July 28, 2008
And finally the moment that we have all been so anxiously awaiting, a new search engine to battle the Google giant. I have always been an advocate for the small guys. Cuil.com was created by Ex-Google workers, Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier. They have kept a low profile, raised $33 million in venture capital and in the end launched Cuil, pronounced “cool” today.
The first thing I did was look for a Submit URL page. I found a webmaster info page that had an email address for now on site submissions. If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, just let them know:
crawler@cuil.com
Twiceler is the name of their robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” They understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
More info can be found at:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/
Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Let’s see if these guys can pull it out and make some noise in the search space. If I was Microsoft I would be trying to get some investment going on this project as it seems like a small dream team at work.
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July 18, 2008
Our good and sometimes evil friend over at Google are always squeezing the algorithms in how they rank your paid listings against your competitors that are buying the same keywords in an effort to show and reward relevance. This can be a frustrating game for mom and pop shops and agencies to manage as keywords very important to your business can be turned off in a flash without any warning.
Here are some best practices that I teach and use to stay in good graces with the ‘mean’ algorithm:
1. Keyword Insertion. This is a super-duper important one to use whenever possible. Here is the tag and a good secret that not everyone is aware of: {KeyWord: YourName.com}. What basically happens when you use this tag is that the keyword or phrase search will get inserted as the link title and will be capitalized only if you capitalize both the “K” and the “W” (That’s the secret). By including your domain name or trade name then that’ll appear if the keyword phrase is too long as they won’t truncate it for you. I could almost stop right there as this step is so overlooked by most SEM shops. The other great benefit is that your keywords will be “Bolded” when displayed which usually results in higher CTR and lower bid pricing.
2. Use the Keyword or Keyword phrase in the description text field. I didn’t realize until recently how important this was in making sure that your are buying relevant keywords. If you have to break out and build new smaller ad group buckets then take the time to do it on important keyword(s). Google takes this into the consideration factor when weighing out your quality score.
3. Your Display URL. I as a measure of best practice always Capitalize my URL’s and don’t put the www. in front of them. Example: Meeta.com instead of www.meeta.com. It just jumps out at you more and is easier to read and remember.
4. CAPITALIZATION. While we are on the topic this might be the second most important best practice to follow to a “T”. You will end up fighting your brand managers and anal copywriters but don’t sleep on this one at all. Hold the line. Capitalize The First Letter On The Ad Description Text So That It Jumps Off The Page.
Example of all 4 Best Practices in play:
Your ad should look like:
{KeyWord: Meeta.com}
100% Free Dating Service!
Meet Local Singles Today.
Meeta.com
Another quick tip is that you can use superlatives in your ad description. I usually try to get a good short call to action and one exclamation point in the ad.
I’ll do another article on landing page optimization soon and how to use the Google conversion counter free tool.
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July 12, 2008
I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins.
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.
Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.
-Brian
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