Users can download the Microsoft Tag app on their smartphone, take a photo of the Tag and be directed to a website, view a text message or linked to a phone number.

Microsoft says since its beta launch more than 1 billion Tags have been printed globally and in April more than 20 million magazine with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers.

"We’ve already seen a lot of enthusiasm for Tag among marketers, developers and consumers as well as a diverse range of creative scenarios using Tag in industries as varied as publishing, advertising, retail, real estate, transit, automotive, consumer packaged goods, tourism and entertainment," Microsoft said in a blog post.

"This past week, for instance. Amsterdam became the second world city with a Tag-led tour, with Tags on monuments, museums, restaurants, bars, and other landmarks. The Mall of America, in Minnesota, has announced plans to use Tag to help enhance customer engagement and give retailers an interactive tool to promote their products."

Microsoft said it will be introducing analytics, reporting and real-time location services for Tag clients in the future.
 

How To Look Your Best In Search Results

Because nobody makes snap judgments like a searcher.

During a recent trip to Google’s Kirkland, Washington office, Matt Cutts and colleagues spent an hour creating impromptu videos on various search-related topics. The first to be posted involves "the anatomy of a search snippet," and how much control a webmaster has over what information is displayed in search results.

The answer to how much control is: quite a bit, actually. This article will explore Cutts’s explanation of the snippet, and ways to make the best of your search presence. Much of managing your appearance in the search results involves telling Google what to index and what not to index.

Homepage Title

The first thing you see in your search result is the title, and this is the first thing that Cutts also addresses. In honor of being in the Pacific Northwest, he used Starbucks’ search result as an example, which labels its homepage as "Starbucks Homepage." This is your first impression.

Cutts questioned whether the word "homepage" was a good choice (Google took the title directly from the page) as few would search for that word. Starbucks being so recognizable, it hardly matters, but for smaller business it’s a good idea to optimize wherever you can. "Starbucks Coffee" might have been a better SEO choice.

A usability expert might argue, though, that straightforward is best, and giving the searcher what he or she expects to see will have a direct impact on whether a link is clicked. 

The Snippet

The snippet is where the webmaster has the most control of what is displayed about his or her site. Google often pulls the snippet text directly from the meta description tags, and Cutts recommends experimenting with the text to see what yields the best results for individual sites.

Longer snippets, as we’ve noted before, help searchers with informational queries, and may also be of benefit for SEO reasons. Shorter ones work better for navigational queries.

Google may also pull snippets from other places as well, depending on the query or situation. If no description is available, Cutts says Google may grab information from the Open Directory Project or other directories. Or, to find the context of a query, Google may look to beyond meta description tags to increase relevance.

If there is content you don’t want to appear in the snippet, you can add the "nosnippet tag" to your HTML, which looks like this: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Cache Page

The cache page acts as a backup if a website is for some reason unavailable. It will show an archived version of your site, show when it was last crawled by the Googlebot, and serves as a sort of content freshness indicator. Regularly updating content is a good way to influence what appears there, but also useful is the ability to tell Google what not to archive. To prevent the Googlebot from creating a cached version of a page, use the NOARCHIVE tag, which looks like this <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Site Links

Cutts was quick to assure viewers that site links were algorithmic and not payment based. In the Starbucks example, these would be headed "Store Locator" and "Career Center." So there may not be a lot of control over Google chooses as an important related page to increase searcher relevancy, other than using a NOINDEX tag for certain pages so the Googlebot knows what to skip, and making sure the language is clear as to what the pages you do want indexed are for.

If a page is seasonal or promotional only and you want Google to stop crawling that page after a certain time period, you can use the "unavailable_after" tag. Effective use of the tags mentioned also help control what appears on the "more results" page.

In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

Comments

Tag:

Based on threads in both Webmaster World and Digital Point Yahoo! Might have ceased using the No Yahoo Directory Tag.

Reports range from

“I’ve tried switching "meta=SLURP" with "meta=robots" but it still doesn’t work… ”

to

“Just this last few days Yahoo is ignoring this tag on my site:

And has reverted back to showing my Yahoo Directory title and description.

This happened just after my annual renewal in the directory (may be a coincidence)”

More information on Webmaster World and Digital Point.

Comments

"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

"Yeah, but, it’s your name in print," says Navin Johnson.

That’s not a reason to not have one though. A blog is still an effective way to get noticed and to gain an audience. "Things will starting happening to you now," reminds Navin.

But only if you do it right. "If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and start one," says Jarboe, "but the whole industry has moved on. It’s now about performance; it’s now about results."

Okay, so how do you get those results? Well, there’s probably not a finite set of things, but there are some good suggestions. Jarboe suggests staying away from turf already claimed. "Look for emerging terms. Find terms that are upcoming or growing in importancethat don’t have five years of entrenched bloggers competing for them."

