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Friday, December 23, 2005

Blogging and Comments

Before I get into this week's commentary, I want to take a second to point out that this is my 50th blog post and it will also be my last post for this year. That's right... NO BLOG FOR YOU (Imitating the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld)! I am taking some much needed R&R all next week and will be back in the office after the New Year. So... to my loyal readers, I wish you and your family the best for this holiday season. On with the show!

Earlier this week I received an interesting email from a fellow Search Engine Marketer (whom will remain nameless) that didn't agree with my review over his / her involvement at the recent Chicago SES show 2 weeks ago. Now normally I wouldn't have wasted my time with responding to such an email (that's what comment sections are for), but considering the individual and what had seemed to have been misunderstood I wanted to further clarify myself.

Per the sender's request, I will not publish the original email sent to me (I'm not sure that I would anyway... my Blog is not about bashing others), but you should have no problems with getting a general idea of what was emailed by reading my response. With that, I responded with the following statements:

"Thank you for your email. I would like to state that it was not my goal to offend you, or any other speaker for that matter, with my opinions and commentary and I apologize if I did so in anyway. I am in full agreement that you are very good at what it is you do and that you are well educated and experienced in search engine marketing. I definitely don't question that nor do I believe anyone else in our industry does.

As I said in my post, I felt that your presentation was enjoyable and informative... and truthfully it was. My only criticism is that you came off as being arrogant. I have sat in at this particular session at least 5 different times and with each instance it seemed as though you were talking down to the audience, whether you meant to or not. In fact, I am not the only one who feels this way. I have conversed with several attendees (both first time and veteran SES attendees) and several have agreed with me on this.

You may take my comments for what they are... constructive criticism or you may choose to ignore them. In either case, my opinion is just that... my opinion. Those who read my Blog do so because they enjoy the way in which I review over industry tools, strategies, resources, conferences, and other SEO happenings. With that, I will continue to
publish my thoughts in similar fashion."

So the question becomes... was I in the wrong? Regardless of this person's status in our industry, had I really crossed the line by posting my opinion?

To answer my own questions... No! I was not. As I mentioned in my response, this is my Blog and those who read my commentary do so because they enjoy the way in which I post. If they didn't, I wouldn't imagine that they'd still be tuning in. And even so... if I had no readers due to the fact that my opinions were seen as off-based or just outrageously stupid, I would still have every right to post them how I saw fit.

In most cases, I Blog on whatever it is that occupies my mind come Friday morning. Whether I agree or disagree with an idea is my opinion. Whether or not I think a person's SES presentation was good, bad, or simply made he or she appear arrogant is again my opinion. I have a right to my opinion and encourage you all to voice yours.

If you should have an opinion over any of the topics I Blog about (regardless if you agree with me or not) please feel free to post it. I would very much enjoy reading why you feel the way you do towards the topic at hand. At the same time, I would appreciate it very much if everyone refrained from questioning my commentary or my right to post it.

The floor is yours!

 posted by Karl Ribas
Friday, December 23, 2005
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Friday, December 16, 2005

Google Whistles A New Tune

I always find it hard to get back into the swing of things after a conference like last week's Search Engine Strategies show. There's something about returning to the office to find my "inbox" full (which is a funny thing too seeing how I make an effort to attend to emails during the show) and my project work-load doubled that makes me not want to show up on Monday. Does this happen to you?

Don't get me wrong... I love what I do and I enjoy working with those I work with, but the last thing I want to do after returning from a conference is to attend to clients, leads, or company email. In fact, my desires lie within reviewing my conference notes, exploring the latest SEO techniques and strategies, and playing around with all the new tools and resources I learned about the previous week. Oh well... there's always next week.

By the way, I did find time to publish my SES conference pics the other day if anyone's interested. Check them out: Search Engine Strategies, December 2005 Pictures.

Alright, seeing how my headline refers to "Google Whistling a New Tune" I should probably begin discussing the main topic of this entry, which is Google's new Music Search. That's right, Google this past week launched a new service which is intended to give searchers fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page.

Google Music will allow a person to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes. Results will also include links to supplemental Google Web pages with more information about the music, including names of tracks on a CD and other CDs a band or artist has released. Google also will provide snippets of reviews from sites on the Web and links to those sites.

