April 13,
2005
In
This Issue:
1. 'Be Careful With My Content'
2. In the News - Yahoo updates, Become.com arrives
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Page titles
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
'Be Careful With My Content'
We appreciate Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines because
they help people find our web sites. They're the middle man. The
searcher visits Google, tells it what he's looking for, and Google
introduces that user to your web site. At that point, Google is
out of the picture. The searcher is yours, at least as long as
he's satisfied with your web site.
But Google is starting to get out of the "middle man" business.
Like Ask Jeeves and MSN Search, Google is going between playing
traffic cop and taking on the role your web site is supposed to
play -- information provider. It's no longer a "search engine";
instead, for some queries, it's become an "answer engine."
On the surface, it's a nice feature to add and very user-friendly.
Need to know who
discovered radium? Google has the answer. Google
knows how
many moons Jupiter has,
and just for laughs, it also knows how
much wood could a woodchuck chuck.
These are all harmless queries, but as a web site owner -- especially
one who constantly hears people like me talking about the need
to share knowledge and information on your web site -- you might
be less than happy when Google takes that information off your
web site and presents it in this "answers" format that
no longer requires searchers to visit your site. That's not Google's
stated intent with this new service, but it's not hard to imagine
this causing a problem with some owners of information-heavy web
sites. It's also worth noting that there's a project in development
at the University of Washington called KnowItAll which is designed
to do exactly what I've described here -- extract information off
web sites for searchers.
In the end, let's hope Google and others will be careful with
our content. In one sense, having your site shown as the answer
source
will be good PR -- but losing traffic is bad business.
UW KnowItAll project
_________________
In The News
Yahoo announces new index
Here's one that slipped by while I was on vacation, but is worth
mentioning now. Just about two weeks ago, Yahoo announced publicly
that it would be updating its index. In and of itself, that's news
because SEs don't typically shout "Hey! Changes are about
to happen!" But what matters most is, of course, the new index
and new SERPS. I'll take a little more in-depth look at that aspect
next week. For now, if you're inclined to pay attention to your
own site's rankings, have a look at how you're doing on Yahoo and
if you discover anything interesting about your rankings, your
Yahoo referred traffic, etc., drop me a line.
Become.com Launches
This is a new shopping search engine, but it launches with a
unique approach -- the focus is on information, not products.
Shopping
search sites such as Shopping.com or MySimon.com take your
query and give back a list of products and/or places to buy products.
Become.com instead typically feeds back a list of informational
pages such as product reviews, comparison information, and
such.
Become.com
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
Meta-tag optimization tips
April 11, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Know more about your e-mail subscribers
April 11, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Increasingly, companies are going back to their e-mail list members
to learn more about them.
Blogs, Boards, and Posts: Capturing Consumer Buzz Online
April 07, 2005 - Search Engine Watch
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
I'm a new subscriber to the newsletter and need some help with
my web site. What are the rules on using the title tag for
search engine optimization? When I'm searching on Google, I see
some
pages with title tags that have long lists of keywords, and
other pages that just have a short phrase or a couple words. Is
one
method better than the other? How long is too long?
Ken
Hi Ken --
You asked "what are the rules" and I'd reply first by
saying there are really only guidelines. As you've said, different
pages can rank well with different amounts of text and keywords
stuffed into the page <title> element. In general, you're
limited to about 60-80 characters; anything beyond that will be
ignored. Whether or not you stuff keywords into the <title> element
or not is up to you, but I'd suggest you make sure whatever you
put there matches the actual text content of the page.
In other words, if you have a page on your site that talks about
two or three different products or services you offer, the title
element should reflect each of those. I might suggest a better
idea in that case -- create individual pages for each of those
products or services. And then you can tailor the <title> element
of each page just for the specific product or service.
In addition to search engine concerns, you also want to take
your users into account when you write page titles. We did an article
on this last summer which is still appropriate and should be
helpful: Writing
Page <title>s
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Back to work for me. Hope business is treating you well these
days!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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