Download the Internet Marketing Guide for Nonprofits in PDF format

Today, as an accompaniment to the start of New England’s GiveCamp weekend in which I will be participating, I am releasing A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing contains information about:

• Why nonprofits should consider Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
• A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
• Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
• Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style
• Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies

The guide is totally free, but if you like it kindly donate to any of the charities that will be present at New England GiveCamp. Here’s the list of nonprofits scheduled to attend the event.

Also, if you know a nonprofit or charity that can use this guide, please feel free to share a copy of it with them or refer them to this site.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there. If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

Leafing through the pages of the latest issue of DMNews, I saw an interesting article that got me thinking about the role of superlative keywords (i.e. “best” , “greatest”, “most exciting”) in search engine optimization for ecommerce websites.  Customer reviews have become an integral part of the online shopping experience.  Reviews provide potential buyers with more information about the e-store’s merchandise and can grow the customer’s trust in the transaction.  Most major online retailers allow customers to submit product reviews.  Amazon.com and Walmart.com are two online retailers that probably house the largest base of buyer reviews on the web.

Intent of the Superlative Search

The superlative search engine query provides a lot of insights about the user’s intent.  For example,  the query “best seafood restaurant in Massachusetts” can imply the following:

• the searcher is likely planning to go to an eatery in the near future.
• the searcher is likely seeking the advice of other seafood eaters, food critics, or from the restaurants themselves in selecting a restaurant.
• the searcher could be seeking information on how to evaluate a seafood restaurant.
• the searcher is likely looking for only one restaurant, the best restaurant.
• the searcher is looking for information which may be subjective or qualitative.

My conclusion about the superlative search is that it is innately a social query.  In other words, people are using search engines to find opinions written by past purchasers, presumably to act on the information they find at a future point.  This is different than a basic informational search.  For example, had the user typed the phrase “seafood restaurants in Massachusetts” (without the superlative) we could conclude that a simple list of Massachusetts restaurants could suffice as response.  The second conclusion is that the the superlative query has both an explicit informational component and a prominent, but implicit action component.  The user is looking for information that will help him or her do something.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, it may not simply be enough to have a website that ranks algorithmically if the searcher includes a quality modifier.  You’ll get a click, sure, but will you get the user’s patronage without third party confirmation?  Unlikely.  The fact is that the searcher is not expressly looking for information about your product; the user is searching for the opinions of others regarding the merchandise or services you offer.  Furthermore, the self-declared best of something must be supported by another party for the assertion to be meaningful.  This is where hosted user evaluations (such as the ones on Amazon.com) and review websites such as Yelp intercede.

Hosted Product Reviews and Search Engine Optimization

The problem with using superlative adjectives on ecommerce website is that they cannot be integrated into product descriptions without compromising the objectivity of the narrative users must read in order to understand the product offering.  Product descriptions are intended to tell the shopper what the product is, how to use it, and present technical specifications.  Product descriptions are much more important online because the user does not always have direct access to the product or service to inspect first hand.  So, using words like “best” and “greatest” demote the objectiveness of the product description and can often sound like unsubstantiated salesman speak.  How confusing would it be for buyers if every product description found in an online store used the word “best”?

This is why many online retailers capture and display customer comments next to product descriptions.  A glowing review from a satisfied customer is worth much more to a user and to the bottom line of a website than an evangelical product description.  Additionally, review pages can give a website a boost in search engine standings.  Superlative phrases in comments left by past customers can help increase the website’s ranking for queries containing quality modifiers.  In this way, creating good products, providing timely delivery, and offering great customer service can aid in the SEO of a website.  Thus, online shopkeepers should leave the singing of praises to their customers, and instead focus on making sure the search engine spiders have a path to find user reviews on their website.

