Blogging Software IS a Search Friendly CMS

This post is pure HitTailing. I'm both taking HitTail's writing
suggestions, and telling you one of the best kept secrets in search
engine optimization--blogging software does nearly everything
correctly for SEO, and have created a "just add keywords" environment.
Blogging software IS content management software for the web, which
follows the 80/20 rule. It does 80% of things right for SEO by the
time you've invested 20% of the time as everyone else.

One catch is that the keywords whose traffic you're targeting must be
ordered exactly correctly for where the traffic's actually at, then
turned into a headline. Headlines in particular in blogging software
hold search influence because it also becomes part of the title tag,
URL and links leading back to the page. This alleviates a lot of the
manual work SEO's spend a lot of time fixing in sites broken for search.

After you choose the right keywords to target in your headline, the
only difference in whether you're grab the homepage of Google or not
in short order is how competitive your targeted term is. One way to
ensure that you both receive traffic to be worth your effort is to
choose quality longtail keywords generated by HitTail.

HitTail for Paid Search AdWords Optimization?

There is a need for niche keywords--longtail keywords. Call 'em what you will, but they super-charge both your AdWords campaigns and SEO efforts. Their very nature as obscure but effective make well chosen long tail keywords the best deal in marketing.

For those already into AdWords, think 4% CTR, $0.06 CPC and tons of clicks. For those still only doing SEO, think about reducing the need to continuously expand website content.

That's about to become commonplace, because one of the best kept secrets in natural SEO is about to cross the chasm into mainstream marketing, and AdWords will never be the same.

With just a wee bit of keyword review and approval on your part, your AdWords campaigns will virtually become self-optimizing. We take the competitive intelligence that your site is always trying to give you but which most analytics software ignores (as long-time HitTail fans know well), and feed it directly into your AdWords campaign.

The result is simply amazing, as long-time HitTailer and million-dollar campaign manager Gary Beal has been trying to tell the world for a year. But alas, we are only just starting to teach the world this amazing approach to AdWords campaign management.

The irony here is that its coming from the very same PR firm that helped launch GoTo--later Overture, and today Yahoo! Search Marketing-- the company that taught Google how to make money. Yes, the very same Connors Communications that helped get Amazon off the ground is about to teach everybody how to be low-budget brilliant marketers... by living on the edge of the keyword competition.

Is HitTail the Future of Marketing?

The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.

That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.

But how do you reach them in the first place?

What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.

Word of mouth only got you so far.

Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.

The time was ripe.

And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.

Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.

Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.

My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".

I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.

I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.

I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.

All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.

And we saw that the time was right.

Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.

HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.

HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.

But it's the first act.

And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.

Stay tuned.

Methods of Driving Traffic

This will be one of the most self-referential posts and blatant examples of HitTailing I have done in a long time. Yesterday, someone in South Africa googled on the exact term I used in the headline of this post. HitTail recognized that we were not fully optimized on this term, and issued it as a suggestion. But when I clicked to reproduce the search, I didn't see us on that page--understandable, considering it was a South Africa Google Datacenter that it was probably pulling from. So, what to do? I could just click around. But instead...

Using the free FireFox RankChecker tool from SEOBook, I popped the term into the Keyword field and www.hittail.com in the Domain field and hit Start. Lo-and-behold--RankChecker showed me that we were in the 83rd spot in Google on the term. So, I went to Google and performed the search, and clicked right on page 8 of results, and low-and-behold, there was HitTail! I clicked on the result to see that this page about driving traffic for less (a previously acted upon HitTail suggestion) was the page that was found.

So being that the page that was found was something that was targeting and optimized on a completely different term, imagine what would happen if I actually targeted it. And hence, the writing of this post, and giving out of some of the most competitive SEO-industry-insider knowledge that exists... period! For you see, the new writing suggestion that was issued was the direct result of a post that was made as a result of an old writing suggestion that was acted upon. And thus the iterative process of continual improvement is happening. This is why I talk about TQM so much. The "output" from quality assurance is being fed directly back into the "input" of the production line, which produces more quality assurance data.

