Joe Hall

WhosTalkin.com Video Demo 2

I just made my profile using the new Google Profiles. It appears to me that the links found inside the profiles are SEO friendly! Check out the screen shot I took below using FireBug to look at the code.

Am I dreaming here??

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

OK, I want to first start off by saying that this will be a short one because I am really busy today.

Lets start things off by pointing out a post at Michael Gray’s blog where he talks about Guy Kawasaki writing reviews for products that he has been given. This prompted the debate over the link aqquistion only for us all later to find out that Guy doesn’t really know that much about links to begin with!

Maybe Guy should take a look at Dave Snyder’s most recent post.

A local police department in Wisconsin opens up a criminal investigation after a woman links to their web site. The police department ordered a cease and desist of the link. The woman responded with a law suit against the city at large! Moral of the story here is what ever you do, don’t send any link juice to the Sheboygan Police Department (Oops!) What makes this get even more interesting is this article that describes this whole insanity. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and tell me if you see anything funny at the bottom right.

Allen Stern just wrote a post in response to a post that Seth Godin wrote. Both of these men are exploring ways to compensate content creators, such as bloggers. They both are recommending that users click on the ads that bloggers display. Godin calls this a form of tipping. As you can assume there are quite a few that aren’t very happy about this.

Apparently Seth Godin has never worked for real tips, and might have never really appreciated any tips that he might have given. Why you ask? Real tips display gratitude based on transference of wealth. Click ads does not transfer any wealth from the person making the “tip” to the content creator.

To better understand this point lets pretend that I am at my favorite Italian restaurant “Gianotti’s”. If I have enjoyed my meal (which I always do) and if I have enjoyed the service then I enjoy leaving a tip for the server. This transference of wealth from my wallet to the server is genuine display of gratitude, because I am giving MY money for a service that I appreciate.

However, following the teachings of Godin and Stern, I should reach over to the guy sitting at the table beside me, take his wallet out and steal a few bucks from him and use it to tip my server.

If you have ever worked for tips you know that this is not only wrong for the obvious reason but it also looks disingenuous because you obviously haven’t valued their work enough to tip them with your own money, instead in the case of internet ads, you have made a simple click that require no extra effort or expense.

But there is a much deeper dangerous side to this practice that we as internet marketers should be concerned with. Click fraud devalues ad cost. If you really want to help the blogger then you will only click on the ads that you find useful and relevant. Why? Because the very basis for PPC is relevancy and if advertisers see a rise in CTR with out a rise in conversions then they will drop PPC ads like a bad habit FAST! Nobody likes wasting money on marketing!

So the question that Stern asked is still left unanswered. “How do you compensate content creators?” Here’s an idea: If content creators feel their content is valuable enough to receive compensation then why not add a PayPal Donate button to their side bar. This way visitors can actually give a real tip. Or if you would rather you could always give the content creator a bit more publicity by mentioning their post in your blog or telling folks about it There are numerous ways to compensate content creators with out cheating advertisers at the same time.

Not long ago, Marketing Pilgrim posted about some Hitwise data on real estate search terms and real estate web sites. As expected Realtor.com did very well ranking #1 as both the most visited real estate web site and the most used real estate search term. This wasn’t much of a surprise to those in the real estate industry. What surprised some (and still confuses me) is the list of most visited real estate web sites.

Hitwise Most Visited Real Estate Web Site Rankings
1. realtor.com - 9.08 percent
2. HomeGain - 2.44 percent
3. Yahoo Real Estate - 2.25 percent
4. RE/MAX real estate - 2.21 percent
5. Rent.com - 2.19 percent
6. Zillow - 2.06 percent
7. Apartments.com - 2 percent
8. Move.com - 1.91 percent
9. ZipRealty - 1.86 percent
10. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - 1.42 percent.

When I first saw that list I had this gut feeling that something was off. If any of you are familiar with my work in the past you know that I love crunching the numbers. So, lets take a look at what the numbers say:

zillow.com trulia.com remax.com century21.com

As I expected my analysis shows Zillow.com doing better than REMAX.com. And, even more interesting is Trulia.com doing better than remax.com as well! Trulia.com isn’t even listed on Hitwise’s report!

Confused? So am I. But, don’t worry, I will explain all of this and more in a future guest post at Wolf-Howl.com….stay tuned!

From Cuil:

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Then maybe someone can help me understand these searches I ran:

Am I missing something?? Saying that you are bigger than Google is a damn big statement, and I would think that you should have some data to back yourself up!

Earlier today Janet Meiners posted an awesome post at MarketingPilgrim.com about the top ten most visited real estate web sites. One of the things that surprised me the most was that there was only one national franchise site in the list. I think that this is interesting because it shows something that I have been feeling for awhile. Most of the national real estate franchises are dropping the ball against more savey web 2.0 business that are attracting all the traffic.

Despite that it might be a good idea to get a grasp on who in the group of national franchises are doing better than the others. Therefore I have done a bit of research and put together what I think is a good assessment of the top 5 national franchise real estate web sites. To conduct my analysis, I used four different traffic firms to make averages for each. The list and results for all are below:

Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites:

1. remax.com
2. century21.com
3. coldwellbanker.com
4. prudential.com
5. kw.com

Google Trends for Web Sites

Quantcast.com

Alexa.com

Compete.com

Internet regulator ICANN recently voted to over haul the way it handles web addresses. Starting next year they will allow companies the ability to register their brands as TLDs. Which means we can start to expect www.mickey.disney. You can read more about the decision here.

What I am concerned about is all of the large corps reaping the SEO benefits of these branded URLs. Think about it: www.trucks.ford is going to rank allot higher than a small used car dealer that sells Ford Trucks, even with geographic search terms. It won’t matter how much money he puts into SEO he will never be able to market his product like the corporate competitors! Now of course if you own a local Ford franchise then I suppose that corporate could set up a site for you at smithautos.trucks.ford but that only means that you need corporate affiliation to compete in the same market place. I think this move is a win for large corporations that want to dominate SERPs. And if you think this will be the last of this type of behavior from those that regulate the internet, think again, this is just the beginning!