YouTube has become a beast, taking seat as the second largest search engine in the world. Hulu and other niche’ engines are nipping at YouTube’s heals. Yet video search optimization remains relatively uncharted territory for most.

Today at SES Toronto, respected industry experts answered the question “Are you overlooking the opportunities of video search?” The  answers were a veritable “how to” clinic on tactics and optimization techniques, which will undoubtedly prove insightful for any business looking to fire up a video content campaign.

Panelists in the session, “Optimizing for Video Search: Virgin Territory?” drilled deep  into the promising statistics of this massive vertical. Moderating today’s session was Mona Elesseily (Page Zero Media). On the panel was Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit), Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative) & Steve Espinosa (eLocal Listing).

First to speak was Amanda Watlington. She begins by noting that Canadians are global champions of online video viewership with a whopping 21.1 million people  watching according to comScore. Nearly 3.1 billion videos have been uploaded to the Internet and the average viewer watches 147 videos per month.

Eighty-eight percent of Internet users viewed online video in February.  The average Canadian video viewer watched 605 minutes of video in February. These facts mean one thing, if you aren’t doing video you are neglecting a gigantic online user segment.

How do viewers find videos?
Forty-five percent of video viewers begin their surfing experience by navigating directly to a video sharing site, mainly YouTube. To a lesser extent people find video via search engines, social networks, bookmarking sites and email.

Set Realistic Expectations
A small percentage of videos reach 1 million or more views. If you want more views, you must work hard to get them. Optimization & social media engagement are key components in driving viewership.

Challenges for Brand & Search Marketers
Brand marketers – creating brand personality, engagement and loyalty in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem.

Search marketers - challenged with limited search engine result page (SERP) real estate. With a large amount of advertising and various verticals funneled in with universal search space is limited.

Advantages for Brand & Search Marketers
Brand marketer – Creates a direct communication channel with users, adds new media outlets and taps into communities that may not have been available to you through traditional broadcast media. Community engagment and brand personality are easily channeled to create a meaningful relationship with users.

Search marketers – Optimizing video content is another way to gain a foothold and take a significant place in the SERPs.

Should you host or post your video content?
Host it – Hosting your own videos allows you to seize control, but also presents optimization challenges. It’s necessary though to optimize the video content landing page to ensure your users know video is available.

Make sure you:
- Create video with branding in it
- Write a clear title and description
- Create tags to identify subject
- Create landing pages for each video
- Avoid pop up layers

Post it – YouTube, Yahoo! & Brightcove get the most attention, but just because videos are branded and get significant views on these sites doesn’t mean you’ll take over the SERPs.

Make sure you:
- Create and optimize a channel
- Socialize and engage through the channel
- Optimize each video submitted
- Seek subscribers & ratings
- Aim to be on page 1 featured videos
- Look at what successful channels are doing
- Embed videos (use the same techniques for optimizing the landing page)
- Experiment with annotations, video responses and thumbnails

If you host it you can also post it; as of now there is no duplicate content screen for video content. In either case the SEO must be good. As more video is optimized users will be able to find video more easily in the SERPs. If the optimization of a video isn’t strong enough it will be pushed farther down as new content with better user search syntax.

Tips and Tactics
- Offer videos in multiple formats
- Do keyword research before creating the video
- Write a compelling video summary
- Use PR and word of mouth
- Embed links to video in online press releases
- Use marketing communication
- Feature links on you website
- Make it easy for viewers to share your videos
- Optimize video by applying SEO principles

Next up to the podium was Gregory Markel. Gregory begins with a disclaimer:
the best YouTube expert in the world still doesn’t know what a YouTube engineer knows. It’s necessary to search out the information for yourself, subscribe to the YouTube blog and Twitter YouTube channel.

Once upon a time keywords and video counts were very important to ranking. These are still very important, but they are only two of several ranking factors.

YouTube Ranking Factors
Title, keywords, descriptions, tags, links, ratings, view counts, thumbs up/down, shares, favorites, comments, authority channels, annotations,  flagging, one box result, subscribers, usage, embeds and paid search. Whhewww!! Is that it? It’s better than 200+

A big mistake many people make is using the wrong keywords or placing the keywords too late in the title and description. Tip: YouTube will tell you what is popular with the drop down suggestion menu under the search query box.

