website marketing web site marketing
internet marketing search engine marketing seo marketing search engine alt tags web site optimization web site seo
Home
Download
About SpiderLoop
Resell SpiderLoop
Support
SpiderLoop WIKI
Test Drive SpiderLoop
Windows Hosting
SpiderLoop BLOG
SpiderLoop SEO Forums





Welcome to SpiderLoop web marketing.
You found a page created by the SpiderLoop SEO Control Panel:

search engine optimization company


You can download the SpiderLoop SEO control panel for free for your own web site.
Use the navigation above or click here to find out how.



Buy backlink to your site
Your backlink on our pages only $50.00 a month
941.751.3550
 Link Partners 2


TextLinks.com


Would you like to see
your RSS feed here?
Feeds.SpiderLoop.com
Link Partners

search engine optimization company

search engine optimization company Search Produced 25 Matching Articles
Belated Thursday Roundup for the Week of 4/12/09

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

  • Smashing Magazine shares 15 essential checks before launching your website. Regarding cross browser checks, I bet the process goes something like this.
  • Jeff Sliger, beloved SEOmoz member, came up with a free charity fundraising tool. Spread the word to any charities, non-profites, colleges, etc. that you know!
  • Wondering how to nail that interview? This website should help give you some pointers. (By the way, Rand and I can attest to the "Do not wear perfume" suggestion. I bet our old office still reeks of that applicant's au de toilette.)

YOUmoz entries:

Best of YOUmoz:

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

Central/South America:

UK / Europe:

Asia:

Australia:

Miscellaneous:

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

  • Marshall England is the online marketing manager for IP Commerce in Denver, CO. He oversees all SEO, SEM, SMM, online PR and email campaigns, as well as tracking and web analytics reporting. Marshall would like a new role in Internet marketing to advance his career and take on new and different challenges.
  • Angel Singh is looking for SEO, SEM and SMO positions in Seattle, WA. Angel has experience with SEO, SEM, UI, web architecture and design, and enjoys working on detaild projects.
  • Amy Reis is an SEM living in Aurora, CO. She has over 8 years of web design and marketing experience and 5 years of Internet marketing skills, including organic SEO, PPC management, and social media marketing. She's looking for a position that allows her to focus on online marketing goals as a whole and would also like to be part of a team that's forward-thinking and moving.
  • Eric Burgess is looking for an online marketing position. He has experience with building brands and managing web content, as well as project coordination, art direction, online social networking and web research, advertising and more.
  • Christie Wang from Austin, TX, is a paid search analyst who has managed multiple campaigns, performed bid management, edited ad copy, and tested tracking methods. She's also experienced with generating Internet marketing strategy and keyword research reports.
  • Lawrence Ladomery has over 10 years of experience in new media and has worked for large organizations doing web management and consulting. He's offering his design skills for hire and works primarily with text-heavy sites.
  • Ed Youngs is a directory advertising sales professional who is seeking an opportunity to leverage his skills and experience within the SEM industry.
  • Joel Goldstein is an independent consultant in Orlando, FL, who's available for hourly consulting and creating online marketing campaigns.
  • John Sisler is looking for an SEO architect/online marketing director position. He's well versed in implementing organic white-hat SEO, PPC, and link acquisition and building strategies.
  • Kimberly Wolfson is looking for a client services role or an analytical role within the digital/interactive marketing area.
  • Michael McAnally is a senior marketing major at the University of Northern Iowa, and he's focused the majority of his studies on aspects of Internet marketing and SEO. He'd love to start his career in the SEO field and has experience with the fundamentals of SEO, link building, content development, web hosting services, and PPC.
  • Rich Grosskettler is an experienced online media, product development and marketing executive. He has strong operations, product management and product marketing skills.
  • Kevin M. Rose is an Internet marketer who is looking for full-time positions in the Los Angeles area, as well as contracted work.

Happily Employed:

  • Trevor Ginn is an ecommerce consultant and entrepreneur with experience in launching online businesses.
  • Justin Britt is a link builder and SEM who works for Wasabi Marketing Elements.
  • BHaskar is an IT enthusiast from India. He's been in the IT industry for the past 10 years.
  • Annapurna K S works for GoodBazaar.com and has been doing web design and SEO since 1999.
  • Gunakesh Parmar is an SEO expert who specializes in both on and off-page optimization.
  • Ben Rush is the SEM for Premier Farnell PLC and is responsible for the search engine marketing activities of more than 35 global locations across Europe and Asia Pacific.
  • Peter Uzzi is a web designer and front-end developer who loves content, evangelizing web standards, and designing great user experiences.
  • Carmelo Jose Diaz is an online marketing analyst with over 5 years of professional work experience in the paid and organic search market sector.

Do you like this post? Yes No


Full Article
Google's Rajat Mukherjee Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: March 31, 2009

The following is the transcript of an interview of Rajat Mukherjee, product lead for Google's Custom Search Engines project.

Dr. Rajat Mukherjee is a group product manager on the search team at Google, Inc., working on several products, including Google Custom Search.

Prior to joining Google, Rajat was senior director of product management, Yahoo! Search Technology, and was responsible for managing the product platform for Yahoo! Web Search, ultimately providing innovative search products for consumers to find, use, share and expand content across the Web.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Rajat was the director of software engineering at Verity, Inc., where he was responsible for managing and creating new applications including Verity Ultraseek (formerly Inktomi Enterprise Search), Verity Enterprise Web Search, Verity Response and Verity Federator. Before Verity, Rajat was a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center, conducting research on Web technology and content management.

Rajat began his career as a research staff member at IBM´s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. There he conducted research on parallel and scalable Internet servers, high availability in clustered computing and scalable transaction processing. His experience included contributing to the design of infrastructure used during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the Deep Blue-Kasparov chess match.

Dr. Rajat Mukherjee holds a Ph.D. and a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University, as well as a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Tell me what's been going on with custom search engines?

Rajat Mukherjee: Over the last couple of years many things have happened. It's been very exciting to be part of a team that's spearheading a new hosted search paradigm. And it's been a lot of fun developing the product features with the help of an outstanding development team and watching the product grow.

Eric Enge: Can you give us a top-to-bottom overview of the major initiatives you have and the goals you are trying to accomplish?

Rajat Mukherjee: When we spoke two years ago, we had over 100,000 registered search engines. Today, we have more than one million registered custom search engines. Since I joined the project in January 2007, we have had about one hundred times growth in traffic.

So, the program has been doing really well, and we have pretty significant traffic. I think this effectively validates the need for high quality contextual search, and it proves that there is a need for this kind of product in the business world. Our goal is to satisfy this need with the best product that we can build.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. You have also focused a lot on site search, correct?

Rajat Mukherjee: We have a range in terms of product capabilities and deployment of technology. Site search is one requirement, but we also have a range of different types of search experiences.

For example, we launched a Blogger widget on Blogger's experimental site . With this, people can actually create a search experience that's not just searching their own blog, but also pages they've linked and their blogrolls. It's like a blog neighborhood, if you will.

Many personal search experiences have been created, e.g., around bookmarks, and many developers are doing similar things around their communities. So, that's one category of search engines.

Google Site Search targets businesses. There, you have a whole bunch of organizations that are developing search across a single site, or collections of sites. So, if you have a publisher with many publications, for example, you can search across all those different magazines or brands.

Then, we have interesting community-based implementations. Adobe has implemented Community Help, which allows people to search both Adobe.com as well as content from their developer communities. Thousands of sites are encompassed within Community Help, and Adobe has taken the further step of integrating this search experience into Creative Suite 4. That was very exciting. Basically, users and developers have created this range of different search experiences based on contextual needs.

Eric Enge: Right. This notion of searching comments from the community is an interesting one.

Rajat Mukherjee: Yes, I think the community aspect is something with the potential to develop and we hope to add interesting new features as we go forward. I think that's going to be an exciting area down the road.

Eric Enge: Right. Have you seen anybody just simply investing the time and building high quality search experiences by editorially selecting a set of sites to use?

Rajat Mukherjee: Yes, absolutely. If you look at About.com, they have a very interesting implementation. They have multiple sections, and each of their sections is handled by an editor or guide. They use Custom Search both within and across sections. So, they've used advanced capabilities like Linked Custom Search to create dynamic search engines that morph over time, and that's a very interesting implementation.

Eric Enge: Yes, that is interesting. How long have they had that out there?

Rajat Mukherjee: It has been around for over a year now, if I am not mistaken.

Eric Enge: That must be doing quite well for them.

Rajat Mukherjee: Correct. They've also adopted interesting advertising changes. With Custom Search, you can tune your ads to be more topical by using keywords. We use these keywords to further refine the ads that we display. Partners have seen revenue improvements with this feature.

Eric Enge: You could really do some very interesting tuning there. It's one of those things where you might pick the few obvious phrases, and find that they don't do as well as when you pick some less obvious phrases.

Rajat Mukherjee: Right. We are interested in looking into this area in greater detail and developing better technology for it, because monetization is one of the key aspects of Custom Search. This has also led to its success, because we've had monetization in place since our initial launch. Publishers are obviously benefiting from that, both in terms of getting the right ads in front of their users and monetizing search. Any improvements in this space can help our webmasters and publishers right away.

Eric Enge: Another thing I have noted is the programmability of custom search engines has increased dramatically.

Rajat Mukherjee: Yes. As I mentioned, Linked Custom Search provides users the ability to create dynamic search engines that change over time. And we update these engines automatically by reading the appropriate definitions that developers have made available to us.

In addition, we've also added a programmatic interface for management and creation of Custom Search engines. That is very interesting, because we've integrated Custom Search with several web hosting providers who've provided their users the ability to add search to their websites from the hoster's control panel. We announced this a while back with a number of hosters like BizLand, IPOWER, StartLogic and FatCow. They have implemented this provisioning API, allowing webmasters to create search engines and place search boxes on their websites without even coming to Google.

Eric Enge: So, why don't we talk a little bit about some of the other new things that have happened, such as On-Demand indexing?

Rajat Mukherjee: We've made a lot of improvements in our indexing pipeline over the last year in order to go deeper into the sites that we are searching across. We introduced On-Demand Indexing, which allows you to index specific content within 24 hours. That's very, very important. For example, when you are launching a new product on your own site, you want it to be indexed and searchable, so you can use On-Demand indexing to achieve that.

As part of these indexing improvements, we've added support for Sitemaps and integrated more tightly with Webmaster Tools. It helps to have many of these services integrated.

We just launched Google Services for Websites, a program for partners that offers integrated services from Google that are relevant to webmasters. This enhances our offerings to hosters so that their users can quickly sign up for Google services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search and AdSense.

Eric Enge: Right. It's a way of helping get it out there, and an expansion of what you did with the hosting companies already.

Rajat Mukherjee: Yes, exactly. We are looking to make it easier for hosting companies to use our APIs and services and offer them to their users at the hosting control panel

Eric Enge: What aspects of the product are you focusing on?

Rajat Mukherjee: Over the last couple of years we've done a lot of different things. I'll put them into three categories.

The first one is product improvement; features that we've added to improve the product. I think we are starting to see some really interesting implementations of dynamic custom search. We've had great feedback on our experimental Blogger gadget and we hope to improve it and make it available to all Blogger users. We're also excited about our ads improvements.

The second category is the offerings we provide targeting different classes of users. Site Search offers businesses optional ads, branding controls and greater presentation control via XML results. Business customers also have greater needs for On-Demand Indexing. AdSense for Search is for publishers who wish to monetize, and developers can take advantage of Custom Search and AJAX Search APIs. These offerings address the needs of different market segments.

The third area is how Google itself is using the technology. We use Custom Search in many of our products and services. We eat our own dog food.

In addition, Custom Search is available globally. More than half of our traffic comes from outside the US and in languages other than English, so that's exciting. Custom Search was one of the first Google products that was internationalized into forty languages in one shot. It's really pushing this global approach to the product from day-one.

Eric Enge: Right. What country outside of the US do you receive the most volume from?

Rajat Mukherjee: There are quite a few. We, of course, get a lot of results from the UK. We also have countries like Germany, France, Brazil, Turkey and China. It changes on a weekly basis. There are many languages that are showing tremendous growth in traffic, e.g., Spanish.

Eric Enge: What improvements are you making on ads?

Rajat Mukherjee: We have the ability to tune your ads through keywords that you can provide for your search engine. We are looking to expand this as we move forward in terms of being able to automatically figure out what ads we should show for a given topic. We hope to improve user experience and publisher revenues with more topical ads. And we also talked about integrating promotions. I think we talked about subscribed links last time -- we've tightly integrated that so that people can provide promotions right on top of the results for specific queries.

Eric Enge: For the benefit of people reading this interview, what exactly are subscribed links?

Rajat Mukherjee: With subscribed links, a webmaster who is providing search on his website can decide that he wants specific information to show up right on top for specific keywords. Say you are a travel website like Orbitz, you can show a special promotion that you are offering for a trip to Hawaii integrated right into the top of the search results for users who are searching for queries like "hawaii", or "maui".

We've made it easy for people to configure that. And we'll be looking to make further improvements for promotions. The idea here is that you can promote a given set of results that you know your users want to see right to the top.

Eric Enge: Tell us a little more about how Google uses Custom Search internally.

Rajat Mukherjee: We learn a lot as we use the product ourselves. Many Google sites are powered by Custom Search, for example, Google Analytics and our Help Centers. We also customized the search experiences for Google's landing pages for the 2008 Olympic Games and the 2008 elections. That's where the contextual nature of search shows right through. So, for example, if you do a search for "nuclear power" on Google, you get very good, but generic, results about nuclear power. But, if you performed the same search on the elections landing page, you would get information around the policies of both candidates during the elections. So, that was a very tightly focused search experience, and that's where custom search really does a great job.

Eric Enge: How does someone go about creating something like this politically-oriented version? What is the process?

Rajat Mukherjee: This was actually quite simple. When the election team was putting together this landing page, they decided that they wanted to have a very tightly-coupled search experience. Effectively, they decided on a number of high-quality sites, including the Convention sites, candidate sites and top political blogs. There were obviously many active blogs at that point in time.

That was done by a set of Googlers, and they used the collaborative features of custom search over a couple of days. Custom Search allows users to invite others to contribute to the search engine.

Eric Enge: Right. So, there is some up front work to decide the family of sites that you want to have included, but if you are knowledgeable about your space, you can probably do that fairly quickly, rather than trying to invent something you don't know so well.

Rajat Mukherjee: Exactly. I mean, this really confirms that people who are experts in the field can collaborate for a better user experience.

When Google celebrated its 10th anniversary, we created a timeline and we used Site Search to search the timeline. So, we've been getting a lot of feedback from internal teams in terms of features or enhancements they'd like to see in the product. So, with internal requirements and feedback from webmasters, our users have helped enhance the product significantly over the last couple of years.

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little bit about how the timeline was put together?

Rajat Mukherjee: We were trying to highlight product launches and events that have occurred over the last ten years in the development of Google as a company. An interactive timeline application was built - you should check it out. Site Search was used to search the timeline. The search user experience was very tightly coupled with the timeline. So, when you click on a search result it brings up the interactive timeline, which is a very nice AJAX-driven dynamic browse experience.

Eric Enge: It really sounds like a lot of cool things are going on as programmability is allowing different people do more aggressive things, and the outreach through distribution partners like the hosting companies.

