PR & SEO Blog from Silicon Alley

I found this interesting blog post on iMedia Connection about conversational marketing, and it made me think of how it relates to SEO…

Back in the old days of traditional marketing (which really weren’t so long ago), communication with the consumer was generally a one-way street. The consumer was told, “BUY THIS.” Period. End of conversation.

But, today’s marketers & businesses must keep that conversation going.

It’s called “Conversational Marketing,” a buzzword brought to global attention by 1999’s “ClueTrain Manifesto.”

Here is a simple example of conversational marketing: a business sets up a blog on their webpage. The blog is there to, of course, help sell the product -- but also to provide some good content and a place where customers and potential customers can engage in Conversation about said product.

Having something valuable to say and being there to listen – the hallmarks of a good friend, or at least somebody you’d want to hang out with. And that’s the key to conversational marketing, and of the sea change that has taken place in the world of marketing in general.

The consumer of today is tired of being talked down to, ordered around, and generally told what he or she should do with his or her money. He or she is also getting too savvy for the bells and whistles marketers and advertisers dream up to coax them into a purchase. No, what they want is not bells and whistles – but a person to talk to.

The meteoric rise in social media of all stripes – blogs, message boards, social networking, social bookmarking, news aggregate sites – have provided the perfect platform for this conversation between Business and Consumer to flourish. And, it’s incumbent upon every company, big and small, to make use of these resources.

Now, how does conversational marketing relate to a public relations firm that has transitioned to SEO?

Well, we can extend the conversation over to SEO pretty easily. In conversational SEO, you are not merely looking at a list of keywords, but really understanding how your audience is conversing – and then optimizing on the words they use to search! Again, the art of conversational SEO – like that of conversational marketing -- is a distinctly two-way, personal interaction. One-to-one (or many-to-many) versus one-to-many.

Now certainly, one cannot live on “conversation” alone. However, making the most of social media in conjunction with a skillful SEO campaign is a winning combination!

Labels: conversational marketing, conversational SEO, Marketing, media, seo, social media, social networking

posted by Valerie D'Orazio  0 comments

The SEO Firm & New York

Friday, January 18, 2008

Madison Avenue is the home of advertising agencies and PR has often times found itself at the heart of New York City. But SEO has yet to be pinned to one specific geographic location.

Having been in the SEO business for about 10 years, we seem to be dominating the SEO space here in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan. Perhaps our chic locale will start a trend.

In our increasingly interconnected world, however, we might soon find location to not be as relevant as it once was. After all, we are doing business with companies outside of our little neighborhood. We are even branching out internationally.

Being competitive and offering truly unique services is thus the top priority for companies dealing with the online space. In a recent ClickZ article, Mike Grehan warns SEO-ers that we need to step up our game in 2008. Years before, when search was more rudimentary, SEO was pretty straight forward. Streamline a company’s website and they are on solid ground for months.

With the evolution of our search habits, SEO is just not that simple anymore. We have to get beyond the basics and truly add creativity to our practice.

It’s a good thing that Connors recognized this years ago. We have always banked on the long tail concept, knowing that the majority of hits to a site originate from people searching on material that is only remotely related to it.

For example, let’s say you type “French restaurant NYC” into Google. You then see a French cookbook in the midst of your search results. You click on the book and, since you are craving French food, you buy it. So, even though you were not aiming to buy a French cookbook, you did anyway. It might go against the grain of your common sense, but that often happens with human behavior.

Labels: 2008, Google, New York City, search, seo, Web 2.0

posted by Gina Bolotinsky  0 comments

Connors in the New Year

Friday, December 21, 2007

It’s hard to believe that Christmas is just days away and that 2008 is looming around the corner. The decade, which we have yet to name, is almost over!

It’s early still to reflect on the first ten years of the 21st century, but I think it is safe to say that we have come a very long way since the days of Y2K. In fact, in that short time, we have overcome the first web revolution and found ourselves basking in the glory of the second.

Some people laugh at the phrase Web 2.0, but it’s not just a gimmick. For example, yesterday there was news from the San Francisco Chronicle about a study recently conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project on the propensity of teens to engage in online content creation and sharing.

The study found that “almost two-thirds of online teens have created something online.” The article then goes into the specifics of the data, the most impressive of which is the rise in the percentage of blogging teens. In 2004, the number was just 19%, where as now, almost 30% of teenagers blog in some shape or form.

And it’s not just a phenomenon reserved for the younger generation. We are all coming to rely on the Internet at an exceedingly growing rate. If you’re skeptical, just look at what’s happening to print publications. We’re clearly no longer getting information in the ways that we grew accustomed.

It is for all these reasons that in the new year, Connors will no longer be doing PR in the same old way. We have been split between traditional PR and SEO for years, but taking society’s changing ways into consideration, it is becoming more and more clear that the traditional PR road is no longer paved in gold. The road online, however, is looking very bright.

Our president, Connie Connors, recently spoke to Enid Burns of ClickZ about our changing direction. In the resulting article, Connie points out that the communication channels no longer equate to “one-to-many.” Rather, “many-to-many” is the formula that dominates, creating a “sphere of influence.” Meaning that, with the help of the Internet, we are all now playing a more active role in each other’s lives.

Labels: Connie Connors, Connors Communications, Internet, new media, Public Relations, seo, Web 2.0

posted by Gina Bolotinsky  0 comments

Our Brain and Google

Friday, December 14, 2007

Have you ever wished that you were as smart as Google, or that you at least thought with the same diligence? Well, it turns out, you do.

Scientists have discovered that the formula behind Google PageRank and how the search engine finds relevant information is very similar to the way we think, associate and remember.

It’s a truly remarkable discovery that makes a lot of sense once you think about it. Take the Google PageRank, for instance. Google determines a page’s rank or importance by the number of sites that link to it, as well as the importance of those sites and who links to them.

This means that if you have a website and 100 of your friends linked to your site from their sites, you might still have a somewhat low PageRank. This is because your friends are not really all that important in the larger scheme of the Internet. But, if you had a website and the New York Times and Newsweek linked to it, your PageRank would be pretty high, because those two sites are very important.

In this same way, our brains categorize information. Just think about all the nonsense you come across every day. Can’t? That’s because your brain has chosen to bury it in its depths; perhaps, on the 20th page of search results, for example.

Now try to recall what you were told on your last performance review. It’s all coming in crystal clear, isn’t it?

What’s most interesting to me about all of this is that we are learning about our brain function from formulas we (well not me, and probably not you… most likely someone much smarter) created for a search engine.

As an article in World Science pointed out through quoting this month’s issue of the research journal Psychological Science, the approach of the scientists who discovered this similarity “indicates how one can obtain novel models of human memory by studying the properties of successful information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines.”

The article goes onto to say that, likewise, programmers developing new applications for search engines are “likely to find good solutions by studying the mind.”

Labels: Google, Internet, seo

posted by Gina Bolotinsky  0 comments

When will Marketers start to get it?

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

In 1996, I left a secure 9 to 5 job to work in sales and marketing for a "multimedia" agency - two guys who designed websites. At the time their biggest name client was Rollerblade Canada. The site was pretty advanced for the time whereby surfers could actually look at a 3D skate from all directions.

Once I got the lay of the land I opened my Rolodex and started calling the corporate headquarters of well-known companies in my city offering the service of designing a website. The response was overwhelming - 90% of the people I spoke to said they had heard about the World Wide Web, but were not ready to start the process and kindly asked me to call them back… in a YEAR!

This was amazing to me. Here was an opportunity for companies, with advertising dollars to spend, to take advantage of a new vehicle that could not only generate awareness and sales, but likely set them apart from their competitors. I assume that within that year they all had websites, but I left the company after three months because people just didn't get it…

In my current position, handling business development for Connors Communications, I feel like we are at the same crossroad. The Internet has changed the way that consumers research and buy good and services and, Search has become a unique marketing opportunity for companies to influence the landscape they ultimately control. From propagating positioning messages to gathering intelligence about the marketplace, Search Marketing is creating industry leaders that you've never heard of. For example, shouldn't the mail order business have dominated eCommerce? Instead of Sears, some no-name brand called Amazon.com ate their lunch. Procrastination at these crossroads can be deadly. Companies need to shuffle not only their budgets, but their mindset - the consequences are simply too great. Marketers: how and where your brand is found online is where the game is being played. It’s time to get in on the action.

Labels: eCommerce, Marketing, messaging, SEM, seo

posted by Liz Bazini  0 comments

It's Free!

Friday, September 21, 2007

To no one’s surprise, the New York Times announced Monday that its TimesSelect service will now be available to all readers for free. It took them two years to realize that even though they were generating money with people signing up for the service, they were losing tons of advertising money by not having the content available for free.

So how is it that now, thanks to the Internet, companies are able to make more money by offering things for free than by having people pay for them? The answer is simple: search.

People visiting the NY Times website would be frustrated that they couldn’t access the TimesSelect material. But these folks only made up a small percentage of the advertising money that was being lost. The overwhelming amount was coming from those who were searching for specific topics and were being routed to material from this paid section.

So, let’s say I wanted to learn more about France (which happens to be where I just went for my Honeymoon). I would Google “France” and towards the top of the 1^st results page, I would find a great article from the New York Times. Because I know the Times to be a reputable source, I would be eager to see what it had to say about France. However, when I would try to open the article, I would find that I didn’t have access because I was not a paid subscriber.

You can only imagine the millions of people who had the same dilemma.

Simple as it may seem, there is a very important PR lesson to be learned here. People are no longer putting their faith into their trusted news services. Now-a-days, the collective majority Googles whatever it is they want to know about. Sure we might still be more likely to go to the Times than to some random blog, but (as we PR people well know), the Times does not and will not write about most things.

What it means for us is that the days of traditional media being the gatekeepers to influencing the public are slowly fading. That role is now shifting to the Internet. With this change, we must pay more attention to not only the press we get online, but the kind of persona our clients have online. What is their voice? Do they even have a voice?

Because as I was Googling France, I didn’t find very many helpful websites ending in .fr that were in English, which I am sure isn’t terribly helpful to the French tourist industry. Yet, literally and metaphorically, France is on the map. But for those companies that aren’t, having a solid presence on the Web is starting to make all the difference.

Labels: Google, media, new media, Public Relations, seo, Web 2.0

posted by Gina Bolotinsky  0 comments

The Irony of Advertising

Thursday, May 10, 2007

I find it ironic that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) of all organizations is trying to challenge comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings on metrics when they themselves don't even distinguish paid search from the rest of online marketing. Can we even tell if industry forecasts for online marketing include search engine optimization? Not very often.

Yet, to us, SEO clearly falls under the realm of public relations. Our work influences the free editorial listings, the same way as we pitch news to newspaper and magazine editors. Honestly we'd be happy if the IAB ignored SEO altogether, but I don't forsee PRWeek or the PRSA picking up the slack. Unfortunately unless more people demand clarification, Google will shape the discussion in its own light by claiming their A/B ad testing tool is optimization… despite 10 years of history that has shown optimization to be clearly about influencing the natural unpaid results.

Paid search was pioneered by GoTo.com (a former Connors client, now Yahoo Search Marketing) and it made search engines immensely profitable. Ad agencies and their clients seem to know no bounds in their budgets. However, just as viewers watch TV for their favorite shows and not commercials, people go to search engines for the credible, organic results and not the advertising. There's little doubt that the long term benefits belong to SEO. After all, the web-savvy children who are growing up as Google loyalists often don't even notice the ads. Perhaps the greatest irony of all would be if future generations all used Google and not a single one clicked a text ad. You can bet that is one reason they acquired DoubleClick.

Labels: advertising, Google, pr, seo, Yahoo

posted by Adam Edwards  2 comments

The Cobbler's Children DON'T Live at Connors

Saturday, April 28, 2007

OK, here's the remarkable thing to make my point about blogging, SEO and the long tail. This page is in the first page for the term "cobbler's children".

I was merely stating that the Connors Communications PR firm that created HitTail is NOT a victim of cobbler's children syndrome, because we do practice what we preach.

Did that earn us the first page of Google on this 2-word term, as if we were a Wikipedia entry? I don't think so, but hey, you be the judge. Comments welcome.

