SEO Information and News Blog

As important and necessary professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is today, other alternatives now exist to companies wishing to complement their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns. Combined with a solid and well-structured, serious SEO program, SEM campaigns can be used to additionally increase visibility in the engines, as well as conducting some product-focussed marketing surveys on new services or products offered on a company’s web site.

Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.

For example, an Infoseek search for keyword “Pre-Owned Electronics” returned the following match:

Pre-Owned Electronics, Inc – Refurbished and Used Apple Macintosh Systems, The independent source for new, remanufactured and used Apple Macintosh computer systems, parts, peripherals and accessories. We offer a full line of refurbished as well as used… 98% http://www.preowned.com/ (Size 3.1K) Read more…

An example of effective use of keyword proximity is to use your prominent keyword or keyword phrase in both forward and reverse proximity.

If I write about an Internet service provider specializing in accelerated dial-up Internet access, I will first consider the keywords I am targeting for the specific page. If I determined that the target keyword phrase is “accelerated dial-up”, I will want to use keyword proximity such as the following:

Page Title: Accelerated Dial-Up

Description: Accelerated dial-up: Surf faster with dial-up accelerated to 5x the speed.

Heading: Accelerated Dial-Up

Sample Sentence: seohyd Internet Service offers server-compressed accelerated dial-up service. Dial-up acceleration service provides up to five times the download speed of Web pages compared to standard dial-up Internet service.

In the instance above, I have used keyword proximity to display the keyword phrase as both “accelerated dial-up” and ” dial-up acceleration” and repeated it throughout prominent places within the page.

Please note that the keywords are used in both directions (e.g. accelerated dial-up and dial-up acceleration). It often takes a careful eye to detect proper keyword proximity usage, but search engines see everything.

As I have discussed in previous articles on keyword usage, and how to never cheat a search engine, you should not become overzealous with any tips that I offer. At the same time, if you have a page about a specific topic, you should make it clear why a reader is there, and why a search engine should index your page.

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/proximity.html Keyword Proximity Analyzer

Keyword Stemming in regards to PPC, is taking the stem of a word, and building additional words by adding a prefix or suffix and using pluralization.

Sometimes the words from the output of these keyword stemming tools don’t have any meaning. That’s because the keyword stemming tools are meant to strip a word down to the root and show different variations of the word form.

So, the solution is for the keyword stemming tools to cross-reference the output against a huge dictionary of words (like Merriam Webster Dictionary) to insure that the output is linguistically correct words.

An example of Keyword stemming for the word “search” is:
search
searcher
searches
searched
searching
searchable

Keyword Stemming tools are very useful for expanding keyword lists. Some of these keyword stemming tools will give you the equivalent of long tail keywords. My suggestion is to use keyword matching options to increase your conversion rates. Bear in mind, that most 2nd tier search engines won’t have the keyword inventory. So, keyword stemming is a better strategy on the large engines like Google & Yahoo rather than smaller engines like Ask.

http://www.related-pages.com/adWordsKeywords.aspx  Keyword Stemming tool

I was looking forward to the Yahoo Web 2.0 Strategy session as there have been a lot of questions about Yahoo’s strategy since they missed the YouTube deal and haven’t acquired Facebook.

Yahoo’s Strategy Still Unknown

While I think it’s pretty strange to really judge their strategy based on those two things alone, I was hoping this session shed some light. It started off a bit slow as an overview, but delivered some interesting things at the end.

Yahoo and Social Media

Eckart Walther, the Vice President of Product Management for Yahoo! Search led off. Eckart went through a powerpoint that gave some basic definitions of social media and how Yahoo feels about it. He pointed out that Yahoo’s mission is to “Enrich people’s lives by enabling them to find, use, share, and expand the world’s knowledge.” Obviously, social media and much of what Web 2.0 seems to be about fits their mission well.

He also defined it as “Anyone with a XXXXX is now a XXXXX.” So, anyone with a keyboard is now an author. Or anyone with a camera is now a photographer. Anyone with a computer is now a publisher. Basically, users are now empowered.

