Search

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Will SEO spell the end of headline pun-ishment?

Not everyone agrees, but I’ve always loved newspaper headlines that employ the art of the pun.

Not every headline writer should try their hand at this technique. A special skill-set is required to pull off a really dynamite pun. Most headline puns are stretches, ill-conceived or repetitive. (Many travel writers have worn out their welcome with headlines like Czech It Out and Going Dutch. But a good pun headline is a delight and a definite enticement to read further.

It’s a shame that search engine optimization is killing the pun.

I’m not one of those who believes that SEO is destroying good writing. Lazy practitioners of SEO may load keywords into paragraphs with such wild abandon that they become unreadable. But good SEO technique should actually make headlines and lead paragraphs better, since they’ll help readers focus on the article’s core content.

But puns just don’t help articles rise to the top of search results. An article on SEO techniques for journalists from eConsultancy dished up this example:

Poole Council replaced their town centre Christmas tree with a green cone that plays music and flashes inbuilt lights. Naturally, almost every newspaper covered this story with the headline ‘Elf and Safety.’ However, I heard the story on the radio and then Google News’d it at work. I searched for ‘Christmas tree health and safety,” so ended up reading one of the few articles that didn’t make that joke in its headline. (The Telegraph ran with ‘Poole axes real Christmas tree for safer fake one because of health and safety.’ There’s a paper that gets it.)

Therein lies the problem. With a paper newspaper, you flip through all the pages and glance at all the headlines. Online, you search for stories that interest you. The headline you see while turning pages isn’t one you’d ever think to inform your search when exploring Google News.

There are ways around the problem. One answer to a LinkedIn question asking how to retain puns and still meet SEO requirements suggested putting the pun in the headline but the more descriptive headline in the title tag.

Not everyone appreciates puns in headlines. “Clarity and ease of understanding should be the aim of all headline writers, whatever the medium they’re destined for,” wrote one LinkedIn member answering the pun headline. And David Higgerson, head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror Regionals, insists that, “Far from killing headline writing, the Internet provides a way to tweak a skill to reach a new audience.”

But how many headlines do you remember from 35 years ago? That’s how long ago it was that I worked for the (now-defunct) Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle, where Steve Springer was the sports editor. (Steve went on to cover the Lakers for the Los Angeles Times; he’s also written several sports books.) Steve was a master of the pun headline. One day, he planned a large color photo on the front page of the sports section featuring colorful yacht sails that were photographed at a regatta in nearby Oxnard. The regatta happened to be held on election day. Steve’s headline that has stuck in my mind for three and a half decades?

Heavy boater turnout

And if that’s not enough, here are some classics I uncovered while doing some searching for this post:

A British Airways flight attendant was suspended for stealing a muffin that a passenger left uneaten on his tray. The Sun‘s headline:

Much ado about muffin at BA

The New York Post printed this headline over a movie review:

Iron Man Steels the Screen—Sure Hit is Weld Done

The Sun—known for its puns—drafted this headline with an unheralded football team from Caledonia beat the Scottish titans, the Celtics:

Super Calley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious

The Detroit News ran a story about a no-smoking ban taking effect at the stadium where the baseball Tigers play:

Tigers: No butts in stadium seats

A newsmagazine (the author of the post the recounted the headline couldn’t remember if it was Time or Newsweek reviewed a movie called “Switching Channels,” a poor remake of the classic Cary Grant/Rosiland Russell film, “His Girl Friday” (itself a remake of “The Front Page”):

Weakened Update

No less an institution that The New York Times has gotten into the act, as with its obituary of the artist, Salvador Dali:

So long, Dali, it’s been surreal

A food review from some forgotten publication declared:

What a Friend We Have in Cheeses

When a volunteer working at a bingo hall was the victim of an assault, a newspaper reported:

Bingo hall worker B-10 and robbed

And the Chicago Sun-Times was just one of the newspapers that couldn’t resist a pun when the fast-food chain, Wendy’s, suffered a PR nightmare with the discovery of a severed finger in a cup of chili:

