Carol Bartz is finally out at Yahoo. Gone as well are investor and industry confidence, and nowhere to be seen is the $30+ share price offer for acquisition that Microsoft once made. The Bartz legacy will likely be summed up in the phrase “couldn’t articulate a vision.” That early postmortem comes despite the fact that what Yahoo got from Bartz would appear to be precisely what they hired her to give them. From day one to her final email, Bartz was a straight-shooting, organization-tightening leader with a history of success in the Valley.

The problem is Yahoo is less about the Valley and more about Madison Avenue and Main Street than any other major player in the space.

So, while bets are being placed on the next leader of Yahoo, it seems that Yahoo’s board of directors must first reconcile what exactly a post Yang, Semel, Yang, Bartz really is. We know what it is not, a search engine. Bartz from day one went to great lengths to distance Yahoo from comparison with Google, and on that front one must declare her efforts a success. No one today would confuse what Yahoo has become with Google.

The efforts made over the past two years to publicly convince users, the street and advertisers that Yahoo was a representation of YOU and that its future was in premium display has been upended for any number of reasons. From multiple reorganizations that changed the legacy of an industry by defining sales culture to an identity crisis caused by forsaking the origins of the original tech company and search leaders, the talent drain and vision loss has been significant.

Before wagers are placed on potential successors to lead the battle cry of “YAHOO!”, the question to be addressed is: Yahoo? Is it still the world’s homepage? The numbers suggest Facebook and/or Google have a more legitimate claim to being the true owners of that doorway. Each certainly has found ways to monetize engagement both at scale and by influence better than Yahoo. There’s little debate over the quality and depth in many key verticals (news, finance, sports), but what does that make them?

If not a search company and not a scale play that can monetize as effectively (the same problem that led to the still questionable Yahoo-Bing alliance), then where does Yahoo go from here? There’s an “easy” answer and it’s sitting 850 miles north of Yahoo headquarters. That, of course, is where Microsoft sits today, and for far less than what was offered a few years ago, Microsoft can finally cement their position as a player in the digital age. That’s not to say a Yahoo acquisition is right for Microsoft — but it’s a viable end game for Yahoo.

But let’s say Yahoo wants someone who can lead them to prosperity as a stand-alone. It was what they hoped for when Jerry Yang returned to the chair and what Bartz was tasked with doing. In both cases it appeared the end game (fending off Microsoft for Yang and right sizing the organization for Bartz) was just the wrong answer. It would seem the answer for Yahoo absent of acquisition is as the pre-eminent premium content play on the web. To do that properly the culture and components would need drastic attention. Acquisitions (AOL? Hulu?) would be in order and a return to a sales-driven culture that aligns with Madison Avenue, as described in this article on The Makegood.

Yahoo was the digital brand many in this industry grew up with and the depth of talent it has placed around the industry is staggering. Can it return to prominence without search, mobile and social at its core? That’s a huge hill to climb for the next CEO, if that’s really the job. In honest assessment, when Yahoo does determine “the who,” it will likely say everything about “the what” to come for the organization.

 This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was  published in AdAge, September 8, 2011.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

 Let’s begin by defining some terms and referencing established rulebooks and guidelines.  First, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, sometimes referred to as Organic Search Marketing.  Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing traffic to your website by improving “natural” search results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) of a given search engine.  There are three categories of SEO techniques used within the search marketing industry.  “White Hat” techniques are perfectly acceptable and follow all the rules – these SEO techniques can withstand the harshest criticism and hold up because there is nothing “unethical” about them.  At the other end of the spectrum are “Black Hat” techniques.  These techniques violate webmaster guidelines and risk detection, leading to penalties, by search engines that are constantly evolving their algorithms.  Finally, there are the “Gray Hat” techniques that are a little bit harder to categorize.  These are the techniques that are not obviously acceptable or unacceptable.  The rule of thumb for assessing these techniques generally involves asking the question, “Would my competitors report me for this?” and, if so, “Would a human reviewer working for the search engines determine that the technique is unacceptable?”  If you are genuinely trying to improve the user experience and not game the system, then you will be able to determine the shade of gray your techniques occupy.

