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Why optimizing your pages for search doesn’t work

Written on June 14, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, searchengineguide

by Mike Moran

What do you do when you set out to attract search traffic? If you start by optimizing your pages, you might not succeed, because you must answer the question, “Optimize for what?” You must optimize your pages only for a specific set of search keywords. If you accept at face value that you already know the search keywords you must optimize for, you might be in for a rude awakening. You might be wrong.

Image via Wikipedia

Often, we think that we know what people are looking for, but we’re wrong. We think that people are looking for our product names or other names we call our products, but they might be searching for something else. People often use different words than we expect. I remember when I worked for IBM that we insisted on calling our computers “notebooks” even though “laptops” was the word that searchers used the most. So, if you spend an enormous amount of time optimizing for “notebooks” then you might be surprised when it helps a lot less than you’d expect.

Google: Site Speed Live as a Ranking Factor

Written on April 9, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Last December, Google publicly announced a new ranking factor: site speed. Today, Google announces that site speed has joined the 200+ other ranking factors in their algorithm.

However, not all sites will be affected. In the blog post, Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team (you’ve heard of them?), say that the change has actually been in place for “several weeks,” and isn’t even that widespread:

Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

According to Matt McGhee at Search Engine Land,

there are two primary ways Google will measure page speed:

1. How a page responds to Googlebot
2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar

You can check on your site speed in Google’s Webmaster Tools, under Labs > Site performance, and Google points to several other resources to work on your site speed:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

Google emphasizes that page speed won’t trump actual relevance.

What do you think? Is this a good move for ranking?

See the rest here:
Google: Site Speed Live as a Ranking Factor

Google Search Suggestions For Mobile Get Locally Relevant

Written on January 14, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

At the recent Google Search Evolution event late last year, Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra demonstrated search suggestions on mobile devices that varied by location. He showed that query suggestions could and would be different based on user location.
Today Google is rolling that improvement out for the iPhone and Android devices. The geographic point of [...]



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Google Search Suggestions For Mobile Get Locally Relevant

Google Mobile “Evolution”: Voice, Languages, “What’s Nearby,” Goggles

Written on December 7, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Object

The Google Search Evolution event today featured a fair amount of discussion of the impact of mobile on the future direction of search and the user experience. There was a flurry of announcements about mobile products and feature upgrades, summarized on the Google Mobile Blog. Danny live-blogged the event.
Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering, discussed [...]



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See more here:
Google Mobile “Evolution”: Voice, Languages, “What’s Nearby,” Goggles

All New Google.com Redesign

Written on November 26, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Google is a master of innovation in the search space and while they seem to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s “release early and release often” new product philosophy, the attention to changing the Google search page is near-holy. Minuscule design changes at even the pixel level are cautious and carefully considered. And rare.

Apparently, Google is testing a redesign and logo which you can see in this home page screen shot:

The logo has changed and the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons are blue rather than gray. But the biggest changes are on the search results page. There are three columns rather than two:

I’ll mention some of the specific changes but I have to say, my initial (and critical) opinion of the updated search results page is “awesome”. I liked it immediately.

Left Column: Colorful blue headings and icons are added for categories of search. The number of initial categories displayed varies by the search query. When I searched on “playstation 3″, Everything, News, Blogs and Shopping showed as the default search categories. You can expand categories to include images, video, books, maps and forums.  What initially displays and the remaining categories to expand varies by the query.

Related search queries are listed below that followed by options for time intervals which are from the Options feature.

Additional search tools can be expanded including even more related searches and a timeline.  I did a vanity search for my name and the timeline went back to 1960!

Standard search are displayed as a default, but under expanded search tools options for Page images, Fewer shopping sites, More shopping sites and Page previews are available.

Middle Column. The search results for news, blogs, images, video etc all stay within the same format as standard search, although shopping is unique.  There is a preview page image search option that is pretty handy, allowing you to see a thumbnail of the page.

I did notice related queries suggested at the top of the page on some queries, but not all.  Normally, related queries are displayed at the bottom of the search results page.

Search queries for items that invoke local search results like “pizza” display best match web sites on the top consistently in my tests and the map displayed in the local listings is much wider than it is now.

Right Column. I didn’t really notice major changes in the sponsored links. Recent changes in the right column have included movement left, closer to the organic search results as well as the inclusion of images in the sponsored listings vs all text.

What does this mean for SEO? For Social Media Marketing? With the efforts to disambiguate search results by offering search category filters, it makes sense for content publishers and therefore, website marketers to ensure Digital Asset Optimization efforts are in effect.  By showing the time sensitive search options all the time, it will bring more attention to fresh content.

I think core strategies that are focused towards creative content creation and promotion in multiple media formats will do well in a new Google.   Besides the aesthetic changes shown above, I noticed several instances of Google indexing and ranking images for text displayed within the image when that text did not appear elsewhere.  It could have been due to anchor text of incoming links, but I think it’s worth watching.

Along those lines, I suspect with YouTube’s automatic captioning feature that uses speech recognition software to convert the audio of a video into text, that even more implications will be seen for rich media in the search engine optimization space.

As far as I can tell, this new Google design was reported on Google Blogscoped yesterday where you can get the copy/paste code to check out the redesigned Google yourself. SEL also mentioned it and I would expect that if this is indeed a new change Google will make permanently, that Danny Sullivan will provide a comprehensive analysis and info direct from Google.

Tags: audio ,book ,flickr ,google-search ,image ,online marketing ,search ,search-engines ,search-results- ,seo ,time ,timeline ,video

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