Last month I attended Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago and a recurring theme throughout the week was universal search/blended search and how to leverage it for your online marketing campaigns. In particular I attended 3 panel discussions on online video and in each session universal search was a hot topic. The big takeaway I got was that if you don’t have any videos online and indexed by the search engines then you are missing out on a lot of potential, qualified visitors to your site.

Universal search means the search engines show results with not only blue text links, but a blend of results from images, video, local listings, news, and text links. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, if you search for “elmo” you get image results, videos, and text links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have versions of the universal search results and search marketers are observing a trend of more and more people skipping over text links in favor of clicking on other rich media like video or images.

One case study that was explained in the “Video SEO” presentation was about a cosmetic dentist in Sunnyvale who sees a 16% conversion rate from people that contact him after watching his online video, compared to a 3-4% conversion rate from those who find him from a paid or organic text link. In addition this particular dentist increased his search engine visibility, when a user types “emergency cosmetic dentist sunnyvale” in Google, he owns the number 1 organic spot with his youtube video. Having the video allowed this dentist to appear 3 times above the fold because he had a paid listing, a local listing, and a video listing. This is what we mean by starting to “own page one” because he owns multiple place on the first page of search engine results which greatly increases the likelihood that potential patients will find him.

A lot of the people at SES including myself agreed that video is the wave of the future online and the fact that youtube is starting to beat Yahoo in the number of monthly searches only validates this assumption. My prediction is that in the new wave of search engine marketing you will not be able to survive only on a paid search account with text links. Companies will need to have a universal online marketing approach utilizing paid search, good search engine optimization (SEO), press releases, a social media strategy and different online media like video, images. The days of surviving on simply having good SEO and a high ranking for a few terms is over.

Aaron Shear wrote an excellent blog post on the expected changes to Google’s ranking algorithm. If I were to paraphrase the story, the essential take-home message is this:

The prevalence of Google Analytics allows them to measure value of a site based on actual user behavior, instead of second degree measures such as linking or traffic. We’re going to use those measures as much as possible to identify relevance and ranking.

There are endless questions about how exactly this will be measured (is it within a sector or across all sites? How about improvements? Do site facelifts get noticed easily? etc.), but at the end of the day Google is challenging websites to embrace the entire constellation of website fundamentals, not just links or words.

This is fine as far as we’re concerned; basically we as a company view internet marketing at a strategic level: we help companies develop internet marketing strategies whose core online face is targeted, visible websites that are useful for visitors. Why? Because sites like that work to grow business.

So we’re glad Google got here. They are basically arguing that a site’s relevance is a combination of market analysis, visibility strategies, and usability (and usability. AND some more usability. Really, usability is IMPORTANT).

What this change does do is change our emphasis. Historically we have recommended Usability as a way to optimize a site that is already getting a pretty healthy head of steam from traditional SEO strategies. Now, we may start at the end-user experience for sites that are already nominally visible in order to grow their traffic through links and user experience statistics.

One challenge here is that many SEO companies, committed to certain strategies, may draw the wrong conclusions. For example, Aaron asserts in this article that this new model means people should focus on Blogs, social bookmarking sites, and Facebook. Maybe. But aggressive link building to a site that doesn’t hold a viewer’s interest will not mean much in this new universe. The question is whether or not content is working for your site. Even Aaron’s recommendation that a site create traffic that is RSS-worthy is just another kind of link-building strategy that is content-agnostic.

Not all sites are going to need to generate daily content, however. Those sites should focus on a useful, usable experience that maximizes the enjoyment and value to the user. This will provide Google with lots of data to measure site “satisfaction”. For those sites that are lucky enough to be properly aligned with daily content, creating blog- or RSS-worthy content is a great strategy as well.

Regardless of what happens next, Pure Visibility’s emphasis on the fundamentals of a positive internet experience will be useful to anyone trying to keep up with the shifting tides of ranking algorithms.

