I’ve been doing a search engine optimization for a few years, and I don’t really think there’s much difference between the major search engines. There might be some little differences, most noticeably:

• MSN still displays very spammy pages every once in a while.
• Google updates some pages faster and makes an effort to find breaking news/content.
• Google gets a lot of pages in its index.

A little less noticeably:

• Google puts huge emphasis on links and link quality.
• It’s possible to get new pages with a lot of new links to the top of MSN fast.
• Yahoo! might put a bit more emphasis on “on-the-page” content than the other engines.

Overall though, I think the major search engines rank really similar pages. And I think that optimization efforts that are good for one engine, generally work for the others.

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Scenario: (Happened recently to a Pure Visibility client.) Your company has some nice blogging momentum going. You’ve been posting on the regular for about a year now, not quite in Jonathan Schwartz territory yet, but it’s going well. Then one day your Internet marketing company notices that none of your posts are indexed by Google…tried querying Google with the advanced operator site:example.website.com and your blog is nowhere. The Horror!

Here’s what happened behind the scenes.

1. A security flaw in an outdated version of WordPress allows spam to get to the blog, even though comments are moderated.
2. A spider sees the spam and Google removes the blog from its index
3. Spam content deleted, WordPress updated with security flaw corrected.
4. Blog remains de-indexed.
5. Verified site with Google Webmaster Tools & receive notice of Removal from Google’s Indexes
6. Use Webmaster Tools to submit Request Consideration form.



7. Within the week (much sooner than expected) the site is reindexed by Google.
8. Problem! SERP snippet now shows spam that no longer exists on the blog.



Nice that Webmaster Tools allows Google to communicate with site owners and provide them with critical notifications.  This could be pretty frustrating for anyone, particularly someone limited time or intarweb experience.  Takeaways: keep your blogging program up to date; use Akismet or other anti-spam tool; moderate comments vigilantly; sign up for Webmaster Tools.

There is a lot of talk out there about the US economy and about a recession. As a result I have noticed that business owners are more careful about how they spend their marketing dollars. I think it is great that business owners are attentive to all marketing money spent and it makes my job as a Pay Per Click (PPC) specialist easier because PPC is a completely measurable marketing solution. If you think about it, how do you know how much direct business you received through a newspaper or billboard advertisement? PPC advertising allows you to calculate your exact cost per conversion and know whether you spent more money than the cost of your product.

At Pure Visibility we sometimes meet with companies that don’t have a marketing budget to justify our complete management of monthly online marketing efforts. So, we developed product offerings that could help smaller businesses improve online. Some of the products that we’ve developed are our Pay Per Click Success Workshop, Jumpstart Brainstorm sessions, and something we call PPC “coaching sessions.” I started holding bi-monthly PPC coaching sessions with our friends from Arbor Teas in February and so far they have been really successful.

What is a Pure Visibility bi-monthly PPC coaching session you may ask? Basically, a member of the PV team sits down with whoever manages your PPC account/s for 90 minutes every other week and we have a thorough account walk through, then optimize everything. This type of session provides the opportunity for someone to see how a seasoned PPC specialist goes about managing an account. You may have noticed that Google’s representatives will go through and optimize your account for free (which Arbor Teas took advantage of) but, the difference with our coaching sessions is you have the chance to actually learn the PPC concepts and strategies, so, you can optimize your own account in the future.

Arbor Teas came in with specific goals in mind. In our first session we went through the AdWords account and identified what was working and what wasn’t. Then we looked at how we could improve bids, ad copy, and account organization. Next we looked at landing pages, usability, and touched on SEO. When we started seeing success in AdWords we rolled out the advertising to Yahoo! and MSN AdCenter. By meeting every other week or once a month it allows us to measure the results of our changes and so far we’ve seen continuous improvement in the cost per conversion.

I’ve found that the coaching sessions are a very efficient way to manage multiple PPC accounts for a company on a budget because we continuously improve and eventually the management can be done independently. Of course if you want a quicker day long training course you should look to our AdWords Success Workshop (Google AdWords Success Training Reviews.)

