted my arm… you can find less details about this on SEO-Scoop

As reviews go, this is going to be a really short one. While using the built in Blackberry browser to go to Yahoo, it detected my device, and asked me if I wanted to download this dedicated application. Thinking that I may as well give it a try, I downloaded it, and set it up. Clicking on it, the first screen asks for my user name and password. Easy enough you’d think, right? Wrong. While there’s no problem entering my user name, my password has a couple of special characters in it, as is recommended by most places that require a password i.e. erm… Yahoo!. So, I moved to the password field and hit the Symbol button on the Blackberry… this created a character in the password field rather than opening up the symbol option page as usually happens. Hmm, maybe if I hit the symbol button, then the appropriate key for the symbol that I use in my password, it’ll work?

Nope

So much for that. I have no desire to go and change my password in Yahoo, Trillian, and in the mail setup for my Blackberry, just so I can use this application, so this review has to stop right here, at the first hurdle. Not a good job there Yahoo!

Yesterday I wrote a post on EndlessPlain.com titled “8 tips for Blogging Inspiration”, the traffic that it generated for the site was fantastic, so I though that I’d post a little bit over here, for anyone that has yet to check out that site (I typically post on that site every Monday, as well as whenever it strikes my fancy).

…So what happens when you’re down to the last minute, and you have our newly redefined problem – Blogger’s Block? There are several things that you can do. The easiest thing to do is, of course, nothing. However, that’s not a strategy that’s going to be conducive to the long term growth of your readership, so instead, here’s a list of real (fairly quick) solutions for your problem;

1. Link Post: Do a post where you link out to posts or articles that you’ve recently read that you think are great. Why not expose your readers to them? If you’re worried about losing your readers, don’t. Instead you may find that they’ll like you for exposing them to some great new stuff, and they’ll come back to you to see what else you recommend…

To read the rest of the article you’ll just have to head over to EndlessPlain.com and read “8 tips for Blogging Inspiration“

Having read many posts by Lyndon on the topic of getting the right title for your posts / articles, I found the recent post on SEO2.0 challenging Lyndon’s skills both interesting and amusing. Then I came across this article in the Guardian about the actress Leslie Ash and her recent compensation award. This post screamed out for a better headline than

“Actor Ash gets £5m payout over hospital superbug“

or the headline that was used when the story was submitted to DIGG

“£5m Hospital Bug Payout For Leslie Ash“

So based on the article, I thought I’d give it a go:

“How falling out of bed during sex can net you $10 million”

“Get paid 5 million quid for sex with your spouse” (do colloquialisms such as ‘quid’ work?)

“Sex, pain, bugs and $10 million”

“Sex, Bugs and lots of dough”

“Superbug sexcapade victim gets $10 million”

“Rough sex leads to $10 million payout”

“5 million reasons to stay out of NHS hospitals”

“Leslie Ash becomes Leslie Ca$h after superbug infection“

Can you think of some better ones? I’m sure you can.

N.B. Obviously this exercise is not meant to trivialize the problems that this woman is going to have to deal with for the rest of her life, which are terrible.

While doing a quick Google search on the new name of my company – Serengeti Communications – I noticed that there’s now a listing in the top 5 from Merchant Circle, which talks about how you can:

Contact Serengeti Communications to request a deal, get a coupon or to do business.

Strange, I wasn’t aware that we were offering ‘deals’, or handing out coupons…

I’m also not keen on their little box at the top right of the page that indicates that you can ‘talk to’ Serengeti Communications through their site.  For a user that’s used to interactive sites, such as Carmax, this may lead them to believe that typing in this box will link them directly to a Serengeti Communications sales person.  Instead, it appears to post a comment to the Serengeti forum on their site, and from reading Matt McGee’s review of Merchant Circle from last year, Merchant Circle then contacts the business to let them know that there’s a message out there on the forum.

The information about the company has obviously been scraped from our website, so when I saw the blog section, I assumed that they’d also scraped our blog – EndlessPlain.com… nope, there’s apparently a Merchant Circle blog for Serengeti Communications… which had better remain blank, as we’re not writing it.

I’ve got to say, IYP sites and directories that list information about a company are absolutely fine by me, but when one purports to have a relationship with a company that it doesn’t have, either implicitly or explicitly, then that to me is a big red flag.

Just when you thought you’d seen everything, Search Engine Strategies announces that the last session of the first day of their upcoming SES-NYC show will be a ‘Super Session’ on ‘How to Train your Pets to Search’. This session is not restricted to just canine and feline owners, it’s also open to those who own birds, presumably to cover that whole Data Myna demographic. According to my source, the session is not open to fish owners, as evidence suggests that every 30 seconds they perform the same search over and over again (Note: there’s no proof to the rumors that MSN has seized on this knowledge to hire schools of fish to boost their share of the search market). My source informs me that the presentations currently being considered for this presentation are as follows:

• Search: Going beyond scents
• Finding the freshest catnip
• Pecking your way to the top of the rankings
• Using puppy dog eyes on Matt Cutts to avoid the spam filters
• ACME online, a case study in searching for roadrunner extermination devices

What should we expect to get out of this session? Well, we should find out whether there is any truth to the rumor that search is so easy that a trained monkey can do it.

