Jobs in Search is exactly what it says. Jobs in the search industry. If you are looking for a job at a Search Engine company, Search Engine Marketing firm, Search Engine Optimization company, New Media, Digital Media, and any company that provides services and products aimed at the search industry, this is a site to look into.
JobsInSearch.com has special sections for SEO and SEM resources, Events, Search News, and Industry experts.
To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.
MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.
YouTube leads the video search marketplace Like many people, I enjoy a good video. Especially with YouTube. Anything and everything is on there, well pretty much anything.
YouTube hosts any video it seems. From full length feature pirated movies, to news stories, video blog entries, a ton of just plain personal videos of the dog running around, to just plain hilarious videos of senior citizens dancing helping add to the 20 million visitors per month.
Hitwise just released some stats on YouTube, and their amazing 60% share of all videos watched online in the US. Compare that with Yahoo, MSN, and Google’s share of only 3-5%, and you can see why YouTube is a video traffic genius. The company gets around 100 million video’s viewed per day, and YouTube has said that they had 2.5 billion videos watched per day last month.
If you think there is nothing to see in the video search marketplace, look again, it’s hotter then ever, and YouTube is steaming up the web.
I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?
If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.
If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.
Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever…chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.
Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea.
On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.
A couple hours ago the sessions table for Drupal needed repaired or emptied because it was not allowing SEO Book users to login. I just emptied it, so you need to login again to comment, but it should work well again. Sorry about that.
It’s a nice new feature for Superpages to ad to their local directory. It adds a nice touch for local searchers. The current version of the maps embedded into the Superpages directory has three views, standard, aerial, and birds eye.
As recently reported, Superpages.com is rumored to be up for sale from Verizon.
Central hubs on the web fight off manipulation to keep their status and profit margins in tact. A side effect of this war on control over information access is the butchering of the English language.
I’m sure there could be blackmailers out there. We absolutely know that every single day, people try to game our system. Users are involved in illegal or inappropriate activities all the time. They try to set up fake accounts to promote a story. The thing is, we make changes to our algorithm on a regular basis. We plan for that.
Notice how he put illegal and inappropriate right next to each other, as to equate them. This comes from the same company that published this:
We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Why is the Yahoo! Directory Considered a Legitimate Link Buy?
In addition to what Jim said, I also believe the following play a role:
They predate Google.
Google needs some sort of baseline.
The directory business model is horrifically inefficient and poses no risk to Google’s market dominence. (Yahoo! demoted it in favor of Yahoo! Answers. Even the Google Directory, a DMOZ clone, has a higher PageRank than the Yahoo! Directory does.)
Few other sites are comparable to the Yahoo! Directory (especially after the Google directory purge of 2007), so it is not a technique that can’t be easily and profitably be replicated like paying for reviews.
The entire Business.com directory of over 65,000 categories is managed by 6 editors (source). How could they possibly review stuff as well as you or I do? They can’t. But if we all do our business in a direct to direct exchange fashion the central networks and search engines do not get a cut of the action.
Why Google is Different than Digg
Unlike Digg users looking to waste time, searchers have real targeted intent and real value. In response to Michael Gray’s post Danny Sullivan said:
But if he wants to stand up to Google, take the lead and block him from crawling his site — and encourage others to do the same. … No one has a right to Google traffic. Follow the rules, as stupid as they are, if you want it. If don’t like the rules, sure, complain about them — but don’t argue they’re robbing you of anything that is supposedly “yours.”
They change the guidelines on an as needed basis (use nofollow or else), apply them unevenly (why is TLA penalized when TextLinkBrokers still ranks?), and if they don’t like you they can penalize other businesses associated with you.
Michael, illicit as used on the Google Webmaster Guildelines page is defined by however Google wants to define it — in that case, doing stuff against the guidelines.
When the networks screw people over it is the fault of “users” or “the algorithm,” but when the central networks do not like what we do we are “criminals performing illicit acts.”
Recently Google has been more than fair to me, but if they want to use the language they are using to try to control others, they need to clean up their ad network. Just because an ad has a high CPC and gets a high CTR does not mean that it is not immoral or illegal. Plenty of people commit crime.
“Expect affiliates to exploit social media marketing (SMM) for SEO” (eyefortravel.com) As 2008 evolves, expect affiliates to exploit social media marketing (SMM) for SEO, controlling search engine rankings through links and growing fan bases on the sites above, plus destinations such as Digg, YouTube, Del.icio.us , and many more, said Share Results affiliate network CEO Nicky Senyard.
SEO strategy for new websites (e-Consultancy) Starting a new company is extremely hard, which is probably why most businesses fail within the first couple of years. Challenges such as marketing and hiring the right staff are some of the major issues that even good managers struggle with.
Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! Everyone learning a new skill makes mistakes. In some fields the necessary skills are tricky enough to keep up with that even old hands will make mistakes. Search engine optimization is no exception to this rule. Avoiding the most obvious mistakes can help put you ahead of the game…. Better software development info. Get better choices for software development from the expert sources. All in one.
