Posts filed under 'Tips'

Getting There With Search

Six steps you can take to help search engines find and index your content

You’re trying to get your website noticed and search engines are an excellent channel for visibility. In this article, we’ll look at some basic things you can do to make sure your content is being indexed by search engines. The more of the items you can implement below, the more noticeable your site will be to the search engines. 

1. Check your “Robots.TXT” file
One little line of code in a simple txt file can be very costly if it’s blocking your site from search engines. A robots.txt file allows you to tell search engines to crawl or not crawl certain directories or files in your site.

For example, this simple line of code disallows all crawlers (a.k.a. robots):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To find your robots.txt file simply type in your domain followed by /robots.txt. For example, here is the robots.txt file for the W3C: www.w3.org/robots.txt. For more details on what can be in this file and how search engines treat it visit robotstxt.org.

2. Make sure your content is indexable
Although search engines have come a long way over the years in terms of indexing all kinds of content on the web, there are still some types of content that may not be fully indexed or not indexed at all. If you are seeing missing content when you look at the search engine’s cache of your page, you may want to check if the content is presented in one of the tough-to-index ways below.

This is also true for people using screen readers due to a disability. A screen reader “sees” the page much in the same way a search engine crawler does – by crawling content and deciphering the elements.

JavaScript
Some JavaScript is crawled by search engines today and more will likely be in the future, but JavaScript (including its related scriping technique AJAX) can still present an issue.  Because most content in JavaScript is usually not indexed, things like navigation, on-page apps, and any other content presented by using JavaScript may not be seen and therefore cannot contribute to the context of the page (or sometimes cannot be followed, in the case of links) for search engines.

Flash
With better indexing capabilities coming about recently, Flash sites are becoming more prevalent in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), although a site built entirely in Flash is still probably not the best idea if you care about search engine traffic.

Today search engines primarily attempt to index links and text from Flash files. While this is better than it used to be, 100 percent of content still may not be indexed depending on how your Flash site is created. Navigation through “pages” in a Flash file is all contained within a single swf file that lives on one URL, eliminating separate topical content for separate pages.  This can be problematic when you’re up against competitors with much more targeted topical and sub-topical content living on distinct URLs (with links to each of those specific URLs providing even more context).

To minimize indexing difficulties, try to use Flash in smaller pieces. Make sure each topical page of your site has its own unique URL first, then put Flash elements on each page if you like.  Beware though—the more of your content you put in Flash, the less content and context you may be providing to the search engines. 

Image Text
It’s rare to see the entire content of a page posted as a .jpg or other image these days, but it still happens. And when it does, a crawler goes through the code and just sees an image instead of seeing all of the pictures, content, and link text on the page. Search engines simply cannot read any textual content you present in an image, whether it is the entire content of the page or just titles or headers.  You will see the images displayed when you check the cached version of a page.  This is because it is displaying the actual image that is cached, not reading the text content within it.

3. Strenghten your link structure
Links to and from your pages are very important for the “findability” of your pages.  If a page has no links connecting it with any other indexed pages on the web, it may not be found by search engines, since they follow links to discover new content. 

Internal links
Make sure you have a sensible linking structure in place on your site that is crawlable, links to top level as well as deeper level pages, and links to content relevant to the page the links are on.

Crawlable links are links that can be seen by search engines, meaning they’re not in JavaScript or in unindexable links within a Flash file. Also link to different pages within your site, not just from the home page, but all pages. Deeper pages in a site tend to be tougher to find and index, since they are linked to less often, or from more obscure pages in a site. Try to include links to pages most relevant to the content of each page, to give the search engines better context, and to provide a good mix of deeper links. 

You can also include a sitemap page on the site (similarly named xml sitemap files are discussed later).  Provide the sitemap link from your home page and/or from a header or footer on all pages.

External links
If you provide worthwhile content, your site and the pages within it will attract links naturally.  These links from external sites help search engines find and classify your site, especially if your site is newly published. To kick-start your visibility,you can add your site to  trusted directories like The Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory.  If it is relevant, you can also add your site to online local listings pages like Yelp, Yahoo! Local or CitySearch. 