A recent post addressed the social media metrics debate among SEMs. Missing from these conversations, as far as I can tell, is any mention of metrics used in network theory proper. These measures have been used by researchers studying real world networks, including the internet. It might be useful to build a bridge between these metrics and the ones that SEMs propose.

First, a quick overview of network (graph) theory and its methodologies. A network is made up of nodes and links (also called edges):

The metrics used to make sense of a network use these basic components to make predictions about the network. The metrics vary based on whether the network is directed (links go in one direction; for example, I link to you, but you don’t link back) or undirected (links are always both ways). The web is a good example of a directed network. A system of interstates, on the other hand, is an undirected network.

Centrality measures determine how important a node is to the network. This information can be useful in answering question like, What is the shortest path across the network?, and, Which nodes are most likely to receive information traveling across a network? A node’s centrality is called its “prestige” in a directed network. Pagerank is Google’s approximation of network prestige.

The individual centrality measures that result in prestige are degree centrality (the number of links a node has, interpreted as how much risk a node stands of to catch what flows across a network), closeness centrality (a node’s relative distance from the “action” in a network), and betweenness centrality (how important a node is in the flow of information across a network). These measures, along with study of the power laws that govern networks, are applied to information diffusion, prestige, community structure, growth, and robustness of biological and digital networks.

Now that these terms are clear, let’s translate network theory to social media communities. Let’s say you are brainstorming a social media strategy for a client. Because there is a thriving blog community in their field, you recommend a blog. First, you might make up simple guidelines to help you define what defines a relevant blog in the community, such as a certain number of posts on a given topic. After coming up with a map of the community, you can determine who the key players are in the community by using centrality measures. Which blogs are most likely to be stopping points to users browsing the community? You can recommend to your client which bloggers to seek interaction with, including linking, using knowledge of the structure of the network.

Every day, when I take the walk from my USPS mailbox to my recycle bin, I wonder about the role of a catalogs today. A recent catalog from Cabela’s, an outfitter offering over 200,000 outdoor products, offers an interesting new way to use print catalogs to support online sales.

Back in the day, catalogs used to be exhaustive tomes offering lots of details about each product variant. Think of the iconic, encyclopedic Sears Catalog – people got enough information in them to purchase Sears Catalog mail-order homes!

Now, I might page through a print catalog, but I’ll use the website to place an order. But, I’ll admit it, even as I don’t like getting and then recycling catalogs, I will visit a website and make a purchase after seeing something offline. I do want to limit the number of “unsolicited” catalogs I get, and so I recently joined CatalogChoice, a free service that lets me reduce the number of print catalogs I get in my mailbox. With CatalogChoice, I can enter in the customer # and address and ask to be unsubscribed from the print catalogs I want to stop coming.

I just got a fascinating catalog from the outdoor outfitter Cabela’s. This one I won’t stop. Cabela’s has an immense selection of fishing, hunting, camping, and boating gear. They also have large retail outlets, I’ve heard that Cabela’s here in Dundee, Michigan is our #1 tourist attraction due to the sheer volume of visitors it draws to the state.

This catalog is unique and designed entirely to complement my habit of doing most of my research online. Instead of filling the catalog with words detailing product features, they’ve set the catalog up as a teaser to draw me to their website. The catalog consists of photographs of featured products, including action shots of the products being used. They do include some basic info, such as prices and a couple of feature highlights. Instead of giving me long product codes or SKUs that I would have to squint at and type into a search box to find the product on their website, the catalog provides recommended search terms for locating the product via in the site’s search. For instance, for the tent in the image below, the catalog urges you to “search: guide tent“. Plus, the print catalog shows user reviews, selected from the reviews on their website.

I think this is an exceptionally cool and smart print catalog, so I called up Cabela’s main office and spoke with David Draper, a Cabela’s representative. He said that Cabela’s releases around 90 catalogs a year, of which 89-or-so follow the more traditional catalog format. He said this “internet catalog” (what they call it) is a new effort for them, and that it is specifically targeted to online consumers. The inaugural issue was mailed within the last week. He couldn’t speak to our individual case, but the catalog could have been triggered by an online transaction at cabelas.com or by an opt-in from a transaction at our local retail store in Dundee.

