Search Engine Tigers

To Joe Whyte on his engagement (even if it wasn’t a Superbowl commercial)

…and to Matt Mcgee on the release of his U2 book

Yes, I know that I said I wouldn’t use Twitter, but I did recognize that I still needed to reserve my namespace to prevent anyone else from grabbing it.  Within a few hours of doing that I already had a couple of subscribers, so I gave in and started listening, then tweeting, and now I have Twhirl on my laptop, Twitterberry on my Blackberry, and a (usually) fun timesink on my hands.

Have I found Twitter useful?  I would have to say Yes.  It’s currently one of the places where there’s usually one or two good conversations in progress that you can either lurk and listen to, or actually interject yourself into.

For the couple of you that are still subscribed to this blog, despite my lack of attention to it of late, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’m over at twitter.com/simonheseltine

It seems as though more and more companies are starting to move SEM in-house, and as they do so they run into the same kind of situations over and over again.

1) The Perception of Inferiority

This occurs when management falls into either the absolute ‘rocket science SEO’ belief, or just simply the belief that because consultants charge obscene amounts of money for their services they must know a lot more than the people who’d be willing to work for the wages that the in-house staff are drawing. Sometimes the only solution to this is to let it happen (not that you can really stop it if there’s an executive champion), and watch for if there is an opportunity to learn, and if not, the company will realize that they just blew money on a resource that they didn’t need to. Ways to mitigate this perception involve keeping up communication with the executive team, assuring them that the in-house team is up to speed on the latest developments in the industry, and making sure that they are aware of the latest results from the in-house team’s efforts.

2) The Short-term Development Vicious Cycle

Since SEO produces long-term benefits, there is sometimes a tendency within a company to push development resources to work on the items that will have a more immediate effect, thus pushing the SEO tasks out further and further. Of course, this is only an issue in an environment where the development and SEM functions are separated, which is not that uncommon. Again, education is the best way to assure that the SEM items are given a fair hearing and are placed in the development queue.

3) Aiming for the Moon with a Bottle Rocket

The belief that since SEO is ‘free’ and a ‘one time thing’ with maybe some ‘minor adjustments’ over time, there isn’t that much need for staff, and as for linking, well there are automated solutions that do that for you aren’t there? Without an adequate staffing level to support the sky high targets of the SEM effort for the site(s), the chance of success (or the definition of success) is limited. This can then lead into ‘The Perception of Inferiority’, as the full job can’t be done without the full resources.

4) Departmental PPC Wars

If there are multiple departments that are involved with similar products that have competing keywords in PPC campaigns, there’s a good chance that, unless the campaigns are centrally co-ordinated, the departments will be competing against each other, with possibly undesirable results (or rather definitely undesirable results as far as the company as a whole is concerned).

5) The Helpful Developer

‘Ooh, they used H2 tags on this page. Obviously they didn’t realize that you can create custom css tags. Let me go in and fix that for them with a class=”prettyText” tag and put it up in production.”. Changes such as this can occur if the development team isn’t kept notified and informed of the reasoning behind the way the site has been put together for SEO purposes. Of course, a more formal change process would also help to alleviate a problem such as this.

6) Jack of all trades

In small companies the Search Marketer may also be the sole developer, website designer, and chief bottle washer. This invariably leads to a lack of focus in one area or another as a day is still only 24 hours in length no matter how many hats a person wears.

7) Beware the Emperor

The director that was a fuedal chieftan in previous life may set up their department as their own private fiefdom, rejecting or obstructing any inter-departmental co-operation. Different job functions that could be handled by other departments are redundantly replicated in their department, so as to give them control over that function. This can lead to Department PPC wars, and requires finesse or more likely executive management oversight to overcome.

Do you have any more examples that I’ve missed? I’m sure there are quite a few. Also, if you’re a SEMPO member feel free to check out the in-house committee as we’re always looking for input from people with in-house experience.