Promote your website in your advertising campaigns, add it to your business card, and provide any other means for visibility that you can. If people find your site interesting and useful they will link to it.

To see what your inlinks looks like, go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and type in your URL. Click on the Inlinks button.  Use the dropdowns to look at links to one page or the entire site, or to look at links from all pages, all pages except that subdomain, or all pages except that domain.

4. Create a  sitemap XML file
The major search engines we’re addressing here all support xml sitemap files. These sitemap files are different from the onsite sitemap pages previously described. They are xml files that contain a list of the URLs on your site along with a small amount of information about the URLs that is placed on your server and crawled by search engines. This allows you to tell search engines about your URLs, even if they haven’t crawled them naturally by following links on the Web.

Visit sitemaps.org for more information, or see Yahoo!, Google, and Bing’s support of sitemaps.

5. Verify your “nofollow” and “noindex” tags
Noindex and nofollow tags can be used to block search engines from crawling specific links or content. 

Noindex
The noindex meta tag tells search engines not to index a page.  It looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />

To check for noindex tags on any of your pages, right click on the page in the browser and choose “View Source”.  Search for noindex on the page.

For more information on the search engines’ support of noindex, see these Yahoo!, Google and Bing pages mentioning it.

Nofollow
Nofollow tags can be found in a robots meta tag at the page level, or within the <a> tag at the link level.

Nofollow at the page level tells search engine robots not to follow any of the links in the body of the page that the nofollow meta tag is on.  It looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Nofollow at the link level tells search engine robots not to follow that particular link that the nofollow attribute is applied to.  It looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>link text</a>

To check for nofollows on any page, you can look at the source code of the page by right clicking on the page and choosing “View Source.” Then do a search for the word nofollow in the source code.

For more information on nofollows, see this Wikipedia article, or see Yahoo!,  Google and Bing’s  support of nofollow.

6. Specify your site’s language
You can also help search engines by specifying what language your site is written in. This is a simple meta tag that looks like this:

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en”>

See all ISO codes at the Library of Congress site for more information.

To check for language meta tags on any page, you can look at the source code of the page by right clicking on the page and choosing “View Source.” Then do a search for the word language (or content-language) in the source code.

Still having problems?
If you’ve tried everything above and believe you still have indexing issues, browse the webmaster guidelines below for more information, troubleshooting, and contact information for the search engines. 

Search Engine Guidelines for webmasters

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Bing guidelines for successful indexing

For more on getting your site noticed, refer to Laura Lippay’s previous post “Is Your Site Invisible?”

— Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing

(Image by Kapungo via Flicker, CC 2.0)

Right on Target

Case Study: Affiliate marketer profits by fully leveraging the targeting tools of Sponsored Search

Self-proclaimed “retired computer geek” Don Tuttle is a man who’s always tried to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making money online. His current line of work, commonly known as affiliate marketing, involves using search advertising to send traffic to third-party companies, and when a sale is made, Tuttle gets a commission.

To do this, Tuttle uses all of the popular paid search providers, but he identifies Yahoo! Search Marketing as his favorite, primarily due to its powerful and more extensive targeting capabilities, and to the high quality of customer support. In a business where having access to key information about users—and then using it to reach the right prospects with the right message—is essential to making a profit, Tuttle shows that being bigger is not always better.

Using pay-per-click
In 2005, after a less-than-successful foray into selling items on eBay, Tuttle recognized a growing opportunity in the field of affiliate marketing, and decided to dive in. “I don’t own the products or the companies I promote; I’m more like a commissioned salesman,” he says. Tuttle keeps a close eye on his advertising expenses, to ensure that they don’t exceed the commissions he receives from the traffic that the ads generate. “I’m very bottom-line oriented,” he explains. “Cost-per-conversion is the metric I primarily use. And like a lot of people, I didn’t succeed at first, but once I got the hang of it, I’ve been very happy with pay-per-click advertising, and with Yahoo!.”

