Search Advisory   Brought to you by Prominent Placement, Inc., provider of search engine optimization services and pay-per-click advertising

Tom Shivers from Capture Commerce recently interviewed me about how social media impacts search engine optimization.  This was prompted by last month’s AiMA/SEMPO Atlanta event (our coverage here).  Listen to the podcast here.

Topics I cover in about 10 minutes:

• How social media has changed the search landscape
• Google+ and what marketers think about its chance for success
• How businesses can improve the SEO value of their Facebook page
• How businesses can get more marketing value with their use of Twitter
• How Newell-Rubbermaid has pioneered product reviews to impact search rank, marketing, product development, retail shelf space and sales

The Interwebs have been abuzz since yesterday about a public relations scandal that pits Facebook against Google.  Apparently, Facebook hired PR giant Burson-Marsteller to anonymously represent them in an effort to have privacy advocates shed light on Google’s questionable privacy practices.  Plenty of articles have already been published about this situation – here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take.

Apparently, Facebook doesn’t like how Google’s “Social Circle” results can pull data from Facebook.  Rather than confront the problem directly, Facebook turned this into a privacy issue – one that presumably the public would care about more than one behemoth using another behemoth’s data.  But Facebook couldn’t poke at Google’s privacy lapses directly since Facebook’s own privacy policies are arguably worse.  Hence the subterfuge, which blew up in Facebook’s, well, FACE, when one of the bloggers that Burson-Marsteller approached smelled a rat and published the email exchange online.

Facebook claims that it was just trying to focus attention on publicly-available information, and Burson-Marsteller is now saying that withholding its client’s name was not their standard operating procedure and that they should have declined the assignment.

What was that saying about glass houses, again?

I’ve been watching Yahoo’s slow decline for about a decade now.  A recent article on ClickZ by Sage Lewis put a lot of my feelings into words (read “Dear Yahoo, I Hate You“).  Sage does a great job of listing all the Yahoo properties that have been closed down (including AltaVista, AllTheWeb.com, GeoCities and more), as well as recapping many of the layoffs.

Sage ends by begging Yahoo not to close Flickr, to which I wholeheartedly agree.  And let me add Yahoo Web Analytics to that list as well.  We started using this product back in 2004 when it was an independent company called IndexTools.  It was an outstanding product at that time – it was affordable and offered functionality that many other web analytics software didn’t offer (and still don’t).  Once Yahoo bought IndexTools and made it free of charge…the product changed from a revenue producer to a cost center, and both the quality of the product and the customer support deteriorated over time.  Attention, Yahoo: we’d gladly pay to get the “old” IndexTools back!

In any case, Yahoo’s decline is sad not only because of all its early promise, and all the wonderful assets it has had over the years, but because it’s a competitor that Google desperately needs.  At least we can look to Facebook and other social media sites to challenge Google and try to keep it from becoming a total monopoly – it’s just too bad that no search engine has been able to do so successfully.

I wonder if they lined up the speakers in that order on purpose.  The panelists were (left to right):

• AOL:  Jim Norton, VP of AOL Advance
• Google:  Jay Bowden, Head of Industry, Retail
• Facebook:  Mike Haynes, Regional VP of Sales

When these gentlemen were introduced, it was with the note that they were seated in order of company longevity (16 years, 12 years, and 7 years respectively).  Perhaps not coincidentally, the novelty and excitement of their presentations (or lack thereof) could have been predicted by the age of their companies.  In Internet marketing, of course, companies can age even faster than “dog years.”

We were at last week’s “Best Bets for Digital Marketing for 2011” event put on by the Marketing Technology SIG of the American Marketing Association (Atlanta chapter).  It was hosted by Google, who graciously opened up their fun Midtown offices for the event.  The topic was new media marketing platforms and technology.

AOL

I’ve got to hand it to Jim Norton – the man can spin like nobody’s business.  Read more…

Best practices, guidelines, industry standards, rules of thumb…are they meaningful in a rapidly-changing environment like Internet marketing?

Yes and no. Best practices and industry standards are necessary in order to put our arms around a bewildering, amorphous space.  Some of you may remember how, 10-15 years ago, Internet marketing was chaos!  There were no standards or best practices.  It led to a bad user experience, a lot of reinventing the wheel, and wasted time and effort on the part of us marketers.  As we all got more sophisticated with this new, interactive world, guidelines evolved, and both content creators and content consumers are now better off.

That being said…best practices are just a starting point.  As the online environment and consumers’ sophistication continues to grow, it becomes more important than ever to test, test, test.

We’ve seen it over and over again.  Us smart marketers can sit in our groovy offices (the hipster equivalent of an ivory tower) and predict what a target audience will respond to, based on best practices.  This wording, this offer, this landing page, etc.  But we’ll be wrong about as often as we’re right…best practices or no best practices.

Here are just a few things we’ve learned through running tests on our clients’ search engine marketing campaigns.  Note that some of these tactics follow best practices…and others definitely don’t! Read more…

SEOmoz has published their 2010 Industry Survey, which gives a sneak peek into the details of how search marketers spend their time, which tools they use, and what their priorities are.  With over 10,000 respondents, the data should be quite reliable. 

The statistics that jumped out at me include: Read more…

Nearly one quarter of graphical, online display ads viewed in the U.S. were on Facebook in the third quarter of 2010.  Their 23% share increased from 17.7% in the second quarter and was more than double that of Yahoo, the second company, which had 11% of display ad impressions.

Perhaps most impressively, Facebook served up more ad impressions in Q3 than the next four companies combined, which includes Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media and Google!  Read more…

What are the ramifications of the Yahoo/Bing alliance?  What’s the deal with the Bing and Facebook partnership?  Is Google Instant affecting search marketers?  These were among the questions answered at SEMPO Atlanta’s “Meet the Search Engines” event last night.

Rob (Yahoo), Michael (Bing) & Jessica (Google) Take Audience Questions

Michael Elmgreen, US Search Evangelist for Microsoft, presented first on the Yahoo/Bing search alliance.  He explained that Yahoo and Bing are both working together AND are still competing against each other in some arenas.  Here’s the breakdown. Read more…

Larry Chrzan of Blue Horseradish presented an ingenious framework for the different types of inbound links a company might pursue.  He put them in a framework of “The 7 P’s of Link Trust.”

Larry Chrzan after his presentation on link-building

Read more…

The most important thing that human beings do, according to Steve Patrizi, is make decisions.  Which brings us to The Decision-Maker’s Dilemma – I can make a decision quickly, but I may make a mistake.  Or I can be right, but it may take too long to gather all the information I need.  So how can we be fast and right in our decision-making?

Steve Patrizi, VP of Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn

Steve Patrizi, VP of Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn, was the keynote speaker for the first day of The Power of eMarketing conference in Baltimore last week.  His presentation focused on LinkedIn’s new “Signal” product, currently still in beta, which will help businesspeople filter through the deluge of information available today in order to make faster, better decisions.

“More data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet,” said Mark Hurd, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in June of 2009 (meaning we’re more than one year into his four years!).  So how can we wade through this deluge of information to find what we need? Read more…