Traffic Building

Big news in search engine marketing last week as Google unveiled their new search engine results format which they call “universal search”.

Their aim is to combine traditional search results (those compiled from text web pages) with results from their other search properties including Google News, YouTube, Google Images, and their literary search engine for books. The result is a set of search results that contains links not only to web pages but to news stories, book excerpts, and YouTube videos.

It remains to be seen how the metrics for each of these different types of media are going to be compared to each other to determine relevance but it’s clear that the future of Google’s search results involves moving toward multimedia search.

My first thought is that, with the increased clutter of the organic results, the importance of paid results (AdWords) will only increase. After all, that will be the only way to ensure front page ranking.

Second is the need for search marketing professionals to understand how to rank video, news, images, and book excerpts for their clients. The methods for optimizing and ranking web page text are well known and fairly standard but the best methods for ranking these other media types remain to be discovered.

Good search engine rankings have long been the preferred source for generating free website traffic. In fact, many search engine optimization companies concentrate solely on achieving high rankings in search engines as the be-all end-all to successful online marketing.

But, recent articles in Network World and the Wall Street Journal highlight the need to diversify your marketing efforts so as not to be overly reliant on search engines for traffic.

In short, Google is using automated techniques to flag websites in its rankings that may potentially infect web surfers with malware. If Google flags your site (and they’re being cryptic about the criteria for this flag), potential visitors will be warned that your site will potentially infect their computer and they’ll be required to manually type your website address into their browser to visit your site.

You can read the article for specific details, but what Google is doing illustrates how little control you have over how search engines decide to categorize your website. From day to day, search engines are changing the way they evaluate and rank sites to improve the experience for the majority of their users, often at the expense of individual sites. While achieving high search engine rankings is certainly important and the risk of being blacklisted by Google may be remote, putting all your marketing eggs in the free search engine rankings basket just isn’t wise.

As for Microsoft, their new Internet Explorer 7 browser will recognize security certificates attached to websites that identify them as legitimate and verified and highlight the website address with a green bar in the visitor’s browser. The problem with this system is that many small businesses are not eligible to receive these security certificates and thus not able to qualify for the “safe site” green bar. If surfers begin to associate the green bar with legitimacy and not having the green bar with unsafe sites, this will put small businesses at a severe disadvantage compared to their larger competitors who do qualify.

Undoubtedly, Microsoft will eventually even the playing field for small businesses, but these articles highlight the need to earn legitimacy for your website from sources other than search engines and security certificates.

How?

You need to build relationships with other websites in your industry or niche on the internet. You need to get your legitimacy from the opinion makers in your market and stop simply relying on generic listings in search engines to drive traffic to your site.

How to effectively do this is what modern search engine marketing (and our business) is all about.

Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks webmasters try to use to fool search engines into ranking their pages higher than they may deserve.

These tactics are designed to show different content to users (who don’t see the text either because it’s hidden in the content (white text on white background for example) or hidden outside the viewable area of the page using CSS) than what is shown to search engine spiders.

Search engines have long been able to detect hidden text within a web page, but many webmasters thought trying to hide text using CSS was “safe” and that search engine spiders have no way to detect this.

But, a recent forum discussion at Cre8asite introduces the possibility that Google is indeed checking included CSS files for rules that could be used to hide text.

The lesson here is that trying to manipulate your natural rankings in search is a losing game.

You’re much better off creating new unique content for your site (what search engines want) than trying to stay one step ahead (and invariably falling behind) the latest technologies search engines are using to index sites.

Yahoo! charges $299 for a link in their directory - is it worth it?

In my opinion, no.

For most small businesses, it would be much more cost-effective to use that $299 to buy AdWords or other ads for your site. At even $0.25 per ad, that’s almost 1200 qualified visitors to your site for the price of that Yahoo! directory link.

Not that a link in the Yahoo! directory isn’t worthwhile, but its primary value is not in the traffic it sends to your site, it’s that it provides a quality backlink to your site that can help you rank higher in the Google rankings.

If you’ve implemented other search engine marketing techniques and have reached the point of diminishing returns, the link from the Yahoo! directory could provide a boost but it wouldn’t be first on my list of tactics.

SEO Myth : Search engine rankings for your site can be guaranteed

You’ve probably seen the offers - “Rank first in Google or your money back! Guaranteed!”

Ever wonder what the catch is?

First, no rank in any search engine’s organic results can be guaranteed. Especially when it comes to competitive industries, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars, several months of work, and possibly some risky tactics to even make the front page for competitive searches.

If you’ll look at the fine print of these “guaranteed rankings” offers, you’ll typically find that they will:

1. Get you the top AdWords ad for a search term.
Quick and easy, just pay enough money to Google and they’ll rank your ad first tomorrow. This might do you some good, but you certainly don’t need any search engine marketing expertise to log into an AdWords account and give Google some money.

2. Rank your site first for an obscure search term.
Assuming Google is already indexing your site, getting a page ranked for a non-competitive search term should be fairly easy. The fact that ranking first for this term will do your site absolutely no good is rarely mentioned.

3. Any of a number of other word games that will result in a page on your site technically ranking “first” for some search term that will do your site or your business little good.

There are no short-cuts and no guaranteed rankings. Be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that there are.

It’s tempting to save a few dollars when you’re registering a .com domain name and not register the .net, .org, .biz, and .info versions of the name as well. After all, you’re not going to put any content there right?

First, the main issue is not what content you might put there but what content a competitor may put there once your site becomes popular.

Imagine you spend a year creating useful and relevant content for your industry and branding a particular .com domain name only to have a competitor register the .net and .org versions of the name and redirect them to their site. It may not hurt your search rankings as visitors almost universally go to the .com version by default, but it will certainly dilute the value of that branded domain name and, at best, confuse some potential customers about who they’re actually dealing with when they think of your brand.