Labels: Cobbler's Children, Connors Communications, HitTail, PR firm, PR firms, seo, The Long Tail

posted by Mike Levin  0 comments

Search is Just Another Medium

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

An article by Dave Pasternack today in DM News comments on the growth of search engine marketing. Yet for all of the cheery forecasts, one of his best points is that advertisers still downplay the importance of search. He mentions a journalist that recently said "paid placement search marketing is the dirty secret of online advertising".

Search engine optimization (SEO) gets talked about even less in PR circles, despite the fact it's the same value proposition -- influencing editorial content instead of paying for advertising. Nevermind that it's more cost-effective than advertising and builds a long term corporate asset. Unlike paid search advertising whose influence disappears the minute you stop paying, natural search results stick after SEO contracts end.

More PR firms and advertising agencies need to realize that search is another medium, just like print or broadcast. Oh, but search happens to be the first place people go to do their research... whether you are a reporter, an analyst, a potential consumer, or investor. No wonder ad agencies worry about Google selling advertising and don't want to separate SEM from online marketing budgets. Too bad they don't have much of a choice as Google moves into other media.

Google didn't have to move onto Madison Avenue to make an impact in New York. When will the world wake up and realize the future of advertising is in Silicon Alley instead?

Labels: advertising, pr, seo

posted by Adam Edwards  0 comments

The Importance of Wikipedia

Friday, March 09, 2007

We all use this vast repository of human knowledge from time to time. There's no denying it. So shouldn't the 10th most visited site on the Internet provide authority to all of the other websites that made it so popular? Jimmy Wales no longer thinks so, even though the Wikipedia community does.

How important is Wikipedia? Enough to attract the attention of universities who refuse to call it a legitimate source and senators who want to ban it in public libraries (either intentionally or out of ignorance through overarching laws).

Yet for all of these naysayers, it is still an authoritative place to post mostly un-biased information and refer back to it.

Newcomers to the Internet may not realize it, but Wikipedia was a fix for one of the longstanding problems of the Open Directory Project (which was never really open in the first place). In addition to providing encyclopedic tidbits, you can also link to relevant articles and external sites. As the Internet has grown exponentially in size, it has shown how much we lack a truly open directory. Search engines are great for finding websites based on keywords, but not if you want a hierarchical view to discover things on your own. What happens if you know nothing about a particular category? You can't search on keywords, so you need to do old fashioned research. Without an online Dewey decimal system, we only have Wikipedia.

So there's no reason that links from this great amalgamation of knowledge should not be authoritative. When everyone in the world links to Wikipedia articles making it the 10th most visited website in the world, it seems unfair that links back to the real world no longer provide the same authority back. Especially when we've seen the alternative in the Open Directory Project that relies on mysterious editors who rarely log in to approve or decline your submissions. In reality, it was about as closed of a system as the Yahoo Directory. If Netscape had done something with ODP instead of trying to copy Digg's interface, they could have renewed interest in one of their most influential properties.

But they didn't. So I, like so many others, have helped to build up Wikipedia with my time, research, and monetary donation.

I know Mr. Wales is concerned with spam, as we all should be. However, I think he underestimates the Wikipedia braintrust who has done quite well at keeping this to a minimum so far. As the Foundation slowly learns how to deal with anonymity, it should begin to embrace its authority, not run from it. That's the Wikipedia I want to support, at least.

Labels: digg, seo, Wikipedia

posted by Adam Edwards  0 comments

What is a Public Relations Firm ?

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Public Relations or PR is the art of managing communication between a company and its targeted public audience. The goal of a PR agency such as Connors Communications is to help its clients build and sustain a positive public image. Some of you may be wondering, "How is this goal realized?" The simple answer is; "By carefully creating strategic outreach plans to influence the influencers." Some of these methods include things like press releases, press conferences, and Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ). Public Relations was originally meant to be a broad field but there has been a recent movement of PR firms towards specialization. These so-called "boutique" firms are specialists in areas such as public relations crisis management, technology PR, or health care PR. Connors specializes in helping emerging technology companies through online outreach, crisis management, brand building, and much more...

Labels: Connors Communications, pr, seo

posted by Matthew Adelhock  0 comments

HitTail.com: PageRank of 5 in 4 Months

Friday, October 13, 2006

So, the HitTail.com was registered on June 6, 2006 and we're only at mid-October. In one third of a year, the PR firm of Connors Communications brought a site from a Google PageRank of 0 to a PageRank of 5. Not that PageRank is all that important in long tail optimization, but with all else being equal, if two sites target the same keywords, the one with the higher PageRank will win. So, it's nice to see it go so high so quickly.

This is also a testament to the marketing approach of saying to heck with link building. Just put out a superior product that everyone loves, and make some portion or version of it free. We have no affiliate programs. We haven't asked to trade links. People are just spontaneously linking to HitTail.com throughout the blogosphere. This is yet another reason why search engine optimization is really just a subset of the public relations industry. It's just that no one in PR or SEO really accept this fact yet.

Sure, one can argue that HitTail has been such a success organically because it appeals to the online-savvy crowd predisposed to linking. But that is only particularly true of HitTail because we are so early in the evolution of the new online media of citizen publishing. Give it a few more years, and the "superior product gets rewarded" strategy will work in just about every industry as those audiences go online. And link-building campaigns will be so last-century.

So the message here is that Connors practices what it preaches. We bring our own sites from brand-new unregistered domains to PageRank of 5 and search engine results out the wazoo in under 1/4 of a year, without even asking for a single link. Often, companies are guilty of the "cobbler's children have no shoes" effect. I'm here to tell you that my PR and SEO teams at Connors are as effective in garnering publicity for its own internally incubated technology as they are the handful of emerging technology companies that we take on as clients. And that will serve as one impressive modern PR case study.

Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo

posted by Mike Levin 

How We Help Clients

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

As an agency with a strong base of loyal clients, Connors strives to serve each and every client by maintaining strong relationships and continuing to provide valuable services in the areas of public relations and search engine optimization.

Each and every work day, the agents at Connors work hard for media placement and search engine authority on behalf of various clients. Once a week, the teams meet with each client to discuss how the project is going, what the accomplishments are for the past week and what the next steps should be. Then, taking the client's expertise in their industry along with Connors' expertise in PR and SEO, each team has an internal meeting each week to organize outreach and proactively plan what should come next. This puts Connors one step ahead, looking at what is working now and what will work in the future. This is why a client at Connors Communications does not just have a launch, but they have a launch followed by announcements, news, and profiles, and other timely coverage spread out over time. The same goes for blog coverage and other online outreach.

Helping clients means obtaining the goals that they give as well as using the expertise in the office to figure out what more can be done for optimal coverage. Then, working with the client, these ideas are explored and implemented as seen fit. It is this special attention, hard work, and proactive thinking that allows Connors to help clients each and every day in the office.

Labels: Connors Communications, pr, seo

posted by Jessica Ek  0 comments

The Buzz About PR 2.0 Firms & Technology

Sunday, July 23, 2006

It seems that PR companies "getting it" either consists of partaking in online dialogues via blogging, optimizing press releases, or word-of-mouth buzz. I went to a conference recently, and any time I would introduce myself as being from a PR firm, people immediately thought I was going to talk about the "buzz thing". Some of our peers out there that have done a very effective job of positioning PR as word-of-mouth bumble bees, real-time bloggers or press release optimizers.

While we believe in and partake in these practices, the PR industry has been so successful in getting these messages out, that it makes the challenge even more difficult for PR agencies that are technological innovators. Its one thing to be experts at using online tools, such as blog software or newswires, but it's an entirely different thing to have the insight and capacity to invent wholly new technologies and marketing methodologies.

And PR agencies such as Connors are doing exactly that with applications such as HitTail. And now that we have defined a new category of software, tools to help you write for the long tail of search, we have to get over the hurdle that we're branded as buzzers and bloggers and blasters... oh my!

HitTail fosters a decidedly softer sell that's more aligned to the true mission of PR--to get you publicity that you could never have paid for at any price--usually in the form of editorial coverage. You generally pay less for PR than large advertising campaigns, but the pay-off can be much greater. The favorite saying is what is a mention in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal worth? Today, the equivalent is saying what's a top position in Google, Yahoo or MSN worth? PR and SEO are the same. And brilliant editorial coverage is what happens when the client's prospects FIND THEM in the due course of their research, vendor selection process, or the like. In other words, that taboo acronym: SEO, but made palatable to the mainstream marketers of the world.

So, the question is how does a PR agency formulatize the process of SEO? It needs the intimidating luggage that goes with that horrible acronym removed. And it needs to be executed in a reliable, confidence-building fashion, similarly to how the traditional process may involve positioning & messaging, SWOT analysis, pitching news to journalists, and staging newsworthy events.

PR's answer to online marketing is not merely making those same press releases more effective through search, though that helps. PR's answer is not just in opening a corporate blog and entering the online discussion, though that helps. And PR's answer is not merely in chatting it up online or off, though that helps. The answer is in incrementally and systematically dominating an entire conceptual area on the Internet. And since some conceptual areas are so difficult to penetrate in natural search, the answer is in finding the right starting point, carving out a niche, and continuing digging out from the niche in concentric circles until it grows into a crevice, then a cavern, then a canyon. This is not theory. It actually works. You can control a lot of quality traffic in your space this way.

HitTailing works because there's easy pickings out there in the long tail of natural search. If you pick a phrase that's at all off the beaten track and write about it in blogging software, you're almost assured a strong position in the search results. And it may pay off. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin and improving your odds. And a PR agency has the answer. A PR firm has such a deep strategic understanding of natural search that they were able to break out just a tiny piece of the SEO offerings that they offer to their clients, with that alone, potentially move the entire state of online marketing a large step forward.

The technology is necessary, filling a major missing hole in online marketing tools. Why? Because, if you begin in the wrong part of the long tail of keywords, you're going to be doing a whole lot of writing for nothing. But if you start in the right place, then you're going to start growing traffic and improve the accuracy in your decisions of where to go next in that endless long tail of potentially lucrative, but mostly time-wasting long tail of search. This technology is 50% automation, and 50% hard work, because you can't automate the craft of writing original content.

But I find myself constantly having to knock down the buzzing and the blogging and the news blasting hurdles, which were the first PR attempts to master online media. It has actually given the some SEM firm counterparts a lot of ammunition to discount PR agencies as limited in technical capabilities. As practitioners of warm & fuzzy relationship building, there's no way we can consult about search on a strategic level, some say. In fact, they plan on making the search discussion so technologically intimidating, that they scare away traditional agencies, and reduce the competition in the new media agency space.

Connors has actually made the deliberate decision to deliver paid-search through partners, and to focus instead itself on genuine editorial search coverage. This is the proper domain for PR, and is ever more widely acknowledged by industry observers as the most valuable company asset. Those who master natural search--especially ACROSS engines--are not beholden to anyone. As engines come and go, their asset and very strong posture will remain. With properly executed public relations, a strong presence in search is not the result of an advertising campaign that only lasts as long as you're buying the media. Instead, it persists, just as with the genuine reputation that comes from repeated exposure from trusted sources.

Connors has developed technology to do exactly that. It's different from the type of software you'll find in the SEM world, such as bid management tools, because it's not a media buy. It's a media seize--but in very small, smart increments. Results will be completely measurable, and over time, you can grab bigger and bigger pieces of the editorial media. Eventually, such small grabs will build enough critical mass within your site that making the big keyword grabs becomes possible.

What do I mean by that? Well for example, search for PR firm in any major search engine. Connors was not able to achieve the first page position across all major engines over night, even though it's the subject matter of the main homepage. We first had to start with smaller concepts. We used HitTailing to build up the content of our website and our blog. And over time, the concept of PR firms kept coming up, and natural links started to occur to us from people discovering our site, and they would reliably refer to us as a PR firm, without any prodding on our part. It's a 100% organic process that led from obscure HitTailing to spot-on cross-engine top positions on a paydirt primary keyword that PR firms much larger than us would kill for.

Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, outreach, pr, SEM, seo, Yahoo

posted by Mike Levin  2 comments

Getting Your Site Indexed in One Month

Thursday, July 06, 2006

So, the HitTail domain was registered only 1 month ago. Yet, it is already at the top of Google on some limited keywords, such as longtail marketing. Sure, it's obscure, but obscure keywords that actually are searched-on and convert are exactly the point of HitTailing. But maybe more significant is the fact that today is July 6th, and the HitTail domain only became active on June 6th. And yet, we're included, and indeed at the top of results, on many Google searches already. This flies in the face of conventional SEO wisdom, that you should expect up to a 6-month waiting period, especially on brand new domain names. What's going on here?

I'm particularly interested, because a story got pushed to the front page of Digg yesterday about getting your site indexed before you launch. The Digg crowd immediately lambasted the poster for putting up common sense information, being self-promotional, and generally spamming Digg. This is in marked contrast to the over 700 diggs the story received by the time I read it. There seems to be some disparity between the information that general Diggers value, vs. those who take the time to post comments. Because they're at a "democratic" news site (not really), they seem to already be interested in new ways of propagating news. Yet any story even touching on alternative online marketing methods, especially SEO, results in the geek game of pile-on the spammer. It appears that spam is only permissible if your agenda is the furthering of the Linux cause, in which case no story is too small (I got Debian running on my wristwatch, etc.)

One particularly unenlightened commenter had this to say:

"Hmmm. Maybe the highly intelligent person responsible for this article needs to find out about the Google Age-Delay feature. This prevents any new domain name being indexed and listed with any authority in the first 6 months of going live. This is to prevent domain spammers from using multiple domains to span a single site, or to create so many links between "fake" domains that the google PageRank is spammed into providing BS rankings. So - no - this doesn't work with Google unless your domain is already 6 months old - by which time it will be well and truly indexed. Kinda stupid really.

It's like these SEO companies that charge $70,000 to do a job which takes one guy about 2 days work, and none of it technical. [Deleted] useless. And the people who hire them: [deleted]."

This commenter's notions are so incorrect, I don't know where to start. First off, brand new domains can receive top Google rankings in under 1 month. We've proven and documented that. Whatever "age delay" feature there may be in Google is merely a dampening effect to slow down the influence of suddenly appearing sites. It follows the same "crawl-to-crawl" iterative process documented in their patent applications from last year, meaning that brand new sites are diluted in their influence merely by virtue of not having built up any momentum.

There was some fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) introduced based on the large number of chances wrought by the updates nicknamed Jagger, then BigDaddy. But the core principles of BackRub are still as intact today as they were during the earliest days of Google behind the walls of Stanford. We know that through constant monitoring. The commenter's opinions are some speculative notions that were espoused around the time of these updates to explain why so many people were having difficulty getting new domains indexed. We had the same issue, and overcame it in the 6-month period the user stated. But the 6-month delay rule can not be used as a generalization.

A website's inclusion and positive standings in the results can be jump-started by sudden worldwide organic linking to a site in a way that is impossible to fake, such as happened with HitTail. I'm sure this is Google's way of not excluding sites that become significant suddenly in a very short timeframe. Were Google to not include such sites, it would itself appear not relevant. The Google default search is in itself a news source driven by the wisdom of crowds. And the crowd can accelerate relevancy and natural inclusion.

The point the commenter makes about 2-days of work for one person to do non-technical work... well, I'd like to see the commenter fix such a site with 10,000+ pages run by enterprise content management systems that never had search friendliness as a criteria in the first place. This is often the case. In fact, in addition to the sites being hopelessly broken from a search perspective, the organizations themselves are often riddled with politics--particularly between the marketing and the IT people. SEO is highly technical, sometimes requiring coding and implementing completely new "presentation layers" in existing systems, and sometimes requiring rapid and intelligent tagging of thousands of resources. On top of the technical projects, there is an equal amount of finesse in building consensus among all the stakeholders, so that the projects actually can get done.

Domains can be registered and brought to the top of Google results in under a month. It's easiest to do this when the website itself is graced with sudden worldwide popularity, and the inevitable globally dispersed organic linking that accompanies such popularity. It is also easiest to accomplish when the targeted keywords are not of the most competitive sort, but rather are long tail keywords, such as those recommended by HitTail. If you're looking for the edge in online marketing, ignore the conventional wisdom, especially if it's coming from Digg commenters. And that's a generalization you can count on.

Labels: digg, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, seo

posted by Mike Levin  0 comments

PR Firm Makes it to Museum of Modern Betas

Monday, July 03, 2006

That's right, a product created by a NYC PR firm has reached Saurier Duval's clever and popular Museum of Modern Betas site... twice! Thank you, Saurier for recognizing the value of re-listing us since our name change. It will help us a lot in getting established.

For a variety of reasons, we changed our name from MyLongTail to HitTail. And in doing so, lost some initial momentum. The MyLongTail beta site was becoming linked-to at an increasingly rapid rate. The domain acquired a Google PR of 2 within days of the beta announcement--rare for a brand-new domain. So it was with this sense of urgency that we wanted to get the renaming over with as quick as possible.

Thankfully, we are rapidly regaining our momentum, and just about everyone who blogged about us during our beta release in June has made follow-up posts with our new name. It's in this spirit of gratitude that I'm making this post, to acknowledge the important role that Saurier and site's like his play in giving new beta sites their fair chance in the new Darwinian landscape of Web 2.0... whoops, Web Infinitiy Plus One, betas. Now, if we could just show up in O'Someone's Radar and Michael Arrington's blog. All in due time, I suppose.

Incubating HitTail inside of a New York public relations firm has been an interesting experience, balancing the needs of clients against the desire to extract and abstract a tiny piece of the secret recipe that gives us our edge--then, altruistically giving it away to the world. We're doing this in great part because it is going to be a big public relations win, in and of itself. But we're also doing it with great care, so we do not upset either our Clients, to whom we provide a far greater superset of services, or the search engines themselves, for whom we wish to make their jobs easier and not harder.

The process has also been an exercise in intellectual acrobatics. The connection between PR and SEO was absolutely clear in my mind when I joined Connors. But the way to turn it into a universally appealing product that was not too techie, and which could also scale to meet the potentially massive worldwide demand was not. That took some thought. But we're there now.

Almost everything about HitTail is innovative and counter-intuitive. It hearkens back to the days when Google first started making the rounds outside Stanford. Remember your first reaction? It was probably "so what". It definitively took a few open-minded tries to understand why this stripped-down, seemingly rehash site was indeed something special. It was a culmination of simplicity, relevance and performance at a time that AltaVista and others left an opening so big you could drive a GooglePlex through.

And so it is with HitTail. But instead of the opening being made by anti-search Portal-centrism, the opening is made in the broad divide between the disciplines of natural search engine optimization (intimidating even just to say) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. In other words, the gap between SEO and SEM.

This gap is colossally larger than the chatter on the Internet would lead you to believe. One field is full of technical and editorial projects with built-in inertial resistance. The other field is becoming more like media-buying every day, as analytics increasingly tie back into the campaign / bid management software in order to auto-optimize campaigns, thereby removing the once-technical barriers; in other words, easy!

Are you following? SEO, the free and natural part, remains difficult and rife with politics and inertial resistance. SEM on the other hand, the $7 billion industry part, is becoming easier and more automated due to the financial incentives to make it so. In between lies the void. Atmospheric pressures collide, and there, inside the tornado, lies HitTail.

It is with this level of strategic thinking that we created the HitTail product. It is with the desire to fill this void that we named it with a noun, a verb, and a present participle. You use the HitTail site, therefore, you HitTail. This makes you a HitTailer engaged in the practice of HitTailing. And it is neither the intimidating uncertainties of SEO, nor directly paying homage at the alter of G/Y/M.

And because HitTail is solid, delivering on exactly what it promises, and is adding features with the same cautions "stay close to core" approach as Google, we're not getting shoved into the crowded analytics space (the "portals" of today). Also, similar to Google, our service is so radically different, without seeming so at first glance, due to something very analogous to PageRank that lurks behind the scenes--something that makes our writing suggestions super-charged for natural search effectiveness.

We are effectively taking a practice that many of the most advanced, top-of-their-field SEOs have long engaged in, and making the average marketing Joe able to do the same thing. But this is the nature of all technologies. They are arcane and difficult-seeming at first, but then someone comes along and cost reduces, improves ergonomics and markets it for the masses: like Henry Ford. Or like Prometheus bringing fire to the people. It's a recurring theme, and is inevitable.

But we are not simply making a high-end SEO method as it existed available to everyone. We are adding our own special formula. Just as Larry Page realized that hyperlinking was the equivalent of academic citations, and was a key indicator of relevance in what was to become PageRank, so have we come to understand the key indicators of what is bound to work in terms of natural search.

And THAT is what makes the HitTail data so special, and using HitTail such a source of competitive advantage.

So, on this note, we'll end this blog post that started as a simple thanks to Saurier Duval and the Museum of Modern Betas. It's a real sign of the times when a PR firm in New York City can incubate one of these puppies itself, from idea to execution, instead of waiting for it to come in as a Client.

Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo, The Long Tail

posted by Mike Levin  0 comments

Friday, June 30, 2006

HitTail - A Practical Alternative To Paying For Search Hits

Welcome to HitTail, a practical alternative to paying for search hits--and a free service to all low-to-medium traffic sites.

Connors Communications, the company bringing it to you is the PR firm that launched Amazon.com and Priceline. We worked with GoTo.com in the early days, helping to establish the pay-per-click industry. And now, we're doing it again... but this time through the long tail of natural search.

What is The Long Tail? It's a notion popularized by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, implying that less popular items collectively account for large amounts of business. Here, the items in green outnumber the most popular items in red.

Initially, this concept was great for online music stores with no physical inventory, so their library was impossibly large, compared to their retail counterparts. But soon, the concept was equally embraced by pay-per-click firms, managing massive keyword campaigns.

But a dirty little secret is that long tail strategy is even better when applied to natural search than PPC... where all the less popular search terms already account for the largest amounts of traffic. We just take it to the next level.

What's natural search? It's the portion of the search results that people come to the search engines for... shown here in green. It's the equivalent of editorial content... while sponsored pay-per-click results are the equivalent of advertisements. This advertising / editorial mix is characteristic of most media, maintains trust, and we expected to continue.

And as a PR firm, we believe that natural search is better... because it's the equivalent of real world reputation. Securing a listing HERE is the best deal in marketing, with the lowest possible cost of customer acquisition--even lower than PPC. It's like landing free editorial coverage in mainstream media. Every visitor is partially pre-qualified and in is in a receptive state.

The mission of our new HitTail service is to lower your reliance on paid ads while increasing your qualified visitor traffic from natural search... in a sustainable, long-term, cross-engine fashion.

The problem was that until now, no product has been able to deliver this without incurring some sort of penalty... keeping it out of the world of mainstream marketing. HitTailing changes all that. By knowing what’s “almost working” for you, you can grow the mouth of your opportunity funnel while respecting the search engines, and being good net citizen.

The technique has already been used to help many Connors' clients create "super-niches". For any journalists listening, we may be able to get them to talk.

So, whose a candidate to become a HitTailer?
• Anyone who wants to stop paying to acquire visitors
• Anyone who currently has a pay-per-click ad campaign
• Basically, the marketing departments of every company in every country of the world

It's an easy value prop: Use HitTail to quickly identify lucrative new topics, and apply all that saved energy to actually WRITING about the topic. You thereby help increase sales and lower marketing costs. This “formulatized” approach is safer and more long-lived than other methods. It's blogging with insight.

How is this accomplished? HitTail tells you WHAT to write about for growing an effective long tail of natural search...

Watch in real-time as the search hits come in... and get addicted to the black river of keywords that occurs in any healthy site. Learn which keywords HitTail suggests that you write about.

The HitTail site actually shows you the growing long tail of your site. Far into the tail, and for reasons that are not obvious, is the best and most often overlooked data. Connors has developed a unique way to identify these words and turn them into short, actionable lists! Using HitTail is like us doing all the mining dirty work, and handing you the gems.

By optimizing on these gems, you take results found many pages in and bringing them to the top--exposing much more of your site overall. Determined searchers are thereby cluing you into where you should locate yourself for each future iteration.

