aaron dalrymple dot com

I just read a great article by Mike Grehan about the future of Search Engine Optimization. The question, “what is the future of search” is getting asked a lot lately. It’s changed a whole lot since I first got involved just about 10 years ago.

One key element that Grehan points out is that SEO is a really a function of marketing, which I don’t think many people outside the industry (and some inside) really understand. He says,

…even though industry leaders acknowledge that SEO is much more of a marketing process than a technical effort, there’s still a lot of fixation on crawler activity and indexing.

Most new clients and even developers I work with tend to think that I can put up some meta tags and do some voodoo to their code and, POOF, their site will be “optimized.” A lot of people (and, again, developers) call me a week before a new site is set to go live and say, “can you make sure this is optimized?”

Another thing Grehan mentions that stands out to me is:

Personalization and digital asset optimization will end 1999-style ranking reports, as search engine results will be based on blended results from end-user specifics, such as geographic location, time of day, previous searching history, and peer group preference.

Thank god! I’ve already started to ween myself, and clients, off of ranking reports. And with the availability of good analytics programs (like Google Analytics), there is really no need to base success on a handful of keywords. Ranking reports are easy to manipulate, inaccurate, can provide a false sense of SEO success (or failure) and, today, really have very little value.

It HAS to be about conversions! 1000 #1 placements aren’t any good if users aren’t going to and taking action on your site. Unfortunately, the search industry is still pushing rankings (Guaranteed #1 in Google!) as the be-all and end-all of SEO success. Let me make this my new motto:

Rankings are not an End, But a Means to an End…

Another key here is that great rankings and great traffic still aren’t any good on a broken site. This is why I’ve started to include a site analysis incorporating usability best practices as part of my standard SEO offering. My job is not rankings, it’s to help my clients succeed.

Another thing to point out from Grehan’s piece is that SEO is really turning into Reputation Management:

Reputation management will become more important as marketing continues its reversal from a broadcast medium to a listening medium.

It’s part of your overall marketing message. It’s about having a consistent marketing message acorss all channels and monitoring the voice of consumers. It’s social networks, it’s blogs, it’s public relations, it’s search results, and… just a little bit of voodoo. (-;

The Future of SEO - ClickZ

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Marketing, SEO, Online Marketing, Analytics, Mike Grehan, Future of SEO

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Here is Why:

Eyetools Eyetracking Research

This eye tracking research by Eyetools, Enquiro, and Did-it states that 100% of users look at the top three organic listings on Google’s search results page. Only 85% even LOOK at the number four listing and after that it’s all down hill to number 10, which only 20% of searchers even take a peak at.

In addition, the importance of managing SEO along with PPC campaigns is further strengthened by the fact that only 50% of users are even giving a glance to sponsored ad units on the search results pages.

“We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link. The past few studies we’ve done, this one included, shows that there’s a huge importance placed on where the eyeballs end up on the page. Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It’s all about location, location, location.” - Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, enquiro, eyetools, did-it, eye tracking, heat map, serp

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I just got back from PubCon Las Vegas. As usual, this was a great conference if you make your living in e-Commerce, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. I was very impressed by the presenters this year, and I want to take a moment to recognize several by name and to highlight why they made such a strong impression on me:

Robin Liss

Robin gave a highly informative presentation of content production for the web. She used a beautiful manufacturing analogy to illustrate her points. To summarize, she informed us that creating quality content is like manufacturing any product. As a manufacturing endeavor, both the quality of your end product and the efficiency of getting it to market depends heavily on the process you use to get there.

Robin is founder of Reviewed.com, a network of independent product review sites, including CamcorderInfo.com and DigitalCameraInfo.com. Her sites are known for their high journalistic quality, their stringent independence of thought and for meticulously sticking to a consumer advocacy mindset.

I was impressed with the discipline and attention to detail that Robin’s company brings to the content they put on the web. Not only does Robin understand the process to drive a piece of content from Assignment to Research, Research to First Draft, Draft to Edit and down the pipeline to a finished, ready for web document. She also has an expert grasp of the economics of this kind of endeavor. By meticulously tracking each step of the process, Robin insists you can arrive at a very accurate understanding of the resources necessary to keep your content pipeline full, whether you want to generate one or two quality articles and postings a week or ten million words of high-quality, valuable content per year.

Robin Liss is a bright light, and I was personally very impressed with and appreciative of her insights.

Michael Stebbins

Some people impress you by their breadth of knowledge and marketing acumen. Some people impress you with their generosity of mind and their willingness to share what they know in order to raise the overall level of our craft to new heights. In Michael Stebbins PubCon presentations, I was impressed with both. Clearly Michael and his colleagues at MarketMotive are doing excellent research, which benefits both their clients and the rest of the web marketing profession. His willingness to share key insights in a plain and easily executed manner is quite refreshing, and I really appreciated Michael Stebbins’s contribution to the conference.

