Imagine your beautifully designed email, which has carefully crafted copy to drive maximum donations this holiday season appearing as a mess of HTML code in a block of text in one person’s email client.

Imagine that same email appearing without any images to spruce up the holiday element of the greeting.

Imagine that same email again appearing perfectly as intended.

This is what is happening to nearly all email marketers and email newsletters designers. Emails are being rendered differently based on the program used to open the email. Just see this dizzying array of charts on the CSS support in some major email clients.

For more on why web standards matter for email, discover the Email Standards Project.

As a follow on from Nate’s post the other day, where he talked about this being the ‘donation season‘, I thought that we should throw out some advice for anyone intending to put out a direct call for donations using Google’s Pay Per Click program.  Whenever you place a call for donations in your ad copy, you must ensure that the landing page that you’re pointing to has the details of your 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, otherwise your ads will be denied by Google, and your campaign may screech to a halt.

Usually ads placed in Google are manually reviewed days, weeks or even months down the road, but it seems as though at this time of the year Google has placed a strict watch on donation appeals in ad copy, so save yourself the hassle and make sure you’ve got the right text on your landing page(s), besides having that text there is probably going to lead to more donations anyway, as visitors will see that your organization is a legitimate nonprofit.

When you push out something to the public, you want to make sure that it puts your best foot forward. Make sure that you proof read it, have someone else read it, if changes are required, make them, then have someone else proof it. It sounds simple, but not everyone does it…

From the otherwise excellent FIFA announcement about their commitment to social causes in Africa (bold added below for emphasis)

With the world’s focus on Africa, the broad consensus on the need for action towards social change and the acknowledgement that football itself is a powerful tool for development, the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ represents a unique opportunity to use football at a catalyst for social development. The 2010 FIFA World Cup Official Campaign (link to introductory text) is designed to harness the power the beautiful game for positive social change across Africa.

…and now if anyone copies that text, or links to it they’re not getting the link benefit they may have received had the link been there…

For non-profits this is crunch time. Between now and the end of the year many non-profits will bring in over half of their yearly revenue.  Competition for your generosity is stiff as their 2008 budgets largely rest on how successful they are at finding new donors and persuading their current donors to reach deeper into their pockets.  The challenge is figuring out how to stick out at this time of year when all the other non-profits are also battling for your attention.  Email is a given for any non-profit in their efforts to cultivate their current list, yet many don’t follow these simple steps to create a successful email appeal series.  Most have caught on to PPC and as a result have driven up costs significantly in the past few years for end of year giving keywords.  Many have also turned to banner ads which typically don’t have much success in delivering donations.  So what are non-profits supposed to do to gain the upper hand if they’ve already tested the methods above and are leveraging those that work?  Well there are plenty of other options in a Web 2.0 world that’s full of social networks and bloggers who are passionate about the numerous causes that non-profits stand for.

Over at netsquared.org they have recently compiled thoughts and recommendations by members of their community on how non-profits can use the social web during the “giving season.”  Take a look and you might just find a new avenue that you may not have previously thought of.  Also check out Integrating Marketing Efforts for Your Nonprofit Social Media Plan and 5 Easy Social Media Wins for the Nonprofit Organization for more ideas.

Last night I spent some time working on an audit for a client. One of the issues that I look for is the potential for duplicate content. What is Duplicate Content? Well, here’s the ‘official’ definition from the Official Google Blog:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

So why is it a concern? Well, let’s turn back to Google and see what they have to say on the issue:

During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.

One of the more commons pages that you’ll see duplicate content issues with is the most visited and most visible page on your site. Yes, your home page. Think about how people may get to it:-

• http://yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com/index/
• http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm

If they all show the same page with different URLs, how are the engines supposed to know which is the one that you want displayed?So what can you do? Well, in the above example it’s actually quite simple. Just 301 the ones you don’t want to the one that you do want. (a 301 is a permanent redirect that indicates to the search engines that the one the others are pointing to is the ‘prime’ page).

The site I was looking at tonight did their home page redirects perfectly, so no problem there. As I worked through their site, I noticed that they had 4 regions that you could select, based on your location. Each of these regions had slightly different pages that you could access, however the core of the site was the same regardless of region. Yep, the exact same content, each with different URLs. So what’s our recommendation in that instance? Obviously we don’t want to have to do a 301, as we don’t want to force everyone into the same region. Instead what we recommend in this situation is to use the noindex tag on the duplicate pages, so that the engines won’t index them, therefore no duplicate content issue.

Other possible solutions would include:

• blocking directories in the robots.txt file, which the structure of this client’s site would support, but it would then prevent the unique pages from being indexed.
• not putting the same content out across these different regions.
• Restructuring the architecture so that the core pages are ‘core’, yet the site is still aware of the regional selection, and modifies the navigational choices accordingly.

Also, don’t forget that sometimes the duplicate content issue may not be of your own doing. If someone steals your content and posts it on their site, the search engines have to make a judgment call as to which is the originator and which are the ‘copycats’. They may not always get it right…

As one of the speakers for this session I wasn’t able to take notes, so let me start out by apologizing to my fellow panelists Mikkel deMib Svendsen and Mark Rogers.  I also didn’t take notes for my presentation, but I have put the slides up in the resources section for your reading pleasure.

The big takeaways from the session:

• People can impact you negatively and positively through their actions.
• Never make a call to the lawyer your first response, even if you’re completely in the right (or believe yourself to be so).
• Monitor, Monitor, Monitor.
• A reputation problem can appear very quickly (less than a minute).
• Not responding correctly to the problem can cause the problem to snowball out of control.

• Moderated by Jake Bailee
• Ken McGaffin from WordTracker
• Dixon Jones from Receptional
• Rob Kerry from Ayima

Up first was Ken McGaffin

First, a definition – What is cutting edge? – the most fashionable or the latest and most advanced, they don’t mean the same thing.
Example – Wordtracker free keyword tool. Most people used Overture then moved to a paid tool. So Wordtracker reacted quickly and pushed out a free tool.

• Emailed their list of experts and writers
• Pushed a release out on PRWEB

Result: a feature piece on the WSJ & Thousands of inbound links, many from quality sites

Then he made a slight change in the positioning of the link from the free tool to the paid tool, and traffic shot up dramatically. Don’t forget your SEO and to look at your analytics

1. Find out who links to you now, and who brings you traffic
2. Get the most out of what you already have
   1. Encourage deep lnks to specific links
   2. Ask for Keyword rich Links
   3. Explore relationships
   4. Consider Joint Publications
3. Look at market segments where you’re weak
   1. Carry out kw research
   2. Find the important authority sites
   3. Test markets with articles off and on site
4. Look for emerging markets and establish your position early- Microtrends by Mark J Penn (book)
   1. Does the market exist and is it relevant
   2. Use PR to establish position
   3. Customize product offerings
5. Plan initiatives for the year ahead
   1. Identify the Business Objectives
   2. Then Create Content and foundation
   3. Launch
   • http://labs.receptional.com/links
   • User: smxlondon Password: smxlondon

Next up Dixon Jones
Links are now such a large part of the SEO equation, link building is so much more necessary
Getting indexed was easy

Link tool available for the next 2 weeks

1. Strategic Partnerships
2. Out with the bomb (Google bombing allegedly removed) – still works on image results
3. Out of space – Google Earth – Maxim giant poster
4. Insider Trading – Internal Linking – Siloing
5. Insider Tricks – mistyped urls – mod speeling

Last up Rob Kerry
What’s hot and what’s not?

• The good – DMOZ, Yahoo, BOTW, etc
• The bad – Built for Search Engine Directories
• The ugly – fake page rank directories, spammy backlinks, promoting link exchange and accepting all sites

Google promotes snitching on link builders
Quality over Quantity – 2 great links can be better than 1,000 bad links
High Page rank != high rankings – link age and topic are becoming more important
Image is everything – Some webmasters respond better to link requests based on the picture they form of you.
For sites that link to you, to get spiders to realise that they’re updated send the url to pingomatic
Paid links
Text link ads publishers losing their ability to pass on link value
Other major paid link networks get filtered using pattern matching
Even link acquisitions are under threat from ‘sponsored links’ and ‘advertise here’ footprints

Don’t waste your money:
Avoid broker footprints
Be stubborn when agreeing upon a link location
Try Paid Reviews, no footprint and great links
Stay away from link exchanges
Link pages make your site look bad to both visitors and search engines
Backlinks from link pages hold minimal value
it is the most obvious form of artificial linking

Behold the marvelous magic link network
Search Agency Spam networks
#1 today gone tomorrow
Digital point link co-op
A cross between a link exchange and link exchange
Currently used and abused in the finance and ringtone verticals
Content for links
Offer content in exchange for links
Control where and how your links appear
Guarantees a quality page for your link
Cost effective for those with in-house editorial
Publishers don’t see it as a paid link
In line links are much safer than blog rolls & Directories

This session starred

• Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia
• Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility
• Cam Balzer from Double Click Performics
• Lisa Ditlefsen from Base one interactive

First up is Kelvin Newman talking about the etiquette of friending and the importance of connections in Social Media Marketing.

Friends make you influential, it’s much easier to make friends online than it is in real life.

How to do it?

• Make a long term hit list of people that you’d like to be your friends – people that can help you out, and people that you can help out. Look for common interests.
• Don’t target the hotshots
• Make yourself easy to find – same identity
• Never let a friend request be the first contact
• Give first, take later
• Limit your friends:- more than 250 friends makes you look like a Floozie, how can you provide value to the relationships?
• Connect not Collect…Build relationships

Next up is Lisa Ditlefsen with her presentation – SMO – an SEO’s best friend
66% of people visit social media sites
Facebook has a unique audience of 16.5 million users with an audience growth hof 110%

Time per person on Social Media sites has increased

• Facebook has an average time of 1:07:56 per user
• YouTube 43:50
• MySpace 2:38:14

Facebook Demographics

• 55.53% female
• 44.47% male
• 30.78% 25-34 age group

Don’t forget SEO when doing SMO, don’t forget SMO when doing SEO
SMO can generate hundreds of thousands of links in a short period of time
An increase in awareness will increase the number of searches for the brand

Next up Andrew Girdwood talking about Social Media in Europe

In Sweden:

• Bookmark sites are pretty rare
• Swedes really like blogs
• Very few PR sites
• Sweden has YouTube alternatives – fejmtv.se bubblare.se
• Swedes like creating content

In Norway:

• Blogging is much less popular
• Voting sites are much more popular
• Norwegians like accessing and rating content

Be careful what you localize, don’t over translate, in Sweden don’t translate Page Rank, use the English, it’s what they use.

If there’s an established player in the market use it

In Germany:

• 100′s of social networks in Germany – fragmented audience
• iGoogle very popular
• Company blogs rare – personal blogging bigger
• Mr Wong biggest social network site

In Italy:

• Growing market
• Corporate blogging has become more fashionable in the last month or so
• Italian language press releases increasing

In Spain :

• Blogger is popular there and in Portugal
• No shortage of soial networks
• Ranking sites

Just remember it’s a fragmented social network world

• Second Life investment is global
• Second life is very popular in Italy
• Orkut big in Brazil
• Blogger is big in Portugal

Last presenter is Cam Balzer with his presentations on SEMs: SNA! (Social Network Advertising)
Web 1.0 = finding stuff – SEM
Web 2.0 = Create, share and interact

New functionality coming out in Facebook to allow businesses to have people register for events to branded pages
He then walked through demographic targeting in Facebook – Social Ads. Demographic targeting is easy to set up. The actual ad itself is bigger than 70 characters, and allows you to upload a photo. Price is auction based PPC along with CPM activity.

Is Facebook the next AdWords or the next Overture?

Massive microtargeted campaigns
Optimized in real-time
Managed to very tight metrics
Supported by bespoke technology

This first session stars Massimo Burgio of Global Search Interactive, Robin Goad of Hitwise, and Piers Stobbs of ComScore Europe, and is moderated by Chris Sherman.

Robin Goad was first to speak.

He showed a bar chart of market share for October for the top 4 SEs in each country for the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. The chart shows that Google is not as dominant in all countries – i.e. Hong Kong < 40%, Yahoo is ~ the same level as Google in HK.

The next graphic showed the number of words per search query by country. In the US the tail is longer, in the comparison countries, the UK has the shortest tail.

The trend for branded search is universal, it dominates everywhere. Social networks have taken over as the most searched for brands. 1.25% of ll searches in the UK are for Bebo. 4% of all searches in the UK are for Bebo, myspace, Facebook and ebay.

The next graphic displlayed the differences in a vertical – travel. Showing search terms in the UK, US and Australia. The US has a much greater % of searches for maps. In Australia more people search for flights than holidays. The UK has more searches for price comparison / travel agency sites. In the UK people search for airports, in the US and Australia people tend to search for airlines.

Image search is most popular in the US, followed by the UK and Australia. Hong Kong has a much lower % of image searches. People are now spendinng less time on image search – shows that the right images are coming up more and more now.

The UK is more reliant on search for traffic generation. Followed by Australia and the US. Hong Kong has a much lower % of search traffic, with Social Networks providing a much higher % for them.

Next up Piers Stobbs

The perception is that Google rules the world of search globally. They do have a 63% worldwide, which lends credence to that perception, Yahoo comes in 2nd, Baidu 3rd…

In September there were 1.4m searches per minute. 19.4 billion searches in Asia Pacific, 19.2 billion searches in Europe, and only 15.3 billion searches in North America… 3/4 of all searches happen outside the US. Yet Google only generates 50% of revenue outside the US, much bigger opportunity for monetization.