Your first search results give you a look at all of the results together. However, Become has added in sub searches that categorize and filters the results based on the 4 research topics of Product Reviews, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details. Searches also dump recommended products with images to the right of the results, based on what you have searched for. It’s like a little shop built right into your search results. From there you can also customize the shopping by process or brand.
Become makes for a much more targeted and fun approach to search. Would I use it as my main search engine? No. I still prefer Google for their high quality lists of results.
The WSJ let the “our content will be free” story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering” for subscribers, he said. “The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”
The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.
Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:
there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.
I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?
If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.
If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.
Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever…chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.
Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea.
On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.
A couple hours ago the sessions table for Drupal needed repaired or emptied because it was not allowing SEO Book users to login. I just emptied it, so you need to login again to comment, but it should work well again. Sorry about that.
As mentioned on SearchEngineLand, the Google Local onebox may now include up to 10 links in it. The increase from 3 to 10 results was allegedly due to usability testing, but them using text smaller than the rest of the text on the search results doesn’t really conform to good usability standards either.
Start your search on Google seobook.com/images/google-local-map2.png” />
Clickthrough to the top review site there - still get Google maps limit usage. In a few years Yahoo! will be wishing they begged people to spread that data far and wide to build a leadership position in the market, which is what Google will do via syndication.
If Google can drive a lot of traffic to their local listings and start encouraging user reviews that gives them another way to keep users on the Google network and monetize the search results.
Here is a great speech by Chris Anderson about how reputation and attention are becoming the new economies upon which much of the internet (and potentially offline) world may be based upon.
Freemium consists of giving away value (and possibly wrapping it in ads), as a lead generator to sell premium products and services. The model minimizes consumer risk by allowing them to become familiar with and reliant on the service before paying for it.
David Beisel, principal at Masthead Venture Partners in Cambridge, Mass., says the freemium model is attractive to VCs for the same reason it’s attractive to entrepreneurs. “Giving away a free version of the service allows consumers to not just learn about it through collateral or a free trial,” he explains, “but it presents them the opportunity to fully adopt the service and incorporate it into their lives.
“Those types of customers are ones who begin to evangelize the product to others. Entrepreneurs then greatly benefit, as powerful and inexpensive word-of-mouth marketing kicks in.”
One of the things I believe is that just like services that move toward free, all forms of content (even specialized high value niche content) will follow the same path. Information that is sold as a product (not a service) will keep seeing its margins decline as self satisfying hollow chucking and local substitution (ie: wikipedia editors rewriting your content, or someone uploads it to a torrent site) drive the value of most information to nothing.
This video is about more than just generating keywords for AdSense sites, it is about finding the most valuable keywords for any business. But most the people searching for top paying keyword lists are looking for AdSense keyword lists. I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).
If you have ever wondered how the mainstream media works, watching Manufacturing Consent does a great job of displaying its sordid underbelly. The bias is not always this obvious, but it is always there:
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the libs of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
The media rides the story up and rides it back down. We always need something to talk about. It happens to the media offline just like it does to niche publishers online. But the memory and analysis are short and shallow, quickly pointing a finger at a false cause, fixing symptoms like antidepressant drugs do:
The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a “subprime mortgage crisis,” but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in the price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.
It puts the formation of the alternative energy market in a fascinating perspective, especially as I finished reading about the demise of ACA and hung up the phone from an automated call from a sleazy telemarketer company calling me at 8pm, stating their partnerships with non-profits to help consolidate the debt that I don’t have due to the country’s current credit crisis.
Modern Search Engine Optimization (WebProNews) In the course of judging the SEMMYs, one of the great posts I read was The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice by Stuntdubl (aka Todd Malicoat). It’s a great post because it helps outline how SEO is expanding in it’s scope. read more
The WSJ let the “our content will be free” story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering” for subscribers, he said. “The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”
The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.
Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:
there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.
Yahoo! killed off their brand universe project, and recently fired 30 people. Rumor has it that about 2,000 more layoffs might be coming soon. Yahoo! shares are nearing $20, trading at $20.78, and giving them a market capitalization of $27.8 billion.
This WSJ article highlights that about half of Yahoo!’s value is in cash and equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Over the last year Yahoo! lost significant momentum and marketshare in search. They need to outsource search and search ads, fire a bunch of employees, gain search marketshare, or there is going to be a buyout or merger before the year is out.
Pageviews Still do Not Have Much Value
Sidebar: to anyone hyping the value of pageviews and social media, think of how many pageviews Yahoo! has. If you pull out the value of Yahoo!’s large equity stakes in other companies and cash on hand, Amazon and eBay are each worth about 2 to 3 times Yahoo!, and Google is worth about 13x.
