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SEO - Web Strategy - Communications

How Google Reposts Old Stories As New Stories

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Barry Schwartz has a great article over at SearchEngineLand that goes through how Google may be mistaking old stories as new. This of course caused great concern when a third-party analyst for Bloomberg put up an old story about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy which was flagged as current!

Schwartz pulls up a story from Google news which shows as a new story:

Google News Result shows old story as new
Google News Result shows wrong date on SERP

It seems that Google grabbed that date from the top of the page where the current date is displayed, not a crazy thing to do, but in this case – wrong.

This is something I guess all news outlets need to think about going forward.

Google’s Image Search

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Have you ever found yourself wondering why some of the images from your site don’t show up in Google’s image search?

There a few things you should check on …

1. Are the images are discoverable, crawlable, indexable, and not being blocked by SafeSearch.  To do
this, go to images.google.com and do an image site search i.e.  [site:seo.1918.com].  To check if images might be blocked by SafeSearch, click the link below the search box to toggle your SafeSearch settings.

2.  Image rankings and inclusions steme from many factors beyond alt text and title tags.  Image rankings also consider the ranking of the parent or linking page, meaning that if the parent or linking page does not provide enough information or rank well, then Google may not have enough confidence to serve those images as results to their users. (see official Google explaination)

The Power of StumbleUpon

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Traffic from StumbleUpon is valuable. In my opinion, more valuable than Drudge taffic. Traffic that is driven to your site from Matt Drudge’s site, is fleeting, because his stories fall into the “immediate” news cycle. You will have a big spike for a day or two, but those folks never seem to return. StumbleUpon, on the other hand, seems to drive more traffic over a longer period with stories that usually have a slightly longer life.

There are other socialized news feeds like fark and Technorati, but I think StumbleUpon is the easiest to just jump on with your normal everyday stories. Take a look at the “buzz” page for StumbleUpon, do you have a story up there?

RM put in nicely at Pick RiteSEO:

As more poeple stumble through your URL, and leave review (icing on cake) your website ranks higher on StubleUpon which gets hits in thousands every day. So the formula is, the more stumbles, the higher the stumble ranks, the quicker SPIDER crawls through your URL.. followed by unique hits by actual visitors.

McClatchy’s Compete Rankings

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Compete is one of several services that aims to provide data about website traffic levels based on intelligence gathered from ISPs, toolbar usage data and other sources. Compete shows a rank (from 1 – the most popular site on the web, all the way into the 10s of millions – for very low traffic sites) for each site it has collected data about and displays it on a trends page.

The Compete Rank is based on Unique Visitors and does not consider page views or number of visits made to the site.

Sac Bee 2,080

Kansas City 2,100

Miami Herald 2,135

News & Observer 2,645

Star-Telegram 3,367

ADN: 5,894

News Tribune 6,637

Kentucky 7,039

The State 7,077

Modesto Bee 8,339

Fresno Bee 8,838

Kansas 9,134

Sun Herald 9,434

Idaho Stateman 10,110

Myrtle Beach 13,568

Centre Daily 13,773

Macon 14,255

The Olympian 15,435

BND 15,897

Bellingham 17,638

Tri-City 19,079

Bradenton Herald 20,104

SLO 20,980

Charlotte Observer 23,159

El Nuevo 27,980

Merced SunStar 28,297

Herald Online 29,493

Ledger-Enquirer 31,600

Island Packet 43,922

Beaufort Gazette 55,812

Olathe 145,599


Google Tweaks Algorithm – Anchor Text Less Important?

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I was reading over at BlogStorm about his “observations” that Google may have tweaked the algorithm.

Quite a number of the queries we track have altered recently and websites that previously ranked have dropped down by a number of places. This doesn’t appear to be a penalty – just an alteration in the algorithm.

The common characteristic all the sites have is that their rankings were based very heavily on anchor text rather than on-site optimisation. The changes don’t seem to have affected major commercial queries yet but they are visible when you search for particular peoples names.

For example a search for “patrick” used to bring blogstorm.co.uk in 5th place, this week it dropped down to 35th place. The sites above all have better on-site optimisation for that keyword but previously a few good anchor text links was enough for Blogstorm to rank.

I actually like the fact that the big search engines are always trying to improve their product, so a change like this is exciting!

SEO Widgets and scripts that are worth a look

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Bad Neighborhood Scanner: Text links are an important factor in today’s search engine optimization, and exchanging links with other websites is a good way to get them. However, doing a link exchange with a website that is penalized can have some detrimental results. This tool will scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

Google Position Tool: Check your position in the google searchresults with this simple tool.

