'Dang it, I could have sworn I saw an SEO business around here somewhere!'

About a month ago we received a letter from Google congratulating us on the number of times Google users found our business listing between July 1 and September 30, 2009.

They said ‘Because you’re so popular, we’re enclosing a window decal that shows customers you’re a “Favorite Place on Google”.’

I know of at least two other local web design companies who received the same letter and decal. Google concluded the letter with ‘Congratulations on your popularity on Google. We look forward to providing you with more and better ways to grow your business.’

Well, we’re not a favorite place on Google anymore, because Google has decided to exclude SEO and web design/development local listings from the web results (see Google Maps forum thread).

Before exclusion our local listing averaged:

• 894 impressions a month
• with 77 click-throughs

Since exclusion we’ve averaged:

• approx. 52 impressions a month
• with just one click-through

If Google felt it appropriate to congratulate us on how popular we are with their users, which indicates the local interest in our services, why are they now ‘intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries’?

An additional consequence of Google’s decision is that since helping businesses with their local business listings is one of the services we offer we can no longer use the ranking of our own local listing as an example of our capability and knowledge. In fact it’s possible that our potential customers may wonder whether we have a good understanding of how Google local listings work since we no longer appear in local searches.

Ultimately though, my main concern is that Google is arbitrarily filtering information with no convincing rational behind their decision. Do we really want to use Google Maps as our primary source of local business information if they can’t provide the same fair and balanced results that they supposedly do for their search product?

We’re excited to share a search engine ranking tool we’ve recently created and have just added to CCSEO.com.

This tool uses the search APIs from Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find the rank of a specified domain URL (website addresses) in the search results for a given search query (keyword/search term).

For example, if we enter the search term “seo” and the domain “wikipedia.org” the search results show that Wikipedia ranks first in each of the three search engines for the keyword “seo”. (The number of results checked is limited to 50 listings, owing to parameters set by the search engine APIs.)

We allowed for domain URLs both with and without the www prefix, it checks for both regardless of what is entered in the domain field. This functionality can alert you to whether any of the search engines have a website’s pages indexed with and without the prefix. In which case if it’s your website, you can take steps to rectify the matter.

Additionally, (if the website is listed for the search query you entered) the tool shows the complete URL (web page address) of the ranking page, and gives you a link to click through to the SERP (search engine results page) to see the listing live at that search engine. This gives you additional information about how the listing appears, and who the surrounding competitors are.

We welcome you to use this tool to help you research domain ranking for target search terms in your SEO strategy, and your competitors’.  We hope that you find the interface simple and usable.

If you have any feedback, thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment!

SERPs are ‘Search Engine Results Pages’ (the pages of search results you see after submitting your search query).

Understanding what kind of content is presented to you in the SERPs, and how it got there, can help you be a more shrewd and savvy searcher.

If you’re a business owner, with or without a website, getting to know what the SERPs have to offer gives you more ways to market your products and services, and maximize your web visibility.

A Google Results Page

At the end of this post is a large screenshot of a Google search results page with the various parts identified (click on the thumbnail on the left to see it now). It highlights the paid and organic listings, the shopping results and the universal search results, all of which I’m now going to describe in more detail.

Organic vs Paid Search Results

One of the first things you need to know about SERPs is that they usually offer at least two kinds of results, organic search results, and paid search results.

On the left of the SERP you will see the organic listings, which are given the majority of the page space. The term ‘organic’ is used to describe the non-paid search results that are ranked by Google’s calculation of their value and relevance to the search query you’ve entered. The owners of the organically listed websites have almost certainly spent time working on the quality of their content and optimizing their web pages for the search engines.

Paid search listings are placed at the top and right hand side of the page (or sometimes only on the right hand side of the page). These results are labeled ‘Sponsored Links’ and if placed above the organic search results are distinguished by a pastel backround. This is what is known, among other things, as ‘Pay-Per-Click’ advertising. The advertiser has to pay for every click through to their site via one of these paid search results.

So as a web user, when choosing what to click on, it’s important to bear in mind, that the organic results have earned their placement based upon their content. The sponsored listings have paid for their placement.

Universal Search & Google Base

Also, on the left, in the main body of the Google search results pages, you might see some other results from Google’s ‘Universal Search’. These are results Google offers if it’s pertinent to your search query.

