In the past few years, we have seen a flurry of articles celebrating the forthcoming death of SEO (AKA linkbait) and an even larger flurry of angry rebuttal articles from the SEO community (AKA retweetbait).

So not wanting to be left out of that link party, I decided to weigh in with our clients’ opinion on that matter (click for larger version):

Have a nice day.

In between having an awesome time at Pubcon and having not so awesome time catching pneumonia, there are quite a few articles that have gathered in my Reading List bookmark folder. So here are the articles that have caught my eye in the last few weeks.

If you think I missed something groundbreakingly important or that your article has covered one of the discussed topics in a better way, please let me know in the comments and I will make sure to review it and post it in the next Reading List.

Enjoy

Didn’t get a chance to write any updates about the Pubcon, so it is a pity that my first update is going to be a complaint, but I guess since everyone is talking about the good stuff (of which there is plenty) and it is the complaints that get you to improve stuff so here it goes:

First day of Pubcon, there was almost the whole session track devoted to Twitter. The sessions rocked, the presentations rocked, it was realy great. You would think that the leading search marketing conference would plug in to Twitter and utilize it in ways that are a bit more creative than scrolling the tweets with the #pubcon hash on plasma screens in the expo area. The most significant failure in understanding twitter, IMHO, is failing to understand that my Twitter profile is my point of contact, part of my online identity, my way of plugging into what my friends and people that I follow are doing in real life. Instead of allowing me to integrate Pubcon into the fabric of my online presence, I am given only one option of participating, through the hashtag.

So what could have been done better? Here are three things from the top of my head that seemed obvious from the first day of the conference:

1. My Twitter profile is a part of online identity – was it hard to ask people for a twitter username at the registration stage and print it out on the name tags? I do not talk to Ben Cook on Twitter, I talk to @skitzzo and the connection between the two should be made immediate through the name tag. Giving the ability to upload the avatar image and print that too would be ubercool.
2. More session specific hashtags . The moderators were doing this out of their own initiative, but it would have been really helpful to have a specific hash tag for each session and to be able to follow the sessions like that. Tomorrow if I find a tweet saying that @sugarrae gave an awesome tip about redirecting affiliate links, it would be really helpful to know what session it was on, what the context was and maybe to find the presentation as well. This way I have to sift and search since there is no way of me knowing when it happened, was it an answer to a question from the crowd or part of the presentation, etc.
3. Make sure all the panelists have their twitter username on each and every slide of their presentations. When I sit on the panel where Lyndsay Walker is rocking an awesome presentation on website architecture and SEO, how can I share that with my tweeps from England that are eagerly following every piece of info on Pubcon? What I needed to do is start searching on Google for the twitter username to be able to give proper credit. With the WiFi speed surging to as fast as 1Kb/s at certain points during the conference, I had to miss a whole lot of slides to be able to tweet about one. One exception that I’ve seen was Jill Sampey (who is awesome, regardless of the presentation) who had her username on each and every one of the slides. The majority of the presentations are using the default Pubcon background, it shouldn’t have been too hard to insert a space for a twitter handle of the speaker.

So as I said, the intention of this post was to help improve things for the next conference. I am having a great time so far and while some of the panels speakers do leave a lot to desire in terms of the novelty of the info they deliver, there are some really awesome panels and the networking is as good as it gets. So Pubcon, keep rocking and help us be active Pubcon participants on Twitter too.

When beginning a new SEO campaign, a crucial first step is the keyword research. As a part of this step, one wants not only to find a comprehensive list of keywords that could serve as a potential target markets on Search Engines, but also to be able to predict amounts of traffic that each keyword will bring to his site. So we usually turn to different keyword prediction tools that provide us with this kind of information. Obviously, the most popular such tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool, but there are others – Google Search Based Keyword Tool, SEMRush, Spyfu, Wordtracker MSN Excel based addon (check a great review and tutorial on SEOMOZ about this one), etc.

