Welcome to the fourth installment of Enumerating Enumerable, a series of articles in which I challenge myself to do a better job of documenting Ruby’s Enumerable module than RubyDoc.org does. In this article, I’ll cover Enumerable#count, one of the new methods added to Enumerable in Ruby 1.9.

In case you missed the earlier installments, they’re listed (and linked) below:

1. all?
2. any?
3. collect / map

Enumerable#count Quick Summary

Enumerable#count and Arrays

When used on an array and an argument is provided, count returns the number of times the value of the argument appears in the array:

# How many instances of "zoom" are there in the array?
["zoom", "schwartz", "profigliano", "zoom"].count("zoom")
=> 2

# Prior to Ruby 1.9, you'd have to use this equivalent code:
["zoom", "schwartz", "profigliano", "zoom"].select {|word| word == "zoom"}.size
=> 2

When used on an array and a block is provided, count returns the number of items in the array for which the block returns true:

# How many members of "The Mosquitoes" (a Beatles-esque band that appeared on
# "Gilligan's Island") have names following the "B*ngo" format?
["Bingo", "Bango", "Bongo", "Irving"].count {|bandmate| bandmate =~ /B[a-z]ngo/}
=> 3

# Prior to Ruby 1.9, you'd have to use this equivalent code:
["Bingo", "Bango", "Bongo", "Irving"].select {|bandmate| bandmate =~ /B[a-z]ngo/}.size

RubyDoc.org says that when count is used on an array without an argument or a block, it simply returns the number of items in the array (which is what the length/size methods do). However, when I’ve tried it in irb and ruby, I got results like this:

[1, 2, 3, 4].count
=> #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0x189d784>

Enumerable#count and Hashes

As with arrays, when used on a hash and an argument is provided, count returns the number of times the value of the argument appears in the hash. The difference is that for the comparison, each key/value pair is treated as a two-element array, with the key being element 0 and the value being element 1.

# Here's a hash where the names of recent movies are keys
# and their metacritic.com ratings are the corresponding values.
movie_ratings = {"Get Smart" => 53, "Kung Fu Panda" => 88, "The Love Guru" => 15,
"Sex and the City" => 51, "Iron Man" => 93}
=> {"Get Smart"=>53, "Kung Fu Panda"=>88, "The Love Guru"=>15, "Sex and the City"=>51, "Iron Man"=>93}

# This statement will return a count of 0, since there is no item in movie_ratings
# that's just plain "Iron Man".
movie_ratings.count("Iron Man")
=> 0

# This statement will return a count of 1, since there is an item in movie_ratings
# with the key "Iron Man" and the corresponding value 93.
movie_ratings.count(["Iron Man", 93])
=> 1

# This statement will return a count of 0. There's an item in movie_ratings
# with the key "Iron Man", but its corresponding value is NOT 92.
movie_ratings.count(["Iron Man", 92])
=> 0

count is not useful when used with a hash and an argument. It will only ever return two values:

• 1 if the argument is a two-element array and there is an item in the hash whose key matches element [0] of the array and whose value matches element [1] of the array.
• 0 for all other cases.

When used with a hash and a block, count is more useful. count passes each key/value pair in the hash to the block, which you can “catch” as either:

1. A two-element array, with the key as element 0 and its corresponding value as element 1, or
2. Two separate items, with the key as the first item and its corresponding value as the second item.

Each key/value pair is passed to the block and count returns the number of items in the hash for which the block returns true.

# Once again, a hash where the names of recent movies are keys
# and their metacritic.com ratings are the corresponding values.
movie_ratings = {"Get Smart" => 53, "Kung Fu Panda" => 88, "The Love Guru" => 15,
 "Sex and the City" => 51, "Iron Man" => 93}
=> {"Get Smart"=>53, "Kung Fu Panda"=>88, "The Love Guru"=>15, "Sex and the City"=>51, "Iron Man"=>93}

# How many movie titles in the collection start
# in the first half of the alphabet?
# (Using a one-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|movie| movie[0] <= "M"}
=> 3

# How many movie titles in the collection start
# in the first half of the alphabet?
# (This time using a two-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|title, rating| title <= "M"}
=> 3

# Here’s how you’d do it in pre-1.9 Ruby:
movie_ratings.select {|movie| movie[0] <= "M"}.size
=> 3
# or…
movie_ratings.select {|title, rating| title <= "M"}.size
=> 3

# How many movies in the collection had a rating
# higher than 80?
# (Using a one-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|movie| movie[1] > 80}
=> 2

# How many movies in the collection had a rating
# higher than 80?
# (This time using a two-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|title, rating| rating > 80}
=> 2

# Here’s how you’d do it in pre-1.9 Ruby:
movie_ratings.select {|title, rating| rating > 80}.size
=> 2

# How many movies in the collection have both:
# - A title starting in the second half of the alphabet?
# - A rating less than 50?
# (Using a one-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|movie| movie[0] >= “M” && movie[1] < 50}
=> 1

# How many movies in the collection have both:
# - A title starting in the second half of the alphabet?
# - A rating less than 50?
# (This time using a two-parameter block)
movie_ratings.count {|title, rating| title >= “M” && rating < 50}
=> 1

# Here’s how you’d do it in pre-1.9 Ruby:
movie_ratings.select {|title, rating| title >= “M” && rating < 50}.size
=> 1

(You should probably skip The Love Guru completely, or at least until it gets aired on TV for free.)

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

(For the full story behind these photos, see this entry on the Accordion Guy blog.)

[Found via Laughing Squid.]

We’re less than a month away from RubyFringe, the self-described “avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies” being put on by my friends at Unspace. RubyFringe promises to be an offbeat conference organized by the offbeat people at Unspace, an offbeat software development shop, with offbeat speakers and MCs (I’m one of them) making some offbeat presentations, which will be followed by offbeat evening events. It stands to reason that it should come with an offbeat guide to its host city, and who better than Yours Truly, one of the city’s most notorious bloggers and a long-time resident, to write one?

From now until RubyFringe, I’ll be writing a series of articles posted under the banner of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, which will cover interesting things to do and see here in Accordion City. It’ll mostly be dedicated to the areas in which RubyFringe and associated events will be taking place and provide useful information about Toronto for people who’ve never been here (or even Canada) before. I’ll also try to cover some interesting stuff that the tourist books and sites don’t. If you’re coming up here — for RubyFringe or some other reason — I hope you’ll find this guide useful.

I thought I’d start the series by covering a topic with which I have almost no familiarity: smoking. It’s a safe bet that at least a few smokers will be coming to the conference from outside Ontario: if you’re one of these people, this article’s for you.

