Information Architecture

Sometimes I find it hard to describe Picasa without sounding like a late-night infomercial for a multi-bladed thingamabob: "It's a photo organizer! A photo editor! A web-savvy photo sharing and management system in just one tiny package!"

We try hard to avoid hyperbole around here, but it's true that Picasa software, working together with Picasa Web Albums, can help with nearly every aspect of owning and operating a digital camera. And because many of us take pictures in order to share them, we try to make sure Picasa does a great job of getting your favorite photos online, where friends and family can enjoy them too. In Picasa 3, that means powerful new features like automatically syncing changes between the photos on your computer and what you're sharing online, useful privacy controls integrated into the software on your PC, easier notifications, and more.

And today, we're releasing Picasa for Mac. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the "it-slices-and-dices" feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.


Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

Right now, Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs, but we very much wanted to get an early version out to folks attending Macworld (you can learn more about this beta release at the Google Photos blog). To run Picasa, you'll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above. We hope you'll give it a spin, and give us your feedback in person — members of the Picasa engineering team will be conducting demos at Google's Macworld booth all week (you can also check out the video tour below).



Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

Posted by randfish

Is it possible that in all the years we've been writing at SEOmoz, there's never been a solid walkthrough on the basics of content optimization? Let's fix that up.

First off, by content, I don't mean keyword usage or keyword optimization. I'm talking about how the presentation and architecture of the text, image and multimedia content on a page can be optimized for search engines. The peculiar part is that many of these recommendations are second-order effects. Having the right formatting or display won't necessarily boost your rankings directly, but through it, you're more likely to earn links, get clicks and eventually benefit in search rankings. If you regularly practice the techniques below, you'll not only earn better consideration from the engines, but from the human activities on the web that influence their algorithms.

Content Structure

Because SEO has become such a holistic part of website improvement, it's no surprise that content formatting - the presentation, style and layout choices you select for your content - are a part of the process. Choosing sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are wise choices for the web; Verdana in particular has received high praise from usability/readability experts, such as this article from WebAIM:

Verdana is one of the most popular of the fonts designed for on-screen viewing. It has a simple, straightforward design, and the characters or glyphs are not easily confused. For example, the upper-case "I" and the lower-case "L" have unique shapes, unlike Arial, in which the two glyphs may be easily confused.

Another advantage of Verdana is that the spacing between letters. One consideration to take into account with Verdana is that it is a relatively large font. The words take up more space than words in Arial, even at the same point size.

The larger size improves readability, but also has the potential of disrupting carefully-planned page layouts.

Font choice is accompanied in importance by sizing & contrast issues. Type smaller than 10pt is typically very challenging to parse and in all cases, relative font sizes are recommended so users can employ browser options to increase/decrease if necessary. Contrast - the color difference between the background and text is also critical - legibility usually drops for anything that isn't black (or very dark) on a white background.

Content length is another critical piece of the optimization puzzle that's mistakenly placed in the "keyword density" or "unique content" buckets of SEO. In fact, content length can have a big role to play in whether your material is easy to consume and easy to share. Lengthy pieces often don't fare particularly well on the web, while short form and easily-digestible content often has more success. Sadly, splitting long pieces into multiple segments frequently backfires, as abandonment increases while link-attraction falls - the only benefit is page views per visit (which is why so many CPM-monetized sites employ this tactic).

Last but not least in content structure optimization is the display of the material. Beautiful, simplistic, easy-to-use and consumable layouts garner far more readership and links than poorly designed content wedged between ad blocks that threaten to overtake the page. I'd recommend checking out The Golden Ratio in Web Design from NetTuts, which has some great illustrations and advice on laying out web content on the page.

CSS & Semantic Markup

CSS is commonly mentioned as a "best practice" for general web design & development, but its principles coincide with many SEO guidelines as well. First, of course, is web page size. Google used to recommend keeping pages under 101K and, although most suspect that's no longer an issue, keeping file size low means faster load times, lower abandonment rates and a higher probability of being fully indexed, fully read and more frequently linked-to.

CSS can also help with another hotly debated issue: code to text ratio. Some SEOs swear that making code to text ratio smaller (so there's less code and more text) can help considerably on large websites with many thousands of pages. My personal experience showed this to be true (or, at least, appeared to be true) only once, but since good CSS makes it easy, there's no reason not to make it part of your standard operating procedure for webdev. Use tableless CSS stored in external files & keep Javascript calls external and follow in the path of CSS Zen. 

Finally, CSS provides an easy means for "semantic" markup. For a primer, see Digital Web Magazine's article, Writing Semantic Markup. For SEO purposes, there are only a few primary tags that apply and the extent of microformats interpretation (using tags like <author> or <address>) is less critical (the engines tend to sort out semantics largely on their own since so few web publishers participate in this coding fashion). Using CSS code to provide emphasis, to quote/reference and to reduce the use of tables and other bloated HTML mechanisms for formatting, however, can make a positive difference.

Content Uniqueness & Depth

The final portion of our content optimization discussion is the most important. Few can debate the value the engines place on robust, unique, value-adding content. Google in particular has had several rounds of kicking "low quality content" sites out of their indices, and the other engines have followed suit.

The first critical designation to avoid is "Thin Content" - an insider phrase that (loosely) means that which the engines do not feel contributes enough unique material to display a page competitively in the search results. The criteria have never been officially listed, but I have seen & heard many examples/discussions from engineers and would place the following on my list:

• 30-50 unique words, forming unique, parseable sentences that other sites/pages do not have
• Unique HTML text content, different from other pages on the site in more than just the replacement of key verbs & nouns (yes, this means all those sites that build the same page and just change the city and state names thinking it's "unique")
• Unique titles and meta description elements - if you can't write unique meta descriptions, just exclude them. I've seen similarity algos trip up pages and boot them from the index simply for having near-duplicate meta tags.
• Unique video/audio/image content - the engines have started getting smarter about identifying and indexing pages for vertical search that wouldn't normally meet the "uniqueness" criteria

BTW - You can often bypass these limitations if you have a good quantity of high value, external links pointing to the page in question (though this is very rarely scalable) or an extremely powerful, authoritative site (note how many one sentence Wikipedia stub pages still rank).

The next criteria from the engines demands that websites "add value" to the content they publish, particularly if it comes from (wholly or partially) a secondary source. This most frequently applies to affiliate sites, whose re-publishing of product descriptions, images, etc. has come under search engine fire numerous times. In fact, we've recently dealt with this issue on several sites and concluded it's best to anticipate manual evaluations here even if you've dodged the algorithmic sweep. The basic tenants are:

• Don't simply re-publish something that's found elsewhere on the web unless your site adds substantive value to users
• If you're hosting affiliate content, expect to be judged more harshly than others, as affiliates in the SERPs are one of users' top complaints about search engines
• Small things like a few comments, a clever sorting algorithm or automated tags, filtering, a line or two of text, or advertising does NOT constitute "substantive value"

For some exemplary cases where websites fulfill these guidelines, check out the way sites like C|Net (example), UrbanSpoon (example) or Metacritic (example) take content/products/reviews from elsewhere, both aggregating AND "adding value" for their users.

Last, but not least, we have the odd (and somewhat unknown) content guideline from Google, in particular, to refrain from "search results in the search results" (see this post from Google's WebSpam Chief, including the comments, for more detail). Google's stated feeling is that search results generally don't "add value" for users, though others have made the argument that this is merely an anti-competitive move. Whatever the motivation, here at SEOmoz, we've cleaned up many sites' "search results," transforming them into "more valuable" listings and category/sub-category landing pages, and have had great success recovering rankings and gaining traffic from Google.

