Do you want to have at least some control over the description text for your results on a search page? Don’t we all?

A Google Webmaster Central post about improving snippets using meta descriptions gives pointers on how to best apply all the steps in making a meta description that they’ll most probably use for SERP snippets. It’s not something that’s not already known, well not unless you’re a new webmaster that bought the “you don’t need to bother with meta tags” hype. The truth is, meta tags are there for a reason and were originally intended to help create a structured approach to helping robots (software) to identify and classify content on the Internet. The fact that these tags were overused for ranking purposes in the past has moved the focus from their SEO importance completely, but meta tags have remained a necessary part of a well designed web page.

The post goes into detail on how to formulate your description tag to properly identify the content that can be found on a page and gives good and bad examples. I’ve been using meta descriptions for my own and clients’ sites and have found over the years that a properly formed description tag that’s reasonably short (you have to experiment), does eventually find its way into the SERPs and what’s most important drastically improves click through rates. It really makes sense when you think about it. The post gives examples where the meta description tag contains specific information such as availability and price. This kind of data is probably best left out, since you can’t rely on search engines to dynamically update your snippet every time your description data changes (product sold out, price changes…), but if you stick to information that’s probably going to be static for at least months ahead, than that should be fine. Again, my experience with meta description changes ranges from seeing effects in a couple of days to several weeks. If you are a retail site, it’s probably not a good idea to put in information like prices, especially right before the holiday shopping season - changes will probably not take effect on time, and your information will probably change quickly.

It may be important to note that sometimes a snippet chosen for you by the search engine indeed does a good job of presenting the content on the page in the SERPs. In this case, if the content on the page will not change too much over time, it’s probably a good idea to leave the page the way it is, since it already has a nice descriptive snippet. The meta description should not be ignored for such pages, but your efforts at that moment would probably be better spent on pages which show up with snippets that are just horrible. Fix the bad first, than move onto tweaking the rest.

What’s the best length for a meta description tag? Well, there is now magic number, so you’ll have to experiment. From my experience, keep it concise and page specific. Maybe about 150 characters, but you’ll just have to try and test.

The process of changing descriptions on a site can be very time consuming, but you don’t have to make all the changes at once. Prioritize between pages that are more important (ie. have better rankings for their keywords and bring in significant traffic), and than move onto other pages over time. Meta descriptions are a long term effect, but are well worth the effort. A good meta description will help differentiate a site’s presence in the search results and most likely contribute to better conversion. Oh, and it you are building a new site from scratch, don’t forget meta tags, especially the description meta tag. Trust me, they are important, and the required efforts will pay off over time.

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John Cleese (yes … Monty Python should ring a bell), who has had a successful history both as an actor and comedian, but also as a podcaster, has decided to embrace the latest technologies again in form of a new project called Headcast. This will be a series of video casts where John will share his insights, humor, thoughts and rants, available through The Podcast Network, with whom the author has signed a deal.

The series will be made available as a free version on The Podcat Network over the next few months, with the premium version available as well.

According to TPN’s post, the author’s free podcast, produced by UK company Funk, has achieved over 500,000 downloads in 2007. The John Cleese Podcast is free, since it started in 2005, and will remain that way, but the author and the producers are aiming to explore video as the new media, and experiment with premium content.

Can’t wait to see this!

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The latest upstart to, er …. start, is Attendi, a search engine that differentiates from other search engines by enabling visitors to search and communicate with others online at the same time and learn about the search topic from attendees who are online. Attendi likes to call this “a living breathing search engine”.

Basically, you enter a search query and get a set of results paired with someone who can answer your questions in real time (unless they are offline naturally, in which case they are labeled “offline”). In order to use this you have to be a registered user. The whole thing is actually a chat session and looks something like this for the query “halo 3″:

The concept is interesting, but would I use this kind of search instead of standard search … well, I am not sure. Maybe when researching something more complex, when a single search result simply won’t cut it, Attendi might be useful because chatting with someone (or seeing a chat session relevant to my query) who is well on top of my search topic can give me bits of information and resources that I would otherwise be searching for for hours using standard search.

The site is still in beta so you have to leave your email address to get an invitation from the team to be able to register. There is limited content since the project just started but the authors promise more content soon. Their goal is “millions of Attendi’s storing billions of insights”, and since there seems to be a patent pending, maybe they are actually serious about this goal. If it ever gets to that, a social network powered search with all the social network features comes to mind as the next evolution step for Attendi. Something like Facebook with the primary purpose of friend assisted web search.

