As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

In our previous post, we discussed how Google personalized search will affect your business. Now, we look at how a business can influence personalized results, and whether we think that’s a good idea.

Should Businesses Try to Influence Google Personalized Search Results?

Some blackhat SEOs will say “of course, businesses should game the system any way they can.” Others might say that trying to influence personalized search results in any way is unethical (but those people probably work for Google – which, last time we checked, is neither a non-profit organization nor a branch of government). Clearly, the techniques described above could be abused; for example, an unscrupulous SEO company could trick its clients into thinking their ranks are getting better and better, or into thinking the SEO company’s ranks are higher than they really are.

But working with the system is not necessarily abuse. We always advocate 100% ethical SEO, and we advise the following: go ahead and be smart about personalized results, but never use any tactics that you wouldn’t want your potential clients or customers to find out about. Your potential customers are the last people you want to alienate – and they don’t want to be tricked or manipulated.

Influencing Google Personalized Search Results

Here are a few ways that a company could influence personalized results:

• Create a promotion with an unique or unusual name, and build a page for it on your site, for example, “Bring on the PicklePal Pickles!”. Wait for your page to indexed in Google and check to see that you’re ranking #1 for this unusual phrase. (Don’t forget to opt out of personalized search before you check!)  (As we’ve said in our book, it’s easy to get a #1 Google ranking for a unique phrase. Now there’s a good reason to do so.) Then promote the Google search results page via Twitter, for example, “Free Pickles this Tuesday! Click on our link here:http://[point to the Google page, not your website.]]”
• If you’re absolutely certain you have very high ranks for a particular phrase, you could include links to your Google results for this phrase – rather than directly to your site – in email campaigns.
• Run print ads with a callout to a Google search rather than your website. (“Hey kids, Google ‘PicklePal Pickles Forever!’ to get your pickle fix!”)  Just be sure your site stays at the #1 spot for the phrase! You may have seen something like this on billboards for the movie 2012, which suggested searching for the term “2012.”
• Run an AdWords campaign that includes a call to action telling users to perform a Google search that returns your business’s website. Keep in mind that Google has strict editorial guidelines and this tactic may require some trial and error on your part.
• Seed forums and blog comments with a search call to action where relevant and appropriate. For example, in a forum thread about finding discount pickles, a business can post a reply saying: “We are currently running a discount pickle promotion at www.mysite.com – you can Google ‘discount PicklePal coupon’ [link to the Google search result for this term] and click on the link to see the coupon.”

Caution: We haven’t tried these tactics yet – and we may not recommend them to our clients. We’ll keep you posted as we embark on this new SEO journey.

As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

Google’s expanded personalized search is a game-changer in search engine design. It’s a big deal but it has gone largely under the radar. All Google searchers will now get customized results that are influenced by past searching and clicking behavior, bookmarks, and other factors. Any time a user clicks through from Google to a website, it gives that site a boost in that user’s future search results. Organic search results – previously considered an “objective” third-party viewpoint – now differ based on who is doing the searching.

Personalized search is activated for all Google searchers whether they are logged into a Google account or not, unless they opt out. We don’t expect many people to opt out.

Why isn’t this making more headlines? For one, we’ve all grown comfortable with seeing localized results (“bakeries near San Francisco, California”). Plus we’re all starting to get used to more and more personalization in advertising, particularly on Facebook screens (“37 year old woman in San Francisco California? Click here”). Enhanced personalization of search results is a natural evolution.

Personalized search will affect your business

The full ramifications of this change are still unknown, but here are our preliminary thoughts on what personalized search means to website owners:

• When you check Google, don’t assume that the ranks you see for your site are the same as what your customers are seeing. To turn off personalized search, opt out, or add the tag &pws=0 to the end of the Google page URL.

For example, if you search for “early reader comic books” in Google you may get a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books

But you’ll get unpersonalized results with this URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books&pws=0

• Personalized search will increase the importance of search queries that occur early in the buying cycle. If people click on your site during the browsing, comparing, and information-gathering phase, you’re likely to get increased Google exposure later, when they’re ready to buy. Does your site offer a good destination for keywords containing “compare” and “review?” Do you know what people search for in the early stages of buying your product?
• The advent of more personalized search places a higher value on clickthrough rate (how many times a person clicks from Google search results to your site). Your clickthrough rate can be improved with compelling, well-written titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.
• Personalized search may increase the percentage of site visitors who are repeat visits. Does your website offer something useful for the second and third visit and beyond?
• Do you have a website with an easy-to-remember or easy-to-guess domain? Lots of people are probably typing your URL directly into the browser instead of finding you in Google.  This is very good for your site traffic in general, but now there is a down side to having an easy-to-remember domain name: if users are less likely to use Google as a navigation tool for your site, you  might be at a disadvantage in personalized search.
• It isn’t clear what percentage of Google search results are personalized. If personalization is very heavy, it may be more difficult for newly established websites to use SEO to gain market share from already-established business.