The Rules for Smoking in Ontario

If you really feel like poring over a legal document, you can read the Smoke-Free Ontario Act. If you’d rather not slog through the legalese, they can be boiled down to these two rules:

• You have to be at least 19 years old to purchase cigrarettes.
• No smoking indoors in public places.

Canadian Cigarette Brands

You’re going to have to ask someone else about which Canadian brands to smoke. Beyond “quit now,” I can’t really make any recommendations. What I know about Canadian cigarettes versus American ones isn’t much:

• I am told that American cigarettes are “raunchier” than Canadian cigarettes. Can any cross-border smokers comment on this?
• If you’re really homesick for Marlboros, you can get “Rooftop” brand cigarettes, which are Marlboros with packaging that makes use of Marlboro’s “rooftop” design but not the word “Marlboro”. The cigarette marketing site Filter Tips explains these “no-name” Marlboros, if you’re interested.

Canadian Cigarette Warning Labels

If you’re a smoker coming in from the United States and don’t travel outside the country much, you might not be aware that your country has the teeniest cigarette warning labels in the world, despite being the first to put warnings on cigarette packs in the first place.

Here in Canada, cigarettes have to devote half the visible surface of cigarette packaging to health warnings, which have livelier copy and are backed with pictures. Here are my two favourite warnings: first, the “mouth cancer” one…

…and the “trying to stick a marshmallow into a parking meter” one:

If you’re going to ignore the warnings, you might as well be entertained by them, right?

Canadian Cigarette Displays

And finally, I’ll come to the title of this post, Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?

If you set foot into a convenience store here, the first thing you’ll notice after the bilingual packaging is that there are no cigarettes to be seen. What you might see is a blank wall behind the shopkeeper that is almost completely devoid of features or markings. It’s a cigarette cabinet:

An Artcube cigarette cabinet.

This started only a couple of weeks ago in Ontario, when the law banning the open display of cigarettes in stores came into effect. This “out of sight, out of mind”-inspired law requires people who sell cigarettes to store them in featureless cabinets, and it seems that they’re not allowed to post anything on them, even if it’s not tobacco-related. If you wander into a convenience store and are wondering where the cancer sticks are, they’re in the blank cabinets.

The Return of Enumerating Enumerable

Back in January, I wrote that although the Ruby documentation site RubyDoc.org was useful, I found its writing unclear or confusing and some of its entries lacking in important information. In the “do it yourself and share it afterwards” spirit of open source, I started cataloguing the methods in Ruby’s workhorse module, Enumerable in a series of articles called Enumerating Enumerable. Enumerable is a pretty good place to start: its methods are often used and RubyDoc.org’s writeups of its methods are sparse (and in some cases, barely intelligible), especially when it comes to applying them to hashes.

In observance of another spirit of open source — that part that makes me sometimes yell “Free as in crap!” — I dropped the ball. There’s nothing like a little company turbulence and a sudden and very complete change in jobs to completely throw a wrench in a not-for-profit, self-driven, spare-time scratch-an-itch project like Enumerating Enumerable. Each time I started to write a new installment of Enumerating Enumerable, something would come up and I’d say “I’ll write it later.” As you know, later often turns into never.

I’ve been meaning to bring programming articles back to Global Nerdy for some time. In spite of the fact that my career track has been taking me away from day-to-day programming, I still plan to keep my skills sharp with writing development articles and working on hobby coding projects. With the RubyFringe conference coming up (I’m MCing the first evening’s commencement event) and my feeling a bit Ruby-rusty, I thought “What better time than now to reboot the Enumerating Enumerable series?”

So here begins version 2.0 of Enumerating Enumerable. I’ll be working my way through Enumerable’s methods in alphabetical order, from Enumerable#all? to Enumerable#zip, each method covered for both arrays and hashes as well as special cases, supplemented with easy-to-grasp tables and graphics. I hope you find it useful!

Enumerable#all? Quick Summary

Enumerable#all? and Arrays

When used on an array and a block is provided, all? passes each item to the block. If the block never returns false or nil during this process, all? returns true; otherwise, it returns false.

# "feta" is the shortest-named cheese in this list
cheeses = ["feta", "cheddar", "stilton", "camembert", "mozzarella", "Fromage de Montagne de Savoie"]

cheeses.all? {|cheese| cheese.length >= 4}
=> true

cheeses.all? {|cheese| cheese.length >= 5}
=> false

When the block is omitted, all? uses this implied block: {|item| item}. Since everything in Ruby evaluates to true except for false and nil, using all? without a block is effectively a test to see if all the items in the collection evaluate to true (or conversely, if there are any false or nil values in the array).

cheeses.all?
=> true

cheeses << false
=> [”feta”, “cheddar”, “stilton”, “camembert”, “mozzarella”, “Fromage de Montagne de Savoie”, false]

cheeses.all?
=> false

Enumerable#all? and Hashes

When used on a hash and a block is provided, all? passes each key/value pair as a two-element array to the block, which you can “catch” as either:

1. A two-element array, with the key in element 0 and its corresponding value in element 1, or
2. Two separate items, the first being the key, the second being the corresponding value.

If the block never returns false or nil during this process, all? returns true; otherwise, it returns false.

# Here's a hash where for each key/value pair, the key is a programming language and
# the corresponding value is the year when that language was first released
# The keys range in value from "Javascript" to "Ruby", and the values range from
# 1987 to 1996
languages = {"Javascript" => 1996, "PHP" => 1994, "Perl" => 1987, "Python" => 1991, "Ruby" => 1993}

languages.all? {|language| language[0] >= "Delphi"}
=> true

languages.all? {|language, year_created| language >= "Delphi"}
=> true

languages.all? {|language| language[0] >= "Visual Basic"}
=> false

languages.all? {|language, year_created| language >= "Visual Basic"}
=> false

languages.all? {|language| language[0] >= "Delphi" and language[1] <= 2000}
=> true

languages.all? {|language, year_created| language >= “Delphi” and year_created <= 2000}
=> true

languages.all? {|language| language[0] >= “Delphi” and language[1] > 2000}
=> false

languages.all? {|language, year_created| language >= “Delphi” and year_created > 2000}
=> false

Using all? without a block on a hash is meaningless, as it will always return true. When the block is omitted, all? uses this implied block: {|item| item}. In the case of a hash, item will always be a two-element array, which means that it will never evaluate as false nor nil.

And yes, even this hash, when run through all?, will still return true:

{false => false, nil => nil}.all?
=> true

Special Case: Using Enumerable#all? on Empty Arrays and Hashes

When applied to an empty array or hash, with or without a block, all? always returns true. That’s because with an empty collection, there are no values to process and return a false value.

