Searchlight

When it comes to Internet retailers, getting found in search results is often just as important as the right location is to brick-and-mortar retailers. When a big part of online success comes down to words, why settle for selling what everyone else is?

All retailers, no matter what their channel of choice, often sell the same products as at least some of their competitors. If you are a big enough fish, you can command enough power to at least obfuscate that fact . . . different product names, model numbers, etc. -- of course the underlying product is often still the same, anyway. Ever wonder how some retailers offer those huge pricing guarantees if you find the same product elsewhere at a lower price -- much easier to do when you have your own guarantee with the manufacturer that no one else can carry that same model.

But online retail is a bit more challenging, because aside from brand loyalty or being at a convenient location, the difference is often about search results . . . obtaining those highly coveted top rankings for the right searches. I began our duplicate content discussion by focusing on the duplicate content filter or penalty topic and the challenges of external content duplication. What better way to bridge the gap from external to internal, or on-site content duplication, than by talking about sales copy.

Looking to get started with a blog? More importantly, do you hope to monetize that blog? There are a lot of articles and books on blogging these days, many with limited or inaccurate information, but How To Make Money With Your Blog is one of the most complete and thorough publications on the subject that I've encountered. Authors Duane Forrester (a search engine marketer) and Gavin Powell (a technical writer) have covered all the important bases from identifying the best blogging platforms to covering the ins and outs of blogosphere culture. Oh yeah, and in between, they explain quite clearly the options for monetizing a blog.

The book contains five main sections, including Quick Starts: Top 10 lists; Blogs and Search Optimization (SEO); Generating Revenue With Your Blog; Managing Your Blog; and Extras and Inspiration. While the quick start lists were interesting and worth a read, they weren't particularly useful. The meat of the book begins with the section on SEO. Like any website, getting found in the search engines is extremely important if you intend to make any money. All of their SEO tips are excellent and would apply to any site, blog or otherwise. The blog management section is also quite good, much of it being basic business management, but some of it also dealing with syndication and promotion on the web. The inspirational section is less focused. It contains many points on blogging culture and blog etiquette, and while those with some blogging experience might find it commonplace, it will interest people completely new to blogging.

Central to the name of the book, and probably the most interesting to those attracted by the pecuniary title, is the section on generating revenue with a blog. Options discussed include affiliate programs, contextual ads, and ad networks. The authors go into detail on each one, and even recommend specific partner services in each of those industries. They also warn that, while it is quite possible to earn income off of a blog, it takes a highly trafficked site for significant money to be made. Still, the book is encouraging and makes the reader feel confident about pursuing a monetized blog.

While this book - and most technical books about the Internet - will become obsolete quickly simply because of how fast the web changes, it is a worthy investment for anyone wanting to create a blog right now. It's an easy read, flows logically, offers well-researched suggestions, and is full of quality information.

Google's new teleportation, its search-within-search function, is getting mixed responses, at least from some site owners, who may be remembering occasions when teleportation in the Star Trek transporter went wrong. Earlier in the month, Google introduced the teleportation functionality as a way to better help searchers find information within a site by providing a search box below the snippet of the top listing, which performs a "site:" search on the domain of that listing using the additional search terms the searcher added in.

The "site:" advanced query is quite familiar to those within the search industry, but much less so to the average searcher. So bringing this functionality front and center for the searcher should be a well-received addition.

When I first saw this, I thought it was interesting--once I was able to get it to show up. It doesn't come up for every site, mainly big-name sites, nor does it come up for every search. One that it did come up for was searching for Amazon.com. After playing around with the teleportation search, I also began wondering how these big-name retailers would react and thought that some might not care for this new functionality. Why would they object?

Let me show you--except I can't use Amazon to do it anymore. According to the New York Times, Amazon is one such retailer that has already objected and asked Google to turn off this functionality for its site. It seems that most of the talk so far, like that happening at Search Engine Land (here and here), has been more about acknowledgment than anything else, but Rishi Lakhani's post at SEO Smarty shows that others have had similar thoughts as I.

