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The San Diego based search marketing services and software firm, Covario , has acquired NetConcepts, the SEO agency which was founded by Stephen Spencer . Many in the Search Marketing industry know Spencer from either his speaking engagements, his contribution to the Art of SEO and his endless supply of WordPress SEO plugins. Stephan Spencer is good people. Covario are good people. We’re very happy to hear this news for both NetConcepts and Covario, as two companies Search & Social highly respects. And now for the press release : Covario’s acquisition strengthens its industry leading position providing SEO solutions to the world’s largest advertisers. The combined company will have nearly 100 customers in key industries such as high tech, financial services, ecommerce, retail, consumer electronics, media, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods. Covario will leverage the acquisition by integrating Netconcepts’ GravityStream™ technology into Covario’s SEO consulting practice and Organic Search Insight™ software. Netconcepts, founded in 1995, is the leader in driving online sales for the retail and ecommerce space through management of natural search engine rankings using its GravityStream technology. Key clients include Cabela’s, Northern Tool, Ann Taylor, Deckers, Woolrich, and Builder’s Square. The merger will help these retail clients, and other clients, gain access to Covario’s software and team of service experts to better synchronize their paid and natural/organic search efforts to create efficiencies, improve results for both channels, and ultimately improve their return on investment (ROI). The technology is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) web content management solution that allows an advertiser to deploy SEO strategies in a scalable and cost effective way. “With the acquisition of Netconcepts and the GravityStream technology, Covario is bringing a unique solution to advertisers to help them accelerate their ability to present their brands on all the major search engines globally,” said Russ Mann, Chief Executive Officer of Covario. “By coupling Covario’s Organic Search Insight with NetConcepts’ GravityStream technology, advertisers will be able to identify the SEO actions that drive better rankings, and also deploy those strategies quickly, and in a highly scalable way to achieve their ROI goals.” The growing importance of SEO in advertising is a key factor behind Covario’s acquisition of Netconcepts. According to Forrester Research, advertisers would spend approximately $2.5 billion on SEO in the U.S. alone in 2009, and this is estimated to double to $5.0 billion by 2014 [Forrester’s July 2009 US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009-2014]. “Marketers looking for clicks at a cost much lower than paid search are joining those who return to SEO after mastering paid search programs,” according to Shar VanBoskirk, an analyst for Forrester. “Nearly two-thirds of all marketing spend to manage search programs is for advanced technologies or outsourced partners — an indication that search programs are gaining maturity and investment.” Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Covario Acquires
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We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. The interesting part of this change is that it is not focused on one concept, but rather several, that mixed together change the face of search as we move into the new year. What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “ Search-o-morphis ” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking. Personalized Search Changes Real Time Search Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search Social Search Bing Growing into legitimate option 2 These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009. Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010: 1. Social Media 2. Mobile Search Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information. In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have? With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many. Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others. What’s our point? Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging . If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking ( ie. URL Shorteners ). If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet. How will social media effect search directly? Well these new changes are sending signals beyond search. Traffic The signal of traffic will not come simply from SERP use. The engines will be looking for how users interact with pages beyond their search product. How do they find the site? How do they share it? This can all be monitored from the methods above. Social media sites spread a ton of traffic throughout the web every day. But traffic is not measured in terms of shear numbers, the relevance of traffic to a site can be measured via conversions (sales, sign ups, shares), bounce rate, time on site (all hail video!), diversity of traffic, whether the user revisits the site, and how the site is viewed amongst its peers and followers. Engagement The more users engage with a document, the more it will show up in their personalized results. Methods and systems for personalized network searching (Google Patent) An embodiment of the present invention may comprise features to facilitate community building. For example, in one embodiment, the uniform resource locator comprises a community bookmark. The bookmark may be shared by a set of users or may be transmitted by one user and received by another. The second user can then perform personalized queries that are based, at least in part, on the shared bookmark. In another embodiment, a cluster of users is identified based at least in part on the bookmarks and annotations that they have previously identified. If a user spends a great deal of time on a site, it is identified as a bookmark for later personalized searches. In other embodiments, the implicit measure may comprise at least one of the quantity of repeat visits to the site or the quantity of click-throughs on the site…Other implicit measures include printing the page, saving the page, and the amount of scrolling performed on the page. Upstream and Downstream
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voice