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I just read an interesting post by Stephen Spencer in which he takes a look at the SEO side of progressive enhancement.

When a site is developed with the lowest common denominator approach (minimal viewing requirements) and then enhanced in a way that degrades acceptably if the viewer disables advanced scripting on their browser is called progressive enhancement (or shorter PE as used by some). This design and development approach is usually used for the sake of accessibility, but it also has some implications for SEO, even though it really comes down to do you load your content dynamically (after a certain browser event - click, hover…) or do you load all relevant content all at once. Stephen’s post shows a good example of how a page should degrade well when JavaScript (thus AJAX) is turned off, but this is still more an argument for usability, unless the content is loaded dynamically after the page has initially loaded, which indeed could present a serious SEO issue.

It’s not a good idea to load potentially SEO useful content to a page dynamically (through AJAX), thus “hiding” it from the search engines, especially if the content is relevant and specific to the page in question. Using Flash for showing content is also something that has been known to be bad practice for a while now, and should be avoided, unless of course you rely on sources of traffic other than search engines. Best workaround is a mixed page (Flash and HTML), with plenty of good links to level the content deficit. Instead, both AJAX and Flash should be used moderately and all the content that may be interesting to search engines in terms of defining the specific topic of a page (assuming it’s useful for the visitors first and foremost), should be presented using plain old HTML. This way a page will have all the content easily readable by both humans and search engine spiders, and will most likely be taken into consideration as a good result for a search query related to the page’s topic.

Here’s a mind breaker - if you have content that’s initially hidden but accessible through the UI through whatever advanced page control layer (DHTML, Javascript, whatever) and than the content becomes inaccessible (invisible) with scripting turned off, does it qualify for the hidden content penalty from the search engines? In other words, if the content is only accessible by humans through the UI and not the search engines (they can’t determine what to click visually), and is otherwise hidden, will the site be penalized?

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Facebook released a press release with the latest statistics regarding site performance. I won’t go into detail here because there is plenty to see for those who like to watch numbers in the Facebook press release, but I will quote some of the interesting stats:

• More than 42 million active users; 200,000+ new registrations per day since January 2007
• Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than 54 billion page views per month

The numbers are impressive, especially the steady growth. It’s no wonder Microsoft is interested in investing close to $500 million for a 3-5% stake in Facebook which is now valued at $10 billion. The price for such a moderate stake is quite big, but looking at the latest stats, there may be good reason for that. If Facebook continues to grow, and with more steps taken towards opening Facebook towards developers thus creating space for further major development, the company may even bust the $10 billion threshold to go much higher. Let’s hope Facebook’s growth doesn’t resemble a balloon being blown up too much.

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Widgets seem to the next big thing for online marketing. Web widgets and desktop widgets have been around for a while now, with web widgets being more successful (no download and install), but haven’t had a major impact on online marketing, until recently. Many online businesses already use widgets to attract more people to their sites. Sites like Amazon.com use widgets to allow bloggers to show their favorite Amazon products on their blogs. More and more companies are starting to use widgets as a source of traffic to their sites. With the expansion of social networks, Facebook for example, widgets have come into focus. Apart from their original purpose, widgets embedded into social network profiles are perhaps much more than just small content boxes. With the growing popularity of social networks, widgets represent a specific online marketing channel since they appear on personal profile pages seen by other people on a social network, usually people who are friends or colleagues, in other words a specific audience, that is otherwise unreachable. This means widgets now carry a dimension of personal recommendation, as well as the content served within. Nick O’Neill over at AllFaceBook wrote an interesting post where he goes deeper into an analysis of Facebook’s effect on the widget economy.

MarketingSherpa released a special report on widgets usage (open access until Sept 28), which showed some interesting results. According to the report, some marketers have seen incredible ROI from widget based campaigns (as much as 1250% !), while others have enjoyed more moderate results. CTRs have been in the range of 3.5% .

Widgets are definitely starting to create impact as marketing tools. Even though they are still underdeveloped as a marketing tool, widgets will probably become an interesting online marketing channel, and should be considered in an overall internet marketing strategy. Although many companies use widgets more as a tool for increasing brand awareness (low conversion rates), there are obviously examples of widgets delivering satisfactory results in terms of traffic and conversion. This probably depends on the business industry, but testing is the only sure way to know if widgets are going to give good results for a particular business. Widget production is not expensive, and allows easy performance measurement. Are you considering widgets as a marketing tool?

