Does your URL matter in ranking?

Here is a very good thorough discussion of what a URL is and how it should be constructed to help you with your ranking on the terms that are important to your site.

The author points out that keywords are currently important to the major search engines in varying degrees.

"Currently, Google, Yahoo, and MSN each appear to be giving some ranking boost to pages that contain the keywords in the subdomain of the URL. We believe that Yahoo places the most significance on keywords in the domain name, closely followed by Google. MSN doesn't seem to place quite so much emphasis on this, but it does appear to factor it into their scoring."

I emphasize the currently because this, like almost everything else about Internet Marketing, is changing constantly.

This article takes you through the structure of a URL, describing each of the elements in turn, and points out appropriate and reasonable strategies for incorporating keywords into your URLs. He includes some very good, and some subtle points.

He discusses the question of how and why to use subdomains on a site, and whether to use hyphens in your URL to separate keywords. In short, subdomains are good if they are justified by the site size and content, and keywords in the subdomains will help you. Hyphenation, according to his findings, is no longer necessary to allow search engines to distinguish keywords in your URL, because search engines are becoming more sophisticated at separating English (he specifies) words from one another the same way a reader's eye will do. My experience with other automated tools like spell-checkers makes me a little leery of this advice, but it is what it is. Judge for yourself!

He also says that search engines now examine URL's with multiple hyphens more critically with an eye to identifying spam techniques in operation. This makes a lot of sense to me, and is consistent with avoiding "too long" URL's, which can cause other problems for you.

He includes a discussion on dynamically generated URL's and some of the problems inherent in their use. In the past, these were simply death for a page, but times have changed somewhat. As he says,

"Note: a large number of URLs with session variable have begun appearing in Google recently. This appears to be a glitch in Google's indexing process that should be resolved soon, as Google states on their webmaster guidelines page that they do not index pages with session variables."

In this case, the basic rule that we have always taught seems to remain sound, "Do not allow your site to utilize "session variables" and outlawed characters like "?" in the URL's of your pages." This avoids the problem, and is not that difficult an issue for your development team to work around. they just have to recognize the importance of doing so!

This is a very good article for everyone to review, as it is a good reminder of some basics that everyone should keep in mind, with some additional information and insights that are less obvious, but still quite important for marketers.

Why search is so hot today,

An article in Searchenginewatch reports from the Search Engine Strategies conference, February 27-March 2, 2006, New York, NY.

Searchers want more control over the information that they will base their opinions and purchasing decisions on. The Internet serves this preference with search engines. As the presenters at the conference made their point:

Searchonomics: Search Statistics Made Fun:
"1. Consumer skepticism and resistance to advertising. According to Insight Express, 'consumer trust in advertising has plunged 41% over the past three years' and only '10% of consumers say they 'trust' ads today.'
2. In the varied world of today's media, the consumer is increasingly in control. A 2005 study by Yankelovich showed that almost 70% of consumers were actively looking for ways to block, opt-out, or eliminate advertising."

The speakers went on to describe how advertisers are spending their money on Internet advertising, but this represents a real disconnect with waht is happening on the web. Note the following quote from the presentation:

"A 2004 Enquiro study found that B2B users had a 63% preference for organic. Interestingly, according to a 2005 MarketingSherpa report, "organic SEO gets a higher conversion rate than does sponsored search." The conclusion? "Advertisers should be spending more time, effort, and money towards improving their natural search results," said Ramsey."

The question this raises is, "Why do advertisers insist on spending their money so ineffectively?" One can only speculate. My personal reflection on this question is that there is a familiarity with advertising that is driving part of this phenomenon, whereas the dynamics of organic search are unfamiliar to marketing personnel. People will stick with what is comfortable to them even though all indications are that another approach would be more effective. In addition, advertising through a system like PPC (Pay Per Click) lends itself to statistical reporting and analysis in ways that organic search promotion does not.

Good organic results promotion is a more amorphous process. A PPC ad can be measured more precisely than the impact of good site development and promotion, which has a more holistic nature to it. I find this encouraging because it means that there will continue to be opportunities for those of us who are willing to put in the effort to focus on organic results. We will still be able to compete against the larger organizations with their bigger budgets.

Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search

A new blog search engine is coming out in beta which has generated some favorable comment in several notable locations.

"Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. As with web search, Sphere attempts to understand link structures, who's linking to whom, and what are the quality of the links. Crucial to this analysis is an attempt to understand who's starting or leading discussions in contrast to those bloggers who are simply commenting on existing conversations.
Sphere also looks at meta data, things like posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other non-keyword related data.

And finally, Sphere's algorithm content does some heavy lifting with semantic analysis of blog postings."

This article by Chris Sherman, an always reliable and authoritative source, goes into much more detail about the featues of the new engine and how it is intended to solve parts of the relevance issue. In following up on this story, I also went to the home page of Sphere and found other links to comments in other search engine blogs. I was not able to explore the engine myself, as their server is presently overloaded by the response they have received, and they have closed off access temporarily. I did learn a lot by following the other links, which I recommend to all who might be interested in more detail.

What I found interesting about this whole discussion in these various locations is the insight that it provides to how search engines must approach the problem of determining relevance for their search results. All search engines are wrestling with this problem as the Internet continues to expand, and the solutions that this talented group of developers come up with will be echoed in the solutions that other search engine developers employ in their engines. No one has the complete answer yet, of course, but, as we progress up the learning curve, the steps that one group finds to be successful will be copied by all the others.

For webmasters and business owners trying to keep up with effective marketing on the web, understanding the direction that developers are moving with their algorithms is the best route to success in the competitive Internet arena.

As always, the basic message is to provide good content to the audience on the web. Remember that what all the developers are trying to find and deliver is the best content that they can locate to deliver to their users. If you consistently provide that, the search engines developers who find the best algorithm will be more and more likely to prefer your content to other content offered by less effective marketers. All the techniques that we teach in our Internet Marketing Clinic are simply ways to communicate more efficiently with the search engines to let them know that your content is truly the best they will find!

Google continues to refine its engine?

Google has acquired rights to a new algorithm that could influence its search performance. There are no examples of how it would work available yet, but it is likely going to have an impact on the value of links from other sources.

The brief description in this cited article says,

"'Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works.
Orion would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search.'

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant."

To stay in touch with developments like this andwhat impact they should have on your internet marketing strategy and practices, we recommend attendance at our weekly Internet Marketing Clinic, offered almost every Wednesday at the University of Houston Small Business Development Center, just outside of downtown Houston.

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