Google answers some of YOUR questions

November 20th, 2008

What’s one of the most interesting things to read online at the moment? Google’s latest answers to some very interesting questions. You can read an article at WebProNews for a brief look at some of the responses and how they can be interpreted.

The WebProNews article focuses on the more interesting questions and answers, namely:

-    does the age of a site really affect the rank of the site (sometimes),
-    do links from bad sites actually harm your site (not if you don’t control them),
-    how do directory links affect sites now that “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” has been taken out of Google’s guidelines (possibly going to be discounted)

There are a lot of other questions in the original posting relating to:

-    sub domains
-    sitemaps
-    redirects
-    backlinks
-    duplicate content
-    Geo-targeting

You will find the answers to these also very useful. I have seen these specific questions being asked in quite a few forums but no one is really ever able to give a definite yes or a definite no. Now, finally, answers directly from Google are available:

-    Is both a XML and HTML sitemap necessary?

“Google: A HTML sitemap file can help search engines, especially those that don’t use XML Sitemap files. Also, the 404 widget in Webmaster Tools (which you can place on your 404 pages) will use “/sitemap.htm” and similar files to help users to find the content they’re looking for. So yes, I would recommend making HTML sitemap files, however I’d focus on the user and not the search engines.”

-    “I understand the best practice is to have a perm redirect for the non www to the www. some appear to get away with it and rank high, others don’t

Google: Doing a redirect or not doing one does not significantly impact your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking in Google. I’d still recommend doing that though - otherwise it can confuse users to see different domain names for the same content. If you have a local (.com.nz) and a global (.com) site, then I would recommend using separate content for them (since there are going to be different users) — but I wouldn’t worry too much about it if you have the same content at the moment.”

-    Should websites have different URL’s for different languages ie different subdirectories or different sudomains?

“Google: Both versions are fine. I personally generally recommend using a subdomain when the sites are completely different and using subdirectories when it’s more or less a shared site, but it’s up to you.”

And this is one of my favourites (I have always wondered but since I have never experienced any penalties I didn’t know):

-    “Anonymous: Do you feel that the webmaster should be informed in case of a manual penalty & the reconsideration requests should be looked into more seriously in case of a manual penalty.

Google: That is a very good question, that we are being asked on a regular basis. So, imagine you have a site on which you add original content and/or tools on a regular basis.
If it has been hacked and contains hidden content/links or you are a website owner and your webmaster did something he/she was not aware of being outside Google webmaster guidelines, like a 0 seconds redirection. In that case chances are high you would be informed about a temporary removal from Google results via Google Webmaster Tools. The message will surely contain hints regarding the problem on the site. Once you have fixed it, your reconsideration request will be reviewed very carefully.
On the other hand, if you have a couple of hundreds of identical sites with - for example - scraped content from other sites, these are not adding any value to the Internet and I would not expect any notifications from Google.”

The Q&A is certainly worth a read and covers a lot of ground that would make a very long list if I were to put it here, I’d rather just entice you to go and have a look – its more beneficial to you all.

I have read it three times just to make sure I got everything!

Personally, I like how their answers aren’t all related only to the bots, and that they make a few points to remind internet marketers and web developers to keep user experience in mind when working on sites.

If you ever needed proof that our SEO software analyses and rates your sites according to best practises, the Google Gods themselves have just given it to you.

What did you think of the responses? Did you see much of the famed Google ambiguity?

Posted in General | No Comments »

Life after SEO breakfast

November 7th, 2008

Following up from our SEO tools for starters post, I’d like to suggest some other tools and operative commands (commonly called operators) to use on the major search engines.

After you have researched your keywords, built your site and put it live you will need to measure, test and analyse your progress.

3 of the most handy tools to track and analyse your progress are:

• Google Analytics is good for tracking traffic and user behaviour, converting keywords – know which words work, which pages work, which ones don’t where you need to work most. It is also free. There is a slight delay on the results, about 24 hours.

