In the spirit of Halloween, I would like to take this time to talk about a potential trick that was pulled on all of us recently.

As anyone in the internet world will tell you, it is difficult to make something ‘viral’ in today’s online media world. The one thing required to make something viral is that it needs to be something that, when viewed, inspires the viewer to pass it along to everyone they know, invite people around their desk to watch it, or tweet/retweet it.

And that’s not an easy task.

Today’s savvy internet user is fairly unshockable.  There is little you can do (and keep it PG-rated) that will create ANY kind of shock, interest, or humor.  That makes it relatively hard for a big company like Microsoft (who already has a perceived image) to create a promotional campaign/video.  What can they possibly do, then?

Let’s fast forward to right before the launch of Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7.  They of course needed to market it after the dismal Windows Vista release, so they decided on a (let’s sarcastically say) brilliant ad campaign where users would host Windows 7 launch parties.

Essentially, a person could decide that they liked Windows enough that they would go online, sign tons of paperwork and become an official launch party host.  They could then recruit all their friends to come (using an overly complicated invitation system that discouraged people from actually using the official way) and sit around and… install Windows 7.

But that’s not all.  If you had enough people you could potentially get a Windows 7 box signed by Steve Ballmer.  Don’t even check eBay, because I’m sure no one would want to part with that gem.

I realize that I may not be explaining this process very clearly. So Microsoft, in their eternal wisdom, made a video that explains the whole process.  Please enjoy below.

Now… I’m going to assume you watched it and that you have the sensibilities and intelligence of a moderately intelligent human being.  What the heck was that?!?!  Awful, awful, awful.  I mean really… it’s embarrassing.  On every single front.  Acting, video, writing, sound quality… was this really produced by a multi billion dollar company?Why, this video is so BAD that I am inspired to forward it to all my friends and laugh at it…

Oh wait.  They got me.  Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but this one has to make you wonder. Did Microsoft intentionally make one of the worst, lamest, milquetoast videos to play right into the lame-o image that Apple created for them?  My gut says no, they aren’t that smart.  But at the same time, it makes me wonder.

If the goal of the video was exposure and publicity, it worked.  The video has been viewed millions of times.  It has been laughed at and mocked, it has been spoofed and goofed.  It’s an embarrassment.  Again, I don’t think they meant to, but Microsoft made one of the most talked about viral videos of the year by making themselves the brunt of the joke.  Congrats.  They did it.

But at what cost?

So your business is green now… how about your website?

Imagine if you printed each page of your site, and then gave them to Google. Then, after you handed them over, Google had to file them away in their archives. The smaller the pages are, the less space your pages would take up, correct?

If we look back at rule no. 1 of the Three Golden Rules Of SEO: “Do right to Google and Google will do right to you,” we uncover a great SEO rule for techs: the more we can reduce the size of the pages on a website, the better the website is for Google to crawl.

So – how do I reduce the size of my pages and my site?

Removing on-page CSS and Javascript and placing them in external files.

Reusing the same style sheet and javascript file will make your site easier to update and also more consistent. This will also reduce the total number of bytes the page contains when Google has to index it. In order to do this, you would need to edit the pages of your site and move the code into a seperate file.

Given the sample below, PennDOT has 87 lines of javascript on their home page. They could copy and paste that code into a file called home-page.js and replace all those lines of code with 1 line.

<script src=”/home-page.js” language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”></script>

For moving CSS, it is the same approach but the code is slightly different. Take a look at the 300+ lines of CSS on the Lancaster County Library website. This can be easily moved to an external style-sheet by copying and pasting that code into a file named home-style.css and replaced with 1 line in the head section as follows:

<link href=”/home-style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />

You’re welcome Google, we just saved you 8KB of bandwidth and 8KB of storage each time you index those two pages!

No-Index duplicate pages with robots.txt

Create a file in the main directory of your website named “robots.txt”. The search engines will read this file each time it crawls your site to see what urls you don’t want included in the index. To determine what urls to exclude, you could do a Google search using “site:yourdomain.com” and look at the results.

