Archive: January, 2010

Ad Hoc Keyword Research is Dead

Determining an optimal keyword list can be a very involved process and is always considered the lynchpin of any successful search marketing campaign. Gone are the days of focusing your search marketing efforts on a phrase list consisting of one or two keyword terms. These “short-tail” phrases might prove to be over saturated in the search engines results or are lacking in specific relevancy to your message thus leading to a poor conversion potential. Finding those “long-tail” terms will always lead to a great ROI potential, and greater user retention.

The Process –In a Nutshell

The phraseology process has in recent years has truly become an art form and each analyst will have a core set of tools and different methods of data collection when crafting their final targeted terms.

The first step of this process typically includes the collecting of related search terms en masse. Generating large groups of search terms varying in length are gathered using keyword search tools and one should utilize more than one set of tools. Relying on one keyword tool can be detrimental to the end result when assessing your keyword targets. It is always a safe bet to back up your search data comparing the results between multiple sources. As one can imagine different search data sources can lead to very different results.

Cyber Attacks May Mean the End of Google China

Search engine giant Google announced yesterday that they have been targeted by cyber attacks of “varying degrees on a regular basis”. Google’s Chief legal Officer David Drummond also mentioned that Google was not the sole recipient of these attacks and that it included at least 20 other companies from a variety of different industries. Google investigation thus far has led them to pass along the details of this cyber activity to these additional companies.

It is apparent that the attackers attempted to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and Google is reporting that the malicious activity was for the most part unsuccessful. The unauthorized access consisted of two Gmail accounts being compromised and the attackers were only able to view the account creation dates, email subject lines and basic account information. Google immediately implemented changes to their architecture to enhance security for its users.

This latest round of cyber attacks has promoted Google to review their business ventures in China. In the interim Google has decided to not to continue censoring delivered results to Chinese web surfers claiming that they do not wish to further limit free speech.

Some recent articles credit “APP”s for mobile phones and devices as the death of websites, and that may or may not be true. However, if registry behavior is any indication, there may be something to that theory.

If we look at “.UK” for example and its domain name registration and web hosting company, LCN.com they will be offering free .UK domain names as part of its “10th Birthday Countdown Promotion”. This “free” offer is only valid with purchase any other two year domain extension in the same order, but the strategy is clear; get more domains out there.

Then this week, Montenegro has released a news story about how their domain  .ME is ‘proving attractive to businesses’. Central to their strategy is the personal nature of the word “me” which has the same meaning in a host of languages. Not only that, but the extension has a marketing side-effect, that a number of other extensions also possess, which is simply, .me spells a word by itself; like youand.me and whatabout.me, and even notify.me.

Google’s Nexus One product hit the market this week which marked Google’s surprising entry into the smartphone market.

More surprising however, is the apparent lack of a proactive domain strategy.

NexusOne.com appears to have been around since 1998 and does not appear to be owned by Google nor any Google service provider or affiliate. In fact, it appears to be a web design themed site. Google has not publically shared any plan or strategy to acquire the domain name either.

So what exactly is Google’s strategy here?

We have all seen the shift from broad purchasing of defensive registrations by companies, to instead, better utilize property owned and step up enforcement efforts. There are many ways companies are doing this, and service providers like Metamend have the experience and expertise to assist in crafting these domain name management strategies.

In this instance, not much is going on domain-wise either. However, Google does appear to have “unofficially” acquired at least two gtlds with variations of the “nexus one” brand, but I will not list them here as this is not been made official.

If you look at basic variations, we see the following intellectual property still available: