Since entering the search marketing industry I’ve realized that there’s a lot more to Google search functionality than I had used before. I used to think that I was a pretty efficient Google searcher, using general key-terms at the start, and then adding in more specific key-terms to narrow down my search. Who knew that there were actually specific modifiers that you could use?

The [define:] modifier-
This is definitely my favorite search modifier that I use most often (because my vocabulary stinks; and is probably getting worse the longer that I’m here in  China), and helps me to save face by having a quick way to look up those tough SAT terms that I should have studied harder for; heh.

The [site:] modifier-
Using the sit modifier, you can tell Google that you want your search results come from a specific website. So if you were wanted to search my website for any time I talk about Hong Kong, you could use [hong kong site:duncanleung.com].
If you’re doing research for a paper on relativity, and you want to search educational sites, you can also do searches on [relativity site:.edu].

The [cache:] modifier-
There have been instances at work when I need to see if Google has actually crawled and indexed a website. When Google sends out it’s spiders/crawlers to index the web, it takes an image of the pages it visits and uses these pages to determine the content of the page. These stored images are also used if the original page isn’t available. Using the search modifier [cache:duncanleung.com] will bring up the cached/stored page, and will let you know if it been crawled and indexed.

The [inanchor:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the anchor text of other pages, to link to the website. Using the search modifier [inanchor:plumber] will bring up websites that are linked to with the keyword plumber in the anchor text.

The [intitle:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the title text of the pages. Using the search modifier [inanchor:Beijing] will bring up websites that are indexed by Google that use the keyword Beijing in the title text.

The [inurl:] modifier-
This modifier returns any websites where the keywords entered  are used in the URL of the pages. Using the search modifier [inanchor:pets] will bring up websites that are indexed by Google that use the keyword pets in the URL text.

Granted, these are definitely modifiers that I probably wouldn’t use outside of SEO work, and for day-to-day casual searches on [best wireless laptop mice], I’ll actually just be plugging in keywords to refine my search.

I’ll end this post one one last tidbit that I picked up somewhere. If you’re looking to do a comparison on a product or service, you can try the search form ["better than iphone"], including the quotation marks, and that search will bring up results on where people have posted up their experiences using the product, and have made a recommendation on a better product or service.

Hope this wasn’t too geeky of a post!

-Duncan

Great, a chance for me to make a shameless plug about Morodo and our product: MO-Call Mobile VoIP! Kidding (kinda).

So in pretty much all my previous posts I would digress and start talking about my work at Morodo Beijing. I kept telling myself that I would make a post to talk about work; and, although I’m really trying to make it a habit to sleep early, I’m going to break my ‘sleeping-early’ rule and churn this post out.

(I think I’ll write this post out in a FAQ sort of layout, answering the questions that people have been asking me as they come to mind; at least this way my writing will be somewhat coherent, because I’m really tired right now, heh.)

Where are you working?

I’m working in the marketing team (which consists of about four of us in total) at Morodo Group Ltd, and although my focus is in search and online marketing (which is what I was also doing at adSage/MeshTop last year), I’ve actually been assigned a pretty diverse rotation of responsibilities to get me up to speed with the company and product; from managing the files on the app stores, to working with the CSS (that’s Customer Sales and Service, not Cascading Style Sheets) team talking with customers from all around the world- I think my most interesting task with CSS was to test out our network routes to Russia, so I was calling all these banks and hotels in Russia to see if the calls would go through- and when they did, I’d have to make up some random excuse to talk to them and not be rude and hang up on them, “Hi, yes; I was thinking of making a trip to Moscow and I was wondering if you had any vacancies?”. Fun- and when they would transfer me to reservations or put me on hold, then I’d hang up on them; haha.

What’s Morodo?

A lot of my friends have asked if Morodo is another marketing agency, but it’s actually a UK based startup in the telecommunications industry. What we aim to do at Morodo is to provide a solution for users to avoid the crazy international calling rates when calling abroad, and also to avoid the expensive roaming rates when traveling internationally. Morodo has created an application called MO-Call, which runs in the background on cell phones, and automatically detects when an international number is being dialed. The MO-Call app then switches to the MO-Call network to avoid the expensive roaming rates that the cellular companies charge. It’s actually pretty cool- maybe I’ll post up some diagrams to kinda illustrate what goes on within the MO-Call network. If you want to read more about the MO-Call process: How to Avoid Mobile Roaming Rates.

MO-Call World Service: The World service uses an SMS to request a callback connection from the MO-Call network.