Finger in Chili Not Getting Any Easier to Digest

Perhaps the headline pun isn’t all that long-lived a tradition. Perhaps it’s not as clear and concise as a statement of fact. But it’s creative, it’s fun and it sticks with you. As newspapers continue their migration online and adopt SEO techniques, I’ll miss seeing these journalistic gems.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Google forces the issue: Social media is no longer optional

My friend Steve Crescenzo’s latest post on IABC’s Communication World blog is a straightforward social media 101 treatise. Steve cautions communicators to develop a strategy before launching into social media: “Slow down,” Steve writes. “Back up. Be a communicator, not a Social Media Evangelist. Some Social Media will makes sense for your organization; many others will not.”

Like Steve, I’m an advocate of strategizing your organization’s use of social media. But whether or not social media is right for your organization is no longer a question. As of this past Monday, December 7, your company has no choice but to establish a social media presence in channels like Twitter and Facebook that you might, strategically speaking, be otherwise inclined to forgo.

We have Google to thank for removing the ability to make a choice.

As of Monday, Google began incorporating real-time updates into its search engine results pages (SERPs). Within seconds of posting, tweets, Facebook status updates, blog posts, and updates from news sources will be indexed by Google and made available for searches. This change has been anticipated ever since Google and Twitter announced the relationship, but it’s unlikely that most organizations have considered the implications or made adjustments to their SEO efforts.

Companies that have delayed or rejected social media nevertheless invest resources in search engine optimization (SEO). After all, we function in an era of what one writer called “survival of the optimized.” With luck, nobody reading this blog needs to be convinced of the importance of search.

Now, with real-time updates mingling with search results from static pages, if your organization doesn’t have a presence, you’ll be crowded out of the first page of results by those who do.

Using the example Google provided, I searched “Obama.” The first result was “News results for Obama,” linking to thousands of current news items. But it’s the “Latest results for Obama” that’s new—a box that updates in real time with the latest posts from real-time sources. Other results linked to Wikipedia and to President Obama’s MySpace and Facebook pages.

All of which pushes other results that once would have made the first page onto deeper pages. There’s widespread understanding that most people never click beyond that first page.

According to Sam Tilston, online marketing director for Zoombits, a UK-based Internet mail order company, “For a company to control its message on Google it´s important to have a presence on all elements which may feed into the search results page.”

If you accept Tilston’s premise, that means you no longer have the option of creating content for Facebook and Twitter. And whether you’re new to these services or have a long-established presence, you now need to consider seeding your updates with those same keywords that drive your existing SEO efforts.

As I’ve noted before, SEO is now a core PR skill.

Okay, I admit, maybe declaring that you have no choice is extreme. Of course you can opt to stay out of these channels. If you do, though, prepare to have your competition kick your ass.

None of which means that you shouldn’t be strategic about how you use these channels. But there’s no longer much question about whether you should. Google has forced the issue. Thus, contrary to Steve’s conclusion, you should be a social media evangelist. It has become part-and-parcel of your job as a communicator.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Must everything be optimized for search?

Search Engine Optimization—SEO—is critical. Your content won’t influence anything if people can’t find it.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to ask: Does absolutely every nugget of online content need to be optimized for search?

I just finished delivering the morning keynote at a healthcare conference focusing on social media. During the Q&A, I was asked about the deleterious affect involvement in social media has on all the efforts of the marketing staff to ensure their content is well optimized.

I sat down after my talk, fired up my laptop, and checked Twitter to find a link to a WebProNews piece by Chris Crum titled, “Social Media Will Not Replace Search.” The piece digs into some Nielsen research. Crum says, “Your friends may not have all the answers you seek. Furthermore, if you are asking people you don’t know, why would you trust them any more than search results?”

A couple days ago, I read a SearchEngineWatch post by SEO PR’s Greg Jarboe, who dismissed the Social Media News Release (SMNR) because Google News doesn’t index them. My answer to Greg: Are cars a failure because they don’t fly? Flying is not something a car was ever designed to do, just as SEO was never a goal of the SMNR. While HubSpot’s research showed that distributed SMNRs don’t get indexed to the degree that traditional releases do, the goal of the SMNR is increased coverage by reporters and bloggers who will find the release either because they have been personally directed to it or they found the link in the traditional release or on the company’s website.

