Any good business owner carefully monitors all company expenses. Business owners must make decisions on a daily basis of whether or not to “invest” (aka purchase) stuff for the business. This “stuff” can range from simple office supplies to marketing and all the way to sending staff to industry conferences.

Recently, here at Best Rank, we’ve been wrestling with the decision of whether or not to send ourselves and/or our employees to the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose this month. I’m even thinking about attending the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East event in October. Part of this decision process is to evaluate whether or not sending myself or an employee was really valuable to our company and could we see a positive return on investment (ROI) from this activity.

For those of you not aware of these conferences, I’ll tell you that they aren’t cheap. The admission cost alone, for a full-conference pass, is roughly $1795 (for SES) and $1195 (for SMX) if you purchase before a certain date, more if you procrastinate. Plus there’s the cost of travel, accommodations, and food. Oh…and let’s not forget the opportunity cost of attending a conference vs. doing your normal work routine; it’s inevitable that you will miss some work and either have to give it to someone else or let it slip and then catch-up later.

So, what’s the value of these conferences? Is it worth me spending ~$3000-4000 per attendee? If I send myself and 2 employees, can I make up the ~$10-12k in expenses?

Let’s look at the positive aspects of search marketing conferences for a minute. What kind of value can a search marketer get out of attending a conference?

Networking

Networking with search marketing colleagues/peers and potential clients can be invaluable. You never know when you’re going to make the right connection at the right time. Not only do these events attract the most well-known professionals in our industry, but they also attract your more under-the-radar search marketers…who can prove to be very valuable connections. Rand Fishkin, over at SEOmoz, wrote a good post about the benefits of search marketing conferences. Check out what he has to say about Community Building, Meeting People, and Securing Relationships.

Learning the Tricks of the Trade

We get so engulfed in our every day work that it’s tough to keep up with reading and continuing education. Going to a conference and attending educational sessions is a good way to force yourself to learn the latest and greatest. Some of the most useful tools and tricks that we currently use were gleaned from sessions we attended at last year’s SES events. Staying up to date with the latest trends, tips, tools, and tactics (the 4 T’s) will keep your business valuable and on the cutting edge of search.

Speaking

I normally take every opportunity that I can get to speak in front of an audience. While I haven’t had the opportunity to speak at a search marketing conference yet, I do know that speaking can be a significant boon to your business. Best Rank is regularly asked to speak at local business and networking events; every time that we speak we always get a fresh new set of hot leads to follow-up with. After every session at search marketing conferences I see the speakers getting swarmed by people. I imagine many of these people turn into quality leads. Speaking in front of a large audience automatically gives you credibility (deserved or not) in the eyes of the audience. They assume that, since you’re in front of a large group of people, you must be an expert…thus able to handle their project. I would encourage anyone to take advantage of speaking opportunities and of the assumptions that audience members make about you, the speaker.

So, how do all these positives translate into an ROI for my investment dollars? The real answer is that I don’t know. If I were to go to SMX East in October, and if I were to make one good connection (client), then I can justify spending the money. However, there is no guarantee that I will get a new client simply by attending this event.

But, what about the educational aspects? If I go to this event and learn some great new tactics, that I turn around and apply to my client’s campaigns, then maybe my client’s site gets an extra boost in traffic and they decide to expand the campaign, thus more money in my pocket.

I have to echo the same sentiment from Carsten Cumbrowski, who wrote a post about this topic over at Reve News (click here for the post). She states that:

“The single most important reason for me to attend real-life conferences is to do something that cannot be replaced by the best communication technology available: human interaction, meeting people face-to-face and getting to know strangers across different verticals that you would not have “bumped into” otherwise.”

Carsten is right!! While I can’t directly tie an ROI to meeting people, it’s obvious that making the right connections at these conferences can significantly outweigh any direct costs involved in the effort. I’ve made connections at search conferences that are worth 5x more than I’ve paid to be there. Plus, I’ve implemented strategies that I’ve learned at search conferences into client campaigns; campaigns that I’ve gotten great results for and ultimately expanded.

I’m probably not going to SES in San Jose this year…but I’ll most likely be at SMX East in October. Hopefully I’ll make some great connections and be able to positively impact my company’s bottom line. Happy conferencing!!

Here’s another good article about the value of search conferences.

I just had to write this post about the explosive growth in the online advertising space. It seems our market is growing very fast even in these times of uncertainty.

I subscribe to email blasts from a company called Mediapost. I get several emails each day with cool stats about the online industry including search and social media. Sometimes I just delete the emails based on the title, and sometimes I glance through the emails and try to glean some good nuggets of info. A couple of days ago I got an email that was titled: “Web #2 Ad Medium in 5 Years” Hmmm…that piqued my interest, so I opened it.