The official search engine guidelines can be referenced here:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Bing Webmaster Center
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Here are some SEO tips to keep in mind:

DO: Research

Stay informed about SEO marketing trends by subscribing to industry newsfeeds and learning from others with relevant experience.  It is also important to research your target keywords, understand the competition, set goals for yourself and develop a plan for success.

DO: Copywriting

Write content that is relevant to your audience and that your visitors will actually read.  Provide RSS feeds for your articles so that your audience can subscribe to your website and get notified when new content is published.  Consistently add new content to your website so that visitors get in the habit of reading your articles.

DO: Site Optimization

Ensure that your website is technically sound and that there are no barriers preventing the search engines from accessing your content.  There are plenty of useful beginner guides to SEO that can help get you started in the right direction.  If you focus on optimizing the user experience and apply best SEO practices, then your website’s ranking will naturally improve in the search engines.

DO: Get Noticed

Be involved in your web community.  Visit other websites that your visitors are going to so that you can participate in the conversation.  Join social networking sites that your audience regularly visits and provide useful advice to questions they may post.  If you focus on providing an interactive experience, you will start to get natural links from other websites.  You may also utilize paid search engine marketing or purchase advertising space in influential websites to market your site further.

DO: Be Honest

Honesty pays.  Nowadays, people are power-surfing the web, quickly scanning pages and making split second decisions based on trust.  If your website is only optimized for search engines and does not provide meaningful content, then your customers will know right away and instantly hit the “Back” button.  If you build your website with honest intentions and focus on the user experience then the search engines will reward you for your effort.

DON’T: Cloak

Cloaking is when you serve one version of your website to the search engines and another to your visitors.  This is an old technique that can be detected automatically and will result in the removal of cloaked pages from the index. 

DON’T: Hide Text

Hiding text is not the same as cloaking but is often confused with it.  Hiding text is when you use technical tricks to make your content disappear from the page when a visitor accesses it.  Some tricks include having white text or slightly off-white text on a page with a white background, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide content (“display: none;”), or using JavaScript to hide text.  Again, this is very easy to detect and will result in negative consequences from the search engines.

DON’T: Participate in Link Farms

It is a much better use of your time and energy to build a quality website and market it properly than it is to chase very poor quality links.  The biggest risk here is that the search engines punish the link farm and then apply penalties against the websites that participated in it.

DON’T: Spam

Spamming can take on many different forms including bulk emails, automated form submissions, and automated discussion board posts.  These types of practices annoy people and ruin any good will and trust that you may have already established.  Moreover, their effectiveness is generally poor.

DON’T: Lie

If a technique is blatantly distrustful then it is only a matter of time before the search engines catch on.  The last thing you want is to get called out in a public forum for dishonest tactics.  This can lead to public relations nightmares and a overall tainting of your brand.

Conclusion

Most of the issues surrounding Ethical SEO can be clarified by properly doing your research and ensuring that any SEO marketing company you choose to work with is credible.  If the SEO consultant is guaranteeing results or over-promising success then that is a good indication that you may need to look elsewhere for help.

What`s Unique About Naver in Japan?

Naver in Japan has been operating a closed beta version of its portal since June 15th, recruiting a group of around 5,000 local Japanese internet users to evaluate and test out the new service, which has received positive feedback to-date. Naver’s Japanese portal certainly has a much cleaner UI (user interface) than its Korean version. On the front page, hot search queries are placed prominently using flash showing current search themes. The use of flash is also carried through onto the search results pages mimicking a Windows Vista type style, which adds some nice visual impact. Key services from its top page are the usual web, image, video and blog search services, as well as a question-and-answer message board, and matome, (meaning “arranging” in Japanese), allowing users to edit their search results as well as create new pages dedicated to a certain topic, enabling users to add a variety of content, links, images, etc., which will then be exposed as search results. Kind of a blend of Wikipedia and search.

