One of the more exciting recent search engine advances I’ve seen in a while is Google Squared. Search for something which has multiple attributes and Google will try to build a structured table of results, adding columns for each major attribute it knows about. As an example, try “Hitchcock films”.

Figure 1: Google Squared search results for “hitchcock film”

Did Google miss a film? Just add a row and Google will try to fill in the missing attributes. Is a film attribute missing? Just choose from a column suggestion Google offers or specify it yourself and Google will try to find the data. Does a data element seem amiss? Hover over it and Google will display the data source along with alternative values. In the Hitchcock example, one film was reported with the re-release date rather than the original date; a click or two later and the correct date appeared.

Good user experience is fundamental for the success of a website:

On the Internet, it’s survival of the easiest: If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Give users a good experience and they’re apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But the Web also offers low switching costs … Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around. – Usability guru Jakob Nielsen¹

While Nielsen probably had site design and information architecture in mind, his point also encompasses search engine visibility. Without search engine visibility a website is hidden away on a dead-end street instead of being front and center on main street², where the people are.

It may seem like a cliché but on the web no website is an island. Any site worth its salt will have accumulated inbound links and will most certainly contain outbound links to other resources on the web. Indeed, one can easily say that without links to interconnect websites, there wouldn’t be a worldwide web.

For search engines, such as Google, incoming links provide a strong signal as to the authority of a website. If multiple websites link to a specific website for a given topic, there is a good chance the website cited by others is deemed to be highly relevant for a good reason. Google and other search engines identify the theme of a website page by analyzing a page’s content and the text of the incoming links – the underlined text you click on to arrive at a page. Links, especially inbound links, are thus one of the most significant in the over 200 factors Google considers in its ranking algorithms. Inbound links from related sites in a business’ sector are also an excellent source of highly qualified direct traffic.

As many may know by now, Google has been experimenting for a few months with Ajax (JavaScript) based search results. One problem with the initial trial was that no referrer information was passed when a user clicked on a search result, “breaking” the historic ability of Web Analytics systems to track search traffic from Google. Google has more than one service on each of it’s domains which may send traffic to a website, such as the Google Reader, so just knowing traffic is from Google isn’t so informative.

Keyword information from search referrers is in particular very important as we want to know not only where our visitors came from, but what was their intent, intent indicated though the keywords they use to express their need or desire while searching.

It was bound to happen. In an economic climate of belt tightening, Microsoft has finally done the unthinkable. First there were those 5,000 layoffs. Then there was the abandonment of adCenter Analytics, Microsoft’s web analytics solution. Yesterday Microsoft announced it was discontinuing Encarta, tacit acknowledgment that it has been trumped by Wikipedia.

So perhaps I should have seen the writing on the wall. Yet today’s announcement that Microsoft is abandoning it’s Live Search took me by surprise. Is Yahoo! next? Will we soon be looking at a Google only world?

To judge by an e-mail I received, and this post Microsoft is abandoning the Live Metrics solution it relaunched as adCenter Analytics.

On a personal level, this reminds me lot of another web area (book search) where Microsoft competed with Google but later got cold feet and pulled out. I hope Yahoo remains steady in its commitment to Web Analytics [and hope they open it to SEO folks like me :-)]

The rel=”canonical” link duplicate content panacea

As many readers probably know, Google and other search engines recently announced support for a rel=”canonical” link attribute value. The new attribute value canonical (not a tag mind you, link is the html tag) can be used by website developers to specify which of essentially similar web pages is the definitive version.

A SEO problem known as duplicate content arises when websites use different URLs, generally through parameters, to provide slightly different versions of a page, such as a printer friendly version, or to support web analytics campaign tracking. In order to give search users unique choices, search engines tend to choose the “best” URL for a page, filtering out similar versions.

This SMX West 2009 session looks at how internet users interact with search engines and how that might influence search engine interface design and our SEO efforts.

Moderator: Gordon Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro

Speakers:

• Larry Cornett (@cornett), VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo!
• Gordon Hotchkiss (@outofmygord), President, Enquiro
• Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager - Live Search, Microsoft
• Jenni Tafoya, Vice President, comScore, Inc.

Some statistics to consider

Jenni Tafoya introduces comScore; notes they have a world-wide panel of 2 million people (as far as I know, no third party audit of their claims or methodology is available – Sean).

Jenni says U.S. search activity on engines and sites is up 38% – people are doing more searches and more people are online.

Search Engine Marketing is part of a bigger web ecosystem. At SMX West 2009, three habitués of the social media scene shared tips on successfully promoting a website using social media.

Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors

Speakers:

• Chris Bennett (@chrisbennett), President, 97th Floor
• Brent Csutoras (@BrentCsutoras), Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
• Gab Goldenberg (@GabGoldenberg), Founder, SEO ROI Services

reddit

Brent Csutoras describes the user-generated news site reddit. When logged in, the front page is dashboard of reddits. You can create your own social media site using a CNAME sub domain name and the Reddit platform. (Add a CNAME record aliasing your domain to rhs.reddit.com. Enter this new domain, e.g. social.antezeta.com, in the domain field when you create a new reddit. - Sean)

I love the web. Despite being somewhere in Italy, I’m able to follow many professional conferences like SMX West through session write-ups posted online. After all, it isn’t always possible to attend conferences in person. Yet even when the post quality is high, there’s something missing, something that can’t be replicated virtually. Above all, its the human dimension, the networking experience. If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend professional conferences (or you’re a bit shy!), you might think, “what’s he on about?“.

