On the surface we’ve been tracking a number of good metrics for years, but at the same time it feels like there are a lot of assumptions being made in our reporting, and that there is miles of room for more data to enable better actual analysis.

I’ve been re-reading through a pile of articles online, all the way back to basic “Analytics 101″ type posts, to refine my thinking on what what we currently collect, identifying what other data we have available and could use, and what data we want but don’t have. These last are the things which then become tasks for our WebTrends guru – because we certainly have the ability to assemble new reports if we know what we need.

Other articles I’m referencing:

• Choosing SEO KPIs and loads of other things on Occam’s Razor
• the recent Analytics for SEO Whiteboard Friday video
• post after post on WebAnalyticsDemystified
• and this massive, headbreaking post about what Google likes.

Part of the challenge is of course understanding why various bits of data are useful, and learning how to interpret it in meaningful ways.

It’s going to be a task, for sure.

Real-time search hit the big time this week, as both Microsoft/Bing and Google announced major deals with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate public timeline posts into their search results.

• Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
  Bing announced massive deals with Twitter and Facebook this week, which may quite literally change the face of search.
• Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter
  Google follows hot on the heels of Bing’s announcement, meaning both of the major players are now looking very seriously at delivering real time results.
• Official Google Blog: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
  The official announcement from Google.

And then there was all the other fun stuff to fill your Friday afternoon.

Content and marketing…

• The New Era of Inbound Marketing
  The effectiveness of brand advertising, direct mail, trade show marketing and cold calling sales have all diminished rapidly in favor of a new set of channels we all use to buy – nearly all of which center around the web.
• Writing TO Your Customers—Not AT Them
  “Copy that focuses strictly on your company and practically or completely ignores your prospects doesn’t work nearly as well as copy that speaks to your target customers in their language and about the benefits they will receive.”
• Five Killer Press Release tips for Small Businesses
  So we’re not a small business, oh well. What this article does is really highlight ways to think about the function of a press release in brand-related activity. It’s not just about announcing a new feature; it’s about attaching your brand to something people find interesting enough to pass along.

More technical stuff…

• How Google Uses the Toolbar Data
  This very question came up in the roundtable today, and hey, lookiethat – one of the things they track is page load time. My, my, my.
• Brands vs Query Refinement: Is Google Using The Second Search?
  An interesting theory on what Google’s big “brand” update (aka “Vince”) earlier this year is really doing, sparked by a comment from Google itself.
• Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools
  This makes a big statement about how little value that little green bar really has.
• An update on Rich Snippets
  Rich Snippets make it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google’s search results. Some tools and information about microformats (RDFa) and related things we’re hoping to be looking into more in 2010.

Looking at the big picture…

• Defining Search Engine Optimization
  Defining search engine optimization is often focused on the *mechanics* of search – crawling, indexing, ranking. This argues a broader, commercially focused definition, which is very much in line with where TJG wants us to be.
• Search Engine Optimization: The Truth About SEO
  As long as things can be searched, they can be optimized for better performance in search.
• Whiteboard Friday – Future-Proofing Your SEO [video
  SEO is an ongoing process, but a lot of the fundamentals have stayed the same for years. Strategically, where should we focus to make sure we can keep up in the years to come? A look at three core areas: Technical, Content, and Marketing. Something for everyone!

Looking at the *really* big picture…

• Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
  In short: People like what other people like.
• Filthy Linking Rich
  Long, but fascinating exploration of network theory – and ‘the rich get richer effect’ – as it applies to internet popularity.

And finally…

• Some people just don’t get it

The picture says it all.
Enjoy!

SEO basics, best practices, and tactics

• Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines
  Rand sparks a debate: “In my view, SEO starts with the user (of course), but cannot ignore the incredible importance of search-engine targeted (and specific) tactics”
• Is Choosing Search Engines Over Users A Fatal Flaw In SEO?
  Jill Whalen responds to Rand: “If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go”
• SEO Truths Or Should That Be SEEO?
  SEEO = Search Engine Evolutionary Optimization. The “truths” are mostly based on observation, and fluctuate based on change…
• When the PageRank Toolbar Goes Dark…
  Where PageRank is the great distorter is that many site owners – not SEOs – value their sites by that alone.

Marketing and content

• Can Viral Marketing Be Manufactured?
  The very nature of viral content makes a traditional marketing plan next to impossible. How can a marketer improve their chances of striking viral gold?
• The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Site
  A useful checklist – All you can do to promote your site online
• 10 Useful Social Bookmarking Websites to Promote Your Content
  What it says on the label
• Link Building With Content: How To Attract Links And Leads
  This article outlines how to merge the practice of linkbait (we call it linkable content) and the strategies of content marketing to maximize the value of your content creation and publishing efforts.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for News Search
  Tips, background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News Search

Pretty graphs

• 4 Visual Charts on the Value of SEO Tactics
  Particularly interesting graph on the value of XML sitemaps, which we’re working on next sprint. Would be a fun exercise to scatterplot where we think each of our sites land on these various other graphs.
• Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff
  Interesting [and heady] charts about the Google Algorithm ranking factors.

