Editor’s Note: In the first part in our series on Optimizing for Relevancy, we discussed optimization, contextual advertising, and semantic analysis; in the second, we explained how bots work, optimal web page anatomy and site structure. In this, the third installment, Cody and Amit school us on writing content that works for both bots and bipeds.

How to write good content
Barbie says, “Math is hard.” We say, “Writing good content is tough.” While we are not about to give you tips on how to improve you literary skills, we have some do’s and don’ts that will allow you to make the most of what you have.

Content Do’s

• Write for users. Users come to your page to read your content, not to click on ads. The clicks just happen.
• Maintain your editorial integrity. Write unique articles that drive traffic to your site.
• Take time to optimize your web pages. Use distinct titles, headers and section headlines for each article.
• Limit the number of low-content pages on your site. If you have a page with lot of images, make sure you use alternate text.
• Maintain a high “signal-to-noise” ratio (more on this below).

Remember that high-paying ads on your site do not necessarily mean high revenue. It is important that users click on those ads for you to gain any financial benefit. Relevancy drives click-through-rate. Aim to make the content relevant to your users’ interests, which will help make the ads more appealing to your users. The more clicks you get, the more revenue you earn, and the more we learn about your page.

Tag: You’re it!
That sounds so meta, doesn’t it? But seriously, meta tags play an important factor in helping us determine what a page is about. If you take some time to work on your meta tags, it will result in better targeted ads for you and an easier time for search engines.

Here are some helpful tips for meta tags:

1. Place tags as high as possible in a page’s code; they should be the first thing that we see when analyzing your site.

2. Create compelling meta titles and descriptions with clear calls to action.

3. Include the most desired keywords, but keep repetition of individual words to a minimum. Place the most desired keywords at the front of the tag string. And don’t put any words in your tags that aren’t on your actual page. You don’t want to get spam email; and we don’t want to analyze spammy tags. We’ll just delete them, just like you did with that email with some strange pharmaceutical name in the subject line.

4. Exact per-tag character limits vary by the service that is analyzing your page, but in general try to keep your maximum per-tag character limits—including spaces and punctuation—to the following:

Meta Title Tag — 70 characters
Meta Description Tag — 250 characters
Meta Keyword Tags — comma delimited; 250 characters

Signal-to-noise ratio
Try to keep the content of each page focused on one or two topics at most. For example, let’s say you have a site about knitting. You might want to have a page dedicated entirely to yarn and yarn types. In that case, you’d want to repeat the word “yarn” multiple times on the page. But the page shouldn’t be “keyword-stuffed”—that is, the content should still be very useful and user-focused.

Most of this requires some initial effort to get started, but it is easy to fall into these good habits once you get going. Make these your rules to blog and publish by—they will be good for your users, good for our semantic analyzers, and good for your wallet. You can even turn it into a bit of a game: Make small changes here and there, and analyze the results in terms of the two key drivers, revenue and traffic. 

Implement, measure, optimize, repeat.

Next time: Content Don’ts

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager 

Introducing “WOMM,” and Finding the Right Influencers to Enhance Your Brand

Editor’s Note: When I heard Louise Rijk speak at last fall’s Webmaster World, Vegas conference on a panel with Lawrence Coburn, Rand Fishkin and Lee Odden I was immediately struck by the depth of her knowledge in guerrilla marketing and asked her to pen a piece on the subject of her talk, “Word-of-Mouth Marketing,” or WOMM. In the fourth chapter in our ongoing series on driving traffic, Louise introduces you to the concept of WOMM and shows you how to find the right “influencers” who can make a difference to your brand.

What Is Word of Mouth Marketing?
“Word of mouth” (WOM) is the oldest form of marketing. WOM is the act of people providing information and making honest recommendations to other people about a brand, product or service. Today this is often performed by what we call “influencers,” those who are already successfully using products and services and are naturally inspired to talk positively about it.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) happens when marketers launch campaigns to influence and accelerate “organic” WOM. Unlike traditional offline and online marketing, WOMM is not about how many people you reach directly, but more about how many people pass your message on to other people. WOMM is, therefore, based on intense user engagement and primarily relies on finding and empowering “influencers,” opinion leaders who have extensive knowledge in a specific area, to spread the word about a product or service. WOMM requires an excellent product or service that influencers can use, be excited about, and talk about.

Although most WOMM still happens offline, online WOMM is growing fast. It includes online consumer activities using Internet technologies such as blogs, online forums, videos and podcasts to create consumer-generated media (CGM). Unlike offline conversation, online WOMM conversations don’t dissipate after the conversion ends. They exist as long as the site or vehicle stays live, are archived and indexed in search engines, and continue to be accessible to consumers.

Whether online or offline, a successful WOMM campaign involves true and passionate influencers who are willing spread the message. Here is a guided tour to finding your offering’s true influencers.

Who are the influencers?
In general, influencers are typically the 10 percent of individuals who are influencing the choices of the remaining 90 percent of the population. They are sitting at the top of the WOMM pyramid and possess usually three main characteristics: larger social networks than the average person, persuasive power and the drive to disseminate product or service information within their expertise.

Influencers are different from the general population in several ways:

• They are four times more likely to be associated with five or more organizations.
• They are four times more likely to be considered “experts” by others on a variety of general topics or issues.
• They are well connected, and have about three times more knowledge than the average person.
• They are twice as likely to recommend a product or service they like; and when they do, they are four times more likely to tell nine or more people about it.
• They are typically well traveled and are activist-oriented.
• They are willing to inform with feedback, ideas and competitive information on a consistent and regular basis.
• They do their research and uncover unethical programs and communications. For example, 72 percent double-checked the information they received with an offline source, and 69 percent with an online source (E-fluencials Study, 2001, Burson-Marsteller).

How to find and target influencers
An important step in finding the right influencers for a WOMM campaign is identifying those individuals who feel strongly about your brand, and giving them the means to participate. The most passionate influencers are often part of the current customer base, and can be located and engaged with the help of your marketing, sales and customer support departments.

Start with “listening.” Go online to find out who is talking about your products and services. This can be done by monitoring blogs (Blog Pulse, Technorati), news search alerts, online discussion forums, del.icio.us tag analysis, RSS feed monitoring (PubSub, Technorati) and other methods. Another, more automated way is to use professional online “listening services” from the various CGM analytics vendors, such as Cymfony, Nielson Buzz Metrics, Umbria, BuzzLogic and Intelliseek.

Interview and qualify potential influencers. Finding the right influencers for your WOMM campaign requires insight into their backgrounds, passions, motivations and aspirations.

Choose the right influencer partnerships. The ideal relationship is mutually beneficial—collaboration always beats paid partners.

In Part II of Word of Mouth Marketing, I’ll talk about how you can motivate, empower and retain your influencers.

—Louise Rijk, Co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Advanced Media Productions

“Congratulations on prospering in money” 

That’s how the traditional Chinese New Year’s greeting—gung hay fat choy—literally translates. A more nuanced translation might be, “Best wishes and congratulations. Have a prosperous and good year.”

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year, which marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. During the 15-day celebration, called the “Lantern Festival”:

• Scrolls are displayed on walls and doorways with messages of good health and luck, long life, prosperity and happiness.
• Firecrackers crackle in the streets to ward off wicked spirits.
• Red packets, known as lai see in Cantonese, and containing money in even denominations, are passed out to unmarried young people.
• Ancestors are honored and gods are thanked for their blessings.
• Homes are filled with flowers and fruit, symbolizing good luck and joy.
• Blossoms, symbolizing longevity and courage, are arranged.

China by the Numbers
The following eight metrics on China and the Chinese people were compiled in eight minutes using Yahoo! Search.

8—The number associated with sudden fortune and prosperity
16.5—Average hours Chinese Internet users spent online as of July 2006
778,400—The number of Chinese websites as of July 2006 (up from 110,000 in 2005)
60 million—Number of people of Chinese origin or descent not living in China
123 million—Number of Chinese Internet users as of July 2006
1.1 billion—Number of dollars spent online in 2005 by Chinese residents
1.3 billion—Number of people in China, 2006
10 trillion—Gross domestic product (purchasing power parity) of China in dollars

We at Yahoo! have to admit to a marked affinity with prosperity and big, lucky numbers—for our advertisers, our publishers, our users and, yes, ourselves. And we also like the idea of a 15-day party. We’d like to wish everyone in 4704, the Year of the Boar, a big gung hay fat choy!

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Suggestions for further reading on how to reel ‘em in

A few weeks back we published a guest column by search scenester and SEOmoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, about the art and science of “linkbait“—i.e., “content on a web site that targets link-friendly audiences such as bloggers, news sites and social media aggregation portals” in order to gain links, attract viewers and help improve in search rankings (and maybe even your CTR).

The piece turned out to be a pretty darn good example of linkbaiting itself, creating buzz across the blogosphere and gaining beaucoup trackbacks and in-links from enthusiastic publishers. One trackbacker, D-Blogged, even put together an “Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting Resources” that we thought might come in handy for those of you interested in further developing your own linkbaiting strategies.

Take me to the Ultimate Guide »

Props to D-Blog for all the hard work.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

The Yahoo! Searchlight Awards and more

If you happen to be in Manhattan on Thursday, February 22, be sure and drop by the Yahoo! Searchlight Award show, which will be held on the 8th floor of the Time-Life Building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. The entertaining and interactive show will celebrate the best and brightest in search advertising over the past year. A panel of industry experts will evaluate four agency search advertising campaigns and the audience will vote for the winner. While this isn’t exactly a publisher-centric event, it is a good chance to meet and greet successful folks in the search marketing field, get marketing ideas that you might be able to employ in your own business, be a part of the Yahoo! community, and have a good time. For more info, click here. 

More Upcoming Yahoo! Events
Yahoo! Publisher Network will be on-hand for these events over the coming weeks and months. Check back for more detail as the date of each draws near.

Lunch 2.0
When: February 21
Where: Yahoo! Mission College campus, Building 1, Training Rooms 3 &4
What: Meet us for sandwiches and lively conversation about what’s going on inside Yahoo! In addition to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, folks from Mail and MyBlogLog will also be on hand. Expect announcements!

South by Southwest Interactive
When: March 9 to 13
Where: Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
What: One of the best interactive meet-and-greets around, this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival will feature some of technology’s heaviest hitters. Yahoo! will be sponsoring a special party the evening of March 12, open to all registered SXSW Interactive attendees, and our own Cody Simms will be manning the panel “Online Publishers & Ad Networks” on March 10. 

Web BlogHer Business Summit ‘07
When: March 21 to 23
Where: Affinia Manhattan Hotel, New York City
What: A business summit for both women and men—web publishers, small business owners, media mavens, entrepreneurs and executives. Yahoo! Publisher Network will be welcoming all conference-goers with a cocktail party on opening night.

Web 2.0
When: April 15 to 18
Where: Moscone West Convention Center, San Francisco
What: The first event specifically designed to help teach Web 2.0 techniques and best practices to people in the trenches who are directly involved in the design, development, engineering, marketing and business of second-generation internet technology. We’ll be manning a booth, so look for us on the floor. (What’s web 2.0?)

EconSM
When: April 26
Where: Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles
What: We’re co-sponsoring The Economics of Social Media conference, which will focus on the business, financial and economic aspects arising out of the disruption being caused by the rise of social media, emerging business models, and how all this is changing the dynamics of many industries.

—Michael Mattis, Head Blogster

Harmonizing and monetizing

I’m always a fan of the un-conference conference, and Noah Kagan’s Community Next did not disappoint. It was complete with a Hawaiian lunch luau, Bong Vodka giveaways (good luck getting that through airport security), looking down on money-focused ventures (”do it for the love or go home”) and engaging speakers who left their sales pitches and boring Powerpoint slides at home (with just a few exceptions).

Stand-outs included interesting demos of Say Now from Nikhyl Singhai (MySpace’s most popular resident, Tila Tequila, leaving you a voicemail) and loopt, from “gray-haired” Mark Jacobstein (want to know how many of your friends are within a five-mile radius of your local watering hole via GPS-enabled cell-phones? No problem!); and entertaining presentations from the Threadless dynamic duo, Jeffrey Kaimikoff and Jake Nickell. (Their mantra: “Your Project is not Good Enough!”)

Indieclick’s Heather Luttrell was afforded a “full 15 minutes” of the one-day conference to discuss the four-letter word of all un-conferences—monetization.   Heather did a nice overview of the top-ten myths and misconceptions about growing and monetizing the web. “Number 5: Our audience won’t accept advertising.” I for one, am sold on monetizing the web.