If you have a lot of duplicate pages, especially from a dynamically generated script, the results will most likely be displayed at the end of the results. Click to the end of the pages of results, and look for the caption at the end “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X already displayed.”

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. Click on that link and browse through the duplicate results. Once you have determined some urls to exclude you would simply add them to the robots.txt one url per line, as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /url-to-block

The search engine spiders support blocking an entire directory as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory-to-block/

Googlebot specifically supports a wild card feature. So if you would like to block an entire range of urls, say from a web calendar at an address like /calendar-2009.html you could do this as follows:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /calendar-*.html

See if your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP headers

I use a Firefox plugin called Live HTTP Headers so that I can inspect the http server headers. This is a handy troubleshooting tool while testing 301 redirects as well.

In order to use this you would need to be using Firefox, and install the plugin. Go under the tools menu and choose “Live HTTP Headers.” Leave the box open and load your website in the browser.

Several lines of text will go whizzing past. Go the whole way up to the top to look at the original request and response. Note the headers for a page from Wikipedia in the image below. In the first section – “GET /wiki/Google HTTP/1.1″ – is the request that the browser sent to the server. Note the line “If-Modified-Since.” This second section is the response from the server. What we are looking for here is the first line “HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified” and “Last-Modified: Sat, 24 Oct”… This server does support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.

When the Googlebot spiders this page again, it will be able to determine if the current web page is newer then the one already in the Google cache, therefore saving bandwith to download the page and storage space to store duplicate pages.

Is Google finding a way to integrate the tracking of online and offline marketing results?

Many people know that one of the great things about internet marketing is the ease and accuracy with which marketers can track the results of their efforts. With internet marketing, it’s generally not a case of not enough data. It’s more like:

“What in the world do I do with all this data?! What’s relevant for my company?”

But what about businesses that still rely on that antiquated tool – the telephone – to do business? How do you know which marketing activities generate the phone calls? Was it that magazine ad, an internet search, that midtown billboard, or a customer referral? Sure there are ways to track that, but none of them are convenient.

Your trusted, data hungry friends at Google may be working on a solution for at least part of this phone call tracking problem. Using Google Voice, the search engine has begun tracking phone calls that are coming from ALL Google-related internet marketing sources.

Google Voice allows for the creation of a phone number that is not tied to a particular location or phone. Instead, the number is tied to you or your company. The user can also control which phone rings (office, home, mobile, etc.) when someone dials a Google Voice number. A “G-Voice” account is similar to a Gmail account in that it’s portable and more flexible in where, when, and how it can be used.

One of the things that is rumored to be part of Google Voice (which is only available by invitation only at this point) is call tracking. If this is the case, companies would be able to use their Google Voice phone number in various internet marketing mediums to track calls generated from those sources. Two mediums that jump out right away are AdWords Pay-per-click and Google Local Business Center.

Yes, there are PPC management companies that connect sponsored ads to phone numbers. But if Google could provide a way to use that phone number across a variety of online properties, I think it would be quite valuable.

Ease of measuring marketing results is always a good thing in my book.

Get more info about Google Voice from this handy YouTube video.

I have been known when I speak to groups around the country when publicly asked about ranking in Yahoo! to smirk a bit. I have despised Yahoo! for years becuase of their completely unethical practice of having you pay them to be included in their “organic” results. Well, it’s coming to an end, largely because of their deal with Microsoft.

Barry Schwartz broke the news a few days ago and included this from Yahoo! in his post:

We are committing our resources and efforts to our core areas of focus, including improving the search experience and relevancy of our ads to increase user engagement and ROI for advertisers, and as a result, have decided to exit Search Submit. We have stepped up innovation in Search Marketing, recently rolling out search retargeting, Rich Ads in Search and improved matching technology, and in Consumer Search, with enhancements like the new search results page. These enhancements deliver value, control, innovation and relevance to our advertisers, leading to increased ROI.

