CloudBurst Consulting

Last week Google added what it’s calling People Profiles to search results. Now you can create a central identity with relevant contact and other info with Google. This is in addition to other profiles you may already have created on Google services like Blogger, Google Reader or Picasa etc… And in fact this central profile can list and link to all of those profiles. It’s kind of profile overload.

What it does help with, however, is Reputation Management. It is possible to have unfavorable search results come up on a search of your company’s brand or even your own name. This is another tool in the arsenal of getting your online reputation optimized.

[Illustration credit: Daniel Miessler]

We all know the simple answer to that question – right? Banner ads, email offers or sponsored links!  Well, guess again …

According to ARAnet and based on polling by Opinion Research Corporation , the best way to accomplish visitors following your brand or getting them to your website may not be those particular advertising tactics.

Articles that include brand information were the most likely source leading US users to read and act.  A compelling written article that is informative and engaging to the target market can be one of the most effective, most natural ways in which to get the word out . 

We all know that people are turning to the Internet to find credible information for a product or service and, because of that, consumers are chipping away at a marketer’s ability to influence a mass audience. 

So what’s the answer to influence your potential target market online without pushing your marketing/advertising message on them?  Maybe it’s time to start writing informative, relevant articles. 

Still wondering if your company should be moving their traditional advertising dollars to the Internet?  Everyone is familiar with the products Lysol, Clearsil, French’s Mustard and Mucinex, to name a few.  The company who owns these brands, Reckitt-Benckiser, has taken $20 million in advertising away from TV and will be investing that money in online advertising (up from $1 million in online spending in 2008).  Do you think there is a message here? 

Why the big shift?  It was the need to improve to CPM which relates to the cost per thousand page impressions in online advertising.  The company and their advertising agency knew they had to deliver impressions more efficiently than television did so …  

They will be boosting the effectiveness of their TV campaigns by using online video with video ad networks such as Glam, Tidal TV, YuMe and Brightroll, rather than broadcaster-owned sites like Hulu or TV.com.  

Online video is indeed a major opportunity for some companies because the consumer is online and they are watching videos!  The following comment by the company’s media manager and Internet specialist, Marc Fonzsetti, pretty much says it all:

“The integration of traditional and digital media is here now,” says Fonzsetti. While YouTube started the revolution, Reckitt-Benckiser wants to be aligned with professional content.  R-B will measure the campaign by combining TV’s gross rating points with the web, along with elements like online coupons and clickthroughs at some of the brands’ microsites.  Each brand’s audience metrics will then be paired with data from Nielsen’s Homescan panel.

Google's Orion Update

Google very recently implemented a set of updates to how its search engine works.  It involves some very advanced technology that detects the relationships between phrases and website pages.  As advanced as we may think computers are, they still can’t really understand the meaning behind words entered into a search box, referred to in the industry as “semantic indexing.”  Orion moves us a little closer to a world where machines don’t just match words together, they begin to understand what the words mean and how they relate to words we may have not even entered.

As an example, let’s say you type “red apples” into Google.  It does a good job of finding websites where the words “red” and “apples” appear close together.  What it doesn’t do, that this update moves towards, is understanding that when a user types this, they may also be interested in things like farming, agribusiness or gardening tips – when pages like these appear, it’s only because they’ve placed those two words on the page.  Now when you perform that search, Google has a much better chance of bringing up results that also could be helpful, but might not have the exact words “red” and “apples” in them.

One of the other important things this update brings is longer descriptions in some search engine listings.  Google and others typically only shown two lines, or snippets, from the pages listed in results but now may show three lines for searches involving three or more search terms.  This can be very beneficial in deciding which result is of the most interest.  It also capitalizes on the search trend of people using more words in each of their searches.

What this means for your website is to be sure that you’re search engine optimizing each page for more than one keyword, in a process that is sometimes referred to as “blending.”  This creates a higher likelihood that your page will show up for searches where not all of the keywords are present.

More in-depth info can be found on this SEO tips blog.

As we all know, keywords can be split into two groups – short tail keywords such as “web design,” and long tail keywords like “small business web design.”  From a competitive standpoint, “web design” has thousands more competitors compared to “small business web design.”  Choosing the keyword(s) on your website is an important tactic in keyword positioning in order to attract quality traffic.

According to data from Hitwise  which reports an overall trend toward longer searches at the major search engines, “search queries averaging five to more than eight words have increased 9%.”

It’s not a surprise that due to web searchers being more sophisticated and their desire to avoid the mass of clutter and unrelated search results on the Internet, they are using more specific keyword phrases.  We all know if we are going to find the information we are looking for online that we need to be very specific in our selection of keyword phrases – and more importantly, have you checked your website copy to be sure that what potential customers are typing into the search engines are the same phrases that are appropriately seeded throughout specific pages of your website?

Are you a member of a social network community or blog?  Well, just a thought, but it might be worthwhile to pay close attention to how social networking is continuing to change not only the global online landscape but the consumer’s experience as well.

Nielsen Online recently conducted some research that indicated more than “two-thirds of the global online population visits social networks and blogs and participation in these member communities is now the fourth most popular online category – behind search, portals and PC software, but ahead of personal email use” – take a look at the report “Global Faces and Networked Places.”

If social networking and blogging account for nearly 10% of all time spend on the Internet, then from a business standpoint, it might be time to take a good look at this report which provides recommendations for advertisers to help them understand the world of social media and potential opportunities within it.

These are interesting times for traditional retailers. eMarketer reports that shoppers are increasingly finding deals through online coupons – and with much higher redemption ratios than their old school printed counterparts. According to the report, 13% of online coupons were redeemed in 2008, versus only a 1% redemption rate for print coupons.

While the majority of consumers still get their coupons from paper sources, such as Sunday papers, receipts or in-store, the continuing decline in newspaper circulation figures presents a unique challenge for traditional retailers who have relied on traditional channels.

It’s less about clipping and more about clicking these days – with rich media banners that enable coupons to be served directly from an online ad, and sites like ShopLocal that render catalogs and flyers in online-friendly and interactive presentations with coupons printable on demand.

Some retailers already offer text messages with coupon codes, and I have handed over my iPhone in Borders and had them scan the barcode in an email coupon directly – no printing needed.

Vanessa Fox, the Features Editor over at search engine land, has a great post up about audience analysis as it relates to keyword research.  It seems an entire town in France is going to be changing its name because their website doesn’t come up at all when users search on that term.  Trouble is, it doesn’t seem that the Mayor knows enough about Search Engine Optimization to understand how much of a mistake this could be.

It’s a natural tendency to make assumptions about what keywords people use to find your website and it’s easy to make some big mistakes when it comes to determining what the right keywords to target are; especially if you’re not willing to do a little work to try and confirm or deny your theory with one of the many free keyword research tools available from Google and third parties.

If you haven’t chosen your favorite Internet marketing tactic, now’s the time to give your opinion.  Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog is conducting a poll on which Internet marketing tactics are most favored for 2009.

It’s not surprising to see that blogging ranks as the number one tactic.  Hubspot asked 167 respondents and 75% said their blogging activities where “useful,” “important” and “critical” to their businesses’ survivability.

Interestingly enough, Twitter was a close second in the survey with Search Engine Optimization right behind.  Next comes social networking followed by social media monitoring and outreach.  With Twitter beating out Facebook, it could be a good indication that in the near future Twitter will replace Facebook as the #1 social site.

Depending upon your business, it can be a bit overwhelming to know just what tactics will work the best for your target market.  One thing for sure – don’t do nothing!  There are too many possibilities in the online environment where you can engage with your audience … however, remember that without a good strategy, you could make some strategic errors and wind up down the wrong road.

Google, Yahoo and MSN yesterday unveiled a new way for website’s to specify which pages are your “main” or “original” ones.  This goes a long way towards helping prevent the dilution of backlinks to a website.

For example, if you work for the Tourism Board of Mars and have the following page on your website, listing Martian hotels:

www.visitMars.com/hotels

… and users were allowed to sort the list of hotels by different criteria (price, rating, proximity etc…), doing so creates a new version of the page.  It’s still the same content, just re-ordered.  Using the above example, when a user sorts the list of hotels by price, the URL might look like this:

www.visitMars.com/hotels?Sort=price

The search engines identify this as a separate page, and other websites can link to either of the two URLs.  If that happens, say 10 websites link to the first URL and 1,000 link to the second, each version of the same page can be assigned a separate PageRank by Google as a result.

To avoid this, and maximize the value of other websites linking to yours, Google, Yahoo and MSN have introduced a new way to tell them which is the main page.  To do so, you simply insert a single line of code into the source code of all the “extra” or “duplicate” pages.

Following our example from before, we would add the following into the page at www.visitMars.com/hotels?Sort=price:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.visitMars.com/hotels” />

That’s it.  this tells the search engines that www.visitMars.com/hotels is the main page for the other pages with the same content.  And Google will give the full PageRank value to that page, instead of diluting it across each separate version.