This free computer program analyzes up to 1000 inlinks (backlinks, inbound links) to arbitrary page (or website) and shows domains of backlinks. It shows separately different classes of URLs like .edu, .mil., .com, .net, .gov and other. It is similar to host and IP backlinks checker, but it might be a bit faster and doesn’t do IP address analysis of backlinks.

Filed Under: SEO

How to entice half a million people to visit your site

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Photo by: PhillipC
Photo by: PhillipC

You need to write better headlines. (See how that would have really sucked as a headline?)

Saw a great post over at Condomunity yesterday about writing better headlines on your blog. My headlines will continue to be sub-par, but the ideas are worth highlighting here for all to use.

The post highlights an article written about worldwide condom prices, which isn’t all that earth shattering, and it was titled Cheap Condoms, Expensive Condoms. Then when the story gets picked up by EnviromentalGraffiti and newly titled: World’s Most Expensive Places to Have Sex. As you can probably imagine, headline #2 drew in about half a million visitors while #1… not so much.

Let’s look at some ways you are going to start doing things…

Google Analytic’s Conversion University reports: Recent research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your site in 8 seconds or less — in that short amount of time, headlines are the one piece of copy that users will actually read.

CornwallSEO argues: If you cannot be motivated to write the article based on the headline, how is the reader going to be motivated to read it based on the headline.

Here’s some more…

On writing news and SEO headlines. “Avoid puns.”

Don’t be too short. “Rarely (almost never) use short, verb-less labels as main heads for news stories. They fail to tell the news.”

Be controversial. “There’s no better guarantee of catching a reader’s attention than to stir up a little controversy. Be bold, dare to incite a little indignation, or get the pulse racing just a bit. Don’t be moronic about it though. You don’t need to incite a riot.”

Tell stories people can relate to. “Create a headline, title or slogan that tells a story people can immediately recognize and relate to, and they may just start telling your story for you.”

Use hot keywords like Apple and Al Jazeera (instead of Hardware and Qatar TV Channel). “People love to read stories about topics they’re interested in. Some trends endure longer than others, whilst some are short lived – but if you’re writing about a hot topic, be sure to drop in those keywords to whet your reader’s appetite.”

Your title is what brings visitors from search engines. “The title tag is what’s displayed as the link in search results – research in the US showed that it accounted for 30% of a user’s decision of which result to click on.”

Use plain English. “Search engines don’t understand metaphors, puns, or other forms of wordplay, and people don’t use them when searching for information – use plain English.”

Explain your headline with your subheadings. “Add a h2 headline which is a sentence explaining your h1 headline. Example: h1 – ‘SEO Services Glasgow’, h2 – ‘We’re the first professional search engine optimisation company in Glasgow offering SEO services since 1995′.”

About hyphens, acronyms and apostrophes. “Most search engines treat hyphens and apostrophes as a space. E-mail is seen as being slightly different than email. If a word is split by a hyphen or apostrophe then you should check to see which version is used more frequently and optimize for whatever versions are commonly searched upon.”

Try these for help:

  • Google Trends
    Track the seasonal search popularity for your keyword. Displayed visually.
  • Google Insights for Search
    The new Google Insights for Search tool lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Very handy.

Better metrics to measure your site’s success

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Google’s PageRank used to be the most reliable and easiest way to point at a hard number as proof of a “good” site. Many things have changed over the last few years. PageRank is still nice, but let’s face it, it’s not the be-all and end-all it once was.

Tad Chef over at seoptimise put’s it this way:

Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?

Tad goes on to mention quite a number of better ways to measure your metrics, but a handful made me nod in agreement when I think about my particular field, online news publishing.

Returning Visitors! I wish I could get every McClatchy affiliate to know their percentage of returning visitors like the know their “hits”. Nothing says, “I trust you” more than a return visit.

Time on page/site. Both of those measurements mean that your visitor is actually reading content.

The problem with both of those measurements is they don’t lead to an immediate increase in cash flow. In the current state of the “newspaper industry”, cash flow is the first thought, and sometimes, the only thought.

What should I do now?

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I hear this question a lot. Usually after someone has spent a week or two making a real effort at writing better headlines (which means better title tags).

As usual, SEOmoz has done a lot of the legwork. Their “Ranking Factors” article is still must reading for people trying to figure out “what should I do now?”

Ranking Factors is described as:

…the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value – although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google’s algorithm is contained…

I’m only going to hit on the ones that are of the greatest importance, and yet easiest to get to for the CMS-driven news generated sites.