The big picture

• Why SEO Training Should Be An Organizational Imperative
  Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and ultimately a failure to effectively capture search traffic.
• The Guardian / Trafigura Thing – Gagged by Carter Ruck Solicitors? Fail.
  The days when corporate malfeasance could be hushed up by a deal cut in the smoke-lined back rooms is over.
• Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion
  The key to success in business hasn’t changed – provide good customer service and work your butt off. [Video, full of profanity but great]

Enjoy!

SEO basics & best practices

• 10 Common SEO Mistakes
  This could also be called, “Why SEO touches every part of the business.”
• 5 Common Pieces of SEO Advice I Disagree With
  There’s a lot of “best practice” suggestions out there which aren’t really the “best.” Rand at SEOMoz offers opinions on a few of them.
• The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
  An old post, but an “advanced beginner’s guide” full of value. Quote: “Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between.”
• 4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results
  It all comes down to this, really.
• Brent D. Payne Interview | Tribune Company SEO
  Brent is the the in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization for Tribune newspapers, which include pubs like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. A great case study in practical SEO at a large company.

Content

• Title Tags Revisited – What’s a Title Tag and How Important are They to SEO?
  A solid reminder about the power of the well-formed meta title.
• 6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers
  A good look at researching and identifying long-tail keyword opportunities, with a bunch of specific detail about how to put various tools to use.
• The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO
  The zeroth law of SEO is this: Write an article whose title is a question people are asking Google and whose body is the answer.

Technical

• Optimizing Your Web Page Speed
  Load time can impact how much of a site gets crawled and indexed by search engines, but can also affect user experience and conversions. It’s unfortunate this site is so completely wrapped in advertising, because there’s some really useful info buried in these pages.
• A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
  Google continues to work on better seeing what users see, regardless of how it’s delivered.

And completely unrelated to SEO, but so painfully bad it must be shared…

• Windows 7 Launch Commercial
  In Redmond, no one can hear you scream.

Enjoy!

6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a “Caffeine” Boost
A pretty thorough comparative dig into Google vs. Google. When Caffeine rolls out of beta and then migrates to the UK, what can we expect to see?

Also did a whole bunch of reading up on HTML 5.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/7-html-5-elements-that-will-make-seo-more-enjoyable
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/06/22/html-5-seo/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-html5/
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/07/24/google-html5-and-standards/
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/html-5-and-css-3-the-techniques-youll-soon-be-using/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

…the last one being a particularly useful writeup, explaining in pretty good detail but in a nicely readable way.

All this reading was prompted by a sort of ambiguous requirement included in our ongoing CMS migration – restructure code so that SEO-valuable content is at the top .

On the surface it makes sense – get the central content box as high up in the code as possible, move all the excess crap to the bottom, and position it all onscreen with CSS. A strict interpretation of this, though, is a nightmare when using shared resources across multiple sites, and causes all kinds of headaches for accessibility. A full code revamp is happening anyway to better linearize the code for accessibility, and the question came up whether coding to HTML5 standards would be sufficient. If a search engine discounts boilerplate code, can we assume that the HTML <nav> or <footer> tags will be recognized and equally discounted, regardless of where they are in the code?

Clearly nobody yet knows. What is the actual SEO benefit of HTML 5? There is absolutely logic in thinking that a cleanly organized page which essentially follows a DOM tree will be more easily crawled, and the content within more easily parsed and indexed by a spider. But that’s completely speculation at this point…and as the HTML 5 spec is still very much in draft mode (and likely to remain in development for years), we seem likely to make a stab without really knowing at all.

You see this all the time, people bragging on digitalpoint that they’re #1 for their target term. What they never say is quite what that term is.

In the quest for traffic, you can aim for a slice of a competitive term, or you can look for opportunities with little or no competition and build your own market. Ranking number 1 is easy – the value is in getting people to search for that term.

I’ve had a music blog for a while now, occasionally showcasing some new band I’ve found. The name derives from the title of a song by a band I like. I looked up this morning and found that I am now sitting comfortably at #1 (and #2), overtaking all the sites referencing all the lyrics sites and the band itself. Well, that’s great. But what’s it worth? Less than a visit a day.

So how do I improve on this?

• More regular updates – my wife updates her theatre blog at least a couple times a week. More updates mean more crawls and more visibility for more terms. Individual posts easily land on page 1, and searches related to the shows we’ve seen drive far more traffic than do searches for the name of her site, which is also comfortably number 1. Relevance isn’t just about keyword usage, it’s about being timely and topical as well. I admit, I haven’t posted an update in over a year, so I’m losing out on the fact that fresh content encourages traffic. One of the bands I wrote up 2 years ago is now up for a Mercury award. When I first posted the review I hit page one with minimal effort. Maintaining the momentum in the intervening time could have paid off mightily in terms of traffic.
• More visibility – more content will generate more readers and more links and ripple into more traffic. New bands are hungry for good press, and getting a post referenced on a band website or myspace page can mean thousands of new eyes seeing the name of the site as a viable source for information. There’s also the knock-on effect that more readers mean more people who know the name of the site, and thus more likely to search for it.
• More links – generated through more visibility, and through more active self-promotion. It may be a term nobody searches for, but so was the word ‘google’ at one point. Building the site as a brand means building the awareness of the brand term, which in turn will encourage more searches for the term and more traffic associated to it.

Ranking number 1 for a junk keyterm isn’t actually valuable by itself, but in the process of building a site as a brand, sometimes it’s a good start. Now that I’ve got the top spot, my challenge becomes building the brand and traffic to it, which will be far easier than trying to start off trying to rank for a more competitive term like ‘music blog.’ If the site takes off based on the merit of the content, over the course of time it will begin to register for broader and more competitive terms on its own. I’ll end up with that traffic anyway. I’ve just come in through the back door.

So, clearly, the thing to do is to set up an account for your website, and then set up accounts for all of your other websites, and just have all the accounts watch all the other accounts, creating this vast network of interlinked twitter profiles .

Um. Is this just corporate use of twitter gone horribly wrong? Ignoring the fact that all these websites are creating one big link farm already¹, since almost everything on Twitter is nofollowed, I’m trying to think through the logic of this approach. Is it about visibility, is it about traffic, or is it just about getting the content indexed?

¹since these guys are consistently showing up as #1 in Google for ‘jobs in [location],’ what I see as very dodgy interlinking would seem to actually be doing them some good.

Gotta say, that’s some confidence there.

One of our brands has recently been pursuing a campaign with a similar angle – instead of a web address, we’ll prompt you to simply drop this key term into a search engine, and dimes to dollars (pence to pounds?) you’ll find our site at the top of the results.

This particular campaign is being managed by an external agency, and apart from dropping a link on the main brand site, the current Google rankings are being driven exclusively by their linkbuilding efforts – and the fact that they’ve accomplished the promised #1 and #2 spots for the two landing pages may speak well for them…though you know it helps that the term in question is absolutely unique on the web. It’s kind of like, "why does Flickr rank number 1 when I search on the word flickr?"  Maybe because it’s a totally made up word? That’s what this campaign has done. The real challenge is raising awareness of the term in the first place so people know to search for it.

Certain search marketers will have business cards which simply prompt you to search on their name. "Just google me – you’ll find me." That’s a little easier to control, perhaps, unless you’re named John Smith. Then, I imagine, it’s a bit more of a game. But I could do that, and I haven’t really been trying too hard. I’m just more active online than that guy in Tucson is, now that he’s stopped racing bikes and getting listed in the sports section every two weeks. But as a potential client, you want to be able to look up the person you are paying and know that they can do their job – and if most of the top ten results point to the same person, you get a pretty good feeling that they know how to play the game.

I have to say, though…I was impressed by the cajones involved behind a campaign that was relying on being able to perform based on something as generic as ‘I am.’ Even my jaded self was prompted to go plop down on the laptop and do the search – and this is where it backfires.

See, I use the CustomizeGoogle extension on Firefox, and I block paid ads. What do I see when I search on "I am?" Humorously, i-am-bored.com. Wikipedia. A London-based branding consultancy who you can bet wasn’t part of this campaign. I Am Legend. I Am Kloot. And a bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with Orange mobile communications. Whoops.

Of course, when I enable ads or search on Yahoo!, there they are, right at the top…but how disappointing.  That’s just a matter of being willing and able to spend more money than anyone else, and once again for something that probably not a lot of people are either searching or bidding on. And I’m let down, just a bit, because somebody had some rocks to sell this advertising idea, but the execution, in my book, is far less impressive than it could be.

Here’s my first email back to her.

‘Online reputation management’ is a big issue these days thanks to situations exactly like this. I thought I’d send over a few articles which talk about it.

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628265
This is a good, broad overview.

http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/07/11/reputation-management/
This is very much centered on *personal * reputation rather than a brand.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/27/online-reputation-management-basics
This is very brand-focused, but it still applies: Your name is your brand.

http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2006/11/09/top-5-ways-to-establish-an-internet-identity/
Even if you’re established already, there’s more places you can be, over which you’ll have more control down the road.

http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/reputation%20management Links to a bunch of other articles which may be of interest.

