Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

In case you are looking for me over the next couple of days, I’ll be attending the Google Reaction B2B Executive Summit with our CEO, the director of our department, and our VP of west coast operations. If you’d like to digitally stalk me over that period, I’ll be making regular updates to multiple platforms as often as possible, without upsetting my gracious hosts of course. Just because you aren’t attending, doesn’t mean you can’t participate. Feel free to shoot me a message at any of these sites below and I’ll try and slip them in if possible:

• Twitter
• Brightkite
• Friendfeed

You can also see feedback/reactions after the event here and here.

I’ve read a few articles recently about “optimizing your website for mobile SEO”. I know it’s the big focus of many conferences in 2008, but frankly, I think this is kind of a waste of time. Mobile SEO - SEO - it will all be the same very soon. As more and more mobile devices become more of an internet gateway than just a mobile device, search engines are going to have to catch up. People will no longer think “I’m on a mobile device, I want mobile results”. They will move to think more along the lines of, I know I get these results on my laptop, so I would expect a similar result set on my mobile device. Just because I’m on a mobile device should not change the results.

PPC/SEM
I think for the short term, at least until search engines combine results, running mobile search campaigns is still worthwhile. However, for the longer term, PPC/SEM will follow suit soon after people begin to expect more from their mobile results.

Design
I do however think designing and thinking about mobile is still a key issue when designing for mobile devices and something that should be kept in mind. Just because you are designing for the web, doesn’t mean that users will not access the site using a mobile device. There are a number of websites which can address the minor technical issues associated with developing a mobile stylesheet. Here are just a few:

• Mobile CSS First Steps
• Mobile CSS is a reality
• Make your site mobile friendly

Now as for local search optimization, I think this is one of the key segments where search optimization can make a big difference, but that’s for a later post. What do you think? Is mobile seo worth your time, or just another piece of hype to keep many SEO’ers busy for 2008/09?

I find it fascinating that Google has someone who speaks out as much as Matt does about SEO and search marketing in general. I don’t think there are many other industries where there is such a reciprocal back and forth between company and customers. Thanks for the insights (and great one-liners) Matt!

So I’ve been over doing it lately with technology. Twhirling, Twittering, Vimeo-ing, Flickr-ing - it got to be a little much. For that reason, I’ve stared reading a bunch of blogs outside of those areas. Here’s some of my top 5 right now. Feel free to add your top in the comments:

1. A Hamburger Today - This is probably my favorite non-tech blog right now. Beware though, this blog is deadly if it’s before noon and you’re in need of your lunchtime fix. They have an amazing camera, which means you can almost hear the sizzle and smell the burgers every time you visit the page.
2. Shirtlog.com - This website features cool t-shirts found around the web. It’s pretty easy being here in Chicago to become a Threadless only zone, but this website provides varying coverage from around the net.
3. KEXP Song of the day - Although I have Pandora, which I use pretty much every day, it’s always nice to get some spice into my normally house music filled ears. So I have this podcast/blog coming in on a daily basis. It’s great, you should subscribe.
4. Web Urbanist - Geek art, music, graffiti, new technology. You’ll love it. Trust me.
5. Green options - For the treehugger/environmentalist/urban hippie in all of us.

So what are your top 5 non-tech blogs?

My mom sent me another article today about the Detroit auto industry and yet another round of layoffs which continue to decimate the Michigan economy. On a side note, if you didn’t know, Michigan has one of our hardest hit economies right now as a result of the entire state leaning on one industry for over a century, but that’s for another time.

The article got me thinking though about risk. Risk is inherent in any online campaign - be it SEO, SEM, a website launch, an ad campaign, anything. Here’s some questions you should ask yourself before, during, and after any SEO campaign.

What happens if you’re successful?

• Does your client have enough inventory to support a surge in website traffic?
• Can they handle a large volume of sales leads?
• Are their pages optimized for conversions?
• Can you report the metrics they want for success?
• Is there website setup to handle large volumes of traffic?
• If it crashes, do they have a contingency plan?
• What’s your next move if you’re a marketing/search agency and you get to be #1 in Google?
• Is there information on the website you don’t want to get out?
• Any case study or success stories you can harness to use for future sales opportunities?

What happens if you’re not successful?

• Have you defined success? Perhaps #1 in Google was too high to shoot for. See what the sites ahead of you have going for them and set client expectations accordingly.
• Can you at least demonstrate the efforts you made or results you were able to secure?
• Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve you can try?
• Was it your fault? Did the client hamstring you into solutions you knew would never work in the first place? Did you voice your opinions?
• Any learnings that can come out of this?

Is there anyway you can mitigate against those risks? Not everything is within your control, especially when working with third parties, but always good to hedge your bets if you can. Just food for thought.

