This is my last official post in the role of News Editor at StepForth Placement. As of the middle of the month, I will be a free agent. As of the end of this post, I am on vacation-time. Its a strange feeling.
It has been an incredible adventure and a true privilege working here for the past six years. In that time, the website optimization and search engine marketing sector has grown from a tiny cottage industry to become one of the most significant sectors operating on the Internet.
When I started at StepForth, Google was a garage level start-up. Lycos, Alta Vista and Infoseek were the major search engines and Yahoo was considered a directory, not a portal. Top20 placements on forgotten engines such as Northern Lights, Magellan, and Excite were once as important to me as Top10 Google results are now. Six years ago, banner ads were the most creative form of online advertising and formed the bulk of the website marketing industry. Animated .gifs were still kind of cool. Back then, consumers were afraid to offer their personal information online. Today, they don't even think about it, allowing vast amounts of personal information to fall into the data-mines of a vast number of professional trackers.
I used to see technology as electronic applied mechanics. I now see technology as people. That might look weird in writing but I have had a number of privileged peaks behind innumerable curtains and have learned that the Wizard is, in reality, a number of creative and talented people. Website optimization used to be played like a game with the search engines providing both the playing fields and the scorecards. Today it is a full-time responsibility for many search marketers just keeping up with the various marketing channels presented by one search engine.
When I started my search marketing career, search engines were seen as the cutting edge. Today search engines are closer to the mainstream with social networking in the form of image, file and contact sharing moving to the forefront.
While a lot has changed over the years, as much remains the same. The spirit of entrepreneurialism online is wild, unfettered and infective. So is the spirit of helpfulness and cooperation. I continue to participate in a number of search engine marketing forums and discussion groups, most of which can provide expert level advice to newbies and experts alike. The only difference between peoples general attitudes towards the Internet today and peoples attitudes back then is that online businesses and operators tend to be a bit wiser and better informed than before.
The Internet continues to be the ultimate equalizer for small businesses competing against the advertising might of much larger corporations. Its use is changing, as more people become web and technology literate. The Net has become an ultimate equalizer for individual and collaborative content creators trying to get their materials noticed by a now global market.
Most small and many known bands, for instance, share their music through their MySpace accounts, getting notoriety as friends notify friends about something they liked. Similarly, services such as YouTube, Technocrati, and Flickr allow creators of video, text and image content to share their work with the most popular getting the most attention. The distribution opportunities offered by the Internet enforce a quality conscious meritocracy as opposed to the lowest-common-denominator corporate content that constituted the consumers' previous options. Perhaps the best synergy between independent content creators and the search marketing industry is going to be found on a couple of the old school search entities. Yahoo is developing the Yahoo Publishing Network allowing members to share and use content available across the network. Ultimately, individuals can become their own network publishers, financing their efforts on paid search advertising and commissions for selling music and other products through the greater Yahoo network. Lycos is planning a similar network, as is AOL.
Search marketing is changing as rapidly as the search environment changes. SEO is still extremely important but the techniques used to achieve first page placements have changed several times over the years.
Six years passes and everything about search marketing (and the Internet environment) has changed, except the people. Doing business on the Internet is all about communication and communication is all about people. Happy long weekends for folks in North America. I'll see y'all in a month or so in a new format. I am going to continue writing regular columns, including some for StepForth news. I will continue to work with StepForth as a consultant.
Again, it all comes down to the people whether they are clients, readers or colleagues. It has been an amazing six years. Thanks folks.
Ever seen an iceberg? They are magnificent ice mountains, frozen floating islands bobbing around the most northern and southern oceans. Aside from the fact they are frozen, the coolest thing about an iceberg is that only about 1/10 th of the mass of the berg is visible above the water. Knowing the other 9/10 th of the mass exists below the surface adds oomph to the awe.
Google is like an iceberg. There is so much happening beneath the surface that even the most well informed observers can find themselves confounded and confused when contemplating the full Google's spectrum of services. Apparently, a similar sensation is felt around the Googleplex where an initiative to refocus on the core mission, "... to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is said to be underway.
Google has grown and diversified as rapidly as the web environment around it has, often placing itself on or even beyond the cutting edge of communication technologies. Its impact on our society and economy is hugely helpful and distressingly disruptive at the same time. Through its own innovation and a series of acquisitions, Google has managed to make an entry in most, if not all, major online marketing venues and is in the business of creating an ongoing stream of online marketing assets. It also has ambitions to venture into the traditional print, radio, and video ad markets, anticipating the inevitable migration to digital delivery of these mediums.
Much of Google's tremendous growth was spurred by its wildly successful stock offerings. The company went public in August 2004. Before their initial public offering, Google was the most important search engine on the Internet. Slightly less than two years later, Google has become one of the three most important and influential media companies in the world. Google is going where the big-media money is, a place known for its dramatic effect on the attitudes of those who inhabit it.
Regardless of what Google is, or might actually become, the general public still thinks of it primarily as a free-for-use search engine. That perception is important to Google because information accessibility, the core of Google's core mission, is facilitated through some form of search function. Being known as the world's favourite search engine gives Google a significant advantage when it comes to attracting advertisers. This is the reason Google, like its rivals at Yahoo, MSN and Ask, will invest a bulk of its resources on facilitating and improving search functions. Reliable search makes loyal users.
Conversely, a significant loss of public perception in Google's credibility is a risk. Over the past two years, Google has faced a steady stream of criticism for many of the choices it has made. Investment types criticise Google's secretive and sometimes bizarre ways of communicating financial matters. Social activists criticise Google's compliance with Chinese Government censorship of "sensitive" search results. Ironically (but necessarily), content creators and copyright holders criticise Google for living up to its stated mission goals.
