As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a lover of words.  So I take a short break from the serious work of online marketing to enjoy the beauty of our language and contemplate how single letters can not only change meaning but add humor.  After all, in SEO words are our business.

It seems The Washington Post runs a regular feature called The Style Invitational in which it invites readers to change a single letter in words to create a non-existent new word and come up with a definition for the new version.  It also has a variant of the game where the reader is asked to give a humorous definition for an existing word.  They both produce hilarious results, but I’m going to focus on the former game.  Here’s an example:

ignoranus: An individual who is both stupid and an asshole
(Pardon the offensive language. I’m quoting it.)

These will have you bending over in laughter, but since we are in the SEO game, I thought it would be fun to see the exact match volumes from Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  It turns out “surprise! surprise!” that people actually search on these new terms.  So for all of the SEO experts in the room, you now have data to justify creating pages, content and tags for these words. The words are shown in the table below. By the way, I am in stitches that ‘bozone’ and ‘karmageddon’ are the two most searched for terms. Like, wow. I mean, like really? Dude, it’s as if some karmic word God has touched all humans with the ability to recognize the truly funny. Enjoy!

Like many I have an iPhone. Admittedly I still have a 2G because I’ve become more thrifty in my old age (funding a national-level gymnastics career and private school tuition will have that effect) even at the risk of having my Silicon Valley friends call me a technology troglodyte. But I am an avid user of all the main apps (I can bump with the best of them), use it for location-based searches (e.g. AroundMe, Google maps), send images to Facebook, Tweet in real-time at events, Ping when I can, check my blog traffic with Google apps for the iPhone, and know how to plan/execute advertising campaigns specifically on mobile phones. No one who knows me would say I am in any way behind on my use of mobile technology.

But until now, I’ve never felt like mobile has really changed the basic way I have experienced the world. I go to trade shows and listen to all the ideas for the latest mobile services or how mobile concepts should change my daily life, but I have never felt that I had crossed a Rubicon with the real-time nature of mobile in the same way I did when I got my first laptop or sent my first Tweet.

That changed yesterday. I had the pleasure to take my family to a performance of The Smuin Ballet at the Sunset Center in Carmel. I am an admitted ballet snob, and Smuin is a wonderful company with talented, disciplined dancers and creative choreography. So whenever they are in Carmel we go to see them. The second act was a performance of Smuin’s Medea, which was first performed in 1997. It is a dramatic ballet that retells the story of Medea, the wife of Jason, the intrepid explorer of Jason and the Argonauts.

The myth of Jason and Medea is a dark and haunting tale of revenge and self-destruction. But in the dark as the curtain rose on Act 2, despite being a student of mythology, I couldn’t for the life of me remember even the outlines of the tale to tell my wife and eight year old daughter, neither of whom knew the first thing about this particular myth.

So what did I do? I pulled out my handy iPhone and while shielding it so as not to disturb others, I did a web search on Medea and pulled up the Wikipedia entry.

Despite the dark and small print, I was able to glean from Wikipedia the details of the story. Jason met the sorceress Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis. Medea falls in love with Jason, and he convinces her to help him to acquire the Golden Fleece in return for a pledge of marriage.  After acquiring the Fleece, Jason and Medea flee to Corinth and have children. In Corinth, King Creon offers his daughter Glauce to Jason in marriage, and Jason feels he cannot pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess. Despite explanations and promises of support from Jason, Medea feels betrayed. She gives Glauce a wedding gown covered in poison that kills the bride. Then to ensure that nothing of Jason’s will outlive him, she kills their two sons.

I quickly related the story to my wife and daughter (who was especially engaged by the dark and intense drama onstage).  I then sat back and enjoyed the performance, knowing that they now could now understand what they were seeing and, as a result, enjoy it with more insight.

Not a big deal, you might say. I say otherwise. Prior to this, I had used my mobile capabilities to get directions or find a resource nearby. I was using the mobile device as a tool for location-based information. It was a parallel use to a GPS, which while practical, was not a fundamental change in my experience over a map. It was easier than a map and had better information, but the experience was just a replacement of one form of information (paper) for another (digital).

In this case, for the first time I used my iPhone to plug into the wisdom of the commons, into the global village, to enhance and extend the quality or content of an experience.   In other words, the phone and the information it provided in real-time became an integral part of the experience, although it was unintentional (from the perspective of the choreographer or the dancers) and because it was unintentional, it was distracting. But this little thing, this one act, was a fundamental change in how I interacted with the world. This was not a substitution of paper-based data with a digital version. Instead it delivered the true promise of the mobile web. It allowed me to access a completely new set of information that was then added to a real-time, real world event to enhance the experience. The equation is real-time event + Internet information = a real-time multimedia experience.