Can personalized search results be influenced? Certainly. Your website’s ranks in personalized search results will be improved by any method that encourages people to navigate to your site using a Google search.

In our next post, we’ll discuss ways to influence personalized results.

Dynamic content used to be a red flag for search engine friendly design, but times have changed. Search engines now include dynamically-generated pages in their indexes, but some particulars of dynamic pages can still be obstacles to getting indexed.

Whether it’s keeping in synch with inventory or updating a blog, more than likely if you’re a website owner you have some level of dynamic or CMS-managed content on your site (and if not, you should really be looking into it for your next redesign). Follow the guidelines here to avoid major pitfalls and ensure that your dynamic body of work is search engine friendly from head to toe.

Rule #1: Be sure that search engines can follow regular HTML links to all pages on your site.

Any website needs individually linkable URLs for all unique pages on the site.   This way every page can be bookmarked and deep linked by users, and indexed by search engines.  But dynamic websites have an additional concern: making sure the search engine robots can reach all of these pages.

For example, suppose you have a form on your website: you ask people to select their location from a pull-down, and then when people submit the form your website generates a page with content that is specifically written for that geographical area.  Search engine robots don’t fill out forms or select from pull-down menus, so there will be no way for them to get to that page.

This problem can be easily remedied by providing standard <a href> type HTML links that point to all of your dynamic pages. The easiest way to do this is to add these links to your site map.

Rule #2: Set up an XML site map if you can’t create regular HTML links to all of your pages, or if it appears that search engines are having trouble indexing your pages.

If you have a large (10K pages or more) dynamic site, or you don’t think that providing static HTML links is an option, you can use an XML site map to tell search engines the locations of all your pages.

Most website owners tell Google and Yahoo! about their site maps through the search engines’ respective webmaster tools (Links: Google Yahoo!). But if you’re an early adopter, you should look into the new system whereby a site map can be easily designated in the robots.txt file using sitemap autodiscovery. Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! currently support this feature. Cool!

Rule #3: If you must use dynamic URLs, keep them short and tidy

Another potential problem – and this is one that is subject to some debate – is with dynamic pages that have too many parameters in the URL.  Google itself in its webmaster guidelines states the following: “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

Here are a few guidelines you should follow for your website parameters:

• Limit the number of parameters in the URL to a maximum of 2
• Use the parameter “?id=” only when in reference to a session id [this is no longer a problem.]
• Be sure that the URL functions if all dynamic items are removed
• Be sure your internal links are consistent – always link with parameters in the same order and format

Rule #4: Avoid dynamic-looking URLs if possible

Besides being second-class citizens of search, dynamic-looking URLs are also less attractive to your human visitors.  Most people prefer to see URLs that clearly communicate the content on the page.  Since reading the URL is one of the ways that people decide whether to click on a listing in search engines, you are much better off having a URL that looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/church-bells/discount/

rather than this:

http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234

We also think that static-looking, “human-readable” URLs are more likely to receive inbound links, because some people will be less inclined to link to pages with very long or complicated URLs.

Furthermore, keywords in a URL are a factor, admittedly not a huge one, in search engine ranking algorithms. Notice how, in the above example, the static URL contains the keywords “discount” and “church bells” while the dynamic URL does not.

There are many tools available that will re-create a dynamic site in static form.  There are also tools that will re-write your URLs, if you have too many parameters, to “look” like regular non-dynamic URLS.  We think these are both good options for dynamic Intrapromote has a helpful post on dynamic URL rewriting.

Rule #5: De-index stubs and search results

Have you heard of “website stubs?”  These are pages that are generated by dynamic sites but really have no independent content on them.  For example, if your website is a shopping cart for toys, there may be a page generated for the category “Age 7-12 Toys” but you may not actually have any products in this category.  Stub pages are very annoying to searchers, and search engines, by extension, would like to prevent them from displaying in their results.  So do us all a favor and either figure out a way to get rid of these pages, or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

Search results from within your website is another type of page for which Google has stated a dislike: “Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index.” Here’s our advice: either make sure your search results pages add value for the searcher (perhaps by containing some unique content related to the searched term), or exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

Bonus Points: Handling duplicate content

While it’s not a problem that’s specific to dynamic sites, this rule is one that dynamic sites are more likely to break than static ones. If multiple pages on your site display materials that are identical or nearly identical, duplicates should be excluded from indexing using the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag.  Think of it this way: you don’t want all your duplicate pages competing with each other on the search engines.  Choose a favorite, and exclude the rest. [Editor's note: we no longer (2009) recommend de-indexing duplicate content. A better approach is to either redirect your duplicate pages to the primary page using a server-side, 301 redirect, or to set up a <link rel="canonical"> tag for any page that has been duplicated. A good explanation of best practices for handling duplicate content in 2009 can be found at Matt Cutts' Blog]

Dynamic content is usually timely and useful, which is why users love it, and the search engines want to list it. And now you know how to help your dynamic website reach its full search engine potential.

