HGTV Gets It: They're Launching a New Social Networking Site

From ClickZ, one of the best search engine marketing news sites out there, comes the announcment that HGTV is launching a new social networking site called Rate My Room.

Several months ago, I was a part of a conference call with someone I wont name, but he has a fairly popular show on TV that relates to DIY related home improvment. As a part of the conversation, we had a conversation about his target audience, their behaviors, their habits and more importantly, how he could connect with those users on his site. While his site wasn't bad, it had a few videos, it had a lot of great content and he wanted to take his strategy to the next level. I told him about social networking, creating features on his site to submit content, submit videos, vote on projects, add their expertise and even create a wiki of sorts to be a reference. The call went well, but over and over he expressed doubt about letting his viewers participate on his site. He was completely uncomfortable with giving his users that much control over the content. He eventually decided not to go in that direction.

Now, here comes HGTV, they're launching Rate My Room. One of the brilliant things about this move by HGTV is that they have a ready and willing audience who would love nothing more than to interact with each other, giving advice, comparing projects, rating their rooms and household projects. I think it's brilliant. If HGTV adds some expert or celebrity designer interaction within the communities, that could only bring more people to the network.

I truly believe that social media and networking is just one of the ways the internet will change the ways people live, the ways people interact and the ways that marketers and companies communicate with their audience. I really enjoy the fact that the internet has evolved to such a degree that the power of the individual, combined with the voice of their network can influence an industry like marketing, which has for so long, tried to tell the consumer what to do. Marketers have always said that the customer ruled, but only recently have consumers actually felt the power of "ruling".

Google's Webmaster Tools Enhance Backlink Information

One of the holy grails of search marketing is to capture backlinks. It's hard to find the quality ones, it's hard to get some good (I hate the term) link bait, and it's hard to develop a backlink strategy that involves a ton of directories you've never heard of before.

Now that Google's added backlink information as a part of its webmaster tools, people like Matt Cutts and Andy Beal are reiterating the following:

- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

So, if you can assume that viewing more backlinks that may or may not carry any ranking weight is inherently a good thing, the first question I had was what's the point? Why would Google add the links that they would essentially consider to be dren, when a simple link:searchintelligence.blogspot.com will actually give me some of the links that actually lend weight to the ranking relevance.

To tell the truth, I havent exactly figured it out yet. I'm not sure what the real value is, but I do know that the more data revealed, there's a potential that more useful revelations can be made, however, it also carries the potential that data-overload and perception blindness might set in.

I'm definately going to play with this for a while and write again on how it can be turned from raw data into actionable intelligence.

A Vertical Search Engine for Coders: All The Code

There's been a lot of speculation about vertical search engines. Some think that vertical search will be the Google killer, others think they're ultimately doomed to fail under the giant footprint of the big 3.

Nevertheless, innovation is at the heart of the industry and it's good to see another vertial oriented search engine enter the field. All The Code is geared towards coders. However, it has a little bit of competition in the highly niched and specialized area: Koders, Krugle and Google Code.

Search Engine Watch has a great article about the launch of All The Code -

All The Code at this time is a source code search engine for the Java language only. Plans are in the works to add more languages later. All The Code has no mechanism for submission of code. This too is promised for the future. It looks like there is a lot of development still to do.

Visually, it's a little bland, it's a little pale... but it's not offensive and it's not annoying. I dont want to go off on the look and feel on All The Code because from the looks of it, it's got a pretty powerful result engine under the hood. Like all new search engines, it's pretty obvious they need to do some more work, some more tweaking and some more enhancements to the engine to include more than just JavaScript code, but once they start adding more coding languages, I think they have a great opportunity to give coders and coding students what they want quickly and efficiently.

They have sponsored links on the right hand side and on the footer, and I hope that's not their only monetization strategy, but for such a niche search engine, it might work. However, I'd imagine that most people using All The Code will be looking for coding help, any purchases of coding software or services would probably go to Google.

I hope they do well, and I think they are off to the right start. I look forward to seeing what they do and how they improve their engine.

A Grimoire for the Wizards of Search

SERP's & Searchers
A compendium of magical spells for the wizards of search and technology.

To the outside world, we are the mystical manipulators of magical energies that surround the inner sanctum of search. However, within our ranks, we are divided... the wizards of the white hat and the wizards of the black hat. We eternally battle to control the virtual domain of the everpresent Google, who was, who is and who will be to come, the Master of Past and Present.

There are powerful spells and arcane knowledge that we possess to channel the energies of semantics and the internet.

Level 1 Spells:

• Summon Keywords: This ability allows the wizard of search to conjure up lists of relevant keywords. At higher levels, this spell allows the wizard to have a more focused and refined list.
• Reveal Plugins: The legendary Firefox, unlike the Explorer has the ability to allow wizards to customize it according to their needs, during incantations, this can be helpful to give the wizard to see deeper into the site than normal.
• Detect Spam: Upon looking at the page, the wizard will be able to spot non-sensical and repeating phrases that plague the site.
• View Source: There is a hidden world behind all websites, the wizards of search are able to decipher the source and divine the hidden knowledge that it has.
• Summon Directories: The search wizard can tap the energies and forces that flow from public directories. These energies enhance the site with a glow that the Search Gods recognize.
• Spam Source: One of the first spells the wizards of the black hat learns, this allows the wizard to manipulate the search engines with repetative words. This ability could backfire however, as they could be banished by the Search Gods.

Level 2 Spells:

• Summon Key Phrases: The wizard is now able to craft the summoned keywords into phrases that match the intent of the site.
  
• Summon Title Tags: The wizard is able to manipulate the site's source directly and give it the ability to be named. Once a page or a site has a true name, the Gods of Search can properly identify it and give it its due.
  
• Detect Redirect I: This spell allows the wizard to detect the simplest of redirects, the meta-refresh and the Java Redirect. Once the redirect is identified the wizard is able to channel the coding magic to put them in order.
  
• Find Whois: The "Whois" spell allows the wizard to find other sites on the same IP, revealing other efforts of the black hat wizards.
  
• Text of Invisibility: A higher level of the spam spell, this allows the black hat wizards to hide their spam with white on white text, text under images, spammed ALT tags and source code spam so that the users dont see the spam.
  
• Shrink Text: Another black hat spell, this causes normal text to be shrunk past the point of legibility, yet still be seen by users and search engines. Another variation of the spam spell, it often causes confusion and anger in user behavior.
  
• Summon Links I: A summoning spell more powerful than "summon directory", this spell allows the wizard to manipulate the words on the page to draw unsuspecting users to feel a compulsion to link to them. At this level, the user has a good chance to resist the urge, but each link adds more energy to the site.

Level 3 Spells:

• Invoke User Intent: The wizard is able to determine the users' mind and use the keyword phrases to guide them along the path of their intent.
  
• Summon Description: This spell combines the ability to charm the user into entering the site, while keeping the keyword integrity intact.
  
• Summon Link Bait: The wizard is able to charm a massive amount of people into linking to their site.
  
• Detect Redirct II: Upon detection, the wizard is able to see more difficult redirects and divine the type of them, 301 and 302 redirects become second nature to the wizard.
  
• Summon Paid Traffic: By combining the energy channels of the search engines, the wizard sacrifices a small amount of their own vitality in exchange for traffic and the potential to gain a higher amount of vitality
  
• Div of Invisibility: The wizards of the black hat are able to hide some of their spam spells in a div of invisibility, while it's harder for the search engines to catch, there is a chance that they will.
  
• Summon Link Farm: Another black hat wizard technique, this spell summons thousands and thousands of links from other sites, these energy channels are less effective than the true channels, they provide a short term benefit to the black hat wizard.
  
• Evoke Lesser Blogger: Once evoked, the lesser blogger writes about the wizard and hails their efforts in front of their own audience. Both wizards benefit from this spell... but it's also a double edged spell, there's a chance that the blogger will turn on the wizard and try to break him down.
  
• Summon Lesser Industry Contact: There are many wizards of search, this spell allows the wizard access to speak with the industry contact over long distances, the incantations and help from the industry contact allow the lesser wizard to focus and potentially spark new ideas.
  

Level 4 Spells:

• Behavioral Scrying: With this spell, the wizard can see into the minds of multiple users and allow them to create enchantments to attract more and more people. The users find what they want and share some of their vitality with the wizard.
  
• Summon Links III: At this level, the links summoned are from high level wizards, institutions and other quality sites. There is a chance, that at this point, the summoned links will continually rise on their own.
  
• Control Page Rank: One of the tools of the black hat wizard is to manipulate the very energy of the mythic page rank, they're able to use the forces of the search engines against them and create an illusiory page rank.
  
• Decipher Analytics: This spell translates the numbers, graphs and percentages of the analytics portal into real information, when used with the spell behavioral scrying, the potential is limitless.
  
• Invoke Keyword Campaign: The highest level of the keyword spells, the wizard can form a vast chain of keywords that focus on user intent and relevance into a grand unified keyword strategy.
  
• Link Bomb: One of the tools of the black hat wizard, they're able to turn the search engines themselves into weapons. With the link bomb, the wizard can target specific phrases and force their enemy into a negative situation.
  
• Summon Greater Blogger: Like the summon lesser blogger, this allows the wizard to connect with the powers of the other wizards. At this point, there is a low chance of failure since the wizard is able to effectively wield their powers.
  
• Trade Show Teleport: A simple spell in actuality, but powerful in application. The wizard must be at a certain level to understand the concepts and applications of the trade shows.. the added benefit is that the material spell cost is usually paid by someone else.
  
• Create Spell: At this point in the wizard's experience, they're able to see the interaction of all the mystical energies of the search matrix and can create their own spells to see if they work or fail.
  

Level 5 Spells:

• Create Blog: With a vast amount of knowledge and experience, the wizard becomes a lesser blogger. Forging out into the search matrix and sharing ideas and thoughts, the wizard allows other, lesser search wizards to benefit from their knowledge.
  
• Hijack Ranking: One of the deadliest and dangerous spells of the black hats, this spell allows a wizard to take away, without knowledge or consent of the search Gods, the rankings of their competitors and enemies. However, the danger of getting caught and forcing the search gods to change the search energies is high.
  
• Pacify Client: Often times, those who the wizard deals with have unrealistic expectations of the limits of the search wizard. With cool logic and explanations, the wizard is able to charm the client into understanding the basics of the magic of search.
  
• Summon Viral Links: The highest level of link summoning, the wizard invests a small amount of energy and causes thousands of users to create links for them... once summoned, the users pass along and cause other users to link. The duration of this spell widely varies.
  
• Summon Named Blogger: The wizard, at this level is able to connect with and get a link from some of the demi-gods of search, Matt Cutts, Andy Beal or Jeremy Zawodny
  
• Voice of SES: Gaining the voice of SES confirms your status in the search wizarding world. Hundreds and thousands of other wizards come to hear your methods, your insights and your spells. Often thought of as the highest level to attain before you reach demi-god status, the more you become the Voice of SES, there is no limit from where you can go.
  
• Divine Competitor Strategy: The wizard is able to take all the spells, components, tools and scrying methods to divine the strategy of the competition. With this look into the actions of those against you, the wizard is able to create a counter strategy.
  

If you'd like to add to the wizards of search grimorie, just let me know and I'll add them.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Fluctuation

LeeAnn Prescott, the research director for the US markets at Hitwise,
revealed that after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at MacWorld, that the search demand for the iPhone has superceded the search demand for the iPod. It's only a slight coincidence that earlier I defined the concept of "search engine presence" using the example of the iPhone.

That search engine presence measured the top ranking sites, ignoring position, instead focusing on ranking on a variety of terms, that dominate the search engines for a selected sampling of keywords.

Because I was explaining a concept, I chose to use a small sample of keywords that related to a topic that interested me. I used: "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone". The results were as follows.

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

These sites ranked for the preceding terms on 10 Jan. However, for the 4 weeks that ended on 20 Jan, Hitwise compiled the following top sites that had traffic from the term "iPhone".

Apple's sites receive over 50% of the traffic from the iPhone search, however, Engadget, by being one of the most trusted sites on consumer electronics and also having the benefit of ranking well across the board for the searches, received the 4th highest amount of traffic. Hitwise and my search engine presence tool measures two different things, I can only measure presence, Hitwise can measure traffic. While I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges, here's where we see the overlap of traffic and presence.

In the 13 days where I took my first measurements, the search engine marketspace has fluctuated. Supporting the idea that traffic and clickthroughs can influence ranking in the search engines. Notice that Apple and Engadget have a significant upsurge in their presence.

	1/10/2007	1/23/2007
Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7	17
www.engadget.com	7	9
en.wikipedia.org	4	7
www.gizmodo.com	6	6
www.appleinsider.com	5	4
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4
www.thinksecret.com	7	3
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3
www.businessweek.com	3	3
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3
www.macworld.com	1	3
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2
gizmodo.com	4	1

We see EverythingiPhone.com, Gizmodo and ThinkSecret.com drop in their presence, we see Wikipedia increase their presence.

