Google, I suggest…
I’m not usually one to submit suggestions via feedback forms. For so many sites, it’s like sending your well-intentioned ideas and criticisms into a black hole. Never to see the light of day again. Heaven help you if you need some sort of acknowledgement or response.
I have plenty of suggestions for Google. But I don’t trust anybody’s feedback forms, even Google’s.
Therefore, I’ve decided to post my suggestions to Google onto a Blogger.com blog. Check it out. I just set it up a few days ago. So far I have 4 suggestions for Google that I’ve posted: integrate Google Checkout into Google Base, fix the Google API to return the same number of results that Google.com returns, extend the canonicalization feature in Google Sitemaps, and deliver the shopper back to the merchant after a completed purchase on Google Checkout. I’ll be posting more in the coming days. Anyone want to chime in with your own suggestions for Google? I’ll happily sign you up as an additional blog author, if you’re interested.
I’ve also posted some social consciousness ideas for Google on my Changes for Good blog. More to come there, too.
Webinar today on email marketing: 10 campaign critiques
Hope you can make it for my MarketingProfs webinar, Email Marketing Success: 10 Campaigns Examined for Better and for Worse, today at 12pm Eastern. It’s free for MarketingProfs Premium Plus subscribers, and $99 for others. I’ll be doing another MarketingProfs webinar next month (Sept 14) too, Getting Google to Love Your Website… Again. So you might as well subscribe to their Premium Plus package and then catch both of my webinars!
Merchants, police your trademarks!
Jeff Molander of Molander & Associates has given me a scoop on their new service that they are about to roll out — ProtectMyMark.com. Jeff has been kind enough to send me a sample report so that I can actually see what a merchant can get from using their service, and it looks really good.
ProtectMyMark.com’s reporting provides a mechanism for merchants to police their wayward affiliates who are using their trademarks in inappropriate ways — in search listings, in adware and in spyware.
The search engines they monitor include Google (both Google US and Google UK), AOL, Yahoo! and Ask.
They do daytime and weekend monitoring and monitoring of geo-targeted ads as well.
In their reports, they make recommendations for who to send compliance request notifications, termination notifications and “cease and desist” letters, depending on how serious the discovered violation is.
It looks like a great service and I am looking forward to its official launch, which should be happening soon.
Link requests that suck
I’m so sick of getting lame link requests where they can’t even bother to look up my name, let alone come up with a request that’s actually compelling. What blogger in their right mind would respond favorably to link request spam like this:
Subject: Information for your blog and a Favor
Greetings Blogger!
I stumbled upon your blog and noticed that you write articles concerning email marketing. I have a website on a related subject and I think it might be of interest to your readers. It’s “EmailReach: Email deliverability diagnostics to improve email delivery.” This site provides a tip to Improve Email Delivery. The page is located at http://www.emailreach.com/.
Here is a description that you can use if you like:
EmailReach: Email deliverability diagnostics to improve email delivery
Email Delivery Tools A web based subscription site for legitimate email marketers who need to ensure that their opt-in email gets delivered through the myriad of email blocking software installed at ISP’s, networks and desktop machines.I hope you find this link appropriate and useful. We at EmailReach would certainly appreciate a link (article) from your site. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Junelle Caravana
Web Marketer, EmailReach
Lame, lame, lame!
Junelle, (if that’s your real name), you should be fired!
Get your email campaign or newsletter critiqued in front of a live audience
There are a couple of slots still open in my list of campaigns to critique in my upcoming MarketingProfs webinar on email marketing. If you are DEFINITELY going to attend my webinar, Email Marketing Success: 10 Campaigns Examined for Better and for Worse, next Thursday at 12pm Eastern (note that it’s not free, you have to either be a MarketingProfs Premium Plus member or pay a $99 fee), then there’s still time to send me an example of an email campaign or newsletter for me to critique live during the webinar.
Send your single email marketing sample to emailcritique@netconcepts.com along with the answers to the following questions:
- What was the product or service you were promoting?
- Who was the target audience for this campaign?
- How many recipients did you send to?
- When was the email campaign sent? (month, year)
- What was your objective with this email?
- What were the results? (open rate, clicks, sales)
- Anything else you want to share?
If you’re not brave enough to have your campaign/newsletter critiqued in front of an audience of marketers, that’s fine. You can still attend and learn a lot!
My Powerpoint from Blog Feed Search SEO Panel
As promised, I’ve posted my Powerpoint deck from the session I gave earlier today here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.
