aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Via techCrunch: eBay announced a cash acquisition today valued at $75 million for the purchase the social community site StumbleUpon. eBay indicated that StumbleUpon will further their “goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust.” eBay is installing Michael Buhr (requires login) as general manager for the product and they intend to take a hands-off approach at first. SU has been growing exponentially. With over 2.3 million registered users and 5 million recommendations served daily, they have clocked 150% year over year growth.

Community Based Business?
What exactly IS “community based commerce” anyway? StumbleUpon is exactly the opposite at present. Oh, plenty of smart marketing folks drive plenty of traffic from SU but the approach is usually very civilized. The selling that does go on is either very subtle or gets buried by bloggers. Does ebay expect top stumblers to suddenly become brand evangelists committed to selling products for ebay commissions?

What might that look like? When ebay takes the gloves off will we be looking at contextually generated ads served in profiles, affiliate ads on category pages, and video advertising next to tag clouds?

Do I WANT ebay to Know My Habits?
How will blended ebay shopping data and SU content habits be merged and exploited? Will SU, which is almost completely free of successful junk spammers, become a MySpace-like hangout where users are solicited by whores and spammers? Will ebay read my messages to SU friends for later use? Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some highlight’s from this weeks SU WordPress buzz, with links to each reviewer’s SU profile.

Weblog Tools Collection & Blog Archive & Announcing Wordpress Pl…
scorpion68a
Interesting competition. It seems that we are going to improve our plugins collection.

Introducing ProSense: An Adsense Ready SEO Wordpress Theme
VladTheAffiliate From the page: “Featuring built-in ad units with optimized placement and blending, ProSense�s broad design scheme makes it easily suitable for a wide variety of niche topics or content types.”

WPDesigner WordPress Themes & So you want to create WordPress theme…
rockyourbody
Wordpress theme design Read the rest of this entry »

First, welcome to SU friends checking out this post. As background, aimClear blog’s readership is made up primarily of our medium and large size corporate and regional advertising agency clients. Believe it or not many of them have never even heard of StumbleUpon. Given SU’s propensity to drive significant amounts of traffic and generate quality links to worthy websites, the SU community should not be overlooked by any serious Internet marketing professional. The question now is Will ebay Wreck StumbleUpon?

That said, I want everyone to know that SU is also an amazing place to make friends of all stripes and hang out in the coolest of communities. The value of this social media tool is well known. According to Search Engine land eBay May Buy StumbleUpon For $75 Million.

SU Basics
At the moment 2,427,477 channel surfing subscribers peruse the internet via StumbleUpon. The SU algorithm learns what they like by their bookmarks, behavior, and makes content recommendations- many of which are stunning in quality. SU is my personal social community of choice to connect with friends, share content, and meet new people that have interests similar to mine. Here are the top 6 reasons I love StumbleUpon: Read the rest of this entry »

Inside AdWords, Google’s official source for information about AdWords, has been trumpeting the arrival of Click-to-play video ads for AdWords. Yippy Skippy I woke up this morning to find the new video ad serving features in our AdWords client manager account interface!

Video (and image) ads now appear on a high number of Google content match affiliate sites and for goods in the Google Network. Google video ads do not appear in organic SERPS (at least for now). Content provider affiliate websites must opt-in to the image ads program and only then are site’s eligible for video ads. Affiliate content providers are provided with tools to choose preset display formats for ad sizes and shapes to display. It’s only a question of time before these ads are served to cable networks, hotel rooms, satellite TV, and other broadcast streams.

What are Video Ads?
Video ads are first displayed as a static display picture. When a customer clicks the play button (or the placeholder image), the video starts to play by one of two methods: Read the rest of this entry »

First I want to welcome any experienced bloggers who followed the pingback-invitation to this post. We appreciate your traffic. aimClear Blog is a search marketing blog for in-house, agency, advertising and PR professionals.

In our travels we’ve learned the average Internet marketing client needs introductory guidance regarding blog basics like trackbacks, pingbacks, MyBlogLog, social bookmarks, and even foundational topics like posts, categories, and feeds.

Power bloggers are welcome to stay and explore our slant on SEM topics like landing pages, analytics, SEO, PPC. However, this post is primarily aimed at parties interested in learning blogging basics, perhaps as a prelude to a business marketing effort.

What Happens When a Blog Links to Another Blog?
Most modern blog platforms, like WordPress and Movable type, have a built in feature which notifies other blogs that you’ve linked to them. This is called an (outgoing) “pingback” Also, incoming pingbacks are immediately visible to you when other authors link to your blog from theirs. In WordPress the incoming pingback information shows in the dashboard. (See “Latest Activity” graphic above).

