Yogi Land

Defining search at the industry’s biggest annual conference

Yahoo! played a key part in several panels in the 2010 Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in New York this week. The Yahoo! Search blog offers a recap of some of the discussions and panel summaries.

— The Team

Technology and free speech; Yahoo’s behavioral targeting patent; your brand butler, optimize display with search, and more

Exporting values
“As companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter push their technologies around the world,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Benny Evangelista. “Recent events show that they’re not just exporting the latest in online tools, but a basic tenet of the American way of life—freedom of speech.”

Behavioral ads raking in the dough
According to a recent survey by the Network Advertising Initiative, says Forbes’ Laurie Burkitt, behaviorally targeted ads have a conversion rate of 6.8 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for the non-targeted ads. “Behavioral targeting may keep advertisers front and center with their target audiences,” says Burkitt. “It may also keep some publishers in business.”

Yahoo! wins patent for behavioral ad targeting
Speaking of behavioral targeting, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issued a patent to Yahoo! for “optimization of targeted advertisements based on user profile information.” Read the actual patent here. Yahoo!: Putting the science in “science, art and scale.”

Everyone needs a butler
What self-respecting Wooster wouldn’t want his very own Jeeves? But not everyone can afford to have a gentleman’s gentleman to do the butlering. But almost everyone can have their own brand butler. Brand butlers, says an article in Marketing Charts, are “brands that focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their lives, as opposed to the traditional branding model of selling consumers a lifestyle or identity.” Find out the eight categories of brand butlers and see if your brand can butler.

10 Steps to optimize your content marketing strategy
Writing from the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Lee Odden of TopRank sits in on a Digital Asset Optimization panel and offers a step-by-step program for optimizing your content marketing. “What can be searched on can be optimized,” says Odden.

Sketch-a-Search and Mobile Search: What the critics are saying
Since we launched Sketch-a-Search last week at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas last week, it’s generated a lot of buzz. Here’s what the folks at CNET are saying. (It’s the first time we’ve heard an app called “eccentric.”)

Putting display in search terms
Writing in AdExhanger.com’s “Displaying Search” column, Justin Merickel, Vice President of New Product Development and Marketing at Efficient Frontier, explains how you can utilize search data to benefit your display campaigns by mapping audience segments to search term types.

More news from Yahoo!
In this New York Times article, Miguel Helft—who was once the author of this post’s next-door neighbor—tells how Yahoo! News has recruited almost a dozen journalists to beef up its news offering. “In February,” writes Helft. “Yahoo! News had over 43 million visitors, more than any other news site, according to comScore.” High-profile journos being welcomed to the Yahoo! News team include Michael Calderone (Politico), Jane Sasseen (BusinessWeek) and Anna Robertson, an Emmy-winning producer from ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

— Michael Mattis

Challenged by ROI requirements but bolstered by social media marketing, the search engine marketing industry is predicted to grow by $2 billion in 2010

Search engine marketing in North America already is valued at $14.6 billion, but a new report from the non-profit Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization  (SEMPO) estimates the industry will grow 14 percent to $16.6 billion in 2010.

The report determined that the industry’s biggest challenge was ROI, a finding that comes as no surprise to anyone working with search engine optimization, paid search or social media marketing. ROI also underpins a shift of marketing budgets from traditional media to the more efficient, effective and measurable use of search tactics, it emphasized.

Around half the surveyed companies (49 percent) are reallocating budgets to search engine marketing from print advertising. More than a third (36 percent) are shifting money away from direct mail, and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions (24 percent) and web display advertising (23 percent).

Keyword cost is another issue. More than half of advertisers (56 percent) and agencies (62 percent) say that Google keywords have become more expensive over the last year, while around a third of advertisers noted an increase in Yahoo (32 percent) and Bing (29 percent) keyword costs.

SEMPO’s State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010 was based on a survey conducted by Econsultancy of nearly 1,500 client-side marketers and agency respondents. Read more about it here.

— Chris Marlowe

Analyze your site to get the best results

When you’re ready to get a good look at how your site is stacked up for SEO success, there is no shortage of SEO tools that you can use to analyze your site inside and out. The tools listed below are some of the best of the plethora of great SEO analysis tools available today.

