Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Recently I had the chance to sit back and reflect on how far Online Marketing has come since my early days in the industry and where we are headed. Back when i got started in the late 1990’s, when I was more on the development side,  Online Marketing was nothing compared to what it is now. SEO wasn’t really SEO (it was more submitting your site to search engines) email marketing was the best way to communicate with your customers and affiliate marketing / paid search were just showing their true value. Over the years we have seen each component of online marketing grow in importance, change and evolve into real marketing strategies used by companies of all sizes. However, I feel that drastic charges to how we market online are coming.

As with any industry there comes a “tipping point” where the ship is just too crowded and something has to give. For the past couple of years we have seen the rise of people calling themselves “experts” in whatever online area they deem fit - regardless of their actual qualifications. This is creating a great deal of negativity and confusion throughout the online world. The most extreme example is of course SEO. How many SEO experts are out there right now? Just about anyone who even does a tiny bit of SEO work calls themselves an expert. Same thing goes for Affiliate Marketing and every other piece of Online Marketing.  Is the specialization of services really the future? No it isn’t. First, most of the “experts” are just people who are good at selling themselves and talk a good game - but lack in actual real world experience. I can’t count how many times I have talked with these “experts” about a strategy or method and have them back-track and stumble unable to provide any true thoughts on the subject matter outside the normal high-level, over-used, terminology and information. Don’t get me wrong there are a few people who I deem to be TRUE experts in the field but most of the people doing the innovative / meaningful / results driven work are not busy speaking at every single conference out there or spending more time promoting themselves then their clients / companies. The true experts are hard at work making their companies, whether their own or someone else’s, some serious cash.

So what is the future of Online Marketing and all of its pieces like SEO, PPC, Email, etc? The way I see it each piece will become less important individually and more important as part of a total strategy. For example SEO by itself will be a fraction of what it is now as Search Engines get smarter and rely on more semantic information rather then the traditional methods - like inbound links, keyword density, etc - we currently rely on today to rise to the top of the SERP’s. Will SEO ever go away completely? Of course not. As long as there are Search Engines there will be Search Engine Optimization - but what SEO actually entails will change.

The future of Online Marketing is about taking every piece of the online puzzle and putting them together to create a synergistic strategy based on a companies goals and objectives.  Every aspect of Online Marketing should complement each other, no longer will companies be able to rely on one or the other. I also see the future of Online Marketing being about brands and quality. The general web users have and will continue to get smarter - those affiliate based landing pages that offer nothing more than a “order now” button won’t work.  Customers will look and expect to have a wealth of information at their finger tips. Content will still be king but it will go beyond general copy -  the smarter consumer will want to see more social data,  meaning testimonials, feedback, reviews, product comparison and general unbiased information. Companies large and small will need to focus on their entire brand experience, off-site and on-site, in order to compete in a increasingly competitive landscape….notice I said competitive not crowded.

So who stands to really lose from the changes in online marketing? The people who aren’t willing to invest the required time and effort. No more crappy landing pages. No more mass low-quality / high-volume PPC buys.  No more nonsense domain names. Embrace the changes or find a  new line of work.

Ok that is enough ranting for one post…

When it comes to dealing with Mobile Search / SEO, it is important to remember that the mobile audience is much different than the PC audience. Not only do mobile searchers use a smaller screen with a longer load time to display their results; they are often on-the-go, looking for time-sensitive or location based information (flight times, restaurant phone numbers, etc.), and may not have access to a QWERTY keyboard making search a cumbersome process. The goal of Mobile SEO is to make your content easily found by a mobile searcher as well as making their time on your website a simple and streamlined experience so that they’re likely to find what they need quickly and become a return visitor.

Mobile SEO Best Practices
1. Site Content Should Be Easily Accessible

• Flash, AJAX, and frames create roadblocks for the mobile user. Make your site layout simple and avoid unnecessary design elements.
• Remember that the mobile audience has a smaller screen to view your content – keep titles, metadata, and urls short and succinct so that they can be rendered on a small screen.

2. Keyword Research Must Reflect Mobile Search Results

• Google and other mobile search engines provide “predictive” search – ie., after the searcher types a few letters, the search engine tries to predict what is being searched and provides popular keyword options. If you know what keywords appear in predictive search you can optimize your site around those terms.
• Follow all standard SEO best practices including the use of optimized H1 tags, keyword rich anchor links, optimized titles and metadata.

3. Optimize for a Variety of Mobile Phones, PDAs, Blackberry’s, etc

• Use 100% XHTML, cHTML, or WML code
• Follow all mobile web best practices and then have your site validated - http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/ & http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
• Make sure robots.txt is accessible to mobile crawlers

4. Implement meta.txt

• Meta.txt files indicate which URL the user-agent should follow to present the most suitable format to the mobile user’s platform.

5. Submit Mobile Site Maps to Search Engines

• Google, Yahoo and other search engines accept mobile sitemaps
• If your website is location based, also submit to local directories

6. Strategic Linking

• Develop an inbound linking strategy with other relevant, mobile websites to increase your site’s relevancy
• Ensure that you are also linking internally to relevant pages within your own website.
• It is necessary to use keyword rich anchor links for both linking strategies.

