+ The pulse of the search marketing community

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: October 10, 2008"

After a long week of conferences followed by a holiday, we're back for just 2 more business days until another 2 days of holidays kick in. Enjoy us while we're here!

Google Giving More Snippet Data
Searching for articles on Google is now showing content attributes in the results. You can see articles that have more than one author or you can see the author of the article.

Google Reverts PageRank Data
In case you're wondering why your PageRank has been fluctuating like mad lately, it's probably due to the observation that Google is reverting PageRank values. That or you're looking at the PR from another data center. Regardless, most people don't really care. ;)

Make Money from Google Maps with AdSense
So you're searching for something and find it using Google Maps. You may also find another targeted result that you never anticipated due to Google AdSense's integration into Google Maps. Who didn't see that coming?

Google's Attempts to Make More Money with Affiliate Marketing
Google has seen success with Amazon and iTunes, and they want to eat some cake too. That's why you'll see that Google is now an iTunes and Amazon affiliate. Surprised?

Google AdSense for Games
More ability to monetize is seen with the announcement of Google AdSense for games. If you have a popular site, you're game (no pun intended) to be considered. It's in beta, now, though, but if you want to make some dough, go for it.

Don't Use Google AdWords Editor 6.5.0...Yet
Google AdWords Editor 6.5.0 was released but not without a slew of problems. There are errors, slowness, and more. If you haven't upgraded yet, don't.

Microsoft adCenter Upgrade in Fall 2008
We're actually in Fall of 2008, so in the upcoming weeks, we should expect a big Microsoft adCenter update to give more billing/payment options, campaign management simplification, report analysis, and more. Stay tuned!

Google's Search Results Coming in RSS Format
It's taken them years, but Google will offer its results in RSS format so that you can watch for scrapers and all that other good stuff. Can we say "huzzah?"

Linkage Data Provided by SEOmoz
SEOmoz has launched this comprehensive tool called Linkscape that has crawled 30 billion pages to provide detailed linkage data. This tool has received a lot of kudos and I'm sure you'll like it!

Ask.com Loses 3D, Goes to "Less is More"
This past week, we've heard reports that Ask.com has redesigned their page to eliminate the complex 3D interface and to give less information. Is Google responsible for this? It's possible, since Ask.com is looking for money above all else.

Yahoo to Offer Web Analytics
Yahoo's acquisition of IndexTools means Yahoo Web Analytics. The tool is being rolled out on a limited beta and is free. Yahoo Web Analytics boasts real time tracking which many people are looking forward to. I can't wait to try it myself!

SMX East
As I mentioned, we were at SMX East this week. What does that mean? Well, I'm sure you saw our conference coverage. If not, here you go -- enjoy!

• SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals
• Search and Reputation Management
• Ad Agencies & Search Marketing
• The Ten Truths Every CMO Must Know About Search Marketing
• What's New With Video Search Marketing
• Social Media Marketing for Newspapers and Magazines
• What's New With Local Search Marketing
• Search Marketing For Newspapers & Magazine
• Search & The iPhone
• Search Integration: Are We There Yet?
• Googleopoly
• Enhanced Listings
• What Is Ethical Social Media Marketing?
• Personalized & Customized Search
• What Is Spam?
• Internal Linking Tactics
• Keynote with Google's Tim Armstrong
• Tools, Glorious Tools
• A Day In The Life Of A Successful In-House SEO

Thanks again to Marty Weintraub for his guestblogging!

Administrative Note: No Video This Weekend
Due to the holidays, our next video recap is not going to occur until October 26th. You'll just have to read us!

The Live Search blog announces a partnership between Facebook and Microsoft for search and ads. You can now either "Search Facebook" or "Search the Web" using Live.com. Additionally, adCenter ads will be delivered alongside those search results.

So far, it's good to integrate search on Facebook with search on Live.com to prevent opening a second tab/browser to perform searches. However, as one forum member points out, this looks like an attempt for Microsoft do dominate the search realm.

Other implications of this search partnership will relate to the personal information Facebook has about you and how Microsoft should probably leverage that with this search integration. I'd admit -- if I'm searching on the Web using Facebook, I'd definitely want more personalized results than generic SERPs for any random query.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and High Rankings Forums.

We've prided ourselves on Google Analytics. We've seen Gatineau make its debut last year. Now we're looking at something new: Yahoo Analytics. As part of the acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo will be launching Yahoo! Web Analytics.

