Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

Austin Restaurant Week and Beefing Up Your Content

Is the content on your site linkable?  Does it need to be beefed up?  Do you deserve to be ranked on the first page?  No, yes, no?  We’ll use Austin Restaurant Week to illustrate the idea behind creating sumptuous, linkable content to garner incoming links.  Google is hungry and you need to feed it.

First, what is Austin Restaurant Week? Between September 13th- 16th and September 20th – 23rd, those fortunate enough to be in Austin can visit a number of fine dining establishments to feast on a delicious menu set at an affordable fixed price, between $25 – $35.  Call in a reservation to ensure you and your significant other a seat and eat up (if you’re looking for a date idea, I think this fits the bill perfectly)!

Second, how does this have anything to do with SEO and beefy content?  Rewind to last night.  I’m sitting in my living room nearly comatose from the pizza and football I’ve gorged myself on for the past few hours.  Of course, my mind’s nose picks up the scent of Austin Restaurant Week and I head to the website.  I click the links of two places I’ve not been to,Roaring Fork and Green Pastures Restaurant, and notice links to their respective menus:

• Roaring Fork Menu
• The Green Pastures Menu

Now, like I said, I’ve never been to the Roaring Fork and am making no assumptions about the quality of their dining. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard nothing but good things. When I mentioned this blog idea to a co-worker, she said, “Roaring Fork is one of my favs.”

However, looking at these two menus, which one has you salivating?  Which one has beefier content?  Which menu would you rather link to?  Which menu provides the most information about their offerings?  I think the information provided in the Green Pastures Restaurant menu makes their food sound much more enticing – they didn’t even dress up the language with adjectives – and I’d be more inclined to link to their menu.

If I or a search engine only had the information provided by the menus, and could look at the popularity of each by way of incoming links, to determine the most relevant menu for a search term such as “austin fine dining” or “austin restaurants,” then who would likely rank in first position?

The same idea should drive your analysis of the content on your own site:  if someone came across my site, would the information I’m providing them about “Software Development Life Cycle” be enough for them to link back to my site?  If I visit a competitor’s website and notice they’re providing beefier content that likely attracts incoming links, then why should I be ranked ahead of them?

To summarize, be honest about the quality and/or quantity of the content on your site:  Is it informative?  Should more be added?  But not simply added to attain a mythical keyword density.  Is it linkable?  Smoked salmon or The Upland Game Plate: Quail, Quail and Some More Quail?  Serve your visitors with healthy portions of information.

And, in case you’re wondering, I’ll be making a trip to The Melting Pot tonight.

Importance of Local Search Optimization Increases

Each year, Beloit College releases The List.  The List, “…provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college,” and is composed by Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief. I came across The List while Stumbling the other night and decided to look up my college graduation year, 2004, to find out what cultural touchstones appeared on the 2004 list. I noticed an interesting entry at the bottom of the list: “”Spam” and “cookies” are not necessarily foods”. It got me thinking. I wonder what other internet related cultural touchstones separate my class from different classes, generations even, and how this affects my industry, Search Engine Marketing. I bet you could add “Rarely used the Yellow Pages, if at all” to The List and you wouldn’t receive many objections from the younger folks out there.

Why? By the time we needed to call on dry cleaning businesses in Austin, the internet had reached ubiquity status – why battle the phone book drawer (for whatever reason, my family put all of the phone books in one drawer which meant you had to attach a pulley system to a phone book to get it out of the drawer) when you could hop on the internet and find the answer. Well, according to a recent study by TMP Directional Marketing, not only is the class of 2004 using the internet to conduct local business information searches, but more shoppers use Search Engines than print Yellow Pages to find local business information – local search continues to grow.

TMP Directional Marketing’s Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore revealed the first source used by shoppers to find local business information broke down as follows:

• 31% use search engines
• 30% use print Yellow Pages or White Pages
• 19% use internet Yellow Pages sites
• 11% use local search sites

Of the internet Yellow Pages sites utilized, 60% of searchers used Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com and Yahoo Yellow Pages. Google Maps, MapQuest and Yahoo! Local accounted for 40% of local search sites used for finding local business information.

Interestingly, while, “…the online channel is the primary source of local research, purchases are most often made offline. Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%).”

So, what does this information tell us?

• If you aren’t optimizing your local search presence, you are missing out on a lot of business
• Integrate online local search optimization with offline marketing efforts – what keywords did your customers use to find your business on the internet?  Potentially incorporate that language into your offline efforts
• Similarly, track your online efforts offline – ask customers if they found your business via local search.  Tracking forces you to ask yourself: what do I need to do with this data?  Where can I grow or adjust my marketing efforts?
• List your business at Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, Google Maps, MapQuest and Yahoo! Local among other authoritative local search oriented websites
• Make sure each page of your website has a call to action such as “Call us at 1 800 NUMBER”

To paraphrase Seth Godin, the internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me?  It’s, “how are people using the internet and how do I help them acheive their goals?”  Increase your local search presence, and help users find your product or service.

Link Love Monday Edition – Happy Fourth of July!

Is anyone else dragging from copious amounts of sunshine, fireworks and Dr. Pepper? I hope your 4th treated you well, and that you encountered plenty of hot dogs, burgers, 7-layer dips, double decker boats, wakeboards, and sunscreen, of course. Now, to the links we go!

Link: Traffic Drops and Site Architecture Issues

Love: myth busters. Google covers a couple important myths here: duplicate content and affiliate programs causing traffic drops. From my experience, duplicate content seems to be one of those issues that is brought up frequently by both clients and potential clients. I think it’s one of those issues that is easy to latch onto since it’s a simple concept to grasp upfront, unlike, say, tossing out the words canonical, static and dynamic. One area where duplicate content can easily reek havoc, though, is in title tags–if you target the same keywords across mulitple title tags (everything else being equal), you will likely see your site drifting in and out of prime ranking real estate.

Link: 5 Common Information Retrieval Myths

Love: myth busters, again (I’m doing my best Joseph Campbell impersonation). Also, getting into the nitty-gritty, academic side of search. Search is information retrieval and infromation extraction. It’s, “let’s crawl the Internet’s billions of documents” and, “let’s rudimentarlity extract information (I know you have to refine your searches still, I see you) from these documents and provide relevant results.” And, like the article says, search is linguistics, cognitive psychology, information architecture, statistics and more. Motto: Something academic nearly always undergirds what’s happening in front of the masses–go be academic, read the “boring” stuff, find out where your field is heading and how you can help yourself and clients get there first. Or, more simply, “there are smarter people than me behind this, what do they have to say about it?”

