Today – I researched this patent from our good friends at Google.

Patent number: 6526440

Ranking Search Result By Re-Ranking the Results Based on Inter-Connectivity

Filing date: Jan 30, 2001

Inventor: Krishna Bharat

Assignees: Google, In

What did it tell me?

We have known for some time that Google, to deliver better overall search results and put core factors of ranking out of SEO’s manipulation chooses some websites as ‘favored’. They may be human reviewed and then picked or as this patent suggests, computed internally by the algorithm itself.  It shines a floodlight on what has so far been very ambiguous; aspects related to how a website is considered ‘favored’ and how that status influences the SERP’s. 

On a query request a set of websites are pulled from the Google database and sorted on the basis of a relevancy score assigned to each website. Assigning a relevancy score is the first step in this process. Since Google is super at refining the process to get highly relevant results there is a further sorting of the websites to achieve that.

This is accomplished by finding at least two documents or websites to which there is a consistent pattern of linking from other relevant websites within a set. This relationship is quantified and called Local Score Value (LSV). We are not told the details of the relationship factors considered for calculating the LSV. This provides the search engine with a benchmark to evaluate other relevant websites further.

This is really a dual layer purifying process that burns away all the dross. It’s also made very clear that only one website from the same host (IP) or from affiliated hosts become eligible and the one with the lowest relevance score is removed. (ever wonder why you have 2 websites that are similar and only 1 of them ranks?  This is why!)

We are also told how this LSV is computed.

Using this benchmark value arrived at, Google assign to the second set of documents an LSV score.

Here is the geek mix      i = 1 k OldScore (BackSet ( i ) ) m

Google calls it “old score” = old score is the relevance score of that particular document

‘Backset’= Backset has a few separate calculations that are brought together to arrive at ‘Backset’

•               Sum of the relevancy score of i number of websites from the second set
•               K is predefined number account. And m is a predetermined number.

In English? LSV means to put it in earthly tongue, the original relevance scores (old score) are recalculated with LSV. We are also told that other factors to arrive at the eventual score and determine the ranking are size of the set of documents and the maximum relevance score of all the documents in a set.

 What can I take away from this post?

· If you have been wondering why Wikipedia dominates the higher echelons of search result the answer may very well be in this post. Local Score Value could be calculated from the linking and other patterns displayed by that article in Wikipedia.

· Bad neighborhood websites are a big ‘no-no’. What is required is more thematic and topical link building strategy.

· Content was king but it has been dethroned (somewhat) now as context rules. Now keyword is passé and it’s now moreso the idea or a theme. Your theme (market +keyword) is determined by who links to you.

I am sure there is much more to take out of this patent.  In my next post, I will be discussing some very interesting research coming in from University of Toronto that I believe is going to further improve the quality of search and make our lives more, umm, interesting. But then at least we know what’s coming.

Time for me to go gather some more ‘Gooey Chocolate’!

Armed with a succession of tools that flaunt sophistication to report on every conceivable action of visitors on websites, their likes and dislikes, companies are beginning to effectively track and monitor the search patterns of their online visitors.

Andreasen in his book Prescriptions for Theory-Driven Social Marketing Research describes the customer behavior in this phase as Extensive Problem Solving Behavior. A period when a person is comparing multiple competitive brands or features without having any kind of a benchmark to compare them to.

Since it’s such an intense and involved activity, any distraction or block on your website that stalls the thought process is going to be an irritant to a visitor.

S. Kurnia. & P. Schubert, in their book Toward Achieving Customer Satisfaction in Online suggests large scale availability of independent reviews encourages a behavior in a prospective buyer called information “pulling” in other words personal research in contrast to accepting what is dished out to them and termed as information “pushing”.

One important emergent character and one which is very obvious is the lack of patience in online users. It really runs thin during Product Research, Feature & Price Comparison phase. 5 seconds for the page to load was the maximum that most online visitors said they could wait for.

Most visitors preferred summarized information and lack of relevant information in quickly scannable points and bullets delayed the transaction. But most online users were willing to wait for a very long period of time for an offline response to online query. Majority said they could wait from half an hour and up to a day.

N. Koiso-Kanttila in their book Time, Attention, authenticity and consumer benefits of the Web make a compelling point when they say that online customers have a heightened sense of time consciousness (perhaps that’s the first reason they are shopping online) and do not mind moderate loss of money but loss of time reflects badly on the website.

Businesses, which value customer’s time by employing technology, tools, information and customer service are appreciated and revisited.

