Steve Ballmer was interviewed by Danny Sullivan in this morning’s keynote conversation at SMX West in Santa Clara.
One of the most interesting takeways from this session was Ballmer’s statement saying that Microsoft does *not* now intend to “kill off” Yahoo! Search – he further stated that within the deal agreement, Yahoo! may increase their search share via a wide number of initiatives. I’m thinking that if this is indeed the longterm strategy Microsoft is pursuing, they are doing the savvy thing of allowing multiple search engine applications which may better target multiple demographics.
Ballmer naturally responded with some of the usual positive or evasive statements that are typical of large-company CEOs when Danny asked questions that many are curious about. But, Ballmer also answered some questions very honestly/openly in a refreshing and direct manner — such as stating that they didn’t necessarily see Bing as moving overnight from a number two position in the search market pie. And, he said that no one sets out trying to be #2 – that they desire to do a really good job in search.
The main takeaway of the session is just how pleased and confident Ballmer is with how Bing is doing — that confidence implies that Bing is a major strategic initiative within Microsoft, it’s here to stay, and that they intend to continue to aggressively work to increase marketshare.
Google, you’re on notice! Looks like the underdog will be nipping at your heels, ongoing.
Both Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, and Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies for Key Relevance, will be speaking at this year’s SMX West in March at Santa Clara, California. Christine will also be moderating the Analytics Action Plans session.
MAR 2 / 9:45am – Keyword Research Tools & Techniques (Christine Churchill)
MAR 2 / 3:00pm – Ranking Tactics For Local Search (Chris Silver Smith)
MAR 2 / 3:00pm – Keyword Research: Beyond The Ordinary (Christine Churchill)
MAR 4 / 1:30pm – Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO (Christine Churchill)
Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to learn search marketing techniques directly from us, and from other pros in the industry!
Not only is SMX an excellent conference to learn techniques from some of the top minds in search marketing, but search engines frequently choose to announce major new changes here.
With valuable opportunities to learn marketing techniques, plus chances to hear information directly from the top search engineers themselves, and great professional networking opportunities, make it a point to pencil SMX West onto your calendar. Register today!
I’ll be speaking at the Search Engine Marketers of Portland (SEMpdx) day conference, SearchFest, on March 9th.
I’ll be speaking on Local Search Optimization tactics, along with a couple of other marketers I’ve long respected (and enjoyed socializing with as well!): Matt McGee and Mary Bowling.
For those who may be debating between attending a couple of different West Coast conferences, I’ll be covering different material at SearchFest than what I’ll be covering at SMX West. At SearchFest, I’ll be some essentials for local search ranking factors – a somewhat intermediate level of content, as Local SEO goes.
Portland Skyline photo by Eric Baetscher. / CC BY-SA 2.0
I just wrote an article which published at Search Engine Land yesterday on the subject of some innovative and occasionally guerrilla marketing tactics that might be used to display advertising promotion via Google Maps. (See: Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps)
One aspect the article touches upon is how some smaller towns and cities might find it attractive to sell the rights to their names in return for sponsor dollars. I find this concept interesting, particularly as many municipalities have begun considering flogging the rights to name all sorts of things from auditoriums to subway stations to city service departments.
In the article I mentioned “DISH, Texas” which sold its name a few years ago to a satellite dish company in return for free satellite TV service for all of its residents. While this is one of the more recent examples of “City Name Sponsorships”, it’s not the first. My coworker, Mike Churchill alerted me to the fact that the small town of “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico” actually changed its name from “Hot Springs” back in 1950 in order to win a radio contest.
The NBC radio program, “Truth or Consequences” offered to broadcast their show from the first town that renamed itself for the show.
In American history, quite a number of towns and cities went through various name transitions over time, but most of these monikers were inspired by people’s names or were descriptive in some way. These days, I suspect that most larger cities would find a lot of resistance to selling off their names — and for well-known cities they’d be losing a lot of “brand equity” if they dropped a well-known name. But, for small towns, there could potentially be a lot of places which might find large corporate investment attractive enough that they could overcome constituents’ resistance to name-change.
Selling a placename is bound to create controversy whenever it happens. Winnipeg’s plans to sell off naming rights on everything from parking meters to bus tickets and even city services has apparently gotten significant criticism.
Kalle Lasn, founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, says selling off naming rights to city services is an example of backward and unimaginative thinking.
