I don’t think Google or Yahoo! will be following Microsoft’s lead. Google doesn’t need to as a result of its dominance in the paid search advertising market. Yahoo! looks like it might be pulling out from search altogether and moving primarily to content / banner advertising.

Either way, it’s interesting to see some movement in terms of advertising dollars in search, but Microsoft’s move has yet to produce a sizable increase in actual search traffic. If the cash-back system ultimately produces a better ROI for advertisers despite the decrease in reach, we might see an interesting “supply-side” shift in search marketing.

If the increased ROI for Live Search advertisers results in a wider, deeper array of bargains and discounts for Live Search users, we might see a number of frugal searchers migrate from Google and Yahoo! to Live Search. Although marketers typically try to avoid bargain seekers, these users would not be bargain seekers in the classical sense; online “bargain seekers” are people who will rarely, if ever, pay for anything online that they can’t steal or substitute with something that’s lower quality but free. These users by contrast are able and willing to pay for goods consumed online but they simply want better deals.

Should the supply of good deals on Windows Live Search attract searchers away from Google it might create an interesting consumer niche for Microsoft, where in effect Live Search’s audience is smaller than Google’s but its audience is composed of the customers that advertisers value most - people who are looking to buy something right now. I don’t see this happening in the next fiscal year, but if the cash-back system is maintained and if it produces significantly better returns for advertisers then it could emerge as a wind shift in search.

I know that my employer has seen a sharp rise in its AdWords expenses in the past two years, partly because the online advertising laggards took until 2006 to discover paid search and have started bidding one keywords sense and partly because of a phenomenon called “Google Profit Optimization.”

What’s Google Profit Optimization, you ask? Simple. It’s a few automated actions that Google takes to ensure higher profits for Google at the expense of the customer: keyword obfuscation, optimizing placement for high CTR but low performance keywords (Google basically ignores its own Analytics Goals data,) and so forth.

GPO is a phenomenon that only started after Google went public and gained and insurmountable lead in the paid search advertising market, and I think this is a direct result of lack of competition in said market. So back to Google’s talking points for today’s antitrust hearings: Microsoft will be the only one who won’t like our deal? Well, here’s one customer who’s not happy with the deal; keeping Yahoo! out of GOOG hands is the best way to keep Google honest.

If someone, whether it’s Microsoft or not, can finally take the reins away from Jerry Yang and run Yahoo!’s search business with a hint of competence, we might see Google roll back some of its advertiser-gouging policies. The only way paid search advertisers, the people who pay for your free lunch whenever you do a Google search, are going to start getting treated with some more respect is if Yahoo! and Live Search stop losing market share, or if they offer better ROI.

Update: Search Ignite Says the Google Will Raise Yahoo! Search Advertising Rates by 22%. Don’t be evil, indeed.

I’m taking a marketing class this semester at Vanderbilt University and in the run of this course we have to consult a real client based here in Nashville, Tennessee on his or her marketing strategy. My group and I are consulting for a company named CountryHound, which runs a fan site oriented towards providing independent country music news.

The people at CountryHound want to expand their web presence by ranking higher on certain search terms related to CountryMusic, but they don’t know where to begin. I have ideas of my own for them, but I asked their administration if it would be alright to more or less “toss this one up” to Marketing Ninja’s readers.

They said “yes,” so here it goes.

The Problem - Leveraging a New Entrant into Visible Positions Against Big Players

CountryHound wants to position itself as an independent country music news source, meaning that it doesn’t distribute news in favor of one label/artist over another. However, CountryHound faces some stiff competition in the face of the big players in country music news, such as Country Music Television (CMT) and Great American Country (GAC.)

CountryHound’s SEM objective: To leverage AdWords and SEO to make itself visible via Google/Yahoo/MSN for country music related terms.

First Strategic Suggestion - Attack the Local Country Music Scene in Nashville Rather than Try to Compete Globally

Given the current quality and abundance of CountryHound’s content, I’d say their best strategic advantage is their location in Nashville and the ability to dedicate their resources to covering the local country scene, which is where a lot of major country music stars get their start.

Major organizations like CMT and GAC appeal to an international audience and simply cannot allocate the resources to cover local scenes like the Bluebird Cafe, even if they are also headquartered in the Country Music capitol of the world.

The question is then… How can we utilize online media to target audiences interested in Nashville, specifically?

If CountryHound is going to start by marketing itself locally via AdWords and other campaigns, where do we start? What keywords do we bid on? What social media would be the most effective in reaching out people interested in Nashville’s country music scene?

I already have answers. I want to hear yours.

Discussion Questions

I have a few questions below that I’d like to see us try and address.

