A few words about the relative balance between SEO and SEM prompted by discussions at SMX Sydney.

There were two streams on the first day; SEO (Search Engine Optimisation; improving your site’s position in search engines) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing; pay per click ads on web sites and search engine results pages. Google’s AdWords is the leading example).

Gillian Muessig, the President of SEOmoz (gee she was good), cited research showing that 10 – 15% of clicks are generated by Search Engine Marketing ads but many companies spend all their search budget on it. In the majority of cases, companies are underspending on search engine optimisation.

Warren Dobe from the NAB delivered a powerful case study on the value of SEO. The NAB’s 12 month long SEO project has added 2 – 3 million visits per month to their traffic. Just good SEO strategy, properly implemented.

Brent Payne from BaldSEO (yeah, he’s bald; great piece of personal branding) talked about his involvement in doubling the traffic to Tribune newspapers two years running by the application of good SEO principals. The Tribune Company is America’s second largest newspaper group so we’re talking tens of millions of new visits every month and serious competitive advantage. BTW, Brent; here’s how to disable the history on your location bar so that your previous web site visits are not visible to the whole audience.

Moving right along; the keys to success were clearly described:

(1) Get buy-in from top-level executives and (2) Train the clients’ content creators and executives in SEO-friendly business practices. In Brent’s case, this involved telling newspaper editors that they could not do what they wanted if it contravened the SEO strategy they’d agreed to.

So given these successes, why are businesses loath to spend on SEO and happy to spend on SEM?

Well SEM spending, through AdWords say, is easily tracked and has an immediate effect. People click or they don’t. Your reports (brilliantly detailed reports) tell you which of your ads are sending what percentage of clients to the particular pages you specify. Businesses love that sh*t.

And then there’s SEO. Often needs changes in site structure so involves (shudder) the IT department. Might require changes to your Content Management System. Involves link-building which is time-intensive. Has a level of risk attached, since a wrong move could get your site penalised in the rankings. And, there be monsters; how do you separate the shysters from the reputable practitioners? Finally, it doesn’t work by itself. It’s going to require behavioural change and it’s going to involve content. Harsh.

But the pay-offs are substantial. Rule of thumb? I heard more than one person at SMX say 20% of your search budget should be SEO. It kind of depends where you are in the cycle; it should be more than 20% initially, but if you’re currently blowing everything on Google AdWords, you’re definitely doing it wrong.

Oh! Thanks to Stephan Spencer for the recommendation; I read and enjoyed Influence by Robert Cialdini.

I’m going to speculate here that Google Wave is going to make social media even more important in web site search engine rankings. Let’s assume Google implement Wave in more or less its current form. I see four SEO benefits for social media practitioners.

As you know, comments on your blog lead to traffic and in some cases back-links which pass PageRank. In other words, they help your Google ranking.

Sometimes people comment about my blog posts in Twitter or Facebook. Which is less useful from an SEO viewpoint than commenting directly on my blog. With Wave you’ll be able to re-direct comments made on your Facebook profile to your blog. You’ll probably be able to search for and drag in Twitter threads as well. So if you have a well developed social network and a web site you’ll see an increase in your comments. Where comments are relevant to what you’re writing about, all things equal, your search engine ranking should increase relative to people who don’t use those networks. That’s benefit #1: more commenting.

It’s also the case that the more often you post the more regularly you get indexed. Which leads to higher ranking.

Successfully implemented, (and I think that’s what’s going to happen) Wave will break down the barrier between email and web applications. Your emails will become more like threaded IM conversations and you’ll be able to suck them across to your web site as content. Conventional businesses will not allow instant publishing, but once again the social media junkies will ride the wild tiger. Their email/IM conversations and their conversations on social networking sites will become easily publishable content on their blogs. Benefit #2: more content.

The logical consequence of Wave technology is that social media networks will spawn web sites with multiple authors (multiblogs). In other words a new and very fast way of creating web content, which of course can link back to the site you’re promoting. Benefit #3: link-building.

