Smart Keywords

The Yahoo! Summit Series Event, “Search: Thinking Outside the Funnel”, was held yesterday and the first Yahoo! Search Light Award was given to RPA for their campaign for Honda Element.

The competition for this inaugural award was tight. Agency.com was nominated for the work they did on the “Miller Beer Run” campaign, that included an entertaining Flash game developed by SkyWorks.
Avenue A/RazorFish was there for their “Love the Double” campaign for Chase Bank. They used an interesting method of nonsearch marketing to drive traffic to search for the campaign (and obviously to ther site directly). Basically they found a spike in searches for various terms when they were used in other media.
The Bob Lutz blog launched by GM Planworks, the inhouse advertsing efforts of General Motors detailled using specific events – like the Detroit annual AutoShow to launch a product and how these events and some direct marketing also leads to extra searching.

The keynote address was given by David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas, who asked the audience “What would you like to see in your ‘future of search’?” – his involved an interpretation of John Battelle’s view of search integration with other media such as TV and Cable. “It is hard to overstate the position of search in online media advertising and advertising to the interested,” he said.
Verklin also mentioned SMS advertising. “Ads on cellphones is a future growth industry”. He told the gathering of SEM agency heads and other high end search spenders that Cara Mobile had been tracking this and that in Asia 39% of cellphone users have received an text message ad and 34% in Europe, while the US trails the space with only around 8%.
His numbers of 92% of people who search for electronics buy offline seemed high, but he called on the audience who had brick and mortar locations to spend a week asking people if they had searched online before buying. To try and just measure online conversion is many cases may be foolish given those types of numbers, he said.
David Karstedt, Senior VP and GM of Yahoo! Direct Business, introduced the event and apart from some minor glitches with the lighting, Ron Bellanger another Yahoo! Senior Director kept the event moving.

Interestingly the award was made by the guys who “Pimp My Ride” – West Coast Customs – who combined a spotlight with some Yahoo! purple. It looked good standing there at the cocktail reception.

The title of this post came from shor – a regular poster over at Search Engine Watch forums – great phrase!

With all the recent posts about Big Mouth Media, BMW.de and Matt Cutts blog entry about Traffic Power there is definitely the need to get a better grasp on penalties and database glitches where sites are temporaily dropped from the SERPs but return in a very short period (hours to a few days).

Big Mouth Media is a great example of wildfire gossip. The site drops from the SERPs and their competitors are all over the forums dropping comments – some even anonomously. They blast about hidden text and cloaking as the cause – funny this was not discovered before the “alledged ban” … maybe the competitors were too busy playing catch up and only had the chance when BMM fell from the rankings … though the extra clients should have kept all these people busy…
BMM were out for just under four days… and the only people that know if Google dropped them and then put them back is Google and BMM…
The speculation though was scary… if it had been 200 years ago in Salem, Mass they would have been burned as witches without any proof….

BMW.de on the otherhand was banned briefly – but they revamped their site and dropped the offending actions and Google respidered them and back they came in under 5 days… they got back because they followed what was needed to be fixed and Google saw they may have done this by poor judgement in people handling their SEO efforts.
Did they use their influence to get back quicker than most – well that one is to be determined – would you have someone look at your site again and see if they can have it spidered if you had the ability (if you answer no you are lying or someone I would not hire).

Traffic Power is an example of a company that should have let their bad press die. The recent lawsuits are just making sure they never get to walk away from the bad image. Making changes are generally not enough and though they have distanced themselves with renaming etc. – they forgot that stirring the pot at the old name just makes others point to where you are hiding…

If Google is using the penalties to bring attention to what they do not want in the organic listings then the Catch and Release program is a success – though I would suggest the instances of obvious witch hunting because of minor temporary tweaks in the datacenters should be indentified just as Traffic Power was identified by Matt Cutts as a penalised site.

The fear of a Google penalty is a big stick. Terri Wells over at SEO Chat has written a detailled article Beware the Google Death Penalty that is well worth the read.

But before we all start looking like peasants with torches storming the “evil castle” – trial by media is an ugly sight – we need to carefully examine motives and actual knowledge. Traffic Power is suing over things published on blogs – allowing anonymous posts to accuse people is a slippery slope and one that may be indefensible if taken to court.

With the rollout of MSN PPC looming in the not too distant future, more people are starting to notice the solid CPA it is offering. An Internet Retailler Report has found that MSN’s PPC is a solid fit for many e-retaillers.

I blogged about the success of MSN PPC in November last year and those numbers have not changed. Yahoo as an aggregate is still second but not by much as Google has improved its conversion numbers (guess they have dropped some of the poor publisher partners).

I have tried four times today to submit one of our sites to Yahoo! directory… guess they don’t want the money.

The following errors were found in your submission:
We were unable to access your web page. Please double-check your URL.
Please correct and resubmit your information below.

Not impressed…. will try later from another computer on another IP and see if that makes a difference. If not I think it is broken and will get in touch with one of their resellers to do the job for me.

MSN is getting serious. The changes they are making to their User Interface are impressive for a program that is still not out of beta.

They have listened to the complaints on the forums and are adding a much easier way to change and get to things. Some of the little widgets they have that Google and Yahoo are not up to speed yet include day parting, sex demographic, and age demographics.

You can choose not to advertise to people of certain ages or sex – though this is limited to the people they know the info on and act as a restricter as opposed to choosing the others as the ones to run ads on.

You can also choose what percentage of these various segments you want ads served to – which comes in handy also.

They have also made some evaluation tools that provide feedback on the keywords by groups that they know of…

If MSN keeps this up they will have the best mousetrap when they roll this out of beta in the next couple of months.

I went to buy a couple of domain names today and was looking for info on international domains – so I pick Network Solutions as a decent starting point. Well they did not have what I wanted so I went to leave and try something else…

What do I get but a pop under or exit console trying to sell be top positions in Google search…. NICE…

Curious I click the link and they send me to an AdWords signup page…. Come guys this is bush league… but I guess if it works they do not care about the bad PR it gives for other visitors…

Okay this meeting should be over by now but I am curious as to what happened.

And why exactly does the US Senate have the right to tell a company what to do when dealing with foreign companies so long as no laws are broken????

Oh that’s right Human Rights.

Now we did’t do that for companies that worked with governments that supported Apartheid, or South American non-Communist dictators that tortured people…

So is the government getting involved to make this aimed at just situations that support our national interests or more to the point their interests?

This is a slippery slope that our country has gone down before. Who plays the McCarthy character this time?

There are always multiple sides to most situations and we need to be careful that the rhetoric of one is not allowed a bigger voice because they carry a bigger stick!

So Seth Grodin noticed it first – at least of the publications I try and read every day – Google is beta testing Pay Per Call.

And as has been noted it is not working…. though I am sure they will be counting the number of telephone numbers each ad and position generated for the days it is down.

Just another optimization process that will now be needed. What type of keywords work best – action words, branded terms, etc… is position a factor as well as the actual copy… I needed another project to add to my schedule…

Interesting that when FindWhat added this it was not a major factor… also Sensis in Australia has it…

I blogged about a discussion I had with one of the tech companies in this space – Estara – not long ago. The technology is really going to change local search I think.

It did not take long for someone to start exploiting the MSN Search and Win campaign.

A poster over at ThreadWatch.org details his hack of the competition, while another posted the list of keywords.

And we wonder why the search engines are ever vigil of us hacking their algorithms and creating clever cheats to improve SERP ranking…..

Protesters around the world took aim at Google today and using the Valentine’s Day theme displayed broken hearts and ripped cards to display their objections to Google’s support of the restrictive Chinese government through censorship of the search results.

In New York only 15-20 protesters came out two days after the big blizzard and were well behaved according to spectators’ reports.

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, the Manhattan-based group that organized the demonstration said Google’s approach to the China situation was wrong and that over 3600 people had committed to stop using Google for a day.

In the overall scheme of things the protest was a minor event and the loss of a few thousand searches for a day is nothing to Google. But you have to applaud the effort.