Ads in search on the two partners will be powered by Bing, and their combined audience is estimated at 150 million Americans and over half a billion people worldwide. All of the ads will be served from Microsoft AdCenter.  The two companies are currently working out the technology details, so all of your ads on either network will stay the same for the time being. The hope is to have everything running off of the Microsoft AdCenter by Q4 2010 to capture the valuable holiday season.

What this means for advertisers

If you manage or use either Yahoo! or Bing search advertising, then nothing will change for a few months. The new merger should reach out to all advertisers with ample notice and instruction on moving over accounts, or possibly have everything moved over automatically. We will see how this works out in the Fall or possibly later. There is no hard deadline set for the transition, but it is coming.

The combination of the advertisers may end up affecting your campaigns in more ways than just an interface change. With the combination of searchers, there will also be a combination of advertisers. Currently if you run campaigns in both search engines you are competing in separate auctions for your PPC ads. This split can keep the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) lower because the number of advertisers (bidders) is lower. With this new merger, the combined pool of advertisers may cause the CPC to go up for some of your keywords.

Currently we see the cost of keywords in Bing and Yahoo! to be between 40%-60% of the cost of the same words in AdWords for similar position. These cost savings are a primary motivator to advertise on the Yahoo! and Microsoft platforms. While this new paring will grow the number of searchers it could also increase the bottom line. We won’t know for sure until the move is completed, but it may be a good idea to start planning for an increase in the cost of keywords.

The major benefit to advertisers is the consolidation of advertising. Search Alliance will become a one-stop-shop for PPC advertising. The alliance will instantly become the #2 search advertising platform, so advertisers that run ads on Search Alliance and on Google AdWords can easily capture a large percent of the overall search market.

The bids for keywords will probably go up, but they are still not likely to be more expensive than AdWords. Google currently maintains about 80% of the search market, but that extra 20% can be the difference for some online advertisers. The new Search Alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft will make capturing that audience easier than it has been before.

You can subscribe to The SEM Blog to stay up-to-date with the changing landscape of Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click Advertising online.

IPED and IPEDS are acronyms that have quite a few results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, the other spelling brethren to the iPod do not have much meaning. Because of this, all three search engines show spelling corrections for those words and typically include “iPod” search results as well. Today, we still see this for iPud and iPid. And, immediately after the Apple announcement, we saw it for iPad, too.

This was soon corrected, whether naturally or through intervention, in Yahoo and Google. Bing is still showing results for iPod when you search for the new iPad. This instance appears to show a small flaw in the search engine algorithms. How do you quickly add a new term when it had been written off as a typo?

The iPad announcement is the most recent example of this, but many web 2.0 companies experienced the same problem. When companies began to emulate Flickr’s naming convention of adding an ‘r’ to the end of their name, it also confused search engines. Is Snappr a service, or is someone looking for a lawn mower. This is especially apparent when services first launch, which is exactly what we witnessed with the launch of the iPad.

What does that mean for Search Engine Marketers? It means that Google may have a bit more to say about brand names then we would like to think. Is the new product you are launching or marketing a typo for something else? Then you may want to think about a name change. Of course, a strong product can overtake the ‘typo’ designation as they iPad has done in Google and Yahoo, but you may not have the marketing gusto and hype power that Apple carries. If you have flexibility in the name, then do your homework.

It may be time to add “Googleability” to the traditional product naming guidelines. Not only do you need to distinguish your brand from others, but you need to have a brand that isn’t even a close spelling of another product. If I sold a product called a “pespi,” I would be in a world of pain trying to market it online.

We would like to keep the search engines out of these types of processes, and they want to stay out of them as well. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information.” No part of that says anything about governing or changing that information. The unfortunate truth is that online marketing is growing rapidly, and to keep up you need to capitalize on the traffic that Google and the others can drive. So, pick your product names carefully, and market the heck out of them.

SEO Drupal Modules

Pathauto – Creates automatic URL aliases based on patterns created by the Token module. Includes options for taxonomy, user, content types, and others.  This module is very flexible and allows you to modify the URLs for any page on the site.

XML Sitemap – Creates a sitemap based on the sitemaps.org spec.  Also allows for submission to search engines with the required api keys. An XML Sitemap is the best way to show the search engines of new content on your site and this module can create that sitemap very easily for you.

Google Analytics – This is a fully loaded analytics tracking solution.  Just imput the UA number for your site and the tracking code will be included on every page. Allows for blocking tracking on certain pages, tracking by role, downloads, and other metrics.

Page Title – Similar to Pathauto, but for meta Title Tags.  You can setup patterns for different pieces of content. It also allows the option for a user to override and individual page’s Title Tag.

Global Redirect – Creates 301 redirects for different urls on the same site, like node/1, node?q=1, and /about-us/. This is great for making sure you aren’t splitting your rank between different URLs for the same page. Global Redirect also makes sure your URLs are all uniform by stripping the final “/”. This is a great help in Google Analytics reports so you know that every pageview is counted appropriately.

Nodewords – This allows you set meta description and keywords for individual nodes and views. Newer beta versions also include the ability to add a meta confirmation tag for Google Webmaster Tools. This way you do not need to edit your templates or upload a file.

SEO Checklist – This module is a great place to help keep track of all of the above modules and more. There are quite a few things that can be setup to automate your site’s SEO performance. SEO Checklist helps you keep all of these things straight.

Drupal SEO Performance

Because of these wonderful modules, Drupal is regarded as one of the top performing CMS platforms for SEO. With the tools above, you are able to configure everything to run in the background, so you can focus on your pages and your content and not have to worry too much about the technical details.

Other CMS platforms are able to accomplish some of these things, but very few if any are able to do everything for CMS that Drupal does with these modules. The other SEO benefit is that as search engine optimization changes, the Drupal community can adapt and quickly update the modules. The Drupal admin system can notify you of updates to you modules to make sure your site is kept up-to-date.

Schipul offers custom Drupal designs and is also able to do Drupal development for the site of your dreams. And of course, all of this great SEO configuration is included.

Online shopping and events can make effective use of campaigns related to keyphrases such as free shipping, discount, gift, coupon and last minute deals. Use Google Insights and Trends to discover seasonal trends for your segment of the market. Whether it is a gift membership, free shipping or other discount, savvy shoppers are on the lookout for value.

Start planning now for health and fitness related topics in the early January, flu and cold season topics, and upcoming holidays for Spring Break and Valentines. Coordinate a combined effort from on-page web optimization with off-page marketing efforts including newsletters, events, and social media announcements.  Spend some time looking at your past year’s analytics and scour for traffic spikes or increased opportunities around industry events. Setup coordinated campaigns which may include a targeted PPC campaign.

Not sure what dates are important for your business or association? Check out the calendar for editorial planning from the presentation by the Schipul SEM Team.

Bing Twitter Page and Search

Bing actually created an entire page at bing.com/twitter which displays trending topics in a cloud at the top followed by a listing of the most active links below. Each link is followed by a couple of related tweets. There is some mystery as to which tweets are being selected. It does not appear to be the first tweets or the ones from people with the most followers. It also seems the links are tied to the trending topics, and are not necessarily the most popular links on twitter.

Additionally, Bing adds the ability to search the twitter stream in real-time. After searching a term (like Yankees) and you 4 selected tweets followed by some of the top linked content relating to those words. You can view the full tweetstream and either allow it to continually refresh or pause it a read a few. Be careful with some of the top trending topics, as they can start refresh faster than you (or at least I) can read them.

The Bing search adds some value with the related links, but the selection of how these links (and top two tweets) are chosen is still not fully known. Hopefully some of this will get ironed out as Microsoft continues to make progress in developing this search option.