Hence, our talk about the snowball effect.

Sites become virtually self-optimizing... but not entirely. The process is getting funneled through at least 2 things: 1) YOU. Quality content won't write itself (or will it?). And 2) Blogging software, because who wants to worry about the fuss of SEO when free, easy publishing systems get like 80% of SEO correct out of the box? And this is one of the best methods of driving traffic to your site--adding new content, based on HitTail suggestions.

And yes, it is a lot of work.

But there is another...

...darker...

...method of driving more traffic to your site.

And that method has been talked about by a few industry insiders, and fewer still who share the secret with public quotes like "I use [HitTail] for my Adwords accounts and they double my other campaigns in every positive way. Double the Clicks, half the CPC, half the overall conversion costs."

Yeah uh, so if you want the benefit of HitTail, the other method of driving traffic to your site is to take the keyword lists generated by HitTail and put them into your AdWords campaigns... because who whouldn't want double the clicks, half the CPC and half the overall conversion costs?

Seems like a no-brainer.

I'm Back to Help Drive Traffic through SEO and SEM

It's time for me to come out of hiding and start posting again. Like happens to every prolific blogger occasionally, that pesky thing known as real-life interferes. I've finally got a nice tight grip on the reigns, and can take a few moments to re-engage the world through the HitTail blog, which seems to have only been getting better and better in my absence. Kudos to Valerie, Ambar, Adam and all the other (mostly Connors) team that keeps this thing one of the top blogs in marketing.

OK so enough back-patting. HitTail's momentum continues strong, and we have some very exciting things planned. I've decided to take up my propensity for prolific pontification in the SEO arena that dates back to being the Inktomi moderator in the original Search Engine Forums, and re-engage the blogging and SEO (and now... SEM) community.

Whaaaaaat? SEM?

But Mike, you're the SEO guy. OK well, Gary Beal's persistent message to me about HitTail being an awesome tool for PPC, right up there with SpyFu and WordTracker, has finally gotten through my thick skull, and I now view SEO and SEM as virtually the same thing. Basically, in all things online-marketing, you hedge your bet by using just about every service that you reasonably can that Google provides you. You never know how they're cross-indexing their data from different systems to calculate relevancy, and I think it's important to keep a hand in each of them--AdWords, included. I'm managing about $5K/mo in AdWords campaigns just to keep myself engaged on that front. I need to know that stuff well for...

...well, you'll just have to wait and see.

Until then, I'll tell you exactly HOW I'll be re-engaging the community. Primarily, it will take place here on this blog. But I'll be practicing what I preach in actually ENGAGING IN HITTAILING . So essentially, the headlines of every blog post I make will be constructed based on HitTail suggestions. I'll try to document how well these posts do in driving more traffic to the HitTail website, seizing first-positions in Google results on terms that are actually driving traffic, and the various tweaks I perform here to this Blogger section of the HitTail site itself in optimizing it for search. Contrary to popular wisdom, simply starting with Blogger Classic using the FTP feature to transmit the file into a subdirectory of an existing site is a good start in blogging for traffic (there ARE other approaches). But there are dozens of tiny little tweaks on top of that--many of which apply to all blogging and CMS platforms--that can still be done. We've done a bunch of them, like putting the title tag text in the anchor text of thepermalink . But there are others we have not done, such as tweaking out and promoting the RSS feed of this site for maximum reach in subscriptions and syndication, such as on iGoogle. I'll be covering that stuff.

And finally, I'll just be exercising my writing muscles, because using HitTail for SEO can be tough--only because of the "actually having to write" part. It requires a sort of discipline and getting into the groove that doesn't come easy, and lags off quickly. It's just like going to the gym. It's tough to start, but once you do the adrenaline rush keeps your momentum going day-by-day, but if you stop even for a couple of days... BAM! You're out of the game.