It's great to see that Google is committed to adding and providing valuable search services to its users, but in my opinion they are a bit late to the game as competitors Ask Jeeves, MSN, and Yahoo! have all offered similar features for some time now. Personally, I find myself searching music and entertainment related topics on the Ask Jeeves search engine. Ask Jeeves has offered a Smart Search box for many pop artists for some time. Here's an example for U2. Here you'll find a short bio and picture (via AllMusic.com, an amazing reference resource all by itself) along with a links to read the full bio on AllMusic.com. The same happens when searching popular actors and so forth.

Google has a lot of catching up to do if they are going to start competing with the other search giants on a "Music Search" level, but if anyone can... Google can.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Friday, December 16, 2005
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Friday, December 09, 2005

SES Chicago 2005: Day 4 Notes

Hello everyone. I apologize for the delay in posting my day 4 notes. I planned to do so yesterday when I returned from Chicago, but due to some extremely horrible transportation problems... I stress again HORRIBLE, I arrived at home really late and needed to get some quick sleep before going to the office in the morning. With that said, I've posted my notes below.

In my opinion, this year's Chicago show wasn't as good as was previous SES shows in regards to both content / information and evening networking events / parties, but, in all fairness it was definitely worth attending. It was great to meet up with those who I've not seen or talked to since the last show and it was definitely worth every penny to see the west coast attendees bare with Chicago's chilled and windy weather. Welcome to my world!

As usual, I and the other "All Webbers" were taking pictures at some of the sessions and exhibit hall, and I will be posting them sometime within the next week.

Alas, here are my day 4 notes.

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My first session on Thursday, the "Organic Listings Forum", was headed up by an all-star team of marketers staring Bruce Clay, Todd Friesen (aka Oilman), and Mike Grehan. This was a tremendous session in which the panelist discussed many of today's most popular SEO issues such as the Google Sandbox theory, duplicate content problems, and industry standards.

Bruce said something interesting during the session: "Google has improved by about 95% in their ability to detect if an incoming link is 'good' or 'bad', (based on unknown criteria) and has actually created a list which is referenced before credibility or weight is given to the website." In other words, SEO marketers can go out attain as many links as they desire, but Google may or may not consider them all for when determining ranking... which is actually quite fair if you ask me.

I attended the "Meet the Crawler" session. At this presentation, representatives from Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and everyone's favorite butler Ask Jeeves touched on the similar issues discussed in my previous session and also on their abilities to crawl, index, and present Internet content.

My last session of the day was "Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud" which, much like every other time I've attended this session, was a panel discussing (or not discussing for that matter - referring to Yahoo! and Google) the same click-fraud type issues and reporting no new ways of preventing it. Google and Yahoo! representatives claimed that they were not entitled to speak on many of the questions presented because of ongoing legal cases that their respective company's were involved in... which left for a pretty dry session.

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That wraps ups this years Chicago conference. Use the following lings to review my previous notes and my SES picture page.

Review SES Chicago 2005: Day 3 Notes.
Review SES Chicago 2005: Day 2 Notes.
Review SES Chicago 2005: Day 1 Notes.

View Search Engine Strategies, December 2005 Pictures.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Friday, December 09, 2005
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Wednesday, December 07, 2005

SES Chicago 2005: Day 3 Notes

Day 3 of the SES conference is just ending for me and I am proud to say that I am still standing and still looking forward to tomorrow's sessions. In all seriousness, these conferences do take a lot out of you and your days can become very long, especially if you are attending sessions at every time slot and "networking" (notice the quotations) in the evenings.

My first session today was one that I enjoyed very much and one that I have attended at past SES shows... it was the "My SEM Toolbox" session. During this discussion speakers Jim Boykin, Paul Bruemmer, Todd Malicoat, and others laid out some of their own personal tool sets and kits for saving time on many common SEM projects. In fact Todd Malicoat, who happens to be the author of Stuntdubl, one of my favorite Search Engine Marketing related Blogs, provided this link to his tool box: http://www.stuntdubl.com/tools. Enjoy.

After lunch I attended the "Converting Visitors Into Buyers" session with Michael Sack of Inceptor and Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks. This session had its good elements its bad. I thought that both speakers presented some really great material and case studies, but I definitely have to mention that I found serious fault in Heather's voice. You may ask laughing, what does that have to do with the session? Well actually it has a lot do with it.