  1. Keyword Use in Title Tag -This is the big one, and terribly easy to do. For example, sometimes the print world would give a Baltimore site a feed with a news headline like: “Birds of a feather”. The story might be about how a bunch of the guys on the Baltimore Orioles all go fishing during the off-season. That headline needs to be “webified”. No baseball fan is going to type in “birds of a feather” when they are looking for a story.
    So we rewrite it to be “Baltimore Oriole’s stars fish for Marlin during Off-season”, or “Brooks Robinson and friends find happiness fishing”. It will depend on the actual content of the story, but the fact that it’s an actual keyword rich title helps tremendously. I can’t speak to all CMS’s, but on most, the story headline populates the title tag for the actual story page.
  2. Keywords in the H1 and other header tags – In this case, if the search term is “Baltimore Orioles” and your story headline(“Baltimore Oriole’s stars fish for Marlin during Off-season”) is wrapped in an H1, you should have a good shot at being at or near the top of the SERP.
  3. Internal Link Structure – This is one reason many sites now “nofollow” the links to the “contact us” page or the “email the webmaster” link. You can increase rank on pages that are pointed to with high quality internal links.
  4. Outbound links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages – Giving high quality links out from your site certainly helps the site you link to, but it also helps your site.

There are also bad things, and they should be avoided. Sometimes because of coroprate decisions spamminess may creep in, but in general, these are things most people can avoid.

  1. Links to low quality or spam sites – This is not as straight forward as you may first suspect. There is a difference between a site with thousands of outbound links, and 3 happen to be to spammy sites, and a site with 4 links out, and 3 are to spam. Ratio does play a part, but you need to keep an eye on what you or your users are linking to. Keep in mind that the “unverified” outlink was the driving force behind rel=”nofollow”.
  2. Duplicate title and meta tags – There’s just no reason every page on the site should have the same meta description, and certainly no reason the title should be the same.

None of the items I’ve highlighted are new or controversial or difficult, we should all be doing them on a regular basis.

Basic SEO Essentials

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  • If you want your title tag tags to fully display in the search results at the major engines, try to keep it around 65 characters. Google & Yahoo! both display between 62-68 characters (there appears to be some various depending on both the country of origin of the search and the exact query), and MSN/Live hovers between 65-69.
  • To avoid the duplicate content problems that often accompany temporal pagination issues (where content moves down a page and from page to page, as is often seen in lists of articles, multi-page articles and blogs), add a meta robots tag with “noindex, follow” to the paginated pages.
  • A link from a PageRank “3” page (according to the Google toolbar) hosted on a very strong, trusted domain can be more valuable than a link from a PageRank “4” page hosted on a weaker domain.
  • There is no advantage of putting all of your important keywords in the Meta Keywords tag.
  • Google has noted in the past that a maximum of 100 links per page was wise and would insure that all of the links on a page would be crawled.
  • Research from several sources, including this eye-tracking research report from MarketingSherpa, indicates that you get more traffic and click-throughs with both the top paid and organic results than either individually.
  • Keyword density in text on the page is not a metric used by the major search engines to measure relevance or popularity in their ranking algorithms.
  • For search engine rankings & traffic in Google & Yahoo!, it is generally better to have one, large, inclusive site with all the links pointing to that single domain rather than many, small, single topic focused sites with links spread out between them.

Keyword Tsunami

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You have a good site, well respected, but you want to have one particular page/post/story get some extra attention.

Let’s pick on the Miami Herald for this particular post.

Maybe there’s a hurricane headed towards Florida and you want your coverage to be ranked at the top of the search results. You write a story or two, but neither one is really showing up where you’d like it to.

So then you decide to do a little research. You go to Google and type in what you think people are searching for. Well, already you are using an unverified opinion to make business decisions. A better first step would be to go check what people are actually searching for. You can do that by looking at Google Trends.

Now I can see that there are certain phrases that are ranking at the top. #1 is “national hurricane center miami” and #2 is “hurricane fay tracking“.

I will now try to work those phrases into the title of my page, the headline of my story and the first paragraph (if not first sentence) of the story body.

Not surprisingly, The National Ledger has a well written headline. The site is constantly writing keyword rich headlines and leads, in this case: Hurricane Fay Tracking: National Hurricane Center Tracks Fay, Projected Path.

So now we have a good headline, what about the first sentence in the story? Again I will use The National Ledger as an example:

Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center said Tropical Storm Fay mat indeed turn into Hurricane Fay and the projected path of the hurricane is right at Florida. The National Hurricane Center forecasters revealed on Monday that they believe that Fay could increase to near hurricane strength by Monday evening.

The NOAA is tracking the storm as always and while Floridians are bracing for the storm others won’t get too excited as many have the attitude that a possible category 1 hurricane is not that difficult if you have been through the storms before. Remember right now this is still classified as a Tropical Storm.

The SEO going on here is the abundance of keywords in the headline, repeated in the story lead, and if you followed the link to Google Trends, another half dozen of high ranking search phrases thrown in.

The other step a site like The Miami Herald could take is to have a “hurricane section” where all of their hurricane content can be inter-linked and remain a topic-centric section with a very specific subject. That’s a longer term way to become viewed as an expert by the search engines.

You may not have the staff do this type of research for every story/post but when you want to know how to make your story be all it can be, these steps can help you.

Online News Consumption Up

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PaidContent had a nice synopsis of the current state of online news. The Pew Research Center for People & the Press put out the study which talks at length about the blending of “old” and “new” news consumption.

Some of the most interesting tidbits from the article include numbers that are not always talked about within the walls of a news organization.

For example, “A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two longstanding trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment – Net-Newsers – who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.”

Another paragraph drives home what is well known within the newspaper industry:

Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%; the proportion that regularly watches nightly network news has fallen by half.

These trends have been more stable in recent years, but the percentage saying they read a newspaper yesterday has fallen from 40% to 34% in the last two years alone. Newspapers would have suffered even greater losses without their online versions. Most of the loss in readership since 2006 has come among those who read the print newspaper; just 27% say they read only the print version of a daily newspaper yesterday, down from 34% in 2006.

I can remember the conversations that had opinions like, “nobody is going to want to use their phone to do anything on the web, the screen is just too small.” Yet, the hard numbers show just the opposite is now happening: “Overall, 15% of Americans say they have a smart phone, such as an iPhone or a Blackberry. More than a third of smart phone owners (37%) say they get news from these devices.”

The best news that I found in the article was, “More people get news online than watch nightly news—37 percent to 29 percent.”

The news I am the least surprised by is: “The public continues to express skepticism about what they see, hear and read in the media. No major news outlet – whether broadcast or cable, print or online – stands out as particularly credible.”

What do you want?

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For sites that sell something it’s easy to tell if their ideas are working, because their sales increase. Sites that only have as their goal, “more visitors”, would seem to be just as straight forward, but that’s not usually all they want.

What do you want from your site? It’s a straight forward question, but not always an easy one to answer.

If you sell ads based on “impressions”, or “page views”, then plain old traffic is important to you. So your answer would be, “I want a site that makes the users click and click and click”. From a user perspective, probably not a site they want to visit very often. So now what?

If you see the folly of making users click 7 times to get to the content they want, yet you make money by selling ad space that is based on “you’re ad will be displayed XXX times”, you need to attract more visitors.

So I ask again, “What do you want from your site?”. Now you are catching on, you reply, “More unique visitors”.

What are you doing on your site that will make people want to visit your site? What makes your site stand out? Why do people visit your site right now? What is it that makes other people not visit, or leave your site prematurely? What type of feedback do you solicit? What type of market research do you gather? How long do your current visitors linger on your site? What is your most popular page? Least Popular?

If you can’t answer any of those questions, stop reading now and go find out!

If nothing else, you should be checking your stats at the end of each week. What changed?

If nothing has changed, what makes you think you’re going to entice new people to your site?

I often hear McClatchy news sites say that they want their stories to appear higher in search results. What they don’t want to hear as a response is, “write better content”. Design your pages better, less “kruft” and more content will help.

This undated photo released by the Orange County Sheriffs Office in Orlando, Fla. on July 18, 2008, shows Caylee Marie Anthony, 2, who has been missing more than a month.

Here’s an example. Two year old Caylee Anthony has been missing for over a month. The family lives near Orlando, Florida. McClatchy has 2 newspapers in Florida (Miami and Bradenton). If I search Google for “missing florida girl” I don’t see a McClatchy paper’s story until page 3, and then it’s the very last one on the page. When I click the story, it is no longer on the site (it was an AP story by the way) so I hit the 404 page.

Advice to Bradenton.com and MiamiHerald.com: cover the stories in your own backyard! You will get “new visitors” if you give exceptional coverage to your local stories.

Exceptional coverage will attract links from Drudge, national bloggers, local bloggers and even other local news outlets. More links will increase your ranking with the search engines, which will push you up on the SERP‘s. Moving up will allow more people to see your stories, and the cycle continues.

Do I need META Tags

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Short answer: As far as SEO is concerned, probably not.

