During the past year, I became a little excited at one of Google’s many enhancements to the presentation of search results, because I suspected it could hint at a possible ranking factor they might’ve introduced. The element in question is a date stamp.

You may’ve noticed that in some cases Google will prepend the usual listing snippet text with a date. That change was introduced sometime around late 2008 or early 2009. I noticed the addition of the date with interest, but I became even more interested after I heard Matt Cutts state in a Webmaster Help video that Google considered the date to be helpful to users:

When Google states outright that they consider some element of webpages to be “useful” to searchers, my ears prick up, because Google is so obsessed with Usability that they sometimes use quantifiable elements of user-centered design in their search algorithms, such as their recent introduction of Page Speed as a ranking factor. In this way, Google’s Usability fixation can reveal ranking factors.

I wasn’t alone in twigging to the dates in search snippets — Michael Gray thought their introduction might be significant, Barry Schwartz reported on them, and Performics also shared my suspicion that dates might influence rankings, although their analysis didn’t find any evidence that it did. Edward Lewis (“pageoneresults”) also observed the date snippets and theorized that they might be beneficial for newer content.

On one hand, there’s a compelling reason to think Google might give ranking benefit to pages which have the date — their user testing has indicated that people may prefer to be able to see the date in the search snippets. Therefor, pages which have this data which could be shown in a snippet might be given a small boost in rankings in order to give searchers more of what they want.

Edward Lewis’s early theory also makes sense — for some types of content such as news stories and blog articles about current events (and perhaps even for photos), the freshness could make a difference. Yet, other types of articles are about old subjects or could be timeless — in which case the freshness wouldn’t/shouldn’t affect rankings.

I tested just now while writing this by searching for a major current event from earlier in internet history, and I see pages with 1997/1998 dates in the snippets. See: “worldcom and mci merger“. Since there are even more current articles which mention those keywords, the fact that some of the older stuff ranks higher seems to indicate to me that the actual age is not necessarily a ranking factor so much as perhaps the presence of the date itself.

Another theory could be that while Google might not use the presence of a date as a ranking factor, it could still indirectly affect rank because users might be more inclined to click upon search results where they can see the date value. If CTR from search result listings is a ranking factor that Google uses, then the presence of the date in the snippet could be impactful. (Clickthrough Rate or “CTR” as a ranking signal is a controversial subject, along with bailout rates, which I fully recognize.)

Since I think that there’s a high chance that the mere presence of a date may benefit search rankings either directly or indirectly, I believe it’s better to have them than not, particularly for articles and blog posts. But, this is a point where Michael Gray and I diverge.

He recommends revoking the date after 3-6 months, on the premise that users will tend to be biased against older content in nearly every case. In some cases this is a very valid point. For instance, if I’m trying to research details about some software or hardware, I’ll want current information, and not something six years old. So, for that type of content — Michael’s right — consumers would avoid clicking on the result that appears too stale to answer what they need. The downside of this is that I’m going to bail out of his page ultra-rapidly, if I figure out that it’s old content that can’t help me. If I can’t find any contextual clues to the freshness, then I might waste more of my time there, but ultimately become highly annoyed with the site for failing to post a date, since info about how to do something in software from 8 years back is not going to help me. From this standpoint, suppressing the date field is annoying and just not nice.

But, for date-neutral information, he has a point — adding the date to the SERP snippet for articles which are not date-dependent could introduce a bias against clicking which might not otherwise be there. Assuming that the consumer doesn’t recognize that the date is not a high priority in the context of the particular subject matter.

So, how do you decide what to do about all these variables? Google really hasn’t provided enough information from their usability studies to allow us all to make a decision. In the wake of that, I’ve outlined some possible good reasons to encourage dates in snippets, and also some bad reasons. But, where Michael Gray has decided to eradicate dates in most cases after a few months, I thing there’s enough information to argue that we should include dates in more cases than not.

To illustrate this, I’ve come up with a decision matrix to illustrate why I think there’s more pros than cons in choosing to display dates on one’s site. I created a column for each kind of content — fresh or old and date-dependent or date-independent, and a row for each theory on possible impact of date in SERP on rankings and CTR. The green check marks indicate that the combination would be beneficial, and red ex-outs indicate that a combo would have negative impact:

As you can see, there are relatively fewer possible cases where inclusion of the date would have a negative impact. All of those cases are for older content, but, as I pointed out with the very first screengrab, I see lots of cases where Google provides very good/high ranking preference for crusty old pages which have old dates (perhaps partly due to ranking factors giving preference to older, trustworthy, authoritative content).

Just anecdotally, unless it’s about current events or software details, I know that I click on old-dated content as well as new. So, I’d argue that age doesn’t at all count against rankings, nor even CTR in most cases.

