Natural Search Blog

2007-01-28T12:57:00.000-08:00

Whether you're talking about natural or paid search, the quality of your traffic is key to ROI. Not all traffic sources are created equal. On the one extreme, visitors may browse a site, leave, and never come back; meanwhile, some visitors may frequent the site, convert, and refer more traffic to you. Most visitors will be somewhere between the two extremes.

SiteLogic recently posted an article about traffic from social networks or media sites. Essentially, not all traffic is created equal. Social media traffic tends to drive "a lot of traffic, very fast. However the vast majority of that traffic is not engaged ...".

At some point, sites may start to discriminate among traffic sources to ensure quality versus quantity. In paid search, the CPA ad model would enable you to do that; the CPC/CPM model wouldn't work so well. In natural search, discrimination of traffic sources rarely comes up as a issue - afterall, it's free traffic.

Read the full posting on SiteLogic here.

2006-12-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

Hello! It's been awhile since I've posted. Sorry for being MIA. I've been busy with work and travel. Just came back from globetrotting in China, hitting up Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

Did I learn anything about the search world in China? You bet.

Everyone uses cellphones for search. In Shanghai, you can sign-up for a service called, Guanxi, which helps you find anything from the nearest museum to the best restaurants in town. Just text message your query, give it a minute, then you'll receive suggestions in your message box. It's exciting to imagine the search optimization and advertising potential of such a service!

In terms of search engines, Baidu is the leader. It's game plan is simple - play to the nationalist advantage; Google is portrayed as the foreign bad guy. For more on Baidu vs. Google, click here.

Enjoy the article and I'll post again soon! :)

Yahoo quietly overtakes Google in China

2006-08-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

According to a recent report of the search engine market in China, Yahoo! has just overtaken Google in market share.

The increased Chinese market share is a great success for Yahoo!, but Yahoo! and Google still trail Baidu by a significant margin.

Read more here.

SEO vs. PPC

2006-05-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

This article highlights how organic search outperforms PPC: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9395.asp

Key points:

- The Search Marketing Benchmark Survey (MarketingSherpa) shows that conversions with organic links outperform paid links thusly:

Average conversion rates: organic links 4.2 percent vs. PPC links 3.6 percent
Delayed ecommerce/service purchases: organic links 6.3 percent vs. PPC links 4.2 percent
Ecommerce product /service purchases: organic links 4.1 percent vs. PPC Links 3.8 percent

- Earlier research shows that 70 percent of your prospects will click on an organic link over a paid link and that organic clicks outnumber paid clicks by 5:1

- While it takes time to generate prominent organic links, once achieved they last indefinitely, and this long-term quality is what makes SEO cost effective.

Search Engine User Behaviour

2006-04-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

Wondering about search engine user behaviour? Check out a recent iProspect Search Engine User Behaviour Study.

Visit iProspect and click Search Engine User Behavior Study (April 2006) for full details.

Google gains search market share

2006-03-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

Google gained 6 percentage points of the US search market, widening its lead against Yahoo and MSN.

February's share of the search market, according to ComScore:

Google 42.3% (36.3% last year)
Yahoo 27.6% (31.1%)
MSN 13.5% (16.3%)
Ask.com 6% (5.3%)

Learn more:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-03-28T184032Z_01_N2854946_RTRUKOC_0_US-GOOGLE-SEARCH.xml

Google launches Page Creator

2006-02-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

Want to create your own web page, but don't know where to start? Google makes it easy with Google Page Creator.

Google Page Creator allows you design your web page using a simple WYSIWYG interface.

See Matt Cutt's blog for a snapshot of the different web page designs you can choose from.

What's in it for Google? They host your site!

Your web page will have the name: http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

Natural Search Blog - Alt tags

2006-02-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

If you have gifs or jpegs on your webpage, it's good practice to implement ALT tags to help crawlers know what your graphics are about. Generally speaking, the overall SEO impact of ALT tags is low, but offers another opportunity for boosting keyword frequency. Learn more:

http://www.allbusiness.com/articles/EBusiness/3296-2804-2809.html
http://www.perfect-optimization.com/image-alt-tags.htm
http://www.a1technology.com/blog/2004/10/using-alt-tags-is-very-important.htm

Natural Search Blog - Yahoo Tops Google

2006-02-20T21:29:00.000-08:00

BIGresearch's latest Simultaneous Media Survey of 15,000 respondents found that Yahoo tops Google in overall purchase influence.