10 Key Ideas Yahoo! Needs to Implement Tomorrow (or Sooner)
After seeing the underwhelming launch of Wikia Search, I think Yahoo! should push further in human aided search. Relevancy is based on perception and marketing. Yahoo! needs to do the following if they want to compete in search:
Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com), and by becoming more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact that the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.
Yahoo! is testing integrating Del.icio.us data in their search results. Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution. Payment does not need to be monetary. Take a look at the success of Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us and apply those toward search. Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost). Win search marketshare from your users by giving them rebates on your other products as well.
Create a branding and awareness campaign around the new Yahoo! Search. Hire someone to do a fake study proving that Yahoo! Search is more relavant than any of the other players. Make sure Ask or Microsoft is ranked #2 ahead of Google.
Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.
Launch a new toolbar with a meter like PageRank in it…call it YourRank (or something the emphasizes to the user) that it is their web and what they like. Heavily push that branding message to users locked into Yahoo! email, Yahoo! Stores, and other verticals they interact with.
Create a well branded specialty search for bloggers with innovative features that make it easy to follow the conversation both ways. Also launch creative ideas to buy mindshare with other high authority communities (universities, open source projects, etc.).
Easily allow advertisers to do keyword research on Yahoo! outside of while they are setting up search campaigns. Create a reliable publicly accessible keyword tool which actually markets the Yahoo! Search product.
Give away a lot of useful search market data (like Microsoft recently did with their Ad Intelligence plug-in).
Put the Yahoo! brand on the millions of syndicated domain landing pages they power each day.
Increase the relevancy of their contextual ad product and increase payouts to 100% (buy marketshare) BEFORE Microsoft openly launches their network. Perform case studies with publishers who saw their Yahoo! monetization go up AFTER switching from AdSense (and other inferior networks) to the NEW Yahoo! Publisher Network contextual ads program. Perhaps pay key leading bloggers 150% just to get them using, talking about, and giving feedback on your ads. Buy marketshare…
How Could Yahoo! Become Relevant?
Do you still use Yahoo! Search? What could Yahoo! do to make you want to use them and talk about their search product?
Is Linkbait Good or Bad? The term linkbait has been around at least since 2 5. Nick Wilson is sometimes credited with coining the term. It s a great way to lure visitors to your site but some SEO authorities now claim that it s not such a good idea. Who s right … Softwear at Shopping.com Find, compare and buy clothing and other apparel products. Read product reviews and compare prices with tax and shipping from thousands of online stores.
LearnSEOLive.com Launches On February 19th With New Online SEO Training Membership Site (PRWeb) Announcing LearnSEOLive.com with Garrett Pierson and Jordan Kasteler. LearnSEOLive.com is a SEO training site that uses the latest technologies of online video tutorials to teach Search Engine Optimization and Social Marketing. Get top SEO tips and techniques with this exclusive SEO Membership Site. Get the limited time discount and start getting the search engine rankings you deserve. (PRWeb …
To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.
MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.
Community Powered Search Eurekster is a different kind of search engine. It is based on community decisions on what the top results should be.
What you would have to do to get inclusion into Eurekster is to create your own swicki. It would be tailored to your particular interests. The swicki will then scan all of the updated pages from your particular site. As people use your particular swicki, the system will learn behaviors of people, and rank your site accordingly.
In a basic approach, a Swicki is a search engine that learns from your users. Results are produced for relevancy, and a buzzcloud of searches are created based on only what users care about.
Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services It sounds like an April Fools Day joke but SEO-focused journalists first got wind of it around Christmas. Sam s Club Wal-Mart s brand for bulk sales to small businesses now offers search marketing services. What does this mean for SEO and SEM consultants … See how easy remote support can be. Try WebEx free! Deliver efficient and effective support. Remotely control applications. Leap securely through firewalls.
LearnSEOLive.com Launches On February 19th With New Online SEO Training Membership Site (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Announcing LearnSEOLive.com with Garrett Pierson and Jordan Kasteler. LearnSEOLive.com is a SEO training site that uses the latest technologies of online video tutorials to teach Search Engine Optimization and Social Marketing. Get top SEO tips and techniques with this exclusive SEO Membership Site. Get the limited time discount and start getting the search engine rankings you deserve.
• Major SEO Mistakes & Misconceptions You Should Avoid (Turks.US) Almost every Internet surfer locates or finds new Web sites by using search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. When you go to these sites, you type in what you are looking for and generally find it in the top two or three results of the search page.
Some Sites Need Usability Makeovers, Not SEO (Search Engine Roundtable) Stoney DeGeyter has written over at Search Engine Guide that not every client needs SEO. Sometimes the usability needs to be tackled first. Using an analogy, he explains that your website is like a restaurant. If the restaurant isn’t accessible, people might not hang around. He drives the point home with: By fixing usability issues you can sell more while without having to spend a lot of …
How to Choose Specialized Search Engines (Addict 3D) p strong span style= font-size 12pt Robb Lewis span strong strong span style= font-size 12pt vice president of products for Retrevo and an expert in SEO optimization joined Ziff Davis Enterprise Senior Technology Editor Wayne Rash for a recent interview.