Due to the unique nature of this session, it actually requires separate registration from regular SES-NYC, although there are benefits to registering for it before registering for the rest of the conference. So, if you’re thinking of going to SES-NYC, then go ahead and take a look at the “Search for Pets” session.

If this session is successful, I fully expect to see a session at SES-San Jose on Pet Blogging, most likely led by whom I expect to be the next star blogger on the Bruce Clay website – Jack Jack Barone (pictured up top)…

It’s been a while since I’ve let my natural pythonesque tendencies filter out onto this blog, so I thought that the time was nigh to put a knotted handkerchief on my head and hit myself in the face with a vase of flowers while talking about how watching Monty Python as a bairn prepared me for a career in search marketing…

1. In the land of the superheroes, there’s always a need for a bicycle repair man: Yes, the on page issues are generally easy to fix, and not as sexy as generating viral content, or coming up with a social media strategy, but there are still people out there that are blocking their entire site with their robots.txt, or duplicating content across multiple pages, etc, etc. To them, getting those basics fixed can make an absolutely fantastic difference.
2. (Miss) Anne Elk’s brontosaurus theory: Some people sound like they have a great story to tell, or some secret that you can only find by listening to them, then you hear it, and realize that it’s just common sense, or ridiculous, and was a complete waste of time listening to in the first place. Figure out where the real information comes from, and avoid the disinformation from those who just like to hear the sound of their own self-important voice.
3. It’s only a flesh wound: Know when it’s time to get out of a particular line of business or service. It’s all well and fine being told that a particular area of search marketing is lucrative, but when you determine that your business model doesn’t work, figure out why and either change or get out. Don’t keep throwing good money after bad, hoping that it’ll change, before long you’ll find out that you’ve sunk so much money into it, that you won’t have a leg to stand on…
4. Always look on the Bright Side of Life: This is such a fast changing, a still relatively new industry, so there are always opportunities opening up if you keep your eyes out for them. Don’t sit back and wait for them to come to you, go out there and market yourself.
5. If a Budgie is coughing up blood, it’s a good idea to flush it down the toilet: When, for whatever reason, you have a problem with a client, and the relationship goes completely sour, with no real hope of recovery, then you have to learn when to shake hands with them and part as amicably as possible.
6. Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson: Personal Reputation Management is an issue that you need to think about, one innocuous comment, image, or video can follow you around for ever, regardless of what you do for the rest of your life.
7. The Cheese Shop Sketch: If someone comes into your site using a particular keyword, then your site had better have something to do with that keyword, and if you’re an e-commerce site, then you’d better have that product for sale, otherwise they’re not going to convert, no matter how many excuses you give them.
8. Even the Piranha brothers had a weakness: While Google is the undoubted king of search engines, who knows what will challenge their dominance in the future, although it probably won’t be a 12 foot tall hedgehog called Spiny Norman, maybe it’ll be one called Facebook?
9. Whizzo Crunchy Frog Chocolates: An unboned dead baby frog covered in lark’s vomit lovingly encased in the finest Belgian chocolate may fool people once, but it’s unlikely to do so a second time. The same goes for a website that you’re attempting to market. You can do a great job, sugarcoating the message, but if the site is abjectly horrible, either design, navigation, or functionality wise, then the visitors are not likely to come back.
10. But I didn’t eat the Salmon Mousse!: If your site is hosted on a shared server, take a look at who else is on there, and try to see if they’re likely to do things that can affect that entire C block. You don’t want your site to die by association when the Google Grim Reaper comes calling.
11. From Accountancy to Lion Taming: If you have a specialty, whether it be a particular vertical, or area of Search Marketing, and you decide that you want to do something in another area, make sure to research that area prior to leaping in. If you think you’re going to be taming an anteater, then you’re going to get one heck of a shock when you realize that you’re actually standing in a cage with the king of the beasts, with your only training being in the best use of pivot tables…
12. An African or European Swallow?: Know the right questions to ask. Prepare yourself before you have that first discovery meeting with a new client / vendor. Identify what it is that you don’t know, and that you will need to know in order to complete your SEM tasks.
13. Free Dead Dog with every jar of Coffee: In order for your marketing to function, you have to make sure that your offer is the right one to the target audience. If it’s not, you’re not going to see the conversion improvement that you’ve been paid to make happen, in fact you could see a decline if your offer is poorly thought out.
14. There is nothing quite as wonderful as money: The job of the Search Marketer is to improve the marketing of the site to increase conversions, and increase revenues, generating the best ROI possible. Of course, the reason you’re doing it is also to get some of that money flowing your way.

So there you have it, back in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, despite there being no such thing as Search Marketing, the Internet, or even personal computers, that group of Cambridge and Oxford educated gentlemen that formed Monty Python were thinking ahead to a time such as this, where their advice could shape our lives… and now for something completely different…