Online Marketing Blog

At the SIS conference last week there were a number of DoubleClick employees in attendance. In fact, I sat next to Cam Blazer during dinner one night and any speculation or questions about Google and the acquisition approval from the FTC had to be answered with a “We’ll have to see” sort of answer.

Well, now the Google DoubleClick deal is official and the news is lighting up the web.

I for one, would love to get a few questions answered, like “How does it work for a search engine to own an agency that provides PPC and SEO services like DoubleClick Performics?”

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Whether you’re part of the search industry or just affected by it, you’ve probably not only grown used to change but are excited by it.

Attending a session this morning about personalized and universal search, we had a panel full of excited folks and audience members all bursting at the seams to discuss what these two types of search bring.

Panelists included:

Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Richard Zwicky, Founder and CEO, Enquisite
Aaron D’Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Bill Barnes, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.
James Colborn, Director, US Trade Marketing, Microsoft Corporation

In a morning session, here at SES Chicago, attendees had the chance to learn from and interact with folks from the world of Web Analytics.

In particular, if you’ve been wondering what’s new with Google Analytics, I’ve got the scoop for you.

Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager at Google Analytics briefed us on 3 new features and why they are important.

1. Internal Site Search Now Available
Internal Site Search and reporting is now available. This allows you to gain more insight into:
-what keyword phrase was searched
-who searched
-when did they search and
-from what pages are visitors searching most often

This data can definitely take analytics to the next level, if you’re not already tracking this data, by understanding what the visitor is looking for after reaching the site.

I recently discovered a test AdWords account setup by an ex-staffer and while there was never any activity, it didn’t make sense to keep the AdWords or User account live since it would never be used. A cancel request was sent to Google and this was the response:

“Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you want to cancel your AdWords account. After reviewing your account, I see that you have not submitted your billing information, so your account was never activated. Therefore, you are not getting the option to cancel your account.”

You’d think it would take as much time to just delete as it did to “review” the account and write the email saying “no”. I am curious what the policies are with other search engines that offer paid search advertising? If someone creates an account and then decides not to use it, do they say “no” when the customer asks to cancel?

The hot potato in social media this week is the OpenSocial web standards initiative (see screenshots here) promoted by Google involving numerous social applications, platforms and partners including: Ning, LinkedIn, Friendster, Oracle, Plaxo, Orkut, Salesforce, iLike, and Slide. Reported first on TechCrunch, “OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks”. That information includes: profiles, friends and activities.

A distinguishing feature of OpenSocial is that applications will be created with normal HTML and JavaScript. Facebook requires development using it’s own markup language making the apps unusable elsewhere. With the recent $240 million Microsoft investment in Facebook and a $15 billion valuation, the stakes are very high. Some say OpenSocial isn’t really opening any doors or isn’t a threat to Facebook. What say you?

Today Rob Key from Converseon pinged me on how fast their work promoting reforestation through a video as part of an American Express promotion hit the Google SERPs. The project is a great example of the power of social media for a great cause.

In just 4 days the video (Second Chance Trees) ranks #2 for the phrase “American Express Members Project“. It actually ranks higher than the Amex web site for the project, which is pretty impressive with over 4 million search results for the term. Maybe after indexing this blog, the link above it’ll be doing even better.

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

• Keywords in the title tag
• Targeted keywords in the body tag
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.

I just had a chance to watch part of the webcast of Google’s Searchology presentation with Marissa Meyer, Craig Silverstein and others.
Software Engineer Ben Gomes talked about PageRank:

Kerry Rodden talked about usability testing:

and the various Google search products were also discussed.

Danny lists links to live blogging of the event from TechCrunch and AppScout.

While there were hints by a few blogs that have been talking about Searchology day that an announcement of some sort would be made, my “in and out” viewing of the web cast did not catch anything in particular. However, if something of note was presented, I’m sure Search Engine Land will cover it.

Google is always testing tweaks to their search results but today I noticed a very interesting feature that I think is called Google Categories. Below is a screen grab of SERPs for “dvd players”. “motorola cell phones” also triggered these results but things like “lawn care” and “art museums” did not. It’s obviously product focused.

Notice the bold headings on categories of search results including: Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. There’s also a link to turn this feature off at the top right, “Turn OFF Categories for these results”. There are other categories including Forums, News and Manufacturers.

With each category, there is a “more” operator for specific categories including more:stores, more:product_references, more:forums, more:blogs, more:news, more:manufacturers.

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

Find more coverage on this over at Search Engine Land, “Search Engines Unite on Sitemaps“.

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Yesterday when I was searching Google on my partner’s laptop, I noticed down the left side of the search results the tabs that are normally displayed horizontally on the home page: Images, Maps, News, Groups, Books, Froogle and More with the option of drilling down your search using those filters.

I was using Firefox and not logged in to Google but was able to replicate it several times on that machine. When I tried on my own laptop, it was a no-go.

Here’s a partial screenshot:

Here’s a link to a larger screen shot.

This may be something Google has already tested in the past, but I did not find any other blog posts about it. Has anyone else seen this?

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Yahoo Takes Down Panama Geo-Targeting

Online Marketing Blog ranked #5 in top 150 Marketing Blogs – Todd And Power 150

Google Image Optimization – Chris Pearson

SEO Blogs get hacked – Search Engine Land

Optimizing Flash – Jonathan Hochman

Findory to fade away – Greg Linden

DMOZ taking submissions again – Search Engine Roundtable

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