Alex Schultz: APIs

Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits are very different. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)

I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

• Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
• When you address a whole market like a category of e-commerce it’s hard to figure out what  the total volume of searches truly are to get the potential addressable market. Sometimes it’s hard to even find all the keywords (esp. if you don’t own your own search)
• Even when you know what the market size is it’s hard to know what % of the potential listings you have if you are looking across a million or more keywords. What sample size should you look at to understand your total market for example?
• Duplicate content issues
• Every large company I know has or has had huge duplicate content issues either with ?ref=’s and ?src=’s etc… etc… and often for valid reasons where folks want to track things properly or change the ordering of a search result.
• Getting deep links at scale to 100MM's of pages
• Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
• Again sites like Yahoo or Craigslist or others have such traffic volumes they can’t really afford existing web tracking products and the free versions don’t scale well plus often you want custom views to understand demographic of traffic by keyword and cross multiple visits etc… this seems inevitably to lead to some kind of in house processing of huge data files.
• optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
• calculating the value of a given potential seo change
• often it’s a trade off of resources to make SEO changes but even the best SEO experts find it hard to put a precise value on kws in the URL vs the difference between 5 and 10% kw density and so on.
• The benefit of owning a huge media vehicle is you can calculate some of this… the detriment is you don’t have full control of the resources so may not get the chance to use them without a clear value of any change
• dealing with international
• wow, content localization especially around navigational terms like “shopping” when you even want to localize the URL can be tricky

So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

• Christine Churchill http://www.keyrelevance.com/ on keyword research using advanced tools at SMX. Top tips:
• Use http://stats.grok.se/ I continually forget about this tool but it’s ace for really detailed keyword research
• Also a great reminder about the recency attribute value pair on Google
• Matt Cutts on the canonical link tag
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
• Rand Fishkin on just about anything but specifically page rank sculpting
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow
• Mark Mahaney http://biz.yahoo.com/a/1/137122.html on the future of the internet
• Mary Meeker on the state of the internet around the world from her numerous web 2.0 presentations
• As someone who led international paid search and affiliate co-ordination and all international internet marketing at facebook I think her analysis of which markets are the most advanced in different internet areas (esp. advertising and ecommerce) are very accurate from my experience.
• Sean Parker from the founders fund/napster/plaxo/facebook talking about viral loops
• if you ever get to listen to him on this topic it’s amazing… he has a really simple description (which I won’t spoil by sharing here) that helps you understand them extremely well.

Yelp linking to Yahoo!

I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of the following las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way): http://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-steer-las-vegas there is a link to Yahoo! local which says:

 

The link is not “no followed” and points to http://local.yahoo.com/NV/Las+Vegas/Food+Dining/Restaurants/Steak+Houses and this yahoo page is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

I looked into a few other verticals and the same thing is happening in Italian restaurants ( http://www.yelp.com/biz/enoteca-san-marco-las-vegas ) and so on:

Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page you see the following results ( https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Flocal.yahoo.com%2FNV%2FLas%2BVegas%2FFood%2BDining%2FRestaurants%2FSteak%2BHouses&bwm=i&bwmo=d ):

All 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages (wherever their main web presence is, be that on Yelp! or a standalone website). I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

One of the most successful viral campaigns on Facebook yet

The election has been a watershed in interactive and social marketing with the first really mainstream multi hundred million dollar use of social media for one campaign. There is a lot to be said about this (beyond hero worshipping Chris Hughes and co.) and I intend to post a few comments about this here.

The best recent completely novel use (that simply couldn’t have existed 4years ago) was run by the causes application. They asked users to donate their statuses to the vote and changed the status to a link and a message to promote an issue in the election or the election itself. Below is a screen dump of how you do it on the causes application.

My understanding is that 5MM plus users donated their status to promote something to do with the election. I am not going to comment on the impact of that on the election but the impact on Causes is incredible. Every one of those status updates (whichever candidates or propositions were being pushed) promoted the causes application. Given the prevalence of status updates in the newsfeed  it is almost certain that every user in the US will have seen the causes application promoted on election day and that real estate was immensely valuable.

There are more ways to game this system and that is in fact a pretty scary spaming opportunity now the idea is out there but this was a truly viral campaign using something that is unique to facebook. Great job causes even if there are debates about whether this is a fair or genuine use of status updates.

How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 - be positive

This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk. Lou Ragg was the moderator which in Vegas was pretty cool.

The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

I essentially had 5 points:

1. alignment
   • You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO
   • Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
2. measurement
   • sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating
   • whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
3. results
   • do something simple and get a result to build credibility…
   • for example a really really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results and doing that and instantly driving the company’s #1 goal is so powerful
4. double down
   • you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert
   • I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
5. share
   • now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

Recovering from the Hack

Getting hacked was one of the most traumatic things that has happened to me since I first launched a website in the 1990s. My traffic was completely pulverized dropping 60% year on year when I had been growing at a nice 20-30% rate, I have lost a tonne of repeat visitors who have lost trust with the site, my search rankings seem to have been adversely affected which really sucks and all of my social media marketing is shot. The bottom line is now that I am over the hack and clean and all the major places that were blocking me have opened up again my traffic is down 20% year on year and roughly 1/3 from where I would have expected it to be.

 

Rebuilding is going to be tough but I am planning to do some of the things I have been holding off of for a long time:

 

   
1. redesign the site – I am stuck in 2004 with design and need to fix
   
2. move the videos back to youtube – revver isn’t worth it for the money any more and youtube generates traffic when used right
   
3. work out a way for users to contribute more easily – cocktailmaking.co.uk has benefited tremendously from users contributing paper airplanes could do so too.

 

Wish me luck in this new endeavor, as always I will try and post progress on the project to this  blog and would be keen to get your advice on how to proceed.

I Got Hacked

So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.

Google spotted this and took the following action:

Which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!

 

The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things  better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works. This is also not the first time I have seen Google funding this kind of abuse.

Affiliates more Profitable than Malware

Sunbelt Blog is a really fascinating blog for anyone who works in the internet industry. As an affiliate I find it a really fascinating blog since the kind of people who produce malware and so on also are often affiliates. In the early days of running my own site I promoted a company who produced a software that when installed on someone's computer replaced ads on any site with their own ads. If someone came to my site, used my bandwidth, read my content they wouldn't see my adverts and wouldn't earn me a penny if they had installed any of this company's software. The company was called Gator and is now called Claria and have been through a number of legal cases on this which means what they do is legal although distasteful to me.

Anyway something that is very common in the malware industry is to get someone to install a piece of software that does something to your PC in order to get hold of a pornographic video or some other slightly illicit goody. They may hide the fact this download is making you part of a botnet but in the latest example shown on the sunbelt blog they get you to download google pack. The 2 incredible parts of this is that the Google affiliate program is paying more than malware pays and that what appears to be a relatively experienced naughty group would risk attacking an affiliate program. Usually these programs are on top of their affiliates enough that they would catch this, stop it and would simply not pay the affiliate. I wonder why Google appeared an easy target. Was the payout big enough to be interesting, the conversion to Google pack so great that it was worth doing or does Google not have a great affiliate fraud monitoring system in place yet?

Tickle.com - impressive revenue generator

I am a little bit of a sucker for anything that makes me feel clever and so for the first time in a very long while I clicked on a banner ad yesterday. The advert took me to tickle.com and an IQ test.

This IQ test was pretty cool and took 12 pages to complete. Once I had completed the test it through me into a string of 6 co-brand sign ups before I got the results of my test. Each page carried 3 cpm banners from rotating sources. I can get a $1cpm so I expect they should be able to get the same or better. Just the banner ads earned them $0.036 from me doing the test. Each of the 6 cobrands make >$1 per sign up so again low balling it let's say 1 in 10 signs up to only 1 that's another $0.1 a visitor from one test their earning is at least $0.14 and they claim almost 0.5billion tests served, that's $70MM in revenue with the conservative estimates above.

This however isn't the end of the game. Today I received the following email:

Another smart move, I clicked and visited their site, being pushed through multiple pages of co-brand sign ups again, returning to the site and being merchandized a bunch of other pretty cool looking tests, which the internet marketer side of my brain stopped me from taking but I strongly considered.

Tickle.com is owned by Monster.com so it isn't that surprising that they are really professional and good at what they do but it's pretty cool to see such a smoothly operating affiliate/cpm business model out there where arbitrage traffic purchasing is a real opportunity. Great job Tickle.com and keep it up.

Awesome Discovery

A friend from work accidentally opened my eyes wide last week at eBay live in Boston by creating a potential new design for my cocktail recipes website.

The eye opening event was using some stock photography from iStockPhoto (an example of which is above). The concept of iStockPhoto is simple photographers and designers offer up licences to use their photos and designs through iStockPhoto for a small fee and people like me can buy them for PPT use, posters (up to 500k reprints) and websites. The photo above cost me $1 and I just integrated another $1 photo into my facebook app newsfeed posts to have an even greater impact when my news feed stories appear.

I am a terrible designer but a pretty good coder. I thought my websites would forever be doomed to look rubbish because of this but now thanks to iStockPhoto I have hope. Look for improvements in the future and even new projects!