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Editor's Welcome:

Well, Christine and I have done it! Of course, being a man, I only played a minor role in the birth of our new look newsletter. Just like the real thing, all I had to do was stand around and have shrieking abuse hurled at me from a screaming woman telling me how useless the male species is!

Seriously though folks... I have to say well done to my buddy and associate editor for managing to get us this far, considering how busy her current schedule is. But at least the first stones are laid now.

So, apart from a new lick of paint since we last got together, what's been occurring I hear you ask... and as you're asking... I'll tell you.

I took a short sabbatical away from the life of the transatlantic search engine marketer and came home to roost for a while so that I could reinvent myself over here (much more about that in the next issue). This came as a serious shock to my wife and family who immediately assumed that I must have some terminal illness or something and had maybe come back to die quietly in my study.

I've also been doing some serious research into next generation search for the third edition of my tome. There's some very powerful stuff going in again this time, so I'm very excited about the whole thing after taking a decent break from it. But I'll do more about that in another issue closer to the launch.

On the subject of books, I read my friend Catherine Seda's new book on the way back from Washington a few weeks ago. It really is a must read if you want to know how to buy your way to the top using search engine advertising. You can find out more about it at Cat's own web site here. And you should also sign up for her newsletter while you're over there.

And just before I launch into the meat and potatoes of this issue, I should mention that my good buddy and web metrics Guru Jim Sterne, is presenting a webinar covering, amongst other topics, how to measure online advertising. As ever, with Jim, this is not a technical look at your log files, it's very much about business metrics. You can find more over here.

Finally, dear reader, for the opener - stay tuned to BBC TV worldwide the week after next as I'm being featured in a show they're making about search engines (thanks very much to Danny Sullivan for linking me into that). And if you're a New Media Age reader (and you should be!) then look out for the special round table feature with myself, Jim Sterne and a table full of noted authorities too numerous to mention here.

So, to the main feature:

If you've ever attended one of Danny Sullivan's celebrated search engine strategies conferences, then you'll likely have heard the name Jon Glick. He's a regular at these events. And I have to say, I always look forward to bumping into him. He's Senior Manager, Search at Yahoo! and has a unique background in the industry, in that, he's a qualified computer scientist who also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. So when it comes to talking about information retrieval and marketing on the web he's "da man!"

When we last had an opportunity to do some serious catching up, it was at the annual Google Dance in Mountain View last August. At that time, Yahoo! had only just announced it's acquisition of Overture, taking Alta Vista and AllTheWeb with it. So Jon, as ever, had no problem with me quizzing him about the nuts and bolts under the search engine hood. But each time I broached the subject of the Yahoo! purchase, and what surprises were likely for the future... the proverbial cat somehow got his tongue!

Skip forward to last month when Jon and I meet up in New York for lunch: and boy, did we have some to talk about!

But before we launch into it, I'd like to thank Jon right up front, for not only giving me the most in-depth look into the new Yahoo!: but for allowing me to take him off at tangent so many times, that he actually ended up providing us all with a virtual best practice guide to search engine marketing.

I honestly believe that, no matter how far up the search engine marketing tree you already are, you'll still find this feature to be an excellent reference point.

It's a long conversation... very long. It takes place in what was probably the noisiest restaurant in Manhattan. And in amongst the clatter of knives and forks and the hubbub of people trying to be heard over the top of each other, Jon ordered a lunch which he would patiently watch getting colder and colder in front of him as I fired one question after another in rapid volley.

If you're brand new to this feature, then I should tell you that what you're about to encounter is not an editorial piece. It's a verbatim transcript i.e. if you'd been sitting at the next table, this is exactly what you'd have overheard...


Yahoo Search Manager Spills the Beans... Mike Grehan in conversation with... Jon Glick.

<<Play>>

o Mike:

Jon, always good to see you at these events. We had a quick catch-up in Chicago at SES last December. But wow, have things changed since then! Before I start stampeding towards all the latest news. Let's do my  usual "getting to know you thing" [laughs] and get some background. When we first met, you were with Alta Vista. So, let's start with how you got there and then move on to what you're up to right now.

o Jon:

Well I dealt with computers way back. In fact, my first job was selling computers. The Osborne Z80 systems so it really was away back... I started working for bricks and mortar companies first of all. And I came across a company called Raychem Corporation who manufactured solid state electrical components. Anyway, I wanted to get into something where it was still a defining industry, where things were turning over a little bit faster in terms of product cycles and Alta Vista seemed to be a really excellent fit for me.

So in late 2000 [December] I joined Alta Vista. I was originally working on the syndication of their search results and then I moved over to work in product management and work on core relevancy. And that role has been carried over through the acquisition by Overture and then Yahoo! So I'm still focusing on the product core relevancy and what I call features that wrap around, things like spell check, assisted search. Things that enhance the search results in addition to the ten listings which everybody relies on for a lot of information.

o Mike:

So you found your way to Alta Vista, got your feet under the table there, and then just as you'd settled in, along came Overture to buy up both Alta Vista and AllTheWeb... so there must have been a bit of culture change going on...

o Jon:

Mmmm... Not as much as you may have assumed actually Mike. Basically, when Overture acquired us, they had their paid listings business based down in Pasadena, and the first thing they tasked us with was to take the AllTheWeb technology and the Alta Vista technology and combine them to take a best of breed approach... you know, what can we take from these two platforms to build an algorithmic engine that can compete with the best in the industry.

o Mike:

So there had already been quite a bit of work which had gone on between the teams before the Yahoo! thing?

o Jon:

Absolutely. You know, with the folks from AllTheWeb, FAST in Trondheim, Norway, we were taking a look at a lot of their technology, looking to see what pieces they had and what they were doing which was best in the industry. And the same with Alta Vista, what was it that we had which had an advantage and what was it that we could move together, what was the right data architecture for an index. All of those technical details we managed to get fairly far down the road with... And then, of course, Overture was acquired by Yahoo! and they also owned the assets for Inktomi...

o Mike:

So what about Alta Vista and AllTheWeb... I know you guys are all doing the same kind of work in information retrieval, but there is the competitive element. So, I guess that's the first time in the industry that, you kind of get to look under their skirt and they get to look under yours... [laughs] So, after you did that, what was it you saw, what were the main strengths that you thought you could combine...

o Jon:

Well, when we looked at those two technologies, we discovered that one thing that AllTheWeb was very, very good at was rebuilding indexes and keeping very high levels of freshness. Their index build process was very advanced, their ability to go through and segment their index and rebuild segments on a continual basis... they were very, very state-of-the-art. Alta Vista had a really good core technology called MLR (machine learn ranking). We'd previously been using *hill-climbing genetic algorithms for optimisation. We then switched to a **tree-parsing/gradient-boosting style approach, which was much, much faster. It would actually go through and recalculate our relevance algorithm based on a new set of input parameters in about five minutes!