Now, before we go much further, understand that I'm not suggesting ulterior motives here on Google's part or that this is even a good or a bad thing. For regular users, I think this will be well received, and Google pays a lot of attention to delivering the best user experience it can--but that isn't to say that there isn't going to be a potential upside for the PPC program as well.

So let's take a look at some examples of how this may impact results and get a feel for why some site owners may be less than thrilled with this functionality. Let's use national retailer Target as an example while we still can since its site is powered by Amazon. We'll try this on searches for plasma TVs.

Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google just for "plasma tv" which includes eight paid search ads.

Google search for "plasma tv."

Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google for "target plasma tv." Notice how there are no paid search results showing up, and not surprising, Target shows up in the top organic listing.

Google search results for "target plasma tv."

Then let's see what happens if someone searches just on "target." No surprise that Target.com shows up No. 1 again in organic results and still no paid search ads. What is different is the appearance of the teleportation, search-within-search, box showing up below the sitelinks in the Target result, labeled as "Search target.com."

Google search results for "target."

Then when we do a teleportation search for "plasma tv," we get the following search results. Notice that this creates the advanced search query "plasma tv site:target.com." Now the searcher gets Target.com specific search results in the organic area, hopefully relevant to the search, but also eight paid listings that Target is now competing with.

Google teleportation search results for "plasma tv" within Target.com.

This isn't all as cut-and-dried as this example may seem. The appearance of ads can vary widely from none to many. But for now it does serve as an example of at least one scenario that site owners need to be aware of.

So what does teleportation mean for the various players? Well hopefully, for the searchers, it does get them to what they are looking for faster and easier, but this can really vary as well and may or may not be more helpful than getting directly to the site.

For Google, it means that searchers will have performed at least one more search on Google, instead of clicking through to Target.com immediately. And it may mean that it has gained an opportunity to serve up more targeted (no pun intended) search ads that otherwise may not have been served up (as we can see from the other Target focused searches which yielded no ads). Even more subtle here is the fact that many advertisers may not have bid against a big brand name to begin with. Currently, advertisers can use a trademarked brand as a trigger word as long as they don't use it in the ad itself. As much of the legislation in this area continues to be formed and reformed, who knows whether this will always be the case--but it would seem that teleportation search may provide an additional means to serve up ads around another brand without even needing the advertiser to use that brand as a trigger word.

But how might Target feel about this? Well, if it does help get searchers to their destination, then it might be happy with this. But it also might mean that its natural results are competing against paid-listings that it may not have been competing against under the other Target related searches. It also means that it may not be able to cull additional search information from its own site-search. While the quality of on-site search may vary from excellent to completely worthless, some sites invest heavily in their on-site search to not only deliver good results, but also to serve as insight into what their visitors are looking for. Being able to follow the search path, which they may be losing because of teleportation, may help improve the site experience.

Needless to say, Target might prefer to get people directly to its site and have people search on-site, which at least in this example allows it to serve up a richer experience.

Target.com on-site search for "plasma tv."

Good, bad or otherwise, what this means to site owners is that SEO may be more important than ever. Now, getting to the top listing may not be enough. Defending your brand may not be enough. Securing multiple listings through blended search may not be enough. What happens to the site that has excellent search, but terrible indexation in Google? Now more than ever, site owners need to focus on creating the most search-friendly site as they can to make sure that Google and other search engines can spider and index the site as completely as possible. For some sites, this is a huge challenge, trying to overcome legacy CMS and e-commerce systems. Fortunately, there are solutions like Netconcepts' own GravityStream proxy optimization that can help many sites overcome these obstacles, but GravityStream isn't for everyone.

One thing this clearly means is that site optimization is more important than ever. Optimization will help to make sure that the teleportation results for your site are highly relevant and speak to the searcher, hopefully gaining the click-through from the searcher. If you are like Target and experience millions of searches a year just on your brand name, then you don't want to leave your optimization to chance when it comes to teleportation.

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems' Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

"It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers," Cutts said. "So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text."

This has long been the suspicion of Flash developers and SEO professionals concerned with .swf files, but to my knowledge, this is the most direct and clear confirmation to date. The implication is simple but important: if Web developers--and specifically Flash developers--have the ability to test .swf files during development for textual SEO parameters, then Flash files can be designed to offer specific text to search engines.

