By now everyone with electricity has seen images and video of the devestation that befell New Orleans and the surrounding areas yesterday. 80% of the city has been destroyed. Over 100 people have been killed, tens of thousands injured and hundreds of thousands left homeless. The magnitude of the disaster is impossible to express in simple words. When words fail, all we have are deeds. Now is the time to help in any way we can.
According to Canadian Red Cross Disaster Relief coordinator Sherri McCloud, the first and most important way to help is to provide the basic necessities of life. As authorities in the region are still assessing damages and response, the Red Cross is currently only accepting donations by cash or cheques
Supplies of blankets, tents, sleeping bags, non-perishable food, and clothing are likely to be collected by local fire stations for distribution in the coming weeks. Check your local newspapers or call the Red Cross for further instruction.
In both countries, the Red Cross is collecting disaster relief funds though as many remember from last year's Tsunami relief, it is important to specifically ear-mark these donations by writing in the memo section of the cheque "Hurricane Katrina Relief". The Canadian Red Cross also maintains a list of skilled Red Cross volunteers ranging from medical personnel to counsellors which will be activated when needs are fully identified.
While not yet organized, teams of workers will be needed in the coming weeks. If you have vacation time coming and want to lend a hand to neighbours in distress, let them know your availability by calling your local Red Cross office. Again, the same can be said for the American Red Cross branches.
In the coming days, building supplies and skilled workers will be needed to help clean up the city and rebuild housing and civic infrastructure. Materials are needed to rebuild sewers, water treatment, and other critical services. As with all major disasters, they will need blood as well. If you haven't donated blood recently, this is a good day to do so. If not today, tomorrow or Friday. Don't waste time thinking about it, just do it.
To say, "give till it hurts" would be trite. Watching the news last night and reading this morning's papers already hurts too much. Just Give.
One week left. That's it. One week from the time this piece is being written the school doors open and the dog-days come to a close. Summer is over in seven days for tens of millions of students across North America . Going back to school is both exciting and anti-climactic, at least if I remember correctly. It has been quite a few years since I sat on the students' side of the lecture podium. Today, my only experience with schooling is as an infrequent guest lecturer at the University of Victoria or at one of the local technical colleges. My career as a student ended long before the advent of the commercial Internet.
Back in the olden days, we had to pour through books, periodicals, encyclopaedias and government records to research essays, papers and large projects. We had to learn to use the library. In order to find information quickly and easily, we had to learn the Dewey Decimal System, a seemingly clunky but efficient numeric ordering system. Apparently, something has shifted over the past fifteen years and my impression of a student's life is completely out of touch.
I am currently on vacation in southern Ontario visiting friends and family. Joining me is my brother and his two sons from Calgary . While my brother went to catch up with his old friends, I took Justin and Tyler to the nearest cybercafe to see how they related to and used search engines. My research method was anything but scientific. I drew up a short list of topics an eight year old and a fourteen year old might need to research for school essays and asked them to find a sufficient amount of information to write an essay using whatever search engines they thought would provide them with references.
According to my public-school aged nephews, Justin and Tyler, libraries are entirely organized alphabetically and the proper way to find information is to look it up on Google. Mention of the wonders of the Dewey Decimal System brought blank stares until Tyler tried to brazen his way through by explaining that the Calgary School Board used the numbers on the spine of the book to see who has them. To be honest, I am not sure how that works out but I have an obligation to report it as I hear it and that's what he said.
I learned a few things in the process, some of which might be good for the major search engines to hear about.
First of all, though my brother does not keep a computer at home and the two boys attend different schools, both claim that Google is the only search engine worth using. Tyler , aged 8, relies on Google exclusively because, "It gives me the most information back". Justin, aged 14, likes Google because it is simple to use and has a sparse, uncluttered front page. As far as my brother's kids are concerned, there is no other search tool worth using. They say their friends feel the same way.
I tried to prompt them on other search engines. The only one they knew about was Yahoo and according to Tyler (who really is quite bright), "Yahoo doesn't give me much information but Google gives me pages and pages." Hearing this, I tried to prompt him further by telling him that Yahoo claimed to have several billion more documents and objects in its database than Google did. Stone faced silence. "Uncle Jeaeem", Tyler said, "everyone knows Google is the best."
I wonder where the line is drawn between the mouths of babes and the horse's mouth. In a competitive environment reliant on user loyalty, Google's hold on the hearts of today's school kids suggests a massive portal into their minds both today and in the future.
Neither nephew was particularly interested in paid-advertising and both expressed surprise when I pointed out the text-ads above and to the right hand side of search results. Apparently, neither had actually noticed the paid ads before having them pointed out by old Uncle Jim.
When he did see them, Justin identified them as "useless", at least to him. "I don't click on them because they often lead to forms, endless surveys and stuff you have to fill out, stuff I just don't need. They are just junk, a waste of time". Even after I informed him that Google makes the bulk of its vast revenues from the click-fees associated with paid-advertising, he seemed relatively uninterested in anything other than the word 'billions'. When I told him how much Google's revenues were last quarter he said something I don't think he would want his father to read in print. Justin is a born-again punk rocker and as such has developed a somewhat cynical outer shell. I didn't bother to get into the difference between revenues and profits as I was laughing too hard.