Link: Social IDs Go Shopping: Kmart and Sears Implement OpenID

Love: OpenID and the ability to skip out on registering for another website. As we have covered previously on this blog, people don’t like having to register and constantly log in to website after website after website. Well, the big boys are finally starting to get it and are slowly adopting the OpenID platform, or some type of single sign-in protocol, with Kmart and Sears the latest mainstream companies to join the OpenID party.

Link: Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down

Love: openness; as in, “Facebook, tear down this wall!” Your social media platform may be an island, but this user isn’t! </rant> Currently, most of the information contained in social media sites is walled off from the rest of the World Wide Web. As the article states, Facebook Connect does allow users to connect and share their information with other sites, but it’s only a fraction of the Internet. Will users continue to silo their information?

Link: The Idea of Free is Radical–So People Are Going to Freak Out

Love: free? How do you survive as a business that creates content, whether video, text, images, et cetera, in the age of the Internet where free is very easy to find? Check out the conversation between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin on how free plays and will play a role in business. I tend to agree with Seth Godin–free is already here and businesses need to figure out how to provide enough free content to entice users to pay for the rest.

Link: Achieve High Rankings by Using Your Existing PageRank as Leverage

Love: leverage what you’ve already got for SEO benefit–that goes for anything, take all of that offline information and put it online in the form of a blog, how-to articles, videos, answers on Q&A sites, images and more. It can all be spun. In this case, use thePageRank your website already has to provide valuable internal links. Don’t insert that keyword into the content all willy-nilly–make sure it’s relevant and appropriate. Also, an important principle to take away from this article is that it’s okay, not to mention extremely beneficial, to make edits to the content of your site. Updated content informs the search engines that you’re likely providing even more relevant information about your industry.

Twitter as a Real-Time Search Engine

It took me awhile to join the Twitterverse. I signed up about a year ago, tweeted that same day and then let my account sit for three months. Who wants to hear about me cutting my fingernails, I thought. No one. Cutting your fingernails is banal. Boring. Again, no tweet needed to inform the world of my clicking and snipping. Then, three months later, I sent out an email to my natural search team members asking if anyone knew of a program for such-and-such task. I received one reply. With the answer came a post script, “This is the sort of question Twitter is good for; you should check it out more.” Interesting. Twitter as a search engine.

Fast forward to last week. By now, I’ve fooled around 90 people into following me on Twitter. I follow approximately 80. I’ve mastered the art of including @ replies anywhere within a tweet. I use is.gd, BudURL and TinyURL simply because I can – why limit yourself? I follow hilariously pointless accounts and enjoy The Odyssey immensely. I ensure the number of characters I use in a tweet allows space for people to retweet my message. Basically, I’m in it. I understand the ecosystem. I have enough followers to ask Twitter a question I cannot ask Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

While reading a blog I came across the interesting picture at the top of this post. I didn’t know the name of the painting, nor did I know who painted it. In a situation like this, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Mahalo and every other search engine wouldn’t be able to tell me the name of the painting and who painted it. I even right clicked on the image, selected “Copy Image URL” and pasted it into my address bar hoping the person who posted it on the Internet named the file, the painting or painter’s name. No dice – “http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg” didn’t tell me what I needed to know (tip: tag everything on your site properly; it enhances usability, user experience, findability, etc). If you search for [Gruen] on Google you get to learn about the Gruen Watch Company or Sara Gruen, both interesting I’m sure (side note: if you do a Google image search for [Gruen] you can find the answer).

So, I head to Twitter. I tweet, “does anyone who know painted this?” and I included the url. Within 5 minutes, I receive two replies, “isn’t that hieronymous bosch?” and “looks like Bosch to me too.” The plot thickened when I received a reply that read, “Matthias Grünewald 1515 ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’…different from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych version a decade earlier.” The point, of course, is that I used Twitter as a search engine. I couldn’t upload the image to Google for the answer. I didn’t want to instant message each person on my AIM account because that’d be annoying.

This is what Twitter has become, a real-time search engine. The importance of this development is made unequivocally clear with news that Google is potentially looking at collaborating with Twitter on how to best mine its data. Sure, there are still people who tweet about the banal things in life, and that’s okay, but there are also people out there that use Twitter to provide information to followers - links about search marketing or thehunger issue in your town, for instance.  From a business perspective, there are millions of people using Twitter and some are talking about your product or your company.  If you’re participating and tracking your company name and product via the RSS feed ofhttp://search.twitter.com or TweetDeck, you have an opportunity.

Taking a step back, Twitter is not the end-all-be-all social media platform and in my opinion, will never hold that crown – no platform will. The Internet is a rapidly changing environment and the crowd moves from one platform to the next. As a business, you need to follow the crowd. Will the crowd always move to a platform that is easily trackable and readily monetized? Probably not. But, in the age of the Internet, it’s about the crowd. It’s not about the business. My favorite Seth Godin line, and one I refer to perhaps too often, goes something like this:

The Internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me? It’s, “how are people using the Internet and how do I help them achieve their goals?”

If I had to sum up social media strategy in one sentence, it would be “follow the crowd.”

Stolen Flowers and Google’s Business Listing Quality Guidelines

Anyone watch Curb Your Enthusiasm?  If you do, remember when Larry stole those flowers from the roadside memorial? So bad, and yet I found myself laughing the laugh of a rotund, middle-aged man watching America’s Funniest Home Videos (okay, so I still watch AFV, but I am neither rotund nor middle-aged).

Anyway, in a very interesting and disturbing development, spammers recently hijacked the Local Search 10-pack for keyword [flowers san diego ca] replacing authentic listings with “listings sport[ing] ‘Convenient Flowers’ and ‘Amazing Flowers’ and the links point[ing] to URLs which then redirected (via affiliate links) to national floral affiliate reseller companies.”

You can check out the full story here on how the spammers accomplished the feat and what to do in case it happens to one of your clients, or your business.

It is certainly disheartening to think that spammers could conduct this sort of espionage and it makes you wonder when Google is going to compile Business Listing Quality Guidelines. Alas, this sector of natural search seems to have finally graduated as Google released Business Listing Quality Guidelines. So, what do you need to do in order to remain within the Local Search 10-box?

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can. Given the choice, you may want to list individual location phone numbers over a central phone line, official website pages rather than a directory page, and as exact of an address as you can.
• Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
• Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields.

So, what does this mean? Perhaps local search is on its way toward providing the sort of relevant results with see with Google’s natural search engine. Also, with guidelines in place, it will become much easier for Google to go after spammers. Hopefully, flower theft is on the decline!

Tracking the Conversation: Four Must Stop Spots

Do you track the conversations about your business meandering through the Internet? You should. They are not only opportunities to connect with your customers and potential customers, but these conversations can act as link bait. The ultimate form of link bait – outside of a viral piece of content – is certainly the engaging and informative content of your website itself, but conversations don’t need to be 500 page novels. Conversations online can be as short as 140 characters (as they are on Twitter) or as long as the longest tail in the form of a blog comment. The entire Internet is a conversation. Figuring out where people are talking about your business and engaging these users, by both listening and providing information when necessary can lead to improved customer relationships, increased brand awareness, and can serve as link bait to improve your search rankings and keep you in front of the competition that still thinks their online presence isn’t that important. So, how might you find these conversations?

Here’s a brief list of the communication coffee shops you should be visiting regularly:

Twitter
I must admit that the gap between the time I opened my Twitter account and when I actually became a part of the community stretched months, and it wasn’t because I was too busy clipping my finger nails. Twitter does provide value. Twitter provides instantaneous information about anything and everything. Whopper Virgins? Check. Recent news?Check. Conversations about your company? Check. Head to http://search.twitter.com, type in your product or your company name, say hello and start the conversation.

See also:
TwitScoop
TweetBeep

Blogs
Blogs are perhaps the ultimate conversation conduits of the Internet. They allow users to write exhaustively about life, love, lemmings and your product. Also, you can leave a linkwhich will help drive traffic and, if the link is not “nofollow,” help increase the link juice flowing to your page. Head to Technorati and, again, search for your product or company name and engage your constituents (and add a link)!

See also:
Bloglines
Technorati

Forums and Message Boards
BoardReader allows users to perform searches for specific posts and forums about your product or company as well as providing a topic profile for your search. Searching forums and messages boards allows you to find communities of users that are highly relevant to your business and can be an ongoing source of interaction for business and link juice.Blogs, unless they are targeted at your product, can be less qualified in terms of an ongoing relationship than forums or message boards, but they can still provide link juice via incoming non-nofollow links.

See also:
BoardTracker
BoardReader
Google Analytics

Google Analytics
Okay, so this isn’t a website that allows you to find conversations per se, but using Google Analytics can help you find conversations about your product or company that have already taken place (in addition to its somewhat important task of tracking visitors, goal conversions and other metrics for any SEO campaign worth a dime). While scanning thereferrer traffic for a client recently, I noticed a decent amount of traffic referred to their website from bbc.co.uk. “Interesting,” I thought. I headed to Google and typed in “’www.Client’sURLHere.com’ site:bbc.co.uk” and…Voila! Someone had linked to the client’s website on the forums tucked inside the BBC website. Sure, the conversation had already taken place, but it was a naturally occurring (followed) link from a powerful domain (PR 9) which made the forums worth monitoring.

See also:
Coremetrics

This list is by no means exhaustive, but merely a starting point. I’m sure some will notice that I have not included Google Alerts. It’s certainly a good tracking utility, but it might not provide the sort of granular conversation tracking you are looking for, particularly when it comes to forums and messages boards (not to mention the need to diversify your sources). In the end, people are talking about you and your product all over the World Wide Web. User engagement is the name of the game. You can increase your brand awareness and improve your rankings through links and your sales through direct contact.

Listen, learn and enjoy the link love!

Google’s SearchWiki: Rankings Are Not Dead

The year is almost done. I’ve noticed quite a number of “Best of 2008″ posts floating around the search marketing industry, along with the proverbial prediction posts: what does 2009 hold for SEM? The SEO department here at Apogee batted this question back and forth during one of our team meetings to formulate a list of answers. I’m not going to delve into the entire list right now, but instead, talk a bit about one item in particular from that list: the personalization of search and rankings.

Let’s first start with a definition of personalized search. I asked a few friends not barricaded within the ivory tower of search engine marketing if they noticed they could manipulate search results on Google when logged into one of their Google accounts, or if they noticed the “Customized based on recent search activity” text at the top right corner of their search results. The consensus answer? “No.” So, as long as there is an unaware class, I am of it. Basically, personalized search is providing search results to users based on search history, search query intent and user location, and in Google’s case,SearchWiki activity, among other signals.

Of course, increased personalized search on its own isn’t much of a bold prediction. Rather, predicting the degree to which it will infiltrate search marketing, and search engine rankings in particular, is how you grab headlines. Well, I’m not here to join the “Rankings R Dead” team or the “Personalization Won’t Matter Much” team – I know, the grey area is boring and oh so non-polarizing, but I’m not looking for true believers here. Looks like I’m not grasping at headlines.

So how will personalized search affect rankings and how will we utilize them in SEO?

Personalized search will have the most impact on those queries whose relevancy is disparately dependent on location – restaurants and the like – and queries that are not location specific will be affected minimally, but could be affected by search history.

It’s logical that users receive different search results for a query such as “thai restaurants” if one lives in Ridgecrest, CA and another lives in Bremerton, WA. Location should be one of the primary signals in determining personalized results for these queries. However, it’s illogical that users receive completely different search results for queries such as “linguistics” based on location, but logical that search history slightly effect those rankings.

If search history reveals the person searching for “linguistics” frequents websites with videos, perhaps tweaking the algorithms so that websites with videos receive a bit of a boost makes sense. Nonetheless, the overriding desire here is for relevancy. Personalization does not occur in a vacuum where other users do not exist. Looking to the collective, through linking patterns, helps provide greater relevancy than merely one user’s search patterns.

Also, I don’t think the changes will be drastic for those queries where search history can play a role in determining rankings, because Yahoo! is going to anonymize user data after 90 days, and I think Google and Microsoft will not only set a similar limit, but will be forced to do so eventually. If this plays out as predicted, search results will only be personalized to a certain extent.

Finally, how will smart SEOs utilize rankings as a metric for success?

The first example, location dependent queries, would generally fall into the local search realm. I don’t foresee a major change in this department except that local businesses will be required to seek out SEO services from their hometown agency. Rankings are not dead. They are alive, well, breathing, eating, sleeping and working for you.