“It’s really depressing … They should learn how to be a little bit more innovative. There are ways of cutting back and ways of generating revenue that don’t include selling your soul to corporations.”
(Adbusters is famous for helping promote “Buy Nothing Day” and other anti-commercialism and anti-advertising philosophies.)
Regardless of the controversy, the prospect of abruptly having some saleable assets available is likely to prove too attractive to resist for many city managers during these cash-strapped times. I expect we’ll see some more instances of corporate-sponsored city names appearing in online mapping systems like Google Maps.
Yahoo! will be launching their new Network Distribution feature on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010. This will allow advertisers to optionally opt out of the Yahoo Search Partners sites for PPC ad display, and will also allow Yahoo! PPC advertisers more control over how they bid on ads.
Advertisers will have the option of displaying ads on:
The Entire Network – including Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners
Yahoo! Search – includes all Yahoo! O&O properties and co-branded sites only
Yahoo! Partners – includes all Yahoo! Partners Only
In addition to opting out entirely, advertisers will also have the ability to apply a premium or discount (measured as a percentage of Max Bid) to their bid on the Search Network. This comes with a couple of caveats: (more…)
I recently wrote an article outlining how Wikipedia was abruptly rocketed into being heavily influential within Google Maps (see New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia). For small businesses everywhere, I predict that this change is going to bring Wikipedia to the forefront of SMB’s attention. With just a little bit of review, I think that small business owners are going to be noticing how Wikipedia has become very ubiquitous in Place Pages for Google Maps, and they’ll notice or suspect that those Places which sport a Wikipedia association tend to rank higher than others.
Once a business proprietor notices this, they may think to themselves, “Aha! Easy as pie! I know Wikipedia allows anyone to edit articles and add articles about any and everything, so I’ll have my clever nephew who does the internets add an article about my business!” Unfortunately, it’s not this simple.
The ease with which Wikipedia allows community user edits has been a prime area for criticism of the service over the years, and Wikipedia has responded by tightening review of whether subjects are notable enough to merit their own articles, and dedicated Wikipedia devotees try to scrutinize all edits to insure that they’re factual, backed up by respectable references, and worthy of mention. So, addition of articles in a willy-nilly fashion without good understanding of the service’s rules and practices will almost certainly lead to deletion of the content added. It may not happen immediately, but it almost certainly will happen at some point.
The brutal truth is that most businesses simply are not notable enough to merit having a Wikipedia article dedicated to them. There is some sense of the arbitrary about what characteristics are required to meet notability guidelines, because there is some element of subjectivity about it. Essentially, a subject likely needs to be historically significant, culturally significant, or be widely known. A highly significant, publicly-traded company such as Google would meet the requirements, while a small clock repair shop in Anytown likely will not.
Small stores can make the cut, such as the Gotham Book Mart, for which I researched and authored the Wikipedia article a couple of years back. But, few businesses have had as many newspaper articles about them, mentioned in books as much, or had as many associations with notable individuals.
The iconic "Wise Men Fish Here" sign which hung above the door of the famous Gotham Book Mart for decades.
So, what’s to be done if you’re a small business looking to increase your promotional game? Is Wikipedia completely off-limits to you?
No! There are a number of acceptable ways by which one may integrate with Wikipedia in valid, non-spammy ways, and I’ll cover two of the easiest here. These two methods are primarily for those small businesses which do not merit articles dedicated to them in Wikipedia.
Method 1: Set up your own User page and begin authoring and editing Wikipedia articles.
The best way to understand Wikipedia is to begin participating. Here’s an article on how to start. You may validly write up a User page with links to your own sites, and the more you help out with Wikipedia articles, the more important your User page becomes. As it becomes important, your business site may benefit.
Now, User pages and other pages in Wikipedia automatically nofollow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow external links as they are added, meaning that they are flagged for search engines as not being endorsed by Wikipedia. “Nofollowing” a link was intended to halt it from passing PageRank or ranking value in search engines, and was introduced to help fight spam in sites where users are allowed to add links. There’s a debate among marketing circles as to whether Google chooses to count Wikipedia’s external links in ranking algorithms or not. My suspicion is that as other spam-fighting methods have improved in Wikipedia, the links which have been added and have sustained over time likely do have some rank value — and are therefore likely used by Google for ranking purposes.
The User pages of those who add a lot of value to Wikipedia gain PageRank themselves, and, even if they do not pass PageRank, the links do pass traffic which can indirectly help increase a site’s rankings in other ways. (For instance, see MONGO’s User page, which has developed a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 or Durova’s which has a 6.)
If you’re setting up your User page in part to promote your business, I suggest that you consider naming it beneficially with your business name, or a category/keyword name that refers to your type of business. Describe your business briefly. Link to relevant articles about your city or neighborhood. Link to your company with descriptive link text. And, to provide a chance of enabling this to eventually help your listing in Google Maps, include a Geobox in the profile (this addes geocoordinates to the page, a key element that Google looks for when deciding if a page is about a location).
If you’re a newbie at Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you proceed slowly and learn the environment. To get a good grasp of what people edit on pages, check out the History tab on a number of articles and click to compare revisions. This shows how people make changes, what they change, and many ideally provide a super-brief snippet of text to state what they’ve altered.
It’s very easy to find areas where you can add value: read articles of subjects you’re familiar with and interested-in, and you’ll likely find text needing grammatical correction, badly phrased sentences needing clearer writing, factual errors, and articles needing some additional vital pieces of information. Be sure to find and add credible references if adding or altering facts — you should ideally back up all facts with a reference source, just as if you were writing research papers for college.
Method 2: Donate photos of local scenes to Wikimedia Commons for use in Wikipedia articles.
I’ve written before about how it can be beneficial to employ loose licensing for images so that others may be incented to use them and link back to your site, and this is a variation on that theme (see: Why Free Photos Equal Good SEO).
For instance, the photographer who donated this pic of the famous Chrysler Building, David Shankbone, included URLs on the image’s information page which link to his site.
For another example, check out the page for the photo I donated for the Gotham Book Mart of the “Wise Men Fish Here” sign.
Is this allowed? Absolutely. Read Wikipedian Durova’s article on how adding images to Wikipedia is acceptable. Wikipedia desires to have good quality photos donated for use so that they may be used to illustrate articles. This is an area where helping the community can be mutually beneficial for everyone.
This tactic is actually pretty powerful, because releasing images into Wikimedia in return for attribution (a citation when anyone uses your photo, with a link back to you) enables you to achieve a lot of links from other sites as well, depending upon the popularity of and usefulness of your photo and its subject matter.
To figure out what photos to add, I suggest reviewing the Wikipedia articles of famous places in your area, and identifying ones which do not have pics. Then take a Saturday morning with good weather and sunlight, and snap photos to donate. You can also look at Wikipedia’s page for Articles needing images, but many of these may be more specific subjects for which you may not be able to provide photos.
Naturally, there are a number of “don’ts” when adding content to Wikipedia. I won’t expand on all those here, but they probably mostly boil down to “don’t be spammy” and “be polite”. I suggest reading up on Wikipedia Etiquette if you’re just getting started. Wikipedia desires content which is informative, factual, and neutrally presented.
There are a number of more advanced means of optimizing for Google Maps and local search via Wikipedia, for those who are more experienced with the service. I’ll likely be going into more of these tactics in upcoming articles at Search Engine Land and in presentations I make at upcoming conferences. So, stay tuned for more!
Despite cold and the busy holiday season, search enthusiasts gathered in Chicago to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference. This year, I had the honor of presenting a solo presentation on Keyword Research. As long as there are search boxes requiring text queries, keywords will play an important role in being found on the web. Keyword research is a fundamental skill set all successful online marketers must master.
In the keyword session I discussed techniques for finding and evaluating keywords. I also covered a number of the keyword tools available to simplify, organize, and manage keyword research.
One of the main benefits of using keyword tools is that they give marketers insight into the popularity of a keyword phrase, which is another way of saying that they give you insight into the traffic potential of the phrase. Higher popularity in a keyword means there is an opportunity for more visits, but it is often associated with more competition.
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, talked with me after the keyword session about how to conduct successful keyword research. You can watch our discussion in the video below.
Avoiding Keyword Mistakes
Keyword selection is both an art and a science. One of the common mistakes I see people making with a keyword tool is to dump a keyword list directly from a tool into their online marketing campaigns. The tools are helpful, but for best results, there still needs to be a human in the loop reviewing the keyword list for non-relevant or inappropriate words. You need to review your keyword list with several criteria in mind including relevancy, competitiveness, user intent, popularity, and performance.