As the boys embarked on their impromptu research projects, I watched how they interacted with the search engine and with the Internet Explorer web-browser used by that cybercafe. The older of the two, Justin used more sophisticated search strings, entering two or more words for his queries on every search. Tyler on the other hand, almost always used only one word. Naturally, Justin found the information he was looking for faster, often on the first page of results. Looking over at the machine Tyler was working on, I noticed how he compensated for a lack of clarity by drilling down in search results until he found what he was looking for, sometimes on the third, fourth or even fifth pages of results. He didn't seem to mind. It was as if the search itself was an adventure though I am not sure if that had something to do with me hanging over his shoulder asking a bunch of questions and taking an obvious interest in his experience.
One research habit the two brothers shared was the way each would keep the browser windows open to pages, sites or documents that contained information relevant to their search challenges. They would just open a new browser window when they wanted to conduct another search. Forgetting they didn't have a computer at home, I asked why they just didn't bookmark the pages to reference later.
"There are a lot of other kids using the computers in the library", said Justin, "the bookmarks are too full to find anything." Tyler agreed adding that most of the bookmarks on computers in his schools were for game sites.
That's about the time my cell phone rang. It was a local radio station from back home in Victoria BC wanting to do an interview with me. I stepped outside, leaving Justin in charge. The interview lasted about fifteen minutes and when I came back in, Justin was surfing a Marilyn Manson site which could have passed as a fan site from the movie A Clockwork Orange. Two feet to the left of him, Tyler had found a page full of dirty and/or corny jokes and was cracking up reading them out loud to the chagrin of some of the other patrons. It was obviously time to leave.
In a few years, Justin will hopefully be entering college or university. Tyler is sure to follow. When they get there, they will face the prospect of paying absurd fees for text-books, many of which are priced above $100. Those familiar with college level text books know that they rarely differ from year to year in substance but do have unique material added in order to force the purchase and bolster the bottom line for paper publishers. If you were a student in today's educational environment, where would you look for this information? Increasingly, students are turning to the Internet and their primary gateway to the 'net appears to be Google.
My nephews are both pretty smart young Internet users. I was surprised at some of the stuff they had to say and some of the ways they use search engines but I know enough to listen closely. Yahoo, MSN and yes, Google too should listen up as well.
Two weeks ago, I used this space to write about the importance of usability in website design. The article was supposed to act as a lead-in to a short series of articles on the basics of search engine optimization and as a gentle suggestion for webmasters concerned with converting visitors into buyers. As it turned out, the article was long on style but short on substance, a fact that was quickly pointed out by Kim Krause Berg in a blog entry entitled, " Don't Tell Me I Need Usability Without Explaining How ". Kim Krause Berg, for those unfamiliar with her, is one of the leading usability experts in the United States .
To quote Kim's post, "This article, by StepForth Placement's Jim Hedger, is getting a lot of exposure - Website Usability Leads to Conversions , though its another one of those articles that says, essentially, "You have to make your web site more usable but I'm not going to give you the exact details on how to do this."
Kim was right, the article unintentionally short-changed readers interested in usability issues. Last week, Kim kindly agreed to an email interview, the full text of which can be found here . It provides a detailed look at Kim's views on usability. At the end of this article and sprinkled throughout the full interview, there are links to a number of sites where those interested can find a wealth of information about the multiple aspects of website usability. Ironically, by the end of the interview, (which stretched eight pages long), I was left with the firm conviction that it takes tens of thousands of words to literally scratch the surface of website usability. That's why we have specialists and experts.
Kim is a usability expert. A keen observer of websites and design, she cut her teeth in search engine optimization while working as a site designer in Pennsylvania for Unisys and Verticalnet before the dot-com crash of 2000. Kim became frustrated with an inability to help her clients beyond making their sites visible on the search engines. When Verticalnet shifted her to the Quality Assurance Testing department, Kim's new supervisor mentored her in usability issues. The dot-com crash forced a quick career change and Kim found herself sub-contracting for a Verticalnet client that performed QA surveys. Five years later, Kim is the usability expert referred to by many in the SEO field including Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Kalena Jordan, Rand Fishkin and Barry Schwartz.
Kim likens usability to an act of kindness, one that pays huge rewards in customer satisfaction by creating a positive user experience for everyone. " Those of us who work on the Web, whether it be in design, programming, SEO, copywriting, search engines, whatever - we have this amazing opportunity to do really humane things for and with one another. By building web sites that everyone can use, we're generating an act of kindness and consideration", she says in the email interview.
Usability is often confused accessibility (making a site fully accessible to people with physical disabilities) however Kim sees accessibility as a critical element in site usability. " The more I learn on this topic, the more I understand how many people aren't being serviced properly on the Internet." she writes. "At Cre8asiteforums, we've been lucky enough to have several people kindly teach us and provide resources. One example is provided by " Webnauts " in this amazing post . Adrian, one of our Site Administrators is passionate about the topic as well as CSS, as is our forums blog editor, Elizabeth (aka "ablereach")."
Kim added a note of caution to SEOs who use techniques based on site attributes like alt-tags originally designed to assist screen-readers for the visually impaired. "There are some search engine optimization techniques used to enhance content that wreak havoc on end users who require screen readers. Matt Bailey , of The Karcher Group, illustrated this at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York this year by letting everyone listen to an optimized page using JAWS. The mechanical voice kept repeating keywords over and over again. It was enough to chase off even the most patient of visitors."
