Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4:42PM 
Dear Google+, Let me start this off by saying that it's not you; it's me. Really. I think you're great. These last few weeks have been really fun. Your simple elegance is breath-taking and you are so easy to get along with.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 12:10PM 
As most of you know, the new social networking site from Google, Google +, went live on a limited basis at the end of last month. Since that time there has been a scramble in social media circles to get invites.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 11:27AM 
A few months back I did a quick review of the RockMelt browser. In that review, I talked about its reported benefits and challenges. I could not review it firsthand because I had yet to receive an invite.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 3:54PM 
There is a battle going on for your location-based, disposable-income dollars, and the latest salvo has been launched by Google with their Google Boost product.
Friday, October 1, 2010 at 4:25PM 
The Internet isn’t your friend. It’s not your buddy or your pal. The Internet is a machine that lays in wait for that one moment for you to do something wrong
Friday, September 17, 2010 at 4:00PM ;)
It’s difficult to justify a long term SEO strategy to someone when their boss is breathing down their neck, demanding to see improved traffic at next week’s meeting.
Friday, September 10, 2010 at 4:00PM 
If you live in the US, you probably noticed that Google has been acting funny the past couple days. The search giant has implemented Google Instant into their engine, showing you streaming search results as you type.
Friday, August 27, 2010 at 4:00PM 
Given their recent track record with the likes of Google Wave and Google Buzz basically tanking from the word go, it’s difficult not to feel skeptical when Google releases a new “revolutionary” product.
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 4:00PM 
It should come as no surprise that Google Wave is being shuttered by the end of the year. It’s another in a long line of failed efforts from the search giant. Sure, Wave was pretty much set up to fail as Google
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 4:00PM You may be out-ranked, but you can still out-traffic the competition
You pour blood sweat and tears into SEO, clawing your way to the top spot on Google, triumphing over adversity like Rocky climbing stair after stair in Philadelphia. And you still don’t get the clicks.
Like your mother always told you, winning isn’t everything. Being in the top spot in search rankings doesn’t guarantee people will be impressed enough to click your link. It’s likely enough they’ll take a look at the few entries below you and go elsewhere. That’s why your click-through rate (CTR) is the real measure of your SEO success.
Getting that high CTR is all about your meta tag descriptions. These are often neglected since search engines have been ignoring them in their rankings for many, many years. Which doesn’t make much sense as, whether it’s organic search traffic or pay per click, the meta tag is where you pitch your website to surfers, telling them what they’ll find on your page and why it’s worth their time.
Follow the subtle arrow to find the meta tag
But hey, you’ve got the first spot, so you’ll still get most of the traffic right? Actually, you could be missing out on 80% of it. Traffic can vary between 20%-60% of clicks with a brilliant vs. rubbish meta tag description. If we’re talking about tens of thousands of searches, or more, that’s one heck of a lot of missed visits.
Let’s look at an example. Here are the top 5 search results for “international ad agency.” Which one would you click on?
I would go for the second or third entries and skip the other ones entirely since their meta tag descriptions are far from convincing.
Now that you know how important the meta tags are, here are some tips for writing them:
One last thought to mull over as you ponder how to handle your meta tags – if you don’t write them yourself, you may be in for some character assassination at the hands of Google. Just look what kind of spin the meta tag below put on an innocent writer, who in the context of the article is actually held in high esteem. Not so much on Google.
Friday, May 28, 2010 at 4:00PM
Supercharging your
site with keywords isn’t nearly as effective as building it around them from
the ground up
Working on several SEO projects here at The Duffy Agency, I’ve come to realize keyword research has an even better use than optimizing a site for search engines – it should guide the entire focus of a site from day one.
Us SEO geeks usually start projects by doing some intense keyword research to make sure we’re optimizing an existing site for the search phrases with the greatest potential. This does help your content get found by a whole lot more people, but your chance to reach the masses may already be out of reach.
If you want to build a massively successful website in today’s overcrowded cyberspace, you need a cunning strategy. Keyword research is your secret weapon in crafting a strategy to give you a leg up on the competition. Without this research, you’re leaving your fate up to wishful thinking, hoping that your target is already searching for exactly what you’re creating and that you can steal traffic from competitors. But by taking a close look at what your target is searching for, you can tailor your content so that it gets placed where millions of targeted individuals are looking for it. But there's a catch: your site’s core content might not end up being what you had planned.