He broke down what they’re seeing in four categories:

1. User generated content. Flickr is an example of this as users generate all the content.

2. User organized content. This is where del.icio.us comes in, as it’s really about organizing URLs through tagging.

3. User and publisher distributed content.

4. User developed functionality. Mashups like combining Yahoo Maps with Flickr to create geotagging.

He ended with pointing out that Yahoo is the world’s largest community.

Integrating Advertisers with Web 2.0

Next up was Colin (I think) Fishburn. He’s the Director of the Client Strategist Group which means he’s responsible with helping integrate advertisers into Yahoo’s social properties. Colin led off with a bang by declaring that “the killer app of the web is really other people.” He pointed out the media evolution that’s occurred from moving from people consuming Mass Media (newspapers, broadcast TVs), to consuming My Media (My Yahoo! and personalized web apps), to We Media (social applications of Web 2.0).

When they look at brand partnerships on these properties they want them to be:

1. Great for the users

2. Great for the advertisers

3. Great for Yahoo!

This limits what they can do, as they don’t think it’s great for users to slap advertising all over communities like Flickr and del.icio.us. Instead, he gave a couple of examples of what they’ve done:

Nikon Stunning Gallery

Nikon Cameras created a web site using the Flickr APIs to show off images that were being taken with their cameras. Users tag pictures with nikonstunninggallery to have them show up on the site. Nikon then took the top 16 submitters and gave them a new camera they had released, then used the images those submitters took with the camera in national ad campaigns where their pictures were used in magazines such as National Geographic and others. I thought this was a great example of a creative way to partner with an advertiser in a social media context.

One.org

This is an organization and site based on working to end poverty. They used Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers, Google Video (strange but true), Yahoo! Maps, and other services to power all the various parts of the site. Basically, the site is an organized mashup of Yahoo services aimed at a particular audience. And yes, Bono is involved.

The 9

Yahoo! teamed up with Pepsi to create an online show that highlights nine funny/interesting videos out there on the web. They integrated Pepsi throughout the site and built it together in a collaborative project.

Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Music teamed up with Nissan to create a new version of the AOL Sessions concept where musical artists come and record a special set of songs. The difference is that Yahoo! is also involving the fans by bringing in 250 fans of the artist and giving them Nokia phones enabled with Flickr access so the fans can take shots during the show that get added to the Nissan Live Sets site. Of course the video of the performance can be watched, songs can be downloaded, and they cut an EP from it as well. It’s very new and they are very excited about it.

What’s interesting is all these things had flown under the radar for me, and I think Yahoo! is that way right now. Not everything they do gets spread all over the blogosphere like Google, and they have a lot of interesting content initiatives going on all over the place. While it might not get as much buzz, I think Yahoo! is really delivering some applications that general consumers will be heavily involved with.

What Publishers Want

Next up was Josh Meyers, Senior Director of Yahoo! Publisher Network and GM of Domain Match.

Josh focused his talk on the four main things publishers want:

1. Content

2. Audience

3. Monetization

4. Control

The Yahoo! Publisher Network vision then is to satisfy these things and enable consumers and businesses of all sizes to realize the full value of publishing.

How do they do it?

1. Content – Yahoo has a broad set of content offerings they can offer to publishers. The One.org site is an example of using Yahoo! content to add or create a site with. Personally, I think this is a huge opportunity that they need to package better and include in the Yahoo! Publisher Network interface. As a publisher, how can I get Yahoo Answers content integrated on my site? Yahoo Groups? Flickr feeds? Yahoo Videos? Package this up and put it in the interface. This would be a way Yahoo! could differentiate from Adsense and it’s offerings as they own far more content than Google.

2. Audience – Josh mentioned My Yahoo! and other ways in which Yahoo! could actually drive audience to publishers. Besides My Yahoo! I couldn’t think of any other examples of them pushing audience to publishers. I guess one could consider del.icio.us and MyWeb as Yahoo auidence that ends up clicking through to publishers. Again though, these opportunities should be packaged in some way to make it easy for Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers to take advantage of it.

