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Sweet Tools Listing Now Exceeds 700 Tools

This post was created by the WordPress SIOC Import plugin based on this SIOC RDF data describing a post located at http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=448. AI3?s listing of semantic Web and -related tools has now crossed the barrier to 702 tools in total. There are 10 new tools since the last posting on this listing, with a few [...]

Survival Techniques for Yahoo

Jawad Shuaib wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb today called What Yahoo Must Do to Survive, and I thought it was worth some comments as I have some disagreements with it. First, for disclosure purposes, I work for Yahoo! running the product marketing for our display ad platforms. This gives me some internal perspective, but also may leave me somewhat biased for many reasons.

Survival Techniques for Yahoo

Additionally, I have no special insight into what the search business at Yahoo is doing, nor do I control overall company strategy. Display ad platform strategy is a different story.

That being said, the summary of Jawads article is that Yahoo! should abandon many of its efforts in multiple areas in order to refocus on search (and I assume search monetization).

Ive heard this strategy a few times. My main thoughts accompanied with some questions are:

1. Is search a battle Yahoo! can win and gain back significant market share?
I think Yahoo! has done some great things recently like opening up search with BOSS, but Google has effectively become the consumer brand of choice. It will take something major to change that. It can happen, and perhaps Yahoo! can do it, but is it the most likely bet for the company to succeed?

Im not sure succeeding in search is a matter of Yahoo! not putting enough resources against it or a lack of focus. Perhaps it was a lack of resources and focus three years ago when the market share gap was closer, but I think now it will take a radical innovation that changes the way people search to unseat Google. Yahoo! could do it, but I dont think it needs the entire companys focus to make that happen.

2. Yahoos strength and success over the past couple of years has been in building amazing web properties that lead their vertical and then monetizing those properties through display ads. These properties also help drive/maintain search market share from users visiting the properties using Yahoos search which is integrated into them. One common business theme is that a company should focus on its strengths. Would abandoning those things to focus on search satisfy that?

Now to address some of Jawads specific points:

To remain a profitable business, Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The primary revenue generator for both Yahoo! and Google is search and its highly coveted advertising space. The search market, in other words, is the lifeblood of the companys business model.

Lifeblood is too strong a word. The display and services businesses at Yahoo! are not small potatoes. Of course Yahoo! should be concerned about search market share dropping, but its not the only thing going.

Worse yet, the company seems to be everywhere at once, investing in a dizzying array of services that do little to enhance its search standing. What does a search and advertising company need with Flickr, Yahoo! Greetings, Yahoo! Personals, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pets, Blo.gs, Upcoming.org, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! 360, or Webjay?

Id agree that the company has invested in too many areas. A couple of the aforementioned properties have already been shuttered, others got hit hard in recent layoffs, and I expect 2009 will trim it up even more. One thing to remember though, is that many of the properties and services dont require massive investments to keep them operating and profitable.

These services have, thus far, offered little value to Yahoo!. The company has spent its time and resources maintaining services with a huge, financially unjustified overhead; all the while, its search market share continues to dwindle. In contrast, Google, realizing its product line was stretched too thin, has spent the past 2 years aggressively vertically integrating its various product offerings as features ported across its services. While Google has certainly expanded its horizon, advertising and search technology remain its unwavering focus.

Some of the services may have not offered a ton of value, but others have added tremendous value. Id argue Google has also expanded beyond their core focus. Google Docs isnt really search or advertising related, etc. Yahoo! has also always been more of a consumer portal from the start. It didnt start as a core search business like Google.

Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The digital dinosaur is simply not in the position to continue experimenting or investing in markets that it doesnt already have a significant command of. By spending time and money building a gamut of Web 2.0 services, Yahoo! is unnecessarily competing with hundreds of companies, when it should be competing with just two: Google and Microsoft. The company should let users build the content and focus instead on helping others effectively find it.

I dont think Yahoo! is really heavily investing in Web 2.0 technologies at this point, and didnt really in 2008 either. The companies it did buy before that like Flickr and Delicious have continued to be successful assets that were bought very cheaply. Letting the users build the content is also very much a Web 2.0 idea that Jawab is arguing they should move away from. I think the right path there is to focus on high value audiences and combine the creation of good unique content with also empowering users to contribute content. Im not in the audience business either though

Should Yahoo! continue to lose market share in search, the company will be unable to continue its operations elsewhere. Shutting down or selling off ineffective segments of its operation, such as Yahoo! Music, would go a long way towards retaining profitability and reigniting the search effort. Such cuts would undoubtedly require significant staff reductions; unfortunately, though, with dwindling profits and a bad economy, Yahoo! simply cannot afford to continue operating like the bloated behemoth it is today.

Again, many of these properties dont require much investment, but I agree with the general statement here that Yahoo! should cut properties that arent profitable and focus on a smaller number of areas. The company has already been making this move throughout 2008 and I suspect it will continue through 2009. Probably every technology company should listen to that advice in 2009.

This is not to say that Yahoo! is doomed. Apple found itself in much the same situation around 1997, only to see a resurgence under the leadership of the resurrected Steve Jobs. Yahoo! is in desperate need of fresh direction under a leader like Jobs if it is to win the battle against other giants. Yahoo! does not need a new religion. In fact, it needs to rediscover what it lost to ambition. It isnt too late yet, but Yahoo! needs to get off its butt and start fighting for its life.

I imagine a new CEO will provide some of this leadership, but Im also not sure Apple is a great comparison. I think Jobs actually helped provide new innovation at Apple, but Im not an expert on their story.

Jawabs theme is correct that Yahoo! does need to think hard about what it wants to do and streamline and focus on that. I just disagree with the conclusion that focusing only on search is the answer.

Included links: ReadWriteWeb

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Tag: Google, Yahoo, SEO


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Best Practices for Content Optimization

Posted by randfish

Is it possible that in all the years we've been writing at SEOmoz, there's never been a solid walkthrough on the basics of content optimization? Let's fix that up.

First off, by content, I don't mean keyword usage or keyword optimization. I'm talking about how the presentation and architecture of the text, image and multimedia content on a page can be optimized for search engines. The peculiar part is that many of these recommendations are second-order effects. Having the right formatting or display won't necessarily boost your rankings directly, but through it, you're more likely to earn links, get clicks and eventually benefit in search rankings. If you regularly practice the techniques below, you'll not only earn better consideration from the engines, but from the human activities on the web that influence their algorithms.

Content Structure

Because SEO has become such a holistic part of website improvement, it's no surprise that content formatting - the presentation, style and layout choices you select for your content - are a part of the process. Choosing sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are wise choices for the web; Verdana in particular has received high praise from usability/readability experts, such as this article from WebAIM:

Verdana is one of the most popular of the fonts designed for on-screen viewing. It has a simple, straightforward design, and the characters or glyphs are not easily confused. For example, the upper-case "I" and the lower-case "L" have unique shapes, unlike Arial, in which the two glyphs may be easily confused.

Another advantage of Verdana is that the spacing between letters. One consideration to take into account with Verdana is that it is a relatively large font. The words take up more space than words in Arial, even at the same point size.

The larger size improves readability, but also has the potential of disrupting carefully-planned page layouts.

Font choice is accompanied in importance by sizing & contrast issues. Type smaller than 10pt is typically very challenging to parse and in all cases, relative font sizes are recommended so users can employ browser options to increase/decrease if necessary. Contrast - the color difference between the background and text is also critical - legibility usually drops for anything that isn't black (or very dark) on a white background.

Content length is another critical piece of the optimization puzzle that's mistakenly placed in the "keyword density" or "unique content" buckets of SEO. In fact, content length can have a big role to play in whether your material is easy to consume and easy to share. Lengthy pieces often don't fare particularly well on the web, while short form and easily-digestible content often has more success. Sadly, splitting long pieces into multiple segments frequently backfires, as abandonment increases while link-attraction falls - the only benefit is page views per visit (which is why so many CPM-monetized sites employ this tactic).

Last but not least in content structure optimization is the display of the material. Beautiful, simplistic, easy-to-use and consumable layouts garner far more readership and links than poorly designed content wedged between ad blocks that threaten to overtake the page. I'd recommend checking out The Golden Ratio in Web Design from NetTuts, which has some great illustrations and advice on laying out web content on the page.

CSS & Semantic Markup

CSS is commonly mentioned as a "best practice" for general web design & development, but its principles coincide with many SEO guidelines as well. First, of course, is web page size. Google used to recommend keeping pages under 101K and, although most suspect that's no longer an issue, keeping file size low means faster load times, lower abandonment rates and a higher probability of being fully indexed, fully read and more frequently linked-to.

CSS can also help with another hotly debated issue: code to text ratio. Some SEOs swear that making code to text ratio smaller (so there's less code and more text) can help considerably on large websites with many thousands of pages. My personal experience showed this to be true (or, at least, appeared to be true) only once, but since good CSS makes it easy, there's no reason not to make it part of your standard operating procedure for webdev. Use tableless CSS stored in external files & keep Javascript calls external and follow in the path of CSS Zen. 

Finally, CSS provides an easy means for "semantic" markup. For a primer, see Digital Web Magazine's article, Writing Semantic Markup. For SEO purposes, there are only a few primary tags that apply and the extent of microformats interpretation (using tags like <author> or <address>) is less critical (the engines tend to sort out semantics largely on their own since so few web publishers participate in this coding fashion). Using CSS code to provide emphasis, to quote/reference and to reduce the use of tables and other bloated HTML mechanisms for formatting, however, can make a positive difference.

