How treating a web page like a research paper can help you in search listings

You should always keep your audience in mind when you’re writing landing page text. But what do you when you’re optimizing pages for search engines and your audience isn’t even human?

According to search engine optimization expert Jessica Bowman of SEM Inhouse, it may help to think of search engines as your college professor. Jessica recently gave a workshop at Yahoo! on search engine optimization, and she pointed out that search engines read your web pages an awful lot like professors read a college research paper.

They’re alike? Really?
Before the comparison brings sweaty visions of the worst part of college to your head, it doesn’t mean your web copy should be 20 pages long. In fact, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that. But, Jessica says, professors are like search engines in that they have to read a lot of papers, which means they have to make some of their judgment calls by scanning. These are some of the elements that both look for:

• Title: Both of them need to know at a glance what the document is about.
• Headlines, emphasized words and lists: Anything called out with headlines, bold or italicized words, or bullets is likely to be important. Call headlines in your web copy out with tags like <H1>, <H2> and <H3>.
• Conclusion: A good conclusion restates the theme of the opening paragraph, which drives the argument home for your professor and confirms what your page is about for the search engine.
• Sources cited: Professors like to know that you researched the paper, and search engines like to see that you’re linked to other websites.

How to get on the bad sides of professors and search engines
There are a few of the things that both of them hate:

• Plagiarism: You know that little research paper-buying incident that got your frat brother thrown out junior year? Turns out that search engines don’t like it when you steal other sites’ content either. And given that they’re searching the web, they might notice when 15 copies of something show up.
• Too many quotes: Original thinking is important. Just as you wouldn’t devote most of your research paper to huge quotation blocks, you don’t want to rely too heavily on syndicated content.
• Bad writing: Search engines are more liable to penalize your page in results when you stuff your copy with unrelated keywords, strand important content at the bottom of your page, and rely too much on headlines and lists.

Search engines and professors love…

• Verbosity: You probably realized this about your professor when you had to analyze three paragraphs in Dante’s Inferno for 15 pages. In the search engine world, verbosity means substantial, relevant, wordy, full-length, original content.
• Reinforcing your stance: Just as professors like it when you repeat and back up your claims, you want your main concepts and keywords to be repeated throughout the page.
• Good writing: For a search engine that means variations on your keywords, including different endings. If only your professor’s definition had been that flexible.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nic McPhee

What you told us about your plans for the year, Part I

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he shares your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

We’ve previously shared with you what you told us about optimization and how you display ads on your site. For 2007, we wanted to know what you’re planning to do as publishers. And in January, we asked you about your top priorities as publishers. You are obviously passionate about this topic, as the quantity of responses made this our most popular poll to-date. 
Here’s what you told us:

For your published site(s), what is your top priority for 2007?

Almost 60 percent of you told us that you were focused on driving traffic.  But you also had other ideas that you told us about including:

“Increase revenue from advertising.”
“Diversify.”
“Re-design.”
“Create more relative content with better targeted advertising and increase site traffic.”

Largely, most of you want to expand your operations, some through increased visitor traffic, others through expanded content or new sites.  Both methods could provide additional opportunities to display contextual advertising. 

Recognizing your focus on driving traffic, Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, notes there are many ways to help drive traffic that won’t necessarily require additional expense.  For example, suggest your sites to search engines, or consider an RSS feed to distribute your content.  Or, as some of you plan on doing, expand your content.

Forrester Research agrees with Margaret.  According to Forrester, the top five ways users find websites suggest that publishers don’t necessarily need to spend extra dough:

“How have you typically found Web sites that you have visited in the past month?”

Respondents were able to check more than one answer. Source: Forrester Research, “How Consumers Find Websites in 2006,” 10/06

For publishers who are interested in paid advertising, advertising in search engine results pages, like Yahoo’s,  may be a good place to start; sponsored search targets by keyword, and search engine results pages are often considered some of the “lowest-hanging fruit” for driving traffic.

Since we saw such a large percentage of you are intent on increasing site traffic, our next question was specifically about how you’re planning on doing that.  We will cover this in next installment.

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager

What you told us about how you display ads on your sites

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is the second in a series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Following up on our previous post about optimization, below are the results from the questions we asked our readers. Our goal is to help you understand what your fellow publishers are doing, and get you thinking about how you can improve your own publishing experience.

