Image courtesy of mdezemery, Flickr Creative Commons

(The blog post appeared previously on the ComMetrics blog. You can read it there, or read below for the full post.)

Google+ rolled out its Ripples feature on October 27, with just a hint of data potential within Google+ for marketing and engagement. Google+ Ripples is really the first set of metrics we’ve seen from Google around Google+. It’s not enough, of course, but worth parsing because it hints at what is to come from Google. It also offers Google+ users relevant information about the use of circles, G+ influence, and how data is spread.

What is Ripples?

Ripples are the data visualization over time of how your posts are shared: when, by whom, and to whom. Once a post has been shared even once, an option to view the Ripple will appear in the drop-down menu to the right of the post. Google adds a time stamp video to Ripples that visually shows the spread of a post over time. Quite simply, it shows the “ripple effect” of the content that you post.

Why is it important? It’s all about moving people to action.

1. Know Your Influencers

Whether you work for a nonprofit or a brand, you want to know how your social media activities can move supporters, followers, and fans to action. Ripples tells you who amongst your followers has real influence that moves people to act. This is especially important when thinking about campaigns and audience segmentation.

For example, I posted a link to a ComMetrics story about Google+ brand pages to my Google+ profile. It was shared six times (five public shares and one private or limited share).

Visually, Ripples shows that Janet Fouts was the most influential sharer of this post, since she influenced three other shares. What does that tell me? It tells me that Janet is interested in this type of information, that she can influence others to share, and that she may be influential within other social networks as well. If I were a running an organization, I’d find out more about my strongest Ripple influencers, create new circles for influencers, and further segment influencers by their areas of interest. (For a view of an incredible Ripple, check out a Ripple started by the Dalai Lama.)

2. Find New Influencers

If you know who your audience is, use Ripples to find new fans and supporters. Start with your known “superfans,” those that love you and share your information on other social media channels or platforms. Look at who is sharing your superfans’ posts, find those influencers, and circle them. Cultivate those “friends of friends” by thanking them, mentioning them in posts, and asking for comments.

Is there someone you are trying to reach? Find them on Google+ and find out who influences them by looking at their re-shares. Are you trying to find new fans? Search for a hashtag on Google+ and look for posts that have a lot of shares. Also, don’t be afraid to tag Google+ users in a post, if you really want to engage them. Social media is all about engagement, so find those you want to know, circle them, and engage them in a real way through conversation and sharing of their posts.

3. Know What People Want To Share: Content Feedback Loop

Knowing what people want to share is highly valuable information. What news resonates deeply with your stakeholders? What posts will spread more awareness about your cause, brand, or products? What types of posts appeal to which audiences? This information will help you further segment your marketing, identify niches, and refine your messaging.

Be aware, however, that Ripples illustrates only one aspect of content feedback: what people want to share publicly. Ripples will not show what people want to talk about, either. A post may have 23 comments but no shares. Another post may have 15 shares, but they are private or limited shares which are not viewable as Ripples. If your organization deals with sensitive issues, the latter may be the case. If your SMART goal is deep follower and fan engagement, then your strategy is to generate more comments than shares.

4. Look to a Future Google+ Search Algorithm

On Facebook, highly shared content is a significant part of EdgeRank, the algorithm Facebook uses to determine how prominently posts will be seen within fans’ individual newsfeeds. At this time, the Google+ news stream algorithm is real-time. However, I wouldn’t rule out a similar algorithm to Facebook’s in the future. I also wouldn’t rule out how high your post shows up within a Google+ search or a Google search in the future.

5. Don’t Forget The Power of Clicks

Google+ is an important part of Google’s SEO strategy, affecting the future of search. According to Google+ Ad guy Christian Oestlien, 77 percent of brand-centered content is being shared by users and not brands. Moreover, clickthrough rates on a search result actually go up when users can see their friends’ faces next to a search result. If your strategy involves driving your fans to a website, then shares of your content must be an integral part of your overall social media strategy. Google+ posts appear in Google’s social search results, and those influential faces next to them will certainly influence clicks.

