Trying & failing to resist posting about Microsoft & Yahoo

wow. Who isn’t talking about this in the tech/finance world? It’s everywhere with such varied opinions. For us nerds it’s way more interesting than the SuperBowl right now. I think overall it’s a smart and probably necessary (only) move for Microsoft to make.

Reasons why I like it - in order:
1. Flickr
2. Delicious
3. Yahoo mail
3. Yahoo answers
4. Upcoming.org, mybloglog, yahoo finance, yahoo autos, yahoo music, yahoo real estate
5. Yahoo Personals
6. Yahoo Games
7. HotJobs
6. Yahoo portal, search, brand, etc (oh yea, they do have significant search share)

Holy crap! We have to realize Yahoo isn’t just a search engine. They have been and are still the #1 most visited site on the internet for a reason. They have done SO much better at Google at finding promising properties that give them relationships between websites, clickstream data, account and user info, etc. All this stuff is looking so important for the next generation of search. They just haven’t been able to focus under a cohesive strategy.

When I think of being tied to a website, it’s really about places I have an account. I’m tied to flickr and delicious. Google has me with gmail (but yahoo mail is WAY bigger than gmail). Search?…we still type a destination into an address bar or use the integrated search bar in firefox/camino. There’s a reason they push their own toolbar, and an even bigger reason they want to have an account..be it with igoogle, youtube, gmail, google analytics. Owning that user, being able to communicate to that use, is huge. On paper, Yahoo is way ahead in that game, and I really think it’s still a big one. They just need some of that peanut-butter manifesto focus.

Reasons why I don’t:
1. Focus hasn’t really been Microsoft’s strength

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Rae: Smart SEO’s won’t have to adjust much because they’ve been marketing their asses off anyway and saw things like universal search coming. Smart SEO’s have become and are becoming overall online marketers, forcing their link development strategies to get wider and more creative and at times, a side effect of an overall “marketing plan”.

Great comment from a a ’sweet as sugar’ post on link building. There goes Rae giving back to the community again…

This follows on my favorite SEO post this year. Lazy SEO Manifesto

I’ve been doing a lot of other stuff besides what I’d consider SEO recently. But in reality, I haven’t become a less effective SEO, just more passive.

I think of it more like trying to see something in the dark you just can’t quite make out. You know - that weird things that if you don’t look directly at it you can often times see it best in the peripheral. You’re looking at it, you know you’re focusing on it, but it’s everything else you do that lets you get the best results.

Good SEO has moved so swiftly from tech guru to solid online marketing strategy and execution, then blurs into good marketing overall, and now even shoves itself into product development. All the social media fun-ness going on right now that gets SO much attention from the SEO community is really a bunch of savvy marketers finding a need/gap in a market and expertly filling it. It fits in SEO because that’s most of the pros’ background, but the term link-builder is really selling yourself short. Provost is in the right direction with “internet audience building” but I think it goes even deeper. You’re finding niches (markets), creating content/widgets/sites (products) to fill a void, then positioning that product to get the most exposure to the largest audience. THIS IS MARKETING DONE RIGHT! Kotler would more than approve. This is the kind of philosophy that is taught and written about by marketing professors and gurus everywhere but put into action daily.

The next step - and so many “SEO”s are already there - is probably focusing on things like lifetime value, building loyalty, and brand-building. I just don’t know what my favorite part is yet.

I love the lazy SEO title, but being a lazy SEO is hard friggin work.

I would not recommend naming a company something if you cannot secure the domain.

Frank Schilling (top-shelf blog btw) owns a pretty good domain with welcomemat.com. It so happens that he is also getting some free links to that domain (http://www.vflyerblog.com/blog/2007/05/08/real-estate-20/) because someone didn’t take the time to notice that WelcomeMat TM- the new mover direct marketing company - actually is located at welcomematservices.com and not welcomemat.com (Frank’s domain).

• This is a big deal.

It happens all the time. Usually it happens by people looking for a specific site via direct navigation, but a link in a post just shows how much everyone - including bloggers and others who write about your company - expect you to own the domain equivalent of your business name.

Even scarier: what happens if Welcome Mat TM decides to do radio, tv, print, or even direct mail? Are people going to remember welcomematservices vs welcomemat? No. Instead Frank gets more traffic to buy himself another boat down in the Caymens.

The WelcomeMat name creates a good visual and I can see how a brainstorming session led them here, but the actual generic word doesn’t exactly convey the business value proposition, they were unable to get the obvious domain, and are probably losing business as seen in the wrong link in that post. And god forbid they get really big and then decide they want the domain…

Rule of thumb - if you have to add +services, +group, +inc, +company, or any other super generic modifier theat is not your company nam, then consider going back to the brainstorming for a new direction. Find something that you can buy the domain for (welcometotheneighbordhood? welcomingmat? welcome?).  Or else consider including the generic as part of your company (mywelcomemat, thewelcomemat) and use that in your logo, collatoral, everything & all the time because you’ll have to brand it yourself.

Key point here is; WelcomeMat TM doesn’t use “services” everywhere, and that vastly devalues their chosen domain.

WelcomeMat does look like a pretty cool company with a valuable service. However…I wouldn’t buy marketing services from a marketing company who failed one of my (admittedly unjustly unfair) key marketing tests: the company name & domain name.

An SEO seminar on Insider Secrets from a “Master”. Apparantly being a master means you don’t have to worry about such things as title tags or functional navigation.

Gotta love this: <title>titlefixme</title>
http://www.the-dma.org/seminars/seocopywriter/

Someday the Direct Marketing Association is going to surprise us all and show how they really do understand this internet thing everybody is always talking about.

UPDATE 5/17: nice work guys, you fixed your title.  Next step, firefox support for your nav.

Because of obnoxious know-it-all’s like this

PS…it’s not & neither is Search Marketing

I met Greg Hullender in August at SES San Jose. He was acting msndude at the time. Recently, msndude was posting less & less on WMW and Barry noticed. I just found out today that he resigned from MSN Live Search recently. Not sure if that means he’s not with MS at all or just wanted a change of scenery within Redmond. But if not MS, it does make me wonder where he’s headed….

Greg & Matt spoke quite a bit about the two different paths MSN & Google are taking towards search. Greg honestly seemed to believe that he (MSN) was catching up and had the better long-term strategy. I wonder if Matt & Google thought there was something to that machine-learning & they went and poached another MS employee.

Greg, I wish you the best of luck wherever you end up!