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Yesterday, we talked about how Google might have cracked the code on qualified sales leads through search. Somehow, sites are seeing drops in traffic but not all of them are seeing commensurate drops in revenue, because Google is figuring out which keywords drive revenue for each site. So, the question is whether you know which keywords are driving your own revenue. How are you tracking the connection between marketing effort and spending and your actual sales? If you’re an e-Commerce company, it’s easy–just track the sales through to your shopping cart. But for most companies–the ones that sell offline–tracking sales back to the online tactic that led to it is still an elusive goal.

In the old days, often you would see print ads that said “Call 800-555-6666 and ask for Alice.” But there was no Alice. Alice meant that the caller has seen the ad on page 27 of So-and-So magazine dated March 12. Now understand–there might have been five interactions before that ad finally got that customer to pick up the phone. No matter. Let’s at least start by tracking the last one, which most companies still don’t even do.If you can set up a way to track where people are coming from, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition, because you’ll be able to calculate what works and what doesn’t.

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Yesterday, I gave a Biznology Webinar called, “Blogging 101,” that covered the basics of starting and maintaining a blog.  Are you thinking about writing a blog for your company, but don’t know where to start?  Do you have what it takes to stick with it and create good content?  How do you coordinate blogs across your company?

In this Webinar, you’ll learn the dos and don’ts of blogging, starting with listening to your customers.  You’ll find out how to choose a topic and create a plan for your blog so that you can generate new content.  I discuss where to host your blog, and how to publicize it.  I go over how to measure your success, track your subscribers, and optimize your blog posts for search.  I also discuss the tools you can use to make blogging easier.   In this free 30-minute Biznology® Webinar, I show you how to start your blog from the ground up and which tools to use to maintain it, so that you can take advantage of the blogosphere to get your products and your company more publicity.

Thanks to all of our sponsors:

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Some of you follow the news every day, watching Google like a hawk every time it makes a move. This post is not for you. This post is for everyone else that has vaguely noticed that Google has made lots of changes over the last couple of years, but they aren’t sure about what all of them mean for search marketers. As someone who has been in search marketing and search technology before that for almost 30 years, I have to say that the changes that Google has made in the last couple of years have been mind-boggling. I did a speech for the Marketing Executives Networking Group on Friday to go over this very subject: The 5 Things You Need to Know about the New Google Search.

You can look over the whole set of slides, but here are the five things that I highlighted:

• Google indexes content faster than ever.
• Google shows search results as searchers type.
• Google ranks search results based on social activity.
• Google ranks search results based on human ratings of Web page quality.
• Google ranks results based on who your friends are.

All of these changes have come in just the last two years and add up to some massive changes in the way search marketing works. Where you once could conduct link campaigns (or even break the rules by buying links), that doesn’t work very well anymore, because if the human raters and the your site’s social activity don’t validate the link analysis, your site drops in rankings. If you were living off old pages and had ignored social, you might not even find your content showing up. If had good rankings for top keywords but not for the five-word long-tail keywords, you might be suffering, too.

What has brought on this frenzy of activity from Google? I think they have been running scared from Bing since 2009. Bing made massive gains in 2010–to the point that a few pundits were actually predicting that the trend showed that Bing would eventually tie Google in market share. But as these changes have rolled out, Google has stabilized its free-fall in market share, leaving Bing with a substantial 30% US share, but that number has not budged in a year.

Will Google keep innovating? Certainly. Google is worried about not just Bing but Facebook and other threats. And maybe it will even accelerate the pace. If you have  a Web site, you need to familiarize yourself with these changes so you can understand the new ways to succeed at search marketing. Check out the full set of slides for “The 5 Things You Need to Know about the New Google Search.”

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I’ve spent years listening to clients who want me to help them with social media. And, across brand after brand, time after time, Id try to ask them about what their marketing strategy was, so I could tell them how social can fit in. I finally gave up asking that, because I found that what they really wanted was (pick one) a Facebook fan page/Twitter handle/blog/something even dumber. It’s not to say that every client was clueless about marketing strategy. Many in fact, especially the larger ones, could indeed answer the question. But then they circled right back to asking me if we could put up a Facebook fan page. But, recently, I’ve seen a growing change.

Social media marketing just might be growing up.

Three separate clients this week started a discussion on social media strategy with their outcomes. “We want to increase registrations on our paid content” or “We want an increase in buyers for this product” or something equally strategic. (My heart nearly fluttered as each one spoke.)