Now that Panama has given us the ability to manage multiple campaigns within the same account, we’ve taken full advantage of it and gone with 20 campaigns per account wherever we can. When we pull our reports we run the URL performance, as each campaign targets a different URL. Today, however, we ran into a roadblock… about 1/2 of the accounts were displaying their URLs, the rest were displaying the text “DEFAULT URL”.

After contacting Yahoo, we were told that this is due to them not yet having committed the data for this weekend. It is supposed to clear up by tomorrow, and correctly display the URLs.

Update: “Default URL” is still there. After contacting Yahoo support one more time we’ve been told that they have escalated this issue to engineering, and they expect a fix in place by Thursday.

Update2: Fixed as of Wednesday morning, a day early. Way to go Yahoo engineering.

I was all ready to put together a post about the history of the wiki (from Ward Cunningham on down) and then today some news came out about wikis. Wikipedia has implemented ‘no follow’ on all links effective immediately. What this means is that the most popular wiki site is now not passing any ‘link love’ on to any external sites that are linked to. You can still get traffic from Wikipedia, but you’re no longer going to get the fringe benefits.

Why have they gone this way? Well, as SEOmoz also recently announced, there’s just too much link spam out there (SEOmoz are controlling the links on their profile pages, they’ve had the comment links no followed for a long while). People are going out to trusted sites putting links out there in the hope that they’ll get ‘link love’. This really is the fault of the search engines, they make it known that a site is trusted based on it’s links so people go out there to get links for their sites. With wikis giving anyone the ability to create their own links, it was only to be expected that people would take advantage of it, and try to get links everywhere they could get away with it.

So what will this mean for wikipedia? It’s still going to be the ‘go to’ site, based primarily on it’s popularity within Google, but it probably won’t get as much of a workout from people in the SEO community (which their editors will probably be happy with). Now there are other wikis out there (such as this one that I started using in ‘99 long before Wikipedia was on the scene) that haven’t yet implemented no-follow, but whether they’ll follow suit is something that remains to be seen.

Yesterday I listened in on an online webinar given by Microsoft. The two main topics were demographic targeting for Adcenter, and Adlabs tools. However, the webinar got off to a very slow start due to the problems that the presenters had with Microsoft Office Meeting Live… the meeting facilitator in Redmond was doing fine, but the presenters in NYC couldn’t see the slides (not to mention the application crashed on me about 3 or 4 times over the course of the hour).

The demographic targeting was interesting (I didn’t realize the data was based on Microsoft Passport user behavior), but the adlabs tools were more interesting. Here’s a look at 4 of the tools that are available for your use (in beta mode). Naturally all data is based on MSN search data.

The first is the Keyword Group Detection tool. The idea behind this tool is to give you related terms to the keyword that you enter. This seemed fairly buggy, looking at the image below you can see what was returned to me for the term “cookie bouquet” (in case you’re wondering, I stumbled on that term after it was recommended to me as a related term for pizza), not really much related to either cookies or bouquets, unless you get a free cookie bouquet with every new lexus…

The next tool that I played with was the Keyword mutation tool. This tool finds all common misspellings of the keyword that you typed. This is a useful tool, although like the others it does seem to be limited in the keywords that will return results. i.e. “Wolverine” had no significant mutations, however big G did.

The next tool is probably the most interesting of the lot. It’s the funnel tool. With this you can see what searches people either did prior to entering the keyword, or after entering the keyword. It’s handy in that you can see the evolution of a search, and identify high quality tail searches for your particular keywords, so you can see what the user intent tends to be for your particular keywords. It may not be what you think.

The last tool that I’m going to talk about here is the seasonality tool. In theory this sounds like a great tool, giving you estimations and actuals for search terms. Unfortunately it has a couple of big problems. The keywords that can be used to show results must be selected from a limited set of keywords. Then when you select one, it appears that the actual data stops in June 2005… 18 months ago…

The tools have potential, but they’re not there yet, so it was curious that they decided to have a webinar to push them out to the public, although it does have to be said that the problems with the in-house webinar software really set the stage for these tools that aren’t ready for primetime (hence their presence in adlabs rather than actually out in adcenter).

