Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
Yelp opens API for developers
Michael Arrington reported today how Yelp has released their API, allowing developers to dynamically query and display their yellow pages listings, reviews and content for display on any websites. The terms are fairly generous, allowing developers to have up to 10k of queries per day, and relatively few restrictions on display.
This is a really cool thing for an IYP site to do…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/02/2007
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Filed under: Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Online Directories, SEO, Yellow Pages APIs, iyp, Online-Yellow-Pages, Yellow Pages, Yelp
Now MS Live Search & Yahoo! also treat Underscores as word delimiters
So, I earlier highlighted how Stephan reported on Matt Cutts revealing that Google treats underscores as white-space characters. Now Barry Schwartz has done a fantastic follow-up by asking each of the search engines if they also treated underscores just like dashes and other white space characters, and they’ve verified that they’re also handling them similarly. This is another incremental paradigm shift in search engine optimization!
I’ve previously opined that classic SEO may become extinct in favor of Usability, and announcements like this fluid handling of underscores would tend to support that premise. Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search have been actively trying to reduce barriers to indexation and ranking abilities by changes like this plus improved handling of redirection, and myriad other changes which both obviate the need for technical optimizers and reduce the ability to artificially influence rankings through technical improvements.
I continue to think that the need for SEOs may decrease until they’re perhaps no longer necessary, so natural search marketing shops will likely evolve into site-building/design studios, copy writing teams, and usability research firms. The real question would be: how soon will it happen?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/02/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Link Building, MSN Search, URLs, Yahoo
New Google Analytics still poor experience
Back in May I gave the new Google Analytics design a negative review, primarily because it made it impossible to view at a glance how many people in what area of the world are viewing your site. I’d also panned it for making one unable to view both Page Views and Visits together simultaneously.
Despite my griping, they rolled it out anyway with this feature unchanged, and they made it impossible to view the data through the old UI as of July 19th. They report adding more requested features, but how about adding back some of the functionality they destroyed? Perhaps they’re more involved in getting the daily data processing issues resolved, and admittedly I’d agree that would surely be a higher priority. I’m just still flummoxed because it seems so unnecessary to revoke good functionality in the first place.
I’ve found yet another irritating change that I consider to be even more serious: you apparently can’t view the data in monthly units – only daily:
Why did they revoke the ability to visually compare monthly periods?!? Most search marketers I know like to compare overall figures from month to month since it tends to reduce some of the spikiness of short-term bursts, and lots of folks are using monthly billing cycles and such.
If I’m mistaken and there’s some where to set the period to display monthly, I hope someone will let me know. I hunted and hunted, and checked their help section to no avail. If they really did revoke monthly display, I can only reiterate further how bad this so-called “upgrade” really was! All glitz with little beneficial substance.
The Analytics team should borrow some of the members of the Google Maps team, since comparatively the Maps team seems to get it right a lot more lately.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/01/2007
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Filed under: Analytics, Google, Tracking and Reporting Analytics, Google-Analytics, Internet-Statistics, Statistics
Google Maps adds Microformat support to results
I was pleased to see that Google Maps team announced support of the hCard microformat today in map search results. This will make the export of address/contact info easier for users, and pave the way for perhaps greater integration between the map results and other applications. If you have a browser with a Microformat plugin feature, you can easily export listing information for use in Outlook or other applications you may have:
Can we hope that Google’s support of Microformats at the front-end of their application might also indicate that they may eventually support Microformats at the back-end? As you may recall, in local SEO tips I posted last year, I recommended that local business webmasters not just include their business address on their site pages, but to do so in the hCard Microformat. I was probably the first to propose doing this for local search optimization, even though there’s been no overt mention from the search engine representatives that this is necessary or desirable. So, why did I recommend doing that?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/31/2007
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps Google-Maps, microformats
Google browser rumors resurrected
According to Ryan Naraine, Google has hired well-known browser hacker Michal Zalewski to help make their products more secure.
Zalewski has an established history of exposing security holes in various software products, particularly the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/30/2007
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Filed under: Google, Security Browser-Security, Google, Google-Browser, Hackers
Pay-Per-Action Ads may open up Google to being a victim of fraud
I was just reading Barry Schwartz’s report that Google is opting-in some AdSense publishers into Pay Per Action (CPA) ads. He poses the question of why would Google push these ads on the publishers who haven’t asked for it? The immediate answer I come up with is that this could actually be a test to try to detect fraud, since CPA is thought to be less prone to exploit. After all, the publisher would only get paid for these ads if someone buys – not just clicks on the ads on their sites. Perhaps the publishers that are getting opted-in are ones for which Google has had some question about the quality of click-through in their regular PPC ads.
I’ve been thinking that an unpublished problem with Google’s pay-per-action product is that Google itself is likely to become more a victim of fraud with these types of ads. Read on and I’ll describe…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/26/2007
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Filed under: Advertising, Google, Paid Search, Tricks, Worst Practices click-fraud, Cost-Per-Action, CPA, Google-AdSense, Pay-Per-Action
Matt Cutts reveals underscores now treated as word separators in Google
After the recent WordCamp conference, Stephan Spencer reports here and here that Matt Cutts stated that Google now treats underscores as white-space characters or word separators when interpreting URLs. Read on for more details and my take on it…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/26/2007
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Filed under: Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Google, Keywords-in-URLs, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
comScore Report Likely Misses Large Internet Segments
comScore released a list of Rankings of Top Worldwide Properties last week, but there’s likely a large segment of internet usage completely missed by their methodologies. I recently blogged about how Domainers Can’t Get No Respect (a followup piece to my 2nd installment of “Domaining & Subdomaining In The Local Space“), because they haven’t had good independent validation of some of their traffic and conversion rate figures. When I wrote that, I didn’t realize that some of them had apparently attempted to get independent validation, but were thwarted by the methodologies of audience measurment services. Frank Schilling let me know that he’d tried to get audited by comScore a few years ago, and they’d failed miserably, registering only about one-thirtieth of the US traffic they’re really getting.
Being somewhat familiar with comScore’s data gathering and audience share estimation methods, I can easily see how Domainers’ sites could get drastically under-represented in comScore’s figures. Read on for details…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/25/2007
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Filed under: Analytics, Market Data comScore, Domainers, Domaining, internet-analytics
News: Pat Marshall new Chief New Media Officer for Yellow Book
The Wall Street Journal reports that Patrick Marshall, Superpages.com veteran, has just been named as Chief New Media Officer for Yellow Book.
I used to work with Pat back when he was President of New Media Services at GTE, overseeing Superpages.com back when it was brand new, and I know him to be a fantastic businessman. Pat is well-known in the yellow pages industry and was the recipient of The Kelsey Group’s New Technologies Leadership Award in 2002.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/24/2007
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Filed under: Local Search, News, Yellow Pages Patrick-Marshall, superpages, Yellow Pages, Yellow-Book
Is SEO Awareness Dropping? Google Trends Shows it May Be
Using Google Trends, I was noticing how searches in Google for “Search Engine Optimization” seems to be dropping over the last two years:
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/24/2007
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Filed under: Market Data, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Google-Trends, Search Engine Optimization, search-marketing, SEO