Q: Where do you see the most successful ad placement?

Ads embedded in content is the clear leader, with almost half of you indicating that this is where you see the most successful ad placement, followed by leaderboard placement for about a quarter of responses.

These results were not surprising to the team here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, though we have found through our own data that the right rail also performs well. Check out this post from last May, where we discussed ad placement performance and eye-tracking studies. It does make sense that more visible ads—such as those at the top of a page or embedded within content—will perform better, though optimal ad placement will vary depending on individual sites and their user bases.

Here’s another question we asked you, this one about ad design:

Q: Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?

It’s overwhelmingly clear that you design ads to blend into your site, rather than to contrast. We expected that the response would be more evenly split between “Contrast” and “Blend in,” due to the fact that contrasting ads may work better to gain attention. 

Blend in or stand out?
To gain further insight, we again tapped into our experts here at Yahoo! Publisher Network to provide some helpful guidance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or: The Robot Ate My Web Page…

Editor’s Note: In the second post in our series on optimizing your web pages for ad relevancy, Yahoo! Publisher Network Senior Product Manager Cody Simms and Senior Product Manager Amit Paunikar talk about how important it is to feed our “bots” a steady diet of tasty, easily digestible content. Cody and Amit also show how you can cook up more palatable pages to help keep our gormandizing little bots coming back for more—and help keep your ads relevant.

As we mentioned last week, content is king… but only if our content analyzers—the “bots” that read your text—can appropriately analyze your content. Here are some tips to help make sure our bots gobble up all of the good stuff.

Anatomy of a web page
Bots digest everything they eat, but only if they can eat it. They love text. In fact, they can’t get enough of it. If you want to help make your site compelling to a bot, focus on making it as text-based as possible.

Carving up a web page is not entirely unlike carving up a side of beef. Here’s a quick diagram showing the choice cuts that bots like to eat, and the ones they don’t:

In particular, bots struggle with:

• Images (Of course, your site does need images; just make sure that you use “ALT text” so that bots can nibble on them.)
• Multimedia
• Flash
• Frames
• Pull-down lists
• Fly-out menus
• Anything behind a log-in

If you want to avoid “robotic indigestion,” be sure to explicitly include important topic-oriented items in the text fields in your site, rather than hinting at them in images or other elements.

While you’re at it, check your robots.txt file to make certain that you aren’t blocking our bots. Check out robotstxt.org for more information.

There’s no place like home
Home pages, sometimes called index pages, are the face of your web site. First impressions matter to bots just as much as they do on first dates. But home pages can be sometimes tricky for contextual ad networks.

Most home pages have static content, and that’s bad. If the content is static, the ads related to the content will likely also be static. Static ads can lead to user fatigue—users get bored looking at the same content all the time, just like bots. This may result in low click-through rates, which can result in reduced revenue.

You can help remedy this situation by adding some dynamic content on the home page—content that changes frequently while remaining on-topic for your audience. New content perks up your audience, as well as our content analyzers.

Some home pages, especially on blogs and forums, have the opposite problem. They are too dynamic and can become topically inconsistent. This can result in ads that are all over the map. Using the Ad Targeting feature can help alleviate this issue, though it’s important to stay on-topic and on-target with your audience.

Site structure
Just like content, you can use your site’s structure to help your users and our bots understand what your site is about. In fact, site structure can be just as important as content for semantic analysis. Here are some tips to help you out:

Integrate keywords into your URL structure
One way to do this is to use “permalinks” rather than “query strings,” for example:

Permalink (good):
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/educationjobs

Query string (bad):
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/jobseeker/jobsearch/search_results.html?job_interest=EDUEDUCA&country1=USA&metro_area=1&basicsearch=0&advancedsearch

Use strong keywords as “anchor text”
Link text should be descriptive of the content that your user will find under the link, especially when linking to your own sites, both in navigation and in editorial content. For example:

“Education jobs,” not “Click here”

Use concise descriptors
It’s important to put a short description under a link, for context, where possible:

Education jobs
Search for jobs in the education field, including teacher jobs and administration jobs.

Next time: Writing good, bot-loving content, meta-tags, and keeping the noise down.

–Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

Editor’s Note: For WebmasterWorld’s PubCon 2006 conference in Las Vegas, a couple of our star performers here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, Senior Product Manager, Cody Simms, and Senior Product Manager, Amit Paunikar, put together a presentation on how publishers can optimize their web sites to help improve the relevancy of their contextual ads. It drew praise from all and sundry. For those of you who could not be at PubCon, we’ve turned the presentation into a four-part blog series. In the first chapter, we offer a little “Contextual Advertising 101″ to help get you grounded. In subsequent chapters, we’ll show you how you can optimize your pages to help improve relevancy.
 

What motivates publishers?

The anecdote is legendary. Orson Welles, while directing one of his films, told an actor to cross from one side of the set to the other. “What’s my motivation for this cross?” the actor wanted to know.

“Your paycheck on Friday!” growled Welles.

While running a network for publishers, we’ve learned that publishers come in all shapes and sizes, and are motivated to publish for all kinds of reasons—including their paychecks on Friday. Some of you enjoy the “work-at-home” lifestyle. Others like the community aspects of publishing. Some want to stay in touch with the technical innovations that online publishing is bringing to software, and enjoy the challenges of search engine optimization and monetization.

But whatever your motivation, two ultimate success measures stand out: revenue and traffic generation.

Keep your eyes on the prize, and optimize
Optimizing your site for contextual advertising can help you with both of these success measures. Contextual advertising crawlers and search engine crawlers are very similar, so some time and effort optimizing for a contextual crawler could help make your site more search engine-friendly, too.
 
So just what is contextual advertising?
But contextual advertising is not search advertising, and that’s the rub. In the absence of clear user intent—i.e., a user search for a specific product or service via a search engine—contextual advertising systems have to rely on secondary factors to glean what the user is looking for to serve up appropriate ad content. Users’ intentions can be derived from their behavior, their demographic information, or from the information available from the content of the pages they’re browsing. Demographic and behavioral information is hard to come by due to privacy and a host of other issues. Therefore, most contextual advertising networks rely heavily on semantic analysis of the content a given user is browsing—specifically, the content on your pages.

Contextual advertising is intended for content-oriented pages where users are passively consuming content (as opposed to search results pages where users have expressed a clear interest). Contextual advertising relies on one underlying major assumption: that a user is interested in the content of the page if he or she is reading that page. Contextual advertising therefore uses semantic analysis to determine the context of the page and then provide advertising of a similar topic.

Semantic analysis, you say?
Semantic analysis involves text mining, term/phrase extraction, SVMs, page vector analysis, associations and all that jazz. Um… what are these things, you may ask? In simpler terms, semantic analysis relies on good, clear, topic-oriented content on a well formatted page. We’ll come back to both of these ideas in the third post in this series.

The bottom line is that “content is the king” when it comes to getting relevant ads on a page. With a little attention and a bit of luck, you can improve your ads’ relevancy, along with that paycheck on Friday.

Next week: The anatomy of a webpage, site structure and bots.

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager, and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

What You Told Us, and Advice from Yahoo! Team Members

Editor’s Note: Since September, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is a first in a series by Senior Insight Manager, Todd Lombardo, in which he will share some of your insights and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Configuration optimization
First up, let’s talk about optimization, or making changes to your ad listings to improve performance. In a question from September 2006, we asked how often you change ad format–one way to optimize–and the answers broke out as follows:

Q: How often do you change your ad format (color, size or placement)?

Surprisingly, almost half of you told us you never make changes. Additionally, some free-form responses noted that you only make changes reactively, after you “see a huge decrease in revenue,” or “rarely,” “twice a year” and “as little as possible.”

However, being proactive in optimization could lead to improved performance and greater revenue. Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that giving an ad format a chance to prove itself through comparison testing is a good way to see more positive results. She often counsels clients to test a category that is relevant to site users for a week, and then change to another relevant category for a second week, another for a third week, etc., and compare the results to work toward improvement.

There are two important reasons for doing this. One, by allowing a week, you give your category a chance to see if it works with your users. Two, better performance is not always in the most obvious categories; knowing your users can improve results. For example, news publication sites target high-end automobiles or investment ads to better target their demographics.

Optimizing Categories
In another poll question, we asked how many ad categories you’ve designated on your sites:

Q: How many different ad categories have you designated? 

Over half of you answered that you only designate a category at the site level. And through your free-form responses, some of you noted “1 or 2 per site”, “2 for entire site,” or “sometimes for certain pages.”