A presenter has to appeal to the audience and ensure that they are able to understand the material being presented. In addition, he or she has to present in a way that's entertaining and not distracting to the audience... an area where I felt Ms. Lloyd-Martin failed. I found her voice to be really high pitched and annoying and apparently others felt the same as attendees began to walk out almost instantly after she began to speak. I further noticed that a member of the audio team actually went around to each individual speaker and tuned them down.

I want to further state that my intension is in no way to insult her with this entry, or any other presenter I happen to comment on. Her material was detailed and informative, but this it is my overall opinion of that particular session and you, my readers, want to hear my opinion or you wouldn't be reading this blog.

Afterwards, I attended an evening forum presented by non-other than Danny Sullivan. This was a relaxing and humorous discussion-like session which allowed attendees to pose questions to Danny or directly to the audience. In fact a representative of Yahoo! Search was also attending and found himself on the spot answering many Yahoo! Search related questions.

That's all for tonight. Stay tuned for tomorrow's SES show coverage.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

SES Chicago 2005: Day 2 Notes

I started off day 2 of at the SES conference by attending Danny Sullivan's Keynote presentation. As usual he focused his speech on the Search Engine Marketing industry and where it had been, where it is now, and where he foresees it to be in 2006. You've got to give it to Danny... he can draw and entertain a crowd even at 9:00am in the morning and after a long night at the bar for most of the attendees. He is truly a great speaker.

Immediately following Danny's presentation, I moved onto the exhibit hall which at that point had just opened. This year's expo hall was definitely bigger than previous Chicago shows and featured many of the same venders that attended the other SES shows as well as a few new ones. I did my usual quick walk through the expo hall and made mental notes of the booths I was most interested in and wanted to check out a bit later during my free time.

My first session started at 10:15 which was "News Search SEO" with Greg Jarboe and company, and it in its own right was pretty interesting. It offered lots of cool PR info and tips for getting your content in the top news engines.

After lunch I attended the "Landing Page Testing & Tuning" seminar which turned out to be pretty informative. This wasn't the first time I've attended this session as I've seen it once already in San Jose. As with last time, I found myself learning something new and of value that could be used to improve my client's optimization and design efforts. In fact Tim Ash of Site Tuners, who in my opinion is one of the better presenters at these shows, offered some great slides on what to do and what not to do in your website development. Ash provided ideas and concepts that I never thought about until he pointed them out. He's definitely a speaker that I would encourage everyone who attends these shows to see.

Later on during that same session Matt Roache of Offermatica handed out an Apple IPOD to an attendee for his participation in a survey. I feel that this is something that Danny and Incisive Media should adapt into every session. It sure beats dropping your business card into the fish bowls down in the expo hall for a chance to win an IPOD, a PSP, a computer, or any other cool gadgets. It also beats receiving the spam like emails a week later for doing so. I've attended several of these SES shows and have yet to actually win anything. It's really starting to piss me off. Actually, in all fairness I did win a DidIt frog which if you have never seen one before it is a plush prince frog who belts out "Did It, Did It, Did It" when you push on it. They have become pretty popular in my office.

Later on in the afternoon I attended the "Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines" session where Scott Johnson of Feedster unveiled their brand new an upcoming website redesign. I thought it was very cool for him to reveal it for the first time ever at the session and if I would have thought about it then I would have taken and published pictures of it. I am not all that familiar with the company or its products, but he introduced a few new search features that even I could appreciate. The new design should prove very useful among its everyday users. Sorry I can't provide you with an exact day for the launch of the new site, but I'd expect it to go through shortly.

The evening hours kicked off with a nice cocktail reception in the expo hall and from there we (I and the rest of the "All Webbers") made our way to the hotel bar where we spent the rest of the evening.

Stay tuned for tomorrows notes and highlights.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
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Monday, December 05, 2005

SES Chicago 2005: Day 1 Notes

Hello everyone. As I promised, I am going to do my best to post my notes after each conference day in hopes of passing on any of the good stuff that may come this way. My day started off very well considering I was up after 1:00am watching "Bram Stoker's Dracula"... hey, I don't get the premiere movie channels like Starz or HBO at home so I have to take advantage when I can. By the way, the movie sucked. This should go into Matt Cutts' movie reviews and be filed under crap.

