Screencasts by subscription?

Some of the gurus out there are offering paid subscriptions to screencasts, podcasts and other educational materials. For example, Eric Ward recently launched a subscription-based service, The Ward Report — promising how-to podcasts, video training modules and other resources on link building, all at an annual subscription rate of $149. Debbie Mayo-Smith, in a similar vein, offers an annual subscription price of $395 for 3-minute-long weekly screencasts with productivity tips along with other educational resources.

I know I have been promising a regular schedule of 5 to 10 minute long screencasts and I have yet to deliver on that promise. (Sorry about that, folks!) I’ve been wondering if I would offer screencasts/podcasts by paid subscription like Eric and Debbie?

If I had a paid subsriber base like Eric and Debbie, I would force myself to get off my duff and produce at least weekly screencasts. So I wanted to throw this idea out to you Dear Readers and find out what your interest level is in a paid subscription service to podcasts and screencasts, in effect audio and video training on SEO, and perhaps other topics like email marketing and business blogging?

Or should I offer screencasts/podcasts occasionally for free as I can fit them in? After all, there’s already plenty screencast/podcast material floating around the Web for free, like the excellent content at Tubetorial.com, so why would people pay.

Your thoughts on the direction in which I should I go would be helpful. Thanks!

It’s the comments, stupid!

Ok, I admit it. I haven’t been walking my own talk. I say how important it is to comment on others’ blogs, that a blogger should spend as much time commenting on others’ blogs as posting on their own blog. You might have read my (hopefully compelling) case for this here or here. Yet, ashamedly, I have been terribly lax in commenting in the blogosphere. I’ve been, for the most part, a lurker. My excuse — “I’m busy enough as it is just trying to keep up with my blog” — isn’t going to wash any more. It’s about time I get out more.

As of the past few days, I’ve made a conscious effort to start chiming in. For example, I commented on the personal blog of a well-respected WordPress code contributor and plugin author. I commented on Google engineer Adam Lasnik’s blog to inform him of a typo in one of his links that was sending link juice to a domain squatter. Why bother you ask? Because it helps build relationships! Being successful in the blogosphere is as much about relationships as it is about content. Heck, being successful in LIFE is about relationships. For instance… what SEO in his/her right mind WOULDN’T want to nurture a great relationship with “Mini-Matt”?! (Mini-Matt is the nickname affectionately used by some SEOs to refer to Adam Lasnik. Matt being Matt Cutts.)

Another thing I’m going to do RIGHT NOW (as soon as I hit the “Publish” button on this post), is turn off moderation. Yep, that’s right. Call me crazy, but I’m going to risk having some comment spams (those that sneak past the excellent Akismet plugin) showing up temporarily (until I discover ‘em and nuke ‘em) on my blog. The reason being: I want this blog to give instant gratification to commenters. Having to wait a day for the blog author (me) to approve your comment is a let-down. It’s not conducive to an intensively participatory blog. I’m going to remove that barrier.

Care to comment?

Do these qualify as gray hat SEO?

“Gray hat SEO” is that fuzzy area of search engine optimization between ethical SEO (i.e. “white hat”) and the really naughty stuff that you’ll get banned for if you get caught (i.e. “black hat”). Some say that white hat SEO is idealistic, whereas gray hat SEO is pragmatic, employed by SEOs with keen business acumen. I say it’s simply pushing one’s luck.

The difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO is profound and obvious. But the gray area in between the two is not so easy to define. Cloaking and pagejacking are obviously black hat. But what about stuffing the same keyword dozens of times into dozens of links on a web page? Or tucking a keyword away in the top left corner of the page in order to maximize its keyword prominence?

Consider the following examples, illustrated with screenshotted excerpts of three different homepages…

HOMEPAGE #1:

• Are there too many links?
• Is there too much repetition of the same keyword in the anchor text of these links?
• Is the link text too light? (the rest of the text on the page is markedly darker)

HOMEPAGE #2:

• Are there too many keywords stuffed into title attributes of links? (an example of which was made visible in the above screenshot by mousing over one of the links)
• Are there too many links?
• Is the color of the text too similar to the background?

HOMEPAGE #3:

• Is the keyword phrase in the top left of the page too obscured?
• Was it excessive for them to have applied this tactic to over a thousand pages?

Clearly these companies are into aggressive SEO. But have they crossed the line? What do you think??

What I find most interesting is the fact that all three of the sites rank really well for keywords they’ve targeted, and it appears due, at least in part, to these aggressive tactics. Top ten rankings in Google for many of the keywords targeted by the anchor text of homepages #1 and #2, and for many of the keywords targeted in the top left corner of a thousand+ pages of site #3. I can see the allure of these tactics — after all, they seem to work!