But if you have to enter ground already well-traveled, it’s a good idea to get in good with those that know the road. Join their conversations, get their attention, earn a link.

Jarboe joins Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, LLC in providing some expert advice on optimizing a blog, and we’ve organized that advice into a neat top ten list. (The plugins recommended are all for WordPress.)

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1.    Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.

2.    Add a "Related Posts" feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3.    Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4.    Add "next" and "previous" post buttons

5.    Build inbound links

6.    Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7.    Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8.    Use "sticky" posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9.    Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10.    Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

Bonus: Rick Klau, who works in strategic partner development for Google, also has some solid advice for optimizing RSS feeds via Feedburner and even Facebook. He also reiterates the importance of providing full text feeds rather than partial feeds. Check out 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS.

He has followed that up with a full-fledged post on the official Google blog about the new tag. The unavailable_after META tag informs the Googlebot when a page should be removed from Google’s search results:

This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. We currently only support unavailable_after for Google web search results.

After the removal, the page stops showing in Google search results but it is not removed from our system.

Fully removing something from Google still requires the URL removal tool, found as one of Google’s Webmaster Central tools.

Google also extended some control over assets beyond web pages to webmasters. Those who publish PDF, audio, video, or other file types can direct the crawler on how Google should manage access to them from its index.

“We’ve extended our support for META tags so they can now be associated with any file,” said Crow. “Simply add any supported META tag to a new X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header used to serve the file.”

Supported META tags include options like noarchive, nosnippet, noindex, and unavailable_after. Google sees these as offering enough flexibility to satisfy site publishers; we imagine they have organizations like AFP and Copiepresse in mind here.

Whalen’s account of the news appeared at High Rankings:

Google is coming out with a new tag called

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/unavailable-after-google-plans-new-meta-tag-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/keyword-placement-in-title-tag-case-study-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/keyword-placement-in-title-tag-case-study-2007-07#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:51:18 +0000 Joe Whyte http://www.webpronews.com/?p=38994 According to search ranking factors done by SEOmoz, your keyword in your title tag is the upmost importance, but the placement of that keyword in your title tag has been debated. Some believe that placing your branding first and then kewyords in your title tag causes little or no difference when optimizing a page in the SERPS. I am going to finally uncover this once and for all.

]]> According to search ranking factors done by SEOmoz, your keyword in your title tag is the upmost importance, but the placement of that keyword in your title tag has been debated. Some believe that placing your branding first and then kewyords in your title tag causes little or no difference when optimizing a page in the SERPS. I am going to finally uncover this once and for all.

With my experience in title tag optimization I feel that by placing the keyword I truly want to rank for OR the most difficult keyword I am optimizing for on a given page should be the first or close to the begining of the title tag and NOT the end. When I optimized lunarpages for the term “web hosting” I did change the title tag and moved web hosting closer to the front of the title tag and along with many other alterations we where able to get to the home page for “web hosting”.

However because I did much more with the site besides altering the title tag we can not use this as a real life example of the power of keyword placement within your title tag.

Currently I rank 32 in google for SEO consulting. My current title tag reads “Joe Whyte – Seo Consulting – rockyfied”.

Below is a photo of the current rankings within google for the term “seo consulting”.

Adversely I also rank #3 on the first page of google for “Joe Whyte”. See below for image.

I will attempt to change my title tag and Repost my findings. I am curious to know what other people will think about doing this change and the importance of keyword placement within your title tag.

Comments

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/keyword-placement-in-title-tag-case-study-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/scaling-a-tag-cloud-2007-04 http://www.webpronews.com/scaling-a-tag-cloud-2007-04#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:05:03 +0000 Philipp Lenssen http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36886 Like many of you I’m using tag clouds (or related navigation concepts) on a couple of sites, like CoverBrowser.com.

Sometimes I run into the problem of scaling the cloud, when the page is about to get too large and complicated to serve as an overview.]]> Like many of you I’m using tag clouds (or related navigation concepts) on a couple of sites, like CoverBrowser.com.

Sometimes I run into the problem of scaling the cloud, when the page is about to get too large and complicated to serve as an overview.

