ComTech News

And Yahoo Deserves it too!

You bet they do, so what is this all about?  It is about Googles new customized search program that allows users to build their own search engines.  The bigger issue is that if you are an adSense Publisher you can then display your adSense on the results page.

So how is this a punch in the face to Yahoo and just why do they deserve it?

Simple because on August 7th Yahoo Released "Yahoo Search Builder" and beat Google to the punch so to speak in allowing a real customized search engine to be built by anyone.  The custom search relied on Yahoo results but was customized by allowing users to include up to 25 sites that would be listed first in the results or restricting results to only that group of sites.  

The biggest problem was (and still is by the way), that there was no way for anyone to monetize this by linking the results to Yahoo Publisher.  To make matters worse if I built one of these custom engines and my users did a search with it they left my site and ended up on Yahoo.  So I sent my visitors off site and made no money.  Not exactly a win-win scenario is it?

When this occurred it prompted me to write two articles in what I consider Yahoo's self destructive behavior.  They were,

Is Yahoo Crazy

Followed up by

Yahoo Is Crazy  - In this second piece I quoted a member of the Yahoo Search Blog who responded to my comments on their failure to link Yahoo Search Builder to the Publisher Program with the following,

From Ariel at the Yahoo Post about Search Builder: "Actually, yes! Stay tuned. In the meantime, if you have some ideas/thoughts that would make for a killer integration of Search Builder with Yahoo! Publisher Network please let us know"!

My response was, "just do it".  Yet no, they never "just did it" and still till this day I have "stayed tuned" waiting for the ability to get really creative with my sites and especially those that really maximize contextual advertising. 

I had a few other issues with Yahoo's program.  Listing them all together in order of priority they were,

1.  The lack of any monetization
2.  The lack of ability to easily display the results on your own website and customize the look of the results page.
3.  The lack of ability to allow for user input and suggestion of sites for inclusion (community building)
4.  To choose if one of your sites were specified or simply given priority

Well along comes Google just a bit over two months later with Google's Custom Search Engine program which is part of Google Co-op.  I want you to think about my above four criticisms of the Yahoo Program as you read these four Bullet Points right off of the Google Page Announcing this new program, they are,

"What you can do with a Custom Search Engine?

1.  Place a search box and search results on your website.
2.  Specify or prioritize the sites you want to include in searches.
3.  Customize the look and feel to match your website.
4.  Invite your community to contribute to the search engine."

So am I some marketing genius that I figured out the exact formula Google would use when they countered the Yahoo program?  Hell no!  This is common business sense.  

Consider that if you are either Google or Yahoo you should know that your most savvy users with the biggest web presence are your contextual ad partners.  You should know that they have the largest ability to take a product like custom search and get it out into the market and turn it into a profit center for you.  

Honestly this is really simple, Yahoo focused on the one user, the creator who would build an engine for their own personal daily use or the little personal web site owner that wanted a few gadgets for his 20-30 daily visitors.  Nice thought!  Nothing wrong with that but it won't make any major impact on the market, besides if you make the product so that publishers CAN implement it the individual user can still use it as well, you loose nothing but gain everything.

Google however, thought about the market place and how they could find more ways into it.  They thought about how they could stem the advancement of thousands of tiny niche search engines that combined could take away 2-5% of the market in time (knowing in 10 years 2% will be billions of dollars) by making them partners rather then competitors.

Think about it, if you wanted your own search engine, one you could own and sell your own ads on did Yahoo or Swicki give you any real reason not to build one?  Using them you had two choices

1.  Give your traffic to Yahoo for free with some ability to customize the results - not much of a choice

2.  Get more control with a Swicki but have to split your adSense money THREE WAYS.  Yes three between, Google, Eurekster and You.  Further you could not customize the results page at all and often adSense results display Public Service Ads even on Eurekster pages for very competitive terms. - not much better

Now let's look at this major blow that Google has delivered to Yahoo and all competitors for that matter.

With this new program by Google I can do all of the above and really do it far better then I could even with a bunch of venture capital money.  I can do it on my own with no specialized programmers and I can do it in any niche I choose.

"Wait", I hear you yelling at your screen, "what about selling ad space"?  Well simple with Googles "Advertise on this Site" feature you can even customize that.  Yes folks Google just delivered a free customizable search engine, with instant monetization, the ability to fully control the results, fully complete with waiting advertiser dollars and punched Yahoo square in the face!

And yes Yahoo deserves it!  Yahoo could have delivered a solution like this long ago but instead they stood hands at their sides while the blow was delivered.  Yahoo stock holders should be asking why.  I myself wonder why.  Is this self destructive behavior, lack of vision or simply a poor decision?  I don't know but this is one of those fights where an onlooker can have little sympathy for the looser.

I have been called a "Yahoo Hater" as of late for pointing these things out and I want to end here by stating that I am not at all.  I really like a lot of things Yahoo does I just feel in this case they had the opportunity to make a simple adjustment and define themselves in a really unique way, to gain the incumbency in a new emerging market and they dropped the ball.  Anyone could have seen this coming, plenty did and practically screamed, "watch out", all while Yahoo took it firmly on the jaw.  

My fear is while not down for the count, Yahoo is going to spend a lot of time on the canvas for not making the right move on this one and honestly they have no one to blame but themselves.

More Info on Google Custom Search

- Google Custom Search on Google Co-op
- Announcement on the Jensense Blog
- Announcement on the Google Blog
- Search Engine Watch Blog Report on Google Custom Search

Technorati Tags: google, yahoo, seo, sem, search engine, custom search, personalized search, search engines, yahoo publisher, google adsense, contextual ads, internet marekting, search enging marketing, search marketing

Popularity: 14% [?]

If so Donad Trump and his team have some advice for you.  In a recent blog post by Trump blogger, David Highbloom called, What Belongs in an Electronic Classroom?, David lays out 6 Key Concepts that Trump and his group feel needs to be part of any eLearning Program if it is to be 100% effective.

They are

1.  A variety of media, to allow for learning in different ways through out the day.
2.  An upbeat feel to the course to motivate the student.
3.  The ability to repete lessons and courses
4.  A sense of community
5.  Hands on instructors for some parts of the program with real interaction
6.  Real support to help when you do not understand something

Our staff at ComtechNews happens to be in the early stages of putting together our own program for eLearning and I am happy to state that we had planned from the get go to include some element of each item on this list in our program.  To read such a list from a source like Trump's blog tells us to stay the course on our plans and not to let any element get pushed to the bottom.

I personaly believe that eLearning or Electronic Classes or what ever buzz word is dreamed up to describe this concept is going to be one of the futures strongest technologies.  As people become more focused on specific goals for career, business, specilization and even recreation, electronic learning allows you to learn on your time, at your pace and to focus on what you believe is important.

I don't believe that eLearning will ever fully take over all face to face environments but it will continue to grow and make specialized learning more affordable to more people.  

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: elearning, electronic classroom, donald turmp,   eLearning Program, future technology, business, business development, education, online learning, internet education, online classroom, webinar, electronic education, trump blog

 The orginal Trump Blog Post - What Belongs in an Electronic Classroom?

Popularity: 13% [?]

Well Microsoft just did something really cool for search engine marketers and web masters. They just introduced a new command that you can use to research a website’s link structure. The command LinkFromDomain:domain.com (of course replace domain.com with the domain you want to research).

Doing so will produce a list of all the outbound links MSN has indexed from the domain in question.

Here is an example of this for Comtech News, ComTech News Out Links on MSN. So this show you everyone a site links to vs. everyone linking to a site as with the old command of, linkdomain:domain.com.

Now right on the surface there are some cool uses for this command. Such as if you want to know whom that number one ranked site on Google is linking to and compare it to whom links to them then Google is not your answer. First they won’t show you the out links and second they have been only showing a small portion of back links for a very long time. So in essence this is a great way to look into not only MSNs algorithm but that of Google, Yahoo and even Ask.com as well. Live.com may not be becomming the dominant search engine but it is sure turning into “the source” for competitive data.

Another interesting use is just to take sites you manage, plug them in and see what shows up. Doing so may show you some old links you forgot about that are dated and need to come down or be directed elsewhere. Over time a site grows large and many older sections get forgotten, odds are this will find some broken links, changed target pages, etc and help you do some occasional “spring cleaning”.

Most people would not look deeper then that, but most people are not SEOs fully aware of the real black hat world such as we are! Most people still think black hats are guys using hidden text, key word stuffing and link farms. Well, that is old news and black hats are smarter then the average Joe, this is one way to see if some of the more evil among them have targeted you.

So, what do I mean?

Simple one very little known technique for getting links that the vile scum of internet marketing will employ is placing hidden links on your website to sites they want to optimize. How do they do this? There are a variety of ways but they include writing malicious scripts to find sites with security holes in them and then hacking in and placing a link or several links where they won’t be seen. A sleaze ball working for a web host who collects passwords and usernames or a sleazy scumbag web designer who worked on a site in the past. Honestly there are many ways (more then I can think of) that people can gain access to your site and hide links. This new LinkFromDomain command is a great way to find such links!

How do they hide them?

Well they may simply create a small 1-pixel image that matches a background by color and place it on a page in a blank area and link the image. Most site owners would never see this. Or they could even hack into some of your content including your style sheet and create a style that makes links look like any other text, then tool around and find terms in your content and create links in areas you don’t change often. No one would see them as a link unless they hovered over the word. In a large site many such links could be buried and it could take years for them to be found.

There are more but I think you get the point! I wish Microsoft would add a way to see what page of you site was providing the link, if they are smart they will. Doing so would win them even more friends in the SEO and web design world.

Now here is something you really need to be aware of to use this function properly and find any scum links in your sites.

The biggest offenders in this world are “adult sites”, read that porn. So if you want to really see everything that your site is linking to make sure you click on “options” at the top of the search results and turn off filtering, if you don’t you won’t see any links to adult content and those scummy links won’t be found.

To me this command could become the salesperson’s or consultant’s best friend, when meeting with a client. If you can find such scummy links and inform a new prospective client about them on their site you will go a long way toward gaining their trust and their business. This is sure one way to cut the legs out from under a less informed competitor.

So are there any other uses for this command that you can think of? To me there is a whole cookie jar to be explored here,

Popularity: 14% [?]

Ok today here is a bit of free advice that may be worth far more then the cost! Recently I found a really awesome domain name that fit a project my son wants to roll out perfectly. I slapped up some ugly content and gave it some links just to get it in the engines and get it some links. Some of the links were on PR5 pages and I figured that would be that. Now it took only a few days to be in Yahoo and MSN and even got into ASK.com really fast too. Yet it is still a month later not in Google!

Why not? Well checking Yahoo Site explorer I see lots of pages that were indexed for it in the past that have sub tracking urls that include things like, /?mortgages.php and /?homeloans.php and /?health insurance So what's the deal? This domain expired and was not grabbed because it has been banned by Google. Don't ask what the domain is because it is a really cool niche and my son has yet to build the site so I won't be giving it away to someone who will move faster.

The lesson is though now I have to beg google to unban the domain for sins I never commited. So when you are buying a new domain you should check to see if it is in any engines and it if is in Yahoo but not Google beware. It does not mean it is a banned domain but it sure could be. I have always checked for this when I am grabbing a domain about to expire but I never bothered with a domain you are just grabbing with a normal service.

From now on I will check into it. Next time you see that super domain that you just can't believe is still around just know there might be a reason it is sitting there. If I had it to do again I would buy this domain anyway because it is a great domain but being banned by Google before you even get started is a smack in the face, so just be aware of it,

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: google, seo, sem, search engine marketing, yahoo, msn, search engine

Popularity: 11% [?]

Lee Odden just posted the following at his blog.  I find this very interesting and it looks like PRLeap.com is about to get a lot more news being submitted to its free press release service.

Big news from PRWeb’s David McInnis to all PRWeb account holders last night. Free press release distribution will cease as of Oct 23rd. The new packages are as follows:

SEO - $80

This is the distribution level that has set the standard for search engine optimized press release distribution for the last five years. In order to provide a difference for our $80 users, we’re making some clear changes we believe will provide beneficial differences between SEO and the next level.

• To reduce noise, we’re creating a dedicated page for our $80 product. Less competition on the page means more visibility.
• We’re also streamlining the submission process for this level, reducing the time it takes to upload your press release on PRWeb.

SEO with Social Media - $120

This package incorporates all of the SEO features from the “SEO” distribution, plus all of PRWeb’s social media features including our patent pending TrackBacks/PingBacks and PR Tag Clouds. Other features available at this level include Technorati tagging, “Quotables,” and social bookmarking. (If you haven’t taken advantage of these new features, I encourage you to turn them on. Your press releases’ performance improvement can be significant). Also look for your release in Pheedo’s RSS and Blog network. First-page positioning on PRWeb is guaranteed the day of your release.

Advanced Online Visibility - $200

This distribution option gives you access to all of the enhanced SEO and social media functionality, coupled with new tools including our exclusive eBook creation utility and our newly enhanced statistics. We have spent the last year re-thinking and re-vamping the way we measure online visibility. Our Advanced Online Visibility program gives you incisive leadership in your media campaigns, the broadest toolset and the very best positioning on PRWeb.com.

Popularity: 39% [?]

I have always been annoyed by the fact that the titles of word press blogs always seem to end up “Blog Title - Post Title”. (in other words this post would appear in search engines and blog services listed as, “Comtech News - Simple Word Press Modification”) Yes I was annoyed but not enough to bother looking at it.

Then the other day I was screwing around on Digg and found an artile on ten great word press plugins. One was called Optimal Title and it promised to fix my issue and make my titles read “Post Title - Blog Title”. So like a typical lazy blogger I downloaded it and started to read the installation instructions and when I did it became obvious that the plugin would work fine but was not needed, I felt like a dolt it was so simple to just modify the title code in the header. LIKE DUH!

To be fair to myself I don’t know php coding very well (read that I pay others to write any and all code for me and fear mucking around with it much). So I made a copy of the header text, which is always a good idea and tried the modifications and figured if I screwed it up I could just drop the orginal code back it.

If you are afraid to muck with your code like me, don’t worry this one is simple enough.

First, Go into your admin section and click on “presentation” then on “theme editor” and select “header.php” as your file to edit. Copy the entire text and paste it into a note pad file and SAVE IT so you have a back up incase you screw up something.

Second you will see something that looks like this a few lines down in the header.php file

Even if you almost never mess with code this is so simple you probally know what to do next, yep you got it just swap the two php include commands to look like this,

So now if you look at any individual post in our blog you will see at the top of your browser the title of the post comes first. In our case this theme also had a command that brought in the word archive for any post over a certain number of days old. I removed that command so now the titles are short and simple!

If you doubt your ability to make this modification give it a try trust me if you can install a Word Press blog and manage it you can handle this one. Also as long as you always make a back up of the file you can be sure you can fix any screw up and not loose your prior modifications.

So why do you want to do this anyway?

1. No matter what anyone tells you title tags DO still effect ranking. And the order of the words in the title tag also effect rankings. The effect is MINOR but with blogs you rank so many odd and “long tail terms” this little mod could easily bring you several thousand extra visits a year just from rank improvements. This is assuming your blog is active and has links, etc. It won’t fix a blog that sucks but it will make a decent one better.

2. Search Engines and Blog Syndication Services will often use that title tag when they display a link to your post. Also they often will cut the title at 6 words. So consider you are looking for ways to improve your iPod in a search and you see a result that says, “Comtech News, Great Way to Enhance” your odds of clicking that link are lower then Great Way to Enhance Your iPod - Comtech”. See the difference?

3. Blog feeds are used both for good and evil purposes. Such as someone may take your feed and add it to one of their pages because they value it or some spammer may scrape your feed and the feeds of others to create spam blogs (splogs) and there is little you can do to influence either. One way or another it is links for you in MOST situations. So you want those links to always get your best key words in them.

So give this simple modification a try if you are hosting your own Word Press Blog, heck it just looks better everywhere your posts show up and it will help your marketing results as well.  Anyone else know of a similar easy modification for a Word Press Blog?

Technorati Tags: word press, wordpress, blog, blogging, php, seo, sem, internet marketing, search engine optimization, blog optimization, blog modifications

Popularity: 11% [?]

Could it be? Is MSN.com really first in search? Well, yep you bet they are at least according to Google that is!

Let me explain becaue this is a cute little occurance but it doesn’t mean in any way that Microsoft is winning the search engine war. However, it is kind of funny and there is a huge SEO lesson in it for us to learn.

First, here is what I mean if you run a Google Search for the term “search” you will find that Google ranks MSN Search number one of about 8.9 Billion other websites and they only rank themselves number 3. You can view the result here, MSN First for Search On Google.

Just incase it changes anytime soon here is a screen shot of the google result I took at the time that I authored this post.

Now like I pointed out this is kind of cute and all but doesn’t mean Microsoft has the best seach engine just that Google thinks that seach.msn.com is the most relevent site for the word “search” on the internet at this time.

Now, if we want to learn from this we need to ask a one word magic question. Why?

That answer is really simple, Yahoo was always called Yahoo, Google was always called Google and MSN was has always been called MSN Search. See the difference? So what that means is thousands of site owners over the years have linked to the MSN Search Engine and done so with the anchor text of “MSN Search”.

So when you are starting a new site or branding effort you really need to think about what you call anything you are going to attempt to develop links for. I mean you really need to think about what your key branding phrase is going to be, because most of your links will have that in the text. So if you pick some cutting edge abstract concept, you might win an award but your SEO results will be less then stellar.

I would say this alone is a case for advertising companies to work with a good SEO Firm.

There is a second lesson here many people already know but it is kind of interesting to see it driven home this way.

Take a look at this if you search for the word search on each of the major search engines you get the following results for MSN Search…

1. On Google (MSN is ranked #1 for “search”)
2. On Yahoo (MSN is not in top ten for “search”)
3. On MSN Search (MSN is not in top ten for “search”)
4. On Ask.com (MSN is not in top ten for “search”)

Now isn’t that interesting? So whats the deal?

Simple, Google is applying more weight to links in their ranking then any of their competitors. It would actually be more accurate that Google is applying more weight to authoritive links then any of their competitors. So if anyone needed any more proof that links are more important then content to Google I think this is yet another confirmation of that fact.

What do you think about MSN being number one for “search” on Google? Do you think this makes a good case for SEO firms working closely with traditional advertising and branding agencies?

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: msn, google, yahoo, seach, seo, search results, msn search, microsoft, microsoft search, live search, ask.com

Popularity: 12% [?]

Part 3 – No Matter How Good You Are, You Can Be Better.

As soon as you progress in your internet marketing efforts to the point of being able to attract even the most modest amount of traffic to your web sites you need to become familiar with a concept that you simply can not afford to ignore, split testing.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you view it split testing is one of the most ignored concepts today. There are many successful marketers who could be a lot more successful with split testing, if you are a feel good type that wants everyone to be successful I think you would call this unfortunate.

If however, you are like me and you are most concerned with winning in you own specific niches they this is very fortunate. Why? Well, because it means if you do it and your competitors don’t you gain yet another advantage in rising to the top in your space.

So exactly what does spilt testing mean? Most people can answer that question quite well as it simply means to test two pieces of content and measure their results to determine what is most effective. They real question is why should you split test if your content is already successful? The answer is right up there in the subtitle, because you can be better.

The bigger issue is that your sites content is the single piece of your marketing that you have the most control over, that has the largest effect on your over all success. In short no matter how much traffic you have, better conversion will equal more money and while the search engines or your budget can have an impact on your traffic that is somewhat beyond your control you have 100% control of the content on your site so optimizing your conversion is far easier then optimizing your ranking.

Recently I was chatting with Ben Fits (who posts here as part of the Com Tech News Team) via Instant Message told me he was about to buy some split testing software to test a “squeeze page” he was using for attracting opt ins to one of his programs. He was very happy with his up selling results for all the people that opted in to his system but was wondering if he was getting the maximum number of opt ins in the first place.

See Ben is a smart guy and he knows that if he has really optimized his up sell pages to do well then the “gravy” is in the opt in page itself. Consider that a simple 3-5% increase in the initial opt ins can triple his over all revenue. So Ben was going to purchase some split testing software. In many cases software that is specific for split testing is a good idea, like when you are tracking several dozen campaigns at one time but for this simple test Google Analytics was the answer.

Here is what we did.

Google Analytics lets you set up 4 “process funnels” per domain profile. A process funnel simply lets you track users through steps on your site like, step one – step two – step three – step four, etc. Doing this will let you see at which point in your sales process a prospect abandons the process and fails to complete the funnel.

What I advised Ben to do was simply set up two separate funnels. One that started with “test page A” and the other starting with “test page B”. He then simply edited his main advertising page we can all it “test page” and put a simple java script on it that automaticly redirects all traffic to “test page A” and “test page B” at a 50-50 ratio.

Ben had never set up this type of test with Analytics before but was able to completely set it up (including setting up a brand new Analytics Account) in about 15 minutes. So as you can see it is not a very time consuming process.

Now in just a few days of running traffic on this set up Ben will know which version produces better conversion. Note that I said he will know the one that produces better, not think, feel or estimate but actually know.

You see online it does not matter what you, I or any “guru” or “expert”, thinks, feels or believes is best. Reality is reality and we can all look at “Page A” and at “Page B” and we can even agree that we love A and we hate B period. Yet if A produces a conversion rate of 3.5% and B produces a conversion rate of 7.2% all of the sudden what we think does not matter and we learn to love “Page B” because it makes us more money.

So even if your processes are fairly simple and you only have a few steps and choices on your sites you need to have a defined goal and you need to be split testing various ways of leading your visitors toward that goal. This does not have to be complicated but if you are not doing it at all trust me what you don’t know is hurting your efforts.

So what ways can you think of to creatively spit test results with out getting overly complicated or burdening your server with even more software and coding? To me with Google Analytics and a bit a creative thinking most small to mid sized site owners can split test to their hearts content and improve their results just a little bit every day. It is those tiny improvement that over time help you turn your site into a conversion machine.

~ Jack Spirko

Additional Information about Google Analytics

• Google Analytics at your bookstore
• 4 Steps to Site Optimization
• Google Analytics Open to All
• Analytics are Fun
• Ten Minutes with Brett Crosby

Technorati Tags: analytics, google analytics, web site tracking, split testing, seo, sem, internet marketing, google, online marketing, conversion tracking

Popularity: 11% [?]