Posted by randfish

Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:

At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here’s why:

Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google’s results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn’t just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.

I’m not sure when we’ll start to see this strategy employed, but it can’t be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for Search Engine Optimisation.

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Posted by RobOusbey

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new Search Engine Optimisation, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.

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What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles

They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore and peruse the titles on their shelves and take note of what titles grabbed me.

As Makepeace explains:

“Just step through the front doors and take a deep breath: Can’t you just SMELL the money?

“This year, we Americans will spend considerably more than $30 BILLION on books and magazines.

“For the numerically challenged among us, that’s thirty thousand MILLION dollars!

[...]

“As they’d say here in North Carolina, ‘That’s some powerful BIG binnus!’

“Now, with that many shekels at stake, you’d expect the competition to be ferocious. You’d be right.

“Take a look around the store. How many book and magazine titles do you figure you see? 10,000? 20,000?

“Guess again, oh Prescient One. This is one of the bigger temples.

“You are in the presence of nearly 200,000 titles! Lay one copy of each end-to-end, and they’d stretch out for some 25 miles!

“Imagine being the marketing guy or gal whose product is only one of 200,000 competing for your prospects’ attention …

“… AND being limited in your quest for A-I-D-A (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to a single thought that will fit on a book jacket – or worse – on its spine!”

(I’d just like to point out, for those of you self-conscious about pumping schlock by the barrel, that there are at least 5 different writing style tactics used in those few lines.)

I selected the following titles for their brass-knuckles-in-your-face aggressiveness in calling for attention. They’re augmented by some selections found on Amazon’s 2009 Best Seller List.

Self-Help Category – Hook: Improve Your Life

- How To Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons On Finding Hope In Unexpected Places

- How To Talk To Anyone – 92 Tips

- Finish Your Old Year Wrong! Hangover Survival Guide

- Eat Out & Still Lose Weight

General – Hook: Curiosity About The Unknown

- Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

- Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, SuperAthletes And The Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen

- The True and Outstanding Adventures Of The Hunt Sisters

- Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story Of A Band Of US Soldiers Who Rode To Victory In Afghanistan

- The Cure: How A Father Raised $100 Million And Bucked The Medical Establishment In A Quest To Save His Kids

This category particularly fascinates me, so I thought I’d add in my grain of salt as to why these titles work. I don’t know that you can generalize to all books in this category, but the following traits stand out to me at least in the above set of titles.

1. We love stories. We grow up with them, science has proven we remember them better and so on. These books promise a story (or several)…

But not just any story!

2. These books promise a remarkable, quirky or otherwise unexpected story, often explicitly – with words like “outstanding adventures,” “extraordinary story,” and “quest”.

What really strikes me though is the variety of  implicit ways the titles make the promise of such a special story.

• “Patriotic prostitutes” makes me think, “Huh? That’s an unusual adjective to associate to prostitutes… “Global cooling” and “suicide bombers” buying life insurance are equally quirky. The book Spunk and Bite that I referred to in my previous post on schlock explains that to achieve this stylistic element you just need an unusual adjectives noun-pairing. The trick is to find a pair that isn’t contrived.

• “Hidden” and “the world has never seen” plays on our near-universal desire to know secrets, as any unimaginative marketing salesletter-page guru will tell you.

3. There seems to be a thread of ‘belonging’ or what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs addresses as “social needs” – the human desire for relationships with others.

Patriotic prostitutes belong to a nation.

A hidden tribe – well, that’s pretty explicit.

Sisters have family bonds.

We see a ‘band of soldiers’. Not just a group – an organized team with links between themselves.

The father was out saving his kids.

4. This may just be me, but I think there’s a bit of self-actualization (the peak of Maslow’s pyramid) hinted at or made explicit in each title. I’ll let you guys look them over and figure out the details.

Politics – Hook: Prove What They Believe

- Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America

- Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America (by Ann Coulter, naturally)

- The War On Success: How The Obama Administration Is Shattering The American Dream

- Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You And Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists And Union Bosses

- An Invonvenient Book: Real Solutions To The World’s Biggest Problems

Essentially, these titles just repeat back to people what they believe or are concerned about. The right wing titles (which outnumbered the left wing books in the store I visited) also aim to boil readers’ blood.

The Obamanomics title repeats back the following widely held views. Many people are disgusted by the bonuses Wall Street paid itself from the average American’s taxes, which anger just boils even further when these same people hypocritically argue for fiscal restraint as concerns other Americans e.g. in terms of providing health insurance to the poor.

Thomas Friedman’s title does the same sort of preaching to the choir (“we need a green revolution”), and adds in the national-aspirational bit in a way that seems to simultaneously strike the ‘belonging’ and ’self-actualization’ chords.

Miscellanea:

- The Long Shadow Of the JFK Assassination – I liked the shadow image

- Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road From Glory To Disaster – I think this addresses our curiosity and incredulity at the near-failures of the Big Three.

- Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer – And How To Prevent Getting It In The First Place – This seems to be another hook targeted at incredulity, combined with a self-help hook. “Cure” cancer? Prevent it? Awesome!

Conclusion

If you’re ever rocking away in your chair trying to knit up a title to fit your piece, a trip to the bookstore might be just the inspiration you need!

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, an online marketing company in Dublin offering savvy search engine optimisation and web design.

photo credit: Jean & Nathalie

Advertisement: Need an Search Engine Optimisation Audit for your website, look at my Search Engine Optimisation Consulting Services #1

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

The Tales Silently Told By The Cannons Of Titles

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Posted by mgalecki

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Search Engine Optimisationmoz, Inc.

A SHORT INTRODUCTION…

We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones. The architecture of a website is usually correlated with the popularity of these pages expressed by number of backlinks:

• Home page has the most backlinks,
• 1st (e.g. product categories), 2nd & 3rd level pages obtain less links,
• finally the least important are deep pages (with articles, classified ads, product pages, etc).

The above mentioned “importance” of web pages versus the web site architecture has been illustrated in one of the Rand’s posts titled "Diagrams for Solving Crawl Priority & Indexation Issues":

Important pages tend to have a different priority of indexation, and this was also presented very nicely by Rand:

Purple spots are those with the highest number of external links. As it can be seen, the pages which are close, take some of the popularity and they pass part of it further (pink spots). All the other spots stand for pages that are too far from the entrance points of search engine robots, which means that the chance of their indexation is much smaller.

In case of classified websites, which contain a lot of content, the above diagram should include subsequent category listing or search results pages. They are obviously less important than the main category pages, but their indexing additionally influences the indexation of their components – ad details pages. This is particularly important when the listing starts with so called premium ads, which change less often than standard classifieds.

BEFORE THE TEST…

Having this theoretical information, we have decided to see how it is like in practice. We have analyzed a website of http://www.morusek.pl (with animals and pets related classifieds from Poland) which has a total number of indexed pages exceeding 100,000. Using the combination of "site" and "inurl" queries we checked what is the number of indexed pages with a list of classifieds (in Polish “ogloszenia”): http://www.google.pl/search?q=site%3Awww.morusek.pl+inurl%3A%22%2F0%2F%22+inurl%3Aogloszenia

The initial results were the following:

To continue the analysis, we excluded the first pages, as the numbers here are influenced by existence of some category pages with no classifieds at the moment, but which are indexable (there are crawlable links in the menu). In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the "site" query, we took into account a number of pages reported by Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) under "Internal Links". The results were as follows:

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW?

The first conclusion is obviously that the higher the page number is, the less probability that the page will be indexed. Secondly, while the actual numbers of GWT and “site” queries vary a lot, the trends (slopes) are almost the same. On average, the chance that the robot will crawl to the next page of search results decreases by 1,2-1,3% per page.

It is also interesting that, according to Google Webmaster Tools, pages from 2 to 4 have a good indexation ratio which later decreases dramatically at the fifth position. For example, for sites with number 4 the level of indexation is 60%, while for pages number 15 it falls below 30% (according to Google Webmaster Tools), or 40% (for the command “site” in Google). This is due to the fact that Googlebots have a much longer way to reach the appropriate link in case of the latter (a link to page 15 first appears on page 12), while there are direct links to pages 2, 3 and 4 on the first pages of search listings (see below):

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEST: INTRODUCING MORE LINKS

We decided to test what would be the changes in indexation ratios if we introduced more links to subsequent ad listings pages. On the first page of each category we added links to the 5th, 10th and 15th pages as show on the picture below:

After a month we tested the changes. Due to inaccurate results returned by the command “site” in Google (number of indexed pages seemed to be greater than the actual number of them) we present data from Google Webmaster Tools (internal links) only:

THE RESULTS

The graph clearly shows us that indexation of pages that were added to the listing on the first page is much higher after the change (pages: 5th, 10th and 15th), and actually equals the indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4.

However, the increase in indexation of pages directly linked from the home page did not affect the indexation of the neighbouring pages. For example, we can see a huge increase for page 10, but there is no change for pages 9 and 11. The conclusion is that for Googlebots these pages are too far from the points of entry. Only category pages for main region have incoming links. To index page 9 of the intersection of categories and regions, the robots would have to go the following path:

1. main category page (entry point),
2. category page + region (first page of results),
3. category page + region (tenth page of results),
4. category page + region (page 9  of the results).

What makes it even worse, not all the category pages have incoming links.

THE CONCLUSIONS

For classifieds or e-commerce websites, the conclusion is that the more pages linked in the listing, the greater the chance that they will be indexed. In general, it is clear that the farther from the point of entry (external link), the less chance that the page will be indexed. Therefore, it is advisable not to create sites with a very deep structure and to remember that the pages far from the points of entry should be additionally linked to (for example as "similar products", "see also", "related categories", etc.).

Looking at the chart we can see yet another change – a slight decrease in indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4. This can be either because there are new pages added recently and they have not been indexed yet (when the number of ads in a certain category has started to exceed the space on the first page), or due to increase in the number of outcoming links on the first page. I would rather bet the first explanation, because in fact the new links were added to a small percentage of pages. There are only 400 fifth pages (so the links to fifth pages were placed on 0,5% of all the first pages). Pages 10 and 15 are even less numerous.

Introduction of additional links has not increased the level of indexation of classifieds, however I suppose that the rate of change was simply too small to affect their indexation. Moreover, the indexation of ads of Morusek.pl exceeded already 80% when the experiment started. Such changes can produce a visible increase in the number of indexed pages in case of sites where the rate of change is much higher and the level of indexation of classifieds or products – lower.

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