Greg feels that community ranking factors are more important than traditional ranking factors. Analyze the competition, check their public statistics & data on the video watch page. There is a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. View numbers, favorited, honors, links, ratings, comments, etc. After that, assess your marketing objectives and targets and meet or beat them!

Tips for Optimizing Community Ranking Factors
- Make great and unique videos
- Ask users to rate your videos
- Post a “video response”
- Add comments prompting people to watch your video
- Use similar but not the same keywords in your titles
- Post new videos on Thursdays or Fridays
- Join the YouTube partner program (easier said than done)
- Use social media and websites within your control to submit/post your video link/embeds and get the word out.
- Submit your videos to multiple video sites using www.tubemogul.com – currently free but limited use.
- Link your videos together – use annotations with a message to your viewers “stay tuned” /prompt them to click through to the next video.
- Create playlists
- Monitor your video content with YouTube Insight

Video Paid Search
- Adwords: advertise your video or channel via Google/Yahoo!/Bing
- Use “promote your video” and/or “promote your channel”
- Target the YouTube content network via Google content and site targeting
- YouTube Direct Sales: Buy Brand channel ($170-$250,000), buy homepage for a day 240 million views @ $250,000
- Network placement
- Ad insertion placement in YouTube TV and Movies
- Relevant video overlays for certain videos

It’s all changing quickly!
Gregory closed with a one minute research study his company explored. Using the iPhone app 12seconds.tv they uploaded a video targeting the phrase “disruptive marketing example”. The video upload took one minute. In 2 weeks the video ranked 2 and 7 out of 300,000 results. There’s a vast amount of video platforms available today which equates to a great deal of opportunity for you to take advantage of.

Last up was Steve Espinosa. He doesn’t waste time describing how to create a viral video, he assumes we’ve already got some ideas cookin’, but he does ease the tense crowd with a picture of his 6 month kid.

Many people don’t know that Yahoo! has implemented universal search into their search results. Yahoo! still accounts for 20% of search volume so don’t turn your back to them.

Video Length
- Each industry is different, therefore each threshold of attention is different depending on the target audience. Use Google analytics to determine what the videos bounce rate and average time on the page.

Use Google Website Optimizer to do A/B testing. Create different variations of the video and then run a test using the free tool to track your conversions.

Exporting Video
- Export videos as SWF file type – YouTube and Yahoo! video players do not use Active X controls
- Utilize Google video sitemaps
- Be sure to export in 4:3 aspect ratio. Google is still using this aspect ratio for universal search.

Video Link Building
- Drive users to your channel!
- YouTube adds “nofollow” to all video titles except for your latest video
- Yahoo! doesn’t add “nofollow” to video links. By building links to these static Yahoo! pages, it will benefit your

Show your call to action in your thumbnail
YouTube takes thumbnail captures at  the ¼, ½, and ¾ mark of the video, why not optimize this with a call to action?

Optimize your embed code with a link back to your video. If anybody copies this embed code they are ultimately assisting you in bolstering links back to your video.

Twitter nofollows all links on the main twitter.com profile but not the mobile version of the site. Begin by building links to your twitter site. Once you tweet about your new video and provide that link you will ultimately be passing link juice to the video.

As you add links when distributing your video on sites like twitter, use URL parameters in order to gather the same data you get on your site with Google Analytics.

Channeling YouTube Link Juice
Subscribe to big brand YouTube users with high authority profiles and you will be added to their profile under recent subscribers. The link goes to your channel page and that link juice is funneled through your most recent video post.

Continue subscribing to these big brand authority pages and spread it out. After you’ve been removed from the ‘recent subscriber’ section, go back and comment on their profile. The DoFollow link on your username will pass link juice back to your user profile and on to your video. That is just slick!!!

The session proved that although video content is a sometimes overlooked resource, this highly populated vertical is one that is worth taking advantage of if you haven’t already.

