Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Thoughts on Google Instant

September 9th, 2010 by Joe Lucas

We’ve been getting a lot of questions today about our thoughts around the launch of Google Instant and what this ultimately means for search.  Overall, I think this was a positive change because it makes search more accessible to a wider audience and in my opinion, it’s a killer feature.  I see a few big effects of Google’s new feature.

First, predicative queries should allow users to get to a more varied set of information than they otherwise would have.  Why?  Because Google now makes it easier to construct longer, more specific queries.  When a user starts typing in what they are looking for, google will not only predict what that is, but will also provide the user with other alternatives.  For example, typing in “San Francisco “ provides a user with some suggestions of what to search for.  The user can easily filter through that and then combine them with other suggestions to really explore the results of what they are looking for.

The second effect is the auto refreshing of results.  This really allows the user to explore the results of a query and then easily refine them.  This can be done right from the search box without having to wait for a full page refresh.  This makes refining queries and exploring results much quicker and easier.

The overall effect of these major features will be to put more of an emphasis on long tail queries.  We’ve done some research in the past on query length and I expect a trend to form placing more volume on longer, more specific queries.  Obviously, we’ll be monitoring this to see if it comes true.

SEO Implications

From a pure SEO standpoint, I don’t think this really shifts anything in the overall strategy.  There are already people calling this the end of SEO and other non-sensical claims.  I don’t want to re-iterate counter arguments to this, especially since Danny Sullivan has already done so in a very eloquent fashion.  In short, it’s not and likely it’s probably a good thing for SEO.

What are your thoughts on Google Instant?  Have you started doing anything different because of it?  Leave us some comments below and let the discussion continue.


The most underused tool in the marketing toolbox – Linking?

August 26th, 2010 by Rand Schulman

Sometimes I don’t understand things - including the inner workings of marketing professionals. Yet I’ve tried to tackle this challenge and have been building and selling marketing applications for marketing folk for decades. I know that working complex web analytics products can be daunting. Marketing automation even more so. How does one create and allocate lead scoring and attribution? What is the LTV of a customer?

But linking?  Gosh, don’t we all know the value of inbound links? Don’t we know how search engines work, for God’s sake? Well, apparently no. This knowledge is not as universal as one would think (Hope! Assume!).

A few months ago we released Linker which, in short, is a dating site for sharing and creating links. A Match.com for SEO link building. The good news? We’ve had thousands of people start to take advantage of the service. The bad news? Only five percent of them have ANY links on their site! This data floored me.

So we took matters into our own hands and today released our findings as well as made our link building tool FREE . We understand that linking takes time, which could explain the incredible low rate, but with our Linker product it should be much easier. At least that’s our hope. So, world, let’s get found. Let’s use the product and link away. I would be happy to hear from any of you!


Poll Results - Top Link-Building Expert: Eric Ward

August 18th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Continuing on yesterday’s PPC Experts results list, I’m continuing to use the opportunity that Connected Marketing Week presents to post some of the results to the lists I created around top experts in the various online marketing disciplines.

I’ll probably repeat myself in all the poll results, but the lists have been a pleasure to publish, as people are constantly asking for recommendations around who to turn to for advice within different areas of online marketing. This format allowed me to share my recommendations, in a format that allows everyone else to weigh in and share their insights too. Over 3000 individuals participated in this series of polls. Thank-you to all!

Today, I’m publishing the list of top experts you turn to most for link-building advice. As you can see from the original list, this was a really strong group. Every single one of them is incredibly knowledgeable, and worth being on anyone’s reading list.

Your top 5 favorites were:

1) Eric Ward
2) Wiep
3) Debra Mastaler
4) Dave Davies

and a tie for fifth;

5) Rand Fishkin
5) Ralph Tegtmeier - Fantomaster / “Fantomeister”

The graphic, for all of you to see the distribution:


Poll results - Top PPC Expert - David Szetela

August 17th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

I thought it would be interesting to use Connected Marketing Week to post some of the results to the lists I created around top experts in the various online marketing disciplines.

