SEO Crunch

Future of Search

There are two problems with writing an article that dares to project what search engines will be doing in the future, unless of course you are Matt Cutts.

The first is that you run a big risk of dating yourself; the Internet landscape and the search engines are changing so rapidly that what worked even last night might not work the next day.

The second is the gremlin that haunts even the best search engine marketers; no one really know what the search engines are basing their rankings on, most “solid” information is fact just conjecture, although it is conjecture based on solid research (MOST of the time!!).

Be that as it may, we are going to present you with a few different ideas about which direction search engines might take in the future. Bear in mind that unfortunately we have no access to an Upper Google Guru, so any or all of these predictions may be wrong. They are, however, based on the direction that search engines seem to be taking currently as well as how best the big engines could overcome some of today’s glaring dilemmas.

Personalization

There has already been a blip on the Google radar screen indicating that personalization of searches is not too far off. Google, of course, has separate engines depending on country; this can be very beneficial to a web site developer familiar with media protectionist laws in countries such as Canada.

Get the formula right, and you will be number one. Google has also started to implement visitation history on many of their searches, and it probably won’t be long before they develop an algorithm that is based on IP address preferences.

Spider/human partnerships

One of the big negatives about a search on most of the engines is that searchers end up with a lot of useless pages. Developed using solid search engine optimization techniques, these pages forgot the Golden Rule: Write for people, not crawlers.

Look for growth in the method pioneered by Yahoo!; a combination of spider and human editorial staff. Not only will this help to make pages more relevant, it will allow some search engines to gain access to specific, and specialized, information. Web developers will have to write accordingly; the days of bad copy are almost done.

More PPC

We hate to say it, but money makes the world go ‘round, even on a network that was intended to distribute information for free. The search engines make big money off of their PPC programs, although many web developers have found the value is not reciprocal.

The big engines swear that organic searches will be kept alive, but my bet is that they become even more limited, sandwiched between several advertisements. Hopefully you can start planning your web site development now so that you are prepared to adapt when today’s techniques stop working, as they are bound to do. For our part, we think that the future of search will in fact become more focused on the searcher, even in the PPC campaigns.

The most solid prediction we can make is that on all matters pertaining to searches, the engines will want to see more landing pages of use to their users. After all, they exist to supply relevant information; it only makes sense to see them taking a more focused approach on what they rank.

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Much has been written about this topic, but this morning I came across an excellent post by John Cow on the topic of how to promote your blog using giveaways and contests. Have a read to learn the difference between and also how to strategize on what type of promotion will be most effective for your blog.

On competing MMO (Making Money Online) site this morning I also came across a post in which you can see the power of a impromptu cash giveaway promotion in action!

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Most people when first deciding to start a web site or blog, choose something they are passionate about and have knowledge and interest in. This is a sensible thing and, depending on your goals, may well be a wise decision.

However, there are many other factors to consider, especially if making some money with your web site or blog is a goal. The reasons you should choose your niche carefully include:

• Once you begin building a body of content, it is very difficult to change or broaden the subject matter successfully.
  Some niches are highly saturated, including SEO, Webmaster Tips and Blogging, the primary topics of SEO Crunch, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are truly determined and have the guts to stick with it for a long time before seeing any significant results. Better to choose a niche with less competition.
• Some niches pay much better than others. If your web site offers all the information in the world about mouse traps, flowers or tornados, you may well attract plenty of enthusiasts interested in your niche. But, consider the niche also from your advertisers’ point of view. If they sell something that is low cost or which is not generally purchased online, you may find that the click rates you get are quite low.
• Some niches attract more attention than others, which is related to the saturation and competition point above. If you write about a very small niche topic like ladybugs, flytraps or species of spiders, chances are you won’t see a whole lot of traffic since there will be fewer potential visitors. On the other hand, you want to find a balance between a niche that is too saturated and one that gets few visitors, so researching your niche is very important to your success.
• Some niches are more relevant to people who spend time online. Think about your target audience and do some research to determine whether or not they are among the “Web Elite” who spend more time online than watching television or other media channels. A site about retirement villas could be a great idea, but do the people interested in selecting a retirement home tend to do their research online? Hmmm …. Could be a niche worth examining closer!