Rajat Mukherjee: We have worked pretty hard on outreach to developers, and we have a strong developer community as well. On that front I've actually had the opportunity to present to webmasters, because Google has organized a set of SearchMasters conferences -- three over the last year - Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Brazil and, most recently, Bangalore, India. At SearchMasters we have been able to reach out to more than a thousand webmasters, talking not just about products and APIs, but also about integration with Webmaster Tools and other Google services. So, that's been really exciting.

Next month, Nick Weininger, our Tech Lead, will be participating at the World Wide Web Conference in Spain.

We also have a Custom Search session at the upcoming Google I/O developer conference in May in San Francisco.

So, we are constantly looking to reach out to our developer community. We get a lot of feedback from them and on the Custom Search user group as to what users want to see in the product.

Eric Enge: Yes, I imagine you do. Can you talk more generally about the need for such technology and where the industry is currently?

Rajat Mukherjee: I think the good news is that our effort to create a contextual search offering that's relevant and useful for business has been validated. I think over the last couple of years the growth of the product and the feedback we've gotten have been tremendously positive. So, I think we are doing really well in terms of addressing the market need.

One point I'd like to make is that we customize not just the product, but have also customized our offerings for different customer classes - webmasters, publishers, businesses, partners and developers. I think that puts us in a very good position in the industry. We cover everything, from addressing small developers' needs for personal search engines, to helping large publishers who have significant configurability and scalability needs. Our traffic is growing and we're getting positive feedback from our customers.

Eric Enge: Right. So, our good friend from the election, Joe the Plumber, could create a very simple custom search engine for his website, while a massive company like Boeing could create an entirely different kind of custom search engine.

Rajat Mukherjee: Correct. And they have different options. Those who want to monetize have the ability to do so, and they can get the product for free. Those who want to have more control can use Site Search, which is a licensed offering. So, we've made sure to address the needs of these different markets, not just focus on technology.

In terms of product, we have a lot of unique features, e.g., Linked Custom Search for dynamic behavior, the support for On-Demand Indexing and deeper coverage of sites, and topical ads. The ability to do promotions easily and drill-down into results using labels and refinements are all unique features.

The other important point is that monetization has been built into the product right from day one. It's not something that we had to figure out as we went along -- it was part of the core value proposition of the product. Now, with the APIs that we have for distribution and the features we have in the pipeline, I am really looking forward to entering the next phase of product growth. So we've created a very compelling platform offering.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, ten to one growth in the past two years is a hard act to follow.

Rajat Mukherjee: Yes. 100 times in terms of traffic! It's true and it's really exciting. And I would love to see where it is in a couple of years. In terms of future features, there are lots of different things that we are looking at adding to the product. Improving monetization will always be useful for everyone involved; it's a practical need in the market. And, if people can monetize better, especially in these times, I think that's great. A lot of people are looking to those solutions. We have been working on features around improved presentation and customization. Obviously, when you say custom search, people want to customize their search results in various ways. Today we have the ultimate end customization via XML results - you can do whatever you want - but, we want to make it easier for people to do this even without major development resources. So, simple product configurability is something we are always trying to enhance. We are looking to improve support around more structured content. Because our product is global, we are looking at better linguistic support, and there are lots of tools that Google has already developed that we can use in custom search, e.g., transliteration.

There are many other features that we'd like to add. For example, we want to add query suggestions contextual to the topic of the search engine. That's not trivial to implement.

SearchWiki on Google.com means one thing, but what does it mean in Custom Search? Who your community is, right? So, we need to look into how we deploy some of these advanced features in the context of Custom Search.

Customers always want improved analytics, and that's something that we would like to improve. I am personally a big believer in the mobile experience. So, as Smartphones become more common, what would it mean for us to provide a mobile search experience? So, these are some of the ideas that we talk about. And, of course, some of these get baked into our roadmap as we move forward.

Eric Enge: Mobile search is a very interesting animal just because of its very nature, a very challenging environment with small keyboards and more awkward navigation

Rajat Mukherjee: I agree. And I think that's where features like suggestions make a lot of sense, in terms of being able to click on something as opposed to typing it in. If you are searching in a language that's difficult to type, automatic suggestions and transliteration really help.

Eric Enge: Yes, of course. And that will play in some international environments. Well great, there's a lot going on; and it's obviously a very successful product line. Where can readers follow the latest developments?

Rajat Mukherjee: All our developments are announced on the Google Custom Search Blog.

Eric Enge: Thanks Rajat!

Rajat Mukherjee: Thank you Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Rajat Mukherjee interview here.

Other Recent Interviews



About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Full Article
Why am I seeing this dialog?

Internet Explorer 8 has a new feature that keeps you in control of your search engine default, by informing you when software attempts to change your settings.

If you are using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 or RC1, you might have seen the following dialog when installing new software:

search provider default confirmation dialog. The dialog asks the user to confirm or decline a change to the default search provider.

The default search preference is the search engine Internet Explorer uses when you type a search query into the search box in the top-right corner of the main Internet Explorer window:

the IE search box

(Wikipedia is set as my default.)

Internet Explorer also use the default search preference when you type a question into the address bar ? Try typing ?How high is Mt Everest? into the address bar.

A lot of toolbars that plug into Internet Explorer modify the user?s search preference in their installer program. Some ask (by way of a checkbox in their install program) if they should change it.

Some don?t ask clearly, and change your setting without you noticing the change before it happens. We believe this is not a good thing ? a program should never change a user?s setting without their unambiguous consent.

To counteract this, some applications or toolbars install a ?search setting protector? ? a small program that monitors your search default preference, and switches it back automatically to their search engine if any other program ever changes the setting. A lot of users have multiple toolbars installed ? and this creates a situation where toolbar installers, toolbars and ?search setting protectors? are all fighting over your search setting ? If you, or another program, ever changes the setting, you will see a variety of prompts from various ?search setting protectors?, warning you about the change.

All of the squabbling between programs means that you are not in complete control of your search preference ? your setting.

Starting in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, any toolbar that wants to change the search setting default (by setting a registry key) will trigger a ?user consent? dialog, where the requested change is explained clearly, and you are asked to approve/not approve the change. So, no program can silently change your search setting without you knowing about it.

This change in Internet Explorer does not  break any existing toolbar installers or ?search setting protector? programs ? they can still change the user?s search setting (by changing a registry key in the user?s registry) ? but when Internet Explorer starts up, you will be informed of the change, and you can allow or decline the change.

There is also a new API for setting the search default. Any application can call this API, and request that the Internet Explorer Search Default be changed. A dialog box is shown (and the application requesting the change is clearly identified) and the user can allow/not allow the change.

If a ?search setting protector? program keeps asking you to change your default, you can clearly indicate your preference (and lock them out of changing your preference in the future) by checking the ?Prevent programs from suggesting changes to my default search provider? checkbox. You can still use the Manage Search Providers command in the search box dropdown to change your default search provider at any point ? you should be able to set your search default to anything you want, without any programs interfering with it.

the search options dropdown box.

And Everest is 8,848 meters (29,029 FT) high, by the way.

Frank Olivier
Program Manager


Full Article
Angus Norton Interviewed by Eric Enge
Angus Norton is the Senior Director, Live Search, at Microsoft Corporation. Angus previously has had several other roles at Microsoft, including: Senior Director, Developer Platform Evangelism, Director, Windows Mobile, and Group Product Manager, Enterprise Servers & Tools.

Circle of Excellence award. This is an award that presented annually by CEO Steve Ballmer to a select group of employees around the globe who have delivered above & beyond results for their business, and whose performance dramatically impacted the company and those with whom they work.

Angus has also been a winner of the Microsoft Marketing Excellence Award. This award is only awarded to 5 individuals across the global business every year. Angus won the award for his contributions and business plans that helped to shape Microsoft's efforts to become a world class Enterprise Server & Tools brand. This award specifically focused on his leadership of the team that built Microsoft's SQL Server business, which ultimately took their product to the number one position in the market.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Let's talk a little about some of the general aspects of how Microsoft is focusing on search.

Angus Norton: When you look at the search engine landscape and you think about how search engines have evolved since the days of AltaVista, there has been only one fundamental shift in the value proposition for customers and their experiences in the last ten years. There has really just been one monumental shift, and that was Google.

They raised the bar on quality and relevance, but at the same time they also figured out a way to build a healthy ecosystem around it. There really hasn't been lot of innovation in terms of the search experience that customers go through as they interact with the search engine. It's kind of interesting when you think about it that way.

We are not only focused on improving the relevance of our product and the results we give,but we also have thought very deeply around this. If you had a blank sheet of paper and you are able to change the way in which the search engine works and really deliver more of an information tool like approach, what would you do? I think we are pretty uniquely positioned to be able to impact this notion of the search engine being more of an information tool.

We are actually changing that experience to see if we can drive some new change around how users work. We are really focusing in on that commercial search task to see how we can come up with a business model that delivers value to the consumer beyond purely search results, for example, such as with our cash back initiative. We are also looking to simplify key tasks within commercial search, whether the user is looking for a review, or digital camera, or travel, or whatever that.

You've seen our user experience side, we think we have got a great product and we think we are leading in the image search arena in particular. We've got an endless scrolling page, and the video search is another area where we have gotten innovative. We also think that our local search and our virtual look experiences are some of the leading experiences out there. You are going to see more innovation from us around shopping and commercial searches specifically.

Eric Enge: The other thing that I have seen in the past is that you have done a lot in terms of specific experiences in places like healthcare and mobile.

Angus Norton: In terms of search, we have to ask ourselves how we can ensure we are providing a great search experience across multiple platforms and products within that. Mobile, Firefox, Windows and IE are efficiently providing a great search experience, and mobile devices, particularly outside of US, are a very important part of that discussion. We have our mobile clients for Windows Mobile and we have a mobile search client for Blackberry Win devices. And we also have a mobile search portal as well. This is an area where we continue to invest.

Eric Enge: Now, you also did a press release recently about how the cashback is cashing in. There was some interesting metrics in that post. For example, how it was helping merchants with their results. Can you expand on that a little?

Angus Norton: We have definitely seen significant momentum around cash-back. We launched this back in May of 2008, and since then we've seen over 4½ million unique users visiting that Live Search cashback page every month, which has generated about 68,000,000 commercial queries.

The actual number of products that we are offering has increased by 30%, up to over 13,000,000 products. The advertisers that are advertising on cashback are also very positive along these dimensions. eBay has reported 50% improvements in the ROIs as a result of cash-back. On top of that, the merchants that we've added are now 20 of the top 50 online retailers in the US using cashback. Some of those advertisers have seen their ROI go up by 50%, which means they are spending more money and advertising more on cashback than they were before.

We also did a study with comScore where they found that 13% of commercial searches in the last year have been through our cash-back product.

Our overall market share in search is at 8.2%, so cashback is having a real impact. We are seeing it because we know that advertisers are moving money away from other search engines to cashback with these results as well.

Eric Enge: One of the things that you announced at PubCon was Silk Road. Can you talk about what that is?

Angus Norton: So, we announced what I like to think of as a significant expansion around our Live Search APIs. Essentially, it is a set of APIs that enables publishers and web developers to monetize their traffic research and provide their users with a customized search experience. We offer highly flexible data formats so that users, developers, or publishers can build their own search experience.

You might be curious as to why we named it Silk Road. If you know history you'll know that the original Silk Road offered opportunities for culture and technology exchange across the old Asia to European trade routes. We have a very similar thing here, an ecosystem between publishers and developers. It is a set of data formats and it's very open. It supports all the major data types, including JSON, XML, and things like that.

A site owner can use a toolkit so that more relevant results go to the publisher's site. We then use it as a search query on their site for images or video, and they can also syndicate our API for image and video searches as their own web result. We've made it very flexible so there is no daily limit on queries for the custom built systems on their site. We also don't require them to do ads.

They can just use the API anywhere they want. So just think about the difference between what you've seen in the past and this. In the past you could build a custom search engine and build up search experiences into your site. This is fine, but Yahoo and Google can do that as well. The difference for us is that we have boarder format support and we don't require ads.

The last piece to this is if you are building a Windows application. We are making it much easier for the developer that's writing an application in visual studio, visual basic or C++, C# to take our live search APIs and build search experiences within their Windows and web applications.

There is also our webmaster tools, and we are integrating the Webmaster Portal and the Silk Road APIs into one suite.

Eric Enge: Right. So, one of the big things that you mentioned was that there is not a limit on the number of queries, and no requirement to show ads. That certainly provides a lot of flexibility. What are the branding requirements associated with it?

Angus Norton: There are actually no specific brand requirements at all, but there are some quality bars that we strictly focus on to go through when they apply the Silk Road beta. There is an application they need to fill out at the Live Search Developer Center. Currently our search results do not come with any requirement to say that it is powered by Live Search.

Eric Enge: If a publisher gets his data feed as an XML feed, can he then turn around and decide that he doesn't like a site and he's going to take it out?

Angus Norton: Yes, publishers can do custom ranking. Essentially it exposes searchers to content that may be of interest to them, and then customers can impact the ranking the images and the content that they want to expose. We have tried to make it as easy as possible to do that.

Eric Enge: To think about it in broader terms, a publisher or a web developer can look at it as a data source, and then they can do what they want with it, like with any other data source.

Angus Norton: Yes, exactly. You may remember the thing that we did at Pubcon when we had a mountain bike site, and we were able to tailor that site within the category of mountain bikes because the formats are very open.

Eric Enge: Entering a search query is a very basic way to guide what data you pull from the API, but you want to restrict the scope of where search queries are allowed to pull data from, correct?

Angus Norton: That's right.

Eric Enge: So, if you are on your mountain biking site, you want to make sure that you are not getting motor biking data, assuming that's not what you want to have in your version of the search engine.

Angus Norton: Yes. The relevance of the results will be driven by our core Live Search algorithm. We are doing great work on algorithm improvement, that will translate to improvement on those folks that are using the Silk Road APIs. But, it will go both ways obviously. There is a group adoption of the Silk Road APIs that will definitely help it there. The formats of their own search engine are important, which is why we see the partnership with the community, developers and publishers.

The other area that I haven't talked too much about is that a lot of owners will tell us that whenever there is a DNS error, they lose their traffic. To help with that we have creates a DNS error toolkit. What this does is deliver relevant search results on the publisher's site instead of traditional error pages that often result in a customer abandoning the site.

We found that Microsoft.com was experiencing a huge amount of drop off with customers who have entered the wrong URL in the address box. They might put in microsoftif.com as opposed to microsoft.com, and we might lose that traffic. So we deployed this toolkit that helps you detect more and more errors and point them in the right direction.

We deployed this at microsoft.com, and they have experienced a 40% increase in the rate of people getting into microsoft.com compared to the previous error page they had. This essentially allows you to build your own custom error page so that you can retain the traffic.

Eric Enge: What are some of the sample applications you have? With this API I can envision that you can go beyond a simple search tool. If you have the ability to pull search data and manipulate it if you see fit, it would seem to me that there might be the possibility of building some higher level tools.

For example, You may have a publisher that has many other data sources, and maybe there is some way to cross reference these things and do some interesting dynamic stuff.

Angus Norton: I can give you an example of what you are saying. Say we have an application that's built in IE and it has an expense reporting tool. When I get back from Vegas and I'm doing my expenses to submit to my boss. I would enter in the name of the hotel, how much I spent with them, and the address of the hotel, if I know it. If I don't, I will normally have to open up another session, do a search on the hotel and then I'll copy and paste the hotel's address and details into my expense report.

With Silk Road I don't need to do that. I can just right click on the hotel's name, and then select Live Search for the address. Then, I can just insert the address into my expense report.