In essence, you want to avoid the potential for being perceived (not necessarily just by an engine's algorithm but by human engineers and quality raters) as search results. Refrain from:

• Pages labeled in the title or headline as "search results" or "results"
• Pages that appear to offer a query-based list of links to "relevant" pages on the site without other content (add a short paragraph of text, an image, and a formatting that makes the "results" look like detailed descriptions/links instead)
• Pages whose URLs appear to carry search queries, e.g. ?q=seattle+restaurants vs. /seattle-restaurants

Though it seems strange, these subtle, largely cosmetic changes can mean the difference between inclusion and removal. Err on the side of caution and dodge the appearance of search results.

Please do share your own lessons and suggestions for optimizing content. I don't doubt there's even more material here for those dedicated to the practice. 

 

BTW - If you're looking for more "keyword targeting" focused advice, check out our best practices for keyword usage & targeting from the Beginner's Guide re-write.

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Posted by Jane Copland

It was a bit difficult hitting the Compose Entry link in my account to write this, because this will be one of the last blog posts I write as an SEOmoz staff member. At the end of this month and after two and half fantastic years, I'm leaving SEOmoz and Seattle. It's amazingly hard to know how to write something like this: I want to get across so much and there's no way to word it at all cleverly. Like how this is one of the toughest things I've ever had to do because I just love it here, but that I'm also excited about where I'm going next. And how I struggle a lot with the fact that my life wouldn't even resemble what it is now if I hadn't replied to a Craigslist ad for an entry-level "SEO" (whatever the hell that was) at 2am a couple of months after I graduated from college. God knows what normally happens to twenty-two year olds with English degrees, but I know that they don't usually end up with one of the greatest jobs around. I owe SEOmoz so much. This couldn't get much more difficult if it tried.

However, as do a lot people, I've reached a point for entirely personal reasons where I have to move on to the next chapter of my life. And it's quite exciting as well. I am moving to London to join Ayima Search Marketing, home of Sphinn editor and great friend of mine, Rob Kerry. Even though the answer to "what is my first task going to be?" was "learn to use a Mac", I can't wait to get stuck into work over there. I'm joining their team as a search marketer and I'll be working with their clients and projects... apparently only on Apple computers!

As trite as it sounds, I still do look around every so often and marvel at how lucky I am. Firstly, I am constantly astonished that Rand didn't read my atrocious candidacy blog post and pass me up for a less-idiotic competitor. I love it that I was sent to my first search conference--Pubcon in 2006--six weeks after joining the company: talk about being thrown into the deep end! This job has taken me to Australia, New York, Las Vegas and London... and SEO will take me back there again, only this time with a one-way ticket.

Just to be sentimental, I want to take a short trip down memory lane and document my favourite memories from my time here (and believe me, I'll miss lots because there have been many fantastic moments!):

• I had been drinking when Rand called me to tell me that I was one of the final six candidates for this job, and I was asleep when Rand called me to tell me I had got the job.
• One week after Scott was hired, he and I found ourselves browsing Funny2.com late on a Friday afternoon. On the aptly-named /huh.htm, we discovered a couple of ridiculous one-liners that resulted in both of us being completely incapacitated by laughter. The culprits were: "I wasn't rich like you guys. I didn't eat gold or have a flying pony", "Cross my legs and hope to die!" and "He won't last, he's just a flash in the pants." We did, however, hear Rand say to Rebecca, "well at least it seems like they're getting on okay..."
• When we hired Mel, we knew he was from Texas. We were a bit fascinated by the idea that we'd hired someone from the South, but were sad to discover that he didn't have a particularly strong accent. However, the first time he said "y'all" in the office, we all did a bit of a doubletake and stared at him, impressed, for a couple of seconds too long.
• After the inaugural SMX Advanced in Seattle in 2007, Lisa Ditlefsen visited our office. We were all very hungover (some of us more than others. Ahem.) from the SEOmoz party the night before. Sitting around eating sushi in our old office's kitchen, Lisa took a look into one of our little rooms, which served as Whiteboard Studios. We used to own an awful Yahoo!-purple velvet sofa and it was stored in the little room along with Scott's video equipment and studio lights. Lisa came out of the room looking horrified. "Erm," she said, "what happens in there?" I think she still has a sneaking suspicion that we were doing some adult work on the side.
• Bringing a large version of this picture up on Yahoo!'s large monitor in the exhibit hall floor at Pubcon in 2007 by accident, right after being scolded for checking Gmail on a Yahoo! computer. That's Mel, of "y'all" fame.
  
• You Q&A folks have provided some great one-liners throughout my time here. I've already documented some of them here, but since the publication of that post, there have been more. My recent favourite began, "I always seem to get to ask dumb questions (no comments please) and here is another one." However, my all-time favourite is definitely the question that ended with, "Excuse me I am French."
• Even though I have worked here since September 18, 2006, my father still cannot pronounce SEOmoz. The best we get out of him is, "SEOahhh... SEOahhh..." So, of course, I have joined another company with a name that he cannot say. Explaining that it's just "Eye Ee Ma" hasn't helped.
• SMX Sydney:
  
  
  
  
• Partnering with Distilled:
  
  

I have loved my time at SEOmoz more than anyone could hope to love any job, let alone their first. Becoming a Mozzer was the best thing ever to happen to me, right from my first telephone interview to now. Rand, thank you so much for hiring me and keeping me around, and thanks to all of you for being part of the SEOmoz community during my time here. As well as at Ayima, you'll continue to find me on the SEO Chicks blog and, in the near future, at the back of LondonSEO events, Guinness in hand. See you there :)


Just one flight away :)


A great group of co-workers: I'll miss you all.

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Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.

This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.

We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?

But it wasn't all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google's 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people's lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.

Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.

Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools' Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.

And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs. A few highlights: eight new developer blogs (the Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian; and AdWords blogs in Danish, German, Turkish, French, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Spanish). There's even an Analytics blog in French. And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India, Africa, and the Ukraine. Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.

We're looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.

Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team

TechCrunch recently announced that voting is open for the Crunchies. Yahoo! Search BOSS was selected as one of the six finalists for the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category — so we’re asking for your support.

Click the badge below to vote for BOSS!

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The BOSS Team

Posted by randfish

I couldn't help but love Chris Yeh's Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It's a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let's run through the list:

I: The Truth About Relativity

When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a "deluxe" version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain

When contemplating the purchase of a $25 pen, the majority of subjects would drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. When contemplating the purchase of a $455 suit, the majority of subjects would not drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. The amount saved and time involved are the same, but people make very different choices. Watch out for relative thinking; it comes naturally to all of us.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Offer a premium version of your product/service and make it easy to compare
• Charging more has the added benefit of reducing the "bargain shopper" mentality

II: The Fallacy of Supply & Demand

Savador Assael, the Pearl King, single-handedly created the market for black pearls, which were unknown in the industry before 1973. His first attempt to market the pearls was an utter failure; he didn't sell a single pearl. So he went to his friend Harry Winston, and had Winston put them in the window of his 5th Avenue store with an outrageous price tag attached. Then he ran full page ads in glossy magazines with black pearls next to diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Soon, black pearls were considered precious.

Simonsohn and Loewenstein found that people who move to a new city remain anchored to the prices they paid in their previous city. People who move from Lubbock to Pittsburgh squeeze their families into smaller houses to pay the same amount. People who move from LA to Pittsburgh don't save money, they just move into mansions.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Want to be a premium product and charge a premium price? Set yourself against "premium" competitors in premium markets. Positioning is critical to perception of value.
• Anchoring happens - plan for it in your sales models and be prepared that old customers will be resistant to new pricing, even when the circumstances are very different

III: The Cost of Zero Cost

In the real world, this effect was demonstrated by Amazon's free shipping. After Super Saver shipping was introduced, Amazon saw sales increases everywhere except for France. It turned out that the French division offered 1 franc ($0.20) pricing instead of free pricing. When this was changed to free, France saw the same sales increases as elsewhere. Another real-world example: People will wait in line for absurdly long times to get something for free. Free is one of the most powerful ways to trigger behavior.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Offer free stuff, but make sure you get ROI from it (traffic/ad views/email addresses/etc)
• Be prepared for the fact that people will ENJOY free stuff more than normal, simply because it is free. Use this to your advantage and give away to those whose love & affection you need (reporters, bloggers, pundits, haters, etc.)
• Making people work to get something for free is a great way to trigger behaviors that might otherwise cost a fortune (think web surveys, information classification, data entry, etc.)