Most of my blog posts don’t get many hits. It’s not that surprising; I don’t really spend much time being thorough with the information I write about because I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write a post. I do try to be original, so I’m not repeating the same stuff everyone else is writing, but I just don’t explain every little thing and tend to glance over big topics. Well, I’m pretty bogged down with other things to do for work, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for pointers. Something light, fast, interesting; something to get me more hits than usual. What better place to look than a search engine for clues? So I was doing some work and snagged a snapshot of Yahoo’s home page from the olympics:

whaaa . . . Gangsta synchronized swimmers!!! DO elephants hold grudges . . . even long term grudges!?! OF COURSE I WANT TO SEE WORST DRESSED CELEBRITIES!!!!!!!!

Well there you go, it doesn’t get anymore compelling than that. It’s a slam dunk for Yahoo. So here I am, Steve L, your average Joe Blogger, how can I put to work the methodology of Yahoo! to generate traffic for my own blog post?

Well, I feel like I’m on the shoulders of giants now, and for this post, I’d like to share with you a very special, very secret Google document I found. Tucked away in Google’s “Webmaster Guidelines” section, there’s an article explaining how webmasters can get a number 1 page ranking on Google. Not only that, Google leaked a document detailing the formula behind the search engine.

And if that’s not enough, you can see former Google spokesperson, Vanessa Fox, nude.

And, finally, here’s a picture of me, worst hair in the internet marketing industry, probably the worst dressed as well, but it’s hard to tell from the photo:

One of the biggest obstacles to Social Media being perceived as a legitimate marketing activity is its measurability, especially for companies with an annual revenue of $1 million or less. Paid Search and SEO have fairly specific metrics of effectiveness that can be easily related to the bottom line. Social Media, on the other hand, is less focused on end-result outcomes and is therefore harder to measure.

Yet in a lot of ways Social Media is a very familiar kind of marketing. Social Media can be broken up into two broad categories:

• its creation and dissemination, and
• its consumption.

The majority of participants in Social Media are not involved in its creation or dissemination, but instead simply consume it, in much the same way as people consume news or broadcast media: through a trusted channel that provides new and novel content.

This insight suggests a simple way to measure social media: essentially in the same ways as you would measure traditional marketing efforts.

This strategy doesn’t capture many key benefits of Social Media, and also doesn’t take into account the emergent and interactive effects of combined marketing strategies. However, with this strategy you can start your company down a path where the simplest benefits of Social Media can be implemented and measured.

Charlene Li at the excellent Forrester Research group has explored this topic extensively, both in research articles and in a blog post outlining some of the key benefits of Social Media and its value. She argues, for example, that raw blog traffic can be compared to the effort of print media to get a similar number of visitors to the site. Li argues that companies can start to do analysis of Social Media immediately with this approach.

How would this work for your company? There are five steps:

1. Characterize your current marketing efforts. Make a list of all the marketing or client-focused activities your company is involved in and their costs, including resource costs. This list would typically include things like trade shows, focus groups, PR efforts, and print advertising.
2. Define your efforts’ value. For each effort, identify an item of value that is an outcome for that effort. This could be leads, page views, user feedback on a product, etc. Try to keep these values as close as possible to traditional marketing measures of success, such as “views”.
3. Develop or estimate a “cost per value” metric. This should be based on the costs and values identified in (1) and (2).
4. Contextualize your Social Media effort based on the values of your marketing. Categorize the expected outcomes of a Social Media effort in the context of the values defined in (3) so that you can compare the costs of the Social Media effort with existing efforts.
5. Test and Review. Run your Social Media campaign for a quarter and review the results. Use this time to identify both new “values” and to tweak your cost estimates.

Strong supporters of Social Media and marketing have objected to this model as being too simplistic and atomic. We accept those limitations because in order to be able to measure the emergent values of Social Media, we have to be able to measure the ways it matches up with older marketing efforts, particularly in environments where its essential value must be measured in order to justify further effort.

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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Wheeeee. Google updates PR numbers in the toolbar every few months, and another update is happening. The numbers on the toolbar don’t represent anything that Google uses for rankings in its algorithm, except in an abstract way. The hip thing to do if you’re an SEOer is just to ignore it. I have the Google toolbar installed on my browser, and I still look at the numbers. Here’s what I use the numbers for:

1. Get a general idea if Google’s spider sees a page or counts it for anything. In particular, I look out for the grey bar.
2. Get a general idea of whether a page has links or whether a page is linked to from other pages that have links.
3. Show clients that, indeed, I have gotten their site some new links, pointing out an increase in toolbar PageRank.

