Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Relevance

  • The Search Engine Election: 2008 Presidential Campaign Scorecard

    The immense power of search engines to reach people and influence behavior based on information discovery intentions is beyond debate. Still, with the 2008 Presidential Election little more than one year away the ability to quickly find relevant information on the candidate’s views and positions from the search engines, namely Google, is extremely poor. The…

  • The Importance of Relevance in Branding

    A great commentary in Forbes by Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak of Reason Inc on the upcoming iPhone launch that speaks to much of what I’ve said recently on branding in the digital age. One quote stands out: “A brand is neither a goal nor a means, but a result of consistent delivery against…

  • Afterthoughts on SES Latino

    It’s hard to pin down why I liked SES Latino as much as I did. Tropical destination? Short plane ride? Two-day format? Part of it might be the session I participated in. Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics and Behavior had some of the best case studies and tips that I’ve ever seen shared in…

  • Engaging Users on the SERP – How Google Universal Search Changes Everything

    If you haven’t noticed over the past few weeks there has been a sea change on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Universal Search is what Google calls it but it’s much more than search. At its core it creates an entirely different engagement dynamic and search user experience. Until now the goal of Google’s…

  • Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages

    Last week on Search Engine Land Neil Patel raised the idea of creating custom landing pages for Social Media. I’m all for it. I’ll try to build on Neil’s ideas and add my thoughts on optimizing this type of landing page. SMO Success Metrics One problem people have with Social Media Optimization (SMO) is not…

  • Year One of Optimize and Prophesize

    “It’s all one song!” – Neil Young This month marks my first year of blogging. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience that I look forward to continuing with forever. Special thanks to Jamie Roche who encouraged me (actually I believe he forced me) to start blogging. Matt Roche for the friendly page views competition…

  • Convenience Marketing: The Medium is the Message

    As marketers and advertisers we sometimes forget the most basic reason people use the digital medium. Convenience. The user experience online has no parallel in the offline world. The offline experience is optimized in a whole other manner. If you read Paco Underhill’s wonderful insight into offline shopping strategy in “Call of the Mall” you…

  • Skype Boosts Homepage Conversion Rate with Radical Simplicity

    Thanks to the informational heavy handedness of 1.0 design we have the opportunity at OTTO Digital to employ our Radical Simplicity™ methodology quite frequently to improve the performance of pages and enhance brand value. The way it works, simply, is to segment users and then strip the page to a single consideration and call to…

  • How Brand, Product & Community Influence Intention

    In my last post I wrote that all user intentions can be boiled down to one of two goals, discovery or recovery. To create marketing strategies for these intentions we must begin by understanding the way users think in the course of trying to achieve these goals. Users respond to what they know. This can…

  • Targeting the Two Intentions of Users

    The benefit to understanding intent lies in targeting. Targeting ads, tags, copy, images or creative to source or behavior and whether in-session, in-site or retargeting is a proven and highly effective optimization strategy. Targeting will continue to drive the growth of digital marketing for the foreseeable future because it does one thing really well. Deliver…

  • Flash Forward: Six Examples of Optimizing Flash Video for User Engagement

    As engagement becomes a more valuable and measurable metric (and we know through many test across verticals that increasing engagement leads to increased conversion and page views) optimizing flash video movies and other rich Internet applications (RIA) like Ajax become critical. I’ll explore Ajax optimization in an upcoming post. This post was prompted by a…

  • Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

    Brand is many things but at its core it is an emotional connection between a user and a product or service. That connection has its greatest impact at the experience level where an interaction between the user and the product or service takes place. So what is interactive marketing then if not branding? And how…

  • 4 Strategies for Optimizing Name Tags

    How Changes in User Behaviors and Search Results can Increase Traffic, Drive Engagement and Deliver Relevance for Your Name, Event, Brand and Product I have noticed an interesting referrer trend in my analytics. A growing number Organic search traffic visitors are coming to my blog off name queries. Not my name but names of those…

  • Diving Into Google Directions

    I know Stanford has a great swim team and many, many Googlers come from Stanford but these Google directions results prove a couple of things. First, mapping directions is a very difficult task for computers and algorithms. Second, the folks at Google have a sense of humor. Note direction number 20. I love the estimated…

  • 5 Lessons from Multivariate Tests on Google PPC Ads

    Search ads are the bridge of relevance between the keyword query and the landing page. They are a key factor in your Quality Score, affect the traffic to your site and thus your spend and budgets. They set user expectations for the landing page and influence conversion. At OTTO Digital we’ve been working with clients…

  • Information & Intent: Optimizing Content and the User Search Experience

    Everyone has a limited amount of attention to devote to searching for and consuming information. Each day a staggering amount of new information is added to the web and indexed by the search engines. How can your content get the attention of users? I spoke about this yesterday at the 49th Annual Conference of the…

  • Speaking at NFAIS

    It’s with great privilege that I was asked to speak at the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services) annual conference in Philadelphia next week on Tuesday the 27th. The conference title is Creating Change: Opportunities for Growth in the Wake of Disruption. My presentation is: Web 2.0: Maximizing Content and the User Search…

  • 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags

    I can’t get YouTube off my mind. With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, the revolution is being videoized. Contrary to popular opinion it just may be an ad revolution. H&R Block’s recent promo for their TaxCut online filing includes the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube. There has also been a…

  • 7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization

    This is by no means a definitive look at what matters on landing pages. There are more than seven rules. For additional insight I would direct you to this three-part series on Landing Page Optimization. However, these seven basic elements are ones I’ve used consistently for many years now with great results. 1. Have a…

  • The Sphere of Information Distribution & Consumption

    It’s a simple truth: we gravitate toward the information we are interested in. This information sits in many different places. We access it in many different ways and we use it in infinitely more ways. In the online world these 0s and 1s are the window to our life. Information on the work we do,…