NEWS
We can help.
You pay only for performance.
Questions regarding
web site marketing?
 |
GREETINGS | |
| Welcome to another edition of First Page SEO's web site marketing news. In this issue you'll find some very good insight into how Google ranks your site and why some search engine optimization campiagns fail...and much more. First Page SEO's mainstay is internet marketing but we also build some very exciting web sites. We also offer site hosting plans at very competitive rates-100% reliable 24/7. Our goal is to establish ongoing communication with our customers and to assist those just trying to understand the ever evolving world of search engine marketing. We'll also provide tips that may help you to improve your site placement. We want your business! Promoting and marketing your web site can be confusing and frustrating for business managers that really want to focus attention on core services and products. Web marketing is a continuim - not a one time thing. Like many marketing disciplines there are always new opportunities and many things one can do beyond the basics to contribute to your web site success. First Page SEO can keep you on top of the web marketing game and ensure your site remains competitive. | |
GOOGLES ALGORITHM | |
| It looks something like this: Keyword density, internal linking, body copy, url construction, outbound links >+10% Domain strength (or as some suggest the sandbox issue), age of domain, stable history >+25% Inbound links including link age, trust factor, web page source, theme match, PR of backlink, anchor text of backlink >+25% User data, click thru volume, keyword search requests, revisits >+10% Quality score, this is the Semantic stuff Google bought - determining the context and relevance of page and content quality >+10% Manual boosts for sites that do not rank well on their own but are perceived with important news or topical information >+20% Automated and manual penalties as per Google guidelines on mirrored domains, cloaking, gateways, redirects, duplicate content, hijacked content etc. >-??% Obviously being penalized is the wild card...so behave. | |
FIRST PAGE SEO NAMED TOP SEO COMPANY | |
| This is a excerpt from a media release. topseos.com a trusted and well respected resource for evaluating internet market vendors has announced the inclusion of First Page SEO in the list of top 30 search engine marketing companies. "First Page SEO has demonstrated that it is a leader in it's field, showing superior service levels and performance for their clients" commented Bill Peden of topseos.com. First Page SEO is a standout amongst the many internet marketing vendors in the $5 billion plus search marketing industry". It is estimated there are 10,000 interent marketing firms worldwide. topseos.com evaluates candidates based on a rigorous selection process. Each internet marketing firm, consultant or service is evaluated in terms of it's: -Competitive advantage -Superior services and pricing -Customer and technical support -Client response -Innovations that set it apart from the competition -Overall effeciency -Overall performance including multiple client proof of top search engine placement Only one other BC based Canadian search engine marketing company broke into the the top 30 list. First Page SEO has been offering internet marketing services for over eight years. It serves over 400 clients' worldwide and provides optimization services,web site development,opt-in email programs and media link services. topseos.com was founded in 2002 by e-ventures and serves to provide the search engine marketing industry and companies with a single source for researching internet marketing vendors. | |
GOOGLE SYNDICATED SEARCH | |
| Otherwise referred to as Open search where search engines compile data from other sources outside the algo listings like information from news engines, social network sites and other search engine results. Where does this Google rumour come from? Google has been buying up domains related to "syndicated search" keywords. Where there's smoke there's fire. | |
HITWISE TRAVEL INDUSTRY REPORT | |
| Hitwise has released a travel industry report on online trends that says: -local sites contribute 95.74% of all traffic to the travel industry so I guess that kind of leaves international directories out on a limb, also it says something about geographic refinement of the search -40.15% of visits to travel industry sites went to the top 10 web sites -the average visit was 8.5 minutes So buy local directory listings, keep your own site on the first or second page and put something interesting on your site. | |
TRUSTED COPY | |
| You have no doubt heard of the Google trusted link theory. Have you heard about Googles trusted copy? Yes Google looks for certain things in your copy besides proper keyword density. Some time ago Google bought up a company that allows the algo to understand the context of the words around it. Anchor text as it can be referred to. In addition Google sees phrases or words used together in various order as an indicator of importance. By example Google knows that one word reversal might be more popular as search than the other. "Brown cow" can mean the colour of a cow. Certainly "the cow was brown" refers to the colour of the cow but when you read "ordered a brown cow at the bar" we're not talking the colour of the cow so much as the drink called brown cow. So by measuring search terms and the words around the term that provide context along with historic incidence of that search and time spent on the found site, Google can determine the relevance of the text pertaining to the search. Further matches to title and alt tags help to confirm this conclusion. Outbound links with the keywords or font size of the keywords can also be contributing factors of trust. What isn't trustworthy copy? Overly dense keyword phrases, text generated by auto copyrighting, text that doesn't read well or make sense and hidden text. | |
WHAT ARE SUPPLEMENTAL LISTINGS ? | |
