Intelligence
BizBlog
Lijit Search
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Dani was right. I stand corrected. Several months ago I recommended Google Maps as my choice of mapping solutions for some of our clients' location-mapping needs. She over-ruled me. Why? Because of a little clause in the API's terms of use that caught her attention. Bad Kelly. Good Dani.
Posted by Kelly Abbott
9:46 PM
0 comments  
Friday, March 24, 2006
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The Google Keyword Tool used to generate potential keywords has been updated:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Google recently added new features to the Keyword Tool:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/03/keyword-tool-global-trends-and-other.html
Google keyword tools may end-up replacing the paid keyword tools SEO vendors have been using.
Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer
2:28 PM
0 comments
Etsy is at the top of my list of favorites right now. It's a shopping site for hand-made goods. Individuals who make quality hand-crafted goods (think tie-dyes, knit caps, beaded jewelry) manage their own accounts and use Etsy as a portal for selling those goods. But Etsy is so much more than a portal. It's an experience. Hand-crafted goods are expensive. And as such, Etsy justifies the cost by making the experience of shopping there entertaining. They use flash sparingly but it's highly effective when they do. The result is that when you're in the mood to explore what's new in the Etsy world, invariably your experience leads to a desire purchase. After all isn't that what shopping is all about? A little R&R, some catharsis and sight-seeing? Now if only they could figure out a way to enable people-watching . . .
Anyhoo, I'm prompted to mention Etsy because I was in the middle of showing Charles and Jason their site, which is pretty interesting from a UI and Creative POV. Only their site was down. Instead of a custom 404, with a kind message, they did more. The experience of the site being fit perfectly with their quirky sense of being. They tell a true story of a fledgling underdog e-Commerce wannabe, p2p-enabler, smallish marketplace, homey without being your grandma or the neighborhood hippy, crafty without being 'arts-and-crafty', techno-savvy to boot. More important, they look and act and sound different. The copy bespeaks an identity that's different. Plainly said, they're not afraid to be different and take a stand on it for each little widget they create. And as fate would have it, they continued to tell the story even though their site was down. See this pic and tell me you don't love the sheer boldness of being different?
Posted by Kelly Abbott
10:44 AM
1 comments
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
MS stock's taking a bit of a tumble based on vista's delay. What's vista but a new XP? A revenue source. Build the perceived need to upgrade your systems. You want the latest and greatest? Upgrade to vista. Delaying that hurts the stock. What's odd to me though is that if the stock has any value it's because windows is a monopoly on desktops. Vista a few months later still means millions of upgrades in the company's future. Who cares if its now or in June? Microsoft will get theirs; they always do. It's a patented m.o. In 4 years, rinse and repeat.
Where we've seen significant improvements for Microsoft over the past 4 years however has been in the small business market. The Small Business Server product is just fantastic and its been that way for at least two years. Ditto on .Net. They go hand-in-hand. We're only now at .NET 2.0 (which is why Vista is supposed to be the shizz).
For small businesses and divisions of large business, for that matter, the server picture keeps getting better - regardless of the desktop delays. From Microsoft's positioning of their server products though, you'd barely even know that. They have a lot to learn from companies like Macromedia/Adobe who truly understand the small business market. If you're looking for a small business spin, it's this:
Keep your vistas set on a mature product. Small business server 2003 is, pound for pound, the most valuable expense struggling IT departmentsents can invest in.
Old news ain't sexy, but new news in the software world can spell trouble for those who can least afford the luxury of being early adopters.
Posted by Kelly Abbott
12:45 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Reducing the cost of creative development as well as developing brand affinity by asking the passionate consumer (passion for GM or passion for making commercials) to participate in the process.
It sadly cheapens the concept of the creative process (targeting, marketing research, account planning and whatnot losing out to "I totally thought of a cool commercial the other day - you should totally do it"), but is still a great way to connect with the ravenous Internet populace.
Posted by Reid
9:59 AM
1 comments
Monday, March 13, 2006
Once it is published, RSS content should be monitored to look for what others might do with it.
Here is why:
Let’s say you publish information as an RSS feed. Other sites pick it up and may use your RSS as instructed. Everything is kosher.
Here is where it begins (as Owen Wilson said in I Spy) "it gets murky;" let’s say you publish articles on your Web site and then you RSS them into a feed. Granted, the RSS feed is rendered as XML by the search engine; remember, you’ve published your article on a Web page as HTML also.
Everything is still kosher until you have a Web site (rogue or not) that decides the content in your RSS feed is great stuff and copy and pastes it into their Web site as their own content.
Now you have a potential duplicate content issue that may seriously hinder your organic search engine rankings. Multiply this several times and you will encounter a serious search engine ranking problem.
Why can this be a serious problem?
With respect to organic search results, Google’s mission is to provide a good user experience. Logically, this translates to producing relevant results; which most likely occurs when Google can identify what we call “subject matter experts.”