Googling ourselves. We’ve all done it – and privacy experts agree that it should be done on a regular basis. But if the results that come up on Google when you search for your own name are less-than-flattering, you may be scrambling for a solution.

These days, potential employers (and mothers-in-law) are checking Google results for your name rather than just reading your resume. Whether it’s outdated contact info, unprofessional forum postings from 10 years ago, or a photo of you in a wet g-string contest (and you’re aguy!) you may be in need of a personal Google make-over.  Here are a few tips to improve your personal presence on this important search engine:

• Set up a Google Profile. As of April 2009, Google will sometimes display your profile picture and link in the search results for your name. Although the listing is currently at the bottom of the first page of search results (roughly the equivalent of listing #10), it’s accompanied by a thumbnail photo, which goes a long, long way toward getting people to notice it! Even better, you have 100% control over your profile contents – how much does that rock? It’s very easy to set up a Google Profile. Just go to http://www.google.com/profiles and click on the big “create a profile” link.
• See something bad? Ask the owner of the page to update or remove it. Almost anything can be removed from a website – if the site owner is accessible and agreeable.  After all, most website owners want updated information just as badly as you do. If you can find contact information for the website that bears outdated or improper information about you, obtaining an update or removal may be as simple as asking for it.  Be sure that you are very specific about the page or pages that contain the problem, and clear about why you want it changed.   If removal is not an option, you might request that the site owner add text such as “This information was last updated March 1996.  ZappyCo cannot vouch for the current status of this information” or “This page is no longer maintained.”
• Crowd out the results. It’s likely that you won’t find anyone who’s willing or able to change the offending content for you. Items such as archived forums, news and media content, and postings by people that simply hate your guts are destined to stay out there indefinitely.  Your best bet will be to try to outrank them on the search engines. Strategies for outranking your competitors can – and do – fill many websites and books.  Some quick and easy ways to start are:
• Start posting comments in blogs or forums using your full name.  Choose big, popular forums that are likely to have a good presence, and make sure that the pages are accessible without a login.  (And, before you get any big ideas, make sure they’re relevant comments, or else when you Google yourself you’ll be embarrassed by your own spam messages.)
• If you have a business or personal website, you can make your name one of your top target keywords and proceed with an SEO plan like the one described in our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day.
• If you have the opportunity to build your own web page within the website of your school, employer, or any organization of which you are a member (many schools offer this to their students and staff), be sure to do so. A nicely written bio page would be a welcome result on a Google search for your name!
• If you don’t have a website or bio page, build one on any of the zillions of free website services out there (you can experiment with Google’s own here: [Google Link]) and make a page that’s all about you! (Also see the “pay your way to the top” bullet below – Naymz offers a free profile page.)
• Get active on Linkedin or another business networking site.
• Use your middle name. Often, problems with Googling yourself arise because there are other people sharing the same first and last name.  For example, there are two authors on Amazon.com named Jennifer Grappone! If you are plagued by this type of problem, you might wish to incorporate your middle name into business correspondence, add it to your personal signature on emails, use it in forum and blog postings, and be sure that it is included on any web content about you.  In the long run, this will help to distinguish you from all of those online doppelgangers.
• …or no name at all. Some content stays on the internet for a surprisingly long time. Use your full name as described in the previous bullet when you’re making professional postings, but consider using a “pen name” for dating profiles or other material that you may not want to show up in 10 years when a potential employer is Googling you. And go anonymous for some of those those rants that you can’t resist!
• If all else fails, consider paying your way to the top. There’s even a company designed specifically to help you with this: Naymz, at https://www.naymz.com. (special thanks to Andy Beal for this suggestion from his blog). The basic service allows you to create a free personal profile page on their domain. The premium service will sponsor ads listing your profile page in Google, MSN, and Yahoo! (Be warned, as reader Darin Newberry points out: “Naymz web site is for the personal use of individual members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavors.”)

Follow these steps to improve your Google self-esteem.  It’s a lot easer than changing your name!

