text link

Check out this backlink software program. It is a really in depth link popularity checker from Backlink Reporter. It doesn't just tell you how many links, it gives you an in depth analysis of the links.

Part IV Continued: Titles, Meta Data, & URL Structures

For the next few weeks, I'm working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Title Tags

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page's content. It creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:

The NFL's homepage features the title tag "Official Site of the National Football League"

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing software, but this location has been noted to receive a relatively small amount of attention from users, making it the least important of the three.

"National Football League" appears in bold at the top of the search result listing for www.nfl.com

Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will "bold" (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.

Keyword Use in the Title Tag (from Search Engine Ranking Factors)

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden title tags is for ranking at the search engines. The above screenshot comes from SEOmoz's survey of 37 influential thought leaders and practitioners in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:

• Be Mindful of Length - 65 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis - "..." to indicate when a title tag has been cut off), and sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you're targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.
• Place Important Keywords Close to the Front - The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they'll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results (at least, according to SEOmoz's testing and experience).
• Leverage Branding - At SEOmoz, we love to start every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach - think about what matters to your site (or your client's site).
  
• Consider Readability and Emotional Impact - Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it's important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor's first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible.

For more advice on title tag optimization, see this post from SEOmoz - Best Practices for Title Tags.

Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website's content. Each of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use:

• Meta Robots
  This tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major engines) on a page level (for site-wide spider control, the robots.txt file is a better choice). There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page:
  • Index/NoIndex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines' index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary.
  • Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
  • Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results.
  • Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page's title and URL in the search results.
  • NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
  • NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results
  
  SYNTAX:
  
  The tag above would tell spiders not to index the page, to refrain from archiving a copy while following the links, and to refrain from using DMOZ as a description in the search results. The "NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE" combination may be redundant for any search engines who do not archive non-indexed pages, but nonetheless it doesn't hurt to be thorough.
  
• Meta Description
  The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page's content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results:
  
  
  The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords (notice how Google "bolds" the searched keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.
  
  Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters (as in the Balboa Park example above), so it's generally wise to stay in these limits.
  
  SYNTAX:
  
  For more on meta description tags, see Making the Most of Meta Description Tags from the SEOmoz blog.
  
• Meta Keywords
  The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization. For more on the history and a full account of why meta keywords has fallen in disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.
  
• Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-After, Meta Content Type, etc. - although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the process, and so I'll leave them to John Mueller of Google's Webmaster Central division to answer in greater detail - Meta Tags & Web Search.

URL Structures

URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations, including:

Above, the green text shows the URL for SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

The URL as it appears in the browser window

URLs make an appearance in the web browser's address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.

The URL above is used as the link anchor text pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.

URLs are frequently utilized as links by third parties, and as such, carry anchor text that is interpreted by search engines and users alike. Short, descriptive, compelling, keyword-laden URLs can thus provide both click-through and search ranking benefits.

Below are several guidelines to construct great URLs:

• Employ Empathy
  Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you'd expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don't need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.
• Shorter is Better
  While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc) and will be fully visible in the search results.
• Keyword Use is Important (but Overuse is Dangerous)
  If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes - overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search engines, and even people!).
• Go Static
  With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, there's no excuse not to create simple, static URLs. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing (SEOmoz itself switched from dynamic URLs - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog?id=123, to static URLS - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, in 2007 and saw a 15% rise in search traffic over the following 6 weeks).
• Choose Descriptives Whenever Possible
  Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words. For example, a URL like www.thestore.com/hardware/screwdrivers is far more usable and valuable than www.thestore.com/cat33/item4326.
• Use Hyphens to Separate Words
  Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL, as in the SEOmoz 11 Best Practices for URLs example above.

For more information about URL Structure, see the SEOmoz post - 11 Best Practices for URLs.

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Sorry I've been away from the blog so long. I needed a break, and am finally getting a bit of a real holiday. SEOmoz is closed tomorrow (New Year's Eve) and Tuesday (New Year's Day), but we'll be back up and running Wednesday, January 2nd, and are looking forward to bringing you more great stuff in the New Year.

