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April 27, 2006

Doctors, Prostates, Web Development, & SEO Companies

I had lunch last week with a friend who shared an interesting story. He went to see his family physician for a routine physical. His family doc did the physical and took some blood for a standard workup based on my friend’s age. The physical went extremely well and his doctor said he was in great shape. A week later, the physician called my friend with the bloodwork results. One of the tests was related to the health of his prostate and this number was 3x higher than it should have been. My friend asked his family doctor what he should do and the doctor said to come into his office immediately and he’ll remove his prostate. When my friend asked if he had done any prostatectomies, the doctor said he did it all the time and even some of his literature heralded his proficiency at removing prostates.

Same story. Different friend…

The next day, I had lunch with another friend who shared a similar story. He went to work for a new company who gave him the task of finding vendors to build and market the company’s web site. He did some searching and found a very good web development company who built his new employer a very professional, well designed web site, perfect for the company’s target audience. After several months, the site was still looking great, but a look at the site’s analytics showed that the search engines hadn’t indexed any of the site’s pages and was receiving no traffic. My friend went back to the web development company and asked them what he should do and they said they would optimize his pages and submit them to hundreds of search engines. My friend remembered seeing that the company did have information on their site about optimizing web pages and doing search engine submissions.

I’ve met a few physicians that practice family medicine as well as surgery and they are damn good at both. But, they are rare jems and few and far betweeen.

My career includes several years working in the medical field. I worked closely with some highly skilled family physicians as well as urologists specializing in men’s health issues. The family docs took care of an enormous number of ailments, but always knew exactly when to refer patients to other physicians who focused their work specifially on particular health ailments. The referrals were unidirectional as the Urologists didn’t practice family medicine – they left that to their highly trained colleagues.

Of course, this not unique to the health system I worked in. This referral network is based on rock-solid collegial respect and has a history with firm roots. It has worked for many, many years and will continue to do so.

Although we see a lot of stories as described above, we frequently get web development inquiries and have successfully networked with a few companies that take care of these inquiries as well as our clientele when they have unmet web development needs.. These same companies call on us when their client sites need traffic from search engines.

I propose that more web development companies and SEO companies plant more seeds together and start growing a similar network.

Posted by doug at 12:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

Is Anyone Still Leading an M-Life?

Comes now a very bold, it's-about-time dictum from Advertising Age, that galloping-toward-extinction dinosaur of old media:

It is bordering on derogation of duty for a marketer today to commit to a campaign that isn't integrated, particularly in terms of the way it marries offline components with the use of Web tools such as search and even online retail, yet many still start their years by parceling out budgets into media-by-media silos, sometimes even competing agencies, that often don't communicate, much less collaborate.

We see the media silo effect frequently on the SEM side, as a brand will have committed a budget for the year and then, with a new product launch, have no water left in the well for extending out search efforts to meet and integrate in the mix real-time. A companion AdAge.com article has a wonderful exemplar of this phenomenon, frozen in time by its sheer incompetence:

After a consumer's curiosity is piqued by watching a broadcast branding ad, they head straight to the Internet to uncover more information. If the advertiser didn't invest in keywords on search engines, they end up where AT&T did after spending millions to introduce m-life (its mobile initiative) in Super Bowl ads four years ago. Consumers flocked online to find out what m-life was. But since the telecom hadn't purchased any search terms related to the ads, consumers remained clueless about the concept. AT&T was nowhere.

Nowhere indeed. But we do know that an m-load of cash was flushed into the old media silo of Ogilvy and Mather to make m-life come to life; so how much would it cost to make m-life die? A simple 301, search friends, and now we have before our eyes the greatest, most breathtaking disappearance act in non-integrated branding history: http://www.mlife.com

Posted by john at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

If You Build It, Will They Want To Come?

I’ve heard people say that advertising is all about creating need. I disagree; I think it is more basic. I think it’s all about curiosity. I was reminded of this over the past few weeks as I have been driving home from work by the smallest, and most intriguing little sign I kept passing.

What could this sign be about? Is it about a group of people with concerns about this road? Could it be some clever new business that is opening up on this road? I was reminded of this question every day when I drove to and from work until finally I could stand it no longer. As soon as I got in front of a computer again the first thing I did was search for this site, and you know what I found………a nicely done site advertising this persons home for sale. Now I’m not in the market for a house but I was so impressed with how this little curiosity piquing sign had drawn me in that I reviewed the whole site!

