The psychology of plural terms.

I have noticed that plural search terms typically convert at a higher percentage than singular terms. The reason for this is so simple that it surprises me that few people notice this trend in search.

When somebody searches for the singular "widget" it's usually because they already own one, so they have a mental image of a singular widget, and they are searching for information about it.


But when somebody searches for the plural "widgets" it's because they don't own one, and they are curious about what widgets are available, and their mental image is not confined by something they already own (or have owned in the past).


This mental image in a searchers mind is what makes the difference in many cases as to whether or not they will convert. If you sell widgets, there is a greater chance of convincing somebody to convert than if they are merely looking for information about a widget that they already own. Therefore, it is important to target the plural search terms in both natural SEO and PPC campaigns.

Arbitrage PPC landing pages.

These are killing the very industry that spawned them, since they merely aggregate the PPC links that appear in the SERPs into a second landing page. A searcher clicks on a PPC link, only to find another page of PPC links - sometimes disguised as a "search" engine. This creates a seemingly endless loop of PPC links for a visitor, without providing the information sought in the original search term. The result is to train searchers to stop clicking on the PPC links, and click only on the natural results in hopes of finding relevant material.

Even ask.com is currently buying PPC links on Google, and then taking visitors to ask.com, where they presumably will click on one of the PPC links there.

Aardvark
Use the New Ask.com to find it.
Save time. Search better.
www.ask.com

All of this "arbitrage" only provides a temporary monetary advantage to the creators of these landing pages, since searchers will quickly get frustrated and tire of clicking on the PPC links that lead nowhere.

The worst case I've seen is putting a search from MSN on a personalized Google home page. There were extra links that made no sense, yet when I performed the very same search on MSN, these links did not appear. So, I clicked on one of the links in the Google home page, and it took me to an arbitrage page. When I tried to hit the back button and leave, a bunch of pop-ups started appearing telling me to download a file to search for spyware on my PC.

Yeah, right... And while I may not be foolish enough to fall for that one, I'm sure that a lot of people with less knowledge of the Internet would panic and download the file (allowing spyware to be installed).

The danger of Paid Inclusion...

People use search to find something to buy, but sometimes, they use search just to find information.

Yahoo has a "Paid Inclusion" feature, which lets sites appear in the natural results for a fee. This is great for Flash-only sites that have no hope of getting up in the natural SERPs, but it also allows sites that are just trying to sell things to get higher up in Yahoo's natural SERPs.

So, for some competitive terms, ALL of the SERPs on page one of Yahoo are either PPC ads or Paid Inclusion ads. This might be OK if I want to buy something, but if I just want information, there is a strong likelihood that the page one SERPs in Yahoo will be filled with irrelevant ads, and do not contain the information that I am looking for.

This will cause me to switch to a different search engine. And if I find what I am looking for there, it will bias me towards using that search engine in the future - whether I am searching for information OR buying.

And this is exactly what is happening in the industry. I use Yahoo every day as a portal for information and for email, but when I want to search for something I switch over to Google because I am biased to that search engine. Every time I try Yahoo Search for information, I am disappointed because their SERPs are NOT relevant to my search term, and I invariably switch back to using Google. So when it's time for me to buy something, I stay with Google's SERPs.

This is the real danger of using Paid Inclusion to get into the natural SERPs. It may bring a momentary gain in traffic, but as more ads creep up in the natural SERPs, more people will switch to a different search engine. And, it's one of the reasons why Yahoo fails in its attempts to better "monetize" its search engine.

Why are PPC conversion rates lower?

When somebody clicks on a natural listing, they typically find the same search phrase on the landing page. However, PPC landing pages may not contain the search phrase, so people scan the page but fail to find their search term and quickly leave without converting.

Furthermore, the lack of relevant content on PPC landing pages trains a searcher to avoid clicking on those links. This is a direct result of the search engines allowing anybody to set up an account and start creating landing pages that are often of very dubious quality. There is a lot of focus on the ad itself, but seemingly little is done to the landing page so that it matches the ad.

The lack of a "quality" landing page has caused the search engines to begin evaluating "quality" and charge higher PPC rates for "low-quality" landing pages. That does not mean that this will help improve the conversion rates for PPC ads. It only means that they will evaluate the page on their own terms and decide whether it deserves its bidding spot, or should be charged a higher rate to stay there.

It is up to the designer to ensure that the search phrase appears on the page, so the searcher will stay and ultimately convert. Ideally, the search phrase should be in a headline or bullet so it is easily found when scanning the page, which is what most searchers do anyway. Searchers scan the web via a search engine, looking for information. When they find what they are searching for, there is a chance that they will stay and read the content on the page, and then there is a chance to convince them to convert.

It is important to think of a PPC ad as though it were a natural link, and follow through with what the searcher finds on the landing page of the ad so they end up converting. Otherwise, PPC conversion rates will always remain much lower than natural SERPs.

More on Yahoo's CEO

Yahoo falls about a billion short of Wall Streets expectations in revenues, so their CEO, in a statement to the shareholders the other day, said:

"Moving forward, we are going to be laser-focused on these three core things:

1. Close the gap in monetization of search;
2. Widen our lead in graphical advertising; and
3. Seize the opportunity in social media, video, and mobile."

"Close the gap in monetization of search"??? Hmmm... Yahoo already has more PPC ads appearing in their SERPs than Google.

