Existential Crisis in the SEO Field
March 11, 2012
SEO is trying to preserve its credibility and relevance in a shifting world. Search Engine Journal asks, “Is SEO Really SEO Anymore? Index Search Down 50%, Apps and Social Search Exploding.”
Search engine optimization, a young profession (compared to, say, farming or tax collecting) is going through an existential crisis. Why so soon? Writer Gabriel Gervelis explains:
“An earlier post of mine for SEJ stated that index search is down fifty percent. Search has moved to sites like Wikipedia and other popular content sites. Search in the app store is up. People have made a the statement that they prefer branded content from apps they trust, rather than sorting through links on a SERP [Search Engine Results Page]. “When the term ‘search engine’ is actually in your job title (or at least in your job description), that’s a change that demands your attention.”
Indeed. Gervelis wonders how SEO professionals will refocus their efforts on social platforms and mobile apps. For the first, he suggests, they will have to invest more in the end user’s experience. As for the apps market, Apple’s recent acquisition of app organizing tool Chomp highlighted the importance of the apps revolution in Gervelis’ mind.
In the end, the article ponders: is even the title itself, “search engine optimization expert”, obsolete? Marginalized, for sure.
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Ontoprise GmbH: Multiple Issues Says Wikipedia
March 3, 2012
Now Wikipedia is a go-to resource for Google. I heard from one of my colleagues that Wikipedia turns up as the top hit on a surprising number of queries. I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I don’t trust any encyclopedia produced by volunteers including volunteers. Volunteers often participate in a spoofing fiesta.
Note: I will be using this symbol when I write about subjects which trigger associations in my mind about use of words, bound phrases, and links to affect how results may be returned from Exalead.com, Jike.com, and Yandex.ru, among other modern Web indexing services either supported by government entities or commercial organizations.
I was updating my list of Overflight companies. We have added five companies to a new Overflight service called, quite imaginatively, Taxonomy Overflight. We have added five firms and are going through the process of figuring out if the outfits are in business or putting on a vaudeville act for paying customers.
The first five companies are:
We will be adding to the Taxonomy Overflight another group of companies on March 4, 2012. I have not yet decided how to “score” each vendor. For enterprise search Overflight, I use a goose method. Click here for an example: Overflight about Autonomy. Three ducks. Darned good.
I wanted to mention one quite interesting finding. We came across a company doing business as Ontoprise. The firm’s Web site is www.ontoprise.de. We are checking to see which companies have legitimate Web sites, no matter how sparse.
We noted that the Wikipedia entry for Ontoprise carried this somewhat interesting “warning”:
The gist of this warning is to give me a sense of caution, if not wariness, with regard to this company which offers products which delivered “ontologies.” The company’s research is called “Ontorule”, which has a faintly ominous sound to me. If I look at the naming of products from such firms as Convera before it experienced financial stress, Convera’s product naming was like science fiction but less dogmatic than Ontoprise’s language choice. So I cannot correlate Convera and Ontoprise on other than my personal “semantic”baloney detector. But Convera went south in a rather unexpected business action.
Exogenous Complexity 4: SEO and Big Data
February 29, 2012
Introduction
In the interview with Dr. Linda McIsaac, founder of Xyte, Inc., I learned that new analytic methods reveal high-value insights about human behavior. You can read the full interview in my Search Wizards Speak series at this link. The method involves an approach called Xyting and sophisticated analytic methods.
One example of the type of data which emerge from the Xyte method are these insights about Facebook users:
- Consumers who are most in tune with the written word are more likely to use Facebook. These consumers are the most frequent Internet users and use Facebook primarily to communicate with friends and connect with family.
- They like to keep their information up-to-date, meet new people, share photos, follow celebrities, share concerns, and solve people problems.
- They like to learn about and share experiences about new products. Advertisers should key in on this important segment because they are early adopters. They lead trends and influence others.
- The population segment that most frequents Facebook has a number of characteristics; for example, showing great compassion for others, wanting to be emotionally connected with others, having a natural intuition about people and how to relate to them, adapting well to change, embracing technology such as the Internet, and enjoying gossip and messages delivered in story form and liking to read and write.
- Facebook constituents are emotional, idealistic and romantic, yet can rationalize through situations. Many do not need concrete examples in order to comprehend new ideas.
I am not into social networks. Sure, some of our for-free content is available via social media channels, but where I live in rural Kentucky yelling down the hollow works quite well.
I read “How The Era Of ‘Big-Data’ Is Changing The Practice Of Online Marketing” and came away confused. You should work through the text, graphs, charts, and lingo yourself. I got a headache because most of the data struck me as slightly off center from what an outfit like Xyte has developed. More about this difference in a moment.
The thrust of the argument is that “big data” is now available to those who would generate traffic to client Web sites. Big data is described as “a torrent of digital data.” The author continues:
large sets of data that, when mined, could reveal insight about online marketing efforts. This includes data such as search rankings, site visits, SERPs and click-data. In the SEO realm alone at Conductor, for example, we collect tens of terabytes of search data for enterprise search marketers every month.
Like most SEO baloney, there are touchstones and jargon aplenty. For example, SERP, click data, enterprise search, and others. The intent is to suggest that one can pay a company to analyze big data and generate insights. The insights can be used to produce traffic to a Web page, make sales, or produce leads which can become sales. In a lousy business environment, such promises appeal to some people. Like most search engine optimization pitches, the desperate marketer may embrace the latest and greatest pitch. Little wonder there are growing numbers of unemployed professionals who failed to deliver the sales their employer wanted. The notion of desperation marketing fosters a services business who can assert to deliver sales and presumably job security for those who hire the SEO “experts.” I am okay with this type of business, and I am indifferent to the hollowness of the claims.
What interests me is this statement:
From our vantage point at Conductor, the move to the era of big data has been catalyzed by several distinct occurrences:
- Move to Thousands of Keywords: The old days of SEO involved tracking your top fifty keywords. Today, enterprise marketers are tracking up to thousands of keywords as the online landscape becomes increasingly competitive, marketers advance down the maturity spectrum and they work to continuously expand their zone of coverage in search.
- Growing Digital Assets: A recent Conductor study showed universal search results are now present in 8 out of 10 high-volume searches. The prevalence of digital media assets (e.g. images, video, maps, shopping, PPC) in the SERPs require marketers to get innovative about their search strategy.
- Multiple Search Engines: Early days of SEO involved periodically tracking your rank on Google. Today, marketers want to expand not just to Yahoo and Bing, but also to the dozens of search engines around the world as enterprise marketers expand their view to a global search presence.
All the above factors combined mean there are significant opportunities for an increase in both the breadth and volume of data available to search professionals.
Effective communication, in my experience, is not measured in “thousands of key words”. The notion of expanding the “zone of coverage” means that meaning is diffused. Of course, the intent of the key words is not getting a point across. The goal is to get traffic, make sales. This is the 2112 equivalent of the old America Online carpet bombing of CD ROMs decades ago. Good business for CD ROM manufacturers, I might add. Erosion of meaning opens the door to some exogenous complexity excitement I assert.
Faking Out the Panda: Crazy Notions
February 19, 2012
More baloney from the desperate world of tricking Google. Search Engine Journal offers an “Easy Way to Understand Google’s Panda.” Writer Melissa Fach reproduces here an infographic with this introduction:
There are so many myths out there about Panda and what it means. This infographic from Single Grain makes it very easy for you to understand what Panda is, what can hurt your site, link building tips and offers suggestions on what to do if your website was affected.
This graphic actually seems to do what it claims, and the pandas in it are quite cute. However, we maintain that trying to outsmart the Panda is a waste of time and energy, and adds no value to the Web community. Better to focus on providing original, quality content that actually brings value to your site’s visitors.
Nothing tricky about that. Why not just write interesting and useful articles? We just do our thing at Beyond Search. Geese, not pandas too.
