Thursday, May 8th, 2008
This SEO question is from Joel Cohen, RestaurantMarketing.com
SEO Question:
If I have a furniture store website in a first page position on Google for “home furniture Houston” and I decide to do a separate website for my “kids furniture division” and it gets a top position for “kids furniture Houston” and I do two more separate sites for (example) outdoor furniture and recreation room furniture and they all get top positions on Google, AND they all link to each other, does Google discourage this? It’s like building my own linking network.
SEO Answer:
This sounds like a sound business practice. Too often in the Internet world we base on decisions on what Google would want. Google, in fact, says to market your site as if the search engines weren’t involved. Straight from Google’s Guidelines, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” I personally would say this is a solid idea and focusing on product lines on each website can be a seen as a clever business decision. Interlinkng between them is would also be encouraged. Why would it be considered bad to link to your similar themed sites? If you owned more than one brick and mortar store you would certainly point visitors to it, so why should the web be any different.
You should make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your sites. If you are going to break out your outdoor furniture from your “main” furniture site, be sure you aren’t showing the same products with the same descriptions. Interlinking should be done strategically and with an eye towards marketing. Just don’t place a link in the footer, create a page that talks about the other site and its line of products and place multiple links to the other site. You want to drive targeted traffic that is well-informed of its link destination.
In summary, creating topically focused product sites isn’t a bad thing, it is a business decision that should be thought out. There will be more work and stores to admin, of course and cross-site linking won’t encourage visitors to view other related products as much as everything being on the same site. Pros and cons to each, as with most things in life. Just don’t let Google control your business decisions, after all, controlling the search results is enough power, don’t you agree?
If you have a question you would like us to answer, please send to contact[at]bigoakinc.com.
Due to time constraints and the fact we run an SEO business we may not answer all questions.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in Google, Link Building, SEO Questions & Answers | 4 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
Anyone think Google isn’t the most powerful company on the planet? Well, you are wrong. And besides that they know how to keep their employees happy. Feed them. And they did to the tune of $72 million dollars.
Wrap your head around that number. Wow. Some small companies hope to bring in 1 million sales a year. Here’s a tip for you, start a food catering business and cater to Google! 
Get your fill and read the full story on Softpedia.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Update: 4/20/08, Of course as soon as I post on my blog about Alexa’s inaccurate ranking system they decide to update their system. Time will tell if it is an better.
SEO companies are at the front lines when it comes to educating customers and potential customers about what is important when looking at web statistics. I guess I’ve hit my breaking point, which is usually when I start blogging, about Alexa rankings. We have clients that ask why there Alexa ranking is so high (which is bad) and even though they are ranking in the top 5 for their most treasured keyword phrases. They have high traffic that is converting above their industry standards, but still they Alexa ranking rears its ugly head too often.
So I want to put this issue to pasture and definitively state that we do not care about Alexa ranking and do not monitor Alexa rankings, other to see estimated trends for pure entertainment value. They are of little importance an not worth the time to view them. Not only are the extremely inaccurate, but they can also give a false sense of security when they inflate your importance. You must remember that unless you have the Alexa toolbar on your site, your web visits won’t be counted in the Alexa stats. What does this mean for the numbers that Alexa shows you? Well, think about who would have the Alexa toolbar installed: mostly people involved with Internet marketing such as SEO people, webmasters, consultants and other people whose job it is to track statistics. These aren’t your normal site surfers and they skew the traffic numbers higher for Internet-related sites. If you have been reading this blog long enough you know I’m a big believer in actual case studies and real data to prove a point. To that end I have done some research to show the Alexa Ranking Myth and break its spell.
The first chart shows stats from Alexa for this site (BigOakInc.com, a Internet marketing site) and a smoothie recipe site (Smoothieweb.com, a non-Internet related site) and you can see that Alexa shows the Big Oak site with more than double the traffic of Smoothie Web. If you were to view or stats on Alexa it reports our site as being in the top 100,000 sites on the web, specifically we are ranked at 94,204. My, aren’t we so important! Now,don’t get me wrong, we have a nice number of visitors, but to think we are in the top 100,000 sites is a bit much. While SmoothieWeb.com, a highly trafficked site is only ranked at 310,192.
Now that we know what Alexa is reporting, let us look at actual site statistics as reported by Google Analytics. If you look at the graphs below you can see the dramatic difference from Alexa’s reported rankings in traffic over the same 3-month period. BigOakInc.com has 20,311 visitors which is a very respectable number for a B2B site. But when compared to SmoothieWeb.com’s 210,190 visitors you can easily see that Alexa rankings are highly skewed towards technical and Internet-related websites. SmoothieWeb.com had 10x the visitor traffic according to Google Analytics but less than half according to Alexa’s estimates.
