Latent Semantic Analysis for Dummies

When a person searches for “kentucky fried chicken“, Google’s primary goal is to try to understand whether you’re in Kentucky looking for fried chicken or in New Jersey (like I am) looking for the local KFC. In a nutshell, that’s an example of how a searcher’s environment… their associations and place in the world give context to the search that’s taking place.

With that goal firmly in their sights, Google has helped move us from the world where rankings are driven by keyword density to one where context is king. They are looking for cues of what the searcher (you and I) is really looking for when they search for kentucky fried chicken. Take that same kind of richness of context and apply it to the text itself on your website. It has become increasingly important to ensure your website’s copy not only addresses your visitors’ core search, but their motivations and environment as well. What do I mean? In a simple example, when a person is interested in immigration, they also are likely to have questions or ideas about becoming a citizen, the naturalization process, getting a green card… legally, work in the US, visas, worker status, help and more. For both your user and your search engine rankings, this sort of in-depth understanding of the words and concepts related to your topic is key as we move into 2010 and 2011.

Great, Clay. You’ve proven you’re a nerd and like tangents (like Google does???). How can you put this sort of Latent Semantic Analysis (“LSA”) to work for me? I’ve found LSA is great for rankings but, more practically, it’s great for giving you ideas on where to go with your web content development. If you can tap in to the relationships and concepts associated with your topic, it makes it much easier to produce interesting copy that’s useful to your visitors.

Here’s how you can put LSA to work for you using “motorcycle accidents” as an example. Search for the phrase and note the first web URL they return that has good content on the landing page. Take that URL, copy it, and visit the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” select the Website content radio button. Paste the URL into the input box and check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” checkbox. Click to search and Google will go out and gather LSA ideas for you! The results returned include grouped keywords centered around concepts.

The first URL returned is http://accident-law.freeadvice.com/auto/motorcycle_accident_statistics.htm. Analysis shows related concepts like personal injury, motorcycle helmets, safety, learning to ride, head on crash, motor bike crashes, etc. Note those LSA keywords.

Move on to another top URL returned by Google: http://www.vtwinmama.com/accident_survivors.htm. Using the Google Keyword Tool on this URL, we get more keyword concepts like harley davidson, motorcycle safety, leather motorcycle jacket, motorcycle class and more. Each URL you research will return variants that are often useful. Of course, there is a lot of repetition of concepts like motorcycle accident attorneys and motorcycle safety but there are always gems in the results.

Thoughts?

Written by jclayc on March 7th, 2010 with no comments.
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Consolidating Servers

Just a quick website service announcement – we’re moving from Bluehost to 1and1.com hosting. We’ll see how 1&1 does in terms of performance for the price, which is dirt-cheap. Bluehost was acceptable but nothing impressive. Dreamhost is also an old standby and I’ve recently learned that Namecheap hosting is worth avoiding.

Written by jclayc on February 28th, 2010 with no comments.
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Surprise… Google’s Still On Top

The Nielsen Corporation recently released its search engine market share numbers for December 2009. Were there any surprises? Let’s look:

Combine Google with AOL (same results) and you can see that their algorithm serves up nearly 70% of all search results online. This really isn’t shocking, but the decline of Yahoo! is clear; they formerly served upwards of 25% of all search results. Now? They’re lucky to get near fifteen percent. Bing.com (aka Live.com, aka MSN.com) is still hanging in there with just under 10% of searches. One would have thought all of their marketing spend would have moved that needle more…

Validating the summary above is the December 2008 Nielsen chart:

As you can see, both Google and Bing have grown their market share by a fraction of a percent but Yahoo! has seen a more serious decline. There are no surprises here but attorneys and/or lawyer marketing professionals can take away a few ideas:

1. Google is still dominant and will usually be the source of your search engine traffic. You’re right to use Google to judge the overall optimization of your site.
2. Yahoo is on its last leg… While you can still find some good PPC values within Yahoo search and top SEO keywords will yield traffic, consumers are abandoning that search engine in a continuing stream.
3. Pay attention to Bing in 2010 but their rankings will likely fluctuate frequently. (I find bad search results quite often.) If you feel like getting to know Bing better, try their PPC program.

Thanks to the folks over at SearchEngineWatch for calling out this newly-issued data.

Written by jclayc on January 14th, 2010 with no comments.
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Blogging Inspiration

One of the most difficult things about blogging is finding good inspiration for blog content. (We’re not all Shakespeare… wait, did he blog?) The ultimate goal is to write legal blog posts that will attract potential clients, establish your authority or solicit comment by other lawyers. With this in mind, how do you create blog posts that speak about legal topics in a way that’s accessible to the public and enticing to read? There are a few tried and true methods I use to find blogging inspiration, so I thought I’d share those with the audience.

Daily Events

This is the greatest source of inspiration for most blog articles: things that happen to you during the day… something you heard on the radio… a question someone asked you. All of these everyday events are a good source for a blog post. Here are a few examples:

• Summarize and comment on a local news event (DUI accident, an injury at the mall, etc.)
• Help define legal terms that non-lawyers commonly misunderstand (Defining Harassment or Explaining Eviction in New York come to mind)
• The sidewalk you came in on this morning was dangerous… or your house has manufacturing defects… or your kids mentioned another with a peanut allergy: all of these are good sources for articles that discuss legal topics in an informal setting.