Google Social Search

Google takes a completely different approach to the fire hose of Twitter data. While this may not be their long-term plan for the data, they are currently integrating it with a few other services in Google Labs. At the Google Labs Experimental Search, you can join the experiment, which gives you the option to use Social Search. Once you have signed up, when you search for something on Google and click Show Options you will see Social at the bottom. Selecting it gets you into the special Social results.

These results will show links from different people you are connected to and how you are connected to them. It also gives you the option to view results from a single person. Google creates these connections using your Google Profile (you created that, right?). I have Twitter as one of my links, as well as my YouTube account. Google scans these two networks to search for connections I might have, then it searches through that data.

This is much different than a full Twitter search, but in many cases it may be more useful. You are probably more interested in what the people you know and follow have to say than the rest of the Twitter universe. It also works to filter out all of the spam that currently plagues and Twitter trending topic. The links go to tweets, blogs, and other links related to the search, which adds some additional value to just searching the twitterstream.

These two new ways to search Twitter are still early in development so expect some changes and improvements in their results over time.

More Goals

Previously you could only have 4 goals per profile. Now you can have up to twenty, made up of 4 sets of 5 goals. Additionally, you can now setup Engagement Goals which allow you to use Time on Site and Pages per Visit as goal-capturing metrics. This is valuable for many types of sites (like Blogs!) that may consider a Goal accomplished without actually capturing contact information or making a sale.

Advanced Filters

Advanced Filters allow you to create single one-off filters for different reports. Currently, you would need to use the Advanced Segments to accomplish this. Now, filtering top landing pages with over 10 visits and bounce rates over 80% is a snap. This will help you find the pain points in your site and make positive changes. This can also help you identify your top performing keywords and markets.

Automatic and Custom Alerts

If you use Google Alerts then you know how valuable it is to have this kind of automation. These alerts will allow you to track increases in certain activities or to certain pages on your site. They will be very useful when tracking different campaigns and when monitoring the effects of social media. These alerts can be viewed and grouped by date or by type, so you can create clear reports for the things you need to watch, and they can be emailed to you automatically. Alerts are not available yet but should be out by the end of the month.

Other features include Mobile tracking without javascript for older mobile browsers and more custom variables options for tracking members and logged-in status. These take a bit more work to setup but can give you even more details for your more advanced sites.

Many of these features are available today and the rest will be rolled out very soon. Check back with us at theSEMblog for more tips on how to use these great new tools.

Let’s clear some of that up right here.

The Good Advice is obvious, and the rest doesn’t work

This is spot on. The good advice is not only obvious, it’s also very easy to implement on your site.

1. Unique Titles and Title Tags
2. Using Heading with relevant keywords
3. Good text content that is interesting and relevant
4. Outbound links to other related and interesting pages/sites
5. Accessible design/code that makes viewing the content easy

We can all agree that those are the right methods. Derek calls it “making a website good” in the comments. We call it SEO, or at least one aspect of SEO. Google and the other search engines encourage and reward these practices because it makes good content easier to find for searchers (people).

The above list is great advice. It is easy and you should be doing it on your site.

Now we can address the second point: SEO is poisoning the web. Let’s fix it first.

SEO Spam is poisoning the web

That looks much more accurate now. SEO Spam is a mixed bag of loopholes and black-hat tricks that, to borrow Derek’s phrase, “are ineffective at best and destructive at worst.”

There are many practices involving bot computers and fake blogs and other automated processes used to generate link farms solely to increase ranking. They steal content or print gibberish all in an effort to gain clicks for other sites. There are other practices involving hiding links and text to trick the Search Engines into seeing something that the typical web surfer would not see. This is all bad, and any real SEO professional would never recommend these things. They are disgusting and they ruin the search experience for everyone. They force search engines to waste time playing cat & mouse when they could be innovating. If you are exploring SEO services, make sure the company you choose does not use these tactics. They will only end up hurting you.

