November 1, 2007
Seth Godin Dishes Out Meatball Sundaes
Today, SES Chicago keynote speaker Seth Godin spent an hour dishing out his marketing wisdom on a webcast with our own Kevin Ryan. He expounded on the ideas behind his new book, Meatball Sundae.
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A meatball is a worthwhile commodity. They are things we need and sold to everyone. The sundae is the hot fudge and the peanuts, the tactics of social media and the MySpace profiles. These things work but they work best when they're not on meatballs, but when they're on an organization designed to work with them.
Seth also offered 14 trends to help organizations avoid ending up with the meatball sundae. Jody Nimetz at SEO-space has a good recap of those.
Specifically for search marketers, Seth advises ditching the reactionary moves to find the latest and greatest tactics to place well in the search engines, and focus on real marketing:
What he's trying to say to the search engine optimization world is that SEO has traditionally been a tactical minute-to-minute game. It's been about figuring out what the search engines want right now and tweaking sites to meet that. That's over.What we want to do now is to change the very nature of what SEOs do so that regardless of what tactics are hot at the moment, the engines will want to find them because the stuff they're doing matches the strategies the engines are always going to have.
You should print that little bit out and stick it on your wall. If this wasn't a free event, that would have been worth the price of admission right there.
If Lisa and Jody's great coverage is not enough, you can also find more insight from Josh Bernoff, David Dalka, and Darren Barefoot.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on November 1, 2007, 10:49 PM | Permalink
Search Headlines & Links: November 1, 2007
Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:
From the SEW Blog:
- GoogleClick Clears One Hurdle, Another Looms
Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick cleared another regulatory hurdle this week in Australia. - Ask.com Carrying IAC Through Tough Times?
Ask.com's strong performance is helping offset a rough quarter on parent IAC, driven largely by a troubled mortgage industry's impact on its real estate and lending businesses. - Google Custom Search Overlay
This provides a way to have the results of a user's search overlay itself on top of the screen containing the search box. - SEW Experts: How Site Architecture Influences Link Building
Site architecture determines how successful link building campaigns will be.
Headlines & News from Elsewhere:
- FTC Forum Promises Discussion of More than Just Behavioral, ClickZ
- Following Google's Footsteps, Microsoft Launches Beta of Free Web Analytics Tool, ClickZ
- Seth Godin Likes Meatball Sundaes?, SEO-space
- Seth Godin Asks: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?, ProHipHop
- SEOs Should Understand Network Infrastructure, Search Engine Land
- Hakia Adds Social Networking - But Does Search Need Social Networking Features?, Read/Write Web
- Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare, Marketing Pilgrim
- The Google Phone: The Story So Far, Some Launch Details & What's Next, GigaOm
- Life After Text Links: ScratchBack, TechCrunch
- PayPerPost Inc Changes Its Name to IZEA, Problogger
- Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends, SEOmoz
- Forget PageRank, Here's StumbleRank, Search Engine Journal
- Steps to Create a Successful Campaign, RB Digital Rodeo
- The Fate of the Keywords Meta Tag: Misspellings, SoloSEO
- Can't See Your Ad?, Yahoo Search Marketing Blog
- WebTrends Shakeout - Shakeup, Web Metrics Guru
- 2 Pieces of Bad Writing Advice — And What to Do Instead, GrokDotCom
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on November 1, 2007, 6:05 PM | Permalink
GoogleClick Clears One Hurdle, Another Looms
Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick cleared another regulatory hurdle this week when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced on Monday that it would not intervene in Google's plans, according to ClickZ News.
The deal is still working its way through Congressional and FTC approval in the U.S., though experts expect approval of the deal to come soon. Google is still facing anti-competitive troubles in Europe.
The Brussels-based European Commission is currently weighing anti-competitive concerns that may arise from the transaction. A verdict is due November 13. The FTC can approve the deal irrespective of the EU verdict, but Google and DoubleClick cannot complete the deal unless both EU and FTC approve it.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on November 1, 2007, 1:05 PM | Permalink
Ask.com Carrying IAC Through Tough Times?
Ask.com's strong performance is helping offset a rough quarter on parent IAC, driven largely by a troubled mortgage industry's impact on its real estate and lending businesses.
During a conference call yesterday, IAC officials said the company's media and advertising sector revenue -- which includes Ask.com and Citysearch --increased by 40 percent during the quarter. That segment's operating income before amortization was $27.6 million, about $12 million more than the year-ago period, reports ClickZ News.
During the call, COO Doug Lebda said the company's next move in search "is to rebuild and redeploy the infrastructure of the core search engine." Ask.com is in the midst of that rebuild now, he said, adding that the end result should yield “more relevant, more complete and fresher” search results.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on November 1, 2007, 11:12 AM | Permalink
Google Custom Search Overlay
The Google Custom Search blog just announced a new feature, the Custom Search Results Overlay. What it does is provide a way to have the results of a user's search overlay itself on top of the screen containing the search box. You can see an example of this here.
It's an interesting idea. A bit like a pop-up concept, except it avoids the issues inherent with pop-up blocking. The overlay lets you provide search functionality to your users without losing their focus on your web site. So now you get to provide a better site experience for your users, and you don't have to feel like you are actively driving them away from your web site.
Posted by on November 1, 2007, 6:32 AM | Permalink
SEW Experts: How Site Architecture Influences Link Building
Site architecture determines how successful link building campaigns will be. In today's Link Love column, "How Site Architecture Influences Link Building," Justilien Gaspard takes a look at the site architecture for the Web site for the "Reservation Road" film as a case study, and makes suggestions for improvement.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on November 1, 2007, 12:00 AM | Permalink