Well real-life took me out of the game for awhile, but in the words of George Castanza, I'm back, baby!

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

Web News Hits - April 25, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Problogger writes an excellent article on "12 Ways to Be A more Interactive and Accesssible Blogger"

Wired discusses Amazon's cloud computing capabilities:

"Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they're set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there's even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone."

In an interesting development, Yahoo will be including Facebook profile images in its search results.

Chris Boggs at Search Engline Watch presents "SEO confessions of an Online Reputation Management Junkie"

"I admit it -- I've been tracking search engine rankings for my name for years. But online reputation management isn't all about ego or checking out a Friday night date anymore. Your career and future job opportunities are at stake."

Time Magazine presents its first annual blog index. Surprisingly, the number one blog isn't Huffington Post or Techcrunch -- it's Blog di Beppe Grillo:

"Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian comedian, actor, and political satirist, writes one of the few non-English language blogs that's become wildly popular worldwide. That's because Grillo speaks the international language of outrage."

And the The New York Times reports on the shift in online advertising, looking past mere increased brand awareness to as many clicks as possible.

"Is The Mobile Web Dead?" And Other Web 2.0 Hits

ReadWriteWeb asks: "Is the mobile web dead?"

Good question! We think it just might be that reports of its impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Certainly, having a fully-functioning mobile web requires a consistent web viewing platform and resolution (at least getting it down to four with iPhone, Opera, IE Mobile, and Android). Right now there are just too many flavors out there. At least with computer monitors, you can be reasonably sure that everyone will have at least 800x600 if not 1024x768 and greater -- but with phones, there are so many formats!

Still, we think there is a lot of untapped potential with mobile.

Onto today's other posts of interest:

Blog Storm ponders Google's policy on using "widget bait" to rack up links

John Battelle notes that Google's share keeps climbing...their search share, that is.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Land explores the search benefits of the blogosphere with a handy illustration:

Problogger looks at a "new breed of blogger," inspired by this Seth Godin post:

DoshDosh explores the seven essential characteristics of a popular social media profile:

And finally, Techcrunch has announced that Twitter is testing advertising in Twitter streams...

...and that that there is apparently some confusion over deleting Facebook news feed reports from one's profile.

Web News Hits - April 14, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Search Engine Land points out that Google now fills out forms and crawls the results -- potentially opening up material on the so-called "invisible web."

Speaking from the experience of a company that has been bringing visibility to the deep web for years, webmasters should not rely on this service alone. Even if Google does start filling in forms, the results will not be optimized.

Ad Age asks: "Does Your Company Need A Chief Blogger?"

"It's a question marketers are still grappling with years after the first waves of corporate blogging flooded the web. But for better or worse, it seems corporate blogging -- and the title of chief blogger -- is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak all have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers."

PPC Hero asks: "Are You Selling Your Keyword Research Short Because You Have A Poor Research Strategy?"

Somebody at the Search Engine Watch forums has spotted that AdWords Ads are now live on Yahoo...

Here's a useful post from Copyblogger: "Five Lessons From Newspapers to Boost Your Blog's Circulation"

Seth Godin explains the difference between "Catchers and Throwers" in the online marketing world

...and Logic + Emotion presents "The Top 10 Made Up Words Of Web 3.0":

"2. Viruseful.
Viral marketing initiatives that are actually useful.
"Not only did Shave Everywhere make me laugh—I was able to configure and purchase my new electric razor online"

Web News Hits - April 11, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

It's a small business blogging success story, told by Search Engine Land:

"Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going to play gigs and be a studio engineer."

And Tuggle uses HitTail to help him write his blog posts:

"Obviously blog posts can become tiresome, because it's not just a blog post. If all I had to do was write a guitar lesson or story that would be easy. But first I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings. It's a double edged sword. You want to get some good rankings out of the post, but at the same time you have to write good content for people."

