How Google creates the description of your website for the result page

Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it's also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.

How do Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live create the descriptions and snippets that are used in the search results?

How Google creates descriptions and snippets

Google seems to use the description from the meta description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the found page.

If the found web page doesn't have a meta description tag then Google seems to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.

If a web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

How Yahoo creates descriptions and snippets

Yahoo seems to use only the first part of the meta description which is complemented by a text snippet from the searched page that contains the searched keyword.

If a web page doesn't have a meta description, Yahoo will use the description of the web page from Yahoo's directory (if the page is listed there).

If a web page has no meta description and is not listed in the Yahoo directory, then Yahoo will display sentences from the found web page that contain the searched keywords.

How MSN/Live creates descriptions and snippets

MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description. If the searched keyword does not appear on the page, MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that appears on the page.

If available, MSN/Live will also use the DMOZ directory description in the results.

What does this mean for your web pages?

If you want to make sure that your web pages are listed with an appealing description in the search results, you should use meta descriptions on your web pages. If you don't want to use the description that is used in the Yahoo directory and on DMOZ.org you should use the corresponding tags that prevent search engines from using these descriptions.

Social Media Isn't......

There are so many things that Social Media is, and covering those would take a rather long time and make for rather long post. However, I felt compelled enough after researching with social media strategies, to address what 10 things Social Media Isn't.

Social Media Isn't: Easy

So many public relations professionals, advertising agencies and even search marketing firms see Social Media as this "bright, shiny, new medium" that's easy to just throw things out there and think it will automatically just work. If it were only that easy! Social Media takes a lot of hard work and it also takes time (the next bullet item).

Social Media Isn't: Fast

"I put it out on Digg, it should hit the front page in an hour!" If you have worked in Social Media, and heard anyone say that, more than likely you've snickered at hearing a statement like that. Only in the very rarest of situations does social media take off like a rocket. Most plans take time, effort and planning to make them successful.

Social Media Isn't: A Substitute for Sound SEO Practices

Not ranking in the Search Engine Results? Think Social Media will shoot you up to the top in no time flat? Think again! There can be some cases where it might happen (the keyword "purple and blue polka dotted widgets" comes to mind here), but for any competitive keywords, Social Media alone just won't cut it if you want to rank for keywords. Websites still need sound SEO fundamentals if they are going to compete in competitive markets.

Social Media Isn't: A Substitute for Sound PPC Practices

Just like still needing sound SEO fundamentals, if you have a PPC campaign, don't abandon it just because you're dabbling in Social Media. Social Media can be fleeting. You can hit big one day and it may last 2-3 more, but then you can sink like a rock for weeks to come. Abandoning your PPC would only hurt your online marketing efforts.

Social Media Isn't: A Practice to be Done by Interns

If you are a big company looking at interns to "play around in Facebook", please stop. Actually, maybe you should, then, you can call a professional (like me, or many of my fine colleagues) to fix up the mess your intern created. Seriously, Social Media is serious business, stop and think, do you REALLY want to leave your brand's identity in the hands of a college or high school intern?

Social Media Isn't: Another Place to Distribute Your Press Release

If your public relations company is saying "Oh we'll send this out to the social media outlets, too", run, run far far away. Ever hear of the "Bad Pitch Blog"? If your PR Firm or Advertising Agency is offering this, you'll end up there in no time flat! Then you'll be paying the PR Firm (or it might be better to hire a social media or search marketing professional) to dig you out of the mess the PR Firm created in the first place.

Social Media Isn't: Something That Will Work if Your Site is "Broken"

How is your conversion rate now? Are people reading what you want them too? Are you getting the subscribers you want to your email list? If your site isn't working - forms are broken, links are broken, shopping carts are difficult to use, etc., Social Media won't fix that. In fact it might make things even worse, or make you believe your Social Media plan isn't working.

Social Media Isn't: Something To Send Out Mass Emails For

This really, absolutely, makes experienced bloggers irate. Your email gets dumped in the trash. If you send out a mass email with the same exact wording to bloggers, word will get around and you will likely end up on that Bad Pitch Blog.

Social Media Isn't: Something You Can Do Without Participation

Many marketers are under the assumption they can just submit things to social media sites and they will have success. This is where their thinking/judgment errs. Social Media is about .... *drum rolls* .... being social. Without a conversation, without being part of the community, the community will backlash and "out" you for what you really are, a marketer.

Social Media Isn't: Something You Can Do in Disguise

You might want to ask Edleman, Walmart, Sony and Microsoft about this one. Social media communities can smell a fake right away, and when they out you, it isn't pretty. Even a year later, we're still pointing to these major snafus as what "not" to do, that should be enough to show you, be transparent from the get go.

Returns Of Social Media Marketing

There are essentially four different types of return that you can expect from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, mindshare/branding, sales and consumer interaction.