One criterion recognized as a sign of expertness is content. The quality and depth of content in a Web site is therefore of great interest to a robot like Google. Oddly enough, Google cannot see much; in its simplest form, Google is a freaky little robot script reading HTML code. So it (the robot) works from a very primitive point of view in comparison to a human being with vision and a brain.
Provided the robot can access the code, it presumably begins a process of interpreting the words and surrounding text to theme the entire Web site or document. Theme provides structure for a robot to better understand what a Web site is all about.
Problem: in a web crawl performed by a robot like Google, many duplicate and near duplicate web pages and documents are encountered; one study suggested more than 30+% are dups. Multiple URL’s for same page, same web site hosted on multiple host names and Web spammers cause robots like Google to distinguish what is “unique content.”
This is all theoretical of course; Google will never admit to any of their calculations for relevancy. However, it makes sense that “duplicate content” poses as a potentially difficult issue to handle; especially for a robot answering 2+ million searches per day while indexing 8+ billion pages/documents from the Internet; and here’s a kicker - the robot usually cannot distinguish the originator of the original content.
We know Google can identify mirrors or replicated web sites, it wants to avoid storing near-duplicate copies, avoid returning near-duplicate web pages in their results; and likely will use unique content as part of its 100+ calculations and criteria to improve ranking predictions i.e., providing a better user experience.
RSS technology will benefit a business by virtue of syndicating its content throughout the Internet. RSS readers are used by many thousands of people reading-up on subjects of interest.
In regard to organic search engine rankings, syndicating content via RSS must (in my opinion) consider the unique and/or duplicate content issue.
One should avoid re-producing content which may be interpreted as duplicate; and take specific steps in protecting their unique content. If the content is both on a Web site and an RSS feed, should someone copy it, it is entirely possible a robot like Google may decide the content is “duplicate” and will no longer see it as “unique.” If this happens a lot, it can harm or hinder the organic rankings of the Web site.
An associate of mine at Elixir Systems, provides a good article on the subject of duplicate content. In summary here are their tips:
1) Put a copyright notice on the bottom of the page and warn that you check for duplicated content.
2) If you have multiple domains that point to the same site content take advantage of permanent redirection. (301 status report) This informs the spider of the redirection so they understand you are not putting up duplicate content.
3) When you have an article to get republished on other sites send them in a text format. (Articles are a great way to quality incoming links by the way!) This ensures that when the article is republished it will be reformatted and viewed by the search spiders as original.
Organic rankings can be temperamental. Removing a duplicate content issue can directly improve a Web sites organic ranking.
Although RSS feeds alone cannot hurt Web site organic rankings; the scenario described above is entirely possible and suggests we maintain great respect for unique content.
Copyscape http://www.copyscape.com/ provides a free plagiarism protection service that lets people easily search for plagiarism online and identify instances of content theft.
Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer
3:30 PM
0 comments
Another great article from BusinessWeek on some big deals going on these days.
Posted by Reid
12:38 PM
0 comments
Some commercial database vendors are now offering "express" versions of their database products. These stripped down, free products may give open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL a little competition.
Posted by Ingrid Alongi
10:14 AM
0 comments
Thursday, March 09, 2006
The visibility statistics for organic results on Google are impressive; there is 100% visibility for the top 3 organic results, 85% for the No.4 position and 60% for the No. 5 position.
The CTR (click-through-rate) for organic on Google is interesting also; 28% click on the No.1 position, 12% to position No. 3, and the remainder share 3-12% of click-throughs.
On a separate note: Case studies I’ve read have documented Web sites entering the Top 10 have experienced over a 600% increase in unique visitors and over a 190% increase in conversions; obviously your mileage may vary.
For Paid Search Results on Google; there is 90% visibility for the top 2 AdWords advertisers and 50% visibility for the No.3 position.
Source:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20050301RankAndPagePositionStillRule.html
Here’s the breakdown on organic ranking visibility:
(percentage of users looking at a listing in this location)
Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%
Source:
http://www.enquiro.com/eye-tracking-pr.asp
Posted by Paul J. Bruemmer
3:37 PM
0 comments
This is a rough settlement for Google (not that they can't afford it), but will hopefully be a wake-up call for several of the PPC engines to more actively participate in protecting their advertisers from an estimated 30% clickfraud loss in their campaigns.
Another perspective on this, though, is what email and direct mail advertisers have dealt with for years: factoring in a certain amount of loss in the ad buy, but really managing by the return, not by the delivery.
Posted by Reid
9:57 AM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
We help marketers get Web metrics and, more importantly, take action on them to improve their Internet presence to help meet business goals.
Posted by Reid
9:44 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
I am a co-chair of this SIG and wanted to get the word out about this upcoming event. It should be a good one. Our last event had quite the turnout; this would should be well-attended, as well.
Posted by Reid
5:30 PM
0 comments
Friday, March 03, 2006
A very interesting and engaging article about 25 "Web companies" that are the next up-and-comers in our space.
Posted by Reid
6:03 PM
0 comments
The connection between broadcast media and the Web as experienced by KFC.
Posted by Reid
10:16 AM
0 comments
|
 |
|
