MS Live Search Tip: Keyworded URLs
I was pleased to sit in a presentation by Nathan Buggia last week at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York. Nathan is the Lead Program Manager for Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Center, and his talk was on “Getting More Traffic from Search: Advanced SEO for Developers“.
One of the more interesting things that Nathan covered were factors which provide specific benefit to page rankings in Live Search.
It was striking when he covered one element in particular: URL formatting.
Nathan stated that URLs which were shorter and which contain valuable keywords are likely to provide greater keyword relevancy benefit to pages which have them. URLs which are shorter and which have richer words that describe a page’s content work better for endusers and for marketing purposes. Users seeing a keyword-rich URL are more likely to click on them when they see them in search results page listings, because they reinforce the perception that they contain what the user is seeking. URLs also should have keywords delimited by dashes, rather than underscores or even periods.
Check out this slide from his presentation which demonstrates how keywords within the URL can provide additional signal to a page for the terms they represent:
Have difficulty in adding keyword URLs to your site? This is one of the things which GravityStream provides automatically (or even manually-generated). GravityStream proxies a site in order to automatically optimize a great many search ranking factors, including keyword-rich URLs.
Popularity: 15% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/22/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: MSN Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization"Nathan Buggia, GravityStream, Live-Search, SEO
Australian Yellow Pages Finally Optimizes For Search Engines
The Australian edition of Lifehacker reports that Sensis, Telestra’s yellow pages division, has finally allowed bots to crawl their online yellow pages so links to their listings are now showing up in Google SERPs and other search engines. Previously, they were apparently blocking Google and bots by either using robots.txt disallow rules and/or blocking the bots with network access rules.
Australian Yellow Pages in Google results (click to enlarge)
Amusingly, Lifehacker mentions,
Popularity: 28% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/24/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Online Directories, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Yellow PagesAustralian Yellow Pages, local-SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Sensis, SEO, Telestra, Yellow Pages
Privacy Policy Could Be Site Quality Signal
Search engines have increasingly gotten involved in protecting endusers from hostile and intrusive elements on the internet, and they’ve also become more active in internet privacy issues as consumers are getting more educated about issues surrounding data privacy. Ask.com has tried to differentiate themselves by being progressive about communicating their data retention policy and by enabling users to define how long data is retained, for instance, while Google has revised their data retention policy as well as worked to aggressively block or warn endusers about websites containing adware, spyware, and other exploits. Yahoo! even recently paired up with McAfee to assess and improve the safety of sites displayed in their search results.
One aspect of search rankings I’ve written about before is the theory of a site’s quality — a “quality score” very likely is applied by Google (and to lesser degrees, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search) to quantify how much they may trust a site for ranking purposes and for users’ safety. There are a number of factors which might feed into a site’s quality score (including Google’s human quality auditors’ scoring), and one major factor that could be used might be a site’s Privacy Policy. (more…)
Popularity: 29% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/23/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Security, Worst Practicesdata privacy, p3p, personal data, privacy, privacy policy, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, web spam
Travel Searches, Local & More Searches Turning Case-Sensitive in Google SERPs
Some of us at Netconcepts have been noticing that keyword rankings in Google search engine results pages (”SERPs”) have been turning case-sensitive for some queries lately. Search Engine Roundtable highlighted that the case sensitivity issue had been reported for queries seen in the UK, but we’ve been seeing it for queries committed from the US as well.
For instance, search for something like “fossil watches” and compare with “Fossil Watches”, and you’ll see that a few of the listings in the SERPs trade ranking positions:
Popularity: 54% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/15/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Searchingcase sensitive, case sensitivity, Google, Keyword-Rankings, search engine results pages, SEO, SERPs
Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West
Just a quick post here on some simple tips that David Bailey of Google advised in this morning’s session on “The Blended Search Revolution” at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara:
- Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;
- Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);
- Create a Google Video Sitemap;
- Update business listings in Local Business Center;
- Submit your feed to Google Product Search;
- Create a high-quality company blog;
Popularity: 66% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/26/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Conferences, Content Optimization, Google, HTML Optimization, Image Optimization, Local Search Optimization, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimizationblended search, David-Bailey, Google, SEO, SMXWest08, Universal-Search
Flickr Starts Nofollowing
A couple of my colleagues, Brian Brown and Jeff Muendel, identified that Flickr has begun NOFOLLOWing hyperlinks in their photo profile pages. I’ve confirmed this and have a few more details to add. (more…)
Popularity: 52% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/21/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimizationflickr, image SEO, Image-Search-Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Retailers Recession Proofing Through Optimizing Internet Retail Sites
Overall economic fears are causing many retailers and other businesses to step up their games in terms of promotion. While some retailers are cutting back on advertising or paring down on their inventory, there are compelling reasons to increase the intensity in marketing efforts in order to offset the expected reduction in average customer spending. If your competitors are cutting back on efforts, not only could you have a chance to dominate in your sector, but you could even increase profits at the expense of your competition’s market share.
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 (more…)
Popularity: 47% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/14/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Dynamic Sites, Marketing, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationEcommerce, GravityStream, Internet Retailers, Recession, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Mahalo Traffic Growth Vulnerable To Google Penalty
A couple of weeks ago, Heather Hopkins at Hitwise noted that the human-powered Mahalo search engine has been showing a very strong curve of increasing traffic:
They also noted that 76% of this traffic comes in as referrals from other search engines.
This is slightly ironic, since Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, has historically been very critical of the worth of search engine optimization. I’m not the only one who sees the irony in this, since Allen Stern also noted it, saying “Mahalo is an SEO Play“. As Allen notes, if Mahalo didn’t want this traffic it would be easy for them to block the spiders thru their robots.txt file.
Popularity: 56% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/24/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, News, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERPs
Organic Search Marketing in 2008: Predictions
If you’re even the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on in organic search marketing, you couldn’t help but know that Google made a number of changes during 2007 which impacted the natural search marketing programs for many webmasters. So here’s my little post predicting where I see the trends pointing and what we can expect in 2008 and beyond… (more…)
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/10/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social-Media, usability, User-Centered-Design
GravityStream Does Local SEO: Now Fixes Store Locator Pages
I’m pleased to announce that GravityStream can now optimize store locator pages for those retailer sites which provide search utilities for their local outlets.
As you may recall, I’ve written before about how dealer locators are terribly optimized and how store locator pages can be optimized. A great many store locator sections of major corporate sites are not allowing search engine spiders to properly crawl through and index all the locations where they may have brick-and-mortar outlets.
Most large companies seem fairly unaware that their store locators are effectively blocking search engine spiders and are making it impossible for endusers to find their locations through simple keyword searches. I’ve also listed out a number of top store locator providers which produce locational services like this for many Internet Retailer 500 companies.
Read on for details on our results…
Popularity: 29% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/08/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Content Optimization, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, ToolsAutomatic-SEO, dealer-locators, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, store-locators