Like the SEO sector, there is no agreed upon definitions in the usability profession. In her definition, Kim takes the goals and needs of both end users and site designers into account. "For the end user, usability is the ability to successfully, comfortably and confidently learn or complete a task. For the web site designer or application developer, it's the mechanics of designing and building a web site or Internet-based application so that it can be understood and easy to accomplish any task."
Usability is a factor that should be worked into the design of websites from the onset with conversions and customer/visitor satisfaction being the primary benefit. “Web sites are co-dependent on the visitors who search for them and then stop by,"Kim says, however, “Web sites can't do anything you didn't design them to do."
The initial design phase and the planning that goes into how and what a site will do is key to creating a site that meets professional usability standards. "The primary hallmark of a usable web site is that it meets its primary goal and every element, link, page, image, ad, and form can be traced back to and meets the requirements of that original goal."
That's often the place where the differing goals of various corporate departments crash, clash and coalesce into what ultimately becomes a poorly designed site.
"You'd be amazed at the number of sites or web applications that have a completely different primary goal," Kim wrote, "Some of these include "Make our investors happy." This will dictate everything from content placement to the order of navigation links. Other common lead objectives are 'Get as much personal information as possible up front and then sell them something', 'Meet the CEO's drop-dead deadline, even with 35 mission-critical defects', and 'The marketing department stakeholders insist that their stuff go above the page fold on every page'. These are things end users notice. When you play them for invisible, dead or stupid, you'll pay the price, eventually."
In her perfect world, Kim would see usability specialists involved in all design team meetings. Usability specialists have, "...valuable input from the get-go on information architecture and the needs and habits of target markets. They may have case study findings dancing in their heads, ready to bolster a designer's suggestion or adjust a programmer's method of coding a form."
Not only can a person well versed in usability issues help in the design process, they can also aid overall site development by communicating with various and often competing departments in an organization. "They can aid in documentation of requirements and help gather valuable information for stakeholders, as well as developers."
Kim also notes that usability specialists have skills generally missing from most smaller website development teams. "User testing with real people during the wire frame and/or staging process adds enormous value. It's not done in situations where cost is an issue, or time. It takes longer to build and test as you go. But, the advantages to a process that includes usability along the way, is less defects at the end and increased customer satisfaction on roll out."
Usability is critically important to online success. In a virtual world, your business website is your commercial representation, a storefront of sorts open for universal access. Being assured all aspects of it work properly and meet your corporate, business or social goals in a friendly and helpful manner, before spending thousands of dollars marketing it is simple common sense. From the early planning stages to ongoing tests of site functionality to informing and communicating with various departments involved in site creation, website usability specialists set truly professional sites apart from their competitors.
It all comes down to the end-user experience, the ultimate test of the success of an online venture. "The majority of my clients are interested in two things - search engines and what happens after somebody finds their web page." Kim says.
For more information on the vast topic of website usability, please reference one or more of the following documents, sites or forum threads:
It is hard to believe the all too short northern summer is almost over. In less than two weeks, kids will be going back to school and commercial webmasters will be gearing up for the autumn and winter sales seasons. This is as good a time as any, perhaps better than most, to cover SEO 101, the basic techniques that form the foundation to an advanced SEO or SEM campaign.
For the purposes of brevity this piece starts with a few assumptions. The first assumption is a single, small business site is being worked on. The second assumption is that the site in question is written using a fairly standard mark-up language such as HTML or PHP. The last assumption is that some form of keyword research and determination has already taken place and the webmaster is confident in the selection of keyword targets.
Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really not that difficult. Basic SEO doesn't require specialized knowledge of algorithms, programming and taxonomy but it does require a basic understanding of how search engines work. There are two aspects of search engines to consider before jumping in. The first is how spiders work. The second is how search engines figure out what documents relate to which keywords and phrases.
In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about a unique website by sending an electronic spider to visit the site and copy its content which is stored in the search engine's database. Generally known as 'bots', these spiders are designed to follow links from one document to the next. As they copy and assimilate content from one document, they record links and send other bots to make copies of content on those linked documents. This process continues ad infinitum. By sending out spiders and collecting information 24/7, the major search engines have established databases that measure their size in the tens of billions. Every day, both Yahoo and Google claim to spider as much data as is contained in the US Library of Congress (approx. 150million items).
Knowing the spiders and how they read information on a site is the technical end of basic SEO. Spiders are designed to read site content like you and I read a newspaper. Starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line from left to right. If columns are used (as they are in most sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to its conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another bot to copy and record data found on the document the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it can possible find there.
As spiders follow links and record everything in their paths, one can safely assume that if a link to a site exists, a spider will find that site. Webmasters and SEOs no longer need to manually or electronically submit their sites to the major search engines. The search spiders are perfectly capable of finding them on their own, provided a link to that site exists somewhere on the web. Google and Yahoo both have an uncanny ability to judge the topic or theme of documents they are examining, and use that ability to judge the topical relationship of documents that are linked together. The most valuable incoming links (and the only ones worth perusing), come from sites that share topical themes.
Once a search spider finds your site, helping it get around is the first priority. One of the most important basic SEO tips is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from "point A" to "point Z" in your website. This is best accomplished by providing easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages in the site at the bottom of each document. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, which lists and provides a text link every document in the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site as its purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors though designers should keep site visitors in mind when creating the sitemap. Here is an example of the basic sitemap used on the StepForth site. Google also accepts more advanced, XML based sitemaps, providing a wealth of information on their Sitemap FAQ page.