IV: The Cost of Social Norms

Vohs, Mead, and Goode: Participants were asked to unscramble sentences that were either neutral ("It's cold outside" or related to money "High-paying salary").  Then they were asked to solve a puzzle.  The experimenter left the room, and the subjects were allowed to go to him for help.

• "Salary" participants waited 5.5 minutes to ask for help; "neutral" participants waited only 3 minutes
  • Thinking about money made people more self-reliant and less willing to ask for help.
  • On the other hand, they were less willing to help others.
• The conclusion is that thinking about money puts one in a market frame of mind.  Subjects were:
  • More selfish and self-reliant
  • Wanted to spend more time alone
  • Were more likely to select individual tasks rather than those that required teamwork
  • Chose to sit farther away from others

A real-life example: The AARP aksed lawyers to participate in a program where they would offer their services to needy employees for a discounted price of $30/hour. No dice. When the program manager instead asked if they'd offer their services for free, the lawyers overwhelmingly said they would participate.

Conclusion: Market norms drive out social norms.

 Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Those who freely contribute to your site/business with recommendations, referrals, content (think blog comments or UGC articles), etc. might not be willing to do so if paid. Think twice before paying for what you might be able to get for free.
• The mindset of volunteers vs. employees is very different - consider which behavior set you want before deciding on the type of labor to attract

V: The Influence of Arousal

Ariely and Loewenstein conducted an experiment on Berkeley undergrads (Ariely tried to do this at MIT, but couldn't get the necessary permissions).  They asked them a series of questions.  Then they had the undergraduates stimulate themselves to a state of sexual arousal, and asked them to answer the same set of questions. The results show that people simply don't realize how different their decision-making is during a state of arousal.

Implications - Someone may promise to just say no, but that promise is less likely to hold up during a state of arousal.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing

• There's a reason why AdultFriendFinder made an IPO last week, despite terrible economic conditions
• Arouse your audience and their behavior changes drastically (note: this is probably not universally applicable)

VI: The Problem of Procrastination and Self Control

Ariely conducted an experiment on his class.  Students were required to write three papers.  Ariely asked the first group to commit to dates by which they would turn in each paper.  Late papers would be penalized 1% per day.  There was no penalty for turning papers in early.  The logical response is to commit to turning all three papers in on the last day of class. The second group was given no deadlines; all three papers were due in the last day of class. The third group was directed to turn their papers in on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks.

The results? Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle. Allowing students to pre-commit to deadlines improved performance. Students who spaced out their commitments did well; students who did the logical thing and gave no commitments did badly.

"These results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it."

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Procrastination is an extremely common human behavior - plan for it in your business and take advantage of it where it can help (trial offers that turn into paid services, for example)
• By setting up early controls and making people recognize this weakness, we can reduce its negative impact. You can apply this to contractors, employees, vendors, etc.

VII: The High Price of Ownership

The "endowment effect" means that when we own something, we begin to value it more than other people do.

Ariely and Carmon conducted an experiment on Duke students, who sleep out for weeks to get basketball tickets; even those who sleep out are still subjected to a lottery at the end.  Some students get tickets, some don't. The students who didn't get tickets told Ariely that they'd be willing to pay up to $170 for tickets. The students who did get the tickets told Ariely that they wouldn't accept less than $2,400 for their tickets.

There are three fundamental quirks of human nature. We fall in love with what we already have. We focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain. We assume that other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• In contrast to the recommendations for offering something for free, be aware that users who get your product/service for "free" will place less value on it than those whoe worked for it or bought it themselves.
• It's easier to get more money from your existing customers than it is to attract new ones (this marketing wisdom has been around forever, but applies particularly well given this psychology)

VIII: Keeping Doors Open

In 210 BC, Xiang Yu led an army against the Ch'in Dynasty.  While his troops slept, he burned his ships and smashed all the cooking pots.  He explained to his troops that they had to either fight their way to victory or die.  His troops won 9 consecutive battles.  Eliminating options improved the focus of his troops.

We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn't make sense.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Narrow your customers' choices and they'll be more likely to commit
• Narrow navigation options to the most important/desired behaviors - it may seem counter-intuitive, but if you want users to click, reducing pathways may actually increase interaction (page views, sales, etc)

IX: The Effect of Expectations

Ariely, Lee, and Frederick conducted yet another experiment on MIT students. They let students taste two different beers, and then choose to get a free pint of one of the brews.  Brew A was Budweiser.  Brew B was Budweiser, plus 2 drops of balsamic vinegar per ounce.

When students were not told about the nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the balsamic beer. When students were told about the true nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the Budweiser. If you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good they'll end up agreeing with you--because of their expectations.

Not only do we react differently based on stereotypes of others, we react differently based on stereotypes about ourselves. Shin, Pittinsky, and Ambady conducted an experiment on Asian-American women.  A first group was asked questions related to their gender, then given a math test. A second group was asked questions related to their race, then given a math test.

The second group did better on the math test than the first. "Blind" presentation of the facts (presenting the facts, but not revealing which party took which actions) might help people better recognize the truth.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Take advantage of expectations - if you're selling a product or service and can enhance the perception of value/enjoyment, your market is likely to follow along and actually get more value/enjoyment.
• Branding is a powerfullly ally in value creation - position your brand so that users expect great things, and they'll get them.

X: The Power of Price

Ariely, Waber, Shiv, and Carmon made up a fake painkiller, Veladone-Rx. An attractive woman in a business suit (with a faint Russian accent) told subjects that 92% of patients receiving VR reported significant pain relief in 10 minutes, with relief lasting up to 8 hours.

When told that the drug cost $2.50 per dose, nearly all of the subjects reported pain relief. When told that the drug cost $0.10 per dose, only half of the subjects reported pain relief. The more pain a person experienced, the more pronounced the effect. A similar study at U Iowa showed that students who paid list price for cold medications reported better medical outcomes than those who bought discount (but clinically identical) drugs.

Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:

• Higher pricing means higher expectations, but also more fulfillment, even if the product isn't actually more fulfilling! Raise your consulting prices, people.
• The Placebo effect is strong - don't abuse it, but leverage this knowledge to be smart about your own purchases and investments and as a potentially valuable tool to use in comparisons with competitive products/services/companies.

Your turn - go read the full piece and see if there are any terrific snippets of advice/knowledge that you'd apply to marketing online. I've only covered the surface level, so I suspect there's a great deal more value to be gleaned.

p.s. Posting will remain light through January 5th, but YOUmoz is more active - and at its highest readership levels yet!

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The holidays are a time for giving, and Googlers across the globe have found some creative ways to give back to their communities this season. From raising money and crafting greeting cards to building gingerbread houses and giving blood, Googlers from east to west have been busy spreading good cheer. We've highlighted just a few of these efforts here, and we're looking forward to many more opportunities to give back in the new year.

London
The UK engineering recruitment team started to plan its annual Secret Santa gift exchange. But as they began thinking about last year, they realized that hardly anyone on the team could remember what they'd received, let alone given. Instead of spending 10 pounds on gag gifts, they decided to use the money to make a difference. After discovering that a local children's hospital was in desperate need of gifts, they quickly raised enough money to buy a Nintendo Wii gaming console for one of the wards.


