• Are the results I’m getting relevant?
• How would I use the tools on the left side (”refined” results, Related Searches, Search History, etc)?
• How would I pick which result to click on?

As an SEO company, we know it’s important that the client’s site ranks well and that search engine users click through (more traffic + more sales = more revenue which makes our clients happy). Users only have a few pieces of information to help them decide what site to visit when they’re looking at a results page: the title (that is also the link to the page), a short description, and the URL of the page.

From what I’ve seen of the results in Bing so far, it looks like the results page is pulling the title tag and meta description, which is pretty standard. However, they’ve added a little something extra to help users decide if this is the site they want before they click. When you hover over a search result, a horizontal line with an orange dot appears on the right. Mouse over the dot and a Preview window opens. In that Preview there is copy from the page, maybe a phone number and/or email address for the site, and sometimes even 5 deep links. So where is this information coming from?

It looks as if Bing is pulling the first content on the page and the first links. This isn’t so great if you’ve put a tag line at the top or Global navigation above your more-customer friendly links. Here I did a search for “diamond engagement rings” and found MySolitaire as the #3 result. The Preview included the first content on the page (double bonus, it also contained the terms “diamond”, “engagement”, and “rings”) and the first links.

But wait, there’s more to it. A search on “Lucero CDs” gives us Amazon as the #7 result. But its Preview copy is not what appears at the top of the page (and the code). Instead, the Preview pulls information father down; it is actually a customer review.

In this case it looks like Bing is pulling the first “unique” content on the page since many of Amazon’s pages share the same information at the top.  And the content it pulled did not contain “Lucero” or “CDs”.  In a few other results for different searches, it seems they are pulling content near the top but not what I would’ve guessed. So it seems like  Bing is looking for copy that:

• Is near the top of the page
• Is unique
• Has the keywords in it (which is like when there is no meta description and the SE pulls content from the page, that includes the keywords, for the description of the listing on the results page)

Bing is so new that I’m not suggesting your run out and change the key pages of your website to maximize what could be in the Preview window. But, if you are thinking about site optimization for Bing’s result, you might want to consider what content and links are at the top of your page and the copy around your prominent keywords for the page.

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Here is an excerpt from my post under the comic. Please visit and read the entire rant on link buying.

If you would listen to Google, and why wouldn’t you, you would be led to believe that they are against link buying and don’t reward sites who do buy links. In fact, they will penalize sites that do buy links. Don’t believe me? Read Google’s engineer Matt Cutt’s own words on buying and selling links. They even provide a handy dandy form to report paid links. Find a site selling links? Report them. Find a competitor buying links? Report them. Then, your site, which is honestly gathering links, should rise to the top of the rankings. Right?

Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.

Google has been caught selling links more than once. So they understand the temptation and financial rewards of selling a link. But the rewards can be much greater when buying a link: higher search rankings, more customers, more sales and more profits. But if link buying is really being stamped out by the big G, then why, oh why, are so many people doing it and dominating the search rankings?

Read the rest of rant.

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This month’s comic deals with the absurdity of the some of Google’s more spammy search results and touches on the sore point of Google rewarding black hat SEO when their own rules say don’t do it.

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• No related posts.

Search Engine Optimization, known as SEO, is the ability to rank a website in the top search results. That’s what we do here as an SEO Company. However there are times that clients need more than SEO, they need marketing, website functionality, and a plan to increase their ROI.

Clients either are well versed in Search Engine Optimization and need someone to do the heavy lifting, or they come with no knowledge of the subject, but know they need exposure to their websites and heard SEO is the way to go. The bottom line for most clients is an increase in profits. That’s what is measurable to their business. Increased web site visitors or traffic normally increases the bottom line or profit.

Big Oak SEO Company took on a new client in February 2009. The client had a successful brick and mortar store and ventured into the online arena. The client operates a Yahoo Store with over 300 products in a niche market. As their SEO Specialist along with our Keyword Researching Specialist we optimized their Yahoo Store for their keywords and started a link building campaign.