Recently the IDC (not sure what IDC stands for) released a study that forecasts and analyzes US Internet advertising for 2008-2012. Overall, the Internet advertising revenue is expected to roughly double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012.

There are some very interesting little tidbits in this study, which happens to cost about $4500 to purchase. I’m not crazy enough to purchase the entire study (Click Here if You Are), but the excerpts seem promising…here is the Cliff’s notes version:

Essentially they are stating that the Internet will rise from the number 5 advertising medium up to the number 2 medium by the end of 2012. This will make advertising revenue larger than cable TV, newspapers, and broadcast TV. Direct marketing will remain in the top spot, according to the study.

It seems that video advertising will be responsible for the single biggest revenue percentage gain; it is anticipated that video advertising on the Internet will grow sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012, which gives it an annual compounded growth rate of 49.4%. As any good rapper would say…”Unhhh…how you like me now?” A sevenfold increase in 5 years…all I can say is WOW…that is an industry that I want to be a part of. Just slice me off a little piece of that revenue and I’ll be happy. The IDC study also anticipates that brand advertisers will shift significants amounts of their budgets into video commercials; mainly taking away from their current efforts on both broadcast and cable TV.

What’s the reasoning behind this massive growth in the online video advertising space?? I think it’s because advertisers are starting to realize that people are sick of being told what to watch and when to watch it. The Internet allows people the freedom to choose what they want to watch and when…so why not cater to that desire?

Some other conclusions that the IDC study came to are:

- Search will still remain the king. Search ads hit $10.4 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to almost $18 billion in 2012. However, search advertising as a percentage of Internet advertising is expected to go down from 41% of the market share last year to about 34% in 2012.
- As stated previously, online video will explode over the next 4 years and it will expand its Internet advertising share from 2% to 7.4%.
- Another big mover in this space will be referral and lead-generation services. These services will see the second largest market share gain and will grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $5.9 billion in 2012.
- Surprisingly, the IDC forecasts mobile advertising to only grow to “just shy” of 1 percent of the overall market share. Although this is a fast growing market, I expected mobile advertising to be a little stronger.

As you can see, lots of good news in our industry. I’m excited about the prospects and the growth rate. This study just helps solidify my decision to operate a business in this industry…let’s just hope that the study is accurate.

You’ve spent weeks getting your new website up and running. The content is good, the links work, and the site looks great. Now, how are you going to get people to visit? As far as online marketing goes, your two major options are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (SEO). Each provides a unique list of advantages that can be leveraged to improve your site’s visibility and popularity on the web, depending on what stage your website is in.

The problem is that too often, PPC and organic SEO are viewed with an “either/or” mentality, rather than a cooperative one. In fact, most information regarding PPC and organic SEO on the web presents the techniques in opposing, comparative, or “versus” viewpoints.

According to some, choosing PPC as your online marketing platform means you must sacrifice the positives that organic SEO can bring (and vice versa). But why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? Well, if you play your cards (and plan your budget) right, you can. By implementing both PPC and organic SEO tactics to their online marketing campaigns, many website owners have found a winning combination.

Here are a few of the advantages that each online marketing technique can bring to the table:

PPC

• Instant Gratification- your ads appear instantly and bring traffic to site quickly
• Easy to Set-Up and Implement- getting a PPC campaign started takes a short amount of time and is a simple step-by-step process
• Easy to Track- PPC allows you to see how many clicks each keyword is receiving, where clicks are coming from, and how much each click is costing you

Organic SEO

• Provides Long Term Stability- investing in organic SEO ensures that your site will receive quality traffic over a longer period of time
• Its Free- unlike PPC, where you pay for each person who clicks on your ad, organic visitors cost you nothing
• Trusted More By Users- because organic listings are gathered and organized by search engines based on relevance, users are more likely to trust these listings over PPC advertisements.

By looking at the advantages that each technique provides, it is not difficult to see how using both can be beneficial to your site. The ease-of-use and immediate impact that a PPC campaign can provide is perfect for getting traffic to your site now. It can also act as a testing ground for keywords which can later be included in your organic SEO campaign.

While your PPC campaign is bringing your site instant traffic, you can also begin building the foundation of your organic SEO campaign. Although it takes time to build your site’s organic rankings, you will eventually be able to spend less on your PPC campaign for certain keywords that you are ranking for organically. The continuous stream of quality traffic that you can get through organic SEO will be well worth the wait.

I ran across a great little article (link to article below) today written by William Flaiz, the President of SEO over at Avenue A | Razorfish. William very succinctly, and intuitively, wrapped up the hottest trends for 2007 and explained their impact on search marketers. Social Media and Universal Search were huge in 2007 and will continue to grow in popularity, and use, through 2008.

