Full Transcript:

Benjamin Higginbotham: Different types of services you can buy from an SEO - Snake Oil? Apple TV search optimization, sitemaps auto discovery change, the Digg effect click through rates, why did Google change their ad format? And Google adds picon support all that coming up on today’s search Thursday Technology Evangelist Podcast for April 12^th, 2007. It just feels like we have to have music right there and we will work on something, we could just go like just grab some podsafe music and slap in there, but I got once of this uniquely us, something pretty cool. Ed, start us off, by the way Ed Kohler is here with me right in front of me, because position matters and we are going to talk first about the different types of services you can buy from a search engine optimizer.

Ed Kohler: SEO for short. One of our listeners sent in an email with a couple of questions for us and we got to a couple of them last week and we thought we would go after one more in this week, that is what you can actually buy from a search engine optimizer?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Other than Snake Oil?

Ed Kohler: Snake Oil is certainly something you can buy from a lot of search engine optimizers, unfortunately there a dark side of the industry, but there are lot of legitimate services that they offers well, so part of the trick they has to figure out which one’s are providing real services and which one is providing Snake Oil, but assuming you get beyond that. I guess your first step in whole process, so one of the complaints was, a lot of search engine optimizers are selling really large retainers where you are paying a large monthly feed to them and it is not clear what you are getting out of that and also it can be extraordinarily expensive, depending on who you go with on that? so, I think a good way to get a feel for a what search engine optimizer can do is to buy an audit from them, where you basically having them sit down and take a look at your website and then put together a laundry list of all the things that they were suggesting make all the changes they suggested to make the site. That alone could be all you need, if you are a fairly technical person or you have a web development team or copy writers on staff, instead of needing to hire the search engine optimizer to actually implement the changes. All you need to know is some professional advice on what it is that you need to do? That’s something, I tell you things that you should make it, changes you should make to your blog and you implement them, you don’t need me to go in there and do that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, I don’t. that’s absolutely correct, yeah.

Ed Kohler: So, that’s a pretty valuable thing, but there are something that even after you are told what to do you might either not have the time to do or not really have the skills to implement in-house, so that’s where a lot of the retainers come from is taking things up and notch there, so like link building would be one of those things where everyone knows that, if they have more links to their website their site is going to rank higher, but finding the time to actually do link building, that’s something that falls that way side a lot.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And it is boring.

Ed Kohler: It is boring. It is eyeball, drying and boring, but if you outsource it, now you have someone who is responsible for that and so there is more accountability built into it and if you are working with professional they are also not going to risk your business by doing any of things spaming, when trying to build links to your website, because that something you certainly don’t what to have happen.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Sure, we able to get a pretty good feel for how good or bad? How close to that? white or black art of SEO they are going to be working with when they are out of your website and if they come back saying, “you should have a list of all these shared links, this link sharing thing”, if they say things like that, you can probably throw up a big old red flag and go “thank you for your time, run along now”.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, if they are making completely, outrageous claims like that they can guarantee you a top 10 position in Google and under a month or something like very competitive search term, well that’s just not the way search works. So, there is a time and process to it and so if you are in the business of building a brand and having a strong online identity you certainly don’t want to use tactics that could in anyway threaten that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, TalkShoe seems to think that the best way to get search results is to tag your website with hot asian porno and that will start driving a lot of traffic to you.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, for sure. So, do a lot of links swaps with PPC…pills, porno and casino type of sites and see how well that works for ya.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, good SEO, what they are going to do is, they are going to get you a lot of links after the fact,they are going to give you a list of stuff that you can improve yourself on your website or they can do it for you, but they are going to charge you and I am in a like to probably do that, because they don’t know your infrastructure as well as you do, they don’t know what you are? You can probably do it in 10 minutes and may take them a couple of hours just because they have to sift through your stuff. So, getting that perfect blend of what they are going to do versus what you are going to do is step one and then if you find someone you like just having them constantly do the really boring stuff of just getting as many links to your website as possible is probably a good idea.

Ed Kohler: Yeah and today some of the best link building strategies today are engaging bloggers and online PR where, they are just legitimate tactics on how do you communicate with people who are interested in your industry. So, if people are talking about you, you are going to get lot more links to your website.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I know that Palm just recently launched their own blog actually and this is probably part of the reason that I got say that now that they have got their own blog, I am very interested in what they are going to be putting up there and it looks like it is going to be pretty cool, kind of an open voice. So, there is the both directions, not only engaging the blogosphere, but also becoming part of the blogosphere, I would assume.

Ed Kohler: For sure, it is amazing how much Palm has allowed say sites like Treo Central or there are lots of Treo blogs out there. They basically tell the story of Palm rather than Palm itself where Palm puts out launches, but then they are actually breaking down the products and showing how they are used and all different features and benefits from a real user standpoint. They let other people to tell that story, which is somewhat unfortunate, I think they can probably tell better themselves, I mean they know the product they built and so it is time for them to get in the game as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I am excited for that, because you know not a lot of companies actually really do that, do you know the Microsoft Windows Mobile blog, I don't think there is one?

Ed Kohler: I didn’t no, but mix-up has a lot of bloggers as probably someone who is carrying that…

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s true, they at Microsoft does do really good job with blogging and with their online video services through channel 9 and channel 10, I think?

Ed Kohler: Yeah.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, they are, I take that back, you are absolutely right, they are very much so ahead of the curve when it comes to lot of other companies, but you don’t have to look very far to see, a bunch of companies who are not blogging, who are not taking advantages and more so, who are not taking advantage of a good SEO getting them links and pulling traffic to their website?

Ed Kohler: Right and I think that on two great times to consider engaging a search engine optimizer would be when you are about to build the new website or you about to go through a major change to your website, because you already it going to be tearing it apart for some reason or another, so take a look at what’s sort of things that you may have forgot to put into the last build of the website that was hurting you, because may be large sections of the website were not get indexed by Google and it was costing you tons of tons traffic or something so or even really small things where, if you are not building a unique title-tag for every page of the website, that’s hurting you, so, if you have any sort of content management system for your website, getting your developers to simply take the title of the page and the page serving that into the title-tag. It is a very simple change and makes a huge difference in terms of your search rankings.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Let’s talk Apple TV in search optimization, moving on a little bit here. The Apple sent out an email earlier this morning or last night, it basically said here are some great steps for you to really optimize your video for the Apple TV and lot of more or like, if you are encoding a 322x40, stop it, and then the next one was encoder 640x360 which is 16x9 which is what we do and then right after that was do not have multiple feeds. Don’t have a iPod version and then Apple TV version and some other version and I thought about that and I am like “well, that makes a whole lot of sense”, because you don’t want to split your users use up between three different feeds, you want have them all on one feed, so you can optimize that one feed then maybe get front paged on the iTunes music store. The problem is for someone like me who is all about, lets have the iPod version and then lets have the really great Apple TV version, it is optimized for the Apple TV that 720 lines not 360 and lets have a 1080p version, so that you can go as high as you really want to, what do I do?

Ed Kohler: Well, iTunes restrict’s are really is a Search Engine and so there are ways you can optimize for that. If you have a site that’s becoming, or you have a podcast or video blog is becoming more and more popular, so they will front page you and that can lead to a significant spike in the number of readers or listeners you have to your content. So, it is something that’s potentially worth paying attention to.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But, what about the quality, so this is really hard for me, because I want optimize my feed for the Apple TV and I want to make it, so that when they download our stuff, they are like OMG that is awesome LOL.

Ed Kohler: That’s how they would Twitter it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, that’s right. As I start to speak in Twitter now, so when they downloaded it looks just awesome, it looks I am striving for an experience that is as good as, if not better, than broadcast television and I am not going to get that with an iPod video feed, which means I have to have two feeds. What do I do? Or do I, how many users do I have to have on each feed to front page me? May be I don’t care, may be it is OK that it split apart, I only need 500 to 1,000 users, whoop-de-do, right?

Ed Kohler: Right, I think they are not going to front page, say two feeds of the same content, they are in different formats you can be sure of that. so, I think having a feed that’s for the iPod and then the separate one that set for high quality content either on, it meant to be watching in your computer or on an Apple TV, at least having those two options seems to be valuable today, but beyond that I think it is something just to be aware of and realize that if you were to consolidate you may get some traffic advantages, but it just depends on what you are trying to achieve there, if it is having the best quality experience on every device then you probably get want to split that apart. If you want to have the largest audience for the content, it may pay to actually provide less options so, but they are all other thing where people are viewing that content too, so like for example, if someone is pulling that content down through FireAnt instead they don’t need to have a zillion different types of content because FireAnt can create that iPod version for you, or the PSP version or for all the different devices that you could actually end up putting that content on.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But, that doesn’t work inside of the iTunes, So, a FireAnt is cool, because I could distribute a single 1080p version and then it will recompress it to iPod or whatever and then it is optimized for every device, which is ultimately what I think all the players should do? I should be able to distribute one really high quality file…

Ed Kohler: Via Torrent.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Via Torrent, yeah absolutely, because I don’t what have to be responses for all the bandwidth and then have it convert into anything that I wanted to and then in that way I have got one single feed inside the store that it will work on any device, realistically that’s not going to happen anytime soon. FireAnt is kind of pushing forward, but they are no Apple, they can’t develop as quickly as, they don’t have the marketing push behind Apple.

Ed Kohler: Right, Apple has the audience.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, just a little bit, so is there no good solution today? Do I just have to deal?

Ed Kohler: Pretty much, I think…

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s not the right answer Ed.

Ed Kohler: Well, that’s where we are today, another side of this too is a FeedBurner, where all of our feeds that we are sending out, we burn through FeedBurner and so we also have stats that are built up in there and FeedBurner does not have ads yet today for podcast, but I think it is just a matter of time before they do. So, that’s where if you could get more people congregated on to one feed that’s to their advantage, it makes their life easier to sell ads against it. For example, with Technology Evangelist our main feed, I think as 1,900 people on it today for the main blog, but then we have a comment feed and we actually have feed setup for each of the individual authors like if we just can’t stand listening to what I write about and you can just get what Ben writes about or whatever, if you want to follow one of us individually. So, we can splitting things up that way as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Do you have a high account than I do or do we about equal on those statistics?

Ed Kohler: We only publish that very well, so they really haven’t got much traction, I think it is easier for people to…

Benjamin Higginbotham: I just want to braging right now.

Ed Kohler: Well, people I think they might, personally if I am doing a blog that has multiple authors site, still just describe to the blog itself and if I see something that it is by an author that I am not particularly interested in, I just hit the “J” key and best thing I pass it just that fast.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, I do the same thing.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it is problem splitting the feeds further, things like lets subscribe to the comments of any particular blog post and things.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What we really need is, I talk about player, so this isn’t really just an issue in video only, it is the podcasts we do split into two, we have got enhanced version for iTunes iPods and then a standard version just mp3, it almost feels like there need to be like an OPML version, but it is little more static than that where I can say “here is the Technology Evangelist feed and it includes everything inside of it” and that way you subscribe to that one object, but it has multiple objects inside, does that make sense?

Ed Kohler: Yeah and I think from FeedBurner standpoint they should be also ads against all of our content, no matter what format it is in, even though there is broken out in a separate feeds, it is exact same content that’s in all those. So, hopefully it will get there, but it would be nice if Apple would get to the point where they will do some of the compressions to lower versions for you or you could just publish one thing to them, because it make life easier for the content creators as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right.

Ed Kohler: Everyone wins if the content creators can focus on creating content.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, because today there is so many different devices there is Zune, iPod, different PMP’s, PSP, there is the Apple TV, the NETGEAR Digital entertainer 8000, ther's the Tivo, then you've got your computer for 720p, but then can you really play that? You know the list goes on and on and on. And having some sort of device that basically here all the stuff, we support, just get the 1080p version or the highest quality version and we will turn it into whatever you want. It is a little bit wasteful, if you are only going to be sending it to an iPod, so you download this huge 1080p file and turn it into a sub 480p version, but you know what, that’s OK, I think.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it is just run the background anyway.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We will never run out of bandwidth. All right, sitemaps auto-discovery changes, sounds like there is been a change to the way sitemaps work, the Google sitemaps, tell me little bit about that?

Ed Kohler: Right, this is the case where search engine are actually looking out for a content creators where iTunes isn’t quite there yet, but search engine have made a nice step here in last day or two, where search engine who had a format where sitemaps XML file where you could, basically publish a list of all the pages that make-up your website. So, here are the URL’s make on my site, which then makes it easy for Google or Yahoo or Ask or whoever to just come in and go directly to those pages and not have to spread out link by link to find all of your content, you are just telling them where it is at. So, you are throwing a bone on to the search engine making their life easier, but the problem was that at first search engine were creating their own proprietary feeds and so that was just creating a much of excess work for content publishers to create all these different feeds then you had to register them with each of the search engine and say here is my feed is and just go there wherever you are ready, but as of yesterday, they finally agreed upon a standardized way of, basically, now seeing where your feeds is at, so in your robust at text file, you can now just going in there and add one simple line that says, here is where are my sitemap feed is at and all of the search engines when they visit your site, at the first place  they go is to your robust of text file and that file will tell the search engines here is what you can look at, here is what you can’t look at and by the way here is where my sitemap is, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: And they probably like it quite a bit, because then you have taken all their work away and they just index, basically the sitemap problem there, they just going to look at that and hit all those pages and then move on.

Ed Kohler: Yeah and the sitemaps file can, you can communicate a lot of different things within that, like you can tell the search engines which page is you update daily or even more often than daily or pages that update never, in some hardcore archives that are not going to change, you can tell a search engines that as well. So, it is saving their resources and it is actually takes a little bit of pressure off from your site, but…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, if I am a blogger is there a way to automate this process?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, there is plug-in in WordPress for example, it is a site, Google sitemaps plug-in you just drop it in there and it is really-really simple then every time you publish a new blog post, it allow add that new URL to your sitemap.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is it smart enough to do things like this is now in our archive and give it a little archive tag or is this kind of a basic sitemap?

Ed Kohler: You can set rules based on different types of pages, so it is not SuperSIP indicated, but it gets the job done. So, you are still into go manually into add the robust site text edit, but that’s really simple, one time thing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, this is the new standard do all the search engines support this or is it most of the search engines?

Ed Kohler: Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask and Google, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, all the ones that matter?

Ed Kohler: Right and it is become default protocol at this point, so any search engines moving ahead are going to take this into consideration as well. So, if you go to technologyevangelist.com/robust.text, you can see our implementation of it right there and go ahead and copy it and change it to your own site and you are got to go.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, Google speaking of sitemaps lets move on to the Google and their ad format, they changed that a little bit.

Ed Kohler: Well, I think they have to occasionally shake things up just to keep people, remind people at they are, as they suppose to be cooking on to make Google lot of money. So, you need a couple of changes one being that the ads along the top of the page, they switched it yellow from blue, so these stand out a little bit more than they did before and more significantly, there used to be when the ads along the top of the page, if you clicked anywhere in that banner across the top of the page, anywhere that was blue, it would cause that a click through to that ad, so they were trying this with may be you are just clicking on the page just to resent the browser or something and you next thing you are bouncing into an ad where there were some unintentional clicking going on, but now you have to have to click the text of the add itself in order to qualify as a click.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s good, that’s good for ad buyers.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I think so and it is also good for the just web-surfers, because if they didn’t mean to click on it why are they being sent there, so everyone wins on that one, in short term it might hurt Google a little bit, but longer term it is a better experience for everybody, so I don’t think that’s going to make a huge difference. So, they did that and then in the ad sense as they have also just changed the kind of look of them a little bit, so you can make little bit more Web 2.0, they rounded a few things.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Round the corner, they have also and this isn’t available to everyone and interestingly enough it shows up on my computers, but not yours and that is they have picon support on regular Google Searches. So, when I search, say Technology Evangelist in the search bar Google, I will get a picture icon of the website directly next to the search and I am not sure I like it, yet.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, that’s just got to be incredible resource in terms of company in sites of Google, consider how many web search results it serve everyday, but they put a screenshot next to every single one of those results.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Kind of insane.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, so they always testing things, but I cannot imagine that that one is got to show up on everyone’s search results anytime soon.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Why do I consistently get it and you don’t? Like every search, I do gets that, whether I am here at home, doesn’t matter what network I am on, I will get it, do they set like some sort of super user cookie or what’s that? Or do they just to say, no Ed can’t receive this, we don’t like Ed?

Ed Kohler: That could be too. How you log into your account for all of those?

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, I probably yes.

Ed Kohler: So, may be they are tracking as user some how and then, but…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Could they?

Ed Kohler: That I don’t know, I don’t find that particularly useful when I see the screenshots next to the different sites, because I am looking at the snip-it more than anything, I am trying to find out in context does it look like this page has something relevant to what I just searched for.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, what they really need to do is improve their snip-it’s, because sometimes I will see what I am looking for in the snip-it, then I go to search for on the page and it is not actually on the page that I went into and I want the information that was in this snip-it, so they need a better way of following that information, so I can really find what I am looking for.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, throw me a more of a bone here.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Exactly.

Ed Kohler: Give me one more line of snip-it I take that over screenshot any day.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, all right lets complete this and I gave this little bit of time for this one, the Digg effect and click through rates, you wrote an article on this on Technology Evangelist recently  this week and there is a fairly, I don’t say it was heated discussion, but a passionate discussion, is to whether you were right or wrong. So, first tell us what the Digg effect and click through rate ratio is and why that’s alarming? And then we will talk about that a little bit.

Ed Kohler: OK, lot of time that when sites get dugg, a few different sites that I track, the traffic obviously spikes, but the click through rate on the ad-sense ads on the site just drops, I mean it really drops, so the traffic say it may triple to the site, but the click through rate on ads drops by 75%, so basically all that new traffic, hardly anyone is clicking on anything. So, to me that says that Digg users are sophisticated users of the web and they are blind to ads.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are they are ADD users and they just read really quick and then move on?

Ed Kohler: Right, yeah they could be bouncing in hitting the back button to go back to Digg to find something else to take peak at using the web in that way. So, there are lot of different ways that this could be looked at. Once they have read what they read on your site, it is also possible that they could choose to click-out from your site on their relevant ad that’s pretty along the side, but that’s not what they are doing, based on the stats I have seen. So, I assume that the Digg users on average are just less secceptable to advertising on the page, just because they spend more time on the web and just about anyone, so they does know a certain parts of the page, it can just be ignored because that’s not what they are for, so I think same thing is happened with banner ads and the past where, banner blindness set in where if you take anything that’s important and put it in the shape of a traditional banner ad, it doesn’t matter what’s in there, people are just going to see it, because that shape is something they have just trained themselves to block out overtime, so it is really powerful.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I have admit, I can’t remember the last time I actually clicked on an ad. I just ignore them, that even goes for the paid ads on Google, when someone buys an ad at the top of the page, I just ignore them, I move down to the organic results immediately and I think there is something to what you are saying, now the debate in the room was that’s not really how Digg users working this, always going to be a split between the techies and the non-techies and the techies will understand this stuff and the non-techies won’t and that’s just how it is going to be for ever and ever and ever.

Ed Kohler: True, but I think even non-techies become more technical over time, even non-techies have cell phones today and they can put some numbers in their address book and they might even be able to set their VCR clock today, so they become more technical, but I followed up on that actually with a post, just like an hour or so ago, where haf people definitely comments like a great comment, where he took, he found a post someone else had done, where it listed the top individual money makers on ad-sense. The number one in the world is plentyoffish.com, I don't know if you ever been to that site.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No.

Ed Kohler: It is a free dating site, so yes there will be a like a match.com where you have to pay 20 bucks a month or whatever they happen to be charging these days, they just made it free and so anyone can join in, obviously that made their number go way high, but it is an ad sense supported model pretty much and they say their owner that site is making about $300,000 a month on ad-sense. So, there is the high bar and right behind him number two at $250,000 a month is Kevin Rose.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Really?

Ed Kohler: So there are ad-sense ads on Digg and yes they do get clicked on right? So…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Interesting point.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, but I took a look at Alexa. I thought that was pretty interesting too, I took a look at Alexa and Digg’s actual page views are many times that of PlentyOfFish, so although they are making less money, then PlentyOfFish on ad sense and they are serving tons more pages, so between the two audience is, the Digg users are clicking less ads then PlentyOfFish, it is what I get out of that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It make sense, yeah.

Ed Kohler: So, I think that reinforces my theory, that’s my theory, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: In your theory of this, no one ever clicks on an ad world, when do you think the users will be come smart enough to stop clicking on this, do you think Google is aware with this or even cares and when is that going to be that day when ad sense just doesn’t work anymore?

Ed Kohler: I think that there are continually going to try to shake things up and I think they are already doing things to try to correct for this, because I don’t understand why ad-sense wouldn’t look at refereeing URL, when they are trying to decide what type of ad to server on the page? When there is tons of things you can do tagged with java script. So, they can see what platform you are on, they might be able to tell what speed is your connection that you are on a an Apple computer you are running FireFox in without even looking at the content of the page just based on the type of setup you have that alone will tell you something about what type of person is coming to that page, so they could also look at the referring URL. So, if you have a guy running on Mac OS X with FireFox coming from Digg, you probably don’t want to serve him an ad for say like screen savers or something?

Benjamin Higginbotham: You are right.

Ed Kohler: You know enough about the guy, just based on that or girl, so I think…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Do you know that? You don’t know that, do you?

Ed Kohler: No, but Google might. They might have enough data, because they know if you have logged in your Google account, they might be able to figure that out. But, as a content publisher today, like if you had a blog, you could also simply swap out your paper click ads on your site and put in impression based advertising, based on the referring URL, so if you see traffic coming from Digg , or Revvfer, or Slashdot, you know they are not going to click on the pay-per-click ads, because that’s just type of users they are. So, instead swap those ads out and show some impression based ads. So, at least you are making something on that traffic been. You have 30,000 people coming in and just based on the fact that they hit your page, you at least made some money on it. So, I don’t, that seems like something that Google should just be able to do themselves too, instead of impression based ads. Now, someone else mentioned there may be Digg users are using ad blockers more than other users, but I don’t think there is a big up take of ad blockers by anyone?

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t use any, I just ignore the ad, I just don’t see them.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, why you need to block something that you don’t even see.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Exactly. All right, Ed thank you so much for you time today, everyone in TalkShoe thank you also for your time. We will be doing a follow up conversation with everyone in TalkShoe when this podcast is over. If you like to join us tomorrow it will be Freestyle Friday, anything is on the board, we can talk about anything we want technology related or not, that will be at 11 o’clock Central, 12 o’clock Eastern and 9 o’clock Pacific time. If you like to send us your comments or feedback, you may do so by going to my profile at technologyevangelist.com/ben. Thank you so much for joining us and we will talk to you tomorrow.