Part 4 Continued - Keyword Usage & Targeting

For the next few weeks, I'm working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Keyword Usage & Targeting

Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for "dog," it's extremely wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the indexable content of your document.

Keywords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go something like this:

When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data, such as the order of the words ("running shoes" vs. "shoes running"), spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of those terms provide additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.

For obvious reasons, search engines measure the ways keywords are used on pages to help determine the "relevance" of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to "optimize" a page's rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text, and meta data.

The Myth of Keyword Density

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase "keyword density" seems to arise. This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth in this guide, I'll simply reference Dr. Edel Garcia's seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.

The notion of keyword density values predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an IR concept. What is worse, KD plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weights to terms. Why then do many optimizers still believe in KD values? The answer is simple: misinformation.

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms (l = 1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tfKD = 20/1000 = 0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500. Evidently, a keyword density analyzer does not establish which document is more relevant. A density analysis or KD ratio tells us nothing about: = 20), then a keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both documents

1. the relative distance between keywords in documents (proximity)
2. where in a document the terms occur (distribution)
3. the co-citation frequency between terms (co-occurrence)
4. the main theme, topic, and sub-topics (on-topic issues) of the documents

Thus, KD is divorced from content quality, semantics, and relevancy.

Dr. Garcia's background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help "optimize" a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization - without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet's collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.

However, keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines' ranking algorithms (as we've discussed in Section I: Retrieval & Rankings), and we can still leverage some effective "best practices" for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to "optimized." Here at SEOmoz, we engage in a lot of testing and get to see a huge number of search results and shifts based on keyword usage tactics. When we work with our clients, this is the process we recommend:

Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there's a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.
At least once in bold. You can use either the or tag, as search engines consider them equivalent (note: at this time we've only actually tested Google for the vs. equivalency).
At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can sometimes bring valuable traffic.
Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines).
Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains (this is a bit complex - see this blog post for details).

An optimal page for the phrase "running shoes" would thus look something like:

Keyword usage is NOT an exact science, and it is certainly valuable to engage in testing, tweaking, and experimentation on your own sites and pages. Just keep in mind that user experience should never be sacrificed for the sake of optimization - search engines want the same things as humans, and generally speaking, if your page can earn one or two extra links by providing great content, this will far outweigh any benefit from stuffing an extra keyword repetition. SEOmoz's Term Targeting tool is designed to help accomplish precisely this feat and provides a grade to indicate how well (or poorly) a particular page is following the above suggestions.

As you perform keyword targeting, remember that search engines have advanced semantic analysis abilities - this means that they can not only detect whether your page has the right keywords on it, but whether that page is actually targeting the proper subject(s). Thus, embedding keywords as we've described above with perfect precision on a page that's actually about laser hair removal is going to be immediately apparent to the search engines. Instead of merely inserting keywords on a page and expecting rankings, make sure that the document itself contains high quality content describing or on the topic of your keyword of choice.

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In the next installment, I'll finish up the basics of search-engine friendly design and cover:

• Titles, URLs, Meta Data, and Semantic Markup
• Information Architecture
• Canonicalization and Duplicate Versions of Content
• Redirection, Hosting, & Server Issues

Part 4 - The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development

For the next few weeks, I'm working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Search engines, as we've shown above, are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content to retrieve and display in the results. In this section of the guide, we'll focus on the specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they're optimally structured for search engines and human visitors. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in the site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.

Indexable Content

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content - the material available to visitors of your site - must be in HTML text content. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

• Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned "alt attribues" in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content
• Images can also be shown to visitors as replacements for text by using CSS styles
• Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page
• Video & Audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines

Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like SEO-Browser, a website that lets you see web pages the same way search engine spiders do, you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

For example, below, I have an image of SEOmoz's homepage:

The visual images of the Seattle skyline and the graphic elements give the page a great look and feel, but let's see what the search engines can access:

Using the SEO Browser site, we're able to see that to a search engine, SEOmoz's homepage is simply a collection of text and links (which is exactly what we'd want to see).

