The internet is a prime area to focus in this period, since the net reduces distance barriers and the difficulty of locating products for buyers, and efforts to increase sales through this medium can be accomplished at lower costs than many other options. One of the most cost-effective areas for internet promotion is via increasing your “natural” traffic referred to your site from search engines.

Many internet retailers haven’t connected the dots sufficiently to understand that the ways that a website are technically configured and designed can make or break their ability to receive traffic from the major search engines. Relatively simple improvements in the ways that page links are created or keyword choices in product descriptions are written can help to increase qualified buyers by orders of magnitude.

Larger companies with huge e-com sites often struggle the most with getting optimized for search engines, and frequently leave millions of dollars on the table per year in terms of natural search traffic. Expert consultants in optimization frequently observe that these companies suffer significant issues in getting expert guidance and then in getting necessary changes effected to improve traffic. For instance, Matt McGee who is an expert at optimizing for search engines recently noted that:

“Small business owners are quick. I’ve worked with Big Companies where it took weeks to get a single link changed on their Web site. Small businesses tend to respond and act on recommendations much more quickly, making it easier to analyze the success of your project….

On a related note, small businesses are easier to work with because they don’t have layers upon layers of corporate gobbledygook. If you’re working with the Marketing Director, chances are s/he can go straight to the president/owner for a decision. No committees, no meetings, no delays.”

What Matt describes is something that Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 500 companies feel intensely and painfully. The marketing managers for an E-com site can see that something needs to be done, but they can’t get the changes to be done and they can’t keep the intensity on long enough for changes to be continuously driving up traffic.

Our product, GravityStream, was built with large ecom sites in mind. GravityStream allows a company to leverage the brainpower of a cutting-edge, savvy internet agency’s expert think-tank without worrying about whether their technical department can change their application to take advantage of the consultation recommendations.

And, since GravityStream is billed on a “per-click” basis, companies are paying for the value they’re actually receiving.

Don’t allow 2008 to slide by without squeezing your natural traffic for everything you can get out of it. Rather than just shooting yourself in the feet by cutting costs through layoffs, paring down inventory, and cutting back on advertising — instead consider pushing back aggressively by optimizing your site and dragging in even more business at a low cost-to-conversion.

Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization.

I’ve seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains — each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are very clear on this subject:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Most large corporate websites have some level of accidental duplicate content, but if you deploy dozens or hundreds of subdomains with all dupe text, it will appear that you’re purposefully trying to spam the search engines — don’t do it.

If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I’d say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines’ perspective. There’s lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.

Don’t freak out if you have a few subdomains — this is also natural. Many major websites host different site sections and applications on subdomains, and some have external providers delivering content on separate servers — it’s very easy in those cases to assign a subdomain to the third party that’s providing service for you. As long as you’re not duplicating the main content of your pages on the subdomains, this is fine.
Finally, I’ve had a number of people ask my opinion regarding foreign languages — which is better, subdomain or subdirectory.

I actually prefer using separate top-level domains (“TLDs”) for this purpose, since it allows you to send a very clear signal to the search engines that particular content is intended for various countries. For instance, your French language pages could be delivered on .FR domains like: www.example.fr

However, if for some reason you don’t wish to use foreign TLDs for your alternate language pages, you should not worry overly about using separate subdomains versus directory/subdirectories. “french.example.com” will likely function just as well as “www.example.com/french/” in my opinion. I believe that translated versions of pages are NOT counted as duplicate content because they essentially contain very different text. Yes, the information may be duplicated, but the text content is not, and pages in two different languages are far less likely to both come us as relevent for the same keyword search.

So, for foreign language pages, I recommend separate TLDs for best performance, or else use whatever approach is easiest for you to set up and maintain.

Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet.

For instance, check out these small town websites for: Milan, Tennessee; Monterey, California; and Fredericksburg, Texas. Each one of these sites seem to be something less than comprehensive guides for their areas, and each could benefit from having a search engine to provide a route into more info about their areas.