| Supplemental listings are pages that are shown when the search engine has no better examples to present from the main index to match the search query. Supplemental listings are therefore brought out of oblivion to serve the case. Some would say bringing the content out of the sandbox. So when you see sites presented as supplemental, remember they are the choice of last resort for the search engine. | |
HAVE YOU BEEN BOWLED? | |
| One of the techniques black hat seo's have used to hurt competitor sites' has been to play with the competitor sites inbound links. Because the site owner has little control of inbound links and because it plays an important part of search engine algorithmns it is not uncommon for ruthless competitors to point junk links, bulk links, bad neighbourhood links and unrelavent links at a hapless web site to destroy it's Page Rank. More recently Google has been judging outbound links against inbound links. The web site owner can control outbound links. If Google sees a bunch of inbound junk links come on suddenly and no junk type outbound links leaving the site it will be more lenient with the site than when it sees poor links in and out - which can imply exchange services and link triads rather than a malicious unavoidable third party attack on a site. At First Page SEO one of the steps we take when optimizing a site is to check for signs of link bowling. Sometimes we find that site owners have done the wrong thing when putting a link strategy into play but often we also find the site owner had no idea some competitor had "link bowled" them, hurting their site placement. | |
TOP 4 REASONS WHY SOME SEO CAMPAIGNS FAIL | |
| 1. Most common is that the search engine optimization on the web site is done thoroughly and correctly - but follow through in terms of continuing to add copy or back links does not happen. This can be the site owners fault or the contractors fault - if the contractors job was to maintain and add content to the web site on an ongoing basis. 2. Treating all businesses as if they were the same. The first step of any good seo contractor is to ask a lot of questions and learn your products and services and where your customers come from - both geographic and demographic analysis. This way the theme of your site and geographic qualifiers etc can be brought out and prioritized in your content, links and tags etc. 3. Trying to focus on too wide of a market either geographically or product wise. Every business has its niche market. Don't try and be all things to all people. Stick to your core or competitive advantage products or services and focus your seo efforts on that theme. 4.Failure to monitor site progress and make adjustments along the way. No ones perfect and hardly anyone gets everything 100% the first time around. Search engine optimization should not be a once in the life of a web site type of thing. Treat your seo provider like a doctor or ongoing consultant - over the long term - it will pay off for your web site placement in spades. Consider ongoing search engine marketing as part of your overall marketing budget. When compared to the cost of other types of collateral advertising like print ads, your seo costs will be cheap and well worthwhile. | |
FIRST PAGE SEO OFFERS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING PROGRAM | |
| Social bookmarking or social networking has become a popular medium for search engines to spider for trusted links. Like the News Program that utilises viral media content with embedded back links our new Social Bookmarking Program will lever off the viral nature of the many sites that share group bookmarks. Our testing to date shows astounding results in the generation of themed high quality trusted back links. This program will be a major step forward for site owners who already have other link strategies in play and need another link channel. It is equally valuable to new sites that are starting out with few relevant or trusted back links. One that will drive huge numbers of links to your web site. Once again we've found a channel that means very little aging of the links before they are absorbed into the search engine indexes as a vote for your site. Details are on our site under Link Programs. | |
GOOGLE - DYNAMICALLY CREATED PAGE INDEXING | |
| Many realize that search engines are not very good at indexing dynamic scripted pages built with PHP, PERL, ASP etc.It's beyond me why so many web masters insist on building 100% dynamic sites to make it easy for themselves at the expense of their customers.In fact Google has an official statement on the matter in it's Guidelines. "If you decide to use dynmic pages (i.e. the url contains a "?" character [in the syntac], be aware that not every search engine crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." Until recently Google also had this in it's guidelines: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your urls, as we don't include these pages in our index." This is what Google says now: "Google now indexes urls that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewritting it - we'll accept it just fine as is. Keep in mind however, that dynamic urls with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic urls into user friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls." And the lesson is: use dynamic script for form pages and when you MUST generate dynamic content - and DO NOT build sites that are 100% dynamic as they will not place well without significant effort in other areas like link strategies to make up for the shortfall of the dynamic script or more simply, lack of content. | |
WHY DO SOME NEW SITES HAVE TROUBLE GETTING LISTED? | |
| Often new site owners jump the gun and FTP (publish) sites without tags, incomplete content and broken links. The site may get indexed by Google or Yahoo before registration as they are likely to crawl in through an inbound link. If your site hasn't been properly optimized then guess what - you get cached way back in the listings. If your site is dynamic, flash heavy without html content or a site map they may not list your site at all because there is simply not enough content for them to latch on to index. Older established sites that have all the bugs worked almost always out-place new sites. Some search engines will not index all the html body text on the first pass regardless of how well your site is designed so some measure of patience is necessary. Remember optimizing your site as it is being built will save you some aggravation and will give you far better start up results than having to go back and correct problems after the fact. | |