Let’s look at the case of empty arrays:

cheeses = []
=> []

cheeses.all? {|cheese| cheese.length >= 4}
=> true

cheeses.all?
=> true

# Let's try applying "all?" to a non-empty array
# using a block that ALWAYS returns false:
["Gruyere"].all? {|cheese| false}
=> false

# ...but watch what happens when we try the same thing
# with an EMPTY array!
[].all? {|cheese| false}
=> true

…now let’s look at the case of empty hashes:

languages = {}
=> {}

languages.all? {|language| language[0] >= "Delphi"}
=> true

languages.all? {|language, year_created| language >= "Delphi"}
=> true

languages.all?
=> true

# Let's try applying "all?" to a non-empty hash
# using a block that ALWAYS returns false:
{"Lisp" => 1959}.all? {|language| false}
=> false

# ...but watch what happens when we try the same thing
# with an EMPTY hash!
{}.all? {|language| false}
=> true

Here are my notes on the presentation Search Behaviour: A Tour of the Golden Triangle presented by Enquiro Research’s Gord Hotchkiss as part of the Search User Behaviour panel at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto.

The Golden Triangle refers to that upper left-hand corner of a search engine results page where the reader’s eye spends most of its time. The phrase was coined by the search engine marketing firm Enquiro Research based on the results of their 2005 eye-tracking study, in which they tracked the eye movements of readers of Google results pages.

The Area of Greatest Promise

Why is the first listing seen so important? Because it’s in the Area of Greatest Promise. That’s the upper left-hand corner of the page. We found that the average time that users spend on a search results page is about 10 to 12 seconds. During the first 2 seconds of that time — or basically 20% of the time people spend on a search page — users’ eyes are mostly focused on the Area of Greatest Promise.

We ran a test: we took a Microsoft search results page and changed one thing: the sponsored link at the top of the page — in other words, an advertisement in the Area of Greatest Promise. In some cases we showed an ad that was highly relevant to the search, in others, we showed a non-relevant ad. We then asked our test subjects:

• if they would use the search engine for a similar query
• if they would use the search engine for other queries
• if they would recommend the search engine to a friend
• if they would make the search engine their preferred one

Here’s a photograph of a chart showing the results that shows test subjects who were shown relevant and non-relevant ads in the Area of Greatest Promise:

For every question, the test subjects who were shown relevant ads in the Area of Greatest Promise answered “yes”. The lesson is that the quality and relevance of that top ad in a search engine results page is critical.

Why do We Scan Search Results in Groups of 3 or 4?

When you look at the hot spots in our eye tracking “heat maps”, you’ll see that the first 3 or 4 items are scanned, and subsequent results are also scanned in groups of three or four. That’s because of the way our brains our wired. Human memory isn’t stored in a convenient clumps, but instead each memory is broken into fragments and stored in different parts of the brain, depending on the context. When we retrieve a memory, these fragments are reassembled on a “bench” which we call working memory or executive function. Channel capacity — that is, capacity of working memory — is limited to “seven, plus or minus two” items.

We see this all the time in purchasing behaviour. When you think of laptop for purchase, you typically consider 3 or 4 brands. We take shortcuts when thinking of something, cutting things down into graspable chunks. This approach is sometimes called satisficing. Search engines give us a playground to satisfice, and it all happens in the Golden Triangle.

Why is branding so important?

Although we want to narrow things down to as few selections as possible when making a purchase, we feel that a result set is more useful when there are alternatives presented. In an experiment where we presented test subjects looking for Brand A in search results pages with:

1. Brand A as both the top organic and sponsored result
2. Brand A as the top organic result, Brand B as the top sponsored result
3. Brand A as the top organic result, Brands A and B as the top sponsored results

…the test subjects recalled, purchased and clicked more when presented with more brands in the PPC area of the page.

Another strange thing we noticed while doing eye tracking on searches for laptops. We kept seeing “bounces”, where our test subjects’ eyes kept moving away from the Golden Triangle and over to the right sidebar of the search results page where the advertising was. This would happen about 2 or 3 seconds into their scanning the page. We found out that it was because Dell wasn’t a brand returned in the top set of our tests — they were looking for Dell in the sidebar.

This led us to do more research and we ended up finding that there is a 16% “lift” in brand association when your brand is in both the top organic and sponsored results.

How Rogers Missed the Boat on the iPhone Announcement

Rogers recently announced that they were going to the be exclusive iPhone carrier in Canada. We know there was a lot of interest in this development because Google queries in Canada for the search term “iPhone” tripled. If you looked at the Google search results page for “iPhone” on the day Rogers made the announcement, you’d have seen this:

Rogers is nowhere to be seen on the Google results page — not in the organic results, and not in the PPC results. But you know who bought an ad? BlackBerry. Rogers’ heads are up their asses.

“Canada is so far behind in search, it’s embarrassing.”

Here are my notes from Pavan Li’s presentation on “Searcher Moms” in the Search User Behaviour presentation at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference. She’s been conducting research on the search patterns of a demographic we all know and love — Moms!

I’ve been reseraching search usage in the “moms sector”. Moms are key decision makers for purchases of so many things — from cereal and clothes to vacations and financial planning.

In partnership with DoubleClick Performics and ROIResearch, we measured 1000 moms’ internet usage and media consumption. We found that their search engine usage and the role search engines play in their online and offline purchases in a number of categories:

• travel
• furniture
• consumer electronics
• appliances
• automobile
• packaged goods
• personal care
• baby care
• household food
• soft drinks

We found that moms are driven to search by offline advertising: two-thirds of them used search after seeing an ad.

60% of moms have college or higher education. One-third come from a house with a household income over $100,000 or higher. One-third have a child 18 years of age or younger. Moms are a valuable market, with the combination of:

• education
• buying power
• need to purchase for family

76% of moms use the internet at least 1 hour a day. 36% of them use it at least 3 hours a day.

Moms are experienced and tenacious searchers. They consider search the most efficient way of getting information for products and services. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go through multiple result pages before switching search engines. They’re a very loyal group.

What’s the number one thing moms look for? Deals. Promotions, sales and specials. Their top
two concerns:

1. store location
2. information about offline promotions

The higher the price of a product, the more they use search.

More notes from Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto — this set is from the session Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, whose description is:

“Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) is a general term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility, including paid search ads (sometimes called “PPC” for pay-per-click) and improving visibility in unpaid organic search listings (generally referred to as SEO, for “search engine optimization”). This session will provide a broad-ranging and concise survey of how search engines work, where to prioritize your time and effort, and key marketing concepts. The session is particularly useful for newcomers to the field, and first-time SES attendees.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM):

• is a general term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility.
• includes improving visibility in unpaid “organic” search listings. The process of improving this visiblity is SEO, search engine optimization.
• includes paid search adverising, also known as PPC, pay per click.

