2009 September | Own Page One: Search Engine Visibility Blog

Archive for September, 2009

Are you certifiable? Why professional qualifications matter

Posted by Dunrie Greiling at 05:02 pm | Filed in AdWords, Pure Visibility

Sep

30

At small companies and even large ones, people perform tasks outside of their areas of training. This is a natural occurrence, happening when folks cover each others tasks during a vacation, because of a promotion, during special short-term projects, and for many other reasons. A lack of formal training is almost a condition of participating in certain emerging fields, such as, say, search engine marketing and social media. So, how does a professional ensure they’re current with the existing standards? By self-study – reading books and blogs, by setting goals and measuring yourself against your own high standards, and by participating in professional development activities – attending conferences and obtaining relevant professional certifications.

For search engine marketing, certifications are available from professional associations such as the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO Institute offers a certification) as well as the Search Engines themselves:

Anyone managing projects in this industry should consider Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Relevant but non-certifying professional organizations include: the Usability Professionals Association. Read More

Cached Pages on Google and What They Mean to You

Posted by Megan Zlatos at 05:24 pm | Filed in Google, SEO

Sep

18

Search results on Google often come with a handy “Cached” page link next to the green website address. This cached page link will take you to the version of the page that Google saw when it last visited the site and indexed its content. Some websites change frequently, so these cached versions can be very different from the current page you’ll see if you click on the search result.

There are two ways this can be useful: 1. if the site is no longer available, you can still access the cached page that Google has stored in its archives, and 2. if the site has changed dramatically and is no longer related to your search, the cached page will likely include the content that is relevant.

Sometimes, however, you may not want people to be able to access your cached content. In one case, we had a client whose site had been hacked and stuffed with spammy content about prescription drugs. They had updated their site, but Google still showed the spammy text in the cached page link.

Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to take embarrassing cached pages like this out of circulation. You can follow the steps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35306.

A few good things to note:

Removing the cached page will not affect search rank in any way.
However, removing the cached page will mean that you search result no longer includes a short description snippet.
The cached page link and snippet will return the next time Google visits the page.
If you do not want the page to ever be cached, you can place the following tag in the <Head> portion of your page’s code: <meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

The Google help page reference above indicates (as of the writing of this blog post) that the cached page will be removed for a minimum of 6 months. According to a Google employee, this is a typo and should indicate that it takes a maximum of 6 months for the cached page to be replaced by an updated page. In our experience, it is usually much shorter than that.

Google Insights For Search… For AdWords

Posted by Megan Zlatos at 04:08 pm | Filed in AdWords, Google, Keywords

Sep

11

If you haven’t already checked out Google Insights For Search, you really should. Like Google Trends, this awesome tool allows you to figure out how a search query’s popularity has trended over time and compare the trends between these search queries.

But Insights For Search takes this functionality a step further, allowing you to find top searches by location, time range, or any combination thereof.Â You can also see the top search terms that include a keyword of your choice. Insights will also make projections of future trends.

While it’s kind of fun to know that “Michigan” is the most popular search term in Michigan (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=US-MI&cmpt=geo), it isn’t immediately apparent how you would use this kind of information to improve your AdWords account.

Here’s an example we ran into recently when we were able to use Insights For Search to inform the way we built out an AdWords account for a client:

The Detroit metro area is home to a large and vibrant Arab community. According to the 2000 census, Arab-Americans comprised 30% of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Our client, naturally, wondered if we should be targeting the Arabic language and creating Arabic keyword lists since they wanted to target this region. Google Insights for Search to the rescue!

We ran keyword searches within Google Insights and compared the several common terms based on the top searches in Iraq and Lebanon (since Dearborn’s Arab population is primarily composed of Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants or their descendants). In this Insights For Search chart, you’ll find the terms “photos” (blue), “games” (red), and “ramadan” (orange) in Arabic graphed to show their relative popularity in the US. We also tested some terms like “soccer” and “flights” that we thought might be popular, but they were not popular enough to register results.
The states that seem to have a lot of people doing Arabic language searches are Virginia, California, North Carolina, and Florida. According to the last US census, the only state in that group with a larger Arab community than Michigan is California.

It’s possible there aren’t a significant amount of Arabic language searches in Michigan because the Arab population here is longer-standing, much of which immigrated during the first half of the twentieth century. It’s also possible that many of the Lebanese Arabs might prefer to search in French over Arabic, since Lebanon uses both languages, and American keyboards are better-suited to French than Arabic.

Whatever the reason members of the Arab community in Michigan do not search in Arabic, the important question has already been answered – it seems that it is not worth the rather significant investment of time and money to translate keyword lists to Arabic when targeting the Dearborn area.