Yandex’s launch into the global search market. Judging by Yandex’s success at controlling Google in the Russian search market, they should eventually be a valuable player. I say eventually, but I don’t want to take away from the good that they are bringing to the table right now.

Keep in mind this is not a brand new garage project with big dreams of cramping Google’s style. Yandex is a mature contender with combat experience against the big G. Yandex has a few good things going, and a few that are just wrong. Let’s break it down a little.

The Good

Clean SERPs – I’ve seen Rand Fishkin and a few others mentioning this around the Web, and it’s true. Duncan Morris of Distilled was quoted in a post on Search Engine Land saying, “After a very brief play I’m incrediblyimpressed at the relative lack of spam and the quality of the results that are being returned.” He also said it may have a better engine than Google. Over the next few months we’ll see how robust that spam filter really is.

No Ads –- No paid results is a moot point to me. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that the plan will be to ignore paid search all together in the global filter. They will be there soon enough unless Yandex is going to allow purchased placement.

Site Icons – I had to include this. The site logos look great next to the results.

The Bad

A Global Results Mesh — With a little more time, we’ll be able to see where the pain points are with the global engine, but at a first glance I can say that I have a problem with the lack of country specific results.

For example, a search for “beamer” (a popular German term for “projectors”) returns results related to the car and projector alike. The car results are English while the projector results are German. Searchers are intelligent individuals, but they are also lazy and impatient. Sifting through different languages to find what they need doesn’t cut it. I can see Yandex splitting the engine to be country specific in the future.

The Yugly

Go Somewhere Else — One last thing. Aside from displaying monthly search volume on the SERP, I hope we all notice that at the bottom of the Yandex results, they are recommending that we search Google, Yahoo and Bing if we don’t see what we are looking for. I love it! Maybe it’s just my opinion, but that doesn’t sound like a great way to get your customer to keep coming back for more.

If you’ve heard anything about paid search inclusion coming to the global filter, or if you are seeing any other flaws in the results, I’d love to hear about it. Yandex is a great engine, and I hope they find success in the global market. Otherwise, I’ll have to practice my Russian.

Yandex Global Search – the Good, the Bad, and the Yugly is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I read a post yesterday that talked all about the use of trademarks and other symbols in title tags, and it threw my mind into a spin. Some of the information was insightful, but the rest was very outdated and downright dangerous. I think we need to make a few things clear on this subject.

Including the TM does NOT show Google you’re the authority

I hate to use a quote of a quote here, but I appreciated the reference to TDTECHFLEX from the ihelpyou forum that was posted. He states:

“I doubt that Google or Yahoo would see the tm and think ‘oh, this must be THE authority’ since anyone could use such for an off-white tactic. I do think that human users might pay more attention to a title with it.”

I agree with his statement that search engines don’t put weight into TM inclusion, but I am hesitant about it being user friendly. Topic #2 will explain why.

Avoid using Trademarks and other symbols in meta tags

I have seen way too many sites that have had their SERP snippets ruined by including these symbols in the titles. Don’t believe me? Take a look.

If you looked at these and said, “WOOF!” then we are on the same page. Keep the symbols out of your titles, and include them elsewhere in the content of your page.

Double Inclusion in the Title Tags

If you are going to take the recommendation I listed above, then you don’t really have to worry about this one. In the post I read yesterday, there was reference to a thread on Google answers back in 2003 which advised a webmaster to include the product name first with the trademark, then without it in the title.

Example: “Brand/Product ™ – Brand/Product”

PLEASE don’t do this to yourself. Double inclusion of keywords in an element is never a safe idea, and assuming you are a white-hat, good-hearted, life-loving SEO, you won’t do this. We like to call this practice “keyword stuffing.”

Overuse of symbols

I agree with the poster from yesterday on this. Once you have established the trademark within your content, there is no need to carry the TM throughout the rest of the content on your page. Don’t let it potentially mess up the keyword quality on your page.