In addition to preventing potential poachers, these secondary domain names can be useful for publishing other content that doesn’t fit on your .com domain. If your .com domain is focused on bringing in new business, you may not want to dilute that message with company news or pages of information that only applies to existing customers. Use one of those secondary domains as your support site, one as your blog site, and one as a strictly informational site for potential customers. That way, you can focus one message for one target audience and not worry about trying to address all issues for all people on one domain.

Another benefit to multiple domain names is that it’s difficult to get inbound links to a strictly commercial site. If you want to earn backlinks, it’s much easier to get them for a strictly informational or blog site than it is for a strictly commercial site. Use one of your secondary domains to answer questions, provide information, or otherwise act as an industry resource. That domain will earn backlinks and you can easily provide appropriate links to your main commercial domain from it.

When you’re moving your business online, it’s tempting to save a few dollars and only register a domain name for one year. That way if things don’t work out on the web, you’re only out the $15 or so dollars you spent to register the name.

Search engines are thinking the same thing.

Information on for how long you register a domain name is readily available to search engines and they use that data as a factor in ranking the pages in your site for relevant search terms.

Which site would you rank more highly, one that has its domain name reserved for the next five months or for the next five years?

Which scenario says “We’re here to stay” and which says “We’re really not serious about this web thing”.

If you had to recommend a business to a customer, would you choose one whose business license was expiring next month or one who had already printed up next year’s Christmas cards?

Search engines don’t stay in business by linking to temporary or low quality web sites, they stay in the business by providing relevant and quality results for their customer’s web searches.

If you act like you’re not serious about offering a quality web site for them to recommend to their customers, they’re not going to treat you seriously and rankings for your web pages will suffer as a result.

The biggest question in the blogging world is “What do I write about?”

If you’re a business trying to generate leads or sales online, your offline customers are your best source of content.

Think about what questions you get asked on a daily basis by potential customers - even things like “Where are you located?”. If someone has taken the time to call your business to ask a question, you can bet there are a few more like them typing the same question into Google or Yahoo! search.

The questions might take on a different form online like “dallas dry cleaner” instead of “how do I get to your store?” but the intent is the same. If you do a series of blog posts that answer frequently asked questions like these, you’ll naturally be creating unique and useful content that your potential customers are likely to search for.

In addition to questions asked by prospects, answer questions asked by current customers at all phases of your sales cycle. We’re increasingly turning to the internet to do extensive research on products or services before we even contact a potential vendor and you want your blog posts to match the industry phrases and common queries those doing research might use.

Content really can be this easy - just pick a question, use it as the title of a post, and answer it in your blog.

Akami recently released a study that found “Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.”

Although you may not be running a retail site, understanding what your users expect and how they’re likely to evaluate your web site when they visit is critical to keeping them around long enough to see your marketing message.

Think about how you evaluate web pages and how long you’ll search a page looking for the information promised by the search result that brought you there. Chances are you put pages on a pretty short leash. After all, there are tens of thousands of other pages in that search results page just a back button click away.

If the site you’re looking at doesn’t deliver quickly, you simply don’t have enough time to give it a second chance - you just head back to the search results and try the next site in line.

What if you could put your most important content in a spot where most people look first when visiting your web page? That way you could get your message across quickly and hopefully grab the visitor’s interest long enough to keep them on your site to explore the rest of your content.

At www.useit.com, Jakob Nielsen conducted an eye-tracking study and generated several ‘heat maps’ that show the dominant reading patterns of visitors on three different types of websites.

I’ll leave the in-depth study of the results to their website, but one interesting similarity between all three heat maps generated from the study is that a visitor will almost invariably look at the portion of your page to the right of the left navigation column and below the header.

Wouldn’t it make sense to put your most arresting content or message in that spot?

Another interesting tendency is for users to look for visual cues while scanning the page. Looking at the heat maps, you can see that visitor’s eyes fixated on the top left of the content area, on the content at the top right of the page, then jumped to the tops of paragraphs and lists as they scanned down the page.

When writing for the web, it’s important to keep this tendency to scan in mind. Break up your content into several paragraphs and highlight important content by placing it in a list or segregating it from the normal flow of your page. It may be more natural to write a few longer paragraphs instead of many short ones, but you’ll get more of your content absorbed by breaking it up and making it more easily digestible.

Also remember that the typical visitor is only able to read text on a computer screen at around 80% of their normal reading rate for printed text. Considering the extra effort needed to read your content, making it as easily scanned as possible will go a long way toward keeping those visitors around once they find your site.

(Continued from Part 1)

As connection speeds increased and bandwidth and storage became more affordable, search engines were able to visit more pages on a site and record more information about each page. In addition, search engines began to move away from considering only on-page text and put more weight on off-page factors like inbound links that are not as easily manipulated by page owners.

The important thing to remember about search engines today is their continuing reliance on off-page factors to determine what a page is about. In the past, indexing the content of the page itself was enough to provide accurate data but today there are simply too many ways for site owners to manipulate the text on their pages to artificially boost their rankings.

This continues to be one of the biggest misconceptions our clients have about search engines - that simply changing ‘META’ tags like description and keywords will make much difference to a search engine. In 1997 that may have been enough, but search algorithms are much more advanced today. In fact, many of my colleagues believe that including the keywords tag on a page can actually harm a page’s rankings (more on this in other posts).

So, what you should remember about indexing is that it’s how a search engine collects and stores information about web sites. Also remember that influencing a search engine by changing on-page factors like META tags, keyword density, or any other easy to manipulate metric is much more difficult than it was in the past and certainly not a strategy to base your search engine marketing upon…