The theme you’ll probably see is that t here are no silver bullets, but there’s definitely things you can do. The fact that those articles/comments are now 2 years old will probably help – feed the search engines some new information that’s more up-to-date, and the older stuff should fall away. You won’t get rid of them entirely, but off the first page of results would be a great start.

Think of it as a bit of an advertising campaign for yourself; like any campaign, there’s some thought and planning that needs to go into it, but it can be done.

I’m intrigued by this as an exercise because of the challenges involved. If she doesn’t own (and use) her-name.com then is there value in starting it up now? Possibly, but that alone isn’t going to take down the very well established site which contains – admittedly – some very valid commentary. So, what to do?

Look for specific ideas from me later.

We’ve got a handful of small niche sites that recently went live. Each site is a thin vertical slice of information aggregated from several broader datasets, essentially mashed up with other new and relevant content. The plan is for us to each take charge of one site, and within the limits of our acceptable SEO practices, go head-to-head to build links, secure SERP placement, and generate traffic.

Each niche is roughly equivalent in terms of specificity and search volume, and the only budget is time – there are no paid campaigs, so it’s seems a pretty even playing field. I’m thinking that we benchmark on several factors:

• overall page impressions + percentage growth
• page impressions from organic search + percentage growth
• Google SERP position on a pre-defined set of 5 to 10 key terms
• inbound links as counted by Yahoo!
• downstream traffic to the parent sites (this is the conversion metric)

Benchmarks will be taken at 2 month intervals for 6 months, with a lunch on the line for the mutually agreed leader at each checkpoint.

Dev resource and access to certain tools (Hitwise) is limited, and that’s a detail we need to work out before this can start, but there will be some ability to make changes to the sites themselves and do competitive research.

It will be an interesting challenge, to say the least.

My wife does a London theatre blog. I was looking up her past performing search terms, and then looking around to see what the competition was.

Looking through the results for her current all-time top search term, I found a listing for an entry in another blog.

And then I found it again.

Same page. Same URL, same title/meta information, etc. etc. etc. The only difference I find is that the last-modified-since header is 2 seconds different between them. Now, I’ve seen Google index things really quickly, but that’s a little hard to swallow.

So. Why does Google list it twice, as if it is two unique pages? Inquiring minds want to know.

(It’s a great writeup of a great show, by the way.)

Full text of Ballmer’s letter is reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

This quote really seems to sum up the Microsoft’s whole attitude:

This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares

In my view this assumes that the other alternative – Yahoo! remaining an independent entity – doesn’t offer “full and fair value for their shares.” Hm.

The hostile takeover thing is really what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft, really, but I never imagined that we might see it on such a large scale. It’s not so much “shit or get off the pot,” it’s more like “shit or get flushed anyway.” My.

Representatives from major crawler-based search engines cover how to submit and feed them content, with plenty of Q&A time to cover issues related to ranking well and being indexed.

Yahoo!, Google, and MSN all put themselves on the podium and each ran through an overview of their webmaster tools. Anyone who is already using these tools and/or keeping up on the industry blogs probably didn’t get much new out of it, though I did catch just a couple tidbits:

• Yahoo! will now accept the robots.txt sitemap.xml URL being on a different domain. I think this is pretty new, and useful for anyone who may have issues with getting things hosted on their corporate servers.
• The protocol for supplying a Google news feed is different than the standard sitemap.xml protocol. I hadn’t looked into this much in the past, so that’s probably not new, but it’s good information to have heard.

For once, the Q&A was the heart of the session, and after a bunch of standard “I have this very specific issue with my site” kind of questions, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try raising a ruckus with a meaty one. I wanted to know how the engines were currently viewing the use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute on internal links to a website’s own pages. Though Matt Cutts has gone on record about it several times, I think there’s still confusion, so I asked. The responses:

• Sean Suchter of Yahoo! said they are not using a nofollowed link for calculating the “link quality distribution” score for a page. He did not specifically say, “don’t use it on internal pages,” but he did specifically say, “I would be wary of using it for sculpting pagerank.”
• Evan Roseman of Google did a marvelous bit of dancing and basically said “go find Matt’s post,” but also said that there were some situations where an internal nofollow might be appropriate. He did not comment on the use of it as a sulpting/siloing device. (The post in question is, I believe, on Matt Cutt’s blog here, but there are other more recent – and not always clearly consistent – quotes on SEOMoz, SEORoundtable, and Dave Naylor’s blog as well. In fact, there’s a lot of opinion out there, if you do as Evan suggested and Google: Matt Cutts nofollow )
• Nathan Buggia from MSN dodged entirely and simply said he thought there were better uses of your time and money than worrying about it. Which, interestingly, is pretty much what Matt said in Dave Naylor’s post, and with which, honestly, I have to completely agree…though he didn’t, technically, answer my question.