MSNbot WINDOWS LIVE SEARCH | |
| Microsoft is putting mega bucks into search. They have purged themselves of partner search indexes/directories like Looksmart, Inktomi(Yahoo) and have dropped Overture keyword bidding (Yahoo)in the US in favor of their own home brew. Canada Yahoo bidding is not yet affected. The final product is competitive with plenty of innovative features. Microsoft will take some risks with regulators and integrate its search to business applications and operating system - hey its only lawyers and $. In its next version of Windows the new search will be integrated into the operating system so that users won't need to load web browsers to search the internet but rather they can move to the internet directly from any operating system application like say a spread sheet or whatever you happen to be working on. Longhorn will also include a file system to integrate to data bases used in Microsoft SQL server software. Windows Live Search wants the following: -no broken links on pages -content in syntac carries weight -page text content should be under 150kb per page -keep to one topic per page -gooey links to related topics help -follows inbound links -don't stuff alt tags -no hidden text or links -don't spam keyword content -don't use non themed links or buy link farm services | |
SURVEY SAYS | |
| Outsell research has forecast that marketing budgets will continue to shift on line this year to internet marketing such as pay per click campaigns. Online marketing spending is predicted to grow 19 percent with specific search marketing expected to increase 26 percent. Print advertising will increase by 3.3 percent and television & radio only 2.4 percent.The total information industry is estimated at $285 billion yearly with Yahoo & Google owning 5 percent of that market. Google has climbed to the #5 rank from #18 position behind leaders Reed Elsevier, Time Warner, Thomson Corp. and Gannett. Yahoo has gone to the #8 spot from #18th in one year. Are you seeing the trend? Internet marketing is in and print marketing is falling away. If you're trying to reach boomers and younger, your marketing budget should be heavily skewed towards internet web based marketing. Surveys are now showing that young adults under 30 and school age children spend far more time on the internet than they do watching television. | |
WHAT IS LINK WEIGHT & ANCHOR TEXT? | |
| Anchor text is when you imbed links called "gooey" links in text relevant to your link so that search engines can spider the surrounding text and see the relevance or theme that ties to the link. Basically the engine wants to understand the context of the link and sees value in a good match and rewards the site. This is true of both inbound back links pointing at your site and the non reciprocated outbound links on your site. Link weight is the Google Page Rank concept where links or "votes" that point at your site are judged as more important or less important based on the power of their own inbound links. The power or authority of the link pointing at your site (assuming the site pointing at the site matches your site theme) will determine the bump you get in the algorithm for the "vote". Google does not seem to care about links that point at you that have a Page Rank of less than 2 (Google PR runs from 1 to 10 with one being the bottom or weakiest on the scale). So, by example, pages that link to you that have a Page Rank of say 5 or 6 are pretty powerfull votes and an 8 is a very powerful vote. Pages that have a PR above 8 are few and far between and to acheive high PR of course those pages must have many powerful links pointing at them in their own right. So not all links are created equal. For each 1 point increase in PR the link popularity is increased 8X. So a PR6 link is 8X as valuable as the PR5 link. But the number of links count too and most important the relevance of the link to the page content. Weight is important but having it come from anchor text that matches your page theme is even more important. | |
YAHOO FIGHTS BACK | |
| Yahoo and Google have been tripping over each other building bigger indexes and offering new tools to the consumer to brand their respective businesses. For a while, Google left everyone behind. Froogle retail merchant search, Google Earth, Google toolbar improvements, internet telephone click to call, query from your own software programs, 24 billion page index, user profiling, personalized search, WiFi side bar, Google mail and the list goes on. Yahoo is heavily involved also in leading edge research and seems to be able to time its own attribute additions and at the same time add feature additions that actually one up Google.Yahoo's desktop application features are easier to use than Googles and with kind of a friendly elegance. Google launches Maps. Yahoo ups them by adding live traffic conditions. Yahoo launches Yahoo 360 blog integration raising the bar over Googles Blogger. Yahoo has indexed on line movies. Google is struggling. Brands don't disappear overnight they erode. Sometimes leaner and meaner can beat the stuffing out of bigger and more. Google should watch out because Yahoo is back in the ring and it has some new tricks it has learned. | |
GOOGLE PROFILE RANK | |
| Googles Profile Rank has evolved from Page Rank. Profile Rank takes into account user profiles or habits by tracking a web users online behaviour in and outside of Google Search. Therefore it combines the attributes of Page Rank but adjusts the presentation of the search to match the habits of the user profile it has developed. This QueryScore, as Google calls it, is modulated by the site's Page Rank. The effect being that your search is altered to match the priority of your personal tastes based on previous behavior. Scary don't you think? Personalized search in beta form was something you opted into. The gradual integration of behavioral targeting into the algorithm seems to be connected also to an integration of ad marketing where presented Adwords are better targeted to users search patterns. Hmm maybe Google is starting to take this too far. Nice that they want to help me to search better and find the info I want but excuse me for saying so but isn't this getting a little personnal? I suppose I have to learn to love the idea of software learning my preferences but God help us if the info falls into the wrong hands. I guess Google would argue the credit card companies have been doing this for years, why not them. Kind of reminds me of Hal the computer that takes over the space ship. | |