In conclusion, you may love your trademark, but when it comes down to getting crawled, indexed, and ranked properly, that cute little symbol might be getting in the way of a beautiful ranking. Don’t let that happen to you. Pull your trademarks out of your titles. Having ugly looking title snippets in the SERPs will ruin your click through and dilute your keyword density. There is a time and a place for everything. Your title tag is not the place for a trademark.

Trademarks and Symbols in Title Tags is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Yesterday was the last day of PubCon South here in Dallas. There was no shortage of chatter around the sessions, yet somehow I had a song in my head all day. It was something about, “Chinese food makes me sick,” and “Abercrombie and Fitch.” If you know what song that is, you are probably the guy who was two rows behind me humming it. Anyhow, let’s recap with a few of the best sessions of my experience here. If you saw others that I missed, grab me on twitter, @andychesnut. I’m wishing that I had cloned myself for this conference.

Scott Stratten – Keynote Speaker — ROI and Social Media

Scott split the curtains wide to open up the conference day by making every reactionary businessman on the globe feel silly for having referred to talking as “Social Media.” I wholeheartedly agreed with his expressions of frustration. Whether it is text, audio or video, you are talking. If what you are saying is worthless, that worthlessness just became magnified by the virtual channels you released it through.

His best tip of the morning – If you are asking, “what’s my ROI? You are thinking about it WRONG!” Talk with your customers. Use the virtualization “talking” platforms as a chance for publicized customer service. You can try to put a dollar sign in front of the effort required to appreciate and engage a customer, but if the dollar sign is thought about before the happiness of the customer, you’re going to flop in the social platforms.

Jessica Bowman – Inhouse SEO

This next bit applies to the Inhouse SEO, the agency that is trying desperately to understand client business strategy, and the IT department manager who is suddenly having his project scope swamped with SEO requirements. For the SEOs, Jessica was pleading that you understand the SEO-IT gap can exist between the executive vision and the action level.

While your CEO and VPs may be absolutely pumped about the SEO strategy, you may be shooting yourself in the foot if you are skipping the directors and going down to the developers. You can bet that when the development team sees how much SEO strategy is going to add to the budget, hours and scope of their next launch, they are going to take it up the line. Please, take the time to work with everyone in the chain.

To those in IT, be patient with your SEO. Search engine optimization specialists have a tendency to stick their nose in everything. So ask them SEO questions and take a little time to understand the SEO strategy. You may not be able to implement everything at first, but work with the SEO team in baby steps if you need to.

Bill Hunt – Large Scale and International Search Strategy

I got to sit in on two of Bill’s sessions, and I was sponging (is that a word?) everything he said. He talked about his experiences with helping to organize IBM’s global search program. He shared his thoughts on making global site templates a priority in any international brand. He also emphasized the impact that can be had from getting involved in the corporate policies and letting them work to the benefit of the search team. I got the chance to talk with him for a long while afterward and he was kind enough to volunteer some thoughts about managing massive keyword databases.

Rob Snell – E-Commerce

Rob talked a great deal about the story behind his family business. I could recap the whole thing here, but it’s far more entertaining from him in his Mississippi steez. The highlights I pulled from him are:

Do everything you can to interact with your customers online the way you interact with them on the phone. Steve (Rob’s brother) would spend 30 minutes on the phone with each customer letting them get to know him. Do you let your online customers know who you are?

Content happens in the 15 minutes you have while waiting for your next meeting. As a site owner, use downtime to be writing a product review, a description, or an FAQ. Generating unique quality content requires time, so find the time.

Ian Lurie – Query Deserves Freshness

Ian had some great thoughts for those of you who are starting small and feel overwhelmed with the task of beating out the behemoths in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s called QDF and its not anything new, but it is becoming more and more popular.

To break it down, in the event of a spike in searches for a given term, the search engine will boost new content that is relevant and reliable to the top of the SERP for that term. This means that if you are involved in the topic, or well aware of the trending topic, you as a small competitor can grab some traffic from the trend wave. Few big brands are using QDF to their advantage, so take hope, if you are agile enough to post content while the topic is trending, you can get some of that traffic.

There were other sessions about some great search tools, and some thoughts on gathering competitive intel. Michael Gray gave some insight into Google using social network data as an influence in universal search rankings – quantity of retweets, etc. Amanda Watlington was also on the Personalized and Universal Search panel. She made some bold statements about the coming death of rankings. I’ll have a blast posting about that one at a future date because I disagree on so many levels. Rankings will be a key metric for many years, even if the metric is modified. What do you think? Is rank headed for the trash? To be clear, I’m a fan of Amanda and her Ph.D in Linguistics. If ever there were a person who could teach about keyword research and search intent, it is her!

I have about twenty other pages of notes from the sessions, but I just can’t fit it all into this post. Tell me what you thought of the conference.

PubCon South Dallas 2010 Highlights is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Last month, my wife and I jumped on a plane out of Salt Lake City and headed toward what my wife refers to as “the most magical place on earth,” Walt Disney World. Why were we going when we don’t have any kids? I can promise you it wasn’t because of all the wonderful childhood memories. After all, this would technically be my first time.

I went for the food.

This was not just any food, mind you. I’m talking fillets, lobster, bread pudding and more! We sampled everything from the fufu of Africa to the burgers of a Sci-Fi diner. The best part was that the food was free! That’s right. We ate free for the entire week.

Why am I talking about this in an SEO post? It is because amid the lobster, the best milk-shakes of my life, and riding Everest seven times in a row, I began to realize that I had been tricked. Walt Disney in all his cunning had unraveled the magic of successfully inspiring his customers. He understood the principles behind making a customer both happy and engaged. While Disney incented me to become a customer through free food, business owners have used other giveaways to develop opportunities to involve, channel, and give back to their customer community.

Involve Your Customers

The International Olympic Committee recently announced a social challenge called The Best of Us. Utilizing YouTube, Olympic athletes are challenging the young crowd to film themselves completing various challenges and submit the video. Winners will receive everything from T-shirts, to tickets to the Olympic Games.

In recent years the committee has seen a drop in interest from younger generations, and they know they need to act quickly or lose their audience. Setting YouTube as the platform for this involvement campaign brings the Olympics into an environment that their viewers are comfortable with. Assuming that their audience decides to become involved, we should see a viral spread of some of the more impressive videos that have been submitted for the contest.

I rate this as a “good” offer. The actual act required to receive the benefit does not increase your company’s revenue, but it gives your customer a chance to challenge himself, and become more engaged with a great product or activity. YouTube viewers love to see and promote impressive videos done by regular people. We’ll see if the execution of the Olympic campaign brings about the intended goal.

Channel the Community

With the example of the Olympic Challenge, we see an opportunity to inspire individuals to better themselves, but Disney has a current campaign that takes this one step further. Through an initiative called Give a Day Get a Disney Day, Disney challenges us to seek volunteer opportunities and give a day of service. In return, Disney will give one day admission to either Disney World or Disneyland.

This campaign does not engage the customer through a digital platform at all. In fact, it is encouraging the audience to step away from the digital world while performing these acts of service. Effective?

Disney’s idea is counter intuitive, but I personally consider this to be a “better” offer. The intent of the offer is to get the customer to look away from themselves and serve in their community. Guess how many individual bloggers would love to post pictures and summaries along with links to Disney promoting the campaign?

Disney has the goal of getting one million volunteers to participate. We will assume that a fraction of the participants is made up of bloggers, some fraction will be active social network users, and a small fraction will have some other form of a personal website. If the campaign becomes a success in the eyes of the participants, you can bet that they will do their best to evangelize, and that means social promoting, links, and higher customer devotion for Disney.

Give Back

Here at SEO.com we have been trying to do our part to give through the Ultimate Web Marketing Makeover. Our company has seen great successes during a time when other companies may be hurting, and we see our chance to give back. Throughout the month of October we accepted submissions from companies all over.