Allowing spiders free access to the entire website is not always desirable. Good SEOs should also know how to tell spiders that some site content is off limits and should not be added to their database using robots.txt files. Last week, Mike Banks Valentine of Website101 wrote a good overview on how to write and use robots.txt files in his article, "Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!"
Offering spiders access to the areas of the site one wants them to access is half the battle. The other half is found in the site content. Search engines are supposed to provide their users with lists of documents that relate to user entered keyword phrases or queries. Search engines need to determine which of billions of documents is relevant to a small number of specific words. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know your site relates to those words.
There are four basic areas, or elements, a search engine looks at when examining a document. After the URL of a site, the first information a search spider records is the title of the site. Next, it examines the Description Meta tag. Both of these elements are found in the HEAD section of the source code.
Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as the foundation. StepForth's primary keyword target is Search Engine Placement. A glance at our index page shows that phrase is used as the first three words in our site title. Some titles are written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A key to writing a good title is to remember that human readers will see the title as the reference link on the search engine results page. Don't overload your title with keyword phrases. Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the topic of the document content.
The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Search engines tend to use it to gather information on the topic or theme of the document. A well written Description is phrased in two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword phrases woven early into each sentence. As with the title tag, some search engines will display the Description on the search results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide the text that appears under the reference link. Some search engines place minor weight in the Keywords Meta tag however, it is not advisable to spend a lot of time worrying about the keywords tag.
After reading information found in the HEAD section of the source code, spiders continue on to examine site content. It is wise to remember that spiders read the same way we do, left to right and following columns.
Good content is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. The easiest and most basic rule of the trade is that search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read. While some search engines can strip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beats basic body text when it comes to providing information to the spiders. Very good SEOs can almost always find a way to work basic body text into a site without compromising the designer's intended look, feel and functionality.
The content itself should be thematically focused. In other words, keep it simple. Some documents cover multiple topics on each page, which is confusing for spiders and SEOs alike. The basic SEO rule here is if you need to express more than one topic on a page, you need more pages. Fortunately, creating new pages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic SEO techniques, making a site simpler for both live-users and electronic spiders. An important caveat is to avoid duplicate content and the temptation to construct doorway pages specifically designed for search placements.
When writing document content, try to use the strongest keyword targets early in the copy. For example, a site selling the ubiquitous Blue Widget might use the following as a lead-sentence; "Blue Widgets by Widget and Co. are the strongest construction widgets available and are the trusted widget of leading builders and contractors."
The primary target is obviously construction applications for the blue widget. By placing the keyword phrases "blue widgets", "construction widgets" and "trusted widget" along side other keywords such as the singular words, "strongest", "trusted" and "builders" and "contractors", the sentence is crafted to help the search engine see a relationship between these words. Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weaved into them. One thing to keep in mind when writing basic SEO copy is that unnecessary repetition of keywords is often considered spam by search engines. Another thing to remember is that ultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyes as well as search spiders. Each page or document in the site should have its own unique content.
The last on-site element a spider examines when reading the site (and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchor text used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases in the anchor text is a basic SEO technique aimed at solidifying the search engine's perception of the relationship between documents and the words used to phrase the link. A good example is found on towards the bottom of pages in the StepForth site. Note the use of the words "placement services", "seo results", "SEO Faq" and the topic of the internal pages these links point to.
In a nutshell, that's pretty much it to the basics of clean, search engine friendly SEO. The foundation of nearly every successful SEO campaign is simplicity. The goal is to make a site easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for search spiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content and a fair number of relevant incoming links. While basic SEO can be time consuming in the early stages, the results are almost always worth it and set the stage for more advanced future work.
To phrase it in as juvenile a way as I possibly can, I think search engine spam sucks. I think the use of, and subsequent macho bragging about, spammy SEO techniques is detrimental to the SEO/SEM industry as a whole. I have a number of reasons for staking this position, none of which I intend to outline below. I have an even greater concern surrounding spam, search engines, and the nature of the SEO/SEM sector I wish to write about today.
Like thousands of other SEO practitioners, I have been quietly monitoring a raging debate that has crossed several SEO/SEM related forums over the past week. While this debate rears its head from time to time, it remains unsettled and as it continues to unfold becomes more and more unsettling. Given that they differ in tone from forum to forum, there are actually several debates taking place but all seem to have one thing in common, a lack of civility towards other views and a decreasing level of common sense.
As stated a few sentences ago, I have a number of problems with SEO spam. Instead of launching into a tirade against spam and the scammers who slam engines with it, I think I'll set another course. You see I am not sure if I am the best judge of what is and what is not spam. I have an extensive background in SEO but as a critic of another artist's work, I only know what I like and what I don't like.
My biggest problem with SEO spam is that while I may have opinions on what is and what is not spam, those opinions are purely subjective as there are no industry-wide definitions or guidelines. While several points of agreement exist and the major search engines provide written guidelines to reference, there actually isn't a well-defined outline of what constitutes search engine spam. Along with many others I've spoken or communicated with, I think there should to be.
One might think that someone would have written something definitive by now. The SEO/SEM industry is almost as old as the commercial Internet itself. After watching a number of "professionals" I otherwise tend to respect gnaw the intellectual marrow from each other's bones this week, I remember why most SEOs just want to avoid the subject altogether.
