15 Jul 09 Automation follow up…

Ok, in my last post, I wrote about how I was looking to automate some aspects of SEO, which led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about how I was falling into a black hat trap.  Of course I disagreed with him, because he was wrong, however on closer consideration, I think that he might possibly have had a point.

There is a lot of criticism about black hat techniques from many people within the SEO community, and with good reason. The traditional definition of black hat is the use of dodgy techniques such as cloaking and low quality link building, or going against the spirit of the search engine guidelines to achieve high rankings.

Bollocks.

Black hat is doing anything that your competitors haven’t thought of, and doing it well.  Some of the things that people like Eli at Blue Hat SEO do simply defy belief when compared to the white hat techniques that are seen day to day on a client campaign.  I’m a big fan of the black hat in the same way as I’m a big fan of Derren Brown.  I love understanding the techniques, but I don’t necessarily practice them.

Anyway, back to the discussion I had.  My colleague maintained that as automation was a big element of many black hat techniques, the automation of an SEO report was also black hat. In a manner of speaking.

I’m still working on the automation, and I certainly don’t accept an accusation that it is unethical - especially with the uses I have in mind.  This is 2009, and there is more to SEO than link building and recommending a small change to the meta tags of a page.  There is a whole social world that underpins the structure of the modern WWW, and the more time one is able to spend leveraging that, the better the results achieved will ultimately be.

Tags: search engine optimisation, seo

14 May 09 And after all, you’re my Wonder Wheel…

You could never accuse Google of being innovators.  but what you can applaud them for is the ability of their engineers to develop existing ideas and bring them to the masses.  Like Apple, they seem to have a great way of taking something that is already there and making it more user friendly and appealing.  From the time when the original Google.com search engine launched and did away with every trick that existing search companies utilised to keep you on the page, they have been dedicated to bringing users and content closer together.

The latest shiny toy that Google have “invented” is the fantastically named Wonder Wheel for those who haven’t seen it yet, you access it via the new “show options” link at the top of the search results, and it looks like this:

Essentially, its a nice Ajax implementation that fits in with the standard Google design aesthetic of less is more, and allows users to explore concepts related to their original search.  It is almost the same as the interface that Quintura uses - although rather than producing a tag cloud, Google produces a nice little spider chart.  FYI, since about 3 people have ever visited Quintura, it looks like this:

What I like about this is that while it keeps people on the search engine for longer, it makes it much more straightforward to refine the search. and even encourages people to look into different areas - after all, how many times have you been to Wikipedia to check a quick “fact” before finding yourself diverted into a vortex of articles about everything related to the main subject before emerging blinking a week later, none the wiser about what you were originally looking for.

The impact that I see coming from Wonderwall wonder wheel is a better quality of user coming through to the website.  My theory behind this is that if a user has refined their search, they are more likely to be satisfied with the results that they get, and less likely to bounce out.  So, the question is, how do you check if a user has visited from search results refined via Wonder Wheel?

Like this:

Any visitor to the website who has used wonder wheel to refine their search will come complete with a referrer string that includes tbs=ww:[somenumber]&, which means that you can compare the bounce rates that they have.

The only problem with testing this at the moment is that very few people outside the hallowed halls of SEO & Online Marketing are aware of the function, and since it is very new, it is pretty hard to get a decent sample.  Having said that, I’ll be keeping an eye on the traffic to a couple of websites with high numbers of natural search visitors so that I can copmpare the bounce rate for visitors who used Wonder Wheel, and those who did not.

I’ll post back with the results in a couple of weeks

Tags: Google, search engine optimisation, seo