Category Archives: SEO

Donny Deutsch

Posted on by
7

Donny Deutsch has an excellent show called Donny Deutsch “The Big Idea”.  The show is on MSNBC and features interviews with Deutsch and business heavyweights like Bill Gates as well as young entrepreneurs who have had breakthrough ideas that led to successful companies.    It is a lively, intelligent look at clever folks in business like the early Donny Deutsch himself, whose innovative approaches to advertising build a small family business into a billion-dollar advertising empire. 

Here’s an article about Donny in New York Magazine.  It is an excellent piece about Donny Deustch that notes his humble beginnings helping his father the advertising executive, then rising to prominence as the top Madison Avenue advertising executive with a net worth of some $200,000,000 and a billion dollar agency empire.    His strategies have been somewhat unorthodox and he seemed to use bravado, good pay, and outrageous behavior to keep the troops producing, though the article suggests his partners were not happy with their relatively low stakes after the sale of his advertising empire that made Donny Deutsch a megamillionaire.

Donny Deutsch is now hosting a series of shows leading up to CES Las Vegas featuring technology people and ideas.

I’m noticing the poor search engine tuning done for his website here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/22206030/site/14081545/ and his new CES blog here: 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/22274025/site/14081545/ 

So, wouldn’t it be fun to see if I can get ranked in the top spots for the term ” Donny Deutsch ” over the next couple of weeks heading into CES?   Sure it would Mr. Donny Deutsch!     This is my target Deutsch post (not to be confused with the German Postal Empire Deutsche Post).   This page should legitimately rank fairly high since I’m providing a lot of information about Donny Deutsch, but in theory should probably rank *below* Donny’s own blog and TV show website.   Let’s see how Google does with this task given MSNBCs lack of search optimizing for their man, Donny Deutsch.

Hey, here’s a Wikipedia Article about Deutsch and his company, Deutsch Inc.

So, this is another in my series of search engine experiments Mr. Donny Deutsch.  Hope to see you at CES!

CES 2008 – The Hollywood Track and Donny Deutsch’s “The Road to CES”.

Posted on by
Reply

Entertainment Technology will be big at CES 2008 in Las Vegas, and there is a website devoted to keeping you posted on that aspect of the show.    The website is HERE – Digital Hollywood.

Another fun CES preSpinoff is Donny Deutsch’s website.  He’s an Advertising guru and host of the excellent TV show “The Big Idea” on MSNBC.    His CES efforts are online here.    Donny’s CES blog is here.

Yikes MSNBC you *really* need a content optimizer over there!   The URL for this major project is  this!    http://www.cnbc.com/id/22206030/site/14081545/

Search Ranking Factors

Posted on by
2

Rand Fishkin’s SEOMOZ has been doing some of the best work collecting data from prominent SEO folks and groups of experts and then analyzing that data.     Back in April I missed this report about SEO ranking factors but it’s a great read, especially for those who have little idea about how to optimize a website and web pages for better placement in search engines.    Note that experts do not agree.    Also, my fairly extensive experiences have convinced me that Google changes the ranking rules regularly simply to make it impossible to reverse engineer them.   But it’s still important to follow these basic recommendations which include what I’d argue are now the “prime directives” for optimizing websites:

Create pages that are of high and unique content quality.

Use URLs and Titles that are highly relevant to the queries you wish to rank for.

In bound links are still very important – seek external links and create internal incoming links using your desired keywords as anchor text.

Tend to exaggerate the keywords you are targeting.   ie the best writing will NOT result in the best optimization due to defects in the way machines process word information.     

Google adsense discouraged quality content, Google knol is trying to fix that.

Posted on by
4

Google knol is a promising development in online information, where “experts” will write concise, authoritative articles on many topics and the community will rank and comment on those articles.   It may be a great way to combine quality content with social networking, though I’m not clear if the quality content producers will be rewarded with more than just the knol-edge  that they have brought more good info into the world.

Although I don’t think they’d talk much about this, I think Google has begun to understand the degree to which adsense has hurt the online information landscape – basically by rewarding those who are most clever at flooding the web with low quality content rather than those who have provided high quality content.   Likewise with linking, where SEO abuses and excesses and Google decisions have made it increasingly hard to separate the information wheat from the adsense chaff.

Enter knol, which will be a community policed content system.    Basically a good idea, and as I’ve noted many times before Google is masterful at doing good things that happen to help them solve some potential revenue problems.   As Nick Carr noted yesterday Google’s high ranks for un-monetized Wikipedia content aren’t putting many Christmas presents under the tree for Google, and knol may shift some advertising focus back in house.

Hong Kong Harbor, Beijing’s Forbidden City, and the Great Wall of China

Posted on by
2

Wow.   Planning the China Trip is really getting exciting for me.   I’m going to get to see some of the things I’ve heard about for most of my life – things that are on “The List” of stuff I just had to do like Hong Kong Harbor, Beijing, and more.  China’s Yellow Mountains are on my list as are is the Terra Cotta army in X’ian, but those will probably have to wait for the next trip because this one is filling up fast and, frankly, I’d rather relax and enjoy things than try to see too much stuff on my first trip over.

It now appears that the best approach may be to fly to Hong Kong.   I’m finding the Hong Kong flights are in the $700 range rather than the $1000+ to Beijing, and Hong Kong is somewhat closer to Xiamen where I’ll be at the SES China conference.    Also, I’ve learned that the train system in China is modern, comfortable, cheap, and extensive.    I like the idea of rolling along between cities rather than just plane hopping, and since I have the time I’m thinking a good route might be this:

Fly SFO to Hong Kong and spend a few days seeing Hong Kong Harbor and the city.  