I can sense your skepticism. After all, if you want to sell bikinis, why should you go and make a website about swimming, workout tips and dieting instead of simply setting up an optimized webshop?
Because there aren’t many people searching for bikinis. Moreover, your webshop would be competing against every other company in the category, and the best SEO in the world won’t put you in front of the global giants. On top of that, you’ll only be fighting for the people typing “bikini” into search engines.
When you do the research, you see that most people interested in upgrading their beach-look are between 13 and 40, they work out, they dream about vacations in the Bahamas, and even though they want your product, most of them never search for it
. But they are searching for pictures of beaches, reading blogs about working out and trying out diets to lose a couple of pounds before bikini season. In other words, you discover swimwear is actually a small part of a bigger need your customers are trying to satisfy.
So instead of creating the website www.wesellswimwear.com you create www.getreadyforthebeach.com.
And instead of targeting the keywords "swimwear," "bikinis" and "bathing suits," which are being intensely fought over by a slew of competitors, you use "beach," "vacation," "work out" and "diet tips," since they get millions more hits and are less contested by the competition.
There’s still competition to deal with, but you won’t be competing against other webshops struggling for their piece of a small audience. You’ll attract customers from a huge group of people who want your product, even if they aren’t looking for it directly. And you’ll still have pages on your site devoted to your webshop where you can fight for a place on the first “bikini” search results page.
The moral of this little hypothetical tale is that keyword research shows you what content your audience is out there looking for, and it’s likely not what you’re selling, whether it be a product, service or obscure amusement. You can’t do a whole lot with that information after your website is up, so doing the research in the beginning and engineering your site to give your target exactly what they want, where they’re looking for it, will lead to far greater results on search engines and higher traffic in general. Maybe a site that is all about you is exactly what you need, but you won’t know without the research. And if you don’t do it until after you’ve poured your time and money into making a site, your golden opportunity may have passed you by.
Friday, March 26, 2010 at 2:33PM 
Another landmark digital court verdict was announced this week and, big surprise, it involves Google. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled this week that Google could sell AdWords to anyone on any word. The issue at had was whether advertisers should be allowed to use the competition’s name as keywords. Basically, if I own a Holiday Inn in Dallas, TX and someone else owns a cheap motel, they can buy ad words that are featured whenever someone searches for “Holiday Inn Dallas.”
In this case, Holiday Inn is Louis Vuitton Malletier. The fashion giant sued Google in 2004 because companies selling knock off versions of their products were buying keywords that were trademarked by Louis Vuitton. They claim that Google not only allows people to freely trade on their brands, but also aids them in finding keywords to help knockoff brands infringe on their trademark. In effect, Google not only allows but facilitates people in hijacking of a brand for their own purposes.
As YouTube videos, mock Twitter accounts, AdWords and Facebook fan pages become more popular, corporations are in danger of losing control of their brand and trademark. Incidents of brands being hijacked by others are growing. AMC ran into this problem with people creating character profiles for their series Mad Men. At first, AMC demanded that Twitter take down the accounts, but after heaps of bad publicity, they recanted and allowed the profiles to remain as long as they were working in the best interest of the series.
As the Louis Vuitton case demonstrates, trying to sue technology into submission isn’t going to work. But that isn’t to say there’s nothing you can do to protect your brand. Here are a few steps you can take to keep hijackers off your ship.
Register your brand/product name early on social media sites – Even if you never intend to use Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, it’s good to capture your brand’s name before others can. Most of these sites have a private function so you don’t have to make the account visible.
Track your brand buzz – Brand buzz has never been more important. Internet memes come and go so fast you have stay on top of what is being said constantly. It’s impossible to respond to brand jacking if you’re not aware that it’s happening.
Conduct proper SEO for brand sites – Search engine optimization has become of the utmost importance not just for search engine ranking, but also preventing brand hijacking. If a website is on the first page of a search result, it’s less likely that third party sites can gain significant traction over the branded website as far fewer people click on the paid ads than the organic search results. But if your site doesn’t appear on the first page of results, you’re just asking for others to steal your traffic.
Buy misspellings of you brand name – People misspell words all the time online. So wouldn’t it be great if when someone misspelled your product’s URL, it still took them to the correct site? Purchasing common misspellings of your brand’s url and redirecting them to the correct URL will increase web traffic and make it much easier to get your site to the top of multiple search engine results.
The French case reminds us that when it comes to your brand, Google and social media have made due-diligence more important than ever. Corporations have to learn how to become nimble and adjust to the new online paradigm instead of sitting back, calling Google evil, and wondering why the world is passing them by.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.
Friday, February 26, 2010 at 3:00PM
SEO vs PPC: Why you're wasting money
In 2008, $12 billion was spent on PayPerClick advertising compared to $1.4 billion spent on SEO. People still don’t understand SEO. Adwords, on the other hand, is very easy to understand. If someone clicks a banner to visit your site, you have to pay a fee but you know that someone has seen your message. You know what you get and you know what you pay for. It’s like paying the guy who mows your lawn. It is very easy to see the work he did. He spends 2 hours, you can see the guy working through your kitchen window, and you pay him for the work afterwards for doing a good job.
SEO is very different. It's more like hiring an electrician to fix a problem. You know something isn't working right, you can't figure out what, and you have to take their word that everything is wired correctly. An SEO expert can help you optimize your site for Google and just like an electrician, you hand him a pile of money and he will do "something" with your site. He disappears and returns saying everything is fixed. He’s added some “inlinks”, changed some “on page keywords” and updates your “meta tags.” He tells you that everything is fixed and you’ll get great results from organic Google searches. Outwardly, you can’t tell anything has changed.
This is the problem of the SEO expert. It's difficult to explain what needs to be done in a simple manner without sounding like you’re speaking a foreign language, and it can take a lot of time to do SEO correctly, which means it often costs more. After they have finished optimizing a site, the results aren’t instantaneous. They can’t prove that their work had any effect on Google in an immediate fashion, so people prefer using Adwords. SEO isn’t a one time fix. It’s a long process of sitting and waiting. Over the course of three to six months, you’ll see the return on your investment with a stronger return on organic research for your entire site (not just one page) and more traffic to your website.
Done correctly, SEO can have a huge impact on your website and on your entire business. For example, by taking just one relevant keyword on a website and optimizing the site for it, it’s possible to advance from the 19th search result on Google to first or second place. For a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches, it means you will get about 2,000 visitors instead of 10.
Considering 90% of Google users find websites through the organic search, proper SEO makes it possible for them to find your site over and over again long after the Adwords campaign has ended and brings in the people that don’t trust paid search results. So why are we spending 90% of our online marketing budgets to attract the 10% of online traffic generated by search engines?
Why settle for just a small piece of the pie when you can have 100% of it using Google's organic search? Start focusing more on SEO, either by hiring someone to help you out or by learning about it yourself.
Friday, February 19, 2010 at 3:00PM
Google Buzz has dug itself a deep hole, but it can still climb back out
I’m not a Google Buzz hater. As a Gmail user, I was excited to try it out. I certainly wasn’t opposed to the idea of having all my feeds linked into my inbox and being able to respond to, share and otherwise interact with them. Also, I love how images and video are integrated into conversations without leaving the page and that my friends and contacts can jump in and add their own content in real time – it’s like Twitter but with more freedom to elaborate and share on the fly.
But oh how the presentation of Buzz was botched and huge missteps were made that seem so obvious in hindsight, making us wonder what Google, with their “don’t be evil” motto, were thinking.
I’m skeptical of Google’s chances of turning Buzz into a cornerstone social media tool, but there’s a lot of potential there. Here’s how Buzz failed mightily in its first few days of existence, and some thoughts about how they can turn it around.
Buzz invaded your inbox and picked your friends for you
In this increasingly open landscape of social media, the email inbox is one of the last sanctuaries. So it was no surprise that when Buzz took info from our inboxes and made it public there was an outcry of protest, inspiring many people to switch Buzz off immediately. The info Buzz shared wasn’t anything too intrusive, mainly it made plain who you’re talking to most via Gmail, but the gaul of doing so automatically left many feeling violated. One of the reasons Google did this was so Buzz could auto follow these contacts and create a huge user base overnight – another thing people resented, as many of us ended up auto following our ex’s or people we’ve fallen out with. Google has changed this so it merely suggests who you should follow, but many had already shut Buzz down and won’t be coming back.
No Facebook and Twitter integration
Twitter is only involved in a meagre way (you can’t update Twitter from Buzz) and Facebook is nowhere to be found. For a social media tool that had potential to be a one-stop hub, those are huge absences that will keep it from actually being a social media hub. We still have to go elsewhere to maintain our Twitter and Facebook accounts, which makes Buzz just one more social network to spend time on, and we’ve all got about as much as we can handle as it is. True integration with the sites people use most has the potential to make Buzz the primary social media stop for millions of users. But if they intend to try and directly compete with Facebook and its 400 million user strong base, well, good luck Google. I don’t see how Buzz offers up close to enough incentive to get many people to switch.
