The following is a written transcript of the April 15, 2008 podcast between Eric Papczun of Performics and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Let's start with a top-down of what are the fundamentals of Video Search Optimization. In fact, let's first talk a little bit about the opportunity, because there are some interesting aspects to the opportunity. In some degrees it seems looming and large, and at the same time you can turn around and pretty easily convince yourself that there are at least a lot of situations in which it's not nearly as large as you might have originally perceived.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, it's interesting, I think if you think long and hard about anything, you could talk yourself out of how big the trend is and the opportunity that exists in front of all of us. But, I think to me it's relatively clear, which is that video is becoming more and more important to consumers and more and more in demand. And I think content that is being conveyed via video, it just hits people a little harder and is digested a little easier.

Eric Enge: Right. By the way I am a fan of video also, but I am just trying to play devil's advocate for a minute. Now, if you have to watch a two-minute video versus respond to a hunk of text with a pretty little graphic that you can consume in seconds, if people are in man-on-the mission mode they are going to want the simpler experience, right?

Eric Papczun: Well, I have no question about it. I think it all always boils down to what your need is and as far as what kind of content is going to work best for you. And that surely you don't want to throw away your plans to add more and more text content where it's appropriate. But I think we are encouraging our clients to look for those opportunities to use video where it is most appropriate.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's talk about what some of those scenarios are. For example, clearly if you are trying to show somebody how to do something, sort of related educational material when you have a buyer in research mode. If it's a kind of buyer who types in digital camera reviews for example, or a specific product name and then the review, those are kind of made for video, aren't they?

Eric Papczun: Oh without question, I think any time you can get the visual product in front of people along with a product expert that's talking about it, it is just easier for people to digest because you are pointing things out as you are talking about them. But, it also just reinforces the brand and the product by actually having a visual representation of it. For instance, when you think about something like people looking for plasma televisions, which is large ticket item, people are doing a lot of research on that item. I think the ability to have someone, a product expert, look at three sets and walk you through the different inputs and the different functions, show you the remote control, show you the difference in the aesthetics of the piece all help to do a number of things. First of all, it kind of puts you more across as a product expert, gives your review a little bit more credibility, as well as it starts to cement people to those brands that you are talking about. It gets them more emotionally involved with the product as opposed to just more of this kind of analytical connection. There is more of an emotional connection that happens when you see the product and you see someone touching and feeling it.

Eric Enge: Right. And there are certainly enough products where even images don't communicate as well as a video where you see someone manipulating the controls or whatever it might be that they are doing with a given product. So, I think that's particularly interesting. But also recently in an interview with John Marshall, one of the things that we were talking about was the intent of the person who comes to your website, because people are at different stages in the process. And the kinds of things we have talked about here is that, when you have someone who needs more information about a product, they want to see it, they want almost to be able to touch it. That's exactly the kind of visitor that you want to steer towards this type of content.

Eric Papczun: Oh absolutely. I think having that understanding that there are different people that are at different stages of the buying cycle and the research cycle, and being able to deliver content to each of those different types of needs is certainly important. I mean, I am not trying to allocate that video should replace any type of table that shows comparisons or spec data, any of that; it's all needed for people at various phases in the research and buying cycle. But what there tends to be not enough of right now is video content to support the other content that's there.

Eric Enge: Right, yes indeed. So, let us sort of switch gears a little bit and start talking about what are good, solid optimization steps? And then, finally after that we can talk a little bit about strategies for promoting and getting the videos out there.

Eric Papczun: Yes, as you know we are very early on in the optimization techniques, mainly because the major engines haven't quite spent enough resources on advancing the engine's ability to do things like visual detections and speech recognition. We certainly know of smaller search players that are doing that, but the major engines like Google, and MSN, and Yahoo haven't quite adopted that yet.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: So we have to focus on them, by doing that. I think the first thing that folks have to kind of focus on is where the video asset lives on the page and how we put that together. One of the biggest mistakes we see s these video players that play the whole catalog of video assets all from one URL, all from one player and that's probably the biggest no-no out there. Some folks have referred to that as kind of like a video ghetto.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: And I think that's one of those things where it can be beautiful and have great looking feel and functionality, but it bails in its ability to allow each and every one of those assets to be found individually and indexed individually. So, that would be the first thing we would steer people to is to make sure that each video file if possible can live on its own unique URL. We would also love to see that video asset be an object as part of an HTML page and have the text that surrounds it and all the kind of signals that would send to the engine to kind of give them an understanding of what that file is all about.

Eric Enge: Right. And the reason ultimately for that is that since the search engine can't see inside the video content itself, they have to rely on conventional webpage optimization or webpage signals about the video, and you can only get those signals if you put each video on its own page?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, its kind of just understanding that the engines for the most part are blind, deaf, and dumb when it comes to the images and videos. And so yeah, I think the more you can surround that, the more you can kind of not so much focus on the video but optimizing the page around it continues to still one of the best strategies when you are just trying to get ranked into Google or Yahoo engine. But, there are also things just like you would do with an image in using the alt attribute to assign it there. Obviously, you want to encode the video with metadata, it's always helpful to give the file a keyword optimized filename if possible. And then, good captions around that content, that video file itself, as it sits on the page. All of those things can help kind of reinforce to the engines what that file has in it. If you can't there is obviously some interesting technologies out there that are doing some things beyond that, like doing voice recognition and allowing you to put a transcript behind the video. All of those things, I think, will help you in the future. But as of today I think ranking in Google, is more about those elements that are on the page surrounding the video than necessarily the video itself.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, you mentioned metadata, and I assume you are talking about data within the header of the video file itself.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, that's correct.

Eric Enge: And, two questions about that, one is what kind of items do you typically find inside a header that you can play with and secondly doesn't it vary by video file format?

Eric Papczun: It does vary quite a bit and it's one of the things that I think is frustrating to lot of folks in production. Yeah, and we hope at some point there is going to be some standards that are formed around this. But, I think, again it is SEO one-on-one type of tactics here, you want that first thing about who your user is and what their intent is and what search phrases they will be using, and then try to really focus on those terms, and not try to overload or stuff keywords in that file. I think it's more about focus and kind of optimizing around just a handful of terms as opposed to a dozen.

Eric Enge: Now, do any of the file formats allow for a transcript inside?

Eric Papczun: I am not aware of any, I think...

Eric Enge: I wasn't either, but...

Eric Papczun: I don't think that there are, I think there are more services that you can click on, turnkey services that are out there that will embed transcripts in the platform, but I don't believe that they are actually encoding as part of the metadata.

Eric Enge: Right. And but of course, you can include a transcript on the HTML page.

Eric Papczun: They absolutely could, yeah. And, I think that probably for certain types of video that's not the bad thing to do. I think transcripts are great in a way, because all of the content is there, but of course we speak more words than sometimes we write and there is a lot more noise in our language when we speak than when we type. And so, there is a downside of that as well, which is that you kind of start to muddy the message if you are not careful with the transcripts.

Eric Enge: Alright. I can tell you that when I do interviews a transcription service does the transcript and then they give it to me and I still spend another hour- hour and a half on it, because they do literal translation and human speech is awful when you read it.

Eric Papczun: I was just thinking about that as we were talking. I was wondering, ‘this is really going to print out quite poorly.' And I think it's just natural for us to not be as structured and as organized in our speech, because we are responding immediately to a question, we are not sometimes giving ourselves enough time to think it through, give it an outline, and really structure in a way that just makes it easier for people to understand and makes your point. And so, I think because of that I do worry a little bit about over-relying on transcripts for optimization, because I think they do create an awful lot of noise.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, of course you can go through the process and clean them up.

Eric Papczun: You could.

Eric Enge: And then, there still would be the transcription of the essence of the video, so it would be a little cleaner. You know, you remove all the ‘sort of' and ‘kind of' and all the ‘um.' Add a basic cleanup, just to make it read a little better.

Eric Papczun: But, the reality probably is Eric, we work with some very large publishers, who has got time for that? I mean, I think more and more people are going to look for scalable services and using the manual kind of editing of a transcript is going to be very, very difficult for large publishers.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: So, for smaller folks, for smaller entrepreneurs that are looking to kind of milk every opportunity, I think that's probably going to be something they will attack. Larger publishers that are dealing with larger volumes, they are not going to be too excited about a solution like that, their focus is going to be wholly on scale and usability.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you had to name the top three on-page elements in addition to each video having its own page, what would they be in terms of getting your video to rank?

Eric Papczun: In a popular engine like Google?

Eric Enge: Yes.

Eric Papczun: Well, I don't think they are going to be any different than anything else. We are saying a title tag continues to be the number one element. Having the first text on the page hopefully in H1, kind of the heading of the page being aligned to the title tag, I would put as number two. And, I would think the third one is just a good summary of the video's content on that page as part of the body would be three. I think there is more on page HTML factors affecting ranking right now in engines like Google than it is the video itself.

Eric Enge: Right. I mean in the video itself, the biggest thing is the filename really?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And, I think the core metadata like the title and the description would be where also I would spend my time. But, I think there is a short-term strategy here Eric, and a long-term strategy. Short-term, you are going to use kind of the SEO one-on-one approaches to get those files found, it would be more about distribution on YouTube and some of these other services that are going to help you out. And, I think long term, you want to think about just getting videos that are more condensed and more focused around particular subject matter. As speech recognition and as some of these other technologies improve, I think they get adopted by Google, whether Google goes out and buys technology or they decided to develop themselves. At some point they are obviously going to address this need for consumers to be able to search and find videos in a way that is just more effective and more efficient for them. I think if that happens, you want to be positioned for it and that would be where I would put long term emphasis on metadata, more emphasis on structuring and organizing the video itself and the content. Think more about what you are actually shooting, what you are trying to get across, and what the audience says, and put more of just the thought into the video's mission and objectives.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: I get a feeling sometimes that that's done and sometimes that it's not. But, we all think about optimizing the actual production of the video, as much as we'll need too in the future.