Yahoo! will exit Search Submit at the end of 2009. Yahoo! is providing those advertisers affected by the decision a sufficient lead time to assist in the transition. In addition, Yahoo! has recently announced a series of important enhancements to its Search advertising business and will work closely with many Search Submit advertisers to provide them with search solutions that will benefit their businesses.

The Take Away

So what does this mean for business owners and marketers? My advice is to begin paying attention to Bing’s results if you’re concerned about engines other than Google. We believe that you’re going to see Bing’s results when you search on Yahoo! in the coming months.

At ProspectMX, we are proud to say that we aren’t just another internet marketing company that can rank websites with no regard for business goals. While sending an increased amount of traffic to a client website is a goal in nearly every campaign we launch, that increase in traffic is worthless if it doesn’t lead to more conversions on a site.

One of our clients recently came to us with a great question after noticing that a keyword was converting on their site while also generating traffic to on more than one webpage:

“Which landing page converts the best on my site for this keyword?”

The video above is a Google Analytics tutorial showing how to find keyword conversion by landing page. Hope you find it helpful. Enjoy!

So why is this Google Analytics tutorial valuable?

Because the information this analytics data provides can dictate which pages should rank for a particular search query in order to maximize conversions.

In the video above, the webpage that is home to our SEO link building chart drives more traffic than our homepage for the search term “SEO link building.” However, when reviewing goal conversion data by keyword, our homepage generates a much higher percentage of web leads and proposal requests for that same keyword.

So, from an search engine rankings perspective, the page hosting the link building chart is considered more relevant for the term “SEO link building” than our homepage. The ProspectMX.com homepage, in contrast, seems to be the better choice for generating conversions for that same keyword.

Based on these findings, it would be my recommendation to the client that the higher converting page should have a stronger presence for the search term. Perhaps a link building campaign and a review of the on-page optimization could done for that page, with the goal of creating an indented search result of the higher converting page underneath the higher ranking, traffic-generating page.

Search result listings that also include indented listings generally acquire a higher percentage of clicks than surrounding results without an indent. In some studies, the no. 2 search result with an indent even gets more click-throughs than the no. 1 search without an indent.

So I am now officially an Adwords Qualified Professional…woohoo! Just took the test this morning, so I figured it would be helpful to put together a quick study guide for anyone considering taking the exam.

Now, I won’t go into too much detail, since I don’t want to piss Google off, but since I was taken off guard by some of the questions, I think it’s only fair I share my opinion of it.
First off, I did study in the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam Learning Center – but I basically did a review of the outline, skimmed the info and only read indepth on topics I felt I needed a little extra help in.

That was a mistake. While I am confident in my ability to use and build Adwords campaigns for our client’s benefits, there are still details of the program I could learn more about, and that certainly came up within the test.

For example, while I am familiar with Adwords’s billing policies, I don’t have the details memorized. I would suggest understanding their billing cycle before you take the test. Actually, my biggest recommendation is to simply study the Learning Center topics and take any example quizzes you can find.

Adwords Qualified Professional Study Guide

But if you’re like me, and your experience is more with the actual management and optimization of campaigns, here’s a particular list of subjects you may want to work on:

1. Billing details, such as the billing cycle, where to go to change preferences, etc.
2. The tabs/navigation of the Adwords interface and what each section includes.
3. The pros and cons of the different keyword match types
4. Editorial and policy guidelines for trademarks, ad formats, etc.
5. Different ways of “targeting” your campaign
6. The difference between Search Network and Content Network, and their individual policies. (Hint: Look into any difference in rules or approval policies in the Google Search Network between Google search results pages and the search results pages of other properties within the search network).

I think that’s enough for now – if I give too much away, Google might revoke my Google Adwords Qualified Professional status and I worked too dang hard to give up my pretty logo now!

Speaking of which, apparently it takes 1-3 days for the passed exam to show up in your Company profile. Guess I’ll just have to be patient.

We find, more often then not, that the people who develop business websites and web applications do not understand the basic principals of search engine optimization. Even if they do understand, they may not care, or may not find it to be an important enough part of the project, deciding to just worry about it later.

