Gab Goldenberg

(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Time spent on local search advertising today puts a business in better position to benefit tomorrow. Look no farther than Gab Goldenberg and his four steps to getting MontrealSEO.ca to appear twice in universal search: once alongside a Google Map, and once in a high organic listing placement. Here’s how that happened:

1. Bought MontrealSEO.ca and "Sticky"-Forwarded It
2. Submitted MontrealSEO.ca to Google’s Local Business Center
3. Built Links Internally and Externally for MontrealSEO.ca
4. Passed On Reviews Into Google Maps

Eric Lander recommended cross-linking pages with maps and trusted sources to help with blended search. If multiple data sources push duplicate listings into blended search results, the site publisher will want to consolidate.

    Eric Lander

Lander recommended using a free tool at Localeze to help manage their online listings. The Merchant Profile Manager allows a business to add, edit, or remove a single business listing at no charge.

People performing a local search tend to include their city name, Chris Silver Smith noted. Seeing a certain result in a given blended search depends on the search engine and ranking factors.

He observed how ratings on Yahoo Local, and links at the Yahoo-owned Delicious bookmarking site to a business, play a role in where the listing will rank in blended search. Microsoft’s Live Search blended results seem to be impacted by the address of a business.

A sample of a query for [Boston seafood restaurants] ordered results mostly by the numeric address in Live Search.

At Google, the One Box section for universal results contains a lot more listings. This gives businesses more of an opportunity to appear alongside a Google Map and the attention it draws in a search.

SES Chicago: Soaring Through Universal Search

SES Chicago returns, and WebProNews is on hand to bring you reports and videos from the Windy City. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Universal search. Blended search. Vertical search. They all aim at one target: fulfilling visitors’ needs so that they keep coming back.

The speakers at the SES Chicago Orion Panel: Universal, Blended and Vertical Search, noted the need to fulfill the value proposition of search for visitors. Individual search intensity drives that need, with the average American performing 74 searches a month.

As the search engines become more creative with how they present results in the various approaches of universal, blended, and vertical search, opportunities arise for search engine marketers. SEMs have to be more creative to thrive with the options being presented to searchers.

The proof will be in the pudding, or at least the success rates. SEMs who use this ‘paid real estate’ well should enjoy better results than the competition.

Search engines will drive that success too. The essential search experience presents someone with a list of blue links. It’s a far cry from the typical social networking experience, which has indirectly nudged the search industry with its universal results.

Google has found its users like universal search, and the way results pull from multiple sources of relevant results. Microsoft’s work on improving relevance and blending results from other content has people spending more time on their pages.

Ask.com presents as much information as it can with its revamped, Ask 3D approach. Coupled with major spending by IAC on advertising, Ask has been able to hold its ground, even as Yahoo and Microsoft cede search market share to Google.

"In the next 5 to 10 years, search and browsing will be the same thing," Brad Goldberg from Microsoft told attendees. Jim Müller from Google said the universal search experience will become richer.

"Over time, those other search engines are going to be merged into Google and other search engines. Users want to go to a single search engine and have a query and then that stuff (like Google Maps) come up," he said.

The search experience isn’t tipping in a particular direction it seems; instead, it’s standing up vertically more and more, nice and straight.

WebProNews Internet reporter/anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this report.

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Yahoo’s been rolling out some of the changes recently, but on Tuesday they all came together. There’s already been a lot of coverage and instead of trying to repeat what’s been said I’ll leave you with the links towards the bottom of this post. However the best way to see the changes is by going to Yahoo and searching.

SEO Related Observations About Search Assist

In using search assist the last couple of days a couple of things have become clear to me. The first is that whether they realize it or not people will be performing more long tail searches. The second is that when search assist is open one less organic search result is visible above the fold.

In the above image you can see search assist in action for the single word ‘cavern.’ The phrases on the left are search suggestions and one of the nice features is that cavern doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the suggested phrases. The two columns of phrases to the right are concepts around the word cavern you can explore.

