Category Archives: Internet Marketing - Page 3

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has been updated

Posted by on July 2, 2010 No comments

One of my favourite SEM tools through the years has been the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, it’s provided insight into sites of the past, content, look and feel and I have even been able to retrieve content from crashed sites using their services. Now this great tool has got a well due make-over and is looking good. The GUI and the way that they have made it more simple to use is fantastic, I have however experienced some data collection problems with the screens only showing me the word “soon…” with three dots behind it.

Should you serve Googlebot content-only (cloak) pages optimized for load speed?

Posted by on July 2, 2010 1 comment

Matt Cutts says “Nooooooo” and wishes he could come through the screen and press your ESC key and Ctrl C and Break, funny guy :-)  (he actually is).

What I how ever heard was that they are using other means that the Googlebot to look at sites and evaluate the page speed, what he does not say. I also believe that when Google comes in it’s not downloading all the images and javascripts, CSS and so on, Googlebot looks at the content so having good HTML might actually be more important than cloaking content.

According to Mr. Cutts the bottom line is that if you do serve Google one type of content and the user other, it’s cloaking and the “Noooooo” was for that reason. So don’t serve Googlebot content-only (cloak) pages optimized for load speed.

People genuinely don’t understand the work involved behind SEO

Posted by on June 24, 2010 No comments

Found this really good article called “SEO as a Marketing Discipline” written by Rishi Lakhani. It illustrates in a very good way the problems the search marketing industry is going through and what it is that is holding back the upper management. It’s a reccomended read for those wanting to understand how we can make this industry more professional.

“I don’t mean ignorance in a negative way – I mean people genuinely don’t understand the work involved behind SEO – especially at the top level of any organisation. Most people use search engines – but most assume their existence and the results pages as part of life.”

Online marketers closing the database of human buying intent

Posted by on June 13, 2010 No comments

Are marketers closing the database of human intention and reaching the holy grail of marketing, with 100% transparency of the users, the people they are targeting? This evolution can be traced back to 2001 when Google opened Google Zeitgest and with that we could see and understand better the searcher and use that data to help us get better results. Microsoft opened their MSN AdLab tool and with that the dimension of age and gender was added to the equation.

Then entered the world of social media and the applications and tools that came with it and now with opt in “Check-in” applications so now the gap has been closed from the purchase and onsite analytics, to the query, from there to the social graph like who I am and who I know. From there we have the status update though micro-blogging , what am I doing and now with the help mobile phones “where am I”.

The “Check-in” is a statement of “here I am what do you have to offer?”

Google‘s growing prominence on real-time search within search results

Posted by on April 7, 2010 1 comment

In August 2009 Google famously changed their algorithm and how they value current events, but different from the 2003 Florida update this change to how they value content  and display search results seamed to roll out rather peacefully and in some cases unnoticed.

I have been monitoring how this has changed the search engine and it seems that the Google Caffeine update is to putting growing prominence on real-time search within search results. Specifically on Twitter and other real-time communication tools.

This might explain a post on Search Engine Land that the Caffeine update really had not been rolled out fully and is slowly being implemented throughout Google’s data centres.

But what did this update incorporate? First and foremost it was Google keeping their competitors away, there was a lot of buzz about Twitter’s real-time search options and Microsoft had just rolled out their “decision making search engine” Bing. Real-time search was the thing and Google needed to come out with an update and that they did.

Google had some years back introduced their Google Universal search, were they mixed together various results on their organic results pages, when searching on a topic you could find various channels such as web, blog, news, shop, PPC, image and video being mixed together. What Google did with the Caffeine update was to take this even further and put more emphasis on current events and blend them with the more tradition results in a kind of a “ticker style” where things happened in a more dynamic way.

What they also did with this update was to take the emphasis slightly of inbound links (still very important) and put on good copy, other things we have noticed but I am not sure if we can directly relate to this update is the emphasis on URL’s, that is the text between the www and the .TLD/ccTLD.

According to this update two companies in the same industry, let’s say car rental, one has an URL with their brand in it such as www.alp.is has a handicap when compared with a car rental URL like www.carrentals.is.

Having car rental in the URL gives the later URL more chance of visibility, one more box ticked in how Google values that URL. My research has however shown that Google has a limit on how it values the URL so something like “verycheaprentalcarsreykjavik.is” are likely to rise a spam alert, prompting a Google rep to manually review the site for spam tactics or even worse Google just demoting the site or even removing it from it’s index.

There is a massive opportunity for marketers to look pass their traditional emphasis on their own site but also to use Twitter, blogs, online press releases and other channels that can provide an alternative option to visibility based on how Google now places emphasis on current events.

The question of a white hat or a black hat

Posted by on April 1, 2010 1 comment

Just came from a session at the SES called Black hat/White hat “Unconferenced” hosted by Matt McGowan, Publisher & head of U.S. Incisive Media and Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch and ClickZ (believe they are merging). Everyone that came to this session was offered a white hat or a black hat to wear, in my case I got the black.

Not that I am a black hat in the sense that I use under the radar none ethical tactics when marketing online, nobe more because that the size of the black hat fitted my head better. Great session that taught me black hats have bigger heads than white hats or that Matt and Mike did not order enough hats for people with big heads, either way fantastic session and great fun!

JD Sports in the UK comes up in the US but does not have the product

Posted by on March 30, 2010 No comments

I was recently traveling on the US, speaking at the SES in NY. My eight year old daughter asked me to buy her a pair of shoes, to be exact Apple Bottoms. As I went to Footlocker to buy them I realized that they did not carry them anymore so I decided to Google and see what came up.

First when I searched Footlockers internal search nothing came up and as I have learned through the years Internal search on big sites can by quite faulty so I tested if Google found something but no results. But what happened was that JD Sports came up as a PPC result. JD was most likely not targeting me as I was in the US at the time with my Icelandic keyboard. But as I was searching on Google UK JD came up, with a nice ad saying

Apple Bottom at JD
Get the new line of Apple Bottoms
Women’s ware quick and easy at JD!

When I saw the add I tough to myself well if I cannot buy it in the US I might as well when I am next over to London. But when I clicked on the ad I got nothing, that is I got a page saying “Sorry, we have not been able match anything to your search” it was not a 404 page it was a search result page with no results. Still not sure where to buy the Apple Bottoms for my daughter.

Kristjan Mar and Anne Kennedy interviewed at WebProNews

Posted by on March 24, 2010 No comments

77% of all Internet users read blogs

Posted by on March 5, 2010 1 comment

According to the blog search engine Technorati, around 77% of active Internet users read blogs; ComScore claims this figure to be around 346 million people. However, if Internet World Stats makes any sense this figure should be close to 1.3 billion and the percentage of active users should be closer to 20% rather than 77% if ComScore is correct.

Either way it’s a big number! The bottom line is that everything is being talked about and companies deciding not to take part in the talk need to at least listen and react.

Twitter to start an advertising program this spring

Posted by on March 5, 2010 No comments

Twitter social chart-tweets-per-day3_x460networking and blogging messages are known as tweets messages.  These tweets posts are text based statements consisting of up to 140 characters, displaying related searches on Twitter.

Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.