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I was reading up on Google acquisitions yesterday and although Google’s acquisition this year is not as many as previous years, particularly 2006 and 2007, Google’s acquisitions in 2009 certainly made sense with their landmark acquisition of AdMob as their most expensive buy. But looking at Google’s 2009 acquisitions from a quality, and not quantity perspective, we see that the company is focusing its takeover of other companies in two major directions : Mobile & Google Apps. The speeding up of the web is essential to growth of mobile computing, whether on the netbook or smartphone, and judging on where Google has put most of its research and development in 2009 : Google Chrome OS, Google powered netbooks, Google Droid Phone and Android Mobile OS … the ability to condense data into a stream which can make the most of our current 3G and mobile networks’ definition of mobile broadband … while also enhance the usefulness of cloud computing, both are essential to Google’s future. Here’s a look at the companies Google acquired in 2009 : On2 – Acquired on August 5, 2009 for $106,500,000 ; On2 is a video compression applications company. As of today, Google has not made any move yet on how it is going to make use of On2, but utilizing it as part of Google Wave and Google Video (which is being tested in GMail Chat) could make cloud conferencing more of a streamlined and less expensive possibility and assist with the adoption of Google Apps by businesses and governments (Washington DC and Los Angeles are currently saving millions using Google Apps). AdMob – Google’s most expensive acquisition of 2009 made it to spend $750,000,000 last month. This could very well fit into Google mobile advertising business and AdMob is the preferred monetization tool of mobile application developers who use AdMob to earn money with free iPhone apps and other downloadable mobile tools. Google will use AdMob to syphon part of Apple’s monetary market in 2010 and integrating AdMob into Google AdSense is an important part of Google’s long term strategy to corner the mobile development market. Gizmo5 – Acquired the same day when Admob was acquired, Gizmo5 is a VoIP company. Google had to spend $30,000,000 for this company, obviously to beef up its Google Voice service, which is again, an essential part of not only Google’s mobile aspirations, but also Google Apps. Teracent – An online display advertising company bought for an undisclosed amount. Google is definitely going to use this for its AdSense program and further expansion into the world of display advertising … or the DoubleClick side of AdSense. While Teracent may not be an obvious mobile oriented acquisition, it will assist Google in better monetizing display advertising by assisting Google’s advertisers with putting together display ads which bring results and sales. The more money Google and its advertisers bring in, the more profitable Google becomes. In my opinion Google beefing up its advertising is a direct target on the Yahoo & Microsoft partnership, as both companies, especially Yahoo, have strong display advertising networks and power display advertising on various online newspapers. Now that Google is bringing the news onto the mobiles and netbooks in an easy to read fashion with Google Fast Flip (the mobile connection), expect Google to make a strong push to work with these same publishing outlets. AppJet (Etherpad) – This online collaboration tool is obviously geared for Google Wave, an essential part of Google Apps and cloud communication. DocVerse – Although still in the planning stages, it looks like Google will soon be acquiring DocVerse, another collaboration tool which allows users to work together around Microsoft Office documents, much in the same manner that Google Docs allows contributors to work on Docs on Spreadsheets. Yet again, another jab at Microsoft and way to streamline applications and make Google Apps an even stronger service in 2010, especially as Microsoft upgrades Office Live. There has been talk of an acquisition of Yelp by Google over the weekend, which could be the largest Google acquisition since YouTube, if not the most important acquisition by Google ever. ( Update: It looks like the deal is off, as TechCrunch reports that Yelp walked away from the negotiation table ). Yelp would be the central offering of Google’s mobile services and would finally complete Google Local with a Google powered review service, instead of its aggregation of other services. With Yelp off the table however, and Google apparently sitting on over $500 million to spend before the end of the year, are there any other companies they should be acquiring? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google’s 2009 Acquisitions : Focus on Mobile &
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Welcome to another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – Well, maybe it’s the holidays or maybe it was SES, but the world was a little quieter than usual last week. But that’s no problem as the behemoth that is Google put out (yet another?) big announcement/roll-out with Real Time Search. That was enough to feed the savages on its own. Other than that, it was busiest in the Local SEO world and well… if you aren’t on your game with local… Get on it! Enough rambling, let’s get to it.
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Welcome ot another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. It was a somewhat quiet week out there as far as kick ass blog posts, (although ‘Dave baiting’ is in season) but we did make up for it with a bunch of tools and even some patents of interest. Of course the big news was from the fine folks at the Googleplex with the announcement that personalized search is now default for everyone; logged in or not. Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we? Lead
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When news came out that Bing went down for half an hour, I personally didn’t give it much thought since I wasn’t using it that time. And then the Bing search blog posted an explanation for the downtime the same time that the news about it is starting to spread. And then that’s it. But looking deeper into the meaning of things and believing in the saying that there’s a purpose for everything, it got me thinking yes, maybe there’s a reason for this downtime aside from getting into the day’s headlines, nevermind if the news is on the negative side. And I couldn’t agree more with this article saying that the downtime = happy days for the Microsoft search team. Why happy times? The fact that many people noticed Bing’s downtime is an indication that people are checking out Bing on a periodic, regular basis and not just when new features or announcement come out. Does this translate to more people actually using Bing? Perhaps yes, or perhaps no. And it’s not a good indication of usage as well. Anyway in case you’re interested to know what went wrong to Bing when it went down for half an hour, here’s the Microsoft Search Team’s explanation . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Even Bing’s Downtime is Getting into the Headlines
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After putting real-time and streaming quotes to its financial site, Google is again at it, this time adding real-time, self-updating financial news stream to Google Finance, the hopes that financial workers would turn to their financial services site to give them the edge in the market. Google Finance will feature news stories minute by minute, all throughout the day. And if you’re in need of these vital information you can have it two ways – via the Google Finance homepage or Google’s dedicated news page. For the News section, news items will be streamed from 8am-530pm ET, which is actually 90 minutes before the US trade market gets into action and 90 minutes as well after trading stops. Now to make Google Finance more useful, Google has also did some enhancements to the site design and overall navigation feature. These include the following: recent quotes are streamed live in the left-navigation bar, reducing the need to chect quote tickers stock prices, index, sector comparisons and interactive chart are streamed during market hours on company pages interactive Related companies page now allows table customization for comparing companies along specified dimensions Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Finance Streams Real-Time
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time,
tools