I’m fascinated by this very effective use of a print catalog to draw me to their more comprehensive online e-commerce site. I’d be interested to know how successful this catalog is at driving traffic and sales at cabelas.com, and if Cabela’s has put in place some tracking to monitor use of the recommended keywords in their internal search and follow-on purchases after that, essentially to measure the return on this effort. I’ll also be watching to see if other vendors emulate this style of catalog.

Happy Memorial Day to those of us in the U.S. I hope this long weekend kicks off a great summer outdoors for you and your families.

(Disclosure – Pure Visibility has no business relationship with Cabela’s, though I’m a retail customer)

About six months ago we predicted that a key part of social media and user engagement would be micro-conversions that combined products and commodities with demonstrable value-add services. By this definition, Amazon.com is the most successful social media website around, followed closely by Netflix and the iTunes interface. All of these applications (two are websites, but they are truly applications in terms of how they are used and perceived) have three key components:

1. A simple, usable interface that improves on the bare consumption experience of the products in question.
2. An ability to share the information
3. A relatively open API that allows application stacking and linking

This isn’t news; many people are trying to make all three things work (anyone who has been frantically “bitten”, “howled at”, “roasted”, ad nauseum through facebook has experienced some person’s hopeful attempt to make a killer social media app), but like most awesome things the things that look easy are often the hardest.

Enter muxtape, perhaps the most amazing social media application we have seen since the introduction of Google Maps. Read More

“This was awesome,” said a client at the end of our jump start internet marketing audit session last week. We had just spent the last few hours talking about how he can use Internet marketing to grow his business. We touched on search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media, and usability. Most importantly for this session, we talked about how to measure his Internet marketing efforts (that’s something we’re pretty big on here at Pure Visibility).

The jump start is an opportunity for a do-it-yourselfer, like the owner of a small company or the lone webmaster, to spend time with Pure Visibility talking about the stuff you need to do to accomplish your Internet marketing goals. We come prepared with recommendations for you, but the session is all about you; we’re there to answer your questions drive the conversation where you want more answers.

The important thing was that we weren’t just giving him a list of stuff to do. Sure, there was a list of recommendations. The part that really mattered, though, was telling the client why. Our goal was to make sure our client could do things for himself after we were done. To answer his questions and help him make his business grow.

It can be scary when you can’t get your business going, when you discover that you’ve just left the lights on all day long and drained the battery. When you don’t have a set of jumper cables and, even if you did, you are alone in the parking lot. With Pure Visibility, though, you’re not alone. Just give us a call and we can jumpstart your business.

More and more companies are taking blogging, podcasts, and the like as seriously as other forms of advertising. But blogging and other social media channels require sustained effort, for the most part, bringing up the question of how to measure social influence, one that has yet to be agreed upon. While no one is questioning the opportunity that this cost-efficient channel can provide, key components for measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts have yet to be defined, at least in any way that SEM experts can agree on. With the usefulness of traditional internet metrics already in question as new technologies (Flash etc) render them ineffective in some cases, the social media debate is primed for takeoff.

The Social Organization Blog proposes a lengthy list of metrics for measuring social influence, segmenting them into activity metrics (pageviews, posts, comments, referrals), survey metrics (relevance, satisfaction), ROI metrics (cost per number of engaged prospects, number of new product ideas), and individual metrics (new friends after 30/60/90 days, number of ideas per individual). The list is intimidating, to say the least, the most comprehensive list online to date, combining the suggestions of various bloggers and social media gurus. The motivation for many of the social media folks who advocate these measures seems to be the same. As SEMs we should narrow down which ones we think might work and blog/wiki/podcast away, pausing to crunch the numbers every now and again.

Is it really this easy? Can we ever really make the murky, quasi-real world of online communities quantifiable? Does tracking metrics like citations, audience growth, etc, really tell a company that social media is a smart decision? Is there anything to be learned from more traditional network theory, which has yet to be touched upon in these discussions?

