This way of thinking I put in the “if you shoot for the moon and fall short, you’ll end up among the stars” mentality.  Which is actually an extremely inaccurate notion, and in the long haul, will do more harm than good.  Instead, I say “Shoot for the farthest galaxy away – and if you fall short, you really will end up among the stars.”

The Shoot for the Moon Fallacy

Okay so let’s take that saying.  It may be, on the surface, that this saying gives a lot of people great hope.  Hope that if they reach way beyond earth-bound goals, even if you come up short, you’ll still end up way beyond.  Except it’s bogus.  It’s a hollow motivation. Because even if you make it to the moon, (let alone fall short), you’re still going to be 150 MILLION KILOMETERS short of even OUR Star, the Sun.

And if you fall short, you’re not going to be “among the stars”.  You will, however, still be stuck in our solar system.  Which honestly, is pretty much just like everyone else.  And while you won’t be alone in your adventure, you will end up stuck in this little dust-ball in the corner of the galactic playing field.

Solar System SEO

So okay – now that I’ve corrected that bogus myth of a motivator, let’s look at how that equates to the common view that sites should be optimized for “less competitive” phrases.  Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t optimize at least some of your content for less competitive phrases.  Especially when you’re dealing with a small, brand new site, with little content in a highly competitive market.  In fact, you may actually need to start your efforts on those lower hanging targets.

Except if that’s all you ever do, you’re going to only get so far and no further.  Which you might find acceptable.  Or the site owner may seem ecstatic about.  And that’s great, if it means more income generated through organic search.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a 5% or 10% increase in organic search revenue?

Why I Refuse To Settle For Solar System SEO

Something  I learned a while back was that if so many people are focusing on just shooting for the moon, shooting for another galaxy turns out in some situations to not be as difficult as it should be.  Instead, it just takes high quality focus and time.  I spoke about the concept of high quality focus in my “Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified” article.

Here’s an example.

Client – Top 5 B to C Niche Market Retailer

The above results have all come through changing the focus on the site from a “shoot for the moon” mentality to my “shoot for the farthest galaxy away” mentality.

Thirty Percent Increase In Revenue

What’s the bottom line result that matters more than all those numbers?  How about a 30% increase in revenue from organic search?   Yep – thirty percent.  Revenue.  Income.  Bottom line.

How I Did It

As we know, every site is different, so the exact methods applied are going to vary from site to site.  Yet the core principles are going to always be the same.

The LDA Connection

The techniques I use, while not exclusively based on topical relationships, are, as it turns out, heavily weighted in a way that happens to fit the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model (LDA) that Dana Lookadoo reported on this past week, and Rand Fishkin did a follow up article on LDA most recently.

Now I am not a rocket scientist, and honestly, I have never studied Information Retrieval.  I’ve not even read the comprehensive findings Rand so willingly took the time to write-up.  And before the LDA acronym started picking up steam recently, I’d never even heard the term.  Instead, I go by instincts.  Yes – I rely on my intuition as far as how I understand the user mind to work, and how I perceive the search engines to attempt to generate relevancy results.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

Don’t pick my brain when it comes to LDA, and don’t get into a hissy fit with me by claiming LDA is irrelevant.  Take your complaints up with someone else.  Please.  Because ALL I’m saying is that the majority of the methods I detail here happen to line up quite well with the LDA concept.  So as far as I’m concerned, LDA is definitely something the search engines make use of.  And if the exact model of LDA isn’t something they rely upon, it sure is close. At least in my experience. And according to Dana, that’s apparently due to the fact that I think like a topical search algorithm.

It’s All About Topical Focus

What the techniques I use result in is ultimately a refinement of topic focus.  At the page, section, site, and cross-site level.  By refining the quality of the focus aspects of your content, you help the search engines better classify your content as it relates to specific search efforts.  It’s a simple concept, actually.  Because that effort ultimately achieves the goal of increasing relevance identification.  How relevant the content is to a search.

Technique 1 – Go For Higher Value Phrases

If a page is currently optimized for mid-level three or four word phrases, consider refining that down – either to only two word phrases, or perhaps a two word phrase and a three word phrase.  And if you do, make sure the primary focus is on whichever of those phrases is the higher value of the two.  Both in terms of search volume and accuracy of click-to-conversion value.

Technique 2 – Don’t Stuff Page Titles

When I was brought on board, the site was already doing really well (726 thousand page views in a niche consumer market is nothing to sneeze at).  Except the page titles typically contained four, five and in some sections, six phrases on a single page.   While you can typically get several phrases into a page Title field, the more you do, the more you’re going to dilute the focus of the page overall.  So stick with two, or at most, three phrases.

Don’t just choose any two “similar” phrases.  Make sure the two phrases you choose are extremely close to each other in terms of that focus as well.  The more closely related, the better.

Technique 3 – Pull Out All The Stops

If you want to get better results, remember that Google is all about relevance – the more closely your page matches the focus of the search, the more relevant the page will be to that search.  So don’t go half way in your effort.  This means that URL seeding DOES matter.  H1s properly matching page title phrases are a must.

Content needs to be high quality, unique, and written with your site visitor’s readability in mind yet where that same content really does communicate in a way that brings attention to the phrases you’re optimizing for. The pages that inbound links come from need to be as closely related as possible.  Inbound links require proper anchor text matching. All of these may be common sense, yet most people only do a surface effort in their implementation.

Technique 4 – Unleash the Content

Site navigation needs to allow for as much indexing as possible.  My example site here has over 12,000 pages.  When I came along, less than 4,000 of them had been able to get into and stay in the index.  This was because of the fact that categories had pagination that was mostly blocked by Google.  And what the Googlebot could see, was mostly duplicate content due to over-navigation (discussed in my previous Information Architecture article).

By opening up the pagination properly to the Googlebot, eliminating the redundant super-saturated navigation footers, refining and the focus across the board, we’re now averaging over 10,000 pages staying in the index.   All those product level pages in turn, increase the authority of the category level pages they all relate to.

Technique 5 – Long Tail Where it Counts

My example site went from being found through 32 thousand phrases to being found through 58 thousand phrases organically in the same comparable time-frame. Except I didn’t achieve that result by increasing the long tail effort.  Instead, I actually reduced it.

High quality long tail doesn’t come from intentionally optimizing the entire page for eight ten or twenty long tail versions of your primary phrases.  It  means doing the footwork to determine two or three long tail phrases that are highly related to the primary phrases, and only using them in the page content.  By only seeding related phrases in the content, you maintain the quality of the overall focus, rather than polluting it.  And don’t do so much of the long tail work that it dilutes the primary focus either.

By only incorporating long tail in the content, you’re more likely to be able to write content that actually makes sense from a user’s mind model (user thinking).  The stronger the primary focus, the more likely the long tail will grow in exponential ways without you trying to force it.

Technique 6 – Don’t Distract When Linking Out

Whether you’re providing a link out to another page on your site or a 3rd party site, make sure the relationship is also highly focused.  The more you can match the link anchor text (and the focus of the page you’re pointing to) to the focus of the page you’re working on, the higher the relationship focus. 

This applies to in-content links as well as section level links.  Don’t have a sub-set of navigation links that points to content not related in a refined way, to the primary sectional focus.

Technique 7 – If Needed, Reorganize Content

Sometimes you will have a site where the content gets out of hand.  The focus becomes wider and more diverse over time.  Content that really belongs somewhere else ends up in the wrong location.  So don’ t just work on individual pages – look at entire sections of the site and ensure the overall focus of each section is highly focused.

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Of course there are always going to be other site-specific tasks to consider, ever changing search algorithms to contend with.  Yet even when that’s the case, these principles will hold true.  And if you follow them, and IF you can get your recommendations implemented, you may not reach the farthest galaxy.  Then again, you just may…

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Photo Credit Nasa

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Information Architecture – Stop Shooting For The Moon

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You can check out my long tail study to learn more about the how important the tail can be for organic search.  Well, over the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed another great example of the long tail in action.  The example I’m going to explain shows how you can capture the long tail by filling a void.  Specifically, how building valuable content that helps other people can naturally target the long tail and drive a lot of traffic.  It also shows how good Karma can pay off.  I’m going to cover what happened and then what this means to you as a Search Marketer.