Below, a look at each type of return and how you can tap into it, depending on your goals.



Links


Using social media for link building is most popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can effectively produce hundreds or thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is going mainstream, at least within our community.

The objective here is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the idea is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it's exposed to their user base. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for building link are Digg, Delicious, Netscape, and Reddit (see Forget ABCs - The Social Media Alphabet Is DNRS and More Letters Of The Social Media Alphabet to learn more about these sites and others mentioned below).



Mindshare & Branding


Social media marketing goes beyond just traffic and links. It is also great for creating mindshare, branding initiatives, and brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating mindshare are YouTube and MySpace.



Sales


The bottom line for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it is a very indirect process. It is very hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you're reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you're selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there's more there than just a selling message. Any content piece with a strong selling message will not be received well or successful.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way. Blendtec, for example, has created a campaign called Will it Blend?, where they take various consumer items that you would think are impossible to blend and they blend them. This shows off their product is in a way that is compelling for the consumer to watch. Since the launch of the campaign in November, sales for the company have quadrupled.

Sites that are best for direct sales are MySpace, YouTube, or any highly targeted social site.



Customer Interaction


There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

Another strategy is to build white label social media sites for your customers with topics focused around your brand or industry. Examples of these include: Guitar Center's King of the Blues, Dell’s IdeaStorm and My Barack Obama.

These are all breakdowns for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing. I may not have covered everything here. Are there any other positive outcomes that have resulted from a social media marketing campaign that you can think of? Please comment below!

The Layout Of Email Marketing Space

Emails are sent to potential customers to boost the business, and gain the trust of the customer by disclosing relevant information and help them to make good shopping decisions. It also enhances the relationship with a current customer, by doing repeat business with them. In simple words, the procedure of sending emails to customers is known as email marketing.

The major advantage of email marketing is that it doesn’t consume a lot of time. It is minimal in resource consuming and is also cost-efficient. Within a short period, a large audience can be targeted.
Features such as Subscriptions, bounced messages, web bugs, and click throughs help enables businesses to track potential customers. Since the customers can be directly reached, feedbacks can be collected with ease. In terms of cost, it is not as expensive as newsletters. Reports have proven that this is the next best marketing technique after search marketing. It is effective in tracking the returns on investments.

Email marketing is a modernized version of mail marketing. The advantage over direct mail marketing is that it takes less time to reach a customer than mailing. Like people check their mailboxes daily, inbox is also checked by majority of the Internet users on a daily basis. Over a period of time, lots of helpful tools and web services have been developed. List host is web service that provides lots of options to the marketers like managing huge emails and email address databases. If the budget is more, list managers can be hired who can be given charge of opt-in-email newsletters and managing databases. Software is also available in the market that does this job too.

When the customer fills the form for the first time, there are check boxes to be ticked which reflects their interests. Depending on these choices, an advertiser sends information to them, this is known as opt-in-email advertising, because the customer has opted to receive emails and marketing like this isn’t illegal. The content of the email can be elaborate, but it shouldn’t be too long, as people are too busy for that. The call to action, also known as effective words, in the email should be chosen with care. It’s not necessary that the content should revolve around only one item; related product’s information can also be included. This is known as cross selling. By using email blasting or sending an email to multiple customers at a time can save a lots of time and will also increase the efficiency.

The dark side of email marketing is spamming or also known as bulking. Some companies collect email addresses of people illegally and send irrelevant mails to them, which can be very annoying.
Some hackers design an email like an advertisement, but when clicked on downloads adware and viruses that can destroy a computer, which makes it even more dangerous. To make matters worse, the Direct Marketing Association of America has petitioned to make spamming legal. Some prohibitions are also placed on providers who help out business organizations to manage their email marketing by giving them already prepared email templates.

Most of the mailing websites have added the facility of separating spam from genuine email by creating separate folders for both and this is known as spam filtering. But in case of large number of spam mails, a useful mail can go into that folder and can go unnoticed and gets deleted with the rest of the spam mails. This kind of mail is known as false positives. But the chances of this happening are rare. There are many laws against spamming like United States’ Can-Spam act, Europe’s privacy and electronic communications regulations. According to these laws, the companies should get their return address authenticated, false physical addresses should not be included and a one click unsubscribe link should be place in the email. The lesser penalty involves companies sending spam to be blacklisted and on a larger scale, they can be heavily fined.

3 Top Search Engines’ Webmaster Tools: Which Gives the Better Site Data?

Webmaster tools are used by site owners and developers to determine how search engines see their sites in terms of inbound and outbound links and search query used that lands users to their sites. With the recent launch of MSN Live Search Webmaster Center, the 3 major search engines are now in equal footing in terms of providing this nifty tool for webmasters and site owners.