Back to where we started The Internet is an evolving medium. Those of us who work certain segments of that evolving medium tend to form into communities by using the medium to communicate with each other. In the strangest ways, some of us even see the effects of our ideas spread widely across the multiple communities that are ultimately made up of core web-workers. Along with general and advanced tips and information, we share interest in each other's development. People get to know people and thus socio-professional networks are formed. These networks are important. In the SEO/SEM industry, the five or six major forums represent the nearest approximation to self-regulatory entities in the sector. Without any actual power of sanction, these forums often exert the blunt force of intense peer-pressure.
Most of the time, the system worked pretty well. The forums provided a space to educate each other and new comers to the industry. They offered a place for folks working a world away from each other to virtually meet. In many ways, the openness of the forums led to the demystification of SEO and is partially responsible for the subsequent inclusion of SEO in business marketing plans.
The forums also played a major part in controlling the spread of spammy techniques. Reps from the major search engines lurk in the various forums to learn more about what SEOs are up to. The vast majority of responsible SEOs would choose not to discuss spamming or even do it on behalf of their clients as they wouldn't want to risk others talking about it. In two widely reported cases last year, Google assigned penalties against firms from Nevada and California based in part on forum discussions.
In previous years, Google was basically the search monoculture. Now that Yahoo, MSN and Ask have found their way into search-user's consciousness, SEO technique has become a lot more complicated than it was just a few years ago. With the emergence of the multi-spider search sphere, along with the traditional weight Google (and now Yahoo) places on links and the growth of the affiliate marketing industry, much of the new wave of black-hat technique is driven by the evolution of the search environment.
As the search engine environment has changed so radically over the last year, a strange but assumably natural evolution is taking place in the forums. These days, the forums are lining up like the horseshoe shaped congress that constituted the first republic of France. There is a forum to the right that takes an increasingly hard stand on search engine guidelines, a few right-of-center white hat forums, the largest and most widely known one in the middle, and a few on the left ranging from the established radicals to the new radicals. This new arrangement seems to mirror current political trends in the polarization between various forums and the acidic relationships they share in the industry. Basically, the forums have become ugly and highly political and are no longer inviting crossover discussion as they did in previous years. In effect, the SEO/SEM community seems to be losing itself in ideology.
This, my friends and colleagues is dangerous territory for us to collectively tread. What may seem like a fun flame fest in the moment is producing negative repercussions that will linger long after this round of slap down is over.
Future Tense? So, where do we go from here? The past week has seen friendships strained and in some cases broken. A wide chasm has opened between some members of different forums and I fear that gap will further hinder the evolution of our sector. As I have written at least twenty times this year, the Internet and the search engines are changing and becoming far more corporate and mainstream. The force of that evolution is going to force major change in the SEO/SEM sector in the coming months and years. It will also force changes in the ways potential clients think about search marketing vendors. I strongly believe one or more representative bodies will form to create and re-enforce advertising standards in our sector. It is very important to all of us that those bodies come from within the sector itself and that they are representative of all opinions on search marketing, including those of the new radicals.
Where the sector goes from there is anyone's guess but from where I am sitting, the obvious model for a representative congress of SEOs is found in western democratic history and is manifesting itself in the search engine marketing forums themselves.
Perhaps groups like SEMPO and the various SMA initiatives, along with moderators of each of the various forums represent the collective leadership of the industry. If that is so, that leadership needs to learn to work together to pull the various ends of the horseshoe into the powerful marketing industry we should all feel proud and privileged to work in.
I am taking a two-week vacation starting next Friday. That is a good thing too because the past four days have almost turned me off this amazing industry. A break from the silliness of the search engines and the pettiness of practitioner politics will do me a world of good. I'm also sure that the absense of my frantic presence for few weeks will provide a much needed break for the rest of the StepForth crew as well. ;)
For me, a vacation means going away from my apartment in the tiny ocean side city of Victoria and flying (I hate flying) 3500km back to Toronto, the biggest city in the country (6th largest on the continent, 32nd largest the planet and second favourite in my heart) to finally be there without having to work. The last few times I visited TO I was involved with the Search Engine Strategies show and anyone who has attended an SES event knows how totally draining they can be both physically and mentally.
This time, I plan to spend a lot of time lounging in my parent's backyard and visiting friends and extended family all over the massive city.A lifetime of things to do and catch up with and I only have ten days or so to spend there.
While I am there, I would be interested in meeting anyone who wants to talk SEO, SEM, search engines in general or online marketing. I am always looking for new ideas and fresh stories, and let's face it, as much as I love my parents, we often don't speak the same language.
I'll still be writing the feature for our weekly newsletter while away but almost certainly won't be writing more than that. Until then, I am building up a fine head of steam over the spam/ethics debate playing out across a number of search engine marketing forums. I expect I'll type a two-thousand word opinion on that later today. Next week I hope to expand on usability and SEO by interviewing Kim Krause Berg, one of the USA's top usability proponents. I also want to take another look at click-fraud in light of yet another click-fraud lawsuit that looks as if it will be going to court soon. Lastly, in my heart of hearts, I want to write an article on basic non-spammy SEO techniques that really do work wonders without the bother of trying to play tricks on the search engines.
I am leaving Victoria on the 26th and returning on the 6th but am already booked for the 2nd and 3rd for family stuff. Anyone interested in meeting up in Toronto can call myself or Bill Stroll at 1-877-385-5526.
Last week saw the resumption of the search engine size wars in which one major search engine claims to be larger than its rivals, prompting those rivals to rapidly upsize themselves. Yahoo fired the first round at Google, claiming to have over 20billion objects accessible in their database. Google, which can only claim about 13billion objects fired back with questions about measurements, basically stating Yahoo was mistaken or misleading in its claims. Others got in on the act and the blog-o-sphere was full of stories about Yahoo's obsession with size. By the beginning of this week, the search marketing community was fed up with being fed tripe about the importance of size, as reflected August 16 th in Danny Sullivan's post to Search Engine Watch, " Screw Size! I dare Google and Yahoo to Report on Relevancy "
The frustration with the major search engines felt by serious search marketers is real. Our clients don't care about size and neither does their money. They care about being found when searchers are seeking information about products or services they sell. They care about potential clients and their ability to present information to them. They care about being relevant.
Search engine users don't really care about size either. Given the mind-boggling amount of data available via even the smallest of the major search engines, most users have no idea of the depth of search results, as they tend to look only at the Top10 or 20 listings. Even if Yahoo returns thousands more references than Google for any given keyword query, both know that only the first 20 links tend see any measurable traffic. Again, it isn't about being the biggest; it is about being the best. Being biggest does not necessarily mean being best.
There is no real scientific method of proving which search engine is the biggest, and no real way to gauge which one is best. That's not to say folks aren't trying though. The thing to remember is, “best” means something slightly different to every search engine user.
Over the past four months, well known search-blogger RustyBrick has been tracking search engine relevance through RustySearch an ongoing blind user-test of results drawn from a random Big4 search engine that is reminiscent of the Pepsi-Challenge. The RustyBrick site has posted live-time results and an explanation of the methodology. As it turns out, the Big4 search engines all return relevant results most of the time with Yahoo enjoying a slight lead over Google in overall relevancy. The biggest problem with this study is that users who tend to be very well versed in search engines and search marketing provide the bulk of the data. In other words, the study group is not likely to be highly representative of the far greater majority of general search users. Nevertheless, it does provide the only ongoing view of how its unique study group rates search engine result pages generated by the Big4.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois took up a study of results generated by Google and Yahoo in reaction to Tim Mayer's August 8 th post at the Yahoo Search Blog that started this round of the size war. Basing their findings on the average number of results returned from 10,012 random queries, the results clearly show Google tending to return (on average), three times the number of references Yahoo does. The study-document states quite early that there is no real way to test the actual size of the index so its methodology is borrowed from a method pioneered by search legends Krishna Bharat and Andrei Broder that samples the size of search results based on words derived from previous search queries. The NCSA study shows Google gives a greater number of results than Yahoo though it in no way intended to suggest those results are better or more relevant.
In some ways, the results of the two studies seem to cancel each other out with Yahoo nosing ahead of Google in the first and Google squashing Yahoo in the second. Unfortunately, neither study offers a conclusive analysis of which search engine is the best. RustySearch provides data on which search results are considered most relevant, showing Yahoo and Google receiving similar relevancy ratings even though the NCSA study demonstrates Google returns far more results than Yahoo does.
Perhaps the two studies combined show that Yahoo has better filters than Google does though that still does not show conclusively which is the better of the two. As their results appear to be relatively equally relevant, perhaps a measure of which is the best comes in overall usefulness to searchers and, ultimately to advertisers.
The real interesting competition between all the major search engines is being waged on the battlefield of usefulness and user loyalty. This is the user-focused space in which one or more of the Big4 will eventually rise to dominate the various sectors of search. The question is, what is useful to search engine users?
Over the past few years each of the major search engines has introduced a number of new tools that on their own might not seem to have a lot to do with organic search results but collectively have a lot to do with the business of search.
For example, Google, Yahoo and MSN each offer sizable free email accounts to their users, some of whom like myself maintain addresses at all three. Google and Microsoft are sparring over satellite mapping technologies, expanding on the usefulness of maps in relation to local search users. Earlier this week, Google introduced Froogle Local, a revolutionary simple application for mobile device users.
Yahoo has also made improvements to their local search system, this time by allowing registered users to write Wiki-like reviews for local establishments and services. These reviews will be available to other registered users and distributed to members of the reviewer's social network. Earlier today John Battelle wrote an excellent review of improvements to Yahoo Local and their usefulness to Yahoo searchers.
Business 2.0's Om Malik says Google appears to be ready to introduce a national WiFi network while Yahoo's VOIP based upgrades to its Instant Messaging client. Its purchase of internet phone company Dialpad has analysts speculating Yahoo is about to enter the VOIP cyber-phone market, a rumour Yahoo is vigorously denying . Regardless of their denial, the VOIP based improvements to the IM are indicative of much larger plans around digital voice transmission.
The point to all the information above is simple. Google and Yahoo are both working feverishly to provide their loyal users tools that are useful to them. There are dozens of other examples of user-friendly tools created to capture user-loyalty such as blog support, desktop search applications, toolbars of varying shapes and sizes and personalized syndication feeds. These types of applications and labour saving tools are what the search tools are betting on to retain current users and win new ones.
