Panda photo by J. Patrick Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0

For those of us who have been following Google’s evolution over time, the Panda updates actually weren’t all that surprising. For me, the emergence of Panda seemed very familiar, harkening back to perhaps as far back as 2006 when Google clamped down on affiliate sites. At that same time, Henk van Ess revealed how Google was hiring on temporary quality evaluation staff to rate search results. In Google internal documents which van Ess exposed, the evaluators were instructed to give poor ratings to spam content, porn ranking on inappropriate keyword phrases, and “thin affiliate content”. It became clear very quickly that the negative human ratings for “thin affiliate content” were related quite closely to the virtual penalization that many affiliate sites experienced at that time.

What Google was focusing upon in reducing the ratings of “thin affiliates” were instances where a search results page would be filled up with links to pages which all had virtually the same content, and where those pages often weren’t the final destinations of the people who landed upon them (obviously, with most affiliate sites one clicks-through to the actual retailer’s site where more information could be found and orders could be placed). From Google’s perspective, it was a poor user experience for there to be millions of pages indexed which had all essentially identical content and which often edged out other more-worthwhile pages which consumers might prefer.

From all of the information around the “Panda” Updates, it seems highly likely to me that Google is continuing to leverage their human quality evaluator staff, along with a number of other automated metrics which they could also incorporate in determining quality of pages. For instance, the numbers of people clicking back out of a page they found in the search results in order to select another page — this sort of a bounce rate metric could indicate which a page is of very poor quality for a particular keyword term.

Naturally, there are far more pages on the internet than what Google may reasonably have evaluators visit and assess, but there have also been developments in methods for using small numbers of ratings to be algorithmically applied across larger numbers of websites and pages. The TrustRank analysis technique is just one of these methods, and the research paper describing it shows how one could use a small sample set of rated webpages in combination with an automated analysis of the link graph associated with those pages in order to broadly apply ranking decisions to good content or poor content.


TrustRank Diagram

The combination of human interaction metrics is likely used by Google to determine a sort of “quality score” for pages, and some sort of mechanism similar to the TrustRank method is used to apply the quality score values across a broad swath of a site’s sections and pages.

While the Panda Updates were initially targeting “content farms”, or sites which specifically generated large numbers of pages to target user search queries, the criteria used to ding them could easily wreck many other types as well. Poorly constructed sites where users are confused about where to find what they were searching-for, or sites which make a bad impression by being too crammed full of ads, tricky links, or unsophisticated layouts might also fall under the treads of Panda.

The leaked evaluator documents from Google gave a few ideas of the sorts of things which could decide between a “thin affiliate” that got bad ratings versus sites which happened to contain affiliate content but which might otherwise get good ratings. Having additional content on the pages, particularly “value-added” content such as maps or user ratings or price comparisons could make a difference.

Here in 2011, I’d say the bar is even higher, though. You want your site to make a good impression when a searcher lands upon it, and you want them to have trust in your content. You need the site to be usable so that it doesn’t frustrate users, and you need to seriously consider removing impediments which annoy or hamper users in getting what they’re seeking. That gigantic interstitial ad that blocks them from the page, or all the cluttered fineprint and links may result in higher bounce rates which will translate into lower rankings for you.

In the past year, Google introduced Page Speed as a ranking factor — a major element which impacts consumer satisfaction with webpages. In their blog posts about Google they mention improving a number of elements affecting quality of a sites, including spelling and grammar (we previously highlighted how Google could use spelling and grammar in quality determinations and rankings). With the increasing attention to user experience factors in ranking determinations, it has become clear that if you’re not doing usability analysis, you may not be doing SEO at all.

Search engine optimization based purely upon clever technical tricks really appears to be on the wane with the Panda Updates. SEO may really decline in favor of much more sustainable longterm attention to User Experience and Usability factors. Unfortunately, I don’t see a whole lot of websites or companies positioned to take advantage of the trends. Most of the companies I’ve consulted with continue to base site design decisions more heavily upon arbitrary egos, expediency, and mere immitation of their competition rather than upon informed UX testing.

There are a lot of professional websites which have “borked” Instant Previews. For example, check out this Los Angeles dentist’s homepage, which appears with this jaunty giant jigsaw puzzle piece taking up most of its space:

Google has said that the Instant Previews were found to improve their users’ satisfaction with search results significantly during internal testing prior to rolling out the feature. Users can rapidly glance at the preview images to see if the webpages might hold what they’re looking-for, increasing their confidence and helping them select webpages to click upon which are more likely to hold what they want, avoiding clicking on stuff they don’t want.

If that’s true, then the opposite is likely also to play into users’ behavior: if a preview image looks bad and doesn’t look like what they’d expect or want, they might avoid clicking on it.

For anyone who has a site which doesn’t look right in Google Instant Preview mode, this is alarming, since their introduction of this feature could wrongly reduce your clickthrough rates. Even if you’re not worried about the collective effect over time, you still are likely not thrilled that the image representing you may not reflect a true picture nor show you up in the best light.

I’ve been asked before on how to optimize for Google Instant Previews, so here are a few tips I’ve put together:

• Although it was an unpleasant surprise when Google opted to ignore sites’ noarchive tags when launching Instant Previews, they did provide a protocol whereby you could completely opt out of it. To opt out, you may add a robots meta tag to your webpage, and in the content include “nosnippet”. You can also use “nosnippet” in the x-robots-tag HTTP header response sent by your server. (Note, this will also block the regular text snippets which usually appear beneath webpage links in the Google SERPs, according to their FAQ.)
• Similarly, you could instruct Googlebot from spidering the page by specifying in your robots.txt file that the site, section, or page is to be disallowed. Note, this may also have other undesirable effects, since if Googlebot doesn’t crawl through the page they won’t see all the keyword content on the page nor all the SEO-goodness you’ve already put into it. However, there are sites which have done this, such as Condé Nast, and as a result you will not find the Instant Preview magnifying-glass icon next to their homepage in the search results (an effect which I can understand them wanting, since the main content of their page is Flash, which Instant Preview won’t display):
  

  

• Of course, opting out of having Instant Previews entirely may be something of a Pyrrhic victory, since all the webpages around you may have it. If you don’t have it, users might be more skeptical of clicking through to your site. Alternatively, they might click through more, out of curiosity. Read on for options on how to improve your preview portrait instead of deleting:
• It’s important to diagnose why your page appears with chunks missing or with the gray puzzle icon in place of your core content. For example, I’ve run across a number of sites which have disallowed Google from spidering their images, perhaps under the mistaken belief that image search doesn’t help them. Image search can actually enhance your overall rankings, and your referrals from image search can be substantial over time. So, to get your images to appear in Instant Preview, go back to your robots.txt file and remove disallow rules which may have banned Googlebot from visiting directories on your server where you store your site images.
• For Flash content, you really should enhance your site’s overall user-experience by incorporating code which detects whether a visitor’s browser can use the content, and display some default content such as state images or image maps when the browser doesn’t support Flash. For example, you could put the static image content on the page and use Javascript and CSS to overlay the Flash on page load for browsers which support it. In this way, Google Instant Preview may display the image content, allowing the page to look right when previewed. I’ve actually used screen-grabs of the Flash interface itself in order to create these default images for purposes of graceful degradation.
• For YouTube videos, you might be able to do something similar. You can probably set up a static preview image of the video interface and then use Javascript and CSS layers to overlay the actual YouTube video embed code for browsers which support it.
• For Google Maps, instead of using their embed code which relies upon iframes to deliver the dynamic map interface, you could take a screengrab of the map and set it up as a regular static image, possibly linking that image back to the URL for the map.
• For site-wide applications using Google Maps, I believe their API also provides a static image option which could be used instead of the iframe delivery. Obviously, if you’re going for the dynamic functionality, these two options are not going to be preferable.
• Another Google Maps option would be to attempt to use NOFRAMES tags around a screengrab image of the map. You’ll need to test this to see if Instant Previews is correctly interpreting and displaying noframed stuff.
• Finally, for Google Maps you could also use the Javascript/CSS method I suggested for handling Flash and YouTube videos. Place the map iframe on a layer which will be made to overlay a static image of the map.
• Optimizing the call-out text in Preview Images is even more tricky. You may have noticed that Google magnifies portions of text, displaying these snippets larger in boxes on the preview image of your webpages, depending upon the search keywords used. To optimize for this, if it’s displaying badly for some reason, you would need to experiment with placing the page’s most-popular keywords in advantageous places on the page, and then waiting to see how Google highlights it later on in the Instant Previews. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
• I’ve also seen Instant Previews highlight certain images on a page, by drawing outlines around them. I believe this may occur when the search keyword matches the image’s ALT text. If this looks unattractive, you could experiment with adjusting the ALT text and see how it looks, just as with the callout snippets. However, I caution that removing ALT text from images could hurt your page’s overall keyword relevancy determination, and impair your image SEO work.
• It might be a daunting prospect, but another possibility for optimizing for Instant Previews is to redesign. Instant Previews is a very small wakeup call that website appearance matters, and will impact your effectiveness. Considering how Google likes to quantify userexperience and incorporates usability into rankings, website appearance may impact your rankings in search more and more — you could choose to get ahead of the curve now by making your site appear optimally in the little previews as well as when visitors come to the site.

I expect that Google will likely (hopefully) work upon closing the many gaps in how Instant Previews represent pages. Until then, these tips may be useful to you in optimizing how your site appears in Instant Previews.

Copyright statement dates have been something I increasingly check on websites that I audit for search engine optimization purposes, because of a few different things.

First of all, it’s now established that Google has been giving special treatment to content dates found on webpages. I’ve written before on the subject of whether dates on pages might be used as a search engine ranking factor. As I wrote previously, Google’s been parsing date information out of pages already, and they’ve decided to often lump these dates into the snippet found below listings of pages in search results. They’ve stated that their usability testing has established that for many types of content, consumers would like to see the date. I’ve argued that it could be a ranking factor, but whether it is or isn’t is virtually secondary to the positive effect that it likely would have on influencing clickthrough behavior.

One type of date that Google typically does not display in the search snippets are the more commonly-used date included with the copyright statement found on most corporations’ webpage footers. However, it’s my belief that Google is likely to be paying attention to this page parameter just as much as they focus upon content update dates, although for slightly different reasons. Read on and I’ll elaborate.

The date found in a copyright statement could be used in combination with various other signals in establishing whether a page and website is being maintained or not, and whether a page’s content may be stale. It can also be a signal of quality, because a site which does not display the copyright line may not be as trustworthy as more tightly-run corporations, or the site may not have proprietary ownership of the content they are displaying.

Naturally, there may also be compelling legal reasons that you should be updating the copyright statement on your website as well — the date of copyright of content helps to establish whether you have control/ownership of that content for a precisely defined period of time into the future.

The copyright date is one of the most poorly maintained elements of webpages that I run across. So, I admit that if it is one of the many SEO ranking factors out there, it would be a fairly weak one. However, I do not see any good excuses for rolling the dice about whether this element is a ranking factor or not — it should be updated as a major aspect of site quality. Always. It’s faintly ridiculous to run across sites here at the end of 2010 which are continuing to display a copyright date of 2009!

There’s no doubt that sites which have yet to update the copyright dates on their pages at the end of this year may actually forget to do so beyond New Year’s and well into next year. So, make a resolution to yourself and schedule this if you need to get this updated. Do it in the first week of January.

For many of you techies out there, this is an opportunity to upgrade your website in order to remove manual update activities for the future. There’s absolutely no reason that copyright dates should be static text content in pages footers in this millenium — you ought to be able to automate the date so that you never have to touch it or worry about it being updated again.

Now, a quick-and-dirty way to add the code to pages could be to use Javascript, relying upon the copyright to get added into the page when loaded at the client end by the browser. For instance you could use code like this:

Copyright ©
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!—
today=new Date();
year=today.getFullYear();
document.write(year);
// —>
</SCRIPT>
- All rights reserved.

(To see how this appears, view it in action on my copyright code page.)

Although Google is increasingly adept at interpreting Javascript content, I believe it’s better to incorporate the copyright legal statement on the server-side.

For Apache and some UNIX-flavored servers, you might be able to use a simple server side include command combination. As you may know, server-side include tags can be embedded in your static HTML pages, and the server will execute the include commands on the fly before sending the code out to a visitor’s browser. Here’s a simple SSI command that will include an always up-to-date copyright statement:

<!–#config timefmt=”%Y”–> Copyright © <!–#echo var=”DATE_LOCAL” –> – All rights reserved.

If your pages are delivered via a PHP application, the code for an automatic copyright is quite similar:

Copyright &copy; <? echo date(“Y”); ?> – All rights reserved.

If you’re using a PERL application, then it’s a bit messier in my opinion. You could use localtime(time) which is compatible with a number of versions of PERL. For instance, this code works on one of my servers:

$date = scalar localtime(time);
@parse = split(” “,$date);
$year = $parse[4];

Then, when you’re printing the page content back to the browser, you’d print $year.

I say this is “messy”, because I think the $date returned to the application by the server may be in varying formats — so, the code I show above might not work on all servers, and is likely dependent upon how the date is formatted by the server’s administrators. There are also a few modules which you could install for PERL which may be much more dependable for consistent date formats.

Regardless of the scripting language you’re using, inclusion of an automaticly-updated copyright line ought to be pretty easy to accomplish.

I’m personally not a big fan of the date ranges for copyright lines, because I think those are overly-aggressive on the part of intellectual property lawyers, and I’m not entirely sure how they would hold up in potential copyright infringement litigation. The goal is to inform the visitor as to what date the content is copyrighted, and making it some vague range could really undermine the future limit on when that copyright expires. Don’t waffle around with this — make it the current date for when the site is being viewed (since most websites are works-in-progress, and today’s version of the site may be different from yesterday’s).

Since it’s potentially a ranking factor, a freshness factor, a quality factor, and a legal necessity, make a New Year Resolution to update the copyright on your websites once and for all!

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.

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.

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.

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.

First of all, Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, stated in a recent Q/A video that sites’ load times are currently not a ranking factor.

However, there are three reasons to believe that site load times could affect search rankings in the very near future:

• Matt’s opinion is that it would be a great idea for a ranking factor! And, he leaves open the possibility that it could be used as a ranking factor in the future. He’s influential within Google and is named on some Google ranking patents, so this is significant. Other significant Googlers also have indicated that this may be a focus area of increasing importance to them. Larry Page apparently stated that he wanted Google to be central to efforts to make the internet speedier, allowing users to get pages as fast as turning pages in hardcopy books.
• Google recently released Page Speed, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc). (This is also likely Google’s competitive response to Yahoo’s similar tool, YSlow, which even Google recommends as a tool for diagnosing speed issues. Combined with these other reasons, I believe there’s cause to believe it’s not just a competitive checklist item, but part of their strategy to speed up the internet experience.)
• Last year, Google introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google AdWords ads.
• Internal research at Google has shown that slower page delivery times will reduce the number of searches users will conduct by 0.2% to 0.6%. While this may appear negligible, it undoubtedly would add up to a lot of lost revenue over time for Google, and it proves their point that slowness has a chilling effect on internet use and traffic.

Based on the above reasons I outlined, I think page load times are very likely to become integrated into Google’s ranking “secret sauce” soon, and that sites which seriously neglect page load time will find themselves at a disadvantage.

Classic Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) lists of tricks rarely include mention of improving page speeds, but Google has steadily been evolving their ranking methods to reduce the impact of technical code tricks and moving toward more human-centered design factors. In fact, one part of their process already includes having their quality team assess the webpages found in search results for many thousands of sample queries. If one of your site’s sample pages fall into their sample set, the assessor’s rating of the page compared to competitors could result in an average quality score being applied to all the pages on your site.

I’ve believed for some time already that Google applies some automated quality scoring to natural search rankings, similar to how they’ve applied such factors to their paid search ads.

My suspicion is that there will likely be some sort of scale of site loading speeds which might be used to impact rankings in the future. And, I’d also suspect that this factor would be used primarily as a negative ranking factor, as opposed to a positive one. By this I mean that pages from competing sites which have all other stronger relevancy ranking elements essentially equal could drop lower in search results if their load times don’t meet some minimum standard. Load time might negatively impact a ranking, but likely wouldn’t necessarily help it rise above a page which has slightly stronger relevancy/importance factors unless that page had serious slowness itself.

I’d further expect that Google would apply some sort of adjustment to try to assess whether one Googlebot visit ran across just a momentary lag condition, versus a page delivery speed that’s always slow. So, I don’t see any reason to freak out if you have experienced a server or application issue for just a brief period!

Even if Site Load Time were not to become an official member of Google’s list of over 200 ranking factors, load time could still indirectly affect your rankings. Avanish Kaushik at Google has strongly encouraged webmasters to pay attention to Bounce Rate (a factor determined as a percentage of site visitors that only visit one page and/or who only land on a page for a few seconds before hitting the back button).

Google can also easily see if a user immediately backs out of a page they find in the search results, and such a high bounce rate may indicate a poor quality result for a particular query. One prime cause of a user hitting the back key can be if a page is extremly slow at loading. So, if Bounce Rate is a factor affecting rankings, then a page’s load time may impact it, indirectly affecting rankings.

Finally, let’s go to Google’s original point about why this is important in the first place: good User-Experience. Along with faster network speeds, sites need to load rapidly for endusers in order to provide a positive user-experience. Even if this were never used directly or indirectly by Google in rankings, it will still affect how users experience your site, and that can affect your ultimate conversion rates and repeat visits.

But, Page Load Time / Site Load Time will almost certainly be a direct or indirect ranking factor.

So, how to prepare for this important and basic factor amongst all your site’s various optimization strategies? Well, very easily and cheaply, you could get a copy of Google’s Page Speed extension and run it against samples of your site pages to see what speed factors it might recommend for you to improve upon.

Also, note that this browser-based diagnostic tool does not assess a number of factors which can still affect site load times, such as network connection times and conditions which cause sites to buckle under higher loads.

KeyRelevance has long considered site load times to be of prime importance and has included a number of factors affecting page load speeds in web site reviews that we provide for clients. In fact, we even provide clients with improved compression versions of their site images for smaller filesizes. Speed of access has long been important to a site’s overall user-experience, and Google’s increasing focus in this area is now making it of central importance to keyword rankings in search results. So, if you want to be at the top of your SEO game, you need to be paying attention to your site’s page delivery speed — Google is!

There are a lot of people I’ve met who tend to be hyperfocused on whether their pages rank, and don’t spend as much attention on how those pages’ entries appear within the search results pages.

It seems like common sense that if the entry looks like what a user is seeking, they’d be more likely to click upon it. Therefor, if you were to improve your search engine results page entries, you’d also likely improve your click-through rate — increasing your traffic.

Compare these listings on Google for a search for “Seattle indie records shop“:

You can see that the star ratings and review on the listing for “Easy Street Records” is slightly more eye-catching if you were a records shop afficianado — the stars and the dollar-sign price range and the easy-to-read sample review text give it an advantage over the listing for the record shop below it. A consumer who is rapidly scanning and clicking to find what they want is going to be more likely to click here.

How much more likely is such a listing to gain clicks? According to Vanessa Fox, Yahoo! has reported a 15% click-through-rate (CTR) increase on similar types of listing treatments! Their results were based upon comparing the CTR of typical search result listings with CTR of listings sporting their special treatments developed through SearchMonkey. The customized listings really stand out from the other listings, drawing the eye and clicks, too.

Yet, before these research results were released, I’d already seen how merely fine-tuning the listing text alone could improve both CTR and rankings. Using savvy methods for forming TITLEs and Meta Descriptions on pages, one can improve keyword relevance, ranking, and click-through-rates.

Now that Google has launched their own type of enhanced listing treatment, dubbed “Rich Snippets“, there’s starting to be even more options for optimizing listings in search results. The first special treatment they’ve enabled are the ones for reviews and ratings, and it seems clear that they intend to launch more, particularly ones related to the use of Microformats, such as hCalendar, hCard, and hProduct.

One person at SMX who liked this concept of “optimizing listings” for improved CTR was Matt Cutts, who Tweeted out a mention of it:

While these tactics likely have no direct effect on search engine keyword rankings, I’ve theorized for some time now that they could have an indirect effect upon rank. Google’s frequently-discussed patent for “Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data” includes within its descriptions of ranking methods (“scoring”) the possibility that pages might be ranked according to how often they’re clicked upon when they appear within particular searches. The patent states:

“…scoring the document includes assigning a higher score to the document when the document is selected more often than other documents in the set of search results over a time period…”

Very loosely interpreted, this means that if your page’s listing is clicked upon at a better rate than other pages appearing for the same keyword search, that click-frequency or CTR could actually affect that page’s future rankings for that keyword.

It’s long been controversial as to whether Google implemented many of the methods outlined in various patents like this one, but you already have a good excuse to fine-tune your listings: regardless of theoretical impact on rankings, it could easily improve your click-through rate, improving your site’s qualified traffic!

Quick Tips on Optimizing Listings:

• Title should be brief and state what the page is about, and who you are.
• Meta description should be brief and expand upon what the page is about or how it may be better than others listed for the same keyword search.
• Currently, mentioning deals/discounts/rebates may improve CTR since the economy has pushed people to be more price-conscious.
• Implementing Microformats now on your site for appropriate types of content will likely position you to take advantage of future rollouts of “Rich Snippets” treatements in Google results.
• Building a search application with Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey platform will help you to understand how Google’s developing similar types of listing enhancements.

Good listing engineering is a complex task involving semantic tagging, taxonomic research and development, good copywriting, and SEO knowledge. Don’t make guesses when doing this — use a good expert if you don’t have experience with it.

Optimize your snippets and SERP listings, and improve your CTR and Performance!

It affects even how portable you make your content. What I mean by making your content portable is making it easy to share, making it easy for your audience to move it across one social platform to another. If your audience finds your content valuable they are going to want to share it whether its through social bookmarking, social news, email or twittering, people want to share great things they experienced. Content that has value can create buzz and word of mouth without the author really realizing what’s going on. If it’s really valuable to the audience and there’s no way to share it, that content might not take off, however just the opposite can happen. If you believe you are always putting out valuable content and you want it shared and you have too many options to share it, this can be a turn off as well as confusing to your audience.

Lets take for example a blog, there are a few ways a blog can be shared. The blog itself can be found to have a lot of great content, and people who just get to your blog via a twitter link, Stumbleupon or a link through email might not be quite that educated on RSS. So having a dozen or so of ways to subscribe to your blog by RSS can be confusing and a turn off, rather than a turn on to people coming to your blog. If you use Feedburner or other like services to handle your subscriptions, take a look at your audience – what are they using to read your blog and choose those top 3-5 icons to show for RSS subscriptions. While you may think you need every single RSS aggegator listed, your audience is likely telling you differently, listen to them, they understand what’s valuable to them. For the most part, Google Reader has become the giant here, people share blogs and blog posts through the “share” option in Google Reader as well as porting out their list of blogs so their own readers (if they own a blog themselves) can keep up to date on what they view is valuable.

Then there’s blog posts and making them easy to share. Again, just like having too many aggregator icons listed, having too many social bookmarking and social news icons in a drop down or spread across the bottom of your posts can be a real turn off. Look at your analytics, listen to your audience, what are they saying about how they found your content? Is your content the type that would really get traction on Digg? Is your audience even on Digg? You’re audience might be on a very niche site like Boudica, which caters to women and not on Digg. In this case having a sharing option for Boudica or sites like it, just might be the better option. Generally the audiences can cross platforms and if your audiences feels its good enough for Digg, they’ll get it there. The point is make it sharable for where your audience hangs out, not an audience who isn’t interested.

When making your content portable, it’s also important to keep in mind, content doesn’t always equal text. Content that’s valuable to your audience can take the form of pictures, podcasts, videos or even slideshares. Making these types of content easy to share is just as important as making your text content easy to share. Make it easy for your audience to embed things, provide the embed code or the link code and well as the sharing buttons you’ve decided are valuable to your audience. Don’t forget to also provide ways to share through email and social networking sites – if your audience is there.

Don’t stress that you need to have every way to share out there. Yes there are plugins for blogs that can list all the popular sites, and are easy to install, but is your audience on those sites? Are you loosing out on having your content on a site where your audience is because you are focusing on where someone else’s audience is? Before you decide to plaster your content up with a million “submit to” buttons, analyze your audience and listen to where they want to submit your content first.