Because we work with clients on optimizing largely- or all-Flash websites, we want to be sure that we fully understand what Google will and won’t index.

So, we formed online experiments, with the goal of answering five burning questions:

1. Will Google index text content inside a Flash movie, even if you have to click within the Flash movie to see this content?
2. Will Google index content inside a Flash movie, regardless of whether it’s embedded with a standard javascript embed or a SWFObject embed?
3. If Google indexes text inside a Flash movie that’s embedded using SWFObject, will it also index the alternate HTML content to that movie?
4. Will Google penalize a page if there isn’t an exact match between the text it finds in a Flash movie and the alternate HTML text?
5. Do the meta tags within Flash (movie properties – title and description, as well as clip properties) factor into Google ranks?

Here are our answers:

1. Will Google index text content inside a Flash movie, even if you have to click within the Flash movie to see this content?

Answer: Yes. We created a Flash movie on Flash Indexing Test Page 2, which displays the word “dogcarpetnail” only after you click on the word “froglipz” in the Flash movie. After waiting several weeks, we searched on Google for the word “dogcarpetnail”, and this is the result we saw:

We can conclude that Google is able to emulate a clicking behavior within the Flash movie, read the text that follows, and factor that in its ranking algorithm. Notice how Google displays the word “dogcarpetnail” in its snippet description, which provides further evidence that it is able to see the text.

***

2. Will Google index content inside a Flash movie, regardless of whether it’s embedded with a standard javascript embed or a SWFObject embed?

Answer: Yes. We created Flash movies on two test pages. On Flash Indexing Test Page 1, we embedded the movie using the standard javascript that comes out of the box in Dreamweaver. On Flash Indexing Test Page 2, we embedded the movie using SWFObject, which is a different javascript code (written by a third party), and is currently the SEO industry’s best practice for Flash embedding. . In both cases, when we searched on Google for words that were contained within the Flash movie, we saw the pages in the search results. You saw the “dogcarpetnail” results above. The results for Test Page 1 were for the word “nosegroggle”:

We can conclude that Google is sufficiently able to run both standard and SWFObect Javascript embedding codes in order to find and index Flash movie content on a web page. (As we’ve stated in our Flash SEO Best Practices article, we like SWFObject embedding because it allows you to provide alternate HTML text.)

***

3. If Google indexes text inside a Flash movie that’s embedded using SWFObject, will it also index the alternate HTML content to that movie?

Answer: Yes. On Flash Indexing Test Page 2, we included HTML alternate content to display if the viewer was without Flash. This content can be seen in Google’s cache of the page, here:

We then tried searching for the word “yizzlewack” on Google, and this page shows up in the results, as seen here:

We can conclude that Google is using both the text within the Flash move and the HTML alternate text as ranking factors.

***

4. Will Google penalize a page if there isn’t an exact match between the text it finds in a Flash movie and the alternate HTML text?

Answer: We don’t think so – at least not automatically. Our pages seemed to do fine although there was no relation between the actual Flash text and the alternate HTML text. However, this would certainly qualify as spam if reviewed by a human being, and we expect that it would be penalized if the Google anti-spam team ever caught it.

***

5. Do the meta properties within Flash (movie properties – title and description, as well as image or clip properties) factor into Google ranks?

Answer: Not that we’ve found. We invented made-up words and put them into the Flash movie properties (title and description), the name and description of an image inside Flash, and the name and description of a movie object inside Flash, and none of these triggered any results in Google. We also tried made-up words as titles within the embedding code, and they also did not show up as results in Google. We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google does not factor these terms into rankings.

***
The amazing thing about all of this experimentation is that it has had almost no effect on our Flash optimization best practices, which we’ve been following for well over a year! You can read more about how we recommend optimizing Flash in our article, Does Google Index Flash?

Search engine marketers love Digg. But Digg hasn’t been giving them a whole lot of love back. Here is some insider advice for dipping your toe into the Digg pool.

Website marketers far and near are striving for hits on Digg.  Why is Digg so alluring? For one thing, it gets huge numbers of visitors: over 15 million unique visitors a month. A well-dugg article could bring a pointy spike in visits to your site.  For another, it’s free! There’s no fee to get the over-the-top traffic you crave. Instead, you earn the best positions with a more elusive form of currency: compelling content.

We sat down with Scott Baker, Digg.com’s Director of Operations, with a few simple questions on every website marketer’s mind: how can we use Digg to help our clients?  What does Digg really want to see? And what is the formula for success on Digg?

“Don’t Try to Game the System”

Brace yourself for disappointment: Baker says he can’t share any insider secrets that will get you more diggs, because, as he says, “It’s all in the hands of the users.”   Yup, just like so many other marketing endeavors, there are no formulas or magic bullets.