To summarize it all up
1. Amount of information online directly affects consumer search behaviour
2. Online consumers value and reward timesaving features
3. Information breakdown is required to prevent information overload
4. Result pages are scanned for context corresponding to a supplied search term
5. Pace of search decreases in proportion to the depth of the research

Google’s Pagerank™ technology measures the relevancy of content on a webpage for keyword terms being searched in Search Engine’s, and is known to favor big name directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.

As mentioned, ODP (Open Directory Project) or Dmoz.org links are important in attaining high page rankings, here are some pointers on getting your site listed on ODP.. Set aside the time. It does take time, but it’s not difficult.

. Unique, well written and keyworded content on your website.
. Properly following the directory guidelines for submission.
. If your website blends different sections to meet distinctive need of your customer or consumer submit your site to each section separately.

If you have a completely non-commercial website, one of the best places to get listed is www.zeal.com directory, which can also function as a path to get you into another important directory Looksmart.

With Zeal you need to pass a member quiz before you can submit your website and it could be worth your time as you get time re-think some fairly straightforward questions and learn something new.

So to sum it up its worth getting listed in as many directories you can. In times when getting links from Social Network is fashionable, getting listed on directory is not yet passé.

And in my opinion, the timing could not have been better!

The Google Analytics tool, though quite advanced (and free to boot!), is suited to measure the performance of websites with page paradigm in mind.

This makes it easy for analytics code to identify each page by the unique URL that was assigned to it, and parce the information to the Google servers and make it available to you in the form of reports.

The web democracy also known as Web 2.0, is increasingly becoming a popular realm, where you are no longer a passive consumer of information. A blend of technologies like AJAX now makes it possible for the information flow to be two-way.

Google Maps is a great example. You mark the map and alter it with your information but the page never blinks or refreshes after the changes you have made. It’s one seamless browsing experience.

The use of Ajax does not necessitate a unique URL for a page, and without the change in the URL it was a long process of tracking events unfolding on your website with Google Analytics.

Google's new Analytics code has shelved the old urchin tracker function like urchinTracker() and __utmSetVar() no longer exist . The new code is object oriented or in simple terms a very modular way of creating code or programming.

You can see that apart from the very obvious replacement of “urchin.js” with “ga.js” the code carries more lines and also ability to track more events.

Now you not only get to see the number of page views, but detailed reports on in-page events like PDF downloads, Flash, Ajax and other multimedia elements like videos.

Google also has announced Site Searched Report, provided you have on your website an internal search engine. The report will be included in 'Content Site Search Menu'. Though Google is yet to come out with the specifics on how, and what kind of site search engine's will be supported.

Site searched reports will give you additional information on what terms people searched for on your website and to what pages they were taken to, also the percentage that modified the initial search query and what the modified search query was.

There is another very useful report that is going to become available to us. The 'Outbound Link Reports'. It will give us details about which external websites are being clicked from our website or the outflow of traffic from our website to the others.

A word of caution, if you are anxious to implement the new code in beta version on to your website, (which Google supports now) you risk losing the data before the new codes starts tracking again.

My thoughts? Its progress in website analytics. And progress is good!

With 7.3 billion pages added to World Wide Web everyday. It will do you world of good to seek out how to use RSS technology. Placing information from your favorite sources on the web at your finger tips.

As the world web explodes, so is our need for tools to reduce the difficulties that sheer size of the net poses us. RSS helps you to organize the ocean of data, displaying it in links for quick access or you can choose to overindulge yourself with full length article, media files etc.

It’s so convenient it gets delivered to your mail inbox, or to a dedicated program on your machine like NetNewsWire. But the most popular of the lot is http://www.bloglines.com, which works very much like your web based email. Once you get online the program begins to collect information called feeds from blogs and websites to which you have subscribed.

I turned to RSS because I want to catch the latest news headline or see the sports results, update myself on the latest music releases. I would either type in the address of the website or choose the link from my bookmarks on the internet browser.

Now I don’t take the long circuitous route to get to where I want to. It all gets delivered to me in one convenient place.

So much for the introduction.

RSS apart from convenience can also be a shot in the arm for your SEO effort.

The US Patent Number # 20050071741 also know as the Google patent states that documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high.

Strip it of all tech talk, and It simply means you need to keep updating your content not just at a steady pace but keep doing it at a faster rate to cling on to your search engine ranking.

A site updated regularly is never going to miss attention from search engine spiders. They just love fresh content. Website with old content can loose its appeal very quickly. Spiders are content hungry, doll up your website regularly with clean and relevant text and you’ll have the Search engine bots swooning all over again.

There is one lacuna though, we all know fresh content is not easy to come by and it’s expensive.

Enter RSS!