EYE TRACKING | |
| For some time studies have been done on how users scan and perceive a web page. It has been determined that content on the top left portion of the screen gets read by virtually everyone and falls off as you go down the page or to the right of the page. Weak points are to the right margin of the page and increasingly weaker to the right bottom of the page. So it makes sense to put your brand or the important things you want to convey in that sweet spot at the page top left to centre of the page. If your brand name or logo is the most important thing for you, that's where it should be. If you have a special offer or package likewise get it near the top centre or left of centre area. This also has a relationship to viewing search engine standings as well. 100% of viewers see the top three listings, 85% the fourth and by the time you get down to eighth and ninth listings 30% and at the bottom of the page only 20%. That might be a good reason to keyword bid for placement as well as organic listings. You might also want to think about the Google AdWord's that land in the boxes down the right hand side which have very weak position as compared to the top sponsored links. Problem is you can control that positioning on Yahoo pay per click but you can't really with Google AdWords. Something to consider. | |
CLICK THRU ADVERTISING - GOOGLE VS YAHOO | |
| I keyword bid on Yahoo/MSN, Google, Ask and Kanoodle. Here's my comparitive experience from a value point of view. Keyword bidding is a must do for any serious site marketer. Organic placement by itself is not enough. Some businesses need the volume so that they must be on both Google and Yahoo/MSN. Google has the most volume by far. I keyword bid on over 800 accounts for my clients. I get the Yahoo gold treatment with a personalized account rep (which I never use). I have been bidding since the inception of Overture prior to Yahoo acquiring it and back before Google AdWords existed. -traffic is traffic it doesn't matter what search engine it comes from as long as your getting enough of it to run your'e business -Google AdWords are comparitively 4X the bid price of Yahoo PPC -with Yahoo & MSN PPC you no longer know the position you're buying and what it costs exactly by position and click thru cost...essentially they have switched to a Google type model to boost revenue. -with Google AdWords your position is a product of ad design, volume of click thrus and bid price - you cannot guarantee where you will land -Google bid prices often have to be huge to trigger the placement and to get the ad presenting -most Google ads end up in the right border and the top ad gets a 50% eye view at best. -if you take the Google option to present your ad on partner sites and directories you can experience up to 30% click fraud as many sites are set up just to sell Google AdWords and many people make a living by clicking on these ads at your expense to increase the fortunes of the presenting site owners. Google prosecutes but it's hard to contain and harder to prove. -I did an exact comparison of a high traffic term with identical ad content during the same time frame and my conclussion is that overall Google AdWords is about four times the cost of the click thru generated on Yahoo PPC -with my own clients I tend to exhaust opportunities with Yahoo/MSN before I campaign on Google AdWords -having said all this many are strongly branded to Google and if you need more volume than you can get from Yahoo you have to go Google as well -I don't want to short sell Google because it is a great product and it has by far the bigger market reach but I find better value in Yahoo PPC. First Page SEO is an expert in keyword bidding and trades daily 365 days per year. Our transaction cost for campaign management is 15%. Keyword bidding is one of the most effective marketing strategies available for those selling products or services if properly managed. | |
GOOGLE CLICK TO CALL SERVICE | |
| Google is testing its click-to-call service that lets people call advertisers presented on search pages without having to pick up the phone. The web surfer simply clicks on the icon by the ad, enters their own phone number, clicks the "connect for free" button and Googles service calls the advertiser and connects the advertiser to the phone. This works on regular phone lines and your number is protected from the advertiser. Google pays for the call local or long distance. Google hopes to increase the value of its online ads in future by using this technology. Mean while MSN has bought Teleo to offer future similar service and Yahoo is testing click to call instant messaging. | |
INDEXING DELAYS FOR NEW SITES | |
| Search engine spiders may crawl a new site expeditiously but it takes some time to land in the index. MSNbot is the fastest with new sites usually showing up in the index 30 days after the spider has crawled the site. Yahoo (Slurp), Googlebot and Ask (Teoma) all take over 60 days to show in the index and the index may only reflect a small portion of your actual pages. Google can take up to a year to fully reflect some sites in its index. If there is a lot of news associated with your site and powerful links are increasingly pointing at you then this process is accelerated according to interest. You should always avoid switching domains. Old active domains with many aged links should be considered valueable assets. | |
DON'T DO THIS | |
| I run in to web site owners all the time with big problems that need to be fixed. Some of these businesses are literally loosing their shirts while their web site drops off the face of the earth and their revenue tanks. Most site owners don't realize site marketing execution is far more complex than other forms of advertising AND the web will generate the lions share of sales for many businesses. Here's my top 10 - DON'T DO THIS 1. NEVER NEVER NEVER hire your cousin Vinny to build your web site. Yes I know he's cheap and I hope you can afford to throw away most of the potential business that you will never see. There are places where you can save money - building your site is not one of those. A business web site is instrumental to your success and your bottom line. Treat it with more respect than a magazine ad. Over 50% of your advertising/marketing budget should be going into your web site in this day and age so get with the program and put things in perspective. 2. Don't let someone build you a site entirely out of Flash or dynamic scripts such as ASP, PHP, PERL etc. Use it sparingly for form pages and data driven portions. You don't want your site to be a "dog" never to be found by any human search, do you? 3. Don't build a site with shallow content. If your site is going to be important then it must be authoritive on the theme your trying to convey. Content is king and where you end up will be determined to a major extent by content. 4. Never hang on to old frames sites and tired or amatuerish looking sites. Yes web sites have a shelf life. Technology changes. A five year old web site today will not show your business to it's best potential and would probably look like something a child in public school (or maybe cousin Vinny) might build today. Your site is probably the most important marketing tool you have - invest in it. 6. Never build a web site and forget about it. Even if you get high rankings initially it won't last. You have to keep it up to date and add content to it steadily and surely on an ongoing basis or you might as well not even bother to build the site in the first place. 7. You wouldn't want your family doctor to do open heart surgery on you right? You want a cardiolgist, a specialist in his/her field if you're like most people. Your web master is probably not able to make your site a top ranking site. The fact is the majority of web site developers don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes down to structuring the site for placement. So you end up with a post card - the one that no one ever sees - unless they get your url off of other collateral print materials. Now that's not marketing. It's called fumbling around in the dark. Find someone who understands internet marketing and have them prove it by reviewing their own site placement for their top keyword phrases. That's where the buck stops - show me your results. 8. Don't use multiple domains to mirror or duplicate site content, don't cloak pages or hide or mask text on the web page. In short don't do anything the search engines tell you not to do in their "terms of use". Get references on your search engine marketing specialist to ensure he/she is up to date and is not going to get you banned from a search engine for using "black hat" techniques. 9. Never assume your site is performing on track. Check your site stats and look for constant improvement taking into account seasonal fluctuations. Also compare year over year results by month. Look at your entrance and exit pages. Look at the time spent on site and the page views. If your'e getting an average of only 2-3 page views somethings wrong when you should be getting 6-8. 10. Never turn a blind eye to good advice - and that's what I'm giving you - good advice. If your doctor tells you to stop eating potato chips or your going to give yourself a heart attack - you cut out the chips right? If a internet marketing expert tells you that you should pay as much attention to your web site as you do to your other forms of marketing, and you choose to ignore it - maybe because your'e not as comfortable with that type of marketing, whose fault is it when things don't turn out? Buckle down and learn enough about online marketing to function or hire someone qualified that you trust to do it for you. | |
DOES MICROSOFT FAVOUR THEIR OWN SERVER PLATFORMS? | |
| There has been some accusations that Microsoft is giving preference to those sites hosted on IIS servers vs. those hosted on Linux or Apache Unix servers. The theory is that after testing 10,000 sites on Google and MSN search and cross referencing the keyword search results back to the server platform ... and some believe there's hanky panky going on. The test results show that MSN Search gives preferential placement to those sites that are on their own server platforms - by a margin of a few percent. Well personally, I doubt these findings. I think it's more likely to be a coincidence as I can't believe Microsoft would do that - thinking that some bright computer science types would never notice. I mean MSN gets scrutinized by half the IT guys on the planet and various governments wade in for good measure. I didn't test 10,000 sites but what I do know is this. I have many sites sitting on Microsoft platforms. I have even more sitting on Apache Unix servers. I find that those sites on Apache servers get excellent placement on MSN and the placement is consistant and predictable when compared to Google btw. My own site is currently on a Unix server and by example is ranked #1 for "Ontario search engine optimization". If you scroll down a few sites and check the server platform of some of the sites that rank further down on the first page you will see that the Microsoft platform sites ranked below the Unix sites in many cases. Now I realize there are many factors at play here but my point is there are too many variables for anyone to jump to the the conclusion that Microsoft is playing a game for the benefit of their own product over search relevance. Practical research does not bear this out. Give Bill Gates a break, contrary to the beliefs of many he is not trying to take over the world. And I say that as a Netscape perferred user. | |
INFOSPACE SIGNS AGREEMENT WITH MSN | |
