SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Some people think it is an acronym for Put My Website On The First Page Of Google. That would be PMWOTFPOG.
The job of SEO is to optimize your website for indexing by search engines. There is a relationship between how well your site is optimized SEO and its search engine results placement SERP. That relationship is simple. If you optimize your website at least you will not be shooting yourself in the foot. Continue reading
What is my search engine results placement?
Open a google search page. http://www.google.com
In the search box type in site:www.your-domain-name.com (note: replace your-domain-name.com with the name of your domain.)
Press the go button. If you see no results whatsoever, then you are not even indexed in google. Continue reading
While working on an SEO posting for my other blog it became necessary to find a search expression that would return only a few results. I wanted to find a search phrase for which there would only be a few pages that matched.
Silly me, for some reason I figured “tattooing pigs” would yield few, if any, results. Did you know that tattooing pigs is a huge endeavor on this planet. Artists all over the world are using our swine buddies as canvases for their art. Go to google, type in “tattooing pigs” and press the search button. You will find somewhere in the neighborhood of 723,000 pages on the topic of tattooing pigs. That’s almost a million pages on the topic. I would have lost that bet. Tattooed Poultry is even worse — 3,730,000 results.
A “left-handed monkey wrench” has only 12,000 search results. Turns out that this is an unusually low number.
When I started this hunt for search terms with low results I had no idea how truly weird the situation had become. Alas, I need to find a nice corner and go catatonic for a while.
At least good ol’ “morphotony” still only had 64 results.
p.s. If you want to see the end of this hunt check out “Walk In Traffic” on my SEO blog
A Walk In is either a customer that happens to travel past your store and decide on the spur of the moment to drop in or they are a person whose original soul has departed his or her body and has been replaced with a new soul, either temporarily or permanently.
In this blog we are referring to customers. So please put your marketing thinking cap on.
Once upon a time, long long ago, in a land far far away a website would receive a far bit of walk in or drop by traffic. These are people that just happened to locate and visit your website through the vagaries of the internet.
Those days appear to be long gone. Unless you do something to deliberately promote traffic to your website it is most likely that you will receive zero traffic.
Let’s look at some numbers to see why this might be.
If you expect to get traffic from a walk in they will need to see your page in the search engine results page. To see your page in they search engine results page, they need to have done a search. So what is the average number of searches performed per day?
Thus your total potential exposure is 213 million per day. That is if all of the above searches are for your keyword combinations. How many searches are there for your keyword combination? Great question. So far I have found no answers. Google is extremely protective of actual numbers. They will give you graphs depicting trends and hot searches. But they do not give actual numbers on these charts.
For example, if you look up the search trend on “obama birthday” you will find a dramatic increase in August. But there are no numbers shown. Just the percentage increase.
This is an unfortunate gap in our ability to get a handle on what is happening. Deliberate I’m sure. But unfortunate.
So let’s just make up some numbers to illustrate the process. Let’s assume that out of the 213 million searches per day 1% are on your exact keyword combination. This is an absurdly high number. That would mean 2.13 million people a day could potentially see your page in the search engine results. But what page are you on? And how many pages into the results can you reasonably expect people to dig?
On rare occasions I will dig three pages into the search results. How many pages will you dig? Two? Three? Ten? If you are not on page 1, 2, or 3 you can pretty much drop any expectation of being found in the search results.
This is the situation for most people. Most folks do not show up in the top of the search results. This means that either they receive zero traffic or they promote.
But, wait a minute I thought the holy grail of SEO was going to get me on the front page of google search results. Check out a short discussion on my take concerning what SEO is.
Now that the internet is a vast wasteland filling with trillions of web pages the accidental visitorship of days gone by are long gone.
Today there is little or no accidental visitorship. Count on promotion. Don’t even dream you can bait a hook, drop it in the water and hope for a bite. It could happen, but it’s not very likely.
It is simple to play.
It is not occult. No hidden features to unlock or special moves to learn.
Every game is unique. Pong has endless possibilities.
Pong rewards dedicated play: it has a gradient of mastery.
