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21 January 2010

The Zone of Acceptance

One of the most successful ways we use search engine optimisation to improve pages here at Bruce Clay is by providing content recommendations for each keyword. We do this quite a lot, and are pleasantly surprised by how this procedure can dramatically improve rankings.

Photo by Iain Farrell via Creative Commons

What we try do is locate the most 'imperfect' web pages associated with the keywords we are trying to target. We then modify the pages we are trying to optimise to make them resemble the least imperfect pages we found in the first step (in terms of keyword densities and other factors).

But what I've grown to wonder is 'why does this work?' And why does one keyword recommend a spam like density and for another barely a mention on the page.
The answer has to do with what the search engine believes to be natural, and consequently the sites that lie within their zone of acceptance.

The search engine is not an expert and has no worldly experience, but the purpose of a query is to return the best sites for a particular topic. To work out who are the best sites, it makes an approximation of who the experts are, and in turns looks at its most comprehensive resource to help with the decision. This resource is its index. Making the decision of who are the best sites is based on the population within the index.

The belief is, like much of the Internet, that trust can be placed within the wisdom of the crowds. The population knows who the experts are. If a site does not match that of the general population, then it cannot be an expert. The search engines looks for common characteristics among the index, these commonalities determine the better sites and therefore the zone of acceptance.

Google's 'did you mean' option is a simple example of how this works. A misspelled search query asks Google for an answer outside the majority of the population. It sees an unnatural anomaly and looks elsewhere for what it perceives to be natural. Hence the 'did you mean'.

A site ranking for 'Sydney cricket tickets' will contain vastly different information to a site ranking for 'Sydney cricket'. The purchasing website contains a system for visitors to enter their details and buy the tickets. The research website presents a long article detailing all there is to know of Sydney cricket. So you can see how each themed site and (the keywords they ranked for) would naturally have two contrasting content specifications. The search engines know what is appropriate for each keyword.

The great advantage that our toolset offers is a quickly generated measurement of what a natural looking page is. By applying some math to the top ranking sites, a recommendation is given. So for example, one recommendation is to write the body of content with x amount of words that includes the keyword x amount of times. This is the zone of acceptance. This is what the search engine believes to be a natural fit. We know this because these figures come from the top ranking sites. By giving the content writers a natural target that the search engines are looking for, your chances of improved rankings and SEO effect are increased.

Posted by Matthew Geale on 01/21/10 at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Keyword Research

19 January 2010

2010 SEO Checklist

2009 has seen so many changes in the Search Engine Industry and you would probably be surprised to realise how these changes have an impact on your business.

The Vince update is already so far away and so 2009 anyway, but 2010 looks very promising and full of exciting innovations that will keep on influencing the way people search, and find.

So here's our 2010 SEO checklist for Marketing Managers:

1. Personalised Search

The Search Engines have come up with so many new ways to personalise your search results, logged-in or not, based on your search history, on your social media profiles, your location, etc. 2010 will see more of these customised results and the challenge will be to maintain relevancy for all users while businesses will have to maintain their search engine rankings in the new top 8+2. For the online marketers, it will become a greater challenge as they will have to manage the balance between more online profiles to maximise their search engine visibility while ensuring that their primary property ranks ahead of the others.

2. Speed matters

Since Matt Cutts revealed during an interview with Web Pro News that Speed will become part of the Search Engines ranking algorithm in 2010. To rank higher, the webmaster will have to optimise code, technology as well as content delivery strategies to win the race.

3. Real-Time Search

Bing opened the ball this year by starting to index tweets, and Google followed and started displaying real-time search results with its "Latest Search Results" option. The online marketers and the public relations people probably had a chill down their spine realising how much more crucial reputation management then became.

4. Videos

Now that online videos are making their ways up in the marketing budgets and that viral marketing as emerged, video organic rankings have become extremely valuable. The search engines as well have jumped on board, and ever since Google acquired YouTube in 2006, the online video spending has only gone up. Google recently introduced sponsored videos via their AdSense network. Ranking for videos has become critical, and the two big questions for webmasters and online marketers is to decide whether:
a) they are willing to pay the big bucks for sponsored videos as opposed to optimising videos for organic results
b) they want to host their own videos to attract more traffic to their site as opposed to having better chances in ranking for their keywords via video sharing sites.

5. Local Search

The release of Google Maps in 2005 has changed the way people search locally. Little by little, Google Maps has delivered more local results, establishing partnership with local directories and mapping companies to improve the quality of their results. It can now be used in so many aspects, from getting directions to a place to getting a closer look with Street View. The introduction of the new dashboard in the Google Local Business Centre earlier this year has once more proven that it has now become essential to be listed on Google Maps. Bing has recently launched their own Maps engine "Bing Maps", which has an emphasis on user experience.
These new Maps engine now provide a new arena where the SMEs in particular can easily be found and rank for their search term + location. These businesses can now also be found by users searching for keywords only, using the geo-targeting features of the new smartphone generation with built-in GPS, and therefore potentially converting a sale in minutes if the business is found by a mobile searcher.
These new local business listings also provide an opportunity for businesses to rank for highly competitive terms, even without a website.