LearnSEOLive.com Launches On February 19th With New Online SEO Training Membership Site (PRWeb) Announcing LearnSEOLive.com with Garrett Pierson and Jordan Kasteler. LearnSEOLive.com is a SEO training site that uses the latest technologies of online video tutorials to teach Search Engine Optimization and Social Marketing. Get top SEO tips and techniques with this exclusive SEO Membership Site. Get the limited time discount and start getting the search engine rankings you deserve. (PRWeb …
Here is a great speech by Chris Anderson about how reputation and attention are becoming the new economies upon which much of the internet (and potentially offline) world may be based upon.
Freemium consists of giving away value (and possibly wrapping it in ads), as a lead generator to sell premium products and services. The model minimizes consumer risk by allowing them to become familiar with and reliant on the service before paying for it.
David Beisel, principal at Masthead Venture Partners in Cambridge, Mass., says the freemium model is attractive to VCs for the same reason it’s attractive to entrepreneurs. “Giving away a free version of the service allows consumers to not just learn about it through collateral or a free trial,” he explains, “but it presents them the opportunity to fully adopt the service and incorporate it into their lives.
“Those types of customers are ones who begin to evangelize the product to others. Entrepreneurs then greatly benefit, as powerful and inexpensive word-of-mouth marketing kicks in.”
One of the things I believe is that just like services that move toward free, all forms of content (even specialized high value niche content) will follow the same path. Information that is sold as a product (not a service) will keep seeing its margins decline as self satisfying hollow chucking and local substitution (ie: wikipedia editors rewriting your content, or someone uploads it to a torrent site) drive the value of most information to nothing.
If you have ever wondered how the mainstream media works, watching Manufacturing Consent does a great job of displaying its sordid underbelly. The bias is not always this obvious, but it is always there:
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the libs of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
The media rides the story up and rides it back down. We always need something to talk about. It happens to the media offline just like it does to niche publishers online. But the memory and analysis are short and shallow, quickly pointing a finger at a false cause, fixing symptoms like antidepressant drugs do:
The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a “subprime mortgage crisis,” but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in the price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.
It puts the formation of the alternative energy market in a fascinating perspective, especially as I finished reading about the demise of ACA and hung up the phone from an automated call from a sleazy telemarketer company calling me at 8pm, stating their partnerships with non-profits to help consolidate the debt that I don’t have due to the country’s current credit crisis.
Blog publishers get a 25% cut of the ad revenue. About 25,000 publishers have signed up so far, says Michael Knox, V2P’s co-founder, and several large companies and 2008 presidential campaigns have expressed interest in becoming advertisers through the service. A site that gets 2,000 unique visitors per day with an advertiser paying $14 per 1,000 plays might earn $28 a day, or $196 a week.
What self respecting publisher takes only 25% of ad revenue to annoy all of their visitors with audio ads? And how do you keep up your momentum and pageviews if you annoy everyone who comes across your site? If the idea wasn’t bad enough, the company behind this ad network is talking to the media to pump their product while
a blogspot hate site ranks #1 for their official name
their official site that does rank for their official name does not even use NetAudioAds in the page title
they bid on AdWords their core brand name but they are not even bidding on alternate version of their name like Net Audio Ads
How do networks that offer advertising and marketing solutions for others do such a bad job marketing their own products?
Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.
Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.
Shoemoney created this quick video to show how Triggit works
Unlike the automated ad solutions like intellitxt or AdSense, these Triggit ads
look like other regular links on the page (so they should get a high CTR)
can easily be applied on a page by page level (so you do not have to clutter up every page to monetize the few pages that can make a lot of money)
link to products recommended by the editor (to preserve editorial integrity)
can link to merchants that pay via affiliate payout or CPC (offering multiple monetization models)
allow you to keep your pages clean (and easy to link at) until they rank, then have you add monetization after you have a leading market position for related keywords
Triggit ads are easy to set up and should require little maintenance on the end user’s side, but they are still a small start up, so if you start doing well with them make sure you remember which pages do well so you can keep monetizing the pages if the Triggit partnership stops working, and so you can track which pages you should try to monetize more aggressively and/or build links to.
As blended semi-editorial in content ad networks like these evolve, the distinction between optimization and spam blurs. And since Google has a similar product, it is going to be hard to view this in a negative light without looking hypocritical in the process. From Google’s pay per action page:
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.
For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).
Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.
My site was stuck ranking at #6 in Google for a lot of keywords. The site that I had that got hit was a site that I had not built links to in a year, and the on page optimization for it was done years ago. Realizing the issue might have been on-site as much as off-site I decided to tweak it a bit…
All page titles on the site have a brand name in them as this site is devoted to reselling a brand. For the deep product pages the brand was at the end of the page title and on the homepage the brand had one word in front of it. About a half dozen core pages in the site started with the core keywords of a brand the site was reselling. For those page titles the brand related terms were moved to the end of those page titles.