“Theme” is also a unique search method Naver is banking on, which shows related topics or categories associated with a certain keyword, allowing users to conduct searches focusing strictly on a specific category. For example, for a search term like “Manchester United”, Naver Theme search will give you “Soccer”, “Ronaldo”, “Sports”, “England”, “Person/Group”, “Game”, etc. Choose “Ronaldo”, and you naturally get Ronaldo-related searches; choose “Soccer”, and you`d get teams that may have a rivalry or special history with Manchester United.

Opportunities for Marketers in Japan? 

Currently Naver is not offering any form of paid listings, but once their beta program closes and they officially open to the general public in August, they may syndicate with Google as their primary ad server. From an SEO perspective however, there seems to be great opportunity to be visible, particularly with no sponsored ads blocking your view. Upon conducting a search query, the top results is typically one organic listing called “featured web”, followed by 10 organic “traditional web” listings, given solid opportunity to well SEO`d sites. Additionally, on the right column, a constant listing of related images remains present, showing between 6-10 images. If proper image optimization is done, this gives site owners added visibility.

In Summary

Naver has certainly done its job in properly localizing its portal to Japan tastes, through a nice blend of visual stimulation, social integration tools, and an easy-to-use interface. The key for their future success will be to properly promote Naver within Japan and continually innovating while also looking to see what the mobile implications are.

In November of last year, I wrote a post about the changes coming to Microsoft’s search engine. In this post I highlighted some of the plans for upgrades and the new branding push of 2009. Now that we have seen these upgrades and the launch of Bing.com, I thought it’d be a great time to revisit Microsoft.

So, Bing is finally here. I won’t go into all the details of Bing.com, but if you’d like to read more on the GroupM Search POV, you can find it in this SearchFuel post.

It feels like we’ve anticipated its birth forever. Last Friday marked Bing’s ripe old age of one month. What have we seen in the first month? Well, from my perspective, it’s been mixed. We had a ton of hype at the beginning…and then news changed newer topics as it always does.

From an advertiser perspective, we’ve seen some client’s traffic drop. I can’t seem to attribute this to anything other than matching sponsored ads differently with the new topic breakout down the left of the query screen. Instead of an ad matching simply to a keyword query, now the ad may match on one topic of that keyword query, but not another in the topic from the list on the left. In theory, this means some advertisers may see more traffic, some may see less. I’ve also been told small tweaks were made to the algorithm; however, they shouldn’t affect any legitimate clients- they were mainly changes to help flush out some of the link farms still getting through.

From a user perspective, I like it. The organization of results suits my personality well. I’ve found it easier to decipher what’s going on when looking at that intimidating page of blue links and text. While I hate to say it, there are still some instances when I search for something on Bing, I’m forced to visit another engine before finding what I’m looking for. However, these instances are much fewer and far between than they were with Live.com.

Bing. Bing. Bing. Like a cherry…?? What do you think? Do you like the new name? I must say, I think it’s better than Live.com. Bing has a little more punch; a little more pizzazz. If you’re an advertiser, how have your results been? If you’re a Live.com,now Bing.com user, have you noticed a difference in your search results? Are they better? Worse?

What does this mean for search marketers? The Searchme Ad Platform allows key-word based ads to be placed within search results. This means that ads are presented as visual views. For search marketers, it allows the inclusion of more design concepts into their campaigns. What does this mean for search marketers? First, it means more qualified clicks, as searchers are able to see the web page before clicking on it. Secondly, it means that there is an increased chance of a conversion.

You can learn more about Searchme and hear what GroupM Search’s, Chris Westmeyer, has to say about the search engine in Search Engine Watch’s article here.

Stay tuned, as Chris will be sharing a Searchme Q&A session that he had with Searchme CEO and Founder, Randy Adams.

“Sally, I think you have the gist of what I do in that there are two main areas, but they are called Paid & Organic SEM.  Please let me explain.  On the Paid side of things, we are talking about ‘Paid Search Engine Marketing’ or marketing to the ‘Paid’ or ‘Sponsored’ listings.   When you do a search from, say your laptop or mobile device, using Google, Yahoo, MSN, or even Facebook, the paid or sponsored listings are usually located at the top and to the right of the Organic listings.  A marketer can expect to market to roughly 20-30% of the search engine results when they employ Paid SEM.  When you said PPC, or pay per click, this is a type of ad that is utilized in Paid Search Engine Marketing.  Paid Inclusion is another.”