• Google Webmaster Tools tells you where your links are coming from, if you have any errors in your URLs, sitemap or robots.txt files. Free as well.

• Clicktracks can be used to analyse your user behaviour, manage your PPC campaigns and the content on your site but unfortunately, is not free.

One of the most obvious issues about having a website is to get traffic. There are many ways to do this, even a few link building tools out there to help – I would recommend doing it yourself though because this is a very subjective task (or it should be) and software can’t be intuitive like humans when it comes to deciding whether a site is good enough to link to or whether it would add value to your site by linking to you. You can try social media to get links; it is time consuming but can be very rewarding in terms of links and traffic earned as well as knowledge gained. There are a lot of articles you can read to help with your research into this area, and we can start you off with some of our own suggestions on using social media to get links and traffic on our blog.

On the subject of links, you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see which sites you are getting links from. You can also use the “link:” operator to see where you are getting your links from. Simply type link:www.example.com into a search engine search box, www.example.com would be your website – it has been suggested that you receive more results from Yahoo! than you do from Google when trying to find backlink results, but you can compare this yourself.

Other operators you can use are:

· site: - Indexed pages in your site (site:www.website.com)

· cache: - The current cache of your site (cache: www.website.com)

· info: - Information we have about your site (info: www.website.com)

· related: - Pages that are similar to your site (related: www.website.com)

A great way to see where your competitors are getting their links from is by using the link: operator or by simply typing in you competitor’s website into a search box surrounded by “ “s e.g. “www.example.com” – this will show you which web pages contain that URL. You could then try and get links from those sites too.

Another way you can keep an eye on your competitors is by downloading some SEO Plugins for your browsers – such as SEO Quake. These types of plugins allow to you view how many links, the Page Rank, Alexa rank etc your competing website has – underneath its URL in the search engine results.

This is just a brief look at some analysis tools and operators, for those who would like a more in depth look at operators, there are some handy tips for Google operators listed here. As a bonus, a way for you to check if your URLs contain any of your keywords, try typing “inurl:(keyword) site:www.website.com”, and to see if your site’s meta title contains any of your keywords (and they should!) type “intitle:(keyword) site:www.website.com” into a search box on your engine of choice.

Interleado’s “All in one SEO workbench” offers search engine marketers a chance to analyse their site/s against 45 different SEO factors too - using only one tool. There is a free trial available as well as a short video demo outlining the SEO software capabilities – this includes social media tracking and a press release distribution tool.

What are your favourite analysis tools?

Posted in Seo Tools | 3 Comments »

Using social media to get links and traffic

November 3rd, 2008

Working on the social media side of SEO isn’t as easy as it seems, and should not be used merely to get links. Firstly, it is very time consuming and secondly there is a certain way to go about it. Spamming forums or blog comment boxes with “I agree!” type comments isn’t exactly giving you or your company a good reputation, nor will it earn you any traffic.

I am going to touch on 5 social media practises: forums, social bookmarking, blogging, article submission and social networking sites. Not everyone will agree that all of these topics fall into social media, and that’s fine. The way I see it, all of these topics deal directly with people and therefore fall into the social media category. But enough of that and on to the subject at hand.

1. Forums

Forums are a great source of information. You will find a wide range of expertise on the subject matter of your choice, from beginners to gurus, and all levels of people use forums to share their opinions and knowledge.

Generally, there are a few things that you need to remember when using forums:

- You may only be using them to try and find information but they are a great way to get your brand out there and get some backlinks - that doesn’t mean you should spam them with replies or threads that don’t really contribute or are merely for advertising purposes. Start threads that will entice people to reply or click the link in your signature, when you reply, reply with something helpful. Ask your own questions. Using forums in this way builds a good reputation for you and your brand, earning traffic as well as links. If you spam the sites people won’t give your contributions a second glance and you may even get banned.

- You should read the rules for the forums that you join, that way there is less chance of you being banned for something you might not have known you were doing that is wrong.