Simply put, there is no search engine rankings benefit in adding Meta Tags to your page. In ancient times, Keyword Meta Tags were used by the search engines to help rank pages for specific keywords. Keyword Meta Tags were taken advantage of by optimizers and spammers (I know, it’s shocking). Search Engines smartened-up and no longer use them in their algorithms.

Meta Tag Descriptions are mostly unnecessary too. If you have good keywords in your content, your description will be pulled directly from there. That content is always more relevant to the search than writing your own generic description for the entire page. A really great description will not have any effect on where that page will show up in search results, only the page content will… but it may help induce someone to click on it if they do happen to find it.

Meta Tags may harm your Search Engine Results. Yup, you read that last line right. If your description has nothing to do with your content, it will hurt your rank for the given keywords. Remember to keep your content relevant all the way around. If you’re targeting 2 keywords for a page, make sure they relate in some way, and that the page content is relevant to them as well.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and your mileage may vary. One example is a large site’s homepage. If you look at the homepage for CNN you’ll see that it has a bunch of stories that aren’t really related, but when you search Google or Yahoo for CNN, they want to control the blurb displayed under their main link, they do this using their meta description tag:

CNN.com delivers the latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics, and more. For in-depth coverage, CNN.com provides special reports, video, audio, photo galleries, and interactive guides.

Not surprisingly, CNN wrote a smart meta description. They mention things that will always be on their homepage.

What is Google Page Rank?

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Google’s famed page rank is both well known and unknown. Everyone knows that a higher page rank is “good” because it means the Google robots think your page is “important”. On a 1-10 scale, the higher the better.

You can get the Google Toolbar which shows you Page Rank and start obsessing today!

Looking for sites that rank at the very top starts with Google – not surprisingly, but right on their heels is Adobe. Adobe is linked to by millions of pages for their products, this certainly helps their entire site.

Adobe Reader has a PR of 9, other Adobe pages rank 10. Certainly we have all seen the links to Adobe’s PDF reader, all those links tell Google, “Adobe is important and trusted”.

Others that rank up at the very top include whitehouse.gov, nsf.gov and mit.edu

Some news sites include a PR of 9 for the New York Times and CNN. The Drudge Report is showing an 8.

I think you can see that all of those sites are seen as “important and trusted”.

If you could get lots of links from some of sites like those listed, you would certainly see an increase in your site’s page rank.

The downside of constantly checking your site’s page rank is that there is really no way to do it. Google only “releases” page rank a few times a year, often unannounced. And when they do, the data is already “old”, usually at least a couple of months.

So while “real page rank” may still be an important part of how Google views your site, only the internal Google engineers know what it really is. The simple Google Toolbar number they display is just a rough estimate for you.

SEO as an afterthought

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Working for one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States is sometimes surprising.

When McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder I was in the trenches of moving those KR sites off their existing platform to ours. We thought through some things, but some we just completely ignored. SEO was one of them.

About a year ago we started to go back and try to remedy that oversight, and it’s been ugly.

Some sites had 60+ H1 tags on a page, many pages had hundreds of heading tags. Slowly we helped the sites clean up the terrible code we burdened them with. We used many of the great tools at SEOmoz to clear out the kruft.

When we started to actually do real SEO for a couple of sites, we woke the sleeping giants. Then the sleeping giants heard from their bosses that they wanted their pages to rank higher. With only cursory SEO information coming out of our offices for the previous year or so, there was a real hunger.

The SEO information that was being pushed out of the marketing department was very vague and in some cases, outdated, or in some cases, just plain wrong.

I had been with the company 2 years and was completely unaware that we even offered any SEO help. Since I worked in the CMS with and for our sites everyday, that struck me as a problem. When we hired a new marketing person to be in charge of search engine marketing, I decided we needed to get to her early.

A few of us started to push her and her boss that they couldn’t actually do their job as effectively without involving us. It sounded like we were bragging, but soon they realized that dictating to the sites, just means, the sites turn around and ask us to implement the edicts.

Soon we injected ourselves into the flow in a more proactive manner, and things started to move forward. We spoke to marketing and explained that some of their basic assumptions were wrong. Since they had little technical understanding of how the CMS functioned, they were making bad decisions. Once we got marketing up to speed, the sites started getting much better information.

We had spent a year or more stuck in the mud because of two problems, lack of communication and lack of planning.

As we move to redesign 20 of our sites, SEO has been included from the beginning. Our code is cleaner, affiliates out in the field are better armed, marketing is better informed and we are actually starting to measure results.

All steps in the right direction

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