Google actively changes the methods it uses to rank websites on a relatively constant basis. As new technologies, design methods or social trends accumulate users, the body of information those uses eventually compile will have an effect on rankings in Google's index. That's because Google's spiders are designed to follow links and practically every document that exists has a link directed towards it. When blogs were first popularized about two years ago, they had a massive affect on Google rankings because of the interlinked social nature of blogs, the tendency of some to abuse the comment sections, and the sudden emergence of millions of automated or out-sourced blogs.
As a search engine, Google is facing a great deal of criticism from webmasters and online merchants who contend that Google hasn't paid enough attention to the relevance of its organic search results. When it does pay attention, some suggest that Google's cure for spam is often worse than the symptoms its engineers were trying to correct. The recent, six-month long algorithm updates are a case in point. Many search engine optimizers continue to scratch their heads at the strange state of Google's search results.
The organic, or free, search results at Google have been in a constant state of flux for almost a year now. Along with the Jagger algorithm update and the Bigdaddy infrastructure upgrade, Google has been subtly introducing a few new factors to the search results most users see. Keen observers, like those at Search Engine Watch , often spot experimental insertions of content pulled from services such as Google Base, News, Maps and Google Images.
These appearances indicate a high degree of research and development around local search and attempts at providing a degree of personalized search. Google invests approximately 70% of staff resources on search functionality. While its stated, public goal involves making the world's information accessible, its unstated, internal goal is to make its various features, functions and tools work together as a system.
Google is moving forward to integrate its various tools and functions into a stronger set of search tools, all of which are expected to be monetized primarily through AdWords advertising though some will present direct costs to consumers.
Later this week, Google is expected to release an online payment system that has been nicknamed Gbuy. While there are few confirmed details about the system, the clear intent would be to develop an online payment system that works with Google Base listings. This would give Google and its users an ecommerce platform that could seriously challenge the space eBay currently occupies.
Google is also actively assembling the components for a server-side suite of collaborative office-use software as a challenge to Microsoft's Office suite. Last year it purchased online word processor software called Writely. Earlier this year, Google acquired an online spreadsheet application, naming its new service Google Spreadsheets. Combine an online word processor and spreadsheet application with Gmail and Google Calendar. Add Google's photo sharing suite Picasa to act in the role of a rudimentary PowerPoint and Google Desktop's ability to locate any file on a computer or shared network and you have the background tools included in a useful operating system.
Google is an advertising company built on providing free space to frame paid advertising around. Its first priority is to its core mission of making information available, especially if there is a way to tie advertising to it. Its other mission is to position itself for battle against Microsoft, Yahoo, News Corp., Ask, and any other contender that might happen along its path. It is aggressive, overly confident, and often perceived as arrogant. It is also one of the world's largest media companies and responsible for providing the results of approximately half the searches made each day.
Google's continued growth is virtually guaranteed but it is a guarantee that is entirely theirs to squander.
In their favour, they have been far more open and communicative with their constituents than their rivals have. Though unorthodox, Google's mature CEO and mostly mature co-founders have a habit of shooting from the hip when it comes to making public comments. For search engine optimizers, Google's quality czar, Matt Cutts provides a forum for information exchange on his blog and is the A-list celebrity at any search related function he appears at. This is a daily must read.
Working against Google is the fact that the real world of big business is wild, scandalous and fraught with difficult, literally world altering decisions. They, and their primary audience, are grassroots sorts of people suddenly working on the biggest of international stages. No matter what decisions Google makes, there will be a controversial outcome for someone.
A few weeks ago, StepForth's sales manager, Bill Stroll, took a well deserved holiday. That gave me the opportunity to sit in his chair for a few days, monitoring emails from clients and queries from potential clients. My primary focus was to answer client questions and respond to information requests that simply couldn't wait until Bill was back at his desk.
Sitting in front of his computer gave me a chance to take another look a random sampling of websites interested in SEO. From time to time, I tabbed over to see some of the site-review questionnaire responses our system had recently handled.
Search engine optimization is obviously becoming more popular. We're handling a lot more review requests. Many of the sites processed by our review system were already well-designed sites ready for optimization. Many others however, were simply not up to a standard of design or topical clarity in which our SEO services would help. It's a hard thing to tell someone but someone has to do it, the website needs to be redesigned.
Online competition has increased dramatically year after year. Today there are more websites doing business in every commercial sector than there were yesterday. Though the search engines are better able to sort information and rank relevant sites against keyword queries, achieving search engine placements for smaller sites has gotten more difficult as the environment evolves.
Recent changes to the ranking algorithms at Google and Yahoo place increased importance on site user experience, making people-friendly web design an important component in SEO. Because the search engines want to gauge the usefulness of any given document or link, they track the movement of visitors from one web document to another. When larger numbers of visitors travel to a site and spend more time gathering information and following its links, the search engines tend to think favorably about that site. Similarly, when visitors click in and quickly click out, their leaving is noted and the action is somewhat scored against the site. It's nothing personal, its just technology judging technology.
When a website is somehow unprepared to meet the standards we believe search spiders or human visitors are looking for, we call it not-ready-for-primetime. It's a much gentler term to use than others we've tossed about. Not-ready-for-primetime sites come in all shapes, sizes and represent all sorts of businesses. The one thing they have in common is that, in their current condition, their chances of achieving strong search rankings are dim. They are often constructed as if they were afterthoughts, as brochures by people focused squarely on doing business in the real world.
When we come across sites that are not quite ready for primetime, we tend to recommend site redesign. The problem with recommending redesign as a pre-requisite of SEO work is that it needs to be factored into a preset marketing budget. Often, site owners are unable or unwilling to invest in site redesign and either go seeking help or affirmation from other search marketing shops, or give up altogether.
The easiest way to avoid presenting an unfriendly face to search engine spiders is to start from the basics and work your way up. Here are a few quick tips on spotting elements of your website that might not be as search engine friendly as they could or should be.
Every website, good or bad begins with a site structure. Some structures are better for search spiders than others. There are two areas to consider when thinking about site structure, regardless of the eventual size of the site. The first how the overall site file and directory tree will look. The second is how the first few levels of that tree will be laid out.
The overall site should be structured to allow for long-term growth. As more files or documents are added to the site, the designer will want to ensure that search spiders will find those files without too much trouble. That means limiting the number of directory levels as much as practically possible.
The first few levels of a site are extremely important for strong search rankings. Documents or files found on the first few pages of any site tend to contain the most unique, descriptive content. These documents are most likely to receive incoming links from other sites and are most likely to be entrance points to specific product or services offered on pages found deeper in the site. Establishing easily followed paths for search spiders and for live-visitors is important.
The next thing that makes a site not-ready-for-primetime is topical focus and clarity of message. In a competitive search engine environment, choosing a theme and sticking to it is generally good advice.
We often see sites that try to sell hundreds of unrelated consumer items or travel services. These types of sites pose two problems. First, there is no overall theme to think about when determining keywords to target. Secondly, much of the content on sites like this is lifted from other online sources, likely already existing in Google's index.
If these sites were to segment their sites into niches or facets of the industries they are trying to represent and build a number of sites dedicated to those facets, chances are their sites would perform much better on the search engines.
Another series of elements that can make a site not-ready-for-primetime is found in previous attempts at search engine or network marketing. A reality of web-based business is that a little information can be extremely dangerous if applied incorrectly. We often come across sites that have joined web-rings or link-exchanges, or have remnants of spammy SEO techniques left over from a previous run-in with less ethical SEOs. We tend to see these sites just after they have been delisted or have seen their rankings degrade over time.
A site redesign is a serious commitment. Once it is undertaken, a whole range of planning, copywriting and meetings are in order. This process is often good for an online business as it forces the business to focus on how it conducts business online, and how to make that business better.
Perhaps the truest measure of the need to redesign a website comes not from the needs of website marketers but from the experience of the website owners themselves. Is the site producing revenues or attracting business of some form or another? Is it capable of returning some if not all of the money invested in it? If not, the best search engine placements on the Internet are not going to be much use.
A couple of years ago, when I was the head SEO here at StepForth Placement, that was the way I would open all letters, notices or bulletins to our clients. "Dear Friends"
While "friends" might not be the most appropriate business-like greeting, it was the one that I felt best suited the relationship I wanted to establish between the company and its most important assets (and renewable resources), our customers.
For the most part, the salutation fit and many lasting friendships based on mutual respect, trust and honesty have been established. Though the term friends might be seen as sort of flakey in a business sense, I think I have had the good fortune in my career to find ways to use the word well. Thanks friends.
This is perhaps the most difficult letter I've ever written to the growing number of "friends of StepForth" as it is my public resignation letter. About three weeks ago, I gave my real-life friend, mentor and employer, Ross Dunn notice that, by August 1, I will be leaving the firm to strike out on my own.
On August 1, I am opening a new sort of search engine marketing agency named Markland Media. (www.marklandmedia.com - coming Aug1)
It was a tough decision to make. I take an enormous amount of pride in our small firm. The staff members know what they are talking about. I enjoy the intellect, talent and humour of my coworkers and StepForth provides the best work environment I've ever experienced in a small business.
When Ross said he wanted to build a business based on absolutely ethical search engine optimization and marketing practices, he really meant it. That means a lot to me and I think that commitment stands as one of the company's greatest long-term assets.
I remember a few years ago, before the firm had grown to take on more staff, Ross and I were discussing the pros and cons of moving the business (and ourselves) away from Vancouver Island and over to the mainland megalopolis of Vancouver. We decided against the move, even though it would have certainly meant more business and much faster growth, for two reasons. The first was the slow paced lifestyle on southern Vancouver Island is unbelievably rare and precious. The second was that while the move would have brought a lot more money into the firm, it would have likely come at a sacrifice of production quality and our dedication to learning. I think I had worked for Ross for about nine months at the time but it was an instructive experience that forged a lasting respect for the way his thinking and ethics worked.
Many search marketers express frustration that they can't relate to their coworkers or that their employers are unable to relate to them. That has never been a problem around here.
StepForth has earned its reputation as one of the best boutique search engine optimization and placement firms in the world. I leave with unending respect and affection for the company and its staff.
I wanted to take a few short paragraphs (or perhaps a page) to explain the motivations behind my decision. They are all positive and, if this life-altering experience goes the way I am hoping it will, the synergies I see in the search marketing environment will keep me involved in one way or another with StepForth for years to come.
I believe that the search marketing industry is at a threshold point in which the environment it works in is rapidly segmenting into several definable and cross-pollinating channels. My personal interests in online marketing are expanding far beyond the arena of pure SEO. I wish to explore them further than StepForth's dedication to pure SEO allows. I think this has come across in several blog postings that are increasingly straying away from SEO related materials.
I see search engine optimization as the common sense foundation of a well-rounded online marketing campaign. Over time, I believe the SEO industry will gain the respect of traditional advertisers, advertising agencies and other web or social marketers simply because SEO is increasingly important. It is also increasingly arcane and almost impossible to fully grasp unless you already have a deep background in it. SEO is not dead or even close to dying. On the contrary, it is about to morph back to the techno-artistic playground that originally attracted many of the old-timers to the industry.
For the record, and possibly for the final time in this space, SEO is not about manipulating search engines. SEO is about using the best practices of web design, content creation, accessibility, usability, copywriting, and other marketing disciplines, to make a website or web document as search engine and live-user friendly as possible. Though complex, the concept is simple, it works, and it is effective.
As a common sense foundation, SEO provides the base from which other forms of online marketing can and should be built on top of. As new tools and technologies are introduced to the environment, several new marketing venues or channels are opening up. I think that many of these channels are interconnectable and it is those connections, along with the opportunities to run multi-channel online ad campaigns that get my intellectual and creative juices jiving with my keyboard each morning.
