This enhancement is something that advertiser’s have been requesting for quite a long time. If you’re advertising on the AdWord’s Content Network it allows you to see the exact sites where your ads appear. From Google: “Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

My thoughts from the article:

A maker of steak knives, for example, might prefer to have its ads on Marthastewart.com and food-related sites than on the risque Hotornot.com’s photo-rating service, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a search marketing firm that helps advertisers place ads online.

“This will help improve performance because advertisers will now have a better idea of which sites are working and which aren’t,” he said.

To me that’s what it always comes down to – what’s working and what’s not and you need to be able to have that information in front of you to make informed decisions.

Here’s the full online version of the article: New Google Service Helps Advertisers, May Drive Ad Sales

For a good overview of Placement Performance Reports – check out Jeremy Luebke’s post or these help sections from Google.

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There has been a fair amount of community coverage of how the leading candidates of the 2008 Presidential elections are leveraging or missing the boat on SEO and in the Social Media networks. There are interesting posts that follow the quality and strength of the campaigns. Mima looking at backlinks to Presidential hopeful sites. Further on March 13, 2007 Michael (Solo) Jensen did a great candidate SEO review on WebPro News. Rand-Moz chimed in May with insight regarding keyword rankings, missed opportunities and John McCain’s nasty SEO blunders, while Jonah from Alchemist discussed the grassroots value of the web for campaigns.

With regard to eyeballs on campaigns through social media, perhaps the most celebrated and widespread demonstration is the YouTube YouChoose08 section devoted to the election. Google has this section in the paid results on candidate name searches in Google Web search, so they are promoting it fair amount, and just from speaking with other heavy internet users, it’s definitely a place where people will form opinions. YouChoose08 allows candidates to create a video dossier and for visitors to interact with the campaigns and voice opinions. It’s a totally new town-hall, and you don’t even have to go all the way to small town “New Hampsha”, to listen to the candidates speak. You Tube is a powerful venue for campaigns.

But what of SEO/M? I’d like to compare and discuss the recent candidate name search results on Google.com for the candidates Rudy Giuliani (R) | Mitt Romney (R) | Hillary Clinton (D) and Barack Obama (D). At this point, it seems that these candidates are the real players with big money and an honest chance to pull it off (even though Fred Thompson has made a splash without even officially entering). And, let’s admit it, as much as we’d like grassroots to make things happen, it’s going to probably come down to money.

So which candidates are using Google to their greatest advantage? Which political campaigns are running the best name-based search marketing campaigns?

For this discussion, we’ll begin with Google and we’ll continue on with Yahoo, MSN Ask.com at a point in the near future.

Candidate #1: Rudy Giuliani

#1 Organic Result – Official website www.joinrudy2008.com

JoinRudy2008 – Home

#2 Organic Result – Wikipedia Page

SERP Results – 1.7 mm

Stats on Canidate’s Offical Website:

PageRank – 6

Age of Website – 1998

Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes

Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy – Rudy Giuliani for President 12 Commitments to America

Search Marketing Grade: B-

I rate this a B- for one major flaw. If Rudy does not make it in ‘08, and there is a distinct chance he will not, he’s going to have to have a NEW DOMAIN for 2012, if he wants to run. Then, all the authority that he gains from this site in 07 and 08, will have to be redirected to the new site. Would Rudy’s 2012 site be www.joinrudy2012.com and they’d have to start all over again, building authority for that site? So, I believe that they made a mistake right off the bat by not using www.rudygiuliani.com or www.joinrudy.com

As well – Look at this! http://www.rudygiuliani.com

That’s pitiful Rudy. You’re scaring me. I might reconsider and give a B-minus or even a C for that one. This is a site running Yahoo Publisher ads and buying and selling domains. This is kind of sloppy, ugly stuff.

Also, for the title - ending with “HOME”? C’mon Rudy, you’re from New York, you can get a better title than this. If you want to keep it simple, how about: Rudy Giuliani for President. Much better than JoinRudy2008 – Home. Grrrr..!

Candidate #2: Hillary Clinton

#1 Organic Result – Official website www.hillaryclinton.com

HillaryClinton.com – Welcome

#2 Organic Result- official campaign site

SERP Results – 14.3 mm

Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:

PR – 6

Age of Website – 2001

Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not when I searched during this post! That’s a problem.

Search Marketing Grade: B+

Senator Clinton is lucky enough to have sitemap links site links below her first result which is great. These direct links to important pages on her site are an indication of good, clean, clear crawling. As well, she has the 1st, 2nd and 3rd organic results. Her US Senate page is 3rd. With regard to title, Hillary’s campaign may want to tinker with it a bit. The slogan on her website logo is “Hillary for President”, so why not just do a variation of that and keep with the theme while being relevant to a searcher. Try Hillary Clinton for President – Join Hillary. “Welcome” is good, but not a great call to action. And, after all, the end goal with the political campaign is to have people join them.

Candidate #3: Mitt Romney

#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.mittromney.com

Mitt Romney for President 2008

#2 Organic Result – Wikipedia page

SERP Results – 2.10 mm

Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:

PR – 6

Age of Website – 2002

Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not on name-search at the time of writing this post.

Search Marketing Grade: B

Not showing any site links, not showing any official site advertising on Google AdWords

Great title, but not leveraging AdWords properly, at least in my NY geographic region – that’s a travesty at this point; at least on a name search.

Candidate #4: Barack Obama

#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.barackobama.com

BarackObama.com | Welcome to Obama for America

#2 organic result – Wikipedia page

SERP Results – 2.15 mm

Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:

PR – 7

Age of Website – 3/2002

Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes

Official Site AdWords Copy? Volunteers welcome: Sign-up to volunteer at Obama campaign events

And another one that is displaying in NY:

Get to Know Barack Obama
BarackObama.com Learn more about Senator Obama at campaign events: Register Online

Search Marketing Grade: A-

Compelling title: Welcome to Obama for America – That’s what it’s all about. The candidate is for the people and this will ring true for many, many users on searches and at the grassroots. In the name search, site links are readily available and most importantly the www.my.barackobama.com link is there prompting users to “Get Involved” and finally, they are taking advantage of AdWords pay per click. So, this campaign, for the most part got it right.

So, for now, Obama is the winner in this Presidential Candidate name-search campaign.

One of the biggest surprises was to not see all candiates leveraging AdWords properly.

I’m going to leave it to a later post to discuss Yahoo!, MNS and Ask.com and I’ll let our site usability experts discuss the actually sites, because that’s the other part of the equation. I’ll also leave the on-site SEO analysis to someone else.

One question that I have for the SEO/M community and the candidate’s campaign managers themselves: Is it worthwhile to run campaigns or to pay any attention to search results abroad – such as on www.google.co.uk now or further, when you know the candidate has a distinct chance of winning the campaign. Hillary Clinton for example has a ton of strength to with the 08 Presidential election, so, she may be President one day. Should she begin to influence a search result on Google UK in order to be viewed favorably abroad? How is this search result (Hillary Clinton) going to change over time? A for reputation management, is it worth to watch and monitor and attempt to influence the result. If she’s President, the likely search term that people will use is “President Clinton” and that could be a real case study in reputation management.

Lastly, Amy Schatz at the Wall Street Journal did a great job of covering the spend on internet marketing as a whole among the Presidential candidates. I found it most surprising that Rudy Giuliani spent only $7,000 on AdWords during Q1 2007. Obama, by contrast spent nearly $72,000. which is a bit more in line with reality. So, another plus for Obama, but not quite A+ yet.

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The purpose of my post was to see if anyone really was searching for that term:

How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….

Soon after I wrote that, my post was on the Google Trends Page for the term under Blog Searches:

This started sending traffic right away and wound up sending close to 1,200 visitors from that Trends page alone. Even more interesting was how quickly I was ranking #1 for the term in Google (now it’s ranking #2 behind Google Trends). That was something I hadn’t even thought of. Granted there was basically zero competition for that term at the time other then other blogs curious about the term. But interestingly enough there were about 3,300 visitors from Google for that term alone yesterday.