MO-Call Home Service: The Home service directly connects to the MO-Call network server if the user is in a 'Home' country.

MO-Call VoIP: MO-Call VoIP allows you to connect to other MO-Call users for free, or avoid international calling rates to international phones. Our next builds of MO-Call VoIP will implement VoIP calling through the mobile application.

So basically, is Morodo like Skype?

Yes, and no? The MO-Call PC VoIP provides the same service as Skype, however the main service is the MO-Call Mobile application that detects when users want to connect to an international number, and automatically connects to the MO-Call network. The cool thing that I’ve found about trying the MO-Call service is that I don’t need to dial in any calling codes or anything;  I used to have a calling card when I first moved to the US for college, and I would keep forgetting the service number and PIN; yeah, I’m forgetful =p.

Erm, well; I can’t really think of any other questions that people have asked- and I’m really tired, hehe.

I’ll leave you all with some pics that I snapped of the workplace around me. Oh and the cool thing about work is that there are a lot of handsets in the office, because the developers need to build and test the application on multiple devices. My latest toy has been the HTC Tattoo. Hopefully they’ll get a Nexus One in? I’d like to just get one for myself… but I need to watch my spending. Chinese income; yay! hehe.

Horizon International - The Morodo Beijing office building

Welcome to Morodo Beijing- The wall is newly painted; it used to be this really ugly looking wall, heh.

The CTO's desk/office - It's open so he'll know if we're goofing off or not...

Symbian and Windows Mobile developers sit here; the other developers are in another part of the office.

Snuck in a shot of my marketing manager; hehe

I would say that it's pretty cool that I'm working on an iMac, except that my MacBook Pro is faster than it... lol

(I just realized that I have time-stamps on all my pictures… I guess you can see the order that I took these pictures in, heh)

-Duncan

I saw a news article somewhere during my travels in Hong Kong about China’s ‘Green Dam’ filtering software actually being stolen code from CyberSitter, developed by Solid Oak Software, a US software manufacturer.

I Bing’ed (But.It’s.Not.Google – BING! heh. I’m lame) Googled it, and found an article about it on PC Mag. My first reaction was sort of a laugh/chuckle- but I don’t know if it was out of disappointment, humor, or because I was thinking, “w.t.f mate?” (please see End Of The World flash animation for reference of that phrase). It probably was out of humor, since the developers of the Green Dam software didn’t even bother to change some of the code that is identified with CyberSitter’s name, and even used code that made requests back to Solid Oak’s servers for updates. Whoops! Even I know from copying homework in AP CS class to know how to copy code better than that! lol.

But on the other hand; this is really frustrating; c’mon China. I mean, what the heck is going on here? Not only was Microsoft China’s Microblogging platform Juku recently discovered to be blatantly stolen from Plurk, now the government backed ‘Green Dam’ was found to have stolen code too. There are just too many cases of China ripping intellectual property from international businesses.

Anyhow- end rant. I need to sleep. Definitely check out the articles though, it’ll be a fun read.
– PCMag
– BBC News

-Duncan

Time has flown by! I left Champaign-Urbana (Illinois, United States) and arrived into Beijing on June 1st, not knowing anyone, and without having even secured an internship. After about a week of interviewing and waiting, I entered into the Search Engine Marketing industry for the first time as a Search Marketing Analyst with adSage. I’m really so thankful for adSage to have accepted me as an intern, because really, I had no experience in (let alone idea about) the search marketing industry- but since finding this industry, I’ve definitely grown a passion and interest in digital marketing, and is the industry that I hope to build my career in.

I’ll be traveling to Hong Kong next week, and when I return, I’ll be taking a full-time position with the in-house online marketing team at Morodo Group, a UK-based startup in telecommunications services, here in Beijing. It’ll be an exciting journey, especially since there’s so much activity within the mobile internet and telecommunications industry right now.

Anyhow, that was a long tangent; I wanted to list out some sources that helped me to get up to speed on the digital marketing industry. Pretty much everything that I learned was self-taught and I didn’t really have a mentor or supervisor to direct me along my way- which was pretty awesome as well, since I was able to learn about whatever I wanted, and is also how I ended up being bumped over to the MeshTop branch of SagesGroup during my internship, to serve as their Social Media advisor.

SEM/SEO Books & Courses:

Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: I was handed this book to read on the first day I arrived at adSage, and I managed to finish it in about two weeks. This got me up to speed with how search engines work, and gives a good explanation of both SEM and SEO practices. One thing that I was really pleased about when I read this book, was that it even talks about user search behavior and intent- something that I think a lot of people can overlook when thinking SEO. Instead of just thinking about the ‘nitty gritty’ technical side, it’s important to think about what the search user wants, and how they think.

