StepForth SEO News Blog

Friday, July 29, 2005

Microsoft was successful in obtaining a temporary injunction preventing Dr. Kai-Fu Lee from taking over as the head of Google's new research center in China. The ruling, issued by Kings County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez forbids Lee from working on Google projects or research relating to search technologies, natural language processing or speech technologies, and business strategies that would be "competitive" with fields he studied while at Microsoft. Part of Gonzalez's ruling also prohibits Dr. Lee from disclosing trade secrets or proprietary information learned while he was employed at Microsoft. It also forbade Google from "attempting to induce" Microsoft employees to work for Google.

Google is seeking to contest the temporary restraining order as a full trial is not scheduled until January 9, 2006. The order itself is set to expire on Sept. 6. Google spokespersons are downplaying the ruling calling it "...a temporary measure to maintain the status-quo."

"We're gratified that the judge recognized that all Google and Dr. Lee have to do is avoid having Dr. Lee do anything competitive with what he did at Microsoft," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel. "As we have said all along, we have no intention of having him do that." Earlier this week, Google claimed Microsoft was using the lawsuit to threaten employees and stifle competition. In a statement sworn on Wednesday, Dr. Lee testified that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told him that Microsoft would sue, adding that Microsoft needed to take such action "...to stop Google".

This case is getting more interesting as the days progress.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Microsoft wins round 1 against Google in the Strange Case of Dr. Lee

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

On Tuesday, Yahoo announced it was teaming up with cell phone maker Motorola to provide Yahoo's online products and search results over Motorola Linux-based mobile devices, including Motorola's upcoming iRadio product. IRadio will allow users to listen to online radio over their portable devices, or access their own digital music collections.

Yahoo is working to extend its brand away from the traditional desktop to mobile devices in its bid to provide users with a portable personalized information environment. The deal with Motorola gives Yahoo access to millions of Motorola users who will start seeing Yahoo branded content early next year.

Today, Yahoo also announced a multi-year web and sponsored search distribution agreement with Connexion by Boeing, a division of The Boeing Company. The agreement makes Yahoo the exclusive search engine on the Connexion by Boeing in-flight Internet service. Search queries will produce Yahoo organic and paid listings a co-branded search results page.

"We live in an age of connectivity where information should be easily accessible regardless of time, location or device," said Bill Demas, Yahoo's Senior Vice President, Partner Solutions. "This agreement highlights just one of the many exciting opportunities Yahoo and Connexion by Boeing are exploring together to not only provide users with a world-class Internet experience no matter where they are, but to also enable marketers to reach potential customers who are searching for their products and services online."

Available on over 100 worldwide routes, Connexion by Boeing will begin displaying Yahoo content towards the end of this year.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Yahoo Search in Two New Venues - Mobile and In-Flight

For the past few years I have been writing about the immense changes happening in search marketing. These changes are driven by a number of factors but the two that make the biggest difference are technological advances and user adoption. It has been a full decade since Netscape issued the IPO that sparked the tech-boom of the late 90's and the popularization / commercialization of the web. A decade does not seem like a long time in the evolution of culture but as many have already said, we live in accelerating times. Acceleration is based on efficiency and efficiency is enhanced by access to what one needs whenever one needs it.

The Internet has made information both personal and portable. Each user has their own version of the Internet; much like every person has their own version of the city or town they live in. Over the last decade, we the users have learned to weave a growing number of information tools, services and applications into the routines of our daily lives. The web not provides users with a constantly expanding library of data to draw from; it also presents users with their own personal spaces to store or share data with others. Understanding this concept is one of the keys to understanding the strategies of Google, Yahoo and MSN, along with the hundreds of large E-Commerce businesses including Amazon and EBay.

It is the users who dictate how technology develops. While their choices are obviously limited by the number of inventors and innovators, users choose which technologies survive and how those technologies will be used. Netscape withered when consumers replaced them with the free IE browser bundled in their Windows packages. Similarly, a substantial number of users chose Firefox as an alternative to IE. Today, users are migrating towards Internet capable handheld devices such as cell phones, Blackberrys and other PDAs.

The portability of a personalized information environment is what users want, hence the relationship between local search (cool maps included) and user-specific personalization of search results. Portability drives the laptop computer market, which in turn drives the WiFi market. The next natural step in the portability of one's personal information environment brought the web to mobile phones and hand-held devices. Search, being the only practical way to find one's way around the web is an increasingly important resource for mobile users.

According to a whitepaper, "Mobile Search and its Implications for Search Engine Marketing", which is going to be released next Monday by Lisa Wehr, CEO of OneUpMarketing, cell phone screens and other handheld mobiles are emerging as significant user environments. "When you merge the power of the Internet with the on-demand accessibility of a mobile device, you're creating a perfect storm for users and marketers alike," says Lisa.

She calls this environment "the third screen", listing television as the first and desktop/laptop computers as the second. While current mobile searchers tend to come from a younger demographic group, Lisa sees several social trends that will move many of us to adopt mobile devices, thus rapidly populating the third-screen environment.

These third-screens are very different from computer monitor as are the devices used to interact with them. The screen size is much smaller and bandwidth is an important factor. The majority of mobile devices don't have a mouse so scrolling down a page requires the use of buttons. Mobile devices such as cell phones tend to have limited keyboards and those with keyboards tend to have tiny keys. These factors play important roles in how the environment is used and how search marketers and site designers should work within it.

