Archive for October, 2008
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
I had to do some quick research for my marketing class (hooray Drexel Online MBA) about Starbucks and its brand image. I wanted to write a message to my cohort about the interesting dynamic at Starbucks where people identify with the brand because of their individual creation of the brand; it can be a very personal brand. For me, it’s a Grande Non-Fat Extra Hot Caffe Latte. Rachael likes her Tall Non-Fat Caffe Mocha. In my class message, I wanted to point out that about a year and a half ago, Starbucks ran a promotion with Project Runway finalist Mychael Knight where they were giving out limited numbers of free, personalized t-shirts based on your favorite drink. Leslie and I used to try every day to get these shirts (with no luck). We thought they were cute:
I was going to try to send a link to the actual site where you could design your shirt to the rest of my classmates (it was fun to do, after all). After some quick searches, I found the URL from the contest: http://www.mystarbuckstshirt.com/. But guess what? The page doesn’t load!!!
So, here’s where coffee meets SEO (although it already does every morning in our office) MyStarbucksTShirt is a valuable site for Starbucks. It has links pointing to it:
If I was consulting for Starbucks, this is what I would recommend and the same holds for anyone in a similar situation. If you’re going to run a contest, promotion, etc. with a vanity URL, keep track of that URL. Monitor it to see what kind of buzz it is getting and how many links it attracts. When your promotion is over, think about what you are going to do with that URL. If you no longer need to keep content on that URL, consider 301 redirecting it to your primary domain (or at least a page on your main domain that says something like “Sorry but this promotion is no longer available” with additional navigation to pages on your site). With the 301 redirect, then you’ll be passing all that great link juice that you worked so hard to get with your great promotion. It’s also better from a usability perspective. Don’t just leave it out there as a dead end!
PS Funny thing happened while writing this post. I wanted to make sure I was using the term “vanity URL” correctly, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Oh, the irony when the second example on that page is ANOTHER Starbucks vanity URL. The good news? This URL is redirecting to a page on www.starbucks.com. The question I would ask Starbucks is “Why are you using a 302 redirect? Do you plan on reusing this URL?” If yes (particularly if it’s an annual promo), then we’re cool; if not, I would change the 302 to a 301.
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
I had to do some quick research for my marketing class (hooray Drexel Online MBA) about Starbucks and its brand image. I wanted to write a message to my cohort about the interesting dynamic at Starbucks where people identify with the brand because of their individual creation of the brand; it can be a very personal brand. For me, it’s a Grande Non-Fat Extra Hot Caffe Latte. Rachael likes her Tall Non-Fat Caffe Mocha. In my class message, I wanted to point out that about a year and a half ago, Starbucks ran a promotion with Project Runway finalist Mychael Knight where they were giving out limited numbers of free, personalized t-shirts based on your favorite drink. Leslie and I used to try every day to get these shirts (with no luck). We thought they were cute:
I was going to try to send a link to the actual site where you could design your shirt to the rest of my classmates (it was fun to do, after all). After some quick searches, I found the URL from the contest: http://www.mystarbuckstshirt.com/. But guess what? The page doesn’t load!!!
So, here’s where coffee meets SEO (although it already does every morning in our office) MyStarbucksTShirt is a valuable site for Starbucks. It has links pointing to it:
If I was consulting for Starbucks, this is what I would recommend and the same holds for anyone in a similar situation. If you’re going to run a contest, promotion, etc. with a vanity URL, keep track of that URL. Monitor it to see what kind of buzz it is getting and how many links it attracts. When your promotion is over, think about what you are going to do with that URL. If you no longer need to keep content on that URL, consider 301 redirecting it to your primary domain (or at least a page on your main domain that says something like “Sorry but this promotion is no longer available” with additional navigation to pages on your site). With the 301 redirect, then you’ll be passing all that great link juice that you worked so hard to get with your great promotion. It’s also better from a usability perspective. Don’t just leave it out there as a dead end!
PS Funny thing happened while writing this post. I wanted to make sure I was using the term “vanity URL” correctly, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Oh, the irony when the second example on that page is ANOTHER Starbucks vanity URL. The good news? This URL is redirecting to a page on www.starbucks.com. The question I would ask Starbucks is “Why are you using a 302 redirect? Do you plan on reusing this URL?” If yes (particularly if it’s an annual promo), then we’re cool; if not, I would change the 302 to a 301.
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
It’s amazing how Search Engine Marketing (SEM) field has changed in the past 2 years. I was an in-house SEM associate in Washington DC about 2 years ago and due to personal reason, I had to leave the position. Now, I’m back in the game, things have changedâ¦.for the better of course.
I summarized the changes below:
1. Adwords editor
Pre Adwords Editor: For every change, I had to update my excel file, send it to my Google rep and ask her to upload the change. After that, I had to wait anxiously for the change to kick in and hope that everything went smoothly.
Editor era: Now, I can make a change that can instantly be reviewed and modified before sending the final change to the engines. This is a God sent tool
2. Google new Reports
A. Search Query Report
Pre Search Query Report: I monitored the performance of my current keywords. If they did well and converted, they stayed. If they wasted money and didn’t convert, either I lowered or paused. Other than that, I didn’t do much on the keyword expansion. As for the negatives, the keywords listed were based on the understanding of the business itself.
Search Query Report era: I can see what keywords trigger my ads. Some of them are very good and bring in conversions. Guess what, they’re not on my list yet. I can add it right away. Conversely, there are unrelated keywords that also trigger my ads and they eat up our budget. Not a problem, I can add these as negative keywords. Thanks to this report, I can do keyword expansion periodically and potentially increase conversions.
B. Placement Performance Report
Pre Placement Performance Report: Just like Search Query Report, I chose which sites I want to have my ads shown.
Placement Performance Report era: Not only I can see how well my content sites perform but I can also see which sites are holding us down. With that said, I can add URL that will bring in conversion and exclude bad URLs. Another killer report.
3. PPC Management and Bid Management Software
Dark ages (my experience): Switching back and forth between engines, gathering the data and compiling the data in an (sometimes complicated) excel sheet.
Enlightment era (the arrival of PPC Management/Bid Software): One interface for Google, Yahoo, MSN. This is a perfect way to save us time. However, the million dollar question will be whether it is worth the money? I guess it goes back to your needs. Do you need PPC management software that focuses on easiness to switch between engines and providing strong reporting interfaces. Or if you choose the bidding management route, this software lets you automate bidding adjustment. You set your cap and settings, the software will automatically adjust them. It all comes back to you, if you’re comfortable with this, go with it. If not, bid management software might be your answer. As for me and my PPC team members, our journey might end soon.
4. In house vs. Agency
My in house experience: We did everything as we go. No scheduled optimization plan.
Agency: In here, I can “borrow” best practices from clients with similar background. Also, I can improve communication and customer relationship skills. It is always good to have! Lastly, the Optimization Plan. It’s simply genius. With this plan, you can test and monitor the changes. After that, you are able to review the results and most importantly, to convey the results to the client.
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Let’s play a game. What do all these sites have in common:
Philly.com
Compact Appliance
MSNBC
Hewlett-Packard
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
AARP
MLB.com
Cornell University
Pontiac
Sports Illustrated
Ok â how many people came up with this: they all use Omniture as an analytics tool? If you did, you get partial credit because that’s only half the story.
Let’s examine part of the source code for sportsillustrated.cnn.com. And don’t forget â this is a page rank 8 site:
If you’ve looked at Omniture code before, you’ve probably seem something like this before. However, have you ever noticed the line about halfway through this code that starts with < noscript >? It contains a link to Omniture with the title “Web Analytics” (keeping in mind that “title” is different than anchor text). The rest of this tag loads a 1×1 tracking pixel (that’s what comes after img src). Now, I’m not a coding expert, but it looks to me like this is a link to Omniture.
That’s right. All the sites above link to Omniture. (more…)
Posted in analytics, SEO | 11 Comments »
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
Today I did a search and saw this:
A Google search that is bringing in forum information – from vbulletin!
Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don’t know.
By using a highly popular platform for your content delivery, you’ll likely:
1 – Cut costs & open yourself up to a larger developer pool in the case you need development help
2 – Make it easier for Google to parse your data
I’m going to get into more detail about point #2
Google knows that it can hit the a large portion of the market maybe 40-80 percent of content delivered on blogs/forums (I’m pulling this out of my you know what) if it can EASILY parse the vbulletin / phpbb for your forum
or
wordpress / typepad for your blog.
That is exactly what you are seeing above, now lets think about how Google might use this parsed data…freshness maybe!?
If they can slice up # of authors, last post, number of replies, comments, etc in your posts (whether on or a forum or blog) it will give just one more indicator on how fresh a forum or blog is and could be used someday to impact rankings -stale forum that gets few unique posts, very infrequently could equal = poor forum which could = poor rankings.
Being fresh off of my SMX East kick - now its time to think…how can this data be scraped, and if so, what would it tell us? Maybe you only advertise or sponsor forums that have high “freshness”? Again I am thinking out loud here, how else could this information be used?
The folks over at blogoscoped are talking about it too.
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
Today I did a search and saw this:
A Google search that is bringing in forum information – from vbulletin!
Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don’t know.
By using a highly popular platform for your content delivery, you’ll likely:
1 – Cut costs & open yourself up to a larger developer pool in the case you need development help
2 – Make it easier for Google to parse your data
I’m going to get into more detail about point #2
Google knows that it can hit the a large portion of the market maybe 40-80 percent of content delivered on blogs/forums (I’m pulling this out of my you know what) if it can EASILY parse the vbulletin / phpbb for your forum
or
wordpress / typepad for your blog.
That is exactly what you are seeing above, now lets think about how Google might use this parsed data…freshness maybe!?
If they can slice up # of authors, last post, number of replies, comments, etc in your posts (whether on or a forum or blog) it will give just one more indicator on how fresh a forum or blog is and could be used someday to impact rankings -stale forum that gets few unique posts, very infrequently could equal = poor forum which could = poor rankings.
Being fresh off of my SMX East kick - now its time to think…how can this data be scraped, and if so, what would it tell us? Maybe you only advertise or sponsor forums that have high “freshness”? Again I am thinking out loud here, how else could this information be used?
The folks over at blogoscoped are talking about it too.
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 6th, 2008
While there are numerous posts about surviving as an SEO in a downturn economy, I think these are a bit late. Last week, UserEffect.com wrote about changes in search and Patricia Skinner wrote about customers not paying for completed SEO work. These articles along, constant industry changes, and a weak economy got me thinking about the businesses that will flourish during global warming and those that will not be able to pay. Here are my rules.
Rule #1: Stay away from beach realty clients. They will not be able to pay when their market is underwater. You may not agree, but I’m going to miss New Jersey.
With that said, when sea waters rise inches, feet, meters, miles, you know that there will be a bounty of one thing in this world.
Rule #2: Find turbine energy clients. Voith Siemens Hydro and American Hydro are two turbine manufacturing/refurbishing companies in the US. Something has to be done with all the melted glaciers, why not create clean energy? Voith is also animal friendly and created “fish pockets” for their turbines. Fish survive as they pass. Everyone wins.
As more water covers the earth, more heat will be absorbed. There will be an increase in the greenhouse effect and an increase in temperatures.
Rule #3: Find a pharma company manufacturing a pill that decreases sweating and pitch pitch pitch. No secret that we (me) sweat. Add 5 degrees to normal seasonal temperatures and you now have a client with enough money to build a floating air conditioned office and more importantly, enough money to pay your company.
Glaciers will melt. What happens to whatever lived on those glaciers and ice sheets?
Rule #4: Sign on multiple zoos & aquariums. Conflict of interest or not, all of the polar bears, penguins, and Eskimos will have to be saved and put somewhere for us to view.
Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Rule #5: Water filtration companies will be huge for governments and personal use. “Brita Ballpark” has a nice ring to it.
Hot List: Turbine Power, Zoos & Aquariums, Boats, Pharma companies, Water Filtration, Swim Lessons.
Not List: Beachfront Realty, Pools, New Jersey, Kelly Osborn.
Have some better rules? Comment them below.
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Search our Blog
Get our Newsletter
Keep up-to-date search trends, latest blog posts and more.