Search Engine Optimization: August 2007 Archives

Keywords are the starting point of any SEO campaign, so care must be taken to assure the proper keyword usage and proper quality. Using the wrong keywords won't get you the results you want, and plastering the right keywords all over your site will not work any better. Below are readings and tools to help you maneuver your way through the sea of keywords:

Specifically for those of you with a pay-per-click(PPC) ad strategy, the post “Ultimate Guide on Dynamic Keyword insertion” Gives some tips on increasing your visibility when advertising on Google. Here is what he has to say on dynamic keyword insertion:

On most major Pay Per Click platforms, there is a little known feature called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is one of those “dirty little secrets” used by PPC marketing agencies and is the cornerstone of the millions of Internet marketing eBooks written by self proclaimed “gurus”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion needs to be fully understood before it can become marginally effective and when it is, it can increase your ads click through rate (And subsequently quality score) massively.

For more on Keyword focus from search engine land’s Aaron Wall. According to Aaron, the method of placing keywords on your title/text is evolving now that search engines such as Google are changing the way they trawl for results. Simply plastering keywords all over your site is not enough anymore. In fact, it may even be detrimental to your overall ranking as Google is now moving towards being able to detect natural versus unnatural patterns in web pages. Aaron mentions a couple of ways to make sure you optimize your site’s use of keywords effectively, such as- Mix things up and change your word order and "leverage" keyword modifiers in page content.

Google has a tool that can help you come up with a variety of keywords that relate to your main keyword. Although there is no guaranty that you’ll rank better with use of this tool, it does give you more ideas of different words that your customers might use that relate to your business.

Matt Cutts recently gave a talk on “Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers” at a WordCamp 2007 conference. Who is Matt Cutts? He is the guru of all things Google; he currently heads Google’s Webspam team and has been working at Google for 7 years.

There are some important new points that he brings up in his lecture.

- Underscores (found in urls) are now going to be treated as word separators by Google. Previously, urls that you would think were keyword rich would actually be the opposite if separated by underscores – so www.americas_best_pie would only be taken by the googlebot as literally Americas_best_pie – but not anymore.

- The only way to get your blog into Google News is to have multiple authors- this being a Google News requirement for inclusion.

- Use relevant synonyms when you can in your blog – they can be as good as your more “obvious” keywords.

For more tips and comments -- Stephanie Booth provides a more detailed recap of the lecture in her blog

For the video on the talk check this post by John Pozadzides . You might be interested in reading Matt Cutt’s own comments on his talk in his blog . For those who don’t have time to disseminate the presentation or sit through an hour of the video it might be worth your time to refer to Stephan Spencer’s post on the lecture.

What is in store for SEO or SEM? A number of forums and blogs try their hand at gazing into the SEO crystal ball.

E-gain’s Peter Young takes a pragmatic view and quotes the following from Andy Jeal of Mediavest :

“I think the growth of search engines will slow - particularly when people realize that in many ways these search engines simply act as telephones”. Specifically he believes TV advertising still had a role in encouraging people to search for particular brands in the first instance.”

Search Insider’s Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs? By Gord Hotchkiss was able to talk to some of the industry’s top movers and shakers and he has this to say –

“I realized I haven't seen a lot of innovation lately. Certainly, the engines themselves are innovating. And I'm seeing innovation in adjacent areas (Web analytics, competitive intelligence). But I'm not seeing a lot happen in the search-marketing space. After a raft of proprietary bid management tools hit a few years ago, there's been little happening to move the industry forward. In fact, I've noticed a lot of SEM heads buried in the sand. We are not encouraging change; we are actively fighting it… It's a very risky call to spend time and resources developing new tools or technologies that can be rendered useless by an arbitrary change at Google or Yahoo -- or made obsolete by the rapidly increasing pace of innovation.” “The change that's happening in the search space is reflective of the change that is happening throughout marketing and advertising. It's the continuing evolution of a much more efficient marketplace, where connections between customers and vendors are made tremendously more effective through access to information on both sides.”

But a lack of change notwithstanding, what is going to be important and what won’t be? Web Analytics World’s Manoj Jasra goes through a list of what they think will and will not matter for future search engine marketing strategy.

Hard to believe that an industry as new as search engine marketing could be
resisting innovation, or innovating on tactics alone.

At the end of the day, as the old Chinese proverb says “The only thing constant is change” – this is especially true for Internet technology. Try to make decisions based on what your business needs the most now, with the knowledge that things is bound to change in the future.

Even before trying to strategize the best ways to go up in search engine rankings, designing a super efficient website and planning your way through the maze of search engine marketing tactics, you might be interested in taking a step back to wonder –

How do search engines work?

Here is how wikipedia defines Search Engines:

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.

Well, we think we pretty much know what search engines mean, but how do they work? Simply said, there are three steps a search engine goes through – web crawling, indexing, and searching. Search engines store a vast amount of information on web pages- information which they amass using a web crawler (or spider). The pages are then analyzed and indexed based on links and “tags”. So, when you type in your query into the search box of your chosen search engine, the engine then checks all their indexed information based on the keyword you used – and voila they churn out the results ranked according to relevance.

This is of course a really simple way of looking at the search world, but here are a couple of other references you can look into in order to read more into search engines and how they work:

Marci Crane from PromotionWorld also tries to answer that question in her article “Ever wonder how Google Googles and Yahoo Yahoos?”

For those that absorb presentations better than reading long text -- Learn the net has a presentation on how search engines work.

Another good site to visit for more detail is How Stuff Works
where they give a simple to understand yet detailed definition of how search engines work.

Finally, it is always useful to have a glossary of terms for you to use as you try to understand the lay of the land