I have been reminded that although a site can be ranked well does it inspire curiosity? Does the search listing stick in the mind’s eye? Does it become an itch that we just need to scratch? I love the movie Field of Dreams in which the famous line is “If you build it, they will come�. Well, in the web world it’s good to remember that we can build it, but what will make them want to come? Maybe more importantly, what will make them want to stay?

Good advertising can come in many forms, big and small, cheap and expensive, but the best part about effective advertising it is part that inspires curiosity. Curiosity combined with relevancy is a hard pairing to beat, so let the creative juices flow. You never know who may be “driving� by your sign.

Oh and by the way, in case you’re in the market for a home here’s the link.

Posted by brent at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Link Building in Film

If we paid better attention to the great filmmakers, we would have a much better name for Link Building. Wouldn't your response rate improve dramatically if you were in the Homage (pronounce O-mäj for instant film snob status) Building business?

Great filmmakers link out whenever the opportunity presents itself. Scorsese’s best include La Motta mumbling the contender speech from On the Waterfront, and this visual link from Tommy D to the original film outlaw in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. The image does not appear within a scene, but on its own following a scene, just like the original.

You have also seen that link in the intro to Tombstone.

Everybody links to Hitchcock. Imagine what his PageRank would be if he hadn’t been penalized for duplicate content following Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake. De Palma has made a brilliant career of linking to Hitchcock, but his best link – and the best link to the Odessa Steps sequence – comes from The Untouchables.

Terror in the Aisles is 84 minutes of links to the best horror films, proving that a links page can be worthwhile as long as it is focused and/or narrated by Donald Pleasance.

We link for the same reasons that filmmakers link. We increase meaning of a given subject by linking it to another known source. Contrarily, we can send traffic to a lesser-known source that we feel is worthy of greater attention. Like filmmakers (and search engines), we think in terms of links. We express ourselves in terms of what has already been expressed. And audiences (human and search engine) identify us based on to whom we link, so we impact our rank based on such choices.

Choose links wisely, but do link!

Posted by tom at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

Site Changes and the Casualty of Causality

Suppose you make a slight change to your site - for example, you change the sitewide anchor text leading to your services page. A month later, you've dropped below the fold on page 1 for your "money phrase," when you used to be in the top three.

Trouble is, neither the old anchor text nor the new anchor text used that exact form of the money phrase. But it's the only thing that you've done in the last 30 days to the site, so that has to be it, right?

Unfortunately, about 95% of site owners would immediately deduce that the anchor text change was the culprit, and immediately, they'd change it back. But if that didn't work, what would you do next?

One of the downfalls of a highly metricized industry is that we expect answers. We don't necessarily mind problems, because typically, given enough variables, we can identify the problem and overcome it: A/B testing. Tweaking meta descriptions to increase clickthrough. Changing nav structure to increase index counts. And so on.

But many site owners insist on finding answers where no answers - no easy answers, anyway - exist. They insist on assigning causality to the nearest suspicious variable, and in doing so, end up cutting themselves on Occam's razor. Take the example above, where the "only" thing that has changed is the anchor text. To find other suspects beyond the "anchor text" theory and to find other possible causes of the rankings drop, let's look more closely at what else changed (or may have changed) in the preceding 30 days:

• The sites you link to have linked to new sites.
• The links pointing to your site (and all other sites) are one month older.
• Your site has added no new content.
• The site that used to sit below the fold got tired of it and did some optimization of its own.
• The domain of every site in the SERP has aged a month.
• Premium ads increased from one to two, thus pushing another organic site below the fold and altering the organic clickthough distribution.

That's just a small sample. Sometimes, the SEO who knows the most is the one who truly knows how little s/he knows, and is willing to test multiple scenarios to solve the client's problem.

Posted by erik at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

SEO: The New Establishment in Online Marketing

I'll get the disclaimer out of the way: I think the Million Dollar Homepage was a brilliant and cunning concept, and like many, I rooted for founder Alex Tew as his little boxes filled up with garish, cryptic signs.

The brilliance lay in the site's ability to run the gamut from creation to supernova in only a few short months - and making Tew a millionaire in the process. The cunning lay in the inventor's keen method of creating a concept that simultaneously raids the bank vault and boobytraps it so others will never enjoy the same haul.