While there are several tools on the market (both paid and free) that can assist in developing a list of candidate keywords, it is still crucial that you employ your brain to filter the keywords for maximum effectiveness. Otherwise, the list you develop, while extensive, will lack the necessary focus.
There are a number of excellent Keyword tools available to online marketers. Some of the more popular tools available to webmasters include
I’m obviously only scratching the surface on the tools available. In the session I talked about many more and gave demonstations of some of the tools in use. The important thing is tools can help you make better keyword decisions and give you a perspective beyond your own analytics. Not every tool “fits” with every keyword researcher. Try several of these tools (sometimes in combination) until you find a tailored tool suite that works with the way that you think and work.
Keyword Focus
In the keyword session I talked briefly about doing keyword research for different types of online marketing. For example, if you’re doing KW research for PPC, you have the luxury of going wide in your keyword list (budget limiting of course) and targeting more keywords (compared to keywords for SEO). SEO requires you to laser target your keywords, so you really have to cull your list down assigning a small number of keyword phrases.
SEO versus PPC Session
I was honored to be included on the session entitled SEO vs PPC the ultimate battle. The panel was a mock debate to determine which marketing technique was best – SEO or PPC. Representing SEO were the always-a-class-act Rand Fishkin, my favorite SEO bad boy David Naylor, and the provocative and insightful SEO rockstar Michael Gray. Representing the PPC were myself (Christine Churchill), Karen Weber, VP of E-Marketing, Irwin Union Bank and our moderator Brian Lewis, VP, Engine Ready.
I need to emphasize that this was a MOCK DEBATE, because it became clear during the session that many in the audience thought we were serious in our debate and that we were actually recommending one form of marketing over the other. In practice, my company KeyRelevance does about a 50/50 mix of SEO and PPC, and the synergy between the two often leads to us doing both for a given client.
To be perfectly clear, one is NOT better than the other. The goal of the session was to highlight the merits and differences of the two techniques and to stimulate thinking about when and where to use each technique. On the panel in our mock debate, panelists were tasked with defending one side or the other. In real life we believe SEO and PPC are complementary, not adversarial forms of marketing. It’s not an either/or decision… both techniques should be in your marketing arsenal. There may be circumstances when one might be more appropriate (like PPC being helpful with a new site or one needing immediate traffic), but many sites would benefit from both methods.
PPC Site Clinic
My final session was a PPC site clinic with Melissa Mackey, the Search Marketing Manager from Fluency Media and Ayat Shukairy the co-founder of Invesp Consulting. It was a real pleasure sharing the stage with such accomplished professionals.
Clinics are a chance for companies to get a free review by experts, so they are always a popular event, and many others benefit from hearing the points raised about the sites reviewed. Sites reviewed get recommendations that would be worth many times the cost of admission to the conference. That might be a good tactic to use to convince your boss why you should attend a conference. If you were to hire an expert to review your ads, it could cost thousands of dollars. If your site is chosen to be reviewed in the clinic, you could receive valuable, actionable advice for free as part of attending the conference. That’s a bargain you can’t pass up.
Why should you attend a Search Conference?
Search engine conferences are expensive, any way you measure it (travel expenses, time away from work, admission fees, etc.) so you really have to weigh the costs and benefits. Our industry is unique in the volume of changes occurring. Reading blogs, articles, books, watching SEO videos are all also good ways of learning about SEO/SEM, but attending a search conference takes you to a deeper level in your professional development. Attending a conference is like drinking from the Search knowledge fire hose: there is so much information shared, in such a short time, that you can’t help but come away from the conference with several nuggets of valuable insight that you can immediately implement and reap benefits many times the cost of the trip.
I was checking the weather this morning (raining again – Ugh!) and when I went to look at the detailed hourly predictions, I got a suprise.
It was interesting find that the Google Toolbar thinks that the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website is written in Sovenian !
Newspapers and search engine optimization are made for one another, but the newspaper industry has been a reluctant participant in the internet age.
Today I posted a marketing advice article geared towards small, local newspapers entitled, “Local Newspapers Need To Embrace SEO To Survive“. Ironically, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, has just stated this past weekend that they’re entertaining the possibility of completely yanking their news articles out of the Google index altogether! This, of course, would be a large mistake because there’s increasing evidence that information resources that are unavailable via the internet (and availability now is largely synonymous with “findable in Google”) are considered by consumers to be less relevant.
