Posted by randfish

A long time ago (at least, in web years), search engine optimization required specific targeting practices for each of the engines. For Hotbot, you’d need to place two repetitions of every keyword side-by-side in your meta keywords tag, while for Northern Light, a picture of at least one dancing baby in the bottom right-hand corner made all the difference

Nowadays, most SEO is done with the same set of search-friendliness and search targeting standards in mind. Using keywords intelligently without stuffing, making static, easily crawlable URLs, building content that people are likely to link to and promoting sites through social, viral and directory marketing are relatively consistent across the SEO field. And yet… many people still have questions and concerns about which engines they should target and why they perform better at some engines than others. With this post I want to answer some of these common concerns.

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Which Search Engines Should I Target in My SEO Campaigns?

 

To figure out the answer, let’s take a look at the current leading search engines (via SearchEngineLand):

With the big 3 (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) garnering a combined 95.5% of all searches in the US and the big 4 (with the addition of Ask.com) pulling in 99.4% of all searches, it’s easy to see why virtually no effort is paid to smaller players. If you’re receiving 1,000 visits each day from Google, spending time and effort on that 0.6% of small players has the potential to bring you maybe 10 extra daily visits.

As cut and dry as the answers here seem, there are exceptions. Certainly, in markets outside the US, the answers are different. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, most of Central & South America, Africa & the Mid-East are all heavily Google-centric (with smaller inroads from Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask.com). In Asia, the story’s a bit different, as in Russia. Here are some of the search share leaders in these other markets:

• China – Baidu (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all had share here, but were re-directed to Baidu by the government on multiple occasions, helping to keep Baidu the leader)
• Korea – Naver
• Japan – Yahoo! (though Google is also highly relevant)
• Russia – Yandex

Beyond the geographical markets, there are some valuable vertical search properties that aren’t owned/controlled by the search giants in arenas like travel, shopping and video. Newcomers have attempted to make inroads in blog search, news search, financial and local search as well. SEO for these sites, however, is typically significantly different from the traditional practices for web search engines, so don’t expect the same rules to apply.

All in all, the right answer is – the search engines that send valuable traffic. For now, that means Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft & Ask.com. What’s more surprising for many newcomers is that SEO for each of these properties is remarkably similar in tactics and execution. Let’s take a deeper look with the questions below.

What Do I Need to Do Differently to Reach Google vs. Yahoo! vs. MSN/Live?

Not much, honestly. The major engines are all, at this point, largely playing catch-up to Google’s algorithm and optimizing for on-site search friendliness (spiderability, good keyword targeting, semantic markup, clean URLs, no duplicate content, etc.) is virtually identical for every engine. Even keyword usage, once the big differentiator (you used to hear "Yahoo! likes 3X as many keyword repetitions as Google." all the time on SEO forums), has largely fallen by the wayside, with the singular exception that MSN/Live does seem to love keyword-rich URLs and domain names.

From a targeting perspective, just concentrate on building great content, marketing it effectively to link savvy audiences, crafting a search-friendly website and attracting as many links, from as many diverse properties as possible. The engines are all chasing the same goals of relevance, so think like a search engineer and build the kind of site they’d be thrilled to see ranking in their indices, then market the hell out of it

Why am I Ranking Well at Google, but Not at Yahoo! or MSN?

I think this is probably the most common of the questions in this post, and to be perfectly honest, no one can say for certain. Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live all utilize different indices of the web and different ranking algorithms. This means that results between the three will, necessarily, have variance.

However, I’d be a pretty mean guy if I didn’t at least provide some guidance, so here’s my honest opinions on the subject. If you’re ranking well at Google, but not at Yahoo! or MSN/Live, one of these may be to blame.

• Google relies heavily on a trust and domain authority based algorithm, meaning that a barely optimized, poorly linked-to URL on a heavily trusted, powerful domain will probably do much better in Google than the other engines. If your content isn’t highly targeted (lots of keyword usage and many external links), but it’s sitting on a powerful domain, this could be why you’re seeing over-representation in Google.
• Google has the freshest index and the best ability to find new links quickly and count them. If you’ve released content recently or if many pages have recently linked to yours, this could be a big reason why you’re outperforming Yahoo! and MSN/Live with your rankings at Google.
• Google rewards a few very high quality, trusted links over many lower value links and thus, you’ll frequently see pages and sites in Google’s rankings because they’ve won out through the value Google places in their sparse but more trusted link profile.

Why am I Ranking Well at Yahoo! or MSN, But Not at Google?

As with the above, it’s impossible to say for certain, but once again, I’ll give my personal opinions.

• Yahoo! is not as good as Google is at identifying and discounting so-called "manipulative" linking. Paid links, link farms, reciprocal links and even FFA links (like blog comment spam and guestbook spam) will still sometimes provide value in Yahoo!, but rarely do in Google.
• MSN/Live is still way behind even Yahoo! at catching manipulative links and thus, many of their more commercially focused results (and plenty of non-commercial results) are filled with sites and pages propped up by links that Google simply won’t count.
• Google still employs a series of algorithmic effects that mimic a "sandbox" of sorts. This means that new domains launched at Google or old domains moving their content to new sites often run into trouble ranking for what they "deserve" under the normal Google algorithm. This effect is much less strong than it was 2-3 years ago, but is certainly still around. In fact, last week, a good friend’s site just "broke out of the box" in one of the best recent examples I’ve seen of the sandbox effect lifting.
• Google’s the most "suspicious" of the engines, so if you’ve been overly aggressive in link growth, even through no fault of your own, Google will sometimes penalize or devalue your links, at least temporarily. I see this most often with anchor text isues, where a particular site’s backlinks all share the exact same anchor text, but other "patterns" can also trigger Google’s raised eyebrow.

Why Doesn’t My Site Rank at Ask.com?

Ask.com employs a very different algorithm to the other major search engines. While Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live all use global popularity (the link equity built to a site by all the other sites that link to it on the web), Ask.com relies on local popularity, which only counts link equity from other topically-relevant sites in that site’s niche.

If you imagine the Internet as a model of the Earth, Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live are essentially saying that votes from anywhere on the planet count towards a page’s ranking. Ask.com takes a different view and feels that only votes coming from your local town or county count towards your rankings.

This means that with Ask.com, you’ll need a very different set of links to rank well than at Google, Yahoo! or MSN/Live.

Aren’t There Any Other Engines I Should Worry About?

Other than the aforementioned market leaders in other geographies and any relevant vertical search engines, the answer is "not really." Altavista, Dogpile, Hotbot, Lycos and the like simply don’t provide traffic levels that make them worthy of a lot of effort, and their algorithms tend to mimic the major engines anyway.

However, in the future, this may change. Startup engines like Wikia, Cuill, Powerset and even Mahalo are trying to chip into the market leaders and 2-4 years from now, there may be several Ask.com or even MSN/Live sized competitors worthy of more attention.

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Hopefully, this post will help you and your nervous clients to get some closure on these pesky issues. As always, comments are greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Nick Wilsdon pointed out in the Sphinn thread on this post that there are many other countries (like Iceland, the Czech Republic and Estonia) where other search engines are dominant market players. The global search report from 2007 (warning – PDF) covers these in-depth.

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Posted by Jane Copland

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making up new words for something that, as it stands, can’t be properly named or described with existing language. Quite simply, this is how languages evolve and grow, and it would be next to impossible to name everything with words that already exist. However, there should be a reason behind naming, coinage and the general invention of new words. On top of that, there should be a conscious effort not to invent words that can easily turn into annoying memes, or which become just plain laughable. This is not to say that invented names for online businesses have to mean something, although the good ones often do.

Digg is a good name. Long before Kevin Rose and Owen Byrne launched a popular social media company, people talked about "digging" stuff that they liked. The word is still in use, although I’d like to guess that people who use Digg tend to confine its use almost solely to their actions within the site. If I heard someone say that they "dug" something," I’d hear it with two "g"s. Digg managed to one-up its competitors by easily spawning verbs – a common indication of success. No one I know of "reddits" stories.

A lack of a verb aside, Reddit is also a great name. It doesn’t really matter that when I first heard of it, I immediately thought that their icon would be a frog. The idea that you read it at Reddit completely validates the name, even if the homepage is often littered with [PIC] submissions. StumbleUpon also scores very highly on the "good name" charts. I made a pretty good guess about what the service did before I used it: I assumed that it would have me stumble upon things on the Internet, which is exactly what it does.

More browsing, reviewing and agonising over Web 2.0 Award nominations has had me uncover some of the best – and worst – named sites. To me, a well named website has at least had some thought put into its name’s creation. Its name has been coined for a reason, no matter whether the name initially appears to make sense.

Badoo is one of the sites I’ve come across recently whose name I don’t understand. It is a content sharing and social networking service. Some successful online businesses have named themselves in odd ways (Lulu, Bebo, Wufoo, Monster), but it’s a risky move. Taking that risk probably means a putting up with a tougher time when it comes to early name recognition and branding.

There’s also a balance between creative and silly, and sometimes the two can overlap. "Twitter" is creative and relevant: it’s a real word (which isn’t common amongst web 2.0 names) and it alludes to what people use it for. Birds sit in trees and twitter at each other, supposedly imparting small pieces of information. The problem with the word is that it’s annoying and easy to make fun of. Ideally, I’d say you’d want to avoid this.

Think of the words that you can make from "Twitter." Immediately, we have "twit" which many of us use when we’re referring to total idiots. While twit isn’t a particularly American term and the company was founded in San Francisco, it’s often useful to take a look at the world-wide usage of the language you’re using and figure out of other cultures might see your name differently.

Even SEOmoz is pronounced differently by North Americans than it is by most other English speakers. In U.S. and Canadian English, the "moz" sounds like "maahz"; most other English speakers pronounce it with a more rounded "o" sound. This site explains why way better than I can. Being an employee here, I pronounce the company’s name the way my co-workers do. It sounds odd to me when I hear it said in the way I’d have pronounced it if I’d never worked here.

Luckily for us, our company’s name doesn’t change enough between dialects that it becomes inappropriate, and its meaning doesn’t change. I don’t expect that you can account for every regional subtlety that might exist around the world, but most Americans are at least aware that calling someone a twit isn’t complimentary. Despite the fact that Twitter is a real word and relates to the service, I would not have used it. It success makes my argument weaker, only it stands that people who dislike the phenomenon usually cite its name in the list of things that turn them off.

The additional words that Twitter tends to spawn are also annoying: tweet, twittering and, most recently, tweeple might not aggravate everyone, but they’re certainly polarising. Consider how variations of a name might evolve… Although we definitely didn’t invent it, "Moz" has found plenty of uses in reference to SEOmoz (mozzers, Mozplex, MozSquad etc). Some people probably find this irritating. However, I’d hazard a guess that a smaller percentage of people will dislike this usage than will turn away from using "twit" on a regular basis.

In terms of whether a name should indicate what a site does, it seems that most successful businesses at least hint at their service in their name. Myspace’s name is great, especially considering that its most useful feature is providing bands, comedians, film makers, etc with a space to promote themselves and their work. That the site has morphed into everyone’s gaudy space makes its name even more relevant. Facebook isn’t quite as relevant a name (without having heard of it, you may think of a Hot-or-Not style site), but it also managed to combine two real words to make a somewhat-descriptive name. Even Googlemeans something. Not so sure about Yahoo! though. If anyone knows exactly why Yahoo! was named thus, add the reason in the comments. Or make up your own, because that’s fun, too.

If you’ve been using the Internet for more than a few minutes, you’ll have seen the infamous list of inadvertently terrible domain names. Rarely do you see anyone makes mistakes as blatant as this, but it is worthwhile researching alternate meanings for your potential names. I would also stay away from the completely meaningless names, as inventive as they may sound. Let me leave you with an instant message discussion Rebecca and I had yesterday about the naming of websites. We talk to each other on the Internet even though we sit about five feet from each other:

Don’t become someone else’s IMed joke: name your business with care.

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Posted by randfish

A report on the "Natural Born Clickers" (NBCs from now on) was released today by Starcom, Tacoda & Hitwise. The data points to some head-scratchingly bizarre figures about the people who click on paid display advertisements (emphasis below mine):

…heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

If you’re worried about the online ad market taking the news badly, don’t despair yet. It would appear that there’s good news mixed in. Apparently, display ads, much like TV, radio and print ads, don’t demand immediate action to produce results.