As the search for iPhones increase, as they have... that's created the circumstances for the search engines to continually shuffle the results, shuffle the ranks and shuffle the presence. However, what we have strong evidence for here is that ranks change, presence fluctuates and the environment changes. Therefore, it's vital for any company who has a search engine marketing strategy to keep tabs on the environment for their selected keywords and not just on the position or rank of just a few. If you dont notice the change, it's likely that you could be left behind.

While LeeAnn Prescott and I are measuring two different things, traffic vs. presence. The overlapping data as it applies to the search engines often complement each other and provide a larger picture of what's happening.

Thanks LeeAnn, your article was brilliant, informative and I enjoyed reading every bit of it.

Some Cliches Become Even Truthier

From Eric Mattson's Marketing Blurb, he writes about an interesting study from Susquehanna about the trends of content. In Eric's article, he mentions that in 2005, content sites accounted for 36% of the users' time. However, in 2006, that trend went upwards to 45%.

The interesting point here is where that trend is going to go, and where it will reach a critical mass. In 2007, will the numbers be somewhere from 55 - 60% or will the trend start to slow down, even out and become more static?

Another interesting aspect of this is how do marketers create content for users? Rather than having marketers jump into the latest fad, they actually need to have a strategy that's a little more in depth than slapping together a blog. Garrett French's blog has an excellent market conversation strategy guide.

Understanding that content sites are increasing in popularity, and putting together a strategy to communicate with your users could absolutely bring in business, but even more valuable... a relationship with the content providers and the company itself.

Privacy...Schmivacy... Balancing Personal Information with Service

A recent eMarketer article - "Is Privacy Overrated?" shares some interesting information about a "Personalization Survey" from ChoiceStream. They report that giving up personal information for more personalized content has a pendular affect.

In 2004, 63% of people who were 18-34 were willing to divulge Demographic information in order to obtain personalized content. In 2005, that number dropped to 47%. In 2006, it rebounded back to 63%. When we're talking about people over 35, the numbers are 2004: 49%, 2005: 46% and 2006: 54%. When we put things into context, 2005 was a pretty sketchy year for personal information, privacy invasion concerns and other geo-political events that made people a little more nervous about giving up their information, but apparently, they got over it and are now giving up more information.

The other part of that survey was about people giving up personalized information to a site so that it could track their clicks and purchases.

For 18-34 year olds, in 2004 it was 48%. This dropped in 2005 to 35% and back up for 2006 to 49%. The over 35 crowd remained a bit more skeptical, in 2004 it was 33%, which took a slight hit in 2005 to 29%, then rallied up to 38%.

The data here is very interesting, while it exposes an interesting behavioral trend, I wanted to take a look at what this means for consumers and marketers.

From the article:

"Consumers are overwhelmed with the vast array of content and choices coming at them every day online. They want guidance, even though they want the freedom to make their own choices and to explore the data if they want to," said Esther Dyson, editor of the blog Release 0.9 and an advisor to ChoiceStream.

While it's an interesting point that consumers are overwhelmed, I don't think that tells the full story.

2005 and '06 had some big stories about identity theft, MySpace stalking, data loss, government domestic observation and other news that really hit at the core of peoples' sense of security. I would find it interesting to research how online marketers changed their tactics to expressely address security concerns to their users, while at the same time, tried to understand what their users wanted so that they could provide the right value to the consumer.

Time will tell if this effect is pendular, we may see these numbers fall again, or they may continue to rise. However, i think that the lesson of privacy, personal information and trust to the online market is something that will be ever-present, and we'll also see if online marketers keep the lessons learned, or will they (if the trust continues to rise) accept the status quo.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Presence

In an earlier post, I mentioned (without explicitly defining) the term of "search engine presence". This came from the dissatisfaction I felt when talking to clients about the health of their search engine optimization/ marketing campaigns. All too often, I would hear the same mantra..."I want to be number 1 for the term X" or "Why aren't I number 1 for the term X?"

This felt inherently wrong to me. However, I couldn't really answer their question, nor could I give them a sure-fire way to attain that position. I sometimes felt that I should be glib and say "If I knew that answer, I'd be working at Google as one of their engineers, right?"

At the same time, everyone who's been in search marketing for more than a week knows that it's best to rank well on a variety of keywords, while remaining true to the core goals of the site. After looking at some WebPosition Gold ranking reports, something struck me as odd about them, they gave the ranking reports, but the data it gave seemed too myopic. This is when I started thinking about "presence" as a metric for measuring the health of the search marketing campaign.

I went to Adam Schultz, and I proposed to him a creation of a simple program that we would later called the Competitive Analysis Baseline Reporting tool. This program would take the core, top level keywords from the client's input... adjusted and perfected by some keyword research and take a look at which sites ranked for those keywords. We wanted to get a good look at the entire search spectrum, so we took the top 15 results in Google, the top 10 in MSN and the top 10 in Yahoo!. This way we would get an overview of what I later called the search engine marketspace. It's a capture of data at a specific time of what the marketspace is.

For a practical example, lets take a few keywords... "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone" for this example, we don't need a lot of keywords because I'm looking at defining, in a practical sense, "presence".

So, with 3 keywords and (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo) we can expect to have a sample size of 105 potential slots for search engine results to appear. When the same company, like Apple shows up across the search engines and at different positions, their presence is counted as 1. Each presence is counted and sorted for the total presence. In this case, the top 1o results is as follows:

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

For those terms, Apple.com shows up in Google, MSN and Yahoo 7 times, as does Thinksecret.com and Engadget.com. Gizmodo shows up 6 times, and so on. The idea here is not to diminish the actual position, or rank of the site, but emphasize the presence in the overall search marketspace. When your company relies on capturing qualified traffic from search, it's obviously better to have several keywords working for you, rather than focusing on only one keyword. Unfortunately, all too often, SEO/ SEM companies attract the client by either telling the prospect what they want to hear, or implying that ranking on their top keyword is paramount to success.

What we see here is a lack of education and a hype of expectations. When the client is properly educated on the strategies of SEO and SEM, they're more likely to abandon the expectation of the single keyword on top hope and adopt a more gestalt view of the search engines as an environment that changes, evolves and fluctuates. Once they see that, they'll recognize the value of having several keywords that work for them and not just one.

Perception Blindness and Competitive Intelligence Methodologies

For those of you who know me, you know that Michael Shermer is one of my heroes. Ever since I read his book "Why People Believe Weird Things", I realized how much of my life I had spent being a pattern seeking animal. I loved science, but never took it to be much more than a series of facts or theories. In fact, I couldnt even define "theory" very well.

It is due in part of Shermer and the Skeptic Society and Magazine that I live and breathe evidence. I need evidence in life and evidence in my work. Analytics seem to me a perfect example in marketing that evidence is needed. Before I do that, I wanted to show you a video... and you must watch this before you read on... from Michael Shermer's talk at TED - (it's short... less than 3 minutes).



Did you watch that? Did you miss it? Did you see it?

Perceptual Blindness hits all analytics readers at some point or another. Often times, when I'm speaking to a client about competitive intelligence, they think that it's a "thing" that I do. In reality, it's a process... like science is a process. Competitive Intelligence is a methodology and a way to process information in order to make predictions about something. Often times, it's about M&A's... in my line of work, it's about looking at an existing strategy of a selected sample of companies who dominate a keyword marketspace and determining what they're doing and potentially, what they're going to do... then comparing that against the goals of the client and the trends of the industry and making recommendations.

Simply put, it's multivariate research and statistics with evidence guided intuition and theory... and this is the important part - It has to be measurable. Perception blindness occurs when the analyst goes into the research with more than just the goals of the clients. The client often has their own expectations of what you can do, or what the industry is like. I used to tell people that "you know your business, I know your business online". It's two different animals.

One of my old clients wanted me to do an intelligence report on some of their competitors. They gave me a list of competitors and I went to work. When I finished it and presented it, they were impressed, they loved it and all was good. However, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my head. I felt that I had missed something. When I got back to work, I used a program we developed called the "competitive analysis baseline reporting tool". While it was a fairly simple scraper and easy to program through an excel macro... the reporting capability was, in my opinion, very powerful. I found that looking through their online competition, only one of the competitors they mentioned even had a presence (from a search engine marketing perspective). As soon as I found who their online competitors were, I was able to do some more research, report it, and the result was a 20-40% increase in all of their benchmark analytics. If I hadn't done that, if I hadn't recognized my own perception blindness, I wouldn't have done everything I possibly could to help that client.

In the future, I will be talking more about perception blindness in analytics and how to avoid some common mistakes.

For now, if you liked the 3 minute clip... here's the entire lecture from Michael Shermer from TED. It's brilliant.