Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

Google has spawned a whole new generation of search engines with the introduction of its Custom Search Engine (CSE). Without any technical knowledge anyone can now use the Google search platform to create a search engine focused on any content they want.

You can choose which pages or sites you want to include in your custom search engine, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to the index and what the search results page will look like.

Already an increasing number of people are creating niche custom search engines. For example; Specialized Aquarium and Fish Keeping which searches over a hundred aquarium sites, Medical Libraries Blogs which searches all the blogs of medical libraries and librarians or A Dedicated Information Architecture Search Engine.

There is however an interesting anomaly when building a custom search for which I can find no rational explanation. I built a custom search using the seven SEO sites from the SEO Forums http://www.seo-blog.com/seo-forums.php post. It would appear that the order of entry of the sites makes a difference to the order of the results. Here are partial screen shots of the tests that confirm this:

The same seven sites in Test Search Engine 1.0 and Test Search Engine 2.0 are searched for the phrase |external nofollow| and produce different results. The only difference in the build was the order of entry of the sites. Other search phrases (but not all) also show similar differences in the order of results.

Surprising…..

November 2, 2006

A Google Co-op Engineer has shed light on this test result as follows:

Theres actually a very subtle bug going on here, in one of the search engines an extra whitespace got added to one of the URLs so its actually searching over:

forums.digitalpoint.com/%20

Which effectively renders this URL useless.

Thanks for pointing this out, we’ll fix it in the next release by making sure we do a better job of stripping whitespace off the URLs!

That explains it!

“I’m exiled, you can’t convert me, I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways…” From “We Better Talk This Over” by Bob Dylan 1978.

Your website has a purpose, it might be to get your visitors to purchase products, complete a form, download a file, register for a newsletter or some other action. The number of visitors to your website who perform the required action as a percentage of the total number of visitors is called the conversion rate or conversion ratio.

The vast majority of website owners do not know their conversion ratio even though for most sites it can easily be improved. You can use Google Analytics which is free and allows you to set up goals (for example the ‘Thank You’ page you show after a purchase) and Google will calculate the goal conversion metrics for your site. So now there is no excuse for not knowing your conversion ratio!

Once you know what your conversion ratio is you can set about improving it. When you make site changes to improve your conversion ratio it is very important to measure the effects of these changes because they could be positive or negative. The way this is done is to have two pages, one is the original page and the other is the one where you have made changes. You then randomly allocate visitors to these two pages and after a suitable period you can, with appropriate software, analyze which page gives the higher conversion ratio. This procedure is called A/B split testing.

In practice you will want to conduct a number of A/B split tests simultaneously and to do this you will require a third party service that provides Multivariate Testing or Taguchi Optimization as it is sometimes called. You can learn more about this procedure from the websites of these providers; Offermatica, Vertster and SiteSpect.

Addendum:

April 12, 2007

Google has made available a tool that enables non-technical users to set-up and run multivariate landing page experiments. Website Optimizer (integrated into AdWords) works alongside Google Analytics and all third party site analytics packages.

Your conversion ratio will be influenced by many factors but one of the most important for site owners, particularly ecommerce site owners, is how the user perceives your site in terms of credibility and trust. This is not surprising given that users read daily of credit card fraud, scams and credit card data being stolen.

Improving Trust and Credibility.

There are many things you can do to improve the credibility and trust of your site in the eyes of users.

• Show that there is a real organization behind your site. If you have a physical office or store show a picture of it and show pictures of your staff with friendly captions underneath. Your site should clearly disclose its purpose, its mission and its ownership.
• Make it easy for users to contact you. Have a Freephone telephone number in addition to publishing your address, telephone number and email address. Install live chat software which allows your company representatives to engage in one to one chat with your web site visitors in real-time. There are many options for this but LivePerson have a good system with a free trial period and good support.
• Clearly disclose all fees charged before the ordering process begins. Make sure you include all service, transaction, handling fees and shipping costs.
• You should state clearly policies for returning unwanted items or canceling transactions.
• You should openly declare your policy on a consumer’s rights if a purchase is made based on inaccurate information on your site.
• Your privacy policies should be easy to find and be clearly and simply stated.
• You should disclose how personal data from your site visitors and customers will be used.

I have seen large increases in conversion ratios arising from the inclusion of an Online “Trust” Certificate like these : (Click on the certificates to find out more about them.)

There is an interesting dichotomy as far as trust certificates are concerned. Although if prominently displayed they will increase conversion ratios it seems that sites that use them are significantly less trustworthy than those that don’t!

The reason for this is ‘adverse selection’ in that many untrustworthy sites will use certification to mask their untrustworthiness and hope to fool the users. There is a recent study by Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University titled Adverse Selection in Online Trust Certifications which explains this in detail, particularly with reference to TRUSTe and the Better Business Bureau Privacy Program. It’s something to be aware of but definitely should not stop you using them to improve your conversion rate.

One of the common questions from those just starting to learn about SEO and SEM is which is the best forum to read and ask questions? This post makes some suggestions and offers some guidance on how to get the most out of forum participation. Also we show how to search the major SEO forums all at once and look at the results of a not too serious test of forum response.

There are seven major SEO and SEM forums and they each have their own characteristics and range of topic headings.

• Cre8asite Forums
• DigitalPoint
• HighRankings
• Search Engine Watch
• SitePoint
• WebProWorld
• WebmasterWorld

To get the most out of any of these forums you should observe these guidelines:
Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from the recent post SERPs Position and Clickthroughs and after looking more closely at the AOL research data I thought it would be interesting to provide a tool to calculate the percentage increase or decrease in clickthroughs that can be expected in moving from one position in the SERPs to another.

The AOL data contains 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. Obviously not every search will result in a click through but the reason why the overall rate is so low is because of the way AOL displays the results. AOL’s organic results, which are essentially Google’s, are top and tailed by sponsored listings. So many of them in fact that only 54% of AOL search queries are followed by a click on the organic listings. (See addendum below).

However the clickthroughs recorded in the AOL data can be considered as a proxy for the Google SERPs and you can use this tool to see by how much your traffic will increase or decrease when you move from one position to another.

Examples:

1. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 15 and you want to know how much more traffic you would get if you moved to position 5.

Current Position in SERPs 15
New Position in SERPs 5
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs 936.8%
Your Google traffic will increase by 936.8%

2. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 8 and you want to know how much more traffic you would lose if you moved to position 11.

Current Position in SERPs 8
New Position in SERPs 11
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs -78%
Your Google traffic will decrease by 78%

3. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 9 and you want to know how much more traffic you would lose if you moved to position 10.

Current Position in SERPs 9
New Position in SERPs 10
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs 5.1%
Yes it’s true, your Google traffic will increase by 5.1% when you go down one from position 9 to 10! This is because the ninth position gets less clickthroughs than the tenth position, which you can see from the charts here.

Thanks to Richard Hearne at Red Cardinal for providing the data on which this tool is based.

Addendum June 19, 2007

In a recent research study Different Engines, Different Results by Dogpile.com, in collaboration with researchers from Queensland University of Technology and the Pennsylvania State University, it is noted that “….a separate study conducted in conjunction with comScore Media Metrix found that between 54 – 62 percent of all searches on the top four search engines are converted to a click on the first result page”. This of course means that 38 - 46 percent aren’t!

The recently released AOL research data provides some interesting information on clickthroughs as a function of position in the SERPs. Thanks to Richard Hearne over at Red Cardinal, who has imported the data into a MySQL database, I have been able to construct two striking charts.

The first shows the percentage of total clickthroughs versus the position in the SERPs.

It clearly demonstrates the importance of the top position, with the first place site getting 3.5 times the clickthrough rate of the second place site.

The second chart shows the percentage of the first position clickthroughs versus the position in SERPs.

Notice that the ninth position is getting marginally less clickthroughs than the tenth position. This is probably because a few users are not concentrating and click on the tenth result when they really intended to move to the next page of the results.

However the most interesting observation is the dislocation of clickthroughs between tenth and eleventh position. Going from the top of page two, to the bottom of page one, increases the clickthroughs by a factor of 4.5!

Added Position and Clickthrough Tool.