• Search Marketing: I always think of Web Analytics as a tool to help your search marketing strategy. Without an understanding of the different strategies that your business is implementing, how do you know what to measure. Paid Search, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media, Press Releases, and Textual content are all different segments that web analytics should integrate with. Furthermore, once you know what strategies your business is implementing, it becomes important that you have a seat at the table so you can help plan for the future.
   
• Programming / Software Development: Having a background in software development has come in handy numerous times in my career. Understanding a programming language makes it much easier to implement web analytics as well as make it much easier to speak with IT to make implementation changes on your behalf.

  Many search marketing tools (including web analytics solutions) provide APIs which come in handy to integrate data from different sources. Having programming knowledge allows you to code your own applications without having to rely on other developers.
   

• Office Tools, Excel/Access/PowerPoint: Microsoft office products (or similar technologies) are something you’ll use very often. Custom Functions, Charting Tools, Pivot Tables, V-Lookups are just a few components in excel you’d better get used to.

  Anyone can get put together a few slides in PowerPoint, but it takes real skills to create a presentation which entices people to keep watching and listening.

  I mention Access because in the past I have used Access to combine data from Analytics and Paid Search in order to understand the ROI down to the keyword level. You don’t need Access, you could use SQL Server or MySQL as well.
   

• Deeper Analysis: This sounds like a fairly broad topic, but it entails the ability to understand things like Multivariate Testing, Statistical Analysis, Understanding Users (usability) and behavioral targeting. Having experience in these types of skills takes you from a great analyst to Web Analytics Guru.
   
• Passion: This is a difficult skill to develop, it almost has to come naturally. You won’t really succeed as a Web Analyst without having a thirst to continually want to improve and learn. It has to go beyond trying to make $150,000/year, it’s having an understanding that if your business succeeds, then your team will succeed and ultimately YOU will succeed.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

[Manoj]: On the topic of SEO scams, is this something that is still rapidly growing?

[Jill Whalen]: I wouldn’t say that it is rapidly growing, but they are definitely still out there. We get people on our SEO forum all the time asking about the cold calls they get from companies who claim they can place their website in the number 1 spot for $50 and things like that. What they are actually doing is either reselling sponsored ads at a premium and you’re showing up in the sponsored section, or in some cases, they get you to download their special toolbar, and then they can show you whatever results they want to show you. This scam is less prevalent today than it used to be as people are more leery of installing 3rd party software these days.

The latest SEO scam is companies who instead of working hard to help you create something worth linking to, make up entertaining but fake news, and the post it on your website as real news, in order to gain links to it. In the media’s frenzy to re-print and discuss just about any news they can find, they rarely bother to check sources anymore, and freely link to the original made-up story. The tactic apparently works (at least temporarily), but at what cost to the website’s credibility? Google’s Matt Cutts has recently weighed in on this issue and stated that the tactic does fall outside of their Webmaster guidelines.

[Manoj]: What myths do you consistently come across in the search marketing industry?

[Jill Whalen]:One of the most interesting is the myth that your Google AdWords can affect your organic rankings. About half the people who believe this myth think that running a Google AdWords campaign will hurt your organic rankings, while the other half believe it will help your organic rankings! In reality, Google is smart enough to keep their paid and organic results completely separate.

Another myth I consistently run across is that frequent respidering of your website will somehow increase its organic rankings. If you are adding new content on a regular basis, then of course it’s important for Google to respider your site often so that they will index your new stuff. But if you aren’t adding new content, it’s not necessarily a problem; you certainly don’t need the spider to index the same content they already have indexed. Rankings don’t suffer because of a lack of spidering (unless you have some other technical issues going on). Some of the best-ranked pages haven’t been changed or added to in years.

[Manoj]: If you were to prioritize a list of SEO Don’ts, what would be your top 3 in terms of biggest impact to a site’s online strategy?

[Jill Whalen]: Most of the SEO myths that are out there are fairly harmless — whether you do them or not, they won’t impact your site one way or the other. "SEO don’ts" on the other hand, are a different animal and can very well impact the profile of your website in the search engines. There are so many don’ts that it’s difficult to prioritize them, but here are 3 common ones:
 

1. Don’t stuff your page full of keyword phrases at the expense of its readability. SEO copywriting has nothing to do with keyword stuffing. While keyword stuffing may actually increase rankings (temporarily), if your pages read poorly they will be less likely to convert for you.
2. Don’t set out to deceive search engines. They want the best, most relevant pages for the search query at hand. Don’t fake having the best, most relevant content — actually have it!
3. Don’t design your website in such a way as to make it invisible or unspiderable to the search engines. Unfortunately, a lot of website designers still haven’t figured out how to create crawler-friendly websites, which puts those sites at a huge disadvantage right out of the gate.

About Jill Whalen

Jill is the founder of the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum, now celebrating its fourth year. She is also is the host of the High Rankings Advisor, a free search engine marketing email newsletter, and the author of The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines. Regularly quoted in national and industry publications, Jill is frequently called upon to speak at conferences worldwide

Original Post: Web Analytics World

Trying to Achieve 100% Accuracy

• In a JavaScript and Cookie model, web analytics will never be 100% accurate. In a web analytics test performed last year by Stone Temple consulting where they implemented numerous analytics scripts on the same website, the results indicated up to a 10% fluctuation between analytics packages. I feel it’s important to test for accuracy but a waste of your time to try to balance your books using analytics.

Measuring only the Quantity of Leads

• You launch a PPC campaign for your hot new service at 8 AM and by noon you have 1000 new leads, mission complete, pack it up and go home – I don’t think so. Yeah 1000 leads are wonderful until you find out that 50% of them are from a person who has the email test@test.com

Not Segmenting Your Data

• Not segmenting your data is similar to closing your eyes and randomly throwing money at various advertising mediums. I can’t stress the importance of taking your leads, downloads, revenue and information requests and segmenting by Medium, Search Engines and keywords.

Keeping the Data to Yourself

• Good or bad it’s important to share the data with Stakeholders in the company who need to make decisions with it. Long hours of Crunching number after number in order make the results appear in a certain way will only prolong the ability for the appropriate decision maker to take action.

Measuring Without Purpose

• Before jumping head first into the data, Before creating a Dashboard make sure you sit down with your marketing team to figure out the goals of the appropriate project as well as what metrics they need to report on in order to do their job properly.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

• Analytics is not a priority: In many cases web analytics is often an afterthought and is not implemented during a site launch or during a sponsored/email campaign. Web Analytics needs to be given more priority and should be thought of before any marketing campaigns are implemented so that you can actually quantify the amount of dollars you budgeted and spent for the marketing.
   
• The right stakeholders are not getting the right data: If the same dashboard is given to every person involved with your online strategy then you’re not allowing them to make informed business decisions which affect their part of the overall plan. Customized reporting is an absolute must – show the Marketing Manager leads (SEO vs. PPC), show the online marketing team keyword referrals/ROI by source, show the CEO/CFO sales and revenue numbers, show the IT Team Site Errors/Traffic Spikes and show the usability team barriers within conversion funnels.
   
• Too much data and not enough resources: In both the In-House and Agency worlds there becomes a time where analysts are simply bombarded with so many requests that they simply can’t keep up. Web Analytics is an extremely important tool used to show the performance of a business and how to best tweak your business’s performance, so WHY NOT add some more resources to it.
   
• Tough to find good analysts: It is difficult to find analysts who have the technical ability to implement a training solution but also have the marketing savvy to know what recommendations to offer once the data has been collected. However, there are a few good ways to train a new analytics analyst: Get them involved with the SEO/PPC teams so they better understand the business, Give them a mix between reading and scenario based training, give them some work to do which is out of their comfort zone, work with them through an analysis or deliverable, send them to SEMPhonic for some analytics training, and finally see if they’re still passionate after all of this.

Originally Published at: Web Analytics World

• Constantly Reading, Sucks: Providing course material to your trainees is important but don’t overload them with constant reading. There will come a time where their ability to absorb content through line and lines of text will simply run out. I suggest mixing up the textual content with audio and video, additionally I recommend you introduce scenario based training. Scenario based training is way for trainees to get their hands dirty with tasks that they will face on a day to day basis. If you’re providing training for an agency or even in-house training, create tasks that are related to current issues that the company is facing, you never know what kind of innovative ideas some fresh minds could come up with.
   
• Create a Relationship: When you’re training someone it’s important that you create an open door policy right from the start so that your student(s) can approach you with any questions related to the training program or search marketing in general. Throughout the training program, schedule some regular time with your students to ask them how they’re doing with course material. This will keep the students stay engaged with the training program and help you design a course which is custom rather than "cookie cutter." 
   