As demonstrated by the most recent Nielsen Net Ratings , the strategy seems to be working with Google, Yahoo, and MSN (which offer the greatest number of user-focused tools) leading the pack by a wide margin. Guess which of the three offers the most useful tools to the greatest number of searchers? Now, guess which of the three can offer the biggest distributed bang for an advertiser's buck. That's what our clients care about.
This was a truly interesting week. On top of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, the past five days provided search marketers a front-row view of international economic development, the growth of a media empire, the internal disruptive influence of corporate culture shifts, and a colligate game of "mine is bigger than yours." While a happy family obligation kept me away from San Jose, the week had several profoundly powerful sleeper stories that show how serious, ironic and silly the world of search is.
China is the largest emerging market on the planet and it is coming of age more rapidly than anyone could have predicted. While the Chinese paid-ad sector was worth only $148 million in 2004 according to Shanghai based iResearch Inc., international business advertising targeting the Chinese market is expected to grow exponentially while the online economy of China matures over the coming years.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all heavily invested in the growing Chinese tech world. Google and Yahoo both made major moves this month in relation to their interests in China, the most public being Google's hiring of former Microsoft executive, Dr. Kei Fu Lee. Google and Microsoft are now engaged in a bitter legal dispute over Google's hiring policies. The decision in this case could have far reaching implications on how major tech firms recruit employees as well as on Dr. Lee's role in heading Google's efforts in China.
Google also announced it was retaining the services of three large Chinese firms to represent its AdWords advertising for the Google China site. On Tuesday Google named China Enterprise, China Source and Hotsales as authorized Google AdWords resellers and they will provide training and support to the three firms. Google was moved to hire and train experts in their bid to remain competitive with newly public rivals Baidu.com, and Yahoo's newest partner, Alibaba.
Late last week, Yahoo acquired 40% of Chinese ecommerce and business vertical search tool Alibaba.com in a $1 billion stock purchase. This makes Yahoo the largest investor in Alibaba.com, a position it is expected to use to push the Yahoo brand in the world's largest emerging market. The deal gives Alibaba control Yahoo's China business network while giving Yahoo effective control over Alibaba's overall activities.
Following on the smaller heels of fellow media giant Barry Diller, Robert Murdoch announced News Corp is getting involved in search and is going to purchase an established player in the coming months. News Corporation is an international empire that owns FoxTV, SkyTV, FoxNews, The New York Post, TV Guide, The Times Newspaper chain in the UK, and literally thousands of other media outlets, publications and production facilities. In a conference call with investors and analysts, Murdoch said News Corp is in advanced discussions to acquire controlling interest in an unnamed search engine. Speculation has turned to LookSmart and Mamma.Com as reasonable targets. Class A shares of News Corp rose quickly when news of Murdoch's plans were reported early yesterday, jumping from 16.42 to today's close of 18.11.
News Corp is both a creator and a distributor of media content, which makes their entry into the market more a challenge for Yahoo than for Google or MSN in the long run. Yahoo has been actively pursuing online entertainment distribution as a revenue channel along with paid search advertising.
That might be one of the few breaks Google got this week as the media skewered the search giant for its punitive one-year info-ban on CNET journalists. Google's PR department appeared to slip and fall in an apparent attempt to flee the scene after word of the CNET info-chill scandal made headlines early in the week.
The same day, an automatic Google Toolbar update switched the controversial AutoLink default setting from inactive to active. In other words, Google did something they said they weren't going to do and are now forcing limited but very real alterations on private websites without the permission of the owner, content creator or webmaster.
The inevitable culture shift seems to have occurred in and around the Googleplex in the twelve months since they posted their mega-successful IPO last August. While initial investors were fed the same "Don't Be Evil" line in regards to Google's corporate ethics policy the rest of the world was fed, a somewhat darker tone has emanated. Google has lost a lot of its luster over the past year, ironically while it has been getting much better at filtering spam from organic placement results. The word being bandied about is: Hubris (exaggerated pride or self-confidence often resulting in retribution. - source, wikipedia)
Things got a bit silly when Yahoo announced its spidered content index had grown to dwarf Google's spidered content index. Yahoo said its index now contained over 19 billion objects and documents and almost 2 billion images. Google's index is estimated to contain approximately 10 -12 billion documents and images. Their attention suddenly focused away from their own navels, Google scientists quickly glanced at their rival's and questioned Yahoo's claim of size-superiority before announcing they had doubled the size of Google's image index. The search marketing community gently reminded both that size is less important than relevancy, comparing the obsession with size to a couple testosterone driven boys who end up looking juvenile trying to outdo each other to impress an endless gaggle of girls.
What's funniest about the incident is that both Yahoo and Google have a lot of impressive stuff to brag about. Both have strong business models and post strong quarterly profits. Both moved this week to strengthen their core paid-ad businesses by giving advertisers and webmasters more control over various paid advertising opportunities. Yahoo opened the Yahoo Publisher Network to a growing group of beta testers, a move that prompted Google to offer more support to AdWords advertisers and more control over ad placement to AdSense partners. And as mentioned above, both have recently made aggressive moves into the growing Chinese market.
No review of the week could be complete without mention of the massive SES Conference in San Jose. Billed as the biggest search shindig of the year, SES San Jose is a playground of intellect, information and fun. Barry Schwartz, or RustyBrick of the Search Engine Roundtable posted coverage of several of the SES Sessions. Over at Search Engine Watch, this forum tracked the SES - Silicone Valley Parties.
Following the premise that history has a way of repeating itself, the level of activity in the sector this week may not be surprising. The past week was also the tenth anniversary of the Netscape IPO, widely considered the spark that set off the Tech-bubble of the late 90's. The events of this week are not those of a bubble but rather those of hyper inflated interest in a sector that shows no end to its potential growth.
Known as the web's Usability Czar, Jakob Nielsen is one of the Internet's most respected consultants, authors and commentators. Dr. Nielsen's fame stems from his uncanny ability to note basic things most observers miss or gloss over. Although many of his observations on website usability amount to basic common sense, his message is often ignored by small to medium sized business websites and by newer webmasters and search engine marketers.
The Doctor's message is fairly simple, "On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave." That is easy enough to understand. Keep it simple and visitors will use it. Make it difficult and visitors will find something easier to use. The popularity of the ultra-simple Google interface and subsequent gains made by Google at the expense of its info-heavy rivals over the past four years is a prime example. Dr. Nielsen work should be required reading for students of website design and search engine marketing. Similar concepts are taught to students of architecture, creative writing and engineering, fields that share a number of basic skill-sets with website design and marketing.
For search marketers, there are important tips to be learned by studying Dr. Nielsen's ideas. In the early years of the industry, search marketing was mostly about getting Top10 placements for clients under their chosen keyword phrases. As the sector grows in size and sophistication, search marketers are expected to help their clients convert the increased traffic driven by high search placements into increased conversions and sales. In other words, getting a client into the Top10 organic placements and effectively managing PPC positioning is only half the challenge. Helping a site make sales by advising on usability issues is the second side to every coin earned by experienced search marketers.
There is a school of thought in the SEO sector that suggests optimization should be performed for the site users' benefit as opposed to algorithmic focused tricks and techniques. Sites that are designed to be easy for human visitors to use are often the easiest for search engine spiders to navigate. Better navigation options combined with search friendly site architecture and content tend to produce strong search engine placements and increased visitor retention. According to the findings of the Nielsen Normal Group , usability issues have an enormous effect on website revenues. As clients ultimately measure the success of search marketing campaigns by their ROI, search marketers might benefit from a quick review of some of Dr. Nielsen's basic ideas and observations.
Usability, as defined by Dr. Nielsen is, " ...a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use." In a short August 2003 essay titled, "Usability 101: An Introduction to Usability", Dr. Nielsen lists five quality components used to inform site builders, webmasters and content creators through the lifetime of unique site-designs. Each of these components leads to an assessment of an overall user experience working from the basic assumption that good experiences are appreciated and rewarded by online consumers.
The first quality component noted is labeled, "Learnability ". When a new visitor enters a website, how easy is it for them to perform basic tasks like moving from point A to point B, gathering information, or using embedded tools such as maps, video-players or currency exchange calculators?
The second is labeled "Efficiency". Once a new visitor gets used to the site, how quickly can they use the site and its tools to perform tasks?
Third on Dr. Nielsen's list is "Memorability". On subsequent visits to a site, how quickly can users find their way around and use site tools and features?
The next component is labeled "Errors". Web designers should ask how many errors do site visitors make, how severe are those errors, and how easy is it to recover from those errors?
The fifth component is labeled "Satisfaction". How pleasant is the design and does the design please the user?
It is fairly easy to see how applying these simple tests of usability might affect website traffic, visitor retention and ultimately ROI.
In a widely published quote from his essay, Dr. Nielsen bluntly notes the importance of usability stating, "On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave . Note a pattern here? There's no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty."
Understanding these ideas is one thing. Employing them in site design is obviously more difficult. Designers and their consultants work in a bubble of online information and often neglect to consider user experience. For example, many sites are designed in the favourite colours of the designer. While a designer might like striking colours and psychedelic graphics, it doesn't necessarily mean folks visiting his or her site will. Similarly, site designers often know exactly where information and products can be found within the sites they build but the navigation options they often provide visitors serve to push traffic to competing sites.
As noted previously, many of the major search engines have taken Dr. Nielsen's theories to heart. Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest spend a lot of time conducting discrete user research and overt beta testing, using the findings of their surveys to adapt page and product design to users' wants and needs.
In a recent Alertbox newsletter Dr. Nielsen noted that due to their growing obsession with site usability, "Yahoo! now makes 0.3 cents per page (equivalent to a CPM of $3)." He goes on to note that over the past four years, Yahoo! has seen a 28% average increase in page views each year with an increase of 15% per year in earnings per page view. Dr. Nielsen explains, "These numbers show that it was about twice as important for Yahoo's growth to find out what users want as it was to increase the monetization ratio."
In other words, focusing on the user experience over the investor experience tends to make both groups happiest in the long run. For search marketers, there are three important types of user experiences to consider: the search engines, site visitors and the clients. Common sense search engine optimization meets the needs of both search engines and site visitors because spider-friendly navigation and content is often the easiest for human visitors to use.
At the Search Engine Strategies Conference happening this week in San Jose , Barry Schwartz writes an interesting report on the Converting Visitors Into Buyers session. Points made by the two speakers, Bryan Eisenberg and Mike Sack are well worth the read.
Savvy search marketers already know about push and call-to-action techniques that help direct traffic from index page to product page. Learning how live-users relate to navigation prompts and integrating that knowledge into SEO redesign or consultation can help search marketers boost their clients' conversions and ultimately, their own bottom lines.
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