Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Over the past few months, two new search engines have been creeping their way into the limelight;  Cuil and Wikia Search.

Quil (pron: Cool) was started by ex-Google engineers who now claim they have an index larger than that of Google’s.  While Wikia Search (brainchild of Wiki founder Jimmy Wales) harnesses the power of the masses to build the largest human edited search engine)

I used both engines over the past few weeks and while both offer new features, I don’t think Google will lose sleep over either of them, here’s why…

Cuil:  The results are presented in blocks of text including a picture scrapped from the site they’re displaying.  The results page is too confusing as it provides too much information and looks more like a spammy affiliates page than a search engine results page.

Wikia Search: Better results display but the results themselves need much improvement.  More importantly, since users can edit and review results, the database is very much open to spamming.

Having said the above, its still good to see others trying to improve on what  Google currently offers in terms of search.

According to the Wikipedia, Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms.

Google uses LSA in its algorithm when determining which pages to serve back to users, the process is called latent semantic indexing (LSI).

Here is a quick way to discover what words Google sees are semantically related to the word you’re trying to optimise for:

In the Google search box preceed your keyword by ~. so for instance if you’re trying to see what keywords Google sees as semantically related to the keyword tennis, type in the Google search box ~tennis.  Here is what you’ll see .  Note all the keywords that Google bolds (besides tennis).  These words like Wimbledon, Sport, and WTA are all semantically related to the keyword “tennis”.

How do you use this information?  Whenever you’re writing new copy for your website, make sure to include semantically related words in the title, meta description and copy of your website.

Also try to get as many links pointing to your site with your original keywords as well as words semantically related to it.

Google’s Keyword research tool found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal has been updated to include actual number of searches per keyword and suggested keywords.  This is a fantastic development for both paid (PPC) as well as natural search (SEO) campaigns as we can factor Google’s data into the keyword research projects conducted for clients.

More imprtantly, this update will enable us to measure Google’s data against a client’s very own analytics data to begin to understand the synergies between paid and natural search and to better advise how to spend our client’s money for maximum ROI (return on investment).

 Some of the benefits of the new functionality in the Google Adwords tool: 

• Discover high-traffic keywords to include in AdWords campaigns.

• Maximise ROI by analysing CPC and search volume data side by side.

• Identify niche keywords to be be included in Adwords campaigns.

• Analyse average search volume figures to get a better understanding of keyword seasonality.

The official Google Adwords Blog has further information on this new development.

Adobe recently announced it is has developed its Flash technology to enable search engine spiders to read the content within it.

In the past, search engines like Google were able to pick out links embedded in Flash files but unable to index the content within the Flash file.  So even though humans were able to read the content, search engines couldn’t actually see it.

Last week all this changed when Adobe (owners of the Flash technology) announced that new technology within their product will allow search engines to read all content within a Flash file.

What does all this mean?

For Flash developers, this is a Godsend.  They will now be able to continually create beautiful Flash sites regardless of the fact that it was previously “unfriendly” to search engines.  But is it search friendly now? The answer is no. 

Even though search engines will now be able to read content within a Flash file, the fact that it is usually only one file with loads of content crammed into it makes it unfriendly to search engines. 

Search engines like sites that are multi-paged, with content categorised into folders/subfolders with a broad to narrow keyword mapping structure (ie the homepage targets the broadest keyword (most general) and as you go deeper into the site the keywords become more narrow (more specific or “long-tailed”).

Final ruling on Adobe’s new Flash technology…

Well the jury is still out on this one but my guess is that Flash sites will still lag behind their much leaner HTML cosines in the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Here’s a quick guide to audit your site for SEO best practices:

• Robots.txt file

First ensure that it exists.  If it doesn’t, create one.  Its a simple text file called “robots.txt”.  Once you create your robots.txt file you can add to it your Google XML sitemap and use it to give instructions to search engines about which folders on your site to index and which ones to stay away from. 

• Navigation

Is you navigation intuitive?  By that I mean,, does it make sense to users?  If it make sense to users then most likely it also makes sense and is search friendly to search engines.  Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when optimising your navigation structure. 

• Some studies have shown that search engine users prefer split navigation (ie top navigation for the section pages and left hand navigation for the category level and important pages)

• Ensure that you don’t have the same long navigation on the left hand site across the entire site as this will cause issues such as duplicate content always showing up on top of the actual content (unless you’ve addressed this with css positioning).

• Make sure that the navigation is specific for the section/category of the site the visitor is on.

• Content Visibility

This is a no brainer, make sure your content is visible to search engines!  Search engines like basic HTML document and dislike content built with javascript, flash etc… (Although new developments in Flash now allow search engines to read its content and links.  Stick to basic HTML though!

• Trappings Page (404 error page)

Make sure that your site has a “404″ trappings page that tells your visitors if they’ve landed on a page that is no longer on your site.  A 404 trappings page is also useful to keep search engines spidering your entire site if they happen across dead links.  Although too many 404 page errors will devalue your site in the search results! 

• Canonicalisation

Ensure that you only have one version of each of your site’s pages and especially the homepage!  Because of the way severs work, the following two urls are considered the same:  www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com and yoursite.com/index.html.  Ensure that you redirect two of the above to your preferred one.  Also let Google know which one that is by setting up an account in Webmaster Tools.  Make sure you do the same for all your site’s internal folders.

• Duplicate Content

There are various reason why you may have duplicate content including: 

1. You stole it

2. You Syndicated it

3. You’re using an affiliate product feed

4. You’ve not addressed canonicalisation (see above)

5. You have too much similar content in common sections of your site such as site wide footers , headers)

All the above possibilities can cause your site to be devalued so you need to adress them by either removing this content, modifying it, or telling search engines not to index it (see Robots.txt above)

• Internal Links

Internal links are the only opportunity to control the link building process by building keyword-rich links pointing to your site’s pages.  Granted these links are less valuable than external links from authority sites but nonetheless, they are links and if used wisely, they can make a BIG difference in your rankings!

• Load Time

Another no brainer.  Make sure that your site loads quickly 99.99999 percent of the time.  Search engines want the best possible experience for their users and they DO NOT want to serve pages that take ages to load.  Don’t cut corners on this one folks.  Invest in a good host!