7. Mobile SEO Analytics

• Develop benchmarks and analyze your results on a consistent basis

Last night MySpace officially launched their new advertising platform, myAds, which has been in the works for at least a year. MyAds is a self service, targeted ad platform, like the similar product offered by Facebook. Facebook’s ad platform allows only text ads, MyAds currently allows only display ads - advertisers are limited to 728×90 or 300×250.  MyAds offers display ad templates and a flash tool for those who need help creating their ads, of course advertisers can upload their own as well.

MyAds operates on a CPC model and ad placement are prioritized by max CPC rate set by the advertiser and how often ads are clicked on. A key differentiator between MyAds and Facebook however is the ability for MyAds advertisers to “hyper-target” their ads. MySpace’s hyper-targeting technology takes into account a users activity over time, where Facebook focuses on the specific user defined interests. All together there are 1,200 different ways an advertiser can categorize users within MyAds.

So, will this add the revenue stream Rupert Murdoch has been looking for from his social portal? Personally, I don’t think it will be what adWords was to Google but should of course add something to the bottom line. I see MyAds being very similar to Facebook in the sense the CPC will be pennies and result in a high-volume of impressions but low quality click counts. However, as with Facebook, MySpace should be part of any advertisers marketing plan.

From the MySpace Press Release.

MySpace today officially announced the domestic beta launch of MySpace MyAds, the new advertising platform designed to empower individuals and small businesses from local retailers to musicians and politicians to create relevant, targeted promotional business campaigns within the world’s premier social media environment.  MySpace MyAds is a new, do-it-yourself advertising platform that democratizes the landscape of online advertising, enabling anyone to create customized banner ads, target to specific audiences using MySpace’s HyperTargeting technology, and analyze campaign performance tracked throughout the MySpace ecosystem.

With MySpace MyAds, we’re blowing the lid off display advertising solutions for small and medium businesses, said Jeff Berman, President of Sales and Marketing for MySpace. MySpace MyAds is a direct marketer’s dream providing entrepreneurs with the most accessible, personalized, and targeted advertising toolkit in the market. We’re giving businesses better ROI ASAP and in today’s economy, that’s a must-have.

MySpace MyAds empowers any advertiser to build a customized, targeted, and measurable campaign in a few easy steps:

STEP 1: Visit https://advertise.myspace.com or click the Advertise link located at the bottom of any MySpace page
STEP 2: Create a display ad using the MySpace MyAds Builder Tool
STEP 3: Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
STEP 4: HyperTarget to customers
STEP 5: Measure ad performance with MySpace MyAds analytics reporting

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of WordPress as a CMS and especially as a blog platform. WordPress offers the best flexibility, user-interface and stability of any platform out there. On top of that, the real value of using WordPress are the enormous amounts of plugins available to help you manage, promote and do just about anything else with your blog. With that being said I felt it was time to list my favorite WordPress Plugins covering anything and everything.

• All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, generates META tags automatically, avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs. Override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. You can fine-tune everything, Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
• Crawl Rate Tracker: This is a plugin to log every visit by search engine robots, and show the results in different reports.
• Digg Digg: Integrates Digg button into blog posts.
• Lighter Menus: Lighter Menus creates drop-down menus instead of the regular admin menus of the WordPress interface, so that you can browse items with one click and work at your blog in a much more usable environment.
• Enhanced WP-ContactForm: WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• MultiFeedSnap: Plugin for displaying multiple RSS feeds.
• Redirection: A redirection manager - KEY for when you move from one blog platform to another.
• Robots Meta: This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade: Usually you have to go to your hosting company in order to upgrade your blog - not with this plugin which takes care of the upgrade automatically.
• ShareThis: Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.
• SEO Friendly Images: This plugin automatically optimizes ALT and TITLE attributes for each of your images that doesn’t have one. This will make them xHTML valid, and it will also help you a bit in your rankings.
• Twitter Tools: A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold.
• WP Super Cache: WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
• RSS Footer: This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text.
• SimplyExclude: Exclude pages from site search

For more information on Wordpress plugins and development visit Yoast.com.

Not so long ago the Google let the world know of an upcoming AdWords Quality Score adjustment / improvement. Well, today the announcements came out that those changes are going to go live over the next couple days. This change will impact ALL AdWords accounts, so if you do anything in Paid Search you should take notice.

Why is AdWords Quality Score important? Google uses the Quality Score to determine the order of the ads that show up for a search query. The AdWords Quality Score improvements include:

• Better Quality Score accuracy: New quality score calculations will take into consideration the accounts history, click-through rate of all ads & keywords and to a lesser extent landing page quality.

• All keywords are labeled as active: Previously keywords with a low quality score were listed as “inactive for search” and would not be shown on Google.com. Now those keywords will be listed as active and be evaluated for any relevant search query - even though they would continue to produce low-volume impressions.

• First Page Big Estimates: Within the AdWords account the “first page bid estimates” will replace “minimum bids”. “For queries without many advertisers competing for placement, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you’ll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page. Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages — as long as your keyword is relevant to our users.“

So why is Google making these changes? Plain and simple Google AdWords is working on improving the quality and relevancy of ads shown throughout their AdWords network…therefore improving the overall search experience. For more information on Google AdWords Quality Score changes check out the Google AdWords Blog.