| Infospace Search has announced that it will add results from MSN Search to both its search index and directory. Infoplace's claim to fame is that it brings together search results into one engine. Infospace has distribution agreements with all the top tier search engines now - MSN, Yahoo, Google & Ask Jeeves. Infospace reaches about 14 million users a month and controls Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. MSN Search in comparison has 380 million users per month. | |
WHY DO SOME NEW SITES HAVE TROUBLE GETTING LISTED? | |
| Often new site owners jump the gun and FTP (publish) sites without tags, incomplete content and broken links. The site may get indexed by Google or Yahoo before registration as they are likely to crawl in through an inbound link. If your site hasn't been properly optimized then guess what - you get cached way back in the listings. If your site is dynamic, flash heavy without html content or a site map they may not list your site at all because there is simply not enough content for them to latch on to index. Older established sites that have all the bugs worked almost always out place new sites. Some search engines will not index all the html body text on the first pass regardless of how well your site is designed so some measure of patience is necessary. Remember optimizing your site as it is being built will save you some aggravation and will give you far better start up results than having to go back and correct problems after the fact. | |
DO YOU USE MORE THAN ONE SEARCH ENGINE? | |
| According to the Nielson Ratings internet searchers use multiple search engines. The study determined 58% of Google users by example also visited MSN & Yahoo. No surprise there as with Google algorithm changes of late and the variance in results between Google servers has resulted in some folks not finding what they expect in search results. Google is heavily branded and is still the one to beat though with 47% market share compared to Yahoo's 21% and MSN's 13%. The study determined that Google shared 58% of it's vistors with Yahoo/Google while Yahoo shared 71% to Google & MSN. MSN shared 70%. Together those three top search engines represent 81% of the search market. | |
MACROMEDIA FLASH SEARCH ENGINE SDK | |
| Macromedia has developed a software product for search engine software developers that allows them to build in Flash indexing of web sites. SDK uses an application named "swf2html" that extracts text and links from Macromedia Flash files and converts the files to html content. Cool! It works on NT4, Windows 2000 Pro and Linux 7.1 server software platforms. The software allows indexing on Flash 3,4,5 and 6. Keep in mind, the search engine has to incorporate the software - it's not a browser tool. How well does it work? Does not look great so far. It's not time to build 100% Flash sites yet if your'e concerned about search engine placement - but if your'e in a non competitive market space you might start to notice your Flash site placing with some search engines as they adopt the code. | |
ASK - WHAT'S UP | |
| Ask (Jeeves)rebranded is the #4 search engine on the planet. The Teoma algorithm is exceptional and has been under rated by web users for years. InterActiveCorp has bought Ask for $1.85 billion dollars. IAC already owns Hotels.com, Expedia, Ticketmaster, CitySearch, Match.com, Home Shopping Network & Cornerstone Brands. Can anyone say ... media empire? Ask will be integrated into all IAC portals. Ask has already been growing at 5% market share per year. So if I were you, I'd start paying attention to optimization and placement on Ask as their brand on all these partner sites entrenches itself. IAC will also make sure that Ask gets the ad promotion it deserves. Ask has always placed its algorithmic weight in site content and relational thinking as opposed to Google's high dependancy on links. Google, as of late, is also putting effort towards relational thinking as well so do you think the brains at Teoma were on the right track all those years? | |
INTERNET ADVERTISING IS BIG BUSINESS ... AND GETTING BIGGER | |
| Best Buy and EBay will do $8 billion in 2005 more than 20 times what they did just four years ago. PPC search advertising revenue that was under $400 million four years ago is now going to hit $7.9 billion this year. The cost of acquiring a customer through internet search is pegged at $8.50. In contrast Yellow Pages is $20, $50 for display ads, $70 for direct mail and television & radio... well you don't want to know. Many of the large corporate clients are figuring this out with budgets now going into the $5-$10 million mark for single company's paid search budgets. But the market is big and the opportunities even larger so any business of any size can promote and prosper in this market. A year or so ago it was only my larger customers that were into keyword bidding by example. Now even very small businesses, like bed and breakfasts are involved. There has been a monumental shift in the way consumers research and buy products and services. If your marketing budget for print advertising, radio, tv & collateral materials combined is more than 50% of what your spending on internet marketing then I hate to break you the news but your'e missing the boat. Without question many businesses are belated in realizing they have been backing the wrong horse. I'm not saying you shouldn't partake in other forms of advertising. But realize the web is mainstay in North America & Europe and internet marketing should make up the bulk of your promotional dollars. The problem is there are so may web based marketing options that it can be overwhelming for the average business person and hense slower adoption rates and lost income for some people. Over the next few years ecommerce will double again. It is a compounding market with no end in sight. Many people are mistaken in the belief that once they have their web site up they are home free. In fact putting up a web site is akin to putting up a storefront. Once the bricks and mortar are in place you have to start marketing and advertising if you expect to be successful. I can't tell you how often I run into small biz people who developed less than stellar web sites without any marketing and are confounded as to all the hype about the internet because they are not getting any business. The web for almost all product and service businesses is by far the most cost effective way to attract customers and very few customers will make any significant purchase or walk in your door before they have at least researched their purchase on the internet. They'll either find your business or your competitors business, it's as simple as that. If your'e not being found it's game over. So next time you are about to fork over $500 for a single column three inch high newspaper ad, think again - in most cases it is not money well spent unless it is surplus marketing dollars being used to saturate your brand with little expectation of ROI. | |
