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The Rules by Which We Play

It’s a zero-sum game, this industry of ours. There are winners and there are losers. There can only be one site that ranks highest, and many sites that rank below it.

Though strictly speaking that’s not true any more – due to personalised results and the continued integration of social signals – I think we can all agree that there’s limited space at the top of any given SERP.

Fortunately we have a big playground to work in. Search engines process billions of queries a day, many of which they’ve never seen before. Every query, potentially, serves as an opportunity to reach an audience. (more…)

Why I’ve Stopped Defending SEO

Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Ben Hammersley, organised by the British council, about the future of the internet. Read my write-up of the lecture on the Pierce Communications blog here.

There was one small blemish on this otherwise superb evening. At one point an audience member – probably not coincidentally a grey-haired man wearing a checked shirt – in the course of asking a question, referred to SEO (with venom dripping from his voice as he pronounced the acronym) as “snake-oil” and the embodiment of all that was wrong with the corporatisation of the internet. (more…)

Want to be taken seriously? Start by looking good

A Microsoft research paper did the rounds on Twitter yesterday: Augmenting Web Pages and Search Results to Support Credibility Assessment (pdf). Search engine patent-guru Bill Slawski has written an excellent analysis of it which I highly recommend you read – as well as the paper itself (it’s light on science-babble so anyone should be able to come to grips with it).

But it’s not so much the credibility-factors that the paper describes that really made my eyes light up. No, it was the other research that the paper referred to that really caught my attention, specifically the research about how users assess the credibility of a webpage. (more…)

Defining the Long Tail for SEO

Apparently some SEOs believe that optimising a site for long tail traffic is not really SEO. I disagree, and below I will explain why.

First of all, let’s define what we mean by ‘long tail traffic’. It’s one of those often bandied phrases that tends to mean slightly different things for different people. Wikipedia isn’t much help here: “The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.”

Not sure I agree with that entirely. Another popular definition of long tail traffic is any search engine traffic that arrives on your site using 4 or more keywords. That too doesn’t sit well with me, as many 4+ keyword phrases are actually very popular and can generate substantial volumes of traffic. (more…)

We’re tired of Google, it’s time for a change

Let’s face it: Google rules search. With a market share in most European countries of well over 90%, Google is as close to a search engine monopoly as you can get.

When it comes to potential threats of Google’s dominance, everyone seems to be looking towards Bing. This seems perfectly logical, as Bing is a product of one of the world’s biggest and most experienced technology companies. If anyone can threaten the dominance of Google, surely it’s the financial and technological might of Microsoft?

Maybe so. But I don’t agree with that. Sure, Bing has some great search properties. Their image search is very solid, their maps are great, and I quite fancy their Visual Search system. (more…)

UK OFT Judgement Could Have Impact On Linkbuilding

In an interesting development that could have wide-ranging repercussions for UK linkbuilders, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has taken action against a company (Handpicked Media) that paid bloggers to write promotional blog posts, comments, and tweets.

While writing promotional material is not misleading in and of itself, what the OFT did have a problem with was that these posts/comments/tweets did not include a statement that they were paid for. The OFT concluded that this was misleading and against the Consumer Protection Act.

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The Business of SEO

SEO is a bit of an odd duck in the total mix of online (marketing) disciplines. On the one hand it’s a very techy, ‘hard’ discipline that requires a lot of skill and expertise in a wide range of fields. On the other hand, it’s probably one of the more difficult online disciplines to quantify.

Web developers, for example, have a finished product they deliver: a working website built according to the customer’s spec. Email marketers too have very clear deliverables: open-rates, click-through rates, spam reports, delivered emails – all these are very solid metrics that an email marketer can influence and report, and they tend to correlate to a financial ROI somewhere down the line.

Conversion rate optimisers have it even easier: their whole job is to map out the ROI-funnel of a website and to make it work better. And many social media marketers are as of yet still wallowing in the fuzziness of old-school, offline marketing – they get away with meaningless lingo-speak like ‘customer engagement’ and ‘brand building’. In other words, ROI isn’t (yet) a big part of the SMO business.

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Google News in Universal SERPs

Somehow I’ve managed to get the ‘Google News expert’ badge by virtue of my experience with the Belfast Telegraph. In all honesty I don’t feel like a Google News expert by any stretch. I suppose it’s a case of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. There are some truly great newspaper SEO people around like Brent Payne (Tribune, he was on our radioshow a few weeks back), Chris Moran (Guardian), and Julian Sambles (Telegraph) – compared to them I feel like quite the amateur.

But people seem to appreciate my sharing of what I learn about Google News at the Belfast Telegraph. So much so that I was asked to present about Google News on the Manchester SEO mini-conference last week. (Which was a great wee conference by the way, I had jolly good fun and met a great many wonderful people, including State of Search’s own Pete Young, Nichola Stott, and Kelvin Newman.)

One of the main points of my presentation was how simplistic the Google News ranking algorithm is when it comes to including news results on universal SERPs. I want to highlight that particular aspect of Google News a bit more in this blog post. (more…)

Google, the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence

If you’re looking for a valuable SEO insight or a handy tip, you can skip this article. What follows is nothing but pure technophiliac geekery, but it does relate to search engines – albeit in a somewhat roundabout way.

Terminator - Skynet I’ve been fascinated with the concept of Artificial Intelligence – true, self-aware machine intelligence - for decades. In fact I can tell you exactly when I became fascinated with AI: it was the day I saw the first Terminator film. Aside from it being a superb action flick, it was one of the first mainstream expressions of AI and it instantly captured my imagination.

In those days, the mid 1980′s, there was still a strong expectation that computer scientists would soon crack the magic formula and we’d have true machine intelligence. (more…)

The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation

Last week Jeroen van Eck and Bill Slawski lamented the lack of a solid guide to image search optimisation. Bill threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up. Here’s my Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation.

First, what do we mean with image search? Simply put it’s the vertical search option that allows you to search for images on the web. Google has an image search, and so does Bing, and there are several other specialised image search engines around.

For the purpose of this blog post we’ll focus on Google’s image search, though I reckon most of what follows can also be applied to other image search engines.
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Nurses and Doctors in SEO

This article was published first in last months State of Search newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter to receive unique content every month.

I have come to understand that all professionals active in the field of SEO can be divided in to two categories: doctors and nurses. On the outside they both seem to be doing much of the same things, but underneath the surface there lies a big distinction.

Most SEOs are like nurses: they treat the symptoms of a disease by handing out medication and making patients feel better. These SEO nurses provide their patients – website owners – with the common SEO medication: keyword research, optimised title tags, structured content, linkbuilding, and so on. These nurses are effective at SEO, as they’ll make the patients feel better (rank higher) in nearly all cases.

The other type of professionals, the SEO doctors, seem to be doing the same things. The difference lies in the diagnosis: the SEO nurse treats the symptoms, the SEO doctor understands the disease. (more…)

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