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January 25, 2006

What In The Monopoly is Going On Here?

Guest Entry by Dana McGraw, Web Analytics Analyst--Bruce Clay, Inc.

Google announced today that they will be offering a fee-based analytics tool for those who need more than the free Google Analytics has to offer. Google will be teaming with Zaaz to offer a more comprehensive means of marketing and data analysis. It will be a more robust offering than the beleaguered Google Analytics. Two very interesting points jumped out at me in today’s announcement. The first is just how quickly Google raced in to the paid analytics arena after having to freeze their free program due to overwhelming interest. The second and much more interesting point is the phrasing of what this new paid tool will offer, “… data collection best practices, forecasting models, competitive analysis, and site optimization.”

Oh really? “Site Optimization”? I do appreciate the strategic avoidance of the term “search engine optimization”. It is important to leave something to the imagination of the hopelessly paranoid. But it really isn’t a huge leap, is it? They do happen to control the lion’s share of online searches, making them the most formidable “search engine” in “search engine optimization”. Nothing like a good conflict of interest to really get the day rolling. Like everyone else, I look forward to watching Google’s creative dance around the whispers of conflict. Then again, lately they don’t dance at all, they just do!

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/25/06 at 4:20 PM
See more entries in Analytics, Google, SEO, Search Engines

January 24, 2006

Spelling Counts

What do Matt Cutts and Rob Malda have in common? Aside from both having extremely popular blogs (MattCutts.com and Slashdot.org, respectively), both have used recent posts to look at the importance of grammar and spelling on websites. Malda (Slashdot's CmdrTaco), in an entry discussing how the editors decide which stories are going to be posted to Slashdot, made it clear that grammar and spelling were low on his list of priorities, valuing a concise summary and clear anchor text over proper English. His preference was to view the typos as part of community building and adding to the character of the site as well as giving the various Slashdotters something to complain about.

Matt Cutts, on the other hand, was scathing in his dismissal of websites that have typos and grammar errors. He pointed out that people like John Walker have a one strike and you're out rule, meaning they will walk away from your page at the first mistake.

The comments to both entries are amusing. On Slashdot, people complained that improper spelling and grammar gives the impression that the editors simply don't care. On Matt's blog, people complained that insisting on proper grammar is elitist.

I'm on Matt's side, personally. Sure, as the comments anecdotally suggest, you can get traffic from misspellings and it may be worth it to optimize one page for commonly mistyped words but with Google's Did You Mean? feature, it's becoming less necessary to seek that unqualified traffic. If you do decide to optimize for a misspelling, make sure your page acknowledges that it is not the correct spelling, that way you don't look like an idiot who can't figure out how to use a spell checker. The web searcher is allowed to misspell things because they're in a hurry and want their answers now. You, as a professional businessperson who presumably cares about what impression you present, are not.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/24/06 at 11:31 AM
See more entries in Design, SEO Tips & Tricks

January 19, 2006

Google says no to the US Gov.

This is going to be important. According to Mercury News (and any number of other sources, including John Battelle, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Andy Beal and Search Engine Watch) Google was subpoenaed by the Federal government to turn over one million random searches and accompanying data sampled from all Google searches for one week. The purpose is to discern how much pornography shows up in searches that children do. The aim is to revive a bill targeted to shut down sites that allow minors to access adult content.

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. The official statement from associate general counsel for Google, Nicole Wong:

Google is not a party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches. We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.

Danny has queried the other major search engines and is updating his post as they respond. Thus far MSN and Ask Jeeves have checked in. Ask was not asked for data and provided none. MSN's statement is unclear but can be read as a tentative yes. Unsurprising, as Microsoft would rather not draw any more government fire than they have to given all their legal woes in the past.

Reasoning for the suit aside, as Danny points out, this is an alarmingly inefficient way of finding out said data and an incredible invasion of privacy. Random searches will not tell you who was doing the searching and we all know how hard it is to determine which keywords people are searching on for a given topic.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/19/06 at 11:38 AM
See more entries in Ask, Google, Live Search, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo

January 16, 2006

Gone in the blink of an eye.

There's a new study out there about how quickly people judge your webpage and the news isn't good. We'd like to think that people take their time, wait for all the goodies to go by and really notice How We're Different but the truth is that in just 50 milliseconds, a decision has been made.

You want to know why people like Google better? Maybe it's the relevancy, maybe it's the 'Do no Evil' philosophy or all the freebie services. Or maybe it's that easy on the eyes interface. Google is the champion of the pristine homepage, just a couple of links, a logo and a search box. It's impossible not to like it, especially after the cluttered, ad-ridden wastelands that comprise the rest of the internet. According to the study, once your brain has approved of a website, the approval persists, making the content subjectively better simply because the brain likes the look.

So what does this have to do with SEO? Simply this. Like the human mind, search engines take a quick look at your page then place it in a queue to check back on later. Your first impression is important. But there's more to it than that. One researcher suggests that "the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image" and "it's about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible."

Which, if you think about it, is exactly what the search engines want, too.

Who says that SEO isn't user-friendly?

(Hat-tip to Seth Godin)

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/16/06 at 12:09 PM
See more entries in Design, SEO Tips & Tricks

January 6, 2006

Google presents: An Alternate Revenue Stream

Larry Page's keynote at CES brought the expected Google Pack announcement (including 6 months of Norton Antivirus, hmm, that might even be worth it) as well as the much rumored Google Video announcement. Google Pack is free for download and comes with an auto-updater so that it will be easy to maintain.

Google Video Store will allow customers to download and view episodes of popular television shows like CSI and The Amazing Race for $1.99 for 24 hour time periods. What's more exciting is that for that same $1.99 Google has a catalogue of 300 older television programs that can be downloaded for an unlimited period of time.

Payments will be made through the Google Accounts systems, the same way that Adwords advertisers pay for their service. The videos and video pages will contain no ads. (Google is, not surprisingly, considered an ad-supported free system.)

Danny gives a brief history of Google Video in his wrap-up of the keynote. He also interviewed Peter Chane (who actually made the announcement) earlier this week on the new service. As always, it's an excellent overview.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/ 6/06 at 4:40 PM
See more entries in Branding

Round the blogs in 30 seconds

It's Feedback Friday on Matt Cutts's blog. He's started several posts soliciting information on how people think Google should conduct itself in the next six months.

John Battelle is discussing why he thinks that Google buying Monster would be a terrible idea. Basically he thinks that it mimics too much Yahoo's purchase of HotJobs.

Everyone is speculating about what Larry Page might announce at CES today. Will it be the rumored Google PC? The upgrade to Google Video (with Google Wallet thrown in for good measure?) Or will it just be Google Pack the (yawn) software bundle that looks most like a jab at Microsoft? Four hours left until we find out. Hopefuly we won't be left with just another package deal of things we don't need or already have.

Speaking of CES, this morning Terry Semel took his keynote opportunity to announce Yahoo Go which capitalizes on the Yahoo push of "what you want, when you want it".

Down in the Xs, Xooglers is back up and blogging after some technical difficulties with Google Legal. If you haven't checked out this look back in time at the early days of Google from the memories of two ex-employees, well, what are you waiting for?

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/ 6/06 at 11:38 AM
See more entries in Fun Stuff, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

January 5, 2006

Give a man a power outage

Matt Cutts was in rare form yesterday, knocking out articles on URL canonicalization, Interpreting inurl:, 302 redirects and the Big Daddy DC update. If you haven't made it over there yet to read them all, make time to do so.

That trend has continued today, with more on Big Daddy (as his entry says, the short version is that the DC is now at 66.249.93.104 instead of 64.233.179.104), as well as commentary on the end of Jeremy Z's text ads experiment and Marissa Mayer's update regarding the Google/AOL deal.

Apparently if you cut Matt's power and leave him alone to think, the result is an insane amount of pent up blogging. Which is nothing but good for the Google-obsessed SEO community.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/ 5/06 at 10:44 AM
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization

January 4, 2006

Google gets ADA support

To celebrate the birthday of Louis Braille, Google has embraced the non-sighted with their holiday logo: a representation of Google's name in Braille dots. Unfortunately, my monitor must not support the program they used because I can't feel a thing when I touch the screen. Google is probably working on that.

The logo links to the SERP for [Louis Braille birthdate] rather than just [Louis Braille]. Wikipedia gets the top position thanks to a special result.

Joking aside, today is an excellent time to take a look at your pages and see if they adhere to ADA standards. Imagine a screen reader trying to read your page. Will the information be clear and easy to understand or will a client using screen reader be driven away by stuffed ALT tags? Making your page usable will also help SEO it--your page will be more focused and informative if you remember that spiders, like Louis Braille, are blind.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/ 4/06 at 1:47 PM
See more entries in Branding, Fun Stuff, SEO Tips & Tricks

January 3, 2006

Happy New Year

And welcome back. We hope you had a very good holiday season. Things are getting exciting here and wow, are things exciting in search right now and they're just going to get more so. Be sure to check out the preceding entry by Bruce Clay. He's looking into the future through the lens of experience to give an idea of what to expect. Unlike the LA Times, Bruce doesn't see a low cost Google PC or an OS in the future but I'll let you read it yourself to find out what he does see.

But first a quick recap of the fun and important things that happened while we were away.

