Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

As a follow up to the post on Nick’s excellent post on Folksonomies, here are some additional notes on sites that use tags to organize information.

Tagsurf – In the tagging spirit of Flickr and Del.icio.us, Tagsurf is an online message board which uses tags to help organize subjects instead of threads or channels. Currently in “Alpha” but seems to be picking up steam. Definitely worth checking out.

Furl – I list this one because Technorati tag search results are now pulling tag data from Del.icio.us and Furl. Furl allows you to archive web pages and provides up to 5 gigabytes of storage. Your collections of archived pages can be private or public and you can “share” ie promote, your archived pages via email or RSS feed. And, uh, it’s part of Looksmart.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, several major blog software services are supporting the implementation of a nofollow link attribute in an effort to quell comment spam. Of course this relies on the owner of the blog or web site to actually implement the tag properly or at all, in order for it to be effective. As far as blogs go, I would expect the 80/20 rule probably applies in that the smaller percentage of blogs recieve the majority of traffic. Those bloggers are most likely to be very savvy to the comment spam issue because of their visibility and involvment. They’re most likely to start using such a tag. But it will take a long time without mass acceptance which appears to be happening.

Some interesting Google facts from a BayCHI lecture at PARC given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google) as posted by Alan Williamson.
“A very well attended (standing room only session), Marissa took us through a presentation geared around the user experience at Google and the efforts/lengths they go to.”

Some interesting facts came out:

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

Some interesting data from a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project regarding blogs. Thanks to Search Engine Watch

* 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
* Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
* 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators
* 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs
* 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is (what? your dog? no, blog!)

All I know is, I was trying to read 10-15 email news letters per day to keep up on industry trends taking away hours of valuable billable time. Now through a combination Google and Yahoo News alerts plus my nifty Firefox RSS reader called Sage, I can get this information faster and more efficiently in a fraction of the time. It may take a while, but mass adoption of RSS News is on the way.

Wired ran an interesting article recently about how the U.S. Government is using topic maps to provide context for words that have multiple meanings. This would help infer meaning in examples like: Mustang car or Mustang horse?

This is the challenge for search engines as well. Clustering tools like those offered by Vivisimo’s Clusty search engine appear to be quite effective, but not widely adopted. A search on “Mustang” clusters groups of search results according to topics like “Parts”, “Horse” and a town in Oklahoma. This is a lot more helpful than a similar search on Google which displays mostly car web sites in the first page of results.

There area a few web design sites I’ve visited recently looking for resources and to see how they link to other web sites. Many web designer web sites do not link out at all. Some are very organized about it. The following link is an example of what one web design firm asks other web sites to use for the link back:

1# Blue Gecko Web Design in New York
is a full service web design firm, specializing in custom graphic interface design, content management solutions, and online multimedia including audio, video & animation. Get your Free Quote today!

That’s a little more than what some sites feel comfortable with.  Most web designers are content with a simple link:
Web Design

Marketers Focus on Measurable Results – “Marketing Challenges 2004” survey conducted by Forrester Consulting by Unica Corp., a developer of enterprise marketing management software indicated 43% of respondents said they would increase spending on the Internet. – From BtoB Online

Microsoft Buys Lookout’s Search Tool – from iMedia Connection

Google Toolbar Adds “Browse by Name” Feature. Similar to the RealNames feature from way back, you can enter a phrase in your url or address bar and if Google deems there is an exact match, that site is delivered. If not, regular search results appear.

Google Acquires Picasa . Initially, Google partnered with Picase to improve photo publishing on Google’s Blogger.com service.

Yahoo Acquires Web Startup Oddpost – Oddpost provides a web-based email and news aggregation with no ads. At least until now.

I noticed a few articles recently about keyword optimized press releases. It’s good to see the concept starting to attract a broader audience. News sites like Yahoo News and Google News have more readers than CNN and BBC, and in order to find a particular story or release, you have to search for it. So while there’s a broad audience, the viewers of a particular story or release have pulled themselves to it via search – and that qualifies them a bit as a prospect in terms of the marketing value. That’s the beauty of search marketing – visitors pull themselves to your message rather than the message being pushed out to them.

Small and Medium Businesses Rely on Online Research for Technology Purchasing Decisions “59 percent use search engines on a daily basis.” – From MediaDailyNews. Based on research sponsored by Yahoo! and Grey Global Group and conducted by IDC.

Here’s another report supporting the notion that technology marketers needs to emphasis their online marketing component – especially search. I’m continuously amazed at how many technology solutions companies do not effectively market themselves via search engines. The market is there, searching products and solutions every day.

Too many rely on their web designers/developers to perform site optimization when most do not have the necessary skills or time to keep up on the constant changes in the search industry. It takes time and effort to get the basics down and more time and effort to stay on top of what’s current – both from a strategic and tactical perspective.

Took a look at our main site server logs and noticed this interesting list of visitors over the past few weeks:

citicorp.com
hilton.com
bankofamerica.com
intuit.com
fedex.com
kingston.net
lucent.com
norwest.com
nutrisystem.com
ford.com
disney.com
ballyfitness.com
mmm.com

Now the question is, how many of these companies contacted us? Answer, one. But that’s not my point for the list. It’s to show that major brands do indeed click on organic search engine listings when researching online marketing vendors. Each of these companies found our TopRank site through a search on Google or Yahoo using variations of: search engine marketing firms, search engine optimization firms, online marketing firms, etc.

Google Dance. This is sort of old info for those of us in the SEO industry by now, but it’s not a bad take on Googles updates in the past few months. From Media Daily News.

Sullivan: No One Will Win Search War – Great interview with Danny Sullivan and I agree: increased competition within the search engine space leads to better search performance for users and spreads traffic opportunities for companies. It used to be that a web site could gain excellent amounts of organic listing traffic from any of 5 or 6 top search engines. In the past year or more, it’s been all about Google. If Google makes an update that does not favor a particular site any longer, the vast majority of traffic is lost. With multiple primary sources of organic listing traffic, any one engine is not as critical to a site’s success. From ClickZ News