After a very fulfilling breakfast with my colleague Jessica Guadiana, one of All Web's top SEO Specialists, (it's a cheap plug, but what the hell) I rolled into the conference session ready to go with pen in hand. My first session of the day was "Searcher Behavior Research Updates" and I just about walked out within the first 30 seconds. Mark Neal of Galleon, the first speaker at this particular session, actually stood at the podium and stressed how important it was to have your website listed on the first page of the search engine results... as if everyone in the room didn't already know that. In fact his whole presentation was just that. He explained the benefits and so forth for being on the first page which is completely mind blowing seeing as though this whole conference is based around that general concept. Obviously we all understand this idea or we wouldn't be at the show. We definitely didn't need Mr. Neal's 15 minute presentation to tell us so.

Just so that I am not completely bagging on Mark Neal, he did provide this interesting statistic: "90% of all visitors delivered from search engines are from the first page". I new that that the percentage would be high, but, never did I think that it would be as high as 90%. An interesting piece of information I thought.

Another statistic that caught my attention during that session was provided by Jon Stewart of Neilson Net Ratings and it was this: "62 million searches typed a website name directly into a search box this year, representing 40% of the online universe". So what does this mean? It means that there is a large amount of lazy search engine users who just type in "www.yahoo.com" or "www.google.com" into their browser's home page search box instead of taking their mouse and clicking in the main URL box. Another interesting piece of info.

My second session was "Search Term Research & Targeting" with Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance and Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs. This was a decent session with lots of good keyword research suggestions and tools.

After lunch I checked out the "Search Engine Friendly Design" session with Shari Thurow. Honestly the presentation itself was enjoyable and informative, but I didn't really like how Shari presented herself and in fact I never do. She comes off as being very arrogant and cocky... maybe it's just me though.

For the last session of the day I attended "Ads Beyond Search" presented by the ClickZ Forum. As the name hints on, the session discusses other marketing ventures and opportunities outside of Search Engine Marketing. Nothing too impressive.

This leads us to the evening hours. SEMPO kicked off Monday night with a cocktail reception, which is a bit different this time around. Usually they have a meeting and talk about the future of the organization... I guess I should be grateful that I didn't have to sit through all that just to get a free drink or two. Kudos to you SEMPO. Actually Michael Roebuck, the General Manager of All Web Promotion and my conference buddy, and I make it our goal to drink as much as possible at the SEMPO events. We feel we need to get our money's worth some how. If you haven't noticed, SEMPO membership fees are outrageous compared to what little we actually get out of being a member.

Tomorrow I look forward to the Expo Hall opening as there should be some really great venders with great tools, resources, and so forth. Check back for day 2 notes.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Monday, December 05, 2005
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Friday, December 02, 2005

"Pick Up The Phone... It's Google"

This past week Google began testing a new click-to-call service which lets people speak with advertisers on its search results page and without having to pick up and dial a phone. Interesting concept isn't it? It's definitely innovative.

Unlike voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), a technology that sends voice transmission over the Internet, this service appears to connect two parties over the regular phone lines. According to the project's details, a web surfer can click a phone icon adjacent to an ad, enter his or her own phone number and then click a "connect for free" button. Google's service calls the advertiser's phone number and when the web surfer picks up the receiver on his phone, he or she hears ringing as the call to the advertiser is connected.

Impressed?... you should be. Click-to-Call could easily be the next big thing in search engine marketing and may in some instance be as profitable, if not more profitable, than Pay Per Click advertising. That's definitely a long shot statement, but as long as Google is leading the way in this new development than I have no problems with stating it.

In addition, Google promises that it will not be sharing your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. Apparently when you're connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked and will remain unavailable throughout the process. Google itself promises to remove your number from their servers after a short period of time. Ah... this is a relief. God knows we can go without the extra tele-marketer calls.

For more information on this service, view Google's Click-To-Call FAQ page

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Just a reminder that the SES show is next week in Chicago. Last year's Chicago show was a blast and this year should be no different... especially with all of the additional "All Webbers" attending this time. Go Ninja Death Squad!

I am hopping to publish notes throughout the show, but if that should fail for some reason, I'll definately be posting again on Friday.

 posted by Karl Ribas
Friday, December 02, 2005
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