Overture’s Keyword Tool Says ‘No’ to Marijuana

July 27, 2007 – 3:45 pm

Just say no to drug searches…

I don’t think anyone would argue that fact that the Overture suggestion tool is probably not the most accurate or effective keyword suggestion tool on the market today. Besides the fact that it still displays search volumes from January 2007, the accuracy of the numbers have been called into question over and over again because of things like plurals, apostrophes, and hyphens, etc muddling the results. That said, I noticed today that the tool filters out searches for some words (specifically narcotics related) and returns results of “no suggestions”- meaning essentially little or no query volume on those search terms - which is not only a poor business practice but it also does the advertiser a disservice by obfuscating market trends.

Let me elucidate the situation a bit. The company that I work for (and the owner of this blog) Catalyst online, is a search marketing firm that specializes in healthcare and pharma. As such we, on a regular basis, research search volumes for drug names, side effects, disease symptoms and the like, in order to develop keyword strategies for our clients. Read More »

By Francis | Posted in Overture, PPC, Paid Search, Search Marketing, Search News, Text Ads, Yahoo | Comments (2)

Search Matters Weekly Pravda

July 26, 2007 – 10:46 am

All Keywords are equal. Some are more equal than others. DA!

Здравствулте! Камрады! Добро пожаловать к правде людей!

Search links for you to enable your fight against capitalist aggression and banishment to the search engine gulag (supplemental results).

За успеха нашево безнадёжнова дела!

  • Comrade Jane explains the downside of democratic link baiting. (SEO moz)
  • Titleist fails to make social media campaign fly. Power to the people. (SMO)
  • Yahoo Assist helps aid the proletariat. Like a big brother! (SE Land)
  • Is Google Adwords getting into the personalized search Game? (aimClear)
  • Citizen Matt Cutts give good advice from Comrade Google: Don’t keyword stuff. But some keywords are more equal than others… (Matt Cutts)
  • Google docs outwits evil Microsoft and launches calendar events! Spoceeba! (SE Roundtable)
By Francis | Posted in Blogs, Google, Personalized Search, Search News, Social Media | Comments (0)

Google Explains Site Penalties

July 25, 2007 – 12:48 pm
This is Part 2 in an 5-part series of posts on a recent SEMNE session that gave the audience access to a Google staffer who gave useful tidbits of “insider” knowledge. Dan Crow, Program Manager of Crawl Systems, was the guest speaker to an audience of about 100 who ranged from SEO novices to industry experts.

Here’s a summary of the answers Dan could give “without getting fired:”

  • Supplemental Search Results – Dan explained that supplemental results are based on pages that “don’t change often”, get crawled only every few months and only show when there are not enough relevant pages in the results to display. Dan explained the supplemental results aren’t actually an active penalty against your site, but rather they’re an artifact of Google’s old IT infrastructure, which had to make some pages “low priority” to handle the enormous task of indexing the Web. Google is actually working on doing away with Supplemental Results, but no date was given.
  • CSS – The current crawling system at Google partially understands CSS, and they’re working to get their systems to understand it better. This means that Google can understand what information is being shown at the top of the page, even in a CSS-based layout. It also means that CSS spamming will soon be obsolete (something we do not practice at Catalyst anyway.) Read More »

By Denise Haynes | Posted in Google, Organic Search, SEM, SEO, SEO Best Practices, Search Marketing Conferences, Search Matters | Comments (3)

Big Pharma Goes Viral

July 17, 2007 – 9:17 am

It looks like Bayer has made the first real move into the viral space by any of the Big Pharma companies. They’ve built an interactive online game “sponsored by Aleve” that appears to be geared toward the social networking demographic - who are much younger than the traditional Aleve demo (50+ with arthritis) .

