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

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.

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.

“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.

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)?

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.

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?

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.

Google has recently made some big claims about how Google Checkout impacts clickthrough rates on Adwords ads and overall conversion rates.  Google claims that conversion rates can increase by 40% (!) and click through rates on Adwords ads can increase by 10% for merchants who offers Google Checkout. For those who haven’t noticed, merchants who offer Google checkout get enhanced Google Checkout ads when they advertise with Google.

Of course, there is a catch to those claims. Those amazing CTR and conversion numbers are for “Google Checkout users” not for every person who sees your ad. Still, those numbera are impressive, and merchants who are looking for new ways to increase conversion rates may want to give Google Checkout some consideration.

1) Use the subject line in your e-mail for initial clarity and add as much information as you can without making it too long.

2) Consistently use the “To” line for all those who you require a response from, and put those who need the information but don’t need to respond, in the “CC” line.

3) State the main point in the first sentence of the e-mail so folks don’t have to guess what you’re trying to say.

I had to chuckle while reading the post because I think most of us are all too familiar with poor email communication. The Jedi Mind trick email surfaces quite a bit, or my personal favorite, the “pass the buck” email, in which one person forwards an email to 20 other unwilling CC recipients with a simple vague message such as “please advise.”

You can see an example if you search for “book of revelations” in google. Once you see the search results, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on the “timeline results.”

After that you’re taken to a page with the complete timeline results:

Burger King has captured the flame broiled essence of a Whopper and put it into a cologne for men. And of course they have a hilarious website to go with it. Genius. I can’t wait to see how Hardee’s answers. And PETA for that matter.

 More at their “Fire Meets Desire” website and a Yahoo Shopping article here. Too bad they are already sold out for the holidays, that would have been a great “white elephant” gift.

• Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
• Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
• One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.
• Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
• Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.

From an advertiser and a user perspective, I’m not happy with this change. Usually Google strives to make changes that benefit users and contribute to thier financial success. However, this just looks like pure greed to me. It’s way too easy for a user to accidentally click on an ad that hovers right below the search box, creating not only user frustration, but a potential wasted click for the advertiser.

As we can see below, this feature is also integrated with Google Maps:

It’s important to note that you have to login to http://draft.blogger.com to use this feature. You can read more on this feature here at the Blogger in Draft blog.

According to Google, Chrome is ready to come out of beta (already). In just 3 months time Chrome has won over 10 million users. Such impressive numbers demonstrate that there is still plenty of opportunity in the browser market. Apparently plenty of people are willing to jump ship, or at least consider jumping ship, on their current browser of choice. And so the browser wars continue…

“This fall, we changed our policy around beer, for the first time allowing advertisements of its sale in the U.S. via AdWords. And starting today, in response to advertiser feedback we’ve received over the years, we’ll permit the advertisement of hard alcohol and liqueurs that target the U.S.”

Or maybe it has something to do with the economy…

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see what our local (now quasi-local) brewery Anheuser Busch was doing with PPC. I ran a couple searches on “beer” and “mmm beer.” I was disappointed to see that no one is bidding on “mmm beer” because that would be my search of choice.

Then I began to wonder if Bud Light has clickability, not just drinkability. I searched “light beer” and this is what I saw: 

My analysis is that this particular ad doesn’t have much clickability. Thoughts?

“Blackbird is a web browser for the African American community. Blackbird was developed by a team of African Americans to allow you to connect to what’s going on in the African American community….Because we know that 85% of African Americans prefer online news information from the Black perspective.”

Um….Nevermind, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself on this one.

Something that never occurred to me when I purchased the iPhone in the summer (clever release date)…You can’t use it with gloves on. It only responds to your bare skin. This poses a major problem and serious annoyance, especially when you’re driving or walking around outside in the cold. It’s really not cool to have to either:

1) Scramble to take my gloves off and get to the phone in time to answer while simultaneously operating a vehicle or walking two large dogs, or…
2) Use my nose to unlock the screen and type in my password.

That little oversight has become a real annoyance.

Some of the arguments: “Online marketing increasingly aims for awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty all at once…Marketing managers can therefore defend their online budgets as being both above and below the line.” And in relation to traditional forms of advertising: “All this makes spending on [online] advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

San Diego Calc teacher sells ads on his tests to recoup money lost in budget cuts. Brilliant. I’m just glad I’m finished with school because my mother would have bought a large banner at the top of the test threatening me to fail another Calc test…

As we learned from Pulp Fiction, bacon is good. And apparently it’s good for more than eating. Just thought I’d notify you Cyber Monday shoppers of some interesting bacon gifts I discovered thanks to a friend who identifies himself as a bacon (um, we’ll just use the world “fan” instead of what he actually said).  Perpetual Kid has bacon wallets, bacon floss, and my favorite: bacon and egg breakfast bandages.