- If you do have links to your websites in your signature, try not to list more than 3 otherwise it looks spammy. I’m more inclined to only list 1 as it is more “authentic” but most forums suggest no more than 3.

- The most important thing to remember is that it’s not just about getting the links, this is a good opportunity to find regular traffic and learn new things, make it count.

Some good forums are www.webmaster-talk.com , www.irishwebmasterforum.com and www.webproworld.com.

2. Social bookmarking

This is another good way to get links and if you use it, the right kind of traffic too. Social bookmarking is simply telling bookmarking sites that you like certain articles or stories, and sharing those articles with other members when you submit them. You can vote on stories that you like or don’t like and leave reviews.

Of course you can submit your own blog posts or article submissions, but if people see only submissions relating to your site, you could lose valuable traffic because you look like you are spamming the sites.

There is no “trick” to using this kind of social media – all you have to do is not “pretend” to look authentic…but actually be authentic. You will receive worthwhile traffic and build a good reputation this way. Submit interesting articles you read, or blog posts you find funny, include a profile picture…do anything a real user would do – because that is what you should be. There is no quick fix. You need to act like a human in order to receive human interaction with your site.

Some sites you can use are StumbleUpon, Digg and Sphinn.

3. Blogging

By owning a blog you get to share your thoughts, ideas and business with a huge audience. If your content is useful enough you will get links and loyal followers too.

The trick here is to not make the blog about you, make it about your audience. If you have specials running, sure, share it with them…but don’t make your entire blog about specials your company is running. That will encourage…nothing. No links, no loyal followers and no comments.

Make your content relevant and interesting to read. Comment on other blogs you find interesting too – people read those comments and you may get some extra traffic if you contribute something worthwhile, maybe even a link from the blogger whose post you are commenting on - if you get their attention. Interaction is key to making your blog successful.

Other ways of getting more traffic and links in this social media category is by guest posting on other blogs and sponsoring competitions (you will earn links from the bloggers running those competitions etc).

Some good blogs for SEO are www.mattcutts.com/blog, www.seobook.com and www.seo-scoop.com.

4. Article submission

There are many online article submission sites you can use to showcase your articles. As with blogging, if they are interesting and helpful enough, they will earn you links and traffic.

Most of these social media sites require an article length of around 500 words – this is to help to ensure that the articles that are submitted are worthwhile reading. As with the other mentioned social media categories, making an article all about a special you are running won’t earn you anything and will probably not be published – most sites have a waiting period of up to 7 days so that the articles can be reviewed.

There are many free article submission sites online such as eZineArticles and ArticleBase. You will be able to find lists of these sites on forums and in blogs – all you have to do is search.

5. Social networking sites

These sites put you in touch with people of similar interests. You are able to create groups that you can send updates to, network with other members and on some sites post articles that the members of the groups may find interesting. Some examples are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

The thing to remember with social media is that pretending to be involved isn’t enough to earn you the traffic you need. If you are interested, people will be interested in you – show them your interest. Let your audience know that you have opinions and knowledge to share, or questions to ask.

More importantly – make sure your business will benefit from this aspect of SEO as it is time consuming and hard work needs to be put in. Articles and blog posts need to be optimised for the search engines, profiles needs to be created, forums and blogs need to be checked and contributed to. But what’s anything without a little hard work?

Interleado has a social media tracking and monitoring tool in the works as part of the “All In One SEO Workbench” tool. Why not see where you are being mentioned while you run some SEO analysis on your site?

Have you got any favourite social media sites or techniques you’d like to share?

Posted in Social Media Marketing | 7 Comments »

SEO tools, for starters

October 16th, 2008

If you dig a little into the on-line marketing world, you will discover a golden well of hype and information about SEO. If you are just starting out on this road, you might be inclined to display a large amount of enthusiasm and decide you definitely want in on this interesting yet challenging exercise – even if its only for a single website. After you make this decision, the logical next step is to ponder on where to start.

