Google’s first production server at the Computer History Museum.
Photo Credit: jurvetson

Taking that concept to the World Wide Web, Page and Brin set out to construct a search engine that utilized link structure (along with the actual anchor text in the hyperlinks that pages point to) to return relevant results, and to do so quickly and efficiently. PageRank — a play off of Larry’s last name –was introduced. “BackRub” — perhaps a play on back links? — became Google — for sure a play on googol — and the rest is history.

[Larry and Sergey’s Stanford paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, is a fascinating read into the backstory of Google. Amongst the talk of damping factors and mathematical formulas like PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn), the paper gives great insight into the duo’s thinking as it laid out its goal of “Bringing Order to the Web.”]

Now, let’s take that concept to your site. If you write about “rocket science” … and you include that phrase in page titles … and you have it in page headings … and you have links within your pages that include rocket science as the anchor text and point to other pages about the subject … then you’ve told your visitors, and the search engines, that one of the themes on your site is rocket science. Within reason, the more this phrase is naturally used in page content, titles, headings and hyperlinks, the better. Google knows this phrase is important to you, and it can begin to judge the importance of your site for that term.

Here’s where PageRank, external links and anchor text solidify your theme and can help establish your site as an authority on rocket science. When other sites and blogs and Tweets, etc., link to you with rocket science in the content of their pages and in the actual hyperlinks that point to your page, your site in essence receives votes for being important for that topic. (It’s one thing for you to write “we are the best at rocket science.” It’s another for someone else to write that “these guys are great at rocket science” and link to you for more information on that subject.) The more votes you receive the better you rank. And, more importantly, the “better” the vote (from a site which itself is an authority on the topic) the better your ranking.

Again, the concept can’t be abused. Excessive links from bad neighborhoods or from multiple domains controlled by the same owner or from other shady practices can lead to penalties. Like other SEO techniques, it shouldn’t be overdone, or forced, or spammed … but legitimate links from legitimate sites give a boost to your Google Juice … and everybody likes Google Juice, right?

Remember the premise of Google: Each time a given author was quoted as a reference in other academicians’ research papers, it was seen as a vote for the authority of that author. Now, simply carry that forward to the multi-billion-dollar external search engine: The more times a site is referenced, the more authority that site has, and the higher it ranks. Write good copy, optimize it well for on-page factors, and let the world vote on that content with links to your site.

• Yahoo to end Search Submit, its paid inclusion program.  ‘Committing our resources…to our core areas of focus.’
• ‘Westlake Ace Hardware has tapped Kansas City, MO-based…Barkley to take on its CRM and database marketing.’ DMNews
• ‘We believe the worst of the recession is behind us,’ Google says in reporting 7% year-over-year revenue growth. WSJ
• White House converses with LinkedIn community ‘regarding the challenges faced by health care professionals…’
• Was the media ‘punk’d by Balloon Boy?’ Mashable | Twitter, Facebook mash up the story. Mashable
• Us: ‘We Don’t Use the Keyword Meta Tag.’  Danny Sullivan: ‘Yahoo, You DO Index Meta Keywords Tag.’
• Van Natta cuts staff, tears down walls, turns over the C-suite. WSJ Digits.  Will it save MySpace?
• ‘Shared bicycles,’ emblazoned in Google-logo colors, were a favorite on our recent Googleplex visit. ‘Green Tour‘
• Been following the Sidekick data loss debacle at Microsoft sub Danger? They now say most data is recovered. Mashable
• Experian Hitwise data on US search share, long tail, search engine marketshare by industry. via Virginia Nussey
• Danny Sullivan uses the word xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk to prove that Yahoo DOES use the meta keyword tag. Search Engine Land
• Twitter as ‘poor-man’s email’ … and as a tool for community, brand and business. Nice Quick-Start Biz Guide. ClickZ
• To infinity and beyond … or at least 10,000 points anyway, as the Dow tops that mark for the first time in a year. Up 50% since March.
• Will digital print, and the ability to customize content, save traditional publishers? Trib, Time Inc. try it. DMNews
• ‘Promoted Videos has become a critical way for creators to get their content in front of viewers.’ Now via AdWords.
• It took LinkedIn 477 days to get first million users. The latest million took 12 days. Now at 50 million total users.
• Yahoo and Google to report earnings soon. YHOO stock up 39% this year, GOOG up 70% since January. Kara Swisher
• Bloomburg buys BusinessWeek…cheap. Conde Nast’s Portfolio is gone. 3 biz mags remain: BW, Forbes, Fortune. WSJ
• Our weekly Roundup of search engine marketing, advertising, analytics and Kansas City Tweets, through 10/09/2009.
• Top users are on social sites more than email, IM combined. ‘Dollars are following eyeballs,’ ad prices low. eMarketer
• ‘This ship is sinking,’ says Mashable regarding MySpace. Traffic has dropped nearly 20% since June.
• Fun stuff. Esquire’s Digital Man, Barry Sonnenfeld, vlogs about the Traeger Professional Wood Pallet Grill. Kara Swisher
• Email no longer rules, but does that save time…or waste more of it? WSJ
• 9.1 million saw The Office ’spoof within a spoof’ wedding entrance, but 27+ million have seen the JK Wedding Dance. E!
• WSJ: ‘the biggest battle over fonts — ever — has broken out in New York federal court.’ NBC vs. Font Bureau.
• Google Blog: ‘This week we made many small improvements to the functionality and usability of our search results.’