Now let's check out another favorite site of mine, Orisinal, a clever collection of wonderfully designed, Flash-based games.

The graphics are great, but there's not a lot of text on the page - it just says "Orisinal games." Perhaps that's all the page needs to rank for?

Uh oh... Via SEO Browser, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There's not even text telling us that the page contains the Orisinal Games. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games.

If you're curious about exactly what terms and phrases search engine can see on a webpage, SEOmoz has a nifty tool called "Term Extractor" that will display words & phrases ordered by frequency. However, it's wise to not only check for text content but to also use a tool like SEO Browser to double-check that the pages you're building are visible to the engines. It's very hard to rank if you don't even appear in the keyword databases :)

Crawlable Link Structures

On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure - one that lets their spiders browse the pathways of a website - in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obsfucating their navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indices. Below, I've illustrated how this problem can happen:

In the example above, Google's colorful spider has reached page "A" and sees links to pages "B" and "E." However, even though C & D might be important pages on the site, the spider has no way to reach them (or even know they exist) because no direct, crawlable links point to those pages. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist - great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won't make any difference at all if the spiders can't reach those pages in the first place.

To start, let's take a quick look at the anatomy of a standard HTML link:

In the above illustration, the "Jon Wye's Custom Designed Belts." The tag closes the link, so that elements later on in the page will not have the link attribute applied to them.

This is the most basic format of a link - and it is eminently understandable to the search engines. The spiders know that they should add this link to the engine's link graph of the web, use it to calculate query-independent variables (like Google's PageRank), and follow it to index the contents of the referenced page.

Now let's look at some common reasons why pages may not be reachable:

• Links in Submission-Required Forms
  Forms can include something as basic as a drop down menu or as complex as a full-blown survey. In either case, search spiders will not attempt to "submit" forms and thus, any content or links that would be accessible via a form are invisible to the engines.
• Links only accessible through Search
  Although this relates directly to the above warning on forms, it's such a common problem that it bears mentioning. Spiders will not attempt to perform searches to find content, and thus, it's estimated that millions of pages are hidden behind completely inaccessible walls, doomed to anonymity until a spidered page links to it.
• Links in Un-Parseable Javascript
  If you use Javascript for links, you may find that search engines either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded within. Standard HTML links should replace Javascript (or accompany it) on any page where you'd like spiders to crawl.
• Links in Flash, Java, or other Plug-Ins
  The links embedded inside the Orisinal site (from our above example) is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Although dozens of games are listed and linked to on the Orisinal page, no spider can reach them through the site's link structure, rendering them invisible to the engines (and un-retrievable by searchers performing a query).
• Links pointing to pages blocked by the Meta Robots tag or Robots.txt
  The Meta Robots tag (described in detail here) and the Robots.txt file (full description here) both allow a site owner to restrict spider access to a page. Just be warned that many a webmaster has unintentionally used these directives as an attempt to block access by rogue bots, only to discover that search engines cease their crawl.
• Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of links
  The search engines all have a rough limit of 100 links per page, before they may stop spidering additional pages linked-to from a page. This limit is somewhat flexible, and particularly important pages may have upwards of 150 or even 200 links followed, but in general practice, it's wise to limit the number of links on any given page to 100 or risk losing the ability to have additional pages crawled.
• Links in Frames or I-Frames
  Technically, links in both frames and I-Frames are crawlable, but both present structural issues for the engines in terms of organization and following. Unless you're an advanced user with a good technical understanding of how search engines index and follow links in frames, it's best to stay away from them as a place to offer links for crawling purposes.

If you avoid these pitfalls, you'll have clean, spiderable HTML links that will allow the spiders easy access to your content pages. Links can have additional attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag.

Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:

Lousy Punks!

