OneUpWeb Ghosts of Halloween Past

Posted by dave on October 31, 2005 at 02:41 PM

October 31st. Halloween. The one day of the year when you can dress up as whatever you want, run rampant through the streets intoxicated on a mixture of excitement and sugar.

So many of my favorite memories start with "One Halloween..." I thought it only appropriate that we post something special to commemorate the day. So I decided to ask others about their Halloween memories. From their favorite costume, to the worst thing they ever got in their treat bag, OneUpWeb took a trip down memory lane.

What was Your Favorite Halloween Costume?
From the traditional ninja and princess to a busted-head zombie with glow eyes and Strawberry Shortcake, the range of favorite Halloween costumes in the office ran the gamut. And although there were some fantastic entries into the favorite Halloween costume category, the winner took us back to the crime-ridden streets of California in the Seventies and the swift two wheeled justice of Jon Baker and Frank Poncherello. That's right, welcome back into your memories of CHiPs.

What is Your Favorite Halloween Candy?
Well, this one wasn't even close. With only half of the districts reporting, Snickers was already a landslide winner.

What is Your Least Favorite Halloween Candy
Not the dominant winner Snickers was, but still a clear favorite in the category of least favorite candy, Smarties. The colorful little disks of sugar we referred to as the having the texture of Maalox and the taste of a rotten vitamin. It was also suggested that they may not have started out as candy at all, but as chalk factory industrial byproducts.

What is the Worst Halloween Treat You Ever Received?
First of all, let me just say, some people should really be ashamed of what they give children on Halloween. From toothbrushes and toothpaste to pennies, there are a number of really terrible things you can pass out to trick or treaters. But, by far, the worst Halloween treat ever received was a brochure.

What would be the best Halloween costume?
A. Googlebot
B. Jeeves
C. Slurp
D. Spam
E. Clusty
F. Wisenut

The Winner? Wisenut. I can't explain it. Maybe it's the challenge of trying to figure out how to create the costume. Now you've heard from the OneUpWeb Ghosts of Halloween past, it's your turn to tell us your favorite (or least favorite) Halloween memories. Comment away!

Call the Landlord When the Faucet Leaks - A Word to Hosting Companies

Posted by keirsun on October 28, 2005 at 01:27 PM

I recently discovered that a new client has a great number of domains registered and hosted on an IP separate from his main, commercial site. My client's not actively doing anything with these domains, just keeping them warm in the virtual back pocket, so to speak. Some of the domains are simple misspellings of his main site, in case someone stumbles across their keyboard while typing his URL. Adding them all up, I count somewhere in the realm of 75 to 100 of these tadpole sites, just waiting for a chance to make some noise in the e-commerce pond, if called upon.

The trouble, we discover, is that each domain is a perfect mirror of his active site by means of a rudimentary frameset. If you're not familiar with this term, think of a frameset as one of those $100 flat-screen TVs you see at your favorite big-box retail store. Sure, it has a clear picture and all the buttons on the remote work, but you know it's going to give out in about 6 months, tops. And it has this brand name that's vaguely familiar, like South American geography. A frameset creates a cheap version of a valid website by displaying the real site's content under its own name (URL).

I told my client to remove the framesets on those domains and setup redirects, for both users and search engines to follow, which point to his main site. Therefore, the engines won’t penalize him for having duplicate content under various domains, and everyone can still find what they're looking for. Everything's hunky dory, right? Wrong.

While exploring his hosting company's basic user interface, we discover that the only non-frameset redirect option we have is rather hostile (a 303 "See Other", which isn't cache-able by the engines). Sure, it will get the user there, but for a search engine spider it's the equivalent of driving up to an international border crossing with a bag of fruit on the passenger seat. No one wants to argue their case for traveling abroad with oranges, not even a search engine spider, which will turn around and head back the way it came.

My advice to the client? Contact the host and ask nicely for a valid redirect method. They're cashing your checks, and therefore should answer your call. If they have no idea what you're talking about, find a new host that does.

My advice to hosting companies? Do your homework or you're going to miss the after-school trip to Dairy Queen. Search engine friendly solutions should (and soon will) be an absolute requirement of any business with a website. If you don't give your customers what they need, we all know what happens to you. No Oreo Flurry with sprinkles on top at the end of the day.

A Day in the Life Of

Posted by on October 26, 2005 at 01:59 PM

...Because what blog is complete without a tedious account of the author's daily doings and musings? What we do here at Oneupweb everyday is mysterious to the uninitiated, and we do it in a building that is a unique but harmonious mix of retro, high tech, and high functionality. And what I personally do is a unique but harmonious mix of project management (natural search engine optimization - we have a team dedicated to paid search as well) and research. I'll spare you a detailed play-by-play, here are the highlights from yesterday:

8:00
As every Oneupwebber does, the first part of the day is usually spent reading industry news, forums, and blogs (not just the search engine marketing industry, but the industries of our clients as well) to keep on top what's news, what's noise, and what we can do to do our jobs better.

9:00
Routine care and maintenance of client projects, which includes checking up on position reports, traffic, and conversions numbers. Google is currently doing a backlinks and PageRank update, and all is well. A couple of clients have dropped a notch in PageRank, but positions haven't suffered. Which makes sense - Matt Cutts of Google said that the new PageRank and backlinks "have already been incorporated into scoring a while back", but it's always good to keep a close eye on things.

1:00
Keyword research! Probably my favorite - and the most important - part of a natural SEO project. This is the part where we determine which words and phrases the natural optimization campaign should target to get the best ROI for the client. It's analytical, it's creative, it's more than a little psychological. What's not to love? I can't give away the secret sauce, but we did do an interesting study back in January about search query length and its correlation with conversion rate that you can download for free.

3:30
Conference call with a client to chart out the press release strategy for the next several months. Press releases can be a great tool for search engine marketing. They can help build link popularity, and can even give your site the potential to hold multiple positions for your important terms, at least by proxy.

5:30
Back to the keyword research for the last part of the day, and then home. The commute through Leelanau County is sublime this time of year, with the trees dressed to the nines in color. Not bad for a day's work.

Splogs: The New Badness

Posted by on October 26, 2005 at 01:46 PM

His specialty is writing engaging copy for client web sites, but Oneupweb content architect Christopher Carlson has been exploring the whole SEO landscape. Here's what Christopher had to say about one particular blight:

Ah, will the horrors of bad SEO never cease?

Doing a search using, say, Google's Blog Search brings forth a number of valid results but, sprinkled liberally among the valid results are, inevitably, a number of "blogs" chock-full of, well, spam. Indeed, a recent search led me to the discovery of the most horrifying URL I've ever seen; I won't post it, but here's a reasonable (yet truncated) simulacrum:

http://www.product-keyword-productkeyword-keywordproduct
keywordproductkeywordproduct-yougetthepicture.freeblog.com.

And then, of course, the "blog" itself was nothing but keywords and links. For an entire page.

Hence, "splog." An unusually ugly word for ugly SEO used on blogs.

Here's a question: does anyone actually think this does anything for their own or their client's site? One of the first rules of marketing (a term with which SEOs should be familiar, as marketing should be a major concern) is don't irritate your potential customer to the point of revulsion. Putting your name in someone's face repeatedly with absolutely no accompanying content is no way to build brand equity.

You might get a slightly better Google PageRank, but what good is that if you've spent no time on your content (and trust me, these sites haven't)? People visit, don't get what they want, buy nothing, and never come back again.

To be fair, Google Blog Search, and blog search in general, is still in relative infancy. The fact that these "blogs" are getting good search positions at all, when to even the casual observer they're an abomination akin to email spam (h3rb@l V1@gr@, anyone?), points to a deficiency that should be addressed.

It's true: there are no real shortcuts. Natural, organic results take time. But a combination of an attractive, useful site and well-written, informative content will go far toward building the natural links (maybe even in legitimate blogs) both you and Google are looking for. A better PageRank and better search placement will come, and with them will come your customers.

And they'll stay.

Are the Kids All Right?

Posted by on October 14, 2005 at 04:25 PM

An interesting study came out recently from the University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science entitled "How do I find blue books about dogs? The errors and frustrations of young digital library users". Primarily, the study relates past research on the processing and comprehension powers of children with their ability to successfully complete online search tasks. And while it's no surprise that children have poorer reading comprehension, manual dexterity, and abstract thinking skills than adults, it would seem that adults don't do a great job making web sites that children are able to use.

In fact, a 2002 study from the Nielsen Norman Group found that children had the greatest success using websites designed for adults, e.g. Amazon and Yahoo! And my own cursory examination of a handful of popular kids' sites shows a lot of very advanced copywriting for young people to digest (the Flesch-Kincaid reading level scale is built into Microsoft Word, and is a quick, easy way to check your copy if your site caters to kids.) Ask Jeeves Kids (www.ajkids.com) is often cited as a paragon of usability for youngsters, and as an added bonus, gives search engine marketers a glimpse into how kids search by showing random, real time queries. Both the Ask Jeeves Kids "peek" feature and the University of Maryland study indicate that children gravitate much more readily to "natural language" style of searching rather than Boolean.

Welcome Aboard. Now Get Out!

Posted by on October 07, 2005 at 03:45 PM

According to new research by Spencer Stuart cited in CMO magazine, the average CMO in business-to-consumer companies only lasts about two years. The research was based on the "time in office for the top marketing officers at 100 companies." The article makes a humorous comparison to elephant babies, who spend more time in the womb than CMOs spend in a position.

Why so short? It seems they'd just be getting settled in. In the CMO article, Arun Sinha, CMO at Pitney Bowes, says that other C-level executives tend to be much better at proving their ROI than chief marketers. Hey, search engine optimization and marketing can help with that! Oneupweb has shown several times in recent years that top companies aren't paying as much attention to search engine optimization. Perhaps if they realized it could help them keep those six figure salaries, stock options and premium parking spaces, they'd pay a little more attention.

Here's how it works: When you start a job, benchmark your company's website performance—traffic, online sales, click-through rates, cost per acquisition. Hire an SEO and start tracking with web analytics. Presto—show the improved sales and lead generation on a pretty chart to the board after one year.

For the second year, use your web analytics to help you improve the performance of your current campaigns (natural and paid). Add some additional campaigns. Integrate your search efforts with traditional efforts and track those sales too. Show another pretty chart at the board meeting and set a record for tenure in your position by staying on the third year.

After the third year, retire on your bonus. Okay, I'm being glib. Seriously, giving it to you straight—if CMOs can't prove ROI with today's technology, should they have gotten the job in the first place?

Search Marketing and Higher Education: A Report Card

Posted by on October 03, 2005 at 09:07 AM

Oneupweb's director of client services, Rod Call, came back to the office one day so despondent from a ho-hum marketing class that he was compelled to write the following. I have a feeling he's not alone in his frustration.

Keyword research. Algorithm changes. Paid versus natural. Analytics. Did I really expect to learn about these topics in a place of higher education? No, not really. OK. Maybe I expected a few minutes of online marketing methodology, or, at the very least a passing mention of search engines. But no, it was just the same ol' marketing speak that has been recycled from semester to semester. Blah.

I agree. But it can—and should—be introduced. It's time to stop the monotonous regurgitation of traditional marketing practices, and SEM should be given its rightful place within the syllabus of marketing courses everywhere.