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Longtail SEO For Ecommerce
The significance of longtail keywords can be exemplified by thinking about the following two people:
Bill is a cafeteria worker who spends his spare time fishing and has heard that his favorite TV shows will look even better on on this new-fangled technology called “HDTV”. He might as well upgrade from his 20” to something a little larger while he's at it his friends tell him (though they don't know much more about it than he does). He sits at his computer and enters “hdtv” into the Google search box.
Steve also works in a cafeteria but is a bit more tech-savy. He has and uses a Facebook account, watches videos on YouTube and looks up information on Google when he's looking for an answer to one of his questions. He too is interested in HDTV but decides to check out a few review sites first before making the leap. He reads a great review on CNET and likes the specs of the “Panasonic Viera TC-P50G10” and decides to look around for pricing. He heads back to Google and searches for...
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Examine Your Site's Text, Reduce Chances of Search Engine Confusion
Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts?
At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.
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As SERPs Get More Complicated, Focus on Relevant Elements
At SES Chicago last year, Yahoo VP of Consumer Products, Larry Cornett suggested that blended search results bring businesses a broader range of SEO opportunities, a chance to take control of their brand, and a potential increase in qualified clicks. While these blended results can tend to divert users away from organic listings, as SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at that same conference, Cornett does have a point.
Blended search results offer ways to get to the front page of search results beyond just the highly more competitive organic rankings. Sites have opportunities to show up for:
- real-time results
- news results
- image results
- video results
- shopping results
- local results (customers don't even need to go to your site in some cases)
At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, WebProNews spoke with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, who says companies should still build a foundation in organic rankings before trying to conquer other areas:
That...
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Site Speed Tips for When Google Uses That as a Ranking Factor
Last year, Google's Matt Cutts dropped the bomb (to put it in the exaggerated tone that many took the news in), that Google was considering taking site speed into consideration as one of many potential ranking factors for search results.
Is your site's performance up to snuff? Comment here.
This of course freaked a lot of people out, but as Matt and Google as a whole has maintained, this would not trump relevance. It would be taken more into consideration when there are two sites of relatively equal relevance, but one site loads faster and delivers a better user experience. Matt reiterated this point in an interview we did with him this week at SMX.
WebProNews also chatted with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google at SMX, about website performance (speed), how that pertains to search rankings and the user experience, and some tips for making sure your site is up to speed, so to speak.
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SEO and Social Media Matter for Press Coverage
When businesses think about search and social media, a great deal of the time, they are thinking about traffic, customer engagement, and brand awareness. While these are all good things to consider, there may be more to that last one that you have spent much time thinking about.
Brand awareness goes beyond just having a random customer find your site in a set of search results or through a link from their Facebook news feed. Have you considered how channels like search and social media are used by media outlets and journalists? The fact of the matter is that journalists and bloggers alike utilize both to a great extent while covering their beats.
Do you take press coverage into consideration? Comment here.
Search and social both play significant roles in PR. This is a topic that WebProNews recently discussed with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden. Odden calls journalists customers, and in many ways they should be treated as such when it comes to getting your product or site in front of their eyeballs.
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Liveblogging: The State Of The Search Union (Google, Yahoo & Experts)
Watch the Keynote live at live.webpronews.com.
At SMX West in Santa Clara, the State of the Search Union keynote is taking place today. It's moderated by Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, and features SEL Contributing Editor Vanessa Fox, Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, Yahoo Director of Search Marketing David Roth, and Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media and Chief Strategy Officer of iProspect. The official description for this keynote says:
We've just come through the most turbulent period in history for search marketers. Economic disruption, massive algorithm updates, the disappearance of a major player through consolidation with one of its former competitors… these events and others have reshaped the search landscape, creating both challenges and opportunities for search marketers. On this panel we’ve assembled some of the sharpest minds in search to discuss where things stand and where we’re going – you won’t want to miss the insights and recommendations from this group of super-savvy panelists.
