The blog is quite messy right now. I’m working on it. (nobody cares but hey… you never know who might come by…)

]]> http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/site-under-maintenance/feed/ 0 http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:52:59 +0000 Gaetan Bertin http://www.gaetanbertin.com/?p=520

Microsoft and Google are fighting for the email territory.
Some days ago, Google started a campaign to promote GMail.
2 videos have been released by Google.
The first one recommends to make the switch from the “email address you got when you first started using the Internet”to a GMail address.

The second one to help existing Gmail users launch an email intervention to make their friends switch to GMail.

Today, a Microsoft sales video from the Microsoft Global Exchange Sales Conference leaked.
In the video, Microsoft presents the GMail Man, reading everyone’s email to serve them irrelevant ads based on keywords found in their correspondance.

Did the Microsoft video really “leak” or is this some kind of undercover viral campaign?
In any case, the war is not over.

Here are the story I’ve read today (since I wasn’t at the royal Wedding) and that you might find interesting:

Twitter app permissions
ReadWriteWeb has a story about the new, more detailed login screen for Twitter apps that gives more details about what the app can do with your account but also explains that “a few key permissions are omitted from this screen”

Serious game
James Fallows writes about the return of Clippy for The Atlantic. Microsoft’s annoying paperclip is back to teach you how to use Microsoft Office through a game called Ribbon Hero 2. I haven’t been able to test it yet since we’re still using Office 2003 at work =) Anyway, this might be a good example of a “serious game” that I might try if I can find some time at home.

Creating content for SEO
Search Engine Land tells us more about creating true great and unique content to improve ranking in SERPs. It’s always been difficult for most companies to understand that what web users find interesting is not exactly what their marketing or communication teams find interesting.
The related entries at the end of the article are well worth a look too.

F-Commerce
Social Commerce Today confronts two articles about F-Commerce. The articles are from Econsultancy and Computing Magazine and have a different point of view on Facebook ‘s possibilities for e-commerce.

SEO & Social Media
And finally, a video you could watch, SEOMoz’s Whiteboard friday about Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis. Rand Fishkin explains the correlation between high rankings in SERPs and the number of incoming links and Facebook shares your pages get.

This post is an answer to Eric Peterson’s post Would you pay $100 per year for Google Analytics?
I recommend reading his post and the comments, there are some interesting stuff.

I don’t see the point in charging for GA.
As a potential european customer, I think that fees, even as low as $100/year, would require Google to make 2 important (and probably costly) changes:
- sales team: In France, nobody’s in charge of “selling” GA. When you ask Google about GA, they tell you to call partner agencies.
- support: If I’m paying, I need some help when something goes wrong. Every tool I’ve been paying for on the Internet, even low price tools, offer some support. Why wouldn’t Google do the same?

Another point was talked about in one of the comments of Eric’s post: big European companies want their data to be in Europe or have some strong proofs that the Safe Harbor certification & secrutiy of their data is ensured.
Google would need to have security & legal teams ready to talk to customers to prove them everything will be fine.

One last thing: Don’t forget that the data they gather through GA (which they probably use, at least, to study user habits & behaviors) is of high value for Google to keep on improving their offers.

In the end, the cost vs. revenue might not be good enough for Google to begin charging for GA.
But I might be wrong.

On April 18th, AFNIC, the registry for .fr TLDs, has registered its 2 millionth .fr domain name (Well done manucure-saint-maur.fr!).

Everyone talk about it like it’s a good thing. Maybe it is. Maybe not.

My concern, from an SEO perspective, is that companies tend to buy domain names for every possible occasion and that is definitely a bad thing.
When advertisers launch a new campaign, a new product, an iPhone app or anything that could have its own web page, a large number of them tends to buy a new domain name (.fr, .com, doesn’t matter) and create a brand new website.
Most of the time, SEO is not considered relevant for the website since it’s a website that will either have a limited lifetime or is a full-flash presentation of the product that will never be able to compete for any keyword in search results.

Instead of seeing this type of website like a standalone thing, it should be considered as part of the entire SEO eco-system of the advertiser.
If the website was just part of the main website, accessible via a folder of the main TLD (a simple one of course), every link it would gain in news articles, blog posts, press releases, and so on would be adding value to the overall external linking factor, helping out the main website in SERPs.

I think it would be a good thing to reduce the number of TLDs instead of seeing the increase as a goog thing.
There are more than 85 million .com TLDs…
The multiplication of domain names polutes the web just like product packages polute the environment (ok, maybe that one is a little too hard but you get the idea ^^).

Source: silicon.fr

The cost of QR Codes (and Data Matrix, Microsoft Tags…) is close to nothing for advertisers. Close, because you still need to pay someone (be it an intern or even yourself) to generate it.

That’s why we see more and more QR Codes everywhere in France. On billboards, in magazines, on book covers, in bus stops…
It is easy to use for advertisers and makes them feel like they are doing something new, something mobile, something trendy. There’s a “WOW effect” involved there.

But there are 2 problems.
First, the cost of QR Codes for users is too high. When facing a QR Code in a magazine, the user:

• does not know what this is and needs to read the “how to” next to the QR Code, if there’s one (some advertisers think everybody knows what it is)
• If he knows or understand how it works, he must know install an app on its phone if he doesn’t have one. Some Android, Nokia and Blackberry phones now come with a built-in reader but I guess the share of those is still small
• Once he has the app installed, he must launch it, stay in front of the ad (easy if it’s in a magazine but different if you’re in the street facing a billboard), scan it… without knowing what will happen next! Will it download something? Try to make a call? Open a web page? Send private information like my contact details to the advertiser?
• Last and not least, he needs to have access to the internet when he scans a QR Code, which is most of the time not the case if he’s in the subway, where there’s a lot of QR Codes to scan (yes, this is stupid).

The second problem is that QR Codes exist since the mid-90′s. It made sense then because mobile phones had 12 keys and it was difficult to tap a complete URL on such a thing.
But now, most of the mobile phones come with a complete AZERTY/QWERTY keyboard and URL shorteners make it easy to display short, fast to enter URLs on ads.

In my opinion, QR Codes are obsolete.

Great surprise this morning when I launched Xiti (yes, everyone still calls it Xiti) on a different browser than I usually do.
There’s an ad for their iPhone app on the login page.
Looks like it’s been out for a while but since I’m automatically logged in with my other browser I had never seen the news.

The app looks great so far.
You can only access websites with an Analyzer NX subscription but if you don’t have one, I guess you don’t need to access your stats on your mobile.

An iPhone app was definitely a feature that was missing. I’ve used apps for Webtrends (official) & Google analytics (not official).
I’ve checked and there’s also one for SiteCatalyst and one for coremetrics.
It seems most of the web analytics platform have an iPhone app now.

As far as the iPad is concerned, the Analyzer NX app does not have a specific iPad version but you can use the normal version in Safari on your iPad, I’ve never encountered any problems.

I had a talk this morning with a fellow Search Marketer.
She told me every consultant in her agency was speciliazed either in Paid Search or SEO.
The main objective behind that is to ensure each consultant is the best in his domain.
I agree with that and have to admit that, when I was managing a team of Search Marketers, I asked them to specialize for that exact purpose.

But, you still need people who are experts in both area to work on the overall search strategy.
The power of SEO & Paid Search together in a single strategy is far more efficient than tactics applied by experts in each domain.

There’s a need for specialists and all-around search marketers.

I feel the need to write, once again.
And, as you can see, I feel the need to write in english.
Same player, slightly different topics (more topics in fact, wait & see), and a new design for the blog coming soon.

Maybe I’ll manage to blog for more than 2 months this time.

I was doing some research and came accross a (not new) Matt Cutts video about web hosting server location and it’s impact on SEO.
What I understand from that video (and from my personal experience with European websites hosted in a single country) is that Google used to only check for country specific TLD (Top Level Domain e.g .fr or .co.uk) to decide if the website was relevant for a certain country.
That was, like Matt Cutts says, back in the days.

Now, they still use the country code TLD but if they face a generic TLD such as .com or .org they check the host server country to determine the website’s relevance for specific countries.
.
But, they are also checking the IP of country specific TLD to determine if they are relevant for other countries.
I’ve seen some examples where .com.au websites were achieving high rankings in the UK SERPs because they were hosted in England
The important learning is yet to come: those websites were still ranking high in the Australian search engines.
They were not losing any rankings in Australia, they were just getting a boost in the UK.

So the main issue would not be about getting bad results in the country you target but more about getting good results in an irrelevant country, which will only happen if your website is in the same language used in the country your host is located (Canadian website hosted in france, German website hosted in Austria, …).

I heard somewhere that Google is still working on that issue though.

Anyway, in an ideal world your French website would have a French domain name and be hosted in France.
But for huge organizations that have the same the website duplicated in 10 or 20 different local versions, all hosted in the same country, the benefits would not be worth the cost.

Just buy your country specific TLD, configure each one correctly so that they point to the corresponding localised homepage and your local rankings will be just fine.

PS: You can also check the SEOmoz post about international versions of websites. There are some interesting tips in it.