Assume a marketing budget of approximately $2,000 per month.

• Should CountryHound pursue SEM as its primary means of traffic acquisition? Would social media optimization be a better venue?
• If CountryHound should pursue SEM, how can it do so at a Nashville-centric level?
• If you take a look at CountryHound’s site, what recommendations would you make to improve the quality of the content and the interface?

Technorati Tags: CountryHound,Nashville,Country Music,SEO

Some bloggers question whether or not Google’s PageRank algorithm is capable of handling a maturing blogosphere, and in the light of some of the problems with Technorati, things are looking a bit troublesome for bloggers, especially up-and-coming commercial bloggers at the moment.

AjaxNinja is a young blog and its first PageRank was published this weekend; 4/10.

I am, by no means, an SEO expert, although I am enjoying Search Engine Optimization for ASP.NET immensely (it’s a great read so far), but I’m not freaking out about getting a 4/10. In fact, I’m actually pretty happy with that score.

However, I’m not going to run out and come up with an action plan to salvage my PageRank score, nor am I going freak out and send nasty email to Matt Cutt’s or anyone else at Google. Want to know why? Because PageRank scores don’t determine my regular readership.

AjaxNinja is a young blog and it’s still building up external links organically. I don’t sell links nor do I buy them, so this “update” doesn’t even affect me. I’m not a sleazy get-rich-quick/BUY MY EBOOK ON BLACKHAT SEO marketing blogger; I’m a college student who blogs about experimentation with social media, website development, and basic promotional methods. AjaxNinja isn’t a commercial blog, and ad revenue is something I collect just to try and pay the bills for running the site. I blog because I enjoy it.

Bottom line, if you’re not a commercial blogger, focus on building a better audience, rather than worrying about SEO techniques and PageRank.

Warning: If you click on any product links on this page and subsequently purchase a product, I will earn a small commission from Amazon.com. I only refer products that I use or intend to use.

Back in July I wrote an article on Search Engine Optimization for ASP.NET and one of the items I mentioned was a book not due for release until September of 2007 called Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer’s Guide to SEO.

A number of my readers pre-ordered the book sometime in August and I just received notification that those copies were shipped sometime this past week. I had totally forgotten about that book until I received those shipping notifications and I will be placing my order for it this afternoon.

According to Amazon the book is selling very well and there are only a handful left in stock, so you may want to order sooner rather than later if you are just burning to get a copy of it.

There are no reviews for the book yet on Amazon but I will try to write one if I can get through it. I still haven’t finished reading that Web Portals book that I said I’d write a review for a month ago

Today we’re going to step away from AjaxNinja.com for a little bit and visit one of the blogs I subscribe to, Search Engine Optimization Journal.

Their most recent article is of particular relevance and interest to us, as it on should your corporate website link to your business blog? It’s a good read, and we’re going to be looking at this article again when we start talking about building conversations on your corporate blog.

Blogging for Business Pageflakes.com Pagecast:

If you’re interested in seeing what RSS feeds and resources I have been using for research for the Blogging for Business campaign, I encourage you to view Blogging for Business‘ public Pagecast on Pageflakes. If you’re a Pageflakes user I highly recommend adding it to your start page today

Today we’re going to discuss how trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs can improve your search rankings on popular engines like Google, Yahoo, and Live.com; increase your readership; and establish your company as an authority in your domain.

Everyone knows that a high ranking on search engines for search keywords relevant to your product will help drive sales to your business; an entire industry has grown around the concept of search engine optimization, techniques used to help websites increase their exposure on popular search engines.

We will not be discussing many SEO techniques beyond the basic principle of “the more external and internal links to your site, the better,” so if you want to get yourself up to speed on the latest and greatest search engine optimization techniques then I highly recommend reading SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

The Basic Principle of Search Engine Optimization

To quote Google on how their PageRank relevancy ranking algorithm works:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

So to summarize in absolute layman’s terms

the more links pointing to your site from external, relevant websites, the greater your rankings will be in search engine results. Internal links within your website also help improve your search engine rankings.

This is as far as we are going to get into search engine optimization.

Now we are going to cover how blogging can help us increase our number of external links through trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs!

