Mar 27
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 27, 2008
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks
    More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the Searchscape panel at our SMX West conference and online…

  • Google Offers Robots.txt Generator
    Google’s rolled out a new tool at Google Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with the meta robots tag) to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t new. You can…

  • Privacy Policies And Search Engines
    A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether a web site had a privacy policy or not. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected…

  • Details Posted On Google Webmaster Central’s Live Chat Session
    I have more details on the Google live chat session that is taking place this Friday. Adam Lasnik posted the agenda, which starts at 8:45am (PST) this Friday and ends at 10am (PST). In short, Google will give an introduction, then do site reviews, then a topic on image search,…

  • Earth Hour: Google Shuts Out The Lights In Israel
    Google Israel turned out the lights and flipped their white background color to black for שעת כדור ×”×רץ (aka Earth Hour). What is ironic is that we reported in the past that Google argued that black uses more energy that white. (Although they participated in Lights Out San Francisco last…

  • YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
    The YouTube Blog and Google Blog announced YouTube Insight, YouTube’s new video statistics area. In short, additional statistics are now available to users who upload videos to YouTube. You can get stats on the number of views per day your video received, where those viewers are in the world and…

  • We Don’t Need SEO Standards!
    Last month I attended the SMX West session in Santa Clara entitled Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? It was an interesting session, but I wasn’t really sure where I stood on the issue at the time. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it,…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Microhoo

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Other Items

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Mar 27
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 27, 2008
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks
    More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the Searchscape panel at our SMX West conference and online…

  • Google Offers Robots.txt Generator
    Google’s rolled out a new tool at Google Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with the meta robots tag) to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t new. You can…

  • Privacy Policies And Search Engines
    A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether a web site had a privacy policy or not. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected…

  • Details Posted On Google Webmaster Central’s Live Chat Session
    I have more details on the Google live chat session that is taking place this Friday. Adam Lasnik posted the agenda, which starts at 8:45am (PST) this Friday and ends at 10am (PST). In short, Google will give an introduction, then do site reviews, then a topic on image search,…

  • Earth Hour: Google Shuts Out The Lights In Israel
    Google Israel turned out the lights and flipped their white background color to black for שעת כדור ×”×רץ (aka Earth Hour). What is ironic is that we reported in the past that Google argued that black uses more energy that white. (Although they participated in Lights Out San Francisco last…

  • YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
    The YouTube Blog and Google Blog announced YouTube Insight, YouTube’s new video statistics area. In short, additional statistics are now available to users who upload videos to YouTube. You can get stats on the number of views per day your video received, where those viewers are in the world and…

  • We Don’t Need SEO Standards!
    Last month I attended the SMX West session in Santa Clara entitled Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? It was an interesting session, but I wasn’t really sure where I stood on the issue at the time. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it,…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Microhoo

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Other Items

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Mar 27
Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once
again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last
month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the
Searchscape panel
at our SMX West conference and

online to ease concerns that it meant the sky was falling for Google and the
US economy in general.
comScore Paid Search Data & How The Sky Might Not Be Falling from us has
more background on this. But how do things look for the second month running?
I’ve done some drilling into the numbers, with lots of pretty charts. But
frankly, it’s anyone’s guess. We just don’t have all the information needed.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 27
Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once
again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last
month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the
Searchscape panel
at our SMX West conference and

online to ease concerns that it meant the sky was falling for Google and the
US economy in general.
comScore Paid Search Data & How The Sky Might Not Be Falling from us has
more background on this. But how do things look for the second month running?
I’ve done some drilling into the numbers, with lots of pretty charts. But
frankly, it’s anyone’s guess. We just don’t have all the information needed.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 27
Google Offers Robots.txt Generator
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Google’s

rolled out a new tool at Google
Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site
owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with
the meta robots tag)
to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t
new. You can find many of them out there by searching. But this is the first
time a major search engine has provided a generator tool of its own.

It’s nice to see the addition. Robots.txt files aren’t complicated to create.
You can write them using a text editor such as notepad with just a few simple
commands. But they can still be scary or hard for some site owners to
contemplate.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 27
Google Offers Robots.txt Generator
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Google’s

rolled out a new tool at Google
Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site
owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with
the meta robots tag)
to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t
new. You can find many of them out there by searching. But this is the first
time a major search engine has provided a generator tool of its own.

