SMX East is happening Oct 6-8 in NYC, where I’ll be speaking on SEO & Usability. This promises to be one of the biggest and best Search conferences.The friendly folks who run the SMX events are letting speakers offer a $150 discount off all-access passes. Just comment on this post or email info (at) closed-loop-marketing.com if interested and we’ll send you the discount code. Please look me up if you’ll be there. SMX East site

The Iceberg’s Tip

Since their inception, search engines have relied on the visible to locate relevant content. Visible text, to be precise. And not just any visible text, either - the text had to be accessible and readable to a web crawler. That is, it couldn’t be inside an animation, image, script, video, or a wide assortment of other file formats. It couldn’t be stored in a ‘deep web’ database such as the CDC or USGS, one that was reached only via an active user query. And it certainly couldn’t be spoken.

This meant that, for all the blow-your-mind number of visible web pages out there on the web, all this time only a tiny fraction of the available content has been indexable and searchable by search engines. In 2001 the company BrightPlanet estimated in their white paper “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” that public search engines made only 0.03% of the total web content available to searchers. That’s tiny. And this estimate wasn’t even considering content hidden in images, audio files, and video. Like a giant iceberg of data and content, the majority of the web remained - and still remains - invisible to search. But this is all changing.

Making sense out of sound

Google’s beta release of Gaudi, its audio indexing tool heralds to the wider public a profound shift in the search environment. Why? Hasn’t audio search been around for years now? Actually, no. Not this way. (Read the full article…)

Let me share with you how one PPC advertiser achieved…

• An ROI increase from 77% to 323%
• A conversion rate increase from 6.15% to 8.39%
• A CTR increase from 6% to 8%

…solely through match type testing and refinement.

But first some background… (Read the full article…)

More than a year and a half ago, my CLM colleague Sandra Niehaus and I attended the Second Annual Persuasive Technology conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, hosted by BJ Fogg and his team at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.

At that time, I had only a rudimentary idea about what Persuasive Technology was and what its applicability to our company and my work might be.

Fortunately, I have a boss (and good friend) who encourages us CLM-ers to explore avenues that may not initially seem to be related to online marketing because of the opportunities such varied experiences and perspectives can offer.

(Read the full article…)

This post is a continuation of a topic I began a few weeks back, about the cumulative impact that small, often overlooked interactions can have on the relationship between a company and their audience.

Earlier I discussed Thank You pages (see Optimizing the Thank You Page). Today I’ll briefly discuss error messages, cover some optimization basics, and examine two examples.

It’s True - Error Messages Always Come at a Bad Time

There’s a short story behind this saying. Once I was reviewing a potential client’s site with a colleague, and we triggered an error message while trying to use the product search functionality.

“Wow,” I commented. “Good-bye to that sale - that is not a good time to have an error message come up.” My colleague, who’s a bit of a smartass and hence shall remain nameless, smiled and replied, “You know, error messages always come at a bad time.”

(Read the full article…)