This mutual notification is an incredible networking opportunity. Because high quality inbound links are an important measure of any website’s reputation with Google, it is rare for our website not to receive a near immediate visit from a blog we just gave outgoing link love to.

A fascinating dynamic in the blog world is that so many blogs link directly to competitor sites. This astounds many people we talk to about blogging. I understand. It seems somehow counterintuitive to promote other businesses by proxy. However the benefits outweigh potential liabilities.

Myth #1: Link to your competitors’ blogs and they’ll rip off your clients. False! While the online marketing blogs we link to are “competitors” they don’t need to steal our clients…they’ve got plenty of their own. Otherwise we wouldn’t think them cool enough to link to. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern Analytics packages offer a statistic (we hate to read) called the “Bounce Rate.” Bounce Rate is different than the “Exit Rate” measurement and speaks to how many visitors entire a site on a landing page only to leave from the same landing page without going any further within the site. It’s especially ugly to have a high Bounce Rate for a PPC landing page and a bummer for organic traffic.

To clarify, Exit Rate includes site visitors who may have entered other pages in the site as their initial landing page. Since visitors may have spent substantial time in the site prior to leaving, Exit Rate is not necessarily a good measure of how well content and design is engaging traffic. A high Bounce Rate, however, often means that the page or site is simply not stimulating or useful to visitors. Bounce Rate applies to individual pages and a site on average.

I take a positive outlook (even though it sometimes hurts to even look). Bounce Rate provides a great deal of actionable insight for search marketing types who are committed to using analytics for taking steps to actually improve user experiences on their site.

This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Improved user experience means lower Bounce Rates. Lower Bounce Rates mean web traffic is drilling down further into the site. Deep drilling means guests are more engaged. More engaged traffic has a greater likelihood of converting to key performance indicators like sales, qualified leads, and other KPIs. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is of personal importance to me. While my prognosis for a normal life expectancy is now excellent, this August marks the two year anniversary of my diagnosis of cancer (stage 3B lymphoma). Because of the amazing folks at Mayo Clinic, I’m OK. Many others are not so lucky. It took me 7 months of chemo, 3 weeks of radiation, and loving help from many, especially my family and charitable organizations who offered support and information when truly needed.

Online Marketing Blogs Give the Gift of Links
In a blog “meme” among top ranking online marketing blogs, SEM firms are lending their link authority to charities. Links from top ranked websites are valuable assets for any website because incoming “link love” is a crucial attribute search engines use to evaluate a site’s relevance. High quality inbound links are important to achieve top rankings in organic SERPs. Therefore the result of these online marketing blogs banding together, for charity outbound linking, is truly the giving of gifts. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is deploying the most significant changes to its results pages in history, unveiling “Universal Search,” which aggregates listings from Google news, video, images, local, and book searches with traditional website searches. Vertical searches (specialty search engines) which index images, video, local, news, blogs, etc… will soon be fully interspersed with Google search results.

This Will Have a Tremendous Effect on SEM.
Much will be written about these earth shaking changes in the coming hours, days and months. If your SEM firm is good you’ll be discussing the ramifications in the short-term. Suffice to say that this ranks as one of the major industry shifts destined to have a huge effect on SEO tactics and techniques. The links in this post are required reading for any website operators who earn a portion of their income from Google organic SERPs.

Here is what the authority blogs in the SEM space are saying about Google Universal Search:
Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer
Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience Google

Google’s Universal Search, New interface & More
Danny Sullivan’s Daily SearchCast, May 17, 2007 Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a revolution of keyword research tools over time. The first introduction to keyword research for most of us was years ago with the free overture keyword tool, which was the basis for many an early PPC campaign. Overture became Yahoo and provided insight into Yahoo’s keyword “inventory.” it was revolutionary.

Now with more advanced tools like Trellian Keyword Discovery, and WordTracker we have access to databases of differing sizes, quality, focus, skew and insight. aimClear suscribes to several regionl, global, and specialized keyword databases (through their APIs) which we aggregate in a proprietary tool. However WordTracker offers a free keyword research tool with useful functionality to the public. If you’re willing to do a little screen scraping, data can be harvested to provide insight into the keyword universe. Read the rest of this entry »

The following search engine optimization resource has been widely reported on. That said, I bring this SEOMOZ report forward to our readership because NOT everybody reads the same daily trade publications.

37 organic search leaders (ok pioneers) voted on their estimation of what website attributes are attractive to Google’s ranking algorithm. This is a blow-away resource for anyone with imagination and an honest need to understand, debate, and react to the best-in-class thought of the day.

The panel included people who know: Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Todd Malicoat, Christine Churchill, Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs, Christine Churchill, and Danny Sullivan. These folks are the whose-who of authority SEM bloggers. Read the rest of this entry »