Wouldn't it be cool if business websites were all tagged with meta data like:

• business hours
• geolocation (latitude & longitude)
• NAICS code (the successor to SIC code)
• physical & mailing addresses

Just imagine what a search engine could do with such data. Searchers could restrict their results to just those businesses that are open late, for example.

What else would you add to the above list?

Webmasters the world over have already tagged their websites with meta keywords and meta descriptions, and many are rushing to post Google Sitemaps XML files, so the idea that they will also tag their sites with additional meta data seems pretty plausible to me. Particularly if there's a ranking benefit to be had.

If this sort of thing becomes widely adopted and integrated into local search on the major engines, it could spell doom to the online Yellow Pages directories, at least those that fail to keep innovating. More and more, Google and Yahoo are becoming our universal "operating system" for the Internet, and I see that trend only continuing.

Google has raised its mighty hand against automotive giant BMW AG by banning the bmw.de site from Google's index. You can verify that this is indeed the case by conducting a site:bmw.de query. BMW was employing doorway pages and sneaky redirects, two no-nos mentioned in Google's Webmaster Guidelines. To add insult to injury, Google engineer Matt Cutts publicly chastized BMW on his blog.

This proves yet again that even big corporations who spend lots of money on AdWords are not immune to the ultimate penalty from Google: a total site ban.

Now let's see if BMW heeds the warning and completely cleans up its act, removing all the spam from all its domains (such as these two pages: http://www.bmwgroup.com/spider.html and http://www.bmw-motorrad.at/at/de/sitemap-optim.html -- yes, I've nofollowed both of these links so I'm not passing any of my link gain to these doorway pages). Hat tip to Philipp Lenssen and Netprofit (the latter is in German).

January 23 was a momentous day in history. What was said and by whom will have significant, long-term beneficial impact on online advertising. It happened in Atlanta, although not all participants could make it on time due to bad weather at the airport.

Representatives from search engines (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Become, Shop.com), retailers (Sierra Trading Post, Red Envelope, Bare Necessities, CompUSA, Cutter & Buck, Coldwater, REI), agencies (Rimm-Kaufman Group, Performics, Mercent, Mars) and the NRF (NRF’s ARTS, the Association for Retail Technology Standards) all met to discuss establishing an industry standard for describing products for online SKU-based advertising and the comparison engines.

During the two-hour meeting, retailers and engines alike shared their frustration at the lack of a common platform for describing products and receiving back advertising reports.

The most important outcome of the meeting was the decision to move forward towards an industry standard for describing products online using the expertise and process of the NRF’s ARTS.

The group next plans to meet in Menlo Park on February 27 to begin work on a specification.

This standardization effort is newsworthy for several reasons. Such a standard would:

• allow retailers, both large and small, to advertise online more easily
• help the engines by increasing their advertising base
• help consumers by allowing retailers to communicate a richer set of product information to the engines which would then
• facilitate improved product searching and comparing

The meeting was also interesting in that a diverse set of organizations with widely different interests all agreed that the current situation was far from good and that an industry standard would help greatly.

The online retail community needs to know that this is happening. And they need to get involved in the standard building process.

This week I spoke at the Strategic Branding conference in Auckland about word-of-mouth marketing over the Internet, and how blogs, forums, RSS, wikis, and search engines play a role in the process. I shared tips on how to harness "word of mouse", discussed success stories and flops, and in general described how to enhance existing relationship marketing programs and one's brand using new technologies — technologies that most brand marketers don't understand. Feel free to peruse my Powerpoint slide deck from the conference. Enjoy!

MarketingProfs has published my article: "How Does MSN Search Stack Up to Google and Yahoo?." This one is different from my last week's article on MarketingProfs ("What Web Marketers Must Know About the New MSN Search"), in that it's a side-by-side comparison of the top three search engines — essential stats, tolerance levels for "worst practices" etc. You need to be a premium MarketingProfs subscriber to read it. (If you're not, it's time to open up your wallet! Their premium article library and the virtual seminars are well worth it...)

Microsoft officially launched their new MSN Search today, as anticipated. Bill Gates makes the announcement on the MSN home page with a prominently positioned "Letter from Bill Gates," complete with photo. (although I prefer these photos of him).

This is good news for marketers. Microsoft's new search technology offers a new channel for reaching your potential customers. Taking advantage of this new channel isn't hard, either. The tried-and-true search engine optimization tactics work as well if not better on the new MSN Search as they do on Google and Yahoo. These tactics include keyword-rich title tags, keyword-rich body copy, links from 'important' sites and keyword-rich text in the links from those sites.