Eric Enge: Right. Assuming that the companies are involved in our planning and building for the long term, and if they can get in the habit of doing this kind of advance planning as you talk about it and doing the kind of optimizations that will matter more once this search technology improves, they will have a leg up.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I think so, and I think you can almost see a future a year or two or more from now where if you would ask me that same question. I would say the first thing you need to do Eric is make sure you summarize the topic matter at the beginning of the video. In the first thirty seconds tell me what you are going to tell me, then don't spend anymore than three minutes making your point because you have to worry about the viewership and the abandonment, as well as staying focused on your topic matter. And then, spend the last thirty seconds summarizing what you talked about, and having optimization of the video itself so that engines are going to in the very first fifteen seconds.

Eric Enge: Right.

Eric Papczun: Or they might start to pick up on trends like the fact that there are kind of introductions to videos and that they are cues in here to what the video is about. So, there are a lot of things that we don't know yet, but you can kind of just start to put on your search engine hat and say if you had the technology to break this video down, what content would be most important in telling you what it's all about?

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. So, if you start thinking about the last piece, the distribution piece, what are your thoughts on distribution strategies?

Eric Papczun: Well, YouTube is just killing right now, isn't it?

Eric Enge: Yes. Eric Papczun: I mean, it's amazing. It's just on a market share tier as far as we can see. The number one distribution strategy probably is to get your video up on YouTube and optimize it for YouTube by making sure that it's appropriately labeled. And you do everything you can to get metadata in there. I think that's your first distribution strategy, I think experimentation is probably the thing that we would encourage more than anything else. Find other channels where your videos are a good niche and a good fit and go ahead and attack those and go where the traffic is, go where you are starting to get hits. But I mean obviously, YouTube is paramount, you have to be there right now.

Eric Enge: So, you providing the video and hosting it on YouTube, and you are also hosting it on your own site?

Eric Papczun: I think if it's appropriate for you and your brand, yes. But, that's not always appropriate. There are a lot of folks out there, our clients included, who want to absolutely control their own content and they don't want to release it into the wild., I think you have to think about the potential impacts to your business, both positive and negative. But, I do think if it's all about distribution and all about gaining more eyeballs and more viewership, then I would say try to blow it out there a bit more and experiment a bit more. For those folks who are doing that, you obviously always want to try to bring them back to your site and/or bring them to have some kind of call to action in there for them so that you get something out of the video itself as far as some business or enticing the behavior that you want. So, I think as long as you keep those kinds of things in mind, I would say go ahead and experiment with the distribution and try to get your asset out there to the broadest audience as soon as possible.

Eric Enge: Right. I mean you could create or upload the video to YouTube and just use it to embed a YouTube player on your own site, right?

Eric Papczun: Yeah, oh absolutely.

Eric Enge: And, you could still create a page on YouTube even in that structure?

Eric Papczun: You absolutely could, and that's a great strategy for someone who is more protective of the content. I would say your NBC example is a good example of someone who is centering a lot of content out there. They weren't comfortable with that being on YouTube, they have since pulled back, but there is where you could kind of find the middle ground.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, another new thing I think that's going on these days is that there are so many people offering various forms of free hosting services; Amazon, Google, and many, many others that you could set these things up, where even though you might not want to release them into the wild on YouTube and you may not want the man putting it on their own site, there are still options for you.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. And, I think again it just depends on what your goals are as an organization, if you are smaller and you are not as concerned with having absolute control over the asset and the user experience, then you are going to go out there and take advantage of some of these opportunities. But, there are going to be other folks, like large publishers, that are not going to want to give that control up and are going to want to have absolute control over the user experience in the serving of those videos. So, I think it all depends on the kind of conversation that I hope all publishers are having right now as far as their strategy on video.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah absolutely. So, you can end up with your video now hosted in multiple places, and I guess there is an interesting dynamic here, because search engines in general try to serve only one version of a piece of content. They are very studious about avoiding situations with duplicate content. But in the world of video, it appears to me that they are not nearly as efficient. So, you can actually rank for your video many times.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. And, I think that's frustrating to the searchers, to users; they have got a figure that one out. I mean it can be difficult to find what you are looking for in Google. The thing about Google also is that they tend to give more value to older videos. So, Google.com, the example that I used in my session in New York as I talked about Barack Obama's speech that he gave on race relations, which a lot of people considered to be the most important speech he has given to date. And that speech, I believe was shown on CNN at like 11 o' clock eastern time on a Wednesday or Thursday, everybody was at work, very few people saw it. But, by the end of the day, and the next day when newspapers like USA Today had it on their front page, there was a considerable amount of buzz about that particular video and yet no one had seen it. And people wanted to consume the whole speech, it was only 30 minutes long. They obviously get some sound bytes on nightly news, but I think people really wanted to see the whole speech. And so, YouTube had a huge spike, I think they served like two million viewers???? over a course of week on that video. But, if you look for it on Google.com, which probably a lot of people started with, then you put in ‘Obama's speech' or ‘Barack's speech,' which most people did, \ because they didn't think about his whole body of work, they thought about just that one speech...

Eric Enge: Yeah.

Eric Papczun: And they found a speech from back in Iowa. I think even today, I mean I have to check this, but if you search Google today for ‘Barack's speech,' you are going to find some speech that's like a year old now, and, it's not relevant at all to anything going on today. I think that's a huge disconnect.

Eric Enge: Yeah, that's speaks to whole another problem of management of freshness as a weighting factor.

Eric Papczun: Well. And, that's something Google News figured out, the algorithm there is very much geared to the freshness of the content. And, actually there is an edge for publishers who are constantly refreshing their news stories , not just putting it out and letting it sit, but coming in and making edits to it throughout the day. There seems to be a significant edge for those folks, and thus it creates news results that I think are much more relevant and timely, because of that algorithmic factor. We haven't seen that yet in video in Google.com in the universal search results, but we are seeing it in YouTube. But I think your point is a good one, that even YouTube has got a way to go as far as kind of really figuring out what people want, as far as the query goes. Timeliness there is more important, people kind of believe that you are now able to rate the video, all those kind of things are building into overall factors. Obviously as the number of views and viewership goes up, the video gets higher up in the rankings. So, YouTube's done a lot better job of that. We would like to see more of that being transferred over to Google.com and that being factored into those videos.

Eric Enge: Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So, if you had to name a couple of the other most important video search properties for people to consider, what would they be?

Eric Papczun: That for search engines or just as...?

Eric Enge: Video search in this case.

Eric Papczun: Yeah. I am really impressed with EveryZing and their technology. I don't know if that is so much a destination as a technology and a platform. But, I do think that they have got it right on, I think that the folks here are using, and I think The Boston Globe uses their technology now. If you look at those pages, they are very optimized for natural search engines and video search engines. And so, there are a lot of things that they are doing right there. As far as video search, I kind of see it as YouTube and everybody else and there is no one that stands out to me or that I would go up there and make strong recommendations to my clients to be on, unless there was a particularly fit for them. There are some folks that do entertainment a little better, some people that do news a little better, but I think overall it comes down to the fact that you have got YouTube now just dominating in market shares. It is almost like, would I recommend people to optimize other sites or try to get distribution, when they spend a lot of time on getting visibility on MSN? The answer is probably not. I am going to focus where the majority of the traffic is coming from and make sure we nail that down. So unfortunately, I don't have a list for you that I feel is strong enough to even spend much time on. I actually try to get people to think more about the reality of the fact that the people aren't using these search engines in any kind of mass. And thus, we have to really focus on Google.com and Yahoo.com and YouTube.

Eric Enge: Well great, thank you Eric.

Eric Papczun: Yeah, I appreciate it!

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

The following is a written transcript of the April 16, 2008 podcast between Stephan Spencer and Eric Enge (to listen to the podcast click here: Stephan Spencer with Eric Enge):

Eric Enge: Hi, my name is Eric Enge, I am the founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, and you can find our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Stephan Spencer, the founder and president of Netconcepts, you can see their site at www.netconcepts.com. How are we doing today, Stephan?

Stephan Spencer: I am doing great, thanks.

Eric Enge: Excellent. So, one of the things that I find interesting when I go to your blog is that the title talks about a scientist become a web marketing virtuoso. Why do you call yourself a scientist?

Stephan Spencer: It's interesting, it's actually one of my designers who designed my blog came up with that tagline. The reason why she came up with that was because I have master's degree in Biochemistry. I was actually on my way to achieving a PhD in Biochemistry when I quit school at the University Wisconsin-Madison to start Netconcepts. As a result, I have a very scientific approach to SEO.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, I can tell you that my experience is that, it's one thing to have gotten a degree in something, it's another to actually think that way, they are slightly different things. I have seen the scientific approach in what you write, and the things that you have done with Netconcepts.

The reason why it intrigued me is that, my father taught physics in MIT for 30 years, and I learned my way of thinking from him. So, I always described myself as being a scientist. People ask me what I am and that's the answer; what they like to do, well that's a completely different thing. Sort of a mindset in how you approach things. How do you think it affects your approach to doing SEO?

Stephan Spencer: Well, it really permeates everything that I do, and in fact the way that Netconcepts operates. We take a very experimental approach to SEO and apply the scientific method where you come up with hypotheses and you test your assumptions. Just like with email marketing, you test everything, you test the subject line, you test the from and the to and everything.

So, why can't you apply that same sort of methodology to your SEO initiatives, testing all your assumptions in regards to the right keywords, to the right page titles, to the right HTML coding, use of no follows, and sculpting PageRank; and you name it, everything can be tested.

Eric Enge: So, there is lot of opportunity to test and do different things with your SEO campaign. How do you think that differs from what you have seen other people do out there? And, I don't mean necessarily be critical of other people, but just you know what are the things that are a bit different?

