Search Engine Tigers

Google Maps is so nice that they allow for the use of their maps on any website, they nicely provide you with an API key, and lots of fun ways to do fun things with the maps. It wasn’t until one of my co-workers couldn’t find the geocode for an address that we realised that there is indeed a difference between the two. We went to Google maps and did a search for the address there, it was found. The mapping system that Google Maps uses has data from NAVTEQ, whereas the mapping system that they give everyone access to TeleAtlas. Both are copyrighted 2006, but it’s obvious that there are differences in the age of the data. Here’s what we saw…

Is this a terrible thing? No, they’re still giving the maps away for use for free on your own websites, which is very useful for a few projects that I’m working on right now, so I’m not going to complain that the version they keep for their own use is slightly better than the version they let me use.

So today I listened in on a conference call and webcast giving SEMPO members a first hand look at the new Yahoo Panama interface. This new interface is being rolled out to replace the 6 year old Overture / GoTo interface. Out of the 3 main systems, Google, Overture, and MSN, this interface was clearly the most clunky, hard to manage one. This update seeks to remove that label, and try to position Yahoo Search Marketing as the way forward.

One of the biggest changes is the move from the current auction style system to a more standard bid price + quality score approach. A great feature that they’ve added is that they no longer have the 1 keyword to 1 creative, with the new interface you can assign multiple creatives to a set of keywords, great news for anyone that’s added 200 keywords, and had it time out 1/2 way through while you try to copy the creative that you entered on page 1 to all. One of the more interesting features is the graphical slider to determing cost per click v # of clicks. You just simply slide the slider to see what they expect that you’ll get for that keyword in that market. It’ll take some testing to see how accurate that is…

The new Yahoo interface will also have Geotargeting, with several nifty new features. The first of these is when a state is selected, all available DMAs are shown with checkboxes. Clicking on these checkboxes highlights the actual market coverage on the map. This is very handy, especially when you’re working with specific locations, and you want to make sure that they fall within the specific boundaries of the geo-targeted location.

What is the interface missing from current offerings? Well, there’s no dayparting, nor is there any demographics targeting, although both of them are features that they are looking at implementing at some point. I’m looking forward to Panama rolling out, it’s going to make things a lot easier, and easier is good. Is it enough to differentiate them from the other 2? Probably not by much, but it does at least pull them up there.

Jim Boykin ran a poll on his site to see how many podcasts SEO’s listen to. His results? 32% of SEO’s never listen to a podcast, while 15% of SEO’s listen to podcasts daily. I would say that the main podcast that most people listen to is Danny Sullivan’s Daily SearchCast. Personally I listen to that on a daily basis. SEO Rockstars is an interesting podcast, one week it can be a diatribe about wireless phone service, the next an in depth discussion on how to use MySpace to generate links to your site. A new podcast that’s been running for a couple of weeks now is Search Pulse from Search Engine Rountable. I have yet to listen to this podcast, the reason being that I thought that Barry Schwartz tended to talk too fast, and over people when he’d guest host the Daily SearchCast, (I’m not saying that I could do any better), although with this being a different format, I’ll probably give it a try to see how it sounds.

One issue I’ve had is that when you run a geotargeted ad in another area, and you want to see how it looks in that area, you couldn’t. Well, now that’s changed. This week Google released a tool that allows you to do just that. It’s a simple url that you can change how you’d like to display Google ads in any location for any search.

So if you wanted to see what a person searching on Google for “Five Star Hotels” in Philadelphia would see, well here’s the command:-

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&lr=&
q=five+star+hotels&gr=US-PA&gcs=Philadelphia

the piece after the q= is the keyword searched for (any whitespace replaced with a +). the gr= is the country and state, the gcs= is the city.

The page that displays has a watermark”Preview”, and clearly states that this is a testing site. None of the links work, and no impression data is collected from these pages, so there’s no chance of these testing SERP’s affecting your data. Nice one Google, a very useful tool.

Overture has a keyword selector tool that allows people to do searches against data from the previous months data from the Yahoo search engine, so you can get an idea of what people have been searching for, to give you an idea of what people may be searching on.

Plugging a word or phrase into the tool gives back a list of all results that contain that word or phrasei.e. if you type in ‘tiger’ you’ll see results ordered by the number of searches performed in the previous month – 1st is ‘tiger’ 2nd is ‘detroit tiger’, 3rd is ‘tiger woods’.

So what are people searching for locally? Well one way to find out is to type in a city name and see what people have been searching for (since Yahoo does not allow geotargeting, all local searches must be qualified by adding the location to the search query). For a test I typed in Denver, San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, and looked at the results. They were actually fairly consistent with the majority of the highly searched terms across those markets being brand names of cars, although it seems that the further west you go, the more other searches pushed those searches out of the top 10 (Atlanta had car searches in 8 out of the top 10 searches. Chicago 7/10, Denver 4/10, and San Francisco 4/10), also interesting to note was the number of people that were searching for craigslist in each market. The table below shows the postition in each of these markets for these search terms for the month of July.

So it looks like, if you want to do local targeting that you should definitely involve Auto Dealers in your plan…

There’s a tool that a fair few SEO’s use to see how many pages they have indexed, it’s put out by a company called MarketLeap. I’ve been using this tool for reporting purposes, and followed the example, which you entering your website with the www in it. Well today I tried it without the www, and got quite different results… Of course the ‘out of xxx pages’ that Google shows is as unreliable as usual, but here’s an example of the differences that you can see.

Note that www.cnn.com shows 13.8 million pages indexed, while the cnn.com shows over 22 million pages indexed. Why is this? Well it’s because they use both the site: command and the inurl: command, and both of these commands appear to work as basic pattern matches, so if the www is in the query, and it’s not in the results, they don’t get returned. If the www isn’t in the query, then both those with and those without the www get returned. So to answer the question in the title, it appears better not to dub dub dub…

Ben Simon recently talked about some reading he’d been doing about interviewing people by getting them to actually do some work as part of the interview process. Well it looks as though Mr link-bait himself, Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz read the same article. A recent post of his details how he’s narrowed his list of applicants for a job down to 6 people. He’s going to give each of them the opportunity to write a blog post and then let his readers vote for the best post, with the idea being that they’ll factor those results into the hiring decision. Will it work? Well, even if they’re not going to really take the vote into account, they’re going to get an idea of how these people write, and think, plus it’s more link-bait – heck it’s got me linking to it

Google Adwords gives you the capability to geotarget your campaigns – you can target your keywords to a specific location, be it state, city or custom. When you do this there’s no need to include the name of the location in the keywords that you use i.e. “Dentists in Lancaster”, as the ad will display when the search engine detects that the ip address of the searcher is located in the Lancaster area, so just simply having the keyword “Dentists” will be good enough. However, from my experience, it seems as though there can still be a benefit from leaving a version of the original keyword in the campaign, as users will type in the fully qualified search that they want i.e. “Dentists in Lancaster”. From geotargeted campaigns that I’ve run with both the location specific and non-location specific keywords in there the location specific keywords have performed at a much higher click through rate than the non-location specific keywords.

Interestingly, when I worked with some other SEM companies on a project, they asked for a list of keywords for the campaign they were working with, one of the first things they said when they received the list was that we “didn’t need the location in there, as it’s taken care of with the geotargeting”, and so they stripped out the location specific keywords…