Marketing Pilgrim

I had the pleasure of dining with my good friend, Mike Grehan, just before Easter. We chatted about the topic of his upcoming article – Does Textbook SEO Really Work Anymore?

Mike’s article suggests that a lot of the old-school SEO tactics are no longer important.

As far as my own experience goes, links and end-user behavior are the important, upwardly mobile components for decent ranking. So that’s where I’d rather focus my own time and attention.

My thoughts? There’s enough evidence to support Mike’s theory – if you have a great site with quality inbound links, you can be #1 on Google without changing any “content” (as proved by “miserable failure“). I’ve also seen enough evidence that proves a site can languish outside of the Top 50 then rocket to #1 with some changes to on-page content and no changes to links (although, changing a keyword in the meta-tag is not going to be enough).

David Sifry updates his “State of the Blogosphere” with new numbers on the growth of blogging.

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago and there are 50,000 new posts each hour.

Via Mark Evans.

ClickZ breaks-down new data from Hitwise that suggest, on average, only 85% of brand-name search quearies result in the search landing on the official web site.

I don’t think that’s too much of a shock myself. As the study suggests, among the 15% that stray, a good number click on affiliate links (still the brand). The remainder were probably using the brand-name search as a generic replacement for their search query. For example, someone searching for “Dell” may actually be interested in “Compaq” and “Lenovo” as well, they simply chose “Dell” as the launch point for their “computer” search.

I’m outta here for the Easter holiday. Unless something major happens, I’ll see you all on Monday.

Happy Easter!

eWeek’s reporting that Google has been granted a patent for technology that would allow you to conduct a search using your voice.

It doesn’t look like Google has any immediate plans to use the technology – it looks like they filed it just as protection at this stage – but eWeek suggests one use for it.

…Google could use the patented technology to improve its current cell phone search feature, which now relies on users entering text queries on their phone’s cramped telephone keypad…Google could also use the voice recognition feature to launch a competitive 411-style telephone number finder.

Real estate web site Zillow.com has announced the addition of 45-degree, low-altitude aerial photos to its home valuation and data with the integration of bird’s eye images from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform.

In other news, GeoEye, the company providing satellite imagery for Yahoo Maps, tells us they are providing 1-meter resolution images as part of Yahoo’s new offering.

And you thought you only had to worry about your nosey neighbors!

Think Partnership (parent company of my old employer) has today announced a letter of intent to acquire IceRocket.com, a search engine specializing in indexing blog content.

Terms of the deal have not yet been revealed.

My hat’s off to Gerry and Scott, the deal is by far the most impressive in the company’s history.