Here is a recap from e Local listing’s Stephen Espinosa DMS 09 – Direction Media Strategies session.

Fixing the taxonomy structure of a site is not enough on its own, the other content and tag structures is as important if not more important.

YellowPages has to figure out a way to deliver answers to questions asked that don’t follow a normal YP (YellowPages) structure

Engaging the community to add more content is important, user or business generated content drives SEO results

SEO needs to filter through the entire organization, from sales people up through all aspects of product

If you rely on business to create their own content you can run into big problems

Setting the right expectation is important, in the early days of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) sales people scortched the earth and burned a lot of trust.

WebVisibles’ sweet spot is 800-1200 per month and they look for one year engagements to allow for peaks and troughs in the market

IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) aren’t doing a good job of optimizing and distributing local customer videos, the search engines want to display video to video destinations….local videos are the easiest way to get ranked on the front page of search.

SEO can be less tangible but adds enormous value, if it can also stop one of your competitors from getting to the front page.

Videos are sexy…elocal sees 3.1x improvement in performance…video ad networks don’t work as well as youtube and yahoo video

One of the strongest ways to get multiple hits is to put data on multiple domains

Freshness of content is as important as having content…don’t expect immediate results…it’s not “Set and Forget”

You have to be committed to SEO from the top…it’s not black magic it’s an important way to drive results

So there you have it! A great recap from e Local Listing’s Stephen Espinosa’s session at Direction Media Strategies.

I had the privilege of being invited to Webmaster Radio to speak on SEM Synergy Hosted by Bruce Clay, president and founder of the international SEO and SEM company Bruce Clay, Inc. I was interviewed
by Virginia, an Associate Writer and director of the radio show. Also had Ben Saren as a guest who is an Online media entrepreneur and CEO of CitySquares.com.

We began talking about the new buzz about hyperlocal content. Which as Ben Saren says “Has actually been around for over 100 years.” Ever since the days of the newspapers.” Everyone wants Hyper Local news going on in there local neighborhoods. It’s not just about the main city in question anymore, it’s about the towns and neighborhoods. Now with the usage digital media means like photo and video cameras, audio recorders, and blogs.

Hyperlocal Blogger Toolbox:

Smart Phone or any find of digital phone that can take picture, tweet, and record video!
GeoToolKit http://outside.in
http://flickr.com
http://youtube.com
http://twitter.com
http://theflip.com

Hyperlocal Websites and Blogs:

http://neighborlogs.com/
http://wikicity.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://everyblock.com/
http://fwix.com/

Hyperlocal Twitter Tools:

http://localtweeps.com/
http://chirpcity.com/

Listen to this Podcast on Hyper Local Content.
Connect with me:
http://twitter.com/seotips2go
http://twitter.com/elocalrocks

TechCrunch50 was probably the biggest event I have been to yet! The amount of companies there was astounding! I had the privilege of meeting one of the biggest Hip Hop superstars there, Chamillionaire! Don’t be quick to judge, Chamillionaire has some deep insights when it comes to social media and web 2.0! He was on the judges panel for reviewing the startups at TechCrunch50. There were over 47 companies that were selected from over 1,000 applicants.

These were the selected TechCrunch50 Companies:

• 5to1.com
• Affective Interfaces
• AnyClip
• BreakThrough
• CLASEMOVIL
• Clicker
• ClientShow
• Clixtr
• Cocodot
• Crowd Fusion
• CrowdFlower
• Dataxu
• Glide Health
• Hark!
• HealthyWage
• iMo
• Insttant
• iTwin
• LearnVest
• Lissn
• localbacon
• Metricly
• MOTA Motors
• Perpetually
• rackup
• Radiusly
• Redbeacon
• RefMod
• Sealtale
• SeatGeek
• SGN Platform
• Spawn Labs
• Sprowtt Marketplace
• Storysomething
• Stribe
• The Whuffie Bank
• TheSwop.com
• Thoora
• threadsy
• ToonsTunes
• ToyBots Woozees
• Trollim
• Udorse
• Yext

All these companies were competing to be the top presenting company at TechCrunch50 to win a $50,000 grand prize! The TechCrunch50 Best-In-Show Award was determined by a panel of experts and the conference organizers.

Our very own Steve Espinosa had some some interesting thoughts on how Twitter could monetize it’s traffic.

Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetize their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding AdSense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetize it successfully, and create more user generated content.
When you think about it almost everything that is on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local, whether that is local to you or to someone else. The obvious example of this is when you go out to a restaurant and write about that on Twitter, whether you say “Going out to [insert name here] with @stevemcstud” or “Just had a great dinner with @stevemcstud at [insert name here]“. If you simply perform a search on Twitter for “restaurant in”, the point being to see how many people tweet “I am going to restaurant in [insert city]” or “Anybody know of a good restaurant in [insert city name]?” you can see that with just that one phrasing there are tons of results of people talking about local restaurants.

Read This Article in it’s entirety here

Stumbled across a good read over at MediaPost…

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can improve query rankings, but companies also need to give consumers easy-to-use Web sites to boost conversion rates and close the sale. More visitors to the site is great, but if the price of average orders drop, marketers should rethink strategies, according to panelists on a Webinar Tuesday.

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman moderated the Search Marketing Now Webinar, “SEO and Conversion Rates: Hand-in-hand,” sponsored by Range Online Media. Herndon Hasty, senior SEO evangelist, Range; and Chris Knoch, principal search engine marketing (SEM) consultant at Omniture, presented and fielded questions. [READ MORE]

While on the road to the Kelsey Group Marketplaces 2009 event this week I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up the new book by Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?  Early on in the book, Jarvis quickly states and focuses on the fact that small is the new big. Companies can start up with a couple people and not grow past 20 and still attract a large amount of customers. At Kelsey this was proven over and over again.

Small businesses will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of choices they have to market their business online through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing. A great great of this is the start-up dotMenu, which started out by simply hiring stay at home moms to go out and scan in menus from local restaurants for $2 a piece. This allowed them to keep overhead down, efficiency up, and grow within the constraints of cash flow. In 2008 dotMenu ended up taking 3,000,000 online restaurant orders.

The consistent trend of people connecting, sharing, and collaborating on the internet is only going to have a positive effect on small business marketing. When companies and individuals become more open, competition grows larger. When competition grows larger, innovation begins. Products will start to become more transparent, ROI for marketing efforts will become clearer to small business, and the businesses that provide real value will rise to the top, whether they are small or big.

Every time I attend a Kelsey Conference I am amazed at the overwhelming amount of new start ups attending the conference. But the one thing that is more overwhelming than that is the fact that all these start ups are striking partnerships with companies 1000x their size without even a blink. 2009 is going to bring an enormous amount of opportunities for small business to get online, with the big question not being ‘should we be online, but who should we be online with?’

Now that small is the new big, things are going to be a lot more clear for small business.

According to comScore, Inc., among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35%) did so daily, more than double the size of the audience last year.

In January, 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded application. Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users, while search was the overwhelmingly favored use for SMS-based news and information access, with 14.1 million users. Overall, 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and information in January.

Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore, says “…use of mobile Internet (has) evolved from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives… This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium… to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

Young males are the most avid users of mobile news and information, says the report, with half of 18 to 34-year-old males engaging in the activity. The mobile Internet is also popular among females in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic, with 40 percent accessing it at least once in January.
Donovan concludes, “…much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications and by text-based searches… smartphones and high-end feature phones… comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access… 70% of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”

Concurrently, QuickPlay Media revealed the results of its 2009 independent Market Tools survey focused on mobile TV and video consumption in the US. showing that consumers are confident in the uptake of mobile TV and video, with 78% expecting an increase in usage by 2010. Perceived cost represents the biggest barrier to adoption, with 58% indicating that it is the number one reason they have not viewed TV and video on their mobile phone.

• 55% of respondents stated they are interested in mobile TV and video.
• 46% of respondents are aware that their carrier offers a mobile TV and/or video service,  vs. the 35% percent seen in the 2008
• 49% of respondents have a monthly voice and data plan through their wireless carrier versus 38% who currently use a monthly voice-only plan
• 51% said that they would be willing to accept advertising in return for free TV and video content versus 54% in 2008

Consumers show a preference for snacking on content instead of setting aside dedicated viewing times, says the QuickPlay report. Specific findings include:

• 25% respondents view content in between daily activities, 16% while in transit (i.e. on the bus, etc.) and 11% while waiting in line.
• 66% said they would consider the ability to pause and resume content a deciding factor in whether or not they would watch longer forms of content, such as a full length movie. This number represents an increase from the 57% figure reported in the 2008 survey.
• Of those watching mobile TV and video, 45% have spent 11 to 30 minutes watching a TV show or movie on their mobile phone with 30 % having spent 31 minutes or longer doing so. Additionally, 21% are using mobile TV and video services more than once a week.

For more information from comScore, please visit here, or from QuickPlay Media, go here.

I have just read a very well thought through article about how to measure SEO performance. It’s written with traditional SEO done to large sites by SEO specialists but the metrics it speaks about are also relevant for the kind of large/small business SEO that we specialize in. To condense the article to it’s essentials it asks the following questions:

· Are your pages indexed by the large search engines? Ours are submitted and indexed every day

· Do you have back links pointing to your pages? We have an enormous number deployed

· Do you rank well for query term that you care about? We test and adjust to maximize this all the time

· Does your site make money? In our world that means do your marketing dollars make your phone ring….our testing indicates a resounding yes to this metric.

You should ask the same question about your website, enjoy..

March 17, 2009 · by Jill Kocher

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to your site as a whole. “Rankings” measurements will show where in the natural search results your site appears for given search words or phrases. And “traffic and revenue” measurements will show the keywords used to find your site, revenue generated per keyword, the percentage of visitors that purchased products and so forth. This article will explore each of the measurements, which we refer to here as “metrics.”

Indexation Metrics

Indexation is the first critical step to natural search performance. Pages that aren’t indexed have zero chance of ranking in the search engines. However, more indexation isn’t necessarily better because that could indicate that identical pages in your site are duplicated in a search engine’s index, which will decrease a site’s ability to rank because the pages are, essentially, competing against themselves.

What is the “right” indexation number? Most ecommerce sites can only guesstimate based on the number of products they offer. For example, if a site offers 50,000 products but only has 5,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a barrier preventing a search engine from fully “crawling” a site. Conversely, if that same site has 500,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a duplication issue. The site will then have issues with self-competition and split-link popularity, both of which hinder a site’s ability to rank strongly.

Indexation is measured by performing a “site:” query in the major engines. For example, type [site:www.yourdomain.com] into the Google and MSN Live search boxes, without the [brackets]. For Yahoo!, just enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer. These site queries measure how many URLs are indexed in each engine. Compare that number to the number of pages that should exist to determine actions required and progress made.

A complete list of the queries available in Google, some of which are also available on Yahoo! and MSN Live, can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Backlink Metrics

Measuring “backlinks” will show the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links that point to your site, the higher your site will rank in natural search results. However, measuring backlinks varies among the search engines.

For Google, enter a “link:” query such as [link:www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. This is a measure of how many backlinks are coming into the entire domain. However, Google only gives the true measure of backlinks in its Webmaster Tools, which anyone can access once they have a Google account.

For Yahoo!, enter the domain into Yahoo! Site Explorer. Click on the “InLinks” tab and filter the results to show four different data sets: (1) all backlinks (internal & external), (2) only external backlinks, (3) only to the home page and (4) to the whole site.

For MSN, the “link:” query is currently disabled in MSN Live, so backlinks cannot be measured there.

How many backlinks should a site have? There is no way to estimate in the way we can for indexation, and the engines aren’t known for giving accurate, specific or detailed backlink data, unfortunately. The best advice for measuring backlinks is to watch the trend rather than be concerned about individual numbers. And more high quality links are always better.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool for scanning and reporting on backlink trends, including number and diversity of domains linking in, anchor text diversity, and a number of other reports.

Ranking Metrics

Rankings are a tricky metric to report on. Rankings (i.e. where your site appears in natural search listings) vary greatly between singular and plural versions of the same term. Moreover, personalized and blended search affect individual rankings so that no two people are likely to get the same ranking result. However, I suggest a couple of ways to attack this issue.

· Targeted. Choose a select set of keyword terms that you’ll target based on keyword research. These will probably include the trophy terms for which management aspires to rank. Use a subscription rank checker such as WebCEO or a free tool such as the Rank Checker plug in for Firefox to check the rankings for the terms you’re targeting. These tools will give you only the rankings for the terms you specify, for the domains you specify.

· Aggregate. Subscription tools like Enquisite offer the ability to track the page on which a term ranks for every keyword that drives natural search to your site. So, say that [widgets] drove 10 visits to mydomain.com. Enquisite would report which URLs on my site drove those 10 visits, and what page in the search results the rankings were on. The information can be sliced and sorted by keyword, URL, IP, date, engine, and more.

Traffic and Revenue Metrics

Natural search-referred traffic is a common measurement in most analytics programs. The “holy grail” for measuring SEO effectiveness is frequently a report combining URL, keyword, traffic, orders, and revenue. Such a report tells you which URLs are effective, and by omission, which are not. It tells you which keywords and keyword phrases drive traffic, and by omission which don’t. And it tells you which URLs and terms drive sales through natural search and which don’t.

Consider which pages were optimized and how, for which keywords. Those pages and keywords are the ones where you should expect to see growth. Only by performing large-scale programmatic optimizations, like title tags across the entire site, would you expect to see a site-wide increase in traffic. Most optimization efforts will improve performance for individual pages and keywords. Knowing which pages and keywords are most valuable to your business will guide those optimization efforts.

You can see the full article here

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1014-Measuring-SEO-Performance

So when was the last time you used the yellow pages or any kind of phone book?  We all have them, from the Talking Phone book or the Verizon monster yellow page door-stop.  To be sure, there are times when it can be convenient — if you know exactly what you are looking for by category… a yellow page book can be handy indeed.  If you can find it when you need it, the YP generally offers a response across thousands of categories.  For us old fogies though, especially when your reading glasses are not nearby, finding both the right listing in 6 point type and the yellow page book may be a challenge simultaneously.

Given the ubiquity of a desktop computer these days, we generally know where we have parked them and head there first.  And with the ease of internet search, particularly when you start with a Google and Yahoo search bar, it just seems so much easier and immediate in finding the right local retailer or service provider you may need.  With the power of local search, consumers are increasingly relying on a search engine to navigate them to the right listing, or business web site.  And as broadband goes mainstream, fewer people are simply NOT using printed books when searching for products, and services anymore; the immediacy of search and ease of use, increasingly dictate an online search first before we hunt for the YP.

So as a small business why not put your efforts and marketing dollars where consumers are actually searching?  On the web and in the main two or three search engines!

Whether the American economy is good or bad, small business drives our overall macro economy and hiring opportunities.  As we navigate through a treacherous 2009 business climate, we still find in our call center that many small businesses either do not have a good website, or worse still they have no website at all!  We know that small business owners are among the busiest people, and adding search marketing and web site development to their list of  post 5’oclock chores just is not going to happen.   Some claim they do not have the time, finances, technical wherewithal, or marketing smarts to
develop a good website. In a tough economic climate like 09, small business owners simply cannot afford to take up the challenge of find more potential customers.  Local consumers are continually searching the internet looking for products and services and a small business owner needs to know about that intent and business opportunity. And rightly or wrongly, they often judge whether or not to do business with your company on the basis of your website or search presence.

So how does the harried, small business owner get that web site or search presence?   One of the least expensive ways, is to simply create through a service like eLocal Listing,  a one page website that is great fodder for the search engines. We call these one pager business descriptions, a Profile, or a micro site. The search engines love them and in just a matter of minutes, we can usually get a small business owner fully fleshed out for the search engines for something under a hundred dollars a month.  It does not have to cost thousands to develop a website, but you do indeed need a presence to be found in today’s online world.  A fully developed Profile with the right keywords pushed to the right search engines is one way that a local business can compete with mature websites and larger companies on an equal footing.

A Profile when done right is more than a simple website, it’s your online Listing.  An eLocal Profile is more than a simple ‘brochure’ website.  It has the right keywords, basic business description, hours, credit cards, service areas, and details about the company that would be helpful to a consumer searching for goods and services.  And since the web is such an interactive visual, we will often include a video with the company’s name and phone number featured in it.  Our Profile is engaging and entertaining and pushed to several video destination sites, like YouTube.  By getting the Profiles featured in the search engines and destination sites, we build a great presence for a business in its proper business category and locality.  By engaging site visitors and driving the phone or foot traffic to the local business, we give the owner a real chance at converting the searching consumer into a real business opportunity. In this business climate, driving traffic to your business phone, doorway or website makes good sense, especially when you can do it for less than a hundred dollars a month.

So while the print listing may not yet be dead;  in a tough economic cycle, an inexpensive eLocal Profile, or perhaps a more detailed web site is the right choice to make to get your shot at the local business opportunities that come by way of search.

How much dust is on your Yellow Page book?  Got your specs handy?

I frequent the site Hulu often when I have missed a show, or wanted to show someone something funny I watched. The site has just reached the year mark and is implementing new features to keep users on the site and bring their friends as well.

Online video site Hulu is celebrating its first birthday by adding social networking to the site. Dubbed “Hulu Friends,” users can do the usual: share videos, comment on shows and content, and view rankings. Hulu integrates with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Facebook, and Myspace to help users find their friends and/or invite them to Hulu.

Hulu is experiencing 24 million visitors a month. It has risen quickly in its niche and trails only YouTube in the online video space. They began with 50 content partners and now boast over 130. They’ve grown from 30 advertisers to 175+.

Over 3.9 million Hulu players have been embedded on more than 100,000 sites.

Congrats on all the success, Hulu!