Put Words to a Calendar

Sit down with a calendar of your firm’s upcoming outreach events or event sponsorships and blog about your involvement in the community. Alternately, blog about public safety events on your community’s calendar.

Talk About Another’s Article

If you’re a lawyer who likes to blog, it’s likely you read many others’ articles about legal and local topics. Take something that someone has said on a national or regional level and use it as a springboard for a post of your own. I’d go as far as quoting that source and citing the URL where that quote originally appeared. Examples: a right wing blogger promotes expulsion of illegals. A left wing blogger wants in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Either of these should be fertile ground for blogging for an immigration attorney.

Use Keyword Research

Go to the Google Keyword Tool and put in a keyword about your area of practice… “personal injury”, “divorce”, “work injury” and “discrimination” are good examples. The results will be composed of many phrases you expected but will also include many you didn’t. Those unexpected results are usually great inspiration for articles. Another good source of similar article-inspiring keywords is the SEOBook keyword tool (a free utility based on WordTracker).

Work Backwards

What are your goals for blogging? To generate more personal injury clients? To establish B2B relationships with corporations? To promote your expertise as a lawyer? Use your goals to inspire your posts.

• if your goal is to bring in more _______ clients, the strategies above will be very helpful to generate content ideas that will draw in relevant consumer traffic.
• if you’d like to develop B2B relationships, focus on blogging about industry players, blogging about the things that matter to those industries and commenting on their blog posts
• if you’d like to (generally) promote your firm’s expertise, talk about awards or judgments your firm has received

There are certainly more sources for blogging inspiration than what I’ve outlined above, but these five things should get most law firms well on their way to creating interesting, purposeful content. Readers, what sources of inspiration have you found?

Written by jclayc on December 27th, 2009 with no comments.
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Syndicated Content “Duplicate”?

I was recently asked if syndicating or licensing content would have a negative impact on the author website’s rankings. Was syndicated content seen as duplicate content? My answer may be useful to others, so here it is in a nutshell:

Maliciously duplicated content (with the intent to deceive through redirects, multiple pages on the same domain, etc.) will have a negative effect, but syndicated/licensed content has been on Google’s radar for a while as an exception. The short answer is that they do a pretty good job of recognizing who published the content first and it isn’t likely there will be any penalty to your site for syndicating your articles. A longer answer is found in the Google post on duplicate content here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359. They say :

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

The noindex meta tag on the syndicated version would be the ultimate way to ensure it didn’t get indexed and become problematic. I’m not sure of how many publishers will like that contractual provision, though.

I went on to mention the development strategy of www.theknot.com – they licensed content with Yahoo! and used that to establish themselves in the marketplace. It didn’t hurt them a bit… My advice to this particular person was to go for it (syndicating/licensing her content) just make sure you have a few contractual items in place to ensure proper “credit” is given to your site.

Written by jclayc on November 2nd, 2009 with 1 comment.
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Analytics Bounce Rate

A metric that’s increasingly discussed is “bounce rate” – this is largely due to the fact that it’s featured as a statistic on the first report page of Google Analytics accounts. What is bounce rate, how is it useful and are there similar metrics that are useful for understanding your website?

In February 2009, the Official Google Blog released a two part post named The Power of Measurement (1)(2). In it, the idea of bounce rate is introduced by Avinash Kaushik and described simply as

It [bounce rate] measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!

In a later post Avinash went on to outline

It [bounce rate] is usually measured in two ways:

* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

So what’s that telling you? A high bounce rate means visitors are coming to your site, not seeing what they needed or expected and they leave. There are three main ways bounce rate is useful:

• Assessing Referrers – If you’re running any advertising or link placements, bounce rate is helpful for understanding which referring sites are sending low quality or mis-targeted traffic. (Go to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites to view the top offenders.)
• Weak Pages – You can also look at your individual pages’ bounce rates and determine if their tagging is mis-targeted or the content could be improved. (Go to Content, Top Landing pages to view the pages with the highest analytics bounce rate.)
• Poor Design – A high overall bounce rate can also be an indication that your website navigation is unclear or your calls to action are weak. Does your site really make it easy for visitors to find information and/or talk to you? The answer to this question is usually found in A/B testing of one design’s bounce rate vs another.

We’ve addressed the basics of the Google Analytics bounce rate statistic, but are there other website metrics that can serve similar or complementary purposes? (For argument’s sake, let’s say you are not using an analytics package that doesn’t feature this statistic.)

• Avg Time on Site / Avg Time on Page - most reporting systems will tell you how long the average visitor spends perusing your site. A low number usually indicates less engaged (potentially confused) visitors. Of course, you can drill down to the individual page statistics and look at each page’s avg time on page for a deeper view.
• Avg Page Views per Visitor – a very high level metric. Think of it this way: if you have a page views per visitor of 1, your bounce rate is 100%. Very generally speaking, the higher your average page views per visitor number, the more engaged or interested your website visitors are.
• Time on Site or Page Views by Referrer - like the two metrics directly above, this information can help identify referrers sending low quality traffic.

Overall, bounce rate is both a measurement of visitor quality and of your website’s targeting. Traffic sources or landing page content should be inspected accordingly. If you aren’t drinking the Google kool aid and don’t use Google Analytics, there are similar metrics available in nearly all traffic measurement packages. Use information like bounce rate, time on site and page views per visitor to initiate improvement measures, test those improvements and re-test to maximize the return you receive from the traffic your website receives.

Written by jclayc on October 29th, 2009 with 4 comments.
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