Lisa suggests marketers and designers should put more effort into making their documents third-screen friendly. For example, offering easy choice-options such as buttons along with text-links in a document recognizes the limitations of a mouse-less device. Another suggestion she makes is to research and target shorter keyword phrases as typing on a mobile device is often difficult.

Most importantly, Lisa's whitepaper draws a direct correlation between mobile search and local search. Comparing mobile search users' behaviour with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Lisa notes that mobile users tend to search for personal-survival needs such as hotels (shelter), and restaurants (food) before confirming their personal-security needs such as news, email, travel (airline schedules, local mapping) and weather. After satisfying survival and security needs, mobile users tend towards establishing personalized information environments with favourite songs, shared-images and social networking as hallmarks of that space. When Maslow's basic needs are met in the mobile world, users tend to do exactly what one would expect; they go shopping.

When they do go shopping, they expect information on demand, just like they have been conditioned to expect by their search experiences at home or the office. Their behaviours when searching however will be different than those searching on a larger monitor. Mobile users have time constraints and are accessing the web at much lower connection speeds. Lisa's whitepaper goes on to describe two typical types of mobile shopper coined "need-it-now" and "killing-time" shoppers, and offers advice on meeting their needs.

"This shift is big, both technologically and behaviourally speaking," Lisa says, "Therefore, it's going to require solutions on both of these fronts."

Lisa recommends marketers and designers learn xHTML which is readable by both WAP2.0 and HTTP browsers though she notes that mobile browsers are increasingly able to interpret HTML more efficiently. A wealth of information on xHTML can be found at the W3C, or at xhtml.org.

This is the first major study of mobile search, one that is sure to provide a foundation for future research. It should be placed on the "must-read" list for all search marketers, site designers and online advertisers. Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest understand the power of the portable personalized information environment. As users adapt to their new personalized space, mobile search is going to be one of the next ultra-important information environments.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: The Changing Venues of Search - Search Going Mobile

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Susan Decker, Yahoo's Chief Financial Officer reported a 51% increase in revenues from last year at $1.25 billion over the $832.3 million reported in Q2-2004. Ms. Decker also reported a net income of $754.7 million or 51-cents per share, a dramatic rise above last year's figures of $112.5 million or 8-cents per share.

Marketing revenues, which include search and branded advertising sales accounted for 1.09 billion with fees for services rose to $159 million last quarter.

Yahoo actually beat Wall St. estimates for second quarter growth but, as shown by the hit share prices took on after-hours trading, investors expected them to smash analysts' estimates. Yahoo closed the day yesterday at $37.73 per share but opened to day at $33.82. At the time this piece was written (11AM Pacific), shares were trading lower at $33.66, a decrease of almost 11% from last night.

Yahoo has made two key purchases in the past three months, both of which are expected to cost the company more than they make for at least another six months. The first was the telephony firm Dialpad, likely in response to springtime rumours of Google developing a VOIP network. The second acquisition was the purchase of photo sharing and social networking firm Flickr.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel is very pleased with Yahoo's second quarter results, even if a bit miffed with investor reactions. Semel expects Yahoo's paid advertising revenues to increase by more than 34% over the coming quarter. This rise is bolstered by Yahoo's success in the International search market where revenue gains exceeded 84% last quarter. US paid-advertising revenues increased by a more modest but still extraordinary 39%.

Yahoo plans for more expansion in the coming years. "We have a balanced and healthy business model in which all parts are doing well," Semel said, speaking to a conference call with analysts. "We were able to deliver these results even while investing in emerging opportunities, showing the power of our business model."

Semel gave a quick heads up to the SEM community when he stated that Yahoo would continue to tweak its algorithms in an effort to achieve greater revenues from consumer web searches and small business advertisers. It will also upgrade its web publishing programs such as Yahoo Shops for small businesses.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Yahoo Revenues Up - Share Prices Down

Back in the good old days, headhunters never got sued. If a lawyer went nuts on you, there was always a good shrink available. Being a headhunter meant never having to say you were sorry. Corporate law has evolved substantially since then.

Today, Google is getting sued for headhunting one of the brightest techno-brains in China, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee . Actually, Dr. Lee was in Redmond Washington, working for Microsoft when the deal went down and Microsoft is pretty pissed about it all.

In a press release issued around noon on Tuesday, Google reported it had hired one of China 's most respected computer pioneers, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee. Problem is, until Monday afternoon anyway, Dr. Lee was the corporate VP of Microsoft's Interactive Services Division. That got Gate's goat, big time.

Hours before Google issued the press release, Microsoft issued suit in a Washington State court against Dr. Lee and his new employer, citing breach of contract. They are seeking an injunction to prevent Dr. Lee from taking his new position as head of Google's China Division.

"Accepting such a position with a direct Microsoft competitor like Google violates the narrow non-competition promise Lee made when he was hired as an executive," Microsoft said in its lawsuit, as quoted today in a ZDnet report . "Google is fully aware of Lee's promises to Microsoft, but has chosen to ignore them, and has encouraged Lee to violate them."