Some of the sitewide image navigational links had alt tags in them that contained a piece of the core keyword that the site was filtered out for. I removed that modifier and let the navigational links be slightly less descriptive.
I also got the site a few new links which did not focus on the site’s core keywords, but I don’t believe that these were the key to getting it ranking again, as the site already has thousands of inbound links, and their were only a couple new links of low to average quality.
I nofollowed links to some of the to administrative type pages, but I don’t think that was a make or break issue either.
The site is ranking in the top 3 or 4 on many Google IPs for many search queries. My sample size is only 1 site though, so I would love to hear what you did to get your sites ranking again if you have any sites that recovered from this Google penalty / filter.
Markus Friend also highlighted that Google controls about 40% of the (heavily consolidated) ad market:
90% of Advertising revenues are made by the top 50 sites and the top 10 sites take 70% of that, with google taking 40% of all Online US advertising.
This CPM compression is going to cause many late movers to crank out content with more ads on it, further lowering their CPM and direct readership until they are financially insolvent. But then again, the web could use another bust cycle to clean up the meaning of the word “content”. Shoddy intrusive ad networks like NetAudioAds should not be featured as the next big thing in the WSJ.
It’s the aggregators that are the big winners, at least in economic terms, not the legions of individual contributors.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen that the automation provided by computer systems has tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small slice of the population. I expect that trend will only accelerate in the years ahead. If you’re one of the digital elite, you’ve got it made. If not, the prospects are less bright.
What is the solution for publishers? How do prevent yourself from being absorbed by the commons? Develop meaningful relationships, be remarkable, and sell direct. Hugh on owning an idea:
Social Markers are a prime form of social shorthand, that people use to STAKE OUT the ecosystem they’re occupying. So why do I find this such a useful term for marketers? Because obviously, if your product is a Social Marker in your industry ecosystem [the way the iPhone is in the mobile world, or Starbucks is in the coffee world, or Amazon is the book world, or Google is in the search world, or Whole Foods is in the supermarket world, or Virgin is in the airline world, or English Cut in the bespoke world etc etc] you will have an AMAZING competitive advantage to call your own.
And if the product your company makes is not a Social Marker, I guess the first question would be, “Why the hell not?” Quit your job and start over.
One of the easiest ways to claim an idea is to turn its launch into an event, and differentiate it from everything else you are doing. Buy the matching domain name if you can.
Bonus cool link: Bill Slawski mentioned a Yahoo! patent about moving away from the random surfer model to a user sensitive PageRank. Now if they could only apply some good ideas in the SERPs. And no, this does not count.
I think conferences are great for coming up with business ideas and making meaningful friendships and business relationships, and I would not have as many opportunities as I have now unless I went to many conferences back in the day. But I think I have been going to about 8 or 10 conferences a year for the past couple years and have got burned out on them. I am going to be at Elite Retreat this year, but am hoping that I can take a break otherwise.
Appreciating Conference Saturation
This past week Elite Retreat was announced and I turned down speaking requests for 4 other conferences! It seems I could do nothing but speak at conferences, but I just have too much fun playing online and see too much opportunity to have to travel once or twice a month. And conference overload leads to burnout, a line I am near more often than I should be.
Appreciation of Online Assets
In the last few years I have seen
the lowering of the value of typical reciprocal links
the lowering of the value of most directories
drastic reduction in cost of market research
sharply increased domain prices (some people have offered enough to make me a seller, and I get offers about once a week from a rather small portfolio)
increased cost per click prices
buying PPC ads getting harder due to relevancy scores that try to prohibit non-brands from advertising
sales cycles getting more efficient
the creation of shaddow brands to allow businesses to be bolted on to free offerings that build good will and reduce their marketing cost to zero
increasingly complex information formats (both free and paid)
the saturation of markets that were largely created AFTER I got into SEO
quality links becoming tougher to get (you can see this with how the media is linking internally where they used to link out…you appreciate the trend even more when a few friends send you some private internal documents from said companies)
increased time commitment to create valuable brands due to increased market competiton (in some rare cases even pure spammers are creating good content)
people becoming more cynical about content quality due to linkbait attention whoring
hand edits wiping out once highly profitable websites that were cleaner than competing ones own by large corporations
the move from one-time sales to subscription based pricing
I still have a few tricks and ideas that offer an amazing ROI, but as more people use them the ideas will see their ROI approach zero, unless I look for ways to layer real value on top of them. And it is hard to layer real value without committing both time and capital to the project.
Comparing Online ROI vs Offline ROI
A few weeks ago my wife held a meetup for bloggers where she and I gave away tons of tips to people with no sales pitch. I also paid for dinner for about 30 people. Out of that mini-conference type event I think only 1 blogger even mentioned it online. Most expensive paid link ever.