Ecommerce Best Practices, Tip #13: Incorporating customer feedback

I’ve already shared some of the benefits of incorporating discussion forums into your ecommerce site. Now let’s delve deeper into the concept of user-generated product review content.

Intuitively it makes sense that your customers would convert better if they could read credible product ratings and reviews from your other customers before buying. Indeed, studies back this up (stats excerpted from bazaarvoice.com):

RoperASW reports the value of word of mouth as the best source of information on products has exploded from 67% in 1977 to 93% in 2001.

BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion.

So now the question becomes, what’s the best way to implement customer reviews? There are hosted third-party services like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews that offer a managed solution and host the content and technology for you. Or you can host and manage the ratings and review technology and content in-house. Both approaches have their merits. Certainly if you have limited IT resources, a hosted solution would appeal.

But you should be aware of the SEO impact of a hosted reviews solution. The review content gets inserted into your web pages using JavaScript, and as such, that content is invisible to the spiders. So if you expecting that content to augment your existing product page content with additional keyword-rich user-generated content, you’re going to be disappointed. You’d have to do some pretty clever workarounds, like scraping the product content and inserting the review text into your HTML, if you want to realize fully the SEO benefit of this product review content.

Publicly viewable customer feedback can take other forms besides the standard ratings and reviews. For instance, you could offer a wiki, like some other retail sites have done. Just imagine having buyer’s guides written and maintained by your visitors, like ShopWiki has. If you can pull it off, I think that would be pretty cool.

Another non-standard approach to incorporating user-generated content is to get customers to tag your products. I’ve already made a case for tagging as a SEO tactic for blogs. And I’ve discussed auto-tagging.

But what about social tagging (user tagging), where you get your visitors to do the work for you? Frankly, I’m dubious. My preference here is to accept tags only from employees and/or a small trusted group of customers. A thousand monkeys randomly pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years may eventually output Shakespeare. But in the meantime, it’d be a whole lot of useless noise. If you’ve got the time to weed out the useless noise from the tags contributed by your visitors, then social tagging could be a valuable addition to your ecommerce site.

Amazon.com rolled out social tagging. How’s it working for them? Well, according to one contact I have at Amazon.com, the benefits of these user-contributed tags to create a “folksonomy” (i.e. alternative categorization and navigation) has been limited. That’s because the tags added to products are often self-serving and relevant only to the person applying the tag (e.g. “birthday gift for betty”).

Finally, I want to circle back to the topic of discussion forums. If you have forums on your site, consider more tightly integrating them with your product catalog. For example, link directly from your product page to the relevant section/page of your forums. And highlight the most relevant posts to help influence the buying decision. One of my favorite ecommerce sites, Woot.com, does both of these things to good effect.

What you NEED to know about the DMCA

The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, provides you as a website owner with a useful hammer you can use to beat on copyright infringers.

As a content producer, you have the right to enforce your copyright. When your content gets “re-purposed” on other’s websites without your permission, you can file a DMCA Infringement Notification to the infringer’s web hosting provider and get that infringer’s website shut down (like Ian McAnerin did recently). In DMCA legalspeak, this notification is also known as a “Takedown Notice”. In addition, you can get the naughty infringer de-listed from Google and other engines. (I can hear you saying “Ex-cellent!” in a Mr. Burns voice right now).

It is not a daunting procedure. It might take an hour of your time, and it is well worth it.

Here’s what to do…

1. First, look up the web host and the domain registrar of the offending site, using lookup tools such as this one from Netcraft and this one from Domain Tools. You can usually ascertain who the web host is from the Name Servers and/or the Netblock Owner.
2. Next, check the official directory of designated DMCA agents for the host and the registrar. (Hopefully they’re listed!)
3. Then you prepare a letter to send to the designated agent of the web host. The notice you write should include: your contact information, the name of the content that was copied, the web address of the copied content, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is not legal, a statement that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright holder, and your signature. Some web hosts will allow you to email your notice to them, making it all that more convenient.
4. Also be sure to send a similar notification to the seach engines. That will cut off their air supply, in case the site doesn’t get taken down right away. Here are instructions and contact details for each engine: Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search). Note that Google requires you to mail or fax your letter, whereas Yahoo and Microsoft (Live Search) both allow you to email your notification.
5. If the web host doesn’t take the site down promptly, then submit a DMCA notice to the infringer’s domain registrar. Note: It might be worth sending a notice to the data center that the web host uses before you try the registrar, as Dan Richard recommends.

Ian McAnerin posted some handy DMCA notification letter templates to make this process even easier: for the web host, for Google, for Yahoo, and for Live Search.

