More wierd than Cuil – Does search have a new darling?

So now we have a new search engine to add to the list. Though let’s face it, it’s not really much of a list is it? Google always wins hands down. But cuil.com, the new kid on the search-engine block comes from a long pedigree of search engine excellence. Long in internet years that is.

Products from the Cuil stable have been purchased by Google in the past so they are certainly respected and this time they’re not up for sale. You’ll hear a lot about them this week so I’m not going to just regurgetate what everyone else on the web is saying, but their entry into the market on the basis of tracking less of your data is certainly intersting and will appeal to a lot of people. Their claim to have indexed more of the internet that Google will also play well, but in my opinion is worthless as I’m not really sure more is what we need of most things.

So how do they stack up in search accuracy?

Well, it’s difficult to say. They launched and they crashed. Well not quite, but the demand for mission critical task of “Cuiling” (am I the first??) your own name  etc is so high that they haven’t been able to cope completely. But if you are patient enough you will be able to – it’s so hard not to write google here as a verb – search Cuil’s index.

So of course I searched for blueclock and for some reason there is a totally irrelevant picture of someone next to my company entry. Why? Who is this person? The additional information like pictures and categories that they provide is great but now I have doubts about their results.

Also noticable is the fact that they haven’t localised their search yet. So terms that score highly on google.co.uk but less well on google.com don’t do ever so well on Cuil. Relevance to the location of the user is something that Google excels at and it’ll be interesting to see how Cuil respond.

Other than people now associating this stange photo of someone I’ve never seen in my life with me, some other interesting side-affects for unsuspecting 3rd parties are the inevitable. There will be instantaneous fame for any villages called Cuil in Scotland and Ireland (try cuil.co.uk) and the impending server overload for any poor sod that has a domain using a easily mis-typable combination of the letters in Cuil.

Oh dear, someone is about to find out why shared hsoting packages are so cheap…

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , cuil, google, seo, serps

6 Great Uses For Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great system that sends you an email you whenever a new page containing a word or phrase you have chosen to follow enters their search index.

You can create up to 1000 alerts on as many words and phrases as you like. You can also determine how often each alert is sent: “as it happens”, once a day or once a week.

And finally you can also filter the source of the content to specific part of the web:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Videos
• Groups
• Comprehensive (i.e. all of the above)

I usually choose comprehensive and then adjust the settings if there’s just too much information coming in.

Here are a few suggestions as to how Google Alerts can help you keep on top of things.

1. Simple reputation management

The most common use has to be for monitoring what people are saying about you, your clients or your competitors.

I have an alert set up on several client company names and receive a once a week alert on this. It helps me to see where on the web these clients are mentioned and measure the effectiveness of publicity campaigns.

2. Measuring search optimisation effectiveness

If you set up an alert on the title of an article you have written, an “as it happens” alert will let you see how long it takes for it to enter into the Google index.

For most of my blog articles, this is usually in about one hour whereas on certain other web sites, it can take a week. Alerts also let you see where else on the web your articles are mentioned (or stolen, see 6)

3. Monitoring the launch of new products

For my sins as a web designer I’m interested in tracking developments in the latest versions of web browsers. Google alerts keeps me up to date with new releases of all the major browsers and lets me track the opinions of commentators on the same subject.

4. Trend spotting

If you have a hunch that something is going to be big or want to follow the development of a story, Google Alerts can help you with this as well. Over time you’ll start to notice the volume of alerts on particular subjects rise and fall and you may also be able to determine what caused a story to snowball.

5. Alerting you when hard to find items become available

If you’re looking for an out of print book or a classic pair of trainers, Google Alerts does the business, but patience is the name of the game.

6. Content theft

My bug bear. It’s a sad fact that as soon as you post something on the web, someone nicks it and publishes it as their own in order to have content on their web site so they can keep visitors coming and generate advertising revenue.

How much you can do about that is debatable, but it’s at least helpful to have an idea of who is doing it.

So How Do I Create A Google Alert?

Creating a Google alert is really easy.

Just go to www.google.com/alerts

If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up. If you do have one and you’re already signed in, just enter the word or phrase you want to track, set the frequency of the alert and set the comprehensiveness of the filter.

Use quotes for exact phrases to avoid being deluged with emails. e.g. to monitor the term “Liz Hurley” enter it in quotes rather than as Liz Hurley without the quotes.

That’s all there is to it. You’ll soon start to receive updates on any new content that Google finds.

Managing Google Alerts

To add more alerts, edit or remove existing alerts, just go back to www.google.com/alerts

But there’s an even easier way to manage your alerts than that. At the end of each email alert that you receive, there is a link with the option to delete the alert, change the settings for that alert or set up another alert.

