Archive for March, 2007
According to a recent report by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), only 19% of adult internet users have downloaded a podcast in the last six months (this is a rise of only 2% on the 2006 figure), this despite a surge in use of podcasts over the last year.
The study also stated that for those users who had ever downloaded a podcast, 72% weren’t interested in them, 38% didnt fully understand them and 18% wanted to know how to download them first.
Such figures, I feel do reflect the public perception of Podcasts/Vodcasts with many directly associating them directly with i-pods, which may in itself be reflected in the above figures. Whilst such technology is useful in tech-savvy environments, whether podcasting is suitable for mainstream marketing at this point is certainly up for debate.
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March 23rd, 2007
According to a recent report by E-Consultancy in conjunction with Clash Media, 82% of digital marketers see online lead generation as a growth area in 2007. The results were published in the ‘Online Lead Genereation (B2C) Report’, which questioned a number of marketers about how the Internet is and could be utilised to interact with potential customers.
Nearly 75% of respondants working for across the line organisations said their organisations are generating leads online with the intention of then converting them offline. Suprisingly, only 44% of marketers believed their organisations were fully exploiting online lead generation as a means of growing their B2C business. This was in comparison to 47% of respondants stating that their business wasn’t effectively exploiting online lead generation.
The research was carried out in association with Clash Media, and was conducted with around 400 marketers throughout Q1 2007.
To read the full report please visit the e-consultancy website - http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/online-lead-generation/ or visit the Clash Media website
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March 23rd, 2007
Google has released Manager Defined Spend or MDS, a pay per click campaign management tool that allows agencies to amend and update Google PPC campaigns instantaneously.
The main purpose behind MDS is to cut negotiation times and provide agencies with tigher budgetary control.
MDS is currently being released to agencies worldwide., and is designed to counter situations where cammpaigns need to be changed or launched immediately, but are restricted by the time it takes for checks to be carried out.
Source: New Media Age (22nd March 2007)
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March 23rd, 2007
After hinting about it for a while now, Google has finally beta released a cost per action (CPA) platform for testing. The beta test is only currently restricted to Adsense for content in the US, and will run seperate from the usual auction model, and chances are most won’t even get a chance to play around with the system.
However it should be noted this is a significant expansion of Google’s current PPC model, with the premise being that advertisers would pay when a customer buys a product, signs up for a newsletter or completes any other actionable task on the website.
From the publishers perspective, Adsense publishers will be able to opt-in to display PPA adverts from Google and even whether they wish to display a single ad, a cluster of ads or match to a specific keyword that is relevant to their page content. Publishers also get to preview the ads, including company name, logo etc, before the ads go live.
Google here is effectively acting as a broker between the customer and the advertiser, and to a certain extent puts Google in competition with affiliate networks such as Commision Junction.
To read more about Google Pay per action (PPA), we have included some links below
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March 22nd, 2007
The meta robots tag is a standard created over a decade ago, initially, to allow website authors to prevent page indexing by search engine spiders. Over the years this tag has evolved into a far more flexible meta tool.
Todays Robots Meta Tag Commands
- ALL - Sets all directives on. ALL = INDEX,FOLLOW
- NONE - Sets all directives off. NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
- INDEX - An indexing robot should index the page.
- FOLLOW - A robot is to follow links on the page.
- NOINDEX - An indexing robot should not index the page.
- NOFOLLOW - Prevents an indexing robot from following any links on the page.
- NOARCHIVE - Prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
- NOSNIPPET - Google only command that prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results. Also enforces NOARCHIVE.
- NOODP - Stops the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description in the search results and instead forces the search listing to use the DESCRIPTION meta data of the indexed page.
- NOYDIR - This tag works in a similar way to the NOODP tag and ensures that Yahoo will not use the title and description from your Yahoo Directory listing but instead is forced to display the meta TITLE and DESCRIPTION of the indexed page.
These commands can be issued using the robots meta tag, placed anywhere inside the head of your individual web page. Eg: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”>
Multiple commands can be enforced by adding a comma seperated list to the content field of the robots meta tag. Eg: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,NOODP”>
The commands in the content fields MUST be comma seperated for your robots tag to be valid according to Google. These tags are also NOT case-sensitive.
Making the distinction between robots
All of the commands above can be targetted globally by using the command ROBOTS in the name field of the meta tag, but what if you want to tell each search engine something different?
You need to have a robots tag for each particular search engine you want to target. Each tag must identify the robot by name and list the command or commands pertinent to that particular robot. Eg:
<meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”NOODP”>
<meta name=”MSNBOT” content=”NOFOLLOW”>
<meta name=”SLURP” content=”NOARCHIVE, NOYDIR”>
But what if I wanted to tell all the search engines one thing and just one search engine another thing?
You can have multiple tags in your page that target ROBOTS globally and individual robots by name. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo say that thier robots will honor both of these declarations. Eg:
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOARCHIVE”>
<meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”NOODP”>
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March 7th, 2007
I have read a lot recently regarding personalisation in particular from Google, and much has been debated within the SEO community itself on various forums such as SEW, Threadwatch and Cre8asite as to the ongoing effects of introducing personalisation.
In general, whilst the delivery mechanism of such a drastic change in focus will remain the overiding factor in determining whether such a change works to Google’s benefit (and delivers us consumers the results we expect), the effects of such change will provide us Search Engine Marketeers with new challenges.
However in my opinion such a change can only be good for the industry. Gone are going to be the days where results were based on the number of “number 1 terms” and campaigns will be judged by what they physically deliver to a client in terms of ROI, bringing it inline with other forms of advertising both off and online.
This should in turn make us search engine marketeers/engineers start thinking like more traditional marketeers, and rely on a variety of marketing techniques in order to ensure ROI on the websites. In my opinion not a bad thing, and I doubt that other forms of advertising will ignore those that can deliver such results. That and the use of PPC will probably increase in popularity as advertisers endeavour to ensure constant visibility in key areas.
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March 6th, 2007
Gord Hotchkiss featured a very good interview with Google spokesman Matt Cutts regarding a multitude of SEO issues including localised search, personalised search and the future of SEO, and in particular Matt’s perspective on how he sees personalisation of Search affecting SEO in general.
One comment in particular stood out
“Matt: I think that it’s natural that some people would be worried about change, but some of the best SEO’s are the SEO’s that are able to adapt, that are able to look down the road 4 or 5 years and say, “What are the big trends going to be?” and adjust for those trends in advance, so that when a search engine does make a change which you think is inevitable or will eventually happen, they’ll be in a good position. Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for. At the same time, any time there’s a change, I understand that people need some time to adjust to that and need some time to think, “How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect the industry? And what can I do to benefit from it?”
Of course, the big question is how the lack of a monolithic set of search results will impact the reverse engineering that is typical in SEO. How do you reverse engineer something that’s different for everyone who sees it? Which begs the question, “does personalization mark the end of black hat SEO?
I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.”
Source: Gord Hotchkiss - Search Engine Land
Certainly worth a read - the full interview can be found on Gord Hotchkiss’ blog and the SearchEngineLand website
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March 5th, 2007
According to recent report by Hitwise, people visiting search engines accounted for 13.3% of the total UK web visits, nearly 2% greater than the number of visits to Adult websites for January 2007. The marke share of the UK’s internet visits to the search engines increased by nearly 21% year on year in January. This compares against a 14% decline for adult sites.
Whilst many organisations in the UK are taking their search engine marketing/advertising strategies very seriously, there is still some reluctance to embrace online. However as convergence technologies become more mainstream, the use as a maintream advertising source can only continue to increase significantly.
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March 1st, 2007
