EDITOR'S
WELCOME:
[But first: "This is your Captain
speaking, we're now at 14,000 and climbing. It's good to have
you on board..." ] You must have seen one of those movies
where they have the flashback sequence. You know, where the
actor gazes moodily into the middle distance and his recent
past begins to flash by...
Cue soundtrack - run video: <<
Play >>
I'm in the hotel lobby and Danny Sullivan
is giving me a welcome hug. This is the start of the London
Search Engine Strategies conference and Danny has his troops
assembled in the bar. The following morning, Danny and Brett
Tabke from WebMasterWorld are doing a 'freestyle' session
on organic search engine results. I pop in to say hi to Brett,
and Danny invites me to join them both for the session. This
is great: nothing rehearsed, questions being randomly fired
by the audience and one hour seemingly flies by in seconds.
Must do this again I think...
The following day I join a panel with
Craig Nevill- Manning, Senior Research Scientist at Google
(as well as developer of Froogle), and Paul Gardi, SVP Search,
Jeeves/Teoma. I've not seen Paul since we had lunch in Boston
and this is the first time I've worked with Craig. We're doing
the 'Looking at Links' session. My presentation astounds the
audience when I explain mathematically, exactly what PageRank
seven actually means... and what goes on at lunch times in
the Googleplex. Later, wearing a grin, Craig takes me to one
side and suggests that my revelations about lunchtime at Google
may be closer to the truth than I actually think!
With a worldwide TV audience of over
50 million, Paul McKenna is the world's leading hypnotist.
He's also a very close personal friend of mine and we're due
to start our (long overdue) business together online. We need
to talk search engine marketing and luckily for him, my buddy
Jill Whalen of Highrankings fame is also around as she's here
for the conference. I promised her traditional English food
while she was here, so McKenna picks us up (in his new Ferrari
no less) and chauffeurs us around London to... the Kensington
Tandoori! Here, for some unknown reason, Paul suddenly feels
unwell and has to leave just as the banquet arrives. I seem
to remember thinking, I wish he'd hypnotised the waiter before
the bill arrived...
The person in front of me has just dropped
their seat back so far, they're almost upside down. They might
feel more comfortable hanging from the luggage rack like a
bat I think. I've not flown with Air New Zealand before, but
I have to say, that was the best in-flight dinner I've had
in a very long time. There again, it was Lamb - and you Kiwi's
know a thing or two about Lamb. On the subject of flying,
I don't often make recommendations to major airlines, but
I'd like to get a note to them all: If you make me watch that
Ben Affleck movie, Daredevil, one more time - I'll poke my
own eyes out... !
It's Saturday night in Los Angeles and
I'm having dinner with premier book promoter Michael Drew
and his beautiful fiancé Kelly. Michael has already
promoted 12 books into bestseller lists such as the Wall Street
Journal and New York Times. This is a very impressive guy.
I make a mental note to ensure www.promoteabook.com gets a
mention in the next newsletter, for the benefit of the many
business authors who subscribe...
Author and marketing consultant extraordinaire,
Jim Sterne, has been on his feet presenting for three hours
now. This is the preliminary workshop leading to the two day
eMetrics Summit at the heavenly Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel
in Santa Barbara, California. Jim is such a professional at
this, it's no wonder he's won so many awards for public speaking:
And boy - does he know his stuff. He and I are doing a 'before
and after' master- class together for members of the Chartered
Institute of Marketing in the UK soon (I lecture on how to
drive traffic and he lectures on what to do with it next -
perfect!). He's a great man and a true friend is Jim Sterne
- I must tell the readers to go to www.emetrics.org for details
of the next summit.
Just down the corridor from me at the
Biltmore, is Click Z writer; undisputed Conversion Guru; and
buddy of mine, Bryan Eisenberg from New York. He's brilliant.
I go to the bar and come back with a beer and a soda. He says:
"If you'd wire-framed your route first, gone to the bar
and shown real user intent, then asked for a discount on the
larger bottles - there'd have been a 50% higher conversion
and the ROI would have been 298.3%" www.clickz.com/sales/traffic/
Craig Ragland, Group Research & Metrics
Manager, MSN has been attending the eMetrics summit. On the
last day he very kindly gives me a lift from downtown Santa
Barbara back to the hotel. He's a very nice guy and we say
one of those very lengthy goodbyes with promises of emails
being shot backwards and forwards; future business; meeting
again next year at the conference; shaking of hands; goodbye;
farewell; catch you later; so long; bon voyage; see ya!
The following day I board my plane to
San Francisco and sit down right next to... Craig!
I'm standing outside Looksmart's offices
on Second Street in San Francisco. The temperature is over
100 degrees and I'm waiting for the cab driver to give me
my change. The city-by-the-bay is suffering from a heat-wave,
the like of which it hasn't known for a very long time. He's
busy giving me a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the weather
since he arrived in San Francisco from Estonia in 1987. He
seems like a nice family guy, and his account of San Francisco's
weather history is not too boring actually. But if he doesn't
give me my change and let me get in the building before I
suffer sunstroke and collapse in the street - I may just have
to kill him!
The sun's just going down and I can see
Alcatraz out of the restaurant window. I'm meeting Laura Higgins,
Managing Editor Reports, MarketingSherpa, for the first time.
And being a native of San Francisco, she's brought me to Fisherman's
Wharf. McCormick & Kuletos (or McCormick and Schmick's
as it's also known elsewhere) is booked up, so we've settled
for this great touristy place right on the water (strangely
enough, I'd find myself in McCormick & Kuleto's for lunch
the following day with a mysterious French girl who's Paris
based boss has had her track me down. Excellent detective
work. This story will run!) Anyway, the third edition of the
Search Engine Marketing Buyers Guide is almost ready, as is
my third edition, so Laura and I have lots to talk about.
It turns out that Laura also knows the great Jay Conrad Levinson.
So naturally, Mark Joyner's name (and his retirement) comes
up also. Small world. Intriguing...
Fredrick Marckini, CEO iProspect (one
of the leading Search Engine Marketing firms in the world)
is one of the founding fathers of the industry. He's sitting
with me outside a pub in Chelsea, London. I LOVE this guy.
He and I are working together on a top-secret project (so,
naturally enough, the whole industry knows about it!).
We have a surreal moment, as sitting
next to him is former English soccer legend and TV pundit
Jimmy Greaves. I'm discussing citation mapping and linkage
in general. Fredrick, who arrived in London on the overnight
flight from Boston at 5.30 AM that day, has drifted off to
sleep. However, Jimmy Greaves is listening avidly. Search
engine marketing: funny old game...