The first step is research. One of the best things about SEO is that you never stop learning what works and what doesn’t and how to tweak things to work on different websites. The internet is your best friend and worst enemy on this matter – there so much information out there. If you can’t spend much time doing all of the research you need to, there are many, many tools to help you get started and to keep track of what is going on in your niche or with your website.

Again, the internet can be your best friend or worst enemy on this matter. Looking for tools can be time consuming in that you have to find the right ones for you, the ones that are legitimate and the ones with the good reputations. For starting out you will be able to find keyword research tools, meta tag generators (although it would probably be better if you generated these yourself especially if you have a small site), tools that work out the size of your pages (too big and Google won’t like them, neither will your visitors) and of course there are blogs and tutorials to help you.

Some examples of “getting started” SEO tools are:

• WordTracker – general keyword research tool, one of the best known in the SEO industry. You have to pay for the service but there is a free trial.

• Google Adwords keyword tool – Free keyword research tool, specify keywords or enter your URL for keyword performance data.

• Meta tag generator tool – Free tool to help you make sure your keyword and description meta tags are formed correctly

• Page size tool – Free tool to help you determine the size of your web page

• Web developers cheat sheet – PDF file containing SEO friendly tips and hints for the coding of your site.

• XML sitemap creation tool – Free creation of a site map in XML format to help the search engines index your site after it has been created and launched.

• Robots.txt creation tool – Free creation of a file that tells the search engines if there are any folders or pages you want to be excluded from indexing

• Code validators – Free tools that will inform you of any CSS, HTML or linking errors on your site.

There is a wide range of SEO tools out there, not only to help you when you are building new sites but to “spy” on competitors and track your site performance as well. Analytics tools or competitive research tools are a dime a dozen, you can search for them now if you like but we will be giving a list of such tools in the next few days.

What are your favourite tools to help you get started on the SEO of a new website?

Another very important part of SEO is, of course, monitoring and analysing your websites’ performance on an ongoing basis. Lucky for the readers of this post, Interleado itself offers such an SEO analysis tool, complete with a free trial. If there are any questions regarding the software, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Posted in Seo Tools | 6 Comments »

SEO Tools - ‘All in One SEO WorkBench’ launches

September 4th, 2008

Here is a short demo (about 5 mins) of Interleado’s ‘All in One SEO Workbench’ which started rolling out at the beginning of September. The demo below focuses on just one aspect of the product, the Popularity or Authority or a website.

Want to get your website analysed for free?

Click here to get your free trial

So, what’s in the new ‘All in One SEO Workbench’ SEO Software?

Well, it’s got the following features:

1. Optimisation Score
   Find out why your website is not attracting the traffic you think it should be. Learn about how a website sees your website in terms of backlink analysis.
2. Visibility Score
   How well ranked are you for your keywords? We know a lot of ‘experienced’ people don’t give two hoots about ranking and know its all about quality, targetted tarffic. Well, some less experienced and management types are fixated around rankings - that’s just the way it is.
3. Competitor Analysis
   How are you competing against? What are their Key Performance Indicators like? We’re taking a lot of feedback on this areas at the moment and getting the input of very experienced SEO’s.  The analysis of competitors is critical to good traffic from the search engines. Find out what the top competitors are doing for your keywords and just do what they do, but better!
4. Keyword Analysis and Research - Not all keywords are created equal - right? Find out are the keywords chosen by you or your client are good enough for you to optimise for and find new keywords that you should targetting.
5. Online Reputation Management

• Start to build your website authority by building your websites online presence. How? Well, lets start with a press release - written to target your keywords and promote ‘real’ news. What’s the angle you should be promoting for your business?
• Social Media - What’s being said about your business/products/serivces in the social media website? Maybe nothing! Let’s start a buzz about your company!

We’ve a ton of new functionality coming on stream shortly - more about that later.

If you’d like a free demo to find out why your website is not attracting more traffic -

simply contact us here.

Posted in Interleado, Seo Tools | No Comments »

22 steps to the perfect SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign!