Baker was, however, happy to share some basic Do and Don’t advice for Digg newcomers:

• Categorize correctly. For example, if you are posting a blatant opinion piece, make sure to post it in the “political opinion” category instead of “political news.”
• Be unique! Don’t post a story that already exists on the site – search for duplicates before you submit. And, if your story is not covering a unique subject, you’d better have a unique angle.
• Don’t post a link to your own blog and make it look like a news story. For example, posting a story with the newsy title “Rumsfeld Resigns” should point to an actual news story, not a second-hand retelling on your own blog.
• Don’t try to game the system. Digg has multiple safeguards against spam and bombastic marketing content, including algorithms that influence and moderate the rise and fall of stories. But probably the most important safeguards are the diggers themselves. For example, according to Baker, there’s a simple reason that attempts to buy diggs didn’t work: “When unscrupulous content owners tried to pay top diggers for diggs, it didn’t work because the stories themselves were not of high quality.  That’s the built-in B.S. detector of Digg.com.”

Learn From a Master

Hungry for more strategic advice?  You might look to Neal Patel, co-founder and CTO of ACS, and well-known veteran of the Digg homepage. Patel is a great source of Do’s and Don’ts for Digg newbies (our favorite: add humor to your title and description, even when posting a serious story).  He also details a strategy of participating in the community, making friends, and giving more than you expect to receive, in this podcast.

As Digg has risen in popularity, it serves as an excellent example of common challenges in SEO in general. Appealing to a particular user base, providing unique and interesting content, writing well, keeping abreast of changing algorithms and standards of acceptability. These are not new concepts – they’re very, very old school SEO.

Controversy Built In

One thing we learned from Neal Patel’s advice is not to be taken in by the “post it and they will come” mystique. It’s not that simple. Digg’s audience is a community of primarily young male techies. You need to appeal to this audience, but just as important, you need to not offend them. Hell hath no fury like a PO’d digger with a bury button and a commenting feature at his disposal. If you don’t believe us, you can read Danny Sullivan’s account of his own Digg misadventures.

No doubt about it, things get exciting when a website is composed entirely of user-generated content, and directly influenced by its users’ preferences. Sure, there are individual users voting on stories “in a vacuum.”  But primarily, Digg is a community, and it behaves like a community – with affinities, grudges, schisms, and moderators trying to keep things from getting out of control. Networks of friends can coordinate to give each other boosts by digging each other, or to bury common enemies. And then there’s just plain anarchy for the fun of it. Have you heard about the time that hundreds of Digg users mutinied and posted forbidden code?  Or have you seen the popular article “exposing” a group of sites that violate Digg’s user guidelines? Or the world’s most hated comment? This is just the tip of the iceberg on the daily feuds, accusations, and drama that is interweaved with the website’s main menu of seriously entertaining content.

The takeaway? Learn the ropes and avoid breaking etiquette by becoming a user first; spend a good month as a regular user before you even try to post an article.

So, Why Try?

We won’t lie – we haven’t had big success with Digg, but we then again, we never expected any. After our conversation with Scott Baker, we’ve come to a not-so-startling conclusion: The majority of the Digg user base does not like SEOs. We’re not taking it personally, but we are taking it with a practical attitude: we won’t place a lot of our social media marketing efforts into Digg.

You, on the other hand, may have lots of good reasons to try for your 15 minutes of fame on the Digg home page. Here are some indicators that Digg might be the right venue for you:

• You have unique content that has a serious chance of appealing to an audience of young opinionated techies.
• You are an excellent writer who is especially talented at crafting wry headlines.
• You already have a loyal following that is likely to Digg your content.
• You have spent a good amount of time actually using Digg.

If you have Digg-specific appeal and a very strong understanding of Digg etiquette, then get to work on your Digg strategy – you just might make it to the home page!

Why would a perfectly respectable website find itself with a spam-blasted Google listing? Follow along and test your own SEO expertise as we walk you through this actual SEO case study. The solution may surprise you!

In our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, we recommend a method called “I Wonder Why That’s Happening.”  What is this method?  Nothing more than following your curiosity in a systematic way to discover answers to questions about how your website appears in search engines.  In this case study, we walk you through the “I Wonder Why” steps and ultimately solve our Google mystery.

The Setup

Your friend mentions to you that she’s disappointed with her website’s performance in the search engines.  The site isn’t ranking well and she doesn’t know why.  It’s a comment you hear a lot, but you’re surprised to hear it from her.  Her restaurant, Providence, is one of thehottest places to dine in Los Angeles.