For example if you are doing a search on a product, you’re likely to see shopping results at the top of the page listing the product and various prices. These listings come from Google’s ‘Product Search’ database. If you own an e-commerce website you can upload your products and related information, for free, to Google Base for the opportunity to have your product listings show up for related shopping searches.

Google’s Universal Search also includes, when relevant, video results, image results, news results, book results and more.

Local Search: Google’s Local Business Listings

If you are searching for a service and use a town or city name in your search, then Google will show a map and a list of 1-10 related business listings at the top of the search results page.

As of April 2009, even if you don’t use the town or city name, Google will try to identify your location and show you the local business listings if you type in a location-relevant search term such as ‘restaurants’ or ‘bicycle repair’.

If you’re wondering how Google knows where you are located, you can read more about it here – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-becomes-more-local.html

There are a couple of ways Google gathers content for these listings. They either retrieve the information from other web sources, or the business owners  set up a Google Account and enter their business information via the Local Business Center. This is one of many free services Google provides.

In this post we’ve touched on organic vs paid search, shopping results, universal search and local search and have pretty much covered all of the basics of the Google SERPs page. If you have anything to add or any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Example Google Search Results Page

Often we work with clients who wish to breathe new life into an existing website. They can do this by adding new content, new features, or by using search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize their current content.

When we evaluate an existing website, we try to consider and balance many aspects including usability, scalability, modern development standards, design, seo requirements, and cost.  Unfortunately, we often find that existing sites are not designed with scalability in mind, and are built and maintained with outmoded development practices, and more often than not with no consideration for SEO.

In a lot of cases, we conclude that the best and most sustainable route for these websites is to initially re-code them (and sometimes update the design).  There are always minor improvements and enhancements that can be made without a re-code, but it is often like using a bandaid to mask a problem where surgery is required.  Also, it often seems irresponsible to make changes and improvements to a website if there are underlying problems that haven’t and won’t be addressed without a rebuild.

Without a sufficiently sized, well engineered, and stable foundation, it will often be more time consuming and costlier (in the long run) for our client to continue to add to an existing website.  Naturally, it seems counterintuitive to some people to take their functioning website and recreate it, especially given the increased initial cost, but it is often the only reasonable route.  It saves money and frustration down the road, lays the proper foundation for SEO basics, and ensures that their website maintains it’s usability and functionality with growth.

Since this is a new blog about web visibility, I thought I would kick things off with a bit of basic information about the driving force of the SEO industry, the search engine.

The World Wide Web (www), or ‘the web’ as it’s more commonly referred to, consists of gazillions of interconnected computers called servers. Stored on these servers are squillions of web pages and files, the same way we store files on our own personal computers. The web pages and files for each website are stored in one or more folders (directories) on these servers.

Search engines work by sending out a robot (web crawler), an automated software program, that crawls the web collecting information. The robots crawl from web page to web page and from website to website by following links. They retrieve the content they crawl, the web pages and related files (image files, PDF files, Word documents etc.) which are then added to the search engine database (index). Search engine marketers commonly refer to this as ‘indexing’.

Each search engine has an algorithm, a set of rules by which it determines the value, validity and relevance of the content it has retrieved.

When a web user types in a search term (keyword) at that search engine, the content the search engine considers most pertinent to the search query, based upon its algorithm, will rank highest in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The search engine robots aren’t genius and can only do what they’ve been programmed to do. They’re also not human, and historically have not been able to do many of the things that humans can do, e.g. see images, see flash movies, interact with web pages that require the clicking of a button or the filling in of a form.

A website can be built in ways that can either promote or inhibit crawling by a search engine robot. If a robot can’t navigate a website easily, it can’t access all the content. In turn, this means that the search engine will not index the content. If the content isn’t in the search engine database, there is no way for a web user searching at that search engine to ever see those web pages come up in the search results.

Ideally, to promote crawling and indexing of all of a website’s content, the website should be built to web standards using search engine friendly coding. If that content is also optimized for the search engines by adding target search terms in the appropriate places, then the search engine robots will be able to identify & evaluate the website content and rank it for its target search terms (keywords). This will give your web pages a better chance of being seen by the web user searching for your topic, products or services at that search engine.

Knowing the basics of how search engines work is not only the beginning of achieving good web visibility, it is also important to properly approach website search engine optimization.

Thanks to Jeff Jones Illustration for the artwork :-)