Step 1: Find authoritative blogs in your company’s domain

It’s research time. Here are a few good places to get started searching for blogs within your domain:

• Technorati - The blogging search engine. Technorati is unique in the way it ranks blogs, by authority, meaning that the blog that has the most posts written about it by other blogs appears highest in the search results.
• Technorati’s Most Popular Blogs - These include the most popular blogs in the world in all categories. What you’ll want to do though is find a blog that fits your GENERAL domain; for instance if you are involved in the technology industry, you should go to one of the appropriate “top blogs” from this list, like engadget, and then use that blog’s internal search function on keywords relevant to your niche in the business. Top blogs utilize a lot of smaller, niche blogs when they want to write on specific subjects. Find those niche blogs.
• Bloglines - Another popular blog search engine.
• Google Blog Search - Google’s at it again

Step 2: Look, listen, learn

One of the lessons my 10th grade English teacher taught me is particularly relevant:

The best way to learn how to write is not to practice writing, but rather it is reading the works of great writers.

Let’s go ahead and adjust this pearl of wisdom for the world of blogging:

The best way to learn how to blog is not to practice blogging, but rather is is reading the works of great bloggers.

While you may have professional copywriters or publicists in your employ, you are going to want to read the blogs not to see how the blog authors write copy, but you’re going to want to see:

• what the bloggers are discussing
• what the hot topics and controversies are
• how the bloggers generate discussion
• what the commenters on those blogs are saying

If you write material that is relevant to the popular discussions, you’re going to have a much better chance at drawing attention to your corporate blog from the beginning. Understanding the blogging trends in your domain is key to getting effective links and passionate readers.

Step 3: Deploy your blog

Now that you have a sense for what’s popular in the blogging communities for your company’s domain, go ahead and get your blog deployed, and start writing content for your blog relevant to the buzz in those communities.

I will be adding entries down the road on what sort of content to write, but just remember that you’re blogging for your customers and not for your business.

Step 4: Include trackbacks and pingbacks in your posts

I posted a video tutorial on what trackbacks and pingbacks are as part of the Blogging for Business series.

In addition on my BlogEngine.NET test blog I stepped into the difference between how the Wordpress and BlogEngine.NET blogging platforms handle trackbacks and pingbacks, but for the sake of thoroughness I’ll reiterate what trackbacks and pingbacks are:

Notification Services: Technorati, Newsgator, and a number of other services out there are used as “notification” services by blogs; whenever a new post is made the blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, BlogEngine.NET) checks the content of the new blog entry for any links to other blog entries. The blog engine itemizes these links and alerts the notification services, which then contacts the sites hosting the links’ destination. If the destination site subscribes to the same notification service that your site subscribes to, it may choose to register your inbound link as a pingback or trackback.

Pingback: A pingback is an organic link that occurs within one blog entry. It extends from one blog entry to either another blog entry or some external site that uses a pinging notification service. When a pingback occurs on a blog a new comment gets added with the following information:

• The title of the blog entry that pinged the article
• A link to the blog entry that pinged the article
• Some context in which the “pingback” link occurred
• Time at which the blog was notified about the pingback

Here is an example of a pingback appearing as a comment on my blog

Trackback: A trackback is a bit of a different animal from a pingback. Pingbacks are organic; they occur naturally in the process of referencing relevant sources. Trackbacks are explicit pingbacks; they were added to blogging back in the day when sophisticated blog engines that could detect pings within articles didn’t exist.

In order to publish a trackback to a blog, you have add explicit trackback URLs to your post before you publish it. Here’s an example of a trackback to my own blog (click for a full sized image):

Trackbacks also appear as comments on the blog that you tracked back to; sometimes they are even given prominence over the comments and listed above as separate entities. The world’s most popular web 2.0 start up blog, TechCrunch, does this for instance:

Trackbacks and pingbacks are the most conceptually challenging part about writing blogs, but for those of you who need it in absolute layman’s terms:

1. reference authoritative and relevant blog entries in your corporate blog entries frequently. Obviously, do it naturally, but through referencing these blogs you will accumulate backlinks to your site.

Benefits of Pingbacks and Trackbacks:

1. Backlinks increase the number of external links to your site, which increases your search engine rankings
2. Readers of other blogs may follow pingback/trackback notifications back to your site
3. By having your blog’s entries appear on the trackbacks section of a more authoritative blog, you reap some of the benefits of branding by domain association

If you are not convinced that trackbacks and pingbacks are helpful in improving your readership then please read DmNews’ column on using blogs to improve search engine rankings.

Step 5: Provide thoughtful, insightful, and genuinely helpful comments on authoritative blogs

Establishing yourself as an “expert reader” on an authoritative blog is a great gateway to building up your reputation within the blogging community for your company’s domain. Here are the immediate benefits to commenting on other authoritative blogs:

• It establishes YOUR NAME as an authority on the subjects being discussed on popular blogs; you are effectively creating a brand name for yourself.
• It gives you instant exposure to a large audience.
• It provides links back to your blog. Most comment systems allow for you to specify a website address; usually your user name is used as the text for the link.

