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Showing posts with the label SEO

On my Twentieth Service Anniversary - a Retrospective

December 11th 2020, was my 20th anniversary since starting at IBM . I wasn't quite sure how to start this article: I just knew I wished to write something down.  Like many career IBMers, I've learned something - usually several things - every day, solved problems, made mistakes, helped others, been inspired, and sought out support from areas and people I didn't know existed in the matrixed yet siloed presence that is our employer. On balance I am grateful for much of my experiences, and especially for the people who I've gotten to know, respect, and care for. So, with apologies to non-IBMers who would be unfamiliar with the org structure (although I've otherwise tried to avoid internal jargon and initialisms) I dedicate this post to everyone I wish - and need - to thank. You all have been an important part of my life. The Facts: Life events My elopement in the autumn of 2000 to an Irish citizen, which led to my applying to multinationals based in Dublin, Ireland in

What's in a Title?

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After nearly three years in this role, my title changed from "Web Effectiveness Analyst", which was deemed slightly cryptic, to "SEO Specialist", which I hope will not be associated with too many negative connotations (it doesn't, internally to my employer, at least). Those familiar with the fundamentals of SEO would know that the prominence and density of a targeted keyword matters in titles; be they in HTML files, PDFs, videos, or indeed, LinkedIn taglines. So far this year, however, my deliverables have shifted from traditional consultancy - which implicitly involves knowledge transfer - to more of a training role, which has meant explicitly and convincingly conveying SEO best practices to clients. As early as 2011 I'd begun to co-author best practices guidebooks for an external client (primarily operating as a B2C entity), and this month I used the second of such to create a customized curriculum in the form of a presentation and series of live de

Google+ increasing its reach

Just about a week ago, it was announced that Blogger users may now mention either people or pages from Google+ in the same manner as within G+ itself. This would have been quite useful when I first promoted my  +Mayo Takeuchi Plus  page, which has now accumulated a good body of photographs. However, I cannot seem to cite myself, perhaps because I've linked this blog to my personal Google+ account and it would be self-serving? In the meantime, I've also added more G+ related widgets on this blog, including one that allows me to show thumbnails of people who have circled my personal account. Another button hopefully will encourage more people to circle my aforementioned Plus page. During my "day job" researching I'd also noticed that, although the follower/circle counts weren't up to date, that the PPC spots were also starting to make mention of sponsor pages on Google+. In an article " marriage of SEO and Social Media " (which likens this union

Caveat googlers?

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Courtesy of article from  getlisted.org , circa 2010 Google has enjoyed mainstream use  as a verb , in English and Japanese ("ã‚°ã‚°ã‚‹"). Furthermore, if Wikipedia is to be believed, people "google" things in Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. However, a quick look at any of Google's portals shows that the company offers much, much more. Combining its various services with the perceived bias for presenting content with close allegations has led to my finding a recent article by Danny Sullivan . There he, in a nutshell, decries his company's having crossed an arbitrary line of what search engines are "expected" to do - objectively point to online content - and what it now (and increasingly) does: provide a biased subset of content that aligns with its business model. I'd found Mr. Sullivan's op/ed via an article posted to TechCrunch , which caught my eye due to its title: "Why we may no longer be able to trust Go

A tale of Wikipedia's dominance

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As illustrated in the xkcd comic above, Wikipedia has had an enormous impact on many web users. A contributing factor to their success in the more recent years, may be attributable to how visible their pages are in organic searches. Google has been long reputed to favour Wikipedia content in their SERPs. However, recently Search Engine Watch established that (albeit by a narrow margin), Bing is even more likely  than Google to return a Wikipedia page organically. Personally, I find it completely unsurprising that Wikipedia articles would dominate organic rankings: Their URLs are easy to hack: I often go directly to the topic I wish by crafting the URL, and they also have extensive redirects in place, allowing me to reach the desired content even if my guess wasn't the canonical term. They make an effort to police their content to minimize bias and conjecture. Many of its pages are updated frequently, again with the power of crowd-sourcing. The writing quality is also mon