Could Google be using the mere presence of the date as a ranking factor? Maybe. If so, I think that it’s a fairly weak factor compared to many others. But some of these weaker factors are the very hardest to obtain clear research data about — even if you’re an SEOmoz, you have difficulty in isolating the effects of one weak factor versus well over one-hundred other variables.

Due to the matrix I’ve shown above, I think there are more reasons than not to include the dates on your pages. However, I think that Michael Gray does make a number of valid points. You know your own content better than an algorithm, and if you know that your content doesn’t lend itself to display of dates, then avoid doing so. Tread carefully, though, because elements that Google deems important for user-experience may be closely associated with your rankings and CTR. You might ought to actually test whether pages perform better with or without dates before you summarily opt out. Try A/B testing it first.

I’d side with Michael’s implicit stance that Google probably ought to enable webmasters to opt out of display of dates if they choose. I’m generally a fan of giving webmasters rather more control over their own listing display than not — such as what was done with Yahoo’s SearchMonkey and Google’s Rich Snippets.

I’d also strongly encourage Google to publish more of their own internal findings about elements of usability or user-experience. The opacity in this case has resulted in a number of large content sites choosing to suppress dates on pages — a trend that I dislike as an internet user.

One of the creative methods Google has used for associating keywords with images is their Image Labeler game, which has been in “beta” for some years. As you may be aware, it takes images from their extensive repository of spidered pictures, and assigns one simultaneously to two different people who opt to play the game. Each participant submits keywords describing the image presented to them, attempting to also match keywords submitted by the other participant.

If you’ve reviewed very many websites and webpages, you’ll quickly see that there would be a great many cases where Google might spider some images, yet not have very much data to go on in terms of what the image is all about. Ideally, webmasters add images onto webpages with very clear captions right below them, and also use the ALT parameter in the IMG tag to tell what the image depicts. (ALT Text or “Alternative Text” is a parameter that allows a designer to supply some meta-data with an image — the ALT text describes the image in text, enabling audio browsers to speak the image’s text for blind and vision-impaired web users, and the text can also be used by search engines.) Well-optimized sites might even have their image filenames also reflect descriptive keywords, too. However, it’s frequently the case that a webpage designer neglects to do such things, leaving search engines to try to decipher how to make the images appear for appropriate keywords.

So, Google’s Image Labeler game is one of many methods they’re using to overcome the lack of info they encounter in crawling the web. (They also employ some more sophisticated techniques in combination with this, such as supervised multiclass labeling and optical character recognition (“OCR”).)

It recently struck me that Google could easily make use of the Image Labeler in another way as well — a sort of hidden, “off-label use” of the technology.

Since ALT text is a way of hiding text on webpages, it’s also been misused quite a bit by less-ethical SEO marketers and by people who wisht to take shortcuts in promoting webpages. Search engineers have long warned marketers not to put too much text into the ALT element, or else it could be deemed to be spammy behavior.

So, one way that Google could use Image Labeler would be to sometimes check the honesty of the website designer. Images with suspicious amounts of ALT text could be analyzed via Image Labeler, and if people didn’t submit words that closely related to the ALT text, the image and the site where it’s hosted could recieve a low quality score rating — or even become penalized.

One of the types of images that is frequently prone to keyword-stuffing is a site’s logo graphic. Websites which have suspiciously high amounts of text within an image that has “logo” in the filename could be submitted via Image Labeler, and if the game’s players didn’t validate the keywords associated, it could get the website dinged. Here’s one example of a Dallas plumber’s over-stuffed logo, and its ALT text:

Of course, Google has other ways of detecting keyword-stuffing in IMG ALT text. I’ve heard their image search engineers suggest that ALT text that’s longer than a certain number of words could be considered automatically suspect. Likewise, I’ve seen instances where they appear to be using OCR to automatically convert text embedded in graphics into searchable keyword text.

But, I’m also sometimes seeing some images which have text in them presented in the Image Labeler game, so I think it’s quite possible that they could indeed be employing the “off-label use” I’m describing here.

For a while now, I’ve been covering how Google’s increasing focus upon quality measurements are steadily translating into actual ranking factors. Four years ago, I first conjectured that Usability could supplant SEO. Back then, we could see that Google’s human evaluators added quality ratings into the mix, affecting page rankings. Since then, Google added helpful tools for usability testing and page speed diagnostics. This year they’ve continued this progression by incorporating page speed as a ranking factor and the recent “Mayday Update” apparently shifted some ranking factor weighting from keyword relevancy to quality criteria.

Considering Google’s desire to quantify and assess elements of quality in webpages, what are some other possible things which they might attempt to algorithmically measure and base rankings upon?

One possible area which occurs to me is in testing the text body of pages, particularly that of the main body of articles and blog posts.

