Keyphrase Highlighting

One of the reasons we tend to focus on "organic" search engine optimization (SEO), is that the majority of traffic comes from them. Searchers tend to look at and click on the top results from both the paid and organic listings. However, after carefully evaluating we find that searchers who are truly interested in purchasing a product or service actually dig for information. In other words, they do not hurry while making buying decisions and perform a wide variety of searches before actually making a final buying decision.

Keyphrase Highlighting
You must have seen term highlighting in Search Engine Result Pages but do you really know why it is present. Whenever a person types a keyphrase into a search box, the query words (keyphrase) are highlighted at various places in the result pages.

Organic listings:
HTML title tags
Meta-tag description or page snippet
URL

Search engine ads:
Ad titles
Ad descriptions
Display URL

The reason that query words are highlighted in these various places is to help searchers feel more confident that they are being delivered to the most relevant search results. This keyword emphasis in search results is commonly referred to as term highlighting.

But how does term highlighting affect organic SEO? Contrary to some popular beliefs, the goal of SEO is not to rank but to convert search engine traffic into sales. So we need to encourage searchers to click on the link to our website. To achieve this goal, SEOs need to carefully analyze how their listings appear in organic search results and the corresponding click-through rates (CTRs).

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Yahoo's Panama Update

Yahoo's new Panama search advertising ranking system has been both appreciated and criticized by advertisers. Appreciated, because the new system is streamlined, easy to use and offers much more control over campaign management. Criticized, because the previously relatively simple system of the more you bid the higher the placement has been replaced with a more complex formula which includes factors like ad "quality," brand recognition and other things that have reduced the transparency of the system for many advertisers.

Although bids are and will remain a factor in the new ad ranking algorithm, Yahoo is also following Google and Microsoft in analyzing other factors to determine placement of ads in sponsored results. For example, the algorithm analyzes both ad copy and landing page copy, in the same way as web pages are analyzed to determine their rankings in organic search results.

At this point, more emphasis is being placed on ad copy than landing page copy, but landing page quality will become more important in the algorithm over time. Yahoo is also encouraging advertisers to use the "excluded keyword" feature to more precisely target ads.

As a searcher, this means that using precise, specific queries will give you much better sponsor results than in the past. Use words with narrow meanings in your queries rather than general search terms for better search results.

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Google Bombs?

According to Wikipedia “A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.”

How does it work?
A webmaster decides that a web site should have a top Google ranking for a special search term. The webmaster links to the web site with that search term and asks all of his friends to also link to that web site with that special search term. His friends also link to the site and they ask their other friends to link with that search term to the web site, and so on.

Now that many different sites link to the web site with that search term, Google thinks that the web site must be very relevant for that search term. The most famous Google bomb is the miserable failure Google bomb. For several months, the official home page of George Bush was the first result on Google for the search term "miserable failure".

What did Google do about the Google bomb problem?
"These pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. [...]
So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."
That means that most Google bombs shouldn't work anymore.

It’s effect on your website?
Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google. But if the links to your web site have an unnatural linking pattern then Google won't count these links. If you get many links with exactly the same anchor text then these links might be interpreted as a Google bombing attempt. So it becomes very important that you get links to your the right inbound web site.

For more information on strategic link building, please log onto www.oliveglobal.co.uk

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