It is important to remember that these are what manual raters are asked to look for. Machine learning algorithms like Panda are completely separate, but both manual raters and the Panda classifier are probably working to roughly the same goals.

Raters are given a query and a location and are then asked to rate pages for that particular query and location based on the presumed user intent for a particular query. Each sites gets one of the following ratings: Vital, Useful, Relevant, Slightly Relevant, Off-Topic or Useless, and Unrateable.

Sites can also be flagged as Spam, Pornography and Malicious.

Raters are expected to evaluate local intent based on the query location and query itself.

Based on screenshots within the document, a number of raters will rate a particular query/page and they are supported by administrators and moderators.

Here are some highlights.

Six Months From Now, Lists Will Be a Spam Signal

The document identifies a class of queries called “queries that ask for a list.” So go spam it to death.

After typing a query, the search engine user sees a result page. You can think of the results on the result page as a list. Sometimes, the best results for “queries that ask for a list” are the best individual examples from that list.The page of search results itself is a nice list for users.

A landing page that provides links to many good individual results can also be very helpful to users.

“Queries that ask for a list” may be typed in singular or plural form. For example, the query may be [bank], English (US) or [banks], English (US)

The document lists credit cards, banks, bikes, airlines hotels and London Boutiques as examples of queries that ask for a list.

So now everyone will be running to create lists for this sort of query which will quickly make lists a negative quality signal forcing Google to focus on providing the list in the search results page rather than ranking pages with comprehensive lists.

The Relationship between Ratings and Spam

Spam flags do not depend on a relationship between the query and the landing page. A page should get a Spam flag if it is created using deceptive techniques – no matter what the query is or how helpful the page might be…

In some specific cases, it is also possible for a page to receive a Vital rating, and also be assigned a Spam flag.

This isn’t really a big surprise, but it shows how big sites like JC Penny and BMW can spam Google and get away with it because they also get Vital or Relevant ratings for a lot of queries.

Keyword Stuffing

Not that I’ve ever felt the need to stuff a page full of keywords, but for clients that need some convincing…

“We ask you to assign a Spam flag if you think the number of keywords on the page is excessive and would be annoying and distracting to the real user.” p. 99

and, somewhat more interestingly

“URLs may also contain keyword stuffing. These URLs are computer-generated based on the words in the query and are often formatted with many hyphens (dashes) in them. They are a strong spam signal.” p. 99

Sneaky Redirects

Redirects to domains under different registrants is a spam signal.

If you are changing domain names, make sure you use the same registrant for both domain names. This is a particular danger for freelancers who start under their own name and then create a proper business entity or businesses that change names.

What is Spam

Most of the answers shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but I thought the below technical definitions to be quite instructive.

Feed-driven sites with PPC ads are a no-no.

“A page that just contains freely available feeds and PPC ads, and was created just to make money, is spam.” p. 102

And raters are asked to watch for template-driven sites that use keyword suggestion tools to generate related pages.

Some websites use templates to mass-reproduce webpages automatically. The content is usually copied from sources that provide such content. You will learn to recognize templates, which usually follow a generic format or pattern. Look for slight keyword variations that suggest automated use of a keyword suggestion tool. p. 103

Not all Affiliates are Thin

I know a lot of people are struggling with Google’s definition of “Thin Affiliate.” So, straight from the behemoth’s mouth…

Some affiliates are created to help users. Anyone can become an “affiliate” of merchant sites such as Amazon and link to Amazon products. Webmasters may do this to show products they like or to help users find a good deal.

For example, if the affiliate offers price comparison functionality, or displays product reviews, recipes, lyrics, etc., it is usually not a thin affiliate, and, therefore, not spam. Some websites that offer price comparisons or other helpful shopping features, in addition to the affiliate link p. 106.

The lesson here is to be a good website first and an affiliate second. I know, it’s not a great revelation, but it’s worth repeating.

Unique Content is King, Or at Least it is not Spam

Some webpages with content are created just for the purpose of putting ads on them; writers are paid by spammers to create articles on a wide range of topics. Often the articles are very generic and don’t provide a lot of good information, but they are original. You won’t find the articles on another website. Although you may be convinced that the intent is to deceive, if the content makes sense and appears to be original, you will not be able to assign a Spam flag to such pages. You will have to use your judgment. p. 107

Of course, having unique low quality content can still get you a low rating, you just won’t get a spam flag.

Phishing≠Malicious

Ooh boy, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I know it will make some people very angry. But I don’t often see Phishing sites in Google, so should I care about what they tell manual raters?

This landing page should make users (and raters) very suspicious and cautious. The spelling and grammar are bad and unprofessional, and the page feels “spammy”. What is most worrisome is that the page asks for the user’s bank password and pin number!

Even though we would not want to interact with the page, this type of phishing does not go against the Webspam Guidelines and the page should not be flagged as spam or malicious. p. 108

Conclusion, as in Google’s Conclusion, Not my Own

Remember to look at the page as a whole. Spam pages usually have some of these characteristics:

• PPC ads are usually very prominent on the page, and it is obvious that the page was created for them.
• If you do a text search, you will find that the content has been copied.
• If you visually remove all of the spam elements from the page (PPC ads and copied content), there is nothing of any value remaining

Good pages usually have these characteristics:

• The page is well-organized. There may be ads on the page, but they are well identified and not distracting.
• If you do a text search, the original page is usually the first result displayed.
• The page will have value to the user. A good search engine would want the page in a set of search results

I laughed at the good pages have ads that are not distracting part. So basically every single newspaper site in the world is a bad site for those terrible flyover ads.

I found this document on another site, it is not available at that site anymore. If you are looking for the document, I recommend you take an excerpt from this post and search for it in quotes in either Bing or, if you love irony, Google. Please don’t ask me for the document.

Photo Credit: Brent Moore via Flickr

Highlights from the Leaked 2011 Google Rating Guidelines by SEO on Tap

I’ve also been thinking about how Google+ changes SEO and wanted to expand on Chappell’s post with a few thoughts of my own.

Profiling SEOs is Simple Thanks to Google+

It’s not news that Google profiles SEOs and puts their projects under enhanced scrutiny. Google tries to discount viral link building by SEOs while allowing viral links by non-SEOs.

Well, now Google has it really easy. Even if you avoid self-identifying as an SEO in your online presence, if you are on Google+ and a friend puts you in their SEO circle, then you’ve got your own three scarlet letters.

If I were half as smart as I think I am, I’d have a Cafe Press link here selling “Friends don’t add friends to their Google+ SEO circle” t-shirts and mugs.

Google Gets to Find Subject Matter Experts

How does an SEO expert look on Google+? They probably get put in a high proportion of the Circles labeled SEO.

Now when one of these experts uses a +1 button, tweets or links to another document with a related keyword, Google would be well-advised to give that document some more weight.

If I were a betting man, and I am so pony up, Google would give expert opinions extra weight in image and video search until they can do a better job of indexing audio and non-text content.

Of course, if you want to be identified as an SEO expert, you have to contradict my previous advice and identify yourself as an SEO. As an SEO, if you described your relationship to Google on Facebook, it would definitely be “it’s complicated.”

Profiling Authors Becomes Easier

Google has already shown enough interest in giving content creators reputation scores and ranking documents that they have already published a patent on ranking authors.

Let Circles identify the subject matter experts, then combine this information with the agent rank patent and the recent Google-Bing schema.org agreement and you can confidently rank and boost the best authors.

The only real obstacle I see is spammers using schema.org markup to identify their documents as being written by better known authors in the subject area. If you see Google encouraging you to link your own content across domains from you Google + profile, then you know they are struggling with it.

More Anti-Spam

Chappell talks about creating networks of social media accounts to artificially inflate social signals, but there is more to anti-spam than just that.

Setting up multiple sites to manipulate search results also gets a lot more difficult if trusted sites are expected to be owned by a well-networked Google+ account while not associated with the other spam sites.

Google is a long way away from making a Google+ account mandatory because they can’t be dropping small businesses with a minimal web-presence, but if a site smells funny and isn’t owned by somewhat active Google+ account, then there’s a good chance that it is spam.

In fact, I fully expect the next generation of Black Hat SEO to include third-party social media services that employ hundreds of third-world social media account owners to Tweet, +1 and Like so that black/grey sites can benefit from social media signals without being tied to a narrow set of IP addresses or end URLs.

Let me know how you think Google Plus changes SEO in the comments.