Google’s Algorithm

One of the things Google will admit: there are over 200 factors in their algorithm. They won’t say what those factors are, though. In spite of this, you can still take Google and boil it to these two components:

• PageRank: An index of the “importance” of your page, based on things like who links to you.
• The words on your page.

Google has been getting cleverer with how they treat the words on your page. Features like latent semantic indexing allows them to recognize synonyms and related words. They also have the flexibility to respond to challenges such last year’s SEOmoz campaign to make Stephen Colbert the number one result for the search term “greatest living American” through Googlebombing and similar gaming. “Every now and then, when you think you have Google figured out, they’ll surprise you.”

Keywords

The first phase in any SEO/SEM campaign is keyword research. For this, we recommend The Search Engine Marketing Kit by Dan Thies and Dave Davies.

The old way of marketing was: we create a slogan, then hammer it into people. It doesn’t fit search. When people are looking for an affordable hotel, they type the search term “cheap hotel”. “Cheap hotel” is not something that a brand manager would want associated with his or her hotel, but it’s what potential guests are looking for.

The first step in keyword research is thinking like your customer. Think about the words users would type to find your pages. Brainstorm keyword categories that address your customers’ wants. Compile the brainstormed keywords for further review of traffic potential, competition and other factors.

Recommended keyword research tools:

• Adwords keyword tool — you can “use it in reverse” to do SEO research.
• Google Trends is “good for the executives”. You can use it to show them how pathetic the search terms they’re coming up with are.
• Microsoft adCenter. This is new, and has some new features, including a feature that projects keyword trends 3 months into the future. It also gives you a sense of demographics — who’s more likely to use a given term?
• Trellian and Wordtracker are also useful. They’re available in both free and commerical versions.
• Overture is no longer on the list. Yahoo! stopped updating it about 2 years ago.

Once you have the data, the temptation is go for most popular keyword. Typically, it’s one word, and the likeliness of “winning” the one-word term is nil. Besides, the average search term is two or three words long, so use two- and three-word key phrases. Examples: “Russian nesting dolls” and “online press release” (which also contains the often-looked-up “press reelase”). Build each page around the top two or three phrases that you would like it to be for: company or description, products or categories, benefits or lcoations.

Follow Google’s Guidelines, Use Google’s Tools

Follow Google’s design, content, technical and quality guidelines. Make sure that you keep up with the webmaster guidelines, as they’ve been updated a lot. The guidelines, used to be cryptic and vague, with suggestions like “It’s good to have links, but not bad links”. Google doesn’t really want to be cryptic, but they also don’t want to be gamed.

Over the last couple of years, they’ve creating some webmaster tools that will help diagnose your site and show you what they’re having trouble crawling. You have to sign up for it.

Content

Good SEO requires a mix of “writing and crossword puzzle” skills.

Some page writing tips:

• Include key phrases in your <title> tag.
• Titles should ideally be created by the marketing department.
• Find a natural way to reinforce the title tag with headings and subheadings
• Headings and subheadings also break up the text in a natural fashion and enhance readability
• Crawlers use an “inverted pyramid mentality”.

SEO copywriters need to learn white-hat linkbaiting techniques — see Matt Cutts’ January 24th, 2006 blog entry for more on this. In fact, be sure to follow his blog: he’ll clarify issues even faster than Google’s official pages, and what he writes often becomes policy.

Getting Links

Link building is as hard as getting publicity in the Globe and Mail. Quantity, quality and relevance of links count towards your rating. One high-quality link is better than many low quality links.

Getting listed on directories is tricky. Being listed on some directories is okay with Google, being listed on some others is not. There’s always some confusion: welcome to our world!

Another good source of links is the “Buzzing Blogosphere”. You need to understand blogger link love!

Be sure to read Eric Ward’s blog entry titled LinkMoses’ Linking Commandments, Part One (there’s only one part). If you follow only one of them, follow this one: “Thou shalt not use the name of Matt Cutts in vain (at least not publically or where it could be dugg)”.

Social Media Optimization: a new frontier, a new world shaped by Digg, Flickr and so on.

Pay Per Click

• 97% of PPC programs use Google AdWords. They’re the most expensive. (”If you don’t get it right, you’re putting money in Google’s pocket, not yours.”)
• 70% of PPC programs use Yahoo! Panama. Cost-wise, they’re in the middle.
• 53% of PPC programs use Microsoft adCenter. They’re the cheapest.

Analytics

Analytics tells you more than how many visitors you got this month.

A thought about Google Analytics: Google is selling you the ads and knows what people are clicking on. Some people think that’s too much information for a sales vendor to have. Use multiple vendors so you can maintain control over your information — split it up, use tools that belong to different entities.

Vertical search has been around a long time. Not much attention has been paid to it, but there are all sorts: B2B, book search, blog search, local search, image search, news search.

Here’s an important tip: optimize press releases for search. A well-optimized press release can hold its ranking for a long time. I’ve seen a 2003 press release that’s still a #4 result in searches today.

Google Universal Search

Google Universal Search: one of those things that search engine companies are creating that we’re still inventing words for. “This is the challenge that you have entered into.” It blends results from its vertical searches — images, news, video — with the organic results. Search results aren’t just about text anymore! If you’re thinking about optimizing your multimedia assets, now is the time to do it!

Google has not rolled out universal search universally. Only about 17% of searches will feature universal search results.

Here’s another set of notes I took at Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto. These are from SEO Don’ts, Myths, & Scams. Here’s the description of the panel:

Whether it comes from a cold call, a spam e-mail, or just misguided advice on a forum, there is some information that is just plain wrong. Other “tried and true” tactics are way out of date. Panelists address and debunk their biggest SEO pet peeves, and address your questions and comments in the Q&A.

Myths (Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings)

Lessons from the Buddha

A number of lessons from the Buddha apply equally to SEO:

• Do not believe anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many
• …or because it’s found written in your religious (or in this case, SEO) books
• …or merely on the authority of your teachers.
• Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Search Engine Myths

You have to submit URLs to search engines. Search engines will find you if people link to you. If people are linking to your site, you don’t have to go around submitting its URL to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on.

You need to provide a Google site map. It’s nice, but it’s not really going to help. “Most sites are spiderable the way they are.” If you have a site with millions of pages that changes often and your system can auto-generate a map, then mmmmaybe…

Frequent spidering helps rankings. If it’s already indexed, getting it spidered again isn’t going to do much.

PPC ads will help organic rankings! PPC ads will hurt organic rankings Google keeps its search engine and Adwords divisions separate and it appears that your ranking are not affected by whethe ror not you’ve bought pay per click ads.

Keyword Myths

Your site must have a keyword-rich domain. Having applicable keywords in your site’s domain name help, but it’s not make-or-break.

Your site must use keyworded URLs. These may give you a slight boost, but they’re not they key to high rankings. They’re good for usability, though.

Header tags — <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on — are necessary. For headlines, make sense to people, put keywords in them, but don’t worry if your CMS doesn’t use header tags for headings.

Words in your site’s meta keywords tag must also appear in its content. Actually, that’s the opposite of the intent of meta tags — they were meant for extra words that describe your page but might not actually appear in its text (they’re also good for handling common misspellings). They’re useless anyway — Google ignores them.

Content Myths

Content needs to have a minimum number of words in order to be indexed. The number that gets thrown around as the minimum is “250″. I made that up at a conference, when someone tried to get an exact number out of me! It’s a good number of words to get a basic point across, though.

You content must have a specific keyword density. Nope.

You should optimize each page for just one keyword phrase. Most SEOs out there do this — it’s a big waste. It’s hard to write copy for just 1 phrase; in fact, it tends to make pages sound spammy.

You must optimize content for the long tail. Another half-right/half-wrong myth (there are many of these). Just write an article! You’ll get found for the words you used. SEO is really about optimizing for keywords that will get used a lot (which is the opposite of keywords in the long tail).

Duplicate content will get your site penalized. A big myth out there. Duplicates are filtered in search engine results pages because they don’t want to show ten copies of the same article. They’ll show what they perceive to be the most important version. At worst, they might not show your version in the results.

Design Myths

The HTML on your pages must validate to W3C. It’s a good thing to do, but not for boosting your search engine rankings. Crawlers don’t care about web standards. You pages just have to be indexable.

Navigation must be text links, not images. Engines have been able to follow image links since image links have existed. Use the alt attribute for anchor text.

Don’t use Flash. Half-right, half-wrong. It true that you shouldn’t make make your whole site in Flash, because it’ll either be non-indexable or indexed poorly.

Linking and PageRank Myths

Google’s link: command is useful for finding out who links to you No! Ignore it! It often returns no results for pages with plenty of incoming links. Use Google Webmaster tools or Yahoo! Site Explorer to see who links to you instead.

Pages rank in PageRank order. “Toolbar pagerank” — the PageRank that the toolbars display for a site — doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Your site will get ranked higher if it’s in a directory like DMOZ/ODP or Yahoo! Directory. No.

Don’ts (Lyndsay Walker, Web Analytics and SEO Coordinator, WestJet)

Between the <head> Tags

Don’t use the same <title> tags on every page. Make the page’s <title> tag content relate to the page. You have about 65 characters to work with weith <title> tag content before the search engine stops reading it.

Don’t overuse <meta>. The one that really counts is the description tag. It may not help with your ranking, but it may be used as the description of your site in the Google results.

You don’t need to specify GOOGLEBOT=index,follow in the robots meta tag. That’s the default behaviour.

Don’t stuff keywords in meta tags: they’re not really factored in.

Don’t use hidden text (text with the same colour as its background). They know this trick.

Don’t use doorway pages (landing page strictly for search engines).

When someone tells you to make a page for engines that doesn’t match your content, that’s a warning sign.

Google treats subdomains as completely separate sites. example.com, www.example.com and blog.example.com are treated as three separate sites by Google.

Don’t publish before you’re ready.

Don’t bury your links in JavaScript.

Don’t use too many parameters in your URLs. Use mod_rewrite if necessary.

Don’t stuff keywords into alt attributes. If this practice continues, alt might get weighted less by search engines, and that would be a loss for everyone.

Don’t use images when CSS will do.

If you want to use specific fonts for things like headlines, try sIFR!

Don’t use inline CSS.

Don’t use Flash to replace content. Engines can’t read it.

Links

Don’t attempt to get hundreds or thousands of links at once, especially paid or automated. Search engines “know” about this type of scam. The rule of thumb is that “Natural is good”.

Don’t engage in non-relevant link exchanges.

Don’t participate in link directories. Why would you want to put your link in a page that has just a bunch of other links on it? The links that you want are on pages relevant to your content.

Don’t participate in link farms. It won’t help.

Don’t focus all your links on landing on the home page. Put SEO on every page.

Don’t register lots of domains using fake names and addresses.

Don’t get “green pixel envy” — don’t obsess over PageRank. PageRank covers only link input/output and only updated once every couple of months

Behind the Scenes

Don’t guess what you should do with robots.txt. Use Google Webmaster tools for help!

Don’t have multiple URL variations pointing to the home page. Remember, Google considers “www.homepage.com” and “homepage.com” to be two different sites. Use a 301 redirect to clarify what your preferred domain is.

The Boss Wants It!

When the boss or your client insists on doing something that’s “black hat”, it can pose a dilemma. Remember that they hired you to be the expert — they should trust your judgement. Taking a risk means risking your job.

Do it right the first time. Follow the webmaster guidelines. Fight the good fight. Resist the temptation to go to the dark side.

Be patient. It can take months to get good rankings, but they last!

Build your brand — don’t gamble with it!

Get ahead of the search engine algorithm updates — chances are, if you’re following the guidelines, you’ll be okay.

Who are you optimizing for? For the engines? No! The users!

Don’t forget to communicate with your development team. Be good to them, and they’ll do what you ask!

Scams (Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit)

Watch for SEO firms that guarantee #1 rankings. How can they make such a claim? They don’t own the search engines nor maintain them. You have to wonder what keywords might they be able to do this for.

Watch for firms that present proof of achieved #1 rankings. These #1 spots were achieved for very long-tail keyword combinations and non-competitive keywords and phrases. “It’s just fancy footwork.”

When an SEO firm suggests creating entry pages, doorway pages, hallway pages that don’t link to your navigation and may be hosted on other domains, run!

Beware of claims of “secret sauces” or when they say “we can’t tell you how we do it”. That’s a good indicator that they’re black hat SEO. Remember, it’s your site and your business’ reputation!

Watch out for claims of special relationships with insiders at search engine companies — “Oh, I know Matt Cutts!” Matt Cutts is a friendly, gregarious guy, and lots of people have at least met him. Google doesn’t have relationships with SEOs and neither do the other serious search engine companies.

Another warning sign: Linking schemes or things that sound like them. These require you to link to other clients of the same SEO as well as the SEO’s site. They may also offer paid link programs, which have recently come under fire. They promise lots of links via submissions to fake or obscure search engines, focusing on creating lots of links through “free for all” link pages. They claim to automatically get you links from blogs or social media sites. They’re scams!

If a firm claims to advertise for “hundreds of clients”, yet has only been around a very few years and has only a handful of employees, be wary.

