Personalization of search has been a popular topic of discussion for quite a while. Every time Search Engines add variables to their ranking algorithm they create new challenges for SEO professionals, but they also create just as many opportunities.
In the past, search engines determined best results solely on site relevance and a unique algorithm; effective to an extent, but unable to account for the individual user. In other words, the results were always the same. Now search engines provide results that are based on the user’s online history, past actions, social, geographic and demographic criteria, significantly increasing relevance to the search query. While the new generation of search certainly engenders user satisfaction, it also presents uneasy terrain for the ever-changing practice of SEO.
So how will this evolution in search influence your SEO tactics? Widespread personalization affects the rank checking process, because site rankings will differ from user to user, even when searching the exact same query. To what extent will your rank checking be affected? From a blog entry on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst:
Personalization of search results is usually accomplished through subtle ranking changes, rather than a drastic rearrangement of results. You shouldn't worry about personalization radically altering your site's ranking for a particular query.
Traditional SEO will still be very important. SEO professionals must continue to improve pages, making them superior to those of their competition’s and emphasizing intelligently-targeted keyword phrases. Meanwhile, a detailed analysis of that competition comes into play, offering far more valuable information than routine rank checking. After all, any SEO specialist will tell you that you’re not trying to beat the search engines, you’re trying to beat your competition, and good SEO is not based on ranking for absolute terms. Good SEO is based on measuring traffic and conversions. Therefore, as fearful as change may be, SEO professionals will necessarily and undoubtedly adapt to personalization, and satisfied browsers means repeat customers.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
A Little Fish in the Big Sea
The online world encompasses more than the average person can comprehend and has become and integral part of our daily lives. The trick is to understanding the internet and how it works; if that is, in fact, even possible. And have you ever thought of how the design of a site and the web come into play?
In this day and age just about every company and many individuals have websites. So, you have created a site and uploaded it to the web. Now what? This is where the overwhelming task of optimizations comes in. There are many things you can do to optimize your site; search engine optimization, link building, search engine marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns just to name a few. What about your site. Did you know that there are certain ways and applications you can build your site that help or hinder this optimization? Certain designs limit the search bots crawling ability and certain applications don’t booed well in search rankings.
A site is more than just the means of an online presence; it is a piece of the carefully integrated web and it does in fact have a purpose. Whether the purpose is to education, inform, service or sell it is important to make your “stage” as appealing and comfortable as possible. Your site needs to be visually stimulating and pleasing in order for you to get your point across and increase conversion rates. When I talk about making it comfortable, I am talking about placement and navigation. When a site is difficult to understand and hard to navigate the usual outcome is to give up and move on. You have to capture your audience quickly and enable them to easily perform the necessary tasks.
These are just a few of the many items to take into consideration when venturing into the realm of the World Wide Web.
In this day and age just about every company and many individuals have websites. So, you have created a site and uploaded it to the web. Now what? This is where the overwhelming task of optimizations comes in. There are many things you can do to optimize your site; search engine optimization, link building, search engine marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns just to name a few. What about your site. Did you know that there are certain ways and applications you can build your site that help or hinder this optimization? Certain designs limit the search bots crawling ability and certain applications don’t booed well in search rankings.
A site is more than just the means of an online presence; it is a piece of the carefully integrated web and it does in fact have a purpose. Whether the purpose is to education, inform, service or sell it is important to make your “stage” as appealing and comfortable as possible. Your site needs to be visually stimulating and pleasing in order for you to get your point across and increase conversion rates. When I talk about making it comfortable, I am talking about placement and navigation. When a site is difficult to understand and hard to navigate the usual outcome is to give up and move on. You have to capture your audience quickly and enable them to easily perform the necessary tasks.
These are just a few of the many items to take into consideration when venturing into the realm of the World Wide Web.
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Beautiful Disaster – The Nature of Content
Online hotel marketing and optimization is a glorious machine, an intricate, multifaceted juggernaut where the latest engine-dominating technology, punk science inspiration, psycho-analytical design flourish, and forward-thinking marketing dollar strategy coalesce to generate maximum performance of the two great benchmarks: traffic and conversion. But this machine, sleek and attractive though it may be, has a screw loose: content, that irrevocably human element, and unless a property (or the hotel internet marketing company the represents that property) can tighten that screw, all it really has on its hands is a well-fueled, well-designed, and genuinely beautiful disaster!
The fact is that search engine optimization and online marketing placement are brilliant at delivering traffic, and indeed without those initial “clicks”, the entire enterprise falls apart. But it is in the hands of content that the all-important task of turning fence-sitting browsers into qualified customers falls. We call this conversion, and no matter how many visitors that primo page rank shuffles onto your site, conversion will not happen without compelling and smartly-written sales content. It’s that important.