Stephan Spencer: Alright. So, some folks are just kind of on their high horse saying this is how SEO should be done, and that's their line and they are sticking to it. Now, if that's unsubstantiated, there is a problem there because you can't just take somebody's opinions on SEO whether there are a prominent SEO blogger, or in the forums, or communists, or magazine or whatever; you can't just take their assumptions that they sell you and say okay this is the way that this particular factor works with regards to Google or another engine.

You really need to knock people off their pedestal to some degree and just say well, show me the evidence or at least convince me that you've tested these hypotheses that you are making.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, one of the things I picked out of what you said there is this notion that for some people one size fits all and they want to use the same formula on every website. Certainly, there are certain aspects of tactical SEO where that makes sense, but certainly when you turn around to the link-building side of things, one size clearly does not fit all.

There are a lot of different ways to slice that pie and you can have people doing Digg campaigns and hey that works great for them, but you will have somebody else who doesn't want to do that. And, they might be the ones who are out there pushing their stuff out through a widget because they have something that they can syndicate in that fashion. So, you have to bring a certain mindset to uncovering the uniqueness of each business, their website, their markets, and then build your plan to fit in that, does that make sense?

Stephan Spencer: Absolutely. Different clients have different levels of tolerance for Digg baiting, link baiting, and various types of link building tactics. One client may just be totally not interested in social media campaigns and another who you might not think is well-suited to doing social media marketing is all into it.

So, I know a great example, not one of our clients at the moment, a company called LifeInsure.com, and they are in the top ten in Google for life insurance. These guys have done some really fantastic social media marketing, they have put out some great Digg bait campaigns. One of them was called nineteen things you didn't know about death, it was pretty creepy actually.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed.

Stephan Spencer: The first item on list was that you are still conscious for 15 seconds to 20 seconds after being decapitated, and that was a real treat reading that. But, it's actually something that has been really valuable for them, they were willing to take that risk of putting something quite controversial and appealing to the alpha geeks on Digg.com. They didn't link to it from anywhere on their sites, so their loyal customers and visitors would not be stumbling across this particular article when they browsed around.

But, it made it to the front page of Digg as you would have expected, and got them quite a lot of links. So, it really depends on that tolerance level for being really edgy and also what content you can leverage and come up with. So, some clients have more interesting content than others.

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. And, all this thinking fits into how you put together and plan an SEO engagement. And, you've blogged about this recently in your blog, now tell me what your thoughts are in planning an SEO engagement.

Stephan Spencer: Well, first of all not every client or not every prospect that comes to us would make a good client. The first thing we need to figure out is are they innovative in their thinking, and are they willing to invest in SEO? And actually, an article that you will see on Search Engine Land coming out tomorrow that I wrote is on SEO is not free, you can't just think of natural search traffic as free traffic because you have to invest in your SEO and it is a continual investment, you can't just do it as a one-off project.

So, first thing we need to figure out is, are these prospects right for Netconcepts. And, can we actually do a really good job for them? So, there are cases where it is just not the right fit, and we need to refer them on to others, and I have actually blogged that recently too, that I have put out there a few other SEO consultants that I recommend to folks who are interested in doing SEO but aren't the right fit for Netconcepts.

So, the first thing is making sure that the fit is right and that this is going to be successful engagement. And then, we need to map it out, and we very much take a project management approach to SEO, everything needs to be managed. So, if we can show the roadmap and get the client onboard with that, it's going to be much more successful than if they are not fully committed or don't fully believe in the journey we are taking them on.

There are different stages to this journey, so on that blog post that you alluded to, we talk about getting indexed and having crawler-friendly sites, looking at things like site structure, and best practices, indexation levels, navigation, templates that sort of stuff. Step 2 is getting found for the right keywords, and that involves the keywords research, and the content optimization, and programmatic optimization.

Then step 3 would be increasing visibility through natural link building and that link building really is an art as much as it is the science, and getting the right sorts of links and high value links, it's hard to do, but definitely doable. So, the spectrum kind of goes from the real easy, not very valuable stuff like directory listings to really highly sort after, high value links, very high trust, high authority, aged sites linking to from high PR pages.

It's a kind of a process that we've come up with, and then there are other pieces that kind of fit into that latter step 2 that as much online marketing as it is SEO, and that could be like developing widgets or making existing widgets more search engine optimal so that they are passing page ranks when bloggers and so forth put those widgets on their site to blogging.

And, being really effective and integrating yourself into the bloggers here, and not just putting out some corporate shell of a blog and expecting people, bloggers, and journalists...

Eric Enge: To embrace such a thing, right.

Stephan Spencer: Yes.

Eric Enge: So, it's sort of leads into, excuse me, whenever I talk about link-building, I always, in the same breath almost, talk about content; because the questions that people need to answer with their website is why would someone link to it. And, my favorite way of illustrating that point to people is, they don't link to you to help you make money.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, that's right.

Eric Enge: Right. So, they link to you because you are doing something that's exceptional in someway and that gets back to the content or you know there can be outbound programs such as well-structured widget, which is a content syndication thing; but again, you are still using content. That's a huge part of the picture I think as well.

Stephan Spencer: It doesn't actually necessarily have to be content, it could be functionality, just has to be something that's of value...

Eric Enge: Yeah, it could be the tool, right.

Stephan Spencer: Exactly. And, one of the most successful link baits we've ever done in Netconcepts is to create a WordPress plugin for SEO and that is called SEO title tag. That plugin page gets more links and more traffic than our own homepage does, which is pretty unusual.

That was the a successful link bait campaign, and it really, it was a little bit of a hard sell within Netconcepts with our management to invest the time into really building out this plugin.

Because, the target market for the plugin is not our company's target market; our target market in Netconcepts is really focused around larger brands, and online retailers, media properties; and those aren't the folks who are going to be using the WordPress Plugin. It is the small bloggers, just individuals out there that would be using it, but the value is of course in the links. And so, they picked up on that and got the religion.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: So yeah, it's been a fabulous link bait campaign for us. Now, there are great link bait things you could do that have absolutely nothing to do with your business, and it's just still great content. So there is, I forget who it was, but somebody put out an article and got it submitted to Digg, and it was really funny or interesting urinals. And all they did was they combed through a bunch of a Flickr photos looking for really bizarre urinal photos.

They found some really interesting one, they compiled that into an article with a bunch of photos from these Flickr pages and submitted that to Digg and got a ton of traffic from that and links...

Eric Enge: More than 10,000 diggers, as I recall.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. But, unless you are selling urinals, probably have nothing to do with your business, but the links are still valuable.

Eric Enge: You have to be careful to manage that, with respect to what your site is about and what you are trying to do with it, and how it conveys the reputation of your business out there.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. You don't want to destroy your brand in the process, and that's where doing it on a micro site or on a blog can be less risky.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you mentioned that you focus on big brands and large retail sites; what are some of the challenges that large retail sites face from an SEO perspective?

Stephan Spencer: They are an interesting sort of animal, in that most of these large retail sites don't actually know how many pages they even have, for one thing.

They believe they have x thousand pages, because they have x thousand numbers of skews and therefore product pages and then extrapolate to add informational pages and so forth. But the thing is, this is all database driven and they don't really have an accurate count. Usually what they use is the estimated number of pages that Google reports as indexed, which is really inaccurate.

It is just a very rough guestimate, that estimated number of pages; and so it's not really an effective number to be basing various metrics on. So, there are other things they don't really have a good handle on, and when you are talking about the kind of scale data that an online retailer could have in terms of number of pages and number of keywords they are managing in their keyword portfolio, it's really hard to scale across that, right.

So, when you have hundreds and thousands of keywords, hundreds and thousands of pages; how do you optimize them all? It's really tough, you can't go page-by-page, and so there are different tactics that we've come up with and which I can talk to you about if you like. But, that is another challenge is rolling out optimization across lots and lots of pages. And then, the organization constraints are usually overwhelming.

They don't have a lot of IT resource to dedicate to SEO, or not enough; and the IT departments and the marketing departments at these various companies often times at loggerheads, at odds with each other. They don't all see at eye to eye and have conflicting priorities. So, that's a real challenge, it's hard for marketing, to get stuff pushed through that's important to them, when yet another IT project is getting in the way from the IT folks going home at 5 o' clock at night.

Eric Enge: Yeah, it can be painful. You know you have made this suggestion, it's a great suggestion. Marketing is onboard and then you can wait months before it gets implemented and you are grinding your teeth the whole time because you know what the impact is going to be, or at lest you have some idea of what the impact is going to be, it can absolutely drive you really nuts.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, alright.

Eric Enge: But, yet another thing that strikes me for these kinds of environments is, a lot of time large retailers, the various pages of their catalog don't have a lot of distinction in the level of content. And, they may even be using nothing but third-party manufacturers' supplied text. So, they may or may not have a lot of text, but it's all duplicated from somewhere else.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, duplicated content is the big issue for retailers, not only between the multiple retailers using the same manufacturer's supplied content for the product descriptions, but also a lot of pages are pretty much exactly the same or considered to be quite similar to each other by the search engines due to the way that they have built out the site and the technologies they have used.

Let's say they are using Endeca's Guided Navigation, and they have not implemented it in a search engine optimal sort of way. So, you have all these different permutations that look like a lot of the other permutations, and this creates many thousands of pages that have the same content on them, same products, price range might be slightly different, maybe one product is not listed on this page that was on another page. But for all intents and purposes, pretty much exactly the same pages.

Eric Enge: Right. Now, you mentioned earlier in some of the, or you alluded to earlier some of the things that you do to deal with the scaling problems, and you suggested you might be able to go a little deeper, I think one of the things was, you can individually pick title tags and things like that. So, what are some other things that you do to work around those kinds of issues?