Admittedly, the experience was not perfect because it wasn’t intentionally developed by the show’s producers. But what if Smuin developed a mobile video app that during the Intermission allowed audience members with iPhones to see the full story of Medea in an entertaining way that also tied the story to how the ballet attempted to recreate that story in dance. That would be a more intentional, and less invasive, way to provide the same integrated (but completely new) experience.

So yesterday for the first time, I experienced the true power of the mobile web.  I can now say “Eich Bin Ein Mobile Netizen.”

I have been away from the blog for waaay too long. Not a good thing. As someone asked yesterday at the “Ask the SEOs” session at SMX West; “Is it more important to blog often, to blog long articles less frequently, or to optimize your posts for SEO in order to rank well in the SERPs for the keywords you care about?”   The answer from the panel of luminaries – Greg Boser, Bruce Clay, Rand Fishkin (substituting for Rae Hoffman) Todd Friesen, Vanessa Fox, Aaron Wall, and Jill Whalen – was mixed depending on who responded.  But to me, if I had to choose only one, it would be blog often as that gets you crawled more frequently, broadens your keyword base, and generates more followers because people tend to subscribe to folks who generate regular, fresh content.  So I’ve broken my own rule.

Well, let’s see if I can change that with a quick post today.  To help those who couldn’t be at SMX West these last three days, I will list some tidbits here that I found useful.   These will go all over the place, so bear with me. This is Part 1 – I will cover more of the highlights in subsequent posts.

Also, before I get started, let me say a big “thanks” to the folks at SearchEngineLand for putting on another great and informative event. It was fun and you never fail to educate me on things I hadn’t discovered for myself. I’ll see you, of course, at SMX Advanced in June.

Insights for Mobile Search

1. Isolate mobile into its own unique campaign.
   • KPIs are lower than in traditional paid search – so isolate it to protect your other programs.
   • Isolating helps you optimize to raise KPIs of mobile specifically.
   • Adwords lets you segment your campaigns by carrier and site you are on. Cool!
2. In mobile search that are only 5 results above the fold and you must be in position 1 or 2 or not at all – there is a HUGE falloff after those 2 positions.  Literally near zero clicks.
3. Mobile query lengths are shorter – no big surprise there.  Search Term length example:  in a study of 414 broad match queries on mobile, the avg word length was 2.8 and longest phrase was 8 words (used 3 times).  So it is very important to run broad match on mobile campaigns.
4. Length of query versus Click Through Rate is pretty similar between mobile and desktop search.
5. Most popular categories for mobile right now are sports, celebrity, news, wall papers, videos, and ringtones.
6. Other Best Practices for Mobile
   • Reinforce mobile friendliness in ads – “mobile optimized, “4 UR phone”, “Mobile ready” – indicates to viewer that site will work on their phone with best performance.
   • Have a URL that indicates mobile friendliness – it’s another signal to the consumer that you’ve made the experience usable on mobile devices.
   • Build landing pages specifically for mobile. Test landing pages for mobile separately.
   • Simplify the experience for mobile – you have to really get the content down to an essence – we saw an example of Home Depot versus Best Buy. Home Depot’s cluttered page really made the experience unusable.

New Tools to Explore

Of course I’m going to have a section on this, toolhound that I am.  Just a list for you to explore:

• usertesting.com. Quick testing of your user experience for landing pages.  Cool idea: run this on your competitors sites as well – $29/user.  I’ve used this, btw – it has drawbacks, but for testing landing pages it is very appropriate.
• crossbrowsertesting.com. See how your page looks in various browsers easily.
• attentionwizard.com. A free tool that shows where people are looking on your page.
• clicktale.com.  Records sessions and gives feedback/analytics on experience.  Free for one domain and 2-page playback.
• crazyegg.com. Simple and affordable heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior.
• Lynx or seobrowser.com. A dedicated browser that allows you to see your pages the way the search engine crawlers see it
• charles. An HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet.
• Wave toolbar. Provides a mechanism for running WAVE reports directly within Firefox for debugging site issues.
• gsite crawler. Another free sitemap generator for Google, Yahoo and Bing.

That’s it for today. Back to the day job.