(Incidentally, my disagreement with Greg in the post’s comments has led to a new friendship. Disagreements don’t need to be confrontational or disagreeable.)

Search is important, but not everyone online is searching all the time. People don’t need to find the communities in which they already participate or the blogs they already read. If you create a widget that bloggers can embed in their own blogs to share with their readers, the widget itself produces no SEO benefits for your organization at all. Yet it creates visibility for your organization among readers of a blog who you want to reach.

Believe me, I’m not minimizing the importance of search. But how well content can be optimized, or whether it can be optmized at all, is not the only criteria for determining whether the content has value.

Friday, August 21, 2009

For Bing, slow and steady may win the race

Type “san francisco crime” into Google and Google returns over 32 million results. There are pages from SFgov.org that lead to SFPD crime maps, news results, interactive sites, wikipedia listings, blogs, crime watch information, victims pages and more. Lots more. Google does exactly what it’s supposed to do: It returns these 32 million-plus pages in an order based on placement of keywords and the relevance provided by inbound links.

Still, finding an overview of the rate of crime in San Francisco can take some time as you pick through these results.

Enter the same query on Wolfram Alpha, and you don’t find links to any pages. Instead, you find real usable data. At a glance, you learn that in 2007, San Francisco experienced 5570 crimes per 100,000 people and 40,870 crimes during the year. It breaks down violent crime and property crime rates. A chart shows displays a precipitous decline in crimes per 100,000 people over a 10-year history.

In other words, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t point you to pages that might answer your question. Wolfram Alpha answers your question. It’s not entirely fair to categorize Wolfram Alpha as a search engine, at least in the classical sense.

But Wolfram Alpha’s capabilities are about to become part of a search engine, and it won’t be Google.

TechCrunch and Fast Company are reporting that Microsoft has closed a deal with the Wolfram Alpha team that will lead to the presentation of its “fact calculations” in Bing’s results. There’s no word yet on how those results would look, since (as the screen grab of the San Francisco Crime results below demonstrates) they don’t look anything like a normal search engine’s results. There has also been no announcement detailing when Wolfram Alpha results will start appearing on Bing’s SERPs.

But there’s no denying that the move is nicely consistent with Microsoft’s advertising claim that Bing is more of a “decision engine” than a search engine. Real data can certainly help you make a decision faster than a collection of links.

While Google is reportedly trying to come up with its own Wolfram Alpha-like capabilities, Steven Wolfram spent years developing his engine and Google isn’t likely to be able to roll anything out soon. In the meantime, Bing will have one more feature that makes it a compelling search resource.

A lot of people have written off Bing, noting that most of those who are using it migrated from Yahoo and other second-tier search engines; Google’s numbers have remained unaffected. And a lot of people who tried Bing wound up going back to Google, many admitting it was just force of habit.

But Microsoft, which is continually tweaking Bing and adding features, appears to be in this for the long haul and may be perfectly happy with incremental growth as people gradually realize they can get results Google just doesn’t offer. (A number of people have already defaulted to Bing for video searches, for example, based on the far superior presentation of results.)

Bing bashers may have been too quick to dismiss Microsoft’s product.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Your homepage is your homepage

These things are true:

• If your website domain isn’t instantly intuitive, people will go to a search engine to find you
• If people are looking for companies that do what your company does, they will go to a search engine to find you
• As people conduct searches about your organization, they’ll find what has risen to the top, whether it’s positive or negative
• With increasing regularity, people visit destinations other than standard websites when trying to learn about an organization

I get all that. And yet I am increasingly irritated when I hear someone utter this nonsense:

Google is your new homepage.

This phrase produces more than 8,500 results in a Google search, mostly blog posts exhorting companies to embrace this belief. Yes, search in general and Google in particular are vitally important. But your homepage is your homepage.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, let’s remember that a homepage is defined as the opening page of a web site. Your index file, not Google, is the opening page to your web site. But this is a bigger issue than just a formal definition.