Another example would be a small Microsoft product we have called Office. Why is it that when I am in Office and I am writing a word document, I can't just right click on that word, and then click on search the web and bring in content from Wikipedia or wherever? Those are examples of firing up queries within an application without having to go out of that application to do the search.

Eric Enge: We can go beyond just having a custom search engine on your site.

Angus Norton: That's exactly right. At Microsoft, we have sort of a pedigree around platform developers in particular. We want to support the application ecosystem, not just the web ecosystem. Search is a service just like any other on the web.

So, that's definitely where we've gone here, and we think that we are pretty uniquely positioned to do that. We also have web development tools, Expression and Silverlight Visual Studio. We have a great search engine, and we have those assets that we can bring here as well. So, you are going to see more integration of other Microsoft products around our search APIs. You will see more of a search experience within other products that come out of arrangement, whether it's IE, or Office, or Visual Studio Developers.

Eric Enge: Do you envision also being actively involved in integration with third-party applications?

Angus Norton: Yes. We would definitely like to see ISVs signing up for these APIs. There is an age old question that asks whether or not search is a platform or an application. I believe that for a consumer, search is an application, but for a producer, it's a service. But, more broadly, search is a platform, and it's one of those services that is part of our Live platform. The stuff we've talked about around Azure and Live and search is one of those platform components, and Silk Road will help us deliver that.

At the Product Developer's Conference (PDC) we announced the new Azure platform. This is a set of services from identity management, to storage, to instant messaging, to email and to business applications. And generally, when you think about it, a lot of the service is needed to deliver an application to a customer, and a lot of that can be done today in the cloud. We are seeing more and more of that happen. There are certain things that need to happen on the client, and there are certain things that need to happen in the cloud.

We don't think everything can happen in the cloud, and so the goal is essentially a platform to enable developers to build applications and deliver the core set of features to the clients directly. But then, there is a set of other services we manage to deliver by Microsoft through this cloud search.

At the end of the day, we have a great search engine. But what we have that the others don't is a very broad platform story across web development, web design and the infrastructure to host that on Windows server and to deliver it with Silvelight Visual Studio. Search is one of those services like instant messaging or hotmail in that it delivers that broader approach. Google had Gmail, and they had Gtalk, but they don't have the footprint we have to be able to deliver a broader experience.

You could argue that instant messenger is the most used social networking tool on the planet today. I mean, more people are using it every day. That was really one of the first social networking tools on the planet. Hotmail is the number one free email client out there now. We want to make search an integrated part of all those experiences.

Eric Enge: I am sure there are a lot of different and interesting ways to integrate it in. What can publishers do to monetize these applications as they build them? What options do they have?

Angus Norton: We have a self serve online publisher tool that will enable publishers to earn revenue from their websites that they build using Silk Road, using our Microsoft ad platform. The other thing is that successful publishers need to be open and flexible, and they need to have unlimited knowledge on how they can serve their users. They want to engage old users and attract new users, and they want to do right from their core experience.

They don't want their site to be taken over by Microsoft, right? They want to continue that core experience they've built, and they want search to be part of it. So, we are enabling them to retain their own look and feel their sites and build a great experience for their customers, but not have to have their site taken over by Google branding, or Yahoo branding, or Microsoft branding. It just enhances what they are already doing.

We know the publishers want to retain users and attract new users. They want to have them engaged on their site and they don't want to lose them. The openness of the platform helps them build an experience that doesn't detract from their own brand. And for the first time we are able to say, you don't have to use our ads, but you can if you want to.

Eric Enge: You have also focused on a bunch of vertical areas. We talked about some of them briefly- image, video, local, shopping, commercial healthcare, etc. A second area is that you've completely opened up the search experience to people to put things more or less anywhere they want in applications. One thing we haven't actually talked much about yet is the distribution deals that you've done recently with Sun and HP. You can think of this strategy as pushing search into everything and everywhere.

Angus Norton: Yes. Sun and HP both told us that when they advertised with Live they seemed to get stronger engagement but less eyeballs, so they didn't get the volume they need or want.

The problem is that they are not delivering enough users and they are not falling to them. Acquiring traffic and users takes investment and distribution. Then, hopefully once the customer uses the product, we have a product in front of them that is good enough for them to consider as a second choice or maybe even as a primary search engine. But, we can't rely purely on the product to do that.

If you look at where Google has spent money over the last ten years, a huge percentage of their investment outside of R & D has been in distribution. They have done lot of distribution deals, and so we recognized that in order to acquire new traffic, we need to invest in that. So, computer companies is one area we were investing in. We have a global relationship with Sun today, and we have a North American distribution partnership starting with HP in January.

We think that means that our toolbar will be standard on all of those PCs, and IE with Live Search as a default will also be standard. And secondly, ISVs tend to have a broader footprint. There are obviously more downloads of an ISV application than there are on a PC shipment. A classic example of this is the Google toolbar. The Sun partnership is a huge distribution opportunity as well, so we'll be right along about toolbar with every Java Runtime Environment (JRE) that gets downloaded. That will deliver new volume for advertisers, and hopefully get our toolbar in front of end users.

As we are doing a good job with the product, hopefully they will consider us. We humbly ask that they consider us and use us more. We are just the small guy, we are #3 so we are doing as many things as we can to be scrappy and innovative to drive visibility for our product.

Eric Enge: I am having a little trouble imaging Microsoft as a small guy, but that's because I was involved in the very early stages of the PC industry.

Angus Norton: I have been at Microsoft for 14 years. It's funny that I have been involved in a lot of these businesses, and we were a small guy in most of the ones I have been involved in. I worked on the server for thirteen years with our SQL server and Windows server. Different battles for the company, but I can remember ten years or eleven years ago folks would tell me, there is no way that you can get a foothold in the database business. They said that Microsoft would never be enterprise ready, and that we don't have a database that would scale.

Now the SQL business is a multibillion-dollar business, and we are #1 in that market. So, people always don't really think about Office in Windows, but there are actually a lot of other businesses that we have built where we have been the underdog. And, we are the underdog at search, no doubt about it.

Eric Enge: Yeah. Well, it's good that you recognized it and you are acting on that basis, so it gives you the best chance of success ultimately.

Do you have anything else that you can say about the future of where this is going, like other technologies you think that you've acquired or have in hand that you think are going to be interesting when you are fully deployed?

Angus Norton: All I can tell you that we are going to continue driving the distribution and awareness of our search product like the toolbar and the core search experience. You won't see the results from those investments right away. Some of them haven't even started yet, like HP, which is starting next month. In core search we think we have made a lot of advancements in simplifying key tasks simply around instant answers, reviews and shopping.

We think that we are leading in image search and video search, and you will continue to see us invest in those areas. And, from an engineering perspective, we are going to continue to try and attract the best and brightest people to help us build the next experience around the product.

We do think that there are a huge number of opportunities for innovation around the cross-search experience. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the last ten years other than Google changing the way the game was played. We think that this industry is still very, very young, and very, very new and there are opportunities to make that experience even better. We are going to continue to invest in the long-term. So, our strategy is unchanged, and it's going to be more of the same.

Eric Enge: What about technologies like Powerset? Are these the kinds of things that we can expect to see more of in the future?

Angus Norton: You are going to see pieces of technology from Powerset and Farecast, which is our travel acquisition, creeping into the core search experience. So, if you haven't played around with our Farecast travel results, I encourage you to take a look at them. Put in a query like a flight from Seattle to New York, and you'll see Farecast stuff popping up. And then, the Powerset work, you are going to see more and more of that in the next version of the product.

Eric Enge: Thanks Angus!

Angus Norton: Thank You Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Angus Norton interview here.

Other Recent Interviews


About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Full Article
Omniture's Chris Zaharias Interviewed by Eric Enge
Published: March 2, 2009

Chris Zaharias runs Sales for SearchCenter SEM solution, and is a seasoned sales executive whose working knowledge of search marketing dates back to the late 90's. Chris has more than a dozen years of ecommerce, online marketing and enterprise technology experience, including domestic and international management positions at Netscape, RealNames - an early pioneer in the paid keyword space - and Efficient Frontier. Chris is an avid SEM writer and blogger and loves nothing more than knowing what's new in search.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: What are the areas where search and traditional marketing are intersecting?

Chris Zaharias: Advertisers have realized that there are a lot of interactions between search and other forms of marketing. If we were to talk about this four years ago, I would have said the interactions between search in the other forms of marketing and an advertiser's own business were immaterial, because the greatest opportunity for growth in search had nothing to do with that.

It had everything to do with building out keywords sets, making sure that you have the right ad copy, sending the traffic to the right page and doing all of the SEM 101-type of things that most advertisers did. What's changed now is that advertisers, at least in the US, are already buying most of or all of the keywords that they should be. They've done a lot of things, like structuring their campaigns correctly and participating on all three or four of the major search engines, as opposed to just one or two.

Those types of organic growth opportunities have dried up. But at the same time, the overall growth in search as measured by metrics like the number of searches per searcher have also come to a virtual standstill. There has been a lot more focus on how to properly manage search campaigns and what to do to set yourself apart from the competition. The competition has figured out all of those SEM 101 types of tactics because of all the writing, the conferences and the increased focus on this particular.

So this is where it really gets interesting to try and understand search marketing as part of an overall marketing mix and to use that knowledge to get more out of search specifically.

Eric Enge: To summarize, growth was sort of brainless for a while, but that is not good enough anymore.

Chris Zaharias: Yes. I used to always say that all people needed to be successful in search in the first few years was a pulse. It really wasn't that hard because it was such a green-field opportunity.

Eric Enge: Right, but in the current environment, where a lot of that is more mature, it's not sufficient. Your company might get some gains out of that, but it is not differentiated.

Chris Zaharias: Right. There is also the dynamic of the search engines themselves. Because of the slowdown in growth and the continued imperatives on their part to grow their businesses, they have now started to operate their engines with an eye towards yield maximization. There are a lot of things that search engines have introduced that increase their monetization but require more complexity in campaign management.

They have also introduced more requirements for precise and holistic management of the campaigns. This is done in order to create yield management on the part of the advertiser to combat the monetization moves that the search engines are making.

Eric Enge: So you can still get a competitive edge by better managing these second generation opportunities (problems) than the next guy.

Chris Zaharias: One of the key opportunities for growth and improvement of campaigns is conversion optimization. When you look at any given sector in paid search, you will find there are up to order of magnitude differences in the conversion rates that advertisers are getting. SEM tactics being equal, the advertisers that can convert the traffic at the highest rate are going to win.

Whereas the focus for conversion rate improvements used to be just iterating your ad copy or trying to see which page converted best, there are now requirements to get much more scientific about that conversion optimization process. One area that jumps out is known as Multivariate Testing.

Multivariate Testing is testing all of the potential variations of a landing page or a session. This can include the ad copy, landing page, and all of the different pages in the conversion funnel. And on each of the pages of the site there are multiple elements that can be tested, such as the offer itself, page layout, placement and size of graphics, font size, color schemes, and much more.

Breaking down all those variables into a set of tests often yields conclusive results as to what combinations of elements best convert the traffic.

That's the reason Omniture acquired Offermatica in late 2007. Omniture realized that the opportunity to make big strides in conversion optimization was there, but that it would require technology that marketers could manage to take control of and continually iterate through the testing process. So, one big area is conversion optimization.

That industry has been getting more refined in understanding how to manage paid search campaigns. Historically, people started out optimizing paid search to clicks to pay for their traffic. The next wave was from 2003 to 2007-2008, and it concentrated on conversion for people who are optimizing to a cost-per-order or CPA metric.

Now a new area of opportunity for greater efficiency is getting more fine-tuned in the metrics. When you look at a typical keyword campaign, you will find that high-volume keywords tend to have enough data to optimize your conversion metric.

But for the midsection and the tail of your keyword portfolio, you tend to not have enough data to optimize to conversions and you essentially have to use your best human intuition to make decisions. That keeps you from having the efficiencies you want in your campaigns.

We are seeing a lot of people use micro-conversion events, also known as leading indicator metrics.. What that might mean in a retail setting is rather than just optimizing to the conversion event, you might try to understand the ratios of events such as shopping cart fill or viewing a product detail page. You can assign values to the leading indicator metrics. You can optimize using a lot more data than if you were to just look at conversion data.

Eric Enge: That can include things like newsletter signups or contact box requests.

Chris Zaharias: There are literally hundreds of metrics, but the point is defining and assigning values to those metrics. Then you have to optimize to those metrics, which is something that very few people are doing, but something that everyone should do. It just increases the efficiencies of your search marketing campaigns that much.

As result, integrating your web analytics with your SEM Campaigns becomes very critical. If you can't be aware of those metrics or analyze data to understand the ratios of those micro-conversion events then you can't optimize.

The third area is this notion of trying to understand SEM within the context of your overall set of marketing initiatives and your overall business. There are consistent patterns of interaction between TV advertising and search that you can track, analyze and optimize. One example could be overlaying search traffic and conversion data against TV advertising data. It's clear when you look at this data that the TV activity drives search activity in a meaningful way.

What that means from a campaign management standpoint is that you need to integrate those other forms of marketing into how you manage paid search. If you know you are going to be running a set of TV campaigns, for example, you may want to adjust your bid management rules in advance of the expected rise in traffic during that time.

You could say the same thing for whatever medium you are advertising in, they are all going to have an impact on search. For that matter search is going to have an impact on other forms of marketing.

Another thing to remember is that you can't be truly efficient in the management of your search campaigns unless you take into account the direct and indirect online value that you accrue from those activities. But you also have to take into account things that might happen offline. This has been a big challenge, particularly for the SEM community, because it is comprised primarily of SEM-specific tools, vendors or agencies.

When an advertiser sees that there is a competitor that has a big offline presence that appears to dominate the paid search space for their sector, they will always ask how can they afford to consistently spend 40% more than me when I am doing everything right and taking into account all my online value that I am getting from paid search?

The answer is that the advertiser is able to understand the value that they are getting from their search campaigns in their physical stores or something along those lines.

Eric Enge: The classic scenario is that someone does a search for "women's clothing, and then, they want to go see it, they want to touch it. They decided what they wanted to buy based on search, but then they went in the store to complete the transaction.

Chris Zaharias: Yes, the online-only retailer is always going to be at a disadvantage, because they can't consummate the subset of transactions that are going to happen offline. Or, if you are looking at two advertisers that are both in search and have online and offline presences, the one that can instrument their campaign management to actually understand the exact relationship between a particular keyword and a particular offline transaction is going to be much more efficient than one that is limited to knowing that 20 percent of its business happens offline and therefore assumes that each search driven online transaction has a value of 1.2. That would be a very approximate way to do it.

What advertisers need to do is integrate their point of sale systems and their physical stores with their analytics and search marketing systems so offline data can be piped into their analytics and SEM environment. If they do this they can actually take into account the direct relationships between a query and the ultimate offline transaction.

Eric Enge: That sounds like a fairly complex process. Say someone comes to the website and they fish around for a little bit without leaving a name or anything like that behind, how do you create the correlation to when the transaction takes place in the store?

Chris Zaharias: It requires a very specific method of tracking. Let's use a call center as an example. If we are talking about a phone order, what you might do is have a particular 800 number or coupon code that you show to the person that came through Google campaign X.

This way, when they call in you can correlate that back to a particular keyword or campaign just by virtue of the number they call. If you are trying to entice people with some sort of promotion, you might want to tie back that promotion to that promotion code or a particular keyword, or particular campaign, or particular engine.

