SEO Blog

There are a number of items in the SEO/SEM news world today that will make excellent weekend reading. Here is a short list of ones that have caught my eye this morning:

SEO Developments, Challenges and Tactics, by Lee Odden takes a look at the September Report issued by UK-based SEM shop e-consultancy.  This is a good piece for business and campaign planning into 2008.

Get More Traffic By Using Images, by Pat B. Doyle is a short piece reiterating steps SEOs take to optimize graphics for image search engines.

10 Steps AOL Should Take to Reinvent the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), by Loren Baker examines the current state of DMOZ and gives several suggestions on how to improve the venerable Open Directory.

AskCity and Entertainment Publishing: A Real Two-for-One Deal was published at the ASK.com Official Blog yesterday. Ask.com’s City Search an excellent local search engine. If you haven’t used it for local search give it a try, especially if you are interested in saving some money. Ask is owned by IAC which also owns Entertainment Publications, a company that makes and distributes coupon books in major cities. Now, AskCity will provide discount coupons found through Entertainment Publications.

While the concept of local search is obviously important, Google does not promote its local search features as stand-alone products. Google Maps is the primary interface for local search at Google but there are few prompts or cues on search results page directing users to try local search.

Unlike Yahoo, Google does not push or promote its local results as a direct service for a couple of reasons. First, Google mergers local results in with increasingly personalized or regionalised results. Second, general search results from Google Maps are not always as accurate as its general web search results.

Search results at Google that include city or place names will often include a map showing businesses related to the search query. For example, the search query “Hotel Seattle” brings up this result set. Clicking on the map takes users to a Google Maps search. Above the map a text link reads, “Local business results for hotel near Seattle WA” which leads to a set of local results. A similar search for “museum Seattle” produces similar results, as does “restaurant Seattle”

Google News has released a sitemaps feature allowing news publishers to tell Google specifically which files should and should not be indexed. As posted by Google News Product Manager Nathan Stoll to the Official Google Blog,

“… publishers tell me consistently is that they want greater control and visibility into the process by which their content gets included in Google News. It’s been a longtime goal of ours to offer flexibility to publishers as we help them grow their online publications, so I’m pleased to tell you that we’re adding Google News support within Google webmaster tools.”

The development of a sitemaps feature for online news publishers allows for greater control over how Google’s bots access a news site and what content gets indexed. Several European publishers have criticized and even sued Google for republishing content they consider copyrighted. In his post, Stoll makes reference to their concerns saying,

“Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds — or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles — to tell us exactly which articles they’d like us to crawl. While they’ve always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.”

A few months ago Yahoo! shut down a long used free SEO tool known as the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. This weekend, it appeared back online. The problem is, its data remains dated January 2007.

The tool was developed to help Overture advertisers find lists of words or phrases to bid on in the original auction-style PPC format but became one of the most heavily used SEO applications. It was free and provided the relative value of topical keywords and phrases. When a keyword or phrase is queried, the tool produces a database of related words or phrases Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) users entered while conducting searches under similar keyword queries.

Over the years, it was also incorporated into several other free SEO tools, many of which have not functioned properly since Yahoo! shut the service in the early summer.
Though the data it displays is nine months out of date, its return shows the importance of keyword selection and keyword tracking. For advanced SEO shops, that sort of tracking has come a long way.