<< Stop >>
If it's good enough for second rate movies
and soaps to use the old flashback technique to get up to
speed - it's good enough for me!
If you can make it, I'm at the Search
Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. This time the 'freestyle'
session is with Brett Tabke (WebMasterWorld), John Heard (Beyond
Engineering and Planet Ocean), myself and stalwart Detlev
Johnson (and I'll bet a few dollars that we're joined by Danny
Sullivan at some point). I'll also be joining Paul Gardi,
and an as yet unnamed Google-Guy, for another Looking at Links
session.
If you do make it then come and make
yourself known. I'll try to give you the secret of PageRank
and how to achieve number one at all of the major search engines
so that you're rich beyond your wildest dreams. Failing that...
I'll give you a free promotional pen.
Now, it's convenient that I spend a lot
of time in Boston just now. There are some huge developments
taking place up in Canada with Ken Evoy's 'Site Build It'(SBI)
suite of online marketing tools. And he's very kindly offered
to fly me up to his place for dinner and an in-depth look
at how and why SBI sites are search engine chart toppers!
Until next time...
Enjoy!
Mike.
PS - Better start printing (or look for
the pdf link just below - this issue is packed with about
30 pages of must- read stuff.
INSIDE
THE TEOMA ALGORITHM
During the research to the second edition
of my book, I became fascinated by the work of a scientist
called Jon Kleinberg. He's the developer of an algorithm known
as HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search). The intuition behind
HITS is very important as it's based on the notion of "hubs
and authorities", a term I'm sure you've heard before.
The simplest way to explain it, perhaps, is think about links
between documents as being viewed this way:
o Authority comes from in-edges (pages
which point to yours)
o Being a good hub comes from out-edges
(pages which you point to)
This creates a mutually reinforcing relationship:
o A good authority is a page that is pointed
to by many Good hubs.
O A good hub is a page that points to
many good authorities.
However, it's vital to remember that,
this process is a way of, not just identifying linkage patterns,
but also identifying web communities and the major players
within them. If you've attended any of my presentations, you'll
know I describe it quite simply this way: The web sees all
links as being equal. No link has any preference to another:
however, with search engines, some links are certainly more
equal than others: and some are infinitely more equal.
This is why we talk about "link
quality" and not just quantity. A single quality link
can frequently have 50 times more power than 100 random or
"less qualified" links.
Both Google and Teoma are prime examples
of search engines which base their ranking algorithm around
the nature and the characteristics of linkage data.
There's a lot of information about PageRank
the Google algorithm online, but not as much about HITS. And
HITS is possibly the most influential algorithm in information
retrieval on the web. I wrote a document about HITS (which
is free) a short while ago. If you don't have it, I'll give
a link at the end of this, long and very in-depth feature.
Teoma has been fairly open about the
similarities in its algorithm to that of HITS. But the technology
they have developed goes well beyond that which was achieved
by Kleinberg, or another variation on the algorithm called
CLEVER, which was an IBM project.
I was delighted that Paul Gardi, SVP
Search at Ask Jeeves/Teoma, was willing to meet me for lunch
to help Find an analogy which would be useful to readers of
this newsletter, about how the ranking process at search engines,
is based very much on social sciences as much as pure linkage
data. I wasn't disappointed at all. If you've ever wondered
how you're supposed to do well in the linkage based race to
the top of the major search engines when you're a brand new
and "linkless" site, then pay very special attention
at the point where Paul says: "I'd say the same thing
as I'd say to some guy who's just arrived in town and said,
you know, I need a job. I'd say: What are you good at?
By the way: I'm not sponsored by McCormick
& Schmick's! Even if they do get mentioned so many times
in this newsletter (but if you have one in your city, be sure
you'll find me sitting there when I visit!). So, here is where
I'm having lunch with Paul Gardi. Paul is based in New York
and I'm in Boston for a conference which Paul's attending
also. So, it quite simply makes sense to meet in... you know
where!
If this is the first time you've read
this newsletter, let me tell you that, I publish the entire
transcript of my interviews verbatim. It's just as though
you were sitting at the table listening. However, as you'll
discover, this interview ends with my tape being switched
off. You'll discover why.
Paul and I are also joined by the delightful
Alexa Rudin, Director of Communications at Ask Jeeves (third
party witness). If you REALLY want to know where search technology
is going: read between the lines!
<< Play >>
o Mike: [Settling down into the corner
of a cosy booth] I can't quite place your accent Paul.
o Paul: It's South African.
o Mike: Ahh! It's not that strong, but
I could just detect a little "something". So, anyway,
I always do this, it makes it a little easier to get up to
speed: you've mentioned South Africa, so what's your background
before Jeeves/Teoma?
o Paul: Well, my background is Procter
and Gamble on the brand management side; venture capital with
a couple of Internet companies and then I invested in Teoma.
o Mike: Right. So you were approached
about the Teoma deal and saw that it was going to be something
big?
o Paul: Yes, when we met Apostolos [Apostolos
Gerasoulis, founder of Teoma], we could tell that he had a
very definite vision. Also that his approach was unique to
any other approach which was being taken in the search space
and he just had the background and the credibility to build
this kind of thing. The way he described his idea to us, and
after due diligence it became clear to us, that his path was
unique. And we developed enough confidence in him and his
ability to actually build it.
When we initially invested, it wasn't
really anything yet. It was a bunch of early algorithms which
had been put together as the DiscoWeb project. But there was
certainly enough there to see that this would definitely become
something. And we decided to back him... that's really how
I got involved, on the investor side at first.
About a year later, the company had matured,
it had matured its algorithms and they approached me and asked
me if I'd come in and consult for them for a short while.
They just wanted a little assistance on the way forward...
you know, how to take it to the next level...
[And, as if he had been following me
since my conversation with Jill Whalen in the last issue -
up pops the waiter - completely oblivious to the interview
taking place. He hands Paul his Coke, makes some small talk
about the weather and then... notices the microphone. At which
point, he skilfully returns to the kitchen with an eyes down,
backward gliding motion.]
o Paul: [continuing] ... my background's
really technology VC and business building...
o Mike: I was going to ask about that,
because you'd probably have fried your brains going through
all of that technology and the HITS algorithm, as well as
everything else, if you didn't have some sort of [adopts fingers
like Rabbit ears twitching in the air pose] "techie"
kind of background too.
o Paul: Yes, and for a lot of it, not
many people in the world, even those with PhD's, understand
what's really going on with Teoma.
o Mike: [With knowing look - and laughing]
I know...it took me one year just to try and put some of this
down. To put it down in simple English so that people may
be able to understand at least some of the principle operators
in this type of information retrieval!
