Archive for the ‘Yahoo’ Category

SMX East 2011 Recap Pt 1 – Google +1 and Schema.org

September 26th, 2011

The Search Marketing Expo in New York, also known as SMX East, wound up festivities on September 15th after three days of speakers and programs that bill themselves as the “World’s Leading Search Engine Marketing Conference.”

SMX, produced by the fine folks at Search Engine Land, did not disappoint. They delivered an incredibly-comprehensive educational and networking experience for hundreds of search marketers, techies and business professionals from all over the globe.

The programming was chock-full of essential tidbits – almost too much to mention, even in a series of blog articles – but there were some interesting takeaways that absolutely bear mentioning:

1. “Google +1s not influencing search rankings,” said Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer at Google. This was a hot item that surfaced in the Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable panel.

Google steadfastly asserts that they do not currently use +1s for ranking purposes, despite what numerous others have said. Ms. Oberoi, who works in search quality, showed the attendees the +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools and reassured all that they are not a ranking factor at the moment. Could this change? Certainly. We shall wait and see.

2. “Microformats are the game changer in allowing your content to be found,” said Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator at CNN. Mr. Kohan addressed the crowd at the Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging For 2012 panel and gave listeners a highly-informed look at the history of microformats and a look at their expected future.

Microformats are a semantic markup that has been in XHTML for years. It allows site owners and content developers to utilize a library of mark-up elements that address site content and tell the engines and bots more about what the content is actually all about. The really great aspect of semantic mark-up is that it allows the site owners to make content available to as many possible sources – creating even more access to content than ever before.

The big player in microformats is, of course, Schema.org, an initiative launched on June 2nd of 2011 by Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to introduce the concept of the semantic web to websites and create a common vocabulary for structured data markup on our pages. The official Google blog post on the Schema.org initiative states that “Schema.org introduces schemas for more than a hundred new categories, including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. As webmasters add this markup to their sites, search engines can develop richer search experiences.”

In other words (and as an example direct from the Schema.org site), you may have an item on your site about the 2009 blockbuster film Avatar that was directed by James Cameron. By using the itemscope element, you can specify that the HTML contained in the <div>…</div> block is about Avatar the “Movie” and not about the avatar concept in Hinduism or Avatar the Swedish death metal band.

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Movie”>

  <h1>Avatar</h1>

  <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span>

  <span>Science fiction</span>

  <a href=”../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html”>Trailer</a>

</div>

Once microformats are explained in a way that makes it easy to understand how these elements are further addressing content on sites, it becomes simple enough to understand.

Join us next week for pt. 2 of the Search Marketing Expo East wrap-up.

Planning and Measuring SEM Goals: State of Search 2011 pt.1

August 16th, 2011

Decades ago, before we had access to Google, Bing, and the whole of the Internet providing the world at our fingertips, search was a laborious, time-consuming effort.

For instance, if you landed in Honolulu for a 10-day vacation in the Hawaiian Islands and wanted to know where you could find the nearest Puka Dog Hut, you’d have to phone down to the front desk of your hotel and talk to the concierge.

More than likely, they would reply with “Oh, sir, you don’t want to eat that. Perhaps I could recommend the Sansei Sushi Bar for some Asian-Pacific Rim cuisine?”

“That’s not what I wanted. I want a Puka Dog.”

“But, sir, really…”

You get how this is going; we don’t need to belabor the issue. Before the internet, search was cumbersome and unreliable. Therefore, it’s easy to understand and accept the idea that the present state of search is strong, getting stronger every day. How do we know this for certain? The numbers.

I can get a complete listing of Puka Dog Huts in Hawaii from Google in 0.26 seconds. Ease of access is not only turning consumers to search-related resources for their each and every need, but access to this extent is also developing greater and greater levels of impatience in the searchers. We want what we want and we want it now.

Before planning your SEM goals, let’s look at the numbers.

In the State of Search 2011 report, it was projected that search engine marketing (SEM) spending for North America would grow from $16.6 billion to $19.3 billion in 2011. This represents a 14% increase. In fact, the percentage of increase for SEM spending grew 32.19% from 2009 to 2011. That growth rate increase towers over the paltry 19.3% increase that the Oil Drilling Industry saw in the same time period.

Some 54% of all businesses plan to increase SEM/SEO spending, while only 10% plan on spending less (but you can find them in the yellow pages, I’m sure). According to the study, increased spending for 2011 will be focused on:

  1. Paid Search (PPC/Paid Inclusion)
  2. Search Engine Optimization
  3. Facebook PPC Advertising
  4. Search-Related Technology
  5. Mobile Internet

It’s not difficult to imagine that all your competitors are looking into the 2011 and 2012 marketing budgets and figuring out how to spend more effectively on their SEM programs and how to differentiate themselves in the market.

The immediate question for any small business owner is “How does our company define our SEM goals and objectives?” If you like, start with the basics. The state of search 2011 data shows that surveyed business owners plan to allocate their SEM outlays toward the fulfillment of five main business objectives.