Once you have selected a niche for your web site or blog, its time to begin doing keyword research. The goal of this exercise is to identify the keywords you will embed naturally and meaningfully within your site content.

The best tool we have found for such research is Trellian’s Keyword Discovery. Using this or another keyword tool allows you to find keywords that people actually query on Google and other search engines. You may think that flytrap is a great keyword, but if only 3 people enter the keyword into their search box each month, you won’t attract many users.

Now, unless you are one of the lucky few who have an aged domain, with hundreds or thousands of pages already in place and quality, related back links to match, then picking the heavy hitting keywords is also a mistake.

For example, if you are starting a blog about autos, good luck trying to get indexed and highly ranked for keywords like Car (639,182 monthly queries), Chevrolet (210,566 monthly queries) or Tires (544,795). Your competition will be fierce and the long established sites in the niche will outrank you every time.

If you are lucky to be a leader in your niche, then by all means choose the keywords that get the most queries. But, if you are like most of us trying to carve out a place in your niche, you will have much more success using so called “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that get far fewer queries and are not as likely to be saturated already by the competitors.

One general rule of thumb for a newer site trying to establish a mark within a reasonably popular niche is to select keywords that get between 1,000 and 2,000 monthly queries. Also try to select about three to five related keywords to use within each article or story you post, placing them contextually and naturally distributed throughout your article. Front load them in your page title, URL, meta description, image alt tags and excerpt as well.

In future articles we will discuss some of these techniques in more detail, but this hopefully provides you with the basics you need to more wisely choose a niche and keywords to use as you build your site content!

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Look on just about any Webmaster or Blogger forum or blog these days and you’ll find thousands, if not millions, of posts and threads about how to please Google or calling the Big G, as the company has not too affectionately been dubbed, the most vile and evil company in the history of commerce.

Sound harsh? Perhaps so, but most estimates are that Google is responsible for over 60 percent of search traffic today and Adsense is a viable source of income for most owners of content web sites today, so the paranoia and hyperbole is probably well enough deserved!

So, how does the smart Webmaster or Blogger get into the good graces of Big G in an attempt to get content indexed so that visitors find his or her web pages?

For starters, despite the scaremongering and penalties for paid links being doled out like so many school demerits these days, Google was founded on and still relies heavily on the algorithms developed back in 1999 by Page and Brin, which essentially ranks web pages based on nothing more significant than popularity.

And so, like a bunch of fisherman gathered at the same fishing hole, we Webmasters cast our lines, all hoping to hook a big keyword and reel in the number one SERP in our chosen niche. We write great content, put up shiny pictures, videos, keywords and whatever link bait we can think of, just to catch a little more traffic.

That’s right; if your web site has a lot of back links, especially from sites that are content relative, then you stand a good chance of being well indexed by the behemoth of search. But just try putting your best content on a freshly registered domain and watch it sink with despair in the sandbox, with hardly a visitor able to discover the gems it holds.

Those who with the insight to start publishing content and peddling their wares years ago have the huge advantage, since Google’s algorithm seems sure to give more authority to older domain names and those with a ton of incoming links, which it deems to be “votes of popularity” and sees as more worthy of top SERPs than those without.

Ironically, although the algo is supposed to provide the Big G users with “superior search results”, one can find countless examples of top SERPs given to pages with worthless content, shameless product promotions and Made for Adsense sites dangled before searchers like so much stinking shark bait.

Recently, we tried an experiment to prove this point and, without revealing the URLs, for fear of the penalties and because no self-respecting Webmaster will reveal his best SERPs, we can say that if somebody invents a more intelligent search algorithm than Big G’s, he may well do to Google what Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the young Stanford geeks, did to Yahoo, Excite and others only a few short years ago! Yes, the time is soon for a new and improved answer to producing the results searchers deserve.

And so we set out to test whether Google Bots and the legendary algo of Page and Brin’s genius could really sort the wheat from the chafe. Choosing two sites in our portfolio, one aged and having significant backlinks and the other, a fairly new site in the same niche and with similar content, we published two versions of the same article, containing the same well-researched keywords, on both sites.

On the one with high PageRank, tons of great search results and thousands of backlinks, we published a poorly written and relatively trite version of the article. And on the fresh site we posted a polished, spectacular and highly specific version.