August 21st, 2008

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - Internet Marketing - Web Marketing -Digital Marketing

Call it what you like, but getting more people to buy from you, contact you, subscribe to your website, phone/email you - this is the goal of SEO.

But what exactly is SEO? Many business owners see it shrouded in mystery and painfully difficult to get a really clear understanding of what it involves. Is it real or just a gimmick? Are there real, tangible gains to be realised from spending money on SEO? This question is probably the most important - what bang do I get for my buck and what is reasonable to pay for this type service?

To understand SEO and why it might be important, an appreciation of how search engines work may be benefical.

How does a search engine determine what website comes 1st, 2nd 3rd..etc on their Search Engine Results Page’s? Have you ever really thought about this? Ever questioned the accuracy of the results? Think your website should in position 1 and not position 21?

Search engines use a number of different factors when determining how relevant a website is for a particular keyword. When they are determining this relevancy they take into account three main areas:

• Website Architecture
• Website Content
• Website Popularity

Let’s take each area in isolation.

1. Website Architecture
   When analysed against the W3C standards, does a website implement good clean code and more importantly is it easy for a search engine’s spider to crawl a website? What about navigation on the website? Are relevant pages easy to find or are they buried beneath a complicated hierarchy..e.g. www.mycompany.com/folder1/folder2/page.html
2. Website Content
   Simple this one. Does a website have the searched for keyword on a given page? This is simplistic but it’s the foundation of all Information Retrieval IR search systems. There are a number of additional factors that are looked at here, but keywords, visible on a page is the starting point.
3. How many and what type of websites link to yours and (more importantly) what keywords do they use to link to you? Unlike the first two areas, this is very difficult to control and it’s why SEO can be so difficult.

Let’s get down to specifics. You have a website that has 250 pages. You have a set of keywords; let’s say 50, that you want to rank well for. Your target country is the UK. You have not implemented any Search Engine Optimisation before (at least not deliberately).

Where do you start and what would it cost?

Let’s go with the premise that you are going to pick 25 pages and use them to target your top 50 keywords. Here’s the step by step approach (you may take) to optimising your website:

1. Initial analysis of your existing website to find out what are the chief areas of concern

2. keyword research and analysis to define top 50 keywords

3. Analysis of competitors for chosen 50 keywords

4. Analysis of traditional competitors

5. Research current visibility for chosen keywords - what is the base line?

6. Backlink Analysis - What keywords are people using to describe your website?

7. Backlink Analysis - Where are you getting links (links - not traffic) from - what countries, what domains?

We are now ready to start making changes on the website - we have all the research complete, know what the base line is and what the campaign goals are.

8. Clean up code if required, i.e. clean html, CSS, broken links, navigation

9. Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords (ensure 301 redirects are implemented when changes made to page names)

10. Setup appropriate robots.txt tile

11. Write Meta data for 50 keywords - title tag, description tag, keywords tag, image tags - let’s say we target 25 pages for the 50 keywords, 2 keywords per page

12. Generate or optimise existing sitemap, plus develop xml sitemap and upload to Google Webmasters. Setup the geo targetting option in Google webmasters.

13.  Optimise or generate new content for 25 pages, e.g heading tags, bolded text, paragraphs, appropriate bullets, correct font colours and background, i.e. black against white (accessibility concerns), calls to action..etc

14. Implement internal and external links that align with keywords

15. Setup a customised 404 error page

16. Append a blog to the website, Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal..etc

At this stage we have covered a lot of the ‘on page’ SEO stuff, i.e. the areas we can control. Next is the difficult part, ‘off page’ optimisation…

17. From my existing links, see are there any that can be leveraged, i.e. one’s where I can easily change the link text to better reflect one of my chosen keywords

18. From the competitor analysis above, start looking at the links my keyword and traditional competitors have. Pick a bunch every week and start emailing them to ask for links.

19. Start writing appropriate blog posts relevant to my industry and keyword rich. Good blog posts act as a magnet for new links.

