Microformats

At the Atlanta SEMPO meeting last night Topher Kohan from CNN spoke on Microformats. Microformats are not new, but they are being used in new ways that affect search. Topher predicts the release of a standardized open source set of microformat tags from the major search engines within the next couple years and states that this will have a huge impact for the future of SEO.

Microformats are a way to provide additional information about content on the web. Significantly microformats make the information portable in other applications. Microformats can enable data items to be indexed, searched, saved, cross-referenced, reused, or combined. With the emergence of social media this additional information can be very useful to users as well as search engines.

Last year Google introduced Rich Snippets which allow them to provide search results with extra relevant information like votes or ratings:

Microformats & Video Optimization

Microformats seem to be particularly relevant for video content. The challenge is no longer getting indexed. Google indexes content extremely quickly to include a tremendous amount of video. With so many videos being indexed it is more difficult for Google to recognize what video should be served for a particular query. Wrapping the video in microformats can help it to rank in the search engines.

Facebook Share helps you to follow where your content goes after it leaves your site. When you use Facebook share you can access a report that will tell you where your video is being embedded, how many views it is getting.

Yahoo Search Monkey allows you to share structured data to help Yahoo display an enhanced result similar to rich snippets.

In September Google announced that they were going to start supporting Facebook share and Yahoo search monkey RFDa Microformat tagging. Topher demonstrated this with actual numbers from his use of microformats with CNN video content. More news and examples are available at http://microformats.org/

I think that it is important to point out that microformats do not trump the other major search ranking factors. As Topher explained, if two pages are equal in terms of all of the major ranking factors, microformats can help one of the pages perform better in search.

Topher also mentioned the microformats cheat sheet which will be useful to guide our efforts in this area.

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Google’s Real Time Search was launched in early December so that is still too recent for the SEO community to effectively reverse engineer anything about how the ranking is done. Everything is very speculative so far, but I can share what I have:

In Google’s description of Real Time Search it describes that the results can come from Twitter and FriendFeed as well as headlines from news and blog posts (more complete list below). Later on they are supposed to also be incorporating information from Facebook and MySpace. Bing will also incorporate Facebook updates into their real-time search although they do not yet have a deal with MySpace.

No clear patterns have emerged as to what rankings the real-time search updates will fall between in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Sometimes it is at the very top, sometimes in the middle, sometimes not at all. Danny Sullivan describes how Google decides whether or not to incorporate real-time updates into the SERPs after a conversation with Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who heads Google’s ranking systems and oversaw the development of the new real time search system – “In other words, if Google thinks something has some real-time component to it, then it will show the section. In particular, if Google sees a spike in information on a certain topic, along with queries on a particular topic, then it assumes there’s a real time situation happening — very simplified!”

What currently comes up in Google Real-Time Search:

• Tweets from Twitter
• Content from Google News
• Content from Google Blog Search
• Newly created web pages
• Freshly updated web pages
• FriendFeed updates
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates

Continued from the Danny Sullivan article: “How the information ranked? Singhal said only information deemed highly relevant is included. So spammy tweets, low quality pages and other content might not make it into the real time search “layer” that is used. After that, results are ranked by time.”

Scrutinizing some of the statements made by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, might reveal more clues “… authoritativeness exists there as well and there are signals there that indicate it. So for example, retweets and replies and the structure of how the people in that ecosystem relate to each other. You can actually use some of our learnings from PageRank in order to develop a, say, a Updates Rank, or an Updater Rank for the specific people who are posting. So this is something we are beginning to experiment with but it is interesting to see that same parallel where PageRank looks at links you can actually look at the very mechanisms inside of these update streams and sense the authoritativeness the same way.” This would seem to suggest that it is the authority of the profile of the user (how many high quality followers or friends you have) as well as whether and how much a person has been retweeted will be taken into account.

There is also some speculation about it evolving toward social search – which would make the results somewhat personalized – the people you follow would be more likely to come up in the real time search.

