aimClear Search Marketing Blog

The term “social media” provokes a continuum of reactions ranging from parents concerned about MySpace predators (rightly so) to Internet marketing folks invested in leveraging traffic with blog technology enabled online media rooms. It’s interesting to note that, while millions of people participate in sites like StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, FaceBook, Squidoo, Digg, Netscape, Furl, Reddit, Del.ico.us, YouTube, Flickr, twitter, and myBlogLog, many informed Americans have never or barely interacted with social media enough to understand what the heck it is…or so they think.

Same As It Ever Was
In reality participating in an online social community is not very different from the physical human experience as we make our way though life. If you’ve ever recommended a restaurant to an associate, taken your kids to a local community center swimming pool, read a theater review, offered your opinion at a social gathering, or set up a buddy for a blind date you’re already a social media expert. The point of divergence is that online tools make the art of relationships easier. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released research results in which 4001 adults in the United States were segmented into groups categorized by attitudes and usage of mobile phones and the Internet. I was somewhat surprised at the results which revealed that the Web 2.0 user crowd is actually quite small.

The survey, which is fascinating, classified ten specific user-types that fit into three more general categories: Elite Users (31%), Middle of the road (20%), and those with limited “tech assets” who don’t use technology (a gigantic 49%). Here is a verbatim rendering of Pew’s classification data:Read the rest of this entry »

With the proliferation of user generated media beginning to saturate sites like YouTube brands can’t count on control anymore. The question is what to do about it.

Real like a Heart Attack
Like it or not YouTube users create commercials for brand products every day in droves. The commercials, which are sometimes negative, bastardize and segment brands into little pieces that will keep you up late at night as 450,000 potential customers download the latest pro or con rant about your product.

Take this YouTube search for Chevy Truck which returns pages upon pages of user generated media about any twisted aspect of the brand. I like the video where an emotional male shares the experience of shepherding his truck over the 250K mile mark. Ask yourself how this ad might affect a potential Chevy customer.

Compare this how Honda might feel about this video of a Honda Odyssey burning on the freeway. Read the rest of this entry »

Squidoo is an emerging social media channel which is demonstrating an ability to attain top organic rankings in highly contested keyword spaces. More importantly the site seems to operate on a simple (yet brilliant) premise that can truly help folks find the content they seek. It’s worth considering as a channel and offers some cool possibilities for clients.

Squidoo’s founder Seth Goodin knows that the wrong thing to do is try to trick a search engine  into sending traffic you don’t deserve. He saw a huge need in the marketplace a for human beings to act as a necessary step in-between the SERPs and the searcher’s final destination. Squidoo’s results have attained significant organic prominence on Google and Yahoo in some highly contested keyword spaces. [Get full SES coverage @ SES Roundtable]Read the rest of this entry »

The panelists in the SES Video Optimization seminar, Eric Papczun, Sherwood Stranieri,  Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative stressed the growing strength of properly tagged video content on the regular search engines.

To drive this home they shared some brand-related keywords turning up in “normal” Google SERPs within view of consumers. Given the investment most large companies make in branding, it’s a no longer optional  as the whether a company monitors and defends the SERPs video results. I have some large clients who would would fall over dead to discover such an uncontrollable subversion of the brand.

Below I show the keyword, search frequency annually (Trellian Global Database), how many documents were returned, and how many documents contained all of the keywords in their title tag.  Take a careful look. Some of the keyword spaces are relativly uncontested (with  different scales of search volume). Other keyword spaces could be a more serious undertaking to increase your rank for.

I would like to note that in nearly every search I undertook in orginizing this post, I found wikipedia.com results ranking higher than video. If any of you bloggers would be interested in sharing faciniating links, feel free to comment with SERPs for video in normal search engines. youTube is not the only game in town so it would be fun to hear about long tail results from smaller video sites.

Beyoncé
Annual searches: 1,168,180 (Trellian Global DB annual searches)
23,800,000 documents for beyonce
636,000 for allintitle
Google page 2

CSI Miami
Annual searches: searches 79,787
1,870,000 dcuments for csi miami.
allintitle:”csi miami”
Google page 1Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it is possible to predict keyword niches from current events or things you believe will happen. Recently Yahoo Small Business Hosting had a 3 day HTTP server 500 error issue which affected WordPress blogs and other .php applications running on their servers. When we called Yahoo to deal with the issue (this blog is hosted with Yahoo Small Business Hosting for the moment) they told us “Yahoo runs .php scripts just fine” but that the outage “only affected .php pages.” They told us the server 500 error would last for up to 3 business days which surprised us. We responded with a link baiting article on our main website, aimClear.com to attract other upset Yahoo Small Business Hosting Customers.

Predicting Future Keywords
Both wordTracker (12/06 – 3/07) and Trellian (2/06-2/07) were reporting that no searches were queried for “yahoo small business hosting bug” and other keywords which might be associated with the outage. Still, since lots of people host .php applications on Yahoo Small Business Hosting servers. We wanted to experiment with attaining ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) for what we believed would be a future pocket of searches that were easy to attain rankings for now while the phrases were uncontested. Here’s the thinking in 6 steps. Read the rest of this entry »

“Search” Is Not Just About The Internet anymore. Search means people actively looking for things, no matter where they go to do so. Whether our audience is reading the newspaper in the barber’s office or social bookmarking a website on technorati, to know precisely what people search for, the words they use to ask, and how often they seek gives us powerful insight in every communications channel.Read the rest of this entry »