As I reflect on the various breakfast, lunch and cocktail chats I had at SMX West, I think about the breadth of interesting people I met.

In the search engine optimization business there are several recurrent discussions with new client prospects. The most common one by far is around why conversion reports should be used for search metrics rather than traditional ranking reports. Jaws drop when people hear that two different Google users may see different search results for the same query made at the same moment in time. The reasons vary – searches made at google.com vs. google.it, data centers may not be synchronized, etc.

Two years ago, Google introduced Google Personalized Results. Google provides special results, just for me, based on my search history, as long as I am logged into a Google service. In November, Google added SearchWiki, a facility for a user to annotate and customize their search results.

Google Blog Search is Google’s vertical search engine which focuses exclusively on blog content. While overall usage is probably pretty low, results from Google blog search are starting to appear in Google’s web search as part of their “Universal Search”, more generally known as blended search. Blog content can appear in Google’s standard web search independently of its presence in Google Blog Search. Google’s Chris Pennock, an Engineer with Google’s New York office, discussed how Google Blog Search works at the SMX West search conference.

Moderator: Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Chris Pennock, Senior Software Engineer, Blog Search, Google Inc.

One of the nice things about web marketing is the wealth of data available to use in decision making processes. Web marketing data also helps in getting and maintaining management support for SEO activities.

This SMX West session focusing on in-house SEO considered what data to present to management, when to present it and how to best present it. The line-up is an all star cast – two in house SEO practitioners at companies, that among other things, own search engines. As if that wasn’t enough, we also have John Marshall, founder and former CEO of Clicktracks. Rounding up the line-up is Jessica Bowman, a SEO consultant specializing in setting up and guiding in-house SEO programs.

Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com

Speakers:

Passing through the Frankfurt Airport on my way from Milan to SMX West, I couldn’t help but notice the front page of Germany’s weekly newspaper, Die Zeit (The Time).

Google. Der Spion, den wir lieben.

Google weiß alles. Der Internetgigant aus Kalifornien macht uns das Leben leicht. Zugleich aber folgt er uns im Netz auf Schritt und Tritt – nun auch über das Google-Handy. (Die Zeit, 5. Februar 2009)

The image, inspired by 007, says:

Google. The spy we love.
Google knows everything. The California Internet giant makes life easy. Yet at the same time Google follows our every step on the net – now through the Google cell phone as well.

One day you note a fall off in the traffic Google sends your website. As Google is the main source of your traffic, as is the case for many websites, alarm bells naturally start ringing. Investigating, you realize that the site does not appear at all in Google or has poor visibility at best in search results. What is a poor site owner to do? Did someone say panic?

Understand why the site disappeared from Google

There are several reasons why a site no longer appears in typical Google search results.

Several Italian SEO practitioners have noted seeing Google search results with snippets about double the normal length¹.

Google’s query result snippet (the result summary or description) is usually around 150 characters or so. It may be the contents of a page’s html meta description tag, especially if the tag contains the search keywords, or an abstract created by Google from the page’s content.

I hadn’t seen this behavior in English language Google results until I made a very specific search where I used more than the typical 2 or 3 keywords seasoned searchers type. Searching for google feedburner mybrand server not found (no, Google’s feedburner migration did not go smoothly) I noticed that the 4^th and successive results had super long descriptions – around 300 characters or so:

The title might be a bit provocative, but the topic is important for companies which want to insure their website is a profit center rather than a cost center. The number of page views tracked by a web analytics system is often a weak indicator of website monetization potential. With the advent of monetization programs such as Google’s AdSense, the specific content of a web page has become much more telling in this regard. Let’s see why.

In this article we will restrict ourselves to advertising as the monetization tool.

For a long time, Google’s advice to website developers was to keep things simple to ensure search engine spiders could successfully crawl and process website content:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.¹

In reality, Google often found links in Flash objects, significantly improving this ability as announced last June (creating much confusion by misrepresenting this as a new feature rather than an improvement). And despite the hoopla, there are still many good reasons to avoid Flash.

One sign that a profession has matured is in its ability to support a dedicated conference where professionals can hear and learn from presenters as well as interact with other practitioners (and potential clients & vendors).

Search Marketing has had its very own conference since Danny Sullivan started the Search Engine Strategies (SES) series 10 years ago. After growing the SES conference series for many years for the benefit of other owners, Danny started his own conference series, SMX: Search Marketing Expo, in 2007.

15 questions, 5 weeks and 5 books: almost 700 people took the 2008 SEO quiz challenge.

Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on December 2^nd. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.

Why a SEO quiz

The idea of the quiz came from reflections on the state of SEO knowledge and usage in Italy, observed from the perspective of a SEO practitioner.

