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Web designers have been breaking up copy with images for years. While images may enhance a visitor’s experience, SEOs know fully well just how challenging it can be to work with images. Some people balk at placing keywords in image ALT= text, or at placing lengthy copy snippets in the ALT= text. Some page designs make it difficult to embed the images in relevant text.

If you want to enrich a page’s keyword emphasis, consider using floaters in the middle of your copy. Floaters work well especially with columnated copy. Such page layouts are usually described as “news style”, “magazine style”, etc. Embedding a floater in a column, you draw the readers’ attention to expressions you feel are important. For example:

You can use floaters and blurbs to pad out a page’s content. When done right, it looks professional and smooth. When done poorly, it looks cheap and smarmy. What’s the difference between professional and cheap/smarmy? Here are a few things to AVOID when using floaters:

1. Colored backgrounds - especially stay away from yellow
2. Excessive Use - don’t put more than 2 floaters or blurbs on a page
3. Misuse - Blurbs are only used to cite other sites or resources
4. Deception - People should be able to find the text you’re floating in the article, or your citation in the source

Have you ever landed on one of those sickeningly long, smarmy sales pitch pages where the author just goes on and on about how great his tool, technique, book, or whatever is? The page is loaded with anonymous testimonials (”This saved my life! J. Smith, Ohio”), red-fonted bullet points, struck-out objections and pricing, blah, blah, blah.

If you ever write a page like that, shoot yourself.

Good Web copy can be optimized without dragging your visitors through offal and tripe. You can enhance and emphasize your keywords without droning on endlessly.

Sidebars have their own rules. You should try to limit the number of sidebars you include on a page to no more than 1 or 2 (although I have been known to include 3 or 4 on a page, that looks ugly even by my design standards). You must never repeat a sidebar. Every page that has a sidebar must have its own unique sidebar.

Sidebars are not navigational sections. You can use shading, coloring, and formatting to make your sidebars look like your navigation bars but your navigation bars are NOT sidebars.

Sidebars may include images and links as well as text, but they MUST include text (otherwise they are just photo/film strips or link lists).

Sidebars should be relevant to the main body content. Yes, you can embed a sidebar about real estate on a page about applying for loans from banks, but if the bank loan copy doesn’t mention mortgages, buying houses, or real estate you’re being pretty obvious about your link drop.

Sidebars are useful for tackling alternative keywords. They don’t have to be placed in page margins, by the way. They can be included in headers or footers. I’ve used sidebars to fill out columnated page layouts when I didn’t like how short the pages looked with balanced columns, so you CAN also embed sidebars in main copy regions.

If you’re not sure about how to write sidebars or how long they should be with respect to your main page copy, browse some magazines (especially science magazines and magazines designed for children or women). Most magazines use at least some sidebars. Magazines that are copy-intensive often use floaters. Blurbs were developed for book promotion but they have found their way into other forms of marketing and, quite frankly, I find they just work like magic on the Web.

While the majority of the SEO community has prematurely dismissed Cuil as a non-event, now is the time to be honing and developing your Cuil optimization skills and resources. It takes a search engine 2-3 years to mature. Microsoft launched its Live Search engine on September 11, 2006 and Live has already become the second-most visited search destination after Google.

Microsoft doesn’t have to unseat Google in terms of either visitors or queries in order to be taken seriously as a search engine. And with Yahoo! wobbling on the brink of financial meltdown, there is a very real chance that the search industry may be shaken up within the next year. While such an event would produce opportunity for Ask and Snap, it could also benefit Cuil.

So before you hang up your Cuil bookmarks in disgust, keep in mind that they are engineering new search processes that are no doubt being evaluated by the major search engines. You may just find it necessary to figure out how Cuil does things in case someone else decides to mimic Cuil’s (pretty cool) interface.

Here is what I have noticed so far:

1. Cuil likes images
2. Cuil likes text
3. Cuil likes to cluster closely related content

Although Cuil’s representatives have stated they don’t rely on links to determine rankings as much as other search engines do, several people have noted link-oriented properties in the Cuil search results. The one aspect about link analysis that Cuil cannot escape from is the need to follow links for discovery.

And if Cuil can discover an image-less document from a document with embedded images, I’ve found more than one example where the linking page’s images may be associated with the destination page’s images. Cuil appears to be using proximity to links (or perhaps content zoning, including images in the content zones) to determine whether there may be relevance between a linking document’s image and the destination document.

Now, this is not always the case, so clearly Cuil could be utilizing more than one factor to select an image for the destination page. In a sample search for my own name, I have found many relevant results on Cuil’s front page. In fact, if we assume for the sake of discussion that I should be the only Michael Martinez on the front page, Cuil returns more relevant results than Google, Yahoo!, and Live. But some of the images make no sense.

Since Cuil first launched the images associated with my name search results have changed (as have the listings). But some of the images include a dagger (probably page-dressing from a fantasy site, perhaps from a page on the site from which Cuil took an article about me); the SF-Fandom logo (which is placed next to the listing for SEO Theory); a screen capture (next to a now-deleted Wikipedia discussion about my incorrectly created user profile page); and a picture of a crowd of people I don’t recognize.

A search for SEO Theory returns mostly relevant results, but it includes pictures beside some of the listings, including an image from Cartoon Barry’s blog and a scan of a magazine cover (that has nothing to do with me). A picture I have used on several sites is positioned beside a blog that linked to SEO Theory.

The results from these two queries alone are too chaotic to support any reverse engineering hypotheses, but it seems apparent to me that if you want to influence your Cuil listings you should:

1. Include appropriate images within the same content zone as your text
2. Emphasize your keywords in your text, rather than depend on link anchor text
3. Include appropriate images within the same content zone as your outbound links

Where we can go with this
Text-image couplets are not used very much in today’s Web design, but there are certainly opportunities for using them. In fact, if people developed microformats that include both text and images, Cuil (and other search engines) would have an easier time of identifying text-image couplets and keeping them together.

These iBlock microformats could be used for inventory descriptions on eCommerce sites, profile sidebars on blogs and other social media sites, snippet sidebars and floaters embedded in articles on all sorts of sites, and other small text-image combinations.

To implement a microformat, you create a class in your style code (a style sheet that contains all your microformat classes for your Web site would make implementation of new microformats fairly simple). Microformats offer an opportunity to extend the information you associate with a particular image.

People have asked why we don’t publish full feeds on SEO Theory and Best SEO Blog. In the past I have provided two reasons for publishing only partial feeds:

1) Web spammers (content scrapers) cannot easily replicate our articles if we don’t publish the full feeds.

2) Forcing people to visit the Web site in order to read full articles acts as an audience filter. If you want the critical information from an informative post, you have to do us the courtesy of actually visiting our Web content.

RSS feeds are replacing email newsletters. Many people like subscribing to RSS feeds so they can scan the article headlines and decide whether to read the content in full. They don’t have to reveal much about their private activity if the full content of articles is pushed to their desktops.

Internet marketers realize they need to monetize their RSS feeds. Some people sell advertising in their articles. Some people sell links. Some people embed links to their monetized content.

The challenge of drawing converting traffic from a full feed is that you have to continually publish new content. You’re competing for attention in an increasing crowded market, where the market is not comprised of you and your business competitors but rather of you and every other feed publisher. You’re not competing for sales but simply for attention.

Forcing the RSS-feed subscribing public to choose between visiting your site and not learning something new acts as a prequalification steps. You know that anyone who visits your site through a feed really wants to know what you have to say. You stand a much better chance of monetizing your Web traffic by analyzing what your hard core audience responds to.

That is, filtering out light-interest feed subscribers from hard core feed subscribers who actually click through to your site helps you evaluate what type of content people really want to know about. The number of subscribers your site has is meaningless if few people actually read what you have to say, much less consider buying whatever you’re selling.

RSS feeds are proving to be no more effective at building loyal customer bases than the free .PDF eBooks were a few years ago. Numerous marketers put together beautiful eBook content to entice people to visit their sites. In many situations, after serving 10s of thousands of downloads, the marketers realized their eBook “customers” were not buying anything.

If you’ve built your blog around the concept of pushing content to a full RSS feed, what is your goal? What is your business objective? How do you measure success (other than number of subscribers)? How loyal are your subscribers? You can test subscriber loyalty by asking your readers to participate in a poll or buy something — to take an action that requires them to actually visit your site and interact with the Web again.

If you achieve better than a 10% response to any test, you’re doing better than most full-feed publishers. If you achieve 10% or less response, you have to ask yourself if simply pushing content out to people who don’t care enough to actually read it is helping you.

A recent forum discussion between two RSS-feed junkies went something like this:

Junkie 1: I get 400 feeds a day but I hardly read them any more.

Junkie 2: Yeah. I’m up to almost 600. I hardly look at the reader any more. There are just too many feeds.

Junkie 1: I actually visit about a dozen sites a day. They are the most important to me.

Junkie 2: I think I look at 5 sites every day, including this forum. The rest of the time, I just depend on random surfing.

I’ve paraphrased the comments to protect the commenters’ privacy. I have heard many people say much the same thing offline. They subscribe to too many feeds to read, so they no longer bother to try keeping up with their feeds.

Before deciding that full feeds are the only way to manage a blog’s RSS service, you should set up a periodic test schedule to track the quality of your readership. You may be shocked to learn just how few people are actually reading what you have to say.

The September 2008 Search Market Share shows that Microsoft continues to shave search visitors off of both Google and Yahoo! Of course, the search market share reports based on number of queries performed still hide what is going on because they fail to filter out the non-search queries that people run at Google. Rank-checking queries and informational queries constitute a significant percentage of Google’s traffic.

As I have noted in the past, even measuring search market share by estimated unique visitors has its drawbacks (a problem that has become so complex I have given up on measuring search market share by Compete’s data).

I feel a more precise measurement would follow the number of referrals that search engines actually send to other sites. But how should that kind of data be measured? You cannot trust your own server logs and analytics, especially if you have historically only tracked progress for Google. If you don’t optimize for Yahoo!, Ask, and Live, you have no reason to expect significant traffic from any of those search services.

Hitslink measures market share according to its aggregated data, from people embedding its analytics code on their sites. They claim to measure 160,000,000 visitors across their network. Now, while that is all well and good, what Hitslink cannot determine is who among their analytics partners is optimizing only for Google. If their analytics customer base favor Google then Hitslink’s data is biased and unreliable.

100,000,000 million people visited Live.com and/or search.msn.com in September 2008. Fewer than 136,000,000 people visited Google.com in the same period. To suggest that Microsoft serves only 4-5% of the search market is ridiculous. On the other hand, if Yahoo! processes more queries than Microsoft, then why does search.yahoo.com receive fewer than 60,000,000 monthly visitors?

The data we’re missing for a proper analysis of the search market can only be found in the search engines’ tracking data, as they all appear to be tracking click-through results now. External estimates of market referral data are all based on incomplete and non-representative samples.

It’s vitally important for SEO technicians to understand which search engines are being used and how much for each vertical. A great deal of wasted effort goes into optimizing for hypercompetitive expressions on Google. Comparable expressions may exist on Yahoo! and Microsoft, where few if any people may be optimizing correctly for those search engines.

Your typical SEO plan should include:

1. Keyword research for Ask
2. Competitive research for Ask
3. Optimization for Ask
4. Keyword research for Google
5. Competitive research for Google
6. Optimization for Google
7. Keyword research for Microsoft
8. Competitive research for Microsoft
9. Optimization for Microsoft
10. Keyword research for Yahoo!
11. Competitive research for Yahoo!
12. Optimization for Yahoo!

Each search engine serves its own audience and maintains its own database. Relying on any one search engine’s data to analyze and optimize for other search engines is uncompetitive and inefficient. Don’t assume that search patterns are the same across all search engines. Things just don’t work that way.

I went looking for a list of social media sites the other day. I had specific criteria. I was looking for sites that let you create a profile that says something about you, a page with substantial content. Most social media sites seem to be focused on allowing people to create lists of links. There were social media sites for news feeds, blog feeds, bookmarks — but darned few sites that let you create a detailed individual profile page.

Almost any Web forum will let you do that. Some blogging sites will let you do that. Some older sites like Suite101 let you create detailed profiles. But in today’s social media world, your “profile” is your contribution. If there is an “About me” page, it’s very Spartan.

You can find sites like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, TypeKey, and Yahoo! — where you sign up, create a profile page, and then you get to play with their services. But these are not really social media sites so much as Personal Media sites. No one in the SEO industry talks about Personal Media because it’s so 1998 (which was when Personal Media began to take off).

Nonetheless, Personal Media sites are where the self-promotional action occurs. And a lot of people are now trying to promote themselves these days. Twitter may be cute but it doesn’t really tell people anything about you.

In my quest for Personal Media profile resources, I came across this list of Social Media sites from April 2007. There are now many dead domains in the list.

One has to ask why it is that so many Personal Media sites have survived well into the age of Social Media when so many Social Media sites didn’t make the cut? One obvious answer is that the Personal Media shakeout occurred years ago, whereas we’re still at the height of Social Media frenzy and therefore SM sites are coming and going pretty quickly.

But I think there is more to it than that. It seems to me that Personal Media sites offer a more robust user experience. They are not built on the concept of you creating content for their advertising (or resale), but rather on you using their advertising-supported services. The distinction is subtle enough that some sites (like Newsvine) have been able to blend the Personal Media concept with the Social Media concept.

Does the Newsvine hybrid model work well enough to sustain itself into the next generation of Web content production, or will it fail during the era of Social Media? All of these sites meet different needs, and I think the long-term needs that are met most consistently will determine who survives and who falls by the wayside. Clearly, the Personal Media sites are meeting long-term needs. But which Social Media and Hybrid Media sites will be able to match that longevity?

For a search optimizer, these questions are important because they help us evaluate the resources we are pounding into the Social Media scape. We need to understand the long-term return on investment as well as the short-term return on investment. For example, in the realm of personal reputation management, do you want to be continually filling out new profile forms or is it enough that you can create 5 or 10 fairly unique but informative profile pages that help people learn more about you and still ensure that your search results are not dominated by childish nonsense?

Also, have you been using your personal profile pages to practice linking out to other sites you feel are useful? If you create your own domain and use it as a hub for your personal profile pages (a perfectly reasonable practice), you can still use your personal profile pages to link back to your personal domain and also to other sites you want to promote.

But if you list all your social media bookmark pages on your personal domain, are you really telling people anything useful? Do you really want to draw attention to your self-promotional DIGGs, Sphinns, and other link spam?

The sites that you use AND promote through your own personal resources are more likely to have staying power — because at some fundamental level we all want to promote good quality sites, while we refrain from linking to the sites that we just use for links. That unvoiced distinction between these sites and those sites probably explains why so many Social Media sites have died out since April 2007.

Let it be your guide in selecting Social Media resources to develop for your long-term use and strategy.