When I went to the Blogworld Expo I think there were about 30 or 40 people in the audience. And going to the conference cost me a couple days of work. In about the same amount of time I was able to create the Blogger’s Guide to SEO and market it. It got a couple thousand inbound links, over 1,000 bookmarks, over 50,000 reads, and videos I embedded in it got about 300 hundred to 600 clickthroughs to YouTube from my article.
Your Thoughts?
I have way too many ideas and way too little time to implement them. In some cases I have partnerships and my wife is doing lots of development stuff now too, so both of those help, but do you still get the same ROI out of conferences as you did when you first started going to them? If not, what do you do in place of them where you find better ROI?
Seo ready to roar (FOXSPORTS.com.au) SEO Hyuk-su has been cleared to return from injury for Queensland Roar after the team’s last training session before the first leg of their A-League minor semi-final against Sydney FC.
To be honest, I have used the “scam or not” angle before when trying to pull in traffic for something and have called stuff a “scam” when I did not like it, but I have never called something a scam right before trying to sell it.
Guest Post: SEO Kaleidoscope: Exploring the various facets of search engine optimization
Guest Post by Hugo Guzman
Here’s the thing about SEO. Everybody thinks they’re an expert.
From the greenhorn working out of their (or their parents’) garage, to the recent college grad working in the marketing department of Fortune 500 corporation, to the seasoned and often burned-out veteran working at a name brand interactive agency, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of “search engine optimization experts” both in U.S. and the world at large.
And the reality is that very few of them really understand what SEO is all about. Sure, a lot of people know what keyword research is, or how to mine for link targets. But true optimization goes much deeper than that standard set of deliverables.
I currently work for one of those brand name interactive agencies, Zeta Interactive, and if there’s one thing I’ve come away with from my experience in this field it’s that finding and retaining good SEO help is not easy. Both from a site-side and link-building perspective, the workload is extremely heavy, often forcing SEO employees to choose between quality and timely delivery of recommendations. Furthermore, interactive agencies have a nasty habit of failing to take true ownership over the clients they manage and viewing SEO with a pair 2002 glasses, making the job of a truly scrupulous SEO purist extremely demoralizing at times. Add a high level of competitiveness among agencies and the result is a high level of turnover and relatively low number of truly qualified applicants. And did I mention the endless stream of meetings, calls, presentations, and contractual legwork?
When one of my colleagues ponders the cause of this most exasperating of working conditions, I always offer up a painfully simple response; all of the really great SEOs don’t need a day job.
What do I mean by that? Well I’ll tell you if you promise not to get offended. And before I do, please bear with me as I explain a little bit about my own SEO background.
In my former life, I was a salesman. I hated my job and was looking for a more fulfilling way to make a living. A client of mine turned me onto SEO back in 2002, explaining to me just how despite a six-figure advertising budget and a team of marketers and programmers he was simply unable to rank organically for the terms associated with his products. The client basically told me that if I could figure out how to do that for him, and others, that I could probably make a whole lot of money.
That sounded like a plan to me.
Fast-forward to 2004. After roughly two years of working for local search firms in Miami, taking on my fair share of small consulting clients, creating small personal web projects, and writing as much as I could in the various SEO discussion forums, I landed a gig in the marketing department of CBS Sportsline as an SEO coordinator (among other things). I felt like I had finally made the big time. No more foraging around for small business contracts with little monthly budget. No more collection calls to delinquent clients. I was now in charge of SEO for a Fortune 500 company. I should be on easy street from here on out, right?
Wrong.
I quickly found out that corporate bureaucracy and office politics prevented me from implementing many of the most cutting edge techniques that would have given sportsline.com the competitive advantage it needed to set itself apart in the organic space. Mind you, this lack of implementation wasn’t due to incompetence on my part, because I did so well at my position that I was quickly put in charge of cbsnews.com and various other related properties, and was retained by CBS Interactive as a consultant after resigning from my position in the summer of 2005. It was just that certain individuals within the organization were either too lazy or too shortsighted to understand the significance of SEO in terms of both traffic and brand awareness.
Ironically enough, many of Sportsline’s stiffest competitors, specifically in the uber-competitive “fantasy” sports genre, were non-corporate entities that were able outmaneuver corporate behemoths like CBS due to their SEO agility and vision.
So I got to thinking, “man, these independent site owners are working for themselves and whipping the pants off the big boys. Now that’s what SEO is all about!”
Mind you, all this time, I had been developing my own small sites and working feverishly to establish a presence in the major SEO communities such as WebmasterWorld, SEOchat, and several others. I wrote features for SEOchat, served as a consultant to various prominent entities (mostly in the paid link arena) and began to make connections with other bright SEO minds like Rand Fishkin and Aaron Wall.
Little did I know, that soon thereafter, guys like Rand and Aaron would make a permanent mark on the SEO community and establish themselves as true SEO rock stars.
I, on the other hand, chose to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity of my own, accepting a position and a majority stake at a startup by the name of Real Football 365, Inc. Based on my experience at Sportsline, I figured that it would be easier to reach the Promised Land in the sports genre than the SEO genre. Plus I happen to absolutely love football!
