Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
SEO May Be Eclipsed by User-Centered Design
I’ve been seeing indications that Google has shifted their weighting of the ~200 various signals they use in their ranking soup over the past couple of years. It used to be that PageRank along with the number of keyword references on a page were some of the strongest signals used for what page comes up highest in the search results, but I’ve seen more and more cases where PageRank and keyword density seem relatively weaker than they once were. I see a lot of reasons to believe that quality ratings have become weighted more heavily for rankings, particularly among more popular search keywords. Google continues to lead the pack in the search marketplace, so their evolution will likely influence their competitors in similar directions, too.
So, what is my evidence that Google’s development of Quality criteria is becoming more influential in their rankings than PageRank and other classic optimization elements? Read on and I’ll explain. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/15/2006
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Google, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Yahoo Google, IndyRank, SEO, TrustRank, usability, User-Centered-Design, Yahoo
“Search Master” teaches SEO101 but needs SEM101 himself
Was surfing an SEO blog and this Google ad caught my eye:
I’m pretty up to speed with the SEO experts in New Zealand, being based here and all, and I hadn’t heard of any SEO training being given by any master optimizer in Auckland. I was intrigued to learn more about this self-proclaimed “Search Master”. So I clicked. Guess what I got! Yep, a nasty error instead of a landing page!
Methinks this “Search Master” with his SEO101 and SEO201 courses needs to go back to school himself for SEM101. 😉
Lesson #1 in SEM101: If you’re going to pay for clicks, make sure your landing page works!
We all make mistakes, but this seminar is in 3 days and you’d think he’d be watching the online registrations pretty closely right about now…
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/11/2006
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Filed under: Paid Search, Worst Practices search-marketing-worst-practices, SEM-mistakes
Nike.com gets taken to task over its search mistakes
This article just out on MarketingProfs.com is an entertaining rant about Nike.com’s search marketing mistakes, which include…
- Missing out on long-tail terms
- All-Flash sites with no alternative version
- Nothing from the searcher’s query is reinforced on the landing page
- Not developing a descriptive meta description tag
- Putting “Cool” over helping the user find stuff on the site
- Driving a user with a very specific query to the homepage can waste parts of pay per click (PPC) budgets.
- Bad landing pages that hurt PPC rankings
- Flash sites with no alternative version can suppress natural rankings
- Flash shopping cart = no love from Froogle/shopping search
- Investing in great tools and not driving traffic to them
As I was perusing the article and the included screen captures, I couldn’t help but think that a critique like this would be well-suited to being produced as a screencast, using Camtasia Studio or similar.
Maybe I should produce my monthly SEO Report Card column as screencasts? Would that be valuable to you folks?
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/10/2006
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Filed under: SEO, Worst Practices SEO-critiques, SEO-mistakes, SEO-worst-practices
Nouveau Meta Tags for SEO
Back in the earliest days of search optimization, meta tags were a great channel for placing keywords for the search engines to associate with your pages. A meta tag does just what it sounds like — they are the html tags built to hold metadata (or, “data describing the data”) about pages. In terms of SEO, the main meta tags people refer to are the Keywords and Description meta tags. Meta tags are not visible to endusers looking at the page, but the meta tag content would be collected by search engines and used to rank a page — it was really convenient if you wanted to pass synonyms, misspellings, and various term stems along with the specific keywords.
Immediately after people realized that meta tags could allow a page to be found more relevant in the major search engines, unscrupulous people began abusing the tags by passing keywords that had little or nothing to do with the content of their sites, and the search engines began to reduce using that content for a keyword association ranking factor because it couldn’t be trusted. Eventually, search engines pretty well dropped using them for ranking altogether and newer search engines didn’t bother to use them at all, leading Danny Sullivan to declare the death of the metatags in 2002.
Fast forward to 2006, and the situation has changed yet again. Your meta tag content can once again directly affect your pages’ rankings in the SERPs!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/09/2006
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Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tricks Google, meta-tags, metatags, msn, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Yahoo
MicroSoft’s Ms. Dewey Linkbait: Avatars for Blogs & Other Uses
MicroSoft has launched an avatar-fronted search interface called
Ms. Dewey, in order to promote their MS Live search service. An avatar is a term coopted from virtual reality which is used to describe the graphic representation of a person within the VR environment.
The Ms. Dewey avatar is a clever piece of Flash engineering coupled up with various video files and the MS Live search engine. Ms. Dewey is played by an actress named Janina Gavankar, who apparently prerecorded a bunch of video snippets which are queued up contextually for various responses to search terms that are typed into the submission form field. After you submit a search keyword, she says (and sometimes does) something witty, then the MS Live search results scroll down in an AJAX menu beside her.
Try out these particularly funny search terms on Ms. Dewey:
| Congress gmail President Bush Dick Cheney weather forecasts Yo Mama |
Painting Lord of the Rings UFOs MySpace FireFox Halo 2 |
A “share this with a friend” link is included, making this qualify even more as some nice linkbait, as some online marketing folx refer to it. While quite a few folx have turned their noses up at Ms. Dewey as not being a serious search service contender, they’re perhaps missing the point that she’s pretty fun to interact with, and as a promotional effort goes, it’s probably pretty effective linkbait. Within just a short timeframe, many people will have emailed links to Ms. Dewey to their friends, getting a whole lot of people to use MicroSoft’s search engine who otherwise wouldn’t have tried it out.
I’d only say that the design group has dropped the ball a bit by not highlighting their MS Live brandname on the search results. (They also dropped the ball by advertising Ms. Dewey’s email address through the interface, ms-dewey@hotmail.com, because it’s inoperative, at least when I tested it. “Status: 5.0.0 – Remote SMTP server has rejected address”. They should have had someone responding to those notes, or they should’ve created an intelligent agent to respond to submissions to it.)