While we're on the subject of technology,
I've been very lucky, in that, during the research for my
book, I've been able to get to speak to some of the prime
movers in the industry. I talked to Brian Pinkerton, developer
of the web's first full text retrieval search engine [WebCrawler]
and discussed how he implemented early IR [Information Retrieval]
technology such as the vector space model and also how linkage
data was used back then. But, I think now, the science and
technology is developing in its own right. In the early days
of the web, there was only work which had been done in the
field of text retrieval for digital libraries and that sort
of thing. Now, at least we have years of research into information
retrieval on the web to call upon.
o Paul: I'd say, it's now more years of
research, into what I call social network theory. In universities,
people like Kleinberg [Jon Kleinberg developer of the HITS
algorithm] understanding how people interact and how networked
structures are predictive of certain links, like hubs and
authorities. Basically, being able to draw out of a structure
some predictive and very interesting analytics.
Really, what we're doing now is consolidating
a well known theoretical construct from others on how this
should work, and putting it into a practical application.
o Mike: Yeah, I know what you mean. I've
tried to explain this, about bibliometrics and citation analysis...
in fact, I had a conversation with Andre Broder, former chief
scientist with Alta Vista about the best way to describe it
some time ago. Trying to simplify it is the hard part. Trying
to get the average SEO to look beyond basic HTML code and
the technical stuff surrounding the creation of web pages
and become more aware of the social sciences aspect...
o Paul: Well that's really where I got
into Teoma. The company was made up of a bunch of really smart
guys who had taken a technology from point X where they started
and on to point Y where they passed all the milestones that
were required for us to continue to invest. But, what they
hadn't done... well put it this way, it was so advanced, there
was no one who could understand what they were doing, it wasn't
down in plain English. It was very difficult because they
had no real way of communicating to investors, or customers
what they were doing. By that I mean, they hadn't developed
a way of simplifying down to a general 30 second spiel. Two
hours was hardly enough time to explain the technology behind
it!
So, one of the first things I had to
do was to try and distil it down, into a language that makes
sense to someone outside... a set of concepts that make sense
to someone in, say, five minutes of conversation. We haven't
quite done it yet - but we're getting there.
o Mike: I'm just quietly sitting here
grinning and agreeing. When I saw the initial press release
for Teoma, I thought, well... I'm not quite sure that it says
everything it could - but it certainly gets a lot of it down
in two pages - considering it took me personally about five
hours to cover it! [bursts out laughing]
o Paul: That original press release was
a bit "non specific" to anything we were doing to
be honest. In fact, you say it didn't say everything it could:
it might have been "off the mark" deliberately [adopts
a slight "knowing" grin]. We did not want anyone
to know exactly, especially because, around that time, there
were several people coming out and saying that what we were
doing wasn't possible. CLEVER [an IBM project which further
developed Jon Kleinberg's HITS algorithm] had not demonstrated
the success of...
o Mike: You mean the run-time-analysis
problem?
o Paul: Yes, basically being able to calculate
the local structure in real time... or in any time in a useable
fashion. They [CLEVER] had not demonstrated that they could
get the additional information, the much more pertinent information
about these pages, about who they are, what they are and how
they fit, which allows you to rank them. No one had succeeded
in bringing that to the surface. And there were some papers
(and some people) going around saying that this was just not
possible and that you'd need a server farm the size of Texas
and all the electricity in the world, basically, to calculate
the amount of information that's required to work out the
communities. The local subject communities for every subject
so they could then understand who the hubs and authorities
are.
o Mike: Am I right in saying that in the
early stages, as the DiscoWEB project, they managed to get
it to about ten minutes?
o Paul: It might have been about ten minutes.
But our speed run now is sub .03 seconds...
o Mike: And that's just so fantastic.
I know when I was going through my research for the last edition
of my book, I was thinking: "ten minutes to do all that
is pretty good - but nobody's ever gonna wait ten minutes
for a result!"
o Paul: And if you process this on the
fly, I mean... if you were to try and present this information...
like there's a lot of talk about how they're [other search
engines] all providing information on clusters and communities
and being local subject specific. But unless they're coming
to our engine and secretly scraping our results, well, to
do even one calculation would be... CLEVER and IBM were trying
to do it using some very smart people, but it just takes a
very long time unless you approach it in the way we approached
it.
o Mike: The patent for Kleinberg's HITS
algorithm is owned by IBM as it's wrapped in the CLEVER project.
I don't believe that CLEVER was ever used in a commercial
search engine though. I mean I never actually ever saw a search
engine with the words "Powered by CLEVER" or "Powered
by IBM" or anything like that. So, it doesn't seem to
have made it at all into the commercial world of search.
o Paul: I can't say whether CLEVER did
work or not, I don't work for IBM. We certainly haven't seen
anything in the "real world" that appears to be
an outgrowth of CLEVER. I believe the project still exists
at IBM, I just don't really know what they're working on right
now.
o Mike: I'd like to come back to the HITS
algorithm and Teoma in a few minutes, but can we talk a little
about the connection with Jeeves? How did that come about?
o Paul: Basically we were moving along
and thinking about our business model and we approached all
the players in the industry at one point or another. We were
looking to see if we could find the right partner. And Jeeves
were really the ones that came back with the right level of
interest. They gave us the right resources to make the thing
happen. It had to be taken through to sub-second processing
times and we knew that this was going to be the next big thing
in search. We'd solved the problem: This was like the Holy
Grail in the search industry. And Jeeves were great, they
showed that they were committed to taking it all the way,
right through to the end.
Of course, my responsibility was to both
the shareholders and the scientists who'd been shedding blood,
sweat and tears on the project for three years. And those
guys needed to be somewhere where they could see the way forward.
o Mike: And Teoma must have been an attractive
proposition because of the crawling aspect, as Jeeves didn't
actually crawl the web anyway.
o Paul: Actually Mike, Jeeves were working
on their own technology at that time. And part of that was
crawling technology. We actually integrated a lot of what
they had into Teoma. There was some good stuff. They'd done
some good work. They had a good team and done some good research.
o Mike: But from a search engine marketing
point of view, they did present some problems in that, you
simply couldn't get into Jeeves... well, not without some
clever moves. They didn't crawl the web, they were a kind
of directory you couldn't submit to... they were... yuk! I've
started using the paid inclusion service for some of my clients,
and we're seeing some pretty healthy traffic on certain searches
now. So, I guess the crawling and the paid inclusion kind
of... paid off!
o Paul: Paid inclusion? You know, some
people are saying that it's solved the problem, some say we're
simply scratching the surface... I think we're only just moving
our hand down to the surface.