Stephan Spencer: Right. In fact I wrote an article for Search Engine Land on this topic of some scalable approaches to optimizing very large websites. I'll just mention a couple. So one of them we call thin-slicing, and that's after the term that Malcolm Gladwell in the book Blink, where he talks about just kind of making split second decisions not over thinking something, assuming you have an expert pedigree or opinion on this and this, and this is just not an uninformed amateur making this assumption.

You have to really kind of step back and not over think your SEO, and if you take a thin-slicing approach to let's say your title tags, you don't have to spend a lot of time doing keyword research and rejigging things within the page copy and doing the title tag at the same time.

What if you just took a very cursory thin-slicing view and cranked through thousands upon thousands of title tags very quickly, maybe spending only 10 seconds or 15 seconds on each title tag, where you are working on a synonym in changing a singular to a plural and then moving on to the next one, maybe moving a few words around and the another one, just that sort of thing. And, not tying in keyword research and so forth, just kind of using your best guess.

That can work really well, especially when you are talking about a huge website with hundreds and thousands of pages, if you can crank through thousands of titles in the day instead of hundred, you are going to get through all the important pages, the ones that are higher up in the site tree that have more importance in the eyes of the search engines a lot quicker.

Eric Enge: Right. You are subdividing the task and prioritizing, and allowing things to happen a little more on a demand basis almost.

Stephan Spencer: Right. Now, there is another tactic that you can use and we have actually developed the whole product around it. The tactic is actually using a proxy server to make changes. And then, you optimize the proxy version of the website and see how that performs. So, we had at one time, a client who was insistent that kitchen electrics was a category they were going to stick with even though we were trying really hard to convince them that it was not a good category name, because nobody is going to type that into Google.

And so, this is a category that refers to food processors, and blenders and various other small appliances for the kitchen. Kitchen electrics, that's the term for the industry, they would be laughed at by their peers if they changed it to something else.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: They insisted that, no you are going to have to actually prove to us that this is worth seven figures in additional revenue if we changed that, otherwise we are not going to change it. This is like the bane of SEO's existence, right, is when they get a client who makes you prove everything in advance. Well, what if you had a proxy platform or a proxy server based platform where you could change that, change kitchen electrics to kitchen small appliances and see what the impact is? Now, see what the additional traffic...

Eric Enge: Like an AB test basically.

Stephan Spencer: In a way, yeah. But, it's not an AB test where you can test both in parallel; you can only test them sequentially. So, you have the baseline and then you conduct the test, you see what the results are in terms of once the page gets indexed and the rankings shift, and then the traffic then starts to flow in, you collect a reasonable sized samples so it is statistically significant and then you can conduct another test or switch back to the baseline.

Imagine being able to do that in a very large scale, conducting all sorts of different kinds of tests through a proxy-based platform. You could make page specific changes, you could make site-wide changes and do this very quickly and easily where something like a category name change could take months to get pushed through the IT departments, to implement on the native website, you do this on the proxy based website.

You can conduct this test and implement the change in minutes. So, that's the idea behind our product, Gravity Stream, that actually I came up with that based on the frustration I had with this particular retail client back in 2003, that was very frustrating and I was like, if only I could just show them what needs to be done.

Eric Enge: It is a lot easier to talk them into doing a limited scope test and giving them real data basically. So, and it sounds very cool and definitely will look forward to digging into Gravity Stream in an upcoming conversation. What do you thought on SEO reporting?

Stephan Spencer: Right. So, this is an interesting one, most of the SEOs out there really heavily focused on ranking reports. And so then, there are also the indexation reports and the backlink reports and things like that. But...

Eric Enge: Those are just really tools of the SEO trade, right?

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, they are kind of like necessary blocking and tackling sort of things, but it really doesn't give you whole lot of insight.

Of course you are going to do that on your client's competitors as well and look at their backlinks and indexation levels and so forth, and benchmark against your competitors and look for opportunities. But, that is really basic stuff. If you could go into some KPIs there are metrics that are really unusual, but give real insight into SEO, that would be pretty cool. And so, we actually came up with some KPIs, that actually my colleagues here at Netconcepts, he came up with seven of them.

It was Brian Klais our executive VP of Search, and one of them is the brand to non-brand mix because when we are dealing with so many online retailers, they are so heavily focused on branded keywords that they miss the non-brand opportunity. If you look at the long tail of natural search, most of the retailers are comprised of non-brand keywords.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: They are so focused on the branded keywords that they lose sight of the long tail and end up losing the non-brand potential. So, if you establish some metrics around this brand to non-brand mix that would give you some insight into what you are leaving on the table. Another KPI is unique pages, and this alludes to something that we talked about a little bit ago and that most retailers don't actually know how many pages they have.

So, once you establish a KPI around unique pages and you don't assume that the estimated number of pages that Google is reporting from a site: search is your actual number of unique pages, base it on database queries to your database or base on unique pages that have been crawled, you are going to have a much more useful metric to use in other calculations.

Another KPI is pages yielding traffic, or what we call page yield. Now that one is, if you imagine that you have say ten thousand pages to your website and you actually you can measure which pages are driving traffic from the search engines. Well, you would be surprised how few pages actually drive traffic from search engines. So, maybe out of a 10,000-page website, you have 1,000 pages over a given month are actually bringing in search visitors.

So, once you start measuring, that you can focus on that 9,000 other pages that are just sitting there on the bench, the free loaders, they are not doing anything for you there, they are partly a virtual sales forces that's collecting a paycheck but not actually doing anything to help the business. So, measuring that metric will help you to increase your long tail potential and get more pages delivering traffic.

Another one is keywords per page, so you can measure the keyword yield. In other words, how many keywords per page are coming in from the search engines. So, if you have let's say on an average, two keywords per page over a given month, that's how terribly healthy, whereas if you had let's say five or ten keywords per page then you have a much broader, these pages have much broader appeal.

Eric Enge: Yes, some of those are long tail terms.

Stephan Spencer: Exactly, again this is the start of long tail health metrics.

Eric Enge: Right.

Stephan Spencer: Another related KPI would be visitors per keyword, also if you let's say have a average merchants attracting let's say 1.9 visitors per keyword while we actually did a study and wrote up a research report on the study and found that that was indeed the case, that 1.9 visitors per keyword was an average yield for the average merchant in our study.

Then, there are a couple of others that I will mention real briefly: index to crawl ratio, that's taking the number of pages indexed versus the number of pages crawled so you can see if you have a lot of pages crawled that aren't being indexed.

Eric Enge: Right, potentially a bad sign.

Stephan Spencer: Yes. Then, what's each search engine delivering in terms of traffic, because each engine has different audience sizes of course, but also different demographics and if the people would be interested in your products and services and might actually buy from you.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. The other thing that I'll add which is that when I am on the phone with a prospective client and they are asking about their search engine rankings and how to improve or how many links they are going to get per day, or whatever the questions are, those are useful things to think about perhaps. But, I always try to get them focused on, well how much business are you closing on a daily bases through your website.

How do you measure that in terms of revenue impact or cash value depending on what you are doing? And, at a goal level, which is little beyond the reporting question I asked you, is the goal to double, triple, or quadruple the revenue. The other kinds of metrics they typically ask about are just part of the process of accomplishing that. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to join me today, and I'll look forward talking to you again soon.

Stephan Spencer:Yes, thanks, I really had fun talking with you..

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

The following is a written transcript of the March 25, 2008 podcast between Bill Flitter and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, this is Eric Enge. I am the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Bill Flitter, the CEO of Pheedo RSS Marketing Solutions. You can see their website at www.phedoo.com. How are you doing today, Bill?

Bill Flitter: I am doing great Eric, thank you, and yourself?

Eric Enge: I am doing great as well.

Bill Flitter: Wonderful. Well, thank you for having me today, I appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Sure, definitely our pleasure. We are going to get to dive into RSS in a little more depth than the average person does today, so that should be fun. But, let's start by talking about some of the common way people use RSS and feeds in general today.

Bill Flitter: Yeah, sure absolutely. The definition of that is always expanding and the use of RSS is expanding specially with the growth of widgets, and things like Facebook and Friend Feed. It's the idea of content syndication and aggregation. As more and more information is being created, we are going to need an efficient way to stay abreast of all the updates. Think about Facebook, and if you think about the feed of all your friends data that's a one great use of RSS or even Friend Feed that aggregates all of the conversations that you and your friends maybe having on Twitter, or a multitude of social networks.

Then there is a whole another use of RSS really maybe from machine to machine, if you look at Discovery Channel for example they are using RSS to power the different sections of a website page even. So, the left section is powered by RSS, the right section of the page is powered by RSS or XML. So, it makes it easy to update those pages, and the editors can easily update those in real time, you don't have to do a website rebuild.

More and more, web developers RSS will see different tools being developed for its use. I see a lot of numbers being quoted from some old reports back from 2006, and less than 10% online users are consuming feeds. Well, that number has grown significantly over the last two years, and some new readers might be surprised.

For example, we are finding that 56% of consumers are using RSS feeds, 62% of the enterprise sized organizations use RSS feeds in some manner, either again putting it on their site for people to subscribe to content, or using it to power their websites. And, 60% of consumers actively customize their start pages using feeds or widgets.

For many of the top publishing websites, 50% to 75% of their traffic originates from outside of their website, really kind of the ideal syndication model driving traffic. That's one of the trends we are seeing right now, where content is being removed from websites, and is subscribed to and consumed in great numbers outside of a particular publisher's website.

Eric Enge: Now, there are also a lot of these kinds of feeds which aren't strictly speaking RSS, that are being used for exactly that same website-to- website, or website-to-widget type purposes as well.

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. RSS has kind of become the Kleenex, and is more of a generic name than anything else meaning syndication.

Eric Enge: Given how rich the environment is in terms of information on the web and the number of places that people want to integrate it, you can see that there is just a demand which probably is far from being satisfied as yet.

