From: feedburner.com

Hitwise, announced today that Google accounted for 71.16 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending Sept. 27, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 18.06 percent, 5.36 percent and 3.63 percent, respectively. The remaining 45 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.80 percent of U.S. searches.

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From: feedburner.com

People who crave to craft simple graphical ads, but are not really eager to hire a designer can now cherish, as Google has introduced a do-it-yourself “Display Ad Builder".

“If you’ve wanted to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you’ve been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this tool can help,” Trevor Claiborne of the Inside AdWords team wrote a blog in an article that featured this aspect.

This amazing Ad Builder can craft creative units for all placements available on the Google network. These networks include game and video ads also.

“Today we released the AdWords display ad builder, which lets you create professional-looking display ads in AdWords without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch. If you’ve wanted to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you’ve been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this tool can help.

This new tool lets you create customized display ads with your own text, images, and logo. You can also change colors and backgrounds. The tool can create ads to fit all possible placements across the Google content network, including video and game placements. The display ad builder is available now to all advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.

“To start creating your ads, click Display Ad Builder on the Create an ad page within a new or existing campaign in your AdWords account. If you want to learn more about creating and running display ads, visit the new Display Ads 101 tutorial” - Google

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From: sitepronews.com

Sometimes it can feel as though you’re alone in the online business world, just trying to guess at what will make your customers happy. It would be so much easier if customers would simply tell you what they want and what they don’t want from your business - wouldn’t it? This is why [...]

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/10/30/five-ways-to-encourage-customers-to-give-you-feedback/

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From: feedburner.com

Posted by Danny Dover

Facebook Search

TIP: Note the opportunity to take advantage of the inherent flaws of returning results in alphabetical order. It is not a coincidence that so many companies named themselves with alphabetical order in mind in the days when yellow pages were popular. (Ex. AAA Plumbing) The same tactic can be used to drive users to a given Facebook Page.

The search function also has a lesser known feature that has the ability to drive traffic outside of the site. When a user types in a query that doesn’t match anything in their social graph the search bar provides the ability to search Microsoft’s Live search index.

Facebook’s Search the Web uses Microsoft’s Live Index

Performing a search of the web through Facebook returns search results and ads that are exactly the same as those returned by Microsoft’s Live.

Facebook Search Engine Result Page (SERP)





Live SERP

TIP: Consider double dipping. Although Live drives less traffic than Google, it might be worthwhile to target Live in SEO and PPC campaigns to automatically encompass Facebook.

Marketer’s can also take advantage of Facebook’s wealth of domain juice to raise references to their brand in the major search engines SERPs. Facebook’s Pages are publicly indexable and quickly rise to the top of many search queries.

SEOmoz’s page on Facebook.com being returned high in the Google SERPs

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News Feed



News Feed is a feature on Facebook that highlights what is happening in a user’s social circle. It does this by analyzing relevant actions taken by a users friend on the site and presenting the most relevant actions on the given user’s homepage.



The News Feed processes nearly every action taken by every user on Facebook. According to the Feeds creator, Andrew Bosworth, this is over 1.1 Trillion actions daily.



Bosworth had this to say about the underlying algorithm:



“First, it gets a list of all my friends and acquaintances on Facebook and considers how often I interact with them. Then, with full respect for all privacy settings, it gets a list of all the things my friends have done on the site since it last checked. It also looks up all the stories it could have published the previous week in case one of them needs to be updated. After looking at all that information and considering my News Feed Preferences, it picks just the few stories that are good enough for publication and puts the rest in a safe place until it gets back to me again. It does all of this for me in 0.00023 seconds.” Source



He also said “[News Feed] is keeping track of whom we seem to be keeping an eye on recently as well as remembering whom we have cared about in the past. It is very discreet and never talks about this secret information to other people or systems, it just needs the information to do a better job picking stories”:



His comments and my own research have led me to believe that the News Feed’s algorithm uses the following factors to return results:



Outward Facing Data:

• Users Friends
• Fan Pages
• Group Activity
• Photo Albums
• Photo Comments
• Photo Tags
• Wall Posts on other users Wall
• Wall Posts on given user’s Wall
• Event Activity
• Notes
• Relationship Status
• Friend Requests
• Friend Request Response
• Profile Text Changes
• Status Updates
• Posts
• Videos
• Application Activity
• Application installations
• Facebook tools IE “People you might know”
• Privacy Settings

Internal Data:

• Profiles that the user views
• Photos that the user views
• Friends of Friends
• Recent activity of the given user
• Last login of given user

“It doubled the amount of actions taken on the site within the first week, and that boost never went away.” said Bosworth.



This massive amount of user specific data combined with the incredible amount of traffic Facebook receives on a daily basis, clearly has incredible potential for internet marketers. Organic rankings can be gained in the News Feed by performing the actions listed in the factors above while being friends with given users. Alternatively, marketers can buy sponsored stories (called social ads) to appear in users’ News Feeds.

Facebook’s Social Ads are displayed inside the News Feed

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Facebook Advertising Platform



It should come as no surprise that Facebook uses its wealth of user data to match advertisers with very specific user groups. The self service advertising platform is very similar to Google’s Adwords. (In fact, it is now run by Google’s former Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, Sheryl Sandberg.) The system allows advertisers to create small 150px by 155px ads which can contain a 110px by 80px image with 135 characters of body text and a 25 character title. Users can run both ‘Pay for Clicks’ and ‘Pay for Views’ campaigns targeted by any of the following attributes:

• Country
• State
• City
• Sex
• Age Range
• Keywords in profiles
• Schools
• Workplaces
• Relationship Status
• Interest (gender)

To fully understand the value of the advertising on Facebook I ran a mock advertising campaign. I created a company and website (and at the risk of derailing my post) gave it the need to hire models.



For new customers, each ad in hand reviewed to ensure quality.

TIP: The approval process is surprisingly strict. It took me 3 times to get my ads approved due to errors like irregular capitalization (Ex. “Submit A Candidate” instead of “Submit a Candidate”). It is also important to note that the ad reviewers take the time to follow the link associated with the pending ad and decide if the webpage it points to is legitimate. By examining server log files I saw that the person who reviewed my ad not only viewed the landing page but clicked through the navigation to other pages on my website as well.

I eventually got the following ads approved:

Chas Williams	Danny Dover	Mel Gray	Mike Thompson
Timmy Christensen

To make this campaign more fun, I found ugly pictures of my fellow developers and held a competition to see whose ad got clicked the most. The results were as follows:

Facebook Ad Manager (Two columns removed)

Facebook’s advertising platform is a great value. Currently it has relatively small competition (compared to the major search engines) so its prices are very reasonable. To run a CPM campaign targeting the 23,280 Facebook enabled 18 to 25 aged at the University of Washington, it cost me $20.33 USD for 53,368 impressions. The results were not phenomenal but did establish the Facebook advertising platform as a viable marketing option.

---

Facebook can be a great resource for small businesses that rely on local customers. The marketing features are still relatively inexpensive and the platform is new enough that marketers still have a chance to shape it. If you have not already tried a test marketing campaign, I highly recommend you do while the prices are low.

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Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/seomoz/~3/437514632/the-inside-story-facebook-marketing-strategies

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Local business publisher Yellowbook has launched a new mobile application for the G1, the brand new Android-powered phone. Yellowbook already has apps for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm, and the iPhone.

If you want to download it to your phone, follow these instructions:

1. Tap the Browser icon on the home page.
2. Tap Go to URL.
3. Enter yellowbook.com in the URL bar.
4. Tap Go.
5. Tap the pictures of the phones on the lower right side of the page.
6. Expand the screen to view instructions for this phone, located at the top right.
7. From your phone, TAP HERE to start the download process.
8. Follow your phone prompts for downloading the application.

For more information on Yellowbook’s mobile apps, visit http://www.yellowbook.com/iphone-windows-mobile-blackberry/.

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/437138274/081030-115838

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From: sitepronews.com

Every week, I have the opportunity to speak with people about the benefits and challenges of using article marketing to promote an online business. Of course, article marketing is about getting your sales message in front of potential customers and to get links to your website, from the page where an article is posted online.
Where [...]

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/10/30/successful-article-marketers-help-readers-solve-problems/

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From: searchenginewatch.com

When I read that AOL.com launched a new homepage, I naturally hopped on over there to see what the new look, um, looked like. It looked the same, except with dark blue trim and web 2.0 stripes in the background for good measure.

Otherwise, it still holds the same basic design as....Yahoo. I then came across a story by Reuters which says Yahoo and AOL are conducting “due diligence” on a possible (probable?) merger by the two web companies. I was not at all surprised.

Something else to know about the new AOL is that it incorporates a new social element.

What the new feature allows you to do is sign into social networks like Facebook and Bebo directly from the homepage.This is a smart move and will blend nicely with Yahoo’s push toward open source should the merger occur.

“As the Web becomes more fragmented, consumers want choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming. “Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com. We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com.”

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/437108008/081030-111612

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From: sitepronews.com

For someone who is fairly new to web hosting, choosing the platform you are going to use for your server can be a difficult and even mind-boggling decision. Although there are several obscure choices still available, the most widely used Operating Systems (OSs) are the enterprise, or server, versions of Linux [...]

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/10/30/key-comparisons-of-linux-vs-windows-servers/

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From: searchenginewatch.com

comScore released a study today that found 14.5 million people in the U.K. visited at least one blog in August, representing 41% of the total U.K. Internet audience.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director of comScore Europe said in a press release. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie,” he added.

Two of the most popular blogs in the U.K. are gadget blogs: Engadget.com, which ranked as the top individual blog in August with 243,000 visitors, and Gizmodo.com, which ranked third with 223,000 visitors. UnrealityTV.co.uk (225,000 visitors), Kotaku.com (210,000 visitors), and Metafilter.com (207,000 visitors) rounded out the top five.

According to the comScore Segment Metrix H/M/L service, which looks at online activity by heavy, medium and light users of the Internet, heavy blog users were 142% more likely than the average Internet user to visit a site in the “humour” category, a testament perhaps to the sharp wit often associated with blogging. They are also likely to be tech savvy, which can be seen by their skew in visiting technology news categories.

I’ve met a couple of “heavy” blog users in the U.K.—who weigh 38 stone between them.

Seriously, blogs are big in old Blighty. If you check out the agenda for SES London 2009, which has already been posted, you’ll see there will be a session on Feb. 18, 2009, on “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds.” And, who—you may ask—is responsible for that?

Search Engine Strategies London 2009 is organized and hosted by world-renowned search authority Mike Grehan. As you can see below, I interviewed Mike back at SES London 2008. And you can detect some of that “humour” and tech savvy that comScore just reported, although there is no way that Mike weighs more than 14 stone. But, of course, I’m just guessing.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DSRVmu-pr3w&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></iframe>

Mike Grehan, Acronym, on SES London 2008

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/436967704/081030-083334

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From: searchenginewatch.com

We know that searchers want answers, and there are plenty of answer sites out there to fuel their curiosity. Now, Microsoft’s Live Search team is including some answers in their search results.

Encyclopedia, Traffic and Horoscope information will now display answers within results. For example, you can type in the question “How tall is Mount Everest?” and get the answer in the results.

I think search marketers will be happy about this. If you’re trying to sell a product, it can be frustrating when people come to your site who have no intention of buying anything.

The Live Search team says even more answers will be included in the future.

What do you think about the update? Let us know in the comments.

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/436947347/081030-082438

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From: feedburner.com

Posted by Duncan Morris

I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll say it again, in my opinion the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don’t worry, I’m not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I’m going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases ‘site’ or ‘information architecture’ interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)

The Illustrated Guide to building a search friendly website covers information architecture and its importance. I see far too many sites where very little or no thought has been put into the flow of information and, as the guide says this will have a huge impact on the potential search engine rankings.

The most common information architecture issue I see is when there isn’t a way for the search engines to get to every page of a website. This most commonly occurs when there is regular new content, often user-generated. Usually there is, at best, a theoretical way for the spiders to get to every page, but this often includes going via a link deep in pagination.

A lot of clients I talk to struggle with the concept of information architecture. I’m going to talk through my thought process when I’m devising a website’s architecture to try and help with this. I’ll also touch on some of the common problems you come up against.

Most of the sites that I deal with have a large number of pages, which means the correct architecture is almost always a hierachy of some sorts. People tend to be quite comfortable thinking in terms of a hierarchy, but less comfortable coming up with one for their site.

The benefit of breadcrumbs

When I’m thinking in terms of a hierarchy I like to start with a page at the tip of what will become your tree. Unsurprisingly, this is often called a leaf. If you can’t identify these pages there are bigger problems than information architecture to worry about. Often called the ‘money pages’ these pages are normally where a sale is made, or the user finds the information they are looking for.

Let’s take a film site as our example. It’s not really relevant that Quantum of Solace is out about two weeks earlier in the UK than the US, but it makes me feel pretty smug, and that’s a good enough reason as any to use it as the example. For a site that lists films the page about the actual movie is the money page. Maybe it’s the page selling the DVD or cinema tickets, or it could simply be the page with all the information about the movie (with a goal of advertising revenue).

Once you have identified your money pages think about the ideal breadcrumb for that page. Don’t worry about being generic, or how it will work, just think about your ideal breadcrumb. For Quantum of Solace, you may have come up with something similar to this:

Home > Action Movies > Quantum of Solace

It is short, so not many clicks from the homepage, and few people will argue about Quantum of Solace being an Action Movie. We could pick any number of films and slot them into a breadcrumb structure like the above. I also happen to know that there is search volume for the category in our hierarchy (i.e. action movies).

Home > Comedy > Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Home > Romance > Casablanca

The problem arises when there are too many options at any given level. The homepage is probably okay; according to imdb.com there are 27 genres. That’s a pretty decent number of links for a top level in a hierarchy. The issue comes when you look at the number of films that would be in each category, according to imdb there would be 26,469 action films. The maximum number of links you can get away with on a page will depend on your site, but a good rule of thumb is keep it close to 100. Certainly 26,469 links is way past the cut off point.

There are two options available if you find yourself with too many links in a category. The most obvious is to split the category by adding in sub-categories. In this case we could add in a sub-genre. I’m not aware of any universally known sub-genre system, so this looks unlikely to work. It’s important that any sub category you add doesn’t confuse your users. If they don’t know which sub category a film is in, they have to start guessing, which means your hierarchy has failed.

The second option is to add a level above the problematic category. For example we could add the release date as a category above the genre. When adding categories high up in the chain, you need to think about keyword cannibalisation. Let’s add the release date and see what happens:

Home > Movies > 2008 > Action > Quantum of Solace

With this hierarchy we end up with a page for 2008 action movies, one for 2007 action movies, and one for 2006 action movies etc. That’s not a good situation for a whole heap of reasons. Firstly, rather than just one page targeting “action movies” we now have one page for each year that a movie has been released - that sounds like keyword cannibalisation to me. The second problem is writing a content for the action movie page for each year - that’s going to be tough to write compelling content without introducing duplicate content. Finally, I strongly suspect there is low search volume for “2008 action movies”.

Adding high level categories isn’t always a bad thing. You’ll notice I’ve sneaked Movies in as a category as I think that unlikely to lead to keyword cannibalisation in same way as the date hierarchy would.

My final tip when thinking about your site architecture is that you can sometimes move categories around to help with having a small number of links per category. For example, we can avoid duplicate content, and reduce the number of films per category, by moving the date hierarchy I added earlier to below the genre category. This leaves us with the following hierarchy, which looks like a much better place to start.

Home > Movies > Action > 2008 > Quantum of Solace

Disclaimer: The above hierarchy is an example only. I suspect it wouldn’t end up being the right answer, and you would end up removing the year and adding alphabetised pagination or similar. Using the above hierarchy may cause severe pain, injury or death.

Ensuring your quality content is spidered

With your hierarchy in place you now have to work out what to put on each page. The best information architectures closely map to the way people search, and this gives you an opportunity to create useful pages that people may want to link to. The category pages you create shouldn’t just be a list of links, that’s the job of a sitemap.

n the Action Movies example above, we could list the most popular new releases, or show user generated comments about some of the films. It’s alright to add links that miss out a category. For example, given the anticipation around Quantum of Solace, I’d add a link to it from the action (and probably movie) category pages. The key is to add links to your important pages. How you define important is up to you. It could be pages that make you the most money, pages that aren’t currently ranking or any other metric you can think of.

Hurdles

The sheer volume of pages that most sites have, and the fact that most things in life don’t fit into a nice category structure means that there are a huge number of hurdles to getting your information architecture correct.

Overlapping hierarchies.

More often than not there are multiple different suitable hierarchies that could be chosen. When this happens it is important to choose the closest fit as your default hierarchy. You can easily add the other hierarchy for your users, but you can only ever choose one set of breadcrumbs, so to avoid duplicate content you must choose your default hierarchy.

For example, you often get overlapping hierarchies when organising architecture around places. In London, people talk in terms of boroughs, districts and tube stations, which means our office could be said to be in Southwark, Bermondsey and London bridge.

When new releases get old

In an early draft of this post I had “New releases” as a possible category that could sit above action movies. At first glance this isn’t a horrific choice - it will have search volume, it helps to reduce the number of films in each category, and it would be an easy page to write in a way that naturally gathered links. There are two issues with it. Firstly it would cause keyword cannbalisation in the same way that adding a year did. Suddenly there are at least 2 pages competing for the search “action movies”. You have the new release action movie page, and you’d have the archived action movie page.

The other problem is that new releases, quickly turn into old releases. At this stage you have to update the film’s place in the hierarchy. This will most likely include updating the breadcrumbs of the page the URL, and all the category pages that link to it. I mentioned earlier that you need to make it as easy for your users as possible. In three months time, if you were browsing around a site looking for a page about Quantum of Solace, would you choose the new release category or not? What about 4 months? 5? 6? My point is, try to avoid choosing a hierarchy that will lead to pages moving from one place to another within the structure.

P.S. Sorry for the somewhat mis-leading headline. I think people in the know call it creative license, I suspect a number of you will call it keyword stuffing

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From: feedburner.com

Default: when designing a website, make every single button the same size, unless there’s a really really good reason.

This is actually a bad foundation for designing a site. The chances that every button is going to be of equal value in a given setting is close to zero. The default ought to be: when designing a website, assume that important buttons will be bigger than unimportant ones, unless there’s a good reason.

Another example: When dealing with a customer, assume that unless there is good evidence to the contrary, they are trying to rip you off.

Another example: Assume, all other things being equal, that next year will be just like this year.

And a final default: Assume that unless they’ve notified you otherwise, all prospects are willing to get spam (press releases, phone calls, letters, ads) from you.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/436766173/rethinking-defa.html

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Humor is a great form of content that will give people a reason to link to your content, and help it spread virally. The challenge for most sites is coming up with something funny. In today’s linkbuilding column, “Use Humor for Link Marketing,” Justilien Gaspard offers some ideas that can be used by everyone, regardless of the size of your marketing budget.

» Full story

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/437079258/081030-000003

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Social media is revolutionary. It allows CNN anchor Rick Sanchez to have a relationship with 30,000 people, and make a connection with them that can translate to other media. In today’s building brand equity column, “Trick or Tweet for CNN,” Erik Qualman explains that companies need to relinquish the total control they’ve had and allow users, consumers, viewers, etc. to take their rightful ownership.

» Full story

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/437079259/081030-000001

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From: feedburner.com

When you log into your Google Adwords account, Google has a surprise for you, a note that says:

Vote on November 4th Democracy works best when we all participate. Please take time to vote on Election Day. Googles 2008 Voter Info Map can help you find your local polling place. Find your local polling place.

We found it particularly amusing that Google is messaging users via their AdWords accounts, but its still kinda cool. Just a tidbit for you to nibble on today:)

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