I think the paid inclusion program, along
with a number of other models such as PPC is going to provide
a much more positive ROI for significantly expanded audiences
in the search industry.
The combination of algorithmic search
and other data we have to identify structures is incredible.
What we do ensure with paid inclusion though, is that it has
no impact whatsoever on relevance i.e. paid inclusion is guaranteed
entry to the index, but no priority or preference is shown.
We maintain absolute integrity within the ranked results.
We've come so far with all of this research into structures
and hubs and authorities in order to be able to determine
exactly what are the authoritative sites. So we're all about
absolute relevance. If you see the shift in Jeeves - Jeeves
has come along way in terms of relevance. It's so much better
than it ever was a few years ago...
o Mike: As I mentioned earlier, it was
pretty hard to describe what Jeeves was at the time.
o Paul: Yeah I know: Was it a question
and answer service, was it a directory, was it a search engine?
I think users were a little confused about exactly what it
was.
o Mike: When I first got involved in search
engine marketing, or search engine optimisation as it was...
Oh for heavens sake, Spam is probably what it was back then...
There was a very shaky kind of, "them and us" sort
of division with search engines. And certainly there was a
technology battle going on between the big time Spammers and
the search engines. The division isn't so great these days
because of the commercial element which has crept in. I mean,
I kind of figured that we'd had such a good free ride with
the search engines, that they'd have to come and charge us
for something anyway. But, the models which have been developed,
I mean, pay for consideration: what is that? And pay for inclusion...
I use paid inclusion for my clients, but you know, when they
ask me what it means, I sometimes say to them: "You know
how you used to be at 13,397 in the index? Well now you're
paying to be there [laughs]."
o Paul: Well, the motivation for paid
inclusion is not about just getting into the engine. I mean
we're not doing our job if it simply becomes a way of getting
into the engine. The real motivation is about being refreshed
often enough in the index. You know, making sure the fresh
information on your page is just that. And if you're building
sites with dynamic pages etc. then you're targeting in the
proper way if you use paid inclusion. The ability for a user
to find your pages in the index is much higher. You know what
you just said about being 13,397 in the index and paying for
it - well you may be if your pages are not relevant to a user
query. With paid inclusion you get a chance to constantly
update and optimise your pages so that all the more they become
relevant to user queries.
Sure, if someone is looking in the index
to see if they're included in there, then paid inclusion is
a way of doing it. But one thing is certain, as I said earlier,
there is no way that paid inclusion will in any way artificially
increase or improve the rank of your pages. Of course, our
crawlers are random, so it's likely that there are some sites
we're just going to miss (as with any other crawler engine).
And out of the stuff we do crawl there's a whole load which
simply has to get dumped because it's no good. If it's just
about being found, then you can try submitting if it's free
anywhere, but if you're linked well - we'll find you eventually
anyway.
o Mike: I think it's important, because
of the kind of mysteries which go on at search engines and
also the fact that I have two audiences for my newsletter,
those who are very new to search engine marketing and seasoned
veterans, that I always pitch two different types of questions.
So, I do need to cover some of the basics.
For me personally, I use paid inclusion because I know how
to optimise pages for specific search engines. But for the
guy who's new to all this and simply gets his web development
team to create a beautiful 100% Flash web site with a neat
php back-end powering it up - even with paid inclusion he's
still in trouble, yeah?
o Paul: Well, actually, with Flash, through
the methods we use, we'd be able to find that page more easily.
We would have a better picture of what that page is and what
it's about than most. But more to the point, we'd understand
why people were looking for it. Even though it's a Flash page.
Whereas, if our crawler looked at that Flash page - it just
sees nothing... maybe just a couple of words that really aren't
relevant...
So, Flash, dynamically generated pages,
these are the areas where paid inclusion is almost essential
at this time. But in the long term, the real win is gonna
be that, any company, selling anything, has an opportunity
to expand significantly the opportunity to provide information
about their pages which they can make available to us. So
then we can be much smarter about finding them when our algorithm
tells us it's relevant. That's the opportunity which is developing
here. It's the local corner store, sending me data about all
of the products they have and even if there's only one in
ten million search queries which is relevant for that store,
we'll make sure it comes up at number one [if that's where
it belongs].
We're going well beyond, so far beyond
what humans could do or achieve. We're moving into a realm
of very, very smart algorithms looking at information in a
way which will really improve the relevance and the customer
experience.
o Mike: Learning machines? This is something
I'm really into at the moment, vector support machines are
something that I'm looking at very closely. I'm just so into
AI [artificial intelligence] my wife is going to kill me for
getting so excited about a lot of intelligent zeros and ones
[bursts out laughing]... Seriously, it's a good job my wife
is a Russian intellectual - actually, she's so smart she scares
me sometimes...
o Paul: They're learning all the time.
That's why no one can know what they really are. These algorithms
are continually being tweaked and tuned...
o Mike: Is it too far fetched to start
and imagine these machines beginning to start and think for
themselves?
o Paul: This is real, what's actually
happening. It becomes an interesting philosophical discussion...
o Mike: So you realise I'm asking that
question for myself and nobody else [laughs]
o Paul: How intelligent are these machines?
Think about your brain and think about how things work, like
how do we make decisions? So how could a computer make decisions?
How different is that? In the same way, I, guess, that the
brain uses facts, figures, intuition.
What the algorithms are doing is gathering
this type of information. And in the case of Teoma, it turns
out, because we're going down to the level and depth of information
we are doing, it happens to be extremely valuable information.
This is very targeted stuff and these machines are very smart
and they can find this very valuable information and then
process it at these almost unimaginable speeds. No one could
have imagined this... It is artificial intelligence. Our job
is to put all of that information, to input it to the engine
so that it gets smarter and smarter and has more and more
to think about and things come together in a better completeness.
o Mike: There has been a bit of a technological
battle going on between the search engines and the search
engine optimisers or, Spammers, I guess is what I'm really
saying. And that's one of the major problems that search engines
have to endure... I mean how difficult is that? How difficult
is to deal with the Spam?
o Paul: I don't really want to talk about
Spam Mike. I don't want to give the impression to some hackers
out there that... well... Spam is a significant issue on the
web because it affects our user experience and that's what
we are concerned about. If I take another perspective on it,
the truth is, Spammers spend more time at looking at these
methods, when if fact, if they spent more time creating great
content, they'd score anyway - without fear of retribution.
You know, we have ways of dealing with Spam. We don't talk
about them, naturally. We're successful where we have to be.