It is an elegant representation. Pong is a depiction of Ping Pong. The similar nature to a physical
representation provides linkages to stored associations to the represented game.
It is social. Pong is a game of interaction and spectatorship.
It has a cool sound. The pong sound made when the square (ball) is hit by the line (paddle) is satisfying. The sound is not unpleasant. It is positive feedback that one has succeeded in positioning the paddle. It signals a brief reprieve while the ball is in their court.
It is fun.
Digging through Google’s advice to webmaster you will find many useful suggestions and reminders.
In doing this one will come upon a definition for the three main components of a high quality website:
Along with the definition for these three main components, Google offers a covenant “Maintaining a positive user experience in these areas will help improve your site’s landing page quality.”
Strong words. Google is very invested in the promotion of quality websites that give users a positive user experience. In fact, they put their money where their mouth is. When bidding with adwords for position in the SERP (search engine results page) the higher the quality of your landing page the less you have to pay for top position. That’s right. You pay less per click for the best spot if your page is higher quality than the competition. More about this later. For the moment just take it as read that they are very invested in promoting quality websites with quality user experience. Continue reading
In Part #1 of this article we discussed the contribution of “relevant, original, (and authentic) content” to the quality of a landing page. In this (the second part) we shall address the role of transparency.
This is a totally different type of consideration. Now we move past consideration of content into considerations of relationship. You have a relationship with your visitor. This relationship may be brief. This relationship is long-distance. But you have a relationship. And as will all relationships transparency is important.
Anyone that you relate to wants to know three basic things: Continue reading
In Part #1 of this article we discussed the contribution of “relevant, original, (and authentic) content” to the quality of a landing page.
In Part #2 of this article we discussed the contribution of “transparency” to the quality of a landing page. In this (the third part) we shall address the role of navigation .
Why does navigability enter into the calculation of page ranking? Or in other words, how does navigability enter into the question of page quality?
The answer to this lies in the question of “quality of experience” for the visitor. If a website has bad navigation, then a visitor’s experience of that website will be diminished. Remember all of this stems from Google’s interest in the quality of experience for visitors to their SERP (search engine results page). If clicking on an ad leads to a page which makes the visitor regret clicking on the ad in the first place, that reflects badly on Google. And more importantly, if visitors have a bad experience clicking on ad buttons they will be less likely to click on future ad buttons. And, dear reader, is Google being paid per view or per click? Continue reading
Humans love to find patterns – we are pattern finding machines.
In Half-Real Jesper Juul defines a game as thus:
“A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.”
I would modify this definition slightly:
“A game is a rule delineated system with a variable and knowable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different significance, the players’ efforts influence the outcome, the player is identified with the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” Continue reading
There is quite a debate amongst web designers about the relative merits of using zoom vs. using font size to make a page more accessible. Many folks lobby for font-size as the option of choice. Others suggest that zoom is a better representation of page content since it preserves the original layout — just larger or smaller.
My mother has severe Macular Degeneration. I have watched how she works with her various magnifying tools. She is quite used to scrolling both vertical and horizontal. It has become part of her life style.
However, zoom as it is implemented is missing one very significant feature. I call it the “photoshop hand”. Photoshop just happens to be the first place I was introduced to this UI tool. By combining a keyboard shortcut with the mouse one can “grab” the canvas and move it around. It can be moved up, down, left, right, and at any angle. This is very convenient for navigating an image that is larger than the view port.
I have not found this movement tool in the Firefox Zoom feature. If there is one please let me know, my mother will be most pleased. As it is the keyboard arrow keys to some good effect.
If Zoom is designed for use by the visually impaired then it would make sense for it to duplicate the look AND feel of the equipment already in use — such as the table top overhead project type camera and screen. Or, at least for the UI (user interface) designers to study those tools for a bit.
Obviously computer browsers could have expanded functionality beyond the mechanically limited user interface of desktop camera systems. For example, a simple button to jump from h? to h? within a page might be nice. These are semantically the deliminators of distinct areas of a page. Whether or not this would truly be a good idea is left to testing. And testing is something that seems to be missing from many of the accessibility features at the moment.