In europe an average of 91 searches per user per month, the US only 74…

Google is actually stronger in France(89%) and Germany (93%) than in the UK(82%) market share.

In Russia, the top SE is Yandex (57%) – a local Search Engine (Yet Another Index), Google only has a 23% market share. 3rd is Rambler -14%. Yahoo only has a 3% share, and MSN ~1%.

In China – Baidu has 61%, Google 20%, Yahoo 7%.

South Korea – Naver has a 74% market share, Daum 12%, Yahoo 7%, Google only 4%, Empas 3% – the 3 local players have over 89% of all searches in SK.

So all in all there are markets where Google is not the leader, so you need to make sure that you look at the countries that you’re targeting to make sure that you’re aiming for the right market for your international campaigns.

Piers feels as though UI improvements to SEs is the main way that SEs will gain market share.

Specialization / vertical search are other opportunities.

Last up was Massimo, his discussion is going to focus on SEMPO and the work that they do around the world, through their committees and working groups.
SEMPO groups drive local initiatives in local markets. Focus on each market, partner with colleges and universities.
Look for the SEMPO annual research to be released early 2008 (the call for the questionnaire went out this week).

One of the Q&A questions was related to the impact of social network sites on the global search landscape.

More visits to Social Networks than to web based mail applications. Social Networks have now become home bases for people. 1/5 of all page impressions are on Social Networks in the UK, only 1/10 are on search sites…

So here I am at SMX-London. The first session of the first day is the keynote speech given by Mario Quieroz, the vice president of products, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Google. Uh oh, there’s an issue with the sound system, the right hand side speaker isn’t working, which would of course be the side that I’m sitting at. I’m going to have to strain to hear.

The first question asked by Chris Sherman, the moderator, was how Google goes about adapting their products for different locations. Mario talked about them wanting to open their software centers around the world so that they could take advantage of the talent pool outside of the US. They currently have 12 development centers in the US.

Data acquisition is an issue in different countries as they obviously require different source data

12 developers in Zurich have responsibility for adapting Google Maps to different locales.

Google Israel is the base for Google Trends.

London has a large development center for Mobile. TV advertising development work is done both in the US and UK offices.

Google is not moving away from being a search company “Search quality is ultimately the most important thing” to them.

The next question was related to corporate culture, and the transition from a small company in a small geographic area to a large worldwide corporation.

Handling diverse cultures is more art than science. There is a balance between building a generic product, and one for each country / region. Its impossible to create custom products for each country. However, some countries do require a special focus i.e. Russia, Israel, Poland (Eastern Europe), so when that need is identified, they’ll put an office in there.

The next question was on the rollout of Universal Search: How do they decide how and what to blend?

The rollout has started in Europe with Images & Maps. As for what they decide to blend, it really depends on the usage.

How does he feel about Facebook as competition?

Google was working on OpenSocial before Facebook opened up their APIs. Observing what happened with Facebook allowed Google to make some changes to OpenSocial before it launched.

iGoogle is one of their most popular and fastest growing properties, allowing users to customize their user experience.

Mobile? What should we be doing to prepare ourselves?
Expect mobile phones to become more open for people to create more beneficial applications. He doesn’t know where it’s going to go (hard to predict), but by opening it up it allows outside creativity to push it into new and exciting areas.

What’s the role of personalized search, and how is that impacted by privacy concerns?
It’s very important, and its success depends on protecting user privacy.

What are the bet Market Opportunities outside of the Western world?
Eastern Europe and Africa are places to look at. There are over 300 million potential internet users in the arabic world, less than 1% of the internet is in arabic, Google has an office in Nairobi to try to figure out how to get more access to people in Kenya, etc.

What’s his favorite Google product?
Mario likes geo-products such as Google Earth, but his favorite product is docs and spreadsheets (not trying to compete with msoft, but he says it’s makes work so easy for him, with the geo-spread teams that he works with). He loves Adsense, not just for the money it brings in to the company. He also likes gmail’s new capability to open a doc attachment as a Google doc.

Which search engine would you use if Google vanished? He still has a Yahoo mail account, but hasn’t done too many searches on other engines for a while, when he does it’s usually just for customer experience / comparison.

The only question from the floor was from Danny Sullivan – How do you handle cross boundary laws, especially censorship? A blog post went out today on this very topic. They’ll adhere to the laws of the countries they are in, but sometimes they’ll try to discuss with appropriate people how certain laws should be interpreted.