Bill Flitter: Right exactly. The media business is becoming so fragmented, because there are so many sources of information. We might snack on a few things from publisher A, and publisher B, and create our own custom publication by bringing in all of these different sources of this information. If you think about a Netvibes start page, that's essentially an online newspaper customized to my likes, and that type of idea is being duplicated across the web.

Eric Enge: Right. So, are there some types of feeds, that are being undercapitalized upon on the web?

Bill Flitter: That's a great question. I mean one of the other trends that we are seeing is things like RSS to email. Those publishers who have large email databases, and are still sending out an email newsletter, they are converting a lot of the creation of that newsletter over to RSS. If you think how it was done before, either it was done manually by taking a recap of everything they publish in a period of time, and then creating that newsletter, sending it out to the database, right? That was pretty labor intensive.

They have already created RSS feeds as another tool for users to subscribe to, and they are realizing, "well why don't we use RSS to actually create our emails automatically"? We are seeing that trend increase merely from a management perspective, the end user doesn't know. They still get the content, and they don't know how it was created, and obviously nor do they care. But, publishers are looking to building more efficiencies into their processes, so that's one way that they are leveraging RSS.

Eric Enge: Right. I imagine just there are a lot of emails that people put together which are just really just daily or weekly recaps. If you could automatically extract the data from other feeds, perhaps with a little program doing some processing on the data on those feeds, just to put them in your emails format, you would be a happy camper.

Bill Flitter: Oh, yes absolutely, right. Then, of course if you can find a way to monetize that, and still do exactly what you were doing before, but speed up the creation of that, that's what RSS can do.

Eric Enge: Right. Are there any more really advanced applications that you can talk about, that go even further?

Bill Flitter: Well, I think one that I would circle back to here is really the powering of the websites. It's all about efficiency, so another trend we are seeing is demonstrated by the Discovery Channel, where you think about breaking up a webpage into four quarters, and using RSS to fill in that webpage with data that they are creating on the backend. This way it stays fresh, it stays updated, and it's updated in real time. It's about getting the information, and especially if you are a publisher, getting the most recent information out into the hands of the user as quickly as possible.

If you look at MSNBC for example, syndicating a lot of their content, and providing that to websites to add to a publishers website, a third party publishers website to really enhance the third parties content. That might be an obvious one, what we are seeing is the true syndication model is picking up in popularity, putting someone else's content on your website to supplement what you have already created.

I think the idea of Friend Feed is pretty ingenious aggregating old content from these different social networks to make it easy for me to keep abreast of the activity of my friends. But then, also being able to respond to those feeds in that feed data right from the Friend Feed website, I think that's pretty ingenious.

Eric Enge: Right. What about strategies for promoting your feeds once you have them, do you have any suggestions?

Bill Flitter: Yes. One of the things that our publisher is finding, that's pretty effective is converting people from, who are opting out of your email newsletter. Lots of times, people opt out for reasons other than they don't like your content, that it maybe they just don't like your email, right? They are receiving too much email, or in my case I have opted out of 99% of email newsletters to get the feed from that publisher.

The opt out page presents other opportunities for that user to subscribe to information, and we are seeing upwards a 5% conversion on people who decided to opt out of the newsletter, but then take the choice of subscribing to the RSS feed.

Eric Enge: Right. Inbound email feels like a TV commercial. It's an intrusion, even though you don't have to deal with it if you don't want to, it still feels more like intrusion, whereas in a feed reader, it's when you want it, it's on demand.

Bill Flitter: Yes. When you introduce someone to the idea or the concept of receiving feeds, their reaction is always the same. It's "oh, my gosh, well why didn't I know about this sooner?"

Just because it simplifies their life, you can do scanning very quickly, get the information you want. Put it in a separate bucket away from your email, right? I mean I don't know about you, but getting hundreds of emails everyday is no fun.

Keeping my personal and business email in one bucket, and having my newsletters and RSS feeds in another, for me it's a better way to manage that data.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, my email is by design very transactional. And, we don't necessarily want to read things inside our email package. We just want to see if it's a meeting time, and just respond quickly. If it's a document you are supposed to look at, then you will open it up and you read it in the thing that created the document. But, you really don't want to read a lot in your email.

Bill Flitter: No. If you look at, well maybe the idea that users are very in tune with the feeds that they are reading. What I mean by that is if a publisher's feeds are not updating for whatever reason, either maybe the aggregator is slow in getting it updated, the users that are on top of that saying, where is the content? So, the RSS user is a pretty active person, and they want to receive those updates.

I was a little surprised by that thinking, well it's information, it's content, it's the daily headlines for example. And, a lot of their content is not necessarily life threatening if I don't receive it, and but to some, the latest news on Britney Spears, or the financial information is pretty important to them that they want to receive and get those updates immediately. And, if there is any delay in receiving that information, they are emailing the publisher, asking them what's going on.

Eric Enge: Indeed, so any other strategies?

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. Some ideas are pretty straightforward, put it in your e-mail signature file, we do that here at Pheedo. We have our RSS feed in our signature file, people can grab that, subscribe to our feed. I have seen people actually leveraging, again going back to Friend Feed to promote their feed.

People can see your latest headlines, I see a lot of publishers actually now starting to advertise their feed. They might either do a house ad on their own website, or use an ad network to drive subscribers to their feeds. Make sure it's obviously indexed with all of the aggregators like Bloglines, or Google Reader, My Yahoo, an easy way to do that is just subscribe to your own feed in those services.

Create a Bloglines account, subscribe to your own feed, then Bloglines will start indexing that RSS feed immediately, same thing with Yahoo.

Eric Enge: There is a nice side benefit to that too which is, you can get competitive data from Google Reader and Bloglines and things like that, because they will show you how many people are subscribing to your competitors feeds.

Bill Flitter: That's right. That's a very good point.

Eric Enge: So, you can get a sense as to how you are making progress in terms of developing your readership versus competition.

Bill Flitter: Yes. A few folks I read recently are doing that, having a competition of how many subscribers they can get to their feeds. And, just a simple give away of, I forgot but it was an Xbox, or iPhone, or something, they were doing to an RSS subscriber and trying to grow their list pretty quickly. But, the other thing to keep in mind is, the subscriber count you see there is about the number of subscribers. That's a point of pride for a lot of publishers, but what a publisher really has to keep in mind now is how active is that feed.

It's about active users, not just subscribers, because depending on what the publisher's goal is, if it's to monetize, more activity will increase the revenue. Is their goal traffic? That's pretty important to look at your active subscribers. One obvious thing is to continue to create good content and create what you feel is the right amount of content. So, meaning it is once a week, fine for your readers?

Is it once a day, is it multiple times a day? Is that the right combo? That's what you really have to look at as far as, does your activity increase or decrease by the amount of content that you are producing?

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. I do know that there are tools, FeedBurner has one that allows you to see the consumption levels. That's a very, very helpful thing to do. I agree it's great, you could have a million subscribers, but if only one of them is actually coming to the feed and reading your content, it doesn't do you much good.

Bill Flitter: Yes. That's one of the services that we provide. We measure the worth of that feed from a revenue perspective, just to set some expectations for the publisher. We can tell them "look if you want to make more money, you need to publish more often". Or, we can tell them that they need to create more active users, and sit down and talk about how they create more active users. I think what you will find again, earlier we talked about the growth of feeds.

Publishers are obviously realizing the growth of feeds, and that they need to do something about that, right? They are noticing that a lot of their content is consumed off of their site, so how do publishers make money? They make it through advertising back on their website. So, how do they create revenue strategies, and that's really what I think 2008 will be about as far as RSS is concerned. How do we create meaningful revenue strategies for syndicated content?

Eric Enge: This is a topic that you know just a little bit about I suspect?

Bill Flitter: Yeah, that's true. That wasn't a lead in by the way, that was just something that is real.

Eric Enge: No, let's pick up on it. What typically have people been trying to do to monetize their feeds, and what do you think they should be doing? Where do they get critical mass, I mean obviously if you have ten readers a month, you don't really have critical mass.

Bill Flitter: Yeah, exactly. I mean it's really what your expectations as far as revenue is concerned. But, when it comes to monetization, it's not necessarily about the size of the feed that matters. It's really again about the activity, but also the content plays a big role in that. You might find something like EE Times, who has a very niche audience, and their website doesn't necessarily generate a ton of traffic. But, all their traffic that goes to EE Times is very interesting to some advertisers.

They may get a higher CPM than the average website would, and they may do double digit CPMs, or even triple digits CPMs for that particular content. So, it's not necessarily size that matters. How well it does in terms of readers is what will definitely drive the revenue.

Decide what activity means for you and look at your data that supports that activity level. But, we have to start thinking about is, where our feed is consumed, meaning some feeds are consumed online with online readers Bloglines, or Google Reader. Some are consumed through widgets, or start pages like Netvibes. Some are consumed on bookmarks like Firefox, some are consumed through phones.

Our challenge at Pheedo is, we have all these different environments to worry about, and look, and feel, and displays to consider.

If you think about a website in DoubleClick, or any ad network, they really have one display to think about which is the website, right? That's why there are standards there, we are going to buy 250, or 468/60 etc., right? Well, there is no standard view for RSS in the consumption points for RSS, and that's a challenge and an opportunity all in itself. So, publishers have to realize, and as well as advertisers that. This audience by the way is, they are high income earners, they are active users. Bloglines for example states that their users come back three times a day, and stay twenty minutes in each session, that's a lot of time, right?

They are consuming content with one particular vehicle. There is a very good audience to reach for a lot of advertisers.

Challenge is we have to look at the displays of those ads, and how they might display in these different environments, and be fluid on how we change our advertising to fit. Then, I think because it's easy to subscribe, it's also very easy to unsubscribe, right?

So, if a publisher wants to advertise, we have to think about that end user. They are absolutely in control, it's just one click away from unsubscribing. So, we have to look at the weight of advertising in that feed, we have to consider better targeting techniques for the ads in that feed. We do have data on what people consume within the feed, so that helps us determine what ads to place in front of them.

Eric Enge: Right. That's the big key, how you manage that targeting, so that you do get their focus. So, the EE Times is showing the right high CPM ads without a lot of manual labor to figure out what goes where, right?

Bill Flitter: Exactly. That's absolutely one of our challenge, and the placement within the feed itself. For example, MyYahoo only displays headlines as their default, and that's how most people are viewing feeds through MyYahoo. So, how do you display ads in that environment?

You can't do a banner ad in there, so you have to think about doing a headline-type ad within MyYahoo environment. It's still early in figuring out the monetization scheme of things, and you can't just take your DoubleClick ad code, and plug that into a feed, and hope that's going to go into work. Obviously, that's why we exist just to figure out those hard problems in serving ads into feeds.

Here are some numbers, which I think will show the growth and emphasis advertisers are placing on syndicated content. If you look at RSS, and podcast, and blog ads, that spend is to increase to 21.1 billion in 2011, which is about a 70% annual growth.

That's becoming a sizeable market, one billion dollars in advertising is pretty sizeable. 40% of US Interactive Marketers are using or piloting or have piloted RSS in '07. It's up from 10% in '06, so look at that jump from 10% of marketers considering doing something with RSS in '06 to 40% doing something in '07.

That's a huge jump, and then this is the one that I found was fastening. 74% of the top TV networks included RSS in their media mix in '07. 74%, another very large number, so you can see that not only is the user base growing, publishers and marketers' use of RSS is also growing, it's matching the user growth.

If you look at even our organic growth in feeds, so meaning feeds that we are managing for publishers, the average was 250% last year growth in new subscribers, large right? A huge difference.

Eric Enge: Right. And, that's a big thing as you highlighted before. Services like Facebook are part of this, but it's just getting people to realize that this is a way they consume content, and it's going beyond the early adopter types that always are early in getting into new media.

Bill Flitter: Yes, absolutely. If you look at some of the entertainment feeds, or even the one that got me was that some of the biggest feeds right now are knitting feeds.

Eric Enge: Wow. Do you see any changes of significance coming into Feed Readers in the next year or so?

Bill Flitter: I think one Feed Reader that's really underutilized from a data perspective is actually Google Reader. They have really good data APIs. To my knowledge they are the only one that actually has an API that you can look at some of that data. Bloglines on the other hand, they are making some significant changes. They are making it easier to discover new feeds.

They just did a release, I believe it was this week on bundling feeds. So, for example you can get the entertainment package of feeds in just one click, and you get that. So, it's a bundle of the most popular entertainment feeds, or business, or whatever category you might like. Bloglines is also doing some changes within the UI, so you can interact with that feed a little bit more, a little bit better refer that to Friend, comment, etc. But, I haven't caught wind of, or have seen, any really significant changes in RSS readers.

Maybe there is one, My Yahoo, has their own reader now inside of their email client, right? So, but the one reader if you will or start page is more of start page that has seen a significant increase in our traffic is Netvibes.

Eric Enge: Interesting.

Bill Flitter: We are seeing a lot of feeds being aggregated and consumed within Netvibes. That's really not your traditional, what we think of as a traditional newsreader, it's more of again a customized newspaper. So, you go watch out for that one, I think we'll see those numbers only go up.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Thanks Bill!

Bill Flitter: Thanks Eric. I appreciate your time, and we'll hopefully talk again in another year and get a recap of what's going on.

Comments?

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Bill Flitter - Eric Enge podcast here.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Eric Enge and Jonathan Mendez talk about Landing Page Optimization

Podcast Date: November 20, 2007

The following is a written transcript of the October 19, 2007 podcast between Jonathan Mendez and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I am Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Jonathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer for OTTO Digital, and we plan to talk about Landing Page Optimization. You can see the OTTO Digital website at www.ottodigital.com, that's O-T-T-O Digital.com. And, Jonathan also authors the Optimize & Prophesize blog at www.optimizeandprophesize.com. How are you doing today, Jonathan?

Jonathan Mendez: Great, Eric.

Eric Enge: That's good. So, let's get started, why don't you start by defining Landing Page Optimization?

Jonathan Mendez: Wonderful; and first thanks for having me on the podcast. I would define a Landing Page Optimization as using testing and also targeting to provide measurable improvement in performance. And, I think we need to first define what a landing page is. I think that some people are not benefiting from a landing page optimization strategy or doing any landing page optimization at all. This is due to the fact that traditionally landing pages were seen as a paid search strategy.

People don't recognize their site pages as landing pages. This is because of the way that some of the publishers view their content. The fact of the matter is just about every page is a landing page, a person is coming to that page from somewhere. Knowing their source is an incredibly important tool, and really the first helpful step in landing page optimization. Knowing more than sources is even better; we can talk a little bit about that as we go on, but in the end I would say that landing page optimization is defined by creating experiences that deliver a higher degree of relevance towards the goals and attentions of your users.

Eric Enge: Right. So, one of the things you brought out is that somebody may arrive on the homepage of your site, that makes that a landing page for sure. But, then they take the next step and they are landing on a new page. So, you've got to optimize through that experience if that's a common path.

Jonathan Mendez: Absolutely, and many times the homepage itself as you mentioned is the landing page. Especially, if you think about all the people that come from brand search terms. I would recommend different strategies for someone coming from a brand term to a homepage, for someone who go to a homepage for a more generic type of query. So, we have the philosophy that every page is a landing page, and I think when people start to think of it that way and start to work towards improving their results in that manner, they start to see some great success.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what are the ways that you go about doing landing page optimization?

Jonathan Mendez: There are really a few ways and a few techniques that are used, and then as technology progresses we are getting more and more advanced in what we can do, both through the use of JavaScript, and then through the use of APIs that either are existing or that we can create for clients. And, that starts getting to a lot of more advanced techniques. But, the basic landing page optimization technique is A/B testing or split testing. And, it's really an amazingly powerful and really simple way to improve performance.

The idea behind A/B testing is that we are testing a single element of the experience. So, sometimes we test more than one variation of that element, and then so we might be doing an A-B-C test, if we want to test two variations against the control. Or, what we call sometimes A/B/n testing, or we can do; sometimes we've had five landing pages for a single ad group or keyword. But, the idea is that only a single element is changed, so when you think about split testing or A/B testing, you are only changing a single element. That said, the element can be the entire page; it can even be a series of pages.

Sometimes we do A/B testing of traffic flows, such as a conversion funnel. Other times though the element is a section of the page, so it can just be a specific area like a call to action or a headline. So, in my experience though I would say this is where we really see the largest improvements overall, because and this is also why we kind of start. Usually, we start a landing page optimization strategy or comprehensive strategy with A/B tests of entire pages; and where we can test wholesale changes of layouts and messages.

Eric Enge: Right. What are examples of some kinds of things you might test this way?

Jonathan Mendez: So again, A/B tests we have had a lot of success just testing completely different pages. So, one of the key strategies in successful landing page optimization is what I call creative differentiation. You don't want to test things that are too similar to one another. And, so we'll test the landing pages that have a completely different look and feel, radically different from one another, both in the messaging and the layout or the imagery used. You can be quite successful doing those kinds of A/B tests.

The other A/B tests that are really successful many times are testing elements being present or not present. Many times we think about adding things to a page to improve the page performance, but a more reductive strategy many times has better results. So, start to think about what can you take away from the page and actually test removing things, having things again being present versus not present. You start to see some great results that way as well.

One I would call out would be navigation. So, many times people think that well, it's our landing page, it shouldn't have any navigation at all on it. Sometimes that's true, but through testing we found that many times navigation is actually helpful for improving conversion rates. So, I think overall something we all would keep in mind is so much of what we test, what we find in the result is counter intuitive to what we thought. So, it makes us test even more and more, and again it's really important to look at the results and keep testing.

Eric Enge: Yeah. You've triggered three thoughts in my mind there, so I am going to try to remember them all here. One is I think too many people use their gut feel and they come up with the best design or close to best design for their intended purpose. And, so much of what you find when you do this kind of testing is counter intuitive, and it's not what you expected. Your audience isn't what thought it was, and you really need to not only be prepared for that, but you want to embrace that, because it describes the opportunity in this kind of testing.

Jonathan Mendez: Oh, absolutely. I would say one of things we find again quite a bit is as you mentioned, different people respond to different things. Within a one particular test, when we start to look at the results and filter the results by different segments, what we'll find is that even within one specific A/B test for example, if you segment the results say for people coming from Google versus Yahoo as an example, or people who've been to the page second time versus the first time.

What you'll see there is the results are different even within the one test. So, again based on source and behavior, relevance means different things to different people, and that's where we start to really craft again a holistic and comprehensive landing page optimization strategy. I would say that the core of a good landing page optimization strategy if possible, is to look at your results in a segmented way and start to deliver landing pages by segments that have a higher degree of relevance.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you also mentioned the bit about lot of people think that you want to remove the navigation and that's their instinctive response, because they think of navigation as a distraction from the goal of the page. But, there are certainly groups of users out there, if they come to a page and they see that it doesn't have any navigation, it's actually a turn off or a negative, because it doesn't look like a real business.

Jonathan Mendez: Absolutely, it doesn't look a real business and we found that especially for sites about financial services, for example, that navigation could be tremendously helpful. As you mentioned it gives a sense of confidence, a sense of trust to the landing page and just generally I like to err on the side of providing a better experience for the user; which that does. And again, this is why we test these things, but you are right intuitively you would say well, you don't want to take people to a different section of the site.