This has been coming for a while, but I am now seeing a strong change in conversation about social media marketing. It doesn’t make  sense to try to increase your Facebook fans if you aren’t going to do anything for them–and if you can’t find any way for your fans to spend more with you.

It’s not always easy, and Lord knows there are numerous brands where social media isn’t measurable in any stronger way than TV advertising–can you show that surveyed brand awareness went up? If you’re Coca-Cola or Skittles or any number of brands that have smart social media presence to raise brand awareness, that’s fine.

But most companies can make a more direct tie to revenue–online or offline–and they haven’t been doing it. Until now. More and more, I am seeing the same approaches e-Commerce companies have used for years starting to show up in many other places–even B2B companies that once were fairly unsophisticated about almost any kind of marketing.

Direct marketers rejoice! Now it is time to be more social.

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It’s an oft-repeated theory within the SEO community: Google (and other search engines) provide higher search rankings to older sites. You might be wondering why this is true–and if you have a new Web site, you might not be very pleased about that. Is this actually true? Why is it true? Will it continue to be true?

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Among my students taking my search marketing classes, I am often asked what kind of technical skills are needed to succeed at search engine optimization. I think they are especially intimidated because I was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, so I definitely have more technical skills than the average SEO practitioner. Like with all consultants, when I am asked if you need to be a programmer to succeed at SEO, I say, “It depends.” But usually the answer is no.

If you think about what tasks you undertake in search marketing, they are more often about marketing than about search. Keyword research doesn’t need any programming skills. You need to know what your customers are searching for, and you need to be willing to brainstorm, to look at analytics, keyword research tools,and competitive sites to learn more. No messy coding needed.

Building quality content and attracting links and social media activity is also decidedly low-tech.  No matter how much Java or PHP you know, it doesn’t help. You need the ability to create high quality content that attracts the attention of others, and no software can do that for you.

But there are a couple of areas where programming skills can help:

• Infrastructure. If the spiders are not indexing your content, you probably have some kind of technical issue bedeviling your site architecture–anywhere from incorrect redirects to overuse of Flash to poorly-formed URLs to JavaScript links…the list goes on and on. You don’t literally need to be a programmer to fix these problems, but it certainly helps.
• Dynamic content. If your site is generated programmatically, where software uses templates and databases to construct your site on the fly, being a programmer can be very helpful–sometimes necessary–to optimizing your site for search. Even folks using vey polished tools such as WordPress need to modify the underlying PHP code once in a while. You can get away without being a programmer, but once in a while you’ll be stuck.

Now, so long as you have the budget to pay a technology person to take on the tasks you can’t do, you will never need technical skills. But if you are on a low budget, you might need to beg or borrow some help to optimize your site every once in a while. Every year that goes by, however, there are fewer and fewer reasons for technical skills in SEO, but they do remain.

So, if you have no programming skills, don’t worry. You’ll probably be fine.

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Many of you probably got an e-mail last week from Google announcing its new privacy policy. Every site has a privacy policy, and as a marketer, I understand the need to make some use of the information. After all, Google gives a lot of stuff for nothing–I depend on Gmail, Google Calendar, and many other free functions–so it is only fair that we give something back. I personally am fine with allowing Google use of my data, but I do like to read exactly what they are allowed to do. That’s where I ran into trouble.

I mean, I want to read the new privacy policy, but I don’t want to spend my day doing it. When I clicked through on the e-mail, I was faced with a Web page that had some material on it, but at the bottom, several different paths to take:

So, now, no matter what I click into, I have to backtrack and then click the other two links to make sure that I read everything. OK, fair enough. It makes sense that the privacy policy might be lengthy, especially because Google is delivering one policy to cover every one of its products. And, usually, I wouldn’t complain that someone took a lot of information and broke it up into bite-size chunks to make it easier to digest. So, I clicked on the first link and got the next screen:

So, now this is getting a little ridiculous. I think I’d need a pen and paper to make sure I read every branch here, because who knows how many more there are. And a lot of them don’t really seem like privacy policy material–more like general Web safety tips, which I can get elsewhere if I want them. No, the privacy policy is kind of a legal document. It’s a contract between Google and me. I give up dome privacy in return for getting to use free software. I think it’s a good deal, but it would be nice to read exactly what I am giving up to be sure.

So, I acted like the normal Web surfer–two clicks and I haven’t found what I want, so I am outta here. I went to Twitter to complain about how painful it is to see what the privacy policy is about, and I was rewarded with a long Twitter conversation with a couple of smart folks. (The cool thing about Twitter is that your followers always know more than you do, so its a great way to get informed.)

David Iwanow (@thelostagency) quickly introduced me to Kristine Schachinger (@schachin), an expert in such matters. She has a great background article that explains why Google is changing its privacy policy that she wrote back in December. Google has become a credentialed authenticator of identities, which is why it HAD to bring all of its products under a single privacy policy. When I spoke to Kristine on Twitter, she said, “ Google+ is NOT a social network. Eric Schmidt said it himself. It is an Identity Network.” That might not mean anything to you, but, remember that a privacy policy is a legal document. To the lawyers, it means everything.

Google has stepped up to meet the regulatory requirements, and in so doing, they’ve found a way to get exactly what they want while staying completely within the law. I asked Kristine if this new privacy policy is just another Facebook-like sleight of hand, and Kristine told me that “Facebook could learn from Google on this one.” She noted that “ Google is using the ‘frog in a slow boiling pot won’t notice’ strategy.”

So, Google is outsmarting everyone again. Sure, it’s a good deal for users to get free e-mail and other functions, but Google is definitely monetizing everything. And although legislators and regulators stand up and pound their chests on how they will reign in privacy abuses, Google is calling their bluff by complying with every regulation. And, in so doing, Google gets exactly what it wants.

When I worked at IBM, I noticed that one of IBM’s core competencies was lawyering. Looks like Google didn’t mess that lesson, either.

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Everyone knows that you must place the most important content at the top of the page, right? Everyone knows that you should write like newspaper reporter. Put the most important stuff in the headline, don’t bury the lead, blah, blah, blah. And especially–don’t put important stuff “below the fold.” Below the fold once meant that you keep the good stuff on the upper half of a broadsheet newspaper page, but on the Web it has come to mean that you put the best content at the top of the screen so that people don’t need to scroll down to see it. And I knew all of that. At least I thought I did.

My friend Robin DeCato-McCarthy from Converseon alerted me to a new tool from Google that brings this home with shocking immediacy. If you haven’t seen it, check out the Google browser size tool.  It’s such a simple but important idea–put any URL in and it will show you what percentage of browsers see what parts of your screen. Here is what it showed for the Biznology home page:

The page looks OK (if anyone wants to help the design-challenged with a GOOD home page, please volunteer), but what I forgot is that it isn’t just that you need to keep things at the top, but also (duh) to the left. Now, I knew this, I swear. But I wasn’t really thinking about it and doing anything about it. That’s the point.

By seeing it on the screen, it really changes the way you think. And seeing the actual percentages of how many people you are leaving out really makes it hit home. So why does a supposed expert like me need this kick in the rear to actually think through what i allegedly already know?

I think that it happens to all of us. We know what our sites look like. We look at them every blessed day, right? But guess what? We look at them on our own screens. And, drum roll please, do you think that your screen might be a touch larger and better than the average visitor looking at your site?

If you own a Web site that you care enough about to read this article, that already puts you in the upper 10% of the tech-obsessed, whether you think of yourself that way or not. You are more likely to have a big monitor. You are more likely to have a second monitor. You are more likely to assume that everyone sees what you do.

And there is another problem. If some of your visitors are using cell phones to look at our site, you might not know what they see. Because even though you did look at your site once with your own cell phone to make sure it was OK, you probably don’t actually use your site on your cell phone. (And, honestly, do you have a better cell phone than a lot of your visitors, for all the same reasons you have a better computer monitor?)

Some of you might say, “C’mon, anyone with a screen that small will just scroll, right?” Well, no. Sure some of them will scroll, but some of them won’t. And are you OK with losing the ones who won’t? Just check pout the percentages on the screen shot above. Are you OK with losing even 2% of them just because your BUY button doesn’t show up on their screens?

Sometimes the simplest stuff has a big impact. Try out a few key pages from your site in the Google browser size tool and see what you think.

First off, Panda isn’t named after a bear–it is actually the surname of the Google engineer whose ideas lay behind it. And, although it is about to celebrate its first birthday, it isn’t a single event wrapped in the past. Google Panda has ushered in a series of changes over the past year, with a couple of ranking algorthm updates interpsersed with more regular changes in the data that it depends on.

Panda is revolutionary because it adds a new ranking factor to Google’s algorithm–a quality score imposed on sites by human raters that decide whether the site would be worth visiting again, for example. Dozens of human raters might visit the same site and Google averages their answers. High quality sites get boosted in the rankings, with lower-ranking sites, well, not so much.

Now, this wouldn’t be terrinbly interesting if that is all there were to it. For even Google, with its vast resources, can’t afford to pay human raters to visit all the sites that reside on the Web–not when they need many raters to judge each site and when those sites change regularly and need to be re-rated. No, they needed something a lot cheaper than that approach.

Enter machine learning, a technology that looks for patterns in data. Instead of Google having to use human beings to rate every site, they instead rated a small number of sites and then applied those ratings to all the unrated sites that were similar to the rated sites. So, if your site wasn’t rated. but it has the same characteristics as sites that are lkow in quality, your site will be treated as low in quality.

You probably want to know what patterns Panda is looking for, so that you can avoid them, but no one is saying. In fact, the very way that the algorithm works makes it a difficult question to answer. Machine learning algorithms are trained with some of the human data that Google collected, and then tested on the rest of the data. So the algorithm keeps trying to find more and more patterns until it can actually preduct the answers that the human beings gave. At that point, the algorithm is unleashed on pages that have not been rated, assuming that the training it received against known answers will now allow it to predict the quality level of sites that have not been rated.

What this means is that, for the first time, what human being sthink of Web pages is an explicit ranking factor. So, if you’ve been just following some rote rules about how to optimize for search, you might be in trouble if people don’t actually like your pages. This is, alas, the fate of most search optimizers who are only trying to feed the Google beast what it wants, instead of creating a quality experience for searchers. Thise that give searchers what they want are now being rewarded more than ever.

Google is believed to be going after so-called “content farms” with Panda–low-quality sites produced at low cost by hack writers. But some marketers worry that there are other sites affected. Google reassured marketers that merely having a repeated product description from the manufactuerer is not considered content scraping, but searchers might find it to be a low quality exprerience when they have to look through so many stores and keep reading the same information.

Does this mean that Panda never downgrades a site unfairly? Hardly. All of this technology is imperfect, although Google is constantly tinkering with the training data and algorithms. In fact, Google is collecting lots of data from people pressing +1 buttons, and might find someday that those are all the human raters that they need–and they won’t have to pay anyone.

So, many more changes are still ahead. And if Google’s Panada update is successful, you’ll see Bing go in that direction, too, affecting 30% more of the U.S. searches. And who knows how Panda might evolve in the future. To check out all my slides from the event, take a peek at “Google Panda Update” on Slideshare.

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If you care about how your site is found in organic search, you must spend some of your time thinking about search engine optimization (SEO). In the olden days (2005), certain kinds of content had no shot of showing up in the search index (and thus, could never be found). But in recent years, more and more dynamic content is showing up in Google’s search index, as Google makes its spider smarter and smarter.  So, now there’s nothing to worry about with dynamic content, right? Not quite.

I don’t want to downplay the amazing strides that have been made by the Googlebot. Google has worked tirelessly with Adobe to make Flash content indexable. If it is a Flash video, there isn’t much text to index, but many Flash experiences are full of text and Google can index a lot more of it than ever before.

Similarly, dynamic content generated from databases is indexed better than it once was, so it is less important to hide dynamic URLs than in years past.

And then there was the tweet heard round the SEO world in November, when Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that Facebook comments are now being indexed. That might sound like a small thing, but SEO gurus know that it is one more step in Google’s road to conquering a very difficult problem: understanding everything a developer can do with JavaScript.  Just as a browser contains a JavaScript interpreter to render pages correctly, now Google’s spider contains some of that ability. Already, some are wondering how to take advantage of the new smarter Googlebot.

But it’s not smart to count on any of this dynamic content being indexed, for a few reasons:

• Better ain’t necessarily good. Sure it works better than it did, but if it omits any of your content, you’re losing something. By using tried-and-true techniques that avoid dynamic content, all of your content gets indexed, which still seems like the way to go.
• Google ain’t the only search engine. Sure, it’s nice that the Googlebot is getting so smart, but Bing runs 30% of U.S. searches and many other search engines grab market share around the world. Why hide your content from them?
• The negative effects can be bigger than you think. When the spider fails to identify dynamic content, you might lose a lot more than a few words on a page. If that content contains links, the spider might not see whole pages on your site, and whatever pages THEY link to.

So, I’m a technical guy, and I really love to see the spiders getting smarter. It would be great if any Web page that can be rendered properly in a browser could be crawled and indexed by all search engines. It would make SEO a lot simpler and would allow us to concentrate on content rather than technical mumbo-jumbo.

But we’re not there yet. So, make sure that you know what the spiders see (all of them) before you employ lots of dynamic content techniques.