It was while working on www.realfootball365.com that I learned what true SEO is all about. Not so much because of my efforts or results with that site (hell, that site still has plenty of SEO shortcomings) but because I gained access to dozens of successful site owners that make a comfortable living doing something that they love. And the best part is that they’re able to dominate competitors with much deeper pockets and diverse resources because of their know-how in the organic search space.
For my own part, I learned just how important a role content plays in SEO (hint: Google is telling the truth. Content is king). I also experienced the joy of working on something that was at least partially my own and the freedom of experimenting with the most radical of SEO-related initiatives.
Most importantly, from a business perspective, I learned the value of developing professional relationships with industry peers and how catering to your base of users, whether they be customers or readers, is a crucial SEO skill. In fact, there are many skills that seem vaguely related, or completely unrelated, to the SEO discipline but are in fact the centerpieces of a truly successful SEO campaign.
Aaron often discusses some these facets on this very blog, but I feel that many enterprising optimizers soon forget the lessons being offered up, giving into the ever-present allure of keywords, meta tags, and paid link considerations. I’m not saying that traditional SEO skills aren’t important, but rest assured that the difference between the average “SEO expert” and guys like Aaron does not lie in the ability to properly construct a title tag.
So what did I mean when I said that the great SEOs don’t need a day job? It’s simple. Great SEO requires an entrepreneurial spirit and an understanding of the underlying business and marketing considerations that will help a particular company be successful. Failing to understand this, whether you’re a garage marketer, in-house optimizer, or agency SEO, will ensure your continued failure to ascend from good to great.
I think about this every day as I juggle multiple clients at my agency gig up here in NYC and continue to consult for realfootball365.com from a distance, hoping that small site eventually pays the way to my early retirement and to that ultimate personal jump from good to great. In the meantime, I’ll remember my humble beginnings and remind my coworkers to avoid the explicit ineptitude that made me laugh at agency SEO proposals back when I was an in-house evaluator.
If you’re also in the business of “selling” SEO (whether to small businesses or large corporations) or have otherwise fallen short of my definition of great SEO, don’t be offended. Just continue to pay close attention to guys like Aaron and always remember that some of the greatest SEO minds of all time don’t even hang out in SEO hubs like Sphinn.com or WebmasterWorld. They’re busy implementing new business initiatives and raking in the spoils of their non-SEO related web empires.
Does it make sense for MySpace profile pages to rank on the first page for one of the 10 most competitive terms on the web? Should English to English page translations inherit domain authority from another domain? I don’t want to out anybody, but I see way too many tag pages ranking in Yahoo!’s search results. The easiest way they can improve their search results is to simply delist any page with tag in the URL.
If they continue down this path inside a few months they will link to nothing but internal site search / tag pages on other sites. Where is the value, innovation, or thought process in that? What percent of Yahoo! searchers want to see Wordpress.com tags pages and how many Yahoo! Pipes pages are tagged with a brand name? What does a searcher do when they land on a page like this?
If you are going to trust user generated content on authority sites, expect a lot of users to create content just for Yahoo!.
I love the Brit's abilities at the classy understatement.
It's a fishin ghost town. But I like the …
SEO Interview with Ralph Wilson (WebProNews) Back in December I attended the PubCon conference in Las Vegas and I was fortunate enough to meet my friend and Internet celebrity Ralph Wilson for an interview. Ralph has me regularly contributing tutorials and articles to the SEO section of his popular Web Marketing Today website and decided to interview me for a feature video on the website. read more
Re: Virb and Stickam the best current social network has to be koodora.com a very desolate and bleak place that seemed like a good idea at 4am
Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! Everyone learning a new skill makes mistakes. In some fields the necessary skills are tricky enough to keep up with that even old hands will make mistakes. Search engine optimization is no exception to this rule. Avoiding the most obvious mistakes can help put you ahead of the game…. See how easy remote support can be. Try WebEx free! Deliver efficient and effective support. Remotely control applications. Leap securely through firewalls.
Each bulleted list below is a slide from their presentation. I grouped some of them together to discuss how/where I think they relate.
Product Packaging
Broken information asymmetry: Information is easy to charge for as long as only a few have access to it. Today’s information symmetry makes it increasingly difficult to charge for regular news/information.
Losing loyalty: Consumers are increasingly grazing media. If they don’t like it, they immediately move on to greener pastures.
Increased individualism: As we see a strong trend of individualism in the society, mass media has the downside of offering the same message to everybody.
Design Hype: 50-70 percent of buying decisions are made in the store means more focus on design.
They realize they are no longer able to sell what they once sold and they are losing loyalty each day. Eventually they won’t even be able to pay people to take what they once charged for.
They see that consumers want an individualized focused product. They realize that buying is largely a game of taste and packaging. And yet they do not realize that they are selling news, even if it is free. If packaging matters for products it also matters for information. Niche brands are a good thing. Niche bloggers get this. NTY got this when they bought About.com’s blog network. Why doesn’t the rest of the media get it? Probably because actually changing to give the market what it wants feels risky, and the only niche they appeal to is local.
Authenticity
The search for authenticy: In a world of fake stories the authentic and real becomes important.
PR and marketing merging: Editorial content has higher impact than ads, which turns PR into a sales activity.
Online transactions a new revenue source: As media goes online, transaction revenues for services become an increasingly important revenue stream.
New revenue models: Newspapers need new revenue models to keep being profitable. New technology offers endless options to reach the future customers (e.g. rich-media ads, virtual worlds, viral marketing, product placement, parasite distribution, maglogs)
They realize that the perception of authenticity is becoming more important, but their journalistic rules will keep their content too vanila to create it, and they are fine with promoting public relations and looking for new business models including affiliate marketing, product placement, and parasite distribution. Eek.
Complexity & Depth of Coverage
Simplified news: “News snacks” are becoming the norm as customer needs are oversaturated. Simplification means a newspaper can only afford to be good enough.
Analytic journalism: Newspapers will offer deeper analysis, opinions and explanations of the news in a larger context to help people navigate in an increasingly complex world.
I can’t see news organizations being as efficient as blogs on the news snacks angle. And the in depth reporters are not going to be able to beat out subject matter experts unless they focus on a niche. If they focus on a niche and get a following then they don’t need the news organization behind them. Google or Federated Media or some other ad network can do the selling for them.
If you have ever wondered how the mainstream media works, watching Manufacturing Consent does a great job of displaying its sordid underbelly. The bias is not always this obvious, but it is always there:
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the libs of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
The media rides the story up and rides it back down. We always need something to talk about. It happens to the media offline just like it does to niche publishers online. But the memory and analysis are short and shallow, quickly pointing a finger at a false cause, fixing symptoms like antidepressant drugs do:
The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a “subprime mortgage crisis,” but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in the price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.
It puts the formation of the alternative energy market in a fascinating perspective, especially as I finished reading about the demise of ACA and hung up the phone from an automated call from a sleazy telemarketer company calling me at 8pm, stating their partnerships with non-profits to help consolidate the debt that I don’t have due to the country’s current credit crisis.
• Top 5 Best SEO Tips (Turks.US) In the early days of search engine optimization (SEO), using meta-tags were the most important aspects to take note when it came to the job of optimizing a page.
Yahoo! killed off their brand universe project, and recently fired 30 people. Rumor has it that about 2,000 more layoffs might be coming soon. Yahoo! shares are nearing $20, trading at $20.78, and giving them a market capitalization of $27.8 billion.
This WSJ article highlights that about half of Yahoo!’s value is in cash and equity stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Over the last year Yahoo! lost significant momentum and marketshare in search. They need to outsource search and search ads, fire a bunch of employees, gain search marketshare, or there is going to be a buyout or merger before the year is out.
Pageviews Still do Not Have Much Value
Sidebar: to anyone hyping the value of pageviews and social media, think of how many pageviews Yahoo! has. If you pull out the value of Yahoo!’s large equity stakes in other companies and cash on hand, Amazon and eBay are each worth about 2 to 3 times Yahoo!, and Google is worth about 13x.
10 Key Ideas Yahoo! Needs to Implement Tomorrow (or Sooner)
After seeing the underwhelming launch of Wikia Search, I think Yahoo! should push further in human aided search. Relevancy is based on perception and marketing. Yahoo! needs to do the following if they want to compete in search:
Increase the relevancy of their directory by actually featuring it (the directory looks like a sidebar to a blog that occupies most of dir.yahoo.com), and by becoming more selective with what sites they accept. You can appreciate their bad marketing of the Yahoo! Directory by the fact that the Google Directory (a DMOZ clone) has a higher PageRank.
Yahoo! is testing integrating Del.icio.us data in their search results. Brand Yahoo! search as human edited safe search and find a way to pay end users for their contribution. Payment does not need to be monetary. Take a look at the success of Yahoo! Answers and Del.icio.us and apply those toward search. Google gives Checkout advertisers free ads and a higher ad CTR (which leads to a lower ad cost). Win search marketshare from your users by giving them rebates on your other products as well.
Create a branding and awareness campaign around the new Yahoo! Search. Hire someone to do a fake study proving that Yahoo! Search is more relavant than any of the other players. Make sure Ask or Microsoft is ranked #2 ahead of Google.
Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.
Apparently the Superpages.com directory has made the change into using Microsofts Live Local virtual earth maps. Not sure when this change occurred, but Greg Sterling has recently noticed this update.
seobook.com/images/google-local-map2.png” />
limit usage. In a few years Yahoo! will be wishing they begged people to spread that data far and wide to build a leadership position in the market, which is what Google will do via syndication.
Guest Post: SEO Kaleidoscope: Exploring the various facets of search engine optimization
welshbloke.