20. Ensure I’m in the right directories, I’d start with Dmoz , Yahoo and Business.com

The above ‘off page’ tasks would/should be an ongoing process.

21. For more advanced link/brand awareness building I’d start to look at online press releases and

22. Social media optimisation techniques.

So, how much would you expect to pay for this work? £100 per month? £500 per month , £1000 per month?

Ultimately the price paid should be based on the expected ROI from the campaign. As a website owner I’d be looking at the expected return in terms of traffic and ultimately new customers from the website.

What about you?

How much do you currently pay for your SEO? Have I left out any key activity from the list above?

Posted in Organic SEO | No Comments »

The Ultimate Set of Internet Marketing Tools?

August 6th, 2008

That’s a very grandiose statement - The Ultimate Set of Internet Marketing Tools

What would be in the ultimate set of Internet Marketing Tools? What would you as a website designer or an Internet marketing professional want to see in a complete set of internet marketing tools?

Let’s start with the simple stuff.

I have a website that I’m managing for a client, www.example.com and I have a defined set of keywords [kw1, kw2...kwn] and my target country is the UK.

I’m an Internet Marketing professional, an SEO’er if you will (although I think the term SEO is much broader these days than simple on page optimisation tasks). I already use tons of tools, some free, some not free.

I’m sick of the crap that comes with the chosen territory, some of my daily issues…

• the constant reading (sorry scanning) of my Google reader for new updates to the SE algorithms (what’s changed, what’s new, how will my client be impacted?)
• the endless battle to justify hours worked on a particular project. The client pays X per month, so they get X hours on their website. The client wants X+X hours, but only wants to pay for X hours per month. How can I make them see all the work I do?
• are my free tools providing anything relly useful for client targeting outside of the US…?
• are my paid tools providing anything really useful for client targeting outside of the US…?
• how many hours do I spent each month putting together reports for the client? I’d like a tool that gives me a monthly report - and its all automated - zero input from me! I just provide the interpretation.
• I’d like to give the sales guys a polite response to their question.. can you just check this new site out, give it a quick once over and tell me what the issues are…?
• why do I need to know about competitors? Is this information just for me? Can I share competitor analysis with the client, would they be interested in their online competitors? Maybe? Might reinforce the amount of work their website needs..?

So, what would I look for in the Ultimate Set of Internet Marketing Tools? What is my wish list? Well….

1. Automated analysis of a website - give me the optimisation score and what the most immediate issues that need sorting asap!
2. I want page level reporting, tell me exactly what and where the issue is.
3. Authority score - what’s my client’s backlink profile? Who are they getting their links from and what does the keyword link profile look like, i.e. what keywords do other people use when they link to me? Where am I getting my links from, what countries? (Not my visitors - my links)
4. What’s my visibility like? Not in Google.com, but in my target country  -google.co.uk or google.ie or google.ca, or yahoo.co.uk, live.co.uk…etc
5. What’s the work load like to get this website into order? How many issues are there and what are they?
6. Give me a list of my keyword competitors and analyse them for me.
7. Analyse my chosen keywords for me and let me do further keyword analysis
8. Show me my social media profile for brand X or product Y
9. Let me develop and distribute press releases online
10. Give me project management tools so I can easily assign hours to tasks and generate invoices

What else would I like to see….

11. A simple dashboard that I can show my client and they instantly see what I’m doing
12. I want to be able to email this dashbaord or print off a pdf
13. What about customising the report, yep definelty want this
14. Naturally give me secure login and let me give a login to my client, I want them to feel they are getting value for money.
15. I want to know how often these tools are updated to take account of changes in the Search Engines.

What about you?

What functionality would like to to see in the ultimate set of Internet Marketing Tools? What really annoys you about optimising a website or getting improved rankings for websites you look after.

Having problems targeting certain countries? What about social media optimisation? Ever tried any of this? What’s the biggest consumer of your time - research on competitors? Keyword Anlaysis? Content writing? SEO?