Cynthia Murrell, February 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Engine Optimization Billing
January 7, 2012
I saw a graphic which purports to answer the question, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” The guts of the write up is more along the lines of how a client pays for the allegedly high-value, must-have ministrations of SEO experts. Here’s an example:
cost-per-project is the most common pricing model and is offered by 70% of the agencies and consultancies surveyed. A monthly retainer was the second most common cost model offered (60%), followed by hourly rates at 55%.
The big summary of data explains what services the alleged experts offer the clients who pay. The bulk of the work appears to be involved in making recommendations and suggesting key words. Okay, librarians, are you on alert. SEO experts are recommending key words. I wonder if home economics majors, those skilled in political science, and various unemployed high school teachers are trained in indexing? MBAs? Hey, MBAs are born able to manage anything. Key words are a piece of cake. Just look at the indexing of Lehman Brothers’ and BearStearns’ content.
But the big factoid in the write up is the Monthly retainer section. One learns that the fees are in what is “buy a Toyota Camry” range; that is, hundreds a month to $2,501 to $5,000 a month range. The use of blue bars without “real” numbers makes this observation suspect, but I concluded that with advisory services and some key word fiddling, a good salesperson could snag six or seven clients a month. Even at $2,000 per month, the enterprising SEO expert can move up to a baby Lexus.
Project pricing is, it appears, mostly in the $1,500 to $7,000 range. My hunch is that projects drag out over several time chunks. The hourly rate section pegs the experts in the $75 to $150 per hour range. Compared to blue chip consulting work or expert witness work, SEO experts are billing at a rate which probably keeps the lights on and maybe makes it possible to enjoy a holiday each year.
The infographic suggests that making a living as an SEO expert is possible, probably not particularly easy. Worth checking out the chart if you are in the SEO game. No information about the productization of the alleged SEO services. That would be interesting to me.
By the way, the “real cost” of SEO is the friction added to the spending of Bing and Google to deal with the craziness, spoofing, and coding horrors the SEO clan visits on the hapless residents of rural Kentucky. Google’s Matt Cutts has a job because of SEO. SEO costs a great deal of money, and when I consider how relevance has become a thing of the past, SEO has consumed more dough than it has generated for those looking for on point information.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Quote to Note: Perfect Search Engine
December 28, 2011
I find the search engine optimization blogs entertaining and humorous. The writers go through amazing gyrations, often suggesting that “real” SEO pros should tie clicks to money. Yep, great idea. But the theme that causes me to chortle is the message, “Content is king.” Yep, great idea.
Navigate to “Search & Mobile Marketing Trends: SEO Apocalypse 2012”. You will get a shovel full of SEO goodness. But the point of the write up is secondary to this quote to note. The speaker is top Googler Larry Page. He allegedly said:
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want,” according to Google CEO Larry Page. Generalized search tactics become even murkier as results become so individualized to time, place, preference, and personal social trends.
Yep, perfection. But what does “perfect” mean? Ad revenue? When SEO fails, there is the life saver of Adwords I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, December 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Good Content Should be Paired with SEO
December 24, 2011
Today, almost everything is accessible through the Web. Therefore, many companies utilize Web advertising in the form of SEO to increase Web traffic to their sites. Read Write Enterprise recently posted a video that addresses the importance of pairing good content with SEO strategies in the post “Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO.”
In the video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, answers a question about SEO practices and whether “poor” sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google. Cutts states:
Just because somebody dots every i and crosses every “t” and gets all their HTML structure right, doesn’t mean that it’s good content. Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it. In fact, Google tries to make it so that sites don’t have to do SEO. First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.
While Cutts emphasizes that Google wants to reward companies for providing good content, he also makes it clear that to receive the best results, you should work to make that compelling content accessible through SEO. If Google didn’t recognize the importance of SEO, why would they have AdWords?
Jasmine Ashton, December 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Is Kantar Clueless: Online Ad Spending Going Down?
