This Week in Search for 9/3/09

5Sep2009 Filed under: Online Marketing Author: JW

Henry Ford said that if he had asked his customers what they wanted before he built the Model T, they would have said they wanted a faster horse. The reality is few people are industry leaders. Most try to make faster horses. But had the need in 1907 been for web analytics and not transportation, Avinash Kaushik would have been a likely candidate to put America on wheels. So prompted by something Avinash said in a blog post earlier this week, here are some analytics quotes that’ll get the ole pistons firing.

Avinash Kaushik Quotes that Belong on Hallmark Cards:

7. Not segmenting data is a crime against humanity.

6. Never let your campaigns write checks that your website can’t cash.

5. I believe God created the internet so we could fail faster.

4. Magazine advertisements are faith based initiatives.

3. All data needs context, even server errors go up and to the right over time.

2. Bounce rate is brilliantly dumb. It shows that your customers came, they puked, they left.

1. Social media is like teen sex, everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.

Tips for eCommerce websites: From site architecture to product interlinking, Everett Sizemore’s post is a shopping cart of tips and tricks that eCommerce marketers shouldn’t abandon.

How search engines might look at link structure: Building off Microsoft research Bill Slawski articulates his hypothesis on how he thinks the engines use link block analysis.

Bryan Eisenberg: social media is not a message: Marketers may be focusing on social media, but tweets and status updates are not substitutes for conversion funnels and clear calls to action.

Seth Godin: comparing your business to the status quo: The best airport restaurants are those that compare themselves to other restaurants, not other airports. The lesson here is simple yet poignant: if your customers crave better food, don’t be afraid to go gourmet, even if your competition is happy serving McLeftovers.

Robots exclusion protocol tutorial: For those looking to learn more about robots files, Bing’s post on robots exclusion protocols is informative, as well as digestible for non-technical folks.

Rand talks about the history & future of SEOmoz: In a 30 minute video interview with Gabriel Weinberg, Rand shares a personal and introspective look at both the history of SEOmoz, as well as next steps for the company.

Good sales people have expensive hobbies: According to Quota Crush you can also find out how good a salesperson is by looking at how expensive their hobbies are.

Microsoft hired gun takes on Google: Qi Lu never played for the Washington Generals, but he knows about being runner up. For over a decade Lu has tried to beat Google, a mission the former Head of Yahoo Search now continues at Microsoft.

Submitting a Sitemap on Bing: In June Bing rolled out Sitemap.xml support, but if you’re looking to create, submit, or validate a Sitemap with Bing, the post on their webmaster blog is a great tutorial.

Buy happiness through memories, not objects: Why do expensive things not make people happy? Hint: it’s the same reason you can’t feel your underwear.

Does Google know you own your website?: Michael Gray’s take is that both the social graph and XFN links are likely each ways that Google is making ownership associations across domains.

Google gear (and not the browser extension): Who knew how big the Google store was? From t-shirts and hats to lava lamps and yoga balls there are many ways for you (and your toddler) to get Googley.

From actionable seminar re-caps to ethical SEO debates, there were many fantastic YOUmoz posts this week. Apparently dummerboy9000 was not the only mozzer who read Jen’s post about creating great UGC blog posts and noticed that YOUmoz links are followed.