I had a chance to visit with Michael at one of the cocktail receptions, and he is also a hell of a good guy.

Ted Ulle

Talk about a veteran of SEO and someone with a fantastic ability to convey in a clear manner the importance of adhering to sound Information Architecture and Design principles.

Ted encouraged and argued strongly that folks interested in creating websites should look at key resources from Information Architecture and print typography to gain an understanding of the appropriate methods of organizing and semantically categorizing information and for displaying the written word. As always, content is king, but Ted Ulle adds the important caveat that content is king, if and only if users can navigate and find your high-quality content and search engines can crawl and index your content appropriately.

Take a hard look at your design process was Ted’s big message that resonated with me. Consider the purpose of your website and of most websites. You are trying to provide valuable information to a user, or you want them to trust you enough to make a purchase from your company instead of a dozen other options. You are presenting your content to those users, one way or another. The way you organize and structure your website and its pages effects both the end-user’s ability to find what he or she wants and the ability of the search engines to appropriately identify, crawl, and index what is most important and meaningful about your site.

ALL aspects of your Information Architecture, Graphic Design, and coding should support the proper organization and display of your content. Page navigation, headers, sub-headers, internal page linking structure, and graphical page elements all need to support the user’s ability to quickly find what he needs and take the appropriate action to get from first step to final step in a logical and intuitive manner.

I was very impressed with Ted Ulle’s undeniable expertise in his profession, but I was more impressed with his ability to convey his wisdom in a largely unequivocal and authoritative way backed up by clear examples of why and how this matters.

And I have to say that I also appreciated Ted’s very humorous cautionary tales about things as simple as your site’s error messages. They’re important, and if your IT geeks wrote them, please review them today!

I wanted to call these three indivuals out in the marketing community. I learned a lot. I appreciate their contributions to our profession.

Patrick Soch
Marketing Manager
www.eBags.com

Tagged as: Uncategorized, Search Engines, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, Optimization Tips, pubcon, pubcon2007, seo, search marketing, search engine optimization, robin liss, michael stebbins, ted ulle

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Shawn over at diydollars.com has a great post on Blackhat SEO. I largely agree with Shawn’s conclusions about Google and blackhat vs. whitehat. I’ve been known to say, “Google is not the boss of me!” at times. And, I tend to get a little tired of “Matt Cutts said this” posts all over the SEO blogs and forums (I do like Matt, though - really good guy), so this is a nice change of pace.

There could be some lively debate shaping up in the comments at diy, so click over and chime in:

Is Blackhat SEO Wrong? | diydollars.com

Tagged as: Uncategorized, Google, Search Engines, SEO, diydollars, blackhat, whaitehat,

1 Comment »

Great post here from Marketing Pilgrim, and a good lively conversation in the comments. What I would add to the discussion is that many clients WANT exactly what Greg is cautioning against in his post. Most of his points are great, but, unfortunately, a lot of people who call me (I don’t cold call) are looking for a quick meta tag and link building type campaign because the IT folks don’t want to hear your suggestions, the marketing folks don’t want your ideas and the product people don’t want your advice. I agree that SEO programs should be fully integrated, but convincing customers of that is sometimes difficult. They view it as a condiment instead of an integral part of the website sandwich…

The tips here are valid, but I don’t think they should necessarily be presented as find out if your SEO guy is unscrupulous… They should be presented as suggestions to help businesses understand why they need an integrated SEO program with a respectable budget attached to it - and, perhaps, why it is better to do it in-house…
Read on:

8 Tips for Avoiding an SEO Fraudster

Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Search Engines, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, PR, SEO Consultants, Greg Howlett, marketing Pilgrim

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Why doesn’t this surprise me? While Yahoo is getting really good at pinpointing successful models and snatching them up, or creating them itself, all while mastering the art of integration… Google is creating obscure tools, which may or may not be around in a year and neglecting to properly market or integrate them. I think Google is really falling short on user experience. Yes, simple is good - but times change; what worked five years ago may not be the best approach today. Yahoo has integrated its tools so seamlessly that it makes sense to me that users are more satisfied. How will they turn that into search volume though? Do they even need to worry about that?

Yahoo edges Google in user satisfaction survey | Technology | Reuters

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, Other, user experience, survey, reuters

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I know what Google says, “this will help the quality of our results.” But, like most (who ARE NOT Matt Cutts’ disciples), I am cynical when it comes to Google - just like politicians, Fox News and Clear Channel radio.