Aside from being a great opportunity to give back, we found that this was a great chance to increase awareness of what our company represents. We saw thousands of people reached via Twitter and Facebook. Each digital impression is a chance to reach a new customer. Each time that impression is placed in front of a blogger, he has the chance to write a post about your activities. Each email you send to webmasters inviting them to promote your event is a chance to gain a business partnership.

When you are willing to give, your customers are willing to give as well. That is the Law of Reciprocity. Your customers will see your efforts to give back to them, and it will create more respect for your business. While this would be reward enough, links will have a funny way of heading in your direction. News sites and bloggers will spread their opinion of your efforts.

I encourage you to look at your sphere of influence. Think about what you can do to support your customers and give back to the community. Set a plan in motion to involve your customers, encourage them to excel, or give back to the community that helped your company to grow. If you do this, you’ll find that your customers will develop a greater respect for you. When respect for you grows, the internet community starts to talk, and I bet you’ll see some links coming your way.

Is It Really Better to Give? is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

E Mare Libertas, “From the Sea, Freedom” is the motto of the tiny water fortress and country of Sealand. You may never have heard of this micro-nation before, but locked within the history of this principality we may find parallels on how to stake a claim on the virtual seas of the Web.

The British developed a series of these fortresses to deflect German air raids in World War II. They hosted more than 200 soldiers, had radar and were equipped with enough firepower to defend the islands. These metal beasts successfully prevented any invasion.

After the war, all the fortresses were dismembered except for the one known as Roughs Tower located seven miles off shore in international waters.

Can anyone say free real estate?

British military abandoned it; Roughs Tower stood in solitude until ex-Major Roy Bates came along. Bates claimed it for himself and his family; he declared himself, “Prince Roy of the Principality of Sealand.”

As you read the following history, compare these:

• Your Competitors = Sealand’s Opposition
• Real Estate = The top spot on page 1 of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS)

Britain Returns for Her Baby

If you are a business owner trying to defend your position on the Web, you need your site recognized, and you are aware of the fight to get pages indexed and acknowledged for the authority they really are. To do that, follow Prince Roy’s example. He’s been there. He knows how to stake a claim.

In 1968, one year after Prince Roy declared his sovereignty, Britain wanted the fort back. As British Naval Forces approached Sealand’s territory, Prince Roy buckled in to defend his keep. With arsenal at his disposal, he fired warning shots at the encroaching vessels. Bold? Yes.

Similarly, how many of us are prepared when the competition comes back to claim the top spot we took,  after our competitors let their guard down and stopped optimizing? How many of us are so well optimized that regardless of the SEO efforts of our competitor, we are one step ahead? Keep the following items in mind when attempting to be prepared:

• Keyword Research – For each new page, are you finding the appropriate keywords for that page to claim as real estate?
• Optimization – Are you showing the search engines through page optimization that you are the sovereign authority for your keywords?
• Link Building – Is your dominion expanding across the Web? Are your allies and friends endorsing your sovereignty through links? Are your loyal subjects spreading their appreciation of you throughout the Web? Are you forming new alliances constantly?
• Competitive Analysis – Are your Scouts watching the movement and expansion of your enemies?

There is no easy way to say that we are prepared, and Roy has experienced the blows of being caught less prepared than he thought he was.

A Hostile Takeover and the First War in Sealand

I will use an excerpt from the History of Sealand to describe the horrific scene:

In August of 1978, a number of Dutch men came to Sealand … to discuss business dealings with Sealand. While Roy was away in Britain, these men kidnapped Prince Roy’s son Michael, and took Sealand by force. Soon after, Roy recaptured the island with a group of his own men and held the attackers as prisoners of war.

The Governments of the Netherlands and Germany petitioned for their release. First they asked England to intervene … but the British government… made no claim to the territory of Sealand … Germany sent a diplomat directly to Sealand to negotiate.

Roy first released the Dutch citizens, as the war was over, and the Geneva Convention requires the release of all prisoners. The German was held longer, as he had accepted a Sealand Passport, and therefore was guilty of treason. Prince Roy, who was grateful that the incident had not resulted in a loss of life, and did not want to bloody the reputation of Sealand, eventually released him as well.

