Posts Tagged ‘SEO / SEM Research’

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Optimizing for search engines is essentially a form of manipulation. You manipulate your site to get the search engines to consider it relevant for whatever keyword phrases you are targeting, which in turn helps you achieve top search engine rankings. While search engines like sites that utilize great content, site structure and whatnot, they don’t like blatant manipulation designed to achieve top rankings.

The worst offenders are those that manipulate without trying to create the most relevant experience for the user. Essentially, they want to be #1 without actually having a site worthy of being there.

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On the last night of the marketing class I was teaching we got into a lengthy discussion on search engine spidering, specifically how to make sure the search engines can follow your links to other pages of your site in order to index them. There are a couple of quick and easy things you can do.

1) Mouse over each link to see if you can see the URL in the bottom left part of your browser.

If you can see your URL (green box) then there is a good chance that the search engines see the link and can follow it. This isn’t the case 100% of the time because information can be added in the link code which will change what displays in the lower corner. This is used to give the link a title, in which case the title displays there or can be used as a means to fool visitors into thinking a link to their site can be spidered… but in the words of Bill S. Preston Esq. “Dude, why would we lie to ourselves?”

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When you think of keyword research Dan Thies’ name often comes to mind. Dan’s expertise, however goes far beyond keyword research as he has become one of the most sought after SEO coaches/educators out there also being one of the most well-known and respected voices in SEO. Dan was gracious to allow me to interview him and get his thoughts on what’s important and what’s not in terms of SEO.

1) Aside from SEO education programs you provide, you’re known as a keyword research expert. What do you feel are the most important aspects of researching and selecting keywords for an optimization campaign?

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Yesterday evening was the first part of the four-part class I’m teaching at the local community college: Build and Market a Website that Sells. The text book is my very own E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building Optimizing and Marketing Your Website Online. The class will run for four consecutive Thursdays, two hours each.

I was actually pretty worried that I would have more time than I could fill with this first session. Now I’m worried that I won’t have enough time during all the remaining sessions. Turns out that I have a natural ability to yap at the mouth when in front of an audience… but only when I have pre-prepared comments. Heck, put me in front of an audience without anything prepared, you know… off the cuff ad-libbing and I’m bound to start hemming and hawing.

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ComScore released search engine market share figures for January 2006.

Google: 41.4%
Yahoo!: 28.7%
MSN: 13.7%
AOL: 7.9%
Ask Jeeves: 5.6%

Changes from January 2004:

Google: +6.3
Yahoo!: -3.1
MSN: -2.3
AOL: -1.7
Ask Jeeves: +0.5

Netratings has released search engine marketshare for Dec. 2005.

Google: 48.8%
Yahoo!: 21.4%
MSN: 10.9%

Compared to Nov. ‘05, here is the change for each:

Google: +2.1%
Yahoo: -2%
MSN: -0.5%

No Statistcs were provided for AOL or ASK.

Compared to a year ago, the growth in these three engines was:

Google: 75%
Yahoo: 53%
MSN: 20%

But when looking at the numbers from a marketshare perspective, things don’t look so good for Yahoo or MSN:

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A new tool has been posted to allow you to monitor the “Big Daddy” rollout on Google. For those who don’t know, Big Daddyis an infrastructure change on the Google servers. It’s not an algorithm update per se, but rankings will be effected.

Quickly spot checking our clients, looks like Big Daddy is our Daddy Warbucks!

A recent study published by SEMPO shows that a scant 11% of all SEM advertising is spent on SEO, with the bulk, 83%, spent on PPC advertising.

While PPC advertising definitely has it’s benefits, I’m surprised at how much advertising dollars that PPC consumes when effective SEO can produce a significantly higher return on investment. In fact, I think that most businesses understand this considering the number of phone calls we get from people looking for optimization because they are spending “too much” on their PPC campaigns.

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According to Nielsen/NetRatings the top five search engines share a combined growth rate of 15% in the third quarter of 2005. While general web searches showed a slightly smaller increase overall at 14.2%, Image search surged a whopping 36.6% increase.

News and shopping showed the smallest amount of growth, 12.7% and 9.8% respectively, however I’m sure the numbers for shopping will show in increase in Q4, with the Christmas holiday season in full swing.

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One of the first things you need to look into is who exactly you are competing against. You may already know your off-line competitors, but you also need to know what websites dominate the top positions for your targeted phrases. This research gives you a good idea of what sites you’ll be going up against as you optimize.

As you look at the sites that are in the top positions, you need to see if they are in fact sites that are in your same industry. Often times what you think is a good keyword will produce results completely different from what you expected. It may very well be that your audience is performing different searches than you thought they would and/or the search engines analyze that phrase completely different than you had expected.

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