More on How Google Plus Changes SEO by SEO on Tap

The great news is that you can see in Google which queries are returning synonyms and use this information to find synonyms that can rank you for the maximum number of key phrases.

Have a look at these results for “configure remote desktop” in Google.

The first thing to look at is the number of results returned (labeled “1″ in the image). If Google returns results in the millions for a long-tail search term, there is a good chance you are looking at search results that have been expanded through synonyms.

The next thing to do is to look for highlighted synonyms (labeled “2″ in the image) in the SERPs. While the example just goes to page 1, you will sometimes need to go deeper than the first page to find query expansion via synonyms.

For this particular query, “enable,” “setup,” and “set up” are all synonyms that Google is using. Because Google is checking for synonyms and it is returning millions of results, this query is being expanded with synonyms. For more competitive queries, you won’t see any query expansion.

The optional third step is to check the Google cache of these pages to see if the synonym candidate appears anywhere on the page. The reason we check the Google cache rather than the actual page is that if a page is ranking for a term because of backlinks, then Google shows a message at the top of the cache page.

In this particular example, the third document is ranking for configure because of anchor text from links pointing to the page. Configure does not appear anywhere on the page hosting the YouTube video and a number of the results in the bottom of page 1 only have the term way down in the text.

All results in this set either have configure on the page somewhere or in links pointing to the page except for the video search results which would suggest that synonyms are even more powerful when optimizing for video.

The next step is to swap out the synonyms in the query to see if we can find a key phrase that is getting enough volume not to need query expansion. What you are looking for is key phrases that are not being expanded by synonyms.

Based on this data, set up remote desktop is the most competitive term as it returns the highest number of pages without query expansion. While it would be advisable to have configure, setup and enable appear on the page, you can rank for these terms with links.

One thing to note, “set up,” “setting up” and “setup” are all highlighted in the “set up remote desktop” and “setup remote desktop” data sets. This is not query expansion via synonyms, but rather an example of query expansion via stemming.

There are few interesting points with this data set. The first is that in “set up remote desktop” SERPs, “set” always appears adjacent to “up” in some form or another.

This can’t always be the case because if they were truly equal, then they would return roughly the same number of documents, but “set up” returns 14,500,000 while “setup” returns less than half the number documents. The reason is likely that documents where “set” and “up” appear separately are also included in the “set up remote desktop” count; however, Google doesn’t show any results past 1000, so it is impossible to check with this query.

One really interesting query that shows how awesome Google is is “set remote desktop up” which properly stems with “set up,” “setting up” and “setup.”

As SEOs, we should note that “set remote desktop up” doesn’t appear as an exact match anywhere in the search results, or at least not in the top dozen or so pages. So not only is optimizing for mis-spelled words no longer effective, but optimizing for bad grammar doesn’t work anymore either.

In the previous Query Forensics post on synonyms, the data used the same number of keywords and better illustrates the pattern of higher-volume key phrases returning fewer results because of the lower-volume key phrases getting expanded through synonyms.

In this data set, “cycling routes netherlands” gets the highest volume of searches, but it returns the fewest documents. So the best target in this set is “cycling routes netherlands” while trails and paths can either be secondary on-page targets or in backlinks.

Key Takeaways

The technique doesn’t work for every query and in many cases I can’t figure out why one query returns more documents than another. However, for sufficiently long-tail and low-volume queries, the highest-volume key phrase is usually the one that returns the most documents while not showing signs of query expansion via synonyms.

Google can detect and fix poorly formed grammar and pages with poorly formed grammar exactly matching the searcher’s poorly formed search will not be returned.

Pages can rank via synonyms if the SERPs page is showing query expansion via synonyms, but you will probably need links with that synonym. It is still better to have the synonym present on the page.

Image Credit: gorbould

Query Forensics: Choosing the Right Synonyms for Long-Tail Key Phrases by SEO on Tap

You see, Google+ is a social network and they don’t really want it to be exclusive, but they are trying to generate false scarcity to get the type of early adopter upon whom the early success of Google+ depends excited and invested in the product.

The people who got the early invites, whether directly from Google or in several degrees from these first invites, are going to feel special. It’s a natural reaction when you are part of an exclusive club.

Also the fact that you have to put in some effort to get an invite means that the early adopters will be more invested in the product than they would if it were easier to join Google+.

In essence, they are using an involvement device to make the early adopters more committed to the social network.

The classic example of an involvement device is the stamps in the old Publishers’ Clearing House bulk mail. Each catalogue came with a set of stamps that were meant to be pasted on select locations within the catalogue.

It may seem like quite innocent and silly, but by getting the catalogue recipients more invested in the catalogue, Publishers’ Clearing House increased conversions and became a classic case study for copywriters and marketers.

Doubters might point out that Google frequently soft-launches products to a limited user base. But Google+ is a social network and you’re going to need a committed group of users sharing on the network.

And who better than the heaviest web users?

As for the actual Google+ service…I like the ability to choose which circle you communicate with which is great for keeping friends and work separate. I like the privacy controls. But I’m not sure I want Google to know more about me.

Google+ Launch Strategy Features Classic Persuasion Techniques by SEO on Tap

When Google indexes web pages, it stores both the URLs of pages that contain a particular word and keyword position information. To better understand how exact-match terms and synonyms affect SERPs, we’ll map their positions in the target document similar to how Google might index the document using the following notation: T+ = in title; T- = stem in title; Ts- = synonym in title; B+ = prominent in the body; B- = present in the body; Bs = absent from body, but a synonym is present; url = in URL; A = in backlink anchor text (when not otherwise present on page). PA and DA stand for Page Authority and Domain Authority via SEOmoz.

Google could certainly store more information, for instance separating the keyword in the domain from the keyword URL path or mapping the keyword in hx tags and strong tags, but I don’t want this to get any more complex than it already is. Also, Google has only stated that they store information about where the term appears on a page in its posting lists, query expansion through synonyms could occur separately from the posting list that stores exact-match keyword data.

The first query we look at is Cycling Trails Netherlands (guess what I’m planning on doing for my holidays).

The terms Cycling and Netherlands are obviously very important while synonyms seem to carry as much weight as Trails.

The lone page that is hyper-optimised for this query (http://en.wikiloc.com/trails/cycling/netherlands) doesn’t do very well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this site were hit by Panda and I suggest you look at it as a guide for what not to do, even though it is not as bad as many similarly over-optimized resources.

Substituting Routes for Trails (in a different browser to avoid personalised results from previous clicks) gives Cycling Routes Netherlands and it returns the same top five resources from the initial query, albeit in a different order, and six out of ten resources from the initial query appear again.

“Cycling routes Netherlands” (1,300 global monthly searches via AdWords Keyword Tool) is a more popular query term than “cycling trails Netherlands” (not enough volume to display data). As a result, documents containing the term “routes” are a lot more prominent in the search results than “trails” in the first query.

What Google may be doing, is it is requesting the posting lists for each of “cycling,” “trails,” and “Netherlands;” the query processor sees that trails returns too few documents and then looks for synonyms to include more documents. If this is the case, documents included via synonyms are clearly not penalized for not containing the overly-restrictive keyword.

This doesn’t mean that synonyms are always treated equally, only when one keyword is overly restrictive.

The more common “cycling routes Netherlands” query only returns 129,000 documents. The less common “cycling trails Netherlands” query returns 61,700,000. What this shows is that query expansion only occurs when necessary and the query processor only adds synonyms when necessary (rather than adding them automatically, but not ranking them as well).

As an SEO, you should be checking query volume against the number of documents returned by Google when deciding whether to create a new page and comparing them against other synonymous key-phrases.

If a query has a low query volume but returns a lot of documents, then look for a synonym outperforming an exact-match term in the results and target that term instead.

Based on the higher number of documents returned by the lower volume query, query expansion via synonyms in Google likely works like in the diagram below.

Synonym Query Expansion in Google

The obvious next step is to try to figure out where the threshold for synonym-based query expansion lies and what rules govern it so that we can know when to recommend creating separate pages to target synonymous keywords, when to target multiple synonyms on the same page and what synonym to choose.

Query Forensics: Beginning Look at Synonyms in Google by SEO on Tap

Next to some Google News stories you now get a “Shared By” link that you can follow to see some of the people who have shared a particular story.

If you’ve spent any time looking at these results, then you know that they don’t show accounts for all of the tweets, but you can still find the ones Google considers worth sharing by adding &tbs=mbl:1 to a Google link query.