Sally’s eyes haven’t glazed over yet, so I continue.

“As for Organic SEM, what you called SEO, this involves marketing to the Organic search results of the major search engines.  Organic results form the body of the search results page on the left-hand side of the engines.  SEO, as you mentioned, stands for Search Engine Optimizing.  This is one of the tactics used in Organic SEM.  Sometimes the SEO tactic is called On-Page or On-Site Optimization.  This is where you focus on optimizing the pages of a site so that search engine spiders can easily crawl through your site, know what your pages are about, and serve it up in the Organic search results.  Another tactic employed in Organic SEM is Off-Page or Off-Site Optimization. This is where you improve the authority of a web site by utilizing different ways of garnering links from other web sites to your own site.  The search engines look at links as if they are votes for your site; the more high quality links you have, the more votes your site has and generally speaking, the higher up in the index your page will appear in the Organic listings in the engines.”

Sally gives me a satisfying “oh, I get it” and I feel that my job here is done, other than to finish my delicious glass of red wine, a tasty Beringer Founders’ Estate.

In my opinion, when we encounter the ‘Slurry Sally’s’, clients, or colleagues who use terms like SEO and PPC, we should be correcting them.  In the case of PPC, they are calling a whole branch of Search Engine Marketing by one of the ad types used.  When they call Organic SEM, SEO, they are calling the other main branch of SEM by one of the tactics employed.  To me, this seems to be downright inaccurate.  Besides the terms Paid & Organic SEM being more accurate in terms of the activities that we undertake for our clients, they also carry an air of legitimacy and sophistication that befits the fantastic things we do for our clients in these branches of marketing.

I put out a call to SEM’ers everywhere; please help me to clean up the nomenclature of our profession so that we can move forward with our clients, with an accurate portrayal of what we do.  Let’s help ourselves bring clarity and legitimacy to our exciting, new and growing profession called SEM, before the poorly named parts become our entrenched monikers.

A very specific example that I have of this is one of my clients saw a 100% increase in their CPC for their brand term in MSN over just one week. We probed MSN to see what the possible reasons could be for this huge increase in one week – their answer was “could be competition.” My first problem with this answer is the could part. Don’t they have a better understanding than could? My second issue with this answer is the competition part. I went online and checked who the competition was, and to my surprise, there was none. I hit the refresh button; again, no competition.

The above is just one example of the increase of CPCs in MSN without a solid explanation. I have seen through another one of my clients our branded CPC has increased from the $1.00 range well into the $3.00 range in a very short period of time, without any obvious changes in the SERP environment.

Yahoo! is not immune to this problem either. They actually had started to show large increases in CPCs about 3 or 4 months ago with no explanation. I have my own explanation – Jerry needs to hit quarterly expectations… I know I said it, it is out there.

Google has increased the CPCs the best so far, and I am not going to go into detail about their Real Time Quality Score. Please read Erika Moersch’s “Google’s Real Time Quality Score Changes Your Query Results” post for more on how this changes the current landscape. I have noticed CPCs go up for a majority of my clients all for the benefit of user experience.

Now when I stated that there is a CPC conspiracy happening, I say it half-jokingly. I am not completely sure that I believe it, but without a tangible explanation for these dramatic CPC increases, I have no option but to entertain the notion. We as an industry need to have a better understanding, and I put this onus on the engines, on what is effecting the CPC fluctuations. We all are or will have to answer the client when they ask why are my CPCs fluctuating so drastically. Right now I don’t believe I have a strong belief in why this is happening and the engines up to this point have not given me a tangible answer. I know from experience that there are many factors that change the CPCs, but none of them seem to be in play of late.

I would be very interested in what your thoughts and experiences are, and hopefully this opens a can of worms. The truth is out there…

(Image credit: Artist: Chris Madden. Thanks to http://flinchbot.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/conspiracy-theory.gif for the image.)