GOOGLES PATENT DOCUMENT | |
| Recently Google filed a patent to protect certain procedures it is using or plans to use to place web sites as a result of customer searchs. Google never tells you what it is up to so it is always wise to play detective and try and look at cause and effect to determine what impact this may have on internet marketing. And that's probably why your'e reading this enews letter because your'e smart enough to know that this kind of thing impacts your bottom line and those that stay on top of this game have the opportunity to profit over their competitors. Given that lately even very important sites representing household brands are going from #1 to nowhere one might wonder if there is any logic or reason to Google. Well there is logic but unfortunately many good sites just get caught in the cross fire as these algorthmic changes take place and are implemented. Google employs some of the best minds in the world including scientists that implement latent semantic relationships in content. Latent semantics is a science which is kind of like putting Einstien type theories into a blender with statisticians, technoligists and mathematical modelling and coming up with formulas for applying theoretical relationships of words and content. What does that mean to the site owner? It means search engines are applying artificial intelligence to understanding context and content on web sites. It means Google is determining the best site match from both a statistical approach of how many exact phrases resulted in people spending a specific amount of time on your site in combination with understanding the context of the searched words in relationship to other words on your page that weren't searched for. By example when the anchor text of one of your inbound links changes -is that relevant or applied also in changes in the body content of your web site? Or determining when someone searches say "farm for sale" that it can also mean "rural property with barn available". The way it does this is very complex and that is why Google employs rocket scientists to develope their algorithms. And that also leads us to believe that perhaps you can over engineer search to the point that quality of search can decline. Anyways back to the patent registration stuff. Here's what to watch out for: -anchor text and discovery date of links are recorded by Google. -monitoring the appearance and disappearance of inbound links. -monitoring the growth rate of links in quantity and quality against that of independant peer documents. -monitor changes in link anchor text. -record a distribution rating for the age of the links. -links with long life span are important (hence the Google aging filter/sandbox premise). -links from fresh up to date changing pages more important (hence the importance of Blogs and news/press release portals). -if a stale document continues to receive incoming links it will be considered fresh. -if a new site gets a great burst of new links it will only be tolerated if they come from authoritive like themed sites e.g. sites that match your theme with a high Page Rank. -link growth should ideally be constant and slow. -anchor text should vary by link location especially in directory listings (that is why you should employ someone like First Page SEO that understands how to implement link strategies for placement). -Google recognizes that sudden link growth is a strong indicator of search engine spam. -recording of domain in service date and how long your domain is renewed for ... with older domains renewed for multiple years showing more importance. -that link changes and in fact any site changes once indexed may take some time to reflect in your search rankings (six momths to a year type of stuff so be patient and think ahead). -that Google knows relationally some sites are more worthy than others and isn't in a rush to place unworthy content weak sites. | |
DYNAMIC WEB SITES PRO VS CON | |
| Dynamic web pages are not stored on the web server as static content but rather pieces are picked from a data base for customer presentaion based on the query. The downside is most search engines with few exceptions cannot index dynamic pages as they see them as an indefinite string of links so they have to be suplimented with straight html page content to ensure placement or static html pages with links to dynamic content. By example FAST will crawl a dynamic page but Google will slowly start to crawl a dynamic page until it realizes the multiple url query strings are leading to duplicate content and then it moves on. Most search engines will not spider the page at all so the site is riding off it's tags only and not it's content. In these days when content is so important it becomes difficult to get good placement with a dynamic structured web site. The pro side is you give a custom approach to a customer on your site which is great if you are so well branded that they can find you with your URL (eg www.nike.com) or if your advertising materials are so strong your customers get your web address off print material almost exclusively. For the most part small business should avoid dynamic web sites just as they should 100% Flash sites. To often small business owners are taken in by bells and whistles and miss the boat entirely on the fact that you have to be found on the web first before the customer can view your site and products. You can have an exceptional looking site that gets results without having to resort to a full dynamic site. Buyer beware. | |