In my just-published article on MarketingProfs, I reveal some critical factors for success in the new MSN Search, including:

• the power of the anchor text of inbound links ("MSN bombing")
• MSNbot's level of tolerance for complex URLs (i.e. how many parameters in the "query string" are too many)
• how to obtain a list of backlinks for your site
• ...and more

You'll need to be a MarketingProfs premium subscriber to read the article. A version of this article is coming out in this month's issue of Catalog Age magazine. It's not online yet on Catalog Age's site, but I'll post a blog entry once it is.

Rumor has it that the MSN Search beta will make its official debut on MSN.com on February 1st. The source (a moderator at SearchEngineWatch Forums) seems credible, so I would put some stock in the claim.

Here's a sneak peek at what will probably be MSN's new home page layout with the new MSN Search integrated in (including the "Near Me" feature).

I've written an article about the new MSN Search technology — a kind of a "how-to" for marketers — for Catalog Age and for MarketingProfs. It will be published within the next several weeks. I'll let you all know when it's available via my blog.

Exciting times ahead...

In the midst of choosing an SEO vendor to advise or implement search engine optimization for you? Don't base your decision on just a 'gut feel'. Effectively separating the wheat from the chaff requires that objective rather than subjective criteria be used. These include:

1. PageRank scores
   
   Review PageRank scores of your candidate SEO firms' home pages and their clients' home pages. PageRank is Google's scoring system for importance; it's logarithmic like a Richter scale. Check PageRanks with the Google Toolbar. If you don't have the Google toolbar installed on your browser, it's probably easier just to use the free service at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/. Probably more enlightening however is to use the Google Directory to check PageRanks, because then you can see where they sit in comparison to a bunch of competitors in that same category, since the sites on each category page are listed in order of PageRank score. To do so, go to http://directory.google.com and type in the name of the business into the search box (e.g. "Netconcepts"), then when you find its listing in the search results, click on the category name (e.g. "Computers > Internet > ... > Designers > Full Service > N"). Look for that company's listing on that category page. Hopefully it's near the top, and hopefully the little green bar in the left column is more green than gray.
2. Rankings
   
   Get a list of keywords from the SEO firm that they consider important to their business. Get a list of keywords from them that are important to their clients too. Check where they rank in Google for those keywords. If you have time, check rankings in Yahoo too (Yahoo has 32% market share, Google has 45%). Then, and here's the important bit: check how popular those keywords are with searchers, using the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool at http://inventory.overture.com (or better yet, on WordTracker.com if you have a paid subscription to it). If the keyword is searched on infrequently, then a high ranking for that keyword is not so impressive.

3. Evidence of thought leadership
   
   Everyone claims to be a thought leader. A true thought leader, however, demonstrates this through such things as:

   • known reputation in that topic area by other thought leaders you know and trust
   • number of published articles written in that topic area
   • the caliber of those articles
   • number of conference presentations given in that topic area
   • the caliber of those presentations
   • number of books written that adequately cover that topic area
   • the caliber of those books
   • the extent to which they are quoted in the media in that topic area
   • a well-read, well-linked, and oft-quoted blog (web log)

A few days before Christmas, Microsoft's MSN Search team announced their MSN Search Wiki. The word quickly spread to blogs like ResearchBuzz, SearchEngineWatch Blog, and Google Blogoscoped. Of the major search engines, MSN Search is the only one to employ wikis as a way to encourage customer participation in the product development process. Hats off to Microsoft for showing such leadership!

A wiki, if you're unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an interactive website that any visitor can edit, with a view to improving or enhancing it. In other words, a "website run by the community." It's not uncommon for entire websites to be built by web visitors. A great example is the Wikipedia, an entire encyclopedia written by and maintained by its online visitors.

I've just made some contributions to MSN Search's wiki, including:

• A feature comparison chart between MSN Search, Google, and Yahoo!
• Several recommendations for feature enhancements

On the face of it, Trellian's PrioritySubmit.com keyword research tool is quite cool. Paying subscribers can get a full year's worth of historical keyword popularity data. Finally, a way to quantify the seasonality of various keyword markets!

However, I have to say after using it, I'm not real impressed. The main problem I have with it is that I just don't find their data to be believable. Too many discrepencies, too many gaps. Let me show you some specifics...

For starters, witness a huge spike in searches for "Christmas shopping" mid-year. Then it's relatively flat during the Christmas buying season?!? This next one leaves me totally incredulous: no activity whatsoever throughout the year for the search term "holiday shopping" except April, May, and, to a lesser extent, December. Finally, for the very popular search term "shopping," the month of April appears to have been totally lost.

So, although the PrioritySubmit tool sounds good in theory, until their data starts looking a lot more credible, I'll be relying on WordTracker, Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Google's Keyword Sandbox for studying keyword popularity with search engine users. (In case you're curious, according to Overture's tool, keyword searches across Yahoo! and the rest of Overture's network during the month of October for "Christmas shopping" was 13985, for "holiday shopping" was 2751, and for "shopping" was 2273098.)