Update: As of 3:00 PM, a mere 5 or 6 hours after I posted this, Omniture and Webtrends have contacted me to say that they do now properly list Bing as a search engine. That’s pretty awesome turnaround on their parts. Still waiting on Google Analytics. No idea about Hitslink, I don’t have an account.
Just a quick note to anybody who runs a web analytics program. Update your code to include Bing as a search engine.
So far I’ve checked Google analytics and Omniture, and neither one of them is correctly counting Bing visitors as search engines or carrying over the search query.
A lot of us SEO / Marketing types are curious to see day 1 impact of Bing on our sites and if it increases or drops over time, so the faster you get it working right the better.
Part of my work at noslang.com involves educating parents about how to “monitor” their teens online. I’ve written several articles in the past about how parents should be involved with their kids online. I don’t talk about spying, but I do talk about adding them as friends on facebook, keeping the computer in an open area of the house (which is pretty impossible with the rise of laptops,) and sitting down to talk with your teen about being safe on the internet.
Often times, the best solution for internet safety, privacy, and security is to just talk with your teen and let them know what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Plain old parental involvement is usually the best solution for any “teen” style problem.
For some reason though, most congressmen don’t feel that way. They all feel we need silly laws to help us raise our children online. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time secluded away from their own offspring, or perhaps it’s just that they’re all out of touch with reality.
I’m talking about the latest bill, the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (2.0) – where congress is seeking to update the 1998 bill to basically make the internet less private while bragging about protecting privacy.
If you read the bill, there’s several times where it talks about increased privacy while actually doing the opposite. So, to be clear, I’d like to remind the government about a key difference in terms:
Privacy – is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively.
Security – is the condition of being protected.
Now, I’m not a linguistics major, but it seems to me that anytime you require more information from me, it’s decreasing my privacy.
I’m talking about the bill’s requirements for age verification and parental consent. There’s going to be a whole bunch of data collected by websites to enforce this. More data that I don’t want to give you means less privacy. It also means less free speech and more opportunities for data to be abused.
Since it would be a US law, it also means that anybody in the social networking space would be best to start their company anywhere but in the USA – so the law wouldn’t apply to them.
If you’re serious about protecting the privacy of teens online, take the opposite approach. Privacy is all about letting the user control what data he or she wants to share . Anytime you make a law requiring a user to share information you’re sacrificing his privacy.
If I were making a privacy law, it would have 2 major components. The first would be to limit what information websites can store without clear consent, and how long they can store it. The second would be to limit who can propose bills about the internet to those who actually understand the internet – and that rules out everybody in the house and senate, and most of those in the white house.
Just a quick note for Kindle owners: You can now get dotCULT updates on your kindle. Amazon charges $1.99, but it sounds like they’ll push blog updates right to your device. You can subscribe at the following link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002AKKDGO.
I don’t currently own a Kindle, but if you do and choose to subscribe, let me know how it works.
I’m sitting at the food court in the mall eating lunch, and I just had a very interesting conversation with the manager of Sbarro Pizza. It seems that while most food court eateries don’t offer drink refills, Sbarro does. In fact, they even went so far as to remind me that I can get a refill when I paid for my food.
Anybody who’s ever worked in fast food knows that you’re not supposed to advertise the refill. It’s all about maximizing profits. So why did this manager go out of the way to remind me? Simple: brand marketing.
What better way is there to market your brand than to have your customers carry around a giant cup with your logo on it while they’re shopping? You’d be surprised how much that marketing can influence a customer, this company does wide format printing that can attract tons of customers.
After thinking about it for a second, I couldn’t help thinking about Google Adwords. I know what you’re thinking – that some of the connections in my brain have gone haywire – but hear me out.
When most small businesses think of Google Adwords they seem to focus on one metric: Cost per click. If you’ve ever done SEM for clients you’ll know what I’m talking about. Even if they’re getting 150% ROI out of it, they still cringe when they hear something like $3 per click. I suspect that the cost per click focused mentality also has a lot to do with why many small businesses aren’t advertising on Google. It’s a shame.
What the Sbarro cup reminded me of was the branding potential of Google Adwords. The best part of using Adwords for branding is that it doesn’t even require people to click.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose I type in “hair style.” I’m going to get results for various hair styles, but I’m also going to get ads for hair salons. I’ll most likely see “Jeff’s hair salon – first haircut free” in the ads, and skip it over while I look at examples of hair styles. I’m not yet in the “looking for a hair salon” part of my buying cycle so I’ll click the result about different styles.
Fast forward a few days. I’ve already figured out how I want my hair cut, and on the ride home from work I drive past Jeff’s hair salon. I think to myself: “hey, I’ve heard of them” and stop in for my free hair cut. Jeff didn’t pay me anything, but the mere fact that his company name was showing up resulted in me coming in for a haircut – even if I didn’t really remember how I’ve heard of him.
