 Google Testing Varying Description Snippet Lengths
TechCrunch
Jason Kincaid piggybacks on a Webmaster World discussion about Google testing varying sizes of description snippets in the SERPs. Users can select Small, which omits a summary entirely; Medium, which is the current default; and Long, which offers full paragraphs and is about four times longer than the default.
"The changes affect more than just aesthetics," Kincaid says. "The Long setting apparently consists of both the standard meta summary as well as text pulled from the page itself, which could help users weed out sites with nice descriptions but little actual content." - Read the whole story... Price Fixing? Google Already Does It
Ad Age
One of the primary concerns that advertisers have voiced about the posed Google-Yahoo search deal is that Google will be able to "fix" bid prices for search terms across the board -- and users will have no real alternative for their paid search traffic. But Danny Sullivan argues that Big G has been fixing paid search prices for years.
"How can that be, given that it's an auction model?" Sullivan says. "In an auction, the highest price wins. Since AdWords began, Google's never sold to the highest bidder." The winner is calculated through a mix of factors, including bid price and the ever-elusive Quality Score. And because Google alone determines Quality Scores in a somewhat opaque manner, Sullivan says that the giant is essentially manipulating all the prices already.
"Let's be clear: Quality scores mean advertisers with ads deemed 'good' pay less," he says. "But the bottom line is that Google is interfering in the auction in ways only it knows." - Read the whole story... Title Tags That Serve Both SEO And Marketing Types
Conversation Marketing
Ian Lurie serves up a bevy of title tag suggestions that will please both SEOs (that want keywords and the ensuing search engine visibility) and marketing types (that want the company name and the ensuing brand visibility).
For example, you could put the "product name " and "company name" in the title tag. "If you're selling products and you know your customers search for the product names, put the product name first, then the company name," Lurie says. "Unless the product name is 125 characters long, in which case you have a whole other problem."
You can also plug in a "custom title" and then the "company name," which works best if you have a fairly robust content management system. Another option would be to make a snappy tagline your title tag. "Come up with a great selling phrase like 'Buggy repairs while you wait'," he says. "You work in the keywords and might talk the VP of marketing into leaving your title tag alone." - Read the whole story... The Case For Cleaning Up Your URLs
Find Resolution
Google recently posted an article urging Webmasters to not screw with (or screw up) their dynamic URLs, and while Dave McAnally says that some of the giant's reasoning makes sense, sometimes URLs just need to be retooled to reap the ultimate SEO rewards.
The article said that Webmasters shouldn't attempt to make dynamic URLs look static for three reasons: the giant can effectively crawl dynamic URLs, some of the info in the original URL can help the engine's crawlers better understand (and index) the content, and most importantly, that site owners make mistakes when rewriting URLs and risk having the page not crawled at all.
"I can see why a company like Google would take issue with webmasters rewriting URLs to appear static on the premise that it will help manipulate rankings," McAnally says. He also understands that the giant doesn't want inexperienced Webmasters to risk having their pages not indexed at all. "However, there's a big picture to URL rewriting, and for a holistic SEO approach, clean and concise URLs are always preferred. As of right now, my opinion on URLs is that a clean URL is advantageous to the user, and thus, advantageous to the marketer." - Read the whole story... Are Your Search Campaigns Unified?
e-consultancy
"Search marketing is not about careful keyword research, great implementation, or search path analysis--it is about tying all of these facets together into one campaign," says Peter Young. "Only by doing this will you see your online marketing campaigns perform to their maximum efficiencies."
Young argues that each facet of a paid or organic search campaign needs to be connected to a central goal. You shouldn't use broad match extensively, for example, just to boost a PPC ad's coverage if the ensuing traffic will be low quality (and thus drive fewer conversions).
He also says that continuity between the messaging in a paid search ad and the functionality of the entire Web site it links to (not just the landing page) is crucial to snagging more conversions. "The role your Web site plays in the conversion process is crucial, and this ultimately shouldn't be forgotten," Young says. - Read the whole story... |
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