[To] attract a younger customer, the consumer care division of Bayer HealthCare is starting an online game today for Aleve Liquid Gels, a product that was introduced in March. By visiting a Web site, www.aleviator.com, Internet users will be able to follow a fictional storyline that leads them through a series of clues, taking them in and out of social networking sites, wikis and blogs. (source)

Upon completion, the user gets a mild product placement for Aleve and the news that Bayer will donate $5 to The Conservation Fund for every person that completes the game; thus encouraging viral spread without pandering.

Although the game is ridiculously easy (which may lessen its viral appeal) when compared to viral time burners like The Search For Bourne and Ethan Haas was right , it shows that Big Pharma may be ready to get into the social media game. The question is: are the younger and more savvy (read:Web 2.0) consumers ready to join the social conversation with Big Pharma? Feel free to weigh-in, in the comments.

By Francis | Posted in Pharma, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)

Google: Flash Fixes Can Be “Dangerous”

July 16, 2007 – 8:38 am
This is Part 1 in an 5-part series of posts on a recent SEMNE session that gave the audience access to a Google insider. Dan Crow, Program Manager of Crawl Systems, was the guest speaker to an audience of about 100, ranging from SEO novices to industry experts.

Google displayed a new degree of openness at the latest SEMNE session held in Providence, RI. Dan Crow covered a lot of ground on what Google likes and dislikes, but most of all focused on what Google can actually find.

One topic of interest, both in his presentation and in the follow-up Q&A, was the pros and cons of using Flash, and the options for making them work with Google. Read More »

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Google, Organic Search, SEO, SEO Best Practices, Search Engines, Search Marketing Conferences, Search News | Comments (4)

Search Matters Weekly Search Declaration

July 12, 2007 – 2:22 pm

Heroes are born not made. Or something like that.

We skipped the links last week because we were all celebrating the Fourth of July in a 100% real American hero, patriotic way. Even the two dudes on the organic team from Canada. We take that very seriously here. Like SEO. Nothing says red blooded American Apple pie like some good ole patriotic SEO. So we’ve added USA, America, and Apple Pie to all our clients’ meta tags to show our support for the Fourth of July. You know who else is an American hero? All these 100% patriotic SEM and SEO bloggers, by jingo. Here are the top search stories making their way across this great land of ours..

  • Thieves use Google to crack a safe. Don’t they know that will affect their clickstream history? ( SE Watch)
  • Transcend SEO and think about the user by optimizing landing pages. Ommm. (SEOmoz)
  • Holy crap. They executed China’s Head of Food and Safety. It’s not very search related, but, wow. (BBC)
  • Can a small biz afford quality SEO? (SE Land)
  • BE the blog hero that you always knew you could be. Or stay the sidekick. Whatever. (Copyblogger)
  • 3 blogging tips that will BLOW YOUR MIND. All caps is not one of them. (aimClear)

*ed note: Looking back at this post, I feel I should clarify something. There was no actual blood in the apple pie, just red blooded Americans eating the apple pie. Oh, and those two guys in organic search from Canada. They had some pie too. But in a very heroic and patriotic manner.

By Francis | Posted in Adsense, Blogs, Google, Organic Search, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Search Marketing, Search News | Comments (0)

Nielsen//NetRatings Drops Page Views as Ad Metric

July 10, 2007 – 4:06 pm

Courtesy of our friends at Marketing Pilgrim and Yahoo News, Nielsen//Netratings is foregoing the use of page views as a measure of web site engagement in favor of tracking how much time users spend at the web sites they visit. This new metric, accounting for both the amount of user sessions at a website, as well as the average amount of time per session, will be called ‘Total Minutes’.

This new metric was developed in response to recent developments in web development, including Web 2.0, online gaming, AJAX, streaming media (ie YouTube) that were under-represented under the old model of tracking user engagement.

At first blush, this might seem like a welcome development, but only time will tell if that will prove true. While much better at accounting for some of the recent technological developments on the web, this new model still leaves gaping holes that bring its accuracy into question.

Tabbed/Multiple Browsers - As stated so eloquently in Andy Beal’s post, tabbed browsers and users surfing with multiple browsers are a substantial hurdle for this new model by over-inflating the amount of time users spend on a site. This should average out over time, emphasis on the word should.