Over the years, I have played armchair quarterback by observing and commenting on many of the goings on in the greater online marketing universe. Next month, I'm going to take to the field. I plan to use the services of some of the best specialists in this increasingly segmented and specialized field to provide what I consider a full-spectrum, well-rounded online marketing strategy for clients.
I plan to continue my association with StepForth in several ways. First of all, as far as I am concerned, StepForth has first right of refusal for virtually any pure SEO business that comes my way. Scott and Ross are among the best, most knowledgeable and most ethical SEOs on the planet and I have tremendous faith in their expertise. Secondly, I will continue to write a column for the StepForth weekly newsletter. I love this space and highly value the readership of the newsletter. Next, I am available as an SEO consultant through StepForth. (While Markland will provide several levels of consultancy, pure SEO consultancy is best left to StepForth, which has invested in the tools, technology, and server infrastructure necessary to do the job properly.) Lastly, I am going to continue in my role as SEO trainer for new staff at StepForth when and if needed. As I said several times before, I highly value my relationship with the crew here.
I also want to reiterate how important the friends, supporters, and clients of StepForth are to me. Over the years, your stories have literally become my stories. Our clients are the best. I have had the honour to meet too many wonderful and interesting people during my tenure here to mention but, if you even have the slightest inkling that this might mean you, it probably does.
Thanks friends. It, and you, has been great. This isn't necessarily goodbye or farewell but it does mark a huge transition for me and for the company I have grown up with. My last official day at StepForth is July 15 but I have a spot of vacation time so my last real day here is June 30.
One of the most frequently asked questions readers and clients email StepForth Placement's SEO staff, revolves around how websites can be best optimized to meet the algorithmic needs of each of the major 4 search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.
This question, or variants on it, reflects a shared notion among some webmasters that SEO driven placements at one search engine might come at the expense of high rankings across the other search engines. As the thinking goes, the techniques used to make a well optimized website rank well at Google might somehow prevent that same site from achieving high rankings at Yahoo, MSN and/or Ask. Alternately, webmasters and advertisers who already have great placements at Google but not at the others appear wary of sacrificing their Google rankings in pursuit of higher placements on Yahoo, MSN or Ask.
The differences between how each engine works appears to be causing a bit of confusion among webmasters and search marketers, especially regarding how to optimize well for all four at the same time.
Techniques that work on one engine might not work as well on another. In some extreme cases, techniques that work brilliantly with old school engines like MSN and Ask, and even with the invigorated Yahoo, are a kin to a kiss of death on Google.
There is one search engine friendly site design and optimization philosophy that works, almost every time, without fail. Good content, smart networking, and persistence over time. A well constructed website, or one that has been treated by a good search engine optimizer, should be able to rank well on all major search engines, provided that site has useful, relevant information to express.
Questions about ranking well on all four engines brings up some of the basic differences between the major search engines and, in light of so much change in the sector over the past few months, a look at what search engines look at, and how they do it seems in order.
There are a lot of differences between the major search engines but, by and large, they all gather information the same way. Each major search engine uses unique spider agents known as Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo/Inktomi), Ask.com/Teoma, and MSNbot, (updated list @ Wikipedia), that find information by following links from document to document across the web. Spiders are designed to revisit sites on a semi-regular basis as well, though they often hit the index (or home) page more often than other pages. Spiders do tend to dig deeper looking for changes to internal documents based on changes to the index (or home) page. This allows the engines to maintain rapidly updating versions of the web, or parts of the web, in separate proprietary databases.
Each search database has its own characteristics and most importantly, each engine has its own algorithms for sorting and ranking web documents.
Getting information into those databases is the first stage of SEO. The site needs to be constructed (or reconstructed) in such a way as to allow search spiders to easily read and absorb the information and content contained on them.
Assuming realistic expectations and goal setting are already part of the equation, the success or failure of any multi-engine optimization campaign is dependent on the type of site being marketed, as much as it depends on methods and techniques used to market it. If the ultimate goal is strong search engine placements across all major search engines, a few compromises in style might be a temporary necessity in order to expose the great content and reap the rewards of multiple rankings.
Before beginning the building or construction of a site, having a working knowledge of the major on and off-site elements each search engine looks at when examining and evaluating a site and its contents is a key starting point.
There are two overarching areas all search engines examines when ranking a web document or site known as "on-page” and "off-page". As their names indicate, search engines examine factors and elements that occur on the document or site in question as well as factors and elements occurring on other documents and sites related by links or by topical theme.
While the search algorithms of each engine might differ in the number of factors found on or off page and the overall importance of those factors, they all examine generally similar sets of data when deciding which should rank where in relation to whatever search-queries are entered.
For example, Google loves links, as does Yahoo, MSN and to a lesser degree, Ask. MSN and Ask are considered to be old school search engines, allowing simpler SEO techniques to work quite well, as they still do with Yahoo.
On-page factors are generally found in one of four areas, Titles, Tags, Text and Structure, while off-page elements tend to involve links, locality, search-user behaviours and the performance of competing sites.
Here is a thumbnail breakdown the most important factors each search engine considers, roughly laid-out in order of importance.
Google: Incoming Links, On-page SEO, Site Design Spiderability, User analytics, Outgoing links, Inclusion in other Google indexes, Document Histories
Yahoo: On-page SEO, Links and Link Patterns, Site Design, User analytics, Inclusion in other Yahoo indexes, Document Footprints
MSN: On-page SEO, Site Design and Structure and Sipderability
Ask: On-page SEO, Site Design, Site Structure and Spiderability
Because Google drives approximately 50% of all organic search traffic, SEOs, webmasters, and search advertisers tend to be most concerned with Google placements. When planning a search optimization campaign, whether for a new site or in the redevelopment of an existing site, building around Google's needs is obviously the most logical path. It is also a smart way to find your way into the other search engines. Though each of the rival engines want to present the best possible results, Google's algorithms account for quality scoring to a deeper degree than the others do. In other words, if your site meets Google's various tests, it will likely meet those of the other engines.