We always see new techniques being used and we watch it, and
if we don't like it - why would anyone else?
o Mike: I think just generally dealing
with it is a problem, but the fact is, there is just so much
bad advice and downright bulls--t out there. A lot of it is
out of ignorance and lot of it's usually some jerk who's proclaimed
himself some sort of SEO Guru and he's trying to sell his
latest eBook nonsense or "magical" search engine
software scam...
I never get tied down on this whole ethical
issue about what happens online - it's a free place and it's
a big place - so there'll be good and bad guys out there.
I just wish that these guys selling trash to poor innocent
newbies would have the guts to tell them that they're being
sold Spam techniques and software. Some of these poor guys,
and they're not all just mom and pop operations, there are
still larger companies buying into this garbage, and yet they
are the ones who find themselves delivering their brand into
the search engine Spam cesspit.
o Paul: The problem is, once you get caught,
it's just so difficult to bring yourself back into the good
books. Our machines will find it... you know, a significant
amount of Spam we see is not touched by human hands. So, you
have machines making decisions about whether you're good or
bad - and the bar is very, very high. So if you're doing something
to breach the norm, then you may never actually get to a human
to decide whether you really are on the good or bad side.
o Mike: So, I have to ask you, if you
were talking to some guy who's just starting with this stuff...
You know, I think I know what best practice is but, there's
a lot of stuff that's just not about basic web pages. There's
linkage data and all that. If you're just new to the web and
you have no linkage and don't know much about the "black-box"
side of search engines... what do you do?
o Paul: He wants to be a good... Hmmm...
I'd say the same thing as I'd say to some guy who's just arrived
in town and said, you know... I need a job. I'd say: "What
are you good at?"
And then what kind of advice would you
give that person? Well this is exactly the way the web works.
I'd say knock on a few doors. Go and meet people. Talk to
them and tell them what you're good at. And the ones who will
like you for that will put you in their address book or their
filing system so they have a record of you. They can then
refer to you when they have a question, or refer you to someone
who may be looking for whatever it is you do. You become known
for something and you become a member of a community. You
mix in that community.
If you're good at tennis, you join the
tennis club. You become a member of a community and if you're
a genuine value provider, of genuine interest they will treat
you and accept you as part of the community as well. And it
doesn't take as long as some people think it takes. The structures
are already there, we're refreshing the pages all the time.
If a new page comes up, we may not find it straight away,
so you can use paid inclusion so we actually know you're there
right at the beginning. And if you've got some links on your
page going out, we'll see where they are going and we'll start
understanding what community you're in and... well I can't
go much further, but that's the key to success. Certainly
at our level of understanding. We're mostly concerned with,
are you in communities and are they good communities. Are
you an authority or not an authority? And by that I don't
mean that you have to be the leading authority at something,
it's just about being weighted as part of that subject community.
Of course, we don't know what the subject
is, we simply can't know exactly what all these subjects are,
but when someone types in a word [or words] that brings up
that community, as a subject specific community and related
to that word [those words] then you're part of that and we
know. And you'll be found quicker than you might think. It's
not that hard to do. And communities don't have to be that
big. If it's a good community on a subject...
o Mike: Okay, a pet subject here, while
we're discussing communities, and that's the subject of themed
web sites. I'm sure you know all about this. [Paul has a knowing
smile here!] It's long been bandied around that if you have
a web site which sticks to one theme and one theme only, which
is centred around a few keywords then this is the ticket to
success. A themed web site wins by pure mass, or dense aggregation,
or something...
[And timed perfectly with me getting
animated... the waiter arrives with lunch... so let me hit
the fast forward button << FF >> ]
So, the themed web site thing, we have
some poor guys labouring away desperately trying to create
one hundred pages of material on the same subject so the entire
site talks about blue widgets, every page is a blue widget
page...
o Paul: You mean creating page after page
on the same subject? Again, they're focusing on the wrong
thing...
o Mike: Let me jump in again and put it
this way: "Does the guy who has a blue widget web site
with 100 pages beat the guy who has only one page - but one
very IMPORTANT page?
o Paul: No the larger site does not do
better: Because we don't count the number of pages. We care
about this: Are other pages on the same subject considering
this to be a GOOD PAGE. And you know, even Google and what
they do and the other methods, they can't do this. Sure, they
do look at who's referring to the page but they don't look
at the subject - the subject of the page. Yes, we look at
all the information that the others do as well as everything
else...
It's important to understand that...
Let's go back to what I was saying earlier. For instance,
if you came into this room and said: "I'm popular!"
Maybe you had gone to the phone book and taken 2000, who knows,
20,000 addresses out of it and put them in your Palm Pilot
and said to me: "Look how many people know me!"
Now, if you create, say, one thousand sites with other peoples
names and they all point back to you and say: "Look how
many people know me!" I can look and say: "Funny,
you tell me that 30,000 people know you - but, funnily enough
- I've never met anyone who knows you!"
And that's the way we work. If you want
to be prominent then simply become known on your subject.
Become good at what you do, become valuable to somebody else
online for something. Go ahead and optimise your page - but
don't make stupid mistakes as we talked about earlier. If
you're selling, I don't know, window dressings, just make
sure you've got a term on there that says "window dressings".
You know, there are many people who make that kind of stupid
mistake by not having the actual text on the page. And we
are matching text at some level. The problem is that, some
people may stick that in a graphic and we can't read that.
But back to the main point: Become a
member of your community. It's not so hard. If you're about
something commercial there are many places you can go to get
noticed. And then, of course, someone linking to you, well
that's a good reference.
o Mike: Just going back to the "who
knows you" thing, a while ago I discussed this with Andrei
Broder, who was chief scientist at Alta Vista at the time.
And we discussed the premise of fake linkage and attempting
to artificially inflate popularity, as it were. You know,
a thousand fake links from a thousand fake domains all pointing
back to you. Of course, he said that, at first it may look
like something on the map, but then you realise they're not
clever enough to notice that nobody then points to their fake
domains.
o Paul: You know, if I'm an expert on
a subject and there's a charlatan running around trying to
parade as an expert on the subject - and I know this - I'm
not going to point at them! That's it. Especially if they're
actually belittling my area of expertise.
Again, it's essential to come out of
the realm of only thinking about this as the realm of ones
and zeros, like it's only complex mathematical equations and
very complex architectures and just think about it this way:
How do I relate to other people and organisations?
o Mike: Paul - I just love the analogy
you use about being new in town. It's just so perfect about
how we relate and interact with each other... It's as much
about you finding people as it is about them finding you...
and that's what the web is all about.
o Paul: It even goes down to, and I guess
I'll credit the CLEVER project for naming them as hubs...and
that's the only relationship we have with anything they were
doing. In fact that's it, everything else we do is different...
o Mike: Actually, it was Jon Kleinberg
who coined the term hubs and authorities in the original HITS
algorithm As I said in passing earlier, IBM owns the patent
on CLEVER but hubs and authorities was coined by Kleinberg
himself.
o Paul: Philosophically our approach is
the same - or similar should I say. But the methodology is
not the same. In fact completely different.
o Mike: Because yours works [laughs]
o Paul: Yes, because ours works. Maybe
there was a crazy scientist who wasn't building a search engine
- but was solving a problem. I mean, was Apostolos [Gerasoulis,
founder of Teoma] doing that? He went down a route that he
really knew how to go down and he wasn't really thinking about
what anybody else was doing. It's pure innovation.
o Mike: I think his background helped
a lot. He has a fairly unique background in the way that he
was already dealing with massive amounts of data... It just
seemed to gel together the whole thing. And certainly, knowing
what the obstacles were, I applaud him for doing that. In
fact, I sometimes think - how the hell did he do that!
o Paul: He's an absolute genius. In fact
beyond that...
o Mike: I've been doing this job for many
years now, so I've seen many changes in the technology and,
perhaps more so, in the difference in the relationship which
search engines have with search engine marketers, as we are
now known. In fact, just a couple of years ago, it's likely
that we probably wouldn't have had this conversation. Search
engine optimisers were kind of, you know, Voodoo and the black
art or something. How do you see it shaping up between both
sides, I mean do you see a kind of preferred relationship
situation with search engine marketing and a kind of recognition
in the way that advertising agencies have with conventional
media.
o Paul: We're already developing relationships
with selected partners. We have our partners in the paid inclusion
program. And these really are trusted partners. And any partner
who violated that trust would get notice immediately. Because
we allow them to provide us with information that expands
our ability to understand what's there, we have to be certain
that it's the right information as it's just slightly below
our defences.
o Mike: So you've got two levels here:
you've got third party suppliers who work on the pay for inclusion
side. Whether that's subscription or an XML trusted feed like
at Position Technologies. And then at the next level you've
got the guys with the search engine marketing firms, the smaller
agencies (and the larger for that matter), can they just apply
to become a partner?
o Paul: Absolutely, but I do have to say
that we limit the number because we can't manage that many
ourselves right now. Personally, I'm always open to new partners
coming in. We'll work with them as long as they meet a minimum
threshold. If they prove themselves to be good partners and
valuable assets to their own customers, which is very important
to us, then we can choose to work with them on a more permanent
basis.
o Mike: Let me take you to the Teoma brand
then. Where does that fit. I mean it is kind of overshadowed
by Jeeves. Is Teoma out there to compete, I mean like with
Google? I remember the launch and reading in the New York
Times that it's Teoma up against Google...
o Paul: Well sure, it's Teoma versus Google
and all the other engines in the market place. Whether it's
branded Teoma and delivering results to Ask Jeeves and not
being recognised is not that important as such. We think about
ourselves more as Teoma Technologies not simply teoma.com
and it's our goal to get this next wave of understanding,
this evolution, in fact revolution, of understanding in the
structure of the web to as many users as possible. 25% of
the web experiences Teoma right now and 15% of the web worldwide,
25% of users of the web in the US are actually, in some way
or another, being exposed to Teoma technologies. So we're
not out there to build some sort of monolith with teoma.com
but we are out there...
o Mike: Can I just ask about some other
technology? I was wondering about activity at the user interface.
The amount of data and information you can pick up from user
behaviour at the interface is very telling I guess. If we
think about temporal tracking in the true sense, then what
was a popular, or the authoritative result for a particular
movie six months ago will not be the same as now.
o Paul: Yes, there is a level of understanding
which goes beyond the algorithm. It helps to determine "how
useful is this page?" We collect a lot of this information
and look at these numbers very closely. If you look at Ask
Jeeves for instance, we layer in what's called 'The Knowledge
Base'. When we see an opportunity which we consider to be
statistically inside a range where we know that somebody is
asking for something where we know we have additional knowledge
then we pull that to the top. Basically we analyse and look
at the GUI [graphic user interface] very closely. We have
the Direct Hit technology, which I'm sure you're aware of.
We own the patent on Direct Hit technology.
You mentioned earlier about other search engines using that
type of technology, but if anybody tells you they're using
Direct Hit technology - you better tell them to give us a
call [laughs]
Click popularity, as it has been known,
is a very important aspect of how to rank pages. It's a different
type of information, but the trick is knowing just 'how much'
to use of it. It's not really its own vehicle, it's not really
sufficient to be a stand alone search engine. It's only good
for a certain number of results and even for those results
it's only useful for certain fragments of information. So,
we layer it into our algorithm simply as another factor in
the ranking of every page.
o Mike: That's interesting because I wrote
a piece in my newsletter a while ago about HotBot still giving
credit to Direct Hit for results yet I was certain that they
were Teoma results - I guess I was right?
o Paul: Well, yes, but Direct Hit is still
out there. You still see the two little Direct Hit men because
we do have partners who use it in its pure form. As I say,
we believe it's a very important subset of the ranking process.
Any information which we believe adds any value to the results
that a customer [end user] is looking for, then we consider
all of it.
o Mike: Search engines come and go Paul
don't they? The big search engines of yesteryear are the minnows
of today. I remember when Alta Vista was the mighty search
engine: the true flavour of the month. Now we see a few major
players buying everything up and seemingly squaring up: what
do you think is happening?
o Paul: I don't know, you may have a better
perspective than I do Mike [laughs] but I guess the large
players are realising the power behind the algorithm. Algorithms
scale more efficiently, more predictably than humans if you
think about. Teoma is a great example. Because we can use
the 'hubs' we don't need one hundred editors working for us.
We have 50 million editors working for us [big grin]
o Mike: The work that Monica Henzinger
[now head of research at Google] did on further developing
the HITS algorithm was tested - and proved that it was frequently
more accurate at classification and categorisation than human
editors...
<< Stop >>
At this point I want to delve more deeply
into algorithmic search. Paul is happy to continue the conversation,
but says he'd be much more relaxed about it without the tape
running. I switch it off and we talk for another 15 minutes
during which Paul is very candid. This further information
is reserved for the third edition of Search Engine marketing:
The essential best practice guide.
