10e20 Blog

Chris is at two for two: his second webcast in two weeks has been extremely valuable, as always. Thanks to Chris, SearchMarketingNow, and iProspect for the opportunity to listen in and learn.

Today, Chris talked about mixing paid and organic listings. Is it worth pursuing? What are the benefits? Keep reading!

Overview
I am going to talk about definitions and critical differences between paid and organic listings. There are two fallacies and two important concerns. How do you achieve a balance between the two? I will discuss why paid and organic listings are both important parts of a search marketing campaign, and I’ll then give tips on how to balance the two.

Definitions
Organic listings:

• Natural search results that are derived from the full text of all pages found on the web
• The position result is determined by search algorithms that consider dozens of factors: keyword density, meta tags, etc.

I know we focus on social media a lot here on the 10e20 blog but at the end of the day I still view SMO (or SMM) as part of the search engine optimization toolbox.

“Being at the top of Google is probably the most important factor in your whole marketing plan online,” says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20 LLC, a global search marketing and Web solutions company in New York. “Nothing comes close to being able to match it with people looking for what you do.”

Whatever you need to do to get there - do it.

As I told Stacy when she was doing the interview - I don’t believe that anyone knows what Google’s ’secret sauce’ is (not any of the engineers, not even Larry or Serge) because it’s evolved so much beyond any one thing. So obviously you aren’t going to get an answer to Google’s secrets in this article but its a really good read nonetheless with feedback from myself, Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin and others.

In many instances small and mid sized business owners are not 100% sure that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the right solution for the online marketing needs, when in fact, there are very few instances where SEO is not a crucial and central part of an online marketing strategy.

The point of SEO since “day one” is to increase sales by obtaining qualified business leads from Internet search engines. Achieving this goal is possible with almost any business of any size. And, while SEO is a complex, evolving issue and requires tons and tons of work, every business Owner, President, CEO or CMO must recognize that without an organized SEO campaign in place, you will fade off the map, lose sales to competitors and bleed the value of your brand over time. You will spend tons of money on traditional media buys and find it ever so difficult to track and tie sales to those sources. To ignore SEO in its traditional and new evolving forms is to deny your company and its employees the opportunity to succeed online in the long-term.

I was doing some research earlier and did a search on Google for translation services and was quite dissapointed to see Babel Fish as not 1, not 2 but 4 of the top 10 results returned.

Yes - Babel Fish is an extremely popular service for quick, free translations. Does it deserve to be in the top ten? Sure. Does it deserve to be in the top ten - four different times? No shot.

All of these results (despite having different URLs) all lead to the same exact tool. How does this enrich the searcher’s experience?

Interestingly enough, Yahoo! owned AltaVista’s BabelFish doesn’t show up once in Yahoo’s top 10 results for the same term.

Don’t kid yourself — determination does play a part in Google results. This past weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was Google-bombed for “miserable failure” in Google’s Hebrew results, just like George W. Bush is in English results.

The Google bomb is a way of manipulating the search engines to bring up “preferred” results (by a select few webmasters). This is achieved by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites that are linked to these political figures’ websites with anchor text that referred to the particular page (and the President) as a “miserable failure.”

Google (which occupies the only Sponsored Link for the “miserable failure” search result) explains these results and discourages against this activity. Google explains that its “search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them.”

As I touched upon in an earlier post, I once worked as a private eye and researched trademark concerns. When presented with a brand new assignment, I was given a trademark and its “intent of use” (whether it be a restaurant name or a logo of a haircare/skincare product), but little else. It was my responsibility, then, to begin — especially for legal considerations — to research the product as thoroughly as I could, especially if it was off the market (and had been for 20 years!). I can’t delve into specifics for obvious reasons, but I definitely reaped the benefits of this thorough research. Almost everyday outside the office, I encountered an application of a previous case I had worked on, whether in the street or in conversation. Through research, my knowledge of the culture that surrounded me (and even overseas) was enhanced. It was exciting to see how learning about a variety of products and services within an office found me realizing its importance outside the office and how I became more educated through it, especially understanding practical applications of products and the like from a historical and a marketing perspective.

Chris Sherman did it again — I have listened in on yet another wonderful SearchMarketingNow webcast (I have previously listened in on his “How to Find the Right Search Marketing Partner” webcast) about measuring search success in 2007.

I believe the prevailing theme here is conversion as a way of measuring success. But let’s get down to what I learned today from the mouth of Chris:

When we’re talking about measuring search success, you really need data. A lot of people don’t use data or understand its importance. They’ll use metrics like page views or sales. That’s okay but it doesn’t measure success because it doesn’t take advantage of all the data that is available to you.

In this session, therefore, we’ll talk about data for measuring success: the what and how, successful site characteristics, tools, and tips for measuring success.

Measuring Success

My fellow American friends: There are no typos in the subject of this blog post. This is British English. Having spent the past week in England (miss me much?) and having read about different ways that sites that would like to tailor themselves to British users actually end up alienating them, I notice that well, we may all speak the same language (for the most part), but there are some critical differences that should be acknowledged especially if you are looking to sell your services and products to folks overseas.

A few things I think are worth noting:

1. If you are looking for an exclusive UK market, tailoring your wording to British English can only help and not hurt. I’ve noticed the obvious terms among conversations (”rubbish” for “garbage,” “flat” instead of “apartment,” “cookery books” instead of “cookbooks,” etc.) There’s a nice little conversion tool that I discovered that points out some of the more common British and American words.

Today, I listened in on an excellent Search Marketing Now webcast presented by Chris Sherman, executive editor of SearchEngineLand. The hour-long webcast covered how you should find the right search marketing partner, and Chris raises some excellent points.

Chris begins by introducing the different aspects of search marketing:

• Organic Search Engine Optimization: search results that are not paid for
• Paid Inclusion: guarantees entry into the search engine results pages
• Paid Placement: buying sponsored listings
• Contextual Advertising: advertising on a partner of the search engine, like a newspaper or a partner
• Specialized search marketing, such as on a mobile phone, which “is going to explode in the coming five years.”

When choosing your search marketing partner, you need to define your strategy and look at your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? The following methods are recommended:

• If you have short-term goals, you might want paid placement.

It’s a hard task in SEO to explain to an individual who is not technically apt how crawlers understand and interpret websites for the search engine results. I’ve been inclined to say to individuals that they need to view the page source and try to understand that the tags that certain keywords are enclosed in has an impact on how the site is analyzed by the crawlers (especially those who are insistent that search engines will understand their flash files). I’ve been meaning to write up a nice little blurb on some basics: “Look at the code for something that says H1. This means that there is heavy emphasis on the text there. Also, the closer your text is to the top, the more likely the search engines will process it, especially if your page source is large — it might not see what’s on the bottom.” But the HTML to them is gobbelygook, and we don’t want to confuse them too much.