Stephan Spencer reports that Matt Cutts has blessed us with several Google revelations (see below for Stephan’s details, and here for Stephanie Booth’s live-blog of Matt’s talk), one of which is that the Google algo will now recognize underscore-connected words in URLs as phrases. This is a big deal for many webmasters.

While happy for these revelations, my question, however, is this: why did Matt decide to dish all this hot Google stuff at a WordPress-focused conference, instead of at a more logical venue such as SMX Advanced in Seattle, just last month? Matt had ample speaking opps to reveal any/all of these things, but didn’t. I can’t imagine, however, a more relevant or appreciative audience than the SMX crowd.

Quotes from Stephan’s story:

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That’s great news, because it historically hasn’t been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn’t “see” the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn’t recommend targeting “iphone_review” as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.

So it used to be–until now–that any benefit that you would have gotten by having a keyword-rich URL was negated by the use of underscores separating those words. TypePad and Movable Type blogs were particularly affected by this, as by default, underscores were used instead of hyphens. This new change in the Google algorithm should make bloggers using the TypePad service or the Movable Type blog software (and anyone else using underscores in their URLs) very happy, as I anticipate their Google traffic will be going up.

A few other highlights from Matt’s talk that you may find interesting:

* Matt claims that Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! Put another way, you won’t take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don’t have more than two or three equals signs in the URL.

* Matt stated that the number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn’t a factor in your Google rankings. He went on to say that although it doesn’t matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Matt addressed this because I specifically asked the question from the audience.

* According to Matt, the file extension in your URL won’t affect your rankings. So it’s inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe.

* Matt stated it was myth that Google uses its status as a domain registrar to access domain registration data to use it as a ranking signal. According to Matt, being a registrar doesn’t grant one special access to other registrars’ customer data. Note that Matt didn’t state whether Google is or isn’t using WHOIS data as a signal. I believe they are.

* When asked about how to get one’s blog into Google News, Matt shared one of Google’s requirements for inclusion: the blog must have multiple authors. So those of you wanting your blog showing up in Google News results, I hope it’s a group blog!

[END]

Todd Friesen (aka Oilman) has written a new column in MediaPost’s OMMA Magazine (registration req’d - try BugMeNot for a reg code) in which he articulates something we’ve also realized for the past couple of years: that SEO is no longer just about driving more traffic to a site; it’s also about helping the site owner get more of those visitors to take a desired action. Todd sums it up nicely:

I propose that we redefine SEO. Rather than merely driving relevant traffic, I think SEO should be the practice of generating and converting organic search engine traffic, measuring it by raw traffic, ranking numbers, conversion rate, and new revenue year over year.

In other words, we need to lead the horse to water and convince him he’s thirsty.

NSI started increasing clients’ thirst several years ago, when we were approached by a local-entertainment provider who wanted to increase traffic to his site. Actually, he wanted to increase booking-leads from the site, but in his mind that just meant he needed more traffic. More traffic = more leads, right?

We were interested in helping, but a quick review of his website raised warning flags. The home page consisted only of images (graphic logo header and no text), the site was unattractive, poorly organized and had a muddled call-to-action message. I knew that if we took this project on, we could be successful at increasing traffic - even relevant, targeted traffic - to the site, but he wouldn’t get any more leads because few people would stay longer than a few seconds.

And NSI - not the crummy website - would get the blame. As Todd writes:

You can be the world’s greatest at SEO, but
if your clients aren’t getting a decent return on investment from what
they spend on you, I almost guarantee they won’t renew for year two.

That’s what was in the back of my mind, as we talked about this prospective clients needs.

What we did was propose something different for him: no organic SEO - just a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign - until the website was redesigned into a visitor-friendly site, with clear navigation, inviting graphics, helpful copy and a call to action on every page. The client agreed, and we helped redesign the site, making it both visitor- and search engine-friendly. In the meantime the PPC campaign provided targeted traffic, and yielded valuable market-research info in terms of real-world search terms (which were plugged into the new site).

By the time we conducted organic SEO on the redesigned site, leads were already up and analytics showed us that although traffic hadn’t increased very much, search-generated traffic had become much more targeted on important keyword phrases. What’s more, visitors were staying longer and visiting more pages. Analytics also helped us show the client what sites were providing the most referred traffic, which helped him direct his ad dollars to those sites rather than spreading money around and hoping for the best.