See your site like search engines do
One of the most basic and necessary SEO tools is one that allows you to see your pages the way a search engine would, because search engines may not always “see” your site the same way we do when we visit it with a web or mobile browser. Two tools are listed below—the first one is a simple check of your site in search results, and the second is a tool that you can add on to your Firefox browser.

Search Engine Cached Pages
Cost: Free
Most search engines provide a “Cached” link with their search results, which allows you to see what the search engine indexed on its last visit to the page. Our blog post “Is Your Site Invisible?” provides details on how to determine if the search engines are seeing your site, and what exactly they are seeing.

Firefox User Agent Switcher
Cost: Free
The User Agent switcherallows you to switch your user agent to make it look like you’re a search engine visiting the site, rather than a person using a web browser. The User Agent Switcher will only work if you use the Firefox web browser.

When you’re done viewing the site as a search engine, remember to change your user agent back to Default User Agent.

Keyword research and management tools
Doing keyword research allows you to get an idea of the competitive space, guide your site structure, and gives you the information you need to laser-target each individual page on your site for the most relevant and popularly used terms for each page.

Keyword Discovery
Cost: Free trial. Subscriptions from $69.95/mo (or $599.40/yr) – $495.00/mo (or $4652.00/yr)
Keyword Discovery is a comprehensive keyword research tool that includes features like historical trends, competitor keywords, keyword effectiveness and price-per-click (PPC) bid values.

Wordtracker
Cost: Free trial. Subscription $59/month or $329/year
Wordtracker is a keyword management tool that provides search popularity with several filters like misspellings, plurals and U.S. or U.K. searches.

SEO Book
Cost: Free w/ registration
SEO Book enables you to enter a keyword about which you’re interested in learning search patterns and trends. The tool returns estimated search popularity from Wordtracker and the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing) for that term and popular searches with that term or phrase in it. It also returns Yahoo! Search Suggest results, and more.

Google Adwords
Cost: Free
Another long-time popular free keyword research tool, the Google Keyword Tool lets you enter a keyword and determine the search popularity in Google (only) for that term and related terms. Results show estimated search volume globally and locally, plus advertiser competition on each term.

Site Analysis Tools
At the heart of any SEO audit is the on-site analysis. The following tools unearth the kinks and bottlenecks that your site might be encountering, by crawling your site, reporting errors, providing analysis, and often suggesting action items, as well.

SearchCLU
Cost: Varies, depends on domain size and number of users
SearchCLU is an industrial strength site analysis tool that crawls a site or network and reports back detailed information on the SEO attributes and search engine stats, both site-wide and at the page level.

Google Webmaster Central
Cost: Free
Google Webmaster Central allows you to see the data and information that Google sees when it crawls your site. It helps find missing or duplicate meta tags and title tags, crawl errors in web, mobile and news search, and non-indexable content, and so forth

HubSpot Website Grader
Cost: Free trial. Multi-functional products from $250/month to $15,000/year. Call for pricing.
This product lets you enter your URL and receive an SEO optimization grade plus a full report of any issues found, plus advice for those issues, such as site content (blogs, indexed pages, readability level), meta data, image summaries, page analysis, domain info, link info, promotion and conversion assessment and suggestions, and competitor analysis.

Link analysis tools
Inlinks are the crown jewels of SEO. At its most basic, an inlink is like a vote to your site. Site owners strive to have a high number of keyword-rich inlinks from relevant quality sites to help boost their visibility in search engine results.

Yahoo SiteExplorer
Cost: Free
Yahoo Site Explorer provides inlink information to a page or s site. You can check your own site and your competitors’, look at links from all pages or just from external sites (not including links to your site from your own site), filter by links to one page or the entire site, and export results.

SEOmoz Open Site Explorer
Cost: Limited version is free. Full version with $79/month-$229/month SEOmoz membership.
Open Site Explorer is a good-looking and powerful inlink analysis tool, with several layers of link data and filtering. You can sort Linking pages by nofollow and 301 filters, see pages with the most links, view the domain authority of the domains that link to your site, see the anchor text that is used most often in links to your site, and get even more data with the Pro version.

