Video: How to Reach Physicians Online
Each profession has different way that it uses the internet to research information. Physicians are not only looking for different information than a lawyer, the ways in which they use the web is different as well.
Google did a nice 15 minute webinar & video on reaching physicians. If you are in the medicinal marketing field, wish to put a message in front of doctors, or just want to see some good research, the video is worth you time.
Meta Tags Are Not Dead
Once again the discussion has come up that meta tags are dead and most seo is boondoggle.
Do not believe the hype!
Meta tags live.
Title tags are incredibly important.
While the effectiveness of metas might be a decent discussion for those who follow SEO closely and engage in SEO regularly, it is very misleading for those new to the arena.
I recently talked to a company who has a PR6 website (and I’m using Page Rank just to show it’s an authority domain, not to use PR for ranking purposes) who had the exact same title, meta description, and meta keywords on every page of their site. Naturally, they didn’t rank for anything outside of their company name.
They thought it didn’t matter that all the metas & title tags were the same, because the SEO community has been saying metas are dead for a while now.
I talked to another company who was about to remove all their metas & title tags because metas no longer matter.
What do you think would have happened to their rankings?
Unique title tags are one of the most important things you can have on your site.
Period. End of story. Let me repeat, if you have the same title tag on all your pages, it’s the same as naming every single chapter, headline, and page the exact same in a book and expecting a reader to be able to find information. In this case, the reader is a search engine spider – but the analogy stands.
What about meta description tags?
The meta description tag when talking ranking factors is of small importance. However, that does not mean it’s useless. If a snippet is not shown on a search page, the meta description is. Think of your meta description as the body of your ad copy. The body is what someone reads and decides to click on your natural rankings to arrive at your website.
Therefore, a good meta description tag can bring in more traffic.
If you subscribe to the theory that the sites that get the clicks from a search result can move up in the rankings (i.e. natural SERP CTR), then a good meta description can also raise your rankings because it gathers more clicks (not everyone agrees with this – and I’m not going to debate this one on either side at the moment).
Come on, the meta keyword tag – does that really matter?
On Google, not really. On Yahoo, its a small factor – but great for misspellings.
When you get into the other meta tags, such as author, they are useless.
Most CMS systems automatically create meta keyword tags; hence, it’s little work, little rewards and while you shouldn’t spend you time writing meta keywords tags. However, if the system generates an OK list (a few keywords, not thousands) then its not worth your time adding or removing this metatag from your system.
The SEO Discussion Should Be: What a good SEO company should do for you
Most of these discussions arise because SEO companies are still writing meta tags and submitting links to engines. Submitting links to search engines is a waste of time – completely agreed.
However – if all the pages of a site have the same title tag – then the SEO company should be rewriting title tags.
If all the description tags are the same – again – rewrite them.
Every time an article or SEO blog post comes out that says you don’t need meta tags – you are misleading those who are just getting started with SEO.
<updated>What I’ve found after talking with many companies about SEO is that they all think title tags and metas are the same. While the advanced SEO community is saying metas and not titles, most businesses lump metas and titles together, pretty much all the tags that end up in the <head> of a website.</updated>
While a large part of SEO is link building – having links does not mean much if you don’t have the on page factors correct.
Therefore, first fix your on page factors – then worry about link building.
Meta tags are an on page factor. They matter.
Not all meta tags are dead.
For those new to SEO:
Here’s some information to help you out:
Got the basics from those two pages? Now, here are some good resources to read:
Nice Video on Google Product Search (Similar to Google Base)
If you want to learn more about how to get your products into Google Base and the Google product search engine, this is a nice intro video to learn more about those two Google services.
Google Plus Box Coming to Financial Queries
The Google Plus box has received a lot of attention lately in local queries. The new expanded results for financial data will be rolling out soon for financial queries.
Right now, if one searches for a stock symbol, it’s pretty straightforward that one is looking for financial data, so Google shows the information directly in the search result.
However, for ambiguous queries where one might be looking for financial data, or might be looking for something different, Google is adding the Plus Box to the results.
Here’s a screenshot of the plus box for ‘General Electric’:
Google has done a nice job of allowing for more information to be found in a search result without cluttering the initial results.
My question is: Is adding all of this additional information directly into the search results lowering the amount of traffic Google sends to websites?
When Google launched, their goal was for someone to spend as few seconds as possible on their search results. If they delivered the perfect search result, then one could go from a result to a webpage in moments.
Now, with additional information being added to the search page itself, does this keep more users just on the search page, and not going to additional places for information in some instances?
Yahoo Developer Network Launches Code Search
Yahoo just announced that you can now search the Yahoo Developer Network code base using Krugle.
I found this interesting as I just did a quick writeup on my favorite code search engines in which someone from Krugle responded a couple of times.
Google Maps Now Showing Subway Icons
Google maps has recently started showing subway stops on maps. It seems much more prominent to see these icons on the directions page than on the general maps page.
However, if you were traveling to Chicago, this map would be quite confusing.
First off, several of those metros don’t connect. While the pins mark the stations, Chicago has several different trains that run downtown (named ‘the el’) and one often has to switch trains (and know where to transfer) to find a destination.
The second aspect is that mapping software doesn’t seem to take under ground vs above ground into determining directions. I will admit that the above is probably a trick query, it’s for Intelligentsia Coffee’s Pedway location (the pedway is an underground walkway that connects several parts of downtown Chicago. There’s no way to drive to this location, but you’d never know it from the map’s directions.
Overall, it’s probably a precursor of things to come. It would be very useful to be able to use a search engine’s mapping site to find public transportation directions. New York and Chicago can be difficult cities to navigate by car. It’s often faster and easier (once one understands the systems) to use public transportation. However, easy access to that information can sometimes be difficult.
Transitchicago.com is useful for finding door to door public transportation directions. However, if you’re trying to find a restaurant, read reviews, see what’s close, and then want directions to that restaurant, a search engine is the more logical choice to find that information.
Hopefully, we can look forward to finding public transportation directions on maps.google.com sometime in the near future. It would be an extremely useful tool.
Favorite Code Search Engines
Being only slightly technical, I like to use code search engines to find examples that are being implemented or help files without the clutter of non-relevant sites.
Here are my favorite code search engines:
http://www.allthecode.com – This one is good for java and some more technical code. It’s not great for finding example code on webpages.
http://www.google.com/codesearch – This is one of my favorites for finding onpage code.
http://www.krugle.com – Allows you to search for code by specific language. Sometimes I don’t find what I’m looking for, especially when it’s onpage.
http://www.koders.com – This one seems to be the most complete as far as finding information. However, sometimes it can be clunky to use as the UI isn’t always intuitive.
Google adds Maps to Main Search Results
Google has often included vertical search results within it’s main results. Often these are from Google Base or Google Local. Google has recently added a new twist on this feature and started showing map results when the search is an explicit business name.
If you want to check to see if a map comes up for your business, the first thing is to do an explicit search of ‘Your Business Name’ and ‘Your City’. If you don’t see a map in the results, there seem to be two different answers. The first is that your business is not listed in Google Local (more on how to be listed below). The second is that there are many locations and Google isn’t quite sure which results to display. Results for Wal-mart, Target, Starbucks did not bring up a map in Google Search.
Let’s first look at the three types of results Google may show on a local query.
Ads are sponsored listings through Google AdWords.
Local results are from Google Local or Google Base.
Organic results are from the natural listings.
Now, let’s take a more in depth look at the possible inventory.
When you see a result like this in the ‘local ad space’ from above, this is a prompt to do a search on Google Base. Listings can be either hand submitted or feed submitted to Google Base.
When you see results with many addresses in them, Google is pulling these listings from Google Local. One can get into Google local by submitting a business directly (requires a pin number to be mailed to you, and then verification. Often takes 4-8 weeks for the entire process to be completed.) or by submitting a feed.
This is the brand new result that Google is now showing. If your business is not in Google Local, it appears that a map will not show for your business. To ensure your business will show up for these results, you need to submit your business to Google Local (or use a service, discussed below).
This is a local.google.com search result. By searching through Google Local, one can determine if your business is in their index. What is interesting about Google local is that a submission may not show up exactly as you submitted it to Google. Basically, Google looks at all the sources it has for a particular business, does some algorithm magic, and then displays what it thinks are the proper results.
In most cases, this works fairly well. However, if you move, change your business phone number, or any information, often the new information will not be shown because in it’s ranking formula, your new information looks incorrect as there is so much other information that is telling Google it’s still the old information.
How does one get their business into Google Local?
There are a few ways. The first is to submit to the Google Business Center. This requires you to first submit your information. Then, Google will email you a pin number (takes 4-6 weeks). Then you must input your pin number into the account your created. Finally, when Google re-compiles their local index, your business will be listed.
The second way is to submit to Google Base. You can login with your Google account and create a listing all about your business. In about 6 weeks, that information will be submitted to Google Local. Again, once the index is recompiled, then your business will be listed.
The last way is to use a Business Distribution Service. Such a service will take your business information and submit it to many local search properties (such as Yahoo Local, Superpages, Judy’s Book, etc). The leader in business data distribution is
RegisterLocal. There, you can create a profile of your business, track all kinds of results (such as phone calls, map views, etc), and even use it for a marketing landing page so that you can see the effectiveness of internet marketing for your business.
MSN Ignoring Robots.txt Files
Is MSN ignoring robots.txt files?
Here’s a screenshot from the MSN search for ‘Marissa Meyer’:
Here’s a screenshot of Google.ca’s robots.txt file:
Seems there’s a discrepancy between Google’s robots.txt file disallowing search results to be indexed and MSN having indexed the Google file: www.google.ca/search?q=marissa+meyer+google.
Might be time to start checking MSN results to make sure certain files aren’t being indexed.
Ask Jeeves Final Video and Future Outlook
Killing Jeeves might have been one of the most understated viral marketing efforts in quite some time. The SEM community is not known for giving in to viral marketing efforts and sending links, press, and traffic towards these efforts. However, Ask managed to pull it off for several consecutive months.
By announcing the death of an icon months in advance of the actual undertaking, Ask garnered more press from both the SEM community and from main stream media than it had in the previous year (or more). Their query share did not change significantly, however, there community awareness did.
The culmination of this effort was a video and final farewell party at SES in New York. The party centered around a Star Wars Han Solo encased in carbonite theme (pictures on the Ask Blog here).
Ask has a smart marketing department, and the entire death and new releases seemed to be well planned as they didn’t stop at the death of Jeeves. Shortly after his death, Ask has tried to capitalize on the heightened awareness of their product by introducing:
- Maps
- Encyclopedia
- Kids
- Desktop
- Ask Netherlands
- Ask France
- Ask Italy
His death was only a few weeks ago – that’s quite a plethora of offerings in a short time span. While Ask might currently have a small query share, they are the player to watch this year. In order for Ask to really capitalize on their new branding, the time todo so is right now.
If you’re going to watch someone attempt to grab query share from Google this year, it’s going to be Ask vs MSN. Google will maintain the lead, Yahoo will continue to ride in second place with a respectable number, but the dog fight is going to be Ask and MSN fighting for every additional query and user they can recruit to their properties.
It should be a fun few months to watch these two maneuver around the web and the additional offerings they bring to users in their recruiting efforts.
Goodbye to Jeeves – The Final Video:
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