This year Halloween it isn’t just for children to dress up like their favorite cartoon character or movie superhero. Nor is it just for pet owners to dress up the family dog. Today some of your favorite logos are dressing up, and playing along in this masquerade.
Yahoo came as Google, or was it Ask that dressed as MSN? I forget… have a safe Halloween and enjoy these logo mash ups!
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On Wednesday night, I spoke to Brian Caufield from Forbes for a story they were doing on the Microsoft/Facebook deal that had just been announced. In this deal Microsoft beat out rival Google and was able to get international advertising rights and a stake in the company. As I said after Microsoft stole Digg.com away from Google in July, this is another big symbolic victory for Microsoft and especially the AdCenter unit. Here are my thoughts from the Forbes article:
It’s also a coup for Microsoft’s adCenter online advertising team, which has already scored key advertising deals with Facebook and social news site Digg this year. “Microsoft, again, usurped Google to attach themselves to another hot startup,” said Chris Winfield, Chief Executive of 10e20, a social media marketing consultancy based in New York.
“[Microsoft] making the moves now, finally, it seems that a year ago this wouldn’t be possible, that a company like Facebook or Digg wouldn’t even want to talk to Microsoft,” Winfield said. “They’re being looked at as innovative and extremely aggressive.”
Read the full article here on Forbes: Microsoft Gets Some Face Time
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A continuation in our series on how the major presidential candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts. Here are the previous two rounds: Round 1 and Round 2.
The 2008 Presidential debate circuit, along with announcements of record breaking fundraising in 3Q, builds further intrigue in the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Fred Thompson has entered stage-right with much fanfare yet very little energy added to the Republican side. John Edwards lags in polls, but could lurch forward in
Still, Clinton, Obama, Romney and Giuliani are clear front runners and one thing is for sure – when you do name searches on Google, you can access a lot of information about these candidates. It’s my belief that name searches are going to be greater vote and election outcome influencers than are issue based queries. The name query is where the most intent lies. No doubt Google queries surrounding the candidate’s names are going to be a crucial influencer in forming opinion and votes for this race.
According to Google Trends, when comparing the 4 name search candidates, in Y2007 Hillary Clinton has the most name searches followed by Obama, Romney and Giuliani. Obama has the most news references in Y2007.
What’s really interesting is that to date in 2007 Barack Obama leads name searches in
Social Media groundswell by supporters of Republican Congressman Paul is interesting too. We’re always monitoring how Social Media affects organic search results so I may begin to track how he’s doing on a name search, even though, he’s likely to not be a national front runner. Paul has many, positive first page results – most of which sites can revised and/or manipulated by his campaign in one form or another, I would think. Others have written a fair amount about Paul’s surge. Josh Dorkin has an interesting post at timeforblogging with some graphics displaying the groundswell for Paul earlier in the year.
A couple of interesting notes in this round about authority sites: The US Votes Congressional Database of Washingtonpost.com has really proven to be an authority site in the Presidential candidate name search. This is showing up for both Clinton and Obama due to their congressional backgrounds. As well, MySpace, YouTube and Ontheissues.org continue to be leading influencers in the Search Engine Result Pages for most candidates.
In our Round #2 coverage in August, 2007 Barack Obama was the search marketing leader with a grade of A-. Here is how each of the four front runners rated in that Round:
- Barack Obama: A-
- Hillary Clinton: B+
- Mitt Romney: B+
- Rudy Giuliani: B
So how are the candidate’s name searches faring in Round #3?
Mitt’s campaign upgrades to A- as he continues to holds the top 2 spots on Google with the official site and there is really nothing negative on the 1st SERP. His bio page continues to come up in the #2 spot on Google search which is extremely important for people who are just learning about the candidate. New to this SERP as well is a positive grass-roots campaign site. Though his campaign may not be directly involved it’s a tremendously positive development for them and they hold the #5 Search Result with this site. Perhaps the campaign influences this site in the background?