Review Websites and Search Engine Optimization

Yelp and Epinions are two popular review websites.  Review websites, in addition to providing unbiased (in theory, but not always in practice) reviews, are also crucial components of online reputation management.  Customer opinion websites can cosign any claims of positive superlatives made by sites promoting a product or service.  There exists an interesting relationship between search marketing and online customer review aggregators – although a listing in the search results for an opinion website may initially attract a user’s click for a superlative search, they are unlikely to be the user’s final destination because these types of websites do not resolve the implicit action component of the superlative query.  After reading the opinions others have posted on the website, the user is likely to go to another location to act on the information they have obtained even if it is at a much later time.  To resolve the action component the information seeker may then look for information about the company or product encountered on a review website using a search engine or by navigating to the website directly.  In some ways, a good user review can be as valuable as a direct link from a review forum both in terms of providing referral traffic or by leading a user to conduct a search for information about your business, resulting in an increase in your website’s natural traffic volume.

Yesterday, Overdrive Interactive, an SEO firm in Boston, released its highly anticipated 2009 Search Marketing Map.  The Search Marketing Map is in the same spirit of Overdrive’s Social Media Map, which caused a buzz in the Web 2.0 landscape a few months prior.  Jump over to http://www.ovrdrv.com/search-map/ and download this free resource today!

You have to appreciate how I used the word “social” twice in the title.

I heard these two stories on NPR (“On The Media”) over the weekend, and they so tied psychology and sociology to interactive buzz marketing that I had to share them here.  Give them a listen, before you read on.

Peruse any job board for positions relating to interactive marketing and almost always under the desired education requirement you’ll see computer science, IT, business administration, or the narrower disciplines of marketing and public relations.  It seems the interactive marketing community as a whole has severely underestimated the application of a social science degree to an online marketing career.  My undergraduate degrees are in psychology and sociology, and on more than one occasion I have found myself explaining how my training in the social sciences is applicable to a career in marketing.

To me it’s not a big leap; to others it’s implausible.  When people think about psychology, they picture a comfortable room with two people – one sitting in an arm chair taking notes, and the other laying on his back spilling his guts while paying $200 an hour for the privilege to do so.  I didn’t pick psychology out of the list of majors to become a clinical psychologist like the one in this example.  I could care less about a stranger’s relationship with his or her mother.  I started in the field with the desire to become an experimental psychologist and through empirical hypothesis testing I wanted to explore the mysteries of human behavior and mental processes.  If it helps, picture a guy in a white lab coat holding a clipboard observing people through a two-way mirror.

Similarly, I find that people are often misinformed about what sociology involves.  They confuse the discipline with social work or social advocacy when in fact sociology is nowhere as benevolent.  Sociology, in brief, is about investigating the behavior of groups and their interrelationship with the individual.  I have even argued that marketing is a hybrid of applied sociology and business administration, given marketing’s high level goal of influence and persuasion.  It’s pretty well accepted that the multibillion dollar a year industry of market research is a type of applied sociology.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone active in online marketing that would dispute the statement that social media is where it’s at.  With big brands flocking to Facebook and MySpace to transform latent customers in to brand advocates, interactive marketing firms are scrambling to adopt in this new environment.  As much in SEO or PPC, if not more so, interactive marketers that practice social media channel development must ask questions like:

1. How do we influence customers to buy our products?
2. How do we influence customers to promote our brand?
3. How do we enter into a new online community and interact with members effectively?
4. How do we leverage these social networks to create buzz?
5. How do we encourage long term retention in our customers
6. What are our customers saying to us?
7. How do we respond?
8. How do we track the reach of our message?

To my ears, at their core, these are social science questions, not computer science questions.  How companies can actually leverage observations from social science research to generate ROI is the business marketing extension of each of the questions listed above.  Unless marketers first try to understand the questions (and answers) above in the light of the specific community they aspire to influence, they will not be successful in their efforts to generate ROI.  Just because a community or culture exists online, doesn’t make it less of a community or culture.  A person trained in psychology and sociology may be more effective in uncovering deep insights about the types of people behind the screen names used on social networking/media websites than a person with a traditional marketing background.  For example, during my undergraduate years, I took classes in community psychology, social psychology, social problems, psychological anthropology, and methodology of social research.  The sum of all these courses was a solid background in how to systematically dissect, investigate, and influence the inner workings of a community.

Although, I relied on the social media example to make my argument, a social science degree is strongly conducive to success in other areas of online marketing.  In conclusion, folks with psychology and sociology backgrounds have taken courses relating to influence, motivation, perception, group dynamics, cultural studies, demographics, statistical analysis, survey design, consumer psychology, and research – all of which are important in Internet marketing.

Any website optimizer who has been in the game for a while knows that in order to keep up with changes in search marketing you’ve got to examine Google under a microscope, memorize the gospel according to Matt Cutts, and stay up to date with all the cool new Google tools.  That’s just what a good search engine optimizer has to do.  Although Google is the most prolific search engine on the web, responsible for 55% of all searches, there’s another player in the game that I feel doesn’t get it’s fair share of love from the SEO community. 

Enter Yahoo – The Scottie Pippen of search engines.  Yahoo is responsible from somewhere between 20% – 25% of web searches depending on who is holding the stat book, and despite the fact that it doesn’t have as dominant of a market share as Google, owning 1 out of every 5 online searches is a helluva lotta searches.

That being said, today I will give Yahoo its long overdue respect by sharing some tips and idiosyncrasies for working with Yahoo:

1.  Yahoo still uses Meta keyword tags.

There was a time (circa 1999) when all a webmaster had to do was throw a bunch of keywords with high search volumes in to the Meta keyword tag and the search engines would eat it up.  No more.  Top tier search engines hate the tag, including Google, but not Yahoo.  According to this article by Danny Sullivan, Yahoo still eats up terms in the Meta keyword tag and uses it in a search query service process called "recall" to some extent.

2.  Yahoo does not display the cache date for pages in its index.

You’ll never know by looking at Yahoo’s cache when Slurp!, Yahoo’s search engine bot,  last visited your site.  Why Yahoo doesn’t display a cache date for the sites it crawls baffles me. Perhaps, Slurp! is a bit more lethargic than Googlebot, and Yahoo wants to keep a tight lid on the limitations of it’s web crawler technology.  And this is a great reason, in my opinion, not to display cache dates.  It reminds me of something MSN should have done when it announced last year that it can now execute keyword stemming functions in order to determine search results.  My reaction to this MSN news: Are you kidding, me?  MSN, you mean you weren’t doing this before?

Eventually Yahoo’s cache get’s dumped into the WayBack Machine where it get’s stored for posterity.  Here, in the WayBack Machine, suddenly the original Yahoo cache date is rediscovered.

A tip to webmasters: if you want to see when Yahoo last cached your site, put a widget that displays the current date and make it either visible only in the HTML code or in the footer of your website (where it isn’t noticeable to your visitors).  This way the "image date" can quickly be determined when you retrieve the copy of your site from Yahoo’s cache.  The date widget should not be dependent on JavaScript, as search engines are not affable toward the scripting language

3.  The "noydir" Meta tag tells Yahoo not to form your search listing using the Yahoo directory.

Yahoo may assemble the search engine listing description for pages on your website using a couple of different sources, including the Yahoo Directory.  And who wants their search result descriptions coming from an offsite location?  The solution:  use the "noydir" Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />

This tag instructs the search engine not to look at the Yahoo Directory when forming search engine listing descriptions.  The only catch is that this Meta tag must be applied to each page on your website.

4.  Yahoo gives webmasters a better idea of the number of inbound links to a website.

a link:www.websitename.com query conducted on both Yahoo and Google will return dramatically different results. Each of the two search engines has different criteria for evaluating the righteousness of an inbound link to a website.  In short, Google will count only what it has determine to be "highly qualified" backlinks to a domain.  On the other hand, Yahoo appears to return all inbound links to a website, regardless of apparent legitimacy.  Use this disparity of reported links to your advantage.  Treat the number of Yahoo links as a best guesstimate for the actual number of inbound links to your site and the Google number to determine the links in your arsenal with the most SEO power.

5.  Yahoo doesn’t care about PageRank.  It has its own way of measuring page popularity called WebRank.

According to Wikipedia, PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents.  PageRank or PR is a Google proprietary algorithm.  But many folks mistakenly believe, that PageRank is some sort of official web standard that measures the link popularity of a page.  It may indeed be considered an informal, de facto web standard because of it’s widespread usage (and ironically it’s misusage), but PageRank doesn’t mean anything to Yahoo.

Yahoo has knocked off Google’s innovations yet again to create WebRank.  WebRank is so overlooked that its Wikipedia article looks like this.  In fact, I seriously doubt that Yahoo WebRank is still included in the latest releases of Yahoo Toolbar, although I could be wrong.  At any rate, the lesson is that Yahoo’s ranking of page popularity isn’t related to PageRank at all- Yahoo has it’s own methods of weighing the importance of a webpage to the Internet.

6.  Like Google, Yahoo maintains a blog aimed at webmasters.

Yahoo shoots some search engine optimization advice to webmasters too on the Yahoo Search Blog.  It isn’t as well known (or as well loved) as the Google Webmaster Central Blog, but I would strongly recommend sucking down the RSS feed for the site "to keep abreast with the second best in the search engine contest".

Given the current growth of rich media advertisements and wireless enable handheld computing platforms, it is inevitable that rich media will crossover onto the mobile web within the next few years on a continuing widening scale. Mobile computing is just beginning to come of age, and as Internet enabled handheld devices are gaining widespread adoption, there are several questions the online marketing community must answer concerning integrating interactive advertisement models into the mobile world. To that extent, this analysis will examine the challenges presented to online advertisers for deploying Flash-based rich media advertisements in a mobile environment, including:

1. Given the existing state of mobile technology, is deploying rich media in a mobile environment possible? If not possible, what will it take to integrate rich media into mobile environments?
2. What are the benefits to advertisers and users for introducing rich media advertisements onto the mobile web?
3. What impact will rich media have on the overall user experience for mobile users?
4. What guidelines should e-commerce managers use to decide if rich media campaigns in mobile platforms are the right strategy for their website?

As recently as a decade ago, the Internet was viewed largely as a proving ground for new technologies and experimental business models. Most websites were created using simple HTML and contained simple image ads (if at all), Internet Explorer was gaining market share from Netscape in what is referred to as the Browser Wars, and the term mobile computing described the ability for a laptop to connect to the web via an AOL dial-up connection.

Ten years later, the promises of the Internet’s vast fertility to enable business transactions, facilitate interactions, entertain, and distribute information has only been partially understood, yet for the moment seems to be boundless. With the viability of conducting business on the web insured, the websites of companies are now recognized as commercial properties, and the Internet as a whole has become a medium for marketing and advertising functions. According to this article, total online ad spending has grown from $8.1 billion in 2000 to $18.5 billion per year in 2008, with projections expected to increase $44.5 billion over the next 5 years. The regular use of the Internet by Americans has also increased over the years and for many people is an integral part of work and personal life.

Websites and online advertisements are no longer characterized by technological homogeneity either. Websites are frequently built using a combination of high-level programming languages that enable a site to interact with the user. Likewise, online advertising platforms have leveraged new web technologies, such as Flash, to create highly engaging advertising pieces. The phrase “rich media advertising” broadly describes digital advertising media that is characterized by motion and interactivity.

As the Internet distinguished itself as both a destination for users and as a commercially viable medium, along came the development of powerful Web-enabled handheld devices, networking protocols, and wireless technologies that connect users to the web when away from the personal computer. The definition of mobile computing has evolved accordingly to encompass the features of the present handheld computing environment (Turban, Efraim, et al. Electronic Commerce 2006: A Managerial Perspective). The revised definition of mobile computing is nearly exclusive of laptop computers and refers to the use of handheld devices, such as smart phones and PDA’s that permit access to information, application and tools. Internet connectivity has become a critical feature of mobile devices and microbrowsers, or mobile browsers, scale websites down to size for viewing on a smaller screen so that the user can do a range of activities from finding the closest restaurant to conducting m-commerce transactions. Presently, 20% or 34.6 million Americans regularly access the mobile web according to an Informationweek report. However, the US is not the worldwide leader of mobile Internet users; this distinction belongs to Italy.

One of the best descriptions of rich media comes from ClickZ columnist and CEO of WebAdvantage Holland Thomases who describes it’s usefulness as:

“Rich media is the use of interactivity or multimedia to give an enhanced experience to a web user. When it’s used in advertising, it’s done so to attract attention, stand out among the clutter of ads and copy, or shake someone out of their "banner blindness," a term that’s been used to describe the general ignoring of all banner ads. Although we’re in a time when a lot of online marketing buzz focuses on simple text ads or search engine listings, rich media is still a sound piece of the Internet advertising puzzle. (http://www.webadvantage.net/tip_archive.cfm?tip_id=427&a=1)”

To complement Thomases thoughts, it should be noted that interactive media has strong brand enhancing and traffic-driving abilities for online properties. Another factor encouraging the spread of interactive media onto mobile platforms is that streaming videos are quickly becoming part of the handheld interactive experience.

Naturally, some rich media advertising units are more readily integrated into a mobile website than others. For example, Flash-based banner style graphics, interstitial ads (the display of a page of ads before the requested content), video ads and map-based ads will probably be the first generation to transition to the small screen. Ads that request high amounts of interactivity from the user, such as Flash games or gadget ads, may see their mobile debut postponed until hardware, software and compression technology catches up.

Advertisements in Mobile Environments Today

One of the most popular components of non-Flash rich media in mobile has proven to be Google’s Mobile Maps application. Users with capable smartphones and Internet access through either wireless or 3G can access Google Local (also known as Google Maps) on the go. Incorporated into Google Local is a local search application, allowing users to perform searches for businesses and services within specific areas. As a result, Google Local is rapidly becoming a powerful rich media advertisement channel on mobile devices. With both paid and free listings incorporated into the map application, businesses with physical locations – e.g. restaurants, service locations, shops, etc. – can directly target users in close physical proximity to their stores. Not only can business advertise their locations and services, they customers are provided with maps and directions to their locations.

The dominant ad format on the mobile web today are text messaging advertising, and paid text links and image ads placed on websites intentionally designed to be viewed by smart phones.  This observation parallels the adoption of the types of media used in the early days of Internet advertising.

Requirements for Deployment

I am of the opinion that there are three conditions that must exist before for rich media advertisements can be deployed on a large scale into the mobile web community. These conditions address hardware requirements, software requirements, and bandwidth requirements.

Hardware requirements

The first requirement is that it must be technological feasible from a hardware perspective. Rich media is intrinsically interactive, and interactivity can decrease device performance because of the need for greater processing time. Today, Flash powers much of the rich media on the Internet, including interactive games and streaming videos. Many contemporary desktop systems in use can execute Flash without sacrificing performance. However, there was a time when many hardware systems could not execute Flash in combination with other processes without slowing the entire machine down. An extreme example of deployment of Flash technology that preceded the widespread adoption of the hardware required to support it is the case of Boo.com in 1999. Boo.com was a virtual clothing store that featured a 3-dimensional shopping assistant avatar. The site relied heavily on the use of Flash and JavaScript to produce the interactive components of the shopping assistant. In 1999, many computers simply lacked the processing power to execute these client-side languages, and in a pre-broadband, 56k dial-up modem era the size of the site required the shopper to wait several minutes for a page to download. In mid-2000, Boo.com closed down and is remember as a casualty of the dot-com bust.

Mobile computing devices are designed to model the capabilities of personal computers to allow the user to perform some tasks while away from the home or office, but not all duties. Consumer-orientated mobile device design is a compromise between portability and functionality. Mobile computing hardware usually has only a fraction of the processing power of comparable parts for a personal computer. For example, the Apple iPhone, is performance-wise one of the higher-end web-enabled devices available on the US market. The iPhone has a clocked processor speed of 620 mhz and between 4 – 8 gigabytes of memory depending on the model. These specifications are equivalent to the processing power of an average desktop PC on the market between the years 1999 – 2002. Indeed, a personal computer from 1999 may have some difficulty keeping pace with many of the software applications of today. The point is that frequently special web technologies or modified versions of existing web technologies must be developed to accommodate current handheld computing capabilities; seldom can core features of the desktop Internet experience be seamlessly transitioned on to mobile platforms.

Software Requirements

On the software front, developers are trying to refit the existing applications and programming languages of rich media advertisement on the Internet to create a mobile web experience. Adobe, the maker of the Flash browser plug-in and several Flash development applications, has created a scaled down version designed specifically for mobile environments called Flash Lite. Although it has been modified for use by handhelds and microbrowsers, Flash Lite supports user interactivity, streaming video, and can play much of the Flash media found online. Although, Flash Lite has not been adopted by the majority of mobile users, several handheld manufacturers such as Nokia have began releasing units pre-installed with Flash Lite.

In February 2007, another barrier was removed bringing the deployment of Flash media advertising one step closer to fruition. On2 Technologies, a video compression technology partner with Adobe, announced that the new Flash development kit will be able to transcode streaming videos to mobile phones using an engine called Felix Engine 3GPP.  On2 Technologies compression algorithms essentially opens the door for marketers to create a Flash-based online video advertising experience for consumers. The impact of this new development was described in On2 Technologies’s press release:

  "For the first time, web content can easily be made available for mobile services," said Bill Joll, president and CEO of On2 Technologies.  "On2 VP6 based Flash video has taken the Internet world by storm with the creation of tremendous amounts of new content, but that content was not available on mobile devices until now. The new Flix Engine 3GPP changes that."

As a side note, JavaScript is another programming language that is being integrated into the newest generation of mobile browsers. While JavaScript can animate objects in a browser and supports user interactivity, rich media ads developed by combining HTML/DHTML elements, graphics and JavaScript are approaching extinction and there is no reason to expect rich media of these types to cross over into the mobile community.

Bandwidth Requirements

The third consideration is bandwidth capabilities. To properly conduct "m-marketing", it is necessary to have sufficient bandwidth to transmit the ingredients of interactive marketing – text, picture, voice video, or multimedia – to the user’s device. The 3G communication technology, the abundance of wifi access points, and other wireless data connection networks support the ability to send data back and forth from client to server (Turban, Efraim, et al. Electronic Commerce 2006: A Managerial Perspective).

Conclusion

But the real question is – how will customers react to interactive ads? Action Engine CEO, Scott Silk believes the mobile market must overcome several hurdles before accepting rich media ad formats:

“1. Perceived cost – What is this advertisement costing me?
First, subscribers do not want to feel like they are paying for mobile advertising.

2. Personal relevance – What does this advertisement mean to me?
Second, subscribers do not want non-relevant advertisement — and in most cases, neither do the advertisers.

3. Ease of use – Is this mobile advertisement degrading my user experience?
Third, more subscribers avoid data services because they are too difficult to access and operate than because of cost. (http://www.actionengine.com/images/events/mobileadvertising/advertising.html)"

There are indeed other issues that will arise from the foreseeable deployment of rich media advertisements aimed at handheld users that e-marketers must address. One example is how to fully capitalize on a mobile user that has clicked a multimedia advertisement and has general interest in the product or service offered. In this example, depending on the purpose of the website, an “interest form completion” or website registration may be the optimal conversion mode of the marketers, but not for the user who is restricted to an abbreviated keyboard and smaller screen.

When I first launched this blog way back in October of 2007, I used to check my Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Feedburner statistics excessively (even though the three services only update every 24 hours).  A little time has passed and I’ve settle into some sort of groove, so I don’t pull the metrics for my site that crazily anymore.

This week, however, as I was scanning my Google Analytics, I noticed a high volume of search traffic coming in through an article I wrote called How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in September 2006.  It was the first meaningful article I really published on this blog, and one reader was so impressed by it that they kindly submitted it to Digg.com on my behalf (BIG THANKS!).  Like any good blog-keeper, I proceeded to investigate why I was getting so much search engine referred traffic to this page.  Well… it turns out that Google ranks this particular article #1 for the phrase "Organic CTR".  All things considered, that’s quite an endorsement from the world’s busiest search engine.  Although there are a few updates I will make to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the future, the basic methodology still holds up despite the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool being put out to pasture.

Because this post is the second most popular entry point on my site next to the homepage, I wanted get a better idea of just how well this article was ranking on Google.  To determine this, I pulled the top referring search terms for this posting from my Google Analytics and did a quick search engine ranking report to determine the article’s depth among Google’s results.  The table below summarizes my findings:

As you can see, this article ranks highly for a variety of variations and concatenations relating to the valuable terms "organic ctr".  I believe the fact that folks are using these keywords to find my blog reflect that my site is doing decent job in attracting the search marketing crowd.  In the end, I just think it’s all just pretty cool.  I plan to write an update to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the coming weeks.  Please stay tuned!

SEO Store Grand Opening.  Check it out!

Google will now only return the first 1000 results for a search.  This is a bad thing!  More elaboration and discussion will follow tonight when I have time to type up a whole post.

So according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft and Yahoo are reconsidering a merger. At the same time, Reuters reports that Microsoft is trying to take over Yahoo. Since those two things are often pretty much the same, this is pretty crazy news.

Yahoo is still the most popular site on the internet, and has a sizable Web 2.0 presence with Del.icio.us and Flickr. Their two most popular properties are Yahoo! Mail and just the straight up Yahoo! homepage, rather than search, with those two branches of their site driving 6 times as much traffic as search – and they still hold at least 22% or so of the search market. They make billions a year from paid text ads, just like Google does, plus unlike Google they have huge display and banner ad divisions.

I don’t know if Yahoo would sell for any price though, no matter what the offer.

A few things happening with Google are moving it closer and closer to the line between awesome company and massive, maybe not so “Don’t Be Evil” corporation.

First off, Google has purchased Doubleclick for $3.1 billion.  Additional coverage from Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, and Google Blogoscoped.  Google has been branching out into image and video ads for a while now, which is pretty cool.  These are distributed through Google’s content network, showing up on blogs and other sites that have opted in to them.  I’ve managed image ads for a few of my clients, and they tend to do very well for certain audiences (mostly less technical ones) and poorly for others.  Doubleclick is a whole new ballgame, though.  It runs on a completely different model than AdSense’s algorithmic and site-targeted system.  Here I think we can finally say that Google is taking a definitive step, moving from mostly non-intrusive text ads to being a full blown online advertising purveyor.  Additionally, it raises some privacy concerns – Google already tracks a ton of online activity, and this will greatly expand its purview.  To me, it’s a big shakeup.  I think this will almost certainly be good for the online advertising industry, but as private consumer and as someone who uses the internet a lot, there’s a lot of potential for Google to take this in a poor direction.

Moving on from that, comes a second thing that makes me a bit uncomfortable.  Matt Cutts recently posted a series of 3 posts on his blog dealing with linking.  The first one deals with Hidden Links, showing an example of a hidden link undetectable by a hidden user.  These are obviously bad, and have been punished by Google for some time.  The second one deals with sponsored WordPress themes – themes that include sponsored links, tricking users of the theme into linking to specific pages.  This is also obviously bad, and I’d be very unhappy to find my theme containing links to sites I didn’t choose.

However, more troubling is Matt’s third post, a followup from the end of his first.  Matt specifically outlines a procedure to report a paid link as spam – therefore, implying that paid links are illegitimate spam.  This opens a massive can of worms.  Yes, people buy paid links for SEO purposes.  This is because it’s an effective tactic.  Link building is a key component of SEO strategy.  The agency I work for focuses more on content development and internal linking, but external links are a major factor we look at too.  I don’t see this as a necessarily bad thing though.  I think it’s up to Google to make sure that links to unrelated pages carry little weight, rather than cracking down on users buying links.  Is it really illegitimate if I buy a SEO link from a page related to my content?  Just because I paid for the link doesn’t mean the link is inappropriate or bad.  Other interesting and edifying discussion on this is available in the comments on Matt’s post.

Overall, I think Google has to remember that ultimately, it is providing a service to the rest of the world.  It’s doing a great job, and I use Google services every day.  But, as it grows in wealth, power, and influence, it’s important that it continue serving its users, rather than dictating what its users should do.

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