There’s in interesting war of words going on between Microsoft and Google regarding search. An article at Search Engine Land alleging that Microsoft was copying search results from Google was the first salvo in the war. Microsoft followed up by accusing Google of click fraud.

The gist of Google’s claim, seems to be that Microsoft’s uses the data collected from the suggested sites/Bing toolbar feature to populate Bing’s search engine results even if the search results come from Google’s website.

Microsoft’s defense appears to be that they do incorporate the results into Bing, but it is one of many parameters when ranking a link. That the scenario Google executed was not legitimate since Google created false links to nonsensical search terms and then had there employees click on those links.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? Well both are right and both are wrong. Google’s honeypot essentially peeled away Microsoft’s aggregating of the parameters used to rank sites. By using uncommon search terms, Google was able to populate a false relationship between the search term and the site. If a popular term had been entered, the other parameters would have minimized the ranking. Microsoft however is using the search results from a competitor as part of it’s ranking algorithm. They are just letting their end user’s be the means of populating the data. Google’s honeypot just showed that when the other parameters are not relevant, then Google’s results will appear.

Is your company currently engaging in paid display ads throughout a content network in Google or MSN?  For most of you, the answer should be yes if you are trying to increase revenue and your brand awareness.

How many of you are currently running display ads on mobile devices?  My assumptions is that not many of you are- but you all should be.  Did you know that 93% of the 307 million people within the US have mobile devices, and that 40% of these people have smart-phones, mobile internet devices or mobile-web-enabled feature phones? Mobile users range in age, gender, and income level as can be seen below.

Below are some reasons why you should begin to think about the option to display pieces of rich media or banner ads on mobile devices through Google’s Admob Network.

1. Campaigns are set up similar to other display content campaigns and Google is the king of simplicity within their user interfaces
2. Working with Admob you gain the experience they have as they help you manage the complexities that might scare you concerning the wide world of mobile, making it easy for you to target and serve ads to the complete mobile audience
3. You have the ability to target as broadly as possible given your campaign goals. You can even target by OS and have an ad serves specifically to Android users.

Click on the link below to see all the cool stuff you can do within Google’s Admob Team.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV5-w1OgoeM&feature=channel

While watching The Family Guy, I had often wondered where Stewie Griffin’s catch phrase “What the Deuce?”  came from.

Stewie will often say his catch phrase at times of astonishment.

Turns out the “What the Deuce?” was once a euphemism for “What the Devil?”.

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Using Google’s new Ngram viewer, we can see that the catch phrase began falling out of favor soon after the start of the 1920′s.

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So what happened?

Why did the phrase “What the Deuce?” fall out of favor?

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It may have been the loosening of restraint for certain topics or it may have been the overuse of the old phrase “What the Deuce?” which blunted the phrase’s emotional edge.

I can give no definite cause and effect.

Out with the old and in with the new.

Though it has been released for over a year now (December 2009) it is worth stating — or restating — that if you use Google Analytics for your website statistics, you should migrate to their Asynchronous Analytics Tracking script and away from their traditional Javascript library or the original Urchin script. For background, see:

• Google Analytics – Introduction to the Async Tracking Script
• Google Analytics – Async Migration Examples
  

Benefits of a Faster Site

1. A faster site improves your user experience.
2. Your site SERP Ranking (Search Engine Results Page) improves.

A Short Back Story

Urchin was purchased by Google in early 2005 and Google Analytics was rolled out a few months later, largely based on “Urchin On Demand.”  The Urchin tracker is still supported by Google, as is Google’s traditional Javascript GA script. Unfortunately, both are rather large and synchronous — they have to load before page analytics start to be tracked or other events occur. This is why Google has always recommended that you load Urchin or the traditional script at the bottom of the document.

The Downsides to Synchronous Loading

• Events often aren’t tracked because the Stop or Back button is hit before the library is called at the bottom of the page and loaded.
• The library are large and slows your page load down.
• Other events on the page are held up by the time to load the library, further slowing down the apparent “responsiveness” of your site.

The Need For Speed

It used to be that the best practice on website design was small images and lean, clean website pages on a fast server so that they loaded quickly over dialup, on slower computers.  Much of this ideal fell by the wayside in the past ten years as code for sites became more robust and had better features, but came at a cost:

• Code bloat on the page, from more complicated pages or page structure, heavy style sheets or javascripting
• Bloat in applications on the server, leading to longer response times
• Poorly designed code
• Larger, less optimized images
• Web 2.0 and the advent of heavy Javascript libraries to support things like AJAX, highly stylized website designs, chat, image effects, form processing libraries, etc
• Overuse of large Flash animations
• Embedded media like movies or sound
• Shared hosting on overburdened websites

All of the reasons listed above can penalize your search engine rankings on Google, and even how often Google or other search engines bother to index your site. This article isn’t about poor website design or substandard hosting (that’s for another time) but with all of these ways that you can hurt your site, adding to it by continuing to use Google’s traditional script only compounds the problem.

Faster is better, and Google has for some time now factored how fast your site loads into its ranking algorithm.

Because of this renewed importance of page load speed for Google they realized that these large load time libraries were counterproductive to the internet and their own goal to reward speed in search engine rankings.

During 2009 they developed an AJAX, or asynchronous, script that would become the Google Analytics Queue object, or _gaq.  This object is used to asynchronously load the Google Analytics library in the background, AJAX-style.

This switch frees up your pages to finish loading, loading faster, queue up events or commands to execute after the library loads, and better push events on your page into Google Analytics.  You have the ability to push all of the traditional metrics you might use into Google Analytics asynchronously, plus it is now easier to create virtual events or pages and push data into GA for later use.

I would suggest as good reading an excellent reminder article about page speed and user experience from Jakob Nielsen, one of the foremost authorities on User Interface Design and User Experience.  Switch to the asynchronous script, and keep your site lean. It will benefit your users, and your rankings.

I recently did some development for Winston-Salem State University‘s Google Search Appliance. Getting started was a bit tedious, requiring the analysis of 3600 lines of XSLT. This post aims to get you working where you need to quickly style and construct the page contents of the Google Mini.

After navigating to the Stylesheet Editor within the administration console of the Google mini, I recommend copying the contents over to a text editor such as Notepad++. The Google Mini will give you the line that errors occur on, however, there is no line count in the simple editor.

The Mini’s code has a few main stylesheets that we are going to focus on:

• Global variables
• Global styles
• my_page_header
• my_page_footer
• swr_search
• front_door
• advanced_search
• search_results

These can all be found by doing the following searches respectively (CTRL+F) in the document:

• Logo setup (can be customized)
  • Note: Continues through ‘Global Style variables (can be customized)’ section
• Result page components
  • Note: Continues down until line ~200 and XSL variables end.
• <xsl:template name=”my_page_header”>
• <xsl:template name=”my_page_footer”>
• <xsl:template name=”swr_search”>
• <xsl:template name=”front_door”>
• <xsl:template name=”advanced_search”>
• <xsl:template name=”search_results”>

The global styles and variables are worth a quick look, however most of the default settings are pretty suitable. Be sure not include semi-colons in the CSS values.

First, we want to look at swr_search, front_door, advanced_search, and search_results. In each of these templates, you want to add your content directly after:

	<xsl:call-template name="langHeadStart"/>
	   <title><xsl:value-of select="$swr_page_title"/></title>
	<xsl:call-template name="style"/>

You do not have to provide an opening or closing tag as the Mini appears to generate this with ” ” and ” in all four of these sections. Within your tag just below “landHeadEnd”, you should have the following:

    ...
       <xsl:call-template name="my_page_header"/>
       <xsl:call-template name="RESPECTIVE SECTION"/>
       <xsl:call-template name="my_page_footer"/>
    ...

Consider the following basic XHTML template:

    <html>
    <body>
       <div id="topnav"></div>
       <div id="wrap">
          <div id="leftnav"></div>
          <div id="content">
             <!-- LOCATION FOR SEARCH AREA CONTENT -->
          </div>
       </div>
       <div id="footer"></div>
    </body>
    </html>

Now visit the “my_page_header” and “my_page_footer” sections. The above XHTML would go into “my_page_header”:

    <div id="topnav"></div>
       <div id="wrap">
          <div id="leftnav"></div>
          <div id="content">

And the rest into “my_page_footer”:

       </div>
    </div>
    <div id="footer"></div>

The calling sections that we first visited will populate the content area with your template constructed around it. If you need to modify the global styles further, although its is not recommended in the comments, you can search for “Global Style (do not customize)” and make additional modifications to the classes and Ids used by the default stylesheet. Additionally, if you want to remove the use of global styles altogether do a search for “” and comment it out in the respective sections you want it to no longer apply. Although its a hassle, I recommend copying and pasting back and forth between the Google Mini and your editor every few minutes and submitting the changes to debug for errors. The GSA will only give you a single error at a time, so if you there are multiple errors it requires multiple submissions and edits until you get it to validate–Much better just to test it as you go.

There has been some discussion within our web marketing group as to what the most important factors in SEO are.   I’ve always contended that it comes down to two major factors, Relevance and Authority/Quality.    Depending on how competitive the phrase is, the more authoritative your site needs to be to rank but you don’t stand a chance if your page isn’t relevant to begin with.     So with any SEO program, we always start with focusing on creating relevance.   This begins with keyword research to determine what your target market is searching for.  From there, you know what to make your content relevant towards.

First things first…. Is the content indexable?  If not, then don’t worry about anything else.  This takes priority above all else.   Once you can establish this then move on to how relevant your page is.

Relevance:

1. What is the Page’s Title Tag?  Are they relevant to the query and what is the density/order for matched phrase
2. Does the keyword match the anchor text in external links?
3. What keywords are in the internal anchor text
4. How relevant is the URL?  Does it have exact or close matches in the URL structure?
5. Is there a match in the h tags?
6. What is the density of the keyword on the page?
7. How many exact matches can be found on the page?
8. Are their exact matches in the description tags?
9. Does the content qualify for the freshness score?

Authority/Quality:

1. Does the page have high Page Rank?  Does the site have internal structure to pass internal Page rank to it?
2. Does it have external links from relevant authoritative sites?  How many?
3. What is the page’s CTR for query in comparison to standards for that position?
4. Does that clickthrough result in secondary search or secondary result click immediately afterwards?
5. How long has the domain existed
6. How long has the page existed
7. What is the trust score of the domain
8. How many social media links/mentions
9. How old is the domain?
10. Is the domain registered for a long period of time
11. Does it have a lot of non-linked “mentions” across the web.
12. What is the sentiment of those mentions?
13. How many branded searches does the domain receive
14. Is the site hosted on a dedicated server
15. Page Load time

Factors that have Negative influence:

1. Is the page keyword stuffing or madlibbing
2. Is the content duplicated across the site
3. Is the content duplicated across the web
4. Are the meta tags keyword stuffed
5. Does the page have any hidden text
6. Is the page cloaked?
7. Is the URL extremely long and transactional?
8. Does the domain have any penalties
9. Is there a link buying penalty
10. Has the directory been penalized

The interesting thing is that just one negative factor can negate all the other work you’ve done.  If you have a penalty on the domain, no matter your efforts in producing authority or relevance, you may be pigeon-holed to below the first 3 pages.

You can submit a reconsideration request if this is the case, but this rarely has any effect.   Google will not respond to your request directly to let you know whether your assumptions are correct or whether they will do anything about it.

Ultimately there are over 200 factors that go into the algorithm but you really want to focus on the ones that are going to produce the most for your time.    It also seems as though Google is placing more emphasis on factors that are less controllable such as internal historical data such as CTR and secondary searches which indicate quality.

What should you take away from this post?  Google is getting smarter, naturally.  They are placing more emphasis on factors that can’t be manipulated.  This gives them better control at fighting spammers and ultimately the quality of their search engine results.   This also means bigger brands that have more recognition are going to be favored due to CTR and overall mentions.  However, the small guy has an advantage as well when it comes to relevance.  Often times, big corporations have extremely complex websites that make it much more difficult to manage the factors that influence relevance.

Google Remarketing is such a great concept because it lets you serve ads to visitors that came to your site but didn’t convert right in the Adwords Interface.

How It Works:

1. Figure out what visitor segments you want to target and then create lists to fit them into with specific cookie time lengths.  Create specific display and text ads for each of your lists, and activate it.
2. When a customer comes and visits your website a cookie is set on their computer if they meet certain triggers you set within your list.  An example trigger would be that they came to your website, but failed to purchase one of your products.
3. Because of the cookie you set, these customers are now recognized across the Google Display Network (GDN) once they left your site, so anytime time they visit another website within the GDN your ads will ‘follow’ them around.

Different List Strategies:

1. Basic List Strategy: Just create one list and simply tag all visitors that land on your homepage.  This will help you to easily reach all of your website visitors.
2. More Advanced List Strategy: Create lists throughout each section of your website to market certain products to certain visitors.  If they were browsing your website for couches, show they couches, and if they were browsing for coffee tables, show them coffee tables.
3. Shopping Cart List Strategy: Create a list for visitors that engaged in your cart feature but never completed the transaction.  You would do this by putting a requirement in your list that the visitor must touch one of the cart pages, but never landed on the ‘thank you confirmation page.’  I would recommend serving these list members a more aggressive offer to help tip the scales in your favor.

Tips to Increase your Conversion Rates with Remarketing:

1. Use different creative pieces for each of your lists and time segments to keep customers aware of your graphics without them blending in.
2. If you are displaying an image to visitors that went to the shoes section of your website shoe images, and show visitors that went to the purse section of your website purses if you created separate lists for them.
3. Remember to hint about the added value of your products if they abandoned your cart.  This is your change to help give them a reason to say OK in their minds and return to your website to make that purchase!

Good luck from the Beacon Team!

Allow me to explain…  I am a very data driven person and happen to be an avid cyclist over the past several months.   I bought a road bike towards the end of the summer and since my very first ride I have been keeping statistics such as length of ride, time of ride, average speed, whether it was a group ride or solo, and even the temperature and style of ride.  This has given me a wealth of data that I can analyze. The following is a chart that is an aggregate view all all my rides including forecasting trend lines with average speed on the left axis and miles on the right.

So how is this similar to web marketing? First there is a lot of data and it can be difficult to understand trends without knowing how to properly segment and read the data. This is like looking at an all traffic channel report in Google Analytics. It looks interesting and catches your eye but you really need to filter down to relevant information and understand the trends that emerge withing individual segments. Segmenting the cycling data by the type of ride I can better understand a trend-line and the performance of a source/segment of data. In the example below, I have segmented the data to show only solo rides in combination with a “speed” style versus a distance, interval, or fit rides.

Now that I can view and analyze a specific segmentation, I can better understand the performance metrics and better yet create a relatively accurate forecast trend line so I can set expectations as to where I should be within a given amount of time. Things appear to be improving. This is very similar to web marketing data analysis in that you take the same type of approach. You start with a bunch of data that can be somewhat meaningless by itself but by digging deeper and creating segments of data you can better understand how specific channels are performing.

So the next time you open Google Analytics and see a top level trend that appears to not make a ton of sense, dig deeper and start analyzing individual channels. Determine strengths and weaknesses and where you need to either increase your efforts in training for cycling or investment for web marketing. BTW… For anyone wondering about the last two data points on the first chart, those are actually the winning data from two stages in the 2010 tour de france.  I use those for motivation!

During the recession,  did consumers hold back and  buy a less expensive turkey to serve for Thanksgiving dinner?

Google Trends indicates yes.

A search trend for “Butterball” shows a dip in 2008 after peaking in 2006.

Butterball turkeys are one of the more expensive turkey brands.  What other indicators does Google trends reveal?

On the timeline, we see a news snippet at point B “Butterball still poultry icon after sale“.  This was the point in 2006 when the Butterball brand was sold by ConAgra to a company called Carolina Turkeys. Carolina Turkeys was owned by Smithfield Foods and Maxwell Farms.

By the end of this timeline at point E in late 2010, Smithfield has sold its entire  49% stake in Butterball and  Carolina Turkeys company to use the proceeds to reduce debt.

A search trend for “recession”:

At the end of 2010,  will we still be talking turkey or will we all be butter off?