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A recent study about search engine ranking factors, highlights where keywords are most effective on a website. The study results were gathered from a 2009 poll taken by a panel of 72 SEO experts. The top ranking on-page (keyword-specific) ranking factor was using the keyword in the title tag on the page.

Summarizing methods that we already knew and what these findings supported, here are tips on where to place your keywords on your site:

• Title Tags. Get your keyword into the first couple of words in the title tag if possible.
• Domain Name and URL. This one’s more difficult we know. Many of us don’t have a site devoted to just one topic, rather a collection of topics. So if your keyword can’t be in the root domain name, consider adding it to the subdomain name or page name URL.
• Headings On The Page.  Get your keyword into the H1 tag/main headline on your page. 
• Copy On The Page. Include your keyword in the copy of the page. This will let Search Engines find the content on your site that does relate to the keyword searched on.
• Internal and External Linking. Include your keyword in any internal cross-linking or external linking to your site. Include this method in your internal SEO practices. When possible, request external sites that are linking to your site to include the specific keyword in their link.
• Description Meta Tag. Include your keyword in the description meta tag. Google will pull the description meta tag and display it in the search results, if the keyword is included.
• Image Alt Text. Include your keyword in your brief descriptive image alt tags.

And, of course, always make your page and/or website relevant to your keyword with rich, supporting content, videos and images. Remember, keywords are still important, it’s just a matter of how you use them.

Don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time populating the keyword meta tag. And don’t stuff it with irrelevant words. But do spend time focusing on what the main keywords/phrases are for a page, do create content that utilizes those words, and do populate those words into the meta tag. You might even add synonyms and a misspelling or two to help the engines.

At the time, we said, “the search engines virtually ignore meta tag keyword entries.” Recent developments indicate that you can strike the word “virtually” and safely say, “the search engines ignore meta tag keyword entries.”

In fact, Google engineer Matt Cutts mentions that fact three times in a short four paragraph blog post, and highlights it more with a video (below). For good measure, Google says the same thing in its Official Blog, and adds the Cutts video again for good measure. (I think they’re trying to tell us they don’t use the keywords meta tag.) Recently, Yahoo was quoted as saying the same thing at SMX East in New York. (UPDATE: Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo does use the keyword meta tag, and used this word xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk to prove it.)

So, should you spend a lot of time on the keyword meta tag? No. Should you spend time researching keywords and phrases about which you’ll create content, pages, description meta tags, title tags and link opportunities. Yes! (And go ahead and put those in the keyword meta tag for good measure, especially if you use the Google Search Appliance or similar tool.)

Google XML Sitemaps

Search engines do a great job of finding web-based content on their own. But sometimes they need help, and in recent years they adopted a standardized format that site owners can use to submit sitemaps (lists of pages on a site). The format is called the Sitemap protocol and it basically involves putting an XML file listing a site’s indexable content somewhere on the site where search engines can download and process it. Maintaining this XML file can be a very tedious task to do manually, as the format is quite strict. What’s a blogger to do? Surely not update the sitemap XML file by hand after each post? Enter the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

This little wonder updates your blog’s sitemap file each and every time you publish a new post (unless you wish to update it manually). It not only updates the sitemap file, it also gives Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask a big heads-up that there’s something new to come see. You can tell it to exclude certain categories, tags, or posts from the sitemap and set up simple rules for priority and update frequency. Note: For Yahoo automatic notification, a Yahoo Application ID (similar to a WordPress API Key, discussed in our prior discussion of Akismet) is required (sign up for one here).

Check out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Twitter Widget Pro, a great tool to display your Twitter feed in your blog’s sidebar.

All-In-One SEO Pack

The top of our list is this little baby. Yes, WordPress already lets you specify a search engine-friendly URL for permalinks, and it provides several different ways to let crawlers get to content, and it uses a pingback service to inform the web of new content. What else could you want? Well, this this little guy takes it to the next level by:

• allowing you to specify a title, keywords, and description for each post (it will even populate your description automatically)
• automatically adding canonical tags to prevent duplicate content errors
• specify a system or rewriting page titles for page, posts, archives, etc.
• autopopulate keywords with a posts categories
• specify noindex for category, archive, and tag pages
• it’s sweet, and a must-have for any serious blog’s SEO effort

Check out the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. And don’t forget to support the author by donating!

