aaron dalrymple dot com

I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple - choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing - DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy - SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, MSN, WebMasterWorld, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, Blogging, search engine marketing, Search Engine Blogs, Search Engine Guides, SEOBook, DMNews, Search Engine Watch

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Most success stories, be they personalities or businesses, involve someone or some entity reinventing itself to stay relevant.  Everything from Apple to Madonna.

I think the writing is on the wall and online travel agencies better do something rather quick to stay relevant in the eyes of traveling consumers.  And it’s not new technology, it’s a shift in their attitude and thinking in regards to their place in the buying cycle, their place as content providers and even their revenue models.

I, for one, have been using the method mentioned in the following San Francisco Business Times article for some time now:

“The Orbitzes and Hotels.coms of the world continue to be useful for price shopping, but more and more customers are going straight to the source to make reservations.”

Why book a United airline ticket and a Hilton hotel on Expedia when I’m “guaranteed” to get the best price by booking directly with the supplier.  I have to punch in my credit card number twice?  Big deal.  Plus, if I’m part of the suppliers loyalty program I can usually get some bonus points/miles by doing so.  Expedia does have some great shopping tools though; so I use their site, but they don’t get my business.  Add to that a collection of “Travel 2.0” sites that are in the works and suddenly using agency sites to shop price starts to lose its draw as well.

The San Francisco Business Times piece quotes Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hospitality as saying:

“Third-party sites ‘have to go out of being a Wal-Mart and low-price leader and become more of the Consumer Reports for hotels.’”

Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best answer either.  There are a few good travel review sites out there now and I don’t think there is room for many more on a macro level (niches, however, yes).  The newest trends on the internet are collaboration, community driven content, etc.  Those are the angles that the agencies needs to be thinking about.  The challenge is turing that into a real revenue model, however, even if the hotel and air reservations go away (or play second fiddle).

Right now the agencies are pushing packages as something that the suppliers can’t offer and of which they may still hold a price advantage.  This seems like a band-aid solution to me.  It’s only a matter of time before the supplier sites are packaging too and undercutting the agencies once again.  There are no easy answers for the agencies, and they tend to move as fast as a herd or turtles.

Another interesting bit from the article linked below is Conley’s analysis of how the agencies got into this predicament, which I think puts it in terms that any of us working in online travel in the late 90’s already understands (I made my living selling inventory that the hotels considered distressed; and I once stayed at the Bellagio 3 nights for $70)…

“The travel downturn came at the same time (third-party Internet sites) tried to build their business, and they were able to rocket to the moon overnight,” Conley said. “Everyone was looking for a travel deal, and they thought of these web sites as the place to get the best price.” Hoteliers have made sure that is no longer the case, and have invested to improve their own company web sites.

Read the entire article here:

As business clicks, hotels unplug from travel sites - San Francisco Business Times

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Online Travel Agencies, San Francisco Business Times, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Expedia, United, Hilton, Travel 2.0, Chip Conley, Travel

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I get a lot of questions from clients about redirects.

• How do I move my site to a new domain and keep my search engine rankings in tact?
• I’m going to take down some old pages/sites, will this affect my rankings?
• I’m redesigning my website and my directory and/or page names are changing, will the engines just point to the new pages?
• How can I tell the engines to send all my traffic to my home page?

There are answers to these questions, but first I usually say something like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” The reason I ask is that often times the pages or sites that the company wants to get rid of are older pages that have great link reputation and are well “aged” in the engines – they get crawled a lot, have a high Page Rank, etc. Plus, more content is usually better; can the pages be repurposed?

After assessing the need for getting rid of pages or moving domains or changing the page/directory structure (which are all valid and necessary in a lot of cases), using a 301 redirect is usually the answer. A 301 redirect won’t get you in trouble with the search engines as some redirects, like a meta-tag refresh, can. It tells the engine that a page has permanently moved and asks if it would please start indexing the new page in its place. It’s the safest way to change page names, domains, directories, etc. when changing these elements of your website. If you’re deleting an old mini-site or set of pages, you should consider redirecting each page you’re deleting to a similar page on your new or main site.

The next question is, naturally, “how do I do that?”

Here are some good sources that I’ve com across recently on redirects, 301s and how to implement them:

Steve Hargrove - How to redirect a web page, the smart way - added 6/20 

Wikipedia - URL redirection

TamingTheBeast.net - Giving search engine spiders direction

SEOBook - .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy

Bruce Clay, Inc. – Sorting out Redirects

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Online Marketing, MSN, Ask, Link Building, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, 301 Redirect, URL Redirect, Redirect, Bruce Clay

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More 2.0 Madness! Being involved in the travel industry, Travel 2.0 is of special interest to me. As some of you know, I’ve never been a big fan of travel meta search engines. I’ve never quite “got it” when it comes to what they offer the consumer. And their marginal success would seem to indicate that I’m not alone. But this step toward what is being called Travel 2.0 actually seems like it may have some legs.