But unfortunately, the webmaster tools of these 3 major search engines are not the same in terms of providing useful site information. In terms of giving inbound and outbound links analysis and search query/keywords analysis, the 3 search engines differ in so many ways.

Here’s a head-to-head comparison of how the webmaster tools of these 3 major search engines present relevant site data and how useful this presentation in answering webmaster and site owners’ needs.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo’s Site Explorer presents inlinks by listing the different sites that links to a user’s site through deep inlinks within the different parts of the referring site. The site explorer does not give data on which keywords are performing well for the site. That is which keywords brought more traffice.

MSN Live Search Webmaster Center

MSN Live Search present this data in terms of outbound links (Top links from) and inbound links (Top links to). However it does not give the number of inbound links but just rank these based on its popularity and perhaps the number of times the inbound links from other sites were clicked. The same is true for the outbound links. In addition to the ranking, Live Search Webmaster Center also gives the geographic location of the domain which provided the inbound or outbound links and the language used by the site.

For the keyword analysis part, to view which keywords in the different site pages are performing well for a particular site, users must enter the keywords before MSN gives a listing of of the pages and a ranking of how well this keyowrds performed for the site.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s webmaster tools beat the other two search engines’ tools in terms site link and keyword analysis. Inbound links are presented in tabular list and gives the number of inbound links from external sites. Clicking on the number of external links will direct the user to the list of sites with links that points to a user’s site. In addition, Google Webmaster Tools also gives the number of links from the site to another pages in the same site.

For keyword analysis, Google Webmaster Tools have the Top Search Queries that presents which keywords perform well in terms of returning pages from a user’s site. Top Search Queries data spans up to six months coverage. This is very useful for search engine optimizers in better optimizing their site for a specific keyword.

Clearly, Google Webmaster Tools beat the tools of the other two search engines big time. Since MSN Live Search is still in its infancy stage, it definitely pales in comparison with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If Yahoo’s Site Explorer does not make a revamp/restructure/redesigned immediately, it may find itself at the back of MSN in this search engines’ race. But yes, Google’s webmaster tools provide the best data and is the most useful for webmasters and site owners.

Google warns against cloaking: we can detect it

In a recent blog post, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts wrote about cloaking. The blog post makes several things clear:

1. Google doesn't like cloaking.
2. It doesn't matter if a small or a big company uses cloaking.
3. Websites that use cloaking will be removed from Google's index.
4. Google will detect all cloaking attempts sooner or later.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the web page content presented to search engine spiders is different from that presented to the normal web surfers.

This is done by delivering web page content based on the IP address or the User-Agent of the user requesting the page.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a script on the server delivers a different version of the web page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines.

All major search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines. For that reason, websites that use cloaking will be banned from the search results.

Google's opinion on "undetectable" cloaking

In his recent blog post, Google's Matt Cutts commented on a Danish company that offered 'undetectable' cloaking to its customers.

Google tried to check if this claim was true and they quickly found a website that used the services of the company. It turned out that their cloaking wasn't undetectable at all:

"If someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users.

That’s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not 'undetectable.'"

Don't risk your search engine rankings

You might get short term results with shady SEO techniques such as cloaking but it is very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use them. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use black-hat SEO methods.

Search Engine Site Maps

Looking for a way to direct the search crawlers to each and every page on your website? Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all agreed to support one method of submitting a site's pages: through an XML map placed on the root of a website.

This week's infographic shows how search engine sitemaps provide a quick and easy road map for crawlers to follow in order to locate and index each of the pages on your site.

How long does it take until a new site ranks in Search Engine

In a recent test, a webmaster optimized his site for a four word keyword. After about three weeks, Yahoo and MSN showed the website in the top 10 results. Even after several weeks, the same website was nowhere to be seen in Google's top 10 results. The highest result that the website could obtain on Google was position 30: What does this mean for you? It looks like Yahoo and MSN are much faster to list new websites in their result pages. The test confirmed that Google has filters for new websites. For webmasters, the results of this test mean that they have to overcome Google's filters for new sites if they want to have top 10 rankings. It's difficult for new websites to get high rankings on Google but it is possible. You have to make sure that Google trusts your site. For searchers, the results of this little test mean that Google might not always have the best search resaults, particularly when it's a search for new content. Yahoo and MSN might be the better choice for some searches. Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 for your keyword? Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 results although your site is several months old? Your keywords might be the reason for the problem. If you target very competitive keywords, then it will take much longer until your website is listed in the top 10 rankings. If you want to get high rankings for competitive keywords, then you need very many good inbound links that contain your keyword in the anchor text. If you target keywords that consist of one or two words then you might want to reconsider them. One word keywords usually don't lead to sales because these keywords are too general. Keywords that consist of four words are much more likely to convert to sales than shorter keywords (source: Oneupweb Research).