Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I can't remember if I heard this first on the radio or if it was the Daily Searchcast, but I found it humorous to hear our commander in chief talking about how he uses "the Google."

An excerpt from the MSNBC transcript:
CNBC: Speaking of wealth, there's so much change in terms of technology on society, on business; I'm curious, have you ever Googled anybody? Do you use Google?

Pres. BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can--like, I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes. Yeah, I do it some. I'm not a--I tend not to e-mail or--not only tend not to e-mail, I don't e-mail, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don't want to receive e-mails because, you know, there's no telling what somebody's e-mail may--it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn't be able to say, `Well, I didn't read the e-mail.' `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn't?' So, in other words, I'm very cautious about e-mailing.

Just got this email today from Google about the Lane's Gifts Click Settlement:

Dear Google AdWords advertiser:

We are writing to notify you that we have processed your claim for Account Number ************ under the Lane's Gifts v. Google class-action settlement. We are issuing credits to the AdWords account identified in your claim.

To view your credit award, log in to your account and open your Billing Summary page. Your credit award will appear under the label 'Adjustment - Click Quality' between the dates 10/27 and 10/28. In some cases, it may take a few days for an award to be reflected on this page, so if you don't see it at first, please check back soon.

You don't need to do anything to redeem your credit. Google will automatically apply it to future invoices for your credited AdWords account. The credits are valid for one year from their date of issuance and may be canceled at any time after that.

Credits are awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account these factors:
- The amount you paid Google for advertising
- Google’s revenues from online advertising since January 1, 2002,and your claim percentage
- The total amount of credits available in the settlement, which is US$60M.

What this means is that the ad credits for the click fraud are supposed to be showing up in anyone's account who applied for the credit. So, if I'm understanding this right, and the number I see is my credit, my share of the $60M is a lot smaller than I thought it would be. It's tiny. Peanuts. I don't remember whose numbers I was using to figure my expected refund, but it's about 1/10 of what I thought it would be. I must have done the math wrong. Oh, well. It's slightly better than nothing.

SEW reports that MSN is about to launch a huge "customer acquisition campaign for Live Search." It will be interesting to see what they come up with this time...I don't recall their last ad campaign being all that effective. Now they're rebranding as LIVE.com. If they do it right, I bet they can grow their marketshare, but it's possible that they'll burn a lot of cash before they see any kind of return on it.

I just got back from the WOMA meeting in Salt Lake. It was my first time going to the Wasatch Online Marketing Association meeting. It was pretty good. The food was all right, and the CJ account reps were actually quite interesting. Although I was disappointed that we didn't get to hear George, the "human jukebox," sing a few songs for us.

Even though I don't manage any affiliate programs, I always find it interesting to see how advertisers and affiliate networks talk about us affiliates. I also met up with some friends and met some some very cool new people that I look forward to getting to know better in the future. Come on people how 'bout a little link love for your association!

SEOmoz has long been known to dish out a lot of good tips and info. Today Rand gives a huge list of ideas of how to search for sites to get links on. I've used most of these search functions on occasion, but Rand's got some on there that I've never thought of. It's also good to have a list like that so you don't forget any useful searches as you're on the hunt for good links.

It's been know for a while now that Google indexes dynamic URLs. All you have to do is look at the results to figure that out. They recently changed their webmaster guidelines policy to reflect that fact.

It's interesting to note, however that they still recommend rewriting dynamic URLs into more friendly (non-dynmaic looking) versions as a good practice. They also reiterate the idea of limiting parameters to just one or two for best results. So basically, no change here, just a change in the official word from the Googmeister.

I think the latest Pirates of the Carribean movie has everyone thinking pirates this year for Halloween costumes. I took particular interest in the email I got from HitWise about Halloween costume searches because I have a Halloween Costume website...although it's been largely neglected this year due to my general business with other projects, client work, etc.

Here's a blurb from the HitWise press release:
Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that 'pirate costumes' was the most popular costume specific search term capturing .24 percent of all search terms containing the word ‘costume’ for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006.

The next most popular costume related search terms were ‘tinkerbell costume’ and then ‘wonder woman costume’. The search term ‘jack sparrow costume’ followed due in part to the success of the movie, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.” A new trend noticed is that the share of US searches for the term 'adult costumes' was up 209 percent for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006 versus the same four week period in 2005 (four weeks ending October 22, 2005). In addition, the share of searches for 'sexy Halloween costume' was up 400 percent in the same period. Among the top 10 most popular costume searches with US Internet searchers include those more suitable for adults such as ‘playboy bunny costume’ and ‘dog the bounty hunter costume’.

Glad to see Tink and Wonder Woman holding their own on the list of top costume searches. I don't know about you, but I try to dress as something that nobody else is dressed as. If you're like me, this list gives you some ideas on what not to dress as...

Most Popular “costume” Specific Search Terms Among US Internet Users (Four Weeks Ending 10/21/2006)

• pirate costume
  
• tinkerbell costume
  
• wonder woman costume
  
• jack sparrow costume
  
• playboy bunny costume
  
• dorothy costume
  
• dog the bounty hunter costume
  
• little red riding hood costume
  
• jango fett costume
  
• cowgirl costume
  

Also interesting to see is the marketshare of costume sites. BuyCostumes.com is by FAR the leader in the industry with over 30% of the marketshare of visits. The next closest competitor has just 7%. I think a lot of their dominance is due to their affiliate program, but they also show up fairly well in the natural results and I'm sure they do a lot of other marketing as well.

I've started looking into a lot of business networking groups here in Utah this past year. There are a lot of good groups like chambers of commerce, leads groups, industry-focused groups, etc., but I think by far the most active and rewarding business networking group in Utah is Corporate Alliance. Corporate Alliance does a great job of creating opportunities for business leaders to meet up and and get to know each other in a no-pressure, fun environment. I'm still relatively new to the Corporate Alliance thing, but I think they do a great job of helping their members make connections with other members. They have organized the process, but it's still a lot of fun. In fact, the way they do things is a lot more fun than a lot of the not-so-organized "networking" lunches and events I've attended. If you're doing business in Utah County or Salt Lake County, you should at least come check out one of Corporate Alliance's free lunches to see what Corporate Alliance is all about.

Worst case you end up with a free lunch and a few new business contacts--best case, you'll see the value and end up joining the 600 other local business leaders that have discovered the benefits of Corporate Alliance.

Get more info about this awesome Utah business networking opportunity at ConnectingUtah.com

I started following copyblogger a little while back and I have been very impressed with the quality tips and insight Brian offers. The guy is very good at what he does--writing compelling copy. I just read a nice post about Little Known Ways to Write Fascinating Bullet Points. If you love using bullet points (you should) you'll like these tips.

I don't own a mac (unless an iPod counts), but I think the latest Mac ad compaign with the Mac guy and PC guy talking with the white background is one of the best I've seen in a long time. They're simple, yet convey a very strong message.

This one is my favorite one yet:

I recently bought my first iPod. I've wanted one for a while, but I guess the desire to have one didn't overcome my reluctance to shell out the cash...until now. eCost had a sweet deal on the 60GB video ipod that I couldn't pass up. I got it for $299, but it looks like they've raised prices since I got mine. Since this was a "business" expense, I needed to find some podcasts related to search engine optimization and other business-related topics. By the way, in case you're new to this podcasting thing, you don't have to own an ipod to listen to podcasts. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer. I used to listen to some of these occasionally before I got my iPod. The iPod just makes it a lot more convenient to listen when you're out and about.

So here's a quick list of SEO podcasts & Radio Shows that I'm aware of:

• WebmasterRadio.fm offers a ton of great shows (the best I've come across in the industry) all available to download as podcasts or listen online, including: Daily SearchCast, SEO Rockstars, Strikepoint, The Pulse, and The Alternative, plus a host of other non-SEO stuff like affiliate marketing, domains, copywriting, and other online marketing issues that are definitely worth a listen.
  
• Search Engine Radio - I used to listen to this one online all the time. Brad Fallon had some good guests on there. Browse the archives for great interviews from high profile search leaders.
  
• Mr. SEO's Podcast
  
• One upWeb's Straightup Search
  

Most of them are available through the iTunes podcast directory. So if you use iTunes, you can go into the podcast directory and search on "seo", "internet marketing" and similar keywords to find a butt-load of podcasts to check out. I also did a few quick Google searches for "seo podcasts" to make sure I didn't miss any big ones. I kept seeing the same ones mentioned, so hopefully I didn't miss any good ones. I'm sure there are more podcasts out there, the trick is to find the good ones that are actually updated often. There are getting to be a lot of podcasts and unfortunately like anything on the web, as the volume grows, the majority of them will be junk. That's why I can see the value using a service like Podango - a cool new startup here in Utah that offers podcast "stations" with experts who weed out the junk and offer only the the best, hand-selected, quality podcasts in their area of expertise.

One of my pet peeves about the Yahoo/Overture keyword tool is how they combine misspellings, plurals, etc. to show a total for all the searches combined in one number. I'd much rather they broke it out so I could see how many people search on each variation of the keyword. That's why tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker are so valuable--because they don't combine those variations. The problem with those other guys is that their samples are either outdated or very small in comparison to Yahoo's data. That's why you can't rely on one single source for your keyword research. Anyway, this isn't the real reason for this post. I wanted to mention the top 20 misspelled words over on the Yahoo Search Buzz blog. It's not going to be all that useful for most marketers--okay, it's totally useless--but it is kind of interesting to see what people are misspelling. Looks like mostly celebrity names...I must say, though, I find it somewhat disturbing how many people are searching for people like Weird Al and Barbara Streisand. Oh, and how about Britney Spears, who made it on the list twice, with two of the top 20 most common misspellings. I guess there are a lot of different ways to spell Britney, but everyone knows how to spell Spears.

It's well know that the search engines themselves are a great way to research your competitors and see which sites link to them (or at least find SOME of the sites that link to them), how about finding out all the sites that a particular site links out to? Well Live.com (MSN) has just the tool for that--their new LinkFromDomain operator tells you all the links FROM a domain to other sites.

Here are the sites I link to from this blog

I guess anyone can link out to a ton of sites, the trick is getting other sites to link to you.

Anyway, it's a very cool and useful way to see where a particular site links to for competitive research or whatever your little conniving mind can come up with to use it for.

thanks, SEOroundtable

It's about time this happened...they're kind of phasing in the upgrades over time, but should have the process complete by the end of the year.

I remember reading about a controversial new anti-spam law that was being proposed here in Utah a while back (2003?). Anyway, thanks to the Utah Child Protection Registry Act, here in Utah we have a "do not email" list--similar to the Federal Do Not Call list, but for email--and only for Utah residents (Michigan also has a similar law). They say the list is to protect kids from porn, drugs, gambling, and other unseemly email messages. I feel like a do not email list is a bad idea in general--for several reasons--but a list like that with kids' email addresses is just idiotic. Don't get me wrong--I completely agree with their intentions. I have kids and want to protect them as well, but they should have really gone about this a different way. I mean, seriously people, besides the fact that the whole do not email concept is flawed, now a report has come out of a state employee releasing the email addresses of four minors a few weeks ago.

I hope when this goes before the federal court they figure out that this law is faulty and could potentially do a lot more harm than good--and ditch the list. I just don't believe that the scumbag spammers actually scrub their lists against the do not email registry. If they do and someone out there has benefitted from this registry, I would love to hear about it. Although, you still have that touchy little issue of keeping the addresses out of the hands of potential perpetruators...

Oh, and one last thing, do parents even know that this registry thing exists? I'm a parent who's online about 60- hours a week, yet somehow I never realized it until I saw that article from Media Post in my email today. IF the darn thing worked, it would only be any good if people knew about it and used it.

I'm not sure how many local SEO/SEM-ers read this here blog thing-a-majigger, but just in case you're looking for something new. I just caught wind of a search engine marketing job opening at Omniture. Sounds like they're looking for an entry-level type person with a year or two experience with search marketing.

Here's their description of the position:

Provides accurate and timely technical support to Omniture SearchCenter customers via telephone and email. Manages support issues of a complex and technical nature with varying degrees of priority. Addresses incidents within predetermined service levels, requiring the ability to multi-task and prioritize. Carries out projects as assigned and supports other team members in order to represent Omniture in a professional manner.

This position is specific to supporting Omniture SearchCenter, a rapidly-growing bid management and optimization platform. Applicants with search engine marketing or bid management experience will receive special consideration.

So, it sounds more like a tech support position, but it's not really clear what exactly you'd be doing. They are looking for someone with search engine marketing (PPC) experience, so if you've got that and it sounds interesting, you can get the contact info from Omniture's site.

It's official... the rumor mill was churning loudly and quickly and sure enough, Google is going to buy YouTube. I've ready various opinions on whether or not this is a good deal for Google. I'm not certain YouTube is worth $1.65 billion, but I think it's a good move by Google to get the biggest name in online video...and if the numbers make sense (and they must or they wouldn't have done the deal, right?), it put's Google at the top of the heap for video...as long as they don't ruin the community on YouTube and drive users to find another place to share their lame home videos.

This is a great list of links to other great resources published on other blogs about how to get links, create buzz, etc. I haven't read all of them, but I recognize a lot of the titles and have even linked to many of them in previous posts. It will take a lot of time to go through and read each of these, but they're well worth the time...or at least catch the ones you haven't read yet.

Here's the link again to the ultimate guide - check it out.

If anyone is looking for a new home in Utah County you should check out my house for sale in Lehi. I moved several months ago and have been renting this house to relatives, but they're buying their own place so we've decided it's time to sell. This is a great home in a very nice neighborhood. It's right by a nice, big park and very close to the elementary and Jr. high schools. We hated to leave this place, but we needed a bigger home. This is the perfect starter home as long as you don't have too many kids ;)

Lehi is a great place to live--nestled right between Salt Lake and Provo. I lived there for the past 7 years and totally loved it. I'm now out west a little in The Ranches, but I still go to Lehi every day. (My office is in Lehi). If you're interested, check out this page for more info. I'll be adding some more pictures and maybe even some video later on this week if I get time.