When creating a search campaign, you want to make sure you have the right recipe for success: a bowl of targeted keywords mixed with a pinch of catchy ads makes a great search campaign recipe. But what happens when someone does a search query that has nothing to do with your campaign and your ad shows up? This calls for a negative match keyword list.

A negative keyword list is a list of words you enter into your search campaign so your ad won’t appear for that particular search query. For example, if your brand is V8 Juice, you would have “engine” as a negative, so when someone searches for “V8 engines,” your ad will not appear.

There has been debate on whether adding negative terms could hurt campaigns by limiting the amount of traffic to their respective website. I recommend that if your campaign goal is to only drive traffic, try to limit your negative keyword list so you can get as many impressions as possible. But if your campaign has a conversion goal, a negative keyword list will help maintain quality leads to your site and cut total costs. If you aren’t currently using them in your campaign, don’t be scared. Add a few and monitor; you may see amazing results!

Here are some key steps for identifying the negative keywords and adding them to your campaign:

1. Pull or request a search query report from the search engines. This list will show all of the terms that have triggered your ads. You can go through the list to determine if there are terms that are irrelevant to your campaign and add them as a negative keyword.
2. Use a keyword tool that will come up with search terms based around the term you put in. Go through this list to find terms that are irrelevant to your type of business or marketing objectives.
3. Think of terms that you don’t want your ad to appear for when someone searches on that term.
4. Compile your complete list of negative terms and add them into your campaign.

Note: You may be able to add negatives on different account levels, depending on the engine.

I recently worked with a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company, and one of their products was salsa – the kind you eat, not an actual form of dance. So, I wanted to make sure “dance” was listed as a negative. I set the negative match type to Broad to stop any queries with “salsa dance”. To my surprise, I found thousand and thousands of queries that had dance lessons, dance music, musica bailar, boob dance!?! The list goes on and on. These queries triggered my ad because of Google’s Extended Broad Match option (this option varies by accounts). This option is a little tricky, because for this CPG company, their ad could be displayed based on “salsa” when someone searches for “dance lessons.” I started setting those negative words to either Phrase or Exact match, and continued to add more that were deemed irrelevant to attract the qualified engagement we were seeking. Before I knew it, the campaign’s negative keyword list was almost as long as its regular search term list.

I think I may start a petition for an additional match type for negative keywords – AV (abbreviated for Any Variation). By adding this match type, I am telling the user interface of any engine that I don’t want this query to show under any circumstances. That will cut down on the great game of “Search Query Madness” where you, the player, have to weed through thousands of search queries to find those sneaky irrelevant terms that are hurting your campaign and propel you toward ultimately getting the queries that you want. Ultimately, with the right choice of terms, negative keywords can be a positive addition to your search campaign. Maybe my vision of the “AV” match will come in the future, but until then, Happy Searching!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

What does this mean for search marketers? Well, it means that by just buying into Google AdWords your ads will most likely get coverage on Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com. These search properties combined cover an estimated 85-90% of all U.S. search traffic, leaving MSN somewhere between 10-15% (depending on which data you look at). The real distinction with Ask.com and Yahoo! was that each provided unique value (usually lesser costs-per-clicks) than Google. With multiple engines now using Google ads, the majority of those savings may be lost. And without those savings, why not make life easier and just deal with one engine in the future? It will lower the time associated with collecting data from multiple engines, it will help to quickly organize data as information will all be in the same format, and it will simplify the billing process as you will only have to deal with one vendor. Sounds like a good time-saving idea to me.

We could argue that MSN Live Search does not provide the traffic volumes that Google or Yahoo! can, but what I have found with many of my clients that track engagement metrics after the click is that MSN Live Search usually produces some of the least-expensive, most-engaged traffic I get from any engine.

So, does MSN matter because it is a good search engine, because it is unique in some way or because it brings more relevant results? Maybe, maybe not. But the bigger picture about why MSN Live Search matters is because it represents the last truly independent competitor in search to the ever expanding Google Empire.