Google: The Search Party

"the idea is to anticipate a user’s intent in a search query."

I just watched the author, Ken Auletta, at the New Yorker magazine, talk about Google with Charlie Rose, and a thought came to me about this concept. It seemed more obvious in the show than it does in this article, but the question is, "With Google customizing searches based on what it knows about different searchers, are we coming to a point where different searchers will get different results on the exact same search?" And, if the answer to that is "yes", what does it mean to web masters who are trying to optimize sites for the broadest possible reach? I don't have an answer to that question, but will certainly be thinking about it.

This article makes very interesting reading for general information about Google, how important it is, and where it is going. For example, it reports that Google has a market value of just over two hundred billion dollars. By comparison, ExxonMobil, the richest corporation, has a value just under five hundred billion. Google is only about ten years old!

This year, 2008, their ad revenues are expected to reach sixteen billion dollars, close to the combined revenues of the four top television broadcast networks. Google's ad revenues are increasing, while revenues for other players is declining.

Andy Grove, the former chairman and C.E.O. of Intel,says, “Google’s power is shaping what’s happening to other industries.” According to ComScore, Google does an estimated four hundred billion searches a year, which amounts to about sixty percent of the searches worldwide.

One other interesting point in the article is that "Americans spend the same number of hours a week online as they do watching television—fourteen..."

What does this mean to those of us who are working in the SEO field? For one thing, it emphasizes the absolute dominance of Google on our results, and suggests that this will not change in the immediate future, but, in fact, will probably become more pronounced! It says that we have to stay on our toes with the way Google rates our work, because that rating is constantly changing, with possibly serious impact on our results. And, finally, it illustrates the importance that the Internet has taken on in everyone's lives, and how that presence will likely become more significant rather than less significant, as we tie in more devices to the Internet (cell phones, for example!) Our field, while continually challenging, is only beginning to become what it will be in the future!

Eyetracking Shows Web Audience Ignores Ads

More evidence of the importance of ranking in the "natural" or "organic" results! We continually talk in class about how searchers ignore ads. Here is some hard evidence on the point.

In the study cited in this article, the focus was on banner ads, and with some discussion of "annoying" ads and how people respond to them. The posting shows the results of some eyetracking studies. These are tests that are done by having subjects open web pages, then having machines follow their eye movements to see what parts of the page they actually look at. In the three sharts shown, it is clear that people don't even look at the ads sections of the pages!

This is entirely consistent with my observations of my own experience when browsing the web. I can assure you that I could not even tell you what the ads on the page referred to in most cases. They are just not a part of my "scan pattern" on a page!

All studies that I have seen of searcher behavior have always reinforced this point. With this kind of information in hand, one wonders how paid ads ever contribute anything to the success of a site!

Optimizing your site properly so that the search engines present you in their unpaid listings is still the best investment of your marketing efforts! Not only will you get better results for your efforts, but the results don't stop when you stop paying for them!!

So Does Blogging Really Work? Here's the Proof.

An interesting post provides some insights to using blogs to promote your business. The first part of the posting is all about Dell turning around its attitude to blogging for businesses, and is an interesting story about the impact hat blogging can have on a company. It is not really too relevant to most small businesses except in that it shows that the wrong kind of attention can really hurt you! In most cases, small businesses don't have the visibility for that to be much of an issue. Attention is what they are trying to get!

To me, the more interesting part of this post has to do with the South African winery that took up blogging. If you read the details, they increased their business volume by more than a factor of ten! Yes, I did say ten! They state that they were selling some 40,000 cases of wine per year when they began their blog, and are now approaching 40,000 cases per week. Who would not like this result!

Their efforts in marketing through their blog go well beyond posting information on the blog, but that was the starting point. In their case, they began giving wine away to people on the blog, which is sure to get attention, but, for a tenfold increase in sales, it makes a lot of sense! The lesson here is that by using your blog creatively in your business arena, you can have a huge impact. You can be sure that these people are believers in the power of the Internet to promote business.

For more information about blogging and how to use the Internet effectively, browse some of our presentations that we have made in our free Internet Marketing Clinic at the University of Houston Small business Development Center.

Which elements lead to high Google rankings?

Axandra reported back in a May 2007 newsletter on the results of a ranking study performed by the German firm Sistrix. They include a link to the study report, but, unfortunately for me, that page is in German!

The summary is good, however, and reinforces the lessons that we have consistently promoted in our clinic, with only one new note.

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

In summary, the importance of these elements follows the order in which they are listed with the exception of inbound links, which are cited as being quite important. As with any such study, it is impossible to assign any specific measure of impact to the different elements. We emphasize understanding the concept of which is more important, and utilizing them all.

The one note that stood out from our general understanding of element significance was that H1 headline tags appeared to show less significance that the effects of tags H2-H6! This point really jumped out at me from the findings, and could be explained by Google continuing to battle the efforts of search engine optimizers.

Underlying all of this information is the understanding of the importance of getting the right keywords in use on the site in the first place! The elements discussed all relate to the proper use and placement of the keyword phrases.

Almost as an aside in the report, there was a mention that sites with very few parameters in the URL appear to rank higher than sites many parameters in the URL. This is interesting, as it is slightly different from the perspective that we have always taken on the structure of the URL, which is that it seems to inhibit the depth of crawl of a site. These are two slightly different perspectives on the issue, but with the same bottom line: complicated, parameter driven URL's don't perform as well!