The term “search-engine friendly design” has always been misunderstood by many people: usability professionals, web designers/developers, information architects, advertisers, and even search engine marketers. If you look at this phrase at face value, it seems to mean designing a website for search engines.
Likewise, the term “search engine optimization,” commonly abbreviated as SEO, is equally misunderstood. At face value, it seems to mean optimizing your website for the commercial web search engines. In fact, these face-value definitions are so pervasive that people still dismiss SEO professionals as snake-oil salesmen or people who game the search engines to get top positions.
Question: have you conducted a search recently on Facebook? And have you noticed that something different, something huge was happening? AllFacebook went as far as saying that the social site was “declaring war on Google.” So what is it all about? I’d personally call it “stealth search”, no less. Read on.
If you were lucky enough to conduct a query that yielded such results on Facebook, you might have seen that now it does display entries for pages OUTSIDE of its own platform. Not pages, apps or profiles only but, yes indeed, third-party websites and links directly to those. I’ll take you there but first, let’s rewind a bit.
This panel focused on various tactics to control duplicate content for SEO purposes. It’s always a great topic because, while the general guidelines are clear, solving duplicate content efficiently always depends on the specific situation. There is lots of nuance involved in this topic.
Moderator: Adam Audette
Shari Thurow
Maile Ohye
Anthony Long
Shari is up first, and she describes the 6 primary methods websites can use to give the search engines directives and/or hints as to preferred URL canonicalization. (Canonicalization in this context is the consistent representation of 1 primary URL for every HTML document.) These are:
This panel focused on the strategies and tactics of site architecture as it relates to search engine optimization. This is an important area of discussion because site architecture, usability, design, SEO, and analytics are closely related disciplines.
Moderator: Adam Audette
Panelists:
Shari Thurow
Kim Krause Berg
Kristján Már Hauksson
When it comes to teaching machines how to understand human languages, one of the key ingredients is synonyms. Yet what is easy for humans to understand is difficult for machines to grasp.
Search engines are making progress, and Google feels they’ve made enough progress to make a significant adjustment to their results. Synonyms are now bolded in some search results, just like the keywords from the search phrase are.
Google says this will only happen when their algorithms determine its “useful and important to bold.” It’s as vague as it sounds.
Enterprise search software provider Covario has announced the acquisition of Netconcepts, a search engine optimization consultancy. The companies will merge and operate as Covario, Inc. and will be headquartered out of San Diego.
The newly merged company will have 100 clients, offering a powerful, integrated system for implementing SEM and SEO campaigns. Covario will integrate Netconcepts’ GravityStream™ technology into Covario’s SEO consulting practice and Organic Search Insight ™software.
“By coupling the predictive analytics in Covario’s Organic Search Insight with easy execution capabilities of Netconcepts’ GravityStream technology, advertisers will be able to identify the SEO actions that drive better rankings, and then deploy those strategies quickly, and in a highly scalable way to achieve their ROI goals,” said Covario CEO Russ Mann.
Google has launched a beta search platform for those certified by the company as professionals who can help manage Adwords campaigns. People can look up by location and amount they want to spend on a weekly basis. and find people who have passed the Google Adwords Professional certification.
Once you go through the initial search you can add other services you may need such as online display advertising, search engine optimization, traditional advertising (print, TV), web design, website analytics, affiliate programs, new media (mobile & social networks), creative and design services, call recording and tracking, auto-optimization tools and marketing consultancy.
Last week, while you were doing your last minute shopping, Google and Bing were going head to head – over their Webmaster FAQs.
First, Bing took to their Webmaster blog to introduce the new, official Webmaster Center FAQ. They already had FAQ content in the help section and in the forums. The new FAQ compiles that content plus additional questions into a downloadable PDF document.
Three days later, Google said “Oh yeah? Me too” with a post about the FAQ on Webmaster Central. It has been compiled and maintained by high-participating users in the forums, affectionately referred to as “Bionic Posters.”
The two tools are Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper. The concept behind both tools is grouping keywords together for easier search ad management.
The Keyword Niche Finder returns groups of keywords instead of just a long list of keywords related to the term. This is a good place to start if you haven’t already done keyword research for the campaign you’re working on.
For example, let’s enter “Christmas shirt” into the tool. The initial results return various groups:
Click on one of the groups to view the keywords and their frequency:
Video solution provider Fliqz has announced the launch of a new online video search engine optimization (SEO) tool. The tool is dubbed SearchSuccess and Fliqz says that companies who tested the product are experiencing early success.
A whopping two-thirds of the videos submitted by these early customers have reached first page Google rankings. 25% have seen the number one position.