As an aside you might notice the Beatles as one of the concepts and it might seem strange for it to be there, but the Beatles got their start playing at The Cavern club in Liverpool. Just a little trivia for you non Beatles folks.

Getting back to the cavern search I selected Howe Caverns from the suggestions on the left and then selected ‘adventure tour’ in the concepts that showed up.

You can see that Yahoo is now showing results containing adventure tour. While it doesn’t show in the search box the actual search now being performed is

howe caverns + “adventure tour”

Notice that adventure tour is being searched in quotes as an exact match while the howe caverns part of the search isn’t. The query above is somewhat more complex than a user will typically type on their own. It’s not overly complicated, but now thanks to search assist we’ll be seeing more advanced searches that will go deeper into the search tail.

Combined with the observation that one less result will be in front of people (at 1024 x 768 resolution one organic result is visible) I think it becomes more important to optimize for long tail queries for Yahoo traffic. It may not be enough to simply have all the words on the page either as the second half of the query is an exact match.

As you start to use search assist more your attentions naturally ends up more focused more at the top of the page on search assist itself. If you don’t see a good result quickly you may decide to further refine the search as opposed to digging deeper into the results and clicking beyond the first page. It wouldn’t surprise me to see less results being clicked, but more clicks leading to good results. That would likely lead to more satisfied Yahoo users.

Long tail optimization has been good advice for awhile now. Search Assist makes the advice better and should also require more focused long tail optimization. Additionally with one less organic result showing the paid listings take on a greater percentage of the space. It’s very possible Yahoo will start seeing more clicks on their ads.

Suggestions For Search Assist

I’d like to see Yahoo display the actual search being performed when using search assistant. In the above howe caverns + “adventure tour” search why not show the entire search in the search box? Showing the actual search would help users better understand what is happening and it would educate them about advanced search operators. If Yahoo tested the idea and found users were more confused by seeing the search change I could understand, but otherwise I think it would be a nice touch.

Exploring concepts is a great addition and I wonder if it could be expanded one more level. Instead of only exploring concepts around the original search why not allow exploration around the more advanced modified search. It would add one more level of refinement and for Yahoo it would keep more people on Yahoo’s search results page

If possible I wouldn’t mind seeing more advanced search operators gain inclusion in search assist. Right now search assist will include an exact match phrase on top of your initial search. Perhaps they could add a way to exclude certain words or phrases as well.

Resources

These are some of the posts I had been collecting for tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post. If you haven’t yet spent any time with Yahoo’s search assist the posts below will fill you in more about how it works and the general changes Yahoo made. Eric Lander’s Search Optimization Guide will walk you through a variety of the changes and how they relate to seo.

• Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer : Search Assist, Videos, Flickr Integration
• Search Optimization Guide for The New Yahoo! Search
• Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches ‘Search Assist’ & Multimedia Content In Results
• Yahoo Search Launches Search Assist & Blended Search Results
• Yahoo Search Gets Blended, Helpful
• Yahoo Launches New Search Interface
• Yahoo’s Showcased Homepage Content Driving Search Results
• Yahoo’s Search Assist and tracking keywords
• Yahoo! Leveraging “Content” for Queries
• Blended Search, it’s everywhere I look

If you haven’t yet tried it, give Yahoo’s Search Assist a spin and let me know what you think. I’ve been a Google user primarily for years, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of days I’ve been using Yahoo a little more than I have been and I have a hunch that’s going to increase.

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Moderator:

• Sapna Satagopan, Associate Analyst, JupiterResearch

Speakers:

• Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
• Jeremy Clem, Sr. Program Manager, Natural Search, Performics
• Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
• Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer, Everyzing

Sherwood Stranieri makes his second appearance as speaker at SES, San Jose 2007, following yesterday’s discussion on Universal & Blended Vertical Search!.

Stranieri says the purpose of this discussion is to look at online video and how it effects search. A presentation informs that YouTube’s share was more than that of the next 64 video sites. Stranieri has some strategies that will benefit different industries:

Video for Content Providers-

• Bloggers to television networks can use videos to attract more visitors.
• Teaser strategy: Upload a few videos to portals like YouTube; provide links back to related videos on your site.
• The goal is to get them back to your Web site to view ads and explore your other content.
• Video search engine optimization is a key element in establishing “video.yoursite.com” and viral-driven linking helps that.
• As videos now appear in Google’s Universal Search. Video SEO is now mainstream SEO.

Video for Pharmaceutical companies-

• Not too much fun but not uninteresting either. As for eg: Discovery channel
• On-site strategy doesn’t have to dovetail with portal strategy
• Interviews with patients make the drug more real, more trustworthy
• You can use videos on newsworthy topics like AIDS, flu, outbreaks, fad diets, etc.
• Animations of how the drug works (cool site potential at Digg, etc).

Video for e-Commerce

• Follow the buzz and promote your hottest products
• Showcase anticipated uses
• Demo high-tech products
• If you sell high power tools
• If you sell cars show test drives
• A famous example of using video for e-Commerce is the ‘iPhone Will It Blend video’
• Keep it entertaining
• YouTube is not a tradeshow.
• Even if your product is dull create an exciting video
• BlendTec destroys an iPhone: 1.7 million views.
• Digg, Slashdot, MakeZine, and Gizmodo love weird/unusual videos.

Video for Consumer Packaged Goods

• Who wants to see a video about laundry detergent?
• Be choosy and get creative
• Most videos (Mentos and Diet coke) are famous by accident
• Videos with millions of viewers rival ads on television
• Popular videos become a positive and permanent addition to brand equity
• Be imaginative and find ways to demonstrate the value of your products in an entertaining way

Up next, Jeremy Clem from Performics sheds some light on the opportunities available in video. Consider the possibilities:

• In May itself, 75 % American internet users viewed approximately 158 minutes online videos.
• US Internet users watched more than 8.3 billion video streams.
• 72 % viewed news online while 76 % helped drive The Viral Chain i.e. passed it to friends.

These days, of the share of the US users, 49 % are watching YouTube videos, 12 % are viewing MySpace videos while 5 % are viewing Google Videos. The important factor is that viewers are using search engines to search videos and not directly going to the source.

Obstructions facing video SEO is that search still relies on the text page of the video’s related website. Also video technology is not crawler-friendly. Take a cue from CNBC video and surround your videos with HTML. Use social bookmarking tools that will help in the visibility of the videos.

Keeping your video content at one place off the root directory helps in providing easy access to search engine crawlers.

Use a video site map

RSS feeds

Tag videos with specific keywords, even if it means tagging each scene.

Position your trademark logo in the video.

Best Practices for video optimization

• Train editors to think like video searchers
• Encode for the ride keywords
• Use keywords in filename
• One video per URL
• Add tagging
• Keep video files in one directly
• Surround video with on page relevant text
• Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text
• Create an optimized video site map
• Upload videos to search engines
• Add informative Meta data
• Allow video files to be embedded and include a logo

Next to discuss video SEO is Gregory Markel the Founder/President of Infuse Creative, LLC.

According to Gregory the three basic approaches to video search engine optimization types are:

1. Video Files Metadata Optimization: Talking the source video file and infusing it with your keyword triggers in the Title, Description, and Keywords tags. Make sure your content is feature on its own page with relevant surrounding text and properly embedded link elements.
2. Upload Optimization: Most popular. These type of video search engines required that your upload your video search files. Add a social flair by getting your “friends” to submit or vote for you on the social media sites.
3. RSS Optimization: Submit your video to RSS.

Use tubemogul.com, a video portal which has a free standardized upload system. Gregory calls this a ‘one-stop universal upload shop’. It has all the basics on views, news, comments, ratings etc.