<<Pause>>
[Note: * A hill climbing algorithm can be thought of as being like a "search tree". A data structure which is dynamically created as you search the "state-space" to keep track of the states you have already visited and evaluated. This has nothing to do with classification trees. ** Gradient based methods for a typical iterative local optimisation algorithm can be broken down into four relatively simple components: Intitialise; Iterate; Convergence; Multiple restarts. ]

<<Play>>
And so, here's one company that can calculate new relevancy algorithms really, really well and here's a company which can rebuild indexes really, really quickly. So we want to take the best pieces from each and figure out what we're gonna roll up to create a best of breed engine. And that's where work following the Overture acquisition up to the announcement of the Yahoo! acquisition was heavily focused on integrating the technological aspects of those two indices.

o Mike:

So, as you say, after that initial work, along comes Yahoo! in this big surprise swoop and buys up Overture. But, of course, Yahoo! had already purchased it's own crawler/algorithmic based engine with its purchase of Inktomi. Now you have another input of technology and history. How did Inktomi figure in the equation?

o Jon:

One of the things which was very fortunate for us was that we'd done a lot of the work on integrating the FAST technology and the Alta Vista technology and we were fairly up to speed with what the technologies were and what we would choose as best of breed. So it was a matter of also looking at that in the context of what Inktomi was doing in creating Yahoo! Search. The goal in creating Yahoo! search technology was not, you know, let's take a piece here a piece there. Let's not make a Lego system...[both Mike and Jon have a chuckle at this idea!] It was really a "from the ground up" lets make the best search experience... from crawl, from refresh, from relevancy etc. And we were taking the learning... In fact, one of the first things that we did was to take the engineers from FAST, Alta Vista and Inktomi and we all got together in Foster city and people gave a lot of white papers. There was a great exchange of information and we said things like: how do you guys do language recognition?" "How do you deal with the fact that some pages have multiple languages on them..."

o Mike:

Fabulous, that's my kind of day out. Sounds like real tech-fest-geek-out... [laughs]

o Jon:

Oh yeah! And people were saying things like: "You know what we tried that and it seemed like a great idea. But here's the snafu in that..." And so there was this tremendous exchange of information which answered a lot of questions. The core intellectual assets of all three companies are intact. We now have a team of over 60 PhD's over 350 people in search. We have a team which has critical mass. One of the other things you'll see about Yahoo! technology is... well put it this way people are saying, Google had PageRank, you now have an engine as good as, if not better than Google, so what's your secret sauce? What replaced PageRank...

o Mike:

So, there are similarities in the way that you've brought together these technologies and created a team of very clever people on the same scale as Google. But let me just go back to the tech-fest for a minute. Yahoo! already owned Inktomi, so most guys on the search marketing side were kind of just expecting a flick of the switch from Google to Inktomi. But you guys then throw in a brand new "from the ground up" search engine, which did surprise a lot of people I think...

o Jon:

Yeah, like I said Mike, the goal was to build a brand new engine and not make that Lego system type thing I mentioned. And so we're really very happy with what we've built. That's why we simply refer to it as Yahoo! Search technology rather than just taking one of the legacy names because this really is a new technology. It all came together on the basis of information exchange and a lot of hard work by all of these people.

o Mike:

Just thinking about the Lego thing. There's a story that, in Hollywood a guy once took all of the most beautiful film stars... the one with the most beautiful eyes and the one with the most beautiful nose and hair... the whole thing. And then he put all of these beautiful characteristics into a computer photo program and created an image of what turned out to be the ugliest woman in the world! [laughs] It's true!

o Jon:

[Bursts out laughing] Exactly!

That's kind of like the story about the Ford Edsel. Sometimes when you take best of breed technologies and put them together it can work very well. The synergy is there... But sometimes, like you say... I mean, our goal was simple: Create the best search experience for our users. And in terms of timeline? Obviously, like any project, there are time goals... there are times when you just want to launch. But that wasn't the metric. The metric wasn't launch by date x... The metric was to launch when we knew we could give the Yahoo! users the best experience. A search experience better than anything they're currently getting. And sure, that affects the time launch. We were going to work at this and continue to add new features and new thoughts to the process etc. We wanted to make sure that when we reached that, people would look at it and try it and say wow, this is a good as, if not better than anything else on the web. We were most definitely not about people saying: Well it's not bad for a first try...

o Mike:

I guess if you needed to make a change, then we have to get that in perspective. I mean Yahoo! was showing Google results as primary. And Google was the 800 pound Gorilla in search at that time. So if you are going to make that shift, then you really do have to come up with something as good as, or, as you say, maybe even better. Let me just get down to some nitty-gritty here Jon. You mentioned PageRank and Google earlier. There are similarities in the new Yahoo! chemistry now with all the PhDs and the general structure. Of course, when it comes to personalisation Yahoo! is ahead because of the Yahoo! community base. I'll come back to that later, but... first.. As you know, I always wonder about this whole PageRank thing and the amount of importance that the whole search engine marketing community places on it. I have my own view of PageRank hysteria and believe that's it's, perhaps, much like the story of the Emperors New Clothes. I don't use the tool bar for that purpose at all. I mean, PageRank was a breakthrough idea when it was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as two students back in 1997, as was Jon Kleinberg's HITS. But search technology has moved on considerably. And PageRank is a keyword independent algorithm i.e. you already have your score before the user has even keyed in a search phrase. Whereas, an algorithm like the one developed by Jon Kleinberg [HITS] is keyword dependant. Insofar as the technology that the new Yahoo! Search deploys, is it based more on a keyword dependent algorithm or...

o Jon:

It's something which is a bit closer to PageRank. But we certainly do look at communities a little bit. But for a lot of the connectivity we're looking at, it tends to be more of a keyword independent type of ranking. Obviously, in keyword dependency there's a lot of information both on the page and connectivity based with things like anchor text that we do give a lot of weight to. As I mentioned before, people ask us, what's the next PageRank, what do you guys do for that. And the answer is... we try to do everything we can and do it well. It's kind of like having a team of 'All Stars' Vs the Chicago Bulls that relied on Michael Jordan and everyone else just seemed to be a secondary player. We don't have... well there isn't sort of just one star in our ranking algorithm. It's a whole variety of factors and what we do is try and balance those. Because when we look at the team you need to put together for search... to get a good search engine... the best for our end users, everything has to be working well. You know, if you have a great relevancy algorithm and lousy Spam detection you just get a bad experience for instance. You really can't fall down on any of these areas. If you don't have good *de-aliasing tables users get a bad experience. It's all about a lot of things coming together with a very good team. And I think that's what the Yahoo! search team has done very, very well.