The ‘federation’ aspect of Wave gives you the ability to aggregate contacts from your different social networks. This will lead to social network expansion and benefit #4: more followers.

If you’re a black hat SEO, you have already started working out how to manipulating Waves for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. If you’re a white hat, you’ve got six months to help your clients build the size and quality of their social networks.

I wrote an uninformed blog post after reading articles reviewing Google Wave. I’ve deleted it. Herewith, I hope, a more sensible post written after viewing the Google Wave video that was shown to developers. Although the articles I read were well written I got no sense of the likely paradigm shift until I saw the video.

The lessons are:

1. Video communication is much more powerful than a good review.
2. Watch the video if you want to understand this technology.
3. Bret is a schmuck.

So Wave is an exciting technology and it will profoundly affect web communication.

It’s a new communication platform that simply and elegantly integrates email, IM and applications. But there are four significant technology shifts in the way that it works.

The organisational concepts for Waves are intuitive. Lots of stuff just happens, lots of drag and drop and lots of search functionality.

Wave won’t be live until later in the year, but developers already have access to code and the APIs. So what’s it good for? It’s an improvement in collaborative work applications and has the capacity to seriously knock around Sharepoint. It is the first improvement on MS Outlook partly because it breaks down the barrier between email and web browser. And it looks like everyone’s desktop in 2010.

Just been reading Thom Kennon and find myself in complete agreement with him.

He talks about looking for info on Google’s recent changes to trademark policy. “I first searched in Google for ‘google trademark’ and came up with a mix of old or irrelevant algo results on page one, first timely results below the fold. So I turned to Twitter and searched ‘#google trademark’ and voila — nothing but timely results with a wealth of links back to rich, hot-off-the-presses and diverse content.”

This is exactly Twitter’s strength.

Twitter has become a real-time search engine populated with human-reviewed web links (as opposed to Google which uses non-human search indexing). For contemporary matters, Twitter often produces much better results than Google.

It amazes me that Biz Stone has publicly stated Twitter will not pursue an advertising model (eg. AdWords). That is the PROVEN BUSINESS MODEL you THICKHEAD! See all that screen real estate you’re not using on a Twitter page?? That’s what it’s for! To make you MONEY. Sheesh.

Although they were bright enough to buy the leading Twitter search engine (Summize), Twitter have completely missed the boat in the way they’ve integrating it on the home page. It’s a key feature but has been buried.

Google had better hope that no-one smart buys Twitter. Despite what you might read elsewhere, it’s Google’s only serious challenger.

Google’s made two changes to its search results. The first is an attempt to give you more useful suggestions for your search. For example, when you search for ‘oil’, it will come back with ‘did you mean unburned Venezuelan crude oil?’ at the very bottom of the page under the heading ‘Searches related to oil’. This is practically useless to me, partly because Venezuelan crude was NOT what I wanted to mix with Balsamic Vinegar but also because I have Google set to return 100 search results per page. I usually don’t scroll all the way to the bottom. Lazy. *Thinks* Why can’t my browser make scrolling to the bottom a one click operation? We would call it ‘Page Down’.

Chris Crum from WebProNews describes this as Google trying to improve ‘intent-based’ searches and makes the point that they still haven’t solved the ‘Java dilemma’ that Bruce Cray talked about last year. Bruce said some people searching for ‘Java’ are looking for the programming language, some for Indonesia and some for coffee beans. Hint: most are looking for the programming language.

I would guess there is enough intelligence in Google’s algorithms to detect dramatically different contexts. Perhaps Google could give you a disambiguation opportunity, like Wikipedia do…

When the page loads they could give you their best guess as to what you’re searching for, but also give you a line of disambiguation options. Choosing one of those options would then re-do the query but add in whatever word is necessary to remove the ambiguity in the original search query. So that’s another issue I’ve over-simplified to my own satisfaction.