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For years Yahoo has had a paid inclusion program called Search Submit. You would pay a small fee to get hundreds of URLs listed in the Yahoo “Organic” listings (of course, this makes it slightly less “Organic”) but, ethics aside this has been a great program and I’ve seen it make a lot of companies great return on investment especially for ecommerce. The fact that this program was a great way to develop low cost highly targeted traffic was a not-so-closely guarded secret among ecommerce experts, many of which were upset to hear that Yahoo would end Search Submit this year.

Surprisingly a similar program may be re-emerging from the most unlikely of sources. Google has been a long time critic of any type of program that would spoil the impeccable standards of their search results. As this article discusses, the examples of Google experimenting with paid inclusion was within Google Products Search – whether that makes it less fishy is a judgment call.

Status: Confirmed – SSP is dead.

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I am consistently surprised to see professional websites failing to use links in content. This is an important part of the content strategy for several reasons. Links in content are probably the best way to help search engine spiders understand the structure of your site, understand which pages are important and deserve to be ranked higher for specific topics. As discussed in my post Improve Bounce Rate, links within content represent one of the most important factors of usability and conversion architecture – another way to say this is that used correctly, links in content help visitors to your website find what they’re looking for, and that makes them more likely to convert into customers.

Search engines no longer consider only the anchor text of the links. They now take into consideration the context in which the link is placed.

Humans follow links in content using descriptive anchor text like scent trails leading them to their object of interest. One of the reasons that links in content are so good for this is that the content is where the users eyes are looking. Without putting the links in content you expect them to look up, review the navigation to determine the brilliant information architecture of the website, and then navigate to the page where you’re going to make your sales pitch.

The fact that this practice is good for organic SEO while simultaneously improving the usability of your website makes it a rock solid best practice.

There are great examples of using links in content throughout the website for The Community Foundation of Atlanta especially on their Atlanta Charitable Giving page.

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So the common problem with Twitter (or any microblog) is that most URLs are too long to fit into a 140 character message (and still have room for the message).

There have been a few solutions for this, my favorite at this time is a Stumbleupon tool that serves double duty

• Shortens the URL
• Tracks how many people clicked it and at what time
• Shows who retweeted the shortened URL
• One click to submit to Stumbleupon
• Shows who ‘liked’ it in Stumbleupon in the lower right

Here is a pretty good review of the tool by Tim Ferriss

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/09/stumble-upon-supr/

The url for the tool is http://su.pr/ – it may still be in beta but you should be able to use the code suprbeta to get an account.

Below are SU.PR screenshots from an article on Viral Video Metrics I wrote for Talentzoo and tweeted.

Do you have a URL shortening tool that you prefer? Tell us why it’s great!

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There was an article in the New York Times today describing a very important test that went on at the end of 2008. This test was performed by Yahoo and several major newspapers to see how well the two could work together to aid each other in serving advertisements.

Yahoo was able to serve ads on the newspapers websites and vice versa. These ads were targeted to the reading behavior of the users.

“a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.

This allows publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not only on travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel. “

By all accounts this cooperation has been a wonderful success in an otherwise challenging year for both parties.

Old Meets New

What struck me as interesting was that during this 2 week test old media veterans were introduced to some of the virtues of online advertising.

The marketing industry is in a very interesting stage. The veteran marketers are struggling to fully understand that capabilities of online marketing. Permission based marketing is replacing repetition marketing. Those who are positioned on the crest of these two waves should count themselves very fortunate.

Danger Lurking in a Strong Position

As an internet marketer I would recommend you pause to consider the potential danger in this otherwise enviable position.

A great number of the young marketers are limiting themselves to online media. In the short term this makes good sense. There is huge demand for online marketing – even in a down economy it’s not hard to get a job if you understand search engine marketing. Companies need search worse than ever. Online marketing is intuitive for a lot of young people who grew up understanding computers and how they work, for whom the internet is not just a series of tubes. On the other hand, the old media veterans have a vast pool of knowledge that will be left untapped if the youth don’t seek them as mentors.