SEOmoz LinkScape
Cost: Limited version free. Full version with $79/mo-$229/mo SEOmoz membership.
LinkScape layers calculations on regular link data to provide you with link performance and page scores, and the ability to dig into the details to determine the quality of links, find link acquisition targets and measure the success of viral marketing and link bait campaigns.

Even More SEO Tools
SEOs love tools, and while the tools mentioned above are some of the best tools out there, they barely skim the surface. A few other awesome SEO tools out there worth mentioning are:

• Quarkbase—Shows site traffic data, similar sites, social comments, people, description, social popularity and much more
• Web Developer Toolbar—A heavy-duty Firefox add-on that provides page information and tools to alter the view of the page to suit your needs
• Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit—The Site Analysis module, Robots Exclusion module and Sitemaps and Site Indexes module let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files
• Link Research Tools—Offers Common Outbound Links Tools, Common Backlink Tool, Backlink and Anchortext tool, Juice tool, and Strongest Subpages tool
• Bruce Clay SEO Tools—Offers SEOToolSet, Dynamic Site Mapping, LinkMaps, and PathMaps + SEO, PPC, analytics, design and branding training
• Raven Internet Marketing Tools—A suite of 19 tools that allow you to manage SEO, social media, conduct competitive keyword research and create reports
• WeBuildPages SEO Tools—A plethora of SEO tools that includes Header Checker Tool, Search Combination Tool, Keyword Density Analysis Tool, Spider Viewer, Tune Up Report, Website Structure Analysis and several more

Know of any amazing SEO tools not listed here? Drop us a comment and let us know!

— Laura Lippay. Visit her at Lip Service.

New Yahoo! app lets your fingers do the searching

In case you missed the CTIA 2010 conference and our announcement of the new Yahoo! Search-a-Sketch app, here’s an on-the-spot video of the demo, taken by conference-goer, zdnetsam. Showing how it works is our own Ariel Siedman, Director of Product, Mobile Search.

Cool, huh?

— The Team

Paying consumers for privacy; holistic SEO; more on demand-side platforms, notes from SES, and more

Should ad companies pay for your privacy?
The issue of privacy has hit the mainstream, getting a lot of attention from consumers, the FTC and congress. One way to get around that, suggests BNET’s Jim Edwards, is for companies to compensate consumers for their data. Consumers who don’t want to be tracked—and don’t want the money—could simply opt out.

Michael Walrath on demand
We’ve been trying to keep you up on the emergence of demand-side platforms for awhile now (like here, here and here). Over at AdExchanger, Michael Walrath, former CEO at Right Media (now part of Yahoo!), has penned (or is “pixelated” the right word?) an op-ed piece on demand-side. Look out agencies, he says, because demand-side holding companies just might be poised to swipe your martini money. 

“Holistic” SEO
Lee Odden of TopRank fame recently wrote a piece for ClickZ about how search has gone “holistic”—meaning that search engines now include data from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies and agencies naturally want to take advantage of this new data, but it’s not always as easy as it seems. If you’re at SES New York this week, give Lee our best.

SES NY keynote interview: David Meerman Scott
Sepaking of Lee Odden and SES,—Reporting from the event, Lee interviews David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly, offering tactics for going beyond search and display advertising. It’s a must-read for anyone just getting into the digital marketplace.

The value of narrative
Getting your story out is vital. AdFreak’s Rebecca Cullers interviews Rob Walker, New York Times columnist and author of Buying In: What we buy and who we are, on how successful advertisers move product through story. “Narrative,” says Walker, “is a key x-factor influencing an object’s exchange value.” Of course, it’s not easy to tell a story in 70 characters, but you can to it.

— Michael Mattis

Paying consumers for privacy; holistic SEO; more on demand-side platforms, notes from SES, and more

Should ad companies pay for your privacy?
The issue of privacy has hit the mainstream, getting a lot of attention from consumers, the FTC and congress. One way to get around that, suggests BNET’s Jim Edwards, is for companies to compensate consumers for their data. Consumers who don’t want to be tracked—and don’t want the money—could simply opt out.