By looking at this client’s needs holistically, as Todd Friesen recommends - rather than just through an SEO lens - we helped our client far more, and got the renewal, as well. Since this experience, we ask prospective clients a lot more questions than before about their overall marketing goals and needs, instead of just taking their word when they say they need to improve business via SEO. And, we find most are open to accepting us as an online-marketing solutions provider - not just “the SEO guys.”

It’s obviously not the second day of SMX Advanced - events rolled over me before I could upload my thoughts on the second day. By the end I was pretty exhausted, what with jet lag & staying up late for the Yahoo and Google Dance NW evening receptions - happy it was only a two-day conference. At the end, Danny had everyone pose for a goodbye picture - I somehow ended up in the first row (third from right, in white hat & blue shirt)!

Others have posted much (including a helpful 12-point summary), so I’ll just mention my defining moment of the second day. It was when Danny was talking about the impact of Google’s new Universal Search (US). There had been announcements about US a couple of weeks before the conference, but I was so busy I just made a mental note to research it after SMX completed.

Danny saved me - and probably many others - the trouble. He was all set with examples and a viewpoint. As he showed us one Google search after another (such as one on “shakira” that displayed clickable video images together with text-based results), I sat in amazement with one word forming in my mind: “uh-oh.” As Danny explained, this Universal Search is going to change - if not everything, at least a lot - in SEO. (Here’s a good summary of his discussion.)

Mike Grehan, who was in attendance, wrote on this last week. His analysis:

What does it mean for SEO professionals moving forward? It means we’ve finally reached point where better marketing counts — and not H1 tags. I want my company’s site pages to be found with links to audio/visual presentations and images and blogs and…well, everything that can provide the best user experience, ever.

I’ve already shown US results to clients who have had difficulty understanding why we’ve been encouraging them to embrace blogs and social-network media (the corporate gears grind slowly). Seeing the Google results right in front of their faces has, I think, been an “uh-oh” moment for them as well.

I’m blogging from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference in Seattle - the inaugural event of a new series of search marketing-related conferences put on by Danny Sullivan’s new company. Besides that, it’s also supposed to be “advanced,” in that a lot of the intro topics covered at SES conferences aren’t being discussed.

Instead, there are two tracks, one for organic optimization, and the other for paid (PPC) search. So far there’s been lots of quizzing of Google’s SEO public face, Matt Cutts, on a variety of issues, as well as discussion of search personalization, gaining visibility through exploiting social networks, duplicate-content issues, and new developments in PPC networks such as Microsoft’s adCenter.

All the “celebrity” SEOers are in residence and on the speaking agenda, and there’s live-blogging and Flickr-posting underway. Though there haven’t been any great revelations so far, I have to admit it’s great to hear Matt Cutts, or Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, speak on the record about certain SEM issues, rather than weighing what all the industry blogs and forums are guessing about. Today’s social-marketing session was, by itself, worth coming to the conference.

As is typical in this industry, the networking and shop-talking opportunities are also, by themselves, worth the price of admission. Just got back to the hotel room from the evening Yahoo reception, at which I learned much from a couple of guys about domain-parking as a career strategy. Next up tonight, however, is the Google Dance reception, which should yield some quality schwag as well as more good discussions.

SEOmoz has just posted version 2 of Search Engine Ranking Factors. It’s a compilation of opinions from 37 top industry practitioners/writers, regarding what factors are most important for Google in determining visibility rankings. The factors are broken into three categories:

1) Top 10 Positive Factors
2) Most Controversial Factors
3) Top 5 Negative Factors.

This is a great best-practices list to review and think about, especially when coming back to refresh the optimization of older sites. It’s good to see that the Top 10 Positive Factors are all ones that we’ve been recommending to clients for years, and implement whenever possible given a site’s design and sales/marketing purpose.

Elinor Mills’ CNET article “Newspaper headlines lost in Web translation” offers a look back at a number of famous headlines and how they can be altered by installing keywords, thereby making them more easily found by searchers for relevant phrases. To make a headline “searchable” must we sacrifice effect for precision? Not necessarily. In some cases employing a subhead containing key phrases can help preserve the original headline’s artistic qualities. For example, in Ms. Mills’ article her SEO expert, Stephan Spencer, president and founder of search engine optimization company Netconcepts, takes on the task of revamping headlines using key phrases that are well searched and relevant for their topic. This is fine, however another way to approach the question would be to alter the main headline as little as possible, if at all, and add a subhead that would contain key phrases.

In Ms. Mills’ article it is suggested that the headline “Wall St. lays an egg” be changed to include “Wall Street” vs. “Wall St.” This is a worthwhile change that should be made. One could leave the remainder of the headline and write a subhead or one sentence summary like that which appears below the main headlines on many news sites: Headline: “Wall Street Lays an Egg,” Subhead, or one sentence summary below headline link, containing a key phrase: “Stock market crash worst in history.”

In some portions of a news site’s page one line summaries that can contain key phrases are present, but often the headline must stand alone. To preserve more of an original print headline’s artistic form, one could arrange it using a colon as the point of separation. A print headline that Ms. Mills refers to in her article states: “Sick transit’s glorious Monday.” It could be ‘web-enabled’ in this way: “Glorious Monday: Feds Save NY Transit.”

It is hard to recommend a search engine optimized headline when the power of words to move people emotionally can be lost. In the New York Daily News where the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline appeared in 1975, the words “New York” are implicit, and would be easily inferred if a reader saw the original headline on the newspaper’s site today.. However to allow searchers to more easily find the information Spencer is correct that at least adding “President” before “Ford” would make the headline more searchable.

We can broaden the discussion by asking what happens when a reader comes to a news website? How does he / she behave? Are key phrases all that influence the reader, or are there other factors to consider? According to Eyetrack III studies Eyetrack III - What You Most Need to Know, considering the size of the font used and the positioning of the headlines is also critical, and can influence if the reader scans lightly or focuses intently on the headlines. Eyetrack III reports that readers read headlines in the upper left of the page first: “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right.” Eyetrack III also points out:

“A quick review of 25 large news websites reveals that 20 of them place the dominant homepage image in the upper left. (Most news sites have a consistent page design from day to day; they don’t often vary the layout as a print newspaper would.) We observed that with news homepages, readers’ instincts are to first look at the flag/logo and top headlines in the upper left.”

It is a fine line that 21st century writers walk, between that of artist and scientist. Ann Althouse, a Madison, Wisconsin law professor, blogged about the death of William J. Brink, the author of the Daily News Ford headline Althouse: ” FORD TO CITY : DROP DEAD.”:

“Set in huge bold letters, the headline screamed across Page 1 of the paper on Oct. 30, 1975. In six taut syllables, it brought home its message with the power of a knockout punch: At the height of New York’s fiscal crisis, President Gerald R. Ford had declined to bail the city out. Those six syllables, as Mr. Ford later acknowledged, almost certainly lost him New York State in his 1976 race against Jimmy Carter, and with it, the presidency. Powerful. The pen is mighty. The NYT, which had to resist saying Brink “dropped dead,” does poke fun at itself: The corresponding headline in The New York Times that day, FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE’D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL, remains unsung.”

It seems most fitting to find a compromise where headlines can be crafted to elicit emotion and also be found in a Google search.

Elinor Mills’ recent CNET article, examines the topic of using key phrases for writing descriptive headlines that also act as enticements to get readers to click. Specifically the discussion centers around how online newspaper sites are training their writers to use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to improve headlines for Web stories.

Elinor Mills refers to “SEO tricks” in her article. Since Ms. Mills’ article discusses writing for clarity and descriptiveness, perhaps a better choice of words in place of “SEO tricks” might be “SEO strategies.” This choice of words is important as the search engine optimization industry divides itself into “white hat” and “black hat” camps, with the “white hat” SEO practitioners working hard to differentiate themselves from the spam techniques employed by the so-called “black hats,” who engage in questionable tactics that the search engines themselves have declared off limits. The “black hats” might be able to fool the search engines temporarily; causing websites to gain high search positions in the short term. Researched, ethical, “white hat” search engine optimization strategies provide a longer term solution that will not get a site banned by the search engines, and form the basis for a broader Internet marketing program that can help drive more targeted traffic to a website.

Ms. Mills’ article provides intriguing insight into the challenges faced by the newspaper industry; and perhaps an effective idea for training online newspaper headline writers would be pay per click (PPC) ad writing, which can teach writers how to effectively incorporate key phrases within short, descriptive, enticing lines of text. There are many useful references that teach these PPC ad writing skills, including the authoritative Andrew Goodman’s Google Adwords Book.

But why stop with the written word? With the proliferation of broadband even smaller newspapers have designed video-centric websites that contain short video segments to complement the associated stories. Newspaper industry professionals can use SEO to optimize their video streams, podcasts, blog posts, and other new media offerings to build a richer experience for users that also allows the content to be more easily found in the search engines for targeted key phrases. Ms. Mills’ article has shown that newspaper professionals understand that SEO is more than “tricks” but a discipline that combines some art and some science. It is at the same time the challenge of thinking and writing precisely; serving two masters - the human user and the search engine robots.