It's not live for everyone yet, as we're made aware that it's currently only available to Yahoo! Small Business customers who host e-commerce sites on Yahoo and Yahoo! Custom Solutions/Yahoo! Buzz Marketing advertising partners.

Is it free? Indeed, it will be (which comes at a shock to many). It also is making past paid customers of IndexTools at $400/month happy.

The best part of IndexTools beyond it being free is that it has real-time analytics tracking rather than a 24-hour delay.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, High Rankings Forum, and DigitalPoint Forums.

Google is on march to make sure to continue monetizing searches in any way possible. This time, Google has added AdSense to Google Maps, in some cases. This was reported at Search Engine Land, Digital Inspiration and Bloggle first. Let me take you through it.

Doing a search for my corporate address returns a map of my location, with businesses listed on the left hand side. If you click on a business, let's say the first dental one, Google then displays a small single line ad (AdSense like) to the bottom of the map. Here is a picture:

The ad shows a relevant dental ad. But sometimes you do not need a business address, sometimes an ad for office space might come up. It has in my case.

This seems to be a test right now, so we will see how long this lasts.

Google has been testing and posting local ads for a while now. For more on local business ads at Google, see here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The other day, we reported again that Google Testing Dates on Search Snippets. But it is much more than just dates. Google is now showing additional attributes from the content on the page. For example:

Notice how the above result shows post numbers, author numbers, and the last post date. Clearly, in this case, Google thinks this blog post is a forum post or maybe not, maybe Google classifies the "comments" in the blog post as a threaded type of discussion.

They also pull out author names, for example in a case of searching for minotti, the last result looks like this (hat tip):

Will this stick? I am not sure - my gut tells me no, Google won't keep these in most cases. Maybe specific queries will return these details, but I just don't feel that Google will keep these additional attributes on the search results pages. At least not in this fashion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, Google announced the release of AdWords Editor 6.5. I did a detailed post on the new features at Search Engine Land. But, since I posted the second Google released the news, I did not yet get feedback from advertisers on the new release.

All the threads I see are scary. Not only do errors pop up when some advertisers are using it, those who do not get errors say it is about 50% slower than the previous version. In addition, the new editor does not bring in the new quality score metrics.

One issue can be addressed, if you make sure to uninstall the old editor first and then install the new editor. But the slowness and other issues seem to be bugging many advertisers. I am sure subsequent releases will fix the issues.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

A couple days ago, Matt McGee at Search Engine Land confirmed the reports the Wall Street Journal that Google will be offering web search result notifications not only via Google Alerts, but also via RSS format.

Yahoo and Live Search both have RSS results enabled in auto-discovery mode on the search results pages. Google does not and has not enabled this ever. Why now? Honestly, I am not sure why Google has waited this long? I know they don't want their search results to be used for many purposes outside of searching. Does this mean that rank checking tools can go the RSS route, as opposed to the scraping route? I doubt many will change and it is hard to know exactly how Google will release the RSS flavored results. Will it be only via Google Alerts or will Google enabled auto-discovery like Yahoo and Live does? Many of the other Google search properties, like Google News and Blog Search have auto-discovery enabled.

Time will tell - but I am happy about this. It makes Google's web results more accessible.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member is spotting some interesting Google interface tests with regards to placement of dates on snippets of SERPs. pageoneresults writes:

In performing certain search queries, Google appears to be inserting the date of the page in front of the Snippet. I just performed one search and 5 of the 10 results had dates preceding their Snippets. One of them had the date towards the end of the Snippet.

Of the 6 dates shown, all were within the past 10 days with the exception of a Press Release from 2007.

Michael Gray has spotted this as well. (Note: this differs from the visits that are recorded by Google if you're logged in.)

He believes that Google is finding that the dated results is actually faring well for Google. From my experience, the inclusion of the date has helped especially since dated results feel fresher.

In fact, if you do site: searches, you can find some good results as well, and another person agrees that the dated results are obviously incredibly helpful, especially in a technological field where things are always changing.

I'm guessing we'll be seeing more of that in the future.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This article was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 9th.

This year, Pubcon 2008 is going to be held between November 11 through the 14th in Las Vegas. Both Barry and I will be blogging and speaking, but the best news is all about the keynote speaker -- the Pubcon blog announces that producer George Wright of Blendtec's "Will it Blend" series will be keynoting the event.