Romney’s staff should watch out again for John McCain’s campaign which is buying the keyword Mitt Romney and displaying the following ad:
Romney for President?
Why Not Learn More About John McCain for President
JohnMcCain.com
SERP results: 2.39 mm
#1 – Campaign
#2 – Campaign
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – News from Google Universal Search Mix
#5 –electromneyin2008.com (Grassroots)
#6 – MySpace.com/mittromney
#7 – Foreign Affairs
#8 – Ontheissues.org
#9 – YouTube.com/mittromney
#10 –
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 2002
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not seeing results displayed here in NYC.
StumbleUpon reviews is showing the Tag: “Politicsâ€
Extremely surprising is not to see aggressive AdWords campaign from
In round #2 the site was using the words “Exploratory Committee†in the description, and they have revised this to Official campaign site provides news clips, video, a blog and information on making contributions. So now they are really leveraging this coveted space better.
SERP: 12.4 mm
#1 – Campaign
#2 – Campaign
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – News from Google Universal Search
#5 – Senaate
#6 – Whitehouse
#7 – MySpace
#8 – Sentate.gov
#9 – Votehillary.org (Grassroots)
#10 – Washingtonpost.com
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 12/1998
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not when I searched during this post! That’s a problem.
StumbleUpon reviews show the Tag: “Politics”
Obama is downgraded one rung in this round as I’m not seeing aggressive AdWords use and perhaps more importantly the search result returning at position #7 on Google’s SERP. Snopes.com has a post which attempts to debunk the Fox News and Insight Magazine smear campaign. While the attempt to debunk is positive, the fact that the issue is even showing on page 1 Google may be negative overall because it’s raising an issue, true or false – no matter. The StumbleUpon tag as “Liberal Politics†could wind up hurting this candidate in the long run with swing votes. Wikipedia has again taken over the #2 spot from the Senate bio page. Interestingly Obama leads in Del.icio.us page saves with 865 saves (compared to Giuliani with 78 pages saves).
SERP: 3.7mm
#1 – Campaign (tagged as liberal politics in StumbleUpon)
#2 – Wikipedia
#3 – Senate.gov
#4 – News
#5 – Senate.gov
#6 – MySpace
#7 – Snopes.com (possibly negative)
#8, 9 – Washingtonpost.com – Voting record
#10 – YouTube
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 7
Age of Website – 4/2004
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes but not showing in this round in NYC.
In this round Rudy Giuliani’s campaign remains level at a B. On the positive side, they have revised the homepage title tag of the official campaign site to be a bit more aggressive and positive. Instead of just saying “Joinrudy 2008 – Homeâ€, the homepage is now titled “Joinrudy 2008:: Rudy Giuliani for President†much more proactive and positive and they are getting double name bolding on that result. No longer is Zev Adler’s site showing http://www.rudygiuliani.com/ in the first SERP, so that is good for Rudy.
On the negative side, there are negative search results and pages creeping further into the 1st result page on Google. A Rollingstone.com story associating Giuliani with Rove and Bush and Firefightingnews.com (Firefighters Union Letter On Rudy Giuliani) slamming him are both negative portrayals of Rudy, and it shows in the search results. The campaign must bolster the positive results such as the Time.com article and since Google News is injected into search results either at #1 or #4 when you search, they really have leverage their PR angles and get in the press consistently with positive news to counter such negative results.
Del.icio.us is showing 69-78 page tags/saves (depending on the exact URL www – or not) New to this SERP is Ontheissues.org, Washingtonpost.com Rollingstone.com, and Firefighting news.
SERP: 3.2 mm
#1 – News
#2 – Campaign (Tagged in StumbleUpon as “Politicsâ€)
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – NYC.gov bio
#5 – Ontheissues.org
#6 – Draftrudygiuliani.com (a
#7 – Rollingstone.com (Negative)
#8 – Firefightingnews.com (Negative)
#9 – Washingtonpost.com
#10 – Time.com Person of the Year
PageRank – 6
Age of Website – 1/2007
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy –
Support Rudy Giuliani ‘08
Join Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Team Sign-Up Now at Rudy’s Official Site
www.joinrudy2008.com
Round #3 sees Romney steal the lead from Obama.