The net results in just over 1 month was an increase in $2,000 of sales, and a doubling of orders from the prior month. Under normal circumstances we would consider this a huge success. However the client was lacking a fundamental marketing tool for their website, namely a presence in Google Shopping.

This was beyond the scope of our SEO contract, but Google Shopping presence for this clients products would positively effect the clients ROI. After all ROI, Return on Investment is what the client is really after. Being ranked #1 for a term that doesn’t bring in sales will not benefit the client nor keep a happy customer.

It took a several hours over the course of a few days and several tweaks to establish, create and optimize a Google Base Feed for Google Shopping. (BTW this extra effort was free of charge - no extra billing.) In just 3 days after the first Google Feed went live, the Client reported their first sale from Google Shopping. I am still tweaking the feeds for Higher Google Shopping Results and the client is adding more products to the feed, but this is definitely a case where going the extra mile pays off.

In SEO it not only what you know, but who you know at times as well. Having a SEO Company that is well versed in Google Shopping, Google Adwords, Google Maps, Web Design and Web Functionality can mean the difference between Ranking and Rankings along with Increased ROI.

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“A public encyclopedia that anyone can write and edit, even without being logged in?!  And this concoction will serve as the sum of all human knowledge! Madness!” the critics wailed.

Today, it’s hard to imagine life without Wikipedia, which has blossomed into the 7th most popular website in the world¹ and inspired the creation of some 2.8 million articles on the English version of the site alone.  Recently, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales was kind enough to feed my questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s goals, likely future, and ballooning cultural relevance.  I also gave him an opportunity to respond to Wikipedia’s “professional troublemakers”–er critics.

How do you think Wikipedia will evolve as technology evolves?  Can you foresee, by say 2020, a way for Wikipedians to create editable, interactive videos about a topic?

I think we’ll see a lot of advances in video.  One of the things I like to point out is that Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technical innovation.  All the tools necessary to create Wikipedia existed in 1995 when Ward Cunningham invented the wiki editing concept.  Webserver, web browser, database, wiki.

What technologies already exist today for collaborative video editing that no one has created the social structures to use?

Well, having said that, I will also say that words are far more fluid than video, and always will be.  If I don’t quite like what you have written, I can adjust it slightly until we are both satisfied.  But once a video has been shot, there is a very limited set of things that can be done about it.

British-American author Andrew Keen, the self-described antichrist of Silicon Valley, gets a kick out of regularly blasting Wikipedia. I watched your February 2008 debate with Keen, and I agreed with some of Keen’s points, but I found his fixation on the length of Wikipedia articles to be a bit odd.  He pointed out that the Harry Potter article is longer than the Hamlet article, and because Hamlet is more historically significant, this somehow represents a shortcoming in Wikipedia.  Do you find his logic lacking?

I don’t think the words “Andrew Keen” and “logic” generally belong in the same sentence.  No, I’m just teasing!

I actually agree with _some_ of Keen’s points, as would any thinking person. But the overall thrust of his argument is not compelling to me.

Regarding the question of the length of Wikipedia entries, I don’t find the argument compelling at all.  Wiki is not paper, and it isn’t as if we “cut” the Hamlet entry in order to make more room for “Harry Potter”.  And I rather suspect that Keen would agree with me when I say that I wouldn’t find it a very good idea to push the Potter fans to write about Hamlet.

Some criticisms about Wikipedia entries of various lengths is actually misplaced simply due to how we slice-and-dice the world.  It is likely that our entry on “China” is shorter than our entry on “Harry Potter” too.  But that’s more because we have a short overview article on “China” and then break out specific topics into separate articles.

What happens normally is that when one entry gets too long, people will naturally want to break it up.  I have been told that Britannica’s entry on “World War II” is more than 100 pages long.  (I haven’t checked.) Wikipedia’s entry is much shorter, but our overall coverage of World War II is much more in-depth than Britannica.  It’s just that in the medium of HTML on the web, it makes little sense to force the reader to download a 100 page document.  Better to give them 5-10 pages in a chunk, with lots of hyperlinks and timelines to help them navigate thousands of pages of detailed material.