3. Monetize – Yahoo! Publisher Network is what monetizes for publishers. They have their normal contextual ads, sponsored search, and even provide display advertising for some publishers. I think the “Panama” Yahoo Search Marketing platform update should help bring more advertising dollars into their network.

4. Control – Allow publishers control over their advertising, and they also are counting on the Yahoo! Developer Network and APIs to help give publishers control to build tools.

That sums it up. What stood out to me was the brand advertising integration examples and the opportunity Yahoo! Publisher Network has if they can package their tools and content to be used by publishers in better ways.

(Full Disclosure: Yahoo! is a minority investor in my employer Right Media, but these opinions are my own.)

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The search engine world never rests. As online marketing professionals discover new ways to obtain top rankings the algorithms evolve right along side.

Chasing Top Rankings

There are two primary reasons behind the updating of ranking algorithms. To increase the quality and relevancy of the results, and to decrease the many pages of online spam.

As the algorithms are updated, new ways to affect the results are discovered, and the algorithm must then be again adjusted. This is a cycle that has been around since the early days of search, and one that won’t be going away any time soon. A lot has changed over the years, and the future is sure to also deliver its plethora of surprises, but there are three main factors that will always have some level of impact on your search results.

SEO, Content and Links

Some people say that the world of search engine optimization is over and that the entire basis behind successful rankings lies in the power of incoming links. While incoming links do play a significant role, and in most cases are a necessity, they are far from the only determining factor.

There are many determining factors behind what will affect the ranking of a site. The three largest contributing factors are SEO, links, and site content. To compete in highly competitive industries a site needs numerous on-topic pages of content, relevant incoming links from a variety of sources, and, solid site optimization. While search is always changing, these three factors will remain constant. Each may change in the level of impact they have, but they will always contribute to the top listings.

Site content and SEO go hand in hand. Content is very important, but without the SEO to add focus, it can go unnoticed. Proper keyword densities, link paths and keyword placement will always play a role in having the content discovered and ranked by the search engines. If the fundamental SEO aspects are not in place, there is a strong chance that the content may never see the light of day. Incoming links add focus and relevance for the site overall, but if the content is not relevant to the desired phrases the odds of obtaining a top ranking are very bleak.

Links play, and will continue to play a strong role in the future of search rankings as they add that important vote of confidence. When site A links to site B, that tells the search engines site B is worth considering. Value is passed, based on relevance and the overall authority of site A.

As more and more webmasters develop new linking schemes, the algorithms responsible for displaying top sites have to continually evolve to weed out the ever increasing amounts of SPAM. While Google’s current algorithm relies heavily on incoming links, especially for sites in highly competitive markets, this algorithm will have to change and mutate over time as the internet continues to evolve. If rankings were determined 100% by inbound links where would this leave us? Thousands if not millions of valuable websites would go completely unnoticed. We would also see many sites ranking that are not relevant to the actual search term due to issues related to Google bombing.

Political opinions aside, the single word “failure” does not accurately represent the George Bush bio page; however, it continues to rank #1 in Google. This was made possible by the anchor text used in links posted by thousands of bloggers and webmasters. If links were solely responsible for rankings, we would see a lot more examples of Google Bombing as the actual number of links required to ‘bomb’ would decline.

Where is Search Going?

For us to know the exact future of search we will have to wait and see what happens but some things are certain to grow in popularity.

The future will undoubtedly see more advances in localized search, serving results relevant to the locality of the searcher. Is this the best way? Only time will tell, but even if this is the future, we will still see SEO, links & content dictating the results. The SEO and content will have to be in part geared towards local information such as zip codes, city names, etc, but they still will be important contributors.

