Design for your least able user – a search bot

Useful SEO basic principles from Michael Smethurst, IA at the BBC. I like it – lots of emphasis on good links and persistent URIs.

Then he’s written lots more detail here.

Google Search-based Keyword Tool

Google has introduced a new Search-based Keyword Tool which generates keyword and landing page ideas that, it claims, are  “highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.”

So it provides a useful competitive analysis tool, letting you see which keywords Google thinks are relevant to a site or site section. Of course, it’s also suggesting potential keywords to bid on as Adwords and if you sign in with an Adwords account then the list is fuller and more customised.

I had a play and found quite sound suggestions for public sector sites, as the Lambeth.gov.uk example shows:

Unemployment and redundancy revisited

Robin Goad at Hitwise revisits searches for ‘redundancy’ following his first review in June, discussed by me here.

Goad notes a large increase in searches for ‘redundancy’ related terms and ‘unemployment’ related terms, but also a large increase in the range of distinct variations searched for.

Directgov is the destination for a large (and increasing*) proportion of these searches

“Over half the people searching for ‘redundancy’ (63.8%), ‘job seekers allowance’ (56.7%) and ‘unemployment benefit’ (55.1%) currently visit the government site Directgov. The five most popular employment search terms driving traffic to Directgov over the 4 weeks ending 8th November were ‘worktrain’, ‘job seekers allowance’, ‘income support’, redundancy’ and ‘job seekers allowance (sic)’.”

A search on Google for these terms gives the following results:

rank/term	redundancy	Job Seekers Allowance	unemployment benefit
Sponsored	–	Directgov	Directgov
1st	Directgov	Jobcentreplus	Working Rights
2nd	Directgov	Job Seekers Allowance	Working Rights
3rd	BERR	Directgov	DWP (PDF)
4th	BERR	DSDNI	DWP (PDF)

The two Directgov sponsored lnks show the value of including sponsored results to help users navigate. Unemployment benefit is no longer an ‘official term’ and so the natural search results from the public sector are not particularly helpful. The sponsored link points users to a helpful hub page about help and support with looking for work.

*In the period ending in June 54.6% of searches for the basic term ‘redundancy’ went to Directgov.

Change.gov still not optimised

On 6 November, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, wrote about Obama’s new transition website, www.change.gov, demonstrating that it was poorly optimised for search. For example the Home page title:

<title>Change.gov</title>

Not only is it not at all descriptive, but it doesn’t use any of the terms that people were searching for in the heat of the moment. Sullivan goes on to show other pages that could be optimised better. I particularly liked hos point about the Michelle Obama page. People were searching for ‘michelle obama bio”, but the page is called a more “cutesy” ‘Meet Michelle Obama”.

Of course, as Sullivan says, this important site will soon be indexed well, but he reminds readers:

“I think it’s a good reminder that the bedrock of success with SEO starts with words. Think of your audience. Use the words they are using to find you. Write copy correctly from the start, add a search engine friendly architecture and good things flow from there.”

You might argue that when the site was launched the keyword information wasn’t available; although I’d counter there must have been evidence from previous information. But there’s been time since and of course, getting it right when it’s a ‘hot topic’ is key to meeting users’ expectations.

And regarding search engine friendly structure; look what Yahoo! makes of some pages:

McGovern makes arguments I support

In recent blogs, Gerry McGovern makes arguments close to my way of thinking.

• Choosing the right classification words
  argues for the need to ensure content creators use the words that your audience use rather than corporate/PR/government language. Of course, in many cases the “official” language has to be used, but it’s important to optimise content for the non-official terms that your audience actually uses.
• Obsessed by technology reminds us that technology isn’t the total solution to content management. However good the tools, there needs to be editorial/business input.

Redundancy searches: employee and employer behaviour

On his Hitwise blog, Robin Goad notes an increase in searches related to redundancy.

“The top site visited by people searching for the term is a government site for businesses, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), which received 44.2% of traffic; it was followed by My Business (11.1%), a small business advice site. On the other hand, the majority of people searching for the basic term ‘redundancy’ (54.6%) went to the more consumer / public / voter focussed government site, Directgov. Of the people searching for ‘redundancy payments’, 53.4% went to BERR and 20.9% to Directgov.”