- Mitt Romney upgraded to A-
- Hillary Clinton remains flat at B+
- Barack Obama downgraded to B+
- Rudy Giuliani is level at B
One final note is that more and more, the name searches are showing Google’s Universal Search News results mixed into the 1st Google Search Engine Result Page. Blog searches are also being suggested at the bottom of Google’s 1st SERP. What’s the significance of this? Search Engine Marketers – particularly in reputation management should be well aware of news results. Online and offline Press and blogging is still is and likely always will be extremely important in Search Marketing.
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Stats on Candidate’s Official Website: (source: SEO for Firefox)
Chris Winfield in USA Today: ‘Readers want to know what you Digg’
Oct 24, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Press
Jeff Graham from USA Today is one of my favorite tech reporters. He’s not just someone who reports on trends, he actually gets in the trenches. I’ve known him for years and always enjoy speaking with him. So it worked out when I brought up the issue of the power of social new sites (like Digg) a few weeks ago and he said he was going to be meeting with them shortly at Web 2.0.
Today his profile piece called Readers want to know what you Digg ran and it’s about the rise of Digg and has a great interview with CEO Jay Adelson. Jeff also focused on the power of Digg for marketing purposes and search engine rankings. I spoke to Jeff for awhile about this (but had to give him a lot of info off the record):
It’s not just the masses who are digging Digg. Businesses have discovered that mentions on Digg can directly translate into higher website traffic and visibility in search engines.
Social media sites such as Digg are “great influencers,” says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a firm that works with companies on search marketing campaigns. “Getting a bunch of Diggs is huge.”
Another marketer who I really respect, Seth Godin is also featured in the article:
Seth Godin, a veteran marketing guru and author, devotes several pages to “Getting Dugg” in his upcoming book, Meatball Sundae. “It doesn’t cost anything, and it’s a great way to get your message to a large group of people,” says Godin. Digg, he adds, “dramatically amplifies” an old standby for most effective advertising: word of mouth.
Check out the full online version of the article here. Also be sure to read the sidebar interview with Jay. Snippet:
Q: I spoke with one marketer who said his way is to respect the system. He put up a page for a client offering, for instance, 10 things you never knew about vacuum cleaners. Did he play within the Digg rules?
A: One man’s spam is another person’s treasure. If we all learned something about vacuum cleaners, that’s great.
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Microsoft Beats Google for Facebook Deal
Oct 24, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Microsoft, Social Networks
Sexy start-ups seem to love Microsoft lately. At least that’s the way it seems on the heels of the latest report that Microsoft has signed an agreement to sell advertisements from outside the U.S. on Facebook and will acquire a minority stake in the company. Seemingly as important as actually inking the deal is the fact they beat Google in this closely watched contest.
Here’s the terms of the deal:
* Microsoft will invest up to $250 million for a minority stake in Facebook (people are saying that the valuations being discussed for Facebook are as high as $15 BILLION)
* This deal now expands on their previous advertising agreement (which was solely for the US) and focuses on international versions of the Facebook service. Microsoft will be able to run ads on those sites.
Minority stake and basically complete control over advertising on one of the hottest sites on the Net? Not a bad day at all for Microsoft…
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The Importance of Images In Linkbait Articles
Oct 24, 2007 by Patrick Winfield | Design, Link Building
If you’re in an area that finds it hard to build natural links what do you do? You create bait and attract or catch the links whether this is done on purpose or as a happy accident. The best way to do this is with content that is directed at a specific audience and has appeal.
Images and visual aids add to this appeal or can be the whole lure altogether. Eye tracking visualization software studies have shown that viewers move across the content on a screen very very fast. What is to keep them there? Unless the content i
s of interest to them they will move on to the next page and continue the search.
