Category Archives: SEO

Netconcepts report on the Long Tail of Natural Search

Stephan Spencer announced on his blog that his company, Netconcepts recently released a white paper entitled “Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search.” The research was aimed to show E-Commerce managers why chasing the long tail of natural search was necessary to maximize traffic and conversions.

In “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search: How to Capture the Unbranded Keyword,” Netconcepts
attempts to provide insight to E-Commerce managers to quantify and capture their sites’ full natural
search potential. It’s a big opportunity for big sites. But how big is it?

The analysis was based on 1.2 unbranded natural search visits to 5 million pages across 25 merchant sites.

Here’s what an average “merchant’s long-tail profile” looks like:

  • Only 14% of indexed pages yield search traffic, generating 4.6 visitors per month from non-brand searches.
  • 189,000 brand searches are conducted every month.
  • Retailers generate 80% of search traffic from brand keywords and 20% from non-brand terms.
  • Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month — roughly 100 searches for every unique page, 38 times greater than total brand searches.

I’ve already downloaded the 17 page report and I must say that the research is really impressive and provides excellent conclusions. The pdf file is available here.

Andy Hagans on TrustRank

Over at Link Building Blog, Andy Hagans talks about the “index issue” he had with Google and tries to explain how he solved it. He recently launched a new site that had a “2003ish PR5 domain” he acquired hoping that the sandbox effect will not affect him. However, even if the site had more than 200 pages two weeks after he launched it, Google had only cached the homepage.

Apparently, it took only a few seconds for Andy to explain the problem :

Mama didn’t raise no fool, I don’t know why or how, but I know this domain has the proverbial “TR0”.

Translate TR0 by TrustRank 0. While the site may have had some links, Andy realized that he had no “trusted links”.

So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) — Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)… Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

I think his experience reminds us that each site needs to pass the “Google Trust Test” before getting fully indexed and get the rankings it deserves.

Lee Odden interviews Laura Lippay – Yahoo SEO Program Manager

Lee Odden just published an excellent interview he did with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first heard about Laura on CNet, when I saw her excellent SEO 101 video (she’s cute, isn’t she?). You may also have seen her posting smart comments/posts at SEOMoz, Highrankings forums , or Cre8asiteforums.
The best part of the interview is this one:

If there were 3-5 site optimization tips you were to recommend to web masters, what would they be?
1. Usability comes before SEO – better yet, they should work hand in hand. But don’t compromise your user experience for SEO. Unless you’re spamming, of course.

2. SEO isn’t just about H1 tags and title tags – more importantly, you need traffic. You need to be good enough, you need to be smart enough, and gosh darnit , people need to like you. Well, your site at least. In that respect, your client needs to see you as not just an SEO, but a strategist of sorts, and you absolutely HAVE to be a part of site building from the beginning concept stages.

3. You can listen to what everyone else preaches about what works for SEO or you can find out for yourself. Most SEO “facts” are just things they hear from other SEO’s which they heard from other SEO’s which they read in some article that who knows who wrote it, etc. Where are the cold hard facts? They’re in your data, people! Set up a tight analytics structure and go in and do things to your site and test the results for yourself. You’ll be the smartest (and richest) SEO on the block.

I think Yahoo is going to love working with such a smart person.

Of course, Lee Odden asked her if she got to know Yahoo! “secret sauce”, but she promised she doesn’t get any knowldedge from the Yahoo search team (yet?) but she said she has to “get them drunk and hope to get secrets out of them just like everyone else. ” 🙂

A helpful Yahoo! feature for keyword research

I’ve never really paid attention to the “also try” feature in Yahoo!, which allows you to see related keyword. Each time you run a search in Yahoo!, they display a short list of related keywords, that you can expand by clicking on “more”, then “show all” to see the complete list of related keywords.
I wish I used this feature before, because I have to say that it’s pretty useful if you’re running a keyword research. It can help you find related keywords that you may not have found with other keyword tools.

Apparently, they only display keywords that are popular enough, you can use Overture to verify the popularity of each keyword. One other good thing is that it makes the difference between plurals and singulars.

See the example below for the term “internal audit“:

Google and bad neighborhood links

Vanessa Fox posted an interesting blog post on the Google SiteMaps blog. The post followed Search Engine Watch Live Seattle and she wanted to use this blog to share two of the questions the Google team received during the event.

In the post, she notes that links from “bad neighborhood” sites cannot hurt a site’s rankings, but it won’t help at all. On the other side, she confirms that outgoing links to bad neighborhood and spam sites can hurt one’s site rankings:

“In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.”

16% of web sites still use frames

I visit hundreds of sites each week and I sometimes see a few websites that still use atrocious frames. But I didn’t know that the average number of websites using frames accross the Web was around 16% in 2006.

Security Space published a study called Technlogy Penetration Report that shows the penetration rate of a number of client side web technologies, including Javascript, CSS, or Frames. A more complete chart is available here.

The study was based on a sample of 1,358,991 web sites, so you can imagine that the numbers can be quite significant.

It’s interesting to see that 50% of all web sites now use CSS for their design, but it’s still very sad to read that 16% of web sites still use frames. I guess this just shows that many people still need to be educated if they want to make a good use of the search engines to get traffic.

Source: ZDnet’s Web 2.0 Explorer Blog

SEO 2.0

Again Todd comes up with a thoughtful post about SEO. He describes how SEO must be now, and has to switch to a “2.0 era“. He sees SEO as an Internet Marketing technique with a comprehensive understanding of usability, design, traffic, trend, economics, conversion, risks, budget and other detailed principles.

I think this post should be read by all the SEO consultants who are still doing approximate work for their clients, and who are willing to still be there by the end of the year or even earlier.

With the growing number of businesses allocating a budget to SEO, and with search engines trying to use other factors to evaluate the quality of a website, those who still apply shallow techniques will have a hard time achieving succesful SEO campaigns.