Of course, your friend is a restaurant owner, not a web marketer, but still…with great press and a huge clientele, shouldn’t the website be doing well without much of an effort from the restaurant management? You decide to investigate, using your SEO skills.

What’s your first step? (Click on your answer to move to the next step.)

1. Take a look at the site.
2. Check the site’s rank on the search engines.
3. Check the Google PageRank of the site

]]> http://www.yourseoplan.com/google-snippet-mystery/feed/ 0 http://www.yourseoplan.com/business-name-seo/ http://www.yourseoplan.com/business-name-seo/#comments Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:41:52 +0000 Gravity http://seo.shocklab.com/?p=673

As any SEO (search engine optimization) specialist will tell you, it’s never too early to think about the eventual search engine presence of your business. Even such a basic choice as the name of your business should be considered from an SEO mindset.

Your company name will very often be the text used in linking to your website. It’s likely to be the single term for which you have the best chance of gaining a top rank on search engines.  Conversely, it’s a term for which you are going to really, really want that #1 rank, so you shouldn’t make it too hard on yourself.  Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts for choosing a search-friendly company name:

• DO include keywords in your business name if possible.  Suppose your name is Joe Figudacamp and you are starting a company that sells restaurant fixtures in the Salt Lake City area. You could call your business “Figudacamp Associates” or you could call it “Figudacamp Fixtures.” See how the second name includes a keyword, and is also a better description of the company? Continuing along this path, you might consider naming your company “Salt Lake City Restaurant Fixtures,” but oh, it’s so long and boring. Here’s where the fun brainstorming comes in. Can you incorporate keywords while still choosing a memorable company name that represents you nicely?
• DON’T use a word that is also a common word in the English language, especially if it’s unrelated to your business focus.  Let’s say you’re a private investigator. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to rank #1 if the name of your business is “Sneakers”?  This advice applies to product names too.
• DO watch out for inadvertant synonyms, especially those that could have an adult tone.  Trying to do well on search engines for the private investigator’s company called “Sneakers” would be hard enough, let’s not even talk about “Dicks”!
• DON’T choose a phrase that is going to be highly competitive, unless you’re prepared for an uphill battle to that #1 spot.  In our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour A Day, we describe the process of determining how competitive a term is. For a quick read on the level of competition, do an “allintitle” search on Google for the phrase and see how many results come up (see Handy Search Shortcuts for help with this and other special searches).
• Likewise, DO think twice before using a personal name for the business. If your business is going to be tightly aligned with one person (interior designers or other consultants come to mind), and you have a unique, easy-to-remember, and easy-to-spell name, this might be a good choice.  If your name is common and you choose it as your business name, be sure to include differentiating terms: “John Miller Green Energy” will work better in the search arena than “John Miller Design.”
• DO include your location if you cater to a local market. Of course, DON’T limit yourself by including a location in your company name if you hope to expand in the future.
• DON’T go with a three letter acronym.  It may work for UPS and the IRS, but it’s a tough row to hoe for the average business.
• DO make sure the business name is unique, or close to it.  If there are other businesses with the same name but in different industries, consider adding a clarifying word to your name: not just “Pinkies” but “Pinkies Books.”
• DON’T go changin’.  If you already have an established business name, it’s generally not a good idea to change it based on SEO reasoning alone.

We’re no fools, we know that SEO is only one small factor in choosing a business name.  But let SEO play a role in the decision before anything is set in stone, and it just might pay you back with a successful search presence for your business!

]]> http://www.yourseoplan.com/business-name-seo/feed/ 0 http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash/ http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:08:08 +0000 Gravity http://seo.shocklab.com/?p=594

If your website was created entirely in Flash, you’ve got a serious SEO challenge on your hands. Follow this advice to remedy your situation:

Note, this article is really good, and the recommendations are solid. But if you’re looking for  updates based on the 2008 indexing annoucement from Google and Adobe, you should look here: Ask the Experts: Does Google Index Flash?

SEO Challenge: A 100% Flash site, with all content and navigation contained within a single Flash movie embedded in a single HTML page. (If your website was built with multiple HTML pages with some embedded Flash components, your situation is significantly less difficult.)

Why is this a problem? A pure Flash site is a major disadvantage for SEO. For one, search engines will see the entire website as a single page. That means that you don’t have the opportunity to optimize different pages for different target keywords. And you also will not gain the inherent SEO advantage that having multiple pages brings to a website: every unique web page has, by default, some degree of search engine status.

Secondly, outside websites cannot link to interior pages within your site – they are forced to link to your top page. Some marketers think this is great: your visitors will always be led to your home page. But you will not be able to take advantage of “deep links” that could bring more visitors to your site and improve your search engine ranks. Deep linking is when other websites link to pages within your site other than your home page. For websites with an online shopping component, deep linking is much better than home page linking because users do not have to navigate (and risk getting lost!) on their way to making a purchase.