Most of the sites mentioned in the article from Hotelmarketing.com (see the bottom of this post) are tools that give the consumer some real power in planning travel, mostly airfare at this point. By allowing users to search historical air rates, and even predict future rates, these engines may really have something of value that can’t be easily obtained elsewhere.

If you travel with any sort of flexibility, as I usually do, you no doubt spend at least a little time searching for the best rates. And it never fails to amaze us that the same trip to Boston we took last month for $250 is going to cost $500 this month…

Using a combination of Google maps, past price data and tracking software, FareCompare.com allows users to chart historical pricing data for coach and business/first class fares and search for all the lowest future rates to multiple cities from a given starting point.

FareCompare’s engine updates new fares in less than 3 minutes. GDSs typically take 2-4 hours to publish fare updates. Using our tools industry analysts benefit from knowing what is going to happen in a given market before the changes actually occur. - www.farecompare.com/search/corporate

Since the service doesn’t actually sell airline tickets, however, it’s still a mystery how FareCompare will manage to stick around. Sound familiar? Should this be called Travel Bubble 2.0 instead?

Metasearch 2.0: Consumers turn the tables on revenue managers

Tagged as: Google, Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Other, Travel 2.0, Travel20, Travel2, Web 2.0, Web2, FareCompare, Meta Search, HotelMarketing, Google Maps, Bubble 2.0

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Just in case you think that search engine optimization is for businesses only. More and more companies seem to be using search engines to get the goods on job applicants. In the past you could, within reason, give your prospective employer information on a need-to-know basis and not worry much about them finding out otherwise. But, today, what if your political views, details of your lifestyle, legal issues, pictures of you doing keg stands in college, etc. are all available online when the employer searches for your name? If you’re ever planning to search for a new job, you better start paying attention to what the web says about you, or somebody with the same name as you…

I’m not sure that it’s a great idea on the employer’s part. But even if it’s not sanctioned by the company or the HR department, who’s to say that the hiring manager won’t Google the finalists before making a final decision.

Of course the opposite can be true too… If an employer searches for your name and sees it associated with organizations, companies, articles, news items, etc. in your area of expertise or industry, you may gain a leg up on your competition. And maybe they’ll overlook the keg stand pics. It really makes “personal branding” something relevant to most of us.

In fact, I think I’m going to become an “Online Image Consultant” (I just made that up, is it taken already?). Send me $500 and we’ll get going on your personal search engine optimization and online identity control. Comment for a mailing address. (-;

Search Engines as an HR Tool - The Search Engine Marketing Weblog

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Other, job search, employment, personal branding

2 Comments »

Remember back in the early nineties when the internet was going to be this great tool that could connect people and cultures, a great tool of communication and collaboration?  I’m sure that was the premise behind other technologies, like radio and television, as well.  But, sure as day, those ideals give way to commerce and much of the technology becomes a tool to sell stuff.  Think about radio and television; one could argue that today they mostly exist to sell advertising, not some “greater cause.”

Naturally, the internet went the same way.

But, all of the social networking sites that are popping up seem to make the web more like what the promise of the internet has been all along.  The reality is, however, that all of these sites are going to need real business models to survive, because they’re not cheap to run or maintain.  Even scarier is the fact that a lot of folks would love to get there hands on all that data and use it for purposes not originally intended.  Mix that with companies desperately needing cash and we may have a pending privacy nightmare.

Now throw in the government, who also sees a gold mine of data just hanging out there, and social networking starts to look like something out of The Minority Report…

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

I’m generally not the paranoid type, but this article is pretty eye opening:
New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

Tagged as: Marketing, Online Marketing, Other, social networking, myspace, privacy, New Scientist, web 2.0, web2, NSA

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Jim Westergren has put together a fantastic link building guide in what is an example of a fantastic link building technique: great content! It really is a good guide on something that still mystifies a lot of web masters and even SEOs, how to acquire high quality links that don’t risk your positions in Google and the other engines.  It’s a great guide for beginners as well as folks who have been doing it for a long time and need a refresher or some new ideas.
Here’s your link, Jim:

Link Building Guide

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, Jim Westergren, link building guide

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Online Agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc.) do one thing really well, allow you to shop for the best price.  I would be interested to find out, however, how much money these agencies leave on the table from consumers who shop price on the agency site but then buy direct from the supplier.