The other change is to increase the length of ‘snippets’, the (normally two) lines of description that appear in each search result. As of now, Google extracts longer descriptions if the user’s search query has lots of words. Which makes sense because people are writing longer search queries now than they used to. And two lines is often not quite enough to give you context.

There are two ways that snippets are chosen. If you write a Description tag on your web page, in most cases, Google will use what you wrote in that tag as the snippet. If you don’t write one, Google will pinch whatever phrase/sentence it thinks best matches the keywords searched for.

So if you’re trying to get people to click on your web page, it’s a good thing to get a four line description rather than a two line one, right? Question is, does this mean you should re-write your Description tags as four lines instead of two?

My guess is that it will not be necessary. Mostly what’s happening under the new system is that if Google finds lots of matching keywords it is ignoring your Description tag and pulling out the phrases surrounding the keyword. Indirectly, Google are increasing their control of the way search results are displayed and lessening the influence of the webmaster.

Mischief. The first twelve Advertising Agency web sites I looked at are making no effort to attract web traffic. Either they have as much work as they want or they don’t believe that potential clients search the internet for advertising agencies. Maybe they rely on being in the Yellow Pages.

All sites run fancy Flash animation; none of them deprecate properly for people with JavaScript turned off. The full Flash sites are extremely annoying for users. Hit the Back button in your browser while visiting The Brand Agency, Campaign Palace or Naked and get thrown out of the site. Oh good, I get to look at that animation all over again!

None of the sites have Title tags that include any reference to ‘advertising’, ‘media’ or ‘marketing’. This is part of the reason why none of their sites are found when you type “advertising agency” into Google.

None of the sites have Description tags. Which means that when you type ‘saatchi‘ into Google it tells you this about the company:

Saatchi & Saatchi PR in Romania has been appointed by Alpha Bank, a leading name in the financial sector, to handle its PR account. READ MORE > … Compelling content for English-speaking people interested in Romanian bank Public Relations – alas, I’m one of the few …

Saatchi’s site was broken when I visited; none of the links worked. I tried IE and Firefox and re-downloaded Flash but still nothing. I emailed their webmaster. Waiting on a response. Update: links now working.

When you type GPYR into Google it tells you this about the company:
home; about us · work · services · tools · contact us · brand partners · careers. George Patterson Y&R is Australia’s newest (and oldest) advertising agency …

‘Wunderman‘ gives you this:
Welcome to Wunderman : Welcome to the site for Wunderman, the original direct marketing agency. To get our conversation… Welcome, welcome. Should be called Doorman, not Wunderman.

Clearly none of the agencies understand that you can control the way Google presents your search result. Many of the sites don’t work if you omit the www; this can be fixed with a simple re-direct. And it seems none of them know how to get a full Flash site properly indexed by Google, thereby increasing web traffic. I digress.

DDB have a one page site that allows you only an email link. Times are tough. The design of many sites, such as BMF and Clemenger has not been updated in years. The gratuitous use of sound is particularly 1990s.

JWT, Grey and Singleton Ogilvy make up the twelve.

It’s as if they created their sites before Google was invented.

Oh! Found one traditional agency who know what they’re doing: Marketforce use the words “marketing” and “advertising” in their Title tag and have written one Description tag. As a result, they come up at #12 when you search for “Advertising Agency”. A bit of tweaking would put them in the top couple.

I’m running some half-day seminars on web promotion shortly in Perth. If you’d like to pre-register, give me a yell.

Google’s changes to their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) let you change the order of your search results. I’m so excited I could breathe. How often do you re-do a search? Those searches would be a very small fraction of my total searches so why would I invest the time removing rogue sites and re-ordering the results?

Unless Google plans to take into account my re-ordering, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Perhaps Google hopes that by aggregating the re-ordering they can assemble more useful SERPS but I doubt even that would work. The people with the vested interest in shifting results are black hat SEO operators, ie the baddies, so I doubt Google will pay any attention to the re-ordering.

They are allowing you to view what other people say about sites and their re-ordering of them and that is a step towards what I’ve described as a next generation search engine. But it’s a very small step. Would be nice to see third party comments on a site if people bother to annotate. But what’s in it for them?

Listening to Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts discussing the future of Google, the key trends are increased personalisation and localisation of search results.

In other words, Google will know where you are, so it will automatically give you the local laundromats if you type in ‘laundromat’. And it will profile your searches (and perhaps your gmail) to help deliver results that match your own particular twisted personality. Bruce’s claim that ‘ranking is dead’ is just headline-seeking. There will still be benefits in localising your pages and optimising them for your target market, it’s just that it will be a bit harder to prove to a client that you’ve done the job right, because there won’t be a single overall search result page. But as Cutts points out, this is already the case. Australian sites produce Australian pages and so on.

The move towards intent-based search and local search are logical extensions for Google. The only people entitled to panic are the companies trying to flog local search directories. That would include Yellow Pages.

The interesting thing for me in Clay’s talk was the notion of Google interrogating audio/video files and weighting search results towards sites providing video content, what he calls ‘engagement objects’. I suspect that process is fraught with technical difficulties but it makes a lot of sense for Google to go down that path. If you’re not currently doing video on your site, go buy a green screen.

I do agree with Clay and Cutts that people offering SEO services will need to broaden their service offering; the future is not just about ranking, it’s about (1) an effective reach and (2) an effective web presence when they find you. I’m quite happy about that trend, it’s what I already do for clients.

The new search engine, Cuil, has underwhelmed people so far with its performance. I guess it’s early days but their apparent business strategies, ‘bigger than Google’ and ‘better privacy policy’ got me thinking about what a better search engine than Google would look like. What are the areas that might offer a competitive advantage?

Let’s start narrow, with two little ones. When you’re looking at a normal search query, you’re getting the highest ranked results. But these are often out of date. You can use the Advanced tab to get recent results but this is a bit kludgy. I’d like to be able to easily order results by recency.

Second, I think Google seriously underuses Alerts, the email notifications you can set up on any search query. With Alerts, you get new results as they are indexed, so over a period of three months or so, you become very well informed on your subject. My point is, running an Alert once a week for a three month search period can be far more powerful than a one-off search that generates 400,000 results. Some searches you do will be one-offs but some will be ongoing areas of interest. Current search engines don’t distinguish between the different classes of search.

Google doesn’t promote the Alerts; I’d be putting the Alert button next to every search query you run. And I’d be offering it as an RSS feed as well as an email.

Now a broader approach.

Google is a bot. An automated search built in a pre-Web 2.0 world. Perhaps the way to beat it is to take advantage of (1) the fabulous people who are already out there categorising and rating content and (2) people doing new searches who are encouraged to rate/tag the sites they visit.

Imagine a service that aggregates searches done on Web 2.0 sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and WordPress then indexes their tags. Aggretagging. To me it’s not about getting 400,000 results, it’s about getting 20 better results than Google. To do this, you need the discernment that real people bring to the equation.

The other tactic is to turn your search engine into a social engine, using networks of existing and emerging friends. Google has no soul. Compare it to Twitter or Friendfeed; already being used by people to share quality sites. People use social media to build knowledge networks. That’s a threat to the Googlebot model.

Experience with Delicious and Twitter shows that people are prepared to share some of their search results. Our social engine would allow you to share as many of your search queries as you wanted. Cuil was exactly wrong. Less privacy, not more. Combine the social networks with aggretagging and Bot’s Your Uncle. Social aggretagging.

Pictured: Me in Lively, streaming Lisa Nova’s Twitter Whore video into my room, Twittery.