Search engines, with Google in particular (question 1), are the gate keepers between us and the net. We use search engines not only to search for information that we imagine is out there somewhere, but also to navigate to a specific site, such as Fiat, or to perform a task, such as buy a ticket for a Tiziano Ferro concert (question 15).

Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on October 28^th. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.

It seems that the summer fun is now over, but not so fast: it’s time to check, just for fun, your SEO knowledge! We’ve prepared 15 multiple choice questions on topics which appear frequently in SEO projects.

Only for a limited time

The quiz will be available for just 5 weeks, from 28 October to 1 December 2008. Once the quiz is over, the correct answers and the overall results will be published here. Participants will receive an e-mail with their results and a certificate of participation.

That Americans like acronyms is not really a surprise to those who have worked for an American company. Acronyms are extremely useful as a conversational shorthand especially when working with unwieldy terms like search engine optimization. SEO is just so much easier to roll off the tongue. The problem with acronyms is that it is very easy to lose the original meaning – a significant communication problem. In the world of search marketing, SEM is a good case in point.

The following search-marketing glossary highlights common acronyms often used by the search marketing community.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. Indicates the activities undertaken to generate traffic, usually qualified, to a website through the “natural” results in a search engine. In Google, ~80% of user clicks are on the natural (also called organic) results.

In the not too distant past when we spoke of search engine marketing, we focused mainly on search engine rankings (SERPS) or, in other words, of being top in Google. A nice phrase, concise and effective. Visibility in search engines is very important, no doubt.

But in the top spots in Google for what? Here lies the big trap. It is not uncommon that the keywords identified for SEO or PPC campaigns are part of the jargon used by business professionals inside a company to describe their products and services. Yet a typical person generally uses much simpler language to describe what they are searching for in Google or another search engine. Consequently a business can find itself in the top Google search results, but for keywords which are only used by competitors when they fall into the same trap. Ouch.

One of the things that I really like about the Internet is that anyone who has a minimum of familiarity with a computer can communicate their ideas to a wide audience. Once upon a time the platform of choice was a personal site at geocities, clarence city or the like. In the meantime the blog format has emerged, a format that facilitates not only self publication but a broad exchange of ideas through visitor comments.

Embraced as well by politicians and companies, there is little doubt regarding the success of a blog as a means of modern communication. Yet there is a common misconception that I often hear:

“Wordpress (the blog platform) is already optimized for search engines.”

If only!

Recently a friend asked me for some pointers on the measurement of social media, such as blogs.

I have found that Jeremiah Owyang has a lot of interesting things to say on this topic, as exemplified by has article What should we measure and the document Tracking the Influence of Conversations: A Roundtable Discussion on Social Media Metrics and Measurement.

Yet it isn’t sufficient that we measure conversation on the web, we must also consider potential traps hidden in the data – we need to interpret it.

Consider the case of a blog post. The extent that a post has been read and has involved a blog’s readers might be deduced from the number of comments the post has generated. Two potential problems arise using this metric.

In three short years ¹ Google Analytics has become an important tool for many companies looking to get more out of their presence on the web. Google Analytics’ wide range of website reports, from traffic sources to conversion rates, provide invaluable insight into a site’s business performance for an initial cost which is difficult to beat.

One particular report, the Search Engine report, is of particular interest to companies looking to optimize their organic search engine marketing activity. This report identifies sources of search traffic that brought visitors to the website.

For each search engine source, a drill-down feature shows the keywords people used – the very keywords which express a visitor’s intent as they came to your website.

The following is a list of search engines and significant sites incorporating a search engine, such as ISP portals, which provide site traffic attributable to web search. The list can be used to verify if your Web Analytics system recognizes all the sources of organic search traffic and keywords important in your market – or for other SEO activities.

The last two table columns indicate if a search engine is recognized by Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics. See these related articles for more information about search engine and keyword detection in these two Web Analytics systems:

• Improve search engine and keyword reporting in Google Analytics, a SEO best practice
• Microsoft adCenter Analytics search engine recognition & keyword reporting

Microsoft is the other main player, after Google Analytics, in the area of free Web Analytics tools for the analysis of browser centric web data. Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics is the successor to the former LiveSTATS thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of DeepMetrix in April 2006¹.

An ongoing question in search engine optimization (SEO) projects regards which directories might be useful for increasing incoming traffic to a web site and as a means in obtaining better search engine visibility. The question arises due to the importance that was once attributed by search engines to some directories and by the desire to attract direct traffic to a site, where and whenever possible.

For a new site, directories, short reviews of sites organized by categories and subcategories, can be a useful source of incoming links.

However, it is highly doubtful that most directories today help very much in improving search engine visibility, nor in generating much direct traffic.

There are multiple reasons:

You’ve done it. You’ve created a successful web site with compelling content. A loyal community of readers keeps coming back for more. SEO efforts have paid off too, with lots of traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and minor search engines. Time to sit back with a fine Real Ale or a glass of Monteregio di Massa Marittima… but didn’t you forget something? Internal Site Search perhaps?

By Internal Site Search we mean a search feature on your website to allow site visitors to find what they’re looking for, using their own words.

Don’t fret, there are good reasons to deploy site search functionality and it’s relatively easy to do.