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…

A couple of days ago Google launched their much anticipated social media / wiki search initiative: SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows logged-in Google users to customize their search results by promoting, commenting, deleting or even adding specific SERP results. These new features are nothing ground breaking, social media services like Digg have been allowing interaction with SERP’s for years and Wikia Search has been doing the same thing for awhile now. However, when it comes to Google anything they do becomes a game changer based on the pure volume of people who use the service and the amount of companies that rely on the organic traffic it generates.

Here is a screen shot of SearchWiki at work with one of my affiliate websites. As you can see next to the title there is an up and down arrow. By “promoting” my site for the search term “college football jerseys” my site went from the 11th spot to #1 in my search results. At the bottom of the listing there is the comment option which allows you to make whatever comment about that specific search result you want - this comment is public, meaning anyone can see what I wrote about the search result.

Here is a screen shot of how to add a site to your SERP. The below option shows up in the footer and allows you to add a specific URL that will show up the next time you search for that specific keyword. If the URL you add is in the Google search index you will see it show up like a normal listing, however if the URL is not indexed you will see just the URL. This raises the question whether or not adding a URL that isn’t indexed would expedite the URL being crawled and added to the index quicker then with other methods.

Obviously everyone within the search business, especially those involved in SEO, are keeping a close eye on SearchWiki. Google is making it very clear that the changes users make to their SERP are seen only by them and does not affect the overall public ranking of a website. However, Google can do whatever they want and it is conceivable that they add how many people promote / remove a website to the overall ranking algorithm - they could even take into account the publicly available comments based on things like keywords. For SEO’s anything and everything has to be planned for.

The real and immediate impact SearchWiki will have is for reputation management, product reviews and customer feedback. SearchWiki will allow customers, fans, clients and anyone else who is logged-in to leave their opinion - good or bad - about a product, company, offering or person. Screw over some people? You better be prepared for anyone who searches for you seeing those negative comments. If anything this shows the increased importance of companies having a comprehensive online communication and customer interaction strategy in place.

Google seems to be working out some of the bugs with program as SearchWiki sometimes goes away for me. I expect to see fluctuations in the service for some time as this is a massive undertaking on the both the technical and strategic side.

For additional information check out the offical Google SearchWiki video:

Youtube’s traffic growth over the years can be attributed to three main factors: 1) the ease of creating and uploading user generated content, 2) the appeal of watching UGC and 3) allowing visitors to embed video into their website. The ability to easily snag code and post the video content on websites, blogs, and social portals exposed the Youtube brand to a far greater audience then those that would have come directly to Youtube.com - in fact almost 44% of YouTube users are watching embedded videos.

Youtube’s embeddable video has always been functional but other video websites, like Hulu.com, pushed the envelope in terms of functionality and user-experience. Yesterday, Youtube released 4 new features that look to increase usage and compete with other, better, embeddable players.

• High-quality start images (thumbnails) – Before you press play on embedded YouTube videos, the thumbnails for the video will be presented in high-quality. We’re pleased with the results – let us know if you agree.

• Search in embeddable player – At the close of an embedded video, along with the usual recommended videos and URLs, a search box will appear. Not only will you be able search from within the embedded player, you will be able to watch videos through the same window. That’s right, you can search all of YouTube from the comfort of your favorite blog, news, or humor page.

• Integrated video annotations – Annotations enable video producers to incorporate text information into their videos, create choose your own adventure-style stories or add links to any YouTube video. People watching videos through the embedded player can now join the fun.

• Integrated closed captions – Back in August we started allowing video creators to add captions to their videos. Closed Captions are now available in embedded videos like this one:

The key improvement is the search functionality within the embeddable player. Hulu got this right and every other video producer should take notice - allowing users to embed videos is not only good for Video SEO, but when done correctly should result in increased content discovery and direct visits.

The time and effort put into developing a embeddable player that focuses on the content and user-experience is well worth the effort.

As with any website, it is common knowledge to apply standard SEO best practices in order to increase your search engine rankings.  However, when dealing with international search engines there are extra steps that should be taken into consideration to optimize your site properly.  Here are some best practices to keep in mind when it comes to international SEO:

International SEO Guidelines and Best Practices

Foreign extension vs. Subdomain
1.    Foreign searchers tend to search in their native language on local search engines
a.    An Italian consumer will search in Italian on Google.it instead of on Google.com
2.    Local search engines want to deliver the most relevant content for their users; results are skewed to what the local searcher would most like to see
3.    Using a foreign domain extensions is the ideal scenario when targeting a specific audience in their country of origin
a.    Goal: Target Italian consumers in Italy
b.    Solution: Publish your site at www.website.it
4.    While the ideal scenario is to have a url with a foreign extension, it is an acceptable and common practice to use a subdomain
a.    A subdomain is not affected by Google’s sandbox penalty which can help your site gain exposure in the short term.  Learn all the pros and cons of each strategy before moving forward.

International Hosting
1.    Sites with foreign domain extensions should be hosted in originating country if possible
2.    Search engines identify your site based on IP address – your site may be removed from searches if the IP address is not in the country you are targeting
3.    Use Google Webmaster Central for geo-targeting content

Identify Language in Metadata
1.    The language being used on the site should be identified within the meta data
a.    Examples:
i.    If the site is in English, use “EN”
ii.    If the site is in Italian, use “IT”
2.    Meta description should contain information that identifies your location (city, state, etc)
3.    If you have a local address, display it on the homepage

Localized Language
1.    Conduct keyword research keeping your target audience in mind, search behavior varies across countries and languages.
2.    All content should be translated for the native language. A human translator should be used whenever possible instead of an automatic translation tool.
3.    Use local language and spellings
a.    Holiday vs. Vacation
b.    Colour vs. Color

Local Inbound Linking
1.    Develop a linking strategy with sites hosted in the country of origin (it is preferable to link to sites using a foreign domain extension).

