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The Search Light Newsletter
Guiding your site to the top of the search engines... (29 September 2003 - Vol
3 Issue #8)
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Dear Reader,
The thing they don't tell you about being pregnant is
that you're hungry ALL the time. Everything revolves around food. I'm
even snacking on my left-over birthday cake as I write this, so you'll
understand if my introduction to this month's issue seems a bit food
obsessed.
Speaking of birthdays, Google turned five this month, celebrating their
biggest year of growth and popularity to date. See our story this issue
to remember just how far they've come since operation from a California
garage.
And speaking of cakes, this month Verisign tried to have their cake and
eat it too when they decided to hijack non-valid domain names by having
them resolve to their own search engine, instead of allowing them to
resolve as errors in a searcher's browser. It's a controversial move by
Verisign and has already been labelled as sabotage and "typo-squatting"
by many in the industry. Controversial or not, the act has seen Verisign
become the 10th most visited web site on the Internet, according to
Alexa.
Moving from cake to humble pie now - that's what LookSmart have been
forced to eat this month, with the announcement they have decided to
settle a class action lawsuit brought against them on behalf of all paid
submission customers prior to April 2002. Settlement is expected to cost
LookSmart up to USD 850 K - that's one big slice of pie!
Finally, if you're a webmaster, don't miss this month's article. Our
guest columnist is Eric Bonnici and his article gives an overview of the
importance of understanding exactly what your site visitors are doing at
your site, why you need that information and what you should do with it.
Enjoy this issue and remember to visit our daily Search
Engine News Blog for the latest industry news and gossip.
Till next time - wishing you high rankings...
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In this issue...
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* Using Web Metrics To Improve Your Site
* Yahoo Re-Launches Shopping Search
* It's High Five for Google
* LookSmart Settles Class Action
* Verisign Hijacks Mistyped Domains
* Google Gets Local
* Amazon Challenges Google With Startup
Using Web Metrics To
Improve Your Site
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By Eric Bonnici of Alexander Joseph and Associates
"...Web
analytics is becoming one of the hot sectors in Internet marketing and
e-commerce technology. Increasingly, brand and e-commerce managers --
under pressure to deliver a return on investment -- are looking to the
technology to help shape and optimize their Web sites."
Internet.com, October 28, 2002
The goal of any web presence should be to
improve the business as a whole and complement its offline marketing
and sales efforts. In other words, to help it achieve maximum
profitability. In order to do this, your online strategy must:
Drive targeted traffic to your site, persuade site visitors to take
the desired actions you want them to take, and use Web metrics to
analyze and measure user behavior.
Performing these objectives correctly will ensure that you have an
effective marketing campaign and increased sales for your business.
Let's look at each of these objectives further:
Objective 1: Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Site
Driving targeted traffic begins with a search engine marketing (SEM)
campaign including pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and a search engine
optimization (SEO) strategy.
It's important to determine which keywords are worth pursuing in your
PPC and SEO efforts. Tools like
WordTracker should be used to generate a list of possible keyword
phrases. Determine how frequently each phrase is searched for, and
evaluate which are feasible enough to put efforts into by checking how
steep the competition is. Make your selections and test them out in
your PPC and SEO campaigns.
Researching and selecting effective keywords is extremely important.
Be sure to select keywords that your target market would use to find
you. With web metrics and analysis in place, you will be able to tell
where people are coming from, what keywords they used to find you, and
whether they are taking the desired actions on your site. If the wrong
keywords are chosen, you may find that you have high rankings, but the
wrong audience is visiting.
Objective 2: Persuade Your Web Site
Visitors To Take the Desired Action
Whether you are selling a product or service, obtaining newsletter
subscribers, or enticing people to download a software demo, your
ultimate goal is getting your site visitors to take a desired action.
In order to do this you must have a compelling site that draws the
visitor in, and then guides them to the goal.
Design and site architecture factors such as usability, navigation,
content, and ad copy all come into play here. The key is to monitor
how well these factors work at persuading your visitors into taking
action. With web metrics you can monitor everything and see what's
working and what's not. Armed with this knowledge, you can make the
appropriate changes to your site; continue your monitoring, and repeat
the process until you get an increase in the desired outcome.
Objective 3: Use Web Metrics To Analyze Visitor Behavior
The area of web metrics and analysis is new and evolving. Compared to
traditional offline marketing, the Internet provides an unparalleled
opportunity to specifically measure how a customer interacts with a
business. Web metrics and analysis will help you to monitor and
improve objectives 1 and 2. This is done by paying close attention to
where visitors are coming from, learning what keywords were used to
find your site, seeing how they navigated through it, and what actions
they took along the way. This information becomes a powerful tool in
growing your business.
