Last week I attended my second Omniture Summit conference, and I have to say, if you are an analyst, marketer or developer that works with Omniture products and have the oppurtunity to attend, it’s a no brainer, GO. Not only is the summit a great time with good food, drinks, and entertainment, you get to network with some great peers, Omniture employees and even learn a few things. Some of the people I met included Ben Gaines, Rudi Shumpert and I also saw Adam Greco roaming the halls. Go follow them if you are an Omniture customer. Omniture knows how to put together a stellar event and is made up of good people.

The big themes this year were social and mobile, which are also themes at my day job. I personally attended sessions on landing page optimization, advanced sitecatalyst plugins, marketing attribution, offline data integration, sitecatalyst data insertion/APIs and thought I got value out of all of them. John Battelle, Seth Godin’s keynotes were enjoyable, as was Facebook’s presentation. The music act was also great this year, The Killers.

This is the first conference since Adobe’s acquisition and Adobe used the forum to try to sell the acquisition both to Omniture customers and (likely) the investment community at large. Overall I’m still not completely sold on the acquisition, but if Adobe uses their capital to invest MORE in the Omniture Business Unit than Omniture could previously afford by itself, and if Adobe doesn’t try to squeeze dollars, the acquisition might have long term potential.

Apple and Google are clearly the main threats to Adobe and Omniture now. I’m not much of an Apple fanboy and I laughed when the iPad was called the iPod Touch Gigantor. I am a bit of a Google fanboy though, so I hope Omniture realizes they need to compete with SiteCatalyst instead of pitching Discover or Insight for some of the features that Google Analytics provides for free. Maybe I’m just upset because I’m not a Discover customer at my day job. I do think SiteCatalyst is the most advanced tool for capturing data and hopefully their new idea exchange will further motivate them to add features like advanced segmentation. Whoever convinced them to create the idea exchange should get a raise.

In Rand’s recent post about SEOmoz turning into a software as a service company, he shared the following graph to illustrate why SEO is a missed opportunity in the competitive landscape.

While I do think investment in SEO often has the highest ROI of any online marketing spend and many businesses of all sizes underspend and under-utilize search optimization, the graphs used in Rand’s post (and shown below) don’t tell the whole story.

Someone once told me to always beware of pie-charts, and I have to agree. First off, lets call the search channels what they actually are natural or paid search. Not every click on an unpaid listing in a SERP is a result of SEO efforts. (Also not every paid search click is necessarily pay-per-click. CPA is now making its way making its way into paid search results.)

A study in 2008 implied that around 10% of searches are navigational, 80% are informational and another 10% are transactional. You can find definitions of these keyword types from the leaked Google Quality Rater guidelines [PDF]. Lets look at these ‘keyword spaces’ across both the paid and natural search channels.

Navigational – 10% of search clicks
If a brand isn’t ranking for its own navigational searches, they are already beyond help. The vast majority of navigational searches for a brand/website will result to that brand/website without any optimizations. Navigational SEO will likely have low incremental yields unless the website is already royally screwed up to begin with. Brands should probably run paid search ads for these terms, but only because they are cheap clicks and basically forced to defensively buy these ads by the search engines. Optimization around these paid search ads will also not create success and mostly just cannibalize natural search.

Informational – 80% of search clicks
SEO is great for information searches. It’s really fucking great. Look at About.com, Mahalo.com, Demand Media and plenty of other content portals that have a business model driven solely from aggressive SEO on informational queries. Of course, Wikipedia is the dominant player, likely getting around 2% of ALL Google downstream traffic (2007 data). Informational searches are less competitive and have more words per search which create more variation in word use and order. There are a ton of these searches! There’s still plenty of space to play in informational search.

So what’s the problem with informational search? It’s great and easy to measure if you’re selling ad space, but if you are all about customer transactions, it’s more difficult to measure success. The problem with gauging the success is not in the search tools but with the internal client analytics and CRM. Can you attribute customer acquisition and lifetime value to a informational search that occurred days, weeks or months ago? Can informational searches claim they retained a customer that would have otherwise gone inactive?

Transactional – 10% of search clicks
The search engines themselves have provided simple and effective tools to judge success of transactional searches with paid search tracking pixels and Google Analytics. Because judging success is more straightforward with these keywords, paid search spend skyrockets to the limits of what is deemed effective ROI, and the majority of paid search spend is placed on these keywords. In less competitive areas, this is where SEO is a huge win. In competitve areas, this is the space where SEO is hard and brand strength(domain authority, ‘trustrank’) matters more than your clever linkbuilding campaign and perfect on-page optimizations.

Is SEO a missed opportunity? Yes, but so is all of the informational search space. Will this change? Honestly, I’m not too optimistic, but I don’t think it’s SEO tools, training or awareness that is missing. The fundamentals of SEO are increasingly just proper website usability/architecture, viral marketing, brand building and marketing analytics- not some secret skillset that only SEO experts have.

What is needed is stronger client analytics with a more rigorous definition of success beyond the immediate event or purchase. This will help justify any ‘informational search’ spend and also the trendy social media budget.

Wordpress site search sucks out of the box, but with a few improvements, it can end up rendering some fairly decent result sets.

The usual method most people use to track their Wordpress site search is the Wordpress Search Meter Plugin. This is an easy way to get some feedback on how your users are utilizing your site search, but don’t you know that Google Analytics can track site search for you?

As great as Search Meter is, Google Analytics is the ideal place to track your onsite search. Not only can you capture the search phrases used, but I will show you how to capture the number of results in the search result set. This will let you identify all the null search terms used on your site and also see the number of results for popular phrases, and which phrases may be returning too many results.

The first step to tracking site search in Google Analytics is to edit your website profile information and and select Do Track Site Search, and put in s as the Query Parameter.

The Query Parameter input is the only thing necessary for Google Analytics to start tracking your Wordpress search results, but notice we also added a Category Parameter called numResults and set that parameter to be stripped out from the URL.

Next we are going to add a javascript variable near the top of the page in the global header template.

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageType =  "default";
</script>

Then we are going to edit the template code where the search results are displayed. Some themes have a search results template, some display search results from a main template, but this code block should work inserted into either.

<?php if (is_search()) {
$numResults = $wp_query->found_posts; ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
pageType = "search results";
var numResults = <?php echo $numResults ?>;
var searchString = '<?php the_search_query() ?>';
</script> <?php } ?>

The outputted javascript should be 3 variables, pageType, numResults and searchString (We don’t use searchString in this example, but I wanted to show you all how to make it visible in JS).

Finally, you need to edit your Google Analytics code usually placed in your footer template. Make sure you don’t paste this in verbatim, as you need to maintain your unique GA id.

We are going to add a switch statement, and send a different request if the page is a search results page.

<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-99999-1");
switch (pageType) {
case 'search results':
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.href.toLowerCase() + "&numResults=" + numResults);
break;
default:
pageTracker._trackPageview();
}
} catch(err) {}
</script>

This bit of javascript appends the numResults variable to the pageview in Google Analytics, which Google Analytics then interprets as a Search Category. It also forces the URL and search string to lowercase, which normalizes search phrases with different cases.

Once Google Analytics starts reporting on your search results, you can break down search terms by number of results or number of results by search terms.

You can then click on the different number of results to see the search terms used. In a future post, I’ll show you how you can use this same GA switch statement for 404 page tracking.

News is that Joost’s awesome wordpress plugin, Sociable, has been taken over by Blogplay.com.

I recently installed the plugin on one of my blogs with some of my own tweaks.

Replacing the images is easy enough, I decided to go with the Aquaticus icons. You can find a few lists of social bookmarking icons, here and here. Make sure to edit the CSS so the images show up the right size. I recommend including the sociable CSS in your primary CSS file.

Once I had stylish icons on the blog, I wanted to be able to tell if visitors were using the links. Of course you can track the referring site traffic from social sites easily enough with Google Analytics, but I thought I could do better than that.

I wanted to track clicking on the links as an event, so I could evaluate which services my visitors were most interested in sharing content on.  To do this, I added some javascript and edited the sociable.php file a small amount. I used Erik Vasilick’s best practices to tracking outbound links and the Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide.

The javascript function I added looked like:

<script type="text/javascript">
function trackSociable(url,description) {
try {
pageTracker._trackEvent('social', description, document.location.pathname);
setTimeout('document.location = "' + url + '"', 100);
} catch(err){}
}
</script>

I also edited sociable.php, in the php where the href tag was created for the social bookmarking links.

$link .= " href=\"javascript:window.location='".urlencode($url)."';\" title=\"$description\" onClick=\"trackSociable('".$url."','$description');return false;\">";

The event is recorded in Google Analytics with these attributes
Action = social
Category = site (Facebook, Myspace, StumbleUpon)
label = article’s relative path

Here’s an example of one of some of the data in Google Analytics:

You can also correlate social site clicks with article paths or article paths with social site clicks.   Alternatively you could record the article’s page title by substituting document.title in the javascript function instead of using document.pathname.

I felt lucky to have been able to attend the Omniture Summit this year, as travel and expenses are very tight with the current economic climate. Since I just took a job as a web analytics manager in November, and the company I work for just transitioned to SiteCatalyst, a case was made that attending the conference would have a legitimate return (but the socializing is fun too).

Overall I had a great time- especially networking with people and meetingwith venders and consultants.I felt like I left with a better understanding of the metrics marketing landscape. I think the most direct benefits I had were the discussions with other analysts, especially from other retail sites. The keynotes were entertaining but nothing too mindblowing. The breakout sessions were hit and miss for me.

I think that my three medium to long term goals have been clarified.

• Data integration with external tools, specifically email, paid search, endeca

• Understanding and building channel attribution models, based upon a combination of first touch/last touch and time spans

• Data-driven decisions and eventually a multivariant testing tool

Realistically Test and Target is about the only other Omniture product that is sparking my interest.

Google and Yahoo search pages now often include maps and local business information into their results. Search engines often act as yellow pages for people so verifying your local contact information should help customers find and contact you.

Many businesses are already in Google and Yahoo because they take information from Yellow Pages, other telecom databases and directories. But, verification allows you to add some more information and be ready to edit this information if it ever changes.

You can verify your local addresses and business information with both companies by creating accounts, inputting your information and verifying via a phone call or snail mail.

Google Local Business Center – Help page

Yahoo Local Listings

It’s a good idea to include targeted words in your entry, so that more people can find your listing if they search for generics.

Other places you can get free local listings include:

CitySearch.com – MSN partners with Citysearch for local search information, and CitySearch has a free basic listing.

AskCity – Ask.com’s map/local search, if your company is now showing up you have to e-mail their customer service to get added.

YellowPages.com – Large online local directory site that also includes city guides and advertising solutions. Basic listings are free.

Local.com – Online yellow pages and search engine that offers a free listing for businesses.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is considered a very controversial piece of legislation. While I do not personally support some of the law, I have sent DMCA takedown notices when one of my other blogs had posts lifted verbatim and republished without my permission.

When someone steals content and publishes on it on a free publishing system such as Google’s blogger, you can contact the hosting company to have them remove the infringing materials.

Here is a sample DMCA takedown notice I put together by seeing some other examples on the web. I am not a lawyer so use at your own risk. Constantly trying to track down the theft of your posts probably won’t do much good anyway.

Subject: DMCA/Copyright Infringement Notice
Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to you as an agent of your company or website sole owner of copyright to articles written on your website.

A website hosted by your company on publishing system having the host name “hostname“ and the IP address , infringes upon our exclusive rights in a number of copyrighted works. The copyrighted work at issue is the text/video/audio/etc that appears where you publish and has been published without authorization at the URL and IP address indicated.

url of offending site

The above referenced URLs provide, without authorization, partial text of copyrighted works produced and owned by . Below, please find details regarding the infringing URL, and original URL for each of these copyrighted works.

offending URL
Owner’s (Our) URL: your URL
(repeat..)

All of the listed infringements were observed between timestamp and timestamp

Please remove the referenced material from your service at once, and take other appropriate action against the account holder to prevent future infringement.

Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this letter serves as actual notice of infringement in the event of legal proceedings. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Please contact me promptly to confirm the action you have taken.

Regards,
your details

If you are sending your DMCA notice to Blogger, as I did, Google makes you fax your notice instead of using e-mail. I’m not sure why this is (other than to perhaps cut down on volume) as Yahoo, MS and others accept e-mailed DMCA takedown notices.

I know I don’t post enough, but I try to have unique posts. I was holding off on this to better take advantage of it myself, but since SEOmoz is posting about Pligg sites, I better post this now before my content is less than unique.

Everyone knows the use of the social bookmarking sites to drive traffic, but I also think they are good because many of them give out direct links that are indexed by the search engines. Some of the smaller bookmarking sites only give out redirect links, but it looks like almost none of them are using link condoms, and many give out direct links.

In the spirit of the holidays here is my list English-language social bookmarking sites that give out direct links. I omitted the bigger known sites and ones with primarily adult related content.

I grouped them by my quick notes about their niche, but they are basically in random order.

http://www.apbnews.com/ Crime
http://crimene.ws/ Crime and Law Enforcement

http://www.digstock.com/ Stocks, Investing
http://www.business-planet.net/ Business news
http://news.fatpitchfinancials.com/ Investing and Finance
http://www.commercebucket.com/ Economics, Retail, Commerce
http://www.valueinvestingnews.com/ Investing, Markets, Stocks
http://www.2centsnews.com/ Markets, Economics
http://www.marketpicks.net/ Stock and Market News
http://www.bizzbites.com/ Business, Management

http://www.braindigg.com/ Psychology, Neurology, Cognitive Science
http://www.hitsmit.com/ Health care, technology
http://www.medical-articles.net/ Medical
http://paramedic.org.uk/ Paramedics, EMS, Health Care, UK

http://www.podolicious.com/ Podcasts
http://pixelgroovy.com/ Tutorials, Graphics, Development
http://www.thelitlist.com/ Online Fiction
http://bad.webpagesthatsuck.com/ Badly Designed Webpages

http://www.barksbookmarks.com/engine/ Culture, Music, Art (Videos and photos)
http://shakk.us/ General Videos
http://mootion.com/ Videos
http://www.thatschillin.com/ Videos, Entertainment Gen Interest
http://www.coolfunnycandy.com/ Cool, Funny or (eye)Candy
http://www.meme-stream.com/ General, Videos

http://riggd.com/ Politics
http://politipop.com/ Political News
http://www.indianaseesee.com/ Local Indiana News, U.S. Politics

http://www.motorpulse.com/ Cars
http://www.autospies.com/ Auto Shows, Cars

http://www.ravemyspace.com/ MySpace, Profile Pages, Music
http://wink.com/ Profile Pages, Myspace
http://www.nooz.com/ General, Myspace?

http://www.afgnews.com/ Afghanistan, Current Events, General
http://www.news2.ca/ Canadians, General
http://www.news.articlesphere.com/ General
http://www.blogreporter.biz/ General
http://wobblog.com/ General
http://www.indianbytes.com/ India, Technology, General
http://www.spymy.com/ South East Asia General
http://kick.ie/ Irish, Gen interest
http://www.qoolsqool.com/ Education General
http://hubpages.com/ Long Informative Articles
http://www.topkix.com/ General
http://www.buzzjapan.com/ Japan, General
http://www.shoutwire.com/ General
http://www.inboxnews.com/ General News
http://www.clicktator.com/ General
http://www.bythemasses.com/ New York City, General
http://www.blogmemes.net/ General
http://muti.co.za/ General
http://www.humsurfer.com/ Indian General
http://www.italknews.com/ General
http://www.livelocker.com/ General
http://www.getgui.com/ General
http://www.yunar.com/ General
http://www.newsgarbage.com/ General
http://www.contentpop.com/ General
http://www.scooop.net/ General
http://forumsofindia.com/articles/ General
http://quadriot.com/ College General (need a .edu email to join)
http://popcurrent.com/ Online Media, Entertainment

http://www.binarylaw.com/ Technology Law
http://dotnetkicks.com/ .NET, ASP, MS
http://www.betamarker.com/ Software releases
http://wetogether.info/ Gadgets, Tech
http://www.bitchabouttech.com/bitchabouttech/ Technology
http://forumfads.com/ Web Forums, Tech
http://www.techtagg.com/ Tech
http://sharepointkicks.com/ Microsoft Sharepoint
http://www.appslist.com/ Linux, Mac, Windows, Software
http://www.mobilitybeat.com/ Phones, PDA, Mobile, Gadget