William also touches on a point in his article that is one of my pet-peeves; the insistence by more and more companies to have a flash based website.  I understand that companies want the latest and greatest website and that they want their websites to stand-out from the competition.  But, if you don’t implement proper SEO planning into the DESIGN phase, then you will waste a lot of money on a site that cannot be indexed properly by the search engines.  It really could not be more simple…you have to plan properly, which means implementing an SEO expert early into the design phase to work along side the site designer.

Ok..enough of the rant.  Take a couple of minutes and check out William’s article titled: New Search Engine Trends, Old SEO Troubles in 2007.

Here’s to a great 2008!!!

Last week I went to the Refresh San Diego meeting over at Platt College (here in San Diego), a gathering of web developers and search marketers. Bill Bonnefil from Digital Telepathy gave a good presentation of how their company works in terms of their creative process, how they “get stuff done”.

I had the chance to ask Bill a few questions about the future of the web and what the term web 3.0 meant to him. A lot of people laughed when I asked, one guy in the audience even commented:

I think I’ll wait till they fix all the bugs and then go for version 4.0

(thought that was funny). Anyhow, Bill seemed to take the question seriously and started off by giving his idea of what 1.0, 2.0 and then what 3.0 means.

• Web 1.0 was the “one-way” interaction the user had with a web page. You view a web page… and that’s really it, moving onto the next page.
• Web 2.0 is now the “two-way” intereaction a user has with a web site. You view a web page but now you can place content onto the site and see what others are doing, i.e. YouTube, myspace, facebook, ebay, etc. It’s the people that build the site and the communities.
• Web 3.0 is the “two-way” interaction PLUS the site generating or comming up with new information based on past user information it already has already collected. Another way to look at it would be any extra logic or intelligence a web page can “mash up” in terms of, for example, offering suggestions on products other people bought from this site or what to do with your specific current stock portfolio now that you have X amount of dollars saved up… sort of a way for the web site to become “smart” and act more like a human would.

lets just hope web pages don’t start getting too intelligent… I like my artifical intelligence non thretening

I just attended a very interesting session at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose titled: Universal & Blended Vertical Search. The panel of speakers included representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com. These three reps gave us a great deal of insight into their respective company’s theory on universal search and what they envision for the future.

Universal search (or blended search) is the concept of including different types of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When we talk about “different types” of listings, we are talking about listings other than your typical web page reference. For example, check out this search query for “The Family Guy.” You’ll notice that within the results Google has listed The Family Guy home page at number 1 (to be expected), but then notice the number 7 listing…it’s a YouTube video for the family guy. You’ll also notice that the number 9 listing is a Family Guy blog. Up until recently you would never find a video or a blog listed in the SERPs with normal website listings…this is considered Universal/Blended Search.

Universal search can include: Videos, Images, News, Blogs, Book excerpts, and the traditional web site listings. It is these latest developments in search that forces us to optimize not only the website, but also the images on the site and the press releases and videos that we submit to other internet sites. The Yahoo rep highlighted the fact that the number of video comments and video views (on YouTube or other video sites) directly correlates to how high those videos appear in the search results.

All three company reps stated, in a round-about way, that universal search is in it’s infancy and is only going to become more prevalent. As search marketers, we can’t ignore this. We must take the time to optimize every portion of our client’s business including images, blogs, press releases, and videos. This could make our job much more time consuming and more difficult. However, if done properly you could see fantastic results in the form of multiple results on the front page.

Every morning I wake up and launch Sage (an RSS feed reader for Firefox), which is a great way to view a summary of all your favorite blog posts quickly. This morning I opened up an interesting little post, titled Yahoo Traffic Jam, from a company called Apogee Search.

The blog post pointed me at a press release on comScore that summarizes web traffic for May 2007. According to their analysis, Yahoo! sites garnered 10 million more unique visitors than Google sites during the entire month of May; 130MM and 120MM respectively. Also, Yahoo! ads had a greater reach to all internet traffic than did Google ads; 73% vs. 64%. My first instinct, after reading numbers like these, is to question their validity. Where did the numbers come from? How were the numbers obtained? How big was the sample size? If you scroll to the bottom of the comScore article you will see the following explanation:

This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

Anyone who’s suffered through a statistics class knows that a sample size of 2 million is more than enough to get an accurate measure of web traffic. So, what do these numbers really mean? After all, Google is still the behemoth that dominates 80%+ of search traffic, right? Well, according to these numbers, Google is coming in second place for unique visitors and I’m not so sure that we (SEO’ers) are targeting the right search engine.

Now, let me take a step back. More unique visitors to Yahoo! sites than Google sites does not mean that there are more searches done on Yahoo! than Google; I think that is fairly obvious. It simply means that more people are visiting the Yahoo! suite of sites, like Finance and Sports, instead of the Google suite. But to me, an internet marketer by trade, it means that there are more eyes on that Yahoo! suite than the Google suite and maybe we should re-think our targeting strategy a little to be more compliant with the actual results.

