Hitwise reports search engine traffic breakdown… Google is Killin’ it!

Google - 67.9%; Yahoo - 20.3%; Microsoft - 6.3%; Ask - 4.2%; Other - 1.4%

Before attending my first marketing conference I decided to consult an industry veteran, well known social media blogger, and fellow Ogilvy PR / 360 DI colleague, Rohit Bhargava. Rohit has spoken on and moderated several Search Engine Strategies panels, so he’s definitely a qualified teacher for a novice like myself. Here are some of his pointers for making the most of a day at SES:

1. Have a back-up plan for which speakers/panels you want to attend each day in case you don’t like your first choice.
2. Sit near the back so you can slip out to another session if you don’t like it or got what you need out of it.
3. Choose a presenter or two to introduce yourself to.
4. Hit up the expo hall to get some cool gear
5. Look for vendors who offer something innovative and different
6. Don’t try to write everything down. Just make note of the big ideas

As a favor for providing his expertise, I’ll be passing out some flyers created for Rohit’s book coming out soon, Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity - And How Great Companies Get it Back.  Hopefully tommorrows Search Engine Strategies Expo will be a success and I will be able to develope my own list of tips for making the most out of such a day of learning.  Here are some of the sessions I’m most excited about:

Social Search Track
Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For?
Marketing to and through social networks means humans are hot again. Not as directory editors; it’s Web 2.0 and your customers are in control. The old-fashioned media buy has gone bye-bye. Social Media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. Learn about the social search revolution, and hear case studies of how marketers have successfully promoted brands and products with it.

Vertical & Retail Track
Big Brand Search Strategies: Build Connections and Fuel Online Promotions
If 80% of web browsing starts with Search—and consumers are spending up to 50% of their media time online—then why are many major Brand companies spending on average only 2.5% of their media budgets online?

As consumers search, they are expressing their interest in specific categories, brands and interest areas. How can Brand companies better connect with these hand-raisers and how can they better leverage their offline media investments? And how can SEM dramatically improve those connections, conversion, brand health and volume rates?

Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company will address what it takes for big brand companies to shift their marketing mix to align with new customer behaviors, putting more ad budget to Search and digital advertising.

Presentation topics include:

• Tips for how to win budget increases for digital advertising within Brand companies
• How Search acts as a bridge between offline advertising campaigns and online interactive experiences leading a customer to action
• How to increase brand connections and fuel online promotions by enticing customers with relevant, affinity and community based offers such as the Olympics, and Nascar
• Tips on how Search can amplify the effectiveness of online campaigns such as Display and Social Media to fully realize the opportunity for customer engagement
• How Search can drive direct marketing goals for customer loyalty programs such as My Coke Rewards

Social Search Track
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
If search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widely through tagging, click through tracking, search history features and other methods, so can search marketers. Social networks, blogs, feeds, tagging, social bookmarking and immersive game environments provide 24/7 real-time focus groups. Learn how Buzzmetrics, Cymfony and others help quantify and reveal critical insights.

Stay tuned to find out what I actually learn…

I will be heading to Search Engine Engine Strategies in New York for one day this Wednesday, March 19th.  I will be representing Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team, and plan to do a live blog post on the DI group blog.  I am excited to hear Jason Calacanis speak, the Founder & CEO of the Mahalo human edited search engine.  The sessions I will be attending will mostly be on the social track in hopes that what I learn will be able to benefit Ogilvy’s word-of-mouth discipline.  Stay tuned for more…

If it hasn’t already started it will in the very near future.  That is, college kids asking their career centers, “How Do I Get into SEO?”  Search has become such an integral part of our everyday life, that the profession of search engine optimization is becoming far more visible to the average Internet user trying to discover their career path.  Due to the ever increasing role of computers in the lives of kids these days, college graduates now have the tools to become an SEO even if they don’t know it.  I myself went from a liberal arts degree (major in psychology), fairly typical frat guy, to Organic Search Specialist in just a year and a half out of college.  I am highly considering compiling a How To Become an SEO Out of College, providing my story in detail, but I would like to first gauge public interest in such a story.  Please reply to this post if interested in how I got into search engine optimization.  Thanks!

Check out this SEO informational video with interviews of the top guns in the SEO industry.

In the world of search engines, the answer to this question can become less absolute than you may think. My first perception of a competitor, is a company, voice or form of influence fighting to occupy the same space as another. Initially, it all starts in the mind of the consumer. When they get the inclination to buy something, you want your product to take up as much space as possible as the buying thought process moves its gears towards a final decision. Brand marketers attempt to win this battle by sending an over arching message that they hope will slowly infiltrate the consumer’s thinking, while direct marketers cater to their target’s impulses by making their products accessible at strategic times. Despite the different tactics, both methods are competing for the same space.

Unfortunately, the real world does not exist in a vacuum like a consumer’s thought process when they decide to buy jeans. There are so many different influences occupying the same space, that it can be difficult to pick out who is competing against who. A major casino may say, these are our top 5 competitors because they are the other top casinos in the country. On one level those 5 casinos may be their competitors, but type the keyword “casino” into Google, and only two actual casino websites appear on the first page. Are those 8 other websites not their competitors? They certainly want to be in the top position. They are certainly competing for this space. Not to mention the fact that casinos typically have hotels. So their competitors are not only the casino websites, but the hotel and travel websites as well.

These thoughts stem from an assignment I received at work today. I have been tasked with coming up with a standard format for conducting a competitive analysis for SEO. A step by step process that could be performed by an entry level employee. Usually the account service team gives us a list of the clients competitors (in the eyes of the client) and says we need a competitve analysis. In the SEO world, it strikes me this is the wrong way to go about it. I think you come up with a core list of keywords, see who is currently ranking on those keywords, and pick out specific elements of their websites that have been optimized in comparison to the client’s website. I guess ultimately my question is, what is the best way to communicate to the client the distinction between the rankings of who they think are their competitors, and who Google thinks are their competitors?

I hope some of that made sense. Any thoughts on performing a good SEO competitive analysis would be greatly appreciated.

Getting big companies without any internal SEO personel to take a holistic approach to their SEO efforts is difficult. They want to be ranked on top for a host of competitive keywords. They want their web pages to be optimized for those keywords. And they want it all to happen much soon than later. Many of these websites have been around for a while, and have passed through so many hands with different priorities and marketing viewpoints, that architecturally, they are simply in shambles. Marketing executives at these companies can get their heads around the benefits of having the right keywords, but their capacity or desire to understand why they may or may not being ranking well, seems to fall short when it comes to site structure, internal linking, redirects, errors pages, page rank, etc… This, of course, is why us SEOs have a job. We are here to communicate these problems and SEO tactics, however at times it feels like our attempts at explanation falls on deaf ears.

One specific client is hell bent on purchasing and purchasing domains with keywords instead of building content focused pages within their main site. Stopping the use of session IDs in their URLs should be their first priority, and yet every week in our status call they want to discuss what domains they should buy. I see how it is hard to ignore the fact that many of the top ranking sites have keywords in their domain names, but they need to focus on building content on the well trusted domain they already have and making sure the spiders aren’t getting error pages because of their use of session IDs.

There is no doubt that solid keyword research and strategy drives the most effect SEO campaigns, but make sure you are presenting a smooth functioning, well structured website to the users and the spiders before you start expecting high rankings on all your keywords.

According to Google Trends the U.S. ranks 10th in the number of searches on the keyword “SEO.” The list in descending order:

1. India
2. Czech Republic
3. Japan
4. Phillippines
5. Romania
6. Thailand
7. Spain
8. United Kingdom
9. Australia
10. United States

What explains this phenomenon?

The’ve got big names from Microsoft and Amazon running the show.The’ve got the catchy name. Will they eventually come to dominate the second home real estate market as the so adimantly claim?

The answer is yes, and here’s why.

1. SecondSpace embraces Web 2.0 user interaction that online real estate consumers are aggressively heading towards.
2. The majority of real estate listing websites are behind the times when it comes to interacting effectively with consumers.
3. SecondSpace is building out specialized vertical search engines for any and all areas that are necessary for buying, owning, and selling real estate. Specialized search is the feature of the internet.
4. Each of SecondSpace’s verticals (now LandWatch and ResortScape) utilizes semantic search.

