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With plans of building a new house within the next few years, I’ve been researching green construction. The idea of the green movement is to promote sustainability, so naturally, it made me think about how to build a green - or sustainable - presence on the web.

Here are some sustainable building principals outlined by Jake Jacober, a contractor in the Roaring Fork Valley (Blizzard’s home) who’s been coloring his projects green for over 35 years, along with my thoughts on how they can translate to the internet.

Location
Your domain is your location on the web, so choose your URL wisely. While redirects are possible, starting with a good domain name will facilitate your online marketing efforts for many years to come.

Permanence
While there are people who are on the internet to make a quick buck, most of us want to create a sustainable internet presence that will last well into the future. We want to keep the Search Engines happy, so that our pages get into the indexes quickly and stay there. We want to boost our branding, increase targeted traffic and build a base of happy customers who return frequently and rave about us to their friends. By creating a solid foundation and continually strengthening an online business with incremental improvements, it can become a permanent part of the internet ecosystem.

Functionality
In a website, this translates to usability. Create a site that works well for both searchers and the Search Engines. Remove obstacles and provide clear navigation paths that enable visitors to move unhindered throughout the site.

Flexibility
The useful life of a website, like that of a building, is extended if it can be easily modified instead of having to be replaced when changes are needed. Choose a content management system carefully, but do choose one. You need to be able to add and rewrite content, change links, swap out pictures and graphics and include gadgets and widgets quickly and easily. Websites that require major code work to make changes are already dinosaurs and are well on the way to extinction.

Aesthetics
We have hundreds of millions of web pages to choose from, so if you want people to look at yours, they need to be attractive, interesting and fresh.

Safety
You need a host that can keep your website and email safe from hackers and spammers and insures optimal uptime for your servers.

Visitors to your site must feel, safe, too, in all of their interactions with it. They need to know that you’re a legitimate business with a decent reputation, that you won’t spam them or share the information they give you with anyone else and that their online transactions with you are secure.

Community
Use the web to become part of the communities that are (or can become) important to your online business. Position yourself for discovery on Social Media sites. Join the conversations. Engage with visitors to your website using blogs, surveys, tags, polls, bookmarks, widgets, wikis, forums and things that have yet to be developed.

Comfort
Once all the above green principals are applied to your presence on the web, your potential customers will feel comfortable doing business with you. You’ll have an attractive, easily found and easy-to-use website that’s bolstered by the trust from your branding, online reputation and the security features of your site.

You’ ll also feel much more comfortable investing your time, energy and money contructing a web site and internet presence that’s built to last and is sustainable well into the future.

Construction photo by Tengis

Computer photo by hyku

Anyone who’s buying or selling advertising online doesn’t need a detailed explanation of why we want to be able to interpret whether a particular keyword phrase indicates an intention to make a purchase or not. We don’t just want traffic to our websites, we want traffic that converts.

While it’s sometimes fairly obvious - either from the words in the search phrase (where can I rent a beach house in Wildwood?) or from the detail within the search phrase (3 bedroom beach house in Wildwood with WiFi) - this is something that optimizers and pay per click campaigners struggle with continually. 

The Tool 

So, when MSN adCenter Labs unveiled their Commercial Intent Detection Tool about a year ago, it seemed like a great idea. Here’s what they say it does:

Predict a customer’s intention to buy, sell, or complete another kind of transactionbased on her search queries or recently visited URLs.

They backed the release up with an explanation entitled Algorithmic Commercial Intent Detection of Search Queries. The one-pager begins with:

Using algorithmic commercial intent detection, 52% of queries were determined to be associated with commercial intent. The alogorithm was deemed very accurate, with a rate of 90% for detecting both commercial and non-commercial intent.

The Research Behind the Tool  

Then, in the manner of content that appears to be scientific, it dryly goes on to explain why and how the algorithm testing was done. Human evaluators were used to check and verify the accuracy of the results. How? Apparently, they were asked if a phrase had commercial intent of not and their answers were correlated with the algo’s results.

We aren’t given any idea of how these human evaluators were chosen or why. Was there something that made these particular humans any more well-equipped to make that determination than others? Do they have an specific expertise in evaluating commercial intent? Did the testing involve 2 testers or 20,000? MSN’s explanation of the study doesn’t say.

So, I dug a little deeper and read the original research paper on Commercial Intent Detection presented by MSN engineers in 2006. I found that the study was based on the opinions of just 3 human evaluators:

We asked 3 human labelers ro label the search queries and pages. Each query or page is labeled as “commercial”. “non-commercial”, or “confused”. Each query was labeled by the 3 labelers separately. After labeling process on queries, we keep the queries/pages that were agreed by at least two labelers with non-confused labels.

What????? Are they kidding? I’m no scientist, but this seems like a very flawed process. Was any of the data cross-checked with the conversion tracking systems of real websites to confirm whether searches for those terms actually resulted in a sale or not?

My Simple Test 

Here are the results of a quick test I did using the tool. 1.0 is a 100% probability, so I interpret a .8478 as about 85%. The first column is the search term and the second column is the percentage of probability of commercial intent of the searcher:

I think that pretty much demonstrates the tool’s usefulness - or lack thereof - in evaluating keyword phrases.

How It Could Be Improved 

Chances are, we all have at least 3 people on staff who are very well-qualified to label a keyword phrase as having commercial intent or not. Why? Because they regularly view and analyze online sales through sophisticated tracking software. They know the phrases that brought buyers into the websites they manage and the click paths they took once there. Maybe next time, MSN adCenter Labs could at least use experienced Search Engine Marketers as their human labelers and, by using enough of them (way more than 3!), they may get useful data.