Michael Walrath on demand
We’ve been trying to keep you up on the emergence of demand-side platforms for awhile now (like here, here and here). Over at AdExchanger, Michael Walrath, former CEO at Right Media (now part of Yahoo!), has penned (or is “pixelated” the right word?) an op-ed piece on demand-side. Look out agencies, he says, because demand-side holding companies just might be poised to swipe your martini money. 

“Holistic” SEO
Lee Odden of TopRank fame recently wrote a piece for ClickZ about how search has gone “holistic”—meaning that search engines now include data from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies and agencies naturally want to take advantage of this new data, but it’s not always as easy as it seems. If you’re at SES New York this week, give Lee our best.

SES NY keynote interview: David Meerman Scott
Sepaking of Lee Odden and SES,—Reporting from the event, Lee interviews David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly, offering tactics for going beyond search and display advertising. It’s a must-read for anyone just getting into the digital marketplace.

The value of narrative
Getting your story out is vital. AdFreak’s Rebecca Cullers interviews Rob Walker, New York Times columnist and author of Buying In: What we buy and who we are, on how successful advertisers move product through story. “Narrative,” says Walker, “is a key x-factor influencing an object’s exchange value.” Of course, it’s not easy to tell a story in 70 characters, but you can to it.

— Michael Mattis

Paying consumers for privacy; holistic SEO; more on demand-side platforms, notes from SES, and more

Should ad companies pay for your privacy?
The issue of privacy has hit the mainstream, getting a lot of attention from consumers, the FTC and congress. One way to get around that, suggests BNET’s Jim Edwards, is for companies to compensate consumers for their data. Consumers who don’t want to be tracked—and don’t want the money—could simply opt out.

Michael Walrath on demand
We’ve been trying to keep you up on the emergence of demand-side platforms for awhile now (like here, here and here). Over at AdExchanger, Michael Walrath, former CEO at Right Media (now part of Yahoo!), has penned (or is “pixelated” the right word?) an op-ed piece on demand-side. Look out agencies, he says, because demand-side holding companies just might be poised to swipe your martini money. 

“Holistic” SEO
Lee Odden of TopRank fame recently wrote a piece for ClickZ about how search has gone “holistic”—meaning that search engines now include data from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Companies and agencies naturally want to take advantage of this new data, but it’s not always as easy as it seems. If you’re at SES New York this week, give Lee our best.

SES NY keynote interview: David Meerman Scott
Sepaking of Lee Odden and SES,—Reporting from the event, Lee interviews David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly, offering tactics for going beyond search and display advertising. It’s a must-read for anyone just getting into the digital marketplace.

The value of narrative
Getting your story out is vital. AdFreak’s Rebecca Cullers interviews Rob Walker, New York Times columnist and author of Buying In: What we buy and who we are, on how successful advertisers move product through story. “Narrative,” says Walker, “is a key x-factor influencing an object’s exchange value.” Of course, it’s not easy to tell a story in 70 characters, but you can to it.

— Michael Mattis

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo! Search for iPhone and iPod Touch

This morning at the CTIA 2010 conference in entertainment-loving Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced two cool new location-aware apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch handhelds—Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo! Search. These two new apps are not only fun—you won’t be downloading “stoopid stuff” with these apps—they’re also useful. Really useful.

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search makes searching for restaurants on the go incredibly easy. You don’t have to type keywords or even thinking about search terms. You simply draw a line on your phone’s map with your finger to see local restaurants within that area. Later versions will include a plethora of other businesses and destinations—including Vegas casinos and shows, eventually.

Complementing Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search is the Yahoo! Search iPhone app, which brings the breadth of the Yahoo! search experience to the palm of your hand, getting you the contextually relevant results you want, fast. All the bells and whistles are included: embedded maps, localized query suggestions that display as you type, intelligent search history, voice search—basically, the whole enchilada.

For more on Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo! Search, visit the Yahoo! Mobile Blog.