Roy discovered, just as we have all witnessed, that some of our enemies are willing to go to great lengths to sabotage our operations and our rankings. There are companies who would promote black hat SEO techniques and would use them against you. Those tactics are in no way appropriate in the world of legitimate SEO. If those tactics are used, search engines have the right to take those sites as prisoners of war (aka: ban them).

We should think of how Roy handled the situation. Yes, he was caught off guard and his opponents used unethical tactics, but he doubled his efforts and followed the rules of engagement when recovering his claim.

As algorithms change, there are times when your rankings will slip and you will lose your real estate. But you should never give up if you feel that your site is worthy of having sovereignty over that keyword.

One last lesson from Sealand: Britain made one last attempt to retake Sealand. Since it is located just seven miles off the coast, the United Kingdom decided to expand its border to a 12 mile perimeter instead of three. Luckily, Roy caught wind of this (competitive analysis) and expanded his own borders to 12 miles off his own “shores” one day prior.

What is my spin on this? He expanded the keywords that his site was optimizing for. You can only gather a portfolio of real estate in the search engines if you are attempting to rank for a well designed, targeted list of keywords. Expand that list to niche keywords and gather as much territory as you can before the competition tries to suffocate your traffic.

Today, Roy’s son Michael governs as Prince Regent of Sealand because of the valiant efforts of his father. For our own sites, I hope we are all willing to leave the type of legacy and example that Prince Roy has given to us. Happy Optimizing!

Lessons from Sealand: How to Stake Your Website’s Claim as a Sovereign Nation is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Just under a year ago I saw the movie Wall-e. At the time, I did not realize the significance of what this movie contained. It wasn’t for another few months that I realized that Wall-e’s world contained the most plausible oncoming paradigm shift in the world of search. I am not saying that this shift is right around the corner, but I will say that the captain has me thinking forward.

If you aren’t familiar with the movie, get familiar. The portrayal of the human race is quite comical and pathetic. Over generations of reliance on technological power, the group of humans aboard the enormous space yacht devolved to individuals of jelly.

While the bone structure of these humans may have shrunk, their ability to collect, store and retrieve data was astounding. There is a scene that demonstrates perfectly the search power they possess. Earth has been rediscovered by an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE), and for the first time the captain is introduced to his homeland. At the command of Captain B. McCrea’s voice saying, “What is Earth?” a video search results page appears on his interface. Using a huge touch screen, he is able to maneuver the video results until he finds exactly what he wants.

We may not use voice recognition with video results just yet, but the message is there. In our day, knowledge comes running at our command. That is the strength of search, and it is only going to become more powerful. With increases in technology, the quality of content retrieved will increase. It begins to beg the question: who among us is ready for SEO under a new search paradigm?

Who is going to change the way search is performed?  Will it be Google? When will it happen? How will the most relevant pages find their way to the SERPs? Will results be video based? Will they be software downloads, videos, or content pages? Will biometrics become a factor when you search for health facts or products? All of these questions are important, but what new parameters will be used for optimization when the way we search changes?

In doing SEO, it isn’t enough for us to be playing Google’s game or waiting for the next big move. The medium on which we base our SEO expertise is not a static environment. We need to be ready to change when it does; we can’t be a minute late. If you are optimizing your website, are you taking time to research the market? Are you testing best practices, and are you developing new SEO tools and tactics? I would encourage you to think about what the next step for the search engines will be. Think about how search engines will try to give the most relevant, highest quality results. Research will keep you benchmarked at least, and ahead of the pack at best. The best thing we can do as SEOs is prepare for the future. When a paradigm shifts everyone goes back to zero. What if zero means the tenth page of Google? Preparation will prevent us from waking up one day and realizing that we’re as lazy at the wheel as our good friend the captain.

What the Brave Captain Searched is a post by SEO expert Andy Chesnut. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.