Mexico City
In the past, Google has held a "Doodle 4 Google" contest in the US, the UK, and Australia, inviting kids K-12 to submit a homepage doodle inspired by a particular theme. This year Mexico held its first such contest (theme: "the Mexico we want"). For each doodle submitted, Google donated to a non-profit that works to eradicate childhood malnutrition in Mexico. In total, more than 70,000 kilos (154,000 pounds) of food and aid were donated. Winner, Ana Karen Villagómez, was recently recognized in a ceremony in Mexico City; her doodle (pictured below) will appear on the Google homepage on January 6.


Boston and beyond
Boston Googlers delivered gifts to some very grateful students at a local school and spent the morning reading and playing with the children. The Chicago office held its first-ever holiday blood drive, donating 36 units of blood. And the Ann Arbor office held a "CANstruction" competition, creating sculptures out of canned food, personal items and baby items, which were all later donated.



We hope that your holiday season is filled with plenty of time to slow down and reflect on what's important to you, and that you too feel inspired to find ways to give back to your own community in the new year.

Posted by Eileen Duffy and Sarah Falck, AdWords Account Associates

Posted by randfish

It's very late on Christmas Eve, and I can hear our hosts, my cousin-in-law and his girlfriend, snoring in the next room. Their new dog is curled up on the couch, grumbling and huffing through his wet nose, one eye barely open. Mystery Guest crashed out an hour ago after we finished watching the new Muppets Christmas Special (I love Statdler and Waldorf). Here in Ocean Beach, CA, the streets are quiet, the rain's stopped and it's just the sounds of surf and the occassional drunken reveler wandering home from the bars on Newport Ave, filled with Christmas cheer.

To help share in the spirit, and get you through the next 3-4 days sans new posts (although Scott does have a Whiteboard Friday video ready and waiting if the Seattle ice storm lifts enough for him to get into the office), here are ten SEO tips that take relatively little energy but often produce great returns.

#1 - Repoint Your Self-Cannibalizing Pages

Nearly every site has multiple pages targeting their top keywords. Oftentimes, you'll find pages from your site ranking on page 2, 3, 4 and/or 5 of the search results, earning you virtually no search traffic and splitting up your potential relevance and ranking value. Try a search like "keyword site:yourdomain.com" to see a list of the top pages the engine has identified on your domain for that term/phrase. Once you've got that list, consider 301 redirecting #2-3 or 4 to #1, thus boosting #1's ranking potential. If you have to, you can always rebuild those other pages with different URLs.

#2 - Find Your Most Important Pages & Place Links to URLs that Need It

Using non-specific queries like "inurl:domain site:domain.com" or "intitle:brand site:domain.com" (the latter of which only works if you have your brand name in the title of every page) will show you a list of many of the most important pages on your site according to the search engines. While it's not always in perfect order, it can be a great way to see which pages are considered valuable. You can then take this list and point links from those important pages to URLs that need a bit of link juice or anchor text boost to move into the top 5/10. For less competitive terms and phrases, this system almost always results in an extra bump.

#3 - Add Alt Tags to Images on High Ranking Pages

Go through your web analytics and find the top 20-30 pages bringing in search traffic. Now go to those pages, create/include relevant images (if you don't already have them), title the image files with the keyword term/phrase and optimize the alt text. A great number of popular search queries have some image traffic and although it usually takes a while to get your images ranked, it can be a terrific additional source of traffic (though you should be prepared for the reality that far fewer of these searchers will convert).

#4 - Create a Sitemaps.xml File (and Verify it with ALL THREE engines)

Sitemaps are starting to become nearly ubiquitous, but we've seen a lot of sites ignoring Yahoo! and MSN - a big mistake! You can seriously boost your search traffic referrals from these engines by not only submitting, but verifying/registering your sitemaps with them. Yahoo!'s registration is here, and MSN/Live's is here. 

#5 - Move Keywords to the Front of Your Title Tags

It's so simple, but it really does work. Try taking some pages where you rank #10+ and move the keyword term/phrase to the very front of the title tag. We've been amazed to see some results where this brings boosts of 5+ ranking positions in the engines right away!

#6 - Target Plurals & Other Grammatical Forms All on One Page

Don't split up different conjugations or plurals of a keyword term/phrase onto multiple pages until you've first tried targeting them all on your most optimized and well-linked-to URL for that keyword. The search engines themselves have actually come a long way on this issue, and what used to require multiple targeting can now be better achieved with canonicalization (and the coalescing of link juice).

#7 - Suggest a Link through Wikipedia's Discussion Pages

Wikipedia itself stilll uses nofollows on external links, but the second-order effect of being linked-to by Wikipedia and seen as a reference resource by their community (and the many bloggers who use it as a place to find links) is remarkable. You can earn a lot of good links and relevant traffic through Wikipedia, so to get around their stingy linking-out policy, don't embed the link yourself - suggest it! Go to the discussion page for the target topic and suggest a couple good links that can back up unsubstantiated points or provide data. When the editors take notice, you'll have a far better chance of staying listed in the long run, even though it can take longer to get up there initially. 

#8 - 301 Redirect Your 404 Pages

Google's Webmaster Tools  (and, very frequently, your own site's log files) will give you a list of 404 error pages that were accessed on your site. Don't just improve your 404s and try to fix your links - redirect those URLs and get the link juice you were losing over to pages that badly need it. There's no reason to simply plug a leaky faucet when you can re-route the water to a thirsty friend!

#9 - Invest in Your Page 2 Rankings

Using software like Enquisite (or your own search referral analytics - though it takes some manual labor), you can see which keywords you're currently ranking for on page 2 of the SERPs. This is the epitome of low-hanging fruit - pump up those pages with some extra on-site optimization, internal and external links and see the difference between page 2 vs. page 1 traffic.

#10 - Add Long Tail Modifiers to Keywords on High Ranking Pages

Those pages that are ranking well and earn you great search traffic are frequently a terrific opportunity to earn even more. Do a bit of keywords research and find 4 and 5 word phrases that extend the 2-3 word phrases you already rank for. If possible (and relevant), place a few instances in Hx tags, in bold on the page and in the HTML text and watch as you earn even more traffic from these extended queries.

And now it's time for me to catch some desperately needed zzzzs. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

p.s. If you enjoy these and have a PRO membership, don't forget about the 150+ tips here.

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When I look back on four years of tracking Old St. Nick on Christmas Eve, I can't help but smile. The Santa tracker has really come a long way. I always thought NORAD's Santa Tracker was a great holiday tradition, but I felt like it could have been even better if people could visualize exactly where Santa was on Christmas Eve. So in 2004, shortly after Keyhole was acquired by Google, we followed Santa in the "Keyhole Earth Viewer" — Google Earth's original name — and we called it the "Keyhole Santa Radar." The audience was relatively small since Keyhole was still a for-pay service at that point, and we hosted everything on a single machine shared with the Keyhole Community BBS server. We probably should have had three separate servers to host the Santa tracker — that first year, we had only a portion of a single machine. That night, about 25,000 people kept tabs on Santa and, needless to say, wreaked some havoc on our servers!

Over the next two years, our Santa-tracking efforts improved dramatically. By December 2005, Keyhole had become Google Earth and our audience had become much, much larger. Our "Santa Radar" team also grew: we used greatly improved icons from Dennis Hwang, the Google Doodler, and set up 20 machines to serve the tracking information. My colleague Michael Ashbridge took over the software and more than 250,000 people tracked Santa on Google Earth that Christmas Eve. In 2006, Google acquired SketchUp, a 3D modeling software that enabled us to include models of Santa's North Pole workshop and sleigh. We also incorporated a tracking feed directly from NORAD's headquarters, and we were now displaying NORAD's information in Google Earth. That year, more than a million people tracked Santa.