While the concept is simple, the practice may not be. Flash is a complicated multimedia program with tremendous flexibility and many layers of content. Also, parent Flash .swf files can load secondary, child .swf files ad nuaseum, and this is a very popular, load time-friendly technique. The path between viable textual content and the "front" of a given Flash presentation can be very intricate.

There have been tests measuring what sort of text can be discovered by the Search Engine SDK program, much of it dealing with where in a Flash movie it resides, when the text crosses the stage, and what sort of text is most likely to be read. While there may never be absolute rules for optimizing text within a Flash file, now that it is known with fair certainty how Google reads Flash text, more testing is in order.

Well-designed Flash content can be a fantastic user experience. Google may not be pursuing this content, but it certainly has opened the door to the possibility. The ball is in Adobe's court to continue to develop and improve the SDK tool, but this is a great opportunity for Flash designers interested in SEO or for search engine optimizers interested in Flash.

Despite the shortcomings of the current Search Engine SDK software, (it would be nice to see an update, Adobe!), it is quite likely that SEO standards can be developed for dealing with Flash text so that Flash files can "tell" search engines about their content with more clarity.

Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk about the best way to handle Flash on your site. I previously covered quite a few aspects about this heavily-debated topic in Flash Alternatives Blessed by Google and in Progressive Enhancement is Good for SEO. In my previous interview with Maile Ohye, Google's support engineer I had asked her about Google's view on Flash. Maile confirmed that Google looks at the content within "noscript" tags, but she advised to be careful to mirror accurately the Flash-based content you include within the noscript tags or it will look like cloaking to Googlebot.

In my recent interview with Matt Cutts, Google engineer and head of their webspam team, I questioned as to the status of Google reading textual content within Flash .swf files. Here's what Matt had to say:

"It is a good question. I think that we do a pretty good job of reading textual content. Now, stuff within Flash is binary and you can define it in terms of characters and strokes - so you can have things that look like normal text - but that are completely weird and are not really normal text. So it can be difficult to pull the text out a Flash file. I think we do pretty well. It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers. So, my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text. The easiest way to know whether you have textual content that can be read in a Flash file, is that you could always use that tool yourself and verify as well."

Not only did Matt suggest that Flash users take advantage of the search engine SDK tool, he also confirmed that Google is hoping to standardize it and work with Adobe to continue updating it.

So there you have it. If you use Flash on your website, you owe it to yourself to use the Search Engine SDK tool to gain insight into how Google "sees" your Flash content. If the Search Engine SDK tool is used by Google, why shouldn't you?

For more great advice courtesy of Matt Cutts, I invite you to either read the transcript of my interview with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon or you can listen to the Matt Cutts at Pubcon interview podcast (31 minutes, 3.8 MB).

There is still time to capture search traffic, even though the holiday season is half over. Here are some great tips that will give you a quick impact to encourage more shoppers to visit your site.

• Add a few keyword-rich links to your home page: In P.J. Fusco's article "Holiday Shopping: Wrap it Up," she had talked about how you shouldn't "trash the current navigation structure, rather embellish it with a few additional links containing well-targeted, keyword-rich anchor text. Doing so helps create one- or two-click shortcuts that efficiently channel search-referred visitors to all your great gifts and goodies." Did you remember to add one or two highly visible links on your site, directing traffic to your holiday specials?
• Revise your meta descriptions for the holidays: Are you promoting a holiday sale or specific items on your site? If so, don't forget to polish your meta descriptions so that searchers will recognize the keywords they're looking for. Last-minute holiday shoppers will be attracted to descriptions that speak to them, so remember to mention seasonal search phrases to encourage them to click through to your site. After you do this, make sure to make a list of the pages you affected so you can change them back after your New Year's Day sale.
• Be social: In my post "Last-minute tips for retailers for the holiday shopping season," one of the tips I had mentioned related to social media. The great news is that it is not too late to get out there, create viral content, and build your network of friends. Whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, etc., it can be as easy as giving a killer list of gift suggestions on UnSpun or Sk*rt. For example, the Great Gifts for Teenagers list was featured on the UnSpun home page recently. Note that with UnSpun, Amazon.com "employs" (probably through Mechanical Turk) an army of folks to spam the heck out of your list with Amazon products; it tends to happen a few days after you create the new list.

Well, there you have it. Just a few tips and friendly reminders that you can still ensure your holiday season is an SEO success.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, kicking off the 2007 holiday-shopping season...apparently in full force.

As you are probably aware, Black Friday is the term in the U.S. for retail shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday refers to online shopping on the Monday following Thanksgiving.

These have become milestone shopping days that retailers use as indicators for the health of the holiday-shopping season. While they are often referred to as the busiest or even biggest shopping days, they are quite often trumped by other days leading up to Christmas.

Retail, probably more than any other business, seems to live and breathe on year-over-year and comparable-day sales comparisons. Ask even the smallest retailer you know how they are doing, and without a blink they can probably quote how the day, week, and month are stacking up compared with a year ago.

While economic conditions, weather, and countless other variables can greatly impact sales, I have to imagine that most retailers would feel like a high school football team losing their homecoming game if sales fell even slightly below the previous year. Nothing seems to soften that blow.

What really struck me this year, though, was hearing reports of malls opening at midnight and other stores opening up earlier than ever before. I couldn't help but wonder: how sustainable is Black Friday sales growth?

The National Retail Federation reported that Black Friday weekend traffic was up 4.8 percent over last year, but average consumer spending was down 3.5 percent from last year. The NRF projects that holiday sales will rise 4 percent, though, so perhaps it will all be worth it when all the numbers add up after the season has come and gone.

But in the back of my mind, when I start thinking about extra staffing, overtime pay, holiday pay, and perhaps even lower gross margins or even losses on some of the door-buster specials, I wonder what the result of net sales is and whether it is really all worth it? How quickly will the point be reached when you can't open any earlier, drive any more store traffic, or offer enough hot deals to justify it all?

Enter Cyber Monday
Based on survey research from Shop.org, this fact isn't lost on retailers. While Black Friday won't be disappearing anytime soon, many retailers are looking to how they can further tap into the online market to drive sales. I'm sure their data includes retailers that are strictly online-based, but seeing how 72.2 percent of them planned special promotions for Cyber Monday, up from 42.7 percent from two years ago, online holiday sales look to have a pretty solid future.

And if those numbers don't indicate retailers' interest, perhaps the prime-time TV commercial I watched while writing this does. It was for a very well-known national electronics retailer with over 600 retail stores in the U.S. alone, yet the commercial focused solely on its Web site.

Perhaps the number that has online retailers already smiling this year though was from the Shop.org survey that revealed that 72 million Americans--11 million more than last year--planned to shop online this past Monday. Maybe next year more shoppers will measure the shopping season based on remaining online shipping days than store shopping days, and more retailers will start planning their holiday calendar around SEO.

Search engine optimization is one of those ongoing tasks. SEO only has two directions...forward or backward, and the day you stop paying attention to SEO is the day you start moving backwards.

If you are one of the so-called little guys, you may feel overwhelmed with how you can ever compete against the big guys. Well good news, as you'll see, even some of the big guys miss the mark on some of the most basic concepts.

Canonicalization

Simply put, in regards to SEO, we might describe "canonicalization" as identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source. The most basic and simplest example of this is www.domain.com versus domain.com. In most cases, both of these lead to the same "page," that is, there is no discernible difference in content between the two. This doesn't have to be the case, but let's not worry about that for now.

This is so often overlooked because it generally doesn't present any noticeable issues. After all, your visitors and search engines get to your site with either version. It's important to understand that search engines see pages based on the URL, which means, to them, these are two different URLs, and therefore two different pages--even if the content is 100 percent identical.

On a basic level, this means duplicate content. Search engines have gotten much better about handling duplicate content and will eventually choose one page or the other to serve up. On a more critical level, what this means is that you may be dividing up your link popularity in all the engines and PageRank specifically in Google.

