Google makes us lazy?

We are getting a lot lazier, now that we have gotten used to Google providing the "correct" results on top of their SERP. so I am seeing a lot less of the page 2 drill-down effect. 

What this means is that it is no longer acceptable to appear on page one, the best placement is to be #1 on page 1. If you are #1 in Yahoo, you will get referrals, but...    

BTW - Kudos to MSN for highlighting search words in their cached pages. It makes it much easier to find the searched words, and with the date on the top of the page, it is much easier for SEOs to see exactly when a page was brought into the database. MSN has moved much closer to Google now with this move. But Yahoo has a long way to go, and does not put the date anywhere on the page to be seen, although they have been highlight keywords for a while now.

Stock Market Flu

All this talk about the flu causing the stock market to stumble is a croc, I fear.

After all, if the stock market is so fickle that a flu pandemic can cause it to go down, there are much bigger problems with the economy. I wonder if I could say to my boss that I have a bad case of the Stock Market Flu to get a day off work...

Conversion Optimizer Blues

I tried out the Google Conversion Optimizer, after reading that they would only show ads when there was a chance to convert somebody into a sale, but I shut it off in less that a month.

Why? Because the keyword bidding went crazy, so instead of a $0.35 average bid, it jumped to $1.40 with no discernible difference in the conversion rate or placement on the page...

In fact, the conversion rate dropped, but I let it ride hoping that this was a temporary glitch.

I know that Google is hungry for cash at the moment, but come on...

And there is no way to tell them what the problem is, so...

The Secret Word

There's a secret word that I have been using for many years now in all of the page titles that I have written. It does not seem to matter what precedes this word, as long as the word appears as the last word in the title text.

Remember that some visitors to your site only surf by looking at page titles, and they have the descriptions turned off.

So what is this magic word?

It is the word, "Sale" because anybody who clicks on that link has one thing in mind - they want to buy what you have to offer. Without this word, who knows what you want them to do? Do you want a lot of people to click for information? Or, do you want them to buy something?

I understand that the word is meaningless to a marketing person who understands that everything is for sale, but how do you communicate this fact to a surfer?

It is amazing to me how many times the word "sale" or "sales" appear in the strings that people use to find my pages, and it is even more amazing that many of my visitors do not include this word, but they will click on the link to a page that has this word, and from there, it is strictly a matter of getting them to convert...  

I just need to find...

I am impressed with the images on Windows Live and the cash-back perks that they offer me just to use their search engine, but one thing seems to escape their thoughts. I just need to find it and they cannot help me do that! Not on my desktop, and certainly not on the web!

It will be nice to see them opening some stores, but I am afraid that those stores will be very short-lived because Microsoft has lost all sight of why it is so important to help people find stuff... 

Misspellings in Adwords

Unfortunately, with the quality score, Google has raised the bids so much on misspelled words that it no longer makes sense to bid on these. Unless you don't mind spending $10 for an alternate spelling of a company's name.

I wish that I had a better answer, but if the misspelled word does not appear on the page for a visitor to see...

Misspellings...

The search engines used to look at the keywords META tag exclusively to see what keywords were included, and then they would base their  decision on what pages to put in the Top Ten. But that day is no more, so now it is crucial that a page includes the misspelled words visibly on the page for the end user to see.

The easiest way that I know of is to include a sentence somewhere on the page (and it can be below the fold) that talks about the various misspellings of the correct term. This can be a little bit tricky when there are a lot of ways to spell a word, particularly if it is a trade name that some rocket scientist spent a great deal of time inventing, but it can be done, and I always include the misspelled words in the keywords meta tag for extra measure. 

The key is to make it as natural a read as possible so your visitors do not get chased away by bad grammar or spelling errors...