It seems that Google is making some changes to the algorithm that determines your ranking in the PPC listings - or Adwords for the brand conscious. To review, Google bases your rankings on quality, CTR and CPC. Currently, Google uses your actual CPC to help determine rankings. In other words, it uses what you’re paying, not what you’re willing to pay - or your maximum CPC.

Well, it seems, that in the near future that formula will be tweaked to consider your maximum CPC in the ranking algo instead of your actual CPC. You won’t have to pay that max CPC (necessarily), but, according to Google, this will give advertisers more control over obtaining a top ad spot.

Maybe so, Google. But it will also encourage users to increase their max CPC in order to get better rankings under the impression that a higher max CPC will increase rankings - regardless of what your actual CPC will be. And, while users will still pay an “actual CPC,” when everyone suddenly raises their max CPC, the actual CPC will follow - because your actual CPC is dependent on what the other advertisers’ maximum CPC is.

Google makes more money, you have a harder time maintaining a positive ROI, and Google moves one step further toward world domination. Read more about the apocalypse here:

Want That Top Ad Position On Google? The Rules Are About To Change

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEM, Online Marketing, Adwords, algorithm, Google Adwords, PPC, PPC Advertising, Matt Cutts, SearchEngineLand, ROI, CPC

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Nothing too earth shattering here.  But, Stephan Spencer has posted some tidbits from Matt Cutts’ talk at WordCamp 2007.  Most aren’t specific to just bloggers and offer more insight into ranking well (or ranking poorly) with Google.  Matt never gives up the real juicy stuff, so I assume this is just an opiate for the SEO masses more than anything else…

Here are a few of the general SEO items that Spencer notes:

• Underscores in URLs are now seen as word separators, just as hyphens have always been.
• Keep query parameters in the URLs to no more than 2 or 3 and Google will treat your URL the same as a static one.
• Directory depth of your pages does not matter to Google.
• Page file extensions don’t affect your rankings.  Do avoid using .EXE, however.

To read Spencer’s entire piece:

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, Optimization Tips, Blogging, matt cutts, stephan spencer, cnet, underscore, optimization, search engine optimization

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Wordtracker, which has a great keyword generation tool that a lot of SEMs pay for, has recently released a new free keyword search tool that’s great for a quick keyword lookup or for those who don’t have the need for a full-blown keyword generation tool.  It’s very similar to the old Overture Keyword Suggestion tool that only seems to work about 1/3 of the time anymore.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, overture, keyword generation, wordtracker, keywords

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According to Zagat, 75% of travelers say they now use the Internet as their primary means of booking, particularly air travel. While this means great opportunity for search marketers in the travel space, it also means that the space is more competitive than ever. The survey further states that the most commonly used website to book travel is Expedia.com while TripAdvisor.com takes the honors when it comes to finding travel information. Of course with all of the affiliate sites out there for these two companies, I wonder how many people even know that they’re using Expedia or TripAdvisor…

Another report, released by PhoCusWright, states that next year - for the first time - transactions on the Internet will account for over half (54 percent) of all U.S. travel bookings. Other findings from the report include:

• While the U.S. represented just one third of total online and offline travel bookings of the combined North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific markets in 2005, the U.S. share of online bookings was over 60 percent of all online bookings.
• Growth of dynamic packaging — the ability of consumers to easily combine airline, hotel, rental car and other product purchases online — is projected to slow significantly from 51 percent in 2005 to 18 percent in 2008. This trend is partly attributable to the current tight supply of bulk airfares and merchant hotel rates available for packages, thanks to higher load factors and occupancy as suppliers enjoyed strong sales during the recent robust economy.
• Hotels will be the fastest growing segment online, surpassing air travel, which until 2006 had long been the fastest growing product segment.
• The advanced level of the U.S. online travel market creates an atmosphere in which many innovations such as dynamic packaging, metasearch and user-generated content incubate in the U.S. before expanding to other global markets. Many of these innovations include the new online capabilities that PhoCusWright has termed Travel 2.0 — the travel industry’s application of Web 2.0 practices empowering the online consumer.
• The tipping point of the travel market, with the online channel becoming the norm for travel purchases, is going to further shape consumer behavior that utilizes Travel 2.0 tools and applications.

I have to somewhat disagree with these statements on “Travel 2.0″ though. I think they may be a bit premature. I’m not sure that anyone has figured out how to bring value to the consumer, using 2.0 elements, that translates into revenue. Until that happens, what good is it to a bread and butter company that’s trying to sell travel - not trying to impress investors (we all know how well that’s worked out in the past)?

So, how do you go about standing out in a sea of affiliate sites, rising CPCs and product commodification? And, will 2.0 be the answer?

Zagat Survey Coverage

PhoCusWrigt Press Release