Adventures With Syncing A Samsung Captivate

I recently left the world of Blackberry and moved to a Samsung Captivate, a high-end Android phone running on AT&T’s network.  It’s an incredible phone, with some excellent features, but I just couldn’t accomplish one very important task – connecting my phone to my computer to sync contacts, calendar, transfer files, etc.

Needless to say, this is one of the most fundamental things you want to do with a brand new smartphone. I ended up spending over three hours researching the problem, without success.  There simply wasn’t a documented solution for the specific problem I was experiencing.   I was extremely frustrated and was unfortunately ready to bring the phone back.

I spoke with AT&T support, and they conferenced in Samsung technical support, but there was still no solution.  Then, since I was experiencing a visual problem on my phone (flashing screen, usb problems, etc.)  I ended up searching for videos that could potentially solve the problem.  In a weird twist, I ended up finding a video on Daily Motion (in French) that showed the exact problem I was having.  To make a long story short, there was a single comment on that daily motion video page that ended up solving my problem.  Talk about the power of Google, right? 

Welcome to the Void

After initially solving the problem on my Captivate, I couldn’t believe how I ended up finding the answer.  I also couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a solid online resource that explained how to overcome the problem.  It was obvious that there was a void that needed to be filled. Remember, I spent over three hours digging around the web trying to find a solution.  In addition, AT&T and Samsung telephone support didn’t end up recommending the solution.  It was the French video on daily motion.  Note, I had a different experience with Samsung’s Twitter support and I’ll touch on that later in this post (it was definitely impressive).

Good Intentions and Filling The Void

So, I decided to write a blog post to help other frustrated users overcome sync problems with the Samsung Captivate.  I wanted to make sure it was valuable and thorough, and I also provided screenshots to help other users along.  I had a feeling that many other Captivate users were experiencing the same problem.  And since over a one million Galaxy phones have been sold in the United States already, something told me my intuition was right.  I have provided a link to my post below in case you want to check it out:

My Post About Fixing Sync Problems With The Samsung Captivate:

How to Connect A Samsung Captivate to Your PC Using Samsung Kies | The Missing Manual For Overcoming Sync Problems

Being Thorough Covers the Tail

That night, I wrote the tutorial and made sure it was thorough, easy to follow, and provided screenshots to help people along.  I wanted to make sure other Captivate users had a fighting chance of syncing their phones.  Note, whenever I explain the long tail to new SEO clients, I’m often asked how to effectively target the tail.  Well, I believe that a thorough and detailed post covering a specific topic will naturally target the long tail.  As you cover that topic in detail, you will inevitably include a range of targeted keywords, variations of keywords, etc.  If you don’t, then your post might not be as thorough as you think. 

The Resulting Wave of Captivate Users

So I posted the tutorial, hoping that other users would find it helpful.  Then I moved on.  I had an incredibly busy week so I wasn’t really paying much attention to the post.  Little did I know that a wave of frustrated Captivate users was hitting my blog.  Sure, I knew that other people could be having the same problem, but I had no idea how widespread the syncing problem was.  Suddenly, emails started coming in thanking me for the post.  Some people needed more information, while others were asking additional questions.  At the same time, some comments started being posted on my blog.  People were also reaching out to me on Twitter to either explain how the post helped them or to get clarification on how to fix the problem. I could tell the post was helping other Captivate users.  In the graph below, you can see how visits spiked only two hours after the post launched.

Long Tail, Meet the Void.  Void, Meet the Long Tail

After seeing the activity I mentioned above, I decided to take a look at the keywords leading to the post.  As I was logging into my reporting, I was expecting to see several targeted keywords that led to the post (maybe a few dozen).  Little did I know that the Captivate problem was much bigger than I had thought.  I drilled into my keywords reporting and saw that the long tail of SEO was in full effect.

As of yesterday, 896 different keywords have led to that single post.  More keywords are leading to the post every single day and the traffic on my blog has spiked.  It was truly amazing to see the variations of keywords that led to the tutorial.  There are some keywords that are 5, 6, 7+ words in length.  Try and find those in your favorite keyword research program.    It’s a great example of how a thorough and valuable post that fills a void can target the long tail (naturally.)  Below, you’ll see a graph showing the increase in the number of keywords leading to the post since the day it launched.    There were 21 keywords leading to the post on the first day and 896 in total, as of yesterday.

