The history of search engines

Provided by PPC Blog – The History of Search: a Timeline

Infographic by the PPC Blog.com

How does Google work

Courtesy of PPC blog – this is a great infographic showing how Google works.

Infographic by PPC Blog

5 Articles you should read: 13 April 2010

Document Accessibility Should Begin at the Author Level, By Deborah Kaplan and Monir ElRayes. Government Technology, April 9, 2010. "…Significant progress has been made to improve the accessibility of content presented on Web sites, often in HTML format. However, the accessibility of other electronic formats, such as Microsoft Word documents and PDFs, still lags behind and is often added as an afterthought, if at all. Given the enormous volume of content created daily — often in the form of documents authored by individuals who know little about accessibility — this means far too much material is inaccessible to far too many people…."

SEO 101 – Parts 1 – 16, by Stoney deGeyter, Search Engine Guide, January 19, 2010 – April 1, 2010.

Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links
Part 14: Everything You Need To Know About Link Anatomy
Part 15: Everything You Need To Know About Linking

Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media, By Brian Solis, Search Engine Watch, April 1, 2010. " Search isn’t an isolated experience. The act of looking for information is now fused with validation, which means the socialization of search will unite discovery with context and relationships. It all begins with where we purposely search for relevant content and also where we respond to interesting information that crosses our path…" Then read Optimize Your Brand for Sharing and Social Search in 11 Steps, By Brian Solis, Search Engine Watch, April 2, 2010. "Yesterday, we focused on how to make your brand findable and shareable in social media. A white paper by Gigya validates the shift to, and resulting importance of, social search and its dependence on crowd participation. Online businesses must optimize in order to earn referral traffic from social networks. .."

The 8-Step SEO Strategy, Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs, Posted by laura, SEOmoz Blog, on April 6th, 2010. "… The first step in most marketing campaigns, Search Marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience.  Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to…"

Horizontal Attention Leans Left. Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 6, 2010. Summary: Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable…

Google AdWords Seminars for Success in Melbourne: 22 and 23 April 2010

Topics covered include:

• AdWords Basics: Discover the best ways to organise your campaigns and learn common search marketing lingo.
• Keywords: Discover the keyword strategies that achieve the best results for your spend.
• Tracking Results: Learn to identify ads and keywords that really work and to improve those that don’t.
• New AdWords Interface: How to effectively use the new interface to save time and improve results.

Pricing for each day includes GST, seminar slides on a USB thumb drive, manual, Wi-Fi, lunch, $50 AdWords advertising credit and Google goodies.

• Day 1 – AdWords: $499
• Day 2 – AdWords Advanced: $499
• Save Money! Two-day seminar package: $898

Go to www.mangoldsengers.com/seminars/google-adwords-seminars-for-success for details

or contact :

Michael Mangold for assistance with questions, bookings and invoicing, phone 02 9960 6577 email michael@mangoldsengers.com

New Dilbert SEO Comic Strip

Google search snippets

Google has announced that they will now be making use of anchor tags and section headings in their search snippets, displaying them where it makes sense in their search results.

For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a “search snippet.” Recently, we’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.

Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to a your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search?

That’s where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you’re looking for.

To make this happen you need to ensure:

1. you use descriptive headings for your sections, especially in long multi-topic html documents. Use for example, Victorian Government web 2.0 initiatives, NOT Section 1.3.

2. you use a table of contents at the top of the page which uses anchor text to link to your section headings.

3. you don’t forget the anchor text for your section headings.

A Search Engine Land article by Barry Schwartz shows examples of how descriptive headings can be used in search snippets.

More reasons to use appropriate keywords that your searchers are using in the text of your documents, rather than bureaucratic policy speak.

Enjoy!

Matt Cutts from Google on SEO

Matt Cutts, the guru from Google, has given a great presentation on the ins, outs and best practices for search engine optimization at Word Camp in San Francisco on May 30, 2009.

eGovRC – adds member’s forum – section on government websites and SEO

The eGovernment Resource Centre has just launched the eGov Forums for registered members to share information, ask questions and answer other’s on all issues eGovernment.

There is a section on Government websites and SEO as well as Social media and Government 2.0.

If your forum topic is not covered, there is a section where you can ask to have it considered for inclusion.

The forum is governed by rules and there is a help post to guide you through how it works.

Time for government web people to get involved and start sharing and questioning!

My Highlights from SMX Sydney April 2009

I was lucky enough to attend the SMX Sydney conference at the start of April. Even though I think I was the only government employee working in the web space attending amongst all the business types the content was very relevant and learning’s equally applied to government and business web sites alike.

Some of my key takeaways are:

Google

• changes its algorithm about 450 times a year = once every 13 hours
• put a tilde (~) in front of a word in Google search to get synonyms
• now modifying search results based on previous search behaviour
  • everybody’s search results are different – so that two people doing the same search
    from two different locations – get two different result sets with even without signing into their iGoogle accounts.
  • Ranking is no longer a measure of success
• looking at the intent of the search at the same time as looking at the IP address from where the search came from
• an aged domain will always rank higher than a new domain
• According to Hitwise, Google has 90% of the search market in Australia and 92% in New Zealand, but only 73% of the market in the US.
• Lots of brand name searches in Australia., eg., Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, BOM, Hotmail, etc
• Search term length is decreasing in Australia and search term success is increasing from March 2007 – March 2009 – but in the us the reverse is true where search success is declining.

Google Webmaster Tools

• use Google Webmaster Tools
• Will give you: top search queries, crawl errors, external links, internal links, what Googlebot sees, and more…

Yahoo!

• According to Hitwise, Yahoo! only has 4% of market share of search in Australia, but 16% in the US.
• Still gives approximately 10% weight to the meta keywords tag.

Keyword Research

• is vital!
• Drives your website information architecture
• Identify what keywords people are putting into search engines
  • avoid jargon
  • avoid general words
• Try to more your website words to what the market is searching for
• Long tail is very important
• The top 100 terms only drive 5.7% of traffic
• Check out your competition or like sites
• Use variations in spelling, misspelling, word stemming, hyphenated words, synonyms
• Add descriptive words to your keywords eg., faster internet, slow internet
• Use action words in your html page tiles, eg., buy, find, etc.
• Use keyword research before you write that press release

Writing for the Web

• Solve problems for people
• Important stuff at the top of the page, fluff at the bottom
• 1-2 key phrases per page – no more than three
• People scan and jump from page to page – they are time poor
• Cut the waffle
• Forget the "welcome to my website" introduction – no one cares!
• Title tag is most important – stick your brand name at the end – it is more important to get found first
• Turn features into benefits
• Unique and fresh content
• Be conversational
• Link to related content within your site – look at the success of Wikipedia
• Use headings – but use them correctly

SEO – Measuring Success

• Not rankings any more
• Its all about analytics
• Funnel conversion rates
• Segment your data – eg., new versus returning visitors
• Bounce rate is next to useless if you look at it as a whole
• Context is important
• Need to find out what your visitors want and why they are leaving your website

Duplicate Content

• There URL’s are all different
  • xyz.com.au/
  • xyz.com.au/index.html
  • xyz.com.au/home.aspx
  • http://www.xyz.com.au/
  • http://www.xyz.com.au/index.html
  • http://www.xyz.com.au/home.aspx
• But they point to the same page.
• Pick one "canonical" url for each page and ensure you link consistently within your site
• Make all non-canonical url’s do a permanent (301) HTTP redirect to the canonical/preferred URL
• Google’s Webmaster Tools: specify www vers. non-www
• Break ties in Google by submitting your preferred url in a sitemaps file.
• Set preferred domain on your sever to www or non – www
  • implement a 301 redirect from one version to the other
  • eg., http://egov.vic.gov.au permanently redirects to http://www.egov.vic.gov.au

Search Engine Spam

• Spam is anything that violates Google’s quality guidelines
  • White Hat: SEO within Google’s quality guidelines
  • Black Hat: SEO outside Google’s quality guidelines
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
• Ask yourself – Does this help my users? Would I dod this if search engines did not exist?
• Report spam to Google – http://www.google.com.au/contact/spamreport.html

Website Design

• Nobody likes ugly pages, but will people find your pretty ones?
  • specify SEO requirements before design plans, eg.,
    • Unique page titles/ URL’s
    • Nested heading tags
    • Reasonable amount of body copy
    • Spiderable links
• Treat Flash like images – or create a HTML only version*
• Use image alt attributes and keywords in file paths*
• Apply ‘CSS image replacement’ to replicate text embedded in an image*
• Use CSS layers to position text
• Ask yourself – Would you drive a car built purely for aesthetics?

* No cloaking or hidden text!

Linking

• Links = Votes
• The more votes your site gets the more important the site is seen by search engines
• Relevance = Content
• Importance – Links
• Quality links
• Relevant links
• Be seen as an authority in your topic – provide quality content and be a resource – for a government website this should be really easy!

On the whole it was a great conference – the 2 days went in a flash – will try to go again next year.

Create Google Custom Search for your government website

If you follow Google’s step by step custom search engine wizard you can have a search engine setup for free in a matter of minutes.

Your search engine can

• Index one web site, multiple web sites, or specific web pages from within a site
• Host the search box and results on your own web site; and
• Customize the colors and branding to match your existing web pages

Being a government agency you can opt to not have Google ads on the search results pages.

The Google Custom Search API Developer’s Guide documentation on Getting Started walks you through the creation of your first custom search engine.

The Western Australian government’s portal is using Google Custom Search

Screen shot showing the Western Australian Government's use of Google Custom Search

Experiment with Google Custom Search and see what you can do with it – you need a Google username and password to use it – if you don’t have one just set up a Gmail account and you are half way there.