Links will undoubtedly contribute to rankings long into the future, but quite possibly will have a reduced role with more SEO fundamentals making a comeback. One example is to take a look at MSN Live Search. As reported by Ross Dunn in the SEO BLOG just this past weekend an algorithm update has shown increased value on fundamentals such as title tags and domain names. These two areas were once an incredibly powerful tool in obtaining rankings, and had reduced in value. Now, at least in MSN, they are gaining ground once again.

Still in its infant stages, Mobile Search is growing as more and more people turn to their cell phones and other mobile devices for search. Mobile search will likely have the most benefit for localized type searching. People looking for an address, weather report, local business, entertainment information, etc. As time goes on the number of users using Mobile Search will continue to grow, and optimized sites will be the ones found by these searchers. A whole new level of optimizing mobile websites will likely emerge.

In 10 years time search will certainly look very different. While it has become a staple in the lives of millions, in the big scheme of things the internet is still very young and search even younger.

Why SEO will always be important

SEO will always play an important role in having sites found in the search engines. Regardless of how search algorithms evolve they will always require a level of on site content in order to correctly rank websites. As long as this content is considered, proper keyword placement and frequencies will play a role.

SEO in itself will continue to change. The proper frequencies of keyword placement, linking techniques and URL structure may alter, but will always have an impact.

As we move into the future and as the search engine algorithms continue to evolve SEO will always play an important role in having your websites obtain top rankings. While the small things will always change it is important to have the basic fundamentals in place and doing so will help sustain consistent rankings into the future.

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It’s interesting when you can find a demonstrative difference between countries and how data is presented in major search engines.

Discerning Censorship

There is a web page out at Indiana University that gives a vivid portrayal of Google censorship between China and the United States. If you type in information security, the Chinese results number is 505 million, while the American results are 423 million.

This has a major implication for security researcher’s world wide when information is available in one place or one country, but not available in another one. Since I do a lot of security research, and search engines are the major way of finding out who is doing what (that and Bugtrac, full disclosure, and a couple of other lists), any reduction in results can make information security research difficult.

What was interesting was the tag cloud on the search engine. While there is really no way for me to determine authoritative sourcing for this, the Chinese are very busy in the information security field. They have some of the best cyber security, hack and pen crews, and state sponsored cyber security systems.

Knowing what is happening on the information security front in China is very important to keeping networks in the United States safe and secured. It’s a lot like knowing what is happening in Eastern Europe and Russia is also very important to the health and safety of your networks. Access to the information that resides in multi-language web sites, or systems is really something that we need to have access to and know how to use effectively to work out theory from fact, or vulnerability from viable exploit.

Live, Clusty, and other search engines are becoming more valuable for the security researcher than Google or Yahoo. Working on the same generic looking for information security, the amount and quality of the data in Live or Clusty is better in some ways than what is available in Google or Yahoo. While we are a small group, more likely to move around to find the best sources of information, this really does not present a problem when using a Meta search engine, or an alternative search engine. We will go where the data is.

For security implications and availability of data, Google censorship seems to work in the post processing rather than really deleting URLS out of their database. You present data based on the geolocation of the IP address that the user is coming from. Using Wh00t proxy, the proxy is in the United States, so even doing a search via google.cn and google.com returns the same results because the proxy is located in the USA. The results for information security were the same when using a USA based proxy, but using an international proxy returns a lot of the same results as I would get through the google.cn web site. The URLS exist, but are only checked against the geolocation of the IP address against what is being searched for.

Given that, Google censorship appears to be predicated on the IP address and how that IP address shows up in a geolocation database. There are some highly accurate geolocation databases out there, but using a proxy system, it is dependent upon where the proxy system actually is located. Multiproxy.org has an excellent list of available proxies that can be used to work around the information security data presentation model that is currently in place.

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Zippy is a new meta search engine that queries other major engines and returns results in a format most suited for Webmasters and SEOs.

Tools From Zippy Bring SEO Into Focus

Link: Zippy

The site was launched in September by the seasoned SEO Dave Naylor, and provides some valuable tools for site optimization.

Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.