I was thinking I might create an extended version of my presentation (like 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes) and make it available as a screencast video, if enough of you folks request it. Would you like me to do this?
Must-read research report on the Long Tail of natural search
Yesterday my company Netconcepts released a research report / white paper titled “Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search.” The analysis was based on data garnered from 1.2 million unbranded natural search visits to 5,000,000 pages in January 2006 measured across 25 branded online merchants.
According to our research, here’s what the “average” well-branded merchant’s Long Tail profile looked like:
- Roughly 73,000 unique, indexed pages. Yet only 14% of those pages yield search traffic. These “yielding pages” each generate search traffic at a rate of 4.6 unbranded keyword visitors per month.
- 189,000 brand searches conducted per month. 80% of search traffic comes from brand keywords and only 20% from non-brand terms.
- Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month, roughly 100 searches for every unique page, and 38 times greater than total brand searches.
“Brand searches are a small minority of searches conducted every day. Yet most E-tailers rely on them for their natural search traffic. Imagine taking to your next management meeting, a concrete prediction of the value of search traffic available from non-brand searches. Until now, it has been difficult to find the numbers to justify investment in natural search optimization or quantify a site’s potential search traffic.”
We’ve come up with a concept we call “Page Yield Theory”, a method for estimating the potential value of the unbranded natural search tail. We believe it’s possible to make a robust and scalable prediction of long tail potential. We’ve even devised the scientific equation to calculate it:
[2.4 KPP x 1.9 HPK] / 4.7% CTR = 100
It’s solid research; months of hard work and deep thought went into the analysis. I think it’s a must-read for any online retailer. Download the report now »
Day 1 at SES San Jose, er I mean the Googleplex
Hello from San Jose! Ok, I started the title of this post with something a little misleading, because even though I’m here in San Jose for Search Engine Strategies, I didn’t actually make it to the conference at all today. Instead, I got to do something EVEN BETTER!
I arrived from New Zealand in the late morning (not exactly bright eyed and bushy tailed after 16 hrs in transit) but I didn’t require coffee to rev me up… I was on an adreneline rush because I got to head straight from the airport to the ‘plex (that means Googleplex for those not in the know 
for an exclusive “Google Webmaster Roundtable”! It was a small gathering of very smart web people hand-picked by Googlers to attend. I was honored to be one of the chosen few. We are under strict NDA to not discuss anything but generalities that are otherwise publicly available, and I of course will happily comply, so don’t check this blog anytime soon in the hopes that I will inadvertently spill any of Google’s secrets!
Then my evening was taken up by a Japanese dinner at the fabulous Hakone Gardens organized by online retailer Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath. About 80 people were present, including Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer. The highlight of the evening for me was getting to chat extensively with futurist John Smart, the featured speaker of the event (I was fortunate enough to sit next to him during the dinner). If you really want to get thrown for a loop, read about The Singularity. Woah!
Check out my session at SES this morning, or meet up with me later
If you are here in San Jose too for Search Engine Strategies, I hope you’ll make it to the “Blog & Feed Search SEO” session at 10:45am. I’ll share tips on optimizing your blogs and your RSS feeds for the major engines and for the specialized blog and feed engines. I hope to see you there! Afterwards I’ll post the Powerpoint from my session here on this blog, so stay tuned.
And if you would like to catch up with me here at the show but you don’t manage to grab me after my session, give me a call on my cell phone at 608-209-2595. We don’t have a booth here this time (the booth and my Netconcepts contingent are over at the Etail conference which was scheduled for the exact same week as SES, grrr!).
A great how-to on corporate blogging
Debbie Weil’s excellent The Corporate Blogging Book is now out. I’ve got my copy in hand and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s a rich source of practical info for those thinking about blogging for business and for those already blogging and wanting to do it better.
I was pleased to see the blog of my client Steve Spangler listed as one of 10 “examples of effective blogs by small and medium-sized companies or organizations” (on page 20). I was the one who convinced Steve to blog as a marketing strategy, and I’ve been personally coaching him through the process, so it’s great to see him being recognized as a LEADING corporate blogger. Steve is in some great company there in Debbie’s list, with Seth Godin and Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon also mentioned. Booyeah!
And thanks Debbie for mentioning me in your acknowledgements! 
Pick up your copy from Amazon or download a free sample chapter. Do it TODAY, and help drive Debbie’s book to the top of Amazon’s daily bestseller list!