SEO
Search News: Yahoo’s WOO Much Ado about Nothing New
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 21, 2009 | Share This
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Yahoo this week announced that they see the future of search results as something called WOO. While this raises the strong possibility that Yahoo’s entire search team has been replaced with drunken sorority girls, the video on Kara Swisher’s blog of Yahoo’s Guy Raghavan confirms that there is at least one Guy on the search team. And he’s a guy.
Search News: Spotted! New Google Navigational Search Ads
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 20, 2009 | Share This
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Our own eagle-eyed SEO –oligist Dr. Naveel spotted the latest in Google’s efforts to place an ad anywhere search results are today. So far this is only a test but Google is approaching their clients about participation and looking carefully at the data in advance of a full roll-out to all users. Google is simply monetizing the navigation box itself, leveraging auto-complete as a display space for advertisers. By the way, that splotch that looks like cat vomit at the top of these screenshots is Google’s logo for today celebrating the find of a partially fossilized “missing link” skeleton.
Advertising in a Recession: Help, My Marketing Budget Was Cut!
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 14, 2009 | Share This
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This recession-oriented post comes out of a discussion I had with some colleagues earlier in the week. The talk was prompted by the story that as part of their government backed bankruptcy the Obama administration has cut Chrysler’s marketing budget in half. For marketers like us, that’s like watching a limb get severed. Still, whether government mandated or not, it’s a reality that many businesses are scaling back on advertising and marketing just when they need it the most.
SEO: Good SEO Means Good Client Communication
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Written By Mark Pilatowski | May 12, 2009 | Share This
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I have been immersed in the world of SEO and search engine marketing for nearly 10 years. In that time I have also become fluent in a language that most of the world has never heard, let alone understands. This is the case for most specialists no matter what the profession or industry. When you are communicating with peers you use the insider language that you and your peers understand. If a normal person were to overhear a couple of SEOs discussing their work they would probably walk away wondering what they hell they were talking about and why they were let out of the mental health facility without any meds. The language of SEO can seem like Greek to most people but when it comes to dealing with clients it pays to translate.
Blogging: CNN and Larry King Caught Stealing Blog Content - UPDATE
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 11, 2009 | Share This
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Accusing Larry King and CNN of content theft on Larry King’s blog may seem pretty brazen but it has and continues to happen. It’s interesting that the AP and several major media organizations including Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have been huffing and puffing lately over news aggregators who link to their content. At least when that happens, the aggregators (like Google News and Huffington Post) give attribution and send visitors who want more info to the main story.
Social Media: SEO for Twitter Search Set to Boom with Upcoming Changes
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 7, 2009 | Share This
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The news that Twitter Search is poised to make substantial changes to the way results are gathered and presented has caused a frenzy of preparative speculation in this company not seen since Google rolled out Quality Score ranking. Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, has said that Twitter Search will begin to crawl the links included in tweets and not just the content of the tweets themselves. In addition, Jayaram suggested that they were working on an algorithm to define “reputation”, or that they would at least take this into account.
Search News: Marketers Love Data Too
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 4, 2009 | Share This
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One of the big selling points of search marketing and increasingly, social media, is the rich data available from tracking relatively precise measurements such as the number of people who visit a website after it’s been optimized and how they get there, or the clickthrough rate on a paid search ad.
The frustrating part for search marketers is that sometimes clients are loathe to share their own internal data - information that can sometimes hold the potential for more effective and creative search and social media campaigns. This can range from bedrock data such as website traffic to information such as a regional breakdown of top selling products or the age and gender mix of certain customers.
Why is this sometimes so difficult to get from some clients? There are a few reasons:
SEO: Missing Out on Value by Obsessing About Cost
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Written By Mark Pilatowski | April 30, 2009 | Share This
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Being an SEO I spend a lot of time reading and discussing various SEO and search marketing related issues. Most of the discussion is focused on either how to improve SEO efforts or bashing Google for their latest attack against humanity and all that is good. Very little attention is paid to the realtive cost of SEO services, at least in the SEO blogosphere.
On the other hand, cost can be an overriding factor to the organizations actually paying for SEO services, particularly in this recession. In many cases they are moving money away from another marketing department budgets such as print or radio. Naturally this leads to internal squabbles as the departments losing budget scramble to justify holding on to as much as possible.
Search 3.0: Real Time Search Poses Real Time Challenge for Engines
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 21, 2009 | Share This
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When things start happening quickly, it can be tough to control results. It’s one thing to drive Germany’s legendary Nurburgring racetrack in a dimed-out Olds Cutlass at 85 MPH, but quite a bit more challenging when you’re behind the wheel of a Formula One car doing 150-plus.
Accelerating the speed at which search results are indexed and served up by search engines similarly challenges the ability to respond to erroneous or purposely malicious results. I posted earlier about Google News being the test bed for Google’s future search offerings, it’s only fitting that the fastest index part of the Googleverse should also be a testing ground for future Black Hat trickery.
Search 3.0: Susan Boyle Links Her Way to Stardom
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 20, 2009 | Share This
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Yep, I got Susan Boyle’s name in the headline of the post – and now the first paragraph. I’ve now joined hundreds of thousands of bloggers who have done the same, illustrating one of the most interesting new principles to emerge from Search 3.0.
In Search 2.0, optimizing for search engines was achieved in part by link building and sharing with other websites. While this is still a valid part of strategy in Search 3.0, the new wrinkle is that the platform size and strength has moved up a level from individual websites to social media sites, interlinked and connected loosely with each other and directly through well-optimized profiles.