Social media marketing is on the minds of many this year, while proposing ’09 budgets for in-house or SEM agency clients. We’re repeatedly being asked to help with proposals and business plans. If you think selling starter social to your boss could be hard because fledgling participation doesn’t always yield immediate benifit, look again.

Critical reputation management and SEO basics intersect with social, to make first step-social media budget requests no-brainers. Prudent social “campaigns” are not just about generating short term cash.

There are plenty of compelling PR and SEO motivations to start immediately and justify budget right out of the gate. The conundrum at money time, especially in this rotten economy, is convincing your team that social media not only matters, but is a crucial component of both reputation management and search engine optimization.

Truth be told, many businesses simply can’t afford not to begin a social media program because it’s so easy to get trashed (or miss cool treats) if asleep at the switch. Here’s food for thought to pitch your CFO’s direction at budget time:

Social Media Is Vital For SEO
Universal search means search engine results replete with video, news, travel, cars and other specialized indexes called “verticals.” Search engine result pages (SERPs) driving media sharing sites like YouTube & Flicker are terrific verticals for claiming valuable SERP real estate.

Most SEOs would prefer to control every position on the “average” Google first page results with friendly (or at least neutral) content. With appropriate understanding of tagging schemas, it’s fairly easy to rank video and pictures for slightly contested keywords quickly.

With some networking, the power gets greater. The Zen of sharing sites is that in well crafted communities, participation is rewarded with internal link energy to make the sharing media rank even higher. Google wants to present the user with all trusted and topically relevant citations of your site. Google obviously trusts YouTube. It’s a no-brainer.

Anyone could register pubic social media profiles on the name of your business or, worse yet, your personal name and city. Imagine the damage to Google results that could occur if some malfeasant jerk registered the Twitter profile “Last Name-City,” “Business Name-City” or even “Business Name.”

Now the good news: All of this works in the positive opposite direction . Participating in public social channels like Twitter, StumbleUpon and Sphinn can bolster users perception of your brand.

Since it’s not uncommon for social media profiles to rank well, harness the sometimes-prodigal internal link energy of mainstream social sites. It’s low hanging fruit that Google just offers up.

Once a Twitter account owner gets busy with tons of followers, the powerful internal linking community does it’s magic. The name of your profile (and stuff you twit) ranks and propagates virally among the sweaty user-masses.

A word of warning. *evil laugh* The scenario of hijacked Twitter accounts is real. Protect yourself and loved ones. Sure, you might be able to enforce your service/trade mark(s) to ultimately get social media nightmares removed, however do you really want that angst and expense?

Register profiles for all mainstream social channels, mothball them if not appropriate marketing channels and define participation models for those where customers may be.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You Bad
Some communities (or parts thereof) are walled gardens, meaning that search engines don’t index them. Any portion of any site requiring login to access content won’t be indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other crawler.

The end result is one can’t easily know someone said something nasty, positive or outright false. This walled garden visibility gap can mean missed damage control measures or lost opportunities for engaging customers.

Google alerts, and other reputation monitoring tools, don’t work for walled gardens. Monitoring needs to be done by hand by an account holder-avatar. [Techno-geek moment: unless your technical crew feels like hacking the community's login script for automated scrape-searches.

Obviously faked logins and scraping could violate sites' terms of service (TOS)] To monitor walled chatter patterns and one-off events, someone needs to sign up to log in weekly, lurk and report.

To our mind, nearly every business should identify and monitor any relevant walled garden communities (private blogs, forums, etc…) where customers or potential customers might be. It’s even possible that competitors are already polluting your reputation in these spaces, talking trash or setting off bombs about your products.

When our clients see conversations, previously invisible, they’re usually somewhere between amazed, freaked or flummoxed. It’s not uncommon to find long standing threads, which have been doing damage for years. On multiple occasions, cease and desist letters, removal requests to forum owners and even litigation ensued after our first walled garden reports.

Social Media Marketing, Reputation Management & SEO
Augmenting public relations and SEO coverage makes for easy conversation at budget time. Social media channels are now classic tools to accomplish both. Consider whether you’re truly monitoring your brand or capitalizing on social media sharing opportunities.