She also encouraged adding links around ads that encouraged visitors to sign-up to premium memberships…thus eliminating ads and driving revenue through a subscriptions channel. (Better than the links that say, “click on me and support my site.”)

The team from Dogster, the dog-lover’s community site, shared its “Impact Horizon” approach to corporate development. The strategy included all facets of the business, from Human Resources down to the product itself. During the infancy of your company, you want to think small. You should expect to see results (or impact) from your efforts in weeks, not months, when you’re first starting out. Lesson: Don’t take on a project that won’t give you returns in the short term.

Think small to get projects off the ground and make contact; don’t swing for the fences, at least not early on.

Community Next seemed to attract an equal mix of attendees who had the next niche community site brewing in their minds and hearts (”It’s like Facebook, but for church-goers”) or products that community sites can use to keep themselves “sticky” (Say Now and loopt.)

Next year, let’s do it for two days and give monetization even more love.
 

Other Community Next coverage:

• Somewhat Frank
• Laughing Squid
• Listen Out Loud
• POP PR Jots

—Marc Levin, Senior Marketing Maven

Charlene Li blogs about whether blogging’s worth it

Charlene Li, one of our favorite bloggers from Forrester Research, has posted about her recently-released Forrester Research report “The ROI of Blogging,” which she wrote with colleague, Chloe Stromberg.

The value of blogging to a brand has been one of those open questions ever since businesses and entrepreneurs began to put the form to use for marketing, PR and customer relations purposes. But should businesses bother to blog? Note Li and Stromberg:

While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

Just how valuable can blogging be to a business? Is it worth the investment? Li and Stromberg say “yes.”

Among the corporate blogs that Li and Stromberg studied was General Motors’ FastLane Blog, the goal of which is “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers.” A key metric, they say, is comments (which not all corporate blogs allow):

FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila—there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white.

Although she admits their findings are somewhat subjective, Li believes that they have found “a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.”

We think blogging is definitely worth it, albeit with a few caveats.  Blogging represents a different kind of communication between businesses and their audiences—prospects, customers, the press and other interested parties—than traditional channels such as press releases or advertising. It requires a very different attitude, voice and tone in a networked community where the conversation is often two-way (and sometimes multi-way). A blog that sounds too much like a press release or looks like just another marketing vehicle is bound to fail. Striking a balance between getting your message across while serving the needs of your users and building community is critical.

For more, check out these posts on Charlene’s blog:

• New ROI of blogging report from Forrester
• Calculating the ROI of blogging
• Calculating the ROI of blogs – it’s not about the math

—Micheal Mattis, Blog Editor

New release: Yahoo! Site Explorer badge

Ever wonder who’s linking to your pages, and from where, but can’t be bothered to dig into your log files? Yahoo! Site Explorer offers lazy webmasters—like this one—an easy way to measure links to (and within) your site. Just go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and follow the instructions.

In addition, you can now share your linkbait success with the world by adding a Yahoo! Site Explorer badge to your site. This widget has a counter that displays how many links are coming into whatever page that it’s deployed on. When you or your users click on the badge, they’re taken to a page that lists who is linking to that page. As of this writing, our blog home page boasts more than 3000 links.

Setting up your site with a Site Explorer badge is easy. After you’ve set up your own Explorer account, just go the Site Explorer badge page, select your badge format, and copy and paste the code into your own website.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Please note Program Policies changes

Longtime blog readers will know already that we’re pretty picky when it comes to maintaining a quality network, even though we’re still in beta. It’s kind of an obsession, one you can read about here and here.

We’ve always maintained that artfully interweaving our ads with your original, relevant, entertaining content is a common sense best-practice. This helps ensure quality leads to our advertisers while helping you maintain your publishing credibility. Over the long term, enhanced credibility with users may lead to a wider audience and more frequent return visitors.

To encourage this best practice we have updated our Program Policies, which now require that no more than three ad units appear on a single page at one time.

Thanks for helping keep Yahoo! Publisher Network a high quality experience for everyone.

—The Management

Publisher Account Interface to experience scheduled maintenance February 2, from 5:00 p.m. to approximately  9:00 p.m, Pacific Time

On Friday, February 2  from 5:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m.., Pacific Time, we’ll be doing a little scheduled maintenance on the secure account interface. For the duration of this maintenance your account will be unavailable.
 

This will not impact your account earnings nor the serving of ads to your site.
 

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team