If you want to learn more about SEO, Bruce Clay Australia is organising a 1 Day SEO Training presented by Jeremy Bolt in Sydney on February 17th, Brisbane on April 7th, Melbourne on May 12th, and Sydney on June 9th as well as a 3 Days presented by Bruce Clay in Sydney on March 10th, 11th and 12th.

Posted by Martin Orliac on 01/19/10 at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimisation

14 January 2010

Deteriorating search engine results

Photo by _Tophee via Creative Commons

The other day at the Bruce Clay Australia offices we had a discussion about how the search results seem to have deteriorated over the past 3 - 4 years. Whether it was searching for cheap hotel rates in Melbourne or trying to find a review for a laptop, it seems more time has to be spent and more searches have to be carried out just to find the relevant information. Now there are a few reasons why this might have happened and I am going to explore a few of these.

Heightened expectations

With all the advances in technology and search engines algorithms, are we expecting too much from the search results? In the past few years, everything has been geared around instant gratification (I think this was a driving force in the development of real-time search) and we are not only expecting results accurately but immediately. Now I struggle to recall my searching habits of 4 years ago but I have a sneaky suspicion that I was willing to cut all the big search engines some slack when it came to searching. I don't think they have that luxury any more.

I think a big part of this heightened expectations comes from knowledge. I know Google has 5000 PhD's just sitting around thinking of ways to improve the algorithm, but when I want to get the cheapest accommodation in Melbourne I dont want to have to navigate between 10 different, yet almost identical aggregator sites in the SERP's before giving up due to frustration and ending up in Wogga Wogga, just because it's easier to find a cheap hotel.

Another interesting observation is that more and more users are using longer (longtail) search queries to find what they are looking for. The question I pose is: are users searching with more specific search phrases because they are more savvy to the way the web works, or is it because the search results are so poor for broad-based queries that in order to find something relevant you are forced to use detailed and lengthy search queries?

TMI

Too much information! Normally a teenager's response to a friend giving one personal detail too many, it can also describe the explosion of web sites, blogs, aggregators and web properties in general. Since March 2005, the number of people using the Internet has doubled to almost 2 billion. The figures around number of actual sites on the internet are a little hazy, but according to Google the number of sites they had explored was 26 million pages in 1998, one billion pages in 2000 and ONE TRILLION PAGES in 2008, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

Now I know Google has some of the best infrastructure, technology and talent at their disposal but if we take the number of pages as products that Google has to provide quality control for, then that's alot of control - even for the world's biggest brand. Not only is there so much more information for Google to sift through, but the information is becoming more complex to evaluate. SEO is becoming more prominent, with alot of people who own web properties having been exposed to some kind of search engine optimisation education and using that knowledge to make their sites more 'appealing' to search engines. Popular blogging platforms like Wordpress also have SEO functionality now built in, straight out of the box, so again, more SEO-friendly pages are added to the web index. Aggregators, with their boilerplate templates are also becoming more popular in the SERPS again, further adding to the congestion.

Social media also comes into this. With Google and Bing starting to index Facebook and Twitter status updates, the amount of information is expected to increase exponentially. However, I think the search engines have the capacity to do this or they wouldn't try.
The Internet is expanding exponentially and pointless pages are taking advantage of Google's ranking system, rendering it unwieldy, Google and the other search engines need to counter this and find a way to once again become dynamic and streamlined and eliminate all those guff and filler sites that take up a large portion of their index (and my time incidentally).

Diminishing core focus on search

When Google first started, all they cared about was search. They put all their efforts and resources into making search better. Now it seems that have moved into fields pretty far flung from search, like renewable energy, cloud computing and mobile phones. Now I realise a simple answer is that they have invested in massive infrastructure and staff numbers to compensate for their diversification but somewhere along the way, with so many different things going on, their focus on search has diluted. Whether it's right at the top with Eric, Larry and Sergey or down the line through the many thousands of Google employees, it's happening.

I believe this dilution of absolute focus on search has resulted in some deterioration (or perhaps not as much improvement) of the search results. It's time to put the focus back on search, or the current batch of search engines may become the HotBot and AltaVista of the past.

Maybe search results have gotten better and we are just expecting too much, however I don't think this is the case; many people with in the search industry have noticed this and questioned the big wigs about it. I think that there are alot of outside factors that might be negatively affecting the SERPS, but I think it's time the search engines took cognisance of these factors and tried to counter them instead of putting feature upon feature (real-time search, more blended results, caffeine update etc) upon pretty average search results that are already crying out for some better quality control and more relevant sites within those SERPS.

Posted by Marc Elison on 01/14/10 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News

7 January 2010

My 2009 online project

Photo by Titanas via Creative Commons

Happy New Year to all. I hope your festive season and New Year parties were just grand. It looks like it's going to be an interesting year, what with the launch of the first Google (slightly HTCish phone), Facebook challenging Google for Internet dominance, and MicroYahoo challenging Google for search engine dominance. I'm not going to touch on any of these subjects, not now anyway, but they will be covered in good time.

Bruce Clay Australia has always fostered an entrepreneurial atmosphere within the office, offering ideas, support and encouragement for any semi-feasible web idea. Luckily enough towards the backend of last year, I stumbled upon such an idea. Now this isn't my first rodeo, I have built websites from scratch using good ol notepad, and (gasp) Microsoft FrontPage when I was just starting out. However this was my first experience using Wordpress as a CMS and not just a blogging platform. I have recently completed my project (no shameless link plugging here) and what follows are some interesting things I have learnt about the Internet, SEO and myself:

1. Expensive Wordpress themes are not always what they appear. I decided to use Wordpress for my project because it was going to be relatively static (aside from the blog section), and I am pretty familiar with Wordpress and if I wanted to do something, there would probably be a plugin for that. So I went about creating my Wordpress design. After about 3 days worth of work (with barely anything to show for it) I decided to leave it to the experts and went shopping for a theme. Awesome, after just a short while I found a theme that would suit my project perfectly, bought it immediately and set it up on my Wordpress installation. But wait, this doesn't seem right I thought as I stared at the screen that looked distinctly different to the demo of the theme I had just bought. It took many, many many, MANY hours of work for my theme to look anything close to the demo. In the end, it worked out as I got my theme looking just the way I wanted. But a word of warning to those of you about to purchase a Wordpress theme: most of the time the theme you buy isn't going to look like the demo you saw, so allow yourself a fair bit of time to get your theme right.

2. Double check your site is accessible. Now my site was finally finished, I had tweaked, proofread, optimised title tags etc, and I was finally ready to go live. I took off the disallow command in my robots.txt file and thought I was ready to roll. A day later, I feverishly checked my Webmaster tools and some accessibility tools and, to my surprise, my site was still being blocked to search engine spiders. So I started delving through Wordpress, looking for something I have missed. Sure enough, within the privacy section of Wordpress I found this little button ticked

I changed the setting and thought my job was done but apparently not because a few days later my site was still being blocked. More investigations for Marc. After going through every little link in my whole Wordpress dashboard, I finally found that my theme was blocking robots by default, so I changed that too and all was well with the world (well my website accessibility anyway).So in the end I had to check 3 places to make sure the site was accessible; the Wordpress option, the theme option and the robots.txt .This is a pretty vital step because you're in big trouble if search engines can't find your site. So always check your site is accessible and with Wordpress and themes it may entail you checking alot of areas around your Wordpress dashboard.

3. The All in One SEO Plugin rocks. I have always been sceptical of tools that claim to completely automate the search engine optimisation process as I have seen loads of these not come close to what a person can do. However, I had heard good things about this plugin so decided to give it a bash. Besides the fact that it also messed slightly with accessibility of my blog, it makes things alot easier from an SEO point of view. There are loads of features but the ones that made it useful for me were:

• Automatically optimises your titles for search engines and does a fairly good job of this

• Generates META tags automatically, especially great with the keyword tag as I know it's not relevant anymore but I have an almost sentimental need from the old days to always put these in

• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs, so you can very easily
i. Use noindex for Categories:
ii. Use noindex for Archives:
iii. Use noindex for Tag Archives

It doesn't automate everything but it does lend a helping hand.

4. The truth is out there (spoken to the background of the X-Files theme tune). So I ran into a problem that I just couldn't get right myself. You see, Wordpress has a nasty habit of placing the word 'category' or some category that you have chosen in the URL. Now I didn't want that, I really didn't want that. I wanted the name of my blog to be as close to my domain name in the URL as it can possibly be. So I typed "wordpress get rid of categories" into Google and voila, there must have been hundreds of articles and forum entries on the subject and plenty of walkthroughs to help me achieve this. Granted the first 5 little hints and hacks didn't really work but 6th time lucky I guess. The point I am trying to make is that Wordpress is so popular and has such a large community out there, that any problem or query you have, is likely to have been asked and answered before and you can use that solution to fix your problem.

5. Get another set of eyes. I spend most of my time on the content creation side of SEO. It seemed only natural that I should design a project with content as its focal point. So I wrote an ebook :) Now after months of creating, proofing and editing my ebook, I was quietly confident that there would be zero errors, typos and spelling mistakes. Just in case, I decided to get a few people I knew who had an eye for detail to give it the quick once over. My quiet confidence was a little unfounded: there were spelling errors, typos, etc. Now I am normally pretty good at that side of things but I think with this project I was a little too close to the content (almost knowing it by heart) and that inhibited my ability to be objective about it. It's cases like these where you need another set of eyes, just to make sure everything is ok.

It really was a learning process for me and being my own client also gave me an insight into what it's like to be a client and work with an SEO company. It's not always easy! I think that I have learnt a tremendous amount and with my future content creation, link building and social media optimisation, I doubt that the learning will stop anytime soon.

I just wanted to wish the readers of the blog a happy, prosperous and healthy 2010. I think it's going to be a good one.

Posted by Marc Elison on 01/ 7/10 at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Industry News