What This Means For You

If your goal is to attract targeted users to your site via organic search, then keep the following points in mind.  And by the way, although this is a great example of the long tail, it’s not isolated.  There are many examples I’ve seen that are similar.  OK, maybe not with 896 keywords leading to each post, but you get the idea.

• Always be on the lookout for “the void”.  If you can solve a problem that few people have addressed thoroughly, then write a valuable post that explains how to solve that problem.  If you build high quality content that helps others, then you can also reap great rewards (and capture the long tail).
• Be thorough.  The more details you can provide that add value to your content, the better chance you have of effectively targeting the long tail.  Again, this will happen naturally if you write a thorough post.  Don’t skimp on content if you decide to fill a void.
• Be fast.  If you find a void, fill it fast.  Don’t wait.  I immediately wrote the post (that night) and published it the next morning.  This will give you a greater shot at being noticed as the original resource that solved the problem.

What This Means for Samsung

I love my Captivate, but it’s pretty clear that Samsung has a big problem on its hands.  As I explained earlier, there have been over one million Galaxy phones sold in the United States already and I can tell you firsthand, a lot of people are having sync problems.

I ended up working with Samsung Galaxy Support on Twitter (and they have been incredibly responsive and helpful).  I just hope they can add more accounts to deal with the wave of users I mentioned earlier.  I know they are working on a better solution with a new build of their desktop software (Samsung Kies), but they better move fast.

Well, that’s my latest long tail example.  So the next time you are thinking about creating a resource, think about how this story unfolded.  Don’t simply target one keyword or a handful of keywords, capture the long tail and go after 896.  Now it’s time to go sync my Captivate.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Capturing the Long Tail of SEO By Filling a Void [Case Study]

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The key thing to remember with any website is that it should be regularly updated with fresh content and, ultimately, it should be current. So the last thing you want is the top item in your ‘news section’ to be a story about some event that happened twelve months ago.

If you’re going to have news and blog sections on your website, then you have to ensure they’re updated – not only does Google like fresh content, but it will give a much better impression of your company, as one that’s in the loop and up-to-date.

Indeed, the last thing you want is to simply Google Translate news from your English website that a) won’t be relevant to your international audiences, and b) is translated poorly by a machine that knows no better.

This, of course, raises the issue of how you update content when you have multiple platforms covering a number of languages. And there’s no getting around the fact that for each language-version of your website, you should ideally have at least one-employee native to that language who can check everything’s properly localized and who can take responsibility for updating the local site. But it can be easy to overlook this in some markets.

Language Differences

India

As one of the so-called BRIC countries alongside Brazil, Russia and China, India offers fantastic opportunities for companies looking to go global. And crucially, given that English is widely spoken in India (it’s one of the official languages alongside Hindi), you can network and build relationships easier than, say, in China or Russia.

But this shouldn’t hide the fact that India has an astounding 1652 languages, 350 of which are spoken by over ten thousand people. Moreover, thirty Indian vernaculars are spoken by at least a million people.

And then there is also what’s known as ‘Hinglish’ – a sort of ‘halfway’ language between ‘Hindi’ and ‘English’ – which is on the rise across the country, slowly spreading into rural and remote areas via television and digital mediums.

So whilst it may be easier to have a single English website for Indian audiences, you may find that your results are better if you launch sites in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil or Telugu. You need to compartmentalize your audience by offering fully localized websites, so if you know your particular product or service will be of particular interest to a certain region, then you need to localize your website text for that region’s vernacular and talk to them in a language they understand.

Europe

Even if we look at Europe, Switzerland, for example, has three main languages – French, German and Italian, whilst Romansh is an official language too, spoken by over thirty thousand Swiss people.

Again, there may be a temptation to use standard French or German for Swiss markets, but this can backfire, as there are a number of very distinct French and German dialects.

Here are a few examples of how the French varies between France and Switzerland/Belgium.