Content Uniqueness & Depth

The final portion of our content optimization discussion is the most important. Few can debate the value the engines place on robust, unique, value-adding content. Google in particular has had several rounds of kicking "low quality content" sites out of their indices, and the other engines have followed suit.

The first critical designation to avoid is "Thin Content" - an insider phrase that (loosely) means that which the engines do not feel contributes enough unique material to display a page competitively in the search results. The criteria have never been officially listed, but I have seen & heard many examples/discussions from engineers and would place the following on my list:

30-50 unique words, forming unique, parseable sentences that other sites/pages do not have Unique HTML text content, different from other pages on the site in more than just the replacement of key verbs & nouns (yes, this means all those sites that build the same page and just change the city and state names thinking it's "unique") Unique titles and meta description elements - if you can't write unique meta descriptions, just exclude them. I've seen similarity algos trip up pages and boot them from the index simply for having near-duplicate meta tags. Unique video/audio/image content - the engines have started getting smarter about identifying and indexing pages for vertical search that wouldn't normally meet the "uniqueness" criteria

BTW - You can often bypass these limitations if you have a good quantity of high value, external links pointing to the page in question (though this is very rarely scalable) or an extremely powerful, authoritative site (note how many one sentence Wikipedia stub pages still rank).

The next criteria from the engines demands that websites "add value" to the content they publish, particularly if it comes from (wholly or partially) a secondary source. This most frequently applies to affiliate sites, whose re-publishing of product descriptions, images, etc. has come under search engine fire numerous times. In fact, we've recently dealt with this issue on several sites and concluded it's best to anticipate manual evaluations here even if you've dodged the algorithmic sweep. The basic tenants are:

Don't simply re-publish something that's found elsewhere on the web unless your site adds substantive value to users If you're hosting affiliate content, expect to be judged more harshly than others, as affiliates in the SERPs are one of users' top complaints about search engines Small things like a few comments, a clever sorting algorithm or automated tags, filtering, a line or two of text, or advertising does NOT constitute "substantive value"

For some exemplary cases where websites fulfill these guidelines, check out the way sites like C|Net (example), UrbanSpoon (example) or Metacritic (example) take content/products/reviews from elsewhere, both aggregating AND "adding value" for their users.

Last, but not least, we have the odd (and somewhat unknown) content guideline from Google, in particular, to refrain from "search results in the search results" (see this post from Google's WebSpam Chief, including the comments, for more detail). Google's stated feeling is that search results generally don't "add value" for users, though others have made the argument that this is merely an anti-competitive move. Whatever the motivation, here at SEOmoz, we've cleaned up many sites' "search results," transforming them into "more valuable" listings and category/sub-category landing pages, and have had great success recovering rankings and gaining traffic from Google.

In essence, you want to avoid the potential for being perceived (not necessarily just by an engine's algorithm but by human engineers and quality raters) as search results. Refrain from:

Pages labeled in the title or headline as "search results" or "results" Pages that appear to offer a query-based list of links to "relevant" pages on the site without other content (add a short paragraph of text, an image, and a formatting that makes the "results" look like detailed descriptions/links instead) Pages whose URLs appear to carry search queries, e.g. ?q=seattle+restaurants vs. /seattle-restaurants

Though it seems strange, these subtle, largely cosmetic changes can mean the difference between inclusion and removal. Err on the side of caution and dodge the appearance of search results.

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Please do share your own lessons and suggestions for optimizing content. I don't doubt there's even more material here for those dedicated to the practice. 

 

BTW - If you're looking for more "keyword targeting" focused advice, check out our best practices for keyword usage & targeting from the Beginner's Guide re-write.

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SEO Chat Forums - Does Having Outbound links really hurt?

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7 Customer Service Tips

Today's edition of the American Chronicle has an article by Robert Moment called "Customer Service Tips to Keep Your Customers Satisfied". The article opens by stating:

"Customers shop in order to satisfy something: a need or a desire. Therefore, it follows that your goal must be to keep your customers satisfied. However, don´t make the common mistake in assuming that it is only the product or service that you are selling that will provide the satisfaction that the customer is seeking."

"In actuality, the need or desire that customers are seeking to fill include much more than the product in itself. It also includes a sensation that they will be treated well, that they will be served professionally by a knowledgeable staff, and that if they should run into a problem, it will be managed quickly and effectively. Just as it seems, there is a lot involved in accomplishing this task. However, when it is done correctly, your business will run like a well oiled machine, and will be well worth the effort in its rewards."

It then lists seven tips for keeping your customers satisfied.

1. Keep your promises
2. Set Good Goals
3. Go Above And Beyond
4. Pay Attention to Customer Needs
5. Nurture Long-Term Employees
6. Make Customers Feel Wanted
7. Nitpick About Customers For Life

Website Bounce Rates Count

The author's view that bounce rates will certainly be part of search engine algorithms and probably already are.