<<pause>>
[Note: Jon uses the term de-aliasing in reference to knowing that something such as www.coke.com and www.coca-cola.com are the same content. If Yahoo! were to show both URL's following a search on "coke" then the user wouldn't be getting the diversity of results which would be optimal. He's also happy to point out that a search for "coke" at Google is representative of the problem!]

<<Play>>
o Mike:

But we'll not see a Yahoo! toolbar with a "your Yahoo! score is three or four..."  or something...

o Jon:

I can't promise that Mike...

o Mike:

[Raises hands to his head and begins to cry] Oh no!! Spare me... please spare me... NOT another one Jon!

o Jon:

[Laughing] I know... I know... you’re not a big fan of the  toolbar with the little fuel bar that tells you what your  connectivity score is...

o Mike:

Jon... pleeeeeaaase... no. People spend so much time obsessing over this toolbar score stuff. Can we not just get to the point and explain to them that it's just one ingredient in the sauce... It worries me about this score business and people spending their time obsessing over whether it's possible to reverse engineer a search engine ranking algorithm by looking at a PageRank, or a Yahoo! rank.

If you and the other search engines didn't want to be spammed, why on earth would you give something which appears to be a huge clue? I mean, at the end of the day, if this toolbar score stuff is beneficial to the end user then fine. But does the end user really care what his PageRank or his Yahoo! rank is? Surely it's only search engine marketers looking at that stuff. I mean, the end user just wants to buy a digital camera or something. Is he less likely to buy one from an online source if it doesn't appear have a high toolbar score?

o Jon:

[Pauses for thought] I think some end users are curious about it. If you go back to some of the earlier search engines they used to have something similar. It wasn't a query independent score, because they weren't really using connectivity... but it did have a degree of match...

o Mike:

Sure, I remember seeing results with a relevance percentage next to them...

o Jon:

That's correct, it would be percentages or fuel bars. And some users are interested in that information. But we also recognise that we serve a variety of communities. And our first goal, as I've said, is to give our users the best experience: full stop. Without that, nothing else really matters. They're the engine that drives everything. But we do also realise that the people who create pages, the content providers do have a curiosity about what they're doing that's working; what they're doing that isn't working... And this is part of transparency. So, we try and give that kind of fuel bar score in the same way as we'd try and answer questions in a forum. We want people to be able to do the right things. It's something we're considering along with a lot of other things. And if it makes sense, we'll roll it out. The other thing is... well, you mentioned that we'd touch on personalisation. For me it seems as though there have been two phases in search. The first phase was all about what was on the page. The second generation of engines started to look at what it was they could find out about that page by looking at what else there was on the web that gave more information about it. The directory listings, the connectivity, the anchor text etc. And we're still in phase two.

For me, and this is me speaking personally, the next phase will be where you're able to take into account information about the user. And of course local, because local search is a subset of personalisation. For local to really work, you need to know where the person is. So, the issue of: "I'm number one for this keyword"... may not exist at all in a few years. You know, you'll be number one for that keyword depending on who types it in! And from where and on what day... and... It is going to get more complex than something that can simply be summed up in a ranking algorithm, let alone how many checks somebody has on a toolbar.

<<pause>>
[Note: Since this interview took place Yahoo! has indeed introduced a toolbar with a connectivity based measure] :-(

<<Play>>
o Mike:

So do you think there may eventually be two types of search? General purpose search as it is now, and personalised search. Or will it just blend into the same thing?

o Jon:

There'll always be general purpose search. Put it this way, Yahoo! has a hundred million users and they share information with us. And they trust us to use that information responsibly. They trust us to NOT use that information if they don't want us to. So there are bound to be people who are searching on topics, where maybe they don't want us to use that personal information and we'll respect that. It doesn’t make sense for instance, if I'm in New York and I don't want all that legacy information that I have because I live in San Francisco to bias the results the wrong way. But, there will be times when people do find that useful. So my guess is that, more and more the information will be used to get the user to the results they desire. There's always going to be an option to do generic type searching. It just means that it won't be the only option that a user has. It's more a case of the way that when I type something and you type something - we get the same results - even if we have different intent.

o Mike:

And there is something like that now over at Amazon, for instance. Over there if you search and then purchase something they keep a history of your purchases. And that way they get a profile and they can let you know when they have recommendations based on your profile. That's the type of thing I guess is it?

o Jon:

Yes. And also, depending on what you've looked at previously... For example, if you been looking at a lot of travel sites and you type China, then you may want information on the country. If you've just been looking through jewellery sites, or wedding venue sites and that sort of thing, you may be planning a wedding and maybe you're looking for China dishes! So it's taking that type of information. And it's not just which product you're looking for. It's where you are in that product buying cycle. We'll use products as one example. People look for much more than just products. But it's about understanding what it is you've typed and searched for before and then giving people the next level of information. As people are doing more research on, say, that iPod that they really want. They're going to want more and more specialised resources. A person who simply types in: iPod - maybe looking to figure out what they are, should they be getting into this digital music download thing and dropping their CD player for the new thing. Whereas, further into the process, they may be looking for who's got the best price on iPods. Or maybe it's about, does the store down the street have the new one in stock yet. It's taking a lot of that context. Ultimately, what a search engine is trying to do is trying to mirror how humans think. It's trying to give you the same answers that somebody who knows you and knows what your preferences are. And when you ask a question to a friend that friend has context. They know stuff about you and can judge what kind of response to give. The idea would be that a search engine has that level of context. That's the kind of information you get back from a search engine if that's what you wanted. If you wanted that feature to be switched on of course. You can use the search engine to be your single source of information for anything on the web which has been indexed.

o Mike:

Has me thinking back to the Vannevar Bush idea of Memex which he wrote about way back in the forties. Maybe Vannevar Bush invented personalised search before there was any such thing as a search engine! Okay, for personalised search you need relevance feedback. You need user feedback... And some people will sign up and give you that information you need. At Yahoo! you already have that huge user base. And, of course, MSN has that huge user community too. But Google, they don't have that kind of subscriber base at all. How is Google likely to get into that personalised thing do you think?