Google puts an enormous weight on its evaluation of the network of links leading to and out from every web document in its index. Most, if not all, documents found in Google's index got there because Google's spider Googlebot found it by following an inbound link. Because its ranking algorithm is so heavily link dependent, Google is frequently forced to tinker with how it evaluates links, a process that generates a score known as PageRank. The basic wisdom on links says that incoming links from topically relevant sites are beneficial while those placed in order to get a better ranking at Google are not. Google also examines links on a document or site that are directed towards other sites in order to gauge if a webmaster is trying to game it or not by participating in link-networking schemes. To one degree or another, the three other major search engines do this as well, though MSN and Ask are not known for using link analysis as a weighty measure of site or document relevancy. Yahoo most certainly does. Link analysis is used to determine the seriousness and credibility of a web document by comparing it with other documents it is associated with.
Once a document exists in a search engine database, several on-page factors are examined. The engines tend to examine several elements of any particular document and the sites they are associated with including title, meta tags (in some cases), body text and other content, and internal site structure.
The key to providing search spiders with a strong on-page experience lies in presenting search spiders with a well designed, topically focused site. Again, remember the four basic on-page areas; titles, tags, text and site structure, creating documents that are friendly to all four search engines is not terribly difficult.
There are a few easy tips that should be kept in mind though. New websites should always introduce themselves to the search engines with very focused content expressed on a very basic site structure. Adding content as time goes forward is a much better way to feed search spiders than giving them a site that is already full of information. Search engines, especially Yahoo and Google, appreciate fresh content and can be “invited” back to a site again and again when new material is added.
Webmasters with pre-existing websites enjoying great rankings in one place but seeing sub-standard rankings in others should take a step back and re-evaluate the overall theme presented by the documents that make up their sites. In a technically perfect world, the most relevant and topical documents would reach the top of the rankings. As the search engines really are striving for a measure of technical perfection, ensuring your documents are tightly and topically focused is essential.
For those who have lost position at Google but not at the other search engines recently, check your link networks for undesirable connections. Good placement at MSN, Ask and Yahoo but sub-standard placement at Google is almost always a signal that some links going to or coming from your site have raised questions at Google. You should also check the content your site carries to be sure it is (as much as possible), original and not simply a copy of content found on other sites.
In the end, the best practices tend to win with the major search engines. A good website or document should be able to place well across all four engines at the same time, provided the webmaster or SEO specialist takes time to follow SEO best practices.
Founder Bill Gates will be stepping away from the bulk of his duties at Microsoft in two years time. Starting in July 2008, Gates, aged 50, will devote the majority of his time to the management of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest charitable organization.
Gates made the announcement yesterday afternoon at a news conference held after the markets had closed for the day. Gates will remained involved as Chairman of the corporation and will retain his vast stock holdings. "I always see myself as being the largest shareholder in Microsoft," Gates told reporters. He holds about 9.5% of all Microsoft stocks, estimated to be worth $21.6 Billion.
While his departure is officially set for mid-2008, many of his day to day duties will start to shift immediately, beginning with his role as Microsoft's chief software architect, which has been passed to Ray Ozzie.
In moving to take over management of the Foundation, Gates says he was motivated to spend more time tackling the health, education and poverty issues the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to solving. Last year, Gates vowed to use the majority of his estimated $50 Billion fortune to further the work of the Foundation.
Gates' announced departure comes at a difficult and crucial time for Microsoft. Though it is the largest and most powerful software corporation in the world, it has fallen far behind rivals Google and Yahoo in the highly lucrative web advertising medium, and has been roundly criticized for failing to meet several deadlines surrounding the release of its pending Vista operating system.
During his 30-year career, Gates is credited with both starting and dominating the growth of the computing era. Microsoft, a company he built with Harvard classmate Paul Allen got its first big break in the early 1980s when IBC selected as the supplier of the first desktop operating system (DOS) for IBM PCs in 1981. For the next twenty years, Microsoft became a virtual monopoly by bundling several pieces of business and finance software into the ubiquitous Office product.
Though Microsoft is one of the largest IT firms in the world, attention tends to fall towards the geeky but affable Gates. "The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me," he said in a televised interview. "In reality, Microsoft has had an unbelievable breadth and depth of technical talent."
While he might be stepping back from his daily involvement in the management of the firm, Gates still plans to be the face and voice of Microsoft by making appearances, visiting dignitaries and clients, and giving speeches.
Along with the naming of Ray Ozzie to chief software architect, Craig Mundie, currently one of three chief technical officers will be given the title of chief research and strategy officer. Steve Ballmer is expected to assume many of Gates' other duties.
Gates' departure might mark the end of one era in computing but it also holds the promise of initiating a new one. Ray Ozzie is among the most respected technologists in the computer world. With Ozzie's brains, Ballmer's passion and the widely recognized organizational brilliance of Mundie, Microsoft's management shake-up might herald or prompt the breakthroughs needed to fully challenge rivals such as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and IBM.
Search engine optimization, as a practicing sector of the greater search engine marketing industry, is seeing an upswing in business over the past few months. This trend is fueled by a number of concurrent factors, the least of which is the actual effectiveness of organic search placement.
Today's search marketing metaverse is made up of a multiplicity of mash-ups. Paid and organic results now appear in any number of venues beyond the traditional SERPs that are directly or indirectly associated with a branded search engine or social network. While search has been big business for over five years, a growing sophistication is entering the marketing space as creative people find intelligent and interesting ways to get a growing number of applications to work together.
This is a good time to be a SEO, especially if you've been around long enough to know what you're doing. Search and social networking are about finding information. SEO is about affecting documents or files in order to make them findable for interested search engine users. The entrance of social networking applications in the search sphere, combined with the suddenly increased accessibility of rich media advertising, has changed the way SEOs look at their roles in the search marketing industry. A simple way to put it would be to suggest that most advanced SEOs are moving away from acting like search engine manipulators and are becoming search media facilitators.