Eurekster is perfect for this sort of thing — check out the search engine portal I whipped-up there for Milan, Tennessee in just about five minutes:

The rectangular widget that the service provides includes a search form box along with a “buzzcloud” of keyword links to top items you select to hot-link right into the search results. The interfaces are easily customizable in look and feel, and you can set up a few different search ads to run in the results pages, if you’ve signed up with those services to do so.

Here’s another cool example local swicki that someone created as a Seattle search engine.

So, if you need a quick, local search engine, Eurekster is definitely the way to go.

For many national or regional chain stores, providing dealer-locator services with robust maps, driving directions and proximity search capability is outside of their core competencies, and they frequently choose to outsource that development work or purchase software to enable the service easily.

I did a quick survey and found a number of companies providing dealer locator or store finder functionality:

Bullseye Integrated Locator Solutions

CMC International

Flattext Database Scripts

Got WWW Store Locator

InfoNow

Know-Where Systems

SmartLocator.com

Source Software, Inc

SpatialPoint

Tetrad

Where2GetIt

Xtreme LocatorUltimate Locator

Zenoweb Locator

ZipMath Software

Some of these services are relatively simple applications using the APIs provided by the big mapping vendors while others have custom-built their applications from the ground up.

As far as I can tell, none of these services or software solutions have built their applications to be search engine friendly as I described in my article on SEO for Store Locators. It’s not all that hard to build web applications to be optimal, but it does require that application developers understand the need and modify the format of their applications to satisfy the additional criteria, and it requires someone who’s familiar with search optimization to specify the needed changes.

Considering the amount of competition among store locator providers, perhaps some will now choose to better differentiate themselves from the crowd by re-engineering their applications to allow search engine spiders to crawl through their content and index their pages.

And, any major corporation should turn to their service providers and insist that they adjust their applications to facilitate local search optimization.

UPDATE 1/8/2008: We have now begun providing local search optimization through our GravityStream product. Check out the details: GravityStream Optimizes Store Locator Pages.

Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Google’s workings that are interesting, including:

• Unnecessarily long URLs are unattractive, and might reduce chances that a user would click through to your page. While this sounds like a subjective opinion that’s a bit counter-intuitive (because one could assume that users focus more on link titles than length of URLs), it’s quite possible that Google would have done enough experimentation during their usability testing to know for sure that longer URLs might actually have a negative impact on click-through rates. So, avoid longer URLs if possible in your application design!
• When deciding what to display from your site for a user’s search, if Google detects duplicate content matching the user’s query, they’ll group all the dupe pages into a cluster, and then apply some methods to choose which of your pages would be the best choice to present to their searcher.
• They attempt to focus the collective “link popularity” or PageRank from all members of a cluster on your site to one page. This is slightly odd, since it runs counter to her earlier statement that duplication can cause “link popularity” dilution. Likely, this means that there are cases when Google can find it difficult to cluster all dupes from a site, so it’s still best to reduce duplication rather than solely rely upon their algorithms to handle it for you.
• She suggests using a Sitemap to inform them of the primary URLs of a site, which suggests that Google may be using the sitemaps as a prime indicator when trying to select a canonical URL for a particular cluster. I note that while using a sitemap could help Google select which of your dupe pages to present to a user, it doesn’t really solve your entire dupe problem — you should still try to use additional methods to manage dupes.

Maile’s suggestions reiterate some of the de-duplication advice I’ve previously given, and I’ve also suggested having your site resolve to a single domain name to reduce duplication (along with Google’s Matt Cutts, who also recommends domain canonicalization).

Each of the search engines handle duplication issues a little differently, making it desirable to use best practices to manage the issue, if you really want to improve your site’s natural search performance.