The suit seeks monetary damages for the loss of Dr. Lee's services as well as injunctive measures to prevent Dr. Lee from violating a narrowly worded non-competition agreement or sharing information Microsoft claims as its intellectual property. The lawsuit states that Dr. Lee was for some time, "responsible for overall development of the MSN Internet search application."

Calling Dr. Lee's move a "particularly egregious" violation of a non-competition agreement that was part of his contract with Microsoft, Deputy General Counsel, Tom Burt said Dr. Lee "...has access to sensitive information, to trade secrets about our search technology and business plans and our China business strategies."

Google is planning to open a massive Research and Development Centre in China by the end of October. With decades of investment in science and engineering, and many of the world's top technical universities, China is seen by most in the industry to be the leading IT nation in the near future. It also has an economy developing at 9% or more per year, three times faster than most G8 economies.

The press release noted these factors stating, "China , with its thriving economy and excellent universities, is home to many outstanding computer scientists and engineers. By establishing an R&D center in China , Google is making a strong commitment to attracting and developing Chinese talent, as well as partnering with local universities and institutes. The selection of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee to lead this important operation underscores Google's commitment to building a successful Chinese product research and development center and to expanding its international business operations."

Google VP of Engineering, Alan Eustace said, "The opening of an R&D center in China will strengthen Google's efforts in delivering the best search experience to our users and partners worldwide. Under the leadership of Dr. Lee, with his proven track record of innovation and his passion for technology and research, the Google China R&D center will enable us to develop more innovative products and technologies for millions of users in China and around the world."

As for Dr. Lee himself, apparently he informed his boss at Microsoft on July 5 th that he wasn't coming back from a sabbatical he had planned and that he was in discussions with Google about China. In yesterday's press release, Google spokespersons quoted Dr. Lee saying, "It has always been my goal to make advanced technologies accessible and useful to every user, as well as to be part of the vibrant growth and innovation in China today. Joining Google uniquely enables me to pursue both of my passions and I look forward to returning to China to begin this exciting endeavor."

This is bound to get more interesting as time develops.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: New Google China Head, Hunted Away from Microsoft

Here is a good list of stats compiled by the Google directory.

http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Statistics_and_Demographics/

Another component of the overall environment is user behaviours. There are similarities and differences between user behaviours based on the search engine they primarily use. Each search engine has a distinct base of users but users of all search engines do share common habits. The way they look at search results is fairly common across all engines for instance. The results pages of Google, MSN and Yahoo all look vaguely similar. While they each might use different colour schemes, the positioning of paid and organic results is almost exactly alike from one engine to another. Since search is primarily a text based medium, search engine users read results as one might read a commercial magazine or newspaper. They tend to skip the obvious advertising and focus on the content, in this case the organic listings. We know this because of the exhaustive Eye Tracking Study conducted by Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro.

The Eye Tracking study shows how search users work through information on a search engine results page and is the original source of the " Golden Triangle " theory held by many search marketers. The golden triangle is a reference to the area of the search results page seen most frequently by search engine users. Understanding Gord's findings is key to having a good grasp on how search users will perceive a clients' site when they see it appear on the results page.

The next level of external information of interest in relation to a specific campaign is easier to manage as it only covers the business or service sector the client comes from. When planning a search marketing campaign for the hypothetical Blue Widget Software Company from Walla Walla Washington , we need to know what the competitive environment is like. Knowing that Blue Widgets are one of the most popular hypothetical products to market, we expect the competition to be rather challenging. For SEOs and SEMs, competitive research is extremely important. The goal is to get first page listings at the major search engines for your clients and to prepare a paid-advertising campaign that provides a good return for their marketing money.

The first thing we do is go to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves to find out how many other websites relating to the keyword phrase Blue Widgets appear in the four major indexes. Happily, we find that Google only lists about 336,000 sites associated with the phrase "Blue Widgets". Yahoo returns 427,000 results; Ask Jeeves shows 123,900 and MSN shows only 54,280. It shouldn't be too difficult to get a top ten with so few competitors.

But is a Top10 ranking under the keyword phrase "Blue Widgets" really the best target for our client's money? Once we start optimizing for specific keyword phrase targets, we have committed company time and client money towards a goal. We had best be sure that goal is the most effective for the client. To do this, we check a couple of simple sources. The first is the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool (OKS), now conveniently housed at Yahoo. The OKS offers a glimpse at how many searches were conducted for a specific keyword phrase on their network in the previous month by providing a list of related keyword searches. The next is the WordTracker tool, which shows us the relative popularity of general keywords and suggests more specific ones based on the number of times search engine users entered the words or phrases.

A search for Blue Widgets on the OKS shows that nobody used that phrase last month though 3330 searches did look for information on widgets. Similar results were found with a list generated by WordTracker. This steers us back to the client site to look for other keyword targets. Being the wise optimizers we are, we know that Widgets are mini-applications for the Mac OS so our search hypothetically moved to Mac related keywords and phrases and, of course, struck a virtual mother lode of keyword choices.

After identifying the strongest keyword targets, we become curious who the Top5 competitors are, and what they are doing to be there. This range of inquiry will move us from sector-specific to client site-specific research.

There are several factors influencing the organic placement of sites but they can be placed in four basic categories, Titles, tags, text and links. In order to perform a good competitive analysis, as well as to get a handle on what we'll need to do on our client's site, we look at several elements in these four basic categories. Each search engine takes information from these categories though each treats that information slightly differently.

When examining a number of competing sites against a client's site, we look for similarities among the top ranking competitor sites, often to see if we've missed anything critical in our assumptions but also to see if those similarities contributed to their joint success on the search engines.

Onsite factors tend to be somewhat similar with keywords used in the titles and meta tags and sprinkled through the text of documents on the site. Frequently all top sites use keyword phrases as the anchor text of internal links. We are always curious to find the average number of times competitors use keywords on their documents or phrase links with keyword laced anchor text. This helps us decide how to write competitive copy for our clients.

Our greatest interest for both client and competitors is the number of incoming links and the quality of those links. To check links, we use a number of tools but the most realistic view can be gained from the search engines themselves. To find out how many links (and which links) Google sees pointed to a website, go to Google and type link: www.domainname.com into the search box. The number that appears near the top right hand corner of the monitor tells you the number of links Google recognizes. A quick and often random scan of those links can tell you how relevant they are.

One stat we are NOT particularly interested in is the PageRank score as shown by the Google Toolbar. While we have conditioned ourselves to read most algorithm related announcements from Google with extreme skepticism, we do believe them when they say that the PageRank score on the Google Toolbar is for entertainment rather than informative purposes only. It is amazing that some SEOs are still interested in PageRank and even more amazing that some have established continuing businesses based on selling links from high PR sites. (For those of you involved with an SEO selling links from High PR sites, take a few minutes to ask your current SEO to explain the relevance of PageRank and then phone a few others at random to see what they say. You might be unpleasantly surprised.)

Stats and provable facts are cool. Compiling them is hard work but once they are recorded, they provide an invaluable information resource that can grow as the campaign matures. Once an SEO starts keeping hard stats on the overall search environment and client sectors within the search environment, their own professional resource libraries expand quickly. At this stage of the search-marketing sector's growth, SEOs and SEMs are consultative advisors as much as they are hands-on technicians. Having the stats literally at your fingertips saves time in the long run and forms a foundation for a strong campaign.

Sources:

Stats from Search Engine Watch
Hitwise Search Engine Ratings
http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/3099931

Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings
http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451

comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Rankings
http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156431

Stats from ClickZ
http://www.clickz.com/stats/

Search Engine Relationship Chart from IhelpYouServices.com/forums
http://www.ihelpyou.com/search-engine-chart.html

The Atlas of Cyberspace
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html

Global Internet Languages (Global Reach, March 2004)
http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.php3

Site-specific stats generated by server logs are highly informative, complimenting user and search engine and general specific stats generated by firms like Nielson NetRatings, ComScore and Hitwise. The numbers generated by stats help SEOs and SEMs craft marketing strategies for individual clients, all of whom require unique approaches.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Stats, Facts and Organic SEO

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Imagine the ability to create your own 45-second audio/video commercial in less than 15 minutes. A new service from SiSTeR.TV, Pic2Vid.Com allows you to do just that, allowing users to create, store, send and link to, a self-made online audio-video presentation without special hardware or software. According to SiSTer.TV's Tomer Alpert, "Every small business that doesn't have a $10,000 budget can look to Pic2Vid for answers."

Now, imagine if that short spot appeared beside your search engine listings and led to a sales-specific landing page. That would seriously alter the way we look at search, both as search engine users and search engine marketers. If SiSTeR.TV have it their way, such easily produced video-ad spots might appear very soon.

SiSTeR.TV has come a long way in the past six months since I last wrote about them. Already the darling of E-Bay store owners, who reported an average increase of 80% in the number of bids received and a 55% increase in closing prices of listings containing Pic2Vid ads vs. their traditional E-Bay listings. Based in Dallas Texas , SiSTeR.TV has already engaged with a number of Fortune 100 firms including a leading international retailer and 2 of the Big4 search engines.

Pic2Vid is a remarkably easy tool to use. It is available for website owners who want to add another familiar dimension to their websites. In less than 15 minutes, I created a simple "commercial" for StepForth Placement which can be viewed by clicking here.

Though my production did not consider high production values, working with the pic2vid system was as simple as dragging a series of digital pictures from one window to another and assigning special effects (such as slide transitions and Pan - Zoom), and an audio (text-to-speech or a phone recording) to those images in the pic2vid tool. Instead of pulling viewers through a site using static text and pictures, users of pic2vid delivers information to viewers using full motion video and audio which instantly increase the amount of time invested by the viewer.

Here is a short step by step of the process I followed to create the StepForth spot.

• Select a number of images. For this, I didn't even have to rely on StepForth's files, I simply went to Google Images and typed the company name into the search box.
• Go to www.pic2vid.com and sign in. (Registration is very speedy)
• A pop-up window will appear with a large target on it. Drag images from one window to the target to instantly upload them to the pic2vid server.
• When you have uploaded your images, arrange them in order of how you want them to appear in the video and add PanZoom movement.
• To create the audio portion of the advert, users can either record their voice by telephone or type text into the text-to-speech box, which then converts it into computerized male or female voice.

Once you have completed the first five steps, the system renders a video file that you can email, post a link to, or even cut-and-paste HTML code generated by the system into your own site. The HTML code creates an embedded media player on your site that plays back the video.