While the era of the destination website may be over, the corporate website is far from dead. The notion suggests that destination website no longer dominate the customer’s attention online. They once did, mainly because there wasn’t much else online to see. Now, with social networking and online video dominating people’s attention, the importance of the destination website has diminished.

That only means traditional websites are now part of a bigger mix of options online, not that their usefulness has vanished.

The 2009 Trust Barometer from Edelman reiterates that a company’s own website is one of the most credible source of information a company can provide about itself, beating business blogs, social networking sites or advertising. Only corporate communications—such as press releases, white papers and emails—ranked higher, and only by a two percentage points. And while searches of Google News and Yahoo News ranked higher, searches of the core Google search engine didn’t even make the list. At the very top of the list you won’t find any new media at all, but rather the staid and traditional industry analyst report, reinforcing the high levels of trust people place in third-party experts.

Certainly, consumers may glean information that doesn’t help your company’s cause when searching Google. In fact, according to one study, search engines are the most common way consumers find opinions about products, brands and services. But if they’re looking for what you have to say, they’ll still click through to your website, and most often the top search result will connect consumers to your homepage.

Your website is also the home of the static content that still serves a purpose. The bio of your CEO, shareholder information, details of your corporate social responsibility efforts, archives of your news releases (your authoritative statements of record), job listings—all these represent details people need.

And search engine optimization, which has become a core corporate activity as the importance fo search continues to grow, is still about enabling discovery of your content on your site. As this Google-as-home-page notion gains currency, I fear people will spend less resources on the maintenance of their websites—an odd dilemma, since one SEO fundamental is to continuously update your website and infuse it with new content.

Still, according to a study just released today, web content managemente has fallen as an intrinsic component of organizations’ communication efforts. While social networking is part of web-based communications for about 72% of organizations, web content management is an activity among only about 53%. That’s particularly odd given that the study found SEO is an activity at nearly 70% of organizations. What’s more, web content management is declining as a skill companies look for when making a PR hire.

That is, more organizations are optimizing their sites for search than are managing those sites in order to ensure that the sites offer value to those who find them, despite the fact that corporate websites are among the most credible communication a company can produce.

That’s a huge disconnect.

SEO, along with social media engagement, are critical, but let’s not lose sight of the basics as we embrace new media. SEO is a critical skill and companies must do it well. But your homepage is still your homepage.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

RSS workaround for Google News

With no announcement I can find, Google has removed the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of Google News searches. Instead, at the bottom of each results page, there are four “Stay up to date on these results” options, none of which accommodate RSS—even their own Google Reader.

There has been some chatter lately about the death of RSS, but it has been greatly exaggerated. Most of those proclaiming RSS’s demise don’t consider the many uses to which it is put. I also don’t find Twitter to be a satisfactory alternative. I’m aware of only those links I see in the stream when I happen to be paying attention. I can search but will find only those links somebody has thought to post, not everything that matches my interests.

I panicked a bit when I saw Google had removed the subscription option. Would the subscriptions already in my reader (FeedDemon) still capture the latest news items? To my relief, they did. So I copied the URL to one of those feeds, then substituted the keywords for new search terms. I plugged the revised URL into my browser and an RSS feed appeared.

Here’s the syntax:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=KEYWORD&output=rss

Just replace the KEYWORD placeholder with your search term. For multiple words, separate them with + symbols, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS&output=rss

And to get an exact phrase, add %22 before and after your search terms, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=%22MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS%22&output=rss

Go ahead and try them—even with the placeholder words in the examples above, Google’s producing results (at least, as of this morning).

Even easier, though, is to start using Bing for your news searches. Bing doesn’t produce as many results but those it does produce are highly relevant. But Microsoft offers the one-click RSS subscription option that Google has abandoned. Bing also lets you select subcategories, as shown here on a search I conducted for “public relations,” while Google only lets you narrow your search by time (last hour, last day, last week, etc.).

I’m probably going to start using Bing’s news search more often because of this. I’m skeptical of those who dismiss Bing based on the fact that Google hasn’t lost any market share since its launch, growing isntead by taking share from other search engines like Yahoo. Changes in habits are gradual and if Microsoft continues to offer features that make its product more appealing, a slow migration could conceivably occur. After all, there was a time when everyone thought AltaVista couldn’t be toppled, when Friendster dominated social networking and Real had the dominant media player.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Savaging Scoble

I’m feeling pretty bad for Robert Scoble.

Last weekend, Robert released a series of video brain dumps that explained why he thinks “Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google‘s butt in four years.” Since then, he’s been the subject of some scathing critiques that not only point out the technological flaws in his argument but do so in an unnecessarily personal way.

• Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand used 4,000 words to argue that Robert’s wrong: “Want to be like Robert…and keep equating SEO with spam? Then fuck off.”
• At SEOMoz, Randy Fishkin headlined his piece, “I used to respect Robert Scoble’s opinion…”
• Wired’s Adario Strange wrote, “While we always suspected Scoble’s too-quick adoption and evangelism of [Fill In The Blank] Web 2.0 technology spoke to an irrational exuberance unsupported by logic and insight, this video serves as final confirmation.”
• Stowe Boyd says Scoble is imploding, suggesting “Robert, it’s maybe time to go back to evangelizing blogging for some large slow-moving enterprise, I think.”

There’s more. Even Robert himself has listed the criticisms and his mistakes.

 

Robert’s key mistake was asserting that human-created directories were synonymous with search. Critics are also complaining about his lack of understanding of a “social graph.” Mostly, though, they’re chiding him for daring to talk tech that is over his head and impugning his credibility because he did. Strange invoked the old quote, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Sullivan chortles at Robert’s assertion that current search technology doesn’t search video, claiming that the narrative about the video is all you really need to find it: “Want to see the Lazy Sunday video? Oh, look—I found it number one on Google without Google needing to analyze the words inside the video.”

So Robert had the chutzpah to express an opinion and back it up with confused facts and misunderstanding of the technology. Okay, it’s not unfair to point out the mistakes (although the personal attacks accompanying these observations strike me as way, way out of line). If the critics can get past their holier-than-thou “I caught you erring” crusade, they might see a kernel of substance in Robert’s videos: With the web expanding both in volume and content types, Google’s search engine just isn’t adequate any more.

Everyone pretty much agrees—and research supports—that most people don’t go past the first page of Google results. And as search engine optimizers push their content to the top, my keyword search often doesn’t reveal what I’m looking for on that first page. It’s not unusual for a search to produce thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of results. (A search on “Robert Scoble” and “search” generated 1.2 million pages, and only the last one of those on the first page related to this issue—and it was a criticism.)

I’ve suggested for some time that the increased use of consumer tagging and microformats could lead to improved search results. I tend to get better information searching del.icio.us and Technorati than I do at Google. Not as comprehensive, to be sure, but better and more targeted to what I’m looking for. And as for Google’s preeminence in the search space, does anybody remember AltaVista and HotBot? These were the undisputed leaders until upstart Google came along. Who’s to say somebody is working on something somewhere that will topple Google? (And if they are, I’ll bet they’re incorporating tags and social networks into their algorithms.)

So Robert, in his enthusiasm, made some factual mistakes. Fine. Who doesn’t, from time to time? More importantly, he kick-started a discussion that needs to be had about the future of search. While admitting his errors, Robert stands by this, nothing (among other things):

1. Google is getting noisier and isn’t improving as fast as we’d like it. So, anyone who has an idea of how search is going to improve will get listened to. I think this is why Powerset and Spock got so much hype.
2. A lot of people have discovered social networks and services in the past six months. Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, not to mention Upcoming, Yelp, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. And we’re just starting to learn about how those are potentially going to change our life and the services we expect. So, anyone who can see a new pattern in how these will be used will get paid attention to.

I’m on your side, Robert. I never read or watched you for your technical acumen, anyway (which is still a damned sight better than mine). The value you bring to the web is in your recognition of trends and your enthusiasm for what works. Don’t let the eye-rolling of the sanctimony set get you down. I, at least, will keep paying attention.