• Get Feedback: Your search marketing training program is not going to be perfect right off the bat and it may not be perfect for a while, but the idea is to continually tweak your program with feedback from the people who are undertaking the training. Whether it’s your clients or your co-workers, it’s important to get their comments/suggestions in-relation to the course content, their ability to understand the concepts, the level of difficulty of the material and the relevancy of the course material to real-life business situations.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

• Domain Age: The age of your domain can have an affect in the way search engine determine authoritativeness for your site. Theoretically, the longer the domain has been active, the more value it receives from search engines. Webconfs has a great tool for calculating the age of your domain and your competitors’ http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.
• Search Engine Visibility: Take your vertical’s main keyword basket and analyze how visible your site is compared to its competitors in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL. Comparing the number of top X rankings can give you a sense of your keyword market share.
• Site Traffic: This one is difficult to compare unless you have access to your competitors’ analytics, however Compete.com’s search analytics does a fairly decent job of providing some insight.
• In Bound Link Quality: Using a combination of Yahoo Site Explorer and a batch PageRank checker you can begin to determine the quality of back-links for a given domain. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.
• In Bound Link Anchor Text: The quality of links is partially based on the theme of the linking site as well as the anchor text that is linking to you. Image or branded links aren’t as high quality as keyword rich links. http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php
• Meta Tags: This maybe considered simplistic and old school but meta description and title tags are still important in SEO. Analyzing description and title tags can help you determine which competing sites best differentiate themselves as well as the messaging the site is providing visitors.
• Paid Search Campaigns: On the other side of the fence their is sponsored campaigns and a tool like SpyFu can give you some insight on PPC competitors and keyword costs.
• Blogs: Got a blog? Check out Blog Juice from Text Link Ads, which looks at Bloglines, Alexa and Technorati to compute a "juice" score.

[Manoj]: Can you give me a brief overview of the trends you think the search marketing industry will see this year?

[Jeffrey Pruitt]:

1) Convergence of Search and Display
As advertising becomes more and more digitized, we will see a changed landscape over the next few years. Non-Premium inventory (not on first page) served from contextual like products:
 

• Site-Targeting
• Content Ads
• Display type ads
• Video Ads
• Display retargeting
   

• Video Uploading: the process of publishing videos to video search engines on a per vide basis (most popular)
• RSS media: Require submission of content via xml
• Video Crawler: actively crawl the web for video content

Agencies can further monetize their offerings by utilizing video optimization as a formal service line which includes optimization, creative build, tracking and reporting.

Publishers are innovating video ads through engaging, rich media experiences that do not turn off customers. Interactive Ads on Yahoo or In Video Ads served within the creative content of videos on Google (Adsense) are going to become frequently used advertising formats.

Publishers are innovating video ads through engaging, rich media experiences that do not turn off customers. Interactive Ads on Yahoo or In Video Ads served within the creative content of videos on Google (Adsense) are going to become frequently used advertising formats.

[Manoj]: How will marketers have to adjust their budgets to compensate for the upcoming changes?

[Jeffrey Pruitt]:Some of the budgets will be pulled from traditional sources. More and more you will see advertisers relying on performance marketing, especially if there is an economic down turn. Understanding these trends will help drive this change.

[Manoj]: How important is it to understand all the online touch-points of your visitors?

[Jeffrey Pruitt]: Very important. Everything on line starts with research of your customers and what journey’s they have both off line and on-line. Search sits at the center of digital and the insight that can be gained from Search and then utilized across the marketing mix is endless.

[Manoj]: What are some sessions as at SES New York that you recommend attendees should check out?

[Jeffrey Pruitt]:
MONDAY

• Redefining the Customer
• Video Made the SMB Star

TUESDAY

• Microsoft Search Tips and tricks for delivering great results and campaigns with Live Search
• Earning Money From Contextual Ads

WEDNESDAY

• Big Brand Search Strategies: Build Connections and Fuel Online Promotions
• Searcher Behavior Research Update
• Ad Exchanges Are Changing Everything

