Tag Archives: SEM

Knol Knows Ranking

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Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert.   The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.

Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.

Aaron on knol

The SMX search folks – I think it was Danny Sullivan – have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well.     Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites.    If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.

In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank.      I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference  – SES San Jose.

Later:  Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself.    Here are listings I created for:

Beijing, China |     Blogs and Blogging

Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 from Tamar

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Tamar Weinberg  has an excellent  list of some 250 internet marketing posts she collected from various online marketing niches that she feels were the best blog posts of the year.    Obviously you can’t be exhaustive with this type of list but it would be a great way for somebody unfamiliar with internet marketing to jump in and “get it” pretty fast.

Online advertising juggernaut rolls on.

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This Internet Advertising Bureau report notes that online advertising is still showing explosive growth.    Interesting is the fact that the types of online advertising – with search ads at the top – seems to have stabilized somewhat with “pay for performance” one of the few categories that has clearly increased from last year.   

 I don’t think this stability reflects the “optimal” mix of ads, rather it is more an indication of how the big players take some time to get comfortable with innovations in advertising, and still stick to more traditional CPM style approaches rather than the clearly superior PPC and pay per performance models.   Clearly even many of the big advertisers and agencies still have fairly weak SEM and SEO departments so they’ll choose to use big CPM campaigns that are easy to analyze rather than the more productive – but more complicated to manage – PPC and performance approaches.

Online ads are now a mainstay of any good campaign, but it’ll take some years before advertisers realize the foolishness of many online advertising approaches which generally include bloated CPM impression campaigns.   Much more effective are targeted organic and PPC ad campaigns, but these require more analysis and a newer perspective.

The most conspicuously stupid type of campaign – still extremely popular in travel – is to use expensive print advertising in an attempt to boost online visitation.  I studied this *extensively* across many print ad types during my work marketing southern Oregon several years ago and despite the clear results that showed print ads lead to only a tiny number of online visits, many travel marketers still think print is an effective way to promote online.    It’s not, but it will continue until the incentives and simplicity of squandering money on ineffective print advertising go away.   The lack of research in this area is odd to me given the huge total travel advertising spend, but most travel research is self-serving and often sponsored or conducted by the very agencies or entities that benefit from certain results, so stupid biases remain intact for a long time.