Also be wary if the SEO doesn’t outline how they’ll spend your money. These people typically use it on paid ads and try to pass them off as organic search results.

Social media is a new can of worms — black hat SEOs view them as new toys to play with.

Remember, if it extracts value through trickery, it’s a scam. Fake content is a scam and fake blogs are scams.

“I’m a real believer in litmus tests.”

Flash intro pages: bad idea. Why are you putting “skip intro” on your landing page, the most valuable piece of real estate? (Try Googling for “skip intro” or “download flash”) Put indexable content on your landing page!

Fredrick Marckini.

Here’s my first full set of notes from the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference — they’re from Fredrick Marckini’s keynote presentation on Tuesday. These were flesh out from notes I typed during the keynote; anything in quotes is a direct quote.

Enjoy!

Eternal Life

“Search is really boring.”

“You think you came here to learn about search — you are here to learn about eternal life.” Thanks to search engines, what you put online can live forever.

Consider Reebok’s 2003 Superbowl ad in which Terry Tate was hired by fictitious company “Felcher and Sons” to boost office productivity:

In a pre-internet world, it would have only been seen by people who watching Superbowl 2003 and who weren’t running to the bathroom or getting a snack. Thanks to search engines and YouTube (which is in essence a search engine for video), it’s been viewed an additional 10 million times.

(And yes, the name “Felcher and Sons” was probably chosen deliberately. If you don’t get the term, I suggest a visit to Urban Dictionary, with the caveat that the definition ain’t pretty. Not one bit.)

All media and ads lead people to search, and not only on traditional search engines. Not everyone uses only Google and Yahoo! for search.

When it comes to search results, the third page. Having search results past the third page is like “posting a billboard in the woods”

Where People Click on Google Results Pages

“We are living in Google’s world.” Google gets 92% of the pay per click in the U.S. and Canada.

What percentage of users click on the pay per click sections vs. the “natural results” section on Google results pages? We did the research, and here’s what we found:

72% of all clicks were in the natural results section; the remaining 28% were in the paid. Therefore search marketing must include SEO. Without doing the work to boost your rank in the natural search results, you’re “kissing using only your bottom lip”.

Search Keywords: The Ones You’re Thinking Of Aren’t the Ones Your Customers are Using

Consider this: it’s a “Housewarmer” candle, a product of the Yankee Candle company:

Naturally, when the Yankee Candle company wanted to buy keywords for Google search results, they bought “housewarmer”, because that’s the product’s name, and that’s probably how they refer to these candles inside the company.

However, when they checked their logs, they found that the search term that people were actually using to find them was “jar candle”.

Your customers might be using different language than you are!

Other examples:

• What is “swirl marks” the number one search term for? Believe it or not, auto body shops. People doing this search were looking to have swirl marks removed from their cars.
• Institutions that provide loans were buying keywords like “lending”. From their perspective, that’s the business they were in. The problem was that their customer, when doing searches, were searching using terms like “borrowing”, which is how a loans transaction looks from their point of view.
• Places offering continuing education were buying the key phrase “prior learning” — in reference to college credit for life experience and on-the-job-training — and it was performing badly. Why? Because it’s jargon used within the field of continuing education but not by the general public.

The take-away: understand how your customers use language!

SEO-Savvy Sites

“Good SEO leaves behind clues.” Consider the Thingamajob job search site:

• Good use of keywords on the page
• It uses keywords in the <title> tag
• It used keywords in the URL
• It uses keywords in its headline tags (headlines are important — search engines work on the assumption that web documents are written in a hierarchical format)
• It uses keywords in the activated links

SEO is Not Dead

Some columnists say that SEO is dead. I don’t think so. I see SEO benefiting companies all the time.

In one particular case, I saw a travel company employ SEO — for a $900,000 investment, they experienced a 142% increase in traffic, which resulted in their going from $200 million in revenue when they started their SEO campaign to $500 million over a three-year period. In terms of profit, the client indicated that some months the generated as much $27 million in profit.

To borrow the Huey Lewis song line, “SEO is the heart of rock and roll, and the heart of rock and roll is still beating.” There is still good money to be made with good SEO fundamentals.

Offline Advertising and SEO

In Norway, a chain of car repair shops put out a massive TV ad campaign. Their competitor noticed that even though the TV ads weren’t for their company, they were still experiencing an increased number of visits to their site. The TV ads were driving people to search for car repair.

They decided to purchase 50 car repair-related keywords on Google so that when people searched for car repair, they’d show up in the pay per click section of the Google results page. The end result was that someone else’s TV ads were driving them straight to their online ads.

In the end, the competitor had to stop the Google AdWords campaign — not because of a cease-and-desist, but because they were overbooked for car repairs. Their Google AdWords campaign was a smashing success!

As for the company who ran the TV ads in the first place? They couldn’t be found on Google.

The question you should be asking yourself is: are your competitors using your offline ads to drive their online conversions? Research shows that 40% of people are driven online from offline sources when making a purchase. You need to connect offline ads to search!

Take Your Pay Per Click Campaigns Global Now

We had a client who’d maxed out their number of conversions available in the U.S., and they had anywhere from 3 to 20 competitors per keyword and a $632 cost-per-acquisition.

We did some research and found that in international markets, there were fewer competitors for the same keywords and lower costs per acquisition:

• South Africa: $428
• South America: $372
• Europe: $222
• Australia: $176

The take-away: Take pay per click campaigns global — that where you’re competitors aren’t!

Winning results with Google AdWords - Andrew Goodman

Universal Search

Image from Search Engine Land’s article, Google’s Universal Search Explained.
Click the image to see the original article.

These days, “all search is meta-search” — that is, searches of searches. Those different types of search at the top of the Google results page: images, maps, local, news, video — they’re like tabs leading you to specialized searches. Thinking about search results in terms of text only is no longer enough.

Google has recently introduced Universal Search, featuring results blended from all these tabs. This opens up opportunities to occupy the entire first results page, with “web” links, as well as image, video and news links!

Case study: We had a client whom I’ll call “Skeptical Bob” who worked for a shampoo company who thought he’d maxed out the potential of the keywords he’d bought. He didn’t think that a new SEO team could “move the bar higher”.

We did some thinking. Nobody says “nice shampoo”; they say “nice hair”. We improved his results by doing two things:

1. Buying keywords related to hairstyles
2. They had all sorts of video (including one with Winona Ryder) — we put them on YouTube

The end result: more and higher-ranked search results for his keywords!

Search-Leveraged Public Relations

The Wall Street Journal has a daily circulation of 1 million [According to the Wall Street Journal fact sheet, that figure is 2 million — Joey]. The New York Times also has a daily circulation of 1 million [Wikipedia reports the same figure — Joey].

While Google’s News search gets 10.3 million views a month, and Yahoo! News get 33.7 million views per month [which puts it on par with the daily circulation of the New York Times — Joey].

Online news has changed journalism. Reporters have changed their behavior and follow online sources.

Google News presents a good PR opportunity since there are fewer competing items in its results. Unlike regular search results pages, results in Google News are listed in reverse chronological order — that is, newest items first. The entire opportunity in the News tab is 30 days, after which news results eventually migrate into the regular search results.

I had a client in the laptop repair business who was wondering if he should go with PPC or natural SEO. I told him he couldn’t afford either, but suggested that he use a news release focusing on the keyword phrase “laptop repair”. The resulting news release had an activated link and got viewed 250,000 times in the first few weeks and got conversions. Even though not a single reporter wrote an article based on that news release, the exercise was not a failure, because he got search engine results and customers!

The take-away: news release outcomes are now expressed in terms of search engine results. Optimize your news releases for search!

The Long Tail

[In the interest of brevity, rather than explain the Long Tail here, I will refer you to the Wikipedia entry for the Long Tail and the Wired article on the Long Tail.]

On the left side of the Long Tail, you have the hits. As you go farther right, you get more niche-y. What nobody thinks about is that hits today become part of the long tail tomorrow, and that time multiplies the impact of the Long Tail.

[Shows a picture of the band Maroon 5 in concert] I was at this band’s concert. Looking around, I thought “I’m the oldest guy here!”

How did I get here? I don’t listen to radio, and I haven’t been to a record store in years. I’d never even heard the name of the band. In spite of all that, I bought 15 of their songs and bought two tickets to their show. I’d become a customer of a brand I’d never even heard of!

How’d that happen? Thanks to collaborative filtering. If you’ve ever looked through Amazon’s site, you’ve seen collaborative filtering. It’s the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section in every product listing on their site.

If you do a search on Amazon.com for the term “prostate cancer”, the number one result is for Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer. If you scroll down to the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, you’ll see a book titled You Can Beat Prostate Cancer, a book written by my uncle, Dr. Robert Marckini. The interesting thing about this book is that even though it’s self-published, it’s sold 20,000 copies!

The Future of Search

Algorithmic relevancy has hit a wall.

Vertical search is one possible answer. While Google will return a wide array of results for the search term “seal”, iTunes search will return results about Seal the musician, and an Animal Planet search will return results about seals, as in the animals.

Many things we don’t think of as search engine actually are search engines. Amazon is a search engine for books. iTunes Store is a search engine for music. Flickr is a search engine for pictures. Where people search is going to be as important as how.

Will social search matter? Social software applications such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm, Digg, etc. all feature social search. Many blog entries have “Add us to your social bookmarks, please” links.

Yahoo! Answers is also a search engine of sorts. It features 90 million unique users who ask questions or post answers, and its answers are showing up in MSN search results and Google.

People are using search to inform their purchases. Shopping is a “visceral driver of commercial reccomndation systems”. Why do people use search for shopping?

1. Compressed time. There are so many demands on our times today.
2. We crave safety and security. People are “building cocoons and borders around their lives”.
3. The “tyranny of overwhelming choice”: there’s so much to choose from.

This presents a natural opportunity for social media and a challenge for brands. Brands will have to participate in their community and “give back” to receive attention. In the past, the brands who won told the best stories about themselves. In the future, the brands who win will be the ones whose customers tell the best stories about them.

People are already doing this: on Flickr, people post photos of their stuff, and of things they’ve bought. There’s a phenomenon called “unboxing” in which people show, either with photos or video, them opening the packaging of their new “toys”. And unboxings get viewed: one guy [shown below] posted an unboxing video of his brand new Playstation 3, and it got over half a million views!

The phenomenon of customers posting fan pictures and video isn’t limited only to the U.S.. Fans are also taking video ads and remixing them with their own soundtracks.

One way to turn your customers into evangelists is to invite customers to photograph and video your products, and give them a place to share them. Sheraton has done this: they’ve invited people to post videos of their stays, and the result was that they exceeded their sales targets.

PVRs, once only for “early adopters”, hit a tipping point when PVR capabilities became a cable box feature. PVRs are also search engines in disguise: they’re search engines for broadcast TV. They’re an example of search behaviour being adopted to the offline world.

Another trend: the decoupling of content from place. Consider the iPod: it’s not a cellphone, it’s nothing short of a revolution. When the iPhone hit the market, Google saw a surge in search traffic originating from iPhones — queries from iPhones exceeded queries from all other smartphones combined. “Not bad for 2% of the market!” As more cellphones get iPhone-like browser capabilities, watch for them to become mobile search engines.

There’s an increasing decoupling of content from platform. You’re no longer tethered to TV set if you want to watch TV. The Slingbox is an internet streaming device that lets you view your cable, satellite or PVR programs from any computer hooked up to broadband internet.

I predict:

• In the next 3 to 5 years, fetaure films will be simulatenously released in theatres, on DVD and online.
• 80% of content digital by 2010.

“If it’s digital, then it’s searchable. Everyone will be a searcher from every device. That is your future”

The AEP model of engagement: Awareness leads to Engagement leads to Purchase. “The future of marketing is search-centric.”

Fredrick Marckini.

I’m sitting in the press room of the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference as I write this. I’m here on a press pass arranged for me by Byron Gordon of SEO-PR and in exchange, I’ll be publishing blog entries from the conference over the next couple of days.

Fredrick Marckini’s Opening Keynote

The opening keynote by Fredrick Marckini, Chief Global Search Officer of Isobar, was quite good. For a guy like me — I’ve been more concerned about application development and technical evangelism than search engine marketing — it was a pretty good introduction to the search engine marketing and trends to watch for. Not only did Marckini present a lot of useful information (especially to an SEM newbie like me), but he presented with style and humor and kept the audience engaged — not an easy thing first thing in the morning.

I took copious notes and once I’ve formatted them, I’ll post them here.

The Best Thing in the Goodie Bag

It’s not a tech conference unless there’s a goodie bag, and this one is no exception. I always find uses for them, and the ones for this conference are pretty decent:

The goodie bag at SES Toronto.

They’re trying to making this conference a little more green, so they’ve kept the paper contents of the goodie bag quite lean, limited to the conference agenda magazine, a few sheets of administrivial paper and the best thing, the book Meatball Sundae, written by my favourite marketing guru, Seth Godin:

The best thing in the goodie bag: Meatball Sundae, by Seth Godin.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

Update: Matthew points out that Toothpaste for Dinner did a cartoon of this back in March:

I have a tit-for-tat arrangement with the folks behind the upcoming Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference (which runs from June 16th through 18th): they’ll give me a media pass for the conference in exchange for my blogging (both on this blog and on Global Nerdy) from the conference as well as interviewing some of the conference presenters. I’ve been meaning to learn more about search engine optimization and getting one-on-one time with a presenter is pretty difficult, so I think I’m getting the better part of the bargain.