It is really that simple. One issue with the computer generated male and female voices is that they read phonetically. For instance, our Head SEO is Scott Van Achte. Scott's name is pronounced "Van Ack" but when typed correctly into the pic2vid system, his name was read as "Van Achety". This issue was easily remedied by respelling his name in the system as "Scott Van Ack". Another issue is the fact the current version of pic2vid only works with Internet Explorer and is not compatible with FireFox or Apple computers. An upgraded version (version 3DF) is due to be released during the third quarter of this year.

Through the current ASP model, pricing is estimated from 3 - 7 cents per minute of video viewed, based on the volume of use (similar to a calling card account). The free beta provides up to 100 minutes per production but will be phased out as the commercial version is released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2005.

You will be hearing much more to this story in the coming months. Pic2vid has arrived and is there for small business owners to start using at minimal cost. The free beta (limited to 100 minutes) allows users to create and publish videos. Not only is it worth testing just to see how simple the future of multimedia development applications will be, producing your own commercial spot is a strangely satisfying accomplishment.

Create videos at www.pic2vid.com

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Pic2Vid opens the door to V-Commerce

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Over the past two years, both the business and practice of search engine marketing have become much more complex. The same is true of the websites search engine marketers work with. The evolving design techniques and technologies that have made the website of today far more versatile than those of previous years, have also made them harder to work with for third party service vendors such as SEOs. Mix in rapidly growing levels of keyword competition, new styles of search engine and the continued strength of the Pay per Click advertising option and a sector that once resembled a paint-by-numbers art project is now more of an abstract exercise in impressionism.

The changes that have happened over the span of the search marketing industry are enormous but have happened in four distinct waves, the latest of which is peaking right now. These changes have forced a shift in the way strong SEO and SEM firms approach clients and campaigns, most wanting to perform a short round of consulting services before diving into a major campaign. With the increased complexity of the environment in which search engine marketers work, choosing the right keywords and placing them strategically on a document just doesn't cut it any longer. As the search environment is effected by a greater number of factors, helping clients weave their way through layers of information and analysis is increasingly the first stage of a strong search engine optimization and marketing campaign.

Today we are interested in dozens of different factors than we were in previous years. This increased complexity is often lost on potential clients, some of whom seem to see the initial consultation period as an unnecessary waste of time or money. For a good SEO, the information gleaned during these initial market studies forms an indispensable instruction manual for the conduct of the campaign.

StepForth is interested in finding out a lot about clients and their competition before embarking on a major SEO project. During pre-campaign planning, we weigh several factors against each other to determine the best marketing tactics and techniques for each client. Search engine marketers need to know about a website's architectural structure, the products or topics featured on it, the relationships a website (and its documents) share with other websites and documents, who the competition is, and what that competition is doing. With so many factors to figure out, initial studies can take over ten hours per campaign, a significant amount of time considering the expense associated with a competent technician’s rates. When completed however, the information revealed can save thousands of dollars in time and effort.

The need to examine the competitive environment before competing for Top10 listings is a huge step away from the devil-may-care early days of SEO. Even up to 2003, search engine optimization could often be performed after a quick keyword target analysis. The maturing of the search sector has prompted a more mature attitude in search engine marketing as a short history of the search sector shows.

In the beginning optimization was easy. In 1997, SEO was about keyword stuffed meta tags, keyword enriched content and a title based on multiple incidents of target keywords and phrases. While the search results pages might take a month or more to update, a good SEO treatment generally achieved Top20 placements without much trouble. To keep things interesting, there were a larger number of popular search engines nine years ago than there are today. Names like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Magellan, Infoseek, WebCrawler and Northern Light were once considered relative equals in the realm of search.

Ironically, it was the wide variety of search engines back then that led to the development of a lot of spammy pages and sites. Since there were a number of unique algorithms in play, search engine optimizers made a practice of creating several unique pages or unique sites for each of the major search engines. Known as doorway pages or leader sites, this practice quickly gummed up search engines with spammy pages and duplicate content, leading to the development of more sophisticated methods of sorting content and determining relevancy between documents. Although the days of using keyword stuffed meta tags are long over, it is continually surprising to hear how many people still think the technique achieves results.

Just after the turn of the century a seismic shift on par with the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 hit the Silicone Valley and spread to the rest of the wired world. An estimated 8-Trillion dollars just sort of vanished in the span of a few short months following the March 2000 dot-com stock meltdown. Many of the aforementioned search firms were victims in the dot-bomb fallout. Just before the tech-stocks tanked, a smaller, less cluttered search engine started being adopted by search engine users looking for a less corporate alternative.

Google was uniquely different from any search engine before it. While keyword recognition played a critical role in determining which documents matched which search queries, Google based its rankings primarily on the number of links pointing to a document. By early 2001, Google was unquestionably the dominant search engine. Towards the end of 2001, Google was responsible for over 75% of all search results, including those shown at Yahoo, Netscape, AOL, MSN, and many other branded search-names. For search engine marketers, the universe had shifted.

The dominance of Google allowed search engine optimizers to begin adopting basic standards of practice loosely based on the Google guidelines and started to eliminate the dodgy technique of building doorway pages. All things being equal the rise of Google spelled the fall of SEO doorway spam but it led to the creation of an industry based on another dodgy tecnique, link-spam.

Over the next two to three years, Google's rankings determined the rankings of other search engines to one degree or another. Search engine optimizers became obsessed with achieving strong placements at Google, an obsession both shared with and driven by client expectations. Google was the end-all-be-all in the search world, holding a prominence where a Top10 placement could make or break an online business.

During this time, another type of search based advertising began to make an impact on the overall search marketplace. Originally introduced by Overture, the pay-per-click model introduced an instant but potentially expensive way of putting a keyword based advertisement in front of the eyes of search engine users. Overture has since been purchased by Yahoo in a move that started to move Yahoo away from Google and back to a primary position among the top ranked search engines. While Overture built a highly profitable business model out of pay-per-click, Google innovated on the concept and built their monstrously profitable income generator known as AdWords.

About eighteen months ago, Yahoo started generating its own results, independent of Google. They were quickly followed by MSN which began producing its own results in 2004. Running its way into the pack, Ask Jeeves introduced a number of dramatic improvements to its search engine in 2003/2004 and now ranks with Google, Yahoo and MSN as "the Big4" of search engines.

For search engine optimizers the adoption of search as a commercial advertising medium by businesses of all sizes has become a double edged sword of sorts. While there has never been more business for good SEOs with strong reputations, the amount of work needed to be done to provide a strong campaign has never been greater. Search engine marketing reaches more eyeballs than ever before but at the same time, there are more sites seeking those eyeballs than ever before.

Advertisers should start to expect a greater emphasis on research and recommendation before expecting SEOs to start digging into their documents and sites. While the expense might be slightly higher in the short term the results of a well informed optimization effort saves more money over the long-run.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: SEO Sales and Services - Consulting Cuts Complexity

Thursday, July 07, 2005

We're in shock. About six hours ago an attack on the London Public Transit system left over 30 people dead and hundreds injured. The mood in our office is shifting from stunned shock and sorrow to anger and outrage.

London's mayor Ken Livingstone, was quoted to say, "This is not an attack against the rich and powerful. It is not an attack on the politicians, but on the common working people of London - black and white, Muslim and Christian, young and old."

On behalf of the staff and management of StepForth Placement:
Our deepest sympathies go to the families who lost loved ones and to the people of London who've lost a sense of collective security.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: To the people of London

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

It used to be easy to predict the behaviour of common search engine spiders. Today, predicting search spiders is not so easy and with a growing number of spiders and search databases to consider, trying to get a leg-up on where the spiders are going is rather tricky. In previous years, Google, Inktomi and other electronic 'bots could be relied on to visit a site on a regular basis. The working environment was a bit simpler a few years ago, easily summed up with nine letters, G-O-O-G-L-E-B-O-T. GoogleBot was at one time the only important search spider around. While others existed, even as recently as two years ago, Google fed search results to most of its competitors.

Visiting on a somewhat regular monthly schedule, Googlebot would compile information on all the documents in its database, a process that took about one week and then rearrange their listings during the eagerly anticipated GoogleDance. Search engine optimization firms were often able to anticipate the unscheduled start dates of the GoogleDance by examining spidering activities in their weblogs and noting PageRank and back-link updates that generally preceded a shift in Google's rankings. When the shift actually happened, changes stemming from it were fairly significant as many of the search results would be altered based on new data found during the monthly spider-cycle.

What a difference a couple of years can make. Today there are four major general search engines and several vertical search tools, each with a unique algorithm and spidering schedule. So just how important is it to know the spidering schedule of the various search engines?

In previous years, most SEOs would say it was extremely important to know when a spider was going to visit a client's site. SEOs worked with fairly fixed deadlines, hoping to have clients' optimized content uploaded about a week before the expected GoogleDance began. Even then one was not entirely sure that the date they predicted for the Dance was correct but with a somewhat regular spider/update cycle, SEOs had fixed windows of opportunity with subsequent weeks to tweak and rework content if rankings didn't materialize during the last update.

Today's spiders have become almost intuitive and it is less important to know when a spider will visit as it is to know where a spider will visit. Most spiders visit an active website very frequently. According to three months worth of stats compiled by Click Tracks, spiders from Ask Jeeves visits at least once a day while MSN and Yahoo spider the index page of the StepForth site several times a day. Google only visits our index page, every four days on average. Compared to previous years, even the least frequent visitor, GoogleBot is gobbling up content. With daily or even weekly visits, the increased number of visits gives SEOs a much faster turn around time from completing optimization on a site to seeing results in the Search Engine Results pages.

A major shift in the way search engines think about content is seen in where spiders will visit, the frequency of visits, and what drives them there. Previously, search engine spiders would consider a domain or URL as the top level source of information. It would go to the index page and spider its way through the site from that point. That is no longer the case as search engine spiders are now better able to contextualize content found on unique documents within a domain and schedule spider frequencies accordingly. For example, on a site dedicated to the sale of Widgets, the document that refers to the highly popular Blue Widgets will see more spider traffic than a document referring to the less popular Red Widgets. Similarly, a document that changes regularly will see more visits as the search engines tend to know when changes are made on documents in their database. In other words, search engine spiders tend to know your website as a collection of unique documents contained under a single URL or domain, as opposed to a collection of topically themed documents under a single URL or domain. Based on the number of searches for relevant keywords performed by search engine users, the number of incoming links, the frequency of change, and the frequency of live-human visits to a document, the 4 major search spiders are now setting their own schedules.

While the timing of spider visits has changed radically, many standard behaviours remain the same. Spiders still travel where links, both internal and external, take them. The difference today is those links often lead to internal pages. In previous years, most links lead to the index or home page of a site. With the advent of PPC programs such AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, webmasters and search engine marketers are creating product specific landing pages, each of which might be relevant to organic searches. This has allowed savvy SEOs to optimize landing pages for organic rankings as well as PPC conversions. Search engine results now tend to be more relevant to the specifics of any given topic as opposed to a general overview of that topic.

Of all the spiders, the most active by far is MSNBot. Visiting each document in its index at least once per day and often more frequently, MSNBot has been known to crash servers housing sites with dynamically generated content as the 'bot sometimes doesn't know when to quit. After MSNBot, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are the busiest of the major bots. Oddly enough, the quietest is GoogleBot, which visits each document in our site at least once per month but with little or no discernable pattern.

In order to prompt spiders through the site, we suggest creating a basic, text based sitemap appended to the back of your website. The sitemap should list every document in your website. To jazz it up, add a short description of the content of the document linked to below the link. Add a link to the sitemap to the footer of each page in your site. That will help with Ask, MSN and Yahoo. For Google, a slightly more complex solution is available through the creation of an XML based sitemap .

About two weeks after implementing the HTML sitemap on your site and uploading your XML sitemap to Google, start to watch your server logs for increased spider visits. Be sure to watch for where the spiders are going and which documents receive the most frequent visits. You may be pleasantly surprised at how friendly modern spiders can be.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Arachnophilia, the Joy of Playing with Spiders

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Even those brave enough to try to find logical footholds in arguments often found themselves shouted down and improperly branded. Suffice it to say the ongoing debate has become rather ugly.

This has been a difficult column to write but I think it is one that needs to be written. At this point I think I should make a short disclosure statement. Readers looking for specific examples from threads should know now that very few will be provided in this piece. The only ones that will are those that have already hit the public realm. Those who read and contribute to the dozen or so SEO/SEM forums know the material being referred to and for those who don't, it is there to be found. I've actually held off for a few weeks while watching the various threads unfold. Many of the contributors are folks I've had the privilege of meeting in person, speaking with over the phone, or corresponding with on a regular basis. I have a lot of respect for nearly everyone involved, including some who openly use techniques I consider dangerous to clients and to the industry's relationship with the search engines. I am a moderator in one of the forums involved and have appeared at conferences organized by another. Some of the forums publish my articles on their websites. Just thought y'all should know before you read any further.

For the uninitiated, online discussion forums can be enlightening though intimidating environments. Populated by all levels of skill and talent, online discussion forums are meant to provide specific communities with a place to share skills and ideas, a place to converse and debate issues. Virtually every professional group on the Internet has a discussion forum dedicated to their sector. Some, such as the search engine optimization and marketing sector, have several unique discussion forums, each with its own personality. Like other communities, the face and traditions of the various forums are sketched by the attitudes and behaviors of the members. Through the tone and helpfulness of the postings, especially those by moderators, a collective consciousness of sorts is formed. Most forums tend to be populated by good, honest hard working folk who share each other's skills and knowledge in order to improve their community. The forums share several attributes of real-world communities, the most obvious being the fact all human communities are populated by highly emotional human beings. Periodically, all communities deal with inflamed emotions around a highly polarizing debate with the hallmark of a mature society being the way it handles such debate.

The search engine optimization and marketing forums are alive with the sound of anger, some of which is spilling out of our not-so-gated community into the consciousness of the general public. This isn't one of the normal run-of-the-mill spats between two or three posters who seem to have it in for each other. The debate, which has transited all forums, is over the ethics of the search marketing industry and what constitutes search engine marketing spam. While pages of postings at several places read like flame-fests, the central points focus on the morality of different types of techniques used in providing SEO or SEM services.

"Spam is as spam does", is a saying that could be adopted by one side of the debate. The other side could easily reply, "Desperate climbs call for disparate measures". Both sides agree that all forms of search engine marketing are forms of advertising but that's about the point all agreement tends to break down.

The search engines themselves haven't helped define the debate very much either. Until the recent Bourbon update, it could be said that Google didn't always uphold its stated standards and the quality of search results seemed to suffer for it. (The jury is still out on the medicinal effects of Bourbon.) Last year, at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference, Yahoo's Tim Meyer was quoted saying "If you're being entirely organic and going after 'Viagra,' it's like taking a sword to a gunfight. You just aren't going to rank."

The crux of the issue is that some organic optimizers and pay-per-click marketers use techniques that fall within a loose set of guidelines provided by the search engines while other SEOs and SEMs don't. This isn't a new thing. There have been white-hat vs. black-hat debates as long as the SEO/SEM industry has existed.

Here's a thumbnail description of attitudes on both sides. Please excuse the use of the limiting "white-hat" and 'black-hat" monikers.

