It is with great pleasure and excitement that I announce a new Search Engine Marketing (SEM) project for eMarketing 101. In the next few months, I will be working with Urban Impact Recycling, which offers office paper and cardboard recycling services out of Richmond (BC) Canada.

In this role, I am very happy to work with Nicole Stefenelli, President of Urban Impact Recycling. The whole team at Urban Impact is fully dedicated to the environment. Since Search Marketing is an ecological advertising alternative that supports our collective efforts to overcome our major environmental challenges, I could not be more thrilled to team up with these guys and contribute to change the world, one click at a time.

Please recycle more in 2008 and make search marketing one of your priorities.

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I got a great article today and I thought I could not avoid the opportunity to sharing it around. According to many blogging experts, only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. For those who do have blogs, they benefit from it in a variety of ways. Blogging is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand. Since most of my Clients (and the potential ones who are reading this) are small-medium size businesses, this is for you.

Here is the stuff, by Marci Alboher, from the NY Times:

The blog of Sarah E. Endline described the arrival of the company’s first cacao shipment from South America.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.

But while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.

But some companies are suited to blogging. The most obvious candidates, said Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of “ The Everything Blogging Book “ (Adams Media 2006), are consultants. “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.”

For other companies, Ms. Risdahl said, it can be challenging to find a legitimate reason for blogging unless the sector served has a steep learning curve (like wine), a lifestyle associated with certain products or service (like camping gear or pet products) or a social mission (like improving the environment or donating a portion of revenues to charity).

Even in those niches, Ms. Risdahl said that companies need to focus on a strategy for their blogging and figure out if they have enough to say.

“As a consultant, blogging clearly helps you get hired,” she said. “If you are selling a product, you have to be much more creative because people don’t want to read a commercial.”

Sarah E. Endline, chief executive of sweetriot, which makes organic chocolate snacks, said she started blogging a few months before starting her company in 2005 to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the business.

The kind of transparency is a popular reason for blogging, particularly for companies that want to be identified as mission-oriented or socially responsible.

A typical post on sweetriot’s blog described the arrival of the company’s first cacao shipment from South America and how Ms. Endline met the truck on Labor Day weekend after it passed through customs at Kennedy International Airport.

She wrote about climbing aboard to inspect the goods and then praised the owner of Gateway trucking company, who helped her sort through the boxes so that she could examine the product.

“At sweetriot we don’t use the word ‘vendors’ as we believe it is about partnership with anyone with whom we work,” she wrote.

For companies in the technology sector, having a blog is pretty much expected. Still, Tony Stubblebine, the founder and chief executive of CrowdVine , a company that builds social networks for conferences, said that one of his main reasons for blogging is to show that his business model is different from the typical technology start-up.

“Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on venture capital funding and having an exit strategy,” he said. “Because I’m not focused on raising money, I can focus on my customers, since they aren’t a stepping stone to some acquisition or I.P.O.”

He added: “I’m trying to create a community of help for small Internet businesses like mine. My blogging philosophy is like the open source model in software. It’s sort of a hippie concept. If I can help other people, it’s personally rewarding. And those people will likely pay it back in some ways.”

Mr. Stubblebine said he gets new customers largely by word of mouth, and he uses the blog as a way to share news with friends and people who wield influence in his industry as well as a reference check for customers. “That’s why I cover the growth of the company.”

David Harlow, a lawyer and health care consultant in Boston, said he started his blog, HealthBlawg, as a way of marketing himself after he left a large law firm and opened his own practice. Besides, he said, blogging was easy to get started and the technology was straightforward.

Now, after about two years of blogging, Mr. Harlow said he was pleased with the results. He gets about 200 to 300 visits a day, he said. He has also become a source for publications looking for commentary on regulatory issues in the health care field and has even gained a few clients because of the blog. In addition, he has formed relationships with other legal bloggers (who call themselves blawgers) and consultants around the country.

Many small business bloggers achieve their goals even if only a handful or a few hundred people read their blogs. But some companies aim much higher.

Denali Flavors, an ice cream manufacturing company in Michigan that licenses its flavors to other stores, for example, is a small company with a limited ad budget. It decided to use a series of blogs to build brand awareness for Moose Tracks, its most popular flavor of ice cream.

John Nardini, who runs marketing for Denali and is responsible for the company’s blogs, said he has experimented over the last few years with different types of blogs to see which would generate the most traffic. One blog followed a Denali-sponsored bicycle team that was raising money for an orphanage in Latvia. Another tracked the whereabouts of a Moose character that would show up at famous landmarks around the country.

But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday.

He uses free tools like Google Analytics and Site Meter to understand how people are finding the site and which key words are working. Free Money Finance receives about 4,500 visits a day and each visitor views about two pages, which means they see two ads for Moose Tracks ice cream. The effort costs about $400 a year, excluding Mr. Nardini’s salary.

The site also accepts advertising, which earns the company about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, all of which Denali donates to charity. “We run ads because it legitimizes the site; it’s really not about the money,” Mr. Nardini said. “We’re hoping people will go into Pathmark, see the Moose Tracks logo and say, ‘Hey, I just saw that on the Web site I go to every day.’ “

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It is with great pleasure and excitement that I announce a new Search Engine Marketing project for eMarketing 101. In the next few months, I will be working with Banff Lake Louise Tourism to implement a full-scale Paid Search Advertising program.

As a result, I am very happy to work with Paul Thompson, Manager, E-Strategy for Banff Lake Louise Tourism. The whole team is fantastic and I hope you will consider going to Banff Lake Louise for your winter holidays. 

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Have you ever noticed how the web is filled with religious metaphors? Some people call me a “Search Marketing Evangelist”, maybe because I always speak loud and clear to anyone who wants to hear about the new consumer-driven advertising manifesto. In that spirit, I often refer to Google as the facilitator of truth, because of the waste management process it has to go through in order to find great & authentic stories and present it to you in a consistent and orderly fashion. Google weeds out the crap so you have meaningful resources in the SERPs. As a result, a lot of the search marketing images have some kind of a religious significance: the search of authenticity, democracy & freedom and spreading of ideas and opinion. Gord himself talked about it a while ago on his post about The Evolving Whiff of Authencity which you might want to read as well as in the testing of the Google Toolbar Search Term Suggestions Tool. Every concept surrounding search marketing revolves around the search of authenticity and the tools we currently have help humanity finding the essence in everything we search for.

Talking of essence, Google vice president and chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf (known as the father of the Internet) was interviewed by Suisse publication Das Magazin in Zurich in late November. Here are a few of his statements during this interview that I found specifically inspiring:

“Humanity should understand the blessings of the internet. Our history shows: the more people go online, the more flat hierarchies are becoming.”
“The more people join, the more free the world will be. Indeed I have almost religious faith in this.”
“What were doing is this: Everyday we break our heads on the question of how to organize and archive the whole worlds knowledge to make it accessible to millions of people. That is our vision.”
“99% of all applications are yet to be invented. The internet is mainly software, and software is only limited by our imagination, and our ability to turn ideas into programs. The most trivial will be: our fridge, our oven, our entertainment gadgets “ everything will move online. People will start-up companies to manage other peoples devices.
“Asked about a cult-like worship surrounding Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Mr. Brin and Mr. Page are humble, decent and thoughtful men. They are very smart. They talk little. But when they do, you should listen.”
“Asked about the security of the data Google stores in their data centers: First of all, were securing our data through very strict internal rules. Employees which don’t stick to those precise rules are immediately suspended from the company. We have the same sensibility about this as a bank might have. On the data centers: Even when we don’t make them look like a CIA facility we know means to ensure that no one had ever reason to complain about the security of their data with us.”
“On self-censoring in Chinese search results: We debated this internally for one year. Then we decided to offer a censored search engine, but to not offer other services, like Gmail or Blogger. ... We do not want to be getting into a situation where the government asks us: Who wrote this critical blog? Vint adds: Besides: This is the law in China. We don’t want to break the laws of any country. “
“We were and still are very conservative with information about our product plans. We don’t communicate what we do until we do it.”
“We never gave anyone reason for real justified criticism. We have been ordered by courts to release information, but we fought for 9 months and won. We are dependent on our users as we handed them the option to break up with us quickly.”
“The company has a big responsibility and is grateful if it is reminded of it.”
“Asked on when Google will be powerful enough to pressure the Chinese government into accepting Google’s values: We convince governments, but we don’t pressure them.”
“Asked about Google’s recipe for success: Don’t be a threat. Do no evil.”

Vint Cerf, Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist”

There is something profound about the vision Google has which is led by Vint Cerf. He must be proud to see what it is becoming. Are you converted yet? 

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Do what I say, not what I do. There is a recurrent idea that keeps coming back to me over the last few months about web marketing geeks preaching everywhere about what to do in the area of corporate blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media and so on, but are not following these best practices for their own site. I believe this does not bring much credibility in the long run and we need to clean up our act. Over the last few years, I have been observing how regular business people (non-geek) tend to isolate us in a silo and usually take everything we say with a grain of salt. We are used to see skepticism in discussions with potential clients. Maybe we are partially responsible for this. Potential clients would question our motives since we are not doing for our own sites what we want to do for them. The Association of Internet Marketing & Sales is a very good example.

I was browsing around today and I came across the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales website and notice how bad their page titles are.

Here is why:

Use of the word Home in the page title for their “Home Page” (Home is referred as a stop word)

All page titles are written backwards, with the more specific information & keywords about a page are at the end of the page title

Page titles length not optimized (66 characters)

Choice of keywords for each page title does not increase the likelihood of being found, based on the content of every page

Page titles are the easiest thing you can work on in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan. It is also the fastest thing you can change and tweak in order to attract more visitors to your site from organic sources (free traffic). As I pointed out in one of my last posts on the impact of universal search on eye tracking & scanning patterns on a typical SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it shows how important it is to have the content of any page clearly labeled in the first few words on the vertical axis. That can easily be done by putting the keywords related to any given page of your site in the first few words of your page titles, followed by the common theme of your entire site. It this easy enough? This is the first rule in SEO and I can’t wait to see all web marketing professionals following it. 

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Mark you calendar! The best local event on blogging and social media is coming back again this year and I am pleased to join the organizing committee to invite you to attend the Northern Voice 2008 Blogging Conference in Vancouver (BC) which will be held on February 22-23 2008. Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference that’s being held at the Forestry Sciences Centre, 2424 Main Mall, UBC main campus, Vancouver (BC) Canada on February 22-23, 2008.

The Northern Voice 2008 Organizing Committee:

Darren Barefoot, Kris Krug, Brian Lamb, Cyprien Lomas, Boris Mann, Dale McGladdery, Lori Pike, James Sherret, Travis Smith, Julie Szabo, Roland Tanglao, Lauren Wood.

For more Information on Northern Voice 2008, please visit Northernvoice.ca

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As we approach the end of the year and make our predictions for the next year in Search Marketing, Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro hosted a webinar on December 11, 2007 with leading experts on search to discuss its future. They met to share their thoughts on the future of Search in the year 2010 but also what will most likely show up on the radar next year. Enquiro previously released a Search 2010 Whitepaper where topics of discussion included:

* Impact of Personalization of search Search 2010
* How much change will we see in 3 years? In 5 years?
* Impact of Universal Search Results
* The promise of Mobile
* What might happen with search advertising?
* How will the user experience with search evolve?
* What might happen with the search interface as we know it?

What’s The Future of Search Going to Look Like? (and what does it mean to you)
As I was listening to the webinar, which included thoughtful comments by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google as well as Jakob Nielsen, User Advocate and Principal of Nielsen Norman Group, Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land & Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence among others, I took lots of notes which I want to share with you. These are no scientific findings but my own interpretation of what you can do, in simple terms, to adjust your search marketing plan to the new reality that lies ahead.

Search 2008:
According to Marissa Mayer, Search won’t see drastic changes in the upcoming year. For Google we will most likely see an increased level of experimentation & integration of universal search (aka: blended search, unified, 3D). There will also be improvements on how the Google snippets are collected. (Snippets mean the piece of text below every link on a given search results page). Every search engine is trying to define new technologies to understand every user intent, based on their search query. This gap can not be reached easily according to all the people on the panel and we won’t see any breakthrough on that level anytime soon. No technology can actually make it happen. According to Marissa, most search queries are perfectly acceptable the way they are and even if we add rephrasing of search queries, grammar, refining search queries options or the Yahoo assist technology in the steps of disambiguation of search intent or query refinement, you won’t see a major jump in functionality happening next year. According to Gord Hotchkiss, personalization might be the answer to this challenge of understanding user intent and thus provide more relevant search results.

What do these changes mean to you?
Universal search has had a big impact on capturing user attention on a given search page. In a nutshell, eye tracking studies show that universal search results move the eye scanning process down the page, creating an E-shape form rather than the traditional F-shape form, in the initial golden triangle study:

New E-Shape Form

Traditional Golden Triangle (F-Shape)


Consequences:

There are more eye attention being scattered across the page, especially below the fold of search results (paid and organic).

Same idea (as above) applies to Google paid ads on the right rail

E-shape: means in order to capture attention with the first word on a vertical axis, that word must be the first one in your page title. Make sure your page titles are strong and work with search results.

Google Snippets may no longer be the default Meta Description Tag. Make sure all the text on your site is SEO friendly as every little piece may be called for action in search results.

Adwords: you might get away with lower paid positions (4+) in search results, but there is still a major disconnect when it comes to user eye tracking focus & the PPC opportunity.

Eyes are trained to scan pages, there will be a retraining process involved with universal search which might have an impact on PPC advertising.

Google might want to start finding other revenue sources than traditional PPC ads as they focus on the users in other areas as well as universal search, which they are very keen about. Eye tracking studies show a diminishing amount of attention to paid ads at the top of search results. Therefore, unless these ads are spot on relevant, effectiveness of PPC is slowly going down

Avoid traditional marketing lingo in PPC ads as the use of this terminology will most likely accelerate the ineffectiveness of your PPC ads

Use more down-the-tail search terms in your PPC ads and work harder on your ad copy

The best form of advertising is relevance or no advertising at all (organic results). Put more focus on Organic search in 2008 than you did in 2007.

We may see other ad formats appearing in search results to counter balance the eye scanning retraining process and maintain interest, as these studies point out. Be aware of those.

A better balance in terms of investment should be implemented between SEO and PPC advertising in 2008. 

Closing remarks:
If you want to use Google to promote your business, you have to understand what they do, why and their pace of innovations should be reflected in the innovations you put on your site as well. They provide the rhythm and they make it clear about what they want. Follow it. If you don’t stay informed about what Google does and only look at your online presence from your perspective, it is unlikely that you can succeed in the long run. I recommend that, much like Google, you continue focusing on the users, keep trying with new ideas, put content on your site and evaluate what it does for you. Take risks & innovate and you may be surprised how big you can win in the process. Remember: It is no longer the big eating the small but rather the fast eating the slow. 

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