Dan Rosenbaum / Center Ring Media

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SEO is where marketers should start

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If you want to sell something, tweaking your organic search is a great place to start. That’s the conclusion of a new study (PDF) published by Forbes.
The study found that:

  • The tools seen as most effective for generating conversions were SEO (48 percent) email and e-newsletter marketing (46 percent), and pay-per-click/search marketing (32 percent).
  • In the coming six months, respondents expect that ad networks will see the biggest declines in allocation of marketing spend; viral marketing and SEO will likely see the biggest increases. Behavioral Targeting is the category that is least likely to see any changes in spend.

Note that “effectiveness” is defined here as generating conversions, not mere page views — and that SEO is half again more effective than PPC. Notice also that SEO campaigns exceeded expectations of 45 percent of respondents; the next most satisfying tactic — PPC — exceeded expectations of only 25 percent of those surveyed.
And one more encouraging thing: the companies Forbes surveys understood that the important thing about search isn’t traffic (37 percent) or SERP position (34 percent.) It’s conversions: 70 percent.
Organic search = money. Remember that.

Nice Algorithm You Got There

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Google would like you to believe that it’s all automatic, that there is this army of search spiders that digs out every last page and image on the Web and decides which is “better” for any given search term. It’s true, as far as it goes, but the company tends to carefully elide the human element that goes into its search result. Until something goes horribly wrong, as it did Saturday morning. For an hour, Google said every site on the Net was dangerous — itself included.

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Do URL shorterners pass page authority?

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This is something I’ve got to experiment with: do URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly hurt a targeted page’s authority? And if they do intercept the authority, is the added traffic they drive worth the loss?
Services like TinyURL are extremely useful for sending pages with long URLs to people over e-mail or Twitter, where you only have 140 characters. But bloggers use them, too — because shorter URLs are just easier to deal with.
But how do those services redirect the traffic? When search engines find TinyURL and bit.ly URLs on the Web, where do they assign the authority: to the TinyURL URL or the underlying page? Because I don’t recall seeing bit.lys or TinyURLs in search results — and I look at a lot of search results — I suspect that they pass the authority just fine. But it would be a big deal if they didn’t; a few good backlinks can be difference between a non-existent search position and an excellent one.