CONTENT IS KEY | |
| The best way to increase traffic and placement on your web site is to build your site theme to reinforce your tags with generous amounts of well written keyword rich text on the home page and throughout the site. Many sites are well written and convey important information on products and services but lack the keyword density needed to place well for the site theme. In highly competitive fields, sites without keyword density just can't compete. If your site theme carries through all of your pages it further reinforces the theme - especially with text hot links that act as windows to sources of relevant themed information. Remember though, your viewers are reading your story so the keywords should not be so obvious that it appears "clumsy". Use variations of phrases,word reversals and plurals when possible in the text presentation. The best way to do this is to have your keyword phrase list in front of you when you tell your story and spread the main theme around a bit so your not just talking about one themed topic and then moving other topics to other specific sections of your web site. In other words blend variations of your theme throughout the site. | |
GOOGLE SANDBOX - FACT OR FICTION | |
| SEO practioners often debate whether Google holds back new sites and groups of inbound links in what is referred to as the "sandbox". The theory is many new sites come on to the internet and owners loose interest quickly or businesses falter, yet they can stay cached and available for some time and receive relatively good placement. Accordingly the solution is put new sites into the "sandbox" before they achieve their potential placement to be sure that these sites plan on staying around for a while. Likewise when site owners and web masters embark on sourcing links to point at their web sites in the quest for Google Page Rank these groups of new links are sandboxed on the premise that they were not natural links pointing at a good site, but contrived or exchanged links. The "sandbox" gives the site a time out from the links and down the road if the links are still valid and pointing at the site they get released from the "sandbox". Here are my observations. A/The lag time on new sites is simply a result that many new sites have little content and inbound links to support the site. Once Google has spidered a site (usually via an inbound link)it may take it's time before reflecting those sites in the index (what they used to call the Google dance). My observation is Google does not treat all sites the same. Those sites that are determined to be theme & link weak are not a high priority for application to the site index. On the other hand if the site is considered to provide hot news or authoritive content and has quality links it gets the VIP treatment. This applies to any site content. Look at how quickly Google indexes and presents press releases from news feed sites like PRLeap and PRWeb. Many times I have seen new sites spidered and presented within days and many times I have seen sites that that are submitted and wait forever to see the light of day. So my conclusion is Google does not "sandbox" new sites but rather has preference for some over others. B/The issue of whether Google sandboxes inbound links is very different but connected. My observation is Google does hold back taking new links into account in the application of the algorithmn - until it schedules to do it's Page Rank updates. If you use a link popularity tool or inurl: to determine the the inbound links Google has accounted for, you will see several things 1/ Google always lags and has not accounted for the full set of applied links that many other engines are seeing as pointing at your site. 2/ Your Page Rank will be stagnent for long periods 3/ Page Rank Look Ahead will eventually show some activity as the links are applied and Google popularity tools will then suddenly accept the links (but not all of them) that you have waited so long to see reflected. 4/ These links that are now taken into account reflect in a Page Rank change - if the average of all your individual page ranks goes up or down. 5/ It seems it takes 3-6 months to go through this link recognition cycle and then it goes through the cycle again and ignores some links until the next phase. This would account for why some new sites have a hard time of it. If they have weak content theme to begin with (and perhaps a less than stellar title tag) then any links that they do have are not going to be much help for a while. The curious thing is - it almost seems as though when Google does get around to accounting for your links it does not have the resources to accept all of them at once. I say this because I have seen Google begin to account for some links that have less than a perfect theme and a low page rank while it ignores others with high page rank and a great theme. There is no reason to it - it seems arbitrary. However over time it will grab more of your links and it does give the bigger bump for those that have the relavancy and page rank. Patience is the rule of the day - kind of like waiting for Xmas to see whether you get the lump of coal or the present you always wanted. So my conclusion is Google does not embrace all links when they come in - nor does it necessarily account for all links when it does update - sandboxing if you will. The big question - is this by design for ranking, or is it a way to spread the load so that it can account for the the sites but manage the spidering resources the same way a utility might load balance? Food for thought! | |
SEARCH TRENDS | |
| One of the trends that seems to be taking hold is Personalized Search. Basically the way it works is every time you work online with the search engine it builds a profile on your habits. If you use Google Gmail or the Google toolbar you are being profiled. Google keeps track of what you search for and what web sites you land on. Google uses cookies placed on your machine with a two year expiry and then auto renews for active users. You can control the process by managing cookies or by staying away from the toolbar and Gmail. | |
DUPLICATE SITES & PAGES EQUALS DROPPED RANKINGS |