Web Marketing Strategy Update

Squidoo is the brain child of popular and latterly philanthropic marketer Seth Godin, who’s also the author of a small pile of marketing books containing some pretty revolutionary thinking.

The idea is that anyone can set up a “Lens” on any topic they choose, sharing information for the purposes of building reputation, drawing traffic to other websites, making money or just for fun.

Simply a web page with a hip new name, besides giving you space to write on your subject of choice, a lens has modules to optionally add stuff like RSS feeds, items from Amazon, polls, photos from Flickr, etc.

A lot of time has now passed, but if I remember correctly, the basic premise in setting up Squidoo was that search engines would never be able to deliver what people want, and that the people themselves would make a better job of it by voting with their feet as it were, from amongst Lenses created by others knowledgeable on a subject.

Here’s the Oct 2005 post on Seth’s blog with the free ebook download introducing Squidoo and explaining the concept of “everyone’s an expert.”

I was catching up on SEOBook author Aaron Wall’s blog the other day. In this post he talks about how the new Google Toolbar 4 for IE suggests spelling corrections and keyword queries based on the search patterns of other searchers.

On the face of it you might think that’s rather mundane and pretty uninteresting news.

But you’d be wrong.

The key point Aaron raises is that these (semi) auto-correction features will effectively narrow down the range of search queries to the most common keyword phrases.

Here’s a simple example to help you visualize what that means (made up, so not factually correct, but illustrates the concept).

Queries from people without Google Toolbar who want to buy shoes:
“buy shoes”
“buy shoe”
“buy shose”
“shoes buy”
“shoe buy”
“shose buy”

Are all “corrected” by Google Toolbar search and spelling suggestions, to become:
“buy shoes”

The effect will be twofold:

1. Reduce the effectiveness of targeting mistyped, misspelled or otherwise imperfect search queries
2. Increase competition for the more mainstream keywords and thus drive up CPC