Search Marketing Sage

After getting a late start this morning, I’m up and running with the live blogging at SMX West! This morning’s session features Rangan Majumder, Principal Group Program Manager, of Bing and Jack Menzel, Product Management Director, Search at Google, who focused on how search history and geography affect personalized search results in their respective search engines.

To further improve search results, the search engines are consistently releasing new updates and features to help searchers get the most out of their searches.  Staying on trend, Bing has just announced the beta release of Linked Pages.

In a nutshell, Linked Pages was created in order to improve the relevancy of people search results served up by the Bing algorithm. Bing describes this new feature as a way for you to “make a good impression in search results.”

For some people with unique names, for instance, Sarah Lokitis, it may be pretty easy to see which results mean my friend Sarah Lokitis. If someone were to do a search on a more popular name such as, Amanda Chaney, there are a quite a few other people out there with the same name, including a surgeon, actress, and a felon. If Sarah were to do a search on my name, this new feature would be helpful to her since she only has one friend on Facebook with the name Amanda Chaney.

Search engine optimization for images is commonly overlooked by many businesses and organizations

Search Engine Optimization for Images: Learn how to optimize images on your site.

trying to optimize their websites. For SEO in general, it is always important to keep in mind that you should not only be optimizing for the search engines, but you should also be optimizing for the user’s experience. Read more to discover 10 ways that you can optimize images for users and search engines.

Changes in site architecture and Search Engine Algorithms had a decimating effect on our client’s rankings for its over 600 store locations.

The Problems

Search Engines can’t fill out a store locator box.  Google-bot can’t type a zip code.  So even though users can easily use these kind of interfaces to find their nearest store location, a search engine can not do that.

As a result, a directory of store locations had to be developed as a path that Search Engines can use to find the store pages.  This was effective until one day in May.  The directory structure could only be accessed from one link on the site, deep in the site map page.  When the Google May Day update hit, the directory structure had all of the store locations 4 clicks away from the home page.  Ever since the May Day update you really need to try to have your content within 2 clicks of your Home Page.

The client also used JavaScript to dynamically pull the addresses, phone numbers and store names from a database and then put that content in JavaScript on the store location pages.  Search Engines can’t really read JavaScript content.  So if a Search Engine somehow did bother to index all the way down to the store location page level (which they didn’t) their wasn’t any readable content with regard to the location of the stores.

Next up is The Current State of Personalized Search moderated by Danny Sullivan with speakers Jack Menzel, Product Management Director – Google Search, and Stefan Weitz, Director, Bing. Personalized search isn’t just a Google thing. Bing does personalization, too. This session looks at how results are being personalized on both engines and what marketers need to consider when all their users see something different. They tackle comments from Eli Parisers keynote, as well.