The fact of the matter is if your landing page is relevant; if the content of your page is relevant and the message addresses the goal of the user, the navigation won't be necessary. So, it will start to reinforce certain things, but people if your page is done well and optimized, they won't be using it; they will be doing what you want them to do.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about multivariate testing, how is it different and how do you handle different complex scenarios with it?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. Well, multivariate testing is a really great optimization technique. It's probably the most interesting one, because it provides learning into the factor of influence that particular elements on the page have on overall performance. So, if you look it allows you to test a large number of elements, and it provides you with the data that informs you of the best mix of all the different element variations that you are testing. So it's really, MVT is really a test scenario where you are listening to your audience and learning, and because of all this learning it naturally leads to a lot of follow on testing, and a never ending steam of test ideas, so it really allows you to be iterative, and it's also really highly addictive.

The multivariate testing algorithm that we use in the Offermatica tool is called the Taguchi algorithm. It's been tested and proven both digitally and manually over about fifty years. So, it wasn't invented for digital or online testing at all, it was actually I think first used in Japan to optimize assembly line production for automobiles. I guess we know how well that worked out for the Japanese oil industry.

Eric Enge: Right.

Jonathan_Mendez: What it does really is it allows the creation of what we call arrays Taguchi orthogonal arrays. Now, this let's us create what's called fractional factorial testing. What this means simply is that the number of tested elements that we use is reduced. So, the fractional factorial arrays allow us to get faster results without affecting the overall accuracy of the data. And so, we use it, and we like it because we get result in weeks in this type of testing rather than months, and months, and months. So, we need less data to get confidence.

The other way of doing a multivariate testing is full factorial testing which requires testing all the variations possible, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. I think it's obviously great if you can test every single factor together. However, many times that's not possible, because it takes so much data and such a very long time to get results with those types of tests. Because, you need to have so much more, in order to get just core confidence in the results, you need a lot and lot of data.

This brings us to a very important point about multivariate testing, and that is the amount of traffic or tested visits that you are getting in for your test. So, more so than A/B testing, the type of multivariate tests you run should be determined by the amount of traffic that you are going to be able to get into a test, and the estimated conversion rate that you are going to receive, and then start to design the type of multivariate tests you want to do around that data. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time creating what maybe a great test, but one that will never get results or statistical confidence.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you are testing six or eight different elements on a page, that's a lot of variants if you were to try to do what you call full factorial testing, which is where you'd have to show all combinations of those elements. Then, you'll have to have enough data in order to be able to draw a meaningful conclusion. And, that's I think as you said where the fractional factorial testing fits into the picture. As I understand it there is this process of where the algorithm decides what elements of the test it's going to treat as being similar in nature, and maybe they won't vary them at once, right? And, it starts testing scenarios out which it thinks would be statistically significant, even though you are not testing each variant data-wise. Does that make sense?

Jonathan Mendez: Yeah, absolutely. That gets into the array which is the array that's created and forms the actual design of the test. That would get back to the end of the pages that you are actually creating, and what different combinations need to be present on those pages.

Eric Enge: Right. Do you need to have a dynamic web application to do this stuff?

Jonathan Mendez: No, well any page optimization can be done without advanced tools. Multivariate arrays, they've been going back for years, they have been done on spreadsheets. You can still do them on an excel spreadsheet; I believe someone has a website somewhere, where you can create an array online. A/B testing of course can be done across different domains, or different URL's, or using redirects. I was doing A/B testing like many other folks back in 1998, 1999, well before this software, or these types of software were available.

The software just makes it a lot easier to do, it's easier to create the tests; certainly it helps with all the data collection. So, the tools that we have today ranging from free tools from Google to other tools like obviously Offermatica's tool really allow you to do so much more, and get incredible production. But, do you have to have those advanced applications and tools; no, absolutely not.

Eric Enge: Right. A really simple example of course is in your Google AdWords account, you implement two different ads and you just specify different landing pages.

Jonathan Mendez: Yup, absolutely.

Eric Enge: That's a very simple trick that anybody could do even with a static website.

Jonathan Mendez: Yeah.

Eric Enge: So, in the spirit of Danny Sullivan's SMX advanced session, where he had a session called give-it-up, do you have a cool secret of landing page optimization you can share with the audience?

Jonathan Mendez: Well, for the spirit of Danny, I will share something. I think one very important thing that I always like to keep in mind is that, the success you are going to have in your testing is usually determined prior to you even launching the test. So, in terms of the test designs that you are going to go through and the creativity that you are going to come up with, so certainly key to success is again not necessarily the techniques, or tools that you are using, but really the creative elements of the test.

When I see people who failed, it's either that the test design was wrong again for the amount of traffic, that they were testing or even more so, the creative that they tested did not have enough differentiation. So, I think I mentioned earlier creative differentiation is really a key. I would say the hidden secret is to be radical, take chances on the creative end. Test pages that look nothing like one another, try messaging that is completely different, fanatically from one another.

What you find when you do that, when you take those chances is somewhat counter to the wisdom of the crowds. A majority of users will be drawn much more to one than to another, and that really, really gets you a big win. When we look at instances where we've had improvements in conversion rate of 50%, or 150%, 250%, it's always the testing the elements that are diametrically opposed to one another. They are really creatively much, much different than one another, so that's my secret of success.

Eric Enge: Excellent. If you just try and tweak small little things, you might get small little results, and you need to do more if you want to get big results.

Jonathan Mendez: Go bigger, go home.

Eric Enge: There you go. Okay, and how about a case study? Do you have a case study you could talk about?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. Well, we recently did some work with a client, Share Builder. Share Builder is interesting company, they are in the business of helping people build portfolios of stocks, and they have an interesting model. What we did for them was interesting, because we really looked to use a segmentation strategy. When we sat down with Share Builder, we really wanted to understand their paid search campaign. These were going to be landing pages from paid search that we were looking at and they challenged us that they had a landing page that's never been beat.

They had tried many different things, but what we did was break it down, breakdown their search traffic, because they had one landing page for everything. What we did was break their search campaign down, and look at the five ad groups that they were getting the majority of traffic from, and that considered ad groups around their brand returns, investing terms, beginner investing terms, trading, stock trading terms, and buying stock terms.

We also took some traffic from display ads in finance verticals, and created that as another segment. Then, thinking about the different goals and attentions of those different segments, we crafted landing pages that we believed spoke to those goals, for providing more relevance.

Someone coming from a brand term, they know a little bit something about Share Builder. Someone coming from a beginning investment term, certainly there were certain messages and information that they would probably want that the branded person might not need. So, we ended up creating I think seven different landing pages for them around different themes. What we did also was some A/B testing, and again segmented by ad group. We put some of the landing pages into other ad groups. For example we looked at what the buying stock pages that were done, and thought well, maybe we would put one of those into the branding group to see how they would do.

The thinking behind that was to get learning on performance; they may not perform the best or they may, but certainly will tell us though that messaging will inform us more about the content messaging that might work on follow-up tests. We're always trying to think ahead to the next test and learn what will help us on the next test. So, we created all these pages, and we ran a whole bunch of different A/B/n tests. So, each ad group had between four to six different landing pages, that we drove traffic to, and we'll take the branded one to really do a deep dive into.

What we had there was, we actually had a 142% lift on one of the recipes, and getting back to what we spoke about earlier in terms of radical changes, what we did with that, with the winning recipe there, it was actually all the content that they had on their existing landing page that they said can never be beat. But, what we did with that content is we radically changed the presentation of it. We created a page that looked really nothing like what they had, and it actually ended up that that one was the winner. And, a huge win, again a 142% increase from their branded terms, which again for them was huge, because that's where they were getting the vast majority of their traffic.

It speaks to the creative part of landing page optimization, which I think is again probably under appreciated in terms of its importance to a successful strategy. So, what we did, so we took that winner, but the other interesting thing was the three other pages that were tested versus the control. The each outperformed the control anywhere from 30% to 60%. We took the learning from that, and we used those different messages, incorporated them into a follow-up multivariate test.

We did a 4/3 multivariate test as a follow-up. So, taking four elements of the page, and testing the control versus two variations, and the elements that we took on the page were the headline, the benefit statement. We had benefits on the left, and information about the company, more information about the company on the right. And then, also navigation being present or not present as we spoke about earlier, really good test element. So, a really nice mix of different messaging, things being present or not present, and the follow-up to that after the large lift was an additional 14% lift after the multivariate test.

What was also most interesting again there was the element, what we call the element contribution report. So, what elements that we tested had the largest factor of influence to conversion, and it's an interesting issue in this case study, because it came full circle to what we talked about earlier, having the navigation bar actually had a 47% influence on conversion rate. So, really having navigation in this particular test worked out to be really, really beneficial.

Actually I have a deeper dive on to that particular test on my blog, if you go do a search on it. So, but so that I think really a good case study in terms of segmenting your audience, creating A/B test scenarios, and then following up with that learning on a multivariate test to get even more results, better results, and continue learning that can be applied elsewhere.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when you talked about a 142% lift just to get it clear on people's mind, you mean it was almost two and a half times the original conversion rate?

Jonathan Mendez: Yes. We think we do a pretty good job, but even those kinds of results don't happen everyday. But, it's certainly nice to talk about them, but yes they, that is correct.

Eric Enge: What probably happened is that they did their own optimization, but they did very iteratively rather than making radical change.

Jonathan Mendez: Actually they did multivariate testing before, and they did full factorial tests on that particular page. So, they did get some insight, and created a good page before we even got there, which was challenging for us to try to beat it. It was one of the better landing pages I've seen. Usually when we come into a client, we know we are going to have easy time of it, because the landing pages leave a lot to be desired. But, in this particular case, they had been testing for over a year and a half already when we came in there.

They had a page that was really, really working for them, but they just weren't satisfied. They wanted to take it to higher level, and I think again that speaks to, that really speaks to testing. You want to keep testing, and I think these guys as a client had a tremendously great attitude towards testing, they understood the value of it. They created an infrastructure that allowed us to test, they were accepting the kind of bold ideas and radical thinking that we presented to them, and they were able to reap the rewards of that.

So, I think again one thing that we didn't talk about being successful is, you have to have the mindset in place to be successful, and that requires buying into to this idea that nothing is sacred, and everything needs to be tested and validated. And, the data doesn't lie, all those things will breed success, but again it's much easier said than done for many people.

Eric Enge: Right. You need to be willing to take chances, as you have said before, and sometimes for larger organizations that have invested a lot in their brand strategy that could be hard, but there is a lot to be gained. Can you provide some screenshots that we can include in the transcript for people?

Jonathan Mendez: Sure. I'd be happy to send those over to you.

Eric Enge: That would be great. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today Jonathan.

Jonathan Mendez: My pleasure; thanks for having me.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

The following is a written transcript of the October 19, 2007 podcast between Bill Slawski and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, I'm Eric Enge, the President of Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. We are here today with Bill Slawski, the owner of the well-known SEO by the Sea blog and the Director of search marketing at KeyRelevance, and we plan to talk about search engine ranking signals. You can see the SEO by the Sea blog website at www.seobythesea.com, and you can see the KeyRelevance site at www.keyrelevance.com. How are you doing today Bill?

Bill Slawski: I'm doing fine Eric, how are you today?

Eric Enge: Hey, I'm doing great.

Bill Slawski: That's good to hear.

Eric Enge: So, let's dive in. One of the things I really like that you've posted about a couple of times, I think a year ago October and more recently was different kinds of ranking signals that search engines can use. You covered twenty different signals in each of the two posts. And, I'd really like to get your thoughts on which of those signals that search engines might be using now that, aren't necessarily things that everybody understands that they are using now.

Bill Slawski: Okay. Just a quick thing about the genesis of those posts; I tend to cover a lot of different patents that come out from the search engines every once in a while. I find it useful to try to tie a lot of those posts together and extract ideas from them. It seems like that was a good opportunity; looking at the way search engines may take results and re-rank them. I really hadn't seen anybody do that in the industry, so I wanted to last October put a lot of those together and some of them were very obvious. We probably want to skip over those really quickly, but it's just things like filtering duplicate content out, removing multiple relevant pages from the same site, etc. Sometimes you get those indented, sometimes you don't and you see a little link, click here to see more.

There are other ones that are happening that are a little bit less obvious like sorting for country specific results. So, if the search engine thinks that you are in the UK, it might present results in a little bit different order than if they think you are in the US. You can also set language preferences on your browser or at the search engine level for most search engines, so that if your preference is English and you type in a word that might have meaning in more than one language like rendezvous.

It's going to try to give you English results rather than French results. With my background in law and legal type field, a lot of legal terms actually have French origins. Appeal, appellate, things like that, and terms like defendant, and that can get little bit confusing as search engine doesn't know which language you are speaking. There are a lot of re-rankings that happen in a smaller niche area like changing results based on commercial intent. I am not sure that any search engine really has folded that into its main search, but an example of this is Yahoo's Mindset.

When you go there, you see a little slider bar and you can slide the bar back and forth to shopping to informational, and it re-orders results. Microsoft's has produced a lot of papers on commercial intent. They may or may not use those today. Some are informational in nature, some are transactional.

Eric Enge: Right. So, when someone uses the word buy in a query, that's obviously transactional.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Right, as opposed to "digital camera reviews" which is obviously informational.

Bill Slawski: Right. So, with the search engine, if the query is informational or transactional, we rank results based upon that type of intent. One of the other things we talked about is looking at more than one query, where you have a query session. If you look for commercial results by the types of queries that you use one after another, will it change the order of results to give you more commercial results than if you view type in, let's see Portland Maine, and then you type in seafood restaurants. Perhaps the search engine starts giving you search results that have to do with seafood restaurants in Portland Maine, and give you overviews of places like that.

Eric Enge: Right. I think there is already evidence that they are aware of your location based on reverse IP lookup.

Bill Slawski: Not just reverse IP lookup, if you are using a cell phone it might do cell tower triangulation. They might use global positioning satellite information; they might have a query history, if they are collecting web history and search history, showing that you do a lot of searches in that geographic area related to them.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, it gets really interesting if you are sitting in say Boston, and you just did a query on Portland Maine, and then do a query on seafood. So, are you really looking for seafood in Boston or are you looking for seafood in Portland Maine?

Bill Slawski: Right. And, we've been hearing a little bit about generating advertising that's taking the advantage of consecutive queries to show ads related to that stuff. Could we see the same type of thing from organic results? It's possible. A lot of these ranking factors that I've written about to one degree or another are being used or are very close to being able to being used. But, like I said not always within the main context of the search engine, maybe within a smaller sphere like a mindset or with Yahoo's YQ.

It can take certain contextual information from pages that the website owners can tag. This page maybe about thirty different restaurants in Boston, but they've only tagged two of them. So, you have to really learn about those. So, the website owner is determining some of the relevance.

Personalization is another area where you've got to turn it on to get the full impact. But, there maybe things going on behind the scenes during the normal regular web search that influences the results that you see, and that aggregates data from users who search for things similar to what you search for and who tend to select pages similar to the pages you select. You may not have to be signed in or logged into personalized service for them to carry that information over from one search to another.

It maybe done based upon say triples of data. They see other searchers who perform searchers similar to you, and go to pages, select pages similar to the pages you select. There may be 2, 3, 4, 5 different queries in a row in a query session. So, that may influence the next pages that you see.

Eric Enge: Right. Since they know for example that when someone did three similar queries to you, and then they do the fourth query, they know what the majority of the people clicked on. They'd follow that pattern and they can potentially take that if it wasn't the no.#1 result and make it the no.#1 result by the time you get to it.

Bill Slawski: There is a transition there, going from a straightforward keyword matching type search to a more of a recommendation type search.

Eric Enge: What's your sense as to how much of that recommendation model is actively in place now?

Bill Slawski: It's hard to tell. I think we are moving more and more towards it, part of that is triggered by building the statistical model, and doing some machine learning. The more searches that people conduct, the more information that the search engines are able to take and use in a meaningful way, the more you'll see there. The search engines have an incredible amount of data, and when we here talk of infrastructure updates at the search engines, one of the things that we need to consider when they are talking about infrastructure is their ability to switch on and switch off different ranking mechanisms.

Eric Enge: Right, given the global distribution of their data centers.

Bill Slawski: Yes. They may assign different weights to different queries, different categories, different classes of websites, different searchers, and it's possible when you are doing a search that you even have the results from more than one ranking algorithm in front of you at once. Your choice which you click on may not increase the rank of that website, but rather increase the use of that algorithm that produced that website. (Editor: think about this comment a bit, it's a real mouthful).

Eric Enge: Right. Yeah, it's a, there are an intense number of things they can look at. One thing that I'd love to get your take on for example, is how often a particular website is bookmarked by someone, and how that can affect ranking.

Bill Slawski: There is a lot of user behavior information that search engines can collect, and user bookmarks is one of them. The amount of distance somebody scrolls down page, the amount of time somebody spends on a page before they return to search results, whether or not they will come back to a page after looking at some other pages. Those are all things that search engines use to say hey, this is an important page, this isn't an important page; this page matches well with this particular query, etc.

Bookmarking is one of those things; it's an active browsing activity that's outside the normal scope of the search engine. But, if you build in a bookmark tool, or if you watch traffic carefully through ISP information, or toolbar information you can make use of that data. Ask came out with a patent application, where they talk about looking into traffic, and seeing where people go, and seeing how long they spend at places. It even mentioned watching along as people used other search engines, and seeing what results they clicked for specific queries on those search engines.

Eric Enge: Right. The interesting thing to me is when you think about something like bookmarks, right say Google's own bookmarks, Certain people promote and put on their page something that says bookmark us. It seems to me that that would introduce a significant amount of noise into the process, in terms of using that signal compared to sites that don't have a "bookmark this" button on their content. It makes it a very difficult signal to place too much weight on.

Bill Slawski: Webmasters have always come up with ways to get people to extend their relationship with visitors. Newsletter subscriptions, the email update forms or buttons, send this page to a friend emails. You've been able to save pages on your browser as a bookmark. Bookmarking services like Del.ici.ous and others have been around for a little while. There were similar bookmark services that came out in the late 90's that didn't use a tagging system, but they were around. I think what you have to do when you talk about that sites with bookmarking buttons is recognize that if that's been used as a signal, it's just one signal of many.

One or the other patents that was interesting, that came out was actually one of three that talked about building profiles for web pages, and creating traffic estimates that was originally written in the context of paid search. But, it talked about classifying different types of sites by subject, by volume of visits, by search, by bookmarking, and so on to try to get a sense of what the site was like, and build a profile for it. A more recent patent application talked about working on profiles through sites based upon adding site search to the site, and learning what the site was like based upon how people used that site search, what they looked for, how successful they were in finding things, so on.

We have other tools that the search engines are using such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, and so on. So, they are learning a lot about how people interact with individual websites, being able to profile those websites, aggregating the profiles, finding the sites that are similar in lot of ways, that aren't taking advantage of say Google Analytics or Website Optimizer, or a bookmark this page button, so on. They are still be able to find enough points of similarity that they can put the sites together, cluster them together, so they know if these sites are somewhat alike. Bookmark activity by itself its just one signal amongst many.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the individual signal maybe noisy, but the cumulative effect of all the signals isn't.

Bill Slawski: Right.

Eric Enge: Of course the other thing you could do, of course is group sites that have bookmark this buttons together with other sites that actively request bookmarks, and weight them differently. So, the value of their bookmark is different than the people who don't have such buttons.

Bill Slawski: Absolutely. It's same like as you take a small Alzheimer's site that deals in one particular subject matter. It's going to have a different type of profile, and provide different signals to say for instance, than a Blog. You have different quality signals, and signals of importance with the Blog like the number of RSS subscribers. By having multiple quality signals and a big number of group sites together, you can compare them based upon that.

Eric Enge: So, let's talk a little bit about how the different search engines are approaching this, at least Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Do you have a sense as to