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.

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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:

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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.

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