o Jon:

Well, there's always the obvious thing: they could just ask people for information. Something like: here are the results for...er... plumbers. If you'd like more targeted results please give us your zip code. But Google has pushed out tools such as Orkut, which I know  you're familiar with Mike.

o Mike:

I certainly am and I'm very honoured that you joined my motley crew of friends, vagabonds and dysfunctionals over there... [laughs]

o Jon:

So there are ways of getting personalised information about users. A tool like Orkut says: Okay here are the people who are your friends and the things they're interested in - you most likely will be interested in as well. As you mentioned before about Amazon. That kind of "people who bought the book you just did, also bought..." So there are ways and means of tying things across. Nobody's really launched a mainstream product like this yet. But I think that's the next wave that you'll start to see. Again, this third wave is going to be about: we know about the user, as well as knowing about the we page as well as knowing about the connectivity and that the context between the web page and the user exists.

o Mike:

It's very much a case of search gets better the more information sources you have.

o Jon:

Second generation search has proved that you can know more about a page and that it doesn't exist in isolation. But users still exist in isolation. Every user is actually a black box to a search engine. The more information a user is able to provide to a search engine the more targeted the results are going to be. Right now, with second generation search they're able to tap into things like link connectivity and page content.

o Mike:

That's a really nice indication of where search is going. But let's get back to right now. This week saw the roll out of Site Match and I think it surprised a lot of people that there wasn't just a straight flick of the switch to Inktomi results with its old version of paid inclusion. That's not what happened, so do you want to bring me up to speed with the new model?

o Jon:

There are three components to the Site Match program. The first is just, as you said, Site Match and that's the basic per URL submission. It's a subscription charge plus a cost per click. We do this for a number of reasons. If you take a look at what you would have had to have done to get into all the individual subscription programs, Alta Vista Express Inclusion, Inktomi Site Submit etc. You'd generate a subscription fee of over 150 dollars. But now the base fee, for the first year is 49 dollars and then drops for subsequent URL's. So it's much more economical. Especially for a small site that wants to get across a large network. Also, it means that people who are going into a category where they're going to generate a lot of traffic where there's very high value, they have a chance to do it on an ROI basis which they can measure. So it's a more tuned program that we're offering. Then there's the feed component. We have a feed called Public Site Match. This is where we take high quality feeds from Governmental sites, not for profit organisations, Library of Congress and that type of source. This helps to improve the comprehensiveness of our index and also...

o Mike:

So a not for profit organisation would need to put together its own XML feed...

o Jon:

No they could use a third party provider. And we've worked on putting this together for all the stuff that is indexable and make it easier to get to the stuff that isn't easily indexable. So that's Public Site Match. And there's also Site Match Xchange. And that's a similar program to Public Site Match, but it's for the commercial providers. It's an XML feed on a cost per click basis, very similar to what people were used to with Alta Vista and Trusted Feed as well as Index Connect. In addition, I have to mention that as always, about 99% of our content is free crawled in. And there is a free submission option now which covers the entire Yahoo! network.

o Mike:

Okay, I have to ask Jon: How does this XML feed, or "sheet feeds" as they're known, which is basically meta data, blend with the ranking data from a crawl? I mean the feed is data about data, it's not actually being crawled at all. How do you know which is which and what about the linkage and connectivity data...

o Jon:

We still have connectivity values for the sites because there's a lot of information that we take from the free crawl which factors in. For example, an individual eBay auction may not be linked to. But we know what the connectivity score is for eBay on aggregate. So we can take that into account. And as part of the Site Match program, editors are going through and making sure that there is quality to the content and evaluating the quality of that content. For example, pages which are included in the Site Match Xchange program have to have unique titles and they have to have meta data. Things which are not necessarily requirements for a page to be free crawled out on the web. The standards are actually higher because our goal is simply to add quality content. The intention of the entire Site Match program is to increase both the comprehensiveness and also the relevancy of results to our users. We run our own tests to monitor user behaviour. What links users click on; do they click higher on the page... when are we giving users a better experience...

o Mike:

Just before I forget to mention it Jon: What about the Yahoo! directory and the 299 dollars for inclusion?

o Jon:

That does still exist. The Yahoo! directory is there for the different ways that people decide to look for information on the web. Some people like to parse a hierarchy, some people want to find other sites that are related within a certain category. And other people take the more direct route of: "I know what I want, I know the keywords..." and they just go directly to the search.

o Mike:

And now I need to ask about the Yahoo! link. Is it worth paying the 299 dollars just for the link? A Yahoo! link used to have a lot of power...

o Jon:

Certainly having a link from any large site does carry a lot of value. It's similar to having a link from the Open Directory Project. As to how valuable that is... It probably depends on the space you're in; where your page currently is... I don't have a set answer to that Mike. My recommendation is simply that, as a marketing spend it's fairly modest... So try it out. See if it works for you and makes sense. If it does, that's fantastic... If not, you need to look at other options. The main reason that the Yahoo! directory exists is not to create connectivity or do anything specifically for Yahoo! search. The directory exists as a separate way for people to find things at Yahoo! Here you're dealing with several million pages instead of billions...

o Mike:

I think probably what I'm trying to get is that, everybody knows, well those in the industry know, that there is a connection between Google and the Open Directory project which is used for classification categorisation, training sets and that sort of thing. Most people see that as being an important link for Google. Is there a similar kind of relationship between the Yahoo! directory and Yahoo! search?

o Jon:

The way that I would classify it is, that our relationship with the Yahoo! directory is very similar to that which we have with Open Directory. We also have a relationship with Open Directory Project. The way that we look at it for Yahoo! search, with all of its comprehensiveness and quality content is that, if we can find that somewhere, whether it's with a Yahoo! property or a third party, we want to have that content, we want to have that information and we want it reflected in the Yahoo! search index.

o Mike:

Sometimes when you do certain searches at Google, you get the ODP category showing up top, or within specific links. Are we likely to see something similar with Yahoo! search?

o Jon:

We already do something like that when something appears in the Yahoo! directory. It may also point to the ODP if that's available I need to check on that.. If you do a Yahoo! search, we do point to certain Yahoo! properties... the inside Yahoo! which appears above the search results. So, for instance if you type “cars” you may see a picture of a car and links to Yahoo! Autos. That's where we can cross traffic and show people other resources on Yahoo! But, you know, within the main search results, everyone is treated equally.

o Mike:

