Search + Katy Barrilleaux

2010 in Google Search Review

December 10, 2010 Leave a Comment

One of my favorite things to do this time of the year, is to look back at the top stories of the past twelve months. It’s a chance to remember what’s happened this year in the news, in the entertainment world, in sports, and more. It helps give closure to the year, wiping the slate clean for the new year ahead.

Everywhere you look you’ll see a “2010 in Review.” All the news outlets will gather what they consider to be the top stories and compile them into a brief report or story. And you’ll no doubt see some of them.

Well, here’s something different.

The top search engine, Google, has collected and analyzed the most searched terms in 2010. This 3-minute video is an entertaining look at 2010, and you could say is one that is determined by us — not a reporter at a news bureau.

It’s the people’s review of 2010, through the lens of Google search:

If you are interested to see more data about Google searches in 2010, visit the Google microsite.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Filed Under: Everything Google Tagged With: 2010, Google, google search, googles, in google, internet, internet search engines, most searched terms, Search, web search engine, world wide web

Tweets, Links and Organic Search Rankings, Oh My!

December 9, 2010 Leave a Comment

QUESTION: What’s more effective for organic search rankings — traditional inbound links or social media links?

ANSWER: No one knows for sure but Google.

Okay, it was a trick question. But SEOmoz is running an experiment to see how tweets effect search rankings and they need your help.

Here is how SEOmoz has set up the experiment.

“In order to test these two ranking factors (traditional links and social media citations), we are going to need to promote two nearly identical pages using one promotion method for one and the other promotional method for the other while targeting the same keyword phrase. We can then see which page performs better in both the short term (my guess is the the tweet driven page) and the long term (my guess is the link driven page).

These two test pages will need to be targeting the same keyword phrase and on the same domain. I could do this on my own domain but doing so would be disingenuous (Hey everyone, send links and tweets my way! It is for an “experiment” ;-p You wouldn’t be fooled for a second and my apartment would get TPed… again)

Instead, the two test pages will be on a local charity’s website and target the phrase “Hunger in Sierra Leone”. The local charity, SeeYourImpact, is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that sends 100% of donations to the charity of a donation makers choice. The non-profit then photographs the results and sends the photo and a story of how the donation made an impact on an actual person to the donation maker so they can ‘see the impact’ (thus the name) of their donation. There is absolutely no financial affiliation with SEOmoz and SeeYourImpact although we do do consulting for them on a pro bono basis. In short, we think they are doing a great service but no money is being exchanged between the two organizations.”

Where you come in.

Below are two link options. The first is text with a link for Twitter. The second is code for a traditional link for your website. Pick one or both, but any links that you provide will help in this experiment.

Tweet this:

Help end hunger in Sierra Leone and meet the life you change http://bit.ly/hpsMJq

Link this:

<p>Help end <a href="http://seeyourimpact.org/explore/sector/hunger/fighting-hunger-sierra-leone/">Hunger in Sierra Leone</a> and meet the life you change.</p>

Help end Hunger in Sierra Leone and meet the life you change.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

I’ll post SEOmoz’s results here or you can follow the SEOblog to see results as they come in.

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With: inbound links, keyword phrase, organic search, rankings, Search, seomoz, sierra leone, social media, tweet

Never Alter Your Company Brand Unless…

September 21, 2009 4 Comments

Branding 101 says to establish your company brand and then be consistent. Place your brand everywhere and under no circumstances should you change that brand. Use specific PMS colors to print on slick stock and different PMS shades on uncoated stock. The RGB values and hex codes are specified. Maintain a clearance distance of x space around the logo. Never change the size relationship between the mark and the text. And never, ever, under any circumstances, or risk your own personal safety, alter the logo. It’s sacred!

Then along comes Google who proceeds to turn this Branding 101 rule on its head. Visitors to google.com sometimes see a creative interpretation of the Google logo, based on the date. Like today’s logo celebrating the birth of H. G. Wells. A mouse over explains the topic and a click on the logo takes you to a Google search of that topic.

New designs may be related to a holiday like New Year’s or St. Patrick’s Day. It may be an event like the Olympics. It may even be to celebrate the birth of a famous author, or artist, or inventor. Do any of these look familiar?

Google will customize its holiday logos specifically for certain countries, only displaying in that country. Most Americans have never seen these logos.

Why would Google practice such blatant blasphemy of it’s company brand? Two reasons come to mind. First, it gives people something to talk about on the web…builds some Google buzz. Secondly, it gives people a reason to go to the Google search page occasionally…to see the creative logo. Otherwise, with the integration of search into web browsers and websites, there in not much of a reason to ever visit google.com! I also think Google does it because it’s fun and it supports their company culture and brand of being different and “going outside the lines.” It’s a brilliant example of the old adage, “There’s an exception to every rule.”

Google archives all of the logos on its website so don’t worry if you missed the recent “crop circles” logo or the “unexplained phenomenon” logo that you heard all the buzz about. You’ll find all of them dating back to the very beginning of Google. What is “Burning Man Festival” anyway?

Oh, and if you find one that you really like and wish was your default Google logo, there is a new greasemonkey script for Firefox that will enable you to pick your favorite Google logo to display by default.

To see all of Google’s holiday logos, visit the company’s website, but remember to never, ever, ever alter your company brand. Unless you are Google or you have a strategic reason for doing so.

Filed Under: Everything Google Tagged With: branding, Google, logo, Search, search engine, SEO

Play a game and help Google with image search

May 19, 2009 Leave a Comment

Google has a beta application called Google Image Labeler which it describes as “a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.”

Sounds kind of boring, but leave it to Google to turn image labeling into an online game.
Here’s how it works

You are matched up with another online user and both of you are shown an image. You each start adding labels to the image until you both suggest the same label. To add to the challenge, you can’t see the labels your partner is adding. So you just keep adding labels until the game tells you that you matched — or you and your partner may click a “pass” button to move to the next image.

Once a match is made, a new image is presented to both of you and the process begins again. And just to make it really exciting, there is a time clock. You and your partner are given two minutes to label as many images as possible. And of course, it wouldn’t be a game without scoring. So there are points rewarded for successful matches.

After the clock has expired, you are shown a page containing your overall score, thumbnails of the images you saw, along with identifying information:

image size
image URL
whether it was a pass or a match (with matched word)
your partner’s labels

A little warning

Some of the images presented are a bit risque. However, Google does not believe you’ll come across inappropriate images. In the Image Labeler FAQ Google states, “While there’s no guarantee, it’s unlikely that you’ll see mature content because all images are filtered under image search’s Strict Safe Search setting.” Hmm, well I saw a few that apparently snuck past the filter.

Also, since you are playing with an unknown partner, your success – or failure as the case may be – depends in part on the other person. On one occasion, I had a partner who I couldn’t match with at all, and when the game was over and I reviewed his or her image labels, they were not related to the images at all and were rather silly like “poop,” for example.

You should give Google’s Image Labeler a try, but I’ll warn you , it is a little addictive.

Filed Under: Everything Google Tagged With: Google, image labeler, image search, Search

Search Marketing is Dead – Oh wait a minute

March 19, 2009 Leave a Comment

Search Marketing is Dead – Oh wait a minute

Posted using ShareThis

Filed Under: Search Tagged With: Search, search marketing, SEM

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

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

2010 in Google Search Review

Never Alter Your Company Brand Unless…

Play a game and help Google with image search

A little warning

Search Marketing is Dead – Oh wait a minute

December Search Volume by Search Engine

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

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