Don't Waste Your 'Potential', American Express

I saw an intriguing (to a search markering professional) ad in the underground in London and @dusoft was kind enough to snap this shaky photo of it for me.

American Express urges you to "realise the potential" by using the membership rewards programme. The ad contains a URL (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) but also another interesting bit: it says you can just search for 'potential'.

We had a small discussion with @dusoft what that meant. I thought maybe they had optimised for the probably not terribly competitive KW 'potential' on google and ranked. He said the top spots would definitely be taken by dictionary definitions.

I followed up, first trying to search for potential on google.com but nothing related to the campaign came up. When I tried google.co.uk, here is what I saw:

American Express uses Adwords to serve an ad for searches for potential. Surprisingly, the URL displayed with the ad, http://americanexpress.com/Potential fails to resolve. The UK version (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) does work, but redirects to the hideous http://www212.americanexpress.com/dsmlive/dsm/int/gb/en/personal/membershipbenefits/rtphomepage_pr.do?vanity=americanexpress.co.uk/potential&vgnextoid=be57afbe98603210VgnVCM100000defaad94RCRD

So here is my free advice for UK's American Express:
1. Do not waste your potential!
2. Optimise organically for 'potential', maybe the top position isn't achievable but a top 5 should be for someone with your resources
3. Make sure the display URLs you use for Adwords ads actually resolve
4. Users appreciate clean URLs

Danny Sullivan mentions two examples of entities using a call for search for navigation - Matt Mullenweg says to search for 'Matt' on Google on his business card (see here) and Sony said to search for '2012' to find the film. Unlike American Express, these two seem to work.

Someone with their resources should really be able to do better than this, right?

What will happen when Yahoo Site Explorer stops to function

There are not that many functional tools for finding links left - Yahoo Site Explorer rules and is the most frequently referenced tool.

Google Webmaster Central is great for finding out your own links but what about finding your competitors'?

Adwords pet peeves

Wrote an email to Adwords Support regarding my pet peeve - the fact that it is not easy to find out through AdWords and even Google Analytics what actual phrases the people who clicked your ads searched for. I have doubt there is a reasonably easy way of doing this but Google does not seem to promote thins functionality.

On a related note, Google allows all sorts of keyword match types (i.e. you can say you want your ads displayed on searches for Slovakia SEO exact-matched, broad-matched, phrase-matched, as well as negative). There is even an option for all matches together with the exception of exact match - phrase match for [Slovakia SEO] along with broadmatch but with the exact match as a negative.

With this match type, you would be displayed for "shitty Slovakia SEO", "Slovakia SEO cheaply", "Slovakia search engine optimization" but not for the exact match of "Slovakia SEO". Confusing, huh?

Anyway, to make a long story short, a match type that is NOT on offer is something like [Slovakia] SEO, where the word Slovakia would be required, while SEO would be broad-matched. This would allow you to display ads for all searches that contain the word Slovakia and any variation on the words SEO, while not displaying for something unrelated such as Hungary SEO.

Pizza enjoys Tropical SEO

Andy Hagans pledges convincingly to a lazy SEO lifestyle - if not the whole then a few details definitely spoke to me such as having a personal assistant to take care of pesky details, give his phone number only to very close associates. And some parts I arrived at independently, e.g. taking up to a week to answer emails, "especially if the reply requires effort on my part."

I have enjoyed Andy's writing on Tropical and have definitely taken several points he has made to heart. My favourite points/quotes:
1. "...[I]ndustries with poor underlying economics can make even genius managers seem average,", which leads Andy to conclude that "Managing your career is like investing–the degree of difficulty does not count. So you can save yourself money and pain by getting on the right train," in Warren Buffet's Advice to SEOs.
2. Working as a SEO consultant makes for a poor business model, as your time is much better spent on your own projects in high-yielding lead-generating affiliate areas such as real estate, mortgages, insurance.
3. Once you get into the right area, "[i]t takes strategy, tactics, balls, elbow grease, money, and smart planning" but mostly simply working hard everyday, in tips on building a site you can sell for a million dollars

Andy was a professional link-baiter, and as you can see, he got me. I love the blog and the style, as well as the surrounding "blogscape". I've discovered and enjoyed following a little blogring with Andy Hagans at TropicalSEO, Brad Geddes of eWhisper.net, Brian Provost's ScoreboardMediaGroup and several others with a focus on "competitive webmastering".