We all spend countless hours targeting both Yahoo! and Google, usually in proportion to the search traffic (approx. 15% and 80% respectively). But, with these numbers, does it make sense to spend a disproportionate amount of time targeting both of these giants? I really don’t know the answer to that unless I actually spend some time testing out the strategy to see its effects. I do know that I’m going to tweak my methodology a little to see what happens. Maybe there’s an opportunity, within these numbers, to see some gains in website traffic. What do you think?

Several months ago I signed up for Dan Thies’ SEO Research Labs web site and I downloaded his SEO Fast Start…only to be disappointed by the 2004 date. Over the past couple of months I have received numerous e-mails from Dan’s site promising a new SEO Fast Start 2007 book (download the book below). Well, he delivered on his promise. I downloaded his e-book the other day and made my way through it, pretty quickly I may add. His latest book is a great resource for anyone considering entering the SEO game. I felt there were many valuable points in the book, but the most value I felt that a beginner could derive from his book is the methodology behind selecting the right keywords.

Back when I started in this game I nearly pulled my hair out trying to narrow down the list of keywords that I wanted to optimize a site/page for. I would have paid good money for Dan’s methodology back then. If you’re a beginner, I highly recommend that you check out Dan’s latest release and walk through it step-by-step.

Download his latest book here: SEO Fast Start 2007

There’s also a great review/post on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook website about Dan’s book. It seems there is a slight disagreement between the two heavyweights on the proper use of the nofollow tag. But, Dan cleared up his argument in the comments section.

All-in-all, I think Dan has provided the entire community with a great resource that serves as a good reference for all SEO’ers. I’m looking forward to Dan’s other Fast Start e-books (e.g. PPC Fast Start). You can sign up for Dan’s Fast Start 2007 mailing list here. Although the content is a little slim at this point, you can check out his Fast Start Portal (blog) for more info.

Thanks, Dan!!!

Rumor has it that Google is set to purchase feedburner, the leading blog feeder on the internet. This seems to be a great way for Google to tell who subscribes to which blog in order to produce more relevant search results. I.e. they can filter out fake blogs and list the ones people actually read in their search results.

Google did the same thing with YouTube last year. Their hefty purchase of the video startup, turned giant, means they are able to now interlace YouTube videos in their web results. Interesting - something MSN and Yahoo! can’t do, they can’t compete with. Those sly dogs over at Google know what they’re doing when it comes to company aquisitions… now if only I can get them to buy me out (good luck).

Big news today….Microsoft is buying an online advertising firm called aQuantive Inc. for the tidy sum of $6 billion….in cash. This really comes as no shock since both of Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the search industry have recently acquired major advertising firms. The first was Google and its purchase of DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, then came Yahoo! with its purchase of Right Media Inc. for $680 million. Then yesterday, WPP Group PLC (world’s 2nd largest advertising and marketing megahouse) announced the purchase of an online ad company called 24/7 Real Media Inc. Microsoft was in the running to purchase 24/7, but apparently 24/7 had other suitors.

Here’s what Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer had to say about the aQuantive acquisition:

“Microsoft is intensely committed to creating a thriving advertising business and to partnering closely with all key constituencies in this industry to help maximize the digital advertising opportunity for all,”

So, what’s going on here? Do all of the big dogs know something that we don’t? This looks very similar to the Star Wars race between Russia and the US some years back. Whoever can amass the biggest and most lethal arsenal wins….ready, set, go! Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are in a race to see who can dominate the online ad world. And who can blame them? There’s lots of money to be made in this industry.

These are very interesting times. It’s clear that all three of these major players are trying to capture a bigger piece of the $40 billion dollar online advertising market…which happens to be growing at 20% per year. But what does this mean for us little guys?

Well, for starters, it looks like we’re in for some challenging work in the online ad space. With this online industry consolidation, big companies like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be able to offer advertising much more efficiently and, due to economies of scale, much cheaper. They are clearly plotting against us SEO’ers and trying to drive us out of business. I mean, in 5 years who will be able to justify paying a PPC firm to manage their online campaign when a company can have its secretary, I mean administrative assistant, manage the campaign directly through the respective search engines?

I think there will always be a need for SEO’s and online marketers, but it seems that the online fragmentation is becoming, well, less fragmented. Big companies are getting hip to the idea that their deep pockets can keep attracting more and more traffic, which means less and less traffic for the little guys. The same holds true for online advertising. It’s an age-old adage…cut out the middle man = more profits for me!! Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft will continue their march toward total industry consolidation so that we (the stupid majority) can access one-stop shopping. It’s virtual castration…an online lobotomy, if you will.

I guess I can always go back to waiting tables!