over the past three years, Google Labs had been toying with a feature they call Google Suggest. you might have even seen it in action live in the past. i know i caught Google testing it on at least one occasion in the past year. Google Suggest is a feature wherein the Google search box field will offer up suggestions via a dropdown of possible keywords based on what you are entering. the suggestions also come with the Google estimated results values listed right inline with the terms.

very effective tool from a usability standpoint. also, it would seem, effective from an SEO standpoint in that it can help provide long-tail keyword suggestions.

the flipside is that long-tail, geo-specific and misspelled keywords might become less effective if people who use Google end up utilizing the suggest feature's recommendations and not fully typing in what might otherwise have been a solid long-tail term.

time will tell how much, if at all, this feature will effect the SEO world.

here's a screenshot of it in action.

Google has started explicitly informing end-users of how their search habits and geographic locations can/will influence the search results pages of various terms.

now, Google has been doing this for awhile for users that log into their Google user account and search while logged in, but this is the first time where Google has publicly informed the users that their search habits are directly influencing results.

i feel as though this has been going on for some time in limited fashion but now it's "out in the open" so to speak and definitely showing different results. you are able to clear the caching and show what the "normal" results would have been but my gut tells me this will just become more and more standard.

here's what it looks like in action...




and here's what Google says about it...

it would appear that Yahoo! is starting to algorithmically include Google-like Sitelinks to their natural search listings in their search results pages.

a Google Sitelink is a link to a deeper page within a site that Google considers to be important or highly used. so if you have a few main links coming off your home page that lead to other pages within your site (and you have a PageRank of 5 or better) chances are that Google will pick out links that it considers important and provide these additional Sitelinks to your search listing for the benefit of the end-users.

just do a search in Google for Nike and notice the additional links listed beneath the actual search result listing.

anywho... it would appear that Yahoo! is starting to do the same thing. they have offered a deep-linking element on their natural results called Quick Links which are only made available to people using their Search Submit Pro (SSP) paid inclusion program.

but these links are different. they are a smattering of links located below the listing description without the traditional Quick Links identifier. nothing wrong with being a copy cat.

you can see this in action by visiting Yahoo! and doing a search for "shoes" for example.

post script... it would appear that Yahoo! is doing this selectively as a search for shoes, as of right now (july 25th), is not showing the sitelinks. i would venture to guess that they are testing this only at this point.

the Google AdWords Keyword Tool now shows keyword volume in its result sets along with relative competitive nature of the keywords. this is a very nice addition to this tool and can help all of you keyword researchers in the paid or natural search field.

here's a screenshot...

Google makes a declaration of improved Flash object indexing. this is great news from an SEO vantage point of course. Googlebot can "officially" (who knows how long they actually have been able to) read text embedded in Flash objects.

time to start re-creating your Flash objects to include some text.

read more here:
Google Webmaster Central Blog Post Regarding Improved Flash Indexing

i have the pleasure of working with some of the largest retailer and publisher brands in the US. but on occasion i have the opportunity to work on something a little different. i don't know if this has ever really been covered on the blogosphere (i haven't checked), but i thought i'd write a post regarding non-profit (or not-for-profit) organizations and search engine optimization.

as a website whose core is not to "sell" anything, in reality "sales" and "conversions" are every bit as important for an NPO website as they are on any retailer website. driving traffic to NPO and trying to convert the visitors to make a donation is the name of the game. very similar to a retailer driving traffic to their site and hoping that visitors will buy their products.

what makes an NPO unique within the world of search engine optimization?

the fact that they raise money for a cause, not for financial gain's sake, and the fact that many people can relate to goodwill causes.

so what?

these ideals are what make NPO's a "natural" for gaining quality, relevant inbound links as well as gaining the attention of viewer's merely by making users aware of their organization.

i can try all i want to get people to link to a retailer site and the success rate is painfully low. but, i can target the right websites and request a link back to an NPO and the success rate is much higher.

in addition, most if not all NPO's have third-party affiliations of some kind, who are more than happy to link to the NPO site. these affiliations can be in the form of corporate sponsors, politicians, government agencies, celebrities, etc. a large pool of possible high-quality inbound links. and for no cost.

wow, aren't all us website owners jealous now? (i am)

but seriously, the pool of resources available to an NPO is just endless. retailers could only hope to have this kind of influence over inbound links (even if they paid for them).

but the opportunity/advantage doesn't stop with links, it can also manifest itself in an NPO's ability to drive traffic to their site by increasing awareness on the web.

what NPO's understand all too well is the idea that more people would donate to various causes if they were aware of their existence.

for an NPO to fund a documentary or any sort of traditional media tactic (TV, print, radio) costs a lot of money but an NPO can run press releases on a regular basis and distribute them over the web for low cost. via syndication an NPO can release a tremendous amount of awareness-type information to the masses for very low cost.

in addition, the creation and distribution of video is much cheaper now than it ever has been. the opportunities for NPO's to disseminate their video assets and increase awareness is great.

also, just like retailers who get in new product every year or season, medical breathroughs and environmental discoveries happen on a regular basis. these are the opportunities for NPO's to "spread the word" via the web.

in short, non-profits should take heed and realize the vast potential that SEO can hold within their organization and its long-term effect on fund raising.

wow, Google is now allowing site-owners to submit an XML sitemap feed to help index all of their site's video content.

very cool.

this is a great supplement to the optimizing video for natural search post i ran in the past.

now you can provide some meta data around each video file on your site (a title and a description).

this is a major step forward for those with websites whose video content is not indexed or optimized for natural search at all.

i wrote in the past about Google offering excellent low or no cost website tools for the small to medium-sized business website. they have also offered an excellent site analysis feature called Google Webmaster Tools which gives you detailed insight into linking information, crawler errors, xml sitemap feeds and a view to how Google "sees" your site.

well as of today, Google Webmaster Tools has made itself even better...

there is a new "content analysis" feature that gives you insight into: title tag issues (duplicate titles and/or too short of titles for example), meta description tag issues and non-indexable content issues (flash, images, etc.).

how freakin' cool.

there is also additional insight into Google's crawl of your XML sitemap feed and any errors it encounters with that crawl.

the free tools that Google is offering the website owner these days is fantastic. keep 'em coming Google...

one excellent way to make your website more optimized for natural search is to have search engine friendly URL strings. in the "old" days, a search engine friendly URL string was the difference between something like:

http://www.gravy.com/good/gravy.html

and something along the lines of dynamic, database-driven website URL strings such as:

http://www.grossgravy.com/index.asp?pid=156263&cid=33452&msscsid=1293n8913n9923h97123b78g9512h35945

the latter used to really annoy the search engine spiders as they were/are designed for scale and had a hard time parsing such monstrosities. they would hit something like that and would just disregard it.

the bots became smarter and better over time and were able to understand URL strings with one or two dynamic variables (?, &, =, etc.) and now can understand/index multiple variable URL strings.

that is not to say that they appreciate these types of URLs, my guess is that they would prefer the shorter, more SEO-friendly strings over the dynamic strings any day. in addition, it has long been thought that the shorter the URL string, the more search engine optimized it is and the more relevance/weight is given to it by the bots. the understanding was that the further down the URL path the less relevant the content must be (this was with regard to URLs that used folder structures). for example:

http://www.gravy.com/tasty.html

was given more weight/relevance than the following URL...

http://www.gravy.com/peanut/buttery/tasty/gravy.html

i'm not 100% sold on the idea that the latter URL is given less weight any longer. i strongly believe that as long as the string is bot-friendly that being a few folder levels down in the hierarchy will not penalize that given page. this is open for debate of course.

even so, i still follow the practice of using shorter URL strings as much as possible with the higher level category pages being no more than one folder level off the root and sub-category level pages being two folder levels off the root. old habits die hard.

since the bots are better at indexing complex URL strings, the new(er) factor to consider when architecting your URLs is to inject keyword text and phrases into your URL strings. this is fairly easy to do if your site is a basic HTML-type site since you have the ability to create real folders and actually name your HTML files yourself. on dynimically driven websites, you really have to be a developer with experience creating dynamic websites and a good understanding of URL re-writing techniques using Apache web server or ISAPI Rewrite for IIS (Windows) servers.

the best practice is to separate words by hyphens "-" to simulate a "space" in the words. Google has recently claimed that underscores "_" are acceptable as well but i would stick with hyphens (old habits).

if you have a website that sells products of varying types but that can be categorized well, you would do yourself justice by optimizing your URL strings with keywords. let's say you sell pet products online and you have a category for dog foods. a possible URL structure to follow might be:

http://www.petproducts.com/dog-food/puppies/
or
http://www.petproducts.com/dog-food/adult/

or something like...

http://www.petproducts.com/dog-food.asp

then, if the landing page that the keyword-rich URL points to has the same keywords that the URL string contains, you are really creating a better optimized page than if the URL didn't have any keywords injected into them at all.

this is really the coup de gravy of optimization... having a keyword-rich URL string, with the same keywords in your Title tag and in your body copy.

now go out there and force your web developers to create keyword optimized URL strings.

if you have a website with a lot of pages (one hundred or more) and it is well indexed in the search engines, you really have a great resource for developing your own organic link building campaign.

link building is the act of soliciting other websites to create hyperlinks that point back to your site, in order to increase your ranking and relevance to the search engines.

paid link building entails paying someone to link back to you. organic link building is obtaining links that don't cost you a dime.

but what many people seem to forget is that their own web site is a possible resource for quality, keyword-optimized links.

let me explain...

over time, your site will build up PageRank. and if you follow good SEO tactics and continually add quality content to your site, you will have a web site with a PageRank of four/five or better.

now this means that any plain text hyperlink you put on your site to link to other pages within your site will pass along a decent amount of PageRank and will help provide some weight behind whatever keyword phrase you utilize within that hyperlink.

the engines, especially Google, like to see keyword optimized text within hyperlinks that subsequently link to landing pages that contain the same text within their Title tags, their header tag(s), their body copy, etc.

so technically, just by utilizing your own website, you can create a decent amount of link popularity around a few key terms by creating the right hyperlinks and pointing them to their respective landing pages.

if you have a handful of terms that you consider the most important to your website, consider creating a single landing page for each one of these terms and then creating a site-wide footer with these keyword optimized hyperlinks that point to these respective pages.

in essence you would be passing a good deal of PageRank/weight/relevance for these terms (by having these links on every page of your site) and applying this to these landing pages.

couple that with an organic link building campaign outside of your website and you'll be sitting pretty.