…data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.

OK, so if as long as we’re not targeting clicks, but rather attempting to garner attention and brand recognition with our display ads, we’re in the clear. Winners in this scenario are probably big brand advertisers like Dell, Motorola, Apple, American Express and Macy’s while losers might include that lovable brand behind the "punch the monkey" banners. In essence, the report’s telling us that skimming over an ad is good for getting that brand into a person’s consciousness (and making them more likely to recall that brand in future purchase decisions). Conversely, targeting the "click-heavy" demographic and getting traffic through display campaigns might produce much narrower targets than we might hope.

In simple terms, here’s some probably winners:

 

The Movado ad at top targets wealthy readers of the New York Times, many of whom probably have gifts for Valentine’s Day on their minds this week. The ad doesn’t demand a clickthrough – it barely requests one. Instead, it’s designed to make the reader consider the upcoming event and brand them with Movado’s name. Similarly, the Sheryl Crow ad (which I found in the movies section on Salon.com) is barely targeted at clickthrough. It’s much more like a TV ad – attempting to use endorsements from trusted sources to remind the visitor that this is a high quality album.

Now some possible losers:

Both of these require reading, not just scanning, and serve to entice a click, rather than attempting to simply impart a quick brand message. The first, from LendingTree.com, I found on Yahoo! Finance, while the second comes from HotJobs – obviously, these are both well-targeted from a content perspective, but the study would recommend that the clicks they receive may not only be less valuable than they think (as they’re continually over-reaching NBCs), but that using CTR as a formula for success is a flawed metric.

The thing is – I’m not totally convinced that display advertisers should give up on the CTR, as the research suggests:

…said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore. “For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”

If you can earn positive ROI on display ads, for goodness sake, don’t stop just because half your clickers all come from a similar demographic. If you can pay for only unique IP address clicks or reach into sites whose demographic profiles differ drastically from the NBCs, you might have even better success, but it doesn’t detract from the already existing value of the investment. I’m forced to wonder whether this study might have a negative impact on ad placement, or whether the advertisers will read between the lines and see the extra value that they’re currently not calculating.

BTW – Has there been any credible research on over or under-represented demographics/psychographics among those who click PPC ads at the engines?

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Posted by Esteban_Panzera

Google has got lots and lots of uses, and one of them is to define words. It can be done either by typing in "what is keyword" (only 1 definition will appear), or by typing "define: keyword".

Google defines this function on their patent as:

A system and method for providing definitions is described. A phrase to be defined is received. One or more documents, which each contain at least one definition, are determined. The phrase is matched to at least one of the definitions. One or more definitions for the phrase are presented.

What should you do if you want your website to appear as the one that defines keywords? Just follow these 10 simple tips:

1. First, put the word to define, followed by the definition.
2. Make the definition unique.
3. < p >, < tr >, < li >, and < br > are treated as separators between definitions.
4. Put the keyword to define and the definition inside the same paragraph. These have to be the only words in that paragraph, or use < dl >, < dt > and < dd > to specify lists of definitions; these are HTML tags.
5. Pagerank of the document where you list the definition will make your definition rank higher than others.
6. Differentiate the keyword to define by using < b >, < strong >, < em >, < code >, or < span >.
7. Separate the keyword to define from the definition with a : or -.
8. Use the words glossary, definitions, dictionary, what is, and canonical forms of those as Title tag, heading tags, and on the URL.
9. Remember to put more than 5 definitions per page; if not, they will be discarded.
10. Don’t start a definition with the word "see" or it will get discarded.
11. Don’t capitalize the first letter of the definition.

If all the tips are taken into consideration and you create your glossary by what you have read here, you should have no problem in appearing on the next keywords you define.

This post was written by Esteban Panzera 

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Posted by randfish

Mystery Guest and I were talking over dinner tonight about how ours (the current 25-30 year old age group) is essentially the last generation to experience a pre-Internet childhood. If you turned 18 after ~1999, your upbringing was probably impacted, at least in part, by the rise of the web (at least in regions with high Internet penetration rates). What will we tell our children about those fanciful days before search engines, websites and on-demand knowledge wrapped themselves into our collective psyches?

Let’s explore:

1. Looking up Facts in an Encylclopedia or Dictionary
   At my house growing up, we had a huge encylopedia that came with a magnifying glass in an attached cardboard drawer. You’d grab the appropriate volume and scan with the magnifying glass until you got to the right entry. Now, it’s as easy as misspelling the word in a search box and hitting "enter."
2. Using the Phonebook
   Flipping through the phonebook, trying to recall names and wishing you had the fancy phonebook with the business white pages (we didn’t get ours until the late 1980’s) was the basic process for any informational or commercial query that couldn’t be solved without outside help.
3. The Dewey Decimal System & Library Card Files
   Those huge bookcases filled with information cards dictated the structure of knowledge access. Between them and the librarians –
4. Unresolvable News & Pop Culture Queries
   Who was that actor in Back to the Future that played Biff? If you didn’t know his name, you’d have to wait until you could get your hands on a copy of a movie dictionary or an original VHS tape. Arguments about what year the British invaded the Falklands could go on for weeks, until access to source material could be found. 
5. The Modem Connection Noise
   Not really pre-Internet, but certainly something you never hear anymore – that long, ugly warbling is practically nostalgia to those of us who regularly fired up our 2800 baud dialers.
6. Unknown Values of Collectables
   Prior to eBay, anyone in the business of buying and selling goods with a solid dose of charm and charisma could make a veritable fortune buying low and selling high. Today, we just look to the web for a reliable price.
7. The Office Mailroom
   Large and small offices alike once received an enormously greater quantity of business-relevant mail. I recall my Mom’s small marketing business constantly had invoices and checks, legal documents and business communiques coming in and going out. Today, we barely get anything but junk mail, catalogs and physical goods in the mail.
8. No Asynchronous Contact (except Answering Machines)
   No email, no IM, no text messages and until last year, no Twitter. Communication happened in real time between people, or it took place over telephone and radio waves. The postcard and handwritten letter served as the predeccesor to even these technological leaps.
9. Charting Maps & Directions
   Clear the dining room table, pull out the maps, and let’s figure out the best route to Boise. Imagine all the wrong turns, poorly designed routes and lost motorists – not that early versions of MapQuest didn’t cause their own problems
10. Buying Airline Tickets in Person
    I recall standing in line in downtown Seattle, waiting to get into the United Airlines sales office to buy plane tickets, or even driving down to the airport with my Mom to get them before a flight.
11. Newspaper Classifieds
    Before the web, job hunting, scalping and private sales were, by and large, conducted through the local papers’ classified ads. Today, this loss of revenue (largely from sites like Craigslist, Backpages and Kijiji) is dampening newspapers’ ability to operate profitably offline.
12. Watching/Listening to the News for Weather, Traffic & News
    Do you remember when news, weather and traffic weren’t available on demand? Nowadays, I pull them up on my mobile device almost daily, but before 1996 or so, your only option was to turn on the news and wait until they announced it over the airwaves. I remember sitting in the car as a young boy, watching my Dad flip the stations from one to the next, hoping that someone would have a traffic report.
13. Inaccessibility of Adult Content and Knowledge
    Like it or not, this age group may be one of the final generations to learn about the birds & bees from our parents (or that tough kid on the playground in 7th grade – that no one believes at first).

As much as we complain about the search engines and even the web as a whole, they’ve brought an incredible tool to all of our lives, and our job, as search marketers, is to make more information more accessible. It’s quite remarkable, really

Queue Rand’s old man voice:

Back in my day, we had to walk to something called the library. It was uphill both ways, and since we didn’t have global warming, we had to trudge through the driving snow. But the librarians… Oh, those wonderful librarians with their button down shirts and sweater sets and eyeglasses. They didn’t always have the right answer, but they sure were a lot friendlier than that damned pocket Google you kids like so much!

So… What stories will you tell your kids about the time before the web?

p.s. Yes, you can file this post straight in the noise over signal file, but hopefully you’ll get a laugh before you do. Besides, I’m technically out of town, enjoying a romantic Monday night with my fiancee, so I shouldn’t even be blogging (clearly I’m addicted).

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