Real-life SEO Experience

I’ve been knee-deep in Search Engine Optimization for about 6 months now, and I have never wasted my time with anything but the good advice in the list above. I’ve seen great results by simply updating Titles and Headlines and making the text content more web-friendly with <p> tags and the occasional bolding of important terms. It takes some time, but the effects have been lasting and will continue to help future content. I don’t promise results, I just promise that I will do the 5 easy steps above across a website.

Many of my clients are not in the internet business. They are doctors, marketers, educators, and other professionals who have a skill they do very well. They don’t want to learn the easy steps to SEO and spend time doing it. They came to us because they wanted to outsource that task to someone with more knowledge and experience. Derek says that SEO is “so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.” Am I a fool for sending my laundry out? It’s simple and easy to do, but I just don’t want to do it. I’m fully capable of making a grilled cheese sandwich (easy and simple), so am I a fool for buying one at Steak-n-Shake? I don’t think so.

SEO, just like any other business, has professionals that are ethical, fair, and honest as well as those who try to cheat the Search Engines and their clients. If you need SEO services, find a company with a phone number and an office. Meet with them and ask them what they do. A small bit of education can help you to select the right people to help with your Search Engine Optimization needs.

Some of the most interesting features to be included are:

• Geographical Location datelines to show where tweets are coming from
• Reputation validating system to lend credibility to authors as information sources
• Reputation ranking system based on ratings from other users
• Grouping of followers by lists

Read the full article on CBSNews

Jonti Bolles

For more information on Social Marketing, Web Analytics and Search, contact our Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul and follow SEMblog on Twitter.

The Schipul Team has been busy planning speaking and activities around the upcoming SchipulCon Conference in Houston, TX. Search Engine Optimization is clearly a focus as we host Matthew Inman in a one-on-one discussion with Jonti Bolles and moderated by John-Michael Oswalt. Matthew is quite the legend in the SEO world and we look forward to hearing about his experiences and insight in developing traffic.

SchipulCon will be held at the Houston Zoo, October 15-16th and includes tracks focused on Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Brand Monitoring, and managing your website and blogs. We have included sessions specifically for Understanding Your Site Analytics and will have team members on hand in the expo area to answer questions about Search and Analytics.

For more information or to register, visit www.schipulcon.com and let us know you are coming!

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com ]]> http://thesemblog.com/2009/09/schipulcon-09-for-search-engine-marketing-engagement/feed/ 0 http://thesemblog.com/2009/07/google-want-to-see-my-wonder-wheel/ http://thesemblog.com/2009/07/google-want-to-see-my-wonder-wheel/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:50:05 +0000 Jason McElweenie http://thesemblog.schipulwp.com/?p=123 Google has recently rolled out some changes to their search results pages. If you are an avid Google News user most of these changes wont seem that new but to others its a whole new ball game.

Below is a screen shot of a search for the term Schipul. Much like the Google News search results you are now given a link to ‘Show options’

Clicking on that link opens up a few options on the left side of the screen

This will allow you to see recent content related to that term based on the time criteria. You can even sort by date or even related searches.

Ok, this is really cool BUT I want to check to the Wonder Wheel option.

Google Wonder Wheel

Oh sure its been out since May but it hasn’t shown up on the regular search page until this week. So what is Google Wonder Wheel? It is visual wheel image that shows you related search terms based on your term. Below is a screenshot of Schipul again.

Click on another term and you get another wheel

Google Wonder Wheel, Well So What?

I know you’re probably thinking to yourself ‘Well, Jason I really have no need for more graphs in my life so why is this important?’ Well I’m glad you didn’t really ask. If you’ve ever wondered what Google thinks about your site and its content this will give you a quick idea on that.

If you’ve built your site and you haven’t optimized your content you might be telling the search engines something completely different than you want. Run a simple search on your company and or keyterms and see what Google thinks is related to that. If you don’t show up your web presence might not be big enough or your site isn’t optimized. One way or the other you need to get that fixed.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com