Business objectives that companies are trying to achieve through SEM (by percentage of importance):

42% Drive traffic to the website
29% Generate leads
18% Sell products or services
10% Increase brand awareness
01% Improve customer service

The data above shows that a predominance of businesses have come to the realization that converting prospects and generating leads begins with website traffic numbers. Driving traffic to your site is the first step. Converting those visitors into customers is the next. Therefore, your SEM planning has much to do with luring prospects, content development, and on-site conversion rate optimization.

As you can also see from the data above, a slightly-lower percentage of businesses view sales and lead generation as a primary SEM objective. Although much of your typical SEM effort is geared toward getting traffic to the site in the first place, there are many that believe this traffic has an inherent value for outbound sales efforts.

The bottom three responses are fairly typical of SEM and e-marketing efforts in previous years, back when web marketing served to point visitors at product pages and optimization efforts attempted to shorten the path between product and check-out (as if we’d learned nothing from the decades before the dawn of relationship selling).

Note: In the forthcoming State of Search 2011 (pt. 2) article, we’ll discuss defining and measuring social media marketing, but it bears mentioning at this point that increased brand awareness is the top objective for social media marketing.

When measuring your SEM goals, the focus is on data that allows your on-staff SEM, or SEM support agency, to track the progress of a campaign toward your pre-defined objectives (as in above paragraphs). At this time, we are speaking directly about metrics for measuring SEM efforts and analyzing the results. There are a number of avenues for measuring SEM performance, but once again, we’ll return to the survey data to see the top responses from those businesses with active SEM campaigns.

The three most important metrics for use in gauging the success of SEM efforts toward pre-defined goals:

1. Site traffic metrics
2. Conversion rates
3. Click-through rates

Similar to recent years, site traffic metrics and conversion rates are the top two metrics for measuring the success of SEM programs. The click-through rate has seen an increase in importance since last year. Once again, more companies have come to the realization that converting prospects and generating leads with an SEM program will begin with quality ads that draw the eyes and the clicks. No clicks, no traffic, no sales.

In the end, planning and measuring a competitive SEM program first requires a defined, attainable, measurable set of SEM goals. Analyzing the results of your SEM campaign allows your marketing staff or agency to track the progress of your campaigns toward this pre-defined set of goals. And although the metrics for a large e-marketing campaign over a spread of media may include ongoing keyword research and evaluation, web site usability testing, competitive analysis, conversion evaluation, continuing development and testing of PPC ads – your site traffic metrics, conversion rate and ad placement are three top metrics for gauging your success in meeting your SEM goals.

Yahoo Search Direct – Delivering Answers not Links

March 24th, 2011

Search engine giant Yahoo has some interesting news for Bing, Google and nearly two-billion internet users worldwide. Search is changing again. Yahoo is fearlessly calling their new breakthrough search feature “the fastest thing you have ever seen.”

The new Yahoo search feature, which debuted in beta this week, is called Search Direct and appears to take some inspiration from Google Instant – a search enhancement that instantaneously displays suggested results as the user types their request. Note: Google Instant was introduced on September 8th of last year.

Much like Google Instant, the Yahoo Search Direct feature presents instant search results as the user types. The results come in the form of a drop-down box that displays a top-ten list of instant search result options. But Yahoo isn’t calling these instant search results by their common name. To Yahoo, these are not search results or mere links. They’re answers. And Yahoo execs are betting that instant access to answers will draw the interest of the searching public and keep the clicks coming.

I want you to remember three words: answers, not links,” said Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s Vice President for Search, to a gathering of tech news reporters at a recent demonstration of the new search feature in San Francisco.

The new Yahoo Search Direct marketing is furthering the idea of answers over links by calling the development “a powerful new feature that provides direct access to the answers and sites you need – with fewer clicks and fewer hassles.”

One of the most interesting aspects in this is that Yahoo says it can come up with new ad formats that fit in the Search Direct box. This could get interesting if Yahoo wanted to keep this revenue stream separate from BING because currently they handle their PPC search ads.

Yahoo suggests that Search Direct is superior to Google Instant Search, by saying that Google’s search enhancement only displays search results pages faster, while the Yahoo feature strives to deliver quick, relevant answers for common search interests across a spectrum of categories.

One unique feature that separates Search Direct from Google Instant is that Search Direct shows the searcher the top ten hottest-trending topics before you even begin searching (this feature activates when you put your cursor in the search field box). Yahoo calls this a “unique results format” and “a beautiful way to take back your time.”

Initially, Yahoo Search Direct has answers for a limited number of search categories: music, movies, weather, celebrities, athletes, news items, shopping, some local information by city, and information on stocks by ticker symbol.

Since their highly-publicized merger with Microsoft and Bing, the case for Yahoo’s relevancy among the big-three search engines has been in question. Some early reviewers suggest that the new feature might even put Yahoo search in direct conflict with Bing. But engineers at Yahoo clearly believe that the business of the day is re-engineering search functions to better the user experience.

“People still come to Yahoo and search on Yahoo,” said Yahoo chief product officer Blake Irving.  Yahoo is confident that they have re-engineered the search experience to match the changing needs of searchers around the globe. For Yahoo, the future is now.

At present, Search Direct is live on search.yahoo.com and other domestic Yahoo search properties. Search Direct is not available via the main Yahoo homepage at this time. According to Shashi Seth, the Search Direct experience will soon be native to all Yahoo-based properties.