How are people reacting? Well, in a paid WebmasterWorld discussion, people can't believe it and can't wait.

Are prizes on the horizon? I've been a huge fan of Will it Blend for such a long time and want to get one of those blenders myself, but my $25 blender seems to do the job. I'm not alone, it seems:

I so covet one of these, but $350 is a little steep for a blender (last I checked the price).

If you're not going to Pubcon, then, it's time that you signed up!

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (paid link).

This post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted on October 9th.

Hopefully by the time you read this post, the issue will be resolved. However, yesterday afternoon, a Google representative, JohnMu said there is currently a display issue in the Google Webmaster Tools.

A Google Groups thread reports several webmasters who have submitted their Sitemap files days ago, but the Sitemaps file status is still in the status of "pending." Typically, a sitemap file should be accepted within 24 hours.

JohnMu of Google said:

This is currently a known issue, the team here is working on resolving it as quickly as possible. Generally speaking, it's normal for some sites to take a while before the "pending" status disappears. At the moment however, it looks like this is taking a bit longer than usual.

If the "pending" status for your site has been showing for a while now, I wouldn't worry too much about it for now. It's not something on your site, or anything that you need to resolve on your end.

I'll update this thread once it gets resolved. Thanks for your patience!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written on October 8th at 1:30pm (EST) and scheduled to go live on October 9th.

Jeffrey Posnick from the AdWords API Team announced at a Google Groups thread the AdWords API Local Database Sync Project. The details of this project are located over at code.google.com/p/awapi-local-db-sync/.

Here is the summary:

The AdWords API Local Database Sync project is designed to simplify the process of maintaining a local store of AdWords account data. The scripts that make up the project can be used to schedule reports using the AdWords API, store the results in a local database (using SQLite), and then run queries against the database to determine, for instance, what AdWords account data has recently been added or updated.

The scripts are written in Python, and make use of the SOAPpy libraries for accessing the AdWords API SOAP service. The Python code is written against the dbapi2 database API, and by default it will use the SQLite implementation and store the report data in a SQLite database file on the local file system. It is possible to swap out the SQLite libraries for another database library that supports the dbapi2 interface.

So, for you AdWords techies, you may really enjoy this.

Jeff explains that this script allows you to "schedule reports using the AdWords API, store the results in a local database utilitize (using SQLite), and then run queries against the database." Of course, some of you may have built this already using your own code base, but if you have not, you can now use this code base.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written earlier in the week and scheduled to go live today.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: October 8, 2008"

This session takes you on a whirlwind tour of search marketing tools you’ll want to consider adding to your toolbox.

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Ken Jurina, President, Epiar
Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Ken Jurina talks about his tools first.

Firefox extensions:
- They work right into your browser. They're quick, powerful, and free.
- Not many critiques.
- Great for auditing websites, there are many extensions such as SEOpen, SearchStatus, Groowe Toolbar, PDF download, Roboform Toolbar, Web Developer, Customize Google, and more.

SpyFu gives competitive insight into PPC/organic insight. It works within the browser and is free but you can pay for more things.

Browsershots shows what your site looks like in many browsers. It's a bit slow and may time out but it's great becasue you can taggle screensize, Flash, Javascript, and more. It's also fun if you're bored. It's free!

GSiteCrawler - gsitecrawler.com
- You an simulate crawls, get XML sitemaps, and view duplicate content issues. It's slow, though and it can get in a loop with dynamic URLs.
- How much does it cost? It's free!

Google Insights for Search identifies phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on. You cna geotarget where you sell your products, identify product seasonality, and identify if news tories relate to spikes in searches. The critique is that there are no "real" search frequency number - only relative comparison. There's this cool breakout tool area that shows phrases that spike in search frequency which can help in keyword research.

Time Fox - functionfox.com
This is a time tracking tool that will help you from a productivity perspective. It has free upgrades and no contracts.

Epiar Marketview lets you datamine and analyze keyword research and isolates what people put into a search engine.
- It's not free though :(

Deb Mastaler is up next. She says that her focus is on tools that help link building.

She talks about RoboForm and how when you're link building over and over, the redundancy kills you. Use RoboForm as a timesaver. It's very inexpensive and you can control the data that gets input into different directories.

Free tools include:
- Xenu's Link Sleuth : checks for broken links and verifies normal links, images, frames, plugins, backgrounds, local image maps, stylesheets, and whatever else. It takes a lot of room but it's the most thorough app for checking links.
- Link Valet: it does the same thing but doesn't require a download. It's not as inclusive as Xenu.