Jane Motz Hayes

My first interview is with Jane Motz Hayes, who is an Information Designer at WebFeat, a multimedia company that provides services for online marketing, employee learning and hosting/data management/content management services. She’ll be on a panel called Accessibility, Usability & SEO. Here’s the abstract for the session:

Which user experience elements have you been neglecting? Is your site working, accessible, intuitive, and persuasive? Is it compliant with government accessibility regulations? Do you have a regimen for user testing? Building a user-friendly and accessible site generally coincides with SEO strategy, but not always. If you make changes to the site, will there be positive or negative repercussions on search engine traffic?

The panel takes place on day 2 of the conference, Wednesday, June 18th at 2:30 p.m.. If you’d like to catch this panel as well as the rest of the conference, go here and register for Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto.

I had the chance to have an email conversation with Jane recently. Since her panel discussion is going to be about accessibility, usability and SEO, I thought that would be a good jumping-off point for the interview. I asked her some questions, and she sent back some answers, and they appear below. Enjoy!

The Connection Between SEO and Usability

Being findable by search engines and being easy to use by human beings seem like two very things — one’s about machines and the other’s about people. So what’s the connection between SEO and usability?

SEO and Usability are both about humans. You can’t have one without the other. Humans use search engines to seek and find information according to the nature of their query — encapsulated as a keyword search. To say that SEO is only about machines omits the human factor, which is kind of the point.

At WebFeat, we think about how to optimize a website for search during the definition and planning phase and we treat search crawlers like an audience (or persona) whose information needs can be satisfied in the pages of the website. By treating search crawlers as an end user, we design all of the pages to be findable on search engine results pages. In the real world it doesn’t make sense to build a store and then not advertise its location or put up a sign informing customers what the shop is, why its useful to them, or whether to push or pull the door to come in. The same applies to the online space. If you aren’t ranking on the first search engine results page for your brand / name, then you’re less usable to humans. Usability is inherent to SEO.

Getting SEO People and Usability People on the Same Page

Usability is usually the domain of conscientious designers and developers, and if you’re lucky, your company’s usability consultant or specialist. Meanwhile, SEO is usually managed by sales, marketing and the occasional developer with “suit” tendencies. With such different groups with different agendas, how do people get both SEO and usability to align?

Usability is indeed an SEO issue, and vice versa. At WebFeat, we align the two by interconnecting user experience goals at the onset — and ensuring that every stakeholder understands and agrees that there is improved performance to be gained. When the common ground is increasing sales and improving customer relationships, the case for Usability and SEO alignment is made simple. Findability is a priority for website use – and the natural fit is a user-friendly interface and useful content that is accessible, findable and visible to search engines.

It was Dan Saffer who wrote that user experience is everyone’s responsibility, and web teams all have a stake in ensuring usable, findable websites. In the end, it comes down to better performance as the common agenda and focus.

The Three-Way Tug-of-War Between Usability, SEO and Beauty

There’s often a tension between designs that are “cool” and designs that are usable, as well as a tension between optimizing for SEO and making a beautiful site. Surely when dealing with a three-way tug-of-war between usability, SEO and beauty, not everyone wins. How do you deal with these differing agendas?

We see this tension all the time, and more often than not, it is the person sitting in my seat on the team, that must mediate the tug-of-war and broker a peaceful solution. But managing opinions and outcomes becomes easier when you advocate hard for the end user — taking this position tends to neutralize territorial agendas and lessen the risk of offending anyone. Indeed there are studies that show that users deem aesthetically pleasing websites as more credible than those with poor information design, and other studies show the ROI of usability. There are even more studies that show the attempts to measure the ROI of SEO. One can appeal to research to provide guidance, but in the end, looking at the users’ requirements of the website, the client goals, and of course the budget and timeline, will help drive out the design, and how much user research and how many SEO tactics you can tackle.

What About Personas?

I’ve been to a couple of get-togethers where UI types go out for drinks (yes, there seem to be a lot of them) and one thing I always hear them talking about is “personas” — fictious example users that participate in different scenarios that help guide their designs (such as “Bobby is not really a technical person and uses the site rarely…” and “Carol is a power user who uses the service several times a day…”). If usability and SEO are related, perhaps there’s a persona for a search engine. What would that persona be like?

This is a good question. Personas are often criticized for making broad assumptions and for being tied too closely to real customer data. But I think, as a user research tool, they can be very powerful when implemented properly. That being said – what’s the persona of a search engine? A search engine – let’s call her Jane Doe – is a task-oriented girl who browses the web looking for things she deems important (her mind is always changing and she’s not oft to disclose why she’s changed it) and she likes to keep a record of everything. Once her browsing is complete, Jane stores all of her findings neatly in her apartment as she waits to be asked for something in particular. If you ask her nicely (using the “right” keywords), Jane will think about it for a minute and then provide you with exactly what you need in the order of her choosing. If you don’t ask properly, Jane will give you nothing of use at all. Such is the same with search engines. They crawl the web, indexing documents, then processing queries (based on keyword searches) and provide results based on the algorithm of the search engine. Search engine results pages are prioritized according to the algorithmic determinants of the individual engine. It is part of their charm — they can be great and they can suck. It all depends on who they’re talking to.

Using SEO to “Sell” Usability?

In many projects I’ve worked on, usability got short shift, being an afterthought if it was even considered at all. I can see SEO being an easier “sell” to management, as it’s easier to make the connection between it and readers, conversions and money. What do you think of using SEO as a “trojan horse” to sneak some usability work into projects?

Search Engine Optimization is often easier to sell because clients can “see it” and also make a direct connection to ROI — user-centered design is more difficult to conceptualize and quantify a value. But I feel like the tide is turning, as more and more clients understand the value of Usability in informing their website strategy. More than ever, clients understand that usable websites are a measure of brand reputation and credibility – especially those selling products or services online.

That being said, price-sensitive clients may not have the budget for both User Research and SEO so defining KPIs and keyword research is important. KPIs help drive the user experience and well-researched keywords can create a basis for off-page SEO tactics like copy writing and information architecture — which all contribute to a positive user experience. One way to insure proper search visibility is to build off-page SEO best practices into your development process so that you don’t end up with something that can’t be crawled or indexed in natural search When budget becomes available, essential on-page tactics like copy optimization and link-building can occur.