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
Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream
I’ve had a lot of questions about my new work since I joined Netconcepts a little over three months ago as their Lead Strategist for their GravityStream product/service. My primary role is to bring SEO guidance to clients using GravityStream, and to provide thought leadership to the ongoing development of the product and business.
GravityStream is a technical solution that provides outsourced search optimization to large, dynamic websites. Automatic SEO, if you will. Here’s what it does…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/17/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, Dynamic Sites, HTML Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, Tools Automatic-Search-Engine-Optimization, GravityStream, Netconcepts, Outsourced-Search-Engine-Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Build It Wrong & They Won’t Come: Coca-Cola’s Store
I just wrote an article comparing Coke’s and Pepsi’s homepage redirection, concluding that Pepsi actually does a better job, though both of them did ultimately nonoptimal setup for the purposes of search optimization. Clunky homepage redirection isn’t the only search marketing sin that Coca-Cola has done — their online product shopping catalog is very badly designed for SEO as well, and I’ll outline a number of reasons why.
In this article and in the redirection article, I’m criticising Coca-Cola’s technical design quite a bit, but I’m not trying to embarrass them — like any good American boy, I love Coca-Cola (particularly Coke Classic and Cherry Coke). In fact, this could ultimately benefit them, if they take my free assessment and use it as a guide for improving their site. I’m doing this because Coca-Cola is the top most-recognized brand worldwide, and the sorts of errors they’re making in their natural search channel are all too common in ecommerce sites. I chose Coca-Cola’s e-store because they make such a great example of the sorts of things that online marketers need to focus upon. If such a juggernaut of a company, with huge advertising and marketing budgets makes these sorts of mistakes, you could be making them, too.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/16/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, brand names, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Worst Practices Coca-Cola, Coke, Etail-Optimization, Online-Catalog-Optimization, Online-Store-Optimization, SEO
Google Quality Scores for Natural Search Optimization
Google made big waves in the paid search marketing industry when they began introducing a Quality Score which impacted cost and rankings of AdWords advertisements. Similar quality scoring methods are likely in use as ranking criteria for Google’s natural search results as well, and Google’s Webmaster Tools may hint at some of the criteria. Here are some details of that quality scoring criteria and some ways for you to improve rankings with it.
Google provides a very rough “formula” for their AdWords Quality Score:
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/02/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Google, google-webmaster-tools, Quality-Scores, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Spamscore
To Have WWW or Not To Have WWW – That is the Question
Over time, I’ve become a fan of the No-WWW Initiative.
What is that, you might ask? It’s a simple proposal for sites to do away with using the WWW-dot-domainname format for URLs, and to instead go with the non-WWW version of domains instead. Managing your site’s main domain/subdomain name is one basic piece of search engine optimization, and this initiative can be a guide for how to decide which domain name will become the dominant one for a site. Read on for more info…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/28/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Domain Names, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, URLs Canonicalization, Domain Names, SEO, subdomains
MarketingProfs Webinar Today: SEO for Large Websites
I neglected to mention that I’m to be interviewed today by Stephan Spencer in a MarketingProfs webinar we’ve entitled “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Really Big Websites” at 12:00 Noon, Eastern Time. We’ll go over a number of basics and issues for performing SEO at an enterprise level, and I think you’ll find some good information in the topics we’ll be covering. The cost is $99 and the seminar will go for 90 minutes. If you can’t attend it today, don’t worry because there will be a recorded version of it available later.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/28/2007
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Filed under: Seminars Enterprise-Search-Marketing, Marketing-Seminars, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO-Seminars, SEO-Webinars
When Google Changes Page Titles
As most webmasters are aware, the text put within a page’s <TITLE> tags appears in two places – at the top of the browser window when a user is viewing a page, and it appears as the link anchor text on Google’s and other search engine results pages. But there are some rare occasions when Google will display different link text on their result pages than what is used in the <TITLE> text. So, why is this happening, and could it be happening to you?
I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/12/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, Google, HTML Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO DMOZ, Google, html-title, html-title-tag, Open-Directory-Project, page-titles, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERP-display
Advanced Search Engine Optimization for College & University Websites
I earlier posted some basic tips for SEO of University & College websites here on Natural Search Blog. I’m now circling back around to post some advanced tips for optimization of .EDU sites. Some of these tips are more along the lines of helping out with overall marketing, though using the college’s or university’s web presence to accomplish it. Even those ancillary efforts can contribute to the overall online marketing and natural search optimization success.
I wrote those tips after getting a number of interested questions from educational professionals attending the AMA Hot Topics seminar that Stephan and I provided in San Fran a few weeks ago. Read on for the details of my .EDU secret sauce!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/24/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO College-SEO, EDU-SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, University-SEO
How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy
My colleague, P.J. Fusco just wrote a great article over at ClickZ on How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy. In it, she provides a good overview of what’s good and bad about “Web 2.0” stuff, and how some of the technology involved can challenge the goal of natural search optimization of a website. It’s well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with these issues.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/23/2007
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Filed under: SEO, technology AJAX, SEO, Social-Media, Web-2.0
Flickr, why have you screwed up the ALT text?!?
Flickr,
you do a lot that I love – you’re easy to use, and you’ve built-in such elegantly simple and strong features. You’re engineered to function well for SEO, too – your pages are built with spider-friendly URLs, you have multiple link hierarchies, and you allow users to enter in lots of custom text which can allow for optimal TITLEs, H1 text, description captions, user-tagging, and cool geotagging. you even have a fairly cool blog to communicate with your community of users. But, you’ve messed something up this year that irritates the heck out of me:
Flickr’s ALT text is blank on the image pages!
Yes, it’s true – on each image’s main page, the image has nothing in the ALT portion of the image:
<img src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/36/112354736_1de2bc367c.jpg?v=0″ alt=”” width=”500″ height=”375″ onload=”show_notes_initially();” class=”reflect”>
I’m pretty sure that your ALT text was working in the past, but at some point, one of your developers made it so that the image’s custom title text no longer gets populated into the IMG ALT parameter, reducing one of the prime signals that inform search engines as to what keywords apply to an image.
Search engines aren’t the only ones that use that ALT text — it’s also important for the vision-impaired who surf the internet using “talking browsers”. Yeah, yeah — I know — why would the vision-impaired be surfing Flickr to begin with? Well, they can run across the pages when searching for various types of information, just like everyone else.
Please, please, Flickr: fix your ALT text!
Yours truly,
A Devoted Fan
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/09/2007
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Filed under: Image Optimization, SEO flickr, image-alt, image-alt-text, img-alt, SEO
