Today I came across a quote that caught my eye:

“If you can create stories that re-enforce the values of others, then that makes it easier for people to spread your story.” - SEO BOOK

What a great, fundamental marketing concept. As an SEO, we want people to spread our client’s stories, their web content - usually via links. This is why I read Aaron Wall’s Blog every day when I wake up: in his post, he talks about how the concept of public relations (PR) is used to control human behavior on a macro and micro scale via networks. He then goes on to show how PR can be used in the work of search marketing.

Good public relations campaigns spread so well because they make the target want to share the story, by making them feel important, sharing their bias, and/or giving them some incentive to spread the story.

Incentive! That’s the key here, if we can write something that gives people a reason to spread our idea then we have won and our optimization efforts have been that much more efficient. What’s really going on here is that if we can control human behavior, having others want to spread our ideas (i.e. linking and referencing back to us), then we can ultimately control search listings - and this is good SEO.

Here is a quick video on the benefits of PR and SEO:

Why is public relations effective? Good PR is hard to duplicate. For example, if you saw a news story on the front page of the New York Times by author “A” and then saw the exact same story by author “B” on a competing newspaper a few days later, who do you think will get the most credibility? Author A That’s why news stations always want to break information as-it-becomes-available, they want to be the first to talk about it because that brings them credibility, it brings them more viewers and it ultimately brings then more commercial advertising dollars (because of higher TV ratings).

Lets take another example, “Top 10 lists”. You see these all the time on places like Digg or other social media web sites. Why do people like them so much? Because lists appeal to people’s biases, i.e. watch the Late Show with David Letterman and he’ll have a top 10 count down of something like “Top 10 ways to kill your mother in-law without anyone knowing”, playing on just about anyone’s love for laughs and hatred of those who despise their in-laws, which is often mind you for those who watch Letterman (kidding, but you get the point).

If you have the time, make sure to listen to Aaron Wall talk about PR in his video:

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?

The New York Times is reporting that Google keeps tweaking its search engine - and they’re right. Not only do the engineers at Google make manual modifications to the algorithm(s) that serve up results but the algorithm itself changes its own formula weights depending on, for example, where it recognizes spam coming from on a particular day to keep those “bad” results from showing up.

The article introduces one of Google’s top search engineers, Mr. Singhal, who is faced with the daunting task of making search results more relevant for it’s users. One problem Googlers were reporting as of last year (2006) was that search results were becoming a bit stale and not enough new or hot information was rising to the top of the SERPS. Obviously Google changes it’s formulas from time to time but to help tackle the issue, Singhal addresses

…the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team’s solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don’t. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for “query deserves freshness.”) THE QDF solution revolves around determining whether a topic is “hot.” If news sites or blog posts are actively writing about a topic, the model figures that it is one for which users are more likely to want current information. The model also examines Google’s own stream of billions of search queries, which Mr. Singhal believes is an even better monitor of global enthusiasm about a particular subject.

This is very cool, freshness!

You may have noticed that Google bought Feedburner recently and it seems to confirm what the New York Times are writing about in the above quote: Google wants to see who is writing about what’s hot so that they can improve the relevance of their search results to include new web content without including spam! Wow, Genius!

What does this mean for internet marketers? It means Google is helping us to better take advantage of the idea that the web is a series of conversations and channels - and if we can get our client’s brand(s) and ideas talked about in those streams of interest then we can more effectively drive traffic to our targets. This of course can result in happy clients