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This Week's Must Reads in Search Marketing

March 30, 2007 By Leave a Comment

This week closes off the month of March and as usual there was lots of great news to read around the Search Marketing Industry:

Filed Under: Industry News, SEM

Guy Kawasaki's Keynote in Kelowna

March 30, 2007 By 1 Comment

I’ve heard great things about Guy Kawasaki’s speeches and presentations and yesterday I had the opportunity to experience it for myself. Guy Kawasaki was the keynote speaker at the OSTEC Awards Banquet in my home town of Kelowna, British Columbia (sponsored by Enquiro) and I have to admit it was one of the best (if not THE best) presentations I have ever heard.


Even though he had experienced an injury while playing hockey, he still came out and entertained the crowd for the 30-40 minutes he was on the stage. Guy was both hilarious and inspiring as he spoke on topics ranging from ‘his love of Hockey’ to ‘his career with Apple’ to ‘his slight mistake of turning down the job as the CEO of Yahoo’ to ‘stories of people pitching weird ideas to him’ to ‘his top 10 tips for being truly innovative and succeeding in business.’

I enjoyed his top 10 list the most which concluded with is famous 10/20/30 rule of power point presentations (10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 point font). The tip that I found the most useful was “make meaning.” Guy explained that if you start a business venture do it so that it’s meaningful and makes a world a better place, not to make money at it. If it’s meaningful the money will come along with it.

I was proud of our VP Bill Barnes when he simply thanked Guy for an amazing presentation (after the presentation was over) while others were overwhelming Guy with various pitches for potential business ideas – Way to keep it classy Bill.

Here are some pictures from Guy Kawasaki’s Keynote:

The team from Enquiro, from Left to Right: Jody Nimetz, ME (Manoj Jasra), Petra Leinemann, Cory Bates:

Filed Under: Industry News

Future of SEM: What WILL and WILL NOT Matter

March 29, 2007 By 10 Comments

The SEM Industry is rapidly changing, this includes the search engines (their SERP algorithms and spiders), SEO Tactics, and SEM Strategies. Off the top of my head I have come up with 5 things that WILL NOT matter in SEM in the future and 5 things that marketers should stay on top of.

Things that WILL NOT matter:

  • Meta Tags: Meta Tags, especially the keywords version, are already losing their importance. Meta Description is still often used to distinguish site pages but I believe both types of Meta Tags will continually lose their SEO value.
  • Page Size: The majority of Internet users are already using high speed connections and this number will continually increase, therefore to some extent page size won’t matter.
  • JavaScript Code: Very often SEOs will recommend externalizing JavaScript or removing it from a site’s main navigation, however with search spiders continually getting smarter I feel spiders will eventually be able to comprehend various types of complex JavaScript code.
  • Location of Content: The higher up the content (within the page code) the better search engines and their spiders will like your site, correct? Maybe, but as I mentioned before spiders will get smarter and as long as you have good content, location won’t matter anymore.
  • Search Engine Ranking: With the introduction of personalized search are the days of ranking software numbered?….It’s very possible. I have always felt that this metric is useless without traffic and conversion numbers attached to it.

Things that WILL matter:


  • Website Messaging: As personalized search becomes more prominent it’s the messaging of websites that will compel users to click through and remain on a given website. Website owners will really have work hard to build the perfect personas for their target market so they can lure visitors with the right messaging.
  • Competitive landscape: Knowing your competition is always important but in the future it will be even more imperative. As visitors are presented with the results they prefer to see, website owners need to make sure their messaging and offerings are comparable to their competitors.
  • Rich Media: Audio, Video, Podcasts, Flash and AJAX are continually getting more popular, I believe this trend will continue to rise and this type of content will eventually all be spiderable by search engines.
  • Usability: Things like focus groups, A/B testing, Eye Tracking will be normal practices for all marketing professionals. If your site doesn’t cut it, visitors will simply move to the next one.
  • Widgets: Almost every website offers some type of widget because everyone loves widgets (they’re great for link bait too). We’ll see more interactivity with widgets and more widgets from Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Filed Under: SEM

Google Testing Yellow Background on Adwords

March 28, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this month the JenSense Blog reported about Google Testing yellow background on sponsored ads above the search results.

Today I am noticing similar results (see/click image below). It’s amazing how much more the top sponsored ads standout compared to the rest of the page. If Google plans on implementing this change globally I am curious to know what kind of performance increases websites will see when advertising in the top sponsored results. If the CTs increase significantly I imagine that Google could raise it’s AdWords premiums and advertisers would still pay for them.

Filed Under: Google

Blogging is Addictive

March 28, 2007 By 2 Comments

I think I have officially got my wife hooked on blogging. Earlier this year she started a blog called Aditi World and now she is always looking for tips and insight in order to grow her daily traffic numbers and subscribers. Every evening you can find us battling for use of the computer so we can update our respective blogs.

She’s a great writer to begin with and with my assistance on the SEM side of things her blog is ranking quite well for a lot of phrases related to restaurants, cities, movie reviews and activities she has written about. She doesn’t quite understand the way search engines index and rank sites therefore she is always curious on why her blog is not on the first page of the results for more generic keywords. Lately she’s been leaving useful comments on other blogs and has been submitting her blog to various blog directories such as My Blog Log and Blog Catalog.

If you have been wanting to start your own blog and want to hit the ground running try implementing the following suggestions (I had my wife do all of these):

- Post to your Blog Often. The fresher your content is the more search engines spiders will visit your blog.
- Don’t spam your Blog posts with the repetitive keywords
- If you want to see Search Engine Rankings consider a niche rather than a generic blog
- Become a part of communities in your niche (other blogs, forums)
- Sign up for a Google Alerts account you can find out when other bloggers post about the same topic. This will be useful in establishing relationships through commenting.
- Sign up for Technorati and also tag your content. Newer blogs should be patient with Technorati because it tends to update newer blogs slower then more authoritative ones.
- Use FeedBurner and offer subscriptions via email.
- Email your blog to your friends and family and have them pass it their contacts
- Have your significant other dedicate a post to you so you can receive more visitors and back links

Filed Under: Tips

CMS Watch set to Release New Web Analytics Report

March 27, 2007 By Leave a Comment

This news release ties in perfectly with my post on the Web Analytics Comparison Guide last week:

CMS Watch, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, will release a new Web Analytics Report next month. The forthcoming report will sort through the complexities of selecting the right web analytics tool and will identify best practices for incorporating web analytics into broader enterprise marketing and communications investments.

Phil Kemelor serves as lead analyst for the report. “We don’t just talk about features — we look at technical architectures, data integration options, data collection methods, user administration functionality, and the multiple ways to view, slice, dice, and analyze website data.” And he added, “Our planning methodology will not only enable customers to select the right vendor; it will set the blueprint for web analytics strategy going forward and help determine the right resources to ensure the success of the program.”

The report closely examines 13 major Web Analytics vendors, including:

24/7
AuriQ
ClickTracks
Coremetrics
Fireclick
Google Analytics
Nedstat
Omniture
SageMetrics
Unica
Visual Sciences
WebSideStory
WebTrends

The report will be available on http://www.cmswatch.com/ in late April, 2007.

Filed Under: Web Analytics

Interview – Compete Inc co-Founder David Cancel

March 27, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Late last week I had the pleasure of catching up with Compete, Inc’s CTO and co-Founder, David Cancel. During this time I had the opportunity to chat with David about the history of Compete Inc and got some insightful background on their product Compete.com. Here’s how it went:

Tell me about yourself and how CompeteInc.com got started?

I’m the CTO and co-Founder of Compete, Inc. We started the company 6yrs ago right after the bubble meltdown (Oct. 2000). Before founding Compete, I was the founding CTO of BuyerZone.com, part of the founding team of Lycos.com‘s internal labs group and Chief Software Architect and part of the founding team at Bolt.com. That’s sums up the last 11yrs for me. The idea for Compete came from Bill Gross (idealab) who was also an angel investor. For the last 6 yrs we’ve been focused on a few verticals (automotive, financial services, wireless and travel). Our product is usually bought by brand managers, CMOs or CEOs within these industries. We launched Compete.com this past November.

Can you talk a little bit about a few of your clients in some of your target verticals?

In autos we work with almost every car company that sells vehicles in the US. In wireless we work with all the US carriers and some of the MVNOs and manufacturers. In financial services we work with banks, credit card companies, insurance and home loan companies. And more recently we’ve been doing a lot of work w/ the top 3 search engines. That gives you some idea of the type of customers we’re working for. Some specific names that I can release publicly are Yahoo, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, Subaru, Hyundai and MSN.

How are CompeteInc.com and Compete.com related?

CompeteInc.com is our corporate site and represents what we’ve been doing for the last 6 yrs. Compete.com is something that we released 4 months ago and is where our free tools (Snapshot), blog, etc live. Compete.com is meant to be our public/consumer facing site.

Who is the target market for Compete.com?

Our snapshot product is aimed at SEOs, online marketers and anyone who wants access to free premium metrics. Compete.com started out as an experiment for which we didn’t have any real expectations. What we’ve found so far is that we have a lot of Venture Capitalists, SEOs / online marketers and startups using it.

What value can users get out of Compete SnapShot and Compete Search?

Compete SnapShot is giving people premium metrics like unique visitor projects, sessions, time spent for free for the first time ever. In the next couple of months you’ll see us releasing more detailed and timely data (daily) and more metrics. This will be the type of data that you would have to pay for today, think (Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, etc). My goal is to make this type of data freely available and open to everyone.

Who are Compete.com‘s competitors and what advantages does Compete.com offer over its competitors?

Not sure really. On the free side I guess it would be Alexa and possibly Quantcast. I don’t really see them as competitors as what we are and will be giving away is more analogous to what you would pay Hitwise, Nielsen, Comscore, etc for. The work that our CompeteInc.com customers pay us for is not audience measurement type work so we don’t really compete with any of the above companies in our verticals.

Can we expect to see any new enhancements or new offerings from Compete.com?

We have a major release coming out on April 2nd. I would love to announce that release on your podcast show if you were up for it. Just so you know I will be debuting these new features on the ScobleShow on April 2nd but that will probably not air for several weeks as he’s pretty backlogged with video waiting to be edited. Let me know if you’re up for that.

I hope to set this podcast up with David so stay tuned!

Filed Under: Interviews