I was a bit amused that Evan referred to the question several times as a “pretty advanced topic.” Sorry, man, the SEO 101 session was three days ago, and I didn’t cross the ocean to go to it.

When I was in art school way back when, I developed a few pronounced preferences in the pens that I use. It needs to feel right, it needs to write right, and I need to be able to flip spin it around my thumb when I’m bored or in a meeting. Couple this with the fact that I can also be stubbornly cheap, and hate actually buying pens, you can see where going to an expo – where branded pens are the swag of choice – would be like trick-or-treating for me.

Respect where it is due, I will at least make eye contact and thank the folks at the booth, and when I can I’ll have some basic conversation with them, regardless of how relevant their service or software is to me. Now and then I will admit that I just want the pen, but I don’t think they really mind, and seriously, when I find one I like I tend to keep it in my pocket and use it until I lose it or it dies. The Yahoo! pen I got at ad:tech London last year was outstanding, and I was very sad the day I literally ran it out of ink.

Today I made the rounds of the expo (three floors!) at SES NY, although I did not get another Yahoo! pen as they have changed the design and I already have one from PubCon. I’m sure I missed a few, but as a bit of a ‘thank you’ to the vendors for the ones I did get, I give you my reviews:

ABC Search
ABCSearch is the world’s largest privately held meta search engine, conducting over 100 million daily searches through our network of specialized engines and metacrawlers.

Body: oversized white with orange detail
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: textured orange plastic
Branding/Logo: large blue logo and tagline

Rated on:
Aesthetics: eye catching – 3/5
Mechanics: design is biased to hold one particular way – 2/5
Ink quality: nothing special – 2/5
Spinnability: too light – 2/5

Overall: 2.25

Acronym media
Acronym Media, an independent, global Search Marketing and Keyword-Driven Marketing ™ agency, is headquartered in New York’s landmark Empire State Building. Consistently rated as a top 10 search engine agency by Advertising Age, the firm offers its clients 13 years of search marketing experience and top-notch SEM consulting services from multiple locations around the globe.

Body: orange plastic with whizzy integrated spring design
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: black lettering with tagline and URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very space-age – 4/5
Mechanics: so-so – 3/5
Ink quality: boring – 3/5
Spinnability: very good – 5/5

Overall: 3.75

Adgooroo
Monitor competitors, expand keywords, and protect trademarks with AdGooroo. AdGooroo is the leading provider of search engine intelligence. Its proprietary technology tracks search activity across any industry vertical, empowering sophisticated agencies and advertisers with actionable data related to competitors’ keywords, ad copy, natural and paid search via online reports and daily e-mail alerts.

Body: Shiny blue plastic with chrome clip and tip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: textured blue rubber
Branding/Logo: white URL which is also their logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: contoured design is cool 4/5
Mechanics: nice – 4/5
Ink quality: standard ballpoint – 3/5
Spinnability: great – 5/5

Overall: 4

adMarketplace
The adMarketplace Exchange has delivered performance and volume for over 100,000 Pay Per Click advertisers since 2003. adMarketplace is the leading one-stop shop for online marketers to drive performance-optimized PPC traffic from approximately 250 million searches every day.

Body: slim, clear plastic with green plastic clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: green printed logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: logo is difficult to read – 1/5
Mechanics: it’s really just a Bic – 2/5
Ink quality: feels kind of scratchy – 2/5
Spinnability: possible but not fun – 2/5

Overall: 1.75

Didit
With award-winning expertise in auctioned media management and targeted online advertising, Didit has been leading the evolution of online marketing with its blend of technology, intelligence, and passion since 1996. Through its multi-disciplinary methodology, Didit combines top-tier SEM strategy, highly sophisticated analytics and modeling, and best-of-breed technology to produce unmatched SEM results for clients across all major verticals.

Body: Shiny, dark green with gold details and wiry clip
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Twist
Grippy: contoured, smooth green rubber
Branding/Logo: small gold logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very classy – 4/5
Mechanics: twist is awkward in practice – 3/5
Ink quality: dry at first, otherwise un – 3/5
Spinnability: uniquely impossible – 0/5

Overall: 2.5

Interwoven
Interwoven is a global leader in content management solutions. Interwoven’s software and services enable organizations to effectively leverage content to drive business growth by improving the customer experience, increasing collaboration, and streamlining business processes.