The low cost of this channel, as compared to traditional media, helps take the risk out of engaging in social media regardless of the lack of answers. SEMs do seem to agree that social media efforts may be worthwhile without any guarantee, thanks to the value of the information, experience, and opportunity to connect with smart, driven entrepreneurs. Social media is thus the perfect choice for companies dedicated to continuously investing a portion of resources in emerging trends to promote innovation. And, directly monetarily profitable or not, companies always benefit from listening and responding to customers, particularly those with negative feedback. Social media increases their liklihood of actually getting a chance to hold those conversations.

In the end, each company that invests in social media, and the SEMs they hire to help guide and evaluate these measures, must decide whether they need the of numbers in order to warrant the time spent. If the answer is yes, selecting metrics that target different aspects of this channel, such as raw participation versus sentiment versus relevance versus meme propagation, may be one way to hedge one’s bet. From there, basic statistical significance methods can help “prove” (or disprove) a correlation between the channel and profit.

I’m catching up on Brandweek from a couple weeks ago (May 5th edition, page S6) and curiously, a tip in one of the ads jumped out at me. Largely because it’s not uncommon for us to hear from people in the real estate industry looking for a way to gain visibility online now that sales aren’t as quick and easy as they used to be.

Of course, when lots of people in any industry start moving online, sales there won’t be quick and easy either. Online is even more challenging in some ways. For example, a picture of your house isn’t going to show up in the paid search ads as it does in many newspaper ads. You’ve only got words to set your property apart, so choose them carefully! Otherwise your ad will sound just like the next one, you’ll have terrible conversion rates, and you’ll be complaining about how real estate won’t sell online before you can say “recession”.

I’m bullish about real estate online because, frankly, I don’t see much imaginative advertising going on there. The Brandweek ad caught my eye because it was imaginative, listing ideas to help make properties distinctive. Here’s a quick excerpt:

Amid the rubble of the housing downturn, advertising executive Bob Posner sees a golden opportunity. Home builders and real estate agents have taken a mass-market approach, but they should be increasingly segmenting their efforts toward women, he says.

‘Women are buying properties and making the buying decisions, but we’re not seeing messages or products catering to women,’ says Posner, principal of Posner Advertising.

Developers could offer on-site hair and nail salon, catering kitchens and meal delivery services. A townhouse complex or rental community could offer a staffed daycare center next to the fitness room, or baby-sitting services. Most important, developers should geotarget on women’s Web sites and in magazines.

‘Ninety percent of the industry is run by men, and they’re not familiar with women’s media habits,’ Posener says. ‘If they went on Allure.com, they wouldn’t find a real estate ad. But when they start seeing that women are responding because the feel they are being catered to, those builders are going to have a competitive advantage.’

Certainly, building with certain niches in mind offers competitive advantage. But what can you do if your condo development doesn’t already have a nail spa built in? Turn your online advertising into a competitive advantage. There’s a lot of room out there for some creative thinking!

A huge percentage of what we do is helping people focus in on their key differentiating factors and in turn, surfacing those differentiators online. It’s simple, really:

• We’ll challenge you to think about what makes what you sell unique
• We’ll help you make it really, really obvious
• Then we’ll help you make it really, really easy for that person you just got interested to get through to you in a meaningful way

Of course, that’s not all quite so simple. You’ll have to stop and think to identify what makes you world-class about what you do. You’ll have to generate content that fits that picture. You’ll have to invest in your website to make the changes to surface that content, etc. Surprisingly few companies in ANY industry do all that. Those who do win the competitive advantage, hands down.

Got any other good real estate marketing tidbits? We’d love to hear your experiences selling homes online!

The Google AdWords editor makes edits based on search criteria and performance factors easy. When managing accounts, I use it fairly regularly to change display URLs, destination URLs, and bids. Occasionally I might also use cut and paste to rearrange elements of an account. Most of these changes are driven by the advanced search feature. Here are a couple examples of advanced edits in action.

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