Tuttle uses all of the targeting options available to him in the Sponsored Search interface, but identifies geotargeting as the most valuable one to his account. “Yahoo!’s geo-targeting has enabled me to find areas that are hotbeds for what my ads offer, as well as those areas that don’t convert well,” he says. “Being able to stop my advertising in these low-performing areas has probably been the biggest factor in improving my ROI.” Tuttle explains that by picking each state and metro area independently, an advertiser can automatically get statistics on conversions by state and DMA, using the Yahoo! analytics tools.

The campaign scheduling (dayparting) feature has also proved useful to Tuttle’s business: “I’ve found that there are certain things that work better on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day, and once you figure that out it’s pretty consistent across all of the ad networks.”

Adding demographic targeting
Having covered the “where” and the “when” of the traffic he’s targeting, Tuttle also closely monitors the “who,” and makes adjustments to his bidding and ad copy accordingly. “One of the best features that Yahoo! has over Google is the fact that you can get demographic information from the account interface,” he says. “You can get age groups and the male/female ratios of the people searching on your keywords, and you just can’t get that on Google.” Simply by turning on the Demographic Reporting feature, Tuttle had additional options available to him in the Reporting section of the account to provide this transparency. When combined with the free analytics tools in his account, this data became much more valuable. “I was able to learn that although one of my sites was much more heavily trafficked by women, the male visitors actually converted better,” Tuttle continues. “Using this data, I’ve targeted the male audience more strongly by bidding higher for this traffic, and I improved my conversion ratio as a result.”

The Results
Tuttle praises Yahoo!’s excellent customer support: “My Yahoo! rep Justin Hill has been wonderful. I can spend over six figures a year with Google, and I still don’t have a rep. Justin creates campaigns, comes up with new ideas, and runs reports. The campaign results and incredible support have led me to triple Yahoo!’s share of my overall advertising budget.” With Hill’s help, Tuttle recently used the extensive targeting and demographic information to refine his campaigns, with outstanding results. “My expenses were getting out of hand before I did this,” he remembers. “But when I started making better use of geo-targeting, dayparting and demographic targeting, I was able to reduce my overall cost-peracquisition by 40 percent. Anything that improves the transparency of where my clicks are coming from, and what’s working and what isn’t, is pure gold.”

— The Team

4A’s Conference Round-Up

Trends and tips from the smartest minds in advertising

This week, your indefatigable Yahoo! Advertising correspondents went on a field trip to the 4A’s “Transformation 2010” conference in San Francisco. (Those 4A’s stand for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.) While there, we did old the meet and greet, tweeted, and posted to Facebook our take-aways from some the smartest minds in the advertising world. We even did a little live blogging and took some video, too. (Lookin’ good, Carol!)

For a round-up of some the most interesting sessions, switch over to the Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Optimize Your Way to a Cleaner Account

Keeping your list of blocked domains up-to-date

Some things are just plain messy. And unlike the savvy behind keeping previous W-2s neatly filed and probably the sanity behind saving—even electronically—old credit card statements for at least some time, there’s less to be said for clutter.

Desks strewn with random bits of paper and neon-colored post-it notes taped to every empty surface evidently work wonders for some. For others, it’s an impediment to productivity. Which might be why Spring cleaning has become an actual event for many.

Here at Yahoo!, we’re offering our own version of staying organized. Specifically as it relates to the list of blocked domains you’ve accrued within your account. As you know, we recommend using conversion data paired with the information within the recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR) to make sound decisions around which domains to block. And to help make sure that your list is as fresh, crisp and clean as possible, we’re happy to optimize those domains for you on a bi-monthly basis.

Optimize?

Yes, that’s our fancy little way of describing what one of our talented teams will do for you, at your request. That is, we’ll go through your list of blocked domains and highlight any that are no longer a part of our publisher network. Once you remove these, it will free up space, allowing you even more room to block those referring domains which don’t meet your conversion criteria.

