SMarT Marketing

If you MSN does get their hands on Yahoo this will definately open up the market for another player. Although MSN may try and keep the brand seperate, in the online world, this is very hard. It is a big move for both companies, but based on the huge shareholder incentive for Yahoo holders, this may just go through.

Below is a chart taken directy from Google Analytics showing a spike in traffic. This spike occured from one comment (the first comment) on a related article that made the first page of Digg.com. If you come across an article on Digg that is related to your site, you may want to seriously consider adding a relevant comment that includes your url. You can often comment on both the Digg site and the page of the actual article.

Has anybody else seen this:

It appears for certain queries, Google is showing it’s Christmas spirit. As an AdWords user, I think initially this would help advertisers, as the new design should draw some eyeballs to the right.

I finally found a few minutes to blog after returning from Pubcon to an over flowing inbox, voice messages, and rescheduled meetings. It was a great time, as always, with lots of knowledgeable speakers. Here are 3 points that seemed to be stressed by multiple speakers and attendees alike:

1) Buying links is not a good long term strategy. Google (and the other major search engines according to Matt Cutts) are cracking down on sites who buy and/or sell links. Will buying 1 link get you black listed from Google? Probably not. However they have already cut the legs out from under many sites who sell text links based on PageRank. This means that you will be paying for a link on a site that now carries very little weight in terms of passing Link Juice (how PageRank is passed from one page or site to another), which was still a buzz word this year. It is humerous that if you search Link Juice on Google you find a bunch of sites selling links to increase PageRank!

2) Video content is entertaining, good for links, and good for business. There are many new Video search engines such as Blinkx who are tinkering with making Video content much more indexable, searchable, and findable based on the content within the Video. VSEO is ramping up.

3) Creating a buzz using Social Networking websites is one of the best ways to gain links. Pretty much everyone agreed that the traffic from reaching the front page of Digg will not convert very well (depending on the site’s goals), but it can dramatically increase the number of links to your site. A little tip: After the buzz has passed and all the incoming links are to /page-with-story-that-got-dugg.html, you may want to consider 301 redirecting this page to one that will better convert the visitors.

If you have specific questions about this post or other topics discussed at Pubcon, you can contact me through the SMT Contact Form.

Late Tuesday night (tonight) at Pubcon was the open forum with the main public figures from each of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This was moderated by Guy Kawasaki (one of the best speakers I have had the pleasure of learning from!).

So, what was learned from this forum……well:

Google (Cutts) is very defensive about their position on user feedback about their organic search results. It is clear they are not only relying on their algorithms to determine results, but also on user feedback.

Although Guy was very persistent on getting “fact of the matter” answers from the forum panel such as how to rank, what is PageRank, and “what would you do if” there was a lot of dodging and little new information except the old stand by of building relative content (including blogs) and gaining on topic links.

So what did we really learn about internet marketing in general?

If you want to learn the secrets to search engine rankings, ask those who do it, not those who represent the companies who make the search money.

FYI…one tidbit that we all paid attention to was….mod rewritten urls are important. I’ll paraphrase Matt Cutts; “Everything else being equal, a page with keywords within the url is better off then a url with ambiguous numbers”.