It’s nice to see the addition. Robots.txt files aren’t complicated to create.
You can write them using a text editor such as notepad with just a few simple
commands. But they can still be scary or hard for some site owners to
contemplate.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 27
8 Factors to Cover in a Competitive Analysis
in Search Engine Guide
Comments Off

by Manoj Jasra

Coming from an agency, there are often times when there is need to perform a competitive analysis for a client in order to better understand the client’s position in the competitive landscape. The main purpose of a competitive analysis should be to gain awareness of the competitive factors analyzed and to leverage the client’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to their advantage. So what kind of factors should be included in an online competitive analysis? Below are a few that I feel should always make the competitive analysis list:

 

Domain Age: The age of your domain can have an affect in the way search engine determine authoritativeness for your site. Theoretically, the longer the domain has been active, the more value it receives from search engines. Webconfs has a great tool for calculating the age of your domain and your competitors’ http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.

Search Engine Visibility: Take your vertical’s main keyword basket and analyze how visible your site is compared to its competitors in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL. Comparing the number of top X rankings can give you a sense of your keyword market share.

Site Traffic: This one is difficult to compare unless you have access to your competitors’ analytics, however Compete.com’s search analytics does a fairly decent job of providing some insight.

In Bound Link Quality: Using a combination of Yahoo Site Explorer and a batch PageRank checker you can begin to determine the quality of back-links for a given domain. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.

In Bound Link Anchor Text: The quality of links is partially based on the theme of the linking site as well as the anchor text that is linking to you. Image or branded links aren’t as high quality as keyword rich links. http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php

Meta Tags: This maybe considered simplistic and old school but meta description and title tags are still important in SEO. Analyzing description and title tags can help you determine which competing sites best differentiate themselves as well as the messaging the site is providing visitors.

Paid Search Campaigns: On the other side of the fence their is sponsored campaigns and a tool like SpyFu can give you some insight on PPC competitors and keyword costs.

Blogs: Got a blog? Check out Blog Juice from Text Link Ads, which looks at Bloglines, Alexa and Technorati to compute a “juice” score.

Obviously there are other online factors to consider and I would to hear about what other people think. 

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 27
8 Factors to Cover in a Competitive Analysis
in Search Engine Guide
Comments Off

by Manoj Jasra

Coming from an agency, there are often times when there is need to perform a competitive analysis for a client in order to better understand the client’s position in the competitive landscape. The main purpose of a competitive analysis should be to gain awareness of the competitive factors analyzed and to leverage the client’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to their advantage. So what kind of factors should be included in an online competitive analysis? Below are a few that I feel should always make the competitive analysis list:

 

Domain Age: The age of your domain can have an affect in the way search engine determine authoritativeness for your site. Theoretically, the longer the domain has been active, the more value it receives from search engines. Webconfs has a great tool for calculating the age of your domain and your competitors’ http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.

Search Engine Visibility: Take your vertical’s main keyword basket and analyze how visible your site is compared to its competitors in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL. Comparing the number of top X rankings can give you a sense of your keyword market share.

Site Traffic: This one is difficult to compare unless you have access to your competitors’ analytics, however Compete.com’s search analytics does a fairly decent job of providing some insight.

In Bound Link Quality: Using a combination of Yahoo Site Explorer and a batch PageRank checker you can begin to determine the quality of back-links for a given domain. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.

In Bound Link Anchor Text: The quality of links is partially based on the theme of the linking site as well as the anchor text that is linking to you. Image or branded links aren’t as high quality as keyword rich links. http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php

Meta Tags: This maybe considered simplistic and old school but meta description and title tags are still important in SEO. Analyzing description and title tags can help you determine which competing sites best differentiate themselves as well as the messaging the site is providing visitors.

Paid Search Campaigns: On the other side of the fence their is sponsored campaigns and a tool like SpyFu can give you some insight on PPC competitors and keyword costs.

Blogs: Got a blog? Check out Blog Juice from Text Link Ads, which looks at Bloglines, Alexa and Technorati to compute a “juice” score.

Obviously there are other online factors to consider and I would to hear about what other people think. 

