I work with many small businesses with varying levels of technical capability at their disposal. Businesses with few employees often have no IT support. The problem is that today’s business environment virtually requires the use of email.
On the surface email is simple. You sign-up for a Gmail, Yahoo or AOL account. You send and receive. No big whoop. Every once in a while, however, you may not receive someone’s email, or they may not receive your’s. Maybe there is a certain person you cannot correspond with, because the emails never make it to the other’s inbox.
The problem is, this kind of inconsistency in a business situation can make you look unreliable, or even incompetent. You may even be missing golden business opportunities because you are not receiving all the inquiries that area being sent to you. In order to avoid these problems, you need to understand a little more about how email works.
The primary reason that email messages don’t make it to their intended recipients is spam filtering. Spam is a huge problem and expense for internet companies to deal with. There are two ways that companies that manage email servers attempt to reduce the number of spam messages that make it to your inbox:
- By rejecting the message at the server level
- By use of spam filtering software
Both of these methods can also filter out messages that you really want to receive. There isn’t much you can do about spam filtering at the server level. You should, however, have control of the spam filtering software, and be using the following practices to manage it:
- Set the spam filter to save all suspected spam to the spam folder. NEVER set it to automatically delete suspected spam.
- Review the messages in your spam folder on a regular basis, and then delete.
- Add all known contacts to your “white list” or “safe senders” list. This will keep the spam filter from blocking or diverting any messages from these senders. Some email clients will automatically white list all addresses in an associated contacts address book. You may need to specifically add addresses to your white list. To properly implement this practice, you will need to find out how your email client handles white listing.
In addition to receiving mail, here are some best practices for sending:
- Avoid using free email addresses for business correspondence. To more tech savvy business people, this looks unprofessional.
If you have your own website and domain name:
- Make sure that you have a dedicated IP address for your website. Otherwise your messages may be flagged as being from an unreliable source, and either be rejected by the recipient’s mail server, or end up in their spam folder (which they probably never check)
- Consider using a third party email service to manage your email. This can be a little more expensive, but is much more reliable than using free or cheap solutions.
Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:
8. Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
You may have noticed, that images are showing up on a wider variety of SERPs. I have some blogs that get most of their traffic from image search, so selecting quality images and properly tagging them is of the uttmost importance. Here’s what I recommend:
- Include keywords in the filename
- Include keywords in the img “Alt” tag (important for the visually impaired visitors as well)
- Include keywords in the img “Titile” tag
- Use microdata and create a Rich Snippet
Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:
Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
A translation from this French SEO Expert points out that Top Level Domains (TLD) are the best identifiers of the country that the content of a website is intended for. It would follow that Google would want to keep up with the most recent TLD data.
Having worked on sites that have targeted Japan and mainland China, I can attest to the fact that getting country-specific domain names isn’t always easy if your business is not based in those places. To those of use who got by targeting those countries without the advantage of the appropriate TLD, our work might have gotten harder. Probably, though, this is just a clean-up, rather than a tweak that puts more weight on those country-specific TLDs.
I am, in fact, set to relaunch one such site in the coming weeks. I’ll update the blog with any new information I gain. In the meantime, anyone in a similar situation who is having problems as a result of this update, please comment!
Troy Philis
Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:
More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
Google (or at least their CEO, Eric Schmidt) sees Brands as the way to sort out the cesspool that is the internet. So making sure that the official pages, especially of big brands, are properly identified, should be a priority of Google’s search algorithm.
As this seo blogger points out, the change is probably aimed at sites that attempt to identify themselves as official pages, but aren’t, thus taking advantage of that boost in ranking that Google gives to official pages. If your site attempts this, your ranking may have been hurt, and rightfully so. Most SMBs (small or medium sized businesses) were probably unaffected by this particular tweak.
Just a quickie! I’m using the ITPShare toolbar, which is a cool Joomla extension that displays social networking icons on one of my Joomla Websites. The extension is a module. It worked great, but with IE set to display JavaScript errors, I was getting and error from the code in that module. A quick search on Google brought me to this forum. Although the forum was for another extension that I wasn’t running, the solution worked.
Basically, all I had to do was disable the following parameters in the module, under Advanced Parameters:
Facebook Root Div: NO
Load Facebook JS library: NO
Everything else works, and no error! Thanks
Google “Suggest” is one of the 40 search quality updates Google implemented last month.