Furthermore, in French-speaking Canada, they tend to use literal translations of English terms for many phrases, such as fin de semaine for ‘weekend’ (literally, ‘end of the week’), whereas France use le weekend instead, importing the term directly from English.

Brand names

If you’re launching a new product, or trying to sell an existing product, to international markets, your brand name is also important.

For example, whilst US consumers tend to prefer grand sounding names for products (e.g. cars: ‘Mustang’, ‘Eagle’ and ‘Dragon’), Asian markets tend to prefer alphanumeric codes, that sound more technologically stylish. Kia Motors’ Forte, for example, is known as the ‘K3’ in Asia, and the Optima is known as the ‘K5’.

And Canon too has realized the power of localizing its language – the Canon EOS 400D in Japan/Europe was rebranded as the Digital Rebel XTi in the US.

Furthermore, Rolls Royce’s local research paid off in the 1960s – it changed its ‘Silver Mist’ model to ‘Silver Shadow’, after realizing that ‘Mist’ is the German word for manure: Germany was a key market for its classy brand of car.

SEO and Language

So even the best international SEO initiatives can come unstuck if businesses don’t pay enough attention to localizing its language for their key target markets. If a surfer finds a company online only to then discover a whole host of linguistic lapses and cultural faux-pas, then all that good groundwork will be for nothing.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Content and Culture: Localization for Global Businesses

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People and big companies have only these last few years got their heads around SEO, they now know that in order to get more traffic, more sales and more revenue, you need to optimise your site and make its targeted keywords appear as high as possible in all the major search engines.

But moving forwards more and more independent SEO’s are going to be jumping onto the scene, as well as this more and more SEO companies opening up shop. So with even more SEO’s and more companies competing for the same term(s) every sector is going to be a battle field, but there are a few options:

1. Optimise for long tail terms and drive traffic through with ranking for quantity terms rather than the quality ones. (Again this will start receiving huge amounts of competition).
2. Optimise for local terms and then slowly optimise for all the locations that you cover, you will have a lot less competition, but will the search volume and customers be there?
3. Finally and this is what I see expanding rapidly in the next few years, especially for mid sized companies and large companies that are already advertising by other means and already get a lot of direct traffic.

If you look at some of your client’s analytics data you will see that, some of the terms that actually bring the most visitors are their brand terms. As an example, do you know how many people actually go to Google and type in Facebook rather than just typing it in the browser?…….  1,680,000,000 that’s how many!

Now that is not even including mis spellings, so now imagine your client getting a fraction of brand searches, or for the rich and famous reputation searches. Currently there are not many SEO’s concentrating on this factor, but let’s just think about what happens if you do not own the rest of the sites, in the Top 5 or the Top 10? You are basically going to be losing traffic that you could have easily grabbed and converted.  But what is even worse is imagine that Top 10 for your branded term had 3-4 bad experiences or false negatives about your clients company or image, you could potentially be missing out on lots of click throughs even though you are number one for your brand term, because people are seeing the negatives about you.

Brand and reputation searches are on the increase, just take a look at the above graph, this is persistent with most brand terms.

Over the next few years Brand management SEO and reputation management SEO will literally have to be offered as a separate service to clients, because although you may be number 1 for your brand. Is that really enough? What do you think?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Why Brand and Reputation Management SEO are the Way Forwards

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The world of online marketing and, by extension, search marketing is like a giant recipe. You’ll hear lots of people making claims that you don’t need paid search if you are investing in SEO or vice versa. Just like ingredients of any good recipe, paid search and organic search work together to create a masterpiece. Let me share with you my favorite recipe for success:

Search Recipe for Success

1. Identify the keywords you hope to target. The most important element of any search campaign is choosing the right keywords to spend your time, energy, and money on.
2. Create campaign elements. Build landing pages, write content, and create Adwords  and adCenter campaigns.
3. Create a test plan. Despite the fact that I’ve not seen a scenario where paid search and SEO together didn’t make more sense than either of them alone, I still believe that testing and analyzing is the only way to understand the joint impacts of SEO and paid search together.
4. Analyze the impacts. What happened on keywords that you rank #1 for organically that you are also buying in paid search? Are there some terms (such as brand terms) that you are, in fact, cannibalizing organic traffic?