Then there’s the other end of the stick, where someone could use DMCA unfairly against you! It happens. Competitors do use the DMCA to silence competitors. You, as a website owner, need to protect yourself from unwarranted (or at least unwelcome!) prosecution. If the potential exists for you to inadvertently host infringing material on your website(s) — for example if you are hosting online forums, group blogs, blog comments, or other types of content that can be submitted from others besides yourself — then here are some actions you can take to help protect yourself…

1. It’s helpful if you can qualify as a service provider that can be covered under the Safe Harbor provision. For example, you may qualify if you offer a search engine or a bulletin board system.
2. If so, notify your customers of your policies regarding copyright infringement and the consequences of repeated infringing activity. One way of achieving this is by making it part of your Terms of Use.
3. Also, publish a page on your website with DMCA filing instructions and state that, if and when you get a DMCA notification, you will act on it. Here’s an example of such a DMCA Notification Instructions page.
4. And most important, check the directory of designated agents, and if your company isn’t listed there, complete and file this form to the Copyright Office for inclusion in the directory.

If you’re interested in the gory details of the DMCA, you can read this.

Disclaimer: none of this is legal advice.

Another SEO Critique – AirTroductions.com

The fifth of in my series of SEO Report Cards for Practical eCommerce magazine led to the “deconstruction” of AirTroductions.com, which is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 17,000 registered).

I found it to be a solid website, which, with some tuning, would make for a better ride in the search engines. And with fewer than 30 pages in Google, there was indeed room for improvement. 

I’ve highlighted a few of my findings from this SEO mini-audit:

• Opportunities abound to get many more pages indexed. For example, every airport code search result (like this one) should be indexed, but currently the only way to these pages is through a web form. Remember, spiders can’t fill out forms.
• Every page indexed has the same title tag. This makes it significantly harder for the site to effectively target a range of keywords. That’s because each page has its own “song” based on the page’s keyword focus, and crafting a unique title tag for that page based on its keyword focus is essential to really make the page “sing” well to the search engines.
• The home page (http://www.airtroductions.com/) is a 302 (temporary-style) redirect to http://www.airtroductions.com/Anonymous/Login.aspx, which may be causing some loss of link gain. A 301 (permanent) redirect would be better here than a 302. But a “rewrite” would be best of all, since in that case the URL wouldn’t appear to change at all upon loading the home page.
• Pages at airtroductions.com (without www.) are appearing in the search indices in addition to www.airtroductions.com pages, leading to a dilution of link gain and indexation of duplicate pages. Permanent (301) redirects from airtroductions.com URLs to corresponding www.airtroductions.com URLs would be just the thing here.

Get the rest of my findings in the full article here.

Getting the balance right between SEO and usability

Finding the right balance between SEO and a usability can sometimes be a challenge. The two strategies can conflict and companies may mistakenly favor one over the other. For example, one company may choose to stuff the same keywords into every alt tag in their navigation graphics. That, of course, detracts from the user experience, making the page slower to load and making the page difficult to interpret for the visually impaired who rely on screen readers to read web pages to them.

Then there are others who try to maximize usability without any concern for SEO. They choose to “Googleize” their home page, stripping all non-essential elements out of the page and making it as simple and streamlined as Google’s home page. That, unfortunately, offers very little for the search engines to “sink their teeth into,” and consequently insufficient clues for the search engine to identify appropriate keyword themes for your page.

Here’s another way to think of it: search engine spiders are another type of “disabled” visitor — one that can’t read what’s inside your images, fill out your web forms, or interact with the Flash, Java, JavaScript, AJAX etc. on your pages. Therefore, usability and accessibility of your content to spiders is a requirement if you want good search engine rankings. You kill two birds with one stone by optimizing your site’s usability.

In my estimation, usability should come first. An unusable website won’t generate an adequate ROI, even if it ranks well in the engines.

Then there are the sites that miss the mark on both counts — usability and SEO. Consider Nike.com, which just got picked apart for its SEO mistakes in an article on MarketingProfs this week. (I just blogged a quick summary of the article here.) I agree that Nike.com misses the mark in regards to search, and I also find the site severely lacking when it comes to usability and accessibility, IMHO.

I have an article called “Usability and Findability — Getting the Synergy Right” in this month’s issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. If you’re a STC member, you should check it out.

Hitwise biased, but in which direction?

Hitwise is a competitive intelligence service that gives you insight into where your competitors get their traffic from and which keywords drive the bulk of their traffic from search engines, among other things. It comes at a price of course — to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

I noticed that in a post today Matt Cutts, Google engineer extraordinaire, made a small swipe at Hitwise in his review of the Compete search engine:

ISP relationships [buying user data from ISPs] can be a huge source of metrics bias. For example, some ISPs partner with Yahoo, and users on those ISPs are probably more likely to visit Yahoo. Other ISPs partner with Google. And savvy users that use smaller providers such as Covad or Speakeasy are likely not counted at all.

Because you don’t know which ISPs are selling user data to companies such as Compete or Hitwise, you don’t know what biases are baked into those companies’ metrics–and the metrics companies won’t tell you.