Now for the most part, that is useless traffic because that question really has nothing to do with the subjects we cover here but there are sites that it could be. How could you use this info? If you have a blog, scan the top terms each day and see if there are any that are close to your niche. If so, write a post using that term that seeks to give people what they are looking for (and then possibly lead them wherever you want them to go). Just make sure you are in Google Blog Search.

The interesting part about this to me was the fact that the trends data isn’t all fluff. It will be even more interesting to try this again in the next couple of months because I am sure that many of the searches yesterday were also people curious about that wierd term being so searched for…

Yesterday I spoke with Holly Sanders from The New York Post and appear in her article in today’s paper called Ad & Subtract. The article is all about the recent emails that Google sent out to many AdSense publishers informing them that their accounts would be disabled on June 1st.

Search experts said Google routinely cuts off publishers who run afoul of AdSense rules, but they believe this latest round of notices was a more widespread effort to clean up its ad network.

“I don’t really remember where this many people reported it at one time,” said Chris Winfield, president of Internet search marketing firm 10e20.

Google confirmed that it had sent out notices, but characterized it as part of an ongoing review.

Just my $.02 on this whole thing. This was not an all & out attack on arbitragers or even everyone running MFA sites. Out of all the people I know running AdSense only one got the letter. This was more of a move on Google’s part to bring attention to this matter, they knew that as soon as a few people got the letter that a threads would start at Webmaster World, DigitalPoint, etc and it would get everyone all riled up. By doing this they are doing two things:

• Letting advertisers know that they are addressing the problems with their content network
  
• Scaring a lot of the publishers who didn’t get the letter (and who are toeing the line) into possibly changing their biz models

All of this without ever making an official statement. If you’re interested in more information on this, I would recommend checking out this video post from Shoemoney or this short discussion on ThreadWatch which raises some other interesting points.

Check out the full online version of the NY Post article here.

When you go to Google Trends you can find this right towards the bottom of the page:

One important note with these lists is that they will not include all of the top queries of the day because it will be edited to exclude pornography and other common type queries about the weather, popular Web sites like MySpace.com or even prominent celebrities.

So how much insight can this really give you into what people are searching for today? Let’s look at the current Top 10:

So according to Google the Hottest Term of the day is: what part of a graduate’s costume gave the cordon bleu cooking school its name? Even though there are no News Articles or Blog Articles pertaining to this:

Unless there was some big Cordon Bleu Cooking School story that I missed, I just find it hard to believe that more then one person is searching for that. #10 on the list, heroes season 2, makes much more sense. Season 1 just ended, they have rabid fans and they are looking for info about the new season. There are a ton of articles about it and even more blog posts.

So as with any service like this, just like Google’s Zeitgeist or the Yahoo! Buzz, take the data with a grain of salt. Don’t ever make any hard & fast decisions based on this type of data. Its best used as a rough guide or something to spark other ideas.

How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….

Update: As expected this post showed up on the page within 10 minutes or so:

Eariler this month there was an extremely popular story on Digg which told the story of a guy and an argument he was having with his girlfriend. In an attempt to prove him wrong, his girlfriend did what so many of us now do, she turned to Google for the answer:

I was arguing with my girlfriend about women not inventing anything useful. In an attempt to prove me wrong she Google “She invented” only to have ask Did you mean “He invented”

Why was this such a big deal? It just so happens that there are many, many women inventors from Randi Altschul (invented the world’s first disposable cellphone) to Grace Hopper (world’s first computer compiler) to Mary Walton (developed a method of deflecting smoke stack emissions).

I came back across this story today when I was looking at the most popular stories of the last 30 days on Digg and I went to Google to try the search again for “she invented”:

The Did You Mean “he invented”? is now gone and as can be expected the Digg story (which received over 200 links as tracked by Yahoo) is the top result. Was this “fixed” because of the Digg story gaining such relevance and being on a trusted domain or was this a Google fix?

