SEO Tycoon

**VirtuosiMedia** · 05-14-2009, 04:46 PM

I frequent StackOverflow and in reading a blog about how they built it, one of the principles that they used was considering Google as a part of their user interface, namely the starting point for their website rather than their homepage. I thought that was an interesting enough idea to merit some discussion about how you would go about using Google (or Yahoo or Live) as a part of your UI for your own website. It certainly makes sense, especially if you get a lot of traffic from search engines.

Some ways that come to mind immediately are your title tag and meta description, since Google uses the title as the link text in the SERP and the meta description as the description below it. You could create a consistent interface by having the title match the first heading on your page and the description matching the first paragraph. Doing that also helps you deliver what you've promised through your "advertisement" on the SERP, which could help you achieve a lower bounce rate. The title and description should be short enough that they don't trigger the ellipsis (the ...) in the search listing because it will look more authoritative and professional. Both should also be descriptive and human readable rather than just a bunch of keyword phrases. Think newspaper headlines and the first paragraph of a news story or a more modern example, link bait.

Another example on the SERP itself would be getting sitelinks for your category pages or indented listings for content pages. Again, this will be more authoritative, but you'll only be able to do this through a strong internal link structure.

Yahoo allows you to customize the display of your listing to a certain extent and it looks Google will be venturing (a little) into that area as well with their rich snippets.

One way that you might be able to augment your own page is to detect when a visitor is coming from a search engine and then highlight their search term on your page using JavaScript.

Can you think of other ways to use search engines as a user interface, either on the SERP or in your site?

**VirtuosiMedia** · 05-15-2009, 11:46 AM

In addition to search engines being part of your user interface, other offsite doors should also be considered: RSS feeds, Twitter, any sort of social media or directory listing, advertising, emails, etc. The same principles could be applied to any and all of them.

**vangogh** · 05-15-2009, 06:10 PM

Very interesting article. I know it's only one detail, but the idea of thinking about Google results pages as your home page is worth thinking about. However you'd have to think of your business before assuming the main entry point will be Google (or another search engine). It makes sense for Stack Overflow, but it might not make sense for every site out there.

Quote:

You could create a consistent interface by having the title match the first heading on your page and the description matching the first paragraph.

I think it's better to have your title and page heading be variations of the same theme instead of matching directly when it comes to ranking. It would help pull traffic for a more diverse set of phrases. Also with meta descriptions your first paragraph isn't usually written the same way you'd want it to show in the snippet. Your first paragraph might be too long for one, but I think it would be better to write the description with the goal of getting people to click and your first paragraph with the goal of getting people to read. Those to me would lead to two different types of writing.

I like the general idea of thinking about what page ultimately leads to a visit to your site. Some things you're seeing now on blogs is the idea of a welcome message tailored to the visitor based on whether or not they've been to the site before and where they arrived from.

Another thought relates to AdSense (or other advertising). Social media users generally aren't ad clickers so don't show ads to people who arrive from a social media site. Search traffic might be more likely to click so show the ads to searchers.

You can really customize your site quite a bit based on what Analytics shows visitors from different sources do when arriving on your site. You could even take it down to the page level if stats show it would be useful and you have the time.

You do have to be a little careful. For example most of the welcome first time user messages use cookies to determine who's been to your site before. With visitors who clear cookies frequently you're welcoming them on each visit. I can't speak for others, but I find it annoying sometimes to be welcomed as a new person to a blog I've been subscribed to for years.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 05-24-2009, 04:18 PM

It's an especially interesting concept to explore when you think about qualification. I've been learning a lot lately about visitor intent. Microsoft has a great tool that measures the commercial intent of a search phrase. If you can determine not only that a visitor came from a search engine, but also that they came using a certain keyphrase, you could alter your copy, etc. to match their intent, commercial or otherwise. If you combined something like that with multivariate testing, you could programmatically determine which combinations work best for which search phrases or sites and serve that combination automatically. You determine the qualification of your visitor based on the referral page and then show them the page that statistically has the best chance of conversion.

**vangogh** · 05-27-2009, 12:36 AM

The search engines would really like to know what the intent of their visitor is. To a degree they can figure it out sometimes, but I don't think they can ever really get at it. There are simply too many possibilities and you and I could type the exact same query while looking for completely different things.

**willcode4beer** · 05-27-2009, 01:46 AM

What's funny is, considering Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's love of Microsoft is that they modeled Google instead of MSN