It can help you achieve keywords density by subscribing for feeds which are rich in keywords that you are interested in. A keyword targeted feed on your website will add to the user experience and you have a regular fast and fresh supply of relevant content.

Feeds exist for every topic under and above the sun. Newsfeed related to Internet Marketing industry are the Rx (Prescription). News feed are updated regularly and since it’s perfectly ok to syndicate the feeds, why not leverage it for you optimization effort.

Blogs have these days become staple marketing mix in Search Engine Optimization Effort. Providing RSS feed from your blog makes it easier for your subscriber to become knowledgeable about the latest content updates. Imagine if you are an e-commerce website.

Ding!!!

Does it ring a bell? In no time your customers and subscriber will know the new products available. They can narrow in on the product that interests them and click the links to read more about it from your website.

Benefits?

• More diverse traffic source and unique traffic.

• More referrals through links

• Your website vital statistics remain appealing. Lowers your bounce rate. Since the visitors arrived already primed for what they need.

• Most major RSS search engine are in beta or testing phase and RSS technology is not yet mainstream. It’ll give you the advantage of head start.

• In tango with Google and others you can place a RSS subscription button on your blog. Once clicked it’ll give your visitors the option to add you on their igoogle, Windows Live or Yahoo One Search homepage.

• Most importantly you can personalize. RSS feeds can be categorized on the basis of the topics available on your blog. With separate RSS feed for each category. For ex. You are a search engine marketing company, a visitors chooses to read on Web Analytics and decides he wants all the new content on that topic delivered to him. By clicking on the appropriate RSS subscription button he gets only new post on Web Analytics and not on PPC or SEO.

• Advanced personalization might deliver personalized content, product recommendations and so on

• If you want to use RSS to its full potential, then I would recommend that you create multiple RSS feeds for your users. For ex give your visitor option to subscribe only for forum updates rather then having only one feed that delivers everything he may not need.

Now that I have got you excited and raring to go, there are some don’ts if you need RSS to benefit you. DON’T USE JAVASCRIPT to implement RSS. They are common and easily implementable, but Javascript will not be indexed by search engines. The best method to implement RSS is php or html.

Have you heard lately the buzz of a new breed of professional called Web Analyst? I wish you did. It will deceptively sound like a normal conversation. You think you understood it all each word of the conversation but your brain goes fuzzy the moment you try to add it all up…

Jeez!! What was that “bounce” thing and…bout that “visitors” and “unique visitors”. "Cross segmentation", "A/B testing", "Multivariate testing." Listen a little longer you are likely to think the babble is from bunch of spaceman training for NASA’s mission to Mars!

The frontier to be frank may not be the red planet but on the World Wide Web its importance is no less significant. Any advancement in technology or area of knowledge is always preceded by development in language and vocabulary that describes exactly the ideas and puts two people of an industry on the same page. In other words it makes it easier for birds of the same feather to flock together and not get bird brained.

But for sometime now we have eagerly awaited for the latest arm of Internet Marketing (IM), Website analytics to take shape around the most basic terns in the Web analytics field. It means getting down to the brass tacks and ensuring that a particular technical term conveys only one idea and means the same thing to every one in the powwow.

Finally, finally the grey beards at the Web Analytics Association have come out with 26 new metrics which finally every body agrees on and were revealed in the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose.
And here are the new terms:

Term: Page
A page is an analyst definable unit of content.
This means its you who decides what a “page” is, including not a very page like technology like Flash and Ajax.

Term: Page Views
The number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed.

Comments:
Content, such as XML feeds (RSS or Atom) and emails that can be delivered to both web browsers and non-browser clients are not typically counted as page views because the request or receipt of the content does not always correspond to the content being displayed.

Term: Visits/Sessions
A visit is an interaction, by an individual, with a website consisting of one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e. “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit session will terminate.

Comments:
Different tool providers use different methodologies to track sessions. Ask your tool provider how this metric is computed. A typical time-out period for a visit is 30 minutes, but this time period is configurable in many web analytics applications.

Term: Unique Visitors
The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.

Term: New Visitor
The number of Unique Visitors with activity including a first-ever Visit to a site during a reporting period

Term: Repeat Visitor
The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of two or more Visits to a site during a reporting period.

Term: Entry Page
The first page of a visit.

Term: Landing Page
A page intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort

Term: Exit Page
The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session.

Term: Visit Duration
The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.

Term: Referrer
The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object

Term: Internal Referrer
The internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the website or a web-property within the website as defined by the user.

Term: External Referrer
The external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or outside of the website or a web-property defined by the user.

Term: Search Referrer
The search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL has been generated by a search function.

Term: Visit Referrer
The visit referrer is the first referrer in a session, whether internal, external or null.

Term: Original Referrer
The original referrer is the first referrer in a visitor’s first session, whether internal, external or null.

Term: Conversion
A visitor completing a target action.

Phew!! I have just done enough to wet your appetite fora more indepth explanation of the terms you could download a PDF with definitions of all the terms and register yourself as an Website Analyst by at http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/

Federer’ dominance over his rivals is an old story. If the Greek pantheon of gods had one that could play tennis he would be without any morsel of doubt have a scorching cross-court backhand & complete game like that of Federer.

Djokovic’s unabashed celebration on the night of his loss was homage to the closest thing to a tennis divinity: a foregone conclusion, fate decided by gods: You only play for the second place.

Rewind three or fours years back and you could not help but pity the immensely talented Federer losing matches from a winning position. He simply found it difficult to convert when he had the opponents by the scruff of their necks.

If you are having killer e-commerce website that attracts attention, arouses desire and just when you think you are about to hear that pleasing sound of the click on your “Make the Payment” tab they seem to bail out.

Want to convert more visitors? It’s most important to keep the checkout process short and sweet! No doubt that a visitor if he found the right message on your website will be sufficiently persuaded to go through your lengthy check out process. But remember improving conversion rates means rewarding a customer with an intuitive navigation and ‘I am in control feeling’.

Especially so during the checkout process a visitors senses are razor sharp scanning for reasons to distrust you. Even a two-bit typo is likely to make them skittish. Everything in the checkout process, the navigation, the bread crumb trail, third party reassurance certificate contribute to banish those demons of distrust.

Last week I saw a lead from a visitor who had possibly spotted the only grammatical boo-boo (in a very page dense website) on her way to filling up the form and mentioned it. Thankfully she was convinced that this was the right place to shop.

Other than getting the basics right by consolidating the number of steps to payment and keeping the fill-up fields to minimum what else could you do to keep the visitors doggedly on the track to conversion goals.  Here is my top 10 list of measures you can take to improve your shopping cart abandonement rate and improve your website conversion rates!

1. First keep the person oriented through out the check-out process by using a progress indicator. Let him know which step he is on and how many more are there to go.

2. Label clearly the task to be completed on each page. Always provide a way to go back and review the step and come back to the current page if the visitor does go back.

3. It’s so convenient if a buyer after placing products in the shopping cart can always go back to the product page and confirm he has got the right item.

4. Brilliant if you could put up a thumbnail image of item inside the shopping cart. It could lower the abandonment by as much as 10% as has been proved by various e-commerce websites.

5. Cost! Make it known as early as possible both total cost and shipping cost. It’s THE most important information that a visitor needs to mull over. You certainly don’t want him to hum and haw over the shopping cart.

6. Show the stock availability on the product page. No visitor is ever going to return to your website after having a big let down. You had him hypnotized with an appropriate scent trail, relevant answers and it’s almost evil to tell them them now that particular product is out of stock! It will be very polite to tell a very eager buyer “Estimated delivery date or the “Product ships in x number of days”

6. You cannot do without third party reassurance certificate prominently displayed on your pages. Logos of credit cards and Verisign have boosted the conversion rates. They can only a have positive impact. HackerSafe Certification has helped some clients see improvement in their conversion rates by as much as 15%. www.scanalert.com

7. Make it easier for the shopper to edit the shopping cart during the checkout process. It accommodates last minute change in the preference of color, size and most importantly quantity.

8. Let the visitor have the option to call you if the idea of revealing his credit card information is unnerving him. Preferably display telephone number that is not used on any other pages of your website. This will help you track evaluate & understand shoppers needs.

9. Not all customers are likely to fill the forms correctly in one attempt. Don’t make them look foolish by telling them that they were at fault rather tell them the system was unable to understand what they had entered. At the same time making it very clear what is expected of them. It contributes to an overall pleasant experience of shopping on your e-site.

10. Very importantly you will do well to save the abandoned shopping cart for viewing later. They do return sometimes. Send an email after a while reminding them that they can always return and complete the purchase. It’s also good to call them. If they have made it to the shopping cart they are very likely to purchase.

Not a very difficult question to answer if you have been looking closely at the shopping list this season of Google, AOL, Yahoo & Microsoft. Weathervane of search engine marketing points clearly to what the next development in SEM industry is going to be. Its optimization: a network’s ability to acquire a conversion at a lower cost then the competing networks and do it in increasing numbers. And to help them do this the big four have bought smaller network companies which study behavior or the browsing pattern of people and use the information to target them with highly relevant ads or content. So Google has bought Doubleclick, MSN has bought Aquantive, Yahoo has bought Rightmedia and now the latest – AOL has bought Tacoda. They all have something common to them they are all Behavioral Network Companies.