When it comes to budgeting, it’s OK to start small. Lots can be accomplished, even in 15 minutes per day. Consider taking a long term approach and first strive to serve and socialize, until a favorable pattern emerges. Designate resources to bolster SEO using sharing sites and monitor your reputation where the sun doesn’t shine.

As optimized pages gradually rise in the SERPs, conversion is measured and pages modified to achieve better conversion ratios. However we’d rather definitively test and tweak landing page concepts to focus conversion, prior to deploying them for organic indexing, using “fixed length short burst paid search.”

Let’s walk through the thinking. Multivariate landing page testing is an ROI measuring technique often associated with Pay Per Click because advertisers’ can precisely control destination URLs for ads triggered by keywords. Testing grids of landing page permutations is easy, with some structural forethought, using analytics programs like ClickTracks.

Test, Test, and Test Some More.
It’s simple to create multiple landing page variations, rotate duplicate ads pointing to landing page variants, measure conversion (traffic to sales), and nothing is left to guesswork. This modus operandi is exponentially more effective when a matrix of ad-message promise testing is injected into the mix.

Not So Fast with Organic
Organic conversion testing is an entirely different bailiwick for several reasons. Metrics are subject to actually achieving organic traffic, which is not an instant event after pages are deployed. Duplicate content issues arise because landing page versions likely have similar content elements. This requires an intentional robots.txt strategy to avoid duplicate content –which fully defeats the purpose. Also, no matter how terrific search engine optimization is for organic landing pages, there’s no reliable method to absolutely associate search engine keyword searches with specific URLs.

Pilot Organic Landing Page Concepts with PPC.
One solution to this conundrum is to employ fixed length short burst paid search testing to prove conversion ROI of landing page concepts. The PPC expense is minimal given the long term value of deploying pages for organic indexing which we know, with certainty, accomplish the KPI. Here are the steps:

1 Create several optimized versions of each proposed landing page.
2 Create an AdWords Ad Group with several duplicates of the same ad.
3 Purchase keywords you aim to achieve organic prominence for.
4 Avoid the PPC money pit. Use Phrase Match or Exact Match!
5 Exclude the test landing pages from indexing using robots.txt.
6 Measure conversions for each landing page permutation.
7 Tweak landing pages as needed to maximize conversion.
8 Note the version that converts the best.
9 Removed the others from the site
10 Deploy the most effective page for organic indexing.
11 Remove the robots.txt exclusions.
12 Track organic conversion for the page over time.
13 Repeat the process for other pages or run tests simultaneously.

Unexpected Benefits
As a side note I’d like to share that, from time to time, clients who never intended to use PPC discover surprise pockets of PPC profitability. To those ends we employ fixed length short burst paid search tests on many accounts to rule in or out the viability of paid search. Focusing organic landing page concepts using PPC serves the dual purpose of proving potential revenue opportunities for our client’s products and services early in the site development process in a sane and measured fashion

Indeed, generational-game-changing shifts in search occur every morning over breakfast. Universal and personalized search killed traditional organic prominence tools like WebPosition and SEO ToolKit, programs which now gather dust and are relegated to web 1.0 new-client presentations for IT department fiefdom chieftains who just don’t get it. If new clients need us to focus on organic prominence and “hits” to get the gig, so be it. They learn fast once we start working on the project.

Analytics Are the New SEO.
Whereas voluminous chatter regarding the demise of SEO has always been cute and fashionable amongst bloggers, the last year ushered out organic prominence measuring as the KPI (I wish it was that easy). Analytics are the new SEO. Now what matters is TRAFFIC from organic prominence, paid search, other referral sources, and whether visitors convert to pre-determined KPIs. It’s a given for us that we’ll optimize and tag up content properly based on solid keyword research. Old SEO basics are still that…basics, expected, best practices. We expect a page to be indexed and rank as high the site’s authority allows it to do so.

Anyway, here’s a fun list of SEO is dead blog posts from the vaults. They make for fun reading in retrospect.

