Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

I think Jimbo Wales is brilliant, but I must confess my love-hate relationship with Wikipedia.

As a blogger/ web publisher I love linking to Wikipedia, because the information is clear, concise, and easy. However, as a search marketer, I know I am contributing to Wikipedia’s inexorable rise to the top.

According to SeoChat, “Wikipedia has somehow hit on Google’s magic formula for reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).” How so?

Wikipedia is a User-Generated Content Machine

As of July 20, 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 7.8 million articles in 253 languages. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia had about 47 million unique visitors, making it the 9th largest Web property that month.

Source: ClickZ

It is the largest, most extensive, and fastest growing encyclopedia ever compiled. Written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, editable by anyone with access to the Internet, it is a user-generated content machine. This massive volume of content, updated daily by tens of thousands of volunteers all over the Web, is an all-you-can-eat buffet for search engine spiders.

Wikipedia’s Site Architecture is Structured for Success

It has minimal code bloat and the HTML/XHTML validates. Wikipedia provides a clean indexing path for search engine robots. The interlinking structure is masterful, especially since, according to some SEOs, search engine spiders do not differentiate between inbound links from external sites and narcissistic internal page links. Google bots love Wikipedia’s site architecture, which is a model that SEOs ought to strive for.

Wikipedia Link Love - All Take, No Give

Search engines see inbound links as popularity votes and Wikipedia has about 2.5 million of them. Furthermore, these are high quality back links because the anchor text is frequently the keyword that relates to the page. Links from other growing collaborative Wikipedia projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Meta-Wiki will, no doubt, add to the link love.

Early this year, Wikipedia added the <rel= “nofollow”> attribute to all outbound links in order to neutralize and discourage link spam. Many SEOs see this act to be as brilliantly diabolical as the orchestration of the Twin Tower attacks.

Why?

More than discouraging link spam, which can be effectively handled by a number of anti-spam tools, the <rel= “nofollow”> attribute ensures that Wikipedia rises to the top of SERPs.

How?

Link juice is the passing of page rank from one site to another. The <rel= “nofollow”> attribute instructs search engines that the outbound hyperlinks should not influence the destination page’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

The end result is that Wikipedia’s inbound link juice grows exponentially as people all over the Web link to it, but Wikipedia shares no link love at all through its external links. This juice-hording action is the dynamic that drives Wikipedia to the top of Google SERPs. Wikipedia is, in essence, a link hole - a black hole on the Web that sucks all the links in, but lets no links out.

Why do SEOs Hate Wikipedia?

Wikipedia’s domination of SERPs, makes it the object of fear, loathing, and secret envy among search engine optimizers (SEOs). At the heart of the debate is concern over the proliferation of amateur content on the Web, in addition to the ability of meritless and sometimes empty Wikipedia pages to outrank pages with better quality content.

Wikipedia Proliferates Amateur Content

Wikipedia is the logical starting point for information on general subjects on the Web. But it’s written by anonymous authors whose expertise is questionable. Wikipedia content is more often than not, not based on original research, but a re-writing of work performed by others - knowledge built by scanning other sites. However, its influence on the Web is so powerful, that it threatens the survival of more authoritative sites that pay for original content by diverting monetizable traffic to the Wikipedia universe.

While far better content written by experts might exist on the Web, its impossible for a search engine spider to determine what quality content is. Because Google ranks sites through an algorithm that cannot tell the difference between great content and regurgitated garbage, it bases relevance on the number of inbound links.

For this reason, Wikipedia occupies the top 5 positions for most all keywords, even for pages that are staged for future entries, but that are currently devoid of content. Wikipedia is the 800lb gorilla that always wins.

Wikipedia’s NoFollow Tag Sucks

The NoFollow Tag actually does nothing to discourage link spammers. Link spam can be effectively handled by link spam tools. Furthermore, Wikipedia’s legion of volunteer administrators can effectively identify and eliminate said link spam. If Wikipedia is all about community, it can at least friggin’ reward community participants who add valuable reference links to Wikipedia articles and enrich the global knowledge base with a little link love.

What To Do About Wikipedia?

Wikipedia will not go away. But if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.

Green businesses, social enterprises, social activists don’t stand a chance against an 800 lb gorilla like Wikipedia - you will never outrank Wiki. However, your expertise has immense value in the world and deserves to be included in the Wikipedia’s knowledge base. Post relevant content, enhance Wikipedia articles and use your site as a reference. You will not gain any SEO advantage by dropping links, but you could get some traffic.

Reclaim Your Link Love

Practice safe link love - reclaim your Google juice by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute for Wikipedia.

Download this Wikipedia NoFollow plugin designed for WordPress.

Sources:

The Ultimate List of DoFollow and NoFollow Plugins

Top 50 US Web Properties, June 2007

Web Site Architecture Structured for Success

Wikipedia Conquering Google First, World Next?

Wikipedia Takes our Money & Links, Gives Nothing Back

Why Is Wikipedia On Top in Search Results?

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, rel nofollow, nofollow tag, link love, link juice, link hole, SERPs, search engine rankings, search engine results pages, wikipedia top positions, wikipedia site architecture, SEO, search engine optimization, lorna li

According to Hitwise, in December of 2006 Google handled nearly half the volume of all searches executed by U.S. Internet users. In January 2007, this proportion increased to 63.1%, with Yahoo losing the most market share. Based on JP Morgan 2007 estimates, Google revenues amounted to approximately $8.6 billion. Advertising on the world’s largest search engine is as lucrative as oil these days.

Source: Fast Company

Since search hit the mainstream in 1994, users have been fickle, hopping from one search engine to another, leaving some to die by the wayside. Ask.com is a mere blip in the timeline.

Source: Fast Company

Ever heard of Northern Light and AllTheWeb?

Of all the search engines who have shared in the limelight, Google, by far, has held reign the longest. And yet, according to Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Google still produces too much “spam and useless crap”.

Technorati Tags: the search market 2006 to 2007, search volume 2006 to 2007, search engine market share, the history of search engines, google, yahoo, ask.com, lorna l

I have to admit, as much as I preach about the environment, I harbor an awful, nagging sensation deep down inside that I am not as sustainable as I’d like to be.

I routinely leave my home in a mad morning rush for work, forgetting to shut off the ceiling fan. I agonize over which is worse, tossing out clear plastic bags, or using water to wash them. My laptop is on 24/7. The microwave I never use is perpetually plugged in. In fact, every single electronic item I own seems to be plugged in, always. I realize I have too many electronic gadgets that I dread to imagine buried in a landfill. I also happen to love international travel - and I know that no matter how eco I am, the jet fuel gets me every time.

I hope and pray to meet someone who can take me by the hand and Make Me Sustainable.

Fortunately, there’s now a Web 2.0 application that can help make us all be sustainable. Make Me Sustainable is a Web site that calculates your carbon footprint and allows you to set goals and take actions that will reduce your ecological impact.

You start off by selecting some basic indicators about your home and transportation. It then calculates your carbon footprint and energy costs.

What’s interesting is that its calculator, or Carbon and Energy Portfolio Manager (CEPM), will track monetary savings incurred through footprint reducing actions, as well as calculate your carbon reduction per year in tons. Even niftier, to highlight your real-world impact, it translates your reductions into estimated number of trees saved and number of cars taken off the road.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the average American’s carbon emission is 20 tons. In order to offset 20 tons of carbon, 1,263 American motorists would have to stop driving for one day.

Even with 3 long international flights a year, at 7.9 tons, perhaps I’m not so bad after all.

Technorati Tags: make me sustainable, carbon and energy portfolio manager, sustainability, ecological footprint reduction, carbon footprint, lorna li

StumbleUpon is a social application that allows you to discover Web sites, people, videos, online communities, product information and more in a manner very much like channel-surfing, but for the Web.

How does StumbleUpon Work?

StumbleUpon recommends sites based on your personal preferences and the recommendations of friends and other websurfers like you. A simple 2-level rating system allows you the opportunity to pass on or give your opinion on any webpage with a single “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. The community rating system enables StumbleUpon to make better recommendations as you stumble along, providing an increasing level of relevance over time. These ratings also connect people sharing unique combinations of interests. Stumblers can share their favorite web sites and interact with other users to further improve their web surfing experience.

How do you become a Stumbler?

All you need to do is simply download the free StumbleUpon Toolbar. As part of the installation process, you choose which topics you are most interested in. Done.

Why is StumbleUpon cool?

Since StumbleUpon technology functions in an entirely different way from search engines, which gravitate to the large, established, and highly-optimized sites, it is a fun, relaxing way to discover entirely new sites that might never be found on Google.

Since I became a Stumbler, I’ve stumbled upon websites showing low-impact Hobbit-like woodland homes, a real-time map of global carbon emissions, Sam’s mailbox picture collection, Greenpeace’s map of the gigantic North Pacific trash vortex, the incomprehensibly abstract dontclick.it experiment, and the Free Hugs Campaign, which, corny as it seems, both made me laugh and moved me to tears.

Oh my God…StumbleUpon is addictive.

Technorati Tags: stumbleupon, lorna li

Social media optimizers have long touted StumbleUpon’s usefulness in driving new direct traffic to your site. A number of social media optimization experiments have demonstrated StumbleUpon’s ability to generate a significantly larger amount of traffic than other social media sites.

Last June, Social Media Optimization performed an experiment to see What Social Media Sites Send Traffic.

They deliberately picked 2 blogs that were unknown, with no existing backlinks to them: The Story of Tea, and Shopping for Tents.

The number of visitors from each social media site for both posts combined were:

* Stumbleupon.com – 512 visits
* Reddit.com – 65 visits
* Digg.com – 12 visits
* Fark – 8 visits
* Indianpad.com – 7 visits
* Google Referral - visits
* Technorati.com – 3 visits
* Netscape.com -3 visits
* Myweb2.search.yahoo.com – 2 visits
* Newsvine – 1 referral

Interestingly, StumbleUpon sent 5 times more traffic than all of the other social media sites combined.

Furthermore, they discovered that StumbleUpon delivered the best quality traffic. While Digg and Fark visitors left the site immediately after reading the blog post, 67% of StumbleUpon visitors went past the landing page and visited at least one other page on the sites.

In January, SEOmoz released a piece of linkbait for a site called Drivl, called Every Single Mythbusters Myth EVER on One Page. In a period of 5 days, StumbleUpon delivered over 13,000 visitors.

Does StumbleUpon Traffic Convert?

Let’s pause and think about this one.

StumbleUpon is a social discovery site - with a hidden ad network. Web publishers can buy placements from StumbleUpon that guarantee a certain number of page views from StumbleUpon users per day. The cost is a minimum of $0.05 per visitor.

One one hand, while advertisers can reach a highly targeted audience, user interest areas are still fairly broad categories, like “ecology” or “Native American”. Furthermore, when users “stumble” they are in “discovery” mode, not “shopping mode”. So it is not surprising that ads displaying a product (relating to a broad interest area) that the user was not specifically searching for would convert terribly.

In February, SEOmoz published statistics on their Conversion Rate Tracking For Signups, which showed referrals from various sources, StumbleUpon included. For SEOmoz, “conversion” was registering on their blog for free.

StumbleUpon sent 55,599 visitors, but only 22 people signed up - the 0.03% conversion rate being the worst of the bunch.

Suppose SEOmoz paid $0.05 per impression for StumbleUpon’s paid inclusion program. That would have amounted to nearly $2800 for only 22 conversions, a whopping $125 cost per acquisition (CPA).

Conclusions?

1. If you have good, linkable content, expect StumbleUpon to send you a few visitors.
2. If you have amazing content, expect overwhelming response.
3. When creating linkbait, take into account that page’s “Stumbleability”.
4. Use StumbleUpon for brand awareness, and think twice about paying for it.

Technorati Tags: stumbleupon, smo, social media optimization, seomoz, lorna li

Two weeks ago I went to StumbleUpon’s summer party at 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco’s Soma district, conveniently located downstairs from their office and a fortunate 3 blocks from my house. Complimentary beer, wine, and champagne flowed all night long, and San Francisco’s tech crowd was happy.

Photo courtesy of Scott Beale of Laughing Squid

Now, I thought it was kind of odd that eBay, an online auction house and e-commerce site, would buy StumbleUpon, a Web 2.0 website discovery platform for an eyebrow raising price of $75 million. Was eBay simply trying to buy a piece of the Web 2.0 cool, or is there indeed a compelling financial motive?

The StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent year over year, by word-of-mouth only, delivering approximately five million new recommendations a day to its roughly 2.3 million highly-engaged users. But 2.3 million users is barely a drop in the SNS market.

Source: TechCrunch

For most of us, StumbleUpon a free, easy-to-download toolbar that sits benignly in your browser window and, from time to time, takes you on a fun journey into the far reaches of the Web.

Look below the surface, one will find a hidden ad network with an interesting revenue model and profound implications for paid search.

You see, the sites presented by StumbleUpon’s system, are, in fact, not purely random. Web Publishers can buy placements from StumbleUpon that guarantee a certain number of page views from StumbleUpon users per day. The cost is a minimum of $0.05 per visitor.

Advertisers are thrilled because they reach a highly targeted, attentive audience - provided they show something interesting enough to avoid getting thumbed down. Users are unfazed - since the site is related to their interests, most of the time, they can’t tell the difference.

StumbleThru eBay Shopping

StumbleUpon’s new StumbleThru component, launched 4/20 this year, is thought be the bigger motivation for eBay’s acquisition. With the explosive growth of online destination sites like Flickr , MySpace, and Wikipedia it is near impossible to find meaningful content amidst the millions of pages on domains with exponentially expanding user generated content. eBay included.

StumbleThru allows users to stumble, semi-randomly, through the pages of a specific site just as if they were stumbling the entire Web. Imagine stumbling through the universe of eBay auctions, or listings of products at eBay’s, Half.com. Hmmmm.

According to Seeking Alpha, a provider of stock market opinion and analysis, while the purchase price might be startling, from a marketing perspective, eBay’s purchase price of $75 million is “not a drug induced hallucination.”
From internet.seekingalpha.com:

With about 2.3m users…eBay is paying approximately $37 per head. As a lead generation fee, that’s not much more than what eBay pays affiliate network sites. If someone, for example, creates an eBay account and than makes one bid on an auction to activate the account, eBay will pay a lead referral fee of around $25-35 plus a revenue share of won auctions.

With five million web recommendations thrown out a day, and now, some large portion of those being sure to go to eBay sites, eBay is effectively gaining a new marketing channel for a fixed upfront fee.”

Stumble Upon also generates revenue. It’s probably not a cash cow, but it has managed to survive with almost no outside investment. (It closed on an angel investment round in 2006). Mix that revenue to cover operating expenses and then ask: is the value of converted leads, and web marketing, over the next year or two enough to justify the price? That’s debatable, but consider one more number in the calculation: $41 .

$41 would be the CPM (Cost per thousand impressions or thousand displays of a web advertisement) if the only way to value this deal were in the terms of advertising and the advertising price. Specifically: At 5m impressions per day, over 365 days, assuming no growth or churn, StumbleUpon will serve 1.825b page views in a year. Broken down to CPM, or increments of 1000 displays, that equals a fee of $41 per ad (e.g. $41 CPM). (The math is the purchase price divided by Impressions in units of 1000)

If the combined actual revenue from Stumble Upon plus lead generation revenue (from converted new eBay customer sign ups or increased transactions generated from in–site stumbling) generates $20m, the CPM rate would adjust down to about $30 (same math but with the purchase price lightened by $20m to account for the revenue income). Go one step further and split that cost over two years and the CPM is down to a not so crazy seeming $15? So, in the terms of marketing expenses is the valuation of this deal absurd? Doesn’t seem so. $50m would have been better, but $75 is not a drug induced hallucination.

eBay is not buying Stumble Upon for revenue; it’s buying them for marketing and it’s buying them as a tool to help its other businesses. That’s particularly necessary these days when eBay’s retailing businesses are growing more slowly.

Within a marketing framework, there is a clear value proposition. And using marketing/advertising metrics to back out the price, the valuation isn’t crazy.

Sources:

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon: 8 Reasons Why

eBay’s StumbleUpon Acquisition: Confirmed at $75 Million

Why eBay’s StumbleUpon Purchase Actually Makes Sense

StumbleThru : Site Specific StumbleUpon Released

Technorati Tags: ebay buys stumbleupon, ebay, stumbleupon, stumblethru, ebay, lorna li

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. Social bookmarking is a social media optimization (SMO) tactic that can can send direct traffic to your site, as well as build back links and invite secondary back links.

It is hotly debated among SEOs whether social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us confer any PageRank or link juice. Many of these sites have the rel=”nofollow” attribute (otherwise known as a “link condom”) which indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by search engines performing link analysis upon web pages.

Some SEOs claim to recieve some link juice from social bookmarking sites. While social bookmarking sites can definitely send traffic, whether or not a social site will boost your search engine rankings will depend on the site itself.

The two social bookmarking plugins evaluated for this website include:

Sociable

The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Share This

Share This is another free social bookmarking plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.

Unlike Sociable, which displays a busy array of teensy logos from all social bookmarking sites in existence, clicking on the Share This icon neatly pops a box that includes a tab of several major social sites and another tab that enables email.

Unfortunately, Share This doesn’t seem work properly in the newest version WordPress - Version 2.2. Rather than displaying the nifty, 2-tab ajax popup, it redirects you, instead, to another page with a form, which is fully functional.

I am waiting anxiously for the update!

Technorati Tags: SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, SMO, social media optimization, lorna li

Tags are labels that people use to make it easier to find blog posts, photos and videos that are related. Technorati is a blog search engine that employs tags to index content found in the blogosphere. Placing Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog posts is essential if you want to be indexed quickly by Technorati.

When I say quickly, it is almost instantaneous.

SimpleTags

SimpleTags is a free WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your post. While there are already several tag-generating WordPress plugins out there, SimpleTags is the only one that does not make you use the custom fields within WordPress. It’s really that simple.

Download SimpleTags.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

The Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is a free plugin that increases post tagging capabilities and expands site navigation through the creation of lists of tags. UTW also allows you to get an overview of your tags through tag clouds and graphic representation such as a long tail graph and/or weighted bar arrangement. UTW is a versatile tagging plugin that has a numerous features that allow for a wide range of customization, such as:

• Create a tag archive page
• Display a tag cloud
• Display a long-tail graph
• Display a weighted bar

Download the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Tag Cloud Widget for UTW

When used in conjuction with the popular WordPress Side Bar Widgets AND the Ultimate Tag Warrior, this free widget enables you to add a tag cloud to your WordPress sidebar. Tags are sized according to their popularity.

Download the Tag Cloud Widget for UTW.

Technorati Tags: SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, search engine optimization, SimpleTags, tagging, technorati tags, ultimate tag warrior, utw, tag cloud widget for utw, tag cloud, lorna li

I am just getting through a round of SEO enhancements on 2 blogs. I am currently in the midst of testing my new plugins and trying to get them all to work. With the help of Ross Chapman, my eco-conscious WordPress and Joomla! developer, we identified several free WordPress plugins that enable search engine optimization, social bookmarking and RSS distribution.

Unlike the Joomla! Extensions Directory, WordPress plugins are randomly distributed throughout the Web. While the official WordPress site claims that now there is a central place to download all WordPress plugins, I assure you, there’s more out there in cyberspace, some better than what you would find in the WordPress Plugin Database.

I evaluated, installed and uninstalled several SEO plugins, most of which focused on meta data and were extremely limited from a true SEO standpoint. What I was most interested in was a plugin that enabled completely customizable title tags for blog posts.

The Importance of Title Tags for SEO

Title tags are the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization. According to SEO expert Craig Hordlow of Red Bricks Media, an SF-based search marketing agency, 90% of search engine relevance comes from the title tags.

Title tags that are keyword rich, customized descriptions of your page content are excellent spider food. Unfortunately, in Word Press, and in many other content management systems, post titles are often default title tags, which eliminates your ability to incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases that can capture additional search visibility.

An extremely annoying thing about WordPress is that it will place your blog name at the beginning of your title tag, which gives higher search relevance to your blog name than keywords in your post title. What’s even more heinous is seeing “blog archive” smack dab in between your blog title and post title. Who the hell thought THIS was a good idea?

SEO Title Tag 2.0 beta 7

Of all the SEO plugins I reviewed, the only one that offered truly customizable title tags is SEO Title Tag 2.0 beta 7 is a free Word Press plugin written by SEO experts for WordPress. SEO Title Tag is a fantastic plugin authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts. It allows you to:

• Override a page’s default title tag with a custom tag
• Allows mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages - in fact any url, at once
• Reverses the order of your blog name and title, giving more keyword prominence to your title, rather than the blog name
• And more!

The best thing about this plugin is that it’s FREE! Thanks Stephan!

Download SEO Title Tag 2.0.

Now only if I can get it to work…

Technorati Tags: SEO Title Tag 2.0, SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts, search engine optimization, lorna li