Using Search Intent to Build Content

November 3, 2011 Leave a Comment

“Query intent can be classified, according to Google, as Action (“Do”), Information (“Know”) or Navigation (“Go”)”

Well, it turns out that Google’s “quality raters” checklist got leaked, and while it wasn’t a bombshell of secret information, it does provide some useful insights (thanks for the 16 points of insight SEOMOZ!)

Do you have information on your website for all 3 different types of intent on your website? Here’s some ideas to be sure you actually cover with content on your website, this example is for a real estate site, but just think it out for your own industry.

Action: Search for a home, Get CMA, List a home, get a buyers agent, get a sellers agent
Information: Learn about community, learn about home buying/selling
Navigation: Your Office/business location, contact info

 

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Google Update Expands Context and Snippets

March 24, 2009 2 Comments

Google just released a 2 part update that they have announced through their blog. The first aspect is the addition of related search results to your serp pages and new technology (The Gypsy indicates it’s part of a larger algorithm) for Google to correlate terms, the second is an extension of the Description field in the Google “Snippet”, which should prompt us to review our current SEO practices to make sure it’s still the most rational approach.

Context is Everything

Google hopes to  enhance the search experience by better understanding user intent. First up, a new technology has been deployed to understand the associations of a given search phrase. Google offered up the example of “principles of physics.” With the new technology, Google now understands that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “Quantum Mechanic” are all related terms, and will alter SERP behavior accordingly. This is important to bear in mind as you write your content that you need to focus on a broader range of related keywords, because Google isn’t looking just at how many times a single keyword is appearing, it’s looking contextually. Therefore you need to provide a broader context for your content in order for you to show your relevance to that set of related keywords.

Sorry Guys, but Google Says Longer is Better

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

Sounds great right? Well, you need to look at this a little bit harder to see how this could impact your search engine optimization of your website. In the past, the limit of approx 140-160 characters for your description was  pretty standard, because that’s what would actually display on the serp. However, this question comes to mind:

Is the expanded Snippet the Meta description or text from the page to provide “context”?

Now I had previously done some research on how Google uses DMOZ information in their snippet results. So I started with that URL to provide a historical sample so we could compare.

Well here’s a query for [http://www.pathaddad.com]

Short Snippet Of a Google serp resultand here’s a much longer query

[Indianapolis real estate services and homes for sale in Carmel, Noblesville, Fishers, Westfield, Geist, Morse, Zionsville and other Hamilton County areas]

Longer Snippet from Google

From this example we can see that this snippet extension will, for longer query terms, increase the size of viewed characters in the meta description as well as pull in contextual text bits separated by an ellipse. The length can be more double and triple the previous 140 character limit. The good news is that in context it may uncover extra details from a long description, but I would still say that it would be best to provide a 140 character limit meta title and let Google grab extra snippett description from the page to provide content.

The Take Away

It is interesting that Google is taking steps to encourage long tail searches. With the release of the Google suggest, we saw an increase in “Fat Belly” terms…but this change while focused o nthe user experience, shows Google is interested in serving long tail queries more effectively. You need to provide a broader context for your content, and it will lend itself to supporting long tail queries.

Filed under content on google searches, content writing advice, Google, Search engine optimization Tagged with , , ,

Deconstructing the concept of “Under Construction”

December 14, 2007 3 Comments

an under construction IconI was assisting a client in moving their content from one company to another, and they had added an under construction page, and put up an icon like this to make people aware.

I think that the “Under Construction page” should become a thing of the past. I think that putting up the under construction page forces Google, Yahoo and MSN to drop all of the links it had to all of the internal pages of your site. This could set you back greatly because GYM will check the site less for new content if it thinks that there is no content there and it will take longer once you remove the under construction page to re index and rank your site.The primary fallacy of an under construction page is the idea that websites are like traditional buildings. When a building is under construction it is of no use whatsoever, however even a fledgling website, if done with thought, can be useful to visitors even if it doesn’t have every thing the creator imagined. Aside from the icons looking like they came from the 90′s dot com bubble, people can of course tell that site isn’t complete.

As a site owner, you should know that Google doesn’t like “stubs” or placeholder pages that have little or no content. The best way to build your site, is to build it page by page, and publishing when it is filled out. This isn’t to say you can’t add embellishments, or more pictures later on. Ditch the cheesy gif files, and remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was any good website.

Filed under content on google searches, content writing advice, Random, Search engine optimization Tagged with , ,

Geo Keywords – Geographic Placement and Search Engine Placement

October 4, 2007 2 Comments

The thing that I love about search engines is that common sense rules the methods they use to determine value. It’s common sense that if you’re providing valuable content for website visitors about a particular topic, the search engines will view that positively and increase your relevancy to the keyword.

This brings us back to the concept of keywords specific to a geographic area, I’ll call them Geo Keywords for short. When your business is based around a Geo keyword, you have a open door for content writing that you shouldn’t ignore. Your opening is that when you have a Geo keyword, you aren’t competing against all of the people across the world for the term. Look at the term “Content Writing Advice“, the search engines are going to look for information relevant to Content, Writing, Advice, Content Writing, Content Advice, Writing Advice, and other terms that are relative to that area of information on your website. This means that anybody, anywhere who posts information to the world wide web that the search engines see is going to be competing for that keyword. Now lets take a look at “Riverside Content Writing”, now the search engines are going to look for content writing, but also for your relevance to Riverside. The advantage is that you have now narrowed down your competition from a international scale where large companies are most likely going to dominate, to a more local scale where your competition less fierce.

The second advantage to Geo Keywords is that you have a term of relevance that has large amounts of information available to you to use. You can go to city hall and pickup a fly-er on the city, pick up a book from the library and like we learned in our public school system, paraphrase to success! This approach makes writing content half as difficult to achieve, because the research is done for you already. This also applies to your strategy for your site visitors. If your a real estate agent, and are trying to get people to buy homes in your area, having unique relevant content about the community they will be moving to is paramount to capturing out of state buyers. Having that content at your fingertips just makes it easier for you to build up your content.

Good Night and Good Luck

Filed under content on google searches, content writing advice, Geographically sensitive keywords Tagged with

How does your content rank?

September 24, 2007 1 Comment


What’s in Your Top 100?

Google recently modified it’s webmaster tools interface to be more user friendly and convey more information about how Google ranks your site. The best part of this is that Google now displays a list of the top 100 keywords, in order of importance on your site. This allows you to see what words Googlebot understands to be the most important words on your site, and that will directly affect your likelihood of being placed in a keyword search for that term. Obviously, if your primary keyword was intended to be, “content writing”, and it either doesn’t show up on that list or is number 99, you need to take a closer look at your content.

Common sense and Googlebot

So Googlebot reads over you page and your keyword is not in your top 10 keywords, what am I not doing right? Well, you should sit down and actually read through the content on your site as if you were coming to your site from a Google search. Now obviously, if you were searching for “content writing advice”, you’d expect that the site that you arrive at actually uses that word in several contexts. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up on a page that just full of that one word, spammed dozens of times across the page. You want to reach a good “Keyword Density“, that isn’t too spammy, but also reflects well when Google reads the page. Just use common sense, and you’ll get your keywords ranking in the order that will best benefit you and your placement.

Filed under Content, content on google searches, webmaster tools

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