Just a quick return to the Site match program again. I don't think that 15 cents a click is too much to ask for a potential new customer. If I can turn that 15 cents into a 20 dollar sale, or a two grand sale... whatever. It seems fair enough to me. But for some smaller business, the mom and pops counting every cent, it may be different. So, it's a wise decision to check in the Yahoo! database to see if you're already in there before you start thinking about subscriptions. But there may be some businesses who get the idea that, even if they are in the index, they may do better if they subscribe. You know pay to play. Are they likely to see any further benefit in doing that?

o Jon:

If by benefit you mean ranking - no there's not. It's an inclusion program. It is just about inclusion. It gives us an opportunity to use resources to go through and give them an editorial review of their site and puts them on a one-to-one relationship with the folks at Yahoo! And if you go to Site Match Xchange then you get some good customer service support. It's not going to do anything to influence their ranking. But let's take an example of say, a travel company. The Yahoo! Slurp crawler typically is going to come around and visit a site every three to four weeks. If you're a travel company... two weeks ago you wanted to sell Mardi Gras Getaways. But that's finished and nobody's buying those breaks now. It's Spring breaks for college students maybe. Now if your content changes that dramatically, having us come back and crawl your site every 48 hours may have a significant impact on your business. If you have a page which doesn’t change much, like consumer electronics... standard web crawl may be fine. There's a guy who came to see me earlier and he's doing an art exhibit and they won't have the pages ready until a few days before they're in each city. So waiting for the free crawl to come around may mean that they're not in when they need to be. It is an additional service and if it makes sense for people then they're welcome to take advantage of it. If they're happy with it and they're positioned well and have the crawl frequency, then use it. People who don't use the program will never be disadvantaged in the rankings as compared to other people who do.

o Mike:

Site Match Xchange is for sites with more than 1000 pages yes? Or is that 2000... Whatever... Is that when it starts to make sense to look at an XML feed when you're in the thousands like that?

o Jon:

That makes sense, but it may actually make sense before you get to those figures. It may make sense with 500 pages if you go through a reseller. The other thing with the XML feed is it does allow people to target things more specifically. We do an editorial review of all those XML feeds, and one of the reasons is, as you say, people are giving us meta data. And we do want to make sure that the meta data they're giving us corresponds to what the users expectations are...

o Mike:

On the subject of meta data, let me just go off at a little tangent here. Tim [Mayer] mentioned to me yesterday that meta keywords are back again! After all that time away, now they're alive and well at Yahoo! search...

o Jon:

Yes we do use meta keywords. So let me touch on meta tags real fast. We index the meta description tag. It counts similar to body text. It's also a good fallback for us if there's no text on the page for us to lift an abstract to show to users. It won't always be used because we prefer to have the users search terms in what we show. So if we find those in the body text we're going to show that so that people can see a little snippet of what they're going to see when they land on that page. Other meta tags we deal with are things like the noindex, nofollow, nocache we respect those. For the meta keywords tag... well, originally it was a good idea. To me it's a great idea which unfortunately went wrong because its so heavily spammed. It's like, the people who knew how to use it, also knew how to abuse it! What we use it for right now is... I'd explain it as match and not rank. Let me give a better description of what that really means. Obviously, for a page to show up for a users query, it has to contain all the terms that the user types, either on the page, through the meta data, or anchor text in a link. So, if you have a product which is frequently misspelled. If you're located in one community, but do business in several surrounding communities, having the names for those communities or those alternate spellings in your meta keywords tag means that your page is now a candidate to show up in that search. That doesn't say that it'll rank, but at least it's considered. Whereas, if those words never appear then it can't be considered.

o Mike:

So, the advice would be to use the meta keywords tag, as we used to do back in the old days, for synonyms and misspellings...

o Jon:

Yeah. So this is a great chance if you’re Nordstrom for example. Many people type in Nordstroms with an 's' it's a very common misspelling. You don't want that kind of typo on your body text when you're trying to promote your brand. But putting that misspelling in the meta keywords tag is very acceptable and also encouraged. It's actually letting us know, hey by the way, we are a candidate page for that query.

o Mike:

I guess there's going to be a feeding frenzy on meta tags again, which is going to be quite interesting [laughs] And just when I thought it was safe to bury the meta tags issue! Anyway, for the purpose of getting the facts: how many keywords do you put in a meta keywords tag before you start to flag yourself up as spamming?

o Jon:

Okay here's a couple of parameters. Each keyword is an individual token separated by commas. So that's that. You want to separate these things with commas and not just put one long string of text. The more keywords that are put in and the more they're repeated, the much larger the chance our spam team is going to want to check out that page. It doesn't mean that page is going to get any specific judgement. But it is very much a red flag. For best practice you just need to remember it's for matching - not ranking. Repeating the same word 20 times is only going to raise a red flag... It doesn't increase your likelihood of showing up on any given set of search results. It's just a risk with no benefit.

 o Mike:

So I could put, I don't know... er... for instance, ‘laptop computers, desktop computers, palm computers...’

o Jon:

Exactly, and, of course, since each of those is separated by commas, then ‘laptop computers’ will count for ‘laptop computers’ and not ‘laptop’ or ‘computers’ separately. So doing it like that means that you're not going to be penalised for keyword spamming on the word ‘computers’.

o Mike:

Okay, let's take the description tag now. That gives us a little bit of editorial control still?

o Jon:

The description tag does give you just a little bit of editorial control, depending on what your body text looks like. Ideally we like to find the keywords the user typed in your body text. But this can be a very good fallback for search engines in the event that you have something like, for example, an all Flash page which can't be well indexed, in terms of text by search engines...

o Mike:

Are you crawling Flash at all Jon?

o Jon:

No. We don't crawl Flash unfortunately. We crawl frames... but not Flash yet.

o Mike:

Thanks, just a quick check. So, back to tags. The title tag...

o Jon:

The title tag? My biggest recommendation is write that for users! Because that's the one real piece of editorial in the search listing that you can absolutely control. That's what's going to show up for the title for your page when we list it, when Google lists it. So you should remember that writing a title full of a set of keywords will most likely serve as a Spam tip off, and even if you did happen to rank well, you most likely won't get the clicks or the conversions. So there's very little value to it. This is a place where you need to put your good copywriters into practice.

 o Mike:

And back to the nitty-gritty as my dear friend Jill Whalen would say... how many words in the title tag, how many characters...[laughs ]

o Jon:

We typically show, roughly 60 characters. That's the maximum we'd show. I'm not a professional copywriter, so I can't tell you "is short and punchy better than lots of information..." Individual sites have different kinds of content and they have to make their individual choice. For example, at Yahoo! sports, we want a very concise title tag. Somebody searching for the New England Patriots for Instance, a title like: New England Patriots on Yahoo! Sports. That's probably all we need as a title for a page that has that information. For other people if they're selling... a... Palm Pilot, well they may want to put in a title that says: ‘50% off the new Palm Zire X 1234’ and put the name of the store as a longer title may make more sense for them. Again, they have to depend on their copywriters to advise them what works best for clicks and conversions. So we'll index all of the title, but we'll only display 60 characters. You don't want to go past that because you don't want dot, dot, dot at the end of your title.

o Mike:

So you can use that with paid inclusion just as you could with PPC. For temporal reasons and seasonal promotions, that sort of thing, you can do paid inclusion a bit like PPC. You can launch a campaign and then when it's over, like a sale or something, you change all the title tags and then get crawled and refreshed again. You can do what I simply call "organic switch on-switch off" campaigns.

o Jon:

Absolutely. We reflect the content on your page at the time it was crawled. Many pages, even with our free crawler we crawl daily. In fact, we re-crawl tens of millions of pages daily...

o Mike:

That's kind of like the Google Freshbot approach then?

o Jon:

It's a similar type of approach to Google but a little bit larger. We're trying to cover as much content as we can that we see as being important to people and it's frequently changing. If you're in a very time sensitive business... I mean just take the travel agency business we talked about earlier. You may want to highlight in your title ‘XYZ Travel Company great deals on Spring Breaks’ might be very appropriate right now. So that's the type of business, or a page where having a more frequent refresh may be something that somebody wants to consider. So, it may be useful to look at one of these Yahoo! paid programs.

o Mike:

Google has avoided going for a paid inclusion program. I Guess that may change after the IPO when stockholders can see that there is an extra revenue stream at other search engines that they don't get there. Who knows? But they do have Froogle. And Froogle is free. If you're putting together an XML feed for a paid inclusion program you can just as easily feed the same into Froogle. So what about Yahoo! shopping? Is there any similarity there?

o Jon:

Yahoo! Shopping also accepts feeds via their own submission program. But it's completely independent of Yahoo! Search. It's a completely separate data set. It's obviously a commercial shopping engine, so it deals on a different set of rules. But there is an increased focus on comprehensiveness there as well...

o Mike
:
But there is a cost at Yahoo! shopping. It's not free...

o Jon:

No not really. The majority of shops which are in Yahoo! shopping are free crawled in. We've been working with them on this. This increased focus on comprehensiveness also means that they're having to identify and eliminate Spam. When you have a walled garden and only deal with merchants with whom you have a direct relationship, you have some control over that. But when you go outside of the walled garden and start pulling in content from the web in the free crawl, some of it will be desirable and you'll have a lot more products, but you'll also have problems with people not playing by the rules. So there's stuff we need to filter out to protect our users.

o Mike:

What about if I get picked up in a free crawl for yahoo! shopping - and then I also go and do a feed? Would that set off any alarm bells?

o Jon:

Not at all. Being in Yahoo! shopping has no impact at all on your existence in Yahoo! search... Yahoo!'s algorithmic search technology. The two are separated. We do share information. If they identify a site which is using certain Spam tactics, then they share that information with us and we share that kind of information with them.

o Mike:

Alright then Jon: It's been mentioned again. The dark side that is. Let's talk Spam! Of course it's a huge problem with search engines. People who are creating web pages in the industry worry so much about what they're doing with the pages and how they're linking and submitting... and will I get banned... I get asked a lot of questions like: "If I link to my other web site will they know it's mine and ban me?" Or: "My hotel is in New York, New York, will I get banned for keyword stuffing?" Crazy worries. I guess for most of the smaller businesses which aren't up to speed with search engine optimisation, they hear a lot of propaganda which worries them. But at the other end of the scale, I tend to hear more from you guys at the search engines about the activities of less ethical affiliate marketers out there. Now those guys certainly live by their own rules. How do you deal with it?

o Jon:

Well let me just say first that, in that sense Spam has gotten a lot better over the years. You don't really much have people trying to appear for off topic terms as they tended to. You now have people who are trying to be very relevant. They're trying to offer a service, but the issue with affiliate Spam is that they're trying to offer the same service as three hundred other people. And the way we look at that is... we look at that the same as we look at duplicate content. If someone searches for a book and there are affiliates in there, we're giving the user ten opportunities to see the same information, to buy the same product, from the same store, at the same price. If that happens, we haven't given our user a good service or a good experience. We've given them one result. So we are looking at how we can filter a lot of this stuff out. There are a lot of free sign up affiliate programs. They've pretty much mushroomed over the past few years. The plus side is, they're on topic. They're not showing up where they shouldn't... it's the other way... they're showing up too much where they should [laughs] We look at it like this: what does a site bring to the table? Is there some unique information here? Or is the sole purpose of that site to transact on another site, so that someone can get a commission... if that's the case, we'd rather put them directly in the store ourselves, than send them to someone else who's simply telling them how to get to the store.

o Mike:

You guys must get Spam reports the same as all the other engines. So when somebody does a search on a particular product and it turns up that there are ten affiliates in there, whether they're Spamming or not, it's likely that the affiliates could be turning up before the merchant ever does. If you get a high level of that occurring, do you ever go back to the merchant with some feedback. You know, say like, guys do want to optimise your web site or just do something about your own ranking?

o Jon:

We do actually talk to a lot of companies. We obviously have a relationship with many of them through the various Yahoo! properties. Different companies often take a different tack. For instance, a company which has been very, very good on listening to us is eBay. I have to say is a company which has been very good at working with us and listening to us on the affiliate issue. Their feeling is really twofold: One is, the people that are confusing the results in the search engines are the same people who are doing things that they don't like on eBay. And for them they tend to see bad actors in one space and bad actors in another. The other thing, of course, is if you have someone who is using a cloaked page, and so, to a search engine it's a huge bundle of keywords and massive interlinking of domains on different IP's and for a user coming in with IE 5, it's an automatic redirect to pages on eBay... they know that the user doesn't think: "Oh it's an affiliate Spammer. The perception for the user it's simply this: eBay tricked me! There's a link that I clicked that said "get something free" I clicked it and ended up on eBay. And they wonder why eBay would do that to them. And they know that those things hurt their brand. So that's why they have been very proactive in working with us to ensure that those kind of affiliates are not part of their program. But... some other merchants may look at it and say: since we're paying on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis we're actually indifferent as to how that traffic comes to us. They may say, it's like, we don't want to monitor our affiliates, or we can't monitor our affiliates... whatever, we'll take the traffic because there's no downside. It's a different way that they may look at it. And you know, it depends what position they're in, and more, how much they care about their brand, or don't care...

