Search with Design

Well, since my partner-in-design has taken over reporting on new Google features this week (thanks Luke!) I’ve decided to try out a new series of posts responding to some topics from Search Engine Strategies New York.

Recently, a client emailed me a list of ‘notes and things to try’ which he received from one of the attendees of SESNY.  He asked me what he could be doing with each note that would help the optimization of his website. Rather than waste the hour or so I spent putting together the answers on one person, I thought I’d spread the responses around for the benefit of all.  I’ll try out a few of these posts and if it catches on, I’ll make it a series for the next few weeks (there are 39 points on this list in front of me!).  So without further introduction…
Note #1.   We can use Google geo-targeting ads to get an extra line of ad text that lists city and state in the ad.

To clarify the note, let me first explain that if you use geo-targeting in this way, Google will place a line beneath your ad denoting where your business or branch office is located.   Geo-targeting is not quite the right word, and ‘local search’ would probably be more appropriate.  You can see what I mean at the right.  Notice how the AOL ad doesn’t specify a location, where the Athena Capital ad does.

(As a side note, AOL is using half their title line to showcase the word Denver.  You could say that they’re not taking advantage of local search, but I would guess their ad gets more clicks when someone is looking for something in ‘Denver’)

So, where would I recommend using this kind of tactic?  Any industry where being local might be an advantage, or help to differentiate your business.  For instance, if I am a searcher looking for ‘motorcycle parts’ I might be wanting a local shop to help me select and install parts, or I could be looking for an online store.  If your ad doesn’t tell me you’re local, I’m going to assume that you’re national and click or not click depending on what I need.  In this case, the local store would lose business to people needed someone local and would gain excess (untargeted) clicks from shoppers needing a national store.

Of course, if you have a national business that is commonly mistaken for something local, this will compound the problem.  For instance, if you offer national foreclosure listings, but people looking for help with their foreclosure commonly click your ads looking for assistance, adding a locality tagline will only increase the number of untargeted clicks.

I would definitely recommend taking a careful look at which keywords these pros and cons could affect before enabling a local search campaign.  Make sure you are using them wisely.

Luke and I have come up with a great idea for a new consulting business come web application that has the ability to evolve over the next 5 years or so. It provides a service used by huge amounts of people every year, but that has been traditionally handled by a professional. The hook is that we would use SEO tricks, social networking and quality design and style to augment (or replace) the activities of the professional. Let me see if I can explain more clearly with an example…

Let’s say yachting suddenly becomes extremely popular. Folks who already own yachts might see their’s begin to go up in value. To find a buyer for your yacht you can employ a broker for a % of the sale amount and he will track down a buyer, do some negotiating, etc. Because the broker has never really been in a “hot” yacht market before, he only knows his old tricks: calling his friends in the boat business, placing a classifieds ad, etc.

If we were to apply our model in the target industry (sorry, the boats are just a metaphor, we’re not in the yachting market… yet) we would create a stylish one-page site for each yacht, we would make it a thirdlevel domain on our aged and SEO’d website (say TradeWinns.YachtParty.com), and we would make the social/viral elements easy to access and use. The one-page design would also allow buyers to browse a ton of yachts in a day, and because we’ve standardized the photo gallery, the pricing info, the features, etc. it’s all very easy to compare.

Now, a few other ‘YachtParty.com’ ideas have sprung up already, but none of them have been successful. We believe it’s because the first adopters of the idea are trying to hard to replace the Yacht brokers instead of allowing them to gain value from the system too. Also, a lot of these websites list way too many items on the page, when buyers only really want to see pretty pictures and a price first, and then browse a features list and so forth second. They don’t need to know what the weather is like where the boat is docked.

So here’s our hurdle: we can’t think of a name. The industry in which we’re operating is highly saturated with spam and personal sites, and almost every domain name we can come up with is taken or subpar. Here’s a list of how we’ve approached it so far:

1. We’ve tried coming up with 10 names we liked and trying those out, without doing any pre-research.
2. We’ve tried brute force dictionary combinations, using a thesaurus and WhoIs to find unused combinations
3. We’ve tried stepping way outside the boundaries of our idea to drive at the concept of why people buy or sell a yacht.
4. We’ve recently tried to go Web2.0 and drop the ‘e’ off of a fun word (yachtr or sailr anyone?).

That’s where we’re at now. Do you have any tips on how you find a good domain name? We could really use the help.