All you are doing is correlating with the particular click-through that happened from paid search to make sure that you take the value into account. The main reason I came to Omniture is because I felt like the system to do this in a much more exact fashion was going to become critical. The acquisition of Visual Sciences gives us a system that integrates with the point of sale system or the call center system. Then it sends the data from that system to our SiteCatalyst infrastructure, which is the data hub for analytics.

Because Omniture SearchCenter is integrated with SiteCatalyst, we can have SearchCenter act on any source of data, including that call center offline data as it figures out how to bid on keywords.

Eric Enge: Right. Calling a custom 800 number is actually much simpler than capturing the coupon code at the point of the sale because it is fully automated. The other thing to realize is that even though you have improved your situation greatly, you are still only capturing a percentage of the transactions. You are not capturing a hundred percent of the transactions, you are just capturing a chunk of them.

Chris Zaharias: That is true. But every increment of efficiency is good to have.

Eric Enge: Absolutely, the more information the better. Even though we know that analytics is an inexact science and everybody talks about how relative measurement is king, you are still better off every time you remove a source of error.

Chris Zaharias: Right. So, in addition to taking offline call centers and what data you have into account, to understand its impact on the search marketing campaigns and react to it, there is also the continual goal of targeting to or taking advantage of all the targeting capabilities that exist in search.

What you might do is try to use that offline data to understand the impact of search in a particular geography. We have certain clients correlating conversion data back to the geo-targeting they are doing in Google to perform geo-analyses of offline conversion data. Because the response from search tends to drive offline conversions of different amounts in different geographies, that's going to affect how a company actually implements and iterates through geo-targeting in the search engines.

Eric Enge: You might spend more on your Boston campaigns then your San Jose campaign, for example?

Chris Zaharias: Correct. That's one of the main areas where Omniture is going with search and integrating with both SiteCatalyst and the other pieces of Omniture's platform.

Eric Enge: People used to believe that the CPA was everything. Don't get me wrong, it's a great and reasonable way of measuring things, but why not use real revenue goals instead? Once that occurs, the next logical thing is to use gross profit. On each step along the way, you are eliminating a source of error.

Chris Zaharias: Exactly. I just had this conversation with someone in the credit scoring space a couple of weeks ago. They are spending $25 million plus a year on search, but the one thing that they haven't been able to do in their campaigns is optimize something other than CPA. They obviously want to optimize to profit, which requires that they take Lifetime Value (LTV) into account.

Ideally we would take the LTV data, get it into SiteCatalyst, and then use bid rules that take into account the variable profit of each transaction that they are going get from search. Say you sign someone up and they are paying a monthly fee for credit monitoring services. Compare someone who stays with them for just a one month trial then cancels, with someone who stays with them for three months, with someone who stays with them for 12 months and buys an additional product.

They are very different values, and unless you take those different values into account, you are never going to be as efficient as you could be in your search campaigns.

Eric Enge: The people who convert as a result of one group of keywords may be more likely to be long term customers than those that convert on another group of keywords.

Chris Zaharias: Right. Before the whole macroeconomic shift, the sole focus of paid search campaigns tended to be top line growth. But now we are hearing a lot more people who don't care if it makes them money or saves them money, as long as they increase profits. These types of discussions about increasing efficiency, regardless of where they come from, are a lot more prevalent.

You talk about how the search engines are trying to monetize their inventory. The need for analyzing site traffic data to find and implement negative keyword strategies is a lot more acute. And you could argue that an advertiser who is doing everything right should have as many negative keywords as positive keywords. Typically, however, an advertiser will have maybe one negative keyword for every five or ten positive keywords.

If you can help people who are making use of broad match, find all of the areas where the search engines are not properly matching the ad to the query, you can help them build out those negative keywords. This way you can drive a lot of efficiencies that the search engines are unlikely to show you.

Eric Enge: There are a lot of flavors of those kinds of things. It could be as simple as deciding between broad match versus phrase match.

Chris Zaharias: The key to finding the right match type strategy is to think of a broad match type as a baseball farm team. You have a lot of players in there, some of them are going to pan out and some of them aren't. But you need that farm league system to continually grow your campaigns. It's going to feed both the positive keywords as well as help you find all of the negative keywords that you want to avoid at all cost while using broad match.

Have you heard of this automatic match beta that's been going on at Google? It is very emblematic of the direction that the search engines are going in. Some people are discussing whether or not bid management is dead. The real discussion that should be going on is whether or not the keyword is dead. In an ideal world, search engines would go to an advertiser and say, you are in this vertical, let us figure out all the keywords and all the traffic that's appropriate for that vertical.

That would be great for the search engines because it would allow them to cut out the middleman and get a lot more revenue than the conversion data would merit. The reality is that's the opposite of what advertisers should do. Advertisers should take advantage of the ability to target at the individual keyword level to find the right buying intent to go after and capture. So search engines and advertisers are increasingly at odds with each other from a strategic perspective. This is where the online business optimization platform that Omniture is bringing to bear becomes much more compelling.

Eric Enge: Right. So, for an example let us say that you are an online shoe site and you focus on selling men's shoes. Let's say you don't sell slippers, so you really don't want to be matched up with them and you never use the word ‘slippers' in your campaigns. But, with automatic matching, you might end up showing up for that.

Chris Zaharias: Right. Think of Automatic Matching as a beta system whereby Google looks across accounts for unspent budget and then broadens the ad-to-query matching as necessary to spend the remainder of the budget.

Eric Enge: Let's talk a little bit more about TV driving search. Let's say you run a Super Bowl ad. You should see a pretty good spike in your search traffic as a result, particularly if you are smart and prominently featuring your webpage address in the ad. But in addition there will be people who search on your brand name. So, what's the best-practice for trying to measure that kind of impact?

Chris Zaharias: Well, I think that being a very unique advertising scenario, where there is an immense amount of money you are spending in an incredible short period of time, it's definitely a bit different than just the standard ongoing TV campaigns. If you are going spend that much money for a 30- or 60-second spot, you need to be confident that you are going to be able to convert that traffic at the absolute highest rate possible.

In that specific case you would be criminally negligent if you didn't do some multivariate testing in advance of that TV spot to make sure that it converts at a very optimal rate. The very first thing to think about would be testing to make sure that you have the right flow, the right offer and the right formation of pages that optimize that expensive traffic you are going to be paying for.

Another thing from an SEM management standpoint is to know exactly when your ads going to run. You are going to want to make sure you implement a set of management rules for your SEM campaigns that take into account what's likely to happen that day in advance of the Super Bowl.

You might have to up your budget for this period, or you may have to impose a different set of bid rules for a period of time after it airs to take into account what is likely to be a much higher conversion rate than you typically get.

I am also going to revert back to my long standing keyword management principles as the effect of the Super Bowl advertising trails off. And that requires some specific thought and advancement in infrastructure. Let's say you go into SearchCenter and you look on the calendar, and you impose a specific set of bid rules for this specific period of time. That could either be a period of days or a specific set of hours within the day that correspond with when your ad is going run.

Depending on the type of TV advertising that you do, you are going to have to think about different keyword sets, both positive and negative. If ever there is a time when you need to be aware of all possible misspellings of your brand name, this is it. People that are four beers into watching the Super Bowl they might recollect your brand name correctly when they see an ad or they might have variations; making sure you capture all of that is going to be critical.

Likewise, making sure that you have all the negatives set up to avoid getting traffic that you don't want becomes even more important if you are spending about 2 million bucks for a 30- or 60-second spot. You might have specific reporting that you need to see during and after the Super Bowl ad is run.

Obviously, if you are an SEM manager at a company and all of a sudden you are going to be spending 2 million bucks on a Super Bowl ad, you can bet that the reporting requirements of your senior management around your SEM campaigns are going to be very different during that time than it has been to date. You need to be able to provide near instantaneous detailed executive reporting so that they can understand the value of that investment.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can do differential measurements, correct? You can compare the results on the website for the 7 days following the event verses the results for 7 days previous to the event, for example.

Chris Zaharias: Right.

Eric Enge: So even though we may not have a precise number on the income that it brought in, we do know that income was 60% higher during that 7-day period, than the prior 7 days.

Chris Zaharias: Right. Every metric that you can imagine from transaction volume, to average transaction size, to geographic measurements to conversion rate is going to be looked at.

You need to be managing your SEM campaigns in a manner that takes the interplay into account, not just with offline marketing channels, but with other online channels as well. There is a value in someone who might sign up for a newsletter on your site as a result of seeing the ad or who might play a game that you develop on your site specific to that Super Bowl ad, and whose goal is engagement and brand awareness with the target demographic.

Being able to have your SEM systems integrated with your email campaign management systems becomes very important if you are going to achieve the engagement and conversion goals that you have.

Eric Enge: What if we have an ongoing TV campaign rather than a spike event?

Chris Zaharias: In that case you really need to make sure that you are understanding, capturing, and reacting to the value that you are getting from the offline campaigns. You will want to have your SEM management set up to be able to bid in the way you want to during the times those ads are running. Obviously, you will typically get spikes in traffic and changes in conversion rates relative to other times when you run those ads.

If you just let your system react to it, the system is inevitably going to react poorly because it has no reason to know that anything is about the change. It will react slowly and then efficiently to changes in traffic conversion rates.

What you should do is tell the system that you want to bid up or relax your CPA requirement in anticipation of a higher conversion rate or higher average order sizes during this period. Doing that analysis and implementing the rules to coordinate your TV campaigns with your search management is going to yield better results than just letting it ride.

Eric Enge: Right. It could be something as simple as being willing to take a lower margin because you expect a good spike.

Chris Zaharias: Yes and SEM systems act on historical data. It's great to use historical data, but only if it's a good representation of likely future performance, which isn't necessarily going to be the case in TV advertising.

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. So this sort of gets back to Omniture CEO Josh James's presentation at SES Chicago; the notion of the search marketer being the quarterback. Do you have any comment on why it is that the search marketer should be the one driving this process rather than someone else in marketing? Search Marketer as the Quarterback

Search Marketer as the Quarterback


This screen shot from Josh James' presentation as SES Chicago reprinted with permission)

Chris Zaharias: Search has the largest, most measurable aggregation of buying intent that has ever existed. Because the opportunities for optimization are so much greater, the controls are at the fingertips of the advertiser. This is all important because you don't get concentrations, of buying intent, expression of buying intent, and variations of buying intent in any other channel in the way that you do with search. So that aggregation of intent, the ability to analyze the data, the ability to optimize along multiple parameters, , that's likely to be the path that the rest of marketing will take.

If everyone today is worried about Google becoming a monopoly, those worries are overblown because Google actually already is a monopoly for all intents and purposes within the world of search. It has an 80-95% market share in Europe. If you count their distribution partners, they're almost at 80% in the States, and they keep taking more market share.

What's really important to know is that the real time action marketplace that's measurable and actionable within search is likely to grow into all other forms of marketing. We are a couple key technological advances away from advertisers being able to understand individual reactions to things like radio advertising, or print advertising, or billboard advertising. At which point, those offline marketing channels become measurable and actionable marketplaces where advertisers can react at the data they are seeing.

It's much more likely that the search engines with the most efficient advertising platforms will grow into those other areas. And you are already seeing that with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, with some of the interesting tests they are doing around deployment and measurement of radio advertising.

When you see things like quick response codes in Japan, which led to tens of millions of consumers reacting to print advertising by scanning a barcode with their cell phone, it becomes very real to think about the systems in the action environment that is search. The role of the search marketer as a quarterback is not just important because it's this biggest aggregation of buying intent right now, but also because the measurement, the real time optimization and the auction environment within search is likely to be the environment that's subsumes the rest of advertising, not just online advertising.

Eric Enge: So even though the rest of advertising dwarfs search from an economic standpoint, the accountability and measurability of search will eventually become the predominant way of doing everything?

Chris Zaharias: Right, exactly.

When you think about the opportunities for advertisers to take advantage of the inventory that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are aggregating, it's pretty astounding. It is obviously incredibly complex, and it becomes all the more complex for every additional channel that you have to look at.

Eric Enge: Thank you Chris!

Chris Zaharias: Yes, thanks Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Chris Zaharias interview here.

Other Recent Interviews



About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Full Article
Bill Slawski Podcast with Eric Enge
The following is a written transcript of the October 19, 2007 podcast between Bill Slawski and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I'm Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Bill Slawski, the owner of the well-known SEO by the Sea blog and the Director of search marketing at KeyRelevance, and we plan to talk about search engine ranking signals. You can see the SEO by the Sea blog website at www.seobythesea.com, and you can see the KeyRelevance site at www.keyrelevance.com. How are you doing today Bill?

Bill Slawski: I'm doing fine Eric, how are you today?

Eric Enge: Hey, I'm doing great.

Bill Slawski: That's good to hear.

Eric Enge: So, let's dive in. One of the things I really like that you've posted about a couple of times, I think a year ago October and more recently was different kinds of ranking signals that search engines can use. You covered twenty different signals in each of the two posts. And, I'd really like to get your thoughts on which of those signals that search engines might be using now that, aren't necessarily things that everybody understands that they are using now.

Bill Slawski: Okay. Just a quick thing about the genesis of those posts; I tend to cover a lot of different patents that come out from the search engines every once in a while. I find it useful to try to tie a lot of those posts together and extract ideas from them. It seems like that was a good opportunity; looking at the way search engines may take results and re-rank them. I really hadn't seen anybody do that in the industry, so I wanted to last October put a lot of those together and some of them were very obvious. We probably want to skip over those really quickly, but it's just things like filtering duplicate content out, removing multiple relevant pages from the same site, etc. Sometimes you get those indented, sometimes you don't and you see a little link, click here to see more.

There are other ones that are happening that are a little bit less obvious like sorting for country specific results. So, if the search engine thinks that you are in the UK, it might present results in a little bit different order than if they think you are in the US. You can also set language preferences on your browser or at the search engine level for most search engines, so that if your preference is English and you type in a word that might have meaning in more than one language like rendezvous.

It's going to try to give you English results rather than French results. With my background in law and legal type field, a lot of legal terms actually have French origins. Appeal, appellate, things like that, and terms like defendant, and that can get little bit confusing as search engine doesn't know which language you are speaking. There are a lot of re-rankings that happen in a smaller niche area like changing results based on commercial intent. I am not sure that any search engine really has folded that into its main search, but an example of this is Yahoo's Mindset.

When you go there, you see a little slider bar and you can slide the bar back and forth to shopping to informational, and it re-orders results. Microsoft's has produced a lot of papers on commercial intent. They may or may not use those today. Some are informational in nature, some are transactional.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when someone uses the word buy in a query, that's obviously transactional.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Right, as opposed to "digital camera reviews" which is obviously informational.

Bill Slawski: Right. So, with the search engine, if the query is informational or transactional, we rank results based upon that type of intent. One of the other things we talked about is looking at more than one query, where you have a query session. If you look for commercial results by the types of queries that you use one after another, will it change the order of results to give you more commercial results than if you view type in, let's see Portland Maine, and then you type in seafood restaurants. Perhaps the search engine starts giving you search results that have to do with seafood restaurants in Portland Maine, and give you overviews of places like that.

Eric Enge: Right. I think there is already evidence that they are aware of your location based on reverse IP lookup.

Bill Slawski: Not just reverse IP lookup, if you are using a cell phone it might do cell tower triangulation. They might use global positioning satellite information; they might have a query history, if they are collecting web history and search history, showing that you do a lot of searches in that geographic area related to them.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, it gets really interesting if you are sitting in say Boston, and you just did a query on Portland Maine, and then do a query on seafood. So, are you really looking for seafood in Boston or are you looking for seafood in Portland Maine?