Within a short time-frame, your account’s blocked domains list will be squeaky clean.
Which could possibly be as refreshing as purging old, indecipherable conference call notes, or getting rid of those crumpled Starbucks receipts that somehow accumulate at the bottom of your wallet.

Think of it as spring cleaning but offered year-round. To get started with a clean sweep, contact your Yahoo! account manager.

—Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Is Your Site Invisible?

Easy ways to determine if search engines can find your site

If search engines can’t find your site, it may as well be the Invisible Man. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing and others are often a primary source of traffic and determine your ranking. Unfortunately, publishing your files to the Internet does not guarantee that the search engines are going to find them. 

Search engines crawl the Web, indexing pages and following links to find more pages. That’s their job. Pages that are newly published can appear in a search engine’s index (and in search results) within minutes, but sometimes it takes hours or even days.

This article will help you to get an idea of whether the search engines are finding your site, and what they see. In the examples below we’ll look at Yahoo!, Google and Bing, the three search engines with the highest market share in the U.S.

How to tell if your pages are being found by search engines
To determine if your site is indeed being indexed, do this simple search in the search box on any of the search engines by putting “site:” before your URL. Specific instructions like this are called “operators.” By typing that before the URL, you’re using what’s known as the “site operator.”

Example: site:yoursite.com

Don’t leave any spaces in the query. It should look like this:

The results will bring back pages from that site only. If you do not see any results from a site:yoursite.com search, then the search engine is not finding your site. 

Google does not show duplicate pages in these results, but it does allow you to see what’s been filtered. In order to see all pages, including ones Google deems as duplicates, look for a link after your very last search result listing that says, repeat the search with the omitted results included.  Click on that link to see all pages that Google considers duplicates of the ones listed in the initial query results. 

Or simply add &filter=0 to the end of the URL in your browser address bar and hit enter.

If you don’t see the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link or do not see any changes when you add &filter=0 to your URL string, then you don’t have any previously filtered duplicate pages. This is a good thing because duplicate pages can split your in-link value among many landing pages instead of one, potentially hurting the rankings of your canonical landing page.

Is your content being crawled by search engines?
Search engines may find your page URLs when they crawl the Web following links, but they may not have the content of your pages indexed. To determine what search engines are actually indexing, you can click on the “cache” link on listings in search results.

If you’re looking for any page on your site–You can use the same site: operator referenced above.

If you’re looking for a specific page on your site–You can do a search for the page by entering the exact URL in the search box.

If you’re looking for specific content on your site—Enter the site: operator followed by an exact phrase in quotes in the search box (no spaces).

To check what each search engine has cached, click on the cache link under the result you’re interested in.  Here are screenshots of the cache link on Yahoo! (Google and Bing look pretty much the same).

When you click on the cached page, you will see the content that the search engine has actually indexed. Compare that to the page you see in your browser when you visit the page itself.  Do you see any content missing?

Note the content may have changed since the last time the search engine crawled your page. Search engines also sometimes choose not to index “noise” on a page such as advertisements. What is important to look for here is that the topical content of the page at the time the crawler visited was indeed indexed. If there is important content missing, there could be various reasons why.

Read the Search Engine Guidelines referenced below for more information, and stay tuned for the next SEO article where we’ll discuss steps you can take to make sure you’re doing everything you can to help the search engines index and crawl your content. 

Search engine guidelines for webmasters

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Bing guidelines for successful indexing
• Google Webmaster Guidelines

—Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing

(Image courtesy ‘J’, via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

New Yahoo! Mobile blog; making the Internet safer; digital marketing trends for 2010, and more

Yahoo! Mobile blog launches
If you read Paul Cushman’s excellent entry “Demystifying Mobile, Part I” on the Yahoo! Advertising blog yesterday, you’re probably interested in mobile marketing. Well now there’s a new Yahoo! blog just for you. The Yahoo! Mobile blog will cover all aspects of mobile marketing, including case studies, new Yahoo! mobile features and products, and industry trends. Check out the La Quinta case study and see how you, too can up your mobile marketing ROI.

