Liz Farmer of the MD Daily Record attended the Interactive Essentials: Search Engine Marketing seminar that Emily Chua put on here at Congruent Media last Thursday and wrote a nice story. The seminar was produced in association with the Advertising Association of Baltimore and was filled to capacity. Another seminar is being scheduled for those who were wait listed or not able to attend the first session. If you're interested in attending, email Emily.

Google announced a new ad distribution system today, Google TV Ads. Using the existing AdWords system, users can now create television commercials and manage them alongside their online campaigns. The commercials will run on selected TV stations, during time segments that users specify. If you're not sure which stations are right for your ads, there is even a suggest by demographic function that will match your target demographics with TV stations and time segments that would best fit your target viewers. Going even more in depth, users can target a specific program to advertise on or block if they feel that specific programs fit or don't fit into their strategy. Since this utilizes the easy to use AdWords system, television ads are now open to a whole new segment of advertisers who may not have had the opportunity in the past.

TV ads are already starting to encourage people to go online and search for their brand, so this is an interesting way to bring internet and traditional media advertising even closer together. With search, radio, mobile, print and now television ads, Google is helping to promote the idea that in order to market successfully you need to consider all possible avenues to reach your target audience.

Google is always tinkering, inventing, reinventing and otherwise expanding their offerings to stay in front of the pack. Friday's announcement on the official Adwords blog that their demographic bidding is out of beta and into the hands of all Adworders falls in lock step with that strategy.

In short, advertisers can tweak their campaigns to only show ads on the Google content network to those that fall within reported demographic segments. Bids can also be adjusted accordingly. Think about being able to run your ads on MySpace based on what those users report as their age and gender. There's a lot of potential for increasing ROI when properly executed.

We're going to be running some tests here and will report back initial findings shortly.

The news is out, Microsoft is making a bid to purchase Yahoo! for just under $45 billion.  According to reports, the Redmond software giant believes that combining forces with Yahoo!, the ailing Internet portal and search engine, will turn it's own Internet business around as it continues to hemmorage money in the battle against the 700 pound gorilla named Google.  Apparently, the offer is 62% above Thursday's closing price for Yahoo! stock, illustrating Microsoft's brilliance at overplaying it's hand in a desperate attempt to gain some sort web foothold. 

While Microsoft may think that aquiring Yahoo! will help it level the playing field, the only people I can see winning from such a deal are the shareholders themselves, and Google.  If I was a Yahoo! shareholder, I'd take the deal and split with a fat wallet, much happier than losing my shirt as Yahoo! continues to sink.  And if I were Google, I'd be happy that Microsoft is throwing away good money after bad by purchasing an already-bloated, under-performing Internet company.

What Microsoft should be doing is taking a page from the old Google playbook - invest in bright ideas by aquring small companies doing really cool things, as well as tried and true larger ones.  This brings in new talent that hasn't fallen into the brain-numbing rut of the mega-corporate-technocracy, fostering the maverick pioneer spirit of innovation, and generally creating an exciting work environment.

To be fair, Microsoft has aquired its share of small companies as well as large, most notably to this blogger the 2004 purchase of GIANT Company Software, Inc., which had a really cool anit-spyware tool until the good old boys in Washington monkeyed with it and turned it into the clunky Windows Defender.  The problem is that, while Microsoft may be aquiring talent, it's not aquiring Internet talent, which is what it now hopes to achieve through this unholy union.

Personally, I'd like to see Microsoft make some headway in the Internet battle against Google.  Maybe, despite my nay-saying predictions, the Yahoo! executive board and shareholders will approve this proposal and it will be a wildly successful combination and not money thrown down the drain.  Don't get me wrong, Microsoft is no friend of mine.  But just as Netscape and Microsoft battled it out in the late 1990s, followed by the rematch of Microsoft versus Firefox in the last few years, for browser dominance, and just as Microsoft and Apple have been dualing for twenty-some odd years in the computer systems arena, this battle of Google versus Microsoft is bound to fuel new innovations.  This time around, Microsoft is the underdog.  Hopefully it can keep Google in check - the last thing we need is for Mountain View's wildest success story to turn into an evil, information controlling, mega-opoly.  It's certainly sitting on top of that slippery slope right now.

It's no secret that Google loves Wikipedia. The benefits of having dubious freely editable information rank first in the most popular search engine has been evaluated for quite a while, but I have to wonder how long that tawdry affair is going to last with Google's Knol looming on the horizon.

At the moment the service is in closed beta, but the idea looks to be part Wikipedia, part Squidoo. One expert user creates a page (a "lens" to represent your view in Squidoo, a "knol" or unit of knowledge in Knol) on a specific topic that can be edited by others, but only with the expert user's permission. In theory this would allow moderators to have a narrower focus than Wiki admins, and would prevent unchecked nonsense from being added while maintaining a social atmosphere. I'm interested to see if Knol will be better received than Squidoo, which got a perhaps unfair label as a haven for spammers who create lenses as advertisements passed off as authoritative information.

The other thing we know is Google loves Google. In all those examples the Google service snags the #1 spot, along with the top ad spot (and in some cases securing multiple ad spots on the first page). So then what will happen once Knols start propagating through the system? Will a Google / Wiki 1-2 punch become the standard for the front page of every search result? Ultimately the quality of information on those Knols and Wikipedia pages will either create or prevent public backlash, but if websites with a singular focus can’t reach the top of their subject’s rankings because they aren’t “in” with Google, it might raise a few eyebrows.

Click here for more information. 
Click here to win $1,000,000 dollars. 
Click here for a punch in the nose.

"OK, so each link leads you to the same thing.  Why?"  Teachin you a lesson, that's why.

Notice how the top-ranking result for "click here" is Adobe's PDF Reader download page? That's because somewhere in the ballpark of half-a-buhzillion websites link to that exact page with the exact words "click here" in (or as) the link text.  When done intentionally this is called "Google  bombing" and it's pretty old news . . . but it's when it's done as a mistake that interests me.

"What's the problem?  I like clicking here."

Yeah but where is, "here?"  As we all know, links are not like light switches that turn the Interweb forward or backward a step (that's called Stumble Upon); the whole reason that links have different colors and underlines is to give something a citation as well as transport the viewer to that source.  When Google sees you linking to your Photo Gallery as "click here" it initially thinks it's a page about "click here."  And if you don't have an informative Title tag on that next page, it might not ever figure it out.  Just because your page is full of pictures of blue, furry widgets, doesn't mean Google automagically knows it's about "the widget industry's photo gallery of blue, furry widgets."  Google's pretty much blind as a bat when it comes to JPEGs. 

"OK, Officer Obnoxitron, how do I find and fix all the times I used 'click here?'"

I was recently doing some Search Engine Optimization on a website and found that if you Google up "site:www.yoursite.com 'click here'" you can find all the pages in your site where you have used the words "click here" when you really should have used something more descriptive.  The particular site I was examining came up with 107 instances of the dread words.

... You can probably try this same thing with "next," "back," "read more," and "download" or whatever other vague phrases you fancy.

Switcheroo

Also, consider the reverse: If you're linking to a page about the "glyptodon" with a full paragraph of text about its eating habits, you run the risk of missing the point that the page is about the glyptodon and not each and every other word in that paragraph. 

"But 'click here' had such a good ring to it."

I know, it's hard to replace "click here" after all these years.  I try to use the next page's title or the best name for the file if you're downloading something.  You can even keep "click here" if you just move the anchor tag over to the informative words.

"Click here for more information," becomes, "Click here for more information about fruit bat soup."

See, isn't that more fun?

I was doing a little research on some video storage devices and I was sidetracked by an awesome looking new Sony HD camcorder - the HVR-V1. I love video cameras and wanted to see what they're going for in case I hit the lottery.

I went to Google and mistakenly typed in [Sony HVR-VI] using the Roman numeral I instead of the number 1. Here's the search.

Not one Adwords advertiser at all. Zero in my area anyway.

Correct that search and key in [Sony HVR-V1] and you get a completely different picture. Here's that search.

Check out the advertisers all trying to get your attention over there. You'd think at least one of the campaign managers for this would pick-up on this variation.

You have to look deeper these days to find these kind of fringe opportunities, but by consistently looking and implementing misspellings and such, you'll lower your cost per visitor across the board.

Thanks, Dan

Search marketers that have Yahoo! dialed-in as a steady PPC option have been talking for a while now about the much anticipated, way overdue revamping of their administrative interfaces. The Search Team at Congruent Media has had a bunch of clients already transferred from the old system to the new system, and except for the painful manner in which Yahoo! messes-up the account's organizational structure, the upgrades are very welcome.

This morning I received a few emails (all from Yahoo! with the same content - that's another story about deduping multiple instances of addresses on sending a campaign) about another upgrade to the system that is going live on Monday, February 5th. It seems that the folks at Yahoo! finally figured-out that relevancy in search results is more important to the long-term fiscal health of the company than short term profits gained by allowing search marketers to drive up bid costs. So, starting in less than two weeks, PPC positioning on Yahoo! is not simply determined by the highest bidder, but now is determined by "Ad Quality."

What is "Ad Quality"?
Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Example of How Ads May be Ranked
The graphic below helps illustrate a scenario that may result from this change:


Google has become, well Google, by figuring this (and a heck of a lot more) out much earlier in the game.

Not everyone can be Google though, and Yahoo!'s move is a smart one. As I write this I'm listening to Bloomberg on Sirius and they're talking about Yahoo! being up in pre-trading due to "enhancements to their advertising services." Do you think some traders got the same email I did and put two and two together...

Apparently there were another round of changes to Google's algorithm that is affecting some advertisers. It doesn't sound like this round is going to do much to the majority  of our clients, but more the affiliate advertisers that have automatically generated keywords, pages, etc.

The cool thing is that apparently there is starting to be somewhat of a blur between SEO activities and SEM activities.

In short, effective SEO moves are starting to render better quality scores in Google Adwords. Now that I've seen it, it's one of those "makes sense" moves as Google's holy grail is to provide relevant search results.

We're actively working through client campaigns to ensure that landing pages follow some smart SEO moves:

• Add a site map to the website and link to it
• Add links to high traffic websites (give them low visibility as they just need to be there)
• Use relevant text lists v. graphics, bullets, etc.
• Use anchor tags, alt tags, headlines - all with relevant keywords
• Always add relevant content

We'll keep close tabs on the results and provide updates as necessary.