If you’re using Google Alerts I’d be interested in hearing about the ways in which you use the service.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Information Management, Search Engine Optimisation , alerts, google, news, notifications, reputation management

Are You Organic or Direct?

Web analytics is a complex business and depending on how you measure traffic, you can come up with some wildly differing results. Like any kind of statistics, the raw information that you are provided with is largely neutral, it’s what you extrapolate from the data that matters.

Forget About The Home Page

I’ve recently been analysing traffic to a web site that I have been asked to redesign. The client wants to attract new clients in particular areas of business. So I’ve been measuring the extent to which their content talks about those subjects and what percentage (if any) of the traffic that comes to their site via search engines is related to keywords in these areas of business.

One thing that struck me is that the current incarnation of their site works very differently to anything that I would have designed. 80% of the traffic to their current site is direct and direct to the home page. In other words, the majority of people visit the web site because they already know about the company. Building this kind of brand recognition can be a very expensive way to grow a company and find new business.

Promote Your Products And Services, Not Your Company

On sites that I design, usually it’s the other way around, 80% of the traffic will be from a search engine and will be to a page other that the home page. To my mind that’s an indication of a healthy web site that has the potential to grow. It indicates that people are looking for services and products, finding them and potentially discovering your company as a new source of the product as well.

Or Maybe Not…

Something I saw the other night though has made me question that slightly. Some organic traffic may in actual fact be direct traffic in disguise. To truly understand why people visit your web site you’ll have to understand what traffic really is organic and therefore has been worth your investment in creating good content for your web site.

How To Analyse Types of Web Traffic

When we use analytics packages to research how visitors find our web sites we generally break visits down into three categories:

1. organic search
2. referrals
3. direct traffic

Organic search means that someone has typed a word or phrase into a search engine, you have appeared in the results and they have clicked through to your site.

A referral is when someone clicks on a link on a different web site or in an email to get to your web site.

Direct traffic is when someone types the address of a website into the address bar of the browser or clicks on the address in their favourites / bookmarks of their browser.

Direct traffic usually implies that the site is already known and therefore the site has a reasonable brand recognition. e.g. if you want to find Sony or BMW, you just type sony.com or bmw.com in to the address bar of your browser.

You do do that don’t you? That’s why companies put their domain names on posters and on adverts in magazines.

What Address Bar?

Well it would seem that not everyone does type the domain name into the address bar. In fact, I suspect most people don’t.

Now I’ve known and observed this for a long time, but always just discounted it as one of those “Why do people do that?” things (apparently they find it quicker). But the implications for web analytics has only just occurred on me.

I was watching someone book Eurostar tickets the other night. She knew that she wanted to book them via eurostar.com, she knows that eurostar.com exists, yet she opened up the browser and typed Eurostar into Google.

The first result was eurostar.com, she clicked through and proceeded to book the tickets as normal.

In analytics terms, that visit would have counted as an organic visit, but to my mind, it’s a direct visit. She knew the site she wanted to get to, she just happened to use a search engine to get there.

Discount Some Organic Traffic

So when you’re analysing your web stats look carefully at the organic traffic and perhaps think of some of the organic traffic as direct traffic. Organic traffic that could be classified as direct traffic includes things such as search engine traffic using keywords that are unique to your company e.g. your company name, a product or brand that only you provide, your domain name, the name of a member of staff.

It’s not that this isn’t good traffic to get, but if you’re serious about increasing business via your web site, you should take this kind of traffic as a given. Direct resources at the more challenging task of taking on your competitors for position in the search engines over more generic terms related to your products and services. This is where the real battle lies.

Finally, most people understand that they need to achieve better search engine results for their business to succeed, but like all things related to maintaining your web site, it’s an on going job. As your site improves in the rankings for specific terms, your competition will respond and you need to stay on top of creating fresh and relevant content.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Analytics , direct traffic, google analytics, organic search, referrals, Web Analytics, web stats

Niches Are The Name Of The Game

The web excels in connecting niche groups and provides the opportunity to be found no matter how obscure your interest.

There’s a lesson here for all of us that manage web sites. We too often focus on the home page of a web site and the broad, all encompassing search terms that we think our potential visitors will use. When we take a closer look at the stats though it’s usually very precise terms that bring visitors to specific pages on our web sites other than the home page.

I stumbled upon a site today called the Yamaha Snowblower Fan Club which is “A forum for fans of Yamaha Snowblowers including the YS624 and YS828. Discussions about finding parts, getting repairs, and performing service and routine maintenance.”

Wow, it doesn’t get more niche than that. Good luck to them!

UPDATE: Since posting this, I seem to be getting some traffic from people looking for snowblowers (I guess it is Winter after all). You can find the snowblower fan club here.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Search Engine Optimisation , fora, forums, key words, niche, seo, snowblowers, yamaha