Thanks for the birthday present, Google. Feeling more patriotic on Canada Day I went to Google.ca to see what Google’s Canada Day logo looks like and something just felt a little different.

You may have noticed the absence of the “pages from Canada” radio button. Fear not, it has found a new home in the left navigation – after a search query has been input. There is hardly any information regarding this alteration, however it fits in nicely with Google’s recent user interface changes, which were being beta tested back in April. Having gone through posts on the Google Help Forum, similar questions arose from our neighbours across the pond surrounding the absence of the “search within UK”.

If you’re on Google.com you will need to click on “More search tools” and then “Nearby”, which seems to look at your specific location by IP, not just Canada wide, like on Google.ca.

Happy searching and Happy Canada Day!

A recent study may take more of the guess work out of keyphrase selection for SEO purposes. Consider the result from a study conducted by Chitika, an online advertising agency. The company recorded 41,103,579 impressions of organic search traffic coming to their site. 26% of this search traffic came from 3 word searches, 2 word searches lead to 19% traffic,  4 word searches had17% and lastly 1 word searches came in with 14% traffic.

As for pay per click, searches with 4, 5, and 6 long tail keywords were most likely to convert into revenue.

It is no real surprise to Internet marketers who analyze website analytics that people are using more keyphrases in their initial searches to narrow down the results, however, the interesting fact is the magic number of three.  Algorithm advancements of the search engines and the savyness of web users from the early days of the web when searchers would us one or maybe two keywords, have contributed to this changing trend.

Looking forward one may consider the number of keyphrases to continue to increase or perhaps people’s patterns will change to the use of sentences instead.  There have been many new question-type search engines that have come on the market,  Recently one formed by two early Facebook Inc. engineers call Quora allows people to pose or answer questions.

This is not a new idea, but the timing may be just right considering the changes in user behaviour.

Internet marketers will need to keep a close eye on their website analytics to monitor these trends and consider getting in early on the benefits of these question – answer based website services.

Internet marketing is an ever changing environment; a maelstrom of tools and products creating new opportunities. Being successful in your Internet marketing endeavours requires vigilant implementation of industry best practices and constant attention to industry trends.

Our adventures at SMX Advanced Seattle and SES Toronto brought us in touch with several industry trends that will inevitably affect entrepreneurial Internet marketing practices. New and interesting opportunities have materialized for branding your products, attracting new visitors, and encouraging conversions in online sales.

With the introduction of Google’s May Day and Caffeine search engine updates, as well as all sorts of digital media assets in the search engine results pages and real-time search, the Internet marketing game is changing. Thankfully, though, the fundamentals are still essentially the same.

What does this mean for you? It means links are still important, it means your regular SEO and PPC efforts should continue as always; however, it also means the introduction of some new efforts.

Social Media & Search – Where They Meet

Listening first hand to Google representative Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, revealed tidbits of information with massive implications. In truth, you only hear what Google wants you to hear at an event like SES, nevertheless these were valuable gleanings.

Traditionally, Google uses the Internet’s “link graph” to determine site authority and select appropriate pages for promotion to first page, first position search engine results, second place, etc. Using its plethora of search algorithms, Google determines what is relevant and what’s not, based on user queries.

As of late, however, the influx of social media and personalized results has changed the perspective on what a relevant query is to an individual user. Geo-location, user expertise, and most importantly what and whom the user is connected to, does and should affect what rankings appear for their search terms. A 45 year old mother of three, and a 14 year old male in Toronto shouldn’t get the same results for “nice shoes Toronto.” They are looking for different things. (Of course user queries can be more complex, and better examples exist – but you get the point.)

Social Search

Social media, like the traditional linking graph, operates on connections. Social search will look at social connections on the Internet, your “likes” and dislikes, and who your friends are, to determine search result relevancy.

