A large number of online sites cover the search marketing space. Here is a short list of some of the most well-known ones:

Each of these sites publishes columns on a daily basis, with Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch publishing multiple posts every weekday. The columns are typically written by industry experts who have been chosen for their ability to communicate information of value to their reader bases. SEOmoz also provides a wide range of tools and resources for SEO practitioners.

Magazines and journals that cover search and web marketing issues provide an additional information stream. Despite the fact that they provide less frequent coverage (as they are published monthly/bimonthly), the following are worth investigating:

Search engine representatives sometimes actively participate in forums, or publish blog posts and/or videos designed for webmasters. The main blogs for each of the three major search engines at the time of this writing are:

The search engines use these blogs to communicate official policy, announce new things, and provide webmasters with useful tips. You can reach Google personnel via the Google Webmaster Help group in Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/topics). Members of the Google webspam team are active in this group, answering questions and even starting their own new threads from time to time.

You can also interact with search engine representatives in various forums, such as WebmasterWorld (http://www.webmasterworld.com) and Search Engine Roundtable (http://forums.seroundtable.com/). Sometimes they use a nickname such as “googleguy” or “msndude,” so watch for those. You can also watch for search engine personnel who leave comments in popular SEO blogs. We will discuss the value of forums in more detail in The SEO Industry on the Web.

Search engine reps are “managed” by their corporate communications departments. Some aren’t allowed to go on the record. Some need approval before doing so, and/or need their comments edited before publication. A rare few have free reign (e.g., Matt Cutts). Often they can’t be very specific or they can’t answer questions at all. The algorithms the search engines use are highly proprietary and they need to keep them secret.

This means there are certain types of questions they won’t answer, such as “What do I have to do to move from position 3 to position 1 on a particular search?” Or “How come this spammy site ranks so much higher than mine?”

In addition, they have their own motives and goals. They will want to reduce the amount of spam in their search index and on the Web overall (which is a good thing), but this may lead them to take positions on certain topics based on those goals.

As an example, Google does not talk about its capability for detecting paid links, but it suggests that its ability to detect them is greater than the general webmaster community believes. Taking this position is, in itself, a spam-fighting tactic, since it may scare people away from buying links who otherwise might have chosen to do so (as we indicated in Chapter 7, we do not recommend purchasing links, but this example is meant to illustrate how a policy might affect communications).

In spite of these limitations, you can gather a lot of useful data from interacting with search engine representatives.

Let’s imagine you have a product page with a particular ranking in Google for a specific search term, and you want to improve the ranking and resultant traffic. Rather than applying a number of different SEO tactics at once, start varying things one at a time:

You can test many different elements in this scenario, such as:

Testing should be iterative and ongoing, not just a “one-off” in which you give it your best shot and you’re done. If you’re testing title tags, continue trying different things to see what works best. Shorten it; lengthen it; move words around; substitute words with synonyms. If all else fails, you can always put it back to the way it was.

When doing iterative testing, it’s good to do what you can to speed up the spidering and indexation so that you don’t have to wait as long between iterations to see the impact.

You can do this by flowing more link juice to the pages you want to test. That means linking to them from higher in the site tree (e.g., from the home page). But be sure to give it some time before forming your baseline, because you will want the impact of changing the internal links to show in the search engines before initiating your test (to prevent the two changes from interacting).

Or you can use the Google Sitemaps protocol to set a priority for each page from 0 to 1.0. Dial up the priority to 1.0 to increase the frequency with which your test pages will be spidered.

Since geolocation and personalization mean that not everyone is seeing the same search results, you shouldn’t rely on rankings as your only bellwether regarding what worked or didn’t work.

As we discussed in Chapter 9, many other meaningful SEO metrics exist, including:

But just having better metrics isn’t enough. An effective testing regimen also requires a platform that is conducive to performing rapid-fire iterative tests, in which each test can be associated with reporting based on these new metrics. Such a platform comes in very handy with experiments that are difficult to conduct under normal circumstances.

Testing a category name revision applied sitewide is harder than, say, testing a title tag revision applied to a single page. Specifically, consider a scenario where you’re asked to make a business case for changing the category name “kitchen electrics” to a more search-engine-optimal “kitchen small appliances” or “small kitchen appliances”. Conducting the test to quantify the value would require applying the change to every occurrence of “kitchen electrics” across the website. A tall order indeed, unless you can conduct the test as a simple search-and-replace operation, which you can do by applying it through a proxy server platform.

By acting as a middleman between the web server and the spider, a proxy server can facilitate useful tests that normally would be invasive on the e-commerce platform and time-intensive for the IT team to implement.

A sound experiment always starts with a hypothesis. For example, if a page isn’t performing well in the engines and it’s an important product category, you might hypothesize that this product category isn’t performing well because it’s not well linked from within your site. Or you may conclude that this page isn’t ranking well because it is targeting unpopular keywords, or because it doesn’t have enough copy.

Once you have your hypothesis, you can set up a test to gauge its truth. Try these steps:

Granted, this can be a slow process if you have to wait a month for the impact of each test to be revealed, but in SEO, patience is a virtue. Reacting too soon to changes you see in the SERPs can lead you to false conclusions. You need to give the search engines time to fully process what you have done so that you can improve the chances that you are drawing the right conclusions based on your tests. You also need to remember that the search engines may be making changes in their algorithms at the same time.