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.

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.

That is the most frequent request I get from people looking to slice out there own piece of the internet. They want to know keyword and market popularity and I usually write a new email each time or tell them to search for Aaron’s post that covered keywords tools extensively. But now I think if they’re serious, they should be given the list, check them all, and then use the best one of all: bid for it on Google. I still use them all, but actual live Adwords campaigns have become practically my sole keyword tool over the last year. It’s the only real way. Everthing else is just faking it. Although MSN has been impressing me with some of their tools. If they only had the traffic that made it worthwhile now…

So here they are again (below), both free & paid, but get the adwords account and run some test campaigns. You learn real quick how to optimize ads to NOT get any clicks and just reap the impressions.

Here are some hints for DE-optimizing your ad:

1. If it’s a commodity, then display a price you know is not competitive
2. Misspell words
3. Do NOT use the keyword anywhere in the ad
4. Definitely no calls to action
5. Display domain should have little correlation with the keyword
6. Use words that don’t have any emotion. “good” “fine” “ok”. You know, those words and phrases that used to upset your parents when they would ask ‘how was school today’

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
http://www.google.com/trends
http://keycompete.com
http://www.wordze.com

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!