Touché, Inigo! (Matt Cutts’ regular blog readers will get that)

So my question to Hitwise is… If you won’t tell us who your ISP relationships are, will you at least reveal some of your biases? Like which search engine your biggest ISPs are partnered with?

MySpace marketing tips and success stories

As I mentioned in my previous post about marketing on MySpace, one of the critical factors of success is having “Friends”.

Here are a couple of success stories I thought I’d point out. First, consider the various flavors of Apple’s iPod Nano that are on MySpace, such as the Pink Nano, which is enjoying a meteoric rise in Friendship status. I started tracking Pink Nano on October 15, when it had 1,500 MySpace friends. A week later, on October 22, it had climbed to 7,449 friends. Now, on October 27, I see it’s up to 37,070 friends! Not a bad marketing job, Apple!

Now consider the ‘comeback king’ of musical parody — “Weird Al” Yankovic. I remember “Weird Al” from when I was a kid; he’s been around for decades! Now he’s using social media quite successful to help breathe new life into his 27-year-long music career — thanks, in no small part, to YouTube and MySpace. Yankovic told Reuters/Billboard in a recent interview that he had accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July — all of which he had personally added. He stated, “I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can.” (I can only imagine the RSI from that much clicking!) Here’s the kicker: it’s now just a week after this article came out, and he’s already up to 219,033 friends!

Clearly, Apple and Weird Al are making it on MySpace. Any other MySpace success stories you’d like to contribute? Talk back!

I had an article published last week on marketing on MySpace in last week’s issue of DM News. It hasn’t been posted to DMNews.com yet (hopefully shouldn’t be too much longer), but if you’re desperate to read it, you can download the 20 megabyte PDF of last week’s issue. Or, you can just wait and I’ll post a notice to my blog when my article makes into into DM News’ online article library.

As part of my research for this article, I interviewed Michael Boldin at Pugster, which is an online retailer of Italian charms and other jewelry that’s had great success using MySpace to generate traffic and sales. Michael is a member of the online marketing team at Pugster. They chose their mascot, a pug dog, as the subject of their MySpace profile, which I think is really clever. They built up their MySpace page to a very respectable 8,053 friends. Here’s what Michael had to say about marketing on MySpace:

• It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer numbers on MySpace — and important to try to focus on marketing to the “right” group for your product or service — otherwise you’ll be spending a LOT of time on people who will never be interested in you.
• But, on the other hand, when starting off, you need to get friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones — you know, the ones that will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends — bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your friend list, and will leave comments on your page — giving a little realism boost to your profile – making friend adding of the “good” ones that much easier.
• Where else could we find a place to actually build relationships with people — who may or may not have heard of us before. We spend time daily emailing people, and guess what, they email back. It becomes the ultimate soft-sell tool.
• Patience. Without a huge brand presence, don’t expect to turn profits. The only investment is your time. As long as you regularly give people something interesting — blogs, music, and other tidbits that AREN’T related to your business — then you’ll develop enough trust for them to be interested in what you DO sell.
• Keep it personal — talk with the people as if you’d email a new friend. Say hi, get to know them, and they’ll want to get to know you. If you try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll have a hard time earning respect on MySpace.
• As far as layouts, there’s a few “schools of thought” — one says make it fancy and high end, but the other, and seemingly more successful one, says simplicity is best. Since people are browsing through so many profiles with the same layout, they look for certain features in certain places. If you move too many things around, you’ll frustrate your visitors and they’ll leave. Period. Just like a good e-commerce site.
• Also, if there’s anything a “seasoned” MySpace user hates is a slow page; and the site has loads of slow loaders. You may get friends with a lot of stuff on your page, but they won’t actually spend the time to interact with you.

Some great advice. Thanks, Michael!

UPDATE: It’s been another 7 days, and Weird Al has gained another 24,000 MySpace friends (up to 243,221). Wow!

Common mistakes in Paid Search

Last week I conducted a fascinating interview with SEM expert Alan Rimm-Kaufman. You can find the output of it here. Alan made many great points; this one, regarding common mistakes in Paid Search, really stood out:

Typical mistakes made by newcomers to paid search include using an insufficiently large term list, not understanding the strengths and limitations of their tracking systems, not customizing copy to match the search phrase, not having a firm grasp of their online acquisition economics, and not bidding wisely.

Typical mistakes made by more experienced search marketers include not separating their brand from their non-brand results in reporting and bidding; not understanding the (non)incremental value of their affiliate programs; mishandling dayparting; and overbidding on broad generic terms.

I encourage you to read the full interview.

BTW, Alan isn’t the only large brain over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group. George Michie justed posted some excellent tips on giving your PPC campaigns a check-up, which should prove helpful in exposing your own PPC mistakes.