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Facebook may be becoming a serious threat to Google with the ever growing number of users and popularity. Google seems to have decided to take a more active approach to combat what they call the “Facebook issue” by being more open than the Facebook platform. According to TechCrunch, this plant has been discussed behind closed doors at a meeting. The new initiative has been scheduled for as early as November 5 this year.

In short, there will be new APIs that will enable developers to leverage Google’s social graph data, starting with Orkut and iGoogle. This will later expand to include Gmail, Google Talk, as well as other G services in the future. Read in more detail here.

Google has already taken steps leading it into the social network realm by introducing Google Share Stuff. In this post I contemplated on what the future would be like if Google decides to make its own social network (or if it buys en existing one, like Facebook), and it seems the new open strategy is an introduction to something like that. In my opinion, Facebook is really not that open, being a platform that enables you to develop applications that can only be used within Facebook, so being more open that Facebook is not that big a deal. Since Google has had many more APIs open to the public, with much more functionality than those on Facebook, and with thousands of sites that generate (usually useful and interesting) content by using Google APIs exclusively, what Google needs to work on is the social networking side of things, and keep that open from the start. Maybe, if they give support to the open social graph initiative by making their APIs and services with the concept in mind, they can actually outperform sites like Facebook. Since Brad Fitzpatrick (ex Six Apart) now works for Google, this is probably happening anyway. If Google indeed integrates social networking into its existing services than there is little option for independent social networks except to participate as this will give them significant exposure.

Unless there are significant changes, November 5 will be the date to watch for a major announcement by Google.

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Six Apart announced it’s opening social graph. A social graph is pretty much a unified list of friends and connections that are otherwise scattered on the Web on various social networking sites. Social graph as a concept has been started a couple of years ago with the idea to transfer the ownership of a user’s social profile (graph) to the user, rather than the current situation where connections and friends are stored only within the social network the user’s on. If you’re member of multiple networks, there is no easy way for your connections (and content) to be shared with others if they are on a different social networking site. Unless they actually join that particular network, you’re pretty much stuck.

Six Apart defined what they call “OpenID”, some two years back, which they say was successful because it embraced the social graph concept from the beginning. Here’s a short list ways Six Apart looks at social graphs:

• You should own your social graph
• Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
• It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
• Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn’t always be connected
• Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems
• We’re (Six Apart) going to release code and demos soon

This is good news. On the other hand, Six Apart are not alone in this quest. Plaxo introduced Open Identity Consolidator a couple of weeks ago, as a move in support for the Open Social Graph effort.

What this means, should open social graph reach the mainstream, is that pretty soon individuals with social connections are going to be the means of platform independent sharing of information on the Internet, rather than social networks as they are today. In other words, our connections will become the valuable asset, transfering focus from social networks to social networking individuals. Social platform-independent networking will become the main thing, while social networks (as they exist today) will be a collection of tools for social networking. People around the world will become the social network.

Ok, now back to reality. With the social networks only just coming out at the top the Internet hall of fame, I think we still have some time ahead of us before we enjoy things like open social graph, but changes such as these certainly bring a ray of light onto the future of social networking and the Internet in general.

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The G has introduced this change so quietly that one might think they really didn’t want any publicity about this. Nevertheless, there are plenty of blog posts about this already, but one that I think goes into a lot of detail about this is on LifeHacker.

Basically, by using an Email/Share button Google allows you to share or email any web content with your friends. Your shared content (stuff) is publicly available for sharing with friends on the Internet. If you see a Google sharing button on any site, click it to share the current webpage in a preferred way:

• You can add the item to your Google Shared Stuff page
• You can email the page, with a custom message
• You can post the page to some related social bookmarking sites

What may be more interesting than this welcome addition by Google, is the fact that Google is sailing towards social networking waters more openly. I wonder what the social network scape would look like if/when Google decides to own (Facebook?) or make its own killer social networking site.

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About a week ago Netscape announced Propeller.com to go live very soon. Well that day has come, Propeller.com is now live.

Netscape blog states that there are a few bugs and glitches that are being worked on. It is expected they will be resolved soon. Meanwhile, Netscape has welcomed feedback so if you’ve got something to say about Propeller.com send them feedback. The site looks pretty good and has many of the features from its earlier evolution stage, but also some new features and looks. The Netscape team promises further improvements.

…a world class design team, an advanced website platform, and a host of new and interesting ways to enjoy social news…

They are eager to hear users’ opinions before they introduce Propeller.com to the general public. User opinions should help the Propeller.com make further adjustments and improvements.

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