Care to guess the results? Hardly a surprise of course; the “popular” site ranked highly for several of the keywords, while the ugly duckling site with the far better version got nothing higher than page four search results for the same keywords.

Take no pity on the poor Webmaster who toils away for hour on end to make good content available; he deserves no recognition from you or the Big G. But what about the poor searchers who rely on Google to take them to the promised land when searching for something as important as their next HDTV flat screen television or trying to find the latest spring fashions or a good article on how to lose weight, find a WordPress plugin or perhaps looking for information on how to become a successful Blogger?

While they hope to find the content we published on our fresh site, all they will get from the Big G is a pile of garbage because that version is on the more “popular” site.

So, our conclusion is indeed that Google is a hard taskmaster; both to the Webmaster and to the unsuspecting searcher who has been brainwashed by the hype into thinking the answers to all their questions, the links to the best web sites, can be found by entering there query into the Big G search box!

Now that Google is gaining so many haters in the Webmaster community, to whom they owe a fair portion of their fantastic wealth and success, the tide may turn slowly away, leaving the doors open for a new competitor to come along finally, with a pure and simply better search algorithm and an attitude that Webmasters and searchers alike begin to prefer over the Big G.

CEO Eric Schmidt has said repeatedly that Google doesn’t care to own content, but prefers the strategy of guiding users to content instead. And nobody can deny the strategy has paid huge dividends, making Google the fastest growing company of all time. Well, so far at least.

But despite wooing many of the most talented software engineers and employing thousands of brain-bigger-than-a-planet minds, Google still apparently has no better way of judging the actual value and quality of content than how many links there are to a given web page or site!

This all seems a sad affair and, rather than intimidating Webmasters, what Google really ought to concentrate on is how to distinguish good content from utter garbage and rank pages accordingly. Then, they might not have to piss off the Webmaster community with threats against paid links and paid links could once and all go the way of the buggy whip!

If you like this post, please let us know. If you think its complete bullshit, don’t be afraid to tell everyone. Your comments are appreciated either way on our little web site that nobody knows and Google hasn’t confined to banishment. Yet anyway …

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Have you ever seen what happens when somebody sticks peanut butter to the roof of a dog’s mouth?

While I don’t in anyway condone this cruel trick, I have seen it done and it’s rather entertaining.

For some odd reason my mind compares this to writing blog titles that grab people’s attention.

I learned the power of writing good titles when I was in the newspaper business, where alliteration, titillation and fitting a title to the given column space were emphasized.

Following are a few tips to follow when trying to come up with your blog post titles.

To the Point but Offbeat

On my How Did I Do It? Web site, the most popular story has the title “Plant a Butterfly Garden”, which sounds ridiculous, but its offbeat; while others may write stories about butterflies, flower gardens and the like, I haven’t seen any others about an actual butterfly garden … well, now I will since you’ll probably use it in your next do it yourself, home improvement blog post title!

Also, it is important that you do not mislead the reader. Unlike tricking a dog into thinking he’s getting a treat, the peanut butter you feed your blog reader had better taste good and be what he’s expecting.

Put Keywords Up Front

The importance of keyword placement in web site content has been beaten to death by search engine optimization gurus, but keywords are still the only real way search engines can tell what your content is about.

There are a couple of aspects to placement of keywords in your web page title. First, put the 1 or 2 keywords that best represent the topic as close to the beginning of your page title as possible. Second, you might want to select keywords that you have researched and have reasonable certainty will get search engine queries.

Keep It Short

Take a little time when you write titles to consider options and how to cut out words like “a”, “the” and the like. The more space you insert between your keywords, the more you dilute them.

Unless you have a really creative, attention-getting idea for a long title such as “Why SEO Experts Are Completely Full of Crap” or “My Mom Makes a Million Dollars a Year on Her SEO Blog”, you are better off keeping it short and to the point.

