“First – and understand this, Harry, ’cause it’s very important – not all wizards are good. Some of them go bad.” – Rubeus Hagrid (Harry Potter and the Sourcerer’s Stone)

The world’s most lovable half-giant delivered a very important life message to Harry Potter in the statement above. Fortunately for Harry, he learned this lesson from a friend, rather than learning things the hard way. If only everyone could be so lucky…

To work their magic, SEO strategists make use of a variety of complex and ever-evolving tactics that can be difficult to explain, and even harder for those who are less than web-savvy to understand. To further complicate matters, not all SEO methods and professionals are created equal, and this uneven relationship can make it all too easy for web novices to end up getting scammed.

So put on your Sorting Hats. Here are a few simple rules to help you ensure that you are not one of the unfortunate many to get scammed by dark wizards.

Run away (Disapparate if you can) from:

• Companies that claim that they will optimize your site through “meta tag optimization and submission to the search engines.” It is well known that this tactic will no longer accomplish anything in terms of increasing search engine rankings
• Anyone who guarantees you a certain position in the search engines. Since the search engines run on their own proprietary algorithms, no one can guarantee a particular ranking
• Read fine print. Many companies use questionable tactics to meet their “guarantees”
• Be wary of anyone who won’t tell you what they are doing to your site, or says that they can do all of their work behind the scenes without changing the appearance of your site. The odds are that person is either doing nothing at all or engaging in some risky SEO strategies that can ultimately lead to a penalty for your website

Keep in mind:

• A high ranking is not everything when it comes to measuring SEO success. If you get a top ranking for a keyword phrase that doesn’t deliver relevant traffic to your website, then it has no value to your business. Having a lower ranking for a high converting keyword is far more valuable than being number one for some obscure phrase that no one searches. You and your SEO consultant should work together to find the appropriate keyword phrases for your business
• The SEO consultant you are working with should be concerned about your overall marketing objectives. SEO is just one component of an integrated marketing strategy, so understanding a client’s business is a vital part of any successful SEO strategy
• Be an active participant in the planning phases for your SEO project. Be sure to give frequent feedback on keyword suggestions, copywriting and site architecture recommendations
• Before any work begins, outline a detailed plan for measuring success with your SEO consultant. Specify what metrics will be tracked, what kind of reports will be generated and how often you will hold a review to discuss key accomplishments and next steps

I recently had a client ask me if email marketing was dead. He was interested in considering it as part of his marketing strategy, but he wondered if it was “you know, old, and not effective anymore.”

Au contraire, my friend. Email marketing is alive and well, and still gaining ground as an effective marketing tool. Let’s look at some supporting evidence:

• 73% of email marketers say they are planning to increase email’s priority in their future marketing plans. eROI (2009)
• 50% said they’re more likely to buy products from companies who send them email, whether their purchases are online or at a place of business. – Epsilon “Branding Survey” (Feb 2009)
• 80% of Marketers Report Email Is Strongest Performing Media Buy Ahead of Search and Display. – Datran Media, “Marketing & Media Survey” (2008)
• 44% of email users said email inspired at least one online purchase, and 41% said it prompted at least one offline purchase. – JupiterResearch’s The Social and Portable Inbox (2008)

Pretty impressive stats. I also explained to the client that I had just received an email coupon from a favorite retailer that very morning and was planning to make a purchase on my lunch, as I often do. Seriously, my inbox is liquid gold for retailers.

So knowing that email marketing is alive and well, let’s look at some statistics related to email marketing best practices:

• Get to the Point With Your Subject Line. Emails with shorter subject lines significantly outperform emails with longer subject lines. 38 to 47 characters is the average number of characters that show up in the subject line of 57% of all U.S. email recipients’ email programs. – Epsilon (2009)
• Just Say No to Hump Day. Open rates are highest on Mondays, Tuesdays, and the weekends. – MailerMailer (2008)
• People like email with coffee and sandwiches. A recent eROI study found that 49.4% of marketers testing email find sending mid-day (10am-2pm) to be best, while 31.5% find start of the business day (6AM – 10AM) best.
• Beware of Frequency Freakout. A Jupiter Research Study showed that 40% of respondents stated the #1 reason they stopped subscribing to opt-in emails was because they were getting too many offers. While there is no magic number for how frequently you should send an email, the largest percentage of marketers choose to send weekly.

Wondering how MS’s new search engine Bing has been doing in the month since it launched? Okay, well just pretend that you are…

A not-so-surprising report from J.P. Morgan tells us that the search engine is having trouble swaying people away from their usual search habits. No shocker there, it’s only a month old, and old habits/homepages/installed search toolbars are hard to break. But here are a few interesting highlights from the study:

• 59% of respondents had heard of Bing. Of that group, only 42% had tried it.
• Of the group that had tried Bing, 61% used it five times or less in June, which seems to suggest that people were interested in test driving it, but not making a permanent change.
• Interestingly, the people who gave Bing a try were primarily users of Ask and AOL, not Yahoo or Google. Only 10.6 % of surveyed Google users gave Bing a shot, whereas 25.8% of AOL users were willing to consider jumping ship. And really, if you wake up and find yourself using AOL, you should jump ship. Jump into any waters. Anywhere. Save yourself now…
• Despite the fact that the buzz around Bing (how many onomatopoeias can you use in one sentence?) was focused on design and reorganization of content, the interface was not what turned people on the most. 38.3% of surveyed Bing testers said that the relevance of the results was the greatest strength of Bing. Which validates what Google and search engine users have been saying all along…It’s relevancy that matters.

These are some important facts to think about, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel on Bing yet. I for one love to see competition in the search market because it drives innovation and in general, just makes things more fun and interesting. One important challenge that this study points out is that most people are unwilling to switch search engines simply because they are happy. 63% said they saw no weakness in their current search experience. It’s going to take some serious innovation powerful marketing to cause a breakup in search relationships for people who are already satisfied with their search experience.

I’ve just learned that a Twitter TV show is in development.

“The show would feature players using Twitter to follow their favorite celebrities while competing in an interactive challenge. Producer Noah Oppenheim said the show would be the first to bring immediacy of the site to TV.”

I would say more, but I just vomited on my keyboard.

Google has recently announced that they are trying to improve their search results for health-related searches, and collect data that will help them improve health-related tools such as Google Flu. In order to accomplish this, they are conducting an experiment, in which a small random selection of Google users will receive questions from Google when they conduct a health-related search. For instance, if you search for the word “headache” you might get a question that looks like this:

For privacy, Google claims that your answers to these questions are not tied to your Google account, even if you are logged in. However their servers will automatically record information including a cookie, ip address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your answer.

So it makes me wonder, why experiment only with health-related searches? In the future will they consider adding additional questions for other types of searches too, if they feel this will help improve their search results (and ad serving technology)?

I’ve recently discovered the meta search engine Keyboardr. Keyboardr pulls together the results from Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, but that’s not all. It has an added cool factor. And it’s not just the fact that they spelled “keyboarder” without the “e.” I’ve found it’s a great tool for 2 things:

1. People who are extremely lazy. And by extremely lazy, I’m talking too lazy to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse. Or maybe you have a bad case of laptop touchpad hatred like me. For these folks, Keyboardr lets you search the web in a “mouseless” fashion, allowing you to use the arrow keys and enter button to scroll through search results and select the page you wish to explore. 
2. Competitive research. I love how the results update instantly, as you are typing in a keyword phrase. This allows you to quickly get a glimpse of all of the sites that rank for any given phrase in Google, Wikipedia and Youtube.

So we’ve all heard by now that Google is finished trying to save the newspapers, but others haven’t given up hope. Time Magazine published an article claiming that micropayments was the solution – Charging small fees such as a nickel for a day’s edition of the newspaper, or a larger (maybe $2) fee for a month’s worth of access. Critics argue, and I have to agree, that this model has failed in the past and will fail again. 

However, a “new” idea has been thrown on the table recently - Instead of making users pay for content, what if you asked them for donations if they like the content? Okay, so the idea isn’t new, National Public Radio has been doing it successfully for decades, but it’s something the newspapers have not tried online yet. Or at least not to my knowledge, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Start up venture Kachingle (in private beta) has a solution that some feel could help bring this model to fruition.  From a high level, the Kachingle model works like this: 

• A user creates a Kachingle account, and you determine a monthly fee of what you are willing to donate to support good content. This could be $1, it could be $50, whatever you feel good content is worth.
• You sign in once per device – PC, laptop, phone, etc and Kachingle remembers you from that point on.
• Publishers who are part of the Kachingle network place a little Kachingle medallion on thier site
• When you are visiting a blog, online newspaper, etc that you like, you click on their Kachingle medallion which notifies Kachingle that you’d like some of your monthly fee to go to that site.
• Kachingle measures your usage across sites you’ve tagged to receive money, and allocates your donations accordingly. So for example, if you are willing to donate $5 a month to good news content on the web, and 50% of your usage goes to WSJ.com, then Kachingle would give $2.50 to WSJ.com that month. The remaining $2.50 would be split up amongst the other sites you “kachingled” (not sure if that is a real term yet) based on your usage of their sites.

So the real question becomes, is the problem with the paid news model the lack of choice? Will people not pay for online content when they are required to pay for it, but change their mind if they are given the choice to contribute based on their own assesement of the content’s value?

Yesterday Google introduced their Latitude service, a new feature that allows smartphone and laptop users to share their location with “friends” through  Google Maps. It has been compared to the “Marauder’s Map” from Harry Potter, and since someone made a Harry Potter reference, I had to investigate…

Like all Google services, Latitude is in many ways useful, and in many ways creepy. 

On the useful side of things, this new service has some cool benefits:

• Share your location with friends – Could be useful if you are traveling and want to see if any of your friends are nearby so you can meet up. 
• Location based marketing – Could be very useful for businesses to serve ads based on a users location and time of day. For example you could be served ads for nearby restaurants at lunchtime, or bars with happy hour specials later in the day.
• Tracking your equipment – This information could be very useful in the event that your phone or laptop is stolen, assuming it is signed into the service.

On the flip side, this service has loads of creepy potential. You might want to ask :

• Do I really need my friends to know where I am at any given time? 
• In the event that a third party (including the government) demanded access to this data, how much of a fight would Google put up to protect it? What if there wasn’t a Google anymore, then who gets it?
• How many ways could this data be used for evil? Oh let me count the ways – stalkers, jealous boyfriends, crazies in general…
• Will companies begin requiring use of this service so they can track (spy on) their employees and equipment?
• Hacking. Yesterday someone hacked the highway signs in the Metro East, altering their message to warn motorists of zombies and raptors up the road. What if someone was sending you creepy messages based on your location?

Things aren’t looking good for newspapers. Despite making a valiant (or ironic?) effort to save the newspapers, this week Google announced that it will discontinue the Google Print Ads program on February 28th, 2009, allowing advertisers who have already purchased ad space to see their ads run through March 31st. 

Spencer Spinnell, Director of Google Print Ads comments in the blog post announcement, “While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted.”

The program was designed to allow the hundreds of thousands of Google Adwords advertisers to conveniently buy excess ad inventory from daily newspapers, in theory giving the newspapers a big revenue boost. Ironically, the newspapers are desperately in need of a revenue boost because most of their advertisers have moved thier ad dollars online, realizing that their newspaper ads were less effective than their online ads. So really, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why this program failed.

Will they bailout the newspapers and just buy them? According to a Fortune magazine interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, no:

“The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business.”

Well folks, at least we know they could do it, if they wanted to.  And as usual, there is a funnier version of this story at Valleywag.

Yahoo search advertisers be warned. The Yahoo TOS states that Yahoo can create ads, add, edit or delete keywords, and “optimize” your account as they see fit at any time, without your consent. Um, we would hope they would only do this in the advertisers best interest, but WOW. Don’t expect the Yahoo bashing to stop anytime soon…