Ars Technica examines "Why People Read Blogs":

"The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs."

Search Engine Guide discusses "6 Quick and Easy Accessibility Issues That Make Your Visitors Happy" to accomodate users who access websites through nontraditional means.

Mashable provides a roundup of the latest Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL/Google news -- and explains that when "The Big Four Fight Everyone Else Wins"

Search Engine Journal takes a look at six books on SEO that you might find useful...

ProBlogger advises you how to go "From 10000 to 0 Emails In An Inbox In 24 Hours":

"Over the weekend I decided to get serious about my email situation. I’d been sitting on an inbox with close to 10,000 items in it for months and was feeling more and more stressed by the day.

"I posted on Twitter that I needed to do something about it and then decided to take action. Within 24 hours I had an inbox with no items in it (well momentarily) and have been able to maintain that ever since (OK, so it’s only three days, but it’s been a very busy three days)."

And Search Engine Land reports on a study that indicated that the overwhelming majority of searches are informational in nature:

"A Penn State research study showed that about 80-percent of searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional.

The researchers reviewed over 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users to prove the "the 80/20 rule that 80 percent of the cases can be achieved with these clear-cut methods," said IST assistant professor Jim Jansen."

Web News Hits - April 9, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 News

The Conversation Agent takes us through the steps of "How A Blog Is Born"

Search Engline Land reports on Flickr's new video feature -- and says it's not quite a YouTube clone

Michael Arrington says he has seen the future of social media -- and it's mobile:

"A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings."

Shoemoney gives us the skinny on "Widget Best Practices In A Google World"

Dosh Dosh suggests that we narrow our focus if we want our message to "stick":

"A persuasive blog post or sales letter argues one point and accentuates it thoroughly with analogies, metaphors, examples and references. Just one point, because too many and you’ll not only lose your own focus but the attention of your audience. You don’t want to distract them from taking action."

Here's a great treasure-trove of links for bloggers: "Matt's Big Blogging Resource List"

Finally, The PPC Book provides us with the "Murphy's Law Of Campaign Management"

Web News Hits - April 8, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 News

PPC Hero tells you how to “Manage Your PPC Campaign Like A Shark”:

“I was reading an article about sharks and it got me thinking about PPC management. Sure, most people’s brains may not make that leap, but that’s the way I roll. Sharks have been around for approximately 450 million years. Their survival is not by accident; it is a result of evolutionary instinct combined with aggressive predatory skills.”

Search Engine Land explores errors in mapping online systems.

PPC Discussions asks Adwords to “Please Change These 2 Things”

Mashable provides an early and in-depth look at Google’s application cloud service.

The “shockwaves” caused by this recent New York Times article on blogging is still being felt, as Blogstorm helpfully provides “10 Ways To Prevent Death By Blogging”

Finally, Copyblogger gives advice on how to price your freelance writing work:

“If you go looking for advice on how to price freelance writing work, you’ll find that one thing gets repeated nearly everywhere: don’t lowball yourself. There’s a natural tendency in business to feel like you need every client you can find, and that can often mean settling for a below-market rate in exchange for simply having the work. The standard advice is, “don’t fall into that trap.”

Web News Hits - April 7, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Facebook will be launching their new chat service, ReadWriteWeb reports

The New York Times reports on Yahoo’s new ad system:

“Yahoo said the system, called AMP and still months away from being ready, would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo’s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads on their own sites as well as on Yahoo and on the sites of other publishers in the company’s growing network.”

Meanwhile, Ars Technica has some quibbles with NYT’s recent “blogging yourself to death” article...

...and Marketing Pilgrim also responds to the New York Times article, explaining “Why I’m A Tortoise In a World Of Blogging Hares."

Search Engine Land reports on a study that finds blended search resulting in more clicks for news, images, and video:

“Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, "news" results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. The study's overall findings reinforce a point increasingly being made: marketers need to broaden and optimize their various content types to be found in blended search results.”

Pro Blogger teaches you “How To Target The Right Social Media Sites”

Finally, the SERPzone provides “14 Little-Known Sources of PPC Traffic”

Web News Hits - April 3 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Breaking News
The New York Times reports that 300 are set to go at Doubleclick…

…and Matt Cutts talks about Google spinning off the search marketing side of Performics:

Personally, we think it was the right move for Google & applaud their actions.

Search Engine Land suggests how to make your content “submit worthy”:

“In order to be successful on social media news and bookmarking sites, you have to think like a typical power user. Start by understanding some fundamental truths about the users of these sites.”

Small Business SEM helpfully explains how to add a business to MSN/Live Local Search

Ad Age advises that to reach shoppers, retailers need to think beyond the print circular…and go digital

The U.S. trails the rest of the world in social media growth? Online Media Daily reports on the results of a two-year Universal McCann study:

“The U.S. trails emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Russia in the adoption of activities including blogging, social networking and video-sharing. China, for instance, has already surpassed the U.S. in the number of people starting their own blogs, at 43 million compared to 26.4 million.”

And Copyblogger gives you the scoop on “How To Create A Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works”

Web News Hits - April 2, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Search Engine Watch has a round-up of some of the funnier April Fool’s day Internet pranks.

Amazon.com now allows you to shop via text message, Mashable reports (will this make those impulse buys more irresistible?).

Ad Age explains “Why ’08 Isn’t Mobile’s Year”:

“Each year since about 2000 -- and maybe even before -- has been wrongly touted as the year of mobile marketing. And this year won't be it either, despite the we're-not-kidding-this-time rhetoric being spouted by mobile-marketing boosters converging for telecom's big powwow in Las Vegas this week. Here are five reasons why -- and five fixes that could make 2009 the year the channel becomes really, truly, we're-not-joking meaningful.”

ReadWriteWeb has an overview of four services that allow users to conduct polls on Twitter.

Why Blog? The New York Times Provides A Compelling Reason: A Book Deal!

The Blog Herald establishes the “Blog SEO Basics”

Want to connect with friends old and new on your iPhone or Blackberry? The Social Media Trader lists a whopping 38 social networking sites for your mobile phone.

Web News Hits - March 31, 2008 - Your Daily Source Of Web 2.0 Links

Hello and welcome to HitTail's "Web News Hits" where we provide you with a selection of some of the most interesting posts on Web 2.0 and online marketing. Topics of interest to "Web News Hits" include:

* Blogging
* Optimizing your site for search engines using targeted keywords (search engine optimization or "SEO")
* Social media like Facebook, Digg, Wikipedia, and YouTube
* Content management
* eCommerce systems
* General online news and views

I hope you will join us every day for this new feature. And if you have any suggestions for articles and posts we might have missed -- let us know!

Search Engine Land's Jill Whalen explains her four reasons why "We Don't Need SEO Standards"

Yahoo has launched a new online magazine for women: Shine. Is the launch of Shine an attempt -- among other cool features and services that have cropped up as of late -- by the company to boost their value in the wake of the Microsoft takeover bid?

Conversation Marketing provides a list of the "49 Things You Are Doing That You Probably Shouldn't" in Internet Marketing

Here's an interesting post from BlogStorm: "Linkbait In Difficult Industries." The reader who inspired the post asks:

"For example, SEO for a funeral directors? Or kitchen fitters? I can think of a few funny videos that would go great on a funeral site, but I don’t think the client would find them suitable!"

Wikipedia celebrates over 10 million articles!

Mike Jones at Search Engine Watch explains the role of branding in social media marketing:

"Many brands are wary of exposing themselves on social media sites, but as anyone who's been involved in social media for more than five minutes knows, they're too late. Their brands are already exposed, and the community is talking about them, whether they choose to get involved or not. Rather than trying to avoid the conversation, brand marketers need to create a strategy to engage online influencers and social media users who have the power to make or break their brand."

