Watson–IBM’s ‘intelligent’ computer–won at Jeopardy against trivia super-geniuses Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last Thursday. I thought I’d lead off by repeating that information just in case you’ve been living under a rock.  Our question is: will Watson-like technologies end up impacting our industry by changing the way that search engines analyze data?  SPOILER ALERT: The answer is, ‘Yes, almost certainly these technologies will have an impact at some point, but probably not right away, and probably not for some time to come.’  But before we toy around with that idea, let’s do some review.  Who is Watson?

IBM built Watson as a follow-up to Deep Blue–the computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997. By all accounts, it is tremendously more difficult to design a computer that can win at Jeopardy than it is to design a computer that can beat the the all-time world-champion chess-player Garry Kasparov.  For humans facing-off against a master-chess player may seem more intimidating than playing Jeopardy–something that most humans can do with varying degrees of success.  But the crucial difference between chess and Jeopardy is that the former requires the computer to understand graphic relationships & sequences in a clear, rule-bound formula (something that computers are very good at doing), while the latter requires the computer to understand language–which is a far more elusive, fluid, and altogether human ‘game.’ 

So: are computers now able to understand language the way that human beings do?  The short answer is: no, not yet. The tone of this answer has changed, though.  The answer used to be: no, and they never will.  Now even skeptics will say: ‘not yet.’

Let’s look at the ruminations of Jeopardy superstar Ken Jennings for some insight into Watson’s grasp of language.

“Watson is indisputably a huge leap forward in computer ‘thinking.’ When I studied artificial intelligence in college just a decade ago, a question-answering computer as flexible and sophisticated as Watson would have been snorted at as science fiction – the kind of technology that only Captain Kirk, not Alex Trebek, would have access to….But is it really head and shoulders above the best human ‘Jeopardy!’ players, the way it looked on TV? Not by a long shot.”

In an interesting blog post, Ken Jennings says that he’d wanted to be like John Connor (re: the soldier who defeats the Terminators in an apocalyptic future) but he ended up performing more like John Henry (re: the steelworker who died tried to outpace the steam engine).  “BUT…” Jennings qualifies Watson’s victory.  He says that the machine’s primary advantage was its reflexes–it pushes the buzzer at a super-human speed if it knows the answer.

Here is how Ken Jennings explains Watson’s win:

“The key to Watson’s dominance lies in the famously tricky “Jeopardy!” buzzer, the signaling device that allows players to respond to the show’s clues. Like any human player, Watson does buzz with a “thumb” of sorts (actually a magnetic coil mounted over a buzzer), but it can also rely on the millisecond-precision timing of a computer. The reflexes of even a very good human player will vary slightly, but not Watson’s. If it knows the answer, it makes the perfect buzz. Every single time. And it’s hard to win if you can’t buzz. Imagine if John Henry had to beat the steam engine at a feat of brute strength just to be allowed to swing his hammer, or if chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov had to solve a long-division problem faster than supercomputer Deep Blue every time he moved a piece in their epic match.”

With that said: for all that we haven’t arrived at self-evolving artificial intelligence quite yet, even Ken Jennings will concede that Watson does represent a huge leap forward in terms of how data-processors are able to understand language.

As a copy-writer and SEO consultant this piques my interest because that is what our industry is all about: we have to write so that algorithms will understand us as well as human audiences. To some extent, the whole concept of SEO is that search-engines and human beings looking for websites need a middle-man to help them fully understand one another in order to derive optimum efficiency and maximum benefits.  After the epic Jeopardy death-match between man and machine that went down last week, I am left to wonder how long it will take Google to integrate some of these various new capacities into the way that they do search and I am very interested in how that will ultimately change our field.

As Google continues to improve its algorithm–adding reader-levels & n-grams and other tricky mechanisms to the massive amounts of user-data that inform their search results–the ‘intelligence’ of search results can often seem almost eerie. As a sidenote: for me, the addition of millions of OCR-ed texts in Amazon and Google Books has added a new level of functionality to Google’s search engine.  If a stray thought runs through my head from a book that I read years ago, I can type in a paraphrase of that quote and find the source.

But, of course, Google’s search engine is not actually ‘intelligent,’ its just incredibly well-informed. You can enter the terms ‘web-design’ into Google search-engine and it will pull out reams of information on that subject for you in a cleverly arranged hierarchy.  But Google’s search engine does not actually know what ‘web design’ is.  It may know that ‘web-design’ and ‘web-designer’ are related terms–the second term contains the first, but it does not understand that the term ‘web-designer’ designates a human-subject, whereas ‘web-design’ can refer to a discipline or an industry.  The people at IBM, however, are beginning to design machines that do understand these distinctions, however.  It will be interesting to watch as new applications are developed to exploit the advances that Watson’s victory represents.

There was an article in this Saturday’s edition of the New York Times about black-hat linkbuilding that we found interesting. This article might be very informative to the average reader but there’s nothing particularly novel about this ‘news’ to anyone at SmallBox.  Provocatively titled, “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,” this article is just further confirmation of something that we’ve known for a long time: Google is getting more and more discerning about filtering good quality links and high-quality content out of the online jungle.

For anyone who doesn’t have time to read the ten page article, here’s a quick summary:

The NY Times noted that JC Penney’s was showing an abnormal level of dominance in an unusual diversity of keyword constellations in Google Search this holiday season. They showed up in a No. 1 ranking spot for keywords as competitive as “dresses” and “bedding” and as diffuse as “area rugs” and “grommet top curtains.” Other keywords where they were showing up in the number one spot included: “furniture,” table clothes,” “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” and “comforter sets.”  They beat out huge operations like Lowes, Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond and any number of other Big Box retailers in keywords where these other industry leaders should have naturally dominated.

About 34% of Google’s traffic goes to the No. 1 website on the SERP.  The website ranked No. 2 pulls in about half of that, or 17% of all traffic. As you can readily imagine, with number one rankings in practically every product category for sale in their store, JC Penney’s must have been getting great traffic over Christmas.

So: how did they do it?

Well, unfortunately for them, they did it by using black-hat SEO techniques. Company executives claim that they had no knowledge that black-hat techniques were being used and it’s quite likely that they’re telling the truth.  They contracted a link-building service that used shady practices to get them results and now they’re paying the price. Across the board, after Google’s corrective measures, JC Penney’s has been buried back in pages 6 or 7 on Google, even for terms where they would, perhaps, naturally appear on page one or two.  That’s because when Google gets wind of the fact that you’ve been using black-hat methods they dock you.  Getting docked liked this is a known-quantity in the industry, that’s why reputable firms stay away from black-hat techniques.  This can really hurt revenue.

There’s no doubt that JC Penney’s reaped a huge benefit by dominating such a wide array of search terms over this Christmas season, but over the long run the campaign that brought them so much traffic between black Friday and Dec 24th 2010 is going to damage their bottom line.

Back in the Wild West days of Search Engine Optimization–say during the early days of the past decade–there were all kinds of ways to manipulate search results. You could type in your keywords over and over in white type-face against a white background and draw visitors like moths to a flame.  Trashy link-farms were a legitimate way to leverage the marketing potential of a website.  But that was a long time ago.

These days Google’s algorithm has gotten so smart that, believe it or not, honesty actually is the best policy in terms of how we drive online business. Thoughtful, well written content trumps keyword stuffed content.  Links from sites that are germane to your industry will usually help you a great deal more than links from random sites, and links from link-farms will end up hurting you in the end.  Google can tell.  They’re not omniscient yet, but they’re getting close.

That’s why SmallBox has focused on staying at the cutting edge of totally straightforward, strait-laced SEO techniques over the past few years. We always recommend to our customers that they make sure the code and content on their site is in good shape before investing in link-building.  The industry is always changing, and new opportunities appear practically on a weekly basis, but there is a consistent theme to our approach: we’re interested in long-term solutions because, in the end, long-shots don’t pay off.

To learn more about SmallBox’s SEO service click here.

