Archives for August 2005

Marketing VOX writes via AdAge that several TV networks are using paid search with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture) to generate traffic to previews of fall shows.

Here’s an example for the show Prison Break. Networks are certainly feeling the effect of shifting audiences and finally realize search engines are where larger numbers of potential audiences are spending their time.

In fact, here are some numbers for you: Internet usage in the US is currently at 68% penetration with 223 million users as of July 2005 according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Simultaneous Web and TV usage is up 72% according to the last “Media in Mind” survey by Universal McCann.

Big media giants are waking up to marketing online including search. Kevin Ryan makes some interesting predictions about the result:

I know many of the people who read this blog (thank you!) also have their own web sites or blogs.

Please consider donating ad space on your site to help out Katrina victims via the Red Cross.

Thank you,

Lee Odden

Metroblogging New Orleans – Flickr Images – Clusty Blog Search

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable posts a Code of Ethics that prompted me to do some thinking.

Search Engine Roundtable Code of Ethics:
(1) We try to cover public forum threads and quote from public information within those threads.
(2) We will never quote anyone without explicit permission in the following cases:
— Phone conversations require explicit permission to quote
— Email conversations require explicit permission to quote
— IM chat conversations require explicit permission to quote
— In person conversations require explicit permission to quote
(3) We will quote any publicly posted and available content from forums, content sites, blogs and so on.
(4) Anything said during a public presentation at a conference (not at the bars or in the hall ways but rather, what is said on the podium) is quotable as well.

While I was updating my list of sites to advertise or post SEO Consultant positions to, I thought it might be useful to make a list of several niche web sites and resources for recruiting and job search within search engine marketing/optimization.

At the last few conferences I’ve attended, one of the most consistent issues I heard my peers in SEO/SEM talk about was recruiting talent. Since SEO is such a unique combination of skills, I think there’s some opportunity here for a service to be created that recruits into other disciplines and offers training for a career in SEO/SEM. Hmmmmm.

These are in no particular order.

• Jobs in Search – Mostly UK, but is actually world wide.
• Marketing Sherpa – Updated every Wednesday.

On NPR this morning John Gordon had a piece on how Microsoft and MIT are working to develop a more personalized search method.

The method considers the content of your e-mail, documents, blog content, and Internet history to allow personal interests to influence the final search results presented to the user.

The interviewee, M.I.T. doctoral candidate Jaime Teevan, claims that the Google and Yahoo personalized search tools are based on a lightweight user model because they use data that the user provides and the pages they’ve already visited. The Microsoft/MIT personalized search would take into account more than just the web pages recently visited to include other documents and information on a user’s computer and re-rank search results accordingly.

Search Engine Roundtable has an interesting post today regarding whether it’s still ok to buy links or not. Barry cites a comment that senior Google engineer, Matt Cutts made as part of an ongoing debate over the text links being sold on several O’Reilly sites, xml.com, perl.com, etc.

Google’s position is basically that if you sell text links on your site, to add a nofollow attribute to it. Then you won’t be “selling pagerank” which Google is firmly against.

Comments from Matt Cutts:

“As others have noted, if you’re going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links.”

“Remember that just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.”

SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) has organized a free webinar for next Tuesday on planning and budgeting for search engine marketing. Here are the details:

“…geared toward busy executives who need to learn more about Search Engine Marketing (SEM). During this short webinar (30 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of Q&A), you’ll get guidelines and suggestions for planning your search media spend during a time when keyword prices seem to be escalating at rapid rates. Understand where to put your money to maximize your company’s ROI.”

When: Tuesday, August 30
Time: 12 PM EST (9 AM PST)
Where: Online web conference
How: Register via email
Registration Deadline: Thursday, August 25
Cost: Free

For more information or to register, send an email to: info at sempo dot org
with the following information:

I’ve been meaning to post on a slew of recent articles over the past two days but I will never get to them all so I’ll link them here.

“Defending the Art and Craft of SEO” by Paul J. Bruemmer at iMediaConnection

“Neglect A/B Split Testing and Lose Millions”. From DMNews

“McKinsey: Some Online Marketers Still Don‚Äôt Get It”. From Chief Marketer

“Web Analytics Special Report: Analyze This” by Mickey Alam Khan at DMNews

Kevin Ryan’s column “SearchTHIS: Yahoo! & the Search Brand”

“Hitwise: Google Also Tops In July 2005 & Awesome Report On US Search Landscape” from Search Engine Watch

Jim Meskauskas ponders the role of blogs in the modern marketer’s media buy: “Media Maze: Blog Blots”

First there was Google
Earlier this summer Google announced their Google Sitemaps tool that allows web site owners to create an XML or plain text file listing all of the urls of a web site for inclusion in the Google index. At least up to 50,000 and if you’re over, you can just create another site map.

Google offers this tool as a compliment to what Googlebot, Google’s search engine spider, can find on it’s own by crawling from link to link on the web. In cases where a site might have some difficulty getting indexed, providing a sitemap to Google may assist in getting missing pages into Google’s search results.

Google does not charge for this beta service and it’s pretty easy to do. However, as a beta, there are no guarantees.

I am testing a feature from Talkr that automatically converts blog posts to machine generated audio. Look for the “Listen” link at the bottom of each post on this blog.

Does this qualify as a podcast? I’m sure there are many podcast purists that would say no. It should be a real person reading the post for that, which is what I’d like to change this over to. For now, I’ll see if there’s any feedback on the automatic audio.

As feedback to Talkr, it would be nice if there were different voice options you could pick. I can do that with my virtual fax/message service from j2. They should also drop the Flickr naming ripoff and add an “e”.

Amid lots of speculation this week, Google has launched a Jabber/XMPP based Instant Messaging/VOIP application called Google Talk. FAQ here.

For Windows only in this release, Google Talk works with several other IM clients so if you have a Mac or are on Linux, you can still connect. All you need is a headset, speaker and Gmail account. Conveniently, six Gmail invites are included when you download the software.

So far there are mostly accolades with one comment from Daily Rundown about the lack of file transfer, which is a feature that Skype offers. Also, you cannot make calls to land line or mobile phones.

In true Google fashion, the interface is very clean and intuitive. Also of note, it’s free of any advertisements. It seems Google’s intention is to use Google Talk to drive Gmail sign-ups.

I had the opportunity to talk with David Hayden of Jeteye yesterday about the new search engine company he’s launched today. A founder of one of the first search engines, Magellan as well as email company, Critical Path, Hayden is a proven Internet pioneer.

Jeteye is a learning search engine platform that allows users to search the web and save the results in Jetpaks. Relevant Jetpaks are displayed above normal search results. What’s particularly interesting about this is that rather than indexing raw web content, Jeteye relies on human filtering to drive search results.

What Jeteye is doing directly competes with Google’s My Search History and Yahoo! My Web 2.0 but in a very different way.

From the press release: