The answer is simple. They knew it would be a touchdown. It had already run on YouTube for months prior to the Super Bowl, and garnered more than 1 million views. People liked it, and shared their feedback. Smart advertisers test before they spend their budget on placement. One million voices said “run it”.

The real genius behind Google’s Parisian Love commercial is that it’s incredibly easy to riff on. By this time next year, Parisian Love may prove to be the most parodied and imitated commercial of all time. You don’t need actors, animation chops, or even Photoshop. With a few basic software tools, wit, humor, and a tendency toward the subversive, you can create your own version of Parisian Love in an afternoon. And when you do, it will most likely end up on YouTube, another Google property. They really can’t lose.

Let’s see what delightfully deviant ideas spring out of Parisian Love, and see if we can measure the “viral-ness” of Google’s Super Bowl investment.

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Today I tried an interesting experiment. I googled “social media expert”. I wanted to see who would take Google’s #1 spot.

It wasn’t Chris Brogan, whom I would have guessed. Today’s top dog is Giovanni Gallucci. I had never heard of Giovanni, and unless you’re from Texas, it’s probable that you never have heard of him either. Giovanni lives in Dallas and over the last couple years he has made an impressive effort to position himself as a social media maven. I can’t knock that. It’s what anyone who wants to create an independent career in social media should be doing. If you look at his efforts, there is much to learn. Giovanni shows what it takes to gain traction as a social media professional.

To the established social media pros, the A-list, Giovanni Gallucci appears to represent everything that they warn people against. Self-proclaimed rock stars, experts, and ninjas do not present the perfect picture of credibility. There are plenty of articles about what to look for in your social media expert and what to watch out for, and it seems that they all caution us about guys who look very much like Gallucci. He calls himself an expert and a ninja. He alludes to press coverage but doesn’t show examples. He lists clients but doesn’t offer specifics on what he did for them. These points that do not stand up to suspicious scrutiny, and I recommend changing those aspects of his website, but I would not write the man off because his approach is more aggressive. His formula is working. He is the #1 social media expert in Google’s eyes.

How did Giovanni Gallucci steal the top spot from the likes of social media A-listers like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, and Peter Shankman? He did it with focused SEO. Giovanni decided to optimize for “social media expert”, so that is the title given to his website. Within the content, you’ll find social media mentioned numerous times, along with words like “ninja”, “buzz” and “marketing”. The man understands on-site SEO and he has used it masterfully. He also has massive offsite SEO through profiles on more than twenty social networks, content on sites like SlideShare, YouTube, and Flickr, and an active presence on Twitter and other sites. He presents a focused and consistent picture of himself, and knows what he wants people to remember about him. This is personal branding at its finest. Gallucci seems like a smart, hard working, likable guy and I expect that he will continue to work his way toward a position on the social media A-list.

Where is the lesson in this experiment? First, no matter how strong your presence is online and offline, the top spot in any search engine can still be won by someone who is fully committed to that task. Chris Brogan used to occupy Google’s number one position. Chris still has the single most recognizable name in social media marketing, but it looks like Giovanni is in the race and hungry for victory.

Second, there is no such thing as an overnight success. It takes time and effort to not only learn the trade, but to market your skills and create a reputation. Giovanni can work five times harder than everyone else, and it will still take time to grow reputation and wide recognition. But it may take less time to achieve a high level of success because there are examples to follow and an industry that is hot for expertise.

And the last lesson I take from this experiment is that even though the experts say “don’t call yourself an expert, rock star, or ninja”, perhaps doing those things is precisely what you should do because a) they’re not doing it, and b) they’re talking about it. They promote awareness of the terms and refuse to apply the same terms to themselves, creating an opportunity for somebody else. Kudos to Giovanni Gallucci for recognizing the power of calling himself a Social Media Expert.

I noticed that “social media ninja” is still up for grabs. We’ll talk later. I have some work to do.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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When I focus on search engine marketing, I generally concern myself with 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, because I like to start by following the 80/20 rule and give my attention on the top 80% of the search traffic. Acording to J.P. Morgan research, Google is the most popular search engine with 59% of all search traffic. Yahoo comes in second at 20%, and MSN is in third place at 7.7%. These numbers are important because they tell where people go to search, but they’re also important for a formula I created to rank search engine competition on a given term. This formula can be described as follows:

RP is the search results position
PV is the position value
EP is the engine popularity
RV is the rank value
CR is the competition rating

PV = 100/RP
RV= PV * EP
CR = SUM(RV)

If this appears confusing, it may be that you’re like me, and worked on other things during algebra class, but I can explain the formula by showing how it works with an example.

Berkley-Fishing.com is #3 on MSN, #5 on Yahoo, and #5 on Google. By taking the percentage of market share for each search engine and multiplying it by .01, we get the EP values for each search engine. The EP values are .077 for MSN, .2 for Yahoo, and .59 for Google. The PV (position value) is determined by dividing 100 by the results position. This produces a fractional number that is suitably weighted to reflect the significance of the highest positions in RP. For Berkley-Fishing.com, the PV is 33.33 on MSN, 20 on Yahoo, and 20 on Google. Rank value is the position value adjusted by the engine popularity, or share of audience that the search engine has. To determine Berkley-Fishing.com’s RV for Google, we take the position value which is 20 and multiply it by Google’s Engine Popularity, which is .59. The result is 11.8, meaning the RV for Berkley-Fishing.com on Google is 11.8. We repeat this formula for each of the other search engines, substituting the new RP and EP numbers, and sum the results to get the overall Competition Rating, or CR. The CR result for Berkley-Fishing.com is 18.37.

You are welcome to do this exercise on your own, but I have already done the work for you. Here are the individual search engine results and their calculated values for the term “fishing line”.

MSN Bing Search Engine Results

Yahoo Search Engine Results

Google Search Engine Results

Fishing Line Manufacturers Rated by Search Engine Position and Relative Competition Score

From a search engine marketing perspective, we now have a clear picture of who the competition is. If your brand is nearer to the bottom of this list, you no doubt want to know why these various competitors rank so high? For that answer, we have to dig much deeper, looking at each site to understand how search engine factors have determined their ranking. We can do this because search engines try to think like people, albeit algorithmically, and so they try to analyze what the web designer intended and what the person searching wants to find. We just need to know what to look for, and how to think more like a search engine. We’ll save this next step for another post.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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It’s easy to optimize brands for their name. Type Berkley Fishing into any search engine and you’ll see www.berkley-fishing.com at the top of your search results. Optimizing for a product category can be much more challenging, as you have to compete not only with other sites that mention your product, but sites who talk about the category in general as well as every other brand with a similar product.

To compete for product category positioning, you need to identify the most popular search terms people are using to search for products like yours. We’ll use the example of fishing line. There are many manufacturers of fishing line, and the fishing enthusiast community is massive. Someone wanting to optimize for “fishing line” will be competing with informational websites, enthusiast websites, retail chains and other brands. You have a slim chance for gaining the #1 position, but you can be first among competing manufacturers. This is helpful because sometimes people want to find out where they can get the best deal on fishing line, and sometimes they’re more interested in learning about different kinds of fishing line. This is where your brand can compete. If you provide great informational content and can effectively communicate your product’s advantages, you will create a strong and positive brand impression. You may not be #1 for the search term, but you can still be #1 for the people who are seeking brand information.

Fishing line is an obvious choice product category for fishing line manufacturers who want to rank high for their product category. But what about other possible terms? What about “best fishing line” or “bass fishing line”? Should these terms also be considered? And if yes, should they be given equal or more effort than “fishing line”? It’s worth finding out.

Evaluating search term popularity is an essential early step in your optimization effort. Simply put, you might think you know what people are searching for, but that may not always be the case. Using a keyword analysis tool, I determined that “bass fishing line” is more popular than “trout fishing line”, but “best fishing line” is more popular than both by a 2:1 margin. That is good information, but even more important is to recognize that our original term, “fishing line” is 40 times more popular than “best fishing line”. In this case, we want to focus on “fishing line” as our key term.

With our keyword properly identified, we now want to discover whom we’re competing against. Typically, you want to look at the top 20 positions in each of the major search engines, though if you are not ranked in the top 20, you may want to look further. Every gain that you make will directly influence the traffic your website generates from search results. The following results show how much traffic can be gained by advancing into the top 10 of Google’s rankings, and the impact of gaining even one position higher in the top 10.

Google’s Search Rankings

That’s a lot of information to digest for one post. Next, we’ll look at who the competitors are, and try to determine how they have earned a strong position in the search engines.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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Google never ceases to amaze me, but what is more amazing is how Google’s most powerful tools are often just the other side of inconspicuous-looking doorways. How many searchers do you suppose ever click on the “show options” tab on their search results? The number might be many, but compared to the entire Google audience, I’m willing to wager that it is a fraction of 1%. When people search, their eyes go immediately to the results, or back up to the top of the page where they can narrow their search to images, news, retail products, or more.

But if you are interested in how search engines work and how to create a website that is attractive to search engine spiders, Google’s new Wonder Wheel provides an interesting and dynamic view of the semantic relationships between websites and various related search terms.

The Wonder Wheel is a dynamically generated mind map where you can see two nodes and their connecting lines at any one time, plus a breadcrumb trail that shows you the path back to where you started. Mind maps are wonderful things because they organize information by relationships rather than hierarchies. By doing so, they may show results that are important to you, but might not have occurred to you as a search criteria.

Play with the Wonder Wheel for a little while and you start to see how the entire web is semantically connected. With a semantic map of the entire web, you could trace multiple paths from any one topic to any other. The Wonder Wheel isn’t complete, though. Some terms are simply dead-ends. “Urban Dwellers”, for instance, will not generate a wonder wheel. Nor will “Urban Streets”.

I was surprised by the prevalence of three and four word keyword phrases. The semantic engine seems to favor these far more than two word keyword phrases. We will continue evaluating Google’s Wonder Wheel at Keller Crescent Advertising to see what secrets it may reveal, but for now, why not try Google’s Wonder Wheel for yourself? Plug in the name “Kevin Bacon” and see how many steps it takes to reach Steve Jobs. I made it in 34 steps.

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You may think that good writing is good content when it comes to websites, especially if it engages the reader. While that may be true, there’s nothing better than good writing that people come across easily because it’s composed in a way that search engines love. The best way to improve your chances of being discovered by readers is to write the kind of copy that search engines eat like candy. If this sounds intriguing to you, then read on.

You need to start with keywords. A keyword is a term that people search for, and that is relevant to your client’s product or service. You want to identify the keyword that you are most likely to get results with, which usually means it has a high search/competition ratio. The more often a term is searched and the lower the competition, the better your results will be. You can research keywords with Google’s keyword tool.

When you compose a topic, make sure you use the keyword in your title. This is very important. You also want to think about synonyms for your keyword. In the case of this article, the keyword I am optimizing for is the phrase search engines. As I write, I want to mention this term, as well as words like searches and phrases like search engine results. Ultimately, my goal is to populate the copy with at least a few occurrences of the term, but not over-saturate my copy with it. I should mention that there are other words in this article that are also being optimized, including copy, article, and keyword. There is some argument about the appropriate word density, but in my experience, an average of around 6-7% is more likely to earn higher search engine rankings.

Once your copy is written, there are a few more steps that you want your webmaster to follow through with. A picture might be included in your post, and in the HTML code, you will want to provide text that will act as a substitution for the picture, if the picture can’t be loaded. In code-speak, this is called ALT text. The ALT text should include your keyword or key phrase. Also, your webmaster should provide links from your article to other articles on the website, and those articles should contain at least one instance of the keyword. Your webmaster should format the title using an H1 tag, and make one occurrence of your keyword bold, using the bold tag. It is important that these steps are done, but not overdone. Otherwise, the search engine algorithms will not take your copy seriously. The idea is to make your copy appear to be relevant and important, using the few semantic devices available to the search engine robots.

There’s one more step to this Ninja tactic. You want to create inbound links to your copy once it’s published on the website. If you know people who are highly interested in the subject of your article and write blogs or articles, ask them if they’d be interested in mentioning your copy and linking to it. This creates an inbound link from another person’s website. Even if you don’t know someone, you can still create inbound links yourself. There are more than 100 million blogs out there, and surely there are a few active blogs that your article is relevant to. If that blog allows comments, you can write a comment that references your story, and create a link to it. In time, the search engine spiders will find this link, and recognize that it connects to your article, sweetening your popularity.

There is no guarantee that your article will become #1 in Google’s rankings, or anyone else’s, but you will improve your results by following these steps as they are outlined here. It may seem unfair or even corrupt to write copy that influences the search engines, but is that any less fair than writing copy that influences readers? I don’t think so.

For another perspective on blogging, please consider this article.

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Over the last several years I’ve seen different types of websites come and go. You might recall the era when auto-generated indexes dominated Google’s search results for a short time until Google figured out a way to delist them. More recently I’ve noticed blog sites that have content that’s been obviously scraped from legitimate websites and the words modified to make somewhat awkward phrasing. These various websites are built with one purpose in mind–gain high rankings on key search terms, and then make the most pertinent content on those pages the advertisements that Google serves up. The idea is to make money on pay-per-click. I always knew how it worked in theory, but I decided that I’d like to better understand why these people work so hard at what they do.

I spent the better part of my day recently exploring black hat SEO tools and techniques. It’s not that I want to become one of them, I simply wanted to know what I could learn from their approach that might also work in legitimate SEO. Much of what I saw was clearly disreputable. People try selling all sorts of gimmicks from putting together bundles of free software and some documentation on how to use it, to selling electronic books on topics like dog training and “how to” guides. There is software for spamming blogs and forums, hundreds of thousands at a time, and software for stealing content from other sites and republishing it on your own. These are all unscrupulous pastimes.

On the brighter side of this underbelly I did see a verification of approaches I do recommend to clients. Article marketing, link building, videos and podcasts, social bookmarking, blog commenting, and participation in social media sites all came up as things anyone must do, black, white, or purple hat, in order to promote your web presence.

There are far fewer bad guys than good on the web, but since most of them are scavenging an income stream from a few dollars per site, it takes many websites to make it worth their while. And though Google’s programmers are smart, the accumulated intelligence among black hat marketers is a force to be reckoned with.   There is a huge and hungry market for products that help these people get around the normal defenses that us bloggers and forum creators have in place.

We’re always going to have black hat marketers mixing in with the good content on the web. The ones that provide quality original content will at least be the group who lead that crowd because in the end, it’s the content that wins, not the page rank tricks.

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