The Alchemy of Search

We enjoyed this excerpt from The Girlfriend Experience:

I’d like to send a personal shout-out to Lee Odden for running the best SEO book survey on his Online Marketing Blog. We certainly don’t mind coming home first as the Best SEO Book in 2009 in the minds of his awesome readers, especially when compared against the rockstar list of books under consideration.

And while we’re here, I would also like to thank Chris Sherman for his great review of the book on SearchEngineLand’s Best SEO Books of 2009 list.

In both lists The Art of SEO is compared alongside a solid lineup of SEO books by very accomplished experts in the field, many of whom are friends. It’s an honor to have our The Art of SEO included alongside these other great SEO books.

See you in 2010!

Marketers, Game On

Call it the new ROE (return on emotion). If you’re a gamer (or an up-to-speed technophile) you may have already heard of Sony’s new hands-free, emotion tracking game controller called ICU, which stands for Interactive Communication Unit, released this November at the Vision 2009 trade fair in Germany. While the controller raises the bar in the ultra competitive hands-free gaming space, it does so with a twist: this controller tracks emotion.

According to NewScientist:

ICU ‘reads’ facial expressions using a pattern-matching algorithm that has been trained on pictures of people expressing different emotions. Using cues such as the position and shape of the lips, ICU spots five basic states: happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and neutral.

More than Meets the Eye

Way back in March of ‘07, we wrote about a new type of eye tracking that allowed for greater understanding of emotions: Eye Tracking for Ads: Going from Heat to Emotion. It was clear then that using eye movement analysis for emotion identification was an early foray into the nascent world of emotion tracking. Sony’s technology not only uses eye movement analysis (through partnership with Atracsys, but it goes a step further by expanding the data source to include movements of the entire face, or simply – our facial expressions.

Google’s 2008 Eye Tracking Data – Limited, at Best

It will be interesting to see what the search industry does (ahem, is doing), with such forms of technology, which expand dynamically beyond pure eye scan path tracking. In the detailed 2008 research study undertaken by Google’s own Laura Grank: Eye Tracking and Online Search: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead”, three separate eye tracking studies are outlined, and analyzed.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the structure of these studies and subsequent modes of data analysis are geared towards “clicks.” In other words, who clicks, when do they click, where do they click, and what affects those behaviors? It would make sense for a search engine that generates 96% of its revenue from paid clicks to focus on this. For Google, a click is a conversion.

Some quick “click” takeaways from the Google paper:

- For 96% of the queries, participants looked only at the first SERP

- Participants clicked on results one and two 42% and 8% of the time, respectively, despite spending equal amounts of time reading those result listings, or “abstracts.”

- Males clicked on the second result only 7% of the time, and females selected it 14.5% of the time

However, it is more interesting for us to consider that for the vast majority of web sites a click is only an invitation to a conversion. There is much, much more that happens after an initial click – and the user information that one can glean from software such as Sony’s regarding a user’s emotional experience throughout an entire click stream presents much, much more insight into how to identify emotion, understand its implications and immediate associations with site content and usability, and maximize a site’s overall return on emotion.

As far as we can tell, there aren’t any eye tracking technology providers out there that are offering facial expression analysis. While some firms, such as UserVision/iMotions use emotion incorporation via emotional response questionnaires in addition to highly advanced eye tracking analysis, there isn’t any facial expression analysis.

The Eyes Still Have It – For Now

So yes, as far as emotion tracking technology goes, it seems to be true. But we think that Sony’s technology, in fact, makes a damned good argument for getting in your face.

Well, maybe not quite. I’ve been thinking lately about the sexy, wily, real time search and the old-fashioned, chivalrous land of SEO, and how the two will eventually find a healthy, functional, and enduring relationship.

Real Time Search Still Hasn’t Found Herself

RTS is all a flutter with all of the attention she is getting – from everyone. And everyone else.

We are already seeing the incredibly powerful applications – and implications – of RTS in every aspect of our lives – private and public, social and commercial (but the line has even blurred here, hasn’t it?). If RTS is querying real time publishing and you agree with Danny that real time publishing is microblogging (the world the Twitter currently rules) – then real time search has barely scratched the surface of declaring herself as an accessible, reliable, and (gasp) indexable web resource. In other words, as a hot twenty-something. Right now she’s just legal.

SEO is The Man

Yep, I said it. SEO is The Man. And I do mean this in the weight lifting, football watching, beer drinking, beef eating, keep your hands off my daughter kind of way. After all, where do people turn when they are being bullied by the big bad PPC spend? Who does everyone run to, even in a terrible economy, for protection? I think that somewhere down the road, we will begin to see an integration, a real relationship emerge – one in which real time search is much more strongly (narrowly?) defined, having figured out what she wants in life (potentially with another big real time publishing player in the mix to challenge Twitter) – and where SEO the stud in fact loosens up, and his identity becomes a bit more broadly defined to include an entirely new “search” engine optimization set of tasks, tools, outlets, and capabilities. SEO as we know him will find some new parts of himself he previously was afraid to acknowledge. He gets a bit new-agey, if he wants her hand. Maybe a new subset of SEO, called RTSO, could evolve – but given the overwhelm of acronyms in our industry we may just resist that temptation despite our proclivity for things shorter, faster, cooler. Despite our proclivity for niches within a niche.

As Bruce Clay’s blog suggests, RTS right now is, for the most part, figuring out who she is, strutting all over the world yet seemingly limited to social media aggregators. SEO, with his many years on miss RTS, is admittedly a bit gun-shy, still pumping his iron (and did I mention the beer?). He’s got to get to a yoga class before he’s going to have a chance of finding a meaningful connection with her. First he’s got to know where to find her, even.

Vegas and Beyond

So, for now these lovers are flirting, heavily. They just might get married in Vegas, but their true relationship will take time to reveal itself.

But when they eventually do come together, they will likely make each other much, much, much better individuals, and together, well – they might be a power couple in the making.

-Jessie

At long last our The Art of SEO book is available on Amazon. It has been quite a fun, illuminating, and rewarding experience to create this elaborate work. It truly has been an honor to have been given the opportunity, by O’Reilly, to produce such an extensive volume.

I speak for my co-authors when I say that we all, truly, hope you find the book as information and resource-filled as we do.

Once you have your copy in your hands, we would love to hear your feedback – please visit the Art of SEO Book website to submit your comments.

Enjoy!