A recent Google-Nielsen study showed that television commercials for movies were only 2 percent more influential in the decision to see a particular film than the medium of search. What ever happened to print? And what about radio? and only a 2 percent difference between television and search? The world is definitely changing.
Will search ever outdo television? That’s a tough call. Television is absolutely the major advertiser’s medium of choice, but with the growing trend leaning toward online and considering the benefits you receive from advertising on the internet that you can’t get anywhere else (ROI, Source tracking, spot targeting etc.), I think it will definitely happen in certain industries.
It’s official. Our company has been acquired by WashingtonVC and we are now SEO.com! This is big news. Bigger than most people outside of our industry understand. Not only is SEO.com a three letter domain (which are next to impossible to come by), in my opinion, it makes the list of the top 10 best possible domain names in the world.
Granted your domain name isn’t everything, but that’s what is so exciting about this news. There is an outstanding firm behind the name that is innovative, intelligent, and growing. I’m honored to be a part of it.
Search Engine Roundtable recently wrote a post saying that it appears Yahoo! is ordering the links in their site explorer based on their perceived quality. They searched a few sites including their own and found this to be the case so I decided to try a few myself. I tried it on this site (SearchBanter) and it seemed to be true. The first three links seemed to be my highest quality links. Then I tried it on WebTargeted.com and I must admit it put some doubt into my mind about the whole idea. The first link is from searchtrends.org which really, is probably the most relevant link back to the site. But the second link is from halloweencostumesnow.com. This is an affiliate site we created a while back and the link is at the bottom of the page informing visitors who the site was designed by. There is obviously no relevancy to seo on the entire site. The third link is from Dmoz.org which, due to its placement, is just a little more relevant to webtargeted.com in my opinion. However, it is a directory link, and perhaps Yahoo! doesn’t see directory links as high quality links. Some of the links which follow this dmoz link are from blogs and other seo directories which, you may argue, could also be considered lower quality links than those higher up on the list. But then you get to the 10th link and it’s coming from the home page of redcrossut.org (we did some pro bono work for them). I believe that this link should be higher up on the “quality” list. Especially higher than the halloween costumes link. It’s a .org which may not even play a factor in the quality equation anymore, but it’s also from the Red Cross organization. You would think that would count as a fairly high quality link. Then again, maybe not.
My conclusion then? I’m still not sure, actually. I think I’ll have to do some more testing before I can be conclusive, but after writing this post, I actually think it may be the case. Yahoo may be showing link quality through their site explorer. If anyone else does any testing, let me know.
Google Adsense is now allowing its users to put 3 link units on every page as opposed to the 1 link unit you could historically place. This technically means that you can have 3 blocks of Ads and 3 link units on every page.
The interesting thing about this change in policy is that it comes right after Adsense’s announcement that they were cracking down on the websites that were built purely to generate Adsense revenue. Obviously there are quality sites out there that will find this change useful, but I wonder if it won’t give more people more incentive to create ugly and useless websites.
MSN has been continually losing what little footing they had as a search engine. Every month their search engine market share percentage decreases by a percentage or two. You wouldn’t think that was much except that if the trend continues, they’ll have 0 market share before the end of the year.
So as big as MSN is, you would think they would be able to come up with some incredible fix to this fairly large problem. MSN thinks so too. They have hired new people to come up with something totally new that no one has ever seen before. That’s great and I’m all for it, but the problem with this is that building something “new” doesn’t fix the problem. The problem is Google. People want Google. They use Google. Anyone who is anyone uses Google as their search engine. Not MSN. As far as I’m concerned, the only people who use MSN (on a consistent basis) are the people who don’t know how to change their default homepage in Internet Explorer. Am I right?
You see MSN, Google has already filled the “best search engine” quota. Everyone knows it and unless Google really messes up somehow, they will continue to fill the “best search engine” quota. And knowing Google, they’re not going to mess up.
So, I hope that whatever “new” thing MSN comes up with is really “new” and by “new” I mean something that can fill a new best-of. Good Luck.
Matt Cutts recently wrote a post where he talked about reciprocal linking. The jest of the post was that reciprocal linking wasn’t bad depending on how you do it, but as time goes on, it’s definitely given less weight in the search engines.
Should you do any reciprocal linking then? I would say this: Reciprocal linking can still be a good form of link building as long as each of those links are relevant links for your site and your site visitors. If you have a fly fishing site, you may find it relevant for your visitors to include a link to a site that sells fly rods (if yours doesn’t), whereas it would be hard for the search engines and your visitors to find the relevancy in linking to a gambling site.
The keyword here is relevant. The search engines will never fault you for trying to make your site more friendly or more easy for your site visitors. Keep things relevant and you will always be in line with what the search engines are looking for.
So, it’s officially official. Seth Godin is going to come to Salt Lake City on the 24th of May. The conference will be held at the Salt Palace from 1 to 4 pm. We hope to see all you local internet marketers there!
The other day, I had an old friend email me who said he found my blog in the search engines. I was pretty excited to hear from him and so called him up. In our conversation, I asked how he found my blog and he told me he found me by looking up my name on Google. I was pretty sure that my name was nowhere to be found on Google yet, but he said he found it by typing in “Nelson James Utah”. I was number one in Google. Of course there aren’t that many people named Nelson James in Utah, in fact, there are only 97 people in the entire United States with my name, so I may be the only one in Utah. Anyway, I had never thought to look me up by state before.
Still, my goal was to show up for the keyword “Nelson James” by itself. Well, good news friends. I did a search in Google today and I just happen to be on the first page for my name. Again, I know this isn’t a huge success story, but it was a good test to see how fast you can get a site to show up for niche keywords (this one took me 36 days). Of course I’m not stopping at #9, but it’s a good start.
Link to Nelson James - Google Search
If you haven’t heard of the new Google TiSP, you have to check it out. Yesterday, Google announced that it is offering FREE in-home wireless broadband service with a free self-installation kit which includes everything you need to get started. While you are looking at this incredible project, keep in mind what day it was yesterday 
There is a pretty amusing flash game created by Pro Net Advertising called Search Engine Smackdown. If you haven’t played the game yet you need to. Even if you don’t know jack about search engine stuff, It’s a funny game. The players consist of the high and mighties of the internet realm such as Bill Gates, Sergey, Larry, and so forth. It’s good stuff.