In this article Mike Carlton talks about the lost art of mentoring and why it is so important for the next generation of advertising professionals.

Don’t forget them just because you’re well positioned on the latest trend.

Another strong reason to consider reaching out is the vast supply of connections that these industry veterans have. A very talented internet marketer will quickly realize that skills will only take you so far. At a certain point it breaks down to who you know. Whether it is a direct connection or a friend of a friend, at some point you will unexpectedly need the help of a specialist. It is so important that young internet marketers don’t become silos. Without someone to add the extra umph to your campaign, point out a mistaken assumption, correct your perspective or otherwise point you in the right direction, you might find yourself struggling with a losing battle.

There is a mentoring program at AMA Atlanta.

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On the Google Blog Avinash Kaushik wrote a post on Bounce Rate that begins a series called The Power of Measurement.

Lesson one is on Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate is a very easy metric to understand. For that reason it is always one of the first concepts I talk about to my clients that need help deciphering their web analytics.

What does a bounce mean from a user experience perspective?

Bounce Rate is a very important metric because it illustrates one of the biggest problems from a webmaster perspective. It has become normal human behavior to enter a website with the understanding that if you don’t instantly see what you want then you go back to where you were and try something else.

Think about what this means to you as you leave the offending site. You weren’t able to find what you wanted. This doesn’t always mean that the site did not have what you wanted. It means that you were not able to instantly find it. If it is buried two layers deep it doesn’t matter because you are long gone. Even if the path to get there is perfectly clear, if you didn’t see it you are out of there.

What can you do to make it more likely that the person finds what they want on your site?

Well, I’ll give you a hint, pretty much every website now has conventional top navigation. Home, About Us, Services, Articles. These days the problem is seldom confusing navigation.

If it is not the top navigation then what could it be?

Well there are the typical special offers on the sidebar. We hold onto the expectation that people will read enough to decide that they want to do business with us and then go over to the sidebar to let us know. It is possible to improve the graphical appeal of side offers, or even the value proposition, but there is another way.

If you look at some of the most succesful sites on the web you will notice that many of them have something in common. Perhaps more convincingly, take a look at the websites run by people who are conversion and usability experts. You will notice one major trend:

Calls to Action in the Content of the page

Typically when you visit a website you begin by reading the headline. If the headline connects with you then you begin reading or scanning the content of the page. (Why do we expect them to stop reading and find our call to action somewhere else?) Put the call to action right in front of them where their eyes are in the content of the page. Use trigger words that correspond to the user’s motivation for coming to the site. Don’t give them too many choices.

Example of a good call to action in content:

Look right at the very post that inspired this one: At the end of the content Avinash says “check out this article on my web analytics blog”

Do you effective use calls to action in content?

Is there a reason you haven’t?

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Google Analytics Training Series

The Google team is gradually providing the public with more free information about how best to install, configure, and use Google Analytics to its fullest. Training is going to continue to be really important to get the kind of adoption rates they want for this service. The Google Analytics Blog has its own YouTube channel with brief instructional videos. People like Avinash Kaushik and Raku Coryne travel to distant cities to share the good news about web analytics. Raku was even kind enough to send me a free copy of Avinash’s book Web Analytics an Hour a Day.

In my opinion some aspects of the training are over simplified in a way that is similar to the Adwords training. In a way it is an edu-marketing where they sell you as they are training you on how to use the service. The nuts and bolts of making Google Analytics work from a technical perspective are slightly more complicated than the way that they portray (3 clicks and you’re tracking your ROI!). And that is just the technical implementation. You still need a web analyst to interpret the data and develop actionable insights.

Of course advanced segmentation in Google Analytics is the most exciting news for me since I got Ninjas in my Gmail. Months ago I actually emailed Avinash personally to ask him if this was possible in Google Analytics (I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t already know whether it was possible or not). Turns out it was not available at that time.

