Online Marketing Performance » Search Engine Optimization

Google introduces Search Options and Snippets to SERPs

Scott McAndrew — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:10:22 +0000

Today Google rolled out changes to its flagship product: web search. The changes are clearly aimed at facilitating the searcher’s ability to find what they are looking for and find it in short order. If you’re a search engine optimization (SEO) practitioner, your world is about to get more interesting. For the rest of the planet, what can be expected from Google search results just got a whole lot better. What’s new?

The updates include Search Options and enhanced search results featuring microformats for content such as reviews. Google provided a brief video introducing new functionality:

Search Options

Search Options allows the user to quickly refine search results by providing additional context to the search being made. After making a query, a user has several options to further clarify or modify their search results, including:

Refining results to videos, forums or reviews
Specifying the time frame from which to display results
The ability to augment search results with images from the sites returned
Lengthening the amount of copy shown for each result
Showing related search phrases
Displaying related topics to the subject searched upon (“Wonder Wheel”)
Viewing results on a timeline

The options above are available when viewing “all results.” As criteria are applied, the user’s scenario changes. For example, if the searcher specifies video results only, the options change, removing criteria which is not relevant, but adding other opportunities, like the ability to specify the duration of the videos displayed.

Search Result, Snippets and Microformats

In search results, Google is now also returning different information depending upon the the context of the information searched upon. In Google’s words:

We call the set of information we return with each result a “snippet,” and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These “rich snippets” extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing.

The example which Google provides shows a restaurant search in which the results display star ratings of a result right in the search result listing (as opposed to needing to go to a review site). Snippets fundamentally change the function of search results. How and what information to display regarding a particular topic or result is unclear, but what is clear is that this will be a feature which continually evolves. Google’s blog posting continues to explain the role of Google and the community in defining the feature:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google’s search results stays high.

These new enhancements to Google Search are highly significant; the most significant changes since Universal Search was introduced.

The impact to the Google searcher are clear: Search just got better. What impact will this have on the SEO community?

Know when websites link to your site

Scott McAndrew — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:13:55 +0000

I recently wrote on how you can easily use Yahoo Site Explorer to learn what websites link to your site. And, in a subsequent post I covered brand reputation management (or monitoring) using Google Alerts. Today’s post combines elements of each of those posts to provide another method of monitoring links to your website, this time using Google Alerts.

If you haven’t read my first post on Google Alerts and you’re not familiar with the tool, you’ll want to start by reading that post. Assuming you’ve used Google Alerts before, you just need to be aware of a few things to start using Alerts to monitor what sites link to your website.

The method uses a well known variant of Google’s traditional keyword search: the ability to place “link:” before a URL in a standard Google search query to learn what sites Google credits with linking to another website. Here’s an example of what sites Google recognizes as sites linking to this website (the Google Search launches in a new window): link:http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com.

Now, all we need to do is use that exact same method and setup a Google Alert which will notify us when it finds a link to our site. Here’s what that looks like:

Am I that unpopular?

Wait, we’re not done yet. Let’s back up a step and look at what Google returned for the number of links to my site.

Google reported that there’s approximately 31 links to my site. That’s a bit disheartening. I know there are more than that. What gives? First, it’s widely accepted that Google does not accurately report how many links it is aware of. I’m not going to debate that point or pontificate why that might be. However, the obvious thing to do (to me) would be to just see where Google notes it has seen my URL posted. I’d imagine that more often than not there would also be a link to my site.

Mentions of my URL seem as though they’d be accompanied by links

Let’s try a standard Google search on my domain. I’m going to also remove the “http://” and the “www.” as I’m not sure how others might represent my URL. So, my search would be for “onlinemarketingperformance.com” (with the quotes-without them Google will return partial matches, even with spaces and dashes). Here’s that result:

This time Google says there are almost a thousand mentions of my domain name. And, by clicking through and reviewing the results, it’s clear a strong majority of those mentions also provide a link to my website.

So, I’ll add that search as another Google Alert. Here’s my final link (and URL mention) monitoring with Google Alerts:

That’s it. I’m all setup to monitor links to my site. Of course, I’ll occasionally be alerted when there is a mention of my URL that doesn’t have a link, but that’s fine. I’d prefer to know than not know.

How many websites link to your site?

Scott McAndrew — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:59:22 +0000

In search engine optimization (SEO) circles its a foregone conclusion that how many websites link to another website play a role in how well that site ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs). And, of offsite SEO factors influencing how a website ranks, the number and quality of links is at the top of the list.

So, it’s not surprising to me that clients often ask how they can find out what websites link to their site. Finding out isn’t difficult, and, ironically the best provider are search engines themselves. Today I’ll cover one free link research tool from Yahoo called Site Explorer.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer can provide a few different pieces of information about your site, but we’ll focus on those inbound links.

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
At the top of the page, type your website address in and click the Explore URL button.
Site Explorer will return a list of links, but this isn’t the list of links that we’re looking for. This list is of links within the website address we provided. Let’s get the results we need.
Toward the top of the results there are two options labeled “Pages (247)” and “Inlinks (1,281)” (those numbers will differ for your website). The default selected option is “Pages,” but we want “Inlinks,” so click the “Inlinks” button.
Now you’re seeing a list of websites linking to your site, but we still have one more step. The list you’re looking it only shows the links pointing to your homepage, and we want to see links that point to any page on your site.
To the right of the button you just depressed, there is an option labeled “Show inlinks:” and two sets of options. In the first drop-down menu, select “Except from this domain” as we don’t want to see how pages on our site link to each other.
Once the page refreshes, select “Entire site” from the second drop down.

That’s it. You should now be looking at a link of websites which link to your site.

Limitations of Site Explorer

Depending upon how many links you have, you might not be able to see all of them with Site Explorer. The tool currently limits you to the first 1,000 links Site Explorer returns.

Communication and follow-through key to SEO success

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:53:51 +0000

This is another entry that bubbled to the top in the marketing contest from last month. It was submitted by Jason Baer who runs the online marketing consultancy Convince and Convert.

One of the problems I consistently see with SEO execution is the intersection between the SEO company and the client’s in-house Web team and/or the client’s 3rd Party Web team.

Here’s a real-life example that happened to me. I am leaving out the company names of all involved for obvious reasons.

Excellent SEO company is putting together a killer program for e-commerce client. Verbal cue analysis, editorial calendar, backlink outreach, anchor text tweaks, alt image tag optimization. The whole show.

3rd Party company is managing the Web site proper. They are the only ones that can touch the actual site code, per client insistence.

SEO company sends tons and tons of metadata, content, etc. changes to 3rd Party, who installs it on Web site.

Time goes by…..

SEO rankings do not improve. Not one bit.

More backlinks are procured, more editorial is written, etc. More time passes. Still nothing.

Finally, a full audit of the program is ordered by the frustrated client.

It turns out the 3rd Party Web development company was running a semi-bizarre database that essentially rebuilt the site each day. Whenever that happened, it overwrote any changes made to the metadata, etc. As a result, changes to the site were wiped clean each night at midnight. Google indexes fast, but not THAT fast!

A couple of lessons:

1. Fewer cooks in the kitchen is definitely better
2. SEO team really needs access to the site
3. Monitor your work and make sure the great site optimization changes you are making are actually showing up on the live site

Thanks for your entry, Jason. Great SEO recommendations that never make it to the clients public web server certainly is a frustration that many online marketers are familiar with.

Marketing stupidity wins an iPod Touch

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 21:34:49 +0000

Whether you’re an SEO company, a search marketing consultant, or a company who has hired either of the two, you’ve likely come across at least one colossal blunder made by a self-proclaimed search engine optimization expert or online marketing company. I see this all the time, but wanted to get a gauge on what others have experienced. I’m hoping to get some good ones, so I’m going to put up a new iPod Touch (8 GB) as a prize for the winner.

Comments to this post won’t be treated as entries. Please, post your SEO company stupidity story using my Contact form. It doesn’t have to be a SEO blunder “proper” (it could be regarding PPC or a viral video the SEO company employed, for example). Don’t be shy about writing… A one or two sentence post likely isn’t going to impress! A paragraph or two is probably about right. To protect all claimed perpetrators company names will be edited out of any stories submitted.

Deadline? If I’ve got more than 50 repsonses by September 15th, I’ll stop considering entries at midnight. If not, I’ll determine a period of time to extend the entry period. The final deadline for entries is September 22nd at midnight. The winner will be announced on the 23rd! Looking forward to reading your entry!