Build it as if they will come

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Building something though people may not immediately attend? Karlskirche in Vienna by night Last Friday, Search Engine Journal transcribed part of Matt Cutts' talk which pre-announced changes to Googlebot that will address "overly optimized" content: What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now. First, it's my impression th

Is larger (PPC) better? Size matters, but... the #G+ strategy

After winding down from what still feels novel but is actually BAU (business as usual) for me today, I read an article which includes this passage: In testing for the ads, Google mentioned clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the previous 2/3 line sitelinks. One would argue that is hardly surprising givent he[sic] real estate that these new ads take up, and that in itself presents more interesting scenarios to SEO’s[sic] who are already under pressure with many of the changes Google has made to its search results set. Further more[sic] these results bear many similarities to those of the sitelinks already in place within organic search results. More real estate to PPC which this undoubtedly will mean, should mean yet more traction for PPC results, and less visibility on organic results potentially resulting in the following scenario - More advertisers using PPC as organic visibility is being throttled - Competition within both PPC and SEO significantly increasing

Why I won't link to your blog

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Today I received the above comment, unsolicited, and after about two minutes' investigation I moved it into the Spam category. Here's a numbered list explaining why: Although my name is part of the blogspot domain I use, and promote in most places, the message addresses me as "Webmaster", which is possibly today's equivalent of "to whom it may concern". Actually, I have interchangeably experimented with the vanity URL provided to me via my alma mater, such as on Technorati and STC.org. The request is for cross-linking, which already devalues the proposition (as it's a "black hat" practice). If this person truly valued my blog, he would link to it without asking me to link to his. The request uses my domain, implying that it is a "keyword". I've blocked out the destination URL and the keyword he asked for (which, although partially reflecting his website address, was also far too generic to stand a chance at ranking well

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Personal thoughts on Twitter and follower counts

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... iff (if and only if) you appreciate my blog! Here I'd like document various thoughts concerning my journey in Twitter, which I joined in 2009. At first, I wasn't convinced that I would enjoy using it. Already feeling overwhelmed by the Information Age, I also noticed a lot of highly public yet personal (read: inappropriate or irrelevant for mass consumption) tweets as well as quite a lot of rude behaviour (ad hominem attacks). At the time of joining I had no Smartphone, and even now I have a severely minimalist data plan, so I don't tweet "on the go". Since I walk to work, checking the twitter stream on my commute is also fairly hazardous (although having said that, when I had a painful bus commute I relied on audio casts and preferred musical recordings stored in my iPod due to the ease with which I succumb to motion sickness.) As of today, mostly due to the aforementioned circumstances, I still only have a handful of tweets. More depressingly, I

Why most bloggers needn't worry about high bounce rates

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I was encouraged to read a couple of posts that talked about bounce rates from a web analytics person. In them, he describes several contexts in which high bounce rates should not be construed as being a negative reflection of the quality of the site or content. My own bounce rate is nearing 75% to date. In the web metrics world, bounce rate is defined as when " the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages [within the same domain]  before a specified session-timeout occurs. " In the aforementioned blog, the first entry talked about when the page's call to action takes the user to an external page or an advertisement link, and what is most valid for blogs, when the page arrived at is a so-called "destination page". Since most blog designs that I've seen provide the most recent entry content for quick viewing on the root or landing page, people whose blog posts are brief enough to be displayed in their entirety, returning readers only need

Another look at my stats: browser use

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Now that my blog has been extant for two months, I thought I'd compare more of the traffic statistics I can glean. Blogger itself provides some basic information (their penchant for only displaying the top 10 entries is starting to bother me), so I've taken a look at the all time breakdown of my visitors' browser choices: Pageviews by Browsers Firefox 480 (49%) Internet Explorer 170 (17%) Safari 155 (15%) Chrome 97 (9%) Mobile 49 (5%) Mobile Safari 19 (1%) Opera 2 (<1%) SimplePie 2 (<1%) Overall, this is what Searchengineland says are the latest stats for browser use courtesy of Chitika, who studied North American usage. IE is (still) just holding the majority of all users: And also from the same article , people who read Searchengineland use these browsers (I'm thinking these numbers represent their global audience, though it wasn't clearly spec