As I’ve written before, the lists have been a pleasure to publish, as people are constantly asking for recommendations around who to turn to for advice within different areas of online marketing. This format allowed me to share my recommendations, in a format that allows everyone else to weigh in and share their insights too. Over 3000 individuals participated in this series of polls. Thank-you to all!

The first set of results I thought I would share was from the list of PPC Experts. The PPC Expert you feel most comfortable turning to for PPC advice is David Szetela, who received 14.6% support!

1) David Szetela
2) Andrew Goodman
3) Joanna Lord
4) Brad Geddes
5) Marc Poirier

In fact, the top 5 vote getters received 50% of the total support, as shown in this graph:

Congratulations to all! If you missed the list - view it here.

Thanks to everyone for participating - @rzwicky Richard Zwicky


Results to the Lists and Voting Observations - Overview

August 13th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky

Are SEO’s and PPC experts more effective at driving referral traffic to a web site from Twitter than SMM specialists? That could be the conclusion based on data I’ve collected from a series of polls, so far.

A few weeks ago I started running some lists on this blog. My goal was to thank so many great contributors for posting relevant and useful information which would be useful to anyone engaged in online marketing. Some people are established, and well known. There were five lists SEO, PPC, SMM, Links, and Cross-Channel (meaning they fit in 2+ categories).

I’ve known many of these people for years, since before I started Eightfold Logic. I used a vote driven format, because I know polls always draw attention, but also because I thought their might be some interesting data to report. After a couple of system crashes, I’ve finally completed compiling the data and expect to begin publishing the results next week.

While I’ll publish the detailed lists later, I wanted to share out some interesting summary data in the meantime, and get your thoughts and input on a surprising result. Perhaps most interestingly to me: why is it that tweets by SMM specialists in support of the list of Social Marketers generated the lowest click through rates?

This first chart shows how many unique individuals posted, or reposted, a link on Twitter promoting each channel’s list. As you can see, the greatest volume of unique activity was for the Cross Channel and SEO lists. This total is not the number of tweets, but rather the number of unique individual who tweeted about the lists, and used Bit.ly for url shortening purposes. I selected just the bit.ly tweets as it’s simple to track.

This is where it gets interesting. Despite the unique activity levels for the SMM and PPC lists, the Social Marketer’s self-promotions drew the lowest average number of referrals per tweet. Could it be that SEO’s and PPC’s are the most effective Tweeters?

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts as to why this is.

As for the raw numbers for these graphs:


SEO PPC SMM Links Cross Channel
# of names on poll 29 26 24 32 42
# of unique Twitter posters (who used Bit.ly) 42 24 22 27 49
Average # of referrals per tweet 13.7 13.5 5.9 12.0 10.1

Details of each list’s results next week.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Richard - @rzwicky



This Week in Links - Week Ending July 30

July 31st, 2010 by Anthony Young

Is Google Planning to Kill SEO?
Bravo to Econsultancy for winning link-baiter of the week with this story.  Econsultancy claims that “If a recent patent comes to fruition, it seems the big G may have plans to undo all your hard work in favour of their own know-how.”  Back in 2004, Google filed a patent, which was recently granted, for something called ‘Enhanced Document Browser with Auto-generated Linkage.’  It seemed to me a rather broad description with multiple applications so I followed the link to the USPTO website to read the abstract.

The abstract states:  “Additional documents are automatically located that are relevant to an original document, such as a document being read by a user, and also potentially relevant to personal information of the user. The additional documents may be located based on descriptive information that includes personal information of the user and content information of the document being read. The additional documents, or links to the additional documents, may be incorporated into the document being read. In some implementations, the additional documents may be presented in-line with the document being read, such as through an in-link link or text snippet. The user can thus be efficiently presented with additional information that is relevant to the original document being read.”

Huh?  Kill SEO?  My less histrionic interpretation would bet on Google implementing this in a way that would show users an overlay of related personalized content and information similar to what Google Maps does with local business information today.   Or Google Adsense… Then again, that’s one possibility and only one personal interpretation.  Remember, just because the patent was recently granted doesn’t mean Google hasn’t already implemented the technology described therein.

Near the end of the article the writer says:  “On the other hand, it {could be} a dynamically generated, personalized link builder that works based on personal user preference, surely the Holy Grail of SEO.”  Ahhh, so the shoe drops.  Maybe SEO will live to see another day…

So what have we learned?  This is a great example of how link-baiting can quickly build a large number of inbound links to your site (although I’m unsure of the success of this particular story).  Just take care not to take too much liberty with the plot line.


Google Dynamic Linking

David Harry from SEO Dojo offers a more reasoned analysis of the newly awarded patent to Google on dynamically generated links.


Phase One Link Building Strategies

Greg Shuey writes an encouraging article for budding link builders on where to find that low-hanging fruit.  He outlines five easy steps that range from internal linking of resources to directories and link reclamation (404 pages).


4 Ways Link Builders Should Use Twitter

Interesting article on using Twitter as an alternative to traditional link building activities.  Not only can social media sites like Twitter help you find link building opportunities but also help identify hot trends and what’s going on in your particular niche in the online world.  With a large enough following and the potential of retweets, site owners can garner significant traffic from links on Twitter even though they are nofollow.


This Week in Links

June 29th, 2010 by Anthony Young

With the recent launch of our new social link building marketplace; Linker, Eightfold Logic will publish a weekly roundup of the best articles on link building and link development called “This Week in Links.”  Our first installment has great content from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Search Engine Watch, WebProNews, and Search Engine Journal.  We will continue to build out our resources and knowledge base from the very best authorities on link building and white hat techniques.  Please feel free to comment and provide us with your feedback.

Enquisite Reporting Suite Update

November 20th, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

(Nov 2009) We are pleased to announce the November update to the Enquisite Performance Suite. This release includes three new enhancements:

- Bounce Rate, Time on Site, and Page View metrics within Enquisite Optimizer
- Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign
- A 50% speed increase in the core Longtail reporting interface.

Our Enquisite Optimizer product has been enhanced to allow you to see the bounce rate, time on site, and page view metrics for your site as well as any segment of search referral traffic that you create within Optimizer. This has been an outstanding request from publishers and etailers alike.

This screenshot reflects ~10 days worth of data from a web site with ~150k search referrals per day. The segment displayed is showing Google organic search traffic only, where the visitors were searching from within the U.S., and which zip codes they were located in when they visited the business. The map shows the State by State breakdowns (WA is proportionally too high), and the Time on Site / Bounce Rate / PageViews calculation shows us the site average, and the average for just this segment. The system took 5 seconds to calculate the entire dataset, most of which was the time it took me to set the parameters!

This feature was created to provide you with the ability to determine the relevancy and perceived value of the pages on your site. It can help you determine the factors that may compel users who arrive at your site to immediately leave as well as the pages that may entice them to continue to browse. Not only will this help you better structure your site and pages, but it will allow you to understand which pages to focus on in order to best shape the incoming traffic.

Finally, the addition of time on site, page view and bounce rate calculated against both paid or organic search referral segments makes it possible for any search marketer to isolate and identify high value opportunities and optimize campaigns accordingly.

Our Longtail reports is the core of Enquisite Optimizer. We’ve made some code improvements which halve load times, and with a new Database optimization we’re implementing, we expect to reduce load times even more significantly. For all but the largest sites, Optimizer was already blazingly fast for a real-time analysis and insight engine. Now, it’s even faster for everyone!

Finally, we’ve started the process of integrating the segmentation functionality in Optimizer into our Campaign product. This will make it even easier than before to build and manage your search marketing campaigns.

We’ve got a lot more improvements coming in the next few months, and thank-you all for your continued support, suggestions and feedback.