For those queries potentially affected by search history, I don’t think the changes will be drastic. It seems illogical to personalize search results for the sake of personalization while detracting from relevancy. Wikipedia works so well because it looks to the collective – groups are much wiser than individuals on their own.

Will personalization force smart SEOs to adapt?

Of course. Will it potentially make tracking certain rankings harder? Yes, but harder does not mean impossible. However, proclaiming rankings dead is akin to saying search engines are dead. Search is a cornerstone of the Internet. So long as people need to find information about things they do not know, rankings will matter. So long as the search results are organized (ranked), rankings will matter because they bring exposure, traffic, leads, sales and revenue. Rankings should have always been looked at as a means to these ends.

Microsoft’s Head is in the Clouds with Windows Azure

icrosoft unveiled a new web-based operating system at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Windows Azure. This “Windows for the cloud” works under the same premise as Google Docs, a cloud computing suite of applications that stores a person’s data on the Internet rather than on his or her own computer. According to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, Windows Azure takes this idea a step furtherthough, by creating computing infrastructure within the cloud rather than just applications on a computer.

It is now very common for people to have more than one computer in their household. Whether those computers are desktops or laptops, for personal use or business, it is becoming more and more burdensome to manage multiple computers at once. One great way of streamlining this management is through cloud computing.

So, what exactly is cloud computing?

Cloud computing “is an alternative method of storing data and programs that focuses on online storage.”

The cloud is a metaphor for the complex infrastructure of the Internet – for the science nerds out there, think the electron cloud with more precision!

In layman’s terms, when you log into your Google Docs account, add a number or two to the spreadsheet, log out and continue with your work elsewhere, you’re partaking in cloud computing – the application can be accessed from anywhere and the data is stored on the severs within their cloud.  Cloud computing is fast, light weight, requires zero installations and lets you work with other people online.

With Windows Azure, individuals would be able to not only access applications on the Internet from exotic locales, like Starbucks, but would also be able to access their software and operating system remotely.

This new move is certainly important.  Amazon and Google currently utilize cloud computing, and with another big player (loaded with money) hopping onto its own cloud it signals the potential for widespread adoption of cloud computing by the public at large.

There is a line in “The Clouds” by Aristophanes that reads, “But who is it that compels the clouds to behave this way? Isn’t it Zeus?” Zeus might still have something to say about the outcome of this development, but Microsoft is doing its best to usurp Google’s Internet supremacy and compel the cloud to behave as it sees fit.

Link Love Friday

Link: Best Practices for Product Search

Love: optimizing your universal search presence.  The natural search results aren’t the only results that deserve optimization attention.  Universal search requires a holistic approach to SEO where you need to also focus on optimizing for local, blogs, videos, images, and if you have an e-commerce website, product search which makes an appearance in the search results as shopping results.  Check out the Product Search for Webmasters video from Google on how you can go about optimizing for shopping results.  Also, you’ll need a Google Base account in order to get started with the optimization.

Link: Pagerank Sculpting

Love: focusing your efforts on more important things…I kid (sort of), the news from Google that Pagerank sculpting does not work as SEO’ers thought is important.  The Google man himself Matt Cutts explains it on his blog.  The basics:

• Your page has a Pagerank score of 8
• It has 4 outgoing links
• Left as is, each link passes along 2 points of Pagerank, 8 divided by 4
• Previously, if 2 of those links pointed at less important pages, “Contact Us” and “About Us” for example, some SEOs would nofollow those links
• In doing so, it was believed this allowed the other 2 links to pass along 4 points of Pagerank rather than 2
• Pagerank sculpted
• Now, nofollowing those important links does not pass Pagerank points in this simple way and requires Pagerank sculpting using a number of other techniques

Here is a SEOmoz post of the topic that also provides pros and cons from the SEO perspective.

Link: SocialMention

Love: simple and reliable tools that allow you to track your company and its keywords across multiple channels – blogs, microblogs (Twitter, FriendFeed), social bookmarks, comments (blog, forum or otherwise), news, video and more.  It’s extremely easy to get bogged down with tools just as it is with too much data.  Personally, I tend to stick with those that are simple, efficient and reliable and do not often switch unless the tools will allow me to provide even more actionable insight – Occam wins.  SocialMention is simple and reliable.  Not only are you provided with links to blogs, blog comments, Q&A sites, social bookmarks, and more, that mention your company or keywords, but SocialMention also provides data on sentiment (positive to negative mentions), reach (number of unique authors mentioning the entered keyword) and other metrics.

Link: 10 Ways to Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Love: making your website not only able to be found, but actually accessible to everyone. Think of the user.  Remain outwardly focused (just like phenomenal non-profits). Not everyone uses the same setup for surfing the internet, so you should ensure nearly all users are able to actually find information on your site once they’ve found you on the search engines.  There are a few pointers in this post that play a role in SEO:

• Supply proper meta tags – small piece of the pie, but a piece of the pie nonetheless
• Use accesible navigation – descriptive title and header tags provide keyword relevancy and help structure your site, which can help improve the ability of Google to provide Site InLinks
• Supply alternative content for images

Link: Bing Whitepaper for Webmasters and Publishers

Love: when you get information about search from the mouths of the leviathans.  This whiteapaper, distributed by Microsoft, details features of Bing, the layout of the search results page, the structure and details of the search results page and much more information.

BONUS Link Love Laughter Section: The Year The Media Died

Google Simplifies Sign-In with OpenID

Not long ago I blogged about research done by Google on the OpenID platform. Let’s do a quick rehash (cue NFL Primetime music. No, seriously, open a link in another tab and listen as you read):

What is OpenID?
“OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.”

Why should I care about OpenID?
According to the same report by Google, “[o]ne of the biggest reasons the industry has focused on federated login is to minimize the work required for a user to signup for a new account at a website.  When users are presented with a traditional signup page that asks for E-mail, password, & password confirmation, it is quite common for 30 to 50% of users to not finish the process.” Couple this 30% to 50% number with the fact that the average user visits 11 pages within a website, spending 43.62 seconds on each page for a total of 8 minutes spent on site and you’ll see that annoying users with a signup form will only shrink the already paltry amount of time they generally stay on a page. And think, creating a simplified login/signup process was basically completely out of your control.

Google and OpenID
Today Google announced they are providing web services with limited access to an API based on the OpenID protocol which is based on the user experience research of the OpenID community.

Users will be able to sign into certain websites using their Google account credentials without having to sign up for a new account at the websites. Zoho, Plaxo and Buxfer are among the initial launch partners.

With Google now joining Microsoft and Yahoo! in spreading the OpenID protocol to the masses, it looks like the user experience will improve for many people, and businesses could see an increase in sales from that 30% to 50% of individuals who would rather continue surfing than fill out a login/signup form.

BrowseRank and the Future of Search

Undeniably, what currently works in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) occupies a majority of the collective mind of Apogee’s SEO department – links, links, links, on-page recommendations in the form of content, internal linking and tag optimizations, among others. However, we are also keenly aware of the future – that is, what does the future hold? Where is search heading? How will search engines determine a website’s relevancy for a keyword in the future? What will search results look like in the future? Where will Information Retrieval lead us?

To borrow an ongoing joke from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, what will happen in the year 2000 (9, 10, 11, etc.)? It behooves us to be Google, Yahoo! and MSN voyeurs because we are in the business of maximizing web sales or leads for our clients. Constantly researching industry trends will allow us to continue to produce solid results.

At present, Microsoft sits in third place behind Google and Yahoo! in the search engine space. Essentially, Google’s current domination of the market is due mostly to their search engine. Google provides the most relevant search results and, as a corollary, receives the bulk of traffic.

However (emphasis mine), according to Google, as quoted from their quarterly investor report, “[i]f Microsoft or Yahoo! are successful in providing similar or better web search results or more relevant advertisements, or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their web search or advertising services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or the size of the Google Network. Any such decline could negatively affect our revenues.”

So, how is Microsoft attempting to provide better web search results and snag the gold? Microsoft thinks it has an idea about where search could head in the future and, of course, they are looking to mold that future. PageRank meet BrowseRank. Google’s PageRank algorithm places emphasis on the number of incoming links to a website when determining relevant search results for a query. It is not the only criteria for determining rankings, but it’s very important. Researchers at Microsoft feel incoming links are important as well, but their BrowseRank algorithm places greater emphasis on how users interact with a website – length of time spent on the website and click through path, for example. In a paper entitled BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, researchers concluded that, “PageRank only models a random walk on the link graph, but does not take into consideration the lengths of time which the web surfer spends on the web pages during the random walk. Such information can be a good indicator of the quality and thus importance of the pages.”

What might this mean for you and your website? Since we’re strolling through “what if” land (my history professor, Dr. Larson, always said “what if” history writing is terrible history writing, by the way), let’s assume PageRank and BrowseRank somehow form likeVoltron to produce ProwseRank, the ultimate algorithm.

First, developing incoming links would continue to be vital to any SEO campaign. Second, providing users with the best experience possible through informative and interesting content, useful internal linking and optimal website effectiveness and usability would not only increase conversions, but would definitively increase rankings. It already sounds like a recipe for success!

Link Love Tuesday

It’s late Tuesday which means it’s time for Link Love Monday. Hopefully you had a solid, and if you were lucky, relaxing weekend. For the rest of us who entertained guests over the Memorial Day holiday, here’s to drinking lots of water and going to bed at 7:30 tonight! Today’s set of links lean toward the local side of search, but the general principles involved in optimizing for local can certainly be transfered to natural search. Let the link love flow:

Link: GetListed.org

Love: An aggregator that helps simplify the process of optimzing your local search presence. Last month Google kept it weird and got a lot more local by providing the sexy local 10-pack for a broader range of non-geo targeted keywords ([austin tacos] versus simply [tacos], for example).  If you’re a small business, it’s even more important for you to claim your listings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN, as well as optimize your site for maximal local search exposure. GetListed.org, which has been around for awhile now,  provides a hub for you to start this process. Simply enter the name of your business, enter the zip code and you’ll be provided with an overview of your local presence — have you claimed your listing? Do you have reviews, citations, pictures or videos in your local listing?

Aside: speaking of reviews, looking for content ideas for your website?  Check out your reviews on sites like Yelp.com.  Users might tell you exactly the type of information you need to add to your site.

Link: Tracking Local Search Traffic with Analytics

Love: Tracking your presence — it’s vital. Okay, so you’ve hopped into GetListed.org,claimed your listings, updated your website accordingly, notice you’ve improved your lot in the local 10-pack and…now what? How do you know how well your listing in the local 10-pack is working? How much traffic is it driving to your site? You can’t manage what you don’t measure (as Bill Leake, our fearless leader here at Apogee, would say). Check out this excellent post on how to track both local traffic from the 10-pack found in the SERPs as well as traffic originating specifically from http://maps.google.com.

Link: How a Search Engine Might Determine Whether a Search Involves a Geographical Intent

Love: How local search might work, so that you can turn your inquisitive how’s into actionable how-to’s. This post covers an important part of local search, and search in general — intention. What does a searcher actually mean when he or she types in a keyword and how might you go about calculating meaning/intention. The post uses an article by an University of Massachussetts research and two articles from Yahoo! Labs as the basis for the discusion.

“If you have a web site that offers goods or services or information tied to a particular location, the processes described in this paper are some that may help searchers stand a better chance of finding your site online the next time that they search for ‘attorney’s office,’ or ‘camping near shenandoah park,’ or ‘Macy’s Parade Hotel,’or use some other query that may involve a geographical intent without including an actual location.”

Link: Google Analytics Mega-Post: 23 Google Analytics Tips and Tweaks

Love: Customizing Google Analytics, tracking your presence (again) and mega-posts, of course. A great post covering 23 ways you can customize Google Analytics in order to tease out more of the information you need to create a full tapestry of your online presence. Track: full referring URLs, Universal Search traffic, downloads (PDFs, WMV, etc.) and more.

Link: Linked Date is Blooming: Why You Should Care

Love: Data, data and more data. The embedded video is a superb introduction to linked data and why should you care — definitely take the 15 minutes to watch it.

“Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90’s.”

Link: 14 Key Requirements for a Search Friendly CMS

Love: A search friendly CMS. Seriously. It will save you heartache, pain, sleepless nights and money on Pepto Bismol. This is a question that’s asked fairly often by clients, particularly when they’re thinking about or are in the process of changing their CMS. It’s okay to be a control freak when it comes to your CMS — just control it.

BONUS Link Love Laughter Section: Charlie Rose on the future of the Internet by Samuel Beckett.