Google’s N-Gram cache brings their level of near-omniscience–and in particular their knowledge about how the use of language informs human interaction with Search Engines–to a new level. Human language and human behavior (re: consumer behavior) intersect in interesting ways on the Internet, and Google has long been established as the industry leader in mapping and manipulating the site of this interaction.  Cultural theorists have, for a long time, been writing ‘prophetic’ essays about how the Internet is a kind of incarnation of collective memory or a representation of collective consciousness.  Google’s new N-Gram cache & viewer consummates that kind of pipe-dream in some interesting new ways.   At present Google’s N-Gram cache is mostly interesting on a scholarly level–it will not immediately influence the way that businesses compete for Search Engine Rankings. But it gives us some insight into the scope of Google’s long-term ambitions, and for that reason, I think its worth a blog-post.

The N-Gram viewer allows users to search the rising and falling frequency of words as they appear in print over the last five hundred years. Search can be narrowed to any period of years in the past five hundred years, so you can search levels of word-usage from 1500 to present or you can search within a shorter period.  For example, how often did the word Reagan appear in print between 1980 to 1988?

Well, certainly more frequently than it had appeared in the preceding 500 years. No great surprise there.  The use of the word ‘Reagan’ begins to pick up in the mid-60’s and it spikes steeply in the 1980’s.  (In fact, the word Reagan appeared in print more frequently than the words ‘Jesus Christ’ from 1980 until mid-year 2000.  Go ahead, take a look.)  The word Bush fared better than Reagan in the early centuries of Early Modern era, experiencing occasional spikes in usage.  However that probably has more to do with the word for shrubbery appearing at the beginning of sentences than it has to do with certain members of the oil-dynasty from Texas, some of whom have been promoted or elected to various high positions in the United States government in the past 30 years.

Below I’ve called up a comparative n-gram (or ‘bi-gram’) of the words ‘God’ and ‘money,’ spanning the past five hundred years.

As we can see usage of the pronoun ‘God’ in print peaked during the late 1600’s through the early 1700’s, and at the end of the 18th century it began a precipitous decline, the frequency of its usage gradually approaching an almost perfect statistical convergence with the word ‘money’ not too long after the Industrial Revolution.  The usage of the word ‘God’ in print remains at a frequency slightly higher than the word ‘money’ in our present decade.

The appearance of the words ‘Angelina Jolie’ in print, surpassed the prevalence of the words ‘War in Afghanistan’ in early 2002, by a margin that has been growing consistently since that time.

To assemble their N-Gram cache, Google scanned 10% of all books ever published. That’s one out of every ten books, dating back to the invention of the printing press.  That’s an impressive sample and it will allow Google to map the evolution of language in print-form in amazing ways.  This, presumably, will ultimately inform the ‘discernment’ of their algorithm in ways and by means that I am not qualified even to hypothesize about.

It’s interesting that the N-Gram and Google’s Reading-Level filter came out in the same week. At this point, the reading-level filter is not informed by data from the n-gram cache (the reading level filter is informed by a group of teachers who graded sites along specific criteria), but we can imagine that as that tool becomes more nuanced, some bandwidths of data from the N-Gram may begin to come into play, framing the way that Google reads websites, and how we, in turn, encounter the written word.

Fun fact: Did you know that in order to harvest the parchment (sheep-skin) to produce one copy of the first print run of the Gutenberg Bible (the 1st book ever printed) 300 sheep had to be slaughtered?!  In intervening years, with the invention of blogs and so forth, the dissemination of text to an audience has become much less costly!

Many of our clients tell us they want a blog, news section or both on their website. It’s common for many to opt for a blog simply because “blog” is a buzz-word, but it’s important to know the difference between the two and which choice is right for their company and which choice will have the best impact.

I’ll break it down for you.

The News section of your site should be a factual timeline of your company. This is where you announce information very specific to your company, such as new hires, upcoming events, or changes to your service or product offerings. You can think of your news section as an area for press releases. Just be sure to present your company the way you want people to think of you: your brand.

For example:

• Announce new products, services or offerings
• Announce recent achievements or awards
• Announce upcoming events

A blog serves as a space to discuss pertinent topics to your industry, not just your company. This area of your site allows you to be a thought leader within your industry and should always encourage open dialog and integration across social platforms. Blogging allows you to share your thoughts, opinions and reviews on a plethora of topics, just make sure to keep it interesting and relevant.

For example:

• Informative – teach how (easy it is) to use your product
• Editorial – offer opinions and reviews about topics related to your industry
• Promotional – announce upcoming sales, specials or contests

Remember your audience and your point-of-view. Your News section is generally going to be more official, and your blog should have a more personal tone. While it is often expected to announce the author of a blog post, that isn’t necessary for a News post. Additionally, while blogging should always allow discussion through comments, a News section usually doesn’t.

Hopefully this clears up the difference between a blog and news, but there’s one very important thing to keep in mind: you have to constantly update them. Merely having a blog or news page does not make it worthwhile, and not keeping them fresh can actually send a negative message. Constantly posting blogs or news keeps your company in mind and establishes that your company is always up to date. Not only that, keeping it fresh makes a significant impact on your Search Engine Optimization!

Google just introduced Boost, its newest advertising tool through Google Places. Currently in beta, Boost is available in only a handful of cities and not yet available in Indianapolis. However, in a recent conversation with a Google employee, I learned that Boost will be expanded to include Indianapolis in the not-so-distant future.

So small business owners, perk up your ears.

Designed for local small business owners, the core idea of Boost is simplicity itself. First, the business owner writes a simple business description, chooses business industry categories and sets a budget. Boost then automatically creates an ad campaign for your business, finding relevant keywords and managing your budget to achieve maximum potential. Essentially, Boost is a layman’s Adwords, without all the fuss of keyword research, geo-targeting or spending analysis.

Boost ads appear above the search results in the ‘sponsored ads’ section, or to the right of the search results.

On a local search that generates a map insert, Boost ads receive a blue pin on the map instead of the usual red pin.

Boost ads do not change organic search ranking and all analytics data is collected and viewed through the Places dashboard. Each Boost ad budget must be at least $50 monthly, but can be increased at any time. Ads can also be deleted at any point and the business owner will only be charged for the number of clicks that actually occurred during that time period.

More information about Boost billing and the advertising process can also be found in Google Places Help and on the Google Lat Long Blog.

Last week, Google revamped the way that they “organize the world’s information,” giving ‘place’ a new centrality in how they rank websites.  What that means, in SEO speak, is that they’ve merged place results with organic search results. This has a number of important implications, but the long-story-short is that this is good news for small local businesses.

Most searches used to look like this:

At the top of the page, the website with the highest organic ranking would appear.  Then, further down the first page, ‘Places’ would appear.  Appearing at the top of the place list could be important, but without a tagline describing your business in your place-listing, your business had no chance to win traffic by distinguishing itself.  The website with the No. 1 ranking at the top of the page usually wound up winning the highest search-traffic.  Now that Google has merged ‘place’ and organic search results, for local searches Google’s page 1 often ends up looking like this:

As you can see, the red place-balloons with the business’s address and phone-number, now appear beneath the organic listing.  What this means is that maps optimization and organic SEO are no longer compartmentalized in terms of how businesses appear in search.

This weeds national competition that does not have a local presence out of the top slots in many cases. For example, say that your customers enter the search terms:  ‘flowers Indianapolis.’  If the national flower-delivery service that does not have a local flower shop formerly appeared in the top-slot, they are likely to fall in the rankings to the best optimized local flower shop.

On the other hand: whereas, formerly, businesses that were well-optimized on Google Place without any organic SEO (or without a website), might have had an advantage over other businesses that were not well-optimized on Place, now they’ve lost that advantaged.  This makes having a well-optimized website ever more important for local businesses.

In May of 2010, Small Box was approached by IndyLift, Inc. for help improving search engine ranking and overall visibility for the IndyLift website.  The following is a summary of the IndyLift Case Study which outlines our process and the results achieved.

IndyLift, Inc. is a local Indianapolis forklift dealer, providing material handling equipment, parts, repairs and services.  As seasoned and established experts in the material handling industry, IndyLift focuses on offering personal, high quality service and care.

However, before coming to Small Box, the IndyLift website did not incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and as a result suffered from poor search engine visibility and only ranked moderately for a small number of keywords.

After a consultation with IndyLift, we were able to identify two goals for the IndyLift website;

1. Increase organic search visibility
2. Increase local maps visibility.

After determining these goals, we then embarked on a 5-phase strategy to meet those goals;

1. Keyword research
2. SEO Audit
3. On-site optimization
4. Off-site optimization
5. Local listing optimization

A few weeks after completing the implementation of our SEO strategy, IndyLift began to see substantial improvement in both organic search rankings and local map inserts.  IndyLift now holds the top position in the Google map insert for ‘indianapolis forklifts’ and two of the top three organic positions.  Anyone searching for forklifts in Indianapolis will find IndyLift quite hard to miss.

To learn more about our process and results for IndyLift, Inc., download the full IndyLift Case Study.

Recent conversations with some friends about what I “do” at work sparked this idea.  As I’ve been thinking about these conversations, I’ve started to realize that when I launch into an explanation of what I do, more often than not I start to describe what I like to do.  Granted, there’s still a lot more for me to learn, but there’s something exciting about the process of learning and developing a skill while simultaneously discovering what you like about it.

I’ve always liked words.  I chose to study English over music in college because I figured I’d have a better chance making a living using that knowledge (cue laughter – because nobody actually uses their english degree).  Welcomingly, the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) find their roots in words.  One of the first things we do for an SEO client is begin with keyword research.  This is on my list of favorite tasks.  Keywords are exactly what they say they are – key words.  So if a client wants to reach page one on a Google search, they need to know what words people out there are using to search for their product.

For example, lets say you own a hair salon in Indianapolis.  You need to find the keywords that most people use when searching for places to get a haircut.  Is it “hair salon”?  Is it “best barbershop”?  Perhaps, but it’s also important to consider what people expect to find when they enter keywords in a search and if your service meets that expectation.  If your salon is a upscale luxury salon you would not want to target keywords like “best barbershop” or “cheap haircuts,” the resulting traffic would not find what they were looking for and therefore not visit your salon.  What I do is sit down and figure out what keywords are best for your website.  I look at what you offer, where you offer it and who you offer it to and then basically try to solve a word puzzle – putting together different words and word combinations to find the most common search terms, and then choosing which ones fit and describe you best.  The end result is a list of keywords and corresponding data that tells me what keywords you should target on your website.

Of course, this is only one small step of many in the process of optimizing a website.  And I’m not sure I could even comprehensively list and describe every factor or step.  There’s writing title tags (the words in the grey bar on your browser), writing descriptions, press releases and ad copy.  There’s creating listings in Google Maps and other search engines and hunting down respectable directories for more listings.  There’s link-building and social bookmarking and tweaking little things on the website pages to make sure all the little details match exactly.

But what I like about SEO, what I find myself saying when responding to that inevitable question “what do you do at work?” is that the best thing about SEO is – it’s an exploration, it’s an evolution, it’s always changing.  Even the tasks that tend to drag a bit are always made fresh with a new client because the puzzle is different.  Crossword puzzles never get old because everyday the same newspaper square is transformed into an entirely different puzzle, with different clues and different words.  The same is true for SEO, every client presents a new riddle to unwind.

And I can’t help but to think, that maybe I’m actually getting to use that useless degree of mine after all.

If your business has a physical location where customers can walk in and conduct transactions, you probably already know about the power of Google Local. But April 20th brought the switch from Google Local to Google Places. What does it mean for your business?

If you are doing everything correctly, probably everything will continue to work as normal. But what if you have never really completely implemented your local search optimization? How do you know if you require professional Local SEO Services?

Here is a checklist to make sure your local customers can find you:

step 1 – Search for your service. Most services will show local results complete with map and other important information. If you are not there you might need professional local search services.

step 2 – Search for your competitors. If they appear ahead of you, then you are losing business. Small Box SEO can definitely help with that.

step 3 – Assess your PPC. If you are spending money each month for clicks, and not converting those clicks to paying customers, then Small Box can improve your results, or help you replace that traffic with better converting organic results.

step 4 – Search for your company on a mobile device. Mobile technology is driving business. If mobile devices are sending people to the wrong location, then you have lost a customer. Small Box executes your local strategy completely, with zero problems for you.

step 5 – Understand your audience by viewing your statistics. Your audience is telling you important things about your site. Are you listening?

It makes a lot of sense for any business to try and manage as much as possible in house. But when it comes to connecting locally in your community, why leave loose ends? The businesses that have 100 % of their profile complete are going to win the battle for Local SEO.

Don’t take chances, Contact Small Box in Austin at 512-850-4819 or Indianapolis at 317-254-0932.