When I was a student at Ohio State, I had Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger as a philosophy professor.  Sanger had a policy that if you used Wikipedia as a source on a paper, you would receive an automatic five point deduction. Do you think Wikipedia is reliable enough at this stage to pass as a source on an academic paper?

I would do the same thing if I were teaching a course at a university. I would also deduct 5 points for citing Britannica.  This is simply not the proper role for an encyclopedia, no matter how good, in the research process.  A high quality encyclopedia is a starting point, giving us broad background knowledge and helping us to firmly and correctly fill in gaps, not an original source.  The right thing to do is to quickly read the Wikipedia entry to get your bearings, and then go read the original sources.

Do you still dispute Sanger’s designation as Wikipedia’s co-founder?

I think the whole debate is silly.  Ironically, I think Larry is given too little credit for his role in the early days of Wikipedia as the “editor-in-chief” of the project (his actual title).  He was an employee working fully under my direction with no ownership interest of any kind.

Wikia.com, another of your projects, gives people an opportunity to create and develop their own special-interest wiki communities. The site now boasts over 800,000 articles and some 200,000 registered users.  Is Wikia’s growth on pace with your expectations?

Yes, although we’re much bigger than 800,000 articles and 200,000 registered users.  We’ve been growing at a similar pace to Wikipedia, but being 3 years younger, we are 3 years smaller.  I think we’re just now beginning to enter the broader public consciousness, as Neilsen just named us as the 5th fastest growing community site.

Larry Sanger, now the Editor-and-Chief of Citizendium, takes jabs at Wikipedia on a Citizendium page titled Why Citizendium? He writes, “Wikipedia is full of serious problems. Many of the articles are written amateurishly. Too often they are mere disconnected grab-bags of factoids, not made coherent by any sort of narrative.”  Do you see any flaws in Citizendium’s model, and what do you think of Sanger’s decision to critique Wikipedia in what essentially is Citizendium’s sales pitch?

I think Larry’s right on that particular point, and this is a flaw of Wikipedia.  I don’t know if Citizendium (which I haven’t studied in depth) corrects for this or not.

One thing that happens at Wikipedia, particularly on controversial articles, is that the editors get really focused on sentence-by-sentence work on neutrality and factual accuracy.  That’s a great thing.  But what can get lost in the down-and-dirty search for those things is “flow” or what Larry once termed “Brilliant Prose”.

Usually, though, after a period of intense debate resulting in a neutral compromise version of an article that is unfortunately choppy in style, is that some thoughtful good writer who has no stake in the controversy will come in and work gently to make the article more readable.  Such people are the unsung heroes of the information revolution.

In 2007, Wikipedia decided to add no-follow tags to all of its external links. This drew the ire of some and sparked the creation of anti-Wikipedia wordpress plugins that automatically turn all the Wikipedia links on a person’s blog to nofollow.  Has the community’s decision to place no-follow tags around external links kept out spam, and do you think Wikipedia would ever decide to flip the switch back?

I was opposed to the change, and only reluctantly agreed to it after Matt Cutts of Google recommended it.  I am still not sure it is the right answer.  After all, Wikipedia prides itself on public service, and our external links are generally quite carefully vetted.

On the other hand, it is also true than when we were not using ‘nofollow’ we had a bigger problem with skeevy “SEO” experts doing everything they could to get Wikipedia links.  Even today, of course, a link in Wikipedia can drive a significant amount of traffic so we have to deal with inappropriate self-promotion.  But my vague sense is that the troubles have declined.

I don’t know of any pressure within the community to flip the switch back.

Apparently you sat at a long dinner table with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis at Wikimania in 2006, and during this dinner, Calacanis “begged you” (his words) to sell ads on Wikipedia.  He claimed that if you put a leaderboard up, Wikipedia would generate over $100 million a year.  He later offered a more modest revenue proposal, one that involved putting a search box on the Wikipedia.  He estimated this would make $6 million a year, which is ironic considering $6 million is what you raised last year via charitable donations.  Can you ever envision a scenario in which the Wikipedia community would agree to put ads on the site, especially in light of the fact that it met its $6 million donation goal last year?

Actually, I sat next to Jason, but I didn’t know who he was.  Afterwards, when he published his post about the dinner, I didn’t really remember him.  I regret saying so publicly, because this seems to have hurt Jason’s feelings. I was exhausted that evening, and the fault was entirely mine.

The thing is, lots and lots of people propose that Wikipedia should accept ads.  And it is not an unreasonable position.  I am opposed to it, but I am actually a moderate about it.

I think there is a set of circumstances in which the Wikipedia community would accept ads, but we are nowhere near it and I personally hope we never get there.  But, time will tell.

My view is that we should all - not just me, not just the board, not just the current community - but everyone who thinks of themselves as a citizen of the Internet, a citizen of the world - we should all think about Wikipedia as part of the infrastructure of the world, not a competitor in the Internet space, not just a website, but something deeper, cultural, and potentially of value to everyone.

As such, we should think about the long run - not the next quarter, not the next year, not the next 5 years.  What about 50 years?  What about 100 years?  What’s best for the world in the long run?

We desperately need to make sure that everyone on the planet has access to high quality information.  We are on a small and crowded planet that will get more crowded in this century.  We need to live together in peace and productivity.  We need to take individual rights seriously. We need to have political decisions that are rational and fact-based.

We need to have cultural and joy and art and love.

These are heavy responsibilities for us all.  And slapping a “leaderboard” on Wikipedia to bring in short-term revenue might not be the best plan.  (Or it might.  But we need to think like adults about it.)

Regarding your dinner with Calacanis, you wrote on your blog that “there were some very much more interesting people at the dinner.”   Have you and Calacanis patched things up, and do you admire, to some degree, Jason’s ability to get a rise out of people through what some call brilliant performance art?

I have come to admire Jason over time, and I very much regret and apologize for that blog post.

Jason and I are very different people.  He’s competitive, I’m collaborative.  He tries to get a rise out of people on a daily basis (and I hope he doesn’t take offense at that) and I try to be soothing and supportive.  But this means that when I throw someone “under the bus” (his phrase, not mine), it resonates deeply, whereas random statements by Jason don’t have as much impact.  So it’s really bad when I make a mistake like that.

Will it be harder or easier for you to reach a $6 million donation goal in 2009?

Since traffic is growing (according to Comscore) by 4% per month still, I think it will be easier to reach $6 million since we will be 66% larger in terms of reach by next fundraiser as compared to last fundraiser.

On the other hand, I suppose everyone is watching with nervousness about the financial crisis!

You’ve set a tone that Wikipedia has a much deeper responsibility to the world than to act, simply, as a giant encyclopedia.  In what ways do you think Wikipedia will permanently change the fabric of humanity?

Well, if we do our job right, we will be a positive change for the world.  Wikipedia will be a little bit dry, a little bit uncontroversial, but a place where people of all stripes turn for clear explanations and information that allows them to have more difficult debates in a rational and evidence-based manner.

Did you catch this CollegeHumor.com satire of Wikipedia?  Did you find it amusing?

Hilarious!

I’d like to see a roundtable discussion involving you, Andrew Keen, Jason Calacanis, Noam Chomsky, and Ron Paul.  55 minutes into the discussion, a thunderous gong would go off and a mystery guest would emerge and immediately inject himself into the conversation.  As odd as this sounds, I am 100% serious about one day setting this up. There’s no doubt a video of the event would serve as tremendous linkbait–quite an interesting collection of people. Would you participate in this roundtable discussion if your airfare was paid for?

Yes, gladly.  What an interesting set of characters.