He seems to infer that searchers for ‘redundancy’ are employees and searchers for ‘redundancy calculator’ are employers looking to pay people off – presumably on the basis of which site they chose (Directgov for citizens and BERR for businesses). Although he does make the caveat that BERR and My Business are well optimised for ‘redundancy payment’

Visibility in universal search

I attended an interesting presentation on ‘The next step for search’, from a search marketing perspective at internetworld.

Andrew Girdwood and others talked about brand and trade names, social graph driven search and more, but what interested me most was the challenges and opportunities with universal/blended search, where the major search engines are increasingly displaying other content formats – maps, images and especially video within the main search engine results.

So there is a challenge and, of course, an opportunity to get relevant videos etc. displayed in the main SERPs in addition to the regular text link. Perceived wisdom was that its relatively easy to rank well with video for relevant terms and, of course, Google loves YouTube.

Visibility of government information

“Yet government websites rarely fit the way that people actually use the internet. A Google search for ‘UK‘ ‘government’ ‘childhood’ ‘obesity’ and ‘“help’ brings up a site that links to some mildly interesting statistics, but the excellent ‘children and healthy weight’ page on directgov does not come up among the first 100 results.” says Edward Lucas in an Economist special report “Look it up on the web“

I’d comment on two fronts:

• If you search for his keywords on Google (searching the whole web) there are relevant Directgov results at #7 and #11 – although not the article he refers to, they are relevant results. A search on Google restricted to UK gives the same results at #5 and #6. From these pages you can get to the article he refers to.
• He seems, like many commentators, not to understand Directgov’s proposition to write content in the general public’s language. If you change the search to ‘UK government childhood weight’ or ‘children healthy weight’, the “Children and healthy weight” article comes top in whole web and UK. So the article is optimised for general language, rather than more official language.

Nevertheless, it is vital for government to recognise the importance of web search when citizens are looking for information and to start taking visibility in search engines seriously.

Wikia search launches

Wikia Search launched today. Nice simple interface; but, as the site says, “the results are pretty bad”. But the concept is that trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way will improve results. This seems to be based on providing user feedback and creating mini articles that provide short definitions, disambiguations, photos and ’see also’s.

Users get to see the Nutch relevancy score by clicking on the numerical score by each result.

Internet World

I attended Internet World at Earl’s Court 2 on 1 May. The attraction was the free seminars across wide variety of subjects. The reality was a trifle disappointing – clashing events on similar subjects, rather basic presentations and a bit crowded. Did I learn much, well not too much, but I came away with some ideas. I attended these seminars:

Using Google Website optimiser to improve site search
A Google salesman talking about Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer .

Website Optimizer, Google’s free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).

London Borough of Southwark: enterprise search in the real world with Google
Alison Leahy and Stephen D’Arcy wanted one place to search across repositories, including public site and intranet.

Working with Jadu, they implementing Jadu Rupa for Google. Allows user to set and save preferences for scopes. They called this clustering…

Implemented IPSV as a thesaurus for preferred and non-preferred terms. Planning iterative addition of new collections.

Using a content management system to achieve effective search engine marketing
Nigel Jackson from Immediacy did a SEM 101:

CMS should deliver:

• W3C XHTML compliance
• clean uncluttered code
• friendly URLs
• autogeneration of site maps
• accessible navigation (text based)
• mandated actions for editors – e.g. mandatory metadata
• link checker

CMS lets user do:

• optimisation of titles (allows short titles for nav pages)
• summaries
• manage links
• encourage back links
• easily create landing pages, targetting keywords

Useful links:
www.highrankings.com
www.longtail.com

Maximising customer catch points in natural search
Your Amigo which has a technology that spiders sites, identifies important keywords and gaps and creates loads of extra pages optimised around these terms.

Managing huge paid search campaigns
The most interesting presentation of the day. Efficient Frontier use algorithms developed for financial markets to plan SEM campaigns in the increasingly opaque markets where paid position is now determined by click through rates and quality as well as cost per click. The algorithms handle lots of parameters that help optimise your ROI.