As many predicted, wannabes (here are two examples, although there are thousands) learned that "first-mover" status really does mean something.

But wait. Even for the first movers, what exactly did they get? Here's what they saw, and what they have to look forward to:

Do any of the pixel buyers expect that line to shoot up again? Maybe a new PR campaign - something like "Hey, we're still sold out!"? I'm sure that many of the sites that spent $100, $500, even $1000 could have eeked out enough conversions to make it worthwhile, but 25 businesses spent $3500 or more, and some spent as much as $10-15,000 - some even after the initial spike. Ouch.

As SEO celebrates its 10th birthday, it's worth noting that online marketing dollars can be spent to give you a chart more like the following:

In online marketing, old-school, organic SEO isn't the only game in town, but it's one of the surest. It's like a solid investment in a fund with a proven track record. Pixel advertising, and whatever other flavors of the month that follow, are like scratch-offs. A few will win big. The great majority will lose.

Posted by erik at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

Stopping Short on Brand Search Repution

Search Reputation, that grande brand dame of the corporate boardroom, has just become a bit more difficult to please. While most big brand boardrooms are finally just learning to be mindful of the brand itself in the SERPs, a new study by Hitwise, as reported by ClickZ News, illustrates there's a bit more to worry about than just one keyword:

The number of brand-related searchers diverted away from a brand's site can also be affected by other words associated with the trademark. When people searched for "allstate," for example, 83 percent ended up on the brand's Web sites. But when "allstate insurance" was the search term, only 74 percent of searchers found their way to the company's sites.

We've always referred to that here as "Brand +". And we've learned that while most companies have a big algorithmic advantage out of the blocks on Brand + phrases simply due to "Brand" they own being a large part of "Brand +", they aren't always leveraging that advantage, and thus suffering unnecessarily in the SERPs, for primarily two reasons:

1) They aren't aware of the exact "+" composition of "Brand +". Read: keyword research.

2) They don't use these full Brand + compositions in html text copy on page, anywhere.

Other factors obtain, of course, and if it were really that simplistic Search Reputation Management wouldn't be the burgeoning subset of SEO it is today. Yet the above two points are really foundational elements to any Brand + issues becoming resolved.

We like to start by reminding them how much time, money, and years were spent building the brand. Why stop short on the + side of things?

Posted by john at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 14, 2006

My Love Of SEO Is Egging Me On

It's Friday!

Some of us are celebrating Good Friday and Easter this Sunday as others have already started their Passover rituals. So, it's no surprise to me that today is a bit slow on the SEO sales front.

I'm getting lots of voicemails, out of office replies, and find myself forced to use email as my primary way of communicating with clients and prospects alike. It's all good to me though. My love of SEO keeps egging me on to keep makin’ them calls and droppin’ them voicemails even though a lot of people aren’t available today.

It's a special weekend for a lot of us and I can't help but think about grandma's famous turkey dinner anyway. I'm practically salivating just thinking about it.

Have a great weekend everyone! Oh, and try not to drink too much of that special brew or vino this Sunday! ; ^ )

Posted by sean at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

Search Engine Management on a Friendly Level

I have long come to terms with the fact that search engine marketing services cannot be of use in the event of most offline emergencies. If a bomb is moments from detonation or my fellow man is stalked by an ugly mob with redcurrants, my ability to optimize a web page seems inconsequential. Our industry, mighty though it is, leaves me with a lower hero quotient when I put on my civvies.

That is until now!

An old friend called me yesterday. More than a few years ago, he gave some quotes to an acquaintance that was struggling to complete an article about an unsavory topic. She, in turn, made the article about him. This has been the source of great embarrassment, as anyone – friends, family, business associates – who googles him sees this article at #1.

My friend needs search engine management just like McDonald’s, but not on a super sized scale, although You would think the two entities were reversed in terms of respective concern. He’ll jot down Doogie Howser nightcaps on a well-named blogger account for a few months. Maybe a few external links, and the first results page will be his.

Emergency averted. Add a few points to the hero quotient.

After all, he is not a business battling entire sites. He is a human battling one article. I left my friend with the following thought to end this episode, ala Doogie.

… besides, if Traci Lords has a clean first results page, I don't think it should be that difficult for anyone else!

