If you’re in the Santa Monica area Wednesday evening, stop by Yahoo between 4:30 and 7 for food, drinks, site reviews, discussion, and Q&A time. We’ll cover anything you want related to search acquisition, search-friendly web development, content strategy, and web analytics.
Sometimes, we take branded search (searches for your brand name or domain name) for granted. We just assume that people who know our name will find us.
Today, I wanted to book a flight on BMI (more accurately known as British Midlands Airways). First, I tried direct type in to bmi.com. That was not correct. (One of the many reasons no one types in domains anymore and everyone just relies on search.) So, I did a search for [bmi]. Huh. Nowhere to be found.
Refining my search to [bmi airways] does bring up the site, but I could have just as easily refined my search to [aer lingus] or (please never let it come to this) [ryan air].
Because I’m a search geek, rather than just booking my flight, I also checked out the rankings for the BMI site (which, by the way, is flybmi.com). While it ranks #6 on Yahoo for its brand name, it comes in at a sad #128 on Google and doesn’t rank at all on Bing. Searchers who aren’t as hip to refinements and instead rely on paging through results will be looking for a long time.
I didn’t go so far as to investigate what the problem might be (it could be a content problem, a linking problem, a technical problem, a penalty issue…), but perhaps BMI should.
Update! Commenters have figured it out!
Commenters (below) and Twitterers have pointed out that BMI does in fact rank for its name in the UK and Ireland. And I conveniently happen to be in London today and can see for myself that it’s true.
As with the US, a bunch of body mass index pages rank next, along with the Brain Mind Institute.
I concede that BMI’s primary customers are in the UK and Ireland, but they also likely have lots of customers like me who are booking from other countries. BMI surely doesn’t want to rank #128 for their own brand name on Google. So what are they to do?
I wrote up some thoughts on geolocation a while back, but this query points out how tricky things can be. BMI could operate separate sites for each country, each with a specific TLD and have each TLD be an entry to a central reservation system. That might be cumbersome though, so they could at least specify the country location for each folder in Google Webmaster Tools to improve things on Google.
It looks like simply improving their site architecture could also make a difference. An easy clue that this might be an issue is that in the UK, www.flybmi.com/bmi/splash.aspx ranks #1 on Yahoo, wwwflybmi.com ranks #1 with www.flybmi.com/bmi/en-gb/index.aspx (basically the same page) indented below it on Google, and www.flybmi.com/bmi ranks #1 on Bing. Without doing any digging into the site at all, we can see that at least four pages are competing with each other.
I would look into this further, but being in London, I have beer to drink at the pub.
Come on by the Kit Cat Theatre in Seattle tonight for Ignite 7! In five minutes, I’ll tell you everything you need to know so that you never eat boring and non-delicious food again. Because seriously, life’s too short to eat bad food.
Then Wednesday evening, I’ll be hosting a Jane and Robot meetup at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale. We’ll have the usual snacks and drinks and I’ll be answering whatever you throw at me. The in-house Yahoo SEOs will also be on hand to talk about what it’s like to do SEO at a large corporation that also happens to have a search engine (for now anyway). RSVP on upcoming!
Some sites like to play music when you land on them. I’m not sure why. I suppose they want to envelop the visitor into an entire “experience” or set a mood or portray their musical point of view. (Phrase unapologetically stolen from the Food Network’s food reality show where the judges are always asking the contestants to create dishes that express their “culinary point of view”. Ha!)
In any case. When I get to your site, I am not looking for an experience. I am looking for some information to complete my task. That’s what most searchers are doing too. If you invest a lot of resources in ranking well for key phrases and then cause those searchers to flee your site while holding their heads repeating “make it stop!” over and over, well, all the ranking in the world isn’t going to help you gain customers.
I’m generally against any music at all on a site (I am listening to my own music, thank you very much, and now with yours playing, it sounds like the symphony of the dueling evil composers in hell. Just saying. Exceptions for singers and bands, although I would still prefer a large play button that enables me to start the music experience myself (what if I’m in Starbucks! Or on an airplane! Or jury duty!).
If you think I am a lone voice in a sea of music-as-an-essential-part-of-the-web-experience lovers, then please, for the sake of puppies and kittens and fluffy clouds, at least give me a pause button. Or a mute button. Because if you don’t, the easiest way for me to get the music to stop is to leave your site.
Amazingly, there are sites whose methods of adding a musical soundtrack to the web experience make most musical sites seem AWESOME. Below are two. I present them as a cautionary tale.
Lebanese Ministry of Tourism
They picked a very short song. And play it over and over and over. And then they play it some more. And I can’t find a mute or pause button anywhere.
Mercedes Garage
They restart the music every time you navigate to a different page. Seriously. And there’s no way to turn it off! I was looking for their contact information, but I had to close the site as quickly as possible and call a different garage. All because they added music to their site. Which means, by the way, they did additional work, which resulted in driving customers away.