Currently, the three largest search related entities are Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Each entity is actually a vast and growing collection of hundreds technologies strung together to form relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines.
Along with pending offerings from MSN, Lycos and Ask, the three largest search entities offer hundreds of unique but often inter-related applications.
The sudden emergence of so many search related applications has caused a boom in the SEO sector because it has driven the advertisers themselves to learn more about how search works. The emergence of social networking as a group informative, peer-responsive medium has added another extremely interesting dimension to the mix of available tools.
Good SEOs have the requisite background to understand the emerging search and social spheres and find marketing opportunities between the varying applications. Not only do they all connect together, the results they return are still based on keywords either entered by the searcher or found and extracted from a document (or file) and shared with the searcher.
Over the past few years, paid search advertising, blogs, and the growth of social networking have changed the ways Google and other search engines view and rank web documents and files.
Most search advertiser and all search marketers have noticed significant changes in Google's behaviours over the past six months. That's because Google's behaviour has been affected and altered by the emergence of informative, multi-functional media files.
Similarly, Yahoo has embraced many of the informative aspects of the social networking trend. Yahoo's ranking algorithms take social references (such as those found in Yahoo Answers) into account and Yahoo is expanding on its already massive stable of direct marketing and social networking services.
Several layers of SEO related documents can be used to form a chain of cause and effect between the various search-based applications. An easy example would be the chain between AdWords, and branded Google applications such as Gmail, Google Base, Local Search, Google Maps, use of the Google API, and the landing pages paid-search ads and other Google-related references lead to. Another might involve Yahoo Search Marketing, image files distributed by Flikr, eBay advertising, Yahoo Local and, again, the landing pages they all might lead back to. A third, and possibly most relevant example, will be drawn from the paid-search advertising alliance MySpace is seeking from Google, Yahoo or MSN, (whichever makes the sweetest deal).
In each of the examples cited, including any pending MySpace scenarios, SEOs have the opportunity to advise on and help construct the online messages, including brand or product identities expressed by their clients. Ultimately, each of the examples lead back to semi-static landing page documents which in turn should lead a consumer to complete a desired task, becoming a conversion.
The future of SEO, regardless of the introduction of innovative technologies, will continue to rest on the website and documents extracted from or associated with specific domains. The way SEOs currently view websites as domain driven collections of documents needs to evolve to encompass a more fluid view of how individual documents are actually unique nodes in much larger link-networks. The size of many link networks is astounding. The StepForth site has over eleven hundred recognized links in Google and over 41,000 recognized by Yahoo.
Search results, both paid and organic, are distributed in such a wide variety of places it is impossible to estimate the impact of a fully planned, strategic search marketing campaign. The expansive nature of search engine marketing constantly creates larger audiences for advertisers, both large and small.
At the Search Engine Watch Seattle event last month, the majority of attendees were new SEOs who were directly employed by mainstream corporations. Many of these were previously IT or marketing workers who have recently been thrown into their new role of corporate search guru. A relatively similar number of new-cast search marketers were present at the Toronto SES show in April. This indicates that the IT and Marketing departments at medium to large corporations, along with tens of thousands of entrepreneurial ventures, are taking steps to enter the search engine marketing world. It is a confusing space though.
Unless they are capable of taking a six month crash course in search marketing, and given the allowance to fail, the wisest move for many of the new corporate-level SEOs could make is to go back to their managers and suggest they contact an established search marketing firm for direct consultation. That way, the new-SEO gets to play internal quarterback to the coaching provided by the consultant, while offering their company a far higher level of overall service for their annual salaries.
Good SEO techniques can add a great deal of value to web documents and files in both the emerging social search scene and the traditional document/domain driven search scene. From effective copywriting to accessible site architecture to statistical analysis of site traffic patterns, SEOs have a lot more to bring to the table to go along with Top10 rankings or search placements.
It is a strange phenomenon of North American society that the fight for Freedom of Information should so often come down to money. Those who have it tend to get freer access to information than those who don't. A small group of former monopolists (who have lots of it) can even control how information moves across the 'net, even to the point of placing virtual toll booths across the formerly free-flowing information superhighway.
Passed by a 269 - 151 vote in the US House of Representatives on Thursday July 8, HR5252 is ostensibly about permitting greater competition in the rapidly evolving television-signal delivery market by allowing the giant Telcos such as AT&T and Verizon to obtain a national broadcast license to compete with cable TV providers via the Internet. In other words, HR5252 is about allowing the Telcos to become cable TV companies.
On the surface, that makes sense. The Internet has cut into the profitability of the major Telcos in more ways than one. Email has reduced the need to make long-distance telephone calls. Instant messaging has replaced many local calls. The most recent advances allow cable companies offering VOIP services to, in effect, become start-up Telcos. Improving technologies also allow anyone with a web presence and a bit of talent to create their own television shows, movies, audio tracks and other forms of mass-communication entertainment and distribute their creations over lines owned by the Telcos. In short, the Internet has blurred the once obvious lines between the major Telcos and cable TV providers, the most significant of which is, of course, the bottom lines.
Between the lines and behind the scenes however, the bill will change the Internet as we know it today, granting Internet Service Providers both large and small with the ability to levy surcharges when consumers access file types assumed to consume too much bandwidth. This effectively creates the conditions for a multi-tiered Internet in which the "haves", who can afford extra fees, get access to a wider and more powerful Internet than the "have-nots" who can't afford the extra fees.
For the past ten years, the commercial Internet has been run in such a way that all data transferred across any pipeline is considered equal, regardless of the file type or content. Bandwidth charges are measured and levied by volume of bandwidth used, not by the format in which that data is coded. This is what the concept of Network Neutrality revolves around. HR5252 will change that, giving telecommunications giants the ability to charge extra fees for premium content passing through their pipes. Again, this content is currently considered "equal" to any other type of content.