Posted by tom at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Note to Self: Check Out Google Calendar - 8-9 am.

For over a year we've been hearing rumblings about Google Calendar, and Charlene Li was the first person I noticed who'd actually seen it.

Without further ado, here's the exclusive shot of the Google Calendar interface you've been waiting for:

That's a joke - sort of. Access has been sporadic all night, reminding me of the surprisingly resource-draining release of Google Analytics, which had to sit in the time-out corner after a quarter-million signups last November.

Even before I saw the Google Calendar interface, which is cool enough in its light-blue-trademark-Googlish-AJAXity, I got lost in thinking of the unprecedented ways Google will be able to integrate ads into your life when it decides you're ready for them.

Suppose you decide to have "Dinner at Buca" at 9pm. Contextually, Google could conceivably offer to make a reservation by linking to any of the Buca locations near your ZIP code. You could also get offers from Maggiano's, in the untimely event that Buca is full. And expect full integration with Google Maps to show you nearby cafes offering dessert.

Not that any of this is bad, of course. We're getting pretty used to it.

Posted by erik at 02:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2006

Why Does Google Hide its Zeitgeist?

In preparation for a post even less informative than this one, I was looking for the home page of Google Zeitgeist. While I'm usually pretty good at guessing where Google keeps its content, it often keeps me wondering about whether it's a subdomain of the main site (such as Google Base) or a folder off the TLD (such as Analytics).

So when I finally searched for [google zeitgeist], I was disappointed at the options. I clicked over on what I quickly figured was the page I wanted, only to find the UK version. Then there is Canada's. There's also a link to a services.google.com page so cleverly coded that its title doesn't fall within a <.head> tag.

I decided to do a site-specific search for it, hoping I'd find the right page. I didn't, but I found a page that knew the page ("friend of a friend" sort of thing).

From there, I hit "Zeitgeist home" and finally found it. By that time, I didn't even want it anymore, but I did wonder why I had such a hard time finding it. And there it was, in the source:

<.meta content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" name="ROBOTS">

Why on earth would this page be set with those attributes? Is Google afraid too many people will see the rising popularity of queries for [masters], [katie couric], or the [gospel of judas]?

There's a joke there - somewhere - involving betrayal, Matt Lauer, and a 5-iron, but I spent so much time finding the page itself I don't have time to work it out.

Posted by erik at 11:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 10, 2006

The Latent Value of a Fast-Forwarded Ad

Regular riders on the Wagon will recall my disdain for all things Nielsen. I have to admit, though, that those mendacious media ratings men (and women, to be sure) have taken a giant leap towards truth and accuracy in reporting with their latest extrapolation of what the nation's 110 million households are watching based on 5,100 strong.

In a surprising effort to break out what households are watching from whether they are also watching the ads in between, they have now TIVOized ratings down to television minute molecules:

By overlaying minute-by-minute data and DVR ratings - which provide a "live" category and a "live plus seven day" number - the new data provides the average audience for each minute, including minutes containing ads, and serves as a proxy for commercial ratings.

The surprises stop there; only 1% of DVR users are actually watching the ads in between the programming they are capturing. But the punch line comes in that old media spin, with a fresh twist of incredulity:

Networks argue that ads seen in fast-forward mode still offer value, providing at least some exposure.

If buyers buy this, what of the unclicked click in PPC Advertising?

Posted by john at 08:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 07, 2006

Good Content Gets Lost

I’ve been a Lost fan since it’s inception and have marveled at the overall masterful script writing. I’ve also been a 24 fan for some time and thoroughly enjoy the equally masterful writing for that show as well.

I have recently found the official podcasts for both shows and must say this is where the two shows content diverges. The Lost podcast turns out to be an extension of the wonderful creativity shown in the actual show, while the 24 podcast seems to be an afterthought. Now the cruddy podcast for 24 isn’t going to make me stop watching the show, but it has stopped me from poking around their website, seeing more ad’s etc. On the converse, the Lost podcast is so good that it leaves me searching for more.

In the Search Enging Marketing arena good content is not just good for your home or landing page, it’s good for all of your pages. It helps with SEO efforts but it also provides just plain good stuff for your sites visitors. And like the Lost podcast hopefully your inside page content can keep your site visitors searching for more instead of looking for the exit.