Not tried Teoma yet? Check it here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/teoma
>
Free document about HITS and linkage
based algorithms here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/topic_distillation
>
Thanks so much to Paul Gardi and Alexa
Rudin at Jeeves. Don't forget, you can meet Paul and I (and
Alexa) at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose,
August 18 - 21 2003 [see sponsor's link].
EXCELLENT
NEW EMAIL MARKETING COURSE FROM MASTER EMAIL MARKETER + excellent
new email marketing management tool:
The great thing about using Corey Rudl's
software is that, generally speaking, you'll know its had
a pretty decent Beta. After all, he uses the products himself
for his own business. And he runs a very good business, therefore,
the software must do its part. Over the years, I must have
used every single product he's produced. Whether it's marketing
software or eBooks or... whatever. And you know, I've never
sent anything back or asked for a refund. [Not completely
true Mike - you did once complain about a "slightly damaged
copy of the course which happened to have somebody else's
handwriting all over it!]
I have to admit, it drives me nuts when
I sometimes go to one of his sites for just a quick support
call and even those help pages bombard me with pop-ups when
I arrive. And then a week later I get hit with the pop-under.
All right, I'm exaggerating just a tad there. (I must have
told myself at least ten million times not to exaggerate!)
Having mentioned support, this an area
which is so important and where, I have to say, the Internet
Marketing Center excels. Take a bow Andrew Hoyer, Marc Ramos,
Lana Lee and the team. Yes, I know many of the guys (girls)
personally on support, because at one time or another, they've
all helped me out. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy
to stick with the products I use - not because Corey Rudl
keeps telling me how they'll help me to become an Internet
millionaire! I'm English for heavens sake: pragmatism rules.
Anyway, when I heard that there were
some new products coming from the IMC stable I thought: this
should be interesting. In fairly rapid succession, they've
launched MyEmailManager and The Insider Secrets to Email Marketing.
Was I a little sceptical? Yes I was. But I certainly changed
my mind when I actually saw and tried the products. Let me
tell you something here. I don't get time to try all the tools
and read all the books that go around. I'm travelling a great
deal just now and I'm so busy with projects I just... well,
I think you get the picture. So what I do for this newsletter
is this: I try and test the products and services which I
think will be useful to my [online] business. I actually put
them into practice and see how they work. But only those which,
in principal, I've already convinced myself are going to be
right for me.
I don't use a list service or list manager.
I'm one of the "tightrope walkers" of email marketing
and I manage it all myself. But that's because I need to know
how everything works - every single thing. I have to do it
myself or I couldn't talk or write about it. Otherwise it's
just: "What's this search engine guy wanging on about
email for?"
Back to the sceptical thing now. I simply
thought that, if I already owned Corey Rudl's Insider Secrets
marketing course, then I must know everything about email
marketing? Wrong!
The depth which the new book goes into
is remarkable. Okay, a lot of this is not late night reading.
But if you want a reference book to go back to, time after
time, to gradually improve your performance in this discipline,
then this it. For me, it's not about the creative aspect (although,
of course, there's a lot of how to write "killer copy"
type stuff in there) it's about the practical aspect of building
and maintaining your list.
Because Corey Rudl has a strict regime
of planning his campaigns ahead and then analysing the outcome,
he's able to comment on every aspect. I don't want to get
too deep into the various chapters (or lessons which he calls
them) which appealed to me as that simply applies to the way
in which I handle this side of my business. And like I say,
this part is very much "one man band" - I do it
all myself.
Perhaps the best thing I can do all round
here, is to tell you this: I'm going to buy it. Yes, Cory
Rudl was kind enough to give me a free review copy. But of
course, it's in his eBook Pro encrypted format. And this means,
he can switch it off remotely at any time he wants. So, I'll
tell you honestly what I'm going to do. I'm going to ring
Derek McGowan, the very affable affiliate man over there and
ask him if I can keep my review copy for free. If he says
no: then I'll buy it. That's how much I need my own reference
copy.
Find out more about Cory Rudl's email
marketing course here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/email_course
>
Find out more about Cory Rudl's email
marketing manager here: < http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/email_manager
>
WHO
CAME TO YOUR WEBSITE AND WHERE FROM? WHAT DID THEY DO WHEN
THEY WERE THERE? WHICH WAY DID THEY LEAVE? DID THEY SPEND
ANY MONEY?
Last month I was speaking at the eMetrics
Summit organised by Jim Sterne, in Santa Barbara. As you can
imagine, there was a fairly high representation of metrics
and web analytics vendors there. I managed to get a few minutes
here and there with the (still) very English John Marshall,
CEO, ClickTracks.
John's an Ex Pat now living in California.
We're frequently at the same conferences, and yet always manage
to miss each other. We missed each other in London at the
search engine strategies conference (and also at Jakob Nielsen's
Usability Week in London) so it was nice to at least share
a table for a short while at lunch in Santa Barbara.
John's very aux faix with search engine
marketing and the ROI mania attached to it. So ClickTracks
is very much a way of being able to track traffic from search
engines, whether it be natural/organic traffic of paid for
in a tactical campaign with AdWords, Overture, Espotting etc.
I've usually considered ClickTracks as
being very much for the smaller online business and that's
certainly been a very good market place. But John told me
that there was new Pro version due, so I was very keen to
give it a test drive.
I'll come back to the pro version and
the telephone Gremlins in a second. But let me first of all
just look at the standard Analyzer version. This in itself
is a very, very useful tool if you're new to log file analysis
(and pretty useful even if you're an expert for that matter!)
Perhaps, the greatest difference between
ClickTracks and other log analysers, is the presentation.
Most analysers throw tons of information at you in the form
of graphs and pie charts and... you name it. But ClickTracks
actually gives you a representation of web site activity using
your own interface. Basically, that means it uses a special
browser feature to look at your own web pages and ClickTracks
superimposes the traffic data over the top of your own graphics
and links. Ingenious! You can see exactly how many visitors
came to each page; where they went next and also how many
visitors left your site from that page.
As the visual presentation of ClickTracks
is so important, it's probably best at this point if I just
say that this is a very highly recommended marketing analysis
tool. You'll be surprised at just how much information you
find out about your own site. You really do need to take a
look at it.
As for the Pro version, John said he
would talk me through it when I came to write this piece.
John is in the process of moving offices and I had to contact
him on his Cell (mobile) phone. The transcript goes a little
like this:
Mike: Hello John.
John: Hel... bad signa... find better...
hello... hel... [disconnect]
Yep, that was John and I missing each
other again! However, we are getting together at SES, San
Jose for the full feature. What I can tell you though, is
the BIG difference between Analyzer and ClickTracks Pro, is
its ability to deal with much larger sites. For instance,
if you have a huge site which is "mirrored" and
spread over a number of different servers for load balancing
purposes - then Pro is the version for you.