This type of stuff happens all the time – and larger brands excel at it. Think about a Nike or Pepsi commercial. Think about the crazy commercials you’ve seen during the Super Bowl. They’re not selling you something, they’re simply putting their brand’s name out there to get you thinking about it. There’s a reason for that – it works!
Your small business might not have the marketing budget of national brands, but you don’t need it. What you truly need is health and safety support for small business owners in the UK. Thanks to Google’s ability to only show your ad to local customers you can achieve the same result – for less cost than giving out free refills!
I couldn’t help but think about funerals and cemeteries lately. At least in America, it’s pretty custom for grievers to approach the corpse in the casket and say some words to the deceases. I did it recently at my grandfather’s funeral – and later at one of my old hockey coaches. I’m sure you’ve all done it too – you thank them for all they’ve done and tell them how much you love them and will miss them. It’s completely normal.
It’s also normal to visit them in the cemetery from time to time and visit. My mom and grandmother regularly visit my grandfather’s headstone, and I’ve been known to do it from time to time. It’s normal right?
Then I started thinking about it from a purge rational standpoint. Given my current belief system, I’m pretty damn sure all that time I was just talking to myself. There’s no way any of them actually heard me – they’re dead. In fact, if I were talking to a dead person anywhere else other than the cemetery – say perhaps at a coffee shop – everybody within earshot would probably think I’m crazy?
So why do we do it? Why do most people continue to have conversations with people who not only can’t respond, but can’t hear you either?
Sure, there’s religious reasons here, but those aren’t good enough to answer the question. Besides, even thinking that our loved ones would be sitting up in heaven watching our every move is pretty selfish. What makes us that important?
Let’s entertain the idea that heaven actually exists. If I were to suddenly die and go to heaven the first thing I’d do would be to re-unite with my parents and grandparents. I’d then probably throw back a few beers with Sinatra and then finally figure out whether or not all dogs actually go to heaven. Sure, given the possibility, I’d check in on people here on earth – but I’d be more concerned with living in paradise than following what’s happening down here. Besides, they’d make it up there eventually anyway.
From a pure logical standpoint, it’s pretty certain that any time spent talking to the dead is just time spent talking to ourselves – so why do we do it?
We do it because it’s comforting and often times helpful. Talking to the deceased forces us to answer our own questions from their point of view. In a way, it’s very similar to praying. When we ask for God’s advice we’re not really hearing God, we’re putting ourselves in God’s shoes and looking at ourselves through a religious point of view. (no, not the AL Bundy invented ones with individual toes – I’m speaking metaphorically here.)
The same goes for our loved ones. We’d all like dearly to forgive ourselves for something or other, and we all know that grandma would have forgiven us no matter what – so we speak to grandma and then imagine ourselves as her telling us everything is OK. When we’re proud of something we tell grandpa about it and imagine him saying “that a boy” as he pats us on the back. We use our memories of our loved ones to conjure up images of them acting how we perceived them. It’s comforting.
So does talking to deceased loved ones make us crazy, or is it simply a coping method that we have to help us deal with life’s ups and downs?
If you’re not familiar with a “traffic site” it’s quite a simple concept. The website offers to sell a certain amount of visitors for a price. The one I linked is selling 100 visitors for $3.
Another site that was sold by the same seller (this one is jvisits.com) was offering 3000 visitors for $2. That seemed like an incredible deal to me, so I went and did it. In fact, I did it for 2 sites. I did it for one major site that gets lots of traffic, and another site that got no traffic.
The first site I sent their traffic to was already receiving a few hundred visits per day. Within 24 hours I was sent a link to etracklive.com to check the status of my “visits.” A few hours later it showed over 1000 visitors to this site – however my daily total visitors according to analytics was only 850 – and google adsense showed less than 1000 impressions for that day.
Being skeptical of google tools, I changed the code on the 2nd site to simply open a text file, increment the number in it by 1 and close it. It’s a simple 1999 style web counter but it should have done the job here – and it did. The site was showing 1400 visitors, yet my simple text file showed about 45.
So, did they actually send me visitors? Yes and no.
What most likely happens here is that they’re re-directing expired domain names or using popunders. In the case of popunders they’re probably counting a “visit” as soon as their popunder code launches. Since most browsers now can block these popunders, it’s most likely that nobody was ever seeing my site. Those that did see it most likely closed the popup window before my adsense or analytics code launched.
Are these visitors valuable? Only if you’ve got CPM ads – but with most CPM rates averaging around $0.25 there’s no way to make these services profitable.
So why are so many of these sites for sale on sitepoint? Simple: they all use the same reseller. That’s who’s selling them – and why not? Their business model seems to revolve around cranking out templated sites and selling them on the cheap to “new business owners.”