PageRank dilution

When it comes to link popularity and PageRank, you always want to consolidate your efforts. If you don't force all the PageRank you've earned through to one canonical version, you may split that ever important "link juice" between two different URLs. That's because some folks will link to your URL without the www, just out of convenience or laziness. This SEO issue is one of those simple basics that every site should take care of, especially if it ends up being the difference between one of your pages showing up above or below your biggest competitor.

So which do you choose? Whether you go with the "www" version or the "non-www" version isn't really an issue. What is important is that you use a 301 permanent redirect in order to redirect traffic to the version of your choosing. Then you'll consolidate and flow all of the link juice to the canonical version regardless of how others link to your site--rather than diluting or splitting it.

As you can see by the list below, there are still a lot of big-name sites that haven't addressed canonicalization. Each of these sites can be reached by their www and non-www URLs. Is this negatively impacting their rankings? Maybe, maybe not, but why pass up on the simple stuff.

• levenger.com
• dwr.com
• dresses.com
• footlocker.com
• harborfreight.com
• hickoryfarms.com
• jeffersequine.com
• petco.com
• pfaltzgraff.com
• pier1.com
• qvc.com
• systemax.com

Contrast the above with the following big-name sites that DO properly redirect:

• zappos.com
• llbean.com
• wards.com
• potterybarn.com
• cabelas.com
• and of course... cnet.com

Last year, The New York Times published an article called "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google," which focused on the effect search engines are having on journalistic writing. The primary focus was on the negative impact of "writing for machines" and the corresponding loss of creativity such an endeavor entails.

What always amazes me is the fear and anger that many writers express about writing with search engines in mind. Just in using the phrase "writing for machines" they create among themselves a rather Orwellian hysteria, but it is only just that: hysterics. Why? Because it simply isn't true, symbolically or factually. Search engines--and especially Google--are designed to examine text published on the Internet and simply return accurate results when a human user plugs in words on the other end. To that end, there is no writing for machines, there is only writing for other human beings.

What has been affected is twofold. First, the writer must want to be found, or at least must be paid, in part, to be found. Most newspapers, which make money in part from online advertising, encourage this. Second, in response to this need, the accuracy of writing and the logistics of words must be taken into consideration more than in the past. These attributes aren't for the proverbial "machine," however, but specifically for the end user, the searcher.

Thus, creativity is not challenged at all. Rather, the creativity simply needs to shift with the new paradigm. Let's take writing a news story headline as an example. One headline in a recent edition of The New York Times is "Tangoing Cheek to Cheek for 3 Minutes in the Park." The story is about dancers hooking up in Central Park to tango and otherwise skip and hop together. The title above is fun and creative. It may not be fully optimized for search engines, but in fact, it's not far off.

What could be done to improve this headline for search engine users without obliterating its creative edge? It's a matter of including focused, common-sense wording without replacing colorfulness or colloquialisms. The term "cheek to cheek" is fun and describes dancing in a way that might not reflect how a user would employ a search engine. But that doesn't mean it has to go away. The other half of the headline, "for 3 minutes" is also colorful, but has less to do with the story. Little of the article focuses on the length of the dances, but instead the positive attributes of the dancing that goes on among the middle-aged in Central Park. Calling Central Park "the Park" adds ambiguity for humans and spiders alike, so call it "Central Park" instead.

A search-friendly headline can often incorporate search-savvy words within a creative headline by halving the headline into two distinct yet complementary parts. For example, our headline here could become "Dancing the Tango in Central Park, Cheek to Cheek." What have we lost? The time reference, which isn't core to the story anyway. What have we gained? Descriptive and focused search terms in the form of "Central Park" and "dancing" and "tango" (which is more popular with searchers than "tangoing"). And, I would argue, we have not lost any of the creativity or local color of the original headline.

This is just one example, but the core philosophy here is for journalists to let go of their search engine "machine" fears and simply embrace accuracy; writing search-friendly content is not to consider "the machine," but rather to consider the same humans they otherwise write for. Reaching them is the only difference, and through search engines, writers have both a larger and more focused audience to reach. Why on earth do they complain? Hey journalists, these search engines are actually good for you!