Lets face it, people view and read on the screen much different than the printed page. If you have appealing or ‘juicy‘ images for the eyes to feast on then that just may be the
difference for a viewer to stay and read further.
The images need to be relevant to the content, that should be a given. Don’t use a picture of Pam Anderson in Baywatch unless you are writing about her… loop hole, I couldn’t resist.
With so many eyeballs just surfing the waves of content you need to stand out and become noticed. Add some life and face to your wonderful content and use imagery to help get noticed.
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Last week I presented at SMX Social Media in NY on the Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites panel (with Neil & Tamar). The conference was excellent and I thought our panel did a great job.
Luckily there were lots of live bloggers there who did an amazing job of recapping everything:
* Live Blogging “Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites” at SMX Social Media * SEOmoz
* Social News Sites: Digg, Diggers, and Dugg *aimClear Blog
* SMX: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites * WebProNews
* Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites: SMX Social Media New York Day 1 * Unofficial SEO Blog
* Live Blogging: SMX Social Media – Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites * Search Engine Land
* SMX Social: Extra Extra Social News Sites * Search Marketing Gurus
* Duping Digg Hot Topic At SMX Social Media * Social Media Explorer
* Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites * Search Engine Roundtable
* SMX Session Three * Alt Search Engines
* Live Blogging SMX 2007: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites * Non~Linear Creations
* SMX Panel Recap: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites *Search Engine Journal
Also (due to some scheduling/Blackberry conflicts) I wasn’t able to do an interview with WebProNews until after the conference. Luckily Kara is really talented and was able to fill in the video with lots of cool graphics and images. Direct link to the video here or play it below.
Finally if you want a copy of my presentation – please email me at cwinfield [@] 10e20.com and I’ll shoot it over to you.
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Chris Winfield in the Associated Press: ‘Google 3Q Profit Soars 46 Percent’
Oct 20, 2007 by Chris Winfield | Press
On Thursday morning, I spoke with AP reporter Michael Liedtke about Google’s upcoming earning announcement. I told Mike that I expected them to report really strong earnings (especially based on Yahoo’s) and to exceed expectations. That educated guess wasn’t exactly rocket science if you’re in our industry and see how much Google controls…
Chris Winfield, who runs the search engine ad firm 10e20, says Google has become the Internet’s equivalent of the Beatles during that rock group’s heyday in the 1960s. ”It’s pretty amazing. It’s almost like they are in control of the world.”
Beatles reference? Yeah — my exact quote there was that ‘Google is more popular than Jesus right now’. Taken from John Lennon’s infamous quote about his own band and the power they held in the 60’s. GOOG is big right now. Really big. Is that a good thing? Well it certainly is to Wall Street.
Here’s a link to the article at the NY Times: Google 3Q Profit Soars 46 Percent
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Last week Chris Sherman (Executive Editor from Search Engine Land) spoke at a very valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled ‘Leveraging All Search Marketing Channels’. This event was sponsored by 24/7 and provided pertinent information regarding various search marketing channels, both traditional and emerging.
The speaker challenged the audience to think of how many channels we are using and where we might be missing opportunities. Mr. Sherman believes the evolution of search has many parallels with television in that at the beginning there were a few big dominant players and ads were only available to big spenders. Later, as the medium developed smaller niche players and opportunities for smaller advertisers emerged.
In the world of search, at the beginning, we had three or four large search engines and now we are seeing opportunities in smaller, niche oriented markets.
There are two groups of search marketing channels: traditional and expanded.
1. Organic Listings
Natural search results derived from the full text of all pages found on the web
2. Paid Listings
Carefully worded advertisements consisting of 2-5 word title and 2 very short lines of text
1. Content Options
News and Press Releases – Many people aren’t taking advantage of PRs. By optimizing the press releases, companies can drive people and journalists to their site.
Always optimize PRs with hyperlinks to the URL to your site.
Remember to submit PRs to wire services (different crawlers).
Bonus – journalists writing about your news may drive more traffic than the releases itself. Opportunity to have your news picked up on 2 different channels – journalists and web.