Peanut Butter That Really Sticks

Some techniques for writing better blog titles are proven to catch readers’ attention on social sites, news sites and others that might be likely to pick up your story:

• Lists – People love lists and they’re easy to make up. Just think; “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”, “Top Ten Things I Hate about Britney Spears” or “Five SEO Experts Who Don’t Know Crap”.
• How To – Often, people are on the Net looking for information on how to do something; “Plant a Butterfly Garden”, “Design a WordPress Theme” or “Stick Peanut Butter to the Roof of a Dog’s Mouth”.
• Secrets Revealed – We all want the inside scoop; it’s what makes you the most popular person at the office water cooler. Think National Enquirer here; “Britney Spears Lectures on Semiconductor Physics”. I’m not making that one up by the way; Google it and see for yourself!
• A Deal You Can’t Pass Up – Everybody loves a deal and the Internet has become the bargain hunter’s oasis, so if your site has something to sell, offer them a deal they can’t say no to.
• Shock and Awe – Like slowing down on the freeway to rubber neck an auto accident, people can’t help but read something shocking; it’s the oldest trick in the Title Writer’s arsenal really. “The Coming Mortgage Crisis”, “Google Stock Goes Down 3%” or “Britney Spears To Have Sex Change Operation”.
• Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) – FUD is another great way to get people to read something; if they believe they could lose money, get sick or die unless they read your web page, they just have to read it!

While these techniques are good ideas to help you get started writing better blog titles, the main thing is to be yourself, have something interesting to say and say something people will want to read.

The most important thing to successful blogging is to write frequently and not worry about trying to make every post or every title a huge success; you’ll have plenty that bomb and some that strike the hearts of your readers and make it big!

And, if you need some inspiration, just look online and find something popular that you can use as a good idea starter for your next blog title.

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If you use WordPress to publish your blog or content web site, you may not be getting the most from this powerful content management system if you use one of the commonly available free themes.

An often overlooked aspect of developing blogs and web sites is the importance of category pages, which should be updated as you add articles or posts to your web site. If you use WordPress, this is done automatically each time you add a new post, with the first several sentences from each new post being displayed on the category page(s) under which it has been listed.

Ideally, you want your web site category pages to get PageRank and search result rankings that increase steadily over time. But, unless you have optimized your WordPress theme, your category pages simply display duplicate content that also appears in your blog posts, which is not a good thing for search engine optimization!

How to Use Optional Excepts to Display Unique Content on Category Pages

1. I will explain, step by step, how you can leverage the optional excerpts feature in WordPress to create category pages that get search engine results and enhance your blog web site for users!
2. First, you will need to modify your WordPress theme by editing the archive.php file in your theme folder. Using notepad or your favorite editing tool find the following code in your archive.php file: <?php the_content() ?>. Replace this code as follows: <?php the_excerpt();?> and add after it the code needed to provide a “Read More” link for the user to link to the post: <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">Read more</a>

Use the optional excerpt field to add your unique category page intro content.
3. So far, you have enabled the optional excerpt text to be displayed on your category pages. But, unless you actually add content to the excerpt field in your posts, your category pages still only display the first few sentences of the post. To add text to your excerpt fields when writing or editing a post, look for the “Optional Excerpt tab in your wp admin write/edit post screen. Click the “+” sign to the right and you will see the text entry box. Enter about 2 to 3 lines of text here that introduces the article, frontloading the excerpt with appropriate keywords and a nice “hook” to draw readers into the content that follows.
4. Lastly, you should try using the excellent WordPress plugin “All in One SEO”, which provides many SEO features for your blog. Look for the option “Use noindex for Categories”. Once you have added excerpts to your blog posts, you should uncheck this box and update the plugin. This will allow bots to spider your category pages so that they begin to get indexed.
5. Note that this feature should not be disabled if you are not using the optional excerpts or you will have duplicate content on the category and post pages, which is generally considered suboptimal from an SEO perspective.

Popularity: 97% [?]

StumbleUpon

By merit, I mean something that has value to your target audience and catches their attention long enough for them to actually read the text, view the images or watch and listen to the video content.

However, you will quickly find that mentions of your web site article or blog post will not make much money from the traffic that StumbleUpon and other social sites generate.

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So you have a Blog and you’re getting a bit of traffic. Great! So next, how will you make money from that traffic? If you are John Chow, you have a lot of options, from getting people to pay for reviews of their web sites, to private ad placements, endorsements and more. But for most Bloggers, the options are a bit more limited. In this article, I will outline some of the most widely used advertising services available to you as a Blogger.

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