Here's a compilation of aerial pictures of unsold cars piling up around the world.
I'd imagine that a lot of similar pics could be made to illustrate robust commerce. But the telling ones for me are the cars parked around test tracks -- because that means development work has stopped, too. The sudden pileup of inventory plus extended layoffs plus no development activity equals a pretty grim picture....
If you want to sell something, tweaking your organic search is a great place to start. That's the conclusion of a new study (PDF) published by Forbes.
The study found that:
And one more encouraging thing: the companies Forbes surveys understood that the important thing about search isn't traffic (37 percent) or SERP position (34 percent.) It's conversions: 70 percent.
Organic search = money. Remember that.
Rob Kelly, as best as we can put it together, is a guy I didn't quite get to work with CMP. He was a senior adviser to the SEO out on the West Coast while I was editing NetGuide in New York. Now, he's off building building a bunch of interesting sounding new companies.
Rob interviewed me the other day about SEO, and it came out pretty well, although I was talking a little faster than he could type. Click through for the whole deal, but here are a couple of pullquotes:
Ranking in the SERP (Search Results Page) is meaningless. Anyone can get to the first page for something. What I always watch for is traffic, and changes in traffic. I care about the conversion of what happens once someone hits my page…clicking the buy button or the ad. I can rank #1 on a search of “cellphone”…but if they come to my page and don’t convert, all I’ve done is cost my company money. If I can generate meaningful traffic to my reader, to my customer…that’s the win.
SEO isn’t an event, it’s a process... Too often, employers aren’t emotionally equipped to understand what SEO really is — it’s a quality process… that involves the entire company. When Toyota decided they were going to out-quality Detroit, they didn’t hire a quality guy and stick him in a cube. They hired someone who would come in and look at the operations of the entire company and build a process that baked quality in. And the best companies that do SEO, bake SEO in.
I was quoted yesterday in a BNet article about using press releases to boost backlink profiles. It's a good article with lots of useful information. Inevitably, as part of the process, lots of better stuff from the underlying e-mail interview got cut. Here's a fuller version of what I told the writer, the estimable Drew Kerr. (Questions are paraphrased; answers are verbatim.)
Q: What does it mean for a press release to be "search engine ready"?
Search engines put a premium on relevance, so the press release services work (to varying degrees) to make the release as relevant to the release's subject as possible. That means using the targeted keyword repeatedly, and linking to the site being promoted with keyword-y anchor text.
It sounds simple. It isn't. First of all, press releases are usually written with more care than United Nations resolutions. They're the result of endless rounds of writing, re-writing, negotiating and re-negotiatiating -- and it's worse if there's more than one company involved. By the time a press release gets to a distribution service, the competing interests have been balanced like a Wallenda. The distribution service isn't going to have any leeway to change words just for SEO purposes. The best they can do is stick a bunch of links onto the most promising text.
That's a shame, because most releases have been so acutely lawyered that they don't use words that most constituencies would want to search for. Press releases, of course, have multiple constituencies -- the media, the public, investors, competitors, government agencies, suppliers, consumers, the closely interested, the casually interested, and now search engines. They frequently will use different terminology to discuss the same thing; that's poison for SEO, which is most effective when the copy uses language that people are actually searching for.
For all of those issues, distribution services are a fine way for a site to to gain authority by building backlinks. Unless it is hopelessly ham-handed, a release about the latest frammistat from XYZ Corp. will inevitably use the words "frammistat" and "XYZ Corp." repeatedly enough to appear relevant for those terms in search engines. By including a few links back to the XYZ Corp. Web site -- particularly using the word "frammistat" as the anchor text (and, even better, linking to the frammistat landing page on XYZCorp.com) -- the release distribution service has cast a "vote" for the XYZ site. The more votes for a site on any given search term, the more relevant the search engines see that site as being, and position on search results pages go up.
But wait -- it gets better. Many web sites republish press releases put out by the distribution services. So if publication sites that search engines regard highly take the bait -- sites like Forbes.com, CNNMoney.com, whatever -- now *they* are linking to the XYZ Corp. Web page. The technical SEO term for this is "jackpot."
Q: How do people go wrong making documents SEO-ready?
Over-optimizing. It's true that repetition is your friend when you're writing copy that you want to be especially SEO friendly. But even though repetition is your friend, it's possible to overdo it. Repetition is your friend, but keep in mind that search engines understand that the Web is for people and not machines, and if you insist too hard that repetition is your friend you will write copy that no one will read -- and although repetition is your friend, search engines will understand that they are being pandered to. And repetition will no longer be your friend. Neither will anyone else.
Q: Does this work?
As noted earlier, it's very effective and it's an excellent way to start building a good backlink profile. But like anything that works, it's possible to overdo it to the point that search engine algorithms catch on and start devaluing those links. If the only sites that are linking back to you are news distribution sites, you need to rethink the way you're addressing the public. For one thing, if your only backlinks are from distribution services, it's a good indication that no one cares about the news you're putting out and search engines will understand that. At their core, press releases are a not-especially-pernicious form of paid links, which search engines -- Google in particular -- rail against. Like anything that can give a sugary rush, press releases should be a delicious part of a well-balanced SEO breakfast -- not the whole thing.
Q: Why are backlinks important to search?
Backlinks are important because Google sees them as votes of relevance. If one page has 1,000 backlinks from relevant pages and another page has 10,000 backlinks from relevant pages, Google sees the second page as being more relevant for a particular search term -- and will place it higher on the SERP (search engine result page) for that search.