In 2007, Google became NORAD's official Santa Tracking technology partner and hosted www.noradsanta.org. In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on "Santa Cam" arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google's infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously.

This year, Googler Bruno Bowden is in charge of the Santa software, and we have further upgraded our server capacity. We're hoping this version of the tracker will be the best yet. In addition to our "Santa Cam" footage, geo-located photos from Panoramio will be viewable in Google Maps for each of Santa's stops that don't include video. We've also included a few new ways to track Santa. With Google Maps for mobile, anyone can keep tabs on him from their mobile phones (just activate GMM and search for "norad santa"). You can also receive updates from "Bitz the Elf" on Twitter by following @noradsanta. And of course, be sure to visit www.noradsanta.org tomorrow morning starting at 6:00 am EST when Santa's journey begins. Enjoy, and see you in 2009!

Posted by Brian McClendon, Original Google Engineering Elf

Posted by randfish

If you've been playing around with Linkscape a little, you've probably seen our attempts at creating a lot of new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously the exclusive realm of web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. Things like mozRank & mozTrust (mT) have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank (mR) vs. Domain mozRank (DmR) - one is for a page while the other applies to a domain - and been seriously confused about FQDs vs. PLDs. Let's address this issue.

As search engines scour the web, they identify four kinds of web structures on which to place metrics:

• Individual pages / URLs - these are the most basic elements of the web; file names, much like those we've had on computers for decades, that indicate a unique document. Search engines assign query-independent scores, most famously Google's PageRank, to URLs and judge them in their ranking algorithms. A typical URL might look something like http://www.seomoz.org/page.html
• Subfolders - the folder structures that websites use can also inherit or be assigned metrics by search engines (though there's very little information to suggest that they are used one way or another). Luckily, they're an easy structure to understand. In the URL http://www.seomoz.org/blog/post, "/blog/" is the subfolder.
• Subdomains / Fully-Qualified Domains (FQDs) / 3rd Level Domains - In the URL http://www.seomoz.org/page.html, there are three kinds of domain levels present. The top-level domain (also called the domain extension) is ".org," the 2nd level domain is "seomoz" and the third level domain is "www." These are sometimes referred to as "subdomains," although that nomenclature can also be intended to mean 3rd level domains that are not "www." Again, these structures can receive individual assignments of importance, trustworthiness and value from the engines, independent of their 2nd level domains, particularly on hosted publishing platforms like Wordpress, Blogspot, Wetpaint, etc.
• Complete Domains / Host Domain / Pay Level Domains (PLDs) / 2nd Level Domains - The domain name you need to register and pay for, and the one you point DNS settings towards, is the 2nd level domain (though some improperly call it the "top level" domain). In the URL http://www.seomoz.org/page.html, "seomoz.org" is the 2nd level domain.

You can see how we've tackled this in our Linkscape Help Center Concepts area:

However, to date, it's still one of the biggest puzzlers I see when folks are faced with the data, and while I love that we can be so robust and detailed, it's no fun dealing with information overload. There are all sorts of important metrics that can be applied to 2nd or 3rd level domains, but if even the savviest of SEOs struggle to understand/interpret/apply this information it's time for a change.

For example, according to a Linkscape report for SEOmoz:

• http://www.seomoz.org - the page/URL has 41,741 links from 3,281 FQDs
• www.seomoz.org - the Fully Qualified Domain (FQD) has 11,734 other FQDs linking to it
• *.seomoz.org - the Pay-Level Domain (PLD) has 10,039 other PLDs linking to it

Being able to quickly and easily understand these differences is important for comparisons, reporting and SEO implementation, but it's a challenge to explain, so I figured I'd put it to our community - what is the best way to describe 2nd vs. 3rd level domains? What should we be calling them and how can we explain it in an easily digestible but granular fashion?

Please use your thumbs to reward answers you like (I know I will, especially since it's nearly Christmas Eve!).

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I setup Fedora 10 on a new (to me) IBM ThinkPad the other day. I've run into a couple of little niggles - the wireless network decided to stop working with NetworkManager, however system-config-services won't currently run so it still starts by default...

However, a much bigger issue occurred after I did an update late last week - the next time I booted up all the text had disappeared. The graphics were working fine, but there it was just blank where the text would be - in menus and dialogues as well as within applications. A quick Google revealed others with the same issue but no solutions. Finally, last night, Carter Weatherly worked out what the problem was (an issue with the latest version of the ATI driver) and posted a workaround in the bug report:

$ wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-54.fc10.i386.rpm $ yum remove xorg-x11-drv-ati $ yum localinstall xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-54.fc10.i386.rpm $ rebootTechnorati tags for this post: ati • fedora 10

Posted by randfish

Research has been cropping up in the last few years to challenge Chris Anderson's modern-classic theory of demand distribution. The Times of London had this to report today in their article - Long Tail Theory Contradicted:

The internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products - and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets. But a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.

Personally, I don't think this is terribly shocking. The "Long Tail" demand theory has been questioned again and again in application to sales of popular culture related goods (hmm... I wonder why they call it "popular" culture). However, there's one arena where the Long Tail plays out almost perfectly - search queries. Evidence?

How about Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering, noting that:

20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before

Or Google themselves explaining that:

so-called "long tail advertisers" make up half our revenue.

Or Dustin Woodard's investigation into the distribution of search query demand:

It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic.  Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.

"Top 100 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise)   This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you'd still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.  There's so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.  To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

At SEOmoz, nearly every large client we work for has exactly the same type of traffic graph - I've even shown off SEOmoz.org's own via Enquisite. The long tail is regularly producing 50-75%+ of the search traffic to large sites. Don't be fooled by news that the "Long Tail" might not exist - it's just that it might not be as big or as valuable, particularly in "pop culture" niches like movies & music.

What do you think? Is the long tail dead? Are long tail queries driving the majority of your sites' traffic? What about value - are long tail queries impossible to convert or equally valuable?

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Posted by randfish

In the last six weeks, 3 unique events have led me to conclude that this post is essential. We, as search marketers, need to understand not just the small changes the engines have been making in Q4 '08, but what that signals as a broader direction. I'll start by recounting those events:

#1 - More Ads in the SERPs (and other places)

• http://searchengineland.com/google-ads-for-hard-alcohol-and-liqueurs-now-allowed-15756.php
• http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-adsense-for-domains-enough-already-15812.php
• http://searchengineland.com/google-search-suggest-get-ads-links-answers-15821.php
• http://searchengineland.com/googles-countdown-to-2009-promotes-products-services-15849.php
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/05/yahoo-testing-ways-to-make-those-search-ads-pop/

#2 - Yahoo!'s Expansion of their "Open" Strategy & BOSS

• http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-enhances-open-strategy-mail-my-yahoo-toolbar-more-15845.php
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10118008-93.html
• http://news.cnet.com/2300-1038_3-6248414-1.html

#3 - Google's SERPs Enhancements & Modifications

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
• http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-enhanced-listings-pagelinks-auto-spelling-correction-15819.php
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-search-by-style-options-for-google.html

It's hard to describe these phenomenon as "related" or even philosophically cohesive, but it feels like a shift. While that's not very scientific, I'm bolstered by the supporting thoughts of colleagues like Mike Grehan, one of the search marketing industry's smartest and most experienced players. Here's Mike in his latest thought paper:

We're essentially trying to force elephants into browsers that don't want them. The browser that Sir Tim Berners Lee invented, along with HTML and the HTTP protocol, was intended to render text and graphics on a page delivered to your computer via a dial�up modem, not to watch movies like we do today. Search engine crawlers were developed to capture text from HTML pages and analyze links between pages, but with so much information outside the crawl, is it the right method for an always�on, ever�demanding audience of self producers?