The BigOakInc.com site obviously pulls traffic from our competitors, webmasters in charge of finding a honest SEO company and research types for our informative SEO blog. And these users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, if only to inflate their own Alexa ranking by visiting their own sites daily. And before you ask, no, I do not have the Alexa toolbar installed and neither does any of the staff at Big Oak. I think you can agree more web users would be looking for a delicious smoothie recipe.
To sum up, do not look at Alexa rankings with any more than an passing curiosity, for that is all it is. Instead look at your site’s analytics and try to see where you are getting traffic and what traffic is converting. Look at the keywords your site is ranking for and how the visitors from those terms are using your site. In short, look at all the data you can around your actual visitors and leave the estimated numbers based on a toolbar installation to those who need the ego stroking of a high Alexa ranking. And if anyone asks you about your Alexa ranking, please refer them to this post.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Posted in Choosing SEO Company, SEO Mistakes, SEO Research, SEO Tools, Website Conversion | 10 Comments »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
SearchMe.com, the new visual search engine backed by Sequoia, has taken what seems like an obvious concept and built a search engine around it. Words take on totally different meanings depending on the context. If you type the keyword “comic” into a search engine, you could be intending to search for a comic book or a stand-up comic. So why doesn’t Yahoo or Google ask the end user for context clues? Seems like an obvious prompt, doesn’t it? SearchMe thought so. And now we have a search engine based on the idea.
Do a search for “comic” on SearchMe, and you’ll be able to pick amongst a slew of categories to narrow your search. As SearchMe increases in popularity and expands, so will its categories. The end goal is to have such a comprehensive list of categories that the user will be able to pigeonhole any conceivably confusing search term into the right category. This can certainly save the user heaps of time. The problem is that if the algorithm is worse than Google’s, the user won’t care.
But I’ve been fiddling around with SearchMe, and the algorithm seems pretty solid. I’ve not yet come across any search results that I felt were way off. Their algorithm appears to do a good job of categorizing sites properly. When you tell it to only show sites relating to comic books, instead of comics in general, the results are relevant. Must be a lot of latent semantic indexing at play.
Ironically, the worst feature of SearchMe is its visualization element. The website preview screen is too large and distracting. If they wanted to give the user a glimpse of what a site in the SERPS looks like, they should have just copied ASK’s binocular feature. Hovering over a result to see what a site looks like is more pleasing than a bulky window. If you could actually read the content of the website inside that bulky preview window, then SearchMe would have a hit a goldmine in terms of innovation, but you can’t because the text is too small. Frankly, it’s probably better that you can’t because publishers who sell ads on their site wouldn’t be particularly ecstatic about that feature.
SearchMe is relying on user feedback to improve their search results. This seems wise since a single person has the ability to catch mistakes that could affect millions of search queries down the line. I noticed a few flaws with certain keywords. A search for the keyword “bug” brings up ten appropriate categories, including insects, web development, and computer programming. But it doesn’t bring up a car company category, so people searching for the Volkswagen Bug are left out to dry. A search for the keyword “rover” correctly brings up the car company category, which will please Range Rover fans, but it doesn’t bring up the aeronautics category. If you were hoping to dig deeper into information about the Mars Rover, you’d have to do it without the special category tool.
These mistakes speak volumes about the impact of human intervention since it’s unlikely that SearchMe’s own algorithm would have ever caught them. If SearchMe’s popularity ever explodes, they can thank the beta testers. Making the feedback feature so prominent was a smart maneuver.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Posted in Out on a Limb, Search Engines | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
I accidentally did a backlink check on Google.com today. And right before I went to close the browser window my eye caught something very amusing, to an optimizer’s mind anyway.
If you subscribe to the belief that Yahoo shows backlinks in order of importance (e.g. the first backlink is the most important and so on.) then it must be surmised that the first backlink listed for Google by Yahoo Site Explorer is the most important backlink for Google. Funny enough Yahoo considers a backlink from Adobe better than a backlink from Google (see image below), although it is a subpage from within Adobe.com (the Acrobat Reader Download page).
After this initial revelation, I then decided to check the backlinks to Yahoo.com. Surely Yahoo wouldn’t consider another website more important than their own, would they? As it turns out, I was wrong and PHP.net was listed first.
PHP.net was listed under Google.com in the first search. Following this logic, one would surmise that Yahoo admits to PHP.net being more important than Yahoo.com, and we already knew Google.com and Adobe.com are more important than PHP.net. So I am led to believe that Yahoo admits to Google being more important than itself and Adobe is the Grand Poobah of all backlinks.
All this of course means little to nothing, but I did smile at the irony. You can check for yourself by clicking this link and this link.
And don’t forget to tune in next episode when we reveal that Google admits…
AltaVista is the number one search engine!