5. More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
Suggesting queries as you are typing in the query box has two main purposes
- For you, the searcher, it can save you time, as you may see the full search query displayed among the suggestions as you type.
- It helps Google direct searchers towards the more popular search queries, which are the “suggestions” it gives.
It is likely that if you see something close to what you started to type, you’ll click on it rather than complete your originally intended query. If you fail to see helpful suggestions, you’ll complete your own query.
Now the suggestions for YouTube will have a local component, and serve up suggestions that are more relevant based on the location Google believes you to be searching from. More relevant suggestions means there is more chance that you will click on one, and that is what Google would like you to do.
Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates:
4. More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
Not a big deal in itself, as far as I’m concerned. The most interesting detail is the mention of Google’s use of “rich snippets” that supplement the display of images for things like recipes, applications, movie posters and shopping results. Rich snippets are basically a method of tagging data and relating it to a type of information. For example declaring this in a tag itemtype=”http://schema.org/Recipe” tells Google that the information is related to a recipe, and further specifying predefined attributes such as “cookTime” and “photo” gives Google the information they need to confidently display that information and the image, knowing that it will make sense to the user.
Google’s preferred rich snippet format is microdata. Web developers can create a wide variety of rich snippets and test them using rich snippets testing tool.
And of course rich snippets have potential for search engine performance. Here’s a great article on using rich snippets for SEO.
Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent search quality updates:
#3. Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
This update is closely related to the previous updated item “2. Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks.” Apparently duplicate snippets were a big problem, and an additional step was taken to eradicate them. By basing the snippets more on the page content, and less on the search query, less duplication is expected. So I take it that when pulling up the same site in number one position using different search queries, where sitelinks are generated, they should now be more consistent and less prone to duplication. Ok Google, I’ll have to take your word for it. Less duplication should be an overall win for the searcher and webmaster alike.
Continuing with the series of posts covering Google’s announced Search Quality Updates in February 2012:
Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
Google was apparently having a problem with the way it automatically created Sitelinks for websites. If you are unfamiliar with the term “Sitelinks,” they are the 6 or so links to subpages listed after the top result, of the search results where Google is pretty sure that the top result stands out above the rest in relevance. Here’s an example:
Please note that personalization does play a factor in the display of Sitelinks. Google is much more certain to display them for sites you have shared on Google Plus.
Snippets are the description portion of Google search results, under the linked page title that you click on, and above the display URL. Google uses these snippets as clues to the content of the target page when deciding which pages to include in the Sitelinks. Since the occurrence of Sitelinks has noticeably increased of late, especially for those who use Google Plus, Google was apparently seeing a lot of problems in duplication with the algorithm they were using to create them. As lower quality websites built on open source CMS systems started getting Sitelinks, their tendency to create pages with duplicate meta description tags was probably a big part of the problem. Now Google says they have to problem fixed. Bully for them!
Google has recently announced 40 updates to it’s search functionality that are supposed to improve the quality of searches and provide added value to searchers. Anyone who has followed Google’s updates for any length of time is aware that the real reason behind updates is generally to make more money for Google. If improving quality and adding value for searchers happens as a serendipitous side effect, enjoy!
Over the next 40 days I’ll try to dig into each announced change and highlight the most salient aspects from the perspective of a small to medium size business trying to get some traffic to their website through organic search.
#1: More coverage for related searches.
[launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
The “searches related to” section is found at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) and is comprised of a list of eight related search terms. Clicking on a search term will bring you to a new SERP for that term.
- How does this help you as a searcher? If, after reaching the bottom of the results page, you haven’t clicked on anything, Google thinks maybe you used the wrong search term, and is offering some popular terms it feels is related.
- How does this help Google? For one thing, Google has the opportunity to push you to a popular SERP, which in terms of it’s Adwords PPC program, is a more competitive page, with more expensive clicks.
- How does this hurt the small business? People who click on those links won’t be going to Page 2. This becomes increasingly important as Google fills the SERPs with it’s own content and redesigns pages that push more organic results off of Page 1.
With the increase of the number of queries that the “searches related to” will appear on, these effects will obviously become more prevalent. In the end this feature gives Google an opportunity to control where a lost searcher goes, which is primarily good for Google.
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