You can download the remarkably insightful paper - New Signals to Search Engines - from Acronym Media's site and read more, but my big takeaways dovetailed closely with Mike's. There's a new generation of search coming, and we're finally getting a more tangible glimpse of what that future has in store for us.

Danny Sullivan likes to say that we're in Search 3.0, heading for 4.0, and his breakdown goes something like this:

• Search 1.0 - keywords & text
• Search 2.0 - link analysis
• Search 3.0 - integration of vertical results
• Search 4.0 - personalization

I think the search future we're facing has elements of all of these, but it has an additional component that's been part of the "Web 2.0" movement since the very beginning: participation. Right now, the world's leading engines seem like they're all trying to figure out how to become Korea's Naver. Google's tried Groups & Orkut & Lively (without much success). Yahoo!'s tried MyYahoo!, Answers, Mash & 360 (arguably with a few more "hits" than Google). Now Google's on to SearchWiki and Yahoo!'s trying OPEN.

I seriously doubt that either of these will be the "future of search," but I do believe very much that web search's signals are going to involve more than keywords, links, vertical results and personalization. I think we're going to see the hive mind - the "wisdom of crowds" - become part of the engines' algorithms at some point in the very near future. In Danny's model, this might be a Search 5.0, but I think, to a certain extent, personalization, vertical integration and this new crowd sourcing are all a part of the same movement.

Rather than argue about the slight differences in conceptualizing (especially since the leading minds all seem to have a lot of underlying consensus), I'd rather do what I always do - think about how this impacts search marketers. Mike Grehan did a great job of that in his paper:

Signals from end users who previously couldn't vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don't rely on the elitism of one web site owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.

Although Mike had lots of smart things to say in the piece, this was perhaps my favorite. He's distilled the essence of what's happening in the search world - engines shifting, however slowly (and yes, even though it might seem like the sky is always falling, I do think these shifts are years in the works), to adopting additional metrics and data sources to make their results higher and higher quality. If you study the technology of algorithms, you've apparently known for years that more data usually beats better algorithms, so it's not surprise that the engines are trying to discover any data source they can for potential application.

My question is does more data, and in particular this kind of data, change what SEOs need to do to succeed for their sites and clients?

Not really. At least, not if you're a smart, long-term focused SEO.

Sure, if you've been playing the spam/arbitrage/manipulation game, even in the lightest gray hat sense, you could be in for an ugly surprise. But, if you've been building a business intelligently and focusing on not just your raw search rankings, but customer fulfillment, branding, participation and word-of-mouth marketing, these changes are going to be a net positive. Why? Because more data means the engines know more about you and about your visitors - they can see which sites attract lots of repeat visits, which ones have loyal customers, and which ones are succeeding in not just satisfying, but delighting their audience. Those are the sites we should all be building and they're also the sites the engines want to reward.

At the end of the day, the best results are the best sites. The technology the engines have now rewards a very select subset of web properties who have success with two rankings signals: good keyword targeting and good (or lots of moderate to crappy) links. More data collection means more opportunity to win, even if your site doesn't conform flawlessly to these signals, and a better chance that if these are the only indicators you're winning, you could be in big trouble. I still believe we're years (3-5) away from an SEO economy where links don't play the primary role (and I doubt we can ever get away from keywords - that's search at its most basic), but I do agree that we're plodding slowly down that path.

BTW - Blogging on SEOmoz will likely be limited over the next 2 weeks, but we'll try to have some new material to welcome in the New Year.

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Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).

Today we're pleased to extend this capability to clip art and line drawings. To see the effect of these new options, let's take a look at the first few results for "Christmas," one of our most popular queries on Image Search right now.

Photo content

Clip art

Line drawing


All of these options can be selected from the "Any content" drop down in the blue title bar on any search results page, or by selecting one of the "Content types" on the Advanced Image Search page. The good news: no extra typing! In all these examples our query remained exactly the same, we just restricted our results to different visual styles. So whether you're interested holiday wreaths, Celtic patterns, or office clip art, it just became a lot easier to find the images you're looking for.

Posted by Sean O'Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search

We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And we aspire to be an organization that reflects global diversity, because we know that a world's worth of perspectives, ideas and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We have more than a dozen employee-driven resource groups, from Gayglers to GWE (Google Women Engineers), that actively participate around the world in building community and driving policy at Google. This is the next post in our Interface series, which takes a look at valuing people's similarities and differences in the workplace. For more information on how Google fosters an inclusive work environment, visit Life at Google on our Jobs site. – Ed.

It's been a busy few months for the Black Googlers Network (BGN). One of our group's core goals is to build a community that keeps us connected, facilitates the sharing of ideas, and participates in community outreach. We sponsored a variety of events this fall across many of our offices, giving us the opportunity to give back and have some fun while doing it.

To kick things off, a group of us from the Mountain View, New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago and Atlanta offices, to name a few, rolled up our sleeves for our first annual service trip. We headed to New Orleans in September to aid in the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts. Undeterred by Hurricane Gustav, which unexpectedly hit the coast the week before we arrived, we managed to make some adjustments to flights and itineraries and were some of the first volunteers back into the city.

We partnered with the St. Bernard Project, learning everything from how to lay flooring to installing drywall as we worked on three homes. Additionally, we joined a strategy session with The Idea Village, helping them kick off their newest initiative, the 504ward Project. The opportunity to serve the community in such a meaningful way while getting to know BGN members was unique. We each put our minds, bodies, and souls into the city and the experience.



Next, BGN participated in the United Negro College Fund's annual Walk-a-thon in Oakland, CA. Our Google-UNCF partnership also includes an annual scholarship for college students pursing a degree in engineering or computer science, and we're continuing to explore different ways to support and encourage underrepresented students.

This month, we're coming together in many of our offices for the holidays, giving ourselves a chance to catch up and take stock of the work we've done over the past year. Not to be slowed down for too long, though, as we will soon begin the exciting process of planning our new initiatives for 2009.

Posted by Alexa Bush, University Programs Team

Posted by Tom_C

This post needs very little introduction. I’ve scoured the web, my bookmarks and Twitter (thanks guys!) for all the very best articles about PPC that I can find. I’ve broken the links down into several categories to make it easier to read. Enjoy!

Campaign Management

The following are articles on how to improve your campaign, tips, tricks and campaign advice.

Best of class: starting a PPC campaign from scratch by Rimm Kaufman

The rest:

• Google lady with 51 Adwords tips
• Digerati marketing with 3 tips to improve CTR
• Redfly marketing helps take the guesswork out of PPC campaign set up
• Redfly marketing gives 10 tips to increase your quality score
• PPC Hero on following Yahoo’s PPC advice
• Sitepronews on how to turn around an unprofitable PPC campaign
• SEOmoz chips in with 17 common PPC mistakes
• Netbusiness blog looks at 8 Adwords mistakes
• SEOmoz with a Whiteboard Friday on PPC management
• PPC Hero with 6 settings to double check before setting a new account live
• Sitepoint with some of the worst Adwords mistakes
• Searchengineguide with 5 common PPC mistakes
• Me! Talking about PPC! ON VIDEO! no way.

Tools

Here are a few handy PPC tools to streamline your processes.

Best of class: Search Light Digital's PAM-VAR Tool. It's neat and handy and lets you efficiently run your tests.

The rest:

• Google’s ad preview tool. Allows you to check your ads are running and how they look.
• Google’s traffic estimator. Does what it says on the tin.
• Self hosted PPC tracking software. Not used it myself but recommended.
• Vertster. Have a neat little statistical significance test.