Each HitTail tab lets you quickly review and pair-down lists, until you have an editorial checklist of topics that will drive traffic.

The first three tabs are only there for their good looks. It's in the Suggestions tab that the HitTailing magic resides. Evaluate new words that appear under this tab, and choose to write about them... or not. Move only the good ones to the To Do tab, which simply works as an editorial checklist. Check them off this list once you've actually used them as the title topic of a blog post or other content on your site, such as FAQs or press releases.

It's that simple. That's HitTailing. It works.

Keeping this up over time results in the snowball effect. A site that snowballs in size and quality over time is rewarded by nearly all search engines. HitTailing helps this happen at a faster rate than with blogging alone. Seeing the results takes much longer with Yahoo than with Google and MSN, but your patience will pays off. Overall, this strategy takes longer than PPC. But PPC is like paying rent, while at the end of HitTailing, you own the house.

How does HitTail know what terms are "almost" working on your site? Just like analytics software, we provide a snippet of code to be inserted into your template. The moment the tracking code is in place, you will see your search hits occurring. Notice the real-time black river of keywords.

This alone has driven many a HitTail user to detox.

So, how do you get started down this alluring trail?

Simply, go to www.hittail.com, click the login link and register. Put the snippet of code in your template, and volia!

It's important to remember that HitTail is NOT analytics software. We are not tracking individual users or conversions. We just do suggestions... bluntly stating: "If you write it, they will come" This deceptively simple process is off-putting to some who love pouring over analytics. That's fine. They're in the best position to see the results of HitTailing, as opposed to being the practitioners.

But for those who see the magic, we've provided what we think is the fastest way for you to feel the love. The sooner you get started, the better it works.

So, what's your next step?

You can give it a try by clicking the login in link and signing up as a beta tester.

You can spread the word... or keep it as your SEO secret weapon. You decide.

Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you join us soon.

Labels: Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, pr, seo, The Long Tail, Yahoo

posted by Mike Levin  1 comments

Writing for Search Engine Optimization

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

I've written before about the importance of writing in an SEO strategy. Recently, I haven't been the only one authoring online content. As part of the latest Connors offering, HitTail, Mike has been busy blogging about its creation, progress and uses. He has worked on explaining the product and in the process, starting to show up on some very useful keywords.

I'd like to mention this because it's a great way to back up a launch. In addition to gaining top rankings for important search terms, it also helps to manage brand image. If you search Feedster right now, you will find articles from SEO Scoop and other sites mixed in with all the HitTail blog entries that Mike has been writing. Any issue brought up, like whether or not the site will always be free, is quickly answered by a blog post on the product site, with an official response. Any questions are either anticipated and covered or answered once they're brought up elsewhere. In this way, all feedback is encouraged and any concerns addressed, making it a very flexible, receptive, and active launch.

I just wanted to bring this up because I've been following Mike's blogging and think it's a great example of what we're working to do here with search engine optimization writing

Labels: blog, Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Mike Levin, seo

posted by Jessica Ek  0 comments

More Than Just a Press Release

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Besides knowing that the acronym PR stands for public relations, most people only have a superficial knowledge of what public relations agencies, such as Connors Communications, actually do. In addition to handling press releases and coordinating media relations, we employ a variety of techniques to help our client’s message influence media in order to get their brand name and product out to the appropriate consumer demographics.

When Connors engages in a PR campaign, we use different approaches that may begin with creating lists of media at business publications such as Forbes or BusinesWeek, industry trades, as well as blog review sites like ZDNet. Once such a media list is compiled, a pitch is created which will give the targeted analysts an incentive to write and learn more about our client’s message and product, such as Voice Over IP (VoIP) with Vonage. Finally when a positive response is received from a pitch, we are able to get our idea out into many publications and outlets, both online and in print, readily available to our client’s consumers . We highly value our press relations which enable us to maintain a very favorable position within the media and subsequently our clients.

Utilizing unique technologies is another priority here, for example we pride ourselves on offering SEO and tracking technologies not available anywhere else. The work done here at Connors involves a much more proactive approach to positioning our clients message than most people think, and not only focusing on dealing with negative PR, crisis management and writing press releases.

Labels: Connors Communications, crisis communications, pr, seo, Vonage

posted by Barry Kagan  0 comments

Natural-Organic Search Result Quiz

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Here’s a quick SEO quiz:

The best way to get into Google is through excessive meta-tagging.
a. True
b. False

Factors that search engines take into consideration include all but the following:
a. Build a strong linking infrastructure
b. Continually add new content to keep the site fresh
c. Upgrade the site so that it’s all in flash graphics
d. Make sure URLs for the site include a relevant keyword

What kind of search results do I want my company to rank highly in?
a. natural
b. organic


Okay, so the answers to this quick SEO quiz are b, c, and the last one was a trick question. What is the difference between natural and organic search? Nothing. Both these terms refer to the main search results, separated from the sponsored links. Using different terms can be a bit confusing, but no matter what you call the main results that a search engine displays, this is where you want your website to be.

Try it. Pick some of what you think are your most important keywords. Where are you in the search? Where you want to be? Okay, now what about some less obvious keywords. Try some longer keyword phrases. Where are you now? This is actually where most of your qualified traffic is going to be coming from. These are the natural or organic search results that make up what is being referred to as the long tail. And no paid ad-word campaign is going to give you the same kind of traffic as ranking highly on these kinds of searches.

Labels: Google, seo

posted by Jessica Ek  0 comments

How much should keywords cost?

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Nothing. eMarketer recently ran a story on the cost of keywords, a new metric coined from the cost per click camp. And, as expected, the cost went up in every market. Some keywords went up by as much as 10%! To avoid this holiday rush, wouldn't it be cheaper to pay one flat fee and start generating traffic on countless keywords through search engine optimization instead? It's literally impossible to brainstorm let alone manage a paid keyword campaign for all of the ways people could think of to arrive at your website. A proper keyword optimization project can improve you across the board. Besides, it's better to have your terms working for you all year round, and in the much more credible natural results. As web users become more savvy, they are going to continue to prefer natural keywords to sponsored listings.

Labels: optimization, seo

posted by Adam Edwards  0 comments

Advertising Credibility

Friday, November 18, 2005

How many Google AdWords do you need? What ad placement can get you the most results? Or should you scrap your advertising efforts entirely?

Advertising is continually growing, especially in the online space. And for good reason. Advertising can be very effective when done well. And in advertising, you get the exact amount of exposure that you pay for and you know where and when it will run. But this is not the only approach and, in fact, may not be the most credible source for consumers.

Ads can say whatever you want them to. But the audience isn't necessarily going to believe it. Consumers have become very skeptical of advertising and while it can be very effective, it can also have more than a few pitfalls. PR, on the other hand, creates messages that come from an outside source. It is considerably less promotional and the results are always a bit uncertain, precisely because of this. However, articles are trusted more and they cost a whole lot less for the same exposure. This is also true for SEO, where the top 10 search results are so vital and the paid keywords so often passed over.

This isn't to condemn advertising. However, I contend that the best and most complete marketing campaign takes the limits of advertising credibility into consideration and augments these ads with solid PR and SEO efforts that can add validity to the messaging. Your campaign will be the better for it.

Labels: Adwords, Google, pr, seo

posted by Jessica Ek  0 comments

NYC PR

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

In the center of trends and opinions and commerce, New York City is a perfect location as a heart of business and innovation. It is also the heart of American advertising and firms dot the floors of skyscrapers and office complexes. Each one promotes new and innovative ways to spend your money and new schemes to gain the public interest. All the while, the public is becoming more skeptical of advertising tactics. New York is a central location for strategizing about how to reach the nation, although not just for advertising. There are also NYC public relations firms that are tucked in offices around the city. These firms can garner coverage and get view impressions for less money than all the advertising agencies that NYC is so well known for.

I don't understand why PR is not taken into consideration more often when looking into marketing strategies. While the news may not reach the passive audience staring at television entertainment, it will reach those watching the news or seeking out print media and engaging in the reading. This seems to be a more promising lead. It also is trusted more than advertisements that are so overtly biased. Yes, advertising is important, but it's only a small, and rather expensive, piece of that puzzle.

So yes, by all means, come to NYC and look at your marketing opportunities. Find all the qualified talent the city is known for to get your product branded and keep it in the public spotlight. But when you do this, explore all avenues, including PR and SEO. Control the public discussion on multiple levels. I contend that your marketing campaign is incomplete without it.

Labels: pr, seo

posted by Jessica Ek  0 comments

The Long Tail of Search

Monday, October 24, 2005

Once again, Google posts an incredible quarter, surpassing Wall Street expectations. Go, Google! My thoughts keep going to the long tail of search, a term credited to Wired magazine, circa October, 2004. This is where, according to Wired co-founder, and author of the new book, The Search, things get interesting, and indeed profitable, with search. Towards the left of the long-tail graph, search terms get increasingly more volume over a narrower diversity of words. This is where you find terms such as Britney Spears and Pokemon. But as you travel to the right of the graph, search volume over particular word combinations, and therefore competition for the traffic, also goes down. This is where you find terms connected to particular industries and markets, where there is plenty of money to be made, but which frankly is not part of the public consciousness, or zeitgeist.

And this is where search engine marketing makes the most sense. Why would you pay for all the unqualified traffic on a search term like Pokemon if you were not selling anything having to do with it? On the other hand, if you were in the relatively small and fiercely contested space of digital signage software, every sales lead is worth its weight in gold. Why? Because in addition to winning the lead for yourself, if you respond quickly and thoroughly, you just may keep the sales prospect from continuing their Web research, thereby preventing a competitor from ever getting the lead. And the common wisdom is to just run an AdSense pay-per-click campaign. And this common wisdom has now constituted a mainstream market for search terms, and is what's driving Google to the unexpected levels of profitability. It's not only desirable for a company to come up on its keywords. You might even say it's the duty of a company to do everything it ethically can to come up on the keywords associated with its company, product and markets.

But once again, I'm taking the position that the common wisdom is wrong—at least, in part. AdSense campaigns are a must in certain situations. But would you invest in a marketing campaign at the expense of the long-term infrastructure of your company? And natural search results should be viewed as part of your company infrastructure and assets, for when a paid keyword campaigns stop, the genuine editorial results continue. The problem is that it's difficult to the point of infuriating for the average company to work their way to the top of the search results on their most important keywords. And to make matters worse, they don't necessarily even know what keywords they should be targeting for maximum return. Before you know it, you have an unwieldy marketing campaign consisting of thousands of keywords, and an unhealthy reliance on a marketing campaign for traffic that could be yours through the modern day equivalent of positive word-of-mouth and reputation.

For the secret is that the further into the long tail of search that you travel, the harder it becomes to wage an effective PPC campaign, and the easier it becomes to get the search for free. As more words that are put into the search, the more precise the search criteria become, and the less important factors like PageRank become. In some of the most lucrative industries on the planet, there may perhaps be a small market of thousands of sales prospects. And you never precisely know where on the planet they are going to come from or what terms they are going to search on. So, a company is best served by writing prolifically, and with a genuine voice on their subject-matter. This has a two-fold benefit. First, it provides a corporate blogging strategy. Second, it appeases one of the most important criteria in search optimization—the continuous release of new, relevant content. A strategy of writing and optimizing over time increases the overall footprint of your website, and casts an ever-larger net for uniquely well pre-qualified and self-directed sales prospects, who are looking for you right now.

Labels: Google, seo, The Long Tail

posted by Mike Levin  0 comments

Google is the Matrix?

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Just like in the movie that was oh so big a few years ago, before the rest of the trilogy came along and ruined it, the world is full of supercomputers creating our current reality.

Okay….maybe not. But if our world itself isn't comprised of millions of lines of data, our Internet most certainly is. And every minute of every day, people from all over the world are flocking to search engines. Their ideas and interests are visible in a stream of searches leading to sites all across the Web. The Internet is a constant flicker of activity as people jump from page to page. Think of all the hits to your website, scrolling past in a constant march of glowing green data made famous in the movie. It's a digital representation of us and our search matrix, if you will.

In fact, don't just think