Posts by Jeroen van Eck

Jeroen van Eck is still a fresh mind in the world of search. In September 2008, after graduating in marketing communication at the University of Twente, he started as a consultant search engine marketing at the online marketing company E-difference in the Netherlands. And now works as an online marketeer for eFocus. More articles and bio from Jeroen van Eck
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Two ways of using Google Images for product keyword research

Today I want to share a way to do keyword research, specifically for products you want to sell online. Say you’ve got a new product you want to sell online. You’re going to start a webshop to sell this product and you want the shop to be findable for relevant keywords. But you don’t know how your target audience calls this product.

Normally keyword research would begin with an idea of how your audience searches. But there are other ways to find out how a product is referred to online. This type of keyword research is based on a few new functionalities of Google image search. (more…)

Bing tests the unthinkable

Bing test het ondenkbare

This is a guestpost by Jeroen Smeekens from E-Difference (original post in Dutch). Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily State of Search.

Ads between the organic search results. Have they gone mad at Microsoft? Like Google, Bing runs several different tests each day, showing different types of search engine result pages to its users. Some tests only show tiny changes, and regular users probably won’t even notice them. Others tend to be a lot bigger. But Bing just did the unthinkable and just stuffed its ads between its organic results. Shaking my head Bing, shaking… my… head! (more…)

Lipperhey launches new link index: a review

lipperhey links

Last week a Dutch company specialized in SEO tools called Lipperhey announced a new link index. Within 12 months they want to become the largest publicly accessible link database in the world. Together with Target Holding a part of the University of Groningen and 1,000 volunteers they started this project. (more…)

How to influence search robots in crawling your website

spiderman

Search engines depend on search robots or crawlers to find and collect all the information on the web they present in the search results. These robots however have a limited capacity and therefore simply cannot find all the available information on the web all the time. Especially for large content websites it can be a difficult task to get the most important and latest content in the index of search engines. You want to influence the way robots crawl your website to focus on the most important content. But how should you do this?

Crawling the web

First of all you need to know how search robots crawl the web. Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes. From here they start indexing and following links on these web pages. (more…)

The thoughts behind the new Google Analytics

new-analytics

March 17th of this year Google announced a new version of Google Analytics. And to my surprise on State of Search we never posted one single article about this new version. A few weeks ago I attended the Google Analytics User Conference in Amsterdam where representatives from Google explained the vision behind the new Google Analytics.

There I learned a little more about the thoughts behind the new Google Analytics and the views from Google on the future developments for the analytics package. In this article I would like to create some insights in these thoughts. I will use quotes from Googlers to illustrate their thoughts on the new Google Analytics. (more…)

Retargeting: a blessing or a curse?

google-ads-following

A few days ago Google released a piece of research celebrating the success of AdWords Remarketing, the retargeting functionality of the Google AdWords advertising program. They included some success numbers from different advertisers, showing increases in conversions, cuts in costs-per-conversion and higher click-through-rates at lower costs per click. Other impressive numbers Google released include the reach of 84% of the people on remarketing lists accounting for advertising impressions to over 500 million Internet users worldwide. It’s fair to say retargeting is a blessing according to Google.

However where Google is happy about Remarketing some users are not. A search in Google Realtime for “google ads following me” shows a lot of users complaining about being chased around the web by Adwords ads. It’s a sound a hear a lot around the web. (more…)

Low quality is messing up my search experience, bring on the Panda!

PandaDog

As an SEO in my everyday life I am often confronted with the fruits of labor of my industry. As well as my clients I am a user of the world wide web and a subject of the results of search engine optimization. Lately I have been confronted with a few quests for information about different topics which highlighted the results of SEO as an industry. And as a user I have to say I was not satisfied with the results I was offered.

While searching I caught myself refining search queries to exclude specific types of results, ignoring results from the first results page based on certain signals and being generally disappointed by the quality of many results. I have seen so many low quality results it really messed up my search experience. (more…)

Google’s new SearchWiki: Block button to hide low quality results

block-site

Yesterday Google introduced a new feature to help users improve the quality of the search results. It is now possible to block results for a search result page. After visiting a result and returning to the result page in Google a link will appear that allows you to “block all example.com” results. Once blocked, results from the specific domain will not appear anymore in any of  your search results. Instead a message shows at the bottom of the page, telling you some results have been blocked. You will also be able to manage your blocked results.

For some of us this feature sounds familiar. You might think of Google’s SearchWiki, a feature that was introduced over two years ago. The features actually differ on a few levels. The table below shows the differences between the two: (more…)

The Power of RSS for SEO

rss-up-1

RSS is a widely used format of web feeds used for content syndication. It is amongst others used to spread news and new posts on a blog. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to follow interesting information from all around the web. RSS feeds use a standardized XML file format to publish information. Users can subscribe to the feeds with many different RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines but Microsoft Outlook, for example, also supports RSS feeds. They can also add feeds to their browser home page. It is a very good way to spread your information to your audience and therefore a great tool for SEO.

An RSS feed  consists of a part that describes the main information of the feed, like title, website and webmaster, followed by a list of items. An item can represent a news item, a blog post, a new vacancy, an upcoming event, basically everything you want. (more…)

How we got our rankings back with mainly technical changes

construction-saw

I would like to share a case with you. A case that got me thinking about the importance of good coding. Some time ago we made some changes to the website of a supplier of stoves and fireplaces. The website has a good amount of authority within their business and although the website ranked very well on the main product categories, individual products and product types didn’t come up in the search engines as often as we wanted.

The current website was mainly focused on company information with a separate part for the online product catalogue. We decided to create a structure with a major focus on the main product categories, a filter structure that would be optimized automatically for the product types and a better structure to increase indexation of all of the products within the online catalogue.

The goal of the changes was to drive more organic traffic from searches for specific products and types of products and of course to retain the current rankings on main categories. Together with the client we invested some valuable hours coming up with a perfect structure and tackled problems like optimizing pages where combinations of filters were used. (more…)

What Bing needs to bring to the table in 2011

Last monday I had an interesting discussion on Twitter with Paul van Oosterhout and Bart Schuijt about Bing. We were discussing what Bing would need to become a good alternative for Google. We had some ideas ourselves but I decided to involve a few more people on this question. So I started asking people “What does Bing (primarily) need to do in 2011 to become a major competitor for Google?”

Back to the basics

The first response I got from many people was that Bing needs to get better basic results. Although Bing has many great verticals, many of them even better than Google’s, search starts with the basics. When the basic results aren’t satisfying chances are people aren’t going to use the verticals either. They’ll probably just return to Google, no matter how great the verticals are. Maybe they will use the verticals sporadically but people are animals of habit and mostly will stick to one search engine for all their needs. (more…)

Bad publicity as fuel for your rankings

Yesterday I ran into this article in the NY Times about DecorMyEyes.com. The article explains the online strategy of DecorMyEyes.com which is based on bad publicity. Not just bad publicity because they deliver wrong products, overcharge their products or don’t deliver at all. They raise the stakes by threatening the people complaining with lawsuits and even threats to pay these people a personal visit.

On GetSatisfaction.com the complaints about this company have been stacking up. One topic consists of 243 replies tagged with labels like:

  • he’s racist
  • offended
  • unprofessional
  • liar and cheat
  • rude and abusive (more…)
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