Last, while it is true that all the major search engines can index Flash, the content that a search engine spider will be able to extract from your Flash file will probably bear little relation to what your site visitors are seeing (Read our Ask the Experts response, Does Google Index Flash? to learn how to find out what your Flash site looks like to search engines). For example, consider a simple Flash animation showing a line of text moving across the screen. Your human visitors read it as a single instance of the text. But to a search engine spider, it may look like the same words repeated hundreds of times. This is just one example of the many ways that your text optimization can be thrown off in Flash.

What can be done. Here are some possible SEO strategies to improve the optimization of a purely Flash website.

• Break apart the site. You could rebuild your site, breaking up your Flash file and moving each of the major sections to its own HTML page. Flash elements would then be included as-needed on each separate page. From an SEO perspective, this would be a big help. But if you’re like most Flash website owners we know, you probably adore your website and spent a bundle on it, and there’s no way you’re going to break it up and rebuild it as a hybrid HTML/Flash website.  At the very least, think about this approach next time to you do a redesign.
• Get smart with separate URLs. Even if you can’t or won’t break apart your Flash file into separate HTML pages, you can still reap the benefits of having separate URLs by implementing SWF Address like the very clever folks at Blitz agency labs. The blog tells you all about, down to the nitty gritty details that only Flash nerds will follow. Your users will enjoy the browser Back/Forward button functionality and the ability to bookmark your site, and the “linkerati” will still be able to tag pages on social bookmarking sites and deep-link your site. The Blitz folks called their solution “near perfect” and we are mighty impressed, too.
• Focus on off-page factors. “Off-page” factors, which have nothing to do with the optimization of your on-page content, are a major element of search engine ranking algorithms today. Without making any changes to your Flash site, you can still improve your search engine presence by convincing lots of other websites to link to your site. The clickable text that other sites use when they link to your site will affect your rankings for that text. For example, if you wanted to rank well when people search for the term “Flash Goddess,” then you would ask other websites to link to your site like this: “Mary is a true Flash Goddess.” (See our sample link building request letter for a hint at the right way to ask for links – or read our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, for more in-depth advice!)

• Take advantage of accessibility features. Your Flash files can be set up with accessibility features to enhance the user experience of disabled site visitors. These same features may also improve the search engine visibility of your content inside Flash. For example, accessibility features in Flash allow the developer to specify a Name and Description for any element in a Flash movie. See Macromedia.com Flash Accessibility and also this article: SWF Metadata in Flash for more information.

• Create HTML alternative content. Experts agree an HTML alternative is the best option for Flash SEO today. Making alternative content in HTML is not only helpful to the search engines, it’s also great for people without the Flash plugin and for visually impaired site visitors. Making alternate HTML content might be easier than you think, especially if you are using XML to feed content into your Flash files – you can feed identical content into an “alternate” space on the page.  Specifics of how to set this up  can get a little technical – see deconcept.com, “A Modern Approach to SEO for Flash” for detailed instructions.

• Create an HTML addendum. As a last-ditch-scenario, if you don’t wish to – or can’t – get your site to show alternate HTML content, at least create some alternate pages that users can manually click on. Beneath your Flash movie, add a standard HTML link or links to your most important content in HTML pages such as “Our Products,” “About Us” and “Contact Us.”

A Flash website has features that you just can’t get from other technologies.  Follow the tips above and you just might be able to enjoy the benefits of Flash without suffering a major SEO downside.

]]> http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash/feed/ 1 http://www.yourseoplan.com/dynamic-keyword-insertion/ http://www.yourseoplan.com/dynamic-keyword-insertion/#comments Sat, 13 May 2006 18:19:11 +0000 Gravity http://seo.shocklab.com/?p=599

If you’re using Google AdWords, you should know about dynamic keyword insertion. It’s easy to set up, but do it wrong and your ads can be downright embarrassing.

Dynamic keyword insertion is a little-known function of the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) service that automatically inserts a searcher’s keyword into your sponsored ad text. Many search marketers use dynamic keyword insertion to improve their displayed listings while simplifying campaign management.

It’s not easy to find any help documentation about this feature from Google. If you query the AdWords help section for “dynamic keyword insertion”  you won’t see any results, even though this is Google’s official name for the feature.  (We were able to find some information from Google on this feature –  a PDF dating from 2003 – by searching for the term “AdWords curly bracket”.) Regardless, Google’s customer support appears happy to discuss it with advertisers who have questions.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use the function, while avoiding its serious potential pitfalls.

How Dynamic Keyword Insertion Works

Let’s say you sell knockoff gemstones and your Google AdWords campaign is sponsoring the terms “diamonds” and “rubies”. You could use dynamic keyword insertion so that your ad would display “Fine Faux Diamonds” or “Fine Faux Rubies”, depending whether the searcher’s query contained the term “Diamonds” or “Rubies.” By placing a simple operator in your ad text (we explain how to do this later in the article), you can save yourself the effort of setting up and managing separate ad groups with separately written ads for each keyword. You also gain the benefit of adding a keyword to your ad text – a nice bolded keyword, no less -  which can increase clickthroughs.

Even though dynamic keyword insertion is based on the search query, it does not necessarily pluck out the exact text that the searcher entered and stick it into your ad.  The dynamically inserted text in your ad listing is limited to the actual keywords you have sponsored in your AdWords campaign. So don’t worry: even if someone searches for “totally cheapo diamonds,” the dynamic keyword insertion function will just notice the word “diamonds,” and your ad will display “Fine Faux Diamonds,” not something scary like “Fine Faux Totally Cheapo Diamonds”. (This assumes that you’re using broad matching [Google link].)

Proceed With Caution

It’s easy to set up dynamic keyword insertion, but first you need to know what you’re getting into if you decide to use this feature.  Dynamic keyword insertion can get the average greedy or lazy advertiser into trouble.

What do we mean? Well, for your edification (and maybe a chuckle or two), here are some dynamic keyword insertion train wrecks – actual ads –  that we found in only about five minutes of searching:

Distance

Looking for Distance?

Find exactly what you want today.

www.eBay.com

Spleen

Free physician-reviewed articles

on spleen.

www.healthline.com

Crack Whore

Whatever you’re looking for

you can get it on eBay.

www.eBay.com

Bandage

Find, compare and buy Furniture!

Simply Fast Savings

www.Shopping.com

Fertilizer

Find Solutions for Your Business.

Free Reports, Info. & Registration!

www.KnowledgeStorm.com

It goes without saying that you want to look at your keyword list and your ad text carefully before you use dynamic keyword insertion. It will not help your conversion goals if you display misspellings or terms that don’t work in the context of your ad.

How to Set Up Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Now that you are convinced that you need to be very careful about how you use dynamic keyword insertion, here’s how to set it up:

Let’s say your sponsored keyword list looks like this:

Diamonds

Rubies

Yellow tourmaline birthstone

Blue topaz

To dynamically insert these keywords into your ad text, you add a specially formatted string of text to your listing title or description. The basic formula is this:

opening curly bracket + keyword + colon + a default keyphrase of your choice + closing curly bracket

For example:

{keyword: Faux Gemstones}

In this example, “faux gemstones” is the default keyword phrase, which acts as a backup that will only display if the searcher’s query matches a term on your list that’s too long to display (25 characters is the limit for the first ad line).

So, if a searcher types in “diamonds,” the example above would display as follows:

diamonds

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

And if a searcher types in “rubies,” the example above would look like this:

rubies

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

But if a searcher types in “yellow tourmaline birthstone”, which is too long to fit into the 25-character limit, your backup keyword phrase would display instead. So, in this case, the ad would look like this:

Faux Gemstones

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

Inserting Keywords into a Phrase

If you want to get a little bit trickier, you can integrate a keyword more deeply into your ad text, like this:

Simply Unreal {keyword: Gemstones}

So, if a searcher types in “diamonds,” the example above would display as follows:

Simply Unreal diamonds

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com>

And if a searcher types in “rubies,” the example above would look like this:

Simply Unreal rubies

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

But if a searcher types the keyphrase “yellow tourmaline birthstone” (again, too long for the character limit – and your limit is reduced by 13 characters because you’ve added “Simply Unreal”), your backup keyword would display and the ad would look like this:

Simply Unreal Gemstones

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

Capitalization

Did you notice that the capitalization in the previous examples looked a little funky? Luckily, Google allows you to improve upon that.  Your use of capitalization inside the curly brackets will affect the capitalization of your dynamically inserted keywords.  For example, let’s look at a scenario in which someone searches for your sponsored keyword phrase “blue topaz”.

{keyword: gemstones}

Would display as lower case: blue topaz

{Keyword: gemstones}

Would display with the first word capitalized: Blue topaz

{KeyWord: gemstones}

Would display with every word capitalized: Blue Topaz

Dynamic keyword insertion: friend or foe? If you use it with caution and monitor it closely, you might just find that dynamic keyword insertion on Google AdWords can save you significant management time and increase the relevance of your ad.

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