Is this the the advent on Search 3.0? Google have unveiled a new format which could indeed seal its future as the king of all search engines? Squared offers a dissemination of information on a webpage described only as ’spreadsheet like’. Released close the another high profile launch of Wolfram Alpha next week, it presents another way of looking at semantic search. Sources from the San Francisco Chronicles outlines what to expect:
Google Squared, an experimental service, automatically compiles details from several Web pages and organizes them into a table on a single page, with multiple columns like a spread sheet. A search for “small dogs,” for instance, returns a list of breeds, an accompanying image and a brief description, plus the average height and weight of each breed.
I have to admit I’m slightly worried with the fact that these changes and added layers of search just won’t catch on with ordinary Joes (six pack?) out there in the world. It might prove a hit with those researchers but would the person off the high street want these filters, columns and such for finding a cheap TV. I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure that Squared would be a regularly used feature either. I’ll be seeing what Wolfram Alpha does and looking very closely at its ability to deal with spam in particular.
This month sees the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the much talked about search engine created by Stephen Wolfram. Forget the fact that naming the engine after one self may constitute as a glorious vanity project. No, this baby looks serious with a hefty engine under the bonnet. Other search engines have tried and failed to dismount the oversized mammoth that is Google (Cuil anyone?) but WA has a chance to take a slice of the search pie from Yahoo! at least. Here’s why: its much hyped computional engine. WA essentially runs on big server technology sucking up all the data it can get its hands on via your website. Algorithms sift and filter this mass of info but not just a few. The blog states that tens of thousands of algorithms could be at work to get the information you need. A much detailed explanation can be found here.
However, the crux of the matter would be not necessaryily the relevancy of searches generated. Google’s initial popularity was helped by its simplicity over its rival, Yahoo!. Usability and to some degree how it spread by word-of-mouth would be defining factors on the success of Wolfram Alpha. I don’t think your Paris Hilton’s of the world would be much interested in ‘mathematica’ or its ‘world class algorithm’ if it works like a dog and doesn’t offer the simplicity of Google.
I’ll be watching this one closely and hopefully it wouldn’t fall over on launch.
Loving the new feature on Google as I can see the possibilities of having to explore my home town without getting out of the house and getting mugged. Brilliant. Joking aside, I found a cyclist with no legs!
Meanwhile, the contraversy of privacy will always wage on. Only today, Google had to pull some pictures of people in a less than respectable manner off the service. Full details here on the BBC. Earlier in the year, Mr and Mrs Boring ,an American family, tried to sue Google for invading their privacy for using images of the front of their house. They then subsequently shot themselves in the foot by publishing their full address in the legal notes. The case collapsed. Roll on the mighty Google machine!
With the surgence of Tweeting going on, Techcrunch offer a great post on some tools to use. I’ve been using Tweetdeck recently having found Twirl impractical. Tweetdeck is very smart and the panel interface works wonders for those who like to follow replies to Tweets as well as scan for mentions on various topics.
I want to claim Twitter back from Stephen Fry! Who nominated him as the poster boy for all things Twitter? He was in Blackadder as well you know!
Lots of info about Twitter filtering through. Here’s the first part of an interview with co founder Jack Doresy
Well, another attempt at nonsensical advert took another step to weirdness. Cadbury’s now known for two ads of last year including the drumming monkey which unfortunately allowed Phil Collins to re-issue the track to commit more crimes against decent music. Also, the not too popular airport transport trucks. Well, here’s their latest Cadbury’s eyebrow ad:-
What do I think of it? I don’t like it. I feel its trying to desperately wave its arms in the air trying to attract attention. It seems a little weird for weird sake. In this day in age when advertising spend is likely to decrease would these type of ads survive the current downturn.
The original and best ad. We don’t need no eyebrows:
This was an interesting one touted as ‘My Secret Weapon’ on the conference agenda. The main focus was buying sites and domains to give your own efforts a boost in the rankings. First up was Richard Kershaw of qualitynonsense.com. He presented his case in a list:
Why does he do it?
To Gain Links
Be on topic
Deals with competition
Grow your links faster
The good news is that all the tools to by sites are in the public domain and expensive ones are only optional. He noted that quality sites rarely change hands but warned that it is best to buy undervalued sites rather than the cheap sites. Owners will tend to overvalue their property when dealing with them so be prepared to haggle.
How to find the right sites?
There are plenty of ways to find sites on the market. Look at bankruptcy notices. Locate sites in DMOZ and find those hub sites. Look at your competitor’s back links and use paid tools like Syntryx.
The approach will not be easy…
Like with link building in general, most of it involve relationship building. Use the phone to make a call directly to the owner otherwise the primary method of communications would have to be done via email. Try not to mention about money straight away but be tenacious. The objective at the start of a conversation would be gain trust with the owner. Make sure you get to see traffic data. When the time comes make the deal make a firm offer and make it easy to do business.
Don’t get scammed
Move quickly once the deal is in its closing stages. You should make sure that a trusted doamin registrar is involved. Be careful not to get influenced by the more colourful characters - you can use escrow.com as an intermediate. It is best not to trust anybody untill the domain is in your hands.
How important is a domain?
You can raise the sales by 30% just by buying an old domain. Think about the legacy of a domain if you are buying. URLs could have been banned or be associated with negativity (ex-porn URLs)
Dave Naylor
Naylor seems to disagree with Kershaw in that emails are not the suitable for contacting. Contacting should be done through telephone. He states that traffic and on theme topicality are much more important than PageRank.
Be aware of the following:-
Age of Site
Quailty of site
Traffic
Rankings
Price
Beaware that Google algorithms will look out for the passing of WHOis information. It will reset you very quickly if you leave tracks.
First up to speak on Day 2 was Lyndon Antley. His approach was dubbed the ‘Psycho Way’ and the story was very familiar. Lyndon described Psychological hook that works on a subconscious level. He reflected that when it works it can bring lots of valuable links. He cited his piece about the 13 yr old who got hold of a credit card and invited several escorts in to his home to play Xbox. The story ignited getting press from the likes of The Sun and national coverage. The story was in fact 100% untrue and Lyndon stated that it was notified in the actual. So what made it viral? It excited people on a fundamental level. This is what we want to happen. Buying an opportunity to link to something – Emotion is important. He summerized the concept of the story: Boy 13 – Boy discovers girls – Some thing deep within him awakes. Quite dramatic in description but effective nonetheless. Other factors included sexy women, Political correctness gone mad and Pizza delivery (related with convenicnce / downtime / happy times). He said that to write these stories you have to accept that they have to be simple. Take for instance a cleaning carpet firm, a story could be cleaning blood from a carpet in 10minutes. Good for assassins? Or Lyndon got back to the Xbox story and 13 year old cleans carpet in 24hr strip joint; his words!
Next up , Tom Critchlow. Straight off, donating to charities can actually gain you links from Charity websites. If you are a big client then that would be an instant link as long as it does not take a form of a advertisement.
Find and use expired high PR pages to build links. The only issue is that you have to email the webmaster to update the page in question. Usually it can happen but sometimes in cases where you have no such luck, you have to resort to mineing the page for all its back links. How do you go about finding these? Use Google and tap in your chosen sector and ‘Page no longer available’ Companies that have gone out of business are a source. Buying websites where company has sold off assets. Blogs that are not updated can be a target for link builders although difficultly will be the contacting.
On the manual side of link building, try viral stories much like Lyndon recommeded. Online communities such as Forums are gold mines for linkers as they are built up of closely knit communities. You can test links and sites in such forums to gauge opinions. Of course, don’t spam.
Jay Young continued the discussion with the following points:
On traditional link build
Create believeable site
Do not include a telephone
Privatize the whois
Do not disclose your site
Create a profile page for each link for each link builder and use an attractive person.
On Paid links; how to get them:-
Use the telephone if possible
Lowball the price
Ask webmaster to introduce you to potential partners
Offer incentives
Trade products
Focus on .edus domains. sometimes they are maintained by students and are therefore not as closely monitored. Use Google Trends and Insights to determine the best places for links. Make news of big press releases, new product lines and quarterly reports.
On the subject of paid links in general, don’t let it form the main focus of any SEO link building campaign. The majority should come from organic link building as well, as we all know the consequencies from Google on the matter of too many paid links!
I decided to go for the presentation about Persona models in Search marketing having had a slight inkling that this one may hold some interesting advice. I have to say the hall in which this presentation took place looked prepped for a State banquet. I wasn’t too sure about if this was all that necessary considering the hall was half empty. Anyway, the presentation was kicked off by Jonathan Beeston. It seemed a bit vague to be honest talking much about developing personas into categories and seeing what different brands they engaged in. I guess this served the purpose of introducing the next two speakers.
Finlay Clark was on hand to discuss the bigmouthmedia approach (I got one of those chattering teeth things at last). Why do you build persona. Well, according to Mr Clark, you have to know your audience better, increase brand loyalty and build on sales. It is important to give your personas names such as ‘Working parent’ , ‘Business traveller’ or ‘Student gamer’ and so forth. Assign attributes to these people; do they have a High or low value to the brand? You’ll need to identify vital search characteristics about the personas such as would they use different search terms either plural or singular? Next one must identify the right Keywords for these personas. Finally, understand something about the what media influences your personas. Test your creative messages on different personas and see how they react. There was a lot to take in on this presentation and I unfortunately missed the parts on ‘Propensity to defer (deference cycle) and ‘Propensity to search via Proxy’. I’ll have to look around to see if anyone else took notes on this part.
Next up, Will Critchlow from Distilled. Will broke down the process of models in three parts: Tribal, Dialect and Validating. He stressed the model was a simplification of the real world and not one that is exact. You as a marketeer, must understand that you must empathise with the customer. Understanding how the persona will interpret the world andyour brand is key. For instance, age plays a part in what you call an object or thing. Will stressed that users , in general are bad at using search engines simply because they can’t be specific about anything. Finally the one bit of advice that rang true, is that you have to go out and meet your customer. get feedback directly from them and that will be the key to a successful campaign.
The q&a session followed, where Will kindly offered more advice. He said start small when working out your persona. Beware, persona research may fail if you are optimising for a vague keyword which can apply to more then one persona. To solve this, the landing page could be less ambiguous with a choice menu like what kind of person are you?
International SEO
Having thought this morning’s presentation about Global search was about the technical efforts on getting pages ranked in local search engines, I managed to get it right this time round. Key statements from speakers: Andy Atkins -Kruger and Duncan Morris are as follows:
Duncan Morris said the purpose of targeting local search engines was clear:
1. Increase traffic
2. Target new markets
3. Decrease bounce rate
4. Improve your conversions.
The biggest sticking point is of course TLDs. He certainly doesn’t favour redirecting users based on IP address. Understandable as you could be searching in a foreign country and then all of sudden find yourself in the Russian version of the site. There was some debate over whether it was better to use subfolders coming off an authoritative ‘quality’ domain or going down the ccTLD route. It was an interesting debate but I think the ccTLD argument won as it was backed up by research. Anyway, Duncan favoured the former approach for example www.ikea.com/us for American content. His reasoning was all the link juice flows back to one domain. He’s certainly not a fan of subdomaining. However, ultimately the question was what do you have on the homepage? Certainly local TLDs will be harder for link builders and still there could be the possiblity of duplicate content. In terms of content optimisation, it is always important to have a physical address on every page., make sure your backlinks are country specific and of course use webmaster central tools to specifiy a region.
Andy offered his 10 ‘low hanging fruit’ methods to optimise for International sites:
Use keyword rich URLS - Translate them if necessary
Source local links
Use a smart geographic selector - Drop down menus of countries
Expert keyword research - from a local speaker
Local hosting - Apparently it was not as important as you may think!
Language content and presentation
Andy clearly favoured the ccTLD route as he was sure evidence said people from other countries do not use .com by default but .fr in France or .es in Spain etc. His final bit of advice was to pilot test in a small country first. Sounds reasonable.
That was it for Day One of SMX London and it was a serious head blast. Lots of info to take in all round. Some interesting points raised particularly in the afternoon session. Definitely worth some kind of follow up from myself.
The day pretty much started off in a rather unspectacular fashion. The keynote had no big fanfare and everybody was crammed into a largish hall to hear Chris Sherman open up SMX London 2008. I may have missed something but Microsoft opened up proceedings with a long talk about Excel 2007 and Webmaster Tools. Considering the very small portion of MSN searchers in the UK, I found it odd that Microsoft will even try to push their tools on us SEOs. No mater here’s a round up on what was said:-
First Up - Zhaohui Tang, who was responsible for building the Keyword engine feature in Excel 2007. He expressed that the data was more open then ever before with additional nod to open source development with APIs. Excel 2007s own format hasn’t really changed much but the KW tools allow spread sheets of volumes and forecasts for KWs. It will time slice and even show demographic data. Interesting presentation but is it worth the upgrade to Excel 2007? I doubt anyone will clamour for it.
Nathan Buggia then came onto the stage to present Webmaster center. Essentially Google’s webmaster tools offering with a Microsoft twist. Again, how useful is it with a low take up of the search engine. Well, there are a few pointers as to what the big ‘M’ are looking for when determining the quality of a website. Five big issues will stop your pages being crawled namely, 404s, Malware, Robots Exclusion and long dynamic URLs. Nathan also went a little bit into what Microsoft likes best namely Relevance (surprise!). On taking questions, mobile web came up where Microsoft’s official line was to wait n see if the UK , smart phone technologycan reach ‘critical mass’.
Nathan’s tip of the day: Figure out your critical metric to reach your ideal goal conversion.
Global Search Universe
Second presentation up for me was Global Search. I wanted to know a little about the conundrum that is international search engines and what faces SEOs like us to get around those problems like TLDs. However, what I got was various stats about internet usage. Interesting to know so I’ll run off a few interesting pointers. Firstly, Europe is a dominant player when it comes to online users; over 140 million of us Europeans and that’s 2.5 times larger then Asia. Howver, an emerging usership is starting to appear in parts of Africa and the Middle East, growing at a pace of over 1000%. When it comes to domain registration, China is certainly taking a bigger slice of the pie.
Of course, search engines play a huge part in the global online expansion but Google itself is only rules in Western Europe and the States. The speaker, Andy Atkins Kruger, other local SEs dominate in various niches.
Get these stats:
Yahoo! Search is the number 1 in Japan
Naver is hugely popular in South Korea
Eastern Europe is fragmented into the following:
1. Rndex
2. Seznam
3. Nadji
4. Net Sprint
Baidu, of course is the biggest player in China. One interesting fact about Chinese search is the fact that the Chinese keyboard can have 15 methods of inputting characters. The French keyboard is also different and users of search engines are more inclined to drop accented characters.
Certainly tactics can change when approaching online marketing in local countries. It was recommended that engaging the audience through Global PR was the first course of action, then PPC, then SEO. Why? Because PPC may well be cheaper than going strictly down the SEO route for all its complexities.
Next up Robin Goad from those guys at Hitwise. Nothing much to raise an eyebrow at in general but speaking on a top level, websites are in fact becoming much more reliant on SEs. Interesting tidbit was that branded word search is on the increase: 6% in 2005 and now 88% in 2008. 9 in 10 searches through SEs are actually branded terms. There is also a downward trend in Long tail. The example cited was ‘Applae Crumbe’ v ‘Apple crumble recipe’. Maybe the UK are becoming less savvy or even lazy? Another factoid was that Google Images was actually a more popular search engine then Yahoo! in the UK. That was stunning news but it kind of made me feel sorry for the previous MS speakers to know that Live was probably nowhere to be seen. The last slice of knowledge from Hitwise was that video sites like YouTube are on the up. With blended search in Google, users are more likely to be clicking on vvideo results that text results.
Last up was Linus Gregoriadis from eConsultancy with some news for SEMs and the prospects of PPC in a recession. Certainly clients will be interested in knowing exactly what ROI is being delivered with tight marketing budgets. Google is definitely the biggest player in PPC but of course it’s dominance will concern many. The main worry for PPC consultants would ultimately be raising CPC costs affecting over all ROI. With SEO, it is a different story. The pitfalls faced will be lack of resources to implement SEO recommendations which lead onto budgetary problems. All I say about this point is at the end of the day if you want better results you’ll have to pay for them. Unfortunately, that is not a message for which all clients will normally heed.