Buzzes get dominated by white noise
Following big names, like Mashable and Scoble, will deliver great content into your Buzz account. But it comes in a flood relative to the activity of your personal contacts, who are probably the ones you’re most interested in. You can mute conversations (with varying degrees of success as some people have noticed muted conversations reappear a short time later), but there needs to be better filtering options (like FriendFeed successfully implemented) so you aren’t forced to wade through conversations you have no interest in while the stuff you want gets lost. Buzz is supposed to be extremely convenient and easy to use. Right now, it’s not.
Non-Gmail users not allowed
Having Buzz pop up in Gmail users’ accounts overnight was a brilliant idea for jump starting the service, tapping into the 150 million Gmail user base. Not having a standalone desktop app for everyone else was not a brilliant idea. This is probably coming soon, and if it’s not it should be. A lot of people don’t want to link their social media life with their email, and a whole lot of other people simply don’t want to use Gmail. And how many of your most interesting contacts are regularly on Gmail, anyway? The mobile version doesn’t require Gmail and has been pretty successful thus far, with a reported 200 posts per minute from phones. Do us a favor and give us a desktop app too.
Excessive hype + mediocrity = backlash
Google took this bun out of the oven while it was still doughy in the middle. Instead of taking the time to iron out all the kinks, or doing a limited beta launch, they went all out and stirred up huge hype for something that wasn’t ready for users to integrate into their daily lives. Then they went and boasted of 9 million posts in two days, which isn’t much of a claim given that 150 million Gmail users had the Buzz tab suddenly appear in their inbox. Moreover, checking it out and making a post or two does not mean users liked it or will continue using it. The general sentiment seems to be: “Yeah, I checked it out – no, I’m not interested.” The number of tweets referring to Buzz with the hashtag #fail came in a tidal wave (pun intended). If you go out of your way to attract massive attention, social media will give you a piece of its mind when you deliver mediocrity.
If the Facebook/Twitter integration happens, the privacy issues are satisfactorily resolved and a whole lot more people create Buzz accounts, it has potential to streamline our social media experience. But there’s a lot of ifs to take care of, and then Google has to hope they haven’t created too much bad mojo among users to win them back. Six months from now, do you see Buzz riding high, or already forgotten?
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 3:00PM 
Do your bit in just a few clicks
The devastation in Haiti is on a level scarcely imaginable for most of us. It’s made doubly nightmarish by the fact that Haiti is far from being one of the wealthier countries in the world. But millions of dollars are being donated through internet fund raising campaigns that allow people to lend a hand instantly. To make your contribution of desperately needed funding, check out the options below. And after you’ve made a donation, tweet a link to the organization’s site or write about it on Facebook.
World Vision has already sent 18 tons of relief supplies to Haiti. Help them send more by making a donation.
AmeriCares is raising funding for critical medical supplies and medicines, as there is an especially great need of them with a major hospital having collapsed.Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
Friday, October 9, 2009 at 4:00PM
Google moves one step closer to world wide web domination
Google has once again dominated internet conversations. People clamored over each other trying to get an invite to the beta release of Google Wave.
Only 100,000 invites were given out and each invited person was given eight invites. Contest were constructed, promises were made and hoops were jumped though to get one of the precious invites. The irony is, as far as I know, very few people that were invited by the inital 100,000 have received their Google Wave invite.
While you wait on your Google Wave invite, check out Google Wave: A Complete Guide to see what you’re missing.
Another app has been released to much less fanfare. Google Sidewiki is a toolbar application that allows users to add more content and provide context to a website. Imagine visiting a website and being able to add more information for others to see. Sidewiki does just that.
The release has been applauded for it’s user interaction and criticized for allowing people to add content that wasn’t provided by the original site creator.
Taking the offline to the online, Google announced the release of TED 5000 (The Energy Detective) from Energy Inc. The device is a home energy monitoring device that measures a home’s electrical usage in real-time. The Google PowerMeter takes that information and puts it online or your mobile phone.
Personally I think this is a great way to be more aware of your power consumption and helps people decrease their energy useage.
Finally incase you think Google might becoming the Microsoft, Hitwise is reporting that Google controls 71% of the search engine market share.