SEO is Dead
By Stoney deGeyter, Search Engine Guide, January 19, 2006

SEO Is Dead. Long Live, er, the Other SEO
By Mike Grehan, The ClickZ Network, Jun 11, 2007

SEO is Dead
By webmissile, Performancing, on August 8, 2007

SEO is Dead
By pops, March 30, 2007, SEO Refugee

Search is Dead
By Dave Pasternack, Oct 11, 2005

SEO is Dead, Or Is It?
By Craig Danuloff

SEO is Dead! Where is Your Audience Searching?
Published May 8th, 2007

Is Organic SEO Dead?
By Garrett French, Tue, 02/03/2004

SEO is dead – It’s about creating compelling content constantly on a Web 2.0 site
By Roland Tanglao – January 16, 2005

SEO is Dead
By: Nicholas Roussos, Wednesday, April 12, 2006

SEO Copywriting is Dead
by Brian Clark

Is Textbook Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Really Dead?
April 25, 2006

From manufacturing to intellectual property, industry brand stewards have been forced to accept the reality of Collaborative directories like Prefound, Zimbio, and Wikipedia. There has been a lot of debate regarding the powerful weight Wikipedia pulls in Google organic SERPS for direct brand searches.

For example here is a sampling of SERPs that might keep brand managers up at night: Google #4 Dell, #3 McDonald’s, #3 Burger King , #6 J.C. Penney, #2 Old Navy, #5 Apple, #3 Cheerios, #3 Gucci, #5 Salvation Army, #5 Coca-Cola, #4 Doritos, #3 Famous Dave’s, #4 Chevrolet, #3 Target Corporation, #6 Wal-Mart. There are many others.

Reaction from the Search Marketing Industry
A few days ago in his blog post, Search Engine Optimization Article at Wikipedia Doesn’t Deserve Attention, search marketing thought-leader Rand Fishkin took aim at Wikipedia. Using the example of the Wiki-community’s ongoing misrepresentation of OUR industry (SEO), Rand called out Wiki over the quality and importance of Wikipedia listings. Rand’s post echoed around the SEM trade publications.

How to Deal with Wikipedia
As with many aspects of the social media world, some of our client brand managers do not know how to deal with Wikipedia yet. In the coming days we’ll post a series of articles here exploring Wikipedia, the culture that surrounds the Wiki community, and options our clients have at their disposal to deal with listings that are inaccurate.

Here are some links to begin your journey in understanding and dealing with Wikipedia:

Editing Wikipedia for SEO?
Stephen Spencer

Wikipedia SEO: Don’t Spam – Contribute
Web Pro News

Wikipedia & SEO | Search Marketing Standard Blog
Search Marketing Standard

The Art Of SEO For Wikipedia & 16 Tips To Gain Respect
A Survival Guide to SEO & Wikipedia
Search Engine Land

Wikipedia and SEO, An interview with Wit
SEO Refuge

Improving the Wikipedia results for Search Engine Optimization
SEO By the Sea

Wikipedia & SEO
SEO Round Table

SEO: Can Wikipedia Help Your Business?
Practical Commerce

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.

It is with great pleasure that I bring this resource forward (along with some of my favorite writers, to our growing community of professional associates and friends here in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Enjoy…

It’s Not Really New.
Realistically speaking, every channel ever used to disseminate marketing and branding rhetoric has always been dependent on content creation. However, consistent output of worthy content has become more crucial now that search engines rank pages based on relevance of written words, quality and count of inbound links, bookmarked pages, buzz in social communities, and bookmarked RSS feeds.

Set-it-and-forget-it static brochure sites will always have their place in the website constellation, but ultimately the ability to generate site traffic and quality inbound links is dictated by the supply and demand of useful information. Actually it makes sense that search engines assign “value” and “relevance” to websites that publish a steady stream of useful content.  If there is nothing new on your website than there are fewer benefits for visitors who return or for others to discover and link to your site after repeated visits.

Whether one refers to the evolution of organic optimization stratagies and link building tactics as “New SEO,” “Web 2.0, ” social media, or any other catch phrase-at the end of the day successful website marketing comes down to creating valuable, predictable, and intentionally optimized content that people like and utilize.
Everyone’s Got the Same Question.
Yesterday I visited with 4 unique Minneapolis clients to check in on their projects (another classic 15 hour aimClear day). A significant percentage of each appointment included confronting the classic chicken-and-egg-like conundrum of exactly where content should ideally originate. We counsel our clients to do whatever it takes to generate a consistent flow of valuable content to publish on their websites. Whether the content managment platform is a blog , virtual press room, updates to site pages, a podcast feed, email campaigns, optimized press releases, or social media campagins, we want our clients to publish early and often. (Read Lee Odin’s post on sourcing corporate blog content.)

The puzzle for most companies is justifying the allocation of human resources to seed and maintain the process. Creating content is extremely labor intensive. Simple economics dictate that, initially at least, spending an employee’s time and energy on writing every-day content is hard to justify financially. Profit gained from content is measurable but takes time to root and propagate. Usually there’s plenty for everyone to do already!  We tell our clients that the allocation of these resources should be considered an essential part of a marketing budget and is as important as design, paid advertising, and other traditional budget expenditures. In fact we believe these days our clients can’t afford not to develop deep content sourcing initiatives for Internet marketing.

Content Warfare
Online content refers to web pages, feeds, email, and other elements which typically include, text, graphics, podcasts, videos, links, file downloads, and any other beneficial material which adds value to the end-user’s experience. I also consider the creation of text SEO attributes like meta description, title and technorati tags, etc… part of the content creation process. This creative work needs to come from somewhere. The irony is that often there are multiple stakeholders in a website’s content who have conflicting (and reasonable) interests regarding what appears on the site.  These interested parties scream “do my content now” but don’t have time to help create it. Corporate factions typically include PR, brand-at-any-cost-monsters, IT departments, sales personnel, customer support, advertising agencies, and others.

Content Creation Tips
Here are some tips for beginning and maintaining the flow of content for online publication:
1 Leadership is key. As with any business initiative it’s easier to get things done from the top down. Key executives with decision making authority need to buy-in to the long term vision and value of recurrent content, make it a priority, and spend money on it. We see too many companies willing to invest obscene amounts of money on initiatives that overbuild brand, past what’s necessary, and seriously short change content creation.

2 Identity all the stake holders in content and assign a player from each department a daily, weekly, or monthly quota for content creation. Brainstorm content categories, subcategories, and titles and include them on a written schedule. Gain buy-in from all the players. Communicate the long term objective and value in content creation.

3 Set a global calendar for content creation and assign an employee as content traffic manager who is responsible for delivering content to the technical team that publishes your website. Hold players accountable. Give the traffic manager procedural authority for holding the players accountable. One company’s content traffic manager I work with sends reminder emails 5 days, 3 days, 1 day, and 4 hours prior to when someone has content due.

4 It won’t help if the content sucks. Look to those key corporate team personnel that provide the most value to your customers as you source content. It stands to reason that your most valuable resources also have the most to offer your audience. If these key team members are too busy to write, assign some of their more pedestrian daily busy-work tasks to clerical help to free up time. It’s that important.

5 Measure and track your website’s key performance indicators with advanced analytics in order to directly associate site content with sales. Nothing makes a business owner happier than initiatives which clearly translate into measurable profit. Share the performance metrics with all players. Commitment breads success. Success reinforces commitment.

6 Just do it. Making a systemic commitment to sourcing content is sort of like having a baby. There’s never a perfect time.

7 Stay realistic in expectations. Profit from content is a long term investment which grows steadily over time.

8 If you are a one person shop, start writing now!

Paid: Google’s New Preferred Bidding Option
Google AdWords announced a new bidding option enabling advertisers to an to stipulate an average  CPC or CPM bid. Previously the only option was to specify a maximum CPC or CPM campaign bid, requiring third party software to manage bid-to-placement through the API.

Google does not guarantee the exact placement or cost of ads. However selecting the new CPC/CPM option means your bids will likely fall around the price-point you chose. Now advertisers have more control of campaigns within the Google AdWords platform and manual adjustment of maximum bid may be less necessary.  The announcement of Google’s new AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding may signal impending obsolescence for paid search bid management software packages like Atlas, Dynamic Software, Omniture, KeyWordMax.