Facebook is a massive social graph, and Google is as well. Subscribing to something in your Google reader or following people on Google Buzz are examples of things that Google will be taking from your social connections in order to personalize your search – a step that promises massive opportunities in the future. Google is still thinking about serendipity and quality and as such, they want to limit the idea to direct connections. Have no doubt though, social search is next.

Recently many entrepreneurs have been asking, “is Social Media Marketing worth business time?” As a business owner, if you are not involved in social media at the moment, it would be a good time to begin investigating an effective way to interact with your customers in that realm. Twitter accounts will work, as will blogs. The most important metric will remain the same though – bringing traffic through to your website. In short, social networks with proper use will not only drive traffic but in the future will also be considered by major search engines in ranking algorithms. So start building your Social Networking profiles, as their history may be considered as a ranking factor as well.

Site Speed & Site Architecture

When Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) introduced site performance as part of their Labs section, we knew something was up. Well the word is out; users are happier and more engaged with faster sites. Increased site speed means increased conversions, and to Google, happy users and good business is important.

Ranking algorithms do, and will continue to take site load speed into consideration when determining ranking position. This is why in GWT you can view “Page Speed Suggestions,” and even have access to a browser application called “Page Speed”, available for download on Firefox. Suggestions like enabling Gzip compression and combining external JavaScript, are provided to reduce server requests on page loading.

Though this is slightly more technical than we would normally address, here is a detailed list of things you can discuss with your web developer when looking at improving page speed and site architecture (care of our resident Website Architect Guru, Ezra Silverton):

1. global CSS + others when in need of files –use this instead of images when possible E.g. gradient, drop shadows (CSS3)
2. Using a Global JavaScript (.js) file
3. Optimize image for web (max. 50k / image)
4. Use CSS Sprites, where possible, minimize HTTP requests
5. Server‐side caching
6. Minimize number of page layouts, use Includes for common content e.g. Header & Footer

By using these techniques to build a faster and smoother website, you will be of benefit to both your visitors and to Google, which means of course better business and even more of it.

User Generated Content & Google’s Caffeine and May Day Updates

The end-user oriented milieus of these trends are wafted by Google’s desire to provide gripping content to its user-base in order to increase user engagement. Hence the Caffeine and May Day updates. Google’s ranking algorithms for determining search engine ranking pages (SERPs) are continually updated in order to improve user experience. These two updates, in particular, help us understand Google’s motivation in cleaning up its ranking pages, and more specifically how the future trends of Internet marketing are tied to these improvements. While the Caffeine update was an internal infrastructure adjustment which did change SERPs, it was done in an effort to speed up the process by which the Google index could be updated a single document at a time. This in turn allowed data centers to update up to 50% quicker and provided more scalability for the search giant. This change has resulted in quicker ranking updates, allowing you to improve your positioning in SERPs as soon as your site has been re-crawled.

May Day, implemented on April 28th 2010, is a rolling update that was introduced to eliminate spam. Long tail search queries (search terms with four or more words e.g. “no fat fettuccini alfredo and tomoto recipe” vs. “alfredo recipe” ) were allowing webmasters to create less than satisfactory content, and face sparse competition in attracting visitors, which obviously degraded the user experience. With May Day, long tail search queries are considered equal in value to “head queries”, meaning that they will endure the same algorithmic rigours as their more competitive and shorter counterparts.

All of this was done on the premise that “content is king,” says Maile Ohye. It is becoming clear that one more way that Google will be able to tell how authoritative your site is about its topic, will be the level of user engagement on your website. This move comes in the form of evaluating a site’s quality and relevancy based on speed, social reach, and engagement. And what better way to measure engagement than looking at user generated content around your site’s topic(s)?

Allowing user responses to your content in the form of blog commenting, forum creation, video submissions, re-tweets, and RSS subscriptions will help encourage your users to engage with your content, and further indicate to Google that your site is relevant. Not to mention that it provides further value to your site visitors. Opening up your content to allow these sorts of interactions is a necessary first step. If you haven’t already considered adding these features to your website, or would like to consult web development professionals to find out what functionality is right for your business, contact us about Social Media Marketing.

The Long and Short (Tail) of It

Social media interactions/reach, site speed, and user engagement, will all likely play larger roles in SERPs of the near future. Yet the biggest concern is, and always will be content, especially where Google is concerned. At the end of the day, it is the quick and accurate results they provide that have made them successful.

Satisfy your user-base with engaging content and couple it with a fast website that provides avenues for user interaction. While the fundamentals remain solidly intact and important, accessibility is gaining in relevance, and having content that users want to read, respond to, question, and/or buy – this is the elemental key to web success.

This article was developed with the never-ending help and guidance of Lead Internet Marketer, Max Trunov, and 9th sphere’s founder Ezra Silverton.

Social networking has many convenient uses, from accommodating social pleasantries to assisting with community participation. Social network websites allow users to share ideas, comments, and thoughts, connect with like minded people, and keep in contact with friends and family.  On a personal and professional growth level, social networking can provide great benefits for elevating your career. As an ultimate source for networking, Social Media Marketing (SMM) puts you in touch with other experts in your field to discuss ideas, challenges, and solutions and really help you build your reputation.

One popular way in which companies market themselves through social networking sites is by generating goodwill in support of a community or cause. Prospecting, sales and technical support are other common business objectives for social networking.

So as a business owner, how do you determine if social networking is a worthwhile pursuit for your company, and how much time should you spend on it?  As always before taking any major initiative you should reference your company goals and objectives. See if SMM falls under the criteria you’ve set out. If so, then look to your target audience and determine which social networking sites are most popular with your demographic.  If your audience is mainly senior citizens who are not Internet savvy, marketing with Twitter may not be your strategy.

If it turns out that SMM is not for you or your business just don’t do it.  There’s nothing wrong with passing up on the trend. Do however keep social media marketing on the back burner for the future. It might not be right for your company today but it may be worth evaluating again.

If social networking makes sense for your company today, the next step is to determine which sites to join and how much time to dedicate to keeping them current.  Look to see how often others post comments on your choice of social networking sites and compare if you have this kind of time to dedicate to maintaining one social website, many, or none. For the sake of your valuable time and resources it’s important to take the time to research the right social website(s) for you. Note that having a fan page on Facebook for instance, where comments are not responded to for weeks can do more harm than good.  On the other hand, posting a few comments and expecting immediate results is just not realistic, it takes continued contributions and patience.

Don’t forget to track and monitor things like the traffic from different website sources, number of followers, members, and comments over a period of time. These will  help to determine the value of your endeavours.  Mind you, some efforts will be harder to evaluate than others and you may very well not see a direct correlation between the time spent on social networking and incoming sales. However social media networking has so many other benefits, as stated earlier, you are sure to find it a worthwhile task.

Overall have fun engaging with your customers, followers, and supporters or even non-supporters.  SMM can be a very powerful medium that will continue to be interwoven into our marketing mix.

Feb 2009:

• Yahoo Enables Video and Other Rich Media in Search Ads

March 2009:

• Canada’s first street view provided by joint effort between British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack
• New version of Internet Explorer version 8 released

April 2009:

• Oracle buys Sun

June 2009:

• Microsoft launches Bing, a rebranding of Microsoft’s search engine, Live

June 2009:

• Rogers launched Google’s new mobile operating system – Android – in two HTC phones

July 2009:

• Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Takes on Facebook regarding its non-compliance with Canada’s privacy act – PIPEDA

July 2009:

• 9th sphere launches REF:CODE Analytics, a new way to track phone calls that are referred to from a website

August 2009:

• Yahoo announces new versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Search

September 2009:

• Google launches Google Wave, their vision of next level of email communication
• Century 21 sues Rogers’s Zoocasa for “scraping” property data from the Century 21 website
• Skype available to Canadian iPhone users

October 2009:

• Yahoo shuts down GeoCities servers, the well known free website hosting service
• Windows 7 released
• Google’s Street View launched in Canada (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and Vancouver) – second available street view
• One Degree stops production of its Canadian focused Internet marketing blog

November 2009:

• Amazon’s Kindle, a platform for reading electronic books, comes to Canada
• The Canada Revenue Agency expands investigation of eBay power sellers and GST collection

December 2009:

• Canadians reported as top users of social networking sites in the world, according to a new survey
• Microsoft loses appeal on an August district court decision that awarded i4i Inc. (Toronto based software company) $200 million and an injunction on selling Word in its current form

Looking back, 2009 saw the expansion of numerous US based products and services into the Canadian market. On our front, we’ve seen fewer Canadian innovations and more legal battles spotlighting the social and ethical parameters of the web.  The Internet continues to make more headways into our daily lives, both personally and professionally.  Remember, the web is still very young, but growing at an accelerated rate.  2010 has the momentum to bring the web to its next level, as we foresee companies continuing to push the envelope. Or should I say the processor.

As an Internet Marketer for a web design and development firm, one of our main objectives is to use different analytics to monitor the amount of users visiting the websites from all three search engines.

Before MSN put Bing on the Internet, Bing used to be called Live. Prior to that, it was known as MSN Search. Even though it ranked third among all the search engines, not a lot of people were using it for their research. Needless to say, advertisers weren’t getting the traffic they needed for their businesses.

Before Google claimed the number one spot, Yahoo was king.  At one point Yahoo had a deal to use Google’s search technology to generate Yahoo’s organized search results.

Why the history lesson on something so widely known? Well, all I have to say is look out Yahoo! Ever since MSN revamped their search engine and renamed it  Bing, which many say was just a re-branding of Live, the traffic has increased. From the day MSN made Bing live, till the day you read this blog, Bing has been catching up to Yahoo. That’s right, rub your eyes and believe it. Below are actual graphs taken from Google Analytics that compare the difference between MSN Search, Bing, and Yahoo. For privacy purposes to our clients, I will not name the companies that these graphs belong to.

Company A:

Company B:

Company C:

Company D:

Looking at the charts above; the orange line is the MSN organic search, green line is Bing, yellow is Yahoo, and blue is all non-paid search engine traffic excluding Google. At the beginning of the year, MSN is located close to the bottom of the chart until it hit May. This was when MSN changed to Bing. Once Bing became live, you can see how the line on the graphs passes MSN and in some graphs pass even Yahoo, or at least gets really close to it.

So what about Bing? Well, it looks like MSN finally figured out how to get users to research stuff on their search engine. This means that Internet advertisers, business owners, and affiliate marketers should consider dedicating more time for optimizing their websites for Bing.

As of December 7^th, Yahoo and Microsoft finalized a deal to use Bing to power Yahoo’s organic search results for the next 10 years. Yahoo in turn will be providing premium search-advertising services for both companies in July.  Microsoft has also been signing exclusivity deals with major website properties like Twitter to allow only Microsoft to crawl and display Twitter’s content within Microsoft’s search results.

Who knows, if Microsoft keeps up their efforts and if history tells us something, some day soon you may get the same amount of traffic from Bing as from Google or even more.

Hundreds of emails a day find their way to the inboxes of business executives and decision makers. Unfortunately this could mean that your notice or marketing offer may be of minimal interest. Without a sound game plan, the fate of your marketing endeavor may be short lived. Your email may get deleted because the sender is not recognized or the subject line isn’t enticing enough. Bypassing that, your email may just get re-filed for future review but then may run the risk of invalidating a time sensitive offer.

To ensure that your marketing communications receives its due attention, we suggest  first sending out the email campaign to just a portion of your contact list. With a variety of samples deployed, you can test the effectiveness of different offers and subject lines, and determine the best email open rates.  The minimum size sampled should be 30 contacts. Also, according to a eMarketer study, Wednesday’s have statistically shown a better open rate among businesses.  It’s best to allot at least 5 days for the testing of your various sample subject lines. Once you’ve determined your most impactful heading, deploy your email to the rest of your contact list.  Be sure to keep monitoring the open and click-through rates.  After 5 days, go through the list and separate the bounced and un-opened emails.  This will now be your physical mailing list.  Yes, I do mean mail as in the old, traditional form of messaging. You can also include in the mailing list those who opened the email but didn’t click onto any of the links. Alternatively, you can send either a follow-up or another offer to them via email or snail mail. Note that returned mail should be removed from your mailing list so that future efforts are note wasted.

Though this approach introduces a few more steps to your email marketing, the tactic takes advantage of both email and snail mail. Most importantly, the deployment testing process and using email in this way ensures a more efficient way to get maximum impact for your marketing communication efforts.

Updating your online logo for this purpose is a clear and immediate indication that your website is current. Minor modifications of a festive nature can add a touch of cheer to your brand, revealing a more human side to your business.  Logo updates are easy to implement and can always be recycled seasonally.

It’s important to note that we don’t recommend making drastic changes to your logo design. Revising your brand completely and without reason is risky. You don’t want to confuse a previous visitor, or obliterate the message your logo’s initial design means to convey.  We suggest just a subtle update. One that complements the existing logo while acknowledging a given holiday or special date.

Changing colours or incorporating a symbolic motif should do the trick.  Clean and simple is the key.  Adding snowflakes for the winter holidays for instance, is a nice detail. It helps you and your consumer to get into the spirit of the holiday while maintaining the integrity of your brand.

Don’t be afraid to show your visitors the lighter side to your business.  Adding an appropriate and clever design element to your logo will not go unnoticed. Your visitors will not only appreciate your good nature but will recognize that you care to keep them current by making periodic updates to your website.

Altering your corporate logo design for the holidays is a nice touch and an easy way to get some positive attention for your website.

It’s a shame that there was not enough demand for a Canadian focused Internet marketing blog to generate enough income to make their contributions worth the effort.  One Degree offered unique perspectives, news, event listings, and job postings.  We often referenced the site for ideas and contributed comments to the community.

We often too question the return versus the time in takes to write, edit, and support a blog like ours.  Although our blog is supported by 9th sphere, like many other corporate blogs, One Degree was more of a neutral voice from many different marketing experts.  The fortunate thing is that we have other supporting revenue streams that other bloggers may not have.

Supporting a blog on just the advertising, event and job posting revenue itself is not an easy thing to do and requires a large traffic stream to generate enough revenue to make it worth it.

One Degree contributed many great articles on Internet Marketing from a Canadian perspective.  A destination that was respected by myself and among my peers.  One that will be truly missed.

What’s more, even our clients whom we ask for reference of their industry publications can’t seem to name many. The reply we generally hear is, “I don’t remember which website, but I get it from my “x” reader.”  If you take a closer look at RSS or other types of feeds that push news items, many tend to hide or diminish the focus of the brand.

I use an RSS reader on my desktop and Google Reader on my phone.  In both instances, the publisher’s reference is in small text and seldom highlighted.  In the days before the web, the medium was also part of the branding. For instance, with Canadian newspapers, and there are only a few major ones, the style, paper, formatting, etc., all correlate to the brand. You knew what paper you’re reading without glancing at the headline. However, when it comes to the webs feeds, the branding is barely given any regard, while the tactile sense is completely absent from this equation.  For myself, I tend to only take a closer look at the publisher or writer when I need to cite or conduct more research.

I believe it’s important that the publisher of a news publication, blog, or website be adequately identified and remembered. To accomplish this, I would suggest that both the Feed Readers and publishers work on giving more focus to the publisher’s logo and name. It may become necessary to include the publisher’s name along with the writer within the article as a way of reminding the reader which online publisher they are reading.

Here’s to hoping that more people know where they get their online news from!