The basic search functionality for Zippy queries Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and mashes the results together. It then ranks the results among the four.

As you can see from the screenshot there’s plenty more going on than just meta search. First, Zippy shows related searches from each search engine to help find other like keyword phrases. Next, it takes all of those results and shows which pages are in multiple search engines (if any) and ranks them down the page. The results in more than one search engine (ie. Google and Yahoo and MSN) will rank higher.

You can find more about each result’s domain if you click the little orange arrow next to the term. (You can also access this via the sidebar or the homepage.) This will return a plethora of useful information about the domain like age, IP, sites on IP, Google PageRank, all sorts of backlink data, and Alexa rank.

You can get even more detailed data about any domain if you do a Domain Information search. This is where Zippy really shines as you can find:

You can also search the top 10 sites for a keyword. This feature shows an Alexa graph for the top five domains and their traffic, followed the used tags for each domain. This table shows each tag (ie <title>, <h1>, etc.) and the number of words per tag, number of keyword occurrences, and the keyword density. Below that shows the top 10 domains’ backlink and search engine index information across the main four search engines plus Alexa and Technorati data.

Another feature is domain comparison. Basically you can pit any two domains against each other and it will show the Alexa information plus backlink and index information, much like the domain search mentioned above.

Zippy is a handy tool for doing quick market research for free. The fact that you don’t have to use multiple tools to get the same amount of data helps the speed the process up quite a bit. It’s fairly simple to use, but could use a little more information or direction for the new user.

Speaking of SEO tools, Jim Boykin has recently updated WeBuildPages Top Ten Analysis SEO Tool (formally Cool SEO Tool). You can read all the details at jimboykin.com.

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By now just about everyone who depends on the Web for a livelihood is aware that links are a key part of how all major search engines rank their results.

You Must Be Well-Linked To Be Well-Ranked

Stated simply, if you want to rank well, you must be well-linked. Where you rank in search results is due to a combination of factors, one of which is the trustworthiness of the links pointing back to your site.

What exactly does “well-linked” mean? You get different answers to this question. Marketers agree to “avoid artificial link schemes” or “don’t get too many links too fast,” but there’s far more disagreement than agreement as to what constitutes a truly legitimate inbound link profile (IBLP).

In a little known page in the Google Librarian Center, “How does Google collect and rank results?”, Google engineer Matt Cutts states:

“As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we’ll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to”

Three words jump out at me: reputable, relevant, and trusted.

From Theory to Practice

So what is an artificial link? For me, an artificial link is any link that you obtain or create with the goal of fooling a search engine’s algorithm into thinking that link was freely earned. A link that is paid for, swapped, bartered, or otherwise engineered is — at least from an algorithmic standpoint — less trustworthy than a link that occurs with no strings attached. The link may be a great source of direct traffic, leads, etc., but for rankings, it’s likely to have no value at all.

Three Recommendations

Let me offer three recommendations: For sites that are already engaged in artificial linking activities, either remove those links or accept that your site’s ranking is on borrowed time. When seeking links, don’t rely on reciprocal links as your only linking tactic. 100% link reciprocity looks mighty suspicious, that is, artificial. If you have link-worthy content, seek links for that content from known trusted sources. What’s a trusted source? Put yourself in Google’s shoes. Trusted sources will vary depending on the subject matter.

Do a Google query on: “best of the web” library site:.us After all, whose links are likely to be more trustworthy than a librarian’s?

A Warning

Search engines do look for suspicious linking activity now. They’ll only get more capable in the future. If Google or any other engine notices something about the links pointing to your site that it feels is artificial, your site’s rank may drop as a consequence of the engine devaluing the links pointing to it.

One last bit of advice. Have a look at Google search results for the phrase (with quotes around it) “artificial linking“. The fact that there are so many people writing about the problem shows you how widespread the problem is. Read through a few of those results and you will see many artificial linking tactics and rules and warnings. Pay special attention to the warnings and — unless you are willing to accept the consequences — do not engage in linking schemes to fool the engines.