 There are some ways to scale the data contained in the cloud:

• You can hide tags of a certain threshold, e.g. only display tags which are used N times. (This is the most-used approach because tag clouds already utilize font size to indicate importance. But this approach doesn’t lend itself to all uses. What if low-threshold keywords are just as importance?)
• You can include categories which expand a portion of the cloud on-click (by dynamically loading new data via AJAX).
• You can randomize the cloud and only display a portion of it (or its “low-threshold” members) during individual loads.
• You can group related tags into a single keyword (in particular, singular/ plural pairs).
• You can break up the single cloud into several pages, one cloud per letter, and then link to those using a “frontpage” cloud displaying the letters A-Z.
• Via CSS, you can create a restricted cloud area with scroll-bars, though this probably looks rather ugly.
• You can add a search box below the tag cloud for deeper navigation.
• You can add a 1 | 2 | 3 | Next kind of navigation below the cloud.
• If page download size is the main problem, you can add shortened URLs per tag, triggering a redirect to the longer URL on-click (though this is best done only when search engines need not follow these links).
• If you program a really neat Flash (or DHTML?) application, you might also have a fisheye effect, dynamically zooming into the part of the cloud which the mouse cursors hovers over…

Can you think of other good options to optimize a tag cloud that’s getting too large?

Comments

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/scaling-a-tag-cloud-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/key-issues-in-web-anaytics-implementation-and-rollout-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/key-issues-in-web-anaytics-implementation-and-rollout-2007-03#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:08:53 +0000 Gary Angel http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36349 I spent most of the last two weeks on the road – teaching down in San Diego at the WebSideStory DMU and manning a booth at the Omniture Summit. Going out and talking to so many people is always interesting (if a bit daunting for an essentially shy guy) – and if you take out the travel parts it was all pretty enjoyable.

]]> I spent most of the last two weeks on the road – teaching down in San Diego at the WebSideStory DMU and manning a booth at the Omniture Summit. Going out and talking to so many people is always interesting (if a bit daunting for an essentially shy guy) – and if you take out the travel parts it was all pretty enjoyable.

As I think back on the conversations, there were a couple themes that seemed to come up quite a bit. One thing I heard over and over was how many companies struggle in the tagging and implementation phase of web analytics. Information which convinced Paul Legutko (our East Coast VP of Analytics) and I that we should develop more formal implementation checklists for both Omniture and WebSideStory rollouts. That’s something we’re going to be working on, but it also reinforced the direction for my next blog.

Last time, I put forth some pretty tentative (at least for me) views on placing a web measurement department in an organization. Today, I wanted to discuss some of the major problems and mistakes I often see when companies roll-out web analytics.

1. The Plain-Vanilla Tag

Tool vendors often bring this problem on themselves and their clients by overselling the ease of putting a tag on a page. Yes, you can have measurement in an hour. Will it meet your real needs? Probably not. I see lots of companies commit to the plain-vanilla tag knowing that they will have to come back and fix it but wanting to get a deployment out as quickly as possible. Usually, I think that’s a mistake. The pressure to release numbers is always overwhelming – and whatever gets rolled out is immediately in-play. That means the organization starts to use and react to the numbers – almost always before they’ve been adequately tested.

2. The Tag as Software-Development Project

There aren’t two sides to every web measurement coin – but it’s surprisingly easy to either under or over-do your tagging effort. At the opposite end of the Plain-Vanilla tag spectrum is the tendency to treat the tag like it must be a fully-engineered software development project. It’s this tendency that sometimes causes business managers to just throw their hands in the air and scream – ‘Let’s just roll the damn thing out!’ A tag is simply not as complicated as even a very basic software development effort. It has no GUI, the number of options is paltry and the amount of code is about 1/1000 that of even the smallest software developments. IT organizations that haven’t ever implemented tags and don’t really understand the technology often give Business Units wildly inflated estimates of the time and effort involved. If you’re seeing big-ticket numbers around tagging, your best solution is to work with your vendor to train and hand-hold IT (we do this too – but for this particular service the vendor will be just as good). A little bit of training will almost always bring on the aha moment where the IT guy says – "Is that all there is to this?"

3. Rolling out Analytics to High-Level Managers

There are several related issues around rollout, training and reporting that cause no end of implementation problems. Many organizations have the strong desire to train everyone in the company who might need information on using the tool. Don’t do it! Most managers – particularly senior ones – will not be effective users of tools like SiteCatalyst and HBX. And when they do use the tool, they are highly likely to have questions/issues that send shock waves through your organization, suck down ridiculous amounts of time, and often enough damage the whole measurement effort. You need to grow usage of the tool in your organization organically – starting with the analysts and managers who absolutely must have the information. You can grow out from there – but cautiously. And with tools today providing excellent integration to Excel, you need never expose many of your managers to a web analytics tool even while driving home the value they provide.

4. Confusing Reporting w. Analytics

This is a close corollary to #3 and is also a big part of #5 – thinking that analysis doesn’t require analysts. Fast, reliable reporting on the web channel is one of the biggest value-adds to web analytics tools. Managers at every level need this to do their job well. But don’t think that just because you give somebody a report it will answer all their questions. Good reports raise more questions than they answer. And no report set will ever substitute for real analysis if you are trying to use measurement to drive site change.