More Time, Same Impressions - If you’re an advertiser, do you necessarily care how much time users spend on the sites you advertise on? The fact of the matter is, whether people are spending 5 or 5000 seconds on a particular website, the number of ad impressions will not change.

By Jason McGovern | Posted in Analytics, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

Monetizing YouTube Traffic

July 10, 2007 – 3:32 pm

In a recent post on international video search, we looked at the new portals being launched by YouTube and MySpace, and how they could open new marketing channels to a global audience. But how exactly does a YouTube video translate into SEO results, and does that traffic have any commercial value?

Videos grab attention

The connection between SEO and online videos is simple: people link to content they like, and links power SEO performance.

Most marketers familiar with YouTube have a hard time imagining how they can extract real customers from a massive audience of clip-surfing entertainment seekers. After all, we all want targeted traffic, traffic that represents prospective customers.

But the concept of grabbing people’s attention with entertaining content is nothing new. P&G produced soap operas to literally sell soap. In 2000, BMW created BMWFilms.com, a pre-YouTube video campaign designed as a brand-building exercise. In retrospect, both these marketing efforts were very effective, providing entertainment but also targeting a valuable audience.

Read More »

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Linking, Newsletter, Search Matters, Search News, Social Media, Video Search, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)

New Formats and Metrics for Online Video Ads

July 10, 2007 – 11:07 am

Lots of new developments in online video advertising:

Different approaches to video ad formats at TechCrunch

“eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion, but no one’s really nailed a scalable ad platform for video. However, Google’s been quietly testing their own system and there are a bunch of other startups tackling it as well.”

Companies that compile video metrics at Web Strategist

Notable: “MochiBot is a Flash traffic monitoring tool (similar to a hit counter) that tracks the performance of individual Flash content files (SWFs) no matter where they end up on the web. If your SWF is on 5 different servers, then MochiBot will count the number of views that SWF got for all 5 servers. It’s perfect for tracking how viral your Flash content is.”

First demo of Google AdSense in videos at 45n5

The AdSense demo is particularly compelling - the execution of the ads is very slick, very much like the programming promotions that appear at the bottom of a broadcast TV show.

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in Adsense, Online Advertising, PPC, Paid Search, Video Search | Comments (0)

International Video Search Arrives

June 29, 2007 – 4:09 pm

Now that online video has become mainstream in the U.S., video portals are venturing abroad. Does this represent a new opportunity for online marketers? Let’s take a quick look at the new developments:

YouTube

Google will be rolling out navigation, framework, and domain names for localized versions of its market-leading YouTube video portal. Right now, YouTube is already home to thousands of foreign-language videos. The rollout will allow YouTube to put those videos front and center, giving each country its own unique portal.

The initial rollout covers Brazil, the UK, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands , Poland and Spain.. YouTube is also signing content deals with major TV networks in these countries, and is also making deals with soccer teams to provide highlights and news coverage.

MySpace

MySpace is also solidifying its video offerings under a new banner, MySpace TV. The new site will launch tomorrow, offering a revised mix which promotes professionally-produced content (NBC, Fox, Sony) alongside amateur videos. In a classic me-too move, the new site will launch with international versions from Day 1 (15 countries, 7 languages.)

Marketing Potential

Since most of the developed world has higher broadband penetration than the U.S., it’s likely that these localized portals will take off quickly, driven by media buzz and viral linking just like here. This represents a tantalizing opportunity for U.S. marketers with an eye on global markets.

Global SEO is already seen as a low barrier to international markets, because competition levels in most countries are still much lower than they are here. If video takes off, then the viral linking that drives traffic to those pages could pay-off for marketers in a big way, as online audiences get their first exposure to text-based websites via their video counterparts.

By Sherwood Stranieri | Posted in MySpace, Organic Search, SEO, Uncategorized, Video Search | Comments (1)