SEO WORLD NEWS

Posted by randfish

It’s common for people to enter a new year with a resolution, but this year, I thought I’d try something entirely new (and probably overflowing with hubris) and assign New Year’s resolutions to the big players in the search market. Thus, without further ado…

Google should resolve to:

• Build more search demand with the money they’ve amassed. At 70-75% of market share, their focus in engineering should be, jointly, on improving quality (which is already very high) and continue experimenting with new ideas for the SERPs (and beyond). More importantly, though, is to make search an even more essential part of life - and second nature to more of the human race. I still know plenty of tech savvy folks who don’t instantly think "I should search for that" when questions arise - through marketing, advertising or other creative outlets, Google should work to capture those minds.
• Clone Matt Cutts and find others like him. Matt does a brilliant job of representing Google to an exceptionally antagonistic community. Google’s other products need their own Matt and web search needs another dozen of him. My advice would be to select individuals who are already cut out for the work, rather than hiring public relations experts and sending them through press training - that’s not the way Google should want to be perceived and it could hurt them in the long run to craft their image rather than remain au natural. Oh yeah - and get them to blog and comment as openly and candidly as Matt does.
• End the paid links debate of 2007 by responding to all the issues with a few sentences. Something like

Feel free to link however you like for whatever reasons you like. Use nofollow as you please or ignore it if you’d prefer. Google was built on an open concept of the web and we will not ever tell you how to run your business or your site. For Google’s rankings process, we use a lot of different signals to help tell us how to weight links. Links that we perceive to be less valuable, either because of how they were acquired, the relationships between the linking parties or a lack of relevance may be weighted lower, or possibly discounted altogether. If you use nofollow to show us which links present a potential conflict of interest (paid links, comment spam, etc.) we certainly appreciate it, but we also build algorithmic methods to sniff out and discount links we’d prefer not to count. If you see the PageRank in your toolbar drop, that’s just our method of letting potential buyers of links on your site know that they might want to save their money - we’re not penalizing you or the sites you link to, just removing links from our graph that we don’t think are valuable to the ranking algorithms.

Yahoo! should resolve to:

• Win back searcher’s hearts and minds through advertising, branding, guerrilla marketing and creativity. Their search is nearly as good as Google’s for 80%+ of queries and probably better for a fair 10% (the other 10% is considerably worse, but that’s for engineering to handle). They need their users to start thinking about them as a search destination again. Create a story - make it resonate - make it compelling - make it so my grandmother hears about it from her friends, not just her TV.
• Take a bold leap with blended search, possibly along the lines of what Ask 3D has done. Remind us that YouTube isn’t the only video site on the web and that Flickr really is the best image search out there.
• Buy Yelp or CitySearch and make Yahoo! local a superior product to what Google has - it’s not that much of a challenge, but it will be if you wait too long.
• Buy Technorati and make a Yahoo! blog search that’s better than Google’s. Once again, it’s not hard to do now, but when Google turns their energy towards blog search, it will pay to be a few steps ahead.

Microsoft should resolve to:

• Let Live/MSN Search loose from Microsoft corporate. Build the division the same way you built Xbox - as a completely separate company of innovators and fresh minds. Don’t let the Microsoft hierarchy or corporate structure or even the aesthetics overlap. Just let it sink or swim on its own (with lots of funding of course).
• Spend double the marketing and advertising budget (whatever that may be) on engineering. The product itself is still so far behind that it’s not usable. Yes, there have been tremendous leaps, particularly in the last 6 months, but no matter what the user survey satisfaction numbers are saying, the relevance still isn’t up to Yahoo!’s and Google’s. Advertising and contests earned you a little bit of extra share and plenty of extra searches in 2007, but you’re a long-term kinda company, so think long term. Invest in the product quality now and market it later. Or heck, do both - you’re sitting on a mountain of cash reserves and it’s hard to imagine a project with more potential return.
• Change the name back to MSN. It’s one of the most recognized brands on the planet - I love that Live was going to be something completely new, but there’s still time to re-brand without losing anything.