So I saw this video this morning from TechCrunch and it shows a new search interface that Google is testing out more widely. I remember hearing about this last year and thought, I’d rather not. Seeing it again still kind of leaves me with that opinion. Here are my hesitations:

1. User Interface - Please don’t do this to the current interface. It’s kind of ugly. The reason I go to Digg is because I expect this kind of nuttiness. I go to Google because I want information, not a bunch of buttons to push.
2. Politics - There is a lot of competition out there for top search results. I’m assuming that if this is fully rolled out that voting up and down will only be a marginal part of the search ranking, or if you vote up or down or add/remove results, that it will only effect your ranking views when you are logged into Google.

My gut tells me that this is just another product team project that won’t make it all the way to the homepage. Only time will tell though.

Update: I received an email from Dan Lewis, an employee of Wikia Search, and he said that Wikia Search has been doing a lot of this stuff for a while now. Check them out when you have a second.

So recently I’ve been really getting into microblogging (aka lifestreaming or twittering). I briefly tried out Twitter a few months ago, but didn’t really get into it. I didn’t see the value aside from letting people know I was going to grocery store or reading a book. Since then though, I’ve seen the light. Now granted, it has a lot of uses, but be forewarned, once you put your toe into the twitter pond, it can quickly become a deluge of data, a inundation of information, a massive amount of media, a…well, you get the point.

These tools are great ways to stay on top of those conversations and still maintain some sanity and keep your job. Let’s go through some of the tools that I use every day:

Ping.fm:
First, Ping is fantastic! If you don’t already have an account, sign up today. There have been a few other status updating services, but this one is by far the best. It allows you to update as many statuses as you want, at once. The one caveat to this though is that it’s really good for saving time, but if you tailor your message to each individual community, it’s still probably best to visit each site individually. (i.e. I post stuff to Twitter and Friendfeed that I would not necessarily post to LinkedIn.)

Friendfeed
Friendfeed, if you’re not already familiar, is a social media aggregator. You supply feeds from your social media universe (Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. etc. etc.) and it pulls in all of your activity, as well as anyone else who you want to follow on Friendfeed (ala Twitter functionality). Beyond just following, Friendfeed also has intelligent suggestions built in, whereby if I am following say Jeremiah Owyang or Adam Ostrow, it will also show me what their friends are doing as well. I’m assuming this is done based on these people I’m following, interacting with their friends in some manner, which tells Friendfeed to also suggest this content. If someone has a better idea, I’d love to know. Maybe Bret knows.

Plurk:
Plurk is another Twitter clone and there’s been much back and forth as to whether Twitter is better or whether Plurk is better. At the end of the day, Twitter is better because of two factors. First to market and lack of “karma”. Karma is a fun idea that Plurk tried to implement, but which has a divisive effect.  You either love it and stick around, or hate it and leave quickly. I was of the latter camp and didn’t bother to come back. Now, I still update Plurk as part of Ping.fm settings, but it doesn’t go beyond that. It’s again, mostly a content redistribution channel with some Friendfeed functionality. The one thing I will give them credit for is an interesting take of the time stream interface. I also like their quirky graphic design sense and built in user incentive chotchkies.

Adobe Air
Ok, so maybe this isn’t an official twitter application, but since it’s launch, I’ve seen some fantastic implementations of the Adobe Air platform which enable applications to make the jump from the web to the desktop. I’m currently running Pandora Desktop, Tweet Deck, Twhirl, and a few others currently.

Twhirl
I actually installed Tweet Deck first and then Twhirl, but I wanted to feature this one first, as it’s become my default Twitter and Friendfeed status monitors. The only thing I would like to see next is a Ping.fm feature incorporated into Twhirl, so I can update each site at once directly from the Twhirl interface. If anyone knows if or when this is coming, let me know.

Tweet Deck
I installed Tweet Deck to see if it was any better/worse than Twhirl. Well, it’s pretty much the same, but without the Friendfeed feature. So I still have it, but don’t use it that often.

Summize:
Summize is great in that it provides better filtering and search functionality than Twitter itself. Actually, scratch that, as those are now one in the same. Guess Twitter caught on to what was needed.

So what’s been my experience and how does it translate into professional/business use?
Well, so far, I can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve seen my attention stream steadily dwindling from email, to blogs, and now microblogging. It provides quick informational segments, which I can digest quickly and easily, while still maintaining my productivity. By installing Twhirl, Twitter and Friendfeed updates come directly to my desktop, instead of having to go back to each respective website and refresh, refresh, refresh. Now, what does that mean for a monetization model for each of these companies? Well, it’s going to come down to either subscription models or some kind of advertising either integrated into the platform itself or each feed.

Granted, there is a lot of noise that occurs on a daily basis, so you have to be cognizant of that. However, it also offers a pulse about the industry and where people’s foci’s are for any given day. Take the last few days for example, when you couldn’t take two breaths before someone was talking about 3G or iPhone apps.

If you’re looking to network with industry leaders, find additional informational resources, learn about industry opinions, or get some quick feedback - these are fantastic tools. But as always, remember to respect the community you are interacting with and interact often. Even if you are not a rockstar today, everyone has to start somewhere.

Man, I’ve been dreading this for a while, but it’s finally done. It only took me a couple of hours, but that’s mostly my fault. I had to get together some usernames, passwords, backups, and some other stuff, but it’s all done now.

I’ve upgraded from 2.0.4 to 2.5.1 using this absolutely fantastic upgrade guide. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Alex! It was really easy, although definitely filled with a few “man I hope this works” moments.

I’m digging the new dashboard interface. Really snazzy!

Saw this earlier today as part of Robert Scoble’s visit to Microsoft for the Pro Photo Summit. It’s a search engine called TinEye. The concept behind it is that TinEye uses a sophisticated algorithm to find “photo footprints”. I already signed up for a free trial, and the results are pretty cool. The way it works is, you upload a photo or provide a URL for an image, let’s say the Eiffel tower. TinEye takes that image and compares it to images it has already indexed and provides matches. The cool part though is that these matches don’t have to be identical copies, they can also be partials. So you might get images of the Eiffel tower that are not color matched, there is copy over the Eiffel tower, the Eiffel tower is distorted in some way, or the the Eiffel tower is only in the background, cropped, and only partially seen.

TinEye says that it’s picture index is extremely limited at this point, but I think if they can hook into the likes of some of the larger photo warehouses (Getty, iStock, Flickr, etc.) this could really become a powerful tool. If nothing else, than to enforce copyright infringement for professional photographers who are constantly having their work reused online without their consent.

Check out the video below for more info:

I’ve signed up for a number of beta invitations lately for reputation monitoring websites. These are web utilities which aggregate mentions of your favorite keywords: “chicago marketing”, “chicago seo”, “lindsey lohan”, whatever. The one feature that some of the newer sites have over previous iterations are historic records. Let’s review some of the oldies, but goodies first:

Google Alerts

Any savvy marketer should already have Google alerts set up and running on a daily basis. Google alerts is nice in that it’s first and foremost, free. It’s also reliable and very easy to set up and turn off. In case you’re not already familiar, Google alerts allows you to enter a key phrase or set of keywords and create daily, “as it happens”, and weekly alerts. The as-it-happens alerts can be both very useful, but also very overwhelming if you are in a volatile field. It’s good for product launches or PR campaigns, where instant feedback from customers/users is vital for the success of the launch For example, Company A launches a website. 100,000 people sign up instantly. The website crashes. The blogosphere goes crazy. Google alerts in a great way to head off these issues. The only issue with Google alerts is that if you have a broad keyword or huge brand (i.e. Honda), you’re going to get everything under the sun in terms of references, so make sure to be super specific when creating these alerts.

Google Trends

Similar to the volume of email you receive from Google alerts, Google trends allows you to see patterns of mentions over time. In this example of Honda versus Toyota, you can see the mentions associated with each brand over time. This is a good utility to use to see if your PR efforts have paid off over time. Google trends will even show major spikes in traffic and pull in related news materials for the time scale you select (i.e last 30 days, last 12 months, etc.). This is an excellent tool to use in conjunction with Google alerts.

Ok now to the new fun stuff…

Trackur

Trackur bills themselves as “Google alerts on steroids”, which is a pretty bold claim, as Google alerts already does a pretty good job. So what does Trackur do that alerts doesn’t? Well, first off I have to say, I’ve never actually used Trackur, so I’m only relating what their websites says. Anyone who has actually used it, let me know if it’s worth $18/month to start. Trackur says that it searches all media, not just Google (which is what Google alerts searches - but on a sidenote, Google seems to have a pretty good handle on the world’s information, so what else is Trackur searching?). Trackur also allows for more in depth filtering than Google alerts along with saving mentions of your keywords for later review and sharing them with colleagues. Overall, I’m still a bit skeptical without being able to a direct comparison to Google alerts. They do have a free 14 day trial, so if you sign up and find it’s a good fit, let me know in the comments.

Addict-o-Matic

Addict-o-matic is egosurfing on steroids. You can quote me on that, addict-o-matic marketing department. Addict-o-matic is nice in that it pulls in search queries from many different websites in one easy-to-view search interface. Looking up a popular brand, Facebook, yields some pretty fun results from numerous sites without actually having to run out to those sites. This tool can be useful as a daily checkup on any brand doing social media optimization for videos images, blog posts, twitter, etc. A great future feature would be to provide updates to users if anything changes on these pages, so I don’t have to continually come back. Ah well, it’s free and it works.

FiltrBox

I’ve been using Filtrbox for the last few days to monitor some of my clients mentions on the web. It’s got a really slick interface, and again, it’s free. Like Google alerts, you enter search criteria and it sends you daily alerts as to the status of the keyword mentions it finds. You can also chart mentions over time, similar to Google Trends. You can also add direct plugins for source material from mainstream media, the blogosphere, Twitter, and Twitter’s nemesis, Friendfeed. It also provides some really nice login structuring to allow for deep filtering. So I can create a filter that says “honda AND (toyota OR chrysler) AND EXCLUDE hybrid AND SUV”. It also allows for direct importing from Google alerts, which is the mark of someone who knows who their competitors are and embraces it. Nicely done Filtrbox!