SEO Revealed. Exclusive Interview with Peter Niemi
April 26, 2011
An interesting challenge faces search engine optimization experts. Charging hefty sums, SEO experts now have to cope with demanding clients and Google’s increasingly aggressive efforts to improve the relevance of its search services. After my talk in Manhattan at the end of March 2011, I was able to interview Peter Niemi, founder of GHG Interactive, the marketing arm of Gray Interactive. In our hour long conversation, Mr. Niemi said:
The SEO experts are reeling from Google’s crack down on gaming the Google relevance system. Some SEO professionals react poorly to evidence that they may not be the smartest guys in the room as we saw…The majority of Web sessions commence with search. That’s where the eyeballs start, but not where they end. That’s the first problem, the lack of persistence. How do you get a customer if the customer never comes back or forgets you in a second or two?
He continued:
The second problem is that SEO is a commodity. Everyone is doing it to some degree, from the smallest blog to the biggest consumer brand site. SEO requires constant managing to achieve consistent success. In the last couple of years, more and more effort seems to be needed to keep one’s head above water. Market forces, competition, and changing technology require marketing professionals to revisit our campaigns more and more often. Search media agencies charge nice monthly fees to perpetuate what I call a “search arms race.” Google makes $28 billion a year off search engine marketing. In my experience, neither Google nor the marketers are motivated to challenge the status quo. Like investment banks, they make a good living off the status quo and change is not in their best interests.
With some Web sites struggling to reverse declining traffic, SEO is in the spotlight. To read the full text of the interview with Mr. Niemi, read “Google Squeezes SEO Experts: The Panda Choke Hold”.
If you wish to comment on this insightful interview, please, use the comments function for this Web log.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2011
Freebie unlike some SEO mid-tier inputs
Longtop Pumps Up Metadata
April 26, 2011
“Longtop Announces Launch of Upgraded Metadata Management Platform,” reports CNBC. China’s highly successful financial services developer/ solutions provider Longtop Financial Technologies Limited is jumping on the metadata bandwagon with its BI.MetaManager V2.0.
Actually, this is an upgrade and expansion, not a brand new product. The company did some custom work in this realm in ’07 and ’08, and deployed version one of BI.MetaManager in 2009 to many of its customers. The article describes the new version:
BI.MetaManager V2.0 offers extended scalability and flexibility for development, improved reliability and user interface, as well as new features such as visualized enterprise data map and cross-platform support of Structured Query Language (SQL) script parsing.
Sounds good. The use of metadata, information about data that is embedded in said data, can be extremely useful when properly managed. Lately, though, many players have been working to capitalize on it; suddenly metadata indexing is the new black. And metadata continues to roil the legal eagles. Is indexing discoverable? Is indexing not discoverable? Who owns metadata? Lawyers will figure this out. In the meantime, indexing helps users, not sure about attorneys.
Cynthia Murrell April 26, 2011
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Lexalytics Leverages the Human Element of Wikipedia
April 26, 2011
Whether you embrace or scorn Wikipedia as a reference, there is at least one good use for it, according to Lexalytics. “Lexalytics Analyzes Wikipedia to Understand How Humans Think” describes the rewards of their idea for an alternative function for the user-edited online dictionary.
Lexalytics has turned its ability to process and summarize large quantities of data on Wikipedia in an effort to improve sentiment analysis. They “used it as a source for how people think about the organization of information and for perspective on how bits of information are related to each other.” The ultimate goal: the creation of a “concept matrix” to bolster a machine’s ability to link like ideas independently, an essential task in human language comprehension.
The results of the project showed the machine could connect that both a rose and a daisy were classified as flowers. If that isn’t baby steps, I don’t know what is. Granted, how does the saying go… you have to walk before you can run? Machine processing of human language is a difficult undertaking; and why shouldn’t it be considering human processing of human language at times can be an equally complicated and oft-failed task.
The article mentions most of the confusion still lies in sarcasm and double entendres, some of my personal favorite aspects of language. So looks like I may have to wait for the next version of the software. Wikipedia seems to be emerging as the corpus of choice to demonstrate search and content processing technology.
Sarah Rogers, April 26, 2011
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Exalead Taps Basis Technologies for Translations
April 26, 2011
“Exalead and Basis Technology Partnership Extends Capabilities of Exalead Information Access Platform to Asian and Middle Eastern Languages” describes the recent pairing of the search firms, owners of CloudView EL and Rosette, respectively.
Back in March 2011, Basis Technology released a fresh version of its Rosette Linguistics Platform with an expanded language library, encompassing some of the more complex Asian vernaculars. This caught Exalead’s eye. Exalead said:
We partnered with Basis Technology to extend our commitment to search excellence into Asia and the Middle East. Rosette’s speed and textual analysis in a multitude of languages is a key piece in enabling our worldwide customers to unlock the hidden value of data across all sources and languages.
This has all the makings of a match made in heaven. Consider Basis Technology’s move earlier this year to become a search and business intelligence (BI) vendor. Exalead has also been courting the BI market. Coincidence? We think not. It will be interesting to see what develops once the honeymoon is over. Will one plus one equal three? Exalead is on a fast-rising sales trajectory and more languages support increases the Dassault subsidiary’s in Asia, for example.
Sarah Rogers, April 26, 2011
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Google Squeezes SEO Experts: The Panda Choke Hold
April 26, 2011
Introduction
In late March 2011, I gave a 15 minute talk at the iBreakfast Meeting in Manhattan. A few days earlier, I spoke at an Incisive conference in Hong Kong, delivering essentially the same message. In a nutshell, I pointed out that Google’s algorithm changes were only the tip of the iceberg regarding relevance improvement in search results. Search engine optimization or SEO has gamed the free Web indexes so that relevance is decreasing. The fix, I said, is to focus on content. My name for this approach is “content with intent.” The idea I told the two different groups is to create high value content and follow the basic rules of providing facts, sources, and useful information. SEO methods talk about content and then fall back on techniques that try to deliver something for nothing. When you run a query and get pages with no information, the click benefits the owner of the page and does absolutely nothing for the user when the page is without substance.
In Hong Kong, the audience reacted positively. The idea of publishing detailed information, providing sources for the information, and injecting original ideas was enervating. In New York, the opposite was true. I received a couple of emails with harsh, New York style comments. If I were 22, I suppose my feelings would have been hurt. At age 66, my reaction was, “Man, these people don’t understand the change that is upon them.”
I did get a couple of positive follow ups. One person was a stealth type financial analyst and we have talked via telephone. The other was feedback from Peter Niemi. I poked around and learned that Mr. Niemi was the founder of GHG Interactive, the digital marketing arm of the Grey Healthcare Group, in 1995. He was the senior executive until 2000. After more than a decade at Grey he joined Torre Lazur McCann led the team that designed and executed the Paxil Web presence for GlaxoSmithKline which remained one of the top ten pharmaceutical sites in the world until the Paxil patent expiration.
In 2001 Peter co-founded a hybrid technology-advertising agency called Hyphen, an Omnicom company. Hyphen built a software package for managing clinical trial data as well as an online experience guiding consumers through the complex details surrounding the fertility treatment process. Peter currently uses his digital marketing expertise to craft the launch strategies for early stage ventures. Peter earned his MBA at Columbia Business School and also holds a BA in English Literature from Columbia.
I spoke with Mr. Niemi on April 18, 2011. The full text of my interview with him appears below:
What drew you into search and content processing it seems far afield from English Literature and business school?
I spent my career in the ad agency world as the field of digital advertising evolved. This experience lead to my fascination with applying technology tools to the challenges of branding.
Search proved very useful when I was working on my MBA at Columbia Business School. I suppose it was that experience that hooked me on online and various other tools of high finance. I applied many of the modeling principles I learned to our world of digital marketing, and the result is the approach my colleagues and I use today in our work. It’s a quantitative methodology for approaching what is traditionally considered a qualitative challenge.
And the poems?
Still useful particularly the line from George Bernard Shaw: “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.” In my work today, we have a small group with an entrepreneurial streak that motivates us to apply our methods to early stage and growth companies. Our mission is to deliver effective (and affordable!) digital marketing results for the next generation of great companies.
We also focus on results, skipping the economic theory stuff.
You reacted to my discussion of “content with intent” in a positive manner. Most of the search engine optimization professionals wanted to tar and feather me. What’s behind your interest in using content to generate impact?
Yep, the SEO experts are reeling from Google’s crack down on gaming the Google relevance system. Some SEO professionals react poorly to evidence that they may not be the smartest guys in the room as we saw.
There are two shortcomings to search marketing, persistence and commoditization. There is no doubt that SEO is a necessary part of any digital marketer’s toolkit, a critical element for digital marketing success. The majority of Web sessions commence with search. That’s where the eyeballs start, but not where they end. That’s the first problem, the lack of persistence. How do you get a customer if the customer never comes back or forgets you in a second or two? A successful approach includes search but must go further than that, surrounding a target audience with messaging at every touch point.
The second problem is that SEO is a commodity. Everyone is doing it to some degree, from the smallest blog to the biggest consumer brand site. SEO requires constant managing to achieve consistent success. In the last couple of years, more and more effort seems to be needed to keep one’s head above water. Market forces, competition, and changing technology require marketing professionals to revisit our campaigns more and more often. Search media agencies charge nice monthly fees to perpetuate what I call a “search arms race.” Google makes $28 billion a year off search engine marketing. In my experience, neither Google nor the marketers are motivated to challenge the status quo. Like investment banks, they make a good living off the status quo and change is not in their best interests.
Why is Google making changes?
There is growing concern about the relevance of search results. There is mixed information about big social search services are becoming. In the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter world, SEO methods don’t work. SEO is like a mechanic who tries to fix a Ford with parts from a washing machine.
In the ad and marketing world, what’s the perception of SEO?
Agency people are wired to focus on the creative product as an end in itself, not the results it produces. There is some appreciation for the value of targeted SEO, but little awareness of the overwhelming power that a properly executed campaign can wield. Search is often an afterthought in the traditional marketing world, and there is not nearly enough understanding of how effective the tools of direct response marketers can be when applied branded messaging to create explosive mindshare growth.
In our practice we care about nothing but the results. In fact, we have long held that creative advertising awards such as the Addy Awards should be abolished. Creative achievement runs contrary to the best interests of the marketer. We are salesmen, not artists, and must be measured quantitatively, not aesthetically. If you want to paint, paint. If you want to sell, sell. There is no ambiguity.
Give me an example?
Sure, our creative director is enormously talented, truly a genius. But he does not lead the conversation about what we are going to do. The audience does that. The data do that. Once we’ve done the analysis then the rest of the team leaves him alone to work his magic. He creates content that works; content with intent. If he wins any creative awards he loses his key to the executive washroom.
But today, traffic generation techniques like SEO should be a marketer’s first concern. Conversion effectiveness should be the second. All content should be tailored to maximize those factors. Artistic quality doesn’t even enter the conversation.
I am delighted to discuss Shakespeare’s unique literary genius, just not while I am working. There were no content algorithms back then so as optimized language goes, his plays perform terrible and his sonnets are even worse.
What’s the impact of this new world?
Any digital marketing effort that is solely reliant on search for traffic is at the whim of the search engines, as we saw during Google’s recent formula changes. Web site owners too reliant on SEO find themselves under tremendous pressure to adapt to rule changes that can wipe out carefully built site traffic overnight. Just like investing, reliance on one property for too much of your returns is eventually going to let you down hard. The solution is to diversify. Successful digital marketers use a portfolio of techniques to minimize risk from any one source of revenue. The most powerful of these tools is semantic content crafted to deliver results that last. The problem is few know how to use this tool properly.
SEM and online advertising can certainly help to kick start traffic to a new site. Paid media can help to plug traffic holes created by changing conditions. Nothing, however, can substitute for the long term effectiveness of a thoughtful semantic campaign with content, creative, and search all working together to blanket a market with a message. Our approach will drive any idea to the top of every conversation, online and offline. This is true in any field. Branding. Politics. Entertainment. Direct sales.
Is there room for a different approach? The reaction to my talk in Hong Kong was positive. In Manhattan, it was mixed.
Aggressive marketers are always looking for competitive advantages. The pioneers recognize that the current state of search makes any gains temporary until the other guys figure out what you did and copy it. Next generation techniques are of great interest to these people out on the leading edge. Current methods find out where traffic is and then compete to capture it. Semantic techniques go where the traffic is going to be and own it. Ad agencies are figuring out what the early adopters of semantic advertising–our clients–are doing, but the entrepreneurs are a few steps ahead right now. Your content with intent method involves words, tactics, and technology. That’s a different bundle to shoulder.
In Hong Kong, the mobile device is the primary means of accessing digital content. What’s your view of the mobile revolution?
The practice of building web sites as marketing tools, online brochures, is dwindling in significance and has been for some time. This is not a short term situation for traditional communication methods. It is a long term trend that is increasing in momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill. Soon enough more than half of web sessions will be conducted from a mobile device, so the traditional web site is only part of the picture.
Marketers do recognize that and the standard response can be seen in the rush to roll out social media strategies and mobile apps. These are largely versions of marketing content repurposed for different platforms, hardly an innovative or disruptive approach. It’s also unsustainable, as platforms come and go, rise and fall in significance.
What is required is an approach that looks ahead, not back. An approach built for the future, not based on the past. That’s what we have created and employ for our clients. That’s the beauty of our semantic content and proprietary distribution engine.
Let’s jump back to Google. What’s your take on the company’s recent efforts to improve relevance for its search users?
Good question and a tough one.
Google’s recent moves put the pressure on Web marketers to adapt and improve their offerings to continue to see the results which they are accustomed to achieving. Hopefully it also puts pressure on them to diversify, a prescription we have been advocating for some time now. Google is dominant in search (and with YouTube, online video) and so remains a pivotal factor in any successful digital marketing portfolio.
For the most part, Google does not, however, create any content. For that they need the rest of the online world: advertisers, publishers, and sellers. Content creators. Without them there is no Google–at least not with a market cap of $185 billion.
Despite their lofty ideology, Google is a business like any other. To quote the company’s annual report:
We generate revenue primarily by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising.
By “primarily” Google’s wordsmiths seem to mean that more than 95% of their income comes from paid advertising through the AdWords and AdSense networks. That’s where they make their revenue and as a public company they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize that revenue.
The recent changes were in service of driving revenue by increasing the quality and effectiveness, and thus the cost, of that advertising. Plain and simple.
Google does not have any issue with so-called “content farms” except that they drive down advertising prices through redundant and low quality content. After we recognize that we can move on to addressing the recent shifts, which are significant for all of us, content farmers or not.
Protected: Document Retention Policies for SharePoint
April 26, 2011
Google and Mobile: Will the Pass from Web to Mobile Search Be Smooth?
April 25, 2011
Over the bunny weekend, I spoke with two people about the direction the Web is moving. In those information conversations, I learned some interesting factoids. First, the Web today is different from the Web of five, even two years ago. The person used the word “ephemeral” to describe much of the information that is available. I thought that “ephemeral” applied to Twitter “tweets” and some of the short content posted in the comments section of blogs and other social media. As I learned, this definition is too narrow. The ephemeral nature of the Web applies to such content types as:
- Dynamic Web pages such as those produced by airline ticket or hotel reservation systems. The content which is mostly availability and price changes often with each screen refresh.
- Junk pages that someone produces until the pages stop attracting traffic, often leaving no trace anywhere. To see an example, navigate to Webspace.com
- Test Web sites or blogs put up and then abandoned. To see an example, navigate to Captain Roy. The Web page stays behind, but the blog and its content is temporary.
I did not agree with the person’s approach to ephemera, but I did agree with the perception that the texture of information available via the Web was quite different today than it was a few years back.
Can Google’s Web search pass the baton to Google mobile search without losing cadence, speed, or control?
The second conversation focused on the notion of the volume of data. I had heard some astounding and unsubstantiated claims about the rate of growth of digital information. One person told me that Web and organizational content was doubling every two months. This person was the president of a trendy software company, so I zipped my lip. But on the call over the weekend, a person who shall remain anonymous asserted, “Web content doubles every 72 hours.” Again, I did not push the issue, but that is a heck of a statement.
Two observations:
There is a lot of digital information and some of it is clearly not intended to be substantive. Persistence, if it does occur, is accidental or irrelevant to the person creating the information. Other content is machine generated like the Webspace.com “page”, and it is little more than a placeholder or a way to generate ad revenue or click throughs.
Finding information in today’s environment is not particularly easy. The general purpose Web search engines like Bing.com and Google.com are able to provide pointers to more traditional Web content. To locate information that appears in a tweet, I have to exert considerable effort to locate an item. For companies with distinct name, my Overflight services works okay but some outfits have names that make it almost impossible to find them. Examples include Brainware, Stratify, and Thunderstone without lots of false drops to games, rock and roll, or other content which has appropriated a word, phrase, or semantic space.
Mobile search is the primary means of finding information for many people. On my trip to Hong Kong at the end of March 2011, I watched people in public spaces like the Starbuck’s at the giant mall near the central rapid transit station. There were a few laptops and iPads, but the majority of the people were using mobile devices. A similar uptake is evident in most big cities. Here in Harrod’s Creek, there are precious few people, so the one person using a clunky laptop at the Dairy Queen is out of the mainstream.
In my printed edition of the New York Times, I read in the business section today (April 25, 2011) “Google, a Giant in Mobile Search, Seeks New Ways to Make It Pay.” The “it”, of course, is mobile search in particular and more generally mobile online information access. You may be able to read the story online, but the links often go dead. More ephemera, I suppose. Try this one, but no guarantees: http://goo.gl/Ebpnz.
Ducks and Alphas: Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo Unite
April 25, 2011
“Wolfram|Alpha and DuckDuckGo Partner on API binding and Search Integration,” touts Wolfram Alpha’s own blog. Both organizations have brought something unique to the Search universe, so we’re interested to see what comes of this. Will it be more agile than a Google and Godzilla would? (Googzilla?)
Wolfram|Alpha’s Computational Knowledge Engine not only retrieves data but crunches it for you—very useful, if you phrase your query well. Play with that here.
DuckDuckGo’s claim to fame is that they don’t track us; privacy champions like that. A lot. The site provides brief info, say from a dictionary or Wikipedia, as well as related topics at the top of the results page. It’s also blissfully free of advertising clutter. Check that out here.
According to the Wolfram Alpha blog, they are combining the Wolfram|Alpha functionality with the DuckDuckGo search:
So what does this new partnership mean for you? If you are a DuckDuckGo user, you’ll start to notice expanded Wolfram|Alpha integration. DuckDuckGo will start adding more Wolfram|Alpha functionality and datasets based on users’ suggestions. If there’s a specific topic area you’d like to see integrated into DuckDuckGo, your suggestions are welcome.
And for developers, DuckDuckGo will maintain the free Wolfram Alpha API Perl binding. With that, you can integrate Wolfram|Alpha into your application. Keep in mind that InQuira and Attensity are “products” of similar tie ups.
We’ll enjoy watching the progress of this hybrid beast.
Cynthia Murrell April 25, 2011
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Oracle Text Installation Help
April 25, 2011
We ran a query for IBM OmniFind and Oracle Text on Google and found that Beyond Search is one of the sources for information about how to configure these systems and obtain documentation about specific methods. We were hoping that IBM and Oracle would occupy the top spot, but it Harrod’s Creek is the go to place, we are okay with that.
As we have said, Oracle Text is a handy tool for building text queries and document classification applications. For some reason, directions for manually installing Oracle Text are somewhat elusive. That being said, Beyond Search has some good news.
So, if you’ve ever wondered how to “Install Oracle Text on Oracle Database 11gR2”, this blog post is for you. The link contains the code snippets required to install the text, install the language and verify. Appropriate explanations are included.
We’d say it is definitely worth tucking into your Oracle Text tips folder for safekeeping.
Sarah Rogers, April 25, 2011
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WalMart Grabs Kosmix
April 25, 2011
Kosmix, along with the now defunct Navgle, were among the most interesting mash up search systems we tracked. The Google deal with Naver for the Navgle service was problematic and disappeared quietly. Did you even notice? Kosmix was a company founded by Anand Rajaraman, a fellow with pretty good connections to some interesting Googlers. Early on, I thought that Google might acquire the company, but the deal went a different direction. Instead of motoring on Highway 101, Kosmix took a flight to Bentonville, Arkansas. We were surprised when we learned in the article “Wal-Mart Acquires Kosmix to Move Into Social and Mobile.”
Kosmix streams postings from social networking sites and organizes them by topic. As noted in the article:
It’s not particularly clear how Kosmix leads to better mobile and social interactions. The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.
Kosmix’s value is apparently clear to Walmart. They expect it be an important part of their ecommerce strategy, centered in its new @WalmartLabs. The deal should be complete in the first half of this year. We don’t know much about WalMart, but the company operates in a way that would make Ebenezer Scrooge fell warm all over. The WalMartization of Kosmix should be fun to watch.
Cynthia Murrell April 25, 2011
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