So I want to whine and kick and scream because this hasn’t rolled out to my Google account yet, but Google launched SearchWiki today. Instead of testing it, I have to sit back and envy others who are using it and tweeting about it.

Here’s an article on Mashable about how it works: http://mashable.com/2008/11/20/google-searchwiki/

According to Mashable (and jerks who already have the feature), SearchWiki allows you to re-order search results, remove or add links to the search results page, and leave notes with any listing which others will be able to view.

Wow, major changes.

Apparently they are both threatened with extinction. Well, according to this article by the Wall Street Journal. Ouch.

“Agency officials say the water from the system will be cleaner than U.S. tap water.”

Maybe Bear Grylls is actually on to something…

PC World – Top 11 Lamest Blogs

I actually know of a few blogs that are lamer than these. Why is it Top 11 anyway?

“We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of [removed] publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.”

The letter then went on to say that the company realizes the partners are one of the company’s greatest assests and the company does not take for granted the fact that their success is tied to their partners’ committment.

“We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of [removed] lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.”

So it’s probably obvious to you now who this letter came from even though I removed their product name twice. It came from Google. The phrase that was removed twice was “Adsense.” Google is reaching out to Adsense publishers with a heartfelt email. 

One would think that an email that went out in mass to an entire nation of Adsense publishers wouldn’t have much of an impact on an individual level. But it did have an impact on me actually. It made me think for a couple of reasons:

1.  It caught me off guard initially because Google isn’t exactly known for customer service with Adsense Publishers. Granted their CS has been improving quite a bit over the last couple years, but still, it was unexpected.
2. After the initial “huh” moment, it made me think of something more important. I thought about how critical customer service can be when times are tough economically. When your clients are feeling the pinch of a recession, a little extra customer service goes a long way. Letting your clients know that you value their business and that you’re committed to helping them succeed can make all the difference in the world. It could be the difference between developing a long-lasting and respected relationship with them or being the first to find out they’ve recently had budget cuts.

Here’s a summary of the new ad formats in the works, but you can read Danny’s article on Advertising Age here.

1. “Show Products” Ads — Very cool for ecommerce sites. This ad format provides a little plus symbol under the ad copy that says “Show Products From [Merchant Name]“. Users can click on the plus symbol and product listings with images will appear beneath the ad, pushing competitors ads down the page (extra cool). Will we see this in time for Christmas?

2. Google is testing ads on Google Image Search – Banner ads (yep) have started appearing on Google Image search, near the bottom of the page. People have also seen adwords listings with images next to the ad copy.

3. Google is testing “Promoted Videos” on YouTube – Just like Adwords for video. These ads run alongside the normal YouTube search results, and allow advertisers to promote their video content on YouTube on a CPC basis.

4. YouTube “Click to Buy” links – Now you can see these links below some videos. It allows viewers to purchase products related to the videos they are viewing. It generates some revenue for Google, helps calm some compyright infringement issues, and it helps publishers convert viewers to a sale. Very clever. It makes me wonder how many times I would have bought something directly from my TV, after viewing a commercial, if I had that option. Probably too many times, especially during those super motivating infommercials…

5. More ads at Google Maps – We’re starting to see text ads show up beneath the map area on some maps.

1. Gas drops to $2.79/gallon
2. Milk drops to $3.50/gallon
3. US jobs exceed 138 million
4. The Twin Cities median home price returns to $233,000
5. Osama Bin Laden is captured

I was just reading a SearchEngineLand article stating that Google has rolled out audio indexing (GAudio) for YouTube videos on the YouTube political channel and will soon roll it out to all YouTube. That’s very exciting stuff, as it presents a great opportunity for companies who publish great content videos to start seeing their videos rank for important keyword phrases, and increases the relevancy of video rankings. It’s a necessary advancement beyond using meta data to rank vidoes.

Granted, it also presents the opportunity for keyword spam in video content, ie “Governor Palin, we need you to mention ‘Maverick’ 3 times in this speech, and put strong emphasis on it once at the beginning.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/26/what-is-the-deal-with-this-stupid-lighter-iphone-app/

This is a pretty cool opportunity for website owners who don’t have the budget or the technical expertise to build social features into their site. It’s a free gadget/widget based way to implement social features such as rating systems, user community, comments, photo sharing, etc onto a site. It helps a site grow virally by allowing you to invite friends from other social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. As with other open source projects, independent developers are contributing new social gadgets all the time, so the library is growing.

It’s still in beta invite only mode, but I’d expect to see heavy use of these gadgets in the near future.

Some interesting facts in here. I was kind of surprised that Yahoo Mail is the most popular mobile website in the US and that the Motorola Razrs (curse them) are the most owned devices among mobile internet users in the US.

http://www.yammer.com/

They also offer Yammer iphone, blackberry and desktop apps

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jienXKDbIYHNPcywgq84IqyHtbPw

I’m sure the domainers out there partied all weekend. This could have an impact on SEO too.