Landing Page Advice

Of course, PPC management is only one part of the process. You need to make sure that you’re sending the traffic to a page which is working hard for you. How do you go about testing that? What should you improve on your landing page? All below, my avid reader!

Best of class: Copyblogger does a comprehensive roundup of their own stuff on landing pages. Essential reading.

The rest:

• SEOmoz talks landing pages
• ROI Revolution shares 3 landing page tips
• SEL shares some practical landing page tricks
• SEO Design Solutions writes on landing pages which appeal to motivated searchers (like PPC traffic)
• Anywired discusses 13 sure signs that your landing page is a turn off
• Postclickmarketing looks at how you scale your landing pages
• SEM Geek looks at optimising paid search and landing pages for TV, radio and print advertising. Compelling reading.
• 9 myths of landing page quality score
  

Headline Tips From The Dali Lama

See what I did there? Headlines are important. They need to grab your attention, and never more so than in PPC.

Best of class: Google Lady shares some really in depth things to try with headlines for PPC along with detailed examples

The rest:

• Lyndon from Cornwallseo shares some headline writing tips. More for linkbait than PPC, but good reading.
• Copy Blogger looks at how to write compelling headlines
• Copy Blogger again. More good stuff.
• Freelanceswitch on how to write headlines that kill
• Google conversion university tips on headlines. Basic but it’s good to go over this stuff.

Maths

When you’re running PPC campaigns, maths comes in handy. There’s actually surprisingly little written about this, I was expecting to find more. Please chip in with your own links in the comments. No best of class since there’s only 2 links!

• Distilled: PPC lessons from Kenny Rogers (advanced maths)
• Searchlaboratory (who work just across the road from where I used to live!) share some PPC stats secrets

Analytics Tracking, tracking, tracking. If you can't measure it then what good is it?

Best of class: hack Google Analytics to show actual search queries for broad match AND find the referring domain (useful for SEO too)

The rest:

• Use Google Analytics to get proper ad scheduling data

Other

Here are all the other articles I didn’t think really fit into any other categories. Some general stuff, stats, rapping, etc. All worth checking out.

• Searchenginewatch discuss playing dirty with PPC
• Google’s own tutorial. Dull in places but worth checking on the basics.
• Bigmouthmedia on affiliate PPC spending by region (of the UK). Interesting.
• A PPC rap. No, really! If you haven’t seen this then check it out!
• Ewhisper with how to lower your minimum bid (aka quality score)
• PPCblog write on understanding when to bid on your own brand
• 10 travel PPC tips
• 13 myths of PPC
• The darker side of affiliate PPC
• Are you running ads on Google partner network? If so, read this!
• Combining search and display advertising for greater gain
• More than you could ever want to know about quality score

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I’d like to talk specifics a bit. I’m sure there will be some readers at B&A who aren’t gamers, and probably even more who haven’t played Halo—so my apologies to those folks— but… describe in some detail exactly what you contributed to the finished product.

When I look at Halo 3, what ‘pieces’ of the experience did you work on?

I worked on the IA, navigation and screens for the game shell; the social design for the game for systems such as the party system, matchmaking systems and sharing systems; on rewards systems such as the stats, medals and experience ratings; and also on how that user experience extended to the web through Bungie.net. I also worked on the theater features such as film clips and screenshots, and on the Forge “in-game” UI. My compatriot David Candland handled the in-game HUD in addition to collaborating with me on the design, look and feel for the overall UI and specifically handling the visual design for the game. Aaron Lemay was the art and graphic design lead for our team, including Bungie.net. Max Hoberman was the lead for the entire multiplayer and UI team during the planning stage of the project.

The information architecture and navigation includes all of the screens and flow to support the game experience outside of the game—we refer to this as the “Game Shell” UI. With Halo 3 we started by identifying what the “core game experiences” would be for the game and grouping them into “modes”.

These modes were:

• Campaign:The story mode where players play through an adventure either solo or cooperatively.
• Matchmaking:Players are matched with other players over the internet based on similar skills or experience and based on game preferences to play games that are controlled by Bungie matchmaking.
• Custom Games:Players set their own game rules and maps in a player-hosted game lobby.
• Forge:Players can customize maps to play in Custom Games or to share with the community.
• Theater:Players can view films from any game mode and take screenshots.

Do these modes then inform the IA of the shell?

Grouping the experiences as modes allowed us to start with a foundation for the overall player experience and a baseline for the information architecture. Each of the modes support many options within the mode, but these 5 modes have unique characteristics that support a”focused” player experiences within the mode over a period of time. With the priority that “everything is social,” each of these modes are designed to support from 4 to 16 players either locally, on System Link or over Xbox Live, so we gave each of these modes its own “lobby” where players could gather to share the experience.

In addition to focusing the core experiences in the game, this lobby system sets up the infrastructure for our party system. In Halo a “party” is a group of players that gather to play together, particularly over Xbox LIVE. The party leader is the player who makes decisions for what the party will do together, and the system allows players to stay together and do anything they want without breaking up. In Halo 2 this was termed the”virtual couch”…

Yeah, I recall that H2 was really revolutionary at the time—made it so easy to form a group and hang out for the night…

It’s like sitting on the couch together—if you decide you want to switch from one game mode to another on Xbox LIVE you can do it together just like if you were sitting on the couch with your friend. This is a very big deal on consoles because many online systems do not have this flexibility and it is not always easy to get together and stay together online.

The end result was a fairly simple information architecture for our game shell. Each mode has a lobby. Within the lobby, the specific options are contextual to the game mode. For example, in Campaign the main options are to select a level or difficulty for the story, whereas in Custom games the main options are to select a game type or map to play. The lobbies themselves are “locations” for players to gather into a party and play together and once players are together they can easily switch modes from within the lobby system to travel together to try a different mode. For example, a party of players may decide to customize a map together in Forge, then switch over to Custom Games to play on the map they just created.

The other major areas for player experience are community, personal identity, sharing, and settings. These are very much tied to a player’s personal profile and so in the information architecture these are all presented in a global menu that can be accessed anytime by pressing the “Start” button. The menu is always tied to the identity of the player who presses the button.

Regarding navigation and orientation, our goal was that the player always understands where they are in the game and that menus are in most cases only a couple of levels deep. In most cases the player is only a few clicks away from a core location. Another benefit of grouping the experiences into modes is that the main experiences for the game are easily discoverable from the main menu.

What kind of process did you follow?

The overall timeline for game development was “pre-production” where the studio teams plan what we wanted to do for the project and evaluates scope, then “production” where we execute on the design. At the end of pre-production each team submits an overall design document to the leadership group and the project features are approved. For the interface and experience this was a pretty detailed document for the overall information architecture and screens for the game. This is similar to a product requirements document, but in the games world these are design documents. Over the course of the project the design evolved in some places or was scaled back in other places. A great idea may be recognized well into production and is never discarded automatically, but anything new that is proposed during production is weighed against other features that are in development.

Regarding design process, we targeted the foundation first. The information architecture and systems that would support the different features in the game, as well as the overall guiding principles for the game. This allowed us to understand where everything fit.

Then we tackled the major features based on scope and dependencies. Each of these “major features” would cover many areas of the game. For example, the lobby system would provide the foundation for many other features and was also a dependency in supporting the overall IA for the project. It included the “shell” for the interface, the player roster that shows who is in your game lobby and the core navigation for the information architecture. For each major “feature” set, I would put together a proposal for the feature using screen flow “posters” that outlined flow and also detailed screen requirements. We would then review these proposals with the team members that had an interest in the UI. From there we would refine and build out detailed design documents to support the development. Once the feature was built and in the game we would verify that the features were working according to specification through in-game testing.

We also had great support from the Microsoft usability lab. User researchers were part of our review process and provided heuristic analysis of the proposed designs, and also supported usability testing for both the early “prototype” ideas and later with the actual game.

