A study performed by Intelligent Positioning caused quite a stir recently among SEOs. It revealed that Wikipedia appears on the first page of Google searches 99 percent of the time, and in the first position more than half of the time. What, exactly, does this mean for SEO? A lot more – and a lot less – than you might think.

If you would like to peruse the study yourself, you can read Intelligent Positioning’s blog post. To really understand what we can learn from the study, we must first consider its methodology. The researchers conducted the entire study in English, using a random noun generator to compile a list of 1,000 words. They then searched for those words on Google’s UK site, through the Google Chrome Incognito browser to get around any personalization or customization.

On the surface, the results seem to speak for themselves. For fully 99 percent of the searches, a Wikipedia entry appeared on the first page. And for 56 percent of the searches, it appeared as the first result. In fact, Wikipedia appeared on the second or later page so rarely that the researchers could actually compile a very short list of the searches for which this happened: mail, news, trainers, national, sweets, wardrobe, phone, and flight. “All these words are obviously highly competitive or incorporate the word within major corporations and services (for example National),” Intelligent Positioning notes.

For most SEOs, the only surprise revealed by this research is the level of Wikipedia’s dominance. Who doesn’t know about Google’s apparent love affair with Wikipedia? Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Watch even pointed out that Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, “has called Wikipedia ‘one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet’ and ‘an invaluable resource to anyone who is online’ and has generously donated to Wikipedia.” How, exactly, does one compete with that?

To be honest, you don’t – at least, not in the way you’re probably thinking. Look over the study’s methodology again, and you’ll notice something very important. The searches performed used one-word nouns exclusively. For the most part, that’s not how people search today.

Chikita, an advertising data analytics company, recently did a study across five search engines (including Google) focused on users’ search habits. While the study only covered a few days – January 9 through the 12 – it included hundreds of millions of queries. Among other insights, the study  found that the average number of words per query was four.

Single-word queries, like the ones from Insight Positioning’s study, just aren’t used very often these days. In fact, back in November, Hitwise reported that single-word queries made up just a little more than a quarter of search engine queries. Granted, they made up the largest single percentage of searches, but that still left more than 70 percent of searches being two or more words long.

The point is, Intelligent Positioning’s methodology does not provide a true simulation of modern search behavior. That does not, however, mean that we can’t learn something meaningful from looking at Wikipedia and puzzling out how it achieved such a high position for so many nouns.

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Have you ever experienced a sharp pain in your side or numbness in a leg and used Google to find out whether you should call the doctor? You’re not alone; in fact, so many searchers do this that the search engine giant modified its algorithm to help.

According to a Google blog post by Dr. Roni Zeiger, Google’s Chief Health Strategist,many users searching for symptoms often follow this up with a search for a condition related to those symptoms. For example, those searching for “abdominal pain” may follow it with a search for “irritable bowel syndrome.” So Google decided to speed this process up a little.

According to Dr. Zeiger, “now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you’ll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search. The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data from pages across the web and surface the health conditions that appear to be related to your search.”

How exactly is this different from what you saw before? Greg Sterling, writing for Search Engine Land, included “before and after” screen shots in his article, after noting that the after shots were provided by Google. One screen shot showed results before the change of a search on “headache.” It showed the standard links, with the top one showing the headline “Headache Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis…” with the word “Headache” in bold. That’s quite straightforward.

The after-the-change screen shot for the  “headache” search brings up a box with the heading “Searches related to headache.” Below this is a list of conditions, with the start of a sentence describing that condition. The list includes migraine, tension headache, cluster headache, migraine headache (yes, that’s separate for some reason), and meningitis. The line for migraine says “A recrrent thrubbing headache that typically affects one…” The conditions are in blue, meaning that they’re linked to specific searches for those illnesses. Finally, at the bottom of this box appears the following phrase, in small type: “Drawn from at least 10 websites including nih.gov and wikipedia.org – How this works.” The last three words are also in blue, meaning that they’re linked to a page that explains, at least to some degree, how Google does this particular bit of magic.