I will liveblog the event below, when it starts 9:00am Pacific/12:00pm Eastern (please forgive typos):
Liveblogging starts:
12:00 EST: should be starting anytime now...
12:03 People are taking the stage...getting set up with...
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Google SEO Report Card Scores Company's Own SEO Efforts
Google is looking to improve upon its own internal SEO efforts. The company has created what it calls an "SEO Report Card," designed to improve the user experience and visibility of some of its own properties. The company says it aims to identify potential areas for improvement in Google's product pages, which could help users find them more easily in search engines, and fix bugs that annoy visitors and hurt the pages' performance in search engines.
Google is making this report card publicly available though, and that means other businesses and webmasters can study it themselves, and use what they learn to improve their own sites. It may come as a surprise to some, but Google appears to have a great deal of improvement to do when it comes to search engine optimization, the irony of course coming from the fact that Google operates the world's most dominant search engine.
"Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines," says Google's Search Quality team. "From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card...
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SEO and Quality Key to Competing in the Long Tail
A while back, WebProNews had a conversation with RateItAll President Lawrence Coburn about how the long tail of search is getting more competitive. Companies like AOL and Demand Media are working on dominating long tail searches with content across a broad scope of article subject matter. We had another conversation with another company that is doing this, called Suite101, which is placing an increased amount of emphasis on SEO to up the competition in this space even more. Suite101 President and CEO Peter Berger took a break from Olympics mania in Vancouver (home of the company's headquarters) to tell us about it.
 "Making sure well-written articles get found online involves continuous hard work and search engine knowledge," says Berger. "We know that in order to help our writers get their stories found, we need to increase our expertise in the area of search." That's why the company just hired search strategist Aaron Bradley as its SEO Director to implement new SEO tactics across...
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Will Bing Powering Yahoo Make SEO Easier?
There is an interesting discussion going on in our WebProWorld forum about search engine optimization post Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing's algorithm in its search results. The discussion is about whether or not this means businesses and webmasters will only have to worry about optimizing for 2 search engines (Google/Bing) rather than 3 (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).
Will you focus your efforts more heavily on Bing? Discuss.
What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means
It's important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don't know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.
Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up...
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Links Not Always the Best Indicator of Relevance
In a recent video uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel, Matt Cutts talks about creating tags and categories on blogs for SEO purposes. Rather, he discusses how there's not much point in creating them for this reason.
On average, how many tags do you include with your articles/blog posts? Let us know.
"Google is pretty good at saying, 'You know what? The first time you say a phrase, it's interesting, and the second time you say a phrase, it's still a little bit useful,'" says Cutts. "After a while, we sort of realized, 'okay, you've said that phrase, you don't have to keep repeating it 8, 9, 10 different times.' So there are certainly some blogs (including some really popular blogs) who have like an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many, you know, minutes writing tags out as they have the actual content of the post. And I always laugh at that because it's not really that needed."
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Where Does Yahoo Fit Into Your Search Strategy?
In search, a lot of what Yahoo has done has been overshadowed by what Google and Bing have done, simply because Google controls such a huge piece of the search pie, and Bing is still a relatively fresh entity. All eyes are still on Bing as it grows. That leaves Yahoo somewhere in the middle, where it technically sits in terms of market share.
How important is Yahoo to your search strategy? Let us know.
Yahoo has done quite a bit over the past six months, and has a lot more going on in the coming ones. Regardless of whether or not Yahoo's deal with Microsoft finally goes through, and Bing takes over the algorithm side of things, Yahoo is still very much focused on search.
"Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future," says Yahoo's new senior VP of search products, Shashi Seth. "We'll continue to drive innovation. It's our stake in the ground."
According to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Yahoo's market share in the U.S. declined by 2 percentage points from December to January as Bing and even Ask...
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Ways to Get Fresh Links to Old Content for Better Search Rankings
You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don't count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.
Do you still get links to old content? Tell us why you think that is.
Google's Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.
"In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time," he says. (Emphasis added)
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How Many Spiders Does Google Have?