Recently, we ran a test for one of our clients in which we tested a group of keywords that had high rankings in Google. Prior to our test, we measured two weeks (week 1+2) of how paid search and organic search worked together to create a benchmark. The two following weeks (week 3+4), we turned off paid search and measured the impact when only the organic search was driving traffic.

This was followed by two more weeks (week 5+6) of measuring the net impacts of paid and organic search together, and then another two weeks (week 7+8) with paid search turned off.  In both scenarios when paid search was turned off, conversions and net profit were both lower than the scenario s where only organic search was available.

After completing the first 4 steps in the recipe for success, it is important to constantly reexamine your findings. Our recipe for success is always up for improvisation, improvement, and reexamination, but we hope that we can stop with the silly discussions about one methodology being the one and only approach to search. Can’t we all just get along already?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Search Recipe for Success

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So when I say, don’t get infatuated with search engine optimization and rankings, I m primarily addressing the online business owners and not SEO professionals (yes, it’s alright to be fanatical about search engines, back links, rankings and the likes, if you are an SEO professional, even though a multi-talented SEO is still better than a mere link developer).

Nevertheless, let’s take a look at how SEO syndrome can hurt your website in due course.

Listening more to some SEO nerd rather than listening to your customers:

First downside of getting fixated with this ranking stuff … you will start paying more attention to what SEO techies are saying instead of paying attention to your visitors. Now … SEO techies are not evil guys and their blogs are definitely not some no-go zones, neither are any of those websites talking about search engine algorithms, SEO guidelines or Google updates.

The problem actually transpires when you drive yourself into believing that your job starts and ends with improving the ranks. You know … all that hoopla about page impressions and unique visitors. Traffic, undoubtedly is the most needed sustenance for any website but it tends to be useless if the visitors are, just coming and going.

Therefore, do yourself and the visitors a favor, before you even try to get top rankings for a particular keyword. Make sure, your website has the information, product or services that the users will be looking for. Also, pay as much attention to user interface and the usability of your website, as you are paying to those on-page optimization checklists.

Wasting time in things that hardly matter:

At the end of the day … search engine optimization is all-about having great content and a steady growth in back links coming from relevant and trustworthy pages. Instead of keeping it simple (read: Occam’s razor principle) the obsession may lead you to a position where small things will start nagging, especially if you are not patient enough.

The problem with is that it takes some time before you can rank for anything noteworthy. Even if you were right on the mark from the word “Go”. Because the rankings won’t come overnight, the frustration may dupe you into thinking that something is wrong with your website. As a result you will start wasting too much time into research, tweaks and fixes that hardly matter.

Spending all the time and resources on optimization and not on conversion:

If you were asked to pick between two websites … one that gets 1000 daily visitors and manage to convert 1 out of these 1000 into a customer/subscriber, whereas the other one keeps getting 10,000 visitors and still fails to persuade any of them into purchasing … which one would you prefer? Clearly, the one that’s getting less traffic but more sales is the winner.

Yet, we see internet marketers, and even worse the business owners getting more concerned about “More” traffic and “Higher” rankings as compared to what they are making out of the visitors, they’ve already had. Search engine optimization alone is not going to cut it for you. Internet business profitability is measured by the number of sales and not rankings, which brings us back to the long-winded point of this article i.e. “getting overly obsessed with the rankings will kill your online business”

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How Getting Overly Obsessed with Search Engine Optimization Can Kill Your Online Business 

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So I shall just let you get right on with it…

Lead Story 

Google Realtime get’s a new home!

While I was torn between this and Blekko, I decided to go this way. Why? Well for quite some time now I have all but discounted Google’s RTS, (real time search) from not only an SEO standpoint, but as a user as well. There really just doesn’t seem to be enough value as a search tool and was nothing more than fluff added to the universal SERP landscape.

Last week though, Google decided to give Realtime (all one word in this iteration) it’s own home. Yes, it is now a standalone vertical (you know, those little icons such as ‘Video’ ‘Images’ ‘News’ etc..). Is this a huge move? Not really.

It might be a second chance because of it being little more than a distraction as mentioned alread? Is it because focus testing showed people wanted it as such? That much I have no clue. But it is what it is.