Link well my friend,

-LM

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There are lots of ways you can learn to be a better searcher. I probably perform, at minimum, several dozen searches in a given day. Sometimes hundreds.

Search With The Right Query

Link: be a better searcher

There are two common reactions to not getting the results that I want: I use a more specific query. I use a more general query.

While writing this post about reaching your target audience, I was trying to find a very specific song lyric that seemed relevant. It was a very tough query to get results because it involved very specific information that had some very high result general terms associated with it.

Mind you, this is all happening within a matter of minutes, and I retroactively diagnosed the resulting thought process.

Here is the history of my searches (and results):

Query:hip hop lyrics dead presidents
Result: Initial query with decent results – probably longer than most folks originally search. I realized that I probably wasn’t going to find the specific song (since it is the general name “hip hop”) with this search

Query:dead presidents lyrics “hip hop”
Result: I tried making the query more specific with quotes – results were still to general

Query:dead presidents lyrics
Result: In the long run, this phrase probably would have worked as well as the last – it was general enough to find a broad site that I could search, but at this point I was still hoping to find the specific PAGE I was looking for directly from the SERPS

Query:“dead presidents” lyrics
Result: Though maybe combining the artist name words would help. No luck there. Turns out the artist name is also a Jay-Z song.

Query: “dead presidents” lyrics hip-hop
Result: Unfortunately the Jay-Z song is also hip hop music, and more widespread popular.

Query: “dead presidents” lyrics bigger than hip-hop
Result: I thought maybe the name of the song was a bit different (based on the chorus) – turns out they did a remake of the song (which didn’t look near as good). Starting to get pissed now.

Query: “dead presidents” lyrics “bigger than hip-hop”
Result: Tried grouping the song name together to be more specific

Query: “dead prez” lyrics “bigger than hip-hop”
Result: A stab at being a bit more specific. Same shitty remake song results

Query:hip hop lyrics
Result: I finally gave up, and searched more broadly – taking me to a general site, and doing a site search from there.

How Learning to Search Better Improved my Skills as an SEO

Okay, admittedly the title was just to get your attention, but I do often sit down and think through the process of someone doing a search by paying attention to how I searched, and how friends and family search. Sometimes it helps to search WORSE to understand SEO, when you start to assume that everyone actually uses the site: command.

I was actually pretty aware of this already, but this multi-search treasure hunt made for a pretty good example of what I had been wanting to demonstrate. Users “RE-search” two different ways on big engines – more specific, or more general. Most times, it will be starting with a general subject of what they are looking for – let’s say florists – when they realize that more national brands don’t fit their needs (or for whatever reason query results don’t fit their needs) – they will append a more specific modifier (wedding florist in san jose). While single phrases are cool and fun to rank for – conversion is where it’s at. I won’t beat this horse to death, but thinking through the behavioral search process can lead you to some insightful logical conclusions.

I didn’t find a whole lot of information on how people search, in a few brief searches. I’m aware of the normal INTENT of searches (navigational, transactional, informational), but there must be so much MORE that search queries can be labeled as. What is the fundamental learning process that goes into creating better searches? I imagine the process is somewhat similar for all people, where like most things, some catch on faster than others. Searching “better” for more relevant results is a learned behavior. I’d be willing to bet the big SE’s are doing behavioral studies on searchers. Sure must be nice to have the world as your guinea pigs:)

Aaron thinks everyone has ADD – I agree with him. I’m very impressed that he’s managed to concentrate long enough to compile a nice list of the reasons why. By the time I got done reading the article, I was, unfortunately, thinking about something else, and flipped to one of my twelve open firefox tabs, but have to say that the web is the great information equalizer, and while ADD may suck, I still think search can make you smarter too. Remembering that your customers probably have ADD too, helps to explain why they only stick around on your site less than two minutes, and why you should cater to that mentality as well if you want your site to be successful. Learn how to think and search like your users, and it will help to improve your business.

“To catch a fish, you must first think like a fish” – unknown

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