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.
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.
Greg Grothaus of Google explains very well Google’s philosophy of duplicate content. They realize that a lot of duplicate content is not manipulative but simply webmasters trying to take the same content and make is useful in different formats.
For example, if you have content on a page about “10 tips on package fragile glass for your move”, and want to include it in print format as well. Google doesn’t penalize you for the duplicate content. They just include one of the sources and not the other. We’ve been telling our clients for a long time that Google doesn’t penalize duplicate like people think, it’s nice hearing the explanation to how and why they even recognize it. Spam on the other hand, they attach pretty aggressively.
Greg then shares a simple explanation on how to prevent issues that may arise by utilizing the 301 redirect and the new rel= “canonical” tag. I highly recommend viewing the information directly from the horses (Googles) mouth.
Bing is bringing in the cool features with their new Beta of Visual Search. As one who is always looking for the next best thing on the horizon, this may have some potential.
Essentially, you start your search with a page that shows you the main categories, hot topics, ect.
You can start with one of the pictures on display or use the category menu on the left. For instance, if you click on ‘Shopping’ (one of the sections that will really benefit from this, IMHO) you see a display of shopping categories. Click on ‘Books’ and you are shown a really cool display (cover-flow style, almost) that you can scroll through.
With lots of additional features, I’m excited to see if the new look and feel will catch on. I think with new internet adopters, they will be pleased with the clean, futuristic feel of search. Those that have been using Google for a long time will probably find it cumbersome and ‘trinket’ feeling. Either way, I’m excited for the different approach and hopes it gets Google thinking about better ways to display their results.
Much has been said about long tail searches, and the video below illustrates how important these unique, less searched phrases can be to your site traffic. It is critical that you pay some attention to them as an SEO. Sometimes as much as 75% of your overall site traffic can be attributed to the long tail phrases.
So, what is a longtail phrase? Basically, it is a search phrase that is longer and more specific, for example:
Cowboy boots= short phrase, with huge search volume (currently TK has a client ranking on the first page for this hot phrase )
Care for rattle snake skin cowboy boot= long phrase, less search volume
Add up a bunch of these long tail phrases, and you often get significant search volume.
I hear SEO’s and SEO companies occasionally recommend micro-sites, landing sites, splash sites or some version of the same. They hope to create several geo-targeted or keyword-targeted sites that bring immediate success and high placements. I usually discourage such actions as I feel it’s an attempt of SEO companies to simply generate more work for themselves and create a bohemith array of sites that the client would never be able to manage themselves. We encourage clients to build pages on their website, that have the same geo/keyword focus, but keep them a part of the ‘mother ship’. This allows each new page to benefit from the established credibility, pagerank and longevity of the main site.
Rand from SEOmoz recently posting about link value, highlighted one of the principles of search engines that makes this a good idea:
“As you’ve likely noticed, search engines have become more and more dependent on metrics about an entire domain, rather than just an individual page. It’s why you’ll see new pages or those with very few links ranking highly, simply because they’re on an important, trusted, well-linked-to domain. In the ranking factors survey, we called this “domain authority” and it accounted for the single largest chunk of the Google algorithm (in the aggregate of the voters’ opinions).”
I couldn’t agree more. Higher results are gained by creating a new page on the main site, rather than a separate micro-site. Branding and financial issues aside, this is one of the biggest reasons we at TK cringe when we hear a client tell us a company wants to come in and create a bunch of micro-sites.
We all know links are crucial to getting value from your content and improved positions in search engines. I stumbled on this great link building tool. I’m excited to start using it to help out our clients. Basically, you put in the website you are link building for, add 4-5 competitors and run the program. It then spits out a report that looks like this:
It shows all the juicy links your competitors are getting that you don’t have. It then shows you where they are getting them from. Then, you can seek after the same links. It includes lots of link juice information about the quality of the page it’s coming from, the pagerank, etc.
I’m really excited to start using it for some of our clients. Especially when we have 1-2 competitors that we keep chasing but haven’t quite been able to beat yet. It’s going to add another great tool to our arsenal. Thanks SEOmoz, another great tool!
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