For those that missed it, here’s some good coverage on Google’s blog, Search Engine Land and of course, my own on the Trail.

The short version is that there really isn’t anything overly innovative here. But, at the same time, there is a reason it was broken out. Is it one of the aforementioned ones? Or maybe part of some master plan involveing the rumoured social strike; Google Me? Time will tell. But as a search geek I will at least be keeping an eye on it just in case.

If you have thoughts on it, I’d love to here from you!

Talk of the Town 

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 08/31/2010

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If you pay attention at all, it’s easy to see how the economic crisis has reached into our everyday lives. Businesses with an online presence are going through a consumption crisis. Faced with current, real issues and future, theoretical issues, business owners and consumers are taking two distinct attitudes: no consumption or over consumption. Save it all or spend it all.

Interestingly enough, much of the compulsive consumption is happening online. With affiliate marketing, optimizers’ gone wild and social media gurus popping up everywhere, consumers are constantly bombarded by messages to buy, sign up, read and engage.

How does this affect you as a small business owner? Have you become a compulsive consumer, or are you even a consumer at all, now? Are you trying to reduce your spending? Are your hours being consumed by needs a business can’t do without, but you can no longer afford to hire someone to do?

The good news, and the only real good thing about this upside down economy, is that you as a small business can partake and have a big impact. With the changes in marketing that have been happened over the past few years, you can now promote your company, values and relationships through many online venues.

I’ve recently been re-reading David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (2007, updated 2009). It’s definitely a recommended read. In the opening, Scott puts it like this. He says:

“Before the Web came along, there were only two ways to get noticed: buy expensive advertising or beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the Web that your buyers want to consume. The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion. Success online comes from thinking like a journalist and a thought leader.”

Robert Scoble, in the Foreword, says:

“…there’s a new medium to deal with. Your PR teams had better understand what drives this new medium (it’s as influential as the New York Times or CNN now), and if you understand how to use it you can drive buzz, new product feedback, sales, and more.

But first you’ll have to learn to break the rules.”

“The rules” are the old rules of public relations. If you’ve missed the boat, let me explain. You don’t have to have a degree in marketing or PR to engage your audience (although, granted, it does help). Anyone can market their own products, as long as they’re able to engage and interact with readers and consumers. It boils down to “Trust”.

See, unlike the days of old, you no longer have to beg the media for airtime and recognition. It’s a different world with different rules. We’ve moved away from interruptive marketing and towards an informal exchange between business and consumer. We’ve moved back towards transparency, and given consumers more informed choices on what and when to consume.

Make sure you have a user- and search engine- friendly website, easy to use and easy to understand. Take the time to reach out to your audience; try to find out what brought them to your site, what they wanted to know and if they found what they needed. Build your relationships through social media and networking.

You can be your own online marketing team, even as a non-consumer. You can succeed, as long as you keep the exchange for time and money even. When you have the time, spend it; if you don’t have the time, spend the money for your SEO and online marketing. It may be painful, but marketing can and will help you become a successful business.

Post image by Chris Keeney Photography

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Online Marketing – How Times Have Changed

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Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking? Tell us about it.

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. "Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming," one person commented on our story about it.

What do you think of this algorithm change? Comment here.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury’s still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we’ll see.

Should Google change search results as you type? Comment here.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, ". their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site… I’ve never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip’s but there was like 10-20 of them running at once."

Acquisition

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it’s unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Have you noticed anything else interesting happening with Google search within the last week or so? Are you seeing things that are impacting your rankings? Let us know.

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"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

"We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year," adds Keshava. "We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page."

This change may prove to be helpful for a lot of searches, but they could still do more in this area if you ask me. For exmaple, they could rank tag pages (commonly used on news sites and blogs) as top results for appropriate searches.

For instance, if I search for "WebProNews SEO articles" or "SEO articles on WebProNews", it couldn’t get any more relvant than the WebProNews SEO tag page. That points to every SEO article we have. Yet, this result is nowhere to be found for either query, and it’s certainly not unique to us (ironically, another article in which I made a similar complaint ranks at the top). These pages aren’t often linked to, so they don’t get the PageRank, but does that make them less relevant for queries like this?

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