How could the whole process be made easier? We’re always looking to hear from those who feel the pain on a daily basis.

Disclosure

We’re working on developing these set of tools. Have a look to see where we are in our quest for the ultimate set of Internet Marketing Tools.

Posted in SEO Software | 3 Comments »

“I don’t know if Google can have a success if it doesn’t involve an algorithm”

July 15th, 2008

So says Kathy Sharpe when talking about Google’s efforts to make video advertising work. Seems the guys over at Google are having some teething problems selling ads on YouTube.

The success of Google undoubtly was, and is, its ability to deliver both relvant search results for its users and also target text ads for its advertisers. So, what’s the big difference between selling text ads for its search engine and its search network and selling video ads on Youtube?

Apparently some big advertisers are worried that their ads will appear next to ameteur videos and copyright ligitation has also hampered the sales push.

The bottom line in selling ads is advertisers want to see a return for their buck. I don’t see the bigger companies being too interested in the quality of websites their text ads appear beside? Why is that? Maybe its because they are counting the clicks rather than worrying about the SERP’s.

Have you ever seen a video ad on Youtube? It looks like this:

So, when you are watching a video, these text ads appear at the bottm of the screen. Normally I just click on the X and close the ad. This form of advertising , to me, is far different to the model that works so well on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), i.e. text ads. On a SERP, you are actively looking for something and if a PPC ad appears to fit the bill then you’ll likely click on the ad, but when I’m watching a video, I want to watch the video and not look at ads.

I know they are trying to put in relevant ads, but I think the underlying model here will be harder to achieve success with than the adwords model.

Another method Google is using to push video advertising is by using syndication, so just like Google Adsense, but with video (Video Units), here’s an example;

You can see that there is a syndicated video here, one that’s matched to my tags of , ’search engine optimisation, search engines, algorithm, Google, Yahoo, Live, search engine marketing’ ?

Did you watch the video? Did you see the ads? Would you be likely to click on the ads?

Have you tried using video units on Google’s Adsense network? How did you get on?

Posted in Search Engine | 1 Comment »

Microsoft overtakes Google and Yahoo as the number 1 search engine!

July 8th, 2008

No, you haven’t misread the headline, Microsoft has overtaken Google and Yahoo as the number 1 search engine in the world.

Hmmm, ok, so maybe that’s stretching the truth a little bit and maybe it’s something that’ll never come to pass. But what if it does happen?

What would it take for Microsoft to become number one in Search and why does Google currently have such a strangle hold?

Google as a brand is incredibly powerful, ‘Google Equals Search‘ in many people’s eyes. But why? What is it exactly that makes Google so much better for the average searcher?

If you ran an experiment, with three virgin searchers (hard to find nowadays!) to see which search engine from the big three they preferred , what would you find?

Let’s say the three virgins are in the UK and you ask them to search using the term ‘adverising agency‘.

What’s the first thing they’ll notice when they navigate to Google.co.uk, Yahoo.co.uk and msn.co.uk?

They go to Google.com, what do they see?

Very simple interface, completely idiot proof. It’s clear what the user has to do and it’s also clear what the focus on Google is - Search

Now, lets take a look at Yahoo, what do you see on Yahoo.co.uk?

There’s a lot going on here, a user can easily get distracted with what’s on the page, and I guess the theory is so can Yahoo. What is there core business? Search? Being a portal?

And what of MSN?

Again, very cluttered, the focus is definetly not on search. I appreciate that live.com (this is the seach website for MSN) has a focus on search, but here you come back to branding and what company comes to mind when you think search?

So, that’s the homepages, but what about the user experience in terms of search results and relevance?