That's why content creators or distributors such as Google, Yahoo, IAC and eBay line up on one side of the debate against data-pipeline owners such as AT&T, Verizon and Bell South. The content creators have built business models around the "free" provision of electronic information while the pipeline owners have built much older business models around being able to control and charge for the flow of electronic information. Both sides have a lot to protect and both sides have a lot to lose. Caught between the two sides is the literally billions of Internet users around the world, all of whom will be affected by this legislation, even though the vast majority of them reside outside of the United States. The days of free flowing information suddenly appear to be numbered.
Voting on the bill followed party lines with Republicans tending to support the legislation and Democrats tending to oppose it. A last minute compromise proposed by the Democrats could have alleviated many of the concerns of content creators and distributors however it was voted down by a similar margin. Now that HR5252 has passed the House, the bill moves on to the Senate, which, being dominated by Republicans, is expected to pass the resolution.
Supporters of Net Neutrality have not given up. "Net Neutrality is as basic to the function of the Internet as non-discrimination is to the U.S. Constitution. We will win because we must." - Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), sponsor of the defeated amendment to HR5252.
The original inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, added his voice to the debate last month saying, "When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data. The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy."
Debate over who controls the Internet stretches back to the late 1990s to the second generation of innovative technologies that allowed consumers to make better or fuller use of information transmitted over the web. Think back to the early days of file sharing, gaming and emerging video applications. Many of those technologies did not exist in the early 1990s when the commercial Internet was being formulated and introduced to consumers. While these new technologies allowed for a fuller Internet experience and are correctly credited as being primary growth drivers, they also created an expensive situation for the Telcos and other data-stream providers. The Internet they signed up for was based on text and basic images, both of which require very little bandwidth.
The reaction from Internet Service Providers was swift and highly restrictive. A most famous case from the earlier days involved Cox Cable and AT&T, both of which imposed disciplinary action against their clients for using WiFi and Virtual Private Networks to allow multiple users to access the Internet via one connection. A more recent case, which is still ongoing, saw Canadian ISP Shaw Cable intentionally downgrading the signals of VOIP services competing with their own in order to drive customers to choose their VOIP service by making competitors' services appear worse.
Bandwidth has always been the primary cost for Internet Service Providers. Loosely defined, the term bandwidth means, "... a data transmission rate; the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel" (source: Princeton University Wordnet). The size of a data-pipe dictates the amount of data that can be transmitted across it at any given time with larger files such as audio or video requiring much more bandwidth than smaller text-based files such as typical HTML web documents.
In the early 1980s one of the "founding fathers of the Internet", Dr. Vint Cerf, (now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google), invented an ingenious method for transferring large amounts of data electronically across multiple networks. When information from a web server is downloaded onto your computer, it is delivered in a series of separate packets that are reconfigured by your web browser. This allows a large number of people to use the same pipeline at the same time by sharing the available bandwidth roughly equally between them.
Electricity does not necessarily flow in a straight line. Like water, electricity will always take the path of least resistance when moving from point A to point B. For example, it is likely that the document you are reading right now took several unique paths to get from the web server on which it is hosted to your computer. Parts of the document might have gone south while other portions traveled a northerly route. Within seconds, all parts of the document meet at your IP address and are recompiled or resolved by your browser. Because of this, most data flowing across the Internet somehow travels through American-owned cyberspace on its way from web server to Internet user. US law applies to virtually every signal and data burst that crosses US controlled cyberspace.
So how will changes to the tradition of Network Neutrality affect search engine marketers and their clients? That is a difficult question to answer with any sense of perspective. The most honest answer is, we don't yet know however we can assume the effects will come in ways nobody, including proponents of a multi-tiered web ever expected.
Some have speculated that once the major Telcos have the ability to levy surcharges for premium services, alliances or deals will be struck between specific search engines and specific telecommunications providers. This could lead to the same Telcos limiting or even restricting content from non-aligned search providers. Others have speculated that once the major Telcos have the ability to pick and choose information that gets passed across their networks, politically or socially unpopular opinions, or even opinions that differ from those held by the Telcos, could face limits or restrictions.
One way a tiered network structure would certainly affect search marketing is to limit the podcasting and video advertising opportunities that are just opening for search marketers. Content requiring extra bandwidth could suddenly become subject to extra fees.
Perhaps the most obvious way a tiered Internet will affect the search marketing community is a slowing of the sustained growth of the Internet, especially for small to medium sized businesses who see search marketing as way of leveling the advertising playing field with their larger competitors.
One piece of hopeful speculation suggests that the US Congress is rapidly legislating control of the Internet away from US business interests, even as it is obviously trying to give US big businesses more control over the 'Net. As the thinking goes, many other nations are building their own infrastructure and will soon be capable of routing signals away from US controlled cyberspace. This however, is the worst fear of both sides of the debate because nobody wants to see a non-international Internet.
The Telcos and other supporters of a tiered Internet suggest that the current system limits innovation and expansion because there is currently no way to guarantee a return on the massive infrastructure investments necessary to allow the Internet to continue to grow. Opponents suggest that changing the tradition of treating all data types as equal will limit creativity and technical innovation, along with allowing the specter of big business control to morph into outright censorship of competing ideas or technologies.
The one group that has not been heard from in this debate is the users themselves. That is likely because the issue itself is somewhat difficult to understand and involves a plethora of high-power political maneuvering by major corporations and their paid lobbyists. The general public, the ones who will be most affected, appears to feel disenfranchised from the debate, a danger that might only be recognized after the debate is long over and a multi-tiered Internet becomes the norm for US citizens.
For more information from both sides of the debate, please visit:
It took a little while to start to figure it out. Such things almost always do. After months of observation, research, discussion and debate, Search Engine Optimization experts appear to be getting a better handle on the effects of Google's Bigdaddy infrastructure upgrades.