• The SEMPO Survey: 2007 State of the Market
• Video Search Optimization

 Original Post: Web Analytics World

• Leveraging high image rankings: You may have top rankings for your images in both the image results and universal/blended results but what are visitors doing when they arrive at your site? Search Engines such as Google show the exact page where an image resides (after clicking throuh on an image) therefore this is a great opportunity to funnel visitors deeper to your site. The different images queries which refer visitors to your site can help dictate the type of content you should surround your images with.
• Should you freshen up your images? You definitely should. Similar to textual content, keep visitors coming back with images that continue to match the visitor’s query (and intent). The most important point is to maintain the names of the images as well as the textual content within the alt attribute.
• The ROI on Video: Video is an excellent way to promote your brand and services to visitors but how do you know when a given video has maxed out its potential. I recommend checking out trends for views, comments and clickthroughs (and again what visitors are doing after the click through). These trends should help show whether or not the video is still engaging visitors. If you are seeing the trends flat-line you know it’s time to add some new content.
• Visitors know what they like to watch: If you’re thinking about enhancing your video strategy with some fresh content then I suggest you look to your visitors for help. Look at the comments they leave (if you’ve uploaded YouTube or MetaCafe) and secondly look at your internal search terms. Both of these areas are ways visitors have engaged with your content by providing feed back so why not show visitors what they want?

Bonus Tip*

This next strategy is not directly related to video or images but the concept is something you maybe able to apply elsewhere. I have two travel sites: BC Travel Guide (.ca) and British Columbia Tours (.com) and I am looking to rank highly for "Kelowna" or "Kelowna British Columbia." So I created a Kelowna themed page on each site, both with keyword rich content, interlinking and images. The results are too early to tell but this allows me to test the level of authority per domain, the return per domain and the potential for having 2 sites rank highly for a few phrases.

Karl, from what I have heard and read there are a plethora of Search Marketing Jobs available at this time. For both Employers and Job Seekers it can be quite overwhelming to figure where to post/look for jobs in search marketing. Below are a list of resources to Find the right person or to Find the right online marketing career:

• CrunchBoard (from TechCrunch): The CrunchBoard job board gives you access to millions of technology and business savvy readers of TechCrunch and other top technology blogs. CrunchBoard is permanently linked from these sites.
   
• Marketing Pilgrim Job Board: This job board reaches an audience specialized in search marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, web design & development, and many other Internet marketing skills.
   
• Web Analytics Association Job Listings: Search Marketing and Web Analytics jobs powered by the Web Analytics Association.
   
• Jobs in Search: Jobs In Search is a specialist international job site advertising Jobs and Careers within the Search Engine Industry.
   
• SEO Services Marketplace (from SEOMoz): The SEOmoz Marketplace is the single best resource for finding quality SEO companies, employees, jobs & contracts.
   
• SEO Jobs Gaolore: Oaseo: The primary goal of Oaseo is to serve as a vibrant job community for the growing numbers of search engine optimization and marketing professionals and employers throughout the U.S and eventually, hopefully the world.
   
• SEMPO Job Board: SEMPO is an industry organization designed to promote search engine marketing in general.
   
• MarketingJobs.com: Sales and Marketing Jobs across the US.
   
• SEOConsultatnts.com Jobs: A highly targeted audience and have a high rate of filling job positions in the search engine marketing industry. Review our listings of SEO jobs and careers below. SEO help wanted ads posted here are current as of 2007 November 04, Sunday.
   
• Web Analytics Jobs (Web Analytics Demystified): A Site Dedicated To Making Web Analytics Professionals More Successful.
   
• American Marketing Association – Job Listings: Job Board from American Marketing Association
   
• Ad Age Talent Networks: Marketing Resource for Job Seekers and Employers.

• Search Engine Watch: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
• ASK Enquiro: How Can I Optimize My Videos?
• Matt Cutts: optimize for search engines or users Google video
• More Matt Cutts: SEO Answers on Google Video
• Lancer Media: Optimize Videos For Search Engines
• Antezeta: 8 Ways to Optimize Video and Multimedia for Top Search Engine Visibility
• Digg: Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines
• Search Marketing Standard: Optimizing Your Video Pages in 10 Easy Steps
• Top Rank Blog: Optimizing for Video Search Engines
• Fatham SEO: SEO, Video Search Engine Optimization
• Persona Non Gravy: Optimizing Video for Natural Search
• Reel SEO: Basic Tips for Optimizing Video content for Search Engines
• Aus SEO: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
• Rise Rep: Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines
• 10 Golden Rules Blog: Optimizing Multimedia Files for "Blended or Universal Search"

Top 10 Video Competitors – From Compete.com