As Dr. Zeiger notes, the data you get from this search is aggregated from sites around the web and not from doctors. It should not be construed as medical advice or diagnoses. But it just might make it a little easier to do the research before you make that doctor’s appointment. “We’re humbled by the number of people who turn to Google with such important questions, and we are working especially hard to make our search results even more useful for health searches,” Dr. Zeiger wrote.

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Nearly everyone knows about Rick Santorum’s Google problem, and how it may be tripping him up in his long race to win the Republican nomination to run for president. What not everyone knows is that he’s no longer the only Republican hopeful with such a problem. Mitt Romney just recently joined the club.

Danny Sullivan offers a run-down of the most recent events on Search Engine Land. In case you’ve been too busy to watch campaign developments, I’ll start by saying don’t Google “santorum” or “romney” unless you really want to be grossed out. It’s worth studying what happened here, however, as an example of the power of links over time – and how that may be changing.

We’ll start with Santorum’s well-known story. Back when he was simply a senator, in 2003, Rick Santorum publicly compared gay sex to “man-on-dog” sex. This angered Dan Savage, a popular and controversial columnist in the GLBTQ community. He ran a contest to come up with a definition for the word “santorum.” I won’t tell you which definition won. I don’t need to, because Savage next set up a web page with that definition on it, SpreadingSantorum.com, and encouraged his fans to link to that page appropriately.

Over a relatively short period of time, this page became the first result to come up in Google for searches on the term “santorum.” Even today, with Rick Santorum’s campaign maintaining his websites, SpreadingSantorum.com is the first result to come up in Google for a search on “santorum,” right after a sponsored ad and a Google box that lists the results for U.S. Republican presidential primaries. Savage’s site even beats Wikipedia’s entry for Rick Santorum.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Santorum has become a regular joke on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the wildly popular comedy news and political commentary programs. Sullivan provides a summary of these moments, with clips from the shows going all the way back to 2006. Clearly, this politician’s problem didn’t start overnight, and it won’t disappear overnight, either.

Before we go on, however, it’s important to note that this is NOT a Google Bomb, despite some people in the media claiming it is. A Google Bomb happens when lots of people link to a particular page with anchor text that doesn’t itself appear anywhere on the page, thus causing it to rank high in the search results for that text. This is how former president George Bush’s biographical page on the White House’s website suddenly started ranking high for “miserable failure” a few years ago. Google fixed that problem algorithmically, by preventing pages from ranking for terms in their anchor text that aren’t on the page itself. The word “santorum” actually appears on the spreadingsantorum.com page, however…just as the word “romney” actually appears on the spreadingromney.com site.

Next: Mitt Romney’s Problem
 

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When it comes right down to it, the best customers, those that are the easiest to “sell” your products or services to, are those that find you and decide on their own that you’re the best in their field. They have decided, before they even contacted you, that they wanted to do business with you over and above any competition that you might have. People that come to you like that will nearly always be your best customers. The question becomes how to actually accomplish that.

How can you be perceived in your market as the best in your field? How can you get customers to come to you already expecting to write you a nice fat check?

An example to prove my point:

Let’s say you need to visit a surgeon to have something done. It’s important that you get it done, but this isn’t emergency surgery, so you have time to do some research. In your area are two doctors. The first is a little cheaper, and you can’t find anything bad said about him. The second, however, is an internationally recognized expert in the exact type of surgery you need done. He is a bit more expensive, though.

Which one are you going to choose?

Do you see how important being an expert is? People are going to look around on the Internet before doing business with anyone in your field.

If they are given a choice between a recognized expert and someone else, you know they will choose the expert; so why not be that person? Here’s what you need:

1) A commitment to excellence

Now this one really is more than a little obvious.  If you want people to see you as the best, you have to act like you are. You have to be the best at everything you do. If you’re going to do things “half way,” the market will see that, and then you can forget it.

