search engine optimization + Katy Barrilleaux

December Search Volume by Search Engine

January 19, 2009

comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for December 2008, compared to November 2008.

December 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, unchanged from November, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.9 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.

comScore Core Search Report* December 2008 vs. November 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
Core Search Entity	Nov-08	Dec-08	Point Change Dec-08 vs. Nov-08
Total Core Search	100.0	100.0	N/A
Google Sites	63.5	63.5	0.0
Yahoo! Sites	20.4	20.5	0.1
Microsoft Sites	8.3	8.3	0.0
Ask Network	4.0	3.9	-0.1
AOL LLC	3.8	3.8	0.0

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Filed Under: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. Tagged With: Google, Microsoft, natural search, organic search, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, Yahoo

The Reasons for Agencies to Offer Organic Search are Growing

January 19, 2009

You can’t turn on the news these days without hearing at least one story about the economic conditions ─ bail outs, bankruptcies, cutbacks, layoffs and more. Marketing and advertising dollars are usually the first slashes made in the budget so it’s no surprise that industry analysts are projecting advertising spending in all categories to be down in 2009 ─ all areas except one: online advertising.

Online ad spending is expected to grow between 6 – 10% in 2009. The largest category of online advertising is search, which is expected to comprise more than 47% of the ad spend online. Clearly, this creates an opportunity for agencies, but many advertising, public relations and interactive agencies have not yet jumped into organic search.

If you are one of those agencies, you’ll want to read the white paper titled“How to Grow Your Agency in the Downturn: SEO Answers the SOS.” Written specifically for owners and managers of advertising, public relations, interactive and marketing communications agencies, this white paper addresses the current market conditions for the advertising industry and shines the light on the opportunities with search engine optimization (SEO).

Topics covered include:

2009 outlook for ad spending
analysts’ projections for growth in online spending
income potential of search
challenges agencies face in providing SEO services
proven, SEO platform developed just for agencies
historical similarities to the current agency environment

“How to Grow Your Agency in the Downturn: SEO Answers the SOS” is freely available for download on the Ecordia website at www.ecordia.com/soswhitepaper. It’s a must read for all agency professionals who are considering adding organic search to their service offerings. The reasons to do so are growing and with Ecordia, the barriers are shrinking.

Filed Under: Ecordia Tagged With: ad agency, Ecordia, Google, interactive, marcom, online ad spending, online advertising, organic search, pr, public relations, search engine optimization, SEO, SERP

Next DFW SEM Meeting is Thursday, Jan. 15

January 12, 2009

Don’t miss the next meeting of the Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (website) this Thursday, January 15. Featured speaker is Brett Tabke, CEO and Founder of WebmasterWorld (website) and chair of PubCon Conferences (website). Immediately following Brett’s presentation, several websites will be selected for an on-the-spot SEO review by DFW SEM members. It’s a great opportunity to gain valuable insight from DFW’s leading SEO professionals.

The meeting will be held at the Renaissance Hotel (map) in Richardson from 6:15 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Price is $10 for DFW SEM members and $30 for non-members.

The January DFW SEM meeting is sponsored by SEMPO (website) and Lead Maverick (website).

Filed Under: DFW SEM Tagged With: Brett Tabke, DFW SEM, PubCon, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, Webmaster World

When it Comes to SEO, the Color of your Hat Matters

January 11, 2009

SEO White Hat

In movies set in the wild west, the good guys always wore white and the bad guys donned black. The same is true in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).

“Black hat SEO” is a term referring to unethical techniques employed to “trick” the search engines to rank a web page in a top spot of its organic search, despite its true relevance – or lack thereof. Examples of black hat techniques include:

doorway pages — website entry pages filled with keywords that are crawled by the search engine bots, but visitors are immediately redirected to the “real” entry page.
keyword stuffing — placing a lot of keywords on a web page rather than quality content.
invisible text — placing keywords on a page in the same color as the background so that the human visitor doesn’t see them, but the search engine bots do.

Although black hat SEO techniques may deliver top rankings in the short run, sites employing these run the risk of being penalized — or even banned — from the search engines.

“White hat SEO” refers to techniques used to aid search engines in understanding and ranking content based on adhering to SEO best practices. There are numerous things a website owner may do to improve a site’s SEO, but it all amounts to one thing: build a site that is very rich with quality content and people and the search engines will find the site. Google provides a lot of information about SEO best practices. Give it a read for an even better understanding of white hat SEO and you’ll be sure to have happy trails.

Happy Trails for the White Hat SEO

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: black hat, Google, natural results, organic results, Search, search engine, search engine optimization, SEO, SEO best practices, SERP, white hat

November Search Volume by Search Engine

January 10, 2009 Leave a Comment

comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for November 2008, compared to October 2008.