All your video metadata should be keyword rich. Ensure your audio files too are audible and targeted as ow-a-days some video search engines use optical character recognition and search recognition.

Next up is Stephen Baker who starts by introducing his company, Everyzing.

Basically, search engine algorithm does not really have a history of indexing multimedia files etc. It is vital that for video SEO that one makes a transcript of the content. In this manner, one can give search engine crawlers a big amount of "aboutness" of this file. Transcripts, it should be known are crawler friendly and its pages have quality content.

SOURCE: Bruce Clay

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Jarboe showed some screenshots including recent phrases in the news done NOT at Google News, but at Google standard search. A half dozen examples brought up in various combinations – news story results (with photo thumbnail), videos, photos, blog results, maps, images and onebox results. The position of each of those in the rankings varied, but news and maps were usually nearer the top or at the top, with video results hovering around the middle of the page and blog results, photos (from image search) at the bottom of the page.

While we’ve heard the term "Google Universal Search" used quite often, this is the first time I’ve heard it shortened to "G.U.S." Sherwood Stanieri of Catalyst Online followed Jarboe and discussed how universal and blended search affects video in the rankings. In researching how positions in the top 10 results change but show inconsistencies in how their rank was determined by relating those results to pagerank, number of views of those videos and numbers of comments to those videos on social sites and finally, the popularity of the topic searched on.

In Universal search it appears that Google "Hot Topics" (formerly Zeitgeist) is a part of the algo since those topics spiking in popularity will bring up video results more often if they are on that list (and likely photos, news and relevant blog posts).

Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea was up next and pulled his expected studious dissecting of search patents into the discussion. While I’d love to say I did follow a few of his examples and agree with his conclusions and assertions – I can’t outline them effectively here as they seemed to bounce around a bit, pulling bits and pieces out of published patent here and there and back to his own findings, then to search results.

Google engineer David Bailey leads the Universal Search effort and summed up his thoughts on what Universal Search means to SEO by saying "Business as Usual". OK David, I happen to agree, but couldn’t you expand a bit? Tim Mayer of Yahoo briefly how Yahoo’s Blended search intent was to improve user experience, but to me it appeared that Yahoo intends to do all they can to keep searchers on the Yahoo site, with pop-up windows, shortcuts to the giants of ebiz and exclude all but their own pages from click-throughs. Eric Collier of Ask talked about their new 3D search, and how fewer users moved to page two of results, suggesting better relevancy of page one results.

I’ll reiterate what David Bailey had to say "Business as Usual" when it comes to SEO – Google improves results and sends more searchers to relevant sites, Yahoo keeps users on their site and Ask works pretty well, but can’t get a handle on a substantial market.

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Check out Mike’s SES photo gallery.

About the Author

Mike Valentine is an SEO Specialist offering occassional commentary on Search Engine Developments through his Reality SEO Blog and developed WebSite101 Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial in 1999 to help educate the little guy to the intricacies of online business.

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Here is a summary of the coverage by the TopRank blogging team for day one of Search Engine Strategies, San Jose 2007:

• SES San Jose Day Minus One
• The Search Landscape
• SES Videos: Dan Perry Cars.com
• SES Videos: Conversation with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg
• Universal & Blended Search
• Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz
• SES Video Tim Mayer of Yahoo Interview
• Ads in A Quality Score World
• Winning the Search Engine Lottery
• What is a Brand Vehicle? Integrated Marketing Together Forever
• Search Term Research & Targeting Searcher Behavior Research Update SES 2007
• Personalization, User Data & Search
• Women in Search Luncheon

Be sure to watch the TopRank Online Marketing Blog Channel on YouTube as well as our stream of photos from SES on Flickr.Additional coverage of SES is being deftly handled by the many talents at Search Engine Roundtable, WebProNews, Bruce Clay Blog, Search Engine Journal and many others.

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The session was dedicated to universal and blended search, a topic of interested to many marketers these days. The big takeaway for me from this session was that universal search is still in flux and even the leading industry experts don’t have all the answers.

Universal Search and Public/Media Relations

The first speaker up was Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR. The focus of his presentation was on PR and investor relations. One of the important points made during his presentation was that with the introduction of the universal search investor relations are now part of search. Having news and blog posts relevant to the company appear on the first page of the search results ensures that more and more investors and journalists are relying on Google and other major search engines to get the latest updates on the company in question. In fact, according to the data Greg presented, search is the number one way journalists obtain additional story info.

So what should the companies do? For one, make sure your PR and investor relations staff realize that search is part of their job description, not just the savvy SEO people. Two, use services like Newsknife and Google News Report to figure out top performing Google News sources for your media relations. Some huge newspapers out there have virtually no presence on Google News (often times because their site architecture is horrible) and therefore will give you little chance of appearing in blended search results. Three, bloggers matter. Figure out who the important bloggers are in your field and make sure to establish contact with them.

Video Search and Google Universal Search

Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst online was up next. His presentation was all about video search in blended results. At this time it is not entirely clear which factors influence the ranking of videos in Google Universal Search results. When looking at the video rankings in SERPs, PageRank and even incoming links are all over the place so there is no clear pattern there. What seems to be more important is the performance of the video page itself. That performance is measured in the number of comments (more relevant content) and possibly even the number of views.

Sherwood did admit that there were some loose ends to these theories. For example, it is not clear how the timing of content plays into the formula. Naturally, Google, Yahoo and others will have to keep the blended video search results fresh. Also, Google did admit that they fine tune their indexing process for each and every video portal (ex. YouTube, Metacafe).

The fact that the Google engineer, speaking later in the session, did not shoot down all of these theories is a good sign that Sherwood is thinking in the right direction.

Under the Hood of the Universal Search

The next speaker was Bill Slawski, and for those of you who are familiar with his blog it should come as no surprise that he talked a lot about patents and very technical aspects of blended search. Unfortunately, he lost me after the first mention of the word “patent” so I can’t really tell you in detail what he was talking about. Here is an interesting fact I got from his presentation. Based on one of the patents filed by Google a few years ago, it seems that their universal search results were supposed to be stacked instead of being blended. Meaning that they were supposed to look more like AskX interface than GUS (Google Universal Search) as we know it today.

From what I’ve read around the blogosphere, some people hate blended results and some people love them. Personally, my vote goes to stacked results, similar to what Ask.com is doing.

Search Engines on Universal Search

Most search engines had their reps on the panel, with a notable exception being Microsoft. David Bailey, Google engineer, explained that GUS is the next step in the company’s quest for faster, more relevant results. Universal Search is smarter and digs deeper into the database than onebox. He also noted that Google had to change a lot of infrastructure to implement Universal Search but stressed that it is not a major change in direction.

Yahoo was represented by Tim Mayer. Tim explained that Yahoo’s objective is to retain the user on the SERP for as long as possible. This is achieved by adding interaction to the blended search results (ex. Movie Shortcut, Consumer Electronics Shortcut, Hotel Shortcut, etc.) as well as packaging the blended results together (ex. in Movie Shortcuts users can read reviews, watch trailers and buy tickets online).

Erik Collier from Ask.com was the last one to speak. Erik had some interesting insights into the reasons for Ask’s major redesign and effects of the new look. It turns out that Ask had a lot of trouble getting their visitors to click on the links to their other verticals (the ones above the search box). After implementing AskX, the company saw a 30% drop in the number of users that go to the second page and 15% drop in addition user queries. Supposedly, that shows the improvement in relevancy of the first page results.

All in all, it was an interesting session. GUS brought about a new era in search engine marketing. Yet it is still evolving and not even Google knows how far, or even in which direction, they are prepared to take it. Our job as marketers is to try to keep up.

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