The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 3, 2010 at 3:19 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Google, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

The semantic web is coming.  Tim Berners Lee, the “father of the internet”  describes it in this article in Scientific American.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

Clear as mud right?  I’ve been putting together scraps and pieces of information for some time trying to understand exactly what it all means.  I wasn’t able to describe it, or what I thought it was, for years.  Not to myself and not to others.

A few weeks ago I had my ‘eureka’ moment.  I think I was driving to work, maybe I was in the shower (those are places my ‘eurekas’ commonly occur) and I figured it all out.  Rather than interpreting our queries and providing the results it thinks are best, the semantic web will understand our queries and provide the results we need, knowing what we meant not interpreting what we said.  Right?  I think so anyway.

Wolfram Alpha is at the forefront of this new understanding with it’s computational knowledge engine.  Google and Yahoo!?  They’ve made strides and efforts at truly understanding, but have fallen short or failed completely.

Google has, supposedly, incorporated latent semantic indexing into it’s algorithm.  Yahoo! tried tagging by incorporating del.icio.us tags into search results.  Neither, in my opinion, improved search results to the point where Google or any major search engine are able to understand the meaning of a query, or the relationships of words in a specific context.

Oh, I suppose they’ve made improvements and progress here and there.  Fundamentally though, there’s something missing.  Allow me to ‘splain.

I’m optimizing my own site.  Makes sense, I’m an SEO guy, I want the brass ring.  I don’t use black hat stuff, not because it’s wrong but because I don’t know how.  Now, I know, and I think you know, that the following phrases all mean the same thing.

SEO Nanaimo
Nanaimo SEO
Search Engine Optimization Nanaimo
Nanaimo Search Engine Optimization
SEO Nanaimo BC
etc…

I would go on, but I don’t want to get accused of keyword stuffing.  So, as I was saying, we all know that the above phrases are the same.  Google doesn’t though.  I have to target each phrase individually in Google as the results for each query are different.  It’s the same players, ultimately, just in a different order.

For you, the small business, it means you have to choose wisely.  If you have a small site, say only 5 or 10 pages, you’ll have some hard choices to make.   You can blog (like I do) which is a good way to create relevance.  You can do major link building campaigns and target various terms through your anchor text, since Google still relies heavily on links to decide relevance (not as much as before though) or you can build more content for your site.

You could also let sleeping dogs lie and pick one term that represents the best opportunity.   Need help with that?  No problem, drop me a line for free advice on your current keyword strategy.

This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on June 17, 2009 at 9:18 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Keywords, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Small business and individuals are often faced, at least offline, with the daunting task of competing with big box stores.  More often than not, the small mom and pop shop gets squeezed out by a larger, competing business that offers similar (and often inferior, but not always) product at a much lower price.

It’s a bone of contention, especially for this small town guy who has seen Vancouver Island change from a series of small towns with quaint shops to a sprawl of big box stores and shopping centers.

One place the big box stores can’t compete, or at least don’t compete, is local search.   As a small entrepreneur serving a very focused region, you can easily out optimize the larger, even medium sized competitors.  To learn how to fold the big box stores, read my article on seven strategies to optimize for local search.  The why is a bigger question, one that I’ll answer below.

Simply put, a business reaches a point in it’s growth plan where it either has to seek business outside of a particular operating region to facilitate the growth plan or it must stop growing and be satisfied with the business it has.  If you choose to grow, you have to target other markets with your SEO campaign.  Nanaimo becomes Vancouver Island, Vancouver Island becomes BC, etc…

By strengthening your efforts and campaigns to target multiple regions, efforts aimed at smaller regions are diluted.

Let’s say your business previously had all of it’s business come from Nanaimo.  Recently, you’ve expanded into the Comox Valley but haven’t targeted that region with any marketing.   Your site shows up well for Nanaimo related searches, but nil for the Comox Valley.

You could just add the words “Comox” and “Courtenay” to your titles, and it could work, but each word you add takes value from those you already have.  You also need relevant links from the new operating region and relevant content to give you some market penetration.

The more regions you add, the more time you have to spend marketing them and the more competition you have.  This scales to the global level, where you’ll need a staff of marketers, seo specialists and web gurus working on your SEO full time.

I don’t have to spend as much time, for example, as a global blog like SEOmoz.  They’re a great company, with awesome articles.  They have an office and an editorial staff, they have tens of thousands of visitors and probably more links then I’ll ever have to my website.  They’ll not show up for SEO Nanaimo though, because it’s not worth the traffic to go through the effort.  Most big businesses, and even mid sized businesses with multiple operating regions are faced with the same.  To support growth, it’s just not feasible to target a single market.

And that’s where your advantage as a small, local entrepreneur comes into play.  By spending an hour or two a week on SEO you can watch your site soar above those of your competitors without the costly expense of an in house SEO team or outsourced marketing.

This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on June 7, 2009 at 4:24 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Marketing, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Google recently rolled out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions… read the complete article here

It’s true, folks.  I did a search using their suggested phrases.  “spice market review shrimp starter dessert” yields results, one of which had a 312 character snippet.  It should also be noted that Google pulls the snippet from the <meta name=”description”> tag.  If you don’t have one of those, it will use the first snippet of content it finds on your page.

Google also says:

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Sounds like they’re trying to push forward on semantic understanding.  And here I thought they’d given up.

Time will tell if either of these additions turn out to be particularly valuable.  It will mean a change in the way a site is optimized, as individuals try to increase relevance across a broader contextual understanding.  For relevance, I still like Wolfram’s odds of providing the best answers to my questions and queries.

This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on June 5, 2009 at 11:48 am, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Google, Search. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I want to use an example to explain why local search is important. I created a company, Acme Widgets Inc., that has an office in Nanaimo and an office in Courtenay. They each serve the surrounding areas, like the Comox Valley, and Ladysmith right through Lantzville.

Acme wants to have a website so customers can read about them and submit orders online. Most of their new business still comes from referrals so it’s important to show up when people type in their name, address or phone number.

Right, so, there’s things Acme can do. They can use their page titles to emphasize their company name first and follow it with their regions… something like this

Acme Widgets Inc. – Widgets to Nanaimo, Ladysmith and the Comox Valley.

The formula isn’t set in stone, I would recommend that Acme experiment with different combinations to see which work best.

Once a site is optimized, there’s  a certain amount of ongoing promotion that has to take place.  Depending on your business and targets, the costs may be free or they may be in the thousands of dollars.  It may take one person a few hours a week, or it may be an outsourced job.  If you’re just concerned with minimal, basic SEO have a read through some of the things I do when I’m starting an SEO campaign.

I have a Google account and I recommend that every business owner get one master account for their business.  It gives you access to Google Docs, gMail, Google Analytics, AdWords, AdSense and anything new they crank out.  You need one for a Google Maps Listing and I recommend that every business have one of those too.  If you’re serious and want all the tools in the Google toolkit, check out the Google Dashboard on Techcrunch.

I advertise in local directories.   Be wary of any costs or listing fees.  I don’t spend a cent until Ive done the research to see if it’s a good link and if I even need to buy a link to get to the top position.

I participate on the web.  I blog,  I forum (is the verb forumming?  foraging? I was foraging in the forum?).  I facebook and twitter.  I don’t linkedin, but I should.  Extreme enthusiasts might consider adding a YouTube channel, a digg profile, an eBay store and a yahoo! store.

You may only get to a few of these things, and you may not need to spend much time on SEO.  If you want some advice on your current SEO or have questions about local search, let me know.

This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on June 2, 2009 at 1:32 am, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Google, Marketing, Search, SEO. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.