Posts Tagged ‘Spam’

Local Search Marketing Tactics

This session looked at search marketing tactics that can help companies tap into the ever-elusive local market. Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch, Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch and Matt Van Wagner from Find Me Faster presented their thoughts and ideas on how to tap into the local search market. I found a couple useful ideas from this session. First, the speakers noted many local search engines:

• Dex
• Yahoo! Local
• Ask City
• Google Local
• Citysearch
• Superpages
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp
• Insider Pages
• MojoPages

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Social Media Track, Thursday 9:00 – 10:15 AM
SMO: Social Media Optimization

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl
Neil Patel, Co-Founder, ACS
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

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Industry Track, Wednesday 4:45 – 6:00 PM
The SEO Reputation Problem

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP of Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget
Shari Thurow, SEO, Omni Marketing Ineractive
Kristopher B. Jones, Pepperjam Search
Jonathan Hochman, Hochman Consultants
Kathleen Feely, SEMPO
Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief, Search Engine Guide

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Wow – Day 2 was really a good day – lots of interesting stuff. I’m writing my post at the reasonable hour of 8am today rather than 1am as the day before. Stoney’s lifted the pressure and said I didn’t have to post last night when we got back from the Google Dance.

I went to sessions on Ad Testing Research & Findings, Converting Visitors into Buyers, Creating Compelling Ads and Landing Page Testing & Tuning. Of the 4, I think the last one of the day, Landing Page Testing & Tuning had the most useful information for me. I’ll briefly sum up the topics and share the golden nugget that I took away from each session.

Ad Testing: Research & Findings
Five different speakers presented for this one and everyone did pretty good at not repeating what anyone else had to say. Anton Konikoff pressed home the reason for ad testing is to improve conversions for the client. Nico Brooks introduced a term “Route Knowledge” which demonstrates/indicates how people go the same direction to get to the same place. Jonathan Mendez, who I heard on Monday, spoke of the importance of designing your test to answer one single question. Gord Hotchkiss stressed the importance of looking to the future when testing, asking “What’s next?” Finally, we heard from Clay Bavor of Google who suggested we all step back and look at the KEYWORDS, stressing that it is the user experience in which we must be most interested.

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The content of your website is your #1 sales tool. Pictures, tools, and other fun stuff can be important in making your site visibly and functionally appealing, but it is the content that sells. Well written and user focused content allows your visitors to “find out” more about your products and services, as well as how your company will be able to meet their needs.

Content weighs heavily both in terms of how users interact with your website as well as how visitors (both human and search spiders) are able to determine what you offer and what each page of your website is about. While solidly optimized content is important for search engine rankings, considering the usability of your content is of paramount importance for attaining good conversion rates.

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Perusing through my Google alerts this morning I found a blog post of mine that wasn’t really mine. But it was.

Someone took one of my articles and re-translated it through their automated spam-text creator. I’m sure you’ve all seen something like this a dozen or more times but it made me laugh out loud. The original article is here, and below is what I like to call the Web 2.no version. I’ll refrain from linking to the spam blog, even with a link condom. No sense sending them traffic!

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Some of our readers may not know about our super-cool CodeMonitor tool that allows users to monitor web pages for text and coding changes on a day to day basis. We use this tool for all our client pages that we work on plus any competitors and other information based sources that we want to be notified about whenever a change occurs.

The tool is still in beta mode which means, among many other things, we still screw up. And boy, did we screw up big time today. We are in the process of purging our database to get rid of unused accounts that have been set up and abandoned. Here is the email we attempted to send out:

Code Monitor: Policy Change Notice

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I’m fascinated by the way Digg works, specifically the whole idea of burying article. What are the reasons Diggers bury articles? Well, according to Digg they are:

1. Duplicate Story
2. Spam
3. Wrong topic
4. Inaccurate
5. OK, this is lame

Let’s take these one at a time:

Duplicate story: Reasonable enough. If the story is a dupe of another recently dugg article then there is cause for it to be buried. Better, though is for Digg admins to verify if a story is duplicate and simply remove it. End of story.

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Would you want to be part of a business network that has to lie to you to get you to join? Me neither. There is no worse way to try to gain legitimacy than to attempt to gain subscribers through illegitimate methods. I recently received an email from a company attempting to do just that. Below is a screenshot of the email I received from a business networking service similar to Linkedin.

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Just wanted to drop some quick stats that I ran across in an article featured on New Scientist about the shocking volume of spam that is perpetuated on the Net.

• As much as 91% of all email is now spam. – Postini, November 2006
• Daily spam volume is up by 120% over last 12 months. – Postini, November 2006
• In October 2006, image spam accounted for 25% of all spam. – IronPort Systems, October 2006

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