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Content and Links: The Building Blocks of Subject Matter “Expertness”

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 11:32 am | Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 | Filed in SEO

At the end of the day, the goal of SEO is to establish your website as an authoritative “subject matter expert” on the topics and keyphrases you want to target; at least in the eyes of the search engines. To this end, I wanted to share an excellent analogy I heard to help crystalize this notion.

In the early days of the Internet, webpages were conceived of much like academic publications (such as dissertations or journal articles), with descriptive titles and abstracts, deeply informative body content, and references to other authoritative work on the subject. Translated to a webpage, these correspond quite nicely to the <title>, meta description, <body>, and links to related content. At a very fundamental level, sites and pages continue to be thought of in this fashion by search engines.

Using this analogy is helpful to understand how a website might be viewed by a search engine as an “expert” on the topic(s) it covers (and thus be rewarded with higher rankings). Expressed in academic terms, subject matter “expertness” is derived from two basic elements: the size of the body of work on the topic (i.e. the number of pages your website contains dedicated to that topic), and the degree to which that body of work is cited by other relevant, authoritative sources (i.e. links from other high-quality webpages on the subject – both internal and external).

Pretty cool, huh? Now get out there and act like an expert! Start fueling your SEO campaign with some high-quality, link-worthy content!

Local Search Optimization: Like SEO, But Different… (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 11:06 pm | Friday, July 9th, 2010 | Filed in Local Listings

The realm of local search is a burgeoning and rapidly evolving space. And since everyone is local somewhere, it’s a topic worthy of some consideration – whether you’re the mom-and-pop sandwich shop, or the multinational drugstore chain. This post is the first of a two-part series, in which I’ll introduce the concept of local search, and highlight some of the unique differences between optimizing for visibility in local search results versus traditional organic search results. Part two of the series will delve into some tactical “nuts-and-bolts” of local search optimization.

Before I go much further, let’s define what I mean by “local search”. Local searches are those made in pursuit of something tied to a particular geography, often with the intent of taking some sort of action offline. Really, you can think of these as the sort of queries one might have made (or still make) within printed yellow page directories. In response to the increasing use of search for local purposes, search engines evolved to serve up specialized results when they think the searcher is interested in a local result. Because of Google’s 72% domination of the internet search market, I will almost exclusively addresses optimizing for visibility within Google’s answer to local search – Google Places, which are displayed via Google Maps search results.

Search results for "brew pub ann arbor", serving up Google Places listings.

Local search is, in a certain sense, the great equalizer of internet search marketing. At times, traditional, purely concept-driven SEO might be seen as favoring the “big guys” – those who can afford substantial and wide-reaching SEO undertakings to establish their authority on a given topic and propel themselves to the top of the SERPs (content generation/syndication efforts, linkbuilding campaigns, sizeable online PR, etc.). Local search, on the other hand, favors, well… localness. And you don’t have to be big to be local.

This essential difference in the thrust of local search (compared to more general organic search) is driven by a distinct set of factors. Those factors prioritize the local significance and legitimacy of a business just as much as its topical relevance. As I mentioned above, Google will return location-driven Google Maps results on the SERP when it’s fairly certain the searcher is performing a local search. Those search results are populated by listings within Google Places, so much of the focus of local search optimization (for Google, anyway) is placed on tuning up those listings. Once you’ve tackled that, the key is making sure other aspects of your business’ online presence (local directory listings, customer review sites, your own landing page, etc.) are in proper alignment with your Google Places listing(s).

In my next post on this subject, I’ll go over ways specific ways one can demonstrate the legitimacy, topical relevance and overall significance of your local business to Google, resulting in improved visibility in local search results.

More Query Data In Google Webmaster Tools!

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 09:27 am | Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 | Filed in Google Webmaster Tools

Big news from Google Webmaster Tools! This month, Google unveiled richer data about the search queries your site is visible for in the Top Search Queries section of Google Webmaster Tools. You can now view the number of impressions, number of clicks and clickthrough rate associated with the search queries your site is visible for. And better yet, you can review that data position-by-position, and for each page of your site that was visible for a given query.

Webmaster Tools Screenshot

Managing our clients’ pay-per-click accounts, we’re used to monitoring metrics like “impressions”, “clicks” and “clickthrough rate”. But as an internet marketing company that also specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), we have frequently longed for similar performance data for the organic search aspect of our clients’ online visibility.

Until now, we’ve only been able to track the success of our SEO efforts in terms of website visits or point-in-time rankings. Now, for the first time, Google Webmaster Tools gives us the chance to look at the visibility of a website one step prior to a visitor arriving.

Another Webmaster Tools Screenshot

This sort of data allows us to answer all kinds of questions, like “How much of a difference does position make on clickthrough rate?”, and “Which of the pages on my site do a better job of inviting a searcher to clickthrough?”, “Do I have pages competing for visibility on the same keywords?”, and so on.

Of course, Google Webmaster Tools only offers a look into your site’s performance on Google’s search engine – but given that Google still commands over 65% of all US search traffic, it’s still very useful and relevant information!

