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Google Question #4 How do I know if Google "gets" my site?

In previous posts I looked at why Google is so successful, the concept of PageRank, and how to improve PageRank.

No less important than PageRank, when it comes to performing well in Google, are the visible and invisible words on a Web page. By visible, I mean the words in a headline on a page, the words in a caption, and the words in the text on a page. By invisible, I mean those words that are hidden in "tags" -- visible to the browser and Google but not to you or a site visitor, unless you know where to look. 

When Google sends software called a "spider" out onto the Web, where it sucks up all the new pages it can find, and then deposits them back at Google. Then Google's search algorithm tries to make sense out of what the spider brought home. That's when words count. Poorly chosen words can sideline your pages, and they won't turn up well in search results. So how do I know if Google understand what my site and my pages are all about?

It's all about using the right words in the right places. Here are three critical ways that word choice comes into play.

The first is pretty obvious, even if it's often ignored: use words that most people use in normal conversation. Be clear, detailed and literal. Here are three headlines for a fishing report:

• Monstah stripahs stormin the sound
• Nice fish for all last night
• Huge striped bass everywhere in Nantucket Sound and Vineyard Sound

The first two strike out. Why? Because when people are searching for fishing reports, no one thinks silly or cute, they think in clear, literal terms. This is conclusively documented in lots of research. Google doesn't know what a "monstah stripah" is because no one types in that search query, even in Boston, where they actually talk that way.

If the first headline is too obscure, the second is general. "Nice fish" could relate to anything anywhere, from fish markets to pet stores, to Rotarian fish fries. It's nowhere.

The last one is textbook. The details are concrete, specific and clear. And the words are in line with what people actually use when they search for information. So when it comes to the text in your headlines and anything else you write on your site, keep it specific and clear. You'll be rewarded for that.

The second important elementare those words you can't see, which is the information embedded in the tags on your page. Actually, you can see it, but you have do a little footwork: go to your browser's View drop-down menu and select Source. The page you were just looking at in the browser suddenly turns into a tangle of strange computer-speak that looks like this:

Most of this is the "mark-up" language known as HTML that tells a browser what should appear on a page and how it should look. Some of the information contained in "tags" is very important to Google. First and foremost is the title tag, which is a phrase containing, again, very specific words that describe the page's content. For example:

<title>World Record Bass Watch: The Latest on Japans Giant Largemouth <title> (From a Field & Stream article, and a bit abbreviated)

The title tag is one way Google tries to understand the content of a page, and it's also what Google uses in the first line of the search result:

In addition to the title tag, there is the meta description tag, which typically contains a couple of sentences elaborating on the content of the page. Google sometimes uses this text for the "snippet" on the search results page beneath the title tag, so it's important. For more on this, Google has a handy explanation and tool.

In addition to headline and hidden tags, there is the url of the page itself. Older websites are often build on technology that automatically generated urls with long strings of unintelligible characters, like this:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1911882,00.html

They made sense to the software but no one else. More modern Web publishing systems make use of a page name to help create the url, like this:

http://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/fishing/bass-fishing/where-fish-bass/2009/07/world-record-bass-watch-latest-japans-giant-la  (The contender, by the way is a 22-pound, 5-ounce giant. Drop this url into your browser to see a picture at F&S.)

Google likes those more consumer-friendly urls. If your publishing system doesn't generate them, you should consider moving to a new system.

What I've explained in this post are the core basics. They should enable you to analyze your own site, and ask your webmaster some probing questions. If you'd like to read more, Google has a very valuable, free document online called Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which is a must read if you want to become expert on subjects like title tags and meta description tags. It's very helpful and easy to follow. You can download it from this help page at Google, which is also chock full of useful information.

And, in case you were wondering, GoFishn.com will address most of these issues search related issues automatically -- and we'll even let you choose your own url. Whether you write striped bass or stripahs in the headline of a fishing report, however, will be your call.

Thoughts on FlyFishMap.com

The fact that Google (and to a lesser extent Yahoo and Microsoft) makes map information available to all takers online free-of-charge (techies call this an "open API") has been a good deal for creative thinkers online. Tens of thousands of sites incorporate Google maps to illustrated location-based info and other day-to-day stuff. More ambitious sites use Google maps to provide the main attraction. Some more impressive examples include Backpacker, WalkJogRun, MapMyRide and Trails.com, all of which add data to Google maps to create a sort of Google maps plus. WalkJogRun, for example, let's you create a detailed street map of your running course, and calculates your average speed based on how long it took you to cover the distance. And you can share that with other runners and so on.

These sites work pretty well, but are pretty small in terms of visitors, with well under 100,000 viewers per month, according to Compete. The one exception is Trails.com, which averages close to 1 million visitors a month, but even that's not so big considering how central "location" is to so many activities. Maps are not yet a mainstream function on the Web, like, say, search.

Which brings me to FlyFishMap, a site that launched in April and uses Google maps to organize every sort of information about flyfishing -- fisheries locations, blog posts, guide outfits, and so on. It's a good start on cool idea: find everything you want about flyfishing by navigating a map full of markers from anglers in the know. Cool, yes, but hard to make work well in practice, as we've discovered ourselves in the course of developing and testing GoFishn.com.

Here's how Flyfishmap works: You are greeted on the homepage by a map of the world, and you start by clicking on your desired continent to see what's been posted. One click brings you to North America, which looks like this:

The numbers indicated that there are several icons on the map, and that you need to zoom in farther to see them all. Do that, and the map looks more like the second image below.

Then if you click on a marker, and there are many, many types of markers, information pops up in a nicely designed viewer, which you can see in the third picture.

So far so good, but as one earlier adopter of FlyFishMap noted to me, what happens when someone drops a marker on the same spot where you already dropped a marker? This already happened to him, and he's not happy. It's not a new issue with map-based information interfaces; call it the info ghetto problem. Map surfaces, at least as they appear in a browser, are finite in size. In fact they are really small.  But the information that can be attached to a particular lat/lon is almost infinite.

Here's the dilemma for a site that organizes information solely on a map: The more successful information a site like FlyFishMap collects, the harder it becomes to use.

Most sites that allow users to place lots of markers end up with the marker clutter you see on the image below.

To its credit, FlyFishMap provides filters that allow a user to select which makers they want to see -- say guides but not blog posts -- which can help help manage the info ghetto problem. It's pretty clear and well put together, but even so it will take the casual user time to figure it out. Took me several passes. 

The trouble is that people who use the Web are used to a few standard controls on the page, like the hyperlink and the back buton, and they often stumble on what they have not seen before, even if the instructions are perfectly clear. One of the web's best interface designers, Steve Krug, wrote a great book on this subject, and the title sums up the problem and the goal: "Don't Make Me Think." That's the problem with most map interfaces: you have to think to use them. In general consumers have not really gotten the hang of how to manipulate a map online.

There are other limitations to the map-centric  organization of information, and it will be interesting to watch FlyFishMap work through them over time. They are off to a good start, and hats off to their imaginative initiative. At GoFishn, we'll use maps too, only in a more selective way, as a sort of tool to complement to lots of other information.  We'll try not to make visitors "think" too hard!

Real time search: what it means to small businesses

For years the big gripe against search engines was how far BEHIND they always were. The most recent content in search results was often weeks or months old. In recent years Google has tightened up the time lag, and now I often see posts from blogs and news sites that are sometimes just hours old.

But suddenly Google is getting even more ambitious. The buzz is all about "real-time" search results -- content that turns up in Google almost as soon as it gets published to the Web.  Google's founders have said that they are pushing hard in this area, and it shows in Google's results of late. Posts from this humble blog, for example, turn up very quickly.

The reason for the push is Twitter, which has become a sort of grassroots source for vast amounts of real time information on both the trivial -- what's on tomorrow's school exam -- and the crucial -- news tidbits from eyewitnesses to the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Iranian demonstrations. Twitter offers a search engine that taps into Twitter "tweets" pretty much up the second, and Google, in a sense, has a bit of Twitter envy. Why? The blog TechCrunch has a thoughtful post on the subject with a heavy-duty quote from one of the pioneers in this area: "Real time taps into consciousness, search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

That's a highfalutin way of saying that it would be great if search could reveal what's on people's minds a heartbeat ago -- as opposed to a few days ago.

News organizations will rejoice because they've always wanted Google to capture their news stories in real time, instead of days after the fact. Or will they? If Google captures a New York Times story as soon as its published, it will also capture tons of related content from posts and possibly Twitter tweets as well. Google's search pages are going to get a whole lot more crowded, and staying on top may get even harder, even for a big, important newspaper.

So what does this mean for fishing guides, charter operators and outfitters? Look at it this way: if you have a website that doesn't change much, then your site's visibility will start to sink beneath the ever advancing tide of blog posts, fishing reports, and, eventually, tweets that flood your corner of the market. Go to Twitter.com and type in "bass" or "trout." There are posts from a few seconds ago. Maybe you'll buy search to try to keep your business above water, but that gets expensive.

The best answer, and the most cost effective, is to generate your own Google-friendly hubbub by posting regular fresh material, such as fishing reports, photo galleries and so on, and plugging that into Twitter and Facebook (time to sign up if you haven't).

If that sounds daunting, then don't worry: GoFishn.com will make it easy. And it's coming soon.

By the way, you can follow me in Twitter @neddesmond and Ned.Desmond on Facebook.

Google Question #3: How do I make my PageRank grow?

I'm not kidding when I tell you billions have been spent trying to make those PageRank numbers grow for the sites of companies big and small. There are hundreds of specialty firms and consultants all over who will take your money to show you how. Funny thing is it's not really that hard, at least no harder than tying a blood knot in dim light. And you can accomplish a lot without paying an expert.

So how do I get my Google PageRank to increase? There are a number of ingredients but the protein on the plate is the number of inbound links (also called "backlinks") to your site from other sites. But before you ask your brother-in-law's auto-shop to link to you, note that those inbound links, to be helpful, need the following qualities:

• relevance: the page and site linking to you should have the basic subject matter -- fishing -- as your own site.
• authority: Or call it PageRank -- a link from a site that Google thinks is a winner is a good thing.
• authenticity (as in you did not pay for them)-- Google will penalize sites that pay for links or deal with you "link farms" to gin up your results. Yes, there's a big business out there making money off of tricking Google, and Google spends a lot of time and money trying to crush it. Don't mess with link farms or other under-handed strategies. The wrath of Google can be rough, and hard to repair.

There are a number of way to strategize how to get links. They basically fall into one of two broad categories:

• do something on your site -- like post a picture or a story -- that people will link to because it is important or amazing. They call this "link bait" or  "link magnets."
• think through what non-competitive or friendly sites might/should link to you

The first is an argument a site that you can update easily and frequently. (Of course GoFishn.com will offer that, and much more besides.)  When you catch the Big One you want to tell the world immediately and have the local network news affiliate on the way to your dock. Absent something spectacular, just publishing regular fishing reports is good too, especially when other sites link to them.

But there's nothing like a good story, as captain Joe Fitzback discovered when he published a great story about an encounter with a great white shark and enjoyed the usual summer hysteria in the media attached to shark adventures. Publishing that story on his site has helped him obtain and maintain pretty good ranking for years, though now it seems to be declining as the story ages and the site gets a little dated.

In the Google era of the Internet, every site is on a sort of treadmill. There always has to be something new if the site is going to improve, let alone maintain, its rank.

The second approach is to get links from sites that arguably should link to you -- for example directories of fishing sites, your state fish and game agency, the local chamber of commerce, your local tourism bureau, your equipment sponsors, if you have any -- you get the idea. And you can also consider paying for links on sites where you might get some advertising exposure for your own site.

One way to get ideas is to see who is linking to your competitor's sites, which is easy to do with a link analysis tool, like the one available for free at SEO Tool Set. Drop in the url for the site you're interested in and aftera few minutes you geta  read-out of what sites link to that url. Here's a link to the results for Joe Fitzback's site.

TIP: If you're lucky, the person handling your website should be able to help you figure out a strategy. if they're no help, start figuring out on your own who to go to for linkbacks. And if you have a site that allows for regular publishing, get on it. If not, hold on for GoFishn.com. We'll be along soon.

A good Google read from The Times in the UK

I would not ordinarily point my readers to a British newspaper to learn more about online marketing, but just today a friend sent a really fine piece by James Harkin about Google-- how it got so powerful, why it works so well, where it comes up short and where (if anywhere) its challengers may come from.

Harkin tells the story, which I've also told, of PageRank, the key invention that has made Google such a dominant force. But he also points out that Google results can be way off base, and often are, especially when searching for people. In a quick test, Harkin types in the names of three modestly well known Brits and gets back, well, not what he was looking for:

Had I been “feeling lucky”, in Google’s whacky terminology, and plumped for the first hits that came my way on each, I would have come away with information about an Italian porn star, an US football player and a Liberal Democrat MP.

Now Google has us trained to look past the fact that it can't read our minds, and most everyone knows that it's best to add a little bit of extra info to the search, like name + place or name + company and so on, to find who you're looking for.

But it's that limitation that makes a tool like Google so maddeningly inadequate when you're looking for something that's at once broad and precise, like the best way to fish Lake Okeechobee when I head south for the ICAST show next month. Any tips?

That's why we're building this GoFishn.com platform. For the first time we hope that anglers will be able to get a detailed birdseye view of all the professionals in any given area and lots more relevant information to go DIY or sign up a local expert.  More good information will mean more fishing, at least I know it does for me.

Google Question #2 What's my Google PageRank?

In Question #1 I explained why Google dominated search online and we walked through PageRank, the patented technology at the heart of Google's effectiveness as a search engine.

PageRank gives each Web page in Google's index a score of 1 to 10, and the higher to score the more likely that page is to rise high in search results. PageRank does not tell you all your need to know about search ranking, but it's a good guide.

So how do you figure out the PageRank for your site? Google makes the PageRank information public, and you can download a small program that provides the PageRank score for whatever page you have in your browser. Google builds this feature  into its Google Toolbar, which works on most browsers; SearchStatus is another good choice, if you use a Firefox browser. In both cases the PageRank indicator appears in the frame of your browser and it looks something like this:

The longer the green bar the higher the PageRank; if you place your cursor on the bar a little pop-up will tell you the exact number, as in PageRank: 4/10. Ten is best possible score.

I have a friend who is mystified by the presence of a competitor, Maverick Charters Ltd., near the top of many search results for fishing charters in the Cape Cod area. My friend's site is better organized and more contemporary, which he thought would help it do better in Google. That's a common misconception. The cold fact is that Maverick's PageRank is a 4 and my friend's is a 2. And those numbers tell most of the story.

Which leads to the next question: How can I improve my PageRank?

TIP: Download one of the PageRank tools and see how the main pages on your site perform, and check out your competitors'. You'll probably see a pattern emerge. Over time, you can also check to see if your PageRank is improving or not.

Google Question #1 Why does Google rule search?

Even technophobe business owners know that when it comes to the Web, it's all about Google. That's where customers come from. No guide, charter operator or outfitter I know misses that point.

Consumer research shows that the vast majority of folks online get around by using search engines, and Google has at least 60% of the total market share for search. In other words, solve for Google and you have it made.

How did Google get so powerful? I get that question all the time. And the answer at its heart is pretty simple: Google came up with a better way to search.

Back in the mid 1990s there were lots of search engines -- Infoseek (where I worked), Excite, AltaVista, Lycos and others. For the most part they worked the same way. They matched the words in a consumer's search query -- let's say "chicken recipes" -- to the words in documents on the web. The top of the search results page basically went to the web page with the most mentions of "chicken" and "recipes" and "chicken recipes."

The problem was that the consumer didn't ask for the Web page with the most instances of those words. What consumers really expected, whether they asked for it or not, was the "best" chicken recipe or the "right" chicken recipe -- whatever that was.

Enter two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had a better idea: maybe the "best" result is the one that has word matches PLUS the most inbound links from other respected pages. In other words the "chicken recipe" page that had gotten the most attention on the web, with "attention" meaning other pages were linked to it.

They called this idea PageRank, and it's at the heart of how Google ranks pages. Google rates every page it finds with a PageRank from 1 to 10. If your site is in Google, then it has a PageRank. Here's how Google describes the concept:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

In 1998 Page and Brin formed Google, and we all noticed right away that Google results were in fact better. Sometimes they almost seemed to read your mind. The Google revolution was under way.

Today Google's search technology takes many looks at many factors, many of them company secrets, to rank results, but there's wide agreement among search experts that PageRank is still at the core.

Curious to know your site's PageRank? You should be, and I'll address how to find it in Google Question #2. 

Tip: If the company that handles your web site isn't able to talk knowledgeably about your site's PageRank and how to improve it, find another company. Or wait for GoFishn.com. It's coming.

The GoSportn Mission and the digital knowledge gap

I was refining our company's the other day, and decided that it really comes down to this:

Use the Web to make outdoor sporting activities far easier to discover,
plan and share so that the ranks of outdoor enthusiasts will grow
for generations to come.

It may sound a bit sedate, but when you consider the state of information online for most outdoor sports, it's a tall order. 

The majority of small businesses in fields like fishing, hunting, hiking, cycling, camping and so on have barely got a grip on the the Web circa 1997. Back then "success" meant getting a domain name and converting your brochure into a website. Some businesses have re-launched their sites a time or two since those days and added more pictures and maybe some video and whatnot. There's nothing wrong with that; nice looking sites make a good impression, just like nice looking brochures. But there is something wrong with thinking good looking is good enough. Online it's also about getting discovered by consumers, and when it comes to discovery, it's all about Google, which is by far the dominant search engine online.  And when it comes to Google, most small businesses are losing ground.

The trouble is that any thoughtful person can tell if a site looks appealing. But it's not so easy to discern whether a site is set up properly to succeed in Google.  The local Web firms that build sites for small businesses have a bias for good looks because that's what their clients understand and appreciate. They tend to be weak when it comes to the Google side of the equation because their clients, generally speaking, don't know what to ask for. As a result, the clients end up buying search advertising as a way to make up for the poor or declining performance of their sites in Google search results. 

From a marketing perspective, that's a tragic misunderstanding.  The simple truth is this: Google, Yahoo and other search marketing outfits make big profits off the ignorance of small business owners. If those businesses knew how to build modern sites that perform well in regular, non-paid Google search results, they would certainly do so.

I call it the great digital knowledge gap. If you know how to build and operate a site designed in the age of Google, you will get great performance from Google without paying a dime. Google doesn't mind. That's what Google expects folks to do. But the knowledge to do so is still pretty specialized and not in wide circulation. I worked at the world's largest magazine company,  Time Inc., where until the end of 2008 I ran most of their digital teams. We worked hard and long with deep pockets to get it right. Eventually we did, and we saw our performance in Google skyrocket.

Strangely enough, there is no big mystery. In hindsight, it's not hard or expensive. It just takes some know-how, persistence and a willingness to adapt to how consumers and search engines behave.

That's what GoSportn will deliver to small businesses in the outdoors arena. Later this year we'll deliver a self-service platform that puts a lot of power in the hands of those "brochure" site owners. Not just with search engines but with social media as well.

In the coming weeks, I will write a series of posts to help explain how Google and the Web work today. I hope that GoSportn will help apply those lessons on behalf of business owners, but regardless I hope this post and future ones will help folks understand better how to use their presence online to find more customers.

My conviction is this: The Web should provide a  tremendous lift to the strength of small businesses and to the enjoyment of great past times like fishing, hunting, and the rest. We're not there yet, but GoSportn will help. Stay tuned.

Promise and frustration: fishing guides and the Web

In the past few years, I've talked to a lot of fishing guides, outfitters, lodge operators in a variety locations around the country. There's my friend Eric Stapelfeld, who fishes out of Falmouth, Massachusetts, for stripers and tuna. There's Jack Dennis, who runs a big guide and outfitter operation out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Frank Crescitelli runs three charters out of New York City for stripers and blues. Andrew Harris fly guides the beautiful rivers in northern California. Roger Gibson chases tarpon and lots more out of Boca Grande, Florida. Andrew Bennett operates lodges in Alaska, Bristish Columbia, Chile and Andros, and is quite a capable online marketer.  And quite a few more.

Some of these folks I've known for awhile, and others were introduced by friends. What I've been asking them is is simply this: How well does the Web work for you as a marketing tool? The answers are all over the map. The are folks like Andrew Bennett who have websites, a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter presence and probably lots more tricks up his sleeve. But the majority of folks, and I would even include Andrew in this, thinks there's a lot more to be gotten from the Web.

Think about it: With the Web, your business get 24/7 promotion, practically for free. It's doesn't disappear, like last month's issue of the local tourist newspaper. And you can interact directly with customers, through email, instant messaging, or whatever. From the standpoint of simple presence, the Web is a sort of marketing miracle.

The trick is getting found. You know what I mean. Getting found = turning up on page one of Google search results for the searches that matter to your business -- like Cape Cod striper charters for Eric Stapelfeld. I hear a lot of frustration about that. The guy in the next slip is always at the top, and I am on page three. What gives? Why don't I do better?

That's the right question, but it's not easy to answer. For six years I ran the digital/Internet teams at Time Inc., the publishing company in New York (Time, Sports Illustrated, People), and we spent a lot of time and money trying to answer that same question. Eventually, we got pretty good at it. The basics are straightforward to understand, but they are a lot harder to build into a site, especially if you already have a day (and sometimes) a night job.

One of the reasons I started GoSportn was to make it easier and more effective for small businesses focused on the outdoors to use the Web for marketing purposes.

I will use this blog to talk about some of those issues and pass along what I've learned over the years. I'll also use it to keep you up-to-date on the marketing and publishing platform that we're developing.