Organic: Google Search History is Now Web History
Google switched on search “history” for many account holders in February triggering an intense debate over the pros and cons of personalized search and privacy. Now in a provocative move Google has expanded search history to “web history.” Tracking user behavior has expanded to archive where Google users go and what they do as while surfing the web. In making this gigantic move Google has again sparked important concerns over privacy. While previously personalized search was impacted only by a user’s search history, now the SERPs are impacted by web surfing history.

Google’s Profit & Revenue Rises 63% in Quarter 1
What a surprise…Last week (in their ongoing quest to fully dominate planet earth) Google announced revenue for the first quarter 2007 of $3.66 billion. This is an increase of 63% from quarter one in 2006 representing an increase of 69%. Click here to view financial tables for the first quarter of 2007.Organic: Google News Results Mix with Web Search Results
The way Google mixes Google News results with the usual web search results will change. Web pages and news results will be blended if your search is relevant to current events. Previously news links were displayed in a OneBox.

Anchor Text Reporting in WebMaster Central
Google has continued it’s rapid advancement of link reporting in their best-of-breed suite of webmaster tools. Inbound links from “authority sites” are a major factor in attaining organic prominence in search engines so having access to Google’s database of links and anchor text phrases can be quite beneficial to organic prominence efforts. Earlier this year Google added more definitive link reporting for verified sites. Last month Google added anchor text reporting. Danny Sullivan then published an article requesting enhanced features. Some of his wishes have now come true in addition to other changes.

Webmaster Central’s Vanessa Fox of Google announced the anchor text reporting upgrades which include phrase variations and an increase of the number of reported text anchors.

Adding this regulatory layer to organic and paid search thickens the soup. Interestingly enough, many companies do not pay full attention to the regulatory liabilities associated with certain aspects of paid and organic search marketing efforts. It can come back to bite them in the search engines.

Paid Search Marketing
Regulated industries love paid search. With PPC a company retains full control over keyphrases and text listings. Also there is there is the ability to respond to market trends quickly. The downside is that short PPC text ads rarely have the space, due to size limitations in ads, to list required disclaimers like safety/risk information or required disclaimers.

Negative Keywords
Negative keywords can be a useful tool in regulatory environments, especially when using the “broad” match option available on both Google and Yahoo.  Broad Match is sometimes useful because it offers searchers the ability to discover new combinations of your keyword phrase previously unidentified by your keyword research. Unless you have a search marketing firm working for you broad match can substitute for an ongoing program of keyword research.

Purchasing the Broad Match keyword “high blood pressure medication” could result in your ad being displayed on the SERP (search engine results page) if a portion of the search matches any combination of the keyword.  This offers flexibility, and possibly more traffic. Your listing could appear for searches such as “medication blood pressure,” “high blood pressure” and “I’m looking for high blood pressure information.”

However in the case where a pharmaceutical company can not use the word “cure” (and to lower unwanted clicks/cost) Negative Match keywords can be an essential tool. For instance your might purchase the keyphrase “high blood pressure medication” and specify the negative keyword “cure.” This tactic reduces your company’s exposure.

Organic Search
Organic search can be a bit trickier absent full control over how search engines like Google and Yahoo index a website. This reality makes undertaking a proactive and informed organic search engine optimization program required. Even hiddeen code matters. For instance the title tag, meta description, and even the file name structure expose a company, operating in a regulated environment, to liability. All content, visible and hidden, should be run through the legal and/or compliance departments of your company prior to deploying a web page or paid campaign. While both Google and Yahoo entertain requests to remove organically indexed content it is not immediate. 

Protect Your Company
Instituting a search marketing corporate policy is critical. A good way to accomplish this is to gather all the interested stakeholders and create a corporate “Search Marketing Best Practices” white paper. Educate and involve regulatory and legal teams as partners (at minimum) and arbitrators of search marketing policy. Implement monthly or quarterly regulatory reviews of paid campaigns and current organic prominence reports. Visible and non visible content should always be approved by marketing and legal/regulatory teams