As high speed internet continues to penetrate other countries, many U.S. companies are now focusing their efforts on this world wide market. Google’s India site is now the twelfth most popular site in the world, and Baidu.com, a search engine in China, is even better at number nine. Companies can see huge sale increases from people buying their products from all over the world. Problems are created, for internet marketers, like TK, as people from various countries search quite differently.
Andy Atkins-Krüger explains some of these differences and there importance to SEO experts, in a Sept. 23, 2009 article, “Do Accents Really Matter in International SEO?” . He points out that in German and French searches many words require “diatrics”, the little accent marks above or below some words. International search engines treat these words differently. Some ignore them all together, but most have to take them into account as many will actually change the meaning of the query. Also, many searchers will not use the required diatrics in their search words, creating some often missed opportunities for marketers. Many marketers will make the mistake of ignoring the diatric, or ignoring the word without the diatric, hence, missing out on placing their website in front of potential clients.
The author is now hiring employees from diverse backgrounds, or educating current employees on international search trends, so these opportunities are not missed. TK sees the same trend of international search engine marketing increasing over time, and will now consider the cultural background and linguistic ability of the next person we hire. Many of our current clients are already starting to request more international search engine optimization, and these are rather small companies. They see the potential of worldwide customers, and as a business owner, increasing my knowledge of the online searching trends will become increasingly important.
Google dispels the myth that they use the Keywords meta tag. They use the description tag for snippets in search engines results pages, but that’s about it. Great summary by Mr. Cutts.
Several clients, recently, have specifically asked about the many factors that go into helping a website show up higher is search engines. Particularly, on-page factors. The best resource I’ve found in a long time is SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors resource.
One of the reasons this resource is so helpful, is that it’s from a survey they do of SEO professionals. So, you get a true view of SEO…simply a bunch of smart people trying to reverse engineer Google and other search engines. So many of these SEO’s have differing opinions, that it’s nice to get a collection of all of them in one single summary. It helps one understand that many techniques that SEO’s go on and on about are simply their opinion…rather than a hard and fast rule. So, looking over the survey results, one can take what ‘most’ seo’s think, and generally bank on the ones that they all agree on.
Google’s Matt Cutts explains what Google is doing to try and communicate with webmasters. No, they are not about to offer a customer support hotline, but they are trying to do a little more. It’s not much, really, but at least they know we want more information and contact- especially if we’ve inadvertently done something wrong. It’s a step in the right direction, to acknowledge the need, I guess.
Some of our clients recently have asked us to explain Cloud Computing as a concept. I found this decent video from Ken Colbourn, who gives the basics and some examples. He also explains some pros and cons.
Giving up some privacy, and placing your data in the hands of some company that you may or may not know much about. Also, if you don’t have access to the internet, then you don’t have access to your info. The pros include the fact that anywhere you DO have the internet- you’ve got your data. Also, you don’t need to spend lots of money maintaining the hardware. Companies (e.g. Google) is doing this for you, and most the time they offer many of these services free (google docs) or for really low cost.
If the term ‘cloud computing’ is new to you, enjoy the video, above, and enjoy the benefits of the cloud.
I recently read this nice article about testing your website. It’s pretty good and I highly recommend it. A couple points i gleaned from Daniel Waisberg, the author.
1. Your site is a laboratory, not a sculpture. Sometimes we’ll have a client that wants their site, or a page to be 100% perfect before it goes live. Sometimes, this is also when their old page is either hideous and SEO and visual cryptonite, or it doesn’t even exist at all. I like to get the new page live as soon as possible, then tweak it as we go.
2. Calls to action. He emphasizes the importance of these on a page.
“Too often calls to action are hidden, by a loaded page with too many graphic elements, by appearing below the fold or by a bad design choice (too small, faint color, or a button that does not look like a button). By improving the call to action and making it prominent on the page, you can sometimes boost your conversion rates drastically”
A few days ago we posted about Bing going visual with their visual search, well Google is getting into the game as well. CNN posts a nice video that gives you a sample.
I like the direction this leads. The more visual search becomes, even more people will use it. Search engine marketing will just continue to grow in importance and complexity…but with it, will be a more enjoyable, effective experience for the end user.
Matt Cutts from Google explains how they treat pipes (|) and dashes(-) and there use in meta titles.
Essentially, he says it makes no difference to their engine, which you use in your meta title. For example if your title looks like this (on SEOmoz):
SEO Blog | SEOmoz Blog Featuring Search Engine Marketing & Tips
OR…
SEO Blog- SEOmoz Blog Featuring Search Engine Marketing & Tips
Makes no difference to Google. However, one may want to consider the aesthetics and watch the click-through-rate. We like using the pipe |, just because we think it looks really professional. It’s nice to hear directly from Google that they handle each really well.
Google is buying reCaptcha, to help with their book scanning initiative. reCaptcha specializes in those captcha’s you see on forms, that prevent spam bots from inundating a site with information requests. The company uses robust scanning technology to get the images from old books. Google is also in the business of scanning old books, so the two made (or are making) a deal.
Will Cathcart, a Google product manager, in a blog post, explains.
“…reCaptcha’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. We’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”
Google’s noble quest to get all information in the world indexed and easily searchable (and make billions in advertising next to it) continues…
