Just read a post over at Bill Slawski’s SEO by the SEA blog where he takes apart a recent Yahoo patent, and theorizes that:

How much might the usability of a web page matter to a search engine? If that search engine were to look at an approximation of the layout of a web page, it could try to understand how good of a user experience visiting that page might be, and evaluate the page based upon certain characteristics that it finds upon the page.

This is interesting, and while it is not implemented and could be years away from implementation, it brings an interesting, new, and fresh angle to look at what the search engines may be up to.  For those people trying to stay just one step ahead of the search engines (which is not smart, duh).  You should look at this as an idea for where the search engines may someday use to determine your spammy, low value, link heavy site isn’t so great.  Google might look at bounce rates for those who install Google analytics someday.

Of course for most people who just build quality sites with users in mind you wont’ have to worry about this very much, that’s of course the right way to go.  However if these experiments ever become main parts of ranking algorithms, it will be good to know that these kinds of metrics could be used as areas to troubleshoot…someday.  I say someday because we could be years away from these tactics being used by search engines to determine rankings.

Interesting to consider thought, right?

After years of hearing about how great Rackspace is as a hosting provider, we finally bucked up and paid the big guns the big dollars for their “Fanatical Support”.

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW - check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

It’s that time of year again — the kiddies are all headed back to school. Now that I’m headed back to school too (MBA = T minus 2 years), it makes me reminisce about all those things I loved about college – the excitement of a new year, catching up with old friends you hadn’t seen all summer, the first night in a new dorm room, the first weekend of parties (when it really still felt like summer camp & not like school), flipping through textbooks ($500 for 2 books – WHAAAAT?!?!) and thinking “This class might actually be interesting” (then leaving the book under the bed until 3 days before finals)… Sometimes I have weird trains of thought, but I was also recently thinking about all the things that I enjoyed discovering in college and how they sort of parallel the recent online developments that I enjoy discovering every day. And one thing I learned in school (and at home): it’s always nice to share. =)

On the horizon, Compete is going to be launching Search Analytics on September 12th with a Pay-as-You-Go pricing model. This service will provide a new level of competitive research accessible for all sizes and types of companies. Compete Search Analytics will provide companies with access to keyword and site referral data so one can compare a site to its competitors and uncover ways to improve a search marketing strategy.

The second development I want to share is a widget. Yes, it seems everyone is widget-crazy these days, but this widget doesn’t apply to the masses — Due Maternity has found a great way to use a widget to connect to their niche. The first of our friends just had their first baby three weeks ago. I’m married to a second-year associate at a law firm and, as I mentioned, I’m about to start back at school for my MBA, so starting our family is a ways off (much to my in-laws disappointment). But my friend’s pregnancy was — and new baby Matthew is — really exciting for us (now, if they didn’t live in Ohio…). If only I had discovered Due Maternity’s desktop widget earlier, I could have shared it with the mommy-to-be. I love it, not only because it’s cute, but because it’s a brilliant marketing idea; Due Maternity has found an alternative marketing avenue to stay in touch with their target audience, and it has a measurable ROI!

“During the first 45 days after launch, the application was downloaded around 10,000 times—customers were enticed with a 10% discount on select purchases—and sales directly attributable to click-throughs from the application to the e-commerce site hit $7,500. The cost? $600.” -Internet Retailer, August 20, 2007

Often companies want to develop a widget just for the sake of having a widget (or because “everyone else is doing it”). The Due Maternity widget really emphasizes thinking about your target audience, the format of your widget, and widget tie-ins that will entice the downloader to return to your site.

(more…)

Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been making changes that seem to have had quite an impact on search results. Back on July 14th, Yahoo! announced that it had completed an index update. Some people were happy with the change, but overall, most of the feedback was not positive. Many companies saw their top rankings on Yahoo! fall to the bottom of the results.

Then, a few weeks later, Yahoo! let their new Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) loose. As Yahoo! noted in their own Search blog, “You may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.” After implementation of the new Yahoo! Slurp, search results did not improve.

In their most recent Weather Report regarding their Search Index Update, Yahoo! directed visitors to their Site Explorer for more communication and interaction with Yahoo! Additionally, webmasters were asked to authenticate their sites. Whether or not site authentication helps improve search results on Yahoo! is still subject to debate. If you find that you’re not ranking well in Yahoo! and you’re abiding by the rules of SEO, it’s probably worth a shot.

Here’s an example of some of the bad results Yahoo! has been returning for search. On September 27th, I did a search for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor.” Let’s review the results:

1) A Plastic Surgery Savings site. Not truly Philadelphia-specific. I can’t even contact a doctor here – only put in my name & email for someone to contact me. Not a very good result.
2) Another Plastic Surgery Savings site. Comparing paragraphs on this page to #1, you start noticing that the content duplication is remarkable. Additionally, if Yahoo! is going to rank two pages from the same site in back-to-back positions, couldn’t they be grouped together like Google does?
3) A blog page that simply mentions searching for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor” in the context of free speech in the U.S. Bad result.
4) A directory page from e-comoutlet.com. Bad result.
5) A “Philadelphia Guide” page from criany.org – pretty much a scraper site. Bad result.
6) Actual plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area. YAHOO! Good result.
7) Philadelphia page from Looking Your Best. Looking Your Best is a portal site operated by an internet marketing company for plastic surgeons. Good result.
8) Plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area’s website. Good result.
9) Scraper site. Bad result.
10) Philly plastic surgeon’s site. Good result.

Overall, not very good results from this Yahoo! search. Try the same search in Google and see what comes back. Looks much better to me. For now, I think I’ll stick to Google for my searches – a lot less hunting to find quality results.

So what does this mean for your search results? Yahoo! still seems to be working on their search. It might take some time to see where things settle out. In the meantime, it’s hard to sacrifice good rankings on Google on MSN while trying to figure out the new Yahoo! algorithm. Search is sometimes a game of wait and see.