One thing stories like this do though is show us how much we can sometimes rely on Google, forgetting that at the end of the day – Google is a robot. As much as Google helps us in our everyday lives – is it really making us dumber?

Could a potential Microsoft/Yahoo deal solve the freefall?

Short answer: no. Long answer: Internet analysts say it couldn’t hurt.

“Overnight, MSN and Yahoo’s market share doubles,” says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York firm that helps businesses set up search marketing campaigns. “They still aren’t as strong as Google, but they are healthier together than apart.”

My thoughts on this deal are simple. In a perfect world I feel that a Microsoft and Yahoo pairing would make a stronger company to compete against Google, with the key word being compete. Paired together their search market share would be at almost 39% – just 10% below Google’s 48%. But even in the perfect world scenario I don’t think they would be able to surpass Google in search anytime in the near future. With that being said, that’s the perfect world scenario, you are talking about two very ego driven companies that both just spent a great deal of time and money building search applications to compete with Google (Microsoft’s live.com and AdCenter; Yahoo’s Project Panama). They also used to work together (Microsoft used Yahoo’s ad platform) and that got scrapped. So….

But in the end, it doesn’t look like its going to matter anyway because according to recent reports talks have been called off for the time being. But they did say that they might still try to find a way of cooperating together in the future. Interesting times…

One of the first things you will notice when you go to Google Webmaster Central is that you can check if your site is being indexed by Google. The site status wizard allows you to see when your site was last crawled and if it’s in Google’s index.

You might be told that you have potential problems and that you should submit a sitemap. It is recommended that you do so, even though you can now declare the path of your sitemap through your robots.txt file.

If this is your first time at Google Webmaster Central, you need to verify that you are in fact the owner of the site. You can do so with a meta tag or you can upload an HTML file.

Once you are approved, Google will give you more information about your site, such as any HTTP errors it may have, 404 pages discovered, URLs that cannot be followed, URLs restricted by robots.txt, URLs that timed out and unreachable URLs.

You can also see the crawl rate of your site to determine how Google is accessing these pages:

And you can set up a preferred domain (e.g. www.10e20.com or 10e20.com).

Other useful features include the Enhanced Image Search and you need to specifically opt-in to have your images searched to improve search quality. More information on this is at the Webmaster Help Center.

A relatively new tool is the URL removal in Webmaster Central; you can remove content from the Google index easily with this functionality. If you wanted to remove any URLs, you can specify whether you want to remove individual URLs, a specific directory, or even your entire site.

Note that Google wants user feedback, so on the upper left hand corner, you can rate the effectiveness of the tool.

In the Statistics portion of the Webmaster Central, you can get an idea of your PageRank of individual pages and Google will also provide you with data of pages with the highest PageRank.

You are also able see which search terms are generating results from your site and the average top position. You can also see which of these queries was actually clicked. I assure you that you’ll find some interesting surprises here.

One of the newer and cool things about Google Webmaster Central is that you can see a page analysis of external links to your site and the anchor text used. You can download CSV files of this data as well.

You can also see what pages have been linked to the most:

And finally, you can submit your sitemap and track its progress:

These are really the basics of the Google Webmaster Central. There’s a bit more if you dig deeper. All in all, this is a pretty comprehensive tool that is constantly being worked on. It gives webmasters a good deal of information about sites so that webmasters can get an understanding of the search engine’s understanding of your website. I encourage all webmasters to use it.

I’m not sure if this has been going on for awhile but its the first time I have ever seen it. The ads only appear if you aren’t logged into your StumbleUpon account. The other interesting note is that it simply says “Ads by” not the typical “Ads by Google”.

The first is a recommendations button on the Google Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice. Click on the dice, and we’ll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we’ll show you a new one. We’ll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. Just add the button to your Toolbar. (In order to use this feature, you need the latest version of the Toolbar.)

Oh yeah and to use this – you better be signed into your Google Account or its not going to work. Cool feature or another way to make sure you are always signed into G? I know at least one person this will bother…