http://hahahollywood.com/ Celebrities, Gossip
http://hollywoodlowdown.com/ Celebrities, Gossip
http://www.hypediss.com/ Trends, Fashion, General
http://www.bestweekever.tv/ble/ Celebrity, Gossip
http://www.culturepopp.com/ Celebrity Gossip
http://www.scoopity.com/ Hollywood, Fashion
http://thelosthub.com/ The TV Show Lost

http://mp3rama.com/ Digital Music, mp3s
http://news.thetrc.net/ Music, Bands
http://www.theplugg.com/ Entertainment, Music
http://www.soundtrakk.com/ Music
http://undistortion.com/ Music stories and reviews
http://britney.starfrosch.ch/ Music

http://cruisinaltitude.com/news/ Aviation
http://www.hugg.com/ Green, Environmental
http://www.hrsalad.com/ Human Resources, Workplace
http://www.newvoyagenews.com/ Space Tourism
http://www.theadreview.com/ TV / Video Ads
http://www.voteanime.com/ Anime
http://www.winelifetoday.com/ Wine Snobs

http://www.gamelemons.com/squeeze/ Video Games
http://www.pixelmo.com/ Video Games
http://www.leetdaily.com/ Video Games
http://www.gamerbytes.com/ Video Games
http://www.strobe.org/ MMORPGs
http://devbump.com/ Video Game Development, Mods

http://www.sustaind.org/ LDS Religion
http://www.inbreaking.com/ Christianity, Missionaries, Church

http://battellemedia.com/searchmob/ Search
http://www.plugim.com/ SEO, SEM, Web
http://searchenginepress.com/ SEO, SEM, Search
http://www.wrigg.net/ Web Content, Articles
http://www.marktd.com/ Marketing, Advertising
http://adveracio.us/ Advertising
http://www.kablogs.com/ Blogging, Blogosphere
http://www.ordinarii.com/ Advertising, Search Marketing

http://sportsflip.com/ Sports
http://www.wedigsports.com/ Sports
http://www.thumbsupfootball.co.uk/ Football / Soccer
http://run.trihound.com/ Triathlons

Now I am not suggesting you spam these sites (some already have been in my cursory glance), but rather adopt a site if they are in your niche and start building their community… with your posts of course.

Deep links are links to internal pages on a site rather than the index page for a site. The index pages for websites generally acts as hubs and receive most of the inbound links from sites especially directories.

Smaller businesses often only have backlinks to their domain root, and have no deep links to internal pages. Blogs, news and content sites often have many deep links referencing interesting content from other blogs and websites.

We will use Yahoo and MSN Search to compute the deep link percentage in this example, because Google does not support the correct queries.

In this example I compute slashdot.org’s deep link percentage. We ignore internal links.

[link:http://slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] Yahoo
“about 1,910,000” results.

[linkdomain:slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] Yahoo
“about 3,980,000” results

Deep Link Percentage using Yahoo: 52.01%

[link:http://slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] MSN
1,741,451 results

[linkdomain:slashdot.org -site:slashdot.org] MSN
2,571,492 results

Percentage of Deep Links using MSN: 32.28%

Now we will use a smaller site, Threadwatch.org.

[linkdomain:threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] Yahoo
about 124,000

[link:http://www.threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] Yahoo
about 90,900

Yahoo Deep Link Percentage 26.69%

[linkdomain:threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] MSN
120,891

[link:http://www.threadwatch.org -site:threadwatch.org] MSN
94,387

MSN Deep Link Percentage 21.92%

When building links for various sites, I often find myself hand-typing and submitting the same contact information to many different directories and comment forms. When you are serious about getting links, this repetitive action gets tiresome.

Now you can get rid of your typing with the InFormEnter Firefox extension. The extension adds a small clickable icon next to every input field in a web form. When the icon is clicked, you can select pre-configured text to be inserted. You can configure it to display the most frequently used information such as your name, email, address, keywords, url, etc.

I generally store a varations of link anchor text and site descriptions, and sometimes edit them a little so each directory entry I submit is unique.

InFormEnter is not a true password manager such as RoboForm, but it is a free Mozilla Firefox extension, and I use it.