Seth Godin is Coming to Salt Lake City!

Well, even though we didn't get the 500 signups we were trying for, I just noticed that Seth recently updated his tour schedule to include Salt Lake City. I'm not sure when he added SLC, but I swear I checked it a few days ago and we weren't on the list, so it must be a very recent development. Maybe he saw that we were really trying to get the word out and get people to sign up to hear him speak.

He'll be here on May 24th from 1-4 PM at the Salt Palace. The deal is the same as previously mentioned: $50/person and you get 5 copies of his book and admission to the event.

I'll be there.

Exact Keyword Tracking Hack for Google Analytics

One of the nice things about Google Analytics (besides the price) is that there are a lot of people using it, so you get a lot of useful hacks to make it even more powerful than it already is. For example, this hack lets you track exact keyword searches, which is similar to what this filter does but using a script instead of a filter. These tools are very useful to determine which keywords people are actually finding your site with--especially helpful for eliminating non-relevant keywords with negative matches.

PPC Keyword Tips from Google

These tips on the Inside AdWords blog offer up some good advice about keyword length, negative keywords, and deleting non-performing keywords. Definitely things you should be doing if you want to maximize the return on your advertising dollars with PPC.

Eric Schmidt Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

Battelle's interview with Eric Schmidt:







I'm listening to it right now, so nothing to add, yet, but it sounds interesting so far.

Do you blog like a girl?

The gender genie is a fun tool that analyzes text and based on their algorithm determines whether the writer is a male or female. It's based off of word usage and it's not completely accurate from my limited tests, but it's right more than 50% of the time. It's fun to mess with coworkers and blogger friends when it outputs the wrong gender, too.

Found via the Grok

Search Engine Strategies Home Schooling

For those of us who couldn't make it to SES NY this year, you can still get the next best thing with the online version of the presentations.

Selling SEO Services in a Sea of Snake Oil

John Andrews wrote a great post about some of the difficulty of selling SEO services with so much misinformation and snake oil salesmen in the marketplace.

He references Market for Lemons an essay by Nobel prize winner George Akerlof. That essay established what is now known as asymmetrical information theory. Sounds like a very interesting read.

Google...not such a bad business model

Apparently, being a search engine can have its benefits, not the least of which (according to Q1 results) is making a ton of money. $3.66 billion in Q1 2007--which is up 63% from last year. The market seems happy with it--GOOG is up 2.5% so far for the day.

Yahoo Analytics?

I remember the guys at Yahoo taking up their analytics solution several years ago, but until I read this article on NewsFactor, I'd kind of forgotten all about it. The article points out that Yahoo had acquired Keylime Software as part of its purchase of Overture. I had a Keylime sales rep give me a demo back in 2000 or 2001. It looked like a pretty cool system at the time. I haven't heard much talk about it, but this "new" analytics system is part of the new Panama search marketing system--but only available for advertisers spending at least $6K/year in YSM.

I call it GoogleUpon

Yeah, Google's the bomb and all that, but they still know how to copy an idea that works. It's cheaper than trying to buy the company, anyway.

I remember when I first heard of StumbleUpon, I thought it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of. I probably didn't get it back then, plus I think they've actually improved on the idea a lot and made it into a somewhat useful service--obviously it's good enough for google to copy with their new "searching without a query" toolbar button. Hey, they're capturing all that data about your search history, they might as well do something with it, right?

Buh-bye Froogle: Hello Google Product Search

Google has changed the name of their product search to Google Product Search instead of Froogle. Froogle was a clever name, but this ain't Larry and Sergy's tiny little upstart anymore. Google is a big brand now, so they've got to start acting like it. The move makes complete sense in terms of maintaining their brand integrity. Kind of like what I read on Seth's blog about brand DNA this morning.

Gimme more of that anchor text data

Vanessa announced expanded data for anchor phrases in Google's webmaster tools. Data is good. More data is better.

The webmaster tools from Google are good because they let you get a peek under the covers at what Google knows about your site.

Also, with everything else going on, I missed the announcement of the new sitemap support in robots.txt. Apparently by adding a line with the URL of your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file, all the search engines that support the sitemap protocol will know where to find it. Very nice.

The SEO Playbook from Stuntdubl

I've always been a big fan of Todd AKA Stuntdubl. Once again he doesn't let me down with The SEO Playbook It's a blog post on his website, so it's free to read, but trust me there's a lot of value in there for SEO pros. That's what I like about Todd, he's not posting crap on his blog every day, but when he does post, it's worth reading.

Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List on Statsaholic.com

Seth Godin has a Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List on Statsaholic (formerly alexaholic). It shows a list of Web 2.0 sites in order of Alexa traffic ranking.

Speaking of Seth Godin, if you're local here in the Salt Lake City area and want to hear him speak, go pledge the $50. We still need a ton more people to get the needed 500 pledgers.

The Secrets to Getting Your Blog Posts Ranked in Google Blog Search

Very interesting post from Problogger that dissects Google's patent application from back in 2005. Some very interesting ideas on how Google might rank blogs. Particularly interesting are the "big brother" theories including the monitoring of gmail and google talk to see which blogs/posts get mentioned often. I'm sure that will ruffle some feathers, but the idea is taken straight from the patent doc. Makes me wonder if Google will start using these types of methods for ranking sites in the normal Google search as well--or for all we know, maybe they already have.

Google: AKA The Dominator

Dang! I thought Google dominated the search market in the US. Check out these UK search engine numbers from Hitwise - Google's got a stranglehold on the market with nearly 80% of UK searches!

Here's a recent press release with US figures for comparison. According to these numbers, Google has 64% of all searches in the US (and growing).

Google Goes Gangbusters, Acquires DoubleClick for $3 Billion

In its biggest acquisition yet, Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion in cash. Here's the word from the Google Blog. It's pretty amazing when you consider that DoubleClick did just 300 million in total revenue last year. But this is Google we're talking about and they had the cash laying around and apparently it was burning a hole in their pocket. I was thinking Microsoft would make this acquisition, and maybe Google bought to avoid that threat.

Is Google trying to take over the world? Or at least the Internet? Here's breaking news from 10 years in the future: Google Acquires the Internet

More About the New Utah Anti Keyword Bidding Law

Well, I was wrong about the blogosphere's interest in the new law against trademarked keyword bidding. There hasn't been much talk about it so far. I wonder if it's because all the bloggers are in New York at SES? Anyway, I'm starting to see a few mentions of it including an article on ClickZ and I also saw this one from earlier this month on Search Engine Land. Techdirt has another one from back on Apr 3. Interesting how everyone is in 100% agreement that this law is (1) a bad idea, and (2) completely unnecessary. I'm sure it will get a lot more exposure once someone tries to enforce it and/or Google decides to sue over it.

Sure I'll will pay $50 to hear Seth Godin speak in Utah

Any more marketing junkies want to join me in pledging to pay $50 to hear Seth Godin speak? He'll throw in 5 copies of his new book if we can get 500 people to pledge/prepay. There's only 24 pledgers so far. So if you're in Utah sign up and tell all your friends about it. Let's step it up, people!

(I guess Phil Burns started this Seth Godin pledge thing. I read about it on Janet's blog. BTW - I really like the pledgebank concept--very cool.)

Mobile Search Optimization from SES

Here's an overview of yesterday's Mobile Search Optimization session at SES in NY. Some interesting tidbits. btw - SERoundtable always has a good report of what's happening at these conferences.

Search Engine Marketshare Update from Hitwise

From a press release in my email this morning:

Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that the Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches in the for the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22, 9 and 3 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 5 percent of U.S. searches.

Nothing too exciting here, except I'm kind of surprised that Hitwise tracks 52 search engines. Can anyone name the top 52 search engines? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Is Google Too Powerful?

BusinessWeek gets Googley

One more thing about this dumb new Utah law

I forgot to mention this in my last post about the dumb new Utah law against trademark keyword bidding, but I'm sure Senator Eastman didn't just wake up one morning and just decide to make this law. As is usually the case, it came from some kind of special interest group and/or lobbyist who has some kind of ulterior motive. From what I've been reading, Matthew Prince, CEO of Utah-based Unspam has something to do with it, although I haven't seen any clear indication of what his interest would be in pushing this law through. Matthew even did some guest posts on the Utah senate blog. The guy loses me when he starts arguing that Utah's laws need to be more like international laws instead of sticking with the nationwide trademark laws that we have in place. Also, the Pontiac story is a lame example, because no one in their right mind was confused by seeing a Mazda ad when searching on Pontiac. It's not like Mazda was pretending to be Pontiac. That's insane! Pontiac was stupid for doing that campaign like that anyway, why didn't they just direct consumers to Pontiac.com? I'm sure it was some kind of co-op deal with Google, but still, they brought it upon themselves by directing users to Google.

(note: I actually think this was one of the best moves Pontiac ever made in terms of their online marketing--I mean we're still talking about it and linking to them after all this time, now that's what I call a good ROI)

Dunce Award: Utah's Lawmakers Outlaw Keyword Bidding

I'm surprised this hasn't shown up in the news before now, but apparently, the governor of my good state of Utah just signed a Utah law last month that makes it illegal for search advertisers to bid on their competitors' trademarked keywords. (here's the law) There are obviously two sides to the argument--most advertisers want to bid on their competitors' keywords while not allowing competitors to do the same to them--but that's not the point of this post. The point is, it is a complete waste of the legislature's time (and my tax dollars) to create this law. It's a pointless law that won't ever hold up--it's an issue that has been rehashed so many times and will continue to be for as long as the search engines offer keyword advertising. My personal feeling is that there should be no restrictions on trademark bidding at all, but the search engines actually have somewhat strict and I think very fair guidelines as to how advertisers can bid on trademarked terms. What's the point of having a law that's only valid in Utah to disallow trademark bids? It's a law to fix something that isn't broken! It's stupid! What a joke.

In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.

Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.

Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.

The State of the Blogosphere

I just read Sifry's State of the Live Web, April 2007 -- very interesting to see the growth of the blogosphere. I didn't realize Japanese is the most common language among bloggers, with English as a close second (for now).

Search Engine Ranking Factors from SEOMoz

SEOMoz just released a new and improved version of their Search Engine Ranking Factors. It's cool because they get input from a bunch of SEO experts so it's not just the opinion of one or two people.