Search with Design

I could program a computer in FORTRAN. But nowadays, if you can’t use a computer, you’re as good as luke-warm, curdling milk. Computers, and their programmers and designers are everywhere. Your TV, DVD player, Playstation, iPod, car, PDA, phone, alarm clock, even your toothbrush.

And besides all the modern day conveniences, such as having your $160 luxury toothbrush gently massage your teeth while you grow fat staring at yourself in the mirror, and then have a soft LED blue haze blink at your to let you know that 2 minutes are up, you might think to yourself, gee, this is the life. How did my parents make it up til now? But then, remind yourself of the 37 hours it took to program your toothbrush to remember daylight savings time and which default brush speed you liked on the first Wednesday of each month.

Computers don’t equal convenience. They offer automation. A series of yes’s and no’s. Nothing truly revolutionary. It is the designer who must first create the tool, and then teach its functionality and features to the end user. They must put the power and simplicity back into the hands of the humanoid.  Perhaps, “if you have to ask, it should be designed different”.

Design exists when forms follows function.
Design succeeds when it is approachable.

To be good at any job, you need to like doing it. Not just the ivory-tower, CEO-stuff. But the boots-on, factory floor part, too.

An SEO should always be conscious of search. Trying to find a new restaurant, looking for a specific book, or in the case of my next example: looking through an online help guide.

I was busy converting some old Overture campaigns to the new Panama system recently. I was using their online help system to find out what [match type] meant (in the relative terminology of the system). I found the information I was looking for in the 3rd result, titled: “Importing Campaigns”, which contained a concise definition for every field name used in the importing process.

Every time I needed to refer to that information, I searched for [match type]. But eventually, I realized how stupid it was to keep using that term, despite the fact that I knew the title of the article I wanted was “Importing Campaigns”.

So, the next time I needed that information I used the search term [importing campaigns]. It took me about 3 times as long to find the information I needed because my first expectation was that the page I was looking for would be SERP #1. Nope.

Well, it couldn’t be any lower than #3. Nope.

Result #6 was the page I was used to seeing. So I went back to using [match type] to find the information I needed on importing.

What’s the takeaway? Well, if someone at Yahoo! was watching the logfiles, they’d probably see me importing campaigns, and searching over and over for [match type]. They’d think to themselves: “Wow, this guy is sure having trouble understanding match types. But he’s must be having a pretty easy time with importing, because he only searched for it once.” They might then conclude that I am new-ish to the SEM world, and that I don’t undertsand match types.

The course of action then is to improve the information on match types, and neglect the information on importing campaigns. When all I really needed was for someone to rearrange the SERPs for the latter.

It’s subtle, but it’s something to think about.

The Article Distribution Service iSnare.com has been billed as one of the best tools around to increase a website’s presence. And I’ve been a big proponent of it since I first came across the service.

The idea is simple enough: submit an article to this service, it is reviewed by humans for quality and then gets auto-distributed to 1000s of article-aggregation websites, many on general topics, and a few on whatever topic you choose for your article.

After using it a few times, I began to notice that pages I promoted with the service would tend to rise in Google’s SERPs for my targeted terms, and then slowly fall back down. They would usually settle at higher positions than where they started, but I wondered why the Rome effect was so strong (that was a subtle reference to a rise/fall timeline).

So, I decided to study the Google results on fresh articles, and their mentions in search engines. I used the old trick of searching a unique phrase. On August 4th I used a unique phrase from each article on Google’s engine: 0 results. I then submitted both articles to iSnare for distribution. On August 8th I got an email that both articles had been approved and syndicated; a second Google search revealed 0 results for both.

0 results again on Aug. 9th. Then on Aug. 10th I saw the first signs of life: 7 results for Article 1 and 8 results for Article 2. By Aug. 15th, Article 1 had 437 results, and Article 2 had 458 results. There are two points of note here:

Point 1: I submitted both articles under the same category. They were approximately the same length (around 450 words). I submitted them on the same within minutes of each other, and yet Article 1 lagged behind Article 2 for some reason.

Point 2: At this point (Aug. 15th) there were no supplemental results for either article. All 400+ results were fully viewable in the main index.

On the 16th of August the dupe filter must have kicked in on Article 1, because supplementals appeared and total results dropped to 361. Article 2 continued to thrive with 556 results on the 16th, with still no supplementals showing.

Eventually the dupe filter must’ve kicked in on Article 2 as well, and by August 30th, both result counts were below 50 (39 and 34 for 1 & 2, respectively).

As of today, Big G shows 11 results, of a total of 16 for Article 1 (so, approx. 4 supplementals). Article 2 fared better in the end, today displaying 16 results of 22 total (so, approx. 6 supplementals).

The [recently exported] PageRank for the top 10 results on each article range from 0-2, with the majority being 0 (and 2 N/As!).

So now some theories:

1. Article 1’s target phrase was more competitive than Article 2’s. My theory is that the more competitive an area, the greater number of filters (or in some cases, reviews) a page must pass to become part of the index. This is explained best in the theory of long-tail keywords, where phrases that don’t mean much in a marketing sense have a lot of impact on John Q. Searcher.

2. To compete with social bookmarking, Google needs to be buzz-aware. When a site creates a certain amount of buzz (linking, textual-references, etc.) Google needs to get in there and evaluate it for ranking. It will weight these sites with additional trustrank to get on top of the coming wave. A second (and potentially third) filter will later decide if the page is worth keeping in the index. Possibly by analyzing search volume for a phrase vs. the amount of “buzz”.

What might a takeaway be from this experiment? In my case, the combination of the “buzz” created with the article distro, plus the already-established authority (or Trustrank) of the site was enough to put the [brand new] pages I was targeting into the top 10 for their intended keyphrase.

As with most SEO activities, it is recommended to use this tool appropriately, and in combination with other tools.
Any thoughts?

Update: Looks like Aaron Wall and I may have been thinking along some similar lines. He just posted about new domains getting ranked in Google over old sites, and mentioned the following:

“Also think of the search business model as though you are a search engine. To them, being the first person to do something is a sign of quality because to be the first person in a market requires some market timing / knowledge / investment / luck.”

“Catch a wave” theory, explained in financial terminology.

Both Ryan and I agreed that I could speak for both of us on the first post. So here goes.

Neither of us are new to the web. Or to blogs. Or to the Google. But we are both self-taught. And ambitious to break out into our own world of search with design. I bring a creative writing background, a love of (or for, not sure which) art, and the harmonious love of good numbers. I think in great design, the math plays just as important a part. When I meet Ryan, I knew we both had enough overlapping knowledge to be deadly. Like WMID. I is for Internet, and that’s good enough for me.

And while neither of us have a firm belief of what Search with Design or 97 Percent should be in 5 years, we do know what problems we can currently tackle and what problems we would like to solve. We would like to spend 97 percent of the time solving these issues, and not wasting marketing efforts and overcharging clients for needless crap.

First post. Check. More gooey from this 48.5% to come.

I don’t want to blow the whistle prematurely on a respected website like this one, but Luke brought to my attention yesterday that they ranked pretty highly for the Google search [switch]. Now the page appears in the Google index as “Apple - Switch,” but the page title on the linked page is “Apple - Get a mac.”

Strange.

So, checking the cache date, I notice that the page is 7 days old. Okay, maybe they’ve changed the title. Nope, the title is the same on the cached page as it is on the live page today.

So I fire up the good old Lynx-Borland browser and navigate to the same page. The no-Javacript browser says the title is the same as the live version.

Maybe it’s a backlink thing? My backlink analysis shows that less than 3% of links to the page contain the word “switch.” I wouldn’t think that would be enough recognition to warrant an editorial title change by Google.

Checking DMOZ, Apple has over 900 entries, none of which seem to have this page with the ‘Switch’ title.

So the question is: how does Apple get a different title in their search results from the title their users see on their website, and from their DMOZ entries?

Okay, it’s just about time to kick this blog off.

SearchwithDesign is the companion blog to our business, 97percent.com. Here we have an opportunity to riff on the main theme of our work without having to be in a client-provider situation. So first things first, a round of introductions…

I’m the first half of SearchwithDesign. I started out making websites for real estate investors and real estate agents back in my hometown of Tucson. I got really interested in the promotion side of things while working on a particularly large website. Trying to compete for major search terms is part art form, part voodoo, part networking, and part math. It’s the perfect fit for me. While working for a small online software company, I ran into Luke, who is the design half of search with design.

Hopefully Luke can fill in some of his own bio here, but for now I’ll say that he’s got a great eye for design, and I’ve never heard him say that something is impossible. If you set him on a task, you can bet that he will have something to show for it within an hour.

So the two of us will be posting here on topics we find interesting but not necessarily within the confines of our specialties, and probably not even within the topic of search and web design.

Okay, now that the introduction is over, we can get on with the posts.