Bill Slawski: Right. And, we've been hearing a little bit about generating advertising that's taking the advantage of consecutive queries to show ads related to that stuff. Could we see the same type of thing from organic results? It's possible. A lot of these ranking factors that I've written about to one degree or another are being used or are very close to being able to being used. But, like I said not always within the main context of the search engine, maybe within a smaller sphere like a mindset or with Yahoo's YQ.

It can take certain contextual information from pages that the website owners can tag. This page maybe about thirty different restaurants in Boston, but they've only tagged two of them. So, you have to really learn about those. So, the website owner is determining some of the relevance.

Personalization is another area where you've got to turn it on to get the full impact. But, there maybe things going on behind the scenes during the normal regular web search that influences the results that you see, and that aggregates data from users who search for things similar to what you search for and who tend to select pages similar to the pages you select. You may not have to be signed in or logged into personalized service for them to carry that information over from one search to another.

It maybe done based upon say triples of data. They see other searchers who perform searchers similar to you, and go to pages, select pages similar to the pages you select. There may be 2, 3, 4, 5 different queries in a row in a query session. So, that may influence the next pages that you see.

Eric Enge: Right. Since they know for example that when someone did three similar queries to you, and then they do the fourth query, they know what the majority of the people clicked on. They'd follow that pattern and they can potentially take that if it wasn't the no.#1 result and make it the no.#1 result by the time you get to it.

Bill Slawski: There is a transition there, going from a straightforward keyword matching type search to a more of a recommendation type search.

Eric Enge: What's your sense as to how much of that recommendation model is actively in place now?

Bill Slawski: It's hard to tell. I think we are moving more and more towards it, part of that is triggered by building the statistical model, and doing some machine learning. The more searches that people conduct, the more information that the search engines are able to take and use in a meaningful way, the more you'll see there. The search engines have an incredible amount of data, and when we here talk of infrastructure updates at the search engines, one of the things that we need to consider when they are talking about infrastructure is their ability to switch on and switch off different ranking mechanisms.

Eric Enge: Right, given the global distribution of their data centers.

Bill Slawski: Yes. They may assign different weights to different queries, different categories, different classes of websites, different searchers, and it's possible when you are doing a search that you even have the results from more than one ranking algorithm in front of you at once. Your choice which you click on may not increase the rank of that website, but rather increase the use of that algorithm that produced that website. (Editor: think about this comment a bit, it's a real mouthful).

Eric Enge: Right. Yeah, it's a, there are an intense number of things they can look at. One thing that I'd love to get your take on for example, is how often a particular website is bookmarked by someone, and how that can affect ranking.

Bill Slawski: There is a lot of user behavior information that search engines can collect, and user bookmarks is one of them. The amount of distance somebody scrolls down page, the amount of time somebody spends on a page before they return to search results, whether or not they will come back to a page after looking at some other pages. Those are all things that search engines use to say hey, this is an important page, this isn't an important page; this page matches well with this particular query, etc.

Bookmarking is one of those things; it's an active browsing activity that's outside the normal scope of the search engine. But, if you build in a bookmark tool, or if you watch traffic carefully through ISP information, or toolbar information you can make use of that data. Ask came out with a patent application, where they talk about looking into traffic, and seeing where people go, and seeing how long they spend at places. It even mentioned watching along as people used other search engines, and seeing what results they clicked for specific queries on those search engines.

Eric Enge: Right. The interesting thing to me is when you think about something like bookmarks, right say Google's own bookmarks, Certain people promote and put on their page something that says bookmark us. It seems to me that that would introduce a significant amount of noise into the process, in terms of using that signal compared to sites that don't have a "bookmark this" button on their content. It makes it a very difficult signal to place too much weight on.

Bill Slawski: Webmasters have always come up with ways to get people to extend their relationship with visitors. Newsletter subscriptions, the email update forms or buttons, send this page to a friend emails. You've been able to save pages on your browser as a bookmark. Bookmarking services like Del.ici.ous and others have been around for a little while. There were similar bookmark services that came out in the late 90's that didn't use a tagging system, but they were around. I think what you have to do when you talk about that sites with bookmarking buttons is recognize that if that's been used as a signal, it's just one signal of many.

One or the other patents that was interesting, that came out was actually one of three that talked about building profiles for web pages, and creating traffic estimates that was originally written in the context of paid search. But, it talked about classifying different types of sites by subject, by volume of visits, by search, by bookmarking, and so on to try to get a sense of what the site was like, and build a profile for it. A more recent patent application talked about working on profiles through sites based upon adding site search to the site, and learning what the site was like based upon how people used that site search, what they looked for, how successful they were in finding things, so on.

We have other tools that the search engines are using such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, and so on. So, they are learning a lot about how people interact with individual websites, being able to profile those websites, aggregating the profiles, finding the sites that are similar in lot of ways, that aren't taking advantage of say Google Analytics or Website Optimizer, or a bookmark this page button, so on. They are still be able to find enough points of similarity that they can put the sites together, cluster them together, so they know if these sites are somewhat alike. Bookmark activity by itself its just one signal amongst many.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the individual signal maybe noisy, but the cumulative effect of all the signals isn't.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Of course the other thing you could do, of course is group sites that have bookmark this buttons together with other sites that actively request bookmarks, and weight them differently. So, the value of their bookmark is different than the people who don't have such buttons.

Bill Slawski: Absolutely. It's same like as you take a small Alzheimer's site that deals in one particular subject matter. It's going to have a different type of profile, and provide different signals to say for instance, than a Blog. You have different quality signals, and signals of importance with the Blog like the number of RSS subscribers. By having multiple quality signals and a big number of group sites together, you can compare them based upon that.

Eric Enge: So, let's talk a little bit about how the different search engines are approaching this, at least Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Do you have a sense as to, how Google is looking at one type of signal set and Yahoo at a different type, and Microsoft looks at yet another type in terms of their emphasis.

Bill Slawski: There are different types of strategies that they maybe pursuing. We know all the major search engines focus upon keyword matching. They may try to find sites that match the internet researcher, and one of the basic tenants of information retrial is trying to be as precise as possible, and trying to recall as many pages as possible that might be relevant. We've heard from some of the folks at the search engines that those are goals, but they are at a long way towards fulfilling them, but they are trying.

You have Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, they can't be clones of each other; they can't do things exactly the same way, though they are trying to reach the same goal, but their paths to these goals are different. We have patents that may exclude one from doing the same thing that the others are doing, and we have different corporate cultures. You take a look at Yahoo which started as a directory and portal, and a lot of that remains. They try to build sites or try to acquire sites that have a strong community, such as Flickr, Del.ici.ous, and so on, where they are user based, and there is user content generation behind them.

Google started out with search, and the idea behind most of the services Google provides isn't the generation of content, but they both try to use user generated content in what they do.

Eric Enge: Yahoo appears to have more assets in that regard, because they have Del.ici.ous, and Flickr, and Yahoo Answers for example. And so, it strikes me that their approach, that they will be faster to leverage social data, and I could be wrong, but it's just something that struck me from looking at it from the outside.

Bill Slawski: It may seem like that on the surface. The goals, I think in all cases are very similar in trying to get people answers to the question that matches their intent.

The approach is different, and part of it I think does have to do with that background, it's a different background. If I want to add Microsoft to that equation, Microsoft, I think has an approach that tries to be more contextual. If you are searching for a certain type of information they try to understand the intent behind the search.

Eric Enge: That's an outgrowth of their neural net algorithm, right? It allows them to look at the data in a different way.

Bill Slawski: The rank net algorithm, which uses a machine learning approach. I think some of it comes from people from the operating file system search side coming over to the search engine and saying "okay, when we worked on calendaring searches, we tried to find the date of all events; when we worked on email searches, we tried to find the date of the email we've sent or the date of the email we just received". So, the different context of searches had different best answers. So, how can we take that and apply that to search in a search engine?

I think trying to look at context, there are the quality signals that they look for in web pages, it tends to be based more upon on site results, but they also look at on site factors of pages pointing to other pages to see how good or how poor referral that is? The page rank method of ranking pages is based upon academic citations. The more citations that point to a page the better, but the higher quality citations that point to the pages is an even better signal. Everybody can point to academic papers that maybe infamous because it does something wrong. So, we want to point to the high quality stuff, and we want to count citations that are high quality themselves.

Eric Enge: Right, did you by the way in what Microsoft did with their shopping search? They added this thing which is automatically scanning user reviews, finding criteria that a lot of users talked about for a given product, say a digital camera, and then, determining how many of those were positive versus negative, and having a rating for those criteria.

Bill Slawski: There is a hidden aspect to that that doesn't get a lot of discussion. Are you familiar with visual segmentation papers, and patents, or VIPS stuff from Microsoft?

Eric Enge: I am not, tell us about it.

Bill Slawski: Okay. The idea is that, for a lot of search we may search upon content founded specific URL's. So, we rank an individual page, or we take content from the individual page that's not necessarily the best way to go about it. Pages can be about more than one topic, right? You can have a page that's about restaurants in the Grange Village that actually reviews twenty different restaurants. So, how do you use those individual reviews in local search for Google? How do you take those individual reviews and break them down, and point them to the different restaurants.

In a local search database, Google came up with visual gap segmentation, where they are looking at not just the HTML code, but also the white spaces themselves. They are breaking the pages into different parts, and pointing the different paragraph set at the local search result, so that if you look at reviews in Google Local, you might find reviews coming from pages that have reviews for lots of different restaurants, or hotels, or different types of things.

Microsoft has talked about breaking pages down into segments, and looking at where the links appear upon those pages. That was something they were talking about a couple of years ago. They have been talking about what they call object level search, where instead of looking at the full page they are looking at parts of the pages, and they are saying "this page is showed with thirty reviews for this product, let's break it down into individual reviews, and count them each as a separate entity".

It may link to the particular product, it may just mention it, but we are going to break this down, and we are going to look to the different products, and we are going to count all the reviews, and we are going to look it to see if the reviews are positive or negative. If the site we are looking at has a ranking system, one star through five stars, we might take that information. The idea is that they are indexing information within blocks, within segments in a page instead of on a page level. Google's talked about doing that, Yahoo has recently, and a couple of patents talked about doing that too. Google talked about something called agent rank at the beginning of the year.

This is where they break down a page into segments, and look for the authors of those different segments. So, if you have a blog that has thirty comments on it from people other than a person who wrote the post, the original post, you have thirty segments, thirty objects. In agent ranking those different objects maybe ranked differently based upon the reputation of the person who wrote each one. So, we are again on a smaller scale than page ranking, which is an interesting approach.

Eric Enge: It's a way of dealing with user generated content, right? The micro analyzing the individual components, I think that's where that special analysis comes in, it's just simply recognizing the individual component.

Bill Slawski: With special analysis they have talked about being able to distinguish between header and footer, main content, sidebars, where a link within the main content on a page is worth more than a link on the sidebar maybe. Nothing says that page rank has to be evenly distributed amongst outgoing links.

Eric Enge: Right. The really simple stuff the higher up a link is in the page content, the more valuable it is, but that's too simple really for evaluating a links value. It seems intuitively more interesting to evaluate is the link embedded in the content? That removes any doubt, well it removes most doubt I should say as to a link being purchased. Links in the left navigation or on the right sidebar are certainly more subject to being a purchased link, and they are certainly more likely to not really be integrated into the unique content of that page.

One funny thing I got to tell you about which is that I had a client who had a link which they had bought, and when we work with clients we always work with people to replace those paid links with natural links. Put that aside for a moment, the link was in right in the middle of this content, so it was like this perfect hard to detect link, except after the link it said "this is really a great site I know, because they paid me to say so". So, a human review component exposed that link rather quickly I am afraid.

Bill Slawski: It's possible that an automated review system might target a window of content and take your text link itself and look for certain words that might target either flagging the content for human review or might say don't count this one. That type of extended window around the link is something I have seen alluded to.

Some of the other differences in strategies between the search engines, is how they implement universal search. One of the things that interests me is how they decide which results to show from where, and with Google we've had a number of possibilities, and a number of different models. The format of the question itself may trigger certain results, and you could have a query such as "define:" and then some word, and you will see a definition. For question and answer type stuff, you will still get a definition. If you ask a question, ask in a question format something like what is Derek Jeter's date of birth, you'll get an answer in a Q&A type format. We are seeing more information extraction ideas showing up in some of these patents. For example, simply choosing which result. Ask.com does it differently. They segment their results pages into different sections, and so having to choose whether or not they are going to display a certain result, they'll just show most of them. If you search on the name of a famous person, they are going to show celebrity type stuff.

Eric Enge: Right. They are more likely to show images. This is something that Microsoft focused on in their Searchification announcement, not only showing more images, but showing rankings for celebrities, and more.

Bill Slawski: We have had certain sections on the page that are likely to show certain different types of things; we have a section which shows query refinements, and we have an images section. With Google they are looking at a statistical model, the user query, and their user query repository. For example, consider people who have been searching for lots of pictures of lions.

They search engine will show pictures of lions, and perhaps there have been many stories in the news recently about lions. Yes, let's show those news results in there somewhere. It might be the Detroit Lions, but it's still lions, but we are getting user behavior, user information influence in what gets shown in those results, and it's filling in the gaps on a page of different types of results. So, that's a different strategy, that's one way that the search engines differ.

Eric Enge: We should wrap up, and the last question I would like to ask you is for the average webmaster out there. How do they deal with all those things in terms of trying to understand it, and how it affects what they do, or what is the smartest thing to do, because what the search engines keep telling us is to make great content, and for users, and call it a day.

Bill Slawski: It's just such a broad statement that it's really not helpful. Success really means having a good marketing plan and a good business plan, and your marketing plan should include more than just what you do online. But, when you go to the online part of it, it doesn't hurt you to setup a strong foundation for success with your website in terms of making it easy for search engines to crawl, having unique content on each page, unique titles Meta tags, so on.

Using the language that your audiences are likely to use to search for the stuff, understanding who your audiences actually are; making it easy for them to complete tasks, making a usable website, being persuasive without being overbearing, understanding where are the places that your potential customers like to go online, maybe advertising there, or participating if it's community or something like that. You go fishing where the fish are kind of thing.

The other thing I think is important is recognizing that there are different types of searches people conduct where people search for information about stuff; they try to conduct transactions, they look for ways to navigate to stuff. We've had there types of queries based upon that most searches tend to be informational, people want to find out how they can do something themselves and save money, or just find the information itself. So, if you have an Ecommerce site that doesn't help people use their information, help them making informed, shopping decisions, you are not going to get so many queries. You are not targeting as big an audience

But, if you make a site that's engaging, that makes it easier for people to shop as possible, but also helps them learn about what they maybe buying, you are that much more likely to succeed in these days of universal search, thinking more about the images that you use, adding video, thinking about audio, using the podcasts like your podcast here, those are good ideas.

You're creating an interesting user experience for your visitors; you are providing them different ways to learn about what you provide. When you throw pictures on your website, make them good, strong, interesting pictures that help supplement the content that you feed on your page, but also they can stand alone, that can by themselves are interesting and might attract people to your web pages; the same with videos, the same with podcasts.

Eric Enge: Indeed. Well great, Bill. Thanks for coming to speak with me in the audience today. I could talk about this for hours on in, but that would make the podcast a little long. So, thanks again.

Bill Slawski: Oh, thank you very much Eric. It's been a pleasure.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

Full Article
How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding
Information Outlook

Summary

This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook.

Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians.

Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians.

Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products.

Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers.

Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues.

Continue article
Advertisement


SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES

Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity).