Natural Search Blog - To Buy OR Not to Buy

2006-02-19T21:02:00.000-08:00

Trying to boost your PageRank? Buying text links is one way to achieve that end. But some specialists warn it may not help. To be clear, you likely won't be penalized for buying text links, but you won't benefit from it either. Learn more here.

Natural Search Blog - Four Scenarios of Google's Future

2006-02-12T22:24:00.000-08:00

Business 2.0 features an interesting article on Google's future, dreamed up by scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram.

In general, the scenarios spell doom for everything under the sun, as Google starts to truly make use of its stored consumer data. No doubt, search is very much in its infancy and Google is positioning itself to take it into the future.

Natural Search Blog - Google's BigDaddy Update

2006-02-04T22:54:00.000-08:00

Google's BigDaddy Update

For the past couple of months, Google has been conducting an algorithm test, dubbed "BigDaddy". This test is currently live in 3 datacenters (66.249.93.104, 64.233.179.104 and 216.239.51.104).

Google datacenters (DCs) house all the pages Google has crawled on the Internet. These pages become cached pages. For example, if you conduct a search for "ebay canada" right now, you'll see which DC crawled and cached ebay.ca: http://72.14.207.104

The cached content is what Google uses to judge whether a page is a relevant match for a query.

When rankings differ between DCs, it's an indicator of a potential algorithm update (The term Google Dance comes from the fact that rankings seem to "dance around" and differ between DCs).

What's the implication of BigDaddy? According to Matt Cutts, the algorithm test will be applied to all DCs, resulting in an algorithm update. Therefore, website rankings may experience fluctuations in the next month or so.

BigDaddy seeks to:

- Reduce canonicalisation (A Google term for instructing a search engine how to decide which of a series of related URLs is the proper one to insert into the Google index.)
- Eliminate 302 redirect issues.
- Reduce webspam.

Natural Search Blog - Standard Natural Search Checklist

2005-12-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

Standard Natural Search Checklist

1. If an URL is changed and a redirect is necessary, verify that http 301 redirects, http 302 redirects, or html meta redirects are used instead of JavaScript redirects. 301 redirects are ideal since they allow follow & full page-rank transfer. 302 redirects are acceptable since they allow follow & diluted page-rank transfer. Html Meta redirects are allowable since they allow follow but not page-rank transfer. JavaScript redirects are unacceptable since they do not allow follow or page-rank transfers. This should be captured during development cycles. QA is not responsible for checking this.

2. Ensure additional JavaScript is externalized. JavaScript should be externalized by putting JavaScript in .js files. This should be captured during development cycles. QA is not responsible for checking this.

3. Ensure the same page does not exist in multiple places (different URLs with duplicate content)> For example, the following URLs all display same page
http://pages.ebay.com/motors
http://motors.ebay.com
http://www.ebaymotors.com
http://www.stores.ebay.com
http://stores.ebay.com
For each page, one URL must be chosen, and http 301 redirects placed on the other URLs pointing to the chosen URL.

4. Avoid using parameters in the URL> Search robots have trouble crawling URLs with many dynamic characters, such as ?, & and =, and rank these pages lower than like pages with static URLs. This is particularly important if you are adding parameters to the URL, which are separated in the URL with these dynamic characters. Although this occurs frequently across eBay, please go ahead and notify Natural Search team anyways. For example, existing URLs like:

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?query=the+matrix+reloaded
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?query=the+matrix+reloaded&sacategory=617

would become search engine friendly URLs

http://search.ebay.com/the-matrix-reloaded
http://search.ebay.com/the-matrix-reloaded_dvd_W0QQsacategoryZ617

5. Verify that there are fewer than 200 links on a page. Search robots will only follow the first 200 links on each page. Please understand that this is only a consideration that PM needs to review when designing features. If your feature is impacted by Natural Search, please estimate the number of links. Please account for all links on the page, including the header and footer links.

6. Are you using text links for navigation vs. drop-down menus? Search boxes, radial buttons, drop-down menus and other forms of navigation prevent search robots from accessing many of our pages. That is because search robots cannot perform searches, fill in forms, select from drop-down menus, etc. They can only follow links. That is why it is important to use text links for navigation, or at least keep text links as an alternative method for navigation. QA talk to PM.

7. Are you using keywords in hyperlinks as opposed to "click here"? Search robots consider the anchor text in links in their ranking algorithm. Thus you should use relevant keywords in hyperlinks as opposed to "click here".

8. Ensure appropriate title tags, Meta tags and ALT tags are implemented on static pages.