I can’t remember the last time I actually booked on one of the big agency sites; but I regularly use Orbitz to shop for the best airline prices.  Orbitz has some great tools, like one that allows you to search all the rates in any given 30-day period.  For me, that tool allows me to plan travel when the rates are lowest and has saved me hundreds of dollars.  However, as soon as I find the rate I always go to the airline’s own site to book the ticket, which then saves me enough money for a Starbucks in the terminal.  I understand that there’s not much margin available on stand-alone air tickets for the agencies, but I also have similar methods for hotel rates and rental cars.  And very seldom to I buy packaged offers, which puts in the majority along with 60% of of all travelers (according to JupiterResearch).

These seem like big challenges to me…  Are agency sites going to go away as supplier sites get more sophisticated?  Probably not.  If you combine the fact that package purchases are on the rise (JupiterResearch) and that consumers are much more likely to use an agency for combination purchases than supplier sites (PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Eighth Edition), it appears that agency sites are in a good place if they can continue to offer packaged products at unbeatable prices.

But it’s not going to be easy, especially if supplier sites catch up with them from a technology standpoint (ability to build and buy packages with products from different suppliers).  And, they HAVE to compete on price.  All of the research points to this as being the number one factor - over brand, selection, convenience, loyalty programs or pretty colors.

comScore just released a new analysis of the online travel market based on data from 2005.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Nearly 150 million consumers visited a travel Web site in 2005, a 35-percent increase over the previous year.

• Annual online travel revenues exceeded $60 billion in 2005, representing a 20-percent increase versus 2004.

• Consumers have been slowly migrating from online agencies to branded airline, hotel or car rental supplier sites. However, both online agency and supplier sites are growing, with agencies posting a 19-percent gain versus 2004 and suppliers recording 21 percent growth.

• Branded supplier sites captured approximately 57 percent of online travel dollars in 2005, up from 55 percent in 2004.

• Supplier sites, which accounted for 53 percent of airline ticket sales in 2003, have grown in popularity in recent years to capture 58 percent of airline ticket sales in 2005. A similar pattern has emerged in the hotel segment, where supplier sites have grown from a 52 percent share in 2003 to 59 percent in 2005, with the growth from 2004 to 2005 being particularly strong.

• When people begin the process of researching travel services online, 46 percent indicated that the first site they visited was either Expedia, Travelocity or Orbitz — nearly double the proportion of people who reported starting their research at a branded airline, hotel or car rental site (24 percent).

For more information:comScore Study Finds 35-Percent Increase in Number of Consumers Visiting Travel Sites

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, comScore, orbitz, expedia, travelocity, online travel, online travel agencies, travel trends, online travel market,

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Here are a number of articles I ran into this morning concerning Web 2.0 and its integration into our online lives, as I blogged about yesterday.

Google tests Web-based spreadsheet to organize data
Wow, this is almost exactly what Ray Lane was talking about. Google Spreadsheets could be the first in a line of applications that changes how we use and buy software. For a small business who needs basic spreadsheet capabilities, maybe travels occasionally, and would like to be able to share that data with clients, coworkers and partners without a complex network setup, this may be perfect. Heck, I’m thinking it may eliminate the need for me to buy another copy of MS Office for my Mac. I can use TextEdit for Word docs and Google Spreadsheets for Excel files… Powerpoint is the only thing I would really be missing. They’re also talking about integrating Spreadsheet and Google Base (ahh, so 2.0ish!).

Yahoo Updates MyWeb
Yahoo has updated and is even more 2.0ish and seems a bit easier to use and understand as well. It looks to me like a cross between Flickr and del.icio.us, which (surprise surprise) Yahoo now owns both of. I may actually try to use this instead of del.icio.us for a while. I’ve always liked Yahoo’s apps.

Here come the ‘Family 2.0′ sites
More overuse of “2.0”? Yes, certainly. But, a good look at the social networking and user generated sites that are focusing on family networks and a slightly more mature user than myspace.com. One or two of these will probably do really well if they can come up with a decent revenue model. If it’s advertising only revenue though, then there’s probably not enough to go around… Is there?

Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy
The other side of Web 2.0. There are some great arguments here. One thing all the 2.0 startups have in common is no real revenue model to speak of (but high valuations – sound familiar?). The true value of these sites, from a business perspective, is data. And where there’s data there’s marketers who want that data; that’s where the money’s at. So think twice before uploading that next photo to Flickr…

When the Web 2.0 bubble bursts - when the massive buyouts are done, the millionaires are made and the sites we love today are in the hands of big business - the innovation will grind to a halt, and what’s left will be the endless grinding of the marketeering machine. - Wil Harris – bit-tech.net

Tagged as: Google, Yahoo, Marketing, Online Marketing, Other, Web2.0, software, Web-20, Web 2.0, MyWeb, Yahoo MyWeb, Google Spreadsheets, Family 2.0

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