Lively is described as Google’s answer to Second Life. It’s not. Second Life is a virtual world; Lively is chat software with 3D avatars. It’s browser-based, as opposed to Second Life, which operates with separate software, like a computer game. Contrasting the two environments highlights the originality of the Second Life product. Lively is imitative and cut-down in every respect. Conceptually barren. This is by intention; the Second Life interface has proved too daunting for most people. I note that they used to think that computers were too complicated for the mainstream too.

The interesting aspect of Lively is the ability to embed the interface in a web page, effectively offering interactive 3D chat on a web site. For a business, this has the same limitations of normal chat software, ie it only works if you allocate staff to interact with people. Kind of the opposite to what businesses tend to want these days. You can imagine teleseminars and teleconferences working this way, if they get the wrinkles ironed out.

And there are a lot of wrinkles. It’s painfully slow. There is no orientation. Things don’t work. Movement is difficult. Thousands of bad first impressions are being created as you read this. This is no way to run a ballroom.

My friends at Millions of Us are one of two development partners and have created a themed room for one of their clients, National Geographic. So; themed rooms, limit of 20 visitors at a time: looks like a similar scaling problem to Second Life’s.

Lively’s launch has overwhelmed another entrant in this space. Vivaty. It is easier to understand, is less ambitious than Lively and seems to work better, though I haven’t seen it under load.

Vivaty also allows you to embed your room in a web page (coincidence). Like Lively, it offers to suck you across from Facebook (just a coincidence). Quite an unsettling experience walking into your Vivaty room for the first time to find the walls covered with pictures of people you know. It loads pictures randomly from your Facebook account.

But most people I know don’t dwell in Facebook. It’s a ‘touch base’ medium. This is at odds with the 3D chat idea, which is conversation. I would have thought the concept was a better fit with MSN than Facebook.

Always risky making an assessment early on, but here goes. Lively will disappoint almost everyone who ventures into it, will get a reputation as nothing special and die of embarrassment. Vivaty will struggle to move people across from Facebook in sufficient numbers to give it traction. Both are kludgy and compare poorly to their 2D rivals.

Not through to the next round.

Henry Ford is credited with the insight “I know half of my advertising works really well. I just don’t know which half”. The success of Google, the leader in online advertising, is largely due to the impressive accountability that they give advertisers.

Having done the online training course provided by Google, I sat for (and passed) the Google Advertising Professionals exam. The course covered Adwords, cost per click marketing (CPC), cost per impression (CPM), pay per click advertising (PPC), contextual advertising, placement advertising and a slew of other web marketing devices (WMDs; I made that one up).

It all amounts to a fantastic amount of control for the advertiser.

You can start with a tiny budget. Try that on television.

Not only can you select individual web sites that are of interest to your market, you can target based on demographics and/or keywords. In the case of search marketing, you can confine your advertising spend to people in the Perth area who type “model cars” and exclude people who search for “models”, though why you would do that is beyond me.

The system rewards relevance. If you write ads which contain words irrelevant to the web site you send them to, your cost of advertising increases.

You can experiment with different campaign wording and compare the effectiveness of alternatives. Most of this experimentation costs you not a cent.

Having done all that, you can then monitor and adjust at a micro level every aspect of every alternative whenever you want. For example, you can increase your advertising on the weekends or in a particular time-slot. This contrasts sharply with the way NineMSN sells advertising for example. Theirs is a conventional media package: Buy this product, pay this amount, call us if you need a change.

Serious advertisers can also use the Google API to automate keyword changes and daily budgets.

Finally, you can track the conversion rate of every aspect of a web campaign. How effective was each banner ad, Adwords ad, Yahoo ad … in generating an online sale or a page view? Then compare each to your cost of advertising. It’s a system which combines with Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive method of measuring what works and what does not.

Here is one of the sixteen AdWord variations Henry and I are using to launch the Model T:

Ford: Universal Car
Model T; Open Touring & Roadsters
$300 only. 20HP 4 cylinder. Black.
www.ford.com

Call to Action: let me know if you’d like a hand using online advertising. In Australia: 040 990 8133. In the US, 714 656 4001.