The article discussing this on Search Engine Land can be found here. Is this Google being evil? No, it’s just them being a business. Why should they drive traffic / give implicit approval to another company when they have their own solution? (not forgetting that the data in their own solution varies depending on whether it comes from NAVTEQ or TeleAtlas). Looking at Google trends you can see how far ahead Mapquest is above the other 2 in terms of search volume on Google, so it makes perfect sense for Google to just offer their own mapping solution for local searches performed on their search engine.

According to this post on aimclear.com “Yahoo is pulling down geo-targeting features in Panama”. What exactly does this mean? Are they pulling down all geo-targeting? How would they handle that? I know that I’m working with over 200 geo-targeted advertisers in Yahoo, which took a fair amount of time to get them all transferred over to Panama. What is that going to do to those accounts? Are they just pulling down certain features in the background that we may not notice? Who knows? All we do know is based on the post above. Yahoo has not posted anything to the ‘alerts’ section of the account dashboards, so for now it seems like it’s not anything that we should be too concerned with, but we’ll keep a tight eye on our Panama accounts to see if there are any disturbing trends over the next week or so…

The title of this post is the catchphrase of one of the main characters in the British surreal sitcom “League of Gentlemen“. The idea behind the catchphrase is that the local shop owners Edward and Tubs are strongly opposed to the building of a new road into their village, which will bring people in who aren’t local, thus upsetting the equilibrium of their lives.

The analogy here isn’t too hard to find. Local businesses that don’t embrace the ‘new road’ on the web are going to have to make do with their current customer base, whereas those that do embrace the ‘new road’ and plan for the changes that they’ll have to make in order to accommodate the increase in business will be the ones that will reap the benefit.

Of course, if a business is happy as they are, and want to let opportunities go past, then they can know that at least they have company in Edward and Tubs…

As I mentioned in my mostly silly post there’s rather a fair size debate (or for some, link baiting exercise) going on around the SEM community regarding SEO. Some argue that it’s had its time, others that it’s in its infancy. I was thinking about this debate when I read an article by David Wallace on SearchRank about his experiences in front of a group of 20 small local businesses.

What shocked me a bit was when I polled the group as to who was currently doing any kind of search marketing. Two people out of the twenty raised their hands. The remaining either were not doing any search marketing of were completely unaware of its existence. We who are so embroiled in the industry often forget that there still remains a wide opportunity to reach businesses with the search marketing gospel, especially small businesses.

This really ties with the oft quoted Kelsey group statistic that “70% of small firms don’t have a website” (I believe it’s from 2005, so the number may have changed slightly now). If these companies don’t even have a website, then they’re not going to be doing any kind of search marketing, unless they use a ‘total solution’ package such as Leadstream or LocalLaunch. So why don’t they have websites, and have a search marketer working for them, pulling in all of this business that’s out there, especially if it’s so easy? Well, as Danny Sullivan rightly points out

Yes, you can invest time to learn these “simple” things. But if you know nothing about them, they can see like rocket science. Over the years, I’ve talked with plenty of people who weren’t even aware of the basic tip that every page should have a unique, descriptive title tag. They think “title” means the biggest text on the page, not the HTML title tag. Talk of HTML title tags — that IS rocket science to them.

To a lot of these people putting a website out there is a huge step, let alone doing it right and optimizing the site. I recently took a look at the website for a company I used to work for when I first came to this country. They’re a small, fairly conservative millwork company in a relatively small east coast city. The fact that they even have a website amazed me. Looking it over, I can see lots of things that they haven’t done, with the most amazing being that the only contact information on the website being their actual address, no email, no phone number. When I get some time I’m going to send them some suggestions to help them out. It won’t be rocket science for me, but it’ll probably look like that for them…