From mid-winter until this week, StepForth has strongly advised our clients to be conservative with any changes to their sites until enough time has passed for us, along with many others in the SEO community to observe, analyze and articulate our impressions of the upgrade. About ten days ago, the light at the end of the intellectual tunnel became eminently visible and SEO discussion forums are abuzz with productive and proactive conversations regarding how to deal with a post-Bigdaddy Google environment.
To make the long back-story short, in September 2005, Google began implementation of a three-part algorithm update that became known as the Jagger Update. Shortly after completing the algo update in late November, Google began an upgrading of their server and data storage network that was dubbed the Bigdaddy Infrastructure Upgrade. The Bigdaddy upgrade took several months to completely roll out across all of Google's data centers, which are rumoured to number in the hundreds.
In other words, the world's most popular search engine has, in one way or another, been in a constant state of flux since September. The only solid information SEOs had to pass on to curious clients amounted to time tested truisms about good content, links and site structure. Being the responsible sort we are, no good SEO wanted to say anything definite for fear of being downright wrong and misdirecting others.
Starting in the middle of May and increasing towards the end of the month, ideas and theories that had been thrown around SEO related forums and discussion groups started to solidify into the functional knowledge that makes up the intellectual inventory of good SEO firms.
Guided by the timely information leaks from Google's quality control czar Matt Cutts , discussion in the SEO community surrounding Bigdaddy related issues has been led by members of forums WebMasterWorld , SEW ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ), Threadwatch , SERoundtable ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ), and Cre8asite ( 1 ) ( 2 ). SEO writers Aaron Wall , Jarrod Hunt , and Mark Daoust have also added their observations to the conversation in a number of separate articles.
By now, most good SEOs should be able to put their fingers on issues related to Bigdaddy fairly quickly and help work out a strategy for sites that were adversely affected by the upgrade. The first thing to note about the cumulative effects of Jagger and Bigdaddy is the intent of Google engineers to remove much of the poor quality or outright spammy commercial content that was clogging up their search results.
The intended targets of the Bigdaddy update go beyond sites that commit simple violations against Google's webmaster guidelines to include affiliate sites, results gleaned from other search tools, duplicate content, poor quality sites and sites with obviously gamey link networks. In some cases, Google was targeting sites designed primarily to attract users to click on paid-search advertisements.
After the implementation of the algo update and infrastructure upgrades, SEOs have seen changes in the following areas: Site/Document Quality Scoring, Duplicate Content Filtering and Link Intention Analysis.
The first area noted is site or document quality scoring. Did you know there are now more web documents online than there are people on the planet? Many if not most of those documents are highly professional and some are sort of scrappy. While Google is not looking for perfection, it is trying to assess which pages are more useful than others and attention to quality design and content is one of the criteria.
Quality design simply means giving Google full access to all areas of the site webmasters want spidered. Smart site and directory structures tend to place spiderable information as high in the directory tree as possible. While Google is capable of spidering deeply into database sites, it appears to prefer to visit higher level directories much more frequently. We have noted that Google agent visits do tend to correspond with update times set via Google Sitemaps.
Accessibility and usability issues are thought to make up elements of the Jagger algorithm update, marking the way visitors use a site or document and the amount of time they spend engaged in a user-session associated with a site important factors in ranking and placement outcomes. Internal and outbound links should be placed with care in order to make navigating through and away from a site as easy as possible for site visitors.
Another quality design issue involves letting Google know which "version" of your site is the correct one. For most, a website can be access with or without typing the “www” part of the URL. (ie: http://www.stepforth.com , http://stepforth.com , http://www.stepforth.com/index.shtml ) This presents a rather funny problem for Google. Because links directed into a site might vary in the way they are written, sometimes it doesn't know which "version" of a site is the correct one to keep in its cache. To Google, each of the variations of the URL above could be perceived as unique websites, an issue known as "canonicalization", a subject Matt Cutts addressed on his blog in early January.
'Suppose you want your default URL to be http://www.example.com . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/ , it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.)."
Quality content is a bit harder to manage and a lot harder to define. Content is a word used to describe the stuff in or on a web document and could include everything from text and images, Flash files, audio or video and links.
There are two basic rules in regards to content. It should be there to inform and assist the site user's experience and it should be, (in as much as possible), original.
Making an easy to use site that provides visitors with the information they are looking for is the responsibility of webmasters but there are a few simple ways to show you are serious about its presentation.
Focus on your topic and stick to it. Many of the sites and documents that have found themselves demoted or de-listed during the Bigdaddy upgrade were sites that delved across several topics at the same time without presenting a clear theme. Given the option between documents with clear themes and documents without clear themes, Google's choice is obvious.
Google is working to weed out duplicate content. Google appears to be looking for incidents of duplicate content in order to try to promote the originator of that content over the replications. This has hit sites in the vertical search sector; affiliate marketing sector, real estate sites, and even retail sites that carry brand name products, especially hard. Several shopping or product focused database sites have seen hundreds or even thousands of pages falling out of Google's main index.
In many cases, there is little or nothing to do for this except to start writing unique content for products listed in the databases of such sites. Many real estate sites, for example, use the same local information sources as their competitors do and all tend to draw content from the same selection of MLS listings. It's not that Google thinks this content is "useless", it's that Google already has several other examples of the same content and is not interested in displaying duplicate listings.
Many of the listings previously enjoyed by large database driven sites have fallen into a Google index known as the supplemental listings database. Supplemental listings are introduced to the general listings shown to Google users when there are no better examples to choose from to meet the users search query. This is the same index that is often referred to as the "Google Sandbox".
The last major element noted in the discussions surrounding Bigdaddy is how much more robust Google's link analysis has become. Aside from site quality and duplicate content issues, most webmasters will find answers to riddles posed by Bigdaddy in their network of links.
In order to ferret out the intent of webmasters, Google has increased the importance of links, both inbound and outbound. Before the updates, an overused tactic for strong placement at Google saw webmasters trying to bulk up on incoming links from where ever they could
Blink
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Google
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