Remember we’re looking for ‘advertising agency’ and we’re searching in the UK, let’s compare the set of results returned on Google.co.uk, msn.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk:

[Note: we are taking results from 'Search the Web' and not 'pages from UK']

.	Google.co.uk	Yahoo.co.uk	msn.co.uk
1	http://en.wikipedia.org/	http://en.wikipedia.org/	http://www.conrad.co.uk/
2	http://creativeadvertisingagency.com/	http://www.advertisingagency.co.uk/	http://www.adpartners.co.uk/
3	http://www.stlukes.co.uk/	http://www.conrad.co.uk/	http://www.thead.biz/
4	http://www.advertisingagency.co.uk/	http://www.eyeconomy.co.uk/	http://www.adzmedia.co.uk/
5	http://www.giraffeads.com/	http://www.thead.biz/	www.myadbase.com/
6	http://www.adpartners.co.uk/	http://www.adzmedia.co.uk/	http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/
7	http://www.freeindex.co.uk	http://advertising-agency-uk.com/	http://www.agencyinc.co.uk/
8	http://www.adzmedia.co.uk/	http://www.advertisingagency.co.uk/	-
9	http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com/	http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/	-
10	http://www.conrad.co.uk/	http://www.pgkadvertising.com/	-

Yahoo has 40% match rate with Google and over 42% of MSN listings match Google, but MSN is only showing 7 results on it’s SERP.

What about relevance?

Are Google’s results really better than Yahoo or MSN’s? How would you know? Is this really a subjective answer, what I find relevant someone else may not. From the above set of results, there isn’t much to seperate the three engines in terms of relevance.

Our three volunteers would be hard pushed to pick the most relevant set of results and what criteria would they use? Location, company experience, current client list? Point is, agareeing what is relevant and what is not is part of the user experience.

When you look at the SERP for each of the engines you’ll notice that you get

• 1 and 1/2 organic listings above the fold on MSN,
• 2 and 1/2 on Yahoo
• 3 on Google, so Google is giving less real estate on its SERP to sponsored listings on top of the SERP. Again the focus is on Search in Google.

So, with Microsoft not giving up on acquiring Yahoo , and buying up smaller players in Search like Semantic Indexing specilaists ‘Powerset’, it looks like they have set their goal on overtaking both Yahoo and Google as number 1 in search.

The biggest challenge for them is changing how people think about search, getting from Google = Search to MSN (Live) = Search isn’t going to be easy.

What do you think?

Are Microsoft heading towards the number one spot? Or is Google’s brand just too powerful?

Posted in Search Engine | 3 Comments »

What are Microsoft’s Future Search Strategies?

July 4th, 2008

So what happens now that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo looks dead in the water? Yahoo is off trying to build a relationship with Google and both Google and Yahoo are enhancing their search technology by building links with Adobe.

You may get the impression that Microsoft is starting to lose interest in this area and may look to other ways of building its business, maybe in the traditional software world?

Well, think again, have a look at this video from Scobleizer TV, it’s an interview with Brad Golberg, general manager of Microsoft Live Search. Brad lays out the future direct of Live search, well worth a view. To start with Brad mentions;:

• cash back scheme
• search has the ability to get a lot better
• about 40% of all queries go unanswered
• about 50% of all queries get refinded

He also talks about how the search engines have a problem with for example, if I typed in the term, ‘paris’ the search engine wouldn’t know if I was looking for :

• paris, france
• paris hotel in Las Vegas
• paris hilton

They also talk about the branding of search and how difficult it will be to change the mindset from , Google = Search to Microsoft = Search.

Brad talked about the ‘core customer requirement’ for all search engines is relevance.

Also went on to talk about’ commerical search ‘ and one of the ways that search will evolve will be that it’ll become a lot more task centric and he lists the four tasks that people are looking to complete when they go online:

1. looking to be entertained
2. looking to buy something
3. looking for a piece of information (research)
4. looking to navigate from one site to another

He says that Search currently plays a faily small role in all these tasks and they’ll be looking to broaden out this area. The specific area that Microsoft will focus on first is commerce and within that they’ll dig deeper into areas like commercial relevance, looking at areas such as:

• product information
• product research
• product front end experience

Microsoft see themselves carving out a competitive niche here.

Anyway, lots more on the video, check it out…

Posted in Microsoft | 3 Comments »