Jennifer Slegg has 52 different, excellent ways to make your blog more user- and search engine-friendly. One of those classic pages that could save the weary digital marketer several hours work.

TV executive Andy Duncan yesterday pointed out that if Google continues to generate the same proportion of its revenue from the UK (it generated a massive 15% here in the first six months of its current financial year) it will net $1.57bn this year alone and will overtake ITV as the single largest recipient of advertising dollars within two years.

These numbers are extraordinary given the slenderness of most brands’ investment in internet marketing and advertising.  Online is still the poor relation of TV in terms of resources.  Teams are small, and budgets are spent on a combination of banners, promotional microsites and paid search in patterns that have changed little since 2001.  Perhaps this is the wake-up call UK corporations have needed to put more of their resources into online.

Robert Scoble is suggesting that obscure bloggers might consider linking to the word “brrreeeport”.

The idea is that enough people link they they will build their authority courtesy of Scoble. Of course this only really works if someone else manages to interpose their take on the “brrreeeport” phenomenon and gain relevant authority. (And that’s real authority, not the Technorati sort) And that authority is only valuable in the context of someone searching on the word “brrreeeport”. My interest in this is that it is a text book demonstration, using humans, of what black hat influence brokers are constantly doing with spam blogs/splogs.

But there is an upside. Say if you are a marketer, with a message that you are blogging about. You encourage bloggers to use your message in a link using a particular keyword, and you reward the most imaginative of them with a frontpage link. We were talking to a publisher this morning and this would be super-relevant to them. Each time an author’s name or book title was mentioned in an amusing way the publisher could highlight the link, and share some of the brand’s authority with that blogger. A cool viral campaign.

[Incidentally - I came across this post as a result of a mail from my old friend from Amazon - Dave Mutton - who has launched a cool site called Blogcode . The idea of it is to find blogs similar to mine - kind of opt-in collaborative searching for blogs. Neat idea.]

The phenomenon of consumer blogs having such a disproportionate influence on major brands, which we highlighted in our “Search is Brand” study, derives in part from the failure of brands to create functional, easily indexed sites for themselves, and to produce lively, relevant and topical content.

But some companies get over this by cheating. They do deals with unethical agencies who use spam and dummy websites to create phoney relevance and push a brand up to the top of a search term willy-nilly. We have been anxious for a while about this, as large brands have been using this technique not realising the risks (pace the BMW ban) or suffering from the fact that their competitors are doing so.

Ashley Friedlein, writing on e-Consultancy’s forums, points out that some black hat tactics appear to be working for some SEO-related consultancies. A company called Oyster-web seems to have got itself up to number 2 in the “Search engine optimisation” search, but its business seems to be selling leads to SEO companies.

At the same time Google appears to have woken up to this to the extent of going after first BMW and now some SEO companies to punish. It’s very surprising that they have picked a highly reputable agency like Scotland’s Bigmouthmedia to zero-rank. Bigmouth have some very respectable clients and it would be surprising if they have knowingly done anything unethical, but it is a chilling development.

Alexa, the search engine best known for its toolbar and traffic-based services, is reported in both The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian to be planning to allow web developers and others in the industry to ask for customised searches, looking for images or music files, for example, during web crawls.

For instance, someone who wanted to build a podcasting search engine could use Alexa’s tools and computers to request specialized audio files that were newly available on the Web.

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com, and the tool will be offered as part of the Amazon web services. The platform launched in beta yesterday and has been greeted with a guarded enthusiasm by John Battelle in his Searchblog.

While Alexa is still small in terms of Google or Yahoo, I’d hope that this should help bring us user-friendly and focused products to help us get what we want when we go online. I’ll be interested to see what happens, and how the major search engine comanies might respond.

As the riots continue across France, the UMP party of prime minister interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy has created a stir by purchasing keywords like “riots” and “violence” on Google AdWords, and placing a political advertisement there. The ad is at the top of the paid search and leads to an _AcgBAQ&num=1&q=http://www.u-m-p.org/site/soutien.php”>online petition in support of M. Sarkozy, who is a candidate for the French presidency. Controversy has surrounded the fact that one of the words the agency has purchased is “racaille” - or scum - the contemptuous term Sarkozy used of the rioters.

The campaign is the work of French agency L’enchanteur des nouveaux médias. It will set a powerful precedent.

Saul Hansell in the New York Times has produced a comprehensive analysis of how Google has come to dominate advertising - that is not just online advertising, but advertising in general.

We launched our “Search is Brand” whitepaper at the end of June, discussing how customers experiences of brands was increasingly dictated by search - and pointing out that the search gives a lot of prominence to detractors. Our means of publicising the white paper was to blog it, and to email the key opinion-brokers such as Steve Rubel, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Elizabeth Albrycht, Rok Hrastnik and Guilllaume du Gardier. We also talked to our good friends at New Media Knowledge, e-Consultancy and Net Imperative. The cash budget was zero (although it helped to know who the opinion-brokers were).

Prior to the publication of the white paper the “Search is Brand” search on Google turned up citations like “Yahoo search is brand new” in about 50-60 results. As of Thursday 11th August 2005 there are 846 results. 90% are references to our white paper. This process has taken six weeks. References are growing geometrically - when we checked on Monday the number of results was 737.

Our experience suggests that if you if you identify a unique idea or “meme” and decides you want to colonise it, blogging is a highly effective way to do so.

Conversely, although the white paper received coverage in PR week and Campaign, the influence of coverage in these publications was far weaker, partly because the journalist, writing in an offline format, didn’t link to us or use our exact terms, and when the article was published online, it tended to be cut and pasted, again without links or keywords.

To spell out our conclusions (at the risk of stating the obvious):

1) blogs offer you total control over your message and keywords;

2) blogs reward other bloggers for reusing your words and keywords because a) it is easier to link to something than copy or paraphrase it, and because b) linking offers a fellow blogger a chance to associate their comment with the original material and boost their own traffic;

3) off-line media tends to weaken your message because a) they paraphrase it, and b) they choose keywords reflecting their own agenda, and because they are off-line;

4) the combined effects of a number of different sites using the same keywords to link to your site powerfully impacts your Google algorithmic ranking on the message and keywords you have chosen.

Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.

The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.

This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.

This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found

http://www.atomised.org/smartcar/faq.php

Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.

Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:

1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ

2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)

Online PR gurus Shel Holtz and Steve Rubel have linked to our white paper Search is Brand dealing with the influence of online detractors and methodologies for coping.

Rubel suggests that one way forward is pointed by CommonCraft who deliberately targeted a #1 Google slot for “weblogs and business” and achieved it. Commentators on Micropersuasion suggest that this approach becomes more difficult the larger your brand is.

This is true, but Search is Brand shows that you can target smaller search phrases successfully, even if you are a big brand - like Madonna! The report shows how she could optimise her website if there were rumours of marital problems with Guy Ritchie, for example.

To take a theoretical example, Madonna might want to optimise her web site for the phrase ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, and point people to positive content on the site that emphasises how happy she and Guy are, having recently renewed their wedding vows. Then, should the marriage hit the rocks, and more people start making the search ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, the site content can be updated to give her side of the story ahead of the celebrity gossip sites which might not be so positive and promoted via the paid-for listings.