Commercial Intent of Web Pages 

The second function of the tool is interpreting the commercial intent of a web page. However, there’s no information at all that tells you how MSN adCenter Labs accomplishes that. I tried entering pages with and without ads on them and pages with BUY NOW! all over them and couldn’t really come to any conclusions. This part of the tool doesn’t even have any entertainment value.  

Conclusion

The most discouraging thing about MSN’s Commercial Intent Detection Tool is that nothing about it appears to have improved since it was released. It is what it is and it’s not likely to get any better.

I’m afraid I can’t put much stock in this tool as something useful for serious marketers. I think your own experience and instincts can give you much better insight to the commercial intent of a search phrase. Of course, we all have tracker data to fall back on when we really want to interpret commercial intent in a meaningful way.

One of my favorite things about Google Maps is how it constantly evolves. New features are being added all the time and often occur without any noise or fanfare. This morning, for the first time, I saw images being displayed in the Maps results. I searched for “winter park co” and here’s what displayed:

Here’s what a regular Google Search for the same query returned:

I must have been snoozing! Take a look at what you see when you click on the new feature “Explore This Area”:

And this is what you’ll see on the Map next to it:

Why is this significant? Is it the beginning of all relevant results displaying within Google’s verticals?  Images and videos are already in the Maps results. Will local news start appearing, as well?

I certainly don’t know, but it’s great to see another cool feature in Maps. Stayed tuned as the search story unfolds…

I was an Army brat, so every few years while I was a kid, we moved. That meant a new neighborhood (sometimes in a new country!) and a new school. Out of necessity, I learned to make friends quickly, because if you didn’t put yourself out there, you’d get pretty lonely. The other kids already had plenty of friends and didn’t have much motivation to seek me out.

The most effective technique was to hang out where I thought the other kids would eventually be – places like the playground or the ballfield or the corner store. Sure enough, someone would show up, we’d start up a conversation and I’d at least have one new acquaintance that might develop into a friend.

Even if we didn’t bond much, they would introduce me to their siblings and others in the neighborhood. Just being in their presence increased my approachability.

Another technique was to pay attention to which other houses on the block contained kids around my age. When I got bored enough, I’d summon up my courage, go knock on the door and ask whoever answered if they (or their boy or girl) could come out to play. Even if they could not play right then and there, I was often invited in and introduced. Sometimes it resulted in a whole family full of new friends. Other times, it opened the door for them to talk to me at school or even come to knock at my house.

This is the way I like to think of social websites. With search, we are waiting for people to come find us. However, like the established kids in a neighborhood, they probably have plenty of friends and little motivation to seek us out. They may not even know we exist, which makes it even tougher.

Some social websites, like Facebook, allow us to go hang out where the people are and strike up relationships. We may also gain new relationships through that initial tier of contacts. We become approachable to others and, before you know it, we have a great social circle. People who were never even looking for us have now discovered us because we’ve gone to where they are.

Other sites, like Linked In, provide more of a can you come out and play environment. You need to put yourself out there a little, asking for introductions and recommendations, but the rewards can be well worth it.

So, if you’re having a hard time embracing social websites, don’t give up just yet. Go where the people you want to have relationships with already are and allow yourself to be discovered. The key is finding the right places to go-the places where the people you want to interact with are already hanging out.

Adding this layer of discovery to your search marketing can reap unforeseen rewards for you and your online business.

upper photo from Easternblot

lower photo from Moody75

Last week in Houston, a group of online marketers held the first of its kind conference, Small Business Marketing Unleashed. While most Search Marketing events provide information and sessions to appeal to a wide cross section of marketers, this one focused completely on effectively and efficiently marketing small businesses on the internet.

The emphasis was on how to balance the time and effort spent promoting your enterprise with actually running it and how one must zero in on results, not rankings, to measure success. The two day event included both informational sessions and hands on workshops.

Read Jennifer Laycock’s article Focus on Ranking Improvement, Not Domination, then check out the collection of Small Business Marketing Unleashed Videos at WebProNews to see what you missed.

The answer is a resounding YES! If you want to know why, read on…

Your URL displays in the SERPs

If your URL shows a crazy long string of symbols and numbers, it doesn’t tell the reader much at all:

However, look at the URLs in these listings:

Just by looking at the URL, you can tell where they are and what they do. Sure, the context around them can do that as well. However, the URL gives us one more clue that the listing is about what we are looking for.

It Adds Relevance for the Search Engines

Just as keywords in the URL make a page more relevant for a human reader, it bolsters relevance for the Search Engines, too. If you’ve named a page www.emeraldislegolf.net/DiscGolf.html, like this one:

it is likely to be about disc golf on Emerald Isle.

It Makes It Easy to Organize Your Website

If your pages are named for what they are about (like disc golf above) it becomes very easy to organize your website in a logical way and to talk about your pages in a manner that’s clear to all. You have a disc golf page, a photo page, a youth golf page, etc and everyone can tell which is which. When these are coupled with emeraldislegolf in the domain name, it becomes even clearer what the website and its pages are about.

It was once considered a spammer’s trick to put keywords in a URL, but that has changed. Now, Google officially recommends it in their Webmaster Central Blog.

Take your own personalized search a step further and join a search experiment at Google Labs. If you take part in a one of their tests, you’ll see that feature when you search in Google.

At the present time, you may join in:

Alternate Views of the results of your queries, such as within the context of location (maps) and time (timelines) or in normal list view.

Keyboard Shortcuts allows you to perform search functions using shortcuts. This minimizes use of the mouse - great for power users.

Google Suggest, where Google gives you alternative suggestions for the keywords for which you are searching as you type them into the search box.