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This is a great guest post by John Hargaden about the future of SEO consulting.

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Today’s the birthday of artist Marc Chagall. Google has honored Chagall with a Google Doodle.

The Marc Chagall Wikipedia entry states, “After gaining a reputation as an artist, Chagall left St. Petersburg to settle in Paris to be near the burgeoning art community in the Montparnasse district, where he developed friendships with such avant-garde luminaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger.

In 1914, he returned to Vitebsk and, a year later, married his fiancée, Bella. While in Russia, World War I erupted and, in 1916, the Chagalls had their first child, a daughter they named Ida.

Chagall became an active participant in the Russian Revolution.”

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Yahoo has responded to the letter Carl Icahn issued this morning. Here’s the statement

Yahoo!’s Board of Directors continues to stand ready to enter into negotiations with Microsoft Corporation for an acquisition of Yahoo!. Indeed, as recently as June, Yahoo!’s independent directors and management approached Steve Ballmer about just such a transaction, only to be told that Microsoft was no longer interested even in the price range which they had previously proposed. Now Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Icahn have teamed up in an apparent effort to force Yahoo! into selling to Microsoft its Search business at a price to be determined in a future “negotiation” between Mr. Icahn’s directors and Microsoft’s management. We feel very strongly that this would not lead to an outcome that would be in the best interests of Yahoo!’s stockholders. If Microsoft and Mr. Ballmer really want to purchase Yahoo!, we again invite them to make a proposal immediately. And if Mr. Icahn has an actual plan for Yahoo! beyond hoping that Microsoft might actually consummate a deal which they have repeatedly walked away from, we would be very interested in hearing it.

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It’s that time of year again. Search Engine Strategies San Jose will be held the week of August 18, 2008. And whether this will be your first SES San Jose ever, or the sixth one in a row that you’ve attended since 2003, you might need to spend little time optimizing your schedule for what search engine marketers call “the big one.”

A quick look at the conference at a glance will tell you why. There are a total of 77 conference sessions, strategic development workshops, Orion panels, and keynote presentations crammed into the four-day Search Engine Strategies conference. And on the fifth day, there are an additional six SEM training workshops.

Since there are five concurrent tracks during the SEM conference and three concurrent workshops during the SEM training, no one can attend everything – unless, of course, you bring a team of five or more people to SES San Jose.

And deciding which sessions to attend isn’t just daunting for the first-time attendee. It’s also a challenge to SES Alumni.

If you compare last year’s conference at a glance with this year’s conference at a glance, you see that only 12 of the sessions and two of the workshops are repeats. And four of the “repeat sessions” are Site Clinics or the Organic Listings Forum, which examine new web sites or issues every year. This means almost 88% of the content at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008 will be brand new!

The rate of change in the search engine marketing industry comes as a surprise to some – especially the bean counters over in finance. They act like going to one SEM conference a year ago means you don’t really need to go to another one this year. But you can’t learn search engine marketing the way they learned the multiplication tables.

So, if they give you any grief about taking a team of people to SES San Jose 2008, remind them that it will get increasingly harder to manage the bottom line if you don’t continually find new ways to increase the top line. Who knows, skipping this year’s conference could end up costing a bean counter his or her full-time position next year.

If the folks in finance don’t buy that argument, then build your business case for attending the show. And do it in the next couple of weeks.

If you sign up before August 1, you can save $200 off the cost of Platinum Passport. And, if you bring more than two people from your organization, the third, fourth, and others registering at the same time qualify for 50% off their registration fee.

I’m not making this up. Read the registration information for yourself.

If you sign up for a full-day of the SEM training workshops, you’ll save $145 off the cost to two half-day workshops. And, if you make reservations by July 23, you should be able to find hotel rooms for $179 per night.

All in all, bringing a team of four people to the four-day Search Engine Strategies conference as well as the fifth day of SEM training can cost your company under $12,000 – less than $3,000 per person – not counting airline reservations.

This means your business will break even if your entire team discovers new Search Engine Marketing (SEM) opportunities, learns better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, or finds different Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising options that generate an extra $1,000 a month. And, if each member of your four-person team finds a way to generate an extra $1,000 a month, then you’ll be showing a very healthy return on investment (ROI) from bringing them to SES San Jose.

How realistic is this scenario?

According to the Search Engine Strategies San Jose website, you will learn:
• How search engines list Web sites for free and through paid placements;
• How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors;
• How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results;
• How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy – and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t!
• How to build links that generate traffic to your Web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines;
• What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search, and how you can profit from it.

But wait! There’s more!

According to data and research provided by Efficient Frontier, the average cost-per-click (CPC) in the “Total finance” category, which includes auto finance, banking, credit, financial information, insurance, lending, and mortgage, was $2.96 in May. So, if each member of your team finds a way to generate 338 extra clicks per month – less than a dozen clicks a day – then he or she will be providing your organization with a very healthy ROI.

Can each member of your team come back from SES San Jose with new, better or different ways to generate a dozen extra clicks a day? That’s the business case that you can make to the bean counters. And trust me on this: The folks over in finance will love it when you talk numbers to them.

So, let’s say you get the okay to bring a team of four all the way to San Jose. They still won’t be able to cover every session. And now each person is on the hook for coming back to the office with new SEM opportunities, better SEO techniques, and different PPC advertising options that can generate 338 extra clicks a month.

Tomorrow, I’ll recommend the sessions and workshops that an SES newbie, an SEO specialist, a PPC specialist, and an SEM veteran should attend – to ensure that your business gets the biggest bang for its bucks. It’s not a difficult task. There is so much great content being presented.

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The ’state-of-the art’ day care facilities at Google have increased their pricing to around what it costs to go to some community colleges, according to the New York Times. While the free food, refreshments and candy, once looked upon as a great perk by many outsiders considering a Google job, now seem to be considered pampering by co-founder Sergey Brin, NYT reports.

Though a Google spokesperson denied it, several people who attended a T.G.I.F. meeting in June claim Brin said “he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” NYT stated.

Hey Sergey, you keep these people at their desks longer - or is it productivity or new thoughts outside the box are not coming as rapidly as in the past? Maybe the $72 million a year spent on food is cutting into Sergey’s private income, and he does not want child care to take even more.

Given stock prices are a long way from the $700 highs of last year, it should now not fall on the non-millionaire employees to make up the short fall.

Seems to me this approach is a lot like the minimum bid increases that saw the regular advertiser pay for Google’s efforts to stop arbitragers - they were so profitable Google continued this with implementation of Quality Scores to keep minimum bids and have all new advertisers pay premiums starting out their accounts.

Working at Google was once almost an extension of living with your parents, but now it seems dad is starting to charge rent.

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As many of your know I am a big fan of both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. But these excellent tools, along with Google Webmaster Tools are treated by most people as individual single-purpose applications.

There are tremendous synergies possible when you combine them in innovative ways. For the first time, the product teams for each one are stepping out of their respective silos and putting on a joint webinar about how to get the most out of combining them.

More info on the The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer webinar (July 8th, 9-10am PDT)

I strongly urge everyone to listen in…

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Compete.com has released a PRO version of its analytics product. Compete PRO is available in three different price levels: $199/month for Intro, $299/month for Standard, and $499/month for Advanced. Enterprise editions are also available.

Included in the PRO version:

• Search analytics: new search term, site and market category report packages so brands and agencies can ascertain competitors’ strategies and then adjust their own.
• Site analytics: new metrics, daily updates and a full 25 months of history reporting on Reach, Page View and Visitor Engagement for more than 1,000,000 websites.
• Ranked lists: downloadable lists of up to 500,000 sites for the fastest-growing, most influential sites across multiple categories delivering the most comprehensive view of Internet traffic.

Stephen DiMarco, chief marketing officer at Compete had this to say about the announcement:

Compete PRO gives marketers a single place to go for premium-grade online metrics, something that until now was available to only a select few. We designed the platform around the way online marketers work, addressing their feedback that other data providers are too costly, don’t enable them to drill down into critical segments and aren’t built to translate what they see into revenue-generating results.

Last summer, Compete launched a pay-as-you-go analytics service, enabling users to purchase credits that would allow them to view a set number of results. Earlier this year, Compete was acquired by London-based market research firm TNS.

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Recently, Google has been resisting calls to add a privacy link to their home page, saying searchers can simply type “Google privacy policy” in the search box to find the info. Plus, they didn’t want to mess up that beautiful front page - well, except for links to advertising and business solutions that will bring them money.

But the search giant has finally caved and added the 7 letter word to its page with a link to the policy. And as John Paczkowski points out at AllThingsD, the link just happened to go up just after a judge ruled that Google has to hand over YouTube user logs in a suit brought against it by Viacom.

Meanwhile, YouTube addressed the ruling on its blog. While they’re planning on complying with the ruling, they are working with Viacom lawyers to remove at least some of the information they’ll be handing over:

Of course, we have to follow legal process. But since IP addresses and usernames aren’t necessary to determine general viewing practices, our lawyers have asked their lawyers to let us remove that information before we hand over the data they’re seeking. (You should know, IP addresses identify a computer, not the person using it. It’s not possible to determine your identity solely based on your IP address. Rather, an IP address can reveal what geographic area you’re connecting from, or which Internet service provider you’re using.)

What do you think of Google’s move to put the privacy link on the homepage? How about YouTube’s decision to comply with the law? Fire off in the comments!

Related Reading:
If You Give Google a Cookie
Google: A Clear & Present Danger to Corporate Data Privacy
Google Privacy Practices Under Attack
Google Defends Data-Retention Practices

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Google is assuring users of its Analytics product that their data is protected. Apparently, the recent announcements of Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner had some web site owners concerned about how much data sharing was going on among the various offerings.

Brett Crosby from the Google Analytics team went to the blog to allay fears:

Google Analytics doesn’t share individual, site-level information with Google Trends for Websites or Google Ad Planner. These products gather data from multiple sources, then check the data against anonymous, aggregate, industry benchmarking data within Google Analytics. This helps Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner calibrate category data and correct for under- or over-reporting in certain verticals. The benchmarking data comes from Google Analytics customers who’ve chosen to share their data in aggregate.

This isn’t the first time fears over data collected by Google Analytics have popped up. But not everyone is worried.

When I spoke with Crosby last month, he told me that for every person who expresses fears over data collection in Analytics, there is another who wants to know why more isn’t being done with the data. He told me that Analytics works hard to strike a balance for people of both viewpoints, allowing those who want to share in the hopes of developing deep integrations with other Google products the ability to do so.

Of course, there’s only so far you can take integration. Google Analytics does not affect a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

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Pay-per-click advertising is 10 percent art, and 90 percent science. In today’s debut Profitable PPC column, “PPC Advertising: Art or Science?,” David Szetela begins showing you the fundamentals and secrets of successful PPC advertising in his new weekly search advertising series.

»Full story

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