For a search I just ran, Yahoo has 4 PPC ads at the top, 8 on the side, and 2 at the bottom = 14 total PPC ads. Plus, there is a link to Yahoo Shopping right under the 4 PPC ads at the top with 4 more PPC ads, so I have to scroll down just to see the first natural search result in a screen resolution of 800x600.

This means that Yahoo is displaying a total of 18 PPC ads.The same search at Google has 3 at the top, 8 on the side, and none at the bottom = 11 total PPC ads.

What's worse, is that many of the so-called "partner" site that display Yahoo's ads are clicking fraudulently, as can be read in this forum thread: webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search_marketing_overture_ppc/

So, is this how the CEO of Yahoo plans to close the gap in "monetization of search"? More ads, and more questionable partners? How about a focus on search instead? Which is helping people FIND what they are looking for. NOT helping people find a bunch of irrelevant ads.

Myths of SEO : revisit-after

meta name="revisit-after" content="2 days">

Why anybody would think that this META tag would actually control search engine activity is beyond me. It's a myth! But it seems to be a very common myth that is dragged up again and again. I was even foolish enough to fall for this myth and tried it on a page many, many years ago before I was even close to knowing anything about SEO. Never mind that this META tag was only used by a very small, local search engine in British Columbia (Vancouver Webpages searchBC), and only for a very limited time many years ago. Let me dispel this myth with some common sense:

Think about it for a moment - you are asking the search engine to keep track of the last time it visited the page, and to not visit the page again until the time has elapsed. Even if the search engine could create a data field where it could enter the number of days for each page on the web, why would it let webmasters decide when it's a good time to come back?

The search engine has billions of pages to update, so don't you think it has enough trouble setting a schedule and keeping to it? And, if it the robot is ready to come back and update the page, why would you want to prevent it by setting some arbitrary date in the future?

And, why would anybody expect that a search engine would set a preference and come back every day, when the page never actually gets updated? Webmasters could put this revisit tag on a page, and then forget about the page for years. The content would never change, so why should the search engine come back everyday to fetch the page?

But then again, if your mind is already made up that this obsolete META tag will help your web page rise up in the SERPs - don't let me confuse you with the facts. You don't have to take my word for it - but you can read more about it:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/revisit-after.asp

Order IS important

The order of statements in the robots.txt file is important, especially if you want to be certain that your commands are obeyed. If you want to control a robot from a specific search engine, while letting all of the other robots in, you should put that section first.

The following example will keep out MSNbot, while letting all of the other robots in:

User-agent: MSNbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow:

However, the two commands placed in the opposite order may allow MSNbot in to freely index your entire site, since it may read in only the first statement and see that it is allowed in, exit the file, and never even read the second statement.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

User-agent: MSNbot
Disallow: /

This is especially true if it appears much later in the robots.txt file, after a lot of other commands to other robots. Do not expect the robots to read in a very long file, parse through it looking only for their specific instructions, decide which instructions to use, and then follow those instructions. That's like asking somebody else to select options from a menu when you're having your first dinner at a sushi restaurant - you may not like what you end up getting...

At the moment, Googlebot does not seem to have this problem, and you can experiment with the order inside their Webmaster Tools interface. However, that does not show how other robots will react to variations in order. Nor does it guarantee that Googlebot's programming behavior will never change.

So, if you really want to control a robot, put its instructions first, before any global User-agent (*) commands.

robots 2.0

The robot protocols are based on concepts created in the 1990's, and it is clearly time for an update since so many search engines have created their own versions of the robots.txt and META robots tag elements. Combine this with all of the pathetically ridiculous lawsuits being brought against the search engines for indexing and caching pages, and it's obvious that an update to the robot protocols is long overdue.

What specific protocols need to be discussed and agreed upon? Let me start a list here:

1. The robot.txt file should be a required data file, and if it is not present, a search engine robot should leave the site without crawling, indexing, or caching any page(s) in the site.

2. rel=nofollow (some engines support this element in an href tag, while others do not).

3. wildcards (*, ?) in the Disallow command of the robots.txt file (some engines support wildcards, while others do not).

4. NOODP (some engines support this, while others do not - Yahoo uses its own directory listing).

I will add to this list later...

Belgium strikes at Google again...

> rant>

This Belgian court ruling against Google is getting more ridiculous every day, since now the "plaintiff" is upset that Google did not post the court's judgement higher up on their home page, and people had to scroll down to read it. So, now they are upset because they don't think enough people read the ruling?

Give me a break! Google was ordered to put the ruling up there for only 5 days (which they did), but nothing said that they had to alter the page so drastically that it would prevent people from using their service, which it would have if they had put the ruling on top of their home page and forced people to scroll down to search for something.

Besides, 5 days is merely a blip in the life of a human being. Futhermore, Belgium is just not that big... How many Google users can there possibly be in Belgium? What are those lunatics in Belgium thinking? Do they really believe that by posting the judgement higher up on the page that more readers would subcribe to their dying newspaper?

Get over it! Newspapers are history! Nobody cares about newsprint anymore! I'm an old dude, but even I can see that the end of the newspaper is in sight. No amount of winning court cases is going to stop progress. Who wants to get ink all over their hands reading old news that happened yesterday?

The world is changing rapidly, and the sooner that these insane lawsuits stop, the better off we'll all be...

< /rant>