Posted by brent at 04:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2006

MSN Not Available for Interview, I Guess

Wooooooops!

The Wagon had planned an in-depth interview with MSN today. We were going to discuss their aggressive attempt to overtake Google as the premiere search engine.

Unfortunately, MSN grew pale after our first question, and could only repeat a strange, almost cryptic statement. Anyway, below is an excerpt from the interview:

I'm hearing much about your plans to compete with Google. Can we have a look at your future service?

I see. Well then, could we have a look at your present service?

How about your past service?

Sorry, I expected a little more from the interview. Boy, is my face red or what?

Posted by tom at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google Base Continues March Across SERPian Border

Google Base keeps rolling out into regular SERPs.

People started noticing Autos earlier this week, and I saw some recipe results this morning. My thoughts are mixed. For searches like real estate and recipes (sample), the Google Base box can be helpful (where "helpful" is defined as matching the intent of the user query).

For searches like autos (such as [toyota camry] shown below}, I don't think it's helpful. I know enough about certain verticals and user behavior to know that a search for [toyota camry] isn't particularly interested in finding a Toyota Camry for sale nearby.

It's still very early in the game, and no one is sure exactly how these results will come to rest on the page, but as organic results get shoved further and further down the page, Google begins to lose the interface simplicity that once differentiated it.

Posted by erik at 08:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 04, 2006

A Bottomless Cup of SEO

At our house, coffee makers seem to last about as long as congressional campaign promises. By the time we realize just how much they've let us down, we can hardly wait until the next election.

In my latest round of pre-purchase coffee maker research, I came across some interesting marketing claims. One famous manufacturer was touting its latest model, and one of its big improvements was that instead of 10 cups, the new model brewed 12. More important, it brewed those 12 cups with a water reservoir and pot that were exactly the same size as the 10-cup model.

Interested, I probed a bit deeper in some shopping forums. Turns out the claims were true. Sort of. The older model brewed only 10 cups. But with that model, each cup was six ounces. The new coffee maker did brew 12 cups of coffee. But for this model, the definition of a "cup" was five ounces. Thus "more" cups with no change in footprint.

The quick moral (and SEO tie-in) is that in an SEO campaign, for clients and vendors alike, you need to make sure that everyone is defining "success" the same way - and the right way - consistently.

One client recently expressed concern that the company's rankings - for a few phrases they had picked arbitrarily before our campaign started, without any sort of keyword research - had declined. This, to them, was a reason for concern, even though search traffic had risen about 30% and the quality of the leads was rising noticeably. Pulling clients away from a rankings-based success model is always surprisingly tough.

Whether you're buying a coffee maker or running an SEO campaign, everyone's goal should the same: a giant, high-quality buzz.

Posted by erik at 11:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

A Search Reputation Storm on the Horizon

They know the storm's a comin'. One has to imagine pesky results three and four in the search for [mcdonalds] on Google may very well be joined by the upcoming book and film in the top ten, pushing out the tidy .ca, .co.uk, .au, or .sg international domains the Golden Arches have constructed to aid the global fastfood aficionado.

Yet amidst the gathering, ominous clouds, for which even a "war council" has been convened, according to the AD AGE story--

Even though details of the film are closely guarded -- it's being filmed under the code name "Coyote" -- McDonald's has gotten enough wind of the plot to warn franchisees. Both projects have been key topics in recent meetings at the Golden Arches, the latest two weeks ago, when McDonald's executives outlined plans to the U.S. franchisee advertising committee to fend off any potential damage.

--you'll note nary a word in the article about potential repercussions at the search engines. And it's not because they don't expect just the type of buzz that would immediately propel a constellation of sites to the top:

Indeed, where industry executives could easily pooh-pooh the low-budget documentary "Super Size Me," it will be much more challenging for McDonald's to deflect the potential impact on consumer attitudes of a star-studded drama from one the hottest film producers on the planet.

No, it's likely because they just don't know it will hit them algorithmically. At least in the highest places where decisions are made. If and when it does, though, you can be sure there will be a panicked, digital "war council" convened --replete with at least a few spam advocating mad-hatters-- and a furious wave of SEO retrofitting will ensue.

If you're interested in Search Reputation Management this is just too perfect a laboratory setting not to regularly grab some goggles from time to time for a peak at the results. They might very well be a-changin', and quick.

Posted by john at 09:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack