One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on [...]]]> Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

• Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
• John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
• Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
• Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
• Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
• Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its [...]]]> In all the hub-bub about Google Universal Search, and the impact of Web History/Personalization/iGoogle on results, there’s something I don’t know that I’ve seen, but seems like an inevitable next step:

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its behavioral targeting category. Given that it’s being said that Web History is impacting search results for users, and now we have Universal Search impacting the results pages… it’s really a no-brainer to have these elements hit the profitable part of any given search page.

While Mom-n-Pop PPC advertisers may not use much in the way of behavioral targeting features, if available, big-brands and agency PPC buyers will be all over it.

SEOing is hard. Good thing he’s a professional.

I hate hidden links, simply because playing games with CSS to hide links from users is a clear sign of some form of dumbassery occurring.

But paid links are a really messy area. There’s a billion comments in [...]]]> It’s all over the place: Google is looking at ways to get bitchy about paid links and hidden links.

I hate hidden links, simply because playing games with CSS to hide links from users is a clear sign of some form of dumbassery occurring.

But paid links are a really messy area. There’s a billion comments in a billion forums right now pro-killing paid links, con killing paid links, etc. An argument is being made that when you buy directory links, such as Yahoo! Directory, you’re not paying for the link, but for having the link reviewed.

That strikes me as complete poo. You mean to tell me that it really costs Yahoo! $299 to ‘review’ my submission? Man, their reviewers must be pulling amazing hourly rate. I want to be a reviewer. I could sit at home with the cats and wear sweatpants all the time. I could bike all day and review all night while drinking beer and watching the Fox Reality Channel on cable.

The only way the $299 makes sense is if Yahoo! is in fact charging on the basis of the value of the link. Which, as we’re all aware, is the truth of the matter, or else none of us would ever pay the going rate.

Other types of paid links are similarly sticky. Text link brokerage is sort of sleazy — it’s rare that I see an example where brokered text links don’t look spammy on a site. But what of a paid review? Sure, most reviewers won’t give quality reviews just for the freebie or the cash, but everyone lies if they claim the gift or the $$ doesn’t make an impact. It’s a truism of public relations that schmoozing works.

I just feel like, of all the dodgy techniques to go after, paid links are both hard to justify the various nuances, and likely difficult to build into an algorithm. How about devaluing Squidoo and MySpace linking? That would be super-easy, and probably have more immediate merit.

Edit: One of the my favorite summaries to date: The Real Reason Google Doesn’t Like Paid Links. It suits my sense of tinfoil-hattery.

But if you look closely, realty companies are clearly using the Web for brand presence, rather than search presence (save for PPC).

I did some SEO/SEM for a Major Real Estate Company(tm) about, eh, 2-3 [...]]]> I’m preparing to sell my house. Everyone knows that the Interweb is playing a big role in that process these days.

But if you look closely, realty companies are clearly using the Web for brand presence, rather than search presence (save for PPC).

I did some SEO/SEM for a Major Real Estate Company(tm) about, eh, 2-3 years ago. The experience was frustrating, because the site was not built to any specification that would support strong online marketing, and a lot of the work I could do involved either PPC or rudimentary code cleanup.

Looking at other real estate sites right now, I can say them with a confidence that the issues I faced there are more universal in the vertical than client-specific.

1. The Regional MLS is a train wreck of a database. Every site pulls its listings (‘Search listings from every agent!’) from the Regional MLS. The way every site pulls is such a nightmare I can only assume it is a flaw inherent on the MLS side.
2. Beyond that, though, the amount of insane URL structures on the average big-multi-office-agency web site? Wow. And it doesn’t even look like they’re using it for login or personalization in most cases.
3. The session cookies. Ai yi yi. What with session cookies, a lot of the standard, newsletter/brochure content (much of which is pretty good once you dig down), can’t be found or easily indexed for search.

Even if we skipped over the issues surrounding the MLS, setting up pages with local offices, strong geo-targeting footers for each, agent names, and even individual pages shouldn’t be too rough to do as standard-generated pages. Yet, it doesn’t happen. The agent pages set up by most agencies use a stock content template that few agents customize. The agents who DO care set up personal sites, but they show little search savvy — again, no local search elements, geo-targeters, etc., and I see a bunch of people using frames yet. Frames!

I’m not asking real estate agencies to set up a disintermediation system — something I know they all dread. But by making offices and geotargeters indexable and findable, they could create an excellent lead-referral system.

As it is, most of them must be driving traffic on name-recognition for the agency (drive-by signs, billboards, TV/Radio ads, etc.), and via PPC. Keyword bidding for real estate PPC, by the way, is insane. Given that most of them seem to route their PPC to their home pages, I doubt it’s especially effective — and I bet conversion tracking is near-nonexistent. Expensive and unmeasurable: two adjectives I hate, used together.

It’s a pity. This whole process is giving me a headache. I just want to find someone who actually knows my neighborhood who might be able to sell my house in comparison to others in the neighborhood. Mine is one of the larger single-homes, and actually has central air, which means it’s a bit of an oddity — especially since there are no fewer than 4 repossessed homes in a 3-block radius, all on the market for cheap, and all needing twice their price in work. My house is move-in ready (or will be). So marketing this place will take some delicacy. And instead of finding some info online, I’m going to be slogging with a phone and lingering around open houses. Sigh.

Hm. I wonder if I can get an agent to take part commission, part barter on this deal. I build them a decent, locally targeted site, they cut their take focusing on the long-term benefit…