 Resources – great posts about Google+:

How to use Google+ for your nonprofit by Shelly Kramer

Google+ for nonprofits curated Scoop.it topic

You finally have a Google+ business page…now what? by John Haydon

My earlier posts: Summarizing Google+ Pages: the good, the bad, the possible and A Google+ fundraising story

In late March, Google announced the arrival of its version of the “Like” button, the +1 button, and the world waited to find out what that would really mean. With the launch of Google Plus, it’s pretty clear that “+1″ and Google Plus (Google’s brand new social network) are Google’s play for social graph domination. While Google Plus has been all the rage this week, one overlooked point is how the +1 button will change the way we search, interact with search results, and use the web in the future.

Google holds about 64% of the total search market. Though Google lost some market share last year to Bing, this should change with the use of Google’s +1 button. In fact, a recent study of 10,000 of the web’s largest sites found a 33% surge in the number of sites adopting +1 in the last few weeks.

What is the +1 button?

In it’s simplest form, it is a button for individuals to publicly share what content they enjoy on the web. As explained by Google:

“+1’ing is a public action. Anyone on the web can potentially see that you’ve +1’d content when they’re searching on Google or viewing content you’ve +1’d. For this reason, you should only +1 pages when you’re comfortable sharing your recommendation with the world.

Your +1’s may appear to anyone who sees the pages you’ve +1’d. However, we’ll try to display your +1’s to people (specifically those in your social connections) who would find them most useful. Similarly, the +1’s you see will typically be from people in your social connections.”

Google has moved big-time into the social search market

Google’s +1 button works, in theory, similarly to Facebook’s Like button. When you are logged into Google, you will see what others have “plussed” around the web. If you are logged in and searching for content using Google search, you will see what content your friends on Google have plussed. If a friend has plussed a piece of content on another site, his or her name will will show up next to that specific website in search returns. Within Google’s search returns itself you can +1 any search return by clicking on the +1 button next to or below a certain return (faded until you place the cursor over it). Additionally, the total number of +1s on a website will appear next to Google ads for that site.

Simply put, Google is showing you how your friends are using the web.

At this time, it’s not possible to see who, specifically, has plussed content on the web while on someone’s site. I’m sure a +1 button is already in development that will include the faces and names of friends who have plussed the content. However, for now, it’s just a plain button that shows the number of +1s of each piece of content.

When someone has plussed content, it appears within the “+1″ tab on his or her Google profile.

Google really does know all your friends

Your “social connections” include anyone in your Gmail or Google talk chat list, people in your Google Plus Circles, people in your Google Reader, Google Buzz, and Google Contacts. It’s not hard to see how easily this list can expand to include your YouTube friends (Google owns YouTube), those with whom you’ve shared your Picasa album (yep, Google owns Picasa), your Google voice contacts, anyone in a Google group with you, anyone you’ve shared a Google document with…etc. In other words, Google is poised to be just as big a player in social search returns as Facebook. Possibly even bigger. Google handles 1 billion searches daily.

How will +1 affect website search and rank?

It’s clear that Google will factor the +1 into its algorithm of search results. According to Google’s +1 FAQ:

“+1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

No doubt Google’s +1 button will affect search ranking.

I also think it’s only a matter of time before Google begins searching Google Plus public comments and returning them as real time search results. For example, when you search “Boston Red Sox,” Google would include what your friends are saying publicly about the Red Sox on Google Plus within the search results. You’d even see which of your friends are talking about the Sox’s fabulous season this year. This seems ever more likely since Google dropped real time search July 4th when its agreement to show Twitter in real time search expired, just a few days after Google launched Google Plus. “Search by what your friends are saying now” is just a few iterations away.

Taken a step further, what you “plus” on the web will ultimately affect what you will see within Google search, what all of your connections will see, and how the world may perceive you.

What are you thoughts on the +1 button?

I’m a SphinnCon Israel, a conference about SEO and search marketing, and live blogging the sessions. The first session is a moderated panel entitled SEO Fundamentals. The panelists are Eli Feldman (RankAbove), Menachem Rosenbaum (TENS Technology), Uri  Breitman (TBWA Digital), Itay Paz (Itaypaz.net), and moderated by Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineLand.com and RustyBrick). OK folks, this session may be a bit techy, but hopefully by capturing this information for you, you’ll gain some information about how to use search engine optimization to help your blog, website, cause and brand! Let the live blogging begin:

Eli Feldman: The old way of thinking about search engine results = above the fold on Google search results, and everyone will look “above the fold.” Now: there is “fully integrated universal results” and it takes up spot from the SERP. Live results are added. Videos are groups on first page. The big changes – get all types of results on the first page, options to search by types of search, and lots of different kinds of search options.

Major change for video is coming: Google has started grouping video results in the regular search results. You see them in packs of two or four on the page. If the video makes it to the front page, you’ll get better rank all the sudden because of this. It doesn’t matter if your video was ranked 89, because if Google shows it with a high-ranking video on the Google search page, your lower video’s rank is pulled up.

How to get video to come into the Google results and take advantage of the “packs:” utilize the video sitemap (like an XML sitemap), liste in sitemap index, include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, if family-friendly). If your URL is too long, it won’t show up in Google search – it must be less than 60 characters. Will only show up if it is family-friendly.

We are seeing Google show live results, latest news results, on search returns. You can go to trends.google.com and see the latest news trends/news results. If you are in a newsworthy area, your company may come up on the trends results.

Add content into this media, or around this media, as much as you can. Example: put up an image, add text to it with context and captions, tags, comments, translation. In YouTube video, you can add transcripts. For Flickr, you can add info about the type of camera used, and other meta data.

Rules for Video SEO: optimize every aspect of the video (title, description, tag), look at internal backlinks from you tube (comments/groups), external backlinks.

Itay Paz: SEO tips, tricks and fundamentals

Important to have good tags, of course. However, it’s all about content nowadays. Valuable content = traffic generation. Hard to trick search engines with lots of mediocre content. Site maps are critical: build as many site maps as you can – Google likes it. Write about trending topics and “hot” news, which will help bring traffic to your site and help you with rank. Google likes WordPress – a lot, indexes it almost immediately. Use the SEO plugs inside WordPress for SEO – there are a lot of ones to choose from. Incoming links: have to have valuable links pointing to your website. Friendly URLs – keywords inside a URL is a good idea. Control outgoing links – think about the number of outgoing links and not having too many outgoing links. Be SOCIAL – if you put out a lot of content on networks, you’ll gather incoming links and traffic. Blogs give great traffic and links into the website.

Uri Breitman: Talking about keyword research – it’s important to do keyword research for everything, even to prepare to meet with an SEO team. Use the Google Keyword Tool and use it every day – it’s amazing. Then, go back and research using the keywords you found. Find new keywords in the search, then go back to the Keyword Tool, and it involves re-thinking and re-researching. Check the guys who are ranked above you because they know what they’re doing. Prioritize with what you should do with main keywords.

In order to figure out keywords, think about this: Who am I? What is my core business? What would I search for if I were going to search for my company? What would a client look for? Call clients! Ask clients how they found you, and how they found your competitors.

Google Keyword Tool is great. Using that, check the “broad match,” the “phrase match,” and the “exact match.” ALWAYS check the exact. Look at what the competition is doing, and the prices for top keywords in AdWords. Can be a good indication of what’s going on in the organic search field. Beware of keywords that attract a lot of competition, but don’t generate SALES.

Prioritize: most popular keywords, most suitable keywords. Go for regional keywords which may have best conversion. First-step keywords (the ones you thought about at the very first of your keyword search) may not have been the best keywords.

Finalize your list:  make a short list, have modest objectives, (don’t get into street fights over keywords!), it will take time to move your site up, prepare to make changes, and use web analytics for keyword traffic data so that you can monitor every small change, check rankings using 3rd party tool (not your own computer which will give you the wrong results!)

Menachem Rosenbaum: How to judge link building success? What happens if you are building links and you don’t see results? How to judge results quickly? Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website on the internet. Look at the diagnostics crawl stats in webmaster tools for crawl information. If we want Google to crawl as many pages as possible. Each website has a www.yourwebsite.com and a yourwebsite.com URL. Make sure that you have a www.yourwebsite.com that redirects to the one with the www. in the beginning to get the most crawling of the site from Google. Bottom line: the more often Google comes back, the more authority you have. Lower crawl stats, or crawl stats not improving, it reflects in your ranking.

Takeaways:

1. Video search returns in Google can be a huge boost for your video. Optimize for a higher chance that will happen.

2. Social search within Google is huge, and will continue to grow.

3. Google Keyword Tool is great, and critical for your site. Use it as a guide.

4. Content is still king. Good incoming links are also incredibly valuable.

image courtesy of j_a_n

How can organizations best utilize the social bookmarking site Delicious? Though not the largest of the social bookmarking sites (it is 7th of the top 20), it is one of the easiest sites to mine for information. It is deliciously simple (pun intended!) to use, and there are over 180 tools, add-ons, and related resources to help you to take advantage of this platform. I can think of three broad ways organizations can use Delicious: for public/private information-gathering, intra company collaboration, and sharing news with stakeholders. I’m sure there are more! How do you use Delicious?

Information Gathering (public or private)

Use Delicious to gather relevant information: stay on top of the latest industry developments, competitor news, research new possibilities, and monitor tags of your own organization’s name. Use Delicious to search for these items or articles of interest to your organization. Remember, you can determine whether or not each bookmark will be seen publicly, and you decide if you want others to know what you are researching!

1. Follow Users:

Find and follow fellow industry professionals that upload bookmarks.  Select the “add a user to network” option in order to collect all of your favorite users’ bookmarks in one place.  Here is a screen shot of how to add a user to your network:

2. Follow Tags:

You can  “subscribe” to specific tags of interest in Delicious. This action sends all your subscriptions directly to your Delicious home page. Alternatively, you can also create an RSS (really simple syndication) feed to automatically update whenever new articles with the subscribed tag are bookmarked. You can also create an RSS feed of any user’s bookmarks.

As an example, I searched Delicious for all tagged information about the electric car, and subscribe to the RSS feed for all future articles tagged “electric car.”

Intra company Collaboration

Why not use Delicious for sharing information within the company? Create a custom organizational intranet for sharing bookmarks! No copying and sending the URLs by email, no re-posting to your company’s intranet. When everyone in the company is encouraged to share articles, the volume of intra company news sharing increases.

Two options for intra company news sharing:

1. Encourage employees to bookmark and share tags using one company password and user ID, but mark each bookmark as the “do not share!” All employees can log in to see the newest bookmarks, or subscribe to the company’s bookmarks.  Here is a sample screen shot:

2. Create individual employee accounts, and employees tag bookmarks with a set of agreed-upon tag names. To share the information, employees in the company subscribe to each other’s networks, bookmarks, and specifically-named identifying tags (e.g. conversationprogram221).

Sharing News with Stakeholders

Create a news feed on the website of bookmarked news about your organization. This displays a vibrant, crowdsourced “News” section of the website, or a scrolling news widget out of your Delicious bookmarks.  Here are two variations on this idea:

1. Whenever your organization is mentioned in the news, bookmark it to Delicious and tag it with your company’s name. Create an RSS feed for all Delicious tags with your company’s name. Place the RSS feed on the front page of the website or the sidebar of your blog. You could put the RSS feed in the “News” section of your website, but that’s not as fun!

2. Create a public RSS feed to your website of all tags relevant to stakeholders. For example, if your organization’s mission is advocacy for the electric car,  create RSS feeds for the tags “electric car,” “alternative energy automobile,” “automobile efficiency,” and other related tags.

Of course, don’t forget that bookmarks are public by default. This means that you are already sharing information with your stakeholders. Ask them to subscribe to your bookmarks! Tell them that this is the way your organization offers news to other Delicious users. And…don’t forget to mention your Delicious account on the website!

How does your organization use Delicious? Please share your stories with us in the comments section below!

How do you gather and process all the online information that you need to know? Amy Sample Ward opened up her blog reader to the public with her guest post “Want a Peek at My RSS: Here It Is!” on Beth Kanter’s Blog. That post pointed me to some wonderful blogs, but left me wondering about how everyone gathers information online apart from reading blogs.

Today, I’m sharing my information gathering and processing system with you. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this, you’ll write your own post about this topic to spread insights.

I acquire most (3/4) of my information from blogs I subscribe to, and articles that are tweeted. Social media communities (Linkedin discussion groups, Facebook friends or business Pages, and the nonprofit news site Idealist News), online media (New York Times and its blogs), and industry reports give me everything else. I do crowdsource occasionally to supplement.

I spend a not-insignificant amount of time reading news on blogs and twitter. I spend at least an hour a day reading blogs. Currently, I subscribe to 44 blogs. I read them using Google Reader. After looking at Amy Sample Ward’s Netvibes reader, I’ll be switching to Netvibes.   I divide the blogs into “must reads” (Jeremy Owyang, Beth Kanter, Mashable, Inside Facebook, Network for Good, NTEN), others that add value, and the ones that are outside of my immediate world but offer interesting perspectives (Online Journalism Blog, Museum 2.0, eJewishPhilanthropy, NYT’s Gadgetwise blog).

Twitter drives a lot of my reading. Twitter is, in fact, my supplementary RSS feed. I spend at least an hour a day on Twitter, and jump on and off throughout the day as I have time. I use TweetDeck to organize and read tweets easily.  I have divided my TweetDeck Twitter client into columns that make sense of who I’m following (nonprofit organizations, nonprofit professionals, new media, Israelis, friends/family, and a changing current search column).

I join Linkedin Discussion Groups based not only on who I want to meet, but what I want to learn. I belong to Social Media Mafia, Nonprofit Professionals Forum, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Web 2.0 for Nonprofit Organizations, Nonprofit Technology Network, and a few others. I ” fan” certain Facebook pages primarily for information gathering. I am a fan of Hubspot, Web Analytics an Hour A Day, Customers That Click, PitchEngine, Tech Soup, and Facebook Marketing Solutions, among others.

Finally, I utilize crowdsourcing on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Linkedin if I want information about a specific topic. I don’t always get everything that I need by crowdsourcing, but it gives me a good start and direction.

I can’t possibly remember everything that I want to remember, and consider the social bookmarking site Delicious to be my personal recording secretary. I bookmark and tag whatever I think I’ll want to remember. I also utilize Friendfeed in much the same way – it’s a record of my social media activities (status updates, links, tweets, etc) – and it is searchable. Ideally, I’ve tagged important articles. But if I forget, and I tweeted about it, then I can search my Friendfeed by keyword.

I’m sure there are great ways to gather and process information, which I haven’t yet considered. I’d love to learn from you. I hope that this post will inspire a series of posts about this topic. I am very curious how other people gather and process information in today’s online, ever-social world. It’s a jungle out there, and we have to manage it somehow. But maybe we don’t have to do it alone.

How do you gather and process the online information you need?

I’m live blogging the panel discussion and presentation at Affilicon Israel 2009 entitled “Effective Link Building.” Why am I attending this panel? Because I hope to learn how too  use links to bring visitors to a website, for social media campaign success and to increase web traffic for many worthy nonprofits and businesses. I am not a link-building or marketing specialist, but I believe anyone working on the web should understand the basics of utilizing the web for business. And so should you!

First presenter is Gilad Sasson, Search Marketer, Nekuda. (More information from his presentation will be available at tools.algoholic.com.)

There are many (many!) tools that profile incoming links:  SEO chat (arranges results by page rank), Solo SEO (called Link Search Tool to find sites that can link to your website by clicking in a keyword), Majestic SEO, Seomoz.org (a great community for finding tools), Linkscape (a good tool to analyze links), Yahoo! Site Explorer (the best link exploring tool to allow you to see what sites link to other sites and is simple to use), Google Webmaster Tools (to verify what links drive the best traffic to your site), and many more.

The best tool is having a great site with good content that adds value to your site!

Useful activities (not tools) to build links: social networking links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), directories/article submissions, comment on blog posts, associations and clients link to your site, create badges/widgets, internal links and putting “no-follow” tags on your site to help search engines understand what pages are the most important pages on your site.

Ophir Cohen (CEO, Compucall) uses Google Alerts to notify his company whenever new content is being indexed by Google relevant to what his companies are looking for regarding links. This offers fresh, new information that you can utilize. (My note: a great tip is to use Google Alerts for any real-time information that your organization needs).)

Amir Yarkoni, Co-CEI of Easynet search marketing: think of links as an “unbiased vote of approval” for your content and product. Google searches the content you want people to see on your site, but links are votes of approval.

Links are an unbiased vote of approval!

Also think about being creative to develop a certain utility (a document, a widget, etc) that will naturally create an interest in others to link to your site.

Elroei Buchman, CEO of K-Logic is the moderator of the panel.

Gary Beal (@scubagary) – Managing Director of VanguardSEO also on the panel.

Ofer Dascalu, CEO of WiseImpact is also on the panel: There are at least 1,000 free link building tools – pick one or two at most and begin working with them. Don’t spend too much time on tools! There are no real “secrets” – just begin working. Advice is to create a one-year plan stating your link strategy and work on that the first year.  Most important is to have a long-term plan, pick a strategy, do it all year.

Question: what is  one case study of creative link building? Answer: Ophir Cohen. He had a client with attractive content who wanted to launch a new product. He approached leading bloggers (such as Wire.com, BoingBoing) by sending them packages with brochures, DVD, and models of new product. He communicated with the key bloggers. One of the bloggers was granted “exclusivity” to publish the information about 12 hours before anyone else could publish it. (12 hours is a big lead time online.) He then became a ‘de facto’ affiliate of the product, and approached his friends and news sites with the information. Result: about 100 new links, considerable website traffic, and the effect has lasted almost a year after the launch of the campaign.

Gary Beal suggests searching SEOchat to look for the forum about LinkBuilding 101 – it’s a great discussion about basics of linkbuilding.

Another example of an effective linkbuilding campaign: one of the clients of Easynet wanted to leverage its existing customers in order to gain links. How to do this? Analyze the customer’s client base and look at their returning customers. Easynet sent a personal message to all of these returning customers asking them to write a review of the new product. Most of the reviews were great reviews because they were happy customers.

Many social sites like Facebook. Twitter, and others have great authority, are very powerful and create higher rankings for websites as a result of the linking.

Another case study: a translation service put part of its software for free on the internet that anyone could use, linked to the service’s website.  It was free, easy to use. These pages helped many people with translating keywords. They sent the free service to many translating sites and potential users. Many, many people linked back to the free translation pages.

Mistakes:

Link profiling is trying to create an unnatural set of links to your website. Example: if you are selling hot widgets and 89% are pointing to the same page then that is a bit fishy. Using and repeating the same anchor text is bad. It’s easy to detect because all the “new” links are originating from the same text. Try to develop the most natural way of linking. (Confession: I am not a website developer and didn’t really understand this part of the discussion so my notes are naturally unclear.)

Buying links from sites not relevant to your own. Don’t just buy links to buy them. Will the links add value to the user?

Don’t host all of your sites on the same server. Don’t use the same network ID. Google will figure it out.

Really check the site you are trying to get links for and find out if it has a good ranking for the terms that you target!

Remember: the amount of links that you add to your site should seem “natural” and not out of the ordinary.

Question is about shorter versus longer links – (like tiny URL or bitly). It’s more for viral use, but not for permanent links. Make sure that the service that you are using is using a “301 redirection” to make sure all your links go where you want them to go. Check whether or not short URLs expire.

My takeaways:

1. Inbound links are important to your website: they help your website reach higher web search ranking and that can only help your organization/business get exposure.

2. Social media use (commenting on blogs, posting on twitter, etc.) is a great way to gain natural links. A real life example: yesterday I followed a discussion on Twitter about nonprofit CEOs on Twitter. I then tweeted that I had recently posted about the same subject. A nice benefit was that my blog post then received an inbound link from the blog pots about CEOs that Twitter. The unexpected benefits of social media in action!

3. Understanding the importance of inbound links when designing social media campaigns can really help a campaign succeed.

Do you think about inbound links? Did this post help you at all? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image by Denis Collette

I’m live blogging the presentation by Monty Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker.com, SnapNames.com and DomainSponsor.com. He is speaking about online branding, building traffic from domain names, and domain name registration.

SnapNames catches expired or dropped names. If you see a name that you want, you can put a reservation on it and be one of the first to get the name.

Moniker manages 3 million names worldwide. Moniker’s customers are investors in domain names (his customers own, on average, 100 names per person). Moniker also sells domain names through a third party so the seller doesn’t know who is buying. Vice-versa as well. Sells premium domain names as well. Hosts weekly show, Domain Masters on webmaster radio FM, about people who have successfully made money off of domain names sales.

Why Domains Matter:

177 million domain names registered worldwide. Continues to grow: 16% growth rate last year. Domain names are ranked by size: .com, .cn, .de, .net, .org, .uk, .info, .nl, .eu, and .biz.

The sales and aftersales of registered domain names continue to grow at 20% a year.

Why? Domain names are an asset – they are donated to charity, written off on taxes, sold and bought. Growth of social networking (everyone wants an unique identity), growth of broadband cable networks.

Direct navigation is one of the most important vehicles to drive traffic to your site.

Choosing a domain name:

Defensive Strategy: By registering a key word or name in an industry, you can block a competitor.

Offensive Strategy: look at most popular keyword searches associates with your product/service, category top keywords, mistyped brand and domain names. Tip – have friends/staff type the brand name 50 times on the computer and register any mistyped names.

Buy and redirect! Popular example: Books.com redirects to BarnesAndNobel.com. You can by new brands to redirect, rebrand your business, or create a sub-brand for your company.

SEO Impact: if you have a top-ranked site in Google, competitors have to spend a lot of money on ads to get the same traffic.

When register a domain name – register for at least 3 years. Google will look at your registration and how long you are invested in the name. Renew for multiple years for higher SEO. Alternatively, buy a domain name that has been registered in the past with an older registration date. An old name will offer instant advantages in terms of page ranking, traffic, inbound links, etc. Look up at archive.org to find out if a domain name has been used in the past. The stronger and more relevant the keywords, the higher the page rank you will get.

Make sure the domain name is not blacklisted with Google! How to find out: look at archive.org to see if there is bad content from the past. You can look at previous page ranks through the Google Pagerank bar. Also, check Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

The big winner in a “tie breaker” between you and a competitor are the keywords in your domain name. Think about two word domain names that are “long tail” names that drive traffic, such as LookYounger.com for directed and qualified traffic. Long tail names convert views to customers at higher rate than others.

What is the value in registering another extension? #1 extension is .com,  and most people will search for that extension first, unless coming from a country of origin such as Germany or UK. If you are doing business outside of the US, buy those country’s domain extensions as both offensive and defensive strategies.

Never launch a brand with a dash in the middle (e.g. books-local.com). However, for search engines MSN and Yahoo, the dash does increase SEO ranking.

Use fun, humor and interactivity to generate “free” viral traffic. Buy the domain name that is associated with your viral campaign. Example: mytalkingstain.com (Tide-to-go stain remover).

How to acquire a domain name? If not available, look at online auctions (keywords that are coming up for $60 for sale, etc), live domain auctions, online listing services, expired and deleted domain services, private brokerage and stealth acquisitions.

Remember: cover your brands whenever and wherever possible: Misspelling, word and phrase variations, singular and plural, foreign languages (you may want the variation of the word in another language where you have a lot of customers), dashes/hyphens for search relevance, register various extensions.

Image courtesy of bionicteaching

What is the future of Search Engine Optimization? I am not a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, or even very knowledgeable about how to optimize websites, but I know that SEO is critical to the success of any web-based site. That is why I’m live blogging Affilicon Israel 2009 and listening to a panel discussion about the future of SEO  technology.

Do you want people to find your site on the web? Will your organization be able to help more people if more online visitors found your site? Do you want to be the first name to appear when possible stakeholders (clients, customers, funders, collaborators) search for businesses in your industry or geographic area? If you do, then your organization should utilize SEO to raise your company’s organic search rankings in a Google search. Effective SEO can do that.

Here are the comments from the panel I attended today at Affilicon Israel 2009 about SEO (presentation by Elroy Buckman, K Logic):

PPC (pay per click) technologies have evolved from: tools for keyword list generations (rules-based for bidding on keywords) and has evolved into Portfolio Management (don’t look at single keywords, but look at the portfolio of keywords instead to predict performance) and eventually evolved into comprehensive optimization platforms (multiple solutions to direct keywords campaigns include landing pages, creative bidding, etc). Thus we can see that PPC has evolved into multiple dimensions.

Current state of SEO:

• dynamic and evolving
• common SEO practices are a commodity (keywords, titles, text vs. flash, etc) and is not enough anymore to get great organic traffic
• old artificial link-building practices are now questionable, and Google now detects artificial link building patterns quickly
• Big brands have a higher ability to generate more traffic from SEO

Want to build effective SEO to measure real business impact, to find real Return on Investment (ROI) from discreet SEO investments, implement best practices across business development.

The future – a “killer” SEO application will be able to identify an alert for high and low-performing keywords, landing pages, internal lining schemes, new incoming links, title description..and their combinations.

In other words – the killer app will be PREDICTIVE and influence MANY DIMENTIONS.

“The ‘killer system’ will be a decision-making tool for optimizers/managers based on real data.”

Another panelist believes: the issue isn’t specific tools, but thinking about change. What has changed? The rankings, the SERPs, search engine popularity. What has not changed? The workflow, the principles. This is where you “win” the SEO game. Tools and gadgets don’t seem to be that effective to manage time – too much information. To “win” – you need to control time, workflow and monitoring tests. Then, choose a tool or create your own that does this.

Lots of talk about new tools that will work for you. Best tools give you concrete information that you can use and allow you to decide what to do with the information. Make sure the data is complete and not biased for some industries.

Thoughts on the future of Google algorithms and what may affect search rankings (from Branko Rihtman, http://www.whiteweb.com):

1. Landing pages need to load higher for a higher quality score – Google wants you to serve your users betters.

2. Personalized search (the check/x button next to google search results) – doesn’t affect general search engine results yet, but will customize the results you will see as a user in your Google account when you sign in. This is a hint of the future: integrating social search with organic search.

3. Bounce rate may affect Google organic traffic. If you have a high bounce rate for certain pages, you may be penalized by Google. Could be a hint that Google/search engines are looking at bounce rates.

4. Other behaviors on the website that are more interesting to search engines? On-site navigation paths, major exit pages, pages that are read more may have more valuable links, what is the position of the URL when it is clicked, queries with title correspondence, and all other user pattern information.

5. Google does a lot of academic research – so look at what they are researching now.

6. Look at sores by how users browse between pages – the links between pages.

How can we utilize this info? Test, test, test what users are doing on the website. Crazyegg, Google Website Optimizer, Clickdensity, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, ClickTale, and more.

Take advantage of other search engine products to build up your site. Example: using You Tube, Adwords, can help your Google rank.

Think that brand reputation is increasingly important. Google has started to increase rankings on big brands.

What did I take away from this?

1. Build your website for the user – make it as user-friendly to navigate and try to keep your users on the site as long as possible. In the future, Google will place more value on user experiences onsite.
2. Build your brand – this may also grow in importance for Google ranks.
3. Hire a website optimizer that is looking at all your data (not biased to one industry), is thinking about the future of SEO, and is thinking about predictive technology.
4. What I thought I knew about SEO (the “old way”) is now a commodity. Google is always looking for new ways to determine rank. Find someone who can advise you on the latest SEO trends.
5. Begin by looking at your own website data from Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Insight to get a sense of existing user patterns. Learn a little about how your users are using your site right now.