When you're looking for authority sites, you want sites that rank well. You can try
- The Langreiter Tool: this compares site rankings across different search engines in a graph.
- Googleguy.de: compares sites and linked side by side.
The downside: they can't be exported.

Searching for authority sites:
- Deb mentions that SEObook has some great tools, including HubFinder which is at http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
- HubFinder is a colocation tool. It compares backlinks of 2 or more sites and points out their co-occurring backlinks.

Link Harvester makes sorting out duplicate links from the same site eash, which allows you to quickly and deeply query the Yahoo or MSN backlink database. It's at http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php

Paid tools include:
SEO Elite: seoelite.com
PR Prowler: prprowler.com

Backlink Analyzer: http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ - it does the same exact thing as SEO Elite and PR Prowler but it is free!
- It's a free link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking to a page or site.

Firefox backlink analyzers:
- SEO Link Analysis: http://yoast.com/seo-tools/link-analysis/
- Link Diagnosis: linkdiagnosis.com
It gives you visual representations and link data on the site.
- Bad Neighborhood tools scan outlinks on your website. You're not responsible for the links that go to you but you can control outbound links. http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

Utility searching sites:
- SoloSEO and Backlink Builder find sites that give you the ability to add links.
http:/www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

She talks about directories and places to find relevant links. She also emphasizes that hiring an intern is gold!
- Directory Big Boards, ISEDB, Blog Catalog

You also need to utilize social media tools
- Buzz tool from Pierre Far - ekstreme.com/buzz - follows trends from Technorati, Google Trends, blog posts tagged with a keyword, social bookmarks, and more.

Backlink Social Celebrity will tell you how many times you site has been socially bookmarked and where. It's also made by Pierre: http://ekstremecom/backlink-social-celeb - look for these sites that make a lot of noise.

Competitive Research: Domain Tools is helpful as well. You can get similar domains and their age starting with the oldest.

The Dapper.net tool lets you provide users with content and services through widgets, RSS feeds, Google gadgets, and many others. In a nutshell, it creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have them.

Email extractor: A commercial tool - http://www.webextractor.com/index.htm - it pulls contact info off pages and onto spreadsheets for easy contact.

Twitter Alert tool: www.tweetbeep.com - get an update each time your URL/name/keywords are mentioned on Twiter.

Last up is Stephan Spencer.

seo-browser.com - you go to any URL and see what the spider sees. It's handy because only the first anchor text counts

Command line fun
- wget, lwp-request, lynx (which is a text-only browser)
You can also use strings, od, rsync, convert, etc. He wrote a blog post on these on stephanspencer.com.
lw-p-request -S bananarepublic.com
- shows headers, for example.

Thumbshots.com
- give a search term, choose engine, and compare it with another search term.
- you can even do operator searches

InternetMarketingNinjas.com - expensive tools but worth it
- Strongest Subpages, Top 10, Forward Link Title Tag tool,

SEOmoz Pro
- Linkscape
- Trifecta
- PageRank Strength tool - which has historical PR

Raven toolbar for Firefox allows for fast switching between multiple social media accounts, link acqusiiton planning, and ROI tracking

Metatags sidebar tool for Firefox.

Netcraft toolbar lets you know what the site is running (Apache, IIS, etc.)

WASP - Web analytics solution profiler - it gives you data on the analytics and the parameter that are being passed in Javascript.

Woopra - cool analytics tool for Wordpress

Robot Replay - a fun tool that lets you paste Javascript and it will record the mouse gestures as the users traverse your site so that you can play those back and watch the users move the mouse around

YSlow is a Firefox addon and shows you the things that are slowing down your pages for loading.

Xino (spelled correctly) checks PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings, and more.

QuarkBase is a handy tool that shows different stats about your website and competitors.

Enquisite is a search analytics tool that rocks. It allows you to see which search terms are on page 2 and also city by city, you can see the varied search rankings (not only on datacenter, but city!) They're releasing a feature on Friday that lets you look for converting terms on one engine that are not converting on another engine.

Stephan also preaches GTD (getting things done, David Allen) and says that Things for Mac is awesome. Journler is another tool. OmniFocus is like Things. iGTD is a final tool.

Some guy in the audience preaches Excel. Stephan says that Text to Columns and Pivot Tables are awesome.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com explains that this room is for in-house SEOs, all day.