Next time we’ll cover Akismet, the built-in tool that helps prevent spammers from taking over your blog’s comments.

And we’re quite a ways from knowing who will win in the long run.

But before we go there, let’s take a quick look back to see how we got where we are today:

• Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) incorporates in 1995. Google comes along in 1997, MSN Search in 1998.
• Yahoo inadvertently fuels Google’s growth by allowing Google to power Yahoo search in the early 2000s.
• While Google grows its powerful engine from its own core technology, Yahoo and MSN use blended results, growing by buying competitors, trying and re-trying their own engines … and continuing to lose ground to Google.
• By 2006, Google surpasses Yahoo in search marketshare. MSN has about half the share of the Big 2.
• From 2005-2008, Microsoft and Yahoo flirt with on-again, off-again merger talks. The most serious comes in the form of an unsolicited $44.6 billion offer by Microsoft in 2008.
• In mid-2008, Google and Yahoo try to get back together, announcing a deal to run Google’s contextual ads on Yahoo properties.
• But by the end of 2008 Google, fearing Justice Department intervention, calls off the deal with Yahoo.
• Meanwhile, Google’s marketshare reaches at least 65% in 2009, with Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft’s latest engine) around 30% combined. (Out here in the wild, we often see Google driving 75% of traffic to strong, well-written sites.)
• Finally, CEO’s Carol Bartz of Yahoo and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft announce a 10-year deal between the companies that leverages Yahoo’s high traffic volume with Microsoft’s technology for search and self-serve ads.

Here’s Yahoo’s Bartz on the deal:

And Microsoft’s Ballmer:

So why do we think this deal benefits Google? Doesn’t the combined power of Yahoo and Microsoft make a more formidable opponent? In theory, yes. But in reality, any synergies from the deal are two years away – if they ever happen.

First, the deal must pass government review, a process that President Obama has promised to make tougher than previous administrations. And if the deal is allowed – which it likely will, but with Google slowing the process where it can along the way – the parties say it will take 24 months to fully integrate their efforts. What marketshare will Google have by that time … 85%, 90%? The chasm between No. 1 and No. 2 could very well be greater than it is now.

Don’t get us wrong … we like the MicroHoo, er, YaSoft marriage. Competition is good. Since the launch of Bing, for example, we think we’ve seen more chatter than usual out of Google. That leads to more innovation, and better online experiences for all of us. We just think by the time that happens, the game will already be over (if it isn’t already).

Note: Here are some resources used for this entry.

• All Things Digital (Wall Street Journal)
• Mashable timeline
• Wikipedia
• Associated Press
• Choice. Value. Innovation. (Microsoft-Yahoo site)
  

The search query we targeted was “Children’s Hospital.” In our initial test on Live Search (Microsoft’s former search brand), the engine returned Children’s Hospital Boston as the No. 1 listing, with eight “site links” below the URL and an option to “Show more results for childrenshospital.org.” The No. 2 position included three listings geared to my zip code. On the right-hand side was a listing of eight “Related searches.” Interestingly, there were no “Sponsored Results,” which are the pay-per-click listings and the method by which the engines make their money.

On June 2, we ran the same search on the Bing.com. Beyond cosmetic changes (the new wrapper and some elements positioned in different places) the actual results were subtly different.

In the first position on Bing were the local listings, which were in the second position before. A funny note: Initially, Bing (and Live, too, for that matter) kept trying to position me in Little Rock, Arkansas, so it showed me local results for that area. we had to go in and change our location each time to get Kansas City results to appear. Guess we need to log-in and update our info for Microsoft! (Side note: We really, really don’t know why the search engines insist on pushing their local listings on us when there have so many flaws in the results. And getting them changed is a bear … a topic for an upcoming post.)

After local results, the second listing on Bing is for Children’s Hospital Boston, which was the first overall listing on Live. The rest of the results seem to follow in the same order, so it doesn’t appear as if there is a major algorithm change. Related Searches are now on the left (they were on the right before) but again look to be the same listings in the same order. There is also a handy Search History group below the related searches entries.

Here’s a nice feature. As you mouse over a snipped from a site, a line with a circle in it appears next to that listing (the Hover feature). Mousing over that listing reveals an additional excerpt from the site, with site-link-type links as well. This gives you further knowledge on whether you want to click on the site or move on to the next listing.

We still didn’t see any sponsored results for our search. Perhaps a better experience with the search engine will lead to more interest from advertisers. Until then, it may be a good opportunity for inexpensive traffic for advertisers.

The changes aren’t huge, and in our small test we don’t see a new algo, but we are pleasantly surprised with Bing. Let’s hope we continue to see good things from the engine.