Here’s the query for the Search Engine Journal post that first alerted me to the changes.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:http://searchengineland.com/google-web-search-gets-more-social-53255

The neat thing is that you can do this with any page in the search results, it doesn’t have to be in the Google News system. So if you want to find who are the most important social influencers for the latest post from Cracked (disclaimer: I haven’t actually checked that cracked.com is not actually in the Google News system), then all you have to do is enter the following query.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:http://www.cracked.com/article_18792_the-7-most-unintentionally-creepy-places-internet.html

All you need to do is take the following query string and add the URL you want to look up to the end.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&tbs=mbl:1&q=link:

I’m sure there are a bunch of ways to use this that I have never considered, but I know I’m planning on finding the biggest evangelists for my clients’ competitors and making sure they get extra incentive to switch loyalties.

Image credit Luc Legay.

Twitter Citations According to Google? There’s a Query String for That by SEO on Tap

Twitter Clients

Danny Sullivan has a flawed piece today titled “Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think?” The sensational headline is no doubt good for traffic and his basic information and method is good, but the numbers are way off because he has a miniscule sample size.

Google Analytics, and other analytics tools, misreport Twitter traffic because many Twitter users use desktop clients that don’t show any referrer data. When these visitors open a link from their Twitter client, they get reported as direct traffic.

Amongst the analytics community there is a debate over how exactly how much traffic gets misreported. Tweet Stats shows 52% (at the time of writing) of visits coming from the web while TwitStats shows just 61% (at the time of writing).

Danny Sullivan’s Numbers

Danny does some testing to see how much direct traffic in Google Analytics actually comes from Twitter.

His method is to tweet a link to a post tagged with tracking parameters. He then compares his properly-reported tagged links against his Google Analytics referrer data and his Bit.ly stats against his log-files to get his numbers.

His final numbers?

Google records 9 visits tagged with the tracking parameters, but just 2 of those come from Twitter (as in the web site) thus under-reporting by 450% (he rounds it to 500%, I’m cool with that).

Bit.ly records 58 clicks, but there are only 32 tagged visits in his logs. The unaccounted Bit.ly clicks are caused by url-lengthener plugins that request the Bit.ly URL so that someone can see where the shortened URL goes before clicking but don’t follow the redirect. (Bit.ly deserves props for being very up-front about the gaps in their data.)

Log-files record 32 visits tagged with tracking parameters, but just 2 of those come from Twitter (according to Google Analytics) thus under-reporting by 1600%.

Google, in response to Danny’s questions about the differences, says that they are working on some issues caused by mobile devices.

Reconciling GA’s and Bit.ly’s Numbers

I give Google’s numbers more credit than Bit.ly’s.

I get notified every time there is a 404 on one of my sites. I’ve spent a lot of time investigating, and blocking, strange requests. Digging through log files and discovering all sorts of strangeness has given me a great appreciation for how much crap that Google Analytics blocks out.

There are a ton of bots out there, both malicious and innocent, that can quickly inflate your states. GA catches most of them. As a result, I’m inclined to believe the GA numbers whenever there is a big discrepancy.

Even with under-reporting caused by issues with mobile devices, I believe Google’s numbers are closer to the actual numbers than Bit.ly’s.

The Numbers in Greater Context

Danny’s 500% is in line with TwitStats’s numbers, and what I would have guessed because I can’t imagine not using a desktop client. But I’ve got some pretty good data, from a much larger sample than Danny’s, that aligns closely with Tweet Stats’s 52% web visits.

Soon after launching this site, I had a moderately influential Twitterer tweet my post on Involvement Device CAPTCHAs, thanks Naomi.

At the time I was getting very little traffic. Out of the traffic to that post on that particlur day (shown below), only 2 pageviews entered from elsewhere on the site and there was no search traffic to that page so the data is relatively unpolluted.

Google Analytics Twitter Stats

The BeTwittered, Netvibes, and TwitterGadget traffic are all functionally Twitter traffic (bonus points to anyone who writes a filter to group all of this traffic together).

I got 45 Twitter visits with referral information (41 actual visits, plus 4 functionally Twitter visits) and no more than 51 direct visits that actually came from Twitter. Because I was just starting up, I was getting practically no direct traffic and I’d already filtered out my own visits so nearly all, if not all, of these visits actually came from Twitter.

47% of my Twitter visits come from the web and show up in my Google Analytics stats. My Twitter stats are under-reported by about 200%.

It is impossible for this particular post to be under-reported by the 500% that Danny reports simply because all of my direct visits are already presumed (and likely) to be actually from Twitter.

Explaining the Differences

Why is there such a big difference between my numbers and Danny’s?

Here’s a hint. He’s only working with 2 Twitter visits in Google Analytics. If he had just one more visit reported in GA, his headline would be 300% to 1000% instead of 500% to 1600%. Compared with my 45 Twitter visits, his sample size is just too small.

Even though my experiment was accidental while Danny did a better job of setting up the experiment by tagging links and comparing tagged values, my larger data set on a page with less noise makes my data better.

The 47% of visits coming from the web on my post is also a lot closer to the TwitStat and Tweet Stats numbers which use an even better sample size.

Photo Credit: The Next Web

Is Google Analytics Really Under-Reporting Twitter Traffic by 500%? by SEO on Tap

Taxonomies in WordPress Edit-Post Sidebar

Taxonomies in WordPress are categorized tags. They are useful if you find yourself adding a class of tags over and over, like ingredients on a recipe blog. WordPress 2.8 includes updates that make the hidden taxonomy features easier to use.

I’ve set taxonomies up on my home-brewing blog, Life With Beer, where I have taxonomies for malts, hops, yeast strains, and adjuncts (weird stuff in beer like fruit, spices, and mushrooms). I also sometimes write about local craft-brewed beer, so I also have a craft-brew taxonomy that I use for micro-breweries and brew-pubs.

As an example of how you can use taxonomies to expand your blog to include information that visitors and search engines will love, I’ll be using a post from Life With Beer about kelp beer. (The link takes you to the end of the post where the taxonomies are listed. At the time of writing, it’s the only post where I’m using taxonomies, but it’s enough to illustrate the idea.)

To start using taxonomies, you need to dig through the WordPress Codex to find the relevant functions and add them to your theme. Or you can use Joost de Valk’s taxonomy plugin.

By default, the taxonomy pages look just like your regular tag pages, which is kind of boring, and at best will help a small percentage of visitors navigate your site. But, with just a little extra information on the taxonomy page you can create pages of keyword-rich useful information that visitors and search engines will love.

Taxonomies Linking Brewing Recipes with Ingredients

Coding Your Thesis Taxonomy Pages

Thesis doesn’t do well creating a page title for taxonomy pages, so the first thing we need to do is fix that.

Right under the title, we want to add some extra introductory content. To do that we’re going to roll our own WordPress query that only gets a post with the same page name as the taxonomy slug and print it out.

Since I want all of this to be grouped together, I’m putting it in the same function and using the bottom-border of #archive_info to separate it from the list of posts that are associated with the tag.

The second function creates text that introduces the list of posts that are associated with the taxonomy.

Read through the code comments, because there’s are a couple of areas that need special attention.

function custom_taxonomy_intro(){
	global $wp_query, $thesis;
	if ( is_tax() ) {	
	
/*
 * get taxonomy variables that we'll	use
 * to create a page title
 * and query the database
 * for information stored in a private post
*/	
		$taxonomy 	= get_taxonomy ( get_query_var('taxonomy') );
		$term = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
		$title = $term->name;
		$query_term = get_query_var('term');
/*
 * create headline
 * 
*/
		
		?>
		<div class="post_box top">
		<div class="headline_area">
		<h1 class="entry-title">label ;?&gt; Archive</h1>
		&lt;?php
		thesis_hook_after_headline($post_count);		
		echo "</div>";		//end headline_area

/*
 * custom WP_Query that only
 * gets pages with the same name
 * as the taxonomy term
*/

		$query='pagename='.$query_term;
		$tax_post = new WP_Query();
		$tax_post-&gt;query($query);

//Wordpress loop

		while ($tax_post-&gt;have_posts()) : $tax_post-&gt;the_post(); 
			$post_image = thesis_post_image_info('image');
						
			if ($post_image['show'] &amp;&amp; $post_image['y'] == 'before-post'){
				echo $post_image['output'];
			}

			echo "<div class='format_text entry-content'>";
			the_content();
			echo "</div>";
		endwhile;
		echo "</div>";		//end  post_box top

		
	}
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content','custom_taxonomy_intro');

function custom_taxonomy_post_list(){
	global $wp_query;
	if (is_tax()){
		$term = $wp_query-&gt;get_queried_object();
		$title = $term-&gt;name;

/*
 * create intro text
 * by concatenating text with term
 * adjust to your needs
*/

		if ( is_tax('craft-brew')){
			$pre="Posts about ";
		} else {
			$pre="Recipes that use ";
		}
	
		echo "<div><p>".$pre." ".$title.":</p></div>";	//add #taxonomy-intro to custom-css file
	}	
}

add_action('thesis_hook_archive_info','custom_taxonomy_post_list');

Notes on Taxonomy Pages

You need to create a page to hold the introductory content with the same title as the taxonomy term. This page isn’t intended to be accessed by visitors or search engines, it’s just there to hold the unique content that you’re going to use at the start of your taxonomy page.

If you’re having problems and are using post titles in your URLs, check that the last segment of the permalink for the holder page, matches the last segment of the taxonomy page URL. On Life With Beer, my matching URLs for roast barley in my malts taxonomy look like this:

Holder Page: http://www.yoursite.com/roast-barley
Taxonomy Page: http://www.yoursite.com/malts/roast-barley

SEO Issues for Taxonomy Pages

You want search engines to crawl these taxonomy pages.

To avoid duplicate content penalties, you don’t want to allow search engines to access the holder pages. The easiest way to do this is to keep these pages private. This keeps the holder pages out of search engines, stops it from popping up in standard WordPress functions, and gives a 404 error to anyone who guesses the URL (after reading this article?).

Wordpress Page Privacy Settings

The All-In-One SEO plugin treats these pages like tag pages and prevents search engines from crawling the taxonomy pages.

Thesis doesn’t recognize taxonomy pages (actually, both Thesis and All-In-One SEO both don’t recognize taxonomies, but Thesis uses a more strict function when excluding tag pages). So, even if you’re excluding search engines from your tag pages, search engines are still able to crawl your taxonomy pages which is exactly what we want.

All other things being equal, it’s better to dump the All-In-One SEO plugin and just use Thesis’s SEO functions. Alternately, bug the All-In-One SEO plugin people to add the option to decide whether to block search engines from taxonomy pages.

Thesis Custom Taxonomy Pages that Visitors and Search Engines Will Love by SEO on Tap

AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action and is a simple model of the sales process. Using just your title, description, and URL your page needs to take the searcher through the complete AIDA sales process ending with a click.

Attention

Attention is the first step. For our purposes, there are 2 basic components of attention.

First, do you even appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs)? In some cases you can control this based on the strength of your writing alone, but for competitive search terms you need to get links and other off-page ranking factors right.

Second, does your entry stand out in the SERPs and convince the searcher to click?

It is this second component that I’m going to focus on.

Give yourself one second to look at these search results for the phrase Vancouver Tourist Attractions. Which results seem immediately relevant to the search terms?

Vancouver Tourist Attraction SERPs

Here’s my analysis listed in order:

1. The 1st result gets the benefit of increased attention. People typically scan search results in an F pattern, so this result gets more attention so it’s not a big deal that the critical word, attractions, is at the end of the title.
2. An exact match at the beginning of the title makes this a clear winner.
3. Even though it’s buried in the middle of the title, the exact match still gets attention, particularly because it is sandwiched between 2 other exact matches.
4. See number 2.
5. The critical word, attractions, is buried in the description.  Not a very good title for this search.
6. All of the highlighted word in the title help, but it doesn’t really grab attention without attractions.

Which results grabbed your attention and why?

Interest

Interest takes us a little deeper. Think about how relevant each result is to the query. Do you think each page in the search results will have the information the searcher needs?

Now look at the search results again, this time giving yourself a few seconds, and decide which results are most likely to be interesting to someone who is looking for Vancouver tourist attractions. In other words, is it relevant to the search.

Vancouver Tourist Attraction SERPs

Again listed in order, my analysis:

1. The broad focus of the first search results, hotels, accommodation, and attractions, makes me think the site either doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for, or is going to make me dig for the information.
2. Without even looking at the description, adding guide to the title makes this result even more intriguing.
3. Top 10 Vancouver tourist attractions? can we say click.
4. The short, bland description is enough to make it clear that the page is relevant.
5. The title is a little too general and the comprehensive directory of Vancouver attractions seems a little too boring.
6. Vancouver Tourist Information is likely relevant to my search even though there’s no mention of attractions.

