Danny Sullivan Leaving SEW

In a relatively shocking piece of news yesterday, Danny Sullivan has decided to leave the SearchEngineWatch.com website and possibly the Search Engine Strategies Conferences alltogether.  Here are posts from the SEW Blog, as well as his own personal blog which detail the situation:

• Stepping Down From Search Engine Watch (SEW)
• Leaving Search Engine Watch (Daggle)

I've not personally had the opportunity to meet Danny Sullivan, but in my professional opinion, his name (to me) is synonymous with the entire website and (perhaps) conference.  I've been on the website for the last 5 or 6 years, and have found it invaluable when I first began learning the trade and try to consistently get back to it to see what's happening in the industry outside of my own microcosm. 

Make sure to read the Daggle post if you want to keep up on news and developments on Sullivan's professional development in (hopefully) SEO in the future.  I'm sure we will be seeing some shakeup in 2007.

New AdWords Editor Tool

Google is beta testing a new tool for helping people manage large paid search campaigns. Right now this Windows 2000/XP only tool (they are working on a Macintosh and Linux version) provides some nice benefits you can’t get using the normal web interface. Now this is not a replacement for using the web portal, but rather a complementary tool. I’ve always been very pleased with the web portal for AdWords, especially when you compare it to the other services from Yahoo! or MSN AdCenter, which lack in the area of ease-of-use and functionality. So what does it offer that the web portal doesn’t? In summary, some key time saver features.

For starters, since there are no alerts as to when a search keyword goes inactive, you have to open up each ad group to find out. Not so with this AdWords Editor tool, you just list out the keywords and sort on the Status field. You can select a range and adjust the bids all at once. Now if they could allow secondary sorts this would be even better as a way to manipulate the results.

More importantly for managing large keywords portfolios, bulk-loading keywords into existing of new ad groups is necessary. Currently, of course cutting and pasting via the web portal is the way to do this, but again, this is time consuming as you have to open up (or create) each ad group. But what is really cool about the bulk load feature is you can bypass loading up by ad groups and load them by campaign and ad groups in one operation. Of course you need to previously create the new ad groups and campaigns to bulk load to them.

The AdWords Editor tool is great for the seasoned AdWords Pros who need a streamlined interface and don’t need advice as you move along. For those individuals managing large ad and keyword portfolios it’s a must have tool.

Are Meta Description Tags Important?

A common question in SEO is "How valuable are the Meta Description tags?". Strictly speaking, meta tags are optional. Your Web pages will display in a browser without any meta tags and anyone who has worked in SEO or worked with an SEO company knows that Meta tags can be abused to almost the infinite degree.  In a recent SEO factors ranking discussion, a handful of leaders in the SEO industry, generally agreed that the overall value of Meta Descriptions, as it relates purely to organic keyword relevance is minimal and the overall importance in an SEO campaign (on these factors) is average at best (a 2.39 point value out of 5). Most agreed however, that having good Meta Descriptions gives website owners better ability to "control" the message that is read by search engines and (potentially) read by users of search engines.

Jill Whalen wrote a very good article on ways that webmasters can better optimize their sites Meta Descriptions so that they appear, in search results, when strategic keywords are entered.  The bottom line is that the Meta Description, for a strategic keyword, can appear in the search results, if it is written correctly.  The value to this is that the website ownes now have some control over the message they are giving to potential customers and buyers.  Value is found in the click, not necessarily the search rankings when it comes to SEO and more importantly, SEM.

How powerful can this be in real world terms?  I recently revisited eight of he last websites that I had worked on, five of which I specifically worked on Meta Descriptions for the purposes of keyword relevance and three which I did not, or, the descriptions were altered for one reason or another.  In all five examples of sites I had worked on, the main pages I had focused on (products pages, solutions pages, the home page etc), showed the page's Meta Description when searching for the specific keyword that I was targeting.  All five show controlled, targeted marketing messages.  Of the three I did not succeed in getting recommendations through to, none show the Meta Description in search results for the primary keyword.  Does this mean that their search description is bad?  Not necessarily.  But it does mean that they are relying on outside search engine factors to display what their search message really is. 

Finally, what could this mean in terms of real dollars based on click thru's?  In a retail example, the top keyword generates approximately 15% of all referring search traffic but over 33% of all conversions.  There is no PPC being used on coordination with organic search results.  In a B2B scenario, 2 major brand-based secondary keywords that were targeted in our organic SEO strategy, with appropriate Meta Descriptions being displayed, represented a 10% conversion rate, as compared to an average overall conversion rate of less than 2%.  Obviously there are other factors at play in both scenarios - brand awareness, search objectives, competitive visibility, but the fact of the matter is that the website owner now has control over the message of the website for a specific, targeted keyword phrase.  It's their own defined message that the user is seeing in search results.

What are the top search engine sites?

Okay, so it may be rather easy to answer that question; Google, Yahoo and MSN. A recent HitWise report announced Google broke the 60% market share, and there is a bit of twist to the story. Their sampling of 57 various search engine across the Internet had found that these “big three” represent over 94% of the total search volume. Now that was a bit of news to me. I always knew they had the lion’s share of search requests, but with numbers like that it means that the other 54 search sites are really just picking up the scraps. Granted when it comes to search in general this is a rather large banquet table we are talking about, so even well established sites such as Ask still can bring in a some very decent visitor numbers.

What this tells me is the importance of search in the daily lives of both businesses and consumers has matured. In a very real sense the three majors in this space are dominating not just in numbers, but with today’s search users’ mindshare. Of course this may change over time as searching behaviors evolve, but for right now over 94% find what they need from the “big three” and that means collectively they are just 6 percentage points away from a 100% satisfaction status.