GravityStream is a technical solution that provides outsourced search optimization to large, dynamic websites. Automatic SEO, if you will. Here’s what it does…

A lot of major sites out there have difficulty optimizing themselves to improve rankings in search engine results pages (“SERPs”) in order to increase their organic traffic. It requires a unique mixture of conditions to do SEO: an expert who can diagnose all the structural factors that block spidering; programmers and system administrators who can make all the changes recommended by the expert; statisticians who can interpret the web metrics to monitor the impact of changes; writers and taxonomy specialists who can perform keyword optimizations; and, strategic analysts who can find new advantages to exploit.

Most companies don’t have all the necessary capabilities on-staff to do optimization fully in-house, and many companies continue to ignore their natural search marketing in favor of less-complex initiatives. Yesterday, I analyzed the product catalog of Coca-Cola’s online store as a representative example of the sorts of problems internet retail sites have, and outlined a number of factors that they would need to improve in order to rank ideally for all the various search terms their products should be targeting/ranking for. Coca-Cola’s not unique in overlooking proper use of the common signals for search optimization.

Online retail sites frequently share a number of nonoptimal characteristics including:

• Title tags not uniquely formulated for each page;
• Non-unique or non-existant META Description tags;
• Sitewide navigation dependent upon Flash/Java/Javascript applications such as commonly found in dynamic menus;
• Non-unique or nonexistant H1 tags;
• Lack of link hierarchy exposing all pages to search engine spiders;
• Internal links using worthless terms in link text;
• Category nomenclature using keywords which don’t perform well;
• Page URLs containing stop characters which block spidering;
• Page URLs too lengthy;
• User session IDs parsed into page URLs, causing massive duplicaton;
• Page URLs do not include keywords;
• Insufficient text content on pages and image-only page content;
• Image tags not containing valuable ALT text parameter;
• Pages too tightly focused on keywords instead of including a few additional terms to enhance traffic;

So, why don’t companies address these issues? Many companies are missing one or more of the resources needed to handle everything internally. But, even those companies which bring in external consultants to provide SEO guidance do not accomplish all the most-basic optimization elements. It’s well known throughout the search marketing industry that companies often don’t implement the recommendations of search agencies. Most companies are very like big families – dysfunctional to some degree. The marketing managers who understand what needs to be done cannot get the IT resources to cooperate, and it’s hard to keep the focus needed to make sure all the optimizations are executed and maintained.

Even the companies which have awakened to the potential of search marketing and have staffed up to develop optimizations in-house may have substantial delays before they can deploy needed changes, due to the sometimes lengthy development cycles of major corporations or lack of coordination between development teams.

GravityStream was created to fill this gap, providing a near-turn-key solution to automatically optimize large dynamic sites quicker and more comprehensively than companies can do in-house, at a fraction of the cost in staffing up and developing the work. GravityStream can address all the problems outlined in the above list, correcting sites’ pages and delivering them up to the search engines in optimized format.

How does it do it? GravityStream is a solution which allows us to proxy a client’s website by taking the native site pages, dynamically processing them to improve multiple factors such as TITLEs, H1s, META tags, etc – and then we deliver the page back through the client’s own domain name. In order for us to integrate with a client’s site, we ask the client’s system administrators to install a few rewrite rules on the server which send various page requests over to GravityStream to process. We replace core content links when search engine bots visit the site, generating hyperlinks which the rewrite rules can identify and cede over to GravityStream for processing.

One common question we get with clients is whether GravityStream’s process is a type of cloaking. The answer is no! Cloaking is defined as an effort to deceive search engines by delivering up content that appears different to spiders than it does to humans. GravityStream delivers up the same content to users as to search engine spiders for a URL, except the hyperlinks are formatted differently.

For instance, one reason we clean up and rewrite URLs is to remove things like Session IDs which cause heartburn for search engines. Managing URL formats to resolve indexation issues is allowed under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and follows their recommended best practices. Under their Technical Guidelines, Google states:

“Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.”

By working with a client’s application engineers, Netconcepts technicians can enable Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask to crawl a site without the pesky Session IDs, and with shorter URLs which include valuable keywords in them. Once an enduser arrives on the GravityStream formatted page, the hyperlinks revert back to the native site’s format, allowing all tracking and user-experience management methods to be used as normal.

GravityStream doesn’t have to be purely automatic/algorithmic. The GravityStream system also provides administrative interfaces which allow our taxonomy/keyword optimization specialists to inject keyword-rich text into client site pages, and allows them to hand-tweak TITLEs and other page signals as needed. For clients with in-house copy-writing staff, the admin interfaces can be used for hands-on content management so custom optimization can be easily accomplished by their own employees.

The system also provides performance monitoring tools and metrics on how much traffic is produced through the GravityStream pages, as well as information on indexing and keyword referrals.

Netconcepts has a couple of pricing models available to clients, one of which is particularly innovative in the search optimization industry: Pay Per Click! On this pricing model, the client is charged for the amount of traffic that the GravityStreamed pages bring to the site, and we do not charge for certain client brand name referrals such as the company name. How many other search optimization firms offer a pricing model based upon actual performance of their work?

GravityStream has provided best-in-class optimization work for a number of Fortune 500 companies and top most-recognized brand retail sites. Various news reports have also mentioned GravityStream’s success on behalf of clients, though some of our best success stories are kept confidential at the request of the companies involved.

I found the GravityStream product and success very compelling when I was considering joining Netconcepts, and I now  recommend the product for firms with enterprise-class, top retail sites in particular. GravityStream functions very similarly to a system I designed when in-house at my former company, where I had built an application which proxied a legacy site application in order to optimize our own pages more rapidly/easily. So, GravityStream has a basic approach which in my experience functions quite well.

Most companies may want to perform SEO in-house at some future point, but there’s typically a considerable delay between initiating efforts to staff up and work through a project plan to get everything optimal. For some clients, GravityStream has been a solution for bridging them over between their current non-optimal state and the future point where they’re ready to do it all on through their native site. It’s valuable to recognize that failing to optimize sooner will represent some lost market share and money left on the table in the here and now. With change happening so rapidly in the internet space, it’s vital to grab as much market share as possible, as early as possible. GravityStream is a way to get optimized rapidly – we typically can schedule and deploy GravityStream within about six weeks of contract signature.

GravityStream is still evolving, too. We’re working on a lot of new features which will benefit all of our clients using the service. While many companies have some search marketing managers in-house, most do not have the benefit of a broadly experienced staff performing cutting-edge research and development in natural search optimization. Contracting for GravityStream can instantly provide the benefit of a completely staffed department of specialists who know search optimization.

If you’re interested in what GravityStream could do for your site, contact one of our business development representatives at (888) 207-1109, or contact us online.

Tons of hobbyists and computer programmers cut their eye-teeth by playing the Game of Life through programs copied out of magazines onto their PCs. I recall copying one of these programs out of a computer magazine into either our Timex-Sinclair 1000 or Commodore 64. I can’t recall whether it was Dr. Dobb’s or one of the myriad specialty Commodore zines that my dad was always buying.

Anyway, my aunt Amelia recently gave me a book for Christmas from my Amazon want list – it was New Constructions in Cellular Automata (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings) — a few different papers all nicely bound up by the Santa Fe Institute. (I’m a big fan of quite a few theories regarding Complexity, Economics, Biology, etc which have come out of the Santa Fe Institute.) After looking over the papers from various researchers that have studied different aspects of Cellular Automata, I started thinking that it could be worthwhile to set up the Game of Life with some color/display elements which can help with predictive display of Life grouping evolution. I’ve written a little program that does this, so read on if you’re interested.

Glider Pattern animated
with color path projection

The Game of Life

As you may know, the Game of Life is elegant in its simplicity. On a “field” of squares called “cells”, you initially select a few cells to be occupied. For each “generation” or iteration, rules are applied which will decide whether occupied and unoccupied squares will “live” or “die”.  An occupied cell is considered “live”, and the occupied/unoccupied state of each of a cell’s surrounding cells decide whether that cell will “give birth” if it’s empty, stay “alive” if it’s already occupied, “die” if it’s occupied.
The rules are simple: