It a sad commentary on what we value in society when Britney Spears’ hospital stay is the front page story over a little thing like the INTERNET going down for part of the world…
I came across this post in Danny Sullivan post in Search Engine Land today. It points out that Yahoo! is testing out Del.icio.us (Social bookmarking site) data being integrated into search engine results. Basically for search results it will list how many people have bookmarked the site and the tags associated with it.
The posting points out that Yahoo! will not factor in Del.icio.us data into it’s page rank calculations (as of now). You have to imagine that if people believe that pages are more valuable a la bookmarking then one could argue that it should be factored in to page rank. It’ll be interesting to see how much more integration there might be with Del.icio.us or other bookmarking sites in the future. Google already has a “note this” link which can bookmark specific results into your own notebook. I can imagine Yahoo! allowing the ability to bookmark directly to Del.icio.us, the ability add tags to page results, or the ability to select specific results to share with other people.
Web analytics is definitely an important part of Internet Marketing. Having tangible data to see trends, set goals, and measure impact of changes is vital to success. It can lend to much insight into what does and doesn’t work and can shift your overall thinking and strategy.
Vitally important is knowing what each specific metric means and how it gets calculated. One metric that I look at on a regular basis is Time on Page and Time on Site. They measure how long a visitor is engaged on your site. The convential thinking is the more time that is spent on a specific page or site as a whole, the better. I came across a great summary by Avinash Kausisk, a Google Analytics Evangelist that really explains how Time on Page and Time on Site are calculated. It’s a little bit different that I had originally thought and he dives deep into how opening links in tabs can affect the calculations. Interesting stuff.
I came across an article today called “Search Marketing: A Rewarding Career Path ” on Search Engine Watch today. It basically was discussing the results of a new survey of in-house SEMs conducted by SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization . Some very interesting facts from the article:
Some very interesting numbers and figures, especially considering that SEM is a relatively new field of marketing. Simple supply and demand theory implies that salaries should be decent for both inexperienced and experienced hires. How many graduating college students have degrees or concentrations in Internet Marketing? Yes, exactly.
Of course, in the next 3-5 years this will obviously change. I recently took an Internet Marketing class as part of my MBA curriculum at USC Marshall. A few years ago it was an experimental class; today its a regularly listed elective. We all should expect more colleges and universities to offer courses like this. It’s hard to deny the fact that the Internet is an important channel for any marketer to get a grasp on. It will definitely be a competitive advantage going forward for any company and individual who gets it.
Part of my daily news reading for the morning, I came across this interesting article, Top 5 SEO and Link Building Challenges for 2008, by Justilien Gaspard of Search Engine Watch. Paraphrasing, Justilien identifies his top trends and challenges that SEOs, link builders and webmasters will face in 2008:
I’ve been working on a couple pet projects and can attest that link building is extremely difficult. Not only is it time consuming but the hit rate can be also demoralizing. Perhaps it is the trend that webmasters are scared to link out or the fact (as the article points out) that most people’s lives don’t revolve around search engines. I can see the value that Google places on these hard earned links. In my opinion, link building is like having great content on your website - it’s something that takes time and effort to build up, something where shortcuts do not tend to be effective, and something that must be a focal point for your ongoing strategy.