The third bullet is where the SEO benefits rear their head. Posting comments on other people’s blogs helps build external links back to your site, which will ultimately help your search engine rankings. Even if it doesn’t help your search engine rankings it will still drive traffic to your site if your comments are thoughtful and helpful.

So remember,

the key to being a good commenter is to provide genuinely helpful advice and feedback.

Pointy-Haired Pitfalls:

In honor of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, I am going to add a new section of each of these Blogging for Business entries with some pointy-haired pitfalls, which is just another way of saying areas where corporations often get it wrong.

Here are the pointy-haired pitfalls for using trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on external blogs:

• Pinging/Tracking back to irrelevant blogs - This will hurt both your authority and your search engine rankings at the same time.
• Spamming ping/track backs - Link posts are fine every now and then, but if you are really reaching to link every possible blog entry you can find, you are going to ultimately damage your authority and reputation as a blogger.
• Spamming comments - Ruins your credibility and authority.

Further Reading:

• How Not to Improve SEO With Blogs: 5 Golden Rules
• ProBlogger.net: No-one links to the linkers (for those of you considering doing link posts)
• ProBlogger.net: Grow your blog’s readership by targeting readers

Today I explain what trackbacks and pingbacks are, and how you use them to generate buzz for your blog and improve your search engine rankings.

Video:

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I have found a great video on Youtube which concisely explains what trackbacks and pingbacks are, how to use them, why you want to use them, and everything else. It’s about 6 and half minutes long.

You can watch this instructional video on YouTube.com instead if you’d like.
Disclaimer: I did not produce this video, I just think it summarizes trackbacks and pingbacks concisely.

I eventually came to the conclusion that all of the heart-ache of trying to get URL rewriting to work was for naught; however, I want to raise the question:

Are the SEO benefits of URL rewriting worth the trouble in the first place?

AjaxNinja reader Vjeran has been very helpful in providing some additional insight into this question. I’d like to post some of the feedback he has given me:

Vjeran said: Also, I would like to tell, that google understands query strings - and differentiates the pages as separate. What I did on one website was total urlrewriting of everything which ended in a complete mess (i have multilingual content - with multilingual urls)! Also you need to avoid duplicate content, which will be punished by Google if it does appear. Today 50% of web is done by url rewriting - so i guess, search engine will not value document names as they did before.

My suggestion for best practices is to make nice url database. Not for google, but rather for persistent urls.

Based on my experience with AjaxNinja thus far I’d say that URL rewriting has not been much of a factor in getting my site indexed into Google. The vast majority of my traffic (60.7%) comes from Google, Yahoo, and Live search referrals. I’m ranked in the top 10 for a handful of specific keywords that reflect the contents of my articles. In fact, here is the data straight from my Google Webmaster’s stats:

As you can see, I’m doing pretty well in the overall search rankings for a lot of categories where my Facebook application posts are concerned. My website is just over 2 months old and it’s already made it’s way to position #3 for “how to write a facebook application?” Can’t do much better than that without being on Facebook.com I think. The fact remains that Google has been able to successfully spider my blog in its entirety without using any URL rewriting.

The data isn’t meant to prove that URL rewriting does not help, but it does show that not having URL rewriting hasn’t prevented Google from indexing my site. Submitting a sitemap for Google matters significantly more than URL rewriting does in terms of getting your site discovered and crawled as deeply as possible.

Additional Resources for URL Rewriting in ASP.NET

In a second shout-out to Vjeran, I’d like to thank him for directing me towards URLRewriter.NET, an open-source URL rewriting tool for ASP.NET that I had not discussed in any of my previous entries.

While you’re at it, visit Vjeran’s website, doscoop.

In addition I would like to revisit that wacky IIS Wordpress Hack that incorporated using the custom 404 error to emulate URL rewriting. Omar Al Zabir, the Chief Technology Officer of PageFlakes, has revisited this approach using ASP.NET this time. If you’re desparate to have URL rewriting available for your site on a shared host, and you can’t get IIS 6.0 wildcard mapping or add your own ISAPI filter, then this may be your best hope.

Any developers or bloggers out there think that URL rewriting is still crucial? Please let us know!

My attempt at a clever URL rewriter that didn’t rely on a bizzare/slow automatic 404 error handler was great, in theory, until it occurred to me that the ASP.NET 2.0 engine wouldn’t actually ever fire as the result of a request targeted at anything that doesn’t have an ASP.NET file extension, thus my fantasy of targeting virtual URLs and simulating the apache mod_rewrite() command for URL rewriting went up in smoke. IIS 7.0 looks like it will be able to offer this kind of virtual URL natively to ASP.NET without having to use ISAPI filters (if you use a shared host, even one as good as DiscountASP.NET, they will not let you install one, ever).

I currently have a pending request with the DiscountASP.NET admins to add wildcard mapping to my account for AjaxNinja.com, which is something they have historically done for Wordpress users. I’d really like to get that mapping now so I don’t have to hold my breath for IIS 7.0 hosting (which DiscountASP.NET is offering a beta version of to all subscribers), as you need to have clean URLs for good search engine optimization.

But, I digress. I moved from Wordpress.com to AjaxNinja.com simply because I wanted to be able to demo some of my experimentation with the ASP.NET Mobile control library online, in addition to some of my other projects which I will make open-source. DiscountASP.net is a great host that I’ve used for a couple of years, and since they have PHP/MySQL in addition to all of the ASP.NET controls I could ever want, I figured it’d be neat to have a site online that uses both PHP/ASP.NET natively.

I’ve got one more week’s worth of work on my research project for Vanderbilt this week (it’s all C++ and ACE, you wouldn’t be interested), and then I can hit the ground running with some hot ASP.NET code. Stay tuned!

-A.S.

P.S. I’ll be posting more of my mobile phone industry research pertaining to my business plan in the coming weeks also.

AshersWorld was such a huge hit (relatively speaking) simply because it was EASY for Google to query all of its content and I did a good job promoting the site amongst other video gaming outlets, since AshersWorld as a cool new way to rate and share screen shots from video games. VandyStudents was such a dismal failure because I never really managed to reach out to student writers at Vanderbilt and the site was constructed using an architecture not conducive to spidering by search engines, namely a ton of ASP.NET 1.1 postbacks where there should have been hyper links. Take a look at the links on the front page for browsing through the most recent entires and you’ll see what I mean. They are ALL postbacks, which is a kiss of death if you’re hoping to make it big with a search engine.

Word of mouth alone isn’t enough to get a website going, although it will help a ton in the long run; you’ve got to get listed on search engines in order to reach out to a broader audience. Before I get into the specifics of how to use ASP.NET 2.0 mechanisms to make it easier for search engines discover your site, let me cover some of the basic principles of getting a site discovered.

Cardinal Rule: Have Content Worth Finding - If you have a site with poor content, fix that first before you read the rest of this article.

Have Sites with Similar Content Link to Yours - This is a great way to improve your PageRank score, so long as the sites linking to you do not violate the cardinal rule! The way I promoted AshersWorld (which is now defunct) was simply by putting a ton of effort into creating a lot of original content, and then I’d share that content on message boards of similar user communities, and eventually those communities began posting links to my site. If you have quality content, there is no need to be obnoxious.

Use META and Title Tags Effectively - This is another major breadwinner that is often ignored by web designers. Use Meta and Title Tags to appropriately describe every page on your site, as this will make it easier for Google to assign pageranks for particular keywords. Make sure you are accurate in your use of these META tags. Don’t describe yourself as an “Web 2.0 Script Source” when your website publishes recipes for chocolate chip cookies.

SEO in ASP.NET 2.0

Before I start handing out the links, let me give you one quick lesson from my personal experience… AVOID POSTBACKS ON .NET CONTROLS LIKE THEY ARE THE PLAGUE. If you use a DataGrid, come up with a custom paging mechanism for your data set that doesn’t rely on postbacks… Use AJAX or Query strings instead.

Now for the meat and potatoes…

General SEO Information

Search Engine Optimization Factors - Great article on general content and HTML tips to help you optimize your pages for indexing by Google.

General SEO Information with ASP.NET

Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer’s Guide to SEO - This book doesn’t come out until September of 2007 but I will be getting a copy of it for sure. Having taught myself ASP.NET, SQL, AJAX from books, I can say that Wrox does a pretty good job.

If you’re interested in a performing SEO with PHP, check out Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO, which came out in April of this year (2007).

WWWCoder: Search Engine Optimziation (SEO) and ASP.NET Developers - Covers some of the issues I described about POST backs and Title/Meta tags but also goes into some issues regarding ASP.NET ViewState and Creating Friendly URLs. I have included a number of links to URL Rewriting scripts and binaries to help you with URL rewriting utilities.

URL Rewriting

Code Samples:

URL Rewriting with Regex (Regular Expressions) for ASP.NET 2.0

CodeProject: Simple URL Rewrite for .NET 2.0

15Seconds: Rewrite.NET

Binaries:

UrlRewritingModule w/ Regular Expression Support for ASP.NET 2.0

I haven’t decided which one of the libraries I am going to use yet, as I have to take the “shared host” problem into consideration, but once I do I will provide a review and let everyone know how I liked/didn’t like it.

-A.S.