The Yahoo! Search Blog announced a new “open approach to search,” that looks somewhat similar to the recommendations I gave Yahoo! for “improving” their company in January – except I called it making search more exclusive. It looks like me and Yahoo! might have different opinions about the meaning of “open.”

The blog doesn’t give too many details, but we’ll see how things roll out. According to Yahoo!:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners — big or small — an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines.

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Last night, I watched the Democratic debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Like thousands of other Americans, I felt compelled to twitter this action. Twitter is a free online social media site that allows members to post short updates, or tweets, to their online profile and to others who have signed up to see them.

Upon logging in, I noticed something very odd. Many of my Twitter friends had Barack Obama-inspired avatars. Some were simply an image of Obama’s face, and others were unique designs based on his campaign logo. I clicked on one and a pattern started to emerge. Not only were my friends sporting Obamatars, but practically everyone had at least one Obamatars in their network.

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Radio buttons, by their very nature, have only one option selected at a time. For the sake of consistency, it is important to have a default option when presenting the user with radio buttons. The current four candidates for U.S. president all have contribution pages on their websites that let users choose a contribution amount through radio buttons, but none of them have a default option for the contribution amount.

They not only misuse the radio button–they miss an opportunity to anchor users’ expectations for how much they ought to contribute to the campaign. Read More

*If you’re opted into Google’s content network, that is.

The Content Network is a pretty good product, but it’s challenging to understand and use. As a result, it’s a source of major waste for PPC beginners. Almost without exception its clickthrough rates and conversion rates are uniformly lower than the Search Network. For most advertisers, the Content Network should be a place where they go once they have maximized their Return on Investment (ROI) in the Search Network.

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When I first started building sites in WordPress a year ago I was disappointed in the quality of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins available. During that time I put several plugins to the test, and here are the five I use exclusively to optimize my WordPress sites. Remember website optimization still takes that personal touch, but these plugins will help you not only achieve organic traffic but make your life easier. Read More

We love our clients. We are passionate about helping our clients grow, and in the process of learning how best to help them, we often become almost as passionate as our clients are about their own products. We’re particularly passionate, might I say, sweet fragrant pineapple-passionate about our client Arbor Teas.

Arbor Teas offers the best loose leaf, fair trade, and organic teas around, in a range of varieties from herbal chamomile mint and redbush/Rooibos teas, from delicate Japanese green teas, to sweetly perfumed Jasmine tea, to traditional high tea British varieties like Earl Grey and Irish Breakfast, to my personal favorite lovely smoky aromatic and strong Lapsang Souchong. And, ArborTeas has been very thoughtful about their packaging, offering their teas in recyclable, parchment-lined paperboard canisters that are much lighter on the environment than the tins typically used to deliver tea. What’s not to like?

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Command line interfaces are the wave of the future.

Aza Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want rather than requiring a structured syntax.

Still, I find myself typing all the time rather than using the mouse. When I starting using a Mac recently, I left Spotlight alone, up in the corner of the screen. Then, I needed something that wasn’t in my dock and it seemed like too much trouble to root around on the hard drive looking for the application, so I figured I’d give searching a try. Success. Read More

Back links are of serious importance for getting good Google rankings. They establish site authority and boost your site’s perceived importance to particular search engine queries. I’ve seen sites that weren’t at all targeting competitive keyphrases in their page copy, but were able to rank for them by virtue of keyword rich text links from authoritative sites. So these things are important, but I’ve never seen any studies, or even much discussion, about how people naturally link to sites. Here are my common sense observations about it, and how you can expect search engine listings to be affected by it. Read More

One difference between natural search engine listings and paid search listings is the use of IP addresses for locating users to determine what paid listings might show. To understand what I mean here are Google search results for the term “orthodontists.” Click on the thumbnail to get a larger image:

I live in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan so in the paid listings there are results for Michigan and the Flint-Saginaw-Bay City area. Google knows to show paid listings for that area because my IP address shows that I’m searching from around there. The natural listings, however, don’t use IP information. And if you look at the bottom of the page (sorry, it got a little cut off, and I’m too pathetically lazy when it comes to blog posts to try and fix it) you’ll see a listing for PhiladelphiaOrthodontists.com. Pure Visibility did SEO work for this site a couple years back – it’s pretty amazing that they rank for “orthodontists.” But this is a local practice. They really ought not show for such a general query unless the person doing the querying is from Philadelphia.

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At Pure Visibility, we have a culture of $5 Canadian bets. Our $5 Canadian bets mean that we find ways to test our own assertions and those of our team-mates. In the world of search marketing, testing is important. The landscape changes, the strategies evolve, and what worked in the past may no longer hold. We A/B test ad copy and landing pages for our own and our clients’ pay-per-click campaigns. We use Google Website Optimizer to test landing pages. We refine our assertions based on real data from patterns of website use held in Google Analytics or web server logfiles and patterns of search engine use. When proven wrong, or even when not disproven, we then make additional assertions, always willing to refine our understanding in light of new data.
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