Ask should resolve to:

• Get a crawl rate and index size similar to Google’s. It’s hard to tell how good their algorithms and vertical integration is with such a small slice of the pie. The rumor that Ask hand-approves websites runs rampant in the SEO community - end it by investing in the hardware and the people to make a truly competitive index.
• Make an iPhone-like interface. As the search company with the greatest ability to innovate the results page, go for broke and make something so inspiring to use that every tech geek in the world can’t wait to show it off. BTW - A good place to start is by making a gorgeous mobile search interface for the iPhone itself. Capturing those early adopters worked for Google, and it can work for you.

p.s. Credit where credit is due - this post was actually Mystery Guest’s idea. Thanks angel, it’s really tough getting back on the blog bandwagon after so much time off

p.p.s. Happy New Year!

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With the New Year Comes a clean slate: a chance for change and for Improvement.

For many of you that will mean a new years resolution or two. If your resolutions require a certain degree of willpower, commitment, or persistence (such as quitting smoking, getting in shape, losing weight, making more money, learning to program or building your online business) then this method will help you to achieve your goals.

Now, to achieve big goals, the most important thing is to break those goals down into manageable steps. Then break down what you need to do into a daily tasks.

This system requires that you go out and buy a thick magic marker and one of those large calendars to hang on your wall where you will see it every day. Don’t go thinking you’re all clever and try to “make an app for it” or do it on Google calendar or Outlook. Just buy the damn calendar and marker. It’s proven. It works.

Every day that you complete your tasks, you put an X on the calendar. Then after a few days you’ll have a small chain of Xs on the calendar. Keep it up.

Don’t break the chain.

You see, it’s easy to do things one day at a time or one moment at a time. That’s the secret of maintained willpower. As long as you don’t break the chain today, you’ll be fine (because tomorrow you can tell yourself the same thing).

Don’t break the chain.

It’s easy to have a “moment of weakness” without something like the chain there to remind you. If you skip one day, it’s too easy to skip the next. So don’t skip that first day!

Don’t break that chain.

That attitude of “I don’t need to work out today” or “I can have just one cigarette tonight” or “I don’t need to build any links today” or “maybe I can go without Posting today” really feels stupid when you realize that you’d be breaking that long chain that you’ve worked so hard to build.

Don’t break the chain.

Keep the chain going and your life improving habits will become a part of you. It’s easy to accomplish your goals if you take them one day at a time. As long as you know what you need to do daily to achieve your goals (and you do it!) you can do just about anything you set your mind to.

Don’t break the chain.

There are a thousand clichés or quotes I could throw in here like “slow and steady wins the race”, “Every long journey begins with the first step” or “Nothing can take the place of persistence” and they’re all true. People always tell you to be persistent, but they never tell you how. Now you know the how is easy. Just:

Don’t break the chain.

Posted by randfish

For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description  of a page’s content. It creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:

The NFL’s homepage features the title tag "Official Site of the National Football League"

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing software, but this location has been noted to receive a relatively small amount of attention from users, making it the least important of the three.

"National Football League" appears in bold at the top of the search result listing for www.nfl.com

Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will "bold" (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.

Keyword Use in the Title Tag (from Search Engine Ranking Factors)

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden title tags is for ranking at the search engines. The above screenshot comes from SEOmoz’s survey of 37 influential thought leaders and practitioners in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:

• Be Mindful of Length - 65 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis - "…" to indicate when a title tag has been cut off), and sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you’re targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.
• Place Important Keywords Close to the Front - The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they’ll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results (at least, according to SEOmoz’s testing and experience).
• Leverage Branding - At SEOmoz, we love to start every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach - think about what matters to your site (or your client’s) and
• Consider Readability and Emotional Impact - Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it’s to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor’s first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible.

For more advice on title tag optimization, see this post from SEOmoz - Best Practices for Title Tags.

Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website’s content. Each of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use:

• Meta Robots
  This tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major engines) on a page level (for site-wide spider control, the robots.txt file is a better choice). There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page:
  • Index/NoIndex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines’ index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary. 
  • Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
  • Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results.
  • Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page’s title and URL in the search results.
  • NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
  • NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results

  SYNTAX: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, NOODP">

  The tag above would tell spiders to index the page, refrain from archiving a copy while following the links and refraining from using DMOZ as a description in the search results.

• Meta Description
  The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results:

  
  The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords (notice how Google "bolds" the searched keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.

  Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters (as in the Balboa Park example above), so it’s generally wise to stay in these limits.

  SYNTAX: <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="YOUR PAGE’S DESCRIPTION">

  For more on meta description tags, see Making the Most of Meta Description Tags from the SEOmoz blog.

• Meta Keywords

  The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization. For more on the history and a full acount of why meta keywords has fallen in disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.

• Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-After, Meta Content Type, etc. - although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the process and so I’ll leave them to John Mueller of Google’s Webmaster Central division to answer in greater detail - Meta Tags & Web Search.

URL Structures

URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations, including:

Above, the green text shows the URL for SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents and those pages whose names include the queried serach terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

The URL as it appears in the browser window

URLs make an appearance in the web browser’s address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.

The URL above is used as the link anchor text pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.

URLs are frequently utilized as links by third parties, and as such, carry anchor text that is interpreted by search engines and users alike. Short, descriptive, compelling, keyword-laden URLs can thus provide both click-through and search ranking benefits.

Below are several guidelines to construct great URLs:

• Employ Empathy
  Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you’d expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don’t need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.
• Shorter is Better
  While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc) and fully visible in the search results.
• Keyword Use is Important (but Overuse is Dangerous)
  If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don’t go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes - overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search engines, and even people!).
• Go Static
  With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, there’s no excuse not to create simple, static URLs. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing (SEOmoz itself switched from dynamic URLs - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog?id=123, to static URLS - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, in 2007 and saw a 15% rise in search traffic over the following 6 weeks).
• Choose Descriptives Whenever Possible
  Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words. For example, a URL like www.thestore.com/hardware/screwdrivers is far more usable and valuable than www.thestore.com/cat33/item4326.
• Use Hyphens to Separate Words
  Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL, as in the SEOmoz 11 Best Practices for URLs example above.

For more information about URL Structure, see the SEOmoz post - 11 Best Practices for URLs.

Sorry I’ve been away from the blog so long. I needed a break, and am finally getting a bit of a real holiday. SEOmoz is closed tomorrow (New Year’s Eve) and Tuesday (New Year’s Day), but we’ll be back up and running Wednesday, January 2nd and are looking forward to bringing you more great stuff in the New Year.

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Posted by rebecca

I hate MySpace, but then again, so does most everyone else. It’s not news or anything, but it’s just after Christmas and posting is light lately, so I thought I’d get this out of the way before the new year hits and Rand’s bugging me to put up actual, relevant posts.

Anyway, I created an account a few years ago, and within the last year I’ve been letting my account awkwardly hang out by the punch bowl while I make out in a corner with Facebook. Today I logged in for the first time in eons, and I was so frustrated with the experience that I felt the need to share it with my other MySpace-haterz. So, in no particular order, here are things that I hate about MySpace:

1. It takes eons to load anything. What the crap? I have a cable modem, and it feels like I’m back in 1999 trying to download an Our Lady Peace song on a dialup connection. Why the heck does it take forever to load anything on MySpace? I was trying to load a user’s image, for crying out loud, and it went something like this:
   • Click on "Album"
   • Click on first photo
   • Wait
   • Refresh
   • Wait
   • FIrst photo loads
   • Click on photo to see second photo
   • Wait
   • Wait
   • Wait
   • Click "Refresh" eighteen times
   • Blank page loads
   • Raise fists towards the heavens and curse the visual STD that is MySpace
2. Every 3rd click brings up some "internal error." It’s ridiculous.

   

3. Photo albums don’t give you a "Image 1 of x" status, so I click aimlessly through someone’s album until I realize that I’ve rounded the bend and am 1/3 through it again.
4. I don’t receive any more emails notifying me when I have a new friend request, new comment, or new anything. I understand that it’s a ploy to get you to log in regularly to see if you’ve gotten anything new, but I don’t do that because I largely hate the site, so unless I get some sort of heads up ("Hey Rebecca, we know you hate our site, but your friend just posted a comment so maybe you want to take a looksee"), I’ll continue to only log in once every few months to spy on folks I went to high school with (which is the only semi-useful thing MySpace is good for).
5. It’s made a half-ass attempt to emulate Facebook while still looking as ugly as Michael Douglas between facelifts. I’ve noticed that MySpace has added "Friend Updates" and the ability to tag people in photos, but it feels slapped together and is still wedged between blinking ads, AdSense, crappy featured profiles, and other nausea-inducing atrocities.
6. I’m in my extended network? If I look at my profile page, it says "rebecca is in your extended network." Uh, yeah, I know that because I’m Rebecca, and that profile you’re showing me is actually mine. Meanwhile, Facebook is smart enough to know when you’re looking at your own profile, and thus it personalizes your profile page with things like "What are you doing right now?", "View photos of me," etc.
7. All of the junk I don’t care about is front and center on my profile page. To the left is my profile picture, and to the right is a huge ad, "Cool new videos," a "Featured Profile," and "MySpace Links" I don’t give a rat’s ass about. There’s also "Sponsored Links" and a "Featured on Myspace: Comedy," all on my page. This kind of feels like MySpace’s page that they’re graciously allowing me to use a teeny part of. I will acknowledge that I use the "classic" view (the "new home skin" isn’t much better–it looks like a cheap Facebook knockoff and shoves all of the ads and crap to the left column) because I don’t give a damn about customizing my profile, seeing as how all of the "customized" profiles adrift in the MySpace Sea are akin to loud, obnoxious, fuschia colored, blinking Christmas light-adorned party cruises, while mine is a boring but smooth-sailing and sturdy rowboat.
8. The "New birthdays!" notification basically shows me any and all birthdays, past, present, and future, within a half-month radius. Today it showed me Scott’s birthday, which was about 10 days ago, CK Chung’s birthday, which was December 12, and my friend Kevin’s birthday, which was December 11. It wouldn’t surprise me if my friends are getting a "New birthday!" notification informing them that mine is just around the corner on August 6th.

I’d post more complaints, but frankly this site isn’t worth any more of my time. I know that some of you will undoubtedly post in the comments various ways I can fix #4 or how I can tweak #7 or whatever, but while I could feasibly fix a couple of these things on my own, the bulk of it is MySpace’s offense, and it’s really infuriating that they put out a sloppy service and aren’t on the ball about making positive changes to their site’s look, functionality, and user experience. I don’t care how many people use MySpace or how successful it is right now–I think they could really stand to improve their site if they want to retain even more of a userbase.

Oh, and I’m sorry for ranting, but someone emailed me a while back and complained to me that 1/10 of my posts are of a negative or complaining nature, and I thought "Hmm, that’s only 10%. Surely I can keep that going." So, in order to meet my internal quota, here’s the negative post. Happy Friday, everyone!

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Posted by great scott!

Well folks, Christmas is past but we’re here with the gift that keeps on giving: Another installment of Whiteboard Friday! To round out our last episode of 2007, we brought our good friend and search industry celebrity, Vanessa Fox, into Whiteboard studios to talk about Vertical Search (or Search 3.0, if you will).

Vertical, Blended, Shaken, Stirred…however you like your search results mixed, this aspect is one that is becoming increasingly more important in our industry. As the engines work harder to integrate results, it offers tremendous opportunities (and challenges) in getting different content media for the same site to rank for target terms.

In the video, Vanessa and Rand discuss the results they found at the different engines for the search "britney videos" (no, I haven’t bothered to ask). The screencaps below the videos show the difference in the results offered up by Google and Ask, respectively. As you’ll see, Ask is way more integrated (in fact, blended results seem to be their primary marketing focus), whereas Google suffers a bit, despite the presence of non-thumbnail YouTube links in the SERP.  Vanessa also mentions that the engines are all integrating their results because - while us savvy folk know to click the Image or Video or Shopping tabs to find targeted content - average users don’t even acknowledge the existence of specialized search tabs.

Without further ado, here’s the video (broken into two parts because YouTube will not hook me up with an account that allows segments over 10 minutes long).

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Posted by rebecca

It’s time for another roundup! This week was a bit slow going due to the holidays, but nevertheless there were still some happenings throughout the web. Oh, and every week I’ll be sure to also include what happened the Friday and Saturday before the start of the new week; otherwise, those days will slip through the cracks.

That being said…

New editions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO product manager, SEM planner, and search marketing specialist for All Star Directories in Seattle, WA

Featured companies:

• Asia SEO Guru
• Comet Conversion
• Alliance Search Marketing

Featured resumes:

• Yelena Shapiro
• Jay Kaplan
• Sivaprasad Gunji

New events added to the Events Calendar:

• OMCAR 2008

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• The NY Times has a piece about how blogging is a low-cost, high return marketing tool. While I agree with the article stating that blogging isn’t suited for everyone, I disagree that it’s not recommended for the majority of businesses out there. I think that, with a good writer, any industry or business can have a blog. Many blog readers and Linkerati elite are thirsty for information–just look at some of the random stuff that gets on Digg. Yes, tons of blogs are technology-laden, but there are still plenty of niche blogs that do well because they offer a clever twist or certain insight that makes them unique.
  
• Barry Schwartz reports that Sam’s Club offers search engine optimization services on their website. No words on whether you have to buy a 24-pack of SEO, or if it’s located between the bulk spam aisle and the free sample lady. (Get it? A spam joke! Gimme a break, I’m still recovering from the holidays.)
  
• Over at Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox takes a look at each search engine’s webmaster support forums. It’s a general runthrough of what each engine offers, what topics they discuss, how long they’ve been around, and all that good stuff.
  
• Rand and Vanessa were on the Good Karma show on Webmaster Radio. Here’s a link to her post on Vanessa Fox Nude, and also a link to the .mp3 format if you want to give it a listen (I recommend curling up in front of a fire with a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate while listening to the soothing sounds of the Fishkin and the Fox as they chat about nerdy SEO stuff).
  
• Quantcast put out a list of the U.S.’s top 100 websites, along with whether or not each site accepts advertising on it. I’m amazed that Geocities is still ranked highly (at #39)–insert animated .gif/frames joke here.
  
• Advertising online is still a fairly unknown prairie, so it’s interesting to find out that this study deduced that ads in online shows work better than ads on TV. This is exciting news for all of us advertisers out there who have to repeatedly explain to our friends and relatives that we do "marketing, but online" and then have to watch their eyes glaze over.
  
• For all you Americans out there, the United States is expected to hit a population of over 303 million by January of ‘08. Also, Nevada is the fastest growing state. Can you say Viva, vivaaaaa Nevadaaaaaa!
  
• Read Write Web has a great list of 36 startup tips. Though a lot of them may seem basic, the fact that the list is so comprehensive and covers all of the bases, from general things that you may forget to other aspects that you might not have even thought about, warrants this post a hefty five moz stars. Anyone considering venturing off and forming a startup should peruse this checklist of helpful hints.
  
• As Rand put it, this one’s an oldie but a goodie. It’s an article about the "myth of the market share," and about how focusing too much on your competition can actually hurt you. I’d like to think of it as the White Whale Syndrome, but it’s a really fascinating read and a good reminder that there is always a point where enough is enough, and that one shouldn’t focus his efforts on solely one thing, or he’ll risk damaging other areas.
  

That’s about it for this week. We hope you all had a safe and happy holiday with your friends and loved ones, and be sure to have a kickin’ new year, everybody!

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Posted by JaneCopland

I want to get a new telephone. There is really nothing wrong with the one I have right now: it’s been dropped a couple of (ten) times and I once dropped it into Lake Union. It dried. It calls other phones, receives calls and text messages, and it fits nicely in pockets and purses. But it doesn’t do Internet, and that’s not acceptable. Too often, I’m away from my computer and I want to look something up online. Often, my desire to use the Internet is driven by offline marketing that is aimed at Internet users.

As a consumer, offline marketing doesn’t mean as much to me as it will when I’m equipped to take advantage of it. However, there are already millions of people walking around our cities with iPhones, Blackberries and similar mobile devices who can look up the URLs they see while they’re away from a desktop or a laptop. Offline marketing is only going to become more important with the increased popularity of mobile technology. As Rob Kerry wrote a few days ago, many instances of offline marketing could be executed better. Writing about how the advertising on trains is aiming to have people convert online, Rob says, "99.999% of people travelling into/out-of London will use the internet regularly and most likely go online within minutes of leaving the train, at either work or home" Increasingly, people aren’t even waiting to get home. The "what’s that about?" question can be answered while they’re still sitting in front of the advertisement.

It is no secret that one of my favourite forms of offline viral marketing is Acquisio.com’s t-shirts. Simple, bold, well-designed and funny, no one at SMX Seattle didn’t want one of them. I can’t go a day wearing mine without someone asking me what shit I hate doing and where I got the shirt. You can’t wear a t-shirt online, but the company gained links, built their brand and acquired notoriety as a result of the offline campaign. The shirts were also strangely relevant to their company’s product: Agustin Vazquez-Levi explains in his blog post that they "(offer) ad agencies a solution for PPC management and the monthly reporting to clients… because we know they hate doing that shit manually. To make this perfectly clear, we decided to give out t-shirts to help people communicate this frustration, while offering them the solution."

If I didn’t know who created the t-shirts and saw someone wearing one, I may well be tempted to get out my (currently imaginary) Blackberry and look up "i hate doing this shit shirt" on a search engine. Agustin’s post ranks first. For the term "i hate doing this shit," the post ranks third. And don’t The Lisa, Susan and Curtis look stunning!

Some offline marketing campaigns are more obvious in their intent. DirtyBeach is comprised of a group of people who sit beside the Thames and create sand sculptures. Perched on a couch made of sand, the artists include their MySpace and Facebook URLs in their displays.

They claim to have also registered a domain, dirtybeach.tv, but the website currently does not load. Without a presence online, this group would be too easily forgotten as an amusing aside when one is wandering along the waterfront. While only a small percentage of people will think to look the group up later, virtually no one would ever think of looking them up with a search engine if their social networking URLs were not available. Similarly, a clever advertisement, seen by commuters on their way to work, is less useful if the ad gives them no way to follow up online.

Offline Internet marketing hasn’t developed the bad reputation that it has online. While Diggers bemoan the denigration of their precious website at the hands of marketers and linkbaiters and claim that SEOs have "ruined search engines", no one complains when a clever commercial - paid or not - includes a URL. While I smile when I see a piece of obvious linkbait becoming popular at a social news service, I love it even more when I see offline advertising that blatantly aims to draw people to the Internet. As Rob points out when he talks about the visibility of contact information, it’s tougher to get people to a website when they can’t just click on a link: you have to pay even more attention to the branding and prominence of URLs. How do you get people to link to something if they don’t know or can’t remember its address? Even someone using a mobile device could forget a domain name as soon as they get off the train or walk past the billboard.

Getting people to remember your website’s address when they discovered it offline is either made easier or harder with the introduction of alternative TLDs. I’m not sure which. The conundrum is obvious: competitive keywords suddenly become more accessible, but do you think your mum will remember the .info, .tv, .mobi and .biz TLDs she saw on a billboard? Or will she try and look up the domain names using ".com?" When you’re going to use offline marketing, this type-in problem becomes much more important.

Even my father now has a phone with good web capabilities. When people for whom the Internet was never much more than Yahoo! Mail can get online and look for the interesting thing they saw on their way to work, offline marketing for online purposes changes. You want your URL to be easy to remember, whether the domain be a business’s premier website or one developed exclusively for the ad campaign. You want to rank first for whatever catchphrase, keyword or slogan you’re pushing. You want whatever genre you’re using to be interesting enough to catch the attention and warrant the time of people who are used to seeing ads whenever they look up.

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ho, Ho, HO!

SEOmoz inspired me today. It’s not just traffic. It’s what you do with it.Yes, we’ve heard it all before… traffic development is just one piece of the puzzle. Can you convert that traffic into sales? newsletter signups? blog subscribers? Can you convert it into ca$h money?

If you’re anything like me, you don’t completely ignore monetization. You spend maybe 5 days a year on it. (The other 360 are spent on building traffic via social media, SEO, etc.) In reality, this split should be more like 80/20. Or even–gasp–50/50!

The trouble is, the SEO’s skillset doesn’t really lend itself to a monetization mindset. As a traffic developer, I look at building an authority site like it’s an Epyptian pyramid where every good link is a single brick… slow and steady wins the race, and focus on the links, links, links.

But this sort of focus has its downside. To maximize revenues, you have to think of your Web site as a business… a business which is a constantly shifting experiment (thanks Squirrel).

“But my site has 1,000 variables. I don’t have the time, software or expertise to revise, test and optimize them all!”

Relax, friend. That’s fine. The good news is, chances are your site monetization has a ton of ‘low hanging fruit’… you can probably work on this for six weeks, and triple your conversion rate, before you run out of ‘easy’ stuff to do.

So if you’re a lazy, monetization-challenged SEO like me, please act on the following five steps, and find out what your real conversion rate is:

1. Conduct a basic conversion rate audit. Conversion Rate Experts have 101 “quick n dirty” points on their conversion checklist. A lot of these points take 20 minutes to implement (for instance: add a testimonial; add a hacker-safe logo; use bullet points near the end of the copy; etc.). If you can find even 10 or 15 points to improve from their checklist, your conversions will improve–maybe double–right of the bat.
2. Conduct a basic usability audit. A lot of usability issues won’t be covered in a “conversions guide” like the one above, but they will still certainly affect conversions. You can fix a lot of easy issues yourself by going through a basic usability checklist. Then, have an expert consultant go through and catch more subtle issues (make sure to fix the basic issues yourself first, so the expert doesn’t waste their time on stuff you could have figured out anyway). You can get a thorough, conversion-oriented usability audit for as little as $1,000. Following this, your newly usable site will yield even more conversions… I promise.
3. Now comes the fun part: rewrite some key pages and calls to action. Many times the usability audit will uncover some themes which will help you rewrite your homepage/landing page copy and/or other key calls to action. I tend to write copy from a “me perspective”, rather than a “user perspective”, and the usability report will usually tell me where do I this. With this knowledge, I can come up with more user-oriented headlines and copy (benefits over features, overcoming common objections, etc.). If you feel your copywriting skills aren’t up to snuff–or even if they are, and you just want a second opinion–hire some expert help. Again watch your conversions increase, and spend the extra money on coke Apple gadgets self improvement.
4. Test a few design variations of your new and improved copy. Now, if we wanted to get really slick, we could test multiple versions of the copy, each with multiple design variations, etc. But I promised you this was low hanging fruit–and I don’t have much patience–so f*ck that. Take your shiny, polished copy (maybe a short and long version) and have ShoeMoney’s guy whip up 3 variations @ $75 apiece. Feed them into Google Optimizer, gear up your volume for a few days, and bam. Either the best performing version has tripled your original (before-step-1) conversion rate, or I’ll refund you all the money you spent on this blog post!
5. Come to PubCon and get sloshed with me. Now if this list was like every other conversion checklist, step 5 would be “continue to make variations, test and retest.” We have already established however that both of us are lazy SEO’s and have limited patience for this kind of stuff. So, pat yourself on the back, take comfort in the fact that you’ve tripled your conversion rate (and each unique is worth 3x what it was before!), book your ticket to Vegas, and let’s get drunk at PubCon. If you don’t get sick by the end of the night, you didn’t give it your all.

