WebConnoisseur

Finally some solid evidence showing how long the long tail of search really is! Having worked for some big high-traffic sites, I was always discouraged with the underestimation of the true length of the long tail in other public reports. Finally I did my own research and it was published on the Hitwise blog:

Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search

Here’s a sneak peak:

“After great dissatisfaction with the existing research, which I felt vastly understated the true size of the long tail, I decided to do my own research…There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Understanding the long tail and how to target it from an SEO standpoint is no simple task. I hope this article sheds some light on how important long tail traffic is.

In my experience, I’ve ranked for head terms and I’ve ranked for millions of tail terms. I’d gladly trade in the head terms for a larger piece of the tail. A few companies have learned this, including the search engines, but they’d prefer you don’t know how much of a gold mine it really is.

Just received an email from LinkedIn announcing LinkedIn Apps. Here’s a quick look at the apps they’ve launched with and my thoughts on how they might help you with your career reputation management.

“Today we’re announcing many more ways to interact with your network on LinkedIn. Whether it’s a new way to create projects and collaborate, share information, customize your profile, or gain key insights, the new LinkedIn Applications deliver.”

LinkedIn Applications available at launch (in decreasing order of first-glance importance) with my quick thoughts:

• Company Buzz by LinkedIn – Very handy way for non-twitter savvy users to gauge what people are saying about their company.
• WordPress on LinkedIn – Another way to promote your blog to your connections or future connections.
• Google Presentation on LinkedIn – A way to share some of your work in a public way (only presentations right now, but wouldn’t be surprised to see other Google Docs added soon). Great way to promote your presentations.
• Bloglink on LinkedIn – A handy way to keep up with your business network’s latest blog posts.
• TripIt on LinkedIn – Keep tabs on where your network is traveling. May help you better connect with your network in person.
• SlideShare on LinkedIn – Share, view and comment on presentations from your network. Use in a promotional way, or use it for pre or post live presentation feedback.
• Amazon on LinkedIn – Insight into what your network is reading.
• Box on LinkedIn – Share files on your profile and/or collaborate with your network.
• Huddle on LinkedIn – Helpful private project management collaboration abilities.

Obviously many of these applications are available on other sites or in other ways, but having them associated with your LinkedIn business network may bring about some interesting opportunities. It will be interested to see how popular these become and what other applications are added.

So far, I’ve installed Blog link (so far first person in my web savvy ~400 person network), Wordpress (more control and better profile display than blog link), TripIt (two connections on it thus far), and company buzz (didn’t add to my profile, however). Of the three, I noticed blog link may suffer from speed issues (plus I removed it from my profile as I didn’t like the way it displayed) and company buzz doesn’t work very well compared to other twitter search tools.

Love to hear your experiences and thoughts about LinkedIn Apps.

Haven’t seen anyone do this yet on Facebook, so I thought I’d stir the pot and see if this Facebook prank spreads.

Facebook Assault Tagging
Facebook is nice enough to automatically publish any photo of you to all your friends if someone simply tags a photo of you. This has caused embarrassing moments for many people, but there’s a way to guarantee embarrassment:

1) Upload a funny or nasty photo
2) Tag it as your friend
3) All their friends will see the new photo feed of your victim.
4) Watch their friends start commenting on the hilarious photo
5) Prepare to be tagged yourself (you can untag a photo of you, but you have to be on it).

Here’s my first:

The NY Times reports that the largest spam gang on the Internet is being shut down, starting with their assets being frozen. Some key numbers shared in the article:

• This group makes $400,000 a month
• They send 10 billion spam emails per day
• This group, at one point, sent out 1/3rd of all spam
• 90% of all email people receive is spam

If these numbers are true, then:

• The group made 1/7500th of a cent for each email sent (the only cost-effective way had to be sent from unknowingly affected computers)
• Email users should expect a 33% drop in spam, and an 44% drop in overall incoming email volume.

I wish it were true, but I’m skeptical that we won’t see such drops. Unless the penalties are extremely harsh, other spammers will step in to get a piece of the newly available spam pie.

Thought this was pretty funny when accepting a LinkedIn request from a new co-worker named Jack (look at the action buttons):

Apparently I either accept the invite, or admit I don’t know anything.

This well-done video featuring the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Courteney Cox, Ellen DeGeneres, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, Jonah Hill, Dustin Hoffman, Ashton Kutcher, Eva Longoria, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Natalie Portman, Forest Whitaker and other celebs, is sure to be one of the most rapidly deployed viral videos. The non-partison video is aimed at getting more people to vote using the invite 5 friends meme strategy.

At the time of this posting, the video has less than 100k views. I expect it will surge to a million views in short time.

I’m registered to vote, so I’ll pass this along to 5 more who run websites or blogs in the search community:

• Todd Mintz
• Rand Fishkin
• Greg Boser
• Neil Patel
• Jessica Bowman

For those planning on attending the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer in Arizona, but haven’t registered yet, here’s a Discount Code you can use to save $200 (or $350 if you register today): ESPKA08

Being a small company in-house SEO for the past decade has made getting to conferences difficult for me, but I’ve managed to attend a lot of search conferences and still find them very valuable (not so much the sessions themselves, but the out of session/networking conversations). Here’s what I’ve got on schedule for the remainder of the year:

August: SES San Jose
This must be my 4th or 5th SES San Jose in a year. I’ve been there as an attendee, a speaker, and now will attend as press. I look forward to covering the event, but will only be attending Sunday night through Wednesday night. Hope to see you there.

October: MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Arizona

Never been to a MarketingProfs event and never been to Arizona. Looking forward to this event. You’ll find me speaking on link building tactics.

November: PubCon
Hoping to attend PubCon this year – it will be my 3rd in a row if I do attend. I’ve covered the event as press, as an attendee and hope to attend as a speaker this year (though it appears many of the speaking spots have already been assigned).

Hope to see you at one of these events! Also, let me know if there are any others I should consider attending.

I’m feeling a bit guilty for not spending more time writing about SEO on this blog. But, I’m happy to say there is a reason, a very good reason. As you may know, I recently wrote, directed & produced a 30 minute short film which is currently in post production, but mighty close to complete.

Besides learning every nuance to the Final Cut Pro Studio suite, I’m now sharing my experiences with the short film blog associated with the movie. If you are into movies or movie making, I’d love to see your participation on the site. Yes – the image to the right is the Unseen Abilities still image of choice to describe some of our SoundTrack Pro experiences.

I attended my first Jane and Robot event on June 25th at the office of Ignition Partners. As you might suspect, a search event geared towards developers & designers attracts your regular assortment of web geeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the audience was dissapointed that they never got to lay eyes on Jane, nor meet the Robot.

Jeff Pollard gave a rapid talk on AJAX SEO pitfalls. Though it was nothing new to me, the audience seemed to receive it well – Jeff’s really knows his stuff. What I was most surprised by was the number of people I hadn’t met before and the Q&A afterwards. People asked very pointed questions like: “Does PPC affect your organic rankings” and “if we are already crawled well, why should we use sitemaps?”

I really appreciate Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia volunteering their time to educate developers on white-hat SEO and creating an opportunity for SEOs to meet up from time-to-time. Jane and Robot is a service that should be embraced and promoted by those in the search industry.