It is much easier to consider these tactics during the process of the project rather then trying to modify it after the fact. For all the tech’s out there, I’d like to offer my 3 golden rules of SEO:

1. Do right to Google, and Google will do right to you.
2. If you try to trick the search engines, it may work today. But eventually, you will be penalized.
3. You don’t have to do everything right. Just do more right than your competition.

What do these golden rules actually mean?

Do right to Google, and Google will do right to you.

“Do right to Google” means several things. It means to follow their best practices. Think about what Google’s goal is – they want to provide their users with an efficient way to find the information they are looking for. In order to do that, they have created an algorithm to rank sites in order of which they feel is the most likely internet result to answer the user has queried. Most of the scoring techniques are secret, but the goal is not.

So think about it this way – anything we can do during site development to help Google do their job, is extra points for the site. See the Google Webmaster Tools site for more information.

If you try to trick the search engines, it may work today. But eventually, you will be penalized.

Even though rule number two simply states the opposite as number one, it still is important in its’ own right. If we are doing everything right to Google, we shouldn’t be doing anything wrong, right? Sometimes SEOs will employ methods to optimize their site to unnaturally inflate their rankings. Using these techniques are considered “Black Hat” or “Grey Hat.”

The entire premise of rule no. 2 is that we don’t want to do anything that appears like we are trying to trick the search engines. If so, you may not get caught today or tomorrow. But one day, maybe your site will have points taken away… therefore dropping your ranking.

You don’t have to do everything right. Just do everything more right than your competition.

Last but not least, you don’t have to do everything right. Just make sure you’re doing more things right than your competition. It makes sense… perfect sense.

Just like winning a race, a football game or the even the World Series. In all of those examples, the winners can still make all sorts of mistakes, and still end up winning. They just need to do better then the competition.

So fear not, developers of the world. You don’t have to become an expert overnight. Just take these three solid rules into account while working on your next project.

If there’s one thing that most designers will tell you is important when designing a page, it’s that all of the important content should be “above the fold.”  It’s a common practice that dates back to when humans read something called “newspapers.”

These archaic gray monstrosities were often printed on thin paper and folded right in the middle.  Therefore, it was standard practice to put the most important content “above the fold.”

The difficult thing about designing above the fold on the internet is… well, we never know exactly where the fold is!  Nevermind the fact that most people use a variety of screen resolutions, ranging from the dreadful 800 x 600 up to the glorious 2560 x 1600. On top of that, people also can have an unknown variable of toolbars.  Currently, I have 3 toolbars on my 1680 x 1050 monitor, cutting out about 85 pixels from the top of my browser.

So what can a designer do?  Typically, the thought is to design a page for the least common denominator, assuming that your average viewer will be looking at your page on their grandmother’s 13in. CRT display.  This means putting all the stuff you deem as important up at the top and all the rest slapped down at the bottom.  The obvious problem to this is that it will look weird on regular monitors.

So what can you do?

First, you can take a look at your site statistics and figure out what percentage of users are looking at your page with various resolutions. If no one is looking at your site at 800 x 600, don’t worry about designing for them!

Second, you can determine which parts you absolutely want above the fold, like a call-to-action form, and place that higher up on the page. Then you don’t have to worry about whether or not you have an H1 and an H2 above the fold.

Third, and most importantly, you can ignore the problem altogether and read this interesting article about whether or not “designing above the fold” is worth the effort. The article comes with heatmaps and actual user testing.

Read this article…it’s worth your time.

I highly suggest reading this article and making your own opinion.  The most important thing that I took away from it is that your site should have enough important, relevant content on the page that makes me actually want to scroll down the page.

Imagine that?  People will scroll down the page if there’s interesting content!

It sounds so simple, but I think it’s a concept that most people forget.  If you have interesting and relevant content on your page – information that people are actually looking for – it won’t be a chore for them to read it.