Body: amazing rocket shape with blue liquid body and glowing red light
Ink color: black – very small well, won’t last long
Click or Cap: small rubbery cap, will get lost easily
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: white printed logo, no URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: skews the standard – 5/5
Mechanics: cap will get lost, but light is coool – 4/5
Ink quality: nothing spiffy – 2/5
Spinnability: not a chance – 0/5

Overall: 3.75

Marchex
Marchex is a local online advertising company and leading publisher of local content. Marchex’s innovative advertising platform delivers search- and call-based marketing products and services for local and national advertisers. Marchex’s local content network, one of the largest online, helps consumers make better, more informed local decisions through its network of content-rich websites that reach tens of millions of unique visitors each month.

Body: Flat black plastic rollerball with metal clip.
Ink: Water-soluble cool Black
Click or Cap: Cap
Grippy: No
Branding/Logo: White text, no URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: stylish and simple – 4/5
Mechanics: no moving parts – 4/5
Ink quality: Rollerball flows smoothly, I like it – 5/5
Spinnability: kind of light – 3/5

Overall: 4

Marin Software
Founded in April 2006 by experienced search marketers and software experts, Marin Software provides an enterprise-class paid search management application for advertisers and agencies. Combining power and ease-of-use, Marin Search Marketer addresses the workflow, analysis and optimization needs of professional search marketers, saving time and improving financial performance.

Body: gloss black plastic with plastic clip
Ink: Water-soluble neutral Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: Yes, textured black
Branding/Logo: Silver logo with call to action and URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: shiny, modern – 4/5
Mechanics: basic click – 3/5
Ink quality: very nice, smooth flow, neutral color – 5/5
Spinnability: very good 5/5

Overall: 4.25

Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter, part of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, powers the paid search advertising service. Microsoft adCenter improves advertising performance and return on investment by providing a high quality audience and advanced targeting tools, and gives advertisers the right tools to manage and control their campaigns for top performance.

Body: Pearl white metal with black grip and chrome details
Ink: Black
Click or Cap: Twist
Grippy: smooth black
Branding/Logo: simple black text with URL on opposite side

Rated on:
Aesthetics: styley – 5/5
Mechanics: twist is awkward – 3/5
Ink quality: unexciting – 2/5
Spinnability: too much weight at the back – 2/5

Overall: 3

MobileStorm
mobileStorm powers your business with digital marketing solutions that reach people how they want to be reached — and makes you more money. Our customers love the Stun platform — advanced marketing technologies and many ways to reach their prospects with SMS, e-mail, fax, voice, RSS — even video messaging.

Body: Purple plastic with metal clip, chrome detal and black grip
Ink: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: smooth rubber with chrome banding
Branding/Logo: small white logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: busy – 2/5
Mechanics: nice springy click – 4/5
Ink quality: pretty standard ballpoint – 3/5
Spinnability: a little off balance – 3/5

Overall: 3

Offshoring.com
Offshoring is the practice of relocating business processes to another country as a means to decrease staff costs while increasing productivity. At Offshoring.com, we specialize in providing companies with dedicated personnel in a wide area of fields, including IT services, contact centers, and backend business processing.

Body: Forest green plastic with chrome and black detail
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: Textured rubber
Branding/Logo: white logo and tagline

Rated on:
Aesthetics: nice color, clearly swag – 3/5
Mechanics: click button is almost pointy – 2/5
Ink quality: standard – 3/5
Spinnability: way too lightweight – 2/5

Overall: 2.5

Omniture
Omniture, Inc. is a leading provider of online business optimization software, enabling customers to manage and enhance online, offline, and multi-channel business initiatives. Omniture’s software, which it hosts and delivers to its customers as an on-demand subscription service, enables customers to capture, store, and analyze information generated by their websites and other sources and to gain critical business insights into the performance and efficiency of marketing and sales initiatives and other business processes.

Body: contoured silver with black grip and metal wire clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: twist
Grippy: contoured black rubber
Branding/Logo: logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very space age – 4/5
Mechanics: twist is odd, nib is wobbly – 2/5
Ink quality: nothing to write home about – 3/5
Spinnability: possible but not easy – 2/5

Overall: 2.75

Sedo
Sedo is the global marketplace for buying and selling domain names and websites with offices in the US, Germany and London. Sedo offers our users all the tools needed to buy and sell domains among a community of users stretching around the world, including domain appraisals, brokerage services, promotion and last, but not least, Sedo’s popular domain parking program.

Body: purple with white grip and silver
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: white textured rubber
Branding/Logo: silver logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: contoured design is clearly from the same supplier as the adgooroo pen, but still cool – 4/5
Mechanics: looser than the adgooroo one – 3/5
Ink quality: took some real effort to get working – 1/5
Spinnability: great – 5/5

Overall: 3.25

SendTec
SendTec is the premier customer acquisition ad agency with expertise in multi-channel integrated direct marketing, both online and offline.