Find out more about ClickTracks here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/clicktracks
>
MIKE,
WOULD YOU RECOMMEND USING THESE PRODUCTS? NO I WOULDN'T ACTUALLY.
Michael, my
number one support guy, gets so much email about specific
products and services from people wanting an opinion. And,
of course, we get our fair share of people who are simply
looking for free consultancy.
I think it's
fairly accurate to say that, we tend to get more email of
this sort when other search engine related newsletters have
been promoting specific items heavily. So, there are good
products and services and naturally there are bad. I've said
this many times before: you're a grown up, you can decide
yourself what sort of products or services you want to use.
I don't comment on these things that often, but when it appears
that my name is attached in some sort of way, then obviously,
it's necessary to clarify.
This is what
appears to have happened with a product called ThemeMaster.
It's been brought to my attention on a few occasions that
the website which sells the product makes reference to me
and an old article I wrote (the link on the website actually
goes somewhere else). So, as it was promoted quite heavily
in certain places at certain times this year, I get mail asking
if I use it and what do search engines think about it etc.
etc.
No: I do not
use it. No: I do not endorse it: No: I do not recommend it.
And as is usually the case with these types of products, there's
nothing on the site that says whether or not search engines
are, or are not, happy with it. But, you can take my educated
guess here: no, search engines probably would not like it
(I hope you can tell how diplomatic I'm being here).
After visiting
the site myself, I bought a copy of an accompanying eBook
called Checkmating The Search Engines. Nobody's asking, but
I'd like to give a quick review. So here it is:
Eh!
As for the other
product we've been asked about many times, Keyword Site Builder:
Please don't ask again! A service which suggests it will build
a 30 page web site based on 30 words which you provide: It's
just beyond belief.
Here's an idea.
Save yourself some money. Why don't you just open up Microsoft
Word and write a page for your fruit site about Apples. When
it's finished, go to Edit, Find and Replace, and then change
the word Apples to Oranges. And then go back and do the same
but change Oranges to Pears and then go back and...
The when you
have 30 pages, all the same, go to Save As, and save them
as web pages and upload them to your site. But please, don't
expect a human visitor or a search engine to be happy with
your monotonous, repetitive crap! I mean really, what we're
talking about here, is "knocking out" pages for
search engines: machines creating pages for machines! How
interesting is this likely to get?
I have a tool,
and access to many like it, which beats those products above
by a million miles and the search engines love it: it's called
a brain!
That's right!
If you have a web site and you need to use a tool to discover
what theme it should be about i.e. you don't have a clue as
to the subject matter of your own business, then you can be
happy about one thing: the frontal lobotomy worked!
If you honestly
don't have enough pride in your web site, whatever its purpose
is, to take the time and the effort to produce professional,
quality, informative and interesting pages, then you can be
happy about something else: your reputation as a marketing
amateur is completely intact!
I have some
advice for those guys who feel that web sites should be created
using software products to make up for their lack of creativity,
ingenuity and any form of business acumen: get off the Internet!
You're in the
way and the grown ups are trying to do business here.
THOSE
LITTLE THINGS WORTH A MENTION. Includes:
o SPECIAL DEAL
ON GOOGLE ADWORDS REPORT.
Andrew Goodman,
author of "21 Ways to Maximize ROI on Google AdWords"
is due to publish his new Pay-Per-Click Advertising Buyer's
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plenty. Who's telling the truth, and who isn't? This comprehensive
report will retail for $129. But if you contact Andrew now
at: earlybird@page-zero.com you'll be eligible for the early
bird discount price of $77, as a special offer to readers
of this newsletter. Just be certain to mention Mike Grehan
in your email.
If you don't
already own a copy of Andrew Goodman's 2003 Google Adwords
report, then you need it now! Find out more here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/adwords
>
o SBI DOES CARTWHEELS
OVER ADSENSE
I've already
mentioned elsewhere in this newsletter that I have a special
feature coming up soon with legendary online marketer Ken
Evoy. We'll be talking about all things SBI and much more.
Right now though, Google's new AdSense program is presenting
real money making opportunities for SBI guys: pop over there
now and find out what all the fuss is about!
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/sbi_adsense
>
o NEW SEARCH
ENGINE MARKETING FORUM OPENS ITS (VIRTUAL) DOORS.
There are many,
many search engine forums online: But only one of them is
run by my buddy Jill Whalen. One search engine marketing expert
attracts others! In fact - you may even find me hanging out
there from time-to-time!
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/jill_forums
> o A COUPLE OF HAPPY CUSTOMERS WHO REALLY DESERVE A MENTION
(AND A THANK YOU)
Getting the
many, many testimonials I did for the current edition of my
book was fantastic. But it has to be said: It's when I receive
letters like those below that I realise I've really achieved
something.
This is a long
overdue thanks to so many people who have written to me, or
Michael on support, to say how useful you found the book.
It's me who is indebted to you.
From: Bob Murray.
I wanted to
write and advise how helpful I have found your recent edition
of 'Search Engine Marketing'. It is an extremely comprehensive
publication which (unusually) provides very real advice and
helpful tips.
I purchased
it specifically because I needed it for my MSc (Multimedia
Computing for eCommerce) dissertation project which is concerned
with examining the scope for 'categorising' the web to facilitate
more effective searching/browsing.
I should add
that I am a mature student and I have a reasonable grasp of
business models so I am very much looking at realistic ways
in which sites might be categorised for detection by Search
engines.
Again, many
thanks for the excellent content of the book - I found it
invaluable.
From: Peter
Burton. Hi just thought I'd drop you a line.
I really enjoyed
your book.
The in and outs
of SEO is something I've been learning in the evening to help
boost the ratings for some friend's web site that I put together
in my spare time.
Prior to reading
your book we had no ranking to speak of. We've updated our
site to focus on international dealers / wholesalers of antique
Chinese furniture.
And after 3
months we have just got a listing on Google which is WOW!
Master guru,
thanks again for the tips and a great reference book. In tabloid
style I can say it was a "rip roaring read" albeit
I bored the pants off my wife telling her little snip bits!
Best regards
Peter Burton
Novice night time SEO! Singapore
o YOU MAY BE
A GREAT ONLINE MARKETER: BUT HOW GOOD ARE YOU IN THE SACK?
Yes - you know
you have to find out! Click here:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/emodeIQ
>
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.
At no cost you may use the content of this newsletter on
your own site, providing you display it in its entirety (no
cutting) with due credits and place a link to:
< http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk
>
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