Then, your content will be digested by more people and visitors to your site will stay longer, improving your bounce rate. That will help the overall ranking of your site.

So as a designer, this is an exciting revelation. Great content makes or breaks a page, not the designer!  Well, I’m off to forward this article to our copywriter.  The burden is all on you from now on, Ashley!  Guess I’m off to lunch now.

When it comes to my Twittering, I like to kick it old school.

While the rest of you tweet using your fancy iPhones, your massive TweetDecks, or your mini Twhirl’s and TwitterFox’s, I use the original method – “from web.” I realize this totally makes me a dinosaur, but I don’t care.

Anyway, for marketers, bloggers, and PR folks, one of the biggest benefits of using the actual Twitter website is the ability to be able to watch and respond to trending topics. Twitter always provides the 10 hottest topics people are tweeting about on the site in real time, in the right sidebar. The same topics are also listed right underneath the search box on the homepage of the site.

Over the last few months, many of the world’s biggest news stories and popular entertainment topics have come and gone from the rankings of Twitter Trends – District 9, Snow Leopard, and the Iran election to name a few. But over the last month, one particular trending topic has outlasted them all, and the subject may surprise you.

Jay-Z.

Jay-Z’s Tremendous Twitter Trending

During the month of September, Jay-Z seemed to be a trending topic on Twitter literally EVERYDAY. His reign as a trending topic began on June 5 when his single “Death Of Autotune” was released. An admitted Jay-Z fan, I was quite surprised to see my favorite rapper trending on my favorite microblog in June.

Jigga (never thought I would use the word “Jigga” in something I wrote at work) then showed up maybe once or twice during most of July and August as the single “Run This Town” and its video were released. Then his album leaked on August 31…

and then Rhapsody announced a Jay-Z twitter contest on September 2…
and then Roc Nation started a Jay-Z themed hashtag game on Sept. 9…
and then the Blueprint 3 was finally released on Sept. 11…

and people STILL continued to tweet about him through Sept. 24, when Jay-Z was on Oprah.

And through all of that time, Jay-Z remained one of the hottest topics on Twitter. Not the no. 1 topic, mind you, although he did wear the crown at some point on September 11. He did, however, remain enough of a topic to stay trending in the top 10. By the time his album hit stores, I had grown tired of seeing Jay in the list of Twitter trends… and I wasn’t alone.

In total, Jay-Z was a trending topic on Twitter 23 days between June 5 and the end of September, according to TweetStats.com (see photo above). Since September 24 of last year, that amount of time as a trending topic on Twitter puts Jay in the same company as Sarah Palin and Xmas, and only 3-days behind Michael Jackson.

Analysis Of Jay-Z’s Social Media Marketing Campaign

So, after all that attention on Twitter, did social media marketing mean big business for Jay-Z and the Blueprint 3? Sales figures seem to point to a resounding yes.

Despite the web leak 10 days in advance, the Blueprint 3 debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 and sold around 820,000 copies in its first two weeks of release. Only one album in 2009 has sold more copies through its first two weeks of release than the Blueprint 3 – Eminem’s Relapse.

On top of those totals, multiple Jay-Z tracks ranked in the top 10 digital downloads following the release of the Blueprint, and the song “Run This Town” peaked as high as no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Did Jay-Z over saturate the Twitterverse as part of marketing for the Blueprint 3? Yes. Did the social media blitz pay off?

Yes.

To date, the Blueprint 3 has likely exceeded 1 million units sold in less than one month of release. In today’s music industry where traditional sales are far exceeded by downloads of the legal and illegal type, that total seems remarkable. The album should be considered a certified smash.

The amount of money Atlantic Records and Roc Nation were able to put behind the Blueprint 3 typically far exceeds the budgets many companies have to devote to strategic internet marketing.

However, the amount of buzz Twitter generated for Jay-Z and the Blueprint 3 is just the latest example of how social media can pay big dividends on the bottom line.

So, for those of you who still think social media marketing doesn’t apply to your business, I have to ask – why?

And also… can you really afford not to give it a try?