Facebook in China? David Snyder, guest-blogging for Marketing Pilgrim, has a report.


Check out the 96 Women Bloggers to watch for!

PR, SEO, and Blogging

We've been seeing a lot of traffic coming from Steve Rubel's blog post on Friday. I'm flattered that Steve mentioned a recent entry on how blogs can quickly see benefits from SEO. We all know that blogs are often used to position companies as industry leaders and spokespeople as authoritative. That's something our parent company, Connors Communications, knows something about considering its 20+ year history in public relations. And yet obviously times are changing -- which is why we developed HitTail.

Google says that one of the best ways to drive traffic (and therefore get your message out) is by having something worthwhile to say. HitTail helps bloggers gain respect by providing suggested writing topics that interest their audience and are beneficial to readers as well as search engines.

What is the point of blogging if no one finds your blog? You might as well keep a private journal. Blogs may gain some readers from word of mouth and viral marketing, but you can bet that the most successful ones have been learning something from the keywords that people use to find them.

I'm sure that Steve and others in PR are beginning to recognize that the importance of ranking well in search results is just as valuable, or even moreso, than appearing in news articles due to the fragmentation of media.

When even the New York Times writes their headlines with Search in mind, you have to compete with SEO if you want to be heard on similar topics. Or you can hunt for treasure in the long tail with HitTail.

Beyond SEO - Search As Research

I don't think enough has been written about the benefits of keyword research beyond simply one's search optimization plan.

For instance, what about using one's keyword research as a window into the buying preferences of your targeted consumers? Might not such numbers determine not just what keywords to target in the future, but the entire approach to your product as well?

I’ll use the long tail results provided and highlighted by the HitTail service as an example. Say you are in the business of making chocolates. A relatively good portion of the long tail results you have received through HitTail involve variations of the phrase, “chocolate covered strawberries.”

Well heck – maybe moving your business into specifically manufacturing chocolate-covered strawberries would be a good idea! These long tail results are giving you more than tips on good SEO – they are giving you market research.

Take another example that this interesting article on the subject from Media Post proposed – movies. Say you gather from analyzing search query volume that one movie has significantly more “buzz” than another. This might be helpful to project not only what film might do better at the box office, but where one’s marketing budget might be better spent. Or you get a bunch of long tail results like “Movie X Horrible” and “Movie X Bomb.” Maybe the long tail is trying to tell you something important about “Movie X.”

I think there are so many applications to SEO research and services like HitTail that we just don’t know about – yet. It might be advantageous to explore these options on our own and take advantage of them before the general marketing community does.

Realizing SEO benefits quickly through blogging

Quick results in Search Marketing are only possible with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, right? Wrong. The advent of blogging, as well as recent advances to search engine algorithms, has narrowed the gap between PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to mere hours. With PPC, there is instant gratification as your advertisement will appear in search results almost immediately after your campaign is activated. However, this same advantage can now be seen in SEO.

First, let's take a look at some common reasons why SEO projects have not been carried out in the past.

• Companies don’t want to abandon tech investments (e.g. content management systems and web publishing tools)


• Lack of budget dedicated to SEO


• May take a while to demonstrate ROI

Blogging addresses each of these problems.

• SEO best practices are already in place
  
  Blogging software by default includes a few basic but important SEO practices by using proper Titles, headlines, URLs, and internal linking structure. Search engines also like sites that have fresh content, which can give blogs great influence over search results.


• Recent search engine algorithm changes boost the visibility of blogs
  
  This recent experiment by Ryan Durk took advantage of temporary changes in Google’s logo linking to the search results page for "January 1 TCP/IP". It shows two things: the speed by which a new blog is indexed and the short time between your blog getting indexed and it appearing high in search results.