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb, Yahoo Search | 11 Comments »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Dr. Peter Carr is a long-time reader of our blog and I have corresponded with him previously. He has done quite well performing his own SEO tactics to his Seattle Chiropractic site. He was gracious enough to write this post about his success with local search rankings. I wrote a similar blog post on posting reviews last year.
I am a small service business, (chiropractor, to be exact) and I really only make money when people come through the doors. I perform many SEO tactics for my website www.dynamicclinic.com to the point where I’m #1 for Google searching for “Seattle chiropractor”. But people don’t come to chiropractors because of an organic #1 ranking, they come because of referrals. That’s where I’ve found that companies like www.Citysearch.com (a Ticketmaster company), www.Judysbook.com and www.Yelp.com come into play.
People (customers) want to go to hair stylists and chiropractors because their friends go there, and barring that, they want someone to say they like them.
Citysearch is a better bet in my opinion, as they have linked with Google to add their reviews on Google Local, which gives customers a map to the business location and number of ratings. I’m no expert, but it seems like only Judysbook and Citysearch do this.
Google local is trying to get in on the act, too, where people can leave reviews right on Google. Google prefers you leave your ratings and reviews with them directly.
The bottom line for SEO is this: Search engines exist to give the end user the BEST result for their search. If the search engine doesn’t, then people will go somewhere else. Yahoo accomplished this using humans “back in the day” to review individual sites, and now Google is doing something very similar, as well, with these review sites. After all, Google would love to refer you to the best chiropractor in Seattle (me) and have you be happy with their recommendation. Reviews provide that opportunity much better than, or at least more “humanly,” than any algorithm that Google could possibly come up with.
To that end, I request that all my patients who had great results with my service leave a glowing review on Citysearch or other review site, so that others can see how awesome we are. If you are in a service-oriented business, this is one area you simply can’t overlook in your SEO campaign.
Dr. Peter Carr, www.dynamicclinic.com
Popularity: 12% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Google has updated its advanced search page. While most people probably don’t look at the advanced search page very often, it has some nice features, especially for an SEO Expert. One of the best features is the ability to see 100 results at a time rather than the usual 10. Add the CustomizeGoogle Addon for the Firefox browser and you can view numbers beside your listing-now you don’t have to count to find you are at position 67, there will be numbers beside each listing to show you.
Also, selecting the Language as English will more realistic results. (You can also select the English language in the preferences.)
For example searching for ‘big oak seo’ returns 77,900 English pages with results when English is selected language. If you search with Any Language selected the results return 88,100 pages. Not a huge difference, right? It gets worse with more generic phrases. Searching for ’search engine optimization’ with English shows 1,900,000 and without shows 36,900,000. These number will fluctuate, but using English as the language will get you more accurate resutls, especially when you are trying to factor the level of competition for a key phrase you may be targeting.
Of course you can filter your searches through the Advance Search form in a variety of ways and that’s for the for the power user as well as the Mom looking for the best place to groom her pet. Getting familiar with the advanced features can help you do research for keywords as well as finding information about how to grow an avocado plant or a video on growing an avocado seed.
For the SEO enthusiast or the small Internet business owner you can search by date, usage rights and even where the keywords show up on the page. All helpful information when trying to create your SEO plan. Google provides a wealth of information you just have to know where to start digging. The Advanced Search page by Google is a great place to start.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Research, SEO Tools | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
What if there was a search engine that actually understood natural English language search queries? Before you say, “What do you mean? Google understands English,” understand that I am being literal. What if there was a search engine that you could talk to like a person and actually have it spit back relevant results? What if you could type in a search query like “Who mocked Tony Blair yesterday?” and receive the exact result you were looking for.
Well, that’s the goal of the Silicon Valley start up Powerset.com, and they mean business. This isn’t just some company based out of a nineteen year-old’s garage. Some very powerful and influential people are behind the project, including the co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel, and Dr. Jay Tenenbaum, the founder of the first company to conduct a commercial Internet transaction, Enterprise Integration Technologies.
Powerset seems to understand that if it wants to challenge Google in search, it can’t try to beat it at its own game. It realizes that it must innovate by offering something different, just as Google realized. While the major search engine companies gave up on the idea of natural language search engines long ago, the people behind Powerset kept dreaming.
According to Powerset’s blog, Powerset is superior to the other engines because it can analyze a given query for its meaning and then look for sentences in its index that have a similar meaning. Powerset matches the structure and meaning of a given query with the structure and meaning of every sentence and document in the index. Then it returns results that match the exact intent of the searcher.
Therefore, if you did a Powerset search for “Who mocked Tony Blair?” Powerset would understand that you were looking only for results about who mocked Blair, not merely for passages that had the phrases “mocked” (and its synonyms) and “Blair” in them.