The first web metrics were commonly known as traffic logs or site
statistics. These measured things like server hits, unique visitors,
repeat visitors, entry pages, exit pages, first page visited, second
page visited, and average time spent on a page or the site.
Today's newer log analysis software can show us more business-specific
web metrics. These include conversion ratios, browse-to-buy rates and
customer- acquisition costs. As research and development in this area
continues, we will see new metrics appear, along with improved tools
to measure them.
Currently, with the right tools it is possible to monitor web
visitors' behavior such as how and where they found your site, what
pages they landed on, and whether they took the desired actions you
wanted them to take. For this information to be worthwhile, however,
you need to use it to adjust your SEM strategies, keyword selection,
site architecture and design as necessary. Basically, you should test
and improve what is working, eliminate what isn't and figure out new
approaches that will work even better. This process will constantly
raise your return on investment (ROI).
For further details on this subject, including software and vendors, I
recommend reading
"Web
Measurement and Analytics" by Ashley Friedlein. This report goes
into great detail on 12 leading web analytics vendors.
About The Author:
Eric Bonnici is the Director of Internet Marketing and Development at
Alexander Joseph and Associates and has been doing business on the
Internet since 1998. To read more of his articles, visit:
Internet Marketing Articles or
Branded Business Email
Article Copyright (c) 2003, Alexander Joseph and Associates. All
Rights Reserved.
In an
obvious bid to "keep up with the Google's",
Yahoo! has
launched their own shopping search engine.
Similar to Google's Froogle shopping search, Yahoo's new toy is
directly integrated into Yahoo's main search engine and features a
full range of products from across the Internet, with search results
sorted by relevance.
Search engines are increasingly embracing the earning possibilities provided by shopping search. Just this week online retailer DealTime Inc. relaunched itself as Shopping.com, integrating its DealTime platform with the Epinions user-review service.
It's High Five for Google
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Search engine Google turns five this week and is celebrating by riding high on a wave of worldwide popularity and financial success.
The "little engine that could" has come a long way from the Californian garage it started life in on 7 September 1998. According to founders Stanford University PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google was handling around 10,000 queries per day at that time. Consider now that Google deals with more than 200 million queries per day, indexes 3.3 billion web pages and employs 1,000 people worldwide and you start to understand the phenomenal growth this young firm has experienced.
However, unlike some of its older peers in the search industry, Google has not suffered from the potential ill-effects of "too much growth too soon", or fallen victim to the greed of shareholders as the result of an IPO. On the contrary, Google senior management have demonstrated maturity beyond their years, carefully and sensibly guiding the firm around the potential hazards, avoiding the temptation of the fast buck and never losing sight of their original goal - to provide the best search engine in the world.
Even Google's massive success hasn't caused the engine's growth to slow down. A peek into Google Labs reveals that the Google team is doing anything but resting on their laurels. They are also quick to dispel the critics that claim Google is too powerful. As co-founder Sergey Brin commented in an interview during the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose:
"I think people tend to exaggerate in both directions Google's significance," he said. "Some says Google is God others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine. People come to Google because they choose to."
Happy birthday Google.
LookSmart Settles Class
Action
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Search company LookSmart Ltd has settled a class action lawsuit brought against them on behalf of customers who paid for site submission before the Directory converted to a paid listings model in April 2002. LookSmart has agreed to provide compensation to these customers in the form of cash payments and/or additional paid listings.
According to documents received from LookSmart, the litigation comprises the cases of Legal Staffing Partners, Inc. v. LookSmart, Ltd., San Francisco Superior Court Case No. 02-407778, filed May 9, 2002, and Kramer v. LookSmart, Ltd., et al., San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. 02-410034, filed July 9, 2002.
The operative complaint in the consolidated action is the Consolidated Amended Complaint, filed on October 23, 2002 by "Plaintiffs on behalf of themselves and all persons and entities who Plaintiffs allege made a 'one-time payment' to LookSmart for listing services between May 13, 1998 to April 9, 2002 (the "Class Period"), and whose account was unilaterally changed by LookSmart to another type of service that requires additional payments."
The company has sent
emails to all their customers who have rights to compensation under the
settlement agreement. Details of the settlement are as follows:
1) If you submitted a listing to LookSmart during their "one time fee
period" from May 13, 1998 and April 9, 2002 and you were a current customer
of LookSmart (i.e. if you have kept your URL listings in their directory)
until September 5, 2003, you are entitled to 100 free clicks per month up
until December 11, 2003.
2) If you submitted a listing to LookSmart during their "one time fee
period" from October 9, 2001 and April 9, 2002 and you were a current
customer of LookSmart (i.e. if you kept your URL listings in their
directory) until September 5, 2003, you are entitled to 75 additional free
clicks per month from December 12, 2003 to June 12, 2004.
3) If you submitted a listing to LookSmart during their "one time fee
period" from April 9, 2001 and October 8, 2001 and you were a current
customer of LookSmart (i.e. if you kept your URL listings in their
directory) until September 5, 2003, you are entitled to 50 additional free
clicks per month from December 12 2003 to June 12 2004.
4) If you submitted a listing to LookSmart during their "one time fee
period" from May 13, 1998 and April 8, 2001 and you were a current customer
of LookSmart (i.e. if you kept your URL listings in their directory) until
September 5, 2003, you are not entitled to any additional free clicks per
month beyond the 100 per month provided until December 11 2003.
5) If you submitted a listing to LookSmart during their "one time fee
period" from May 13, 1998 and April 9, 2002 and you are no longer a current
customer of LookSmart (i.e. if you canceled your URL listings in their
directory after April 9, 2002 and before September 5, 2003,) you are
entitled to receive an individual cash payment of up to USD 50 per listing
by using their
Claim Form.
Prior to LookSmart's conversion to a pay-per-click model in April 2002, many customers had paid LookSmart what had been described as a "one time fee" to have their sites reviewed and permanently included in the search directory. These customer accounts were automatically rolled-over into paid listings with the introduction of LookSmart's pay-per-click service in April 2002.
LookSmart did not offer to "grandfather" those listings, as is traditional in the industry, instead offering existing customers 100 free clicks per month, after which time the listings would be removed until the start of the following month.
LookSmart's actions resulted in a huge public backlash amongst their customers, countless canceled accounts and a long-term boycott against the Directory by many in the search engine marketing industry. It also triggered a class action suit to be brought against the company.
Settlement of this suit has taken over a year and the acknowledgement that their customers are entitled to compensation as a result of their actions must be a bitter pill for LookSmart to swallow at a time when their popularity is at an all-time low.
With customer claims
expected to reach up to USD 250,000 and LookSmart's legal costs revealed to
be a staggering USD 600,000, it's hard to imagine the one-time search giant
being able to easily recover from this.
Verisign Hijacks
Mistyped Domains
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Domain registrar Verisign has come under intense criticism this week after resolving requests for non-existent .COM and .NET domains to an error page featuring their own search engine, Site Finder. Normally, these requests would be resolved by the user's own browser, typically delivering a "page not found" or DNS error.
In his article about the development, VeriSign's New Site Finder Redirects Bad Domain Traffic, Danny Sullivan reports:
<snippet>"The move, only days old, is already proving controversial. VeriSign is being accused of hijacking traffic, though who exactly "owns" the traffic to non-existent domains is entirely unclear."</snippet>
New Zealand based ISP's have already made their feelings clear on the subject, calling it "sabotage" and claiming it will assist spammers:
<snippet>"Some network operators are calling this 'typo-squatting'. While on the face of it this seems quite a simple move, network operators are up in arms. ICONZ has already introduced software patches to block the move for its customers, says engineering manager John Russell.
'It's nothing more than sabotage and we're treating it as such.'
Russell says the
problem is that instead of non-valid domain names resolving as errors,
they return a Site Finder search page.
'That means we can't do a simple check to find out if names are valid
or not.'
The problem with that is that most anti-spam products conduct this simple
test as their first move in determining whether an email is spam or not.
That means spammers will have a free shot at getting their mail past one
of the most basic weapons in the anti-spam armoury."</snippet>
Ouch!
Google Gets Local
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Research Buzz reports that Google Labs are testing location search, where you can search for products and services specific to a geographical area.
I have no doubt that regional and niche market search will be the future for this industry and it's exciting to see Google so far ahead of the pack in the field. You can test Google's Search By Location via their Labs, but it is only supporting U.S. searches at present.
Amazon Challenges Google With
Startup
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Online retail giant
Amazon.com is
challenging Google with a new search engine startup designed to take
advantage of the booming online search market. Amazon has branded their
new search firm "A9" and has set up an office in Palo Alto, not far
from Google's own headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Unlike Google, A9 will concentrate on product search rather than
general search, tapping into growing consumer demand for online product
research and review. It is expected A9 will feature sophisticated comparison
shopping technology for license to other sites and eventually offer sponsored
listings to potential e-commerce advertisers.
Amazon will launch A9 in October with 30 employees.