• The Search Engine Journal Awards were announced. Matt Cutts won best SEO blog as well as the heated (heh) competition for the title of Most Likely to Flame. Better luck next year, Jeremy.
• Phillip Lenssen at GoogleBlogoscoped took a look at Web Trend that Should Die.
• Marissa Mayer cleared up some speculation about the meaning of the AOL deal and made it clear that there would be "no flying doodads ever".
• The BBC noted that 2005 was The Year of the Citizen Reporter, reaffirming the power of the blog.
• Google Talk is facing a bit of a legal battle, as they're being accused of patent infringement. Danny Sullivan has the story so far.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/ 3/06 at 9:54 AM
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization

The Year in Preview

I am certain that 2006 will behave in a traditional manner, and be unlike any year before it. We have had growth and consolidation, and a great many surprises along the way, and there is no reason to expect that 2006 will be any different.

In the year to come, many patents that were filed 2 years ago will suddenly be granted, so 2006 will see a lot of legal action. Firms that filed and developed products with patents pending will suddenly find earlier filings for the same technology exists and essentially puts them out of business. Eventually the dust will settle, and new products will survive to make all of our lives better.

Search engines at a national level, like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, will find themselves in the same situation as mainframe computers of years ago. Local search, like personal computers, will come from nowhere and displace the market share these larger giants once enjoyed. I believe that 2006 will see so much activity in local search that new contenders, and some established like True Local, will become contenders for number of pages and daily search volume leadership. Offer the searcher what they want and you have their attention. The fact that local search exists at all will drive a whole new generation of web user to the internet, marking a renewed gold rush feeling to the ever expanding web.

The paid search advertising area will become very demographically targeted. This will cause ads to be seen only by the target audience, resulting in higher bid points. It will also make it harder to commit click fraud, currently estimated at 20% of all clicks. This also will result in higher click prices (since the return on investment will be much better without fraud). This will be met with widespread approval as profits increase regardless of the ad price shooting higher. It will also force sites that rely on cheap paid advertising out of some markets, leaving the true business site without affiliates. Higher cost and fewer affiliates will change a great many things.

But, wait, there is more! The amount of time it will take to manage this complex program (and nobody really thinks the 3 search engines will all use similar technologies for managing bids), along with really complex, almost too complex, ROI statistics will make it much too complex for the small business to play and do more than guess. Enter a new wave of Analytics tools, designed to provide ROI numbers tracked to any source. Without these new tools it will become difficult to properly use the power of demographic advertising, making 2006 the year of Analytics. We've already seen this trend beginning with Google Analytics and it can only grow.

But not everybody can afford the time to manage bids, even with Analytics tools. They will simply be forced out of the paid advertising market, or forced to turn to PPC Management services. For those forced out of the paid advertising arena, most will turn to Search Engine Optimization, traditionally thought of as the free search results part of the web page. Of course, as the number of pages increases due to an influx of Local Search sites, and as normal web growth continues, and as SEO becomes commonly practiced, it becomes harder and harder for a business to be in the top-10 results out of millions. 2006 is a bad year for new web sites since they have a high cost of entry into search engines ads or organic results.

Hence we will see a resurrection of other online ad methods, in particular expect to see more banner and text ads. These ads will need to be better than ever, more animated, more eye catching, and more targeted. The banners will be carefully tracked (Analytics again, but not as complex) against ROI but new sites can make a living by embracing this medium.

Which brings us to email. I predict that a safe, simple, certified email system will be released in 2006 that will allow users to “join” opt-in lists that the advertiser never gets. This system will allow advertisers to create email campaigns that can span months, not a single burst. And the advertiser never gets the recipients' information – the email system operates as a middle man keeping the users' information totally private. This system will manage user mailboxes so that traditional certified email is readily seen and accessed. It will support community, charities, and be free to consumers. Advertising rates will be a fraction of today’s search engine paid advertising rates, making this effective and affordable for small businesses. Once the system is in widespread use, spam will be easily ignored, real mail will be easily found, and email will emerge as a trusted and viable advertising medium. 1st Certified is the big news of 2006.

So what does this mean to Bruce Clay, Inc.? We are expanding, and doing it in a big way. We are already a clear industry leader for SEO, one of the few offering proprietary tools, SEO training and certification, and tailored services for large and small clients. Our PPC team understands the subtle operational and business issues of managing client paid advertising programs. We have a reseller agreement in partnership with IBM, allowing us to provide exceptionally advanced Analytics reports at a fraction of the cost of the industry leaders. And we are the marketing arm and a major investor in 1st Certified, the email system that will take the world by storm. We are also building a new team to manage advanced banner ad programs, having already staffed in-house technology teams and simply waiting a while before we recruit industry leaders.

There is a lot more in the works, this is just about half of it.

If you work for a competitor, resumes are being accepted. If you work for a client, you win. All others, watch out.

Posted by Bruce Clay on 01/ 3/06 at 9:36 AM
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines