The Misinterpretation of the internet...

On Monday June 16, 2008 Gail Geronimos had posted an article on her blog about Brent Frei (co-founder and chairman of the board at smartsheet.com) summarizing his very informative article that was posted to Venturebeat.com on April 21, 2008. She starts by stating that the article "was written by Brent Frei, founder of Bellevue."
Now mind you - the Bellevue she is referring to is my hometown that is located across Lake Washington from the major metropolitan city Seattle, WA. A few of us in the office got a chuckle out of Brent being the founder of Bellevue, WA - but in actuality it was founded in 1869 by William Meydenbauer.
This to me is yet another example of how the internet can be the misinterpretation of facts. Given that Gail Geronimos is from Australia she would have had no idea that Brent wasn't the founder of Bellevue, or even that Bellevue is a city all it's own. Through no fault of her own she had misinterpreted what she had read for at the bottom of the article Brent had posted stating "Brent Frei is founder of Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet.com, a privately-held Software as a Service (SaaS) provider."
Remember the old rumor game that we played where we would whisper a statement into someone's ear and that person would then whisper to the person next to them, and so on until the person at the end would then say what they had been whispered out loud and it would never be what the original statement was said? Could it be that the internet is becoming the rumor mill that we experienced in our younger days?
It's up to us marketing and PR people to keep track of not only our company as a whole, but the company's representatives as well as our own personal interpretations.
...and no - I am not actually a Goddess, I just play one on IT ;o)

More and more companies are hiring agencies or even in-house teams to monitor the rumors that fly on the internet as quickly as they become posted. But with today's technology it's becoming increasingly difficult to catch all that there is out there...

Jenn

Google and DoubleClick - what does it mean for PPC?

Google closed it's acquisition with DoubleClick today. So what does it mean for Pay Per Click?
As Google continues to grow we are seeing the search marketing trend pull away from being just that: Search Marketing. With the introduction of image ads being placed on the content network (now placement targeting) and the addition of video ads, radio ads, newspaper advertising, etc. Google continues to stray away from being a search marketing network to an online marketing network.
Some say that Google took off when they revolutionized search by introducing the linking algorithm in order to bring it's users the most relevant results possible. I would say that the company itself experienced a growth when they revolutionized the online advertising industry by offering ads that were charged on a per click basis rather than a cost per impression. This new way of advertising made it easier and more affordable for small businesses to gain a presence on the internet without breaking their budgets.
Banner ads are now becoming a part of that revolution. I have already seen the results of this form of advertising on Google with the placement targeting campaigns. I am able to pick and choose where my ads appear rather than a plethora of pages. By choosing the specific pages that our ads are to appear I am able to bring the users from an article, blog posting, website, etc. that relates to a specific user with a banner ad that when clicked brings the user to a page which then presents them with a document or such information relating to what they were in the mindset for.
By doing this, there is less of a fall-out from the banner ads themselves and thus creating more conversions.
The user is presented with what they are looking for or researching more efficiently, and the company was able to get yet another lead.
It's a win/win situation!

Google Groove - San Jose, CA

The the moment we walked in I was in awe. In all the years I have worked in SEO I have never been to a Google party. I had heard about them, and how much fun the are, but haven't ever experienced it all first hand.
I ran into Carlos who had worked for me at Visible Technologies all those years ago. It was great to catch up and find out that he is doing really well. He is on his own now running his own consulting company specializing in Landing pages for PPC. Jeff Leach had attended with me, we have both stayed in touch over the years as he continues to grow his own consulting business managing those hard to reach Linking campaigns and creating great successes in optimizing for the most aggressive terms as always.

I have been struggling with finding a consulting company that is able to handle our European campaigns including the translation and localization as well as our US campaigns. I had met a couple of guys from the UK that were specializing in handle such campaigns and swapped cards with them.

I also ran into these guys -

The night continued to be a blast as we all stacked our glow int he dark cups while we slammed down the beers before they closed down the open bar at 10:00pm.

Check out their Video on YouTube

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

Since I have made the change from Classmates.com natural SEO Manager now working for Concur Technologies as a full search marketer, I am making he trip to Jan Jose for the SMX West conference next week.
My goal is to absorb as much as I can about search marketing for B2B, as well as learning more about managing campaigns overseas. Our search marketing has been very successful here in the US and with the company now expanding to Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) I am now driving our search marketing efforts there. My main focus has been in the UK, but now moving to Germany, and France as well. Our Australia campaigns have been struggling quite a bit, so am hoping to eventually focus my efforts there and gain some ground.
It's great to see that Google is going to be there, and am excited to get to pick their brains. Especially Fred Vallaeys AdWords Evangelist.

See you there!

Jenn

Remove URL from the Google Index

There has been repeated discussion about how and why you should remove a URL (whether it a whole website, directory or just one file) from the Google index.
The most common issue I have ran into is when two or more domains resolve to the same DNS resulting in more than one website with the exact same pages and content in the google index. I discuss this in one of my earlier posts "Problems with Multiple Domains".

Matt Cutts has presented us with a video explaining more scenarios and the best practices of how to remove URLs from the Google index even more in depth.

Ha! to all you Linking black hatters...

You know I have been talking about is for several years now. When I started as a full time SEO technician several years back, the company I worked for (Visible Technologies) used linking as their main strategy for rankings. While they obtained the rankings quickly, the search engines slowly started catching up to all those websites that used such sites at linkmarket, and linkworth in order to increase their rankings. Funny thing is that now I get to tell them "I told you so".

Does this mean that Google doesn't approve of linking? By all means, NO... Google supports linking in every way, in fact they encourage website owners to obtain external links in order to help their rankings. What they don't approve of is the purchasing of links in order to increase rankings.

The point of rankings within the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to help the user find what they are looking for efficiently. If a website has next to no relevant content and has rankings just because of a load of external links is that helping the user find what they need?

No

If the website has relevant content to what the user is looking for, then chances are the user isn't only going to find what they need, but the user is going to be so excited about the site that they are going to either blog it, or tell others about the site by adding a link to it.

This was the whole basis to Google's algorithms from the beginning. The problem is that SEO's have been using black hat techniques in order to increase rankings quickly (linking, doorway pages, duplicate content, etc) leaving Google and the other search engines having to adjust the algorithms in order to bring the most relevant results.

When optimizing a website, always be sure to provide your user with relevant content, and landing pages that reflect what each user would be looking for. For example, if someone is looking to start dating online they would want a website that offers advice for those wanting to date online. Thus when a user types in "Online Dating Advice" They would find a website and a webpage that reflects the online dating advice.

Google talks more about this and Matt also adds a bit about how Google made some algorithmic changes recently which resulted in a lot of websites loosing pagerank and search results - Purchasing Links is  BAD -

Read it and memorize it well...

Always remember that if you have to adjust because your site lost rankings, then you aren't optimizing correctly.

Google snippets

Matt Cutts visited us here in Seattle by heading to Google Kirkland office. They had decided to make a few videos of Matt while he was there and post it to the Google Webmaster Blog - Anatomy of a Search Result. Matt's video explains the snippets (title and description that shows up in your search results). He used Starbucks as an example. The Starbucks site is a good one since it has limited content on the page, but uses meta descriptions in their code.

Matt mentioned in the video that we have no control over the site links presented underneath the snippet which isn't entirely true. While we are unable to pay for the extra sitelinks within the snippet, we are able to control them through the webmaster tools. Under the "links" and then "sitelinks" within webmaster tool, if Google has generated sitelinks for your website, you are able to control them from there.

Always remember how the snippet works:

1. If the search term is within the meta description of the web page then the description will appear in the snippet (with the term highlighted in bold).


2. If the term isn't in the meta description or there isn't a meta description then the words around the content within the body of the page will be displayed (with the term highlighted in bold).


3. If the page does not have content and does not have a meta description, then the description is generally pulled from the open directory project


4. If there isn't any content on the page, no description in the meta tags, and the site hasn't been submitted to the open directory project then the descriptiontion will be blank.

A great example of the fourth scenario is a client I have been working on that came to me with his website that was created entirely in graphics. The website was a great design, and had a lot of great information on it, but the text was put in images and placed on the site that way. The website wasn't even ranking for the name. The only way to pull it up int he results was to do a site: search to see that the pages were getting indexed, but the content wasn't getting recognized (because of the images).

I am currently in the process of pulling out the text from the images and the html is recoded to keep the design the same while keeping the text still recognizable. I also added a webmap for more efficient indexing, and landing pages for the terms that the client wanted to rank for. There is an xml sitemap submitted to the webmaster tools, and a Google analytics account setup for tracking conversions.
The client should start to see better results soon after we get the new site launched.

Classmates is getting rankings

I was asked for the Classmates.com address the other day and since I hadn't been there in a while I went to Google and typed "classmates renton". I was surprised to see that registration form page for the "classmates test high school"
I hate to say this but the fact that tis page is ranking is wrong on so many levels.
From a usability standpoint - most people looking for the classmates address (such as myself) while Google ha it on the map, to see this page i the results is very confusing. How many of these pages are ranking? I have come across the final form page on several occasions while searching schools, or other such affiliations (researching schools for the kids). The problem is that a user coming to this page for any other reason than to sign up for classmates.com is very confused as to what they should do. This page is meant to be the last in a 5 page registration process in which a user starts from www.classmates.com and then flows through to the school they attended when they graduated. I had mentioned this while the SEO Manager at classmates.com but they chose to keep the pages as is, and decided not to make the fix in order to get the actual landing pages that we had designed and launched in December 2006. The pages were designed to recognize who would be landing on these pages, give the user a clear understanding as to why they were there, and what we would like them to do once there (The target audience, value proposition, and call to action). Those pages went from a 10% conversion rate (that's being nice) to a 50% to often 60% conversion rate.
It's a shame that the registration form page is ranking higher than the intended landing page.

The second reason why it's a bad thing to see this page listed is that the page is the test high school that the QA department uses in order to ensure there are no bugs in the registration process.
If it were me, I would remove it from the index through the webmaster tools, and then add it to the robots.txt to ensure that it wouldn't ever rank again.

Maybe even suggest that we not let it go to prod, and leep it on the QA servers just for testing.

The Shiny Red Button

You have all at some point heard me talking about my ideal website. If not, I'll describe that perfect website once again. You see, us marketing folks want to keep things as simple for the user as possible. A clear call to action on the page in which the user knows exactly what to do within seconds of the page loading.

So what is the clearest call to action imaginable? Why it's a shiny red button.

So my ideal website would be one that has a simple red button with nothing else. Big - shiny - and RED

Us marketing folks joke from time to time by saying we should add elements to this shiny red button. Like a call to action in words such as "click here" or possibly using a bit of psychology and adding "don't" to the "click here".

But then what is the value proposition on a page with a shiny red button? Could it be the button itself?

What does the button do?
How do you market the button to drive visitors to it?

All of these questions and more will be answered in time.
In the mean time take a moment to visit the Shiny Red Button - send it to a friend, and watch the button and all the marketing aspects change over time.