• Blogs are inexpensive and easy to setup
  
  A new blog can be created in a matter of minutes with little technical knowledge. Blog creation is free in many cases, often with a nominal monthly fee for additional features.

Blogging is great for companies that are not ready to make the larger SEO investment or are worried about abandoning a CMS in which they have already invested. Blogging can be used as a proof of concept that shows that SEO can deliver results. Use of blogging software delays the larger discussion of SEO projects that are potentially more time-consuming and require a larger investment that reap longer term benefits. Setting up a blog is inexpensive and doesn’t force you to abandon or modify your existing IT investments.

Then get people to notice your blog.

• Conduct Keyword Research
  
  Creating a blog is just the first step. Keyword research can be the difference between a highly popular, authoritative blog and a blog that no one knows exists.
  
  Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less competitive topics so your site has the ability to rank for those terms. HitTail can facilitate this process of identifying writing topics that other sites aren’t necessarily targeting, yet will drive traffic.
  
  If you’re just getting started with blogging, write about a subject where you have expertise that you feel will interest your audience. Once you reach a critical mass of blog posts, take a step back and analyze how people are finding your blog and use that information to guide your editorial calendar.


• Utilize Social Media and Pinging
  
  In addition to keyword research, it is important to promote the blog using social media tools that increase the visibility of your blog and generate inbound links to your domain. Be sure to utilize pinging services to notify aggregation services of new content on your blog.


• Customize the blog template
  
  It is also important to link to your new blog from the Homepage of your main website to make it easier for search engine spiders to discover it. Often times, the default template needs to be tweaked slightly for maximum SEO benefit. For instance, make sure your blog Permalink uses meaningful anchor text and not "www.yourdomain.com/blog/?p=456"

Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your website.

Get Web Hits

Here's an article about HitTail that needs more attention:

Say for example you want to get away from the clutches of PPC advertising, the first thing you should know is how people are finding your website online. Hittail does this, records the frequency, the keywords, the time of the search, the country and much more. In addition in the click of a button, you can have it suggest new terms for your to optimize for your business based on the results gathered from the live statistics.

They also have this other article about Organic SEO and Low Hanging Fruit or PPC, Which is Better?

The Future of Marketing

For over a year now, HitTail has been talking to its audience about one aspect of the future of marketing--the long tail, where smaller more agile companies can live in "niches" left behind by larger competitors. It works perfectly online, because inexpensive "word of mouth" marketing is intensified through the ability to forward links in email and the use of social networks. But marketing hasn't completely changed. There still are plenty of companies with large budgets, able to shape popular perceptions through saturation TV, print and radio campaigns. These days, those companies are simply adding online banner ads and keyword campaigns to the mix. But it's all still basically just advertising.

Now, the practice of taking advantage of how Google arbitrates traffic to use it to your natural advantage has evolved into the field of search engine optimization. But it's a field that continually shifts, just as the search results do. It only comprises a fraction of what we call marketing. Pay-per-click (a.k.a. Google AdWords) makes this process a bit clearer and more accessible to the mainstream, but even with that added in, it only accounts for maybe $10 billion of what is maybe a $500 billion industry. To really divine the future of marketing, you have to look at how a "long-tail" or niche advertising campaign picks up momentum, and how the company intelligently leverages its revenue to go back into more creative marketing, and how the snowball effect can kick in.

HitTail prescribes a particular formula that helps small to medium sized companies master that process of generating consistent, reliable small successes. When enough of these small successes compound on each other, they fund more aggressive and expensive campaigns. It's very possible, for example, to have completely free natural search produce your first dozen customers, who can fund you to start your first pay-per-click campaign.

Now, if this all sounds very entrepreneurial to you, well then, you got the point. The future of marketing is not about the large, established and complacent organizations. It's about the little guy with enough creativity, determination and patience to get that snowball rolling... rolling... rolling... straight at that stationary competitor.