Behavioral targeting (BT) in the coming years will play an important role as internet traffic gets dense and people’s browsing habits get categorized. Reviews of Gatineau already suggest that it may have the ability to segment data in the age and gender bucket. Which means it will give us the ability to tailor make ads & content and target them to the gender and age segment thus insuring higher conversion rates and better user experience. This is just the beginning!

Imagine you have certain number of visitors who left your website with products in the shopping cart. All they may have needed was some incentive to make the purchase. Or people who looked at the product page did not start the purchase may need more information about the product. The goal is to use behavioral targeting to let you send the appropriate message to each user based on where they are in your product sales cycle. Using BT to deliver laser guide a relevant messages to your past website visitor is the most efficient use of your advertising dollars whether you are a brand awareness focused or direct response advertiser.

Three simple ways behavioral targeting will use to segment people’s behavior online, based on website/web page visited.

This is the common type of Behavioral Targeting. In this case behavioral segments are developed by total visitors who have gone to specific web sites that have very targeted content.

For example visitors who visit lonelyplanet.com, travelocity.com, or upstreamcruises.com, will become part of “Travel Segment” they are targeted with travel ads even when they later visit general websites.

Some other ways website visitors are targetted:

- Based on keyword searched or content that was read.This Behavioral segmentation is done by finding users who have searched for your product using specific keywords or have read content with specific keywords in it. For example, if a user was reading an article about Stock Market going up, the BT technology could target the top five keywords that surround the key concept of that page.

- Based on past visitors to your website.This is a fairly common type of Behavioral Targeting that creates behavioral segments of users who have visited your web site. This is done by placing unique code for different pages. By doing this you could create segments for “Home page viewers”, “Product information viewers” and “Shopping cart abandoned”. Based on these segments you could develop and deliver different messages to these three different segments

In other words — a visitor navigating through your web site is becoming a very powerful tool for website owners in the future. It's the foundation of website analytics, and is only going to grow and grow. Big Brother is watching you! In fact perhaps the gods at TechWyse are right now!

Close on the heels of Google’s free offering Web Analytics 2.0 (WA 2.0); we can now see the results of Eyetrack III.  If Web Analytics 2.0 put within our easy reach important website metrics, Eyetrack III attempts to better understand the reading behavior and elements readers find attractive on a webpage.

Though Poynter.org conducted this study deeply concerned with falling news readership and shorter attention spans, it provides valuable insights for any Internet marketing firm.  So what did the ET III reveal about the eye scan patterns, to help us greatly in designing conversion friendly websites.

While testing participants' eye movements across several homepage designs, a common pattern was noticed: The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.

Another interesting pattern emerged contrary what many would expect.  Photographs and website images, (as we might expect) was not the biggest factor keeping people on the website — it was website copy! Text rules on the computer screen — both in order viewed and total time spent looking at it. Dominant headlines consistently kept users engaged especially when they were on the left side of the page. Visitor’s instinctively gaze in on any logo or dominant headline that was displayed on the left side.

The graph below shows the zones of importance on a webpage. How does your website design measure up?

Since text rules on-screen it made sense to explore the textual vein further.  Here is a bulleted list of important to do’s based on my research:
 

•  Smaller type text encouraged focused viewing behavior and large type promoted scanning.
   
•  Longer paragraph format discourages viewing. Shorter paragraph received twice as many eyes fixation as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.
   
•  Visual breaks in text discouraged people from looking at items beyond breaks.
   
•  People don’t view entire headlines. Only if the first words engages them. (Below is heat map of how visitors viewed headlines) 

•  A headline has less then one second to get the website visitor’s attention.
   
•  People most often scan below the first fold on the homepage for a much shorter duration looking for something to grab their attention.

Describing how images were viewed the study restated things that we already knew and also some interesting observations:
 

•  The most obvious one. The bigger the image the more time people took to look at it.
   
•  Clean & clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on home pages
   
•  A very interesting point: people often click on images even though it took them nowhere.
   
•  Visitors correctly recalled facts, names & places when presented in text format, but conceptual information was more accurately received in multimedia.

Recommendations:
 

•  Make sure the most important information (your call to action) on the website is in the top left of the page.
   
•  Make sure you use a strongly worded and relevant headline.
   
•  Use faces in your imagery as they are looked at twice more then images with no faces.
   
•  Make sure you use short paragraphs in your website copy as it is far more likely to be read.
   
•  People read text that is smaller while bigger text is scanned.
   
•  Make sure all your images click thru to a relevant page because people will try to click on your web design graphics.