Get a deluxe sleeper car for the trip to Xiamen.

Continue on the train to Beijing where I’m meeting up with friends.

Train Beijing to Shanghai if we decide to go there.  

Train from Shanghai to Hong Kong, perhaps stopping in any neat places I scoped out during the earlier trip in opposite direction.

Coffee Calendar

Posted on by
5

Coffee Calendar

Click here for more about the 2008 Coffee Calendar

Hey, it’s Coffee Calendar Google ranking excitement!  As I mentioned in some earlier posts my wife’s Brother-in-law Ricardo has a great Coffee Calendar, a project he has worked on for some time that features some great art and history.

Helping him attain a proper Google rank for his site TheCoffeeCalendar.com offers up some neat lessons in how Google ranks websites – perhaps most importantly how blogs have come to be a very critical factor in some rankings.  

Artist Mike Rohde also has a neat “Sketchtoon” Coffee Calendar he has done for 2008.    Where Ricardo’s Coffee Calendar focuses more on history, Mike’s focuses on the actual coffee drinks.   Both would make a neat gift for any coffee lover in your life so check them both out!

Mike’s Calendar has the top Google spot now and I think this is a good example of Google favoring blog content over an actual website devoted to the Coffee Calendar.    Ricardo’s site was recently launched and thus I’m guessing Mike’s blog is given higher authority at Google when “Coffee Calendars” are getting discussed.    Since this blog appears to have more authority than Mike’s it’ll be interesting to see if this post has any affect on the rankings.

In the meantime, pick a Coffee Calendar and a fresh picked pound of coffee beans as a neat gift for the coffee lover in your life. 

Who is clicking at your online business door?

Posted on by
Reply

Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again.    The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns.   Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large

Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable.    If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.    On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.

Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written,  and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though – they looked at billions of data items).  However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return.     A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico  or other commonly travelled points south in the winter.   Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.

Amazon unearths some great startups

Posted on by
Reply

The Amazon startup contest here has a video profile of the seven finalists in their contest which I think was to showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS).   I think  Jeff Barr  will have more about this on his blog or on Amazon’s blog.

These look like some really interesting companies.    One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!)  One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm – but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?.)

Paid Links and SEO – game over dudes

Posted on by
1

It has now been over two years since Google started their crusade against paid links.  I first understood this crusade back in 2005.  It was the first time I’d met Matt Cutts, and we were sitting at the hotel bar during the New Orleans WebmasterWorld PubCon with a handful of SEO folks. I asked about the practice of paid links.  “Don’t buy links”, he said.  Matt was a bit vague about the consequences and other details, and the the Google guidelines back then were not very clear on this point.   In fact a substantial paid link economy had developed and continues today.  However over time Google has become very clear about paid linking.

In my opinion this this recent post from Matt Cutts, Google’s uberMeister of spam tricks and SEO, should sound the death knell for this strategy even for those willing to take the risks that have been associated with paid linking strategies for some time.   Clearly Google is dedicated about this, and will continue to crack down severely enough that the risk outweighs any likely gains.  Certainly any of the sites and folks I’m familiar with in Travel and Tourism should *not* use this practice to raise their pagerank.     I’ve been advising this for some time, but I knew the practice was still fairly common among some elites in the SEO community which meant it was still working.   I’m sure there are some exceptional cases but the basic advice here is easy – don’t buy links.

Like Graywolf, one of the most vocal critics of the Google anti-paid-link jihad, I have a lot of concerns about fairness, best practices, and how much pleasing Google has come to distort the production of good content.   But jousting at Google’s windmill has probably become a waste of time, especially given that many of their concerns about buying and selling links are legitimate.  That practice certainly did distort the relevancy of rankings in a significant way.   In fact Google’s core brilliancy – the pagerank algorithm – put in motion a variety of online linking practices that have reshaped  web content in dramatic, mostly negative ways.    People used to link freely and often as a matter of course because links are the heart of the web and commercial concerns were not in play.  Now, free links are doled out by many very sparingly in an effort to preserve pagerank at their own websites and to deny others a competitive advantage.    I hope Google is considering this factor as they revise the algorithm.  e.g.  linking out to other sites should tend to *boost* ranks for a given term more than it lowers the rank due to leaked pagerank.

Myspace to join Google’s Open Social. Facebook’s value plunges.

Posted on by
5

It is a mildly risky but potentially brilliant counterstrike against Facebook’s rising popularity.  Myspace will announce shortly that they are joining the Open Social movement spearheaded by Google and which is now officially a social juggernaut of global proportions.    TechCrunch seems to have the latest on this breaking story.

If Facebook was worth 15 billion yesterday I’d suggest it just dropped by more than 50% in value.   Why?   Without Myspace’s hundreds of millions of users Open Social looked like it would be a third player in the field, struggling to catch up with the user bases of Myspace and Facebook and keep up with Facebook development.   But  not any more.  With Myspace, Open Social instantly becomes the key social network, dwarfing Facebook by any reasonable measure of prominence.   Can new Facebook partner Microsoft help sway onliners and developers to stick with Facebook’s “partly open” architecture instead of defecting to what appears to be a very open Google architecture?   No way.