So what is great content? Since this is such a debated topic, we should perhaps start with what it most definitely isn’t. For instance, great online content is not a math problem. If as the saying goes SEO is part science and part art, great sales copy is all art, all the time, and in fact it may surprise you to find that the harder you try to “science it up”, the harder you try to formulize it, the less effective it inevitably becomes.
Abandon your preconceived notions of what makes content work, how long you think it should be, how many keywords you should use and what kinds, bullets versus prose, above the “fold” or not and does it really matter, forget all of it for right now and memorize a Zen-simple philosophy: good copy works, bad copy doesn’t.
For example, traditional wisdom and best practices have previously held that content should be as brief as possible, fearing that inundated browsers would scurry away from all that mean, awful text. However, evidence has begun to show that longer, more expressive copy not only appeases those fickle search engine spiders, but, when well-written, it also doesn’t “turn off” a qualified prospect.
In the article, “Tips for Writing Effective Sales Copy” for Search Engine Workshops, Robin Nobles and Stephen Mahaney write:
“Truth-be-known, qualified prospects will read everything as long as it isn't boring. On the other hand, tire kickers (the unqualified prospects) will not read long copy. But, neither will they read short copy.”
With your SEO and paid marketing efforts delivering a surging tide of qualified prospects to your site, the kind of eager, money-in-hand traffic that a top-notch SEO initiative should provide, the content has the freedom to tell the story its own way, and it must express this freedom to succeed in the increasingly-competitive online market. Quality, not word count, art, not science, is at the very heart of this effective sales content philosophy and is the essence of conversion.
The route to great content, then, is clear. Content must be organic. Whereas marketing and SEO are ultimately co-dependent on systems and quantifiable results, content is dependent entirely on the reader. It must feed off the visitors, speak to them, satisfy their needs, and therein lays its isolation from the glorious machine: every single visitor is different. Content maintains a symbiotic relationship with the machine, but it cannot play by its rules, because the second it succumbs to formula, to strict mechanics, the screw drops and everything falls apart.
Indeed, it would seem that “tightening” the screw means being willing to play it loose.
The fact is that search engine optimization and online marketing placement are brilliant at delivering traffic, and indeed without those initial “clicks”, the entire enterprise falls apart. But it is in the hands of content that the all-important task of turning fence-sitting browsers into qualified customers falls. We call this conversion, and no matter how many visitors that primo page rank shuffles onto your site, conversion will not happen without compelling and smartly-written sales content. It’s that important.
So what is great content? Since this is such a debated topic, we should perhaps start with what it most definitely isn’t. For instance, great online content is not a math problem. If as the saying goes SEO is part science and part art, great sales copy is all art, all the time, and in fact it may surprise you to find that the harder you try to “science it up”, the harder you try to formulize it, the less effective it inevitably becomes.
Abandon your preconceived notions of what makes content work, how long you think it should be, how many keywords you should use and what kinds, bullets versus prose, above the “fold” or not and does it really matter, forget all of it for right now and memorize a Zen-simple philosophy: good copy works, bad copy doesn’t.
For example, traditional wisdom and best practices have previously held that content should be as brief as possible, fearing that inundated browsers would scurry away from all that mean, awful text. However, evidence has begun to show that longer, more expressive copy not only appeases those fickle search engine spiders, but, when well-written, it also doesn’t “turn off” a qualified prospect.
In the article, “Tips for Writing Effective Sales Copy” for Search Engine Workshops, Robin Nobles and Stephen Mahaney write:
“Truth-be-known, qualified prospects will read everything as long as it isn't boring. On the other hand, tire kickers (the unqualified prospects) will not read long copy. But, neither will they read short copy.”
With your SEO and paid marketing efforts delivering a surging tide of qualified prospects to your site, the kind of eager, money-in-hand traffic that a top-notch SEO initiative should provide, the content has the freedom to tell the story its own way, and it must express this freedom to succeed in the increasingly-competitive online market. Quality, not word count, art, not science, is at the very heart of this effective sales content philosophy and is the essence of conversion.
The route to great content, then, is clear. Content must be organic. Whereas marketing and SEO are ultimately co-dependent on systems and quantifiable results, content is dependent entirely on the reader. It must feed off the visitors, speak to them, satisfy their needs, and therein lays its isolation from the glorious machine: every single visitor is different. Content maintains a symbiotic relationship with the machine, but it cannot play by its rules, because the second it succumbs to formula, to strict mechanics, the screw drops and everything falls apart.
Indeed, it would seem that “tightening” the screw means being willing to play it loose.
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