It has been brought to my attention that Google released earnings last month (well, it was April so it’s normal, I don’t know why I didn’t check myself). And, as expected, they’re doing pretty well, in fact $3.4 billion in just the first quarter of this year… Can you imagine that kind of money? Simple to do the math and come to around $37 million a day. And most of that is from online advertising, AdWords and AdSense.

So basically people throw money at Google to be listed there on the first page with their products and services which by a logical deduction means you should too right? Well, no, that would be following the crowd and that’s stupid. Sure, if you’re a multi-national with a million-dollar advertising budget, you probably should do it, but if you’re a small to medium business maybe that’s not the first step. I mean, 80 percent of searches are research (aka no money for you in it). However, the rule with Pay Per Click ads is that if you get a Return On Investment of over 1% you should do it anyway. I have friends who manage campaigns of around 1000euros a month but in some times of the year (easter, christmas, etc) spend in excess of 10000euros in one day because in that one day returns are through the roof. And ads give you a bit of exposure as well. But my point here is that you should first get organic results so that you don’t pay for EVERY SINGLE CLICK. Also, it’s a proven fact that people researching are less prone to click on ads than the same result in the normal search, which is why you need to be in normal search as well. And to back that up, let’s set up a poll:

An iProspect survey showed that 60.5% of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL users selected a natural search result over a paid search result as the most relevant on a sample query. 60.8% of Yahoo! and 72.3% of Google users chose a natural search result as the most relevant. Also, studies by Enquiro and iProspect revealed that 60.5% to 70.0% of users trust organic results while only 30% to 39.5% of users trust paid results.

Also, apparently there was a tool last year that Google uses to determine the actual value of a click. And, low and behold, it seems top rankings in Google are worth a lot more that a PPC ad… it’s called GG score and apparently Matt Cutts said it is an internal Google tool to prioritize the importance of a customer. Here’s a screenshot of the tool, and no, you can’t have it.

And well, the purpose of this is to convince yourselves that organic search is very important and pretty much worth it. I mean think about it, would you want the $1 PPC ad, or the $30 of value the organic search brings? I think we both know the answer. As always, comments are welcome and do fill out the survey

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It’s very nice to see that search engines are now thinking of incorporating ways of detecting spam by smart things such as usability criteria, thus forcing webmasters to rethink the way their site works.

And, since I’ve always been a preacher of optimizing your website for usability as well, I enjoy the fact that search engines are now pretty much forcing you to. More particularly, search engines are preparing to analyze website clutter and see whether a page is for example <strong> full of ads </strong> like a web portal, or basically optimized against ease of use.This is based on a patent application which you can find at this website and which discusses the “QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF WEB PAGE CLUTTER THAT ACCOUNTS FOR SUBJECTIVE PREFERENCES”.

Well, onwards. I personally feel that this is not only targeted for search engines but advertisers all around, since it addresses usability from an advertising maximization point of view:

It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages it is desired to monetize. [...].

If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be jeopardized. One conventional indication of whether a web page is easy and pleasing to use is called ‘clutter.’

What this means is increase the usability and you will get better conversions, and also become more valuable to the search engines themselves by serving up good content. In the patent we get an example of factors which influence this clutter and they are (in no particular order):

• Total number of links
• Total number of words
• Total number of images (non-ad images)
• Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
• Dimensions of page
• Page area (total)
• Page length
• Total number of tables
• Maximum table columns (per table)
• Maximum table rows (per table)
• Total rows
• Total columns
• Total cells
• Average cell padding (per table)
• Average cell spacing (per table)
• Dimensions of fold
• Fold area
• Location of center of fold relative to center of page
• Total number of font sizes used for links
• Total number of font sizes used for headings
• Total number of font sizes used for body text
• Total number of font sizes
• Presence of “tiny” text
• Total number of colors (excluding ads)
• Alignment of page elements
• Average page luminosity
• Fixed vs. relative page width
• Page weight (proxy for load time)
• Total number of ads
• Total ad area
• Area of individual ads
• Area of largest ad above the fold
• Largest ad area
• Total area of ads above the fold
• Page space allocated to ads
• Total number of external ads above the fold
• Total number of external ads below the fold
• Total number of external ads
• Total number of internal ads above the fold
• Total number of internal ads below the fold
• Total number of internal ads
• Number of sponsored link ads above the fold
• Number of sponsored link ads below the fold
• Total number of sponsored link ads
• Number of image ads above the fold
• Number of image ads below the fold
• Total number of image ads
• Number of text ads above the fold
• Number of text ads below the fold
• Total number of text ads
• Position of ads on page

We also find that the purpose of this algorithm is to screen websites that would require a lot of time for people to review manually and the results would be subjective anyway. There were also a few accompanying diagrams but i was unable to make them show up in my browser so here’s the link to try for yourselves. I hope you have enjoyed this, it’s a really important checklist to consider when designing (or redesigning) a web page.

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As I said yesterday, many companies enter the web without a clue of why they do it. Some enter so customers can find them, some to show off products and add pretty pictures of them in a vain hope that the customers don’t know how to use a camera, some even to cope with people always losing service manuals and CDs. But very few do it to connect to the customer in this new age and in this new field.

People tend to think that traditional marketing and online marketing are one and the same. And while it is understandable (many people still do not understand what good the internet is for business) it is in no way acceptable. It’s like going to rob a bank with an 9th century mace, you’re going to get your head blown off… Methods are antiquated and media is changing. The so called new media is making up ground to the old school mediums. Radio is dead, TV is dying and newspapers are used to mask cars for paintjobs. The world is changing, and as pointed out in a million cases so far, the choice is change or die.

Let’s take TV for example. With the advent of modern technology, digital TV especially, you would expect TV stations to begin offering clients more features for their TV, like choosing which episode to view, and at any hour, as many times as they want. However, all that TV does is give you half an hour of ads, then a fragmented movie from 1996, and follow it with bland sensationalist news to wash off the ads. So what happened? TiVo happened. A true revolution for the American market, TiVo put content in the hands of the viewers, and with legal backing (timeshifting is now legal, as it should be) it gave the networks a scare. Why? Because people did what they wanted to TV. They could record shows, skip ads and even download content off the Internet to view it on the TV. They took control, and made TV what they wanted. So now networks are pissed off and can’t do anything about it. However, take TiVo, and now compare it to the PirateBay… There is no doubt in my mind that more shows are downloaded every day from trackers than there are shows recorded to all TiVos in a week… And what that means is that TV is dying. Even with timeshifting, you can’t beat the simplicity of Internet downloading. And why pay when you can get them for free…

The Internet is the future, no doubt about that. The only thing the will remain of traditional TV will be the big screen. Otherwise centralized content providers should rethink their strategies fast…

But forget TV, let’s think of a regular company. Say I have Joe Inc. who sells hot dogs on the corner of 2nd and Main. He heard that everyone is now building themselves websites, to let customers know where his HQ is and how to email him for an order. While this in itself is quite pointless for poor Joe, he feels he needs to because everyone else is doing it. And this is perhaps the most common marketing error possible. And costly. So Joe made himself a website, and it went ok. The blackberry he used to keep track of emails cost a bunch and the web design services, hosting and all that cost a bit, but he did have customers say they came to buy hot dogs from him because they found the website. He even got some buzz since it was a freaky idea. But pretty soon others copied the idea and Joe’s site started costing more than it made. And if anything, this heightened competition around him. Also, Joe didn’t have the time to maintain the site so it pretty much died down, since he didn’t want to pay outrageous fees for the site.

Enter SEO. Now, if Joe had given the website a moment of thought beforehand, a lot of costs would have been reduced. Firstly, he could have thought what advantages the website brings him in the first place. He’s in a neighborhood with good business and clients are loyal. His products are of a good quality, and he gets many referrals. He just heard that the Internet can bring him more money but ended up diving into his profits. Also, because he failed to read his email one day he had a very angry baseball coach arrive at his stand expecting to pick up 75 hot dogs, when there were none waiting for him, just a long queue and a buss full of hungry kids. So, in a sense the extension complicated Joe’s business and created dissatisfied customers.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean Joe did a stupid thing, only that he should have thought about it. The website with the contact info is always a good thing, but he should have adopted an SMS form rather than an email form, which would have produced smaller costs in the end and a more reliable measure, keeping email only for casual conversations. Also, Joe could have created a brand, since that’s how the Internet works, you need a strong brand to become at least a little famous. Make it Joe’s Dogs, the traditional experience. He could have opened a dialog with his buyers, encouraging them to tell him what they like and what they want, help him build a house of quality to determine what he should invest in next. He could have written a blog about hot dogs, funny facts, stories, and all the things he deals with every day, make the customers feel more connected to the story of the place, not only the products. That’s what makes good marketing. And then, he could have hired an SEO to make all these show up when people search for main hot dogs, or hot dogs funny, and establish a brand that is tied to that field, make people know Joe’s is the way to go, and have a connection to the place.

Too many companies in this age of globalization have bland, boring messages (or none at all) targeted at their customers and we need a story to feel attached to any of them. Apple is the big company it is because it sometimes listens to customers, makes interesting things (although not that unique - just designed better visually) and because it has the whole “think different” approach. The Macbook air is NOT the world’s thinnest laptop. There have been at least two other attempts which have been thinner and probably plenty which were just a bit less thin. But they made the whole manila envelope thing, and people were astonished. It’s no longer a thin laptop, it’s a laptop thin enough to come from an envelope. Think of all the hours of showing off at the office when you drop the envelope on the table and pull the laptop out. Apple has created more than a laptop (and not a very good one at that - they forgot a few bits…), a product worth discussing.

And here is why I try to use the word SEO less frequently. It has become a target word for people not understanding what we do. It’s been attacked, and it’s been defined in a million ways. The seo is bullshit guy even went to compare SEOs to lawyers, and well, there’s more to SEO than SEO if I can say so. Online marketing however, is a different thing. It’s knowing what to do when Joe makes that website. It’s knowing how to pitch it and to who and through which channels. There’s no point in having a flash game designed by Ernst and Young, their clients don’t have time for games. But a Vista sidebar widget for stocks, that would be a nice idea. Target the proper client.

As for my last disparate idea, it’s about using the right tools for the job. The Internet is a new medium, and therefore requires new marketing tools. I was having a discussion a few weeks ago to the brand manager for Procter&Gamble Balkans (responsible for about 13 countries or so for the Pampers brand) and talking about what SEO can do for them. As a result to this, I examined the Pampers website which is out of 1980. It uses frames, it has cluttered text, and a very very busy homepage, not a very clear structure of the navigation, and basically is ancient. They don’t even have an email address for contact. And this got me thinking, how in the world can a brand so large, with millions of dollars in marketing budget, not have a decent site? Can’t they afford to pay 5000$ for a amazingly awesome site? Yes they can. Can’t they afford to spend some time devising some online content? Well, they can hire people. Don’t they realize that this is destroying their brand, making them look antiquated and outdated? No. We also discussed the other side of SEO, damage control, where basically people get screwed over by the company and they get pissed off and start a crusade against it. And they’re still using posts on forums for that. They’re P&G, they have money to buy all the hits for a search term and all they do is post on forums. Not taking control over the forums, not making your own centralized forum where you can assess this instantly and reward it.

I’m not sure you know the x box story, where a gamer sent an autographed console for repairs and when he got it back the signature and artwork was washed off. And instead of ignoring him, like Microsoft could have done, they didn’t. Bungie, creators of the game, sent him a bag full of goodies, including a helmet signed by most of the guys there, and Microsoft responded too, by sending him a new x box, signed by all of the guys at the department, and even freaking Bill Gates. That is the Internet, connection to people, making your customers feel ecstatic through small gestures that cost you less than damage control. And see, now I’m making the Microsoft and Bungie brands grow by writing this, and it’s at no cost to them. All they spent was an x box and some time, and now look at it, it’s an internet phenomenon…

So online marketing is a big thing, and many people still don’t use it. And of those, many use it improperly. It’s incredible how in this age marketing isn’t everywhere, and how big companies squander away their brand by not investing in it…

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There have been some comments from the opposers of SEO that it’s only a trend, that it’s going to fade because it’s artificial. But there are two arguments against those opinions.

The first is that SEO is definitely not artificial. Actually, I’m not sure if you know this but SEO aims to create ORGANIC search results, whereas the artificial way is the old interruption marketing way… SEO aims to build content and make it popular, make websites soar through simple tactics that require lots of skill. In a sense SEO is like a blacksmith in our days. It doesn’t take the most imaginative person to think and even learn how to pound on metal, but only a professional can make a sword… It’s finesse and it’s knowing how to step on a minefield and it’s making sure the people who search for you find you…

As for the second one, that is actually the object of this article. The SEO trend. The phenomenon that has recently picked up momentum and is a web site’s worst enemy and best friend at the same time. Why? Because SEO is the trick up the sleeve of small businesses to outperform millions of dollars of ad campaigns by corporate giants. Some don’t care about their website, some don’t know SEO even exists, but the point is many people are missing out on the web, and there are people like myself who aim to put them on the right track.

But enough advertising, look at the graph below:

You can clearly see how the SEO phenomenon is rising, it’s becoming more and more significant, and you can see that it really picked up in 2008. Also, on the lower part of the graph is the news volume, and you can see that has increased as well. SEO is a field of promise, and the fact that it’s picking up speed is proof that it’s good stuff.

Also, as the field has grown, the number of jobs in that field has also grown. Just take a look at the graph below from indeed.com:

It’s been a long steady growth here as well. And it keeps growing, a trend unbeatable. The market is still young and there are still many many new customers out there just waiting to be asked about SEO.

The truth about SEO is that many customers don’t know what it’s for. There are innumerable firms out there which build a website just for the sake of it… And in a sense it’s ok, have people search for you online… But rather than enter the web without a clue and mess up your brand image I say stay offline and call yourself traditional. The web is an exciting medium, a medium of much promise and potential, but there is also a lot of damage that can be done.

More about this tomorrow

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