Link Love Monday (The First Edition)

So it begins.  Welcome to the inaugural installment of Link Love Monday™ (alright, so it’s not really trademarked — is that illegal?) where I’ll pass along links I’ve found particularly stimulating.  Unfortunately, I’d like all of the links I post to have actually been born last week, but monitoring industry blogs could be a full-time job and I already have one of those.  So, some links will be a bit aged as they’ve been perched in my bookmarks for awhile, but they will taste that much better, while others might be born on the morning of Link Love Monday. Either way, it will be an evolving weekly post — which is to say it will likely be more organized, better branded (logo in the works) and more robust.  So without further adieu:

Link: Using Analytics for Local Search Optimization

Love: The emphasis on selecting the proper keywords for your local search campaign. This is always important, but particularly important for small businesses where getting it right the first time can save time (a.k.a. “money”) on redoing a keyword list and the subsequent on-page changes.

“In this attorney’s case, they might quickly find that while “family law” is a formal term more preferred by their profession, more of their potential customers are likely searching for the term ‘divorce.’ And, in most cases, consumers are searching for ‘lawyers’ when trying to find listings of this type of business, rather than ‘attorneys.’”

Link: The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media

Love: The use of the seven deadly sins to drive home the importance of partaking in social media in a responsible, authentic and sinless way. Remain outwardly focused with your social media — focused on the user. Don’t spam him, don’t ignore her, don’t clam up, open up. Each foray into the social media sphere is entirely different according to your business.  Again, remain outwardly focused and adapt.

“7. Sloth: Ahhh the deadliest of all sins. Wanting it all but being too lazy to do what it takes. You have to connect with people, you have to write good stuff, you have to stay current and you have to be willing to show up and put the effort in.”

Link: Introduction to Microformats

Love: Google’s decision to extend microformats into search results — the Internet will be better served with more and more structured data. What are microformats? Basically, information about information, metadata. This sort of markup language allows you to tell search engines and other programs that the information contained in this HTML is, without a doubt, the name of my business, its location, phone number, fax number, et cetera. One of the more widely used microformats are called hCards — think of them as your business card for machines. Would you like to make one?  Try this hCard Creator!

Link: In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indispensable Tips

Love: Simplicity.  Why?  It’s important to your business — specifically your business as a website. People are on the Internet looking for information. Scavenging. Scanning. Scoopering. Your website does not need to mimic the hustle and bustle of Times Square. If users liken finding information on your website to finding Waldo, then you’re losing out.

“Study the best: Google, Apple, Lexus, and Ferrari. They understand that complexity is their best friend, not an enemy. They understand it, so they can exploit it. The Google interface is clean and simple though the algorithm is massively complex. Even Einstein understood this. E=mc2 has an easy and immortal ring to it.”

Link: Apture

Love: Tools and their ability to make your work easier. In this case, the work we’re talking about is adding multimedia to your blog posts that can entice users to keep coming back to your blog because it’s chalk full of awesome information whether text, images or video. I took Apture on a test drive with my personal blog and found it worked well. It’s this simple: sign up, head to a blog post, highlight a word and an interface pops up that returns music, videos, maps, slideshows, Tweets, news and more related to the highlighted word.

Link: Twitter Evolves

Love: thought provoking posts – who doesn’t? And seriously, what would a link repository be without Oprah’s favorite social media platform Twitter? If only this post were about Oprah’s use of Twitter to disseminate fashion advice. Instead, we’ll go with Twitter and copyright laws.

“There are only 27^140 possible tweets, can I just copyright them all and then sue anybody who uses Twitter?”

Federated Login: We’re Not Talkin’ Star Wars

There’s a scene in the HBO sitcom Lucky Louie where the main character Louie is going to apply to flight school.  He heads down to the library to make a copy of a document and, once finished with the difficult task of pressing Copy, ship out the application – flight school there he goes.  However, when he gets to the library, he finds out the copy machine isn’t working.  Louie says screw it, that’s too much effort.  He doesn’t apply to Flight School.  That does not happen in real life, does it?  It does, sorta…

Who else out there has stumbled upon an interesting website, your finger kicks into high-gear, click, click, click, you notice a mouth watering link within the website, click, click, boom!  The last click takes you to a form.  You need to fill out a form to join the website (read the information, play the game).  Form?  The arrow on your screen darts up to the StumbleUpon extension and you’re whisked away to the world wide web once again.  No flight school for me.

Well, according to recently released research from Google on Federated Login, “when users are presented with a traditional signup page that asks for your E-mail, password and password confirmation, it is quite common for 30% – 50% of users to not finish the process.”  In other words, the words of Michael Jackson, you are not alone.  Google, please count me among that 50% (I already know you’re tracking my behavior anyway, so I probably don’t need to tell you that).

I know what you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, so what you’re telling me is that I’m losing customers because of a measly form?”  So it would seem, particularly because it asks for e-mail, password, and password confirmation.  Ring a bell?

And, “What the heck is Federated Login?  How will it affect my business?”  Well, let’s take a real world example to explain the basic premise of Federated Login.

According to the OpenID website, “OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience…OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to…For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.”  Federated login is the elimination of the need for multiple usernames across different websites. In this example, OpenID is merely one protocol currently in use that eliminates this need across a number of websites.

Rather than continuously creating more and more accounts across numerous e-commerce websites, for example, all you would need to do in order to log in is provide your email and your identity would then be validated and the appropriate information would be provided to the website.  Google has been testing user interfaces similar to those found on Buy.com.

The report on Federated Login states that federated login has been the “holy grail” of the identity community, but has failed to find a model that:

• is simple for end users
• had a reasonable trust model between the the website and the entity that will identify you to the website

The study is a testament to the potential that lies ahead for the online world – specifically the business side of the online world – in terms of usability. Equally, businesses with a presence on the internet should also look to this study as more evidence that while increasing rankings and traffic is absolutely necessary to accomplishing your goals, once that traffic hits your website it needs to be usable and effective.

Link Love Friday

Link: What is Location Prominence?

Love: unraveling local search ranking factors.  So you’re a small business (or a large one for that matter), and after doing some reading on SEO, you’ve gone to Google Local Business Center and claimed your business’ listing.  You’ve read about PageRank and the importance of attracting high quality incoming links with your sparkling content.  But what other factors go into the ranking algorithms for local search?  How do you climb up that 10-pack?  How do you improve your “Location Prominence” score–the equivalent of PageRank?  In this post, Mike Blumenthal takes a look at a Google patent to help provide insight into the factors that explicitly help determine this Location Prominence.