Google page 1 rankings check-up

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:52:25 +0000

Earlier this week I ran an experiment to validate a theory about Google giving preferential treatment to blog posting which contained video, essentially allowing those blog posts to rank for keywords and key phrases rapidly. The test which I published was for a new iPhone application called Dynolicious.

You can read the entire experiment parameters and results in the original post, but I wanted to check-in and confirm that the rankings have maintained over time. Here are two Google screenshots taken this morning for one and two-word Google searches:

+3 days – Google Page 1, result 5 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous”) – a decline of 1 position
+3 days – Google Page 1, results 2 and 3 (Search phrase: “dynolicous”) – an improvement of 7 positions

Evidence, but this test isn’t that compelling

While the test did validate that the method has some merit, the terms which I selected are deep into niche territory and don’t receive substantial traffic. To further demonstrate the ability to achieve Google rankings in this manner I’ve run another test with an increased difficulty level. I’ll be publishing those results soon. Stay tuned.

Page 1 Google rankings in hours (easily)

Scott McAndrew — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:20:48 +0000

Over the past week or so I’ve run a few test regarding syndication of video in blog postings and its effect on SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings. I’ve had fairly eye-opening results: The ability to easily achieve page 1 Google rankings.

Here’s an overview of one of my latest experiments:

Hypothesis: Google is giving preferential treatment to blog posts with video syndicated from a Google video sharing site (Google Video or YouTube).

Experiment: Post reasonably well crafted blog posts with relevant embedded video and monitor keywords and keyphrases to see if ranking could be achieved.

Prediction: Page 1 Google SERP listings in less than a day for targeted keyphrases.

Blog/Video/Post Details:

Blog to post on: http://www.on-a-mac.com
Post topic: an iPhone App (called Dynolicous) for which I had recently seen a video on YouTube
Keywords: Present in the post title (and title tag), page name, post content and post tags

Results: This is the third test I’ve personally run and I’ve had the same remarkable result. When searching Google for targeted keywords and keyphrases:

Page 2 or better Google rankings in less than 15 minutes
Page 1 Google rankings in less than 4 hours
A few page 1, result 1 Google rankings for more detailed searches which had direct competition (three word searches)
Without any type of maintenance/attention, some rankings have slipped downward over time but still held page 1 and page 2 positions on Google. Other rankings have held stable, even on page 1 of Google results (those page 1 rankings were for two or three word search phrases).

Timeline to Page 1 on Google (Test date: 19 August 2008):

9:41 am – Blog post with video published (How accurate is the iPhone Dynolicious? [video])
9:56 am – Google Page 2, result 1 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous video”)
1:12 pm – Google Page 1, result 10 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous video”)
1:24 pm – Google Page 1, result 4 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous video”)
1:27 pm – Google Page 1, result 1 and 2 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous video”)
1:28 pm – Google Page 1, result 4 (Search phrase: “iPhone dynolicous”)
1:28 pm – Google Page 1, result 10 (Search phrase: “dynolicous”)

Some of these screenshots (below) are from my iPhone as I left the office right after I posted the video. I was unfortunately in that meeting for a few hours, so I’m not sure exactly when the results moved onto page 1. When searching Google from the iPhone I was using the Safari web browser and the same Google site (not the Google Mobile Search site or the Google Search App for the iPhone).

The iPhone screenshots have the time from the phone on them. For the other screenshots I’m relying on my Mac’s finder to get the “Date Modified” time. The only thing I’ve done to these pictures is blurred my email account as I was logged into Google when a few of the screenshots were taken (being logged in to Google had no effect either way in case you were curious).

This technique has no effect whatsoever on MSN/Live or Yahoo. I would anticipate that this effect will not last over time on Google either. Until then, enjoy!

Where’s the online marketing community?

Scott McAndrew — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:14:46 +0000

I know two places: Sphinn and gooruze. Both are created by online marketers for online marketers. Sphinn takes a Digg-like approach whereas gooruze takes a more social route. If you’re in the industry, both are worth a look.

My gooruze page: smcandrew.gooruze.com
My Sphinn profile: smcandrew on Sphinn