In this example, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, I've told the search engines that I, the site owner, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guestbook, and link injection spam (read more about the launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines:

• Google - nofollow'd links carry no weight or impact and are interpreted as HTML text (as though the link did not exist). Google's representatives have said that they will not count those links in their link graph of the web at all.
• Yahoo! & MSN/Live - Both of these engines say that nofollow'd links do not impact search results or rankings, but may be used by their crawlers as a way to discover new pages. That is to say that while they "may" follow the links, they will not count them as a method for positively impacting rankings.
• Ask.com - Ask is unique in its position, claiming that nofollow'd links will not be treated any differently than any other kind of link. It is Ask's public position that their algorithms (based on local, rather than global popularity) are already immune to most of the problems that nofollow is intended to solve.

Keyword Usage & Targeting

We'll have to save this for the next in the series...

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* Flash and search engines can work together, but it requires the use of some clever code-replacement type technology called sifr (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which can be used to show Flash text to users and HTML to search engines.

Part III: Why Search Engine Marketing is Neccessary

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Part III: Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary

While many readers of this document may have overcome their skepticism about the need for and value of search marketing (and specifically, organic search engine optimization), it's entirely likely that others in your organization, company, network or client meetings may have differing opinions. Thus, this section is provided to help explain the need for proactive search engine optimization.

One of the most common issues I hear from folks on both the business and technology sides of a company goes something like this:

No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been "optimized" by unlicensed search marketing experts.

Initially, this can seem like a tough obstacle to overcome, but the more you're able to explain details and examine the inner-workings of the engines, the less powerful this argument becomes.

Limitations of Search Engine Technology

The major search engines all operate on the same principles, as explained in Part I. Automated search bots crawl the web, following links and indexing content in massive databases. But, modern search technology is not all-powerful. There are technical limitations of all kinds that can cause immense problems in both inclusion and rankings. I've enumerated some of the most common of these below:

Spidering and Indexing Problems

• Search engines cannot fill out online forms, and thus any content contained behind them will remain hidden.
• Poor link structures can lead to search engines failing to reach all of the content contained on a website, or allow them to spider it, but leave it so minimally exposed that it's deemed "unimportant" by the engines' index.
• Web pages that use Flash, frames, Java applets, plug-in content, audio files & video have content that search engines cannot access.
  

Interpreting Non-Text Content

• Text that is not in HTML format in the parse-able code of a web page is inherently invisible to search engines.
• This can include text in Flash files, images, photos, video, audio & plug-in content.

The "Tree Falls in a Forest" Effect

This is perhaps the most important concept to grasp about the functionality of search engines & the importance of search marketers. Even when the technical details of search-engine friendly web development are correct, content can remain virtually invisible to search engines. This is due to the inherent nature of modern search technology, which rely on the aforementioned metrics of relevance and popularity to display results.

The "tree falls in a forest" adage postulates that if no one is around to hear the sound, it may not exist it all - and this translates perfectly to search engines and web content. The major engines have no inherent gauge of quality or notability and no potential way to discover and make visible fantastic pieces of writing, art or multimedia on the web. Only humans have this power - to discover, react, comment and (most important for search engines) link. Thus, it is only natural that great content cannot simply be created - it must be marketed. Search engines already do a great job of promoting high quality content on popular websites or on individual web pages that have become popular, but they cannot generate this popularity - this is a task that demands talented Internet marketers.

NOTE: All of the above issues will be covered in greater detail in later sections that deal more directly and technically with barriers to search engine visibility and rankings.

The Competitive Nature of Search Rankings

Take a look at any search results page and you'll find the answer to why search marketing, as a practice, has a long, healthy life ahead:

Yahoo!, Google & Live Search Results Side-by-Side

10 positions, ordered by rank, with click-through traffic based on their relative position & ability to attract searchers. The fact that so much traffic goes to so few listings for any given search means that there will always be a financial incentive & monetary reward for search engine rankings. No matter what variables may make up the algorithms of the future, websites and businesses will contend with one another for this traffic and the branding, marketing & sales goals it provides.

A Constantly Shifting Search Landscape

When search marketing began in the mid-1990's, manual submission, the meta keywords tag and keyword stuffing were all regular parts of the tactics necessary to rank well. In 2004, link bombing with anchor text, buying hordes of links from automated blog comment spam injectors and the construction of inter-linking farms of websites could all be leveraged for traffic. In 2007, social media marketing, paid link networks and vertical search inclusion are mainstream methods for conducting search engine optimization.

The future may be uncertain, but in the world of search, change is a constant. For this reason, along with all the many others listed above, search marketing will remain a steadfast need in the diet of those who wish to remain competitive on the web. Others have mounted an effective defense of search engine optimization in the past, but as I see it, there's no need for a defense other than simple logic - websites and pages compete for attention and placement in the search engines, and those with the best knowledge of and experience with these rankings will receive the benefits of increased traffic and visibility.

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While much of the last week's news centered around the Toolbar PageRank affair (for a smart perspective, read Greg), there has been plenty of other exciting stuff from other sources:

• Obviously, a big story is that Microsoft is putting a load of money into Facebook, and Live search will almost certainly be a part of that site in the near future. Also - am I the only one who read about OpenSocial and yawned? (FYI - an oft-overlooked trait of mine is that I'm compelled to link to any post featuring a photo of the writer smoking a pipe)
  
• Could Salesforce Ideas actually be a useful Digg clone? I think it might well be - that style's definitely worked well over at YCombinator News (and sends us healthy traffic whenever we get a listing).
• John Mu notes that Googlers in the Webmaster Help forums were quite inactive over September. I blame Susan. Hopefully, we'll see more activity there in the future - it could be a great resource for site owners (and take a lot of weight off Matt's burdened shoulders) if they could staff it (not that I can't empathize - premium Q+A has been eating a ton of time here at the mozplex, too - over 500 threads in knowledge base now). BTW - Mystery Guest and I had a great time in Stockholm meeting John (and a couple other Googlers) - more on that later this week.
  
• Neil had some brilliant linkbait on the difference between marketing, PR, advertising and personal branding. And Mystery Guest got a present from him last week that made her heart happy - thanks, Neil :)
• If Rebecca were writing this, she'd tell us all to read Daniel Scocco's article on Copyblogger - "But shes''' not".
• Want to get insider-y with SEOmoz? Check out Will Critchlow's interview with our own Scott Willoughby.
• Congratulations to Thomas Bindl & Refined Labs, who've taken on some funding (from these guys) to build what sounds like very, very cool software for web marketers.
• Cranium has a character with a familiar occupation :)

As always, feel free to add your news and links.

Part II - How People Interact with Search Engines

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

How People Interact with Search Engines

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO and search rankings is feeling empathy for your audience. Once you grasp how the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, uses search, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

Search engine usage has evolved over the years, but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Below, I've listed the steps that comprise most search processes:

1. Experience the need for an answer, solution, or piece of information
2. Formulate that need in a string of words and phrases (the query)
3. Execute the query at a search engine
4. Browse through the results for a match
5. Click on a result
6. Scan for a solution, or a link to that solution
7. If unsatisfied, return to the search results and browse for another link OR
8. Perform a new search with refinements to the query

When this process results in the satisfactory completion of a task, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. Since the inception of web search, the activity has grown to heights of great popularity, such that in December of 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project (PDF Study in Conjunction with ComScore) found that 90% of online men and 91% of online women used search engines. Of these, 42% of the men and 39% of the women reported using search engines every day and more than 85% of both groups say they "found the information they were looking for."

When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from a multitude of sources. I've extracted those that are recent, relevant, and valuable, not only for understanding how users search, but in presenting a compelling argument about the power of search (which I suspect many readers of this guide may need to do for their managers):

• An April 2006 study by iProspect & Jupiter Research (PDF) found that:
  • 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, 90% within the first three pages. This is higher than in 2004, when 60% chose results on the first page, and much higher than 2002, when only 48% did.
  • 41% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they seek report changing their search term and/or search engine if they do not find what they're looking for on the first page of results. 88% report doing so after three pages.
  • 36% of users agreed that "seeing a company listed among the top results on a search engine makes me think that the company is a top one within its field."
• The November 2005 PEW Internet & ComScore Study (PDF) mentioned above revealed:
  • On an average day, 60 million people use search engines
  • Search engine usage rises with both education levels (27% of those without a high school diploma vs. 55% with a college or graduate degree) and income (29% of those earning less than $30,000 vs. 52% of those earning $75,000+)
• An August 2007 Foresee/ACSI Report for eMarketer (Link) remarked:
  • 75% of search engine & portal users were satisfied with their experiences
  • In a breakdown by property, 79% of Yahoo! users, 78% of Google users, and 75% of both MSN & Ask.com users reported being satisfied
• Comscore reported in August of 2007 (Link):
  • The number of search queries performed on the web grew 2% from 2006 to approximately 10 billion searches per month (across all engines)
  • Google owned the lion's share of searches with 55.2%, Yahoo! had 23.5%, Microsoft had 12.3%, and Ask.com had 4.7% (AOL, which shows Google results, clocked in at 4.4%)
• A Yahoo! study from 2007 (Link, PDF) showed:
  • Online advertising drives in-store sales at a 6:1 ratio to online sales
  • Consumers in the study spent $16 offline (in stores) to every $1 spent online
• Webvisible & Nielsen produced a 2007 report on local search (Link) that noted:
  • 74% of respondents used search engines to find local business information vs. 65% who turned to print yellow pages, 50% who used Internet yellow pages, and 44% who used traditional newspapers
  • 86% surveyed said they have used the Internet to find a local business, a rise from the 70% figure reported last year (2006)
  • 80% reported researching a product or service online, then making that purchase offline from a local business
• A study on data leaked from AOL's search query logs (Link) reveals:
  • The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
  • The second position receives 11.94%, the third 8.47%, the fourth 6.05%, and all others are under 5%
  • The first ten results received 89.71% of all click-through traffic, the next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%, the third page - 2.42%, and the fifth - 1.07%. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

In addition to these statistics, research firm Enquiro conducted heatmap testing with search engine users (Link) that produced fascinating results about what users see and focus on when engaged in search activity. Below is a heatmap showing a test performed on Google. The graphic indicates that users spent the most amount of time where the colors are hottest - in the red, orange, and yellow sections of the page.

This particular study perfectly illustrates how little attention is paid to results on the page vs. those higher up, and how users' eyes are drawn to bolded keywords, titles, and descriptions in the organic results vs. the paid search listings.

For those who are interested, a terrific collection of additional data from studies, surveys, and white papers can be found on SELand's Stats & Behaviors page.

All of this impressive research data leads us to some important conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines. In particular, we're able to make the following assumptions with relatively surety:

1. Search is very, very popular. It reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.
2. Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility.
3. Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
4. An incredible amount of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web.

As marketers, the Internet as a whole and search, specifically, are undoubtedly one of the best and most important ways to reach consumers and build a business, no matter the size, reach, or focus.

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I'm feeling a bit spent tonight, so despite the need for some refinement, and the fact that I should really put the search process into a visual flowchart, I'm hitting the deck. Tomorrow when I do this, I'll try to report some news as well :-)

Understanding the Visuals of the SERPs

For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Understanding the Visuals of Search Results Pages

In order to gain a full understanding of how search engines and searchers interact, it's critical to take a look at the pages the engines return to fulfill a query. In the search marketing field, we call them 'SERPs' for Search Engine Results Pages. Each engine returns results in a slightly different format and will include vertical results (specific content targeted to a query based on certain triggers in the query, which we'll illustrate below).

Currently the world's most popular search engine, Google's simple interface has changed little over the years.

Yahoo! has a similar layout, but they organize things a bit differently and include an additional section:

MSN/Live (Microsoft's search engine) is very similar to Yahoo!

Each of the unique sections represents a snippet of information provided by the engines. I've listed them below with definitions of what each piece is meant to provide:

1. Vertical Navigation
   Each of the engines offer the option to search different verticals like images, news, video, or maps. Following these links will perform your query in a more limited index - in our example above, we might be able to see news items above stuffed animals or videos featuring stuffed animals.
2. Search Query Box
   The engines all show the query you've performed and allow you to edit or re-enter a new query from the search results page. They also offer links to the advanced search page, the features of which we'll discuss later on in the guide.
3. Results Information
   This section provides a small amount of meta information about the results that you're viewing, including an estimate of the number of pages relevant to that particular query (note that these numbers can and frequently are wildly inaccurate, and should only be used as a rough comparative measure).
4. Paid Search Advertising
   The "Sponsored Results," to use the engines' terms, are text ads purchased by companies who use the various search ad platforms - Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, & MSN AdCenter. The results are ordered by a variety of factors, including relevance (of which click-through rate and conversion rates can be both be a factor) and bid amount (the ads require a maximum bid, which is then compared against other advertisers' bids).
5. Organic/Algorithmic Results
   These results are pulled from the search engines' primary indices of the web and ranked in order of relevance and popularity according to their complex algorithms. This section of the results is the primary focus of this guide.
6. Query Refinement Suggestions
   A relatively recent feature, query refinements are offered currently by both Yahoo! and Microsoft (and on occasion by Google as well, depending on the search). The goals of these links is to let users search with a more specific and possibly more relevant query that will satisfy their intent.

Be aware that the SERPs are always changing as the engines test new formats and new layouts. Thus, the images above may only be accurate for a few weeks or months until Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft shift to new formats.

These "standard" results, however, are certainly not all that the engines have to offer. For many types of queries, search engines show "vertical" results and include more than just links to other sites to help answer a user's questions. Below, I've illustrated a few of these:

Above - a search for my favorite local Greek restaurants brings back a direct map with an address and the option to get directions.

It looks like New Yorkers are in for some unseasonably warm weather (as I search, it's October 17, 2007), and via a Google search for weather plus a city name, the engine returns a direct answer.

A Google search for the famous painter, Edward Hopper, returns image results of some of his most memorable works.

This Yahoo! search result for Green Bay Packers quarterback, Brett Favre, shows not only query refinement options, but a slough of information on the infamous gunslinger.

A query on Yahoo! for Chicago Restaurants brings back a list of popular dining establishments from Yahoo!'s local portal, including cuisine choices, neighborhoods, and top-reviewed establishments.

Searching Yahoo! to find the number of pounds in a ton brings back an instant answer of 2000 pounds.

Asking Live.com (Microsoft's search engine) for the Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, returns news results that center around the politician's recent activity.

When querying Live for the famous early 20th-century actor, Charlie Chaplin, we're presented with a "celebrity rank" (Live's own calculation of a celebrity's relative popularity) along with a set of images.

A "digital cameras" search at Live brings back popular products, along with prices, star ratings, and links to Live product search results, as well as a list of guides & reviews.

As you can see, the vast variety of vertical integration into search results means that for many popular queries, the standard set of 10 links to external pages is no longer the rule. Engines are competing by providing more relevant results and more targeted responses to queries that they feel are best answered by vertical, rather than web results.

As a direct consequence, site owners and web marketers must take into account how this "vertical creep" (as it's frequently referred to in the industry) may impact their rankings and traffic. For many of the searches above, a high ranking, even in position #1 or #2 in the algorithmic/organic results, may produce far less traffic and referrals than placement in search results where vertical options like these are not presented. The vertical results also signify opportunity, as listings are available in services from images to local search to news and products. Inclusion in these results will be covered later on in this guide.

As a send off, observe what Ask.com has done with their search results:

Ask has gone beyond the other engines to display vertical and refinement options of all kinds on the sidebars of the organic results in the center. This forward-thinking display functionality has been dubbed "Ask 3D," and represents one potential of how the future of search results might look.

As always, comments and feedback are strongly encouraged and appreciated. Thanks for being patient while I put this together.