The Art of SEO: I actually haven’t read this book, but it seems to be getting pretty good recommendations, and I’ll hopefully be able to pick this book up soon.

Hobo Guide to Google SEO: Not as in depth as Search Engine Marketing, Inc., but I also did read through this free (yes, free!) e-book.

Google Analytics Conversion University: After reading the books I found out that Google has their own training lectures for AdWords, and Analytics; I’d recommend going through these as they’re pretty helpful in getting you up to speed on the general idea of how to use these tools.

Google AdWords Learning Center: Google’s own training lectures on using their AdWords product.

W3Schools: I decided to learn some HTML/XHTML, and CSS- I’m by no means proficient, and won’t be able to build my own webpage from scratch, but I have to start from somewhere, and W3Schools is an awesome resource.

Blogs:

A large part of my reading (as if reading through the whole Search Engine Marketing, Inc. book isn’t enough reading- but face it, this industry is pretty much a 24/7 industry that’s always evolving and progressing) is actually done on Google Reader- I have about 60 blogs (I know, it’s a bit over-the-top, and I’ll need to filter out some blogs soon- but when I first got into the industry I just subscribed to as many ‘useful’ blogs as I could to get caught up as quick as possible to get a broad spectrum on the industry) subscribed on Google Reader, and I’ll daily filter out the articles that I deem ‘useful reading’ with the ‘star/favorite’ feature in Google Reader, and then slowly peruse through the articles during a lunch break, or after work (as I said, it’s a 24/7 job, haha).

I’ll just mention five six blogs that I would recommend following, in particular order of preference:

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Watch

HubSpot Inbound Marketing

SEOmoz Blog

SEO.com

Online Communities:

I’m actually not subscribed to any online (paid) communities, but I’d love to join one- in due time. In due time. Anyhow, for those of you who are stuck in considering the age-old question of whether to join SEOmoz, SEOBook… well, try SEO Dojo! (haha). If you’re not a follower of TopRankBlog, then you probably didn’t know that SEO Dojo was chosen as the best paid subscription SEM community. It’s got me sold (almost… hehe- once I start getting my full-time salary. Salary is pretty low here in China, especially with the conversion rate and all).

SEO Dojo

Well that about gives a good summary of the material that I  read through to get pretty much up to speed with this industry. I hope that some of these resources help you understand a bit more about the digital and online marketing industry as well!

-Duncan

I had the awesome chance to take two days off work to attend ad:tech Beijing 2009 on Nov 17th-18th. I was semi-tagging along with adSage, as they were also attending the conference to hold a press release to exhibit their new tool for Search Engine Marketing account management at the event.

ad:tech Beijing is an advertising and digital marketing conference where the marketing community around the world gathers to discuss technology and use of digital media to build brand recognition and drive ROI on marketing and ad spend.

Having only been introduced to this industry in June, I had a great time listening and learning from industry leaders, and ‘big wigs’ (as I like to call them ), share their case studies, best practices, and future challenges in the digital marketing industry.

Enough rambling; here’s ad:tech Beijing in pictures (I did also realize that my camera is showing some front-focusing issues. Very sad. I’ll have to look up a Canon repair center in Beijing and hope that customer service won’t be too horrendous ).

//Note: Please let me know if you would like larger resolution pictures of any speakers shown in this post

Well, the first blog that I had started has somehow… disappeared. I had transferred the domain name of the blog from duncanleung.com/blog, to digitalmedia.duncanleung.com. However, after about a week of being up – my database seems to have gotten mixed up in some stuff, because I was getting an “Error Establishing Database Connection” error. After rummaging around in my hosting control panel, and trying to link up the databases, I managed to fix the error message problem; only to find that the database seems to have done a complete wipe and now I’m left with no content, and the default blank WordPress page.

Stinks.

Anyhow – I realize that I don’t have enough time to upkeep two blogs. I’ll probably do a bit of redesign and somehow integrate the subject of Digital Media into this blog too. I hope it won’t ‘dilute’ the focus of the blog, but instead, hopefully give a better (and more centralized) idea of what I’ve been up to in Beijing.

Either way – this will have to be done tomorrow. I need to sleep. I’ll be attending Day 2 of ad:tech Beijing tomorrow; more digital media marketing goodness in store.

-Duncan