SEO:Search

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Google Listening To SEW Blog? Offers Video Sitemaps
  A few days ago SEW Blogger Deborah Richman wrote an article about how tough it was to find videos through the search engines. Yesterday Google announced it now offers Video Sitemaps. Coincidence? Maybe.
• Microsoft adCenter Offering Affiliate Program
  adCenter will pay a bounty for each new advertiser people bring to the Microsoft PPC program.
• Matt Cutts Video on ALT attributes
  Matt Cutts has posted a new video about ALT tags in images, outlining the basics about how they should be used, and why they are helpful.
• SEW Experts: SEO Conversion Testing: Advanced Search Engine Optimization
  The C-level executive doesn’t often understand A/B Web site optimization. What do you do, then, when the CxO asks you to explain it?
• SEW Experts: Search Marketing on the Efficient Frontier
  Microsoft bought Avenue A | Razorfish and Atlas Search. Google, buying Performics. Where does that leave Efficient Frontier?

Click to read the rest of this post… 

A few days ago SEW Blogger Deborah Richman wrote an article about how tough it was to find videos through the search engines. Yesterday Google announced it now offers Video Sitemaps.

Coincidence maybe…. I tend to think they took our advice.

The new product is “an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search,” their blog post explained.

As Debbie wrote: “Despite all the search options available, only 33% of consumers find videos to watch through search engines. In addition, 34% of consumers are frustrated when trying to discover videos, and some 62% say it takes them at least a few minutes or more to find videos that interest them.”

Though Google claims it was an “effort to help users search all the world’s public videos”, I believe they took the few days following Debbie’s post and added it as a feature.

Nice job Deb! Now if we can only get them to open the algorithm up for public inspection……. 

Linda Buquet, president of 5 Star Affiliate Programs, announced the launch of Microsoft’s affiliate program today.

adCenter will pay a bounty for each new advertiser people bring to the Microsoft PPC program. The current payment is $35 per sign up - seems all the big engines prefer this one time payment to any ongoing percentage deal.

5 Star Affiliate Program currently offers two Microsoft affiliate programs. “The network encompasses all of Microsoft’s premier affiliate opportunities. Today there are two Microsoft services you can promote and profit from: MSN AdCenter and Windows Live OneCare. Over the next few months more Microsoft products and services will be added,” the press release noted. 

Matt Cutts has posted a new video about ALT tags in images. In it, Matt outlines the basics about how ALT tags should be used, and why they are helpful.

Matt starts the video with a picture of Amy Cutts (his cat) and a ball of yarn on a whiteboard. Matt then points out that search engine crawlers can’t recognize the content of the image, and therefore have no way of understanding it what it is. To make matters worse, standard file names for the image are often something like “DCIMG42,JPG”. This also provides no help to the crawler.

If we look more closely at a typical IMG statement, it might look something like this:

<img src=”http://www.example.com/images/dcimg42.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.example.com/images/dcimg42.jpg” />

Again, no help for the crawler there. SO what can you do? Matt recommends the use of the ALT atribute in the IMG statement. With this modification, your image statement might look like this:

<img src=”http://www.example.com/images/dcimg42.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.example.com/images/dcimg42.jpg”
alt=”Matt’s cat, Emmy Cutts, with some yarn” />

So now we are providing the crawler with some help. The alt tag in the example provided by Matt is 7 words long, and this is an OK length. Matt notes that if you start getting up to 20 to 25 words, that your ALT attributes are getting overly long. Also, you want to avoid spammy looking ALT attributes, e.g., “cat cat cat feline cat fur …”.

You can take this a little further and use the TITLE attribute, or name your file something helpful as well. This would provide more reinforcement for the crawler regarding the content of the images. However, according to Matt, just implemeting the ALT attribute is enough in most cases. Ultimately, the bottom line is that you should use the ALT attribute on ALL of your images. 

The C-level executive doesn’t often get involved in A/B Web site optimization decisions. It’s a tactic better left to SEOs, Web site analytics gurus, and statisticians. What do you do, then, when the CxO asks you to explain how you do A/B conversion testing for an e-commerce site, for example? In today’s Big Biz column, “SEO Conversion Testing: Advanced Search Engine Optimization,” Aaron Shear shares the number one SEO challenge during holiday shopping season: explaining to senior management how complex it is to do A/B testing of SEO strategies for large enterprise mega-sites.  

Microsoft bought Avenue A | Razorfish and Atlas Search. Google, buying Performics. Where does that leave Efficient Frontier? In today’s Search Engine WarGames column, “Search Marketing on the Efficient Frontier,” Kevin Heisler gets an update on the search marketing management platform.

The Google Knol project is drawing almost universal comparison in the media to Wikipedia. That comparison works in one facet of this situation: it seems Google’s goal with Knol is to take back some of the traffic that Wikipedia is getting from Google searches – and then monetize it with Google ads.

As Michael Arrington notes, the timing of the news leads to that conclusion as well, since announcing unlaunched products is not Google’s style, yet they felt the need to pre-announce Knols right around the same time that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is set to launch Search Wikia.

In structure, the project is much more similar to Seth Godin’s Squidoo, since it allows users to build authority and sign their work. It also matches Squidoo in that its aim is to build content pages that rank highly in search engines.

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Google is growing and the question of whether or not it has become too invasive (or persuasive) is one that needs to be answered now. While using pop culture references to attract attention to this situation is fun, it also captures the massive popularity of Google itself.

As any Star Trek fan can tell you, “[t]he Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against whom “resistance is futile.”

Google has shown elements of this with its acquisition of companies and giving away their services leaving others in those industries worried about their futures. Web Analytics (Urchin), Office software, and DoubleClick (the purchase of which has anti-trust examinations both in the US and Europe).

The other part of Google is the control they have on a very powerful industry that impacts people’s lives and perceptions. When Google has the lion share of all searches made globally they have the ability to manipulate what people see.

They can hold a company’s very existence in their algorithm. They can manipulate PPC rules and cost people a lot of money to maintain their marketing.

But beyond that people are hooked on Google. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that over 47% of internet users have Googled themselves. A big jump from the 22% of 2002. We want to know what Google thinks of us… well really we want to know how we rate in Google. People see themselves as a reflection of the SERPs…. please tell me that is not true.

Meanwhile Google is rolling out their Google Profiles - a scary Big Brother type of scenario. But everyone loves Google and will be happy to give their information over to the collective.

As Wired magazine online notes people are fast grabbing a G-Identity.

While it is fun to mix the pop culture references, the humor lies in the kernel of truth that makes it funny. I guess we really have to hope they live up to their motto to “Do No Evil”. 

My latest interview is with Google’s Sep Kamvar. We talked about the personalization algorithms currently in use by Google in detail. Sep spells out in detail for us:

The two signals that we use right now are the search history and the location. We constantly experiment with other signals, but the two signals that have worked best for us are location and search history.

We do talk quite a bit more about the types of signals they experiment with. Net-net most of the other signals they have experimented with are “noisy” in nature. What he means by that is that their test has shown that the input from such signals does not really help them improve the quality of search results for their users.

It underscores the fact that it’s not as simple as we are all inclined to think. There are lots of things that we can guess make for good signals for a search engine to use. But many times, these signals really don’t match up with a user’s search intent.

For example, just because a user indicates a personal preference for something, that doesn’t mean that this really related to what they are searching for at a particular time. In fact, when Google tried to get users to specify their interests, they found that it was not a good signal for them to use.

The key element really is what they user’s intent at the time they perform the search. Turns out, that is not that simple to determine.

When you re looking for information do you go to an encyclopedia or a specialized book If you answered Neither I check the Internet don t click away. The question has more relevance for the major search engines particularly Google than you might think….