December 21, 2011
Data about ad spending is tricky for me. Those collecting the data can make decisions which may have a significant impact on how the numbers flow. I am suspicious of information from the “real” research firms and well as from outfits which are less familiar to me. Hey, we do data analysis too, and some data are slippery fish.
Against this disclaimer, check out “Kantar Media Reports Paid Search Spend Tumbled in 2011.” I found this passage interesting:
Kantar first observed the drop in spending from financial, legal and medical marketers around the end of the first quarter – and the drop continued right through Q3. Swallen said, “I don’t know if it reflects a variance in ad impressions vs. variance in keyword pricing. I can’t comment which of those two factors is more responsible for the declines, but the decline is primarily coming off those financial services.” Overall, Internet ad spending rose narrowly by 2.8 percent for the first nine months of 2011. Total advertising spending in the U.S. grew modestly from January to September, then slowed to a crawl in the third quarter. Third quarter ad spending was up just .4 percent compared to last year, capping a nine-month period that saw growth of just 1.5 percent. The total amount of ad sending for the first three quarters of 2011 was $104.7 billion.
So no big deal, right?
Wrong. If Google sucks in the easy money, the competition has to up its game. If Google plays hard ball and cuts its prices, there will be some new burger flippers practicing their wrist motion at Burger King.
Assume the numbers are off base. Google gets bigger, and it is quite plausible that it will spend its way to an even stronger market position. Worth watching. Ad spending up or down? We will know more in 2012.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Intuitive Design is Amazing
December 5, 2011
SEO is a buzzword that everyone knows but no one really understands. We all know that good SEO can bring Web traffic to our web sites but its difficult to explain exactly how it all works. I would like to share with you a recent article that attempts to outline not only what SEO is, but why it is necessary for your business.
SitePoint reported this week on the importance of not only incorporating, but prioritizing, search engine optimization (SEO) in the article “Why SEO Comes First”
Throughout the article, writer Alex Mason pontificates on the failures of Web designers and the success of SEO practitioners when it comes to marketing a business successfully.
Mason states:
Web designers are hurting the search marketing industry at the very source. When clients whose understanding is only as good as the person who is telling them think that SEO is what web designers do, we’re at the bottom of a big uphill battle. It’s generally up to the SEO to then clean up the mess and rectify the oversights the developers and clients between themselves have left.” In all the time that Mason spends dissing web designers and ephasizing the importance of keyword research and traffic acquisition, he forgets to mention the most important factor –producing good content. Solely focusing on getting traffic and hoping that information value will just come along for the ride is silly and short sighted. This article is an indication of the sad state of intellectual effort today.
Our view is that “intuitive design” can veer from useful to lipstick on a pig. The notion of content is equally slippery. Gossip may be more valuable to some Web users than more substantive types of information. The loss of precision and recall as ways to measure search signals more than a nuisance for search vendors. The loss makes clear that substance is of less value than Revlon hot pink.
Jasmine Ashton, December 5, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Shop City Alleges Google Discriminates
November 20, 2011
Search Engine Watch has reported on yet another discrimination complaint against Google in the Nov 16, article “ShopCity Files Antitrust Complaint Against Google.” Shop City has filed a complaint with the FTC, claiming that Google pushed its Web sites down to the fifth page of results for searches, despite Shop City’s having created content within the bounds of Google’s guidelines. In addition to this, Google placed its own results, keyed to a map, at the top of the results, regardless of whether those results were legitimately more useful. Shop City CEO Colin Pape said of the investigation:
Our FTC submission has nothing to do with a lawsuit or damages of any kind. We feel that the entire marketplace would benefit from increased transparency from the world’s most powerful company, and this complaint, requesting a formal investigation, is the way to bring that about.
I think we can all agree that transparency is a good thing when multinational corporations are involved. Whether Google’s alleged discrimination was intentional or unintentional remains to be seen. One wonders if these accursers are looking for a scape goat in today’s tough economy. On the other hand, is Google taking steps to ensure that its revenues remain robust as the financial winds buffet other organizations?
Jasmine Ashton, November 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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