Here’s the story: A designer eyeglasses seller called DecorMyEyes (I’m not going to link to them) followed shady business practices with its customers, harassing them, overcharging them, and threatening lawsuits.  As a result, the company was rewarded with high rankings on Google.  How did this happen?  Vitaly Borker, owner of DecorMyEyes, received so much bad press from reputable sources such as the New York Times and Bloomberg that Google rated him as having high levels of credibility.

A Google fellow, Amit Singhal, wrote, “We were horrified. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”

Although the business received complaints on numerous sites, these complaints were not increasing the site’s rankings; it was the media’s bad-press articles, which often linked to the site, that were driving the increased rankings.

This story does have a happy ending, but not for DecorMyEyes.  The underhanded company dropped from their competitive first page ranking for ‘designer eyeglasses’ and is now ranked somewhere near the 14^th page.

This doesn’t mean that harassing your customers should be the latest tactic in search engine optimization, as Google has altered their algorithm to weed out bad businesses.  How they can do this is a mystery, but I suspect they are utilizing sites such as Yelp and The Better Business Bureau to qualify businesses.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Google figured out a way to read star ratings on business-rating sites, but, unfortunately, the enigma that is the Google algorithm remains secret.  This does not, however, affect strategies for mobile marketing and other internet marketing strategies.

We’d all love a link from The New York Times, as one such high-quality, high-authority link can skyrocket a site on SERPs, but this example shows us that there is no easy (evil) way to get into these sources.  The best we can do (imho): continue to write quality content and press releases and hope the big-time media sources pick up on them.

“Cleaning Supplies,” “Lawn Care,” “Maintenance,” and “Decorative,” represent subcategories and can also reflect specific items. [...]

“Brooms,” “Mops,” “Vacuum Cleaners,” “Rakes,” “Mowers,” “Flamingos,” “Gnomes,” reflect the specific items to which individual documents and potential search query terms are associated.

The category hierarchy could equally be defined as a list with each category including a full item description. For instance, “Flamingos” could be expressed as a list item, “Household>Lawn Care>Decorative>Flamingos.”

What does this mean for internet marketing companies?  I agree for the most part with this article.  With the new patent in mind, it would be highly recommended that SEOs pay closer attention to the keywords they use, especially paying attention to hierarchies and focusing not only on the target keyword phrases (“pink lawn flamingoes” for example) but also on the hierarchy of categories.  In the example, an SEO may want to focus on the additional phrases of ‘household’, ‘lawn care’, and ‘decorative’.

This new patent forces SEOs to think on multiple levels when optimizing pages, so, in addition to including target keywords in the content of the page, they should take into account the big picture and really know their product in order to categorize it appropriately.  As always, content is still an important factor of SEO, but it may be a good idea to consider categories in the META and title information as well.

YouTube is unable to scan your video for keywords; according to YouTube’s blog, ““Our algorithms are good, but they can only read, they can’t watch your videos.  So in order to properly classify your video and index it for search, we need your help.”  That being said, the most effective way to attract visitors is to create keyword-specific META information (Title, description, keywords).

Much like optimizing a website Title, YouTube video titles should include frequently-searched phrases yet be specific enough to describe your video.  To find these keyword phrases, try YouTube’s keyword finder, with looks suspiciously like Google’s keyword finder.  This similarity is not surprising, because YouTube utilizes Google’s algorithm.

Descriptions may be as long as 5000 characters; however, when optimizing this you should keep in mind that only the first 120 characters, give or take a few, show up in Google snippets (descriptions on Search Engine Results Pages).  So it’s important to fit as many keywords as possible in the first 120 characters, without keyword stuffing.

While Google has admitted they do not use META keyword data to determine results, it’s still a good idea to include targeted keyword phrases, as YouTube and other search engines may still use the keywords META.

All that being said, the best thing you can do to draw traffic to your video is to create a good video.  A good video and keyword-targetted META information can cause a traffic explosion.

A survey conducted by miBuys showed that two thirds of women who use the internet on their mobile phones would be interested in obtaining coupons using that device.  Here are the results:

• 67.89% – Yes, they would use mobile coupons
• 21.49% – Would not use mobile coupons
• 10.63% – Not sure

When compared to a 2009 survey conducted by Honeywell, which found that 71% of women would not use mobile coupons, these findings show a dramatic increase in mobile coupon interest among females.

When asked for which services they would like coupons, mobile internet users worldwide responded:

• 53.49% – Retail
• 27.37% – Concerts/events
• 16.23% – Dining
• 7.31% – Cinema
• 1.60% – Cinema

According to Mark Bamber, CEO of miBuys, “Mobile phones and devices can already play a significant role in connecting retail brands with their customers. It is perceived that women are only just embracing mobile services, but the truth is they’re already well beyond this point and now want access to the entire high street through their phone.”

This is good news for mobile internet marketing, which may utilize online coupons for mobile devices to attract new customers, and many social media marketers and search engine optimization specialists are seriously considering this new method of attracting visitors and customers.

If, for instance, a searcher queries ‘Valentine’s Day’ around February 14, they will receive results for the holiday; however, if at another time of year a movie named ‘Valentine’s Day’ is released, the user at that time will be delivered results for the movie.

Here’s the abstract of the patent:

“Techniques and systems are disclosed for returning temporally-aware results from an Internet-based search query. To determine if a query is temporally-based one or more query features are collected and input into a trained classifier, yielding a temporal classification for the query. Further, if a query is classified as temporal, the query results are shifted by determining an alternate set of results for the query, and returning one or more alternate results to one or more users. Based on user interactions with the one or more alternate results, the classifier can be updated, for example, by changing the query to a non-temporal query if the user interactions identify it as such.”

This new Bing feature represents greater user awareness on the part of Bing, which can now take into account click-through rates for specific keyword phrases.  If a site receives less click-throughs at a particular time of year, it may be moved down the list of priorities.

What does this mean for search engine marketing?  It may mean that internet marketing experts should be aware of temporal searches and create content relevant to specific times of the year.  No matter what the strategy, Search Engine marketers will have to approach internet marketing with a greater awareness of time-sensitive queries.

“Please don’t feed TWITTER NOISE to your Buzz!”

This presents a problem you see. Twitter is hooked up to my Buzz. I could follow her, but unless I remove Twitter from making updates to Buzz, it is not likely we will become useful to one another.

The flip side to this is that I practically agree. Twitter does not need to be hooked up to Buzz. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. By the same token, I don’t think you want to have such a black and white position about it.

See, I agree with @lindalawrey in that by having Twitter automatically re-post to Buzz you run the risk of losing followers. But if Twitter is hooked up to Buzz, or if any of your sites for that matter, like your blog, say, are “hooked up”, then when you post to these places you must now consider the impact it could have with your Buzz followers.

Now let’s rewind for a moment. Think back to a time, say 100 years ago. Or maybe less than that. Think back to 50 years ago. Or wait maybe even less like 10 years ago. Could you 10 years ago make any sense out of what we are talking about here. Google? Buzz? Twitter? “Hooked up”. What is all this? How is this contributing to society? How is this contributing to mankind?

Anyway. This is getting way to serious. I’m really just bummed that someone won’t follow me because Twitter is hooked up to my Buzz. Darn you Linda Lawrey.

From this conventional marketing approach, the impact of such cross-promotion is recognized by the number of times one of your marketing pieces comes into your place of business as a result of being displayed in a nearby venue. If you are smart you marked or tailored each piece to be associated with each different venue so you can know right away from where it came. If you fail to do this then you may know that your cross-promotional efforts are having an effect, but from which sources and to what extent you may not know.

With the advent of Facebook, the idea of cross-promotion can (and in most cases probably should) be carried into this medium, but with added benefits. Considering the more intricate offerings of Internet technology, local businesses can not only expect to benefit from an increase in patrons coming into their place of business, but also from increased website traffic, more Facebook fans, and more email subscribers. Essentially, by using Facebook, you have more conversion goals and capabilities to consider in your cross-promotion efforts than just phone calls and walk-ins.

The one thing that comes to mind for me when helping local businesses to cross-promote with one another using a site like Facebook is “monetization”. Interestingly, this word does not appear in a dictionary, at least not at dictionary.com. It does however appear on wikipedia.com and is defined as, “the process of converting or establishing something into legal tender.” Monetizing is a common word in the blogosphere that typically equates to the practice of using your blog to generate revenue. I tend to use this term more loosely on the basis that there is a monetary value for every activity you perform and that in most cases you want to associate your efforts online to that monetary value.

For instance, a new email subscriber may be worth $25 to you and a new Facebook fan might be worth $1, so if you launch a marketing initiative that results in 25 new email subscribers and 10 new Facebook fans then you know that the monetary value of that initiative is equivalent to $635. If you spent less than that to launch the initiative then you essentially have made (or saved) money.

All this said, when doing cross-promotions, particularly online with a site like Facebook, the possibilities go farther than just leaving comments on the walls of a venue’s Facebook page. There truly is potential to connect with people one-on-one and in groups. Defining and massaging the monetary value of your activities is key to your success. You want to go beyond just publishing information and going through the motions. You want to make real connections and have real conversations. This is easier said than done, but the rewards are there for the taking.