Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO

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An Introduction to Universal Search

Gone are the days where organic or paid listings were all you had to worry about. We now are in the times of Universal Search. Google coined the term Universal Search as it’s culmination of search methodologies. “It’s essentially the largest revision we’ve made in the past two or three years,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, tells TIME magazine. Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Ask have also implemented similar results into their organic listings. Some of the results you might find are:

1. Image Results
2. Online Video
3. New Results
4. Blog Listings / Results
5. Book Listings
6. PDFs
7. Local / GEO Search Listings
8. Traditional Web Search
9. Product Search
10. Catalog Search
11. Movie Search
12. Music Search
13. Map Search
14. Health Search
15. Celebrity Search
16. Job Search
17. Recipe Search
18. Financial / Stock Search
19. People Search
20. Comparison Search

What Does This Mean for Search Results?

Search results now are seen different by users. Eye tracking studies have been conducted by companies like Enquiro that track eye movement on search result pages. In the past, with Google search results, the hot spots of the search results page formulated an eye pattern of the letter “F”, also known as “The Golden Triangle,” that was positioned in the upper-left corner of the organic results. Now with Universal Search we have seen this pattern start to change. With thumbnailed images and video incorporated into the results, the “F” pattern has morphed into an “E” pattern. (SEE IMAGES BELOW)

This means Universal Search has had a dramatic impact on how we scan the page. With thumbnailed images being put in the limelight you might just steal that click away from the #1 positioned organic result if you have an enticing and relevant image. Have a sticky page for that user once they come to your site via Universal Search and you’re in. Typically, Google will keep a header bar on top of your page if they came through Google’s image search, but find some JavaScript to remove any framed bars from referring sites and you don’t have to worry about sacrificing aesthetics or your carefully crafted and positioned messages being pushed below the fold.

Are the Search Results More Relevant Now?

While that has yet to be determined, my humble opinion is “Yes.” It’s now easier to find what you’re looking for right off the bad. When conducting a search for “Britney Spears”, a fan may not be looking for informational articles or news but may be looking for enhanced media instead. Integrated YouTube music videos as well as thumbnailed images of Britney Spears combines the right mix of information, multimedia, and news results for that particular query.

Are Internet Marketers Taking Advantage of Universal Search?

Yes, but not as much as they should be. Internet marketers underestimate the traffic potential they can bring to their site by search engine optimizing their multimedia content. With proper naming conventions, accessibility attributes, and unique characteristics all embedded on a Web page with relevant content encompassing the enhanced media the traffic results can be well worth the efforts.

Not only do internet marketers now have to promote their Websites but they have to promote their content as well. In addition, links to images, videos, and syndication on various social platforms is the key to Universal Search success.

The long tail, in reference to search engine optimization, is all the keywords and keyphrases that hold little traffic by themselves, typically longer 4-7 word phrases, but collectively add up to a large amount of traffic. Illustrated below is a diagram of the head and the long tail.

If you’ve ever ran a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, in your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, for a popular keyword you can certainly appreciate what a drain on financial resources that can be. Especially, if you’re landing page content isn’t “sticky” and doesn’t provide optimal ROI with conversions. There is a much cheaper way of leveraging value of PPC campaigns while driving your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts full force. The trick of this trade is maximizing the long tail search terms for PPC and the head terms for SEO.
You’re probably wondering how you can find your what the long tail of your own Website is. There are a few tools out there for that. My favorite is HitTail. Through an external JavaScript placed on your Website, HitTail records all search queries coming to your site and separates the head from the tail. It shows you a diagram of the percentage of long tail visit vs the percentage of head visits. SearchtheWeb2 is a semantic search engine that clusters word phrases related to your search query via natural language processing. It clusters the popular keyphrases and the long tail keyphrases in a list for you to narrow down your search if desired. It’s great for seeing what kind of long tail phrases are related to certain keywords. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Microsoft’s adCenter Lab Keyword Group Detection Tool are both really great to find semantically similar keywords that people might be searching for in their longtail queries. So bookmark these tools and revamp your search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies for maximum online profit.

Recently, Yahoo! and Google have both been adding new options to their search engine result pages (SERPs). These options include Google’s PlusBox and and Yahoo’s Quicklinks. Illustrated below is Google’s PlusBox for Walmart. They have a PlusBox for their stock quote that expands to give stock information. Along with that, they have category or sub-page links within their site. Google typically does this for strong authorative Websites with a high amount of Trust Rank.

Another example below shows Google’s PlusBox being used for localized search. They have a PlusBox that shows the localized listing in the SERPs with their map, address, and phone number. You don’t have to be an extreme authority to have a PlusBox with this type of localized integration.

Yahoo’s Quick Links are similar to Google showing subpages for authorative sites. However, Yahoo! will also be charging for these Quick Links if you’re a site that doesn’t get them naturally. The think I like better about these Quick Links in the search engine result pages is that they are inline horizontally. Thus, they take up less room.

Good or Bad Usability Practices?

In my opinion, I think Google and Yahoo! are getting out of hand with their SERPs. I firmly believe in allowing the Websites, authorative or not, to display their prominent content to the user (i.e. stock quotes, maps, sub pages, shopping categories, etc.). It is a search engine’s job to display quality and relevant results to queries, but it is not the search engines job to display a site’s content to the user.

When you have more options on a Webpage you have more:

• Distraction
• Noise
• Thinking
• Load Time
• Code
• Images
• Bandwidth (a problem for mobile search)

I think Google became the most popular search engine not by their results but by their simplistic user interface and good usability. Both Yahoo! and MSN have searches integrated into their news pages whereas Google has just had a single standalone search box.

I’m sure I stand alone on this because I’m sure Google and Yahoo! both held extensive case studies, focus groups, stakeholder research, and testing before putting this into motion. I guess they know what they’re doing, but I’m annoyed by it. Sometimes less is more, right?

The way SEOs conduct search engine optimization is changing all the time. The future of a large portion of search engine optimization is really just good usability, accessibility, development, design, information architecture, and marketing. All those measures are going to lead to one thing: developing a quality site that gets users to visit, read, bookmark, act, and come back for more.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will start observing how users behave on your Website to add to a hidden trust rank score, similar to a page rank score. Google already has the tools in place to observe this data through Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Analytics, and sites that have registered XML sitemaps with their Google accounts. With these kind of tools Google can measure how many people visit your site, what pages they land on, how long they stay, what they click on, what they book mark, form submissions, etc. This data is invaluable in calculating the authorative value and trustability of a Website. Once this information is collected it can be used in their algorithm to give further trust rank to Websites and thus boost their SERPs.

There are two approaches to this for whatever hat you wear. Whitehat SEOs will have to make better quality sites and focus on user retention and driving calls to action. Blackhat SEOs will figure out some methodology of fake user-surfing emulation. Either way, it’s time to start preparing for the inevitable.

Google’s changing the game of search engine optimization with their recent release of OneBox. Google OneBox appears at the top of results whenever a popular [city] phrase is combined with a popular search query. For example: [Salt Lake City internet marketing] returns the following results.

How does this changes the game of SEO?

Well not only do you have to aim for top organic search results, but now you have a new algorithm in place to rank on local results such as Google’s OneBox. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have always had local search but Google has been the first to implement theirs into the regular search results as well.

What can you do to optimize for local search?

• Social Local Search - Submit your company’s listing to some of the top social local search sites. This article states social local search is up 44% in the past 12 months. Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySquares, Judy’s Book, and Mojo Pages are good examples of these.
• Internet Yellow Pages - SuperPages, Yellowbook, InfoSpace, SwitchBoard are also good examples of these.
• Local Search Engines - Submit your site to Google Local, Yahoo! Local, ASK, MSN Local, and TrueLocal.
• Data Providers – Acxiom, GeoSign, and InfoUSA are two major powerhouses for supplying local search databases. Submit your company listings to these sites as well.
• Contact information – Have a dominant address and phone number on your contact page and at least one other page, preferably the homepage. This information builds trust rank value in your Website as well.
• Microformats – Microformats are an open format for data specification. hCard’s represent data about people and specifications. Visit microformats.org to learn how you can incorporate hCard’s in to your Website. One more search engines catch on to microformats this will be quite revolutionary for Local Search.
• Meta data – Use geo meta data to tell search engines your location. Code detailed below:

<meta name=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude” />
<meta name =”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name” />
<meta name =”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code” />

Does social media ever slow down? YouTube has announced they are releasing a mobile Website in June of this year (2007). Some mobile phones are currently able to view a demo they have. So add http://m.youtube.com to your bookmarks because it will be here shortly.

Yahoo! just recently released a mobile search services called oneSearch. This is their attempt to compete with Google’s mobile search and a fine attempt it is. Illustrated below is a comparison of the two mobile searches side by side.

I think it’s going to become universal in a URL if you spot a stand-alone “m” then it most likely has something to do with mobile search.

How does mobile search engine optimization differ from traditional SEO?

Typically, conduct your SEO the same as you’ve always done, but there are a few extra measures to take to be indexed and ranked better on mobile meta search engines, and to have your site actually view correctly on mobile devices.