Seriously, I wish everybody would stop panicking and get over it. It’s just the flu. It responds to Tamiflu – and the only people dying are those with no access to health care, or the elderly who are already in bad condition.
The swine flu isn’t going to the be next plague – no matter how much fear mongering the news does.
By now I’m sure everybody is familiar with the “disgusting Dominos video” featuring 2 moronic Dominos employees putting cheese up their nose and onto a sandwich. If you haven’t, you can see it here:
The video quickly spread all over the internet and received more than a million views in its first 24 hours online. Since then, Dominos has done a pretty awesome job of cleaning up the mess. They managed to do all of the right things, but there are a few things they did that were too late.
Shortly after firing the employees and pressing charges against them, Dominos president issued the following response:
The crucial lesson here is that although it seems like he’s reading a script, Dominos issued their response using the same medium that the original video aired on: YouTube. Instead of simply putting out a corporate press release and filing it away in an obscure portion of their website, Dominos joined the conversation already in progress. That’s how you have to deal with social media.
Shortly after the incident, Dominos set up a twitter account and started answering questions on it. I can say first hand that they answered a LOT of questions and responded to a LOT of people. When I tweeted at them, they twatted right back within 5 minutes with a great response.
The question I have to ask though, is where was their Twitter presence prior to this incident? If your company isn’t on Twitter now, let this serve as a wake up call that you should be. Had Dominos been there in the first place they could have started the PR machine in motion before this meme even got popular. It will also be interesting to see if they continue to use this new Twitter account to actively monitor and engage the community. I hope they do.
The lack of a twitter account also brings up other issues. If you do a search for Dominos you’ll notice that most of the results on Google are all about this recent video incident. From a reputation management point of view, that’s bad. Had they had a Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking presence, those sites would be showing up in search results instead of all the bad PR about these employees. It’s a great side effect of having active social networking profiles.
If the Dominos incident can teach us anything, it’s the importance of establishing an early and dominant position on the social networks. Brands simply have to involve themselves in the active discussions concerning them. Not only that, but they can’t just use these accounts to push corporate marketing messages. Customers want people with a voice; people like Matt Cutts of Google or Scott Monty of Ford or Robert Scoble of Rackspace or Jason Calacanis of whatever the hell he’s working on now. Having a social networking presence doesn’t do any good unless it has a personal style to it as well.
Overall, I think Dominos did a great job at handling this incident – and the failure of their stock price to fall today shows that investors think so too. It may be a while before people get over the mental image and order again (at least not a sandwich,) but because of their quick and effective communication I don’t think they’re going to suffer long term. Hopefully your company can learn from this in case you ever have to deal with this type of situation.
There’s an interesting discussion developing in the SEO community about whether or not SEO people should have intimate knowledge of HTML or not.
The common analogy being thrown around is that HTML is to SEO what anatomy is to a doctor. For the most part, I agree with this statement.
As I talk with more and more people involved in SEO, I’m always shocked at how few of them actually know how to program. Not only should a good SEO know HTML, but they should be familiar with .htaccess, robots.txt, PHP, ASP, Javascript, Flash, and even some basic graphic design.
The reason is simple: All of these factors affect SEO, and the more in depth knowledge you can have of the subject the better prepared you can be to improve a site’s ranking, if this is very difficult for you to handle, companies like https://indexsy.com/ help users to have an strong seo strategy.
The biggest advantage comes from knowing the problems that your other teams are going to face and being able to infer what objections they might raise. When your coding team says “we can’t do that” it can be beneficial to offer suggestions. You’d be surprised how many development teams aren’t familiar with apache modrewrite directives or php 301 redirects.
It’s important to not only know about these concepts, but to know how they’re implemented as well. That’s one strategy that’s benefited me greatly in my career. Knowing how to do all of the code has helped me not only gauge how to prioritize projects but to cut through delays given by outsourced programming teams as well.
Making a recommendation to replace images with text just isn’t as well thought out unless you actually know the work required to do so. You can’t truly SEO a site to it’s full potential unless you’re able to look at the complete picture and see every factor of the site.
It’s almost a sick paradoxical joke to say SEOs need to have technical knowledge though, as often times technical people don’t make the best SEOs. A good SEO also needs to be familiar with sales and marketing – as they’re going to spend a lot of time in those areas as well. Much of the job requires presenting, talking, and generally convincing people that you’re right. Salesmanship is clearly a very valuable SEO skill – not just in acquiring business but in getting client and developer sign off too.
It’s not crucial that you be a l33t code monkey to be an SEO, but if you’re one of those who don’t think it’s important to know HTML you should probably start looking for a new career – your SEO one isn’t going to go too far.