Cody Simms of Yahoo!’s Product Management team advises that focusing content development efforts at the individual page level rather than the site level could improve revenue performance with a contextual advertising program. Where possible, strive to make each web page oriented around a single specific topic. Our contextual ad engine performs best when a page has a clear topic associated with it.

Of course, the practicality of doing this all depends on the type of site that you run. If you are blogging, for example, you likely will not be adjusting the content on each page to fine-tune for contextual advertising. But if you are publishing product reviews or other forms of static content, this might work well for you.

Once you’ve focused content development at the individual URL level, you can then use our Reporting URLs or Reporting Categories feature to track performance for each specific page. Following our comparison testing example earlier, try making one small weekly adjustment to page content at a time and track your performance changes as a result.

For further insights into improving performance, Jennifer Slegg, a guest blogger back in May, had some good thoughts on optimization, as did our own Margaret Holland.

Are you optimizing more than our survey let on? Does the above advice ring true? What else do you think we should ask you about in our polls? Leave a comment and let us know!

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network

Famed blogstress Jennifer Slegg unmasks the mysteries of color matching

Many publishers fail to realize the true importance of ad unit colors when generating their Yahoo! Publisher Network ad javascript. In fact, I have seen revenue quadruple when publishers make a simple change to their color schemes.

So how do you know if a color scheme is a good one or a bad one? By testing. For each color scheme you choose, you will want to create a new Reporting Category. But before you do that, you need to figure out what color schemes might work best for you.

There are four types of color schemes that I use for my Yahoo! Publisher Network ad units:

1. The blended technique

This technique sets the ad unit’s background and border color to the same color as the page background color. The title is then in either traditional hyperlink blue or in another color used for page links.

2. The matching technique

If your logo is green, you might try matching both the border and background of the ad unit to the same green, then use the page background color as the ad unit’s text color. You aren’t introducing new colors, but matching the on-page colors, and this makes the ad unit more noticeable than the blended technique.

3. The complimentary technique

This would use new colors not currently on the page, but colors chosen to complement the colors that are. There are many tools available online to help you figure out what colors complement the major color elements on your page. You can leave the border hidden and use the complementary colors for all the text, or use those complementary colors in the ad unit’s border and background, as well.

4. The contrasting technique

This isn’t used as often, but there are publishers who find contrasting ad units perform the best. For contrasting colors, think bold, bright and, most importantly, obnoxious.

What makes an ad unit “obnoxious”? It could be a red border with a yellow background. Or a lime green background with a hot pink border. These draw the eye because they are so garish. But while this technique works best on some types of sites, you should avoid this if your visitors return often or have a high number of page views per visit—you don’t want to alienate them!

Finally, a free script like PHPAdsNew will allow you to rotate your tested ad units evenly. As long as you have set up a new channel for each ad unit color scheme, after a few days you should easily be able to see which ad unit has the highest CTR and is performing the best for you.

Happy testing!

– Jen Slegg, Publisher, Jensense.com

Ad placement tips

“It really depends on what you’re trying to do,” says Margaret Holland, when asked about optimal ad placement. A senior account manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, Margaret helps publishers get the most out of the Network. “From a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a ‘leaderboard’ above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.”

But not everyone wants to be that up-front with their advertising. Some prefer to place their ads in less-obvious but still eye-catching places. Eye tracking studies (like the ones cited here and here) have shown that people tend to look at the top-center or top-left of a site first, then track to the right and down the right side, slanting back up across the page to just below the upper-left corner and down the left side – all in an instant.

In general, Margaret has a found that the second most active placement in terms of click-throughs tends to be the right-hand rail or margin. “Skyscrapers” and vertical banners do well when placed next to the content in the main body.

Square and rectangle ads placed within the center column also do well, provided they are placed in context to the content. Ads placed below the fold tend to perform least well, although that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. If you have some useful functionality or eye-catching media near the footer, that may be a good place to put an extra ad unit. Bear in mind, however, that when pairing ads with media or images, it must be apparent to the user that the media is not a part of the ad. Placing images next to ad units can be construed at an “inducement to click,” and goes against Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Terms and Conditions.

“Each site is different, and each publisher has different goals,” Margaret notes. “Publishers should experiment with different placement, layouts, Reporting Categories and Ad Targeting combinations to achieve the best outcome.” 

 – Michael Mattis, Blog Editor