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It’s been a while since anyone talked about the size of Google’s index compared to its competitors. My guess would be that it dwarfs Yahoo! when it comes to meat and potatoes pages – non-duplicates, non-100%-template, non-ad-spam – but I don’t know where Google is at for certain. This is definitely one of the things that made Google better than its competitors earlier on though. This could probably spark a big long debate, and I really don’t think there is very much difference between Yahoo! and Google, so I don’t care to go into it. But Google continues to take the lead in finding what’s out there, now starting to spider web forms. Here is a whole new set of candidate web pages that Google will be scoring for search engine rankings that other search engines don’t even bother with. Pure Visibility just helped one client surface some of their pages, hidden behind a form, with Google sitemaps; in the future, these kinds of efforts will probably be unnecessary.

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Back links are of serious importance for getting good Google rankings. They establish site authority and boost your site’s perceived importance to particular search engine queries. I’ve seen sites that weren’t at all targeting competitive keyphrases in their page copy, but were able to rank for them by virtue of keyword rich text links from authoritative sites. So these things are important, but I’ve never seen any studies, or even much discussion, about how people naturally link to sites. Here are my common sense observations about it, and how you can expect search engine listings to be affected by it. Read More

One difference between natural search engine listings and paid search listings is the use of IP addresses for locating users to determine what paid listings might show. To understand what I mean here are Google search results for the term “orthodontists.” Click on the thumbnail to get a larger image:

I live in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan so in the paid listings there are results for Michigan and the Flint-Saginaw-Bay City area. Google knows to show paid listings for that area because my IP address shows that I’m searching from around there. The natural listings, however, don’t use IP information. And if you look at the bottom of the page (sorry, it got a little cut off, and I’m too pathetically lazy when it comes to blog posts to try and fix it) you’ll see a listing for PhiladelphiaOrthodontists.com. Pure Visibility did SEO work for this site a couple years back – it’s pretty amazing that they rank for “orthodontists.” But this is a local practice. They really ought not show for such a general query unless the person doing the querying is from Philadelphia.

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Accurate delivery of long tail items through a integrated search tool is the next step in online search engines. Google is WAY behind. Google Base is supposed to deal with that, but I get the sense that Google Base is Google’s bastard stepchild. The frustration of contributors to the Google Base’s user forum has gotten very high about the product’s deep inconsistencies, poor performance, and apparently arbitrary organization.

This is a serious problem for Google, because the one thing it does not do well from a relevancy perspective is manage long tail products for low-volume consumers.

This might seem like a trivial problem, but in fact it could be the thing that prevents Google from remaining the web’s “one-stop shopping” search engine. If you enter an album for a deeply obscure band such as, say, Nomo’s supercool and reasonably obscure afrofunk album “New Tones” into Google, you get something like this:

The most relevant result — the album — is third on the overall list. It turns out that the second result is also the album, but this is not immediately clear from the actual description. The top result is an ad for an iPod, which is far far off.
Now compare it to Amazon’s results for the same search query:

The very first result is exactly what I’m looking for. The key thing to understand about this result is that Amazon provides this search engine to small vendors who can sell their wares through it at about a 15% markup. To put it another way, those vendors don’t have to build a sophisticated website, because they can use Amazon.

Google Base is supposed to change all that, but right now it’s obvious that there are so many critical problems with the system that it hardly seems worth uploading products. The interface is easy and straightforward, but frankly it just doesn’t work very well, either in terms of getting the products out there or linking them to actual search results on the main google site.

Essentially a product search on Google right now, for people near the end of the search process — i.e., PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO BUY — produces noise, confusion, and a poor relevancy experience.

A key component of search engines is the ephemeral nature of their reputations. (Remember Alta Vista? Exactly.) Right now Google is the king of relevancy, but as people become more and more accustomed to searching for products online, they will start to discover that it doesn’t do a good job at certain points in the sales cycle, ironically enough those points being the ones that are most valuable to merchants.

If Google does not get Google Base up and running soon, companies like Amazon and even Yahoo’s excellent, excellent product shopping system will start to make inroads on both its credibility–and its traffic.