November 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, up 0.4 percentage points from October, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.4 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (4.0 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.

comScore Core Search Report* November 2008 vs. October 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
Core Search Entity	Oct-08	Nov-08	Point Change Nov-08 vs. Oct-08
Total Core Search	100.0	100.0	N/A
Google Sites	63.1	63.5	0.4
Yahoo! Sites	20.5	20.4	-0.1
Microsoft Sites	8.5	8.3	-0.2
Ask Network	4.2	4.0	-0.2
AOL LLC	3.7	3.8	0.1

Filed Under: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. Tagged With: AOL, Ask, Google, Microsoft, Search, search engine, search engine optimization, search rankings, search report, SEO, share of searches, Yahoo

To Understand SEO, Get to Know Google First

January 10, 2009 Leave a Comment

When you pitch a new business prospect, you get to know a little about the company first. What business are they in? Who are their customers? Who are their competitors? How big is the company? And a million other things. You cater your pitch to appeal specifically to the prospect. The more you know in advance, the higher your odds of winning the account.

Well, it’s the same thing with search engine optimization (SEO). If you want to understand SEO, you first need to gain an understanding of how search engines work. And with a tight grip on 60+% of the search market, that means Google! Here’s a simplistic look at how Google works, from the 50,000 foot level.

Google has bots or spiders ─ programs it calls “Googlebots” ─ that “crawl” billions of web pages everyday. The Googlebots analyze the pages to determine what each page is about (keywords to match to your query) and the relevance of each page (incoming links from other pages that help determine the importance of the page). All this information is stored to create Google’s “index.” The index is constantly being updated to add new pages as well as to record changes to existing pages in the index.

When you place a keyword into a Google search box, Google checks its index to determine which pages are most relevant to the keyword and presents (or “serves”) a snippet of those pages in order of Google’s proprietary and highly complex ranking algorithm.

Here’s an illustration from Google that shows the search query process, which by the way, is usually executed in less than a half a second:

"Life of a Google Query" by Google

Think of SEO as a process of employing various techniques to:

For a little more explanation of crawling, indexing and serving, check out what Google has to say on the subject. Soon you’ll be ready to make your pitch to Google.

Filed Under: Everything Google Tagged With: ad agency, agency, keyword, natural results, new business, new business prospect, organic results, Search, search engine optimization, search engine results page, SEO, SERP

The Anatomy of a Google Search Results Page

January 3, 2009

Natural listings, organic results, sponsored ads, SERPs — these are just a few of the terms used to describe elements of a Google results page. But do you know what each one means? If they’re Greek to you, then keep on reading.

When you conduct a search query on Google, the results page presented — also known as a search engine results page or SERP — usually contains links that are free as well as links that are purchased. Free listings are referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. They represent the majority of the results on a SERP and are found along the left side of the page. See the green box in Figure 1 below.

Purchased links are called “Sponsored Links,” but may also be referred to as “pay-per-click ads (PPC),” “Google AdWords” or “paid ads.” Sponsored links are found along the right side of the page, and may also be the top three links on the left side of the SERP. See the pink boxes in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 -- Organic results vs. Paid results

As suggested by the name, Sponsored Links are paid ad placements based on the purchase of clicks for specific search query keywords. Organic results on the other hand, are completely controlled by Google. Google bots crawl millions of web pages every day, constantly analyzing the context of pages and adding them to its index. Using Google’s proprietary and incredibly secret algorithm, it serves up organic results to your query, making every attempt to provide the highest quality web pages matching the keywords.

There is a lot more that may be said about how PPC and organic listings happen, but we’ll leave those for other posts. For now, if you would like a detailed explanation of all of the elements on a Google SERP, visit Google’s Web Help page (link).

Filed Under: Everything Google Tagged With: Google, Google AdWords, Katy Barrilleaux, keyword, natural results, organic results, Pay-per-click, PPC, Search, search engine, search engine optimization, search engine results page, search query, SEO, SERP, Sponsored Links

New Year, New Blog

January 2, 2009

The new year is officially here and so is this new blog. I titled it Search Matters because not only is search going to be the primary focus of the site, but it also emphasizes the importance of search engines. After all, there are more than 12 billion searches conducted on search engines every month. And as the following chart from comScore shows, the number is growing.

Monthly Search Engine Searches -- October 2008

Search Matters will approach the subject with the agency executive in mind, specifically those who are not yet knee-deep into the wonderful world of search. This is a perspective the author, Katy Barrilleaux, knows quite well. With more than 20 years in the agency business — the last ten years in interactive — and the past year focused specifically on search engine optimization (SEO) (definition), Katy Barrilleaux knows first-hand the challenges facing agency professionals.

I will attempt to get information posted as quickly as possible, but in the mean time, if you have an urgent client opportunity with search, I encourage you to check out Lead Maverick (website) — the SEO platform specifically for advertising, public relations, interactive and web development firms. No technical knowledge is needed; just use Lead Maverick’s proprietary online content analyzer to publish onto our highly optimized SEO platform — and watch the top natural search results come!

Let me know if there are specific topics you’d like to see covered here or if you have any questions. I hope you find Search Matters informative.

Happy New Year!

Katy Barrilleaux

Filed Under: Potpourri Tagged With: ad agency, Ecordia, Katy Barrilleaux, public relations, Search, search engine, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO

December Search Volume by Search Engine

The Reasons for Agencies to Offer Organic Search are Growing

Next DFW SEM Meeting is Thursday, Jan. 15

When it Comes to SEO, the Color of your Hat Matters

To Understand SEO, Get to Know Google First

The Anatomy of a Google Search Results Page

New Year, New Blog

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