Aaron Shear makes a compelling argument in a recent Search Engine Watch article. He explains that, when it comes to optimizing a webpage for the search engines, improper (or no) ‘targeting’ can severely detract from the ability of the page to rank highly for its chosen keywords.

Within the context of search engine optimization (SEO), ‘targeting’ means focusing the content of a given webpage on or around a particular keyword or keyphrase. The more targeted is your webpage, the more relevant your page will appear for the given keyword or keyphrase.

Higher relevance means a higher search engine ranking, which in turn means greater organic search engine traffic.

As Mr Shear states, the search engines evaluate webpages from the top left hand corner of the page to the bottom right hand corner of the page (including the page title tag). Further, search engines read the content from left to right, with the most important part being at the beginning of the text or tag.

Given this, the greater the quantity of information on a webpage, and, importantly, the more diverse that information is, the greater the dilution in terms of targeting. Which means, in turn, the lower the capacity of the page to rank highly for its chosen keyword(s).

The lesson? Focus your content as much as possible.

Try to avoid having one webpage about two or more different things. For instance, instead of having one page with “great deals on bicycles and tricycles,” aim to have one page on bicycles and another on tricycles.

And if you can be even more specific (depending on your keywords) even better.

I should also note that diluted or improper targeting also tends to cause a higher than desirable bounce rate - another factor taken into account by the search engines. A ‘bounce’ occurs when someone (or something) leaves a webpage the moment they arrive i.e. before the page loads. A high bounce rate indicates that most people find the content to be irrelevant… not good when the search engines place so much emphasis on RELEVANCE.

Source: Aaron Shear, “SEO Dreams are Made of This,” Search Engine Watch, November 18, 2008

Not too long ago, search engine optimizers (SEOs) urged Internet marketers to swap links with other sites in order to enhance their PageRank or ‘authority’ in the eyes of the search engines. This, in turn, would help their sites achieve higher search engine listings and thereby generate more website traffic.

Unfortunately, the search engines caught on and began to detect overt link swaps, and any other kind of linking between sites that seemed unrelated to each other.

That said, most SEOs believe the search engines still regard inbound links from related, authoritative sites as the primary indicator of a site’s relevance for a given search phrase. Which, in turn, is the key determinant of where that site ranks in the natural or organic search engine listings.

So if you still need inbound links… but swapping links is generally out of the question… how do you get ‘em?

In short, focus on the idea of ATTRACTING links. In other words, do whatever it takes to get the right people (websites) saying the right things about you (giving you links). To do this, generate the kind of content that people want to talk about (and link to).

Some ideas for doing this are to:

• Write newsworthy or interesting content on a blog;
• Create a wiki i.e. categorized, helpful information for your niche or industry;
• Write articles for other authoritative, high profile sites (and include your link!); and
• Distribute press releases that include links back to your site.

Google has introduced the Search-based Keyword Tool (currently in beta). The tool suggests keywords for you to target in your Google Adwords campaign, based on their relevance to your website.

According to Google, you can benefit from the Search-based Keyword Tool in two main ways. Firstly, if you are running a campaign the tool will suggest keywords that are highly relevant to your website, but are not currently part of your AdWords campaign.

Secondly, even if you aren’t currently advertising in Adwords, you can use the tool to discover nuances about your target market. The tool essentially generates keywords often used in association with the keywords you have chosen to target.

Right now, the Search-based Keyword Tool is available to advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., with additional languages and countries to follow in the near future.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/sktool

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool”, Inside AdWords, November 18, 2008

If Google hasn’t focused much on monetizing its video site YouTube to date… it’s now doing so with a vengeance. On Wednesday, the company announced it will start selling ad space on YouTube search-results pages.

The new advertising feature will allow anyone with a video on YouTube to promote it on a search-results page. Advertisers can bid on keywords and their videos will be displayed on the right-hand side of the YouTube search-results page with a small image and some text.

Advertisers will pay whenever a viewer clicks on the ad and can set their maximum price per click. As in Google Adwords, Google will choose the order in which ads are displayed based on how much advertisers are willing to pay, along with the relevance of the video to the keyword.

Here’s some food for thought (and something worth testing!): if you can give your YouTube video ANY title… does that mean that as long as the keyword matches the title… you’ll score highly on relevance?

So, in other words, can you change the title of your video to suit the keyword you wish to target? Or will Google index the text of the video (if applicable)?

Source: Stephanie Clifford, “YouTube to Sell Advertising on Pages of Search Results”, The New York Times, November 12, 2008

What should you do when the top few search engine results for your company include one or more listings that are blatantly negative? Articles that are wrong, biased, misleading or worse?

One approach is to contact your lawyer. If the person behind the negative listing has lied or defamed you or your company, you may have a case for defamation. But litigation is costly. Moreover, the culprit in question may not necessarily have defamed you in the legal sense. They may have simply published an item of ‘free speech’ that is negative, but not strictly defamatory.