• Validate your code and separate design from content.
  XHTML and CSS compliant code is important because mobile devices aren’t as forgiving as browsers are.
• Take advantage of the power of CSS.
  Not only will a tabless CSS layout lower your load time, which is important to mobile users being charged per byte used, but you can also specify a separate stylesheet for mobile devices using the “handheld” attribute. Remember the key is to separate content from design.
• Make a mobile sitemap.
  Use Google’s mobile sitemap generator to generate a mobile sitemap . See section 2b for information on the mobile configuration of your XML file. When you’re done you can submit it to Google Sitemaps that is currently in beta.

Off the topic of search, but something I’d like to show you, is MobiTV. I haven’t had a chance to check this out because I don’t have a compliant wireless service, but you can get TV on your mobile phone. I would like to hear about someone’s experience with this.

Personalization has been creating a lot of hype in the Utah search engine optimization scene lately. Personalization has been implemented into the results of Google accounts that are signed in for quite some time now. Google collects your search history and displays results based off of what you’ve searched for and clicked on in the past. Many search engine marketers and optimizers have been reluctant to Google pushing this mainstream. Reason being is that it makes the game of SEO a lot harder when everyone has a different set of results.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spam king, claims that it will be tough times for black hat SEO artists because SEOs will have to focus more on users and less on algorithm reverse engineering. I was curious to what black hats were thinking so I cruised over to SEO Black Hat and found this post. Apparently, they are excited about personalized search and view it as a great thing. Additionally, nobody posted any comments about how this might affect their jobs as blackhat SEOs.

I don’t think there’s going to be too much to worry about for SEOs. Google Bookmarks are going to have a huge impact on people’s results. With that said, I see social bookmarking campaigns being just as big, if not bigger, than link building campaigns.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, said that personalized results only show up in about one of every five searches, and would only lift two results into the top 10, never replacing the number one organic result.

There are many caveats I want to address with personalization. The top result is typically the most visited result for any search query. If the top result never changes then that’s not really much personalization now is it? If you’re someone who typically uses the “I’m feeling lucky” button in Google then you’ll always get the same result whether you’re signed into Google or not. Also, everything you click on gets ranked higher in your personalized results. How does Google determine if you liked what you clicked on or not? That’s a major flaw in this system right now.

Another issue is the latency involved with temporary search patterns and localization. What if you’re on vacation for two weeks in New York and you’re searching for local restaurants, hotels, clubs, etc. When you return home your results are going to be skewed towards New York. How long will it take to recognize you’re not searching for New York based businesses anymore when you return home to Utah or wherever? What if your kids hop on your computer to search for something like kids games? The next time you search for games online your results will be tainted.

Personally, I’d like to see Google more focused on semantic mapping and clustering of search terms while it refines personalization. They already have started implementing this feature for select search phrases, but I think they need to push it a bit more. I think Clusty.com and Quintura.com have both done a good job of semantic clustering.

My top ten list of search engine optimization techniques will primarily focus on on-page optimization with the exception of a couple things. I want to keep this list more at a beginner-level because I intend it to be a general protocol list for Webmasters to implement in their development. I will explain the list in much further detail below.

1. Canonical Domain Issues
2. Keyword Research
3. Title Tag Optimization
4. Meta Data
5. Keyword Density
6. On-page keyword Usage (ALT attribute, H tags, body copy, meta data, title, anchor text, images, file/folder names)
7. Sitemaps
8. Crawlability Issues
9. Code Optimization
10. Internal/External Links

1. Canonical Domain Issues – Typically a domain can consist of several different versions such as: www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.( html | htm | php | asp | jsp | etc). Google can read your WWW and non-WWW as two different versions of your site. The bad thing about this is it triggers a duplicate content filter and then chooses to index only one version. Let’s say Google indexed your non-WWW version, and all of your backlinks went primarily to your WWW version. Well those are wasted backlinks now because they aren’t being passed.

Solution: 301 redirects with a .htaccess file if your site is hosted on an Apache server. A 301 redirect is a “permanent move” of a Webpage. The code below tells bots to redirect the non-WW, index.html, index.htm, and/or index.php to the www.domain.com version. Place the following code in a file called .htaccess and put it in your root directory of your site:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(htm(l)?|php)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(htm(l)?|php)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you’re using an IIS server instead of Apache then do this:

• Open Internet Services Manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select “a redirection to a URL”
• Enter the Webpage of redirection
• Check “exact URL entered above” and “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Then “Apply” those settings.

2. Keyword Research – There are a lot of great resources out there for keyword research that I’d like to share. One of my favorites is by Aaron Wall author of SEOBook. His free tool is a compilation of many different keyword research sources ran together to help you find what people are searching for. It can be found at SEOBook.

Overture.com, also known as Yahoo!, has always offered a free keyword selection tool. Overture Keyword suggestion tool

Keyworddiscovery.com and Wordtracker.com have always been the two biggest paid ones. However, Keyword Discovery is currently offering a free keyword search tool. There was a good article in Search Marketing Standard comparing the pros and cons of each. Unfortunately, I have no used Keyword Discovery, but I have been very pleased with Word Tracker. It’s also good for finding those long-tail keywords. In case you are wondering, the long-tail is the 5-7 word longer key phrases that are less popular. A lot of marketers have found it very beneficial to target these large amounts of longer phrases than the few extremely popular ones. I will blog more about this another time.

Incorporating related words and phrasing to your targeted keyword is very important to spiders especially in relation to LSI/A and PaIR. I will blog more about LSI/A and PaIR later, but for now just know that your content should have a related theme to your keyword, and not just be filled with “happy text”. MSN recently released adCenter Labs. There is a tool on here called “Search Result Clustering” which is great for finding related keywords to your main keyword. The caveat is there data is based of their top 10 results for your keyword. MSN ranks sites differently than Google. MSN results tend to favor on-page SEO and Google tends to favor off-page SEO.

3. Title Tag Optimization – Titles should stick around 5-7 words. A lot of people will say that it’s not how many words but its how many characters. I’ve found word-count to be more important. Your title should have your main keyword and then your branding, typically.

For example: Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah’s SEO Pro

I’ve managed to stick to 7 words, and incorporate my main keywords. Fortunately for me, my branding, “Utah’s SEO Pro”, is also related to my main keyphrase “Utah Search Engine Optimization”. Keywords and branding should be separated in titles with either a dash – or a pipe |. I lean towards pipes since dashes are also used in breaking up words.

4. Meta Data – How many times have you heard someone claiming they know SEO because they know how to construct meta data? I know I have many times. Meta data isn’t half as important as it used to be. I’ve read recently that MSN is the only one who cares about the meta description tag anymore. Even if they don’t matter they’re still good to have because some search engines still use them. Also, meta description is used as the descriptive text in your search engine listing. Here’s an example of proper meta data:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”utah search engine optimization, utah seo, utahs seo pro, salt lake city, utah, search engine marketing, social media, utah web designer, jordan kasteler” />

<meta name=”description” content=”Utah’s SEO Pro is a blog and podcast related to search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Author and Host, Jordan Kasteler, is a Utah SEO professional who is been working in the area of search engine optimization for quite some time now.” />

Here are some rules to follow for your meta keyword:

• List keywords in order of most important to least important
• Keep keywords around 250 characters or below. MSN accepts a maximum of 1024.
• Be careful of repeating a keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times
• Don’t use keywords in your meta data that cannot be found on your page’s content

5. Keyword Density – It used to be that people kept a very close watch on the density of keyword in their body content. Typically they kept their keyword density around 2-7%. Now days there is very little weight on the keyword density of your content as long as it’s not overdone or unnatural appearing. They keyword density I’m referring to is in your meta data and title tag. I’m not going to give you an exact rule to follow, but just use common sense for this. Don’t have your title, meta keywords, and meta description all be just your main keyphrase. That’s a 100% density and will raise a red flag.

6. On-page Keyword Usage – There is such thing as over-optimization if you abuse your usage of your main keyphrase. The places you do want to have your keywords and keyphrases are here:

• ALT attributes
• H tags
• Body copy
• Meta data
• Title
• Anchor text
• Images, file, and folder names

ALT attributes can be added to your <img> tags. They tell spiders and screen readers what that image is about. If possible, use your main keywords to describe the image.

H tags should be set up as a hierarchical tree of headings. Your main header description of your page’s content should be a H1 tag. The H1 tag is the most important and should include your main keywords or keyphrase. Secondary headers should be H2’s, Tertiary should be H3’s, etc.

Body copy should have your main keyphrases used throughout. It’s most important to have them in the first 200 and last 200 words of the content. Extra weight is given to them if they are bolded or italicized. This is an old technique that many SEOs cringe against using, but search engines, especially MSN, still give good weight for it. Like I said before, there is such thing as over-optimization. I wouldn’t bold the main keywords more than 3 times in a typical 750 word page.

Meta data – We’ve discussed this up until now, but to recap, don’t overdo it. Don’t repeat keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times, keep meta keywords to 1024 characters or preferably 250 or below, and don’t add keywords that can’t be found in your content.