2) A willingness to give your knowledge freely

Experts nearly always end up being seen that way because they share their knowledge. In fact, sharing what you know is really the way to being viewed as an expert. When you add that to your commitment to excellence, so that you’re producing great information of value to your market, this can make some serious things happen pretty fast.

Actually, let me back this up. Just being viewed as an expert really isn’t enough. You have to strive to be a thought leader in your field that helps to spark discussions, and even helps to determine the direction of your industry.

You see, here’s the thing: far too few people in any market actually even attempt to do this. That means it can be pretty easy to make something happen if you just go out and do it. Most people are just hoping they can advertise and sell their stuff.

The problem with that method of doing business is that in most parts of the first world, people are getting so ridiculously advertised to that their brains are beginning to tune it out as little more than noise.

Not only that, but the growth of social media such as Facebook and Google+ means that more than ever people are referencing back to people they know. If you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your field with those folks before they actually want to buy what you sell, it becomes fairly easy for you to be the defacto choice.

The issue is, how do you get that done? How do you build the perception in your market that you are the expert, the thought leader, for your field?

Before I continue and explain how to do that, let me be clear about something: each of these steps are meant to build on each other.  You have to want to produce excellent content relating to your market, and you have to be willing to share it, for any of the rest of this to work.

3) Know your relevant keywords

Many times small business owners know this, but knowing which keywords are important extends to more than your products and such.

What I’m talking about here is understanding those keywords so that you can focus your content around them. You can create titles that use those words. Now you do need to be careful with this somewhat.  You have to remember that people use the search engines. If you “over optimize” only for good rankings, then the people that will visit your site won’t like it. 

Titles to your products/services and your content need to be 60% for the people that will be consuming that content or buying the product/service and 40% for the search engines. Later you will understand why there is a bias toward people.

That doesn’t change the fact that when you’re producing content designed to help you be seen as an expert by your market, it sure can help a lot if you’re cognizant of the search phrases for which you would like your content to rank well.

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Can you imagine paying $1,000,000.00 for a measly hamburger and soda? Is there any possible way that you would ever, for any reason, pay such an exorbitant sum? What I am going to do is prove to you that asking you to pay that amount of money for a hamburger would actually be a bargain. I’m going to set up a situation where you’ll happily pay that much and more. Not only that, but I’m also going to explain why you might be focusing on all the wrong things with your marketing efforts.

You see, I get clients all the time where a meeting will start with them proudly talking about their large social media presences, viral marketing efforts, traffic to their blog, and so on. All of those things are good, of course, but not if they miss the point.

If you are running a business, then the point of that business is to turn a profit.  The only way to do that is to get customers (duh). Therefore, any marketing activity that isn’t generating more customers for your business is a waste of time and money.

The thing is, often it simply requires the correct framing of your activities so that you do the right things, and therefore get the right kinds of responses from your market.

That said, let me tell you the story of the million dollar hamburger and soda and then I’ll tie it into how you use this to make you more.

I’ve actually told this story a number of times at several events, and honestly it’s something I learned from Kevin Nations.  I usually make this the last story that I tell before a break, because I love hearing the mental shift that people tell me that they are having during the break. This story should change the way you think about your business and how you position your product; it’s that powerful. With this article however, once I tell you the story I am going to expand on it and explain how you can leverage your new knowledge into top search positions, lots more traffic, but more importantly, far more sales.

Anyway, on to the story:

If you’re looking for a cheap hamburger and drink, you can pick one up at any of several places for a buck in most places in the US.  You can get a reasonably decent fast food burger for about $5.  For the moment, lets just say that a reasonably decent burger is worth about $5 and that’s what you would pay for one.

However, lets change the situation a bit.

Let’s say that the burger is made with all organic ingredients. The lettuce and tomatoes were picked from a garden just that morning. The bread was made by hand from all organic whole grains only a few hours previous. The beef is free range grass fed USDA prime.

It’s being served at a fine restaurant with white linens, and you’re being served by a maitre’d.

I’ve gotten numbers as high as $50 before I start seeing people rolling their eyes.

At this point, just by making the burger better, and by adding great service and an impeccable setting, the burger has increased in price ten times. However, paying $50 is a long ways away from $1,000,000, so let’s keep going.

Let’s keep that same $50 burger and the same impeccable setting, but lets make it part of a charity event, where you’re going to get to sit at the same table as any living celebrity, sports personality, or politician of your choice (even the President of the United States).

How much is that burger worth now? How much would you pay for that kind of an event?

I’ve gotten numbers as high as $10,000 for this. While that’s quite a bit of money for a hamburger, it’s still quite a ways away from $1,000,000.

So let’s change something else.

You just saw your server drop the burger on the floor.

To make matters worse, he stooped down, picked it up, put it back together, and proceeded to bring it to you like nothing had happened.

How much is that burger worth now?

Almost without exception people say the burger is now worthless. It has a value of exactly $0.

Well, remember when I said I was going to show you how a burger could be worth $1,000,000? What if I make this even more difficult? What if I told you that I could happily have you paying $1,000,000 for a hamburger you just saw dropped into the dirt?

You see, I’ve been changing the scenario slightly to make the burger worth more and more. The reason why the most I’ve been able to get is $10,000 is that the entire time I’ve been selling a burger and a soda and simply “packaging” the items better with atmosphere, or improving it through better ingredients.

Let’s change “what I’m selling” while the items that will be delivered will still be a burger and a drink.  You’ll see what I mean by this in just a second.

You see, you’re out in the middle of the desert. You haven’t had a bite to eat or drink in days; worse, you’re five days away from the nearest source of anything to eat or drink, but you’re only two days away from dying of thirst and starvation.

And in the middle of the desolation, you see me and I have a burger you just saw me drop onto the desert dirt, brush off, and put back onto my table. Beside it is a tall glass of your favorite soda. How much is that burger and drink worth to you now?

I once had someone tell me “I’ll give you $3,000,000 right now and I’m vegan.”

The reason is that I’m not really selling a burger and drink anymore. Yes, that’s physically what you’d be getting; the truth, however, is that I’m now actually selling you the ability to continue to live. I’m selling freedom from hunger and freedom from thirst.

Let’s make some real world comparisons with what I’ve just run you through, with one of my favorite case study companies, Starbucks. Prior to Starbucks becoming a national company, most people were spending anywhere from twenty five cents to at most one buck for HUGE amounts of coffee. I remember my father literally getting 64 ounces of coffee from 7/11 for 49 cents when I was a kid. Coffee was a cheap commodity that could be obtained from any number of places.

By changing what they were selling from coffee to lifestyle, Starbucks was able to cause a 400% to 800% increase in the price of what people expected to pay for “coffee.” They set up a good product with a great atmosphere, and now they weren’t selling a commodity anymore.

My point in all of this is to pay attention to what you’re selling. Don’t try and sell hamburgers to a room full of people that just ate (don’t sell commodities). Your burger in that scenario is simply a commodity.  Sadly, this is what far too many people try and do. It’s why they constantly complain about the price at which their competitors are selling, and the squeezing of profit margins, and all that nonsense.

Going back to the Starbucks example again, they set themselves up as sort of a “better coffee.” It’s the coffee that smart “in the know” people drink. It’s where cool people get their coffee. Whether or not it was true, Starbucks set themselves up as coffee experts that sold better lifestyle.

Instead of selling burgers to a room of full people, why not instead sell freedom from hunger to people that are starving? Why not sell freedom from thirst to people that are dying of thirst?

Now if you aren’t skilled, doing that can be challenging. So how about if you just do this:

1) Dramatically increase your prices to much more than anything your competitors charge.