When we look at these tools, we can see only a single value for each keyword, representing a predicted monthly number of searches performed for that keyword on search engines. However, there are important issues that need to be taken into account when considering this data: what position will bring that amount of traffic ? Can the change in title (such as adding a brand name, special characters, call to action, etc.) increase the amount of traffic that the site gets from a current position ? How do Universal Search Results affect the percentage of traffic I get from the 1st page of Google SERP ? In order to be able to consider these issues, we need to be able to estimate the percentage of traffic that each position will bring.

Now, when reading about the importance of getting to the first page on Google, there is one piece of information that always gets quoted: 90+% of users do not go past the first page of SERPs ( I don’t know who was the first to come up with that statistics, so I will just link to this SEM article). While being probably true, this statement creates a misconception that if we do succeed and get our site to the first page of results, we have managed to achieve exposure to those magical 95% of users.

I am sure that many people rationally understand that this is probably not the case, that each listing in the top 10 does not get the same amount of attention and that introduction of ads on top of the SERPs and universal search results within the SERPs change the distribution of clicks among the top 10 results. That said, it is hard to find valuable and reliable data that confirms or negates these premises. In order for people to check it themselves, they need to control every site in the top 10 for a keyword that provides enough traffic for these measurements to be statistically significant. Furthermore, there would probably be need for at least another such setup from a different niche to confirm the validity of the results in the first niche. To summarize, it is close to impossible to produce such research with the means available to an average website owner.

There are two ways that such researches can be done: one is by eye-tracking studies. In these studies, a group of people is fitted with an instrument that follows their eye movement and records them against what the examiners are seeing on the screen. It also records the clicks they do on websites and correlate that data with the “heatmaps” created through the eye tracking. For some more info on those studies and on their misgivings, check out this great post from 2006 by Bill Slawski.

The second way is to get hold of the search engine log data that provides not only the identity of keywords that were searched and results that were clicked but also information about the position that a URL was located at when clicked.

Luckily, there are both kind of data available. There are quite a few people out there interested in web usability and testing those concepts through eye tracking studies. As I mentioned in my Affilicon 2009 presentation, all of the major search engines cooperated with universities and conduct academic researches in order to investigate new concepts or improve the existing ones As for the search engine data, remember AOL data dump of 2006 ? So apparently that dataset included all of the data needed for estimating the number of clicks each website would get if it was located in a different position on SERPs.

In this post I will try and summarize several such researches, spanning the time from 2005 till 2008. Only the 2006 study is based on the user data accidentally released by AOL and the remaining studies are done by the eye-tracking technology. They are all investigating the distribution of clicks each of the top 10 results on Google gets. It is interesting that one of the researchers signing on the majority of the eye tracking studies is Laura A. Granka. She did her PhD in Communications at Stanford and has been in the User Experience Team at Google since 2005.

Here are the links to the sources of data for all five studies according to the years:

Notice that the above dates are dates of publication, not necessarily the dates when the study was done.

And here is the graph presenting the results of these studies (click to enlarge):

I have added the CTR for each location for the 2008 data

Some Conclusions:

SEO Strategy

It is obvious that the vast majority of users click on the first 3 results (60-80%) and that anything below these positions will bring low to negligent traffic. These results should make us consider the overall optimization tactics – instead of massive investment into links for the sake of promotion of a few highly searched keywords with high competition; it may be worth our while to go for the long-tail traffic with almost certain top 3 positions through concerted efforts in wide scope content creation, site architecture optimization, deep linking, etc. Obviously, the shape of the above curves will depend on the nature of the search query, nature of the target audience and the data should also be cross-compared with the expected ROI from each term.

Universal Search

There is a very clear difference between the data in 2008 and the previous years – there seems to be a sharp shift of the majority of users towards the top 3 positions, making the above described differences even sharper. There is also a spike in users that click on the bottom results in the 2008 data. This can be explained by the introduction of universal/blended search results – video, news and image results. By being visually different, these results will naturally draw more clicks than the bland organic listings. Furthermore, an additional research done by the iProspect company shows that 36%, 31% and 17% of users click on the Image, News and Video results respectively. This should point towards possibilities of inserting content into those three categories of results and thus capitalizing on more SERP real estate.