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 27
YouTube Gets in on the Stats Game
in Search Engine Guide
Comments Off

by Jennifer Laycock

If you’re a marketer and you put content online…you want data. Data is what tells us our ideas our working. Data is also what tells us our ideas are falling short. It’s what tells us who came, where they came from, how long they hung around and if they actually did anything during their visit. The problem data loving marketers are facing these days is how to reconcile new sources of traffic and exposure with an extreme lack of insight into how people are interacting with our content.

With the rise of social media marketing and so much content moving from our web sites onto these third party social media sites, it gets frustrating to try and track data. Sure, you can keep tabs on mentions and incoming traffic from those social media stories, links, videos and so on…but we rarely have insight into how people interact with our content when the content isn’t on our site.

We’re starting to have more options on tracking this data, (Twitter users can rely on Twitstat and Tweet Scan) but we’ve got a long way to go. That’s why I was pleased to see YouTube’s announcement that they’ll be offering up video analytics to their users.

Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site.

YouTube points out the potential in their blog post announcing the feature.

…using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?)

So how do you view these stats in your YouTube account?

Step 1: Log in to YouTube and go to your account page. Look for the “Videos, Favorites & Playlists” link under Manage my Videos.

youtube1.gif

Step 2: Find the video you want to get the information on and click on the “About this Video” button.

youtube2.gif

Step 3: Check out the data!

youtube3.gif

Right now, the data breaks your traffic down by date and by geographical region.

When it comes to viewing the traffic by date, YouTube gives you a handle little slider that lets you move back and forth to view data over a long period of time. As you move the slider at the bottom, the data viewable on the chart moves to match your selected dates. You can even expand the size of the slider bar so you can view data over a larger range of dates all at once. Overall, it’s a pretty slick way of doing things.

On the geographical data, you start with a default view of traffic from around the globe. Users can either click on a country or use a drop down box to select a continent to view data from. In the image above, I’ve zoomed in on traffic from the United States. You can quickly see the majority of views for our video come from California, Texas, Ohio and New York.

What’s interesting is how you can match up the traffic levels on the left with your geographical region on the right.

For instance, take a look at the traffic level for the video in early March when I narrow the field to Ohio visitors.

ohioyoutube.gif

Now, look at data for traffic from California for the exact same time period.

californiayoutube.gif

For some reason, our visits from California tended to spark higher and faster than our visits from Ohio. A more connected audience? Perhaps. Or maybe Ohio Internet users just aren’t in as much a hurry to go view videos and read RSS feeds as our west coast friends.

What’s interesting is that I can use that same information to spot a giant surge in Ohio when the event was blogged by Anita Campbell. While Anita is hugely popular with small business owners around the country, she’s based out of Cleveland and likely has a very strong Ohio reader base. Matching up the dates the video was blogged with the location of the bloggers can go a long way toward helping me see how audiences vary not only by site, but by region.

YouTube says they have more data on the way. On their list is a more specific break down of just how visitors found their way to a particular video. In the meantime, it’s certainly worth while to get in there to play around with your data.

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 27
YouTube Gets in on the Stats Game
in Search Engine Guide
Comments Off

by Jennifer Laycock

If you’re a marketer and you put content online…you want data. Data is what tells us our ideas our working. Data is also what tells us our ideas are falling short. It’s what tells us who came, where they came from, how long they hung around and if they actually did anything during their visit. The problem data loving marketers are facing these days is how to reconcile new sources of traffic and exposure with an extreme lack of insight into how people are interacting with our content.

With the rise of social media marketing and so much content moving from our web sites onto these third party social media sites, it gets frustrating to try and track data. Sure, you can keep tabs on mentions and incoming traffic from those social media stories, links, videos and so on…but we rarely have insight into how people interact with our content when the content isn’t on our site.

We’re starting to have more options on tracking this data, (Twitter users can rely on Twitstat and Tweet Scan) but we’ve got a long way to go. That’s why I was pleased to see YouTube’s announcement that they’ll be offering up video analytics to their users.

Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site.

YouTube points out the potential in their blog post announcing the feature.

…using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?)

So how do you view these stats in your YouTube account?

Step 1: Log in to YouTube and go to your account page. Look for the “Videos, Favorites & Playlists” link under Manage my Videos.

youtube1.gif

Step 2: Find the video you want to get the information on and click on the “About this Video” button.

youtube2.gif

Step 3: Check out the data!

youtube3.gif

Right now, the data breaks your traffic down by date and by geographical region.

When it comes to viewing the traffic by date, YouTube gives you a handle little slider that lets you move back and forth to view data over a long period of time. As you move the slider at the bottom, the data viewable on the chart moves to match your selected dates. You can even expand the size of the slider bar so you can view data over a larger range of dates all at once. Overall, it’s a pretty slick way of doing things.

On the geographical data, you start with a default view of traffic from around the globe. Users can either click on a country or use a drop down box to select a continent to view data from. In the image above, I’ve zoomed in on traffic from the United States. You can quickly see the majority of views for our video come from California, Texas, Ohio and New York.

What’s interesting is how you can match up the traffic levels on the left with your geographical region on the right.

For instance, take a look at the traffic level for the video in early March when I narrow the field to Ohio visitors.

ohioyoutube.gif

Now, look at data for traffic from California for the exact same time period.

californiayoutube.gif

For some reason, our visits from California tended to spark higher and faster than our visits from Ohio. A more connected audience? Perhaps. Or maybe Ohio Internet users just aren’t in as much a hurry to go view videos and read RSS feeds as our west coast friends.

What’s interesting is that I can use that same information to spot a giant surge in Ohio when the event was blogged by Anita Campbell. While Anita is hugely popular with small business owners around the country, she’s based out of Cleveland and likely has a very strong Ohio reader base. Matching up the dates the video was blogged with the location of the bloggers can go a long way toward helping me see how audiences vary not only by site, but by region.

YouTube says they have more data on the way. On their list is a more specific break down of just how visitors found their way to a particular video. In the meantime, it’s certainly worth while to get in there to play around with your data.

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 27
Highlights from the SEW Blog: March 3-7, 2008
in Search Engine Watch
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Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

Mar 27
A Simple Reminder of Why Alexa is Useless
in Search Engine Guide
Comments Off

by Jennifer Laycock

While catching up on my RSS feeds today, I came across a post at Matt McGee’s Small Business SEM that’s a few days old, but well worth mentioning. The post dives into the issue of Alexa rankings and explains why they should not be used as a gauge of how successful a web site is.

While most everyone who has been involved in online marketing for any length of time knows this, Matt’s article serves as a great little reality check to those who are a little newer to the game. Alexa rankings are pretty much meaningless. The problem with Alexa is that it draws data only from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their web browser. Since it’s mostly marketers and tech types who have even heard of Alexa (and not your mom, aunt Sylvia or your best friend Joe), the results tend to skew toward the types of sites marketers and tech types enjoy.

In other words, relying on Alexa to give you an accurate picture of what’s popular online is akin to asking the local sorority or fraternity what the best movie is. The results simply will not reflect the overall population.

Matt demonstrates this brilliantly on his blog by showing the Alexa stats AND the traffic stats for his Small Business SEM blog and his U2 hobby blog.

Even though Alexa shows Small Business SEM as kicking U2’s arse, the truth is that @U2 gets about 30X more page views. If you’re in search marketing, you know why: Because Alexa’s stats come from people who install the Alexa toolbar, and the only people who do that are webmasters and online marketers who have a vested interest in trying to manipulate their Alexa ranking into something that matters.

If you are one of the folks who finds yourself thinking about how high or low your Alexa ranking is, take a moment to ask yourself if you really want to worry about what the guys down at the local frat think of you. If they’re your target audience, you might. If not, you’d be better off working on ways to increase your feed subscribers, your actual traffic numbers and your conversions.

Learn something from this post?
Come and experience Search Engine Guide style teaching in person! Join us for our first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference in Houston, Texas on April 21st and 22nd.

Mar 27
Privacy Policies and Search Engines
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

Small is Beautiful - a Column From Search Engine Land

A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether a web site had a privacy policy or not. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected about visitors might be used? Probably not.

But it’s possible that a search engine might consider that the source of content is more trustworthy, and more authoritative if it does include such a page. And that may make a difference…

Click to continue reading…

Mar 27
Details Posted On Google Webmaster Central’s Live Chat Session
in Search Engine Land
Comments Off

I have more details on the Google live chat session that is taking place this Friday.

Adam Lasnik posted the agenda, which starts at 8:45am (PST) this Friday and ends at 10am (PST). In short, Google will give an introduction, then do site reviews, then a topic on image search, followed by a short Q&A session.

Click to continue reading…