Social Media
Simple definition: Internet way finding tools informed by human judgment. There is currently no good industry standard definition of social media. They do have some component of search involved but they are involved by human beings (voting on stories, answers questions, contributing content).
Why bother with social media? Social media sites are attracting huge audiences that have a memory (book marking). If you do well on these social media sites, people might find your content when they aren’t actively searching.
Types of Social Media
Collaborative harvesters – People on the web are trying to find content and recommend it to other uses (Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Sphinn).
Collaborative Directories – ODP, Wikipedia, Prefound – These sites are created by human beings and not search engine crawlers. 
Wikipedia can be used for search marketing because you can add content you want (with caution – as the editors are suspicious of anyone changing content for marketing purpose) or at the end of all Wikipedia entries there are links to external sites. Wikipedia is heavily trafficked and the links can send traffic to your site. IF you have images about your product or service, you can upload those images and those images can have a link to your particular product or service page.
Social Q&A sites – Yahoo Answers, Answerbag – They have less value than the other
types because of the Q&A format so you don’t have much opportunity to influence people.
Local Search
Likely to be the next big thing.
Relevant for both small location based businesses and large companies relying on locally purchased goods or services. (Even large companies can take advantage of local search because most people are still buying their products locally instead of online).
Many players, so try to submit to as many as possible. Most are free or minimal cost.
Feed-Based Search Marketing
Allows you to have a direct dialog with search engines (if you have a product based inventory or a large site that you need control on what gets to the search engines).
Gives you control over what the search engine sees and indexes.
Types of Feeds
Web based inclusion
Shopping and product comparison
Local search and directory
2. Ad Options (beyond traditional)
2nd tier or alternative search engines
Operate just like Google, Yahoo – but with less reach.
Be careful: traffic quality can be poorer than with the majors (may not get the same level of qualified buyers and poorer conversion rates – monitor to make sure you are hitting your performance goals.
Advantage – usually less expensive and can target searchers not using the majors. Examples: (Looksmart, Enhance, Epilot, Marchex, Miva, Mirago (Europe), Search123, 7Search, PageSeeker).
Contextual ad networks
Backend works just like the search advertising platforms, but ads are distributed to content sites on the web rather than search results pages.
Be careful: potentially less engaged users.
Consider all the majors, plus the smaller players like Kanoodle.
Ad exchanges
Auction style exchanges designed to facilitate exchanges betweens advertisers and media
buyers (no middleman & potentially better audience targeting).
Players include RightMedia (Yahoo), DoubleClick (Google), AQuantitive (Microsoft), & Context. AdsDaq is a new player that will be launching soon that has recently launched.
3. Platform options – the web is now an object based platform, instead of just a text based platform.
Video
Two ways to use video in a search marketing campaign.
Optimize meta data to be found by the search engines (because the search engines can not see video – only text). 98% of videos aren’t doing this so it is a wide open area right now.
Embed URL in titles and inserts on video for people to type into their browser – simply by having your video out there you can drive a lot of traffic.
Podcasts
Are increasingly being picked up in general search results.
Optimize metadata (ID3 tags), but also optimize web site (content information (overview), unique landing pages, transcripts). Gives crawlers more text to chew on.
Create and submit RSS feeds with embedded podcasts (content).
Mobile
Similar to, but also very different from web based search marketing (difficult because of small screens and keyboards).
Crucial difference: mobile searchers have different needs and wants (big opportunity because of the number of users – definitely something that everyone should have on their radar and start experimenting with it). Need to optimize content differently- for example the navigation structure should be at the bottom instead of top. These users want an immediate action; they don’t want to scroll through dozens of links etc.
Two other key players – device manufacturers and network operators.
Big Five Areas for Mobile (verticals) – these are the players that should be involved in mobile now because of customer needs.
- consumer packaged goods
- fast food restaurants
- entertainment
- travel/hospitability
- financial services
Opportunity to get a big leap forward than competitors
Mr. Sherman concluded with posting the global question…
You need to ask yourself that question.
If you answer yes – you’ll need to spend more time researching the channels (e.g., The Digg of France is Scoopeo and Brazil is Linkk).
Take into account local customs, local laws. Remember what plays well in the U.S. may not in other countries. Don’t make the presumption that if something is big here it will be elsewhere (ex. Google is not the dominant search engine in China).
Chris Sherman asked the audience to consider how you put it all together. Answer these questions to help guide you along…
Is your SEO strategy aligned with your paid search initiatives? If you have that solid foundation, you are ready to go out and experiment with newer channels. However, SEO needs to be aligned with paid search first.
Are you leveraging all relevant search marketing channels? Not all channels will be relevant to all businesses. Ex. top five categories for mobile are very relevant for those industries and not for others. If it’s not relevant to your business and won’t impact your business goals – don’t move forward.
Are you integrating online and offline marketing efforts? Because we are moving into these peripheral areas with search marketing, we need to make sure our campaigns are integrated in online and offline efforts. To really gain the maximum leverage you possibly can, make sure all your campaigns are integrated and play off each other really well, reinforce each other.
Mr. Sherman counseled that we have much richer opportunities for search and we will continue to see it evolve. Keep aware of the new things coming down the line and keep an open mind and take advantage of all the new things that are coming on the web as that will make it easier to reach our customers.
There was a few minutes for questions at the end of the session.
What are some of the newswires?
Business Wire, PR Newswire are two of the biggest. Search or look for online news release services. Most are fee based, some are free and they’ll give you instructions on how to do it. Relatively inexpensive and painless.
Can you be penalized for duplicate content when on a newswire and on your website?
No, the search engines know that you’ll be on a newswire and you won’t be penalized for duplicate content. Newscrawlers and webcrawlers work independently. Not to be concerned.
Are Podcasts are more useful for staying in touch with existing customers or acquiring new ones?
Both, it is easy and cheap to do a podcast. Great way to keep channels of communication open with new and existing customers.
What do feeds cost?
It depends on the pricing structure. They could be content based (yahoo) i.e. Based on number of pages on your site. Could be based on the number of clicks on the site. Shopping feeds are the same thing and depends on the comparison engine you are submitting to. Consumer products cost one thing, another product category costs another.
What is the best social media option for someone just getting started?
Get out there and lurk, don’t jump in right away. You’ll find the sites are dominated by people who have been on the site for some time – you need to make sure you are familiar with the community and be careful not to promote in an overt way. The social media loves lists (top ten reasons to do x), if you have content that will help the page achieve their goals that is helpful. Tread cautiously. You might want to start with smaller, niche based sites first as the communities aren’t as hard core and a little more inclusive and may accept newcomers. You will get focused and relevant traffic.
What effects to you see on human powered search marketing?
People in search is very promising because human beings can watch videos, provide tagging etc. Yahoo Answers has introduced a rating system where good answerers get good ratings and are higher rated.
Thanks to everyone for putting on an informative web seminar… Chris Sherman, 24/7 Real Media, and Claire at Search Marketing Now!
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There is a new article on Forbes today about how marketers are harnessing the power of Digg. I am one of the marketers included in the article:
Chris Winfield, president of search marketing firm 10e20, enumerated some subjects that are sure to get approval from Digg’s largely libertarian and adolescent user base. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, the NBC show Heroes, and the iPhone, for instance, are favorites among Diggers. President Bush, Fox News and the Recording Industry Association of America, on the other hand, are hated topics that companies should avoid.
Andy Greenberg’s article also includes 4 other brilliant social media marketers: Cameron Olthuis, Neil Patel, Tamar Weinberg and Brent Csutoras. The article stemmed out of seeing all of our presentations at SMX Social Media (which was a great success). I kind of like this quote of mine that he ended the article with:
“They knew their audience and they came up with a great idea,” Winfield says. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
Check out the full article here to put it all in context….
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