For these four reasons SecondSpace will eventually dominate the online real estate market for people’s second homes.

My first reaction: Cool, someone found my white paper.

Second reaction: Al Jazeera?… what tha?

Third reaction: This could be cool, but these questions are rather biased.  What are they reaching for? Will I be misrepresented?

Needless to say, I had mixed emotions, but I got the backing of my agency to represent them, so I went for it.  I did, however, alter some of the questions and avoid others for fear of Al Jazeera taking what I say out of context.  Without further ado, here are my questions and answers:

1)     Starting at a very basic level here, could you name the top three web search engines currently and what makes them so popular?

• Currently the top three search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN; in that order.  The reason for their popularity is that they have been able to produce the most relevant search results on the most extensive number of topics.  The majority of people searching the internet want to find what they are looking for in the least amount of steps, and for the average user, these major search engines fulfil that function.   

2)     How have these search engines developed such a dominance over how net users access information?

• The ability to index the massive amounts of content on the Web and collect it in one location has proven to be enough to draw millions of internet users. 
• When these search engines were first established they primarily ranked web pages based on the on-page content.  Eventually the use of link analysis allowed for the improvement of relevancy in the search results. 
• Fairly recent developments regarding new social aspects of the Web are allowing the major search engines to evolve in order to meet the needs of an increasingly involved, web savvy, internet population.  

3)      Could you tell us some of the flaws of the major search engines?

• One of the biggest flaws among these search engines exist in Yahoo’s natural results.  They offer a paid inclusion program to their natural listings which allows advertisers to pay for higher rankings.  This creates a bias towards commercial websites. 
• It has also been speculated that for competitive search queries some of Yahoo’s top search results are hand coded because of their algorithm’s inability to weed out spammers.
• People seem to want to find flaws with the search powerhouse Google, however the only bias I can detect is their skew towards informational resources, which could hardly be considered a flaw.
• In reality Google’s algorithms are much better than any other search engine at filtering out spammers and other unnatural results.  

4)     Can you talk us through a comparative search on Google and one of the newer/different search engines?

• Recently, human edited search engines, such as Mahalo and Cha-Cha, are claiming to provide a more concise easy to navigate search experience.  While these engines may provide clear results to many competitive search queries, they fall short as a result of their inability to return results on long-tail keyword queries.
• Search behaviour follows the long-tail rule of statistics, which means that the majority of people are using several keywords in their queries.  A human edited search engine will never be better equipped than Google when it comes to indexing enough web content to accommodate long-tail search behaviour.

5)     What is social searching?

• Social searching is the human highlighting of content, by tagging with descriptive labels, in order for like minded people to find what they are looking for.  It can also involve a user voting process that allows more popular content to rank higher.

6)     How will social searching make a difference?

• Social searching has made a difference in how many people search in the web, however it will not have an effect on a mass scale until the major search engines begin to adapt the social methodology. 
• No matter how many people get involved with bookmarking, tagging and voting the web is simply growing too quickly for humans to keep up with it.

7)     What does social search mean in terms of challenging Google’s search techniques?

• Google has certainly taken notice of the popularity and effectiveness of social search.  Their most recent update, called Google Universal, is in many ways a response to the new social aspect of the net. By incorporating vertical searches on blogs, video, images, news, and books into their main results, they are answering the call of people who are finding this information on social sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Digg.

     How will Google continue to evolve to meet the social needs of internet users?

• I believe that Google’s Customized Search Engines represent the future of this search powerhouse.  By allowing users access to their search technology, Google has created a platform for users to create their own niche search engines. 
• Similar to their recent inclusion of verticals with Google Universal, over time these user generated search engines will be incorporated into the main search results.
• Google will become, in a sense, an aggregator of smaller user influenced search engines.  

9)     Why have developments and innovations in search technique started booming now?

• In recent years the internet has become an environment of participation and collaboration.  Through the use of blogs, videoblogs and wikis users are creating new content at a faster pace than ever before.  This new interaction is demanding better ways to search for information.