You can follow Jimmy Wales on Twitter at @Jimmy_Wales and read his blog at blog.jimmywales.com.

Image credits: William Brawley

¹based on Quantcast numbers

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As any quality SEO company will tell you, link building is crucial to any successful SEO campaign. Of course your on-site optimization needs to be done right - keyword density, the right titles and so forth, but without links you are left with a site no one will ever find via the search engines.

At Big Oak SEO link building is part of the monthly work we do for our client and it is mandatory. Often I will talk with unhappy clients coming to us from other SEO companies, and they will complain, rightly so, the fact that they spent thousands of dollars with little to show for it. My first question is what type of link building did they do? A moment of silence usually follows and then the response, “I’m not sure.” or “None.” Well, besides the fact that every client should know exactly what their SEO company is doing, I am shocked that any true company who claims to be providing SEO services is not heavily involved in link building.

And a few minutes of sleuthing it is easy to see that little to no link building was done and the client was basically paying for a ranking report to be run every month. Too many suspect “SEO companies” rely on an initial optimization and then cross their fingers and hope for the best. Or more likely they just don’t care and look for the next desperate site owner to come along. A churn and burn mentality is prevalent in the SEO industry.

Why is this? I think it is this way because link building, or more precisely, link finding is hard work and takes a lot of time and time is money. A successful SEO campaign needs to include link building which increases time and money. Money the client doesn’t want to pay, so the SEO company gives a low price to win the work and then does site optimization and then runs reports for 3 or 6 months until the site owner fires them. Meanwhile, 6 more unknowing clients sign up and the scam repeats itself.

Before you hire a search engine optimization firm, be sure they are doing the hard work - securing quality links to your site on a consistent basis. The focus of this post does not allow me to get into the types of links, but quality counts, so be sure they are building links that will help your rankings. I wrote a post on the perfect link if you are interested.

We joke in this month’s SEO comic Link Building 500 that this process can take on a race-like mentality and can be grueling, much like a NASCAR race, but that comparison doesn’t lie far from the truth. Usually the site with the best links and the most links wins the race to the top of the search results. But getting to the winner’s circle can take a lot of laps and that means larger budgets.

If you are an SEO company don’t insult or set up your clients for bad results, be up front and let them know that links will need to be created and it will increase the costs. If you are looking for and SEO company, I would say give us a call at 804.741.6776, but whoever you choose, be sure a link building plan is in place. Your site’s success will depend on it.

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For example, what if you created a series of assignments to roll out over the life of your work with the client starting with each staff member tagging the company on delicious, then digging some page(s) on the site that they like, then creating their own lens on Squidoo.com, etc.

Providing instructions for your clients on how to do this would be part of the SEO consulting work you should be doing for your clients.

SEO is hard work and many hands make light work as my Mom used to say. Get your client’s involved and they will appreciate you efforts all the more and feel like they are part of the process and the success.

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However you really have to wonder when their estimating algorithm has trouble counting to 17 as illustrated below with screenshot snippets from the first two pages of results I witnessed today.

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Talk about the genesis of CNNBrk.  Why did you decide to make it?

Back before @cnnbrk, I was looking for a way to get breaking news alerts onto a mobile device in any way possible; I wanted to feel connected even when I was out. It was sort of systemic from 9/11–knowing when to go find a TV set began to make more sense. It took me a while to find the CNN alerts.  Back then it was all desktop tickers or other more convoluted streams (I even spoke to Reuters to see if access to their output was feasible). With the advent of Twitter, especially when it still delivered to my cell phone (I’m in the UK), it seemed like the easiest way to solve that problem, and so @cnnbrk was born.

Did you actively promote the account at the beginning or was its growth mostly organic?

This was the first announcement: http://twitter.com/imajes/status/1963133 - almost two years ago! I didn’t really do much else to promote it; I didn’t really have to. I have tweaked the page a bit to ensure it has decent Google rankings.  The account is the 3rd or 4th listing for “CNN breaking news,” which is nice. At no point has Twitter even mentioned it in a blog post or email, so it’s been very organic.

You’ve mentioned that CNN has been in contact with you.  Describe the nature of this contact.  Have they given you their blessing?

We’ve had a few conversations. Blessing is a difficult word in mainstream media, but certainly the guys over at CNN have done a lot to protect and help me.

Do you think the sheer popularity of the account was what prevented CNN from forcing you to pull the plug?

The popularity has been a defining factor, certainly. I think CNN is aware of the real costs involved with seizing accounts and have done the right kinds of things so far to keep the status quo.

Your bot was at the center of controversy during the summer Olympics. When Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal of the Olympics, many Twitter users who planned on watching a taped, prime-time version of the event complained that @cnnbrk had spoiled the surprise for them.  I found it bizarre that Twitter users who opted into a breaking news service would whine about receiving breaking news.  What was your reaction?

Yeah, it’s a tough one. I certainly felt for the people who were looking forward to seeing the Olympics without the result being pre-empted.  But I think it’s the same as any action replay: you avoid all forms of media till the game is on. There’s a great episode of The Simpsons where Homer ends up running around Springfield avoiding the score, only to be told it by Marge just before the game is on. At the end of the day, the world doesn’t stop, so news doesn’t stop. We’re very much in a 24 hour news cycle, where a story might live or die in the space of just a few minutes–you can’t expect it to pause.

I would think that a better reaction should have been for people to realize the potential for this to happen and choose how they wanted to avoid it. It was pretty amazing to see everyone pile on after the Bolt time and records were announced, as if people hadn’t had enough warning yet!

From my perspective, I chose not to pause the updates.  There’s a healthy percentage of followers who are non American, and therefore un-encumbered by NBC’s tape delay.

When did it first hit you that your account was, for lack of a better phrase, “famous on Twitter?”

I knew early on that I was trending in the top ten/top five Twitter users; a bit of insider info and solid circumstantial evidence pointed me there. With the growth of tracking apps like twittercounter.com it’s more apparent. It also makes you realize you have to be responsible with how you choose to behave with it.  I’ve been more and more careful not to add any non-CNN content into the feed of late, for example.

According to TwitterCounter.com, your account grows by an average rate of 275 followers a day.  Assuming that your account’s growth can keep pace with the growth of Twitter, you’ll have over 170,000 followers within a year.  Do you think this is likely to happen or do you see Twitter’s growth flat-lining?

Actually, the number is a bit depressed, and I’ve not seen any new sign-ups. I think the account has been temporarily flagged, which is annoying. I do fully expect to see the account scale in the same way twitter does. I think it’s responsible for a large number of new twitter users who discover it by Googling for breaking news. But it is also the sort of low volume account that people should subscribe to almost right away.  It’d be great to see it as a suggested account, a sort of “Myspace Tom” if you like.

You can follow James on Twitter at @imajes, and if you’re not already receiving breaking news updates, you can join the masses at @cnnbrk.

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Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months. - From TechCrunch

Wow, Yahoo! has certainly fallen from those halcyon days when they ruled the Internet. But this news is really more important because it tells the SEO community that you should not be overlooking the video world of YouTube.com. Big Oak SEO has been stepping up its efforts into the video marketing world and this is a sure sign that it was a good move on our behalf. Are you using the power of video for your product or service? It would be a mistake not to and it is a lot more affordable than you think.

And lest you think your videos would only show up if someone is searching on Youtube.com, take a look at the screen shot below. I did a search for cheap wine (don’t ask) and the screen shot shows the last results on page 1 of Google’s search results. Yes, you see two videos from Youtube.com. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your video there if you are a wine seller.

Results for Cheap Wine. Notice the last results are videos from Youtube.com

I have also seen video results in the #4 position on Google’s search results and I’m sure this will only continue to happen more in the future. Don’t sell your service or product short, anything that can be marketed on the web can have video marketing to support it. Make sure it is part of your Internet marketing plan.

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