The white-hat side considers itself more ethical than the black-hat side. Existing within an algorithmic order based on the accurate location of words, descriptions, links and content, white-hat practitioners have three critical bottom-line responsibilities. One is to their client. Another is to their business and staff. A third is to search engine users and the search environment.

Each of these bottom-lines are loaded with ethical considerations. For instance, ethical SEO or SEM shops offer clients exclusivity over their target keyword and keyword phrases. It stands to reason as even the best SEO in the world can only make one site rank in the #1 organic position at any given search engine. (For some dark-art practitioners that simple line can be blurred by the precarious power of mass cross-reference linking between disposable sites. Why not have three clients using the same keyword phrase if you can, at least temporarily, deliver three times the traffic?) A more long-term white-hat responsibility is to avoid using any tactics that will get the client's domain in trouble with the search engines. For many clients, their domain name is a part of their brand name. Getting a brand name banned by Google is considered to be pretty much the worst disservice to a client an SEO can commit.

The commitment to business and staff is obvious. Less obvious is the commitment to the search engine environment as a whole. Search engine optimization can be a very powerful tool. In the early days the adult industry dominated any term that could even remotely be considered sexual. Last year, blogs, link-factories and affiliate content were used to game search results. The search engines have been wary of the power of optimization. White-hat SEOs and SEMs would tend to say we have a collective responsibility to deliver exactly what is promised in the SERPs. Not only that, we also have an ethical responsibility to keep relations with the search engines and search engine users on an even keel by considering the effect of our work on how the search engines themselves work. After all, they provide the billboards upon which our clients' advertisements are hung.

Many who use tactics labeled black-hat would say that much of the white-hat stuff is a load of wood, or some other non-sector specific four-letter word. The black-hat side considers itself more honest than the white-hat side. This is serious marketing and if the client of the black-hat practitioner is not in the Top3, there are a lot of stops that can be pulled to get them there. The client-focused black-hat might be concerned about getting caught by the search engines but that concern can be assuaged with a series of throwaway sites. If one domain goes down or gets banned, there is always another to take its place. The real concern is in getting results.

As one famous black-hat said, "Search engines chose whom they will list and whom they won't list. That is a choice made by electronic bots whose sole purpose is to scour the web and sort what they find. When a client comes to a search engine optimizer, they expect to be found in the first place and that's it". The primary allegiance is to the client and the client only. After all, the contract is with the client, not with the search engines. What does the SEO owe Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves anyway? If a massive link-factory can get a few months of rankings and the client is fully aware of the strategy, nobody really suffers, except perhaps the ones who designed the algorithm in the first place. In other words, if it works well and your client gets results, do it.

In between both sides are thousands of shades of grey whose choice of tactics would cross the polarized white-black pallet gradient. Many of these are relative new-comers to the industry. Those who have gotten involved in SEO and SEM over the past year might feel a bit confused with the recent debate as it has evolved over the last few weeks. In the past two years, the search environment has changed enormously. The new twist to the debate is the rapidity of change in the search engine optimization world. Two years ago, Google was it. There are now four unique search algorithms that compile results, each of which has implemented upgrades in the past eighteen months. The SEO/SEM industry, while evolving rapidly simply hasn't kept pace with the hyper-evolution of the search engines. Ironically, the SEO success of various branches of the affiliate marketing industry has driven much of the recent change in the organic algorithms at Google and Yahoo.

The High Ranking forum has an interesting (and still civil) thread that appeared earlier today. Jill Whalen has long been associated with the school of thought that says good content gets great results. She is still in that school, at least judging by the company she keeps most of whom are among the best SEO copywriters in the business. A post at her forum today shows how the search environment has shifted and that due to those shifts, a shared sense of ethics might be found in the databases of the beholders. In a posting titled "Is there such a thing as spam anymore", Jill notes something a famous red-suited black-hat said. The current generation search engine spiders are smart enough to find, sort and deliver results without much direct human intervention. Spiders crawl links. Humans place them but once placed, spiders find and devour the content they lead to. In the next generation of search, (Google Personal and Yahoo myweb2.0) the human intervention that will affect results is highly subjective and might be based on behaviors of the searcher and his or her peers. Considering these facts, what is the boundary for search engine spam these days and, does it really exist?

Jill will almost certainly get massively flamed for asking the question but it is a good question to think about. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask have made the machines. They have given us literally dozens of ways of getting client content into these machines and once there, the mechanisms of these machines take over. The debate is likely going to take a new turn in the coming days.

The bottom line for anyone involved in SEO and SEM is that the rules of the game are evolving. The ethical debate in the industry needs to evolve as well.

The hallmark of a truly great society is the way it deals with disagreements. Mature democratic societies elect bodies of representatives to hash it out while the rest of us get on with the business of minding our own industriousness. Whether we like it or not, our industry is changing faster than our industry's traditional and often libertarian values on ethics in search advertising are. The only professional body that was talking about trying to define a sense of ethical best practices, the SMA-NA seems stalled in process due to lack of secure funding. For the most part, SEO/SEM practitioners regardless of the color of their hat tend towards ethical client relations. Perhaps a constant debate in forums dedicated to search marketing is the only way our industry can define a code of ethical technique. If only we could just agree to discuss without degrading and stop feeding the trolls.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Ethics and Advertising - A Debate in SEO/SEM Circles