I think Murdoch’s idea of creating a walled garden is a bad strategy in this case, although I’m highly sympathetic to the plight faced by large and small newspapers all over the country. With news subscriptions having dropped all over, and advertiser revenue switching more to online and other channels, newspapers companies have been feeling the pinch terribly. It’s my believe that most have huge potential for online, and can turn this around. In my article, I described how the news archives with many papers contain a gold mine of information that a great many people don’t even know exists because it’s walled-off by badly-built sites.
Even so, it’s my opinion that newspapers continue to have a role in our day-to-day lives, and they have an important place in local marketplaces, both online and offline.
Small businesses who desire better exposure online need to keep their local papers’ websites in mind as one component of their online marketing. If you’re a small business desiring better rankings in Google, examine your local newspaper sites closely to see if there are opportunities for obtaining valuable links. Some tips:
Pages of newspaper sites which rank well in search engines are desireable places for you to obtain links. See what pages are exposed to the search engine, and find out what opportunities there may be to get a link to your business website from them.
Consider traditional promotion activites to obtain newspaper articles about your business! The old methods can still work today. Just ask the reporter really nicely if they can link to your business website at the end of the story — that makes the story more useful for their own users, too, so there’s a good reason for them to do this.
Link to the news story(ies) about you! So, if your local newspaper site is one of the badly-built ones, and the story about your business isn’t indexed by Google, help it out by linking to the stories about you from many other places on the internet such as from social bookmarking sites, your personal homepage, and other places. If the URL is publicly available, you can help the page get indexed by linking to it, and if it mentions you or links to you, the reference citation can only help your business site!
Don’t forget the classifieds! Online newspaper sites have online classifieds, frequently, and many people forget to make use of them. This can often be a free or low-cost option for you to further promote your business and business site.
Newspaper yellow pages? Many newspaper sites include helpful local directories of businesses, and these are places where you want to claim your business listing, expand your business profile, include links to you, and even consider spending advertising to improve your reach.
Comment! User comments on news stories online are also another way that one may be able to effectively interact with newspaper sites. You could comment on a news story about your business, thanking the reporter involved. You could comment about other news stories that my be related to your interests in some way. Interestingly, some major newspaper sites allow links in comments and they are not all “nofollowed”! They can do this since they may review/moderate comments prior to publishing them. In other cases, comments may not be good for links and many news sites don’t allow much customization of user profiles. Still, the references to your business are worthwhile, so consider interacting with the local news audience via comments.
So, while newspapers may be struggling to adapt to the internet age, and their sites may not be search-engine-friendly, they can still be valuable components of your overall local marketing mix.
When Google introduced their customizable maps feature two years ago, I thought to myself, “Cute, but who has time to be messing around creating special maps in most cases?” Now fast-forward to 2009 and I’ve turned into something of a technical evangelist for the feature, touting it at the SMX East conference last week and publishing an article today on Search Engine Land which highlights it as a long-tail marketing tactic for Google Maps.
The premise is fairly simple, although I see relatively few companies and individuals using the custom maps (”My Maps”) feature in Google Maps to help market their website or business.
Many users are generating custom maps, some of which garner tens or hundreds of thousands of views, depending upon how well they’re optimized and how much they target subjects of general interest. There are maps pinpointing crimes around cities, maps to find wifi locations, tourist points of interest, and maps showing where to go for certain types of shops or charitable organization donation dropoff locations.
Here’s one example of a entrepreneur leveraging My Maps effectively in Google:
The user, “Sister Diane”, has provided a very helpful map for people interested in her industry. The map shows stores where one may obtain various craft supplies all over the Portland, Oregon area. When one of her location listings is clicked, the information bubble that pops up on the Google Map contains a great description and address, and for some locations there are pictures, phone numbers and URLs.
She also filled out her Google Profile, so when her username is clicked or moused-over by the cursor pointer, map users can see her website URLs for her blog and another site where she writes articles.
This is a really good example of how developing and providing useful content within Google Maps can help to further promote your own content by exposing you to more consumers. While crafts in Portland is very much a small niche, Sister Diane’s map has achieved over 28,000 views since its creation two years ago.
Custom maps may be created by hand, using the simple tools for editing My Maps on Google. For larger lists of locations, I highly recommend creating a KML file as per Google Maps and Google Earth documentation, and either manually uploading the KML or submitting it via a geositemap from your website.
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