I present this post as a public service announcement. I’m just trying to make the web a better place.
I’m not positive, but it seems like there may be some news about Yahoo! floating around today. I only scanned the headlines, but I think it has something to do with the Jane and Robot meetups at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale and Santa Monica offices in August.
Next Wednesday, August 5th, come on over to the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus from 6pm to 8pm and then Wednesday, August 19th, stop by the Santa Monica campus from 5:30pm to 8pm. As with all of our Jane and Robot meetups, we’ll have lots of drinks, snacks, and knowledge and all for free. Can’t beat free!
If you’re a web developer, search marketer, entrepreneur, work at a startup, work at a large company, have a web site, are thinking about having a web site, blog, or otherwise do stuff with the internet, come by and get answers to your hardest questions about search.
Today, I was browsing apartment rentals in Riga, Latvia. I was searching via the Flock toolbar, which defaults to Yahoo search. I found a pretty good result that had all kinds of apartments, with prices, descriptions, pictures, and maps, and lots of great information about the area. This wasn’t a fly-by-night operation, autogenerated made for AdSense site.
At first, the site got me thinking of geolocation issues. The domain has a .lv TLD, which makes sense, as it’s a Latvian-based company, except that they likely are targeting an audience not in Latvia, and does the TLD prevent them from ranking as well as they could for searchers in other countries.
But then I got distracted from all of that by something else. In the left nav, along with events, bars, and excursions, was another menu item: Link exchange. Really? In 2009 a link exchange program so blatant it gets main menu treatment? I scrolled to the footer. Copyright 2002. But the reviews are from 2009, so clearly the site is still being updated.
I clicked on the link exchange option. That brought me to a page with link-exchange in the URL. The page instructs people to copy their text link code into their web sites and once that’s done, email them with information about the reciprocal link. Sure enough, looks like lots of sites have done just that. “Link partners” include an RSS feed submission program, online mattress sales, Canadian car insurance, and diesel electric generators.
These are my questions: the owners of the Riga apartment and all of the sites listed on the link exchange page know enough about SEO to know that links matter, but they don’t know enough about SEO to know that link exchanges can hurt you (or at the very least not help you) in the search engines? Clearly, the apartment site isn’t trying to hide its link program and the reciprocating sites don’t mind being prominently listed on the “reciprocal link exchange page”. Are these site owners following bad advice and know just enough to be dangerous? It’s a conundrum.
Sure enough, the site ranks #1 in Yahoo for relevant queries, but for those same queries, it ranks on the third page of Google’s results (and on the second page of Bing). And it’s a good site, with great content. It’s exactly the site I was looking for. And it likely would be better off without all the resource investments of that link exchange programs. The company apparently spends time reviewing incoming emails and updating the web site with links — they are allocating limited resources to something that’s actively hurting them.
Seems kinda crazy.
I have tons of really long blog posts I want to write, have half-written, have nearly done, but clearly none of that is getting this blog updated. So, I’m going to introduce a new feature, in which I post short, random thoughts about search craziness. And maybe search awesomeness.
I’m calling it search shorts, because I’m creative like that.
Just a quick post to mention a couple of places to get answers to all of your technical search-related questions!
First, check out my post on Search Engine Land on Google’s new ability to execute JavaScript onClick events and the continuing searchability issues with technologies such as AJAX and Flesh.
This afternoon (June 3rd) at the close of SMX Advanced in Seattle, Jane and Robot and Adobe/Global Strategies are hosting an after-hours meetup so SMX attendees can ask any questions that came up over the course of the conference. The meetup is open to anyone! You don’t need an SMX pass to attend, so if you’re in Seattle and have technical SEO questions, come on down! It’s in the Sound Conference room at Bell Harbor from 4:30 to 6:30pm. We’ll have the usual drinks and snacks and networking time as well!
Then on June 12th in San Francisco, Jane and Robot and Microsoft are hosting a Search Developer Summit. If you’re a web developer, this is a great opportunity to hear directly from other devs who have been there, as well as search engine reps, on best practices for building sites that can be easily found by search engines. there will be lots of case studies, discussion time, and Q&A with the experts. And both lunch and afternoon drinks and snacks are included for the amazingly low price of $49! (For a limited time! Act now! Representatives are standing by!). But seriously, space is limited to register now before we’re sold out.
And if you’re at SMX Advanced today, come by the SEO audit session or the mega session and say hi!
Mike McDonald of WebProNews sits down with Vanessa to talk about checklists at SMX Advanced.
What’s a key element to effective search engine optimization that leads to increased customer acquisition through search? In the immortal words of Steve Ballmer: developers (and also developers, developers, etc.).
SMX Advanced, the always-awesome advanced search marketing conference, is coming up in Seattle on June 2nd and 3rd. Last year, I programmed a developer day that brought developers and search marketers together around technical SEO issues. We continued the dive into web infrastructure issues at SMX West in February. This year, SMX Advanced features great advanced online marketing content and an all-new In House SEM Exchange, and some of you asked if this year included content for developers, since we aren’t doing a separate developer day.
I’m happy to report that we’ve just added a developer-focused session and events and have put together a recommend itinerary of the agenda to provide developers with a list of the sessions that will interest them the most.
So if you’re:
Then you don’t want to miss this special itinerary at SMX Advanced. If you’re a search marketer planning to attend the conference, bring along your developers and come away from the conference with a shared understanding of how best to work together to build SEO into the entire marketing and development process.
I’m a developer? Why do I need to know about SEO? Isn’t that for marketing?
Search is the primary navigation method on the web, so if your site can’t be easily found in search engines, you’re losing substantial customer acquisition opportunities. A key element in being found in search engines is the site’s technical architecture. If you are a web developer, the ability to create search-friendly technical architecture is a valuable skillset. If you are launching a web startup, you want to attract as many customers as possible, and being easily found in search is a great way to do that for free.
What can I expect as a developer attending SMX Advanced?
The developer itinerary outlined below can give you the foundation you need to ensure your site’s technical implementation improves rather than hinders the ablity of potential customers to find you from searching.
We’ve added a special session and Q&A time just for developers, as well as provided a suggested path through the agenda with sessions that focus on technical implementation, diagnosing issues, and overall site architecture for optimal search engine crawling and indexing.
Remember, you’re free to attend any session you’d like and havefull access to all sessions and networking events. But the recommended path for developers is:
Day 1:
Jane and Robot Presents SEO Overview for Developers
This special session is intended to give developers an overview of how search engines work and the important element to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building web infrastructure. This introduction will set the stage for later sessions that will dive into the details of each technical element.
Learn about how search engines work, including discovery, crawling, extraction, indexing, ranking, and display. Find out about the most important technical elements for effective search acquisition. Topics include developing a crawlable infrastructure, building rich internet applications, URL rewriting, redirection, and canonicalization.
See examples of how things can be done well and how things can go really, really wrong. Topics include building search-friendly search architecture, including URL structure, rich media (such as Flash, video, AJAX), and managing bots.
Duplicate Content Solutions and the Canonical Tag
Many site infrastructure scenarios introduce duplicate content, which can hinder effective search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. The search engines can’t efficiently crawl the site, which can lead to less of the site being indexed, and links pointing to multiple versionis of content can cause PageRank dilution, which can lead to lowered rankings.
Tracking codes on URLs, parameters for sort orders, separate pages for very similar items (such as identical products in different colors), and page revision history (such as a wiki-style site that provides access to earlier versions of pages) can all cause these duplicate content issues.
Recently, the search engines introduced a new tool to help combat duplicate content issues: the canonical tag. This session looks and how the tag has been performing for some webmasters plus revisits other duplicate content tools and techniques.
SEO Ranking Factors in 2009
How much does that H1 tag really matter, versus the number of links pointing at a domain? Do “authority” sites always have an advantage over other sites with less reputation. Is brand recognition now a bigger issue? This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful and what new signals are growing in importance.
Is Your Hosting Ready For Social Media Success?
Congratulations! You just made it to the home page of Digg. And seconds later, your server crashed, taking with it the chance for all those eyeballs to see your content. In this session, a look at how to ensure that your hosting provider and content management systems are ready for what social media might send, when something goes viral.
You&A With Matt Cutts
What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.
Day 2:
Keynote Q&A: Dr. Qi Lu, President, Online Services Division, Microsoft
Dr. Qi Lu took the helm of Microsoft’s search efforts in January. Now six months into his new role, during this keynote Q&A with Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, Lu shares in this some of the changes that have been made to Microsoft Live Search and where the company intends to head in the search space.
Conducting an SEO Audit to Troubleshoot Problems and Tune-Up Performance
Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.
Flash and Search
Flash content has historically been problematic for search engines to index, although it’s been nearly a year since Google & Yahoo gained more support to index Flash content. This session takes a close look at how that’s playing out in real life. Can you just leave it to the crawlers to understand Flash now? Do you still need to consider alternatives to help them? Get up to speed on the current state of how search engines interact with Flash.
Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers
This PowerPoint-free panel is made up of veteran search engine optimization experts taking questions on SEO issues. Put your biggest challenges to them and come away with solutions.
Jane and Robot Presents After-Hours Technical Q&A with the Experts
After two days of tech sessions, get answers to all of your technical questions from our panel of experts. Stay tuned for more details!
Networking and Topic Tables
In addition to all of this great content, you’ll have access to all networking events and topic-focused lunch tables on both days. We’ll have industry leaders in search and development leading discussions and Q&A during lunch for additional opportunities to get your technical search questions answered.
Use discount code jr@SMX for 10% off registration.