2) Make your products far better than anything else they can produce. Since you’re charging more, your product can be better, and therefore worth the extra you are charging. Not only that, but because it’s so much better, it’s now also worth dramatically better profit margins.

3) Turn yourself into the recognized expert in your field by freely and generously giving your information to anyone and everyone interested. People expect to pay more from the top expert in a field/industry/market/niche.

Here’s the thing: when you sell your products for a lot more, you can make them much better. In other words, by charging as if you are the best, you now have the ability to actually be the best. It’s synergistic.

Don’t. Compete. On. Price.

Ever.

It’s foolish.  Let me explain just how foolish.

In 2009, GM went bankrupt because it couldn’t sell enough cars. GM sells its cars like a commodity where it is constantly competing on price. This constant competition to be seen as the lowest price provider for the cars it sells in a given car class squeezed its profit margins to the point that, with the fallout of the 2008 financial collapse, it nearly went completely out of business. Only massive infusions of cash from the federal government saved it.

Compare that situation to that of Aston Martin, which, during 2009, sold out of every single car it produced, and had a waiting list it couldn’t even fill. Aston Martin’s cheapest car gives Aston Martin more in profits than the entire revenue for most cars in GM’s line up.

Let me ask you this: would you rather sell cars based on cheapest price like GM, or be the highest provider and arguably best provider, selling cars at huge profit margins, like Aston Martin? You don’t need to be an accountant for this to be a fairly easy decision!

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What do you do if your pet enterprise fails? If you’re a brave (or perhaps foolhardy) entrepreneur, you build something even more ambitious. Such is the case with Nick Oba. When his contributor-driven online magazine failed back in 2010, he came up with a bigger idea: take on Facebook, but make the members into shareholders. And thus Zurker was born.

As far as I know, no one has ever set up an online social network as effectively a co-op before, and as you’d expect, Zurker’s set-up isn’t quite that simple. As Zurker’s About page explains, “Every Zurker user becomes a co-owner (future shareholder) of Zurker.” As Zurker hasn’t had an IPO or anything of that nature yet, users earn vShares.

A vShare is a stake in Zurker; it’s the unit of equity the company is allotting to members during the alpha and beta testing phases. They aren’t actually stock. “vShares can be thought of as agreements between the owners of a startup about the size of their stake in the enterprise to be incorporated,” Zurker explains on its vShares page. One vShare equals one-millionth of a piece of the company. Users can earn vShares by signing up, and by inviting friends; they can also purchase them. “When 1,000,000 vShares have been allocated, Zurker will be restructured as a public corporation and vShares will become real shares,” Zurker elaborates.

That’s not the only surprising step that Zurker has taken. In part because it’s a co-op, Zurker has an open books policy. What does this mean? It means they have a page on which you can check their finances, line by line, for each country they’re in.

That’s another interesting difference: Zurker is an independent project in each country it’s in, owned by the members of that country only, with its own balance sheet. Oba did this because “different markets react in different ways.” He’s trying to avoid what he describes as “Friendster syndrome.” Friendster eventually became highly popular in the Philippines; in fact, the site quickly became dominated by members from that area of the world. The social network’s US-based management, which was unfamiliar with that area, didn’t know how to capitalize on the popularity and traffic. So the site ended up stagnating. Local owners will presumably not experience that problem.

So far, there are Zurker projects in the United States, United Kingdom, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia; there’s also a Zurker Worldwide, for all other jurisdictions. As near as I can tell, this only matters for which vShares you’re allowed to hold; someone from the US can’t hold vShares for Zurker UK, for example. However, you can connect and interact normally with members on other versions of Zurker. “A member of Zurker UK can subscribe to a member of Zurker India,” the site helpfully explains. This, of course, brings us to the interface.

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When trying to rank well on Google, you want to get as many factors working for you as possible. If you can use a few effective techniques your competitors overlook, so much the better. Keep reading for some ideas.

I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece.

We’ll start with a ranking factor that’s near and dear to every writer’s heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you’ll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you’ll want to use it as well.

So how does it work? Google provides information on the technical details of authorship markup (), so you can implement it on your own site. But what do you gain? Patel showed an image from a search he performed which displayed an author’s thumbnail picture – in this case, Joost de Valk – underneath the link to de Valk’s article. Next to de Valk’s picture, Google displayed his name as an active link, listed how many Google+ circles he was in, and finally included a link for “more by Joost de Valk.”

I don’t need to tell you that anything extra that catches the eyes of searchers may be worth doing, but you can already see that this gives you something special. Searchers can see that there’s a real person behind your articles; that builds trust. Content farm postings usually don’t list authors on their pages, so right away this separates your site from the fluff.

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea sees even more positives to using authorship markup. Based on some Google patents he’s read, he believes the search engine will take it further. For example, if you do a guest post and have an authorship markup profile, authorship markup could let you connect all of your content so readers can follow you wherever you blog. Slawski also thinks that authorship markup could stop content scrapers in their tracks – if Google crawls both pages and finds authorship markup on one, it might recognize that as the original page, thus keeping the scrapers from outranking you.

These are just two possibilities that Slawski listed. If Google takes the next step and actually starts using author badges, there’s even greater potential. But for right now, adding authorship markup will at least give your pages more authority, increase reader trust, and might increase your click-through rate even if you’re not at the top of the SERPs – because that author thumbnail really does make a result stand out.

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You run a local business, and you claimed your Google Local listing so searchers would see your website. That’s a start, but with Bing and Yahoo together holding more than a quarter of the search market in the US, you’re still leaving money on the table. Fortunately, you can easily get onto Bing Local by following a few simple steps.

As Chris Silver Smith explains at Search Engine Land, Microsoft’s Bing Business Portal features a “beta” interface through which you handle your business details. It replaces the Bing Local Listing Center. If you want some information about the service before adding your business, you can read the FAQ.

To star using the interface, you’ll need to find your listing. Bing Business Portal will ask you to enter your business name (required), address, city, state, and zip code, and then press the search button to see if Bing already has information about your business. If you enter only your business name, be aware that Bing will insist that you also enter either your city AND state, or your zip code.

Once you’ve entered this information, Bing will return a listing to you if it finds one that matches. You can then click the claim button. If it doesn’t, you can add a new listing. Smith notes that “having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase ‘trust ranking’ factors.” Remember that search engines hate to show stale information to searchers – and businesses fail all the time. If a business owner has claimed their listing, it may show the search engine that the business is active, and could lead to a more prominent position in the search results.

Once you’ve claimed your listing, you need to check the contact information it displays. Make sure it’s correct. At a minimum, it needs to include your name, address, and phone number, in addition to your website’s URL. If you choose to include an email address, treat it professionally – check and answer the messages it receives at least once a day. Otherwise, customers will think you’re ignoring them, and go somewhere else.

Next, if you can, you should at least consider adding an image to your listing. Smith notes that for Bing Local searches, “higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings!” He was careful to state that this could simply be due to the fact that listings with images are always claimed listings, and they could be ranking higher for that fact alone. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Smith uses a Bing search on “intellectual property attorneys Chicago, Il” as an example. The first listing past the ads is a box with a map and five options; when I clicked through, I noticed that the top two and the fifth ones included images.

As a potential customer, I think I’d be more inclined to take the next step with a business that includes an image. If users conduct a search on Bing Local (rather than a general web search), those images actually show up next to the relevant listings, drawing the eye and making you stand out. As a searcher, if I don’t know any of the businesses listed in my search, and distance isn’t a huge factor, I start looking for anything that catches my eye and makes it stand out. Including an image is one approach that can help attract eyeballs; there are others you can use as well.

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