All About Content

According to just-released data from Compete, Google continues to gain search market share at everyone else’s expense (yawn, what else is new), everyone but AOL that is. Now there’s a twist. Is AOL the little search engine that could? Well, no. While it’s market share might not have declined last month, it’s still in a distant fourth place, with no hope of catching up, unless something dramatic happens in the search landscape. And then there’s the issue of AOL not using proprietary search technology.

ComScore released its own market share findings this week as well. According to comScore’s press release,

In December 2006, Google Sites captured 47.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.4 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites grew 0.3 share points, maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.4 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent).

ComScore further says, “Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.”

More info on these data at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land.

Very cool: Google’s Blogger now allows custom domains even if you don’t have your own hosting. That means you can have your own branded domain just like the grown-ups (rather than that silly name.blogspot.com address) but keep all your content on Blogger’s free hosting. And the Blogger system automatically redirects all your old URLs to the new versions once you’re set up. All you need to do is register your own domain name, if you haven’t already. Nice!

Doesn’t it seem like there was a time — somewhere between Mahir (“WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!!I KISS YOU !!!!!”) and [anything] on YouTube — when you didn’t get inundated with the same forwarded email from at least half a dozen of your friends telling you about “funniest thing you’ve ever seen”? Probably because that’s when the effects of Bubble 1.0 were really starting to hit home and the dot-commers didn’t have time for such inanity. Not that I have nostalgia for the bad old days of the recession, but …

Inanity abounds again, via content sharing sites like Digg and YouTube, etc. As a marketer, I always wonder, without fail, “how in the world did that become such a hit?” The answer seems to be two-fold. If you want something to spread across the Internet like wild fire, it needs to be 1) ridiculous and 2) photo documented.

What prompts this post? None other than a joke played by a bunch of pranksters at InPhonic, which has become a pretty hot topic in the Blogosphere, as far as these things go. The tale of what happens when you take a half a dozen employees, someone’s precious Jaguar, and 14,000 Post-It notes has been blogged in at least half a dozen languages.

Seriously? This is viral material? I can swear with 100% confidence that this was never intended to be anything more than a practical joke on a particular InPhonic employee. The photos were published to Flickr in the hopes that the joke’s target would find them before he went down to the parking garage — that’s it. Yet this non-story about the prank’s popularity has been on the ABC World News homepage for 3 days, For God’s Sake!

(Note for those who are still keeping score: It would not be an exaggeration to say that being one of the top stories on ABC’s homepage was meaningless in terms of traffic and popularity next to to getting to the homepages of Digg or Boing Boing. New Media definitely wins this round in the ongoing battle of New Media versus Old Media.)

Take-aways:
- do something unique and unrelated to any product or promotion
- the more ridiculous, the better
- take photos and videos!! (and be sure to assign Creative Commons licensing)
- don’t use your own bandwidth, host on a third-party platform
- share!

Oh yeah, and if you enjoy the photos and want to blog about this yourself, be a dear and link back to Scott’s Flickr page in your post.

Generally I have a policy about not doing paid postings for sites or services with which I’m not familiar. However, last week one of the paid blogging networks I belong to sent me a link to a website so atrocious that I can’t help but post about them and why I hope you don’t give them your business.

(The terms of the service don’t require that I write something positive, only that I mention the link 3 times. However, even if they decide not to pay me at all for this negative posting, I think there’s some value in doing a site evaluation.)

The owner of the site explains that after 9 months in the Google Sandbox, http://www.searchengineoptimizationtoronto.com/ is ready for prime time. The marketing pitch on the homepage (highlighted to draw extra attention to it) is such:

we trust ourselves to optimize your site to be search engine friendly and save no means to drive you a descent [sic] amount of targeted traffic.

Unfortunately, I don’t trust this SEO company to get anywhere near any of my sites, despite the promise:

“We are so clear and ethical in our SEO practice, and we will definitely do useful things for your site includes adding useful content to your site…”

Besides absolutely butchering the English language, other issues I see with the site itself are:

• Bad, table-based depricated code used for layout, despite style sheets being defined on every page. Not that code load is a huge issue on a site this small, but the code for each page is probably more than 5 times as long as it actually needs to be. Looks like a classic case of Used-FrontPage-itis.
• Misplaced tags (meta tags residing outside the HEAD tags). Again, having a site not validate isn’t exactly a death sentence, but on a site this simple and small (and one built by a professional SEO no less) there’s no excuse for that.
• No use of H1′s and H2′s to define the hierarchy of the content (again, despite the fact that all of these are defined in the in-page CSS, AND the fact that the pages actually do use headings that are defined with “bold” tags)
• The one page that actually looks like someone spent more than 5 minutes on it total — the plan comparison chart — appears to have been stolen almost line-for-line from another website.

I could go on, but I’m a little disheartened that I just keep finding more things that would have been caught by the most cursory pre-launch QA. I’m a LOT disheartened by how even less attention seems to have been paid to simple proofreading. The site’s writer needs to take his own advice to heart: “So I need to remind every web master and all seo people that seo is a matter of good content.” Yes, it is. And this, sadly, is an example of content that does not inspire any confidence.

I can forgive non-native speakers who struggle with the language, and I can forgive lay people who don’t know the first thing about code, but I cannot recommend any SEO who can write neither a complete sentence nor the most basic HTML.