Tactics to Avoid
1.    Keyword Stuffing
2.    Doorway Pages
3.    Javascript Redirects
4.    All of these tactics will negatively affect your rankings and your site will be penalized

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

For as long as their has been SEO in conversations there has always been one simple fact: Flash and SEO do not mix. However, a couple month ago Adobe looked to change this by announcing their planned improvements in the indexing of flash files by Google and Yahoo. Obviously any change in how flash files are indexed by search engines would have a serious impact not only on Flash SEO, but Video SEO and site design / development as well. Since that announcement was made I have not seen any significant changes, through my own testing and research, in how flash content is being indexed. In fact I have seen little evidence or talk about Flash SEO since that announcement was made. However, Brian Ussery put together an awesome “2009 Google Flash SEO” post that goes into in-depth analysis of flash indexing through his own testing and case studies. Brian’s blog post is a definite must read for anyone involved in SEO or site design / development.

Here are the case studies he put together:

• Google flash content association with parent URLs
• Google flash file pagerank
• Googlebot #anchor (fragment identifier) URL extraction
• Google flash text translation

Bottom line is that there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to Flash SEO, however things seem to be moving forward (slowly). My recommendation stays the same for now -  it is ok to build flash heavy sites but take into consideration the standard  SEO best practices - check out my SEO Checklist for guidance. But, keep an eye on this as things can change very quickly.

Youtube has been busy the past couple days launching new features, yesterday came the video upload enhancements, today they announced some new features to their YouTube Insights tool. Youtube Insights enabled video uploaders access to detailed information about their videos. The new feature takes video insight one step further by showing actual traffic details and user interactions of the video itself. This new feature called “Hot Spots” allows video uploaders to see details like what part of the video people dropped off and what part people watched over and over again.

“The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.”

So what does this mean? Well for the average user uploading random clips this probably doesn’t mean that much. However, for anyone that works on building a viral campaign or social media strategies the new insight can give a tremendous amount of detail on why a video is popular and can lead to a better (and more popular) video production in the future. Basically this should be treated by anyone interested in driving more views to their video like any optimization technique used for other web elements.

You can read the entire announcement over at the Google Blog.

The biggest issues most video uploaders have with YouTube has been their file-size limitations, lack of multiple upload functionality and restrictions on inputting metadata during the upload process. Well, those issues will soon be a thing of the past…today the YouTube team has announced the release of their new video upload interface into public beta - the new video file uploader had been in private beta for a few months.

The new video upload features:

• The ability to enter in metadata (Video SEO!) during the upload process.
• The ability to uploaded multiple files at one time through the video upload interface.
• File-size upload limit has been increased deom 100MB to 1GB.

This is a smart, and predictable move, by Youtube on so many levels. Obviously this increases the functionality and usability of YouTube. However, the most important benefit of the new features are the increased level of monetization this allows. By giving users the ability to upload a video as large as 1GB, Youtube expands past the short-form UGC content and gets more into long-form content that is easier to sell against.

Of course we all know this just means we will see longer clips of guys getting kicked in the nuts…

If you are looking for best practices in regards to building an online video destination look no further then Hulu.com. Since Hulu launched in private beta last year it has become the gold standard for what a video website with professionally produced content should be - from content, to ad monetization, to social syndication with their embeddable player,  Hulu has gotten it right from day one while other competing services have missed the mark. Today Hulu announced feature enhancements which will further increase their user engagement.

The new features of Hulu include:

• Show recommendations
• Topic specific discussion forums
• Actor based search
• Genre-based channel browsing

The timing of the new features come not long after rival video aggregator Joost announced they were going away from the downloadable app and going all browser with a focus on social networks. Hulu doesn’t go as far as Joost but does take some of the wind out of their sails with their new community features. Along with the new features listed above, Hulu also launched 17 new content channels including comedy, horror and anime.

Bottom line is that there are no shortages of online video destinations - whether UGC / professionally produced or short-form / long-form. The power of online video, especially when you factor in Video SEO, is not being lost on the masses. However, the majority of these video destinations focus either on content with no long-tail benefit or make the user-experience a complete disaster. Hulu has the content people want to watch and has focused on the UI so that content discovery comes naturally: content + discoverability = winner.

Watch and learn…

One of the basic fundamentals of building a SEO friendly website was the belief that static URLs are always better than dynamic URLs when it comes to search engine crawlers. However, last night the Google Webmaster Central Blog put together a in-depth analysis and comparison of both URL structures with the bottom-line conclusion that dynamic URLs are not bad for SEO…when done correctly.

The Google Blog post covers the following topics:

• What is a statis URL
• What is a dynamic URL
• Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static
• When can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
• Dynamic and Static URLs myths and facts
• FAQ

I don’t feel that the post offered any ground breaking secrets or insights, most of it was common sense, however what the post did do is erase any doubt and / or questions webmasters might have had when it came to building SEO friendly URL structure. Just another examples of how Google is becoming more transparent with the inner workings of search.

You can read the full blog post here: Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs