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It’s a match made in heaven, or at least Mountain View, California. Adsense for search is now integrating Custom Search. Now you can control those search results users conduct on your site and make moolah at the same time. Here’s what you can look forward to:

• Site Search: Choosing this option will keep users on your site only.
• Improved indexing of your pages: Google hopes its recent indexing updates will prove to benefit your Site Search users by providing better Adsense for Search results.

Vertical search: You can allow your users to search outside your site, but still set some boundaries. Examples include forums, blogs, or a network of sites.

• Tuning search results and ads with keywords:Control search results by setting a context. If your site is about cats, then enter “cats” and “cat food” as keywords and when someone searches for bowl, then results for cat food bowl will come up instead of other types of bowls or the sport of bowling.
• Selecting ad location: Choose where ads will be placed in relation to the the search results on your site.
• Quick and easy updates: You can now use the ad management feature in Adsense to control the settings for your custom search engine ads.

Here’s a video from the Googleplex explaining the update:

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While the standards debate rages on, our industry is fast coming under the influence of government regulations. This week has seen discussions about behavioral marketing at the FTC and the FCC weighing in on ISPs filtering sites.

The behavioral regulations being looked at by the FTC had Google, Yahoo and Microsoft commenting from different angles.

Google wanting to make sure their method of selecting ads was not rolled into the mix stated “our AdWords program allows us to provide ads on Google.com in response to search queries… . We believe this type of advertising should not be considered behavioral advertising, even if such analysis takes into consideration previous search queries.” (from Alan Davidson, Senior Policy Counsel and Head of U.S. Policy, Google, Inc.).

Yahoo’s VP Global Public Policy David Hantman stated: “The information they will receive when they click through for more information will include an explanation of how customization works, how they can participate in the NAI opt-out, and a link to our privacy policy where they can find more comprehensive information”

While Microsoft provided a list of ways to possibly address the issue:
Sensitive Personally Identifiable Information Advertising - Opt-in Consent;
Personally Identifiable Information Advertising - Propsective Use: Opt-out Choice;
Retroactive Use: Opt-in Consent; Behavioral Advertising — Opt-out Choice;
Multi-Site Advertising - Pass-through Notice;
Online Advertising - Prominent Notice, Security, Data Retention.

If social media success = 1/2 social network + 1/2 quality content … an understanding of both social network building and content development is necessary. I’ve written extensively about developing a social media network previously, so now I’ll focus more on social media content with a view to finding ways and means to assess quality of content. More specifically, in this post we’ll look at segmenting social media into different types of content.

In its simplest form, there are 3 types of social media content:
1. News Content
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content
3. Resources/Educational Content

1. News Content
This is content that is time-sensitive, and is based on facts, events, and happenings. As thousands of news sites exist, the latest news is almost always syndicated and distributed to these thousands of additional sites within minutes of its release. This makes the news itself a commodity … and ultra-competitive. Only the original source of the story typically gains.

News content does exceptionally well in the realm of most social media sites. In reality, there are two types of news in terms of social media opportunities:
a. the news you read about from other sources … and submit
b. the news you make (by using research, scoops, etc.)

2. Sensational/Entertainment Content
This type of content is most often not based on fact, but rather on personal opinion or speculation, and is designed to entertain or attract attention. You’ve seen the thousands of submissions to this effect, many of which are “Top 10″ type lists, staged videos (e.g. BrideZilla), majestic images, and the like. These entertainment-focused submissions typically perform very well on general social media sites like Digg, Reddit, or Stumbleupon, but do poorly on industry/vertical sites.

3. Resource/Educational Content
Resource/educational posts are based on research and facts in most cases, or at the very least professional opinion. These types of posts are typically well researched, and where conclusions are drawn, they are based more on deductive reasoning than inductive. Conclusions need not be drawn in these posts, as the posts/articles can also take the form of very large and relatively comprehensive lists (e.g. U.S. Universities Offering MBA Programs by State).

The fact-based nature of these posts, and the depth and comprehensiveness of information, increases the likelihood that they’ll be bookmarked or saved for future reference. As a result of the time and effort invested, these types of posts are relatively rare, and perform exceptionally well on certain types of social media but not others.

Second Level Combinations:
Obviously, people do not necessarily think in terms of these categories when creating content. Accordingly, most social media submissions will involve some combination of the above types. All tolled, there are 4 additional possible types based on combinations of the original 3:
1. News/Entertainment - this would be the type of content piece that might make the National Enquirer (you know … Brad Pitt meets Jennifer Aniston [the News] for a secret rendezvous [the Entertainment])
2. News/Resource - an example of this type of content might be a post on a recent sighting of a Tasmanian Tiger (the News), in which it shows a comprehensive list of the locations of all sightings since the late 50s (the Resource).
3. Entertainment/Resource - a post of this type might be “the definitive guide for alternative uses of a power nail gun” wherein a number of the uses are more humorous in nature.
4. A combination of all 3 - cannot think of any examples at the moment, and they are rare, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Why Do Types Matter?
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the 3 types of social media content (and the 4 additional combinations), is important for many reasons, including:
a. selecting the right type of content to fit your blog’s purpose and personality
b. selecting the right type of content to fit the medium (Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Stumbleupon, etc., all differ somewhat)
c. selecting the best type of content pieces for your industry

In future posts, I’ll delve much deeper into each of the above. Next week’s post will look specifically at finding good blog content that also performs well on social media. Stay tuned …

I recently got my hands on Marketing Sherpa’s newly released Landing Page Handbook. This detailed guide is packed full of industry information and practical case studies.

One of the things that jumped out at me was a table of conversion rate averages for different marketing tactics. The survey data was drawn from over 5000 active online marketers in a variety of settings.

In-house managed PPC Search - 3.84%
Outsourced managed PPC Search - 5.40%
Difference: 40%

In-house Natural Search Optimization - 2.62%
Outsourced Natural Search Optimization - 4.76%
Difference: 80%

As you can see, the outsourced conversion rates are much higher. Before I go any further, I must admit that this is not a scientific sample, and that self-selecting biases of various kinds are bound to obscure these results. We are not given any breakdown by industry or company sizes, or other critical information. However, at a high level the data makes perfect sense, since agencies must perform better to justify their fees and keep their client’s loyalty and business.

Agencies that are specialists in a particular area see a wide cross-section of accounts and industries among their clients and should be able to do a better job. This is not a slam at their hard-working and capable in-house counterparts. It is an acknowledgment that our industry moves very fast, and unless you have a whole organization focused on keeping up with the changes, it is very difficult to stay up on the latest developments.

Marketing activities are the engine of growth for a company. They are not administrative cost centers. Many companies mistakenly try to save a little money by running their programs in-house. They do not realize the real cost is in the lost opportunities that they can not capitalize on. If your in-house program is profitable, that is not enough - you must consider the scale of your program and always question how much money you might be leaving on the table. Giant conversion rate differences such as the above can be turned into strategic weapons that let you soundly trounce your competition.

So next time you consider the in-source / outsource decision, consider opportunity as well as direct costs.

If you’re going to Search Engine Strategies London next week, bring your camera or cameraphone. And, if you upload your pictures to Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s site for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics; Picasa, Google’s photo organizer; or Flickr, Yahoo’s online photo management and sharing application; then please tag your photos: SES London 2008.

We’ll be posting our own pics from the event online — and we’ll be tagging them with the phrase: “SES London 2008” – and if you tag along with us, hopefully we’ll all get found in that big photo album called Google Image Search.

If the photo sharing website you use happens to be Flickr, then we invite you to join us and post to the SES London 2008 group.

And while you’re there, why not send a buddy request to your favorite Search Engine Marketing conference? We have photos from last month’s SES Paris and we look forward to adding to the collection.

By the way, I want to encourage you to “take you best shot.” At the end of Search Engine Strategies London, I will be selecting the Best Photo of SES London 2008, the Best Photos of SES London, and Best Photography of SES London 2008. (Don’t ask me to explain my criteria. I’ll know it when I see it.)

The prize for each one of these top search terms — I mean, these prestigious awards? One static text link to your site.

Hey, that’s all I got. Unless, of course, you get some really funny pictures of people who happen to have a few incriminating photos of me — geotagged at one of the pubs near Islington. Not that I want to encourage that kind of behavior.

No, no. I’d much rather encourage you to photograph Kevin Ryan, Mike Grehan, Fredrick
Marckini, the Orion Panels, the conference sessions, the exhibitors, the crowds. You know. The photos that you can show your business colleagues.

Something like the photo to the left, which was taken back in 2004 at Search Engine Strategies New York. I think I was speaking during the Balancing Organic & Paid Listings session on Thursday, March 4. Not that anyone really cares about the past anymore — except maybe history majors.

But, the fact that you’ve read to the end of this blog post and are still hanging out at the bottom of this page with nothing but this silly text to keep you amused is proof of your deep and abiding interest in what we’re planning in the future.

So, what are you waiting for? Bring your camera or cameraphone to Search Engine Strategies London next week and tag your photos: SES London 2008.

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Choose correctly, and keywords will make one’s career. Choose poorly, and becoming SEO tartare for the competition may be the least of one’s career worries.

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