Google has posted a short but interesting video to its Webmaster Central YouTube channel. A user asked the question, "How many bots/spiders does Google currently have crawling the web?" and Google's Matt Cutts gave his answer.
"It's important to realize that it's not really actual robots or actual spiders out there...instead, it's banks of machines ...at Google's data centers who open up an HTTP connection and request a page and then get it back," he says. "So any bank of machines (even 50 machines) could easily be requesting a bunch of different content."
"We try to refresh a large fraction of the web every few days," he adds. "So it turns out you really don't need a ton of machines. Even a relatively small amount of...
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Google Sets Record Straight on Page Speed as Ranking Factor
Late last year, in a conversation about the Caffeine update, Google's Matt Cutts told WebProNews that page speed could become a factor Google looks at for ranking search results. His comments received a lot of attention, because Google has never taken this into consideration for ranking websites in the past. The notion that they would do so riled a lot of people up, because a lot of site owners out there simply don't have incredibly fast sites. That could pose a big problem if it suddenly damages their search rankings.
Do you count speed among the priorities for your site? Comment here.
Despite the fact that Cutts never said that page speed would become any more important of a ranking factor than anything else, many around the web and Blogosphere jumped to conclusions. While many more have remained sensible about the concept, not expecting page speed to trump relevant content, Cutts has now provided a video setting the record straight. The video is a response to the following user-submitted question:
Since we're hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about...
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A Markup That Could Have Big Implications for SEO
RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa.
In fact, this is the topic of a current WebProWorld thread, which was started by Dave Lauretti of MoreStar, who asks, "Are you working the RDFa Framework into your SEO campaigns?" He writes, "Now under certain conditions and with certain search strings on both Google and Yahoo we can find instances where the RDFa framework integrated within a website can enhance their listing in the search results."
Lauretti refers to an article from last summer at A List Apart, by Mark Birbeck who said that Google was beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes sites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with "rich snippets". This results in the Google results you see like this:
"It's a simple change to the...
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Has Google Begun Changing How it Indexes the Web?
Last summer Google announced a new project called "Caffeine", which was described as a re-write of Google's web search architecture. Around that time, Matt Cutts discussed Caffeine with WebProNews, comparing it to the "Big Daddy Update" of 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites. It appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild.
Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.
Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over - January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn't want a repeat of the Florida update).
The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine,...
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Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results
Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google's results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.
Do your site's breadcrumbs show up in Google's results? Comment here.
The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don't give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don't get with regular search results.
Google's move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It's definitely a...
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10 Details About How Google Handles Natural Language Search
Google has posted a thought-provoking piece to the Official Google Blog, discussing at length, Google's system for understanding synonyms in search. As author Steven Baker says, "An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers."
Google considers understanding human language to be one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and the key to returning the best possible search results. While it is far from perfect now, Google has invested a great deal of time into this (5 years of research to be exact).
To cut to the chase, here are some things pertaining to Google's handling of synonyms that you should keep in mind:
1. Google contantly monitors its system for handling synonyms with regard to search result relevance.
2. Google says synonyms affect 70% of user searches across over 100 languages.
3. For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improve search results, Google has only found one "truly bad" synonym.
4. Google does not normally fix bad synonyms by hand, but rather makes changes to its algorithms to...
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How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter
The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:
Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?
Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.
Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It's just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).
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Google Reveals Factors for Ranking Tweets
It's ok to say "no" to Twitter if that's your thing. There's a chance that it just doesn't fit into your strategy or help you achieve your goals. That's cool. However, if it is your thing, you may be interested in how Google ranks tweets. That is if search marketing is your thing.
Do you see Twitter as important to an effective search marketing campaign? Share your thoughts here.
Google and Microsoft almost simultaneously announced deals with Twitter a few months back, that would give the companies access to tweets in real-time to fuel their respective search engines' real-time results. Microsoft immediately launched their version, but it was separate from the regular Bing search engine. Google waited a while, but eventually started incorporating real-time results right into regular Google SERPs (including not only tweets, but various other sources).
After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, "If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower."
 Google was not...
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