5. Thinking Analysis Doesn’t Require Analysts

Tools in web analytics have improved dramatically in the last few years. But they haven’t gotten this good and they never will. Useful analysis is a time consuming activity (we usually spend 3-6 weeks on an analysis) invariably requiring decisions about how and what data to use, how to interpret the numbers and how to apply the results to meaningful decisions. If your Managers have 4 solid weeks to devote to web analytics, then they aren’t Managers they’re analysts. You pay your Managers to manage – you have to pay analysts to analyze. Avinash famously addressed this with his 90/10 rule (you should spend 90% of your analytics budget on people not tools) – I’ve never thought the rule itself was good guidance but the underlying point is dead-on. If you don’t dedicate resources to analysis you won’t get any worth having.

6. Not Tying Change to Measurement

This is a cultural and process issue – but it’s frankly staggering how many organizations with perfectly good measurement virtually ignore it when deciding what and how to change their site. Hey – this is what measurement is for! If you find your company making changes that aren’t measurement driven then you really need to assess whether your measurement is what it should be. And if the problem isn’t there, then you need to think about how your measurement people relate to everyone else. It is in this arena, by the way, that I see particular value to our Functional approach to measurement. It’s a great way to get every stake-holder in an organization understanding how measurement fits in with what they are trying to do.

7. Not Pre-Committing to Measurements

Here’s one of my least favorite tasks in the world – a client rolls out a site change and then asks us to show that it worked well. We always do, of course. But that doesn’t make me think that every site change we’ve ever measured was positive. The simple fact about measurement is that if you can look for anything as evidence of success you’ll always be able to find something. By forcing everyone to pre-commit (before a change) what the expected measurement test and direction really are, then you can put a lid on this sort of nonsense. If I change a page to improve its routing performance then its routing performance had darn well better improve. And the fact that its page time increased isn’t going to convince me that the change was effective if that wasn’t what I was trying to achieve.

8. Not Putting a Method around Measurement

Most of us who practice web analytics have come to one not so great conclusion. Web Analytics is hard. Harder than we all thought when we got started. Harder than you probably think if you haven’t actually tried to do it. As someone who comes from a background in credit card database marketing, I definitely believe that it is more challenging to squeeze behavioral insights from web data then from the incredibly rich vein of information in card usage and purchase data. Not that credit card database marketing wasn’t pretty challenging too. Doing any analytics well takes a considerable amount of skill, effort and organizational attention. So if you expect to get much out of your analytic effort, it’s really important that you put a structure around it that prevents everyone involved from wheel-spinning. What makes for good structure? I think that there are (at least) two answers: a good methodology and a strategic road-map. Having a methodology (like Functionalism) that you commit to provides a built-in analytic focus that makes it much easier for an analyst to be productive. It also provides a ready-made way for you to get into the test/measure cycle that is so critical to analytic success.

9. Not Having a Road-Map

Probably even more important than a good method to getting where you want to go with web analytics is having a clear analytic road-map. I think the biggest challenge for most organizations is after the honeymoon (post-implementation) – when everyone has gotten over the joy of just "having data" and actually wants to do something with it. How do you address this dangerous cross-road? I think the best way is to commit your organization to a specific road-map of measurement projects. You’re going to change these as you go forward, but if you start with an analytic road-map that takes you through the kinds of analysis you want to achieve in the next year, then you’ll never have that horrible awkward stretch where everyone looks around and says "What now?" Since most organizations are also struggling to build measurement into their culture, the Road-Map is a great way to generate buy-in and push the whole organization toward that test/measure cycle I mentioned earlier.

10. Believing that you are doing Good-Enough

Out at these events I talked to quite a few Digital Agencies – all of whom, almost without exception, assured me that they had web measurement well in-hand. What do they know that the rest of us – and their clients – don’t? Maybe it’s all self-interest, but I just don’t believe it. What I see when we share clients doesn’t make me think so. And while it’s reasonable to expect that the really big Agencies are at least on their way (and trying hard) to having measurement expertise – I’m not buying that most of these smaller and mid-size Agencies have the faintest idea how to do web measurement. This attitude is actually rarer in the corporate world – but I see it there often enough – with companies where the measurement is obviously raw and unused still convinced that they have it covered. I certainly don’t think my company Semphonic is doing well enough. And if you are living through the current web analytics environment and you aren’t at least worrying about how to do better then you just don’t get it.

I’m sure this list is anything but exhaustive – but ten is such a convenient stopping place for a list! I doubt I’ve said enough about any of these issues to really provide lot’s of practical guidance. But it’s useful to know what land-mines are out there – and I think each of these 10 are common and serious enough to deserve real attention if you are in the process of implementing or rolling-out a web analytics solution.

Comments

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