Which results do you think are most likely to be relevant to the search?

Desire

Ahh, persuasion. This is where things get interesting. Who gives the searcher a good reason to click?

Instead of listing my analysis in the order, I’ll only cover the results that give the searcher a reason to click because I want to keep things positive.

The big winners are the 2nd and 3rd results.

Our guide helps in planning where to go and what to see in Vancouver aligns with the average searcher’s goal of planning what to do while in Vancouver. It makes a concrete promise “planning where to go” with an implied, but obvious, benefit of helping me accomplish the task at hand.

A guide to the top 10 Vancouver tourist attractions! Find out the best things to see in Vancouver, what they cost, how to get there, and tips on when to … also aligns with the searcher’s goal by promising to offer the just the best in an easily digestible format. This is perfect for someone in a hurry or who doesn’t have hours to spend researching.

Both of these search results provide good reasons to click.

The 5th and 6th results are interesting because they signal credibility. In these cases, it’s their official status, as City of Vancouver and Vancouver Tourist Information, but awards, accomplishments, and testimonials can all be signs of a credible source of information.

Action

I don’t really know if it’s necessary, but there aren’t any calls to action in the search results. No one inviting the reader to learn more. A link alone may be enough of a call to action in the search results where the appropriate action is obvious and repeated regularly by anyone with a passing familiarity with the Internet. It still would be interesting to test whether calls to action in the search results encourage click-thrus.

Conclusions

1. The first result gets more attention and doesn’t need to be as sharply focused as other results.
2. The best results were either for sites about tourist attractions, or for sites that had dedicated tourist attractions pages. Focused pages do better simply because there are fewer possible searches that you need to be relevant for.
3. Make sure your critical words are in the title. For the search Vancouver Tourist Attractions, Vancouver and tourist are scoping the search while attractions really defines what the searcher wants. Look at your key phrases, figure out which words are critical and make sure these find their way into the title.
4. Just because a particular search result doesn’t work well in one situation, doesn’t mean that it is poor. Depending on how competitive your industry is, your search results ad copy will rank for a number of different searches. How narrowly you target your search results ad copy has to be a strategic decision. Including lots of different keywords will make it seem relevant to a wider range of search words attracting attention and interest at the expense of desire.

The final decision on whether to balance SEO and selling the click or using your titles and descriptions exclusively for SEO depends on your site and your resources. Giving the searcher a reason to click will help you get more clicks when you are seen, but may affect how often your search results ad copy appears and gets attention.

If you have the budget for lots of separate pages of content, then each page can have a narrow SEO focus which gives you more words to use for selling.

If you have a small site in a non-competitive market, then you can probably do very well with broadly focused SEO and limit your efforts at persuasion; if there’s no competition, you don’t really need to convince the searcher your the best, only that you have what they are looking for.

I’m sure I’m missing other factors, so please let me know in the comments.

Image credit: fs999.

Winning Clicks in Search Results Pages by SEO on Tap

Bold? yes. Interesting? sure. Successful? not a chance.

The problem with both Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo?’s new direction is that if they suck, they’re going to fail, and if they rock, they’re going to fail.

Let’s pretend Wolfram Alpha improves to the point where it works well for most queries and Yahoo? is able to do the same. Let’s even extend the fantasy to the point where both search engines gain traction and a large market share.

What’s going to happen? Most content producers are going to lose the incentive to produce good content.

Search engines crawl the web getting free content, skirting the fringe of copyright by allowing webmasters to block them if they choose, and in exchange they send free traffic to the content producers who are able to make money by selling crap or showing ads for crap.

A successful Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo? won’t be sending the content producers free traffic, they’ll take the best content while preventing the people who create the content from profiting.

Dead-tree media companies already howl about Google crawling their and making it accessible to people even though they get preferential treatment. Stop giving them their cut and get ready to see them unleash the dogs of law before finally going all dinosaur on the world.

While Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo? are fighting, and losing, legal challenges, there’s only one realistic outcome. Content producers are going to block Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo? from crawling their sites.

It may be killing a great and useful idea, but, if someone can kill the electric car, then killing these two seems rather trivial and profitable.

Photo Credit: Moore Fun

Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo!: Destined for Failure by SEO on Tap