WordPress 2.1 Released

From the WordPress Blog, the latest version of WordPress (2.1) has just been released.  Here are some of the features that I am excited about seeing in the new version:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• The new tabbed editor allowing authors to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

Some of the features are things that I had wished were there before, and am glad to hear they will be available and look forward to working with the new software.  If anyone has any reviews or initial opinions, please comment here.  I'll also try to track reviews as they appear as well.

Making MySpace Your Own

These days it seems we just can't get away from Myspace.  It is a common topic on blogs, in newspapers and I have even seen numerous stories about it on TV.  I hear Myspace come up in everyday conversations between people, and we aren't just talking about high school kids.  Myspace for the moment is everywhere and I will not deny that I love it. 

For this post, I am not going to discuss the effect Myspace has had on social media and our culture.  I am not going to discuss the latest spamming techniques that have been going on within the community and I am not going to talk about how people need to be more careful about using it.

What I am going to do is take a step away from all of these issues and talk about one of the things that make MySpace fun and popular - customizing your own page.  Adding backgrounds, music, slide shows, animations, videos, sparkling banners, etc.  It’s a little silly but I love that Myspace allows you to make it your own, and based on its popularity I think other people do to.  Here are a few of my favorites:

MySpace Backgrounds/Layouts

MySpace backgrounds are very easy to figure out.  Simply find one you like, copy the code provided and paste it into the ‘About Me’ section of your profile.

Be careful though.  A search for ‘myspace layouts’ will return about 9 million websites all claiming to have the best ones around.  Most of these sites are very spammy and almost every single one of them will add a bit of code to include their name and URL on your Myspace page.  After going through about 50 of these I have two or three that I like to use:

http://www.myspacepimper.com/
http://www.freecodesource.com/

*Here is a trick is to remove the images and URLs the website puts into the layout- Once you paste the code into the ‘About Us’ section of your profile, search for the URL of the website you got it from.  (It will usually be encased it div tags)  Simply delete everything between the <div> and </div> tags and you should have a clean page.   

MySpace Music

Myspace did a great job by making this as easy as it could possibly be.  Simply go to the music tab within Myspace and search for the artist you desire.

Click on the artist’s profile (make sure it’s the correct one) and click ‘add’ for the song you want.  Again, be forewarned.  Like most things on the internet some of the music can be deceptive.  Aside from songs being removed due to copyright infringement, some are being edited just for Myspace.  I found a song I really enjoyed on the radio and added it to my page.  When I checked my profile, the artist had added a verse to the front of the song thanking people for listening to him and then giving instructions on how to add his album cover photo to your profile. 

Adding Videos and Slide Shows

Some other things you can put on your page include videos and slide shows.  Videos can be added from Myspace, Youtube and pretty much any other sites on the internet that offers video codes.  If you have the know-how, Myspace also allows you the ability to upload your own videos. 

Adding a video is just as easy as adding a layout.  Simply copy the code and paste it into the particular section you want your video to show up in.  Unlike the layouts, video codes do not have to go in the ‘About Me’ space, they can be placed in any section.  When using videos from Youtube or Myspace, you are given a URL and an ‘Embed’ code.  Choose the embed code or the video will not show up on your site.

   
To create slideshows from your digital pictures there are quite a few options.  Just searching the term ‘myspace slideshows’ will bring you about 2.5 million results.  To make things easier, here are two sites that I have seen the most and don’t appear to cause any issues with spam.  You do have to create accounts with them but they are free. 

www.slide.com
www.slideroll.com 

Conclusion

These are just a few things you can do to customize your Myspace page.  Yes adding backgrounds and videos are silly.  But just for a minute, stop thinking about how Myspace can be used for branding or marketing purposes.  Stop worrying about the effect it is going to have on our society or what kid is going to get in trouble next for posting something on there he shouldn’t.  Just for a minute, don’t take Myspace so seriously and have some fun with it. 

Yahoo!’s Conversion Tracking Measures Assists

As in soccer Yahoo! now gives credit due for search terms that even though they didn’t produce a conversion or sale they will be accounted for as an “assist”. So if your top performing search terms is producing a poor CPA (Cost Per Action/Conversion) from not scoring enough goals, you could consider assists as a new metric. This feature is part of the new upgrade of Yahoo! and is only available to accounts that have been upgraded and you must run the “Keyword Performance” report. You will notice a column labeled “Assists” that should contain a number value of how times the search term helped with the conversion process.

How does Yahoo! know this term assisted in the selling process? It’s a well-known fact from live testing that people use multiple searches to find what they are looking for. For example, say you are looking for a leather bound address book for a birthday gift and are rather new at using the search engines for shopping. A typical first search term you may enter would be “address book”. A broad search term such as this will often return limited results that specifically mention leather address books in the top results. They click on your ad which lands them to a web page that shows lots of various types of address books, later the web searcher or prospect returns to the Yahoo! search site to continue shopping around. This time they are a bit more educated and have added “leather address book” to narrow in their search.

As a smart advertiser, you are bidding on both the broad and detailed terms for "address books" and so when they search by that refined term a new ad appears that is dedicated to your line of leather address books. This time you convert the prospect into a sale. The original search gets credit for an assist and the second term gets a recorded conversion. I like this new view into search behavior and it has me thinking up ways to develop a new formula for measuring the ROI of the top terms to help refine my bidding strategy.

Firefox Takes a Social Media Advertising Strategy

Read/WriteWeb released a post on December 11th announcing the new Firefox commercials to appear in Boston and San Francisco initially.  The 4 video ads were taken from some 300 clips which were submitted to Mozilla's Firefox Flicks program and a partly sponsored by Firefox fans (sponsor names appear at the end of each commercial.  They're goal is to increase sponsorship of commercials to numbers in the thousands, with an initial investment of as little as $10.00.

What is interesting to me is how integrated social media development is becoming in mainstream media.  The news on this information and the commercials themselves have already hit YouTube and will no doubt gain more exposure over the next few days in other social media circles.

Update: I had initially found the post and thought the information was posted on January 11th, not December 11th (the correct date) - meaning I apologize ahead if the information was already distributed.

Google Infrastructure Update Underway

Matt Cutts' recent blog post indicates that there will be some visible updating to a few key Google numbers we like to look at (most of the time :-))

• PageRank is being updated in the Toolbar, which also will reflect search results around the "link:www.domain.com" and "site:www.domain.com" numbers.
• Issues with supplemental results should be corrected
• Most importantly (IMO), he also writes to indicate (and validate) a key point about "data pushes" to public search results.  These happen more frequently than before - every 1-2 days in comparison to a 3-4 week timeframe in the past.  While this should not affect keyword rankings over the long-term, we've definitely noticed more fluctuation on a regular basis, and this information supports the observation (and why it is happening).

To illustrate how this can affect search results, we recently wrote a post reviewing SEO Spyglass.  This post currently ranks #1 in results for "review seo spyglass" and "review of seo spyglass" as of 1/11/2007, but was just recently #9 in results (Tuesday - 1/9/2007 actually).  The greater point here is that as more users review this tool, or write about it, you should see our rankings drop over the long term  - unless - we take active effort in building our own presence for that keyword online through link outreach. 

This example is being used to illustrate the fact that what used to be something you could gauge (more or less) on a monthly basis may actually fluctuate weekly, or even daily if you check it that much.

Keyword - Competitor Link Building Example

We apologize for the inconvenience but have removed this link building tactic from the archive.  Make sure to check out our search engine marketing blog for more strategies and information on SEO, PPC and social media.

SEO SpyGlass Software Review

About a month ago we received an email from Andy Moor at Link-Assistant.com telling us of their new SEO tool, SEO Spyglass.  SEO Spyglass is a competitive analysis tool that allows you to analyze the backlinks of your competitors.  You can find out all sorts of information about the backlinks, including who they’re coming from, the PR of the linking page and even the anchor text used on the page. 

The tool sounded very intriguing and hey, it’s free so we thought why not give it a try.  To test it out I decided to use one of our current clients as I am already somewhat familiar with their backlinks.  Here it goes…

SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass is very easy to use.  The download is quick and using it is as simple as entering in your competitors URL.  The program can take a little time to run depending on how many backlinks the site actually has, but if you are capable of multi-tasking this shouldn’t be an issue. 

After you enter in your URL and the report finishes, you are given a screen that shows the backlinks and the PR for each link.  Simply click on a link, hit analyze, and you are presented with the following:

• The anchor text of the link
• The number of times your competitor's keywords appear within the anchor and title text of their backlinks
• Number of outbound links on the page
• Page Rank of the main domain and linking page
• Number of backlinks from domain to your site
• IP Address of domain
• If the domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
• Alexa rank
• Age of Domain

This is all really great information in determining whether or not a link is useful or not and it is definitely nice to have it all in one place for you.  The best part of SEO Spyglass is that it truly is time saving.  There is no way someone could find all of the information about each link in the time it took SEO Spyglass.  (And trust me, I’m not going to even try)

The only real downfall of the program is the inability to save the results or even export them. (In a Digital Point forum post December 14th, there was an indication that they will be working on these).  For now, you simply have to copy the results directly from the program and paste into an excel file.  While it’s not ideal, it is still easier than manually trying to find all of that information.

Conclusion

I have to say that I was very impressed with SEO Spyglass.  Everything I had read about it on other posts and forums was accurate and it seems as if they have a nice product on their hands.  One thing I do have to disagree about…this claim on the website: “SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool designed to let you see exactly how your competitors got to the top in search engines — so you can mimic their winning linking strategy, improve on it, and blow right by them in Google, Yahoo! and MSN!”  Ahh, if it were only that easy.

Looking Towards 2007 in Search

While 2006 was a great year for us and for search in general, 2007 is looking to be an even bigger, more exciting time to be in the search industry.  Here are three big themes that I am looking for the new year:

Greater Depth in Web Analytics
Web Analytics tools (like anything in technology) are so much more than what they were in the past, in terms of functionality and capability.  As technology matures, website owners can take advantage of these tools at very low costs and even for free!  By understanding the goals of a website and implementing the applicable code required (an easier task than often believed), web managers learn more than their daily traffic numbers and pages per visits. 

Web Analytics allows us to track and measure objectives such as the cost/conversion for almost all of our leads, the original point of entry of a recurring visitor that ultimately buys or fills out a contact form, and the overall effectiveness of each page's unique message.  It also gives us the ability to understand the visitor traffic pattern - from start to finish, identify and improve page content that has high exit rates, and ultimately provide a better experience for the visitor.  Here are two tools we are using today that are well within the traditional budget for operating expenses:

• IndexTools
• Google Analytics

Understanding the Competitive Landscape
If you don't have a good handle on what your competition is doing, you'll lose in the end.  This is true in traditional business as well as in doing business online.  More emphasis needs to be placed on comparing and contrasting the competitor's websites as it relates to yours, including:

• Key functionality
• Presence online - strategic partnerships, advertising strategies
• The navigational elements and overall user experience

In addition, having the insight into how they drive traffic to their website is more important than ever. Competitive referral analysis offers the opportunity for better quality link building and potentially new sources for qualified traffic.  Analysis of the terminology being used in the paid advertising space and in organic search traffic generation can uncover new opportunities in search optimization and help identify strategies for improving existing keyword referral numbers.

Contribution as a Way to Drive Traffic, Links and Revenue
The rise of social communities and collaborative networks was at an all-time high in 2006, highlighted by Google's $1.6 billion dollar purchase of video sharing website, YouTube.   The search industry has taken notice and you can see this in the search results you receive on a daily basis. It's almost inconceivable to not find a Wikipedia result in the top 20 results for any given research-based search term and more and more blog results, MySpace accounts and social networking sites appear in everyday results. 

The opportunity lies in website owners sharing their own knowledge of their specific industries with a public that is devouring the information and need for content and doing it in the right ways.  There is more to be gained in well thought out blog posts, user-group discussions and social community profiles in the forms of industry expertise, targeted traffic generation and better, qualified link building.   

In Conclusion
The search industry is adapting into a much more proactive, strategic service for website owners.  The three topics above are only a portion of opportunity that lies ahead in 2007, to us and in general, but it is important to note that almost any measure of success in our industry will be determined by the adoption of solid web reporting tools that measure our success for the client, or your success in the development of your web strategy.   2007 will certainly be a challenging and exciting year of further developments and innovation which will also lead to highly anticipated success stories and growth in the world of search engine marketing.