Would your design artifacts look totally familiar to most practicing Interaction Designers? Wireframes, flows, that kinda thing?

Absolutely. The format I found most useful were poster flows.These are large format posters with detailed wireframe screens, navigation and flow decisions for a feature area. These would include detailed specs and use cases for specific features near the screen or decision point on the poster where they were relevant. I would print these out and post them on the wall near the UI pit, and also post them internally as pdf documents.

The posters allowed everyone in the studio to get an overview of the feature by reviewing the printed poster on the wall, and the engineers and QA team would use the pdf version as the spec while developing and testing the feature. I preferred this format because it was a format that outlined “the big picture” graphically, so it was easy to collaborate and refine as a team. It was also easier to update than a detailed 50 page word document. In many cases, the poster on the wall would be the “most up to date” spec because—as we were developing the feature—our team collaborated to work through issues together using the printed posters, and we would update the poster specification with markers as we refined the direction. The QA team calledthe poster wall the “wall of truth”.

I also put together design documents for the main feature areas such as matchmaking, the party system, sign-in and profile, etc. These were word documents with detailed specs, or in some cases excel spreadsheets. The word documents started with an IA diagram and overview of how the feature worked in context with the core shell UI and that then outlined specific specifications for each feature. Early in the project I also had wireframe”prototypes” in power point to walk through certain use cases to explain an idea and get feedback.

Did you do any prototyping of concepts? And how about tools in general? Does Bungie have proprietary tools for screen design and prototyping?

We conducted rough prototyping during planning to test our concepts in a usability lab or to get feedback on concepts, and we also put together a polished director demo to present the final interface proposal to the team at the end of the pre-production phase.

On the rough prototyping we worked with Randy Pagulayan and John Hopson from the Microsoft Game Studios User Research group to test the concepts in the usability lab. We put together a script for the prototype, then I created wireframe screens in illustrator and John coded the screens into a prototype so that test subjects could use an Xbox 360 controller to navigate the prototype. Randy and John and our team spent about three weeks running the prototype through tests and then rapidly iterating on ideas with matchmaking, the core game shell interface and the party system.

The content was all fakery, I think we called the game in the prototype “Mecha”, but it was designed to confirm the fundamental direction for our user experience. The lab setup and process was top notch and I really have to give props to the Microsoft usability team. The process helped us to refine our thinking and have confidence in the information architecture and core navigation. In fact, the final prototype for those sessions is very close to what we shipped in the final game.

David Candland, Max Hoberman and I then put together a polished demo in Director that was scripted to run through the main use cases for our proposed interface direction. We used this to present our proposed direction to the team and Max and the leads used this to evaluate the direction, gather feedback and reach consensus on feature sets and final direction as we moved into production.

Thanks, Colm!

Note: shortly after Halo 3 shipped, Colm left Bungie to work with Max
Hoberman at Certain Affinity, a game design and development company
based in Austin, TX.

In Part I, I discussed how to make the first three steps of Quick Turnaround Usability Testing (QTUT)—Sales & Kickoff, Recruitment, and Preparation—as short and efficient as possible. In Part II, I discuss the final two steps: Testing and Analysis & Reporting.

Steps in the QTUT Process

• Step 1: Sales & Kickoff
• Step 2: Recruitment
• Step 3: Preparation
• Step 4: Testing
• Step 5: Analysis & Reporting

Testing

It’s testing day. You have successfully recruited enough participants for the first day, but you feel a bit of panic as you make the finishing touches before the first participant arrives. You have a rough but solid test script. You have five attentive stakeholders in the observation room ready to begin taking notes. Now you need to execute the test and you need to compile results as you go along.

Up to this point, the lack of time you had to plan and to refine your method creates a bit of a panic as you begin the testing phase. Often, we are working on the script until the very last second, incorporating changes from the stakeholders that they hand off when they arrive at our testing facility.

Early on the test day, I print out a screenshot of every important page and component (e.g., the primary navigation). I number these screenshots and then tape them above a large whiteboard that we keep in an “idea” room that is adjacent to our usability lab’s observation room. We use the whiteboard to keep track of issues and metrics across participants.

After you finish each participant session, immediately note changes that you need to make to your test script or the application. Then go talk with your stakeholders about the results. Here, the time that you have budgeted between sessions for discussion really pays off. If your stakeholders have been watching and taking notes, they are likely already talking about the results. They may also be already talking about potential fixes.

The whiteboard can be useful for focusing the discussion on issues. It’s often useful to set ground rules for the discussion. First, the discussion should focus on results and not solutions. It is important to manage your stakeholders by telling them to be patient and to let the results play out over several people before drawing conclusions. Second, as the person facilitating the study, you should lead the discussion on each topic by first summarizing your notes on the whiteboard. After we summarize a page, we ask for any additional feedback from the stakeholders and then quickly move on to the next page. Occasionally, we need to remind the stakeholders that since we have limited time between participants, we cannot dwell on any one finding.

You may think that stakeholders will not have much valuable feedback to add, but we have found that they often see things that we don’t because of their knowledge of the history of the application. For example, one client had just made a political decision to change a button label. Since the participants understood the new button name, we didn’t think to list it as a finding. But for the stakeholders, it was helpful to track it and mention it in the report.

After the first participant’s session, you will likely realize that some of your tasks and questions were not worded correctly. Through the whiteboard session, you may think of additional questions to ask participants, or you might even want to add, delete, or change tasks. Do not rely on your memory to do any of this. Instead, make the changes to your script and print out a new copy for the next participant.

At the end of your first day of testing, you should have a board full of findings, including some task completion data. If you test five participants per day, by the fifth participant trends are becoming clear. You may decide to stop a task because you already know the issues, which allows you to test other tasks that you couldn’t fit in. Discuss this at the end of the day so that you can make the necessary edits to your test script before you leave for the day.

In addition, if your stakeholders are already discussing potential fixes while you facilitate the test, it is important for you to be a part of that discussion. In their eagerness to fix things, our stakeholders occasionally solve the problem in such as way that a larger problem is created.

If you are in a fast-paced development environment, where developers are staying until 10 p.m. at night to make changes, your stakeholders may want to change things that night. Because of the potential to affect your testing, you should be very careful to attempt only easy fixes. You do not want to rework the navigation or radically alter a task flow overnight. However, you may want to change a button’s behavior or the text in a label.

As sessions progress, your whiteboard may start to fill up. Usually it is easy to condense the notes. We use a Post-It note for each issue and then start writing participant numbers on the note for each person that experiences the same issue (see Figure 1). We take pictures of the whiteboard throughout the process, prune non-issues, and type up results for tasks and questions that we have stopped using.

Figure 1: Whiteboard full of findings after two days of testing. Post-It notes contain reoccurring issues.

Finally, as you reach the last few sessions, increase the level of detail about potential recommendations. If possible, test these ideas with your participants. Get a sense from your stakeholders about what recommendations are feasible and cost effective on a short timeline, and which require long-term attention.

Testing Tips

• Keep the testing as simple as possible—for QTUT avoid technology such as eyetracking and anything else that makes your job more difficult or confusing.
• For changes to your tasks and questions, modify the test script and do not rely on your ability to remember the changes.
• Be willing to change questions and tasks. It is better to find and to fix the issues with your testing script early on.
• Remind your stakeholders that because of the aggressive timeline your test script is not perfect, so you may have to change tasks and questions on the fly for the first couple of participants.
• Keep a whiteboard in the observation room and use it to keep track of and to discuss problems with your stakeholders after each session.
• At the end of the day, summarize the results and discuss potential recommendations. Consider making a list of the most important findings from the day.
• Expect long work hours.
• Don’t duplicate effort by typing up th