If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence.

Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.

Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link to any page in your domain, including internal pages); pages of your site that are indexed; and pages that contain your URL in the Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN, Teoma, Lycos, AOL, and Alexa search databases. (See Figure 1.)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Once you register (it's free), you can also see overall Google page rank, the number of pages you have at each Google page rank, and whether your site is listed in the DMOZ Open Directory, one of the major search directories. Page rank is one indicator of a page's popularity and authority. Registration lets you do mass reviews of up to 16 domains and have the results e-mailed to you. (See Figure 2.)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

This has become one of my favorite tools, because it provides one of the most comprehensive snapshots of Web presence as far as the number of search engines it covers and the type of information it shows. The one area it doesn't cover is competitor comparisons. When I need to do a competitor comparison, I use the Top 10 Google Analysis and Marketleap tools.

Top 10 Google Analysis (www.Webuildpages.com/tools/internet-marketing-google.htm) provides the top 10 search results for a keyword on Google, along with the ranking of the base URL. This makes it a great competitive intelligence tool. (See Figure 3.)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The results also show the number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo; the number of backlinks for the reference URL and for the domain as a whole from Yahoo, Google PageRank, Yahoo Web Rank, and AllInAnchor (query words in anchor text of links pointing to the site); body keyword density (ratio of keywords to total words); and link keyword density (ratio of keywords in links to all links).

This tool is a good indicator of the overall standings of your competition on the two major search engines and provides information about what gives them their rankings (keyword density, number of links to the site, number of links with keywords to the site, number of pages indexed, and page ranks). By analyzing the key characteristics of the top 10 sites for a keyword, you can get a good idea of what it takes for the term to rank well. (See Figure 4.)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

To use this tool, you need to have a Google API code, available free from Google (www.google.com/apis). The API code lets you run a limited number of specialized searches on Google.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Marketleap offers a suite of free SEM tools, including the Search Engine Saturation Validator, the Link Popularity Analysis, and the Keyword Verification Tool. (See Figure 5.)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

The Search Engine Saturation Validator (www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm) shows the number of pages that several top search engines have in their databases for your Web site and the sites of up to five competitors. The search engines covered are AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo. I use this tool primarily to see how the site I'm optimizing compares with specific competitors on the number of pages indexed by the search engines. In general, the more pages a site has indexed, the greater the opportunity to be found by searchers. (See Figure 6.)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

What I like most about the Link Popularity Analysis (www.marketleap.com/publinkpop) is its ability to choose competitors with whom to compare link popularity, along with the ability to see the link popularity for 25 other Web sites in a company's industry category. If your company's industry isn't included, you can choose General, which shows the link popularity for 25 companies across a number of industries. What you get back is how your site compares with others in your industry on link popularity on the AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google/AOL, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. (See Figure 7.)

The tool shows your presence on the Web in terms of number of pages in each search engine's index that contain a link to your site, including your own Web site. Another valuable component of this tool is that it gives you an idea of whether your link numbers make your company a major player on the Web:

* Limited presence: 0-1,000 references.

* Average presence: 1,001-5,000 references.

* Above-average presence: 5,001-20,000 references.

* Contender: 20,001-100,000 references.

* Player: 100,001-500,000 references.

* 900-pound gorilla: 500,000+ references. (See Figure 8.)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Needless to say, there are very few 900-pound gorillas. In some niche industries, there may not be any sites that come close to having this many total "references" across all the major search engines. (Note: "Total" data are inflated, because they include the total of all links for the six search engines, which means many duplicates. Nevertheless, the total is a good relative indicator of what it takes to be a top site.) The General Industry category lists 14 gorilla sites; the top five are listed in Figure 9.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

By looking at the sites linking to your site, you can get an idea of the volume and quality of pages linking to you and who may be referring traffic to you. Once you know who is linking to you and the part of your site they are linking to, you can examine the areas of your site that are performing well and those that aren't. By checking out competitors who are outperforming your site, you can see who is linking to them and figure out what you need to do to improve your visibility. (See Figure 10.)

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Marketleap's Keyword Verification Tool (www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm) provides a quick way to see if your site ranks in the top 30 keywords through keyword verification. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people don't look beyond the first 30 search results. You may have numerous pages indexed with plenty of links pointing to your site, but if you're not ranked in the top 30 on keywords that people use to search for your products and services, you're not visible. The Keyword Verification Tool covers AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Google/AOL, Lycos Pro, Hotbot, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo. (See Figure 11.)

Thumbshots (http://ranking.thumbshots.com) lets you compare the top 100 results for a term on two different search engines or compare two different terms on the same search engine. You can highlight a particular site to see where the site ranks on both search engines. (See Figure 12.)

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The output is visual, with lines connecting pages that rank in the top 100 on both search engines or keywords. Pages from your site are in red, and those of other sites that have pages on both sides are in blue. Hover your mouse over any of the hundred circles and see the URL, rank, and, if available, a thumbnail image of the page. The text output includes the number of overlapping links and number of unique links. (See Figure 13.)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The comparisons also show how little duplication there is on the Web--there are usually very few connecting lines between search engines. In a search on "retail displays," only 15 pages ranked in the top 100 on both Google and Yahoo.

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

I like this tool because it shows you where your site is ranked along a 100-dot line for a phrase on two search engines or how it ranks for two different phrases on one search engine. I use it more for seeing how two different terms rank on the same search engine than for search engine comparison, as there are other tools to do that. I've used it most often for demonstrating to clients the success of using one phrase over another in their site's content. (See Figure 14.)

Link Desirability

The next two tools are designed to help you determine the "desirability" of having another site link to yours. Not all links are created equal--some can even hurt your search engine rankings. Generally, a popular site that contains a few relevant links will be a better site to seek a link from than a "link farm" site that is nothing more than a collection of links. Although Google's PageRank is considered to be an important indicator of the link popularity of a site, I don't give it much weight when I'm looking for a site from which to request a link. Instead, I look at whether the site is a good fit for the one I'm marketing, and whether a link on that site would benefit both sites. (See Figure 15.)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

One tool, Link Appeal by Webmaster Toolkit (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml), calculates the desirability rating of a link on the URL you specify. The calculation includes factors such as page rank, number of outbound links, and overall percentage of links to HTML. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not. (See Figure 16.)

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The Class C Checker (www.Webmaster-toolkit.com/class-c-checker.shtml) allows you to check whether two domains are hosted on the same Class C IP range. Links from sites that are not on the same range as your site are thought to give more weight. (See Figure 17.)

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

Search engines don't like duplication in search results, so having a different IP address can help separate sites that are located on the same servers and may share databases or programming elements. Because EBSCO hosts many sites, I use Class C Checker more for the latter purpose than for link popularity. (See Figure 18.)

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Other Ranking Tools

While the following tools aren't strictly SEM tools, I find them very valuable in my work.

The main Google search engine doesn't number results, which can make it difficult to figure out where you rank on a particular term. But Google Results (www.google.com/ie?q=&num=100&hl=en) gives numbered results. A disadvantage is that it only shows title and URL information, so identifying your site among the results can be difficult (unless your site name is in the title). I generally do a search on the main Google search engine and use the browser's Find option to see if my site's URL is in the top 30 or 100 results. If it is, I make a note of the title, then go to Google Results and redo the search. I check to see my site's numbered ranking. This is a lot easier than trying to physically count search results on a screen. (See Figures 19 and 20.)

Google Dance (www.google-dance-tool.com) has two uses. The first shows how you rank on the various Google servers; the second presents numbered results. I use this tool primarily for numbered results, unless I've discovered that I'm getting vastly different rankings when I search on a term within a short period of time. (See Figure 21.)

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Froogle (www.froogle.com) is Google's shopping search engine. It allows companies to add their products to the site free of charge. I use Froogle in two ways: to expand a site's listings on the Internet and to illustrate price comparisons. Because Froogle is free, it is the simplest way for an e-commerce company to get all its products listed online. And because Froogle results sometimes appear at the top of Google results, it's a good way to get a site to show high in rankings if it doesn't do so organically. Currently, Google is generally not allowing new sites into top-ranked positions for at least six months after launch. (See Figure 22.)

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Froogle is valuable in price comparisons because it helps me understand where my clients' pricing is compared with that of their competitors. You can do price comparisons on the other shopping search engines, but the only Web sites you find on those are companies that pay to be on them. All our e-commerce clients who meet the requirements for Froogle are added to it when ESWS redesigns a Web site. (See Figure 23.)

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Figure 9

Marketleap Top 5 Most-Linked-To Web Sites

Most-Linked-To Web Sites Number of Links

Yahoo.com 51,624,212
Mp3.com 26,652,540
Amazon.com 24,213,964
Microsoft.com 18,340,881
CNN.com 10,777,438
RELATED ARTICLE: How to use keyword saturation and popularity tools

1. Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity can help you identify some of your online competitors and determine how you compare in the terms you use to describe your products and services.

2. If you get a question about why your company Web site isn't performing as well as a competitor's site in search engine rankings, the Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Search Engine Saturation tools can illustrate why--or show why your site is doing well.

3. Librarians often spend a lot of time explaining to people why it is important to use more than one search engine in doing research. Thumbshot is a good tool to graphically show the lack of duplication in search results.

4. The Google Dance tool is good to know about if two searches for the same phrase return different results. Use it to see if Google is in the midst of updating its index.

5. Use Google Results or Google Dance for a concise list of numbered search results.

6. Froogle and the other shopping search engines are an easy and effective way to find out what your competitors are charging for your type of product and how your pricing compares. Because Froogle is a free service, it has a broader range of companies to compare with. However, Froogle also has a smaller percentage of visitors, so it may not be representative of all shopping visitors.
Full Article
Search Engine Sales vs. Search Engine Marketing
You might consider yourself a search marketer when really you only focus on sales. What's the difference? Read on.
Full Article
WordPress Search Form without Search Button
This article explains a method for displaying a WordPress search form without a search button. The user simply enters they text they would like to search for, and hits enter. While this is easy to do with the use of a hidden submit button, this method also allows for the use of a default message [...]
Full Article
In the click: want all the right people to notice your business? Then you need to make the most of today's hottest marketing method???search engine opti
In the click: want all the right people to notice your business? Then you need to make the most of today's hottest marketing method???search engine optimization
Entrepreneur

You can't resist the temptation. Fixated on your computer screen, you anxiously type keywords relevant to your business into your favorite search engine. A list of search results appears. You cringe as you spot several competitors, then grumble because your company's Web site is nowhere to be seen. Where is it? That depends. Where is your search engine marketing strategy?

Gone are the days when adding keywords in meta tags to your site produced rankings. Search engine marketing has evolved into a complex and competitive program. It's also profitable--according to a March 2003 report by Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Safa Rashtchy, online search is the most cost-effective direct-marketing method. The average cost per lead from search is 29 cents, far less than e-mail (50 cents), the Yellow Pages ($1.18), banner ads ($2.00) and direct mail ($9.94).

Gather your Web design and marketing staff; both teams are required. Understanding search engine marketing basics will help your team execute a strategy in-house or outsource it to specialists. The sooner your site is visible for relevant keywords, the sooner future customers will find your company.

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?

Many business owners are unaware that search engines feed their results to each other. For example, if you type a keyword into MSN Search on Microsoft's consumer information and entertainment site (www.msn.com), the Web site listings displayed could be from Inktomi, Microsoft or Overture. Overture provides search results not only to MSN Search, but also to AltaVista and Yahoo! Could a top site on Overture then appear as a top site on a distribution partner's site? Yes. Unfortunately, these distribution relationships change frequently, making it difficult to determine exactly where results come from.

The challenging part, however, is figuring out how to land a top position in the search engines. There are two complementary yet completely different types of methods: optimization and advertising.

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to enhancing your Web site design to make it more appealing to crawler-based search engines. An automated robot, also referred to as a spider, is sent out to crawl the Web looking for site pages to add to the search engine's database. A mathematical algorithm then determines the ranking of pages in the database for the keywords consumers use. These rankings are referred to as natural or organic listings.

Search engine advertising, on the other hand, enables you to buy listings for your keywords. Positions achieved this way are referred to as paid or sponsored listings. The most popular program in this category is pay-for-placement. These programs typically allow advertisers to open an account for $5 to $50, then bid on keywords for a minimum amount of 5 or 10 cents per click. Advertisers outbid each other for a higher position by increasing their bids by 1 cent per click. Only when a consumer clicks your listing is your account debited.

Are you disappointed to learn that search engines don't magically and objectively find the "best" sites on the Web? That's understandable. However, it was always possible to influence search results. Today, it simply costs more. Yet, for companies willing to invest the time and money, it's well worth it. The plan begins with the right set of keywords.

MAKING KEYWORDS COUNT

If you have the wrong set of terms, your site won't rank well in algorithm-based search engines. Plus, you'll waste money on pay-per-placement programs by attracting browsers, not buyers. To create an effective list of keywords, start with these suggestions:

* Company names: Start with the name of your company, products and services. Include misspellings and plural forms of words, if appropriate.

* Themes: Consider related words your customers might use to describe your business. People looking for an automobile insurance company might type in "car insurance" or "auto insurance." Perhaps drivers are likely to switch insurance providers when they buy a new car or used car, which would be good terms, too.

* Profile your competitors: Your competitors are excellent sources of ideas. Study the keywords in their Web sites and their metatags. From your browser toolbar, click on "View," and then select "Source." If they're using metatags, you'll see keywords listed at the top of the page.

Then, brainstorm ideas about how your customers are looking for your business. "Think like your customers," recommends Nacho Hernandez, 30-year-old co-founder of online Mexican grocery store MexGrocer.com, a La Jolla, California, firm that projects 2004 sales to hit more than $1 million. "A majority of our customers are English-speaking Americans, but most use Spanish keywords because they want the more authentic products. So they'll search for 'salsa verde' instead of 'green sauce,'" Hernandez says. "While we market hundreds of keywords equally split between Spanish and English, we were surprised to see [that] 440 percent more traffic and 200 percent more sales come from the Spanish words."

Of course, if nobody is looking for certain keywords, it's pointless to promote those. That's why a popularity check is important. Search engine marketers typically use Overture's free Search Term Suggestion Tool (www.overture.com) and the subscription-based program Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). These tools reveal how many people search for your keywords. Moreover, these tools and Google AdWords' free Keyword Suggestions tool (https:// adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd= keywordsandbox) will provide suggestions of related phrases consumers use. Finalize your list to include relevant yet popular keywords.

GETTING OPTIMAL RESULTS

Modifying your site to please the search engine spiders can be tedious. Be prepared to wait weeks or months for your site's natural rankings to improve. Although top listings aren't guaranteed, time-consuming efforts can pay off.

"The credibility boost is huge," says Gary Salzman, 47-year-old co-founder of coffee resource retailer site WholeLatteLove.com. The Victor, New York-based business projects 2004 sales of more than $10 million. "Consumers see that natural listings are awarded to highly relevant sites. That's the match they want."

To make your site relevant for your keywords, it's important to realize that sites don't compete against other sites for rankings. It's Web page against Web page. Therefore, each site page needs to be assigned a set of keywords. Focus on the pages that have valuable content for your visitors and are good for new visitors to land on first. A few places your keywords need to be include:

* Meta tags: This tactic alone has absolutely no impact on your rankings, but your keywords still need to be in the meta title, description and keyword tags of each site page you'd like ranked. The page title and description are often used as the Web site listing in the search results.

* Alternative text (ALT tag): Mouse over an image, and you may see a text box appear if the Web designer has used alternative text. Try to use a different, but related, phrase for each ALT tag on a page.

* Page copy: The keywords you want your site to rank well for must be in your page copy. The thought is, if your site visitors can see them, then your page is relevant for those terms.

* Hyperlinks within your site: Don't link "click here" copy to other pages within your site. Hyperlink keyword phrases instead, because search engines follow these links and the keywords in them.

Link popularity is also a chief ingredient in an SEO campaign. Your site needs to link to other related sites and, more important, well-ranked and content-relevant sites should link to yours. Run a search for your keywords in Google or Teoma (www.teoma. com) and evaluate the natural listings. Contact sites that aren't direct competitors, and offer to trade links or buy one. Marketleap (www.marketleap. com) has a free Link Popularity Check tool which shows you how many pages link to yours and how many link to your competitors.

You're not done yet. Once your site is optimized, a majority of search engines need to be notified to crawl your site. Unfortunately, most search engines now require an inclusion fee. It may be a per-URL fee, a fixed per-click fee on any site rankings you achieve, or a combination of both. Inktomi, Overture and Teoma are examples. Google is still free and will index your site on its own; however, you can use the "Add URL" form if your site isn't in its database.

"Analyze, optimize, submit, monitor, then repeat the process," says Shari Thurow, webmaster and marketing director of SEO firm Grantastic Designs and author of Search Engine Visibility. "Getting top-10 positions and maintaining them is an ongoing process. A site should always get consistent, high-quality traffic from the search engines," Thurow adds. "It's also an ongoing challenge to determine what competitors are doing to achieve search engine visibility."

Thurow recommends evaluating site statistics reports monthly. Once your site is fully optimized and submitted to the search engines, maintenance can usually be done on a quarterly basis.

Is your anxiety level increasing yet? Don't worry. There's a quick way to get any position you want. Just buy it.

BUYING YOUR WAY TO THE TOP

Pay-for-placement is the easy way to get a top position in search results. Open an account, then choose your keywords, set keyword bids, write a title and description for each keyword or group of keywords, then designate a landing page for each keyword or group of keywords. Your ad listings will be live as soon as editors approve them. Typically, these listings are placed under a "Sponsored Listing" type of header to set them apart from natural listings.

On FindWhat.com, Kanoodle.com and Overture, positions are awarded to the highest bidder. A one-penny bid over an advertiser moves your listing above his. On Google AdWords, positions are given based on the combination of bid amount and click-through rate. That means the highest bid doesn't automatically get the number-one spot. Consumers are part of the voting process. Ad listings that aren't clicked will drop.

Wondering how often to update your bids? Watch your competitors. If they perform daily or weekly updates, you'll probably need to do the same to keep the positions you want. Maintaining a top-three to top-five position is important, because those generally appear as sponsored listings across the distribution network. That means greater visibility and resulting traffic.

Bid management tools such as BidRank and PPC Pro automate this process for you. Companies such as Atlas OnePoint (formerly Go Toast, www.atlasonepoint.com) and Did-it.com even offer tools that manage your bids based on your cost-per-lead or cost-per-sale goals. Pay-per-click is still time-consuming to manage, but at least the results are instantaneous and often rewarding. For example, these campaigns added more than 60 percent to WholeLatteLove.com's total growth in 2003.

Tools alone won't improve your conversion rates. Compelling ad listings and landing pages that persuade people to complete an intended action make or break your results.

"Don't misrepresent your offer," warns Salzman. He noticed that out of 60 competing ad listings for "espresso machine reviews," only 38 percent showed what they said they would in their ad copy. "Consumers make snap judgments in seconds. Lose their trust, and they'll back out of your site to click on your competitors' listings. The back button is not your friend."

Don't panic over this crash course in search engine marketing. In addition to the resources listed here, you can turn to SearchEngineWatch.com, the educational hub for search engine marketers. You can also meet with search engine representatives and marketing experts at Jupitermedia's Search Engine Strategies conferences, or breathe easier by outsourcing your campaigns. Just make sure your Web site can be found by using relevant keywords. Your customers are waiting.

GET PROFESSIONAL HELP

Do you prefer to let a team of specialists worry about fluctuating algorithms and bids? You're not alone. However, finding a quality search engine marketing firm is challenging, especially for search engine optimization (SEO), because much of it happens behind the scenes, and you can't easily tell if a company is using ethical tactics. Here are a few tips:

* Find the experts. Read articles and books, and attend conferences to identify the companies with strong industry visibility. Even if they're not good matches for you, they could recommend other reputable firms.

* Interview firms. Don't be afraid to quiz companies about their marketing philosophies, process, tools, reporting and results. Ask them to define spam, then refer to your resources to see if experts agree or disagree.

* Avoid responding to e-mail spam. The "Get a number-one position for $99" spam is likely from companies that will spare the search engines, too.

* Speak to client references. Ask them to describe their experiences, results and recommendations for working with the company you're interviewing.

* Outsource. Some companies manage their own paid placement campaigns in-house while other companies manage SEO. Find out what your options are.

Programs and pricing vary tremendously in this industry. However, with a little research, you'll find the right marketing partner.

TABOO TACTICS

There are good and bad search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Good methods can improve your rankings. Bad tactics put your site in danger of losing rankings, getting kicked out of the search engines' databases, and possibly being banned forever. The following activities are considered spam, and, if caught, your site could pay the penalties:

1. Stuffing keywords in your meta tags: Repeating a keyword too many times in your meta tags is a red flag. Study other top-ranked sites to see what seems to be an acceptable range.

2. Hiding keywords: For example, avoid hiding text on your pages by making it the same color as your background.

3. Using tiny text: Think tiny text is too difficult to read? Maybe by your visitors, but not by spiders.

4. Using redirects: This code is placed on a Web page to send visitors to another page without the visitors clicking any links.

5. Linking with free-for-art sites: These sites link to each other for the sole purpose of improving their link popularity. Don't link to or from them.

These aren't the only dangerous SEO tactics. But they're some of the oldest and most obvious forms of spam, so avoid using them.
Full Article
9 Ways Search Engines Can Personalize Your Search Results
by Jeff Quipp from SearchEnginePeople.com. Personalization of search results is very important to the future success of any search engine, and its an effort well underway with many of the big 3 search engines as we speak. If its true that the key success factors of search are: a. reliability [...]
Full Article
Eric Enge and David Szetela Discuss PPC Optimization
Podcast Date: October 24, 2008

The following is a written transcript of the October 24, 2008 podcast with David Szetela of Clix Marketing and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hello everybody, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am pleased to be here today with David Szetela of Clix Marketing. You can see his website at www.clixmarketing.com, that's c-l-i-x marketing.com. Thanks for joining us today, David.

David Szetela: Thank you, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Enge: Indeed, so we thought we would talk a little bit about what's going on in the world of broad match. Let us start just by talking about some of the general problems with broad match if we can, and then expand into the way Google has expanded it recently, making it potentially a lot more dangerous for advertisers.

David Szetela: Got it. So broad match is one of the keyword match types that can be used in Google Adwords PPC Campaign, and basically the way the broad match is supposed to work is for a given keyword, let's say a two-word keyword for example like red sneakers, Google was supposed to display the advertisers ad when somebody does search using both of those words in any combination.

So, broad match will match the keyword red sneakers to "looking for sneakers that are red" as well as "I want the red colored sneakers", so the point I am trying to make is the words, the keyword will be matched to a search term when that search term contains those two words in any combination with any intervening words that might occur in the search query.

So about a year ago, maybe a little more than a year ago, Google decided that that they would start matching keywords, broad match keywords, to a broader range of synonyms, and their official explanation for this is that they are helping advertisers who don't have the time or the imagination to bid on all of the variations of keyword that they should be bidding on.

Eric Enge: Right, maroon for example might be a synonym for red.

David Szetela: That's right. My official stance on Google is they are not evil, at the same time they are a publicly-traded profit-making company, so this is an example of a move that they made to both benefit some advertisers and benefit the shareholders as well, because increasing the number of search queries that match a keyword displace the ad more frequently and therefore I gets more click money for Google. Hopefully, that means more click money for the advertisers as well, but in practice there is a problem, and the problem is that Google's software matches the keyword to a variety of search queries that is way too broad.

I will give you an example, let's say the advertiser is a sneaker manufacturer and they sell red sneakers and they sell a lot of them. Well, Google might match that keyword with a word that has synonyms for each of the individual words. So for example, they might match, if someone typed in a search term where can I see a picture of Ruby slippers?, the ad for red sneakers might come up because of the fact that Google decides that they have matched the word red to ruby and sneakers to slippers.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: Obviously that's a problem because the ad is not at all relevant to the search query, and Google might say or some might say that's not really a problem because if the ad display and the ad is pertinent to the search term then the person doing the search will not click on it. Well, there are two problems with that explanation, one is that if the ad comes in reaction to a search term that's irrelevant, the ad accrues an impression and the click through rate is worse and the quality scores worse, so that's a problem.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: A bigger problem is something that I have been trying with calling the Szetela Theorem which is that people will click on anything. Basically Eric, when we start talking about content I will describe this again, but basically you can assume that no matter how irrelevant the ad to a search query, some people that use that search query will click on the ad, and I think it's intuitively obvious that all of those clicks and combination will be less likely to convert, so the net effect is impressions go up, clicks go down, the clicks that do come through a low conversion rate, so that in a nutshell is the expanded broad match problem.

Eric Enge: Right, so it seems like you have two options: you can spend more money and get less results or you can spend more money and get less results. Let's talk about how we can avoid this problem or at least minimize it.

David Szetela: Yeah, there are three good ways to minimize it. I will start with the most extreme, and by the way we have tested all of these methods. I also worked out a couple of methods with the help of my good friend Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster, who's a brilliant guy.

Here are those three ways - #1 is just don't broad match on one word and two word keywords, okay. So, that's kind of the most prudent, safest method; just don't bid on them. And as a segue into method #2, I will say that if an advertiser has a sufficient number and variety of phrase match and exact match versions of dangerous one-word and two-word keywords, then they should be covering most of the bases. So again, solution #1 is just don't bid on one-word and two-word variations of keywords, broad match versions of those keywords.

Variation #2 is at the other extreme, which is keep them, and this is actually Google's suggestion, which is go ahead and run one word and two word broad match keywords, but use a very useful report called the search query report that does a pretty good job of showing the advertiser the search queries that are matching the keywords in the ad group. So basically, this is how we first found that the bad matches were happening, running the search query report and seeing things like Ruby slippers, mauve high-heeled things like that, that Google was, that search queries that Google was matching to our keywords.

Then, Google's recommendation continues by saying then the advertisers should use negative keywords to try to make sure that such bad matches don't occur in the future. Well, I think that could be a fine strategy for advertisers with relatively small campaigns, with relatively small number of keywords; because it takes a lot of time #1 and #2 it, Matt and I coined the phrase, it's like playing Bob the Weasel, it's basically closing to barn door after the horse has gone or scrambling to negative out bad matches after the money has been spent.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: So, for our clients, we concluded that basically closing the barn door once a week or once a day was basically prohibitively time-consuming and not really staunching the flow of ad money.

Eric Enge: Right, so that the preferred tactic then is the, take the one-word and two-word phrase and exact and phrase match them.

David Szetela: Right, but here is one trick, and this is solution #3 and I have to credit Matt for this, which is let's take the example of red sneakers again. The phrase match version of red sneakers would match the search query I am looking for red color sneakers but it would not match the search query I am looking for sneakers that are red, because phrase match only matches search queries with the same words in the same order.

So, the way to mitigate this is, and I will through a quick step-by-step process which is the way we are handling it, and that is #1 stop bidding on one-word and two-word broad match keywords, #2 make sure that the phrase match and exact match versions of all those keywords that you might turn off do exist in your campaign, and #3 add phrase matched versions that are the inverse of the two-word broad match keyword. So if you bid on phrase match red sneakers and phrase match sneakers red, then you will cover the widest variety of almost all of the matches that you might have gotten with broad match if it were correctly, it wasn't expanded out.

Eric Enge: Right. So, that's very cool. Well, super. Why don't we talk a little bit about ways to turbo charge your Google content advertising?

David Szetela: Yeah, okay, before we get into that I just remembered one thing that I really do need to include and that is 3 months or 4 months ago Google introduce yet another feature very similar to expanded broad match called Automatic Match. And I am not going into detail about it, just realize the fact that it's like broad match but on steroids, and it results in an even greater number of inappropriate ads being triggered by keywords where the search query and keywords bear no resemblance to each other.

So, my recommendation for most advertisers is to definitely do not use automatic match, turn it off if it's on; the only exception again is the small advertisers with small ad groups or small overall campaigns with a small number of keywords that just don't have the time to manage a campaign as tightly as others.

Eric Enge: Alright.

David Szetela: I hope I saved some listeners a lot of money.

Eric Enge: I imagine you did, and so let's talk about content advertising.

David Szetela: Okay, in a nutshell, and by the way I want reference to our blog where there is a lot of information about expanded broad match and content match or content advertising and also to the 30-Installment Search Engine Watch column that I did on content advertising, so I am going to summarize the best advice from those 30 columns in about 10 seconds to 45 seconds.

Okay, the #1 reason why advertisers do not succeed on the content network is they don't realize that best practices for content network PPC Advertising are much, much different from best practices in search. So here are the top three tips, #1 never run a combined search and content campaign. Unfortunately, this is the condition by default in Google and Yahoo and Microsoft too. So basically, if you have combined search and content campaigns, turn off the content. If you are creating new campaigns, create separate campaigns for search and separate campaigns for content; just do that and you will save the lot of money.

Tip #2 is that one of the main reasons that, one of main ways that content and search campaigns are different is that the keywords function completely differently. In a content campaign, the keywords should be the words that appear most frequently on the kinds of sites where the advertiser wants their ads to appear.

So one of the examples I give in the column is, a company that sells bodybuilding equipment and they realize that their target audience is also interested in hunting, so basically they want to put their ads on sites where hunters hangout. So basically, their keyword list would be all about hunting, it would be big-game hunting, I don't know hunting very well so I am not going to do well on these keywords, but let's just say the keywords are all about hunting; so that the ad which may even be addressed to hunters like "hey hunters, want to make sure that you are physically fit for the next hunting trip come to our body building website" it seems counter intuitive to search advertisers because they are used to making sure that their keywords match search queries, search queries match the ad and it's all about the product and service.

To be successful at content advertising, you have to start thinking about what kinds of sites do I want my ads to appear on and sometimes that's a demographic group sometimes it is a special interest group, so the keywords, if you just follow this one tenet you will do fine, and that is the keywords in a content keyword targeted campaign should be the words that would appear most frequently on the target group of websites.

Eric Enge: Right, because ultimately this is display advertising, it's a different environment, right? And, someone is on a website, this is about hunting site, they are not really thinking about bodybuilding when they get there, but because the demographic matches right, that might be good place for you to run your ads.

David Szetela: Absolutely. In concert with that, tip #3 is exactly as you just said Eric, content advertising is much more like display advertising, or print advertising, or television, radio; basically the ad is interrupting the main event which is the content that the website visitor came to view.

Search advertisers are used to writing ads that assume that the person looking at the ad came to the page with an interest in what the ad might be selling, just the opposite occurs when an ad appears in a website, the site visitor and the person who is looking at the page came for the content and the ads are tangential to the content. So, the ad has a responsibility that every ad has but it's even sharper with content ads, and that is it's got to jump up the page and scream I have got something for you, so it has to, its first duty is to distract attention away from the content and to the ad.