There also seems to be a pronounced difference between the 2004 data and the later studies – there seems to be a much more pronounced gravitation of users towards the #1 position than in the following years. In order to understand the reason for this we should look in the way the research was conducted (was there any difference in the methods, was there a pronounced difference in the queries that the test subjects used, etc.). However, we can speculate on some other explanations, such as possible higher quality of SERPs in those years which brought more relevant results in top position for more searches than in the later years when more users had to click to lower-ranking results since the top-ranking sites did not offer the best match to what they were searching for.

My new company got me a snazzy BlackBerry Bold to help me keep up to date with all the emails and tasks i need to do, since I am working the majority of the time from home. Since I live in Jerusalem and the new office is in Tel Aviv, on those days that i do commute, I have about 3 daily hours of train time to kill. Needless to say, the optimal way to utilize that time is to have an internet connection through the whole ride, but without the wireless modem, there is nothing to do but watch How I Met Your Mother

BlackBerry Bold has changed all that and one of the first things i did when i got it is to set out and find instructions how to tether its internet connection to my laptop. After a long search and a lot of dot connecting, I managed to find a solution:

1. Connect your Blackberry Bold through the USB and start the Desktop Manager app (came with your phone). Without the Desktop Manager running, you will not be able to connect to the internet.

2. Go to Control Panel -> Phone and Modem Options -> "Modems" tab.

3. You should be able to see a list of all the modems you ever installed on your computer. Blackberry modem should be marked as a Standard Modem on COM14 or COM16. Notice how all the other standard modems are Bluetooth modems. I am guessing that Blackberry can serve as a modem even over Bluetooth, but have not checked this.

   

4. Click Properties (if on Vista, now click on Change Settings in the new window) and go to Advanced tab. Note: If you are on Vista and did not click on the "Change Settings" button, you will not be able to perform the next step

5. Under the Extra Settings in the Advanced Tab, enter the following line:

   at+cgdcont=1,"IP","internet"

   Make sure that there are no spaces before and after. Click on OK to close the window

   

6. Now go to your Network Connections and create a new connection (Setup a New Connection on Vista). Choose Setup a Dialup Connection and pick the  Standard Modem (not the bluetooth one).

7. Next step you are going to be asked for a dialup phone number. Enter the following number:

   *99***1#

   No username or password are needed.

8. Go to the list of your network connections, right click the new connection you created and click on Properties. Go to Networking tab, pick the TCP/IP protocol (on Vista this is the TCP/IPv4 protocol) and click on Properties. Click on Advanced. Uncheck the "Use IP Header Compression" checkbox (marked in red in the below picture).

   

That is about it. Before connecting, make sure that you have 3G network enabled on your Blackberry. I personally disable 3G since it devours my battery within like 6 hours. The connection speed that I measured was something under 2Mbps download, which is not bad at all. I also managed to use my VPN client and have yet to find a significant difference between this connection and the regular WiFi connection.

I’m sure that not everyone will manage to connect smoothly with just following the above instructions, but I am hoping that at least some will get some benefit from them. in case you hit some bumps, let me know in the comments.

In between the whole nofollow-gate affair, SMX Advanced, Google indexing links in Java and a velvet revolution in Iran, there was a Google I/O conference. The conference sounded like a pretty cool place to be, especially with the Google Wave announcement and the Android phones being given out to all attendees, there was also a Site Review Session done by Matt and two guys from his team, Brian White and Greg Grothaus (who mostly  sat and looked at their laptops while Matt was stealing all the limelight ).

So while Matt was talking mostly about pretty basic stuff (which was understandable since this was not the usual SEO crowd he caters to), I managed to fish out a few interesting tidbits from his talk. While these are not necessarily new for everybody, it seemed to me that some of the stuff he said was not always clear enough or was just guessed, so it is nice to have them out in the open and confirmed. I would recommend for anyone interested to go and watch the video and for those that do not have time/mental strength to do so, here are a few gems that I  picked out of the talk. Again, it is possible that none of these are new for you, but I am sure that there will be people that will learn some things from this:

1. Google doesn’t read the text in the images.

   While this is clearly stated in Google Webmaster Help section, every now and then there are speculations popping up about how Google definitely reads text inside images. So Matt clearly said that Google will not OCR the whole web and will not read the text inside images any time soon, even if they do have OCR capabilities, as can be seen from the Google Books example.

2. Don’t worry about keyword density, make sure Google knows there is a word on your page, after 2-3 repeats, it doesn’t matter any more.

   While it was clear for a long time that keyword density does not play a role in the ranking algorithm, I have never seen a clear statement of “2-3 repeats” and then no impact. Matt did review a site that was stuffing keywords and made it clear that Google knows how to discover these cases and punish them.

3. If you want some links to get more PR, put them higher up in the page.

   We all knew that the links showing higher up on the page seem to be more important, but this is the first mention of the fact (that I know of) that there is different PR flow related to the position of the link inside the page. This may explain several phenomena that people were seeing affecting the importance of the link (such as supposed decreased importance of links in footer)

4. Google doesn’t care if you link to www.site.com/dir/dir/dir/page.html as opposed to www.site.com/page.html. All that matters is the linking distance from the homepage. Other search engines, however, may deem that important

   So while it is not exactly news that Google does not care how deep your URL structure is, as long as the pages are linked from homepage, it is interesting that he bothered to mention the situation with other search engines. So when building your website hierarchy, try to make it as shallow as possible

5. Pagerank can go to images, not only pages

   Again while this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, it is interesting to hear it directly from Matt himself. So when thinking about those linking images, make sure that you are using an optimal image that you would want to appear in the Image SERPs

6. Typically, Google revisits the whole index on a weekly basis. In the worst case, it will be monthly.

   This seems like a good benchmark to start checking whether your pages are in the main index or the supplemental  or whether you are being punished or neglected for some other reason.

None of these are news to people that have done optimization for a while, however i have a feeling that a few newcomers may find this information valuable, especially when one sees the questions that are being asked on forums, blogs and Google’s Webmaster Help groups. So there it is.

Just came back from the Affilicon conference where I participated on the Future of SEO panel and gave a talk about behavioral parameters that (maybe are and) will possibly be used by search engines in their ranking algos. The response to the presentation was great (especially from the SEO crowd at the conference). All in all, had a great time, met a few new people, started rolling the ball on some SEO meetups and cooperations we may organize here in the near future and enjoyed the panels. Food was also great. Kudos to Itay and the crew for putting everything together and big Thank You for providing the opportunity to participate on the panel. Here is the presentation I gave:

We usually focus on optimization for the organic SERPs, but there is a lot of traffic to be found in other Google Services as well. For example, if we look at the levels of traffic other Google subdomains are receiving, we will find that even though the numbers drop sharply after google.com, there are still substantial numbers in other services:

(taken from Wolfram Alpha, originally from Alexa)

Specifically, Google News can be a great source of traffic not only due to the volume of searches performed, but also due to perceived authority that listing in the News section can carry. I don’t have any hard data on this, but it would be interesting to compare the conversion rate of News visitors vs. regular search visitors.

In any case, I wanted to share a problem one of our clients had with his Google News listings recently and the way how we managed to solve this problem, hoping that this solution will help other people with similar problems.

We’ve noticed that the number of visitors coming from Google News has dropped sharply in mid-April. Performing a site: search on Google News, showed that the most recent article indexed was from April 18th. Since this specific client publishes several news articles a day, all of which usually get featured on Google News immediately, it was obvious there was a problem.

A quick check of the Google Webmaster Tools of the site discovered a list of news-related errors, the most frequent one being “Title not Found”

Searching for that specific error on Google, led me to this thread on Google News Help forum, which in turn pointed to this page on Google News Help for Publishers section. There are two suggested ways to fix this particular problem:

1. Make sure that the title is repeated both in the <title> tag and again in the body of the article in <h1> tags. The suggestion is that these two are as similar as possible, although we found that they do not have to be identical
2. Ensure that the <h1> title in the body of the article is not hyperlinked

Prior to the first delisting of this client’s articles from Google News, they performed a number of changes on the website, including hyperlinking the <h1>Title to point back to the original article page. This practice is commonly used to both ensure the link back to the original content from the websites that pick up the articles feed from the website and to tell Google which of the articles is the original one and thus prevent duplicate content issues.

It turns out that this hyperlink was preventing Google News bot to correctly identify the Title of each article and therefore to stop lisitng them in Google News. Removal of this hyperlink got the client’s articles back into the Google News in a matter of minutes.

Quick glance at other Google News listed sources shows that the majority of them do not have hyperlinked Titles. There are those that do (like LA Times for example), but they may be doing something else to ensure the correct recognition of the Title. In any case, if you are planning on getting your site listed in Google News, linking from the <h1> title of each article is not something I would recommend.

I am pulling down the last post about the IE8 compatibility tag. It looks like the quotation marks got screwed somewhere in the process of copying the tag and that was what was screwing the title tags.

My bad, will validate in the future, lesson learned.

Thanks to Thomas Scholz and Christian Schmidt for spotting the (rather stupid) mistake.

Yesterday I gave notice at Tens Web Marketing. It feels weird to even write this, let alone do it.

I have joined Tens at 2001. Fresh out of the army, I moved to Jerusalem, searched for [internet companies in Jerusalem] on Walla and sent out my CV to all of them. Emanuel was one of the few that responded and it all  went downhill from there. There was lot of discussing, plenty of learning, lot of good times and some bad times too. In the course of those 8 years. Internet has completely transformed (think no social media), SEO has evolved from quick fix of the metatags to what it is today (don’t get me started there) and Tens has evolved with it all. From being a two man (and a cat) operation working from a private apartment in the beautiful Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem to the 10 people company in the offices in the hi-tech area of Har Hotzvim, it has certainly grown since then. Together we went through the aftermath of the bubble bursting (not this bubble, that bubble), demasking of GoogleGuy from WMW, Florida update, participation on (late) Jimworld forums, iHelpYou forum and now Sphinn and many other landmarks in the SEO timeline (bit weird to call it history).  In those 8 years we have (usually successfully)  tackled some of the most bizarre search engine niches (hip replacement anyone?) as well as some of the most competitive ones. With time, the company exposure has grown as well and from giving a talk to 20 marketing executives with question marks above their heads (SE-what?) at the Israel Export Institute, cooperating with other SEOs at SEO Circle, talking to entrepreneurs at the MIT Forum, helping organize the first Sphinncon here in Jerusalem (oh man, that was fun) and talking on the SEO panel at the coming Affilicon and Tens has definitely become an integral part of the Israeli Internet marketing landscape.

So where am I headed next ?

I have joined a very interesting marketing company from Tel Aviv named WhiteWeb. Beside the impressive customer portfolio and all the benefits, the things that was a deal breaker for me was the job description – I am to be responsible for acquiring and maintaining the know-how of the company. What that means is that I will be doing a lot of experimenting, problem solving, A/B/C/D/E… testing and blogging – one of the things I asked for was to be able to blog about all the interesting findings and discoveries and you can definitely expect more of that coming. In addition I will be attending more conferences both here and abroad so will finally get to meet a whole lot of people I was interacting with through different (fill the blank)spheres. It tells a lot about the company that is willing to invest in a full time research position even in this economy and I am very excited to be joining the WhiteWeb team.

I will not be neglecting my MSc. either and until I finish the lab work (beginning of October), I will be working partly at the office and partly from home.

So since I am staying in the field, I will definitely be bumping into all of the Israeli SEOs in general and the Tens crowd in particular. I am really thankful for everything I’ve learned and am wishing all the best to my friends at Tens.