o Mike:

And a similar kind of thing happens on the paid side. I don't want to get too much into that because this is the organic side and I don't want you to get too embroiled in that as I don't know if you're much connected with it. But in PPC with a campaign you can only bid once on the same keyword. It's not possible for you to fix it so that you can turn up at one, two and three on the paid search side. So, what tends to happen there is that, the merchants don't mind if the affiliates are bidding on the same keywords. So one way or another, it's likely that, if they can't hold all the positions down the right hand side, the affiliates will help them. And at least that way they get the sale anyway.

o Jon:

The downside of that for some of them... I actually covered this in a session yesterday. They’re competing with their affiliates who are actually bidding up to what their zero margin is on their CPA against the cost of those bidded clicks because their landing pages were just like.. you know, one page with a link on it that said: "Click here to shop at Nordstrom." And their marketing spend was actually going up. They were paying people to get traffic that they were likely to have gotten anyway. And they need to roll that back. It may make some kind of sense for a product. But it often doesn't make sense for a brand. It's like, people are probably going to find their own way to your brand name on their own without the affiliate inserting themselves in the value chain. In that case, unnecessarily. And I think people are getting a little more savvy about their affiliate programs. Now they're thinking more about here's what you can do - here's what you can't do. Now they're thinking a bit more about the ways that affiliates can give them distribution. Here are ways that can optimise sales or hurt the brand. They know that people don't view them as affiliates, they view them as their representatives. If you make lousy pages for people it reflects badly on the brand.

o Mike:

So, to finish off the affiliate and Spamming fear factor... because your lunch is getting cold... if for no other reason  [laughs] What is it that gets you banned - if at all? Is it cloaking, mini networks...

o Jon:

Mike there isn't an exhaustive list. There are new technologies coming out all of the time. At the highest, or fundamental level, someone who is doing something for the intent of distorting search results to users... that's pretty much the over arching view of what would be considered a violation of our content policies. In terms of specifics... um.. let's do some notes on cloaking. If you're showing vastly different content to different user agents... that's basically cloaking. Two different pages - one for IE and one for Netscape with the formatting difference between those, or having different presentation formats for people coming in an a mobile device perhaps, or just different type of GUI that's acceptable. That's helpful.

o Mike:

What about a Flash site with cloaked text pages just describing the content - but a true description of the content.

o Jon:

Exactly. For a Flash site which has good text embedded in it. And the cloaked page simply says the non cloaked page has the following text in it... no problem with that. That being said, if someone cloaks the content, that will raise the red flag. The Spam teams are going to look at it. And if what they see is a legitimate representation of the content that's fine. If what they see does NOT represent the content, I mean something entirely different to what the users would get.. they're going to look at that and probably introduce the penalty.

o Mike:

Linkage data... obviously people are going to do this... they know that links count with search engines, maybe not exactly why though... so the quest begins to get links... any links.  Some will buy a thousand fake domains and have them all  interlinked and pointing back to the main site...

 o Jon:

Yeah. Massively interlinked domains will most definitely get you banned. Again, it's spotted as an attempt to distort the results of the search engine. The general rule is that we're looking at popularity on the web via in-links. The links are viewed as votes for other pages. And part of voting is that you can't vote for yourself. And people who buy multiple domains and interlink them for the purpose of falsely increasing popularity, are doing that, just voting for themselves. And the same applies with people who join reciprocal link programs. Unfortunately there are many people who join these because they're fairly new to search engine marketing and maybe someone tells them that this is a great way to do things. That's very dangerous. People linking to you for financial or mutual gain reasons Vs those linking to your site because it's a great site, a site they would go to themselves and would prefer their visitors to see, are doing it the wrong way. Let's just take the travel space again. Someone who has 30 pages of links buried behind the home page, literally each with several hundred links, with everything from... golf carts, to roofing, to... who knows. You know that's kind of like: hey if you like our travel to Jamaica site, you may also be interested in our roofing site... [Mike and Jon burst out laughing here]

o Mike:

It's a shame really. People seem so desperate for links but frequently just have no idea where they're going to get them from. It's my mantra over and over again, and I know you've heard me saying it many times at the conferences: the importance is in the quality of the links you have - not the quantity. And of course, everyone wants to do incoming links. They don't want to do reciprocal linking. They even worry too much about whether they should link out themselves. Getting links in is a lovely blessing, but should people worry too much about linking out?

o Jon:

The thing to remember here Mike, is about who you're linking out to. If you hang out in bad neighbourhoods as we say, then you will get more scrutiny, that's inevitable. If you end up linking to a lot of people who are bad actors and maybe have their site banned -- then you linking to them means you're more likely to be scrutinised to see if you're part of that chain. The other thing, of course, is, when you take a look at connectivity, every site has a certain amount of weight that it gets when it's voting on the web and that is based on the in links. And they get to distribute that...energy... via its out links. And by that, I mean outside the domain. Navigational links and other links within a domain don't help connectivity, they help crawlers find their way through the site. I'm just talking here about the true out links. Those outside of the domain. For those... how much each link counts is divided by the number that exists. So if you have a couple of partners, or suppliers you're working with and have an affinity with, if you link out to them - then that helps a lot. If you have... 3,4,5 of them... well if you added 300 random reciprocal links, then you've just diluted the value of the links that you gave to the other people you have the real relationship with. It's as simple as this, people who have massive link farms aren't really giving much of a vote to anyone because they're diluting their own voting capability across so many other people. So you need to consider the number of out links you have on a page, because each additional link makes them all count for less.

o Mike:

Jon... I feel as though I've virtually exhausted you. This has been so useful and I really do appreciate the time you've given, not just to discuss your own Yahoo! properties but for giving such a wonderful insight into search engine marketing best practice. I honestly believe your contribution here will help the entire readership, at whatever level they're at in the field, to have a more comprehensive knowledge. Thank you so much.

Jon:

No problem Mike. Anytime at all. It's always good to talk with you.