Another approach is to complain to the search engines. But they’re unlikely to do anything unless you can show them that the negative listing is unlawful or the result of ‘gaming’ the search engines.

A more practical approach is to beat the negative listing at their own game: use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to push down their listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, as with anything to do with SEO, you can take a ‘white hat’, ‘black hat’ or ‘grey hat’ approach. A ‘black hat’ approach is to try to game the search engines; a ‘white hat’ approach is to follow the ‘rules’ i.e. the rules of relevance and authority; and a ‘grey’ hat approach is somewhere in between the two.

The problem with black and grey approaches is that while you may be able to get rid of the negative listing in the short term… in the long term you run the risk of losing your own listing altogether and damaging your reputation among the search engines.

This is rarely a risk worth taking when dealing with your company and/or brand name and main website.

On that basis, a ‘white hat’ approach is the only approach I recommend for optimizing your main site AND for defending against threats to your search engine positioning and/or reputation.

And what if you actually rank highest for your company name anyway, and are simply trying to get rid of a negative listing that sits BELOW your listing? In that case, it’s not so much a matter of optimizing your main site or page any further… but to get other favorable listings to rise above, and push out, the negative listing.

One way to do that is to build and optimize alternative websites… but that’s likely to take a long time and a lot of effort on your part. This is because, among other things, the search engines tend to be slow to rank brand new domains highly in the SERPs.

Here’s a much easier - and more effective - way suggested by Aaron Shear: build a presence on various popular social media sites.

The search engines tend to rank the popular social media sites highly. Therefore, by establishing a page on all the major social media sites - Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and so on - you’ll have a shot at getting those pages ranked… and ranked higher than the negative listing you’re trying to get off the first few pages of results.

The key, of course, is to put some unique, compelling content on those pages, and attract in-bound links to those pages from authoritative sites. But it may not be as difficult as you think. Placing videos on YouTube, for example, is something you might be interested in doing anyway, and will likely to have many benefits (in terms of traffic and conversions) other than ousting those negative sites from the top listings.

Indeed, building a presence on the popular social media sites is a recommended traffic and SEO strategy and, by including links to your main site, can also aid in achieving or maintaining a high ranking for your main site.

It’s certainly your best bet in terms of getting rid of those negative listings that just don’t seem to go away.

Source: Aaron Shear, “Maintaining Your Company’s Image in the SERPs”, Search Engine Watch, November 4, 2008

Frank Watson, writing in Search Engine Watch, reckons the real threat to Google may not come from Yahoo, Microsoft, or indeed any other search engine. Instead it may come from social media.

“People are starting to move away from being satisfied with search results,” writes Mr Watson. “They’re starting to develop trust groups with social bookmarking tools and other community or social networks. If this behavior continues, we may see a change in the way the majority of people use the Web.”

Watson seems to be saying that as more people use social media… and as more advertisers follow people onto social media… search engines will lose their pre-eminence, if not relevance.

Hmmm… I dunno. While I appreciate the rising popularity of social media, I don’t see it happening at the expense of the search engines. What may emerge is a kind of morphing of the two - where search results are more informed by social media.
But that’s kind of happening already, isn’t it? At least to the extent that the search engines seem to favor social media results in the organic search engine results.

As for social media advertising displacing search advertising… I don’t see that happening any time soon. Not among direct response advertisers anyway. Nothing yields an advertising return on investment (ROI) quite so high as advertising your product to people who are specifically looking for that product.

So unless social media can start delivering a direct response kind of ROI, it won’t beat Google or the other search engines on the advertising front either.

All the same, I think Watson is on to something. A Google beater may well emerge from social media or ‘Web 2.0′… and it may not be anything we’ve seen yet.

Source: Frank Watson, “Could Social Media Be the Google Killer?” Search Engine Watch, Sep 19, 2008

Last Thursday, Google announced improvements to its Quality Score, which it introduced in July 2005 to vary minimum bids for keywords based on relevance.

Google is making three key changes to Quality Score:

1. Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query. On that basis, Google will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. Consequently, Quality Score will vary according to such factors as where an ad displays (Google, search partner, content site) and where the searcher is located (country, state).

2. Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’. Rather than be deemed inactive for search due to low relevance and/or searches, all keywords will be able to have ads shown on Google and the content network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them).

3. “First page bid” will replace the “minimum bid”. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results in Google, based on the ‘exact match’ version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

So what do these changes mean?

Well, as far as a more dynamic Quality Score goes, it probably just confirms the need to keep keywords relevant. The good news is that, theoretically, YOUR ideas over what is relevant can be borne out by the behavior of your target market, rather than be deemed by Google. Provided, of course, that you get it right.

