Search Engine Reports

Search Engine Reports

June, 2007
If you are in the habit of checking your search engine rankings in Google by hand, you may have noticed that the #1 position has been supplanted by an item from one of Google's vertical engines - usually from Google News, Google Maps, or Google Video. This is a frustrating development for those who are already on page 1 for their key phrases. But it is also an opportunity to get a #1 position. If you can get listed in one of Google's verticals, you might find yourself at the top of Google's universal search results - even if your site is new and Google is otherwise ignoring it. Video, in particular, is a good way to market your product or service. Not all keyword searches will bring up a video from Google Video, however. Right now, searches including the words "how to" and "guide" are more likely to have this result; and it's possible that such searches do not indicate an intention to buy. But it doesn't hurt to submit your videos to Google Video, or to YouTube (now owned by Google), or to think about creating one.

A business search on Google Maps now brings up a smaller map, along with more information about the listed companies. Instead of just an address and phone number, we now see photos, sometimes, and starred (or unstarred) reviews. Clicking on a listing brings up more information about the business. If you haven't submitted your site to Google Local yet, you should. Getting your location's photo listed will almost certainly increase your click-through rate.

As Google continues to track how long users spend on indexed sites before they click away, rankings will be based, more and more, on popularity and relevance, not relevance and inbound links. Google's purchase of Feedburner, an RSS feed network for bloggers, seems to confirm this, at least in terms of Google Blogs. Feedburner allows bloggers to track their subscribers as well as click-throughs on their posts. With Feedburner, Google will know as much as the bloggers do about traffic on their blogs.

Google has been beta-testing a new Adwords feature that will allow advertisers to see where their ads appear on the AdSense network, so they can remove them from low-quality sites that convert poorly.

Yahoo introduces support for a new "robots-nocontent" tag that allows you to "tell" their spider which content on your web page to ignore. It is best used on content that has nothing at all to do with your topic, such as legal disclaimers.

Microsoft buys advertising network aQuantive, presumably for its ad network and ad serving technology, indicating a move toward beefing up its ad publishing and pay-per-click programs.

Microsoft released an experimental search engine, Imagine Live Search, displaying their normal search results in the main part of the page and results from their vertical engines along the right-hand side. Unfortunately, most of these were irrelevant to user queries. Like their operating systems, this engine was hatched a bit too soon.

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I increased traffic to one website from 200 to 9,000 visitors per month with search engine optimization alone.

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