<<Stop>>
Jon Glick is Yahoo!'s Senior Manager for Web Search, managing the core relevancy initiatives for Yahoo! Search. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Jon served as the Director of Internet Search at AltaVista and has held positions in new product development, strategic analysis and product management at Raychem Corp., Booz Allen & Hamilton Consulting and the Lincoln Electric Co. Jon has a BS in Computer-Aided Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Intermission Time - Go get a drink, take a break, but come back! There's more good stuff to come!

Study Shows How Searchers Use The Engines
by Christine Churchill

Usability has always been one of my favorite subjects, so when Enquiro published a new study showing how users interact with search engines, it was a must-read. The study turned out to be such a fascinating report, I had to share it.

Gord Hotchiss, President of Enquiro, and his team of able research assistants ran 24 demographically diverse participants through a series of tests to observe and record their behavior as they interacted with search engines. While everyone will agree that 24 is not a statistically significant sample size, I think the results of the project show interesting findings that are worth considering.

As I read the study, a number of his findings in user behavior correlated with other studies I've read. For example, Gord mentions that almost 60% of his users started with one search engine (usually Google) and then would switch to a different engine if the results weren't satisfying. This finding is consistent with data from ComScore Media Metrix that talks about user fickleness toward search engines. CNET writer Stephanie Olsen did a great job summarizing that data in her article on search wars . The message to the search engines is "Stay on your toes guys and show us relevant results or we're out of here."

The Enquiro team found that there was no consistent search method. Everyone in the study did it a little different. People doing research used engines differently than people on a buying mission. Women searchers differed from men in their searching techniques. Gord tells us "an organic listing in the number 8 position on Google might not have been seen by almost half the men in the group, but would have been seen by the majority of the women." Let's hear it for women's powers of observation!

One finding of the study that is near and dear to every search engine marketer's heart is, "If no relevant results were found on the first results page, only 5 participants (20.8%) went to the second page."

This is consistent with numerous studies documenting that users don't go very far in the results pages for answers. Probably the most famous research to document this behavior was the study by Amanda Spink and Bernard Jansen where they found 58% of users did not access any results past the first page. I had the pleasure of talking with Amanda a few years ago when I was first moving to Dallas and she was moving out of it. She's a fun lady with a flair for writing provocative titles to research papers on search engines. Expect to hear more from her in the future.

A finding that warmed my longtime SEO innards was that there was a "sweet spot" for being found on a search engine's results page and that place was in the "above the fold organic results," that is to say, in the portion of the free listings that can be viewed without scrolling. Considering how cluttered some search engines results pages are getting this is good news! According to Gord, "All 24 participants checked these 2 or 3 top organic rankings."

I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising to find the "prime real estate" in the middle section of the page, this is consistent with eye tracking studies that show the center column to be the first place user look on a web page. Of course, one might wonder why users tended to skip over the category and product search lists? Gord's team asked users about why none of them bothered to look at the news and shopping feeds that appear at the top of the organic results. Users said they didn't know what they were.

I had a déjà vu moment when I read that because this is almost identical to a comment that was made to me by a usability tester in an in-house usability test. My tester said they skipped over the product search section because they were unfamiliar with it and it "looked confusing". They jumped straight to what they recognized as "safe" - that being the organic list of results.

Another finding I found myself agreeing emphatically with was that top sponsored positions had "a 40% advantage in click throughs over sponsored links on the right side of the screen". It makes sense when you think about it - the spot is so in your face - users can't miss it. The fact that this spot produced a great click through was a well known PPC insider secret and many of us who do PPC management had devised elaborate methods to get our clients in those top spots. We've been hearing evil rumors that Google may be phasing this spot out in the future. It was still there today when I checked, so maybe Google is planning on keeping it awhile.

A finding that could be affected by Google's recent ad overhaul was that users of Google were more likely to resist to looking at sponsored ads than on other engines. Part of the answer explaining this has to do with Google ads looking more like ads than on other sites - hey, they were in little colored boxes off to the right that practically screamed "Ad!" You couldn't possibly mistake them for content or organic results. Since Google has dropped the little colored boxes and gone with plain text for the ads, one can't help but wonder if users will be less resistant to ads now.

The Enquiro study includes a summary section toward the end of the report. Here they identified items that captured the searchers' attention enough to make them click and listed important items to include on a landing page. I won't give away the store by telling you everything, but I will tell you, as you may expect, the title and description shown in the results page were the most important eye magnets for attracting user's attention.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the report findings was that search is a circular and complex process, not a linear process as we sometimes like to simplify it into. Instead, search is a multi-step process with multiple interactions with sites and search engine results pages. Gord's team found that "a typical online research interaction can involve 5 to 6 different queries and interactions with 15 to 20 different sites." That's a lot of sites and a lot of back and forth between sites and search engines.

The takeaway point from this study is that search is definitely more complicated than at first glance. I guess that's what makes search marketing so absorbing. For every thing you learn about it, there are ten more questions yet unanswered. Sounds like we need a sequel to this report - eh, Gord?

Check out the study yourself by downloading it off the Enquiro web site. It's a fascinating report and it's only 30 pages including lots of pictures. Happy reading!

P.S - Oh... If you're in Chicago next week (23 April), be sure to catch Jill Whalen, myself, and our friends at Jill's High Rankings Seminar. Check Jill's ad below for the details.

High Rankings Search Engine Marketing
Full-day Seminar April 23, 2004 in Chicago

Everything You Need To Know for a Successful SEM Campaign!

Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Debra Mastaler, Karon Thackston and Matt Bailey will cover Search Engine Marketing from start-to-finish.

Learn SEO basics, link popularity building, PPC, writing for your target audience and the search engines, plus how to measure traffic & conversions.

10% discount to e-marketing-news subscribers!
Use Code EMN: <http://www.highrankings.com/emnseminar>.

Quick Bits:

Here are some cool things we've discovered recently.

Search engines aren't alone in looking at the interconnectivity between nodes. Try the Visual Thesaurus for a fun way to visually study word associations.

Here's another little tool that caught our attention, GROKKER 2.1 It does the searching and grouping for you. It could be very handy for people who spend their days pulling together links in from from various sources. A right handy way to manage your resource build.

And, just for the sheer weirdness of it, try this tool that applies the infallible science of numerology to see how much good or evil there is in your web site: Gematriculator. Warning: this is seriously weird...

See you next issue!


(C) Mike Grehan & Net Writer Publishing 2004

Editor: Mike Grehan. Search engine marketing consultant, speaker and author. http://www.search-engine-book.co.uk

Associate Editor: Christine Churchill. KeyRelevance.com

e-marketing-news is published selectively on a when it's
ready basis. (C)2004 Net Writer Publishing.

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