Eileen Winslow, Sr. Director of SEO, MeziMedia is up first to talk. She worked at Shopzilla and even BruceClay in the past. She believes in having a devoted SEO team.

Top 10 Questions She Gets:

(1) How Does SEO Work? She explains how it works. Basically getting your site more and higher visibility in the search engines.

(2) What Does SEO Do? There is technical optimization to make them search engine friendly. Then content optimization, then link building and then reporting.

SEO Projects:
- Tech optimization
- Page Revamps
- New pages
- Reporting
- Etc

SEO Operations:
- Keyword Research
- Taxonomy
- SEO tags
- Link Requests
- Content
- Community

(3) Why Should I Care? Free Traffic + Conversions = Bottomline Revenue

(4) Who is on your team? Director, manager, analysts, and assistants.

(5) Who does your team work with?
(A) Product owner; content, usability, network admins, project managers, engineers
(B) CEO; biz intel, sales, sem, biz dev, and PR

(6) How Do Projects get on the Site? From idea to approval, to spec, to build, to priority, to plan to demo to QA and to launch.

(7) How do projects get high priority?
- Forecasting is critical
- Join efforts
- Piggy backing on things already being done
- Trading resources
- Building SE into roadmaps
- Success breeds confidence
- Tip: Not everything is high priority

(8) How do you target operations?
- 80/20 rule
- Marketing calendar
- Thematic clustering
- Project support
- Glory keyword
- Tip: You cant fix everything, especially at once

(9) How do you measure success?
- SEO revenue, SEO incoming, conversion rate & RPI
- When to report? weekly, monthly and quarterly also post launch and 2-8 weeks post launch.

(10) Why is traffic up or down?
- Give clients an action plan on what you will do.

Brian Piepgrass, from UpTake is next up.

Start ups.... You likely have a small budget. You also likely have strong motivation, because time is of the essence. Space might be tight in your office. You also have very little process in a start up. You do get to work with your whole team.

4 Habits of Successful Start Up SEO:
- Insert yourself into the important process
- Build Rapport
- Limited Budget
- Missed this one

Suggestion 1: Get involved in the development process
Suggestion 2: Take on an "official role" if you can
Suggestion 3: Promote a "culture" of Traffic & SEO

Building Rapport:
- Target Your Boss
- Target your brand guy or traditional marketer
- Target your developers

(1) Drive links every day
(2) Check stats every day
(3) Recognize when your in over your head and if you need, find great people

Bill Scully from Siemens is next up.

Invest in yourself:
- Listen to SEO and Online Marketing Podcasts
- Checkout WebmasterRadio.FM and Search iTunes
- Read newsletters and blogs
- Download whitepapers
- Check on twitter

Analyze your web logs and reports
- Key campaign traffic changes
- Goal changes
- Overall traffic changes
- 404 errors
- Optimize problem areas

Work with Teams:
- Conduct weekly meetings
- Conduct one and ones
- Attend IT/Web Dept meetings
-- Application changes
-- Structure changes
-- New project scopes
-- Remind them of SEO

Finding the Right People is hard

Attend a WebEx
- Search Marketing Expo
- SES
- Marketing Experiments
- Schedule demos with companies

Communicate with everyone, supporting them, and make sure they feel they are getting credit. They will keep coming to you, and you can gain bigger budgets. Make them feel like they are successful.

If you can, create a quarterly newsletter to send out to the teams.

Experiment with things, try new things, try ad formats, ad networks, try SEO techniques. Go to SEO conferences at least twice per year.

Audit templates
- Check nofollows
- Make sure robots.txt is ok
- Check 404s
- Check redirects

Schedule training sessions

Update XML Sitemap
- Rerun your site map software
- Upload new file to site
- Submit it

Closing
- Plan your calendar
- Invest in yourself
- Communicate
- Make internal customers successful
- Always sell value

Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo! Inc. is last up.

She came into Yahoo as a one person team and had to build things up.

(1) The main thing she needed to do was get buy in from the top level.
(2) Then create accountability
(3) Set up underlying process and train teams such as training, resources, CMS that are SE friendly and reporting.
(4) Implement the work

She then lists out the teams and players...

Challenges:
- Where to Start?
- Lack of top level buy in
- Lack of accountability and no implementation
- Lack of education
- Chasing your tail with search site refresh
- Closed doors

And she showed us this new video, Ill embed:

Awesome!