Safer Internet day
Safety first, right? On February 9, people and organizations around the world—including Yahoo!—took a moment to recognize the importance of safety on the Web. Visit Yodel Anecdotal to learn more.

Digital marketing 2010 trend round-up
CMO.com’s hard working editors have put together a page of trend pieces on digital marketing for the coming year. Based on the Society of Digital Agencies’ recent report, “SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook,” CMO.com editors asked some of advertising’s heavy hitters to respond. You’ll find both the report and the responses illuminating. Not to be outdone, iMedia Connection’s Michael Sprouse offers his own round-up.

Creative spotlight: Super Bowl ads redux
It’s not only the biggest sports day of the year, it’s also the biggest day for ad agency creatives, the day when advertisers spend up to $3 million for 30 seconds of air time. There have been some real classics in the past. This year? Maybe not so much. But there has been controversy—you know what we’re talking about—and that is always interesting. The kids over at the free TV/film site, hulu.com, have been kind enough to put together a special page where you can review all of the ads from Sunday’s big game. Want to see the ads that didn’t make the cut? Check out Spike’s rejected ads page. Who really won the battle of the brands on Super Sunday? You can score it by the tweets.

— Michael Mattis

Yahoo! Network Distribution and Import Campaigns Webinar

Please join us Feb. 4, 2010 for this free and informative Sponsored Search webinar

We’re offering this free webinar for our Sponsored Search customers, covering two important features: Network Distribution and Import Campaigns.

The Network Distribution feature allows you to target marketing campaigns to the entire Yahoo! Network, including Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners. Learn how you can control where your ads appear, use reporting to help you optimize your settings, and adjust your bids, as well as how to set premiums based on the traffic most valuable to you.

The Import Campaigns feature allows you to import your Google AdWords campaign data into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Learn how the tool can help you to import your AdWords campaign data, so you can leverage the insights and know-how from your Google campaign data for your Yahoo! campaigns.

To enter the webinar on February 4, you will need the password you created when you registered.

When: Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010, 11 A.M., Pacific Time
Where: The Internet—go here to register
Why: Because it’s great stuff to know for improving your campaigns and results

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Selling the Super Bowl; digital ad budgets to increase; keeping it simple; promote your blog

Selling the Super Bowl
This Sunday is arguably the biggest sporting event of the year, Super Bowl XLIV. Advertisers, according to AdWeek, have shelled out nearly $3 million each for 30-second spots during the big game. “The game is the only significant TV showcase for commercials left in today’s media-fractured environment, and advertisers are frantically putting the final touches on their plays for the day,” writes Eleftheria Parpi. How are they are building buzz around their creative? Hint: the initials are S.M., and we don’t mean the naughty kind.

We’ve got good news and bad news
Remember those old good news/bad news jokes? (Like, the good news: the captain aboard a Viking ship doubles rations for the guys on the oars. The bad news: he wants to go water skiing.) Well, the good news for digital marketers is that two-thirds of marketing execs in a recent CMO.com/Society of Digital Agencies survey say they’ll up their digital budgets in the face of current economic conditions. The bad news? Those conditions still suck.

Keeping it simple
Savvy marketers know that people are suspicious of complexity—and they know that the way to get people to engage is to keep the message simple and straightforward. The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett shows how “cognitive fluency” can help you to get into people’s psyches because, in people’s minds, “easy = true.”

Tips for promoting corporate blogs
Last week, we took note of a recent TopRank survey that showed how blogging can enhance SEO. This week, TopRank blogger Thomas McMahon follows up by offering several useful tips for promoting your blog and keeping it alive. All common sense, but sometimes we all need to be reminded just what common sense is.

—Michael Mattis

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Quantifiable creative; blogging enhances SEO; search surges; kids more plugged in than ever; celebrating Guy Day, and more

Three simple steps to better creative
Let’s face it, a lot of agency creatives like to blather on about “inspiration” and the “creative process.” But, says iMedia Connection blogger, Robert Boman, (who is also Javelin’s Interactive Creative Director), “Marketing is a profession, not an art show. Your work’s got to be far more than just eye candy. It needs to be smart. It needs to be trackable.” He offers a handy, three-step process for creating measurable marketing.

Survey says: Blogging enhances SEO
Writing on TopRank’s Online Marketing blog, Lee Odden reveals the results of a TopRank survey that asked 326 marketing pros if they thought blogging had a positive effect on their SEO. Most did. In fact, more than 87 percent of respondents said blogging had “successfully increased measurable SEO objectives.” A common reason why some companies don’t blog or quit blogging? Resources.

Search usage jumps 50% in one year
According a new PC World report, Web search jumped a full 50% from 2008 to 2009. In fact, last year there were more than four billion searches each day. “We knew this was going to happen,” says Tribble Ad Agency blogger TheFounder, “and it’s going to get bigger and bigger for quite some time. Search has become the definition of marketing and advertising.” All true, but you heard it here first.

The 10 habits of highly effective CMOs
You’ve probably heard of the perennial self-help bestseller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” But what’s it take to be a top Chief Marketing Officer? Jim Stengel, the highly effective former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, offers 10 tips, for free.

Kids: Plugged in or couch potatoes?
A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that kids aged 8 to 18 are more plugged in now than ever, spending 7 ½ hours a day, or nearly 53 hours per week, with electronic media. How does that daily usage break down by media and minutes?

• TV: 270
• Music: 151
• Video games: 73
• Mobile phone chat: 33
• Texting: 90
• Computing (non school): 89

Creative Spotlight: Bye, Guy
Today’s Creative Spotlight is not about a piece of creative. It’s about a creative. Legendary ad man and Chiat/Day co-founder, Guy Day, who brought us such compelling creative as Apple’s infamous “1984″ Super Bowl spot, has died. He was nearly 80 years old. Hats off to one of advertising’s greats.

Here’s a clip of the original “1984″ ad. For those old enough to remember, it was just about the darndest ad anyone had ever seen on TV up to that point. Enjoy. And thanks, Guy.

(Logic-Creative image by RabiD Son, via Flickr, CC 2.0)

—Michael Mattis

Navigating Your Way to Better Quality

Using the ADR and blocked domains to your advantage

Back in the day, family road trips were incomplete without maps. Actual, paper maps. The kind that were supposed to fold neatly into a rectangle when not in use, though in most cases, probably ended up crumpled on the floorboard or dash of the sedan.

Luckily for most of us, technology took over, and instead of relying on a state atlas or old-fashioned city grid, we can now print out door-to-door driving directions online, or even fancier, rely on a GPS device. And though some probably still prefer the thrilling adventure of just hitting the open pavement with no specific destination in mind, most of us like to know where we’re going, and the fastest, most logical way to get there.

This is the idea behind our recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR.) By navigating to this spot in the account interface and selecting a date range, you’ll get a list of all of domains in our network that are driving traffic to your account. If you’ve installed Full Analytics, you can also access domain-specific conversion data, which is another bonus.

The concept behind the ADR is really one of transparency. We believe that rather than sharing a high-level list of partners in our network—which may or may not be sending traffic to your account—it makes much more sense to provide you with the actual list of domains that are contributing to your clicks. This way, you’ve got a clear view of where your ads are served, something that will aid you in your quest for tailoring the traffic mix at the account level.

Meaning?
Well, by poring over the ADR—and either our Full Analytics conversion data or your own third-party conversion stats—you can make informed decisions about which domains do or don’t meet your performance thresholds. This, in turn, will factor into your decisions relating to domain blocking, which is a great way to improve the overall performance of your account.

Say, for example, that you’d like to eliminate referring domains that are contributing more than 100 clicks and are converting at less than 0.05%. By reviewing the ADR combined with your conversion information, you can isolate any domains that meet that criteria and then block those using our blocked domains functionality. This essentially removes those domains that aren’t performing to your standards, which ultimately will benefit your traffic quality mix.

And unlike the sometimes illogically persistent and oftentimes monotonous tone of the voice-enabled GPS, our ADR will simply show you the stats and let you navigate from there.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

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