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
Zawodny’s Cool Diet Tips
I noticed with interest that Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! fame has been posting some of his personal dieting tips on his blog. These are really pretty good tips, IMHO, for all of us in the IT industries who work desk jobs and are constantly fighting the “Battle of the Bulge”, as they say.
I find it interesting that I have generally been following most of these guidelines by coincidence, though I’m not nearly so disciplined (nor anal-retentive) enough to be tracking my weight in spreadsheets and such. I don’t even own a scale!
Even if I don’t track measurements, I’ve never fully devolved into lazy habits, and I’ve kept up with moderate exercise and such since high school. Just a couple of weeks ago, my sister and I participated in a charity 5K run for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure near here in Plano, and I’m fairly pleased to’ve clocked in at a respectable 31 minutes.
Jeremy’s dieting tips seem really pretty good to me — I highly recommend them.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/14/2006
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Filed under: General diet, dieting, losing-weight, weight-loss
Photo Image Site Referrals Valuable
In an earlier posting on image search optimization, I mentioned how image search utilities and photo album sites could potentially be tapped for great referral traffic. Some people have ridiculed the idea, on the false assumption that only porn sites can get good referral traffic from such sites. However, this is really naive thinking — there are many, many reasons why people use and explore such sites. Providing many images related to your site content and optimizing them can result in some really great referral traffic — some accidental, and some purposeful. It can take some experimentation to use it successfully in a way that can convert.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/14/2006
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Link Building Image Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, Photo-Albums, SEO
How major companies choose SEOs
While we have our own in-house SEO team (and I immodestly consider myself something of an expert in SEO), I do periodically hire an SEO company for various special consulting projects to augment our internal expertise. We hire for stuff like auditing of our optimization work, advice on special problems, strategic planning, and etc. While I’m expert in this area, it’s incestuous and full of hubris not to get some external input.
So, how do we select SEO firms from out of the pack? The internet is crawling with firms and individuals who perform all sorts of SEO work. On the business side, there’ve been times when various firms have seemed to be virtually beating down the door with proposals to “help” us. And at SES conferences, there’s times when it seems like all our Marketing and Sales people attending are perceived as chum thrown into the roiling waters of sharks. Fortunately they look for those of us in the technology department to vet such proposals.
I thought it might be of interest to note down a handful of general guidelines for many of you other SEO professionals out there who are interested in doing work for Fortune 100 firms such as ours.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/06/2006
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Filed under: SEO choosing-seo-firms, SEO-business, SEO-consulting, SEOs
How much traffic does the top keyword position garner on Google?
Have you ever wondered how much traffic the top keyword position on Google can bring a site, for a hotly-contested term? Or, how much traffic does the top slot get you, compared with the second slot?
Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.
The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and Did-It show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.
I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/31/2006
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Filed under: Google, Keyword Research, Market Data, Tools, Tracking and Reporting Google, Google-Trends, Keyword-Analysis, Keyword-Positions, Keyword-Rankings, Top-Position
Searching for brick-and-mortar retailers?
Data now out from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were all brick-and-mortar retailers:
- “home depot”
- “walmart”
- “target”
- “sears”
- “best buy”
SearchEngineWatch Blog then arrived at the conclusion that:
These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it is they want.
I disagree. I think most Americans already know where their local Home Depot is. Instead, these searchers are looking to buy online. Some will opt for in-store pickup (which both Sears and Best Buy offer). Some may be on the hunt for product information, buyer’s guides, or the current circular with the week’s in-store specials.
I believe brick-and-mortar brands dominate shopping-related searches because those are the brands that are the most pervasive/popular/trusted in the marketplace. Their online shops offer a safe and familiar place to buy online.
A huge number of Internet users are searching for “home depot” when they could be typing in homedepot.com directly into their browser’s Location bar. Why is this? I imagine that for many people, typing in “home depot” into the Google Toolbar or into the search box on their Start Page is just easier or most comfortable. Perhaps some, like myself, even configured their Google Toolbar to display the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, to go straight to the first search result. 😉
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 05/28/2006
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Filed under: Market Data brick-and-mortar-retailers, NetRatings, Nielsen
Print Yellow Pages Vs. Online Yellow Pages / Local Search
I was noticing that Paul Haahr, an engineer I met at Google Dance last September, mentioned on his blog in January that he doesn’t like traditional print yellow pages. He consideres them to be something of a dinosaur, and his attitude is clearly communicated by his habit of leaving them to be turned into a pile of gray sludge by the rain on his doorstep when they’re delivered to his neighborhood. (I’m okay with him neglecting his directory in this way, since it’s an AT&T phone book.)
As a longtime employee of Verizon’s yellow pages directory company, I probably should act completely horrified at Paul’s disparagement of the well-established printed books, but I have to agree with his take on the matter. Print yellow pages don’t give me all the info I’m wanting any more, and the book has become something of an annoyance. It takes up space in my house, and it seems like the new replacement is always showing up about the time that I’ve only just gotten around to shelving the previous one. Online yellow pages and internet search sites have given me everything that I need.
Paul’s take on the matter is so amusing to me because it strikes a resonance with my own feelings about the whole thing. It’s a bit ironic to me (and it feels slightly disloyal!), because when I started at SuperPages nine years ago, I couldn’t really conceive of throwing away my phone books. Back then, we almost couldn’t imagine people choosing to use our online YP, because it was faster to look stuff up in the books rather than trying to use our online service!
But, stuff’s changed a whole lot. People have continuous and speedy connections to the internet, and our site responds back to queries a lot faster than in the old days. I can’t even hope to find everything I want in the print directory any more — it can’t tell me what theatre, store, restaurant, etc. is closest to my home or office. Since I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I’d likely have to page through about 10 small city directories and perform distance interpolation on a map to figure out which businesses were closest to me! Fun (and geeky!) exercise, but I don’t have time for that.
Considering all this, why haven’t print yellow pages disappeared altogether? For that reason, why do merchants still spend significant amounts of their advertising budgets to have presence in the books? Are the printed books still a good business proposition? Surprisingly, they are indeed still worthwhile — read on and I’ll explain.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/17/2006
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Filed under: Online Directories, Yellow Pages Online-Yellow-Pages, Phone-Books, Phonebook, Printed-Directories
The significance of GData
Gdata, short for Google Data APIs, promises to be Google’s new standard protocol for transmitting all sorts of data back and forth to Google and its various services. As Google states on Google Code: “All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items.” Imagine for instance, starting with a base feed, then adding query parameters like restricting to a particular category and date range and ending up with a customized feed that specifically fits your criteria. Gdata builds on the RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 protocols.
Imagine your desktop machine — armed with your personal profile — communicating with Google (and even with the Web in general) about your email, search history, RSS subscriptions, calendar, bookmarks, blog posts, and the news… and all through the GData protocol. As Reto Meier states, “Google already has a ridiculous amount of my information. Now with an API that promises access to this information to use the way I want to, there’s one less reason to think about storing it anywhere else.” Kinda scary but also exciting at the same time. Google Operating System here we come!
Will we all be speaking GData in years to come? Will the GData protocol become as ubiqitous as the HTTP protocol? Only time will tell, but I certainly think GData is one to watch!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 05/12/2006
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Filed under: Google, Research and Development APIs, ATOM, GData, Google, Google-APIs, RSS, XML
Google Maps for Europe & the Rise of GeoTagging
A couple of weeks ago when I was writing the joke article on optimizing roof ads for Google Maps, I happened across this weird satellite picture when browsing the downtown area of my city, Dallas:
(This weird situation of buildings apparently leaning into one another is caused when two or more satellite pictures, each taken at different angles to the buildings, are stitched together. This phenomenon is referred to colloquially as the “Google Escher Effect”.)
I thought it was particularly amusing, so I posted the screen capture to my account on Flickr, and then sent it out to a few friends, and lazily posted it to a number of groups in Flickr that would have an interest in the pic. When researching appropriate related groups in Flickr, I noticed that there are quite a few groups dedicated to “GeoTagging” — this new and rising trend is something that’s got a lot of potential which businesses involved in local search may not be aware of yet, so I thought I’d mention just a few details and ideas on the subject in conjunction with Google Maps expanding their level of detail for European maps.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/26/2006
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Maps GeoTagging, Google, Google-Maps, internet-trends
The Keyword Index Is Out: $1.39, On Avg.
Interestinghttp://battellemedia.com/archives/002496.phpFathom’s quarterly index is out, and prices “easedâ€? a bit (3%). Average keyword price is $1.39. From the release:
(more…)
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Posted by Brian of Brian on 04/21/2006
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Filed under: Keyword Research, Paid Search average-bid-amounts, Keyword Research, Keyword-Index, ppc
New Study – Importance of Rankings on Brand
36% of search engine users associate top rankings with brand leadership
In addition, 88% of users will change engines or search terms if they don’t find what they seek within the first three pages of search results, up from 78% in 2002.
Brian
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Posted by Brian of Brian on 04/21/2006
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Research and Development, Tracking and Reporting Branding, Searcher-Behavior