The lifting of the ‘inactive for search’ restraint is, I think, good news. Again, provided that you know more about your market than Google’s algorithm.

As for the replacement of the “minimum bid” with the “first page bid”… this sounds suspiciously like an excuse to make Google Adwords advertisers pay more. Hopefully not, but we won’t know until Google rolls out these “improvements” over the next few weeks.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score Improvements”, August 21, 2005

When I first began pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google Adwords a few years ago I learned to:

• gather together hundreds or thousands of keywords that seemed appropriate for my campaign (from the most highly searched on to the most obscure or “long-tail”);

• stick them into ad groups;

• write ads that matched those ad groups;

• create landing pages that matched those ads; and

…ta-da, I’d have a highly performing Google Adwords campaign!

Only it wasn’t as simple as that. And it certainly isn’t now…

While that was - and IS - broadly the right approach to take, a big problem emerged from gathering all those keywords… one that is even bigger now, given Google’s Quality Score.

You see, with so many keywords to organize, it was all too tempting to bunch lots of unrelated long-tail keywords into the same ad groups. After all, there was little justification in creating individual ad groups for keywords that rarely got searched on.

The result was, however, that I’d end up with generic ads that didn’t quite fit each of the long-tail keywords in a given ad group. And today, such an approach would more than likely lead to a low Google Quality Score. All of which amounted to – and would now amount to - low click-through rates (CTRs), high cost per click (CPC) rates, and low ad positions.

Does that imply that long-tail keywords should be abandoned?

Not necessarily. According to search engine marketing expert, David Szetela, all the keywords in an ad group should be tightly related to each other and to the ad text. So much so that he says PPC advertisers should make this our mantra:

“(Almost) every keyword should appear in the ad text.”

This is important for several reasons including the fact that Google bolds keywords that appear in the ad text which is likely to attract clicks and higher CTRs. Furthermore, it reflects RELEVANCE between the keyword and ad text, which is likely to have a positive impact on Quality Score. And, in sum, your ads will likely get higher CTRs, which will lead to higher quality scores, lower CPCs, higher ad positions… and in turn higher CTRs!

Mr Szetela further recommends you divide and group keywords in your keyword list based on who you are targeting and where they are in the research-shop-buy cycle. In other words, group together keywords that are likely to be used by people in research mode… other keywords used by those in shopping/comparing mode… and others used by people in buying mode.

What if you have some long-tail keywords that just can’t be grouped together in any meaningful way? Well, if they really are long-tail i.e. hardly ever searched on… and they don’t seem related to any other keywords… then… what are they doing in your keyword list? Get rid of ‘em!

Source: David Szetela, “Tightly-Themed Ad Groups: The PPC Pro Advantage”, Search Engine Watch, August 4, 2008

Monday July 28 saw the release of Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine launched by a group of ex-Google employees including Anna Patterson and her husband Tim Costello.

According to Cuil’s founders, Cuil is more comprehensive - with an index of 120 billion web pages, more than any other search engine - and delivers more relevant search results than Google’s search engine.

Despite the pedigree of Cuil’s founders and team, many commentators - myself included - were rather unimpressed when giving Cuil a spin. I found it slow, the layout confusing (no clear order and a strange use of images alongside unrelated webpages) and the results to be less relevant than those generated by Google.

It also lacks any kind of unique selling point. As an up and coming search engine it has nothing like the “wow” factor of, say, SearchMe and isn’t based on any markedly different technology as is Powerset (which uses semantic or “natural language” technology).

Rather it’s main selling proposition seems to hinge on being better than Google i.e “we’re bigger and more relevant, therefore we’re better”. Yet, as Google has indicated, bigger is not necessarily better (given all the crap on the Internet!) and Cuil has a way to go before it delivers more relevant search results.

Of course, it’s early days and Cuil may still become cool. Who knows, Microsoft might buy it.

Sources: Miguel Helft, “Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine”, The New York Times, July 28, 2008, Frederic Lardinois, “Cuil: Good, But Not Great”, Read Write Web, July 28, 2008, Michael Arrington, “Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story”, July 27, 2008

Now more than ever, email marketers need to send their subscribers content they regard as relevant and in response to their needs.

A study conducted by Epsilon International and Return Path in the Asia-Pacific region has found that while nearly one in three respondents (32 percent) say they “always” respond to targeted,
promotional e-mails… over a quarter also regard emails that no longer meet their needs as spam.

Sounds about right. Once you start deviating from sending subscribers what they want and expect… they’ll start ignoring your emails, unsubscribing and, in some cases, complaining.

Sources: Epsilon, “Email Marketing Increasingly Important In Reaching Consumers In Asia Pacific”, Press Release, June 18, 2008, eMarketer, “E-Mail Relevance a Worldwide Concern”, eMarketer, July 14, 2008