Spammers frequently use programs to automatically assemble snippets of text for the purpose of targeting many combinations of keyword phrases without requiring that their pages be all hand-written. Some spammers merely steal others’ content, screen-scraping pages and redisplaying it on their own sites. The more savvy ones know that the search engines seek to detect duplicate content, and try to credit the originating sites as authoritative for matching keyword phrases. Recognizing that purely identical text can get filtered due to duplication detection, these spammers may automatically insert random words throughout the text, resulting in weird sentences and nonsensical writing.

Less dramatically, marketers who desire to rapidly develop out thousands of pages of content sometimes resort to copy writing companies that outsource article assignments to third-world countries. Poorly-educated writers result in terrible grammar and bad spelling. And, foreign companies sometimes hire bad translators to convert their pages for English readers. (Such bad writing can be entertaining — check out Engrish for samples to make you grin.)

Spammy sites and pages with poorly-written articles would definitely be deemed to be low-quality by most consumers. Most of us don’t want to end up on such sites, and Google doesn’t want to lead us there. So, if I were them, I’d try to find ways to detect such poor content.

But, would it be possible for Google to detect bad writing?

I think the answer to that is a resounding “yes”!

Have you noticed how many different software packages offer spellcheck functionality? And, software such as Microsoft Word can assess grammar in documents as well as word/phrase variety and reading level.

So, it would be possible for Google to detect bad writing. I’m not sure how process-intensive this sort of functionality would be for them, but it could easily be incorporated as a subsidiary process that operates after many of the more-rapid ranking systems have already assessed a webpage. A grammar/spelling grading process could trickle-in ratings over time.

Is Google using such a process?

For now, this is unclear. It would be hard to isolate the effects of such a process, since their human quality evaluators might also negatively rate a page for some of the same reasons. A few different search engine patents relating to display of search snippets, assessing reviews, and ranking of news stories mention the possibility of utilyzing grammar and spelling in ranking processes. This sort of text analysis appears so simple that I think it would be a no-brainer to believe that Google would use such a system.

For spammers, I’d say that the bar is moving higher. Ignoring quality for the sake of a fast buck is getting more difficult. The days of merely sprinkling a keyword phrase randomly among paragraphs of words are probably coming to a close.

For marketers, the implications of text quality assessment should be clear. Cheaply-written content ought to be avoided for sustainable, long-term benefit. And, if you wish to improve your rankings, have a professional writer with good English skills look over all of your content, and correct any errors they may find.

You don’t really even need proof that this could be used as a quality ranking factor for it to make sense to clean up the grammar and spelling on your site. Poor grammar and spelling can make a bad impression on consumers, resulting in loss of trust and lower conversion rates. Improving your site’s user experience provides short and longterm benefits.

At the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle last week, the keynote session with Matt Cutts has become an expected feature, but it’s also one of the most highly anticipated and attended sessions of the entire conference. The search engines love to take advantage of search marketing conferences to make major announcements, and Matt Cutts has been known to drop both major and minor bombshells during these sessions. For instance, during last year’s session, he stated that the practice of “link-sculpting” (using “nofollow” parameters on links to advantageously design the flow of PageRank within a site) was now pointless, because Google had implemented nofollow such that it did not conserve PageRank, but instead a nofollowed link merely evaporated PR.

It was clear at this year’s “You & A With Matt Cutts” that he and Danny Sullivan had planned in advance to launch directly into addressing one of the top most-recent issues of interest to webmasters: the “Mayday Update” — so-named because the algorithmic shift occurred roughly around the first week of May, and because affected webmasters were left with a helpless feeling after their pages dropped in rank for long-tail search queries.

Matt and Danny opened the session in a really jocular fashion by wearing inflatable life-jackets, as a nod to the Mayday algo change. They followed that up by handing each other caffeine-free sodas, which they quickly deprecated in favor of fully-caffeinated Coca-Colas. (As you may know, Google began rolling out an infrastructure/processing change this year, called “Caffeine”, which allows Google to rapidly absorb fresh content, process it for ranking purposes, and display the new content in SERPs. Some webmasters who were concerned over the Mayday Update had wondered whether it might have been caused as some side effect of the Caffeine change.)

After the lifejackets and soda hijinks were over, Matt stated clearly and seriously that the Mayday Update was separate from and in no way caused by the Caffeine change. His statements further underscored statements he’d made earlier online. According to him, the ranking algorithm development team had decided, after consideration and testing, to publish a change based upon some “quality factors”, reducing the rankings of some deeper content pages for longer-tail queries.

Just as Vanessa Fox had opined in her piece on the Mayday Update, the weighting for keyword relevancy factors was likely reduced some in comparison to quality factors.

One thing that Matt suggested to those who wished to counteract Mayday’s effects was to redesign a site’s links so that they wouldn’t be as deep within the site structure. (From chatting with close colleagues at the conference, Chrstine and I also have a few other strategies for counteracting Mayday effects, which we intend to keep in confidence for the benefit of our clients only.)

Another hot-button area that Matt and Danny discussed was that of the supposition that Google AdSense advertisers might get superior page rankings, because of the suspicion that pages linked-to from ads might receive better document analysis from the ads’ bot/processor than from the processing of strictly organic pages. This discussion came up due to a question about how well Google could interpret JavaScript content. Matt tried very hard to answer the question comprehensively, but his effort to be very specific in answering anticipated qualifications to the question gave many in the audience the sensation of a politician trying to side-step a delicate question.

(My opinion is that he answered this question truthfully, to the best of his knowledge, but his overly careful and hesitant phrasing made it come across as someone trying to provide a limitedly-true statement while dancing around the intent of a quesiton — rather similar to how one must carefully phrase a wish to a genii in the bottle or else get the wish answered in a literal-yet-unintended fashion. But, you have to cut the guy a break on this — when he answers a question with a flat-out, simple answer, people dissect it to death, searching for exception cases or conspiracy. So, no wonder he’s trying to carefully and specifically anticipate every permutation of the question and answer!)

Throughout the conference, Matt tried to further emphasize how marketers should try to pursue user experience, since that’s what the search engines themselves are pursuing, instead of obsession upon ranking factors. He suggested that ranking factors change over time and have a more limited lifespan than usability and user-experience criteria, so user-centered design is far more sustainable over the longterm. The continued focus on user experience is gratifying to hear, as it’s a philosophy we’ve endorsed for a long time as well.

My article covering how Google’s fixation with Usability reveals local search ranking factors published yesterday on Search Engine Land. In it, I described a number of common website elements which few-to-no marketers have ever cited as ranking signals. Some of these elements, such as whether or not a site may have employee profile pages, or whether a site displays prices for products and services offered, might be controversial in search engine marketing circles.

CNN's homepage checked with Google Page Speed - Google introduced Site Speed as a new ranking factor in 2010, and provided tools like this Page Speed extension in FireFox to assist webmasters with Usability improvements.

Other elements I described have been cited by other experts as beneficial for search marketing, even though they may’ve recommended them for reasons other than those I outlined. Inclusion of images, maps and locations pages make sense for multiple reasons in local business websites.

The thought and methodology behind coming up with these factors is sound, and has allowed me to successfully predict present and future search engine optimization factors where others have not. It makes logical sense that while Google is interested in Usability, they will seek ways to quantify and measure it on websites, just as they have done with Site Speed. And some very easy usability elements to quantify include common website elements such as the About Us, Contact Us, and Locations pages.

Back in 2006, I began predicting that the practice of Search Engine Optimization might become replaced by Usability. Unquestionably, this change is occuring to some degree right now.

I’ve known a lot of top corporations which are involved in very sophisticated paid search marketing and search engine optimization, but few of them are also including usability testing and user-centered design considerations when performing a site redesign. Google has tried to make the importance of user-experience abundantly clear by actually going public with their adoption of page load times in determining search result rankings, but many companies are still not connecting the dots.

Here at KeyRelevance, we have long prioritized usability in our assessments of web sites’ design. When companies contract with us to audit their websites, we offer both a Technical Website Review as well as a Usability Review. However, many companies eschew our Usability Reviews or dismiss them as less-important.

For some reason, people often react to usability recommendations from experts in an emotional way, rather like how a portion of the population avoids going to their doctors for a yearly physical. For some companies, there are already so many dependencies and requirements going into web design projects that they can’t include more without losing impetus. For others, individuals with authority over projects have egos which do not want to lose discretionary control over project decisions which could be altered if usability research ran counter to what they desire to do.

Usability testing can be the difference between a design that becomes highly popular versus one which is rapidly forgotten. Google itself is an example of how user-centered design will translate into success. More design options can be scientifically decided, honing down to interfaces which will maximize ease-of-use and enjoyment-of-use. Instead of being avoided, usability testing should be embraced — after all, in the business world we’re looking to increase the potential for success in our company projects, right?

Knowing Google’s heavy focus upon usability factors, consider that if you’re not doing iterative Usability testing and adjustment for User-Experience, you really may not be doing “Advanced SEO”.

If you’d like a thorough Usability Audit of your site, contact Key Relevance today to schedule our review and get a report of items to consider before your next sitewide redesign is completed.

Also, check out some of the free tools that Google has been providing to help you with portions of usability analysis. Try out Google Browser Size, Google Page Speed, and look at the Site Speed reports in Google Webmaster Tools for your website.

As interest in Bing continues, and with the pending launch of the Microsoft/Yahoo paid search partnership, advertising in Microsoft adCenter PPC is becoming more viable. One concern is that adCenter does not allow one to opt-in/opt-out of their Search Network Partners. Here is a breakdown of the big three and their options for Ad Placement. On all three ad platforms, advertising on the Search or Content Network is optional on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Once you decide to use a given network, however, the details begin to vary:

Definitions:
SE Owned and Operated Sites – sites owned by the Search Engines (e.g. msn.com, YouTube.com) as well as the main Search Sites themselves
Search Partners – sites owned by others that show search results from the search engine(s)
Run of Network – Ads are displayed across all partner sites based on the content of the page – not as the result of an active search
Opt-in Placement – Content ads are displayed on a given site only if that site is provided by name in a whitelist, perhaps with separate bidding on a site-by-site basis.
Opt-out Placement – Content ads are displayed on all sites unless the site’s name is provided in a blacklist.

As you can see above, MS adCenter does not give you the option of optiing out of their search partners. This raises the question: what is the quality of the partner sites on which adCenter Search ads might display?

To answer this question, I looked over some client accounts that are advertising through adCenter. Looking over several accounts and over 1/3 of a million impressions, here is a breakdown some of the sites that MSN is using for their Search Network. This is far from an exhaustive list, and is biased based on the types of accounts reviewed, but it serves as a good snapshot into the high caliber of sites in the network.

At the moment, the AdCenter Search Network consists primarily of MSN properties and quality partner sites.

MS Owned and Operated

Health

• health.msn.com
• lifestyle.msn.com

Jobs

• careers.msn.com

News

• autoshow.autos.msn.com
• local.msn.com
• msnbc.msn.com
• realestate.msn.com
• today.msnbc.msn.com

Research/Information

• moneycentral.msn.com

• movies.msn.com
• office.microsoft.com
• search.windowsmedia.com

Search

• advertising.microsoft.com
• m.bing.com
• www.bing.com
• www.bing.com/travel

Partner Sites

Community

• facebook.com
• ivillage.com
• tinypic.com

Health

• *.menshealth.com
• *.runnersworld.com
• righthealth.com

News

• al.com
• cleveland.com
• mlive.com
• nbc.com
• nj.com
• nola.com
• online.wsj.com
• oregonlive.com
• pennlive.com
• plusnetwork.com
• syracuse.com

Research/Information

• acronyms.thefreedictionary.com
• encyclopedia.farlex.com
• encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com
• hubpages.com
• idioms.thefreedictionary.com
• internetbrothers.com
• legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com
• medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com
• thefreedictionary.com

Search

• surfcanyon.com

Again, this is a representative list, not an exhaustive one. The big issue on the horizon is: what will happen to the caliber of ths list in a post-partnership world?

So, if you’re feeling intimidated by how Google Maps works, and can’t figure out what to do to get them to rank your website higher in the search results, I’ve got a tip for you. This tip is mainly for small-to-medium businesses who are pretty new to online marketing, and this is simply one of the simplest ways to get listed higher than you currently may be.

This tip is really pretty simple: Claim your business listing!

Yes, that’s right! If you merely claim your business in Google Maps, this factor alone can help you rank higher than other businesses which have not claimed their own listings in Google. This is an open secret amongst local search marketers!

This is one of the FEW ranking factors within Google Maps which Google itself has actually publicly STATED will benefit rankings by some degree. From surveying hundreds and thousands of listings in many cities, I can confirm that this ranking factor appears to be very influential.

There are a few reasons why Google rewards businesses which claim their listings. First, listings claimed by their owners contain information which Google and consumers can trust better — Google obtains business listings from a great many sources, and a common problem is that old, stale and defunct business listings get into directories, but it’s hard to figure out what needs fixing without getting input from the business owners.

Second, Google wants to expand information they have about businesses, so when you’ve claimed your listing, be sure to add in other information about your company within the Google Local Business Center interfaces.

Third, Google desires to get lots of small businesses to be very familiar with them, so that one day you might become self-serve advertising clients and purchase some of their ads.

There are other incentives to claim your listing, too. Businesses which claim their listings in Google have a better chance of achieving “Landmark Icon” status, enabling them to appear on more map views when users browse their area.

Also, Google has sent claimed listings “Favorite Places” decals which can enable consumers who pass by your store to grab a digital address to your Place Page in Google Maps with their cellphones.

So, if you haven’t done so already, claim your business in Google Maps and begin reaping the rewards!

For quite a few years now, I’ve been theorizing that the practices of User-Centered Design and Usability might eventually supplant Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”). Google has progressively tried to reduce effectiveness of mere technical tricks and tweaks, and they’ve improved their ability to overcome common site infrastructure issues in order to be able to access and rank content.

My theory has been supported to a degree by the announcement that Google was planning to incorporate website speed into the 200+ signals they use in their algorithm to rank webpages.

But, there are even more compelling arguments for focussing higher levels of priority upon refining your website with usability in mind. Highly usable sites make it easy for consumers to find what they’re seeking rapidly, and don’t frustrate their audiences. Usability impacts performance over the long-term, and that has a direct effect on market share and future growth. Google itself prospers on this philosophy, and other sites like Craigslist are similarly successful because they are simple and usable.

For these reasons, one of the standard services that KeyRelevance provides is a careful and comprehensive Usability Review. Optimization of a site in order to streamline user interactions will help to make all other site promotional activites such as SEO and PPC advertising more successful.

Google Labs provides a very useful tool for analyzing one of the many aspects of Usability which we commonly look at when reviewing clients’ sites. The Google Browser Size tool allows one to input the URL of a webpage, and they provide a semi-transparent overlay which outlines the area on the page which is visible to certain percentages of users viewing on various sizes of monitor screens and browser window dimensions.

This is extremely similar to an analytic tool I created quite a few years ago which “sniffed” my website visitors window sizes when they visited the homepage, stored the values, and then provided percentages of size ranges. Such tools are invaluable when writing the specifications for site designs/redesigns.

The reason this is so important is that one should not create a website design that is so large that key elements are pushed outside of the viewing area horizontally. The vertical area is important as well, but it’s considered of far greater importance to be careful with width, because it’s expected that very few consumers want to scroll horizontally, so content falling off the right side of their screens simply gets missed.

The area of a webpage which visitors can see initially upon arriving, without any scrolling, is called “above the fold”, using old newspaper terminology. Many studies have supported the premise that content “above the fold” on a website typically will receive the most attention and perform the best.

Many designers are using much larger monitor sizes than their site visitors may have, often resulting in designs which do not fit the audiences they’re targeted-to. The egos of corporate employees often figures in as well, and there’s a human tendency to be impressed with larger, graphically-intense splash pages with too much key content falling outside the horizontal width or below the fold for many users.

Magazine sites frequently neglect to design towards internet users, perhaps because their designers may often be more accustomed to print media design where there are far fewer variables in designing a common user experience for the audience. For example, Vogue’s website when viewed with Google Browser Size shows that a significant percentage of the audience will not see content on the right side of their homepage, including the important badge ads that are intended to generate revenue:

You can see that their masthead navigation links for “International” and “Video” are falling into the band of “90%” in Browser Size along with the site search form – this means that 90% of internet viewers are viewing pages with their browser windows large enough to see that right side content. The other 10% are not able to see this content, and might miss that it’s available. I’d bet that if we looked at Vogue.com’s analytics we’d find that those links get significantly lower click-throughs compared with more-commonly-visible areas on the page.

When we look into the 95% band, we see header links for “Renew”, “Parties”, and “Style.com” get lopped out of the viewing area, along with the ad content.

Vogue’s site is designed to be about 980 pixels wide – at the upper end of the typical range of non-dynamic width websites. When you see how the larger size results in a less-optimal experience for 5% and 10% of their overall audience, one can’t help but ask if the designers could have created a design at a smaller width while still retaining all the beneficial aesthetic value. I’d say that they most definitely could have, but they likely were ignoring the statistics when they set the site design specifications.

The wider design represents a lot of untapped opportunity, and money left on the table. While 10% may not seem like a large percentage, when you figure how many visitors Vogue’s website must receive annually, the raw numbers of people that fit into that demographic really add up. That 10% of people whose monitor screens were likely too small to easily see that right-side content on Vogue resulted in fewer people clicking through to view the Video content, International content, and the search form. The 5% of visitors would have missed the “Renew” link and the ad content, resulting in a little less revenue.

If you’d like to see a site that’s done a far better job of setting their size with user browser window limitations in mind, check out Nordstrom. Their site fits in a width closer to 770 pixels, making it work for a much greater percentage of internet users.

There are some caveats to using Google’s Browser Size utility. For one, the striations of browser size percentages that they display in that tool are based upon Google’s usage statistics, and not your site’s. While Google certainly has a huge usership sample to base these numbers upon, your site may have a significantly different demographic of users who have larger or smaller monitor sizes and browser window widths.

Google’s Browser Size utility is a fast way to check size based on overall internet averages, but if you want to do even more precise checking of your audience’s capabilities you need to check your analytics to see how many users are accessing your content with what size of windows and/or monitors. Here at KeyRelevance we do calculations based off of your analytics package for this — a lot of top web analytics (such as Google Analytics) will give you detailed numbers over time.

Regardless of which method you use, you need to take browser window size into account when redesigning your site. This is an easy way to bake more success into your website without trying to do anything complex or tricky.

Google Maps blog recently announced how users may opt into their new experimental features by clicking on the “conical flask icon” near the upper right of the Maps pages (when logged-in to your Google account):

For most users, these will likely be more of a novelty than really useful. However, for local search marketers, one of the new beta features appears to me to potentially reveal a bit more than perhaps Google intended.

Most of us are familiar with the “site:” advanced search query refinement when conducting Google searches. These allow one to list out all pages indexed for a particular domain, or, when including a keyword with the “site:” command, one can see all pages Google’s indexed on a domain which include that keyword. For instance, to see all pages from CNN, one would conduct a search for “site:cnn.com“.

One interesting aspect of Google’s “site:” command is that the pages it returns from a domain are generally returned in ranking order. The highest-ranking pages on a domain are returned first, next-highest returned next, etc.

All this goes to show that most of Google’s special search commands will return results in ranking order, with the highest-ranking or highest-PageRank pages returned first. We already know that happens with keyword searches (albeit rank order is not solely based on PR any more — other factors are modifying order, such as various quality criteria and relevancy assessments). But, my point is that within the constraints of many special search commands Google provides, pages are returned to large degree in rank weighting value order.

Back to Google Maps Labs, one of the optional beta features really caught my interest – “What’s Around Here?”:

Once you enable this one, a “What’s Around Here?” button is added out beside the “Search Maps” button. It provides a very cool wild-card search capability to the Maps interface. So, if you first search for a map area, then click on this button, you’ll be shown the most-popular places in that mapped area.

From a local search marketer’s viewpoint, this wildcard feature is more than just a means to explore popular attractions in various cities. I think it’s potentially an invaluable tool for exploring what criteria factor into Google Maps’ search rankings. This tool provides marketers with a list of the most-popular business listings for any given city!

I think the “What’s Around Here?” feature is particularly useful for analyzing very small towns, since business listings in small towns have a lot fewer variables feeding into their search rankings. One can easily list out many of the variables between each business that ranks above another business in smaller towns, then compare those variables to isolate down which elements seem to be more prefered by Google Maps above others.

For instance, I love using one of the smallest towns in Central Texas for such comparative analysis – Round Top, Texas. It’s not at all a surprise to me to find Royer’s Round Top Cafe ranking tops for that tiny town, and it’s very telling to see all of the various on-page and off-page elements which factor into its rankings and the other top businesses in that town versus businesses which are ranking lower in Google Maps for that area.

When Google Maps dramatically began introducing PlaceRank elements into ranking during the past year, the change not only added Places which may not be businesses into map results, but it also shifted to an algorithm which attempts to assess the relative popularity of addresses and locations within the maps, independent of business listing data. This paradigm shift added a lot of other factors into rankings that are less business-oriented and less-prone to commercial influences, such as Wikipedia pages about places.

Attempting to reverse-engineer Google’s algorithmic ranking methods in order to figure out what factors are more influential or less influential can be very helpful to the marketer or business that desires to change a website to improve its performance, and can make the difference in whether a business achieves landmark icon status in Google Maps versus being lost in the crowd. I think this tip on using the “What’s Around Here?” feature provides really great clues as to what elements work versus what elements are less influential.

I probably shouldn’t have revealed this local search optimization “secret” tactic, but it seems like so much of a no-brainer that I couldn’t resist opening a dialogue about the theory.

For another source of great info on ranking factors in Google Maps, see also David Mihm’s annual survey of Local Search Ranking Factors.

I recently wrote an article outlining how Wikipedia was abruptly rocketed into being heavily influential within Google Maps (see New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia). For small businesses everywhere, I predict that this change is going to bring Wikipedia to the forefront of SMB’s attention. With just a little bit of review, I think that small business owners are going to be noticing how Wikipedia has become very ubiquitous in Place Pages for Google Maps, and they’ll notice or suspect that those Places which sport a Wikipedia association tend to rank higher than others.

Once a business proprietor notices this, they may think to themselves, “Aha! Easy as pie! I know Wikipedia allows anyone to edit articles and add articles about any and everything, so I’ll have my clever nephew who does the internets add an article about my business!” Unfortunately, it’s not this simple.

The ease with which Wikipedia allows community user edits has been a prime area for criticism of the service over the years, and Wikipedia has responded by tightening review of whether subjects are notable enough to merit their own articles, and dedicated Wikipedia devotees try to scrutinize all edits to insure that they’re factual, backed up by respectable references, and worthy of mention. So, addition of articles in a willy-nilly fashion without good understanding of the service’s rules and practices will almost certainly lead to deletion of the content added. It may not happen immediately, but it almost certainly will happen at some point.

The brutal truth is that most businesses simply are not notable enough to merit having a Wikipedia article dedicated to them. There is some sense of the arbitrary about what characteristics are required to meet notability guidelines, because there is some element of subjectivity about it. Essentially, a subject likely needs to be historically significant, culturally significant, or be widely known. A highly significant, publicly-traded company such as Google would meet the requirements, while a small clock repair shop in Anytown likely will not.

Small stores can make the cut, such as the Gotham Book Mart, for which I researched and authored the Wikipedia article a couple of years back. But, few businesses have had as many newspaper articles about them, mentioned in books as much, or had as many associations with notable individuals.

The iconic "Wise Men Fish Here" sign which hung above the door of the famous Gotham Book Mart for decades.

So, what’s to be done if you’re a small business looking to increase your promotional game? Is Wikipedia completely off-limits to you?

No! There are a number of acceptable ways by which one may integrate with Wikipedia in valid, non-spammy ways, and I’ll cover two of the easiest here. These two methods are primarily for those small businesses which do not merit articles dedicated to them in Wikipedia.

Method 1: Set up your own User page and begin authoring and editing Wikipedia articles.

The best way to understand Wikipedia is to begin participating. Here’s an article on how to start. You may validly write up a User page with links to your own sites, and the more you help out with Wikipedia articles, the more important your User page becomes. As it becomes important, your business site may benefit.

Now, User pages and other pages in Wikipedia automatically nofollow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow external links as they are added, meaning that they are flagged for search engines as not being endorsed by Wikipedia. “Nofollowing” a link was intended to halt it from passing PageRank or ranking value in search engines, and was introduced to help fight spam in sites where users are allowed to add links. There’s a debate among marketing circles as to whether Google chooses to count Wikipedia’s external links in ranking algorithms or not. My suspicion is that as other spam-fighting methods have improved in Wikipedia, the links which have been added and have sustained over time likely do have some rank value — and are therefore likely used by Google for ranking purposes.

The User pages of those who add a lot of value to Wikipedia gain PageRank themselves, and, even if they do not pass PageRank, the links do pass traffic which can indirectly help increase a site’s rankings in other ways. (For instance, see MONGO’s User page, which has developed a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 or Durova’s which has a 6.)

If you’re setting up your User page in part to promote your business, I suggest that you consider naming it beneficially with your business name, or a category/keyword name that refers to your type of business. Describe your business briefly. Link to relevant articles about your city or neighborhood. Link to your company with descriptive link text. And, to provide a chance of enabling this to eventually help your listing in Google Maps, include a Geobox in the profile (this addes geocoordinates to the page, a key element that Google looks for when deciding if a page is about a location).

If you’re a newbie at Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you proceed slowly and learn the environment. To get a good grasp of what people edit on pages, check out the History tab on a number of articles and click to compare revisions. This shows how people make changes, what they change, and many ideally provide a super-brief snippet of text to state what they’ve altered.

It’s very easy to find areas where you can add value: read articles of subjects you’re familiar with and interested-in, and you’ll likely find text needing grammatical correction, badly phrased sentences needing clearer writing, factual errors, and articles needing some additional vital pieces of information. Be sure to find and add credible references if adding or altering facts — you should ideally back up all facts with a reference source, just as if you were writing research papers for college.

Method 2: Donate photos of local scenes to Wikimedia Commons for use in Wikipedia articles.

I’ve written before about how it can be beneficial to employ loose licensing for images so that others may be incented to use them and link back to your site, and this is a variation on that theme (see: Why Free Photos Equal Good SEO).

For instance, the photographer who donated this pic of the famous Chrysler Building, David Shankbone, included URLs on the image’s information page which link to his site.

For another example, check out the page for the photo I donated for the Gotham Book Mart of the “Wise Men Fish Here” sign.

Is this allowed? Absolutely. Read Wikipedian Durova’s article on how adding images to Wikipedia is acceptable. Wikipedia desires to have good quality photos donated for use so that they may be used to illustrate articles. This is an area where helping the community can be mutually beneficial for everyone.

This tactic is actually pretty powerful, because releasing images into Wikimedia in return for attribution (a citation when anyone uses your photo, with a link back to you) enables you to achieve a lot of links from other sites as well, depending upon the popularity of and usefulness of your photo and its subject matter.

To figure out what photos to add, I suggest reviewing the Wikipedia articles of famous places in your area, and identifying ones which do not have pics. Then take a Saturday morning with good weather and sunlight, and snap photos to donate. You can also look at Wikipedia’s page for Articles needing images, but many of these may be more specific subjects for which you may not be able to provide photos.

Naturally, there are a number of “don’ts” when adding content to Wikipedia. I won’t expand on all those here, but they probably mostly boil down to “don’t be spammy” and “be polite”. I suggest reading up on Wikipedia Etiquette if you’re just getting started. Wikipedia desires content which is informative, factual, and neutrally presented.

There are a number of more advanced means of optimizing for Google Maps and local search via Wikipedia, for those who are more experienced with the service. I’ll likely be going into more of these tactics in upcoming articles at Search Engine Land and in presentations I make at upcoming conferences. So, stay tuned for more!