This question has resurfaced in the SEO-world, and in my world recently, and so I’d like to weigh-in. Here’s the latest situation presented to me:

My friend sent an email to 100,000 subscribers, of which 1,000 of them were GMail addresses, advertising “college widgets”. The link back to his site contained the anchor text “college widgets”. He went from ranking #10 in a Google search for [college widgets] to #1 in just a few days, then later he dropped back down to #4. I looked at my GMail account and the email page has a PageRank of the 7!

The first thing to understand is that the way the PageRank in your toolbar works, is that when it doesn’t find any data for your current page, it extrapolates an approximate value from the previous page you visited as well as the domain. Because the Google domain is a PR10, your toolbar extrapolates a PR7 for your mailbox.

So where did the resultant change in rankings come from?

Well, the page in question has a title tag whose first two words are “College Widgets”. The page also has 59,000 links pointing at it (according to Yahoo!) most of which are from the same domain, with the anchor text “college widgets”.

In a sample of 100,000 emails, I have to think that at least 1-3% would have the Google Toolbar installed. Add in the GMail subscriber base, and Google has 3-4 thousand pieces of user data to use about the page in question. I would estimate that amount of user data spread over just a couple days would be more than enough for Google to trigger a deeper crawl of the page, and potentially index or count more of the backlinks.

As RC mentioned, you can’t triangulate with only 2 points. Google uses user-data, it’s time to face facts and build your websites for users too.

As a designer, I loved the invention of Flash some many internet moons ago. Motion, bad site intros, and tweening gave way to easing, elasticity, gravity, internet games, full flash sites and flexible ads. Now, with actionscript, you can build a slick slider menu to complete apps. Flash video reinvented itself and made it the industry standard for sites like YouTube. For designers, information architects, and those in interactive media, Flash is your Desktop Zeus.

But for the search bots, Flash just looks like one large grey box. Like an image. Like nothing extraordinary. Just something taking up space in the code and more space on the page. It offers little in the way of information on it’s value. The H1 tag says, “Hey, I’m more important that my little brother H2, or the paragraph kids.” Flash says practically nothing. “I’m this wide and this tall and thanks for passing in those variables and please run me at the highest quality. Thanks.”

So Search with Design could really be called GoogleandFlash.com

It could really be about how the human eye and the robot see.
About which perception holds the most value.
Now, and in the future.

So I’m completely addicted to Yahoo! Pipes, the new service which allows you to create mashups of RSS feeds, as well as maps, user inputs, etc. There are even a few logical functions available to help you organize the data.

My first few forays into the pipes-world were somewhat disappointing due mostly to the fact that I was trying to do things with the interface that are a little bit out of it’s league.

My first project was an attempt to take Shoemoney’s website market RSS feed, parse out the URLs of sites for sale, and reconstruct them with Pagerank and Pages Indexed values to provide more stats on sites for sale. This failed because I couldn’t find a way to return PageRank values into my pipes.

So, for my first couple rounds, I have a couple of requests for future Pipes iterations: more logical operators and more ways to get information.

So, for my most recent project, I decided to tackle a more simple project, but one that requires lots of leg (finger) -work when you do it by hand: finding link partners for SEO.

(more…)

I was reading a thread about meta tags on the DigitalPoint forums today.

.NET magazine wrote an article on SEO recently and stated that meta tags no longer matter for search engine optimization. Were they correct to do so?

The SEO industry is in state where most of the mechanical aspects of optimization can be handled by a competent web designer who stays on top of the basics (.htaccess, robots.txt, static URLs), which is why we see so many design firms now touting that they can perform SEO while designing a site.

So that takes care of the ’search engine’ part of SEO. But what about optimization?

Search engines (specifically Google) still use meta tags, but not to rank your site. At least not directly.

Let’s start with three statements:

Fact 1: Google has access to your meta- title and description tags.

Fact 2: Google will display your title and description tags in search results, unless the engine feels that writing its own description from your text, or using your DMOZ entry is more relevant (algorithmically determined, happens less than 20% of the time in my experience).

Fact 3: Google will rearrange its search results by click through rate and other (measurable) factors to provide he most relevant results to users.

You may wish to debate fact #3, but for now let’s assume it’s true in this world.

The acceptance of these three facts means that you need to write a title and description that will impress visitors and increase your click through rate. A better visitor experience will push your site higher in the rankings.

So how do you write a good title and description? Well, that means it’s time to take a page from the PPC-world…

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.

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?