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
Talkin ’bout RSS… on the Chris Pirillo Show
Want to listen to me rant and rave about the power of RSS as a content delivery channel for search marketers? That was a rhetorical question. Frankly, who wouldn’t! 😉 So now you get your chance, on my interview on the Chris Pirillo Show, which was just podcasted today. Chris interviewed me last week at Search Engine Strategies. Have a listen.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/11/2005
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Filed under: General, Link Building, Tracking and Reporting
New eyetracking study: where Google searchers look and click
I found the eyetracking study from Enquiro and Did-It unveiled last week at Search Engine Strategies and covered in Search Day fascinating. The aggregate heat map shown on the right (larger version here) shows where participants focused their eyes (and their attention) the most. As you can see, the first listing not only drew the most attention; the full listing was read more fully from left to right, than other listings.
Visibility drops the further down the search results you go, and clickthroughs drop even more markedly (as you can see from the graphs below). This got me thinking about Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s Law is applicable to Top Ten Lists, as Seth Godin explains, perhaps Zipf’s Law might be applicable to the SERPs (search engine results pages) too? (In general terms, Zipf’s Law states that being #1 is much, much better than being #2 which is much, much better than being #3 and so on. So dominating a Top 10 list is critical.) Although these graphs don’t follow Zipf’s Law exactly, nonetheless given this data I’d consider it foolish to be complacent if your search listings are not at the very top of the SERPs.
What is it about searchers that makes them so blind to relevant results further down the page? Is this due to the “implied endorsement” effect, where searchers tend to simply trust Google to point them to the right thing? Or is it just the way humans are wired, to make snap decisions, as Malcolm Gladwell insightfully explains in his new book, Blink? According to the study, 72% of searchers click on the first link of interest, whereas 25.5% read all listings first, then decide. My guess is that both effects (“implied endorsement” and “rapid cognition”) play a role in searcher behavior.
A few other important take-aways from the study:
- 6/7 (85%) of searchers click on natural (“organic”) results (not 60/40 as the search engines and PPC (pay-per-click) vendors would have you believe).
- The top 4 sponsored slots are equivalent in views to being ranked at #7 – #10 natural.
- (corollary to #2): This means if you need to make a business case for natural search, then (assuming you can attain at least #3 rank in natural for the same keywords you bid on) natural search could be worth two to three times your PPC results.
In all, a superb research study. Great job Did-It, Enquiro, and EyeTools!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/10/2005
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Filed under: Searching
Retailers and Catalogers: Sign up for this free webinar from Catalog Age on SEO
If you’re interested in practical, no B.S. advice on how to achieve higher rankings in the natural search results, this is the webinar for you: Wednesday, March 9 at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific. It’s brought to you by Catalog Age magazine. I’ll be the main presenter, with Joan Broughton, VP of Multichannel Programs/Online at REI, presenting a case study (Disclosure: yes, REI is a client), and Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems expounding on keyword research tools and tactics. At the reasonable price of FREE, you’d be a mug to pass this up! Sign up here, and do it now.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/08/2005
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Filed under: Best Practices
Become.com shopping search engine coming into its own
Become.com is a pretty cool little new shopping search engine, specializing in product reviews and other info for the research-oriented consumer. Its index is now up to 2.2 billion pages in size, all of it taken from shopping-related web sites in the US. It’s in public beta now, so give it a whirl. You’ll need to register as a beta user before you can start using it. www.become.com
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/08/2005
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Filed under: Searching
RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers
Hello from Search Engine Strategies in NYC. Yesterday I spoke at the Webfeeds, Blogs, and Search session. My talk was focused on on implementing RSS feeds as part of your search engine marketing strategy. I’ve made my Powerpoint deck available online at www.netconcepts.com/learn/rss.ppt.
A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.
There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:
- You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the <content:encoded> container. This is known as a “web bug.” Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
- You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the <link> containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user’s IP not on clicktracked URLs)
- You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed or Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs… for example Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber’s email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.
I consider personalized RSS feeds to be “best practice.” As of yet I’m not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I’m sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can’t scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it’s one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you’ll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.
IMPORTANT: An oft overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!
Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders’ feed access.
Some more “gotchas” if you don’t set things up right:
- You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
- You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the “Add to My Yahoo!” link; don’t just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically “ping” Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)
- Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don’t know your RSS feed address. That means putting <link> tags in your HTML. For example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.rdf" />
Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: “Subscribe in NewsGator,” “Subscribe on Bloglines,” and “Add to My Yahoo!”
RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:
- Getting onto bloggers’ “blogrolls” (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
- Getting links through “trackbacks” (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers’ blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/02/2005
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Filed under: PageRank, Tracking and Reporting
MSN Search vs Google vs Yahoo!
MarketingProfs has published my article: “How Does MSN Search Stack Up to Google and Yahoo?.” This one is different from my last week’s article on MarketingProfs (“What Web Marketers Must Know About the New MSN Search“), in that it’s a side-by-side comparison of the top three search engines — essential stats, tolerance levels for “worst practices” etc. You need to be a premium MarketingProfs subscriber to read it. (If you’re not, it’s time to open up your wallet! Their premium article library and the virtual seminars are well worth it…)
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/09/2005
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Filed under: Google, MSN Search, Yahoo
Google Maps
Geez, I just posted an amalgamation of Google news, then a day later they launch another new service — Google Maps. I can’t seem to keep up with all the cool stuff that Google Labs pumps out. I love the way you can pan around by clicking and dragging with the mouse. Check it out!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/08/2005
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps Google, Google-Maps, Local Search, Maps
Latest Google happenings
- Google’s estimated numbers of search results per query aren’t to be trusted? Hmm… kinda looks that way. Certainly Yahoo’s numbers appear to more believable from this little study.
- Google releases an API for Google AdWords – an Application Programming Interface for manipulating your AdWords account programatically without having to do screen scraping. Way cool!
- Google unveils new “nofollow” link tag. Yahoo and MSN follow suit. I’m dubious that this is going to do anything to squelch comment spamming, but I thank Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) for giving us website owners better control when we link to sites that we don’t want to share the “search engine juice” with.
- Google more than triples its word limit on search queries to 32 words. Good work Google! The 10 word limit was one of my pet peeves. Now I can finally run queries that have a pile of site: operators all separated by ORs. Now please Google will you let me further refine link: queries with additional operators? (Yahoo! and MSN support the use of other operators with link:)
- Google launches Google Referral program, an affiliate program that pays $20 per referred AdWords customer. Sounds kinda cool, but I can’t imagine I’ll make nearly the cash I make as an AdSense publisher…
- Source code released into the public domain for getting the PageRank of a page automatically in PHP. Not that the Toolbar Server can really be trusted anymore to serve up anything resembling the actual PageRank score used by Google’s ranking algorithm…
- Google loses another trademark lawsuit in France relating to selling AdWords ads against trademarked terms. Ouch, that smarts!
- Google earnings for 4th Quarter 2004 top $1 billion. Makes me sorry I don’t own Google stock…
- How To Destroy Google With $100 Million? – a flawed idea, but it does make one think…
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/07/2005
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Filed under: Google, News Google, Google-News
Catalog Age article: Microsoft is Gunning for Google
My article, “Gunning for Google,” has just been published in this month’s issue of Catalog Age magazine. As of today, it is now live on their site. Enjoy!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/06/2005
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Filed under: Google, MSN Search
What would you ask the leading SEO gurus?
We’ve got a great line-up for the upcoming Thought Leaders Summit on search engine optimization that I’m organizing for MarketingProfs.com: Mike Grehan, Barry Lloyd, Jill Whalen, Christine Churchill, Ammon Johns, Eric Ward, Ian McAnerin, Cam Balzer, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, and Brian Klais.
I’m working up a list of questions to send to our panelists in advance. Here are some questions that initially came to mind for me:
- What can/should be done to get rid of search engine spam that isn’t already being done?
- Are the search engines taking the right approach to comment spam with the href rel nofollow tag? If not, how should it be handled instead?
- What is the definitive list of no-nos that an SEO must refrain from in order to be considered ethical?
- Are there any SEO tactics that you think are misconstrued as unethical but are actually acceptable?
- Is buying PageRank ethical? Is it dangerous?
- How would a buyer of SEO services go about ascertaining whether a potential vendor is ethical?
- What is a fair price for SEO services? How is SEO typically priced?
- Is it ethical for an SEO to make guarantees?
- What are your “top 10” most effective optimization tactics?
- What is it that sets a top performing SEO apart from a run-of-the-mill one?
- Who are your SEO heroes? (can be individuals or companies) Why?
- What are your favorite search engines? Why?
- What should one do to make a solid business case for SEO?
- What’s wrong with the SEO industry today?
- What do you think will be the major issues for the SEO industry in 2006?
- The worst kind of SEO customers do what sorts of things?
- What’s wrong with search engines today? Are any search engines doing anything wrong or inappropriate?
- What will search engines look like in 5 years? What will the SEO industry look like in 5 years?
What would you, dear reader, add to this list, if you could pose any SEO-related question to this illustrious panel?
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/06/2005
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Filed under: Searching