p.s. extra props to myself, for linking actual recommended people for each service I mention… it’s so hard to find good people these days.

I’m 10 weeks in here in Houston, and I’ve found myself referring to CitySearch again and again. I check there first for everything: from delicious Thai restaurants, to reputable Thai massage parlors (Side note: who knew come to this place for “a good time”!!! was a common euphemism?). The point is, I’m not checking any local business’ official Web site, but instead, I’m checking other platforms for third party information. Any business that’s been around for a while will have several reviews.

As users embrace local search in droves, having this “distributed presence” is becoming increasingly important for any local business. The distributed presence is important for national and global businesses, too, but even more so for a firm that gets half its online customer referrals from Google Maps.

Which brings me to the fake reviews. I first began to notice these on hotel reviews at Travelocity:

“I don’t know what the other reviewers are talking about!!! My room was spotless and the decor was beautiful. The management was extremely helpful and gave me everything I could have possibly needed. The nice owner, Lisa, even gave me tips on sightseeing. I can’t believe how cheap their rates are!! Stay here and you won’t regret it!!!!”

*gag*

The fake self-reviews are here, whether you like it or not, and they’re surprisingly pervasive. It’s gotten to the point where half the businesses I check have at least one obviously fake self-review. Generally the only ones I can trust are:

• Negative reviews (these are extremely helpful)
• Mixed reviews (here’s something positive, here’s something negative)
• Tons of reviews (generally the managers only do two or three fake self-reviews, so if I see 47 reviews for a business, I allow myself to trust the “aggregate opinion”)

So, local business owners, if you’re going to do fake reviews (and, let’s be honest, if you own a local business, you probably will), please keep the following tips in mind:

• Don’t end sentences with multiple exclamation points.
• Don’t begin with “I don’t know what those other reviewers were talking about!”
• Don’t refer to the owner or manager by name. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen this happen when it wasn’t a fake review.
• Include a negative or two. They can even be “gentle negatives”. The following does NOT count as a negative: “The only negative I found was the price: it was too cheap!”
• Don’t rate yourself 5 out of 5, or 9-or-10 out of 10. Instead, stick with 4 out of 5 or 8 out of 10.

Instead of:

Mai Thai is my favorite Thai restaurant in Houston! Everything from the chicken pad thai, to the hot and sour soup, to the chef’s specialty “Chicken Curry No Hurry” is absolutely delicious! The decor is wonderful, there are authentic Thai paintings on the wall. I go there at least twice a week, and the owner, Lewis, always says Hi to me and we chat pleasantly for a while. It is a great place to go for a business lunch or even a Friday night date!! Oh, and don’t forget to try the green tea ice cream!!!!! 10/10

Try:

Mai Thai is a pretty decent Thai resaurant for the price. I’ve tried the Pad Thai (good) and the hot and sour soup (average). The lunch crowd is busy but they get you seated fairly quickly. 8/10

The second review will get me in there. The first, not so much. Oh, and for the record, I’m not actually trying to coin FRO as an acronym. I think we have enough silly acronyms, don’t you?