Counting backlinks and judging their relevance is what Google's revolutionary PageRank algorithm is all about. But it's important to remember that PageRank is only one of 200 or 250 "signals" that Google uses to rank pages.
And it's also important to remember that only Google has ever said anything about how it ranks pages. Yahoo and Microsoft have never said how they build their SERPs. It may be some PageRank knockoff, or time-based randomization, or chicken entrails, or 5 million hamsters running on 5 million hamster wheels with roulette numbers randomly attached to them.
To searchers and readers, all that matters is that they get highly relevant results quickly. If Microsoft ever decides to reveal anything about how they rank the Web, you could expect SEOs to start optimizing more for Bing, which will increase the utility of Bing's index, which will draw more users, which will increase the advertising value of Bing's index.
Bing has now been around long enough for people to start looking for referrers in their server logs. Most people aren't seeing a ton of traffic from Bing so they think it's not a big deal.
It's a dangerous and possibly self-deluding conclusion for any content provider. Remember: you -- the content provider -- are not the search engines' market. You are, in fact, the product that they're selling.
Bing is not innovating in search, as far as anyone can tell. It gives some very different results than Google; in many cases, it presents much deeper results than Google's while missing other stuff.
Where Bing (and Yahoo) are innovating are in user experience. The goal of all these search engines is to give their users as much information as possible without their leaving the SERP. You want them to click on your URL to see your content and ads. But the search engines would just as soon that their page be the final word. That's why Google is relying less on Description tags and more on page scrapes and microformats for its snippets. It's why Bing has page excerpts pop up next to the URLs on the SERPs.
Bing has looked at the heat maps of what people look at in SERPs and is innovating around that upper left quadrant of the window. Google is making more options more easily available to searchers. But what kind of business model would your site have if it only existed to send people away? Right: none. The search engines are ever more in the business of helping people stick around, showing your information on their pages, and building environments where they let people leave only if they really want to -- but would rather have them stick around, thanks.
Google today announced its inevitable reach into real-time search, instantly adding results from Twitter, FriendFeed and MySpace. As cool and useful as this may be, I've got a couple of questions about it.
How do they assign relevance to tweets? Google's search algorithms are based, in large measure, on the number and quality of backlinks -- relevant links to a given page. How is Google assigning relevance to tweets? By hashmarks? By the number of followers on an account? That's obviously problematic, given the triviality of manipulating it. By the number of relevant followers? Then what determines relevance?
Is more weight given to official pronouncements from known or trusted entities? How do the entities get to be known or trusted? And if "official" sites do get preference, isn't that contrary to the whole idea of Twitter?
What about a common situation where a reporter for a publication tweets about a story that's about to break on their site or in print? How is that differentiated from an unsubstantiated rumor that some celebrity has died? It's not Google's place to be judging the truth value of tweets or posts, but I worry (as often) that this will only accelerate a race to the bottom.
And one more: Tweets are 140 characters long. Google snippets are 156. By presenting tweets on SERPs, Google is preempting one possible means for Twitter to monetize: ads. Why click through to a Twitter page when you get all you need on Google's?
I've been around the Macintosh world since about 1985, so I'm real familiar with Guy Kawasaki. Guy was the software evangelist for the Mac -- the guy who went around persuading software developers to write for this unusual and innovative computer. In the intervening years, he wrote a couple of books about what became known as guerrilla marketing; those books are still on my shelves. In certain circles, he was (and is) quite famous. In certain circles, he became sort of yesterday's news. Now, he runs a venture company and a news aggregator Alltop.com.
But there's an excellent interview with him in this past Friday's NYTimes, where he dispenses some pretty insightful advice about careers and marketing:
Sales is everything. As long as you’re making sales, you’re still in the game....They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off... Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting. What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”
...In the end, success in business comes from the willingness to grind it out. It’s not because of the brilliant idea. It’s because you are willing to work hard.
Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice.... They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life. Looking back, that’s absolutely incorrect. By definition you cannot make a mistake in your first job... Let’s say you join a start-up, and it implodes. You would learn more about leadership inside a company that crashes than you would inside the next Google. Specifically, you will learn what not to do. You can’t make a mistake as a college graduate.
Jobs for college graduates should make them gain knowledge in at least one of these three areas: how to make something, how to sell something or how to support something.
It's a quick read. Worth the time.
Microsoft's Bing search engine will be rolling out UI changes starting in the next few days. Since its launch about a year ago, Bing has been innovating mostly on its interface, and these changes continue that mission. The emphasis for the update will be on providing more context -- including real-time feeds -- and visual information.
What's worrisome about Bing, from a content provider's perspective, is that the search engine will provide so much context that a click-through to the originating site becomes unnecessary. (This, of course, allows Bing and not the publisher to monetize the publisher's content.) Microsoft doesn't see that as much of an issue. From Redmond Channel Partner:
One attendee of the keynote asked [Yusef] Mehdi [Microsoft's SVP of online audience business] if Microsoft’s efforts to render more contextual data within Bing would result in fewer click-throughs to sites. Mehdi responded that he doesn't see cause for concern. "What we have found is there are more click-throughs when you add richer captions," he said.
There's a interesting data point, if he'd be willing to share his numbers. It would also be interesting to discover if rich-content clickthroughs convert on a publisher's site better than clicks based on less-rich content. In other words, do people who click on high-context links bounce more or less than referrals from low-context links? Or are high-context links killing the geese with the golden eggs?
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