Potential Factors in Ranking a Website Highly for Location Specific Searches:

1. Incoming links – not simply directory links, but links from other authoritative sites; sites with a high PageRank or Location Prominence score.
2. Reviews – I’m particularly interested in how Google uses reviews as a factor in local search rankings.  There are the metrics that are already quantified–the actual number of reviews a business has received on a site like Yelp for example and rating itself, 3 stars, 4 stars or 5 stars.  But how do you quantify the content of the review?  How do you turn “good”, “bad”, “efficient”, “okay”, “disgusting”, “spicy” or “pusillanimous” (maybe you rented a guard dog, alright) into a number?  What’s the scale for all negative words?  What’s the most negative word you can give a restaurant?  Does that mean that word passes along a -100 score?
3. Citations – it’s not merely about links, but how many times your business and its accompanying address appear on a website, not as a link.
4. Information about the business – search engines want information.  It helps them develop a rich tapestry of search results.  They’re machines, not humans.  They can’t decipher meaning like you and me.  Providing the search engines with little information about your business is like the difference between a picture from an inexpensive camera versus a professional camera.  If you don’t participate in sites like Yelp, Google Local Business Center, comment on industry blogs, add your business to Best of the Web, then you’re taking a picture of your business with a cheap camera.  Google wants you to use that Nikon D3X!  What’s the business’ annual revenue?  How many employees does the business have?  How long has the business been in existence and how long have they been present in listings across the web?

Link: Page Speed

Love: the need for speed!  Recently, Google announced they were open sourcing a nifty Firefox add-in, integrated with another superb tool called Firebug, called Page Speed.  Page load time is a factor in quality score on the PPC side of life and there have beenrumblings about whether or not page load time plays a role or will play a role in natural search rankings for some time now.  Let’s assume it doesn’t play a role in natural search rankings, though.  Does that mean I should compress the images on my site, enable gzip compression or remove unused CSS from my site anyway?  If you happen to have a site that takes a bit longer than usual to load, I’d vote yes.  Users find pages that take too long to load annoying, which translates into users bouncing away.  The thinking behind improving page load, and as a corollary the user experience, is driven by five best practices:

1. Optimizing caching – keeping your application’s data and logic off the network entirely
2. Minimizing round-trip times – reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
3. Minimizing request size – reducing upload size
4. Minimizing payload size – reducing the size of responses, downloads and cached pages
5. Optimizing browser rendering – improving the browser’s layout of a page

Aside: “…reducing…cached pages.”  Hmm, interesting. Nofollow links to your About Us page, AND robots.txt them out?

Link: Web Data Quality: A 6 Step Process to Evolve Your Mental Model

Love: data, but don’t allow imperfect data to cause you to freeze and not act.  One of my favorite lines from this post says there is no limit to the amount of data to you can collect and store on the Internet, and it’s headache-inducingly correct.  I’ve mentioned in previous posts the importance of collecting data, analyzing data and then providing an interpretation of that data for insight into what action should be taken, and I of course still feel that way, but I’m not a Quant.  There’s a point where granular becomes so microscopic that the difference in dataset A and dataset B will not cause your client to change his or her decision. Therefore, you need to accept imperfection and act.  I know we’re big into models and science and equations, but so was Wall Street, and we saw what happened there.  Certainly collect your data, but don’t allow it to bog you down into indecision, and don’t allow incomplete data to bolster that indecision.  After all, it’s all incomplete (esoteric alert!).

“How do you measure the effectiveness of your magazine ad? Now compare that to the data you have from DoubleClick. How about measuring the ability of your TV ad to reach the right audience? Compare that with measuring reach through Paid Search (or Affiliate Marketing, or …). Do you think you get more useful data from Neilsen’s TV panel of between 15k – 30k US residents to represent the diversity of TV content consumption of 200 million American television viewers?”

Link: 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites

Love: social media for something other than retweeting, posting pictures or helping you acquire links.  Social media websites work because they facilitate communication and sharing amongst users (and they allow us to talk about ourselves, of course).  The good ones also work on a different level–user interface.  Thinking about your website in this way, and incorporating these features, can help drastically improve your conversion rate.  Remember, it’s all about the user, not you!

Link: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive

Love: scientifically proven ways to do anything.  Who doesn’t want to be persuasive?  You’re a business, right?  You’re trying to tell your story in order to persuade the potential client to help you write the next chapter, right?  A few favorites from the post:

• Too many options necessitate selection, and hence frustration…
• How restaurant mints are a personalized affair
• Asking people to substantiate their decision will lead to higher commitment

(Thanks to @ifss who tweeted this post)

Link Love Friday

Okay, so the first installment of Link Love Monday was actually born to two proud parents on a Monday. The next installment hit on a Tuesday. Therefore, it’s only fitting that Link Love “Someday” occur on a Friday eventually. Things have been quite hectic around here to say the least, but due diligence will be paid to ensure a specific day of the week (most likely Friday) is linked with love. On to the links!
Link: Tracking Transactions Back to the Initial Referrer with Google Analytics

Love tracking your websites progress at an even more granular level than Google Analytics normally allows. Let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and the user clicks on your ad, heads to the page, but does not initially fill out a form or make a purchase. He or she needs time to mull. Some of us are mullers. We need time. The next day the user heads to Google, types in the name of your company, lands on your website and then fills out a form or makes the purchase. By default, this transaction would be credited to organic search even though the user initially found you through your PPC campaign. The transaction can be tracked the other way as well, where the user initially finds you vianatural search, but returns via paid search and makes the purchase then. Either way, this will allow you to get a better idea of how well your well ranked website and paid search campaigns work in tandem.

“Google Analytics, by default, will attribute transactions to the last referrer. While this is all fine and good, there are some situations where you would really like to be able to track these transactions back to the initial referrer rather than the last referrer.”

Link: 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process

Love optimizing your website after the organic or paid search click. Many potential clients come to us looking only for search engine optimization and/or paid search campaign management — and that’s perfectly okay. However, many people do not think about optimizing the site itself. Does the navigation bar remain in place as the user navigates through your site? Is there a visible call-to-action in the same spot across the entirety of the site? How complicated is the checkout process? All of these issues can cause users to leave your site due to confusion or frustration if they cannot find what they’re looking for in a timely manner. From my personal experience, if a website requires me to register to participate or make a purchase, the minute I see this requirement is the same minute I hit the back button (unless I cannot live without the product or participation). Check out these 12 tips that can make your checkout process that much more efficient for your users — you’ll likely improve your conversion rate.

“8. Keep the checkout interface simple - The checkout process is different to the rest of the browsing experience on your site. During this process your customers aren’t shopping — they’re making the purchase. This means all the browsing controls are redundant here and would only distract your customers from the task at hand. Eliminate these unnecessary elements — e.g. product category links, top products, latest offers, and so on — to keep the interface simple.”

Link: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.

Love the recurring theme of tracking your work. If you work with an agency that a) does not track your websites progress through various metrics or b) tracks the websites progress in the form of handing you charts filled with numbers and without explaining what they mean…well…then perhaps it’s time to do some shopping for yourself. Measuring your websites progress through a combination of metrics, across multiple channels, and uncovering what these numbers mean is incredibly powerful. If there is one area where you can get a muscular leg up on your competition, it would be through early adoption of data-driven marketing and advertising initiatives.

“…Still, getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.  Traditional ad agencies still don’t have budgets that allow for a lot of digital experimentation, Mr. Herman says. He notes that most traditional agencies “make the bulk of their money in print, radio and television.”  So even as this area becomes increasingly technology-driven, old ways of doing business and clients reluctant to embrace radically new approaches mean that the advertising culture won’t change overnight.”

Link: 10 Ways to Re-Energize Your Blog Today

Love your blog. Please. Don’t let it sit and waste away. Certainly participate in the latestsocial media platform if it fits within the scope of your overall online marketing strategy, but do NOT leave your blog heaving for breath on the roadside — especially if you “don’t have anything” to write about. Not only is figuring out what to write about as simple as taking these 10 tips and running with them, but your blog can serve as the hub of all of your social media efforts — direct users back to your blog and then track where they go from there. Talk to them. You can be even more authentic with 250 words as opposed to 140 characters.

“1. Grab your local newspaper – pick one column (it could be a news item or op-ed piece) and blog your own perspective on it.”

PS – that’s what we’re looking for, your perspective — subjectivity. “There are no facts, only interpretation.” Even if you don’t believe that, keep it in mind and it will help you write stirring blog posts.
Link: The Local Business Center Dashboard Opens Its Doors

Love more data on your Google Local Business listing! I know, you just can’t get enough data (alright, so maybe there is such thing as data-overload). Additional data includes:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for “tea” or “coffee”?
• Zip codes where driving directions originate: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

Link: Microsoft’s Bing Vs. Google: Head to Head Search Results

Love competition. Microsoft recently rolled out it’s new search engine, Bing, to the masses. It’s still too early to know whether or not people will change their search patterns and turn to Bing instead of Google (I doubt this will happen anytime soon, personally), but competition is good. Take a look at this article over at Search Engine Land to see how the search engines differ for a number of search terms. Side note: they’re certainly going after the David Letterman watching demographic. It seemed Bing made an appearance at each commercial break last night.

Internal Linking: It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts

Okay, I’m sorry.  In this particular instance, what’s on the outside does count as well, let’s not fool ourselves.  Incoming links from the outside do matter; I’ll be the first to admit that while I’m on my weekly Sunday jaunt through BookPeople, certain covers catch my eye and I buy (like this one.  And, as it turns out, Snoop was a solid purchase).  Anyway, back to the inside.  We’re here to discuss the importance of link architecture and how it relates to usability (visitor interaction) and crawlability (search engine interaction).

Recently, Google kicked off a series of posts on their Webmaster Central Blog called Links Week. The second post in this series is entitled Importance of Link Architecture and it provides three guidelines for ensuring Google indexes your site’s pages and visitors are able to easily navigate your website:

• Keep important pages within several clicks from the homepage
• Use descriptive anchor text
• Verify that Googlebot finds your internal links

Let’s start with “keeping important pages close to homepage“.  Search boxes can be helpful, but search engines rarely, “type into search boxes or navigate via pulldown menus.”  Instead, step into character and attempt to find information on your website from the homepage.  Or better yet, bring in your kid, your grandma, your spouse or significant other and ask them to find information on Product A, contacting sales, etc., you get the point.  Why would they not be able to find the information you asked for?  How are search engines going to find your Product A page and provide this page within search results?

Maybe a visitor hits your gifts website on a random walk through the Internet.  He or she lands on a sub-category page four levels removed from the homepage and wants to get to the homepage.  Outside of making a Home link, another way to improve the link architecture of a website is to provide breadcrumbs.  If the visitor landed on the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, the breadcrumbs on that page might read:

Homepage > Gifts > Father’s Day Gifts > Colorful Father’s Day Gifts > Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts.

Not only does this enhance the website’s effectiveness and usability, but these breadcrumbs help improve keyword relevancy to pages within your website – a perhaps minuscule piece of the pie, but a piece nonetheless.  Text links are easily navigated by both users and search engines alike.

Additionally, according to Coremetrics’ Benchmark Industry Report the average time a visitor spends per session (the entirety of the visit) is 479.87 seconds, that’s 8 minutes.  How many pages do visitors traverse during those 8 minutes?  11.  So, approximately how long does a visitor spend on each page?  How much time do you have to make sure your website is easily navigable, usable, effective? On average, 43.62 seconds.  Would you like some breadcrumbs on that internal link lasagna?  While you’re at it, create a sitemap that centralizes all the links of your website – users will appreciate its efficiency and search engines will reward its efficiency by crawling all of your pages.

How about descriptive anchor text?  You don’t have to write Seamus Heaneydescriptions when deciding on what the text of your internal links should be.  However, linking to the Purple and Green Father’s Day gifts page like this is less than optimal:

Check out our awesome Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts <a href=”http://www.gifts.com”>here</a>.

Instead, make the text of your link the name of the product, <a href=”http://www.toys.com”>Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts</a>.  This not only explicitly lets the user know that he or she will find the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, but search engines will crawl the link and associate Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts with the page – “The more Google knows about your site—through your content, page titles, anchor text, etc.—the more relevant results we can return for users (and your potential search visitors).”

Finally, Google Webmaster Tools provide website owners with information regarding the internal links the search engine has crawled.  As Google mentions in the post, this tool is particularly useful for websites utilizing Javascript with navigation (Javascript isn’t always executed).

Thus, the Leviathan has spoken – optimize your internal links.  Provide a great user experience through effective link architecture and not only will users potentially extend their 43.62 second stay per page, but search engines will sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider as they crawl, crawl, crawl your website.