This screenshot from their private beta demonstrates the search in action. In this example, Powerset is only pulling results from Wikipedia.
Now, check out this screenshot of a Powerset search query for “Who proved Fermat’s last theorem?” If the vast majority of search results are as accurate as that one, then Google may have a real fight on its hands, even though the battle will clearly be an uphill one for Powerset.
If you wish to join in the private beta testing of Powerset, you can sign up here.
Presuming that Powerset lives up to the hype when it launches, what do you estimate the odds are that it can challenge Google?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Out on a Limb | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 21st, 2007
How many companies can make Google Blink? At least one and that company is eBay. Take a look at the no. 74 in the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business as reported by CNNMoney.com. You’ll read that Google invited eBay’s top sellers to a party promoting Google’s Checkout payment system, a competitor with eBay’s PayPal. eBay found out and pulled its ads from Google for a week, just to test. “Mysteriously” Google’s party was canceled.
Its good to know Google “respects” someone. Even it is must cost them a lot of money before they do
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
Having the best blog in the world, won’t do any good if no one knows it exists. Make sure Google visits and indexes all your posts with a few simple plugins. These are for Wordpress only, but why would you be using anything else? The following Wordpress plugins will help provide numerous links to older posts on your blog that might otherwise be buried. The added benefit is your blog readers will also be inclined to read more posts when using these plugins.
Similar Posts
URL: http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/
This plugin will search the text of all posts and display other posts which are similar or related. This will help provide links to older posts making them more accessible to the reader and to the search engines.
All in one SEO Pack
URL: http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/
This plugin is a must have SEO plugin and combines all many SEO features in one plugin, where beforehand you needed two or three. You can control the following options with this plugin:
- Define your home page title, description and keywords
- Define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
- Use categories for META keywords
- Avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
- Autogenerate descriptions
This particularly replaces the SEO Title Tag many blogs use.
Top Posts
URL: http://www.macalua.com/2007/02/01/top-posts-by-category-plugin/
This plugin will post your most read blog posts automatically a blog page, providing a good starting point for new readers. While giving new readers some direction if you have an overwhelming number amount of posts, this will also provide the search engines with a direct link from a top level page to deep posts in your blog. Think of it as a super sitemap.
You can also create a smaller top post list that can be shown on every post of you blog in the right column.
Making sure your blog is well read by readers and well known by search engines is a critical step towards increasing your blog’s popularity.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Blogging, SEO Tools | 6 Comments »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007
Any good SEO campaign will put the emphasis on ranking your site for the content of the site. But overlooking the images on the site can be a big mistake especially if your site is selling products which naturally use imagery as part of the sales pitch. So why not use those image to draw visitors through organic image search?
Your first step should be to set up a Google Account where you can use Webmaster Tools. Inside the Webmaster tools you will find an option under Tools named “Enable enhanced image search”. When this option is enabled Google will start cataloging your images for placement in the search engine results for images which can increase your traffic, especially if you can show in the search results that show images above the organic search results. (See example of Google search with images above organic results for the search term ‘oak tree’)
After you have instructed Google to look for your images, you want to be sure your images are telling Google and the other search engines exactly what they are about. How do you do this? Here are some things to pay attention to and think about when using images. I’ve listed them in order of “my importance”.
- Image Size Does Matter - Larger images tend to rank better. Most image results that show in the top three I have done test searches on have been over 280 pixels in both directions. Bigger images make sense to show first, all other things being equal. I would shoot for 300 x 300 to be safe.
- Image Close to Relevant Text - Keyword above or below the image in the same DIV -or- keyword in the same paragraph as the image, close to the image. Keyword should be in the same <td> (table cell) as the image.
- Page Title & Page Theme - The title, content and image should all be connected.
- File Name - It can be difficult to add the name of the image to the file name, especially if the shopping cart software doesn’t allow it, but when you can, be descriptive.
- Alt Tags - Alt tags are designed to provide alternative text when the images cannot be displayed. They should be descriptive of the image. Example: <img src=”oak-tree.jpg” width=”200″ height=”350″ alt=”Oak Tree”>
- Image Title Tags - This text shows up when you rollover the image in a popup. They should also describe image. Example: <img src=”oak-tree.jpg” width=”200″ height=”350″ alt=”Oak Tree” title=”Oak Tree”>
- Image Sitemap - Okay, this is an idea which may or may not be of any help, but it certainly can’t hurt and if you feel your images are important enough to help your rankings then creating a sitemap with descriptive links to your important images might be the extra boost to get your images to the top of the search engine results.
Alt/Title for images have been spammed too much (like Meta tags) so I don’t think they play much of a factor at all anymore in images search.Please share any successes you may have had with image search or ideas you have tried. I’m especially interested in anyone who has tried an image sitemap or what you think of this idea.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
Want to know what Shell is doing?