I always find it interesting to keep tabs on what is still missing from Google Analytics. Some of the major factors are the lack of the ability to control your own data, house it on your own server, reprocess it, combine it with other historical data, etc. That coupled with the fact that Google will not maintain this data forever – they currently estimate that they will be dropping data every 2 years. It is still a fantastic free tool, but there is an important gap that must be filled by a paid provider and it is really important to know where that gap is and how it will affect you and your business.

Tracking ecommerce

There are several important ecommerce metrics that are easily trackable in Google Analytics. There is a description of the technical implementation here. You can of course measure the visitor engagement to include the following and more:

• Adwords Keywords generating the most profit – Because of Google’s broad match you can be a little misled here if you are not careful. The phrases you see in google analytics won’t be the exact phrases that brought people to your website. The good news is that the exact phrases are available with a little bit of customization.

• Revenue Per Click, ROI, and Margin – Crucial metrics to determine the health of your online marketing efforts.

• Average Order Value – It is crucial to take average order value into account when you are analyzing data surrounding user behavior. Always check because if you make decisions based on trends of the majority you could be alienating a big spending minority.

• Overall revenue per marketing channel – Use this to determine which channel deserves more attention and resources and what is completely useless.

Limitations

It is also important to understand what metrics cannot be easily tracked:

One important metric from this perspective which is not available in Google Analytics is latency. Latency is often measured and analyzed grouped with recency and frequency. Recency describes the amount of time between the first time someone visits a site and the subsequent visits. Latency describes it takes for that person to turn into a customer – make a purchase fill out a conversion form or take whatever action is desired on the site.

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As many of you know I’ve recently finished my Web Analytics class at the University of British Columbia. I was incredibly fortunate to have the renowned analyst and lecturer Stephane Hamel as my teacher for this session. In very few occupations do you get the opportunity to be taught by the very top industry professionals. In this case I think that Web Analytics is still such a young industry that so many of the great minds are still clustered around WAA, Yahoo Web Analytics Groups, and the first Web Analytics Classes at UBC and I am taking full advantage!

Accept Coaching (at the right price)

I can attribute a great deal of my success to accepting coaching from the right people. One of the best ways to do this is to hire them personally. It seems that a natural side product of engaging with someone for a consulting gig is to gain access to their opinions and expertise in the subject in general.

Group Coaching

When it isn’t possible to hire someone for one on one coaching it is a good practice to engage with the expert in a group setting. This costs less and in many cases can be just as beneficial. One thing I’ve learned with regard to this is that in a group the teacher will generally favor the person who is the most inquisitive and proactive and give them more personal attention, in which case you are getting 1 on 1 coaching but you are paying group prices.

Recently my good friend Sally Shields decided to release her personal coaching program to the public. The next round is set to begin January 5th and it will fill up soon.

Turn you and your book into an Amazon.com bestseller while increasing  your visibility,  credibility and revenue!   A 5 week mentoring course with bestselling author Sally Shields— 100% money-back guaranteed.  If you’re ready to reach more readers  with your message and your book, this may be just the  course you have been looking for.  Begins in early January.

http://www.sallyshields.com/coaching/

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The team really did a fantastic job on the Freedom Ops website. This one might win an award. It is a site for children to report to once they purchase one of the officially licensed U.S. Military Special Operations Toys. There will be games and all sorts of fun things for them to interact with on the site.

Since most of the site is Flash we are going to have some interesting challenges in tracking the activity on the site. There are various events on the site which we will want to track which are not necessarily pageviews. We want to track every time a user downloads an image, watches a video, or interacts with Flash in some way.

Fortunately Google Analytics just announced that they were event tracking which is designed to track AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, widgets. Stephane Hamel makes some good points about event tracking in his blog post on Google Analytics Event Tracking. There is also more information about this on the Google Analytics Blog.

Are you encountering tracking challenges?

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