Still Jonesing for Google Caffeine…

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 03:39 pm | Monday, March 29th, 2010 | Filed in Google

Google Caffeine is a major overhaul to Google’s search infrastructure that was announced in August of last year, which aims to deliver faster and more comprehensive crawling and indexing for the Google index.

About the Caffeine Roll-Out
After a developer preview period, Google rolled Caffeine out to just one of its data centers sometime around November 2009, giving a small percentage of users access to search results powered by Google’s fancy new infrastructure. So when do the rest of us get to play!? In a recent Search Engine Land article, a Google spokesperson is quoted as expecting Caffeine “to roll out to all data centers over the coming months.” This is a lot later than the estimate given by Google’s Matt Cutts, who blogged about Caffeine being rolled out after the 2009 holiday season. Bummer.

So Why’s Caffeine a Big Deal, Anyway?
Just to be clear, Caffeine is not a change to Google’s search algorithm, but a new approach to crawling and indexing web pages and content. That said, it’ll almost certainly result in differences on search engine results pages (SERPs), because the new technology will allow Google to index more content (including more kinds of content) faster (think: realtime results). What can we expect to see on Google SERPs powered by Caffeine? Here’s a quick summary of speculations from around the web:

The speed of search results will increase;
The temporal relevance (i.e. real time) of results will increase;
Social media will be more prominent/prevalent in search results;
The variety of content offered on SERPs will continue to increase;
The relevance/importance of long-tail keyphrase searches will increase (because of an even larger index).

Another Good Reason To Use The Google Analytics API

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 05:04 pm | Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 | Filed in Google Analytics

The online interface offered by Google Analytics offers a wealth of easily-accessible, business-oriented data and reporting about the usage of your website. But it has it’s limitations. Recently, when attempting to segment branded and non-branded keyword traffic for one of our larger clients (which, by the way, is a good idea for anyone who wants to understand whether their SEO efforts are gaining traction), we ran into one such limitation. Here’s the scenario: in order to capture all of the possible brand-related terms associated with our client, we created regular expressions matching variations of each (20 in all), and plugged them into two Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (one segment to exclude those terms, and one to match only those terms). After quite a bit of work (identifying the branded terms, writing the RegExes, creating the Advanced Segments, etc.), we clicked the Advanced Segments “on” with eager anticipation. And voila! Here’s the spiffy chart that appeared:
Analytics Sampled Data #1.egg by jlopatin on Aviary

Hooray! Just what we wanted – visitor trends by branded and non-branded keyword traffic! But wait, what about that little yellow box of fine print? It reads: “This report is based on sampled data. Learn more.” So what exactly does that mean to us? Check out the data table that Analytics presented us with:
Analyticsd Sampled Data #2.egg by jlopatin on Aviary

The numbers for branded and non-branded traffic *should* add-up to 100% of the visits… but they don’t. See those little yellow boxes next to the segmented data? Those depict the margin of error that Google’s data sampling resulted in. Basically, the statement “This report is based on sampled data” means that the numbers aren’t as precise as we might like them to be. In fact, the margin of error on some of our results was over 70%! Kind of a big deal…

After a little experimentation, it became clear that neither the size, nor the complexity, of my Advanced Segments were triggering the use of sampling. Instead, it turns out that the number of visits contained in the selected date range was the determining factor – specifically those instances where the total visits exceeded 500,000. In order to return reports for large data sets quickly, Google employs sampling whenever it generates a report through the online interface that isn’t automatically compiled.

The take home message? If you’ve got large volumes of Analytics data that you want to slice-and-dice, you might be better served to pull the raw data from Google using the Analytics API and perform the calculations on your own!

Keyword Research = Market Research!

Posted by Jeremy Lopatin at 03:01 pm | Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | Filed in Search Engine Marketing

I was recently working on an SEO engagement that began with an extensive phase of keyword research and analysis. As we worked to categorize, organize, and generally make sense of the terms that populated the language of our client’s industry, we began to notice clusters of search terms for which no corresponding content could be found on their website.

Did our keyword research efforts somehow run amok, inadvertently pulling in keyphrases unrelated to our client’s business? That was certainly a possibility, and can happen quite easy if you’re not careful. Another, more exciting possibility is that we uncovered niches within our client’s market (perhaps even potential products or services) that they weren’t even aware were worth considering.

The beauty of well-executed keyword research (using some of our favorite tools like Google’s Keyword Tool), is that the keywords you come across often paint an interesting picture of the subject you’re investigating. Looking at the language used by searchers can give you insight into their needs or motivations (consider, for instance, the different needs associated with the search terms ‘buy dog leash’ vs. ‘dog leash training’). And better still, Google’s Keyword Tool doesn’t just give you keyphrases related to your subject, but the traffic volumes associated with them, as well. With this information, you begin to understand the degree of interest associated with the terms your keyword research uncovers.

Of course, this is a very simplified demonstration of the potential for using keyword research to aid in market research, but it’s a beginning. With the right tools and know-how, there’s a strong case to be made for using keyword research to kick-off your quest for new market niches and opportunities for new products or services.