Body: white metal with black grip and chrome clip and details
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: smooth black rubber
Branding/Logo: logo and tagline, heavily printed so you can feel it

Rated on:
Aesthetics: pretty classy for swag – 4/5
Mechanics: nice click and feel – 4/5
Ink quality: standard – 3/5
Spinnability: good – 4/5

Overall: 3.75

The Search Agency
The Search Agency helps businesses develop effective online marketing strategies and improve their Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization results.

Body: clear orange plastic with white grip and chromed plastic clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: white textured rubber
Branding/Logo: white printed logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: orange is an acquired taste – 3/5
Mechanics: nice click – 4/5
Ink quality: very dry – 2/5
Spinnability: so-so – 2/5

Overall: 2.75

Yellowpages.com
“Need something?” For more than 125 years, consumers have trusted the Yellow Pages to deliver comprehensive information on local businesses. And today, wherever, however, and whenever they “need something” local, they use YellowPages.com.

Body: bright yellow shiny plastic with black details
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: flashy black rubber racing stripes
Branding/Logo: black printed URL/logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: distinctive – 4/5
Mechanics: strong spring, very solid – 4/5
Ink quality: sadly standard – 3/5
Spinnability: actually very good – 4/5

Overall: 3.75
On averages alone, the Marin Software pen wins, and that or the Marchex are likely to be in my pocket for a long time…though the Interwoven Rocket is easily one of the ‘must haves’ from this show. I am surprised to note that there is not a single blue ink pen in the bunch.

What does it all mean? Nothing, I’m sure, this was a lark that gave me an excuse to go check out the vendors. But if I’ve helped just one person have a better writing experience this week, then my work here is done. For now.

All company descriptions lifted from the exhibitor listings at the SES NY website; all other opinions are my own and should in no way be taken as reflective of the quality of the services or software provided by the merchants or of their respective marketing departments.

Search result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements will guarantee the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. Before you attend this week’s optimization and best practices sessions, hear from industry gurus about how search, marketing and information seeking is changing the industry that follows the search. Our ongoing series on universal search will include research data available only at SES.

I almost didn’t go to this, and in fact showed up a bit late, but in the middle of a day of sort of uninspiring sessions, this genuine conversation in panel format ended up making me glad I went.

As I walked in, comScore’s James Lamberti was discussing a very interesting graph they’d built. Their research into universal search results showed a direct correlation between type of search result and clickthrough rate. In their model, if “no universal results” provided a 100% clickthrough rate, including video results showed a slight decrease to (I think) 98%. As more types of results came into play (images, maps, and so on), the clickthrough rate continued dropping, and result sets including “news” or “stock quotes” were showing less than 50% clickthrough.

Predictably, the Google rep-du-jour (Jack Menzel) then got raked over the coals for the rest of the session and spent a lot of time denying that they’d changed their business model. If they were intentionally providing information which did not lead people to click off the page, aren’t they then becoming a portal site? How are they going to monetize this, and how will that affect the downstream sites ability to monetize themselves?

Lamberti commented that the future value in search results will be not in the click, but in what is being displayed in the results. If people are clicking less, then it’s all the more important to be showing them something of value in the window of opportunity you have. The follow on question I have is a practical one: how do you measure this? Right now, universal results are showing for a small percentage of search traffic, but I have no idea if my sites are showing as part of an integrated SERP or not. I can’t get impression data for organic results, now, can I? No, I cannot.

The other Big Issue that put Jack on the hotseat was the fact that Google owns space in many of the channels now listing in the universal search results, and it’s hard to believe that there is no bias. YouTube has the most traffic and the most videos, but does that mean they have the best video for a particular result set? No. But the perception is that YouTube gets preference because Google owns it. Is it true? Jack insisted not.

Of course, with a G-man on the stage, the conversation was bound to focus there, but clearly Yahoo! and Ask and everyone else are taking their result sets in this direction as well, and in the theoretical or “big picture” view, the questions directed at Jack are going to be relevant to all. The final takeaway comments from the panelists were worth summing up, as they really seemed to encapsulate some very key bits of the future of search:

• Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director of Big Mouth Media thinks it is important to understand how the searchers of today are different people. There is a whole generation growing up with YouTube and Flickr and social networks and they are interacting with the web in new ways, and their expectations are different than Google’s original “ten blue links.”
• Lamberti agreed, opining that this is the way search has to go, because it’s what the consumer wants.
• Jack Menzel simply said Google were not changing their business model at all: they are continuing to try presenting the best, relevant content on the web.Universal search is just reflecting the fact that there are more images, there is more video and images and maps and etc. available.
• Finally, John Battelle of Federated Media commented that we’re at a unique turning point, paralleling it to the shift from DOS to Windows. The difference being, instead of 200 developers in Redmond creating something in a vacuum, Google is engaging their users and advertisers in a conversation, and this is just one step along a continuum of changes leading to an interface and experience we don’t yet know.

All in all, quite a provoking conversation, one which offered no solutions or tips and tricks, but addressed some hard questions and I think left everyone in the room with a lot to consider.

How can you translate analytics data into meaningful, actionable, recommendations for improvement of an SEO strategy? The focus is on ACTION.

Matt Bailey opened with an excellent presentation arguing that the traffic stats by which we live and die are nothing if we’re not actually doing the analysis to put them in context. If, as he says, we simply report the numbers, we then spend the rest of the month justifying them; analysis provides the ability to identify actionable changes, backed by the data, and drive progress.

Using his brilliant example of the Red Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek (also summed up on the aimClear blog), the backbone of the presentation emphasized the importance of segmenting your data to get a clear view of what the numbers really mean.  Since he’s got the whole thing out there on the blog I’ll not go into all the details, but here’s his summary:

Of the elements that helped to provide this analysis, segmentation was key. Segmentation of groups allows for comparisons. Comparisons allow you to spot trends that by be different from the rest. Asking questions of the data allows you to dig into specific trends and spot additional factors that have affects the original analysis. Unless we dug into Kirk’s personal life, we may never have spotted the contrast of Kirk’s attraction to alien females as it related to saving red-shirt crewmen’s lives.

This definitely had me thinking about how we’re currently slicing and dicing in WebTrends. We’re generally measuring visits to conversions, and are of course segmenting by search term and referrer, but I think there’s far more we can be doing. Matt drove home the idea that as well as benchmarking vs. our competitor traffic information, if we aren’t fully looking at how our users are using our own site, we’re missing opportunities. This will be prompting some further research when I’m back in the office.

Steve Keller followed up with his look at how he shifted his PPC campaigns from a CPC model to what he called ROAS – Return on Ad Spend. By adjusting both their method of estimating customer value and how their bid management partner used analytics data they provided, they were able to deliver much better traffic, focused to the right version of their product, and improved their returns significantly. Admittedly, since I’m not doing paid search at all, this left me a little dry, but it did make me want to refresh on just how we’re defining ROI on our organic traffic.

I have spent just a little bit of time looking through the actual session schedule, but I’m not likely to be really putting brainpower towards that until I’m there, awake and bored at oh-god-o-clock because of the jetlag.

I’ve certainly been giving some thought to Todd (Stuntdubl)’s SEO conference tips again, as well as his more recent tips on how to be a conference douchbag. I don’t think I fared too badly at PubCon, so should be safe again. Though this time, I’m glad to say, I’ll have business cards.

Packing? Hah. I have been doing the proper planning this evening, looking up the latest recommendations on the best pizza in New York, scoping out Broadway shows and perusing the official SES NY party and events schedule. St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl? Hell yeah. See you there.

Now, even back in the pre-internet days, the library (remember those?) had a search function. You would start at the card catalog and find the book you wanted. These days the card catalog has been replaced by a terminal screen, but the function is the same. Or, you could wander the stacks – organized by category – and manually find things that looked relevant. Or had good reviews on the back, or had a pretty cover.

Search engines are the card catalog of the web, though each of them has their own version of a Dewey decimal system. Based on a couple words or concepts, they’ll deliver a set of pages which they’ve determined match your needs. Just like some of the books you find in the card catalog won’t really be what you want, some web pages in the SERPs are going to be more useful to you than others. At the same time, search results can be the equivalent of the categorized stacks in the library, letting you browse through a variety of pages around a related topic.

What a physical card catalog doesn’t do, though, is offer suggestions of things I might like. Search engines are aiming to do this with personalized search results, as are sites like Amazon (with the “Amazon suggests” feature), Last.fm, or Stumbleupon. These sites want to be the friend who passes me a book and says, “I think you’ll like this.”

The thing is, even if someone knows me really well, they’re not always right…because frankly, personal preferences aren’t rational. Even within a genre I like, some things will work for me and some won’t. I can’t really tell you why I like James Bond books but not Mike Hammer books. And if my Last.fm playlist leans towards melodic singer/songwriters like Cat Power or Neko Case, their algorithm is never going to even consider offering me any Norwegian death metal or west coast hip-hop. But I like both of those things, too.

So to the original question: no, personalization won’t replace search. We’ll always have a need to find new things, and there will always be personal, irrational filtering that a software program will never be able to consider. And now and then I’m still going to want to just browse the stacks and pick up something with a pretty cover.