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Great Googly Moogly: I’m In The SERPs!

Posted by admin on January 1, 2007 in SEO Theory

In the old days, before directories became objects of derision among search engine optimizers, people used to agonize over what it took to get into them. There was a time when a Yahoo! listing was deemed the most important part of an online marketing campaign by many people.

I barely remember the days when Yahoo! was almost all there was in online search. Oh, there were other “tools” and “resources”, but I recall snorting and scoffing at a company meeting in 1995 or maybe early 1996 when someone mentioned Yahoo! “Oh, puh-leeze!” I said. “What sort of a name is ‘Yahoo!’?”

By the end of 1998 I was taking a very different position. Yahoo! had become critical to my own online visibility campaign. At the pinnacle of my Yahoo! success I would have a total of 10 listings in the directory for Xenite.Org. If you include non-US versions of the directory, Google thinks I have about 14 listings in the directory right now. Not bad for a science fiction and fantasy fan site, in my opinion.

Back then people had a very difficult time understanding how directory optimization worked. All they could think of was that they weren’t showing up on the first page for whatever category they were listed in. The more competition for visibility there was in a given category, the more angst newcomers to the topic expressed in SEO forums. One day, as I searched through Yahoo! for something, I realized that I was not using directory category pages. It occurred to me that I had rarely looked at them except when considering where to submit sites for listing.

“Could it be that no one looks at the directory category pages?” I asked myself. I posed that question in an SEO forum. The answers surprised me. There were indeed people who searched through category pages. They would use the query tool to find the category they wanted and then they would scan the category page. “Hm. I think I still do that myself,” I pondered.

So getting a title in the directory with “AAA - Great Things Here” was considered a real coup for Yahoo! optimizers. It rarely happened (your business name had to start with the triple A’s and they had to be included in your title element). Some SEOs called this Phone Book optimization, because the trick was taken right out of the old yellow pages directories. Companies literally rebranded themselves just so they could be seen first when people scanned through telephone directories.

Query tools and search engines changed all that for the user. As Altavista became better at organizing data, as Inktomi contracted with more and more search firms, search engines gradually superceded Yahoo!’s directory category pages. Even Yahoo!’s own supplemental listings, the once-dreaded “Web pages” section, slowly but methodically became more valuable and important because searchers continued to look for content that the directory just couldn’t index.

There were other directories, and some darned good ones. Looksmart, Zeal, Disney’s Go, even the original Snap (eventually bought and rebranded as NBCi) were all excellent directories. Those of us who were involved in the industry were more Search Optimizers than Search Engine Optimizers. The engines were there, they were important, but the directories were considered critical. You had to be very, very good at writing a title and 25-word description for a directory listing; otherwise the directory would reject or rewrite your submission. Rejection was sometimes better than being rewritten.

People often agonized over those titles, but I eventually realized there were four pieces of data that directories evaluated when processing queries: listing titles, listing descriptions, categories, and actual URLs. And that was really all the directories had to go on. Imagine determining relevance on the basis of so little data. But that’s what we (and the directories) had to work with. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that searchers moved on to the actual search engines, which despite their vulnerabilities to manipulation still processed a great deal more information for evaluating pages.

Each Web page still possesses the equivalent of 3 of those directory-specific criteria: we have title elements, we have meta description tags, and we have the page URLs themselves. And for pages that are listed in the surviving directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ, perhaps their categories are also taken into account — but I wouldn’t look too far down that road. Ask seems the most likely to use such information, but you never know what Google thinks it’s looking at.

With a little bit of creative testing, most people can figure out which elements are used by which search engines.

Still, here we are, 8 years later, still writing 65-character titles, 25-word descriptions, and thinking about whether our URLs are suitable or too long. A very common question in SEO forums remains, “Do keywords in the URL help?” (Answer: Yes, but it’s not a deal-breaker — go ahead and use ID=927 if that’s what you feel compelled to do.)

In the early days of organized link reciprocation, I found myself writing many directory-style listings for my pages because I was, after all, submitting my sites to more directories. I never bothered to reciprocate with people who used software to crawl the Web and build cookie-cutter directories (and then they emailed you to say, “Hey, I’ve linked to you, would you please link to me?”). In fact, I gave up on third-party reciprocation the day my service provider (one of the very first guys in the field) sent out a message to his members saying, “The manipulators are taking up too much of my time — I’m shutting down the service”. A few cheaters spoiled the fun for everyone, because Gabriel was actually creating a very useful resource. People were actually browsing those pages and clicking on the links.

I tried to do the organized reciprocal thing on my own for a couple of years, but I realized that the whole process had become derailed after about the third time I received an email saying something like, “Hey, your (Toolbar) PageRank is higher than mine — I think we would both benefit if you exchange links with me.”

The message has long since been revised, but it’s still the same old pyramid scheme you used to see passed around news groups, mailing lists, and Web forums: “My brother-in-law is a lawyer and he assured me this is legal….” When link reciprocation became as spammy as make-money-fast schemes, I was done with it. I’ve linked out to other people freely (without seeking reciprocation) ever since and haven’t looked back.

But I did not abandon my directory-style listing habits. After all, I’ve kept my eye on the search engine results and I realized something long before various usability studies were published that confirmed my observations: people don’t always click on the first result. That may be hard to believe, but if you yourself go searching for “ancient wooden ships” and you see in slot number 1 “Gizmo’s Model Ships” and in slot number 2 “The History of Wooden Ships”, which listing are you going to click on? I found myself clicking on many listings below number 1.

Eventually, something sank in: I’m being drawn to the most informative SERP listings first. Being number 1 in the search results no longer meant as much to me as being the most informative listing in the search results. Admittedly, you want to be above the fold — usually in positions 1 through 5, but sometimes in positions 1 - 3. It depends on how much advertising is above the organic search results.

I could not compete with the ads but I often took great delight in the fact (and still do) that “context-sensitive advertising” is just another name for “spam”.

I focused on writing the most compelling listings I could for my pages. Of course, Google made things difficult by using those stupid DMOZ listings. DMOZ has an unpublished editorial guideline that translates into, “Screw any Web site any way you can”. Basically, they’ll list other “Lord of the Rings Movie” sites with titles that read “Lord of the Rings Movie news” but for my page they put “Xenite: Lord of the Rings Movie news”. Why? Because my LoTR movie site was part of a larger domain.

I wouldn’t have cared except that Google kept incorporating that stupid title into its relevance calculations — which bumped my site out of the 1st page of search results. I finally figured out a way to get around the stupidity but it took more effort than it should have. I was very, very happy the day “NOODP” was introduced and you’d better believe I dropped everything to incorporate it into my own pages. I still have a ways to go but I’ve got “NOODP” all over the place now.

It’s not all about being listed on the front page. You can get there but once you’re there, what do you say to people? I found I got many irrelevant inquiries for certain services that were positioned well. I asked myself why people were asking such stupid questions. One day, as I sat staring at my number 4 listing in the SERPs, the obvious slapped me in the face: my descriptive text was implying things it shouldn’t have been.

I had made the mistake of writing a keyword-rich description for a highly competitive query and forgot to write a compelling description. People were focusing on the keywords in the search results but not paying attention to all the explanatory text on the actual Web site. So, yes, that meant I had to rewrite the Web copy too, but I found that with a few changes in meta description wording I got fewer click-throughs but better conversions.

A compelling meta description can tell people, “Nothing for you to see here — move along”. If you don’t have what they are looking for, don’t give them the bad impression of being the wrong page. Don’t entice people to click through if you aren’t going to satisfy their curiosity. Let their first impression of your site come when you are what they are looking for.

Now, I’m sure I still get plenty of “Oops” click-throughs. After all, I get a ton of organic referrals and I look at my referral strings. People come to Xenite and other sites looking for content that has never been there and never will be there. Sorry, folks, I don’t do pornography.

But for several years now I have been advising people to write truly compelling title elements for the search engines, because what users see in the SERPs has a direct impact on what they do. Today I still see many Web pages that stuff keywords into the title elements. Regrettably, one of my own clients insists on doing it because a high-ranking competitor does it.

All I can do is explain why it’s best to show people what they want to see. I cannot force people to do what’s best for their sites.

But if you pay attention to the way you yourself search and evaluate search results when you’re not doing “competitive research”, you may realize (as I and others have) that you’re optimizing the SERPs the wrong way. Search engine optimization begins with what the user sees in the search results. Getting there is just the first (or second) step in a long journey.