It’s maybe mentionable that Ask dropped the Jeeves butler mascot from the frontend of their search earlier this year, and here MicroSoft is adding a human mascot onto their search. Ask was never this attractive, though, and this ploy doesn’t seem in the least retro. Slick!
Interfaces like Ms. Dewey actually aren’t all that hard to do, and there’s one company that has made it really easy to incorporate interactive avatars similar to this within your blogs and other websites. Read on and I’ll describe how you can use avatars.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/30/2006
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Filed under: Link Building, Marketing, MSN Search avatars, linkbait, MS-Live, virtual-reality, VR
Brave New Future of SEO & SEM? Marketing thru Second Life
I came to hear about Second Life after reading about it in a blog by Greg Sterling, former editor and director of the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program. If you haven’t heard about it, read about it in this article. Second Life is basically a virtual reality (“VR”) platform (or, “world”, or “metaverse” if you will). People go in there, buy VR property or other objects, and interact with thousands of other participants.
“So what?” you might say. So, how does this differ from World of Warcraft, the Sims Online, or EverQuest?
First, there’s no goal to Second Life, per se — users just go into the thing, hang out, and interact with other users and the virtual environments. Second, users can own property in this world, and they can sell the property for real money in the real world! (Contrast with EverQuest, where they’ve actively worked to keep people from selling characters on eBay and such.) Finally, people have begun marketing through this new media — like gangbusters!
Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
People like Anshe Chung are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by designing and selling the SL virtual real estate. Others are offering services like architecture, event planning, selling artworks, scripting, and even financial or legal services. Some universities are now teaching within the space, too!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/24/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO online-marketing, Second-Life, SEM, SEO, virtual-reality, VR
Update: Sullivan still to be involved in SES
Last night I noted that SearchEngineWatch briefly cratered as some sort of early apocalyptal sign of things to come after Danny Sullivan’s earlier announcement that he would be leaving SEW behind, and that he wouldn’t be involved in Search Engine Strategies Conferences in 2007.
Now for instant turnabouts: Sullivan announced just this morning that Incisive Media worked out some details with him at the eleventh hour, so he’ll be chairing SES NY, co-chairing SES San Jose, and participating in the SES Chicago.
That’s great news for 2007!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/23/2006
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Filed under: Conferences, General Search-Engine-Watch, SES-Conference
SearchEngineWatch.com Cratered Briefly Tonight
Well, SearchEngineWatch.com apparently had a crash for a short period tonight, giving back pages that looked like this:
Ironically, this illustrates what many in the SEO industry felt would become of Search Engine Watch ever since Danny Sullivan announced he’d be leaving editorship of the site and the Search Engine Strategies Conferences.
Â
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/22/2006
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Filed under: General danny-sullivan, Search-Engine-Watch, SearchEngineWatch
Verizon to Spin-Off Verizon Information Services & Superpages.com
Verizon’s official announcement regarding the spin-off plans came out just a short while ago. Verizon Communications Corp. is spinning off the business unit that I work for, Verizon Information Services, and its local information website, Superpages.com.
The new company’s name is “Idearc Inc.”, and it will operate under marks of “Idearc” and “Idearc Media“:
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I’m not allowed to make any sort of forward-sounding business statements in relation to this until the spin-off is completed, due to the usual SEC rules. This is one of the common-sense limits one must place on one’s self, if one is an employee who happens to blog in one’s personal time! 🙂 (Wow! That sounded inhuman and recursive, didn’t it!) While I am an employee of VIS, I’m not speaking here in any sort of official capacity for my company, and any interpretations I place here are completely my own viewpoint. Obviously, nothing I say should be used in making stock purchase/sale decisions!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/18/2006
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Filed under: Design, Marketing, Yellow Pages idearc, Idearc-Media, Local Search, Online-Yellow-Pages, Verizon-Information-Services, Yellow Pages
7 Tips for Achieving Online Brand Recognition
I’ve worked for Verizon SuperPages.com for about a decade now, and it’s always been a bit deflating when John Q. Public asks me where I work, I tell them “SuperPages.com” — and then there’s sometimes this faint look of incomprehension that crosses the person’s face as they fail to recognize the name. Oh, sure, they recognize the Verizon name, if I drop that — and they often tell me they use our wireless phone service or somesuch. But do they recognize “SuperPages.com”? Not always.
Why is it that our brand name doesn’t have wider recognition? I’d wonder. After all, our site has certainly been around long enough, and has been used by plenty of people. We’ve been one of the primary websites of a Fortune 10 company!
Well, maybe we finally reached the tipping point where this is concerned, earlier this year. We noticed that the SuperPages.com name was mentioned in the Sally Forth comic strip. Did we reach brand identifiability with this? Is having your brand name mentioned in popular culture media the sign that you’ve finally arrived — that your brand name is at last graduating into the coveted household brandname recogizability status that trademarks like Coca-Cola, Ford Motors, Wal-mart, and yes, even Google, have enjoyed?
It’s made me wonder what it takes to build and achieve a recognizable online brand in this day and age. How is it that a well-founded, major corporation like ours has worked for years, spending millions in promotion, while a relative upstart like Google can come along and zoom past us in brand recognition within just a few years?
I have some ideas on the subject which traditional marketers may not agree with, so read on and I’ll describe what I think it takes to make it into the mass consciousness.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/11/2006
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Filed under: Marketing Brand-Name-Recognition, Branding, Building-Online-Brands, Marketing