Title – We’ve also discussed this as well. Don’t go too far past 7 words and don’t repeat your keywords in your title.

Anchor text is very important for internal and external links. Your anchor text tells crawlers and users what that link is about. It is important to you user main keywords in the anchor text of link to give that particular page or site good ranking for that keyword or keyphrase. When getting backlinks from other people, try to vary your anchor text around your main keyphrase. Too many backlinks with the exact same keyphrase, especially in a short amount of time, will trigger Google’s ‘Google Bomb’ filter.

Images, files, and folder names should also be focused around your main keyphrase. Use dashes (-) when separating words in your naming convention. Dashes tell search engines that the word is separated. Underscores (_) tell search engines to read it as a whole. For example:

Utah-SEO-Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “Utah SEO Pro” as the name of that image.

Utah_SEO_Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “UtahSEOPro” as the name of the image.

Do you see where your keyphrase can be hurt by using underscores?

7. Sitemaps – Sitemaps are important to search engines and users. My favorite sitemap tool is www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will create an XML, ROR, and HTML sitemap for your Website. In addition, it will create a URL list of all your pages to submit to Yahoo! for indexing that can be submitted here http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. The XML map is made especially for Google to submit to their Webmaster tools that can be submitted here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. This is important in telling Google how to crawl your site. MSN, Google, and Yahoo! teamed up to create one generalized protocol for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org. It’s nice to seem they playing together on this issue.

8. Crawlability Issues - Never hide your navigation behind Flash, JavaScript, or Images. Always use text for search engines to crawl your navigation. CSS gives your text-based navigation the power of styling similar to using images and the power of roll over similar to JavaScript menus. Spiders have a hard time crawling Flash, and almost impossible time with JavaScript, and they can’t read text that is made from an image (although, Google’s new vector reading patent on images might change that in the future). If you are insistent on having a Flash menu or image-based menu then I suggest creating a text-equivalent alternative in the footer of your site.

If you have a dynamic site then your pages might not be crawlable if they have many parameters. If your URL looked like this for example:

http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date

Google can typically crawl up to 2 or 3 parameters of your site. It’s best not to risk it though. Any more parameters than 2 or 3 you definitely need to use Mod_Rewrite

Solution:

Mod_Rewrite. Many tools can be found on the internet such as this one: http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/url-rewrite.html. In a (.htaccess) file you can tell your Apache server to write your parameter-based URL to appear as a static URL such as : http://www.domain.com/folder/1234.html instead of http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date.

9. Code Optimization – CSS layouts have many benefits over table layouts. They lessen your code-to-text ratio and allow spiders to access your content easier without sifting through tons of nested markup. Keep your CSS and JavaScript out of the <head> and in external stylesheets. This reduces your on-page markup and index page’s file size. It also gives a slightly quicker load time. You can use PHP to combine your scripts into one file so it only makes one call to the server. It also can strip out empty space and comments to condense file size. To learn how to do that visit: http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72.

For table data use the “summary” attribute to tell screen readers (and search engines) what the content in that table is about. Also, use the ALT attribute to describe images. “Longdesc” is a good attribute if you have a longer description of something such as a Flash movie. You can store the description in a completely separate HTML file it will read from.

It’s good practice to keep your code validated. The World Wide Web Consortium offers great code validation tools for XHTML and CSS. Although, Matt Cutts claimed that Google doesn’t care if your code is validated or not other crawlers might. If there’s a code conflict it can halt the spider dead in it’s tracks and may not be able to fully crawl your site.

10. Internal/External Links – Receiving external links from other sites is the #1 item of importance for your rankings. If “content is king” then “linking is queen”. Just keep in mind that pages that link to you should be related to your content. One-way links from sites carry far greater weight than links that are reciprocated. Reciprocal links are a dying practice. Try to keep a good ratio of top-level URL links and deep links. This means don’t get all links going to your www.domain.com. Get some links going to the most prominent pages of your Website (i.e. www.domain.com/page.html). The reason being is because it looks natural to search engines when someone is linking to something specific, like your internal page, rather than something general like your main domain. There are many variables that determine the weight of the link such as:

· The content of the page that’s linking to you

· Where on the page your link is (within the body content is the best)

· If it’s a directory listing then the higher on the page the better

· The anchor text of the link (should include your keywords)

· The # of outgoing links the page that linking to you currently has

· The relevance and authority of the page that’s linking to you (PageRank is a small determination of that)

· If the site linking to you is blacklisted in search engines or not

Internal links help users find things throughout your site, and help search engines crawl pages better. It’s good practice of information architecture to link to related pages within your content. This will help pass PageRank throughout your site as well.