Bing tests mixes of paid and organic results on SERPs

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I was distressed to read in Searchengineland that Bing is testing something similar to Google's SERP structure, where organic result lists are interrupted by paid entries, or compilations of "emphasized" content, often at the "fold" position (4th or 5th place, roughly halfway down the page). Distressed, yes, but not surprised - time will tell whether their trial run reveals that users pay attention to the faint labeling that indicates that a listing is an advertisement, but it seems well established already that the Google practice of placing sponsored links at the very top and to the right hand column in SERPs has led to its users learning to largely ignore the right hand area of the page , along with spending less viewing time on the very top of the main body as well. The presence of "search engine provider-preferred" content at the fold position, also means that listings that fall beneath this visual area are only likely to be noticed by visitor

Who my readers are (so far)... by country

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It should be unsurprising to my readers, that this blog itself has been an experiment in SEO. From its inception (e.g. which service I selected to host it), to its traffic analysis, thus far I've learned a bit and questioned much. For interests' sake, the all-time visitor breakdown by country (which could be skewed by anyone spoofing their IP, of course) is the following: United States         250 Canada                   92 Austria                    74 France                    74 Australia                 45 Japan                      18 Germany                 13 United Kingdom        9 Russia                       8 India                         5 Some counts make perfect sense: I can trace back the majority of Austrian and Australian visits to people whom I know. In the US, I can thank Mick for being such a faithful reader and commenter, although not all the American traffic is likely to be solely attributable to him

Correlation, Causation and SEO

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Much speculation abounds when it comes to reverse engineering which criteria are prioritized in search engine ranking algorithms. In the SEOmoz ranking factors summary  from this year, the correlation of higher page ranks to greater Facebook "like" numbers was noted. As my team lead (co-author of Audience, Relevance and Search - here's its companion blog ) and I discussed, it was clear that there was an implication that people were likely to interpret this correlation as causation - that is, cum hoc ergo propter hoc.  It's a very easy trap to fall into: thinking that we can rely on a quantifiable factor such as SNS-driven endorsement counts to predict how high up a SERP the page would be likely to be found. However, if one examines the use case scenario of a "popular" page, here's what I would easily envision happening: Something that is useful, very entertaining or plain memorable is published. News of its existence begins to virally spread - t

Response to "Ethics of personalized search" SEOMoz blog post

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The Ethical Issues of Personalisation Online  asked the following questions, so I thought I'd present my views here: But, is it rea sonable to expect a corporate entity to act for the greater good? Particularly if providing users with a more balanced SERP results in them high-tailing it straight into the warm embrace of the competition? In any case – wasn’t it always this way? Before the internet people consumed news only via whichever media sat comfortably with their own political affiliation. Plus of course, even if a more balanced mix of results are shown, you can’t *make* people click through to read something they don’t want to. So, what do you think? Should we be afraid of personalisation? Should we push for easier ways to turn it off? Should there be more ‘balanced’ results for certain types of queries? Should I get myself a tin foil hat, cancel my broadband, flush my smartphone and hide under my desk?   First, while I would imagine a for-profit organization would consider

A tale of two search engine result pages (SERPs)

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As many of us are wont to do, I periodically perform exact match searches on my full name on various search engines. For neutrality, I use a cache- and cookie-cleared Firefox, and happen to be on OSX. The results I see from Google and Bing today, are surprisingly different. While it doesn't surprise me that Google prioritizes its own sites (of which blogspot is one), the Dogear and Lotus presence are listed in the top SERP, which is a bit surprising, considering how old they are. Bing, on the other hand, doesn't show any of my employer-hosted pages, not just in the top set of results, but anywhere in the 45 listings it provides. Google also claims there are "about 476" hits for my name in double quotes - that's more than ten times the number acknowledged by Bing. Also, due to a combination of its emphasis on Facebook matches and my high security settings, 4 of the Bing hits are of someone eponymous to me, whereas only 2 of Google's points to that same p