So, I go into probably two installments of this in the column using imperative words, using exclamation points, using very, very strong offers in the ad are all good practices. Now, the good news is that, and this is another major difference between content and search; with content ads you are not penalized if your ad text does not correspond directly to the keywords and if you think about my explanation of the keywords you will see why that's true.

So, there is lot more latitude the advertiser has in the language that they can use in the ads, they could and should basically jump off the page, grab this site visitor by the throat and convince them that there is something to gain by clicking through to the website.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: And by the way, I go into a lot of detail in the column about non-text ads because as many people have probably noticed there are some really great non-text ads that do a great job of distracting attention away from the content. Sometimes obnoxiously so, but if you do, the advertisers do their job right, they are making a very logical, credible connection between the content, the ad, and the website that's offering the product or service.

Eric Enge: So, right I mean at the end of the day, if your mission is to be a distraction, which it is in this environment to some degree, then embrace that mission. I think that's a great tip. This so much opportunity I think in content advertising because very few people do it that well.

David Szetela: Yeah, I mean the time right now is perfect to start using it because #1 at the available click inventory, the number of possible impressions and clicks is huge and growing faster than search and #2 as you just pointed out, since it has traditionally been very scary to advertisers there is much less competition in the content network than there is in the searching network, where the competition is huge and is driven and the cost per click clicks up way out of the range of some advertisers.

Eric Enge: Alright, cool. So let's move to our third topic and talk about different types of keyword variations that people should have in their ad groups.

David Szetela: Great topic! The backdrop to this is that people type some crazy things into that search box and sometimes you can blame the literacy, sometimes you can blame different styles, sometimes there is just no explanation; but we have spent a lot of time in our company doing research into what people actually type into the search box. And so, I will give you three tips out of many that I believe every advertiser should be using in every campaign.

#1 is when a noun appears in a keyword list, the advertiser should bid on three different plural versions of that noun or that noun within a search phrase. And those plural versions are the correct one, and at least two incorrect ones. So if the keyword is a red sneaker, then obviously the keyword red sneaker should be included, but also red sneakers with sneaker's and red sneakers with sneakers'. People use the incorrect pluralizations all the time and Google let's you bid on them separately.

We have frequently found that there are more impressions and more clicks on the keywords that are incorrect pluralizations, and we would not have gotten those if we had just bid on the singular version of the noun or just the correct pluralization of the noun, so that's tip #1. Tip #2 is I am going to, it's kind of 2a and 2b, 2a is many savvy advertisers bid on their trade names, let us say the name of their company.

Eric Enge: Sure.

David Szetela: The slightly more savvier bid on the domain name and the URL of their company because the fact is that people doing searches, many people, and I am talking about uneducated people, I have watched lots of my educated friends do this, they don't even use the address bar or the address field on the browser, they just go directly to Google or Yahoo, they type the domain name into the search box, they don't go immediately to the site, but generally the listing for the site comes up first in organic and then they click on it and then go to the site.

What is less well-known and well-practiced is that, again people type very strange variations of domain names and URLs into the search box. So, we routinely bid on, I think we are hitting up to 250 or 300 different variations of domain names for every brand name or domain name that's we bid on. And I am talking about things like "www (space) domain name.co", things like if the domain name is two words like Clix Marketing, they enter "http://www.clix(space) marketing.com" where they accidentally put a space in.

And if the advertiser is not bidding on that, then the searcher even though they know exactly what they are looking for will not find the site, because the site won't come up in natural and it won't come up in an ad. So that's 2a, 2b is frequently when people are looking for specific product or service, they start by saying to themselves, I wonder if there is a site out there that is named exactly this product or service. So, an example of that is red sneakers; if someone is get set on buying a set of red sneakers right now, many people will say I wonder if there is a redsneakers.com and type that search term into the search box on the search engine.

Another best practice is to find your best multiword keywords or even one-word keyword and bid on all of the domain name variations and URL variations of that word, and you will be very surprised to find that lots of people typing crazy things and the clicks are cheap and the conversions are high.

Eric Enge: Well great David, I think those are some great tips that can really help people who are new or even fairly advanced in paid search and content advertising jack up their campaigns. So, thanks for joining us today.

David Szetela: My pleasure and I just wanted to add that I would love to hear from listeners; I would love to hear success stories based on what I have tried to teach and also be happy to answer any questions. My email addresses david@clixmarketing.com.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Full Article
Rails Hosting Leader Engine Yard Named 'Cool Vendor' by Gartner (TopHosts.com)
Ruby on Rails Web hosting provider, Engine Yard considered 'innovative, impactful and insightful in the cloud computing system and application infrastructure market'.
Full Article
Searching for Bloggers Near You
Want to meet local bloggers in your area? A new service from Blogdigger pinpoints bloggers by their physical location in the United States, with coverage soon to be extended to cities throughout the world.
Full Article
Hitwise Reports Surge in Gift Card Searches as Last Minute Gift Ideas

Hitwise reported today that the share of US Internet searches for "gift cards" surged 109% for the week ending December 16th, 2006 vs the previous week as online shoppers looked for last minute gift ideas. Some of the fastest growing Gift card searches include "american express gift cards" up 184%, "itunes gift card" up 69%, and "visa gift cards" up 19%.

“For the second year now, we’ve seen a pattern of increased searches on gift cards as Christmas day approaches,” said Bill Tancer general manager of global research at Hitwise. “This year branded credit and charge gift cards dominated top searches as gift givers opted for the most flexibility for their gift recipients.”

Now that shipping deadlines have mostly passed, online shoppers will probably start looking at digital / email-able gift certificates that can be purchased right up until the last minute.

Happy Holidays!


Full Article
Scrutiny grows on company tax breaks to gain jobs (AP)
<p><a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/taxes/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090419/ap_on_re_us/tax_breaks_scrutiny"><img src="http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20090419/capt.bf2ebb87710e4a52a9790d9be26a8065.tax_breaks_scrutiny__co201.jpg?x=130&y=95&q=85&sig=jJdC3dC3vx_4aMMZZdjD9Q--" align="left" height="95" width="130" alt="FILE - This Jan. 2003 file photo, shows the world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co in Akron, Ohio. (AP Photo/Phil Long, File)" border="0" /></a>AP - The time-honored swap of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the promise of thousands of jobs is under more scrutiny as states slash spending to shore up their budgets.</p><br clear="all"/>
Full Article
Searching Google for Girls
Search engines are popping up left and right. With people fiddling and tinkering with open source directories, and API's. But i have never came across something like this....

Are you a girl? A girl that loves searching? Better yet, a girl that loves searching on Google? Why not try Girgle?

There is really nothing new as far as search technology goes here. Girgle is really just a pretty landing page for the AdSense search tool. Pretty might not even be the word. Its landing page is a little malformed with its heart shape thingy. The developer might have something, but they might want to spend a bit more time making it at least appear a little prettier.

Thanks to Nathan for spotting this site!

UPDATE: Girgle has changed their site to a "million dollar pixel homepage". Thanks for the notification Orang
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments


Full Article
Let the World know your Website
How it works :

Now when i say drive traffic don`t imagine that you go into a car and you drive :) , people need to know about your Website and what you have to offer there ( can be information, chat, sales, news anything that Google aproves p.s read Google policy ). I will now teach you how to do that in few ways and i`ll update this page when i fiind more ( please contact me if you know more i`ll add them here ).

On internet people search information with search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN this 3 are the main search engines but they are more.
Search Engines:

I will now give a list of search engines, the free ones like i mentioned you can do money with free resources on internet if you use them:

• Google search engine Submit here to make it easy and faster for your Website to be indexed visit Google Webmasters Tools, you must be logged into Google AdSense before, and submit the information Submit here.

• Yahoo search engine login to Yahoo mail before Submit here.

• MSN search engine MSN.

Besides this 3 they are Websites that include you in 10-100 search engines at onces like this ones:

• Submitexpress www.submitexpress.com also very important on this Website you will fiind a meta tag analyzer that will generate a raport of your Website and you will know what you have done wrong or right analyzer.

You can link exchange at
http://www.freestuff4you.phpnet.us/directory/

Full Article
FORBIDDEN - Dec 20,2007
Queen of Myspace, Forbidden, aka Christine Dolce joins us live on Baker Thursday. Last show of the year will be a hoot for sure. Call in with your questions for Forbidden!

2008 | christine dolce | radio | bakermedia | bakerradio | blogtalkradio | business | creative | design | end of year | entertainment | facebook | forbidden | linkedin | makeup | media | myspace | networking | online | web 2.0 | web site


Full Article
Tracking a package through MSN Search
MSN has just announced that you can track packages through its MSN Search portal.

To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.

MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.

Who knew that search could be this exciting?
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments


Full Article
BAKERRADIO'S BlogTalkRadio Internal - Dec 11,2007
Come listen for an interview with BlogTalkRadio founder and CEO, Alan Levy. It will be a little serious, and a LOT of fun!

life | myspace | social network | society | weekend | work. | bakerradio | bakers | blogtalkradio | btr internal | career | comedy | current | entertainment | facebook | internet radio | alan levy | bakermedia


Full Article
Would you allow others to scan your hard drive in the name of personalization?"
Microsoft is kicking an idea around about developing a personalized search function on MSN Search using personal content stored on an individual's computers.
Really Personal Search
Microsoft Attempts To Make Search Truly Personal

Apparently, the idea revolves around using MSN Desktop Search to acquire said personal data. This would then be fed to MSN Search and personalized search based on the contents of your computer would be delivered.

What are your thoughts concerning MSN's approach to personalized search? It seems kind of "Orwellian" to me.
Full Article
5 Ways Companies Half-Ass Their SEO Efforts
Why it matters and how to prevent the same mistakes… A good search engine optimization strategy requires a difficult mix of analytical prowess, creativity, and a detail-oriented mindset. While not all of us are able to decipher algorithmic formulas or draft the most powerful piece of linkbait; we can improve in almost every aspect of [...]
Full Article
Revisited Local Search Engine Optimization
Roughly a year ago, local search engine optimization was all the rage - the new frontier in search engine marketing. For a while, it seemed that everyone was interested in the local search angle - even multi-national companies. However, for many companies selling products or services to the entire United States, or even globally, it [...]
Full Article
Search engine optimization tutorial
Step By Step Page Optimization Starting at the top of your index/home page something like this: (After your logo or header graphic) 1) A heading tag that includes a keyword(s) or keyword phrases. A heading tag is bigger and bolder text than normal body text, so a search engine places more importance on it because you emphasize [...]
Full Article
You Searched for search engine optimization company and found 25 results
To Search again please click the search words below.

HOME › website marketing › web site marketing › internet marketing › search engine marketing › seo marketing › search engine alt tags › web site optimization › web site seo › search engine postion › web site search position › web design marketing › seo company › search engine optimization company › sem company › internet SEM › web SEM › optimize my web site › optimizing my web site › web site optimizing › seo firm › sem firm › seo position › sem postition › Google SEO › Yahoo SEO › Google marketing › Google search engine marketing › Google search engine optimization › optimize my web site for google › market my web site for google › web site META tags › web page marketing › web page META tags › META tags › search engine key words › key words optimization › key words generator › seo key words › seo key word generation › key word optimizer › page ranking › web page ranking › trade links › free back links › back links for my web site › back links software › back links program › seo affiliate program › seo backlinks › buy back links › trade back links › seo link trading › link trading script › free back links script › internet marketing strategy › search engine marketing strategy › google site map › google sitemap › search engine algorithm › asp net search engine optimization › asp net web marketing › asp net internet marketing › asp net SEO application › web design meta tags › asp net programming › asp net programmer markeing › asp net marketing tools › asp net marketing tool › asp net SEO plug in › SEO with asp net › asp net SEO module › buy my widgets › search engine optimization › search engine optimisation › affiliate internet marketing › free internet marketing tools › affiliate marketing › internet marketing seo › internet marketing service › internet marketing solution › internet marketing tools › internet marketing advertising company › internet marketing master › ecommerce internet marketing › internet marketing seo search › internet marketing resell › seo affiliates › internet marketing and advertising › internet marketing plan › internet marketing search › local internet marketing › website affiliate program › web affiliate programs › affiliate programs › webmaster affiliate program › join affiliate program › internet marketing affiliate program › internet affiliate program › free affiliate program › new affiliate program › money affiliate program › internet marketing resource › web business › online marketing business › increase web traffic › search marketing › make money › residual income › make money on the internet › online money › making money › affiliate software › pay per click SEO › quality SEO › SEO forum › Search engine optimization blog › seo software › free seo software › asp net seo software › SEO prices › RSS seo marketing › RSS feeds seo marketing › seo support › seo and hosting › asp net master pages seo › search engine meta tags › intenet marketing company › internet marketing companies › website marketing companies › website marketing company › website marketing secrets › website marketing services › internet marketing services › website marketing tips › website marketing plan › website marketing ideas › internet marketing secrets › internet marketing tips › internet marketing ideas › automated seo › automated internet marketing › automated search engine optimization › automated seo marketing › automated seo control panel › seo control panel › automated seo submissions › automated meta tags › automated link trade › free text links › free textlinks › internet marketing online › internet marketing business › internet marketing advertising › marketing advertising › marketing online › marketing software › marketing › web marketing › web internet marketing › internet marketing program › strategic marketing › marketing companies › small business marketing › marketing promotion › marketing and advertising › product marketing › advertising › SEO advertising › online business marketing › marketing web design › seo search engine optimization › search engine optimizing › search engine optimization marketing › search engine optimization service › internet search engine optimization › search engine optimization services › search engine optimization consulting › organic search engine optimization › site search engine optimization › search engine optimization specialist › effective search engine optimization › search engine optimization seo services › internet marketing search engine optimization › search engine optimization search engine › search engine ranking › search engine placement › search engine positioning › seo service › seo services › seo search engine › website promotion › keyword optimization › seo expert › seo companies › search engine optimization keywords
Q: What is the Best search engine optimization company solution strategy? A: SpiderLoop | search engine optimization company › Best search engine optimization company › automated search engine optimization company › strategy search engine optimization company › plan search engine optimization company › services search engine optimization company › search engine optimization company
Buy back links
Your backlink on one of our pages only $50.00 a month 941.751.3550
Link Partners
Download SpiderLoop SEO control panel now
What is SpiderLoop? A quick Reference:

SpiderLoop is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Control Panel, that you install on your web site. Once installed it does several things for your web site.

It will:                                Have questions? Need help? call now toll free ( 1.888.273.0833 )

  • CREATE TARGETED ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE download now
  • create quality content and articles for your web site that is indexed by search engines.
  • allow you to quickly trade links with other SpiderLoop users creating backlinks.
  • optimize your web site for the search engines by creating and managing your meta tags
  • allow you to purchase one way backlinks
  • It has several plugins available
    • Create and send your own news letter
    • Dynamically generate a sitemap for your site
    • Create and publish Google Base Feeds
    • Create and publish RSS feeds
  • Manage Google Adsense code on your pages
  • Manage banners on your pages.

Some Pages you should visit before leaving this site.

Do you own an SEO company SEM company or hosting company? SEO affiliate program
You may be missing an income stream. SEO companies can reach clients that can not afford your regular service. SEM companies can add value to their pay per click efforts, and asp.net hosting companies can generate a whole new revenue from existing clients with the SEO affiliate program
search engine postion web site search position web design marketing
seo company
About SpiderLoop free trial
Download SpiderLoop
search engine optimization company
sem company



Copyright 2009 -2010 MMK Technologies
Terms of service (use) | Billing Agreement		 internet SEM